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Read the full transcript here.

 

Morag Gamble:

Welcome to the Sense-Making in a Changing World Podcast, where we explore the kind of thinking we need to navigate a positive way forward. I’m your host Morag Gamble, permaculture educator, and global ambassador, filmmaker, eco villager, food forester, mother, practivist and all-around lover of thinking, communicating and acting regeneratively. For a long time it’s been clear to me that to shift trajectory to a thriving one planet way of life, we first need to shift our thinking. The way we perceive ourselves in relation to nature, self, and community is the core. So this is true now more than ever and even the way change is changing, is changing. Unprecedented changes are happening all around us at a rapid pace. So how do we make sense of this? To know which way to turn, to know what action to focus on, so our efforts are worthwhile and nourishing and are working towards resilience, regeneration, and reconnection? What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation.

In this podcast, I’ll share conversations with my friends and colleagues, people who inspire and challenge me in their ways of thinking, connecting and acting. These wonderful people are thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and spark the imagination of what a post-COVID, climate-resilient, socially just future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to compost and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections and actions. Together we’ll open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking, community action, earth repair, eco-literacy, and much more. I can’t wait to share these conversations with you.

Over the last three decades of personally making sense of the multiple crises we face. I always returned to the practical and positive world of permaculture with its ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. I’ve seen firsthand how adaptable and responsive it can be in all contexts from urban to rural, from refugee camps to suburbs. It helps people make sense of what’s happening around them and to learn accessible design tools, to shape their habitat positively and to contribute to cultural and ecological regeneration. This is why I’ve created the permaculture educators program to help thousands of people to become permaculture teachers everywhere through an interactive online jewel certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global PERMA youth programs. Women’s self-help groups in the global south and teens in refugee camps. So anyway, this podcast is sponsored by the permaculture education Institute and our permaculture educators program. If you’d like to find more about permaculture, I’ve created a four-part permaculture video series to explain what permaculture is and also how you can make it your livelihood as well as your way of life. We’d love to invite you to join a wonderfully inspiring, friendly, and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I’d also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land in which I meet and speak with you today, the Gubbi Gubbi people and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.

In this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, it’s my honor and delight to be speaking with a giant in the world of design, positive design professor Janis Birkeland has dedicated her professional, her academic and her personal life to figuring out what is genuine social and ecological sustainability and how we can work towards it. She was drawn to exploring the re-imagining of the design of our cities, the places where we work and where we live and she sees that as essential to exploring this question. She first became an architect and urban designer, and then transferred into city planning and then became a lawyer too, to better understand the barriers to systems change. She has originated the theory of net positive development and design. She’s the author of many books, including Positive Development, Design for Sustainability and more recently Net-Positive Design and Sustainable Urban Development, which includes an app as well as over a hundred papers too. I’ll put the links in the notes below. She’s been a professor of architecture at QUT in Brisbane, a professor of sustainable architecture at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and is now an honorary professor at the University of Melbourne. Together, we explore ways to rethink how to design human settlements for one planet living and what in ways that enhance and regenerate, not destroy the places they’re in. I hope you enjoy this conversation. It was such a great opportunity to get back together with Janis and to explore these really important questions. Welcome to the show, Janis, it’s an absolute delight to see you again, and thank you for taking the time to be here today. I wanted to open up our conversation. Yeah, thank you. I wanted to open up our conversation. You’ve been working your entire professional life and probably even interested in it before you started working professionally in that, but what motivates you about trying to do something about thinking differently about how we’re living on this planet? What is it that started you to head on this journey?

