The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Food & Community in the Ruins: Dougald Hine, Chris Smaje, Pella Thiel | Reality Roundtable #05

Episode Date: October 15, 2023

On this Reality Roundtable, philosopher and writer Dougald Hine, social scientist and farmer Chris Smaje, and ecologist and farmer Pella Thiel join Nate to discuss the future of food and community. Our disconnected relationship to agriculture and our neighbors have been shaped by a modern industrial society fueled by surplus hydrocarbon energy. What will these relationships look like in a lower energy future, where we need to once again work with each other and the land, rather than in isolation. Can we learn from history to celebrate with each other in times of abundance and find strength in community in times of need? In the present world where people are in constant search for meaning and purpose, what are strategies to find joy in simplicity and well-being through the growing and sharing of food? About Dougald Hine Dougald Hine is a social thinker, writer and speaker. After an early career as a BBC journalist, he co-founded organizations including the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME. His latest book is At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies (2023). He co-hosts The Great Humbling podcast and publishes a Substack called Writing Home. About Chris Smaje Chris Smaje is a writer, social scientist and small-scale farmer, co-running a mixed holding in Somerset, southwest England. He's the author of A Small Farm Future (2020) and Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future (2023), both published by Chelsea Green. He blogs at and is contactable via www.chrissmaje.com. About Pella Thiel Pella Thiel is a maverick ecologist, part-time farmer, full-time activist and teacher in ecopsychology. She is the co-founder of swedish hubs of international networks like Swedish Transition Network and End Ecocide Sweden and a knowledge expert in the UN Harmony with Nature programme. Pella was awarded the swedish Martin Luther King Award in 2023 and the Environmental Hero of the year 2019. Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/NVeCw-Ljenk Show Notes & Links to Learn More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/rr05-hine-smaje-thiel 

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, in our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. Welcome to Reality Roundtable number five. Typically, we have former guests that have been on the podcast. This one are three new friends of mine. Firstly, Pella Teal, a maverick Swedish ecologist, part-time farmer, full-time environmental

activists, and a teacher in eco-psychology. She's the co-founder of Swedish hubs in the Swedish Transition Network, as well as something called End Ecoside, and I expect Pell and I will be fast friends going forward in the future. Second is Chris Smaid, who is a writer, social scientist, and small-scale farmer in Somerset, England. He is the author of a small farm future and saying no to a farm-free future. And rounding out the roundtable is Dugold Hein, who is a social thinker, writer, speaker and co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, as well as a school called Home. His latest book is called At Work in the Ruins, which is actually how we organized this

call thematically. How do people paying attention to this podcast, paying attention to the way the geopolitics and energy and culture is careening towards ruins? How do we take our first steps into living differently, doing things differently, specifically with respect to food and community? This is a great discussion. I hope you enjoy this roundtable. Welcome to reality roundtable number five.

With me today are Pellateel, Dugald Hein, and Chris, how do you pronounce your last name? Smage. Chris Smage. Chris, where are you joining us from? I'm on my small farm in Somerset, Southwest England, about 100 miles west to London.

Well, it's great to meet you. I have a copy of your book, say no to a farm-free future, and welcome to the program. Dugald and Pella, I know you were both in Sweden because I saw you both in person a couple weeks ago. Dougald, good to see you again. Good to see you, Nate. Yeah, joining from

the old shoe shop in Astavola just north of Uppsala. Excellent. And Pella, hello. Yes, hi, great to be at the table. I am from a small farm as well, 40 kilometers east of Stockholm. Excellent. And I just spent the night there and helped you with your sheep and other chores to pay for my supper. Yeah, yeah, we miss you a lot. When the lamps were making sounds here and waking me up in the morning, I wondered where you had gone. So the reason that you were all on this podcast is because you are ready to borrow a phrase from Dugald at work in the ruins,

trying to midwife society and culture towards what comes beyond our current overconsumptive, overshoot, environmentally damaging resource consumptive fossil fuel-based situation. No one knows the future or what will happen, including me. but I do think that in the middle of the distribution, something like a great simplification, where our lives will be more intensely local, we'll have less technology and consumption, and we're going to require more interaction

with other humans and our local environments. But probably we won't get too much warning for such a future. And now kind of, the media and the government narratives are this like cultural anesthesia that keep most people from feeling the urgency of this path of cultural change. So you three are already working on this future in your own ways. And I would like to have you each start with a five minute or so overview on how to think about this and what is the thrust of your personal work. in this space of more local, more community, more food in your local area sort of pathway.

Dugold, can we start with you? Sure. Well, I guess maybe it's helpful to start by landing this at work in the ruins framing, because there's sort of two parts to it. First is, there are ruins. And yeah, we might not be sitting in the ruins right now, but they are already written into the story to some extent. But the second part is acknowledging that isn't the end of the story,

because there's also work to do. And I guess one way or another, I've been trying to offer framings that make room for recognizing that for quite a long time. And that started publicly back in 2009 when Paul Kingsnorth and I wrote The Dark Mountain Manifesto. And right at the end of that manifesto, we say, the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. So that distinction is trying to highlight the danger that we mistake the one for the other. Because unless we can distinguish between losing the world as we know it and losing the world full stop,

then we're going to throw everything at attempts to save or sustain the ways of living that have been taken for granted, around here lately at all costs. And I think that's actually how people end up, you know, with the best of intentions and with some awareness of the depth of the trouble we're in, nonetheless advocating for and working for a path that I call the big path that I think leads to the thing that you describe as the Mordor economy, Nate. And so in saying we could lose the world as we know it and we wouldn't have lost a world's worth living for, future's worth attempting to bring about, part of that is trying to just broaden the spectrum of things worth working for to include something more like a great simplification. So I guess my work has been finding these

frames, perspectives and examples that help us out of the trap of mistaking the world as we know it for the only world worth having. And one of the people who took that framing that Paul and I put out in the manifesto and ran with it was an Italian philosopher called Federico Campania. And the way he tells it is like this. He says, sometimes you're born into the ending of a world. This is a thing that's happened. It's happened to others before in other times and places. He says, you know, how do you tell that the world you were born into is ending?

Well, a world is held together by a story. And when the world is ending, its story is coming to an end. And so when people talk about the future within the logic, of that world, it no longer sounds convincing. Politicians are no longer able to mobilize people by appealing to the future in the way that worked two or three generations ago. And instead, what's left politically within that world is that the political potency lies in turning to the past.

So you get, you know, take back control, make America great again, these potent political slogans that appeal to the past. And that's not a mistake. It's not because people aren't advocating for the world. the future convincingly or powerfully enough or trying hard enough, that actually tells us something about the moment we're at, which is that the future in the normal sense, which is some kind of trajectory that can be extended from the recent past through the present and on into a field of promise and continuity, no longer seems plausible even within our mainstream culture.

