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Permaculture and the Case for Hope with Geoff Lawton
244 Plays3 days ago
In this conversation, Geoff Lawton offers us something rare: a genuinely hopeful and rigorously grounded vision of how humanity can become a reparative rather than destructive force on this planet.
As one of the world's leading permaculture designers and educators, Geoff has built demonstration sites and trained practitioners across six continents, from the Jordan Valley to the Australian bush. At Zaytuna Farm in New South Wales, he has spent over two decades transforming bare, degraded land into a thriving food forest with 32 bodies of water, hundreds of tree species, and a model for what regenerative living can look like at every scale.
In this episode, we dive into:
- How permaculture redefines wealth, from money to clean air, clean water, clean food, and community
- Why the biggest missing element in modern agriculture is trees
- How soil organic matter holds the key to our water crisis
- What Zaytuna Farm looks like today after 25 years of regeneration
- Why our economy needs to shift from extraction to deposition
- How permaculture projects in Jordan, Hungary, and Spain are proving this works at scale
- Why Geoff believes humanity may be on the verge of a new kind of consciousness
More about Geoff Lawton, Zaytuna Farm, and Discover Permaculture:
Geoff Lawton is a world renowned permaculture consultant, designer and teacher. He took his PDC in 1983 with Bill Mollison, widely considered the “father of permaculture.” Geoff has specialized in permaculture education, design, implementation, system establishment, administration and community development since 1985. Working in over 50 countries, Geoff has taught more than 15,000 students, he established the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia and Zaytuna Farm which is Geoff and Nadia’s family home. As an award winning Permaculture Designer, Geoff’s main aim is to drive the establishment of self-replicating educational demonstration sites across the globe.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.
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Transcript
Transformative Effects of Permaculture
00:00:03
Speaker
There's another reality suddenly that happens when you take a permaculture course. People say to you, you changed the way I see things. You changed my view of the countryside. I've seen the world through another lens.
00:00:15
Speaker
I'm seeing through another sort of pathway. There's something there that was always there and suddenly you opened it up. Welcome aboard.
Agrarian Futures Podcast: Season Two
00:00:27
Speaker
In season two of Agrarian Futures, we're starting with a simple question. How did we get here? Farms are disappearing. Land is getting harder to access. Rural economies are hollowing out.
00:00:39
Speaker
But there are people building better ways forward. Join us as we investigate what's broken in our food system and what it looks like to build something better.
00:00:54
Speaker
Welcome to the Agrarian Futures podcast. Jeff, thank you so much for being willing to do this. A little bit about the conversation I want to have to kind of just frame the conversation. Agrarian Futures, we're a U.S.-based podcast, and we've been looking at the food system and really trying to understand kind of like the historical forces of what have led to what it is today and how can we understand the different trends that that have happened, especially over the last hundred years, to understand why it is the way it is today. And then talking to different leaders, visionaries, practitioners like you, looking at like what are the possibilities moving forwards and what are what are the places of hopes that we can look at to inspire us to think about what a better food system would look like.
Permaculture: A Design Science
00:01:41
Speaker
So to get us started with a very basic fundamental question to this conversation today, could you tell us
00:01:49
Speaker
What is permaculture? Okay, well, thanks for coming. It's always a pleasure to talk to people who want to know what we're about and what the potential is for a better world. Permaculture is a design science based in ethics, and it sets out to provide all the needs of humanity in a way that's beneficial to the ecosystems of Earth, which we depend on.
00:02:13
Speaker
We depend on the ecosystems of Earth to moderate climate and to sustain our soils. because our base resource is our soils.
00:02:25
Speaker
So we put together systems that use ecosystem mimicry. We use the wisdom of the ecosystems, which are truly sustainable and have been for millennia, to design systems that actually improve soils and increase the creation of soil while providing all our needs. That's our ah approach, and we're doing pretty well.
00:02:45
Speaker
And when we spoke yesterday, you mentioned that permaculture is not even just about agriculture. i don't want to put words in your mouth, but it's it's a holistic way of thinking that, you know, thinks about all the different components that we need to live.
Holistic Approach of Permaculture
00:03:01
Speaker
Could you talk a little bit of more about that and and the other elements of permaculture outside of growing our food that you guys are focused on? Humanity needs not just food. I mean, we actually need a peaceful world. We need to create less pollution or no pollution.
00:03:16
Speaker
We need somewhere to live. We need habitat. We need communities. and We need exchange of money, if it is money, but we need to trade somehow. We need to deal with our waste because we actually create waste ourselves. We have a liquid waste and a solid waste on every human body and every animal we deal with. And that needs to go back into ecosystems in a beneficial way.
00:03:37
Speaker
So we design toilets, which shocks people. but And we design waste systems in all different all different forms. And we need some degree of energy system. We all today use quite high-tech energy. and We have the internet running. That's how this is probably going to go out. We're filmed on technology here.
00:03:56
Speaker
So there's all kinds of ah technology. a lot of it's inappropriate and it's not designed to the best benefit of the ecosystem. It's designed with thoughtlessness to ecosystem. It doesn't really matter. We got high tech. Well, high tech doesn't necessarily mean it's necessarily very environmentally friendly. So we have appropriate technology.
00:04:17
Speaker
And all those things we design. So we design every need of humanity. We need food, but we also need fiber. We need some clothes. We need some warmth. That's a big thing to answer. But if you just look at the Bill of Human Rights, if we were to rewrite the Bill of Human Rights within the permaculture design, ethical design science, we would start off saying, we as humans, we have a right to clean air.
