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 dual certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global Permayouth 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.It’s my delight to welcome to the Sense-Making in a Changing World show today, Scott Williams, UN advisor, author, Warm Data host, ultra marathon runner, sustainability leader, and explorer of the right relationship. Scott’s fully immersed in the world of global capital and global dialogues, things that I really know nothing about, but yet in conversations we’ve had during Warm Data, we’re both Warm Data hosts trained by Nora Bateson. There was a similar heart and a deep care for the planet and for life that I felt in working with global systems, I focused mostly with local communities. Scott, on the other hand, works mostly with global institutions. Scott very kindly accepted my invitation to join me on the show and for me to be able to ask my naive questions about the global economic system. I hope you enjoy this episode and a deep dive into the juxtaposition of the global and the local. I really wanted to dive in with you to sort of explore some of these ideas of the Global South funding, the global north, and all of those sorts of you talk about, you know, the things you’re talking about with right relationship and what are the kind, understand a bit more about the global financial system and yeah. My work has always been at the community and talking about, you know, and it has been about this idea of changing. It’s interesting trying to unpack a whole lot of that through working with Nora about shifting the language. And then you mentioned something about how.. I think it was something that you mentioned on one of the conversations about how even the loans that different countries get, they need to pay back at different rates and it’s completely skewed against the Global South. And that just sat with me and it still sits with me so long as this incredibly unjust system. And I haven’t, I have been so not in that world that I, but yet I work all the time with communities. I work with communities that are talking about climate change. I work with refugees and I, you know, there’s all these programs and projects and activities that are happening. My question is really like, am I missing something really important that I need to know about the things that you understand? So that the efforts that we’re all putting into doing things practically on the ground is not just for naught. You know, that’s kind of, what’s been sitting with me when I, since I heard this thought, oh, it was like a big kick in the gut really, you know, and that also that when that sort of, the naive kind of is smashed a bit, why didn’t I know this before, you know, I mean, I’ve lectured in food politics at Griffith university. I remember the students sitting there in the audience, you know, going, why didn’t I know this backstory to the food system. I felt a bit like that sitting there going, why didn’t I know the backstory to the economic system, you know, and I’m still sitting with that. So thank you for joining me to unpack this a little bit in trying to understand what is actually going on and where are the places where we can work with this. And, and also, I guess, somewhere in the midst of all this, to understand a bit more about how permaculture and the SDGs might link, whether there’s any kind of light you can shine on that part of the conversation. So it’s quite, quite a broad and opening questioning, and I’m sitting here very much as an absolute novice in the world that you live in. Just hoping to find some kind of clarity, I suppose. So I don’t know if there’s any starting points within any of that, that I just said that we could explore.Scott Williams:Oh, there’s so many starting points and it certainly can’t be a linear explanation, but so many reasons that measure would be all wrong if I tried to do a medium and I’m a complete novice to this as well. So I think that’s, I used to understand the financial system and the economic system perfectly five years ago. Probably. I was very sure of that. I’m much, much less sure of that then becoming less sure of it as each day goes by that I actually know very much about anything actually, which is such a lovely feeling, of no longer trying to hold those illusions of certainty that I actually, you know, that’s that in itself is a hard thing. Like, as you were saying, that being confronted with the naivety, but, not so much even no naivety, just the veils and layers between you and what other people are doing. Because it always comes down to human beings. It’s all human choices. It’s not some grand overall conspiracy. And I certainly don’t believe in anything like that. There’s no overriding system here. There’s just a combination of reinforcing behaviors that overlap each other and continue to reinforce him in a certain direction or not in a certain direction. And where to start. There’s a wonderful, quote attributed to an Italian gentleman by the name of Luca Pacioli, back in 1492 or 1494, he’s commonly thought of as the godfather of double entry accounting and the current modern version of accounting, you know, “A person should not sleep until the debits equal the credits”. And as a trained chartered accountant, who did accounting at university, and who’s a good sort of, cog in the machine for a long time, working at PWC for a long time as an accountant and a very good accountant too. Very good interpreter of accounting standards and creative in being able to come up with ways to account for life in ways which were compatible with the underlying metaphors and the underlying assumptions loaded into the economic and financial system that you could account for the dynamic processes of life by double entry accounting. And it was a moment for me back in about 2006, I think it was around like 2006, early 2007, it’s just a simple realization that, okay, there’s always debits and credits and they all balance but something’s not right. You know, there are some very big not rights going on, whether it’s inequality or whether it’s an emerging climate crisis or well-known climate crisis, but not as substantially impacting as it is today. The food system crisis or whatever it was like, but there’s something missing. And then understanding more about the notion of externalities and the ability to externalize as like, yeah, we were like, we’re just one planet. I’m pretty sure it’s all kind of linked up somehow, but not having much of a sophisticated understanding of that led to a lot of reading and a lot of talking to people and, you know, ultimately led me towards yeah, complexity, science, and complex systems theory and cybernetics and shared friendship with Nora, with her late father who still seems to live in my daily presence in terms of his words echoing from 50 years ago, it was if they were spoken today. Yeah, that, that statistic that you mentioned about which, I think I’d had glimpses of, and I’d had a pretty good understanding that it was occuring, but it really got reinforced last year when I was working on the UN high-level initiative on what was called financing for development in the year of COVID and beyond.But it’s like, okay, we’ve got a major global whole species planetary thing going on here, surely now is the time to reconsider the way that we are, that we are thinking about the distribution of wealth, the way that we’re thinking about financial resources, the way we’re thinking about access to land, the way we thinking about access to water, the way we’re thinking all the way from the individual, through the community level, all the way to the global. And, you know, for many years, I’ve been sort of playing with this sort of panickist idea, or I guess the, you know, Daniel Christian Whal talks about it, and others have, obviously, it’s based on wisdom from thousands of years ago, that everything from the very smallest part of life to the biggest global systems are all completely connected. So maybe that partly answers one of your questions and one of your openings that, does it make sense to work at the community level?? Yes, it does, but not in isolation of an understanding of how the global processes work and likewise, operating at the global processes level, which I often am at the moment. There are many people who are not at all cognizant or aware or in any way operating in the community or individually. And so, there’s these disconnects and these separations where the way that human beings actually are interacting outside of protocols and roles and descriptions and expertise in institutions is actually quite different. But then likewise people working at that community level where there is a lot more warmth, where there is a lot more genuine human interaction, not understanding that actually there are extraordinary constraints and restrictions on the way that people feel, perceive, that they are able to act in that level. And so there’s all of these, these breakages in what is still an interdependent overall system. It doesn’t change the fact that those interdependencies are there. It’s just that they’re not able to be perceived for the most part. And so, this statistic of the cost of borrowing for the government of Kenya when they issue bonds to the market, to be able to fund their activities, whether it’s feeding their population, building new infrastructure, building health systems or whatever, there’s something like six or seven percent interest they have to pay each year. So just like if you take out a home loan, you borrow money from a bank, the bank says, okay, you’re a reasonable credit risk. Okay. You’ve got decent collateral, blah, blah, blah, all of that stuff, okay, we’ll charge you 2% interest or 4% interest or whatever. And I think the going home loan rate in Australia is something like three or 4% or something at the moment. Maybe it’s less something like that. Whereas the borrowing rate for the government of Kenya is still at around six or 7% for the entire government of Kenya, with what, 60, 80 million people worth of activity contributing to the ability to repay a bond. Whereas for the German government or the American government, it’s negative. So it’s around negative 0.5, in Switzerland, it’s negative 0.5% as well. So basically people pay you fee to borrow money for you to be borrowing money from them, which doesn’t make any sense. It does make sense if you look at the way that the geopolitical order thinks about itself, the concentrations of stability and confidence for investors and all of that sits very much within the G20 space within the OECD space and all of the other countries in the world who are outside these clubs are much higher risk, so-called higher risk because investors don’t feel confident, but it’s something I’ve been playing with for a long time with the UN actually now for about eight to 10 years on exploring the systemic nature of risk, moving away from compartmentalizing, earthquake risk and flood risk and this risk and the risk in Kenya and the risk in Australia and the risks in the Sunshine Coast and the risks in whereabouts to actually there is a planetary scale risks that we’ve unleashed to point ourselves now, which for the most part considered existential risks is kind of a term that is often used. And that just doesn’t find its way in any way.Morag Gamble:
Just want to ask you that. Like is that, you almost, I think you answered my question right there, is that kind of level of conversation happening in the corridors of the places where you’re working in the UN this existential crisis, the talking about the climate crisis at the level that I’m hoping that maybe they’re talking about it, is that one of the key drivers yet? Or is it still something else?Scott Williams:
It is. But it’s the same reason that I would, in response to your question about, is there a role for permaculture in the SDGs to come together there’s such completely different, logical types, the absurdity of the SDGs compared with the, just the basic common sense of permaculture and a regenerative approach to agriculture and the generosity, the sense of generosity, honorable harvest, all of the indigenous thinking around how we are in relationship with the land, the SDGs that, that complete antithesis of that, and that thinking, that way of compartmentalizing and separating what is an overall interdependent inter-relational systemic challenge into different buckets, 17 SDGs, 169 indicators, 243 targ ets and thousands of people who know how to fix all of that. You know, none of that is actually true, but the problem underlying below that, which is now playing out through the high level dialogue and energy that I’m a part of the first time the heads of state have been sort of convened by the UN general assembly to do anything about energy. And the last time they met was in 1981, and that was at the end of the so-called oil crisis and what that gave rise to was fossil fuel financing, cool and normal, you know, not great. What we’re trying to do with this high-level dialogue on energy is to actually shift away from a transactional approach to a relational approach. That is what I would like to see come out of this. But the problem is that underlying metaphor all the way from Plato, through Descartes, and then the dualist notion of mind and body, humans and nature, transcendental and real world that, that separation giving rise to those delusions of the ability to control, to dominate, to fix and to solve that nature is a machine. And it’s an advanced mechanism with pulleys and ropes. This is what Descartes was talking about, that if we can just open it up, then we can fix it all. And, you know, Nora has this beautiful, when she does her training courses on Warm Data, she has these beautiful images of interconnected and interdependent. And I’d been working for a number of years in various UN spaces and in different parts of the financial system, insurance community, pension funds, and central banks, and whatever to help to shift that thinking away from interconnected to interdependent. Because when you view things as interconnected, you view them as able to be fixed. All you’ve got to do is identify all of the different parts and the connections between the which are static necessarily static, because you have decided they are static, even though they’re obviously not, but you have decided by applying the scientific method to be able to extract that connection between that point and that point, if you fix that by putting more money into it or putting policy, or doing some capacity development, then you can fix it. And it’s the constant quest for fixes and souls. And why is that? Because that’s what money requires. Money is the objectification of life. It’s the elimination of inconvenient relationships. When you take nature and you turn it into money, you eliminate all of the life process. When you take a human being and you turn them into a unit of labor by giving them a wage, you can, you have a notion that you’re controlling that, but actually all you’re doing is, and Gregory spoke about this by having a continuance in a system, everything else has to discontinue in random and unpredictable ways. And oops, that’s kind of where we own now. And so what is happening is the same processes that have been in place since the 1980s, since before the 1980s, since the Bretton woods conference in 1944, since forever, in terms of the, those who are the so-called elite, those are who are the decision-makers on behalf of others, maintaining this underlying metaphor of separation and control.