So then Campania's suggestion is, what do you do if your diagnosis is that you were born into the ending of the world you were born into. Two things. First, stop worrying about trying to make sense according to the logic of the world that is ending. And second, look for ways to be making good ruins. Because when a world ends, it leaves things behind. And obviously we know that there are plenty of toxic legacies that this way of living is going to be leaving behind. But that doesn't exhaust what's going to be left behind. And so maybe making good ruins includes from the kind of moment in the story we're in, attempting to smuggle resources out of that existing story that is ending, that can be fragments, that can be material to work with for building futures that are

presently unimaginable as the end of that story becomes more undeniable. And I feel like that's one of the things that brings the four of us together. So if we say world's end, this is a thing that happens. people will say quite reasonably, yeah, but this time it's different. So I think that's the last bit of the framing that's worth landing is, you know, what's the nature of the difference? And the obvious answer, people say, well, this time it's global. I actually don't think that's quite as important as we often make it, because it always feels global in the world that is ending. But even when a world ends, there are things left behind, and that will be true, too, on this global scale.

I think what's most different this time is that we've never had a situation in which so many of us were so far removed from having the skills necessary to meet each other's needs at the levels of communities and households. And I think that that's the real unique quality of the kind of ending that we're headed into here is that, you know, cushioned on this resource of fossil energy and on the global next. networks built up through colonialism, so many of us have been able to live oblivious to where our food comes from or any of the other things that meet our basic needs. And that's almost been a matter of pride. The fact that hardly anyone around here is involved in growing my food has been proof of progress until it begins to dawn on us that this story, which is the story of progress, is coming to an end. And so now in terms of the work in the ruins or the work to prepare for the, the, the arrival of the ruins. I think a lot of that work has to do with rebuilding this capacity, both

in practical terms and also at a cultural level, the capacity of being able to come together and meet our needs much closer to the ground than we've been doing around here lately. So I guess that's where I'd leave it for an opening. Thank you. I have written down lots of questions. My most visceral reaction is I wish all my podcast guests had British action. I accents and we're trained in British schools because you all are so articulate and crisp in how you explain things. I'm sure it's something cultural or in the water or whatever. So let's, instead of interrupting each of you with questions, let's, let's hear from each of you first. Let's move to another Brit. Chris, take it away. Right. No pressure on me now after that, after that

intro. Yeah, well, I guess the first thing I'd say is, you know, I spend a lot of my time sort of making this case for the need for, you know, for local future and the fact that food production, local food production is going to be key. So it's great, Nathan Dougal, you've already done my job for me, really. That's, you know, that's really key. But I suppose, I mean, what I would say is ironically, you know, I came into this, you know, focused on the practicalities of farming, but I don't think that's the main problem. I mean, there's this kind of myth that only with sort of modern high tech, high energy, high capital food production can we feed the world. The reality is it's not that difficult for us to feed ourselves locally. And, you know,

we can look for inspiration to, you know, most parts of the world have got a kind of pre-modern, pre-industrial, very ecologically sophisticated systems of food production that we can learn from. You know, one of our big problems, I think, is we've sort of got to get over ourselves in thinking that, oh, you know, that's in the past. You know, we can't learn anything from that. You know, it's backward looking. It's turning the clock back. You know, basically, we can learn from past agrarian systems.

And, you know, we can argue all day about different farming, systems, different techniques and crops and so on. But basically, it's not that difficult to produce them in principle locally. The problem, I think, is the political and economic frameworks, kind of how do we get from where we are now to that local agrarian future. And I'm going to sort of leave that question aside for a moment and talk about, you know, what a small farm future looks like. I think we have a pretty good idea on the basis of what small farms, societies of the past and present look like.

And what they generally look like is small-scale household-based production. You know, we're talking about individuals and families largely producing for their own needs in households, typically with a lot of de facto private property rights, yeah sort of producing for own need but that is set within it's kind of held within a larger community a kind of moral economy and you know maybe we'll get into the details of this in the discussion later you know the question of commons and so forth so you know I write in some of my books about autonomy and community you know I think that that two levels of sort of households set within communities is important. And this is, I think, is quite confusing to our modern political categories.

You know, people really struggle with this. On the left, people struggle with the idea of private property rights, families, household-based farming, and people on the right struggle with the idea of quite how communal and collective, you know, that, you know, the larger local structures around that can be. But a really important, I mean, yeah, there's so many sort of directions that can go in. I mean, I think an important aspect from my point of view is the kind of self-limitation of local and household productions. So by producing for yourself or for your community, you get immediate ecological and social feedback about the consequences of your actions, you know, how you farm affects known, um,

identifiable people locally and it affects the known identifiable ecology of, of the landscape you inhabit. And that's really important compared to the kind of modern global industrial farming system, you know, which is just pushing over production the whole time, sort of, you know, pushing us to buy products where we have no idea where they, you know, where what we're buying comes from the social and the ecological consequences of it. So I think, you know, that is where we're headed, probably whether we like it or not. You know, the big question is how we get there from where we are now. I don't have a lot of faith myself in sort of modern, gigantic, bureaucratic nation state.

You know, people, you know, the question I always stumble on is, so what do you think the government should do? You know, what five, you know, policies would you suggest the prime minister implements, you I think, you know, we're too caught in that, that sort of old model that Dougal was talking about. I think where renewal is going to come from is, you know, if it comes at all, is from the margins, is from people innovating out of necessity. In my first book, A Small Farm Future, I used the analogy of supersedure in beehives. I talked about the supersedure state. So when the queen bee dies unexpectedly, the worker bees, after.

their initial panic, they have to innovate, they have to create a new queen, they have to create a new politics, a new set of relationships with whatever they have to hand. So the way I see this playing out is, you know, increasingly large-scale, centralized bureaucratic states are not going to be able to keep all the balls that we're accustomed to them keeping in the air. They're not going to be able to deliver the service that we expect. People are therefore going to have to innovate that for themselves. And, you know, that is a worrisome and a scary prospect, but also out of that I see the potential for new kinds of agrarian localism emerging. And I think, you know, where that's going to, where that may or may not work, you know, I think we're going

to be looking at a tough politics of access to land. Where that's going to work is when there's kind of distributed, you know, the way that the class politics falls out in terms of distributed access to land. So in terms of my personal work that you asked about, I guess basically I'm on a small farm. I'm trying to figure that out as best I can within present limitations, both in terms of the farming and the sort of community relationships, you know, how that works socially. In terms of my writing, I think we need to recover some, you know, we've got wrapped up in very kind of modernist political categories and there are older traditions like agrarian populism, distributism, civic republicanism, we need to sort of look at those, those more marginalized types

