The Sustainable Hour no 299 with architect Alvyn Williams from SoftLoud Architects, Sonia Randhawa from the Coalition of Everyone, and Rick Coleman from Southern Cross Permaculture Institute.

The UN is preparing to declare 2021-2030 The Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. Adrian Drew is part of a group of farmers and land owners who think Australia should take a leading role in making that happen.

What to call the equivalent of a modern-thinking ‘urban farmer’ or permaculturalist, who works with growing food on a big piece of land on the countryside, but in a very different style than how the conventional farmers do it?

I suggest we introduce the expression the natural farmer.

My definition of a ‘natural farmer’ would be that it is a farmer who is focused on observing, understanding, following and making good use of the way nature works – the interaction between plants, microorganisms, animals, the landscape and the weather – rather than being directed by the way the agricultural and industrial economy works.

In The Renerative Hour today, I visit one of Australia’s natural farmers: Adrian Drew. He is part of a growing group of intelligent farmers and ‘landscape mechanics’ who share the vision that by 2030, Australia’s catchment and watershed systems can be drought-proofed and restored by using Peter Andrew‘s Natural Sequence Farming methods and the Australian Landscape Science Approach.

After working with this topic over 40 years, Peter Andrews has become a bit of a national icon. In books, articles, tv documentaries and numerous conference speeches and presentations he explains to the Australian farmers how a transformation of the way water flows through the landscape can help enable them to restore soil fertility by using all plants – understanding their function and part they play in landscape process at any point in time – so they can grow food without the use of fertilisers or pesticides, artificial irrigation or drainage.

Peter Andrews’ basic idea is to be working together with all plants and with the community to achieve maximum productivity and biodiversity in the shortest amount of time, storing water and fertility where it has greatest potential for use in the landscape, and working with the unlimited maximum of water flow in the landscape, while at the same time storing carbon in the soil as a result of plant production and growing more plants to reinstate water cycles and a more moderate, farming-friendly climate.

Adrian Drew: “The shift is coming”

“The shift is coming“As our summer get hotter and drier each year, it could be argued, as Adrian Drew does it well in this podcast, that this shift in the landscape is needed, moving from a drainage paradigm to a water storage paradigm in the farming sector and land management generally.

However, it will first of all require a major shift in mindset and mentality among Australia’s 200,000 farmers – and that is probably the most difficult obstacle to deal with and overcome, if this 10-year vision is going to be successfully implemented. 

“We are in luck, though,” says Drew: “The shift is coming. The evidence for that are the many committed landowners at various sites throughout Australia, who currently are participating in making this vision come true.”

Climate change is real#ClimateChange impacts at home,across Australia and around the worldEvidence for #Perthand for south-west Western Australiais extraordinarily clearreduced rainfallreduced streamflo...

People who deal with horses have this expression ‘the horse whisperer’ – which is a about that here is a person who really understands horses, how they think and feel. Almost as if he or she could talk with the horse.

Here in Australia we have, in a similar way, a plant whisperer. Someone who understands the Australian landscape and its plants in a deeper sense. Peter Andrews is a landscape-restoration legend in Australia – he has been on the ABC’s Australian Story a couple of times, his videos are viewed by thousands of people on youtube, he has written two books, and it is all about rebulding a plant-managed landscape – in a way that Peter calls Natural Sequence Farming. He also travels around the country to give talks and presentations, and this is what brings him to Geelong today.

So, welcome to a Regenerative Hour where we are eager to learn what Peter Andrews is on about at this time, where we stand on the doorstep to what the United Nations have announced is going to be called the Decade of Eco-Restoration.

Landscape restoration instituteThe group of people Peter Andrews refers to that he is working together with is the TALS Institute. TALS is short for The Australian Landscape Science Institute, and on their website, you can read about what they call “The Australian Landscape Science Approach”. The website is found on www.tals.org.au

The TALS Institute proposes the establishment of a national governing body for landscape restoration that allows a regional program of landscape practitioners to be initiated “to inform farmers to take practical steps to restore our landscape and prevent droughts and bushfires as it once did.”

