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What if It’s Not Dystopia? With Permaculture Elder Linda Woodrow
954 Plays28 days ago
It’s Permaculture Week, friends and phascogales! And what better way to celebrate than a big old heart to heart with permie elder Linda Woodrow. Linda is the author of 470, The Permaculture Home Garden, and the Witches Kitchen blog which is now in its 17th year. She is humble and extraordinary, and I think you’ll dig what she has to say about finding our niches, neighbours, purpose and freedom in the throes of collapse.
🧙♀️LINKY POOS
Linda Woodrow’s home on the web
Linda Woodrow’s blog The Witches Kitchen
The Permaculture Home Garden ~ Linda Woodrow
Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual ~ Bill Mollison
RetroSuburbia ~ David Holmgren
Permaculture One ~ Bill Mollison & David Holmgren
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Riskilliance and Permaculture Values
00:00:06
Speaker
Hey, this is Katie, and you're tuned into Riskilliance, gratefully recorded in Jarrah country, central Victoria, where the long and dusty summer has finally been quenched by a decent day of drizzle, and suddenly we're all thinking about firewood stacks and cauliflower seedlings.
00:00:25
Speaker
Well, I just had an eggshell moment. I was listening back to the interview that you're just about to hear while I was cooking dinner. I was making a kind of all-in-anything-goes-greens pie that I always fall back on when there are cubic metres of silverbeet to deal with in the garden and an abundance of eggs. So I cracked a few eggs into a bowl with the cooked greens and goat's cheese and kept the eggshells aside.
00:00:50
Speaker
and gave them a little rinse and placed them onto a tray full of other eggshells. and I've been collecting them to make a calcium amendment for the garden. And as I did this, I thought, wait a second, this is something Sue Dennett would do. This is something a permaculture person would do.
00:01:07
Speaker
This is something that I do. I'm doing it. I'm doing my values. I'm living in a way that feels aligned with what I care about and respectful of the food that I'm gleaning and growing, that feels integrated Like there's no such thing as waste, just eggshells in the wrong place in our household.
00:01:27
Speaker
It feels like my priorities are in some semblance of order. You know, I've got enough time to make a pie from scratch. Plus that little extra step of reverentially saving the eggshells.
00:01:39
Speaker
Now that is a sign life is heading in the right direction. And sometimes we don't pause to celebrate these small wins, hey? We easily overlook the wonderful, humble trajectory that we're on by comparing ourselves to other people's paths, aspiring to do more and be more, and forgetting to appreciate the steps that we've taken.
Celebrating Permaculture Influences
00:02:01
Speaker
And maybe it's even while listening to podcasts like this, We assume that everyone else is getting it right, while we have so very far to go. But I'd bet all of my broad bean seeds, and I have quite a lot.
00:02:15
Speaker
that you too are making positive change, whether it's thinking critically about modern society or secretly saving the leftover sandwiches from that excessively catered work meeting to chuck to the neighbor's chooks.
00:02:26
Speaker
So I'm wondering what your eggshell moment is. What quirky little permaculture habit can you celebrate today? And that spirit of celebration is palpable right now because it is, in fact, Permaculture Week. It's running from March the the 29th.
00:02:42
Speaker
I don't know who declared it, but we're going to go with it. Because permaculture is an amazing trellis with ethics and principles that can support us during these blustery times. And when I was thinking about who to interview in celebration of Permaculture Week, I reminisced about one of my earliest Permi influences and discovered, there in an overgrown corner of my memory, a book called The Permaculture Home Garden by Linda Woodrow.
00:03:09
Speaker
I plucked it out of my mum's bookshelf one Christmas and was instantly drawn in by Linda's wise and witty writing. and her punk permy lifestyle roaming around with a trailer intercepting waste streams, amassing coffee grounds, lake weed and kitchen scraps, this permaculture thing struck me as earth logic.
00:03:30
Speaker
Like almost too obvious to even articulate, and so exquisitely intelligent. Of course, David Holmgren and Bill Mollison co-originated the concept back in the seventy s But I suspect they had a direct line to Gaia, like they were channeling some serious earth wisdom.
00:03:49
Speaker
So back to Linda. She also wrote 470, a novel that puts flesh on the bones of all that cold, hard climate data to tell a story of what the coming decades might look like and feel like to
Interview with Linda Woodrow
00:04:01
Speaker
live through. And I actually read 470 last month, as Cyclone Alfred threatened northeast Australia and towns braced for its impact.
00:04:09
Speaker
And I felt pretty seasick because 470 is premised on a cyclone destroying Byron Bay. So I wondered, what would Linda Woodrow have to say about how permaculture can help us weather such storms?
00:04:22
Speaker
What might Linda share as an elder, a researcher and a realist to help us prepare for what's coming? I'm constantly amazed that people so readily say yes to joining me on the show. Like, if you want to spend time with your heroes, I recommend starting a podcast.
00:04:36
Speaker
So when Linda responded with a speedy and enthusiastic affirmative I couldn't quite believe it. It gives me great joy to share this compassionate and unexpectedly optimistic conversation with you all because contrary to our imagined worst case scenarios, Linda actually believes that we're much more resilient than we realize.
00:04:57
Speaker
And perhaps the loss of all our modern luxuries and conveniences, or even just some of them, may be our greatest liberation. I just want to take a moment to send some gratitude to the permaculture elders like Linda, who are keepers of the precious knowledge about how not to be a jerk, but rather work in service of life.
00:05:18
Speaker
We are listening. Here's Linda Woodrow, and I've got a few more shout outs at the end of the show.
