Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - Surviving the Collapse, Agroecology, & Mutual Aid with Andy C. of Poor Prole's Almanac

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

Today on the show — surviving the collapse, permaculture and agroecology, native seed bombing, and much more with Andy C. from Poor Prole’s Almanac.   This week’s Conversation is a rebroadcast of an interview originally produced by The Response — a podcast that explores how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.   The Response, co-produced by our very own Robert Raymond, is another podcast of interviews and documentaries — we definitely recommend checking them out and giving them some love by rating and reviewing them on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. They've done episodes on topics like mobile abortion vans, mutual aid efforts in war-torn Ukraine, and the Stop Cop City movement — and they just did an excellent episode on the disaster in East Palestine, Ohio.   In this episode, Robert and Andy talk about a wide range of fascinating topics — including agroecology and sound ecological practices regarding the growing of food and the stewardship of land, native seed bombing and other forms of mutual aid and disaster preparation, and why building collective power and resilience is the best way to ensure that we not only survive the slow but inevitable societal collapses that have already begun — but to thrive through them and build a better world out of the ashes of the old. Resources: Poor Prole's Almanac on Instagram and Twitter Thank you to Haley Heynderickx for the intermission music and to Carolyn Raider for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

Before we get started, please, if you can, go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. You can also leave us a rating on Spotify now. This really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. Also, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to support us with a reoccurring monthly or one-time donation. This helps keep this podcast free prepping, we have to put it within context, right?

I have things to make a bad situation less bad. And if it's less bad for everyone, we can build together. Now, as we've continuously had these shortages, we consistently have these things. And I don't think it's going away. We're going to consistently see these structural fissures where products that in an efficient system would be provided are not being provided is pointing to the fact that we need to be preparing together, taking advantage of when resources are available and starting to think outside of the conventional. I'm preparing because this bad thing is going to happen, but then things will go back to normal. Right. We have to start thinking about what a new normal should look like. And we can only do that by thinking collectively.

You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Today on the show, surviving the collapse, permaculture and agroecology, native seed bombing, and much more with Andy C. from Poor Pearl's Almanac. This week's conversation is a

rebroadcast of an interview originally produced by The Response, a podcast that explores how communities respond to disaster, from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more. The Response, co-produced by our very own Robert Raymond, is another podcast of interviews and documentaries. We definitely recommend checking them out and giving them some love by rating and reviewing them on Apple Podcasts and documentaries. We definitely recommend checking them out and giving them some love by rating and reviewing them on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. They've done episodes on themes like mobile abortion vans, mutual aid efforts in war-torn Ukraine, and the Stop Cop City movement, as well as recently an excellent episode on the disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. In this episode, Robert and Andy talk about a wide range of fascinating topics, including agroecology and sound ecological practices regarding the growing of food

and the stewardship of land, native seed bombing and other forms of mutual aid and disaster preparation, and why the building of collective power and resilience is the best way to ensure that we not only survive the ecological aid and disaster preparation, and why the building of collective power and resilience is the best way to ensure that we not only survive the ecological and societal collapses that have already begun, but thrive through them and build a better world out of the ashes of the old. And now, here's Robert in conversation with Andy See of Poor Pearl's Almanac. All right.

Well, Andy, welcome to The Response. I'm wondering to start if maybe you can just tell us a little bit about, well, if you want to start and maybe give us a little bit of background on yourself and then also a little bit about the Poor Pearls Almanac, sort of what inspired you to start it, what sort of is the project, and what are you hoping to accomplish with it? Sure. So my name is Andy. I'm a farmer, accountant, child of generational farmers, subsistence farmers. That's basically my background. My family came from Italy. My dad came here when he was a kid from subsistence farming to the hopes of the 1970s of moving to the United States after being in southern Italy. So that's a little bit about my background in terms of the podcast. It's an interesting story because a friend of mine in 2019 died unexpectedly. And he had moved 1000 miles away. He was in Maryland. I'm in Massachusetts. All my friends growing up are still in Massachusetts. So it was a shock to all of us. I reached out to everyone.

We wanted to go to his funeral. Only one of my friends was able to take the time off to go to the funeral. That was Elliot. And on our drive down to Maryland, you know, we hadn't seen each other in five, six years. And we were just kind of shooting the shit. Can I swear on this? I'm sorry. I should have asked.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Okay. So we're just like talking, and we're driving in the middle of the night out in the middle of nowhere, and he's like, you know, people would want to hear this because we're talking about like the stuff

that's on the podcast, ecology, climate collapse, how that relates to like economy and all these different things. And I'm like, no one wants to listen to this. Like we sound like a bunch of maniacs. Mind you, this is before COVID hit and this was October before COVID hit.

And so I'm like, no, we're not going to do that. And then like a month passes and I'm like, you know what? Now you got me thinking about it. And so we're kind of going back and forth. Like,

Hey, what do you think about talking about this? That, you know, like who's going to even listen to this? Maybe we'll do like 15, 20 episodes and like, you know, something cool that we can look back on. And we wrote three or four of the episodes and then COVID hit. And then I was like, OK, now we have to record these and just get it out there.

And he was like, you know, this is going to be a lot of work because we've done a few episodes. As anyone that's done a podcast knows, it's a lot more work than it seems on paper. And we were just thinking about it like, all right, what are we going to do then? And we slowly started building out this catalog of what we thought was really important to talk about. And suddenly 20, 30 episodes was turning into 40, 50, 60. And we put it out in the world and

like many podcasts had a few plays. And then over time, I think as COVID started becoming like this real reality of this is not a three, four week thing and it goes away, right? People started wanting to think about these systemic issues of why COVID is happening and what are we doing to stop the next run on toilet paper or what, you know, at the time it was kind of a joke, but like, let's be honest now, we're in the third month of a shortage for kids like ibuprofen. Like it's just changing what it is that the shortage is, right? So there's this fundamental issue with the way we're living that is becoming more and more apparent. And I think that's drawn people into this project. And what we're trying to do is think about what does it mean to be sustainable?