of politics that I think speak to present needs. There are organisations, La Viea Campesina, I want to mention the global sort of peasant movement is doing great work worldwide, so getting into that kind of politics of small-scale farming here in the UK, the ecological land co-op trying to sort of decommodify access to land and enable new entrants who maybe don't have huge amounts of money available to get established in farming. And also, I know you don't like it, Nate, just stop oil. I've had a sort of a very bit part to play in climate protest here. And I think that interests me is trying to turn that moment of protest and that moment of civil disobedience into, you know, a politics around food and land locally. And I think, finally,

part of that is going to have to be about conflict resolution, you know, a little bit involved locally in community mediation and that kind of stuff. You know, we have become very accustomed to there being, you know, some larger organisation that, or, you know, being able to walk away from local conflicts or being able to sort of kick it upstairs to some bigger organisation. I think it's important for us, you know, not to do that to actually, you know, meet each other face to face and learn how to resolve difficulties on a on a kind of individual and personal level that's going to be a big part of the future so yeah that would be my opening gambit excellent thank you um let us pass it over to the next upcoming queen bee uh pellet teal thank you yeah i have a lot of

practice in conflicts resolution on a personal level living on a family owned farm So I totally agree with that point. But I would like to start with the storyline of a recent film from last year. It got a lot of international awards, but it's a Swedish director, Ruben Ustlund, the Triangle of Sadness, where it's a group of very rich people on a yacht. And they are being, the yacht is being sunk by pirates. and the group of them are getting saved on a small island, some billionaires and a couple of supermodels

and one of the cleaning women, a Philippine woman who is called Abigail, and she's the only one who has any survival skills at all. So with her ability to fish and to make fire, she can sort of feed the others and takes the lead. And previous relations, previous power, relations become totally upside down. And so she gets a lot of privileges for herself.

She gets the best food and she gets to live in the life boat that they have also. So she keeps that as her space and she also takes one of the male supermodel as her lover. And what I remember most from this film, which is horrible and great, and I really recommend it, is that Carl, the supermodel, he says to Abigail the cleaning lady, I love you, you give me fish. And I think that speaks volumes. Like we will tolerate any regime, any authoritarian regime as long as it feeds us, which is what the fossil system is doing now.

But when it breaks down, what will happen? So that's where food sovereignty is a really huge thing. And where I come from is from the transition movement, which is very interesting because I met with that movement in the US, but it's from the UK originally. And I have been active in it and been part of founding the Swedish branch for about exactly 15 years. and food is often a starting point. So this network is focusing on local resilience or lately shifting into local regeneration. And of course food has sort of so many layers in what we are trying to do.

So we often start there. And I want to tell you what we did when at the outset of the, set of the pandemic when there was sort of the food on the shelves began to not be obvious that it would be there as we were used to. And when sort of the global food security became a thing, it became a discussion. And we were like, yes, how can we grab this opportunity to create some awareness that we have a very vulnerable food system with the, um, very low resilience.

So we started something that we called the potato appeal, where we urged everyone to plant potatoes in a small way or in a bigger way, any way that you could. And we built that on something that, a movement or an uprising that was during the first World War in Sweden, the potato uprising, it was called, when a quarter of a million people, mostly women, were marching to urge authorities to feed them because they couldn't feed their kids. And this is said to be maybe the closest that Sweden has been to a revolution.

And at that time, authorities responded. So they also, they urge people to plant also in central Stockholm. And they were giving out free seeds and potatoes and, you know, built on food security. And I have this very great picture. It's a great picture where it's sort of this big placards in the central Stockholm. and there are men, very nicely dressed men with hats and ties. And it says on one of the signs, it says, plant potatoes or you will starve next winter. This is such a great case of communications.

They were quite frank in their communication. Plant potatoes or you will starve next winter. And the other one is saying, everybody is planting potatoes, except boring people. I love the communication from the authorities. And sadly, this is not what we are seeing today. So during the pandemic, the Swedish Minister of Rural Affairs, she said that, okay, yeah, there is a problem. Apparently the stocks in the supermarkets isn't enough.

But you don't have to worry because there will always be food in the restaurants. and I'm like, okay, there is an abyss opening here. Our leaders, I mean, I knew that they don't lead, but sort of the level of awareness is just very close to Marie Antoinette, who said if people don't have bread, they can eat cookies. And so to me, what the transition movement is doing in a very, very sophisticated way, is to work on the responsibility that we have as people. Like, how can we find our agency when it is like this?

And what we did in the potato appeal is to tell people to plant potatoes, tell others, and ask your local authorities, what do they do? And we got a huge, overwhelming response. People were planting potatoes all over and in any way they could. And we're not interested in this prepper style, every man for himself and feed your family response. But what we want to do is to build community, build relationships. And you can say that, okay, facing what we face with planting potatoes is a small and insignificant response. But actually, it isn't because it becomes.

a process is starting where you find your agency. It actually becomes very empowering. When you plant some potatoes with your neighbors and in the autumn you get to harvest, maybe hundreds of kilos which people have done, even if they have never grown anything before in their lives. So to us, it's a way of increasing not just the caring capacity, but the caring capacity.

and relationships between just, I mean, you and yourself and your agency, and between people and also between people and land. Thank you, Pella, and thank you all. I have so many questions. Let's just carry on with what you were saying, Pella. Can we prepare for what we envision, be coming by focusing on food or does the focus on community have to come first? Because as you pointed out, they're interrelated. I always thought that local currencies like in Bristol or

in upstate New York weren't really to be for trade and commerce, but to build social capital. So can each of you offer your speculation on the relationship between community and food and how they interrelate as we approach a different cultural lower consumption future? Well, maybe I can bring in an example from something that I created around the same time that Paul and I started Dark Mountain. The same year, I founded an agency called Spacemakers, which was, it started as meetups that were happening around London for people who were interested in making use of space that was sitting empty because of the global financial crisis in high streets and neighborhoods. And the best project we ended up doing during the era when I was running the agency was a thing called the West Norwood Feast, which is a monthly community-owned and run street market, which is still going, you know, 12 years and one pandemic later in West Norwood in South London. And we would have at 6 o'clock on a Sunday morning, local people getting out of bed, unpaid to come and put up market stalls up and down the streets of West Norwood. And I used to think, you know, maybe these people always secretly had a burning desire to run a street market. But I don't think that's what it is.

I think it's that the street market is giving people an excuse to do something that gives them a great deal. And that has something to do with the fact that running this together as a community, it's outside of the logics that dominate the societies that most of us have grown up in. because these societies are dominated by this twin logic of the state and the market. The logic of the state is people do things because they're told to by people who have power over them. The logic of the market is people do things because they're being paid money and if they don't gather enough money in the course of a month, then they're homeless next month. And the only reason why human beings are here at all is because for almost all of our history,

we had a greater range of reasons why we come together and do things than those two powerful, rather sort of brute, simple logics that have come to dominate a vast area of the social terrain of modernity. And so why was I at the same time as writing the Dark Mountain Manifesto running these projects to create community-owned street markets? Because it was a way of learning about and practicing the skills of coming together to do things for reasons other than because we've been paid to or told to.

