(ominous string music)
- The current system has to go through a collapse
unless you believe that infinite growth is possible
on a finite planet.
The system is growth dependent, so there's gonna be
a collapse in one form or another.
- If you just look at what's happening in terms of
deforestation, resource overconsumption, waste streams
and climate change, and I mean, these are all phenomena
that are brought about by our overconsumption,
overexploitation of resources.
(unsettling music)
- We have to leave 80% at least of the fossil fuel
that we know about and that we know we could make money
digging up, we have to leave it in the ground
for the entire century at least.
- [Man] The ecological crisis comes from treating the earth
as an other, as just a bunch of stuff.
- We've been so powerful and we've impacted on so much
of the wild world around us that if we don't do something
fairly soon, the wild world is going to consume us.
(eerie string music)
- You know, these are the massive issues, climate change,
energy and food, all of these things that are converging
on us and yet, you know, you pick up the paper every day
and there'll be nothing about this stuff.
- If you look at our global economic system,
I'd guess you'd have to first think of it as a system
by accident, nobody sat down and designed this thing
and in a lot of ways, it's sort of the worst
of all possible combinations, because what you have
is something that is supposed to be based in the real world
but behaves as if it were in a fantasy world.
- It's really exploitive, extractive, damaging,
not only to people but to the environment
and to the economy too.
(somber music)
I think we're heading for some very deep water
if we don't make these changes.
- Being sustainable is not just a nice thing to do.
Being unsustainable isn't just a bit unfortunate.
It is an existential threat to our species.
People don't seem to get that.
We actually need to do something about it or we're gone.
- You've probably had those moments of despair
where you think it's just hopeless and the world
is always gonna be this way and anything we do is not enough
but there's also and I would say that this is more
of a heart knowing that understands that
a more beautiful world is possible.
(somber music)
(atmospheric music)
(gentle string music)
(somber music)
- The world is built on stories.
Or even a story, a mythology.
Every culture has a mythology
that answers the deep questions
like who am I, what is a self, what's real,
how does change happen, what's the nature of reality?
(string music)
Every culture answers that in a different way
and the answers that our culture has
and when I say our culture I mean the dominant culture
of this planet, the answers that have worked and guided
our culture for several hundred years now
and to some extent thousands of years
aren't working anymore, we're facing a crisis
in our basic way of making meaning about the world
and our understanding of the recipe for living life
and all of these things are in a state of crisis.
(somber string music)
- The problems that we face in terms of environmental
condition, degradation, overconsumption of resources,
a lot of social justice problems, really pretty much
all stem from a common cause and that's economics.
(somber string music)
The biggest problem it has for us right now,
the biggest implication it has for humans
and pretty much everything else on the planet
is that it's causing a lot of unsustainable growth,
it's causing growth to accelerate in a way that cannot
be met by natural resources or sinks on the planet we have.
(somber string music)
- The money system demands endless growth.
It compels endless growth, it encourages endless growth.
So in other words, it encourages the conversion
of nature into property, into profits.
- Now the problem with this growth, of course,
is that if the economy keeps growing,
sooner or later it needs natural resources
to support that growth.
(bombs explode)
(somber music)
- One of the big flaws in the current money system
is interest, we would probably only need to work
half of the hours that we do
and still be able to maintain the same standard of living
if it wasn't for interest.
Interest is hidden in so many ways.
The price of any goods and services,
most businesses have loans on which they pay interest
and they don't pay interest, you do.
I do.
And so that means that we have to work and work and work
and exploit Mother Nature as well in the process.
Way more than would be necessary if it wasn't for interest.
(somber music)
- For a lot of the things to keep running,
keep the finance engine ticking along and keep economies
moving, we have to have lots and lots of energy.
(frenetic music)
Energy for extracting natural resources,
energy for shipping things around the world,
energy for manufacturing, energy to promote them,
energy to keep them going, energy to maintain things
so it's a lot of energy used in the system.
(somber music)
- Fossil fuel energy is energy from the sun
that's been stored in plants or other living things.
And has been stored under the ground usually
for millions and millions of years.
When you dig it up, you get a free bonus, basically,
you get this amazing wealth of energy which you can do
all kinds of creative and amazing things with,
but the problem is, is that when it runs out, that's it,
it's gone.
The other aspect of that, of course, is the process
of getting it and digging it up is both destructive
and so expensive and requires energy to do.
(frenetic music)
- Peak oil is a concept that is quite simple.
What it means is that you have a finite amount of something
and if you consume it at a steady rate, then...
There kind of isn't a peak, you just consume it,
but if you consume it with an increasing rate
then you'll hit a point where you can't increase anymore,
that would be a peak, and then the consumption
would necessarily drop off in some way.
(somber music)
- The energy return on investment from fossil fuels
when we first discovered it was so big
and that's why we have the abundance that we have now,
as just that free energy and we've been having this
crazy party for a hundred years now on fossil fuels,
it's just a crazy binge that we've been on
and we're at the end of the binge now because the energy
return on investment is dwindling all the time.
That's how our food system works.
We talked about this green revolution that would feed
all these people, but it's not a green revolution.
It's an oil revolution.
(somber music)
- The entire system is hugely dependent on fossil fuels.
You pull those out and I guarantee you within days
the whole thing is gonna fall down.
(somber music)
- If you take into account fossil fuels and the transport,
the tilling, everything, the packaging, the movement,
the whole food system that we have in the developed world,
so called developed world, then...
You know, there's at least 10 units of energy for every one
we get out of it.
- Basing a food production system that's meant
to feed the world on something which is temporary...
Brings obvious problems.
As a result of that is the huge loss of biodiversity and
while not a lot of people care about bugs and all this
other stuff, biodiversity is critical.
So when you strip that away by having what we call
monocultures, then you get massive problems.
With monocultures, we are talking about growing one crop
or farming one animal and you don't see that in nature.
Nature doesn't work that way.