00:04:43
Speaker
Well, a lot of people die of air pollution a day. A lot of us live in not very nice airstreams, in cities particularly. But I think just being born as an intellectual, intelligent human being, civilized hopefully, we have a right to clean air.
00:05:00
Speaker
we would ah not like to have a right to clean water. Water that doesn't cause you problems, hasn't got all these strange additives in it. Most people live in areas, cities that all kinds of things are put in our water and it's traveling through all kinds of strange pipes and media. It's
Rights to Clean Resources
00:05:16
Speaker
not the best water.
00:05:18
Speaker
We would like to have a ah right to absolutely clean water and that's quite rare today. and And we pay a lot for water. We pay more for water than we do for ah fuel for our vehicles. We would like a right to clean food. And that's kind of almost a joke, right? Because a lot of our food is not very clean, has all kinds of other elements in it. And it's also not very nutritious. We've lost the nutrition of food a lot.
00:05:40
Speaker
And it would nice if it was really fresh and not come from the other side of the world on a boat or a plane, you know, causing more pollution. So we'd we'd like to ah write to clean food. And when I say clean food, I also mean very high quality food. and And it hasn't cost pollution to get it to us.
00:05:58
Speaker
And then sensible housing. um We can have quite modern housing. We don't have to start living in like mud caves anymore, you know, things like that, you know. You could, you could live in straw bale houses and mud brick and all those things, but you can live in a modern house. It's a very modern house, but it's completely solar.
00:06:13
Speaker
I've lived on solar for over 30 years. I don't know what it's like to live off solar. I've collected in my own water for over 30 years and I've grown all my own food. It's not hard to do, but you need some science approach. You need a design system. It relates to climate and landscape, of course, as well. So after sensible housing that heats itself, cools itself, catches its own water, is reasonably easy to replace, and it's energy efficient, then warmth. You don't really want to be too cold. You don't really want to be too hot, right? You just want to be warm.
Redefining Wealth in Permaculture
00:06:45
Speaker
Warmth is a sort of general term for ah feeling comfortable.
00:06:49
Speaker
And then you'd like to have a community. So it's like clean air, clean water, clean food, sensible housing, warmth, and community. Now, we've developed this wealth idea, and it is an idea, it's not a reality, because that's what gives you wealth. If you're wealthy, you have an abundance of clean air, abundance of clean water, abundance of clean food, an abundance of sensible housing, an abundance of warmth, and an abundance of community. But you find that when you look around the world or you travel around the world, the only people with community are people who are living in poverty.
00:07:27
Speaker
The richer you are, the less you want to know who lives next door. And if you get hyper-rich, you actually have armed guards keeping everybody away from you. You live like in a protected razor-wire castle. And most of the rich and famous people die in those situations.
00:07:42
Speaker
And the other extreme is you're in absolute poverty, You've got a dense population around you and everybody knows everybody. And if you scream in the middle of the night, people will come in and see if you need any help.
00:07:54
Speaker
They protect each other, they cooperate. In a rich suburb, if you scream in the middle night, someone calls the police and complains. We don't want to know who our neighbors are if we're wealthy. So that's actually going in the wrong direction.
00:08:07
Speaker
If we all try and become rich and wealthy, we just need four or five more planets of resources and they're going to run out after a while. If we all go towards poverty, we need more planet because we're more fertile.
00:08:21
Speaker
So the poorer you are, the more babies you have. The richer you are, the more infertile you become. But you demand more resources. It's called the biological effect. And you can check it out by checking the edges and the patterns around that. So that' we look at edges and patterns a lot in permaculture, and then natural patterns and natural edges where things interact over an edge boundary.
00:08:45
Speaker
So if you look at infertility, and you can check that out by IVF clinics, infertility clinics, where are the most IVF clinics? Where the richest people are, where they think they're rich. They haven't and might not have an abundance of clean air clean air, clean water, clean... They don't necessarily have that, but they have monetary wealth. So you'll find that the richer they are or the more social services they have, the more IVF clinics.
00:09:13
Speaker
If you go to the other extreme, if you go to where people think they're going to die soon or today, like a war zone, there's no infertility. Everyone's extremely fertile.
00:09:24
Speaker
It's an event that happens in nature with all things, all living things. As you're pushed towards the edge of extinction, you're you become more fertile.
00:09:34
Speaker
When you oversupply with all the resources you need to a ridiculous amount, your your fertility drops. So we need a balance. So we need to redefine wealth.
00:09:46
Speaker
It's not necessarily money. It's often not money at all. Wealth is this feeling of abundance where you know where your resources come from, you know they're not depleting, you've got an endless amount of clean air, clean water, clean food, sensible housing, warmth, friendship and community, where that is all in abundance, you're very wealthy. And what we teach people is how do you design that for yourself? How do you design that for your community?
00:10:11
Speaker
The agricultural world has gone in the direction of like, let's just create volume and sell it for as much money as we can. Don't care about what happens to the soil much or the environment around it. Don't use an environment model. Don't include environmental elements integrated within the system.
00:10:28
Speaker
Just cash in. And when it all stops working, and move over and do it somewhere else and leave that to repair itself, which can take hundreds, if not thousands of years, because we are very good at degrading landscapes to be way beyond the local endemic species that can repair.
Zaytuna Farms: A Permaculture Model
00:10:45
Speaker
You won't find any local elements that can repair it. it's going to take a long time.
00:10:50
Speaker
That's the catastrophe. Helping people design for abundance. That's obviously one of the the core mission of what you guys are doing. For people that aren't familiar with Zaytuna Farms and where you guys are based and kind of the model that you have developed here on this land, could you briefly describe how you came to this area, what it was like when you got here and kind of what you've built up over the last 20 years? Yeah, 2001, we bought the land.