00:05:27
Speaker
Well, Linda, it's quite, I've done this really unconsciously, but your head in the computer screen is actually resting on the shoulders of Bill and David because those books are supporting my laptop. So we've got Retro Suburbia and a Permaculture Designer's Manual underneath my laptop here, raising you up to a decent height so we can make eye contact. But I was actually reflecting on where I first started learning about permaculture and how that seed was planted in my mind. And I actually think that I picked up
00:05:58
Speaker
your permaculture home and garden book from my mum's bookshelf way, way back. And I remember reading it when I was home for holidays one time and at a loss for what to read next. And so I pulled this thin spined little book out of the bookshelf with its chickens and verdant greenery on the cover. I was like, oh, what's this? And started reading about mandala gardens and chook domes and intercepting waste streams. And it just rang you know, so clearly to me of intelligence and and fun and abundance.
00:06:33
Speaker
So I actually feel like you have a lot to do with my love of permaculture and how I see it as such a sensible and and beautiful way to live our lives. And it got me curious about where you first came across this strange permaculture
The Evolution of Permaculture
00:06:47
Speaker
notion. I was just thinking as you said that it's a real paying it forward thing because Those books, those those lovely, great, big, thick books that are propping up your computer, because they are. They're real slabs of books, both of those.
00:07:00
Speaker
I first came across Bill Mollison and David Holmgren's Permaculture One in the late nineteen seventy s And I really, I don't remember how it was that I came across them. i don't I don't have a moment like yours with your parents where you can remember because they were quite, Permaculture One was quite a strange book to end up in my orbit.
00:07:25
Speaker
You know, I came from a family that didn't garden at all. It was pure serendipity, I think, that that I ended up coming across this book. And like you, it was just that kind of moment of, oh, this is so clever.
00:07:41
Speaker
This is so this fits together so beautifully, you know, like that pattern thing. You know, I love that sense of there's a ah pattern that works in this.
00:07:53
Speaker
So that was my first introduction. And Permaculture One was a nice skinny book too. Now, nearly coming up to 50 years later, 45 years later, i can see permaculture has come a long way in the meantime you know a lot of those concepts have been ground truth and a lot of the the actual technology in it i think has has come a long way but that's what should happen that's that's the evolution of a concept so the concepts are true though still i still think those concepts in permaculture one were the were the thing that attracted me to it right in the beginning and they still hold true even if a lot
00:08:34
Speaker
practicalities ah have evolved a long way since then. And what kind of trajectory were you on at the time, Linda? Where was your life heading?
00:08:44
Speaker
Oh, who knows? I do remember a moment before that that kind of prepared the ground a little bit. i was I was about 15, quite young, and I was a horrible child that I'm very glad my kids weren't like as bad as me.
00:09:02
Speaker
I was one of those kids that made my parents tear their hair out. And somebody I'd met on a bus to a youth conference in Western Australia, who was a student at university, so a few years older than me, turned up at my parents' house early in the morning and threw rocks at my window and was travelling on up to, hitchhiking on up to Mullaney to visit friends.
00:09:26
Speaker
and said, do you want to come? So I left a note on the kitchen table for my parents, gone hitchhiking up to Mulaney. But he was visiting friends of his who were kind of that 1970s back to the land movement.
00:09:42
Speaker
And I remember that was so strange, so alien to me. My parents were very poor, in fact, lower working class. And I remember that sense of abundance again, that sense of what a beautiful lifestyle and how secure, that that sense of food security, which hadn't been there in my childhood, and that sense of abundance and and that real wealth of that environment.
00:10:11
Speaker
I remember thinking at the time, this is what I want to be when I grow up, but I had no idea of how to get there or anything like that. So where was my life at that time? By the time I got to my early 20s, I think I was, yeah, milling around like early people in their early 20s do a bit with no real idea of where I was going.
00:10:33
Speaker
I had enrolled at university and done a semester and working backstage for theatre and done a lot of things like that, but nothing that was remotely permaculture-ish.
00:10:44
Speaker
Wow, yeah, it's such ah an impressionable time in our lives when we're in that middle to late teenagehood where we're conscious of ourselves and then more broadly the world and so receptive to these these ideas and they all seem very exciting so yeah I can credit friends in my teenage years with simply doing things like cooking a healthy locally sourced meal and that lodging itself in my mind as something very special and different to what I was used to so fascinating to think back
00:11:18
Speaker
to those earliest little occurrences. And then Linda, from there, I really want to get into kind of your choice of of, location where you live and your lifestyle and resilience and all of these bigger things that I know that, you know, you've really plumbed the depth of, but to kind of ground that conversation, I'm interested in this, this transition that you've made from living more rurally, and as I understand it, to moving into a more suburban context. So I wonder if you can talk us through life on the land and decision-making around where to land then now where you are.
Transitioning to Suburban Living
00:11:54
Speaker
Okay.
00:11:55
Speaker
We moved here to Coffs Harbour, cos harboor smallish, medium-sized regional city in late 2019. There were a lot of reasons for the move.
00:12:07
Speaker
um Amongst them were some very practical At the time, we didn't think it was um necessarily going to be permanent. It was a bit of an adventure. Our daughter had just had her second baby and she was in her final semester of university. And it was, if you came to COFS and did babysitting for me, I could finish uni.
00:12:33
Speaker
And so that was one reason we could move to COFS and be grandparent daycare, which is a really wonderful thing. thing to do. Multi-generational families are one of the things that I really love.
00:12:45
Speaker
So that was that was there, but I think that um only stuck because we were ready for an adventure. We'd been living off-grid, rural, permaculture lifestyle that turn that was really quite idyllic for quite a while, for a long time.