It's evolved diversity for resilience.
When you take that away, these systems become really brittle
and they're very prone to breaking.
Now we kind of stave off the worst of those effects
or we try to with fossil fuel inputs.
We put in fertilizers, we put in herbicides, fungicides,
pesticides, we go to great lengths to try and protect
these very fragile food production systems.
(somber music)
I think what a lot of people don't realize is that
our food system is incredibly vulnerable.
We do a pretty good job most of the time of getting food
where it needs to go, managing supplies, managing surplus,
transportation, all that sort of stuff,
but it is quite vulnerable to major upsets,
all kinds of crises, particularly economic crises.
(eerie string music)
If the shops, the supermarkets, stop selling food
for three days for some reason, how would you survive?
What would that be like?
How would that feel?
What would you do?
You know, it's happened to me in a major city just one day
and it really made me think, you begin to realize
that there is a series of things that all need to be
in place and all need to be functioning properly
all the time for things to run smoothly.
In a world of increasing climate volatility
and the economic pressures that that can bring,
it's really easy to see how a bad situation could develop.
- So this is the kind of scary reality and it's coming fast
unless we really, really quickly change our food system
and how we do it, you know, then there's gonna be huge
impacts on humans, and on the other animals on the planet.
(somber string music)
- To a certain extent, people who really do understand
the problem of climate change and resources and equity,
it's really easy to get focused on the miracle technology
solution to that because that's what we do,
that's what society's asking us to do.
- I think if technology could have
solved all of our problems
then it would have already solved all of our problems.
Theoretically we already have all of the technology
we need to live beautifully on earth and beautifully
with each other, but we have not lived
beautifully on earth and beautifully with each other
so something else has to happen.
(somber music)
- 100 years from now, every solar panel we build
will be rubbish, it'll be toxic waste, in fact, somewhere,
I hope somebody figures out what to do with it.
Every windmill we build now won't be running anymore.
Hopefully a lot of it'll be recycled, I don't know.
But the carbon we put in the air will still be there.
(somber music)
You're never gonna have air travel with renewables,
you're never gonna have steel with renewables.
You're never gonna have electronics with renewables
'cause you need diesel so making sure
that you leave some diesel for later
is kind of important.
I'm not disillusioned with solar or wind or anything.
I know that the substitution of those things for
fossil fuels isn't possible,
so as long as we keep telling ourselves the story
that it is, we aren't actually doing the thing
we have to do which is to just leave the stuff in
the ground, which means what, there's only one thing
you can do then, which is to use less of it.
(somber music)
If there's an industrial civilization out there
a couple centuries from now, then...
They're using fossil fuel.
Tiny amounts of it.
And they're using renewable energy
and that renewable energy they are using
is hydro and geothermal.
And wood that they are harvesting and husbanding
very, very carefully and what we notice most
about them is how little they're using of most everything.
That's what has to happen, it doesn't matter
how many solar panels you ever put on anything.
The only thing that matters is leaving the coal
in the ground, leaving the oil in the ground,
leaving the gas in the ground, all of it
and planting back every bit of forest that you possibly can.
That's the only thing that matters.
(somber music)
- The history of civilization
has been kind of like a history of an increasing power
to dominate and control the other,
the cultural other and also the natural other.
(frenetic music)
And this was supposed to bring us into utopia.
We were supposed to live in paradise by now,
a paradise of electrified comfort, robot servants,
space colonies, artificial food, infinite lifespans,
et cetera, et cetera.
The breakdown that's happening today in part is happening
because this glorious promise of technology
and also social engineering was never fulfilled
and in fact things are getting worse and worse
and in fact our technologies of control
now look to be seeding our destruction.
The breakdown of the ecological basis of civilization.
(somber music)
We don't know anymore what the answer is.
We don't know who we are.
We don't even know what's real because on every level,
the story that answered those questions is breaking down,
politically, economically and especially technologically
and in our relationship to nature so that leaves us
not knowing and it leaves us open to another story.
(somber music)
(hopeful music)
- If we want to solve health crisis, food quality issues,
economic issues, we really have to change the system
and the infrastructure of the system and we have to create
our own infrastructure.
(cheerful music)
I've been studying sustainable farming systems
for over 25 years.
There are no real issues, we can solve all of them.
There are really easy answers to grow food quality
and do that with good environmental care.
That's the easy bit.
We are in the position to do it properly
because of the CSA, our members allow us to create
that diversity, that other old system doesn't allow
you to create that diversity.
- CSA stands for community supported agriculture.
It means that a farmer starts growing food
and growing food, there's a lot of unknowns in there
and you have to start at the beginning of the season
and you don't know for whatever reason if you're gonna
harvest all the things that you plan to harvest,
that you started sowing months back.
So the idea is that a group of people support a farmer
so the farmer knows he's got an outlet.
And the members that we have, they know that every week
they're gonna get a box of healthy fresh foods
that have been harvested just before they got them.
For us it means we have stability in the fact that
the plants we sow, that they are sold.
We don't have the issue of food waste.
Because if a broccoli is small and it normally wouldn't
be able to go to a supermarket, we can give people two.
(cheerful music)
- As a farmer, you want to create healthy soils
and healthy plants and healthy animals and further up
the food chain, you make sure that you create a soil
that invites the right sets of microbes.
(cheerful music)
That for us means we have soil which is the mineral
component, in the soil we've got the microorganisms
which are governing the system, we just create
a habitat for them, then you got the plants growing
out of there, be it annuals, perennials, and trees.
(cheerful music)
Then amongst that you've got the insects living in there
and then we've incorporated pigs, sheep, cows, ducks,
geese, and I'm sure we're forgetting a few bits and bobs
and every single item adds value.
(cheerful music)
- So on the closed loop systems they will have tree crops
and all that, nuts, fruit, that kind of thing
happening on the fringes or in shelter belts.
