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Dr. Stobart’s journey into the realm of herbs started when she participated in a permaculture design course at Dartington in Devon during the early 1990s. This ignited her passion to cultivate more herbs for her clinical practice and she began cultivating herbs in her cottage garden and allotment. However, her desire for a more substantial supply of plant materials motivated her to purchase Holt Wood in 2004. Using permaculture design, she and her partner transformed the area from a redundant conifer plantation into a flourishing medicinal forest garden.

Beyond her hands-on work with herbs, Dr. Anne Stobart has worked extensively in education. She took a leading role in a professional herbal medicine program at Middlesex University in London. Additionally, she is a founding member of the Medicinal Forest Garden Trust and is a member of the advisory board for the Journal of Herbal Medicine. Her noteworthy contributions to the field led to her appointment as an Honorary University Fellow at the University of Exeter.

Anne has also published research articles on historical recipes and the history of herbal medicine, and has a continuing interest in research into agroforestry and permaculture related to herbal medicine.

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Read the full transcript here:

Morag:

Well, thank you so much for joining the show today. It’s an absolute delight to have you here. I’ve been exploring your works in medicinal forest gardens and I absolutely love it. It was fascinating to me that you did your PhD on 17th century healthcare. Where did that spark of inspiration come from? Because it’s quite a specific thing.

Anne:

Well, I suppose when I completed my first degree, which was in psychology, I really didn’t know where I was going. So I was trained as a teacher and I ended up in adult and further education. To cut a long story short, I used to live in Liverpool, being from London originally, I moved down to Exeter. Exeter University had this wonderful programme, which was a Masters in Women’s Studies and being an out and out feminist I joined up as soon as I got there.

The tasks set in that course were very varied. Looking at women’s history, I kind of latched on to the history of medicine. I discovered some local archives of handwritten recipe books and I just wanted to know where they used and that sent me on quite a long exploration. I was very lucky that I was able to embark on the PhD when I was working at Middlesex University, training herbal practitioners and I had a wonderful supervisor who was interested in the history of science. So the whole idea of herbal history really got kind of wrapped up into a study of domestic medicine – this was in the 17th century.

Morag:

Fantastic! Household medicine in the 17th century. Wonderful! So are people still doing those practices in some way? Did you find that there was a continuation of this? Or are you rediscovering things that were done before and bringing them into this new food forest garden context?

Anne:

Okay, so there is a punch line here. The records that still exist are mainly to do with larger households – more wealthy, aristocratic households. So it’s still very difficult to research what happened to poorer people and women in particular, because so much of their work went unrecorded. But I looked very closely at letters, recipes, household accounts, for those that were focused during the southwest of England and prepared a huge database of the recipes, the constituents, and so on.

I actually discovered that most of the recipes probably were not used. I mean, it was a bit of a shock and it still is a shock. People don’t want to hear this from me when I say it. But even further than that, I discovered that the recipes that were likely to be used, recorded and shared as very valuable were ones that contained bought ingredients. So spices and more expensive items. There were a few simples that tended to get repeated quite a lot and so it’s possible that they were handed down.

But in general, I think we have some very mythological ideas about household recipes. I write about that in the book and describe the research process in some detail – trying to get to the nub of which plants were used. Actually, I think people were really poorly informed, even by word of mouth about plants in the past and they suffered, they suffered a lot because they couldn’t do much about illnesses in the like.

So to answer your question, yes! We do have lots of history around herbs and the like, but some of it’s pretty suspect because it’s wishful thinking, romanticism about herbs. While I was doing the research, I got together with other herbal practitioners because I’m a trained herbal practitioner, and we set up the herbal History Research Network to try and encourage more scholarly approaches to the research as it exists.

Morag:

So what are some of those main herbs that you found that actually were used commonly? And what are some of the myths that you busted?

Anne:

Okay, well, in the research, I found that the recipes were about 80% plants and then otherwise minerals and animal parts. I put it in the book, they weren’t the ones that came out as most popularly mentioned, but they weren’t really simples. There were occasional plants that became quite famous like elder because they had a particular interest in the households. There was one member of a household who had a swollen neck gland, scrofula, which was basically down to tuberculosis infection, and the elder was recommended by some people as a treatment for that. 

So recipes got spread around because they were thought to help. In this case, these were herbs that dried up the nasty secretions issuing from ulcers, and then there were other herbs that were spread around for example cures for rickets and such like. I don’t think I could really pick on any one particular except for possibly roses.

The reason being that one householder, Mary Clark – was a very interesting, forthright lady – she gave her children rose syrup, and it’s still not totally clear whether it’s rose leaves, which were rose petals (they call them leaves), or rose hips. But it’s likely that the vitamin C produced a laxative action. So it was thought that Rose was clearing for toxicity in children to reduce diarrhoea type problems. In that case, we don’t know the parts properly – we don’t know what problems, when they were given, why they were given, but they were very popular. They probably worked for reasons that were not clearly understood. Today, we would think of roses as stringent. Not as a laxative!

Morag:

We think about lots of things as being vitamin C though, don’t we? I mean, that’s true that roses have lots of vitamin C in them. So that the action may have been to do with the vitamin C? 

Anne:

Yeah, the action may have had something to do with vitamin C, especially if it was rose hips which are higher than oranges in vitamin C. So just investigating – it’s very difficult to find the evidence. But that’s what I was after, to find corroborative evidence. Of course, women who collected herbs and brought them to the household for sale at the front door, or probably the back door, were rarely recorded in accounts, but they occasionally pop up. So you do get other particularly flowers, as well.The folklore traditions don’t appear in the recipe books an awful lot.

Morag:

That’s fascinating, wow, that’s really interesting! Because there’s a lot of information out there and it’s hard to know what is actually useful and what is real. It’s really interesting to hear this work that you’ve been doing. You’ve recently, it’s about to come out, the title of the book is ‘Trees and Shrubs That Heal’. So in this book, you’re really focusing on looking at a forest garden approach. You also have a previous book, ‘The Medicinal Forest Garden Handbook’. So you’re taking the research that you have and then blending it with transforming landscapes that heal the planet and heal people. What does that start to look like? What are the kinds of plants that you’re incorporating and encouraging people to grow as ways to help common conditions and help to keep people healthy?

Anne:

So as you’ve probably gathered, I’ve got a fairly rigorous approach. I’m a sort of an evidence seeker. But of course, sometimes the evidence is not easily found. My first book, the design book, was really all about the experience I gained in setting up the medicinal woodland Holtwood, which I can talk about more. But the experience of writing about the design, people wanted to know, like you’re asking, which tree is the one that you would recommend to plant? 

So I felt I had a lot of material about how these trees could be used. And I was very frustrated about the other herb books around – they’re mostly about sort of twee herb gardens. They’re wonderful in their own right, but I wanted to look up and see what else was available. We did a lot of pollarding and coppicing at Holtwood. So I learned about some of these trees that I was planting.

I wanted to write a book that told people about the magic of medicinal trees and shrubs, but I wanted to explain the magic. So in the book, I have not included a lot of history, folklore and so on. People write about that really well and it’s not really my place. Instead, what I’ve tried to focus on is what these plants really do. We’ve got a bit of an idea from tradition, Chinese traditional medicine, North American traditions, as well as European and UK traditions. I’ve tried to provide some introductory material which puts the plants in their place.

I did it by herbal action – the astringent properties of the trees and shrubs, their leaves, and all the antioxidant properties from the fruits and so on and I tried to write about how they can benefit health. So I suppose my answer to the question, which tree? ‘You could use this one, for example.’ For an astringent you could use oak for wonderful body washes and all sorts of external uses. But what about this lovely ornamental Asian forsythia plant the flowers are fantastic – they’re astringent and antiseptic, they can be used for soothing a sore throat or for a face wash and the like. It’s a bit of a melting pot book – I’ve got 80 trees and shrubs that I’ve managed to get into that framework of different herbal actions.

Morag:

Fantastic. I wonder if there’s also a recommendation for some that would go well in tiny gardens where people can create. Like mini medicinal forest gardens if they don’t have the space. Are there some that you think are really good for that kind of urban context?

Anne:

Yeah, I’ll probably start doing some blogging later in the year once the book is out to draw attention to different site requirements. But the smallest plant in the book, which is technically a shrub is Partridge Berry (Mitchella repens) – a wonderful North American, a sort of ground covering, it’s just a few inches tall. It was traditionally used, partly for its astringent and antiseptic effects in childbirth, and related to women’s complaints. There are a number of other plants, like eucalyptus trees, which are huge. So I’ve been trying to find cultivars or varieties or species that are somewhat smaller and I latched onto the Snow Gum (Eucalyptus pauciflora), which is a smaller eucalyptus. We started to grow it at Holtwood to try it out.

Morag:

How’d that go? Did it grow alright there?

Anne:

Well, it’s very slow growing! It doesn’t produce a huge amount of material. But all of the eucalyptus trees are so wonderful in the leaf matter that it produces. The eucalyptus are part of the myrtle family and there are other trees in the myrtle family that are fantastic. And in fact, common Myrtle, it does really well here in southwest England, and it’ll do well in sheltered sites. So as global warming, unfortunately, hits us, it’s one of those that I would be looking to. It has wonderful aromatic leaves, beautiful flowers, which are great for celebrations, and berries as well which are edible.

But it is the aromatics that interests me because it can be distilled and it can be clipped like a hedge into any shape you like. So, one of the things that I tried to do in the book is to identify some of the variations of families that have particular characteristics that can be used in different contexts. I’m aware that smaller gardens are a bit of an issue for people that don’t have that much space here.

Morag:

Yeah! Have you come across any that are good as soap? I keep getting this question because I talk about soap and actuaries, for example, and people say ‘yes, but they come from the Himalayas and they’re disrupting that.’ And I’m always looking for plants that were used as soap. It’s not medicine, but I just wondered if you’d come across any on your way.

Anne:

So it’s quite interesting because of course, when you make soap you use sodium hydroxide for alkali and then you add oils – it’s the whole process of combination. So you could infuse any plant matter, leaves and whatnot in the starting material, but the chemicals are so powerful that they tend to denature everything. We had masses of willow and we ended up stirring in dried powdered willow as an exfoliant into soap. So that’s because sometimes you get soap with oatmeal and other things like that. And that seemed to work quite well except some people find it a bit strange having little grains of brown in there. So not everybody likes that.

But in general I would avoid using citrus in soap because it denatures so much. It’s sort of looking for the less reactive essential oils, the lower key odoriferous smells that might be appropriate. After we sold Holtwood, we didn’t produce the products anymore, but I think that’s a really interesting area that you mentioned to explore more. There’s lots of potential.

One of the things I’d really like to do is work on how to use infused herbal waters in making shampoos – so that’s one of my bucket list of things to do! So because there’s lots of saponins in some plants like horse chestnut. I put a recipe with every one of the 80 trees and shrubs, I put a simple recipe and I can’t remember which one it is now, offhand. But you can make a soapy lather with something like horse chestnuts because of this saponin content.

Morag:

Great! I can’t wait to check out all those recipes, because it’s fascinating! And it’s there right in front of us. Talking about adding these medicinal and really fantastic household uses into our forest gardens – expanding it from the sense of chop and drop for the soil, food for us, food for the wildlife. There’s this other dimension that I think hasn’t been talked much about in the permaculture world, and I find it fascinating. It’s one of the things I love. I often go out and give talks in local community centres, libraries and garden groups. One of the things I love is the bit afterwards, when everyone comes up and says, ‘Ah, I use this plant for this and I use this plant!’ 

That’s when all this knowledge sharing happens. It’s just so fascinating that so much knowledge about plants is held within families. I think that bringing that into a book that we can share with recipes is great.

Anne:

Yes, I’ve particularly tried to use simpler recipes. Some people might think they’re almost too simple, but I want to get people started. Yeah, one of the online courses that I’ve been running, I got a bit of feedback from someone saying ‘Your course got me started on making things and I’m really looking forward to making many more.’ That’s just the sort of feedback that I like to see that once people try out a few things, they get hooked. For example, who knew apple leaves can be made into tea! Once you start to harvest tree leaves, then the world is endless!

Morag:

We need to talk about tree leaves a bit more, because this is something that I absolutely love. I mean, here in my garden, I have mulberry leaves, and I use them as a tea. Also the olive leaves, I use them too. There’s a lot of leaves all through my garden. I actually did a whole series of little YouTube clips about them when the pandemic was in full flight and people found it hard to get out and get food. I was just saying just have a look in your garden and walk around. So we did that. But I didn’t know about the apple trees! So for your climate, I wonder what other edible leaves there are? Because then all of a sudden, your mind just goes ‘poof! there is so much food around us all the time that we just walk past!’

Anne:

So there’s two things: one is it’s great to be able to preserve some of these leaves. So it’s quite important to think about a drying facility somewhere in your house, whether it’s drawers, a loft or hanging baskets or whatever. Because it’s very frustrating just to try things fresh and very often. Drying seems to concentrate the flavour. For example, I’ve just ordered a dryer and it’s supposed to arrive today. So I’m really kind of yay!

Morag:

Is that one of the multiple stacked cabinet ones?

Anne:

Well I made my own when we had Holtwood – a big thing based on baking trays, which worked brilliantly. I used a fan from a computer to get air into it and a puppy blanket warmer to warm the air. This homemade version worked really well but it’s too big now, because I’m sort of semi-retired – just writing and doing talks and such like that. So that’s one thing that I think people don’t always have, and it’s good to think about.

The second is: I really love tree leaf combinations. This is where the trees and shrubs come in because of course, every single rose family member – raspberries, blackberries, right up to the apples and cherries – all of those leaves are quite astringent. So I love combinations. I like to combine an astringent with something that’s a bit more aromatic. So that’s where the myrtle comes in. And then mint for the aroma, rosemary, those sorts of things, although they can be a bit overpowering. And then I like to add something a bit medicinal. For example, there’s always the ground level herbs like yarrow, great for urinary problems. Then plants that can be somewhat more digestive, so quite bitter plants. I may add three herbs together to make a tea. 

When we were running courses in Holtwood we would walk about with people and just literally pull leaves off trees and, and then come back and put them in a pot to brew them up. People would be sitting there saying, ‘Gosh, I never knew tree leaves could taste this good!’ I think sometimes it’s an acquired taste and I would never want people to drink stuff they don’t like, but you’ve probably experienced this, that bitterness is a very individual thing. Some people do like the bitter taste.

Morag:

So can we just talk about bitters? Because it’s something that I think in our society we’ve pushed, quite aside to the detriment of their health. What’s your take on that? What are some of those ways that we can reintroduce the bitters into our system?

Anne:

This is a bit of a hobby horse for me too, because there’s so much bitter potential in bark. I’m a bit mad about bark as well, because trees and shrubs are so productive, especially if you’ve coppiced and pollarded. It’s very, very straightforward. If you’re able to manage them in a garden or other sites to get large quantities of bark. I’ve always been very interested in buckthorns.

We have two native buckthorns in the UK – the purging buckthorn which gives you an idea of what it does, it’s so bitter that it’s probably not safe to take. It causes a lot of griping and stuff. The other buckthorn is the alder buckthorn, which is the most beautiful little tree. We have one in our cottage garden and it’s just buzzing at the moment with bees and other insects. It seems to be full of tiny nectar full flowers.

The bark of the alder buckthorn (which is Frangula alnus) is supposed to be aged for a year and then it is an excellent laxative. So that’s the kind of thick end of the wedge if you like the laxative, detoxing action. But then at the other end, there’s the bitterness of all of the daisy family, which is excellent for stimulating digestion. So if you over brew chamomile wildflowers, that bitterness is great, because it gets your digestion going at that slight edge. Yarrow, I always think of as a supercharged chamomile. So from the bark through to the ground level. We’ve got bitters to suit every situation. And I think in a world where detoxing is sold as a commercial possibility, we could do much more just for our self help and improve our health by clearing the body from these regularly produced wastes just from everyday living.

Morag:

Yeah. I was gonna ask you, as you were talking about the buckthorn – how do you get the bark off those in a way that’s not damaging the plant? Do you take off the cuttings when you’re coppicing it? What’s the process of collecting bark?

Anne:

So bark on mature trees is thick, rigid, grooved and brown and not much use. So we want the bark from younger trees or branches, maybe two or three years old. In the case of willow, one or two years old. Other trees, maybe a few more years. So they’re ideal for coppicing cycles, and just pruning branches. I’ve got a beautiful fringe tree, Chionanthus virginicus, which is a member of the olive family in the garden and I know that the roots are great as gallbladder remedy and I’m thinking, aha, perhaps the bark! So I’ve just been pruning it because it fell on my Chasteberry and greenhouse!

So quite often, branches need to be taken down for all sorts of reasons, safety or otherwise. What’s needed is a knife which has a bit of a curve on it. I designed one, which I called the Stobi, which I’m huge on. It was handmade so it’s quite pricey, but it was actually based on a carving knife, which had a sort of a curve to it.

Morag:

Where did you get that made? That fascinates me that you designed a knife and got it made! Is there a local knifemaker you went to?

Anne:

It’s kind of a no. I think the networking here applies. I was doing a stall for the Medicinal Forest Garden Trust somewhere and came across a person who made knives. So I drew it on the back of an envelope and about six months later, came back with a beautiful knife. I mean, there are alternative ways, but maybe we can get the Stobi into mass production.

Morag:

Yeah, that’d be great!

Anne:

So a bit of a curve is ideal for thin thinner branches. Always cutting away, for health and safety. In the spring is the best time when a lot of pruning is done. But it can be done at other times of year. If you’re cutting two to three year old or younger branch bark, you can strip it off and put the strips in a paper or cloth bag, give them a shake every now and then and then they’ll dry really well just indoors and they’ll keep for years.

Getting the bark off in strips in that way, it means that then you’ve got just a ready-made bark for making teas and the like. So for example, I harvest ash bark. We have this awful problem with the disease of ash here, but there are some ash trees that are okay and its bark is brilliant for arthritis. It grows really well as a coppice, so I save ash bark peelings, and I put them into a mixture with nettle and rose as a way of getting rid of joint pains tea.

Morag:

I was wondering, I live in a subtropical environment and one of the things that I battle with when I’m saving anything is mould. I wonder whether in a moister environment like yours if that’s an issue? How do you make sure that you dry things properly so that they store for a long time?

Anne:

Drying is a big issue. Actually, it’s an issue for larger scale producers, smallholders and the like, who want to produce herbs for sale, because they’ve got to have somewhere where they can dry and store effectively for safety’s sake. But our cottage is made of manure and straw and it’s quite old. The moisture level is quite high, I think it’s often 60%, easily everyday. And so getting things to dry, because you want moisture to get down to about 10-15%, it’s very difficult. It’s also quite difficult to find something that measures that moisture accurately. Apart from the snap test as well, that’s always quite good.

There is a way forward, which is that if you dry things until they seem to snap, and gentle warm air is the best that I found. Then, once those things are dry, you can package them in paper and then put them in a big plastic barrel. That is a way to keep things properly dry or otherwise they have to be processed because they won’t last. But in general, dry things don’t last for more than 12 months really.

Morag:

I wanted to ask you, you mentioned before about when you dry things that it concentrates the active ingredients. I’d always wanted to ask someone who had knowledge about this, something in my brain says ‘When you dry things, you actually lose some of the living qualities of it. Where does that sit? Like do you lose something but concentrate something else? Do you understand what my question is? I’m not sure what I’m asking.

Anne:

Again, I think a lot of the tradition is around dried herbs because that’s one of the best ways people in the past had to preserve. Things like freezing and so on are quite new possibilities and we don’t really know how that works. But my interest is really good drying. So good practice in drying then preserves the most active ingredients. When you see herbs for sale in a shop and they look a bit brown in the bottles and jars you know, don’t buy them.

What you want to do is dry gently – so heat is not the key. If you heat herbs then they will start to denature. You tend to lose the active, particularly the aromatic ingredients. But if you can blow air across them, I like to use pillowcases. I bundle everything into a case and pillowcases have this really useful. I don’t know if they do this the world round but they have this really useful flap. You can hook them up or on a stick and then as I go past I give them a whack, which bundles up all the heavy stuff inside and they’re cotton so they can be washed. That’s a really great way to dry just at room temperature and then pack up in glass or paper. Always add a label! The number of times I’ve dried things and forgot to add the label…

Morag:

Before we go and talk about design, I wanted to ask you another question that I get asked a lot when I’m talking to different groups about the safety of different things, because we’ve become so disconnected from plants. As kids, a lot of people say ‘don’t eat little berries, don’t eat this, don’t eat that.’ And there’s this fear there. How do you know? When you’re making your home herbal remedies, what’s a safe thing? Can we harm ourselves as well? In? How do you educate around that?

Anne:

I mean, I think we need to avoid experimenting when we don’t know what we’re doing. Just recently, there’s been newspaper articles in the UK about hemlock being found on the road on the way to school that children walk past and shock horror! Of course, this hemlock’s been there for years! And it’s everywhere. It’s a beautiful looking plant, it’s very ferny. I would absolutely go with the view that we need to educate people so they can identify plants. The carrot family is a particularly good example because there are some toxic members alongside the sort of edible versions. When I’m doing talks and walks, I always warn people about that particular family, because it seems particularly problematic.

But the thing is that in the past, there’s been a lot of observations of what are safe herbs. So generally speaking, traditional recommendations that survived today are pretty safe, because just by experience, we know that they’re safe. We also know that herbs are very difficult to measure exactly in terms of their ingredients, there’s a lot of variation through seasons and the way they’re prepared. But in general, they’re very weak. If in doubt, many of the recipes in the past for things like wrist plasters would be used externally on the body. So maybe only 10% of the active ingredients would have been absorbed. And so using externally is a good way to go. 

I have quite a lot of thoughts about health and safety. But essentially, they boil down to education that people need to learn about plants. We have these lovely forest schools here in the UK, and I think they’re quite widespread now. And I’m really quite keen. One of the things we did at Holtwood was to have a training session for forest school leaders, where we could talk about health and safety in relation to health and medicine ideas. Because what we don’t want is to have children going out, not knowing what’s safe and what isn’t.

Morag:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you for clarifying that. There’s one other question on health and safety. What’s your take on comfrey?

Anne:

Okay, so comfrey is full of pyrrolizidine alkaloids and particularly in the root. When I was first training as a medical herbalist, we used to use the root to make an ointment and some herbalists still do, because used externally it’s relatively safe. Generally, they’re pretty bad for the liver and I would only use comfrey leaf nowadays to make the ointment. I would only recommend it for use externally. But since comfrey is also a wonderful fertiliser plant, there’s lots of other uses for it so we don’t need to completely chuck it out.

Morag:

Yeah, it’s fantastic! I have a lot in my garden, but there’s always lots of questions about it. Thank you for clarifying that too. So Holtwood! You transformed a conifer forest into an edible and medicinal forest garden. Can you tell us a little bit about what it looked like and your process? What was your motivation for taking a piece of land like that and how long did it take? Lots of questions all bundled up in one, sorry!

Anne:

So, I was trained as a medical herbalist, so I had a bit of a career in adult and further education, managing programmes and meanwhile, I trained as a medical herbalist. As I went along, I found it really odd that so many of the herbs that I was buying from my dispensary like Hawthorn, Berry tincture? I mean Hawthorn hedges? There’s millions of them in the UK. And yet the Hawthorn berries were coming from Eastern Europe. I just couldn’t kind of put it together so I started to learn to make a lot of my own tinctures and I thought, ‘Well, can’t I grow them as well?’

I got in my head that I wanted to be able to harvest particularly trees and shrubs. Then my partner Kay and I discovered that there’s a lot of small woodlands for sale in the UK, which are broken up from larger woodlands that have been sold off. We discovered this hectare of Sitka spruce in North Devon, and it had been up for sale for five years, nobody was interested in it!

When we actually went to look at it, we walked down a hill through the spruce and we discovered that the bottom was a meadow leading onto the River Torridge. Just straight away we went ‘great! Let’s buy it!’ So we grabbed the money somehow and bought it with the idea that we would gradually fell all these conifers. There were about 1000 Sitka spruce, they were all very neatly planted in rows. I think it had been an insurance company investment in the 1960s so they were about 40 years old.

Anyway, the idea was to gradually fell those trees and replant. As it turned out, it’s not that easy to just fell a few trees – it’s actually easier to have help from a friendly contractor to clear the lot. We ended up with a bomb site for Sitka Spruce stumps and the story unfolded from there. A lot of this experience is in the book, The Medicinal Forest Garden Handbook. Somewhere I have an archive about that process. So now, which bit of the question has not been answered yet? 

Morag:

From the bomb site, how long did it take for you to create the forest garden? What were the starting points in that transformation?

Anne:

By that time, I was living in Devon and I had done some permaculture training. So I was fascinated with the idea of edges. I did a back of the envelope design, splitting this hectare up into about a dozen rectangular spaces with the idea that around the edges of all these little planted tree plots, would be introduced trees – I was very interested in North American trees particularly – then I could harvest them for use in my practice! There’s a wonderful organisation in the United States, United Plant Savers, and I did a six week placement with them when I retired from the university job and learnt a lot more about those beautiful North American trees where the United Plant Savers are trying to make sure that they are sustainably harvested.

I was able to look for trees, not just native trees, Oak and Ash and Willow and Birch and so on, but also introduced trees, ranging from a Snow Gum that I was talking about earlier, the smaller eucalyptus to Virginian Witch Hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) which is North American, Prickly Ash (zanthoxylum americanum) – zanthoxylum species from North America and so on. We had some wonderful volunteer help and we started to plant up the bomb site area. We have got it fenced to stop deer coming in, which is just about feasible to fence a hectare. I’m not sure if you could do it for larger areas. So it grew like topsy.

Morag:

How high did you have to create the fencing system to keep the deer out?

Anne:

Two metres high is the minimum in the UK because we’ve got three types or more. We’ve got red deer, we’ve got fallow deer, we’ve got Muntjac, we’ve got so many. They all nibble everything. So the idea was that these sections would be coppiced and pollarded bit by bit and we could move around harvesting the produce. As it turned out, the trees just grew so rapidly, particularly at the lower parts where there was a lot of moisture from the meadow and river – the Willow and Cramp Bark (Viburnum opulus) – they just grew like topsy. So in the end, there was no way of keeping up with the coppicing regime.

Morag:

Can you say a little bit of the difference between coppicing and pollarding?

Anne:

Coppicing is cutting at the base, and pollarding is cutting it. Usually willows here would be meadowside willows, we pollard it quite low, maybe a metre high. A lot of pollarding in Europe is done more at five/six foot high.

Morag:

Have you tried any hedging as well on your site? Do you work with hedging methods or any other more traditional ways of managing trees?

Anne:

So I didn’t try it at Holtwood. But I have been talking with other organic growers about ways that medicinal trees and shrubs could be cultivated for commercial use here. For example, there’s so many miles and mock ups of Hawthorn as a hedge – it seems madness that they can’t be harvested. In this country, there’s no tradition and also other plants could be readily used in this way. But there’s an issue about how hedges are managed here. Because many hedges are cut sometimes by flail, which is quite violent, most years. Of course, Hawthorn only produces flowers and fruit on one year or older shoots. So it would be necessary to look at the way that hedges are managed. It seems to me that there’s lots of potential!

Hawthorn is used here because it’s very easy to grow and its stock proof because it’s quite thorny. It’s like a miniarchy type of forest. But it would need a bit of a study, I think to look at maybe with some sympathetic farmers who are smallholders? Why couldn’t they cut each side in alternate years so they could get the fruit? That sort of potential. We don’t have to rely on traditional methods, we could be looking ahead and thinking about what do the plants actually need to produce?

Morag:

I understand there’s quite a rewilding movement going on in the UK. How does what you’re doing and advocating for here fit with that rewilding context of turning UK’s land back to wild spaces for biodiversity? I don’t know if I fully understand the controversy around the rewilding that’s going on as well. So I don’t know whether I’ve misunderstood anything, but you could hopefully clear up my understanding of what’s going on!

Anne:

So I think that there’s a bit of a myth about rewilding that you just leave land to regenerate naturally. But in the original rewilding projects that have sparked off interests, like Isabella Tree and her farming set up in Southern England, they actually manage that process – they cordoned off areas, they stopped animals from going into certain areas, and so on. They had to negotiate with neighbours and walkers. I think rewilding is slightly a bit of a misnomer.

The other problem, of course, is when I’ve approached members of the Woodland Trust and other tree planting initiatives, that there’s been very much a focus on native trees and shrubs. Quite rightly, there is an interest in making sure that the sort of flora and fauna match up here. So I suppose my view would be, well it’s great to see rewilding, but well-established forests here have a fairly limited array of medicinal possibilities. So what interests me more is recognising that we do interfere with the landscape. We do want to manage our growing areas.

Also some plants can be quite invasive. For example, I’ve just written a blog on my website for the Medicinal Forest Garden Trust about Buddleia and I discovered that one flower spike of Buddleia may contain 40,000 seeds. Although it’s called the butterfly bush and very welcoming nectar wise for bees and butterflies, it’s actually not a good plant because the caterpillars can’t eat it here. So it doesn’t help the wildlife in the way that people might think it does. The important thing is to deadhead that plant. You can have it, so long as you deadhead it and don’t let the seed spread. That’s the kind of management that I’m talking about, is within sort of fenced or limited areas that we can grow medicinals that we really want to see and are just the right products.

Morag:

I was going to say I imagined though that by doing the plantings the way that you’re doing them, and bringing in that diversity of layers, niches and all different foods, that the biodiversity is naturally increasing on your site. Did you map that at all or notice the shift and change from the Spruce to when you left the site?

Anne:

Well, the problem is, it’s difficult to measure because as this global catastrophe of climate change has come upon us, it’s been so noticeable that there’s been a massive drop in diversity out there in terms of birds and insects. Our garden is a miniature permaculture project here. We do have birds, insects and butterflies, but still the numbers have dropped. I think one of the reasons is that the plant material, the habitats are very piecemeal. So the garden next door’s garden is quite bare and the same with fields. I think you mentioned hedges earlier and if we could start looking at ways to join up those habitats, then we might begin to reverse some of this decline. If we could join up more habitats, then we actually give the insects and wildlife a bit more of a chance to prosper.

Morag:

I was just asking about as well, do you find that the general movement in your country is tending more towards regenerative approaches? Do you find his more support for that? Has there been a shift? Because I know there’s been different agricultural bills come in and different support for expanding that approach? Are you seeing that on the ground yet? Do you get a sense that there’s a cultural shift happening?

Anne:

Yes, yes, there is. You know, we’ve had sort of ecological arguments on the Arches, and Farming Today, Countryfile – our TV programme on Sundays visits places that are doing good things. But it’s pretty hard going even though there are changes afoot in terms of funding, which will hopefully help pay farmers for what they call public goods.

It’s kind of difficult to get the messages across, because people want to know exactly how to do it. They want to be told what to grow, how to grow it. There’s still a lot of experience and experimentation to be gathered about what are the best ways. I think that it’s an evolving process and we do have a really good band of organic growers in this country. But there seems to be, not silos, but some separation between being organic, being agro-ecological and being permaculture. They do have a lot in common but they’re not all totally at one.

Morag:

You do have the Food and Farming Festival which seems to me like a great idea because all those different groups are coming together, at least there’s conversation going on!

Anne:

But notice that it runs at the same time as the official Oxford Farming Conference, which is where all the big landowners are.

Morag:

I didn’t know that, ok!

Anne:

There’s probably a lot more that could be said about how the economics of farming works here. But I discovered this up close when I tried to work with organic growers and colleagues in promoting a herb market. Because there was a huge amount of interest and people saying, ‘What should I grow? What should I grow? How do I dry it?’ and so on.

The problem arose that we couldn’t get buyers in the firms that use these plants to commit. Some of them would say, ‘Oh, well, we’ll buy any if you’ve got some leftovers after harvest!’ But no grower can commit land on the off chance that they might. So it was like a lottery! People can’t plant trees on the off chance that they might be a value at some point. We need some more well-funded projects to prove that some of these approaches could be used in a more commercially sustainable way.

Morag:

Yeah, great, Tell us more about the trust and what you’re working on with the trust.

Anne:

Okay, so it’s very much the Medicinal Forest Garden Trust is a bit of a fledgling organisation. During the pandemic, we decided that we needed to move on from Holtwood and it was sold at the time, so I went online. There’s a website, and because Holtwood had become very popular, we were running courses and they all had to be cancelled and money was refunded.

I went online, and tried to recreate those courses. So the Medicinal Forest Garden Trust is is kind of a focus, if you like. I try to do a monthly blog about particular trees, and how they might be used or places I’ve visited, and such like. What I want to do is to highlight examples of where medicinal forest gardening is going on. The idea really is just to spread the word of the possibilities. We’ve also got a little shop where we can sell a few things.

Morag:

Fantastic. And, and there’s a book that you’ve got coming out later this year?

Anne:

It’s coming out in October 2023. It takes the previous 40 trees and shrubs that were in the medicinal forest garden design book and adds another 40 that I wasn’t able to squeeze in last time. There’s a bit of information about cultivation and other uses so that it may be useful for permaculture growers, to see how it would fit into the context of a forest garden or some sort of project. As I was saying earlier, there are recipes with each species.

The idea is that there’s plenty of information to select for different sites, if you want to grow, but also perhaps foragers and forest schoolers, might be able to use it looking at trees and shrubs, not just in local woodland, but also in gardens and parks. Because there are plenty of ornamentals in the UK, coming from Asia, Australasia, and North America, particularly which can be used. The introductory chapters are mainly about how these plants might be used, giving people the possibility of substitutes. Once you know what you’re looking for, for example, you’re looking for a stringent action, maybe there’s an alternative if you can’t find a particular species of plant.

Morag:

Oh, fantastic. And I love the way you know that it’s global, that people will be able to pick it up from lots of different places across that kind of climate zone and be able to see all those uses. There’s a lot of things that are in and around our gardens wherever we look that are possible. So having that is absolutely amazing.

Anne:

Well, they’re all temperate plants so they would all be suitable in a temperate context.