Prof. Janis Birkeland:

Well, first of all, when I was a young child, I was exposed to nature and enjoyed everything about nature, really just the infinite complexity, it’s some miracle. And I found out that wilderness would be, probably gone within my lifetime as things continue the way they were. So that would have been the early fifties. I had been a butterfly collector and had to give it up because I realized one of the insects I caught was bordering on extension. So later on, I was teaching Green Design, well throughout the 1970s, sorry, 1990s and I had a break in about 2000 or 2001. So I published my teaching materials as a textbook, and when it was at the publishers, I stopped to think that really, you know, there’s all these new ideas and so many people getting involved in sustainability issues. But it was futile because even if we build terribly green buildings, there’s still usually doing more harm than no building at all. Because of the material flows and damage, and simply landscaping the site, and adding a green roof didn’t begin to compensate for the upstream and downstream impacts. So that, so I had a little bit of time and decided that buildings and cities could have net-positive impacts as incredible as that sounds because of the huge impacts. But it’s for that very reason, big buildings touch on every sustainability issue you can think of. I think even more in peace because if you segregate people from their basic needs and basic opportunities, by sectioning them off in poor regions or poor parts of cities, you are fomenting resentment, insecurity and social strife. So there’s really nothing you can think of related to sustainability that is influenced by the design of cities and buildings. And as many people have said, and we’re saying since the 70’s, really less bad is not really sustainable, from a whole system perspective. And sustainability is a whole system issue. It can’t just say a building is sustainable within its property line or its building envelope and people are still saying that. You have building tools that will say they’re produced, they’re net positive because they’re generating energy and shipping it across the property line. But that means nothing if the final use of that energy is for something socially or ecologically harmful or simply wasteful. So you have to look at whole systems and all our tools, our principles, our strategies are based on simply what’s easy to measure. So we apply input output analysis, or basically arithmetic, green building rating tools have trouble dealing with embodied energy. So they just make up rules about how much square percentage of your roof should be green, or how much of your facade should have a living wall, or, you know, pretty arbitrary little rules that are based on what would be an improvement over a typical building. So they’re not really looking at sustainability and when they do adopt terms like nature positive or net positive, they use them incorrectly. Maybe I should let you.

Morag Gamble:

No, that’s great. That’s a fantastic introduction because I think my next question was going to be, well, how is it that you describe net positive and you also have this term, what was it called?, a positive ecological footprint, you know, so we’re familiar with this idea of our ecological footprint or the ecological footprint studies that have been done, but what does it mean to have a positive ecological footprint and use net positive in your framing? Like what’s the paradigm shift that you see that we need to be having in this realm?

Prof. Janis Birkeland:

Well, I maybe should start with the definition. Net positive has to be both nature positive and socially positive. And the simple definition is that a building or city could increase the ecological base, which is just my term for all things nature, because you want to include biodiversity and ecosystems, healthy environments and so on, but rather than just increasing them compared to what we’ve done in the past or what we consider best practice really needs to be beyond pre-settlement conditions. And that’s because we’re in a huge deficit, we’ve increased the population beyond human and by biodiversity ecological carrying capacity, we’ve increased pollution. We’re still adding pollutants to the environment and not even knowing how they interact with each other. And of course, we’re increasing consumption. Consumption’s linked to population, but it’s not, you know, if we had less people, we would still have unsustainable systems, that being the case, we’ve got to increase nature in absolute terms. And whenever I say that, people think, I mean, cleaning up nature, remediation, restoration, not increasing it in relation to pre-settlement, pre-urban or pre-industrial conditions, which exact measure use would depend on what you’re talking about. And that’s number one, increasing the ecological base. Number two is, I call it increasing the public estate and that means all things, community, fairness, equity justice. And in that case, you know, pre-industrial conditions would not be a good standard, but, I say beyond regional, current regional conditions. So green buildings really just talk about equity and justice among building stakeholders, healthier occupants, not healthier neighbors in most cases or healthier workers. Those of course are important, but we need public benefits. A building transfers resources in many cases to private parties, huge amounts of material flows are being accumulated by those of us that are lucky enough to have our own homes or work in huge office buildings. If we’re corporations, that’s transferring resources to private parties. The anecdote to that, since we’re living in a capitalist society, is design because design can create features that not only benefit the building occupants, but benefit the public as a whole. And so it’s conceivable to have net public benefits through multi-functional design. Now it’s not just multi-functional design, it’s also gotta be adaptable. A lot of traditional green buildings focus on durability and they don’t mean parts that last a long time, they mean structures that you can’t change to meet new climates, new technologies or new uses. Now we’re gradually moving towards more adaptable, modular design concepts. There’s all kinds of changes going on in all parts of the industry, but basically we’re not designing for adaptability, and that’s, we’re also not using, quickly enough all the new products that are coming online that are not only nature-based, but very low impact and that they use less. They not only damage land less ,as we have in forestry, mining and agriculture, but can actually be grown on a lot less land. And ideally, one day those materials could return land to the environment, to nature rather than just to industrial uses alone. .