00:11:19
Speaker
Yeah, like all our projects, we have projects all over the world that do the same thing. And mostly we set up demonstration sites and education centers that as they develop, usually end up being eco villages or eco hamlets. This one's not really a village, it's a hamlet. We have eight villages.
00:11:37
Speaker
households live in here, eight families. Now they all have their own area. We set up a system with multiple variations of demonstration site for education process.
00:11:48
Speaker
We did a lot more design work here than than we needed to for this land and for what the eight families now require. But we did it to demonstrate for people so they could see the event in process. There were no trees here. Had the only trees here when we arrived.
00:12:02
Speaker
I have a photograph from 1943, and there was about 25, aerial photograph, about 25 trees here or so. When I arrived, you could see right across the land. it was it was mostly cleared. So there's enormous amount of extra trees, and there's a great diversity of trees here. There are novel ecosystems everywhere. They're not all endemic. They're quite novel. There's a lot of hardworking immigrant species, including people. There's a lot of water systems. There's a lot of rehydration.
00:12:32
Speaker
There's 32 different bodies of water. You might call them ponds. In Australian English, you might call them dams. Some of them are canals. They're permanent or semi-permanent bodies of water here. And there is enormous amount of rehydration systems that soak water in sponges. There's four kilometers of water harvesting long lines on contour that soak water in called swales.
00:12:59
Speaker
And there's enormous amount of ah food forest activity. Plus, we still have grazing. We still milk cows. We have poultry. We have small animals, quite a few gardens. We have farm forestry. Another 20 years, we could start milling our own timber. We'd have enough timber easily to replace all the houses that we've got.
00:13:17
Speaker
and more And we have a lot of regeneration areas. There's hundreds of thousands of trees that are coming up from the original. When it was really empty, we've regenerated enormous areas. But we still have cleared areas. It's a very patterned landscape. But so is our project in Hungary, and so is our project in the Jordan Valley, and so is our project in southern Spain. And and there are thousands of projects worldwide, if not tens of thousands of projects worldwide, that are doing exactly the same thing.
00:13:47
Speaker
you They all look different. They're all in different climates. We base our design work on a climate analogue. So what is your latitude, north or south of the equator? What is your altitude above sea level? Because every 100 metres changes your temperature range.
00:14:03
Speaker
And what is your distance from an ocean? Starts the climate analogue. So you find that you can go all around the world. You can pick climate analogues that the same as where we are here.
00:14:14
Speaker
Southern Brazil, there's a lot of areas are the same as this. San Paolo is identical to Brisbane, which is not far from where we are here. You can pick your climate analogs, north and south of the equator, doesn't really matter. And then you can design appropriate assemblies of species that work to supply the needs of humanity. So I have some Hawaiian trees here that actually supply the fuel of the traditional Hawaiian people.
00:14:40
Speaker
Candernut grows here. In the future, could be a sustainable fuel source. Right now, it doesn't matter, but it could be. You guys obviously have done projects all over the world in many different climates.
00:14:52
Speaker
And the principles of permaculture apply everywhere or global in nature. The principles are, obviously, I'm guessing a lot of contextual knowledge is also very important to every project. In a world where, you know, so much of that traditional knowledge has been lost in a lot of places where like, you know, the people that have been working the land have, you know, been disconnected from it and have lost that.
00:15:16
Speaker
you know, indigenous knowledge. How do you guys navigate bringing in that like kind of global perspective and principles that come with permaculture with the on the grounds knowledge that comes from the people that have been living in the place for a long time? That's so easy to do. Yeah, it's called Google or AI.
00:15:35
Speaker
yeah It's all there. You know the question to ask. The answer comes in eight seconds. it's It's all out there. We're in the information age. And we've been in the information age for quite a long time now. Now we're in the super speed information age. You can ask right now a question, now how many different food plants grow here?
00:15:54
Speaker
I mean, actually, we have our own AI, but we can actually put a longitude latitude in and can spit you out all the food plants for your garden, your food forest and the type of house you should build. And we've actually developed that. And then that doesn't help you be a designer. That that gives you that gives you the ingredients for the recipe. The information is massive that you've got available to you. And it's never been quicker. We can quickly assemble that.
00:16:15
Speaker
And you can look at what traditional people did, if you like. But traditional people didn't have the species we have now. So you have 800 and increasing to 1,000 plus different food plants you can grow in your garden, wherever you are, that you couldn't grow in the Middle Ages.
00:16:31
Speaker
800 times. And they're increasing because we're discovering new food plants all the time, all over the world. Of course, they're not traded on the stock market. The only thing traded on the stock market is soybeans, rice, maize, you know potatoes.
00:16:46
Speaker
yeah That's kind of heat. So the whole middle of America is maize and soybeans. That's simplifying your food down to very limited nutrition and loads of process and massive amounts of energy and lots of environmental destruction.
00:17:01
Speaker
So you couldn't go in a worse direction to be truly sustainable. And where every garden could have 200 perennial food plants, not annuals, not the annuals, not the seasonal vegetables.
00:17:16
Speaker
And we have examples of it. Holyoke, Massachusetts, where you get two foot of snow every year, Eric Tonesmeyer, one of our famous practitioners, on 1,000 square meters, a quarter of an acre, trialed 300 perennial food plants. I have to emphasize perennial, not annual.
00:17:34
Speaker
And he settled on what he thought were the best 200. Most people don't know that. But AI does. You know, these things, there's no secret information anymore. It's time to wake up people and get it done. mean, you don't have to go down the road and eat processed soybeans and rice and maize and wonder why you're not very well.