And I think that there's a hidden capacity there that's just not on the market, sorry, not on the map of either the market or the state policy-making world. And if anything is going to make things turn out less badly than we mostly think that they're going to in the time to come, that hidden capacity of what happens when people come together and do the work of being human together, you know, that's where it might come from. And our motto when we were running those projects with space makers

was, you know, people are good at being people. We've been doing it for a long time. And if we are finding ourselves in situations where everything seems to be really dysfunctional and really badly done, it's probably because of something we've not been doing for very long at all that's got in the way of our evolved and cultural capacity

for being human together and finding solutions at a human scale. So that's kind of, that's the level at which I've, you know, tried to push the importance of community alongside of. It's not one or the other. But if we don't attend to that part of it, then our attention to food will end up, you know, falling down traps like the kind of individualistic prepper mentality

that Pella was describing. Yeah, I'm increasingly thinking about calling it pro-social prepping, which is much long. the lines of what you were just describing. Chris or Pella, do you have follow-up thoughts to that? I mean, maybe I could riff a little bit on the, you know, kind of what I was saying about moral economies and the relationship between household farming and commons. I mean, if, you know, agriculture is complicated because there's times when, you know, you kind of need all hands on deck, but some of the time, you know, sort of ordinary human nature being what it is, you know,

there's some things that people just sort of get on with sort of better on their own and you can, you know, there's all sorts of, you know, the more that you amplify relationships around certain tasks, you know, the more people fall out over exactly, you know, which, which way should you weed these carrots or whatever, you know. So, and if you look at a lot of traditional historic agrarian systems, they're very, very cleverly find ways to give people autonomy when autonomy is what's needed, create collective labour when that's what's needed, and share the harvest, you know, so it's not about kind of personal accumulation to, you know, to grow as many carrots as, as you as you possibly can and sell them.

It's more that you just don't need, you know, 30 people weeding a small patch of carrots and disagreeing about it. But you do sometimes need to bring people together. One of my teachers, Paul Richards, he did his work in West Africa, Sierra Leone, with Sweden farmers where, you know, burning, you've got to burn the secondary forest to establish the crop. That's a big collective job of Scandinavia, you know, interesting. stuff with Sweden farming historically, maybe particularly in Finland as well, you know.

So you bring people together and the way that the farmers did it in Sierra Leone is by brewing beer and throwing a party. So the farmer that makes the best beer and throws the best party gets the people, you know, they come do the work and then and then it's also pro-social. And you know, you look at a lot of commons that, you know, they are about managing the larger aspects of the land I've called it in some of my writing the elemental commons, you know, you can't manage fire risk, you can't manage watersheds and irrigation, you know, you can't manage certain aspects of soil management as an individual farm, so you have to come together as a community. But then there's other aspects where, you know, everyone is different, everybody wants to do their

own thing. And then in terms of the harvest, you know, we are intrinsically reliant upon one another, you know, it's not about accumulating the most and being the best off. It's always about, you know, putting the produce into the, you know, larger life of, you know, your family, your household, your neighbourhood, your community. And so we can really learn a lot from historic agrarian societies that, you know, they faced all of this very directly. And if they got it wrong, you know, it had very serious consequences in a way that we've insularly. ourselves from in modern society, but, you know, the way that we've set up this conversation, we, you know, we can't insulate ourselves from that long term. So we really need to learn from

this kind of clever dance of, you know, household, community, commons, collective landscape management and so on. You know, everywhere is different, but, you know, that's the challenge before us. Yeah, I would just add that I think food and community, they are inseparable. Chris is saying, I mean, why don't we have community? To have community, you have to need each other. And when you are trying to produce your own food, and you will know this because we had a plan to do something when you came to my place. And it totally didn't work out because of circumstances with this sheep. And that's what happens when you are directly working with living. systems. If you are a gardener, if you have a farm, like if you're interacting with

living complex systems, you will become humble because it won't work out. You may have a plan, but it won't be like that because there is so many factors. And as Chris is saying, that's when you really realize that I can't do this on my own. And that's where community starts. And also, I mean, both when you produce food and when you consume food, when we have community, we share a meal, a small meal or a big meal or a party. And to me, at this time of the year, like harvest time is when there is such abundance, I feel so rich.

I can go out and I can just get a lot of food. and I have so much food that I want to share it with people. And I think just this sense of abundance, like in a culture that is so focused on scarcity, and it's actually also creating scarcity. That sense can teach us important things. Except for most people, the abundance is 24-7, 365, because they just go to the grocery store. and buy things imported from around the world from New Zealand and other places.

So my next question pertains to that. You all have been working in this space and dedicated to it for a very long time. I would have thought, and I was wrong about this, that as the years went by and the details of our predicament became more and more obvious that the cultural stories would change. at the same time. But it almost seems like denial and that we're going to be planting potatoes on Mars with Matt Damon or in our flying cars with net zero and these other narratives that are very different from at work in the ruins are still incredibly popular. So how do you each find the work

and the narrative that you're talking is landing with others? Is it still kind of fringe or is it obvious to people once you have a little bit of a conversation and they're curious and they want to play a role have you noticed any change or what gives you optimism

or lack thereof on this issue? I think definitely the sense of urgency is increasing it's more you come more

more directly into really a depth in the conversation. But that is with people who are already caring about nature, for example, and these are the ones I often meet. But I would, I mean, I've found that when I started listening to you, and this is like 10 years ago, we were talking so much about peak oil. We had a peak oil film festival. And that we hired this huge venture.

new and like eight people came and wanted to talk about peak oil. So just to try to have this very, very difficult conversation that you have on the Great Simplification, that's too scary for most people I meet. And they just close their ears. So what we try to do is to not have that, to skip that. and just start doing something instead. So we have this saying in the transition movement that it's more a party than a protest.

So yeah, we know about the meta crisis and everything, but, you know, let's plant the potatoes. Or actually my best transition project is probably the pub in my barn. And I stole this idea. I think it was Paul Kingsnors who was involved in this, money-free pub, the happy pig. Was it to go? Yeah.

It's one of his neighbors. It's Mark Boyle. Yeah. The penny-free man, money-less man. Money-less man. The money-less man. And he wrote about this thing with the happy pig. And he said,

it's going to be the world's first money-free pub. We just have to fundraise first. And I'm like, I don't have to fundraise. I'll just open the door to the barn and I'll tell the neighbors, Now we're going to have a pub. So I think we actually were, we got ahead of him.

But that's been, I don't know how many years, maybe six years or something. And we have it a couple of times every year. And my neighbors are, you know, they are just common people, some quite rich people. And they don't want to hear about climate change. They don't want to hear about energy. But they want to meet each other at the pub. So that's how we create community. We're doing very similar things with the old shoe shop here in this little town of 1,500 people where we live.

