It is my great pleasure to welcome Dr Michelle Maloney to Sense-Making in A Changing World. I’ve known and worked Michelle for years and deeply respect her clarity and commitment to the earth.
Michelle is widely known as an Earth Laws (Peaceful) Warrior . She is an extraordinary connector of changemakers and host of wide-reaching networks and challenging conversations. At the core of her work, Michelle advocates for systems change, in order to shift industrialised societies from a human-centred, to an Earth centred governance system.
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Dr Michelle Maloney is a lawyer and advocate for Earth-centred law and governance. She is Co-Founder and National Convenor of the Australian Earth Laws Alliance (AELA), Adjunct Senior Fellow, Law Futures Centre, Griffith University; and Director of the New Economy Network Australia (NENA) and Future Dreaming Australia – an organisation created by Indigenous and non-indigenous leaders to promote cross cultural sharing of governance and ecological knowledge in Australia. Michelle is on the Steering Group for the International Ecological Law and Governance Association (ELGA), and was on the Executive Committee of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) from 2012-2020. Michelle has 30 years’ experience designing and managing climate change, sustainability and environmental justice projects in Australia, the United Kingdom, Indonesia and the USA, and this includes ten years working with First Nations colleagues in Central Queensland on a range of community development, sustainability and cultural heritage projects. Michelle met and fell in love with Earth jurisprudence and Earth laws in 2009 and since 2011 has been working to promote the understanding and practical implementation of Earth centred governance and systems change – with a focus on law, economics, ethics, education and the arts – through her work with AELA.
We talk about her work and the intersections with permaculture. I hope you enjoy this wide-ranging conversation.
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Read the full transcript here.
Morag Gamble:
Welcome to the Sense-making in a Changing World Podcast, where we explore the kind of thinking we need to navigate a positive way forward. I’m your host Morag Gamble.. Permaculture Educator, and Global Ambassador, Filmmaker, Eco villager, Food Forester, Mother, Practivist and all-around lover of thinking, communicating and acting regeneratively. For a long time it’s been clear to me that to shift trajectory to a thriving one planet way of life we first need to shift our thinking, the way we perceive ourselves in relation to nature, self, and community is the core. So this is true now more than ever. And even the way change is changing, is changing. Unprecedented changes are happening all around us at a rapid pace. So how do we make sense of this? To know which way to turn, to know what action to focus on? So our efforts are worthwhile and nourishing and are working towards resilience, and reconnection. What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation. In this podcast, I’ll share conversations with my friends and colleagues, people who inspire and challenge me in their ways of thinking, connecting and acting. These wonderful people are thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and spark the imagination of what a post-COVID, climate-resilient, socially just future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to compost and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections and actions. Together we’ll open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking community action, earth repair, eco-literacy, and much more. I can’t wait to share these conversations with you.
Morag:
Over the last three decades of personally making sense of the multiple crises we face I always returned to the practical and positive world of permaculture with its ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. I’ve seen firsthand how adaptable and responsive it can be in all contexts from urban to rural, from refugee camps to suburbs. It helps people make sense of what’s happening around them and to learn accessible design tools, to shape their habitat positively and to contribute to cultural and ecological regeneration. This is why I’ve created the Permaculture Educators Program to help thousands of people to become permaculture teachers everywhere through an interactive online dual certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global Permayouth programs, women’s self help groups in the global South and teens in refugee camps. So anyway, this podcast is sponsored by the Permaculture Education Institute and our Permaculture Educators Program. If you’d like to find more about permaculture, I’ve created a four-part permaculture video series to explain what permaculture is and also how you can make it your livelihood as well as your way of life. We’d love to invite you to join a wonderfully inspiring, friendly and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I’d also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I meet and speak with you today. The Gubbi Gubbi people and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging.
Morag Gamble:
It’s my pleasure to welcome Earth Laws Warrior Michelle Maloney to the show today. Michelle is a mate who I’ve known and worked with for many years, and I have huge respect for her work in earth centered systems change. In essence, Michelle is working towards a vision of an earth centered society. She’s a big picture thinker and advocate for earth and nature for all life and deeply committed to connecting positive practical action towards an economy of wellbeing and being informed deeply by indigenous ways of knowing and organizing. Michelle would have to be one of the biggest hearted people I know for her love of the planet of life and nature. Her entire days are spent dedicated to this work. So towards this goal of earth centered systems change, Michelle convinced three organizations, Australian Earth Laws Alliance, Future Dreaming and the New Economy Network of Australia. She also hosts the Regenerative Songlines Australia conversations that I’m also part of alongside indigenous elders, such as Professor Mary Graham Anne Polina, Tyson Yanka Porter and many amazing local leaders. Her focus, Michelle’s focus is about encouraging us to reimagine economics, governance, the legal system, and support the emergence of a national civil society strategy. And Michelle also encourages to start where we’re at with what we have and to give yourself permission, to step up, speak up and act for the change that the earth needs and that all life needs. So I hope you enjoy this conversation just as much as I did.
Morag:
Thanks for joining me on the show today, Michelle. For me, you’re one of the biggest hearted people I know who has this interesting vision about what the world. Where we need to be going in the world and actually, how would you get there. So I wanted to talk with you about that. You know, I’ve come across a lot of your work and been involved in many different programs you’ve run, and it’s always this really big, comprehensive, overarching view. And I’ve seen you described too as like a warrior-lawyer like you’re a force of nature. You really are. An enormous sense of movement that you bring to anything that you touch. And it’s just, it’s magnificent really. And I’ve been so delighted to be working with you in different ways and different things all the way through many of those and to be part of programs that you’ve organized. But I wanted to just maybe start at that point, if you could maybe articulate, what is that bigger picture? What is the kind of world that you think that we need to be working towards? What is, what is it that you see.