There’s a lot of hubris and arrogance in there, nature is a machine, time as a unit, you know, time is money, idleness is seen. All of that nonsense from the enlightenment era is still playing through at a very nonconscious level though. It’s not that the people come into these conversations consciously and go, right, these are my metaphors. I’m going to work with these as my conceptual framings. No, it’s not even subconscious. It’s non-conscious, it’s invisible, but it’s sticky. It’s just, it’s there from the first year you go to a conventional educational facility where you are indoctrinated into siloing and separating and fixing and gradings and the assessments and scorings and blah blah. And that is the way that these conversations continue. And when you throw into the mix, you know, some poetry or some spaces to explore different perceptions on what we’re actually talking about, i.e, that we can’t fix or solve this, the only fix or solve that is possible is for us to shift our perceptions, to be able to understand that these are constant dynamic, interdependent inter-relational processes. And the best we can do is to shift the way we are behaving to be more in harmony, to be able to attend and notice them more in the same way as humans, for 97, 98% of our entire existence on this planet notices the way that trees grew. They noticed the way when the flowers bloom, when the fruit blossomed, they notice the movement of the insects, the movement of the animals, the way the clouds flow, the way the wind went down, the valley, they notice and attended to this in the way that we notice in the team to celebrities and sports results and, you know, political nonsense and brand advertising or whatever, but we noticed all of that stuff. But we, and all of that is rooted in the notion of separation of control and of monetization and objectification. So, going into these spaces with anything other than sort of a sense of care and love, and how can I help nourish, how can more people who were working at community level in a nourishing, modality, or a way of just living to nourish and care for people? How can that be brought into spaces, which are completely absent of that, because that is not seen as, in any way, valuable to contributing, to achieving arbitrary goals, SDGs Paris target, blah, blah, blah. You know, they only heuristics. They should only have ever been seen as heuristics, but they haven’t been taken. And then largely a distraction for the left to focus on all of these without actually changing the culture underneath, without actually changing the worldviews and the mental models and the stuff that, you know, Gregory Bateson wrote about, the hard programmed habits that we never challenged. We Habitually don’t challenge them because our brain doesn’t want to, it’s hard work it’s as you said, it hurts. It’s like, dmn, I should have known that. Dmn, I should’ve, you know, that’s how much we wouldn’t want to do that. And the brain doesn’t want to do that on a daily basis because it is exhausting. But if you do it together, then it’s less exhausting, that’s been my finding. If you do it in, in a mutual space with lots of people doing it, then you, you’re actually just outsourcing bits of that naivety, breaking down, shifting, that I used to take on myself and do you know, that led to multiple mental breakdowns, nervous breakdowns, but doing it with a group of people, it’s a very different experience then, we’re all exposing ourselves to, okay, this is what we’re doing. Why are we doing it? Why aren’t you doing that more? What are you doing that, Scott? but not in a judgemental way, in a kind, curious, exploring work.

Morag Gamble:
Yeah. Cause you know, exactly what you’re saying about taking that love and care and nurturing approach, which is very much what I feel where the permaculture world is for me. That’s what it’s about. That’s what draws me to it and it’s very much about connection and just being so present. And I’m grappling with the question of how do we take that to the kind of world in which you dwell? And the reason why I mentioned the SDGs was because I thought that possibly that might be, like a little like Trojan horse. You know, that somehow you could really describe the SDGs through a permaculture lens, like each one of those, but not seeing them as separate buckets, but seeing them as a whole and just redescribing them through a permaculture lens, it may be a way to communicate in a language that is understood in your world that then permaculture could have an opening to be discussed and explored as a way for that, somehow it’s seen as something that can be used to support communities. So you kind of see where I’m coming from. Like I’m thinking here’s all these communities on the ground, doing all of this amazing work and struggling so much to try and find ways to ripple it out, but then seeing, you know, millions of dollars just passing by and being spent over here, not really doing anything or whether they’re actually adding money into those nurturing systems would destroy the very nature of them. I don’t know, that’s another question. So there’s kind of a few little bits and pieces floating around in that little section there. One is about how does permaculture be seen by the UN? How does, how is a way that the UN may be able to support more of these types of permacultural approaches? Or is that the wrong question to be asking altogether?