A whole really diverse approach to farming
that is way more sustainable but also it closes
that nitrogen, that fertilizer loop
so you don't have to bring it in from the outside.
You just don't waste it.
(cheerful music)
- While eating less meat is a really important thing to do
it's important to recognize that you can't have
a healthy ecosystem without animals.
A truly environmentally friendly
and ecologically healthy food production system
must have animals because when you take animals out
of that system, all the jobs that those animals did
in that functioning ecosystem now needs to be done
some other way, whether that's by people or chemicals.
The health of these food production system is supported by
the natural and healthy interaction between plants
and animals and that can take the form of pest control,
fertility cycles, there's lots of interactions
between animals and plants which we can and should use to
support a healthy and resilient food production system.
So really what that boils down to is we need to eat
less meat, we don't cut it out, but the best thing
that anyone can do is try and find producers that are
operating systems which are looking after
the health of their environment, including the animals
and supporting them.
(eerie music)
(cheerful music)
- What comes out the back end of a worm is really good stuff
and then it's just really cool just seeing
this high field of fungus and it's just growing
on the surface of the soil.
(cheerful music)
And so holistic grazing is a management technique that's
been devised by a Zimbabwean man, Alan Savory,
and he was observing the large herds of buffalo
in Africa and the bison in north America
and just massive herds of ruminant animals
and these animals were constantly on the move
'cause there's generally some lions or something
just on their back and wanting to pick off any
of the weak ones.
We have large amounts of cattle that are shifted
every day but instead of lions keeping them
bunched together, we have electric fences
and each day they're going to fresh grass
and it's long grass and so they're not eating it all.
Some of it's getting trampled and with the dung
and urine and that, that's just all forming
that kind of compost heap on the ground.
Other farms might be looking at us and saying,
well, you're just wasting all that grass
'cause it's dry and stalky and what have you,
but my reply is that waste is a human concept.
Nature doesn't do waste and so we're using that pasture
as part of our first fertilizer program
because that's what's getting put down on the soil
and broken down and going back into the soil.
(cheerful music)
When the grass is grazed and with the holistic long grazing
system, it gets cut off short by the animal
and it also sheds its roots at that time
and that's what is releasing carbon into the soil.
And I guess one of the most exciting things
and drivers of what we're doing is the potential
that that has for...
For helping with climate change issues.
(cheerful music)
Some of those CAFOs that they call 'em in America
or the feed lot, cattle fattening operations,
are a climate disaster, but again,
under this system, they are sequestering more carbon
and are part of a natural cycle that is actually beneficial.
Conventionally farmers, it's all about
keeping the grass short
in a vegetative state so it's growing vigorously,
and that system works while you put on lots of
imported fertilizers, particularly phosphate fertilizers
largely from North Africa and a whole system that requires
digging up that fertilizer and tracking it and then
shipping it and then tracking it and then processing it
and then flying it.
On the whole it's a system that's not going to work and...
In a future with less fossil fuels.
(cheerful music)
What we're doing at the farm here is trying to reduce
the amount of fossil fuel that it takes to produce food.
We've got the cattle going around, we have hens following
along behind the cattle, there's pigs on this farm too
and we're milking a few dairy cows and all that
is really about using a perennial crop like grass, pasture
with forage from trees and that around as well
so we can produce eggs from the chooks and pork
without relying on so much of the annual grains
and all the energy that's involved in producing them
so just trying to get the fossil fuels out of our
food system as much as we can and producing
healthy, natural food.
(cheerful music)
- The powerful thing is that with regenerative agriculture
we can not only produce food and we can not only produce
an abundance of food, but we can do it in a way that
regenerates the land, that replenishes the aquifers,
that sequesters carbon,
that nurtures and supports biodiversity.
Regenerative agriculture, permaculture, holistic management,
there's nothing magical about the way that these things work
It's all based upon sound science and about having
a point of view that is looking at your ecosystem
in its entirety, not just individual aspects of it.
So really what this breaks down to is that anyone
who's looking after land, whether you're a farmer,
a gardener, whatever, you're an ecosystem manager.
(gentle music)
- My philosophy about what to do in the world
isn't to go to a pristine area and live there
and enjoy your life, it's to find a place that's degraded
and fix it up.
(gentle music)
- 23 years ago we started developing the food forest
system here.
We've got 480 different species of plant at last count.
That doesn't include the 80 different types of apples
and the 60 different types of gooseberries
and it's lovely to have that diversity
and it means that every time there's things flowering,
things giving fruit, you know, fruit crops you can eat
and so having diversity's special and that's what makes
a forest garden resilient.
(gentle music)
This property had been abandoned for probably 40 years,
no one lived here, an old house had burned down on the spot.
- And the top area, this area where the house is now was
completely covered in junk and the remains of the old house.
Most people would have not even crossed the threshold
of the property to have a look at that, I don't think,
because it doesn't look very appealing but to us it did
because I thought, well for one thing, nobody wants it
so it's probably going to be cheap and it was,
cheap to buy and secondly I thought I can fix this.
(gentle music)
- A food forest is a permanent planting,
so you want to set up just a like a fire system,
so a fire system can always be the big trees
and the middle sized trees and the bottom layer,
the ground layer, they work together, some plants
cap some minerals and give others back
and another one does something else.
- Growing out in the forest garden, aside from the native
trees which I used as a framework or a platform
for building everything else and those provide me
with shelter from the wind and also nest sites
for the birds and the birds are a really important player
in the management of the garden and the cork
or the cabbage trees that I've got growing there
and the starlings nest in almost all of them
and those starlings as they're feeding their youngers,
their babies, are flying out and finding any soft bodied
caterpillar or grub they can so there's our pest management
or that kind of thing.
And then as an understory or the second layer down to that
we have our fruit tree layer which is our heritage apples
and pears and plums and nectarines and peaches, apricots.
And then below that a layer of berry fruits and currants,
red currants, black currants, white currants, gooseberries,
woosterberries, all of those sorts of shrubby...