00:17:54
Speaker
It's not only is that a simplistic diet, but it's actually very low nutrition. Wheat alone, we produce 16 times more wheat in volume than traditional people did in the Middle East where it originated.
00:18:08
Speaker
but it's one twelfth the nutrition. you've got to eat 12 times more wheat to get the same nutrition. Who benefits from that? The people who promote that type of agriculture, the people that make the million-dollar tractors, the people who make the pharmaceutical chemicals that keep it growing in that unnatural state. We're pouring more and more and more systemic chemicals onto our food all the time. It wasn't a good idea to grow our food on poisons.
00:18:32
Speaker
and keep doing it, and say we're high-tech. We're high-tech poisoning farmers. that that And the tractor gets bigger all the time to do this because the land gets more degraded. where our our land we can We can grow the same nutrition on 4% to 6% of the equivalent area presently used.
00:18:51
Speaker
Most people don't know that, and they're shocked when I tell them. The area of land we use to produce food alone for humanity is incredibly inefficient. And it's at a great distance from the consumer.
00:19:04
Speaker
So a lot of it doesn't even make it to where it's consumed because it gets lost in process, it spoiled in process. The nutritional quality is extremely low. And the amount of energy you have to put in to grow it and transport it is massive.
00:19:19
Speaker
So if you just look at the equivalent area, I don't say the same area, the equivalent area close to humanity, you have to eat seasonally. You have to eat what grows when it's ripe or process it so you can keep it over winter. So food that will store, if if you have a winter,
00:19:38
Speaker
If you have ah a serious winter or you have a very, very hot, dry period, those are the climates where you need to store food, where you get very cold or extreme dry. Both have no moisture.
00:19:50
Speaker
When it's all frozen, you've got no moisture. When it's all super hot and dry, you've got no moisture. So there you have to store food. You have to grow food that stores, or you have to value add it through fermentation and process.
Perennial Plant Systems and Independence
00:20:03
Speaker
that This is not highly processed food in a bad way. This is often processing food so it increases in its nutrient quality, fermentation processes and values. So once you do that with food that's grown locally, you need a very small area.
00:20:18
Speaker
It's 4% to 6% of the equivalent area we now use with massive inputs of energy, massive inputs of transport costs, massive machinery, and massive amounts of very strange chemicals.
00:20:34
Speaker
And that all comes through to us. There would be foods you wouldn't even know about. I picked a salad this morning for breakfast. I think I got about 15 different ingredients in a salad. I picked a lot of spinach and there was about five or six different types of spinach.
00:20:49
Speaker
And we had a chicken egg that was organic from the chickens. And we had a little bit of kimchi with it, which is your processed food. And for people that, are again, that are not familiar with Zaytuna, just to kind of give them and a sense of the abundance that you guys have here, could you quickly describe the different species of fruits and vegetables and trees that you guys have here, just to give them a sense of the abundance? We have about 53 varieties of fruit tree and about 180 different herbs and vegetables.
00:21:17
Speaker
But we could have 300 or 400 if we wanted. We have to simplify our systems a little bit because people come here to learn and they're kind of swamped by what we've got already. But some of the specialists have way more than I do. And then there are wonderful people in our movement, like ah Joseph Simcox is the is a biological explorer. He goes out there looking for food crops that are not yet known or not yet domesticated.
00:21:42
Speaker
And we've come up with like 200 palm tree species, edible palms alone. Globally, there's about 2020 new species of plants and trees discovered every year.
00:21:54
Speaker
ah Quite a lot of those are are edible. we We don't know much about what's edible, really. we've We've just simplified, simplified, simplified, and turned the farm into a factory. And now they want to feed us with a laboratory.
00:22:07
Speaker
So the the technological answer is no more farms. You can grow everything inside a laboratory. And it's all microbes and organisms and insects and different things. And we just get off the land. Well, we lose the psychological benefit of working with nature, working with the abundance, listening, experiencing. And what it is like...
00:22:30
Speaker
When you work with the land, instead of working to destroy the land or say, what does this land have to give me? What can I take from this land? It's what has this land got to offer?
00:22:42
Speaker
And what is the relationship I need to develop? So it's literally like a relationship. Relationships are complicated. You've got to work on relationships. They don't just happen. And even thinking about this from a human point of view, relationships are very special and they get better over time if you're doing the right thing and you're not tearing each other apart.
00:23:01
Speaker
So the divorce issues are a bit of a worry, the number of divorces out there. But when you've got the world right, we dev develop together as a relationship within a relationship with nature.
00:23:11
Speaker
And that's an infinite relationship. It goes on forever. There's no end to this. The more you learn about permaculture, the more you realize there is to know about permaculture. It's an infinite journey. And so is nature. Nature is an infinite journey. And that's the relationship we've lost. So kids today don't want to go to school anymore because why would they? They can just ask AI.
00:23:32
Speaker
Now, I just referenced AI. So everything's good and bad together. Technology can be used for a tool and it's dumbing our kids down. Why do you want to go to school? I can do all my homeworks on AI. i get top marks every time. And I know I'm going to do that when I get a job.
00:23:45
Speaker
My job is going to be using AI, isn't it? That's that's the logic of children today. I can get a university degree using AI. I'd be a master's. I can be a doctorate. But you can't do that out there so much.
00:23:57
Speaker
There is a certain amount of intimacy that is involved in than the relationship with nature. And it's a beautiful thing. It's a very, very beautiful thing. It's really good for you and your your spirit, your soul, if you like, feels that relationship. Now that's passed on generation and generation and generation. It gets refined through community.
