Morag Gamble:
Welcome to the Sense-making in a Changing World Podcast, where we explore the kind of thinking we need to navigate a positive way forward. I’m your host Morag Gamble.. Permaculture Educator, and Global Ambassador, Filmmaker, Eco villager, Food Forester, Mother, Practivist and all-around lover of thinking, communicating and acting regeneratively. For a long time it’s been clear to me that to shift trajectory to a thriving one planet way of life we first need to shift our thinking. The way we perceive ourselves in relation to nature, self, and community is the core. So this is true now more than ever. And even the way change is changing, is changing. Unprecedented changes are happening all around us at a rapid pace. So how do we make sense of this? To know which way to turn, to know what action to focus on? So our efforts are worthwhile and nourishing and are working towards resilience, and reconnection. What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation. In this podcast, I’ll share conversations with my friends and colleagues, people who inspire and challenge me in their ways of thinking, connecting and acting. These wonderful people are thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and spark the imagination of what a post-COVID, climate-resilient, socially just future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to compost and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections and actions. Together we’ll open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking community action, earth repair, eco-literacy, and much more. I can’t wait to share these conversations with you.Over the last three decades of personally making sense of the multiple crises we face. I always returned to the practical and positive world of permaculture with its ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. I’ve seen firsthand how adaptable and responsive it can be in all contexts from urban to rural, from refugee camps to suburbs. It helps people make sense of what’s happening around them and to learn accessible design tools, to shape their habitat positively and to contribute to cultural and ecological regeneration. This is why I’ve created the Permaculture Educators Program to help thousands of people to become permaculture teachers everywhere through an interactive online dual certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global Permayouth programs, women’s self help groups in the global South and teens in refugee camps. So anyway, this podcast is sponsored by the Permaculture Education Institute and our Permaculture Educators Program. If you’d like to find more about permaculture, I’ve created a four-part permaculture video series to explain what permaculture is and also how you can make it your livelihood as well as your way of life. We’d love to invite you to join a wonderfully inspiring, friendly, and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I’d also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land in 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 delight to welcome you to this episode ofSense-making in a Changing World Podcast. My guest today is Suzie Cahn. An indigenous Irish woman, permaculture teacher, leading voice in the Irish permaculture scene and a member of the international permaculture CoLab , as well as an art therapist, Suzie and I met at Findhorn eco village a couple of years ago, attending the climate change and consciousness conference. And immediately became friends. You know, the kind of friendship that when you just click and then you don’t see each other, but as soon as you start speaking again, you’re right back in the zone. I really love those kinds of friendships. Anyway, with Suzie’s family, she runs Carraig Dúlra in the Irish west country. It’s a permaculture education farm and social enterprise that focuses on education for sustainability and empowerment. It’s a permaculture center and through her permaculture work too, she’s embracing the Irish culture. This interview is a little bit different. We’re actually doing very permacultural thing, making this podcast multifunctional, Suzie and I are interviewing each other simultaneously. She’s editing this for her podcast and I’m sharing it here with you on Sense-making in a changing world, come and join us for a wonderful wide-ranging chat about living a permaculture life , teaching permaculture, setting up permaculture centers, raising kids, connecting locally and embracing culture enjoy. So I’m trying something different today and welcome everyone to the show. We’re actually doing a dual recording of two podcasts. One, this Sense -making in a changing world show and my friend from Ireland, Suzie Cahn is recording this for her show as well. And so this is something new and it’s an experiment and I always love experiments. So welcome to the show. It’s so great to have you here. I guess you could welcome me to your show.Suzie Cahn:I’m going to welcome you exactly. So I, the podcast that I started creating this year is called Cailleach. And I think we’re a pair of beginner Cailleachs. And that’s something that I connected with with you, Morag, when I met you in Scotland and the Cailleach is someone who is the older wise woman. And so we’re kind of at the beginning of that phase of our lives, where you’ve gone from máthair, mother, or even from while you might still be an Enchantress kind of warrior woman, but I’m definitely heading towards elder. And so I think that we could explore our shared thoughts and protal wisdom. I don’t really claim to be wise yet, but I’m trying to get wiser.Morag Gamble:
Well, I think I mean, I know for myself, I find the wisdom in these kinds of conversations. It’s when we come together that something else happens. And that’s why I love sharing these podcast conversations because it’s such an interesting place to explore ideas. And I actually never really know what’s going to come out of the conversation, which makes it really exciting.Suzie Cahn:
Absolutely.Morag Gamble:
I have a few key things I think I’d like to ask you, but then it just goes where it goes and that’s beautiful.

Suzie Cahn:
No, absolutely. I think I’m the same and in some other threads of my podcast, I am basically having the conversation with myself. I think there’s a lot of people actually in my head, so that’s not that difficult. But I really also like you, I feel like there’s something that is a magic between two people that comes when you’re particularly when you’re open to exploring questions and where they lead. And I think we were both saying just before we began, that we’re not really seeking that we’re going to find answers. It’s just that there are questions that need to regularly come up in new ways and new generations at different times and different, you know, to try to make sense of our world. We continually ask questions. And for me, I think probably because of, I grew up in Northern Ireland at a time when dogma and polarity was extreme and it’s still there to some degree and it’s raising again at the moment in Northern Ireland. And so I’ve never wanted to get to answers that leave me dogmatic.

Morag Gamble:
Hmm. Yeah. It’s the continual asking of the questions and that’s where the magic lies. Maybe we should start a bit, I was just going to say, maybe we should start. Where did we meet? Like where was our point of connection that started this conversation? Cause whenever I think of you, I start to giggle. There’s something about kind of like when we met at Findhorn at a climate change conference and we’ve both taken our children as youth members of this event as well. And we were part of a , kind of like a home group and whenever w e w ould get together, we would just start to chat and giggle. I kind of, there was a sort of a playfulness and an openness about you and that deep q ueering about what was going on. That just was, I d unno, I just got attracted to your energy o f somehow and every time I think of you, I just feel happy. And so I’m so glad that we’re having this chat because I haven’t seen you for ages and it’s really..

Suzie Cahn:
It’s a very long time, and I think that I really trust those moments of connection because I mean, Findhorn for me was there were a lot of magical things about that because I had my sister lives near Findhorn about 30 minutes away and I had not been there, but she’d told me about it. My parents had visited it and they were kind of like, that’s your sort of thing. You’d like Findhorn. That’s the sort of thing , you know ? And so I kept thinking, I must go one day and I hadn’t been back to Scotland for a long time. I hadn’t visited my sister for a long time and she comes to Ireland a lot, but I hadn’t to get to her. And I thought it’s Easter. And I just spotted this climate change and consciousness conference . And I thought, do you know what to think? I will go. And what I could do is I’ll spend a bit of time with my sister. I’ll leave my two younger offspring with her and her kids. And I will go on up to Findhorn on my own. And I was looking forward to that because I think my kids are bit older than yours. Some of them are older. And so I was like, ha , I can do things on my own again, you know, somy actual plan had been to go to Findhorn all by myself. So it’s just funny. Whenever you say that I was there with my youngest son, because completely coincidentally he was at a democratic school in Ireland. And through, I think two very random connections Findhorn were reaching out for Irish kids. And there was somebody that knew about the school. And then somebody said, you know, we’d love to have more of the youth voices there. And in the end, I think there was also a random funder that said, I want specifically to fund Irish kids to come. And so the school rang me and said, so would you be up for fin going to Scotland at Easter? You know, and I, and it was a few months away. And I said, I mean , he’s already going to Scotland at Easter. I’ve a ticket booked on a ferry . He’s going, you know, and they’re like, well, it’s to this conference. And I said, is it in Findhorn? So Finn actually came completely independently of me where I booked my own self. And then he basically ended up booked and going and with all of his friends and his other sibling ended up staying at my sister’s . Finn came up with me.