Scott Williams:
Yeah, Yeah, I mean, I’m grappling with this because I know I’m very much working at that individual and community level as well in as many conversations as I can at the community level. But also I try to be at the global level for the way that I’ve kind of been playing with this over the years is there’s kind of only, there’s really only two levels. Everything in between is arbitrary. So there is a planetary boundary. There is just one planet, which is floating around the sun. And so that is a reasonable unit to be thinking because there’s just one species, which is all human beings. And then there’s a bunch of really interesting other non-human parts of life which we kind of rely on. And then there’s the individual slash community level where people are in real relationship, both with themselves, with each other and with the land, but everything in between is an arbitrary construct for the purposes of the maintenance of the metaphor of separation and control. And so it creates an interesting tension working in and with the United Nations and articulating that one of my practices in life that I’m pursuing is to rub off all of those arbitrary lines across our beautiful planet to allow us to have the spaciousness to re-engage with nematicism, which I feel is inevitable now that we are going to have a period of extreme human migration that has never actually existed before. And it’s unimaginable to most people, what hundreds of millions of people quickly moving is going to look like, and why is that? Because we’re approaching wet bulb temperatures of around 35, up to 35 degrees and plus 35 plus on the wet bulb in a number of different places occasionally. And it’s going to become very frequent in the very near future and that’s unsurvivable for human beings. So people are going to have to leave places. And at the moment that creates tensions because of the artificial nature of states, nations and all of that in between. The underlying, but then the reason why I do work within the United Nations is I do believe in the UN charter, I believe very firmly in the UN charter, I believe very firmly in the underlying basis for why the United Nations was established. I just don’t think we should have United Nations as the title just United life maybe is a better way of putting this so that we can get rid of this silly notion of nations, the problem with the SDGs, apart from the categorization and the distraction that that creates to go after SDG one on poverty or SDG seven or energy or SDG 13 or climate or whatever that, you know, what’s your favorite SDG is that they’re rooted in two fundamental assumptions. And one is the perpetuation indefinitely of the nation state system of the sovereign right. And it specifically says in the preamble that sovereign nations will maintain the right to be able to act in their sovereign interests. That’s deeply problematic, particularly when you’re in conversations about energy, that we have certain friends who are sitting on certain large oil reserves in certain places with a lot of sand who are suggesting that it would be be within this over an interest to perpetually continue to put holes in the Earth and allow that to come out to the surface and to sell it. And that’s actually allowed and encouraged within their SDGs and the second one is that all of the SDGs are based on Kusnet’s flawed notion of GDP, which even he knew what he came up with in the 1930s and 1940s.

The GDP was a bad way of measuring human progress, but all of them are actually understood through the lens of the continuing growth of GDP at three or 4% that leads you back into that underlying metaphor again, or sort of the platonic notion of separation. Whereas, when I look at permaculture, look at regenerative agriculture practices, I look at re-relationshiping with the land. We’re looking at a reintroduction of animist concepts, the notion of every part of life being animated and at the rivers and the soils and the worms in the earth, they’re our brothers and sisters. They are just a different form of stardust on which we are in relationship with. And if we don’t honor that relationship and respect that relationship, quite frankly, we’re fckd, you know, they are too, but we definitely will be. That is not in any way understood at the surface level, within any of the SDG conversations, but just like the UN charter, the UN system has been, wildly corrupted by the influence of the geopolitical elite beyond funding to a program project fixed, solve imposition of this is the right solution. We’re going to put it off-grid, solar, you know, solar farm in rural Chad and people in rural Chad that just like, oh yeah, that’s so exciting. But of course they’re not because it’s like, this is what someone in New York has decided. This is a good thing, someone at the world bank headquarters in Washington, because they’ve got money to be able to put this project together. Yes, there’s an energy need there. So let’s slap that in, instead of, is there a different way that we can actually talk to and be in community and be in conversation, in relationship with people who are energy poor, because it’s not actually they’re energy pour it’s that they are being constrained and restricted by the conditions of the systems, which sit above, above that level of community, to be able to have the right to have access to fresh water, the right to have access to because of the decimation of the land, by those interests who are able to project that power because of the prevalence of GDP, which as at the heart of the SDGs, but underneath all of that is, yeah. This sense of heuristics that yeah, look, you know, ending poverty. It’s probably a good thing as long as poverty is defined very broadly as in poverty from having our basic needs met as opposed to poverty from having Ferrari’s and Lamborghini’s, that, you know, everybody should have right to sort of, you know, interesting work, stuff to keep them busy and occupied and interested during life that people should have the right to fresh water, that people should have the right to some form of education. Heaven forbid that it’s the continuing formal education system, hopefully not, but that they’re able to be able to learn new things rather than be formally educated. All of that, if you sit underneath that and think about how to knit all of that together, which is all knitted together, and then playing that back in, which is that’s a role that I try to play. And for the most part, I’m often laughed at, abused, or just told not to come back, and more often than not, it’s just ignored. You know, the emails go out, please give us your thoughts on this, the email goes out. Oh no, not those thoughts, different. No, no difference. We’ll wait till he gives us the right thoughts but they are the thoughts based on the understanding of the interdependencies of life that are missing from the constructed, separated logic, which sits at that global conversational level. I don’t think it’s that far apart, because at the end of the day, we’re all humans. That’s what I hope is, you’re human, I’m a human, these people who have these constructed roles that sit in these walls of protocol, they sit within cages, but those cages don’t exist, but they’re their metabolic system, their microbiomes, that does exist. That’s real. That’s actually happening, the rest of it’s not. So if we can just, you know, you can’t move that mist away. It feels so simple some days I’m like, yeah, this is so simple. Then it’s like, dmn, that mist is thick. That’s some serious thickness

Morag Gamble:
So I guess, coming back into that, yes, some days it does seem simple and some days it does seem possible when you’re in that flow state of thinking there’s possibilities, then where does that take us? How do we start to, like how would someone like me then start to negotiate those sorts of conversations to be able to somehow find a voice that can kind of echo through that mist? Is there a way that my voice could be heard and not necessarily just my voice, my voice as, or, you know, Ben Ricky’s voice from the Ugandan refugees settlement. How does that voice enter into these conversations? And in order to, I don’t know, you know, like what is the question is, you know, we were talking about these limitations that are there, that are constructed limitations that keep the Global South poor. You know, these people who are inside these camps, where I work with, you know, I talk with them every day, you know, they are on the frontline of climate change. They are the ones that when this, when COVID is happening, you know, the food system breaks somewhat and they stop getting rations. They, you know, whatever happens, it happens to them kind of first and worst. And you start to question, well, what if that could shift, how, what does that look like? Where are some of the, maybe the cracks that you can kind of peel back a bit and see a different story emerging and how could that emerge or am I just completely diluting myself and just carry on doing the community work and building local resilience and relationship. And that, that in itself will kind of crack open a different possibility.

Scott Williams:
That’s an easy question. [laughter]

Morag Gamble:
You know, I ponder these things in my spare time. I don’t expect you have an answer necessarily. .

Scott Williams:
I have a thinking, not an answer.

Morag Gamble:
Yeah , you know, because, I hear in you, something that I hear in myself when you speak, but because we are working in different spaces, hearing your perspectives on this, somehow just kind of expands my understanding so massively. So, I’m curious.

Scott Williams:
And likewise. Whilst I’m at novice, this whole financial system malarkey, and the whole political maneuverings malarkey, I’m an absolute novice when it comes to permaculture or like now, I am working with a community garden finally in my town and it’s a fabulous experience. It’s only been a few months now, finally, we got planning permission or a group of people in the town got planning permission, and there’s, I don’t know, we’ve got 60 plots or something. And there’s some professional gardeners who are helping to support just if people need, but otherwise just find your way into the soil and just spending so much time with hands in soil, knees on soil and feeling our way into, into how to nourish a care at a properly localized, totally present space, to be able to then think about how that relates to what I do in the spaces where likewise, I’m trying to nourish and trying to care. And I hold this notion of stochastic generosity, very close and letting go of any sort of sense that I’m trying to create change which is how I lived for many years when I was leading climate change teams in PWC and I was keynoting all over the world. And I used to think I was very, very important and I was very, very important. I was very, very clever and I was very good at what I did and all of that, I was very sure of that too Morag. And lots of people told me that, so it must have been true but it was all bllsht. And coming to that realization over a period of time that, you know, I’m not even Scott, you know, I’m just Scottying, I’m a verb. And most of me is not human anyway. And by being able to change the context in which I exist to spending hugely more of my time in forest areas and now in spaces of growing food for my family and for my community, changing the way that I’m able to even describe my, what I am, who I am, where I am, is been compared to being in an office environment day after day, but still holding that when I’m in conversations with people who are still very much in that to be able to recognize the patterns, which they are demonstrating about the conditions of the system they exist within, but this notion of stochastic generosity, instead of, I think how I used to try to you know, lead change was to try and lead from the front and always articulate. This is where we’re going this is what we need roadmaps and all that sort of rubbish. We’re going to go along this direction. We’re going to, you know, I know I’ve done all the reading and I’ve talked to everybody, I’ve got all these experts. This is the way we’re going to go but never actually being kind to people. just taking the time to be kind, to be playful, to be spontaneous. And actually just been reading a bit of Jason Hickel’s new book, Less is More, and he talks about the enclosures that happened back in, the sort of 14th, and 15th century. And it was an enclosure of land to be able to then maximize the output, to increase the profit for those who were in charge of the enclosure, enclosure of colonial areas of the world, colonial areas the world, Africa, Asia, Australia, wherever to continue to maximize profit, but it was the enclosure the mind as well, that happened, that created a form of numbing away from being able to live your life in play and spontaneity, in care for other humans, in care for the rest of life. And actually trying to come back to that and just living that as a day to day reality and space where it is not common. It is not welcomed for the most part. It’s often feared. Why are you reading a poem when you’re supposed to be giving, you’re two-minute, short, specific comment on the state of energy access in the world? I think the poem holds more complexity. That’s why just, I don’t know why I just felt that that was a way that I could maybe offer some care and kindness to other people.