Morag:

Fantastic. I was gonna ask you a little bit about your writing process as a final question, because as part of this writer series on Sensemaking in a Changing World. I’m always fascinated by how writers actually structure their thinking and manifest books. I’m always curious personally, because I’ve got lots of little book ideas that keep on swirling around my head, but I never actually find the time to make the discipline of doing it. So what was your process of actually writing? You’re on your third book now!

Anne:

There’s two sides to this one: getting someone interested in publishing! And the other side is actually writing it! So my background is in sciences, I’m a report writer, I don’t have much artistic ability. For me, writing is very often a case of getting loads of notes, putting them together on the computer, then printing them out and looking at them and thinking, ‘oh my god, that doesn’t make much sense’, and scribbling all over it, and going back to the computer. It’s an evolving editing process. The key being that I ended up with far too many words, like I remember with my research thesis, I ended up with twice as many – usually producing about 100,000 words and I ended up with over twice as much. Trying to reduce that is a bit like cutting off arms and legs. 

But the key to that is, what am I trying to say? I talked about the historical research that I was doing earlier. Then the two things I wanted to say was, how you could consider researching recipes in context and actually, when you do, you find that surprising result! Maybe they weren’t used so widely, after all. Similarly, I’ve had to focus on ‘what I am really trying to say’, in a nutshell, and then that helps to prune and focus. I am very much in favour of the introduction – what I’m going to say is all about ‘this, this and this’, ‘here is this and this and this’, and then concluding, ‘what I’ve said is this and this.’ So it’s a bit kind of stylized, but I don’t really know any other way.

The first question is how you get something published, don’t just send it off into the ether! You need to network and get to know the publishers, ideally, the editors and their names, and try to speak to them about your idea of what you want to produce. Because they’ve got to be with you on the idea. The first time I tried to publish my research, I was a bit knocked back by other people’s comments and ‘what you should do is this, what you should do is that’. I tried those things, and it didn’t work. I needed to go back to my original nutshell idea.

You need to stick with it. And a network until you find the right people who want to publish your book, or self publish – which I didn’t have much experience of.

Morag:

So I was wondering about the topics of your book, did you unfold the topics as something that emerged from your passion and interest? Or are they things from all the education that you’ve done – common questions that people ask and that? Where did you find yourself landing?

Anne:

The topics are a bit like those spider diagrams. They do come up from what people ask about and problems particularly. I think they kind of start from what I think people ought to know and then they’re slightly modified by not just what people ought to know, but what people actually are interested in. That’s probably why this third book has been produced because not everybody – although everybody ought to design a forest garden – not everybody has the possibility. So this third book is intended to give a much wider set of people from gardeners to foresters, and foragers and therapists, ideas about what they could be harvesting or growing.

Morag:

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. I’ve learned so much and I really look forward to the release of your new book. I wish you all the best with the release and with all the things that you’re sharing through the Medicinal Forest Garden Trust!

Anne:

It’s been an absolute pleasure, thank you!

The post The Medicinal Forest with Dr Anne Stobart appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

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Read the full transcript:

Morag:

This episode, I am delighted to be speaking with Erik Ohlsen, a well known successful and much loved Sonoma-based ecological designer, permaculture practitioner, educator, author and regenerative entrepreneur. He runs multiple companies deeply grounded in a love of nature of service to the community and based on the permaculture ethics and principles. Erik’s just kind of one of those wonderful people who gets stuff done!

In this conversation I asked Erik about how he’s grown his wildly successful permaculture artisans company that is regenerating landscapes from urban to rural. Even as we spoke in the process of informing the design of permaculture agrihood. It’s a wonderfully inspiring, uplifting and wide ranging conversation spanning from his early volunteering projects giving away gardens while cultivating huge social capital and skill development to his current work. His legacy book, as he calls it, is just about to be released by Synergetic Press, the massive 550 page guide, ‘The Regenerative Landscaper: Design and Build landscapes that Repair the Environment’. This is going to become the go to manual and curriculum for permaculture learners who want to put into practice their learning in permaculture courses. It gets right into the nitty gritty and shows how to make it work.

Towards the end of the conversation, I asked Erik about his process of writing. I now feel entirely liberated and how I can set about writing too. So thanks so much, Erik. So check that out if you’re interested in writing as well.

Erik, welcome to the show. It’s really great to have you here on Sense Making in a Changing World.

Erik:

Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure.

Morag:

Well, across the oceans, I’ve been watching your work for a really long time and been superbly inspired by not just what you do, but where it comes from for you – the heart of what you do, your purpose in this. Before we talk about your book and your work that you do, can we start just there? Where is that kind of fire in the belly for you about the reason that you do permaculture and perhaps how you even discovered permaculture?

Erik:

I got into permaculture when I was 19. So for me, this has been my entire adult life. I’m 44 now, and this is all I’ve done in my career. What started it for me was you first off to know, I was never very much an academic person. I didn’t go to college, I barely graduated high school and didn’t find a lot of nourishment there. But I got really turned on by learning about some of the terrible things that happened in the world as a teen, which I think a lot of teens are experiencing right now.

It’s hard to look away from climate change, hard to look away from genetic engineering, genetic seeds, industrial agriculture and all these things. As a teen, you’re about to inherit this world. You’re about to come into and be a steward of this world. ‘Here’s the keys to the house. Good luck.’

What first turned me on was learning about Monsanto’s Terminator seed technology. So that was back around 1999. The concept of thinking about technology that could sterilise the biosphere, sterilise the plant world – something inside me clicked and I just became terrified and turned on at the same time. Because coming from a fairly challenging home environment, I’ve been through a lot of challenging things in life and getting through was always about bootstrapping it, get to work, we could do this, we can change things.

When I first discovered permaculture, I found a sense of hope, a sense of belief in what’s possible, that really sings the song of the natural world. I grew up hiking and camping with my parents and being outdoors most of the time. So the natural world is really infused in my life at all times. You know, when you look out into the forest, it’s hard not to see abundance, right? It’s hard not to see beauty and goodness and possibility. So permaculture became that for me, while holding this grief of the world that I was inheriting at a young age.

I came through the ranks of hardcore activism. Going to mobilizations, locking down streets, getting arrested, protesting, organising on all different levels, nonprofits, collectives, activist groups, and everything in permaculture was a thread through all of that. When I hold up, when we contrast, the world that we know is possible that we are creating, you and me and so many of your listeners here. And we look out through the media and we look out and we see through the industrial agriculture lens, the technology complex, the military complex, all these things. When you hold up, what’s what we’re creating out in the garden, it’s like, that’s not all bad.

We don’t have to wallow in how terrible things are. Because we can create beauty, we can create abundance. That’s my drive, you ask what keeps me going, what my drive is, getting out. Listening to frogs and birds and watching the fox, we have a fox family living here that we see everyday, and we engage with every day. So being in a relationship with foxes, these fuel me these relationships, fuel everything I do. Because I know what’s possible. I know abundance is possible.

Morag:

Thank you for articulating all of that, from the terror to the active hope to being in relationship with the natural world – we’re not apart from it, we’re in daily relationship with other species. 

As you were speaking, I find it resonates a lot with my journey, the activist journey. Getting up and trying to find a way to live. I heard another video of you talking about one of your early projects when you were 19. The Great Garden Giveaway. I wonder if you could do some retrospective and tell us about that. Because there’s something about the way that you were saying instead of going to college, ‘I did this and this was my learning.’ Through that you crafted what’s become your career. I think it’s a beautiful inspiration to young people looking for an alternative way forward, a way that we can step into this active hope and make a contribution. I’d love it if you could unravel that story a bit for us.

Erik:

Yes, the great garden giveaway. Thank you for presenting that into the space here. I think in Australia, you have the Permablitz. So this is almost the same thing. But before I first heard the word Permablitz, we kind of imitated earlier pioneers – all building on much more ancient ways of being. So in 1989, we started an organisation Planting Earth Activation pa like the pea plant. Our mission was to create a seed bank, a seed safety network, in our community. We did that by offering free gardens to anybody that wanted them. We were very idealistic, very powerful and very effective. There was maybe a core of eight to ten of us, but we worked with other collectives, and we grew into about 40 strong at our peak.

What we would do is we’d go into a neighbourhood, we’d walk down the street and say, ‘There’s a lawn. There’s a lawn. There’s a lawn. There’s…Okay, our new target.’ So literally, we would go knock on the door. ‘Hello, we’re Planting Earth Activation. Can we give you a garden for free? Turn your lawn into a garden?’ And you know, it’s hard for people to say no to that. The way that we organise this was usually a neighbourhood weekend volunteer project. We usually wanted to have ~6 gardens we were going to do at one time, but we’ve done up to 10.

We’d organise a whole weekend volunteer effort, we got a lot of the compost, mulch and plants donated. And so we would take over neighbourhoods, sometimes we would even get to literally shut the street down, the city would give us the cones, ‘okay, the street’s shut down for the weekend.’ We would give gardens away through the weekend, and the exchange was that we would come back and save 25% of the garden seeds that we would let go to seed. We would save and process that seed as a community resource.

Morag:

Wonderful. And as a direct response to that Terminator gene, this whole cycle of the ripple effects of what you were doing that – the closing the streets, building community, bringing food into the urban landscaping, the way that ripples out. And then each of those 30 people and all the hundreds of people who are involved, shifted something in them. So I think the power of these volunteer actions, activating programmes that are so awesome, and then rippled out into your enterprise, and what’s eventually also become your books that you’re writing as well.

Just before we move into that, this role of being a volunteer in permaculture, as a beginning point, as a training ground. Maybe there are ways that you’ve seen as you’ve continued on that you’ve been able to help other people to step into these volunteer roles or internships? Or is there a way that you see in your world that that can continue?

Erik:

So I’ve spent years, 40 hours a week, volunteering for many years and built my whole career off that. Of course, I had help from my parents, I took side jobs and we fundraised a lot. When you think about being a permanent volunteer, that’s it, that’s a whole thing. I actually even started an organisation once called Adopt an Activist, specifically to fundraise money for people who were volunteering full time. That’s another story, but that, for me, was my college period training ground.

That’s what it was, it was skill, it was about learning skills. It was not just about the skills of transforming a lawn into a garden, saving seed, planting fruit trees, building soil, catching water and all these things that we do. But also the skills of working in a community, building a vision and then doing the work to see it come to fruition. Also working with city politics, city government, and how we engage these civil processes that are there for us to engage in – this was all part of the learning ground.

I think next to skill building, the second greatest harvest of volunteering is social capital. My entire business, my entire career is built on social capital. And I still volunteer, even though I have a successful business, and I will if somebody’s in need. They’ll have funds, depending on who they are, and what the situation is, ‘oh, I’ll go, I’ll spend a month with people who need it to do the work.’ Because we can’t lose track of the gift economy. We can’t lose track of a non-monetary exchange with our people, with our land, with our community. I think it’s social capital that generates relationships.

Sometimes what I like to say is that a lot of the things that I do now don’t have a harvest for another year or maybe five. And that’s how social capital works. You don’t get an immediate return because you’re not doing it for a return. You’re doing it to be of service but inevitably you’ve put energy into a social bank account, and in some way it will come back. At times when you aren’t expecting it and times when you need it, you can lean on that.

Morag:

It’s a kind of a trust, trust in the process of being part of something larger than yourself. And being in that mind, in that way of being, that ‘I am part of this broader community’ and by giving someone else who gives someone else something – it kind of works out somehow. But it also means that we do need to step in at some point and think, ‘Okay, the things we need to make some money to do concrete things is where your companies come in.

I wonder if you could talk us through the transition from your volunteerism approach to starting to make a good living from permaculture. I also want to sort of talk a little bit about that notion that ‘you can’t make a living out of permaculture’ – I think it’s essential that we can, let’s explore that a bit too. So what was that transition point between being an active volunteer out in the streets into starting a business in permaculture.

Erik:

One thing we have to kind of present before we dive deep is what’s happening on a mental emotional level for folks when they are going into this activist mode. In all these wonderful things we said about volunteerism, part of the motivation behind that is anger about the world. This destroyed planet that is being inherited. Grief that the generations before me didn’t do more, and a feeling of ‘I need to be worthy somehow.’ And I think this is really important, we have to start here to understand this transition. Because this self identity of how we do the work, who we are and why we’re doing it is fundamental. It’s make or break for the whole process.

I’ll tell you what happened to me – I broke, completely broke. I gave everything I could. My entire identity was wrapped up as being an activist and being this person who volunteers, this person who goes out there. Then I got sick, I got a chronic illness. I literally couldn’t go to meetings, I couldn’t go do the work that I had been doing before. I couldn’t even teach a permaculture course! I’d been teaching permaculture courses since I was 22. And I had to stop doing that at that time. Grief really set in because these were the ways I was finding financial reciprocity – was being an activist, Adopt an Activist and getting fundraised money to care for me, working on projects that had funding behind them. Then I was able to make my ends meet that way, by teaching permaculture and getting paid a paycheck from that. 

When I got sick, I totally burned out. I couldn’t do these things and  I really had an identity crisis, honestly. That identity crisis was rooted in the fact that I couldn’t go out. I hated money at this time in my life in my early 20s, I literally hated money. The idea that I couldn’t make ends meet through my volunteerism, right? It’s weird to say it that way. But that’s just basically what it was. I couldn’t tap into the fundraising and all of that. I had only one thing to fall back on. And that was my permaculture skills. Something in me had to change in order to say, ‘I’m going to charge for my time.’

I got invited onto my very first project! It was a commercial lavender farm with rainwater harvesting terraces and microclimate moderation, with a stonefruit orchard element. Luckily that that came around, right as this was happening, I said ‘yes, I’ll take this project on.’ That was my very first project for my business, which is still alive today – Permaculture Artisans we’re a design contracting company.

We’ve been around since 2005. And that very first year, when I got on that first project with one wonderful client who mentored me – she was a business woman, very ecologically minded. She helped me kind of get in. The most amazing thing happened on that first project. I’ll never forget it. I hired a bunch of friends to come help me. Within that first year, we planted more fruit trees, built more water harvesting systems, than in two years of nonprofit organising.

All of us were like, ‘we’re able to pay our rent doing that. We were able to put gas in our cars.’ You want to stay away from cars as much as possible, but I live in a rural area and you have to use vehicles to get around. So it kind of blew my mind like, whoa, wait a second. There’s something here that I hadn’t seen before. Now we’re doing the work that builds soil, we’re doing the work that captures and stores water, we’re growing food, we’re growing medicine, and all these people, these guys and gals who are working with me, they get to do this for their job! And I get to do this for my job!

A light bulb went off and all of a sudden, I understood something that had taken me six years in the movement to understand. We can’t be stuck doing this work as a hobby. This can’t be just a hobby thing that people do on the weekends. I mean, that’s lovely. That’s what you do. And you have a job you love and you do great. No judgement, you know, more power to you. But when you look at the scale of the problems, and we want to respond, we have the solutions, right? We have the solutions, the solutions are really not the issue at all. We have so many solutions, it’s almost overwhelming. But how do we implement them?

We live in a society that is money based. Let’s be real, if you’re putting on your permaculture lens and you’re reading the existing social landscape, that’s the system that we’re in. Yes, we can change the monetary system, we can do all these things. But if we base all of our work outside of the system of money right now, we’re essentially not applying basic permaculture principles, we can’t use the existing resources that are moving quickly through all of our families and systems and communities towards that end. So the other piece is the social bit about permaculture.

Yes, volunteering is lovely and wonderful, we should all put our time in it. But not everybody has the privilege to do that. Plenty of families are poor, living in poverty, don’t have adequate housing, don’t have clean water, and don’t have healthy food. They have to work six or seven days a week. That’s just the reality and I work with a lot of these families, I know a lot of these folks. They’re going to just go wherever the job is, people who are that desperate are going to go where the job is.

If the only jobs that are available are spraying roundup at the edges of a lawn, putting chemical fertiliser down and putting in irrigation that they’re going to do that because you don’t when it comes to baseline survival for a lot of people in the world right now. It is about money and access to that.

Morag:

It’s creating work in this, creating livelihoods – not just for yourself, but for other people is a prime directive. I think this is an enormous piece that we need to understand as a movement that, we have the solutions. You can look at all of the things that are going on. There are so many dimensions that come together through this way of thinking. It’s not a set of recipes, but it’s a way of seeing the world. And we apply that thinking to everything that we look at – then there’s possibilities everywhere.

I think we need to be able to articulate that clearly, step up and speak up – be a little bit more. The word that keeps coming to me at the moment is audacious. We need give ourselves a bit more permission and agency to step up and speak up – to put permaculture in all those different realms. So how did you transition into that? You did your first one, how did you get from making your first garden to creating this hugely successful company that you’ve created?

Erik:

Well, I had to learn business skills. So that first year was ‘oh, now I have to learn.’ I hate asking for money. I hate charging. But I have to learn these skills and I have to learn project management skills different from when you’re volunteering. You don’t think as much about the logistics and costs of getting a delivery of compost and the timing because that’s usually donated and it’s a resource that just arrives. But when you’re doing this work professionally, you’re managing the flow of material in and out of a project – the timing, the staging, the placement, the costs, the sequencing of the project itself, and how all of these factors play out. That took a while to learn, probably about five years.

Within that five years, I was fortunate enough to barely make it to the end of one project, having no idea what’s on the horizon, asking ‘is this is all about to just collapse under me?’ And then another project comes in and then I would volunteer to initiate a project, because again, this is what I know – how to build social capital through volunteerism.

So I’ll work with a client, I’ll start doing free design, free consultation, and I’ll take them out to lunch. Whatever is needed to build relationship, build trust. Then little by little, ‘oh, we have a project here, and how much is it going to cost?’ We engage, we negotiate and we do that. I was fortunate enough to just have referrals come in at the right moment.

I remember even once I was sitting in the parking lot of a landscape materials vendor, and I was all out of work, this was my last day on the job – I had four people working for me at the time. This is what they were feeding their families with, doing this work – working for me doing this work. If I couldn’t get them work by Monday, then why would they stick around with me? When I’ve trained them with permaculture and the whole thing. Now sitting there, and I was pulling my hair out, and almost prayers to the universe. Just, I don’t want this, we have to keep going. Let’s keep going.

And right at that moment, the phone rings, and I pick up the phone. It’s an old client who says, ‘Hey, I’ve got a project, I need you. Like, how soon can you show up?’ ‘Oh, we can be there Monday, no problem.’ That’s how on edge for five years it was. But what happens is after, it takes about five years for any startup to become an actual viable business. And that’s been my experience with other endeavours as well. At that point, there’s enough word of mouth, enough skills and enough understanding of the industry that now you have more work than you can do.

I had a lot of students, because I teach people how to build landscape companies, ecological permaculture landscape companies. And I find this as the, the crux position for a lot of folks, they can get started, they can get known, they get some establishment, and then there becomes a moment where either they have to go to the next level or they’re going to start losing clients, losing staff and things are going to unravel. It’s a weird little thing that happens around four or five years in, and you have to take a risk.

Usually that risk is hiring people onto your business team who are not billable. That means that you can bill hours out to clients – people in the office, taking phone calls, returning phone calls, doing the bookkeeping, doing administrative stuff. These are vital components of running system. It’s an ecosystem. And this is part of the nourishment that keeps the exchange flowing and moving. But those are hard decisions to make, to hire people.

Often when you get more work than you can handle, then you start thinking what do I do? If I say yes to all these projects, then how do I come through and surface the land and the people in a way that still has integrity. Sometimes that means hiring a bunch more people to try to get them trained. So it takes a bit of time to go through those processes and a lot of risk.

But for me, it was always that seed of seeing the landscape come to life. We’ve transformed asphalt parking lots, we’ve transformed schools, we’ve transformed cities, we’ve transformed congested forests that were about to burn down. When you start to see these landscapes respond to management, seeing food growing in abundance and people actually have too much food. ‘Oh my gosh, this is my big problem!’ If that’s the problem, I want you to have that, it’s game on. This is what we’re doing. And this works.

On Fridays we had a tradition for years, we’d all come back to the ranch where we had our ‘offices’ and have a beer or a barbecue. We’d listen to each other’s stories, talk about each other’s kids, talk about each other’s families. And at one point, this light bulb went off, like, there’s 50 people, not just who worked for me, but all their families, depending on this company right now. Right now, there’s probably 75 to 100 people, depending on this company. And these people are spending their days planting fruit trees and digging swales and putting in roof catchment systems.

Morag:

That’s so fantastic to hear. I started getting really excited to hear the way you take it from the forest to the city, to schools, to all of these places across your bio region. I wonder, I often look at the suburbs around here in Australia on the Sunshine Coast. It’s one of the fastest growing suburban areas up here in the Hinterland and all the bit between me and the coast is starting to spread out with cities and suburbs. With all the work that I’ve done over the years and all the places that I’ve seen, the possibilities of designing them differently really excites me.

I wonder whether you have any interesting examples of how new suburbs have been transformed and whether you had any influence into that space? I’m trying to find the key. I don’t know if that’s a bit of a random question. But if you’ve got any ideas of how to approach developers…

Erik:

Yes, I do. I have a project like that right now that we’re working on. We’re working with a developer who’s about to put in around 250 units, it’s a whole neighbourhood building a whole neighbourhood. And they’re very conscious already. So that helps. But one of the things that they and a few other folks I’ve talked with too are doing similar things, is that they are starting to understand instead of building homes to just sell a home, they actually get more value if they’re selling a lifestyle. This is really a change in approach, obviously, it’s part of that money conversation. And we’ve seen places that we’ve transformed into permaculture paradise gardens that look like your garden, that looks like my garden. 

Typically in this area, in almost every case, the last few years those houses have been sold for bids around $100,000 over asking price for the garden. People are buying that lifestyle more than they’re buying the house. Because yes, the house is cool. Yeah, we need a house, but what’s gonna happen when the next pandemic hits, what’s going to happen when the next fire hits? What’s going to happen? People are on edge and they want security. I think globally in western industrialised culture, there’s a new understanding that security isn’t just financial, it’s also peace of mind. It’s food, it’s medicine, it’s access to nature. So with this developer I’m working with, they’re on that so we’re designing a 25 acre regenerative farm in the middle of a neighbourhood!

This farm will be a CSA, there’ll be a CSA programme that will provide for the neighbourhood. The farm will be a place for people in the neighbourhood to come in, push your strollers, put your babies and go around the hiking trail that’s going around the edge. Then there’ll be cultural events, harvesting events, music events and maybe even have your wedding there – have your daughter’s wedding there. Whatever it may be, have your Bar Mitzvah here. This that’s how we’re designing the space so there’s cultural relations and honouring of the community as well as food production, as well as connection to the land. 

What I’m starting to understand working with this developer and speaking more to this is about selling the lifestyle more than the house. If you’re a developer wanting to make money, that’s going to be a lot more attractive to the millennial generation – the new way of thinking about the world is a different kind of security that you provide. So I think that is one way to look at it and agri-hoods. Essentially, it’s an agri hood. And there’s so many great examples around the world of agri hoods.

Morag:

That agriculture idea is absolutely fantastic. I’ve seen examples of this across Europe and in the States as well. I keep spruiking it here in Australia, and I’ve just not been able to get an edge in yet. I think it’s possible, when we have the land, we have so many new sorts of suburban developments getting started now. Now is the perfect time for these to get going. I’m looking, maybe I need to go on a bit of a road trip around Australia and talk to different developers with examples to boot and just sharing this out.

Erik:

Another in is talking with county officials, it’s finding the ones that are also aligned with the permaculture thinking. One of the things that happened in Sonoma County – really building on that earlier conversation about The Great Garden giveaway and what we did 20 years ago – from those members of that original group I worked with, they got elected to the City Council at the age of 24. And went on to become mayor and be on the decision making body for eight years after that. From that point on, our city council has been a progressive majority council for decades, from a base built out of this wellspring of good ecological thinking and planning in the city, from a prior grassroots organisation.

Morag:

As a 19 year old doing what your heart speaks you to do, you’ll have no idea that that was going to be the ripple effect of your actions. When you ground yourself in, in being in service, and coming from this place of trying to be in service, to do good in the world to regenerate the planet. It’s this myceliation that happens and it brings a kind of a power to the moment that you have no idea when those little new mushrooms are going to start to pop up and be seen. But this rippling going on, this connective thread that’s unseen most of the time. 

Erik:

How many city planner folks or future city planner folks have taken your programmes, listened to your podcast or listen to us right now? Are the ones that will now or in the near future approving these suburban developments? What kinds of parameters are they putting on these developments? Because one of the things that’s been happening a little bit more in Sonoma County, where I live, is the planners. We have permaculture trained people on the board of supervisors, we have permaculture trained people on multiple City Councils, permaculture trained people in the planning departments. And this takes time.

I’m positive that it exists throughout Australia too. Within that, when developers are coming and saying, ‘we want to do this in that project’ we can say, ‘okay, great. We want you to do the project too but we want you to have this much green space, we want you to grow these kinds of trees, we want you to look at all on site water management and these sorts of stipulations.’ And the developer is like, ‘Oh, shoot. Okay. Well, I haven’t done it that way before. Oh, no. I need somebody who knows what to do to help me.’

Morag:

All right. You’ve been teaching people how to set up these companies and you’ve written a book, as well. A couple of books now, actually. So what’s the latest one that’s about to come out? Tell us about that?

Erik:

Yeah, so it’s called The Regenerative Landscaper. Honestly, this is 25 years of experience all wrapped up in this book. I would say it’s probably will be of the most comprehensive manuals out there on regenerative design, permaculture and the rest. It’s 520 pages packed with fully-referenced scientific backing of cutting edge ecological science and how to implement them. It’s what I wanted to do with this book, I haven’t seen a lot of this in the ecological design and farming space, getting beyond inspiration. Of course, it’s filled with inspiration, but it’s not just about that. It’s not just about theory and exciting ideas. But how do you go from that to then actually doing stuff, doing the projects?

This is something that a lot of students of permaculture struggle with, as I’m sure you’ve seen. You come out of a permaculture course and you’re so excited. And wow, a lot of folks who come out of these programmes are turned on by the principles and such, they still don’t know how to get the principles in a principled way of thinking to work. It usually ends up being more about technique than bigger strategy. So you go to the land, ‘oh, swales, of course, every land every project should have swales.’ I did the same exact thing. I’m totally guilty of that, without stepping back and looking at what’s there already.

What’s actually the ecological dynamics that are occurring right now? Who are the stakeholders here, human and non human? How do we create an experience of collectively designing, stewarding, managing and moving towards a goal that takes into account all these all these project stakeholders? You know, birds, lizards, foxes, trees – those are all project stakeholders.

So this book is really about how to do it in a very rational way. How to create a project timeline, how to manage a budget, how to implement an agroforestry system from step by step. That’s what I wanted to give to the world. You know, it’s really a legacy book, it’s something that you can take, and you can really dive in and reference it.

And of course, you know, the Permaculture Manual, that was like breakfast, lunch and dinner in my early 20s, just munching up that manual, implementing every single thing that I could. But Bill is a brilliant thinker. And sometimes it’s hard to wrap your mind around what he’s saying. I don’t totally understand it. I would read like a column and then spend a week trying to figure out how to get away, you can’t read it cover to cover that? No, no, I probably do it three, four times, my friends. I would be like, What does your permie book look like? It’s like, ‘I sheet mulch the cover of mine on you, you’re better than us.’ But, there was some struggle in the the realistic side of implementation.

I think that what my book offers is a smoother, more realistic way of doing the work. So for people who want to do this professionally, this book would be a manual for professionals. But that’s just one of the audiences, for anybody who wants to just do it in their own backyard, build their garden, build their homestead, this would be a full scale manual to do that.

Morag:

Oh, fantastic. I know that it’s taken me years to do this. And it’s kind of like a little bit of growing up with permaculture, that like you’re saying, what Bill did was he grabbed a whole lot of things and put it together. And then here’s an idea. Here’s all the things that I’ve been thinking of, and through the practising, the experimentation, the application and all these different contexts it’s grown up into what you’re now presenting. It’s something that’s super tangible, tested and tried and bringing in all the latest things that’s been going on in the world in the last 40 years. It’s time to really bring those into the fore.

So can you tell us a bit about your writing process? Part of what I do on this podcast, I’m speaking to authors and ask you how do you do it? I’ve always in the back of my mind 10 books all hanging around here. Honestly, I didn’t find the time to start writing the first chapter because I’ve got the charity over here, the teaching over there and I’ve got kids at home. How do you write?

Erik:

I love that question. Because it’s a process as you are acknowledging here, that can be quite challenging and especially with the businesses. Okay, so the first thing that I tell people who are interested in writing is that you have to get away from having things done right at the beginning. You have to let go of any expectation that what I write today is going to be good at all. That expectation has to go out completely. The most important thing to do is to get words on the page, no matter what quality they are, you have to start with something. So you have an idea, ‘oh, boom,’ right down to notes, just get it down.

I have really honed the art of dictating into my phone. For me, this became a life hack. Because the last thing I wanted to do was sit at a desk, six to eight hours a day. I had a computer, but that’s not a life that I want to live. So what I would do is, ‘I’m going to write a new section in my book. I’m going to go to the beach and I’m gonna hike for hours on the beach, dictating into my phone.’

The night before, I would create a bit of an outline. Let’s say we’re going to talk about water harvesting. Okay, infiltration, rain gardens, swales, terraces. rain catchment, tanks, roofs. I’ll just create a little bit of an outline there, then I would go out and I would just have adventure, dictatating into my phone. I don’t even look at it when I’m doing it, the technology is pretty good. So that’s maybe about 90%. When you go back, there’s some things that I don’t even know what I was saying there. ‘That doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t matter.’ I could do 4000 words in a day that way. That’s a significant amount of words in a day so I created the whole first draft that way of every chapter.

My book has 55 chapters or more, it’s a nine part book. It’s about 200,000 words. I would dictate, then I would go back and I would edit that. That’s the sitting at the desk part. Now I’m editing it. But when I’m editing it, a new little thing clicks in. When you’re editing, people misinterpret about editing, it’s mostly removing stuff. That actually makes the writing so much better. When you go into remove, you’re just like, ‘oh, that paragraph – delete.’ It feels so good to get down and compress it. So that’s how I would do it. I would reward myself.

I would oscillate between these writing adventures, to get myself out in nature. If I want to talk about water, I go for a walk along the river. And then when my brain gets tired, I just stop, sit by the river, watch the Ygritte, listen to the water and look at the willows. Then the next idea comes out. Let’s keep walking.

Morag:

That is so brilliant, Erik. A book written in that way must have such a different tenor, I think it really is emerging from that. I think you might have just unlocked something in me, telling me that story. Because as an educator, a lot of the way that we communicate the knowledge is through speaking it out. And that articulation of ideas as you’re teaching and as all the ideas sort of flood into your brain you can bring all these things. And it comes. I don’t even know what I say at the end of lots of sessions, because it just kind of comes. Also if you’re walking through a beautiful place and you imagine you have a group of people, you’re explaining what’s going on, maybe that’s just – boom. Exactly. Thank you.

Erik:

My pleasure. Yes, I was the same exact way as you. I’ve always been good at teaching and public speaking and educating. And I thought, how can I bring my voice into the writing because you know, sitting here doing this, I’m not very good at it. But I will say just to forewarn you that the writer’s voice does have to change, that it does have to become a writer’s voice, not a speaker’s voice, that gets smoothed out in the editorial process. All your little nuggets and gems and how you connect them are all there for you to find. Then you just have to adjust the words.

When we speak sometimes we add things at the end of a sentence that when you write it, you wouldn’t put it at the end, you’d put in the beginning. So those are some of the editorial things that would come up. It’s like, ‘oh, I have to rearrange this for a reader versus the way that a listener would hear it.’

Morag:

Yeah, great! The other thing I want to ask you about story is, how much story do you use to explain? It’s like the batting about how things happen. But there’s also stories which open up people’s perception of how those bits of information land, where does that fit into your writing?

Erik:

Well, story must be part of any book for anyone to want to sit through it. You have to ground information, especially scientific information in actual stuff. Real things that happen can’t just be lalalalalala all up here. Then you have a story about actually how it was implemented or what you experienced. I think stories are a journey that a reader gets to go on, where they get to see a lot of your mistakes. I think that’s one of the most important parts of stories, to highlight mistakes. And in learning lessons, my approach is that I want readers to know that I’m human and that they are just as capable as I am doing anything that I talked about or speak about. And I truly believe that 100%.

I was a 19 year old kid, I had absolutely no skills, I barely graduated high school, you know what I mean? But the path, to step on the path and open up and listen, eat, drink, breathe, ecology. To breathe this work into the world, and you learn as you go.

I think how we become learners is probably one of the most important things that we could get from a permaculture course. Honestly, how do you become a learner? How do you listen? How do you observe? What kind of perception do you bring to the land, to a community, to a partner or a client? These are skills that are the most important. And if we can get that, then all the rest will show the secrets of the universe. So this book, these stories are parts of that experience of going out into the world with ideas and perception, either failing or having success.

One of the other aspects of my book is I do feature ten other regenerative designers from around the world, a lot of women, people of colour, indigenous folks to tell their story. I felt like it was vitally important to not have this book be only my voice. Because I’m a white dude in California with a very specific context. And there’s a lot of other contexts when we talk about regenerative design and regenerative landscaping, that are necessary to understand different approaches, ways of beings and cultural emergence that’s happening from different cultural groups. It’s so fun to tell the story of other people and the work that they’ve done because it’s so inspiring. And the possibilities, the things that people are doing.

This is a little bit of an aside, but it just has to be said. There amount of solution oriented projects happening in the world right now, it’s impossible to quantify. When we get into dark conversations about the world ending and out of control climate change, the military, the industrial complex – all these things where you could just give your soul to that and die in your heart. What isn’t able to be told. Because it’s so decentralised on such a massive scale, many ecologically based regenerative systems are happening around the world, millions and millions of them are happening right now.