00:13:03
Speaker
I mean, we'd lived there for 35 years and had built it up into something that was really beautiful. but i I'd been, I'd written 470, I'd written my novel, so I'd written the the second book and that had consolidated a whole lot of ideas for me around responses to climate change and what was happening in the world in ah in a bigger sense and how we adapt to that and how we live that kind of life.
00:13:32
Speaker
One of the big things that that came out of that for me was that what I was living was a lifestyle that wasn't readily accessible to most people and wasn't going to change the world. It felt a little bit like it was privilege.
00:13:48
Speaker
It certainly didn't start out as privilege because we started out, you know, home building houses on nothing. But, you know, 35 years on, I felt like if I really wanted to do something meaningful, I was...
00:14:03
Speaker
All I was doing was living well. I wasn't doing anything meaningful. So that was there as well. It was what am I doing with my life at this point? another And another factor too was you only get one life. you you want to having ah We were ready for an adventure. We were ready to do something different.
00:14:23
Speaker
At the time we thought maybe only a six-month adventure. So all of those things kind of came together into moving to COFs for a little while. And that then turned into whole... David Holmgren's Retro Suburbia came out and that idea of challenge of could I put into practice what we'd learned in rural off-grid living in suburbia? How much of it would be applicable in suburbia? How much of it could you do on a little 500-metre square block?
00:14:56
Speaker
And that was an interesting challenge. that That met all those... questions of, you a fun challenge, a thing to do that was worth doing and answer those questions of how could you live in a really climate change sensible way in the world as it is now.
00:15:15
Speaker
So I guess that that's all the things that led to the decision of where we are now. I'd love to dig a little more into this idea that you've surfaced around living a meaningful life, not just living the good life and what it means to you to be doing your bit in this time of, you know, great turning as maybe jo enough Joanna Macy would call it or a poly crisis as many are calling it a climate changed future and present.
00:15:44
Speaker
I'd love to hear what it means for you to not only be setting yourself this fun and exciting challenge, but exciting. Adding the layers that are going to satisfy your own need to to give and contribute to the world during this time, or at least your local community. What does that look like?
00:16:00
Speaker
What a big question that is. There's a word that I've come across that I really, really like. I've only ever seen it in print, so I don't really know how to pronounce it, and I'm probably going to pronounce it really badly. You'll probably have people writing back to you going, that's not how you pronounce it.
00:16:16
Speaker
But it's i yeah I think it's pronounced eudaimonia. It came up for me, I was reading the IPCC reports, and there's a section in that that is really interesting now that's looking at demand side, and it's looking at how we combat climate change from the idea of what is wealth? What do people want?
00:16:41
Speaker
What does demand for a good life look like in a climate changed world? And that word eudaimonia came up and it fascinated me. And so I've been digging through that.
00:16:52
Speaker
What it means is it it's the good life. It's what is the good life really? And it's a life that is well spent. meaning there's enough.
00:17:04
Speaker
It's a mixture of that hedonism of living a living good life that's satisfying, that's fun, that's enjoyable, that has all those those enjoyable bits to it, but that also feels meaningful, feels purposeful, feels like you can you can look back at your life and go, that was a good life. I lived a good life.
00:17:24
Speaker
You know, but that's what that word eudaimonia means. And so it doesn't necessarily coincide with wealth in the concept that we have a very consumeristic society.
00:17:39
Speaker
It doesn't coincide with that at all well because it's very much about enough that that when you have enough and you're living meaningfully, that's a eudaimonic life.
00:17:51
Speaker
And so...
Sustainable Living and Climate Concerns
00:17:52
Speaker
I got really fascinated by the the boundaries, not just climate change, but all the other boundaries, the boundaries that are to do with plastics. That's a stunning one.
00:18:04
Speaker
I'm reading research now that's saying we've got the equivalent of a teaspoon of plastic in our brain at autopsy. And you go, that can't be good. That cannot be good. I have a ah theory that microplastics, it we're going to look at them in the future the way we look at lead where our generation is leaving a legacy of microplastics that's going to be as hard for the next generation to clean up as lead is now.
00:18:31
Speaker
So not just CO2 in the atmosphere, but all the other planetary boundaries and that idea of doughnut economics, that there is too little that puts people in a really bad place and there is too much that also puts people in a really bad place.
00:18:51
Speaker
there's that nice zone in the middle that's the donut that is the eudaimonic space to be in where you have enough so that you can be quite wealthy with enough there but you you don't have so much that it stresses and warps your life what what it looks like what it looks like to me is a life that is secure affluent that has huge bunches of bananas and when we first moved here was the first time I'd been without a garden for a really really long time and there was real suffering in not being able to go out and just pick herbs you know i was kind of like how do people live like this and that idea of going to the s supermarket and buying a bunch of herbs that
00:19:41
Speaker
was wilted and blah you know so there's there's a lot of hedonism in it in being able to just go out and pick fresh herbs what i want to to cook with and ah there's that food security there's that hedonism of food and beauty and flowers and greenery and animals and chickens and fresh eggs and all of that that makes life beautiful there's time you know time to spend with grandchildren time to to do that multi-generational family and there's a meaningful life.
00:20:14
Speaker
And all of those things to me combine to make a good life. And that's the question but I'm on at the moment is how do you do that? What does that look like in suburbia?
00:20:26
Speaker
I kind of know what it looks like in rural permaculture homesteading, except that when you get hit with a a heat wave or a drought in that situation, you very much get a sense of,
00:20:40
Speaker
I can survive this, my garden can survive this, but I'm not doing anything really to prevent this. happening It's going to happen. Nothing I do is going to have the remotest influence on the trajectory we're on as a as an entire culture.