00:24:20
Speaker
And that becomes our identity. That's the personality of our community. That's who we are. We don't know who we are any anymore. Everything's generic.
00:24:30
Speaker
Everyone wears the same cap, the same clothes. Everyone drinks the same soft drink. None of it comes from our local community. It could do. Easy. he Easy it could do. And that could be our identity. As you move from climate analog to climate analog, you get different identities. The world becomes this wonderfully abundant, diverse place in people's interaction with nature as one of the most interesting and complicated components. That's hard to get across to the corporate multinationals of the world.
00:25:01
Speaker
They're not interested in that. What are you talking about? Some kind of old-fashioned hippie thing? or say No. You've linked your traditional knowledge to the appropriate technology, to the species that are available to develop the new superhuman.
00:25:17
Speaker
We are the new indigenous. We are the future indigenous. When you timescate forward and see the possibilities of abundance in nature and people, whoa, it's a world that's hard to imagine. And it's wonder.
00:25:33
Speaker
It's absolute wonder. Get children young enough, they get it. You get people old enough, they get it. You get old people who've lived a bit of a life and you were just they say, yeah, that's right. And children just are in wonder.
00:25:46
Speaker
Anyway, if they're less than four years old, the whole life is wow. Get them early enough. The people in the middle, they're all too busy to even think. They spend 60 to 80 hours a day, a week on a phone or or a screen. But we can use the screen. I use the screen.
00:26:03
Speaker
Well, and so, yeah, I wanted to get to that question because you you, you know, you talk about like we've never had so much information at our fingertips. Our ability to access knowledge is unprecedented. The tools we have in a way is unprecedented.
Challenges in Spreading Permaculture
00:26:18
Speaker
And we have these incredibly hopeful examples like here, like projects all over the world that you've worked with. A lot of other people doing really interesting work of abundance being possible both in terms of how we live and in terms of the culture that we create, like this is possible despite the message that we maybe hear from the establishment around kind of this Malthusian argument around food scarcity and a growing population and how we're going to feed people, all all that kind of stuff.
00:26:47
Speaker
What do you think are the bottlenecks to this worldview, this kind of worldview grounded in place and culture and appropriate technology? What are the bottlenecks that you see to that replicating across the world more broadly and creating this tapestry of diverse cultures that that you described?
00:27:08
Speaker
only information exchange. If people don't know they can do this, they're not going to get to the tipping point. The tipping point, if Malcolm Gladwell's right, who wrote the book Tipping Point and used lots of examples in most diverse ways, I love that book, right? I had to read it and it was so hopeful. 11% to 18% is where we tip, right? So if 11% to 18% of the world go, I found out that you could do this. I didn't know that.
00:27:33
Speaker
I thought the world was all going to end. They told us at school that humans were the the the most damaging thing on Earth. The thing is, the the universe is balanced. Everything's in balance.
00:27:45
Speaker
I'm not gonna get hippie here, but like, it's like that, right? If you actually look at it, right? what you know So where there's so much bad, there's equally so much good. If humans can be this bad at damaging the planet, we can be equally this good at repairing it just as quickly as well. Just as quick as we've damaged it in 100 years, and we've increased our damage.
00:28:04
Speaker
Just as quickly, in 100 years, we can completely repair it into absolute wonder. And it will moderate our population naturally because we'll all understand what true wealth is. We kind of need to get in this situation almost like we're in a war. We're in a final war. This is a final war. We've got to win this one.
00:28:21
Speaker
And what we win is paradise. So we have to get in a warrior mode. We have to say, we're going to do this and we're not going to be afraid anymore. When you decide that you're going to, you're fed up with this, you're fed up with being scared and it's boring being scared, real boring, right? So you're making this podcast because you're probably bored with what's happening out there and you don't want to believe that we're only bad, right? So you're one of the warriors. You're going to get it out there to people.
00:28:45
Speaker
This is what we need. We need people to get it out there. When you become a warrior, you stop being afraid. You're dying every day, living like this, living this boring job. And every weekend you want to step out, and but you come back.
00:28:58
Speaker
You don't quite jump over the line. When you jump over the line, you go, I'm going to do what I can to get this message to people. And it's kind of like you're in a charge mentality. You're charging at the enemy, trying to change it. You die once. Die, death you've got to have anyway. But you're no longer afraid because this is something I can do.
00:29:19
Speaker
I can do a garden. I can improve my transport. I can improve my my house. I can improve my waste system. Little things, all of us. When we all start moving together and we get to that tipping point, we stop buying that rubbish. We stop supporting it. We stop voting in the idiots who keep supporting it.
00:29:36
Speaker
They go broke. They will give you nuclear power from a nuclear power station or a coal-fired power station or whatever. As long as you get using the electricity, they'll give it to you. You've got find a way to shut it down.
00:29:48
Speaker
So they they don't give it to you. We can run on renewables if we all shut down and use appropriate systems. We can run on local food supply if we stop buying tropical fruits from the other side of the world. yeah We have to develop the ethics and understand it's just an energy analog. We're just... We're analyzing the energy of our life. What is your life cost in the world?
00:30:11
Speaker
And um once we see that, that's something we can jump on and feel like, oh, this is worth doing. I can put my heart and soul behind this. I can believe in it. So we're looking for answers. There are answers out there. We can get involved. And and we're finding ways to increase that, speed that up.
00:30:27
Speaker
And so it's just information, really. And when they block us, we've got to find a workaround. I wonder if it's just information or if it's kind of like imagination in a way, because I do feel like there's a lot of information out there. And if you take a more like, i don't know, discrete issue, like everyone in the U.S. knows that conventional farming is bad. Like, I mean, everyone's seen the famous documentaries. Everyone's read Michael Pollan. Like they technically know it in their brain.