We’re not quantifying the carbon that they’re capturing, we’re not quantifying the food that they’re producing. We’re not quantifying the community resiliency that’s been developed – because it’s totally decentralised! I just wanted to state that because I don’t think it’s a fair representation in any any media forms that tell us about the state of the world because you it’s hard to quantify the good stuff.

Morag:

I’m so glad that you said that because when you do put on this lens, you see this dimension of the world of what people are doing. When you notice those things, it fills your heart and your soul with this active hope of possibilities and you know that everywhere around the world are seeds being planted, these ripples that are forming. There’s this mycelial network that connects them all. And what I love about permaculture is that it becomes a language that can connect us. When we speak across the planet, like through the Institute, I speak with people on six continents almost daily and just hearing these snippets of news and stories, they’ll hear that general theme of something over here. It just keeps going and there is no measurement. I wouldn’t have even have a clue of how you’d begin to measure that. 

But this is the power of story, when we share the stories and we find a way for those stories to get out. When there’s a manifestation of those stories and maybe a glimpse of it in the city, through the projects that you’ve always been doing or something that’s going on in the refugee settlement, foregrounding these stories and finding a way is why I also run a new programme I started recently called Share permaculture. It’s about how do we share what we’re doing out to the world? How do you blog it, YouTube, podcast it, get into the media, on TV, on radio? What are the skills that we need to tell those stories? And books are always the keeper. That’s the bit that eludes me. And congratulatios for getting that – your second book, is that right?

Erik:

This is, if I counted all my books, this would be my seventh book.

Morag:

No way!

Erik:

Some are children’s books and some ecology based colouring books. Another was how I described my path into permaculture. I didn’t go to college, I just got out there learnt that way. Well, that was the same way for writing for me. It’s been seven years now since I wrote the first book. That was part of essentially putting myself through a master’s writing programme, not through any conventional means, but just through podcasts, online programmes, experimentation and reading every single book on writing out there. So experiment, experiment, experiment, write, write, write. I was producing little children’s books, colouring books and things like that as a way to understand the industry, to learn about the production process, and to start to hone my writing skills. This new book that’s coming out, The Regenerative Landscaper, this book for me is more like a masterpiece. 

Those other books were more like training grounds. So there’s still value in those and especially, I have a children’s book called the Forest of Fire. That’s a book to help children understand wildfire and living through wildfire and fire ecology. That one has been very well received as we live in the lands of fire, as do you. We’ve been evacuated and have been in the smoke and all of it, the whole experience. So that’s been a really nice book to share with folks, kids in schools and things like that. But it was all part of the learning process, to develop skills and understand the industry. And this new book, The Regenerative Landscaper is the evolution and emergence of all of that.

Morag:

So when will it be coming out? When can people get their hands on this book?

Erik:

It’s available for preorder right now through Synergetic Press and other outlets, it’ll be officially sent out and available on August 22. That’s when the printed versions and the Kindle ebook versions will be released.

Morag:

Fantastic. I can’t wait to see it and to share it, to share this podcast too and encourage absolutely everyone to to get their hands on it. I think it’s going to be a new textbook for permaculture educators. This is a transformation of possibility right here. So thank you so much for taking the time. I know it’s taken you so many years to write, all that knowledge that’s gone into it and the process is the book, how many years has it taken?

Erik:

Three years of writing to get the book to this part – diligent writing every week for about three years. So it’s a big body of work! Thank you so much for sharing it, talking about it and your enthusiasm. It really is a full curriculum and I’m very excited to share with folks and see how people respond. Then the hope is that it’s a real reference book that people can come back to. One could read it from cover to cover.

I did try to write it with a logical flow of information with stories and inspiration and things that can carry you all the way through. But people who are more experienced and well seasoned could also just jump in & reference the water sections. I think there’s seven or eight chapters on water, things like that. That’s a very robust part of the book.

Morag:

Well, thank you for taking the time to rigorously document your work and to make it available to the world. I mean, what a gift! Thank you so much. And thank you for joining me today and sharing your story. Absolutely inspiring. I’m going to get my phone to go and start walking, I think.

Erik:

Oh, it’s truly been a pleasure. I’m so grateful to you for having me and for all the work you do in the world. And thanks.

The post Regenerative Landscaper with Erik Ohlsen appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

My guest today is deep ecologist, rainforest activist and author JOHN SEED – a fellow ecovillager. He’s based at Narara Ecovillage in NSW and I’m at Crystal Waters on Gubbi Gubbi Country, QLD.

John is the founder and director of the Rainforest Information Centre in Australia, working for rainforests worldwide since 1979. He says many of their campaigns have been successful, but sadly,  for every forest saved, another 100 have disappeared. John realised you can’t save the planet one forest at a time – what we need is a profound change in consciousness.

Deep ecology reminds us that the living world is not a pyramid with humans on top, but a web. We, humans, are but one strand in that web and as we destroy this web, we destroy the foundations for all complex life including our own.

It’s not enough to have ecological ideas, says Arne – we have to have an ecological identity and ecological self. To nourish the ecological identity, John and the american peace scholar-activist Joanna Macy developed a series of experiential rituals called the Council of All Beings. John co-write a book, Thinking Like a Mountain in 1988  about the council of all beings, with Arne Naess, Joanna Macy and Australian Pat Fleming.

https://www.rainforestinformationcentre.org/john_seed
https://www.facebook.com/johnseed.deepecology
https://www.instagram.com/johnseed_deepecology/

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Read the full transcript:

Morag:

Hello and welcome to the Sensemaking in a Changing World Podcast. In this episode, I’m delighted to be speaking with a pivotal figure in the world of deep ecology, a concept I came into contact with at Schumacher College in England way back in 1992 when I studied directly with Arne Næss, the Norwegian mountaineer and philosopher who coined the term ‘deep ecology’. John Seed is my guest – a deep ecologist, rainforest activist and author and a fellow eco-villager. He’s based at Narara ecovillage, and I’m here at Crystal Waters Permaculture Village.

John is the founder and director of the Rainforest Information Centre in Australia. He’s worked for rainforests worldwide since 1979. He says many of the campaigns they’ve run have been successful but sadly, for every forest they saved, another 100 have disappeared. He realised that he can’t save the planet one forest at a time, what’s actually needed is a profound change in consciousness. So deep ecology, he said, reminds us that the living world is not a pyramid, with humans on top, but a web – that we humans are one strand of that web. And as we destroy this web, we destroy the very foundations for all complex life, including our own.

It’s not enough to have ecological ideas, says Arne Næss, we have to have an ecological identity and ecological self. And to nourish this ecological identity John Seed alongside the American Peace scholar activist Joanna Macy, developed a series of experiential rituals called the Council of All Beings. John co-wrote a book ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’ in 1988 about the Council of All Beings, alongside Arne Næss, Joanna Macy, and the Australian Pat Fleming. So come and dive into this conversation with me with John Seed to explore the world of deep ecology. I just feel so deeply nourished by this conversation with John and I hope you enjoy listening in.

John it’s an absolute delight to have you here. I’ve known of your work since gosh, I can’t remember since I began reading all about the ecological worldview because I studied at Schumacher College. I remember hearing about you there and I remember hearing about you even before then because you started the rainforest information centre in 1979 when I was just a wee 10 year old. What activated you as a young man to become an activist?

John:

Well, I was living at Bodie Farm, a community in northern New South Wales which I’d helped to create a few years earlier. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life organising meditation retreats and delivering babies and building houses and growing veggies. When I went to the market one Sunday and a neighbour got up on the stage and said that the Forestry Commission were coming in the next day to log the rainforest at the end of Terranea Creek Road. And we’d have to stop them and ‘could everyone please come and help?’ And I had no interest in a rainforest. I didn’t know what a rainforest was. I didn’t know there were rainforests in Australia. I’d never been down the end of Terranea Creek Road even though it was only a few kilometres from where I’ve been living.

But I was into the neighbourhood and Dudley was a friend and so I showed up. And somehow my whole life got spun around that day, and I still haven’t recovered. So don’t ask me what happened. It was completely a shock. And, you know, I just maybe it was years of meditation or maybe it was LSD before that, but for some reason I was right in the rainforest and went ‘yeah, okay, we’ll have it.’ And that was that.

Morag:

Isn’t it interesting how there’s just moments like that that come in as a disruptive force and transform us. This is quite profound, isn’t it? So the Rainforest Information Centre, was that in Lismore? That you set that up? Is that right?

John:

No, I first set it up in a school bus in the forest above Bodie Farm. It had been the preschool before we build a preschool and it was a derelict bus. After six weeks of protests, 2000 people showed up at a protest meeting at Terranea Creek, the government realised that it wasn’t going to be able to deal with this with the police force. So they announced an inquiry and called the moratorium just thinking they could spend a million dollars on the moratorium and at the end of it, everyone would have gone home and forgotten about it so they could get on with business as usual.

I saw that coming and I was just trying to think of how I could keep myself focused on this issue, which had totally come to obsess me. And I started to wonder about what was happening to rainforests elsewhere in the world, because by this time, I’ve learned that the rainforests are the very womb of life. They’re home to more than half the species of plants and animals in the world. And the satellite photographs they’re showing them disappearing at a horrendous rate, so that less than a single human lifetime remained at those rates of distraction.

I felt like the course of my life had been set. And so I started the Rainforest Information Centre. I mean, it was just a letterhead. It just started with asking a friend to design a letterhead forming, it actually never did never got any more formal than that until we had to

do something in order to get tax deductibility many years later.

Morag:

Yeah. From that moment, when you began engaging with rainforests till now, what’s the state of health of rainforests that you’re mapping?

John:

Well, I mean, lots of rainforests in Australia and elsewhere are being protected. But given that they’re all on a planet that’s sliding that rapidly towards oblivion with the extinction crisis

gaining momentum without a fundamental revolution in consciousness, I would say they do. Now the ones that we’ve saved as well as the ones that we haven’t saved.

Morag:

So this shifting consciousness, is this where deep ecology comes in for you?

John:

Exactly. I mean, it was in 1986. The New South Wales rainforest campaign ended in 1981 after two years when an opinion poll showed that more than 70% of the people of New South Wales wanted to end the rainforest logging, and our campaign had been tremendously successful. And the government of the day created a string of national parks that stretch from the border ranges up near Queensland all the way down to Barrington Tops near Newcastle, including Terranea Creek in the Nightcap National Park. And so these were the subtropical rainforests.

Then we went on to the temperate rainforest in Tasmania, and the Franklin river campaign, the huge blockade to stop the damming of the Franklin River in 1982. And then up to Kate Tribulation and the Daintree for the tropical rainforest in Queensland. And in each case, national parks and dimensional world heritage listing, we’ve watered our efforts.

But during those same years, worldwide for every forest that was saved, 1000 forests had been destroyed. Clearly, there was no way to save the planet one forest at a time, that unless we could address the psychological, spiritual disease that allows modern humans to imagine that we can profit from the destruction of our own life support systems, clearly these actions would be of no particular use. And that’s what sent me on the quest of trying to see how to address this deeper issue. That’s what led me to deep ecology.

Morag:

So now would be a really great time to explain to the listeners what deep ecology is? What’s your explanation of it and who else was in this field at the time when you first were emerging into this? Who else was with you on this journey?

John:

Well, Devi College is a philosophy of nature that says that under all of the symptoms of the environmental crisis, there is the illusion of separation between human Beings and the rest of the natural world. This illusion of separation is a result of anthropocentrism, or human centeredness, human supremacy – the idea that human Beings are at the centre of everything. So we are the crown of creation, we are the measure of all being. This illusion, this fantasy goes back 1000s of years, at least as far back as the Old Testament where we learned that man is created in God’s image, the rest of nature is not. That we have to subdue and dominate nature. And nature is to be in fear and trembling.

Deep Ecology as a philosophy and term was coined by the late Arne Næss professor of philosophy at Oslo University. And according to Næss, this illusion of anthropocentrism is so deeply embedded in our psyche and in our culture, that we won’t be able to think our way out of the mess and new philosophy won’t be enough to save us. He said that ecological ideas are not enough. We need ecological identity, ecological self, and what was needed in order to nourish our ecological identity and to bring it into the foreground for us were community therapies to heal our relations with the rest of the natural world. And that’s kind of what I’ve been working on ever since.

Morag:

So could you explain that a bit more like community therapy? What do you mean by that? Is this where the Council of All Beings comes in? Or is it something else as well?

John:

That’s it I mean, the Council of All Beings was the first of the community therapies that emerged in 1986. I attended a workshop called Despair and Empowerment, facilitated by Joanna Macy – a Buddhist scholar and an environmental activist from the United States who was in Australia. And that was the next big turning point in my life where I realised that this was what was needed in order to create the community therapies that Arne Næss had been calling for. And Joanna was just as influenced by running into deep ecology as I had been and as I was now running into her work and quite excitedly after that weekend workshop, we went walking into Rainier Creek.

Then and there, the Council of All Beings emerged as the first of the experiential, deep ecology workshops, deep ecology processes. And the following weekend, Joanna was scheduled to be leading a facilitators training in Sydney in her work, and she invited me to come down and we did the first Council of All Beings Together and both of us have been doing this ever since.

Morag:

The first one I ever did was at Schumacher College in probably 1992. An  extremely profound experience as a young person stepping into that space. So that’s where I ran into deep ecology. But I wondered, like you said, you ran into deep ecology. How does one just happen across deep ecology when it’s just an emerging philosophy? How did that even happen?

John:

Well, it was just, you know, life has these strange twists and turns but someone sent me a newsletter called Mind Moon Circle, which was a newsletter of a Zen Buddhist teacher in Hawaii called Robert Aiken Rōshi. And in that, he had written an article about deep ecology, and I was very, very excited. And there was a reference to a paper by an American philosopher called George Sessions, which was called Spinoza Perennial Philosophy and deep ecology. So I wrote to Robert Aiken Rōshi and he sent me a copy of that paper, and when I received that, I dropped everything and caught a train to Sydney from Lismore and borrowed a library card so I could have access to stacks at the University of Sydney.

I spent a fortnight going through hundreds of references at the bottom of this paper. You know, I’m not a scholar myself so that was like, totally out of character. But I couldn’t believe my good fortune that finally I’d run into the answer to the questions about the nature of the problem.

Morag:

Cultivating an ecological self or ecological identity, beyond the ecological ideas seems to be, as you’re saying, is the work that needs to happen today. How do we help to support and cultivate that? My background and main focus is permaculture. So how do you see the weaving of permaculture and deep ecology, for example, as a way to help cultivate a deeper sense of ecological self?

John:

Well, I think that permaculture thinking and practising and learning about permaculture is definitely a process that develops ecological identity. Because digging your hands into the ground in the garden anyway, whether it’s kind of cultural or not, all of these things are moving in the right direction. But the trouble is that we live in a culture which is so staunchly going in the opposite direction that we need a whole bunch of different things.

I’m reminded of a story about the poet Gary Schneider, one of the ancestors, the deep ecology movement. In the 70s, he was working in the administration of the then governor of California, Jerry Brown, a very radical administration at the time. Nonetheless, Gary was a thorn in their sides and one day, his boss, the governor, Jerry Brown, says, ‘Gary, why is it that whatever the issue, you’re always going against the flow?’ And Gary replied, ‘Jerry, what you call the flow is just the 16,000 year eddy, I’m going with the actual flow.’

So when we’re stuck in the 16,000 year eddy we need a lot of resources in order to remember who we are in order to somehow integrate the necessity to stay alive in the 16,000 year eddy and still move things in whatever way we can – in the direction of making sure that that eddy doesn’t destroy itself, through losing its connection with the flow.

Morag:

I have this sense all the time that the pace of the work that you and I do is at this community level, and this pace of destruction is increasing at a global scale. How do we connect that more so that the impact or the difference that we’re able to make in these community processes can mycelium it fast enough for the healing to take place?

John:

When Arne Næss was asked for a definition of deep ecology, his answer was asking deeper questions. And so the first thing I’d have to say in response to that is ‘good question.’ You know that the question is, to a sceptical philosopher like Arne Næss, the question is more important than the answer. And deepening the question is the purpose of the answer rather than brushing it aside. But the first answer is, I don’t know. If I knew I’d be doing it. But at the moment, the hypothesis that I’m working on is that… I was kind of close to death from cancer and spent several years doing nothing but staying alive not long ago.

And when I came back to my astonishment and delight, my enthusiasm and passion for the environment and deep ecology and rain forests and things returned with a new brilliance. I got a sense that what I needed to do was to master social media and podcasts as a way of moving this understanding closer to the mainstream than it’s been until this point. So I don’t think that that’s an answer as to how we’re going to solve the problem exactly, but I feel like I have nothing more important to do than to throw my life at it and to hope that there’s enough people feeling the same way that between us, we are able to succeed in turning this thing around.

Morag:

I think you’re right, opening more conversations in a place where we can feel that resonance, maybe it might be the first time that someone’s heard about it. I remember my dad, he was always listening to the radio and that was the first time that he’d ever heard about permaculture and he told me about it and I was a young kid. These little ripples, or resonances, or something land in you, and it’s transformative. It doesn’t have to be the answer. But it’s an opening of a door in your mind to start. So I think, yeah, holding space for conversation, holding space for new ideas to emerge, is really important.

Part of what you do, I was looking at some of your workshops that you ran, and the connection between deep ecology and mental health and addressing grief, fear, loss, rage, terror and all the things that so many people and particularly younger generations are feeling around what is happening in the world with climate change with forest loss, with extinctions? How do you hold space for that? And what happens in a Council of All Beings, or other types of processes that really enable some transformation to take place?

John:

I’ll answer that, but as a prelude, I’ll say that I’m having an interesting experience more than ever before. The workshops that I’m doing are filling up and there are waiting lists, and I’m having to create more and more of them. I’m 77 years old, which means that I can remember the 50s and I can say that there was nothing about the 50s that would have given you the slightest reason to imagine that the 60s were coming, the changes in mood, in temperament of the world were coming.

I just get this feeling that we’re at the beginning of a wave. There’s always been a really strong response to the workshops and to deep ecology from hippies, pagans, witches and environmentalists. But now, it’s all kinds of ordinary people, and especially young people are coming along. I’m training all of these facilitators which I’ve never done before, because maybe something like the 60s is looming ahead of us.

The other piece is that a lot of the people that are coming to the workshops are working in the mental health field. So last weekend, I did a workshop in a community and there were three therapists and two students of therapy among the 28 people present. So I feel that. I wrote a paper for the Australian Psychological Society years ago, at their annual meeting about eco psychology and I suggested that the reason that most therapy doesn’t work, is because the self that they’re trying to heal is an illusion, is a social fiction. There is no self without water, air, and soil.

Try to imagine that all of the pain is personal pain, not to realise that the pain that we’re experiencing, which we may interpret personally, where our therapist may want to talk about our childhood, or whether we were weaned too early. So much of that is that ‘how could we live in knowing that these things are happening to our world without experiencing the pain?’

So to experience the pain in the workshops, we part of the process is what Joanna now calls, honouring our pains in the world. This is the present day way of framing despair and empowerment. In honouring our pain for the world, first I introduced this by talking about the denial of feelings, that is part of the culture that we live in where we’re never invited to share our deepest anguish about what’s happening to our world, it makes other people uncomfortable. The rage and terror that we’re feeling (that all of us are feeling underneath),  is never welcomed in polite society. So part of what we do after we’ve got to know each other and created a safe container, is that we invite people to begin to experience and to share their deepest feelings of horror, terror and rage.

I introduce it by letting people know that this is completely safe. I’ve done this hundreds and hundreds of times, I’ve never lost anyone, etc. The healing comes from being present, and not from necessarily stepping into the centre. Because what we realise very quickly is that everyone’s feeling the same way that we are, it doesn’t matter who steps into the centre.

Pretty soon, the place can get very noisy and get very passionate. And the upshot is empowerment, that when we release the suppression, a huge amount of energy is needed to suppress these feelings, because they’re part of our intelligence. For 99.9999% of our evolutionary heritage, we hadn’t yet developed this bulge over our nose and started thinking our way through the world. And yet, there was this extraordinary intelligence where, without exception, every single one of our ancestors was intelligent enough to reproduce itself before being consumed. All of this intelligence is what we now call feelings, not thinking! We can call it intuition, we can call it instinct that doesn’t matter.

What we call feelings inside ourselves is what remains, that is ancient intelligence that led us safely through the tumultuous challenging aeons and aeons before we became humans and started to think. So there’s a huge amount of energy that’s necessary to suppress this intelligence that’s pushing up and trying to inform us about what’s happening to our world and what’s wrong.

The suppression of those feelings fizzles away our energy and leaves us feeling helpless and hopeless, ‘what can one person do anyway’, and ‘must be too late’, and so on with all the stories. When we create a container, where people are invited to share these feelings, then a huge amount of energy is liberated. We experience that as empowerment. And so we do that part on a weekend, we’ll do that on Saturday morning and it creates tremendous enthusiasm, energy and vision in participants. That’s why the mental health professionals are interested because the other thing that happens is that we see that everyone underneath. Whatever it is that they’re presenting to the world is feeling just as broken as we are ourselves. And it’s like, ‘there’s nothing wrong with me’. It’s like, ‘how does one live in such a world?’

Morag:

Yeah. What do you notice happens after? Do you circle back around and talk to people afterwards months down the track after their experience of deep ecology?

John:

No, sometimes people come back and do another workshop 15 years later and may mention some change that’s taking place in their life as a result immediately after the workshop. I remember I was in Ireland giving a lecture and somebody in the audience said ‘it’s all very well you environmental superstars fly around the planet creating all of this co2 and telling everybody what to do. Why don’t you just stay home?’ I said, ‘You know what, I think you’re right.’ I couldn’t justify it.

Then someone put their hand up and said they used to be the marketing manager for a big company. I went to my workshop and now they do the marketing for Greenpeace. There were three people in the audience who then testified to the changes that have taken place for them. And I went, maybe it is worth the pollution that I’m causing by being active.

Morag:

Yeah. You never know what the impact is, but when you show up and open those spaces, remarkable things happen. I wanted to ask you about what experience has been running these Council of All Beings in other countries, because I know you work in many different places, in rainforest communities in South America. Do you run those there as well?

John:

No, I mean, it’s interesting that one of the things that become clear is that every indigenous society that still maintains its ceremonies and rituals, has ceremonies and rituals that are synchronous with deep ecology where the whole society gathers regularly throughout the year to honour our relations with the earth. And, to me it seems like to make sure that we don’t stray away from our ecological identity, that we don’t disappear into merely social conceptions of who we are. I’ve attended such ceremonies, as a witness, but I would never think that I had anything to offer there.

It’s really only those of us in the modern world who don’t practise this. Of course, we had indigenous ancestors ourselves who would have been practising such things. But we may be the only people in hundreds of 1000s of years that have dispensed with these things that every culture has developed as ways of correcting for the drift away from connection.

Community therapies don’t seem like such a good metaphor for me anymore, because therapy is supposed to have a beginning and an end. I remember attending a ceremony on a mesa in the southwest of the United States and Hopi indigenous. And to my shock, they were doing a Council of All Beings, which I thought that Joanna and I had invented a few years before. They assured me they’ve been doing it for 10,000 years without a break. Therapies shouldn’t take that long. If you do 10 workshops, you are connected. It’s not like you do hundreds, you do it all your life, you have to keep coming back and coming back and coming back and making it part of the culture.

That’s what I’m thinking about at the moment. How can we move from merely facilitating workshops which put us in touch with this bedrock of truth? It can’t just be a matter of workshops, it has to be a matter of creating cultural forms, in our world that allow us to do what indigenous people continue to do?

Morag:

Yeah, it’s a really big hole in our society, ritual and celebration of that deep nature. Perhaps that’s part of that deep and shallow ecology, way of being. I’d love for you to describe a bit more about this notion of ecological self, can you describe what that means? How would you describe it to someone who’s coming at this idea for the first time?

John:

For a modern person with a background in empiricism and science, rather than a mythological interpretation, we could say that it’s undeniable that every cell in our body is the standard in an unbroken chain from the first cell of life on Earth. There’s an immense amount of evidence for this, perhaps we could start from the fact that when we were an embryo in our mother’s womb, we developed the vestigial tail and gills. There is just like a huge amount of evidence that the story of our evolution is not just another story, it’s not socially constructed. Well, it’s not only socially constructed.

This is who we are, this is who this is contained inside us. And the person that we identify with that we call our self, which includes our nationality and our religion, our education and our job and all of these things. It’s just the thinnest veneer over this ancient being. Our ecological identity, one quick way to experience it, is to think about the atmosphere, which is part of the environment. Hold our breath for 10 minutes while we consider what is outside and what is inside, what is the environment, and what is me. Very quickly, our ecological identity becomes clear to us, you can call it anything you like, but it’s not out there. It’s cycling through me all of the time.

We understand intellectually that if we poison the air, that it makes us sick, or it makes us die. But there’s something about trying to hold your breath as long as you can. And then a little bit longer. It gives you a really visceral sense that this isn’t included in our normal ideas of identity, this isn’t included in who we are. But it’s fundamental that anything that we create in the world that threatens this, is clearly moving in the wrong direction.

In the workshops, as I do them at the moment, one of the processes is called the cosmic walk, which I borrowed from Sister Miriam Therese McGillis, a Catholic nun from a community called Genesis Farm in New Jersey. In this, we make a model of the history of the universe, stretching back in the scientific version of that history stretching back 13.7 billion years to the Big Bang, and make a spiral out of a ball of hemp that’s 50 metres long.

Each metre on this spiral represents 374 million years in the story of the universe. In my version of this, there are 23 beads placed appropriately on this ball of hemp. And these are what some of them are borrowed from Sister Miriam. And some of them I’ve placed in myself, what I think are 23 of the most important and poetic stories in the evolution of the universe up to the present time and lay this out as a spiral.

We learned a chant called Child of the Universe, there’s a tea light candle next to each of the beads and the story of the emerging universe is told, and these candles are lit as we move from a universe in which nothing exists except hydrogen and helium, through a world 10 billion years later, where life appears on Earth mysteriously. Sister Miriam was a colleague of the late Thomas Berry, who was the most prominent, progressive Catholic theologian of his time. And he speaks of the universe, not as the place in which we live but as who we actually are.

He says that we humans are that moment when the universe has become conscious in a particular way, that for the first time, perhaps, the universe is able to slowly turn around and look over its own shoulder and gasp in awe and wonder at the trail that it’s trod, the story that’s emerging. The incredible story of cosmology and evolution and so on. 

He says that we can’t leave it to the scientists to tell this story because they don’t know how to make a creation. They don’t know how to tell a good story. We need the poets and the mystics and the musicians to tell the story. And this is how Sister Miriam responded to this beautiful ceremony. When we got to the last candle to tell the story of the human, we realised that it’s impossible to make a candle thin enough to accurately portray where the human sits in this picture. We identify only with that and we forget that that whole story is part of something bigger.

Morag:

It’s incredibly powerful, having a ceremony to name people, to feel into that is incredibly powerful.

John:

It’s a ceremony that turns it from an idea into an experience. And that’s what Arni said was that the ideas aren’t enough, we need the experience.

Morag:

I’ve done a similar kind of thing in a different format with Stephen Harding, from Schumacher with his deep time walk. We’ve created some down through the river, along Crystal Waters and map spots along, taking young people through this journey, through the forest to the river. We’d stop at each point and share a story about and get to that very end with the human and just spend that time exploring, sitting in the middle of the river. So many different ideas and their concerns about what’s going on.

It’s really powerful, so much more powerful than anything we could do inside the classroom with them. It’s such an extraordinary possibility of seeing ourselves entirely differently and it opens up a much greater sense of possibility. I think what you said about Thomas Berry turning around and being in awe of the world of everything. I don’t think we do that enough. We have this constant forward looking. 

How can we keep being in absolute or who we all are in this wonderful collection of beings. I feel that this is a missing chunk in our education system that continuously disconnects us from this. What ways have you been able to connect with young people to bring them into this space to offer ways of seeing, knowing and being?

John:

Well, I haven’t worked with young people myself very much at all. But many people who have attended the workshops have been teachers or worked with young people who have then taken these processes and used them with young people. The Council of All Beings itself is one that young people are much better at than older people. In the Council of All Beings, we each find an ally from the nonhuman world that can be a plant or an animal or a feature of the landscape or anything really. We make a mask to represent that ally and then we move through a ritual portal to enter the Council of All Beings where each of us speaks in the first person to represent our ally.

You don’t have to believe anything, you don’t have to believe that this really is the spirit speaking through me. All you have to do is become childlike yourself and very soon, a conversation develops, which none of the participants have ever heard before, including me who’s done this many, many times. You know that something new always emerges from it, utterly compelling and authentic. So kids love this and many people have done this with kids. Many people have taken other aspects of the work and all that I’ve done is put a page on the Deep Ecology website at the Rainforest Information Centre’s website where people have reported their work with kids so that people can find out what others are thinking.

The other thing that’s happened recently is a woman in Tasmania who has started creating a deep ecology space for kids. She’s working very actively on that. I went down there and the workshop that I organised was full. So I have to organise a second workshop on Bruny Island. Many of the people they’re working with Maggie, it’s going to be something new in the world of really deep ecology with kids at the centre.

Morag:

Fantastic. That’s so wonderful. I wonder too, you’re also a musician and you’ve been involved in film. So as well as these workshops, the way of communicating out these ideas have come through different mediums. So your film, can you mention a bit about that and where people can find it?

John:

It’s only an internet search away. But one film in particular, called ‘On the Brink’, which we made in the run up to the New South Wales state elections in 2002. The script was written by the Council of All Beings. One of the conversations was that the different Councils had several endangered species from New South Wales forests present and they were trying to think about what they could do to change their endangered status. One of the ideas that came up was that ‘if only humans would make a film to tell our story’. And then, ‘how can humans possibly understand?’ So maybe we need to write the script. As a result of that, we had several more Council of All Beings workshops, where endangered species from New South Wales forests were invited to this workshop in order to write the script. It’s a very interesting film.

Somehow, I was able to persuade Jack Thompson and Olivia Newton-John to be the voices of quoll and koala, and then to persuade David Suzuki and David Attenborough to be the presenters. We had this 25 minute film, three months before the state elections when the future of these endangered species would be decided. Because there was 70,000 hectares of forest that had to be protected. We went from town to town, showing the film all over New South Wales, every city in town.

The stars of the film were these costume creatures – koala, quoll, yellow-bellied glider, and mask owl. The costumes would parade through the shopping street at lunchtime, handing out leaflets about the show. Then the show would be on in the hall that night. When the lights went on at the end of the show, there were three tables at the back of the hall with a space to write letters to the premier. More than 80,000 people saw the film, and I think most of them wrote letters, because 10 days before the election, the premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, announced that if reelected, he would protect those forests.

Two weeks after the elections, he did so. So it was a very powerful film. And I’d love people to look at it. It’s kind of historical, but it’s also very topical at the moment. It’s on YouTube. If you look at the film page on the Rainforest Information website there’s 20 films that we’ve made over the years. There’s also a music page with environmental songs that I’ve written or other friends have written that I’ve sang. And so I’ve tried many different ways to communicate.

Morag:

The cultural ways of shifting culture rather than the ‘ideas’ way seems to be the most powerful that we can come together and enjoy together! In an interview with Satish Kumar a while ago, he said ‘Morag, don’t forget to celebrate!’ It gets so busy doing all of the things that we do, because we’re so concerned and so earnest. So don’t forget to celebrate. And that is the music and the gatherings and the feasts and all of those things together.

John:

One of the consequences of the cosmic walk and being able to actually experience our identity with the universe is that it was I, who suddenly came to life, 4.5 billion years ago. It was I who crawled the shore and started to live on the land. As the universe, whatever happens in the future on the earth, that part of us that is universal, it’s really not impacted by that. We then can return to our incarnation as a human and struggle with all our minds, for the protection of life, for the protection of nature. But not from that hysterical place where all of us are at stake. Because there’s part of us that’s really not at stake here.

I think that helps us to celebrate, it’s hard for people to celebrate who feel that they’re on the brink of extinction and there’s no light. There’s just something about this that just feels to me that we have to balance our lives at this time between struggle and celebration.

Morag:

That is a beautiful challenge. Just one final question because I realised we’ve been talking for quite some time. It’s wonderful to have your company here on the show! You live in an ecovillage now and I know you’ve lived in communities for a very long time. What can you reflect on life in an ecovillage & a community as a conscious choice of stepping into an ecological way of being?

John:

It’s what we were made for. We were selected to live in community. For me to walk down the street here outside my home, to greet every person that I meet and to know everyone that I see. I’ve got a nine year old son, who has a posse of friends. If it gets dark and he’s not home yet, I just go on to our local Slack channel, and discover who it is that is feeding him tonight and it’s just so great!

On the surface, it’s not that different from the suburb in Narara, outside the gate. But we probably use a quarter of the power, and all of that power is produced by solar. It really is an eco village that is moving resolutely towards making sure that our part of the eddy is aligned with the flow of the way that life requires us to live. And hopefully creating a model. We have open days once a month, and we’re actively seeking to show people that this is a way of life that’s possible. Unfortunately, it’s no less expensive to own a house here than it is out there and I don’t know what to do about that. But we’re doing the best we can.

Morag:

Thanks for reflecting on that. Well, it’s been wonderful to have you on the show today! And I encourage people to follow all the links that we’ll put down in the show notes from, from the films, to the music, to the workshops to the work that John has been doing for decades now. And also links to ‘Thinking like a Mountain’. Any other key documents that you think we should drop down there, John?

John:

Well, ‘Thinking like a Mountain’ is towards the Council of All Beings, the name of the book that I wrote with Joanna Macy and Arne Næss in 1988. The PDF of that is available for free.

Morag:

Well, thank you, John. It’s been an absolute delight.

John:

Just as a last word, I’d like to say thank you so much for the permaculture. I just feel like it’s been part of my life ever since Bill Mollison. I remember, back in the late 80s, I started doing deep ecology segments in Lee Harrison’s Permaculture Design Certificates. In exchange for doing that, she would have someone from the Rainforest Information Centre do the course for free. Wherever we were working in the world, we found that unsustainable agriculture is always part of the reason for the destruction of the rainforest. So people trained in permaculture were really important in the rainforest conservation that we were doing. So I am just very grateful for you and others that are keeping this humanness moving forward.