00:20:56
Speaker
So are you ah you saying that there's kind of more work to be done in suburbia that could be more impactful? Definitely, I think, given that that most of the population lives in cities, in suburbia or urban situations, very few people can live that rural homesteading lifestyle.
00:21:17
Speaker
In the 1970s, in the back to the land sort of thing, it seemed like that could be a possibility, but young people these days would have an awfully hard time affording it, moving into that kind of lifestyle.
00:21:30
Speaker
So I look at it now and I go, It's not going to change things, at least not fast enough. Well, yeah, I'd love to take this opportunity to pull more of those threads from 470 because I know you did so much research and and therefore, you know, hearing...
00:21:48
Speaker
your perspective that comes from that place of deep steeping in the data and the discoveries that you made on that journey to write um a very eerie and engaging work of fiction.
00:21:59
Speaker
And interestingly enough, I've only read it this month um and it's like it's been waiting there for me. And so I started reading it as Cyclone Alfred was approaching. And it's just incredibly prophetic because this is not a spoiler to say that it starts with the decimation of Byron Bay via cyclones. So i wonder, Linda, if we can kind of go there with some of the research and the climate forecasting that you would have done in the creation of 470 in tandem with the fact that you've made a choice to live closer to the people in the throng of things and our our natural instincts might be to actually run away from the general population
00:22:40
Speaker
when we know that these things are in the pipeline naturally here. In the book, you know you paint a pretty grim picture of what it can be in the city, heatwaves being a huge, maybe the number one killer of people in those urban environments.
00:22:54
Speaker
Yeah, if you could speak a bit more about not only your choice to kind of face into this this issue with your choice of of home and location, but also how we can all kind of be part of the resilience in urban and suburban contexts. I'd really love to hear from you on that front.
00:23:11
Speaker
It's been a journey for me. i remember the genesis of 470 much better than I remember the genesis of Permaculture Home Garden because it was more recent, I guess, and I was more conscious of of what I was doing at the time.
00:23:25
Speaker
I actually remember the moment i was out in my garden and i was mulling on the the idea that I followed the science because I've always had a ah brain that's a bit interested in.
00:23:38
Speaker
science and patterns and and I'd been following the science of climate change and I knew what was being predicted. I knew the science. i find it hard to say the word I believe the science because I don't think it's a matter of whether you believe it or not. i I think physics doesn't care whether you believe it or not.
00:23:56
Speaker
And I thought, here am I, I know all this, but it's not actually... changing my day-to-day decisions at all. You know, when i what I choose to do today, tomorrow, what I choose to do with money, what I choose to do with, you know, where I live, all of those kind of decisions, it's as if it's an abstract out there that I know, but I don't act like I really know.
00:24:21
Speaker
And I thought, if I look around, that's not just me, that's everybody. that That was the genesis. I was like, why aren't I? ah Of all people, why aren't I acting like climate change is bearing down on us?
00:24:35
Speaker
And i I remember thinking it's because I know it in abstract, but I don't actually have a picture of it in my mind, what it would feel like, what would living in that world be like.
00:24:48
Speaker
I don't have that visceral imagination of it. And that was the moment that I thought, That's what it needs. It needs somebody, somebody to write it as a novel, to write characters living in it, to write it as a story rather than as a ah set of probabilities and numbers. and And that was the moment that it started. At the time i I went, I didn't know that somebody would be me. I just thought, I'm going to play with this because that's one of the advantages of that whole permaculture life is that you have the freedom to play with things.
00:25:24
Speaker
And I thought, I'm going to play with it a little bit and see what comes
Storytelling and Climate Science
00:25:27
Speaker
out. And I probably played with it for a few months before I got to the point of going, I think I could do something with this. And then I committed to it.
00:25:36
Speaker
I don't know if it would ever be published. I didn't know if it would ever be finished, but I committed to I'm going to i'm going to write the thing. Don't care what happens with it after that. Part of committing to it, I guess, was I enrolled to do a master's at the same time in climate science communications.
00:25:53
Speaker
using storytelling for climate science communication. And that was a bit for me to provide external accountability to myself. Like, you're going to do this, you're going to do it. You know, there's no opting out now.
00:26:08
Speaker
I was doing two things at the same time. I was writing a fiction book and I was also deeply researching the real science and how do you communicate the real science through fiction without compromising either.
00:26:22
Speaker
Because... To write a fiction book, it's got to be specific. It's got to be detailed. It's got to have characters. You've got to care about the characters. um It's got to have plot that moves it forward. You know, there's a whole lot of things in that that aren't normally in climate science communication.
00:26:39
Speaker
On the other end, science communication has a whole lot of stuff in it that's not normally there in a novel. It has generalisations, you know, not not detail, not specifics. It has generalisations. It has probabilities. It has...
00:26:53
Speaker
a lot of provisos and a lot of ifs in it that novels can't have. Novels don't have that if. How to be true to both genres at the same time. Well, there were actually three things. I was researching the actual climate science to make it true.
00:27:10
Speaker
I was researching how do you communicate climate science and then I was writing a novel all at the same time. I was writing three things at once. And that was how that all came together. So 470 very much grounded in real research. It's an honest expression of the science, which doesn't mean that I expect that a cyclone will devastate Byron Bay in the year 2031.
00:27:38
Speaker
What it does mean is that events like that will happen somewhere like that, sometime like that. It's an honest expression of the kind of thing that will happen.
00:27:51
Speaker
So not that I'm saying I don't think that that will happen, but I think it's an honest expression of the kind of thing that will happen. And the same thing goes for heat waves and all the things that I put characters through.
00:28:05
Speaker
i think they're an honest expression of the kind of thing that will happen. But the interesting thing that happened to me was that as I was starting to write it, aye I had my own anxiety write-up.
