Community Resilience Podcast

INTRODUCTION Welcome back to Community Resilience, a podcast created in collaboration with the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project, facilitated by the Global Ecovillage Network. I’m your host, Eva Goldfarb, inviting you to gather around the fire as we explore resilience, adaptation, and transformation in our time of deepening polycrisis. It is a great joy to introduce Dougald Hine. I first came across Dougald two years ago as a speaker for the ecovillage Gathering in Denmark. Whether listening to Dougald live or online, his powerful storytelling holds great warmth, a balm for the souls awakened to these times of endings. Dougald Hine is a social thinker, a writer, and a speaker. After an early career as a BBC journalist, he co-founded organizations including the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME, a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture. He has collaborated with scientists, artists, and activists, serving as a leader of artistic development at Riksteatern, Swedish’s national theater, and as an associate on the Center for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University. His latest book is At Work in the Ruins, finding our place in the times of science, climate change, pandemics, and all other emergencies. He also co-hosts the Great Humbling podcast and publishes a substack called Writing Home. I hope you enjoy our conversation and are inspired to dive deeper into the wise mind of Dougald Hine. INTERVIEW Eva: Today we are joined by Dougald Hine. Dougald, thank you so much for making the time to talk with me today. Dougald: It’s a pleasure. It’s good to be here. Eva: I’m hoping to start by asking you to share a bit of your personal journey and how it has led you to your work with the Dark Mountain Project, with the various books and projects that you’re involved in, and if you feel like adding how these experiences have shaped your approach to resilience. Dougald: Well, my journey is that I grew up in the north of England in the 1980s and 90s. I went into working as a radio journalist in my 20s, but already before that I’d been very much alive to and shaken by the news that was coming in about climate change and about the rest of the ecological crises tangling with our ways of living. I think I had from when I was fairly young a sense both that the ways of living that were being taken for granted in the world I was growing up in were not going to last, nor was it a desirable thing that they should last, that there were things that were importantly lacking or destructive behind the surface of, in many ways, in global terms, in an ordinary sense, quite a privileged experience that I was having of the world. Relatively quickly after I started working at the BBC, I realised that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life working in radio newsrooms and in the mainstream journalistic world that I was in, but I didn’t really know what alternatives there were, how you could shape a life. I had been around various kinds of activism, some of which had inspired me deeply, but I had also learned relatively early on that I’m not the most useful person on the front line in high tension conflicts of the kind that that can take you into. I also had a sense that we needed to get below the surface and the energy of a lot of the ways that we were doing activism and a lot of the ways we were framing the trouble we were in and what it called for. I was still following these lines, still trying to figure out how to use the skills in telling stories that journalism runs on in service of something else, in service of making room for other possibilities and shifting the boundaries of possibility. When I crossed paths with Paul Kingsnorth, who had been editor at The Ecologist magazine, among other things, and as we started comparing notes, it seemed as though we were asking some of the same questions about the need for a reckoning with the depth of the trouble that went beyond the urgent mutual encouragement that was one of the modes of cheering each other on, you know, we can do it, we’ll go to this year’s COP meeting and this time they’ll listen to us, that kind of spirit. We wanted to make room for something else, which might start with a kind of admission of not knowing, an admission of not believing in some of the stories you’d been meant to be propagating if you were involved in environmentalism 15 or 20 years ago, saying, you know, this is all, this trouble is deeper than we are acknowledging in the way we’re talking about it, deeper both in the sense that things are worse, but also in the sense that the roots go down a lot further than the language we’re mostly using is bringing into view. And that was the origins of what became first The Dark Mountain Manifesto and then a project with a journal and festivals and an international network of writers and thinkers and artists and musicians and all sorts of folks collaborating and just making room for a different kind of conversation. And for a good number of years, I guess from sort of 2009 when we published that manifesto to 2019, I was partly responsible for the running of Dark Mountain itself and also increasingly getting drawn into all sorts of different contexts as a consequence of what we were writing and publishing and curating with Dark Mountain. I mean, to fill in the biographical details, during that time I moved to Sweden, came to a festival in Sweden where I was speaking and met Anna, my now life partner, and moved here to live together and we started a family and in 2019, after 10 years, I stepped down from my role as co-director of Dark Mountain and by then Anna and I had already begun to open up this ongoing work that we call A School Called Home and that takes multiple forms, including online, international gatherings and series that I teach and that lead into an ongoing community called The Long Table but also where I’m sitting speaking to you from in this old shoe shop in this town of 1500 people north of Uppsala in Sweden, we have a gathering space which we use just to do things with our local community and also to bring people from our international network and our local network together for different kinds of conversations and events and all of that is woven around this language of the work of regrowing a living culture in a sense that that names part of what’s called for today and just to touch on this word resilience, I remember back in 2012 being invited to take part in a project that was called the Guild of Resilients, so resilient with a t like it’s a noun, a kind of person and the idea was that they were asking me to be a journeyer so something like a journeyman in the old guild system, wandering around Europe for a summer collecting stories about resilience and I said well I’ve looked at the definitions of resilience and a lot of them are relatively technical and scientific and I’m going to assume that if you wanted somebody to collect stories about that you would have asked someone who has more of a background in that, so I’m going to interpret this in terms of cultural resilience. The question that I carried into the places I went that summer was what is cultural resilience, what makes for cultural resilience, what makes the difference between going on and giving up in hard times and what is the role of culture within that and I guess that inquiry is part of how Anna and I ended up with this frame of creating a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture, recognising that there is something brittle, something lacking in resilience in the dominant culture, the dominant ways of inhabiting the world that we’ve inherited from recent generations of what we sometimes talk about in terms of modernity and so given that it seems reasonable to assume that there are hard times around and ahead, what part of the work that that implies involves learning again how to be human together in place and over distance in ways that maybe bring us into a humbler relationship with the whole history of the ways in which humans have been human together, one that doesn’t present where we’re starting from as the summit of some grand arc of progress but actually recognises that for complex reasons we got out of practice, lost some of the habits that have been a matter of life and death in most times and places where humans have been human together and that we are going to need again if we’re going to hold together and make life work under uncertain circumstances in the times to come. Eva: Thank you so much. I’m very curious what some of the major learnings from this time of asking this question were. What did you come back, what was your report like? Dougald: Well, I remember that one of the first things that happened was my old friend Vinay Gupta. When I lived in London, I created a thing with Vinay and a few others called the Institute for Collapsonomics and Vinay got wind of this project that I was doing and he said, okay, Dougal, you have to go to Finland and ask people about Sisu and I went and spent a morning walking around the streets of Helsinki with a sign that said Sisu, interviewing people and asking people to tell me about this word. It’s one of those culturally important, untranslatable words that names a quality which is part of the self-narrative of Finnish culture that has something to do with resilience. Among the answers that people gave me, they said, Sisu is what meant that we won the Winter War against the Russians or Sisu, it means you carry on even through the grave or Sisu, it means you climb the tree with your ass first. It was fascinating because as we got into this conversation about this strange word, people were able to make jokes about the almost foolish stubbornness that they saw as an element of their cultural character and also objects of pride, bits of important history woven into it. There is nowhere in the world where I could walk around the streets with a sign that has the word resilience on it and get into those kinds of conversations with people because resilience is what the sociologist called a plastic word, a word that starts off within a specialist technical scientific vocabulary and then gets brought out into a larger conversation wearing a white coat, wearing the authority of that technoscientific background but with a set of resonances. None of that is to say that it can’t be a useful word that’s appropriate to certain settings. But if we’re wanting to work culturally, it’s worth noticing the difference between language that is specific and grounded and woven into stories and that can be reworked. I know another thing that someone told me that morning about Sisu, they said, it’s a word that’s as powerful as a swear word but not negative. And I thought, wow, I don’t even know if modern English has words like that. So finding words like that, finding ways of talking about where we are and what’s called for that speak to the heart and the gut and the history and the sense of humor as well as the head and the analysis, that’s one of the things that I came back from that trip with a clearer sense of. Eva: Very nice. I’m wanting to jump into that communication topic a little bit already. In the Resilience Project, there was a noticeable gap between ecovillages recognizing their unpreparedness as the project was exploring this plus 2.5 degree global warming scenario and the bright optimism that many community members still seem to share for the future. And you’ve already mentioned this a little bit in your introduction but you have a quote that says, I remain convinced that the world is deep in trouble, deeper than we know how to talk about. And I’m wanting to tap into the second part a bit. Why don’t we know how to talk about this? What do you believe the disparity that we observed in the ecovillage project reveals about human nature or human culture and our approach to climate resistance as we’re referring to it? Dougald: I think that the question that I was asking in the context in which I wrote those lines that you quoted is about whether the whole frame of talking about climate change might be less helpful than we think it is as a way into facing up to getting to grips with the depth of the trouble. And I was thinking that as well when you talk about the 2.5 degrees and the sort of bright optimism and the gap, in order to find ways of talking about the depth of the trouble, we have to go places that the language of 2.5 degrees or even the language of climate change won’t take us. We have to go places of loss and longing. We have to let in questions that that language doesn’t bring to the table. The one that I often come back to is how did we find ourselves here in the first place? Is it a piece of bad luck with the atmospheric chemistry that it turns out seven generations down the line that the fossil fuels on which we built modern industrial societies were having all of these knock-on effects for the climate system? Or is it a consequence of a way of approaching the world, a way of seeing and treating everything and everyone, which would always have brought us to such a pass, even if the atmospheric chemistry and the chemistry of those fuels had been different? And I think that second possibility takes us into the deep. It brings into the picture things that go missing if we’re talking as if it’s a matter of bad luck with the atmospheric chemistry. And that also has to involve a reckoning with the multiple kinds of loss and destruction that have been written into the story of modernity. The colonial devastation of so many cultures and ways of inhabiting the world that is the other side of the coin of the destruction of landscapes and ecosystems. The way that those two things go together and are produced together and feed in and out of each other. And the ways in which even in the societies that are taken as a whole, the winners of those games of modernity and coloniality, the places where most of the benefits accrued, all kinds of damage was also going on here, whether it’s in industrialised landscapes and communities, and then the post-industrial wreckage left when those industries are globalised and moved elsewhere, or whether it’s in the cultural hollowing out that is the other side of the material privilege of those who are the winners within those societies. The loss of some really basic skills of being human and inhabiting the world that happens when we become so reliant on the power of money and the power of the state to organise things that we almost forget that for most of our history humans had to get together and do things in ways and for reasons that don’t fall into that twin logic of, you know, the power of money, I’m doing this because someone told me to. The power of the state, I’m doing this because someone who has power over me told me to. So yeah, someone paid me to or someone told me to are those two twin logics. And they dominate, they take up so much of the space in rich societies and developed societies that we almost grow up without learning or noticing that there’s still a lot that doesn’t fit into either of those categories that our ways of living depend on, so much of the care that goes into our ways of living, so much of the relationships to land, even within mainstream farming, you know, you meet farmers and these are people who are very often part of an intergenerational relationship with land and creatures that may have been distorted and bent out of all shape and made destructive by aspects of modern industrial farming, but that still only goes around because people are willing to live lives that are far less materially prosperous than those who are eating their food on the whole, because of a sense of being bound into something that matters, you know, that goes a long way through the world of agriculture even today in ways that are hard to compute for people who are working on financial markets or sitting in think tanks. So all of these things and all of the grief that goes with the destruction and the distortion needs to be brought to the table, brought into our conversation about the trouble that we’re in, if we’re going to get past that shiny optimism and not just lose ourselves in despair either, you know, often we produce optimism of that kind because we fear that the alternative is a despair that would be the end of everything. One of the things I realized after a few years with Dark Mountain was that part of the work that we were doing with that project was holding a space in which there wasn’t a rush to action or to answers, in which people could admit things that they might feel ashamed to say in other settings and not feel judged and not feel alone. And by doing that, I was watching people go on a journey to the far side of despair where we’re changed by allowing that into the room. But in order for any of that to happen, we also have to break this kind of spreadsheet logic that underwrites the idea of progress. You know, progress is used as a signpost to point to lots of good things, including achievements that we would not gladly lose. But nonetheless, as an idea, in order for it to make sense, progress means movement towards. So you have to be able to measure, are we getting closer or further away? So you have to be able to depict history as if it is the kind of thing that can be measured on a single dimension. And in order to do that, although we don’t often admit it, you have to be implying that history is like a cost benefit analysis, that the losses of history can be balanced out against its gains to produce a single number that is going up or down from year to year that tells us whether we’re on track of progress or whether we’re getting off track. And the problem with that is that, yes, history is made up of gains as well as losses, but the losses are like bereavements. They’re like grief. They need to be grieved, not treated as if they’re numbers that can be cancelled out against the positive numbers within what’s been going on. And if we don’t admit that, if that’s outside of what’s conceivable within the logics on which our culture, our society is running, then that ungrieved loss is like an untended wound that will be going septic and going toxic and boiling over. And sure, we’re seeing plenty of that in one way or another in our societies these days. But recognising how deep the source of that is in the ways of thinking, the ways of telling the story that tend to dominate in the spaces of those who think of themselves as the good guys, the ones who are on the progressive side of the argument, on the right side of history, and so on. That’s part of why I say that the trouble we’re in is deeper than gets admitted in the ways that it’s normally presented in lots of good, well-intentioned, progressive, activist and environmentalist settings. And if we can make room for that grieving, for that space in which we move towards the far side of despair, then I think that we can also catch sight of stranger kinds of hope that can give us things to steer by for the next step along the way in the journey into the strange world that we’re headed for, not least because of what climate change is bringing us. Eva: Absolutely. I think you’ve also touched on another nerve of society, which is our incapacity to grieve, and this exclusion of death in the cycle of progress. This is, for me, a very profound thing that has been shunned over the past centuries. You talk about this journey to progress and all of the important things that have been lost in this second scenario of the relationship we have created, when I say we, I mean the general society with our planet, this monetization, this individualism and commoditizing life. You also talk about a lot of the things that we’ve forgotten as a society, and then without knowing exactly what you mean here, I’m wondering if this may allude to some of the optimism that we see from the ecovillages, because a lot of the ecovillages within the network really work with these concepts, they work with grief, they work with healing the relationship between the natural world. I’m wondering if maybe a few of these pieces that have already been recovered, allude to some of the optimism. Dougald: Yeah, I think you’re probably putting your finger on something there. I think that it’s worth us distinguishing between different things that can ride under the name of optimism, where particularly within mainstream society, there is a great deal of optimism that is wishful thinking, or a kind of forced optimism often in environmentalist circles where you have to convince yourself to believe in something that in your heart you’re not convinced you believe in, because otherwise that would be giving up and giving up is the worst thing that could happen. I’ve been looking for where are the people and the settings that seem to be living on the far side of despair, living in a relationship of awareness of the depth of the trouble that is not simply being stuck in the doom scrolling on Facebook of the endless salami slices of the apocalypse that the Guardian will serve up in its newsfeed. It’s not just that it has diminished returns, at a certain point that’s actively unhelpful. We don’t need more information about the factual layer of the trouble. That becomes a way of avoiding where we are and what we could do. I definitely notice that the recurring pattern of the people who impress me by their being in a place of a grounded hope, that is not in denial about the depth of the trouble we’re in, is that these are people who are getting back involved with place, with living creatures, landscapes, with the life of human community and culture. In one way or another, through doing that, it’s not that you show up and present the evidence of what you’ve done and what you’re doing in your little corner as the proof that the big story about the trouble we’re in is wrong. It’s not that. It’s that you’re like the climber who is on a rock face and each hold only comes into view as it comes into reach. It’s what rock climbers have described to me. They said you can be looking further up the rock face and you can’t see how it’s going to be climbable and a hold will present itself. It’s not just that it was objectively out of view because of where you were before. It’s that it was subjectively out of view because your hand wasn’t going to reach it yet and you couldn’t see it until it came there. I think that’s a lot like the way that we navigate these times, which is not to say that there isn’t use in stepping back and looking at the rock face, which is what the factual layer can give us. But then you have to get on the rock face. You have to be there. You have to have a direction that you’re moving in and be there with your vulnerability as an embodied creature. We’re not talking about climbing a rock face here. We’re talking about the things that feed us in body and in soul. Those practices, getting back involved with those, awakens memory in the bones apart from anything else. The things that you’re doing are things that your ancestors would recognize. You might be doing them a bit differently. You might be in a halfway place of relearning how to do something but still being reliant on things that you know are products of an industrial supply chain and the rest of it. But nonetheless, the activities in which we come alive and in which we have this sense of finding the next hold, I think, tend to be activities which, unlike many of the things that take up our time in the societies most of us are living in just now, would be more or less recognizable to our ancestors 100 or 1,000 or even 10,000 years ago. There’s a clue there as well. There is a kind of hope, which I think you’re right in saying, is likely to be kindled in many of the communities and spaces that are part of the ecovillages network, amongst other places, that looks like that, that feels like that. Eva: I love how active that task is as well, because everyone’s ancestors are different and unique, and it’s not, you need to pick up this skill or this habit, it’s do the research, and as you say, get on the wall. I also, as you were talking through this metaphor, thought back to earlier, you were talking about how in our society we try to measure things, and to make progress it has to be measurable, and this is actually one of the aspects of the Resilience Project, we were tasked to measure resilience, and for me, hearing this metaphor, this task is almost strange, because I have observed in my own life how flexible resilience is, in my definition of it, and you might not see the handhold, because in that previous moment, you might not have had the capacity to hold it, but as we are faced with these new situations, we grow and adapt, whether or not we are ready to. Dougald: The thing about measurement is, it’s not bad, it’s not wrong, it’s just that it doesn’t reveal to us a truer reality than the reality of experience, rather it’s a tool which can sometimes be made useful to us in the reality of experience, which is the reality we actually inhabit, but there’s been a tendency in modern societies to get that back to front, and to think that the things that are revealed by techniques of measuring and counting are a truer reality than the deceptive reality of experience, and that’s where we go astray, so measure by all means, but put that in service to a larger reality, rather than treating it as the objective, authentic revelation of what’s really real, hidden behind the misleading surface of the world that we inhabit and embody ourselves in and experience. Eva: Absolutely, I am also the communications leader for GEN, and through this, I work a lot with questions around cultural transformation, and how do we communicate in such a way that really entices people to shift their mindsets, to turn away from this individual society, and embrace, as you say, activities that their ancestors would recognise, and I’m curious if you have found any answers to my questions along your journey. Dougald: I find increasingly that I’m less interested in starting a conversation from talking about climate change, I’m more interested in starting it from talking about beauty, and meaning, and skill, because I think that the same trajectories that have given us climate change have also brought us to societies which, despite their achievements, are strangely lacking in beauty and meaning and skill, compared to almost any human community that we can find evidence of historically, and I find that just telling stories that brings that into view is in itself a way of waking something up in encounter that’s happening when we’re using language, and so I mean, I had a conversation not long ago with the artist Caroline Ross, where we talked about this, and we called the recording of that, Taking Beauty Seriously, and those are the kinds of places now that I feel more and more called to go, and then I think it’s about embodying that, because if we don’t embody it, then it doesn’t matter what we’re saying, and if we do, doesn’t matter that much what we’re saying, because we are, you know, as the creatures that we are, we do have a kind of navigational tool, what the Brazilian psychoanalyst Sully Rolnick calls the vital compass, this kind of gut level ability to steer towards the things that we feel ourselves coming alive in the presence of, and away from the things that we feel ourselves slowly dying in the presence of. Now, there is work needed to awaken and connect to that capacity to navigate in that kind of way, because we’re also operating, you know, part of the lack of beauty is that we’re operating in anaesthetic cultures, which means both cultures lacking in beauty and anaesthetized, numbed cultures, cultures which, in order to even go on existing within these settings, because of the cultural brokenness, we have normalized habits of numbing, whether it’s the drugs, or whether it’s the Netflix subscription, you know, one way or another to get through the day, to get through the week. Totally understandably, for many people around us, there are habits of numbing the very parts of us that might be sensitive to those twitches on the vital compass. But nonetheless, when something happens that is full of life, the twitch is still there, we still feel it. I remember Martin Shaw, the storyteller, talking about this. Martin will say, you know, people talk to me about kids today, having these splintered attention spans, because everyone’s on TikTok and so on. And he’s like, no, no, I can get a group of kids and like a lot of his life and work, Martin’s been working with kids who are on the boundary of ending up being sent to prison. If I can get those kids around a fire, their attention will be held for an hour and a half, as I tell a story that’s 5000 years old. And I’ve seen that happen with my own eyes. I know that’s true. So often we locate the problem in the wrong place, because we’re so lacking in examples of what fully alive would look like. But we know it, like in our bones, even when we don’t have the kind of cultural transmission that we might wish we had been born into. We know it when we see it, some part of us does, and is drawn to it. And so really, below the surface of communication, and there are other things we could talk about, about the different languages that are useful for bringing a project to life. But at some deep level, the question is, what is carried on your words? What is the music beneath the words? Because if that’s not right, if there is an energy of fear and panic and anxiety running beneath our words, then the invitations we make, however rationally, people might rationally go, yes, everything this person is saying makes sense. And there’s a certain fraction of society that is actually guided by that, but it’s a small fraction. Most of us are more in touch with this gut level intelligence than that. And therefore, even if it makes sense, we will steer away from it, if that’s the energy that’s running on it. And that’s why we need, you know, other practices and skills. And just looking for the things that are the oasis of beauty and meaning and skill within the desert of a crumbling modernity, and then we’ll find the words that are needed. Eva: Through your words, I think you’ve also given me an answer on how to create this cultural shift. And for me, it would come down to the individual for taking the initiative to change the context to build a fire and tell a story that’s centuries old, and change the context for the capacity to listen. Dougald: There’s a quote that I love from the great Marxist thinker and storyteller and novelist and artist, art critic, John Berger, where he is near the end of his life, he’s in his late 80s. This is probably 10 years ago or something. He says, you know, we’re living in a new dark age. And he says, in an illuminated age, there are these big paths into the future, that you can kind of come together and sort of march like a May Day parade into the future. And that’s what solidarity looks like. That’s what working for change looks like. So in a dark age, there’s no motorway to march off down. What you have are these little paths that are made by people on their own, people finding each other, people walking in small groups. And that’s the kind of path that’s open to us in these times. And I love that passage, you know, especially because it’s someone coming from that history and that political and intellectual tradition and recognizing that this is the nature of what’s called for now. And so the sort of cultural work, you know, it probably involves finding each other, like finding one or two people that does nonetheless, even that finding each other relies on small moments of courage, from an individual making a move, trying out an invitation that feels vulnerable. And then it’s practicing, and often practicing things that are small and hard to, hard to name in ways that sound impressive, in the contexts that we’re coming from. A lot of the work that we do with The Long Table, which is the community of people who’ve come through one or more of the online series that I teach, involves just getting together regularly in the same groups, with some very simple tools for meeting and sharing time together. And with an ongoing reflection, in which we notice what we’re learning from that. And quite early on, the Australian artist Kelly Lee Hickey said to us on one of those calls, she said, I’ve realized that when we meet regularly on Zoom, at the same moment in the week or the month, time becomes the space in which we meet. And then another image came to us, which is the image of, you know how the hare doesn’t make a burrow like a rabbit does. So it doesn’t go under the ground and make its place that it dwells. It lives on top of the ground, and it will have a patch in the grass that it keeps coming back to. And that patch has the imprint of the shape of its body, waiting to receive it as it returns there the next time to sleep. And something similar happens through practices of repeated gathering. Whether it’s, you know, fire keeping in your local area, or whether it’s getting together with the same group of people at the same moment every Tuesday afternoon on Zoom. We make something in a gentle, undramatic way, through those repeated practices of gathering, that becomes a shape that’s waiting for us, a vessel that can hold us. And, you know, sometimes on a Tuesday afternoon in our heartbeat call, all that might happen is that everyone shares something from what’s going on in their garden just now. There’s no need to perform, something big and emotional and dramatic doesn’t have to happen in order for people to go away satisfied from the call. And I think that’s we have to be really attuned to is the addiction to drama, the addiction to the performance of depth, the performance of authenticity. And instead, what we’ve noticed is, you know, sometimes someone comes along, and something big needs to be said. It might be something that’s happened personally for them, that gets spoken into the space. Sometimes it’s a kind of chain reaction of things that are shared by different people, that takes us to a space of depth and rawness and vulnerability. But because that doesn’t need to happen, when it does happen, it’s not dramatized, it’s not performed, it’s not feeding anyone’s dependency or addiction. And that to me, although it’s a very small thing, I feel like we are practicing and learning some of the things that have been essential to how human communities have made life work in other times and places. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, who wrote Hospicing Modernity, she’s also known as Vanessa Andreotti, she’s part of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective. I remember Vanessa saying to me one time after some experience that she and a colleague of hers who was a Canadian First Nations man had had, and they’d been talking to each other, and they’d ended up saying to each other, working inside these institutions of modernity, it’s as if this culture is just everyone sitting in kindergarten all their lives singing the ABC song over and over. They’re like, that’s how primitive and how crude the ways of living of the dominant culture look from the perspective of mature cultures that have lived through the endings of their worlds and are still here and still figuring out how to be part of ongoingness. And so, you know, when I describe something like that Tuesday afternoon gathering that we have as part of the Long Table, I always say these days during the series where new groups are arriving and getting involved with the Long Table, I say, look, we’re in remedial class, me too. We weren’t born into a culture where we were taught these things by the age of eight in the way that we would have been in many times and places. We’re having to teach each other them in, you know, the middle years of life. And that’s okay. We need to cut ourselves a bit of slack about that and be able to laugh at our own foolishness rather than have to be either the heroes or the villains of the story of what’s happening in the world. And then, yeah, get practicing, because practice is a over a lifetime and it applies to that terrible sound that the eight-year-old in the next room is making in their first year of trying to learn to play a violin. Practice is a word that has room for a whole trajectory, including our lack of skill and our starting from places of uninitiated beginnings. Eva: You speak so beautifully. I’m very happy that you’re here sharing your wisdom with us today. For me, it sounds like you’ve shared a lot of practices that build resilience in you. And I’m wondering if you have more to say on that. How do practices like the long table personally result in your ability to continue walking in this world? Dougald: I think the simplest answer is the feeling that I have when I arrive onto one of those calls or into a room with a group of those people where the heart says yes, the guts and the bones say good. This feels like a good place to be. And that can happen even in the context of a Zoom room where most of the people there are people I’ve never met in the flesh. That’s a mystery. And yet it’s true. It happens. I know it. And that’s something that feeds me. And in the process, having convened and sharing in the hosting of that, I get to see and contribute to others being fed. And if we all found in one way or another, both ways of noticing what really feeds us as distinct from the things that are like binging on a McDonald’s meal or whatever your equivalent is, and also ways in which we can feed others. And especially in that last bit, I think, especially for those of us who are heirs of privilege in one way or another, there’s a terrible risk involved in allowing it to be possible that we might actually have something to contribute. Because secretly below the surface, below the bluster, the story about what humans are like, and the way we show up in the world as creatures that modernity has been carrying is a very dark one. I know that people sometimes will go on and sometimes with good reason about, you know, the dark picture of what humanity is like that Christianity or monotheistic religions have and so on. Now, I as somebody who has been fed by those traditions, among others, would say, yeah, I understand why some people’s experience and why a lot of the historical way that those traditions have shown up would contribute to that. But they’ve got nothing on the underlying story of Hobbes and modern free market economics, and even of whole currents within environmentalism of what the human being as a creature is like. We need a story that has room for us being a presence within the world that is not simply or automatically a destructive presence. And we’ve been cut off from the experiences that would allow us that story. So we that’s part of why I bring and try and pass around these smaller stories of instances of humans showing up in ways that look more like that. And I mean, a book that comes to mind that is full of gifts for that would be Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. And she has that moment in it where she talks about asking her undergraduate students to make a list of examples of humans having a destructive impact on the living world. And they can fill three pages without pausing for breath. And then she asks them to come up with examples of humans having a beneficial impact. And they sit there with their pens hovering over their paper frozen. And she says, it’s not because those examples aren’t out there. But it is often because we have lived lives where we’re so cut off from any involvement with what feeds us and with what we might be feeding, that we don’t have much experience of that. And again, this is one of the reasons why I think you might be detecting a grounded hope within the ecovillages networks that gives some counterweight to that, because it is a context in which it’s normal to have experience of being involved in a living, ongoing, contributing way with other species, other creatures, other beings and landscapes. And we need to share that experience and invite more people into it one way or another. Eva: Absolutely. This theme has come up for me a lot in my life over the past few days, is we are looking to settle in a very wild piece of land, and really speak to this fear of having a negative impact. And one of the stories from Robin Wall-Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass also is a reassurance for me when they talk about a study on sweetgrass, and how the patches of sweetgrass that went unharvested, were the ones that died, and the ones that had the attention of humans, were the ones that thrived. And this calms my soul. What if we’re meant to be here? Dougald: Yeah. I think that there’s a secret fear that we’re a mistake, that is underpinning a lot of actually a lot of the mainstream culture and also has inflected a lot of the environmentalism that’s been born out of that culture. What if we’re meant to be here? And what if, even now, even with all of the loss that’s written into the story and all of the hardship that’s written into the story, there’s still time for us to show up and remember that? Eva: Oh, I am needing to wrap up this interview as much as I don’t want to. I have a few last questions, one of which is, if you could inspire one major shift in culture through your work, what would it be? Dougald: It would be people meeting each other in the places where we find ourselves, it might be a place where we’re staying put or a place we’re passing through, in ways that are not defined by identity. They’re not defined by what kind of person I am, who I am like, who’s like me, who’s other. And that we start practicing some simple things that can be passed along, things that are so simple, they can spread by word of mouth. That make it a little easier to start doing that in the places where we find ourselves. And you know, those practices probably don’t involve mentioning climate change, or lots of the other things that, you know, clearly animate the work that I’m doing and a part of how I ended up here. But actually recovering this capacity for being human together involves not starting from having this whole big story that we need to invite everyone together and screen a film about to inform people and then form a group about, you know, the stories worth inhabiting aren’t made that way. The stories worth inhabiting are made together through getting alongside each other, and taking one step at a time, doing things that our ancestors would recognize, without it all having to be theorized or analyzed or mapped out. And those of us who have something to contribute by theorizing and analyzing and mapping out, we can get together in the corner and have those conversations. And we can hopefully be helpful to others. But the world isn’t changed by everyone getting pulled into those conversations, or everyone who likes having those conversations living together in the same village. Like each village probably only needs a small number of those people. And then we need ways of connecting up the villages so that we can get together in the guilds of our different sets of skills with people who live elsewhere, but share these kinds of preoccupations or practices. And that’s part of why, so long as it’s around, I find myself using the internet to convene the kinds of conversations and groups that we do as that side of the work of our school. Eva: Absolutely. My last question was on passing on advice to listeners that might still be in this sense of overwhelm or panic in the state of the world. But I’m wondering if you haven’t already given it in the passing on the little things, like what if we were meant to be here? Dougald: Yeah, well, let’s just linger a moment longer with that question, because it’s real. I’ve been in those times of spiraling in the fear and the panic. And, you know, that can be a season that we need to pass through now and then to strip off a layer of protective skin and experience the rawness of the depth of the trouble. And then there’s something there about the need to be kind to ourselves and to each other, the need to not sit completely alone with those kinds of feelings, but to find the settings in which it’s possible to get together, to have that person you can talk to about those things. And then really important to the question of overwhelm is renouncing the sense of agency that we’ve inherited from modernity. There is a sense of agency in which in order to do something, we all need to get together and work out what the answer is. In order to do something, we need to somehow be like people sometimes might have imagined a monotheistic God to be, you know, all knowing and all powerful. So step one, we need to survey the world and know it from above with the satellite’s eye view, put it all in a spreadsheet, et cetera. Step two, we need to act from that above rather than from where we actually are, which is within unable to see the edges and the full shape of the patterns that we’re part of. And so then the what to do question, which can be where the overwhelm comes from as well, isn’t a question that needs to be answered for once and for all. It’s a question that we answer for here and for now, starting with those we find ourselves with, starting with the particular histories and gifts and the particular twitches on the vital compass that you or I have. And out of that, we find a place within a story, the full shape of which we never get to see and don’t need to see in order to be able to be acting and playing a part within it. Eva: There is so much more to say and at this time, not more designated space for it. I am very happy that I will have the chance to maybe speak with you again at the ecovillage Gathering this summer. I’m looking forward to being back there. And I thank you so much for telling your story. Dougald: Thank you, Eva. OUTRODUCTION Join us again next week as we continue the conversation over what it means to be resilient in our time of deepening polycrisis. While you wait for the next episode of Community Resilience, we invite you to explore more about the ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project by visiting us online at ecovillage.org/resilience.