I mean, like, how does sustainability exist outside of, I guess, the way we think of it in terms of economic benefit, right? Where it's like, how can we be sustainable economically means, how do we do things so that we don't overuse or have enough for everybody equitably. And when we talk ecologically, there needs to be input back into the system for that sustainability, right? So it's a little bit of a different conversation. And that's been our focus, our interest is what are the ways we can look to history,

to the science that we have today, to all of the resources that are available for us to be in alignment with the needs of an ecological community, especially in the face of climate change. Yeah, absolutely. And that's really interesting to hear about that background. And I'm going to ask more about sort of how COVID shifted things for you and the rest of us in a little bit. But I also wanted to underscore, I really appreciate the use of the term economy because my other podcast, Upstream, my co-producer talks a lot about and introduced me to this idea of economics really being when you break it down to the root of the word in Greek, taking care of the home, taking care of our home and always expanding what that

definition of home means. And the home is our planet really. And so economics definitely is, as the poet Gary Snyder says, like I like to think of it as a sub branch of ecology and, and many other things. But yeah, so I want to ask you to a little bit about, well, I'll get into the prepping question a little bit later. But I'm not sure if you know what you if you consider what you do as being prepping, because it's a pretty loaded word. But if you want to address that now at all, but like, also, I'm curious about if you could give us a little bit of a picture of like, where you're homesteading, what that looks like, and sort of how you got into it and where you are now in terms of the

land that you're homesteading. Sure. So I'll start with that prepping piece because I do think it's much more intertwined than it might be. Well, you might see on the surface when it's like these guys only talk about ecology. How is that prepping? You know, when we think of prepping, we think of prepping as this like immediate solution, right? This idea of there's no more toilet paper, but I have some in my basement, right? And that is a component of it, of course. But we have to think further out when we talk about being prepared for the future. It also means being prepared to develop the food systems that we need in the future, right? And that means understanding the ecological conditions today, 30 years from now, to plant the hickories

or whatever it might be today so that they are ready to be there for us in the future. In my mind, that is still prepping. That is thinking about the future. That's preparing for my children. That's preparing for our grandchildren, right? And by utilizing prepping through a number of vectors, we can talk about ecology the way we are right now. We can talk about prepping as in toilet paper.

But ultimately what that comes down to is understanding your place within a bigger infrastructure, whether that's the ecological condition or a social condition where having toilet paper and being able to share with our neighbors is just as radical and just as important to building community and building healthy functioning relationships between ourselves, our ecology, our our neighbors and ultimately our community right both the human and non-human to get to the other half the piece about my own personal site i really try to stay away from the term homestead and farm because farm i think

implies that you're growing food for other people which you know arguably i am but not like at a scale that's meaningful homestead comes with a lot of like really you know arguably i am but not like at a scale that's meaningful homestead comes with a lot of like really you know individualists colonialist baggage that i also don't like but there really isn't a good term so like is what is right but the site that i try to manage i steward uh is seven acres i've been here for five years now i do a lot of livestock work, sheep, Icelandic sheep, Cayuga ducks, Icelandic chickens. I've done turkeys here. I've done guinea fowl, a little bit of everything. What's my personal interest is generally like native plants, specifically like tree crops. That's the thing that like gets me excited is like working with some of this cool old stuff, especially the cultivars that were

discovered by colonists from the work of indigenous people before them. So back in the early 20th century, there was this huge movement towards permanent agriculture. There was a ton of research done to rediscover these things that indigenous people had been working on for hundreds, if not thousands of years. And after World War II, all that was basically abandoned. But there does seem to be a lot of people today working to try to restore and rediscover these things that had been planted on landscapes all around us. And a lot of these are just hiding in plain sight. We just don't know that we're looking at these very rare, very important cultivars of species that have been here forever.

So that's the thing I get excited for is working with these kind of rare tree crops, starting to think about, you know, how do we utilize them and how do we relearn to integrate them into our life ways? Yeah, yeah, got it. Thank you for that. And that's really interesting. interesting. And you were mentioning before when we chatted yesterday about the importance of looking at how we've grown food historically and how it's often disconnected with ecologically sound practices and that a lot of what you do is trying to inspire people to sort of get reacquainted with their landscape. And yeah, I'm wondering if you wanted to touch more on that, like specifically on what you

are doing with the land that you're stewarding, some ways that you do that. But also, you mentioned permanent agriculture or permaculture as, you know, that's one of the alternatives to sort of traditional farming. But you've also talked a lot about how there are limitations with permaculture and that you sort of gravitate a little bit more to something that is, I guess, more popularly referred to as agroecology. And I'm wondering if you can sort of talk about the differences between those two forms of land stewardship, as I think is a great way to maybe frame it. And yeah. Yeah, so yeah, you've just offered a lot of questions. Yeah. Feel free to, you know, pull any of those threads, whichever feels most relevant. Yeah. So I think I'll answer the first one and it'll segue really well into the question about permaculture because it'll become really clear where that fracture is. So, you know, one of the

reasons why it's really important to think about reconnecting our agricultural system with ecologically sound practices is because we've historically, at least in the United States, thought of our food system as separate from local ecology, right? But that's not the case. We know that we've, over the last 50 years, seen the impacts of pesticide and all these other things that we're dumping into the soil, how it's impacting, you know, the downstream effect of waterways and soil and, you know, the soil degradation, the destruction of microbes within the soil themselves. So there's like been this number of consequences of treating agriculture as a separate thing, right? And this has only

