00:15:12.820Yeah, I think it operates at several different levels.
00:15:16.600Firstly, there's the issue of all of us being complicit by being embedded, dependent on
00:15:26.320benefiting from the structural systems of global exploitation. So there's a sort
00:15:35.320of, to some degree, an ethical imperative that if we are talking about a different
00:15:44.360world where these systems need to be dismantled, that there's a sort of an
00:15:51.220ethical pressure or imperative to see if we can do that ourselves and although strong arguments
00:15:59.380can be made that that is the degree to which we can do that is very limited because of the
00:16:07.700structurally embedded nature of those systems nevertheless there's there is that imperative
00:16:13.620to try out our own radical ideas ourselves and I think that gives enormous credibility
00:16:23.620and gravitas to those ideas compared with sort of demanding that we sort of
00:16:30.980somehow restructure society in these radical ways but to attempt to do that at a large scale from
00:16:38.500the top down is almost certainly either going to fail or have adverse consequences because any
00:16:47.380system that works that is successful from a systems thinking point of view has evolved from
00:16:56.420a simple system that works so the simple system that works is at the smaller scale that of the
00:17:02.260individual, the household, the local community. So we need to have working models at the smallest
00:17:10.260scales that then inform and feed up into the redesign, reformation, and where necessary,
00:17:19.300the radical turning over, destruction, and salvage of larger scale entities. There's also
00:17:26.980a really important argument about scale and human ability to understand or comprehend
00:17:37.520the current scale of industrial systems. But there's also another important aspect
00:17:45.020in terms of political autonomy, that when we have some degree of self-reliance,
00:17:52.380And I'm generally not thinking of that at the individual level. I think it's very difficult to think of that at the individual level, but at least at the household level. And by household, I tend to mean more robust, often multi-generational households of several people.
00:18:09.740There is an enormous strength and partial political autonomy that comes with that self-reliance.
00:18:19.700And then when speaking to power from that position, there is not necessarily leverage over those systems, but at least we're in a position where we can't just be turned off.
00:18:32.720Whereas the modern person embedded in the industrial system is almost dependent on that system for the air they breathe.
00:18:42.960So it's very difficult to have a mass movement shouting for change when there is actually very little power over the day-to-day most basic needs.
00:18:54.740When we regain that, as all of our peasant ancestors actually had, then we can combine that with global understandings and information systems to be in a much better position to change those larger scale systems.
00:19:12.720And I think finally, the recognition that we are in such an extreme level of crisis, that we do have to come to terms with the fact that our agency to bring about transformative large-scale change without collapse and some degree of chaos means that it is incredibly circumspect
00:19:41.060to have that self-reliance as some degree of function in the sense of lifeboats.
00:19:49.040Not that, you know, there's some sort of isolationist view of that at the extreme of
00:19:55.840perhaps the, you know, survivalist attitudes is, of course, in any way viable.
00:20:02.340But it does make sense to be doing those things for all of those nested purposes
00:20:08.860and that ability to have some degree of autonomy
00:20:14.680by people who are part of the global middle class,
00:20:18.800I've articulated, is a potential huge strike against the system.
00:20:25.400It's not just a strike of labour, it's also a strike of consumption
00:20:33.460it's potentially a strike of capital in terms of investment and that is a very powerful withdrawal
00:20:42.440of contribution that is possible and that signal into the system I've suggested that it would only
00:20:53.220take relatively small proportions of population to do that to have an enormous effect on the system
00:21:00.880Whereas if you look at the democratic politics, the whole attempt to get majority ideas over the line, that's a huge task, especially when the mass movement we're talking about is in some ways a dematerialization, a reduction in material consumption, a mass movement shouting for less.
00:21:29.680You know, we don't have many, if any, precedents in history for such ideas being successful.
00:21:39.080And we also have recent history that shows us when the system is committed to a particular direction, even a majority of the population wanting to go in a different direction doesn't necessarily produce the result.
