In this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, my guest is permaculture humanitarian, Kym Blechynden. As an aid worker with the Red Cross, Kym has worked in some of the most challenging places on earth – post conflict regions, disaster zones.I am in awe of the work she does and the calm courageousness and humanity with which she does it.
Kym’s background is in public health, food security & nutrition. She’s worked extensively throughout Australia and internationally in places like Bangladesh, Chad, Pakistan, Vanuatu, DPRK, Mongolia, Japan, South Sudan, Philippines, Pakistan, Myanmar, Laos, Nepal, Cambodia, Fiji, Malaysia, Jordan, Turkey, Syria, Maldives, PNG, Indonesia, Timor Leste, Sri Lanka, Thailand, DPRK and many more.
Download this list of 10 of Morag’s favourite books.
Morag’s 4 part introduction to permaculture video series.
She shares with us her insights about what permaculture aid and humanitarianism is and how permaculture it helps design integrated and appropriate responses to disasters and crises.
Download and stream the Podcast here.
Read the full transcript here:
Morag Gamble: (00:00)
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 worthwile and nourishing and are working towards resilience, regeneration, and reconnection. What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation..
Morag: (00:56)
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 thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and spark the imagination of what a post-COVID, climate-resilient, socially just future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to compost and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections and actions. Together we’ll open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking community action, earth repair, eco-literacy, and much more. I can’t wait to share these conversations with you.
Morag Gamble: (00:56)
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, and also how you can make it, your livelihood as well as your way of life.
Morag: (01:54)
We’d love to invite you to join our wonderfully inspiring and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I’d also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I meet and speak with you today. The Gubbi Gubbi people and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. It’s my great pleasure to welcome to the show today my dear friend, Dr. Stephan Harding from Schumacher college. He’s a Gaian Ecologist. He has a doctorate of ecology from Oxford university. He’s a musician, author, father, co-founder too of the Masters of Holistic Science Program at Schumacher College co-founded with Professor Brian Goodwin. He’s also the research fellow of Deep ecology at the college and the Dartington Estate Ecologist. He has two books. The first is Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia. And his recent book is called Gaia Alchemy. He’s worked closely with James Lovelock over the decades on the Ga theory. James is now 101, but back in 1992 is when I first met Stephan. When I was a resident at Schumacher college, beginning with a course that’s Stephan has co-taught with Fritjof Capra and with his wife, Julia Ponsonby, who’s the author of two books, The Gaia cookbooks and head of food at Schumacher College. We traveled up to Ladakh in the Himalayas to volunteer with Helena Norberg Hodge. And so our friendship goes a long way back. And this is a brief recording of our conversation when I was teaching at Schumacher college last year. It’s pre-COVID times, and we would enjoy a walk through the Dartington Estate, exploring the work of James Lovelock, and also Stephan’s work with the Gaia Theory. So I hope you enjoy this conversation.
Morag Gamble: (05:06)
I’m out here in the Woodlands behind Schumacher College at the moment with Stephan Harding. I met Stephan about 27 years ago.
Stephan Harding: (05:13)
Yeah.
Morag Gamble: (05:13)
And you, how would you describe yourself? The Head Ecologist? The leader of.. The master of holistic science? What else?
Stephan Harding: (05:22)
Well, I’m a resident ecologist. Yeah. As you said, MSC and holistic science. And I’ve been here from the very beginning of the college. So I’m one of the founders of the college. My background is in science and ecology.
Morag Gamble: (05:35)
Yeah.. Should we walk back down this way? A lot of the people who come and do the permaculture courses with me are fascinated about Gaia and I thought it’d be really good person. You.. The perfect person to ask because that is.. has been your focus for a long time. And particularly because you spend a lot of time with James Lovelock.
Stephan Harding: (05:57)
I did very lucky to spend time with him.
Morag Gamble: (05:58)
So what is Gaia? Hang on. I just noticed this..
Stephan Harding: (06:02)
Oh yeah, we’ll go this way.
Morag Gamble: (06:02)
Alright.
(06:02)
So Gaia has got various levels. So there’s the mythological depth psychology level to Gaia. And then there’s the scientific level. So you can talk about both of those, if you like. On the scientific level, Gaia is about all the feedback relationships between all the organisms on the planet, the microbes, the fungi, the animals, the plants, etc. Between themselves and with the rocks, the atmosphere and the water. And the idea in Gaia is that they all interact with each other through feedbacks and what emerges from all those interactions it’s something completely unexpected. And that is the ability of the planet as one great whole to regulate it’s surface condition centers, that temperature. So the idea is that Gaia is a for me anyway, a great living planetary organism constituted by all the relationships between all living organisms on the one hand and the atmosphere, rocks and water on the other. So there’s like a sort of tight feedback.