And so this notion of stochastic generosity, you know, not knowing where and when the change will happen in people, but knowing that if you’re not kind and you’re not caring and you’re not playful, you’re not demonstrating that, even in the face of the grimness of the things that we’re dealing with, which are very, very grim that we can still be. We can still have fun, we can still laugh, we can still be playful with each other to then be able to open up different spaces because play is how we learn. That’s knowing the difference between playing and fighting is such a critical part of the way that animals actually exist and that we’ve existed for a long time, you know, having little punch-ups as kids, you know, that you’re not actually trying to kill the other person. You don’t know how you know, but you know, that, bringing that into whatever you’re doing and whatever sort of, level for one of a better term, whether it’s the individual, just yourself and your family or your community, or into the global processes and working with financial system actors. I just feel that the very, the absence of having a voice like that means that the possibility of change is very, very small, almost none. The possibility of having that voice. A voice like that and a worldview, a set of habits, whatever, does create the possibility for change and understanding how systems change, they don’t change linearly that actually that could be Gregory Batesons’s term, the difference that makes the difference is the difference. Okay, well, why continue to do the same? So how to find ways to not just be at the community level in terms of permaculture, how to, and you do this? So when you’re doing it in different communities, you’re not just doing it in your proximity, geographically proximate community, you’re doing it all over the world. So I think you’re very much a living example of that. And for me, it’s de-burdening myself from the notion that I have to do this because all that does, it takes me back into the same metaphorical construct of fixing and solving. You know, Scott’s got to do this, Morag’s got to do this. No, you know, you’re meaningless. You, me, you’re nothing, I’m nothing, we’re stardusts. It’s been over 14 billion years. We’re going to be in for another 14 billion or so until something happens. We just, currently in this form, we can communicate this way, but that’s only very, very temporary, but we will go on, life just shifts matter, energy. It just shifts in plays, that’s all what happens. Taking that burden off yourself but whatever happens if I can be kind and I can be caring, I can have a spirit of generosity. I can hold that reciprocity, that the grass out there and the trees out there and the insects that they are giving me life, there is a sense that I need to do what I can, to give them life. And that extends to every human being.

And this, again comes back to the ending of nation states, the ending of these artificial boundaries that continue to keep us into a community or a city or a country or whatever, all these ridiculous levels that just love and care for everybody. It sounds naive, but actually thinking about it through the lens of the way that the economic system and the financial system works to your earlier question, how do you build that into accounting system frameworks? And that’s something that I continue to explore, how to build that into reporting and disclosure frameworks, how to build that into supervisory mandates for the International Association of Insurance supervisors in Basel, how do you build this into the bank of international settlements? How do you build this into the way that you actually price risk into the way a government can issue a bond to be able to fund the wellbeing and quality of life of its citizens, not the continuation of extraction of minerals or oil and gas reserves or whatever it might be or grow it’s for internal combustion engine vehicles. How can you actually completely change the way that those very boring bits that sit within tax codes and they sit within supervisory mandates within accounting frameworks. How can that be loaded in with permaculture thinking? And of course, again, you know, these sorts of conversations enable that but these sorts of conversations across different domains, more than I have played in the academic spaces, in writing different material for the UN, bringing academics together, as well as working in the financial sector, as well as working in the energy sector, in climate folks, in the UN, in water and green recovery and COVID, like, these people don’t tend to talk to each other outside of their tracks, even within the same university, even within the same government or the same business, you sit within your tracks, but those spaces can be there. And, and that’s one of the reasons I love the Warm Data practices. And one of the reasons we’re trying to do this experiment with the UN at the moment, or the Zero-Step Warm Data approach prototyping. What happens if you open these big spaces up? What happens if you give an invitation for people to be a human, not a politician, not a financial sector expert, not a bond issue or not an energy developer, but just a human being like that, learning that you talked about, I hear your perception. You hear my perception, both our perceptions shift. Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Morag Gamble:
I wonder, how things are with the uptake of the Warm Data conversations with you and like, what’s the perception? What are people seeing? Are they getting involved?

Scott Williams:
It’s, you know, the original hypothesis that I wrote down, sort of in the spirit of this, obviously being it’s rooted in adaptive process, not dialogic process. So you are actually looking at what the patterns are and the shifting of the patterns, none of the content of the discussion. So much of the UN conversations are about the content. It’s all about the content. And the tonality is always the same. The aesthetic of the conversation is always the same. It’s like rice. Okay. Is it UN protocol? That’s the highest level. Okay. That means we’ve got member state governments in, that means we have to follow all of these very strict rules. That means we have to go through all the countries of the world and they all have to have their say and blah, blah. And then the private sector, then civil society, then other human beings, or there’s a level below that, where we can have a slightly informal, but, it’s still very structured dialogue. And it’s about what did that person say? Can I get a record? Can I capture that? Can I either use that against them? Or can I use that to build some other form of, you know, change in some way, but it’s always about the content. So offering a process, which is about the tonality and the aesthetic about the, you know, the information about the way that people are responding as being understood as information about the conditions of the system, in which they exist, not about them individually and being able to see at that systems level is not something, as I said, a number of times in conversations with people, like, I just don’t recognize it. It’s like, yep, because that ability to perceive in that way has atrophied. You had it as a three-year-old, you had it as a four-year-old, probably by the time he got to six or seven, you know, when people asked you what you were going to be when you were a four-year-old, five-year-old, it’s like, I want to be a fish, you know, want to grow up to be a fish, perfectly normal answer. Why can’t I be a fish by the time you get to sort of 10 or 12 or 14, I want to be a fireman. I want to be an astronaut or be a doctor I want to be, or whatever. Very few kids at that age will say, I want to be a fish still, let alone. And if a 40-year-old or a 50-year-old says, what do you want to be when you get older? I want to be a fish. It’s like, okay, I might need some medication there. They need a little bit of intervention because something’s not going right with the programming. And that difference of the possibilities that exist in that structured dialogic process, where you’re looking for the content and you’re working on the content. And that’s what you hear. That’s what you receive. That’s what you’re used to hearing and receiving to a process where the content is largely irrelevant. There is no set content. There is no set things that are going to be talked about. There’s no SDG framings, for instance. Well, is this an energy conversation, Scott? Or is it a climate conversation or is it yes, yes, yes it is. Yes, yes, yes. But is it, which one is it? Yes, it is. It is. Yes, but which one? It has to be one of them. Yes. Or all of them. Now, you’re just being a bstrd, you’re just being vague. Yeah. And, you know, we need to be specific. I am being specific, you know, life is interdependent. It’s actually, as Gregory Bateson wrote, you know, everything is everything and I get lost. Yeah. That’s what this is about. But getting lost when you’re used to always finding and knowing and being certain, it doesn’t land very well. So, um, the response has been largely, as I had hypothesized it would be, that unless people were forced to do it, like as a mandatory training program or a mandatory, you know, skilling up or whatever, they would largely ignore it.