TALS Institute wants to underpin the program by scientific evidence and the introduction of a standards and accreditation system supported by both private and public organisations as well as the federal government – “to ensure landscape restoration can occur with minimal risk to others within a water catchment, using the best practises in design and execution.”

“The results will be astounding and create economic certainty and prosperity for agricultural Australia as well as ensuring food security for our nation,” writes TALS Institute.

After the podcast interview with Peter Andrews, we play an older interview which TALS Institute posted on Youtube, where he is standing at a pond and a willow tree at Mulloon Creek in New South Wales. This was produced by Paul Cockram from Artplan Videographics eight years ago – in 2011.

The podcast hour is rounded off with two short excerpts from ABC Australian Story’s half-hour documentary, which you can also find on Youtube: ‘How Peter Andrews rejuvenates drought-struck land’:

Published on Youtube on 29 October 2018“Is “natural sequence farming” the secret to restoring our water-starved continent? For more than a decade, two farmers have shown that parched landscapes can be revived. And finally, Canberra’s listening. Australian Story explores the potential solution to Australia’s drought crisis.” – www.abc.net.au/news/2018 

“…the path we are following is taking us downhill, possibly to destruction. Calamity does await us if we keep doing to the landscape what we have been doing. The good news is we can fix the problem. In fact, fixing it is relatively easy.

Our guests in The Sustainable Hour on 18 December 2019 are seven-year-old Holly and her mum Jana Holmer, who share their enthusiasm for everything organic, repurposed or reinvented.

We talk with kayak-campaigning Steve Posselt, who recently published his new book, ‘Tough is not enough’ about climate despair and redemption – described as “a must read for every climate activist, adventurer and their friends.”

Sustainable People is on a hard mission this time, and it is not about finding Santa Claus… One of the most popular Danish Christmas songs, written 171 years ago, has this famous sentence: “Just don’t touch my old Christmas”. But Christmas has been touched, big time. The 5.5 million Danes go shopping for around $5 billion Australian dollars in the days around Christmas, and the figure for all the presents given equals to tonnes of carbon emissions. So Lene Foghsgaard asks: What on Earth can we do to actually make Christmas both green and sustainable? Two women, Johanne Stenstrup and Louise Thustrup stand behind the company Sustain Daily, which has made it into its mission to collect relevant information of all aspects of a sustainable lifestyle and inspire us all to change our habits into a more sustainable dailyday. They know everything worth knowning about the transition needed, and they generously give out some of their advice. 

We start the hour with a clip of Greta Thunberg and an EU media representative Elina Bardram speaking at the UN Climate Summit in Spain, and Colin Mockett‘s perspective on this in the global context of things. We end the hour with an excerpt from an inspirational end-of-year TEDtalk with Jane Fonda. Cheers, and a happy new year to all our FM and podcast listeners and followers in social media.

Video recording from the studio

“Health and medical groups from across Australia are calling the current air pollution crisis from unprecedented bushfires in NSW a public health emergency and calling on federal and state government to act to address the immediate health crisis as well as the underlying climate emergency.”~ Climate and Health Alliance’s joint statement

In the same breath as we send our respect to the traditional custodians of the land on which The Sustainable Hour is produced, the Wadawurrung people, in recognition of their continuing connection to the land, water, culture and community, in today’s program we also send our disrespect to our leaders in Canberra, who went to Spain to sabotage the global climate negotiations so that they basically collapsed — while in Australia, an area almost the size of Denmark now has been burning in the last month. More than 30,000 square kilometres – Denmark is 43,000. So that’s like seeing three quarters of Denmark on fire.

And we’re told it will be 47 degrees in Mildura on ...

John Paul Lopez Taberdo runs a business in Geelong, Victoria, where he helps Australians make sustainable and ethical choices for their local and overseas travels. So far he has created holiday plans and bookings for over 800 Australians.