And I completely agree that at the level of starting where you live, creating invitations that bring people through your door and into a space of practicing being human together that don't rely on them having to buy into the overarching analysis that is why you are doing it is part of how we get out of feeling trapped by the limits of how many people grasp this analysis. Zooming out a bit, the other thing that I have been tracking over the years is it's very clear that within the wider culture, there has been a deepening sense that things are astray. The future doesn't work the way it used to, that the promises of modernity, the promises of modern society are not being fulfilled,

even if, you know, at a superficial level, some of the shiny surface of it for some of the people still looks like it's delivering and the supermarket shelves still look full a lot of the time. And that sense of things being astray is very widespread. If you look at population surveys, by the beginning of last decade, so by 2010, you have majorities of two, three, or four to one,

across the Western countries saying that today's young people are going to have it harder than their parents rather than have a better standard of living than their parents. That reflects this diffuse awareness of something having gone badly wrong. It's a lot of steps from that diffuse awareness to an analysis that might fit with what you're putting forward in the Great Simplification. And in between, that often gets hijacked by, you know, clever, cynical politicians who are very good at pointing at, you know, an other whose fault it is. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, the Brazilian scholar who I've worked with a lot, who wrote a fantastic book called Hospicing Modernity. She said to me, when we were in Paris in 2018 at the time of the Gilles-Jealé-Jean protests there, we were walking

through the streets of Paris, and she said, you know, it really matters a lot whether people think that the promises have been betrayed, that they could have been fulfilled, but they were cheated, or whether people realize that these promises could never have been fulfilled, that they were never even a good idea in the first place, and a lot hinges on that difference. But it's a big journey. You have to walk a long way with someone else's worldview that descends from the background reality that we've all been born into, to walk a long way with that before you get far enough to see how much help it is. whether it really allows you to understand your situation better.

It's a really big ask, and therefore we have to find ways of, you know, sketching on the back of an envelope, one little corner of what we're seeing, and seeing if that helps someone make sense of something they're experiencing and working from there, rather than having a 300 slide PowerPoint that explains how we got here and what we need to do that we have to talk people through before we can come into doing anything together. So that's where I find myself circling back from this kind of

big zoomed-out analysis to agreeing a lot with what you're saying, Pella, about how we start in the places where we find ourselves. I usually only have 200 slides, but I get your point. But yet, I think you need both, right? Because the Great Simplification podcast is a bat signal to people like you around the world that are aware of these things and fluent in them and trying to learn more. But then locally, it's more of a diffuse strategy to just build social capital without all these scary details. That rings true to me. Chris, did you want to add anything? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, your question, you know, the way you set it up, I think is right, in some ways the sort of 24-7 global food commodification system, you know, is dominant and alternatives,

a niche and, you know, I spend a lot of my time, you know, my recent book saying no to a farm-free future kind of arguing with that kind of techno-fix, eco-modernist mentality. But beneath that, I think there is change. And, you know, in looking for positive signs, I think a lot of young people are much more knowledgeable and energized about local food. I mean, you know, when I started in this kind of firm sphere, you know, you didn't become a farmer or a grower unless, you know, either your family, you know, you inherited it from your family or you did really badly at school, you know, whereas now a lot of young, thoughtful people are occupying this space because they're aware. I mean, I think there is this narrative among older people. It's like nobody wants to farm anymore

and there's almost like this cultural memory of being a kind of peasant under the thumb of the aristocracy or, you know, being kind of screwed, you know, the Great Depression being screwed by the banks or whatever. So, you know, that's why this has to be a collective movement and not, you know, a response to present times, not a harking back. But it is, you know, it is, in some ways it's a hill to climb, you know, the whole notion of seasonal food has almost disappeared. You know, here we have a narrative about the sort of food miles narrative. people say, oh, you know, it turns out if you run the numbers, it's, you know, it's more carbon effective to import tomatoes from Spain than to produce them in heated tunnels in the UK. You know, if you want to eat tomatoes in March or April, and I'm like, why would we be eating

tomatoes in March or April? You know, no small scale grower I know does that. You know, you eat something else in March and April and you wait until, you know, the tomatoes come through without using fossil fuel. to produce them. And that leads into, I guess, you know, Carnival and Lent. It's like, I don't know, is this just a British thing, but we kind of have Shrove Tuesday, you eat pancakes and then you fast until Easter, whereas now we kind of eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and then continue stuffing our faces through until Easter. And, you know, we have this narrative that that's a great

achievement of modernity. But it isn't really, you know, if you look at the health indicators, you know, ultra-processed food, obesity, you know, lack of knowledge about local, seasonal, whole food. So we need to kind of get out of that narrative. You know, obviously, it's not about being hungry or starving, but we need to, you know, I've written a bit about this in some of my writing, you know, we need to know how to party. We need to know, you know, how and when to have carnivals, like Pella was saying, this time of year, you know, the harvest is in, you know, let's have fun and party.

But we also need to know when to tighten the belt and to kind of. husband and marshal our resources and that's you know that's not intrinsically a bad thing you know being physically hungry is a bad thing but this is about avoiding that so i think you know there are sources of hope but there is a big kind of ideological onslaught that we have to argue against which is you know kind of technophics more and more you know that in a way the whole idea of lent is to burn capital you know that accumulating too much capital you know which you've shown in a lot of your work, Nate, is not a good thing, you know. And so we need to kind of, you know, push, get that cultural narrative out there about capital, but also about food. And it's not easy, but, you know,

but there are signs. There are possibilities to do that. Thank you. I want to definitely save time for each of you to give advice to our listeners on on how to get started in this direction. But But building on your tomato example. So tomato, sorry. No, no, no. We can, you say tomato. I say tomato in this case. It's an example of relative versus absolute wealth and also addiction and convenience

and also status. This is all wrapped into one. And, you know, I'm queuing up Pella because I know you just got back from a trip to Nairobi last week, but so much of our consumption doesn't make us happier or healthier. It's just the cultural baseline that we look around and this is what the other people are consuming. And it's this dopamine treadmill where we're turning billions of barrels of ancient sunlight

into microleaders of dopamine and getting status in the process. So two-part question for each of you, how much of our consumption is really frivolous and we could be happier with significantly less without realizing it. And also, are there, is it possible to have people living smaller, more agrarian, more local lifestyles start to actually get status for that instead of looking, being, looked at as weirdos or fringe, like, oh my gosh, look at how happy and healthy and what they're doing makes total sense. Maybe I should try something like that. Do each of you have any thoughts on all that? Well, I could sort of build on what Chris was saying just now about noticing

differences amongst younger people in a way that maybe speaks to that as well, because I've seen something similar. You know, if I think about the international networks that we have around our school. We have this thing, a school called home, and one side of it is very local here, the other side of it is very scattered around the world, gathered in screens like this. And amongst that network, I'm thinking of a young woman who was studying in New York when she first came on one of our courses, and he's now moved to Malaysia where one side of her family comes from. This is Ayaka Fuji, and she's part of a project where they have taken over a palm oil plantation, So an incredibly destroyed landscape that was previously to it being turned into a plantation, a very ecologically rich landscape.