00:30:58
Speaker
And yet, not that many are moving to action around that. And I get the sense that a lot of people are kind of trapped within like the the kind of boundaries of what they perceive as possible, which is extremely narrow.
00:31:11
Speaker
My affirmation you need to have it is, please, every morning, please let me see the world as it really is. Not my imagination over the top of what I've been told.
00:31:22
Speaker
You have to ask to see it clearly, what exactly is happening. You need hope. And what we give people is hope. What I give people a lot with that my teaching and my my lectures is like, wow, you people say if you gave me hope. yeah There is something I can do. And um there' do you need more of that, especially with the young people. They've got a life in front of them and they've got energy. And they're going be healthier. They're going to be more vital because that's what this gives you. Right? And there's meaningful things. I can have a meaningful life. Otherwise, my life looks like it's got no meaning at all. And you look back on your memories, and they're all black and white, fuzzy, out of focus.
00:32:01
Speaker
If you live a meaningful life, you look back on your memories, and they're massive. They're almost slow motion, technicolor, high definition. Your memories are huge when you've had a meaningful life.
00:32:11
Speaker
When you've had a meaningless life, time's dragged. It's been really slow. The last five minutes on Friday night, Friday afternoon is the slowest five minutes of the week. And the weekend comes, it goes in a flash, and you're back to this boring job, and you wish you could do something else. Your memories, you don't remember that.
00:32:29
Speaker
Your memories remember emotional things. When you're really, really scared or really, really happy and you're really doing something meaningful, that anchors. And that's when you know you're doing the right thing.
00:32:40
Speaker
And resources keep gathering around you. Some of that's information. Some of it's wonderful people. Like you found me and we're doing a podcast. How did that happen? I mean, because when you're doing the right thing and the resources are around, they come to you, right? And a lot of them are people.
00:32:58
Speaker
So you're a resource for me and I'm a resource for you and we're making a podcast. like How did that happen? You're from the other side of the world. Because we're engaged in trying to do something meaningful. People, we can all do this. We can all do this. Have hope.
00:33:12
Speaker
yeah you're You're a very intelligent organism. The most intelligent. You can do bad things easier than you can do good things. And it's pretty boring doing bad things, actually. And the good things you can do are really interesting, super interesting.
00:33:27
Speaker
And it's infinite. Welcome to infinity. You don't need to be scared. It's a bit edgy to start with. But then you go, wow, like I have an infinite resource.
00:33:38
Speaker
So I can endlessly learn. One of the things that makes you live long, longer, is having an infinite interest. Your intellect is infinitely stimulated and you've got great people to talk to who have the same approach to life.
00:33:55
Speaker
That's one of the longevity factors. Food is one of them. The other one is no vices. Stop taking those vices that numb your existence because you're not happy. You don't need vices. We got one. It's absolutely wonderful. It's outside, right? it's great. You're interacting with it all the time.
00:34:11
Speaker
Decent amount of sleep, right? And stay moving. Keep moving. Keep active. The people who live the longest are gardeners. Look it up. Yeah. Gardeners live a long time because he're using all the muscle groups.
00:34:23
Speaker
I've been quite athletic and I'm still trying to be quite sporty. I still surf. I still ride a horse. I fish. I do a few things. But I'm 71 and I'm working every day in the garden. And some of the young people here have a job keeping up with me.
00:34:35
Speaker
and they've just got to get on get into it. That's what makes you live a long time. But at some of it's like intellectual stimuli. You can't go numb. Looking at a screen doesn't do a lot, but there are good things you can look up on the screen.
00:34:48
Speaker
You can look up permaculture projects on the screen. You can look up permaculture people on the screen. You can look up all kinds of information you need to understand about permaculture just to get you started. But The more you learn about permaculture, the more you realize there is to learn about permaculture. ah There's nothing wrong with that.
00:35:04
Speaker
That's that longevity journey. Yeah, I mean, I watch some of your videos on YouTube, and I think that is what you do so well, give people hope. Because people feel inundated by all this negative information of horrible things happening all over the world and the climate crisis that's described in this kind of technocratic way that doesn't give people any agency to do anything about it. It's kind of like carbon, you know, sequestering into the atmosphere everything.
00:35:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's what you do so well is kind of tie it back to what you can do on your PovLand, no matter what the size, with your community that is building that better world. Let's get on with what we can do.
00:35:43
Speaker
Make ourselves feel better. When you want to feel better yourself, you want to look after your own health while you do something that looks after the environment health. You're on. If you don't want to be healthy and you ask to look after him, like why would you look after him when you don't even want to look after yourself? So a lot of people in the in the developing countries, they haven't even got time to look after themselves. They haven't thought about looking after their own personal health. And you go in there as a permaculture aid worker and tell them, we've got to look after the environment.
00:36:08
Speaker
Well, they'll take the money, but they won't take the idea that well. But first off, what we've done in a lot of our developing country projects is set up a health center. and What natural health is like. How do you get natural health care?
00:36:20
Speaker
How do you get natural makeup, organic makeup? i it For the women, how do you get organic hairdressing? How do you get fit? They've never had that. They skipped that bit into the screen age. We had it.
00:36:31
Speaker
you know In the developing world, we kind of had you're supposed to look after yourself. wow Well, probably we should look after the environment as well. But a lot of people don't realize that when you go in to teach people in a developing country you should look after the environment, they're going to say, yes, yes, yes, because they're going to say, well, we're going to fund us, you know, and we're poor.