INTRODUCTION Welcome back to Community Resilience, a podcast created in collaboration with the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project, facilitated by the Global Ecovillage Network. I’m your host, Eva Goldfarb, inviting you to gather around the fire as we explore resilience, adaptation, and transformation in our time of deepening polycrisis. Today, I am thrilled to introduce Luea Ritter, a dynamic force for change. Luea’s work is all about fostering long-lasting, transformative change by supporting people to share and learn together. She excels in creating safe spaces for dialogue and healthy confrontation, focusing on guiding and aligning processes for healthier structures. Luea invites experimentation at the cutting edge of collective potential and wisdom, weaving transformative change processes, creative practices, trauma, and healing work with leadership and organizational development. As a craniosacral and trauma therapist, Luea integrates holistic and indigenous healing models. She is experienced in systemic constellation and understanding living systems, offering grounding amidst chaotic dynamics. Her regenerative living systems design perspective informs her approach across diverse sectors globally. Committed to creating safe, conscious environments, Luea’s long-term action research focuses on collective sense-making and embodied practices. As co-founder and creative steward of collective transitions, she collaborates closely with other skilled individuals and organizations to explore new innovative pathways to strengthen community resilience. INTERVIEW Eva: We are joined today by Luea. Luea, thank you so much for being here and taking the time to speak with us about resilience. Thank you for the invitation and I look forward to our conversation. I always love to let guests introduce themselves, so I’m hoping you can tell us a bit more about your background and how you came to be where you are in your career, in your community building, in this point of life. It’s a big question, if you can try to answer. Luea: I’m originally from Switzerland, grew up very close to the land and especially also the mountains and that has a very important imprint. I also grew up in a context, or at least in my family structure, where it was very normal to tend and bridge between the natural and the social world. When cows were, for example, ill, there was not just antibiotics, but there was pendling or checking with minerals and things like that. It was very normal, for me at least, but we didn’t speak about it, so there was a clear on it somehow. I had a very strange relationship to the society because I didn’t understand certain processes of why this is disconnected and why these processes have to go in such ways and how education functions. I was really questioning a lot of the times. Actually, GEN was a really important lighthouse for me when I was in my teenager years trying to figure out how society works and realizing it really doesn’t add up to my understanding, at least, of how we could live more connectedly together. I had this book, The Ecovillage Guide, or I don’t remember how it was called at that time, and I was so fascinated. I was always trying to understand how we better make sense of things and build relationships and also trying to understand why are things so… Already at that time when I grew up, that’s quite a long time now or at least some decades, why are things so fractured? I felt it sometimes really viscerally. I had a very strange search and doubting and living a bit more at the margins, let’s say, with this big hope if we live together, if we work with what is. I then became a craniosacral therapist and trauma therapist. I studied arts because I had the hope or the trust in art as a transformative power, which then led me to be a curator in the more experimental transdisciplinary scene until I realized with that hat on of a curator, even though I bring great topics into the mix and trying to bring in other ways of knowing and trying to how we are building relationships to our neighborhoods, how we take care of social issues, how we work with, you know, not only within the arts, but also with people from more science-oriented, more social-oriented people. I could still feel I’m a nice add-on with my work, but nothing really fundamentally got then tackled even by politicians being involved and people in power. And I was very disillusioned by that. So I had a hard spot in a way and also got fed up by having arts focus and at the same time a focus on building community with, at that time, my context and partner and a very dedication to the spiritual path or the more subtle, let’s say. And they were all in a way, I had networks there and there and there, but they, so I was at the junction, which then also led me to collective transitions. And so these days I feel my work is really, how do we co-weave again? And not to say we have to change it, but more like what can we enable as a dormant potential or things that may have lost sight of each other? Not that they’re lost in the sense of gone, but haven’t had any more the chance to build bridges between the synapses in societal weave and also our connection to the natural world, our connection to ourselves in first place, of course. And through my work with craniosacral, I know of the power of the system knowing its own wisdom and healing potential as an individual, which in this approach, you don’t do anything as a therapist. You’re just there to hold and so that system can see itself. And from there, it may give a little notch. And so in a way, I feel these days I was drawn then to make the systems are bigger systems, but I feel I’m still operating from a very similar place of what is there that hasn’t been recognised as valuable and important within the system itself. Yeah. And I have a big, I was informed by different indigenous healers and including also systemic constellation, which for me is very rooted, not only in Bert Hellinger’s work, but also in the Zulu. But it’s really about, there is not something wrong if something goes out of balance, but it’s the question of how can we see the symptoms as arrows and signals that below the surface, there is something has lost its connection or has forgotten or has been avoided. And it’s all our collective responsibility, not someone or out there to co-hold again space for this realignment. So that has a lot to do also with my inner work that I feel I have to do. So it’s part of my work to not just do the outer, but yeah, part of my work, I see also working on what is funnelling through me in order to work through these embodiments and these imprints that I surely also carry from Swiss society and being Western born, et cetera, with all its privileges. Yeah. Sorry, that was a long one, but. Eva: Thank you for all the wisdom that came with it. One thing that did come up for me while you were speaking is you were talking about working in the art world and being frustrated that there weren’t any fundamental shifts happening. And I’m curious in your work since then, have you started to notice these fundamental shifts and how have they arisen? Luea: I guess because I’m now working with these more multi-stakeholder long-term processes and really weaving the different stakeholders that are part of the system, not together because sometimes it’s not possible, but like holding more that long-term aspect of things. I can feel that there are shifts that are maybe totally not obvious as a, you know, changing the symptoms or the outcomes, but the relationships start to shift and the quality of the relationship, especially. But I also recognise that what I aspired to as a curator, I thought I was just, okay, how can we do it in one or the other year? Now I also feel like a lot humbled throughout all my learning journey, which was my real education, I feel. Yeah, things take time. And if I can contribute with my own life, something that may come to the surface more visibly after I have left this earth, at least in this body. So there is also the time scales for me have shifted, I would say, because I’m clear to the people that I work on the relationships, the ones who are engaged and the ones who are in a way also inviting this kind of work, I feel it then actually sometimes doesn’t take so much to feel the shift rather than if you come out like, oh, you’re the curator and you do this great project. Of course, I was always embedded in it, but there wasn’t an invitation. So I think that also shifted. Now I’m only going if I’m invited by a part of that system. As a curator, of course, I was part of that system, either the area where I lived in or the city I was working in. But it still came from a very one sector view. And I think at that time, I didn’t have the skill how to create that invitation, grow that invitation before then more people would join. So I think my approach was also a bit more top down or, you know, like pressured into rather than now, I feel like I’m more aware of what it takes to create that environment that an encounter can take place, which I did in my art projects. But I do it in another level. I think that then these resistance to shifts are no longer so extreme, maybe. Eva: Yeah, you said collective responsibility. I think this is a very nice definition of the shift, more individual society to yes, we really have a collective responsibility to look at our constellations, to look at how we are adapting and coming through change. Thank you. You mentioned in your introduction a bit of your work with collective transitions. You focus within collective transitions on building these collective capacities that are needed for shifting mindsets, beliefs and deeply ingrained patterns. And I’m wondering if you can share a bit more about these. What shifts have you been able to identify that really can shift our mindsets, beliefs and deeply ingrained patterns? Luea: So collective transition was born out of this question in this crisis that I shared before with the art world. But then how do we do it collectively? I can do my own and you can do your own work and X, Y, Z can do their own. But I realized or saw again and again and then realized that that doesn’t add up to this. And I almost felt like in the collective body. So if we start to understand us, including the beyond human, of course, it’s given for me. If we don’t understand us as a collective body, then of course, I don’t know how my arm is moving and how the leg is going. And it’s kind of discombobulated. So and also, we don’t know which muscles do we need to train more because as we know from whatever sports or musicians, you have to train your fingers and legs and everything to stay agile and present in your art or artistry, whatever it is. And so what I was recognizing together also with my collaborator, Nancy, it was like, how do we create spaces where we first of all get to know this sense we are part of an organism? And then how do we train these muscles? And how do we stay in the inquiry? So I think a lot of that is also, I come with questions, I don’t come with answers. I want to sit with the questions with others together and then find our way, like Vilke beautifully said to the young poet, one day maybe you will live into the answer, almost like surprisingly. So back to your question, I think for me it is how to shift starts with being in the question and being in that curiosity and that awe of not knowing and being ready to surrender in a way to that not knowing or that uncertainty also and kind of learning how to navigate in complexity, which means I have buddies with me, I’m held in a community, I feel relating to the place where I am. I listen to cognitive, but also other ways of knowing as an orientation and knowing it never ends. It will keep on going and it’s just more the question, how am I ready to keep on, yeah, not only training, but maintaining my muscles and these fine things. So talking about training the muscles for being in community, being present with the place you are, some of these other aspects you mentioned, do you have any concrete exercises or tools that people can use to shift their beliefs or that are effective in helping this training happen? I wouldn’t say shift beliefs, that because I think that’s something once I feel more relating and related to bigger, then that’s disrupting patterns maybe. Yeah, I mean, one thing is systemic constellation and there’s a field of others as well, but into system sensing, so where I can really not only think in systems, which I think in the West at least you’re very good, but how can I reactivate my innate knowing, some would call it also intuitive knowing or felt sense, or there are multiple words out there for it, forced person knowing, etc. But where I connect with multiple ways to see and connect with a certain given issue. So for example, I have a conflict with someone and I don’t really understand what happened or why this is now happening. I could just lay it out in a system sensing exercise to at least listen to the different aspects from another place and that in itself would maybe enlarge my awareness of things, through that my compassion of things, through that my also understanding, oh, in this situation, I may actually step more back than coming in with my view or my thoughts. And I think this navigating what do I think is important versus what wants to happen is for me, that’s what I keep training in all these exercises. I can’t give it to you right now here in this podcast, because it would need or it would go beyond there. But I think these kinds of exercises to listen beyond what I think and beyond what I bring forth from my previous experiences and always again, what is important now in this very context versus how it was being done in the past or how it was helpful for another context. So always this again, being in a learner position where, ah, if I drop that for a moment, not to forget my wisdom, of course, but drop my assumptions for a moment, what else would then come? And I mean, talking about exercises, hearing different people about the same issue and inviting unlikely allies. What is your perspective? And really like even the enemies, so-called whatever, or the conflicting parties, tell me more. Again, it comes back to this curiosity. That’s for me an exercise I try to train and always know that there’s surely more to it than what I can even grasp or even see, but also not, of course, doubting them constantly myself, which would be also sad. How has this grown awareness contributed to resilience, both maybe in your work and also in the different groups you are working with, but just kind of relating back to this topic of resilience, which has brought us all together, what you see as the interlinks? So from my understanding or how I relate to the word resilience, it’s really that sense of being not only, you know, resistant against something and strong enough, but really vital to stay flexible, agile, adaptive, open, welcoming, and also ready in a way, like ready to respond rather than react. So I think this has, from that end, understanding resilience in that way, what I see is that more patience with things that are difficult, through that more breath for the long haul, and especially more relational acknowledgement of what else has played into a certain situation. I may reach back centuries even, like, you know, from my trauma background, I very much believe that there’s always a personal layer and intergenerational layer and surely collective stuff that we are informed by, no matter if I now officially belong to a group that has gone through trauma potential events, but I’m part of a fabric, no matter where I was born, that is informed of these trauma responses. And so I feel in the teams and in the organisations that I’ve worked with, and also in our community of practice, we can be more okay with what is rather than having to jump to solutions or rather having to fix and fight, which I think is a very difficult pattern of a lot of socially change-driven people and organisations. But even just the fact of recognising, okay, this may be going back much further than we ever thought, and I’m okay with not being everything and everyone that can do it right now, but surfacing what is. And I think for me, from this family constellation, systemic constellation, that’s a huge thing. Everything that is excluded, even in thought of a system, will scream to be reintegrated. And from the moment it is recognised and acknowledged, at least the charge of it is starting to be released. And then there’s more energy and more resources available to work with what can be done right now, being it forgiveness work, reconciliation work, or actually building a water tank. So yeah, that’s what I witness, which then for me has to do with being resilient, not only for what is now, but also acknowledging how I’m informed and part of a lineage that reaches back into. Eva: That is so rich, and I feel I’ve derailed myself a bit, because now I really don’t want to go on to the next question, which is coming back to the resilience communities of practice. And one of the aspects of the project was measuring resilience or measuring the success of the project. And I’m curious, in your application of constellation work, of trauma therapy, of different art and group dynamics, have you seen indicators that mark and measure this transition, this disruption of patterns, this journey towards resilience? Luea: That’s a good question, indicators, because that’s actually one of my big, together with also others, I could give you indicators of being more curious, staying open to answers or solutions, feeling okay with navigating in complex things, feeling connected to a bigger whole than only just either my family or my community or having more relationship with the natural world, etc. But I think what you’re also asking, or at least that’s what I’m hearing, is how do we articulate what we find, which is so highly complex and multilayered and subtle, often, that goes often unnoticed, why an organization thrives and another not, even they may have the same funding or so, or why big organizations with big dreams still seem to be discombobulated and misaligned. And for me, that’s actually very much these days, together with how do we collectively transition, but as in a way, a more focused question is how do we build coherence in social fields? My experience is if something is, and coherence I see as a dynamic state, not something that is fixed. If coherence is there within small groups, even, there’s a whole other level of an attractor field even created. But with that research that I am on, I need indicators. And that’s very difficult, because in the typical science, that would maybe not be exactly what we can measure in the typical way. And then it’s also the question of the measurement method. So actually, you touch upon something, I have no answer. And I struggle also with, because certain things are so obvious for me, but then I realize, oh, that’s not always for everyone. And then how do we talk about that? And how do we make it visible? And through the visibility comes validation, also legitimacy, which often for certain things that are less visible, there’s less validation, which then again, you know, certain things are less nurtured than others. So yeah, it’s, it actually touches a part that trouble me also, sometimes, because we are, we, I mean, in the West, we are so used to a certain way of measuring and key performance index and methods to do evaluation that sometimes are often can’t capture the richness that really happens, not only within individuals, but also, and that can’t be right away tracked from year one to two within a funding screen, because it’s maybe year 10 to 20. I love for that Paul Lederach, the late Paul Lederach, who was a scientist and did so really great work. He once said, I’m not taking any, no mandate or no work out there. If I’m not getting at least 10 years to do my work. And that was for me such a relief. And I heard it because, yeah, also coming from a humbleness and not think we can play golf. And yet we have this divine spark in us, of course. It’s humbleness. And also, you mentioned the beginning of our interview, this adjustment to patience. And I think these are two strong indicators, maybe measurable, at least within our own observations of how we’ve come to begin disrupting, to begin shifting towards resilience. Eva: You spoke about building coherence in social fields. And I find this such an interesting theme. And I’m very curious what this has looked like from you, what challenges you have had with trying to build coherence in social fields and maybe also how this relates to resilience if you see a direct link. Luea: It definitely connects directly to resilience and especially also how we have been understanding resilience in this project. On one hand, the social ecological resilience with that together is the personal interpersonal resilience. And from an understanding that they’re not either or seeing that they are impending and informing and interrelating with each other. So I come from an understanding that clearly grew and I’ve found now having more language and also seeing it more easier being resonating with others than maybe 20 years ago is that acknowledgement that what is inside is outside and what is outside is inside. So whatever I need is a mirror of myself, which can, you know, whatever spiritual lens we want to put on, we know for a long, long time. But I think especially in the West through all these divides, there is a clear sense of separation and being different then. And of course, for the ones of us who know, Ho’oponopono and all these things, it’s nothing new. It’s so deeply old that it almost feels like embarrassing that we have to remember it. So from that understanding, if I come into a field, and there are also these stories of the rainmaker, for example, that Jung refers to, where it’s not so much about what can be done, that rain comes back, but how do I look inside of me, what has gone out of balance, that rain not coming or rain to be coming too much, would be a sign of an imbalance that also I can find within myself. And if I’m working on that part that I have agency of and responsibility of, then that has a ripple effect into the field I’m in, as much as my imbalance or my disconnect has a ripple into. So if I understand myself as an antenna that constantly sends and receives all of it, all the whole spectrum, then I do also have another responsibility. But we also have a responsibility as circles and communities and groups of people, being project holders, teams that lead a network, whatever it is. And I feel I’ve experienced when groups take the time to come into their coherence, where everyone is dedicated to find that sweet spot of being somewhere in a dynamic balance and dance in a way, where falling and stumbling is part of it, but where the connection is so strong that you can co-hold after a while a field that is bigger than this circle. I specifically experienced that with the Nile churns that I co-founded, that has also some connection to Jen, where we went very slow in the beginning, and it is a huge endeavour. But the level of coherence and then also what got attracted through that of goodness in a way, I would really say had to do that we didn’t know, we stayed present. And we also worked through our shadows, including the collective stuff that is part of this. For example, me as a white person working in the Nile Basin, how dare I am? I was the only white person, but still, that’s also represented. And not to say it’s only my stuff or that’s only collective, but saying all of what is showing up can be co-held with others. So that’s something that for me is part of this coherence. And I was inspired by this beautiful quote by Ilya Grigoshin. I mean, I’m now quoting not totally correct, but little islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the whole system into a higher order. And that is really for me, an inquiry of, and then again, the capacities that we need to even be present while I’m maybe with my nervous system totally occupied by a conflict that I just had with my partner. How do I refine that? Not with excluding that reality, but including it even more, including my fears, including my insecurity, including our not knowing how to do that as a group. And I feel the stronger this relational bond with all there is gets, and the more we relate to each other and stay present and voice things when they’re there and work with it. Work with all there is, not as like that’s good to deal with and that’s bad to deal with, but like, wow, this is juicy stuff to make something juicy out of. The more that the ability comes in that I would call coherence, the more than actually the next level of, yeah, it’s going back in a way for it is what I said before with the craniosacral aspect of, then there is a new fluidity in the system where the system knows what it needs and not me as a team member or as a whatever in my function is. And then things like we would call them serendipities and synchronicities or coincidences start to unfold that we are like, how? And it doesn’t matter who did it. That’s beyond important. To address the challenges of coherence, I hear we stay present, we stay tuned into this collective field and allow space for serendipities to arise. And if it doesn’t, it’s also okay. You know, like also this now, oh, now we have the magic because then I’m already attached again to an outcome. Oh, let’s do some magic. No. Yeah. I think it has also a lot to do with detaching from expectation, how something should look like versus what wants to happen. Knowing this, every system has smaller B knows its own healing and healthy expressions. Even that may look different than I think it would be the best solution for everyone. I mean, the word coherence is more circulate these days, which makes me very happy, but we are in total state of relearning these capacities to flow with what is and being that not only including and excluding mindset, but that capacity to embrace. Eva: In this knowing of how young we are in this journey, I personally really struggle with staying calm and presence, knowing how much and how quickly we need to adapt in the coming years. So maybe we start shifting our conversation in that direction, looking to this very uncertain future with significant climate changes. Do you see any qualities or practices that we as individuals and communities need to develop or really can work on to speed up this growing up? So to call it. Luea: So I’m not talking about the concrete things that we can do in terms of water retention areas and all this, but more about these finer, more subtle muscles. I mean, honestly, if I don’t have a daily practice and I, if I don’t take care of it, I get wobbly very easily. I do also know how, when I perceive it, how to align back quite quickly these days, because I feel like I’m now a bit more trained to eat these muscles, but the personal practices for me, unquestionable. And it’s not negotiable like, because I’m so often informed by everything. And then to be clear, what is now mine to do? Where have I really a level of responsibility and where am I just a witness? Because otherwise I would burn out or I would pretend I’m something else than a man. So knowing myself as you know, it’s also known. I think it’s the question, where do I have spaces where I can practice? Because all these stuff is out there is, wouldn’t say in educational systems anymore, unfortunately, unless you go back to alternative forms, et cetera. But this reconnecting with oneself and building a group of people, I can be in this learning and also being in zones that are confusing and like, how do we then build that container that I know? I said yes to committing to that group, for example, or that practice. And not in a rigorous, in a way that I have a discipline, but not with a punishment like, oh, I didn’t do my practice today. Oh, bad me. So I think it has to do with releasing these double binds and these polarities of what is good and bad. When I feel stuff coming up that I reach out for help. I, for example, have a few things currently running in my life that are really tough for me and bring up stuff that I don’t like. So I reach out rather than thinking I have to all do it by myself. Even that shift from the lonely wolves to giving someone else permission to actually support me is a great gift. So yeah, that personal practice and then a collective hygiene also like an energetic hygiene, both for myself, what belongs here in this room and what doesn’t belong in my room, clearing if I feel stressed, knowing how to do that, use all these practices. And I don’t want to even name them because I would be incomplete in the list, but also practice that together with others in a community of practice, what we did with this project, which was so powerful. And it sounds so simple and it’s so profound, like recognizing oneself through the lens of someone else who has a whole different life is huge because suddenly my horizon expands without even me having known that would be possible. So also that exposing outside of the bubble, I think is another thing that, okay, that’s a stress for you. I hear you. Wow. I didn’t even know that this is a problem at your part of the world. So this kind of, I think coming back to the quality, sorry, I made a little loop, but reaching out to parts of the system that I’m not in contact with just because it’s not my reality, but hearing these stories, being in connection, building relationships, because we are in this together, no matter if I now have very little rain or if someone else has too much rain. So seeing how these things are connected, orienting, having people that I can fully rely on. And I’m committed to also being reliable. And I think place-based solutions are at the end that what is needed, but then how are these place-based solutions connected with each other? And how are we learning across the learning that emerged in one place isn’t an isolated or doesn’t travel anywhere else? Because I think now it’s like all hands on deck across, you know, I have another opinion across, I have another worldview across, I have another religion, whatever. I mean, I think this is for me the most important. And even within the social change movement or however we call it, there’s so many wonderful methods. If you pretend one is the solution or yeah, I mean, only one practice space and not seeing the value added from another practice space. Like I think these kinds of metanetworks that many people already speak since years, but how is it then again, brought into practice? I think that’s for me really the needed when we talk about personal interpersonal resilience, that at least we can co-hold the intensity and the voltage that runs through our system, that our systems are not so trained to receive 2000 watts. We are maybe made for 500 or 1000, not made, sorry, trained or educated conditions. So sometimes I feel like how do I and we together expand the capacity of the conduits we are so that whatever it is that needs to run through and needs to be ventiled out or exploding out can be at least held in a safe enough container. Eva: This is also, you brought a lot of dualities, but this is one polarity that I struggled to really envision. Yes. How we can increase our capacity so quickly and to such a scale. And at the same time, I noticed in my own life, when situations arise that I’m unprepared for, they build resilience anyway. And I just somehow grow really rapidly and maybe it’s not comfortable. Maybe it’s not a held container, but the outcome is still there. Luea: Exactly. Yes. Beautifully said. Yeah. Reminds me of this. If I lean in wholeheartedly and like I surrender and we can do that even together, I think there’s so much more than we think can happen. It doesn’t take long. If I know where I have my place in my agency and my level of responsibility, and then we know that of each other and together, I have stopped honestly to tackle the big things in terms of like, oh, let’s look how the climate crisis could be solved. But always like with an anchor. Eva: Yes. How can we solve the climate crisis, but from a particular place, from a particular context, because each context is so unique. So how could we even dare to say there’s one solution that fits all? One solution may be good for certain places, or we’ll tackle a few levels of the issue, but we need other ones then who amplify that through bringing in other aspects such as healing work or social dynamics or whatever. And it has to be anchored in my understanding of place and context. I think with localism also comes a lot of not relief quite yet, but okay, I can make a difference here where I am now. I can make a difference on this land, on my nearby community, on my neighborhood. I can reach out to my neighbors. For me, at least brings a lot of comfort. Luea: Yeah, totally. And if I know then I’m part of a global network, for example, that’s the strength of GEN. Then our smaller efforts on specific places then add up to so much that only can be done through collective efforts. So if I feel embedded, then I also don’t, I personally feel also like what you said, this relief. If I do my part really well and I’m really well connected with the bigger things or the other things, the movements and networks across networks also, then I see in my system, then I again feel hopeful and even trusting us as humanity to be able to do it. Eva: We leave our conversation on a bit of hope. This is good. Before we part ways today, I want to open up and see if there’s anything you have really wanted to talk about that we didn’t get to, or any parting words of wisdom you have for our listeners. Luea: Not something that I feel I’ve said so much now. Of course, I also acknowledge there’s each situation so unique. So what I’ve shared here are a few things that I learned and I keep learning. What kind of having the readiness to get my hands dirty and even my heart’s vulnerable, I think is what kept me being okay with not knowing anymore, being at the end of almost what I think is my powers. And then like in yoga, in the asanas, oh, I take another breath and oh, I can stretch more even. There are thoughts. There’s so much more in us than what we often are taught by, conditioned by, or think of ourselves. I trust in that. Eva: Me too. Thank you very much for joining us today. It was a pleasure. Luea: Likewise. OUTRODUCTION Join us again next week as we continue the conversation over what it means to be resilient in our time of deepening polycrisis. While you wait for the next episode of Community Resilience, we invite you to explore more about the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project by visiting us online at ecovillage.org/resilience.

INTRODUCTION Welcome back to Community Resilience, a podcast created in collaboration with the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project, facilitated by the Global Ecovillage Network. I’m your host, Eva Goldfarb, inviting you to gather around the fire as we explore resilience, adaptation, and transformation in our time of deepening polycrisis. Today we are joined by one of my personal heroes, Looby Macnamara. Looby is a renowned author, designer, gardener, song leader, mother, and artist. With over 20 years of experience in permaculture, she has pioneered approaches, blending systems, thinking, cultural awareness, design, and nature connection. Her influential books include “People & Permaculture”, “7 Ways to Think Differently”, “Cultural Emergence”, and “Strands of Infinity”. Looby’s groundbreaking work includes the Design Web, a globally used dynamic design framework. In 2016, she co-created the Cultural Emergence Toolkit with Jon Young, and in 2023, introduced the CEED – Cultural Emergence Empowerment & Design deck. At Applewood Permaculture Centre in Herefordshire, UK, Looby and her partner, Chris Evans, run courses demonstrating both land and people permaculture. She is also a key figure in the international Mother Nature Project, one of the senior tutors for the Permaculture Diploma in Applied Design, and serves on the expert panel for the Permaculture Design Course. Join us as we explore Looby Macnamara’s innovative work in permaculture and cultural emergence, shaping a more resilient world. INTERVIEW Eva: Welcome Looby, it is an honour to be sitting here with you today. I’m so grateful that you could make the time to join us. Looby: Yeah, thank you for inviting me. It’s lovely to be in conversation with you. Eva: I just want to start by letting you introduce yourself a bit, and starting to form some definitions as well. You work a lot with permaculture and cultural emergence. I’m wondering how you became interested in these concepts, and if you can introduce them briefly for us. Looby: Yeah, straight in there with some big questions. So, I came across permaculture in 1999, and at that time I wasn’t really land-based, but what really inspired me about the course I did was how it was taught, and how the collaborative learning, and how fun it was. And so it was the fun, and the community spirit, and the creative learning that really inspired me, and made me say, yes, I want to know more, I want to do more, want permaculture to be part of my life. And so I then went on to become a permaculture teacher, and in that process I was really struck by many threads there. One of which was the idea that we already have all the earth care solutions we need on this planet at the moment, and then the big question is, well, why are we not implementing them? And so the answer to that really is people, on many different scales. And the other thread to it was also recognising that permaculture had so much more impact in people’s lives than just what they did in the garden or on the land. It really influenced every relationship, how they saw their purpose in life, their creativity, their health and well-being. All of those things were impacted in a positive way by having permaculture thinking in their lives. And this big question then of like, how do we scale up permaculture? If we think it’s really important, how do we scale it up? So also the limit of that actually, a lot of people in the world don’t have access to land, so earth care is one step removed, but everyone has access to people. We’re all involved in people care, looking after ourselves, interacting with other people. So those were the three threads that made me say, okay, this is really important. I want to explore people care more. Where’s the writing about this? And I was like, okay, I don’t know where the writing is. Maybe we need a book, maybe it’s mine to write. So my first book is People and Permaculture. And that I have the privilege to say has been the first, and there’s been a few others since, but it was the first book globally that really explored the people care ethic of permaculture and translated the principles and the design and all the methodology to people-based systems. And that was my first encounter or first exploration and expansion of permaculture from being a land-based system into people-based systems and how we can then make it relevant for everyone. And then my second book was a much shorter book, and it was looking at this question of what is permaculture? Everyone asks this question, what is permaculture? So my answer is then like seven ways to think differently. It’s like the thinking changes and then what we do on the land changes. And then I was really hoping to kind of bust the myth of permaculture as land-based, didn’t fully do that. Still a work in progress. And so I was looking for kind of reframe and an evolution of the work, how to expand it and deepen it. And that was when I came in contact with Jon Young, who has developed the Eight Shields model and deep nature connection practices and village building cultural repair. And we were invited to collaborate together and we were like, okay, well, what do we do? And then it was like, let’s expand beyond what we both normally do. There is overlaps, but let’s see what emerges from this collaboration, what’s new. And that was the beginning of the Cultural Emergence Toolkit, which then has been my next book, then Cultural Emergence, with the mission of creating this profoundly effective toolkit to challenge and awaken, move and invigorate, nourish and empower. Maybe we’ll unpick those three phrases later in the podcast. And so this was a whole toolkit that emerged, that brought together my work with the design web and people in permaculture and his work with Eight Shields, and then a whole new set of principles and practices that came out of that collaboration and that thought and the collective wisdom of the groups and the courses we were running. And then I’ve since made it, my latest project has been to make it into a card deck, the CEED, Cultural Emergence Empowerment and Design Deck. That’s a really, you know, hoping or intending that that will then become even more widespread because it’s got this universal visual language, and it’s really accessible to share with other people and to use it in groups. And what’s happening now, which I feel is really exciting, is it’s kind of gone from, you know, since the book came out, gone from a toolkit into a movement, a global movement of people. And like, that’s like the mission now is how to create networks of people using the toolkit to develop that collective wisdom. So that’s kind of my history of my biography of using my books and the card decks and the other strands I think are relevant to share. I’ve been working with the Mother Nature Project for the last six years, empowering mothers on their journey, on their journey as natural leaders as well. So bringing leadership, mothering together, producing resources and podcasts for that. And then also my big project as well is where I live, which is Applewood Permaculture Centre in Herefordshire. And we’ve got 20 acres of land here, myself and my family, and we run courses here in person. So yeah, I’ve got plenty going on in my life that is really rich and nourishing. And I try and avoid saying I’m busy and glorifying busyness and just say, yes, I’m really feeling full and productive in my life. Yeah, thank you. That’s a nice way to start off. Eva: Yes, and thank you so much for your fullness and your productiveness. It has infused my life with a lot of meaning, your work. And just want to mirror back your story a bit and how this affects others. People in Permaculture book was kind of my gateway into community a bit and into the eco village scene. And really using this to, as you say, take permaculture out of this land-based process and really look at it as a tool for addressing everything in your life. I was talking to a friend last week who’s also a permaculturist, and she was sharing that it’s a part in her relationship that she tries to put permaculture on everything. Oh no, this is just this principle, and this is just this principle, which is wonderful. And then also 8 Shields is a big inspiration for my education work. So I hope we can talk about that a bit more later. And I would just like to maybe touch a bit more on the personal and hear about what experiences in your life have shaped your understanding and your approach to permaculture and cultural emergence. Looby: I think the experience for me with permaculture was very much started with heart and body, embodying it and feeling it and feeling the connection and the community and the purpose before I felt the words and the theory. And that came after that. So it was an experience of connection and growth and feeling expansive and comfortable. That was the beginning of my journey with permaculture. It didn’t start with the theory and the academic side of it. It didn’t even necessarily start with the hands. With a lot of people, it starts with the hands and the gardening or the doing. But for me, it was, yeah, the heart. And then with cultural emergence, the first cultural emergence course ever in the world was the week after we had moved into Applewood here. It was the first time John and I had met. And with him being deep nature connection specialist, the way he showed all of us how to interact with the land and how connected I was, that was profoundly influencing my whole journey with Applewood and how I relate to being here and how I see being here as being part of the web of community of the species here of the owls and the badger and the deer and the bats and the apple trees and grandmother oak and that I am just Looby walking through that web of life rather than this is my land and I’m in charge here. It’s like, no, I’m part of this and feeling humble in that being part of the land here. Nature connection is one of the strands of cultural emergence. I’d say cultural emergence is woven with nature connection, design, cultural awareness and systems thinking. So those are the main strands then the toolkit enables. And so the awareness of culture was also really significant with moving into a new place and having lots of people come here. And it’s like, what is the culture of here? What are we trying to create? And what’s my personal culture then influences how I run courses. And so that was also part of the weaving that happened. I mean, we’ve been here eight years now and it’s an ongoing story. When I started writing People & Permaculture, one of the things I did was use all the tools to help my process, use the tools to write about the tools. If I was writing about being effective, it’s like, how can I actually really embody that to be more effective? So that’s been one of my guiding principles in creating this. And whenever I do courses and things as it’s not just, don’t just have it as theory, actually use it and embody it and use it to create the next steps, use it to feel connected, use it to enhance my relationship and navigate here with my partner and my family and all of those things to really embody them as I go. So it’s not just theoretical. Eva: Can you share what the culture that you defined at Applewood was? You said through cultural emergence, you were really kind of figuring out what your personal culture was and what the culture of the place was. And I understand that culture is always changing, but this is one piece that is so interesting for me. And I’m wondering if you were able to define a culture through this practice. Looby: Yeah, so my working definition of culture is that it is a complex web of seen and unseen patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving, interacting. And when you realise that, it’s like, okay, this complex web, and you think, okay, there’s like, there’s different macro, micro climates. So we’re, you know, we’re both in Europe, but actually are in a big macro climate of Europe, but actually, where you are in Spain, you’re saying it’s so hot, you can’t sit outside. And I’m saying it’s too wet to sit outside here. So, you know, that’s the different, very different micro climates. And even, you know, you can scale that down and down and down into like a different micro climate here from here to a few miles away, or even then on the farm from here to the pond at the bottom of the land, it’s different micro climates. And in the same way, you can take cultures in that way of like, we’re, you know, we’re part of the same macro culture of Western industrial civilisation, or we’re part of the macro culture of being women or being adults. So we have this complex web of seen and unseen patterns. But then we also are part of, we’re part of many macro cultures, and then many micro cultures as well of the micro cultures of our school or our local town, or it could be anything from our dietary choices to our life stages to like our families. And then you can bring it down and down and down. And then you realise that actually, my complex web of seen and unseen patterns is entirely different to the complex web of seen and unseen patterns of each of my family members. And I’m living with them, you know, we have a family culture, but then each of us have our own separate complex web, our own separate personal culture. And that comes from all this mosaic from all these different places, these different cultures, we’re part of that some of this is really conscious choice. I choose to have these values or choose this dietary choice, or I choose to start with gratitude, or there’s can be choices, but then there’s a lot of unseen patterns, a lot of things that we haven’t consciously chosen, but are in there. And that’s where it becomes quite interesting to realise that we have this personal culture to be able to say, Oh, yeah, what are my unseen patterns? And that is a lifetime exploration to really dig down and discover them. But the more we do that, the more the more we can consciously choose and say, yes, that’s what I believe or no, we don’t. And coming back to book seven ways to think differently. And the first way of thinking differently is abundance thinking. And that shift from that scarcity mindset of not enough, I’m not enough, I don’t have enough, there’s not enough time, I haven’t got enough skills, I haven’t got enough community, I haven’t got enough, you know, enough, enough, enough, what into there is enough, you know, that actually there is enough on the planet for us all there is enough time, I, you know, it can be so many layers of that. And we’re constantly bombarded with the not enough messages, absolutely constantly bombarded with it, you will only be happy when you buy this, this product. But that’s not enough either by two and get one free, you know, it’s constant bombardment. So it, you know, that it that’s why it’s a lifetime’s work, because it’s, you know, we’ve, we’ve have so much that we need to clear, and it’s constantly coming in as well that cultural conditioning. So it’s, yeah, it’s about making choices about seeing the unseen. So we, you know, when we start realising, oh, there’s all these not enough messages, then we can start questioning ourselves. When we say that, when we get up in the morning, and we say, Oh, I’ve not, you know, and the first thing we say is, Oh, God, I’ve not had enough sleep. And I’ve got not not got enough time to do the things I want to do today. And you know, how many of us wake up with those messages, those two immediate not enough messages that then ripple out through our day, and but we can, we’re aware of it, we can catch ourselves and and start reframing it and start saying to ourselves, I’ve had enough sleep, there’s enough energy in the world for me to do what I need to do today. And seeing those unseen messages, but then enables us to reframe and at first, first, it might seem a bit like we’re almost lying to ourselves. And it’s like, no, we really haven’t had enough sleep. But after a while, you can see how it almost doesn’t matter the hours you’ve had as to how much energy you feel. And how much you can feel excited about the day is more relevant than how many hours sleep you’ve had. Eva: I completely agree. I am a little embarrassed to say I started my day with a few of these thoughts. And yeah, very, very grateful that it has transformed. I miraculously had an abundance of time and got to take a longer lunch than usual and enjoy the sun. And yeah, thank you for sharing. I’m very curious what the most creative or original place you’ve gotten to apply some of these principles and key concepts that you’ve worked with in your life. We talked at the about how permaculture doesn’t have to be land based, it can apply to multiple areas of your life. And just hearing a bit on that. Looby: Yeah, great question. One of the ways I did it was a design I did. So in People & Permaculture, I created the design web, which is this nonlinear, holistic, dynamic design framework, which thousands of people have used for many different designs. One of the designs I did was around my arm, I got repetitive strain injury from fighting too much. And it was this ongoing problem that was quite debilitating at times. And I thought, okay, let’s try and apply some design to this. What can I do? So the first thing I did was like, okay, let’s rename it. I don’t want to call this the repetitive strain injury design, you know, repeated over and over again. So I called it the regenerative arm movement design. And one of the key things with this was the solutions thinking and believing it was solvable, and that it wasn’t just something I had to live with. It’s like, no, okay, I can, I can make a difference here, I can be empowered. And even that shift was profound, from like, Oh, God, here it is again, you know, how terrible, poor me, to like, okay, well, I can feel it coming on, what can I do differently in this moment? How can I break this pattern intercepted, so it doesn’t get as bad? And how can I strengthen myself so that it doesn’t happen in the first place? What can I do differently? Yeah, I went through the design process. And like, even things like having micro pauses, and just really observing my own body, taking steps, and just feeling how it is, yes, stretching. And I’ve got a sit stand desk, which I love, which enabled me to write cultural emergence without getting repetitive strain injury. So and it’s an ongoing thing, I can still feel it sometimes now I’m like writing, it’s like, ah, okay, stop. And so it’s an active design. And luckily, since I did it, which has been quite a few years, I mean, I had so just to put it in some context, I had RSI for maybe six, seven years, and then I haven’t had it for six or seven years. But it’s been very much I can feel it on the horizon, or I can feel it in my arm. And I’m able to stop it and nip it in the bud. Whereas before I wouldn’t say so again, that personal patterns and that thinking about, you know, before, I would just kind of be like, I’ll push through and you know, you can do it and carry on and, and just re-patterning that thinking and that work ethic to actually self care is really important. Stop, you can be more productive over time, if you stop now and pace yourself and all of that. And then I’ve done other designs for like being becoming a song leader, and manifesting Applewood, we did a collective design, myself and my partner, for, you know, actually making the commitment. And I think that’s part of the design process. When you step into design, you’re saying, yes, this is what I want. And I’m willing to do the work to get there. And that can be really profound in whatever you do. So I’d use it to create projects, create the card deck, I did multiple designs at different times during the process of like, how to do regular artwork. And then I did a Kickstarter. And yes, so many different designs through the process. I really use it in everyday life. So I’ll design my week or I’m having a staycation, let’s design that. And let’s think about, for example, what do I want to limit in my staycation? So looking at the limits, and actually thinking, where are the limits I want to put in, rather than what were the ones I want to take out? It’s like, okay, what do I want to put in? And okay, let’s limit my time on emails. And let’s spend more time reading. So yeah, really, every day, so many design opportunities. And I think that’s one of the key things when I’ve done the design web course, and people wake up, and they’re just like, wow, I could just design everything around me and have this kind of overwhelming, like, everywhere’s a design. And it’s more a case of what can’t you design? And what don’t you want to design rather than what can you design? Eva: Exactly. And I think you’ve already a bit started to connect the dots. My next question is around how these designs and tools help you build resilience in your life. So I can see regenerative art movement, this is one form of physical resilience, but you have other examples to help bridge our subjects. Looby: Yes, thanks. I think just the whole concept of emergence, and when emergence moves from a concept into an embodied experience of emergence, that builds resilience. Because we’re pattern creatures, we like our patterns. We’re often fed the belief that people don’t like change. And I think I heard this, someone say this, and I thought, gosh, I’ve heard this so many times before, but maybe this isn’t actually true. Maybe we do like change, because we do change a lot, don’t we? As human beings, we like to change our clothes, we like to change our places, relationships, our jobs, friendships, our eating, you know, so there are lots of things that we do change. So going back to your question about resilience, I think one of the practices of cultural emergence is pattern disruption. And we can’t have change without pattern disruption. You know, I feel like they’re almost synonymous terms there, that change is pattern disruption. And with the practice of pattern disruption, we get to do that regularly, and in small ways. So it’s like, you know, how can you change the speed at which you walk, be quicker? Or how can you speak more slowly? What happens when you speak more slowly? You know, eat more slowly? So you can start doing that pattern disruption on small scales, which then just makes you realize the patterns you do have, don’t need to be fixed. They’re not necessarily true. They’re not necessarily the best way of doing things, or the most healthy, or the way you even prefer. They’re just the ways you’ve been doing things. And with so much change on the horizon, that we can’t control where it’s coming from, or what to do about it. I think it’s really good resilience to know that we can be okay with change, that we can invite it in, that we can, on an individual level, we can give up coffee or we can wake up earlier or we can speak slower, we can, you know, whatever it is, that we can make these changes just enables us to be a bit more resilient in the face of all this change that might be coming our way that we don’t know how to deal with. It’s like, okay, actually thinking, well, I know that I can deal with change when it comes and I can embrace it and I can find ways to enjoy it and to see what emerges in that process. Because going back to this complex web that is culture, if you change one piece of that web, one pattern, everything else changes. So you wake up an hour early and that influences your family patterns, that influences your eating patterns, your work patterns, your energy levels, all of those like have ripples in the web when you change one part of it. And what’s happening now is that there is lots of ripples in the web of patterns in the bigger webs that we’re part of. That I think is really what helps us build resilience is knowing that we can adapt to change. And then just going back to the word emergence, though, and feeling the embodiment of that of like, when we do embrace that change, then maybe some creativity emerges in that new hour that we have in the morning, or maybe there’s stillness or some purpose or something that emerges, relationship or friendship that merges with our neighbours that we weren’t necessarily designing for, but comes out of that change. And so we start to have this embodiment of recognising that change emerges new things within us. And that embodiment of emergence allows us to think there’s possibility within that change, and there’s possibility within the collective change that we’re facing. That can be really empowering and help us to face that change head on and hearts open and collectively together with others rather than in fear or in fear or chaos or denial, which is often some of the responses that are happening. Eva: Thank you so much for taking us into the word emergence. I think this is a very grounding practice. Okay, so now I can touch a bit upon on that emergence. I am a newly expecting mother and fully resonate with these things of okay, now you can give up coffee. Now you can not have a