really been the last century or two, at least like in a sense, like when we think of like industrial agriculture, you know, crop rotations and things like that had been par for the course, for better or worse, even how it was done, because of the quality of the soils, especially in places like the Midwest. And you know, that played out in the Dust Bowl that what we were doing wasn't really sustainable. You know, one of the things that you'll hear a lot when we start talking about this idea of food systems is like food forest, right? And that's a very popular concept when we start talking about permaculture,

which I'll get to in a little bit. But the reality is when we start talking about things like food forest is that there's a bit of a disconnect, right? So when we say food forest, who is that food for? It's for humans, right? And there's nothing necessarily wrong with food for humans. But also, more specifically, what are those food trees? Are they things that we eat today because of mass production that has made our palate, our diet look a certain way? Or is it framed in a bigger question of what we can eat, right? A food forest can be an oak savanna, right? We can eat acorns. That's not what people mean when they say food forest, right? And we have to kind of unpack that a little bit and ask why, why do we have a certain vision of what a food forest is? And it really raises the question of,

okay, if that's what a food forest looks like, to go back to like, you know, your peach and apple, you know, whatever it might be, your very heavily Eurasian fruit trees, nut trees, not necessarily nut trees, but more fruit trees. If we think about like, okay, we're eating these peaches, these apples, these plums, whatever, what is the ecological consequences of that, right? What supports are they giving for local ecosystems? And there's always going to be some good things that come from planting any species, right? But how does it compare to like a native plant? So if I were to plant like a peach tree in my backyard today, what ecosystem services outside of me eating peaches

does that do compared to like a beach plum, which is native for me? Now, a beach plum can support hundreds of native pollinators. I have no idea what peaches support, but I would imagine it's not nearly as high. It's significantly lower than historically, like in any comparative valuation than any native species. And that's not because native is better. It's because we understand things like co-evolution, right?

These plants evolve with, you know, the pollinators, with all these other pieces. And in that co-evolution, the reason why they co-evolve is because they become more efficient at doing what they're doing. Whether it's, if we think about like any type of evolution, a bird evolves its beak to get the food that it eats, right? It makes it a more efficient process to get that food. A plant evolves its flowers for the type of pollination that it gets, the species that it co-evolves with, right? So if we understand these co-evolutionary traits as being an

evolutionary efficiency, then when we're planting things that have none of those relationships, it's not going to be as efficient. It's not going to be as resilient for our ecosystem and ultimately for us as humans that are living on that landscape. All that energy lost is lost from that ecosystem. And that's not a good thing, right? We want to keep that ecosystem healthy and resilient. And we do that by creating highly efficient, highly complex systems. So that is why to me, it's really important to start talking about what an ecologically sound food system looks like. And how do we support that is by understanding how ecology and our agriculture has to work together,

and in many ways can improve one another. Historically, that's how humans have existed across the planet. We've always lived in a way where the food we grow and the way we steward a landscape improves the quality of life, not just for us, but everything around us. And when we don't do that, we see what's happening in California with the fires, right? That's because we have removed the human element. We've actually made the landscape worse by taking off an element of what it means to be human. Now, if we go back to like permaculture, this question of like

permaculture versus what I advocate for agroecology, how they're different. Well, I'll backtrack a little bit. So permaculture, I think, will claim the concept of agroecology, even though historically it has not. Permaculture came out in the 70s. Agroecology was actually being discussed in academic circles as early as the 60s. So it actually predates permaculture by a bit. And they also came from different parts of the world. Agroecology as a formal science came from North America, whereas permaculture came from Australia. And permaculture has co-evolved and kind of coalesced into this thing that is, if it's good for nature and it makes nature better, then it's good and it's permaculture. But I would argue that while agriculture, agroecology rather, addresses ecological

conditions in the way that I'm discussing, permaculture doesn't do that. And what permaculture does instead is it tries to be this big tent thing, you know, organic is permaculture, no-till is permaculture, agroforestry is permaculture. All these things are permaculture because it has this really fluid definition that's really hard to nail down and like, you know, put some data behind it, which in some ways can be a great thing, but also can be really frustrating when I'm advocating for like agroecology. And permaculture tries to say, well, that's what we're doing too. And it's like, no, you're missing the ecology part of it. If you're advocating for food forests that are predominantly non-native, you're not doing agroecology. If you're advocating for food forests that are predominantly non-native, you're not doing agroecology. If you're advocating for planting invasive species because they're

nitrogen fixing and they're destroying ecosystems in the name of, you know, building the soil, increasing nitrogen, to me that is not agroecology. You're not working with the ecosystem, you're actually destroying it in the name of creating fertile soil that allows for the plants that you want to be there, not the plants that the ecosystem wants. And that is a nuance that is very important. And we have to get beyond the idea of food forests as the way we think of food forests to start having these really honest and complicated and humbling, I think most importantly, conversations. Yeah, no, that's super fascinating. And I appreciate you bringing up that important distinction. And when you were talking, I remembered an anecdote that you actually

brought up when I was listening for preparation for this interview. I was listening to you being interviewed by Brett O'Shea on the Revolutionary Left podcast. And you mentioned this thing that like is super common that we don't think about now that like there are no more bugs on our windshields when we drive on the highways. And like that really stuck with me because I've heard that from a number of folks, including an interview with Oliver Millman. He's an environmental correspondent at The Guardian. And he wrote a book called The Insect Crisis, The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World. And it's so true. I mean, I think that when you're talking about, like, finding like a sound ecological food system,

you're talking about creating like you talked about the beach plum trees versus peach trees. creating like you talked about the beach plum trees versus peach trees. And I know people that here in California, they make sure to plant, you know, native plants to help, for example, the monarch butterfly and its migration and that kind of thing. But it just it seems like that's so foreign to not only most people, but I think importantly, most people that are making the decisions about how we grow food. And so I'm glad that you sort of highlighted the importance of keeping the more than human world in mind when we're feeding ourselves, not just also not just for ourselves, even though I think it's more beneficial for us to do that, but also just in terms of having a more sort of holistic and like appropriate relationship with the world that we live in, I think can make a huge difference