Michelle Maloney:
What I see is I guess industrialized societies being able to wake up from this strange couple of hundred years, possibly longer, if you look into the deeper elements of our worldview, but if as a descendant of the Western culture and as a settler slash invader descendant here on this continent, my vision is for human societies who have been causing huge destruction to actually wake up to themselves and look around at indigenous cultures at deep ecology at other ways of thinking about our relationship with the world and to really significantly change most of what we do, not how we are as people, not how we love or have fun or have a laugh. I mean, these things have been around since time, but how we organize ourselves and how we create work and how we create stuff, how we organize our societies. So my vision is a very positive one and it’s emerged over many years of loving the environment. But my particular passion is for Australia. I am connected to many international initiatives and of course I care about the whole planet deeply, but I’m really madly in love with this continent. So my vision is, and in fact, one way to imagine it is if we think of the past, as a map of Australia with its current political boundaries, the Western past is this invasion of a place we knew nothing about. And we drew all these straight lines and we started to extract everything we could because that’s what we were used to doing. And then if you press pause on that and you look further into ancient time and 250 years ago, and you look at the map of Aboriginal Australia, where you had the equivalent of five or 600 language groups, Mary Graham, and wonderful complementary indigenous elder refers to them as think about the whole continent as managed by all these little local councils. And they were all deeply connected to place. And they had a really profound governance civilization. Like the more you learn about it, the more remarkable it is. And then if you go to a third map and think it’s blank. It’s just a map of Australia. That’s blank. Then what do the future hold? Given the sheer level of destruction my people have caused on this beautiful continent. So the map I bring up when I have these discussions is actually just to trigger conversation, which is a map of the 89 bioregions of Australia. It’s a Western scientific concept. It’s not indigenous boundaries, but it’s a way to open up the minds of non-indigenous people and say, if we actually cared about the living world, and if we understood that we are patterned into it, we’re not separate from it. And he wanted to undo some of the bad things we’ve managed to develop over hundreds of years, then thinking about exactly as Mary Graham and other indigenous people say, thinking about land first, I mean, life I’m always talking about life and not just the biosphere, but everything that supports it. So my vision for the future is how do we take the very, very best of us and turn that into something that ensures we can have all of our life, all of the community of life flourishing in Australia, as well as human beings. How do we take the best of Western science Western knowledge, but how do we go so the back and go, let’s right some of the wrongs, let’s engage with each other around a colonial or decolonial conversation. And how do we grapple with both the human justice issues, the human equity issues, but always within the template of caring for country and loving life and not wanting to take out entire forest with all the possums and the gliders, but actually going, how do we do these human things whilst supporting more biodiversity and more flourishing of life? So my vision is on the one hand really, really general. I just want more life. I want more feathers and scalings. I like my animals and my plants and my soil. I’m fascinated by the little things and the big things. It’s also quite complex as you say, and I was laughing when you introduced me, because I think it’s because I’m a lawyer by training. I certainly never was a lawyer in court, but my fascination with how people organize themselves and the deep understanding you can get of Western systems from a law degree helps you think big picture, but connect that right down to the minutia of which mushrooms should really be flourishing on this hill. So, so yeah.
Morag:
Wonderful overview because essentially what I’ve seen you describe it in some places is as a earth centered society and that very much based as you’re saying on indigenous ways of knowing and learning from that. And so the governance structure that you talked about and Mary Graham, I wonder if you could just like I’ve always sort of starting here rather than the beginning of the story, but I’m kind of happy that we’re doing this because I think this conversation that you’re having with Mary Graham is such an important part of the work that you’re doing. You’re currently writing a book with her. Could you just tell us a little bit about who Mary Graham is and what it is that this government, this different type of governance is and how that fits with your picture of the world.