Morag:

Yeah, I see a deep connection with that. And a central part of what I teach in anything that I offer is through a deep ecology perspective – really noticing that the key part of what permaculture is all about is enabling us to cultivate, as you said before this ecological self, but also that we bring our footprint as humans into a scale that enables all life to flourish. For me, that’s the fair share part of permaculture, that we’re not only protecting forests but we’re repairing forests. We’re finding that deep connection with ourselves and healthy human habitats within the overall habitat restoration and protection. I think forest protection is the primary directive of permaculture in many ways. Thank you again and enjoy the rest of your day! And I look forward to talking to you again soon.

John:

Thank you!

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This episode was a conversation of hope for me, exploring the concept and practice social forestry with Tomi Hazel Vaarde – everything from ancient indigenous knowledge to stories of forests. Also Tomi reflects on design – avoiding it being an imposition, but something that emerges from connection with place and community  – an incredibly important distinction for a permaculture designer.

Social forestry is the Tomi’s big picture thinking, their frame of reference for engaging in local and bioregional restoration.

“Social forestry is tending the land as people of place. How do we cooperate with each other to do useful things in these places? It’s always site specific, and it’s always culturally specific.”

 

Tomi Hazel Vaarde is a long-term resident of Southern Oregon and is deeply situated in place and permaculture. He’s a prolific permaculturist – advising farms, stewarding forests and teaching environmental sciences for more than 50 years, even helping Bill Mollison in the first PDC on the West Coast.

Tomi’s latest book (published April 2023) is Social Forestry: Tending the Land as People and Place – an acclaimed guide of practical placemaking advice and ancient lore – a must-have for anyone wanting to have a reciprocating relationship with their communities, themselves, and most importantly their awe-inspiring forests and landscapes.

In this conversation, we also discuss this book and the many projects that have informed its emergence.

Enjoy!

You can listen on your preferred podcast streaming service or on Youtube.

Read the full transcript:

Morag:

Hi everyone, it’s Morag Gamble here from Sense Making in a Changing World and in this episode, I’m joined by Tomi Hazel Vaarde who has recently written a book called ‘Social Forestry: Tending the Land as People of Place’. And so we’re going to dive into a conversation about that. But this is something extraordinary about Hazel, Hazel is a pioneer in the permaculture movement and has been involved in permaculture since I think I was still in high school. So the depth of knowledge and experience that Hazel brings into the story of permaculture and the flavour of permaculture, that is brought through this social forestry approach, is extraordinary. And I’m really excited to have you here on the show today Tomi, thank you for joining me. So I’m calling in from the land of the Gubbi Gubbi people here in Australia. Maybe we could just place ourselves, where are you calling in from? Can you tell us a bit about your place?

Tomi:

This is the Little Applegate Canyon up against a wall of mountains at 7000 feet and it’s Athabaskan Territory. There’s a lot of different tribes that speak with the Athabaskan roots. And these people were called Dakubetede which means ‘people who love the beautiful valley’. And what this valley actually is, is overpriced real estate with very little productivity potential. No water, very little good soil. And it’s a pocket desert on the west side of the Cascade Mountains. So it’s on the Pacific slope, but we get as little as 10 inches a year and as high as 30 inches a year. And it’s been hammered by colonialism. And the Dakubetede were pretty much wiped out and then ran up to a reservation. Slowly things are coming back and we learned how to say the name properly. I have grandchildren who are Athabaskan and I tell them relatives of theirs lived here, which is really a cool thing to be able to do. ‘Hey grandkids!’ They are a Mescalero Apache who are Athabaskins. So in 1830 beaver trappers came through from the Hudson Bay Company, and they took all the beaver – taking out to beaver exposed to the gravels. Thus gold was found. And you know what happens when gold gets found. So it’s been downhill since then. And we’re just beginning to go back uphill again.

But our small farms are failing, utterly failing. From ditches being shut off, and just economics and things. The land here is like, I guess it’s priced for gambling reasons. It’s like crazy! It’s insane how expensive the land is here. It has nothing to do with what the land is itself. So we’re trying to figure out culture in the valley, and luckily, we have built some culture. Just in the last couple of weeks, we’ve had the community theatre skits. Wonderfully put on in something called the Shiny Barn. And so we’ve had a lot of small businesses, some of them are still going. We have a lot of theatre, we have ‘battles of the barn bands’. We have a lot of farm workers, and the marijuana industry just tanked last year. So there’s lots of jokes from mostly from Northern California about, ‘Hey, need any weed? I’ll bring the weed, got weed’ So I mean, it’s just hilarious. Everything. It’s one with one colonial shitstorm after another, it’s just been beaver, gold, timber, grass, land speculation, marijuana, salmon. It’s just a disaster, disaster, disaster, disaster. So what a perfect laboratory to think about social forestry in!

Morag:

Social forestry. Before we talk about what it is and what solution that can bring to this situation that you’re describing, can you take a step back and sort of situate yourself where you first came into contact with permaculture? Because I know from reading your backstory you’ve been involved in wildcrafting and forest care – being out in the forest, being out in nature, connecting people with nature for decades. And then at some point you met permaculture and that became entangled in your life. Can you describe a bit about that part of your journey?

Tomi:

I was drafted to help build and teach the first course on the West Coast, because Bill didn’t know the ecology. I had come out with two degrees from New York State College of Forestry. My Quaker organic farming background, my people have been 400 years in the same villages, which is very rare for blue eyed blondes. So I have this really unique cultural thread that goes right back to the first English colonisation of New England and I can name names. I mean, I’ve had a family story. So when I got to the west coast as a political refugee during Vietnam, medical relief and things like that, I got hired off the street to teach at a junior college in 1971. And of course, without me knowing it, a sign up list was put up and it was titled, Wild Edible Plants and Woods Lore. In other words, it was social forestry in 1971. So by the time we got to 1982, I had already been teaching ecological terminology. And here comes permaculture. And I was like, ‘Ooh, this might be a basket big enough for me to like, find some room to move in. Check this out!’ So I ended up being pretty principal in North America in many ways. I think I am eligible for having written the standard curriculum and I published a pretty famous article on how to certify a permaculture course which I got anarchists from Australia sending me love notes about, that was fun.

So I did a lot of teacher training, I did a lot of that. And slowly, I have left this script. So as far as I’m concerned, permaculture is a tool that we use in social forestry. Social forestry is not a tool of permaculture. Permaculture is like bootcamp, recently arrived pedological and experimental procedures, hopefully, in a wider context than the traditional age of enlightenment science. So yahoo for permaculture! But I have some quibbles at this point. Mostly about the word design. ‘Oh, so you’re a designer? I suppose you want royalties, do you?’ So where’s the social in that? And, yes, it’s an emergency situation. And yes, Uncle Bill kind of drafted us into an army. You know, we got to do this and we got to do it now. And I was like, ‘Okay, sure. Why not?’ Where are we though now? Where has the permaculture movement gotten to? And what it has done positively is a long list. We could go on, we could praise it. I think there’s more permaculture people working in the field than there are from government aid organisations worldwide. They don’t advertise themselves, they don’t wear a permaculture hat. They just had some education and see the world differently. So the part that I really liked, which I was into before, is systems theory. Is looking at things in multiple dimensions, and in complex layered ways. And certainly, that’s what Uncle Bill brought us. 

And that was my college education. I got one degree in forestry and the other degree was Systematic Botany. So I studied phylogeny, the evolutionary theory of the plant kingdom. And that taught me systems theory. So that got me kind of set up, along with my village background. Then permaculture arrived so that kept me alive for a while. And now for the last 20 years, I’ve been getting this book out. So I hereby adopt permaculture into social forestry. Welcome to social forestry, permaculture. Where have you been? We’ve been around for 10s of 1000s of years, I would claim millions of years. I could go into that, the anthropology is fascinating. But how do humans work with complexity in useful ways? And that’s the thing that people like to hear from me – guess what, humans can be useful! And the forest misses us. It’s lonely, where’d the humans go? Because we’ve been a presence on this planet for millions of years, in very, very complex ways. And then we kind of went wonky! We went sideways! It’s a problem! And we can go on and on about that. But let’s talk about where we are now and where we can go next.

Morag:

Thank you for sharing that and flipping it and putting that in perspective! I think foregrounding indigenous ways, human ways, long term human ways of being in place, is what I think we all need to be doing right now. In some ways my experience of permaculture is really about trying to reconnect with that somehow, you know, find our ways back into that way of thinking as you were saying. So I think it would be so great if you were able to describe a little bit more about how you see social forestry. If you were to just lay it out on the table for people to be able to say ‘I get what he’s talking about now.’ What is social forestry?

Tomi:

It’s not just tending to land, it’s tending culture. And that’s something we’re not very good at as Europeans. We’ve got this hyper individualism going on. And that has alienated us from nature, which is profoundly a cooperative venture, scientifically, or ecologically. So social forestry is tending the land as people of place. How do we cooperate with each other and with life to do useful things at this moment, in these places? It’s always site specific and it’s always culturally specific. But I think we can boil it down to drainage basins. I gather only Americans call drainage basins watersheds, the rest of the world knows what a watershed is as the ridge line. So we’ll go with drainage basins. If we can reorganise our political thinking on an ecological template, a fractal drainage basin template, and then look at our priorities, we can create a culture – meaning a celebration of place – that inspires us to do the work, and then keeps us grounded through a cultural process, which would be drainage basin councils. Here that would be salmon, beaver, and cultural fire. Those would be the icons, they would be artwork, they would be celebrating, we would understand those are our big three. And we would hold everything in the light of those, for now. While we move into any relationship at all.

So social forestry needs to have that strong ecological basis. I like to say that all cultures and all languages have traditional ecological knowledge built into their language. It’s in their stories, it’s in their fairy tales, it’s in the language, it’s in the silly songs we sang while we were skipping rope. I mean, traditional ecological knowledge is an inheritance of all human cultures. Indigenous ecological knowledge is extremely place based. And social forestry tries to move settlers into people of place, not indigenous – by definition that goes First Nations. But useful habitants doing the work and perhaps coming into relationship through building culture, so that treaties of mutual aid can be established with remnant indigenous peoples. And I’ve managed to do this on a few different continents on the side, much to my benefit. Thank you very much to all the people who have spoken to me. And so I have great hope that we can do this, that we can come into relationship with cultures and with place, and that we need to do both at once.

So how do we build culture? And that turns out to be the number one question that students ask when they come. In fact, it boils down to ‘how do we ever make decisions?’ And so that’s where my hicksite Quaker cultural background becomes handy with committee structures, unanimous consent, speaking to the spirit, and all entities and all peoples. So there’s a spirit aspect, which, if I remember correctly, Uncle Bill said we’re not going to talk about that. But I want to say that all things have spirit, the forest misses us. We can come into relationship with complexity by understanding how much is beyond us and how small we are and how little we know. And then we can do the things that I claim we’re good at and social forestry which is number one, urinate, especially in the right places. Number two, make messes. In anthropology that’s called disturbance regimes. But making messes is a very useful human thing – done right in the right location. And then being absolutely silly – we’re the most ridiculous species on the planet, and oh my gosh, all the other species are highly entertained. We’re so ridiculous. So I mean, clothing, what the hell? And singing and drumming and ‘oh yeah, let’s act silly.’ So those are the big three. I know, there’s a fourth one, but I’ll remember it later. But there are certain things that are essentially human, that are really appreciated by complexity.

And my philosophical statement is: none of our complications are enough to deal with complexity. Complexity is way beyond human understanding or human abilities. We need to take our place. So our prayer, similar to what I just went through in social forestry, is we are idiots! We do not know what we’re doing! Please excuse us, we’re doing the best we can, we accept feedback, gracefully. So before we make our messes, we usually sing that song, to keep us a little sober. And to help us notice. So there’s a great book that came out a few years ago now called ‘Mushroom at the End of the World’, by Professor Xing, UC Santa Cruz. And she points out what noticing is about. And this is in permaculture, this is in that whole observation thing. But in systems theory, you can only deal with complexity by noticing emergent properties of complexity. You’re reading the edges of things. You just notice a bird move or you notice something just happened. And if you have a story in a song about that, you might notice what that special notice is about, you might go, ‘oh, oh, hey, we should talk.’ So this is delicate. It has to do with helping each other stay centred. Keeping our focus on a larger world, not just the human world and especially not the individual. Very challenging. So okay, I went on for a while.

Morag:

Thank you for describing that! And as you were speaking, my mind was imagining how you might begin to cultivate that kind of cultural insight. How do you invite people to come and play with you in that space? So say, for example, where you are now and you’ve described the destruction that’s happened. What’s your invitation to people in that area to come and participate in this?

Tomi:

I help people discover who they are in relationship to nature and to other people. And of course, now a big thing is pronouns. So, my pronouns professionally are them/they, but number one, the Quaker pronoun, which is Friend. ‘Friend speaks my mind’ is a famous Quaker phrase, very inclusive. So there’s a pronoun so first of all, what gender do you think you are? Second, what are your passions? Third, what are your propensities? So you can kind of map humans as soon as their personal experience, personal as it is, in relationship to other people. And then I encourage them to be part of guilds. So guilds sort of like mediaeval craft guilds. Guilds in social forestry are rangers, mothers who are herbalists, bodgers make things. Charcoal liaise are charcoal people. There’s a few more. Hunters. The rangers are big because that shows up in a lot of science fiction. The Ranger idea has been around and ‘I went to Ranger School, I drive a Ford Ranger, and I drink voodoo Ranger beer.’ So anyways, you might think I’m a ranger. A ranger, for instance, is an in between, I have a intersexual body type and I have a certain personality and that’s why I ended up in ranger school. I can help other people understand, ‘oh, you have these passions, you have these propensities, you have these skills, you have this cultural background. Might you be interested in…?’ And then I get people to talk to each other in these guilds. The guilds send delegates to the drainage basin councils and then managed to make decisions, because we have feedback from a whole bunch of different angles that different human types have put together. A lot of this I got from teaching at Dihu University a multi-tribal college in Davis, California in the 80s. Because we were dealing with people off the reservations and they were completely confused how they were going to fit into modern times. Luckily, we had Mohawk educators from New York and others. So this is the Iroquois nations who came to us and taught us. First thing you want to do is find out what a person’s passion is. Forget all these academic testing things. You want to know, what do you love? And then you want to feed it. ‘Oh, okay. leatherwork.’ Alright, here’s all these tools, here’s all these materials, go for it. And if you do that, they come, people come forward, they feel seen, they feel loved, they feel taken care of, and they start to participate. Because now they have honour, they have creativity, they’re being brought into the circle. And they’re being told, ‘You’re cool. And we want to work with you.’

Morag:

I just want to jump in there. Because where do you differentiate? Culturally, we talked about before, as the individualistic culture, that is a big part of the problem. And how you’re describing is now it’s like focusing on nurturing this individual. How do you find a way to bring that individual back into that wholeness, like you’ve just brought them up? So how does the individual not become the kind of the independent or separate person when they’re fed like that? How do you, through social forestry, weave them into the story as opposed to just creating a whole lot of individuals who are following their passions and not connected?

Tomi:

Well, I think we do it through place. This is where place comes in. So if you commit to place you become a people. And if you can bring together the cultural aspects that we all have, even though we’ve been traumatised and colonised and commercialised, commodified. If we can bring together the threads of narratives in place, and dedicate ourselves to the work in a place, the place will teach us. And this is what indigenous knowledge repeats over and over again, just look at the shape of the land. Check out where we are, this is this place. And this is how we are as a people in this place. Now, when you’re dealing with indigenous people, you can help them reconnect with their tribal backgrounds, and you can do adoption. So that’s something we don’t know much about – cultural adoption, not family adoption. So that’s tricky, but it’s something that can be done. And so, if we can understand that place is adopting us. It wants us. It wants to talk and dance with us and sing with us. Then we can start to feel like a people and we can start to be a people and we’re having that in the Little Applegate. This is what I was talking about earlier. We have certain cultural things going on that are building this sense of ourselves. And I have a folk song I sing about Bunkum, a mining town, a ghost town. So that’s part of it. Okay. But you’re asking a very important question that’s complex, like how do we become people of place? Well, ‘there’s a page in the book of the 10 steps to’ and the first thing is take a permaculture course in your place. Get oriented! You need to know so much! All the plants, all the animals, the water, the soils, the geology, the weather. So how do you do that? That’s why this book is chock full of posters, teaching posters that were made for permaculture courses.

Now as I said before, trying not to emphasise permaculture, but social forestry. And understand that permaculture is a tool in a greater work. And how we get there, it’s going to be through relocalisation, decentralisation, and oh my gosh, I believe we’re in it right now. You heard about the banks collapsing in America? Have you been paying attention to the news? I’ve been through this a few times in my life. I think I’m noticing something. And I want to tell people good news, that we should not be freaking out. But we should understand what the long range priorities are. For survival, and not just human survival, but complex biodiversity. How do we do that? Well, I use systems theory a lot. So that’s the book ‘At Home in the Universe’ by Kauffman. And it’s the book ‘Chaos’ by James Gleick. I have a lot of mathematical scientific background. So I have a little bit too much fun with this. But we are at a phase change. We can’t see what’s on the other side. But we’re doing some of the things that will build the new organisational structures, we just don’t know precisely what they are. And we don’t know where to put our energy. I say go with the rhythm, the tune and the dance and the heart. And that’s the best we can do. And do it in place! Because that’s the only thing – place-based attention to ecosystem functions. I’m actually hoping through a series of transitional cultural artefacts like stewardship contracts that we can get subsidy in first phase of social forestry, because there’s some serious ecological repair that needs to be done. Roads to bed, forest to stabilise, reintroduction of fire, helping the salmon come back because of nutrient cycles. So I just threw a whole bunch out. Okay, but kind of just to give you a taste of what we can do now, where we are. And I usually say start with the children’s watershed pilgrimages. Let’s walk the watershed.

Morag:

Yeah. So that connecting to place. I mean, there’s lots of different questions that were arising in me as you were speaking and one is about ways of connecting urban communities that don’t have that. When you look out your window you can’t see the landscape. I mean, where I am here, I can look out here and I see the clouds pop off the top of the mountains and float off and I have that perspective from being out here in the countryside. But if you’re in an urban environment, and I grew up in a city, there is far less of that. Bigger picture, your ability to see the watershed, you see your street or the next house over. And so what you’re saying about actually going on a pilgrimage, I think that is a beautiful place to begin whichever part of the world you are dwelling in. I was really interested to hear you talk about beginning with joining the dance, because often when a community will come together, they’ll go out and they’ll start to plant trees. So where is the place to begin? And I guess there’s no one answer to that either. But what are some of the places to begin that you’ve noticed? You’ve mentioned the pilgrimage with the children up into the watershed. What other things have you noticed that have really been a way to connect people with place?

Tomi:

Luckily, in Oregon in the 80s, Governor Kitzhaber subsidised watershed councils, this the Americans. And those watershed councils did a tremendous amount of information collecting, like any good designer might do. And I’m afraid all those rolls of maps are sitting in closets at this point because the subsidy was removed. So the continuity during transition, of having statewide, province wide watershed awareness, requires some help. I’ve actually spoken to provosts at universities and stuff, who of course always want to know if I can get a big grant for them as soon as possible. But I’m like, ‘No, we have what we need.’ The information has been gathered by some government entity or some academic entity. Our neighbourhood needs to put that closet of maps together, so that we do understand where the watershed was, even if that even if that ridge line got paved, or McMansioned, and as we say. And then do the walk on the watershed as close as possible. And just by doing that, we see it, we feel it. I’m talking about very small watersheds, you know, let’s do a couple of 100 acres, you know, 100 hectares or something. Let’s look at a small watersheds. And let’s try to understand it as an entity. Eventually, I think we need shadow governments that are watershed based, that are drainage basin based. And those shadow governments are going to suggest to the idiot political situation that it’s do or die, folks. And here’s where we are, let’s get properly organised on a watershed basin basis, and reconfigure our actual representative governments so that we are on the ground that way.

That’s a lot of time for people right now. And the big part of the urban question is ‘who has the time?’ Well, okay, I’ll get one of my reputations of being a bad auntie and saying the inconvenient things, I would say we’ve been in a phase of surf and dodge. This is what we’ve been up against. And just to stay alive, I also call it triage. But we’re about to enter and we are already in I think, a phase of salvage and squat. In America, there’s huge amounts of empty commercial property adjacent to degraded forests and riparian areas in urban jungles. And these areas are eligible for social forestry work. We can do brownfield mushroom remediation, we can do tending, we can do charcoal making, we can do species surveys. We can designate remnant ecological places like cemeteries or temple grounds, land too steep to build on. So both Portland and Seattle in the Pacific Northwest have lots of forests. They’re just on super steep ground. Portland has a trail system that has an urban pilgrimage that you can walk, I think it’s 50 miles in a circle connecting parks together. So that’s progressive. But I’m more radical than that. I want to get granular down to actual water, actual drainage basins, actual boundaries, and start doing what we can where we can. And indeed, the City of Portland, has subsidised the recovery of a large warehouse in a brownfield area in Northeast Portland. And all of this is happening because the last podcast I did was with Peter Bower with rewilding and I asked him that question. He was on it. Oh, yeah, we got it. We’re doing it. Boom, here, there. I was like, Oh, good. Like to hear that. I’m not dead yet. Stuffs happening. Cool.

Morag:

I think the idea of having these watershed councils with shadow governments is a really key part. Because what I see around is that there are people in our watersheds who are doing amazing work, but they’re not necessarily all talking to one another. If there was a possibility of having that work cross fertilising, supporting, singing up what’s actually going on, and not maybe even competing against the limited funding, some way that would be transformative. I think, in the moment and, and give us some somewhat of a quantum leap in, in where we’re going with this accent, it feels really potent to me.

Tomi:

So I’ve tried this in Ashland in the 90s, I had meetings with multiple nonprofits present. And we’d go through the meeting and I would explain what the potential is and what we might be able to do. And everybody says, great! Time for dinner. So I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to do set and setting. That this needs to be done really well. And I’m going to go back to the Pantheon in Greece, I’m going to go to Ivan Illich ABC, I’m going to talk about cathedrals in Europe. These are called minomic architectures. So a proper Watershed Council is going to meet in a sacred space, the druids and their tree alphabet. And they’re going to be surrounded by icons. And these icons are going to keep people oriented. Because if you can point it to one icon and show its relationship to another one, brains rewire. So this is why my book has 30 posters in it. I imagine that if we have these systems posters up on the wall, surrounding us, while we’re sitting in counsel with each other, we’re going to stay better oriented. If we’re helter skelter, and we can’t quite figure out an agenda and we’re competing. I’ve been there, I’ve seen where it goes. We need to come together in a whole different way. And that way includes indigenous peoples starting the meeting, making a gratitude. Let’s spend some time on the gratitude. Let’s get oriented and let’s understand who we are, where we are. Then let’s try to be – this is a Greek word I believe – sophisticated! Oh, okay.

But anyway, systems thinkers. Let’s look at this. It’s been a major tool in my permaculture course teaching, is to have these multiple posters up and a laser pointer or a long willow stick and be able to say, “See, look how this is connected to this and check this out over there.” I’ve seen people have steam coming up their ears, because their brain just went into high gear. We think in symbols, and this is nature and madness. Paul Shepherd says nature and madness. For children to be let out in nature’s stings, scratches and falling out of trees and all – slime, goo, bites, the works – a human child develops a symbolic deck of cards in their mind. Some people who haven’t spent enough time in nature are missing some cards, therefore they can’t do holistic thinking. If we can’t sink as full humans embedded in nature, we’re not going to get very far. And that’s part of the children’s pilgrimage. But it’s also that we can fill in some of our missing cards, by taking a good permaculture course, or by having these icons up or by meeting in an artistic holistic place. 

And I will give a little mention of Allan Savory here and holistic management. He has the elderly gentleman angst at the moment because no one’s listening to him. So he kind of spouts a bit these days, the last interview I saw. But he makes a very good point, which is, cultures have learned to think holistically but not manage holistically. It’s another jump. It’s another paradigm to go beyond that. Good that we’re getting our holistic thinking together. But we now need to make some decisions. And that’s a matter of management. I’m suggesting that social forestry is a way we can start to do this, because we’re dealing with hammered lands and downtown. And we can make some progress and in the process, develop culture, do culture tending, learn how to work together, learn how to meet, surrounded by our icons, and do symbolic thinking. Because words are the last thing to come out of our mind. All of our dreaming, all of our planning, all of our trying to solve unsolvable problems is done in a completely magical, symbolic way. And back to your liking the idea we have to dance into this thing. So there you go, a few more little clues about we need some elders, I don’t have a lot of cohorts. They are still doing pretty well.

Morag:

I wonder too, I don’t know, it’s not a reluctance to join, but an inability to join is coming from the deep level of anxiety that people feel around what’s happening. Just like frozen in the lights of what we see going on. And I know that you do work with Starhawk. And I wonder whether you could talk a little bit about that eco anxiety and your response to it or your collaborating with Starhawk.

Tomi:

I think we all have ancestors who were forcibly removed from social forestry. And the trauma that we all carry as settlers, has deracinated people, is deep. It’s in our art, it’s in our language. For instance, English itself has been degraded. The English language is not a great language for us to be talking about what I’d like us to be doing. It’s lost a lot of complexity. It’s lost a lot of art, a lot of dance, and my hicksite Quakers spoke Quaker plain speech and that’s older English with the ‘the’ in the ‘thou’ in the phrase-ologies and so, so there’s a whole language thing now, what was your question again?

Morag:

So it was really around how do we get past? How do we support people to get past this feeling stuck or hopeless to be able to actually engage in this work?

Tomi:

Well, first I want to, I want to just give everyone some love because we’re traumatised people. And we come from traumatised cultures. And I want to suggest but that’s not all bad. Because there’s some threads in that trauma that are beautiful, and let’s weave them, let’s weave them into a new tapestry, a multicultural tapestry that’s focused on place. Bring all these different threads together for healing, and work on the trauma and actually acknowledge it. And I mean, again, this goes back to discussions of freedom and The Mushroom at the End of the World. The modern American concept of freedom is completely misplaced, quite different from the concept of liberty. Liberty is the ability of cultures to make their own decisions, sovereignty. Freedom has been co-opted by Freud and others for purposes of commercialization and advertising. So freedom now is ‘rip off everything you can grab. It’s your right, it’s your freedom to steal as much as you can steal. It’s how the world works! Didn’t you know?’ Very bad science, excellent propaganda, and really good for imperialism. And for justification. Bad, bad, bad. So we need to have that conversation, we need to point out where we’re a little misdirected. But actually, there’s a good part of this story. So let’s go there and let’s start using these ideas and start to understand what the difference between liberty and freedom is. And then let’s start to talk.

So I had a permit system for roadside gathering with the Forest Service with the federal Forest Service. And it turned out that we couldn’t close any gates because of commerce laws. And so all the improvements we made on the roadsides – basketry materials, compost piles – anyone could drive up there with a pickup truck and just take it away. Because it’s theirs. Well, guess why that sense of freedom came up? Because the king took the villages away. So we’re only stealing from the King, who stole our culture – that’s trauma. Let’s look at those fairy tales. Let’s look at those operas. Check it out, those are attempts at healing, that’s a dance that we can benefit from, if we can do it culturally.

Morag:

It’s a really interesting part of this exploration that it’s not saying all of that story is bad, we have to replace it with something else. It’s how do you re-weave different threads into that and allow other threads to dissipate that are no longer serving our purpose. I think that feels like something that we can grasp hold of. It really is about finding the parts of our story that we need to carry on and parts that we need to retell. And also I want to come back to that language piece that you mentioned. English language seems to have lost a lot of the nuances of place in terms of the 100 different words of a forest or the smell of the soil whereas I think that is a huge part of the healing and of moving forward is enriching our language with that with the nuance of place. I wonder if you’ve done anything in that kind of realm and have any clues of how we begin to do that more.

Tomi:

There’s a big movement on the West Coast of changing place names. Because a lot of the place names are evil. And that has been quite a healing conversation to start to rename things and re-understand things. But I’m trying to remember the author was it Langlands who wrote that book about all the different names for a creek this big or rivulet, all the Scots terms. You know, all the Irish terms, all place based. Well, I think we can start building those things. People want to know what ‘gulch’ is. Right. That’s a desert term. It’s a forested desert term. Well, it could get pretty local if we start to talk about different types of cultures and gave them different names. So the children would learn these things. Again, this takes time.

Morag:

New stories, new songs.

Tomi:

Yeah, bring that stuff back or find it new. So here we have indigenous languages still intact. And that has helped a lot. And so the name of bear, or the name for dragonfly. So the river here that runs through Southern Oregon, is called the Rogue River, which is basically calling it a Thieves River, the rogue. And it had to do with what the indigenous people were called rogues. But the people are Dialagamun (?) which means people that have dragonflies river. So, when the publisher wanted a map in the book, I had to work with the cartographer. We need to change this and we need to change this, and I barely was able to get going. I mean, I got some of them. No, luckily, some things are being changed on their own. But this is an ongoing thing that lots of people are working on with input from indigenous tribes in Oregon. And we’re slowly changing a lot of place names, big help, and we’re starting to teach indigenous languages to all to children, what the name for bear is, etc. You know, like know why this place is called that. Why are they called that? What happened there? There’s a lot of history that’s missing. And, again, all praise to my family, especially my mother for telling me the stories. And for always going for picnics in cemeteries. A lot of wildlife in cemeteries, butterflies, you know, I didn’t know what she was up to but I think I got it now. She should go for picnics in cemeteries, for sure. Where the hell are we? What happened here?

Morag:

I think it’s a curious mind, isn’t it. to have the noticing mind, like you were talking about before. To be able to enter into that space? To be in conversation? And to be in noticing? And to and to find a way? Yeah, I think maybe we could just sort of come back to that question you had around design. So you have a new understanding, you’re noticing. So where do you find the rub with the concept of design, if it’s coming from that place? And you’re really thinking about ‘I understand this place and now I’m going to think about how to maybe regenerate this place’? Isn’t that the design process?

Tomi:

I see it more as a process of discovery than a process of design. I think design is just loaded. It’s not that bad. But I’m trying to do some nuance here, right through my elder status as an aged permie. If you think you can put a system together that’s going to work, I would call that ‘quick fix.’ So I’ve now changed how I used to talk about design, I’ve changed it into a three phase process, which all happens simultaneously. And that’s quick fix triage. Retrofit – which is what we think of as traditional permaculture design, and ultimate – which is visionary. So I think we really need to get to the visionary stuff first. And that it’s very difficult because it’s not in our language abilities. So I like to go to the land that teaches us the vision. The vision is in the shape of the land, in the shape of the drainage basin. That is the vision. What does it look like? Is it a heroic landscape? Is it a diffuse landscape? So it has qualities, it has personality, it has lines and shapes, and that’s place. And so if we can come into relationship with ultimate visionary thinking, then our retrofit work, and especially our triage work, is going to be constrained because you don’t want to do anything. That’s going to compromise ultimate. If you compromise ultimate, bad idea, look what has happened. Not good. So we need the ultimate, which I’m calling beaver, salmon and fire. And then we do the retrofit, which I claim is squat and salvage. Not exactly a design process. It’s kind of helter skelter. I call it the ‘aggravation during the phase shift.’ How do you surf and dodge? That’s not design, that’s surfing and dodging. And oh my gosh, we need to know and we need to notice. We need to be really supple and agile. Talking and not hung up in ego and not hung up in too much of a linear process. If you go back to Heidegger and those German philosophers, they were big on doing things on purpose with intelligence and intention, and thus we are enlightened and we are knowledgeable. This is the Age of Enlightenment, and we have data and science, and therefore we are designers and we can fix it. And I’m like, ‘No, you can’t fix it. You’re just part of a process.’ We all really ought to understand where we are in that process. So that’s why I flipped this and put vision right at the top.

Morag:

Thank you for clarifying that, that makes so much sense and really does bring the imperative of people who are in the permaculture process to really open up from looking at what’s going on in their backyard, or in that plot that they’re looking at. Which I hope that any good permaculture teacher begins there, in place, and then gradually brings it down into the nuances of what you can do in the piece that you’re in – but with that bigger picture. That’s what I hope good permaculture courses are, in my view, trying to help people to connect with. I really liked the way that you’ve described that, it makes it very clear, thank you so much. I realised that we’ve been talking for quite some time now. And I wanted to respect your time and I think we just talked for an hour. So where can people find your book and what would be a call to action that you would like to share out to for people to ponder on or get involved in?

Tomi:

Juggle grandchildren! So the book is going to be available from so many different sources. If you’re in North America, you can do it through our fundraising campaign, because that helps us to pay for the artwork. But that’ll be over, you know, in May or the middle of May. And after that, probably best to buy directly from the publisher, because that helps all of us, rather than Amazon. But that’s where you get to book. It’s an actual publication that’s in the publishing industry. I’m kind of in shock, to tell you the truth, because I self published a book 30 years ago and I hardly sold maybe 2000 copies in 30 years. I think I’ve already sold 2000 copies of this book or someone has sold it. So it’s available very easily. It’s a reasonable price, I’m so happy about that. And what can people do? Figure out where you are. And this is kind of hard, right? Because with rents and with jobs and with everything turning over, people are being turned into capital – mobile capital, instead of actual humans of place. So making an intention of placeness is very radical. And I would say I have a few different places. There’s a place I live here where I’ve been for 50 years, the Sicsous (?) mountains. But then there’s the cities that I have roots in that I have cultural ties with and those are my places too. So I think we all have multiple places.

Morag:

I think some people get hung up on the fact that ‘I’m a bit mobile and I can’t land anywhere.’ We could land in multiple places. I think that is a gem of a gift. Thank you!