full night’s sleep because your bathroom habits have changed very bluntly. And really what can emerge in the space and also this touches for me again on self care and really the importance of that slowing down and leaning into the emergence. Looby: I was doing the Mother Nature project and I remember asking a group of women there, what are the patterns in your life that have changed since you’ve become a mother? And the list was just endless from like how we drive to how we clean the house to our own how often we shower, you know, it was just every single corner of our life. Every single pattern changed when we became a mother and we have to reweave that whole web. And that can be part of that like, oh my god, what is happening on the mothering journey, you are then entering this macro culture of mothers around around the world and through history and all the patterns we have and the cultures of care and connection and love and possibly the cultures of overwhelm as well. And we explored cultures in relationship to being mothers and, you know, being that macro culture, but then also the micro cultures of how that is in different countries or whether you’re a rural mum or a mum of twins or a mother of teenagers and all those different macro cultures within that for being a mother and in the same way there are for us on other different paths in life. Eva: We’re kind of continuing with that weaving. You’ve already brought a lot of intersections into our conversation, but leaning into that a bit more and talking about where your work meets itself between people in permaculture, cultural emergence and your work with mothers as natural leaders. What are some of the patterns or synergies between these approaches and how do you see these synergies really enhancing our resilience? Looby: Yeah, so for me, sort of sitting in the centre of all those weavings, it’s hard to kind of say this is one thing and this is another thing because as I’ve just shared, the cultural emergence work sort of influenced the mother nature work and then the mother nature leadership work is coming in and so I see them as they’re very much, they’re distinct in themselves, but they overlap so much that it’s hard to kind of pull them apart, but they do feed each other. I think that’s also really important that there is flows and of nutrients and wisdom between all of them and people that discover mother nature and then they’re like, oh, now I want to know more about cultural emergence or people that are involved in permaculture and they’re like, well, I want to know more about the people side. So there’s a flow of people as well that are moving between the toolkits. So yeah, it’s an exciting time and we’ll see how it grows and develops and what emerges with that. Yeah, I would just love there to be more people involved. I think one of the things that I was feeling and aiming for with the cultural emergence toolkit is that it would become this mycelium that connected lots of other networks so that it could connect up the permaculture network and the eight shields network and the transition and gen and the reconnects and could become this common language that would work between them all and that there would be then different groups would have different specialities within the toolkit. So some groups might be more focused on the nature connection part, some more on the systems or the design or the listening or all these different aspects, the creativity or the self-care or the work that reconnects is the supporting emotions to flow. And GEN is very much about collaboration and co-creation. So each network would have its own way of interacting with the toolkit depending and able to also contribute. So not just here’s the toolkit, that’s how you’ll benefit, but also a two-way exchange of like, here’s the toolkit, here’s how we use it and how this is what we’ve learned and pour that into the toolkit as well and into the mycelium. So that’s the kind of big vision for cultural emergence is that it becomes this mycelium connecting up all these networks of changemakers. So as well as connecting up changemakers as individuals that would connect up networks of changemakers and allow that emergence between networks that really will enable us to have the presence on the planet that really has that emergent properties that we were talking about that has this like quantum leap of collective wisdom that can hold humanity through the next stages. And this is one of our premises of mothers as natural leaders as well is that mothers through the ages have held individuals through developmental stages. You know, we hold our babies and then we encourage our babies to become toddlers, obviously they do that naturally, but they’re being held by us in that process and that process through all the way into being hopefully responsible adults in the world and that we can do that collectively for humanity, that humanity needs to go through a collective leap of consciousness or a collective leap of how we function in the world, the developmental leap that we are kind of stuck in egocentric, species-centric way of seeing and being in the world that is akin to like a toddler or a teenage stage that we’re not yet in that responsible adult stage. Obviously there are some individuals but collectively we’re not in that responsible adult stage and definitely not in the elder, reflective elder stage and that we so we’re needing that collective developmental shift. So that is one of our premises of mothers as natural leaders is that mothers have the unique set of skills to enable that to happen, to support that to happen, because that is part of our DNA, part of our skill sets as mothers to support that developmental process, which does involve some letting go of old patterns and letting go of conditioning and letting go of limiting beliefs of like, no I can’t, you know, going from I can’t brush my teeth to myself, by myself, to I can brush my teeth to myself, to you need to remember to do it by yourself, you know, it’s simple things but it’s, you know, when you add them all up it’s huge and that how can we do that collectively for humanity. So that’s part of, you know, where the weaving is between Mother Nature project and between a cultural emergence is this, again, this idea of developmental shifts for humanity, this quantum leaps, this way of being that will have emergent properties that enable further growth and development. Eva: Absolutely, I am so intrigued by this mycelium concept that you were talking about, I’m resisting the urge to dive all the way in there and spend the rest of our time together exploring that, but you’ve also really already begun touching on another theme that I noticed in a lot of your work which is leadership and how you really are able to hold people through this process of, okay, how do we become leaders within the scope of permaculture, how do we do this within the scope of culture, within the scope of motherhood, and I’m also wondering how we collectively can, yes, step into this leadership position and help this collective developmental shift, as you called it. Do you have any more insights in here, the role of leadership and how this can really play a role in the transition to a resilient human presence on earth? Looby: Oh yes, I was part of a collaborative writing project for the Mother Nature project and there were five of us that wrote a book, Mothers as Natural Leaders, and it’s available as a free download from our website mothernatureproject.org, so do go and join our newsletter and get that book. So yeah, I have a lot to say about it. I think one of the things is about reframing what do we mean by leadership and the limiting beliefs we have about leadership, about leaders are bossy, leaders have to be perfect, leaders will become targets for people, only one person can be a leader, you know, all of these limiting beliefs that we have about leadership make us shy away from it, make us go, well either that’s not me or I don’t want that to be me, and so that’s part of the process of embodying leadership and stepping into it is to let go of those limiting beliefs. You know, the word leadership is quite sticky with people because we’re used to our political leaders or CEOs of big corporations that are really greedy in their leadership and it’s like, well no, actually how can we reclaim that word leadership and acknowledge that it can be distributed leadership and shared leadership and regenerative feminine leadership that is collaborative, that actually supports the gifts in other people, them to shine and take responsibility. How can you as a community take leadership that means that each person is using their strengths, is growing their weaknesses, is part of the new framing of leadership that then makes it feel more exciting, more accessible, more part of what we all want to do. Eva: Okay, we’ll transition a bit into looking at the role of diversity in ecosystems and really drawing on this permaculture principle and seeing how this can leverage cultural emergence and the permaculture principles to cultivate not just ecological but also cultural and social diversity within our world, how the role of diversity and ecosystems helps build resilience. Looby: Thinking about that as you were talking, I was thinking you can’t really have emergence if you’re just putting the same thing together or the same people together, you know, like if you’re just putting flour and flour together, you’re not making a cake, you need flour and you need eggs, well you can have vegan cakes but you know you need the flour, you need the sugar, you need all the different ingredients and it’s the different ingredients that create the emergence. We have a principle of emergence happens in relationship and it’s the relationship of different things that bring that emergence there, that it’s how it’s the differences that bring out the newness, that bring out more differences. It’s part of what we like to do with cultural emergence is create fields of encouragement so that when you are in a cultural emergence group or course or an event you’re just feeling encouraged by being there, you’re feeling in your heart space, there’s encouragement happening in many different directions, you’re giving and you’re receiving encouragement so it creates this like this energetic field that you’re part of and that is part of the process of emergence that happens, that process is about celebrating the diversity, celebrating the unique gifts of each person and acknowledging them as unique and valuing the different ways people see things and their different perceptions and their different patterns as well and so it breaking away from there is one right way to actually collectively we can discover many different ways of doing things. Eva: Do you have any examples from your life how embracing this diversity and ecosystem and people has really given you resilience or given a situation more ability to adapt to change? Looby: Well I think just on a very personal level it supports my family life to celebrate diversity and to really learn and value particularly like my children’s point of views because I think from my generation there was more of a cultural paradigm of kind of learn from your elders and your parents are right and that kind of thinking whereas I try and I’m still you know again it’s a lifelong process to let go of that cultural thinking but I try and embody more of a like an interest in the perspectives of my children and in what they have to to share with me and the new ways of thinking that they invite from me so trying to come from a place of listening and witnessing rather than a place of enforcing or saying this is right this is how we see things or you know this is how it’s done to be like okay that’s okay if you want to question it yeah celebrating just even on the basic level celebrating the diversity of the people around me you know I hold my hands up to saying it’s not always an easy process or where I don’t always get right by any means it’s a process and it’s a an ambition and an intention rather than a skill I always have because I’m perfectly imperfect you know this was part of my process for when I was right wanting to write People and Permaculture and I was like how can I write a book on people care when I still have arguments when I still find it difficult to get out of bed in the morning or when I can’t do this or that and I was just like okay hold on you can’t wait to be a perfect person to do this the world needs this book before you’re going to be it before you’re a perfect person which is never but you’ll learn more in the process so I’m constantly using the tools that I’m talking about to develop myself and my family life and Applewood and you know my creative process and things constantly using them and seeing how they work for me absolutely and it’s so easy to get stuck in I’m not ready so I thank you for bringing that it is absolutely a constant evolution a constant emergence constant learning and one I think key element to building resilience is getting out of your own way so thank you for bringing that yeah absolutely like we could really always say we’re not ready to be a mum or we’re not ready to get land or to move into a community or to write a book or to become a teacher but all of those things you learn on the job that there’s kind of almost no way around it you’ll never know enough to do it without having done it and that you have to do it to learn how to do it if you’re waiting to be ready you’ll never be ready step into it and that’s what you’ll learn and it’s it’s this idea of emergence as an adventure that we’re stepping into something new and this is this is my new book that I’m writing which is design adventures about the design web and how we need to step into these adventures before we maybe feel we’re ready, before we feel like we’ve got the skills to just embark on it and learn in the process and enjoy the process of discovery. Eva: Absolutely, Looby. You also work with a lot of different people helping to bring your learnings by doings into more hands and I would love to ask you about your views on education and in general more or less and if you have any ideas on how we can effectively integrate this cultural emergence permaculture principles the notion of leadership and emergence into our education systems and and how we can start to regenerate education in a way. Looby: oh wow I think we need a year-long training on this well I did write a chapter in people in permaculture using the design web of how we would reimagine our education system so I feel like I’ve done the design for reimagining our education systems we just need a lot of policy and a lot of educators to take that forward which there are I think it’s probably the policy that is the thing that’s lacking rather than the the educators it’s about you know learner-centered education so rather than this like prescriptive this is what you need to learn to really learn through the doing learning through where people’s where their passions are how to collaboratively learn as well because this is such a shift from our mainstream education which is very much competition-based and exam-based and you know individual-based rather than actually how can we all develop the skills so how would you know how would a class operate differently if instead of each individual getting a grade if there was a an average grade for the whole class you know just imagine that so just that one shift of like okay you’ve got 20 people in the class and you’ve got to you’re going to get the average how can each learner then support each other learner to do a bit better because then it’s contributing to the whole you know I mean that just one idea there is just such would just absolutely radically reframe our entire education system from rather than the you know the first pass the post and just you know do well for your individual gain. Eva: Just this one idea that you’ve just shared around collective grades gives me so much creativity already to start to think about this on a neighborhood scale if in your neighborhood everyone had a collective income for example this one creative idea I think opens up a lot of opportunity for us to rethink our culture and our society so thank you very much for bringing that. Looby: Yeah I think there’s so many different possibilities aren’t there and it’s like we kind of get stuck in that this is the only way but actually there’s many different ways and I think this is really important when we think about what are the solutions where they’re coming from is like well what are the the values and the ethics that are driving those solutions so when we’re like saying okay you know technology might save us or politics might save us actually culture influences politics and politics influences culture and technology influences culture and culture influences technology and the same with language if we really feed the culture it’s like feeding the soil it’s like then the things will grow healthy and strong the technology will grow healthy and in service to humanity and to the planet if we’ve got the cultural values that feed that. Eva: Thank you so much for all of your wisdom we’re going to have very rich show notes and I look forward to to linking to how people can get in touch with you and find your work and before we part ways I’m wondering if you have any parting words of wisdom or maybe we can pull one of your cards. Looby: Yeah I’d love to just pull a card and see what what comes with for people that are listening and just thinking about yeah what’s going forward. Well out of my cards I have picked building resilience. Oh that’s wonderful. It says be adaptive to changes, recover from adversity, allow challenges to inform you and spread strategies for practical and emotional resilience. So yeah perfect card for this podcast and yeah it’s been a delight to talk to you and I think parting words of wisdom then is for people to just just to begin and to to allow themselves to just loosen that complex web to just just you know wiggle it free a little bit just to do something a little bit different to just question their thinking or their internal dialogue to just try something new just to see how it feels and just to embark on that journey of emergence and shifting cultures and embracing our personal cultures. I’d really like to invite everyone to get involved I’ve got a cultural emergence principles coloring book which is really good fun really good to use in groups as a way of easing people into their creativity and that’s free for when you sign up to our newsletter at cultural-emergence.com free taster course and the mother’s natural leaders free books and I do lots of online and in-person courses so yeah there’s many rich resources for people to tap into and embark on their pathway because we all have a life pathway and at any time it can take a turn into exciting new adventures so yeah embrace it. embrace the opportunity. Eva: Thank you so much Looby for your wisdom and your time it’s been a pleasure to talk with you today. Looby: Thank you it’s been a joy to talk with you as well. OUTRODUCTION Join us again next week as we continue the conversation over what it means to be resilient in our time of deepening public crisis. While you wait for the next episode of Community Resilience we invite you to explore more about the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project by visiting us online at ecovillage.org/resilience.

INTRODUCTION Welcome back to Community Resilience, a podcast created in collaboration with the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project, facilitated by the Global Ecovillage Network. I’m your host, Eva Goldfarb, inviting you to gather around the fire as we explore resilience adaptation and transformation in our time of deepening polycrisis. It is an honor to introduce Allyson Quinlan, Senior Research Fellow at the Resilience Alliance. With a PhD in Geography and Environmental Studies, Allyson has led transformative resilience assessments across the globe, from rural Tajikistan to the coastal fisheries of Western Canada. Her work emphasizes community engagement and stakeholder collaboration in building social ecological resilience. Allyson’s extensive experience and passion for protecting our environment make her an inspiring voice in the field. Join us as we dive into her insights on fostering resilient communities and sustainable futures. INTERVIEW Eva: Welcome, Allyson. It is so lovely to have you here today to speak with us about resilience from your expert position. I would love to start by letting you introduce yourself to our audience. If you could share briefly who you are, what’s brought you here today. Allyson: Thanks, Eva. My name is Allyson Quinlan. In my professional work, I’m a Senior Research Fellow with the Resilience Alliance, an international research network and organization that brings together researchers to study social ecological systems. Many of our members have developed a lot of the theory underlying resilience concepts that are currently being used in a lot of different ways around the world today. I’m based just outside of Ottawa, Canada, in Chelsea, Quebec, in a forested landscape that means quite a lot to me to be able to live here close to nature. And I think I try to just make the most of enjoying this place and my place in it. Eva: What led you to focus your work on resilience? Allyson: That’s a path with many steps along the way. Definitely. My background initially was in environmental science and ecology. That’s what I studied in school. And, you know, in part, that was informed by some work that I did tree planting and just growing up in nature. I mean, I was always interested in the natural environment. I feel a real connection to nature. And so to me, it was very intuitive. And I remember my first ecology class just feeling like this isn’t even like studying this just all makes perfect sense to me. And then in doing that work, one of my early studies that I did was around bison habitat and prescribed fire in northern Canada. And that’s where I really learned that, you know, it’s not just about the ecosystem and the ecosystem dynamics, but it’s about how people interact, how they manage the landscape, how they benefit from different aspects, whether through food or recreation or just, you know, a sense of place, how we interact with our environment influences both ourselves and the environment. And so it was really that connection. And that led me to look more closely at ecosystem governance. And I was working at the time with the Resilience Alliance. They publish a journal, Ecology and Society. And I kind of continued to work with the Resilience Alliance in the journal through my studies. And some of the early work we did in the early 2000s was around sort of bringing all of these theories and ideas, translating them into practical ways to make use of them to sort of better manage how we interact with the environment, how we make decisions to avoid some of these looming thresholds and tipping points that have been talked about already for the last 25 years. Yeah, so it was very natural path, I think, with many steps and stops along the way. And I’ve, I would say that I’ve always been very much drawn to the applied part of resilience thinking and resilience concepts. The theory interests me. But what really like I feel passionate about is making use of these ideas so that we can do better. Eva: The project is very lucky to have you to ground some of these practices and ecovillage and ecovillage resilience. Through the lens of working with this project, can you help me define what resilience means in the context of ecovillages? And through your experience, how this differs from resilience and other settings that you’ve worked with? Allyson: I don’t think it actually differs that much for me from how I conceptualize resilience in other settings. I think my conceptualization of resilience has been informed and honed and developed over the years and is general enough that I can apply it to different, I call them systems, communities within that idea. So I think maybe what I could offer is that for me, resilience, there’s many layers to it. It’s very nuanced concept. It’s actually very rich and it has a lot to offer. And it’s tricky because it also is a commonly used word. And so it’s easy to kind of just think about it in the very general sense. And I know we’ve talked a lot about resilience as being, you know, the ability to cope. And that is part of it. But it’s only one small part of it in my mind. I feel like resilience for me is about everything that goes into making a system more able to adapt and transform in different parts and really looking at it through this sort of complex adaptive system lens. So when we’re thinking about, for example, the resilience of a community, it’s not just its capacity to cope with change, because we can cope with a lot of things. I think people are extremely good at coping and even adapting. But I think there’s more to it than that. I mean, we want to actually think about resilience in terms of enabling the things that we value about the system, the sort of identity or structure and function is sort of theoretical kind of ideas around it. But like, how we interact with that community, what we help the ways in which we benefit from it, all of the things that go into the parts of the system that we value parts of the community that we value. We want that to more than cope, we want that to thrive and persist, and parts of it to be able to adapt and parts of it to be able to like, intentionally change and transform so that it can continue to provide the benefits that people value. So for me, there’s many layers and different ways of thinking about and reflecting about the resilience of a community or a place or a system. And I guess I would just say that I think it’s, it’s very nuanced, and offers a really a lot of space and scope for exploring the different dimensions of resilience and all of the different features of the community that go into that property of the community in the system. Eva: Do I open Pandora’s box if I ask you to go into these different layers of resilience? Is this something you are able to briefly outline? Allyson: Yeah, well, I can say that there’s been a lot of research around what is it that makes a system resilient or community resilient. And some of the work that goes back a couple of decades was able to define different properties or features of systems, a book that the Resilience Alliance members contributed to a paper and book on principles of resilience of social ecological systems, some other work that’s been done, distilling some of those nine properties, seven principles, five attributes. I mean, we present them in different ways, but they’re these core features or characteristics that contribute to resilience. So, and we’ve worked with these in the project as well, I should say, we worked with six attributes of resilience in communities. And some of them include things like diversity, many different ways that diversity contributes to the resilience of systems through offering different ways of responding to disturbances, as you can imagine, like seed diversity, crop diversity, many benefits that strengthen resilience of a system through that, livelihood diversity. So, diversity is one of those attributes. Connectivity within the system, that could be connectivity from a sort of physical landscape connectivity, habitat connectivity perspective. It could also be connectivity among people and networks and their ability to share information in a timely manner and effective manner. Other attributes are system feedbacks. Some of the feedbacks that could include something like regenerative agriculture and other sort of reflective practices, including conflict resolution. So, there’s both social and ecological components to these attributes because I’m approaching it as an integrated social ecological system. I should have stepped back and mentioned that the other attributes that we looked at were inclusivity and equity, adaptive learning, and redundancy, which is more backups, system backups. So, those are the sort of high level attributes or principles, features of a social ecological system that we can look at more closely. And within each of those, there’s multiple different things that would fall under those headings that we can start to map out a really rich picture of ways in which we can contribute to resilience of systems and the different things that contribute to that. Eva: In addition to these attributes, thank you so much for sharing, can you provide a brief overview of other methodologies and tools that you’ve used throughout the project to measure and evaluate resilience within the ecovillages participating? Allyson: Yeah, I’ll say that it’s not easy. It’s actually a real challenge to work with some of these concepts because as I think about it, it’s sort of asking people to look at something in a totally different way from the way that you’re used to looking at it. And so, it requires kind of, you know, almost breaking down the way in which you’re always, the sort of entry points that you or your go-to entry points and trying to come at the issue or system or community from a different perspective. And it requires some like flexibility in your thinking and just an openness to that. And so, a lot of the activities that we did early on were to help develop and cultivate these sort of system thinking. I know that you’ve heard about the historical timeline exercise, always success and a hit and people really enjoy that. There’s a lot to that as well, including, well, I know that some people have suggested how when they did the timeline, they could see cycles. And that is, you know, that is exactly what I would hope one would arrive at, is seeing some of these cycles over time of how community in this case may have responded to past crises, what sort of adaptations they might have put in place, and then how things played out from them there, the pathways that were taken. And I think that historical timeline exercise also enables one to consider how different events throughout time can interact across scales and sectors. So, something might happen regionally or locally, and that might have influences at a much smaller or larger scale. And similarly, events happen across ecological, economic, social aspects. And so, it’s just a way of starting to think about a community as this complex adaptive system that’s changing, that has these features that cross scales and sectors, and developing that way of thinking about the community. I’ll leave it there for now. That’s one of them. I’ll just mention that was an early step in the process. We also developed some just hand-drawn conceptual models of the system to understand how different parts of the community were linked and interacted. We looked at tipping points and thresholds, both global tipping points, but also local thresholds within the community, and reflected on what sorts of implications those would have for the communities. We explored using Three Horizons methods, future scenarios, and storytelling about futures. And I think a really important part of the project that I’m super happy with, Anna Kovasna and I, in collaboration with the members of the community of practice, developed an indicator, what we call a resilience tracker. And it’s a way of using these six attributes that I mentioned, developing indicators. I think there were 32 in total for each of the attributes. And it’s a monitoring tool going forward to help each community identify their strengths and weaknesses, and to focus their attention on areas where there’s an opportunity to strengthen resilience within the community. So I think that’s a really valuable contribution going forward, and something that I’m looking forward to seeing expanded beyond this first initial group that participated. Eva: Thank you very much, Allyson. I really hope to link to all of the methodologies you’ve shared, as well as sharing the tracking tool when it’s ready for the wider audience. I think that’s a wonderful resource for both the ecovillages that have participated, and also all of the ecovillages within our network. We have asked a lot of the ecovillages through this podcast to share some of their practices of building resilience. And they have been incredibly diverse in answer, as well as in setting and the type of ecovillages that we’ve been interacting with. And I’m really curious from your perspective, with kind of this overview of the project, did you notice any overarching patterns of how ecovillages were able to respond or are responding to crisis and adversity? Allyson: Yeah, definitely. There were some, I guess, insights and emerging themes that we’re working on and putting together a report. And they weren’t surprising, necessarily. They reinforce some ideas that are already out there. I think one of them that is important and not to be overlooked is simply that climate change impacts and social ecological resilience generally are really unevenly distributed around the world and within this community of practice. And that, I think, is something that would be really interesting and meaningful to explore more deeply within the network. I know that there were many sessions we had where people were really touched to hear and distressed to hear about the reality of climate change impacts in some parts of the world and the challenges that people are confronted with. And yet, in other places, climate change is still a little bit abstract or can be really buffered in some places. And so just that unevenness, unfairness, inequity was definitely a really strong emergent theme that I think we can approach with the idea that there’s something about the connection, though, that was made that I think was really valuable, really important to have that personal connection, I think, and to cultivate that. And fortunately, something like Zoom and other tools we can use can be really helpful. There’s a place in time. I mean, you can look at someone in the face and they’re on the other side of the world and you can see and hear firsthand what’s happening. So definitely that was important. There’s also another sort of theme or insight I had is that we know a lot. There’s a lot of information about climate change impacts and risks at the community level. A lot of that’s still not being integrated into planning in a very strategic and serious manner. I think it’s still easy to kind of keep things that are a little bit out of sight, out of mind and continue on with the day-to-day busyness that is in all of our lives and just running a community or a household. And it’s really difficult to feel that sense of urgency and to make the change and start the transformation that needs to happen. I have a bunch of them. Eva: You’re perfect. I have always been very moved by this inequity that you speak to. And it feels inapproachable by how unfair or disproportionate it is and how the top polluters in the world are not the ones being most affected by the impact. And yeah, I’m really, I wouldn’t say happy, but I’m glad that this was given space within the project to really integrate and work with. And also you mentioned the technology tools. Allyson: Yes, they are so wonderful that we can connect and we can make these cultural bridges. And at the same time, they in themselves are not without heavy footprint. So this is one of the catch-22s of my work. Eva: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. Allyson:I mean, there’s costs to almost everything. And I suppose we have to be thoughtful in how we make our choices. But I think that in the absence of being able to be there face-to-face in person, making a connection through a screen is still possible, talking to someone directly. I think that’s a really fantastic opportunity within the Global Ecovillage Network is to make the most of that network and the, yeah, the ability to just share information and stories and like at a really human level, connect with people. And some of that I would say definitely came through in our sessions, as well as more specific sharing around seed storage, how to set up a seed bank. One community saying, we’ve experimented with this. It took a while and we figured it out how to do it. And we’re happy to share. And another community was at the point where they were wanting to get started on a seed bank. There’s a fantastic connection made. And I would love to just see that sort of cascade across the whole network because so many of the different communities have something to share with another community. Eva: Absolutely. And looking also to this as a pattern, communities tend to build really strong common culture. So were there any cultural dynamics or cultural practices that were shared by ecovillages that emerged as a pattern? Allyson: Everyone had this element built into their community culture, which really helped them be more resilient. It could also have the adverse effect. This cultural pattern appeared and was detrimental to the resilience of communities. When I look across the results from our resilience attributes tracker, some of the real strengths were the attributes that were really strong, that were ranked quite high across all of the communities, fell under the attribute of inclusivity and equity, for example. And a lot of that was around the participatory practices, the ways in which communities self-organized, trust levels, reciprocity, sharing resources. A lot of that fell under the inclusivity and equity and knowledge integration. That was more around different types of knowledge, not just scientific knowledge, but local knowledge, traditional knowledge and other types of learning and meaning that there was an openness to integrating into practice. And then looking across, again, the attributes, another key social aspect fell under the area of connectivity. And some of that was the modularity and governance, sort of non-hierarchical governance structure that involved a lot of conversation, discussion, and more, I wouldn’t say flat, but that sort of approach. And also, yeah, self-organization, I think I mentioned that, and social networks. So definitely a lot of social practices that were written into the ranking criteria for these indicators to ensure that they were being interpreted in the same way by the different survey people who were participating in that. And yeah, those were definitely strengths within the sort of social system domain across the communities that was a strong signal coming out of the synthesis of the resilience attributes. Eva: Thank you very much. From this awareness of patterns or also this awareness of inequality, were there any common challenges that you noticed that many of them are learning how to be resilient? Allyson: I think a common challenge that kept emerging and coming up that people were discussing was just trying to get other people in the community involved and interested and engaged. That was definitely something that was voiced repeatedly. And I think fairly, people were asking for help, could say, I don’t think that’s the area that I could offer the sort of help that’s required. That was a little bit unexpected and surprising. I just assumed people would be really enthusiastic and interested. But again, communities are busy places, people have lives, they have work, they have lots of different groups to help out with and families and time is really valuable. And it’s also super easy, too easy to not engage with thinking about the reality of climate change. We started this project with part of the initial concept for the proposal was considering whether or not ecovillages are resilient to 2.5 degree increase in global temperature scenario. That is confronting to think about. We are on track for 2.5. This is what the research is saying. I still can’t wrap my head around it. I know it will require people to make changes, to do things differently. We cannot continue to do things business as usual. But it’s really a lot of work, heart work, mental work, thinking, having those conversations, going deep, doing the dive as we did as part of the project and thinking about global tipping points and thresholds. It’s really difficult. So I understand why it’s easier to not think about and to not make it a priority. I think that is one of the big challenges. And maybe we need psychologists and others to help us with that. I don’t know. Most probably. Eva: Yeah, this connectivity challenge, going back to one of the attributes that you mentioned, is something that I see a lot in the movement. And I think it is, as you say, a result of everyone being so busy and really working on overdrive to address a lot of the offshoots of the climate disaster and policy crisis in general, working with the local government, working on a bunch of different projects. And at the same time, there is such an importance to really draw back and reflect and feel. I participated in a climate circle when I was living in Artera, which is an ecovillage in the north of Spain two years ago. And this was very new. This was brought by the younger members. And it’s heavy. So I also understand why, amongst everything that people really believe that they are doing to move the resilience tabs forward, can kind of shy away from the deeper work. Allyson: Yeah, I think there’s something to that for sure. I also think that it’s not to say that people are not already doing a lot. And I think there is also probably that sense that, especially in ecovillages, there are so many sustainable practices are not necessarily part of other communities. And so people in the communities and in the community of practice, they’re already doing a lot around water management, regenerative agriculture, preparing for overland flow of water, and thinking about wildfire protection plans and stuff like that. So there is that happening. And so maybe sometimes there’s also the feeling that, well, we’re already doing everything we can. And all of those sustainability practices within communities will contribute to and help the resilience of the communities.Whether or not it’s enough. And it’s always you’re not resilient or not resilient. I don’t think it’s a binary thing. I think it’s resilience fluctuates, you have more or less, which may or not be enough, depending on the sort of disruption and disturbance that the system has to deal with. Eva: Absolutely. Do you feel you have an opinion about the ecovillages that participated? Are they prepared to work through the challenges that you see coming? Allyson: I’m sure they’re prepared to work through them. If I go back to my definition of resilience, the community or the system is resilient in the sense that it would be able to retain the sort of things that, you know, give it its identity, parts of the community that people benefit from and value. I’m not sure. I don’t think many places in the world are resilient to the 2.5 degree pathway, actually. And again, it will depend on the community and where it is and the type of impact that it’s confronted with. Maybe I could say I think that some of the ecovillages in the community are more resilient than others. And some are more resilient than other places. But across the board, I don’t think I would say that they’re resilient to the scenario. I want to look a little deeper into that, into these external factors that might be outside of the control of an ecovillage that established themselves 50 years ago and wasn’t necessarily thinking about the water area or the different ecological resilience factors. On that point, that was, you’re reminding me, that was something that came up. And I think some of the ecovillages that were established more recently had the opportunity to take into consideration in their design. how to build buildings that are better able to moderate the climate and deal with severe storms and that sort of thing. So yeah, there was a little bit of a difference in terms of when the community was established, but it’s still variable. Some communities that have been established for a long time have had more time to put into place a lot of practices. So there is definitely a lot of variability across the communities, which I think is also a strength if we’re thinking about sharing practices and knowledge among the wider network. Eva: Hoping to dig a bit into your research and your experience, what external factors, ecologic, economic, political, really impact the resilience? And how have you seen the ecovillages in the project been able to kind of mitigate these external pressures? Allyson: Well, that’s a difficult question. Again, it depends on, you know, where we are. But I know there have been some severe heat waves that some people who were participating in the project were having to get through and drought conditions, some flooding, some of the more immediate shocks to the system, those sorts of things. I know here in Canada, we talked quite a bit about the fires, the wildfires that were happening out west last summer, and that are already happening again now when we’re just in mid-May. So definitely there’s a lot of discussion around these more immediate shocks and disturbances, as well as the sort of looming potential for more global tipping points and thresholds, like changing in the ocean, Atlantic Ocean currents and implications that might have for rainfall patterns in different parts of the world and agriculture. So we had both discussions around impacts that are real and happening now and how people are coping with them, and also forecasting and thinking about potential future impacts when and if tipping points are crossed. Not sure if that answers your question. It does good enough for now. Eva: Yeah. And I guess one more thing that I would really also like to say and make sure that I share in this conversation was, and something that emerged from our project and the community of practice discussions, was the need to sort of think beyond the boundaries of the community and recognize that the resilience of the community also is linked to the resilience of the surrounding community and broader region, and to really take whatever opportunity there is to make those connections and to think both how to strengthen resilience within the community and share some of that beyond the boundaries of the community. This is also one of the questions I was hoping to bring, so maybe we can go into that a bit deeper. Do you have any suggestions for how ecovillages can better engage with their neighbouring communities, local government entities, and really strengthen resilience within their region, their bioregion? Allyson: Yeah. I mean, it depends, but I think there’s always opportunities for collaborating, collaborating on some of these challenges that are not going to neatly stay within boundaries and maybe that’s through food networks and supporting multiple alternative sources of food, agricultural CSIs and other models for having different sources of food. Also, around wildfire planning and emergency preparedness, there’s lots of opportunities to collaborate at a broader scale, I would say, and that can be a way of working on a project and in so doing, building trust and sharing knowledge and all the other aspects that go into strengthening resilience across those boundaries. Eva: I’m very curious. A lot of the ecovillages within our network are bound together by a shared decision-making process, some sort of horizontal leadership structure. I’m curious if you’ve noticed that this has an impact on the way that they’re able to respond or build resilience, either within their own community and engaging with the other communities of this project, or even looking to that lens of connecting with the wider region. Allyson: Honestly, I think that’s something that I would love to know more about and think more about, because from my sort of outsider perspective on that, I feel like, well, it’s time-consuming, one thing, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is time-consuming, and I guess that can be acknowledged. But then, when a decision is made, it’s probably much more fully thought through, talked through. People understand the process and thinking that went into the decision, which is very different from, say, municipal decision-making, where it’s easy. You elect your council, and they make the decisions, and then you deal with them, and a lot of people might not be happy about that. I feel like the sort of alternative governance structures that I was learning about in the different communities have a lot to offer. And I guess, in this sense, maybe diversity is also a strength here, and lots of experiments of different ways of governing. I mean, we could argue that it’s definitely not going well in a lot of places. So, having those experiments, having those alternative, well-worked-through, thought-through, successful ways of doing things is really valuable. Eva: I just noticed that it is a criticized practice by a lot of mainstream society, and even in the process of creating community, I find a lot of resistance within the group for not being able to make quick decisions. And yet, I noticed that there’s a lot of the attributes that you started with kind of embedded in this. So, the diversity, the connectivity, the different layers of resilience, it’s just something I wanted to bring in and see if you had a personal opinion. Allyson:I think you’re absolutely right. I think what I can’t figure out for myself, and I’m sure there are examples and I’m just not aware of them, but is how you scale that up to larger communities. I can see this working really well with a couple hundred, a few hundred people. When you move into the thousands and tens of thousands or millions, how does that work? How does it work at bigger scales? I’m often going back to that point, and even with this project, with the Ecovillage Resilience Project, how do we scale up? How do we scale it out? How do we spread these ways of doing things? They are like seeds, and I feel like we just kind of have to find a way to sort of tap into scaling things up, and that will be really helpful. Eva: I’m curious if, in your research, you have explored the tool of sociocracy at all, because this is one kind of pathway that I can start to imagine for how to scale it up, when you can break down this horizontal leadership into smaller decision-making circles that have then consulted, in the end, the group as a whole. This could be a tangent that we don’t have to go deep down there, if you don’t have a strong anything to add. Allyson: I would be listening, and I would be happily listening and learning. I don’t have much to contribute. I haven’t. I’ve been hearing about and maybe learning a little bit about sociocracy, but I don’t know enough to speak to it. I would say I’m very intrigued, and especially with your comments about it being a way forward in terms of scaling up. Definitely worth thinking about and looking into. Eva: Maybe it’s not too late to pull a sociocratic expert into the podcast. Yeah, definitely. But for now, really focusing on your strength and your research, I’m curious if there were any unexpected lessons or insights about resilience that you learned from working and studying with ecovillages. Allyson: I don’t think I learned anything unexpected. I definitely learned a lot, which is great. I want to be in a learning position, not just in a, I hold the knowledge and here’s what I have to offer. I feel like maybe one insight I could offer here that I think is really valuable and a little bit untapped in the broader community is just this really creative experimental mindset. And I think that this is something that is worth nurturing because there’s an openness that comes with having that creative mindset. And I feel like we need that to be able to both imagine multiple future trajectories or pathways and scenarios of what the future could be, good and bad and everything in between. We need to have the sort of ability to think loosely and creatively to be able to even imagine what’s possible. And if we can’t imagine it, it’s really difficult, I think, to actively move toward and make things happen. And I also, at the same time, if we can’t imagine it, I think that we’re in trouble in terms of failing to react in time. And also it’s fun. I mean, we should have fun. This is something that I learned through the Resilience Alliance research, surprisingly enough. I mean, you think it’s a bunch of scientists kind of getting together, but one of the things that was very different about that research network, especially initially, was just having fun and approaching ideas playfully and enjoying what you do. And I think that just to tie it back into that creative mindset idea, I think that’s something that I felt emerged from some of the discussions and feedback and reporting from the different communities, the ways in which creativity has informed practices within the community and brought joy to people. Yeah, I think that is something that would be really worth kind of digging into more and cultivating, nurturing. Eva: Thank you. Dragon Dreaming is kind of a beloved practice by the Ecovillage Network, and this really puts a lot of emphasis on the celebration phase. And it’s interesting to hear you tie that to creativity and creative thinking, because I agree, I think being able to creatively problem solve and approach a problem with a creative hat on really helps us be resilient. And it’s nice to see that direct connection to play and to celebration. And so just thank you. Allyson: Absolutely. And I know others have brought up Dragon Dreaming, and I have to find out more about it. Eva: I’ll put it in the show notes as well. I can send you a link after this. Okay, so one of the goals that you’ve been working on throughout this project, you’ve already mentioned a little bit, but creating resources to support the wider Ecovillage Network to become more resilient. You talked about the project tracker, and I’m wondering if you can share some of the key principles or practices that other communities can apply just from listening to this podcast to help build more resilience within their community. Allyson: I mean, I think that’s difficult, because it’s going to vary from community to community. So speaking at a very general level, I think a lot of the practices are already underway in a lot of communities in terms of regenerative agriculture. And going back to those resilience attributes can be helpful in thinking about the second one was redundancy or having backup systems for things. And that was an area that many of the communities gave themselves low scores on across those areas. And so putting into practice energy backup systems, freshwater backup systems. But I mean, it’s difficult to think of specific practices, I guess, because it will vary. But I think there’s a lot of general level looking into particular areas for resilience, if that makes sense. Eva: Yes, and I think going through the attributes is, as you say, a good step, just starting by looking at the problem, or at the conundrum, we are in track for 2.5. How can we begin to wrap our heads around this? Allyson: Yeah, and now that you mentioned that, another one that I was really surprised, it didn’t show up as a strength was having reflexive practices, which I thought would have scored more, and it may have been well, the way in which we described the criteria for ranking, but it just the idea of having a process within the community, a practice of coming together and reflecting on decisions that have been made to inform how they’re made going forward. I understand from the resilience tracker that that is not a practice that many of the communities had in place, but are looking at how that might be worth investing in. Eva: Absolutely. Looking ahead, and with the hat of resilience researcher on, what do you see as the most pressing research needs or areas for further exploration regarding resilience, and particularly resilience in ecovillages? Allyson: There’s so many. I’m trying to, I think, honestly, it comes to this as we spoke about it scaling up, because how many ecovillages are there in the network? A few thousand, maybe, and we worked with 20. How can we bring this perspective and this way of looking through a systems lens and considering the different attributes and features that go into strengthening, enhancing resilience in your community? How can we bring that to a broader community? I do think that is a research question, and it’s also a tangible project and something that would have a lot of value going forward in terms of bringing more people into the conversation around what it is that we’re trying to do, which is to strengthen our resilience, both within the community and beyond. Working together, we can have a better chance at actually navigating our way through some of these challenges and building the futures that we want to have for ourselves and our communities and our families and everyone, really. Eva: After witnessing the journeys of each of these projects, as you say, these 20,000 ecovillages over the past years, what has given you or continues to give you hope when you envision the future of ecovillages and the ecovillage movement? Allyson: I’m really hopeful in the sense that in reading through the comments and the reports that the people that were participating in this project did a lot of work. They not only came to the sessions that we held every three weeks or a couple of hours at a time and then took the information back to their community and held workshops and then uploaded, wrote reports and stories and outputs, photos, models, et cetera, and uploaded it all, and they all have their reports. That was a huge investment in their time, and that gives me hope. That’s the work that needs to be done. We’re only going to get to where we want to go by putting in the time and effort and making it happen. It gives me hope that people stayed with the project, reflected on it, and have already been commenting about changes that they’re making within their community. Maybe it’s not all 20 of them, but it’s more than half. That gives me a lot of hope. Again, scale it up. Eva: Can you share one or two of these changes as little seeds of hope for the listeners? Allyson: I know many of the communities did not have monitoring systems and early warning systems in place, and many of them are planning on putting those in place. That’s one example. Eva: Thank you very much. Before we close, I always like to give those that I’m interviewing just an open space. Is there any question that I didn’t ask or anything you would really like to share before we end for the day? Allyson: I think your questions were fantastic. They gave a good picture of the work that we’ve done and what I could bring to it. Maybe the only thing I would like to leave with is acknowledging that this was very much a core team effort. There were several of us involved in planning how this project would happen. Trudy, Anna, Lueya, and all of the people who showed up in the community of practice and came to those sessions and participated and offered so much. I feel like that is an enormous strength. Nothing fizzled out or faded away. It stayed strong the whole way through. I’m really grateful for that. Eva: Thank you. I think ending in gratitude is a wonderful step towards resilience and a great way to end our conversation today. It’s been an honour talking with you. Allyson: It’s been a pleasure, Eva. Thank you. OUTRODUCTION Join us again next week as we continue the conversation over what it means to be resilient in our time of deepening polycrisis. While you wait for the next episode of Community Resilience, we invite you to explore more about the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project by visiting us online at ecovillage.org/resilience.

