I share a GRIPPING TALE about a droplet of water before sitting down with Helen Lehndorf, who is a radical forager, author, anarchist, poet and plenty more wonderful things besides. I loved her memoir A Forager's Life so much! Helen and I dive straight into the weeds about permaculture life strategies, unlocking creativity, writing for nature and how to rebel against The Machine by playing the Holy Fool. Medicine for muddled, blocked or chronically shy creatives.

IN THIS CONVO

Swimming upstream of the over culture

Undoing cultural entrainment

Social permaculture

Permaculture design web

Establishing a daily writing habit

The world isn’t saying PLEASE ARTIST MAKE MORE ART but you should anyway

Anarchism

The YES, AND rule

The Holy Fool archetype

AI? *shrugs*

Enspiriting your art

ECOPOETICS

Getting past sharing insecurity

Writing for nature

Why little lives are worth sharing

Invisible care work

Journalling versus publishing

Blackberry medicine

What is it to relate with plants?

PUNK GRANDDAD DANDY

Synesthesia

The future has an ancient heart

🧙‍♀️ LINKY POOS 🧙‍♀️

Helen’s home on the web

A Forager’s Life ~ Helen Lehndorf

The Bruise Palette ~ Helen Lehndorf

Social permaculture ~ Looby Macnamara

Kirsty Porter

Wild ~ Cheryl Strayed

E.M Forster ~ Howard’s End

Annie Dillard

Sound credit: Morepork / Ruru (Owl) - Auckland, New Zealand by tdes -- https://freesound.org/s/319539/ -- License: Attribution 3.0

We built this city on rock n roll! And cheap oil. And it’s currently running out… so what happens now? This week I chat with Nathan Surendran to get a foothold on the fossil fuel crisis (which is the Everything Crisis) and how we can keep our balance, together. Nathan is a systems thinker, recovering engineer, energy and security analyst, policy advisor, author of the Energy and Resilience substack and chair of the Wise Response society. He is also seriously kind, and provides so much practical, empowering advice in this convo, including:

Moving far far away from civilisation

The unsustainability of cities

Neurodivergence leading to deep research

The Energy Elephant in the room: WHAT AREN’T WE SEEING

Why oil (diesel) is the lifeblood of industrial society

Drawing down ancient sunlight 1 million times faster than it’s being recharged

Every calorie of food takes 10 calories of fossil fuels, oof

The Iran War

Why we can’t just switch to renewables

Right relationship with renewables

What are baseline standards of living?

Household appliance heroes for the energy descent

What is Energy Blindness?

Emotionally processing peak oil

One barrel of oil = 5 years of human labour (!)

Are we being gaslit about the situation in the strait?

The industrial system schools us to comply, not think

Why the rich aren’t as protected as they might think

Less affluent people are ahead of the game

What is mutual aid?

Un-pathologising co-dependence

Maori concepts of community care

Why we need danger from a mental health perspective

🧙‍♀️LINKY POOS 🧙‍♀️

Nathan on Substack ~ Energy and Resilience

Nathan’s home on the web

[doc] When The Trucks Stop ~ mutual aid guidelines

Wise Response on Substack

Jason Bradford ~ The Future Is Rural

Steve Keene

Ian McGilchrist

Charlie Hoyle

Nate Hagens

Steve Keen

Howard T Odum

📸 Photo credit: Jason Hosking

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Ever wish you could sit down with permie elders to hear their take on the current chaos; what to do, where to live, and whether it’s really that bad in the grand scheme of things? Well just call me Genie cos this convo with permaculture educators and radical homemakers Ian Lillington and Marita Zeh will deliver.

Ian and Marita live in a solar passive straw-bale home on the edge of Castlemaine, Victoria, surrounded by fruit and nut trees and veggie gardens, where students come to see – and feel – what it is to be wrapped in abundance. And this is where I found them, on a sunny autumn morning, in the cosy warmth of their kitchen, dealing with masses of peaches, pistachios and zucchini. And we all sat down and chopped and chatted, eventually remembering to turn on the mics.

In this convo:

Pursuing a hybrid model of permaculture

Rat poison sandwich

Renting till your 40s

What is good debt?

Where is even affordable anymore?