00:36:48
Speaker
But it's just lip service because they're not even looking after their own bodies. They're not even looking after their children, really. I mean, they're just doing what they need to survive. But you say, look, you have every opportunity to look after yourself and then we'll look after the environment as well. Well, good idea. Let's do it. And it feeds back.
00:37:05
Speaker
The environment then looks after their health. And we see that connected loop systems of, well, it all works together. And I've spent little bit of time in Egypt. You've obviously spent tons of time in all sorts of communities. One of the, I guess, maybe like challenges i ran into, and I'm curious how you navigated this, is when you go to these countries that are...
00:37:28
Speaker
in some ways impoverished, potentially because of colonialism, and imperialism, all that kind of stuff, and that have been inundated with this Western image of progress and wealth and consumerism that kind of has taken over in a way where like it's what they aspire to and kind of have in the process are kind of rejecting their own their own culture and the kind of connection to place, land, health, you know, all all the kind of things that would make up that kind of resilient local life. How do you go about navigating that? or and And even in our context, like how do we fight back, I guess, against this, for lack a better word, like Hollywood consumer vision that's like pumped into all of us?
00:38:14
Speaker
Well, it's got easier and easier because you've got the internet and he got the mobile phones. And then all the rich and famous have permaculture gardens. so So some of the richest people on on earth, some the famous people on earth have a permaculture garden.
00:38:26
Speaker
And some have had them for 30 years, by the way. you know So you can reference that and say, look, this is the new future. that People are aspiring to this.
00:38:36
Speaker
right So you can put those up as examples and then you start small. You don't go into big projects. You start small and say what individual families can do. And you set up the demonstration for them.
00:38:47
Speaker
You live the example in position. And it may mean some time investment. A lot of aid projects only fun for three to five years, but you may be 10 years setting up your project. What I do is I bring Westerners from wealthy countries into project sites overseas in poor countries to take a design course. They're excited to go to an exotic location and they pay the same price they would in America for a course in Jordan, let's say.
00:39:16
Speaker
This is what I've done for over 20 years in Jordan. You come to Jordan, you're going to pay the same price taking a course with me in Jordan as you would in America. But that extra funding runs the project. And people there who are working on the project say, well, these all these rich people come into Jordan to learn this for.
00:39:32
Speaker
Right? And after a while, they're kind of like, something's going on. Because more people will keep coming. Now, then we build them something very first world, like an organic coffee shop or an organic restaurant.
00:39:46
Speaker
And they see the rich people in their own country come into this location because they want to have an organic coffee or they want to have a destination dining.
00:39:57
Speaker
And there's traditional food in an organic situation, in a natural building, in a local food forest. And it starts to click. Hold on a minute. What are they doing? Why are they doing this? They're not silly, right? but They're just poor.
00:40:11
Speaker
they They haven't had the opportunity to see this happening. So well maybe this is important. Maybe we should do this. Maybe there's a reason to do this. And actually, it's cheaper in in many ways because you either pay the farmer or or the gardener or you pay the doctor. Because sooner or later, immunity goes and your health goes.
00:40:31
Speaker
And people are just not being informed. So we become an information network to their awakening, really. And that spreads, that information spreads, and you get another project come up and another project come up and they start to work out.
00:40:45
Speaker
And to finish us off on this podcast, we like to explore kind of the economic layer, which I feel like in a way is maybe too dominant today. Kind of we have a nature has become embedded in our economic system and our economic system is trapping people and nature in a way that is not sustainable, I guess, for lack of a better word.
00:41:05
Speaker
And you've alluded a few times also to like the stock market and profit and greed. Looking at from the permaculture perspective, how would you think about our economy?
00:41:18
Speaker
Our economy is definitely more local-based. You're looking at bioregions rather than surveyed boundaries. So within each bioregion, there's a local wealth and a local economy rather than a national economy.
00:41:32
Speaker
But the national economy is the stability of the ecosystems and the the national biodiversity of the landscape. You've got carbon capture programs and carbon credits. Now you have biodiversity capture programs. right, in biodiversity credits.
00:41:49
Speaker
So we actually realize we need that stability. You get that with the systems we put in. And what are your thoughts on carbon credits? I think they're working very well now because they're actually paying us to put trees into agriculture. Agriculture is greatly deficient, and it's not suddenly going to flip into permaculture in one move. It can't do that.
00:42:10
Speaker
So you've got to make agriculture, it's way out of scale, and it's very... It's positioned at very remote places where you inevitably have to truck or fly, you know, food items and products, fibers and different things, great distances.
00:42:26
Speaker
But it's very unstable. So your food is creating enormous amounts of food and fibers and different products, causing enormous amounts of soil erosion. And it can't go on. Base resource is the soil. Your main crops of the world are losing 200 tons per hectare per year, right? Or 200 tons.
00:42:46
Speaker
Tons and tons, metric and non. So to see an American audience, 200 tons per hectare per year of soil loss. and and can top out at 400. Yet that can't go on.
00:42:57
Speaker
So the biggest thing, the biggest single elements that's missing from agriculture is trees. And not just singular species, but diversities of trees. And they need to be integrated through.
00:43:07
Speaker
And usually they need to be on strips, reasonably sized strips on contour. They're paying us to put those in with carbon capture. They're paying for that to happen. Not just land that's degraded and no longer useful, but We can wait for that. Let's, for goodness sake, stop the damage or slow the damage in agriculture and bring agriculture into a polyculture and then scale it down to where it's appropriate.
00:43:34
Speaker
That's the future economy, the ability to slow the damage or stop the damage. We should be paid to stop the damage.