Plants that like to grow in the semi shade.
And then wrapping around all of that are the biennial
and perennial herbs, some of which are edible,
some of which are medicinal, and then below that
there are bulbs and root crops that grow such as parsnips
and wild carrots, those kinds of things
and then winding their way up through these things
are vines like grape vines and kiwi fruit
and mint and gooseberries and hops and all sorts
of things which kind of bind everything together
and tie the forest together.
(gentle music)
- That's so peaceful when you walk about.
It's just all different flowers and the energy in action,
all the insects and the birds have their own life
and so the birds are doing all their thing up in the trees
and coming down and feeding and the insects
are flying around and having babies
and flying off on missions.
It's like being in an another universe, really,
it's just amazing, it's to me how life should be
with livingness and interconnectedness,
all the plants and the bees and the herbs.
(gentle music)
- In a forest garden like ours, the major player is
wildness, is, you know, the natural world
and all those things that happen in there
and my job is just to kind of mold that to suit our purposes
to a certain extent.
We are not separate from the world.
We are as wild as it is.
But we've worked towards a form that is not fitting in
with the wild world at all well
and it's going to realign us fairly soon
in my view unless we can recognize
that we need to be fully integrated into that world.
(gentle music)
- People in indigenous societies and tribal societies
or in agrarian villages, they were enmeshed in
a matrix of relationship that gave them a strong identity.
Everybody who they saw on a daily basis
knew them really well.
And we also were in intimate connection with the land,
we knew every plant, every animal, every bird,
we knew its song and when it sang and what bugs it ate
and where those bugs lived and what the soil smells like
where the bugs live and what plants grow there
and what medicine plants are used for.
We were in this web of inter-being.
We felt as if we were at home in the universe.
That is missing in our current society.
We're surrounded by a sea of strangers, people that we know
only very superficially, if at all.
(eerie music)
- For Maori people, the ancestors and the land
are all part of one, we come from the land.
And most people, humans on the planet relate to land
one way or another because they belong to it
and they forge their own identity out of it as well
and that will always continue to happen.
It's like a biological bond between a mother and a child.
You can't break it.
That bond is enforced with the genealogy of the ancestors,
the families, grandparents, there's emotion stored
in that person that they feel they belong here.
(acoustic music)
- Interbeing is a very natural term, it means more
than interconnection or interdependency, which kind of
suggests separate selves having relationships.
Interbeing is more of an understanding that we are
relationship, that my very existence depends or draws from
or includes your existence.
(people laugh)
My wellbeing is intimately connected to your wellbeing
or to the wellbeing of the river, the ocean,
the forest, people across the world and so forth
because I'm not really separate from you.
And that means that in the story of inter being,
I know that whatever I do to the world
will come back to me somehow.
So if our true being is the totality of our relationships
and includes everything in the cosmos, if we are truly
maybe a holographic mirror of all that is,
then when we cut ourselves off from any aspect of nature,
other people, we create a wound, we create a cutoff
and this is painful and we yearn to recover our wholeness.
However, due to ideology, due to the economic system
that we're immersed in, due to cultural factors,
due to many, many, many reasons,
the reunion that we long for
is unavailable to us.
That is good for business because it drives consumerism,
it drives acquisitiveness, it drives greed,
it drives all kinds of neurotic behaviors
that seek to compensate for the missing relationships.
(acoustic music)
- I felt myself being drawn into this materialistic world
because all the people that were around me
had material possessions and there was this wanting
and creating of attachment and wanting and wanting
more stuff so I sort of got swept into that in a way.
(acoustic music)
So yeah, I studied business and I was involved in finance
and more specifically the stock market, so we used
to help people manage their money and...
One of the organizations I worked with, we used to manage
hundreds of millions of dollars for people.
I wasn't from that background, from sort of a conservative
sort of upbringing, then all of a sudden, I'm involved with
guys that are driving luxury cars and living in expensive
house in Sidney suburbs, it's sort of a bit overwhelming.
A lot of the guys that I had worked with,
they were multimillionaires,
but 20 million wasn't enough, so they have to have
the three cars, they have to have the holiday home,
they have to have a boat and what happens is you can get
trapped in that lifestyle, hey.
(acoustic music)
So the idea is to, you know, have...
Native plants mixed among fruit trees
so we've got natives here, we've got a tamarilo here,
we've got minook and canook are in and piss borns,
natives, we've got a cabbage tree here.
This is a pine nut, so those really expensive nuts
you get in the supermarket, this is one of those.
It takes about 10 years to get any fruit on it
or any nuts, so that's a longterm project
and then over here we've got a fig tree which is fruiting
quite nicely and then for the monarch butterflies
we've got a couple of swan plants which they really enjoy
and we might be lucky to see one, here he comes now.
It was only after Beth, my wife and I, made the move
to New Zealand, we'd just had enough of the whole
corporate life and we wanted a slower, simpler lifestyle.
It was then the realization sort of hit home,
I started to research more, read, you know, hundreds
of articles and watched hundreds of documentaries
and all sorts of stuff, then I started to really understand,
well, wow, we've got some serious issues here
and no one's really talking about this stuff
and it's quite scary.
I guess with realization of some of the broader issues
such as climate change, peak oil, the resource depletion
and the extinction crisis we're currently going through
it's sort of like it's these massive issues
have been given lip services by governments
and organizations and it's like, aw, it just won't happen
or the system'll solve this problem
and that's what it sort of feels like.
So I guess that brings up a lot of emotions like
frustration and anger and guilt and it's like
why isn't someone doing something about this?
Here we go, here's strawberries, here's strawberries.
So here's a nice one, I can, look at the color
on that thing.
Then I started to research permaculture and realized that
it was an integrated approach to how we're living
so at the moment, our current society,
it's a fragmented approach to living
so everything is compartmentalized or separated,
whereas permaculture is a holistic approach
to how we're living.