INTRODUCTION Welcome back to Community Resilience, a podcast created in collaboration with the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project, facilitated by the Global Ecovillage Network. I’m your host, Eva Goldfarb, inviting you to gather around the fire as we explore resilience, adaptation, and transformation in our time of deepening polycrisis. Joining me today are two remarkable women from GENOA, the Global Ecovillage Network Oceania and Asia branch. We have Thao Kin, the current regional representative, and Trudy Juriansz, her predecessor and one of the project leads, who has played a pivotal role in bridging communities across borders and disciplines. Trudy is a key figure in fostering collaboration across Asia and Oceania. With a rich history of coordinating and leadership roles within GEN, both internationally and regionally, Trudy has been a catalyst for numerous projects and initiatives. Her work spans from coordinating democratic schools for refugees in Thailand to managing a forest garden education center in Sri Lanka. Now she’s pioneering a new international land-based community in Queensland, Australia. Kin is an earth steward, a community weaver, and an environmental trainer from Vietnam. Since joining GEN in 2016, Kin has been passionate about creating spaces that evoke wonder and awe in nature. Her dedication to this cause led her to co-found Project Awe, an eco-community in Northwest Vietnam. In this episode, we dive deep into the role of regional representatives in the resilience project, exploring how their unique positions allow them to gather invaluable insights and foster resilience within their communities. Trudy and Kin share their experiences, challenges, and the powerful lessons that they’ve learned along the way. Whether you’re interested in community building, sustainability, or simply looking for inspiration, this conversation is sure to resonate with you. INTERVIEW Eva: Welcome Kin and Trudy, two of our regional representatives from GENOA, or the Global Ecovillage Network Oceania region. I want to start by letting you both introduce yourselves briefly. Where are you in the world and what brought you here today, if you can share that shortly. Whoever would like to start, maybe Kin? Kin: Sure, hi Eva, happy to be here with Trudy. I am calling from the west of Vietnam, where I’m living on a mountain range and really happy to be here. I’ve been with the project since the beginning, the resilience project, and been a big fan of it, even though I’m not one of the ecovillage representatives. That is a part that I’ve learned a lot as a regional representative. I’m happy to be here. Trudy: Thanks Kin, and thanks Eva for holding this space for the resilience podcast. I’m Trudy, and I’m part of the GEN Resilience team that’s been kind of holding this process over the last two and a half years. I’m currently based on the east coast of Australia, the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, and my heritage is Sri Lankan. I come from Sri Lanka and spent a big part of my life over there. Thank you for having us. Eva: Thank you both for being here. I also hear that you are both co-founders of new ecovillages in your areas. This is very exciting. This is also a process that I’m embarking on at the moment. I’m hoping you can both tell us a bit about it. What are you loving about the journey at the moment? Maybe we can go reverse this time. Trudy, if you’d like to start, then we can hear from Kin. Trudy: Yeah, sure. Maybe I didn’t quite answer the previous question of how we came here to be here today, which is also what’s brought me into the process of creating community where I am. But I started this journey in 2011 when I was in Sri Lanka. Actually, previously I was in Myanmar and spent a lot of time high by my border and in Myanmar. I learned about GEN and the ecovillage movement and this beautiful ecovillage movement actually in Myanmar, which we don’t really hear so much about. But then I deepened that knowledge and understanding when I was in Sri Lanka when I met some colleagues from Gaia Ashram in Thailand. Then I just fell in love with this network and the work that was happening. I spent possibly over 10 years working with Gen International and GENOA, the Gen Oceania Asia. So, yeah, quite deeply involved and visited many ecovillages in Asia and in Australia and done a lot of ecovillage projects in these countries. And now being in Australia, moving from Sri Lanka five years ago and in Australia, I’ve been in process for the last three years with the collective of people. We have this beautiful vision and dream to create our own community here. Yeah, it’s like with all communities, as you probably know and spoken with, it’s a process and it takes time. There’s a lot of time involved in spending time with each other and understanding each other and working out how do we actually make this happen. And we’ve got to the point now in our process where we’ve got legal structures registered. So we’ve got two legal entities, one that will own the land and one that will run the community, a co-op. We’ve created a business plan. We’ve got a consent decision making process. We’ve got new members coming in and we’re in the process of looking for land. So it’s very exciting, but there’s a lot of work in Australia. It’s really different with working with government, you know, and I think we might get deeper into that later in this conversation, but it’s been a beautiful process so far and a lot of hard work as well. Eva: Thank you Trudy. Kin, if you’d like to reflect as well in the process. Kin: Yeah, so I have only heard of what an ecovillage is when I attended the Ecovillage Design Education course back in 2016 in Gaia Ashram in Thailand. And that’s where I met Trudy as well for the first time. And I felt really amazed, like mind blown by the idea and by how much I’ve learned in that course, how much I felt really resonated and at ease thinking about working on regeneration with a community, with a group of people. And I have been brewing this idea of wanting to have a community where I can belong to in Vietnam. And it took quite a few years, till two years ago, together with a group, we have actually only six people. We bought the land two years ago and moved to the land more than a year ago. And now we’re living here as a small community, like really new kids on the block, if you compare it to other communities and ecovillages in gen. But it has been a very deep, transformative journey for me already, because I’ve learned a lot about how to work with others, how to talk about, discuss, make plans about really difficult topics like our relationship with money and power, and learned a lot on how to work, observe a very particular piece of land and ecosystem, how to work with it. And I think everything I have learned from being a part of GEN now, I have the opportunity to actually live it, practice it. It feels very much like a blessing to really just starting to understand a little bit deeper to what I have heard and learned from others all these years. Eva: Thank you both for sharing. One thing that has been a pattern through these interviews is this notion of how quickly you learn within the ecovillage setting. So I’m just hearing that reflected again from both of you, both on an interpersonal level and about the ecosystem that you’re caring for. So we will get into that a bit more later as well. During this podcast series, we’ve been sharing about gen as a network, as well as hearing from many different ecovillages that have been participating on the project. And you represent a very important function of the network, which is the regional representation. This is kind of the bridge between the ecovillages and the Global Ecovillage Network. And I’m hoping you can share a bit about the role of GENOA within the wider ecovillage network, kind of taking into consideration that the region of Oceania and Asia has incredibly diverse socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental context. So there is a bit of complexity there. Kin, if you want to start. Kin: I can start and then maybe Trudy can add if she wants to. So currently, I’m the network weaver at GENOA, the Global Ecovillage Network, Oceania and Asia. And I actually inherited this role from Trudy, who was my predecessor. And in GENOA, we have members that are ecovillages, communities, individuals, and also we are connected with other networks, like like-minded networks. And we want to support either individuals or communities to really head towards regenerative ways of living, to practice, to share, to explore and evolve together. And we have been doing that by connecting communities and ecovillages and individuals so that we can really amplify the learnings and connect for a bigger impact. We have also been encouraging people to develop more and more regenerative practice in different areas. We use the map of regeneration that’s very famous in GENOA with like social, cultural, economic, and ecology. And then we also have different educational programs to build capacity to exchange knowledge, cross-pollinate for both individuals and communities. Some of them we collaborate with other regions in GENOA, with the GEN Global, GEN International. And we also aim to really showcase, make visible the practice and the impact that are being done by members of the network so they can be like the lighthouse, inspiring people to go towards regeneration pathways. So that’s how I see the role of GENOA as the regional practice and a network. And we also have the regional network is quite big. As you said, it’s both Asia and Oceania, geographically very big and also very diverse. So inside GENOA, we have urban, suburban, rural communities. We also have traditional communities who have been living together for so long as like villages. There’s also intentional communities. There’s communities with very different backgrounds in terms of politics, religions, economic standards, and all. So it’s been quite interesting learning from all of them. And I think that’s the complexity in GENOA with such big diversity, even language, it’s both a blessing and a challenge. And it’s also been very fruitful just to have different people to connect to and learn from. Yeah. Eva: Trudy, would you like to add to speaking to GENOA as a regional representative? Otherwise, I will move on to the next question. Trudy: I think Kin has shared quite nicely and clearly. So I’m really happy that I don’t have too much more to add, and I think we’ll flow on as we go. Eva: Beautiful. So with that lens throughout the resilience project, the ecovillages have really been on this discovery journey of what resilience is and points in which the ecovillages have needed to be resilient in the past. Kind of zooming out from this process and looking at it from a regional perspective. I’m wondering what patterns you have observed through your region and also the ecovillages participating in the project. I know there’s a lot of diversity there again, but just some patterns and challenges that communities are facing. Trudy: Yeah. And maybe I can kind of speak to this a little bit and also build it in and carrying on from what Kin shared previously. We have diversity is a huge strength in the region, but it can also be the cause of also many challenges. And like Kin shared, the network is so broad that it ranges from intentional communities to traditional villages to eco projects and all these different types and variations of how ecovillage or community plays out. The network is diverse. The region is naturally diverse from coastal communities to communities that are inland to communities that are in the mountain region. So the geography affects the communities as well, their cultures and languages Kin shared. But also many of the communities that are in the network are on the front lines of climate change and have been very much in this mode of industrialization and even more so. And also kind of noticing that within GENOA, we also in areas where it’s very materially wealthy as compared to other areas that are not so materially well off. And if I compare from where I came from in Sri Lanka and the communities that are there versus where I am now in Australia, where it’s a completely different environment. And when we’re talking about climate change and polycrisis, I feel like a lot of the communities in Asia are really at the forefront of this. In Oceania, we have Australia, we have New Zealand, but we also have a lot of the island communities that are facing sea level rises. And one community in the Solomon Islands is having to actually move back and they’re really having to face this challenge and work with government and talking about how they can relocate. In Australia, we’ve had bushfires and we’ve had floods, but I feel like sometimes when these things pass, it’s like people forget because we do live in a much more well-off situation. We have communities that are really at the forefront of polycrisis. And as an example, we have a community that’s part of the Resilience Project, “Beds”. They’re from Bangladesh and they’re based in the Sunderbans. And the Sunderbans is like the largest delta in the world. It’s where three rivers come together. And it’s so diverse. There’s probably about four and a half million people that live in this region. And this community, it’s actually a network of communities and they’ve faced so many challenges. And one of the challenges they shared with us was that there’s been a lot of the tourism has exploded in that region. So they’re having to face all the challenges that come with that and the pollution and kind of like, yeah, it’s very unsustainable. There’s a lot of chemical agriculture that’s also quite prevalent. So high chemical use is also really polluting these river basin. So this network is really trying to educate the farmers that are in their communities to do organic agriculture and trying to kind of like shift into that. But it’s been a big challenge for them. And when they talk about crisis, the first thing that really comes to their mind or what they talk about is the ecological crisis that they face in their communities. So that’s something also that we are aware of and how that also differs from region to region in our network. I think that those are some good examples. And I wonder if, Kin, if you have any more that you’d like to also add to that. Kin: Yeah, I think you have displayed really well. I think I really want to emphasize on how a lot of the communities are vulnerable to the political crisis that we’re facing, both in terms of ecological crisis, we have climate change, and a lot of communities are being affected by extreme weather events, storm, typhoons, droughts, floods, or like salinization, like in the case of BDS in Bangladesh, and also the social political crisis, like some of them are inside conflict zones. So all of these different challenges are very much affecting how communities can not just be resilient, but also how they can keep the connections with the network with other communities. And there was, just want to add an example of Maya Earth Village back in, I think, 2021, there was a typhoon, Typhoon Rai, that came through and pretty much destroyed all of their settlements. And afterwards, they run a campaign on themselves. And then we shared it within the GENOA network to bring people and resources in to help them recover after the typhoon. So I think things like this is something that we can definitely be more well aware of as a network, and also find ways to support each other to respond to challenges like that. Eva: I’m very curious if your participation in the Resilience Project equipped you with any tools or bigger takeaways to help in your communications with these communities that are more on the forefront of public crisis. Trudy: I can share an example, like during the Resilience Project, during the process, you know, we have a community called Earthsong, that’s part of the network and part of the project. And they had some extreme rains and flooding events that happened. And interestingly, they’re an urban community, you know, in a very small urban community, right in the midst of a bigger neighbourhood. And when these events happened, the neighbours were actually really affected by the flood. And through their design processes in the community, they didn’t have it affect them as much. But they had people from the neighbouring, their friends all actually coming to the village and asking for support, asking for a place to be. And they found that they were having to actually open their doors to these kind of like local climate refugees. And so that was something we found really interesting. And I think you’re going to be interviewing Robert Allison from Earthsong, and you can probably find out more details about that. But that was a really interesting fact for them also to actually reflect on. It’s like, actually, how do we respond as communities, you know, in the wider community? Because we are going to have more extreme weather events. How do we facilitate space and process to bring people in? And can we actually do that? Do we have the capacity to do that? So these were big questions that came up during the project that a lot of the communities were asking and reflecting on, you know, in the process. So this was, I thought, a really good example. And, you know, the communities through this process, we’ve learned so much in what they’ve shared, and how resilient they feel they are as community members on an individual level. How are they resilient at a community level? And there’s a lot of tools and practices that were shared. And there were lots of common practices, but there were also really individual ones, you know, but they also learned that they feel that they are resilient. But when they look at themselves, and really look at the bigger picture and what’s happening, a lot of them shared, actually, we’re not really resilient. But if we compare ourselves to other communities, and the broader mainstream public, yeah, actually, we are, you know, so there’s this question, and feedback that they get, and knowing also there’s space to improve and how they can grow as well. Yeah, I’ll pass on to you, Kin. Kin: Thanks, Trudy. I think I just want to add a touch of perspective from being the regional representative journey with the different ecovillages in the project. I first found it was a great opportunity for me to understand the ecovillages better, because they have done a lot of different workshops and exercises as part of the project in which they share more about their history, about different aspects, about their focus, and also what practice they’re using personally and collectively to respond to certain disturbance, and things like that we don’t really get to talk about a lot with communities. So it’s just a chance to understand them better, and also together journeying to these reflections of, like Trudy said, how resilient they think they are, and how resilient they want to be, and what kind of, like, where’s the gaps, how they can continue developing these strengths, the strength they already have, and fill in the gaps. I think that has been a very interesting process, and it got me thinking of how it would be very helpful for other ecovillages and communities in the network to actually go through this process, to share with each other, have dialogues, exchange around different topics related to resilience. Actually, Trudy and I, we also talked about how it would be great to have some sessions where we invited the communities who were part of the resilience project to share their experience and learnings with other communities who have not yet had the chance to be part of. There would be, like, ripple effects from the learning of the communities who were there. Eva: Amazing. I really look forward to hearing more as you develop this community outreach or regional outreach. If you plan any events to host this, please do share it with us, and I will add it to the show notes. I really think this notion of identifying the gaps or the spaces of improvement was one of the intentions behind the resilience project, so it’s nice to hear that that came through and has been helpful. So we have talked a bit about the different types of ecovillages that make up the GENOA region, and I want to focus a bit on traditional communities and see how you think traditional knowledge and culture practices contribute to resilience in communities across Asia and Oceania. Do you have any examples of how cultural resilience has helped communities overcome challenges? Kin: I think for this, we would love to share some, maybe, examples. I can share one first, and maybe, pass to Trudy, if you have something to share. I think traditional knowledge and wisdom and culture play a very important part, and especially where I come from in Vietnam, and maybe I can speak for, like, Asia in general, because we still keep quite tight roots to our indigenous and traditional wisdom, and we have a community here in Vietnam that has been built 15 years ago. They currently have 150 people living in an area not so far from the capital, and they were actually replaced. They replaced indigenous because the area where they used to live was taken to become a military site, so they were relocated to a new location. They are one of the ethnic minorities in Vietnam, and now they have been displaced and lived among the main ethnic, which is Kin. I’m also one of the Kin people, and the community is from Thai minority, so it’s different ethnicity, and since they started rebuilding the community, they have set up that the preservation of their traditional practice is so important, and they started to do that since the beginning, 15 years ago, and now when we visit them, we can see very strongly how that had an impact on the way they lived. So firstly, they kept all of the indigenous practice around medicine, about natural building, about cooking, and they grow all of the herbs and ingredients they would use in their traditional cooking around their house, and they know what kind of medicinal plants to use for certain illness, and it’s like a common knowledge for them, and it’s not a common knowledge for us now, like in mainstream society. So I think that one is already very strong on how we can just preserve this knowledge that had been built by our ancestors living so close to nature and understanding nature and how we can work with nature, and also there’s a lot of cultural practices that they have kept that really, I think, build this harmonious relationship with nature and with each other, especially on the terms of gratitude and respect. So for example, in Vietnam, we have this tradition of celebrating the first harvest of the year, or the first day going to work after the lunar new year, and this has been a very long-term celebration, and in many places in Vietnam, they still keep it, but they celebrate it more like a chance to party, rather than having any deeper meaning connected to why it started. But in this community, these intentional communities that I’m talking about, they do this ceremony very respectfully. The elders would share why they’re doing it, to show respect to nature, to share part of the first harvest back to nature, and to show that we thank nature for all of the support that we have received, like for having good rain, for having the sunshine, the nutrition, so that we have this food. And this is also a very special occasion for the communities to really bond over dancing, rituals, and meals together, and I think they kept it really beautifully, that I think a lot of the places in Vietnam, even though we had it in the past, we’re kind of now losing these traditions, and this community managed to keep it. So that was really beautiful to see. Eva: Thank you very much. I just want to quickly touch on the importance of celebration and respect to the natural world. These are two big topics that have also been reoccurring patterns in my interviews, and I thank you for bringing them an example. Trudy, would you also like to add an example of a traditional knowledge or community, and how their practices contribute to resilience? Trudy: Yeah, I mean, I can just share a little bit, you know, in Australia, we have a very rich culture of Indigenous culture that’s been around, as you know, for like more than 60,000 years. And some of the communities in Australia have been able to preserve culture a lot, but many of them have been fragmented through colonization, which is a very tragic history of this country and a very sad story for most of the Aboriginal communities here. But even through the hardships and through this really traumatic history, they are still resilient, they still hold the stories, you know, from the past, even though families were split apart and children taken away. And, you know, it’s the stolen generation where children were taken away from their mothers and put into communities, put into missions where they had to learn the colonial way or the white way. And, you know, when you separate people from their land, you separate people from their family and culture, they lose everything. And it’s been huge sadness for many of these communities. But in that they still remember, in remembering stories from their mothers and their families, the stories carry their history and their culture. And for them, it’s their law. It’s the law of the land, you know, and when they have that connection to land, they know how to live with it. I’ve had the real honor and privilege to have worked with the community, Indigenous community in Far North Queensland. And I worked with them for three years and was able to really get deep into the space with them and be in circle and to hear their stories. And some of them very sad, you know, but they’ve really come together to kind of step up to the world and to the local council and the local society and to say, you know what, we’re here. And even though we’ve had all this trauma happen, we’re still going to stand on our two feet and we’re going to hold our heads high and we’re going to work through this. And they were really interested, actually, as I worked with them and shared about like the ecovillage principles and was trying to understand and hear what their views and what their vision was for the future. And that was kind of what they asked me to come in to help them to share with the world. So I was able to really go into process and hear some of these stories and hear what they wanted to do and document that so that they could then share this broadly and say to their local governments, this is what we want and this is how we want you to help us. There is a lot of support out there for traditional communities. But sometimes they don’t always have a say in how they want resources to be, that comes to them to be used. So for them to be able to have something that they could show to them, to local government and say, this is how we want to spend funds and this is how we want our community to thrive, was a really big deal. And in that, they’ve really come a long way. They’ve had many events happened. And they get hit by many things. One of the things that did hit them a few years ago was a cyclone. And in that time, they were cut off. The roads were cut off. They didn’t have electricity. But they were able to come together in their community hall and fend for themselves and support each other. And that strong bond of family, you know, kinship was really able to see them through. And remembering the stories and what one of the processes that we were able to support them with was to actually have the elders share some of the stories as tragic as they are with the younger generation. The older generation also felt for a time where they had to kind of hold these stories because they were too traumatic to share. But they’ve realized, like, actually, we need these stories to be known. The younger generation need to know about this so that they can actually learn how to be resilient. They have to learn from what we’ve gone through so they’re not going to be pushed down again. So it’s really opened up a big space of truth telling in the communities. And they’re able to kind of work through that. There’s still a long way to go. The elders have really stepped up. The community are really getting involved. There’s a lot of projects happening now that’s really supporting people in the community to actually, like, be motivated to do things on the land. It’s been really wonderful. But yeah, still a long way to go for them. But their stories and their culture is strong. And that’s what really holds them as they work through the times of crisis. Eva: There’s a lot of collective heartbreak there. And I have become more and more aware that traditional communities are disproportionately affected by the polycrisis. Yet somehow they remain these examples of resilience and especially connection to nature and a more respectful way of living as a human for the network as a whole. I’ve heard from many intentional communities who really draw from the traditional wisdom to help transform their Western ideals into respectful practices. So with this kind of lens, the regions really are bridges between a lot of different types of ecovillages. And I’m wondering if you can reflect on the value and opportunity of networking within your region. Specifically relating to some of the initiatives that GENOA has stewarded over the years, but as well as what you’ve witnessed in the community of practice. How are communities supporting each other in this journey? How can they support each other in this journey? Kin: I can start. For us as GENOA, the possibilities of really bringing people together and share their stories to build understanding also build a lot of learning. Kind of amplifying the message, the aspiration, but also the impact. It’s very important. Pre-COVID, we had a regional gathering that I was not there at that time and Trudy was. We can comment on that more later. But I think the opportunity to really bring people together is really powerful because then they can share practice. They also feel very energized and motivated knowing that there are people who are dedicated to the same path all around the region, around the world. Because sometimes for communities that want to go towards regeneration, they can be a bit out of the mainstream. They can be different. They do different practices. They think in a different way compared to others. So it could get a bit frustrated and lonely sometimes. So really, that’s where the power of being part of the network would come in. We keep each other to stay grounded and also kind of like sharing the fires. Imagine keeping fires between peoples and communities to keep it alive. And just most recently, we had a project called From Ubuntu to Kapwa. It’s actually a collaboration project between three regions in GEN. We have Oceania and Asia. We have Africa and Casa Latina, which is the Latin American network. And we work on the diving deeper into how we can be informed by traditional and indigenous culture into be consciously developing regenerative food system. And with this first time, we did the collaborative project. We had three countries as pioneers in three different countries in the Philippines and Cameroon and in Colombia. And it was a very beautiful project because we did workshops in person in each country. And at the same time, we do online sections where the countries and the elders and also the different participants, stakeholders in each country can come together. They share what they did, but we also try to bring some of the essence of the cultural activities online. Even though it was difficult, not everything can be transmitted through Zoom, but we did our best. And I think it worked like a lot of people who were in the room was really deeply moved by this different indigenous teachings, the songs that people would use to bless the rice or the prayers that were shared from different countries. And I think that was one example of how, even though we come from many different backgrounds and cultures, there’s a lot of diversity that we can learn. The core is very much mutual, in common, how we want to treasure love and gratitude, how we really see community bonding and indigenous knowledge as the source of power for us. From that project, I think we have really highlighted it and we wish to do more of that work in the future as well. And I would love to also just want to add one more example. It’s an online education project that GENOA did. It started during COVID. Trudy was here and Sarah from the Philippines were the designers, the pioneers of the project. We called it RegenNations, and it’s our regional online version of an ecovillage design education course. And what I want to bring here is that through developing and conducting this project, we actually invited a lot of the thought leaders of trainers and elders of the region, Oceania and Asia, to come and share about what they have been doing with their communities, about the knowledge and the wisdom that they have. And that’s very beautiful, because usually before that, when we talk about a ecovillage design education course, a lot of the examples of the trainers are from out of the region. Not many of them are from our region, but through this project, we found out that there’s so much wisdom, so much treasure in this region that we can learn and share and we can bring people together. And the fact that we have, I think in that project, we have like 32 different speakers talking about different topics, coming from different countries. That was just really beautiful, being able to bring them together and share the depths of experience and knowledge that they have cultivated through the years. And they just fit nicely into the different areas of regeneration during that project. Eva: Thank you very much, Kin. I will be sure to add some links to the show notes if anyone wants to explore that course or learn more about the Ubunty to Kapwa project. Thank you for sharing. Trudy, do you have anything to add about the power of networking, maybe even reflecting on some of the in-person events that you’ve been able to help coordinate? Trudy: Yeah, I just want to just reiterate what Kin just said about the regenerations, you know, and really brought to focus how much we have in our region and the richness that we do have. But yeah, pre-COVID, we had the real honour of hosting these in-person gatherings, which were just amazing because it brought so much energy, so many different people’s ideas. And there’s so much that can happen and that can get ignited when hearts and minds come together. And so much of GENOA, of also what we have today in the network, were people coming to these gatherings and connecting with each other and, you know, courses and projects kind of being formed from that and growing. Networks have grown from these gatherings as well. We had someone, this was many years ago, from Bhutan come to one of our gatherings, you know, because he had heard about it. And he was invited by a representative from India and was just so inspired by what was happening in the region and went back to Bhutan and started the Bhutan Ecovillage Network. That’s an example of how things can get ignited as well. But we’ve hosted gatherings, you know, in India and Thailand and Sri Lanka, and it’s been really quite amazing. And I think one of the sad things to see is with COVID and with things actually going online, we start to see less of that. But I think we also have many trainings that have happened, you know, that also continue to happen, which I think is also really wonderful. But some of the trainings that also was able to ignite were some of the ecovillage design education courses that have happened, the in-depth courses, as Kin was sharing. We’ve had training of trainers that have also happened, which also helps to bring people together and ignites things. And the gatherings, Kin, like at Gaia Ashram, you know, Gaia Calling, that also brings a lot of young people together. And again, so much evolves from these, you know, in-person meetings. So I think that’s also the power of the region, you know, being able to hold space for people to actually come together and do these things. Because as a region and GENOA, we also have to think of it from a different lens. It’s a region and it’s also a network, but it’s also an organization. You know, so there’s also these like dualities that happen that sometimes we’ve also had to question and figure out, like, actually, what’s our role? We are a node in the network, you know, and we are a network, but we’re also an organization within the network. So it’s been an interesting balance over the years to also understand, like, what is the role that we play and how do we connect people? And, you know, what else do we need to bring and what is the need? And I think that’s a big question, I think, in GENOA at the moment. Like, where’s the need and what’s the niche that we can fill in the ecosystem? Like, what’s the space and is there something unique that we bring as well? You know, and I think through the Resilience Project, I’m hoping also that there’s a lot of these questions that are going to be looked at in the network and in GENOA as the organizations. Like, because we have so many communities at the front lines of climate change, how do we service, how do we support these communities from this angle? And I think these are going to be really interesting questions to explore. And hopefully we’re going to create more space for that as well. Eva: We will also create a bit of space to go deeper into that future dreaming in a moment. But first, I would love to hear a bit wider than the network, how you have, as a region, been collaborating with local governments, other regional organizations. If there’s any learnings from this resilience journey that have impacted your regional policy. Kin: Thanks, Eva. This is actually a tough question when it comes to policies, because every country is different. But I also just want to take this opportunity to highlight that there’s amazing work done by national networks in different countries in GENOA. So we are a regional network, but there’s also GEN in Japan, South Korea, Australia, now in China and soon in India as well. And they have done a lot of work bringing communities together, echoing on certain message and practice. And I think it would be also interesting to learn if they have made any impact on social or political level in their own country. But just the fact that people can come together, sharing the same language, because language is obviously very diverse in GENOA. So not everyone can come to an English-speaking gathering. But the opportunities to actually be with each other and speak their own language in exchange, I think is very beautiful. And a lot of practice can be echoed and learned in that way. And I just want to share this point from more like a personal level, coming from a community here in Vietnam. I think the relationship with the local government is one of the very key relationships that we acknowledge and we want to build at a very early stage. And I think for us, there’s a lot that we envision that we can bring to the surrounding area, to the communities that are living around where we live. But first, we want to learn how things are here, like how people have been living, what’s their way, what’s their understanding. And one of the ways we can do that is actually by collaborating and being in conversation with the local government. And also understand what is the development trajectory for the area as well, so that we can see where we can contribute in the long term. And I think that’s very important because for us, when we first came here, we had a lot of ideas. We want to experiment this and that, and we think it’s going to be very good for the region. But as we are here and slowly, slowly immerse ourselves in the area, we understand that this is a conversation that it takes time. And first, to build relationship and build trust with the local government and with the people around is very important. And I think that part is something that a lot of communities have been doing really well. I had the opportunity to visit Gaia Ashram in Thailand, for example, quite frequently. And I see how much they are connected to the local government there. And they have shared with the local government about the practice of like permaculture, organic farming, build business that using sourcing materials from the local areas, from the people around. And now they’re also building an eco school with the local government. So I think those are like big steps, being able to work on a project with the local government. So I think as we are persistent on our path and just keep learning and building relationship, there’s a lot of beautiful flowers can go from there. And I see Gaia Ashram as an example because I understand that example more than others. But I believe that there are a lot more from communities around the region. Eva: Thank you very much. Coming back a bit to the point that you were speaking to earlier, Trudy. We have done a lot of future visioning through the Resilience Project. And I’m very curious what you see as future priorities for resilience building within GENOA. You know, this might be a difficult question or a question that is not so clear yet. But if you have anything else to share on this topic, now is the time. Trudy: Yeah, and maybe I’ll just build on kind of what I was sharing before. I think there’s a big space and I think it’s a really important space, actually. And I think the region, GENOA as an organization, needs to hold that space for the network. Again, it’s not so clear how we can do it. And we need to discuss and share. You know, we share our learnings. I think that’s the first step. It’s like take the learnings from the Resilience Project and share that with the council and with kind of like the holding circle. And then share that more broadly with the network and then maybe collectively decide how we can move forward together. But because we’re such a diverse region and we have so many communities that are affected by climate change and the polycrisis, we do need to hold space for that. You know, we do really need to genuinely like look at that and question how do we actually support communities in the network? How can we really bring resilience in? And I think we have these beautiful principles that are part of the Map of Regeneration. You know, the Gen Design cards, the Map of Regeneration and the resilience attributes. You know, and this is a work that we’re doing actually in the project is looking at how we can integrate them. Because as we move forward and through the future, we need to design for regeneration, but we need to design for resilience, you know. And we need to bring all these principles together and what we’ve learned so that communities can really integrate this. And there’s been big learnings from the communities that have participated in the project that we can carry forward and share with communities that are evolving, pioneering communities, as well as communities that are older and more established. Because at some point in the near future, we’re all going to be facing it. And we need to be ready with the tools and know how can we respond and maybe even be more proactive rather than just responding. So I feel like from a regional perspective, there’s a big responsibility in taking this knowledge and then really helping it to kind of spread out and pollinate further. And yeah, I hope that we’ll be able to really make that space to do that. Eva: You remind me of a quote from one of our early episodes with Bruno Tambelini from Piracanga in Brazil. He says, “climate change is for everyone”. Very simple, a little dark humor. Trudy: Yeah, well, we can’t run away from it, you know, and we can try to sweep it under the carpet and be complacent about it. But it is going to come back. It’s there, you know, it’s not going away. Eva: That’s the importance of working on these tools to figure out how we can respond and cope to the coming changes. So on that notion, I’m wondering what some of the valuable tools for resilience that you have seen in ecovillages that can really be shared with the wider world. And why do you think these are so valuable? Kin: Well, I think there’s a lot of different tools and learnings that we can share. It probably would take a lot of time if we go through each and every one of them. But I think every ecovillages would have their strengths in certain areas. And we’re all moving towards a holistic design. Trying to build our resilience in different aspects. Some communities would be stronger in ecosystem restoration and they would share some practice and learning towards that. And then the others would be more on the social and how to resolve conflict in communities. And recently we have some community call in GENOA where we invite members of communities to come and share. An example of a tool would be micro-gifting. