Episode 71: Regenerating Culture and Earth with Joe Brewer and Morag Gamble

In this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World podcast it is my delight to welcome back to the show  - regenerative designer, practitioner, author, climate activist, and visionary, Joe Brewer - a transdisciplinary scholar who is dedicated to healing and regenerating the earth, and connecting with people who want to participate in the urgent global action. 

Joe is the author of The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth (2021) Chelsea Green and founder of the Earth Regenerators, Design Institute for Regenerating Earth.

Joe talks directly and practically to the fact that humanity is confronted with threats unprecedented in the history of our species. Jo shares the urgent need to describe the “how” we can address the converging threats of ecological overshoot and civilization collapse.

Every episode of this show is hosted and sponsored by my organisation, the Permaculture Education Institute - the host of the globally recognised Permaculture Educators Program . 

I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the unceded lands from which I’m speaking with you, the Gubbi Gubbi, and pay my deep respect to their elders past present and emerging. I’d like to recognise their deep care for this land, the waters, air and biodiversity.

Please leave a lovely review (it helps the bots to find our little podcast).

And finally, I’d love for you to share this with a friend or group - to myceliate the ideas and open conversations for positive practical change.

Morag Gamble
CEO/Founder, Permaculture Education Institute

Check out the video version over at our youtube channel - and subscribe there too.

Help us ripple support refugee action to create local permaculture food resilience through our registered charity. We send 100%  - please donate at Ethos Foundation 

Transcript

Morag Gamble:

Hello and welcome. I'm Morag Gamble and you're tuning in to the Sense-making in a Changing World podcast. It's my delight to welcome back to the show regenerative designer, practitioner, author, climate activist, and visionary, Joe Brewer. A transdisciplinary scholar who is dedicated to healing and regenerating the earth and connecting with people who want to participate in this urgent global action. Joe is the author of The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth, published late last year by Chelsea Green, and the founder of Earth Regenerators and the Design Institute for Regenerating Earth. Joe talks directly and practically to the fact that humanity is confronted with threats unprecedented in the history of our species and Joe shares the urgent need to describe how we can address the converging threats of ecological overshoot and civilization collapse. So every episode of this show is hosted and sponsored by the Permaculture Education Institute, the host of the globally recognized Permaculture Educators Program, and before we begin I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the unseeded lands from which I’m speaking with you, the Gubbi Gubbi, and pay my deep respects to their elders past, present ,and emerging. I'd also like to recognize their deep care for this land, the waters, the air, and biodiversity for 1000s of generations. So let's dive in and please make sure to check out the show notes for links to Joe's work and the earth regenerators. Also, a copy of the transcript and information about our work here at the Permaculture Education Institute, and make sure to subscribe so you get notification of all our new episodes and leave us a lovely review. It really does help the bots to find a little podcast and finally, I'd love for you to share this episode with friends or any groups that you're involved in to help myceliate these ideas and open conversations for positive practical change. 

Morag Gamble:

Thank you so much for joining me on the show again, Joe. I'm here talking with you from the bank of the Moocooboola  River in Gubbi Gubbi land here in southeast Queensland and it's been raining so heavily lately. I don't know what's been happening over in your part of the world, but I feel a sense of relief at the moment that the ground is so moist and the trees and everything is just growing because we're about to head into bushfire season here and that feeling of moistness and lushness kind of helps me breathe. I wonder what's going on in your part of the world right now. What are you tending to in your landscape that surrounds you?

Joe Brewer:

Well I am in Barichara, Colombia which is in the Great Northern turn of the Andes or the Andes go from Northeast Northwest and make themselves become part of Panama and the dry season started here about two weeks ago. Normally it would have started two or three months ago, we've had a lot of rain just continually, not a lot of heavy rains, but a lot of rain and the dry season seems to have come and what's interesting is part of the work that I'm doing right now and building a food forest, that's right on the edge of town, is I'm learning how to draw snakes like serpent curves down the landscape with my water retention systems, which we are building by digging them by hand with a pickaxe and a trowel and I'm seeing the shape of the serpent as the ground is getting hard, because it's not been raining and yet it's like the frozen impression of the water to come which comforts me as I'm watching this drying out. 

Morag Gamble:

So how long is your dry season there? When do you expect to feel the rain and moisture again in your landscape?

Joe Brewer:

Well, I've looked back at the climatology of this area and basically what's happened is utter turbulence, that there used to be a very distinct wet season and dry season and now if you look at these statistics for rainfall month by month and the last 10 years, it's a complete scattershot. You have no idea when the rains are going to come, when they're going to end, how long they're going to last, how long it'll be until they come again. It is just like unpredictable madness and people would say we're entering what's called the summer here. We're right at the equator, so summer and winter are strange terms here. But basically the dry hot season is the summer and not any colder but wet, because the temperature is basically the same as the winter and so we don't really have a season anymore and I grew up in Missouri, in the middle of North America, which for those who know Tim Flannery will know that North America has the most distinct four season pattern of any landmass on Earth and I grew up in one of the most pronounced differences between seasonality. So to grow up as a kid with that and watch climate change basically destroyed by the late 90s; sun in January and no longer have snow for more than four days in a row, and as a kid it was four months of snow. I watched the dissipation of seasons and now I live in a place where it's much more subtle, because they don't change as much, but it's just as erratic, absolutely unpredictable.

Morag Gamble:

The question I'm holding is how is that affecting the people that are surrounding you. I know that you're creating a more perennial food system or food forest that's more resilient to this, but what's happening with the people around you who might be in more kind of animal agriculture and dependent upon that, what's going on?

Joe Brewer:

Well actually, here, there are a lot of people who have really good multitier agroforestry systems, and so they survive just fine. The thing that I noticed, though, is when I look at how they build their water retention systems, sort of like you take the simplest mental model you can imagine, if I dig a whole water can sit in it and that's about as far as it goes for almost all of the campesinos here, they've completely lost the ability to direct rainwater into the ground and it's sort of like the difference between having a really strong set of community relationships versus only having money in your bank account, that people feel such scarcity that seeing water at the surface were very quickly evaporates and a circle creates the maximum surface area, the maximum evaporation. I can just tell they really don't understand how to use water and so it's very interesting. First thing I do in any piece of land is start to shape it to hold water and I see a real absence of that. A few exceptions, but in general, people just are really nervous about water and they don't know how to put it in the ground.