Michelle:
It’s been one of the, really the greatest gifts of my life to not only met Mary, but to become friends with her and anyone who knows her knows how wonderful and really remarkable she is. And I don’t want to speak for her, but I can give a brief introduction. Mary Graham is an associate professor of political science and is a Kombu-merri person from the Yugambeh language group, which is now the Gold coast. And Mary has been working for decades on a whole range of policy issues and projects and insightful ways of analyzing governance and systems. But I guess I can only speak for what we work on together and that is she can talk about the relations ethos, and almost the kind of the deeper underlying systems of thinking and philosophy and logic that created the Aboriginal governance and the Aboriginal civilization that flourished on this continent for thousands of years. When sheshe talks about the relational ethos and the way, I mean, I don’t want to try to speak for Mary. I strongly suggest people. Yeah, we’ve been doing a lot of workshops and interviews with her, so there’s material, but the thing that’s beautiful is when she kind of blows back the mind of your average westerner, because Westerners have come from a very, very old culture of expansionism and extractivism. I’m not saying that we weren’t once connected through whether it was paganism or any other belief system than Europe, but at the same time, tribes, pre-neolithic were running around, taking land from each other and doing stuff and expanding. And then the colonial era saw that European culture continue to keep taking and fighting and stealing and grabbing and moving and expanding, and people think of it as extractivism. But I think of it as a real expansionism, which quite frankly, seeing now in some of the discussions we’re having around the exploration of the moon and Mars, this blind belief that we can have whatever we want even when we don’t understand it. So on the one hand there’s the Western culture and many of our ways which have infiltrated, particularly post-industrial revolution, this market-based idea of how life is other people could talk more deeply about notions of progress and how the West thinks we must keep moving forward. And so then to sit with Mary Graham and have someone like her to talk about the relationist ethos. The fact that the land creates you and you are obliged forever. And that everyone is an autonomous being. Plants, animals, spirit, beings, whatever, and everyone deserves something even deeper than respect. And then she goes deeper into the, kind of the structures of these clan groups and local governing entities that were deeply egalitarian and small cultures are deeply patterned into their own bioregion and big things like completely non-hierarchical the head elders, but that was emerging through the norms and their society. Not, I will pay you, therefore I am your boss. No respect required. So, and whenever Mary gives her talks in some of our workshops, I often lead, which is unusual. I prefer obviously our first peoples to go first, but we often, I do a critique through earth jurisprudence of how the Western systems emerged and what things like property law and the belief in private property and market-based systems have done to the world. And then Mary comes in explaining this very different worldview. And as she says, not better or worse. But just a really wonderful way for many of us who come from the dominant culture, who come from privilege to just see something completely different. To accept that not our way is not always the right way. In fact, it’s often the wrong way. This book that Mary and I are working on is called Future Law. I had a column and something long after it, but I can’t remember I’ve changed it a few times. What we’re doing is exploring this amazing, I guess, dense space of knowledge around indigenous governance from Mary. And then I do, and as jurisprudence critique and, and I’m kind also to the Western culture and what our ways of doing are, and it’s an almost as like what I just said about the three pictures of the map. And then the third map is how do we build a future on this continent that looks different, but isn’t too scary for people to change towards. And that’s where our project called the Green Prince Initiative is all about. And it’s really about how do we start from country up? How do we respect and work in solidarity with Aboriginal peoples and let them lead projects and get out of their way for their own self-determination. But how do we, as Westerners, shift our law, our economics, our interactions with each other, the way we govern each other, how we shift that so that we can have a 21st century future that rolls into time immemorial. As opposed to what many of us see at the moment, which is a ticking clock.
Morag:
Hopeful vision, isn’t it? That you’re actually describing that there is actually another way. It’s not like we’re just catapulting ourselves towards oblivion, but if we just pause and look sideways and, or even, you know, full 360 we can see that there’s not just one trajectory of society.
Michelle:
Yeah. And it’s been so interesting. I’ve been working with Aboriginal mates and friends since my teens, since my twenties. And so my hunger to understand difference and to understand the different ways of being has always been part of the Western concept of novelty seeking. And I’ve always been a bitnot even frustrated, just confused by Westerners who are so close minded to other things and who is in a phobic and such, because I always assumed our Western culture. One of its key traits was the pursuit of new. Was the obsession with the next new shiny thing or the new exciting place. That’s why we were explorers. And yet we get to a place. And then we shut down in terms of what we’re actually interested in learning about. So yeah, that engaging with other more land-based cultures is a really good way to stimulate thinking about something. And I guess I really want to stress and Mary, and I talked about this at length. A lot of really well-intentioned, non-indigenous people in Australia think that what they can do now is throw up their hands and just follow Aboriginal people. That’s what they should do. Aboriginal people know everything there. They look at them as some kind of other creature and, Oh, they know they have all the wisdom. And Mary and I just sit back and laugh and go, Oh my God, that’s not cool. You know, we trash the joint. We treat people like rubbish for 200 years, and now we want them to lead the way because we made a mess and we don’t know what to do. To us it’s about all of us taking responsibility. And particularly as a non-indigenous person, bloody well man up, girl up. Take responsibility. Face colonization, right in the face and go, this is what happened. My ancestors were part of this. My culture has caused this and I’m going to handle that. It freaked me out in my early 20s when I did all the reading. And finally my school system didn’t teach me any of it, but I started to age with deeper understandings and deepest stories from Aboriginal mates. And with my God, I spent many, many, many a time fetal position crying in bed in my twenties, but I won’t block that off and go white fellow guilt. There’s a lot well.. How can I play a role in making things better? How do we do this together? How do we in our cultural background, not just take responsibility in aggressive way, but actually Mary comforted me by saying this. She goes, you guys got to look at your own culture, too. You got to look back into your own ways of thinking and doing, and just, you know, grab onto some of those for your own land-based culture. Um, and I think that gives some people a bit of comfort too. I am not ideological. I just want people to love the living world as much as me, and that’s a bit soft. Just to make decisions on a daily basis that don’t trash the joint, you know, that’s it.
Morag:
Yeah. That earth centered approach that you put yeah. Life comes as the first part of any decision-making that you do. So I wanted to kind of unpack a little bit more around that because in terms of actually shifting towards this more earth centered society, we need a different kind of governance. A different kind of economic system. And you talk too about the way that land is owned and shared. And so maybe, I don’t know whether those two can fit together the different kinds of economics and land systems. How do we approach that as a society? How do we re-imagine that? And also how do we shift? Like, what’s the transition towards..