How to deal with gluts

Giving to community

Small garden farming

Being strategically connected to the grid

Diverse household energy systems

Scales of usage

An elder’s perspective on current affairs

Sharing permaculture as a political act

Permaculture priorities

Gratitude vs. fear

Impermaculture

🧙‍♀️ LINKY POOS 🧙‍♀️

Send Ian an email ~ [email protected]

Or keep it old school with a text ~ 0478 297 057

The Castlemaine Permaculture Hub PDC

(for locals) Castlemaine Permaculture FB group

(national) Permaculture Australia FB group

I tell a story about my grandpa’s deathbed song request before having a heart-to-heart with Emily Coats, a deep nature connection facilitator, ancestral skills practitioner, threshold-crossing guide and dreamworker.

In this convo:

Shakespearean activism

What the world needs right now (hint: not more intellect)

Ways to wholeness

Does activism have to feel hard and gnarly?

Being precise in the ripples we cast

What happens at Tracker School

Ancient skills… for survival?

Why to prioritise spiritual preparedness

How we live and how we die

Losing her dad; the gifts and lessons

Intentions vs. realities of living in a handmade black wattle shelter offline, offgrid and alone for 7.5 months

How to use spirit tracking to find lost stuff

🧙‍♀️ LINKY POOS 🧙‍♀️

[starts soon in Naarm] Earth Time: The Lost Art of Being Human

Emily’s home on the web

Emily on Instagram

Nature's Apprentice

Nature Based Leadership Training

Bill Plotkin & Animas Valley Institute

Jon Young

The Animal Communicator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBpG1nkM5jc

Jon Young Australia workshop

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In 2018 Professor Jem Bendell published an academic paper that went viral; pretty weird for a piece of scholarly writing. The topic? Societal collapse caused by runaway climate change. The timeline? Soon. Deep Adaptation presented a frank, delusion-free framework for facing the end of the world as we know it, sparked a movement, and copped a lot of flack.

I wanted to chat with Jem not so much about the grim facts but about how, “as that collapse guy”*, he is filling his life with meaning at the eleventh hour. And it turns out, that includes becoming a farmer, writing folk songs and considering having kids.

*Jem happily identifies as a doomster

🎙️ In this convo

Experiencing climate change first hand as a farmer in Bali

How to act on knowledge about collapse and climate?

Making the leap towards your values (with the help of a global pandemic)

Why the wellness community is full of shit

Farming fails

Picking up music at 48 and writing comedy rock

Faulty beliefs we have about our creative gifts

Living fully at the eleventh hour

Letting go of status and security

Why it’s all ok when everything’s not ok

Kirtan and ecospirituality practices

Jem’s evolving views about how collapse will unfold

Bringing kids into this world, yay or nay?

The Deep Adaptation framework

Becoming NURTURANT

How to help others through the grief

Jem’s simple pleasures

Oracle cards for cynics

🧙‍♀️LINKY POOS

Jem’s home on the web

[paper] Deep Adaptation ~ Jem Bendell

[book] Breaking Together ~ Jem Bendell

The Metacrisis Initiative

Jem’s collapse-aware oracle cards

Jem’s music

Songbird credit: Australia Outback Birds by EduFigueres License: Attribution 4.0

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I tell a story about Jar Power before sitting down with Robin Greenfield, an incredible fella best known for his radical experiments in simple living, food reclamation, waste minimisation and wild foraging.

He has been called “the Robin Hood of our times”, “the Forrest Gump of ecology”, and “the best kind of crazy”. To me, Robin is a torch bearer for truth, leading the way towards justice – with a whole lotta joy and integrity.

This year he is eating 100% foraged foods – unreal! – so we chat about that, as well as:

Why Robin is so gassy

How it feels to break free from the global industrial food system

Why Robin is not into human optimisation

Practicing non-attachment and impermanence

Freedom in community

What gives Robin the power to do crazy stuff?

Non-delusionalism

How to identify your purpose and niche

The most limiting factor in figuring out who you really are

Pursuing radical honesty

Robin’s simple finances

Skills + relationships = freedom

Transition ethics

Compassionate communication

What IS foraging, really?

All the foraging nuances you never thought about!

How our language is built around disconnection

What would happen if everyone foraged?

Joy as resistance

🧙‍♀️ LINKY POOS

Robin’s website

Robin’s books

Robin on Instagram

[book] Mark Boyle ~ The Moneyless Man

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Christie Green spends days at a time in the mountains, in the snow, tracking elk, solo. Her hunting journey began at 40 as a practical way to feed herself and her family, and became a fierce and fluid exploration of womanhood, motherhood, stewardship, intuition, listening and kinship. Christie wrote a memoir about her experiences called Moonlight Elk that I rapturously devoured, licking my fingertips with every turn of the page, it is that delicious. 