00:28:17
Speaker
because I thought this is going to turn into a dystopia. But it didn't. It didn't. The more, the deeper I got into learning about how to write a novel, and i'd I'd set characters up and you'd think, I'm going to put them in this scene and I'm going to make them do this.
00:28:33
Speaker
And then you'd find that the characters just wouldn't do that. It wouldn't be true to their character. It wouldn't be true to the kind of people they were. They wouldn't be that passive. And so sounds absurd to say, but the characters would resist and they would go, i'm not doing that.
00:28:51
Speaker
And I would go for great big long walks, furious walks, going, how can I make do that? And it was as if my characters were sitting there with their arms folded going, no, can't make me.
00:29:02
Speaker
And so I'd have to come back to writing and going, okay, what would they do? And so I'd get inside their imagination, inside their innovative capacity, And I found that my characters were much more resilient.
00:29:17
Speaker
And that was really hopeful. That was really lovely. ah I found that through my characters, there was a way through all this into a good life, into a good life. It was as if my own characters were teaching me, how do you live through this in such a way as get to a really good life?
00:29:33
Speaker
That was wonderful. So even though, like you said in the beginning, there's harrowing scenes in it, it's also really full of hope and positivity because I think the characters find a way to live well through that, through refined responses that I didn't know I knew.
00:29:54
Speaker
ah Thanks for sharing. part of that intimate process with us. And as a writer myself, I'm always really fascinated by other writers' experience and I hear that so often that the characters have a will and a way all of
Climate Change and Personal Connection
00:30:08
Speaker
their own.
00:30:08
Speaker
And I think we can all relate to that sensation of um climate change et al being this abstract thing that kind of floats above our heads and actually viscerally experiencing things its impact and implications in our you know limbs and torso and heart and gut and feeling body is something we probably don't engage with so often and do very often as an exercise.
00:30:33
Speaker
So I wonder if you can put us into that space for a minute, like what are some of the things that might happen in our social structure, in our and environment, in our gardens that you discovered in writing 470. It doesn't have to be exactly what what showed up in the book, but as some examples.
00:30:54
Speaker
One of the things that you can really expect, and and this is really well borne out by even insurance insurance agencies now, is that the cascading cost of climate disasters and the cascading cost of of the risk, like the whole thing about climate change is risk. It increases the risk of so many things.
00:31:15
Speaker
And cascading cost of those risks puts enormous strain on honour a society and will change a society in really big ways because of that.
00:31:27
Speaker
So we're seeing that happen now already, like with insurance premiums going right up in bushfires. areas people will be seeing this they'll will have looked at their insurance premiums and be going when did that happen and that's just that's just like what's going to happen and so it puts real stress and strain on a society to the point where a lot of the institutions and systems that we know of like insurance aren't just aren't going to do it for us anymore a lot of the things that we expect and we take for granted
00:32:00
Speaker
just aren't going to work anymore. We're going look around one day and find that they're not there. And it it won't be as a result of one thing happening. It won't be one final disaster that just goes, right, that wipes out everything. It's the cumulative effect of one on top of the other.
00:32:17
Speaker
You know, in 470, I had this debate with a lot of people because a lot of people were saying novels these days are supposed to start with, they start in the middle of action.
00:32:28
Speaker
you know, yeah like movies do, start in the middle of action. And I went, I don't want to start in the middle of action. I want to start with my characters being in in this world that just feels slightly unsettled, because everyone expects everything to go back to normal. There's all these little, little things that are the bottoms falling out of, but everyone expects it to go back to normal.
00:32:53
Speaker
After this next little crisis, it'll go back to normal. After But the next crisis comes on too fast. So before it goes back to normal from the last one, there's a new one on us and they're coming closer and closer together until it just stops going, you stop even expecting it to go back to normal.
00:33:12
Speaker
What my characters taught me in that situation is that that can be an opportunity as much as a threat, that when you stop expecting normal, you're freed up to go, right, well, what would be better?
00:33:25
Speaker
What is it I'm invested in, that I'm stuck in now only because that's the way the world works? What am I free to explore now as a better way of living in this world? Some of the things that came out of that that I'm looking at now are radical shortening of those supply chains.
00:33:43
Speaker
I mean, we we struck that during COVID and we strike it during lots of disasters and things now is that those very fragile supply chains that we've got that are incredibly long,
00:33:55
Speaker
are a big risk. So having short supply chains, yeah deal luckily you know, deal very locally, get to know local suppliers of all sorts of things, shorten your supply chains as much as possible.
00:34:07
Speaker
That's a very permaculture idea of do as many things as you can do as close to home as possible, including electricity generation, food production, waste disposal, do those things as close to home.
00:34:21
Speaker
shortens all those supply chains and that makes it much more robust, much more resilient. And another thing that came up in it too that my characters taught me was the value of community. I knew that.
00:34:32
Speaker
I didn't know how that would work in suburbia and cities and exploring how how valuable that mutual community mutual support and that value of community is.
00:34:45
Speaker
So I'm strongly sceptical of the homesteading movement that, you know, go out to the bush and bunker down. What works is being very well connected into a local community with a very nervous skill set and capacities all over the place.
00:35:06
Speaker
Well, just have about 23 more questions off the back of that, Linda. I'd like to dig into personal preparedness and resilience and community resilience.
00:35:18
Speaker
And one question that I have as a whimsical, wordy type who prefers things thinking to tinkering a lot of the time. I really have to push myself to learn hard skills and be a bit more tactile, even though it gives me great joy when I do get over the line and put my hands, plunge my hands into something. But I was interested in your take on, you know, hard hard versus soft skills and in these crises, what comes to the surface as truly essential when we're trying to meet our most basic needs and what people
00:35:52
Speaker
like me, for instance, or very intellectual types who are used to kind of sitting at their desk and pontificating what our role might be and what our place might be in that altered context or new normal.