And it’s been interesting to be able to see the number of people who’ve clicked on to the registration page for the Zero-Step Warm Data, the number of people who have then clicked through to the registration button to maybe register for one of the pods of conversation. And then the number of people who have actually registered. And then the number of people have actually turned up and then people who have actually turned up and stayed in a conversation for the series, or even for one conversation, or even just for the whole of one conversation, because more and more, the feedback I’m getting is after 20 minutes or 30 minutes. And so then that comes back to me to fail. You fail, Scott’s obviously, it’s a failed process because otherwise we’d stay. If it was worth doing, we’d be there, which has all sorts of issues associated with it. But if it’s not a process that’s recognizable, then it’s obviously of no value. And this is the challenge. This is why I didn’t say, let’s just change the way that the whole UN process works to do Warm Data because that’s madness. It had to be as a prototype to be able to understand what is actually going on. Is it, as I suspect, is it as I’ve observed, as others have observed, as others have written about, as others have tried to do something about, yeah, again, it’s coming back that yes, it is very much that the conditions of the system do not allow the individuals to have their flexibility either in terms of just the time or in terms of the cognitive flexibility, to be able to consider something that doesn’t have a specified outcome, which again goes back to that underlying metaphor of the illusions of control and separation and domination and projects and fixes and deliverables and outcomes and results-based management and indicators, which takes you back to the SDGs, which are loaded with those, which takes us back into the money system, which is all about the objectification. So it is all, you know, there’s obviously everything’s all connected here, but as a point of intervention, to be able to offer something, which is undeniably an invitation, which is a game, which is creating some interesting spaces for people to consider what you’re literally saying that any human beings in the online space who has an internet connection, who has any sort of form of cure, any, really don’t think so, now which stakeholder group you’re focusing on the human being one, that one, and look, bring your pets too, you know, no problem but you know, we can have different types of exchanges there, thinking about that, very interesting

Morag Gamble:
That is a very odd concept, the stakeholder one, I’ve never quite got it. I don’t think I’ve ever quite entered into the space. I remember, I actually had a job for nine months working with the government once. And I didn’t understand the thinking. I think I was, I went through a normal schooling system, but then I hit Schumacher College and Fritjof and Gregory Batsone. And when I was in my early twenties and that’s kind of been my world ever since, and I got to this place, and I just didn’t really know what to do with this stakeholder thinking. And now, you know, I still keep thinking as I go, like I’m 52 now thinking maybe one day, I should understand how it works so I can interact, so I can interact with it better. But, you know, as you were speaking, I was also thinking about how the Oceania pod that’s happening and the youth pod that are happening, which are two of the ones that I’m working with out of the 12 that you’ve brought together are just beautiful. The people have come in through the permaculture network who are all part of this Oceania pod are just saying, this is amazing. This is what we need, this space, and people have been crying, and you know, you’ve been experiencing that in your pods too. There’s been deep emotional responses to having respect, like particularly now at this time when people are locked downs and, you know, a global trauma that people are experiencing around this existential crisis that you’re talking about, and this awareness that we’ve pushed the limits of our one planet, you know, and then within the youth too, you know, when your daughter’s there with my daughter in this, and it’s an amazing thing that they’re doing, and they’re discovering new young people because that group had been going for a while and then they paused, and now they’ve got this whole new world of, of young thinking that’s happening. And so I, you know, for me from my perspective and being involved in it, it’s amazing. And I, cannot, I can’t see how it could, I understand when you’re saying, you know, like it doesn’t fit within those boxes, but if you open that door and enter into that space and you can not be touched by it, I guess the question is whether they kind of go, well, is it relevant? Maybe you’re still coming in, yeah. Anyway, it’s been an amazing experience and I’m loving it. So thank you for organizing.

Scott Williams:
It’s been, it’s been very emotional month. Um, since, since I guess the double bind that broke this open, the will series , this resistance and reluctance there is also, and , uh , I don’t know if you were in , in, in the last warm data reading cell on the piece around , um , maybe it was two ago about, is there, is there a conspiracy? I think it was called , um , it was a Mesa log, one of Gregory’s metal logs . And he said, they , they knew what they knew and they didn’t care about what they didn’t know. And in that lay the possibility to become , um, conditioned to and used to the greatest of horrors in inhuman times. And when he was talking about the prison guards in Dachau, he was talking about , um, people who had become accustomed to atrocities, but that was in 1970 or 71. But actually when I look in the UN system today, those same sort of systems conditions are there, but they’re the reason why many, many people go into the UN some go in for the wrong reasons. But if you have that mindset, you would tend to go in directly into the financial system, not into sort of intermediary of the financial system, because the sort of sociopathic rewards are much, much higher, but most people have a level of care. Most people, when you get them out of their office space, out of their constructed role, as a green recovery expert or an inequality expert or gender expert, they’re actually beautiful people. They’re kind, they love life. They genuinely want to, just as we opened this conversation, they want to do something which helps but the conditions of the system only allow that care to extend to a frame and over time that frame becomes real as opposed to just constructed. And it becomes so real that to be able to recognize beautiful, nuanced, soft, uncertain, deeply emotional, profoundly upsetting, but just joyous moments, but also being able to be in a space where you don’t know when that’s, you cannot predict in any way that’s going to happen.Some of the feedback I’ve had, or I guess I had feedback from someone that you haven’t pulled the other day, a guy who I’ve never met before. I mean, I haven’t met most of them. I haven’t met you in person, but I feel like I know you like a sister in terms of what we’re thinking, being whatever. But he said that the sessions are beautiful. They’re really beautiful, but what’s more beautiful Scott, is it’s emotional, just talking about actually, but it’s the way that I can be with my family now. It’s not just the way I’m in conversation and the way I’m allowed to be. And Nora talks about this. It’s not about the content. It’s about what is allowed to be said, it’s about what that space offers the possibility of you saying, or me saying when I talk to you, I feel I can just talk about anything. I feel you can talk about anything that is not the case for a very large number of people who are in that sort of political, upper, financial. They have allowed themselves to become incredibly restricted, but he was saying, the conversations I’ve been able to have with my kids, with my dad, talking about stuff we could never talk about. We should never be able to be talked about. And that’s extraordinary because that Is what’s missing. And that is what’s missing in this constructed structure of dialogic processes of sense-making activity, sort of mindfulness and all of that, which are all still prescriptive and outcome-based, you’re still trying to get somewhere, actually just being confused, messy, even in silence with a group of people. And as you said, this is a global trauma and this is a little test for us because this is nothing. I mean, yes, COVID is terrible and particularly, I’m in Switzerland andthe restaurants are open for the first time in six months today, we’re still getting thousands of cases a day as to what our hospitalizations, the helicopter flies over to the hospital regularly. You know, it’s still, and that’s here. I mean, let alone India, Brazil, other places where it’s still just disaster, but compared to the destabilization of the Northern hemisphere jet stream, which is already happening compared to the full impacts of the climate crisis, the ecological crisis, the soil crisis, the forest crisis. This is nothing. This is this, the tiniest taste of , can we find ways to get into spaces where we can be together with other people. And that’s been so beautiful and it is exclusionary and that it’s online. And that is something that, you know, we have to live with just at the moment, but we can bring more in person and more people coming together as people. But I don’t think the online will ever disappear for some of the reasons that you were talking about with my daughter’s experience. I mean, she’s 15 years old. She has the most inane conversations at school, which, she comes home, she’s like, oh God, I’m just going to talk to these kids? It’s like, it’s all about BTS this, it’s this, this, like the latest celebrities. It’s the latest thing, that’s an H&M, it’s whatever. It’s like I just don’t care, yeah, it’s partly my fault in the sort of stuff I’ve talked to her about since she was born,

Morag Gamble:
Yeah, I feel sorry. We, are daughters, all the same thing and we’ve both brought them up with the same kind of thinking, and they both don’t fit into that kind of normal schooling model. And you know.