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. But it’s the idea of people build collective parts where it could just be gifts for members of the community who are in need. Regardless of asking them to explain in details and report what we use this money for. It’s built on trust and generosity. It could be every month or every year members of the community put in a pot. And then that pot will be used to support as the next year goes. To support anyone who’s in trouble, who needs urgent support financially. So that’s one beautiful practice. And there’s also a lot of practice on supporting each other in different forms of capital. It’s something that’s very popular in communities. So we acknowledge that there are many other capitals than just money. So there could be intellectual capital. It could be relationship capital. So utilizing all of this capital and sharing knowledge about how we can support each other in more than just one form of capital. I think it’s also something that I’ve learned and saw in many different ecovillages. Eva: Thank you very much. I’m curious to hear from you if there’s anything in particular from the Resilience Project that you’ve really taken and either integrated or are in the process of integrating into your process of building an ecovillage. Trudy: Well, I think some of the things that happen in communities is that because you’re living in close proximity to each other, you become mirrors to each other. And so there’s actually like a big space for personal growth because you’re in that evolution process. Like you see yourself, you see your triggers. Some of the things that we’ve learned through this Resilience Project is that you bring a lot of your background, your context, your traumas with you when you enter community. And so there might be things that happen that will trigger you. And I really, for me, that’s a beautiful thing to remember and also to embrace. And even though it might be hard, it’s important to just to accept that and to kind of work through that. And also the thing that I found really also interesting is, you know, during COVID, in most of society, people were separated. They were not allowed to see each other. But people that were in community, like they didn’t have that any social anxiety or missing out or having that human connection because they were together. They were together in lockdown. And that’s also a really beautiful thing when you have this kind of decentralization. And some of the things that I learned also was when there is a crisis or a challenge in community, somehow it enabled communities to actually just come together in solidarity and collaborate and work through those issues. You know, and somehow those crisis just brought them together even more and made them stronger. That’s also a really beautiful thing to know that, okay, we can have process, we can have protocol. But when something really does get really bad, that we’ll have each other and we can work through that. And so I think some important principles to take away are like, you know, there’s a great sense of trust within communities with each other. There’s a sense of collaboration and sharing. There’s also one of the things they shared is like they have common meetings and have common gatherings or have and have them regularly once a week, once a fortnight. That’s something we do in our community at the moment is that we meet weekly and we have regular campouts and gatherings where we can go deeper into process over a weekend period.And having those skills or really practicing those skills of listening to each other, really deeply listening with empathy so that you can really be there and hear each other so that you can work through whatever is at the forefront. And I think that’s really important when we start to talk about all these crises that are happening, these multiple converging crises, like how do we work through them? How can we really listen to each other and come together and work through them with love in our hearts? That was a big thing that came from the project as well, that a lot of communities that have been around for a while, they have a real deep love and care for each other and they love being together. And I think that’s also something beautiful and something I really hope that we continue to cultivate in our forming community as well. You know, we love being together. We love hanging out. We work. We work really hard, but we also love and care for each other. And I think that’s beautiful. You know, it’s this beautiful connection and yeah, almost like a marriage with like multiple people because you’re just there in it together. Eva: I’m curious if you have any advice for someone who is in a similar process of creating community. Kin: This actually would bring me to one of my favorite learning from the resilience project. It’s like at the end of the project, there’s this resilient tracker. Hopefully, I think soon the tool will be shared to a wider community. But for me, looking at my own community is very helpful because it’s like a compass. When we are starting our community, we can get four to one direction, focusing heavily on, for example, at the moment where I am, we’re focusing very much on regenerating the land. So the ecology part of it and like building new structure in an equal ways and how to source our energy in an eco and efficient way as well. So we are very much focusing on that. And sometimes we can get in that direction and neglect other aspects of our resilience, like building relationship to each other. Like what Trudy just said, how we can build trust, openness inside a community, how we can make space for things to land for reflection. And I think that’s a big invitation from the resilience project is the whole series of different activities. I see them as reflections for communities when they come together and they look at a certain angle, their communities. A lot of communities probably don’t really have intentional space to look at them and could show them some blind spots they probably have. And for me, it’s like make sure that you breathe in, not just keep breathing all the time, doing all of the work out there, but also nourishing the inner resilience and the connection and the trust within community. So that’s very much linked to what you just shared. And as an observer, hearing all of the stories from other communities and reflecting back to my own communities, I think that was like a very big, big learning. And I am very aware of how necessary this internal breath is, how much it can really cost to fully develop and build community from scratch. Eva: I’m curious what your individual tools for building resilience in your lives have been to help you cope with these processes. Trudy: Yeah, it’s evolved and changed over time as well. And as you get older, you know, but I think reflection is a big one. Just being able to take that time to stop and reflect on a personal level and using tools for me, meditation and yoga and movement for me is a really big one. Being able to dance and music, singing is a huge one as well. So there’s different practices that I use on a daily basis that helps me stay centered and focused. And also just taking that pause to take a deep breath when the time is needed. For me also, I have a tendency to throw myself deep into work, into whatever project that I’m working on. And especially being in GENOA for a long time and giving so much. And then you realize, oh, where’s the space for myself? So having the courage to actually stop and say, you know what, I need to pass the baton. I need to pass the flame on to other people so that I can breathe and find my center again and come back when I’m feeling okay. And I think that’s also like a really important part of resilience is being able to really notice that about yourself. Notice when you’re having those moments of vulnerability and seeing yourself and just going, I need to take a break. I need to check out for a minute. And I have friends and I have people here who can step in and giving them the opportunity to be able to step in. And that was, it’s been a really beautiful process in GENOA as well. Like as a team, several of us colleagues putting in a lot of work and then being able to step out and feel confident. Because we trust the people that are stepping in and we have that friendship. And so it’s been a big learning curve in my life. But also just huge, so much gratitude for the people that are a part of our network and the people that are in the team of GENOA. And how far we’ve come and how resilient we are actually through all of this on that personal level. And having that real groundedness, I feel that’s a really important aspect as well. Eva: Thank you, Trudy. Kin, do you have anything to add then? Might be a very helpful tool for someone listening. Kin: Well, I echo a lot with what Trudy said. I share some of the same practice. And for me, spending time to really be in nature, to observe what’s happening around. To look really deeply, like just sit in a spot in the garden, look deeply at what’s happening around me. It’s like a great medicine for myself. And really the moments that I can really try to be still, to observe, to be with nature. It is where I think a lot of my moment of awe in nature actually happens and it gives me the sense of humbleness and also gracefulness of being a part of something a lot bigger than myself and all of the consumed thought about my problems suddenly become not so big of a problem anymore compared to this like vastness of beauty that I’m a part of. So like the sense of awe, sense of wonder, things really intentionally take time out of the day to just keep space for that to happen. I think it’s very important and that’s also why we came up with the project Here in Vietnam Project Awe. We want to cultivate more of things like that. Eva: Really putting the context of your life in perspective. Thank you. What a beautiful name for an ecovillage project. Before we part ways for the day, I just want to open up space if there’s any questions that were left unasked or anything you would really like to share before we leave. That was the space for it. Trudy: Yeah, I have something actually that I thought would be really nice as we were been speaking and sharing. I think it’s really important for communities not to be an island, like especially as we’re coming into these really deep times of turmoil on so many levels and from so many angles and aspects. We need to actually really be there for each other and communities can tend to have this really insular movement, but actually we need to have a bit of both. We need to be able to work within and shape and help each other grow, but we also need to be able to give and receive from the outside. There’s so much that communities can do. I think this is a lot of the learning also that’s come from this project for communities as well. We can’t be insular. We’ve got to give out. We’ve got to be open and create space when things do get bad to be able to welcome people in if we need to and also to share the knowledge. The ecovillages have been living laboratories for however many years. Traditional villages, Indigenous communities have so much knowledge, so much insight, so much wisdom. There’s a lot that needs to be shared with the broader community and there’s a responsibility there to be able to share this with open hearts and not to be afraid of it, to share it openly with governments as well. All the findings that we have and to say these are important things and we need to integrate this into wider society. How can we get this information out there? How can we share trainings and workshops, inviting people to come in and see what’s happening, inviting governments to come in and see what’s happening? I think there’s a beautiful opportunity for ecovillages to really open up. That’s one of the things that really came up for me as we were talking. I think if we look at it from a regional lens, regions can do that too. I think that’s what one of the projects that Kin shared, the Ubuntu Tukapwa, a way of that inter-regional collaboration. There’s again, I feel like more opportunity there as well. Eva: Thank you both so much for your insights, your time and your years of service to the network. It was amazing talking with you. Trudy & Kin: Thanks Eva. OUTRODUCTION Join us again next week as we continue the conversation over what it means to be resilient in our time of deepening polycrisis. While you wait for the next episode of Community Resilience, we invite you to explore more about the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project by visiting us online at ecovillage.org/resilience.

Introduction Welcome back to Community Resilience, a podcast created in collaboration with the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project, facilitated by the Global Ecovillage Network. I’m your host, Eva Goldfarb, inviting you to gather around the fire as we explore resilience, adaptation, and transformation in our time of deepening polycrisis. Meet Alfusainey Sey, a dynamic leader and passionate advocate for sustainable development. Trained in Permaculture Design and Ecovillage Development, Alfusainey is the operations director at Sandele Foundation, where he oversees innovative projects in briquette making and compost production. His IT expertise was pivotal in the establishment of the People’s Coast Ecovillage Network, which proposes a transformative development model for the coastal zone from Carfontine, Senegal to Kachuma, Gambia. This network places communities at the heart of development, addressing ecological challenges, fostering social and economic opportunities, creating long-term wealth and employment, and promoting regional cooperation. Currently serving as a network secretary, Alfusainey is also a key figure in the NextGEN Africa leadership. Join us as we explore his journey in conservation, restoration, and organic farming, and learn how he’s driving the Ecovillage movement forward in the Gambia. Interview Eva: Hello everyone. Today we are joined by Alfu. Alfu, I’d love to just let you introduce yourself. How did you get here? Who are you? What are you participating in? Alfusainey: Yeah, my name is Alfusainey. I’m currently living in Kachu, The Gambia, which is in West Africa. Yeah, I’ve been working with the Sandele Foundation for nearly seven years. I’m getting into the eighth year now. Eva: How did I get involved with the Sandele Foundation and the People’s Coast Ecovillage Network? Alfusainey: I first started working with them as a volunteer. I started volunteering as an IT assistant and to support the whole Ecovillage movement within the Gambia using my IT skills, helping preparing flyers, taking photographs, and publishing it into the social media platforms. At the same time, I was also helping the work on the Sandele Foundation and running their website. And yeah, several other activities led to me becoming a fundamental figure, I would say, in the whole movement, where some of the members have seen me as somebody that can lead some of the organizational activities and projects. And so when these projects came, I found myself as somebody that was designated by the People’s Coast Ecovillage Movement to participate in the COP project by them. And so I was selected and I more of lead the workshops, also reporting back to the quota and the like. And so yeah, I found myself and that’s how I came to become within the People’s Coast Ecovillage Network. Eva: What were some of the favorite workshops that you’ve gotten to lead through your participation in the Resilience Project? Alfusainey: Especially when we, at the beginning, very beginning, when we started, we have a map of where the Ecovillage Movement or the peak in People’s Coast Ecovillage Movement, where it started and where it has gotten into. That was really amazing. We had the team coming up and talking about things that we never realized were as important and in fact, key parts to having a functional body. Things like the establishment of the Sandele EcoRetreat by the British couple, Gerry and Maurice. And also looking at how much each and every one of us from a community point of view contributed in an impactful way that we didn’t, we’re not able to realize. So that the history mapping was really, really a workshop that still holds a piece as a memory for me. It was really exciting bringing people together, sharing and mapping where we came from or where we want to go to and some of the challenges that we have overseen over the years. So that was one of the workshops. I think the most, not really the most recent, but one of it was having the, doing the horizons and that was really also a memorable one. Talking about the impacts that will happen in the future and what is already happening or what is driving all those activities and challenges within the community. So that is one. We also had to talk about tipping points. Where are we, where do we see the problems, the climate crisis, where are we seeing it the next 10 years, in the next 20 years, the solutions that we are trying to apply or where do we really see those solutions? What are the surprises that will be coming out of those solutions that will impact the solutions that we are trying to apply in a negative or positive way? So those workshops were really exciting and then it kind of gives you a measure of how much of an impact from a personal point of view and also from a community point of view. As a group, the impact was also measured. So those workshops really helped a lot. Eva: When you were asked to participate in the Resilience Project, I’m curious if you brought any expectations with you. Were there any lessons or messages that you really wanted to bring from your work at the People’s Coast and in your home community to this wider network? Alfusainey: We wanted all of the messages, especially from the People’s Coast point of view. It’s more talking about our challenges as an institution, also as an organisation. But what I realised, in fact, what the group initially thought what the project would be, it ended up becoming something more of, in fact, giving us the platform to actually analyse and become the solutions to some of the challenges that we were already facing. For example, we at the People’s Coast Ecovillage Network, we did have some separation in terms of connectivity with the GEN movement itself for nearly one year or two. One of our great partners that we had, or the most approachable person that we had within the GEN itself was Kosha Joulbert. And we haven’t had that contact since she left. And so we are relying a lot with talking to Sonita and the like. So the lack of connectivity between GEN and GEN Africa to the peak and ecovillage movement. And you also had several other reasons for that. It’s just not about Kosha. We also have a transition phase where, and we are still in the transition phase also, where we have the pioneers of the ecovillage movement in the Gambia with Jerry and Maris, also not having so much activity within the Gambia anymore. And so all those things we want to really say, how can we re-establish the relationship between People’s Coast and the ecovillage movement in the outside world. And so, in fact, we realized that is a message we wanted to pass out. But also with this project, we were able to just not do that. We’re able to, in fact, set out and actually better analyze what our position will be within the whole Global Ecovillage Network and the whole wide world and how we can actually protect and also continue operating as a network within the Gambia and be important to the community. So those are some of the messages we really wanted to get out of there. And our expectation, we have to say, is met in a way that we never thought it will be. Eva: That’s very nice to hear. I’m very grateful for this project to really be able to integrate all of the regions and the regional representatives into the structure. I think it’s really been important. And I also think it’s very important to recognize and honor the transition that a lot of the movement is in right now between more of these old pioneer, pivotal people and the rise of the new generation. I see you’re also participating in NextGEN Africa. Would you like to speak at all to your experiences there? Alfusainey: Yeah, I mean, NextGEN Africa, I think I got into the group in 2019, yeah, 2018, 2019. I became part of the interim executive position to kind of find ways of coordinating NextGEN Africa into becoming a more established organization. And so we have been organizing meetings and also organizing online workshops. Unfortunately, some of the challenges that NextGEN Africa has is also mainly because we lack resources in having to have one-on-one meeting sessions. And also the team is so diverse. And also, you know, we are not living in one location. Some of them are in Ghana, so in Nigeria, Cameroon, Portugal and the like. So that lack of connection, it really disturbs the operations of the NextGEN Africa organization itself. And so those are some of the challenges we have. We’re still trying to find ways of really channeling our energy in a way that we can still have a functional body that is yet impactful, not just regional, but in the whole continent, Africa. At the same time, on an individual point of view within each community, each individual that’s part of NextGEN to be impactful in your own country. But it has been beautiful. I’ve been able to meet Charles, who sadly passed and has been a huge loss for NextGEN Africa. We have the likes of Crystal and, you know, you have Mercy. All those people I have really not known, I haven’t met in person, but through the calls that we have, we have been able to learn from each other and inspire each other, take ideas from each other that we try to implement within our own community. And so that has been beautiful. We have been able to open up a channel on a WhatsApp kind of group where we have many Ecovillage, young Ecovillage people, young Ecovillage lovers that really want to become or establish Ecovillage within their own communities to join up into that group and perhaps share their work. In 2020, we had an Ecovillage award program where we gave some young inspiring ideas within Africa here and to send in their ideas. And then later on, we gave them prizes to support their own projects. So that’s some of the activities that we have done. We are wanting to continue moving on. And obviously, as I said, the passing of Charles really disturbs us. And so we need to find ways of replacing and also giving, hopefully giving demand to young Ecovillages within Africa to continue their work. Eva: Have you learned anything through your process with the Resilience Project that has helped this connectivity, both between GENAfrica and the global movement and NextGENAfrica and the global movement? Alfusainey: On a personal point of view, I feel like just learning from what other people are doing from outside and the way they are trying to use, even though the distance, I would say, as I just said, one of the bigger challenges is that how we can still be impactful for the youth that are living. And we are hoping that we will pick all those things, the ideas that other people from Brazil and from Findhorn, Sieben Linden and some of the ideas and the results that they have been able to have from certain projects that they are running. Those ideas, we feel like are suitable for our end here, and we can still implement them. So those are some of the things we are able to learn from them. And I feel like it just rejuvenates the whole movement within the Gambia here. In fact, as I’m talking on Friday, the 24th to the 26th, we are having another Ecovillage gathering within the region here, and that we will be having an Ecovillage gathering, and we’ll be talking about some of the challenges and using things like the horizon to kind of map out some of the solutions that we could be able to start implementing and set out plans for just not this year, but in the following year as a whole group. And so it gives a new starting point, as I just also said earlier, that we are in a transition phase as an organization. So it gives us the opportunity to also connect to other partners within Africa here. We have Mr. Mugove, and that we know that he’s doing some certain work within Zimbabwe, and also knowing that Mercy, who’s an exemplary member, who lives in Zimbabwe, finding ways of partnering and working together, and we can be able to perhaps use those people to come and train people here within the community in permaculture techniques or more of a project management. So those are some opportunities that the Resilience Project has really given to us, more of a networking point of view for us. It’s also given us the skills, like workshops, where we’ll be able to analyze, talk about the problems that we have, even though in fact already, as the people’s goals, we have already mapped out some of those things in the quarter, start to use those things again, and also use it as a study and go around the community and talk about these things and tell us if they don’t agree or they do agree, how can we move forward. That’s really impactful from the Resilience Project, is that it just gives us an opportunity to really increase our capacity in terms of intellect. Eva: Lovely, you are invited today to share your story and experiences with your project, and also in relation to the problems with sand mining that you are facing. I would love to just open and let you begin to tell the story, and I will chime in with questions to help steer us deeper. Alfusainey: One of the major challenges that the People’s Coast Equipment consists of 13 communities, and all those communities are within the southern end of Senegal and the Gambia, and they’re all around the coastline, so therefore they share the challenges, similar challenges in terms of environment and social. And in the environment, one of the challenges is that we are having lots of coastal erosion, that’s obvious because of the climate change. We are having more water runoff into the ocean, so the coastal erosion, we can’t really stop it right now. When in the early 2000s, 2003-2004, and five, the Gambia started really seeing the results of climate change, where some of the lodges, some of the hotels within the coastline started, their fences that are near the water started to be destroyed by the water, and so we had high waves coming in, high tides, and all those kind of things. And when those things happened, the government intervened, and they brought huge amounts of rocks and just, you know, spread around the coastal area, but they can’t do it in the whole coastline of the Gambia. The kilometers between Kachu, which is the last community in the Gambia, to where Banjul is, is huge, nearly a stretch of more than like 100 kilometers or more, and so you can have the government really throwing rocks everywhere. And so with the communities that where we are, which is 13 communities, having coastal erosion itself is a big problem. We realize that the government is wanting to push more on sand mining, and so they continually came into the communities and then forcefully pushes the community gardeners and farmers, women farmers, away from their farms and using those sand for infrastructural development. And even though there have been measures that have been set on boundaries where the mining needs to end, we realize in starting from 20 to 2010 that those boundaries and those measures that were set out where mining needs to end and it needs to be responsible, the mining companies were not respecting it, and so they started digging deep down six foot under and up to the level where they started getting into onto the water table. And that is not helpful because what is just not moving the women wouldn’t be the problem that they are creating. And the other problem they are creating is that the communities might not be able to exist anymore because then the small stream of sand that they are living between the mined quarries and where the ocean is just less than 20-25 meters apart, a very small strip of sand within an area of like 27 kilometers, and they are also digging deep down under. And so when we have a storm and the water might just come into those quarries and perhaps also affect the community more. We are in a situation where we realize that if you’re going to continue to let the government continue giving license for mining to happen, then it’s at the cost of the communities and the indigenous and not on to the whole country. And so that has been a big problem. And when that happened, we had one of the communities where I live in Kachuma, we actually stood against the sand mining within our own community because we already saw that the mining companies are not respecting the boundaries and the agreements that they have with the Department of Geology. And so we just stood like young men stood out. We had one of the great fallen men, I would say we call him Habib Ture, was one of our leaders. He stood out and said this can’t happen. We can’t allow another sand mining company to come into our community knowing what they have already done and what they are doing in other communities around the country and around the coastline. And so in 2016, we stood against the sand mining and we had 33 young men from the community that were locked up in jail for two weeks just for protecting the sand that we have within the coastline of Kachu. And so when that happened, took the government by surprise that young men and young people and in fact a whole community can stand against us. And mind you, this was during a regime within the Gambia that is, we call it a dictatorship, very brutal. And so the president that was there had so much power that he normally has it his way. But the people of Kachu just refused and said, you know what, we are not going to allow the even though the company that is coming here is in fact having relations with the former president. And so the youths of Kathu stood against it and they were locked up for two weeks. We had a court case where in fact later on the president and the government did let the young men, let the three young men, let them go. When they came back after a week, we saw the trucks coming back into the community. But what we realized that was that the elderly women and Alcalo, who was the community leader, went on to have conversations at the resolution to let go of the young men and also to say to the government, you know what, you can have some little sand to particularly use it for a certain project that you guys wanted, but it just, that’s the only sand that we can give. And so the trucks came in, took the amount of sand that they wanted and went with it. And so the beautiful thing about the story is that after that incident happened, we actually had more uprise from other communities standing against the mining of sand within their own communities. And that was so beautiful. And the People’s Course Ecovillage Movement was in the middle of this. Most of the men that were trained, the participants that were trained in some of our Ecovillage Development Education courses were within those communities and actually said, you know what, we have seen other communities, a community like Kachuma standing against it, we can do the same. And the result was not the same, but it was impactful that the young people started to realize that they can also stand up for what is good and also stand up for the environment and also talk about the environment in a good way. And so as I’m talking in fact today, now the community of Kachu and the community of Gunjur, which is also next to Kachu, have stopped all mining activities by the government. We stopped it completely and we took it back into our own hands. Say, you know what, this sand belongs to the community. And if it’s going to be mined, it needs to benefit the community in a way, but also just not in a way. We need to mine irresponsibly, thinking about the coastal erosion that is already happening. And so that’s where we are. And the sand mining within Kachuma, I have to say, it does have a history. Before 2016 mining happened, in the early 2000s, there was sand mining from the First Republic. And when that happened, by then, you know, the population within Kachu was not much. Also the population in the Gambia was not much. And the infrastructure development demands were not much. So that government really did mine responsibly. In fact, the old places that were mined, in fact, have regenerated in a way that the community is benefiting. Those places now serve as birdwatching sites. So you don’t want the government to, in fact, come back again and disturb those environments. So that’s the fight. We do know that also that the fight is a continuous one, because lately in 2021, 2022, they have been another sand mining company that has approached the government and also came into the community, started bribing community elders, so they can give them the go-ahead to mine the place. And thanks to the people’s support and also some of the members within the community of Kachuma and outside communities did come together and try to facilitate community awareness meetings where all the community came out and, you know, started fighting against this and saying it wouldn’t happen here, whether you are bribing the elderly or not, they don’t have the final say. Whenever we are going to decide, we have to decide as a community. And so they are still in negotiation with the community to find ways of mining the sand. The community as a whole has agreed that, you know, when the sand is not going out of the community, we’re going to mine, we’re going to mine to develop our own community. And also we have ways and certain places that we are going to mine, paying attention to the coastal erosion that is already happening. So that’s where we are in terms of the sand mining that is happening within the People’s Coast. Eva: What an incredible story. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I have taken so many notes on different themes that really stood out to me. One of the most recent, I think, is an extremely powerful example for the network, but how communal and group decision making is stronger. I think this is something that sees a lot of controversy, especially in the Western world for the length of time it takes. But really to say, wow, no, you can’t bribe our elders because they don’t make the decision for the community. We make the decision together. Alfusainey: It’s so beautiful, yet so confusing a bit. In fact, as I’m talking about, group decision making is what everybody wants. Those are the structures that were in the communities, perhaps in the olden days. The people, when certain developments need to take place in the community, you need to call for a guidance. So those kind of principles within the communities are being forgotten. People are just not going back to those things. And the young men within the community, knowing that in terms of good leadership, in terms of good development, it needs to entail everybody’s participation. And so that’s what we are calling for. There is a bit of confusion where our elderly personnel within the community and the elders are the ones that have seen times where people have been decided in a general group, but they are actually not wanting to use those routes and wanting to just confine the decisions within a certain smaller group and not using it as a community. Whilst the youth within the communities who have not seen yesterday, but do learn about what happened yesterday, we want that still to continue. We want to have a participation of everybody in terms of decision making. And so that’s a little bit difficult. And those are some of the certain societal conflicts that we have within our communities that the elderly want to just confine their decisions within their own group. And perhaps if certain decisions come in, certain developments and some benefits come in, it goes directly into their pockets. And so we don’t want that. And so the conflicts, majorly within the communities in Kachu, in Gunju, in Sambuya, and all these communities that I’m calling are all part of the People’s Coast Ecovillage Network are all the same. They are similar. It’s just the elderly against the youth in terms of development. When development comes in, even if it’s good, everybody needs to participate. And so those conflicts are still there. We do understand that as a People’s Coast Ecovillage Network, and we try our best to find ways of moving in a way that is going to be respectable to the elderly, and also try to facilitate activities. Encourage the young men and the young persons that are within the network to actually use those kind of approaches, peaceful resolutions, respectful ways of approach, considering the elderly contribution to the communities. Inasmuch as we want development to happen, and we also actually don’t want bribery to happen, we also have to recognize that the elderly do have wisdom. They have been there before or they do have experience. And so therefore we need to find ways of respecting ways of approaching them. And so those are some of the things that the challenge that we have and the People’s Coast Ecovillage Network have been trying to facilitate to their members. Eva: I see this pattern of intergeneration, I don’t want to call it conflict, but differences emerging in a lot of spaces within my life at the that keeps coming back into conversations. It’s just very interesting. Alfusainey: We actually have never foreseen it coming when the people’s cause was setting up, because in fact when the people’s cause was setting up, it’s the elderly that actually went ahead before all of us were gathered and you know as a community as young men and taking up the training and the EDE certification and the permaculture, before we actually knew that happened it was the elderly that actually brought in those kind of developments and so in fact they signed the accord that they want the cartoon to transition into an ecovillage and so when we set up the People’s Coast Ecovillage Network after the trainings in 2014 and 2015, we actually thought one of the biggest stakeholders in this whole journey would be the elders and so we go two years, three years further, they realize in fact the biggest challenge is to overcome, maybe globally also that’s the case. Eva: And one piece of your story stood out to me as a really beautiful example of how these generations can work together in a very supporting way. You said the youth were the activists, they were out there protesting, they got sent to jail and then it was the elders that came in and through storytelling and their position of wisdom were able to argue with the government to get the youth released and then the sand miners out of the region and I think this is a very nice balance between the generations to really use the fire and the passion of the youth to drive things forward and then bring in the wisdom and the storytelling of the elders to really cement that and ground that in the earth. Alfusainey: And so what is happening within also the within our Kachu, I normally call Kachu because it’s one of the more active in terms of community conversation and dialogue, what is happening is that within the youths we also have differences within ourselves as youths. We have some that want to stick by the rule of law where you know what if somebody is bribed okay you need to go to directly to the police report and get into court and have somebody prosecuted and when you do that you are actually provoking another young person within the network and within the group because it’s either their father or their uncle that you are about to prosecute. And so they will also prefer a different approach where it’s more of a community dialogue in terms of cancelling out those people that are bribed and not giving them the opportunity and also the platform for them to actually be able to perform their bribery and scandalous ideas. And so those kind of approaches, those two differences is what is actually working around within the communities. We want to have dialogue and settle out conflict and the difference within the community and you have also young men that just want to use the rule of law and say you know what we need to do this otherwise it wouldn’t work. But then that is now us moving from a community point of view into a modernized way of approaching the whole challenge and if you do that you are creating so much chaos that perhaps later on you will not be able to resolve because then the people that you are working with actually don’t like, just not don’t like, but don’t think that that’s the right approach. And so those differences and those kind of conversations are what we also have within the young people in the communities that are part of our network. Eva: Amazing. You also spoke a bit to, you might have to help me piece this together with the story, to how communities were benefiting to sustainably harvested sand. Yeah. Is it true and can you speak a bit more to this? Alfusainey: Yeah, so what we are doing now within the certain communities, what we want to do, we have certain portions of the area within the coastline that is allocated and we know that is viable for mining but also the mining needs to be responsible and so the community itself is saying that the sand that we’ll be mining is not enough to supply to the whole Gambia, the whole country and therefore we are going to confine it into the development of our own community and so it’s just going to be within the community and that we know that it’s going to be enough for anybody that wants to do a modernized type of building and so we are going to stick with that and so therefore that’s what we are doing. The approach is that the sand mining companies have also derived is that they’re not going to land owners, they’re going to individuals and families that own lands within these communities and actually giving them a huge amount of money and saying that you know what we want to mine your land, that’s the approach that they’re using and so therefore we have another problem where the land ownership problem comes in where we say okay all land belongs to the indigenous communities, the lands are owned by the families and so if the families own those land then it means that any mining company can approach there. We already know that that is happening in Gunjur a neighboring community where two families have been approached and have given their consent for their land to be mined and so those are some of the challenges that we have and in a way it’s not sustainable but those are certain benefits that families within the communities are getting and not as the community as a whole. In Kachu, the community as a whole are not benefiting in a way that they are now in charge, the community is fully in charge of the mining places and also they know and they have set standards of how much depth can you mine and how much space can you mine, how much sand and where is the sand going to be used. So those standards are being used and now I think basically those are the sustainable approaches that really I wanted to use until new technologies are implemented in terms of building. Eva: Just wondering if there’s any support that you need to make these policies accepted regionally? Alfusainey: Right now we started the People’s Coast Ecovillage Network. Some of the solutions and ideas that we had over the last four years is to start running a restoration project and so majorly what I’m just saying is that we can do a lot in terms of the policies that are already there but we believe that if the land is there and not being used then the government will then have the opportunity to say you know what this land is not benefiting the community in one way or another and therefore we are going to come and use it and we are going to just mine it because in fact the sand needs to benefit the whole country and so we want to run away from that by running restoration projects to restore some of the already mined places within the coastline and so the government that if you’re going to do mining you actually also fund restoration projects and actually also run restoration projects in this way and in this manner. If there’s any way that a person is going to help or an organization is going to help we’re going to really want to run a restoration project where we saw and implement a pilot project to restore some of the one place or just a certain area of land within the already mined places kind of a sample of what is possible after mining and not like we want to promote mining but already places are mining as I’m saying that other places have reached the water table and so the government have no other choice but to leave those places alone. I have said we have taken footages pictures and videos of this already mined place we shared them online we talked about them online we went to the government officials to say you know this what is happening you guys need to stop what you’re doing you should not do it in any other community but then after visiting and then having agreements you don’t have a sand mining company coming in the next following year after the rainy season they come and do the mining so they don’t agree they don’t hold on to their words they’re just in for the money and they’re going to take any amounts of bribery just to get and they can give any amount of bribe just to get the sand and so we just want and as well you fight against sand mining we also want to find ways and implement solutions which the government can actually also adapt to and do some restoration of already mined place in Kachu in the first mining that happened in the first republic it has been bad but then the place started itself naturally and so those places are now one of the leading places for bird watching to nearly a thousand tourists coming to do some bird watching and we have young members from the communities that are bird watchers and also having their living from it and so it’s not too bad but if you’re going to do it and you do it responsibly and the place is able to be restored it can actually also benefit the community in other regards amazing is there anything else you would like to share about sand mining before I transition us a bit I would also really like to hear about the local workshops that you’re running and how you see this contributing to community resilience. Alfusainey: About the sand mining, I did talk about the pioneers who were running the Sandele eco-retreat so the eco-retreat that they were running was built from earth blocks the earth block uses what they call in the compressed stabilized earth blocks and the system was gotten from Auroville I think it has to be in Asia or India and so that techniques were was brought into the Gambia and they constructed the ecology that itself as a solution to end the sand mining within the Gambia is there the previous government started a funding of young people to go outside to study they came back and were weren’t able to afford the machines and all those kind of equipments to run those projects but that is picking up a little but we have to say that thanks to Jerry and Maris who also are the pioneers of the ecovillage movement with the Gambian People’s Coast thanks to them those kind of solutions are being implemented proudly people’s cause also have contributed in running that program and that is that has been beautiful and we have to say that we want that to continue we want to train more young men to be able to know how to do the compressed stabilized blocks and take that up as an employment build their skills and able to transform the construction system within the Gambia into more eco-friendly ways we hope that it continues on because sand is it’s really scarce in the Gambia now in fact what is happening the government has started doing a dredging in the capital city of Gambia Ganjul they’re dredging sand from the ocean and that’s major because the community within the coastline are refusing for their sand to be mined so now they’re trying to dredge and also selling that sand when that sand that they’re dredging is finished they will want to come back they will turn their eyes back to the small sand that’s left in these communities when that is finished they will then need to find new systems and new ways of building and so we think that we are further ahead we foresee those problems and we are hoping that we will be able to train more young men and to prepare to when the demand of more sustainable construction systems and then they will just take the market into their own hands. Eva: Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing all of this. I think there’s a lot to learn from your story. Would you like to speak at all to how has the resilience project impacted how communities are responding to the sand mining crisis? Alfusainey: So the the workshop has also mapping of the history of the ecovillages and also mapping out the solution and the challenges all those mapping works of that we did have our members especially five of us have been able to run and host this workshop because what the other thing that has happened is that we needed to transform some of those materials into the local language because most of the members within the community here are not better equipped in the english language so you need to speak mandinka a lot so most of the programs and works that we have been hosting have been in mandinka the local language and so therefore in order for you to be able to do that you yourself need to be better equipped in terms of understanding what the workshops entails and some of the things that need to be said out there the questions that need to be asked and also then translating that and so that has helped us as a team and it helps us to be able to actually run or the workshop within the People’s Coast as I said by next week we’re having another workshop not a gathering a complete garden where we have other equal networks or organizations and so the team will be the one hosting that gathering and we’ll be able to share all the things that we have learned from the eco bridge Resilience Project. We haven’t been able to talk about the sand mining in so much detail these two years last year and this year we’re able to write and understand the problems deep deep deep deep problems that are causing the sand mining and certain other challenges that we’ve had the sand mining is one but for example as I said we never realized that when the sand mining came the women just going out of the those plots of land where these are used for gardening actually did impact them in a societal point of view and just not economic point of view and so thanks to the project that we are able to analyze those things and understand it’s just not the economics of the problems you also have social aspect of the problem and so that has really helped us and we are able to have a deep dive and to analyze and talk about the problems that that are facing our communities thanks to the project and so in fact during the project also we have been able to lay out plans we are now talking about wanting to establish an ecovillage center where we’ll be able to to take more to have more capacity building workshops so that plan did not come out until when we started having the workshop we started talking about you know “what do you ambition for 2050?”, “how do you see your community in 2050?” and so those are some of the things that came out of our plans is that we want to have an ecovillage center where we train young people within the communities and continue having the same kind of impact that we really wish to have but haven’t been able to achieve it and so we are hoping by having an established ecovillage center we’ll be able to take more people and also you know like having model systems where we are able to analyze what are the relationship between how does our society and ecology really relate that has been amazing what really causes the society to act in a certain way towards the ecology and perhaps what kind of benefit do they get from the ecosystem and all those kind of things so through the Resilience Project we are able to get all those kind of knowledge analysis we’re able to also ground ourself and also kind of analyze ourself from a personal point of view and a community point of view on “what our strengths are?”, “where are we more resilient?” and “why are we more resilient?”, “how can we become more resilient towards the challenges that face us in the times of need?”. Thanks to the project we have been able to get some of these answers for ourselves now and so basically that’s that’s some of the things some of the works that we have been able to run we have been able to get data on we already have flip charts but we are yet to in fact have printed out all this information that is already type in the computers and be able to perhaps share it to other more people within our communities so those are some benefits. I can talk about all day talking about some of the benefits and thanks to them given to run the project workshops are not easy to run within the communities, you know, you need to cook for the people, pay for the venue, you also need to find of incentivizing the person that is going to be or the persons that are going to be running the daily activities and also doing the typing and all those kind of things. I think the GEN support was in a major way it’s very rare that we have this kind opportunities where you’re in a program and again at the same time have some financial incentives this has really supported us and we are hoping that this will really take us far especially for the information that we have been able to gather for the last one year and a half or so. Eva: Absolutely this interplay between the social and ecological dimension specifically and then how one really affects the other is one of the patterns I’ve really loved hearing about during this podcast. I don’t know if you have any or just one specific example of how different dimensions have impacted each other? Alfusainey: The elderly had ways of living and they had this consciousness that you know what for for us to really to be in this community in this kind of environment we need to live in a certain way and so they have principles that guided the whole community there was this ability where you wouldn’t cut a tree unnecessarily. If you’re going to cut a tree you wouldn’t cut the whole tree. If you needed firewood you’re going to just cut branches and you also have places where you’re going to cut out branches and so because the society has started moving away from the community point of view into a more civilized point of view where you have a government overlooking and actually governing the communities instead of governing the whole country and so society started moving away from that from just a community point of view and now we are looking at the government to actually make those decisions for us and so majorly because the societal change in terms of knowledge in terms of civilizations and modernization we have moved away from the community principles to a more a more diverse point of view and so what affects the coastline it doesn’t affect the inland communities and so those kind of mistakes that’s what right now we have realized thanks to the project we actually realized that those kind of mistakes really happen and so the society is shifting in terms of ideas in terms of behavior. We also have young people that actually don’t see their communities anymore. What they see is the outside world most of the young men within within Kachu within within the People’s Coast Ecovillage Network they want to move out they want to move out from their own communities and therefore they they are ready to do anything to move out from the communities and therefore if a person doesn’t want to live in a certain environment they wouldn’t protect the environment and so those kind of thoughts are actually some of the things that are really really impacted at the ecological point of view and but at the same time we are able to to be exposed to the outside world thanks to people that really love ecotourism so we had trees we have a very good flora we had the beach we had very good beautiful sand dunes that actually invited people from outside they came without their own knowledge they came without their own wealth their own characters their own ways of living into the communities but majorly they are attracted by the ecology and so we have been using that as a source of employment we have lots of lodges within the coastline and we just they’re just not normal they’re ecologdes and thanks to that people have been able to sell produce they’re able to take people for guided tours to look at the the communities to take them around but majorly the thoughts of of the young person have changed and are actually looking outside of their own communities they’re not thinking about protecting what is within their own community. We have a generation where young men and women are neglecting their community ecology and therefore the ecology is not being considered and so if you are not considering the ecology that has been actually providing a living for your parents and for yourself and paid for your school fees when you don’t take care of that then it doesn’t take care of you and it doesn’t benefit you anymore. So that is major, for me that is the connection. Let’s say, for example, one of the things that is happening is that the young men are using the the Atlantic Ocean trying to get to Spain and once they get to Spain, how they got there is by selling their land a portion a piece of their land and they found this this journey and then whatever did they earn they actually send it back they either come back or send back to their parents right but their parents are not they are not living in conditions that are right because the land that they have sold out is not being occupied by an outsider and an outsider that doesn’t really care about the environment doesn’t care about the ecology and the way and the standards that the coastal communists live by and therefore they bring in with their own kind of impact that is negative. It’s so, it’s so so deep. Thanks to the project we are able to think deeper and you know able to analyze it from a different angle than we studied before. Eva: Thank you so much for your incredible story and all of your work also as a bridge between these generations. I think this is a very important thing that is a pattern throughout your episode and before we end I’m just curious if you have any ways that the youth of Africa can engage with NextGEN that people can engage with the People’s Coast Community but trying to draw some of this connectivity that we identify as a challenge at the beginning of our conversation as an outcome of this project in this podcast. Alfusainey: There are ways of improving the resources that we already have we need to find and motivate people that are willing to stay back in their own countries and actually also kind of support them to establish some of the ideas that are there within their own community we need to do that in a major way and for me the focus needs to be on that and so that’s therefore I think every young person that is on the journey towards implementing ideas need to be supported and be actually used as a sample as a measuring tool as an inspiration for other communities outside I think that is majorly that is what what is lacking and therefore projects or organizations struggle and struggle and struggle and then kind of have a breakthrough but it’s not really a breakthrough because the support is not enough and I actually think now that’s what we need and the support will be financial but I actually think it’s just not the finances it should be more on the intellectual point of view we need more education we need to really educate people the young person what sustainable development is so them ideas that they can actually be able to implement within their own communities have positive impact within their own communities and also into their own life for me that is the way forward for anybody that is really considering of taking the sustainable development goals further. Eva: Thank you so much. Are you open to being a contact for people that want to get in touch and support with education, with implementing some of these practices in their communities? Would you mind if I listed your contact in our show notes? Alfusainey: Yeah. I’m really open to to getting people to know about us we also want people to contact us work together with us there’s a way forward for us I believe we need to form a network of organizations within Africa and outside of Africa within the whole global level and so we will want to share our contact with everybody and you know everybody can contact us we have a lot of things we have women cooperatives that are happening around we have uh we have composting we have community gardens that are running around we also have Ecovillage Networks that are coming up and there are so many other excellent things to do within the People’s Coast Ecovillage now and we are really open to work with people. Eva: Thank you so much for joining us and sharing a bit more of your story. It’s been an honor talking with you. Alfusainey: Thank you very much, Eva. Outroduction Join us again next week, as we continue the conversation over what it means to be resilient in our time of deepening polycrisis. While you wait for the next episode of Community Resilience, we invite you to explore more about the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 degree project by visiting us online at ecovillage.org/resilience.