in the way that we view and treat the world and each other. And I want to ask you, yeah, I guess more about the land that you steward in terms of you mentioned some really interesting projects that you're doing. And of you mentioned some really interesting projects that you're doing. And I'm not sure if you would sort of put them into this sort of broad framework of mutual aid or how you view that term specifically. And I ask I bring that term up because it's it's a term that we focus a lot. It's an idea, a practice that we focus a lot on this podcast. But yeah, maybe if you could talk a little bit about ways that you are sharing your resources, like information also materially with others. And

you know, you mentioned you have this seed program that's connected in a really interesting way to Instagram. And you have plans to explore a model of a land trust and creating programs around land stewardship. So yeah, I'm really curious if you could just tell us about the sort of exciting things that you have going on and that you have planned. Yeah, you know, that's the most fun part is doing the planning, not the actual doing in some ways. So like the land trust thing is like this really cool, grandiose idea that's just like, super intimidating, but also like really exciting. But on a smaller scale, I do a lot of things here. Sometimes I think too many things. In a couple weeks, I'll be starting my seedlings for

my own annual garden. And what I'll usually do is grow too many and then put a bunch on the side of the road and people can take them for free. And it's heirloom stuff it's usually stuff that you don't see a lot of places because i like cool old plants and if you haven't gotten that vibe yet and um it's really fun to just see people growing this like you know weird and rare and super delicious varieties of stuff that they never knew existed to get them to think about like tomatoes that aren't just beefsteak you know what i mean yeah, yeah. And so I've got that. We do the seed distribution, which I'll talk about in a moment. I'm working on this year building out a native thicket. So, you know, part of building community

is like finding common ground. So I have a new neighbor on one side of my house. He had bought a house that was abandoned for a number of years, was totally wildly overgrown. The trees were not safe or healthy. He clear cut the lot basically more than I would have done, but he, you know, it's his decision. But now we have no barrier between our houses. So we're working on a 400 foot long thicket. I convinced him that a native thicket would make a lot more sense than just doing the

arborvitaes. So that is something I'm excited to put together this year, create a bunch of resources for, and then ultimately, in the next couple of years, be able to use that to create thicket packs that you could buy, or if we can get, you know, the resources to give them away for free, giving people basically seeds or cuttings to basically quickly create their own thickets wherever they are. While we always talk about like, you know, the indigenous people on this landscape burned the landscape, you know, the plains were cleared out. You've probably heard about like oak savannas in the southeast where they were burning and keeping the growth below the canopy very low and keeping the trees sparse so that there was a lot of sunlight access to the ground they also had a lot of thickets and if you're not familiar with the thicket it's basically like a natural wall that exists like in the middle of a prairie basically and that they would be like

fire stops and also usually be full of tons of edible plants like beach plums and they would be you know incredibly important for habitat for wild animals and uh that's something that we've basically lost from our landscapes right like when's the last time you walked around and saw like a native thicket like it doesn't exist we clear it and um they're wildly important for for ecology and a lot of species co-evolved with those existing on the landscape so trying to get those back out there and talking about them and getting people to think about them and to even recognize their value versus like, I think a lot of people are like, I value the prairie and I value the forest,

but the thicket seems kind of like this weird wild space that isn't as important. It looks overgrown a lot of times and they're really important. So going through the process of building that native thicket, highlighting it, giving people access to resources for it, I think is something hopefully in the next couple of years we'll get more going on. We've also, like you said, got the seed project, and basically what it is is what we're calling restoration agroecology. So you brought up this idea of, you know, needing to get people to be reacquainted with local plants, getting them to start thinking about the bugs, the insects.

But even in those conversations, we still think about it as I'm engaging with this wildlife from a perspective of a viewer, right? I'm not integrated with it. I'm planting a five by 10, you know, native pollinator garden, right? But most of those plants are very edible. So when we start talking about rewilding landscapes, we have to remember that part of that is for us, not just because the insects are, you know, important for our ecosystem and they offer a number of ecosystem benefits, but also that, you know, if you plant evening primrose, that's an edible plant. And it's also a really aggressive grower that can push out a lot of invasive species. So that's like a wildly important plant to put in, if you live on the East Coast, at least, when you're

thinking about like wildflowers, even though it might not be the prettiest plant, it has a very specific role that is very important. The same for goldenrod. A lot of people don't like goldenrod because it can be aggressive, but it is that aggression that is so important to keeping a lot of invasive species at bay while also being one of the most important forbs for our native pollinators. It supports, I think, over over 100 pollinators, which for a flower is like wild. Most of them are like 40, 50, 60. So it's like, you know, it packs a big punch and it's aggressive and it competes with invasives. So it's, you know, this like really great thing that we should be utilizing a lot more.

And again, I'm talking primarily about the East Coast that I know the best. I can't really speak to the West Coast. I don't know it enough. And that's again, to go back to the conversation about permaculture, that's the part that gets lost is like we have to talk in a very specific terms and these very ecological terms that can oftentimes get lost when you start talking about these vague, aspirational things, right? So to get back to the seed distribution thing, though, so what we're trying to do is myself, a bunch of other people that are correlated with the podcast, people that listen to it.

We've been collecting seeds, grasses, flowers, perennials, annuals, you know, a mix of everything. And we've been putting together seed packets that we'll be giving out for free. The seed packets are being funded by Instagram reels. So what we do is we just make a meme, put it as a reel, and people share it and we get paid a little bit of money. It's not a lot, but over the course of four months, it adds up to being enough to ship out at least a thousand seed packets. Those will be going up primarily again to that East Coast

because that's where these plants are from, like Northern Georgia up to Maine. We have most plants in that range, especially like flowers are mostly the same. There's obviously some that don't translate well to certain parts, but for the most part, it's 70-80% the same. So the idea is basically leveraging our social media account to do cool stuff for free for other people. And we are not paying, to do cool stuff for free for other people. And we are not paying, you are not paying as a consumer, and we can create cool, fun, exciting ecosystems.