Scott Williams:
She always feels like this thing she has to say. And she’s like, I can’t ever think about what to say. Whereas in the Warm Data spaces, I can say whatever and people will listen and then they can say whatever. And it’s challenging. It’s interesting. It’s like, I don’t know what they’re going to say, sound, I don’t know how that’s going to make me feel. I do know that I’ll go to school and I’ll basically be in the same conversation over and over again. I know how it makes me feel. I kind of know how it makes them feel because they talk about it but it’s just that this very, very superficial level of us being our roles as high school kids, basically living the roles. It’s like, yeah, that’s actually what the education system is for, is for you to get used to living a role, because then you go to university, you do a role, then you go into work and you do a role and then you die and that’s your role. Boom. And none of that’s true cause you never die. You just change into something in the matter, you are never just one role. You are always overlapping lots of stuff. And being able to be in conversation with people in South Africa or with the amazing community that we’re all we’re both connected to in Nakivale Refugee Camp in Uganda, particularly with Namuwongo you know, about to go super explosion and communities already in very difficult situations, about to be in much, much more difficult situations. And they, and I’m working with the people who in theory are running the programs and the billions and trillions of funding to be able to make sure that those people are actually able to live according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which has largely been scrapped and beamed in favor of GDP, but it’s still there. And in theory, it’s a guiding principle and a guiding declaration of how we should be dealing and working with and being within relationship with every human being on the planet. I just don’t see another way other than being in these sorts of conversations, the only other way, and it goes back to something we were talking about before this conversation is my ultra marathon running. That’s where I found this first, this ability for human beings to shed their identities and just shared all of that and be stripped back. And then that happens through my experience of ultra running out on trails, in nature, the combination of the humility which is basically imposed upon you by fast, immense sublime, natural spaces, but also that suffering and that mutual space of being there as humans together has created some of the most beautiful moments in my life. Exactly like I experienced in the Warm Data conversations, because it’s just humans being humans to be with humans, to hold other humans, to care, to vent, to rage, to scream, to just to be there.

Morag Gamble:
Hmm . You know, when somebody’s just sitting with me at the moment when you’re talking about what’s to come and the tendency of reaching for solutions and I get stuck in this a bit because I’m thinking, well, permaculture is gonna really help a lot of people. I speak to a lot of people in, you know, say in the refugee camps and they’re saying, this is our lifeline, if it wasn’t with this, we would be so struggling, you know, this is, and so, so from shifting from solutioning to something, you know, I’d love to hear your perspectives on this because I always feel like I get a bit stuck on this. I have a solution, but not in a way of going, well, here, do this. It’s very much an offering of connection of remembering, of localizing, of sharing, sharing seed, sharing resources, sharing ideas, helping each other to find a way to actually live in a way that is going to mean less suffering. That’s going to mean more care for the place, for the community, for the children, for culture. And so I get stuck in this salute, you know, not see, I don’t know, and I don’t come at all like, but I, though this is where I can also see there’s a problem because if you try and go forward into somewhere like the UN or to a larger grant organization and say, I have this solution that will help all these people. And yet, when I’m working with people, it’s an everyday thing. I’m talking with them every day and we’re finding solutions together. They’re actually finding the solutions and I’m kind of in conversation with them to ask different questions, to help them ask questions and make connections in other ways. And it’s really just this very fluid process of working. And so I guess it’s, where does that even work and is permaculture a solutioning thing or is it actually, People Need People thing and that, and this is a question that I, that I hold. And because you are in the Warm Data world as well. It’s kind of a question I’d love to get your perceptions on. I don’t know whether you have any reflections on that.

Scott Williams:
Yeah, I think about this all the time, because, you know, permaculture has, for those outside of permaculture, it has sort of some cult-like branding, solutioning senses to it. The same comments often you know, saying to me around Warm Data, this feels like some sort of cult, it feels like almost like a religious practice or something. And in some ways I see both and I’m a novice at one day, and as I said, an extreme novice of permaculture approaches and practices. But yes, they’re both practices, I think. And that’s important practice rather than a solution. Yes, it’s semantics, but it’s not, because the solution is rigid in the transactional. I, clever person, come to you, fix you, all good. You fixed me clever. Relational is I live a life practice, which has changed my relationship with other people with land, with seeds, with the air, with water, with nutrients, with the worms, I’m offering to share my practices, the way that you practice this relational approach to life will be different to mine because of a thousand million different contexts. But it’s the shift from a transactional to a relational. And I think this gets very confusing in those spaces, which are rooted in the solutioning and fixing it’s like, okay, can we just buy permaculture? How much does it cost? Can we just buy it? And then we’ll just like, scale it up, roll that sucker out the problem. No! And with Warm Data, same thing, how much would it cost to buy it? Can we just buy it just by the International Basin Institute? Just buy it. Not again, not because it’s not a thing. You’re trying to thingify something which is living and it’s constantly adaptive. It’s evolving because it’s holding the relationships. It’s not trying to suppress the complexity. It’s trying to live within the complexity. And I think that’s what I’m trying to play with is, there is complexity in every single one of us. There’s massive complexities, trillions of complexities within me, within the interfaces I have with everything then between us, then between all of us then between the rest, those complexities are in a transactional solutioning space. Let’s try and suppress them. Let’s control them. Let’s try and absent ourselves from it as much of that messiness so that we can take that solution that worked in Mongolia and replicated in Uganda and replicated in France and replicated in Australia, that’s scaling and replication, whereas a relational approach taking much more than lessons from the way that mycelia form, that we are all, I see us all as sort of either a combination of earthworms or hyphae, you know, we’re at the very end, we’re being, we’re sending out, seeing if there are resources seen, and sometimes we have to pull back and sometimes, but actually being comfortable with that, that our explorations in our curiosity, into different ways of being in relationship and living in a rapidly changing macro environmental space, a macro biospheric change, which has only been experienced probably five or six times in the history of this lovely ball rock and stuff floating in the solar system. But can we find a way to be able to hold all of those complexities everywhere? Not hold them centrally? And the mentality still within corporations, within the financial sector, within the UN system, within governments, is how can we effectively maintain a form of colonialism, maintain a form of systemic racism without acknowledging that we’re doing that by saying we sprinkle fairy dust down here and here and here, because we’ve seen it here, it’ll definitely work here. Whereas as you know, with permaculture, it works differently everywhere. The soil conditions are different the air, the density of moisture, the people’s lived experiences, there’s a million, trillion and you can never control for all of them. The only way you can control all of them is by dousing everything with phosphate chemicals and, you know, nuking and annihilating the soil. And therefore you’re just eliminating the context. You’re eliminating that, which actually allows for life and the relationship for life to continue.

So that’s kind of how I’m playing with it, that increasingly using this language of transactional versus relational, and Kaczynski talked about the map and the territory. The transactional is the map. It’s back to the interconnected balls. It’s, okay, we’ve got soil, we’ve got water, we’ve got seeds. We’ve got, we just stick them all together the same way every time, no problem. The territory is okay, we’ve got water and seeds and land. Let’s explore what the relationships are between all of these. And see if we can’t tend and notice that it’s the tending and the noticing, as opposed to the controlling and the dominating. That difference is the difference. It makes the difference for me. And it’s so hard to not keep slipping back into that. Like you were saying over and over again, how do we do this in mycelial way? How do we nourish the soils so that we can have the blossoms as opposed to focusing on which blossoms we’re going to have, and forgetting to nourish the soil, but we’re trained from basically birth, and for age four or five, to focus on the blossoms and you get enough blossoms, you’re powerful you’ve outcompeted everybody. You’ve got status. You’re the best, which has never been the case. It’s never, in the way that life operates in the way that ecosystems, as you know, I’m sure much better than I do. Everything has its place and behind it, hierarchies are dynamically, always shifting between all forms of life. They’re never static hierarchies, they’re always shifting.