Tomi:

Yeah, totally. Absolutely. And we’ll know so much more. I’m again, I don’t know how I did it but I got to a few different continents, and oh, boy, that really helped me a lot. I got some perspective. And North America is a big place and I’ve gotten around. But then at home on the ground, I have walked 1000s of miles. I know this place. I love this place. And the Sicous (?) are a world class biodiversity hotspot that has made it through major climate changes in the past. So I’m counting on that. It’s kind of a hard scrabble place that survives. And it has to do with how broken up it is.

Morag:

Well, thank you so much for joining me here today. The links that you’ve spoken about I’ll pop down in the show notes. So for anyone listening, go and have a look down there, you’ll be able to find out how to connect with the crowdfunder if you’re listening to this in the next few moments. If you would like to get the book, I’ll put the links to that. Any of the work that Hazel’s got, I’ll make sure the links are there. And also some of the references that you talked about, as we were going through the conversation, I’ll find those and drop them in there, too. So thank you so much. And I really wish you all the best with this book, and I’m going to be putting my order in to get a copy as soon as it’s released. I really look forward to that. Thank you so much for bringing that out to the world. I heard you say it’s been a couple of decades in the making.

So just as one final little question, I’m trying to wrap up. But what is your writing process? Can I just ask you that? Like, I’ve been talking to lots of authors lately and really curious about how you step into that space around you? Do you sit down all at one go? Or it’s just like a gradual infusement? Or how do you get to that point of distilling this into something that you can go ‘right, I’m ready to hand that out into the world’?

Tomi:

Well, at my age, you better damn well have a notebook next to your bed at 3am. Old people do, they wake up at 3am and they have ideas and they jot down notes. But I’ve had a lot of experience with curriculum and academic writing. So I do kind of organise things. But this book went through four very different manuscripts and a dozen editors. So there’s quite a process. But the biggest thing for me, I want to thank my ancestors, is learning how to clear and allow things to flow through to really believe in writing things down, and then editing and editing and having it checked. I mean back to things we said before, I don’t believe any of us on our own hold truth. Truth is only held in culture and in place. It’s not held by individuals. If individuals get all hot headed, because they think they’ve discovered something, the Quaker elders would always say, ‘Oh, you have a leading ticket to clearness committee, we’ll check it out.’ So it’s a community effort.

But I myself, in the middle of it, am an administrator. Not a designer. I’m an administrator. And I’m letting things flow through and I’m gathering resources and then I rearrange it, rearrange it, rearrange it. So it takes a while. And it helped that we used a lot of this material in teaching, and got that feedback, not just editors, but taking it out into the world, seeing what you get, bringing it back, figuring out what to write. 

And how did I know when it was done? I just said, I’ve had enough. I’m declaring it done. And then everybody stepped up. It was kind of amazing, really! I mean, I didn’t look for a publisher, they called me! This has been my life, I keep getting drafted. Uncle Bill drafted me. I mean, whatever. I’m just following orders. I’m not following orders, being inspired and yeah it’s great.

Morag:

Oh, thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate you unpacking that a bit for us because everyone does it differently. And I know that there’s a lot of stories that need to be shared and finding how people are finding their way into doing that really does help to bring it into the light. Thank you so much.

Tomi:

Lovely conversation.

The post Social Forestry with Tomi Hazel Vaarde appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

As a permaculture author, designer and educator, Jasmine has many amazing stories about her journey finding & exploring permaculture through many years of teaching and writing as well her experience in being part of a forming ecovillage – where, with her husband, she build the famous hobbit house (which sadly burnt down a few years back). Right now, Jasmine mentors community groups with a focus on nature connection and basic skills for resilience.

Jasmine’s book is the Permaculture Design Companion: A practical workbook for integrating people and places  –  a step by step guide to applying permaculture in your own life, in any context. It combines creative and analytical activities with self reflection and observation. Published by Permanent Publications.

• Here’s a link to one of Jasmine’s articles – Developing Personal Resilience with Permaculture (Issue 107: pg 69) in Permaculture Magazine available until  June 18th 2023
• Here’s a link to another of Jasmine’s articles – Permaculture Design in Practice in times of crisis. (Here is access to the whole Magazine issue free courtesy of Permaculture Magazine until June 18th 2023 – her article is on pages 45-46)

Throughout the conversation, Jasmine shares such wonderful tips about writing and what you’ll find in her book the Permaculture Design Companion –  a step by step guide to applying permaculture to any project from start to finish, integrating places and people, buildings and ecosystems into the process.

When I asked her about the kinds of permaculture books she things we need more of, her observation is that there is a great need for more books that cultivate greater levels of ecoliteracy, earth psychology and bigger picture thinking.

Permaculture, she says, has also been something that keeps her sane and grounded, and is something she can offer to help others deepen their connection with nature, and for kindness to the planet.

Enjoy!

Accessible through any of your favourite podcast streaming services.

Read the full transcript:

Morag:

Welcome dear listeners, to the Sensemaking in a Changing World Podcast. This is one of our Permaculture Writers episodes. And I’m delighted to welcome Jasmine Dale today, all the way from Wales. She’s written an amazing book called the ‘Permaculture Design Companion’, a practical workbook for integrating people and places. And I had a bit of a look through it because I haven’t actually got this book on my shelves and as I looked through some of the little snapshots that I can see, oh my gosh, I need to get this one and share it far and wide. So I’m really excited to explore this with you. But before we dive into your book, Jasmine, maybe a really good place to begin would be just to let us know a little bit about how you ended up finding your way into permaculture. Because not only are you a permaculture writer, you are a permaculture educator who lives a permaculture life in a deeply intense way. So how did you come to discover permaculture and then weave it so much into your life?

Jasmine:

Well, I had was doing a degree in politics and it was largely focusing on

food, poverty, land use, you know, and international trade and all that stuff. It’s very heavy. It’s very theoretical. And so in that process, I became, I suppose a green person. But I was, I think, in my early 20s. I was quite a bit of a pain to my friends because I was, you know, overwhelmed by the problems. And I used to subscribe to a magazine and there had been something about I think Lot 83 at Crystal Waters.

It was about an older guy, it was just an article about him and it kind of stuck in my mind, but I didn’t really understand what permaculture was. But a vivid enough picture was painted of that place and of his work. And so then, the year after uni, I went to see my cousins and best friend in Tasmania and ended up in the call centre with Telstra which anyone who might appreciate, you do 12 hour days, ringing hundreds of people a day and it’s pretty stressful. 

And yeah, I think it’s worth sharing this anecdote. So you know, you get these calls come up automatically, and up popped Crystal Waters! You know, I’d forgotten about it. And it was just an answering machine with the sound of like bullfrogs or something, and insects and birds in the background. The stark difference of sitting there in this tower in Melbourne, which I got acne from the stress of the calling and everything. So I just finished that job and I hacked off up to Queensland, Maleny. And when I got there, they didn’t want any volunteers but this young man whom I believe is Max Lindegger’s son, he just said, ‘oh this PDC (permaculture design course) just started yesterday, why don’t you go?’ And I looked at the money I’d earnt at Telstra, and it was my whole amount and what I managed to save. And so I went on that course and pretty much within 12 hours, I probably was blown away, because I never learned to play with creative methods before. Apart from that, the whole environment was amazing for me. 

By being presented with solutions, it kind of dissolved that four years of negativity around the intractable situation of global and local, economic and environmental problems, that kind of just mitigated it instantly. And so then within a few years, I’d started picking up more training on that, and I decided to move to the countryside. I had also seen lime plastered buildings at Crystal Waters. And quite shortly, then me and my husband got really into lime building and rammed earth building and lived off grid for many years.

So that was sort of how I was in it. I got access to fields, first as a volunteer living on a project, and then later in my own place. Although on the course that Crystal Waters we’d been taught it through in play, I didn’t have analytical processes to follow, but I knew about them. And I quickly started applying that quite diligently really partly because it felt like such a big responsibility to have bare land to repair.

I’ve always thought that permaculture was useful for people like myself who were a bit too timid to impose our views on land. I felt like it was ideal because it stewards you through a sensitive approach to the other species and patterns that are happening on that land. But then I also think it’s good for people that are gun-ho and maybe a bit too confident, because it holds them back. So it’s a great process, I think by using it in quite a step by step way.

Morag:

I really like the way you’ve just described that because it is so useful for both of those ends of the spectrum, as you say, and everyone else in between. It’s a really lovely way of explaining it. So I know you’re you’re one of the founders are the co founders of Lammas Eco Village, you want to just maybe tell us a little bit about that place and how you landed there and what it is like living in a in a permaculture, off grid, one planet eco village, what does that all mean? 

Jasmine:

Yes, there were so many people living what they might call low impact lifestyles in West Wales, that there basically a policy was made to kind of formalise that to sort of stop it happening erratically. And we were living at someone else’s place as full time volunteers and I happened to get a small inheritance that was enough to go out field. So up came this project, and it has certain requirements on it to live a land-based lifestyle, you need to have

to have an enterprise, I suppose. And I in no way was in the mood for retail, and I hadn’t, ever, but I did want to live in the countryside. And I really would’ve like to have my own holding. So that was the motivation and because nearly every other family had children of the same age.

There was a four year process of getting planning. And I would say we didn’t use the permaculture process really to design the plots or anything. I think I was the only person there that had done a PDC out of 17 adults. There was a loose understanding amongst other people and so we went at it quite formally. There was this amazing opportunity – 70 acres, which is quite a lot out here, but denuded overgrazed land and everybody had their seven acres. And so we did set out and it was an amazing thing at the beginning. You know, every single one of us had been massively craving to have that connection with soil and to get orchards in and everything else. So that was that.

On the downside, you know if your listeners can see the picture, if you move on to fields without road access, without toilets, without electricity – with most people living in caravans and having children and having to still work. And pretty much apart from three families, the other six hadn’t ever done off-grid living. So you might imagine that there was an incredible pressure on us. And we also didn’t really know to what extent we might come under quite a punitive system, because we had planning permission to uphold. So we’re there in like, the shadow of the stress and that overwork.

I remember years later, Robina from New Zealand, I think she’s quite famous, and Robin Clayfield. And some others came through. And they showed a lovely slideshow of all these places all over the world, permaculture holdings, and they all had these beautiful shrines. A lot of care had been put into making ornamental places. And I felt a little sadness for us at last, because we just worked like dogs, really. There were one or two people who were very committed to beauty that had managed to provide those sorts of spaces. So there was a lot of hard grind, as well as being very beautiful. And sadly, in a way, we had huge governance problems. Our original documents were rubbish and that combined with stresses, I think led to quite entrenched conflicts for a while. That resulted in some court cases and things.

So I think all that as far as I understand, it’s all been clarified. Now, there’s still a little bit, I think it’s still a little bit beset by difficulties, but it’s grown its own culture, there’s excellent people, obtained permission all around. What did happen there really clearly, and this is partly to do with the people but partly to do with nature’s forces itself, is the biodiversity is amazing.

Everybody, however, skilled or not, cared so much about their places. And even if they were just arguing with neighbours, they cared about their places. And everyone made ponds and planted trees with a lot of attention to, you know, accommodating wild plants as well as bringing in plants. So within quite a short few years, it really showed me how quickly land can be repaired from totally bare with just a few hedgerow, hardly any mature trees. To I think within three years, you could notice a big difference. Five years, it was pretty obvious all the microclimates were there. And one of the great things about doing lots of things by hand and not having many resources, is people didn’t have the money, say to make massive changes with machinery, I mean we did use machines to terrace. But you can’t manage to impose your will on those many acres if you’re busy. And so there’s huge, lovely areas of wild corridors everywhere. And it sustains an immense amount of bird life and because it’s little patches, it’s a mosaic, you know, it’s highly diverse.

Morag:

Yeah, you know, I really feel the challenges that you’re talking about, but also the beauty in that natural regeneration. As you know, I live here at Crystal Waters and it’s the good, the bad, the good too! It’s kind of part and parcel of being in a place. I’ve been living here for 25 years now. So, where are you now then? And what positive lessons did you take from that experience and take with you into your new place where you where you’ve landed?

Jasmine:

Yeah, well, I’ve landed quite nearby that we’ve had for two years now. We’re in an area where it’s the same elevation, but it’s rough grassland with lots of standing stones and big rocky outcrops. And it’s very low farming, as in not intensive, you know, it’s a low input farming around me, and National Park. And it’s very, very old. So we were always building new houses on fields that have never been lived on before, marginal places. Whereas where I am now, there’s been a house for hundreds of years. And so that probably means there was someone here for forever, really, because that’s the way they plant houses in these ancient places.

One of the key lessons that have stayed with me was the observation phase. So, with Lammas we had three, four years in the planning process, so I made an extensive design. Then there was a hell of a pressure to get it on the ground and get producing. Whereas here you know, I’m older now. I work outside rather than working for my plot. And so for this first year or so, I haven’t felt any impulse to put anything down.

Part of me could think that the land’s actually said, ‘Look, I’ve been like this for a long time, don’t just come in here and put your newfangled ideas down’. Though I did, actually, this week, order my first fruit trees. So that’s after being here for two years. It’s not really a good microclimate for anything like that. But as you could appreciate, as a permaculturalist, we got to have some fruit trees, don’t we! And I did put in a lot of, you know, wildlife and timber trees last winter, actually. So I think that that sort of sector analysis, if you like, the wind, sun, water, view – that sits in me, although I’ve gone away from the analytical, more and more, especially from teaching, those ideas are really deeply imprinted in me. So I strangely haven’t been bothered to do a proper base map or anything. And I wonder about that, maybe that was because I have been thinking about it like this for 20 years? Well, since 1999, roughly, I’ve been thinking about these tools. Maybe they’re in me. I’ve used sectors to plant a small veg garden. I’m going to put these fruit trees in and in me very deeply, you know, where is the wind coming from? Where are the most sheltered spots?

Morag:

And that’s interesting, what you’re saying, because once you get it into your elbows and your knees, as you’re saying, it’s in you, you just naturally tend to think and plan and map things out. That’s kind of when you get to that point, I suppose – that’s a mastery of a topic, isn’t it? When it just is there, and it just, it becomes sort of obviously seen how things go together, you don’t have to work it as much it just kind of is. You’ll obviously be going through all those processes, but it’s like riding a bike, you know, it just is.

Jasmine:

I’ve tended to use the word ‘fluency’. I wouldn’t like to say of myself mastery, exactly! But yes, especially when I used to teach the design process as a sort of certified course and workshops, it can seem a bit sort of contrived and analytical for people to go ‘step by step’. But that’s always what I felt the benefit had been, especially during the diploma which was quite tedious. The benefit of that was that you kind of got a fluency in it. There’s a great young farmer called Matt, who’s probably not that young, up in North Wales who I went to the Wales permaculture gathering there in September. He’s running a brilliant regenerative farm, a couple of market gardens, the whole thing. And he said, ‘You know, when you walk past something 1000 times, you don’t really need to do the steps anymore’.

So there was that thought, but I think I’d probably pick this idea up from the Bill Mollison type of books: that in our genetics in ancient selves, we had to be completely connected – reading landscapes and materials. We were so connected with them that we knew. So I always think that we kind of lost that completely just in two generations. You know, there’s all ‘Oh, aren’t we terrible humans’ and everything, but I feel like it’s just dormant in us. Although we wouldn’t advise new people just to go into somewhere and start rampaging the soil or something. But surely, we must have some innate understanding of soils and shelter and plants, we must do.

Morag:

Yeah, I definitely feel that and I love the word fluency. I think that’s a really lovely way to describe it. How did you become a permaculture teacher? What was your pattern? And how do you like to teach? What’s your way of teaching?

Jasmine:

I suppose on that Crystal Waters PDC I did have a little bit of a like, ‘oh, maybe I might enjoy doing something like this’. Then it was completely parked. Then back a long time ago, 2005 ish, I was teaching something we have out here called Forest School, which is a sort of self-esteem building thing. It’s got quite a specific method to it and I just noticed instantly that play based learning went very well. So I was weaving permaculture in the games and in the things we did with the children, without obviously mentioning the word, devising little games where we were using our bodies to represent the layers of woodland edge – because forest gardening out here we got so little light compared to you in Australia that we are productive with the woodland edge. Devising games and that creative teaching method of Robin Clayfield that really had stuck in me. When I got to Lammas, I suppose as a volunteer for other projects, I started to give the odd lead session of some type. But a brilliant woman called Jody Talon came along and she was already used to teaching introduction courses. We just devised one and the first one we ever did we put so much into it, we thought out every single tiny bit and used every single permaculture tool to do it. I just felt like, ‘Yeah, this is something I really feel I can offer and I feel like I’m really thriving’. After a while Jody went, but because I had the smallholding, we did tours that nearly every other week and we’d get a lot of visiting groups, from all sorts of people – artists, architects, anybody, all sorts of people! So, within a couple of years, I was really fluent at doing that and it went very well. But I couldn’t really get people to come for permaculture courses, but my husband was quite a well known natural builder of straw bale round houses. And so people would come for that.

So that’s really where it went. I did all my talks and things, I’d do this, show them the plot, the sectors and the layers and everything and had all those wonderful resources there to kind of really bring it to life and develop my own style of delivery – trying to use the body wherever possible as a sensor to complement the analytical side of everything. But it ended up really being varied. Because everyone wanted a hobbit house, they called it, which was what my husband had become well known for making. But they weren’t really thinking about the landform, or it connecting in. It’s to do with this dream people have, it really awakens something in them. So I was like, what is the solution? Well, they don’t want to come from me or my or my skills, but they will come for him! And he didn’t really want to be a teacher. So I thought ‘Oh, there’s the gap, isn’t it?’ They want the house but they haven’t thought about where to place it or any of the surrounding systems like food or firewood, water – everything that makes a house usable and sustainable. So that’s how I based it, I did the formal sessions in the morning with the design tools and the observation. And then they’d go and build for the afternoon and do something with lots of straw and mud. And in West Wales, we’ve got the Lammas project itself. But there’s also a huge array of really interesting other sites to visit communities and organic farms. So we had a wealth of places to do great visits. And that’s something I’ve learned from the course that yours as well as other courses was that, you know, you really got to have the diversity and mix it up with, with all sorts of experiences to help people really learn on multiple levels. Yeah, yeah.

Morag:

You still teach permaculture now?

Jasmine:

Not strictly, occasionally, someone will say, ‘Oh, can you come and do a day or weekend?’ So they organised everything…

Morag:

And you just turn up and teach! That’s nice.

Jasmine:

It gets tiring, doesn’t it?

Morag:

Did your book come out of the teaching? Where did that fit into your flow?

Jasmine:

Yeah, so the book is basically the sum total of everything I learned up to that point in 2017 – from other teachers and from the more than 1000 people that came through my hands, and from working on that piece of land. The chapters are in effect, the sessions we would run, so they’re like an idea, like half a page, followed by some body thinking exercises that you do on your own place. And so yes, with a few other things chucked in, it was very much the basis and I had come to a point where I didn’t want to teach that course, all those types of topics. But I didn’t want to lose that harvest, it felt like it had been very rich. And although I was increasingly not kind of enthusiastic, I knew that there was something good in there. And so I don’t know, do you know the morning pages, the Artists Way? The Artists Way is a brilliant book. But it has you do these things called Morning Pages, where first thing in the morning you write three pages of A4, or whatever is on your mind. And it’s partly a way to get out all the crud that’s in you to allow your creativity to come through. But sometimes you get really clear crystal bell ideas come through.

A few years before writing the book that had started to come through, like, why don’t you just write up at least one sector, because I’d developed some really cool exercises for that. I thought they were a great interface between analysis, design and observation, you know, they were all those together. And so I had this idea to write the pamphlet. And also because it gets boring people would buy land, and they’d ask me to come and do it and I always want people to do it themselves – never really been one for being a consultant. But then I did a big survey of what was out there and existing permaculture books, because there’s no point writing something that’s already out there. And I thought, okay, like the Artist’s Way, it’s a practical workbook. It’s a self led process. And so I drew on quite a lot of things like that in my survey process and I mapped it out. I could see it felt like, I don’t know, if you as a writer, you get this feeling where there’s quite a massive energy behind it, and you just know, it’s going to come out and come out clearly. So I did start that.

At the same time, I finished teaching certified courses on October 17. But then, in January, the first of 2018, I spent a couple of days writing a chapter on the wild sector and fire sector. Like writing about the fire sector, I’d said that in Australia or Portugal, we need to take care of this in our design. We don’t really have wildfires here in Wales. And I’d write more about the sun sector and under fire. And then I wrote the next chapter was just a one page on wildness and the unexpected and how that can come and change a design completely. Or how do you accommodate uncertainty in the wild when you’re doing such controlled processes designing something? And then strangely, my house burned down in one day in like, a few hours. That happened just the day after I think I wrote that chapter. So something that was then being built for six years went in a couple of hours. A month or two afterwards, because there’s obviously some sort of trauma involved, my husband just said, ‘Come on, pick up that book’. So it was just what I did for that year afterwards. That’s why I wrote it all up. Because I didn’t want to lose everything. You know, it seemed like a great thing. They said, then it’s out there and I don’t really mind what happens to it. But I think teachers and diploma students find it really useful.

Morag:

Yeah, I think it sounds to me like a book that would be so helpful for everyone starting to work out how to teach design as well, whether you’re actually doing your own design, or also working out how to teach design. So you know, that’s kind of what I do a lot of, is teaching permaculture teachers. And one of the things I’m hearing a lot now is asking for support for more activities or how to share this and it sounds to me like that would be something that would be perfect. So I’m going to be sharing that out with everyone from now on! So thank you for articulating that so beautifully. I wonder whether there’s any other tips in terms of writing that you would have for people who are thinking about getting started to write or any other kind of gaps when you were doing your survey? What’s out there in the permaculture world? What are the gaps you might have seen in the permaculture writing sphere?

Jasmine:

Yeah, I don’t know exactly. I mean, I do buy the occasional book still, but I feel at the moment, there’s maybe a bit of a call for…I’ve just picked up a wonderful book called Imagine which is about how an ecosystem works and I feel like in this reductionism that’s going on about carbon and carbon dioxide, whichever you want are two very different things, but people seem to conflate the same word. I think that that might be quite useful because I’m now a mentor for community groups, and they’re mostly people that has just become a new idea to them – about being green. And there was, I think, compared to any time in my life, I’m nearly 50, is that people are actually turning their attention towards being green. Now, I don’t have that much faith that I could suddenly turn them on to permaculture suddenly, but there’s this great love of nature and the preciousness coming through. But there is a skills deficit and an understanding deficit, I feel around ecosystems. I don’t know. That’s just what I seem to feel. So say like the obsession with planting trees when there’s lots of data to show that well managed grasslands and shrubs sequester as much carbon dioxide if not much more. Or I was with someone and they were seeing a willow tree – in our cool, temperate climate, all our plants have evolved to be coppiced, you know and to be grazed and eaten and cut continuously. The person I was with actually had a science PhD, we were looking at a willow tree, it was all straggly and overgrown. They said how sad it looked and that people should come and cut that tree down. I felt sad and not because of the willow. It’s this lack of understanding, because that tree’s roots will pump down and do much more if it’s regularly grazed or coppiced. And it’ll provide more bird habitat. So I think that could be a place for bringing people into nature stewardship, and combining that with self awareness and self care. There could be scope there just to help people understand natural processes a bit more. Because they’re not really getting that through the mainstream information, I don’t think. So that’s one thing.

I also noticed that there’s this book called Earth Pass by Starhawk, I don’t know if you know it, it’s probably quite old now. But pretty much guaranteed every year, my courses, someone would borrow it and never bring it back. I think it was the most borrowed, least brought back book. I’ve bought it like six or seven times. So I think there’s something in that. That’s probably influenced my book quite a lot in that she combines analytical with self observation. You go into a field and you think, ‘Oh, God, it’s I don’t like this’, but you park those thoughts away, you don’t really acknowledge them. They’re marginalised. But there’s information in there. Because you’re in body and mind is having a response. And it might not even be about the physical environment, it could be, you know, about anything and the people element, whatever. So, that could be because I noticed, yeah, that could be something that really yokes together, our own inner workings with this observation outside, and then the practical solutions. There could be scope for that. In fact, someone called it Earth psychology to me.

Morag:

Yeah. Fantastic. I love those two ideas, and it’s just really wonderful. And I really think there’s so much scope, even just coming from a permaculture perspective and thinking about books, like really trying to expand the field of where we go with it and finding those edges of intersecting between eco psychology and design, and how we can bring those things together. I think that would be amazing. And also thinking about how to apply different scales as well. For example, bringing it down to something that children could really access all art or even maybe some more materials for youth. I’m hosting a whole series of forums coming up soon, and we’re really looking at sort of what’s permaculture when you’re thinking about active retirement? What’s permaculture when you’re thinking about homeschooling? What’s permaculture when you’re thinking about mental health? So really going ‘permaculture and’ ‘permaculture and’ – where can we go when we start to expand the field. Yeah, I really feel like there’s a lot of possibility of bringing together different fields of knowledge, like forest schooling and permaculture. What does that look like together as this beautiful piece that can be shared out?

Jasmine:

Well, I’ve got a question for you in a sec. But there are quite a few people who are quite active like that in Britain. I got a friend. She’s 78 or something. She’s doing her diploma. And so her designs have been a lot about how to transition to not being able to physically do things. I think there’s quite a big body of work for children in permaculture, like Lucy Leagan, people would find some stuff like that. But I was interested to think, for you, if I do workshops now, like yesterday I was with some wonderful people. And I was bringing in permaculture ideas, but I never mentioned that word. So it seems a shame, doesn’t it, to lose the legacy and the coherency of all that first principle stuff and the massive movement that goes on in its modern form. What do you think about this dilemma of bringing in the word or not bringing in the word?

Morag:

I always do. And I, you know, I question it too. There was this woman, she must be 70 odd, and her name is Rhonda Hetzel and she’s written this book called Down to Earth. I was interviewing her in a local food festival and she’d just released a new book so I was talking to her about that and I was just amazed – I wasn’t expecting when she said, all of a sudden, she said, ‘and I blog and I have, you know, 20 million followers’. I think I almost fell off my chair! Like these people are interesting. So she said, ‘come over, and I’ll teach you how to blog and do all these things’. So I did, I went and sat with her for a long time. And we talked about it and I said ‘Look I don’t know, I’ve always done permaculture, but I don’t know whether I should call it permaculture or not, whether it would limit what I’m doing’. She just said, ‘no, Morag you are so already involved in it. Feel it, infuse it with all that you are as well. And bring new ideas into permaculture, expand the field of permaculture, redescribe it through your language, every person who comes into permaculture will redescribe it in their language’ and I really have tried to do that, tried to make it more gentle and open and accessible and welcoming. Particularly as we’re teaching permaculture, here, it’s sort of saying, what is all that you bring to permaculture? You apply a permaculture lens, and who is it that you want to be working with? Who would you like to teach? Like, it’s not like a fixed thing or a cookie cutter approach that ‘we do this and it has to be that way’, it’s kind of a way of seeing. It can be a permaculture way of doing something, and I just find it a really gentle way of bringing the concepts in, because as you start to introduce a tiny bit, you can then open doors gradually to multiple dimensions of what it is. It kind of creates this connective thread. What it does is it brings forward that body of knowledge and it also helps to create this global language of connectivity between people all around the world. I think too what gives me a lot of confidence is when I see people in the refugee settlements in Uganda saying ‘Permaculture is making a difference in our lives that is actually saving lives here’. When you sort of step out of your own comfort zone and imagine the possibilities of what that actually means there, that there is this system of knowledge that can be handed accessibly through this democratic education process to communities like that, and it makes a difference? Then I really embrace it so wholeheartedly.

Jasmine:

Okay, well, that’s gonna give me food for thought then because you probably know like, you’ve probably got your own ways of giving it the one sentence explanation for different types of people, because that little first mention of it makes a difference. I suppose quite a few years ago, now you’d meet people, they’d go ‘I don’t want to hear about it, its just composting’ or something, you know, I developed various quick ways in and if it’s a certain type of person, I might say, well, it’s a design system that’s modelled on ecosystems, or another type of people, I might say, well, it’s a way of planning human needs. Sometimes if it’s a new audience who wouldn’t have heard the word then I will try. Now you’ve said that maybe I’ll give it a bit more effort. Because yeah, they can’t really access the further and wonderful world of it if they don’t know the word.

Morag:

I know. That’s right. And you know, as soon as you sort of drop that in, it can just start to open up a whole whole world of knowledge that exists out there and a connectivity. And I think too, through this podcast series that I’ve been doing now, for a number of years, I’ve been talking to people from all different backgrounds. Some people who are not directly in the permaculture world and I start to talk with them. People say like Fritjof Capra, and he will say, ‘Permaculture is the way of applying this system thinking, it makes sense’. You hear people like Vandana Shiva saying, and ‘Permaculture is a big part of the solution’. So I’ve looked to different people from different backgrounds and tried to see. People like Helena Norberg Hodge, and all different people, people I’ve highly respected for many years, who’ve actually now sort of understand what permaculture is a bit more and go are ‘actually yeah, that’s what we’re talking about’. And I’m delighted to hear that because I was inspired by them when I was in my early 20s and, and it was because of the kinds of things that they said about what’s happening in the world, what we need to be thinking about, what we need to be doing, that drew me to permaculture as a way to respond. Like, ‘okay I understand all these big pictures, but what do we do in our own communities? How do we apply that?’ And then share it and myceliate out into the world in a way that makes sense. Something that’s tangible, accessible, shareable. And I’ve yet to find anything that is more than that, that I am able to kind of offer as a bundle. You know, there’s a lot of different independent bits and pieces, but something I can go ‘okay, well, here it is’. And it’s got permeable edges, don’t kind of see it as ‘that’s it’.

But it’s kind of like something I can grasp hold of and offer as a way that people in their everyday lives, anywhere in the world can actually grasp and do something with and that’s why I think doing what you did in terms of writing down your process is such a valuable thing and I would really love more permaculture writers in the world. Which is why I started this series, to say, well what is your experience? How have you done that? And how can we inspire more people who’ve developed a body of knowledge within this to be able to get out and share it out into the world. I think that would be so wonderful, that we share our stories. We’re so busy doing our stuff, that we don’t actually share what this thing permaculture is all about from all these different angles. I think the diversity of perspectives and ways that it manifests in people’s lives, it’s really important. And not to be dogmatic or fundamentalist about it at all, I just see it as a field of knowledge and a connective thread of concept that helps people to kind of grasp what it is that we’re talking about. How about a paradigm or a way of seeing?

Jasmine:

Yeah, I’ve used that term of a lens too, that you said there and it’s a pattern language in a way, isn’t it? That’s why it’s so applicable to any context. So there’s been a good movement in Britain to apply it beyond land. There’s been quite a few teachers and people who have really pushed that one forward. It’s really healthy the way it grows. I love the early works of Bill and David and all that stuff, I think they’re amazing and I was just lucky enough to get my hand on a manual. They’re hundreds of pounds in Britain now. Someone I know died and somehow I got their copy. But yes, but it grows really organically it fills niches, doesn’t it? It’s like an ecosystem process itself, a niche appears likeLooby Macnamara and she’s taken this idea called Cultural Emergence. And, you know, that’s very popular, and it’s really taken the people side of it up.

I was thinking about the process of writing, although for that particular book, I very much wanted to lay out the design process, and we call it often using survey, analysis, design, implement, maintain, evaluate and tweak. That’s partly just an adamancy, to help people who’ve kept finding permaculture confusing so you see that side of it, and there’s a section on principles and stuff. What I thinking might be nice to just share with the listeners is if I’m starting a fresh piece of writing, which will now be more like something like an article or report for someone, I like to sit fairly still and then maybe this wouldn’t work for everyone, but I then pick or go to what I would call ‘the shamanic bookcase’. I think this is an idea from Edward de Bono or someone else, that you just go without thinking and you hold the topic that you’d like to write about and then let it go. And then go to the bookcase, put your hand in, pull out anything. The first thing you open it on – you see how that links, like in a holographic way. Because as Carl Jung, he’s one of the first people to really describe that everything is linked in some way, like in psychology anyway, first one. So yeah, so I did that. 

So I might be thinking I’ve got to write this thing about peer mentoring. Yeah, I had to write a peer mentoring handbook recently. But I know that for writing to be good, it has to have a catchy thing, doesn’t it? We’re not in the 1800s anymore where you can do a long, slow novel. You need to have something that draws people in instantly. So I might go and open the book, open the bookcase, and it might say anything – I’ll make a link and that’ll be my opening gambit. Especially because lots of people get writer’s block, sometimes you have to do the body of writing first and go back and make the intro, that’s quite common as well. Because it takes a while to settle – to know really what that powerful opening sentence will be that really draws people in. But it’s a bit like being a magician like spell casting. We do need something with some quite a sparkle to it to get someone to actually bother to sit down and read. And then I have this one called ‘walking on alligators’, which is something the Artists Way recommended from a ‘Book of Meditations for Writers’. And it’s like hundreds of one point ideas. So I will quite often use that. You know, if I said ‘I’m going to write to Morag today’, I’d open up and it says ‘nearly all important transactions of life, we have to take a leap in the dark’, and blah, blah, blah. And so then it says, ‘Today, I’ll set aside my doubts and simply write’. So there’s a much longer thing there. I don’t think it’s ever failed me. It’s by 

Morag:

Very good. Yeah, I think those sorts of things. And I love the idea of just grabbing something random, and then doing the moiré effect and bringing those things together. I think that’s fantastic. There’s a couple of ways I seem to find a way to start, I sort of map out all my ideas even before I start writing the text, and then I’ll just see it there as this big kind of soup of ideas and then go for a walk. And just kind of then something will just land. Like an oomph in my belly. And I think right, that’s the starting point. Sometimes that works. Other times, I’ll go off, similar to the bookshelf, I’ll go off and listen to a seminar about something else or join in a conversation with a group of friends talking about something else and then just some little thing of that, and raise the topic and see what happens in the conversation where the energy of the conversation is.

Jasmine:

Going for a walk or something, I have had it recommended. Again, it was Artists Way – any right brain activity, like making a big soup or something. Yeah, I mean, just create that space for the thing to bubble up.