00:43:45
Speaker
The economy should be a repairing economy, where at the moment it's an expanding damage economy. That is obviously can't go on. It just can't. Any basic kid's mathematics will tell you that.
00:43:59
Speaker
If you keep taking, you end up with nothing, right? You can't run a system like that. So our economy should be in repair, in slowing the damage, not repair. You can repair later or wait for nature to repair unproductive land. If that land's gone out of production, another piece of land is in destruction. It's being destroyed. Stop that now. Scale it down. That's where the economy should be paying us. It is starting to.
00:44:26
Speaker
So then we come down to more and more diversity, more and more stability. Diversity creates stability. Stability creates fertility.
00:44:36
Speaker
Fertility creates local economy. What you're doing is you're you're you're driving this monster that's causing massive amounts of damage, and you've got to change it and steer it off course a bit, slow it down,
00:44:51
Speaker
and turn it round and bring it back to being a productive, reparative thing. you know Rather than extraction, we need deposition. We need to be depositing more soil. We need to be depositing more diversity. We need to be depositing more carbon. It's a simple way to talk carbon. You should be talking organic matter.
00:45:10
Speaker
If you don't have 4% to 5% organic matter in the soil, your soil will not be
Economy of Repair and Sustainability
00:45:16
Speaker
sustainable. You need to have more. If you have 5% organic matter, you can reduce your water input, your irrigation by 10%.
00:45:24
Speaker
If you have 7% to 8% to 9% organic matter, you can drop your irrigation water demand by 50%. If you go to like 12% to 18% and you'll only get that in a garden, you'll only get in a small area,
00:45:37
Speaker
12 to 18% organic runner, you can drop your irrigation demand on the garden by 75%. And you think you're running out of water. You think you're sold in water. It's just the way we're using the land. It's just the way we do it. We need to understand this stuff.
00:45:50
Speaker
And we can turn it around, easy. It's not a problem. We have to have intention. Everything's about intention. If you don't have the intention, it's never going to happen. The consciousness of humanity needs to realize we can be the most reparative and positive element on the planet, not the most damaging. Because we can be the most damaging, that proves we can be the most beneficial element on the planet.
00:46:13
Speaker
We ourselves don't do a lot of work. We do a lot of thinking. We do a lot of design. That's what we're good at. We're not good at physical work. We're actually pretty useless compared to... ah Chickens are much better than we are. A lot of things can repair us soul better when we direct them.
00:46:29
Speaker
We are good directors. It's just realizing who we are actually. And I think we may be coming to kind of a maturity. It is said, if we study the neurosciences, how now we can see one synapse in the brain fire.
00:46:43
Speaker
If you read the book, The Brain That Changes Itself, yeah, famous book about neuroscience and how our brains work. With ultrasounds now, and the most powerful and so ultrasounds, we can see one synapse in the brain fire.
00:46:55
Speaker
Like when we lose our eyesight, our hearing comes up because we reprogram our brain differently. It is said that when we started to read and write, because there was a period when humanity didn't read and write, we just lived the experience. When we started describe things by reading and writing, our brains grew a little bit extra neural pathway, like the outer branching pattern of our brain just grew a fraction because we were doing this other thing. we were thinking about what we were writing down and we were using alphabet,
00:47:27
Speaker
and numbers. There was a period when we started to do that, and our brains kind of grew a fraction. I think there's a final light neural pathway polish. It's like a little tiny set of, but there'll be more of them, neural pathways. There'll be billions of neural pathways. There'll be more than normal. It's like the outer twigs of a tree or the outer root system of a tree. There's more in number, but smaller in size, and they're faster moving.
00:47:54
Speaker
Same with rivers. In all natural systems, you get scales of order of size. So the larger part of the river, the larger part of the tree, all patterns, right, through the whole cosmos, the whole of reality.
00:48:08
Speaker
The larger the number, the smaller the size, the faster the speed. The smaller the number, the larger in size, the slower the speed. So our main brain cortex coming up through our spine is a larger pathway. On the outside, we have more neural pathways. They're smaller in size, they're larger in number, and they're faster in speed. where i I think, this is my hypothesis, right? yeah We're about to grow this final layer of which is more numerous.
00:48:40
Speaker
They're smaller in size and they're faster in decision-making. This is where we become the blink decision-makers. The experts make blink decisions. And Malcolm Gladwell wrote the book, Blink.
00:48:53
Speaker
If you'd read Blink and you read The Brain That Changes Itself, you'll kind of see cross-pollination. of ah what how our brains work and how experts make a blink decision. We're all about to get this extra cortex when we start to design permaculture systems.
00:49:12
Speaker
There's another reality suddenly that happens when you take a permaculture course. People say to you, you changed the way I see things. You changed my view of the countryside. I've seen the world through another lens.
00:49:24
Speaker
I'm seeing through another sort of pathway there's something there that was always there and suddenly you opened it up welcome aboard you're seeing through this new design eyes and once we enough of us do that it'll just click and i'm afraid the destructive extractive corporate greed will die at that point in time we're going like we don't need you guys You might be like less than 10% of the population. and You might have to go and live with yourself and exploit each other. But we the people, we the people in relationship with nature, we're going to live on the world for on on this earth forever.
00:50:04
Speaker
That's the answer. That was a beautiful answer. Thank you so much, Jeff. My pleasure. um Love it. and yeah, your ability to connect broad topics together in a compelling way and also a hopeful way is truly, truly incredible. so No problem. Thank you. Thank you.
00:50:25
Speaker
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice.
00:50:35
Speaker
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