Morag Gamble:

I wonder where that disconnect happened.

Joe Brewer:

I have a sense of it and it's related to a particular dark bit of history in Colombia which is there was a time that they just call locally, La violencia, the time of violence, where for about 57 years there were three different categories of people in the country who committed random generic in any direction you can imagine. Homicidal terrorism toward other members of the population and one thing that that caused was massive displacements of people. And so in most parts of Colombia, for about 50 years, which was like two generations of people, where people could be displaced for 30 or 40 years and when they would return, they didn't have written records of land ownership and so someone would just create deeds and steal land and hoard it all. So there's massive inequality of land ownership in Colombia and so this disconnect to the particular landscapes and their histories is like a scar and time from an extended period of violence that really technically ended just a few years ago and it's not a problem here where we are, but in many parts of Colombia, it's still very much alive and well.

Morag Gamble:

What that makes me then think of is how displacement around the world is shattering so rapidly. A deep understanding about how to be in a relationship with a place. 

Joe Brewer:

I think a lot about this, especially with cities, people in cities have no idea where they are. Anyway, I'm sorry, please continue on.

Morag Gamble:

This is really important because it's such a short period of time that this deep knowledge can be lost in the deep knowledge of connection. So my question then is, for you, what is the pathway to reconnect, to regenerate, to come back into that knowing and share it in a way that's not like an imposition? But, I forgot, like it's a cultural thing, isn't it? How have you been tending to those sorts of relationship building activities?

Joe Brewer:

I have like a secret amulet of power. She is a beautiful, wonderful, four and a half year old daughter and she is a great source of power and insight because I move her on the landscape at her pace and if I want to go faster, I carry her and she's getting heavy because she's not a baby anymore. So one of the ways that I do this is by walking the landscapes and walking them slowly and with the fingers and the eyes and the height of a child, getting down close to things. So one thing that I'm doing personally and that our family is doing is immersing ourselves in the tiny worlds of insects, of the native seeds, of different kinds of trees, collecting them, germinating them, or failing to, into the intimacy of these creative moments and the other side that I want to name, and I know we can elaborate on, is I'm learning a lot about how to cultivate psychological and social abilities to be in relationships in complex times and we're working with a framework called Prosocial and developing capacities for psychological resilience. It's sort of like we have to learn to relate to landscapes and there are ways of doing that. But we also just have to get better at relating in general and for me it's this two pronged approach of emphasizing perhaps even more the ability to relate and then having healing from my hardships and struggles in my past traumas by connecting the landscapes. It really is the emphasis of it in that direction for me as from relationality and capacities to relate into what does it mean to relate to this place into these particular aspects of the culture, the history of the landscape, the ecology.

Morag Gamble:

Can you speak a little bit too? I wanted to pick up and talk more about pro social, but I want to go right back to where you're talking about going deeply into the details and sort of the very small, slow? How do you then reconcile the urgency and the scale of the problem with the scale of the solutions? How do you describe that?

Joe Brewer:

I describe it as a great release of pain. After 20 years of nearly crippling depression about the state of the world, what I came to, as grieving processes tend to stay on them, is I came to a place of deep and profound acceptance and the more I could accept that planetary collapse is occurring, that the worst of it was set in motion even before I was born, for example the Green Revolution of Agriculture that happened in the 1950s, I was born in the late 1970s, so there was this explosion of human population of which I was a later participant but I wasn't the creator of, that I came to realize that as I let go of the futures I was afraid of, I actually had the energy and capacity to plant seeds for the future that I want and this was very different from trying to stop the system. And so I put a lot of energy into being afraid for a long time. I was afraid of the human population collapsing. I was afraid of the extinction of non-human species. I was afraid of plastic building up in the world's ocean, I was afraid of a lot of things that were all happening and generally speaking, I was pretty powerless to stop them and what I came to realize was that there's a story about what it means to be human that makes sense of this moment and we have elders who have written down those stories. People like Joanna Macy and Dwayne Elgin and others that some people are listening to right now and those stories tell us that we are in a moment of maturing or going extinct as a species. And this is our moment, our moment is like a two or 300 year long moment, geologic time is the blink of an eye, and what I came to realize was that if I could create capacities for cooperation and co creation, among people in my immediate vicinity, that we could do more than I could do on my own and that I would have a place for my dreams, because I have big dreams and my dreams are so big that they were never for one person, but who else wants to participate in them, who else wants to be part of them, and who is healed enough from their own traumas to be able to believe? And so one of the big things that's happened is when I started writing a book, The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth, I gave it away as a study group instead of publishing it. It eventually did come to be published, but during the time in between more than 3000 people gathered around and began building relationships with each other about what it means to regenerate the earth. And so now, I find the abundance of those relationships, similar to the abundance of mycelium and microorganisms and a good soil substrate. They spend some time and energy cultivating it, but then it just works like magic and in a way I feel that these little things I'm doing are big because I know what a fractal is. I know how little things are nested in bigger things which are nested in bigger things still and that I can think in terms of systems and act like it's acupuncture and I'm getting pretty good at doing that, and so when I go into my tiny little world, like we have a one hectare piece of land that's part of six and a half hectares of a community reforestation project, it's called Bo park a mancora (16:00), and in one hectare up in the upper corner, I started digging a water retention system and pulling out that nasty invasive Brachiaria, this grass that just outcompetes and kills all the native plants. And by slowing down and paying attention to the little things, I realized that in the roots packed into that grass, for those who haven't seen it it's like six inches thick and so tight, I take a pickaxe and pry it up, it's like pulling carpet, take a big section of it and then the area where I already pulled the grass, I walk around digging my fingers into that side that's at the bottom and breaking it apart and I take the compact clay that's there and build a layer of porous, open, powdered pulverized soil that had been improved by that invasive grass and by doing that I have a place for the native seeds to land. And I watched in three months a crescendo of biodiversity of flowering bushes and shrubs that immediately attracted all the different kinds of bees, and wasps, and then the birds, and then the lizards and the frog started to come. It all happened in the span of three months because I was focusing on the little things and I was paying attention. And I knew that once I set that biodiversity in motion I could walk away and it would eventually become a forest. Because that grass wasn't going to come back and kill everything again. So it's the understanding of fractals and space and fractals and time that let me focus on the little things because I see how big they get.