Now, what the seed packets do in particular, and the way this is different than maybe a lot of rewilding habitat kind of stuff that you see, is that it's not meant to be a big site that you're restoring. The whole idea is finding a hole in the wall that needs restoration. So if you live in the city and there's a little weird weedy patch that's two feet by three feet, that's perfect. That's what you want to restore. You're doing your little bit that you can do that is manageable.

You may or may not claim legal ownership to it, but you have access to it and no one else cares. And you can provide a home for countless native insects and pollinators. And that to me is the most empowering piece of it all is giving people the access to create change without having to draw, you know, significant financial resources or to have already been given financial resources, whether it's land access or something like that. You know, you can do this on the side of the road. You can do this, you know, next to the parking lot at work, like wherever you've got your little plot of dirt, we can do some really cool stuff because again,

we're trying to work primarily with more aggressive plants that can just create a little bit of native habitat. I love that idea. It's so, so cool. If I was on the East Coast, I would be asking you to send me a packet. Yeah, I'm hoping next year we can do the West Coast. You know, it's like one of those things. It's just very fluid where we're still trying to figure out the nuance to it.

And we have people on the West Coast that want to do it, but we like I'm not on the West Coast, so I can't really be the person to guide that process. Absolutely. Yeah. So I'm not on the West Coast, so I can't really be the person to guide that process. Absolutely, yeah. So I'm hoping next year. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Andy C. of Poor Pearl's Almanac. We'll be right back. The milk is out. I've barely been to college and I've been doubtful

of all that I've dreamed of. The brink of my existence essentially is a comedy the gap in my teeth and all that I can cling to the milk is sour the milk is sour with olives on my thumbs and all that I've stuck to and all that I've clung to I've thought like a dog This world that I've trusted has been over and busted And rested by an arbitrary sonogram Shalala, ooh, ooh, shalala

Ooh, shalala, ooh, ooh ooh She let it go south with olives and no thumbs And I've been doubtful of all that I've dreamed Of the brink of my existence Essentially is a comedy, the gap in my teeth And all that I can cling to, the milk is sour Sha-la-la, ooh, ooh, sha-la-la Ooh, sha-la-la, ooh, ooh, sha-la-la

Ooh, sha-la-la, ooh, ooh, sha-la-la Ooh, sha-la-la, ooh, ooh, sha-la-la Ooh, sha-la-la, ooh, ooh, sha-la-la If you don't go outside, well, nothing's gonna happen She'll never write her number on a crumpled-up napkin She'll never be your ego, She'll never be your bandit She'll never get to eat you like your heart's a pomegranate I'm throwing out the milk The olives got old I'm tired of my mind getting heavy with mold I need to start a garden

I need to start a garden I need to start a garden I need to start a garden I need to start a garden I need to start a garden Gonna start a garden in my backyard I'm gonna start a garden in my backyard Cause making this song up is just as hard Cause making this song up is just as hard Ooh, sha-la-la Ooh, ooh, sha-la-la Ooh, sha-la-la

Ooh, ooh, sha-la-la Ooh, sha-la-la Ooh, ooh, sha-la-la Ooh, sha-la-la Ooh, ooh, sha-la-la Sha-la-la, sha-la-la Sha-la-la, sha-la That was Um Shalala by Hayley Hendricks. Now back to our conversation with Andy C. of Poor Pearl's Almanac.

So just a couple of things that you mentioned before the break that I wanted to sort of pull some some of the threads on. You near the beginning of your response, you'd mentioned, like heirloom seeds and tomatoes specifically. And it reminded me I lived with a friend of mine many years ago, who was training to become a master gardener. And she received, she gained access to this like website and a database of like all of these different heirloom seeds that are only available through the master gardener program. And we grew these heirloom tomatoes. And it was the first time in my life that I actually ate a tomato off of the vine in the summer. And anytime I've had a store bought tomato since then, I just like,

it doesn't match up, like not even close. It's just like, what, what is this mealy ass thing? Where did it come from? You know? Um, yeah. And then also another sort of anecdote is, uh, very briefly, I did this, uh, AmeriCorps program where I was running a recess garden club for elementary school kids. And I didn't really know a whole lot about gardening. But one of the things that they loved the most was when we planted nasturtium flowers, which are edible. And now every time I walk by nasturtiums, which they grow all over the place here in the Bay Area, just on the sidewalk and everywhere. And I mean, if they're far enough up off the ground, so that you can make sure there's no like, you know, dog urine on them, like you can just grab

grab one and eat it. And it just it they taste like radishes. And it, it sort of just transforms immediately transforms your relationship to that space that there's like actually a living flower here that I can eat as a little tiny snack right now in this urban environment. And so I appreciate you sort of bringing the importance of that up. And just sort of on the same note, talking about thickets, just the word thicket brings to my mind, at least this, like, sense of overgrownness, like, kind of a wildness, which I feel is so lacking in like, especially urban and suburban spaces, like here in the Bay Area, everything is just so fucking manicured. Like you have this army of leaf blowers and lawnmowers and hedge trimmers and

herbicide dispensers that like not only monopolize your perceptual field and give you fucking cancer but also there's like no room for anything overgrown like there's literally no space for anything that doesn't fit into this perfectly manicured little pretend world and i mean i kind of feel like you know i don't know i don't want to sound like an old man yelling at a cloud, but just the idea of thickets sounds so refreshing. And I was in Portland, Oregon last summer, and I was in this very specific neighborhood off of East Burnside. And I was just walking around these like residential neighborhoods, and it just happened to be like the hottest day on record in Portland.