Morag Gamble:
And I think that at the very core of the questions that I’m bringing here today is this idea that you were just talking about the difference between the scaling of something and the spreading or something. I’ve always been working at that kind of level of spreading or what I call it, myceliating. But I guess where I am at the moment is acknowledging the extent of the global catastrophes that we’re facing. And there’s this urgency to need to do something more than what I’m already doing. How can I, not necessarily scale up or maybe also kind of slotting into that thinking, or maybe by scaling, I can spread faster and further, you know, not me, but these ideas so that people who are, you know, having to move from their places that they are, people who are becoming refugees, people who struggle in whatever different ways they have the capacity to understand these sorts of things or have access to this information or resources or skills, because, you know, generally, generationally we’ve become disconnected from it. And there’s this gap and I guess this is where I sort of see permaculture helping to fill some of that gap of linking back knowledge that we have, at the being lost, that are being pushed to the edges. But bringing that knowledge back in or recreating some of the knowledge that already has been lost to be able to live in ways that can, you know, like you talk about care and love. I mean, I always sound, I feel like I’m going to be a bit corny when I say this, but it is around, it is around peace and it is around love because we have more access to resources to meet our needs then the divisions between cultural or religion or race become less obvious because we’re able to meet our needs. So I kind of see permaculture as a way of building peace. And so it’s actually the very conversation that I had with one of the community leaders in the refugee camp the other day saying I work with Burundians, Somalis Rwandans, you know, like Congolese and through doing this work with permaculture and connecting people in conversation and offering these seeds and tools and skills and access to land and collaborative projects. It’s peace building. It’s the best peace building I’ve ever seen in my life. He said, I used to be a peace builder, like with NGOs. And he said, do you know, we’d go and we’d have these conversations.

Scott Williams:
Yeah, about peace

Morag Gamble:
About peace and we’d have some here to say all the right things. But then as soon as we left, it would go back to what it was. So this ups me differently because we collectively have projects that we’re working on. We’re collectively working together with tools and land, and there’s something else that’s happening that maintains the connection, across cultures, across languages. And this is so important. And, and so, just seeing more and more reasons why I love permaculture every day when I hear it described in so many different ways in different places and how it’s just giving a shared language for people to be able to connect and be in relation.

Scott Williams:
The permaculture of the mind as well, the permaculture of humans have played around with rewilding, I mean, obviously rewilding of natural spaces, rewilding of oceans, just allowing spaces to, with the magic of time, to be able to find their way back to harmonies and balances and exploring that in the human context, as well as being part of nature that are rewilding about imagination, that rewilding of the possibilities of how we actually wake up each day. And I love something that’s Wavy Gravy. I think you might know about Wavy Gravy, the famous clown in the US, you know, written on his roof, above his bed. You know, every day, muster my best Wavy Gravy and that helping people to have that sense to actually alleviate some of the pressure that you’re talking about, which I feel as well, because of the sense of urgency, which is actually just an artificial sense anyway, because we’re only in the present than anything that’s to come. Is just another present. And we’ll be there at some point maybe, or maybe we’re already there depending on different forms of indigenous wisdom, but this sense that I’m just trying to get up every day, every time I wake up, open my eyes, feet on the ground can I muster my best Scotting today? Can I muster my best Scotting? What’s that going to be? And not being sure what that’s going to be, allowing therefore for the possibilities to be much more open as to what that will be. And it’s interesting, when I was first playing around with how to get this, this Zero-Step experiment even considered using language about, you know, the issue of energy is not about the energy, the issues of access to energy and transitioning energy systems from coal and oil to renewables or cleaner energy. .

It’s not about finance or technology or politics or data. It’s about how we are in relationships. What are the stories that we tell ourselves about our relationship with energy and what are the stories we tell ourselves about other people’s relationships with energies? And what are the intergenerational differences between the stories that we tell ourselves about our relationships with energy and the stories we tell ourselves about other people’s relationships with energy, and why are they different? And can we explore that, and positioning it all the way from thingification and nounification into which permaculture by its very nature is about relationships. It’s about, again, coming back to the relationships over and over again, but I see this and I mean, I talked to Nora regularly about this and talk to others as well about this sense that is collapse inevitable? This notion that things are accelerating so fast in terms of the wet bulb issue and the destabilization of seasonality preventing us from actually being able to grow reliable food crops, all of that sort of stuff, regardless of whether we engage in permaculture, we may be at a point where the seasonality prevents us from being able to have any form of anything other than a foraging, foraging-based diet. At some point in the future, I actually got a question this morning from a guy who I often just bounce big ideas, he’s like, yep, just thought I’d throw some ideas he threw the question to me. Is collapse the only solution? Or do we have a chance to make intelligent changes? Which I thought was an interesting question because you know, permaculture at one level is an intelligent change. It’s like moving from industrial, chemical fertilizer and fossil fuel energy based agricultural and food provisions systems to meet the needs of human beings to permaculture approaches seems like an intelligent change, but I think, what I was saying to human, why I’m trying to live this practice and why I was so happy to get all these pods of conversations happening simultaneously for people to be able to dip in and out and just practice, and practice and practices, we’re practicing for time that’s that’s not quite here yet, is how I see it. We are in a world, which is still certain enough and has enough edifices of structure even through COVID, as they try to reinsert themselves. That educational system still makes sense, financial systems, educational systems, health systems, but all of that still somehow was working and will work again, both of which are problematic beliefs but they are being reasserted by the system. But in having conversations with a number of indigenous elders who I’m working with on some systemic nature of risk stuff and writings, they don’t see any concern about the so-called collapse of civilization. Um, it’s almost a welcoming of it because a lot of people will die and that’s a hard thing to accept, but actually it’s something we need to accept anyway, because we are definitely on track for three degrees of warming. We’re probably more likely four or five, six, ten or more particularly with sort of the methane bursts, which appear to be starting to present themselves in nearshore and onshore areas around the world already. So how can we prepare ourselves with a life practice where we jump out of bed each day, if we’re lucky enough to have a bed. So how can I muster my best self? How can I be stochastically generous and just care? And what are the relationships that I am tending and nurturing to today? Is it the soils? Is it the food? Is it the people on the other side of the world? Is it the people in my family? Is it my microbiome? Is it myself? Is it just letting go of idleness is sin and time is money. Just finally, just letting, how can we prepare ourselves for a time of extreme migration, enormous amounts of nomadisms, the stability of all of the systems, which most of the people alive today have either some notion of, are controlled by or are controlling. That is all, that is falling apart, but that is only a very temporary phenomenon, been a temporary phenomena for a few generations, you know, 300, 400 years at the most, but really in its current form, it’s accelerated egregious form really only since the 1970s and 1980s or since the second World War at the longest. So only a couple of generations. Can we create a space? It’s our lifetime. Yeah, in the early 1970s, we were at 350, 360 parts per billion, 370, maybe.

Morag Gamble:
And when I was born, I think I was born in 1969. And that was the last time where we were actually living within one planet. Right, exactly, exactly. A Lifetime for me.

Scott Williams:
But now we’re at a multiple, we’re really at a too globally, but that’s even, that’s misleading obviously. But I was basically saying that this is not a practice, which is comfortable or recognizable. And I don’t have an expectation that a vast number of people will adopt this practice, a combination of sort of a permaculture Warm Data. But basically just the relational way of being an animist re animating animism effectively, and releasing ourselves from dualism that life practice, I just want to start those spaces, because as you said, when people do go into those spaces, whoever they are, whatever their script, whatever their life up until that point is, even if they’re 60 or 70 or 80, and they’ve lived a certain way, bang, that shift can happen. And I’ve had it just in the last couple of, just last week, I had two moments of just a lady who was in her late seventies or eighties. She said just this, I don’t know why I live my life like this. Why? And she was getting very upset about, you know, I was like, but now, you know, I’m not going to, now I know I can, yeah. She was like, I never thought I’d be able to make a change, and I was like, wow, how extraordinary in a two or three minutes of conversation, that this can happen. So trusting in the properties of systems just as we do when we’re trying to grow food, you know, I’m not down monitoring every aspect of the soil. I’m not monitoring it at all. I’m just, I’m just tending and watching what I can go down every day or every couple of days, take a few weeds out, put a bit more hay on to cover things up a little bit when it’s hot, put a bit of water on when it’s been dry for a few days, but I’m very much relying on the properties of the system to be able to do what the system does .