Morag Gamble:

I just think what you've just described is the most profound theory of change that we need to hear. Because what I think most of where we're stuck at the moment is in the fight. Is this last grasp to say, “No, we don't want that.” Like, “Stop that, stop that” and it goes down into household levels, it's out on the street, there's this kind of polarization happening and I feel like it's pulling communities apart even further. They're like, “Are you this or are you that?” or, “Are you for this or are you against that?” There's all this struggle that's distracting energy from the task of setting in motion, these regenerative fractals and I've experienced a similar experience recently with the particularly with the permayouth, how this is kind of myceliating and reaching into communities that I would never imagined to have such deep relationships with socially and ecologically and so this theory of change, I think, is a really important one to to maybe talk about more and you've mentioned how you shifted to that, but it was a long process. 

My question, I guess, is considering how urgent the situation is. How can we invite more people to enter this space? It's a lifelong process, I started out my work as an activist fighting on the streets. I remember as a teenager, the thing which activated me most was this existential crisis of the nuclear threat. There were lots of different things at that time that activated my thought process, “Somethings wrong in the system. Let's have a look at it and the first thing is to find it.” But it feels like it takes time to come to this place of seeing a different way. Is there a way that we can accelerate that process of transition?

Joe Brewer: 

There absolutely is and it's almost mind dizzyingly simple. It's so simple, we don't realize. And this is the basis of every mindfulness practice, as well as the basis of a lot of public health research for how people live successful lives. Which is that there are two basic psychological capacities in the body of a person that enables them to make effective decisions and that is the regulation of emotions and psychological flexibility. But both of those things begin with something that, like I said, is so simple. Noticing, practice noticing and then practice accepting what you notice. Just practice, because you're not going to be very good at it at first. Notice and then accept, and what happens when you notice and accept is you get better at discernment. You also create a biofeedback loop, where what you're noticing creates a conceptual separation between you and what you're noticing. Which allows you to regulate your emotions, you don't respond as quickly, but instead you notice how you were responding as a habit. Like I got angry, or why did I get angry?, or what does it feel like in my body when I get angry, can I just notice that for a little while? I noticed tension on my chest. Oh, that's interesting, I noticed shortness of my breath, I noticed that I jumped to quick conclusions and became judgmental. So just start noticing and when we do this and it's a practice that we share with other people, where we tell them about our practice of noticing and accepting, we start to discover that there are very powerful techniques to do this better and we start to discover that it's very often that we are behaving in ways that go against what we actually care about and then as we practice noticing, one thing that starts to come into our awareness is what's really important to us and as we have more emotional space to notice that, we begin, just begin, to care about whatever is important to us and then we start forming a relationship that's that part of ourselves and this sort of spiritual inner permaculture is what the prosocial method does. 

And what I was just describing comes from a field of research called contextual behavioral science and there's a tool called the ACT matrix act is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and it's a matrix because it's a four quadrant matrix with a vertical line and a horizontal line and what's powerful about this matrix is that there are two basic tendencies in human psychology: to avoid things we want less of and to seek things we want more of. Attraction and avoidance, and so what we need is a way of noticing our inner sensations and experiences of what we want more of, what we want for ourselves and we need to have ways of observing visible behaviors or behaving in ways that take us away from or take us toward what we care about and that's what this act matrix helps us to do. I only mentioned that there are tools they work with, they're very well researched. There are lots of people that practice using them. But even if you don't use the tools, just go back to noticing and trying to accept and as deceptively simple as that is, the more we do it, the more we notice and accept. The more we start to realize that we can actually change how we relate and how we act upon things we deeply care about and we discover a source of empowerment, hiding right there in plain sight the whole time and the pause between emotion and response and that's the moment when I can choose to pull some grass. That's the moment where I can choose to reach my hands down and feel the soil. That's the moment I can choose to stop and watch the bee that's dancing around on the flower and then those moments, I get an insight into relationships that will help me with everything else that I'm doing. So that's what's amazing about this discovery is that we can change our own behavior by noticing and accepting that the problem in the world is our behavior, collectively and individually, and we have all these institutions that behave badly and were never created to support us to behave well. So we have to do that, we have to learn how to do that ourselves. And one thing I found is that this creates an ecological point of view because it causes us to begin really paying attention to interdependencies, interrelationships and the causes and effects across them, which is exactly what ecology is about. And so what I see is that this cultural work inside ourselves is the pathway to regenerating landscapes. Because it's the pathway to changing our own behaviors and our relationships, and it's funny that I wrote my first book was The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth and then one day I realized I knew the name for my second book, even though I haven't written it yet, and it's a play on the same title, The Inner Pathway for Regenerating Earth, and it's exactly what we're talking about. When you go into your sense of being, as you notice and accept how you are, you begin to build scaffolding to become more of what you want to be in the future. That's the ability to notice and be in a relationship like I just did with my daughter, to realize that she wasn't interrupting my important work. That actually my important work is to pay attention when she asks something like, “Can you help me put toothpaste on my toothbrush?” So I am just a role model for you is what I'm talking about. I noticed and I accepted that there was a conflict intention between my objectives and I know how important it is to me to be a good, stable, supportive presence to my child and so I chose that over responding to you. That's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. It was an intentional moment of moving toward values and behaviors that I want more of in my life. So I hope that makes it more clear how the theory of change really does have a very strong foundation and how we can begin to do it.

Morag Gamble:

Seeing that in how you are in your family in your place. Can you describe a little bit more at a community level, how you interact in that way?