It was like 110, 115 or something like crazy like that. And yeah, but this neighborhood was super shady and cool. And like, I think because all of these houses had front yards that were just like totally overgrown with all sorts of plants and gardens and ferns and like they created almost like a living plant tunnel down the sidewalk. And it was fucking awesome. And yeah, so like when you talk about thickets and like native seed bombing, yeah, I'm just like, yes, please. Like we need so much more of that. And last thing I was going to mention is the Poor Pearl's Instagram page is awesome. So you all should definitely check it out. I'm going to provide the links in the show notes and all that. But it's a it's a great Instagram sort

of meme and resource page all packed into one. So definitely make sure to hit that up. And so I'm going to ask you about something we alluded to at the top of the show, which is this idea of prepperism. And I guess what it means to you, the role it plays in the work that you do. And also, I want to talk a little bit, like I think a lot of the times when people think about preppers, and actually, I'll make a pop culture reference here, because it's on sort of the top of my head right now. There's a series called The Last of Us, which is sort of like a post-apocalyptic zombie show that's currently coming out. I think they're about three or four episodes in. And it's actually pretty good. But like without giving any spoilers,

there is an episode that features this guy who is he's like very much a prepper. They even like they use that word to describe him at one point. And it's obvious that he's kind of the stereotypical, like the image of prepper that you think of, it's like sort of this lone wolf. And there's even like a scene where he's got a don't tread on me flag in his house. So very libertarian, right. And I think one of the most important things about actually preparing for disaster, things that we've learned in this podcast, for sure, is that, like, as we continue to experience this slow collapse, or what I've heard to what I liked, Robert Evans of, he has a

million podcasts, but he's referred to the the crumbles as sort of what we're experiencing right now. And you know, not this like singular apocalyptic event. But as we continue to experience all these disasters, and from the documenting that we've done on this podcast, and a lot of other folks have done, it's very clear that like prepping as an individual is not going to be the way that you're going to get through any kind of either slow or, you know, even if there is some kind of like singular event, apocalyptic event, like this is all about community. And the most prepared communities are often the ones that are most resilient during disasters. And we discovered this for sure, like when we did an episode on Hurricane Sandy,

and we explored Occupy Sandy, which was an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which ended up being like the most helpful, unofficial response to that hurricane, but they were more helpful oftentimes than the official response. And so, yeah, I guess I'm wondering, like, how do you view Prepperism and this idea of like left prepping and this idea of building community in terms of creating resilience and in terms of actually being prepared for what we have coming ahead? Yeah, I mean, that's a that's the million dollar question, to be completely honest, is how do we engage with this in a way that is, you know, not just a marginalized thing that, you know, a handful of people are doing, but thinking about prepping that doesn't fall into that trap of, you know, the guy with his bunker full of beans, right, that is going to outlive everyone and then go collect the spoils. is going to outlive everyone and then go collect the spoils.

Like I said, when we start thinking about these systems, or if we start thinking about prepping as part of these systems, that this is our short-term solution, but what is the long-term solution? Are we going to continue to be consumers that draw from the landscape without giving anything back? Because that is what that right prepping method is. I'm going to outlast everyone, and then I will reap the spoils of what's left. And that is not building anything that is reacting to a negative situation. So when we start talking about this idea of prepping, we have to put it within context, right? I have things

to make a bad situation less bad. And if it's less bad for everyone, we can build together. A friend of mine, Margaret Kiljoy, I'm sure you're familiar with her. She just had an article come out today, actually, or maybe it was yesterday, asking basically a lot of the same questions about prepping and what is left prepping. And it's really awesome to see that people are engaging with this in a much more honest way than they might have even a year ago, I think, despite COVID being this, you know, obviously terrible thing that made the instability of our system around us, like, much more apparent. for like preppers to feel good about themselves, but it wasn't like an acknowledgement of the reality of the situation, if that makes sense, of like, hey, look at all these preppers.

They finally got it right once, like broken clocks kind of thing versus now as we've continuously had these shortages, you know, looking at egg prices right now because of, you can argue about what that's all about, but we consistently have these things and I don't think it's going away just like you were saying this idea of the crumbles where we're going to

consistently see these structural fissures where products that in an efficient system would be provided are not being provided is pointing to the fact that we need to be preparing together taking advantage of when resources are available, and starting to think outside of the conventional, I'm preparing because this bad thing is going to happen, but then things will go back to normal, right? We have to start thinking about what a new normal should look like. And we can only do that by thinking collectively, because none of us provides everything for ourselves. And even on the right, like, we think of, again, that stereotype of the guy in the bunker with his beans, right? But a lot of right-wingers

are not planning on going in a bunker and living by themselves for 30 years. They're going to do it with their friends, their family, their community, their church, all these pieces that are really important that, in a lot of ways the left is lacking because we don't have physical community the way the right often does. And if the stereotypical movie scene global collapse were to take place, the left is in no place to build to those inroads or to create community or create safe spaces or whatever it might be, right? It doesn't mean that there aren't people that would agree with us and would be on our side, but we haven't started to think about what it means to build community before that moment

happens. So that is, I think, where left prepping is so important, where we can start to use that and leverage our resources and our knowledge to start building inroads into disaffected communities and our community around us, inroads into disaffected communities and our community around us, because most people are frustrated and tired and, you know, they don't believe in the system anymore. I don't think that's a wild statement to say that a majority of people, left or right, don't believe in, you know, the way we're living, that they know this is not sustainable. And what are we doing to build inroads to get people that may not agree with