Morag Gamble:
Well , my eldest was the one who came into the conference with me, I think at the time she must’ve been 12. And yeah, so my two youngest was staying with Evan in the , over in another part of Findhorn. And it was a turning point for her. It was absolutely trance-like meeting your son and all the friends in that group and just feeling the power of the youth voice and seeing what was possible and having, seeing that there’s a different perspective that you can have and holding that space and being in that youth forum. So, you know, since then she’s ended up quitting school, going back to homeschooling, she set up things like the PERMAyouth, you see runs philosophy groups. She’s just stepped into her space as being a leader. And it’s phenomenal. It’s absolutely it’s a point for her that I think she’ll look at throughout her entire life as one of those key moments, those key turning points.

Suzie Cahn:
Yeah. I think it was certainly like that for my youngest son, too. And it’s still like they also, like he also would have come back to Ireland he and I got involved in school strikes and he did a run down the country kind of highlight things. And he kind of plugged me into some of the youth in Ireland, but , he was hitting an older age and he’s now just done a year of college. And actually he’s kind of in a different space now having done a lot of that activism , of trying to return to what does he get to do for himself? And what’s the obligation to do for the world for others, you know, and he’s a musician and creative, and he’s really in a place now of figuring out his privilege and what does he do with that? And, you know, but can he also have fun and be young still and make music more. And so it’s really. Yeah, but he would also track back to that, even that waking up moment to thinking about those things, to facing those kinds of challenges that o ur generation are facing about.

Morag Gamble:
Yeah . There’s something about both the way that I guess the, the educational environment that you’ve created and surrounded your children in. And I guess maybe similarly here that created the possibility for what they saw there to land. And I wonder whether you talk a bit about the, kind of the way that the educational platform or environment..

Suzie Cahn:
I guess the interesting thing is for me I sometimes feel like I’m part of a resistance that is almost done in the, in the secret places, in the hidden places. And I think for me, there’s a cultural piece of that. I remember meeting another Australian permaculturist who came over for a different conference in London, the international permacultur conference , her name’s April, you probably know of her. Yeah. And she stayed at our farm and she said, oh, the thing you’re talking about, we call tall poppy syndrome in Australia. And I said, ah, we don’t have that expression. But for her, it was like, if you stick your head up too high, your head get chopped off. And I think that one of the cultural pieces of equipment that we have in Ireland is not putting your head up high, actually. As quietly and in the marginal places and in the edges doing something that’s resisting and not necessarily shouting about it, although there’s moments when I was young in my twenties and I definitely was involved in protest in that straight up way. But I think as a mother, I did things that were less in the face of something, but it was still resisting. Resisting is really an ongoing and challenging energy if you don’t just opt out entirely. Which I think I think now what if there had been community around me. What, if there had been enough other people in that resistance that that’s come late because I have, I have four kids and my eldest will be 27 this summer. And so the period where, and he did go through a period of homeschooling and so on, but I think that the the communal resistance, like the school that Finn went to was started by another mother. And it was like, there was all these other people looking for another way in education by the time Finn came along whereas it was a bit of a little more lonely journey where I was aware of things I didn’t like about mainstream education system. And was very aware of things that were fitting my children and some more than others. And yet I didn’t, I was. So I think what I did was something that maybe I also had by luck or whatever for myself as I did not fit in the mainstream school system, myself, especially not primary school. But what was surrounding me was actually a lot of community and was a lot of time in nature and being able to be a wild child and and so I think what I, the environment that you’re trying to draw out of my experience was, well, maybe if I just create enough of other influences, maybe if around them, so some will go to school. Some won’t, some will be homeschooling , but that they’ll encounter. So through our kind of permaculture hub, we’ve had so many different people come from all over the world and from Ireland, and also the spaces that I could create or send them to, or to just know that there’s diversity in the world, and there’s not a one size fits all. And that there’s a hundred million pathways to your own identity and to your own. So now I like what I’ve been watching in my children over as they, as they do that thing, where they shed lots of the identity that you might’ve had around them, or like your identity or your what you like, what you’re passionate about, what you’re into. And they go, well, let’s just shake the trees and see how much of that we’re keeping and see what is new for us. I feel like they at least have a lot of choice about their values, their passions, their identity, but I also get the feedback because of course now they tell me what I got wrong. And one of the things that the feedback is is that by living on the edge and not having supportive community and not living on the edge of the main stream system, they also didn’t have full housing security. They didn’t have the little economic security and they were in a way exposed to educational concepts and ideas that are quite common. And people who do have affluence who can travel maybe, or send their kids to an international school, or so they had this kind of exposure to other ideas, but they had , they lived in a family with an economy that was closer to people without money or without those opportunities. And it’s actually confused them lots because, they all talk about kind of wanting that the comfortable home and these things that didn’t, they could see peers having. And because we were resisting because my husband and I were both going nowhere, not going up the corporate ladder in his case when he got into computing and then could’ve risen up a corporate computing ladder, but kind of bugged out and was like, I can’t do this. So I’m getting out of here. And so that resistance in me to , whereas in the arts and then art therapy, and then nature-based education and community gardens and school gardens, and then permaculture holding and so on and eco village friends and alternative friends and working class friends and all these different things that it was actually very confusing for them to try say, why do we not get the benefits of the bloody system? Could we not have had some of that please? You know, you made these choices, but we actually suffered the consequences of those choices and I mean, they’re great. They’re very forgiving as well, but they’re really, if you bring up your children to have a voice, then they’re pretty articulate with that voice later on. So for the good. And now, so I don’t know , I mean, for me, I’d be really curious about that for you and whether any of your experience of the culture you were brought up in our lifetime, this deepening of the divide and the kind of post, like late stage capitalism and post-colonial legacies of damage and great degradation of land and people. And I’d be curious whether that you were conscious of resisting it or, providing an alternative in your life and in your children. And what happened for you at like, I dunno , where it begins for you.