Joe Brewer:

It’s really interesting when volunteers - I use the quotation “volunteers” because we don't actually have a program that people join - People are in some transition, changing their lives, and they come here to learn regeneration and become part of the community while they're here and what people notice is how I'm sort of like water. I'm sort of shapeless, but moving along the shapes of everything around me as I move through the community and people seem to like me. I say hello to a lot of the shopkeepers and the little old men that are sitting drinking beer on the street that are like in their 90s. So in this little mountain village, we always say hello and pass some pleasantries in Spanish as I pass by and so there's that part, but there's this other part, which is that I went up to the bo Park, a (28:44) community reforestation project, and started building this food forest and this is after a year of doing other work in another part of the park, and what started to happen is people would come by walking their dog, or there's a hiking trail nearby, they might be going on the trail and they wouldn't notice and not say anything, but then keep going. But eventually, they saw me there enough times that they'd stop and just look over the stone wall, like “What's this guy doing?” Sometimes, if some of them would say, “Did you buy this land? Is this yours?” and I would say no, this is community land and the bo Park (29:21), it's not mine and I would start to just help them to become curious. Who is this guy who's not from here, who's here on this community project and is here all the time, and I see this place changing dramatically, and I don't really know what he's doing, but I'm curious. And when I tell them what I'm doing, I'm building a food forest and it's going to require that I gather the fragmented knowledge of the campus from people whom I do not know yet that they are going to tell me what are the native plants and how are they used? And I'm telling them that that's what this is for and then they start bringing their plants from their garden or from their home and I plant them and then they become part of the project and then they pass by to see how it's doing because their little plant is in there too, and instead of having a strategy for what I should plant first and what the sequence is, like the tropic farming or some of these other models that are really regimented and for good reason, the regimented, I’m doing exactly the opposite. Jazz style improvisation to weave the community because that's what this project is about and then something else that happened last week, and I want to tell the story because it's just so powerful, my wife received a call from a friend that there was an endangered tree, a tree that's at risk of extinction, that only exists in the Chickamauga Canyon that's nearby, just endemic species, it’s a type of ceiba. For those who know ceiba are these magnificent giant trees and the movie Avatar, the home tree is a ceiba from Costa Rica and there's a ceiba called ceiba barrigona only exist in Chickamauga Canyon, it's at risk of extinction because goats run freely through the canyon and they eat the flowers, they eat the seeds, and they eat sapling treats. So this tree that only exists in this harsh desert environment is going extinct. 

But there happens to be one that's three and a half years old sitting in the garden of a hostel here in town because someone had planted one there and that person, I had a fight with the owner and they were kicked out, so a new hotel is coming in and all hospitals are closing and the owner wants to have the tree cut down because if it grows tall, it might fall on the house even though it's an endangered tree, and he doesn't know that, and the fight is so bad that they're not allowed to come back in and retrieve the tree. So my wife gets a call from another friend who's talking to these friends to ask if we might go and rescue this tree and then we go and talk to the people that are transitioning to the new hotel and we enter into the garden and there's this absolutely gorgeous two meter tall, ceiba barrigona just thriving in an environment it doesn't really belong in. It should be down in the canyon and up on a plateau, but there it is thriving all the same and what do we do? We go one meter away and make a circle which means two meters in circumference, pretty big hole. Then we're gonna dig one meter deep, all the way around it, and then start excavating the soil all the way in until we find the roots. All the while the local campesinos are there painting, deconstructing, doing construction and renovating the space and they see us there with pickaxes and trolls and shovels and at first just for their curiosity digging a hole around this tree. But then they notice we're still there digging an hour later, and two hours later, and the holes get deep and they start to come over to be like, “Wow, that's a big hole. What are you doing here?” and we say, “Well, don't you know? This tree is ceiba barrigona. It's at risk of extinction and we were asked to come and save this tree and we're here to rescue it” This tree, there are only a handful of them left of existence and they start to sense this really, really important work that we're doing and they have no idea. And what happened was everyone, during the three days we were digging this hole, everyone who came into contact with us became part of the story and they were excited, and they were inspired, and they were curious, “Who are these people from the outside? Like they're not even from here? Why are they the ones rescuing this tree?” Two guys that were workers, they were from Venezuela, and they started filming us on their camera and said to answer these questions, we were like, “What?,” “We want our friends in Venezuela to know what you're doing. It's so exciting and so we transplant the tree up to Beale park a (34:09) to our food forest and we named the tree named Yetta saiba (34:14), the granddaughter Saiba. Because this is the tree for our granddaughters to sit under when they're old women and this is a tree that we want to have granddaughters. We wanted to survive to produce offspring. We started telling the story and then over the next few days, different people were walking by on the street looking over the fence curious what we're doing. Word is getting around about the name yet the thema (34:41) and the strange heroes, the foreigners, who spent so much time digging a big hole and lovingly carrying a tree up the hill. So this is what's happening in the community. This powerful, contagious energy comes from the simple act of devotion for something beautiful and important and sharing the story as we go.

Morag Gamble:

What I was feeling in that was the absolute importance of story and love in bringing forth change, like the sense that if you just went in and dug the tree and moved it somewhere else, you'd save the tree. But it's a completely different story that you just shared. You still save the tree, but there was something else that happened there was that myceliating process of infecting a love of curiosity and care and seeing a different approach and I think that's such a beautiful description. Can you tell me more about how you work with story? 

Joe Brewer:

Well, it started for me as a teenager who was depressed and suicidal and needing to change my story of how I was and how people treated me, because I was projecting negative stories and basically doing therapy on myself was what I was doing without realizing it and realized later, I had a knack for changing my story. I had a skill for doing it. Many years later, 10 years later, when I was 30 years old. So as much later 30 years old, I started reading a lot of cognitive science and was able to get a position as a research fellow at a Think Tank in Berkeley, working with the cognitive linguist, George Lakoff, doing linguistic analysis of political discourse and connecting it to the functioning of the brain and how the body makes meaning and then I spent about 10 years working with social movements and nonprofit organizations and community groups, helping them to do strategic framing. Which was basically helping them to live different stories. So I have a lot of experience with storytelling and one thing that I learned about the climate crisis and ecological crisis was a lot of people kept saying, “We need to tell the story of what we're going to do” and I would say, “No, no, no, the way that frame semantics works is you can only have a concept for something you've already experienced” and what's happening is unprecedented in human history. So we cannot tell the story that we've never experienced. So instead of telling the story, what we have to do is embody and learn how to live the story and this is a deep change in storytelling strategy. Because it's not storytelling, it's story doing, and story doing is what we need to be doing. 