Introduction Welcome back to Community Resilience, a podcast created in collaboration with the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project, facilitated by the Global Ecovillage Network. I’m your host, Eva Goldfarb, inviting you to gather around the fire as we explore resilience adaptation and transformation in our time of deepening polycrisis. Today we speak to Rob Wheeler, the Ecovillage Resilience Project Partner for the Farm Ecovillage and Education Center in Tennessee, USA. In addition to his work locally, Rob has participated actively in the UN’s primary conferences and processes on climate and sustainable development for the past 25 years. He is the North American representative on the Facilitating Group for Action for Sustainable Development, which works with the UN on the Global Week for Action for Achieving the SDGs. Rob serves on the Advisory Council for the Ecosystem Restoration Communities and is the founder and CEO of Sustainably Wise, which will be a web portal to assist all interested people and stakeholder groups to achieve the SDGs and to transition as rapidly as possible to a fully sustainable world. Rob is also the Global Ecovillage Network’s main representative in the United Nations and a newly elected board member. I hope you enjoy diving into the projects of the Farm Ecovillage and finding the gems of wisdom in Rob’s storytelling. Interview Eva: All right. Welcome, Rob Wheeler. Thank you so much for being with us today. Rob: My pleasure. Happy to do it. Eva: Rob, I wanted to start by giving you an opportunity of sharing a bit how you came to this podcast today. I know it’s probably a very long story, but in short, how you came to know The Farm Ecovillage where you’re living and how you came to the Ecovillage movement and thus this project. Rob: This goes all the way back to my love for the Earth and living here on planet Earth. When I was a kid, I was in the scouts and we spent a lot of time out in nature, camping, canoeing, hiking, backpacking, and I just fell in love with the Earth. It’s like one of the most wonderful things that you could do is be out there in nature and see the beauty that’s there. Not all of nature is that way. There’s plenty of else that goes on, but there’s certainly that element of it. When I went to college, I moved up to Humboldt County in Northern California and started doing gardening, recycling, studying solar energy. It was a time of free love, peace, and brown rice. I had lived just 50 miles south of San Francisco and the whole hippie thing was intriguing and very exciting to me. I started studying environmental education in college, took Native American studies. I taught in resident outdoor schools and the Youth Conservation Corps with high school kids. In around 1970 or 71, this fellow came to my university at Humboldt State, Peter Caddy from the Findhorn community, which is where the headquarters from the Golden Eagle Village has been and the founding of it. I had the wonderful opportunity to go there in 2015 for our 20th anniversary. Peter came and he talked to us about the creation of Findhorn and how they got guidance from spirit. He had plans to do something else. He was told to go down this road to do something and he drove down into this huge pile of manure and compost. He’s like, oh my God, this is exactly what we need for our garden. He picked it all up. His wife and his good friend that they lived with there, it was out in the dunes. There was nothing there. It was abandoned Air Force base and spirit told them one day to go there. That started the community. So Peter told us all these stories and I said, oh my God, this is incredible. They were given guidance and they grew these incredibly beautiful, big, sweet, juicy produce where there was nothing but sand before. So I took a workshop from Peter and I followed that story of the development of the Findhorn community. Then Monday Night Class came out as a book from Steven Gaskin, who was the founder of the farm with several hundred hippies that drove across the country. Again, this is the time of the Back to the Land movement. Humboldt County was a place in California where there were still wild lands. We would go to the beach and it was free love. We all took off our clothes and jumped in the ocean and laid in the sun. It was a wonderful time to be alive on the planet with a lot of other young people. So, you know, the Back to the Land was very intriguing to me. I had a friend that bought a couple acres out on the river and we would go there in the summer and have a potluck cookout, work on his homestead, etc. I had a wonderful composting toilet. We have one in the farm community where I live now at the Ecovillage Training Center. It could be 35 degrees out and I’ll go outside to the compost toilet rather than use the one in the house because I love it so much. All of that nurtures our bamboo grove, and the bamboo grove goes into the biochar pit. The biochar goes into our compost piles, which then goes into the gardens themselves. Last year, I taught at the farm school. I was just here for a couple of days and they sent my resume to the farm school. The farm school hired me three days before school started and said, we need you, come and teach. When I went there, they said, we’d like you to teach English with a focus on caring for the earth. I said, how could I not? Eva: What a job offer, beautiful. Rob: Yeah, so I brought the kids down to the Ecovillage Training Center. We made the biochar. We took earlier biochar and spread it with the compost and raked it into the gardens. So as we plant the spring, then that will be ready to go. So what had happened then, after I had done a sustainable community campaign in Santa Cruz where I moved after college, I decided to move back east to get involved with the UN. We had our sustainable community campaign, which was one of the initiatives that came out of the Rio Plus 20 Earth Summit Conference. We did that for five years in Santa Cruz and the 50th anniversary of the UN happened at the same time as the 25th anniversary of Earth Day, which happens to be on my birthday, April 22nd each year. So each year I celebrate with millions of people around the planet. Eva: That’s fitting. Rob: Yeah, so I did a video film festival during the nine weeks for the earth from the 25th Earth Day to the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. And we showed videos throughout that high-end period. But through that process, I saw how the UN is wonderful in some ways, in other ways, it’s somewhat dysfunctional. So I decided I wanted to go back east and get involved at the UN and see if I could help it become a more effective institution. People generally say the UN is a norm-setting institution. It invites governments to do the right thing. But then it’s up to each government whether they’re going to do it or not. And it’s not so good at establishing programs, but it is pretty good at partnership initiatives. So I moved back east and I did get involved with the UN. And one of the first things that happened is I went to a talk on ecovillage development and Albert Bates, the founder of the Ecovillage Training Center at the farm, spoke. And I was like, oh my God, this is wonderful stuff. So I followed through with that. And I got to be good friends with Albert and with some other of the ecovillage organizers who I’m still very good friends with today and started to get engaged with the ecovillage network. And then after COVID happened, it was a time in my life to move. And I wanted to go to an ecovillage community. And I called Albert up and I said, is there any chance that I could come and visit the farm? And he said, well, we’ve had it shut down for two years because of COVID, but we’re just going to start opening up. Why do you want to come here? And I said, well, I’m ready to move and I would need a community. And he said, well, we would love to have you come down and visit and we’ll see if it works out. And so I did. And like I said, I got hired at the school in a month and three days before school started. And so here I am. Eva: Amazing. What a lovely story. Thank you so much for sharing, Robert. Rob: You’re welcome. Eva: Can you help situate us in the world a bit? We have been traveling in this podcast to all the continents. Where are you calling in from today? What is your bioregion? Rob: Planet Earth. So I consider myself a world citizen and that’s my nationality, being a citizen of the Earth. But we live in the United States in Tennessee. Like I said earlier, the community came in 1972, 71. They drove across the country, a caravan of hippies in school buses and vans looking for land and settled in Tennessee. My girlfriend here lives just off the farm where the caravan landed. And a good portion of my time I spent at her place where the caravan came 50 years ago and settled into this community. Within a year, they had bought a thousand acres here. Community expanded to 1500 people within a period of six or eight years. They were growing all their own food, developing all the infrastructure. There was like three buildings here when they arrived and they had to figure out how to do everything. These are city kids from California that migrated to the Haight-Asbury and then decided to be back to the Landers. It’s amazing the community is still here 50 years later. It’s thriving. There’s 230 or so people here. We have 30 kids in the farm school, midwife training center, which is known all over the world, book publishing company. Albert, the director of the farm, has had a number of his books that have also been published by Chelsea Green and are very well known on Biochar and the need to transition to a climate-friendly economy and world. But the book publishing company has 400 books they put out. There’s a number of 30 different businesses here on the farm with only 230 people. Eva: I think The Farm is a wonderful example. It is a very old establishment, a great resource for starting projects. I greatly look forward to getting into a conversation on resilience and seeing what wisdom we can maybe find among the stories. Rob: Well, like I said, I came here in August a year and a half ago after having represented the Golden Eagle Village Network at the UN for the past 20 some years. I was thrilled to be living here. The thing that popularized Steven Gaskin and all these hippies was he did Monday night class at San Francisco University. He soon got 2,000 hippies all came to his talks that he gave on Monday nights. Ever since then on the farm, they’ve done Monday night class or Monday night circle. Right away when I came here, Albert took me there to go to those sessions. We knew the grant application had been approved for the Golden Eagle Village Network and that they wanted 20 communities to join in. So I said to Albert, I said, why don’t we do an introductory thing at Monday night class? And he said, that’s a great idea. So we introduced it at Monday night class and Albert suggested people that should be a part of our coordinating team to do climate resiliency on the farm, people that have been on the land use committee and worked on our trails. We have a trust here, a land trust, 4,000 acres in land trust to preserve the area around the edges of the farm and all the money to purchase the land in perpetuity. So the land will be preserved in the natural area along Swan Creek and the tributaries going into Swan Creek. So it’s Swan Trust. And so some of the people that engaged with the Swan Trust for a couple of decades as well, that are now a part of our coordinating team for the climate resiliency project on the farm. Eva: This is beautiful. How has the team been engaging with the project? You started talking about it briefly, aside from the historical infrastructure like the Swan Trust, how is it going about resilience and community? Rob: Gen Climate Resiliency Project has been now a year and a half. And every three weeks we have meetings of the coordinating team. So I’m one of the representatives from the farm on the global coordinating process that have met. So we have these 20 eco villages that then our representatives all meet every three weeks. And then we’ve had about six community workshops that we’ve done during that year and a half. Our coordinating team meets every two weeks or so to plan for what we’re doing here on the farm. I would have done some things different from the beginning than the coordinating team from Gen does, but no fault of that team. It’s like fantastic what we’ve learned and what we now are ready to share with the world. But I would have liked to start the envisioning process and implementation processes earlier than we did. But I also realized that the farm has been here 50 years and some of these eco villages have only been around for 10 years or they’re much smaller and not as well established as the farm is. So at The Farm, most of our eco infrastructure is handled by The Farm itself. We do have internet access and electricity that comes from off farm. So we do have a number of large solar arrays as well. But otherwise, the water system is ours, the road maintenance and the initial paving came, it belongs to the farm. So we’re pretty far along, but the roads are so old that they need repairs now. And a lot of the roads are still just chert, which is a kind of a mix of gravel and clay that is endemic to this area, this bio region. So we had wanted to pave the roads with biochar. If we’re able to do this, it’ll be one of the first demonstration projects in the United States. You can imagine how much carbon we can sequester with the biochar into the construction materials. That’s one of the best opportunities for demonstrating climate resiliency around the world. And we can be one of those first examples in the US. But when we started the climate resiliency project, the farm was already planning to repave some of the roads to repair where they’ve got what’s called alligator cracking.So you see this maze of lines where it’s cracking and whatever, and it starts to separate. And where we are located, it gets down to freezing and below, we had zero degree Fahrenheit temperature for a week this winter. And it just like the pavement started to bubble up. So there’s about six spots where all the just chunks of pavement coming all loose. So it would have been great if we had been able to do that with biochar already. But it was just this week that Albert sent us an email and said, we’re ready, we can do the demonstration now. But it took till then for the business to be established in the US that could do the work. And in the meantime, we’ve signed a contract with the paving company. So I don’t know what’s going to happen if we’re going to be able to biochar there, that’s going to have to be paved with asphalt. And then we’ll do some of the other spots with the biochar. But we expect to be one of those first in the country. But you know, it would have been good if we had started with visioning and implementation earlier on. So with our community, we’re very interested in regenerative agriculture. But it’s taken us a year and a half to get to the point to where we’re really engaged now with the discussions of what we’re going to do to advance this. But I mean, we have these wonderful projects that are already underway on The Farm. So it’s not the end of the world that took us a year and a half, but I would just sort of like to see it happen sooner. So we’re interested in doing a greenhouse that will be biologically heated from the siding of the greenhouse. We have a large community garden that’s the now biointensive row crops we’re looking into. We have pasture land that needs to be some type of fertilization of it or whatever. So the question is, are we going to do the cheap route, which is chemical fertilizer? Are we going to do biochar with composting and cover cropping and all of that? And those are big questions. We have 230 people. The communities that have 20 or 30 people, it’s even more challenging because you have these wonderful project ideas, and then you don’t have enough people to carry out everything you’re doing. All of humanity needs to make such a huge transition to get to climate resiliency. And so far, the investment capital to do that is limited. So you can’t just go and hire people to do the work that needs to be doing. You have to find those resources somehow or other to make the transition and to raise the capital to make the changes. And that’s for all of humanity. So the extent to which humanity invests in capital investments in the transition is the extent we’ll make the change in time. And we know that here on the farm too. So that’s one of the things that we will be focusing on doing planning is raising capital to make these transitions in a timely manner. We have a blueberry patch, which is like an acre large of nothing but blueberries. And they’ve been here for, I don’t know, three or four decades, and they’re just eight foot tall plants and they’re thriving. We have a food forest that needs a lot of work, 200 trees that have been planted that we have to continue to support the trees thriving and keeping the grass cleared back from it. So many different things have been done. Last year we grew watermelon, I think of all these training centers that we shared with the kids when they came down to do the biochar burn. So this year we have a unity garden that’s two acres in size. It’s all fenced in and ready to go. Now we just need the human power in order to get it to the point where it can be replanted again. I would say a quarter of it has been planted and into row crops and stuff so far, but we need to do the rest of the three quarters of it. So then the question is, how are we going to do that? Where will we get the human power to to do those things? Eva: Let’s see if you get any interested volunteers from this podcast. Rob: Yeah, the food forest came from a university about 40 miles from here where we’re located. They’ve come down a couple of times and helped with the planting of the trees and digging out the holes and adding the nutrients into the soil and preparing where the trees would go. So our watermelon patch this year is going to be done in unity garden and the kids from the farm school will come down. They’ve worked in the food forest as well this year. So it’s been a wonderful project. I just went to get seed for the watermelons yesterday and we found some seeds for 200 pound watermelons. Can you imagine? So because I’ve done the biochar with the compost with where I lived before, chicken manure and horse manure, I was growing 35 or 40 pound watermelons, which is already, you know, it’s like to carry it. Oh, beautiful. Eva: Thank you so much for sharing about your ecologic approach and the decisions between affordability and sustainability that even established communities like the farm are making. It’s really nice to hear you’ve already included some wisdom, but very briefly in the mention of biochar and different methods that you’re using at the farm. I’m wondering if you have an opinion of what the most valuable lesson on resilience that ecovillages could share with the wider world is. Rob: It’s a very good question. It could also be the farm specifically. First, let’s start with the challenges humanity is facing because everyone needs to know this. I mean, it’s so important. Like I said, I represented the Gold League Ecovillage Network at the UN for the last several decades. So I’ve been through these UN processes all throughout that whole time period, but we’re far beyond the carrying capacity of the earth. It would take five earths. If everyone lives like people in North America and Europe live in the other developed countries, we would need five earths just to sustain it. We’re rapidly depleting the natural environment, whether it’s forest, soil, water, and that’s got to change. So UNEP said 10 years ago that we only had 60 years of topsoil left. So now it’s 50 years of topsoil left. I just read this morning that we lose five and a half tons of soil every year, topsoil per acre, five and a half tons per acre. So per hectare, that would be like 15 tons. A ton is 2000 pounds. That’s an enormous amount of topsoil. It’s so valuable. And nature’s processes take an incredibly long time to regenerate soil. I mean, it’s like thousands of years, tens of thousands of years to generate just an inch of soil. We’ve gone from 10 to 15% for the natural environment of humus content in the soil, organic matter in the soil, down to around 2% of organic matter in the soil that we’ve lost because of humanity’s farming practices. I did this for 2015. The Global Ecovillages Network did a webpage on climate resiliency that I helped to develop. And at that time, we said that humans put into the atmosphere as much carbon from farming and from soil degradation and from the degradation of the natural environment as from fossil fuels. So what that means, though, is that we have the opportunity now by restoring nature and by practicing regenerative agriculture practices of drawing that back out. Project Drawdown with Paul Hawkins identified the 100 best practices say that two of the best things you could possibly do to transition to regenerative farming with biochar is equestrian, all the carbon from biochar, which is made from burning any type of wording material without oxygen. When you do that, you get a char which then can be brought into the soil or into construction material. And that sequesters that carbon and keeps it there for thousands or tens of thousands of years. So it’s a wonderful solution. And then the third is the restoration of the natural environment and the forest, which interestingly enough, was a project that I was working with, with Gen people 20 years ago, we went to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 in Johannesburg, 23 of us from the Global Ecovillage Network, which is how I got so well ingrained with the community of all of those going there that were in leadership positions in Gen. During the run up to that from the Fintorn community again, Alan Featherstone, he has a project for regreening the Caledonia forest in Scotland. He was working with Roger Doudna. And Roger knew of me from the Global Ecovillage Network. He said, we have this project, we’re holding conferences on restoring the earth, and we want to invite the UN to do a global decade and a global century of restoring the earth. And the project was called Restoring the Earth. And I said, wow, what a privilege to be able to represent you and to invite the UN to do that. So I did indeed. And at that time, no government supported it whatsoever. But every chance we’ve had at the UN to talk about restoration and nature-based solutions, we have. And in 2015, the UN started supporting this idea of nature-based solutions to address climate change. France at the Paris Climate Summit conference that we were at said, we’re going to use nature-based solutions. And we are going to do a regenerative agriculture project. And France took the lead on it. It’s called the 4 per 1,000 initiative to increase 4 per 1,000 every year in the soil nutrients going back into the soil and organic nature going back into the soil. So now there’s 35 countries that are part of that initiative that France launched there for regenerative agriculture. So in 2019, the governments decided to launch the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. There’s a beautiful strategy plan and every country is now invited to do that. So we seeded that idea in 2002. And then, you know, seeded the idea of nature-based solutions, regenerative organic agriculture through the ecovillage movement. Almost every ecovillage I know has some type of a project to grow their own food, along with eating a vegetarian diet, which now the UN endorses as well. And that was an initiative through the ecovillage network and the hippies around the world saying, the animals don’t want to live the way they live in factory farms. We should be eating a plant-based diet. And most communities have incredibly delicious vegetarian food. And that was one of the reasons I was really happy to move to The Farm. We just, we have a senior luncheon that happens once a month and it’s just the best food that these hippies have been here for 50 years have just made. And many people were our second generations. Now we have third and fourth generations that are living here on the farm, as well as many new people coming that are intrigued by the climate resiliency, regenerative lifestyle that’s been developed here. Eva: Now, I just want to thank you for sharing so much about the resilience you’ve been able to build on a global scale through your work with the UN and GEN. Rob: A lot of the things that have come through ecovillages then get adopted by governments and then the governments bring it to the UN. They don’t like to just blatantly support civil society, but they love to copy what we’re doing. And that’s a civil society at large, not only the ecovillage network. So that’s one thing that we have with the climate resiliency. Now we just received funding notice a month ago that we will get a second phase of a climate resiliency project. So communities will be sharing this with the world and the farm. We’ve been already that we want to be, continue to be a part of the project, focus on implementation and what we’re doing here on The Farm, focus on sharing that with the world and focus on running training programs throughout our bio region and North America. So we can share what we’re doing with others that are interested in climate resiliency. And you were going to ask me another question. Eva: I’m wondering if I can take it in a different direction. So please let me know if you’re not done expressing this one. You mentioned that you live at the farm with multiple generations, and this is something that’s stuck in my brain. I have really enjoyed projects that I visited that have had three, four generations living under the same roof. And for me, it plays to the resilience of a community on a social side. I’m curious what your experience has been living in multi-generational housing and how you see the social resilience of The Farm. Rob: Living in a community has positives and negatives and I don’t think any of us living in these communities want to sugarcoat that, but I mean it’s the same that happens. We’re like a microcosm of the world, you know, but I lived in another community earlier and there were only 25 people here so there were only like 15 to 20 adults and the rest were kids and I said this is like being married to 15 people at the same time. You have the same issues that come up with a couple’s relationship but now 15 people are totally invested in those relationships, again for positive and negative. So we would have incredible birthday parties for kids at all ages whether you’re five years old or 85 years old with the whole community coming to the birthday parties and celebrating together. In the summertime we would eat dinner all together with the 15 or 20 of us and then we would go outside and play foursquare together or one of our interns was a dancer with a fire hoop and did a fire hoop thing with us. So it’s so nurturing to have the younger and the older people together like that. Here on the farm we have a farm road that goes from our welcome center where you start the farm and then it runs along through the horse pastures where that when they had 1500 people here that was all farmed and now it’s pasture and a lot of it’s horses but it runs along there. We have the head of the roads which is where Monday night class and we have a big fire circle and before you get to that it’s a community garden and then the roads go out from there. So we’re on a ridgetop plateau and then there are ravines go down that are wooded down towards where our swimming hole is and then the houses are along the top there of the ravines. So as you go across the farm field you could look at out there’s a big huge oak tree right alongside the road. Many people on the farm have golf carts, electric golf carts. So if you do have a solar panel it’s charged with the golf cart. If we lose electricity on the farm at the Ecovillage Training Center we have a solar array that has backup energy to keep our refrigerators and our lights running and the golf carts charged up. So you see whole families in their golf cart together you know and as the kids get to be 16, 18 years old they can take a cart to school. In the summertime we had our summer program. It’s just a wonderful experience to be able to share like that across the generations. My girlfriend wants to have a regenerative elders area which is near the school where the young people and the middle-aged and the elder people that you know would end up going to retirement home where they could live in community together instead. We have a fairly large population now because so many came here 50 years ago. So now they’re in their 60s, 70s, some into their 80s. We need to take care of these people well along with the younger kids that need to be with their grandparents and need to experience all elements of life. Absolutely. Coming from a community with 50 years experience there’s a lot of history that informs the evolution of the farm. A cemetery here that you know was started I mean was here when they when they came already and now I don’t know 50 or 100 people have been buried in the cemetery in just a year and a half. I’ve been to four funerals there and again it’s all ages. When I was young a great-grandma just disappeared and my parents hardly talked about it you know even though the cemetery was only a half mile away. To have the kids experience all those elements of life and have it be acknowledged rather than hidden is I think it’s really important. So during our seminar on caring for the earth we studied green cemeteries and green burial measures and we were doing press conference. So a couple of my kids did press conferences on green burials and why it’s something that is much needed in the world. Now they like to composting of the human body. One of the worst things you can do is crematorium and you know it’s like you have to heat up to I don’t know how hot in order to burn a human body and then the toxic materials are there. Good to learn about these things. Eva: Absolutely and as you said that each ecovillage is a small microcosm of their system. It’s funny that maybe you’re seeing some patterns of your wider structural interplaying there. Rob: I mean we’re all learning. We’re all learning together. We live in a time when we recognize that basis of humanity our economic system has been a competition dog-eat-dog world and we’re learning to move towards a cooperative ways of living together and doing things rather than just competing. With the Global Ecovillage Network we met with this fellow Graham Boyd from Evolute 6 last week on regenerative economy and we’re exploring doing projects with Evolute 6 and you know the focus is yes competition has a place. You know kids love games and they love to challenge each other but yet you have to have collaboration and learn how to work together and treat each other with respect and show good sportsmanship and you know you get so much more out of much more effective when you collaborate. That’s the way nature does it and that’s what Graham said that to us. He says you know nature just doesn’t compete everything against each other. Everything supports each other in regenerative processes in nature in order for things to thrive. So you have symbiotic processes with the oak tree, with the lichen that goes in the soil, with the soil microbes, with the mushroom mycelium that supports life coming up from under the ground. All of those things help nature to thrive and sustain itself and you couldn’t nature would not thrive without the processes of decay or regeneration. A human can’t either, it’s just a part of the natural cycles again. Just happy to be here and be a part of this project and sharing the things that we’re learning with the rest of the world. Eva: In your many years of involvement with the ecovillage network with the UN and with ecovillages themselves, what practices have you seen observed to dealing with resilience? I think ecovillages dig a lot into the social so I have already had a lot of examples as well as the ecological which we’ve talked about a bit in this interview, biochar, different forest management and garden practices. What are some of the tools that you’ve seen that build resilience that have excited you? Rob: Attributes is one of them. There’s like six or eight attributes and Jen has created now as a part of the climate resiliency approach a set of indicators for these attributes and they’re the things a community needs to do to move you rapidly and stably towards climate resiliency. So they include redundancy. So if you have a water system, you want to have a water system that can back itself up in various ways. The last time we had a major freeze here, we’re in a little town next to Summertown. You go to town, there’s a road sign for the city and it says the farm lives here on the bottom of the side for the community. So that’s pretty special. Now there’s like a couple thousand people in the farm with 230 have been recognized on this along with the town’s baseball team. Anyway, oh the attributes, redundancy, they lost their water supply in the town. We have our own tower that’s set up. Two smaller systems that were set up earlier on and they went and purchased a larger one and it took 30 people to load it onto the truck with the flatbed truck and bring it across Tennessee and then big heavy equipment in order to install it and put it up. There are wildflowers. Because we have all these ravines go down and it’s all forested, it’s protected, it’s all protected conservation status, more than half the land on the farm. But there’s wildfire danger from that, you know. The fire sweeps up the ravine. All our houses were purposely built at the edge of the forest, which has been very nice. We have all this open space and everything. But if you have a house that’s next to the forest, you have a number of different threats. We’re 80 miles from one of the largest tornadoes to ever hit the South in the United States. We had 20 minutes warning that that tornado was coming. And we’re just 80 miles away from the path of that tornado. We have straight line winds from what’s called atmospheric rivers. So they come across from California where all the hippies came 50 years ago. A huge amount of water sweeping across the country with a huge force of wind. Because you have cold with the hot, it pulls everything up into the air to get through the freezing cold and drops it down. And it creates these winds that come rapidly across the country. So you get these really cold in the wintertime blasts of winds and knocks down these 80 foot tall trees. All of the Eastern United States was clear cut centuries ago. So there were white oak here when they came, but shortly before the land had been cleared, before the hippies came here, which is why they could afford to buy the land. And they were able to farm it. But the end result was the white oak has been decimated and it’s been replaced by red oak, which is not as resilient. And now we need to move back towards mature forests that will be able to thrive with climate change. So Albert is a fond of all this information. He’s lived here for 45 years on the farm, and he shares all this information with me of the changes that we need to go through and are going through. These challenges exist now that we are going to have to face. And so these things hold to me as a being a part of the course and the learning situation. So redundancy is one of them. So we need to now have not only our water tower, but we have like four natural ponds, but we need a natural pond close to where all the residences and all of our agriculture is. So that as we start to grow, bring back regenerative farming on the farm, we need to have access to that, not from our water tower, but from the holding ponds that we could feed the agriculture. So we calculated it out during one of our climate resiliency meetings, and they said we’d run through the water in that tank, which is 100 feet high every day. All that water is drawn down to take care of 230 people on the farm. So we need to have resilient systems and backup so that we continue. If we lose our power for a week on the farm from coming in, we’ve got big problems. So we need to make solar panel backup system for the truck that pumps the water through the farm system out to all the houses, the types of things. But then there’s like six or eight of those attributes that are important that we now have a set of indicators for any community can see how well you’re doing implementing those different attributes. Eva: I will be sure to include those attributes in our show notes as well. Thank you so much, Rob. You are a wealth of knowledge. It is lovely talking with you. I feel like you’ve interviewed yourself before we separate for the day. I’m wondering if there’s anything you would really like to talk about that we haven’t touched on yet. Rob: Well, you know, I had started at the beginning. I got off track again with the things that we learned about the challenges. We are facing tipping points as humanity. There’s different of the leading scientists have been studying the tipping points for a number of years now. We no longer have a period of 20 years or 30 years to move towards climate resiliency. We have at most 10 or 15 years before it’s going to, changes are going to seriously hit the fan. The whole question of how bad are we going to make it for our children, even for ourselves, if we’re even going to be able to recover from it. You cut a large percentage of the trees already in the Amazon rainforest. I think, I don’t remember this clearly, but it’s something like if you cut 23% to 28% of the forest, then you’re going to lose two thirds of the forest without cutting them all, just from the impacts from climate change. And we’ve already cut 17%, which means there’s only 5% left. Every year we lose 17 million hectares of forest each year, destroyed as large an area of land degradation as all of South America. Two billion hectares of land that we’ve degraded from farming practices and deforestation and illegal logging, all of that needs to be repaired and restored. It’s such a huge project that humanity has. There’s almost nothing that we do now on the planet earth that’s done in a fully regenerative way. It would be almost impossible to do it. But fortunately, many governments are now setting goals to move towards electric vehicles, which would be a huge plus. There’s major effort to get off of fossil fuels today. Many countries are moving in that direction. There’s a non-proliferation that’s been proposed by civil society that a number of small island development states have embraced that. At COP28, I was there this year in Dubai, and Colombia agreed to support that initiative, the non-proliferation fossil fuel treaty. So the support is building all around the world for that treaty to get off of fossil fuels and to move towards renewable energy systems. These changes have to take place. That’s the Amazon rainforest. That’s just one of those ecosystems. We’re very concerned about permafrost melt in Siberia and in northern Canada, where you know that there’s massive wildfires this year. The melting of the glaciers is a major concern. These things that are now happening, not 10 years, 20 years, they’re happening already. The permafrost, they’ve measured it down 30 feet. It’s heating up 30 feet under the ground. The earth is excellent insulation. So imagine that now the earth’s heating up 30 feet under the ground. That’s a huge concern. The loss of the corals in the ocean and the loss of the fisheries, because that’s the hatching ground for so many of our species of fish. And there’s something like a half of a billion people are dependent on fisheries and the ocean health in one way or another for their livelihood. And we’re threatening those due to climate change and due to the heating of the ocean and the acidification of the ocean. So the faster we can get off of fossil fuels and onto renewable systems and into regenerative farming and make the other changes that are needed to move towards climate resiliency, the better off we’re all going to be. And there’s something all of us can do, no matter where we live and who we are, changes we can make in our personal lives to help make that difference. Eva: I think that is a great way to end. Thank you so much, Rob, for all of the work, art, commitment you have put into this movement and representing also the ecovillages in the UN. Rob: It’s been my joy to do it. I just love to be a part of the change. Now, I think so many of us have come in with that in mind to help make this transition. And I just salute you as well for everything you’ve given the ecovillage movement over the last several years to help us to continue to thrive. And all of the viewers, all of your commitment as well to help as we go through this transition. Eva: Thank you very much, Rob. Outroduction Before we end, I invite you to take a moment to sit with the concerns brought by Rob. I invite you to close your eyes if you can, to take an intentional breath and to sense into where you hold the pain of the world in your body. Sit with it. See if through grieving, through honoring this pain, you are able to transform it into the motivation to actively participate in the transition to a resilient and regenerative human presence on earth. I will leave you with a quote from Joanna Macy’s book, Active Hope: Our pain for the world arises out of our inter-existence with all life. When we hear the sounds of the earth crying within us, we’re unblocking not just feedback, but also the channels of felt connectedness that join us with our world. These channels act like a root system, opening us to a source of strength and resilience as old and enduring as life itself. Join us again next week as we continue the conversation over what it means to be resilient in our time of deepening public crisis. While you wait for the next episode of Community Resilience, we invite you to explore more about the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project by visiting us online at ecovillage.org/resilience.