And they're now bringing it back into use as this agroforestry project, returning it to a condition of far greater diversity and abundance. And listening to her in her 20s speak about this. Firstly, the power of the way that she speaks. I remember her saying, you know, we've realized that the land. is dreaming of being forest and the people are dreaming of being community. And that journey is one that we have to go on together back from this desolated place that we've ended up in, which is absolutely that kind of place that looks a lot like addiction, even if superficially it might be abundance when you see how full the supermarket shelves are.

And she was talking about how friends of hers who haven't made that leap express a kind of longing to her. And it's also a longing that often involves a bit of a kind of projection of imagining that it's a total break. And so part of the message she's feeding back to them is it's not that total. I've still moved backwards and forwards between the city and the farm, you know, because we're not yet in a place where we can live on the farm. But it's a journey that, you know, I see people in that generation going on. The other part of that is because of how deeply aware and shaken up by climate change, so many young people in that generation are.

And I think maybe you sort of had to be in Europe during that moment in 2018, 2019, to experience quite how different those climate movements in their first eruption of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for the Future were. Part of that was because, you know, it was large numbers of people, many of whom had no background in activism, of all ages, getting sort of pulled across almost an initial. threshold out of the reality they thought they were living in, into a wake-up call to, you know, we're not going to stop the ruins.

We're going to have to find some way of making life work in a very different world. And when that narrows into just being about climate, then it leads to a whole set of risks, which you've unpacked very well, Nate, and you'll just stop oil sequence. But a couple of things that really struck me this summer. One was I was invited to speak to a group of journalists from a couple of across the Arab world. These were investigative journalists, and they had asked for this summer school that was being created for their network to be themed around telling different stories

around climate, because they said the whole story that we're telling, journalistically, around climate change doesn't work. And the most interesting thing I heard in that session was a journalist from Jordan, who was almost apologizing for the fact that they couldn't do, you know, climate movements that went out on the streets and demanded that the politicians just do something because of the restrictions in lots of these countries. She said, you know, we don't live in a free country like you guys do. She said, but the closest thing I can think of in Jordan is this food sovereignty movement where people started organizing to grow wheat in the gaps between houses in towns and villages.

And now when you go to a bakery in Jordan, you can choose to buy this thing that's called the people's bread, which is made from the wheat that's being grown by people taking part in this movement. And I said to you shouldn't be apologising for that. You should be teaching workshops to climate activists in Europe. But then the next week I was talking to someone who's deeply involved in Exar, who was telling me that they're starting to see local groups that have kind of gone back from the big stunts in capital cities and gone, no, actually we have to get into the poor communities we're in in the north of England, you know, where I grew up, where I used to work as a journalist, and get involved with the fact that people are struggling to feed themselves

and heat their homes, and that the government isn't going to come and sort that out. And so at that point, you start to see something like Chris's description of the supersedure state, arising out of the dawning recognition of just how messed up the system is already in many of our countries, even as that system continues to deliver for the top, whatever proportion of the population it is, who still get to experience the full shelves in the supermarket and not having trouble paying for it. Yeah. So to me, that's kind of, that's how this is starting to play out. But I'd be really curious what things others are picking up on that that match up to that or complicate it. Yeah, can I build on that? Because I thought it was so interesting with

what you said, Dougald, on this, that we, what's different this time is that we don't have any skills. We are like, we are so helpless. And we have the state, especially, maybe in Sweden we have this totally trust in the state to deliver what we need and in the transition movement we are talking about reskilling and food production is a huge part of that but it's not the only part

and you mentioned Nate that I came back actually yesterday from Kenya and I had so many conversation with all kinds of people like you know guards and taxi drivers and what not and they were all I mean Everybody I spoke to knew how to grow their own food because they did that when they were children. And that's kind of three, four generations for many of us. And I think this climate framing has actually, it sort of puts us also into helplessness.

Because we are talking about it as a huge global thing. And then what can I do? I'm very small. It must be the state or the market that delivers on. this huge crisis. And so I want to show you because I have this group in Kenya that I'm supporting. It's the Mabinjou Powerhouse Youth Group. And these are people who, they dropped out of primary school in their little village. And yet they have started this initiative. It says mitigating climate crisis through afforestation. So in their village in Western Kenya, they are

developing permaculture systems, they are restoring lands, planting trees and mitigating climate crisis. And to me, that's kind of, it's so humbling. Like, if they can do that with their very small means, then what can we do if we actually start taking our response ability and our agency seriously? Yeah, I mean, to the first part of your question, it's probably worth just noting this kind of logic of overproduction in the global agricultural system where we've got this massive production of grains beyond what we sort of know what to do with them agriculturally. So we're you know we're force feeding them to livestock, turning them into biofuels and you know basically there's kind of a logic of comparative advantage where every part of the world you know has a

complex mixed diverse agricultural tradition but tends to get forced into producing you know, the single crop or the handful of crops that it can most advantageously sell into global markets in a kind of commodified way. So, you know, my answer to your question is if we could drop that kind of overproduction dynamic and that that kind of monocultural comparative advantage sort of dynamic, it's actually relatively easy to produce a healthy, wholesome, sufficient good diet through small scale local producers. The second part of your question is the status that attaches to that. I think it's changing.

I mean, I quit my very nicely paid job as a young college professor to grow vegetables and people of my generation and my parents' generation thought I was crazy. To be honest, I thought I was crazy some of the time. But, you know, when I was a college professor, nobody ever said, oh, can I come to your lecture hall and, you know, spend a day, you know, working with you. Whereas we get requests, the whole, you know, can I come to your farm? Can I stay there? Can I help? And so I wouldn't say we're at the point yet where being a small holder, a grower, a homesteader, what have you, is regarded as a high status occupation. But I think, you know, in relation to your preamble, I think that will change quickly. when, you know, as you said, it's unpredictable how, you know, how the great simplification is going to happen.

But I think people who know how to produce food, you know, I think it will quickly become high status. And people, you know, people who know how to tighten the belt, who know how to get through, who know how to make do and mend, you know, is suddenly going to be, you know, that's going to be impressive. But, you know, there's also an educational dimension to this. We have a forest school, community school thing that happens on our land where kids who are getting into trouble at school who basically can't cope with being in the classroom all day. They come out here and spend time just interacting with the wildlife and the trees and the plants and, you know, doing practical hands-on stuff. And it's kind of transformative to them. And, you know, we're like, these are supposed to be the naughty kids.