So we're not just doing, like you said I could have moved the tree and no one would know, its story doing. I'm in a story and I'm telling the story while I'm doing this story, and then because the story has changed by the telling, I'm improvising the telling of the story, which is part of the doing. And I found that this is really important for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that in the next 30 to 50 years, the part of humanity that comes out in tact on the other side is gonna be the part of humanity that can discern the real context of where we are and can create meaningful stories and there is so much meaning to be had in the crisis that we're in, that those people are going to find a reservoir of joy and meaning and purpose and living those stories that when they were depressed and sad and biting the system, they had no idea that they could discover. And then by living that way, the really magical thing happens. They become the source of nurturance, stability, and healing for others to join the story to defuse the toxic narrative by healing trauma, and helping people to have different emotional responses to their contexts. And this is again that work of being prosocial, of having the psychological capacities to notice and accept and to act with love and build relationships. And this is why I said, a few minutes ago, that I focus on the cultural healing and the psychological and storytelling capacities first and the landscape second. So the way I enter the landscape, like the way I entered the rescue of this tree was in a psychological, social and cultural space. And the tree was just an emblematic act of the story, that also might happen to help this tree avoid extinction. But that's a byproduct of the story. The byproduct of the story is the tree doesn't go extinct. The action is to rescue the trees, but not to go extinct. But the story is the story of finding purpose and service and joy and meaning and inspiration while rescuing the tree.

Morag Gamble:

Do you think that's, in a way, it's looking differently? Indigenous pathways, indigenous ways of knowing. This is more the way I talk a lot with local indigenous people here and about dreaming. As I was growing up and taught about dreaming, the dream time, in my standard schooling. It was something of the past, it was like, that was what happened then and that's what they dreamed and it kind of stopped at some sort of point. But the dream time continues and new stories are constantly being enlivened and the stories are changing and growing and adding new dimensions all the time that the stories are living and I completely reframed my understanding of where I live and the communities that have lived here for more than 100,000 years and how I connect with that. And so I wonder, How do you describe this from a perspective of being perhaps in a more indigenous pathway of being knowing?

Joe Brewer:

I would say it is profoundly and explicitly indigenous and the idea, that is probably the scariest and most dangerous idea that I'm attempting to teach and the teaching that I do right now, is the idea of the future indigenous. The future indigenous that are not like the past indigenous, in part they're not like they're completely different, but just that they're very continuous with the past indigenous, but they're in a future world that is not the past world. And because every human alive has 99.999% of their history as hunter gatherers, all of us are descendants of indigenous. It's a very dangerous idea in the social justice context after genocides and colonialism, it's also empirically true and what that opens up is a pathway of indigeneity for anyone. Anyone can be part of a pathway of being indigenous and as a part of a pathway of being indigenous, I separate those things out because I'm not very good at being indigenous. I didn't have all of the community support of indigenous. I don't have the stories of history and the connection to place. I'm a displaced lost soul and yet, to be indigenous in the way of, say Wendell Berry, would be one of the only languages of bioregionalism to be indigenous is to be of and for a place and to care for its future. This idea that only the indigenous can be indigenous is actually a type of hubris painted onto the indigenous by the trauma of people who have lost their indigeneity. It's a trauma and that's why the idea of the future indigenous is so dangerous. Someone might try to kill me for saying we could be the future indigenous, it might threaten their identity that much. Because it evokes deep trauma and actually the continent that evokes the deepest pain, when we'd have people from all over the world in our learning journeys, it probably won't surprise you, is Australia. There are the people who felt the deepest reservoirs of pain because the violence against the indigenous people is still extreme and never ended and was always terrible. And so this ability to be indigenous, without being from indigenous is a paradox. It's not supposed to make sense as a logic, the way it makes sense is as a way of learning how to relate; it’s a process of relating and that's exactly what all humans need to do that are going to contribute to the future of life on Earth. We need to rediscover gratitude for water, gratitude for soil, and kinship with the rest of life and our role, our unique role as humans, to dream with the rest of nature and to dream on behalf of the rest of nature when it's necessary, when nature needs her humans, we do the dreaming. And when I say something like this, one of the things that will activate a lot of people's psychological blocks is, “But humans have done all these terrible things and I hurt so much for all these things.” Like yes, that's exactly what we have to heal if we're going to be grown up as a species. Because of our ability to dream, our ability to imagine worlds and like theater to play them out, for me to be Macbeth, and play the role for me to be the humble forest man who brings a forest back and playing a role. There's no other animal on earth that does that the way that humans do and humans are shapeshifters, we can dream into different roles. I can try to imagine the river and I can try to imagine the bird and I can try to imagine the bee and then I can make something that's good for each of them, and no other animal can do that. So this way of being indigenous, for me, is that almost all of hunter gatherer history was during the last ice age or before the blip of time that was civilization was the Holocene. The Holocene is now over, for those who don't know, I'm talking about this 10,000 year period of warm, stable climate after the last ice age, it's over. It’s done. The future is unprecedented. It's uncharted territory. So if we're going to be indigenous, we will not be indigenous like the people of the past. We have to be planetary indigenous, not simply by our regional indigenous, but that means we have to be bioregional indigenous and planetary. This is different. Ancestral indigenous people did not do that and they didn't need to, but we do. Our survival depends upon it. We have to think at a planetary scale

Morag Gamble:

Become planetarians.

Joe Brewer:

Yep, thank you, Peter Berg for that lovely word.

Morag Gamble:

I heard you say before, “Nature needs her humans.” and it was something that Anne Poelina, an indigenous elder from Far North West Australia was saying the other day that we can't just heal the earth by getting rid of humans, it wouldn't be bett. Nature needs humans, she would be lonely without humans and it was a really interesting thought, because you do hear that a lot. And particularly now, thank God, the Earth would be better off without humans, humans are the problem. And we hear that so often and I remember being a teenager thinking that too and getting to that point of like humans are the cancer, humans are the problem, and similarly feeling, ultimately depressed. I don't think I spoke to someone for well over a year. I just hid, thinking that's what's the point and it was through this deeper noticing and connection and just coming into that space of a relationship that shifted and changed everything for me and I think that the healing is such an important thing. Creating spaces and conditions where the healing can take place and it's not something that easy to do alone. Like it kind of needs a community of practice for that which I'm hearing is the prosocial kind of community is a place where you can open up those conversations and explore those. The other thing that I heard you saying that I think I'd love to hear a bit more about is the importance of imagination. I wonder whether you could speak to that a little bit.