us on everything to say, even if I don't agree with you on X, Y, Z, I trust you, I recognize you as a person who cares about me, my community, and we're on the same team, even if we don't agree on everything. And for the left, the biggest challenge that I see is that we can't get out of our own way. We're so eager to be right that we cannot be humble enough to have real conversations with people and to recognize that those people's lived experiences that give them a different set of politics than us is no less valid than the same set of circumstances that led us to where we are today. Absolutely. I'm not going to go on a tangent about my frustrations and toxicity within the left, but I absolutely agree with everything you said. And I think you made a lot of really interesting

points. In fact, I was going through some of your older tweets last night in preparation for this interview, and you brought up two points, which I came across, which one is this tweet that reads, Hey, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. If you're worried about resiliency and don't want to grow vegetables and shit, don't figure out what you do enjoy and build community with folks who enjoy the things you don't erase the voice that tells you preparing means doing it all, which I think is like a perfect sort of encapsulation of a lot of what you were just sharing. And then I don't think I have a screenshot of the second one, but it had to do with definitely like the people who you are going to be in community with

are not the people that you get to choose all the time, right? And like, when these things happen, we're going to have to be able to get out of our bubbles a little bit and maybe break bread with folks that we may not agree with every particular political idea that they have. And so I appreciate you bringing all that up. And I also wanted to definitely bring in mutual aid here, because I feel like the idea of mutual aid, what I like about it so much is, so just, you know, on the record, like, I'm not an anarchist, like, I wouldn't consider myself an anarchist. However, I do believe that mutual aid, which is very much like a beautiful anarchist tradition, is an incredibly important strategy and idea and the principles around it are wonderful and important.

And this idea of prefiguring the world that we want to live in is beautiful and important. And this idea of like, I really see mutual aid as exercising these muscles that have atrophied within capitalism and learning how to be in community, learning to share, learning this idea of mutualism and solidarity and all of that. And yeah, I'm wondering if you want to talk about mutual aid explicitly, if that informs the work that you do and sort of, yeah, just generally your thoughts on mutual aid. Yeah. So I'll say one thing that I think is frustrating to some people that listen to the things I say. And you brought up this idea of like, I'm not an anarchist. And like, I, and this will preface into the mutual aid thing, I promise. We're so quick to address in these these terms that we like to use, because

we think it presents a certain whatever to the world, right. But I, I find those terms to be like, entirely useless. Because like, if we're talking about, like, collapse, right? Like, we're not going to build an anarchist, you know, a bookchin-led communalist, you know, whatever BS society out of the ashes of whatever's happening right now, right? Like, we're all just going to try to, like, duct tape shit together until, like, we have a society that society that like kind of functions in a way that we're all more or less happy with. Right. It may not be pretty. It may not be perfect. It will not be perfect.

No one is going to be 100 percent happy with it. But like that, that's part of it. Right. multiculturalism, including in our political alignments, then it's not going to be anything that anyone wants. And like advocating for like a very specific vision of the future, I think, outside of like being place based is really pointless. And that that's important when we get into this conversation of like mutual aid, because, as you said, like mutual aid as a terminology is very loaded in a very specific way. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that.

But I find in my own experiences, the things that I've been involved with, sometimes people are so attracted to the idea of like aligning with this anarchist principle and living out there, you know, not to be rude, I guess, but like LARPing their politics in a way that is like, I don't know, very easy to like prove, right? Lifestyle anarchism, I believe is what, was it Bookchin? It was Bookchin, yeah. Yeah, lifestyle anarchism, yeah. Yeah. Anyways, go ahead. Sorry, I was totally not worth interjecting on that. No, I think it's interesting because like that goes right back into what I was saying, though, about like our obsession with like very loaded language about how we describe things.

We can't even describe mutual aid as like this thing without it having its own specific term that is like can be very offensive to some people and other people. It's like they're using it for that offensiveness. What all this really points to, though, is like, when we do stuff like mutual aid, the whole idea is to like, you know, empower the people on the receiving end, right? That they will have the capacity to say, this is what I need and advocate for what they need and to be respected for that. And to know what they need better than charity, right? That's if I'm not going to just be like, you need a loaf of bread and know you are going to tell me what you need. But with that, and I think the part that is more important in some ways is the humility that comes with being the person giving. There's a humility that is really necessary to engage in that mutualistic relationship. If this person is having power, that means you are giving up power. And I think that is the really important part of mutual aid that we should spend more time talking about, is this really aspect of humility. And in general, I think humility is the thing that the entire left just needs to work on a lot more. And when we talk about mutual aid, it's usually

to address an issue, but we're never really infrastructurally building anything more than being a reaction to the flaws in capitalism, the falls in capitalism, right? We're addressing a very specific issue. And it's a really beautiful and amazing thing to see these projects spring up out of nowhere and provide something that the government often can't do. And in a way, many times better than the government can do. in a way, many times better than the government can do. But if we're not building dual power in a way that is beyond that moment, we're not solving any long-term issues. And I can understand people say, well, that's not the point of mutual aid. But I think it is, given the fractured state of the left and the fractured state of our communities as a whole, it has to. Just like

you said, we've let this muscle atrophy so much. We have to take the one thing we've been good at and make it into more than that. Yeah, no, I love all of that. And thank you so much for such a rich response to a, you know, a very broad question. And this idea of flattening hierarchies and this idea of meeting people where they're at is, I think, not just sort of value wise or theoretically correct personally, but it also works so much better. and decide this is what the people need, like dust our hands off and leave versus you had folks that were actually in communities, doing relief work, listening to people, understanding what people needed, and at the same time, like building community so that we're not just able to get through this storm and weather the next figurative storm or literal storm. But now we also we're organized, maybe we can actually form a tenants union and figure out this other parallel disaster whether the next figurative storm or literal storm. But now we also we're organized. Maybe