You know, they're good as gold. They're having a great time. So I think, you know, we need to connect with that, you know, that need that people have to, you know, to be in nature and not just to be in nature in this kind of, you know, wandering sort of, you know, admiring the natural world, but being a protagonist in it, you know, thinking about food, how, you know, we need to be creatures in nature kind of producing food for ourselves and getting that feedback. So I think it is changing, whether it's changing fast enough and whether, you know, when these the sort of curveballs that are coming down the line, you know, hit us, are we prepared? Probably not. But, you know, there is change. And I think, again, it's that sort of generational thing where I think younger people get it.

And, you know, we've got the sort of overproduction and less good conditions in mainstream work now. So a lot of young people are like, you know, why would I toil away in this mainstream job and be miserable? And people are looking to, you know, to connect to community and food production. Again, a lot of it comes back to the politics of access to land, though, which I think is a really crunchy issue. You know, the economics of land ownership and inflation in land values and just finding ways to access that, you know, for more people. for local communities. But, you know, there are positive signs, but, you know, we've got some way to go. So on a wish list would be that people of means, philanthropists, etc., would set aside

a parcel of land in every community or city in my country or in your country to act as a pilot and a community-proving ground for more social capital, more food, more skills. I don't know how likely that is, but I don't think that's impossible to do. And I think that would be leverageable. So let me get to the meat of this conversation for the people listening to this who are already aware of their part of the walking worried to coin a phrase on what we face. What would be first steps? because we're hearing the siren song of business as usual and technology will solve it. But people intuitively feel that we, you know, at work in the ruins is a nice phrase that encapsulates what we face.

What are some practical steps for people listening to this program? maybe in a semi-rural area or even in a city, how do people get started on planning, building a network, and looking two or three steps ahead from what we face? Because sometimes it's daunting to get started. Can each of you offer a couple bits of advice to the listeners? The way we often frame it here at the school is we talk about, people come to our school because they're drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture.

And one of the first challenges is not to construct that work as a big, massive project, but to find the small steps. And that can be, you know, in one way or another, practicing being human together, looking for the kinds of activities that humans have done in almost all times and places where there have been settled groups of humans. and one way or another, you know, that starting point might be that you start doing something different with your garden because if you live in an area where people walk past, then there's nothing better than starting doing things in the garden for people stopping and talking to you.

That was like how we started to get to know people when we moved to this town was because people stopped to look at what we were doing and then came and chatted to us or we went and chatted to them. But it can also be just getting people together around the table at a very human scale. Yvonne Illich, who's one of the thinkers who's really deeply shaped my life and work, he used to say towards the end of his life, the limit of political possibility today is the number of people who can get around a table and share a meal together, which sounds very, very pessimistic the first time you hear it. But then there's nothing that says that everyone needs to be sitting at the same table at every meal time. And you can actually start to think about a whole kind of layer

of political agency, which is below the radar of what we normally think we're talking about when we talk about politics from the perspective of modern institutions and ideologies, in which we meet around sharing food, which is one of the things that unites us. You know, I've yet to meet a human being who doesn't need to eat once or twice a day, most days. So in terms of finding common ground from which we can start. And part of what that's about is it's making sure that you've met your neighbours before the crisis comes. Like you're not having to build the relationships at the moment you're needing to send the message asking for help or offering help within your neighbourhood. And the other, the last bit of that I would say is, you know,

people who've been in the kind of online courses or in following your podcast or, the great humbling that I do with Ed Gillespie or the other kind of conversations going on these networks, they'll often get in touch with me and say, I want to start a book group around hospicing modernity or around at work in the ruins where I live. But I'm having trouble finding people to come. And I go, maybe don't start from there. Maybe don't start from a big book about something or having a conversation about climate change or peak oil. Maybe start from trying to create something beautiful that would be worth doing.

I love that quote that's attributed to Martin Luther. It was actually made up by someone during the Second World War, but if they told me the world was going to end tomorrow, I'd still plant my apple tree. We need to be doing things that have that quality where even if they fail,

they will have been worth doing because we were being human together. We were remembering what it was that got our ancestors through hard times, practicing it in a way that has a chance of contributing to us and our descendants coming through hard times, but they also have that quality of the party that Pella and Chris were talking about. They have that quality of conviviality of the company of meeting around the table and remembering what it's like to be human together. Start from there.

I love that, Dugalds. And as you were talking, I just felt this feeling that this is what this whole podcast should be about. and I spend so much time trying to articulate the problems of what's happening in the oceans and with human brain and behavior and energy and money. But what you just articulated is exactly what we should be talking about and catalyzing and trying to pass the baton to others. And it's a monumental challenge. But I think your last three minutes just encapsulated it really well.

Pella, Chris, hard act to follow there, but do you have recommendations on how people get started? I mean, in terms of getting started with practical local food growing, I mean, what I would say is, you know, just do it, start, you know, start learning, learning how to do it, how to produce food. What I would say is be, there's a big difference between doing it commercially and doing it, you know, for, for sale, for community food production. So, you know, allotments, community gardens, that kind of stuff is great. And you get drawn into, you know, you kind of get drawn into the big system if you're trying to do it commercially. But there's still scope for, you know, small scale local growers and so on.

Well, I would say there is be cautious of sort of gurus. And, you know, I guess humanity, we've got this great tendency to sort of, you know, it's almost like these agricultural stories about the, um, um, um, um, you know, the giant beanstalk and so on. Like, people think that, you know, that someone's got this great news weas that's going to make it really easy to make a lot of money. You know, there are these books, you know, how to make $100,000 off a quarter of an acre or whatever.

So be really, you know, you can do that. You could, well, I don't know if you can do that. You know, you've, you can work on efficiency and work on, you know, your marketing and all of that. But, you know, as I was saying earlier, connect to the older tradition. You know, there's nothing new under the sun. you know, there are no real shortcuts in agriculture. You know, we've got solar energy coming in.

We've got plants or animals. You know, you tend them. You produce food. So don't get too excited about, you know, the latest, you know, kind of whiz new technology. And you kind of get that in the alternative farming movement as well as in the kind of technophix ecomodonist space. But the other thing I'd say, obviously it depends on where you are. But I think the category of existing. traditional family farmers, you know, people on the sort of medium scale. I mean, maybe there's not

many of those left in many places, but there are really, you know, people who own land, people who are farming a couple of hundred acres or whatever, are going to be really critical in terms of access to land and, you know, drawing them into this narrative. You know, they're often worried about succession, don't necessarily have someone to leave the farm to, uh, interested in new ideas and it can be very possible to develop a new small enterprise that you know you stack on an existing farm and you know build relationships with existing farm communities you know not the big corporate agribusiness stuff but people who are kind of you know like like you like you know like young people like urban people they're invested in their community and um you know you

know, how that plays out the kind of politics of access to land is going to be really critical. So, and a lot of farmers are really interested in new entrants, stacking enterprises, you know, doing new things with their land. So, you know, I, you know, sometimes making, making it available for non-commercial, you know, community allotments or what have you. But, yeah, sort of don't just connect with the usual suspects and sort of like-minded people in your immediate neighbourhood. but kind of reach out into the agricultural space and that can be challenging, might not always work along the lines of what Dougal was saying, but it can do and actually kind of getting into that space

of rural land ownership and sort of connecting with good people there, I think is going to be really critical. So as you said, the ruins are sort of inbuilt already. But actually, flowers can also grow from the ruins. And I think maybe the greatest responsibility that we have is to find out what we long for, find our vision, find the most beautiful that we can create together and start moving towards that. If we can't even envision a beautiful world, we will not build it. and this I find that this is actually something very, very difficult to do

and maybe impossible to do on your own. So to do that, I think you have to find the others in some way. And maybe they are not in your place. They can be somewhere else. But to find your tribe that you can hold each other in this potential, in this vision is. has been very, very important for me. And I also think that in a way this is an existential turn that we are in when it comes to how we see each other as human beings.