Joe Brewer:

So on August 7 of 2020, my friend Vivi asked me to visit a piece of land. Terribly degraded irrigated land. I visited that land and for the first time in my life, something happened. Something shamanic happened. Within about a minute of arriving on the land, I felt this strong need to just kneel down and put my hand on the ground. It was so barren and so scarred, I felt it. I felt the land and what I felt the land say, not in words, but then like I felt the impression was. If you can, will you heal me? So I took a few pictures of the land, on Facebook later that day I posted the pictures and said, this land just calls out to me to be decolonized and liberated from private land ownership and to be regenerated to the native forests that it was and I feel this deep inside of me. I didn't ask for money. 24 hours later, I had been gifted $10,000 by an aggregate of 20 people, all of whom, one on one, or individually offered to give money to help me buy the land, before I asked and that's what emboldened me to start, to name the imagination, to name the dream. I dream of this land. I dream of this land being restored. I have a name for this land. I'll call it already Hindle agua (51:29), the Spanish name for the origin of water. I started telling the story about a land at the top of a ridge line, the highest point on the ridge line, the place where the fog and the clouds bring moisture to the land from the sky and it's at the top of an aquifer system that brings all of the groundwater to the village of Barichara and it's the top of the surface tributary, one of 15 that used to sell real barichara. So in three ways, this is the origin of water and I started to tell this story and that's how we raised enough money to buy the land and we approached the family that was selling it and we told them, we will not buy this land until first we speak of your ancestors. We spent three hours there because there was a set of brothers and sisters whose grandfather had owned the land and then personalized it and gave it to all of his kids and then they had kids and they and they personalized it again, ended up with five siblings, four brothers and a sister who owned the land together and it was the redheaded stepchild. Each of them had their own farms that they were maintaining, and it was a neglected and abandoned piece of land and we told them, we cannot begin a conversation about this land until we speak of your ancestors, because their family had been there for at least five generations and then when we came to negotiate to purchase the land, they said we actually need more money and we said, all of our money is from donations and we've already actually agreed to a price. So what we said was, we'll give you a little bit less than the money and buy half of the land. If you immediately agree to give the other half of your land to your grandchildren. They didn't know how to do that so they ended up selling it to us for the price that we had agreed. But then we kept telling them, this land is for your grandchildren. This land needs to be native forest for your grandchildren and by selling it to us, you have agreed to steward it with us because we would not buy the land without the family that the land belongs to. Now it belongs in a legal sense. They are animated dust of this landscape. They are this land living as human beings and so we had a five month long negotiation for the land and it was a prosocial process of building relationships, changing stories, and creating consciousness and connection to the land and so I tell the story in that way to say that imagination was how I could see in the scars of that land. I could see its splendor of regeneration and then the fragmentation of the landscape and the family being disconnected to the care of their land. I saw that recuperation of it in their grandchildren and this is still having an effect. Because last Friday, I ran into one of the brothers and he had just sold some land to another woman I know because she wants to reforest it and he knows what it feels like to put the land into care of someone who's going to steward it and he has another piece of land and he'll sell but only to someone who will steward it, because he's not able to steward it himself. So the imagination is now contagious. He was also the brother that when we were going to the bank to get the cash to give to them, tears started coming down his cheeks and he said, I hope I live to see the day that my eight year old granddaughter stands in the forest with all those native trees again, because he believed we were going to do what we said. So, imagination is essential and we're now preparing to begin negotiations. We started them last year and they fell apart for another piece of land, where I talked about the river that went away and that my dream is to bring the river back to life with the children of the community. So by the time the children and adults, not only do they know that they can bring a river back to life, they've done it. So anytime they see a dead river anywhere on Earth, they know how to bring it back to life.

Morag Gamble:

But in that, itself, is the notion that the river is a living system. It's not just a thing, it's also about life itself and I'm hearing you talk about buying land and I know that there's a whole different relationship you have with money and I wanted maybe just to sort of shift the conversation and ask you a little bit about that. Because you have talked about different forms of exchange before and I wonder if you could just share a little bit about this changing relationship with money and how it supports this different way of imagining, and stewarding, and being in a relationship.

Joe Brewer:

Let me start by taking one of the key insights from David Graver's book, The First 5000 Years, when he explains the invention of money because then we'll really understand what our billionaires are today. Money was invented because there were professional soldiers and the professional soldiers needed a way of getting food and shelter because they couldn't stay on their own farms and take care of themselves. They were off soldiering and so money was printed and given to them. But who could they give the money to? Well, after they conquered a land, the people were forced into economic slavery and told that they must give the money, or I'm sorry, they must accept the money from the soldiers. Notice what I just said, and put it in the crude context. That is the invention of prostitution, because there were many desperate women who would accept money for sex. So when I say that prostitution is the oldest profession, what we really mean is war and conquest as the oldest profession and prostitution as a byproduct and that the money system is just friendly or nicer forms of prostitution because people are forced into a debt relationshi, to receive the money. Because if they didn't need anything, they wouldn't need to accept the money and now look at how money is created today. Money is created as a promissory note, a future exchange, where almost all of it is created as debt, issued as loans that are interest bearing loans by banks. Now, what does that mean? That means that the money you have is future labor, working to create value in exchange for the money you receive. So what is a billionaire? A billionaire as a human being who has debt slavery in the future, to pay back all of the value of the wealth they might give to allow someone else to stay alive?. So Bill Gates, with 1 billion of his dollars, might have 5 million slaves working for 50 years and that's what $1 billion represents. I started to answer your question and that's why very intentionally, because of the decolonization of money, turning money into an indigenous practice, is to relinquish the spell the magical spell in our minds, that causes us to accept this slavery and so what we do is we only work in a gift economy and all of the money we have is given as gifts. For example, if someone signs up for one of our two month long learning journeys, we ask them to make a $30 donation to our regeneration fund. Why is that? Because we want to give them a copy of my book and we don't know what postage costs and with postage in the book, it could be a maximum of about $30. So we want to be able to get in the book without losing money. Any surplus money goes into a regeneration fund to support regenerative projects and then people get it for free after that exchange, a two month learning journey, where they form deep relationships with other people who become friends for life and transform their ability to relate as they do things in the future and you could say they bought all of that for $30. But you'd be missing the point, what we actually did was we use a monetary transaction as a symbol of liberation, to enter into a space where people are invested in relating to other people for a two month period of time. Because we've learned in practice that two months of being in a cohort, by being in the same learning journey, is a long enough time to build relationship habits where they want to keep hanging out with the same people and their relationships keep getting stronger and then what do we do with the money, we use it to liberate people who are in different forms of economic servitude. So some of the money we raised went to community projects here and Barichara, inspired by a Women's Fund that was invented in Brazil, for very poor families who are so poor they don't even have a bank account. We give them small amounts of money, with no strings attached to do something that benefits them in the community that they weren't going to do anyway, if only they could overcome some bottleneck, we gave out eight of those grants this year to community projects here in Barichara, with money that was raised to help educate people about being prosocial social while forming transformational relationships with each other, so that they're better able to be of service to the earth. So the thing that's really important here, is an ecological insight which is the value stored within an ecosystem in an uneven way and there needs to be an active transport process that moves it to where it needs to go. So it might be the leafcutter ants that are clipping away parts of the leaves and turning them into biomass into the soil, actively transporting from one part of the system to another and by having that act of transport, there is robust circulation of value within the ecosystem. So what I've just done conceptually is I took the trophic flow, which is the flow of energy and nutrients through a food web and I used it to describe circulation of value. What is finance? Finance is the measure of storage and movement of value through a system, the coordination and communication system for value. If we apply finance to trophic, flow to food webs, then we get a regenerative financial system automatically. But now, if we're looking at human social exchanges as another kind of ecosystem, then we see value exchange among humans, whether money is used or not, is a regenerative financial system. So we teach people how to do this, we teach people using prosocial relationships, we teach them how to have robust circulation of value in their relationships with each other and then those who have more can actively transport it to where it creates value in the system and they do this by donating money to community funds that serve different people who don't have the money as a limiting resource for what they need to be able to do regenerative work and this is how we're decolonizing money, creating regenerative finance, practicing it socially first and ecologically second, and financing the revolution. We've been doing all of this since the beginning of December last year, inspired by that gift of $10,000 to buy a piece of land that started in August.