00:21:54.240maybe you need sort of 80 or 90 percent of the population to overturn some deep drive in the
00:22:01.680system in a certain direction. In Australia, I use the example of Australia's decision to join the
00:22:08.280United States in the invasion of Iraq. The vast majority of the Australian population were
00:22:14.380completely against that, but it still happened because the system at a deeper level was so
00:22:21.180deeply committed to the American alliance and the geopolitical machinations driving systems in the
00:22:29.740Middle East that we still, you know, went to Iraq. So I see the possibilities of relatively small
00:22:40.420proportions of empowered people voting with their feet can have an enormous influence on the system.
00:22:49.300But even if it doesn't, it serves all of those other functions.
00:27:00.800Of course, we're now in a situation where the global middle class
00:27:05.720might be still expanding at the fringes in India and China,
00:27:10.880but it's places of origins in the Western world.
00:27:14.760The middle class has been in a process, I would suggest, of contraction since what I call the Reaganite, Thatcherite revolution of the late 1970s and early 80s of gradual squeezing down of that.
00:27:33.260And then, of course, that's part of what has generated the toxic politics in so many countries.
00:27:41.060But that privilege that still exists there for those who can step outside the propaganda of the system,
00:27:51.860which is telling people to basically do things which are actually against their own economic and political interests.
00:28:01.680and that gets down often to telling people that they need a big house and a high debt and two
00:28:08.920full-time incomes on a treadmill when if people stepped back from their own situation and looked
00:28:17.580at it objectively but say no we should actually get out of debt move to a simpler place drop back
00:28:25.420to two part-time livelihoods or one livelihood and the other get the household economy cranking
00:28:32.300again because actually we'll be better off. So that ability to step back from the propaganda
00:28:41.400and be able to actually look at one's own self-interest firstly and then extend that in
00:28:49.860some sort of enlightened self-interest and think about the larger social and ecological systems
00:28:57.540we're embedded in is to some extent privilege but it's also incredible opportunity and those
00:29:05.120opportunities are in some ways historically unprecedented so for example there are so many
00:29:12.860middle class people in our countries who actually do own their own homes and those homes are the
00:29:18.200largest homes that mass populations have ever owned in history. So actually, as owners of those
00:29:26.740homes, people are in an amazing position to take in borders, create extended household economies,
00:29:35.980while still having some degree of control, privilege over that process, and yet empower
00:29:45.100these, you know, other people and provide conditions for other people to participate
00:29:50.520in that. Now, the fact that most people don't choose to do that, have some large house sitting
00:29:56.260there largely unused and going out and working in jobs they don't like to support all that1.00
00:30:05.280is, to me, people being really stupid. You know, they're not actually looking after their0.99
00:30:12.580self-interest they're not actually making use of their privilege they're wasting it both from
00:30:20.000themselves for themselves and obviously for the for the planet for their wider community
00:30:26.200the other aspect that i think of um privilege is when we if you like dabbling with growing our own
00:30:38.020food rather than doing that with the need for certain success each year like a lot of our
00:30:47.540peasant ancestors couldn't fiddle with the recipe too much because their food supply in the coming
00:30:54.500year really depended on what they did whereas we have the privilege to experiment to do things and
00:31:01.860oh well that didn't work what's the learning from that now some people disparage that as saying
00:31:08.100that it's just um recreation or hobbies or you know it's not real and it's just of course propped
00:31:17.060up by the larger system but if we take that opportunity as a learning opportunity where we
00:31:23.940can take risks where we can bring that spirit of the entrepreneur the scientific experimenter
00:31:33.940back down to that domestic scale and said yeah this is our privilege and our obligation
00:31:40.500to do this so that the next generation has got more robust systems in case they don't have
00:31:49.780have the privilege and the opportunity to do the experimentations that we can do.