Morag Gamble:
Well, as I was listening to you I felt like you were sort of describing how I feel about it, too . Tha I was also a protester in my teens going out whatever was particularly around protecting forests. There were peace rallies. There was a whole lot of different things happening at the time, uranium mining. So I was constantly on the streets talking about different things. And I think I got to the point where I did get a bit burned out by that. I felt I got to the point of thinking, no one’s even listening. No one even really cares about this. You know, there’s a few of us who just keep on pushing and resisting, but it’s being heard. And so I think I, there was a few other things that were going on in my life at that time. I was in my late teens, you know, a lot of angst of all sorts don’t really need to go into that. But I retreated for a year. I just went into a little bubble and I was, I just felt deeply hurt by society in so many ways. And just , I had to take that all in. Like I didn’t get brought up in an eco village or a permaculture community, but I was brought up in a suburb in Melbourne. Mum and dad were public servants. So we weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either. We had enough to eat. We always had clean clothes on our back and after school , it was a very standard kind of upbringing. But yet within that, there was a resistance that I felt coming through with my parents. Like they built their house with their own hands. They designed it to be oriented, to collect the sun and the thermal heat. And they had natural foods and they filled the backyard and the front yard with native plants, which would attract the birds. And whereas everyone else had the lawns . And that was different. Like the house didn’t face the street, which was what you meant to do. It faced the sun. The garden was not neat. It was wilderness and tucked in amongst that were fruit trees and pots of herbs. And they brought us up as vegetarians. And so you’d go out somewhere back then, there weren’t vegetarian meals. They’d just kind of go, oh, you’re vegetarian, scrape off the meat and give you the peas and carrots. So we didn’t go out very much sort of events. We were, it was a very kind of quiet upbringing. But there felt like there was a resistance in that. There was something about caring for what was happening. Particularly my mum was around what was going on in the planet , w ith wildlife. And my dad particularly was, h ad a focus on ethics and being socially just, and that was all. And t he, he talked about permi. He introduced me to permaculture thinking and ideas. And so, yeah, as an activist it was sort of a natural fit. It was like, well, you ar e a lways talking about solar and, you know, not harming anything. And so I just naturally went into this activism mode, but when I got burned by it and society, and came back to thinking what do I do? What do I do with this? Where do I go? And I had really no interest. I remember being, I was studying landscape architecture at the time and I remember actually thinking, well, I don’t actually really care about what they’re teaching us here. They’re teaching us how to become a designer for landscapes, for the ri ch a n d y e ah. Anyone who has money for a student, we have this suburb in Melbourne called Toorak , which was kind of like, well, everyone was aspiring to be a landscape architect for Toorak houses. And I just saw this absolute pointlessness in spending all your life just to do that. So I started exploring ways of weaving permaculture in with that, the landscape architecture and th inking a bout design with nature. And I remember being told at university, de sign w ith nature that’s passe. And w e need to be focusing on these contemporary methods of de sign. I just felt like punched in the stomach by that. And I quit. And I had like, I think one term left to go, I didn’t want to be part of that system. And I left and I went off to Schumacher college and studied with, Fritjof Capra and Vandana Shiva, and Satish Kumar, and just tried to sort of explore different ideas and, and go to like, where was where do I come from as well? Like where do I belong? So I started traveling and traveling into Scotland and across the island, because that’s where, where my roots are but I knew nothing of it. When you grow up in Australia. You’re in this place, you have this sense of that it’s not your place, you know that, but you don’t have another place that is your own either. Like we, even though you feel part of the colonizer group, you’re also migrants. And in some ways from ancestors also refugees, and I know I can’t possibly even begin to relate to the current existence of refugees, but there’s this sense of displacement that’s in that. And so I s pent a bit of time, t alking with indigenous elders about this, but I mean, just before I go down that line of thought though, and just back on that resistance idea that I did feel a shift too when my children were born, that there are so many different ways to be strong and to I don ‘t kn ow.. I guess, what I’ve tried to do with what, with my life is to be in a place where I can live and be fully present in what it is that I feel are the most important values to me. And that there’s an integrity about that. And so tha t wh en I speak, or when I teach that it’s from that place, it’s not something that I’m going, well, we should be doing this, or we should be doing that, or you should change, or, you know, it’s all that kind of the well, let’s just be it and see what happens and then share from that phase. And that’s kind of the resistance model. Just being it and ra i sing children in a way that is helping them to see past the corporate gloss. I was hav ing a really interesting conversation about Minecraft with my son the other day. We have thi s ongoing dialogue. We’d avoided having computer game type of stuff in our house for a very long time. And he discovered it and he loves it. And I’ve had to kind of really open up my whole thinking about what that means. We were on a journey somewhere. I’d lov e actually going on a journey with them in the car every now and then, just because it gives me a chance, like a one-on-one. You’re locked in t hi s car we’v e mad e for the next hour. I’m going to have a real go at having a conversation with you where you can’t be distracted by all the things around. And we started to talk about all the inherent bias and values that are in games and he can see, he looks at advertising, he’s critical of what he sees around him, but when it came to the game, he just had his blinkers on. And so we had these, I said, you know, what about if I’ve noticed you on there as I’ve walked past that you’ re lik e, you’re chopping this monoculture crop of sugar cane or something. It’s like, what have you got more points on a game like that for adding diversity? Like the more diverse crops you had in your Minecraft farm, the more points you would get, and that you start to inherently shift the way that peo ple think and the values they’re getting by adding. So, like, my resistance comes in many forms. I try to find ways to still have the same kind of conversations and open up the dial ogue wit h them through the lens that they’re currently in. The more that I push against that, the more that I see him goi ng into that world and rejecting what it is that I represent, or the conversations that we can have openly. And so, oh, gosh, it’s hard. Yeah, so the resistance is in the everyday conversations that you have wherever you are.

Suzie Cahn:
Absolutely. I guess that like this phrase that has been in many of my conversations in the pretty much every like of my spheres of chats in the last year. And so many of them have been online of course, but [inaudible] dimension and in some ways, a more inclusive dimension, although I would still say not really that inclusive, but there’s been more edges, but I think the things that have come to a stronger light the deep, deep, and deepening inequality in the world and the justice and the conversations about climate justice and who’s feeling the effects of the world the inequality that this got. So even if you knew it before, and you were aware of deep inequality, that the COVID situation has just like shone such a torch to show it where it’s, you know, even for those who might’ve been in a state of denial about it cannot deny it. So then they’re faced with choices about like, at the moment the question of do we take the benefits of capitalism and the benefits of our privilege and like, what do you do? And I suppose that question that you’re saying for your son, with the Minecraft, it’s no different than would you like the vaccine? It’s like do you take it o r d o y ou, and if you withhold your, this is something I definitely grappled with for the children and what I was saying that t hey’ve come back , which is if you withhold these privileges, you just make us crave t hem they just want them because they are there. And I suppose I’ve been interested in the d ecolonial conversation about, is it just enough to acknowledge your privilege and to do something with that? As much as you can say, I have a great amount of privilege. I think also those insights of the people on the edges of the resistance, it’s this strange thing of not like, I know that the the culture that your parents were doing things for themselves and building a house for themselves and growing food for themselves is one of the forms definitely o f resistance of saying, okay, I’m not going to support this other e xploitative system. There’s a writer here in Ireland, Mark Boyle w ho wrote t he moneyless m an, a nd then he’s since gone on and several other books, but o ne of them, his most recent one was e xperimented with, how far do you take it? And he came off of all sorts of violence. As an individual that he could, as a consumption e xperiments, like, could he have nothing that is made and i t’s through an exploited and violence of the colonial capitalist world, you know? So that brought him back down to candlelight and, you know, not much else, no electricity so he wrote his latest book by l ong h and. And what he talks about is like, what did he gain from that as an individual as well. And he gained a lot of old man f riends down the road who were the only ones w ho at the time that was on the same kind of timeframe that he was, that at the time to stand at the edge of a field and talk, and he gained whole different m ental state for writing by hand and how he composed his thoughts a nd, and all of these things. And I have definitely g ot those leanings. I have definitely got the complete switch off the grid and almost hermit like existence to just feel free for one minute of the inherent violence of my p rivileged life that’s all those invisible a cres and all those invisible social justice things that feed me and, and allow us to talk on this computer. And so it’s almost like, I feel like that that conversation with our children is around how high do we live within this with our privilege, with t hese access. Certainly to go down the route of, my husband brings in the balance, I think, because that’s, I think a good thing for that living the l ife life of like how does one individual, I think that there’s something, one of my, c hildren actually talks about is that, that is the ultimate of a capitalist system is to make you believe it is you as an individual that has to that that’s an argument. That’s a lot of that system promoters be very happy having with you, you know? O h y eah. Which individual choice would you like to make this one or that one. And t hat they love us to stick to that rather than to look at it systemically and in a holistic sense. So in some ways that’s the resistance as well with our children to not say, it’s actually not got to do with you as an individual playing minecraft. That’s really not what we’re needing to worry about here. You know, your individual choices aren’t his, but it is that greater awareness. Like you’re trying to give of the system we live within and the choices y ou’ll then be faced with and the things that, that we have privileges within, but also the things we don’t.