Morag Gamble:

I would ask you then, because here in Australia and perhaps where you are too, so many young people are almost desperate to try and find a way that they can begin. They finish school. Going well, I can't afford to buy land anywhere. I can't afford to build a house. There's so much disruption, I can't even get a job. So I completely rethink about money and work and housing and ways of living feels so imminent and I wonder what advice would you give to young people who are just stepping into the world going, “What next? What now? Where do I go from here?”

Joe Brewer:

I would want to give advice to them and at the same time or maybe a few minutes later give advice to the baby boomers, because it's the relationship between the boomers and these young people that really matters. So I'll tell you a story really quickly and then I'll answer the question for the young people. So young people, if you're listening, get ready. I have a baby boomer friend, meaning he's 63 years old. He lives in California and he has enough money and savings that he was starting to play with cryptocurrency and has a little more money now. So what did he do? He gifted it to me. Well, in the process of getting moved, it's worth about 120,000 US dollars right now. So that we can decolonize a piece of land and create a community commons, we're going to create the barichara ecoversity. Now, why does that matter to young people? Because if we have land that is held in common and the land's purpose is community, as a community mission, and it's already paid for without debt, meaning we just have the money to buy it outright, then we don't have to make any money on that land. So as a young person, if you align with the mission of the work that we're doing on that land, we could invite you to live there and if we have a relationship with local farmers, before we've built our own food forests and organic gardens, then we'll feed you. Because we're also going to teach you things that you can go and practice on the land or those campesina farmers and exchange for food. While we teach their kids alongside the kids from the outside and they don't pay for it, because they're donating food. All the while we're starting to do permaculture work and building food sovereignty for the people living on the land and there's a transition period where there's going to need to be some money left to build some buildings, we’ll have to pay for some things for a little while until it's self sufficient. That's just like you were inside your mother's uterus for nine months before you were born, because you developed within the safety of a nurturing environment. So we only need finance to create the nurturing environment until it's able to work on its own and after we've done that, we had a Community Learning Center, that is also in this case, a nine and a half hectare piece of land, connected to another 20 hectares of land adjacent to it for friends projects, where everyone's trying to do reforestation work. So automatically, we have 30 hectares of land, as a lot of land to work on for a bunch of young people who will do work in exchange for money and community. So just come, don't pay me any money, I don't need it. Don't worry about getting a certificate, it's not going to matter. Your reputation and the referral from people and now your work is all that's going to matter. Come live here, don't pay a cent, get your education for free and start doing regenerative work right now. Because there's no time to waste and this is the model for what permaculture centers need to become. For the next phase, for the next 30 years, really the next 10 years, it's urgent that those who have the money to buy land. Decolonize the land, turn it into a community commons, recruit the people who will build the education centers and do the regenerative work and then tell the young people to show up by a couple of tents.To assemble onto the roof, get those kids out of the rain, start building what rainwater harvesting systems and just get to work and so what I see for young people, is a lot of them have been told the great lie: Which is that if you work hard, you get good grades, you'll get a good job, you'll make a lot of money and you'll be good, you'll be successful. The great lie is that there's this huge cancer, wealth hoarding, a tiny number of people now own almost everything and the whole system is collapsing, and by the way, the biosphere is collapsing too, and if you want to do something about that, you're not going to do it by making money. You're not going to do it by pursuing money, you're going to do it by living in relationship to community intellect, which you're going to discover the same thing. But you're only going to discover that if land is held in common and so I see this is really essential that we need pockets, little important places where people can just come and learn and do work exchange, while learning how to create value for the community, and as they create value for the community, an alternative economy will arise. And those who have money, need to create a buffer of financial freedom for the period of time that it takes to get there and this is doable, not for the entire planet, but for enough places that humans don't go extinct, or the global system goes away. And very importantly, just like that need yet to see about (1:10:09), many important species will not go extinct and if you don't know why that's important, that's a whole other conversation. But we need not to think from a functional point of view, we need a great splendid diversity of relationships to know ourselves and we are thinning out and pruning our ability to relate as we destroy nonhumans, that species. It's like taking your own friend network and carving people away, and erasing them from your history, because you never met them and so we can do all of this by creating commons based land, creating education centers around them, and creating financial buffers for them to grow 

Morag Gamble:

And your advice to the baby boomers, but do you want to say directly to them?

Joe Brewer:

Yep. Baby Boomers, if you think giving your house and your money to your children is a good inheritance, let me ask you, where's the water that they can drink? Because what you should invest that money and as resources in is clean water, healthy soils, biodiversity, and a viable community for your children. The way you can do that is by liquidating and downsizing as much of your assets as you can, in turn land into community land trusts, turn land into comments, and the more of that you can do, the more of an inheritance your children will actually receive and that's just the truth and if we ask ourselves a simple calculation, how much money did the boomer generation have? It's a few trillion US dollars in whatever currency equivalent to 15% of the global economy. The number of people who I think would be in the mindset to do this might only be a few 100,000 to a few million baby boomers, which means it might only be a few billion dollars, only. Because it's tiny, but a few billion dollars, allocated strategically over the next five years to create comments all over the planet is a game changer. It's a game changer and all the young people thinking about going to college or dropping out, will actually have something meaningful to them and you'll give them the most important thing, which is a story that they can live into. That's what I would say to the boomers.