Morag Gamble:

What are some of those materials that you’re talking about Janis?

Prof. Janis Birkeland:

Well, there are new, mycelium-based structural products, such as wall panels, insulation, and even boards and, and whole structures have been built out of them and they’re coming online. Now, these mushrooms, so there’s a simple term in a sense, can sequester waste, carbon, other kinds of things, they can be strong or they can be infill materials, but there are mushroom-based bricks that have been used. The beauty of these things is that they can be grown in low impact vertical factories. They don’t take much space, they don’t have, I mean, hemp has a very good product and whole houses from the concrete to the boards have been made entirely from hemp, but you still have to have a lot of agricultural land. And there’s a lot of materials made from agri-waste, which is fine if it’s a by-product of an essential crop or something, but it does take up land and in that sense, it’s destructive. Now buildings are really compilations of products and a lot of fabrics and furniture, so in the past at least, the material flows that went into furniture that’s changed over so many times when new owners move in, particularly in office buildings, that the material flows are greater than, than the building itself over its lifetime. Studies have claimed, and fabrics can now be made from algae. So it’s another example, so you could call those nature-based materials and of course, more ecocentric design. To give you an example, a building that’s designed to contain permanent gardens and trees, can have just as much space for people, but can sequester more carbon over its lifespan than it emitted over it’s whole lifespan. And I, in a couple of sessions, wrote a paper on that some years back. The work was mainly by David Midmore, an agronomist who did the figures, but it has been shown and people, when they look at something like that, they sort of dismiss it and say, oh, well, that would be, planting is temporary. Well, not necessarily, permanent planting that’s continually upcycled can live as long as a building does, certainly, and you can have, you don’t just have to have green walls, you can have what I call green scaffolding, which is a three dimensional environment. That’s either the wall structure itself that’s added on to the wall in places where it’s appropriate, that’s part of fencing or on the roof. So, you know, it’s just creating ecosystem enclaves that also provide building services. So green scaffolding is a way of designing for ecosystem services, that increase the biophilic amenities of the living environment, improve the views, create living wallpaper, produce clean air and water and passive solar features, but also are efficient and recyclable in the old sense of green building. I mean, it can do anything because this scaffolding can be designed for multiple purposes. It can collect and store energy, it can collect and treat water through natural systems, certainly can produce biodiversity and even provide biodiversity incubators for particular butterflies that are rare in the area or food sources in nesting places for birds that are endangered. So, the potential is literally infinite much like nature.

Morag Gamble:

So when you’re saying that really, that the cities have the possibility of restoring the problems that we’re facing, the paradox of that and I wonder, as you’re talking, I’m imagining, I could start to see it in my mind and I’m imagining this both being something that you’re talking about as a retrofit as the same time as any new builds, how do you see transforming the middle of dense cities that exist in the world today? How does this relate? You know, could it relate to somewhere like Seoul for example?