Introduction Welcome back to Community Resilience, a podcast created in collaboration with the EcoVillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project, facilitated by the Global EcoVillage Network. I’m your host, Eva Goldfarb, inviting you to gather around the fire as we explore resilience, adaptation, and transformation in our time of deepening polycrisis. I’m thrilled to introduce Tanya Mottle, a passionate newcomer to the Ecovillage movement. Tanya’s journey began after four years of surreptitiously teaching sustainability in her English lessons in Prague. Returning to Australia in early 2019, she was horrified by Australia’s global status on climate action. She set out to explore how she could participate in proven local solutions to our global problems. In May of 2019, she attended a training of trainers program using the Map of Regeneration, which marked the beginning of her deep dive into eco lifestyles and sustainability. This experience not only reconnected her with her homeland, but also highlighted the importance of integrating First Nations wisdom and sustainable practices with positive innovation. Tanya is now an active member, both within Narara Ecovillage and GEN Australia, and serves the movement as a GEN Ambassador, fostering collaboration between ecovillages across Australia. Since her participation in the Ecovillage Resilience Project, Tanya is now organizing a series of “How Resilient Is Your Community”, talks and online games to expand and explore the Ecovillage movement’s impact. Join us as Tanya recounts her inspiring journey with the Resilience Project, the challenges and opportunities she’s encountered, and how she’s contributing to a global movement for sustainable living. Emphasizing the importance of community, meaningful conversations, and practical solutions for a regenerative future. Interview Eva: Welcome everyone, today we are joined by Tanya Mottl in Australia. Tanya, it is so nice to have you here today. I wanted to start by giving you an opportunity to introduce yourself. Who are you and, in short, what has brought you here today? Tanya: Thank you. I’m Tanya Mottl. I’m a member of Narara Ecovillage, close to Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. I am a GEN, Global Ecovillage Network Ambassador for Australia and the rest of the world. I facilitate climate conversations for tomorrow and the possible world gamification for transformation and also a fabulous game called the 2030 SDGs game. And why am I here? Because Narara has been one of 20 Ecovillages that participated in the GEN Resilience 2.5 project, which has been phenomenal at looking at the ways that we may, no, we definitely need to adapt to this changing world. Eva: Can you share a bit about how you became connected with the movement and with this project, a bit of your background, life story with Ecovillages in a nutshell, if you can? Tanya: I’d heard of Findhorn as a teenager. It’s an amazing place and I went, oh, I’d like to go there. And when I was living in Europe, I thought that before I left Central Europe, I would get to go and I really wanted to do the transformation game. It felt like a good transition. Unfortunately, I didn’t. I came back to Australia and bemoaned that I had not been to Scotland and Findhorn and my friends went, oh, well, it’s an Ecovillage just up the road. So I came, I visited and I was blessed that the people grabbed me. I didn’t like the site initially because it was too far away from the sea. And I had so missed the sea when I was in Central Europe. So I then found out that there was a game being facilitated here, not a game, but the training of trainers by Kosha Joubert and supported by Trudy Durians and Shane Sylvanspring of GEN Australia. And I just loved that. I loved, loved, loved that experience on that experiential map of regeneration. And I could see it being used in a coaching context for an individual tool. What’s important to me, you know, and it gave a structure for consideration and contemplation and reflection. And I said to Trudy, when I dropped her back at a train station: “I’m going to be involved with this”. So that was the beginning. And then of me sort of putting my toe in the water at Narara and going, look, I’m not quite ready. I am grieving the loss of my dad, but through the exposure and I threw myself in, I went, and this was at the beginning of COVID. So I just started doing online courses, connecting with the others and in 2020. And I tried to participate in everything that I could. You know, I listened to Paul Hawken of Project Drawdown. I was on a webinar with David Suzuki. I went to webinars with David Holmgren, the co-founder of Permaculture. And I just kept learning through all of that time. So that was how I got involved. I felt it was important. I felt like a renegade or an outcast because I didn’t feel like a lot of people in my world that I was just relanding with after four years away seemed to be as concerned as I was. So yeah, I connected with the Global Ecovillage Network. I was enormously impressed with the fact that there was the consultative status with EcoSoc and the United Nations. And that to me said, wow, you know, this has depth. So I kept going, you know, and then the next step was doing the online ecovillage design education in 2021 and collaborating at 10 o’clock at night till two o’clock in the morning with people all around the world and hearing different perspectives. And, you know, I’d had a training background. So being with different personalities and people’s processing and strengths and skills was phenomenal. So that was why I got involved. Eva: Thank you so much. And I’m so impressed that you did that EDE from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. Tanya: Yes, I was on. Eva: Yeah. Amazing. Joining an ecovillage after the founding. I’m very interested in hearing a bit more about this process. How was it to enter into an established ecovillage? How did you feel received, incorporated into really the building process? Tanya: Narara is actually still building. And so we’re still very much in the building community stage. So I felt very warmly welcomed and particularly because the woman in our community circle, Cila is Scottish and an incredible communitarian and warm. So she found a way for me with what was happening in my life to be able to come and participate, even though I wasn’t a full member of the cooperative so that I could have that toe in the water experience. I could witness and participate. And I was even given the possibility for a consultative status, which really engaged me, you know, and that was all through Zoom. Not entirely. I mean, it came and it went. I’ve seen the site go from three houses and then we had the 2019 Sustainable House Day and they come up like mushrooms and there were people coming to the site and it was exciting. And then we had COVID and more and more houses got built and we’ve moved some of our heritage plants from the horticultural department of primary industries research station to different parts and kept them. And so the history has been, you know, and the stories that have been woven through that time because I think history is great and learning that we’re about one of Australia’s oldest arboretums and walking in there in the summer when it’s just so hot and it feels like 10 degrees cooler. And then when we have the fireflies and it’s magical and then when we have the bunya season and the big gnats go and drop on us, not on us, not on us. And we do have to be careful of that. But nonetheless, there is a festival around that time. So it’s been a magical learning about the people that have embraced the site, the magic elements of the site, the projects that have grown and developed and of coming into a space now, you know, certainly welcoming others along their journey to joining. And community is where we do our biggest personal development, right? And it’s also an opportunity in times to have deep conversations about how we can connect, collaborate, be in community and come to deeper reflection. And certainly I’ve seen that growth now with not only the sustainable development goals, but also the inner development goals and that need for being and gentle transformation as well as, you know, sometimes abroad. Eva: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for all of the resources you are already bringing. These show notes are going to be very rich. Talking a bit more about Narara, you have shared that you are outside Sydney, but if you are a bird flying over, I would love to get a visual of what this ecovillage looks like, what your bioregion is like, so we can orient a bit on the planet. Tanya: Right. For many people who are considering coming here, you’d come by train or you could come by an EV or you could come by an electric bus. We had the community Congress, Community Energy Congress come to us that way. And we do have drone footage of the entire site. And what is quite normal about this area is that all the valleys are quite different. And it’s a very pretty site. It used to have a lot of forest on it and the forest was actually logged and the stream came right up to the bottom of the property. Well, unfortunately, because of development of highways, that’s quite been silted up now. We have a lot of ridgeways around us. We’re surrounded on three sides by forest or bush and it’s very quiet as a result. Although we do also have the distant sound of the freeway uphill of us and down the valley, we can sometimes hear the trains as well. So we’re actually only about a 12 minute walk from a nearby train station and quite close to urbanization, but yet it’s quiet and very beautiful. And we have the opportunities on a very large site to go walk about and to be truly in different parts of the site, whether or not that’s high and looking back down on the village and by our water tanks or across to our other rural lots and imagining how that could be. So that’s where we are geographically. And looking down, you can see the one side where we’re abutting suburbia and the other sides where we have the creek and the forest around us. We have a central spine coming through the village, which has some of our growing area on one side, our administration really in the heart of the village. And we’ve been able to utilize the existing buildings. We’ve removed quite a number of them, but the existing buildings, we are upcycling or up-purposing into something because we have incredible skills and human capital within the village. So that will be used again as more of a heart of the village so that we do come together, which is really great. Yeah. And the other exciting thing is because of our position, we have a lot of an ecosystem with quite a lot of biodiversity and through the regenerative practices of clearing invasive weeds, we’ve managed to regenerate particularly frogs. When we have frog ID week, it’s hilarious and delightful. And the people that get involved in the frog ID and the little jigs that they do, it’s great. And the same thing with birds. And we’ve participated in a regeneration project to regenerate the habitat for swift parrots, which is the swiftest parrot in the world. And these fly between here on the central coast and also down to Tasmania where they do their nesting. And that has been part of what Bob Brown, who his civil unrest has been globally acknowledged for what he did to save the Franklin River in Tasmania. So this connection between where species travel around, which is akin to many places that are regenerating wetlands and so on. Eva: Wonderful. Wanting to land a bit within the resilience project. I’m curious if Narara as an ecovillage had a concept of resilience, a shared concept of resilience before entering the project and how this understanding has shifted over the last years. And if you have one now. Tanya: I think the fact that we grew out of an existing horticultural site where research was done about imported plants and how they might adapt is somewhat foundational to even how we are as a village without perhaps it having been stated outright. But I think that because of the site, because of the people that have come, horticulturists, permaculturists, scientists, and passionate people, that I think that the sense of resilience has been in understanding and connecting to the land and recognising that we’re all part of a whole. And there’s certainly the sense of gratitude as well as, gosh, we like other species are all so different and learning to accept that. Eva: Digging in a bit into the project, one of the earlier exercises that communities went through was a historical timeline. And this is a tool that was really profound for a lot of communities that I’ve talked to in helping them identify different phases of their project. I’m really curious what you learned from this process about Narara and how you as a community respond to change. Tanya: Personally, it gave me such deep respect for those of the Sydney coastal ecovillage that was the initial iteration and how they’d searched up and down the coast for the right land for what they were looking for. And that was because our founder, Lyndall Paris, had been to so many ecovillages around the world and had done the social element of the ecovillage design at Crystal Waters and had a clear picture of what was needed. And she and her husband went, wow, this is it, when they drove into this site. And about resilience and the historical timeline, because there were setbacks to be expected. Yeah, the history and mapping that to what was happening locally, bioregionally was very, very interesting. And seeing how the village has evolved in those areas, social, ecological, and economically, through the governance that’s come through and through the process in 2021 of reviewing the vision of the village and doing that. It took six months to review. And that actually is now read in many of our meetings so that we come back to the vision of why we’re here, why we’re doing what we’re doing. And it does help, especially we’ve just held a new members orientation. And that timeline does help as well for people to understand the depths of foundational work that has been done by the pioneers. So things that have been important is, as I mentioned, finding a site that was important with the water, the aspect, the possibility to regenerate. And also because the desire was to be a demonstration ecovillage. So that’s happened. We’ve had challenges because the local council has gone into administration, financial administration. So that has made the project take a lot longer. Knowledge of soil research, and particularly we had a visiting professor who said, it’s incredible to see a group of individuals carrying on that knowledge of growing food and of being able to share land together. You know, we’re doing it perfectly and perfectly, just saying. Eva: Aren’t we all? Yeah. I want to really underline that point. I have heard this a lot through my ecovillage research of just how important a really strong vision is and how important it is to have this very present within the community. So I like that you draw this out. You also spoke to a few challenges that emerged during the starting process. And I’m curious if you have any reflections as to how those challenges, what they were, first of all, and how they were met by the community, either in a resilient way or in a way they could have been. Tanya: Sure. I’m going to start with the vision because that was an incredible thing. And it’s actually, it was part of the resilience project to do some visioning. It was part of, and it’s now part of what is happening here in Sydney next week, this week, Climate Action Week, visualising the future. And it’s interesting that the visioning that was originally done was a drawing and how that’s come to pass. And visioning how we might live and work together through coming together and having discussions has made a big difference. So coming back to the challenges, well, the council was an issue. That was an external issue. And the way that that was dealt with was through the group of members going to the council meeting and making themselves known through, if you will, passive resistance simply by being there so that the council went, who are they? What are they doing here? And it was like, well, we’re present so that you see us and so that you actually move our housing, the entire development forward. And so that our individual development applications can be developed as well. So that was one challenge. There’ve been other challenges of death, divorce. There’ve been the challenges of, during building, when we were our own property developer, we had two builders go bust. We had to lock the gates so that the subcontractors who were not being paid were not taking off site the resources that we had paid for, doors, windows, things that they would then be able to utilise. So financial things. There’s been a turnover of members. And that has been because the project was going to take, we didn’t know how long. And so many people have left because it costs to continue renting whilst your property is being approved. And we have a fairly stringent internal process to make sure that our ratings are as high as can possibly be so that we can be a demonstration ecovillage. So other challenges, projects that people would agree or disagree on. And of course, one of the biggest disagreements and challenges was COVID because we had a full range of where people sat in terms of vaccination or non-vaccination and fear that came through understanding, misunderstanding and recognising that perhaps people were doing the best they could, people, governments, et cetera, in a time that, you know, movies had been made about, but had we really thought that through? And I think that as well goes back to the thing now of what I’m seeing with challenges here in our bioregion, that we have a disaster recovery and resilience network. And there’s a lot more mapping going on of areas that are fire, flood, drought affected. And there’s a lot more encouragement of community connection. There’s a lot more awareness that insurance is no longer available to properties that are built on a floodplain that has been flooded, you know, three times in the last two years. Eva: It’s really impressive that there is a bioregional awareness of resilience and the need for resilience moving forward. So that’s amazing. That’s definitely a leg up. Trying to shift some of these challenges into points of hope or overcoming. I’m really curious what practices were created or integrated into Narara during these different times of sadness, of fear, of external circumstances and maybe overwhelm that would come with that. What practices really helped you build your community resilience and overcome these things? Tanya: I think that prior to the pandemic, there had been a lot of, well, first of all, people would come from Sydney for a weekend to work on the land. So that was a shared vision. Then there was the community dinners that would happen at that time. There was the members meetings. There was the evolution of how long or how short or, you know, the working days that happened at that time. There was the building of the experimental building in the campground of using straw bale and other earth building practices. And because that was intergenerational, I don’t know if there was any throwing of mud, you know, but there was fun things that got done. So that was somewhat of a resilience. Now we’re also blessed because we have a number of people that are in the community thing that have strong practice or skills in facilitation and bringing people together. But we also have John Seed, who is a peer of Joanna Macy for the Council of All Beings. So John’s deep ecology workshops and John’s simple way of being have been valuable to us, invaluable. We also, you know, in coming out of COVID and the differences, we’ve had listening circles so that people could speak their truth, you know, how challenging it has been for whatever position you may hold or if you sit on the fence like Switzerland. And so those have been useful increasingly as we’ve come out of the most fearful part of COVID has been the increase in and the reopening of our open days once a month. We had the experience weekends. We’ve had John Seed’s deep Ecology. We have had a lot more music, which has been wonderful and more community dinners. And we celebrate such things as the solstice, the equinox. And, you know, again, because we have psychologists and counsellors in our midst, you know, we’ll quite often have a little ritual around burning something that we want to leave behind and then putting an intention into something that we can, for example, posts that we put into the ground for the stage two development. So doing these little positive rituals. Eva: Absolutely. Thank you so much. I hope that ecovillages going through similar struggles can draw from one of those things or individuals. I always underestimate the simple power of listening to one another. Sharing circles is one thing that I utilize a lot. So thank you for bringing that in as well. You’ve already touched a bit about the four dimensions that ecovillages operate within the social ecology, economic and culture. And one thing I’ve experienced through doing these interviews is that there’s a lot of interplay between them that comes out when you start talking about resilience. So I’m wondering if you can maybe speak to one, you can pick a pair, but how two of these elements have really shifted or affected the other one in your time with Narara and talking about resilience. Tanya: I definitely say that society, you know, and our use of sociocracy imperfectly. We were very blessed to have on our board for some years, Gina from Western Australia, who’s a sociocracy practitioner. And that helped us enormously, as well as the connection to sociocracy for all who have a lot of online resources. So it’s the social element where we continue to contract and recontract with whatever projects it is that we’re doing. And that has helped. And there’s been constant review of our domains within the aims and domains of the different sociocratic circles. So that’s been interesting and helpful. And the overlay, you asked me to do a second one, is that correct? Eva: Maybe digging in, how do you notice that the social adaptation and society’s influence maybe shifts one of the other dimensions? How does this affect your community culture, your ecological impact, your economic resilience? Tanya: Well, there’s two areas that I really see. Sorry, I’m not very good at just doing one. One is the ecology, because the social groups work out the differences, et cetera, and come to understand how effective sociocracy can be. That the working groups perform better together, not always. And I think that that’s like anything. And I use sailing as an example, because you’ve constantly got to adapt and change and transform and sometimes go very slow and other times be quite rapid in your decision-making. So for me, it’s the ecology and the way that the site has evolved with the constant thought about food resilience. And I would say that also that as the social element and the more and more considerations have been utilised or adapted, that we’ve become more cognisant about the ways that we do things economically as well. Something that has come up here at Narara just recently has been the SDG number 12, which is responsible production and consumption. And this is because we’re blessed. We’ve got a PhD candidate doing research about circularity and ecovillages. So it’s really been that, how is it that ecovillages have a low impact? And it’s through, if you will, a consciousness or a mindset about what do I need? And therefore, what can I refuse? And how can we keep everything, just like in nature, circular, so that we are using fewer resources? And that’s where I would go back to Project Drawdown and my horror at hearing Paul Hawkins say, you know, with Donut Economics, that there is a certain amount that the planet can sustain. And when I heard it was six pieces of clothing per person per year, I was horrified. That’s an example of data. Now, I have to say, I’m on my fourth pair of underpants purchase this year. So I’ve only got two pairs of socks that I can buy now. And that’s it. So that’s why I believe in the circular economy, the fashion economy, not buying anything new. So this responsible consumption and being aware of whether or not it’s in the food that we purchase is not all wrapped in plastic and that we’re buying local or that, you know, if there’s cardboard boxes, how can we re-utilise those in the garden? If we’re having a coffee at our gorgeous coffee cart, can the coffee grounds do go into the compost, which then goes into our community garden, the community garden that then comes back, goes into the produce created at the coffee cart, or it’s sold in a little village pantry. So this responsible consumption is again, a mindset of the impact that it has elsewhere. So that was something that I felt was really important. And the way that we transform our world through both acknowledging Indigenous wisdom, but also embracing innovative technology. It’s a combination of the two hand in hand. And I think that that’s a really important thing to consider and reflect upon. And to think about, just as I have a moon waxing outside the window, you know, what are the things that bring us back to something that we really love? Eva: Thank you so much, Tanya. I think these are all wonderful examples of how ecological data really can impact our social choices and rituals and celebrations. Thank you. In your experience throughout the Resilience Project, and since joining Narara, do you have an imprint of whether Narara is becoming more or less resilient to deal with future climate adaptation change? Tanya: Definitely more and more resilient, because there’s more and more awareness, you know, about the importance and the delight of growing food. There’s more and more awareness, again, around, you know, how blessed we are to have a dam and that what we may be able to utilise that for. And also the preparedness, again, the committing and recommitting to the social elements with sociocracy and particularly as we bring new members into the co-op. Yeah, I think those are the primary things. And I think the more that we actually share and have the discussions, it’s really challenging because we have so many people that are currently building their houses, currently designing their houses, you know, then about to launch, and construction costs have gone up enormously here in Australia. So that has meant that people’s dreams of what they thought they could achieve versus what they’re now probably going to have to achieve are very different. Everything is changing. And our ability to change and adapt, I think, is the biggest thing. Eva: Thank you. I’m going to zoom out a bit now, looking at the Resilience Project as a whole, if there have been any really big takeaways or big lessons that Narara has from this project implement into your community culture? Tanya: I think that the coming back to what has been foundational in the planning over the last 11 years since the site was purchased, of using the map of regeneration, using that as a base point and reviewing and mapping that to how we look at our projects. I think that’s been a really valuable tool. I think the Resilience Tracker is one that, you know, we looked at and I think that we need to come back to and have a review point for that and other areas. The awareness that we are willing to be experimental. I personally use the IPCC 2022 Climate Mitigation Report, which had Findhorn on the front cover. And then it also had a summation of that, and I think it was over 3,000 pages, that the scientists were saying was that we need more ecologically aware and socially innovative experimental communities that go together and network, and to provide educational outreach. And this was really reinforced when at our open day last month, we had a professor of property law come and visit us and make an incredible comment. She said, you know, the Department of Primary Industries or the Department of Agriculture used to teach what was possible, you know, through the experimentation, acknowledging some experiments had been wrong, and that Narara was an incredible example of individuals taking that information and resharing it back and demonstrating it. And today, just today, you know, we implemented a new car sharing. And as I sat and gave the induction to the others in the car, how you drive it, how you charge it, you know, there was this real sense of, oh, we’re doing this together. You know, and the questions that came up, and I said, you know, we’ll work it out. And we just document it so that as we experience this as being an effective way of showing that collaboration can work, and that we can minimize carbon impact, that we can actually have these experiences as being not just input output, but actually being a social connection, where it’s really worked well for us. So these are some examples of working together, which is great. Eva: Do you have any advice for a project or an individual wanting to start some sort of community project who has not participated in the Resilience Project to build resilience themselves and within their community practice? Tanya: Heck yes, do your research, do an ecovillage design education program, because it’s a whole systems, you know, you start in the social area, then you would go to the ecology and have some understanding, then dive into the economics of it, then dive into the cultural, and then finally finish in the worldview, you know, the whole systems and integrative systems and how everything is interconnected. I feel that that is foundational. And not only the ecovillage design education, but also the co-housing project, or education I did with Robin Allison from Earthsong in New Zealand, who turned out to be a buddy in many ways during the project, because I went and visited them twice. And they came here, and Robin did a workshop here as well. And creating buddies, you know, that you can learn from. And I don’t know if you remember, but when we did our ecovillage design education, we had a participant from Turkey. And when they had the horrible earthquakes, bang, she picked up the phone, the email, and messaged somebody else to say, what resources are there, so that we can help these people with emergency resilience, and to be able to get back on their feet. And a lot of that is around the permaculture principles. And I was very blessed a couple of weeks ago to meet Roe Morrow, who does permaculture for refugees, and she was just off to Bangladesh. And really the understanding that comes from when you understand the principles of working with the planet, you know, the sun, the water, the rain, and the soil, and of course, how we interact with each other, then it can be so delightful. And that can create, you know, the impetus and the positive upward spiral of collaborating on projects. I hope that answered your question. Eva: Beautifully. And it also fills me with a lot of connection to the reason I became involved with the ecovillage movement in the first place, because there is so much potential within this connection. And it really just takes passionate individuals willing to make it happen, willing to make the connections and create these lines of relief when difficult situations come about. Tanya: Yeah. And a lot of it is that thing of the research, taking a scientific approach, collecting some data around how things perform, acknowledging that things are changing, and so we have to adapt and change to that. Yeah, I think it’s really fabulous and interesting how just as scientists have done that, and as I said, you know, there may have been plants or animals brought in that are now invasive, and the recognition that we’ve made mistakes. And I love that we’re shifting back to this acknowledgement of First Nations, Indigenous, ancient ancestral wisdom of thinking, behaving, and responding. And I love, you know, that we see our First Nations people saying, you know, we’re here together. How do we improve country? Eva: Absolutely. I’m hoping this understanding really leaks out into the wider world. Wanting to shift now a bit more personally, as we wind down, hearing about you, how personal and interpersonal resilience has a role in your life? Tanya: It’s about whatever balance is and recognising that, you know, my thoughts and my body change constantly. And so just recognising what do I need right now? What’s the most important thing for me to feel somewhat in balance or somewhat grounded so that I can be agile? So that’s my personal resilience. And, you know, I personally find that through getting wet, whether it’s minimum on my face, you know, oh, now I’m awake, now I can function, but I prefer to get my head in the water. And everybody’s different, you know, and certainly what is a practice that I may have about connecting back to my personal vision? And my personal vision is about thinking of future generations. And how do I embody being as joyous as I can now here in the village for these little people that are coming through with their joy and delight and their awe for the natural world? And for the things that we can share, that resilience comes through sharing. And, you know, it’s learning. I just love constantly learning, learning to be creative, learning to grow things, learning how not to kill things, you know, plants, particularly where they’re edible. And on that interpersonal thing as well is connecting, recognizing differences, seeing how I can be myself and support, you know, as part of holding hands that we’re doing things together. Eva: And as you do enter into more intense spaces of change or loss, what are some practices you have to help cope with these? Tanya: Practices personally would be, you know, my own meditation and mindfulness. And I’m grateful whenever we have programs that are offered, whether it’s within the village and we have a number of mindfulness practitioners, including John. The reminder of those simple things and connecting and walking in the forest, a mindful, soulful talk or listen or just me and my friend, the dog, and recognizing that it’s just so lovely or observing a butterfly or a stick insect, you know, a really big one. And then it really I’m looking forward to the community dance, you know, and the community dinners and the community film nights. Oh, it was so valuable us watching the Firebird about Findhorn, how Findhorn had grown and, you know, the challenges they’ve had and how can we learn from that? And how did it make some of us reflect on just how lucky we are to have the village that we’ve had the vision and that grows and changes and that essentially there is kindness. Eva: Essentially, there is kindness. Thank you so much. So you’ve also spoken a bit to how these acts interweave with your community practices. So thank you very much for bringing that in. Can you also share, aside from walks in the forest, how practices of connecting with other living beings help boost your resilience? This is something that was focused on a bit of the project. I’ve heard you touch upon it through time in nature, through walks in the forest, working with plants, keeping plants alive, learning how to grow food. Just wondering if there’s anything else you want to touch upon there. Tanya: Absolutely. I think that John Seed’s passion for making compost and John Seed being such a demonstration because everywhere in the village that he has lived, bam, it’s green. And seeing that that’s so possible. The other thing has been walking around with different members of the village on the things and the knowledge that they have, whether or not it’s been the horticulturist who holds a flower and says of the Davidson plum, isn’t this a beauty? And John Seed having the Bunya Festival and telling the story of the Bunya trees and how the Aboriginal people would come together for a festival. That’s magical. The discovering new sites, parts of the site, especially by moonlight, beautiful. Hearing others with their gratitude for their walks, going to yoga, you know, going to Tai Chi, doing the dancing in the dark, going to the walkway and seeing the village from the opposite side where the beautiful trees have been growing and growing and growing and hearing that we have more of the swift parrots coming, which is just divine. Eva: I’m hearing a lot of perspective shifts, changing the way you do things, be them at night or from the other side. And also deep awe of nature. I’m very curious how cultivated this in your life, this awe of nature. Is it something that has been with you forever? And how do we bring this awe wider than ourselves? Tanya: Personally, I was blessed to grow up in a national park. I was blessed to be in a place where I could only get to by boat. So I was constantly surrounded by that. We knew that there had been Aboriginals in the area. It was probably not too long before we had moved in when Aboriginals were actually moved out of the northern beaches of Sydney. So there was always that sense of wonderment. There was the sense that we were free range like chickens and that we were able to go out in the bush and able to go to the waterfall and able to find some Aboriginal carvings. I grew up understanding about tides and how that affected and the winds that were at a particular time of year. I didn’t know a thing about growing food and it’s been the greatest delight learning about permaculture and recognising that’s something I definitely need to have. And in awe, well how could you not be in awe when there’s a full moon and it’s beautiful and the water sparkles and you can feel the whisper of a wind. It’s divine. And it’s the same thing with the sunshine. But equally I recognise that when the tide goes out, you know sometimes you can see the dumped fridges, the cars, the glass bottles that have been carelessly, thoughtlessly discarded, the oil slicks that have come from vehicles or boats, cars that have been poorly maintained because we haven’t valued how it is to care in our industrialised world, to deeply care and to understand how those systems work. So how do we come back to a place of awe? I think it’s sitting with children and telling stories. It’s the story of the hummingbird that when there was an incredible fire that all the animals ran away from the forest, but the hummingbird didn’t. And the hummingbird would go down to the water and bring up a beak full of water and drop it on the forest on the fire. And the gods apparently looked down and said, it’s time. This little bird has so much courage and bravery. And so the gods reigned so that the fire stopped. Now that’s a story I heard both in the Storytelling Festival in Ireland and in Scotland. And the story is one for me of continuing to do what you feel is right. And that sometimes something bigger than us is looking out for us. And that is why we should have hope. Hope to regenerate this magnificent planet and hope to regenerate our social connection because the planet will look after itself and the planet will look after us. So we need to connect. Eva: I absolutely agree. And I feel that’s such a beautiful round ending. Wondering if there’s anything else you would like to add before we part ways today? Tanya: I think that looking for tools that create conversation would be my biggest take out from my own personal quest to learn more. And it’s been a marvellous thing to look back at my first visit to Narara where I knew nothing other than it was time to do a permaculture course. And to what I feel like I have learnt through my practical PhD in being a human on a planet that has enormous potential for regeneration. We have enormous potential for transforming our world by 2030. And that the ecovillage and permaculture movements are fabulous. And you don’t have to be part of an ecovillage to be an eco-citizen. I mean, we are all part of this place. And so just finding something on, for example, the map of regeneration, which has got a structure. So what’s something that I love, that I’m passionate about, that either I have skills to contribute, so my value is giving back, or what is something I would really love to learn? We see that with the volunteers that come to ecovillages that want to learn about natural building and then are bewitched by the creativity that comes from that. And equally, there’ll be those that come because of the practicality of modular building, that in these times of extreme weather, that we do need to build or rebuild homes quickly and shelter quickly. And that is the right of everybody to have that, and that there should be equality for all. So that’s why I’m so passionate about the sustainable development goals, because I think they’re a very simple way of looking at things. And when we understand the way that the story in between of lack of poverty, quality education, wellbeing for all, life on planet or on the land and in underwater, and how it all connects, clean air, I think it’s exciting times to be learning. So we’re all educators, we’re all learning. I think these are exciting times to truly look to how do we transform the planet. Eva: Thank you so much, Tanya. I’m hoping you can leave us with just one tool that you have learned for starting conversations that any listener could take and implement in their day today. Tanya: I think asking the question, how do you feel about something? How do you feel about the changes that are happening right now? And what is something that you’re really passionate about that you feel that you could not live without in your world? So asking those kind of questions helps a person to recognize, A, how are we feeling, because I think we’re immensely disconnected from our feelings. And what is something that you feel is that you absolutely love? Is it whales? Is it butterflies? Is it about creativity and expression of that? And is that art something that you express through your tattoos? Or is it something that it is through your garden? Is it something that it is by innovation? Have you created something that demonstrates small footprint? So what is something that in conversation you are passionate about? And if you break it down to four areas, which makes it far less, I don’t know, is there something socially, ecologically, economically, or culturally that excites you? And then of course, my thumb was showing up, the fifth dimension being the whole systems. Eva: Thank you so much, Tanya, for all of the wisdom you’ve imparted on us today. And this ending remark, I love it. And it’s actually come into my life quite often lately. “What is your passion”? as an icebreaker in conversation. So thank you for bringing that in as well. And for spending some time with us today. Tanya: Thank you, Eva, great to connect across the world. Eva: Absolutely. Outroduction Join us again next week, as we continue the conversation over what it means to be resilient in our time of deepening polycrisis. While you wait for the next episode of Community Resilience, we invite you to explore more about the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 degree project by visiting us online at ecovillage.org/resilience.