He has lived, worked and travelled in 32 countries, but right now, he has settled in a tiny house in the outskirts of Geelong, from where he covers most of his transport needs on his bicycle.

As not only the new year but a new decade approaches, we visit him in his home to learn about why he has chosen to live and work in this way, and why in Geelong – and how he sees the future we are stearing towards.

John Paul

→ John Paul’s home page on www.travelcounsellors.com.au – LinkedIn – Instagram

→ John Paul Lopez Taberdo’s blog – 7 November 2019: How can travel be sustainable?

After the interview with John Paul we play excerpts of these youtube-videos:

March 2018 in the Blue Mountains

Charles Eisenstein sees a lot of encouraging signs that civilization is returning to an understanding of a living Earth. Interview by Pachamama.org

An introduction to what Ecosystem Restoration Camps are. Video from August 2018

Ecosystem Restoration Camps are an inspiring project or movement that is doing the work that needs to be done. → Find out more about Ecosystem Regeneration Camps on www.ecosystemrestorationcamps.org → Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/1206960359323785 → Lessons of the Loess Plateau in China: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QUSIJ80n50

Tiny home

Travel: Plane versus train

→ Traveller – 24 January 2020:Does carbon offsetting work? Why your holiday will never be carbon neutral

Research uncovers why Australian now identify as conscious travellers

ING released new research revealing that ‘conscious travel’ is on the rise and is influencing the nation’s spending habits,

“Perhaps it is only by imagining the end of the world that we can begin to imagine a better one.”~ James Bradley, author of ‘Ghost Species’ and the essay ‘Unearthed: Last Days of the Anthropocene’

In 2018, Stuart Rosson published his first fiction novel, ‘East’, set in the 2720s – at a time when our current civilisation is long forgotten. In The Regenerative Hour he shares his thoughts about the impending societal collapse, which more and more people anticipate in the near future, and how we best prepare for what is coming.

The Carbon March to CanberraStuart is part of a group planning a major #BurstTheBubble walk, inspired by Gandhi’s historic Salt March, to the Federal Parliament in Canberra, with the first steps being taking already on 4 February 2020, and with much bigger and more ambitious plans for September, aspiring to gather up to 400,000 Australians at the steps of the Parliament building for an entire week or more.

About Stuart Rosson

Born in Geelong, south west of Melbourne, Australia, Stuart Rosson was educated at Geelong College and Deakin University. After a Bachelor of Science and a brief foray into molecular biology, he studied journalism before landing a job as the medical and science writer for the Sun News Pictorial in Melbourne.

Throughout the mid to late 80’s he covered news and feature stories relating to every aspect of science, health and medicine. Returning from overseas in 1989, he purchased a restaurant – casting himself as manager and chef of a small French eatery.

The restaurant was listed in the Age Good Food Guide but, fell victim to the localised recession which followed the collapse of Geelong’s home-grown building society. Moving to Torquay on the Surfcoast, he spent most of the 90’s managing the mountainwear division of a local surf company, where he was often co-opted into writing marketing copy for the global corporation.

After leaving the Surf Industry he studied natural medicine and astrology, and went on to practice as a naturopath until 2009.

He claims the idea for ‘East’ came to him whilst up a ladder cleaning out the gutters at his mother’s house. By the time he came down the ladder he had the ‘bare bones’ of the plot for all three books.

The first book in the trilogy was completed a few years ago, but went on the shelf whilst he built himself a house in Torquay. After being edited by accomplished local editor, Nan McNab, ‘East’ was released in November 2018. Biography from Amazon.com.au

Mentioned during the hour:

Welcome to the new grand story of interconnected sustainability

“The fire and the rose are one”

Guest in The Sustainable Hour’s studio bunker on 11 December 2019 is chef Jono Hall from the Little Green Corner café in Geelong, who shares some inspirational stories about how the café and his kitchen have been able to reduce their carbon footprint and keep pushing for doing things in ways that are more sustainable.