Michelle:
It’s huge and when we’re teaching, I often use this very corny saying, but it’s appropriate. Like the last thing a fish will notice is water. And the last thing that any of us notice really and sometimes we have to be poked through an education or a process is the world we live in. We take our housing and climate, the plants and animals and parents completely for granted. And that’s why traveling broadens the mind. You know, that’s why anyone who says, when I traveled, mostly what I learned was about my own culture. Cause I go, well, hang on how they do that. That’s really cool. We don’t do that. You know? So it’s the learning and breaking out of the way we automatically think. So how do we do it? Well, there are so many ways and I will often joke, but it’s true. My idea of creating systems change is to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I am not precious about what we do. We should all, we have to do a whole bunch of things at once, but certainly in the realm of thinking about Western relationships or lack of relationships with land or with plants and animals, a really nice place to start is just talking about rights of nature versus current private property and ownership structures. And it depends on what the audience is interested in, but often if you start with, well, what if a river had its own rights to exist? What does that mean? And then get people to explore that. And I really have to keep saying this. This is just to push back at Western ways of thinking. Rights of nature. If it’s at all useful for indigenous people is just another Western construct to build their own systems connected to explain to Westerners why Earth in life is sacred, right? They don’t need rights of nature. They had a completely different structure of in built ethic and care for the land of animals or at least management of resources in a more sustainable way. So certainly when we talk about the land ethic, it’s really interesting to talk about the history of property ownership and the concepts around land and who owns what literally from pre-medieval England, because that’s where our legal system comes from. The feudalism or they call it the realism was a name. We threw back at it afterwards. But this notion that people could not only own land, but own each other. And the deeply inbuilt hierarchical structures that those who owned things were more important then, and could control others. All of these hierarchical structures, these attitudes towards land and resources came very, very, very early on in our culture. And you can point back to anthropocentrism in the Greek culture. Some people that’s two and a half thousand years ago, or more depending 4,000 years ago. You could point to all these points in the, in the Western culture where we see ourselves as the primary entity and that land is just there for us. And there’s lots of different ways to convey that to people. Land really is in our legal system. Maybe the best way to explain it is if you put the Western legal lens over your eyes and looked out at the world and you could see what the legal system sees, you’d see people, some people. You’d see all these perhaps beige boxy entities and their corporations. We have created them. They have legal rights. We see them in the law. They can go to court, people can go to court and everything else is just as kind of nothingness because everything is either an entity or an object that we own. And then if you put the lens of [inaudible] over the top of that, then suddenly imagine life breaking out across this beige landscape. Pop, pop, pop, all these little beige boxes turned into possums and koalas and grass and butterflies, but the legal system doesn’t see any of them as a subject of the law. It just sees them either as something, an object we’ve decided to protect or an object we decided to eat, or an object we’ve created that has a lot of legal power. The corporation examined these ideas of the foundation of how our legal system supports destruction of nature. It’s because it was built to. The legal system emerged through the common law and through these other weird equity and processes with the King who himself saw his self sovereign and connected to God. And he was at the top, you know, and then whatever he said was the law. So somewhere way down the track, the law stopped being any way connected to land in our European culture, I think it’s a very, very long time ago.
Morag:
I remember being at university in Melbourne and I studied landscape architecture and environmental planning land-based things. And I was sent off as part of the undergraduate course to the economics department. They wanted to have like a really go into engineering and architecture and geography and economics. And I remember this economics lecture down the front of this massive, great hall talking about nature, just as an externality. It’s like, I just felt this rise of anger. And I just wanted to explode. And so what is this type of economic? How do we… the legal system it’s the economic system? It’s the land system, the government…
Michelle:
It’s interesting. And I’ve had similar conversations. I remember sitting, I had the misfortune of being in a government position for two years when my husband had some health problems and I’d just had the bub, but we needed the money. And I got this job in government. I knew that I would not, not enjoy it. But I do remember sitting in this room with about 10 other people, not talking about some regulatory stuff and cost benefit analysis. And I just sat there and I couldn’t help it. I actually burst out and said, that cost benefit analysis doesn’t count. This forest is unique. You protect that offsets, you know, and I had the offset conversations. I’m sure anyone listening will understand, but they looked at me like I was like some mad witch. It’s tricky, but I think the next stuff, the next ways we think the next systems, I mean, they’re already bubbling. They have been for awhile, but I don’t think there’s going to be one simple transition. You know, I’m not going to say, voila! We are in the new economy. We have everything. Yes, we have arrived! The new systems are being created and have been emerging for a very long time. But the trick now is joining up the dots and pushing that systems change. So simple example around economic thinking, you know, the neoliberal project, which a whole bunch of right wing think tanks really got together with a phenomenal amount of money and deliberation and deliberately created in the late seventies, a shift from economics as being even anything to do with the welfare state and being primarily about. These doctrines around individuals and marketplace and the free market. Anyway, that stuff can be broken down. It’s all human created. So persuasive, but they’re not gravity. You know, they’re not breathing in and out. So all of this stuff can change. But the one thing that we’re up against is a rising tide of amazing grassroots people, individuals, organizations, governments, in some places, but they keep getting pushed back on. Why would I would call the one-percenters the, those who have thank you very much made a huge amount of not just money, but power and privilege through either the 20th century or really by being born into the 20th century on the back of their own, very rich relatives who made a huge amount of money off empire. So we’ve got really big. And I was in a panel discussion on the day and someone said, why don’t we have the political will? And I said, well, may I just gently point out? It’s not just a lack of political will. It’s an actual, very deliberate, complex structures stopping the new changes from happening. Whether it’s tax subsidies, government allowing certain kinds of projects and developments in our current federal and many state governments completely rejecting anything that would threaten really at the heart of it. It’s track of expansionism.