Prof. Janis Birkeland:

Well, it could, but I think the first place you would start is not the business hub of a large city, but the perimeter areas that are generally degraded, old, abandoned factories and warehouses that could become and have been used to support urban agriculture, which of course is one of the essential ways of returning land to nature. Urban agriculture of course saves transport, provides food in an emergency, which we seem to be having more of. And it just uses space efficiently and it’s producing oxygen, recycling water, doing lots of other good things. So that would be the place to start. And of course homes can be retrofitted, buildings and homes can save money. So the retrofit can pay for itself and we’ve known that for decades. It’s been proven, but it’s, and there are companies, energy retrofit companies that will reduce your energy bill at no cost to yourself. This has happened even when I was at the University of Canberra in the 1990s an energy contractor came in and upgraded the buildings in very simple ways, with better lighting. They paid themselves out of the savings, so the university did not have to spend any money and then at the end of the process, they inherited a lower energy bill, but unfortunately they’re only looking at energy and picking the lowest fruit. Like once you change all the light bulbs, then you don’t have the spare savings to create multi-functional benefits instead of just reducing negative impacts. So that’s kind of a shame. I complained about that in the 1990s, in fact, so it’s all pretty old news, but if you have to retrofit cities, if they want to be sustainable, because they’re doing so much harm and the retrofits could pay for themselves and create better jobs and it can all happen at once. You can virtually be retrofitting every building, although there might be supply and demand issues for sustainable materials and energy-efficient equipment and the like, but I liked the idea that you could be like ants cooperating and building the perfect anthill that’s solar-powered and air-conditioned through natural systems where everyone or everyone that wants to hire someone to retrofit their home can be doing something simultaneously. And there are a lot of products that I call them, retrofitting modules that have multiple benefits that could just simply be added on to rows.And your typical suburb, or you could add if you wanted to increase the density of a suburb rather than replacing it with really unpleasant apartment buildings, you might want, or for some reason that’s politically infeasible, you could add a second storey to virtually every house which becomes a grandma unit or a rental unit, or a place for unemployed, young children, I mean, older children. And in doing that addition, you’re solarizing both units, you’re not increasing transport significantly. Most suburban houses already have roads and enough parking spaces, so you can see a real boost to the economy while making things better in the short term. The next stage might be to add these units in backyards, but that increases the overall biodiversity of a home. So there are many, many solutions, but they all require and design thinking, not reductionism where you try to get the most efficient, single purpose, single function item, is often not very efficient because it only serves one purpose. There were a few things that were coming out of there that I wanted to jump in and ask you, but I might just ask you as a three question and then wherever that goes to, so the first one was about, I’m interested to hear that you’re talking about a really good starting point is around the edges. So around the suburbs and the peri-urban areas seems to be kind of a sweet spot for starting. And whereas often we’re sort of focusing on the inner section or the densification in the inner ring, whereas actually it’s this outer ring of cities that possibly holds a lot of potential. That was sort of one question. The other part I was thinking about, what is your overarching metaphor, perhaps, of how you think about cities as cities, city as forest, city as ecosystem as a way of imagining it differently. So rather than it being guilt. Yeah.

Prof. Janis Birkeland:

The metaphor I have always used is that a city should be like a reef. A reef or a mangrove that seeds the ocean, you know, that provides habitat for a little biodiversity that can then restore the bioregions. So that would be, that’s my metaphor. The first question, the other reason I wouldn’t start with, I mean, you can retrofit tall buildings and it’s been done, you can put cladding on solar cells. And there are examples of buildings that have either been designed for solar energy or have even been retrofitted for solar energy. The thing about downtown glassy areas, I call them gilded cages. I don’t think they’re good for people. I can’t work, really in a city, in the downtown area. I have thought about it, they might be fun to visit, but they’re extraordinarily unhealthy, but some people like them and we should have choice and we can afford to have shiny, new, metallic areas in cities for those that want it, of course solar-powered. But you know, people shouldn’t all have to live one way. My parents, for example, grew up on farms and neither of them liked nature. They wanted to be and a nice, comfortable, home that was devoid of nature or particularly bugs and mice, you know, so, and I respect that. Some people like ultra high density living, and that has some efficiency advantages, but again, it’s a single function because it can’t be ecologically sustainable in itself. But zoning is reasonable as long as you’re compensating for those deadly high-rises somewhere else. And again, they can be generators of energy and efficiency. There’s a lot of things that can’t that high density areas can’t do but as you say, the peri urban areas can be retrofitted to supply what’s missing in those inner city areas.