00:31:56.940Yeah, you wrote a retro suburbia, and it highlights the importance of strengthening the home economy,
00:32:05.020which I think many are beginning to experiment with informally right now. At the same time,
00:32:11.500I also feel that the cultural conditioning of consumerism has been so omnipresent over the
00:32:18.000past few decades. This pandemic temporarily showed us just how unnecessary so much of
00:32:24.940the economy is, but the halt of consumerism was short-lived and it was simply re-channeled
00:32:30.920to different venues. So I'm wondering how can we replace mindless consumption with mindful
00:32:36.720productivity in the home economy and how will this impact our relationships?
00:32:41.280Yes, well, you're certainly right that how quickly the forces redirected that consumption system in other ways.
00:32:55.400But I think the halt or the pause of the pandemic has provided a trigger for so many people who are already questioning the way they live, thinking about other possibilities.
00:33:11.280and like a lot of analysis about the pandemic just accelerating processes that are already underway
00:33:20.160for example the digitization of the economy and all of those sorts of things we can see the emergent
00:33:29.440interest in self-reliance and the household economy which has been growing in pulses for the
00:33:38.560last 30 years against a background of decline. Little pulses at different times when faith in
00:33:47.040the mainstream economy and society declines, there's a rise in interest in these things.
00:33:52.400And I can correlate the interest in permaculture with those pulses typically associated with
00:34:00.720economic recessions and we can see how the pandemic is a another stronger one of those.
00:34:10.080So I think that also can re-spark learnings in young people or younger people that they inherited
00:34:21.520from their parents going through similar ideas in the past but were then swept aside by the
00:34:28.400the onrush of the economy. So we've always taken the view that's often said in the Catholic Church
00:34:37.560about, you know, give me a child until seven and I have them for life. That's a little bit more
00:34:43.780problematic in the postmodern world. But the idea is that children raised in a family where
00:34:52.580there is a robust household economy when the conditions are right as adults they will
00:35:00.400immediately pick up that that experience rather than having to start it from scratch
00:35:07.500so I think we are already seeing the consequences of this multi-generational
00:35:15.280if you like, countercultural aspect of the revival of household economic values.
00:35:24.100And that is a sort of a building at the same time.
00:35:28.700And of course, there's these larger forces that keep funneling everything towards the
00:35:34.940centres of power and wealth and control.
00:35:38.020But of course, there's huge challenges in that because that brings us face to face with
00:35:43.700the people we share household with, we are in intimate relationships with, and so many intimate
00:35:50.940relationships in our society actually successful and to some extent enduring because people spend
00:35:58.580very little time with each other. And that is a very sobering realisation about really fragility
00:36:06.840of relationships, that when people are embedded in outside work and even entertainment and
00:36:16.860different networks, they can avoid the difficulties that come with being in close proximity.
00:36:25.220So I think the challenges of how to work together are certainly ones that a lot of people are
00:36:34.300finding difficult in the in the pandemic and it naturally leads people to say oh let us free to
00:36:42.540get out and get back to what we're doing and some of that is positive engagement with you know many
00:36:49.180more people and a lot of it of course is back into the the patterns of the past so I think
00:36:57.100where people have a history of working from home,
00:37:05.640certainly my own experience of a partnership
00:37:09.340in life and livelihood that's been going on for 35 years.
00:37:15.000People often marvel at how do you actually put up
00:37:18.140with each other and the mechanisms by which we develop
00:37:22.800autonomy or authority in certain areas and whether those are ones that might be traditional
00:37:33.600if that suits our disposition or quite different ones but you know certainly in our own household
00:37:40.080the notion of his and her department creates a situation where there is autonomy of action where
00:37:47.840you don't need to consult with others you may get help and you put the conditions for that help
00:37:56.160but you have your territory of influence or authority and working out how that household
00:38:05.040economy has those complementary relationships rather than the idea that we are all equal have
00:38:12.240all have equal skills and we all do the same things because in an ecological sense
00:38:19.440we see in nature that is actually a setup for actually competition between species or
00:38:25.840competition between individuals. What we see in nature and in human society is people
00:38:32.480with different capabilities, different dispositions actually have a natural tendency to
00:38:39.920cooperative relationships because there's this mutual interdependence and of course it's that
00:38:46.560dance between having the interdependence that is for the benefit mutual benefit but enough autonomy
00:38:57.680that we are not totally dependent on each other in in ways that are not so healthy and
00:39:06.640And, you know, it's always a balance and it's like the balance between are we jacks and jills of all trades in permaculture, that very much self-reliance, do it yourself, or a master of one.