00:36:05
Speaker
So like, is there hope for folks who feel like they don't have very many practical skills? Because one of your characters in the book, I loved how he did transform his potentially fairy fairy skillset into something a little bit more practical. Like what can you say in words of comfort to those of us who feel a bit flimsy?
Building Community Resilience
00:36:26
Speaker
If we're thinking of the same character, i was going to bring you back when first started this. I was surprised by that too. I was surprised that he found his niche in the new economy as in information management.
00:36:39
Speaker
Like information management is hugely crucial and it's one of those things that we just take for granted. We go on the internet and Google, we don't ask the question of what's going to happen to Google without advertising?
00:36:51
Speaker
You know, what's going to happen in an economy that doesn't rely on mass consumption driven by advertising to and Google, Facebook, those kind of sources of information? How are they going to how are they going to work?
00:37:05
Speaker
And what are the skills that are going to be needed in your local community just in in information management and in being able to find out things, you know. So that those kind of soft skills, I think, are going to be really nicely in demand. I can see librarians everywhere going, yes, I have a role.
00:37:23
Speaker
But the other one too that's really big is conflict management in a community. You know, like when people are under stress, conflict comes to the surface and people who are really good at what we in permaculture call social permaculture, who are really good at bizarre things facilitating meetings can you facilitate a meeting so that a group of people can come to a decision in a reasonable amount of time without ending up murdering each other that will be as valuable a skill as being able to grow bananas any day so yes i think there'll be lots of those so sort of soft skills that are really valuable networking the kind of people who know people you know who who chat to everyone and
00:38:08
Speaker
Ah, yes, you want somebody who knows how to mend a fridge. I know somebody who knows how to, yeah, those kind of networkers, people who make friends really easily.
00:38:20
Speaker
Lots of those kinds of soft skills ah will be really, really useful. And then in terms of our local communities, our neighbors sphere, we've got a local singing group in this community headed up by a really wonderful woman who knows that things like singing actually stitch people together in a really important way. And she's got an underlying, I'm not going to say a agenda, but an understanding that that is community building and resilience making. And so we were doing our carpooling to singing yesterday and we were all coming home
00:38:53
Speaker
saying how much of a community spirit we felt on these days and how how thankful we were to find each other in this little tiny kind of agricultural middle of nowhere town where we live.
00:39:05
Speaker
And I jokingly said, okay, when are we going to get walkie-talkies? Like we've got to take this to the next level because I'm thinking about, okay, how do we plan for disasters together? How do we take it from, oh we know our neighbours and everyone's lovely and sometimes we swap lettuce and produce to, How do we actually prepare for times of crisis and emergency without sounding like hysterical worry warts?
00:39:30
Speaker
Join the singing group. You're doing it. It's a good place to start. Yeah. yeah that I mean, people often say they their community is formed around kids' sporting clubs.
00:39:44
Speaker
I know my partner coaches the under-11 soccer team and the under-11 soccer team In our area, which is low socioeconomic and has a lot of refugees in it, most of the kids in the team are from refugee or non-English speaking backgrounds, which means that their parents have been through a huge amount of trauma and change and shown huge resilience.
00:40:09
Speaker
And so we've got an automatic community there of people who have a huge range of skills and resilience and capacities and what is it, ability to weather things and and react quite quickly in situations. So, yeah, I think your singing group is not a bad place to start at all or the under-11 soccer team or just making friends with the neighbours.
00:40:33
Speaker
I mean, there's all the practical things, obviously, like set your house up for for brownouts, for power power outages, set your house up for heat waves when there's power outages, which means when there's no air conditioning. Know what you're going to do in those kind of situations.
00:40:51
Speaker
food, grow food, have at least some capacity to augment food production. I'm challenging myself here to see if I can produce enough calories on a little 500-metre square block in suburbia, enough start, not just enough snow peas and lettuces, but enough calories, enough staples and proteins.
00:41:13
Speaker
Even if you don't set yourself big challenges like that, I'm I know ah I taught permaculture in Havana, Cuba, 25 years ago for a little while, for a year.
00:41:26
Speaker
And one of the things there was teaching people, if people had a they had access to rice and beans and you get scurvy and vitamin C deficiencies and vitamin D, you get a small amount of high vitamin herbs makes a huge difference.
00:41:42
Speaker
in those sort of situations. So, yeah, growing some food, dealing with some waste, knowing your neighbours, setting up communication systems, have an e-bike, lots of those very ordinary sort of things.
00:41:58
Speaker
Once you start imagining real climate change and what might happen, then you can think of Hundreds of little changes that will make a really big difference. And pulling back to look more broadly at this collective pickle that we find ourselves in, whatever you want to term it, a lot of people are talking more about collapse.
00:42:19
Speaker
That's kind of entered their public lexicon and a little more in recent times. I wonder, Linda, what your take on this time is. Have you seen it as something avoidable, something we could have avoided if we'd acted, you know, soon enough or inevitable or necessary for us to learn certain things? do you kind of have a ah philosophical take on this situation?
00:42:42
Speaker
um I try not to get evangelical about it because I think there's there is a huge range of uncertainty in there still, you know. The bits that are no longer uncertain at all is we're already past one and a half degrees centigrade.
00:43:00
Speaker
We're pretty well locked into, so we are already locked into huge loss of species, which I find you know is a source of grief.