Morag Gamble:

If we’re getting a long-term shift, do you think there’s a swing to outer areas again happening now? Is it just like a short phase or do you see this as a long-term trend that might happen? Because I know that everyone’s kind of, the cities are kind of emptying out quite a bit.

Prof. Janis Birkeland:

Well, I don’t know, but I think a lot of people are attributing that to the cost and time involved in transport and of course, COVID, people are beginning to appreciate the outdoors a lot more now that they’ve been locked in, but I think change will continue. There’s going to be demographic shifts in the future, and that’s why we have to be more adaptable. We let urban, nice urban areas like the town I grew up in were allowed to degrade and become almost in places like slums because big new shopping centers were built on prime agricultural land that could only be reached by cars. That’s changing, there’s now more gentrification at the same time and outward migration. So I think it’s just essential to design every environment for, to benefit the general public and nature, not just the owners and the site alone.

Morag Gamble:

One of the questions that I was reading that you’d had a very long time ago and obviously a continuing one was about like, where that change happens and how systems change happens? So we’ve been talking about the kinds of change that we’d like to see, but what are the, I’m not going to say leavers because like, where is it that that change takes place? Or where is it that you feel that the shift needs to happen in order for this to be something that is seen everywhere?

Prof. Janis Birkeland:

Well, I’ve been concerned about governance, positive development is really a theory about whole systems. And it’s, although it’s focused on design, which has been so underrepresented in our culture, it’s about changing systems of governance and decision-making, and I think one of the reasons that the green movement hasn’t progressed too far, instead, it’s only been focused on changing people. So everyone’s trying to convert everyone else. That’s, I mean, that’s perfectly good. I’m not knocking that, but when you only do that, you’re always going to be trumped by dirty politics, you know, movement builds and everyone’s advocating sustainability. And then you have the Brundtland Report, which I think quite innocently pulled the rug out from under the movement. It was starting to build up again, and then you have Rio and suddenly it’s government controlling, and again, probably with the best of intentions, controlling community participation. So I think trying to change people individually, you can only change people on a one-on-one basis. That’s true, but focusing on changing others is pretty short term and it’s not changing systems. I think it’s also tending, to ask hard-working people to do all the work while we go around preaching that they should think differently and be more like us. When I worked in the government, I pointed out that they were in the promotions department, the environment education unit was in the promotions department, public relations, and they were trying to educate people to do what environmental groups were already educating people to do. So they were just repeating what others were doing voluntarily at great personal sacrifice and I said, well, only governments can change systems. Basically, I just got, I think blank looks, you know, like that’s too hard, we don’t know what you’re talking about. And after I left, I ran into someone who was still there and I said, well, has anything changed since I was there? And they said, oh, yes, we’re now back into changing people as opposed to talking about systems. So I also really, I like to argue, but I don’t really care what people think if they don’t believe in climate change, that’s fine with me. I only care about not what they’re doing as an individual because they can’t really change anything. I try to live well, you know, I have my solar cells and battery and my rainwater tanks and so on, but it makes no difference in the bigger scheme of things. So I’ve always been interested in systems design and you can’t decide your way or choose your way into a new system. You have to design it because it can’t choose something that’s not there already. And all our systems of policy making and decision making just rely on better choices because we don’t and we say, oh, innovation, innovators will take care of that. It doesn’t happen that way. Let me give you an example, I went to a conference where someone got up and bragged that they were going to build the biggest building in the Southern hemisphere and someone else raised the question and said, well, what about sustainability, not just bigness. And the guy said, Oh, the market will take care of that, we’re getting a much better design. Well, he, this developer, was the market. So, you know, we can’t just sort of say, designers will solve the problem or technology will come along and fix everything. It’s not, first, it’s not really about technology, design is quite different. Technology has generally been about efficiency. Design is about multi-functional use of structures and spaces in ways that meet the needs of nature and people are, let’s say not positive design would be good design would be.