Morag Gamble:
And just being in relation with it, you know, just noticing things and feeling, you know, I often go out even here in Australia or in, particularly in the Southeast Queensland where I am, I garden barefoot and people see my films and they say, what, why are you doing that? You’ll get all these parasites or you’ll stick a fork through your foot, or you do all these things. And I’m saying, because I feel the soil, I can feel its softness. I can feel its temperature. I can feel its moistness. I feel the life I can tell when different parts where I walk, what’s going on. And it just is by noticing over, over decades that, you know, I just, that’s the feel. And you know, I often feel sometimes that we totally dismiss that as being a valid perspective, what we notice and what we feel as being an okay way to monitor and monitor things rather than measuring things. .

Scott Williams:
Yeah . Yeah, exactly. That’s so important. Feeling and noticing instead of measuring and creating indicators, it’s all you do by doing that, is, cut off every other possibility. If you set forward a measurement indicator, then that becomes the only thing that you can notice instead of everything else and stuff that you didn’t even know that you could notice. And you’ve got no idea of actually intellectualizing in any way of what you’re noticing, but you can feel it. And I, this makes it hard to describe and that becomes problematic. When again, you’re saying, how do you, how do you take this? How do you offer this into spaces where the descriptive potential is very scripted. It’s very, very contained without actually those, in those scripted and contained spaces. Being able to experience that shifting perception, which allows for the shift in description, how do you, it’s like, okay, well, there’s a loopiness here .

Morag Gamble:
There is. And you know, there’s the other thing too, that you talked about this, the woman who came into the space and had that transformative experience, it’s like similar things happen when I find people come into the permaculture world and then that opening happens. There’s something that happens before you get to that point. Before you enter into the permaculture world, before you enter into Warm Data space, how do you find yourself there? How do you nurture the conditions that open up these spaces to your visibility, to your realm of noticing? And that’s kind of, I guess also the question, like all of this exists here as a, as a world, but there’s sort of feels like we talked about a mist or a fog before, but there feels like there’s this great big mist that separates them. And it’s hard to see that it exists, to know that it’s out there and I don’t want to separate it, but it does feel like there is this quite significant disconnect. And I guess it’s, maybe it is just that the possibilities of it becoming visible. And in what ways do we do that rather than maybe, you know, I’d been seeking and trying to couch it in the language of the UN for example, maybe not the way to do it at all. The way to do it is just to be in the beingness of that way and shine and attract through it being beautiful, amazing, attractive,, and the relationships that come from that, and people who enter into that space share their experiences, who share their experiences, who share their experiences and maybe that is, that is it. Maybe that’s it.

Scott Williams:
I think there’s a sort of a form of social pollination, almost that I kind of think about that there is extraordinary and growing pressure on people who have roles like, you know, adaptation expert or mitigation expert or inequality reduction expert or whatever. The toolbox is pretty empty. You know, it’s when they sort of open up their toolbox, okay, we’ve sort of tried all those things. Okay. Well, keep trying them for the sake of trying them, because that’s what the funding is asking us to do. But increasingly that understanding that the dissonance between the tools that they’re being trained in that are available to them that feel comfortable and this ever growing challenges, space, problem, issue, existential risks, systemic risks, whatever you want, whatever language you want to put around it, that is on all the indicators, the things that are actually being measured, it’s all going backwards, conversation after conversation. Now that it is, you know, not only are we not making progress against the SDGs anymore because of COVID, because of the pandemic, because of the change in the fiscal priorities and the spending priorities of governments, to do anything, to say, jobs and GDP, rather than to focus on the more holistic changes in the quality of life and the wellbeing of humans and all life, we’re actually going backwards now, you know, we’re back to where we were or more measures of energy access, access to water and sanitation, mortality, and all of these, they’re going back to where they were in 2015 or 2010 or 2000, like, okay, we need to be doing something different here, do something a bit different, definitely different. It’s like, okay, well, this is different though it’s too different now it’s too different, too different, too different too different. And this is my notion that, you know, it’s, there, there is a timing aspect to this, like all timing, like all periods of fear and trauma and grief. You can’t rush it. I just don’t think there’s, if you do, judgment comes in.

I’ve tried in the past, but I’m still dancing between that dance between being able to speak the language of the system, having worked in the system and knowing the system do an extent although knowing that I know less than I used to, but knowing the vocabulary that nomenclature that, that is used and being able to use that as well as being able to use the language of poetry and verbing and non-thingification and then moving into those more beyond language, beyond sort of verbalizing spaces, that feeling of nurturing and nourishing, attending, dancing between the two, and you know, it’s, it’s overwhelming. Some days it’s just heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking. Why can’t I do this? But then releasing myself again, just go out in the forest. And like, you’re nothing, you’re meaningless. You know, if you can just be kind and caring that actually is enough. Anything else on top of that, a ripple effect, that’s going to allow someone else to be kind to someone else, as you said, someone else to be kind. So they’d be caring to then be thinking I can’t continue to be violent in this way, that financially violent, institutionally violent, hierarchically violent, you know, psychologically violent, or actually physically violent. There’s so many different types of violence that if you live your life with care and kindness and offer of that and receiving, violence becomes, it doesn’t, it’s just not there anymore. There’s no sense of, oh, I hate that person, that person wronged me. Well, no. What were the conditions of the system, which gave rise to that person? Speaking to me in that way? It’s not the person, it’s the individual and as again, it’s Gregory Bateson and the cybernetics said, has this been proven over and over again? There is no such thing as an individual organism. It’s always in a symbiotic relationship. It’s always anatomically, it’s not possible to have a single organism. It’s just not. So it’s not you, you’re not the problem. You may be exacerbating it, maybe by not challenging the conditions of the system, but you are in a position quite likely where you cannot or you feel there’s too much fear, there’s too much risk, there’s too much at stake. What about your family? Related work? If that shifts, then how do I live? How do I, you know, the system wants me to be like this. If I’m not like that, what the hell happens? Look at you. Look at me, I’m still alive. I’m still here. I’m laughing more often than I used to five years ago, but I’m dealing with existential threats every single day. I’m trying to think about how to create some space for us to be able to work and play differently. But there’s a playfulness to it. Do you genuinely want to live your life, be so serious, so angry all the time? I don’t think most people do. I really don’t. Even the people who say, you know, this is how I am, this is what I am. I just, there’s always something you can see. You feel it’s like, oh, no you don’t really. You don’t want to be angry sometimes when you stab your barefoot when you’re gardening with a fork, there’s been anger, fair enough. But living your life like that every morning waking up going, I’m angry, I’m going to hurt someone today. Just genuinely don’t believe that life and we are a live opera that’s not. Life finds a way to be continued to be in relationship with other life.

Morag Gamble:
Thank you so much for taking the time to explore these ideas with me, Scott, because these are questions that I sit with all the time and I’m, you know it’s so nice just to have an opportunity to explore them with someone else and to, yeah. Thank you.

Scott Williams:
Thank you. It’s been beautiful. And we need more, we need more of these spaces. This is what we do need to scale or spread or whatever more opportunities for people.

Morag Gamble:You know, this, I hear a lot of people talking about being in zoom fatigue or spending too much, you know. I’m actually loving the possibilities for having conversations like this. You know, we’re on other sides of the planet. The only way that we can have this type of conversation is on a platform like this, where we can see each other, even though we’re not kind of 3d, we’re at least got visuals. I can see your face. So I think, you know, I love the opportunity to be able to have conversations like this. And I think, you know, in the last 12 months, the space that this has created for conversations that have taken, I don’t know. I think this is what’s helped me to get through these really challenging times and challenging thoughts about where we’re going and how do we move forward and how do I, where do I fit in all this? You know, all these questions that you hold when you think a lot about what’s going on, you read a lot about what’s going on, you hear and see the impacts of what’s going on all around the world. And you, and you care so deeply that you want to be part of, you know, doing the best thing that you can in the world with what you have, and then all these questions emerge. And, you know, so thank you for sharing this time with me today.

So that’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining us, head on over to my YouTube channel, the links below, and then you’ll be able to watch this conversation, but also make sure that you subscribe, b ecause that way we notified o f all new films that come out and also you’ll get notified o f all the new, all the new interviews and conversations that come out. So thanks again for joining us, have a great week, and I’ll see you next time.