Morag Gamble:
I think for me the thing that, because there’s so many questions about it and you don’t, you don’t see the privilege that you have until you sort of faced.. It’s just inherent in everything, isn’t it? You know? And so this conversation has started to unpack so many different things. And what I found so useful is to just open up conversations. So I’ve just faced my uncertainty, the questions I have and not go I don’t know, I’ll just kind of continue on. It’s like, I actually really don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing here. This is new for me. And I know that I don’t see a whole lot of stuff and just be in that, that open space. And soI was starting to say earlier that I spent a bit of time with a indigenous elder. He lives not actually from this land he’s , from the [inaudible] land, which is just south of here, but he spends a lot of time in this area and he’s, he’s always up for a chat. I often see him in town and I just sit down. So we went down to a little park next to the neighborhood center that he’d been involved in setting up with bush foods. And as we’re walking down there he’s picking off all these berries. Oh , do you know, each one of these berries has a different flavor? Can you check them out as we go along? Like, we’re having this sort of bush tucker feast, we’re going along, we get down, we sit down in this little yarning circle that he created there. I started asking him about this question about I don’t really know what I’m meant to do about this and where I fit and where I’m from, like how, what voice I have within of this. One of the things that just struck me so much about this whole conversation, I actually recorded this conversation. I think it’s up on the YouTube somewhere. I recorded one of the conversations that I’d had with him . We were talking about, cause I said I have ancestors in, Ireland and Scotland.I know my mum was from England. She came from England, but her ancestors were from Wales. And so like, there’s all this kind of history there, but I was born in Melbourne and I kind of feel like I’m part of the problem. And he says, well, where exactly in Melbourne were you born? Where, where are you from? And so we started talking that, I’m from near the Mullum Mullum river. And my land is th e, as, from the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. I always felt like, well, that’s not my right to ever say that I’m from that land because I I’m not, but he actually said, no, you are, you were born there. That is your land. And you are, you have, you don’t have the dreaming, but you have the responsibility to connect with that land and to be with that land and care for that land and to be a steward of t hat land. And it just transformed how I thought rather than being sort of someone who’s kind of a part of the co lonized a s p art of the problem, we always get stuck in this and this. I think one of the things that makes us so stuck here in Australia is the guilt and a lot of people don’t want to face it. So they’ll just kind of turn th e other cheek. And, and so, but then if you get caught in the guilt, then you become stu ck as well. And so finding a way. So it’s being in conversation, h a ve the great honor to have an enormous amount of, w o men elders around me at the moment who I can talk, I can just ask them questions and they just tell me if I’m being an idiot or not, and just being straight up. So the part of this, I think that the process of deco lonization is to be in the conversation, is to I think we’ve talked about this before is t o be asking the questions to be open to change your script, to be open to, we’ll not have a script at all, because we don’t have one for this.

Suzie Cahn:
In those conversations that you’re having, like, I’d be really interested because of permaculture origins. You said even your dad was telling you about it in Australia. And I have these little snippets of stories and sometimes you have a story that isn’t the truth, but it contains a greater truth. And that there’s a way that they say like, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Meaning that there’s something in it. And that’s , I don’t know if these have any facts in them, but the stories that I have is I got to tell you, and you’re going to , I just would be interested to hear, I understood from, a friend of a friend in America who came over to Australia and worked with Bill Mollison, and then there was these other pieces about in Mollison’s book , there’s this image that is from my understanding is it’s from some kinds of Aboriginal world view and imagery. And then there’s pieces that make in the book a cknowledgement of the inspiration f r om Aboriginal people in per maculture. So the story that I have is that Mollison knew that he had gotten huge inspiration for Aboriginal people, but he didn’t talk, he allegedly didn’t talk about that. This is this guy in America that knew him, told another person that told me that he didn’t talk about it too much because he thought that it would create another thing that people could show up. Like they show up to get Aboriginal art or to extract some other thing or some other wisdom by kind of extractive non generative, you know , means of saying we’ll have some of that as well, please. We’d like your perhaps an allegory may not be true at all, but even if it were true or not true, it is something that indigenous people around the world have been vocal about. The codifications of , their wisdom and connection to holistic understanding of ecosystem and intelligence and ecosystem management and restoration and living in balance and so on. And that it does seem like for me, that ecology and permaculture are like a translator for Western science educated people that it’s like and, but often not acknowledged and often not honored I suppose, with its lineage. And that for me is something that I’ve certainly been talking about on our permaculture course this year. I kind of said some of this and we , we always do a kind of big community welcome to all the diversity that’s there and to the ancestry of the people in the land that we’re on and all the peoples that have been on the land, we don’t have that exact dreaming, but with the Celtic knowledge or the pre- celtic knowledge, it’s kind of there that there is a , they think a continuous to most recent studies of , I think bog remnants is that there’s people on this land for 33,000 years. So we were around a long time as continual connection to this island. So my question is, what’s your thinking about that as an Australian permaculturist, who has access to perhaps repair and not extraction of just going back to the aboriginals, saying well now could you help us decolonize ourselves actually..now that we’re waking up? Could you be once again, like gifting us this, or a re we extracted or how do we do it in a, in a healthy exchange that’s not so easily l ike corrupted by what I think my eldest son says that capitalism swallows everything. How do we not let that happen again, if we’re really being in d ialogue and being in conversation?

Morag Gamble:
It’s a really, really interesting question. And there’s lots of different aspects to the response that I have as well. So one of the things that happens within the courses that anyone who wants to join from indigenous community is welcome to. We join in as part of a , like a conversation. Actually one woman just joined the other day. She has a background in nutrition and she’s exploring indigenous foods from that perspective. And she did a permaculture course a little while ago, actually. And she said, while she was doing it, she just had this moment of realization that permaculture and indigenous ways of thinking just fit so beautifully and that it gave her kind of a platform and a voice for also sharing that. And so we’re going to start working together, she’s coming to this course to revisit that. She went off on a tangent, she went into university, she’s started doing a PhD and just went, oh, hang on wrong direction, right topic, but wrong direction. So she’s coming back into really just immerse herself in permaculture thinking in a way that we’ll see how we can have this dialogue, so that how the permaculture thinking can inform how she revisits her knowledge of place at the same time as permaculture being informed by how she sees the principles and the ethics and the way of describing permaculture. And I think the thing is that for me, there’s this like multiple descriptions of permaculture anyway. So, you know, I’m also working at the same time with , um, refugees throughout east Africa, and they’re describing permaculture as something which fits within their worldview. So there’s a whole group of women that I’m working with in , in Australia at the moment who are, who are exploring their indigeneity, like they’re , they might’ve been brought up with part of that knowledge, but not all of it and feel kind of lost as well between worlds and that permaculture they’re finding is actually a way that’s kind of like a bridge. It’s a bridge between, like you’re saying the scientific world or the Western world that is deeply rooted and resonates with them. It speaks to them. So many conversations that I’ve had, that it’s been an entirely embracing of it, but really describing it in language that makes sense. Another woman, for example, down a bit further south from me, a Kambungi woman again. She sort of the Coffs Harbour South of Byron bay area there , um, sort of ocean people. And she’s exploring the seasonal calendars of plants and the stories of plants and the dreaming of plants. And then how do you start to then create indigenous food gardens that can be shared? Cause people still want to grow carrots and cabbages food from places that it doesn’t belong. So there’s a big shift, but at the same time, I also have other conversations with elders from other places like amazing woman called Lilla Watson who’s grown up in an incredibly strong vocal indigenous family that have been resisting for a really long time. And she says, well, you know, there’s some key issues here. One is around access to land and very few indigenous people have access to land to even begin to regenerate the type of food systems that we want. Another one is that it does go into a corporate thing. So like Kakadu plum for example has been identified as having one of the highest vitamin Cs. But if the kakadu plum i s grown in the forest, in the forest community, then it has the connectedness to all the others it’s grown. It’s grown in a community. If you take it out of i ts community, plonk i t over here, it will not have the same qualities. It won’t have the same healing qualities it’s extracted from its context and context is everything. So t hey’re s aying one it’s destroying what it is by separating it. And secondly, what it’s doing is it’s then taking our knowledge, corporatizing it and putting it in a way that we don’t ever get any value back from that. It’s just an extraction of knowledge. So there are all these dimensions of it . Some people saying permaculture is really well. I mean, that’s not permaculture that’s agriculture. So I think the value coming in through permaculture is se eing w hat I’m experiencing anyway is really important. I’ m j ust about to head up in a couple of weeks to the Northern part of Australia up near Ca irns i n the ra inforest j ustcoming together to explore how they’re going to move forward because they’re stuck. And they’ve said, look we’ve got land up here, but we’re kind of a little bit of a loss what we’re going to do with it. We ‘ve g ot this land. And it was an old banana plantation, which was huge amounts of chemicals. The land was degraded. It was clear of the rain for us. We need to work out how to regenerate it and how to find a way to access the knowledge.

Suzie Cahn:
They lost that knowledge did they express that they’ve lost that because of what’s happened in their education or..

Morag Gamble:
Yeah. Well, cause they’d been taken off country. Most people have been shifted to places so that the country they’re from and the stories they have and the knowledge that’s embedded in all of that has just been all mixed up. And so when you come to a place and you land in a place and you get given a piece of land, it’s not necessarily the land that you’re from, it might be somewhere nearby, but it’s not. It doesn’t have those..