00:43:11
Speaker
Forget about threats to humans. i I think all the other species that we're going to lose, all the natural world that we're going to lose, You know, I think that's a source of grief. I think that's really sad.
00:43:25
Speaker
even Even things like a current thing that's making me tear my hair out and bang my head with fury every so often is satellites.
00:43:35
Speaker
You know, the the but lack of regulation of satellites and orbiting means that our children, our grandchildren forever more We'll never be able to sit around a campfire at night and look up at the stars.
00:43:49
Speaker
Like that that's just gone for you meant humanity for all of history. And you go, how could that have happened without anybody even going, hang on, let's think about this for a moment.
00:44:02
Speaker
So I think there's a lot of grief that's locked in already, but I think there's all also a huge amount of room to change things. There's also a huge range of possibilities that are out there.
00:44:15
Speaker
ranging from i complete dystopia, which I don't think is likely to happen because, as I say, my characters taught me that human beings are much more resilient than we think they are.
00:44:29
Speaker
I don't think that Hunger Games or, you know, those those kind of movies actually portray what real people are like. very well. like They're extreme characters all put together.
00:44:41
Speaker
When I tried to make my characters, even some of my characters do things like that, they wouldn't. I think people are much more resilient. So I think the range of, I think that's still in the the mix, but we're much more likely headed towards a future that has grief in it for the mistakes that have already been made, but also has a lot of opportunities in it for something that's much better.
00:45:05
Speaker
I think You know, there there was that meme that came out during COVID of who wants to go back to normal? Normal wasn't working. And I think that's kind of true. There's room there for something that's much better than what we regard as normal.
00:45:21
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of assumptions within our ideas at this point of what's good and what's bad and what's what's comfortable and what's nourishing and satisfying. So, yeah, I can see how I don't know what I don't know at this point and there's a possibility or a little glimmer of potential that some of the things that I've most feared could present, you know, a huge personal opportunity. I'm not going to say that's good or bad, but an experience nevertheless.
00:45:50
Speaker
what is wealth what is eudaimonia what does a eudaimonic life look like once you really delve down into that then you look at the life that most people most of us are living and you go where do those two cross over in a venn diagram and you go how can i increase that that area of of commonality that more of my life is in that sphere, you start to see, well, some of the that changes that ah that aren't possible now because of the world, the pressure the world puts on us, if they became possible, that would be a good thing.
00:46:27
Speaker
Well, as we kind of close out or wrap up the conversation, i'd love to hear ah few more details from your world because i have had people request very regularly to hear from folks who are living more suburban lifestyles and working within that
Permaculture in Suburbia
00:46:46
Speaker
space. And even if you could share with us Linda some of the ways that you are filling that 500 meters squared with with abundant calories and maybe some permaculture techniques that you're using to grow upwards and outwards or in surprising places I think that would give listeners some nice little things to chew on wow that's a really big one where do I start with that okay
00:47:13
Speaker
What I had for breakfast this morning was homemade yogurt because I make all my own yogurt and I make all my own sourdough and that reduces the need for money.
00:47:25
Speaker
Making a lot of those kind of things reduces the need for money right down. Once you get good at it, once you actually just practice it a little bit, it becomes second nature and very easy and very non-time consuming, you know, so...
00:47:39
Speaker
just becomes a routine that's not time consuming at all. So this morning I had homemade yogurt with passion fruit because we've got lots of passion fruit at the moment and um bananas from the batch of bananas that we saved out of the ones that got that were near enough to write from Alfred and we saved them. So I did get some bananas out of it.
00:48:02
Speaker
So bananas and passion fruit and dragon fruit. Got dragon fruit growing all over the carport. So that's that permaculture idea of multi-using space. Our carport trellis is a trellis for passion fruit, dragon fruit and Madagascar beans, which is really nice source of protein.
00:48:22
Speaker
subtropical protein. And dragon fruit tastes much better with a little bit of lime juice and we're just starting to get limes. All of those plus a bit of um Davidson plum or good gin.
00:48:34
Speaker
Good gin is the proper bunjalung name for what used to be called Davidson plums because Davidson was that they were named after really didn't discover them and was a horrible coloniser. Nasty man. So I call them by their bunjalung name.
00:48:49
Speaker
But Davidson plum syrup on top. Davidson plum syrup is very, very good for You've got lots of antioxidants and everything in it. That's what I had for breakfast.
00:49:00
Speaker
But i my other choice was eggs from our chooks and garden greens. That's the other thing that I often have for breakfast. Garden greens, which at the moment, because in summer, the garden greens are not sorbet or spinach. The Egyptian spinach is a really good summer green. So,
00:49:20
Speaker
molachia that is a green that I learned from my non-English speaking refugee neighbours one of those bits of getting to know your neighbours and getting to know diverse culinary things mixed with parsley and spring onions and batches of garden greens cherry tomatoes scrambled with an egg from my backyard chooks that are deeply orange eggs fed with garden waste and I've got half a dozen neighbours now who throw their, our chook pen has a gateway to a laneway down along the side of the house, which is a very lucky thing about this site.
00:50:01
Speaker
And I have half a dozen neighbours now who throw their kitchen waste over the fence to my chooks. And some of those neighbours have kids. who empty their lunch boxes and anyone who's got food knows how much is in that.
00:50:16
Speaker
So I don't buy chook feed. The chooks get fed neighbourhood kitchen scraps and lunchbox waste and market waste once a week. On a Sunday, we go to the market and the farmer's market and get all the outside leaves of cabbages and lettuces and things that are spoiled and that goes over the fence to the chooks and chooks make compost out of that which goes out to my front raised beds where I raise all the annual vegetables or out to the verge food forest because I'm planting a lot of the bigger trees out on the verge where they get shared the neighbours, which then introduces me to Egyptian spinach and other herbs and vegetables and the plants that I don't know of and things that I can do with them, including I've got some really good Myanmar neighbours behind who...