Morag Gamble:

Where is that then? So it’s not, it’s not in the, it’s not in the people. So where are you talking about this change being you talking about it being in governments, in policy, what happens if you have a bad?

Prof. Janis Birkeland:

No. Well, wait, there, there may not be such a thing as a good government. Um, no I’m saying it’s a design problem. And as a society, we’re not, we’re not looking at, um, at design. A lot of people don’t have never even thought about it. They think design is a subset of decision-making. Uh, one thing I pointed out, I’ve always said, design is a different way of thinking that sort of, not the same at all, but, and now this to the right and left brain, uh, I’m not, I don’t want to say that design is right brain decision-makings left brain or anything like that because design and decision-making both require both sides of the brain. Um, that it’s an, it’s an analogy. And throughout, uh, history, uh, for various reasons, we focused on decision-making and measurement. So we’ve never measured. Our current tools cannot measure net positive design or net positive environments. That’s where our building rating tools just make up the rules that industry will accept as a target. We prioritize arithmetic over sustainability. So we make up tools and systems for things we know how to measure and the example is, before, we didn’t know how to measure embodied energy in the building, cause material flows and life cycle analysis are pretty complicated and you have to have a finished design usually before you can apply one of these assessment tools. So, that’s why some certification companies will now use the term net positive, but they’re only meaning good, good is not net positive. They’re only referring, they talk about reductions and damage. They started calling them positive and then later they heard the term net positive, so they started calling reductions and damage as net positive meaning we’re making an improvement on something, but it’s not in a whole system sense and improvement.

Morag Gamble:

So when we’re talking about design, in a city design, community design, home, like at what scale are we exploring?

Prof. Janis Birkeland:

Well, design is a way of thinking that’s more creative and creating something that hasn’t existed before. So we need to design systems of governance. That was my PhD thesis back in the eighties, was designing a system of governance that could take into account the environment. Now, where I am at today or a couple of years, well, actually years ago, I designed a tool for measuring that positive design and development, but I couldn’t do an app because I’m a generational challenge. So a year or two ago, I put out a net-positive design app that’s completely the reverse of all branding tools. So it’s a design tool, but it can simultaneously assess the impact based not on typical buildings but on environmental conditions or social conditions that say not comparing something to existing practices or how much better it is as an integrated site, you’re comparing it to natural conditions and regional social conditions. And it’s fun because it has sliders where you can estimate the impacts in the beginning, later on, you can refine the impacts and this whole digital diagram, it’s a fractal diagram all will change before your eyes and the ideas that it stimulates, design thinking, because it reminds you that you’re not just trying to improve water, but you can use that water to create several functions and you can create several design elements to improve the quality of the water or make it more suitable for biodiversity, not just people and so on. So the design app as a tool, I also developed planning analyses. So many of our planners are pretty good, they all know what sustainability is unlike many architects until recently, but they didn’t have analyses that were very relevant to sustainability. So, positive development has about 22 analyses that planners can apply either. A community group can think about it as a mind mapping exercise or planners could measure it with sophisticated new tools, you know, [inaudible] even satellite imagery or whatever is increasingly available. But this set of tools shows that we really haven’t been analyzing development in ways that are really relevant to net positive impacts. So positive development is a theory that basically says everything we’re doing in sustainability has been bass ackwards and by reversing those approaches from top to bottom, from really upending them, we can see ways of doing things better that certainly don’t cost anymore, that solves multiple problems. So yes, we do need more design education or more relevant design education. And that requires that design be given more credibility in the culture.

Morag Gamble:

I was, that was one of my questions about where can people actually study the kinds of things that you’re talking about? Like you’re a retired professor now, well, not retired, but not teaching actively in universities like you have been for decades. And all of the things that you’ve been talking about, like where are these things being taught about? Are they being taught about in architecture schools? Are they being taught about like, where is net positive design or positive development being talked about?