Suzie Cahn:
How is that happening. How are they re-accessing the land?

Morag Gamble:
Well, their particular piece of land I think, is quite unusual that they have. So this is one particular community jump on community, which is one of the groups out there that have access to quite a significant piece of land that back in the 1970s I think was bought for them I think it was by the government.

Suzie Cahn:
So sort of resettlement program say , you can have this bit of land because we’ve taken this other bit of land, that sort of thing.

Morag Gamble:
Yeah. And then they managed to get a few other bits and pieces and have this. So, now that a big hurricane came through a little while ago and knocked out all the banana plantations, which were chemical banana plantations, they weren’t growing traditionally. And that was kind of the main source of income. It was a really good income for them for a while. That got taken out. They didn’t have any resources to be able to rebuild it and now they’re going, well, actually we don’t want to rebuild that. We’ve had a pause. We realized now we actually want to do something completely differently. How do we do that? We want to integrate with that our bush food knowledge and bring back our stories and sit together with people who have an understanding of how to think in a way to regenerate land and just see where we get to. And so we’re having a circle up there in the next few weeks to talk about that. And who knows, what’s going to come with the kind of the idea is that it’s integrating eco village, it’s with the global ecovillage network as well. So looking at what are the ways of regenerating economy thinking about housing, water, wastewater food systems, because they have, so they really have so little up there and very little access to resources to do it.

Suzie Cahn:
I noticed some stuff coming out of the global ecovillage movement recently, that seems to be moving more into alignment in a justice way, like into work that social justice and maybe a different like in service to kind of using the knowledge and t he resources, or maybe it’s simply paying it back, you know, having taken it forward one way, it’s like saying, well, we have all this and actually it comes from your people and it comes from your ancestors and we’d like toshow up and return it. Is that something you’ve noticed too? C ause I’m not that connected with the global ecovillage. I don’t live in an e covillage and permaculture sort of circles and transition t own circles tend to intersect e covillage circles. So I hear bits and pieces.

Morag Gamble:
Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I mean my world, even though I live in an ecovillage, my world is more in that of permaculture and permaculture service work, wherever that might be. Whether it be with youth, with indigenous communities and with refugees. So that’s kind of my main area of work. What I find really interesting about this particular direction that GENOA is taking, which is the Oceania region, is that they’re mostly working with a lot of indigenous groups. Whether you’re talking about Koreans or various countries through Southeast Asia to indigenous communities here, there is, that is a big focus. It is about decolonizing the concept of an eco village and reframing what an eco village means, because that is what, like what is one planet living? What is living in a way that is nourishing the planet, rebuilding traditional cultures, all of those things at the same time. And that what I’m seeing is that by going into a community like that, it’s not going in saying, okay, we’ve got an answer fo r y o u. And here’s the ecovillage design, and this is what you do. And it’s the same with permaculture. Like you wo uld n ever do that. It’s just you go an d y o u o pen up conversations to explore what this means and how that relates to that. And somewhere you find that point of connection and when you to f ind those points of connection, then you start to explore other things. And then they’ll say, oh, well, you know, actually that bit there looks like it wo uld b e really helpful for us. And we see how that relates to us. And then it’s just kind of this sort of, this, it’s a weaving that happens. And s o me gets left off, we ll, that’s ir relevant t o us. We don’t need that bi t, or we’re going to redescribe it as that. And, what I hear often, and I r emember this, even in Indonesia, like 20 years ago, working with communities th ere, they’re saying, we really appreciate you bringing this because we’d been told, like in the 1970s, when the green revolution just sweeped the islands of Indonesia, they were swept at gunpoint saying, give us all your old seeds, take these ones, use these chemicals, do this, you know, rip out those, food forests and expand your crops into larger fields. This whole transformation happened so violently and so rapidly in those places that some had kept the little seeds aside, or a little corners of food forests in valley somewhere. And then when you come and you share stories about seed saving and food forests and al l the stuff that’s within permaculture, they say that’s it like, that’s what we had before. They recognize it totally. And so it’s not saying that this is permaculture and we own it. It’s saying this is a pattern that people everywhere can recognize and can relate to when you look at that. And so I think it’s really, I think it’s totally dependent on how you explain what permaculture is and how you open conversations about how we use permaculture.