It integrates food, environment, with your lifestyle
and taking care of people, the planet and
the natural resources.
So a lot of people come over to our property
and have a look around, they go what about
all your fruit trees, do you get pests and stuff
like birds that eat them, and I say yeah, sure,
but we don't mind that, they were here first
and we're a part of nature and we have comments
from other people that live around near us
on the farms and they say I can't believe how much
wildlife and bird life is here and their properties,
just a few hundred meters away have almost no
wildlife or bird life.
(acoustic music)
So, we're attracting bird life and wildlife
through just letting nature be as opposed to just
wanting to control it.
Permaculture links into other aspects like collaboration,
localization, food resiliency and networking,
so it's not just about growing food,
it's about connecting a whole system
and integrating a whole system into one's life.
This lifestyle working on the land and doing permaculture
feels more rewarding and like I'm putting something back.
We also live a less consumerist lifestyle,
so we don't need as much stuff, so I haven't got
this constant craving for more and more things
to make me feel satisfied or happy.
So there you have it, we have homegrown salad,
fruit salad, a green salad and some eggs
and I can't believe still that...
I don't have to go to a supermarket,
we've grown all this ourselves in just three years.
I'm still amazed, so anyone can do it.
(acoustic music)
When I was living in big cities,
it was like I had to get away to connect with nature,
but when I wake up every morning, I come outside
and I'm immediately in nature here.
I don't have that void anymore.
I've just got this instant connection and satisfaction.
It's hard to explain.
(gentle music)
- I mean, maybe you've had this experience, feeling like
I'm not living my life.
I'm living the life I'm paid to live,
but what about my life?
So this is a different dimension of human nature that...
We need to invoke, we need to...
Implement, we need to create conditions
for that part of human nature to blossom.
(acoustic music)
- We had been living in Caty Caty and I was...
Working...
A regular job as a GP in the practice there
and then I just found these kind of warning signs
that I was started to get out of balance.
I'd be lovely with my patients, but I'd come home
and be kinda shitty, I...
Was feeling quite depressed.
Just kind of the internal...
Cogs weren't running together very well.
And...
We started talking about it and thought, well,
maybe we really need to kinda...
Radically rethink how we want to live.
(gentle music)
So the house is 20 square meters.
It started with a sheep shearer's quarters just to the
side of us here and that was maybe 20 years ago
that that was built, so our bedroom is the original cabin
and then this L shaped space is our kitchen, lounge,
library, office.
Day bed.
- Everything. (laughs)
- Everything, yeah.
20 square meters.
We've got a shower just adjoining
and a bit of a deck out the back.
A few months ago a friend of mine helped me
put a 300 watt panel up on the roof
and so that powers the broadband and telephone.
And a bit more light.
What else, now we can...
- Use the sewing machine, which is very exciting.
- The sewing machine is good.
A lot of people when they hear about it, they think,
oh my gosh, how is that with the baby
and even before that, how is that just the two of you?
- I think actually it's great with the baby
living in a small space in that...
Wherever she is she's never that far away.
So it's quite easy to be doing whatever I need to be doing
and keeping an eye on her and when she's sleeping,
she'll be close by.
(acoustic music)
- We have...
I don't know the term for it, like a work trade arrangement
with the owners and we've been living here
just over a year so about three or four days a week
I'm on the farm and then part time I work as a GP.
So our costs are...
Fractional to what they were living in town.
I don't have any stress about money which is a huge benefit
Emotionally I'm healthier.
(both laugh)
(acoustic music)
- It was a choice wanting to be...
More immersed in my environment and more directly
connected with my needs, where my food was coming from
and I love going out and seeing the garden each day,
seeing how things have changed and yeah,
it's like having a relationship with a living thing
or lots of living things.
- Regularly tending in the garden, I had this feeling
of almost being in love with the garden.
Which blew me away.
- The future of humanity is to return to that
relationship to nature and to all beings
and to all human beings too, to fall in love
with the world, its wellbeing is my wellbeing.
If we really were in love with the planet
and incorporated that love into all of our systems,
into our money system, we would not have
an ecological crisis.
- If an economy is operating outside
of ecological limits and the inevitable conclusion
is that it's going to completely erode the resource base
until it...
Implodes or collapses.
So really, the choice that we have is to design and
develop an economy that operates within ecological limits.
That's our only safe bet, that's our only bet at all.
- So if we think about the whole problem of deflation
and what could happen post collapse in a country
that experiences a sudden reversal and this loss
of liquidity where the money supply really really gets
chopped down, people still have needs, people still have
goods and services, they're gonna
find a way to exchange those.
What you want is the easiest possible way
to make this happen and this is where alternative currencies
would plug the gap, if a central government
were quick thinking, quick off the mark
and actually had a plan for dealing with this stuff,
they could introduce a new currency,
maybe a parallel currency, maybe a replacement currency
to counteract the disappearance of all the bank money.
That probably won't happen, though, so it's going
to be up to local and regional currencies to fill that void.
(piano music)
- I woke up one morning and jumped out of bed
without even being conscious yet saying,
I'm going to start a local currency.
And I just felt so much joy, there was just like
this energy moving through me.
Loaves stands for local origin
Ashurst voluntary exchange system.
It's one of those acronyms that you fit the words
to the acronym instead of the other way around.
It is meant to be a voucher system that circulates
in Ashhurst and the Bohomona valley
as a voluntary alternative to using money for exchange.
So Loaves is primarily trading
at the Ashhurst Community Market
and we have about a dozen or so businesses
that are accepting it there.
We've got the cheesery, we've got the fudgery,
we have several plant businesses.
We have a business consultant who accepts it outside
of the market and there's half a dozen others
that are accepting it as well.
One of the primary benefits of the currency in my mind
is the awareness raising that goes along with it.
We're after not the currency itself
but the relationships that come out of the currency
so one of the major things is this awareness campaign
around the benefits of buying local, the benefits
of having a commitment between customers and businesses.