00:39:21.780And I think really we have to be jacks and jills of all trades, but also a master of one.
00:39:31.740And so there's a connection there between how that household economy works and how the wider society works and our roles in it.
00:39:40.240Yeah, human relationships and the dynamics that follow are so complicated and challenging.
00:39:52.620And yeah, I found that many permaculture communities tend to be dominated by a very similar grouping of people.
00:40:01.740But you write that these adaptive strategies are accessible and intended to be adapted by the majority, which I think for many begs the question of who is permaculture for?
00:40:13.420Is it accessible to everyone in terms of resources and tools?
00:40:17.180And if not, how do we work to make it more so?
00:40:20.800Because I found the practice to be so incredibly pleasing to the soul, the way in which natural growth is allowed and common sense is welcomed.
00:40:30.000I think where we see permaculture as a specific set of practices, inevitably the limitation of
00:40:41.760those practices when we shift from one environment to another shows up quite obviously and I've been
00:40:48.620a great critic of people proposing permaculture in that sense of a specific set of practices
00:40:56.060You know, because of that, everything is context dependent. And similarly, when we look at people's social or economic situation, and a definitely cultural context, some things will translate from others, but not always.
00:41:17.380So, for example, if you look at the idea of the most classic or iconic permaculture idea of a food forest, we're talking about systems that are dominated by long-lived, often slower-growing fruit and nut trees, and especially the nut trees, often quite long-term before they even produce.
00:41:41.800So obviously that investment of energy to do that, you can see how that has been a major limitation for people in poverty-stricken parts of the world with limited resources where they're growing their food from annual crops each year.
00:42:00.560We can also see in the history of suburban food production, as documented in Australia in the early 20th century, that middle class people grew gardens, whereas working class people mostly restricted themselves to backyard livestock because they had poor security of tenure.
00:42:23.720They didn't necessarily, couldn't invest the time and the forethought in planning a seasonal garden, but they could feed some rabbits or backyard chickens and take them with them if need be.
00:42:42.480So you can see how in different contexts, both historically and in terms of permaculture design, different strategies and techniques are going to be relevant to people, both in their cultural interest, their food preferences, all sorts of things.
00:43:04.480And we can see that with appropriate technologies as well of how we build on what already exists.
00:43:13.660And the retro suburbia paradigm is really obviously focused on the Western world where the large numbers of people in many of our countries, the majority of people live in some sort of low density residential living arrangement.
00:43:31.820and that that template of living has this sort of huge potential for transformation
00:43:38.580by creative adaption, building on what already exists.
00:43:43.260So that retrofitting paradigm is really a little bit moving away
00:43:49.520from what a lot of people would see the lineage in permaculture of clean slate design,
00:43:55.700whether that's a bold new plan to develop an eco-village
00:44:00.480or whether it's simply starting with a patch of grass and building a garden from scratch
00:44:09.180to the idea that everything has a history, everything has an existing state,
00:44:15.860everything already has some value and some constraints, whether those are physical or psychosocial.
00:44:25.760And so that retrofitting from what we already have is both an honouring and an acceptance of what already exists without saying this is fixed, that we can change it to make it fit for new purpose.
00:44:43.860And that's where the retrofitting paradigm sort of really came out of the 70s energy crisis, especially in the United States, the idea of retrofitting buildings to make them fit for an era of expensive energy.
00:44:57.000But similarly, we can apply that to the biological domain of changing existing gardens or farms.
00:45:08.380And of course, most dramatically, we can apply it to our own behaviour to retrofit our own behaviour to make it fit for new context.
00:45:17.620And so that we can shed behaviours like an old worn out pair of shoes or a pair of shoes that's inappropriate, that are too tight for our feet or high heels that don't work on natural ground or a million other things that we can be open in that way to adapt and retrofit our own behaviour without saying we need to throw everything out and start from scratch.