Suzie Cahn:
So I have kind of a question about that, because as you were saying that, and as you said, so of course you wouldn’t go into permaculture would not go. And I’m thinking, yeah, I know maybe you wouldn’t, but I’m not sure that that’s true of everybody that’s going around the world bringing permaculture. And I experienced this because I basically wouldn’t do it. I got invited several times to go and do overseas work in permaculture. And there were lots of reasons why. Different age of my children and stage of life and other needs. But I started going, okay, I’m kind of tempted just to at least explore and know that this system that I am working with here in Ireland is universally applicable atto a deeper understanding of land and regeneration. And so we did two different things. One, we took a family trip as a charity rally and we drove from Ireland to Mongolia with a van to donate. It was part of a charity that did this thing. And on the way I visited some permaculture students I known in Ireland who were in Poland. And then I also told the charity, look, I’ve no idea if my skillset is of any use in Mongolia, but we’re going to stay an extra period of time. And if there’s somewhere that I can do something, just tell me and I’ll try and do something. And what happened was that, I mean, I could have been kidnapped. Honestly, the people that I did interact with who were in a different reason for the displacement in Mongolia, they would have had Russia and China and still do at their door. And even they worry, they’ve kind of made friends more with Japan and Korea because they feel safer in their hands, but it’s still, you know, capitalism’s rife and rushing into build airports and extract minerals and so on. But the Mongolians themselves, the reason that they need to change their food production systems is the same reason all over the world, where there is increased urbanization, increased people going to the city. But it’s sort of really, there’s an interesting, like the climactic conditions, the resistance of the land itself almost, and the environment is such that, like it’s only 3 million people in a vast landscape and about a million and a half of them live in Ulaanbaatar the biggest city and everybody else still lives on the step. And the things that we’re forcing them to change were climate change. They had stories of something called the dzud, which was a severe winter when their herds and they have different herds depending on where they are in Mongolia live. They have sheep and goats in some places, but they have camel and yak and a lot of horses, you know, as their herd but whatever that was, whatever the meat and milk that they survived on, that have happened maybe once every a hundred years. A bit like a hundred year flood or a hundred year storm, they had a hundred year freezing winters and then their herd would die off. And it was a dzud. It was a famine. And they’re happening all the time now, like every couple of years or even every year. So the cattle or the herd or whatever the herd is, is under threat. And that’s pushing more people to cities and towns. And what was very interesting though in the conversations that I’ve had with lots of different people in different projects that I got to visit and share was that they actually really have such a deep connection to being food producers. And at that base level producer not extracted, although there’s an attempt. I mean, what if I met somebody in the ministry of agriculture and it was so interesting if I was meeting someone in the ministry of agriculture in London 2013. I’d still be trying to convince them climate change was a thing. But then I started my conversation I was saying, you know, so what are the changes in your environment? What are the things, why do you need any other system? What’s changing? And with him, it was like, well, okay, so there’s climate change. It was like, move on, let’s get to the solutions. You know, there was no, there was no convincing me to, it was lived experience of their lands. But the thing that was interesting was that there was still an attempt to sell meat through a series of middlemen into the city that was still happening. But what was also happening was in the guard district around the city where they weren’t supposed to keep any herds , all the people living in what would look like shantytown , maybe if it was India or somewhere where there’d been refugees displaced in Africa and from one country to another, where you have hut s hantytown, it was kind of shantytown poor, except that they brought with them all their traditional knowledge. So they were living in [ i naudible] cold. And they all had herds that weren’t supposed to have in the city, but everybody kept a few something and they walked them out of the city onto the step at night, you know, brought them in at night and m ilked them and ate things. And so there was this connection to we are still. Capitalism and hasn’t taken away our means of production. We can still produce for ourselves and still kind of a really strong interest, even though t hey’ve no tradition of eating vegetables of any kind. In Western Mongolia, I’ve met some women who were growing vegetables. And it was really interesting for me. I was really fascinated by a community meal that I was involved in being invited into and there was p iles of things i n a shared meal that you just ate. T hey tried to give me a fork at one point, but t hey couldn’t find it. But there was just a kind of this, and the really interesting thing was that the men were still eating all the meat in the meal. And there were a lot of preserved jars of pickled vegetables. And the women were demolishing them and they’d grown them and they were eating them, but the men were kind of not really eating them. And I was just, it blew my mind. I was like, is it because they don’t want to adopt a new vegetable? Like is it that, or is it nutrients that the women are going, yeah, I really want more of this. I like my body’s saying, I quite like this. L ike, it was so interesting, but t hat was the only time and I didn’t stay and I was invited to go back and to do a lot more, but I didn’t feel t he level of comfort or ability to do that at the time of my life. And so I didn’t do a ny m ore overseas permaculture work or anything like that, but it was interesting to begin t he thoughts. And then I don’t know if you know, A lbert Bates w ho’s a global village educator. Albert t eaches [inaudible] e covillage a nd permaculture for intermittently for quite a lot of years. And I had done my PDC with him. We had connected and being on the same teaching team and we’d had lots of nice chats. So he started trying to persuade me to come to Belize l ast year and well two or three years ago, actually. And I kept sort of pushing back and s aying, I don’t know why you want a white woman from Ireland to come and teach in Belize. I don’t understand the request. And it’s like, there’s a 30 year M ayan mountain permaculture project there. Then I had met his partner in the same international pe rmaculture c onference in London. And so they just kept trying to persuade me to come and eventually I was, I du nno, they said, well, it’s the community stuff you bring. It’s the female stuff you bring. We previously had Star Hawk and we previously had Maddy Harland of permaculture magazine co me. And we want someone in that niche. And I, that was like, first of all, by the way, Star Ha wk’s a bit of a hero. So it was a bit like you want me to fi ll S tar Hawk’s shoes. That’s not intimidating at all. But I wanted to ask you by way of that, because wh en I did go in the end, it was partly because their funder pushed them to say, why have you been teaching permaculture but you don’t have indigenous local teachers that you’ve passed this on t o . And the funder said, we ll, if we’re go ing t o f und, we need to see you hand it on. And so I was like, okay, now I’ll come. If that’s what you’re doing in this piece of work. Now I’m interested if, if you want to take what the white Americans have brought, even though it’s 30 years, you know, to these. You want to see the people that have taken in y our course from the indigenous groups of Be lize, and there are they’re there. And they’re interested in bringing into their own communities an d r eclaiming it in their own wisdom in that way. So I went in a nd it was really interesting. There were five teachers who had done the course before who were then meant to be doing a sort of a teacher track with us to then take it away again. I had said in the beginning, I did opening circle, and I said, I’d love to hear from all of us, because there was people from America th ere, Guatemala, Belize. So I ‘ d l ove to hear, like you just talked about where are your ancestors from? Where are your people from, and where were you born, but where are your people from? And it was lovely because we went around in the group and there was, a n American young woman teacher and talked about her ancestors being probably Irish, but then becoming poor dirt farmers in th e S outh of America. And, you know, this kind of, you know, it was everybody kind of shared different things. And for me, it was, I needed this as an education in Belize because there are many different groups of Be lize. There are Indian in Northern Belize there’s, Ea st Indian that came later, but there’s also Mayan people that we were mostly connected to in the Mayan mountains and with the village that we were there, people that were coming up to the course from up the river from just where we were and the [i n audible] a whole amazing story of a A frican tribe, who were one of the few African tribes captured [inaudible] and escaped their boats and were never enslaved. And th en e nded up on an island, w ith what were called Red Ca ribs a nd then because the British were not very happy th at t his had happened, decided to come and try and annihilate them or capture them again. And they did, and they brought them to a island off of Belize and Guatemalan coast. And there were dentured and enslaved Irish people, and the Garifuna died. People came there and they said to the Irish people break th emselves t hat they will be slaves for us and work them hard. And the Irish apparently basically said, no, we’re not going to do your work to enslave people. We’ve already been enslaved by you. And so they got them all and got them escaped off the island and sent them to the coast of Belize and Guatemala. And I met one of their elders who whenever I was there said, oh, I was in your country in Ir eland, because we considered ourselves to have a blood debt to the Irish. And one of your former presidents is involved in a h e rbalist women’s circle, and they were trying to reclaim your knowledge of herps. And she’s a p l ant woman of the Garifuna and they funded her to come to Ireland for two years to work with secret Irish women’s circles of herbalism to hel p tr y to refine. So there’s this mad sort of stuff. But one of the things that happened in that circle was I said, I’m a strange phenomenon because I am white. And I have the privilege of being a white European. I don’t get checked at airports. I can tr avel the world and use this white passing privilege and also wealth that was from what has ha ppened in a kind of new liberal capitalist world, but I’m also could be considered a white indigenous person because I’m from the land that my people are from. But I’m a mixture because there were, some of my people came from Scotland and some may have mostly fled as refugees, but they’re parts of these tribes. And so I just mentioned this when I was trying to describe my ancestry in that opening circle. And three days later when basically these teachers are supposed to be going to be teachers, there was one young woman amongst them who was just furious. She just felt like she was being patronized by some of the way that the teaching was going on, that wasn’t acknowledging its wisdom and its tradition. And there was almost going to be a mas s le aving. And the mas s le aving didn’t happen because this Garifuna older woman sort of sat them all down and said, let’s go tal k to Su zie that remember that white indigenous woman. And it was just such a funny thing because I really don’t want to claim indigeneity in that way, you know? And I felt like a false moment of like, oh no, what have I said? But it did actually what you’re saying, it did create a bridging moment. And so we sat together and talked and through the way that I continued to teach on the course, I mean, there was one moment where I, u h , Al bert said, oh, could you teach that game, with the eco system an d the str ings. S o I assume you know this game where everybody has an element, a creature, plant of an ec osystem, and you figure out who eats whom and what the exchanges of nutrients are. I said, do you want me to do that in a sub rain forest in Be lize. So I said, okay, I’m game. I will do this. So I had actually a lot of fun because what I did was I said, okay, I know nothing, but I know you know who the top predators are. So within this teaching group we did that and we did all the so who eats him and who wor ks th e ir pl ant, and we created it together. And then I thought I’m goi ng to keep going with this. Cau se I’ ve used this game before fortransition towns stuff. So I said, okay, now I want you to do it again. But now could you tell me from your people, what were the exchanges in a v i llage before tha t yo u find yourselves being corrupted or corroded or broken apart or fragmented like the old people, either you r ol d people are as far back as you can tell me what let’s pick up some rol es. S o then they picked up these roles of the different things people exchanged in the village, including one very hilarious thing that was to do with, I can’t say it, but the mor e th ey did this, by the way, the more, they all went into the common language amongst all their di f ferent is yes, English, but actually it’s pigeon. So they all were kind of getting more animated. And I had been with them by then a week and I love language and I love listening and picking up. So they’re throwing out pit ch it . A nd I sta rt th rowing out pitching too and the y’re th e re in st itches because I’m obviously not doing a very good job, but I can’t believe I’ve even picked up any of the m, y ou know, tha t th ere was something, I think it was called a cut job, man, something like this. And it was basically, there was it’s the person who, who still exist in Belize today, who is like the odd job man. You kn o w? S o one of the characters that they kin d of ca me up with was the cut job man. And he would do other things. And then I did it one more time for, if you wer e a r e paired and regenerated your community in the wa y that it needs. What are the things that have gone and th e y’re mi ssing, we put them all back in and did a kind of like, you might call it eco village de sign. And we did like all three of them. And we were in stitches like the whole time. It was very, very funny. And afterwards the others we had a conversation every evening with the teachers and Albert kin d of sa id, well, I’ve never seen anyone do it like that before, but it was like my attempt to say, and in the end, when they did their design projects like tha t, p eople do at the end we said to the teachers where you do one for how you now take this, if you want to bridge it back into your com munity. S o what will you do? Like how, what design could you come up with. Bec ause th ey had, and they basically did reclaim it as their knowledge. And they, when they presented, they said so we know all of this, but we didn’t know how to teach it to our young people and what we want to have a center in our own communities. And one of the things that had happened by the Mayan mountain PDCs was, they said we don’t normally meet outside of our cultural groups. So the Mayan people don’t normally meet many people in the Garifunda ground then the East Indian groups don’t really meet groups, you know? And they said, whe n we come here with all of you, we meet each other. So they, they conceived of a vision of indigenous wisdom permaculture center that was for everyone. And that would be in their own village away from like where crisis developed. Say, it’s great. We could go to you as a site visit, but we don’t, we can’t keep coming here. We’ve got to embed this back in our own community. And, I w as very fascinated by all of that. Now COVID hit and they ‘d bee n in dire stra its and the women that I particularly made friends with, who want me to keep on talking to them, like they ‘ve bee n basically just looking after their immediate health needs of their communities. So that’s a very long win d ed sto ry, but before we finish up, I’d love for you to touch on gender and your, what you said about, of course you wou ldn’t beha ve tha t way in p er maculture, you know, caus e I k ind of t hi nk, but I think people do behave that way everywhere and it’s not like, I feel like there’s a risk of saying we’r e we wouldn’t do that in permaculture. It’s like, we’re the special folk.