Morag:
I was talking to an economist who’s in the who happens to be able to get into things like world bank conversations and has a has a heart of the kind of like ecological thinking. And I don’t know how he manages those both worlds. But anyway, he was saying, we were talking about the work that I do in Africa and with refugees. And this is the, you know, it’s not going to change the world. This current economic system exist. You know, like if Kenya borrows money, for example, they pay back 68 times the same amount as the a first nations country. So the loans that they are given are so differently offered that it’s always going to stick people in the debt trap and always disadvantaged. And so like you’re saying, it’s these subsidies, it’s these sort of the game playing that happens at that level.
Michelle:
And the networks it’s the networks. Like a lot of these people sit in a position of power and someone says, I need this stuff. We’ll make that happen. And then if you’re a poor person in another country, anywhere, even Australia, and look, I’ll give you a simple example back in the day when I was a young and I was trying to buy a house and I had the deposit, but I didn’t have any credit rating because I’ve been traveling, you know, I was rejected. And I remember just recently, a bunch of us pooled our resources to buy a little house so that we could use it for a community space. And when we walked into the bank and they all had mortgages and they all had some equity, No, no money, no cash, but the conversation is so different. It was like, Oh, how much do you think you want a loan? Well, we’d like you to tell us how much we can loan. Okay here. We applied and got the money. So it’s the systems, you know, it’s like when you’re in the system and you speak the language and you have some assets. Whereas when you’re out of the system, you might as well be a chair. Might as well be a koala. Bizzare. So, yeah. And these are, think back to your point about externalities. I mean, it’s the greatest insult to life on earth is the current economic system. I know that people like Kate Raworth with her concept of economics, I mean, I love seeing that being picked up, it’s really taking off and it’s making people think differently about the economic system and that is very powerful and very important. So all these systems are breaking down and look, I would honestly say that if it wasn’t for climate change bearing down on our planet, I would be a hundred percent optimistic all the time because I do have a long view. Nothing stays the same. A thousand years ago, we didn’t have nation states. 500 years ago. I think most people thought the world was round.. Oh flat.
Morag:
A lot of these things that you’re talking about, you’re exploring economics, you’re exploring governance, you’re exploring food systems. You’re exploring a whole lot of different things all together in one big picture thinking. And I think that’s where it is that we need to be in that space. We need to have big picture thinking in order that all of these things are happening. Like you said, all these amazing initiatives that communities are doing and have been doing can have some light shine on them, and that they can actually sort of come to the forward and be seen as a real and viable alternative. So what are some of the things that you’ve been doing? There’s like a whole series of different organizations and programs. And maybe if you could just describe some of those.
Michelle:
For sure. I find that some people have a little bit of trouble putting their finger on what it is that I do, but if I take a step back. So I’ve always loved the living world and I’ve always been aware of the injustice and the horrible things that we do to each other and especially to the so-called voiceless plants and animals. When I did my law degree. So I grew up in the Bush out in the middle of Queens. And I think it gave me a very grounded worldview, which I still notice today when I sit with a lot of people who have been born and raised in perhaps a different world, a much more middle-class city kind of world, and more and more have been seeing the mindset that Westerners have. And I might come back to that actually. But so what I did is I was interested in trying to be a useful presence in supporting environmental care and protection. So I studied law. I did an arts degree in political science and history. History is really important for this stuff because when you hear people today thinking they’ve invented something amazing. And you know, you’ve been doing this for 35 years and you go, actually that’s just building on the thing that was done in the nineties, but it’s all good. The law helped me understand the basic, think of it as coding for society. It basically through the constitution and all the different kinds of legal structures and where power came from and what is it exactly that the Australian system had to come over here with and dumped onto this continent with its English legal system. So I did environmental law for some time. And then I went off and worked with Aboriginal mates. Cause I was very frustrated with the law. Anything you did with law was slow and grumpy and it wasn’t fun and it wasn’t creative and whether it was government and private practice, I personally just didn’t gel didn’t fit. And it wasn’t until probably the mid, probably around 2009. When I went to a Wild Law conference that I came across this concept called earth jurisprudence, which is a philosophy talking about a centeredness, but with a bit of specificity to it. So to explain why I’m involved with a couple of different organizations, it’s really helpful. The starting point was when I read Thomas Berry’s book, he’s a deep ecologist and often joking and he’s pretty good for an old white dude. But what’s nice about Thomas Berry’s work for a westerner is that we’re looking through a Western lens at the Western system, bashing it to pieces and trying to think about how we do it differently. And yes, his work was deeply inspired by indigenous people. But as Mary Graham says, we have to look into our own cultural worldviews. We can’t just click a finger and become something different. There are some very, very, very deeply held cultural ideas and ways of being in our system that we have to understand if we want to shift it. So it was actually Thomas Berry’s book, The Great Work that inspired all of the work I’ve done since reading it in 2000. In The Great Work, he looks at the underpinning, what he called the underpinning structures of industrial society and what he calls the kind of the four institutional pillars of the way we literally work, live and play in the West. And he looks at law and government, economics, education and religion, and that all four of these underpinning structures, he said have emerged from a deeply anthropocentric worldview and have enabled by being anthropocentric, by being so human centered that nothing else matters. Of course you can use it as you wish, because you don’t have, regardless of those things, you don’t have respect for those things. And it’s from that four point structure that when we created AELA, it wasn’t just about law. So the Australian Earth Laws Alliance a group of us formed in the end of 2011, incorporated in 2012, started very much with the focus on the law, particularly on rights of nature, because it’s, as I started to say before is a very handy spearhead concept. It actually jolts people into thinking, not just about the rights of nature, but the flaws in our current property system. So AELA was