In November, the Sustainable Hour team went on an excursion to Narmbool to learn about a local tree-planting project – and our latest regenerative hour podcast is all about that. In today’s program we play an excerpt of our interview with Colleen Filippa, the owner and CEO of Fifteen Trees.

Last week we talked about Coldplay’s push on the Pause Button, as they stated that they won’t be touring until it can be done in a way that is responsible and not doing any harm. Charlie Mgee from the Formidable Vegetable Sound System did something similar half a year ago, when he announced that we was stopping doing international tours because of the climate crisis.

But what if he offset his flying by planting some trees instead? Well, if you follow the discussions about this topic in social media, you’ll quickly learn that offsetting your flight or car-driving with purchase of trees gets a lot of criticism. We talk with Shane Adams, who was quick to post a message about this on Mik’s Facebook page, to find out what the core of this discussion is.

Heidi Lenffer from the band Cloud Control started a carbon offset project, FEAT, initially mainly to offset the flight-emissions from their own touring, but over the last three years their project has grown into something which also involves the sports sector, and next year they are launching an even bigger platform, which everyone can get involved with. 

We kick the hour off with Colin Mockett’s global outlook about the United Nations’ climate summit in Spain, the European Union’s Green New Deal, and Denmark’s new and world-leading climate law which requires a reduction of the country’s emissions with 70 per cent below 1995-levels before 2030.

The formidable song we play by Formidable Vegetable Sound System is called ‘Earth People Fair’.

“This is Europe’s man on the moon moment. I’m convinced that the old growth model that is based on fossil fuels and pollution is out of date and out of touch with our planet.”~ Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President

Listen to The Sustainable Hour no. 297 on 94.7 The Pulse:

The eight Regenerative Hour is recorded at a beautiful place called Narmbool, situated at Elaine between Ballarat and Geelong in Victoria, Australia, where we meet with Colleen Filippa, who is founder and director of Fifteen Trees, and Mathew Dowler from the Narmbool Education Team.

Colleen and Mat talking with Jackie and Tony

Colleen Filippa’s treeplanting company Fifteen Trees from Ballarat has raised funds for 3,000 trees and shrubs to be planted by school children and community groups at this site. All together, the company has planted more than 160,000 trees since they started 10 years ago. Fifteen Trees offers to plant any number of trees on your behalf. For instance, 15 trees is estimated to reduce the carbon footprint of your car for one year, whereas 60 trees could reduce the carbon footprint of your lifestyle for one year. If you are about to travel by air, one tree per hour in the air would reduce the carbon footprint of that flight. Or you could consider planting one tree per person you invite to your next big celebration – as a way to reduce the carbon footprint of your events and parties. But won’t carbon offsetting in this way just delay the process of us cleaning up our act genuinely and decarbonising our activities – like for instance figuring out how we can transport ourselves, fly and party without emitting any carbon in the first place? That is one of the topics we discuss with Colleen.

Public service announcement:Carbon offsetting doesn’t reduce emissions.Projects often do real harm to communities.We need rapid, radical emission reductions at source. No amount of carbon-shuffling will do the job. (&@GretaThunberg agrees.)https://t.co/SPFI7faQyZ— Teresa Anderson (@1TeresaAnderson) November 9, 2019

Mathew Dowler explains about the project

Jackie

Mik

National Tree Day Tree Planting at Narmbool

Sunday 2 August 202010.00 am – 1.00 pm

National Tree Day started in 1996 and has grown into Australia’s largest community tree-planting and nature care event.

It’s a call to action for all Australians to get their hands dirty and give back to the community. ​​​This day sits right at the heart of Narmbool’s ethos and is the perfect place to bring your family and make a connection with, and contribution to, our incredible natural environment. BYO morning tea and lunch.