00:45:47.620You talk about trees, say ain't got no stress, no, no, no, it's like water from the ground.
00:46:55.700Here in the United States, there has been a significant exodus of city dwellers to the countryside.
00:47:03.680And this jarring shift from one locale to another is not always done with care or consideration.
00:47:12.080So when I think about building community resilience, this is something that also comes to mind, the dynamics and tensions between community and change.
00:47:21.340I wonder if you could just speak personally to what you're seeing in your community in
00:47:27.280terms of pandemic-inspired relocations and how we can weather the growing pains of gentrification.
00:47:39.040And of course, being on the 130 kilometers from Australia's second largest city and the
00:47:45.780one that went into a long extended lockdown has resulted in us seeing this exodus process you
00:47:56.260were speaking of. And I think, again, it's accelerating something that was there. There's
00:48:02.840been these sort of waves of moves to the country. And in some ways, my retro suburbia paradigm is
00:48:10.540is sort of saying to people, look, there are other opportunities, including adaption in situ.
00:48:17.820But we're also seeing a shift from higher density urban core living to suburban living.
00:48:27.940But more commonly, this jump from the city, if not to rural properties, then to small towns like
00:48:38.980where we live and also our larger regional towns and that is mostly happening through people
00:48:47.680with the choice and the ability to do that of course and it doesn't take many people in a city
00:48:56.380of many millions to choose to move to the country to towns with only a few thousand people being
00:49:03.980overwhelmed by both buyers of existing housing stock and people buying land and building.
00:49:14.000So I find that certainly a bit depressing that we're going to get these, it appears,
00:49:22.540we are getting it right now, this rapid infill development and urbanisation and gentrification.
00:49:31.600But I also sort of see how that's partly a consequence of the social evolution that happens.
00:49:41.840And I wrote about this in Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, where people who moved to the country in the 1970s and started many places that then became attractive to others of their own ilk that had stayed in the city,
00:49:59.920that then were attracted to the resources, the economic resources,
00:50:04.400the health food shops, the alternative schools, the art galleries,
00:50:11.600all sorts of resources that then attracted urban people.
00:50:16.080And meanwhile, those pioneers who had begun that process
00:50:20.640had themselves become more influenced and ruralised.
00:50:26.080to some extent there'd been this fusion and I think this has occurred in the United States
00:50:32.480like it has here where people moved with the environmental values that may have come out of
00:50:39.120urban middle-class ideals and found themselves in connection and community with people who were
00:50:48.160rural working class people. And that both groups actually started to see some of the sense or value
00:50:58.980in the other. And I think that's been one of the processes that then leads to people looking at
00:51:07.080the next wave of arrivals from the city with disdain, because they recognise, or maybe they
00:51:15.580don't recognize but they have changed as well as you know people bringing another phase of
00:51:24.620hyper consumerism the other aspect that i'd see that is some positive aspect is that
00:51:35.020those people coming who have more financial resources, often in a position to employ local
00:51:47.420people and take direct responsibility for the paradise they want to create for themselves.
00:51:55.680And that that's actually, in a social evolution sense, a better step than the disconnected
00:52:04.040consumption in the centralized system where they don't really have any direct relationship with
00:52:12.760the things they're consuming and often don't have any direct relationship with the people
00:52:19.800they might be employing so you know these things are always um i think a mix that the you know that
00:52:29.800perspective in in permaculture that the problem is the solution i'm gonna have to remember that
00:52:37.460and tell myself that when i'm feeling the anxiety of the gentrification of the countryside because
00:52:45.240it's definitely yeah something that makes my heart beat faster and in the article previously
00:52:53.900mentioned the class divide in a time of pandemic a permaculture perspective you also write quote
00:53:00.700the greatest blessing of the ancient mediterranean world was to be a free citizen of rome but over
00:53:07.440time the tax burden of sustaining the bloated empire made citizenry more of a curse when the0.72
00:53:14.460empire did fall life for many ex-roman citizens actually improved even if many of the great
00:53:20.300cultural projects and achievements of the civilization were progressively abandoned.0.98
00:53:25.920Maybe humanity can make a better job of it this time around with the progressive failure of
00:53:31.220global industrial civilization. It is a great irony that the fate of our cultural legacy
00:53:37.180will lie more in the hands of households and communities than with grand institutions and
00:53:42.680nation states, end quote. And I've also read about how you see great limitations when it comes to
00:53:49.940how we imagine dystopias. So this question is open-ended, but I'd love to learn about how
00:53:56.480you're thinking about the potential of salvage economies or your work with future scenarios
00:54:02.820and how you're guiding people to think about extreme crises as a temporary portal.