Knowing what's available in your own community,
of going to town instead of the city when you need something
of supporting your neighbors and looking to your neighbors
and their businesses as a primary way of meeting your needs.
- The wealth generated by using our local currency,
100% of it stays here, there's no interest
and it just keeps circulating and recirculating
in the local community.
And rather than...
Being considered in competition with the national money,
it's actually complimentary to it.
(gentle music)
- So you strengthen these local connections,
of course, that's a very resilient thing to do
because it just means that if things are rough,
you've got friends, neighbors and people in your region
that are able to help one another out.
Timebanking is a very interesting development in that
it uses a very egalitarian basis, it says everybody's time
is equal, it doesn't matter how skilled you are
or what your qualifications are or what you do
for your day job, that your hour is worth the same
as my hour.
(idyllic music)
- I'm Maria Li from Te Mahi Kai at Diamond Harbor School.
Which is a gardening to cooking program.
So we teach the children how to grow everything themselves
and they plant the seeds and then look after the garden
and then when it's my turn, we harvest
what they've grown and turn it into lunch.
(gentle music)
So...
Today we're making kale chips and broadbean dip
and each week it's different.
The idea is just to teach them some basics of cooking
and in order for that to work, we use time bank volunteers.
And we couldn't do it without them.
Our volunteers are paid one credit per hour that they come
and volunteer for us so we take those from the school
time bank credit system and give it to them
and then they use that to trade for whatever they need.
(gentle music)
- It's always easier to build your barn while the sun
is shining than try to put it up in a howling gale
so if you put these things together now,
if you get the system up and running,
and especially with something like a local currency
where they may be some marketing involved,
trying to get buy in from people and all that,
you don't create one of these things out of whole cloth
and get it widely accepted overnight.
(gentle music)
- But there's no getting away from it.
A huge part of this is that we just consume too much stuff.
(eerie music)
Our entire economy is built on getting us to buy
and consume, dispose and reconsume things.
I don't think it's realistic that we can expect to live
in a world where we don't make things or use things
or use resources, of course we do, we need to use them
in a way that is smart, you know,
it's about intelligent use, it's about being efficient
and not wasteful.
- The notion of waste is something that wasn't around
two or three hundred years ago, you know,
we just didn't have waste, things had utility,
things had value all the way through
and if they reached the end of productivity,
they were reformed into something else.
Welcome to Bayswater Repair Cafe.
A repair cafe is a free popup event
where local community experts
in a variety of different areas,
offer their skills and services to other people
in their local community for free.
You know, every year, we send a crazy amount of stuff
to holes in the ground and this is about maybe doing
something to address some of that flow
but also in the process of doing that
bringing people together in a beautiful way that...
Connects people, creates some networks
and maybe even some friendships.
So we've got five different repair areas at the cafe today.
We've got an electrical appliances repair space
and that is overwhelmingly the most popular area,
so people bring in toasters and lamps and all kinds
of random bits and pieces.
We've got a clothing repair space
and we've got a team of seamstresses
and a seamster, if that's the right word,
who are mending clothes.
(upbeat music)
We've got a guy who is repairing wood and pieces
of furniture and we've got general repairs
and we've also got two bike mechanics.
I was speaking to the daughter of one of the volunteers
who helped out with the repairs and he was an older guy
and he said to her that he felt...
A real sense of...
Belonging and a real sense of feeling useful
and having purpose and...
I thought that was an amazing output from the day
to make someone feel good about having
shared their skills with local people.
This is a beautiful example of a community initiative
that brings people together and enhances connection,
enhances a sense of community and neighborhood and...
You know, we fix a lot of stuff,
but more important than that I think is the building
of connection and community.
(somber music)
- It's really important to remember that when you
dispose of something, you can't throw it away.
When you throw something it goes somewhere.
You might not know where that is,
it may be out of your sight,
it may be out of your mind,
but there is no such place as away.
(somber music)
- In 2007 we were really starting to think about our impact
that we were having, just our regular day to day actions
and one of the things we focused on was how much rubbish
we were producing, I mean, we could have focused
on anything, but rubbish was so visual and just every week
of rubbish bags filling up and so we somehow decided
to challenge ourselves, I don't remember whose idea it was
now but we did this crazy thing where we thought, right,
we're gonna try and make no rubbish for the entire year.
We were genuinely not green people.
We were putting out a bag of rubbish every week without fail
and we had literally never thought about it before.
we sort of, it came to us one day,
we went, oh my gosh, this is terrible.
- In terms of the challenge was to try and live
for one year with less than a city council rubbish bag
and most of it was made up of the items
that were out of our control, so the radiator hose
in our car burst and so we had radiator hose
and we tried to carry on doing things
that you'd normally do so we were renovating our home
back then and...
We had all the lead paint from scraping the weatherboards.
So in practical terms, that's what we had left over.
(acoustic music)
I think when we look at the average rubbish bin,
you know, what people are putting out,
at least 50% of it's generally organics and so
you take the biggest things out first, right,
so deal with organics is the no brainer.
If you do that, you're 50% ahead of the average citizen
and then there's another sort of 30% of recycle material
general these days in the rubbish bin so there's
the next thing, so you deal with the organics,
then you recycle everything you can and you're getting up
there by that stage, you've made massive gains.
People can feel overwhelmed and feel that what they're doing
doesn't make a difference, but most of the waste
we create or we're kind of...
Complicit in is waste we've never seen
so we'll buy something and there'll be a bit of packaging
around it that we see, but making that item,
that's when the bulk of the waste is created
so if you put out a rubbish bag, it actually represents
70 rubbish bags of waste that you've never seen
that's gone into making that bag of waste.
Consumers have it tough, right, a lot of money
goes into marketing and sending them messages
that you can buy our compostable packaging
and you're saving the environment
and of course, compostable packaging in the landfill's
just as bad.