really born from this interest in systems change, but very specifically articulated. It’s not wishy-washy or fluffy. It looks at law, it looks at economics, it looks at education. It looks at religion. We don’t go in anywhere and critique religion, that’s not our cup of tea, but we are very interested in the human spirit and emotion and feelings and love. So we have an earth ethics and spirituality kind of focus. So in 2012, we formed up the Australian Earth Laws Alliance and we started workshops and we call them a little road show to find out who else around Australia was doing this stuff, because nothing worse than being a bit arrogant thinking you’ve invented something new. What we realized was we were bringing people together who already had a great interest in this. There’s a huge amount of terrific work already out there, but it was probably in 2013, early 2014. When I realized that everything we were doing as kind of interested in law or governance or systems or even education was bumping up against the economic system. And so that’s when cut a long story short when Bronwen Morgan, who’s a professor at UNSW asked if I might help the run a workshop conference in 2016 around social enterprise and the new economy, we both agreed. Maybe it would be cool to ask the conference folks if they think, or they thought they might be used in developing a network of civil society people interested in shifting the economic system. And that’s why then another year or so later, we set up the New Economy Network Australia, which is its own incorporated entity. It’s a cooperative, and it’s got this whole other focus and a whole other network of people who are really passionate about all the things you mentioned, food, different work systems, universal, basic income, um, building the, sort of the psychological health that you need to make the transition, energy challenging extractivism social enterprises, small businesses, community gardens, and all your wonderful world of permaculture and food. So, whereas AELA has really evolved organically from the ideas from that was stimulated by the book. NENA was a very specific strategy, particularly,. in the work that I was doing to help be part of that building of it, which was we need entities and spaces for civil society to explore what economics is and isn’t. To not just think about big picture systems change, but to join up all the dots and all the energy, as we’ve already said, that’s already out there. There’s phenomenally awesome, good people doing great things. And then the master plan is we’re just coming to it now we’ve invited all the different members of NENA to share their ideas about what strategic things we need to do to shift the economy. So it’s literally this cobbled together, grassroots up civil society strategy for new economy. And it’s just going to be a dodgy old draft probably in June, but it’s really cool because it’s showing what ordinary folks working in the food sector or housing or whatever, what they think, not only should we be doing, but what should a group like NENA be supporting across sectors for each other. And then the only other thing I’ll mention my organizations is, as I already said, I grew up out West and my formal schooling never taught me anything about the history of Australia. It wasn’t until I started working with awesome women from an Aboriginal community in Queensland central Queensland, that I was lucky enough to be really indoctrinated into the impacts of colonization, my culture, Aboriginal culture, the good, the bad, the ugly. And then I knuckled down for 10 years and raised money and worked with friends on community development. So all the time that AELA was starting to form up, we had, a little program inside AELA called future dreaming, which was how we formally connected with informal friendships and relationships under the kind of the first nations or Aboriginal banner. And then I think, I can’t remember now I’m losing track of time. Plus COVID ate my brain. Last year or the end of 2019. We incorporated a new entity called Future Dreaming Australia because Mary Graham and myself, and another amazing indigenous leader, Ross Williams, who’s a Bindal/Juru lives down in Brisbane. And another couple of other mates decided what we want is a space where Aboriginal people can lead the discussions about their culture, but share it with white fellows because we all need that knowledge, but also a place where we can trust each other to explore what I’ve said is this, this new way forward into the 21st century that enables first peoples to have self-determination and to do their thing and to do it for their people and to care for country, but enables Westerners or non-indigenous folks in this continent to learn about the first peoples and respect that remarkable knowledge system and governance system, but to also find their own way into a better ecological future. That’s why I’m now co-founder and manager of three organizations, but it’s not just me, you know, I’ve got tons of great volunteers, but I’m really proud of the work that, that everyone in, all of these networks has done because there’s no funding, everyone’s free. Just incredible work. And that’s, I think that’s what gets me up in the morning. Probably the thought of making sure possums and bats and frogs might be better off, but also literally to connect with all these amazing other human beings who really deeply care. And if you watch mainstream news, you wouldn’t know we were all out there, but as you and I know sometimes like the dominant population are good, they just got these phenomenal barriers from those who have really benefited from an unjust system and they’re not going to go away easily. So we have to break down the concrete of colonized, hierarchical, power.
Morag:
I think that’s a very positive message that you just said just a moment ago, about how that, you know, often we think that there’s a lot that’s going on, there’s this sort of corruption and badness and all that, but most people are really have the heart of wanting to do something really good.
Michelle:
Yeah, they do.
Morag:
We know that too. This kind of work that both of us do. We visit people. We talk to people. We’re talking with people in all across Australia and across the world. And we see all of these little projects together and this mycelium network that kind of connects them all, but they’re still not being seen. So things like AELA or NENA or all these things can actually start to sort of shine the light so there’s no mushrooms can form and they can be seen and can actually go, Oh, there it is. That’s what it is. That’s what we’re looking at.
Michelle:
That’s right and all we can do is our own humble contribution. You know, that’s all we can do. None of us can save the world on our own. None of us can change the system on our own, but if we all do our thing and if possible, bring others with us, or I often say, if you have your own ideas and you want to lead, go for it. But if you just want to be a second dancer, there are so many amazing projects out there that need someone else to come and stand next to them and go, this is, I want to do this. You know, even my work with AELA, none of it would have sustained without the cool people who came in and went, this is nifty. Can I volunteer with you? None of us do it on our own. Some of us might have a few crazy ideas, but we really need everybody to join up. It’s hard work, but what are you going to do instead? Stay in bed and watch TV. I mean, sure. Do that for a day and get back up and do something good.