Morag:

Metaphorically and physically as well! Yeah, gosh. Well, so if you’re if you’re not teaching permaculture now, how do you just as a final kind of thing, how do you see permaculture in your life? Or in having informed where you are now? Do you still feel it’s like bubbling away there? Because obviously it’s been a big part of the journey to where you landed now.

Jasmine:

Yeah, well, I still work as a workshop leader, I’m largely mentoring community groups. Mainly to do with being green. If I’m project planning with them, I still basically am using the permaculture design steps. I still bring in the principles, even if they’re not really mentioned explicitly. And yeah, I’m using it all the time to think holistically about what they might need. So yesterday, the people I was with, they were totally new to green ideas, but they were dealing with people that had trauma. So I’m thinking all the time about the people care, earth care, fair share, those three ethics. I’m gonna give a lot of thought now to what you’ve said about bringing it in more clearly. But I’m always thinking in it and then in my garden I am applying it. Probably more like in that sort of Holmgren principle kind of way. That sort of idea. Anything I’m doing here will be backed by permaculture in my mind in the garden.

And I’m not so good at this one but I use it for like, the inner landscape survey, you know, that sort of idea. I think I’ve copied it from other writers, but I made a resource for the inner landscape. So you say what’s the big trees in my life? What’s my microclimates? What’s my shelter from the wind? Like thoughts. What’s my sunny spot? And where am I in transition? Where does the water flows? You know, I used to do that really regularly.

Morag:

That’s beautiful. Have you written it up? Like has someone written up that process?

Jasmine:

It was in the Permaculture Magazine, they asked me to make something during lockdown about personal resilience and I wrote it up for them. So that was in about 2020, I suppose.

I think I’ve copied it from somewhere. I like the idea, maybe Starhawk because she interprets all the elements. But I have never seen it written like I did. But I just started it when I wrote my zone 00 design up for my diploma back in 2010. I just thought, well, ‘we’re a landscape, aren’t we?’ And when you’re with other people, when you have to do training for groups on conflict resolution. Well, it’s so boring for me, I don’t want to think about that! But what you could do, you can address your inner landscape. And perhaps that’s the best thing you could do to operate harmoniously in a group is pretend your inner world.

Morag:

Yeah, that’s beautiful. Oh, yeah. I’d love to read that piece. If you’re able to send through a link that would be amazing. So are you still writing articles?

Jasmine:

Only occasionally, if someone asked me or something. I haven’t noticed any big urge to write come through, like when I wanted to write that big book. And I keep thinking, why aren’t I writing plays to connect people in a deep, ecological way! But it’s not coming through. For the people I work for, I just made a handbook on peer mentoring. And I really enjoyed writing that.

Morag:

Fantastic. That’s a great topic to write about. That’s wonderful. I was going to ask you, too, you started your story saying that you went and studied politics? And do you see what you’ve been doing through permaculture and what you’re doing now as a form of political activism, in a way that responds to the things you’re concerned about?

Jasmine:

No, no, I kind of keep away from anything that’s considered political or ideological, there’s very complex reasons behind that, but I think it’s just been the way to keep me sane, you know. I wasn’t the person to interact on a policy level, or occasionally maybe I’m contributing to that in a really left field way but I’m no longer really massively someone that’s trying to build the eco-dream or something physically because I’ve done it for too long and I’m now tired. So I think it’s just my personal thing, but where I suppose I am an activist in a way, is when I’m working with all these community groups. I suppose I’m on a mission on some levels to help people thrive. And myself personally, I’m probably like an animist or something, you know, because I really love rocks as much as I love plants. But I’m not at all interested in going and pushing that on someone else. Anything that helps someone feel better and more confident, more connected, then I feel that the nature connection will come in and it’s up to people to make their own choices. Kindness, I think there’s a few good people and writers and everything like Buddhists or whomever have emphasised that perhaps that’s the really important thing and I can be quite mean (laughs). So yeah, I think that’s what’s motivated me much more than anything political, is kindness.

Morag:

Yeah, kindness. It’s a motivating force, I think that we really do need it in the world more than anything else right now.

Jasmine:

I think we’re really trying to do a wildlife project, and do it for the plants and for the animals and for them, more than because ‘I believe that we must have…’

Morag:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so, so much for joining me today, Jasmine. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking with you and learning about your way of applying permaculture in your life and writing your book and your ways of writing too. I hope that those people who are listening to this will be inspired to pick up the pen or find a way to share their story or connect in with what’s going on. So thank you so much, Jasmine, it’s been just wonderful.

Jasmine:

Thank you for this. You seem to be taking it out into the world on many fronts! Thank you.

The post Permaculture Design Companion with Jasmine Dale appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Tune in to the latest podcast for my conversation with Pippa Chapman –  author, permaculture designer, forest gardener, artist and mother – to learn the best way to start forest gardening – as well as her simple process of writing a permaculture book.

We chat about how to create multiple layers on a small-scale to maximise your growing area, using polycultures and guilds for healthy, low-maintenance food. Pippa also shares how to use perennials for structure and for year-round food, and how to incorporate flowers for beauty, wildlife and for the kitchen – as well as her journey finding permaculture.

Based in Yorkshire, Pippa has been professionally gardening for over 30 years, but she’s been exploring nature since she was a little girl. In 2007, she left her job as Head Gardener on a private estate to take a year-long practical apprenticeship at RHS Harlow Carr. Then she discovered permaculture and everything changed!

In her (first) book, The Plant Lover’s Backyard Forest Garden, published by Permanent Publications, Pippa explores how to grow your own beautiful multilayered food forest in your own backyard.

She was introduced to forest gardening and permaculture and in 2010 set up a sustainable gardening business with her husband – Those Plant People.

She grows a wide variety of fruits, flowers, herbs and annual and perennial vegetables in her small backyard, creating a beautiful, edible and wildlife friendly space.

You can find her on Instagram and Youtube as well.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!

Or access it on any streaming platform HERE and through Youtube.

Read the full transcript:

Morag:

Hello and welcome to the show everyone! We’re here on Sensemaking in a Changing World and we’re continuing our Permaculture Writer’s Series with my guest today, Pippa Chapman from West Yorkshire. Pippa is the author of ‘A Plant Lover’s Backyard Food Forest’. I’m really excited to talk with her today about not only her love of plants, because that’s something I deeply share with people, but also the love of food forests, and a world in permaculture and permaculture writing. So welcome to the show Pippa! Thank you so much for joining us today.

Pippa:

Thanks for having me here.

Morag:

Maybe we could just begin with the description of your food forest, your forest garden – I tend to call them food forests! But a forest garden, in my mind, is kind of a similar thing. Do you see a distinction between that and could you describe what your first garden was where you are in your backyard?

Pippa:

Yeah, I think that’s quite a good place to start, actually, because quite often when I’m talking to people about what I do, I say that a food forest is a good description, because quite often forest gardening is a bit of a confusing term. But in terms of what I do, I tend to call it a forest garden because quite often the focus of what I’m doing is not always food. So you know, I think that’s quite an important distinction. I’ve done some which are sort of more healing medicinal forest gardens – I’ve just been designing a forest garden at a community garden that we’re setting up with Yorkshire water. And as part of that, we’ve created a teaching forest garden and each section is shaped in a circle, a bit like a mandala garden.

Each section has a different focus. So one focus is food. Another is medicinal healing plants. Another section is all about fibres for weaving and creating textiles and cordage and plants for natural dyeing. And another section is focused on habitat and wildlife as well. So yeah, I think food forests is a good term when you’re describing it to someone who’s new to the term forest gardening, because I think it explains it a lot better. But I tend to think of myself as creating forest gardens because it’s not always about food.

Morag:

I love that distinction. Because you’re right, it’s not all about the food. I mean, if you’re thinking from a human perspective and creating edible gardens through a permaculture lens, you tend to put food as the first thing. But as you say, there’s so many other benefits and purposes, as well as the purpose of being a wildlife or rewilding garden. I wonder whether it’s something to do with the fact that there’s, like Robert Hart and his forest garden, whether the UK movement has that terminology more in the culture of that gardening? Or do you have any thoughts on that?

Pippa:

I have noticed over the last few years, the term food forest creeping more into the UK. When I was writing my book, I was thinking, do I call it a forest garden or a food forest. But as I say, in the end, because quite often, I’m doing forest gardens that aren’t the sole focus isn’t food, I decided to go with forest gardening. Quite often, I use the term food forest as well, but it’s definitely starting to come into the UK more now. 

Morag:

Oh, thank you for describing that. I really appreciate that distinction. I like the image that the term forest garden conjures up. I’m imagining wandering through this beautiful garden that is a forest in and of itself, rather than focusing on the food first, but thinking about the forest, the ecosystem, as being the main part of it.

So what cultivated in you in the very beginning a love of plants? You obviously have a deep relationship with the plant world. Where did that begin for you?

Pippa:

I’ve always enjoyed gardening. I remember when I was younger, my mom used to go out and potter around in the garden and I would love to go and help. I would take out my little dolls and we’d, you know, play fairies in and amongst the flowers and I just used to really love it. 

The first bit of garden that I was given as a child I used to grow lupins and nettles. I think really just because they were the two things that grew well there! I used to always try and give my family nettle soup, which they weren’t always very happy about… But yeah, I think I’ve always liked being outdoors. I grew up in the Yorkshire Dales so I used to go out looking at wildflowers and drawing pictures of them, writing poems about them. So I’ve always really enjoyed the natural world.

But when I was at school, I think because I was naturally very good at drawing and painting and things like that. That was the direction in which I was sort of encouraged to go and when you’re at school, there isn’t horticulture on the menu. There was no option to study plants and gardening. So it just never occurred to me to go into that as a profession. I ended up sort of going off for a few years doing a degree in fine art, then really hating being indoors all the time in an art studio! I thought I would really love being in this amazing creative space, but I just wanted to be outdoors.

While I was thinking about what I wanted to do, I got a job in a garden centre. I was just really lucky that this particular garden centre had all sorts of weird and wonderful quirky plants. It wasn’t like your usual garden centre that’s mostly a pet shop, it was a proper plant nursery. And so I really got to know individual plants. They wouldn’t just have sort of one geranium, they would have 50 different types of geranium so you really could get to know the slight differences between the different plants. And I think that really set me up well for my plant knowledge, certainly, and all the botanical and Latin names for plants as well. 

After a while, I just felt I wanted to actually garden with the plants, not just propagate them and sell them in the garden centre. So I got a job in a large private estate in Yorkshire. It was a beautiful large house with about five acres of garden which was fantastic. And even luckier, after a while they promoted me to head gardener, which was also fantastic. So I got my own cottage on site and it was just a beautiful place to live and so much to learn. And, you know, I had to do everything from rose pruning to gardening in the kitchen garden. It was fantastic.

But once again, I got to a point where I realised that even though I didn’t know very much, I was the most qualified person there. And therefore there would never really be the opportunity to learn more there. I just have always enjoyed learning and I felt I couldn’t stay there forever until I retired, it just wouldn’t suit me at all.

I was lucky enough to find that the Royal Horticultural Society does traineeships. And I’d live not far from Harlow Carr which is their northern garden in Harrogate. So I applied for a place and it was a bit of an odd move, because normally you would apply there as a sort of very beginner rather than coming from a head gardener position. But I think they could see my enthusiasm and how much I wanted to learn more. You know, I was the head gardener, but really, I wasn’t a very knowledgeable gardener. So yeah, they accepted me and it was a fantastic year. 

It was a bit like an apprenticeship, really. So you got to go round each different department. One week I’d be working with alpine plants in the alpine house. The next week, I’d be in the woodland. The next week, I would be in the kitchen garden. Constantly moving around all these different departments and just soaking up so much knowledge. I used to go home and do further research for the evening and put together a massive diary of everything that I learned within that year. That was an absolutely amazing year of learning.

I think I was lucky that while certain elements of the RHS that still have quite old fashioned approaches to things, but at Harlow Carr they were very into sustainability and the environment and actually they did have plans, when I got there, to plant an acre of forest garden, which unfortunately never happened! Now it would have been a wonderful example of forest gardening to go and look around, but that never got planted. But it introduced me to the idea of forest gardening. 

And it was whilst I was there that I was looking around the book shops, they had a fantastic bookshop, and I love reading. So I was having a little look around, and I came across an introduction to permaculture book! I had never heard of it before. Now it might have been, might have been Graham Burnett – I’ve still got it somewhere. But it’s been so long since I’ve read it. And as I was reading it, I just thought ‘this is exactly what I want to be doing’. This is how I want to approach my future career in horticulture. And it just made perfect sense. So that was sort of the beginning really, of my permaculture journey.

Morag:

Which bit about it appealed to you? Coming from that horticultural plant perspective, what drew you to the permaculture ideas?

Pippa:

I think it was the holistic approach to it all. In my previous job as Head Gardener, the clients had wanted bowling green lawns. So I’m there trying to plant flowers for pollinators. But at the same time, I’m pouring weed killer and moss killer all over the lawns. And I remember one day, which was really one of the final straw days, I decided ‘I just can’t do this anymore’. I was watering weed killer over clover. And a bee just flew on to a flower at the moment that I put this weed killer on and I just felt like, ‘No, I just, I can’t do this anymore, there must be another way!’ II think it’s just that feeling of a lot of gardening is very much how to control nature, how to work against nature. And it always felt wrong to me.

When I started reading about permaculture and about this holistic approach of how the garden is part of nature, how to work with that, how to make the best of a plant. Rather than ‘if you’ve got clover in your lawn, use weedkiller’, permaculture is doing loads of great things. Just having a totally different perspective on gardening. 

Unfortunately, I never managed to convince the clients to leave their weeds in their lawns. But when we now take on clients, and they have weedy lawns, we explain the benefits. And we do have somebody who does insist on mowing a very large area of lawn, they are quite happy for the buttercups and the clover and all the other weeds to just stay in there. Which feels like a huge step forward.

Morag:

That’s fantastic, isn’t it? And so when you have clients, do you do design work as well as the maintenance work? How does your permaculture or forest gardening career look?

Pippa:

I think from everything that I learned when I was at the garden centre, I was really lucky that the person who owned the garden centre also ran a design and landscape business. And he was hoping that he would take me on as a garden design apprentice. So I did get a chance to learn quite a bit about garden design. But I did feel very quickly, even before I learned about permaculture, that I didn’t like just designing a garden, planting it and then never seeing it again – it didn’t really give me much satisfaction. And I didn’t feel that I was learning very much because how do I know what those designs turn into? How do I know how successful the planting design was? Because I never see it again.

So now I would say we manage and develop gardens. So I will take on a garden and usually it will develop and be redesigned slowly, rather than coming in and saying, ‘Oh, I’ve seen your garden for five minutes. Here’s what I think we should do. Get some bulldozers in and then plant it up. And that’s it.’ So yeah, I tend to say that we manage and develop gardens. I do some design work. But generally if somebody wants a design I say, why don’t I come and give you a consultation? And then during that consultation, we can discuss what their needs are, I can have an assessment of the site. And then usually whilst I’m there, I say, ‘I think it would be much better if you developed this garden slowly rather than just got rid of everything and redid it all at once’.

Morag:

So when you say that ‘we’, do you have a team?

Pippa:

Yeah! My husband, Andrew. We actually met while I was at Harlow Carr. We both share a love of plants. He’s a bit more sciency than me, so he’s got a sort of more botany and plant sciences background than I have. But yeah, it complements it quite well. I come from the more artistic side and he comes from all the plant sciences. So we have lots of fun!

Morag:

Oh, great! Isn’t it wonderful. I was going to ask you about your artistic side and how you’ve been able to weave that into your world of permaculture and garden management.

Pippa:

I think particularly when I first started with permaculture and learning about forest gardening, I felt that I had to leave behind all of my artistic ornamental stuff. I felt like everything had to be functional and edible and useful. And that there wasn’t a place for all of the beautiful plants. I think as my understanding of permaculture grew, I realised it’s just as much about people care and our relationship with the garden. So I started to bring more ornamental plants in and understood that, okay, maybe I don’t need a bit of willow woven edging around my bed, but maybe it gives me a lot of joy to make it and see it there! And that’s enough because that enhances my relationship with a garden.

The more that I enjoy being in my garden, the more beauty that I see in it, the more that I’m going to actually go out and garden in it. Once I discovered that, I think that’s where I had a light bulb moment and everything really came together.

I started to do a lot more forest gardening within some of the gardens that we manage because I could say, ‘I can make you a forest garden that will give you food, be low maintenance, and also be really beautiful’. And that’s what has always sold it to people. Before that I was saying, ‘well, you know, we can have some, a few fruit trees and a few shrubs and some edible plants’. And I think for a lot of people, it’s particularly when you have a really small garden, that they sort of say, ‘Well, what about my beautiful flowers? I want it to look nice.’

It was the same at home really, even though we’ve recently moved where we were before was five acres all together that we could garden on. Not that we did very much with most of it, just sort of rewilded it. But the area that I used the most was a very small yard, with just a few beds that was mostly paving.

To start with I just concentrated on edible plants and it was just green, it was very green! Not that there’s anything wrong with that but it did just feel lacking. You know, it wasn’t a really beautiful space and it wasn’t until I started to introduce some more ornamental flowers – both for pollinators, but also just plants that were more tropical plants – they were just beautiful plants that I love. That was when I really began to fall in love with our yard as a space to garden in.

On tours when people would come and look around, that would be the part of the site that they wanted to talk to me about the most, ‘oh, I’ve got a small garden like this, what’s this plant and how can I grow in my garden?’ And so that was really the start of what led to the book – just wanting to say to people forest gardening is about growing useful and edible plants. But don’t forget that they can be beautiful as well and you don’t need five acres to grow it, you can have it in a small corner of a small garden.

Morag:

So what does a forest garden look like in your part of the world? Can you describe what are some of the guilds or some of the diversity of different plants that you have in your garden? I’m calling you from Gubbi Gubbi country here in Queensland which is subtropical so I have an image of what a Yorkshire forest garden is like, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you what all the different plants are in it. I’d love a visual walk around!

Pippa:

I suppose there’s two different versions really, because I have a forest garden that we grow that’s very wild so it’s like a young British woodland with silver birch, alder and oak. But underneath that there are gooseberries and roses, and raspberries and mint, things like that. So it looks very wild, it still has grasses and docks and primroses and things like that growing within there. I really love that space. Because really, all we ever do is stream a path through it and throw the grass around some of the fruit bushes and that’s pretty much it.

I think we’ve occasionally gone in and taken out a tree as a silver birch, which was self seeded and got bigger and bigger- there were too many. But that’s really it, it’s like a young British woodland but with edible plants in it. And so that’s a lovely space, there’s even bluebells in there as well.

The gardens that do better in smaller spaces, you can’t be that wild – you know, one silver birch will take up the entire garden! So you have to have a completely different approach. I would say that the forest gardens, the small scale forest gardens that I do, look much more like a garden and it just happens that the plants in them are also edible and useful.

I have a guild where I have an edible Hawthorn, the wild ones that we have in this country are edible. So I would say a culinary one might be a better description – one with larger, tastier berries. And we’ve crown lifted that a bit so we can fit some other things underneath. So I use things like Taunton Dean kale, it’s one of my favourite kales. So I grow that a lot even though it’s got really tough, thick leaves, which the pests don’t like so much. Once you cook it, it’s just melt in the mouth and delicious, I use that quite a lot.

I’ve put blackcurrant and some raspberries under there as well. I don’t like to stake my raspberries, I don’t put any supports in but I will grow them in little groups and I would just tie them at the top with some string – like you would sort of obelisk and then they support themselves. Underneath that I’ve got some lemon balm and chives – some Good King Henry. In amongst that I’ve got some flowering plants as well like some salvias, some catmint, some pulmonarias which are flowering right now looking lovely, and even bulbs as well. I love crocus because they come up really early before anything else comes in and they don’t grow so big as to cause any problems to any of the other plants that are coming up.

Morag:

It’s really interesting. So many of the ones that you’re mentioning, except for the hawthorn, I have here too in my garden! Their range is really huge. I mean, obviously, they would probably grow differently with seasonal change. But, you know, we’ve got some crocus and the lemon balm and all of the different things like that you mentioned.

Pippa:

I think in particular, in West Yorkshire, more specifically the valley that I live in, it’s the light levels that we struggle with.

Morag:

I was just going to ask you about that because quite often people say when I talk about this concept of food forests, they say, ‘yeah, that’s all right where you are because you get so much light’. But I’m in such and such a place where the light levels are really low. How do you explain that to people and to encourage them to try this way of gardening when they are used to the notion that it needs to be sort of open and flattened, catching all the sun. So how do you define it?

Pippa:

I think I tend to just suggest that because I think people think the focus of forest gardens is always the trees and how many trees you can fit in your garden. But actually, by putting in lots of trees in the area, you really do limit what you can grow underneath. So I always try and say, ‘you know, be a bit sparing with the trees, plant them a bit further apart than you want, don’t try and squeeze in as many as you can. And then really concentrate on the understory, because you can grow so much in the shrub and herbaceous layers.’ So trying to make that more of a focus.

That tends to be how I garden – I’ll really space the trees out quite a bit. At the end of the day, there’s only so many apples that you’re going to eat! (laughs) Do you really need 10 apple trees? Or could you get away with two?

I think in areas where there are lower light levels, or maybe you’ve got a very shady garden, then really look at the understory plants that will grow quite happily in shade, like a blackcurrant growing under a ginormous Elaeagnus Maculata. It can survive with one hour of sunlight in the middle of summer and it still fruits really well. So I think, don’t assume everything has to be in full sun. But equally, don’t take away all of the sun because you’re so keen to get so many trees in.

Morag:

What about the management and the maintenance of a garden like this? Have you noticed that it actually simplifies the way that you garden in terms of the time and effort it takes to keep a garden looking good? Or still you find lots of management required?

Pippa:

I think that growing this way, we’ve always even in our purely ornamental borders, we’ve always had the same approach which is ‘put as many plants as you can in, you don’t want to see any soil and there will barely be any maintenance at all’. So around this time of year, February/March is when quite a lot of the weeds get going before the plants. You can get in there and take out anything you really don’t want. I mean in our wilder forest gardens, as I say, we don’t really do any maintenance at all. Nobody minds if there’s dandelions or docks or grass or anything.

But on a smaller scale, more ornamental forest gardens, I will go in at this kind of time of year, I will take out any weeds that I think will swamp out other plants. Then we will give a layer of mulch if needed. Quite often on a smaller scale, it’s harder to get that self-mulching, self-managing garden. We’ll go in, do a weed, do a mulch and then that’s pretty much it for the year other than going in and harvesting. So occasionally there’ll be a plant that’s just so happy where it is that starts to take over the garden! And so might have to go in and cut it right back and dig bits of it out.

You know, even in the middle of summer, there’s a lot of plants where you can go in and cut them right to the ground, give them a bit of mulch and water, and they’ll come back and give you another crop.

I would say mainly, it’s the harvesting and maintenance throughout the year. Really, just once a year I go in, do a bit of a weed and take out what I want. Do a bit of editing, if things need moving around, some things die, you know, even if you’ve put them in the right place and the right soil and the right level of sun or shade, you know, they’ll just die for no reason. So I do quite a bit of editing as well.

Morag:

I’ve never heard it called that. I love that, ‘editing;. Is that a horticultural term, is it?

Pippa:

I don’t know! I suppose, it’s just what I’ve always called it.

Morag:

I was going to ask you about the feed. I heard you saying you add a bit of mulch and water. But what about feeding? How do you keep the nutrient levels maintained in a garden like this? Do you find this enough nutrient cycling going in? Or do you add anything else in composts and other things?

Pippa:

I think a lot of that depends on what you’re planting and how heavily you’re cropping as well. I do try and add as many plants as possible that will add nutrition – so nitrogen fixing plants  and things like comfrey.

Morag:

What are the nitrogen fixing plants in your area?

Pippa:

So there’s things like clovers and lupins and peas and beans, plants like that. A lot of which are really attractive as well as being edible. So they’re really nice additions, if you’re growing a lot of annuals in there as well and I was thinking, it doesn’t have to be purely perennial. Natural woodland doesn’t just have perennial plants in it, it has annuals and biennials as well. I think it’s really good to mix those in there as well. So if you’re cropping heavily with a lot of annuals, then you might need to bring in some extra feed. But really, we just bring that in the form of a mulch.

So I don’t go around liquid feeding or anything like that. If there’s something that’s really struggling, and just not looking very happy, I tend to take it out and replace it with something that will grow better in poor soil rather than forcing something to grow.

Morag:

Yeah, that’s a really interesting point, isn’t it? Often in gardens, we can tend to be really protective and push something along. Whereas you know, maybe the best thing is to think, ‘oh, maybe this is just not the right plant in this place’. Oh, that’s fantastic. So tell me more about your book. So firstly, how did you start? Are you a writer? How did you get to the point of going, ‘oh, I’ll write a book about this’? I’d love to hear a bit about your process of writing, too.

Pippa:

I definitely wasn’t a writer, wouldn’t have called myself a writer at all. I’m terrible at spelling as well, which has always put me off a bit. I think I just really wanted to share my learning. I wanted to share my approach. And I had done a couple of articles for the Permaculture Magazine. Just really along the same lines, I just had been doing something that I was really enjoying, I wanted to share that and Maddy Harland very kindly agreed to put my article in her magazine which was amazing because not being a writer, I didn’t know that I would ever be able to do that. So that was fantastic. And then I think I just got to the point where I thought, I’m ready to share my learning.

Now I want people to see that they can have forest gardens at home, that they don’t have to constantly be dreaming of buying a small holding or an acre of land or moving somewhere. That they can just do it now. And so I had a chat with Maddy about it. They agreed that it sounded like a great idea.

And I think I was one of the few people who actually locked down and got into the way of writing my book. So it was actually, because of lockdown. Because we have the gardening business, we could carry on working, we were able to keep going to work, so no furlough for me! And the kids were off school. So I was homeschooling, they didn’t take well at all to the idea of zoom lessons, they could not sit and concentrate on a screen. It just wasn’t happening.

So we basically homeschooled all of the time that they were out of school, which was loads of fun. We did all sorts of interesting environmental learning. That was lots of fun, but I didn’t get any writing done. (laughs) And so it wasn’t really until things had settled down again and they’d gone back to school that I could get working on it properly.

I would really encourage anybody listening to who has already done their permaculture design course to do a diploma and applied permaculture design. Because that really helped me to approach permaculture in a different way to really understand it on a completely different level. When I was doing my diploma, I was struggling with some of the design processes and how to use them to design better because I wasn’t just designing gardens, I was designing my livelihood, I was designing how I manage my home and family life. And so I actually did, as one of my designs in my portfolio, I did one called designing the design process. So I kind of unpicked all of the different design processes that are used in permaculture design and came up with one that worked really well for me.

And so when I was thinking about writing a book, I did a bit of a survey. I read some of the books that were my favourite ones on forest gardening. I tried to work out what gaps the word that didn’t quite answer the questions that I had. And I also identified the fact that I wasn’t a writer. So, you know, that might have been an issue. And also that I had no time in which to write a book.

Even after the kids went back to school and work calmed down a bit, I still work full time, have a busy family life and manage a garden at home as well. I decided that the only time in which I had to write really was little snippets of time. So most of the book was written in my van while my daughter was at running club. And it would be just under an hour of time that I would have. And so it’s very hard to focus when you just have this small space of time. I had to realise quite early on that I had to be very organised about it.

So I looked at the idea of pattern to detail. I broke everything down, I looked at what chapters I wanted to write. So before I wrote anything, I already had all of the chapters, the subheadings, and the general topic of each paragraph within those headings before I wrote anything. It meant that I could very easily drop my daughter off at running club, sit in the van, which was actually great, because I have no distractions at all, I just had my laptop and a coffee. And then I could just look through my list. And I could think, right, today, I’m going to do this paragraph, piece by piece.

When I finally got all those pieces together, I did take some chunks of time, so I could read through them and make sure that they made sense and that they flowed well. But yeah, it was a case of really using permaculture design, very rigidly to do the survey, analysis, design and then going through each stage. And that was the only way that I could make this book happen.

Morag:

Oh, that’s motivational! So many people say ‘I just simply don’t have time’, you know? What you’re describing is amazing.

Pippa:

I think that it’s just I think once you’ve decided that that’s what you want to do, then you have to just find a way to make it happen. Really, I could have easily just sat in the van and listened to a podcast or scrolled on Instagram or something like that. But it was really enjoyable as well. At the beginning, I just thought, well, I don’t even know if I’ll enjoy writing, I might really hate it. And actually, I discovered I really, really love it. I really enjoy it. And so I’m now starting to look at how I can do more writing as part of my poly-income.

Morag:

Another book?

Pippa:

Yes, yes, I’m already working on two, very slowly at the moment, because we just moved house. So that’s got in the way of things a bit. I’m looking at maybe writing for other gardening magazines. I’ve just joined the in the UK, we’ve got the garden media guild. I’ve just joined and had a few chats with people from that, which has been really interesting. So yeah, I feel like it’s opened up a whole, a whole new world of things.

Morag:

How long did it take you to from the moment you started mapping out your chapters until the book came out? 

Pippa:

Yeah, I think probably it was about maybe a year and a half, something like that. But a lot of that time was spent being frustrated that I couldn’t write it because of lockdowns and everything. But I think once I really started working on it properly, it was probably about six months maybe of writing. I think because I’d spent so long thinking about it and scribbling the odd note, when I actually sat down to do the writing part, it came together really quickly.

Morag:

How did you organise your note taking?

Pippa:

In a not very organised way! just in a book randomly writing stuff down and I would try and write a big headline so that when I’m flicking through it later, I can see at the top of the page it would say, you know, ‘how to design polycultures and guilds’. So that I would know because I knew what my headings were, I would know that those notes would relate to that. When it came to writing each chapter, I could gather all my notes together.

Morag:

What about your illustrations?

Pippa:

I did take a lot of photographs. So my husband and I both really enjoy photography as well and because what I’ve written about is what we do, we had literally 1000s of photographs that I had to scroll through. So that actually took, possibly almost as long as writing the book, trying to get through all the photographs! One of the things that I did in lockdown with the kids was doing some lino cut printing. So we really enjoyed that. And I enjoyed it so much that I decided to incorporate some of those into the book as well. So there’s, there’s a few of my lino cuts in there as well which is really fun.

So I think that was really nice, too, that I had all of the photographs to illustrate what I was talking about, as well. It’s definitely a book that’s full of pictures. There’s a lot a lot in there. Which is really great. Because I think, you know, so often you can write about forest gardening and the theories, but actually to have some pictures, it’s really helpful

Morag:

So helpful, really helpful. That’s right, and also at a scale that makes sense to that backyard context that you’re talking about. Yeah, it’s fantastic. So I wonder, too, if you could just talk a little bit about the publishing process, and what happens when you’ve written your book, then what happens? Like, you know, it gets out into the world, and then you need to start to share it out into the world, talk about it. How’s that changed the work that you’re doing? Is the work you’re doing getting amplified by having the book? Like, how have you found things have changed because of being a published author now?

Pippa:

Yeah, I was so focused on getting the book written and on the book launch that I had not really thought enough about what happens after and all the work that I had to do to get the word out there – that I’d written it and that this book existed. So yeah, I think I really enjoy doing talks, and going & meeting people. But I hadn’t really thought about the fact that I should have been doing all of that before the book came out. So in my head, I had to think right, when the book comes out, you know, in September, then I will go out and get in touch with all of these people. But really, I should have been doing that beforehand. So that’s a learning for book number two. But yeah, it has been great.

Really, I just went through, well, what podcasts do I listen to? And then I asked other people, what podcasts do you listen to? Just talking to sustainable gardening groups and emailing people, agreeing to interview invites. You know, that’s been really fun. I’ve had some really great conversations. I’ve gone to talk to gardening groups. And sometimes, you know, you go along to these groups, and you wonder if they’re very traditional double digging, spraying everything with chemicals, kind of groups. But actually, it’s been really fantastic that, you know, loads of people come up and talk to me and buy books and say, ‘it’s really inspired them to change the way that they garden’. So I really enjoyed that.

It’s funny, really, I was thinking it seems odd, because I haven’t done anything differently in terms of my horticultural practices. I’m still doing the same work that I did before. But suddenly, people want to hear about what I have to say, because I’ve written a book, which, you know, is fantastic, because I think there’s so many people doing really amazing things that nobody knows about. And that if they could write about it, too, they could share that.

Morag:

Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, there’s so many people in so many places doing something particular – like it could be their focus on how to address managing a woodland in a subtropical area, or it could be, how to manage a school garden in a highly urbanised area and working with the teachers. Each one of these different aspects or lenses of how we apply permaculture is so fascinating and I think it’d be wonderful to have more people that could step up.

So this is still part of why I’m doing this series on permaculture writers within this podcast because I’d love to encourage people who are listening to think ‘ah, actually, I suppose that’s something that I could do – she just said she wrote it in the car while her daughter was running!’ It is possible. Having people like Maddy and Tim with Permanent Publications you can pitch to them and work with them through actually getting something forward. And they’re really open to the idea of people putting forward really practical positive ideas and have specific knowledge that you can take and do something with. And I think that’s really, really wonderful.

Pippa:

Yeah, I think as someone who is not a writer, and who has never done writing before, they made the whole process such a joy. It was really such a wonderful process. And I have spoken to quite a few people since, they’ve been saying, ‘Oh, I just wouldn’t know where to start with writing a book’. And I explain my process and breaking it down into small chunks so it seems less daunting, because I can’t imagine just sitting down with just a blank screen and just starting on, ‘right, this is me, starting the book’, I don’t think I would have ever gotten started because that’s way too daunting.

But I think if you just start brainstorming chapter titles and breaking those chapter titles into smaller titles, suddenly you realise that you’ve got the framework of a book and you just have to fill in the gaps. And I think that makes it so much more accessible. For people who don’t have a background in writing to get started.

Morag:

Did you have a writing mentor? Like as you’re going through, someone you could bounce ideas around with to see if you’re on track, or you just kept going and felt like you’d gotten your own groove?