Morag Gamble:
Yeah. Well, see the thing is I don’t, I don’t know if I ever really speak, I don’t think I could ever speak for a whole culture, you know, like permaculture as a culture. I guess, when I speak it’s from a perspective of. Maybe this is where that kind of challenge becomes because it becomes like the dogma of permaculture is this and you know, it gets bundled up as this thing and what someone does over there affects everyone. When I said, of course, I mean, that was coming from my perspective of like, well, of course I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t ever do that. That’s the sensitivity and the real kind of experience of having worked in context, like just as you described it, these for decades doing that kind of work. And when I hear people say that permaculture is just for white privileged folk or it’s it doesn’t, it’s not relevant to that culture. It’s just, it goes over the top of that. I just see them think absolute, like it’s not my experience whatsoever where, you know, if as a way that we’ve been describing permaculture and maybe that is a feminine approach to it. Not needing to know things, but needing, you know, coming from the perspective of opening a conversation to explore, like what does that mean for you? How do we describe, how do we make sense of this together? Like we are all here as humans, as people deeply concerned about the state of the world. Deeply concerned about our families and about nutrition and about the forest and about the quality of the food and caring. Essentially the basis of it all for me is about the quality of care, you know?

Suzie Cahn:
So that does sound like you’re coming at it from a sensitivity that yeah. I don’t think, I think is more eroded. I mean, although you were saying by the way that your dad was interested in justice and so on, but I think that, that development work or that engagement with people from that same place. And I guess I mentioned to you that I spent 25 years working as an art therapist, so I was very drawn to that same place that maybe this is the thing that even though we actually only met very briefly and had a lot of daftness and hilarity and carried on with each other, I think I was doing that as very much the balance. And it happens to me sometimes with the deepest seriousness, that we were engaging with looking, looking at the void, looking at the deeper knowing and looking at the long narrative of destruction and so on. And so for me, yeah, I definitely come back to a place of I need a bit of light relief here. It’s really heavy, but I think that I find that company, that kind of immediacy of care, and also that having a bit of daftness, I find that most with other women, with indigenous people and with children and young people. I feel like they’re all the people in the places who’ve been most oppressed by the system that we’re talking about, and yet have somehow found caring for each other, caring for our children, caring for like, that’s, that’s one it’s the ultimate resistance really, isn’t it. It’s the only thing you get left with is, well , I’m going to keep on caring even though

Morag Gamble:
How deeply can you care.

Suzie Cahn:
Yeah. Even though it kind of is very, yeah, it’s like the burnout you described at the beginning of the activism, even though that caring is pretty painful, if you continue to do it all the time.

Morag Gamble:
But there’s a different type of caring that, like there was, I cared. Like, I felt so deeply inside as a teenager that I cared about what was happening that I went out and I fought and it’s that kind of is exhausting bit. But when the resistance is more about r ather than fighting and knocking down stuff, I mean, it’s about a generative approach, isn’t it. A generative approach of creating a new field or new connections. And through the caring, like exploring the richness of the relationships and reaching out and like the learning. I remember being part of starting up an d a ll of t hese streets city farm, and some people would come down, we’d get the ga rdens s tarted, but I no ticed t hese women who didn’t come in, they would sort of be around the edge . And I think there was this Taiwanese woman. I was the kind of person wh o w o uld f loat around in the farm. I don’t know if I did terribly much work sometimes be cause I was always just talking to people. I’d go over. And I c h at t o h e r a nd I’d say, oh what are you harvesting there? Ca use s he was busy in th e t ree. And she said, oh, well, this is a tamarind tree. It was like a street tree. She’d discovered these row of s treet trees of tamarinds ha d b een planted by the co uncil l i ke d ecades ago said, and this is what we do with them. And then another guy came through another time from Timor and said, well, the tamarind tree, did you know that actually the leaves of this tree what kept us alive during the famine? Like, no, I didn’t know that. It ‘s l ike all of a sudden I’m looking at t h is m assive trees transforming my perception of what it is that. And so it ‘s t hrough this conversation all the time and the richness and what I realized was like, it ‘s w hen you slow down enough to notice what’s going on around you and to care to reach it like that, the lady co uld h a ve j ust kind of gone past. But when you do notice what that, and you reach out and you invite them to be part of what’s happening or to open a conversation, something happens. And she said, oh, no, I don’t think I’d really like to come in. I don’t feel comfortable, but I’m really happy to share with you what I do with all these plants. If you’d like me to show you. And then, so she did that. And then before you knew it, she was coming in and talking to everyone, it w as just like, how do you find those points of connection to t hen weave new stories together? I think for me like the core part of permaculture, I mean it comes through in the ethics and every time I come back to the ethics, yo u c an kind of gloss over them, go, ok ay, like roll it off your tongue. But then when you come back to it , li ke i t is essentially deeply about care, yo u k n ow? And this is what we’re just talking about now. And it’s that very much about slowing in t he noticing and reaching out, but also se lf c a re. Like that’s kind of one that I possibly don’t do quite as well as I s p end m ore time doing work outside than I do. And ye t a t t he same time I’ve chosen to live in this environment where I have, you know, like p u rposely this direction when I was really young to live in this ec o v illage, surrounded by permaculture. And like, it took a long time. Little bit by little bit planting a c utting here, stick of timber here, like just, we didn’t go into debt. We just, when we got a little bit more of stuff, we would just gradually make it. And s o we’re surrounded now by, yeah, the forest on one side, the gardens down there, we collect our water and th at I feel nourished by the environment and the community. Th e c ommunity, I’ve lived here now for 21 years. So I’m still kind of a newbie, but we’re all kind of new in this ecovillage. It’s not much older than that.

Suzie Cahn:
I do have that nourishment too. It’s not in an ecovillage , but I have community. And I suppose one of the things that my dad teached us is that community itself was never, has not been completely eroded despite like, particularly in parts of rural Ireland, maybe there’s huge damage in cities. There’s huge damage. There’s huge inequality, but during COVID I hear you t alking like during COVID the communities have looked after Ireland. The communities th at o ften wi th t he least have stepped in and ha ve d one meals on wheels and organized runs and created all in the background with very little resource and gratitude. And with still obviously like not in a just way, but at least it’s not so eroded that feeling. And so where I live, I’ve been able to, I have people around me. There is connections. We feel the same that we also worked our way through trying to get access to land and managed to do that. We have a little cottage, we still don’t have a bathroom or kitchen, but we’ve go tten t here. It ‘s b e en, sort of that st age w here we began that th ing a bout the guilt or how much you can change on an individual basis and how much you can perhaps like, for me, if I don’t align myself with the play, like when you talked about not being a landscape designer in a wealthy neighborhood where you could have accrued a lot of money, y ou have to do it in a slower way. That if you’re not go ing t o b uy into that, you’re not go ing t o i mmediately have the mortgage and immediately have the big house.