Morag:
And I think too, that what you just said like seeing that what’s going on in the world is permission to stand up and don’t wait for permission from someone else. You don’t need someone to say, yes, you can stand up and speak up. The earth is saying you can stand up and speak up.
Michelle:
Yeah. I think interestingly, and that’s a whole another nerdy governance conversation. Since the 1970s, since the raging tsunami of neo-liberalism, governments have more and more abandoned their post in the spaces that are meant to support civil society or meant to support social justice. So more and more, there is no one that’s going to give you permission. There’s no one who’s going to hand you funding to do it. Sometimes you just got to stand up and do it. And that sucks sometimes, but it’s also liberating. As someone who just does the work and I scrounge money in other ways. I mean, I’m not bludging off society in any way, but that would be okay too. I scrounged money with workshops and raised money from conferences, but very rarely does anyone get like a salary hand here, change the world. And here’s a $90,000. You have to piece it together so you can survive and do the things you want to do.
Morag:
So one last thing that I wanted to ask you. I know you’ve got other things to go out and do and coordinate and your days are awesomely, wonderfully busy doing this work. Can you talk just a little bit about the Regenerative Songlines project? We haven’t touched on that yet.
Michelle:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s so new, isn’t it? So the first thing is the Regenerative Songlines Australia Network doesn’t really have a fourth word. We’re calling it Regenerative Songlines Australia. Firstly, I’m excited about this project because it’s being led by amazing people like Anne Polina, Tyson Yanka Porter, Mary Graham, and Ross Williams have now been there. Charles Marshall, Atlanta all these incredible indigenous thinkers and leaders. So right now there’s a website has been popped up and there’s going to be a symposium in July that if anyone’s listening, please visit the website. There’ll be more info at the end of this week. So the website is www.regenerative-songlines.net.au. But the story to go backwards is, some really lovely people, including Jason twill and Louise Crabtree had been connecting to this rather odd entity it’s connected to the CommonwealthSecretary, like the Commonwealth Secretary, which is now the last bastions of colonialism from the British empire. But the Commonwealth secretary, it has this really cool initiative under Common Earth and it’s called the Regenerative Roadmap Process. And so like Costa Rica, there’s the regenerative roadmap, Costa Rica. I believe there’s a regenerative roadmap, New Zealand. And so when Jason through his context and he was about to leave the country and go somewhere else said to a few of us. Hey, it’d be great. If Australia could connect to this regenerative roadmap process. And we all said, well, must have indigenous leadership because it’s country. So long story short last year, we had a series of meetings where Jason brought in, a few of us and some of his connections. And then Anne Polina started to really get a feel for what people were interested in and what we thought we could do. Cut a long story short, the Regen Songlines project is going to be a number of things, but to kick it off, there’s a really cool map on the website and it will show where different regenerative projects are. And you know, we’re still in the throws of defining regenerative, cause it can be anything. It could be based, which is what a lot of people think about, but it could also be regenerative economics or regenerative health issues. So we’re in the throws of defining what this looks like and what it means. But I think the thing I’m excited about is the two aspects of true indigenous leadership and us white fellows, absolutely being partners in this, but quite frankly, shutting up long enough to let them all do what they got to do. You know, it’s still connected to their country. They know their country better than most of us. So this is a wonderful opportunity to work with indigenous people together. Let them lead the show for change in certain sectors. That’s very hard tojoin groups that are not dominated by white fellows and then the mapping tool and the network will show off all. Eventually we’re going to invite everyone to upload their info onto it. So when you want to go, what’s going on in Queensland, around regenerative agriculture, or permaculture gardens or whatever you can possibly use that kind of look. And that’s not the only project of its kind, but it is going to be quite remarkable given the caliber of the indigenous people leading it. So visit the website and I think what we’ll probably do is now that we’re getting the foundations shored up, we’ll be able to invite people through the launch symposium to just get connected, get on mailing list. And I suspect by the end of this year, we’ll probably start really making sure people can find each other really effectively. And again, it’s a bit like a regenerative NENA, because it’s, it’s all about how do people find each other, see the projects out there feel really encouraged and optimistic and learn from each other and you might want to reach out and go, Hey, you’re doing this cool project. I want to do like something like that in my community and making the invisible, visible, and hopefully raising the profile of indigenous knowledge. So yeah I’m helping out probably under the banner of AELA and Future Dreaming because with Mary Graham and Ross Williams connected to the steering group of the Regen Songlines, it’s kind of very much a Future Dreaming supported project. So it’s all very exciting. We’re very interconnecte too.
Morag:
They’re all, they’re all part of kind of like an ecology of organizations. I try and describe all the stuff that I do too. So Evan says to me, for those of you listening, it’s my husband he says, I don’t think anyone really gets what you do. So many phases to it.