Prof. Janis Birkeland:

Well, it’s probably not, I mean, people could read my textbooks. My first textbook was really about regenerative design, but it tends to like design for ecosystem services and concepts like that. It’s widely read because it was for undergraduates. My second book, Positive Development, was a postgraduate text read by some, my most recent text, Net Positive Design and Sustainable Urban Development, I don’t think it’s been widely read because it’s a dense textbook for posts, for over grads, you might say but it does give examples of how buildings can provide ecosystem services and work like reeves that support their bioregions. I think I get a Google scholar and sometimes some I’ve been quoted and if you click on the button, it’ll actually show you the paragraph where you’ve been cited and almost every time they’ve got it completely wrong, you know, there, and I even read a PhD thesis that quoted what someone else has said about my book that hadn’t read it. We’ve got this problem in academia of Chinese whispers. Academics are so busy having to publish and do myriad other things that they really don’t have time to read or engage anymore. That was certainly happening to me and my final years, so I think, at, well, I call it the business model, you know, academics suddenly had to produce KPIs and now academics have wonderful, amazing qualifications. There are all these new awards schemes, and all these honors that have been created so people can increase their KPIs. And I think many are busy chasing their tails. So they wouldn’t know what not positive design is, for example, because they might throw in a citation, but they haven’t actually read it. They don’t have time. I’m virtually retired and I don’t have time to keep up either.

So I have real empathy and I think we do, you know, we are, there’s one step backwards, two steps forward, or vice versa. But I think we need a real shift towards design thinking and towards positive thinking. And what’s now seen as positive is what in the 1970s, I think would call cleaner production. There was a shift from remediating toxic sites to cleaner production, but that’s not, that’s 1970, we’re now in a new century. And we have to think about increasing in absolute terms, nature, and community and equity and justice to make everyone better off. And we can do that through design, but we have to make that shift and it’s not going to happen, I don’t think until, I’m sorry to say, important people say it.

Morag Gamble:

I wanted to..

Prof. Janis Birkeland:

The things for me, the things grassroots environmentalist’s were saying 50 years ago were scoffed upon, now, mainstream people are saying those same things, but they’re still knocking environmentalists, not necessarily the same individuals, but society as large as saying, Oh, great, economists are saying this, why didn’t you environmentalist think of that? And a little voice says, but we said it 60 years ago, you know, that’s what we’re up against. And we have important people like Biden saying build back better, but, at least 50% of the US population can’t even take that on board, you see, and that’s because, I mean, I sound like I’m contradicting myself because it’s people. You do have to change people’s minds and people vote for politicians and so on. But my point is that, that’s great what those people are doing to try to educate laypeople is wonderful, but we also need more designers that work to improve systems of governance, decision-making, planning and design.

Morag Gamble:

Yes. Thank you. That’s a really great call to action, I think.I want to do just maybe as a way to kind of wrap up, would be to ask you who or what is providing you with inspiration at this time? Like, is there somthing that you’re seeing or that’s a new spark of energy in the work that you’re doing, or is there some particular inspiration from maybe earlier on that you wanted to point to?

Prof. Janis Birkeland:

No, I’ve just always been a nature lover, so everything I’ve done in my life to try to save nature, which would also save people, you can’t save people without saving nature. So, I can’t explain it, but I was just born an optimistic nature lover and I spend at least a couple of hours a day planting things nowadays. So, for my own pleasure.

Morag Gamble:

Edible things, native things, or just a whole mix of?

Prof. Janis Birkeland:

Just native things. I’m not very sophisticated. I’m just trying to create a little biodiversity habitat on my property, which I was too busy to do, basically, when I was in academics. I was so,

Morag Gamble:

Well, thank you so much for taking the time today to chat. I’m going to include all the different links to the references that you’ve sent me and to all the books. That’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining me. If you like a copy of my top 10 books to read, click the link below, pop in your email and I’ll send it straight to you. You can also watch this interview over on my YouTube channel. I’ll put the link below as well, and don’t forget to subscribe, leave a comment. And if you’ve enjoyed it, please consider giving me a star rating. Believe it or not, the more people do this. The more podcast bots will discover this little podcast. So thanks again. And I’ll see you again next week.