Morag Gamble: (07:09)
So the difference between Gaia and say science that’s taught in schools is that it’s about the interconnectedness between all parts. Isn’t it? That it’s not just the rock. So it’s not just the plants or it’s not just the climate. It’s how all of those.. interconnect.
Stephan Harding: (07:22)
Yeah. This is Lovelock’s Gaia theory. It has revolutionized our understanding. So before Lovelock, the idea was that the earth was just a hunk of rock floating around in space with a little thin smear of life on the surface, which had no influence on the surface temperature or other factors or the surface at all. Life was just like a passive passenger. That’s what people thought.
Stephan Harding: (07:49)
And so Lovelock had a pretty interesting background, too. Can you tell us a little bit..
Stephan Harding: (07:54)
Well, he’s an absolute genius. He’s a brilliant inventor of scientific instruments. He’s got a great knowledge of science, across all kinds of science and he’s.. but the main thing about him is that he is phenomenally original and creative. Yeah. I mean, I’m very brave because when he came up with the idea of Gaia, even just to call it Gaia is incredibly brave because he was jokingly thinking of calling his theory The biocybernetic universal system tendency.
Morag Gamble: (08:24)
Oh that would have done really well wouldn’t it! [laughter]
Stephan Harding: (08:26)
The bus hypothesis.
Morag Gamble: (08:27)
Oh, I see. I didn’t get that. Sorry. I missed that! [laughter]
Stephan Harding: (08:31)
So that was the idea. It was a joke but anyway, that would have gone down very well with the scientists. Biocybernetic. Cybernetics is the science of feedback and the truck universal system tends to be pretty good, but he didn’t like it. And he saw, no, it’s not right. I’ve got, I need some really good… And his friend, the novelist, William Golding told him to call it Gaia. And he’d never heard of Gaia. Now this brings us to the mythological dimension. Gaia is the ancient Greek divinity of the earth. She’s even more primordial than a goddess. Cause in the ancient myth from Hesiod which has Hesiod wrote down about 600 BC, there was, first of all, before anything existed, there was this chaos, vast and dark and out of this chaos. Well, sorry, this chaos wanted to become something. It felt a bit lonely. So it formed itself into the Earth. And that was the first thing that came out of primordial chaos. It was Gaia. Fully formed.
Morag Gamble: (09:28)
I don’t think I’ve heard this story before.
Stephan Harding: (09:28)
Yeah you see this very deep. And so Golding said to Lovelock no, don’t call it tbiocybernetic universal system tendency call it Gaia. This huge sacred name came out of Golding’s mouth and Lovelock to his credit eventually understood it. To begin with Lovelock thought Golding had said ja-ya, you know, there’s big swirling. So Lovelock said, no, not Ja-ya. Can’t call it a jaya-phere. And I like to think in my crazy way, but the whole biosphere that had been for waiting for 2000 years for Gaia to come back into the Western culture gave up. But Golding said, no, not Jaya.. Gaia! Then whole thing started again. And this time Lovelock heard it to his credit he really liked the name. It resonated. I mean, for a scientist to adopt such a deeply mythological poetic name for his theory is phenomenal. Yeah. So we got Gaia back into our culture through Science.
Morag Gamble: (10:31)
And so what, so how do people respond to it in the early days?
Stephan Harding: (10:35)
Well, the new age and the hippies love it, of course, and that was right. But the scientist hated it. Because Gaia for them suggested that something about the earth was sort of knew what the temperature should be, or it knew what, what the amount of phosphorus should be. In other words, there was what we coincides with a teleology teleological implying that there’s purpose in nature. And that is not allowed in science. Such a big taboo. I mean, I was brought up in science. The last thing you’re allowed to say is that there is purpose. It’s all meaningless, purposeful purposeless. It’s one great dead machine. The whole column was, is one great dead machine to be observed and to be manipulated and used for our purposes. So, Gaia smacked of teleology of purposefulness in nature. So they hated it and they gave it a really bad time.
Morag Gamble: (11:30)
How did he managed to get it heard?