- It's the sort of thing that actually needs
to be composted at very hot temperatures
so it really needs commercial composting to be done properly
One of the biggest problems in my business is
that I have to go vendors and say, I'm sorry,
I know you've paid more and you've been promised
that this is eco and compostable by the person
that sold it to you but they didn't actually go
and do their product stewardship and find out
whether the composting industry can take it
in every place.
- I think we've actually got consumers
that want to do the right thing,
we've got businesses that are doing amazing stuff,
and we've got a government completely missing in action
in terms of providing a framework to encourage
those behaviors more and more.
- So when you do buy a container at the supermarket
you make sure it's a reusable container
and then you wash it out and you take it into
one of these stores and you get them to weigh it
and you fill it up with whatever you want
and they take the weight of it
and you've just stopped that plastic packaging.
- If people combining composting and learning
how to recycle and they're just putting a bit
of extra thought into how they're shopping,
particularly considering their packaging...
(gentle music)
It's that choice when you're at the supermarket
or at Buntings or whatever, thinking about the item,
essentially if it's plastic or got other composite
materials in it, what can you do with it
at the end of life, not much, it's gonna be rubbish,
it's gonna be around for thousands of years.
Every time you spend a dollar it's a vote.
We have so much power, so much more power than what
we realize, so it's like keep on that knife edge,
yes, see, there's these big issues, but also yes,
we can make a difference.
(gentle music)
- Like there's part of me, you know, when I go to recycle
my bottles or compost my waste...
It's like, well what good does it do?
Now I'm just subtracting one plastic bottle
from the enormous trash heap that gets shipped to India
and is making new mountains in India and China, you know,
of waste, like what does it matter?
One bottle different?
You can say well if everybody did it, then it would make
a difference, so you have to do your part,
but part of you will say, well, I'm not everybody
and if everybody does it, then it doesn't matter if I do it.
So we have to have another reason.
For me it comes down to relationship and ritual.
I like to save my compost and use composting toilets,
for example.
Not because I've done some calculation that...
This is gonna save the world but because it's a different
kind of relationship with the beings around me.
(gentle music)
- Composting toilets, like composting your own shit,
processing your own toilet waste is a real basic fundamental
thing that we should all practice, it's a...
Simple way of being, of demonstrating self responsibility.
- So with a flush toilet basically you take really nice
clean drinking water and our shit and mix the two together.
Both wonderful resources, when you mix them together,
you create a toxic problem.
So with a compost toilet system,
you're able to capture that amazing resource and...
Take care of it and treat it in a way that removes
any pathogens or problems and create a wonderful resource.
(gentle music)
- Okay, so welcome to our toilet, for a start,
it's a composting toilet bucket bench system.
We've got cover material which we use old sawdust
from the mill, it's already got bacteria and a bit
of fungus in there.
So you go make your deposit, (clicks tongue),
put a bit of cover material on, leave it.
And then when we've got a certain amount of buckets
we go to the compost and add straw and garden waste
and kitchen waste.
(upbeat music)
And this is one I did maybe a week ago
and we'll put the compost thermometer in here
and see what we're looking at.
It's still looking at 50 degrees, it's going up,
we've got up to 65 degrees the other day,
I recorded it.
- You know, there are pathogens you have to consider,
there's roundworm eggs and all these different kinds
of worm eggs that can exist in your manure.
If you do a hot compost, that's the safest way
because you can nuke all those things within hours.
(upbeat music)
- And over here...
Is...
What you get.
I put it in a bag, but you don't need to. (grunts)
That there is about a year old,
it's got lots of worms in it.
We put all our garden waste and all our kitchen waste
in here, but the worms are a good sign.
If you've got worms, it means it's not too acidic and
(sniffs) mmm, yum, good stuff
and that goes straight on the garden
and the plants love it and we love the plants. (laughs)
- When it's finished composting it doesn't look like
or smell anything like poo.
It's just beautiful black compost.
So we have monitored it closely,
we've watched the temperature,
we know all the pathogens have been nuked,
we feel confident in our process
so we feel safe to use it in our garden.
Anyone can do this, it's just really a matter of being
engaged and wanting to do it and getting the knowledge,
it's a knowledge based system, it's not technological
or anything really advanced, I've seen people do it
in cities with a wee backyard, small backyard.
Yeah, and I've seen people do it in really rural settings.
It's just a matter of being engaged.
- Yeah, it's for everyone, everyone,
everyone who wants to take more
responsibility for themselves
and not pass it off.
Everyone who values their poo. (laughs)
I value my poo. (laughs)
I value your poo too, so you're welcome to leave a deposit
before you go, it's sort of expected,
actually, no pressure. (laughs)
(gentle music)
- I've come to see that in order to be part of the solution
we really need to use our everyday choices to change
our behavior and it's a cultural shift
that needs to happen in order for us to at least
sustain ourselves, which isn't even enough, of course,
because...
What are we sustaining? (laughs)
And so that's something I've really been putting
a lot of time into recently, is designing my work
so that it's actually regenerative.
(upbeat music)
Sort of out of necessity I started this organic waste
collection.
Check this out, whoa!
Now we're currently picking about two and a half tons up
each week from local businesses and instead of that
all going into a hole in the ground, it gets returned
back to the way of wind row erodic composting.
So we currently have around 45 businesses on the Why Waste
collection, and they have a number of bins or buckets,
mostly wheelie bins and some have up to five
wheelie bins at their business and every week
Why Waste comes and picks that up and we take it to,
we weigh it, we record all the data, things like that,
we take it to a composting facility and so yeah,
we're in partnership with them so that we can return that
waste back to the soil.
Recently, one of my clients rang me up
and they were super stoked because they were able to cancel
this big, like, skip bin for their rubbish, you know,
and now they just use a 240 liter wheelie bin
which is much, much smaller and that's as a result
of all of their...
Compostable waste going back to the soil.