Because from the sustainability lens, we are often, you know, destructive. and damaging. And then what we try to do is to diminish ourselves. We try to diminish our footprints and become smaller and do as little as we can. And when I meet young people, it's often that, you know, it would be better if there were fewer of us. Or it would be better if there were no people. And I love people. So I think that's a very sad outlook.

and a friend of mine in the regenerative farmers community he's always saying that the landscapes are calling on their people now so as Chris also mentioned like how do we become part a productive part of the landscapes how do we become those who make the world rich and alive again and that's what the group in Kenya is doing And a lot of people are also doing that. And I think that's no small thing. Like, that's creating beauty on a place,

but it's also creating a beautiful humanity. I'll have to have you back another time, because I know this is only one of your many hats and you're working on rights of nature and eco-side and things like that. But I think that's a beautiful, what can the, the land is calling the humans. I feel that on the small bit of land behind the office here. There's there's a,

there's a vibrance and something that I feel connected to. So final question before, uh, I ask each of you for closing thoughts. How would you change that advice to young humans, uh, listening to this, uh,

podcast. All of you either currently or in the past, um, have been teachers, uh, of young, um, humans,

around the world. What advice do you have to 18 to 25 year olds who are listening to this, who are aware of what we face? What would you say to them? I'd say, don't let anyone tell you that they know how the story ends. That's not to say that there aren't lots of things written into it already, lots of possibilities that were there that have gone away. But, But one of the things you'll notice among the people who are 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years old than you is that some of them have fallen into a place where when it finally broke in on them, that the future they were promised wasn't going to happen. They flipped into thinking that they know exactly how and sometimes even when it will all

be over. That's not the kind of world we're living in. That's not the kind of story that any of us were born into. The other thing I would say is I have a lot of people who come to me because they know that I write about these things and that I'm a father. I have an eight-year-old boy, Alfie, and they come to me to talk quietly about decisions around becoming parents in a time like this. And I respect the different decisions that people arrive at. and it's always, you know, those conversations are always so thoughtful. One thing that I do say to people is there are many things that are unique

about the times that we find ourselves in, but that parents are bringing children into the world without being sure about or having a sense of being able to secure their future. That bit isn't unique. You are the descendant of many people who brought children into the world under conditions that felt very similar in that respect. So yeah, I think those are the two things that I would want to say to young people who are often being asked to bear more than their fair share of the weight of knowing the trouble that the world is in and providing leadership in how we respond to it. And I guess that's the last bit is just so much respect to those who are doing that.

I guess, I mean, I think young people are perhaps more receptive to some of the stuff we've been talking about. And, you know, Pella's lovely point about the land is calling, I think, you know, what I would want to do is just find whatever way that worked talking to young people to enable them, you know, to answer that call. And I think part of it is, you know, there's a whole debate about rewilding. And people often say, if we're going to rewild, we need to rewild ourselves. And people often agree with that. But they don't really, you know, we don't really do it because so much of a modern society, is about being unwild, you know, it's not about taking risks, it's not about putting yourself out as a protagonist into wild nature, you know, which can be a pretty scary and dangerous place.

But I think young people, more than any, are prepared to take risks, and particularly as they see, you know, the future that was promised kind of crumbling a little bit before them. So I guess what I would want to do is help however I can for them to answer that call of the land and to be really wild about it and grab that opportunity in all its danger, but also its promise. That's great. Yeah, I don't have so much to build, actually, apart from just saying that you are significant. we can feel small and when we view ourselves as separate from when we view the world as consisting of separate parts,

which we often grew up with, we can think that we are insignificant but we aren't. So that when we find our longing, when we find out what we really, really want to do, regardless of if we succeed or not. And then we will create ripples. So maybe that's the first thing to find out what is important to you, what you want to do because you long for it to happen. And then see what happens and know that you're going to fail. But there is no such thing as failure.

Failure is always learning. In many ways, I feel like we should just keep talking for three hours. because we've just scratched the surface of this. I mean, this is the work. This is the conversation. So for now, can you each share where people can find out more about your individual work on these issues? Chris, you've got a couple books out there. Where can people find you?

Right. So, yeah, I've written two recent books about this, A Small Farm Future. and saying no to a farm free future, both published by Chelsea Green. I also write a blog which has quite a lively bunch of commentators from all over the place. And you can get my book in all the normal outlets. But yeah, if you come to my website, chrismage.com, have a look at the blog. You know, there's a lot of material and a lot of lively discussion on there. And yeah, you can contact me through there.

I have a problem because a lot of the things I do is in Swedish, but I have a website, pellatil.compt.s.i.pelatil.si. And, but I don't think, you know, don't follow me. That's also an advice. Create your own initiative. So go to transitionnetwork.org and look at the resources there. Dugald, I'll let you advertise your own work and also end us on a closing British articulate pithy phrase. Oh, well.

So, yeah, I also have a book which is also published by Chelsea Green. So a big shout out to Chelsea Green for creating space for books in this area. And my book is called At Work in the Ruins. I have a podcast that I started in 2020 with my friend Ed Gillespie, who

describes himself as a recovering a recovering futurist and sustainability consultant. And we call that The Great Humbling. So we've been ploughing a similar furrow to you note. And then my new writing and new episodes of the podcast and all of the rest of it, I put out on substack. My substack is called Writing Home. The school here is a school called Home.org.

And yeah, as I say, we call it a school for, those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture. And I guess that's the bit that I would add to what Chris was saying about rewilding ourselves. Rewilding ourselves done properly is not going feral. It is going cultural. It's reculturing ourselves. It's remembering, you know, a human culture is a way of living within limits, making sense of and making meaning within limits and living in an awareness of the costs and consequences of our living. And so that's kind of, to me, that's the journey that we're being invited back into by the land, by the times, by the trouble that's around and ahead of us.

Thank you all. You are my people. I feel at home in conversations like this. And thank you all for your continued work, preparing others and passing the between to like-minded humans around the world. I am sure this will not be our last conversation to be continued, my friends. Thank you. Thank you.

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