Listen Now Introduction Today, we have the honor of hosting two remarkable guests from Togo, whose dedication to community health, environmental conservation, and sustainable development serves as an inspiration to us all. Our first guest is Koto Koku Agbee. Koto is a state nurse trained at the National School of Medical Auxiliaries of Lomé , specializing in community health. His passion for nature and community development has led him to play a pivotal role in the management of natural resources – particularly the community forest in his hometown of Ando-kpomey. As an endogenous facilitator, Koto represents the Ando-kpomey ecovillage to both national and international partners. His exceptional contributions have earned him prestigious accolades, including the Equator Prize from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) at the World Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil, and the Solution Search Award for climate change adaptation in Washington, USA. Koto is also a proud member of GEN Africa, thanks to his involvement in the Ecovillage Resilience Project 2.5+. Joining him is Agbossoumonde Koffi, who holds a Master’s degree in Natural Science with a focus on the environment from University of Lomé . Since 2009, Koffi has been a dedicated civil servant at the Ministry of Environment and Forest Resources, where he coordinates the national Ecovillage Development Program in Togo. His work has been instrumental in transforming seven rural localities into ecovillages, with ten more in progress, promoting renewable energy, water management, agroecology, and income-generating activities for women and disadvantaged groups. Inspired by the commitment of the Ando-Kpomey ecovillage community, Koffi chose to become a member and actively supports their conservation efforts. He too became a member of GEN Africa through the “Ecovillage Resilience Project , following a pivotal meeting with the GEN team at COP26 in Glasgow. Koto and Koffi’s extensive experience and deep-rooted commitment to community resilience make them invaluable voices in the discourse on sustainable development and environmental conservation. We are thrilled to have them with us today to share their insights and stories. In today’s episode, Koto and Koffi will begin in French and then our dear friend Abdul Otman will chime in with the English translation. Interview Eva: How did you become involved with the Ecovillage movement? How did you become involved with your projects? Koto: I’m Koto. How did we arrive at the Ecovillages project? It’s thanks to Kofi. We have an Ecovillage in Togo. It was a community initiative with the support of partners, the government, and the ministry. It was thanks to the empowerment of the government and the local community. Thanks to the Equator Prize that we received in 2012, our Ecovillage has taken on an international dimension. We continue to work so that this international dimension can be sustained. At COP26 in Glasgow, we had the chance to work with Anna and we have continued the exchange. It was desirable that we participate in this project so Kofi registered the community. This is a bit of how we were able to belong to the Global Ecovillage network. Through the Resilience Project, we participated in training sessions, capacity building, community workshops, and reports that we have produced to date. We’ve been in this process for about a year and a half now. Kofi: My name is Kofi Abusumonde. Abusumonde is the family name. Kofi is the nickname. I was born on a Friday. When a boy is born on a Friday, we call him Kofi. I work with the government to implement the Ecovillage Development Programme. Its a project that the government wanted to develop to sustain the local population of communities bordering the forest so that the people can protect the forest. We started with two villages and now we are at ten villages. So among these localities, I found the Ando-kpomey community and we identified it as a community that makes a lot of effort for the conservation of nature. So among the villages in which I worked, Ando-kpomey marked me a lot because of their faith in conservation, their tradition, and their respect for nature. Ando-kpomey really touched me from the beginning and now I’m with them. At COP26 in Glasgow, I met Anna, from GEN’s team, and we exchanged and shared a lot of things about what we are doing in terms of the development of ecovillages in Togo. And in 2022, there is a call for projects to participate in the Ecovillage Resilience project. This project was initiated by GEN, and we registered Ando-kpomey to participate in this project. Eva: Thank you both very much. Kofi, you have already begun sharing a bit about what the communities you work with look like, and where they are in the world. Can you elaborate on this, taking us on a voice guided tour of your community? Kofi: Our village, our community is located in the south of Togo, at the border to Ghana. It is an indigenous community of about 500 people. The community is located in the heart of a forest. There is a forest of more than 120 hectares that surrounds the community. The forest was made by the community. In 1972 there was only the savannah, which burned very quickly. And it had decimated the village. So, following this event, the community, our elders, decided to plant a forest around the village, so that it would become a large forest that protects the village. Back in 1972, we had a big, big fire, and that’s the moment where the community set up the forest and created the forest around the village. In 2012, in Rio de Janeiro, Koto went to Brazil to receive the Equator Prize. For this initiative of communal forest creation. Back then, we didn’t have any facilities. The social education system and health system was absent, and there was no water. Now, thanks to the help of the government, we have established a first school, we have water, we have a funded project about solar panels and we are working on the different aspects for resilience that are still missing. Eva: I will direct my next question to you, Koto, to give you some speaking time. If you feel Kofi is a better person to answer this, please pass it to him. So, in this project, we talk a lot about resilience, and I’m very curious what resilience means to you. Koto: Thank you again. For us, resilience is all the mechanisms that we develop to face social challenges, climate challenges, environmental challenges, and economic challenges. Resilience is a way to adapt to your environment while making the necessary efforts to meet your needs. It is the capacity to take care of our basic needs while adapting, considering social, economic, and environmental aspects. Regarding the community, as Kofi mentioned, resilience involves adapting and developing mechanisms to face climate challenges, regardless of past events. This project has been ongoing for at least 50 years, initiated by our parents and great-grandparents. Today, our ability to improve our resilience capacity is evident. For example, on the social level, we focus on improving social governance, inclusion, and the role and importance of women. Women in our community are both victims and key players in resilience efforts. They feed their children, educate them, fetch drinking water, gather wood, and provide heat. For 50 years, we have built our community with a strong focus on resilience, especially regarding women’s roles. Women act as both fathers and mothers, taking care of children and community relationships. Women are victims of environmental impacts, as we are a farming community. Our income depends on agriculture. To develop resilience, we must work in the fields, find food, feed our families, and generate small incomes. Our economic resilience depends on our crops and harvests. Supporting women is crucial because, in our country, men are typically the decision-makers, but women significantly contribute to the family’s and community’s social and economic development. We must also focus on fathers who make decisions at home or in the village, as their role can overshadow the mothers who manage relationships. If women are healthy and economically stable, the family thrives. Women handle child education and health, with fathers playing a secondary role. Therefore, resilience in our community emphasizes the importance of women. The core of resilience is the mother; if she is doing well, the community does well. Currently, as Kofi mentioned, women make up 60% of our population. Resilience, as I understand it, involves developing capacities toward women. There is significant economic pressure on farming, but we must focus on the relational aspects involving women. This is the critical point. Eva: Thank you very much. I hope we can touch on this a bit more in depth later. But I appreciate this introduction to what resilience means to you. Before we go deep into the process and learning some of the impacts, I want to take a moment to better understand the traditional practices that you see have contributed to resilience and conservation? Kofi: First of all, I’m going to go back to what Koto said about resilience. For us, resilience is the ability of someone to recover from a shock or a painful event. It’s the ability of the person to rec over from a difficult situation – to face it. Now, putting the word resilience back in context, there is a natural solidarity and collaboration that operates when, for example, someone dies or is unwell. People come together, offering healing with plants, financial support, and other means. Individuals from various backgrounds and with different kinds of power are there to provide support. Now, as far as conservation is concerned, for us, the earth and the forest are sacred entities that we venerate. They are gods for us. Some trees are forbidden to be exploited in our country because they are considered divine. Our connection to nature is sacred, and certain animals represent gods, making it forbidden to kill them or cut down specific trees. These practices ensure that species of trees and animals, which are disappearing elsewhere, are preserved in our homeland. This contributes significantly to the conservation of nature. There are also parts of the forest that are off-limits except for specific rituals or ceremonies. These dense forests remain protected because no one is allowed to enter them to set fires or perform rituals indiscriminately. Such practices contribute to the conservation and density of the forest, similar to traditional protection methods in Brazil. For example, we have crocodiles that we can approach at five meters and they are not afraid of us. They are not aggressive. Because we honor them, we give thanks and graces to them. They are still there and they are not attacking us. Cultural practices are being lost as agriculture becomes mechanized and fertilizers are used. Traditionally, agriculture in our community is not mechanized; we don’t use engines. When clearing a field, we organize and help each other. The community can decide today to go into the field of a person and we help them do everything they need to do to prepare the soil. Even at the time of the harvest, we go and help. This is solidarity. We have an agroecological farm where we practice fish and poultry farming innovatively. This farm also serves as a learning center for people to farm without chemicals. More than 80% of what we eat is locally produced. Eva: Thank you so much, Kofi. You have just shared so much wisdom and a lot of things that I think ecovillages around the world can learn from. I personally love hearing an example about preserving the forest as a sacred space that you need permission or a reason to enter into. This is one element I hope to implement in the project that I’m co creating in spain. So, my next question is an outcome of one of the exercises you did within the Resilience Project, which was the historical timeline. Through this process, what patterns and fundamental changes have you observed in the communities you work with? Koto: The fundamental changes that we have experienced can be structured into three categories. The first category is, as Kofi has just recalled, the vegetation fires that we experienced in 1972. I haven’t returned, Kofi has already described it well. These fires completely devastated the community, food infrastructure, and stores. The initiative was taken to create a forest around the village so that this would not happen again. After we recovered from these climatic or environmental disasters, in 1982 we experienced another phenomenon of pest locusts that appeared out of nowhere and ravaged our agricultural crops. They came to completely destroy the insects. They came to destroy the fields with our courses. And that, this year, created a situation of famine, of lack of food. We had practically nothing left to eat because the crops were devastated by the locusts. In addition to these two major events, there have been difficult times when we would have to travel around 20 kilometers to look for water to drink. The first category of events that we can describe as happy came in 2012. The community was identified among several countries, several projects, as a best initiative, and was awarded the Equitor prize by the UNDP. I had the honor of representing the community at this event in Rio at the Sustainable Development Conference. It was an important event for us in the life of the community. It was a great thing to be recognized in this way. These are the three major events that we can remember in the life of the community. Eva: Another exercise you did in the Resilience Project was engaging with a community of practice. There were many workshops that took place over the past year. One example is the exercise that looked deeper at the root causes of some of the issues you’re facing today. Can you share a bit more about this activity? Koto: I’m very thankful to GEN for bringing this practice because it helped us to deepen the context and the root causes of what led us there and what is happening in our community. This allowed us to analyze, to reflect together with the community, on what could still be similar or more serious events that we could predict, and what should be our ability to develop aspects of resilience in the face of similar situations. We did practical exercises to understand the challenges that we could face, especially the climate challenges, to better adapt. Because for us, survival depends on our environment. For us, the resilience is rooted in nature, the village is surrounded by the forest. Our very existence depends on the forest. So we cannot preserve our life if we do not preserve the forest. And the two are entirely related, its a very primordial thing. One of the exercises we did was a timeline, and this gave us a big overview about the resources that we had. If there are other aspects, Kofi can complete. Kofi: So, as Koto said, this exercise with GEN allowed us to better know the deep causes of the difficulties that the community had. In fact, before, we generally found a spiritual origin for everything that happens, we said to ourselves, “Well, it’s because someone has gone beyond the traditional rules. That’s why the season this year wasn’t good. Or that’s why we had such a pandemic, Or that’s why there was a plague in the village.” It really helped us to identify the causes of these practices, because for us, we’re very linked to the spiritual reality. If something goes wrong, its connected to something spiritual, like a boundary that has been crossed, something that has not been respected. We see, for example, reality, but there are other underlying causes that are deeper, it’s like an iceberg. For example, the tree model that we did, we see the problems or the reality above, but at the bottom, there are things that have happened that you dont necessarily see. The majority of the community does not have a high level of education. Thanks to this project, we were able to show them the connections between various environmental issues. We explained that droughts today are partly due to deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. We informed them that certain chemical products destroy soil fertility by harming microorganisms. Using these chemical products long-term makes the soil less productive. Additionally, people often use these chemicals without protection, which can cause health problems over time. Our animals also wander in the forest and might consume contaminated herbs, leading to diseases. We highlighted that many diseases we see today result from our own actions. It was a significant moment to explain that the root cause of many issues, like the spread of diseases, originates from past actions, such as using chemicals and fertilizers. When animals eat contaminated grass, they spread these contaminants elsewhere, which has multiple negative effects. We also discussed how the absence of grass can lead to fires. Young people traditionally protect the forest from fires, but if they leave, the forest will burn. Since the community depends on the forest for fruit, wood, and minerals, its destruction would force the community to leave as well. We used this opportunity to help them understand the broader impact of these actions. Thanks to the project’s framework, we were able to explain how destroying the land leads to unsustainable conditions, causing young people to leave. Traditional practices and spirituality, such as honoring the land, would also disappear. It’s a complex system that gets dismantled piece by piece. Through GEN and the practices we developed in the workshop, we were able to make these connections clear to the community. Eva: Just to review quickly, one of the other exercises you did was in feedback loops and how your social action affects the ecology. And you’ve just touched upon this very nicely, so I just wanted to restate that. And I’m very curious, in your opinion, what the most valuable tool for resilience you think ecovillages can share with the rest of the world? And why? Koffi: Among all the tools we did with our communities activities its the one with the atributes. That allowed us to asess the resilience capacity of the community. I think we can share it. Eva: Can you explain why it was so important for the community? Koffi: Yes, because during this exercise, we were asked to make classifications. These different classifications by category, such as our ability to produce and our dependence on the food plan, were really important for us. We could categorize and sort these elements clearly. For example, we looked at our production and identified parts where we are dependent and parts where we are independent. By analyzing these elements, we could determine that we are self-sufficient in terms of food. Additionally, there are three attributes that assess whether our territory is conservative of nature. For instance, what percentage of our territory is covered by natural resources? We know that more than two-thirds of our territory is covered, indicating that our territory is part of those that are conservative of nature. There are also aspects related to our practices, such as how we manage fields during inundation periods. During the dry season, we crop in the basements. These practices and proposals have allowed us to situate ourselves and assess our resilience capacity. We have identified areas where we need capacity reinforcement, especially in management. Our leaders lack sufficient management capacity, requiring training and capacity building. Using these attributes has allowed us to see ourselves in the mirror, revealing our strengths and weaknesses. It was a very great tool to see our strengths and weaknesses. Eva: In addition to the tools you’ve taken from the Resilience Project, is there another lesson you would like to share with listeners ?. Koffi: It’s not too early. Koto: Yes, precisely. Another important tool is the tree model. While we know the difficulties and problems, being able to catalog them, situate them, and study the deep causes was not easy. These two tools, the attributes and the tree model, have been instrumental in addressing our challenges. Eva: Beautiful, thank you so much. You have already shared a bit about some of the ecological shocks that you faced throughout the years -from fires to droughts to insect invasions. And we are sadly aware that many places in the world who are contributing the least to climate change are impacted the worst by it. I’m wondering if there are any other shocks you have experienced, either in your ecovillages in Togo or in West Africa more generally? Koto: We haven’t seen an exchange of activities between communities or ecovillages. It’s true that during our sessions, thanks to GEN, we interact with our brothers from Ghana, Gambia, and Zimbabwe, who face situations similar to ours. Now, it would be a great opportunity, if GEN wishes, to organize an exchange activity between these ecovillages to learn from each other and discover new practices. Eva: Thank you. Noted. Koto: It’s true that in the rest of the West, there are Ghana, Gambia, and Senegal. For Togo, Senegal has mainly served as a model. As Kofi mentioned, the first missions proposed by the Senegalese government were to observe the ecovillages in Senegal. These initial visits were organized by the government so we could witness what was happening there. As members of the community, we haven’t had many exchanges with other ecovillages to share experiences, good practices, and challenges. Our focus is more local. We want to express our gratitude to those who wish to join us. This is a new opportunity for us to discuss this initiative, present it to the president, share our experiences, and connect with the local community. / We warmly invite you to come, visit, and see Togo for yourself. In our exchanges with GEN, I tried to read a little and also see the experience of certain countries. There is a model of an eco-village that participates in our process that I found interesting. What we are trying to do in the movement today is to copy a little of what they did. It’s an eco-village in Ojibwe, something like that. I don’t remember the name of the country exactly, but it’s in the district of Winan. I’m trying to find the name. It’s Uta Ganishampao in the region of… Yes, we are copying the framework of this eco-village. I don’t have the name right now, but we are a bit copying it. It’s an eco-village in Banojibe. It’s the name of the country that I can’t find. But the model of the eco-village is something that interested me a lot. The design of the eco-village is what we also use to produce in our agro-ecological farm. There is the agricultural production part, breeding, pisciculture. Now, they have put a welcoming infrastructure that we have tried to build, some bungalows too for the welcomes. It’s the eco-village in Banojibe. They have structures like we are also creating bungalows for people that would come and be there to see what we do, and yeah. Now they also have at their level a training center for universities. We don’t yet have the means to build a training center, but if we manage to put this training center in place, it would help a lot of young people in our community and from the surrounding communities to come and settle, to learn to produce in an ecological way. So it’s a project that is important to us, and if we have the means, we will also establish a training center in the future. We have a big farm with enough space, but not enough means to do it like Balo-Djibi. We would like to do like Balo-Djibi and have a training center. For now, we don’t have the finances to do it, but we are working on it. Eva: Thank you very much. I think you’ve already started to answer once again my next question, I’m curious, throughout the different ecovillages you are working with, do you feel you are becoming more or less prepared to deal with future changes, and how? Koffi: Yes, because during the sessions, we listened to the testimonies, people shared their experiences. We have also learned from everything that people have said. The way people have set up forests, for example. The way they have helped set up solar energy, for example. And then the problem of flooding. The problem of flooding here and there. What we also learned in Canada last year, for example, the floods, all that. No, I wanted to talk more about the fires of vegetation, the fires of forests. All these events, we learned from that. And then we said, no, we have to develop the capacity to avoid or minimize these risks for our community. For us, it was a really important moment to see different communities and ecovillages in their storylines. How they created the whole community and which, I would say, threshold or problems they faced to get there. For example, hearing examples about how people dealt with the drought or with severe winds. Or what happened in Canada with no weather at all. It was really a lot of experience and refocused us on all resources. Eva: From these learned experiences, would you say the communities you work with are becoming more resilient? Koffi: There have been wars, there have been movements for the community to adjust…. ….Yes, in fact, we have gained resilience because there are communities that have experienced very painful events in the past. For example, at the beginning of the session, we listened to certain stories of people who have been through wars, or there have been movements for the community to resist. There is a community at the level of the coast that has been very much experiencing atrocities. It’s in the distant past. So, if we listen to this story, what they have experienced, the ceasefire, we say to ourselves, there have been worse elsewhere than at home. So, when you know that there are people who are living worse, who have more difficult conditions than what you are living, it motivates you not to be fatalistic. For example, I don’t remember the name, but the community that was next to the coast, and they really had a painful time back in history, even worse than what we somehow faced with the fire. It really strengthened us to say, yes, it is possible. We can face anything. Eva: Thank you very much, Kofi. Koto, I will invite you to answer the next question – Can you share some of the practices and tools that you practice as an individual or that your community practices for coping with change or for resilience? You’ve also already shared a bit about what traditional practices exist that add to resilience, but this is more on a personal level. Koto: Yes, personally, in terms of resilience, I think that, as Kofi said, it’s not about being fatalistic. We have experienced difficult situations, and personally, We have experienced difficult situations but I told myself, we have to adapt, we have to fight, whatever the events we know, to say that, well, it’s not the end, we have to keep resisting. And, so if we have to share from our experiences, it’s about being optimistic for the future, and taking into account the current realities of what we are currently experiencing, to project ourselves into the future, and to say that, no, we cannot be condemned to live in a situation that we have today, as we will continue to live. That’s the example, the experience, the lesson I have drawn from the time we spent developing aspects of resilience. And personally, it helped me a lot to face individual challenges, personal challenges, which we continue to face. So, I am better prepared than before to face certain challenges. Its like there is really a power to go beyond to really achieve them. There is no reason to stay in what won’t work. There are very difficult situations and for me it really helps to empower myself to get thtough different difficult situations that I have to face. In the image of the community, looking at what we have developed in the past 12 months, there is a better perception of what catastrophe we have experienced. And we understand much better the causes now. At least 90% of the community can say that what we have experienced is not necessarily due to an error or the appreciation of God. It is human behavior that is the origin of things. And if we do nothing at home, we risk simply disappearing one day. That’s what I’ve noticed as a lesson for the community, outside of my own personal resilience. So it is upon human behavior to change and to determine the results. We are stepping outside of this vision that things are coming from the outside. It’s more that we’re looking inside. What are our actions? How can they be the source of what really affects us? So it’s not only spiritual or external effects. And so, if we have to share from our experience, it’s to be optimistic about the future and taking into account the current realities of what we are currently experiencing, to project ourselves into the future and say that, no, we cannot be condemned to live in the situation that we have today, as we will continue to live. This is the example, the experience, the lessons that I have drawn from the time that we have spent developing the aspects of resilience. And personally, it helped me a lot to face individual challenges, personal challenges, which we continue to face. So I better prefer than before to face certain challenges. It’s like there is really a power to go beyond and to really achieve that. There is no reason to just stay in what won’t work. There are very difficult situations. And for me, it really helps to empower myself to get toward different personal challenges that I have to face. Eva: Now I would love to hear a bit about the future that you are envisioning. What do you see as a resilient community, region and planet? Koto: There are different aspects to be improved… … As far as we are concerned as a community, with the efforts we are developing, there are different aspects that we have raised. Time does not allow us to review all the challenges, the constraints, the action that we envision taking place, the social cohesion, a dynamic that can allow us to envision a better future. But from my point of view, I am optimistic and I am for our community too. The community is capable of being much more resilient with regard to the phenomena we are experiencing today. There is excessive heat that we’re experiencing today. We have never experienced it before. We do not know what catastrophes will happen, but we are optimistic to say that the better we organize ourselves, the more we will mobilize and find solutions to the challenges. So, for example, the heat is one of the big things we got from the journey. And thanks to GEN, being a link at the global level, so that the difficulties we share in the network can be relayed. And the local solutions that we offer through our traditional knowledge, through our actions, can be relayed at the level of large international organizations at the global level. So we can together find solutions at the base, at the level of community, towards the whole planet. Because if at the level of community we do nothing, it will be difficult for everyone at their level to find a solution. So GEN constitutes for us an important tool, a relay, so we can go to the big decisions that are being made. Those who have the monopoly to lead the world can understand the local issues and work and accompany us to raise the challenges worldwide. For us, it’s really important that GEN is a sort of connector to the wider community, so that our local practices are transmitted. And also that we hear from other practices and other parts of the world. What are people doing? It’s important for the stakeholders, for the people that actually have the power to decide on a political level, for example, to really get to know what is happening somewhere and where resilience is coming from. Indeed, our community today is more resilient. The level, the capacity for resilience today is better. Secondly, our community is difficult to access by road, because we don’t have access roads, especially in the rainy season. To have access to help our community, our villages, it’s very difficult. So it means sometimes if a woman wants to go to bed at night and we have to evacuate her quickly to a health center, the closest one is 25 kilometers away. So instead of barely 30 minutes, we’re spending hours before accessing the health center. So that’s also a problem. It reduces our resilience capacity. We produce, we are mostly farmers, but we don’t have the means to conserve the products. So the products once harvested are sold at a lower price because we cannot conserve them. To align this difficulty with this health center, we have 25 kilometers to the next health center. So if a woman is giving birth at that time in the evening and the road is flooded, then it could take hours to get there. And that’s one concern. The other thing is we’re farmers mainly selling directly our products because we don’t have anywhere to store them or techniques to process them. So we’re selling it at a small price because of that. If we had the capacity to conserve agricultural products for transformation, but we don’t have a factory. So now if next season the crop is bad, we don’t have a good harvest, there will be famine. So if we had been able to conserve, then at least we could use it for the next year and face the hardships. So in conclusion, we have improved our resilience capacity in relation to what we have been able to achieve. In relation to the stories we have heard over the years, to what we have shared. So this has allowed us to be a little more resilient, to prepare us mentally to face future shocks. But in relation to what I have just said, for instance, in terms of social and collective structures, we are not ideally resilient. Eva: Thank you. Before we close, I’m very curious , how have the insights that you’ve gained during the Communities of Practice influenced your work supporting the many communities that you work with? What do you leave this project with? Koto: During the different sessions and workshops that we organized, we used the tree model to trace back to the deep causes of our current reality. This process fostered a collective awareness within the community. Reflecting on past events allowed everyone to appreciate our current situation. As we conducted these activities, we also projected ourselves into the future, considering current realities. Kofi mentioned that we lack enough workforce and have started using chemical products to develop agriculture. This raises concerns about the state of our soil and environment in 10, 20, or 30 years, given the pollution and health impacts we’re already experiencing. We recognized a loss of consciousness and realized the need for alternative solutions. These concerns highlight the relevance of the elements Kofi mentioned. We acknowledged the loss of collective consciousness in our community and, through our practices and workshops, emphasized the importance of finding alternative solutions to ensure resilience against the challenges we face today. Koffi: In fact, when we conducted the different sessions with the youth and the workshops, particularly after the tree model, we noticed that everything is linked. For example, we explained to the population that today we are learning to produce in an ecological way to avoid chemical products. However, if the use of chemical products persists, these products will destroy the soil by killing microorganisms, leading to poor soil quality and reduced harvests. We do not have the means to produce large quantities. We are mainly using small tools like a hoe to work in the field. Poor harvests can lead to young people leaving for cities, resulting in fewer people at home to protect our forests, care for the elderly, and look after our animals. If our animals are contaminated, we become contaminated as well, and we won’t have healthy blood. Using chemical products pollutes the soil, potentially forcing us to seek new land, which would lead to further forest exploitation and eventual disappearance. When people leave the village, those who protect the forest from vegetation fires are no longer there, risking the community’s survival since it relies on the forest for more than 90% of its needs. When we explained that our actions today could destroy us tomorrow, there was some awareness, but it’s not yet 100%. Some still hesitate to go in the right direction. However, there are signs of a growing awareness of the need for change, and we believe it will get better and better. Eva: Thank you so much for sharing, Koffi. And is there anything else that you want to add to our rich conversation today? Koto On the whole, I’m quite satisfied with the interview. It effectively summarizes our current mindset, ambitions, objectives, and the challenges we face – spanning from climate to social and economic issues, all intertwined with environmental concerns. Collective mobilization is key, both within our community with our available resources and globally, where organizations like GEN play a vital role in advocating for support and assistance from various sources. Beyond our traditional structural and cultural frameworks, there’s an urgent need to adapt our way of life to effectively confront future challenges. This emphasizes the importance of GEN’s role in communicating our efforts and facilitating connections that can actually expand our resilience. Koffi As Kotu mentioned, GEN serves as a platform for us to showcase our community and increase its visibility. We aspire to create a documentary film highlighting our conservation and resilience practices, aiming to share them with others. With support, potentially through Jan’s website, we can amplify our community’s presence and reach a wider audience. Our dynamic community, nestled within a primary forest rich in biodiversity, seeks to share its experiences globally. While financial means would accelerate our progress, visibility is paramount. We aim to demonstrate our commitment to environmental betterment, utilizing our forest and resources sustainably. Ultimately, our goal is to inspire others and attract support for our cause. Whether through financial assistance or increased visibility, we remain dedicated to our mission. We want to emphasize to the world that we are actively contributing to the global environment and well-being through our local efforts. Eva It has been really lovely talking with you both today and hearing about how your local solutions can have a global impact, learning some of the lessons you’ve discovered through the Resilience Project, and learning about your setbacks as well as your successes. Thank you again for joining us Koto/Koffi Thank you very much, Eva. Thank you. Outro Eva Join us again next week as we continue the conversation over what it means to be resilient in our time of deepening polycrisis. While you wait for the next episode of Community Resilience, we invite you to explore more about the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project by visiting us online at ecovillage.org/resilience.

Listen to the episode Transcription: In this episode, we take a moment to step back from our usual in-depth storytelling and instead, marvel at the framework that has allowed us to observe the ongoing exploration of resilience, adaptation and transformation in a >+2.5 degrees global warming scenario. This June, more than 20 members of our Community of Practice, along with the project stewards, will gather for a reflective wrap-up and celebration of our accomplishments, marking the end of the Ecovillage Resilience Chapter and looking ahead to the next phase of our journey. Together they will explore some of the key findings and the resources that will be offered to the network. This will include a synthesis on the best practices of Resilient Communities, an online course, refined ecovillage design cards, and more. The discussion and digestion of the key learnings expressed live during this event will feedback into the designed materials to help more communities to navigate this journey. We will also nurture the personal bonds that have formed during the Ecovillage Resilience project. It’s about closing this chapter consciously, tending to the connections we’ve built. Throughout the project, a lot of our efforts have been grounded in community workshops. But now, we’re gearing up for something unique – participants from all corners of the globe, spanning various time zones, will come together for a collective gathering, a special opportunity for us to unite despite our geographical differences. If hearing that makes you wish to witness this inspirational celebration and enriching conversation, then you can already mark your calendars for the 24th of June at 11:30 UTC when all of this will be released to the wider network in the live Open Celebration and Public Launch! (Join us here!) Representatives from all participating communities will join, along with their family and friends, the wider GEN network and you, our listeners, if you like. You’ll have the joy of connecting, virtually face to face, with some of the voices you’ve heard in this podcast. We’ll hear more of the stories we’ve tuned into here, though this time in a more weaved tapestry, through the lens of what this journey of exploring resilience really means for them, their communities, the ecovillage network, and the world. We’ll balance the view of understanding the data and giving voice to the stories that gathered the informaiton. We’ll remember the calling question which sparked this participatory action research 2 years ago: What can ecovillages nurture today to be more resilient tomorrow? Building on that, we will begin to deepen the reflection of how ecovillages can enhance and strengthen their practices to prepare for potential climate change scenarios while amplifying their collective impact and transformative capacity. Hear what’s next for some of the communities. How have the other members of the communities resonated with the workshops and activities they’ve been invited into? What will they do now in order to nurture more resilience to climate change and increase their abilities to navigate the polycrisis? How can they retain the transformative capacity that was sparked on this journey? And hear what’s next for GEN as the stewards of this work. which I am excited to share a bit more about this with you today. With words from Anna Kovasna who you met at the begining of our listening journey, let’s take a look at the next phase that is taking shape – Keystone Communities project. The Keystone Communities Project will build on the insights, tools and capacities created through the Resilience project and reflect the ecovillage network’s ongoing commitment to scale and amplify the capacity of local communities to be resilient resources for wider transformation, able to function also when larger systems falter or collapse. In this next phase, we will widen the scope of action, addressing some of the needs discovered through the previous work. And build upon our commitment and hunger for deeper and wider impact. The ecovillage network is committed to navigating the polycrisis not only to survive, but to safeguard and nurture human dignity, the more-than-human world, and the base conditions for life to thrive. This is inspired by two concepts from indigenous scholars which point the way to this life-affirming vision of humanity’s future. It also provides the ethical framework for our activities: Firstly, keystone species. These are species who are able to uphold entire food webs and play a powerfully positive role in the ecosystem – they live lives that enable other life to thrive. When used to describe a type of human existence, it points to civilisations, persisting for millennia, whose sub-sis-tence, institutions and beliefs stem from a lived realisation of reciprocity, mutuality and interbeing-with-the-more-than-human world. Places where, as Lyla June Johnston says, humans are ‘architects of abundance’. Facing mass extinctions, pollution, and the unravelling of ecosystems as well as global injustice and the crumbling of dominant economic systems, we urgently need to return to life-centred design and become architects of abundance again. The second concept is survivance, as articulated by Gerald Vizenor. Vizenor speaks about survivance in the context of native american cultures after the genocide of settler arrival. He says – ”Survival is a response; survivance is a standpoint, a worldview, and a presence”. He points to indigenous ways of life and self expression as resistance to dominant paradigms. Others speak of survivance as a combination of survival and resistance. In learning to navigate crisis for the benefit of all life, the idea of survivance can point us to the potential for liberation, transformation, resistance and the beauty inherent in human imagination, creativity, and culture. It also points to the powerful way in which story shapes human existence. Ecovillages know that narrative and story also have the power to shift the way we relate to place and each other, and impact our capacity to take action, sustain, heal from trauma and keep going through hardship. Facing societal collapse, totalising dystopian scenarios, and hopelessness, we need cultural expressions that support reconnection to the more than human world and provide pathways towards meaning, resistance and regeneration. So from this, we arrive at the concept of Keystone Communities as life-affirming and locally appropriate responses to worsening polycrisis. A Keystone Community plays a powerfully positive role in safeguarding life-affirming conditions in its local social-ecological system. It is based on values that encourage long-term thinking and solidarity, leverages culture to craft meaning, resistance, recovery and regeneration in the face of crisis. And it is able to do so while absorbing shocks, avoiding tipping points, and retaining capacity for system transformation. Closing Are you intrigued by what you’ve heard? Learn more about the details of this event and the Global Ecovillage Movement by subscribing to our newsletter at ecovillage.org/newsletter. If you can’t make it in June, or you’re listening to this episode later, the newsletter will also be your source to access a recording of the session, or reach out to me directly. You are also warmly invited to follow the movement on social media. You can find us on instagram at @ecovillage, or search the Global Ecovillage Network on Linkedin & facebook. Help us rebuild our facebook audience as an act of resistance after being taken down due to “violating community standards” and stay connected to the powerful work of this growing movement. Once again, thank you for listening. I hope you have enjoyed today’s mini episode. And stay tuned, next week we will be back with another full-length episode.