Children & Adults: $10 (towards cost of trees, guards & stakes)

Toddlers (0-4): Free

Bookings: 03 5337 1199 or [email protected]

→ Read more on

In The Sustainable Hour on 4 December 2019, Mik Aidt has just returned from a speaker-trip in New Zealand, where he talked about the emerging ‘Pause Movement’ and the impact which a wave of ‘Coldplay Moments’ could trigger – if more leading artists and sports teams followed Coldplay’s example and pushed the big Pause Button on their activitities. Could it trigger an entirely new level of bold climate action with emissions slow-down and massive economic disruption around the world? Our 11-year-old youth reporter Ben Pocock is ready with his second report – this time with ten good tips on how each of us can take positive action, and our global outlooker Colin Mockett brings a report from EU and the United Nations climate summit in Spain. We learn that he had his ‘Colin Moment’ already 30 years ago.

We discuss the idea of a Pause Movement with Cindy Eiritz, Strategic Director at Regenerate Earth, who is building community consensus for regenerative farming methods and building healthy soils. Will we succeed in making the 2020s into a decade of regeneration and eco-restoration?

“All of us in every industry have to just work out what the best way of doing our job is.”~ Chris Martin, Coldplay front man

Listen to The Sustainable Hour no. 296 on 94.7 The Pulse:

  » Subscribe to ‘The Sustainable Hour’ podcast via iTunes or Stitcher

 LISTENER SERVICE: 

Content of this hour

Links, excerpts and more information about what we talked about in this Sustainable Hour

The unexpected impact of waiting in a tunnel

 #COLDPLAYMOMENT: 

What will be your Coldplay moment?

"How can…our tour be sustainable"Chris Martin on why @coldplay won't be touring their new album. Watch the full interview on #BBCBreakfast with @ColinGPaterson pic.twitter.com/PaQ2nkqeF7— BBC Breakfast (@BBCBreakfast) November 21, 2019

“We’re taking time over the next year or two to work out how our tour can not only be sustainable [but] how can it be actively beneficial. (…) Our next tour will be the best possible version of a tour like that environmentally. We would be disappointed if it’s not carbon neutral. The hardest thing is the flying side of things. But, for example, our dream is to have a show with no single use plastic, to have it largely solar powered. We’ve done a lot of big tours at this point.

Guests in The Sustainable Hour on 27 November 2019 are Maree Fagan and Tory Sorensen from Extinction Rebellion Red Rebels Geelong, and Ryan Mischkulnig from The Reimaginarium.

Extinction Rebellion’s Red Rebel Brigades wish to convey, through their blood red cloaks and deathly white faces a emotive, non violent message which is:

“We are like spirits coming back from the grave, here to warn the living of the grave errors they are making, a beautiful, bloody mob of nightmarish bodies, pleading with us not to destroy ourselves.”~ Red Rebels manifest

Red Rebels at Camp Carlton, Spring Rebellion 2019. Photo by Julian Meehan

Listen to The Sustainable Hour no. 295 on 94.7 The Pulse:

  » Subscribe to ‘The Sustainable Hour’ podcast via iTunes or Stitcher

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Imagination + Commitment = Solutions

Maree Fagan and Tory Sorensen are two Geelong women who have been surprising themselves since they became involved in climate activism. Their latest project is being prime movers in Geelong’s eye catching Extinction Rebellion Red Rebels Brigade. When asked about this, Maree said: “There is no way I would have imagined, say, 12 months ago that I would ever become involved in such a public display arts project. But we all encourage each other, and what’s more, we are having a lot of fun.”

Ryan Mischkulnig isn’t afraid to use his imagination. In fact he he has turned it into a job which sustains him and his young family at the same time providing employment for kindred spirits. As a child he was always encouraged to explore and find out how things work. This imagination and drive has resulted in the Reimaginarium in Geelong’s CBD. Here old radios are turned into modern blue tooth speakers, clothes and furniture items are repurposed. 

Art and culture: ‘Headline-grabbing announcements’

Alison Tickell from Julie’s Bicycle in the United Kingdom talks art and climate on BBC World News

“Following a series of headline-grabbing announcements from the big music names such as Coldplay and Massive Attack, JB’s Alison was interviewed on BBC World News to discuss the vital role that art and culture must play in the climate emergency, and the huge growing momentum behind the movement.”

→ Watch on Vimeo

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