00:54:10.920Well, I suppose just starting at a very simple level with that in my observations of permaculture
00:54:46.960a symptom of the huge opportunities that come as very large powerful industrial civilization
00:54:58.880complexes go into decline and dysfunction. What that means is the world is littered
00:55:07.600with a whole lot of nasty things that we don't want to inherit, whether that's heavy metal
00:55:13.120pollution or you know some of the worst things of nuclear waste deposits and unmanaged nuclear power
00:55:20.800stations and other horrendous disasters that have been focused on but it also means that our
00:55:28.800descendants will have this huge opportunity for creative reuse of things at a lower scale
00:55:36.720I remember a permaculture colleague who did a lot of work in Vietnam talking about the incredible creative reuse of industrial hardware we're left behind by the Americans after their defeat in Vietnam and, you know, engines out of tanks, you know, driving water pump systems and all sorts of amazing creative reuse and
00:56:04.800high levels of skill, engineering skill in fixing and, you know, using things in that sort of way.
00:56:15.620So I think that applies to so many aspects of our society that give
00:56:23.920options when the drive of that system towards constant growth has failed.
00:56:33.380and there's certainly you know if you look at the united states the proportion of its wealth which
00:56:40.660is going into the military budget to project and maintain the power is actually a perfect parallel
00:56:47.520to the roman empire where that's actually depriving the citizenry of basic resources
00:56:55.380and, you know, for the sake of maintaining the empire,
00:57:11.540And in the more extremes of my energy descent scenarios
00:57:15.420of the future, I've pointed out that these scenarios
00:57:21.060are not like some return to the stone age and just the example of stainless steel that the
00:57:30.780quantities of stainless steel that there are in the world that is not going to rust and go away
00:57:36.580and with some fairly basic tools it's possible to fabricate all sorts of things at the most basic
00:57:44.000level a stainless steel knife you know for thousands and thousands of years into the future
00:57:49.280even if there is none of that industrial capacity is ever maintained or rebuilt.
00:57:57.120So that degree, some degree of endurance of not just things, but also of knowledge
00:58:05.440of capacities to do things. And all these things, of course, have depreciation rates.
00:58:12.640you know, there's loss of knowledge, there's all sorts of things which are lost, but there's
00:58:18.960the possibilities of creative energy descent pathways that more than the extremes that are
00:58:29.340associated with, you know, the term collapse. And another aspect of that that I think is very
00:58:35.400important is similar to the way we look at industrial wastes as both toxin and opportunity.
00:58:44.920If we look at biological systems that people would see as running out of control with
00:58:52.920so-called invasive species, that so many of these biological systems are actually
00:58:59.880more capable at rebuilding soil, water and biodiversity resources in the longer term
00:59:09.340than a lot of the species that were originally in those landscapes, partly because they have
00:59:17.040that exotic vigour, that weedy nature. And that even if those things are both inconvenient for us
00:59:26.860currently, or we can see the downsides of the impacts they are having. In a larger sense,
00:59:34.680they may be part of nature's sort of emergent strength out of the, you know, the chaos we've
00:59:43.440created. And there's very good, you know, evolutionary evidence to suggest that that
00:59:48.700is the case. And of course, one of my lifelong sort of subjects of study has been these advanced
00:59:55.200novel ecosystems where you see where nature has taken over after humans have trashed a place and
01:00:03.200we live in an area which was all gold mining sluiced down to the bedrock in a enormous frenzy
01:00:11.680that was part of the richest gold region of the world and we now have these extraordinary
01:00:18.240recombinant novel ecosystems that are building new soil and and biodiversity so i see that is
01:00:27.680not so much a salvage economy but nature actually sort of building new biological wealth for its
01:00:36.220own purposes but that's also wealth which will provide modest resources to sustain people in
01:00:43.400the future. Oh, wow, David. Well, this has been such an incredible conversation so far. And
01:00:53.800as we come to a close, I'm thinking about how permaculture works with nature instead of against
01:01:00.680it, which is a call so many of us are drawn to, but that requires familiarity and relationship.