Ooh, what's that, ooh, tasty muffin. (laughs)
(upbeat music)
I'm really passionate about composting as a solution of
minimizing our waste and our impact here on...
This one planet that we have. (laughs)
Food scraps and biodegradable waste takes up over a third
of what we send to a landfill.
When biodegradable matter biodegrades, anaerobically,
it produces a lot of methane which is 23 times worse
than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas
and not only do you get that gas going to the atmosphere
but you also get a liquid version of it
leaching into our soils, into our water table.
(upbeat music)
So what we're trying to achieve here is build
a really hot compost around this drum and also
all of this, build all this irrigation into it
so that when that aerobic hot compost heats up
we should be able to pump water through the system
out and over to these bathtubs over here
and have free biologically heated hot water.
The reason why I'm so enthusiastic about compost is that
it's fertility in its purest form.
This is how nature builds soil and that enables us
to grow more food and...
If people are conscious of composting,
they're probably gonna become more conscious
about what they're eating and if they're opening
less packets, that's good for everyone,
that's good for the planet, that's good for our people,
if we can get people to focus on eating better,
then we're actually able to produce a lot less landfill
waste and a lot more biodegradable waste,
which in turn can be turned into more fertility
to produce more food, so the healthier we eat,
the better our waste is and much easier to manage
and return to the land.
(upbeat music)
People talk about thinking global, acting local.
I suppose I'm really sitting in that truth presently.
I'd rather think local and act global,
but we've got to start somewhere, you know?
And so...
Yeah, that's the change that I'm wanting to see in the world
so I'm being it the best I can.
(upbeat music)
(somber music)
(upbeat music)
- I see a lot of people who are very sensitive to...
The devastation, the damage or just civilization
and it paralyzes them and that's sad
because we need those people, all of those people.
You know, there are a lot of things that could depress you
out in the world, but if you take each negative act,
there's almost like an opportunity or a provocation
to do your thing, which is the opposite of that,
give more life, then it's fun, it's a winnable game,
that's how I see it.
(gentle music)
- Wouldn't it be awesome to see our country
before human contact?
You know, the thousands and thousands, millions of birds.
Huge, huge Cody trees, it's just unimaginable.
I think we all have done a misjustice to the (speaks Maori).
My ancestors weren't exactly the best conservationists
either but we now have a chance to revive
and recover those landscapes before it's too late.
- Over a three year period we planted 85,000 trees
and the majority of those are New Zealand native trees
which are now flourishing and really transforming
the landscape.
I just sort of would love to see what this place
looked like 1000 years ago, which is such
a brief period in ecological time
and in that time we've sort of stripped
most of the native vegetation and done a whole lot
of damage and we've gone about as far as we can
down that road and so now it's time for us
to try and find the balance and restore those...
Ecosystems but find a place for humans
living harmoniously within it.
- You don't realize this, but this used to be
pastoral desert.
- It was just grass.
- Yeah, and...
This is what people can do. - Mmm.
- [Man] You can create heaven on earth.
(birds chirp)
- Start growing food, food is central to the way we live,
our health and our whole ecosystem, environment.
Even if you're in an apartment, windowsills, pots,
whatever, you can start and that's the first step.
Once you engage with growing and experiencing nature
then things start to happen.
- I get asked this a lot, what can somebody do
if they're not a farmer, if they're not on the land,
what can they do to change it?
Well, they can do a lot, the best thing that anybody can do
is to vote with their wallets.
While in some cases it may be more expensive,
do what you can, you know, you can see
people in your area that are producing food that is
ecologically healthy, they're doing it in a way
that is looking after the environment,
then that adds up, you know, the more people
that do that, the less expensive it will become
as that becomes normalized.
(gentle music)
- You know, from an individual's point of view,
the biggest change by far that we can achieve
in our own by changing our own lifestyle
is to reduce the amount of meat we eat.
That will have a much bigger effect
than what we do transport wise, almost anything else.
- It's a lovely poem that talks about, we don't have to be
good, we don't have to walk 100 miles on our knees
repenting in the desert, we just have to do
what the soft animal of our body loves
and I really like that, I really like that.
For me this turns out to be what I love and I have
a suspicion that this is actually the blueprint
and there's something when people get to it,
everybody would want to live this way, I suspect, but...
It might be a really long journey for some folks
to get to that knowing.
- Last year, I made a submission to...
The council of longterm plan that I thought climate change
was by far the most urgent and important issue
that council should...
Be concerned about and...
They said, and what would that look like?
I got a reaction.
So I ruminate on that for a while
and I took it back to a group that I was part of,
called Project Wairarapa, and...
They said, yes.
Let's do this.
You should've heard the buzz at that first meeting,
it was fantastic and that feeds me, that encourages me.
That I'm doing something useful, it's my time
to give back to the community that's been so good to me,
where I've raised my kids and had such a good life.
- So my vision for the future, I have to be really clear,
it doesn't have anything to do with things working
the way they do now but with renewable energy.
That's actually not a possibility.
Working on renewable energy and being quite different
from what we do now, evolving into something else
is the vision I see.
Now how well that's all working, how high a quality
of life that is, how fair it is, how equitable it is,
how stable the governments are, how much war
has come between now and then completely depends
on what we do right now.
(gentle music)
- I think that the place that we're going
is a place that we cannot see from where we are.
It'll only emerge or become visible as we move toward it
so I'm not gonna say, okay, here's the blueprint
for the future system, I've thought it all out
and so now I'm gonna tell you what it is,
but I do catch glimpses sometimes, you know.
One thing that comes to me is that in the future,
we'll feel really at home in the world, we will be
intimately familiar with the landscape around us.
We will be in rich communities.
The best experiences you've had in your life,
the most authentic, the most vibrant,
those don't have to be exceptions.
Trust what feels loving, trust what feels good,
trust what feels aligned with who you really are.
If you live by that and spread that vibe
and other people start living by that
then the whole planet is gonna change.
(hopeful music)