Stephan Harding: (11:33)
Well, he’s only got it heard a certain amount. Hello. This is my dog friend. It’s all right. So, well what you did was to make a mathematical model. He knew how to make a mathematical model to get around this problem. And so he created a model called Daisyworld, which is actually, he described it as his finest invention, He’s created many brilliant scientific instruments. And so that showed that in principle, you could get Gaia in self regulation emerging from selfish individuals and selfish organisms that interact with each other, but also affect the climate at the same time. No one had ever made a model that put physics and biology together, and it was amazing how you get.. It’s amazing how the Daisyworld, you get a self regulation emerging without building it into the equations. It just emerges from all the interactions.
Morag Gamble: (12:32)
And so you worked with him. Was that part of..
Stephan Harding: (12:35)
What I did. I worked with, I did that for five years until I got really tired of sitting in front of computers. Gaia theory has transformed our understanding of the Earth and it’s become rebranded in science. So it’s now called earth system science.
Morag Gamble: (12:54)
So what’s happening now with climate change and how is Gaia theory informing what’s going on in?
Stephan Harding: (13:02)
Yeah, well now, now the very best climate modelers have been influenced by Lovelock very heavily. Some of them here at Exeter in England.. Tim Lenton and Richard Betts, Peter Cox some of the really top people and they’re making new supercomputer models of the climate based on Gaia theory in which the organisms interact with the climate. And of course it makes things infinitely more complex, but that’s one thing that’s happening. Another thing that’s happening on a more theoretical level is that people are beginning to realize that there’s another level of natural selection, which operates at the level of Gaia and feedbacks. There’s selection amongst Gaia and feedbacks. So, and it sounds a bit technical, but it’s actually breaking open our understanding of evolution and how it works. And we’re beginning to realize that evolution can also happen at the level of planetary feedbacks. So I think it’s a very exciting time when the paradigm is starting to shift all because of Lovelock’s work.
Morag Gamble: (13:57)
And so Lovelock is now turning a hundred this year. Wow. When about?
Stephan Harding: (14:02)
July the 23rd?
Morag Gamble: (14:03)
And you’re going to his birthday part?
Stephan Harding: (14:05)
Yeah in Blenheim palace and he’s as sharp as a button. He’s written a new book.
Morag Gamble: (14:08)
Oh what’s it called?
Stephan Harding: (14:09)
I can’t remember now actually, but he’s only just been, it hasn’t been published yet.
Morag Gamble: (14:15)
So how does he..see what’s happened with, with Gaia since it’s started. Has he shifted his perception, has he had change of thinking about it or just kept on evolving.
Stephan Harding: (14:28)
Um, I think he’s kept on evolving and I think he’s quite happy that it’s been more or less accepted in science, at least certain aspects of it have been accepted. And I think he’s very happy that gradually even evolutionary theory is realizing that there’s a GAIAn dimension that has been ignored in natural selection.
Morag Gamble: (14:47)
And so has Gaia been now taught in schools yet?
Stephan Harding: (14:50)
Not enough.
Morag Gamble: (14:50)
Because you know there’s too much of the old science.
Stephan Harding: (14:54)
Too much of the old science. You see for me, Gaia is both mythological and scientific.
Morag Gamble: (14:59)
What was your book?
Stephan Harding: (15:02)
My book is called Animate Earth. What I try to do in my work…so I’m trying to put together the science, but in a way.. that is in a poetic way, so we can use the science to awaken our poetic relationship with nature, because unless we have a poetic relationship, a love relationship with nature. We’re not going to do anything about it. With crisis our understanding will be too theoretical. I think we need, I mean, I’m a scientist, so I need the science, but I want to use it to help myself fall in love in nature much more. So that’s what my book is about.
Morag Gamble: (15:29)
That was wonderful! In love with nature, everyone to fall in love with nature, I think you’re absolutely right. Until we care until we love. We’re not going to have that.
Stephan Harding: (15:39)
No, we have to fall in love with nature. And because we’re a scientific culture, I think we can use the science of Gaia, particularly the science of microbes, earth worms, fungi, forest, clouds, mountains, rocks, all of that as one integrated living, being told mythologically with the science, I think that can help us fall in love with nature. And I mean, that’s what I’ve been doing at Schumacher college for 27 years. And it works. I mean, I tell that some of the science as a fairy story. Like love affairs between carbon prints and calcium princess. And it works. It works. It really does.