Morag Gamble:

And is there a role in all of this? For that you would like to say to the government? Or is this something that we're just doing separately? Why I'm asking that is because things are feeling like they’re tightening and squashing. Somehow, it's almost like you have to be able to do this in defiance, local food systems that aren't being squashed. There's this recognition that this is starting to happen and growing control that's going on. How do you feel about that?

Joe Brewer:

I feel that if I was having a heart attack, my body would cease and try to grab itself and hold on, which is exactly what the nation states of the world are doing right now, because they're dying. What most people don't realize is that nation states are a new invention. The oldest ones are about 300 years old and about 90% of them in existence came into being after World War One - 100 years ago. This is not a permanent form of social organization. It's a blip in history and it's about to go away. It's in process already and so that doesn't mean we turn our back on all government. But it does mean we stopped focusing on government institutions and instead focus on the much more important thing: Governance. How do we make decisions together? And this is another part of the pro social framework, is the work of Elinor Ostrom, where she discovered that every time a group of human beings are actually with David Sloan Wilson, they generalize it to all living organisms, the 37 trillion cells in your body as an example too, that anytime a group of entities participants or members have to manage something together, there are eight core design principles that must be met and if even one of them isn't, they cannot manage it effectively. So we have shared identity and purpose, we have fast and fair conflict resolution, we have fair and inclusive decision making. Right we have, because I'm forgetting the others now, because it's late at night for me. But there are eight of them, I can usually just drop them off. The important thing is, if you type in Elinor Ostrom, core design principles into Google, you'll find all eight of them.

Morag Gamble:

I'll list them down below in the show notes. 

Joe Brewer:

And governance is those capacities, those eight core design principles, to gather with emotion regulation and psychological flexibility. Because if you have these eight core design principles, but you can't get your crap together for five seconds to be able to be in a relationship with someone when you're having a conflict, then the whole group is going to fall apart anyway. So we have to go back to these basic psychological and social capacities and recultivate them in order to govern together and this is best done starting small and local and getting bigger. So it might work for a water district, it might work for a community council. As a matter of fact, there are 1000s and 1000s of examples of exactly that. It might happen with a watershed board, a regional planning authority, things like this and what we'll begin to discover is our governing institutions that are broken or broken because they're connected to the financial system and because they're connected to the wealth hoarding, and if we can separate out the governance that works from the governing systems that don't, we'll discover that there are governing systems that still work very well and all of them meet Elinor Ostrom’s core design principles. All of them. I will say that as a bold, definitive statement, she did get the Nobel Prize in Economics for her research, it's very well validated with evidence and so what I would say is, like in your case, just watch those honest government ads about the Australian Government, laugh a little bit, cry maybe for a minute, and then ignore the national government. Maybe give it a little hospice love. So it doesn't feel lonely as it's dying. But then get back to your community council and get to work. Because that's what we have to do now.

Morag Gamble:

Thank you so much for your time today, Joe. I know, it's getting late for you there. What a rich set of insights and stories that I'm just so delighted to be able to share with the world. I feel like the kinds of things that you're saying now are the things that so many millions and millions and millions of young people really need to hear right now. Because of what's happening now, I feel this sense of what you talked about, the despair that I felt as well as a young person. But the possibilities of shifting into something that is deeply regenerative, personally and culturally, and ecologically. It's totally possible. 

Joe Brewer:

We’re doing it. We are doing it. I'm not just talking about what we're doing. The dirt on my finger. Like we're doing it. Yeah, It's real.

Morag Gamble:

I mean, I think this is the thing sometimes, often when you're in it so much that you're kind of looking out, but actually noticing how much is here now. That story itself, to tell the story about it is here it is now it is happening, look where it's happening. Look how it's myceliating,there's this deep understanding that it's everywhere. It's absolutely everywhere. But there's the kind of dominant narrative that we hear that doesn't point to those things and doesn't help us notice those things and so I absolutely agree that the act of slowing down and noticing different things. The things that we need to be noticing, the things that nourish us and nourish our relationships is a very simple and profound message that can open up our hearts and minds to know a completely different way of being that holds possibility and a sense of hope.

Joe Brewer:

My hope is that there's a growing number of older people who will support this transition for the younger people and there's a growing number of younger people who are rescuing themselves and rescuing each other into the solutions into these places. Because I have the experience just in the last few days of coming into contact with three different people who are suicidal. It is because the world is so crazy and difficult and it's only going to get worse. So, what we absolutely need, knowing that the world is gonna get worse and that for a while, still, it's gonna get worse, and those of us who are going to carry through for what comes after, we need to know how to be nurtured and healthy and well and happy and capable. So that we’re good for each other and good for ourselves and this can happen even as the dark side continues than the negative and painful side continues the burgeoning of this new way, the new indigenous human, the new endogenous human that brings rivers back to life, that restores native biodiversity, that recovers cultural history and that plants the seeds for the trees that our granddaughters will sit under and it's our granddaughters that we care about because they're the ones who may or may not have children and if humans are going to continue, it's because there are mothers in the future. So this is really, really important and I say this as a man who has a daughter that I'm able to support the cultivation of a future female leader as a father. So this relationship with our daughters and granddaughters is going to be beautifully, painfully important and where are they going to go to learn how to connect to nature, in these community places, so that they need to be created. There already are some I'd say they're already maybe a few 10s of 1000s in the world. Sounds like a big number and it's also small. But we need millions. We need millions by next year or the year after. Because it's down to crunch time. 

Morag Gamble:

Thank you, Joe. 

Joe Brewer:

Thank you for having me. Always lovely to talk with you, Morag.

Morag Gamble:

Thanks, everyone for tuning into this episode of Sense-making in A Changing World. I'm delighted to be able to share my conversation here with you with Joe Brewer. Remember, check out the show notes for more links about his work and also to leave a lovely review and subscribe so you get notification of our weekly podcast episodes. Thanks again to the Permaculture Education Institute for always supporting this show and I wish you all the best. See you next time.