Morag Gamble:
Yeah, yeah.

Suzie Cahn:
You have this other thing. I mean, I would say I have a lot of abundance in [inaudible] capital p ermaculture, guy from AppleSeed Permaculture . And I s ay, yeah, I’m doing really well on seven of them. Very abundant and social connection and food. And like, connection to my ecosystem, all these things, but, u h, yeah.

Morag Gamble:
I just interviewed a guy from Limestone permaculture here in Australia, and he talked about how he moved . He was living that life. He was in this, in the city and he was a builder and he was working endless hours and he ended up going and buying and little a one acre plot of land. And now his entire income is from this one acre land. He has 11 streams of income. And one of the ones that he says is really big and he really values the most is the gift economy. And he says people come up to me, they’ve got fish, oysters, or, you know, venison and all these things. I couldn’t possibly begin to think about how I’d be able to afford to eat as well as I do if it wasn’t the fact that if I had all this abundance to share from my one acre farm and that gift. I think valuing the gift economy is something that happens when you’re entering into this, space, this way of living . And I was just thinking, as you’re speaking too that, I was feeling sad that Australia doesn’t have the kind of village way of life that traditional, like long timescale communities have. Here we kind of just kind of came in and built cities and suburbs, town , and then random houses on hills and farms. There’s no village and the little web of local villages. And so I think this is where the ecovillage concept becomes an important transition thinking. Like, obviously it’s not something that everyone’s going to go and live in an ecovillage, but it’s really about trying to demonstrate. The scale of living in a village and what that’s like. And when people come here, there’s a sense of something different happening. It almost feels like they’re noticing what you might notice if you were living in a village. People knew each other. There’s the local baker, there’s the little local cafe and there’s the clothes exchange thing. And there was all these noticings that people have about what it’s like, can I even have groups of school kids, I get them coming up here on camp from the city. And I was at the end of one session. It’s always stuck with me because they would go around the circle at the end, you know? And , one of the things that they said was I saw amazing just like an hour or so away from this major city where we’re from, there’s this whole other civilization. Wow . It’s like, it’s not that different, but it’s different enough for them to notice that there’s something, there’s some other things going on here and to experience. I think that’s the value of an ecovillage. The ecovillage here is to have a different place. Has different values and it’s recognizable, but it’s different. One of the things that I really have noticed by being more involved because of the advanced basically zoom, you know, that a mother big, tied to home and tied to land, I wasn’t going off around the world easily. If we do go, it’s these bigger trips with a lot of like let’s two years planning and then we’ll go and take this big production. It’s not easy to leave. But I have through the international Permaculture CoLab and through global transition as well. And some European networks of networks have had in the last few years, you know, more and more exposure to movements. And one of the things that I n otice is that the capacity to do things is so much greater in the global ecovillage network that it’s like, not only do you have one village, but you have a network of villages who’ve got your back. So that thing where almost the ability to take a risk as an individual or a family it’s sort of held within your ecovillage that you’re living in. And, you know, like this is sort of what we’re seeing some of through COVID that there is still some of that in a crisis in Ireland, the c ommunity h as got our back. I think what doesn’t happen is that in a non-crisis time, the skill of collaboration and the kind of focus on you must put alone, you must make it as an individual. You can’t be vulnerable and you can’t be asking for help. That’s still, I think outside of crisis times, that’s the way people feel. A nd it’s definitely the way my young people feel trying to go and make it in the world of a city or like leave our care and go and try and do it alone. They just feel hugely challenged. And I’m sure that’s true of the people you’re talking about in the cities and in Australia where th ey’re j ust, how are they going to make it in this really difficult generation of either get exploited by some big corporate where they can be the means of production or be like living in one of the more disadvantaged neighborhoods an d t rying to find any means of production that can keep them going. So I really noticed that that service role that you’re talking about, that’s kind of very heartening to me that th ey k n ow i t s o wn capacity and is stepping back out and okay, we’re actually, we’ve really got a lot here we can offer. I really believe too about the need to open to youth in permaculture in a way that makes sense to them. And so I’m really excited with Maia and the PERMAyouth that’s emerging now is that it’s not like, okay, well, we’re g onna run a program for youth and come on youth, come and do this program. It’s different. T hey’re starting to find each other. And they’re finding each other through music, through art, through photography, through writing, through storytelling, through sharing their love of different passions that they’ve got, that they’re exploring and that they’re coming together through that. And some of the things that’s happening is a remarkable, for example, because the connection of our work goes around the world. S o they hav people who come to th eir z oom gatherings because of COVID. They have people from refugee settlements, from Bangladesh, from Sweden, from Australia, from all over coming together from Southeast Asia. And there’s also America’s hub. And these young refugee la nds h ave decided that their way of, they’ve always have free events, but then they ra ise m oney during those, just from people donating, they might ask their parents or do a local raffle. They gather that money, and then they send that money to help, o ffer free permaculture education in a refugee settlement. And so when they, so t here’s a local teacher over there that we give the money to, and she gathers people and they run their local programs. And some young lads came through that program and said, this is it. This is, and I’ve spoken to him just about every day since then. And he says, you know, I was a street kid before this. I really didn’t have any purpose. I know where I was going, what I was doing, there’s so much depression and violence, anxiety, drug use, s ex offense, all these. All these kinds of things are going on suicides. He says, I discovered through this permayouth, something that really made sense to me and gave me a chance to be self-reliant and not self like self, bu t l ike I could do something with my community that we can actually address the growing hunger that we’ve experienced ever since COVID, we’ve lost access to food support. So they don’t actually get food sent in anymore. They just get $7 a month. They don’t have enough to eat. They’re struggling. And then as soon as they st ruggle, th en a ll these other differences between the different people from different nations come in. So he s aid, this is a pl ay t hat I can ru n. I can help the widows in my community. I can help the young orphans. And all of a sudden, I feel like I am somebody and I have something to contribute. I want to share this with everyone in the camp. I can’t do it fast enough. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to sing it, and I’m going to get together with other young people who we re i nterested in music, and we’re going to sing these songs. So he’s now started every time they have a p ermiefestival, he brings in another song. Some it’s in English, some’s in their language and they have subtitles. He does it all on hi s l ittle phone. He’s got, does music videos. So we started to share these videos out. An yway, the grateful dead foundation have got onto this and said, this is amazing. Young Somali wanted to have a studio where he could invite young people to come and have a voice, to be able to be heard and have something positive to do. So the grateful dead have sa id, they’re going to fund the building of this, music video studio. And then normally the grateful dead, say one project, that’s it, we’re done. And th ey, and then they said, this is such an amazing project. We would like to support the building of youth music studios in every camp. An d s o this is just emerging now. We’re just, so from this little group of kids, essentially coming together to s aying, we want to do things that we care about, that matter to us, they’re starting to change their worlds and therefore transform other people’s worlds by whoever they touch. And so I think the skills of permaculture, like when I look at what they’re doing in, in Kakuma refugee settlement, in Rwanda refugee settlement they’re saying that these skills are what we need to be able to know that whatever happens, we ‘ll b e okay. Ye ah. And I kind of feel like that’s what a lot of young people need wherever they are. That sense of, it’s a deep sense of security. I don’t think that they, th at a lot of kids wh o a re coming through standard school systems have that, like, if they don’t get a job, they don’t get the right mark. If they don’t get the right university co urses, th ey d on’t get the right job, then they’re incredibly insecure. And so redefining wh at’s s ecurity is, I think is going to be something that’s been so many of them need because we’re in su ch uncertain times.

Suzie Cahn:
Yeah. Listen, this has been amazing.

Morag Gamble:
It has been so many more things I want to ask you about. We’re going to have to go another time, another conversation.

Suzie Cahn:
We’ll maybe we’ll stop recording for the moment and we can sign off.

Morag Gamble:
Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you so much for joining me on my podcast. And it’s a delight to join you on your podcast. What a great way to do it.

Suzie Cahn:
Absolutely fantastic. It’s stacking functions. Isn’t that?

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