Morag Gamble: (16:13)
Hearing that again. I remember hearing that 27 years ago, and I remember you had your guitar or ukulele or something, right.
Stephan Harding: (16:24)
Yeah, singing. So it’s a mixture. For me, it’s integrated. Four functions, thinking, feeling, sensing, intuition, put them all together. And then in the middle is Gaia. We integrate our psyches in that way, then we can really fall in love with this amazing cosmos of ours and then we’ll spontaneously act to save it.
Morag Gamble: (16:48)
I think that’s a beautiful thing. And you’re now writing another book based on that.
Stephan Harding: (16:52)
I’m writing another book. This time I’m trying to put together alchemy and Gaia. So I’m calling it Gaia Alchemy, but it’s very difficult. I’m not sure if I’ll manage to do it.
Morag Gamble: (17:02)
Well, I hope you do. I really hope you do. There was also, there’s also a film based on your works.
Stephan Harding: (17:09)
There’s a film called Animate Earth and there’s an app that you know about the deep time walk app.
Morag Gamble: (17:13)
Yeah, yeah. So, what I might do underneath is put links to all these leads so people can see.
Stephan Harding: (17:19)
Please do. Yeah, that’d be great. And of course, Morag it’s so good that you are one of our first students at the college and look what you’ve done as a result.
Morag Gamble: (17:26)
It’s..let’s turn around so we can see the college behind us there. That’s part of it. Well, it did. It transformed my life. The thinking that I got, I think experience it, wasn’t just the thinking. It was the whole experience. It was a learning community. The way we ate and how we shared and the knowledge and the people that came here, too. There was you, there was Fritjof Capra, Vandana Shiva, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Annie , all of those different things together, you know, pour those in there’s a mix of this beautiful learning community of young people. And you create, I think, incredible opportunities for people to head out into their life and do incredible things.
Stephan Harding: (18:13)
And people who’ve been here, like you have gone on to do incredible things like you’ve done all over the planet. So it’s a small place. It’s a center of deep Gaia learning.
Morag Gamble: (18:23)
Absolutely.
Stephan Harding: (18:23)
It’s as if there’s something, some deep energy coming out of the Earth which inspires us all very deeply.
Morag Gamble: (18:29)
And draws us back. Like, I mean, this is, how many times I’ve back. I wish I’d been back more, but this is yeah… As I came around the corner just a week ago and I saw it and I felt it, I was like, ah, I’m home. You know, I have just a few points around that I feel that deep sense of connection and this is definitely one of them.
Stephan Harding: (18:47)
Yeah. You know, that saying in Latin ‘Alma Mater’ which means mother of your soul. This really for me is also the mother of my soul this college for the reasons you’ve said. Incredibly important place. Thank you so much for sharing.
Stephan Harding: (19:02)
Thank you.
Morag Gamble: (19:10)
Thanks for tuning in to the sense-making in a changing world podcast today, it’s been a real pleasure to have your company. I invite you to subscribe and receive notification of each new weekly episode with more wonderful stories, ideas, inspiration, and common sense for living and working regenerative and core positive permaculture thinking of design interaction in this changing world. I’m including a transcript below and a link also to my four-part permaculture series, really looking at what is permaculture and how to make it your livelihood too. So, join me again in the next episode where we talk with another fascinating guest, I look forward to seeing you there.
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Thanks for tuning into Sense-making in a Changing World today. It has been a pleasure to have your company. I invite you to subscribe (via your favourite podcast app like iTunes) and receive notification of each new weekly episode.
Each Wednesday I will share more wonderful stories, ideas, inspiration, and common sense for living and working regeneratively. Positive permaculture thinking, design, and action are so needed in this changing world.
What is permaculture?
Take a look at my free 4 part permaculture series or Our Permaculture Life Youtube and my permaculture blog too. For an introduction to permaculture online course, I recommend The Incredible Edible Garden course. I also offer an online Permaculture Educators Program (Permaculture Design Certificate and Permaculture Teacher Certificate) and involve young people in permaculture through Permayouth (11-16yos).
Warm regards,
Morag Gamble
Founder, Permaculture Education Institute
I acknowledge the Traditional owners of the land from which I am broadcasting, the Gubbi Gubbi people, and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging.
Thank you Rhiannon Gamble for audio editing – a challenging task this week with poor connection
Thank you to Kim Kirkman (Harp) and Mick Thatcher (Guitar) for donating this piece from their album Spirit Rider.