Pippa:

Yeah, I wrote a couple of chapters. And then after I’d written those, I was feeling a bit nervous about whether I was on the right track. So I sent them off to Maddie to have a read through and her editor as well. They gave some really great feedback, which was really fantastic, because I think sometimes you forget who your audience is as well and you can lose focus a bit. And you’re trying to sound knowledgeable and use all the right terminology. But at the same time, if you’re trying to write for beginners then that doesn’t always really fit very well. So they gave me some great advice on keeping on track with who I was writing the book for.

And then I had a great friend, Chris, and because as I said, my spelling and my grammar is really terrible, I would give her my draft chapter and then she would go through and just say, ‘I think you need to explain this a bit more. It doesn’t make sense, or move this sentence around’. Or, you know, there was one chapter where she said, I think you need to make this into two chapters. You’re trying to fit too much into one, I think you need to split it. So yeah, I had some great people to help me along the way. 

Morag:

That’s so helpful to have someone like that, who can just sit down really calmly, and just give that really clear feedback. How did you find your voice, your writing voice? Did you try a few different ways of writing first and then kind of landed like ‘Oh, this feels more natural’? Or did you just start?

Pippa:

I think I just started. I just wrote what was in my head really, it just kind of came out. Occasionally I would read bits back that I would think, ‘Oh, that sounds really boring’. Usually it was because I’d got so bogged down in explaining a technique or something that I was trying to sound really prescriptive. ‘And this is how you do it’. ‘And this is how many centimetres apart this has to be’. So sometimes I would read it back and think ‘I need to rewrite that bit to be as if I was chatting with someone’ and just saying, ‘Oh, actually, I do it like this. And you can do it like that’. Yeah, it was mostly just what was in my head.

Morag:

But I think what you just said then is a really lovely thing. It’s like, it’s your voice. As you’re chatting to someone, imagine you’re taking someone on a tour through your garden and explain that. You’re saying about how you were taking people in the garden, and they were interested in that. So is that kind of the way that you explain? So imagine you are in the garden with people and sharing out the knowledge of my as you would explain it in a class setting?

Pippa:

Yes, I think that’s very much how I wanted it to be – not a book saying you must do this, or you must do that or forest gardens must have seven layers. You know, I think very early on I said, ‘Well, we can’t have big trees in a forest garden. So we’ll just have six layers and that’s fine’. And sometimes you might just not want any shrubs in there. That’s fine.

You know, I just think sometimes books can be off-putting to people, because there’re so many rules, and there’re so many correct ways to do things. And if you’re not wanting to do it that way, or the book is so prescriptive that you feel you’re never going to be able to live up to that, I think it just puts people off. And I think my approach has always been, this is what I do and if you want to do that too, then this is how to do it. But equally, you might want to do it in your own way.

Morag:

And I think just having all the different examples so that you can show like ‘this is our approach, and this is what we’ve been doing, this is what’s working well’. Just giving people options to adapt and localise. I think that’s really encouraging and really offering people a great place to begin, because it is a bit of a paradigm shift, isn’t it? From a traditional way of gardening to a forest gardening approach. And by weaving in all the things that you’re saying, like the beauty and the people care, as also being part of the rewilding movement.

All of those different things come together, there’s so many different reasons why you’d want to do that. So it sounds fantastic. Are you running workshops and courses? Do you weave in your sort of education? Do you have an education hat that you offer? I know you said you’re doing talks around different places, but do you invite people into gardens and teach forest gardening courses?

Pippa:

We were doing quite a bit of teaching at our previous place. And we did run a few forest garden courses, but we’ve recently moved and currently our garden is just flat with nothing in it. So I’m not going to be running any tours on courses here for a while. But at some of the other gardens that I work in, I do manage the garden for the Ecology Building Society, which is nearby. And so we’re just about to start doing some tours there.

So it has elements of a forest garden and it’s also a permaculture garden. And then there’s a garden that I manage near Bradford which is quite a new community garden as part of a Yorkshire Water project. And so I’m going to be running an introduction to forest gardens there. So it’s quite a young forest garden. We just planted it up this winter. So we’re going to be having some tours there.

Morag:

I heard you say there’s a forest garden and a permaculture garden, in my mind they’re kind of like the same thing. What is the difference in your mind?

Pippa:

Well, there’s areas where the focus isn’t food. So there’s areas that are sort of borders for pollinators, there’s areas which are mainly for habitat. Particularly because it’s the ecology building society, there’s a lot of focus on looking at the ecology and soil health and habitat and things like that. There are parts within it, where it’s a layered food system. And then there are other parts where it’s a gravel garden with plants that will grow well and gravel. And so I wouldn’t say it’s all forest garden, but it’s a permaculture garden, which has bits of forest garden within it, but so many other interesting habitats and different ecosystems within it as well.

Morag:

Sounds amazing. If anyone’s listening here in West Yorkshire, it sounds like you should go and have a look! So where can people find your Instagram? I think you have a YouTube channel as well? Do you want to tell us how people can get involved?

Pippa:

Yeah, so I started my Instagram page partly just for promoting my book, but actually I found that I really love going on there. It’s fantastic, I love sharing what I do. I mean, I take loads of photographs anyway. So in that respect, it’s not really changed – it just happens I’m sharing them instead of them sitting on my usual phone.

Morag:

Do you have a proper camera?

Pippa:

We now use my phone, I use my phone but I bought one that specifically was really good for taking pictures – so it takes time lapse video and all sorts of other things that work really well for what I need so I’m on Instagram – @pippachapman_thoseplantpeople. That’s the name of our business as well. And we also have a YouTube channel that we did quite a bit a few years ago, although recently it’s been a very long process moving house. That kind of took our focus away from making videos a bit and also our internet connection at our previous house was absolutely terrible. And it got to the point where we actually couldn’t upload videos. It just wouldn’t happen.

So we’re actually really excited that now we’ve moved house, we’ve got really amazing broadband. We can now upload things in minutes. So we’ve just been doing some filming recently. I’m also going to start doing a few videos from the Ecology Building Society garden and also from the actual whole garden. There are some videos on there that are still very relevant around things like everything from woodchip to perennial kales, things like that. But we’re just about to start a series of videos all about going from a completely flat rectangle and right from the start the whole design process and building the forest.

Morag:

That’s such a great thing to show because if other people are starting, where do you start? If you start with a garden that’s already well established but are curious with what happened in all the bits before… So that’s great.

We’ll put in all the links below to to where people can get your book, links to your website, links to your Instagram and links to your YouTube. If you’re interested in following through and seeing what Pippa’s been doing, go down below and you’ll see all of that information there.

Thank you so much for joining me today! It’s been an absolute delight, hearing about your work, your writing process, your love of forest gardening and just exploring a bit about what it means in your context. And I can just imagine walking through those beautiful food forests with all the colour and texture, it’s just wonderful. So thank you so much Pippa and good luck with writing your second book! That’s so exciting! Already onto the next one – not even taking a break, just keeping on going!

Pippa:

Yeah, definitely! Well, thanks for having me on, it’s been a real pleasure chatting. Thank you!

The post Backyard Forest Garden with Pippa Chapman appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

In this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, I am so delighted to be exploring how permaculture and the financial system intertwine – and not just through numbers – with Della Duncan.

As a renegade economist and permaculture educator, she believes that the new economy we want to see is one that we should be exploring and putting into practice – so we can learn how to shift how we use money in a way that benefits the planet.

Together, Della and I explore the economic dimensions of permaculture.

Like me, Della has also spent a lot of time at Schumacher College (she completed her MA in Economics for Transition) and she works closely with Fritjof Capra and his course, the Systems View of Life.  Della also runs a podcast – the Upstream Podcast!

She teaches financial permaculture on several Permaculture Design Courses throughout the Bay Area of California, and is also part of the Work that Reconnects, following Joana Macy’s work.

Della is also:

• a Senior Fellow of Social and Economic Equity at London School of Economics
• a Gross National Happiness Master Trainer
• a founding member of the Doughnut Economics California Coalition (DECC)
• a Senior Lecturer at the California Institute of Integral Studies and Gaia Education.

Read more – her article in Kosmos Journal: Cultivating Right Livelihood.

Access it through your preferred streaming service HERE or watch on Youtube.

Read the full transcript:

Morag:

Welcome to the show, Della. It’s an absolute delight to have you here with me to talk about permaculture from an economic perspective, a financial perspective. One of the things that you describe yourself, as in the many things that you work on, is you describe yourself as a Renegade Economist. So welcome to the show and please, can you describe what a Renegade Economist is?

Della:

Yes, so the inspiration of calling myself a Renegade Economist came from Kate Raworth, who is the founder of Doughnut Economics, which is a new goal for our economic system where instead of focusing on growth, we meet human needs within consideration of the needs of the planet and our ecosystems. So somebody called her a Renegade Economist and I heard that and I just loved that. I delighted in the ways that she challenges mainstream economic thinking and invites us to rethink economics and I aspire to be a Renegade Economist just like Kate Raworth.

Morag:

I was also inspired by that and I wondered how we could incorporate that sense of renegade permaculturist concept to the work that we do. I think it already is somewhat of a renegade movement and maybe just living into that a little bit would be a thing to do. But I wanted to begin this conversation, I think you are an economist or you have economic training, is this right? You studied the transition economy at Schumacher College and you have a deep interest in the economic system and you’re exploring it from a deeply ecological perspective. I wonder whether you could just share a little bit about what you see is wrong with the current economic system? What are the things that are in front of us that we really need to be focusing on to understand in order to start to either unravel that or create an alternative system? What are the things that you see that just simply need to be understood about the economic system?

Della:

So a few come to mind, one is that economics has wanted to become as rigorous or as scientific as mathematics or physics and this is not to say that math and physics is not beautiful and art filled and even philosophical, but as economics is wanting to become increasingly mathematizable, it’s had to adopt certain assumptions around our relationship with the more than human world and our relationship with ourselves and who we are as human beings. So one aspect of being a Renegade Economist is making visible those assumptions and rethinking them or questioning them. So for example, there’s an idea in mainstream economic thinking that we are humble economics, rational, self interested beings, who simply want to maximize our own self interest and also see work as the disutility, we want to work as little as possible. So that’s an assumption about who we are as humans and it helps with the mathematizability of economics. And that, I would say, is one root cause of a lot of the challenges that we see. It leads to scarcity, thinking competition, survival of the fittest activity, when we as humans also can be kind, compassionate, and altruistic beings. So it really leaves out that part of who we can be as humans. 

Another is our assumption around nature, this idea that nature can be commodified, that it’s an object that we can price nature, that we can find a price of nature and say exchange it for like, we can put a price on carbon or on an ecosystem or on water. Another view would be perhaps in alignment with more indigenous wisdom traditions, where actually nature is our relatives or nature has inherent or intrinsic value beyond its usefulness to humans. So again, those are just two examples, but there’s these assumptions underlying mainstream economic thinking that I think are leading to the ecological, political, social and economic challenges that we face today and to be a Renegade Economist is to reveal them and to bring in a participatory group collective conversation around them and to rethink them so that we can move towards economic systems that are more regenerative, just, and sustainable.

Morag:

I was listening to one of your conversations on your podcast app stream and I was listening to you in conversation with Jason Hickel and I think something also that he really talks about that brings it home too is I think we have in our minds that there is a deep connection between democracy and capitalism. That if you’re a part of a democratic society, you have a capitalist system. I wonder whether you could just talk a little bit about what is wrong with the capitalist system? And what are the key features of that underpinning, our thinking that’s causing the demise of nature and of humanity?

Della:

One way to rethink this element is Richard Wolf, an economist, he once told me, “How can we say we live in democracy when we walk into a workplace or a capitalist, top down, hierarchical workplaces? We leave democracy at the door. Because our workplaces are inherently non-democratic. They’re inherently top down.” So the capitalist business structure is one way that we can see democracy is not equal to capitalism. In fact, it’s a dictatorship. The bosses or the shareholders really, truly, make the decisions and have the power. So that’s one way to do it. Another way is to look systemically at capitalism. So when we look at capitalism and how we have these capitalists and then the workers, we see that when we look historically there were certain legacies that led to this supremacy of capitalists in our current system. Karl Marx called this primitive accumulation and some people say it’s accumulation via dispossession is in that it continues on to this day. But basically, those who own capital, they own the means of production, have gotten that power and that privilege to own the capital through legacies of colonialism, of slavery, of land theft, of genocide, and also exploitation of nature. So that’s another way those things are also inherently non-democratic. So there is a deep power imbalance inherent in capitalism. Capitalism is the supremacy of a certain group over others and that is completely antithetical, not equal to have a democracy. So yeah, I definitely am of the opinion that we cannot have democracy and capitalism, the two cannot exist.

Morag:

What about growth, our obsession in Western societies, in particular with the growth model? Can you just unpack that a bit, this idea that growth is actually the goal. You’ve done a lot of work in terms of looking at gross national happiness and alternative indicators of how things are going. So maybe if we could just start with what’s wrong with the growth model and what are some alternatives that we could be looking towards in a way that would be in enhancing nature, enhancing humanity, enhancing all life on the planet?

Della:

First, I just want to appreciate that you and I are in a community of systems thinkers. We’re in a community with Fritjof Capra and the Capra Course and Systems View of Life community and I feel like bringing in the words of Donella Meadows here and speaking about looking at the goal of our systems as one of the highest leverage points. So it’s a beautiful question that you ask, what is the goal? Whether it’s, again, unspoken or visible. So the goal, typically, in mainstream economics for an individual is wealth accumulation. We see this if somebody says, “Oh, I took a pay cut” or, “I have a job that makes less money” It’s seen as going down or backwards or a lateral move if they just make the same amount of money but a similar job or a different job. 

What if the job gives them so many better things in their life? Like more time with their children, or more opportunity to practice permaculture, or more passion, more purpose, those metrics are included. Then for the business level, the goal is seen as profit maximization. The growth of profit. And it’s not just that you make the profit, it’s that that profit grows. So there’s just this ever accumulating and ever growing hunger for profit growing for businesses. So that’s for the business realm. And then for our economic systems, the goal is GDP growth. So GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is the total exchange of goods and services. That number is seen as the sign of health or progress or the development of a country and GDP is such a reductionist view, because it doesn’t take into account any other things that might be important to us. So fortunately, there are so many movements, and theories, and practices, and communities that are prototyping and exploring alternative goals at all three of these levels. So in the role of the individual, asking folks what’s really important to you. For example, I’m a Right Livelihood coach. So centering, passion, and purpose, and our service to the world, or our contribution to the world as being that which we aligned with our work path. So then in our businesses, there’s a whole realm of not for profit slash hybrid businesses where profit is redirected to social and environmental good. So that’s another beautiful model, but the whole nonprofit space in general, I would say is mission driven in itself, benefiting social and environmental good. 

Then on the systemic level, whether it’s the economy of a city or a state or a country or globally, there’s a large, beautiful movement of people saying, “What is really important to us? What ought to be the true goal?” And so we do have in Bhutan, the inspiring story of gross national happiness, where the King of Bhutan told a reporter that GDP is actually not what’s important to us, what’s important to us is gross national happiness and it’s a way of viewing happiness not in a pleasure seeking hedonistic way. The former Prime Minister of Bhutan, Jigme Thinley, once said, “True abiding happiness cannot exist while others suffer and comes only from living in harmony with nature, serving others, and realizing the true and brilliant nature of our own lines.” That is the goal of their economy. And so they have a whole holistic way that they measure that, which includes ecological diversity and resilience, our time use, our health and well being, community vitality, and cultural diversity and resilience, as well as others. So that’s how they measure the success, or the wealth, or the progress, or the development of their country. But then there’s also the blend of your movement out of Latin and South America, there’s the economy for the common good movement out of Austria, then we have in New Zealand, in Wales, and Scotland at the national level, thinking about well being and centering wellbeing as the goal of economies and then we also have the Doughnut Economics model, which I touched on briefly. But again, that’s the meeting of human needs while staying within the needs of the planetary ecosystem. 

So all of these, we could say, are in the realm of post growth. Because what they do is they say, “Growth is no longer an end goal in itself, it’s not something that we’re seeking, we’re not just seeking endless growth. Because as we know endless growth is not possible on a finite planet and in fact it’s causing so much ecological and social harm, and so instead growth can be a means to an end, but not an end in itself.” So this is the post growth model and Kate Raworth would call this being Growth Agnostic. Just to add to that, because we do acknowledge that some countries are way beyond their ecological footprint, their one planet living, so to speak. This is where the work of Jason Hickel comes in, that in the Global North we really ought to be looking at degrowth. Because if we accept human and planetary wellbeing are flourishing as the new goal of the economy. We would recognize in many places in the Global North that we’ll actually need to degrow. And so there’s a whole degrowth movement and that is a really exciting and beautiful space, because they can have a win, win, win, for all and can include things like grey water projects, living with less energy, share shops, collective or community activities, just like permaculture. So that’s the whole perspective on a post-growth and degrowth world for the Global North.

Morag:

Thank you for articulating all that so beautifully and to bring us to this point here with degrowth and in all those scales that you talked about. I see how degrowth can be really embraced by the permaculture community or other communities. How is it, in your mind, that you see these new frames able to myceliate further and faster at the kind of scale that the world needs these ideas to be rippling out right now?

I’m asking this question, because often you hear the conversation saying that that’s all well and good. But in order to keep progress going, we need to continue this. What are the kinds of arguments or ways of sharing this that we can take it from being something that smaller communities are doing in places to take it out into the broader conversation? Or, in fact, is it because there are people everywhere doing this degrowth work that the change will happen? It’s a scale question, I think, and a pace question because of my sense of urgency as well as the need for change to be happening. How is degrowth being embraced in the system’s change model as opposed to just being in the smaller community groups that are embracing that as a way forward?

Della:

Yeah, absolutely. We need to think systemically at a global scale right now. It is beautiful for folks to embrace degrowth and one planet living in their personal lives is beautiful for communities to gather together and to make them more ecological and just inequitable, that’s very beautiful. And we need to be doing work at the global scale. So the ways that I’m doing that and the ways that I invite folks listening to do that, first, there’s kind of five invitations here. One is to lead movements. So pick a strategy or a tool that would be supportive right now in the regenerative economics or financial permaculture space and take a lead. So some include embracing Doughnut Economics, the public banking movement, complementary currencies, and another would be a debt jubilee for the Global South, another would be a global minimum wage, another is reparations for the Global South; these are just some ideas. So first invitation, take a leadership in it. So for me, I’m taking the lead in Doughnut Economics. I’m part of the California Doughnut Economics Coalition. So that’s one place where I’m taking the lead. I’ve also taken the lead in the public banking movement.

So the second is following a movement. So participating and following, we’re asked to show up either in a protest, or a march, or an event, or a conference, even if it’s online, or to show up financially, to donate, to support, or to show up for petitions, and all of that type of work, to follow and to take leadership of others and offer where our support is most helpful. The third way is to uplift messages. So for example, us having this conversation, perhaps there’s someone who had never heard of a public bank who might just go and look into it, or Doughnut Economics and might pick up Doughnut Economics bouquet rewards. So simply speaking more about these topics and ideas, uplifting them, spreading them, sharing them, discussing them, making sense of them. That’s another way to keep this move going forward. Another is to join a movement. So join a movement of folks that are doing this work so the degrowth movement, the post Growth Movement, the new economy movement, the next economy movement, Buddhist economics, feminist economics, Marxist economics, ecosocialist economics, Via Campesina is another great organization, join the permaculture movement. So join a movement of people so that as a movement you can embrace and forward these different ideas. 

And then the last way is to embody the idea or the practice where you can for example, me moving money from an extractive bank to a credit union, me traveling to Bristol and using the Bristol Pound instead of a pound, so a local complementary currency, staying at a cooperative, or a local and independent bed and breakfast instead of an Airbnb. So embodying and practicing going to a cooperative grocery store where you can. So that’s where we embody. So I think it’s at all these levels and to know that you are a part of the movement. You don’t have to be the lead of all the things, but where can you contribute to the things that you care about at all these different levels and see also holistically how we are part of a larger movement. Because we are and that’s what’s exciting.

Morag:

That’s fantastic. Thank you. Because I think that’s often the challenge that people find is feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of when you throw in addressing the economic system and how enormous it feels to most people. Realizing that all of those things that you just said are ways to act and make a difference and it’s that collective action and awareness and understanding. So I wanted to bring us back into that kind of permaculture thread that you just tossed in there beautifully. What is the way that you see permaculture being able to show up more in this space? And what are the ways that you would like to inform the permaculture movement more with this understanding? Because I know that you focus on financial permaculture, what does that mean to you and how can permaculture really embrace this even more and amplify its ability to sort of step up and speak up in this space? 

Della:

Just to say, I am not inventing this. I’m coming from a lineage of folks exploring financial permaculture and social permaculture as well. So I’m sharing from a long lineage of people who are practicing and teaching who I’ve also learned from. One of the ways to bring this what we’re talking about into the permaculture space is to return to the three principles of permaculture: Earth care, People care, Fair Share. Often in people’s experience, that fair share part is not as elevated as the earth care and the people care. So what would it look like for us to really dedicate some time as to what does fair share mean at the systemic level, not just like a seed bank or a seed swapping or a shearing activity, which are beautiful, but when we look systemically, how can we ask ourselves about income inequality, wealth inequality, land back movements repatriation of land for indigenous folks and also the reparations movement that I shared. So how can we kind of scale our conversations and our actions around fair share in permaculture spaces. So that’s one. Secondly, I know folks are already doing this, but I love thinking about financial permaculture or social permaculture, this space as the zone 0.0, meaning the zone in our head. So I really am talking about beliefs and paradigms and worldviews and values. So in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig says, “If we take down a factory but we don’t destroy the quality of thinking that created it, a new one will simply pop up in its place. If we take down a dictatorship and we don’t destroy the quality of thinking that created it, a new one will simply pop up in its place.” So it’s this idea that no matter how beautiful our permaculture spaces are, the more that we can interrogate and investigate our own worldviews and our own paradigms, a lot of which are shaped by mainstream economics, then we can radiate out in our widening zones. To have even more Earth care people care and fair share. So investigating our paradigms and worldviews and values in permaculture courses and connecting them with economic systems, that’s another piece that feels important. 

And the third way that I like to think about this is that you have your zone 0.0 that I mentioned, then we have the zones of our Permaculture Design site and then I like to think of financial permaculture as the radiating circles of zones beyond the site and considering those as well. So one beautiful invitation that I’ve received and also practice in permaculture courses, is walking around the site and seeing systemically. So picking up a shovel and saying, “Where’s this shovel from? What are the qualities and conditions that made it? Was it made ethically and sustainably? What’s the material that it was made out of?” We can do that with anything on our health. So looking at the ownership of the structures on the land, the financing, and the investment of how our decisions were made. But also, what circles is that design site a part of and how can we have more participatory democracy, or a thriving local community, or better relations with the indigenous groups, maybe a land tax we pay the rent activity. So it’s that kind of widening spheres of zones that we also consider and a story with this, I got to interview Sarah Corbett, who’s a Craftivist in the UK, and she did this lovely thing where she did something called shop dropping and she would go to extractive and exploitative stores where it was like sweatshop labor and made with unethical materials and she would drop little scrolls into the clothing and then when people would try on the clothes, they would unravel them, and it would say, “If clothes could talk, what stories might they tell? Stories of exploitation and harm or care and well being?” So it was just like a light invitation for us to think systemically. So again, inviting that into all of our permaculture projects. 

And then also, what are the regenerative economic models that you can weave into your design site? So is there a tool shed, or a tool library, or a bike shop, or a share shop where people can have a library of things, a community fridge for food that would have been gone to food waste that can help with food deserts, even a little free library, also going from ownership to stewardship and bracing a land trust. What’s the decision making model? Is that a cooperative or collective or is it top down? Is it for profit or nonprofit? Is there a profit generating activity that feeds in and fun submission driven work? So all of this, I think you can ask. So again, Earth care, People care, Fair Share thinking about zone 0.0 and then thinking about the zones beyond your design site. So zones 6789 to infinity, even the planetary system, how is that a part of your design project? So that’s how I would answer financial permaculture in the lens of a permaculture course.

Morag:

Great. Thank you for sharing that. The whole way therefore the permaculture can show up because of that ethical framework, because of the fact that it’s coming from this ecological paradigm, because you’re entering into every single interaction through that questioning lens, it does give the opportunity for us to radically shift what is going on. I wonder what the tools are? You mentioned just about 100 different tools just then as you were explaining, I wonder whether there’s some tools that you have in order to bring people together? So what are the social permaculture tools that you’ve found that have been useful to help amplify the financial permaculture side of things? Maybe something like citizen assemblies or how to take out to that next level? What are some ideas or strategies that you’ve experienced that you found to be really helpful in this?

Della:

Let me offer two. One of them is economics can often feel quite heady, quite theoretical, some people even think it’s boring, or what does it have to do with them. So I love to bring people into the economy to talk about their lived experience within it, to really feel that we actually cocreate the economy and so we can cocreate a more regenerative, unjust economy and so actually bring embodiment practices into my facilitation, like we act out the economy, we play different roles physically, we do kind of constellation work in that regard. But I also do kind of physical reaction activities to certain parts of the economy and also our lived experience in it. So that’s one piece, bringing our bodies and ourselves, making economics, not something outside of us, not something far away that only economists can have a say over, but something that we are a part of co-creating all the time. So that’s one thing. 

But the second thing is, and this is really, I have to say largely because of the people who invited me to teach on their permaculture design courses. I usually lead half a day on financial permaculture and then the second half the day I leave the work that reconnects and the work that reconnects if folks are unfamiliar, Joanna Macy is the root teacher of The Work That Reconnects. An EcoJustice, Buddhist philosopher and activist in Berkeley, California in her 90s, and The Work That Reconnects really allows us to go into our grief and anger and hopelessness and fear of what’s happening in the world, both ecologically and socially but also personally. To honor that pain, to see it together, and then to practice seeing it with new and ancient eyes. So practicing systems thinking that we’ve talked about, practicing eco-spiritual traditions offerings from that realm, exploring our view of time, looking at Seventh Generation thinking from indigenous wisdom traditions, for example. So practice seeing with new and ancient eyes, also practicing in a sense of an ecological self. Looking at, what is the self and what is the more helpful way? What if we were an ecological self, part of a web of life? 

And then going forth, so going to a practice of now, “What can I commit to? What can I take with me?” So this isn’t just a lovely day, but hopefully it’s a lovely day, but that they’re then going forth with some commitments and actions, also accountability buddies, and they’re part of a community of practice, of learning, and of contributing to what Joanna Macy calls The Great Turning, which is another frame for this time that we’re in. So I would say those are two tools or practices and then for one permaculture group in Santa Cruz actually lead regular work that reconnects courses. So it complements the other work too. So I would say those are two that I bring in to deepen the work of the financial permaculture to make it more a lived and embodied experience and to encourage and support people in going forth to take steps in their life to become more a part of the movement.

Morag:

Yeah, fantastic. I love the idea too in having communities of practice that it’s not just they’re exploring it and then it ends, it’s this constant opportunity to keep connecting, and keep having conversations and as you go out and then it sort of settles more that you can come back and circle around and be part of this ongoing learning. I think that makes a whole lot of sense. It’s something that I really work hard at trying to create within the permaculture communities and we have both within the youth movements, but also in those people who are looking to become permaculture educators. We have a lot of threads of connection too with refugee communities  and I wonder if we could just talk a little bit about reconnecting the Global South and the Global North and what are some of the ways that you’ve been exploring to not just focus on what we’re doing in the Global North, but ways that start to address the inequalities and the economic downfall that has come through in so many different countries? And how do we conceptualize that? And how do we start to repair that? Where do we begin? 

A lot of the work that I do at the moment is simply bringing everyone together in the conversation and finding ways to support different projects. But I wonder whether there’s something different that I could be focusing on? It’s quite a personal question, really. I’m wondering if the area in which I’m working, putting the effort to the best effect? Or is there some more systematic way that I could be approaching this work? And within the permaculture movement, how can we be addressing the inequalities far more? 

Della:

It’s a really beautiful question. Some ways that I explore it, because I, too, am simply exploring and asking these questions, I am no expert in this realm. But one of the things that I do or I tried to do is really try to decolonize my mind but also the work that I do. So I’m so heartened by the decolonization movement all around the globe who are really looking at what the streets are named after, what are the monuments like our buildings, and are interrogating, questioning, learning the history of it and in some cases, taking them down and changing them. That’s really heartening, that’s one area that is also doing this deep healing work. So undoing white supremacy, looking at white privilege, and there’s so many study groups and books right now, for folks who are both white, but also settler colonialism backgrounds. That’s really heartening there. And then, I think the main thing is this thinking systemically to really presence, include uplift, and even center the global south in our work. So for the podcast, one of the things that we get to do is working on documentaries and so we always try to include voices from the Global South, whatever the topic is. Actually, we’re currently working on a piece. I was really shocked in a meeting once where somebody said, “A green New Deal in the Global North means an open casket for the Global South.” This is where the impulse for this documentary that we’re working on came from and what they meant was that if we don’t address growth, like you were talking, and we simply our growth addicted and we just tried to change our energy systems and our economies to green that’s going to require so many so much extractivism and over the places that are not only most harmed from the ecological devastation of climate change or in the Global South, but the extraction and extractivism is in the Global South. For example, the lithium triangle in Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. So that led me to learn more about this and to share perspective, and voices, and stories from the global south. We interviewed one person who’s a youth climate activist in Argentina and was like, “Hey, what’s happening to us in our world?” So again, it’s that uplifting considering reaching out to the folks and voices from the global south. So that is one piece and embracing and learning about decolonization and undoing white supremacy, so that’s one element. 

Another element that I’m interested in is reconnecting with our Neo-pagan ancestral traditions if we are of European descent. Because the Christianization of the world has happened everywhere, and unfortunately has come with colonization and with capitalism, and so instead of culturally appropriating indigenous wisdom traditions or other eco-spiritual traditions of a global South, How can we heal and repair our own Neo-pagan, earth based, or sacred traditions in European ancestry? So that’s one other thing that personally I’m exploring. But then thinking systemically, like these bigger policy proposals, which again, people can lead, follow, join the movement, participate in, or uplift, some of them include in a really – I’m totally drawing from Jason Hickel’s work here. So please, if you want to know more, look into his amazing books, Less is More and The Divide. But one of them really is advocating for a debt jubilee. – So many countries in the Global South are still indebted and have largely paid off the principal and they’re just simply paying off the interest and so Jason Hickel says, “Actually, the global south is developing the global north and financing their wealth.” So a debt jubilee for the global south and supporting leadership and movements that advocate for debt restructuring and debt jubilees in the Global South, that’s one. Supporting indigenous sovereignty. We know that indigenous communities are excellent caretakers of the natural world, so supporting and being allies and advocates for movements, for indigenous sovereignty, and indigenous rights movements all over the world and the global South, particularly. Then a global minimum income or a global minimum wage. Again, this is Jason nickel, but a really interesting one, what if everyone’s hour was equal and what if there wasn’t a race to the bottom. Where global south countries have to compete and continue to lower labor standards and environmental standards to draw in what’s necessary and then, of course, reparations, or climate debt repayments, all of that. So again, this returns to this birth question where if we embrace a doughnut or wellbeing economics, there may be places and there may be areas that do need growth in terms of infrastructure or basic needs being met. It’s just what are their metrics? And how could that be financed? So that’s why this wealth transfer or reparations and debt jubilee would be things that I think would be absolutely helpful for that movement.

Morag:

Thank you. I wonder what metaphors we need to be using to start to bring forward this new story in a way that people connect with. It’s like you were saying before that, that the economic system sometimes feels a bit out there. In order to really be able to share this new story, for us to communicate in a way that then someone else can take it up and it gets moved along. It’s a shame that this kind of the growth metaphor has so many other connotations. I wonder what other kinds of ways of languaging and talking about this will land me to myceliate this new story?

Della:

I have several that come to mind. Well, one of them you just wrote. You just said myceliate, I’m thinking about a fungi economics. What if we modelled our monetary systems on mycorrhizal fungi. The redistribution of wealth beneath our feet, the Wood Wide Web. That’s one thing I love thinking about is what happens when a tree dies, how information and wealth is redistributed. So that’s one inspiration, one metaphor, fungi economics. Another nature inspired metaphor would be returning money, currency to current, current water. So thinking about how we want water to flow and we don’t want water to siphon off, be diverted from the main river, and go into stagnant pools of wealth hoarding which are tax havens and tax evasion, right? We want it to keep flowing to where it’s needed. So what if currency acted like currents? So that’s another metaphor that I like to think about. 

And then you mentioned growth and the problem with growth because we do have this like, I want to keep growing and keep developing, I don’t want to stagnate, right? And I hear that. And one alternative way to think about this, Rob Hopkins, who’s one of the cofounders of the Transition Town movement coming out of Totnes, England, where they have and they are trying to spread a whole movement of towns – transitioning from fossil fuels and transitioning and many other ways as well. Rob Hopkins once told me, he said, “Okay, so I have a son and I do want my son to grow to a certain height, and then I want him to stop growing. (laughs) And actually, at that point, I want him to grow in other ways. Like his interest, and his quality of character, and his personality.” So, again, what are your metrics? What are your indicators of success?

A mentor of mine, Dr. Ha Vinh Tho, the former Program Director of the Gross National Happiness Center, says, “We are attentive to what we measure.” So instead of seeing in our minds, this line going up and up and up this exponential growth curve, so to speak, what if we saw a circle? What if we saw a doughnut? The doughnut is a metaphor. But what if we saw a circle of our needs? And then the planetary boundaries, and the goal was this holistic meeting of human needs collectively, while staying within the planetary boundaries? So that’s an alternative metaphor, and goal, and image that we can hold. 

Then another one, just because I have to name a permaculture principle, since I’m talking to you, is the principle of waste equals food. So circular economics is another beautiful field of focusing, what if it was Cradle to Cradle? And we had circular economics.