00:51:09
Speaker
do wonderful trades with me for any roosters that we raise. They're happy to butcher our roosters for us and trade us for some wonderful foods from Myanmar.
00:51:23
Speaker
So that getting that neighbourhood trade going like that has been a really good thing. Is that the kind of thing you wanted? Oh, it's better than what I could have imagined. The stories that are in every plate of food that we eat when more and more of it is coming from our...
00:51:36
Speaker
backyard and our neighbourhood is so beautiful and so rich. It says it all. Yeah, there's there's mixtures in there of hedonism because it really is very, very nice and food security and neighbourhood relations, neighbourhood community, waste, very short waste cycling streams, no money, lots of being able to reduce amount of time and effort you need to spend on it earning money because you can do so much that doesn't need money.
00:52:06
Speaker
So yeah, all of those things are kind of tangled in all of that. Yeah. And you did mention earlier in the conversation that you consider yourself an introvert. So I just wonder how you go with these neighbourhood friendships and whether there's any hesitation in reaching out to people or something within yourself that you have to surmount when reaching out or having people kind of come in and out of your space.
00:52:32
Speaker
What does that feel like and look like for you? I'm very lucky my partner's an extrovert. So he walks the dog and chats to everybody and knows all the neighbour dog's names. Even if he doesn't know the people's names, he knows all the dog's names. So that's a big help for starters.
00:52:46
Speaker
The other part of that, though, is that it doesn't come naturally to me, but I do think it's really important to form relationships with all the the neighbours. And it's not actually that hard, even for a real introvert.
00:53:00
Speaker
I do push myself to do it locally, at least. And he's a big help. and And the fact joining things like that, like i was saying, the the under 11 soccer team and, you know, community gardens and joining things helps a lot.
00:53:17
Speaker
Is there anything you would like to leave with people in terms of an actionable or a kind a point of contemplation off the back of this conversation?
00:53:27
Speaker
I should have prepared for that question. I feel like I should have something very, very profound to put in there and I don't have anything very, very profound. The most profound thing. yeah That permaculture idea of systems thinking is that there is no one big thing. There's no one big thing you need to do.
00:53:46
Speaker
It's systems thinking is that there are lots and lots and lots of very little tweaks that when they're done consciously and intelligently and, you know, that idea of that permaculture idea of things serving multiple purposes, when you start to create those webs, it has a magic effect.
00:54:05
Speaker
Something magical happens that the yield is so much, so very, very much greater than the effort that you put in.
00:54:16
Speaker
And where can people find your excellent works? Okay, the first book, Permaculture Home Garden, has now been in print for an astonishing 28 years now, which I find incredible to understand, to believe.
00:54:31
Speaker
Published by Penguin, so you will find it in just about any bookstore. Very easy to get hold of. My novel, 470, is published by Meliodora Publishing, which is the publisher of David Holmgren's books.
00:54:45
Speaker
You will find it.
Conclusion and Gratitude
00:54:46
Speaker
if if The easy way and the quick way that people will remember is to go to my own website, lindawoodrow.com, and you'll find the link there to anywhere where you can buy it, where you can find it.
00:55:00
Speaker
It's available as an audiobook, as an e-book, and as a hardcopy print book. Yeah, I will link to those books in the show notes as well and highly recommend both of them. And also your blog is such a treat to read too.
00:55:15
Speaker
Yes, Witch's Kitchen, my blog has been going now for 17 years now. So it's been longrunning this long long running blog.
00:55:26
Speaker
And so it spans the time from living rural homesteading through into retro suburbian living. And it's got probably a thousand odd posts on it now over all of those years.
00:55:39
Speaker
Every so often I take a little break from posting regularly, but I tend to go back to it after it in a while. Yeah, it's really brimming with practical tips.
00:55:51
Speaker
i I love it for that. It's succinct and practical and there's also a lot of humour in the way that you write and I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, and...
00:56:02
Speaker
It is just absolutely an honour to so just speak with you and spend this time with you today, Linda. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. i had fun. This was a lovely conversation.
00:56:16
Speaker
That was Linda Woodrow, and if there's more you need to know, it's probably linked in the show notes. I want to say a huge thanks to the good people over on Patreon who are paying me to make this podcast. It's just mind-blowing.
00:56:30
Speaker
I spend a lot of time creating this show, almost as much as a full-time job, and that's my choice, but it's also a kind of compulsion. Like, I believe in the gentle alchemy of these conversations,
00:56:43
Speaker
how they work on us and massage us and how they shape the story. So I doggedly and lovingly produce this show to the exclusion of a lot of other paid work and personal things and the people on Patreon are providing a life raft So thank you so much for donating to the show, for funding this work, especially the show's newest patron, Sharon, who told me she cancelled her Spotify subscription and supported Reskillian's instead.
00:57:11
Speaker
What a bloody legendary maneuver. Thank you so much, Sharon. So you can head to patreon.com forward slash riskilliance if you'd like to donate to the show. And if so, please do that via your web browser, not the app.
00:57:26
Speaker
Because Apple just recently started claiming 30% of what you pledge as a fee, which is a bit greedy. Naughty Apple! So yeah, use your browsers, people. So happy Permaculture Week.
00:57:37
Speaker
Save your eggshells, plant some radishes, pat a goat, send someone a letter full of seasonal observations and seeds. Whatever floats your permy boat. This is the week to do it.
00:57:48
Speaker
Have fun. Catch you next time.