we can actually form a tenants union and figure out this other parallel disaster of the rents too damn high or, you know, whatever it is. And so, yeah, this really, really important framework, I think, whether or not you want to call it mutual aid or however you want to think about it, this idea of like, as we both mentioned, strengthening those muscles. So yeah, I guess just kind of as we close out, one of the themes we do explore a lot, like we've been talking about in this podcast is how communities, you know, come together during disasters. And oftentimes, we're focusing on literal, like, quote, unquote, natural disasters, but that's expanded quite a bit over the months and years. But one of the themes that keeps coming up over and over again is this idea that they open up like

otherwise invisible spaces for new ways of interacting and new ways of thinking. And I think COVID definitely did this. And there are countless historical examples of this happening. And the author Rebecca Solnit did an amazing job showcasing some of them in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell. But you know, it's a very common idea among certain thinkers like Christian Parenti has referred to this term of like disaster socialism. We often call it disaster collectivism. And like even Leonard Cohen wrote about the crack and you know, that's where the light comes in. And like even Leonard Cohen wrote about the crack and, you know, that's where the light comes in. And so I guess like, as we close out, I'm wondering,

and you can talk about this in terms of the context of COVID, if you want, or just, you know, however you want to tackle this one. But I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on this broader idea of like disaster collectivism and this idea that disasters sort of open up a space for new ways of existing and interacting. And yeah, I don't know if you find that encouraging, if you have any encouraging words for our listeners in the face of a lot of the tumultuous sort of like frightening prospects that we are sort of facing as we look into the future, like ideas about, you know, how we can build this new world within the old world as we sort of see this old world collapsing around us. You know, it's funny. When we started releasing episodes, I think we were like, I don't

know, 15, 20. And I was like, this has got to be the most depressing shit for anyone to listen to. And then the response was, this is the most inspiring thing I anyone to listen to. And then the response was, this is the most inspiring thing I've ever listened to. And I'm like, I feel like we're hearing different things here. So I must have a very weird sense of what is good and bad. But I think you've pointed to like a very true reality that the world as we want it can only be found when we see that the world we live in is not permanent. And that is really important and valuable because, you know, I'll just pick on something that's very obvious to a lot of people, work from home. The idea of work from home was basically like something that only a handful of people could

like seriously believe could happen a few years ago. And now that is, I don't want to say it's the norm, but it's become so normalized that the entire idea of what it means to work and what our work does has fundamentally changed for a lot of white collar people, right? It's in those moments that break that we can start to think about these things. And part of that is having the willingness to look at things with open eyes. And again, to go back to the point I keep hitting is humility, you know, the humility that maybe we don't have all the answers. And this is why I tend to be like, not like anti-theory, but I'm just like, theory is framed in the world that existed when it was written.

And there's nothing necessarily wrong with reading it and understanding it. But it's so hard to try to translate that into a world that we don't know, a world that is the future. And we will gather far more knowledge in what the future looks like by looking in those cracks and being honest about what we see and what that might look like. And looking in those cracks and being honest about what we see and what that might look like. And the thing we do need to understand is that we do have to work within the framework of an ecological condition that will exist with or without us. And we can do so many things to make it better. But that requires us to start thinking about the way we have done it to know what works and what doesn't. And it's not like we're going to set the clock back and go back to, you know, 1491. What we're going to do, hopefully, is look at how people lived and start

taking these different tools and start learning these different ways and trying to figure out what is the best, you know, tool, resource, life way that can support that community at that moment, as in 2024, 2025, whatever it might be, 2040. But that doesn't mean that's how it's going to be forever. Every opportunity for us to try these resources, try to apply the knowledge that our ancestors across the globe have developed is going to be different than it was in the past. And that can either be really scary or really inspiring. And I try to think about it as like this opportunity where the world in the future could be so much different and so much better if we are willing to let it and if we are willing to, you know, look into those cracks and see what

could be and be humble enough to say, maybe I thought it was going to look like a certain way and it's not, but that's okay. And what's there is good too. I think that's a really beautiful and whether you agree or not, I think that was inspiring as hell. So yeah, thank you so much for such a rich, beautiful conversation, such a wealth of wisdom and experience that I'm really excited to share with all of our listeners. And speaking of our listeners, where can they find out more about how to get in contact with you if they want to get involved at all, or where they can find the podcast and any of your other work that you want to share? Sure. So the easiest place is porprols.com.

That is our website. Everything is there in some capacity. As of like 10 minutes before we've started recording, I set up a sub stack. So what we're going to do is be putting together what we're calling a supplemental reader for the podcast. So we, as you know, transcribing episodes is just unbearable. So since we didn't do it because we didn't think anyone was ever going to listen, we got like 50 episodes in and people started asking for them.

And I did like three and I was like, this is the worst thing I've ever done in my life. So instead, what I'm going to do is put together basically like memos that go with each episode, like four, five-page memos that, like, outline the key aspects of the episode as, like, a resource. So that is going up on the website. We obviously have the Instagram handle, Poor Pearl's Almanac. You can follow that there. If you're interested in the seed project,

we have been building a resource for native plants called Restoration Agroecology, which you can find at ppasites.org or at restorationagroecology on Instagram. And then I also have another podcast called Tomorrow Today, which is away from the agroecology side, but still thinking about the future and trying to be optimistic about the future based on stuff that researchers primarily are doing to highlight what could be significantly different in the future that may not be so obvious today. You've been listening to an Upstream conversation with Andy C. of Poor Prol's Almanac.

Thank you to Haley Hendricks for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. To find links to any of the resources we've mentioned in this interview, check out the show notes and head over to poorpearls.com or check out their Instagram page

at Poor Pearl's Almanac. This week's conversation was a rebroadcast of an interview originally produced by The Response, a podcast that explores how communities respond to disaster, from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more. Find out more at theresponsepodcast.org. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. And because we're fiscally sponsored

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