So just imagine folks listening, if you bought something from IKEA, maybe like a table and used it until you were done. Maybe you don’t like it anymore, or maybe it breaks. What if you returned it to IKEA and they had to repurpose it and bring it back? I see where I am, there’s so much waste that is actually Ikea furniture. So how beautiful would that be? And actually, to tell you the truth, there are people working on this in IKEA, like they’re actually working on this. And there’s many other beautiful examples of circular economics as well. But just to bring in a permaculture principle to this metaphor, conversation. 

And then the last one, one of my favourites. This is the metaphor from two feminist economists, Gibson-Graham, they write under the pen name Gibson-Graham together, and they’ve written about how we have a global sea of capitalism and many islands of alternatives. Those islands can be like the sharing economy, the gift economy, the Buddhist economy, the next economy, the new economy, the cooperative economy, the Solidarity Economy, the cooperative economy. And what if our goal was to raise these islands out of the sea and connect them and make them more inclusive? Why I love this model is that it tells us that there are times when we participate in capitalism. If I go into Whole Foods owned by Amazon, I am participating in capitalism. But when I give a ride to my neighbour, or when I go to a seed bank, or when I go to a library, or a share shop, or use a complementary currency, or a credit union, or a nonprofit, that’s not capitalism. Those are all alternative economic systems. So actually, I’m performing and participating in alternative economies all the time and it’s not just enough for me to participate in them and live in my own island, my own bubble, but to expand them, to grow them, to connect them, so that it’s a wider movement and to make them more accessible to all. Not everyone can shop at the local independent, cooperative, regenerative, organic grocery store, how could we make it so? What do we need to do to make it so that everyone can live in the new economy or the next economy and participate in it? So those are some metaphors that come to mind. But I love your question.

Morag:

You know, as we were talking about the islands I was thinking about how often I explain it in a way of thinking about this mycelial network and that all those things, instead of being islands in the way I describe it, they’re like the mushrooms popping up. And when you sort of add extra compost to those, then they mature and then they spore, and then you get billions of spores landing as long as we can sort of create those fertile environments for those to land and to continue.I really liked the island one, too, I think that’s great. And I think there’s this languaging of the kinds of changes that we’d like to see that needs to be seen in the world. I think it’s important and really to bring our economics concepts of the new economy into something that is not this sort of dry economic out there kind of conversation that’s only for the so called experts, but something that brings back home, back into ourselves, back into our community, back into our culture, and back into place. I think really focusing on that languaging is important and it also shifts where the power lies. I also think it shifts where the leadership lies. Because I was going to ask you about where do you see the leadership in these movements being, but I don’t know whether that’s a very effective question because it’s kind of everywhere is what you’re saying, is that right? Or do you see the certain threads that are really pushing the boundaries? Like, where are the spaces that are really inspiring you right now that are kind of pushing past what we feel okay with at the moment and opening new doors in our mindscapes for this?

Della:

So I will get to that. I was just wondering, do a lot of people know about the work that reconnects? Like is that something you’d be laboured on your podcast?

Morag:

I would love for you to articulate.

Della:

So what comes to mind when you ask that is the work that reconnects theory of change model, because I think it’s a good addition here to think about how change happens and where this, like you said leadership lies. So in the work that reconnects again, Joanna Macy, the root teacher, there’s something called the Three Dimensions of the Great Turning and we can see these as the three areas that our work can fall within or can be a part of. So she has holding actions, it’s one of the areas of the great turning, which are people and actions that are saying no to something. So they’re holding back further harm and suffering from happening, and alleviating or healing, harm and suffering from happening. So who would be leading that space? Activists, right? I’m thinking about those at Standing Rock, for example, or Julia Butterfly Hill and a tree. It’s also our whistleblowers. So folks who are drawing attention to harm or exploitation that has happened. It’s also journalists who are covering, or writing stories, or revealing harm and sufferings that have happened like the lithium triangle and what’s happening over there in terms of lithium mining. But it’s also the healers, anyone who’s doing healing acupuncture work, therapeutic work, somatic work, social workers. So it’s all those people who are healing, harm and suffering that has happened. So that’s one area. Saying no to further harm and suffering from happening and healing harm and suffering that has happened. 

The second area is, I think a little bit more of where you were talking about, this area of designing systems, or thinking and new systems, creating systems, systems designers. I would say it’s not like there’s one or two particular people I would say are leading this, I would say pick an area of life and there’s some beautiful, innovative, exciting, and innovative ideas in them. So in education, which is not my field, but we have like the free school movement, the unschool movement, the wild school movement, – probably messing that name up –  homeschooling, but also Waldorf Steiner, there’s all sorts of beautiful innovations there. Then in the agriculture space, of course, permaculture and biodynamic, regenerative organic, No-Till, there’s some beautiful regenerative agriculture, regenerative forestry. All of that world and those folks are leading the systems designing new and also drawing from ancient wisdom, ways of living in harmony with nature, then we have products, goods and services, biomimicry, or ecodesign folks, we have it in our businesses, the benefit corporation, the worker, self directed nonprofit, the worker cooperative, we have it in finance. The carbon coin or seeds, cryptocurrency or complementary currencies, public banking, credit unions, the list is expansive there. Then in government. We have participatory democracy, participatory governance, citizens assemblies that you mentioned. So there’s a whole bunch of people doing work there and we could go on, whatever your field is, there’s got to be some people who are saying how do we move this to being more just regenerative and equitable? 

And then the third area is the area of the shift in consciousness. So this is changing the paradigm, that 0.0 that I was talking about. So these are our artists, our poets, our musicians, our muralists. But there also are spiritual teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh who passed away recently. These are our writers, George Monbiot, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tyson Yunkaporta. So these are the people who are expanding, or changing or are rethinking, looking at the ways we live in the world and challenging, and changing, our paradigms and worldviews and our values. I would also say parents, parents are in that realm too. Raising the next generations, and I probably missed so many people. 

Just to say, you asked me what’s exciting. I would say in which area and like in which area of the great turning and also in which area of life and when you think of it like this, you’re like, “Wow, there’s so much going on and it’s so exciting.” And again, you don’t have to do all of it. You just tap into where you are feeling called and I think this is important. I love this idea of we are called to the place where the world’s deepest hunger meets our deepest gladness by Frederick Buechner. So it’s this idea that like, what is it that breaks your heart? if you’re feeling overwhelmed by our conversation right now and you’re like, “Oh, my gosh. There’s so much that needs to happen and there’s so much to learn. It’s like, well, what do you care about? What breaks your heart? Where’s the world’s deepest hunger showing up for you? And where does that connect with your deepest gladness, what makes you come alive, where you thrive, where you step into flow, put those together, that’s where we need you. That’s where you go and start there. And again, either lead, follow, participate, join a movement, or uplift. They’re all welcome and they’re all appreciated right now.

Morag:

Thank you, Della. I think that, in a way, it’s just a beautiful place to wrap up this conversation because it’s a calling, that’s the call to action right there what you just said and where it is that it deeply touches and you feel connected to this, because it’s global, it’s everything, it’s everywhere. And we can’t do everything, but we can definitely show up with all of our wholeness, where we feel that deep sense of deep connection, deep heartfelt connection, and where it is that when we start to act in that way and interact, it feels some kind of flame, it brings us alive, we feel more alive when we are interconnecting in that way. For me, personally, that’s just been my life. I don’t know how to operate in any other way, except to show up in that way. And I know that when I start to feel like a little bit dying inside and constrained or this sort of constriction that’s going on, that I need to really pay attention to those things again and to refocus and to and to reconnect more deeply. It feels to me like that suggestion, that offering, that invitation that you just brought into the conversation, that is probably one of the most profound things that we could be hearing from this conversation and to really reach out into that and connect with others through that process, too. 

Thank you, Della. It’s such an all-encompassing whirlwind of exploration of what economics means in a full and whole sense and to see where permaculture can weave into this and inform this and that all of these other different things can be the door which opens you into this world. You may come in from all different angles. Permaculture is not just simply a thing of the thing. It’s a doorway, to enter into this worldview, into this potentiality of connecting and acting for one planet way of life. And that feels like it connects with what you’ve just said. So thank you so very much. 

Della:

Thank you. May I close with one story? First, I’m just thinking of permaculture really can be seen through the lens of all three of these. It’s what we want to say no to and the holding actions in the ways that we do ecosystem restoration work, and healing of our soil, and also our pollinators, and also the greywater systems, and fire remediation, all of that world. It’s our new systems designs, and then it’s our shift in consciousness, like you’re saying these new paradigms and worldviews, but I also just want to close with this idea that the founder of Schumacher College, he once went to the London School of Economics and he said, “How can you call yourself a school of economics without a Department of Ecology?” And he was referring to the root, the etymology of economics. Oikos Nomos comes from Greek, that’s the root of economics and it means management of our home. Which of course, we have to know that right now it’s the management of our planetary home and also who’s responsible for managing our planetary home? Is it not all of us in our own unique way, contributing to the flourishing and to the thriving and the management of our planetary home? But secondly, the ecology or ecos logos, that is knowing our home, so we need to deeply know our home in order to be able to manage it. So he was saying how can you call yourself a school of economics without a Department of Ecology. So I just want to, again, uplift permaculture is a beautiful way or many beautiful invitations for us to deeply get to know our home, the seasons, the gifts of our home, you know having a sit spot, or working with plants, and noticing the health of our soils, of our waters, of our trees, of our plants, of our animals. This is all deeply important to economics. So just again, making that connection there, and uplifting the importance of this conversation. Thank you so much Morag.

Morag:

Thank you Della.

The post Financial Permaculture and the New Economy with Della Duncan appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

This episode takes me to the essence of why I do what I do and why I speak up – the peace movement, my love of this planet, the political precariousness in which we dwell and my deep concern for our common future.

Click here to listen on your chosen streaming service or watch it on Youtube.

Dr Helen Caldicott (from Melbourne near where I grew up)  is the world’s most articulate and passionate advocate of citizen action to remedy the nuclear and environmental crises.

She practices global preventative medicine and has spent 5 decades educating world leaders, influencers, physicians and communities of the impacts of the nuclear age – nuclear energy, nuclear war and nuclear disasters on the planet, on life, on humanity and the necessary changes in human behaviour to stop environmental destruction. She’s spoken Presidents, Prime Ministers, celebrities – even the Dalai Lama.

At this point in time, she has never been more concerned. She warns that have never been closer to a major nuclear catastrophe at the same time as being in the midst of climate and biodiversity catastrophes.

This is not easy to hear, but we must.  Let it move you, empower you, stoke the fires in your belly and let it rise up.

“What gives me hope is people who have the guts to stand up … like you!”

The Smithsonian named Helen one of the most influential women of the 20th Century.  She taught at Harvard in the 70s and practiced at Children’s hospitals around the world.  In 1980 she resigned and became a planetary physician.

Helen has:

• written 7 books
• received 21 honorary doctorates
• been the subject of several films including the oscar-winning IF YOU LOVE THIS PLANET
• received multiple awards, and prizes – including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 as part of a international network – the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War

When I was a teenager, I was deeply motivated by Helen’s work. I consider her a catalyst of my lifework. And like her, I am astounded that there is so little media attention while we teeter on the edge of nuclear catastrophe.

Please listen and share this widely. Follow Helen’s work. Watch and share her film. Speak up. Show up.

Or access this episode on your preferred streaming platform HERE.

Read the full transcript here:

Morag:

Welcome to the show, Dr. Helen Caldicott. It’s my absolute honor to have you here speaking on Sense-making in a Changing World. Your voice is one that has inspired me for decades now. You’ve been for over 42 years, I understand, working in antinuclear space and I wanted to know from you – have you ever been more concerned than now and where are we at this point in time with everything that’s going on in the world?

Dr. Helen:

No, I’ve never been more concerned than I am now. I think we’re close on the brink of a nuclear holocaust and there’s not much attention being paid to it at all, except for those in the know in Washington. But the media is giving a little attention, if no attention at all.

Morag:

There’s a number of different aspects to this. So maybe we could unpack this a bit more. We have nuclear war, nuclear disaster – the potential of that. So where do you see the biggest challenge that we’re facing right now?

Dr. Helen:

Well, it’s either slow or fast. It’s either global warming and that’s definite. We’re past the point of no return about that and the oil and coal companies still keep digging up the stuff and exporting it. In fact, our whole economy, the world economy, is based on fossil fuels. We could, with enormous emergency and funding, especially in Australia, transition to renewable energy within a couple of years. I mean we’re bathed in sun, blown by wind and we’re perfectly situated to do that. But there’s not enough money being put into it and Germany really is forging ahead on that and some other countries, but not enough, and the United States is far far behind. So if I was a kid, I’d be pretty depressed.

Then there’s a risk of nuclear war with two major superpowers for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis are confronting each other militarily. Putin is back to the wall. I wouldn’t trust him. He’s put his nuclear weapons on a high state of alert. The Russians have taken over the separatist nuclear power plant with six reactors and each cooling pool has 20 times more radioactivity than in the reactors themselves. So you’ve got six cooling pools, 6 x 20 is 120 Chernobyls plus 6 is 126 Chernobyls. If that power plant loses its external power supply (which it has several times), and relies on internal power supplies which requires fossil fuel to run them and they could run out of that, then we could have a meltdown, which would devastate the whole, not just Europe, the whole of the Northern Hemisphere.

Interestingly, the two air massers at the equator do not mix. So we’d be relatively safe down here. I’ve got two grandchildren over there in Europe so I’d have to fly them out immediately. It’s pretty damn scary. If the Second World War was fought today, with Europe covered with nuclear reactors, Europe would be uninhabitable for the rest of time, including much of the Northern Hemisphere.

So we’ve got two nuclear problems, you’ve got the threat of nuclear war and the threat of nuclear reactors melting down or you can have both simultaneously. These physicists who love E=MC2, it’s sort of almost an orgasmic thing. The energy equals mass of the atom times the speed of light squared, that’s Einstein’s theory. They think it’s fantastic and they’re men and they’re sort of dosed up with their testosterone (or lack thereof) and we’re on the course of annihilation.

Morag:

So with this knowledge, why is it that we are now starting to see nuclear back on the agenda as being clean energy?

Dr. Helen:

Because they’re addicted to it and they’re crazy. Small modular reactors are very, very expensive. I wrote an article about small modular reactors a while ago, go to my web page helencaldicott.com and read it. They don’t work. They’re very dangerous. Couple of some of them are cooled by liquid sodium. If there’s a leak, liquid sodium explodes and burns. They’re terribly expensive. They’re keystone reactors.

In other words, the corporation that builds them has to sell lots of them to make a profit and they’ve had them sold anyway. So it’s a physicist’s wet dream, really. But politicians who know nothing, who are not scientifically or medically literate, think it’s a great idea because they’re fed this information by the nuclear corporations. So we’re in the hands of uninformed, not ill informed, uninformed people, mostly men and that really irritates me. Because the fact is that 52% of the population is women. We have hormones to nurture life, oxytocin, estrogen, progesterone, and men have testosterone and we are in the hands of men. Why do we allow that to happen? I don’t know.

There was a play in Greece where the men kept fighting and fighting and the women said, “Okay, no more sex” and guess what? They stopped fighting. There’s a country in Africa where a similar thing happened recently and the men stopped fighting. So apparently, they want sex more than killing each other, which is a very interesting equation.

Morag:

But do you think this is a solution to our current predicament?

Dr. Helen:

Well, I think we should cut off sex. Yeah, absolutely.

Morag:

Coming back to that point about how nuclear energy is back on the agenda. I think I read somewhere that you said that, in actual fact, it takes more fossil fuels to actually create and dig up, that it’s not actually a carbon solution anyway.

Dr. Helen:

That’s right. I wrote a book called ‘Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer’. There’s a very wonderful physicist in Europe who I’ve worked with and worked out the equation of how much fossil fuel is used to mine the uranium, mill the uranium, enrich the uranium, build a reactor (concrete produces a huge amount of CO2), run the reactor, then decommission the reactor, then store the radioactive waste for the next million years according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The whole thing’s a fantasy and it’s absolute rubbish that it’s the answer to global warming. 

f only people understood science and had researched the facts, it’s interesting that the premier of South Australia came out for nuclear. It’s very interesting and then Prime Minister Albanese got on him and castigated him and the next day, he was saying, “It’s too dangerous. It’s too expensive. We can’t have it.” So Prime Minister Albanese is on the right track in terms of nuclear power and that’s because I educated the unions in the 80s about the dangers of mining uranium and nuclear power. The ACG passed a resolution to stop mining, transport and export of uranium, which Bob Hawke and talked about the three mind policy that’s like saying to a woman, “ Well, don’t worry dear. You’re only a little bit pregnant.” I don’t like Hawke.

Morag:

So what do you see as our way forward if we’re on the brink of this disaster globally?

Dr. Helen:

Good question, Morag. My solution is education and the only way to educate people is through the media and we’ve got goddamn Murdoch running the world. When he went to Cambridge, he was quite radical, actually, as a young man. But he changed and he’s an evil man. He’s put in Prime Ministers, he’s put out Prime Ministers, he really runs much of the world. He informs the people through absolute crap on his television stations and Fox News giving out lies. President Jefferson once said “an informed democracy will behave in a responsible fashion.” That’s what I’ve spent my life doing.

Through the media, I had a wonderful agent in Hollywood who represented the film stars, like Tom Cruise and those buddies. She would get me on television, not as this boring, old Australian doctor talking about nuclear power and boring the hell out of people, but putting me on with Lily Tomlin and Sally Phil. So of course, they would have me on and she put me in Vogue and Life & Time and Family Circle. So the average Joe with his six pack sitting back with his family at night watching television, learned about the dangers of nuclear war and in the end of the 80s and I was all over the place, I’d go to three cities a day – address 1000 people and then get the plane and go somewhere else and do the same thing. I apparently turned out to be quite a good public speaker.

In fact, you have to be an actress to engage the audience and then make them cry and so Joe Six-Pack, sitting back with his family, knew the dangers of nuclear war. 80% of Americans at the end of the 80s were opposed to nuclear war. Gorbachev heard the doctors talking and he and Reagan got together – I spent an hour and a quarter with Reagan in the White House trying to teach him about the dangers. After, I came out and said he had impending Alzheimer’s, which he did, he was a very stupid man. He had the best role in his life being the president, he’s an actor. But he and Gorbachev got together in 1988 and almost agreed to abolish nuclear weapons, but got stuck up on Star Wars. So we nearly made it.

Morag:

Any plans to abolish it now? How do we get rid of this? My understanding is that since that point, we’ve actually got so many more weapons.

Morag:

I was saying, what chance have we got now of two weapons of mass destruction?

Dr. Helen:

Yeah, for Clinton, in fact, it’s an interesting history. Putin asked Clinton if Russia could join NATO. Way back then Clinton said no, because Russia is too big. Clinton was an idiot.

Clinton wants to pass the step one treaty through the Senate, which would lower the level of nuclear weapons bilaterally in Russia and America. Senator Kyle said, “look, I’ll allow it to pass if you spend $1 trillion in the next 30 years replacing every single bomb, missile, plane, ship, and the likes” and he agreed to that, Clinton did.

So they are now spending a trillion dollars replacing every single plane, missile, etc. It’s absolutely obscene. And the Congress just passed a bill for $858 billion just now for weapons of mass destruction and it’s not the Department of Defense. Let’s be frank, it’s the Department of Murder. These weapons, murder people. They’ve killed over a million people since 9/11. People had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.

I’ve just got a note here: the weapons industry gave $285 million into political donations. Boeing, Lockheed, Martin Marietta – in the last year they’ve taken over Canberra. They spent $2.5 billion on lobbying, 47 members of Congress and their spouses’ own stock in the military industrial complex. The Pentagon is asking for $30 billion dollars more to buy 375 F-35 bombers, which don’t really work and they can hardly take off. They don’t fly very well and Australia wants to buy them. America has 400 inch intercontinental ballistic missiles, 14 Trident submarines each with 240 hydrogen bombs. It’s got 60 Long Range Nuclear Bombers and they’re bringing some of these into Darwin and we’re becoming the fifth 51st State of the United States. America spends more on defense – killing – than the next nine countries on the list. Since 2014, 400,000 people have been killed. It’s murder.

I took the Hippocratic Oath, I try and practice global preventive medicine. But these people are deranged, they’re psychopaths. And we’re joining them. Myles is the Secretary of Defense now goes to America and you think his speeches were written by the Pentagon and they’re allowing B-52’s into Darwin. Pine Gap, in the middle of the Northern Territory, orchestrates a whole nuclear war scenario. So, we are the 51st state of America. Whitlam would not have allowed that. Whitlam was removed from Parliament the day before he was to announce the operatives at Pine Gap (CIA operative), so removed him from parliament. So we’re being run by the United States which really, really really pisses me off. It’s time we took a stand – that we realized how we’re being used to join the race for annihilation.

Morag:

But doesn’t that then make us more of a target in all of this as well?

Dr. Helen:

Of course. But we’re sort of the frontline now, according to the Pentagon, to fight China, but for God sake, America has to dominate the world. It’s metastasized like a cancer. It’s got 800 bases in 80 countries. How dare they? Who do they think they are? They’re monsters and we join them. Why? What’s wrong with us? Why can’t we stand up for ourselves and for the world and for the world’s children in the future? I’m very worried about it, Morag. What are we going to do, have a revolution?

Morag:

I think so. I think we need one, don’t we?

Dr. Helen:

The thing that I think that what people don’t understand is that the parliament belongs to us. The people in parliament represent us. We are their leaders. We need to educate them when they come back to their districts and say, “Look, if you don’t read this book and do justice, we’ll make sure you are not elected next time.” And we can do that! The independent politicians need to really, really get onto it. The women need to get on to it. I think women are the saving grace of the world.

Morag:

I do too. I was thinking about it years ago thinking, “how can we create a women’s parliament that rises up as a separate group that kind of responds to everything that’s happening, but through our perspective and puts that out into the world?” 

Dr. Helen:

Well, I wanted to start in America, the Women’s Party for Survival and they said, “we can’t have a third party, we’ve only got two parties.” So I started Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament and we were pretty effective, but not nearly as effective as a party.

Morag:

So what do you think would be the most effective response to this? You’re saying it’s everywhere and that here’s this huge power that’s coming out.

Dr. Helen:

As we talk, I’d like to address the independent politicians from the perspective of an imminent nuclear war and the role that we’re playing in this and learn and teach them what’s going on – educate them about America and see if we can’t get them to stand up against this suicidal nonsense.

Morag:

What can you tell us a bit more about AI and nuclear?

Dr. Helen:

Well, Stephen Hawking, the great physicist who was bound to his wheelchair with motor neurone disease. Brilliant guy. About four or five years ago, he said they’re starting to put their nuclear weapons on AI, and he said, that means almost certain nuclear war within 10 years. So I helped with a symposium in New York Academy of Medicine and brought in the best brains of the world to talk about this, including McNamara, who was Kennedy Secretary of Defense, and the book that came out of this was called ‘Sleepwalking To Armageddon’.

They set up their computers to decide what to do using human reasoning and then the computers make the decision. Then we’re on the path of almost certain nuclear war, if the weapons are on AI. These people are mad and every day I read some new things in the news about a new weapon of mass destruction. Meanwhile, two thirds of the world’s children are not being fed properly. What are we doing? We’re obsessed with murder.

Morag:

How do you speak with your grandchildren about this?

Dr. Helen:

Well, they all know. They’ve all followed me. My grandson in Malmo, Sweden is a filmmaker and he came out and filmed me because a film that was made about me giving a speech 40 years ago called, ‘If You Love This Planet’ by the Canadian film board, which won an Oscar, is only half an hour long and it breaks through people’s psychic numbing and makes them cry. So he came out and filmed me doing introductory talks to the film and if you go to my web page, the link helencaldicott.com, the film is there. We’ve put it on Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and people are watching it, but not enough.

Morag:

What response are you getting to it 40 years down the track?

Dr. Helen:

The same response when they watch it, for sure. But not enough people. If everyone watched it, well, we’d have a movement.

Morag:

If people want to watch it or to take it and share it with the community, do you have ways to encourage people to unpack it? Do you have questions or support material that would help people?

Dr. Helen:

If you go to my website, there are lots of suggestions about what to do. All the churches should be playing it on Sunday. It should be played on national television. The ABC should play it. Why not? That’d be good. It’s an Oscar winning film.

Morag:

So there’s this thing though, isn’t there that ‘we don’t want to scare people’?

Dr. Helen:

Oh, no, we mustn’t be scared. No, not until the bombs drop and we’re all dying of acute radiation, illness, vomiting and bleeding to death. That’s what will happen. But we mustn’t be scared, oh no.

Morag:

So how close do you think we are with this current situation?

Dr. Helen:

Well, I got to know Robert McNamara, who was Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense quite well and he was in the Oval Office during the Cuban Missile Crisis and he said to me, “Helen, we came so close to within three minutes of annihilation.” Within three minutes of annihilation. Well, we’re as close as that, I have no doubt. And so many things can go wrong – the mechanism for a nuclear war is so delicate. The President has a three minute decision time whether or not to launch if the satellite sees weapons coming.

Once the mechanism was set up by a flock of geese or a rising moon, and this happens all the time! There’s a man walking behind him all the time with an officer with his codes to start a nuclear war and he has a three minute decision time. He’s not totally on the ball. He’s a little bit vague as the President. But there are so many ways accidental nuclear war can start, particularly at a time of heightened international crisis.

For instance, America launched a missile, a weather missile, in Norway some years ago and they informed the Kremlin and the Kremlin lost the data and saw this missile going up. So because to start a nuclear war, America first targets Moscow and takes Moscow out so that Moscow can’t respond and they thought this was going to be a first strike, they sort of got and they got ready to launch their weapons. Moscow is so concerned about this, they’ve dug a hole in the Ural Mountains and they’ve put a computerized weapon in that to be launched. If America launches her weapons, called the Dead Hand. The Dead Hand goes up and automatically launches all the weapons in Moscow in Russia.

Morag:

Can you just say out loud, who where these are targeted to?

Dr. Helen:

About 10 bombs were targeted on New York, that’s such a redundancy of weapons that they’ve got very few targets for all their weapons now. Each bridge was targeted and each airport. Every city in America with a population of 50,000 or more is targeted with at least one bomb. We’re clearly targeted. What turned me on was a book called ‘On the Beach’ by Neville Susan. I read it when I was about 18 and it was about a nuclear war that occurred by accident in the Northern Hemisphere. Everyone was killed and gradually the radioactive cloud came down to Melbourne and people had their last drink of gin and tonic in the Melbourne club.

The government dispenses cyanide capsules, so people could kill their babies immediately instead of dying a lingering death, vomiting and bleeding to death. The end was the end – there were no people left in the world. That marked my soul. I was 18 now doing medicine. And the thing is, it’s not a fallacy. It’s reality. Neville was very smart.

Morag:

What about the whole question about well, how do you prepare for the incident of a nuclear war?

Dr. Helen:

You can’t prepare! What do you mean, prepare?

Morag:

I was thinking in terms of…

Dr. Helen:

…it’s like preparing for death!

Morag:

I know! You were talking to me earlier about in Australia it’s a little bit okay because it’d be more in the northern hemisphere. But as you said, if it happens in the northern hemisphere, it’s here too.

Dr. Helen:

If it even happens we’re targeted too, so let’s be frank.

Morag:

What cause is there for hope? Do you have any cause for hope?

Dr. Helen:

Only people with any guts will get up and stand up and take on the government and take on the parliament, take on the media, like you! I did it even though I was an alien. I was a woman in America and I didn’t know I turned into a Joan of Arc. Of course, you can do it if you’re smart and you use your intelligence and work out what to do. We all live in a democracy and that’s what it’s about, using democracy. We’ve got the guts, we’ll do it. If you don’t have any guts, we’ll all die.

Morag:

You talked before about how this requires us to be like actresses, actors. You know, recently there was that movie called ‘Don’t Look Up.’

Dr. Helen:

Yeah, I did. I saw that. It was good.

Morag:

It was and there was that moment at the end that reminded me of how you describe the end of ‘On the Beach’. I wonder if you know of people taking on this challenge to do a blockbuster movie on this topic? It feels like it needs to be happening.

Dr. Helen:

No, not really. Some people are approaching me. I’m an old dame now. Some people have thought they want to do a documentary about me. I won’t say who. Trying to get money, I think from the ABC and the Australian Film Institute, etc. But that’ll take a while to happen and there’s an urgency. The Earth is in the intensive care unit, acutely ill. We’re all physicians to a dying planet and we’re not attending to it at all. At all!

Morag:

How do you stay well and grounded when you know this?

Dr. Helen:

Ah well. I don’t know. I love my garden and I know this all the time – when I wake up in the morning and my roses are still there. I’ve lived with this, accepted this. At the age of 84 I really can’t do much about it. I would if I could – I’d like to address a joint session of Congress. I’d like to address parliament and just describe the medical effects of nuclear war and get into people’s souls. I haven’t been asked to do that.

Morag:

Where do you get your information from? How do you find it?

Dr. Helen:

A lot on the internet. I read the Department of Defense stuff from America. There’s a huge amount of information that I gather, I read it all the time, I’m immersed in it, I drown in it.

Morag:

So is that also on your website? Where people can find what you’re sharing what you’re finding out all the time?

Dr. Helen:

Absolutely and there are lots and lots of videos on my web page, some of them are quite fun actually, trying to teach the Dalai Lama about nuclear power!

Morag:

What does he feel?

Dr. Helen:

He’s like a child. He was like ‘really?’ He’s so innocent.

Morag:

So who do you think are the key leaders in the world that need to come together? How can we cultivate the kind of leadership that’s going to take us in the right direction? I feel like the world leaders that we call world leaders at the moment are not at all going in that direction.

Dr. Helen:

Well, Gorchov did.

Morag:

Your silence is everything.

Dr. Helen:

Yeah, I actually think King Charles III is a very intelligent bloke who has thought very deeply about this sort of thing. Whether he’ll do anything or not, I don’t know. But he’s in a perfect position to do so. George Galloway, who’s in the British Parliament. He’s a terrific guy. I really wanted Bernie Sanders to be president. But Vermont makes F-35s so he supports that. You know, they’re all compromised… maybe I’d like to be Prime Minister (laughs).

Morag:

How do we educate people on the broad enough scale to get this?

Dr. Helen:

It has to be through the media. I was in the media all the time in America. Teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching. That’s the only way.

Morag:

Shifting the public perception so that then shifts the message.

Dr. Helen:

Education is the key, it really is. Most people are blindly ignorant. Not understanding this huge nuclear umbrella that is unfolding us and the global warming umbrella. Now they’re kind of aware of that, but not really. We’ve got to stop digging up coal like now! We’ve got to stop getting gas out of the earth now! And maybe turning off our computers and our lights and working like buggery to build renewable energy systems, every single house should have top solar panels. Every garage should have solar panels. Especially when the sun should power electric vehicles, not coal. By plugging in the car you’re still powering it by coal. It’s just one step removed from the source. Boy, that would be exciting, wouldn’t it?

Morag:

Well, I guess this is kind of where I’ve tried to go with permaculture. It’s looking how we can live a life that is a one planet way of life that has, at its core, Earth care and people care and think about people on the other side of the planet. But I really feel like what you’re saying now is that that’s not enough.

Dr. Helen:

No, it’s not enough. No, Morag, not enough at all. Well, maybe we should work together.

Morag:

Maybe we should. You activated me as a 12 year old by your words because I grew up in Melbourne and I used to hear you a lot in the media and that changed my way of thinking – it was a wake up call. It feels like we need that courageous voice in the media.

Dr. Helen:

Yeah, we do. You’re younger than me. How old are you? 

Morag:

53? I think.

Dr. Helen:

You’re perfect. So maybe we can work hand in hand.

Morag:

Maybe we can. Helen, you have activated me! It’s like a fire in the belly!

Dr. Helen:

A fire in the belly, Morag. That’s what we need!

Morag:

Yeah, absolutely and to speak up. We’ve got nothing to lose. This is the thing, is it? 

Dr. Helen:

There’s nothing to lose, but everything to gain. We’ve got everything to lose if we don’t. Everything. There’s a Grecian play I remember called Lysistrata, where the men only stop fighting when they couldn’t have sex.

Morag:

There’s lots of really interesting strategies (laughs). Do you want to tell us a little bit more about If You Love This Planet and how people can access this film?

Dr. Helen:

Yes, you can just go to my website helencaldicott.com and there it is. It has suggestions about what you can do. But allow yourself to just sit there, take it in to bust your psychic numbing, it’s like me telling a patient they’ve got leukemia or something. You have to support a patient, help them through that shock and grief and help them with their diagnosis and their treatment and so it’s really practicing preventive medicine.

Morag:

Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Dr. Helen:

My great pleasure and it’s lovely to get to know you.

Morag:

Well, thank you for everything that you’ve done in the world up until this point! I hope to be able to continue and carry and speak out. 

Dr. Helen:

Okay, let’s join forces. 

Morag:

Fantastic. All right. Take care.

Dr. Helen:

Bye bye!

The post If You Love This Planet with Dr Helen Caldicott appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Graham died in early March 2023 after a brief illness.

I join the permaculture community around the world in acknowledging his enormous contribution to the field of permaculture, and to teaching permaculture teachers. I send my deepest condolences to his family.

Our focus here at the Permaculture Education Institute is about teaching permaculture teachers, and Graham has been teaching for decades too – one of the early pioneers of the movement.  I was keen to talk with him about his insights and experience as an educator. And oh my, what richness is within. I hope you thoroughly enjoy listing to Graham’s story spanning decades and the globe, and his wisdom shared.

I actually recorded this episode late 2022 and had been trying to work out how to edit it – Graham and I talked for almost 2 hours. I thought I needed to edit it to about an hour, but I could simply not work out which stories to leave out. In the end, I have decided to simply share the whole conversation with you.

You can watch this over in our Sense-Making in a Changing World Youtube channel here.

Click here to listen to the Podcast on your chosen streaming service.

The post Graham Bell appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.