🦌 Terrain covered:

Life in Sante Fe, New Mexico

Hunting as a deep and embodied exploration of just about everything.

Listening to other than human perspectives as a landscape architect

Designing for soil, water, animal, pollination; landscapes in service of wild nature

Learning to hunt at 40

Weaving values into business

How to catch dreams

Why would you want to hunt alone?

Being an “other-centred” person

Following desire and intuition

The extreme paradox of loving and killing

Defying categories and boxes

Are there better and worse ways to hunt?

Could and should everyone hunt?

Communal local food relationships

Walking in fear as a woman, as prey

Dreams as soul expression

Writing sex scenes that feature yourself

The choiceless choice of creativity

🧙‍♀️ LINKY POOS

Christie’s home on the web

Christie on Instagram

Get your mitts on Moonlight Elk (note: you can buy it anywhere, or ask your library for copies)

Moonlight Elk audiobook

Selected essays by Christie Green

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Outro birdsong credit: Afro408 - License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0

You’ve heard of swales… but what about swales in the brain to slow and deepen our human experience? Join me and Cecilia Macaulay for one of those special convos that gets to the heart of life’s gnarliest struggles; our biggest messes, our greatest failures, our everyday chaos… and uses permaculture design to harness their power.

This episode will particularly chime with “forgetful, distractible” types, clutter accumulators, chaos agents, overwhelm junkies, and anyone with a hunch that a few elegant household systems could MASSIVELY increase their effectiveness in the world.

WE COVER

Insane wisdom from Bill Mollison

Meeting Masanobu Fukuoka

The FIVE RULES OF HARMONIOUS PERMIE SHAREHOUSES

Japanese rules of Non-Complaint and Taking Full Responsibility

Growing an enduring permaculture spirit

How to become a world expert in a tiny little thing

Creating a failure protocol

Upward spirals

Permaculture for heartbreak

Being an effective human later in life

More than medication for neurodiversity

The connection between untidy houses and trauma

Making your kitchen sink a shrine to beauty and goodness

Setting a household culture using mirror neurons

The eco-footprint of university

STOP AWFULISING!

Permaculture zones in the home

Why to share what’s spare

STOP COLONISING CREATIVE VOID!

Expanding the edges of our gifts and talents

Beautiful messcapes

Knolling

What “can’t be bothered” really codes for

How to use imagination to improve your memory

🧙‍♀️ LINKY POOS 🧙‍♀️

Cecilia’s home on the web

Cecilia’s nine month home harmonising project

The Edible Balcony Garden ~ Indira Naidoo

Sand Talk ~ Tyson Yunkaporta

Screen Zen App

WWOOF, HelpX & Workaway

Polyvagal theory

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Thanks to kangaroovindaloo for the singing bowls: License: Attribution 4.0

Big personal shares at the top of the ep (preview: podcasting terrifies me) before an utterly delightful conversation with Scots folk singer Josie Vallely aka. Quinie.

Quinie's album Forefowk, Mind Me was named The Guardian's best folk release of 2025, but don't worry if you're not into bagpipes because we mostly chat about:

Not making your art your career

Tips for slow art/seasonal living in a rushing world

The mind bending differences between relating with Country in Australia versus Scotland

Minority languages and evocation of place

The right to roam

Confused white settler syndrome

When you’re a cultural mongrel

Impure ancestry

Place as a surrogate elder

Tradition in motion

Where do songs live?

Journeying on horseback

Horses as bodyguards

Why we all just want to be got

🧙‍♀️LINKY POOS

Quinie’s home on the web

Quinie on Instagram

[album] Forefowk, Mind Me ~ Quinie

Quinie’s seasonal almanac ~ Things that happen every year in a cycle

[film] Forefowk, Mind Me 

Guardian review of Quinie’s album

Cover art photo credit: Anthony Rintoul

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A garden drama unfolds during a heatwave, and I share my summer solstice/New Year wishes for you.

Thanks for tuning into another year of Reskillience! We'll be back later in January full of fresh questions and custard. 

Shout out to my love Jordan Osmond for helping produce this episode.

Sound credit: BlackbirdFiltered.wav by acclivity 

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