Michelle:
That’s the beauty of true systems change work is you might come into it from a space, like in my case, it came in from law and governance and perhaps for you initially food and permaculture, but everything’s connected. So it’s like, do I stop? And I can honestly say from my point of view, I have stopped creating new organizations because for me, I’ve got happiness, I’ve got the Earth Laws Alliance, which is fundamentally a centered governance and the rules and the institutions and the, and the shape of our society and how we change that. And NENA is an incredible living organism of its own. But from the AELA point of view, it’s also a strategic way to get the economy up into people’s faces so they can talk about what grassroots economics looks like. And then of course, for me, as someone who’s passionate about Australia and fascinated by first nations peoples or indigenous peoples culture and worldview, Future Dreaming is the kind of the cherry on top, but it’s always been underneath AELA’s sort of formation. There are slightly different ways that we have to approach different audiences and different projects, that’s why they have to exist as entities. And I just want to say, the funny thing about working in the West or the Western culture is no matter how much want to focus on systems change. So many people have still been raised up through particular disciplinary lenses. That’s actually why AELA was happy to create a separate entity for the economic stuff because not everyone gets that it’s all connected. Some people just want to come in and talk about Bitcoin or solar panels, and you kind of have to reach out to those audiences in a way that’s manageable and supportive and to rave on about deep ecology to someone who really just wants to set up their own little business, doing good things. Um, sometimes that’s not appropriate. So why we’ve got these different sort of entities that are focused on shining a light, as you were saying more on different aspects of what we’re doing, but they’re all connected, everything.
Morag:
Yeah. And I think the thing that connects them all, and it’s what, what brought me into permaculture from the first instance was, as you said before, the love of life, love of earth and that how is it that I feel that I’m most capable of actually doing that work, being in service to the planet, to life almost. And that that’s been my way. I figured, well, everyone eats. So it’s a way of accessing so many conversations around caring for the planet.
Michelle:
I’ll have to say as someone who’s like, I’m 51 this year. So I like to call myself an old girl. I’m settling into mid-life and old age really comfortably, because I think I was always a bit century if you know what I mean. Anyway as someone who’s been around for 30 years, what has been remarkable and I’m sure you’ll appreciate this is back in, I guess the early nineties environmentalism was either green or brown, but protecting a forest or you were looking after waste management food didn’t pop up, was still silenced. And what’s been happening as you know, in the last 10, 15 years, the food systems and the impact of agriculture have just the awareness of what the impacts have been especially now. Poor continent have just exploded. So food is, is a crucial heartland for all of the issues around justice, around human issues around ecology. So it’s been a very interesting thing to watch. Now that I’m getting older and I can look back over the 30 years of work, it’s very interesting to watch the discourse change and systems shift. New things do appear. A lot of things are being recycled at the moment and it’s a whole another conversation. So I’m getting a bit, I get a bit grumpy in certain conversations going, Hey, it’s still not going to solve the problem. It’s a Western way of thinking.
Morag:
But I think focusing on building the relationships seems to be the key, I think like strengthening that whole, the ecological system of all of these different aspects. So that they see each other as well as being seen by people haven’t seen them yet. I think it’s incredible that you’ve been doing and thank you for your enormous energy. You’re putting into it all the time. I mean, you don’t stop. I know. I know.
Michelle:
And for anyone who’s listening, who goes, wow, I could never work like that. It’s like in my twenties, I just take months off and travel. Cause I really didn’t have a purpose. I had all these energy and ideas. I didn’t know where to put it all. So I used to like an aimless person, a member of the lost white tribes and unsettled continents. It comes from love. It comes from, and I guess developing some set of knowledge in a place, but can I just say the last thing I really want to say is we don’t even have to deeply understand planet earth to love and care for her. The best thing we can do as Westerners is get a massive dose of humility and open-mindedness, and just stop thinking we have to fix everything straight away and just listen a bit and sit still under a tree for a bit. Because, Mary Graham quotes Lilla Watson saying White fellows always seem to float about three feet above the ground. And I think that’s the single biggest problem. It’s part of the separation. We don’t just sit still and look like over there right now there’s I saw a couple of soggy blue-banded bees in the rain this morning. What do they need to live well here. That’s pretty much the basic question. All these white fellows keep getting all excited about technology and everything else. It’s like, no, we need to stop a lot of what we do. We don’t need to do more. I think in our culture or a mindset that just wants to overcomplicate everything. Is remarkably capable of perpetuating itself. And all we have to do is get into the rhythm. Like you do Morag through permaculture to support and catalyze the continuation of life. So I just want to say, I guess, as I’m learning more and learning less and I’m learning, unlearning. It’s really just humility. Sometimes you shut up and listen to nature or other people and go, I don’t have to fix this straight away. I don’t have to know everything. And that’s not always our fault. We’ve got a culture that is terrified of embarrassment, risk, open-ended conversations. Everything’s got to be fixed and the project management plan and an act for that. Just take your time and have listened to other people and, and just don’t trash the joint.
Morag:
It’s simple really when you put it like that. Thank you for closing it like that because that’s really at the heart of it, isn’t it?
Michelle:
It is. As some of us, I spend a lot of time investigating the complexities of the system simply so I can understand enough to try to be a sensible communicator to those who still believe in that system. For anyone, please take heart. Plant a tree, watch it, grow, support other people who are growing things and have ideas. But if you’re not growing things or restoring things, then it’s still just an idea.
Morag:
Thanks, Michelle. Thank you so much for joining me and for anyone who’s listening, I’m going to put all the links, the references, and all the organizations. all the links you find in the show notes. So thank you again, Michelle. It’s been just an absolute pleasure to chat with you today.
Michelle:
Lovely to be here. Thanks, bye.
Morag:
So that’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining us. Head on over to my YouTube channel, the links below, and then you’ll be able to watch this conversation, but also make sure that you subscribe because that way we notified of all new films that come out and also you’ll get notified of all the new, all the new interviews and conversations that come out. So thanks again for joining us. Have a great week and I’ll see you next time.
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I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I live and work – the Gubbi Gubbi people. And I pay my respects to their elders past present and emerging.
- Podcast Audio: Rhiannon Gamble
- Podcast Music: Kim Kirkman