01:01:08.400and I think about how narratives of climate change and climate chaos
01:01:12.620emphasizes that things are rapidly changing
01:01:15.640and that the earth will become volatile and unpredictable in nature.
01:01:20.860So how do you make sense of these somewhat conflicting realities
01:01:24.500and what can permaculture offer to those who are concerned
01:01:28.640about making it through challenging times?
01:01:32.640Yes, I mean, I think these things are sort of enormous difficulties
01:01:38.140And clearly, we do have the possibility of runaway changes that can make the Earth at least uninhabitable for a species like Homo sapiens, if not many other species of life.
01:01:56.900But at the same time, I think the disempowering nature of that information is more extreme when people don't have experience of the abundance and renewal of nature.
01:02:10.620And whether it's the birth of kid goats or merely just seeing seeds emerge and grow into food plants, so many simple things, inevitably, they seem ordinary.
01:02:27.680But I constantly am surprised at how much that connection to growing your own food, to connection to working relationship with nature, actually enlivens and helps people deal with those larger scale questions of the severity and uncertainty about the future of nature.
01:02:56.220And it doesn't mean that there's a naivety about those things, but it just actually provides a more nurturing environment and a closer connection to the lived realities.
01:03:14.540So it's both bringing us to those realities and the difficulties of that at the same time that dealing with this abundance and renewal of life and the way nature keeps finding new ways to work.
01:03:34.580And I think that really is, at so many levels, contributes to being able to work productively and contribute to that process rather than succumb into a spiral of depression and dysfunction.
01:03:54.020and so really in that sense you know we say in terms of permaculture activism
01:03:59.080this is just um maybe this is just a more fun way to live um you know we're having more fun
01:04:04.980doing this and it appears uh relatively um harmless and uh that alternative when i see
01:04:16.280so many people going through the process of extreme burnout in activist actions to try and
01:04:26.400stop the bad things happening in the world. So many people end up coming to permaculture from
01:04:33.740that state as just, well, this is actually just necessary for their psychological survival.
01:04:39.940and of course it can be said and critiqued that that's not going to change the world
01:04:47.140but neither is if we collapse in dysfunction or we resort to the extremities of the
01:04:56.980the extreme eco-terrorism sort of like we must stop the system by destruction which in the end
01:05:06.020can only be symbolic and only brings the discrediting of the the changes that are needed
01:05:14.020so in that sense you know permaculture has actually acted to find a space to people to
01:05:22.500survive with the burdens the psychological burdens that the the current world provides
01:05:28.820i feel that david the burnout is real and it's healing so healing to be with the earth and with
01:05:39.420our hands in the soil and watching plants grow and nourish the land and ourselves and our communities
01:05:46.620so this has been such a beautiful conversation i personally appreciate your work as well as
01:05:55.800on a collective level and um yeah i'm just excited to continue following your work and
01:06:03.280learning together as we move through this uh strange unraveling this great unraveling of our
01:06:12.820time well thank you it's been uh great to talk and uh appreciate your work in in this regard
01:06:25.800Thank you for listening to For the Wild podcast.
01:06:28.700The music you heard today was by Roma Ransom and Jodi Sieber.
01:06:33.020For the Wild is created by Ayanna Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Melanie Younger.