Pretty enough?

I am not a huge fan of deep introspection. I’m totally happy for others to do it but I like to skate on the surface of most things, especially feelings. But this weekend, I was forced to think a little too deeply for my liking about myself. Ryan, my podcast co-host, is completely responsible because he questioned the validity of a comment that I have frequently said to him and to a number of our podcast guests.

The comment is this:

“I have come to the environmental party a little late in life and I don’t know that much.”

Ryan called bullshit.

And so I spiralled.

It just happened to be a very wet and windy weekend, which, for some, is perfect contemplative weather. It certainly added to my woe. I walked up and down Mt Majura in the wind and rain, I lay listlessly on the couch, I ate a loaf of bread and I stared at a blank white wall. Come Monday and I found myself with a very bad cold, a stomach ache and some serious black bags under my eyes.

At first, I thought that the core of my overly dramatic melancholic state of being was two concerns: your age and the requisite level of knowledge and/or experience that one must possess should one be intent on contributing to efforts to save our world?

After much, much moaning — and a three hour wait at the COVID drive-in — I have concluded that both of these issues are trivial and are also absolutely not the real issue.

On age

Life is a journey and you should want and expect to continuously evolve, right? There are countless examples of people writing their first book when they are 50, running their first marathons when they are 70, breaking world records when they are 110. If we stayed the same as what we were when we were younger it would be a little boring. Age does not matter.

On knowledge

I have had to spend much of the past two days asleep on the couch, suffering from a cold that I am sure was brought on by my wallowing. When I have been awake, I have found myself, somewhat masochistically, reading many summary outcomes from COP 26. There is an awful lot to get across. And this is just from the past two weeks. There has been over thirty years of climate research. There are many reports to read and remember, so much so that it is improbable to think that any one person can possibly know everything. Therefore, my response to this issue has to be the same as it is with age: exactly how much you know does not matter. The focus instead, should be on one’s engagement, interest and openness to learn about the issue.

But…

Even though I can easily dismiss both age and knowledge, getting involved later, coupled with concerns over whether I know enough to get involved, has — for me — come with bucket loads of guilt. This is not great as, already, my head and shoulders are weighed down with a consciousness of all that I am not doing or not doing well. There is: the parenting guilt (are my kids eating vegetables, doing enough exercise, getting enough sleep); the home versus work guilt (am I spending enough time at work, am I spending enough time); and the existential guilt, (am I doing all of the things a “successful” 45-year-old should be doing?). And now, we will add the environmental guilt. And this list is huge. Here are some examples: I drive a diesel car; I used plastic wrap yesterday; I bought a take-away coffee in a take-away cup last week; I used my dryer on the weekend; I buy way too many earrings; and I once had a sneaker addiction.

The environmental guilt seems somehow heavier and harder to shift than the parental, home v work and existential types of guilt, especially right now. It seems ever-present and, unlike the others, unable to be ignored. Almost every moment of every day I feel I am forced to face the fact that I absolutely and unequivocally have contributed — and continue to contribute — to the climate and biodiversity emergency our planet is facing.

The guilt leads to shame, perhaps a more complicated emotion than guilt. I can own up to my guilt, but shame? How do you engage with others when you feel humiliated and foolish and so very, very exposed? Well, now we are getting somewhere way deeper aren’t we? My somewhat lame excuse of age and lateness is a cover. I use them in an effort to escape any form of judgement. It is almost a desperate plea for forgiveness.

Introspection over? No, there is more, (Ryan, I think I may hate you).

Thanks to Justine Clarke’s awesome two part ABC TV series, Going Country, I recently realised that I like country music. As lot of the lyrics in country music are profound and can be interpreted in a number of ways. For example, I used to think Kasey Chamber’s song “Am I not pretty enough” was a sad song, almost a cry for acceptance. But, in a conversation about the song on the show, someone spoke about how the song is more of a challenge — it’s more of an angry anthem because what Kasey is really saying is that she is absolutely pretty enough and she owns exactly who and what she is.

I like this second interpretation way better. And, as I listened to the song on repeat, a habit I have when writing, I realised that this is almost exactly the attitude that my friend Sarah, embodies and exudes.

Like me, Sarah is a mum, a full-time employee, likes to run and is middle aged. I first met Sarah on the soccer pitch. We weren’t playing soccer, our kids were (although later on we tried and I ended up having a knee reconstruction — it turns out that there are some things that I may be too old to get into). One day, on the sidelines of the soccer pitch, we started talking and I’m not sure we ever stopped. With Sarah, once you start chatting, it is hard to stop (or even slow down) as she is super engaging and super enthusiastic.

2018 — the first time our kids were playing Saturday soccer together — was, for Sarah, a catalytic time. Three years ago, just prior to the last federal election, Sarah attended an Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) meeting, curious to know more about the statements ACF was making during the election campaign. Now Sarah sits on the board of ACF council, runs Canberra’s first ACF community group, which has been the most “meaningful, time consuming, purposeful thing I have done (aside from having kids)” and is also on the board of the ACT Conservation Council.

“I went along, took part in a simple action, and two years later I am completely immersed in the field.”

Sarah is an inherently optimistic person. Far from wallowing in not attending the party earlier, she sees the time now as an opportunity.

“It doesn’t matter when you join as long as you join. You can be 6. You can be 15. You can be 110. Everyone has something to bring and the strength of the movement isn’t just in numbers: it is in diversity and engagement.”

Sarah’s actions are as a connector and facilitator. She is a prolific social media operator, always posting and sharing content across many platforms, tagging various people along the way. Her role as a connector, along with her work on boards and as a community group facilitator, seems simple but is, actually, genius and has incredible impact. She enthusiastically shares and shares and shares, linking people and their ideas to other people and their ideas because from her vantage point she sees where some great possibilities and potential lie.

“Relationships are the pivot on which a lot of community is going to turn …there are so many people out there who have this great creativity and great ideas and great skills and it’s really about facilitating the opportunities for them to be able to make those things and make them happen.”

Connecting people and their ideas. Community coming together and having important conversations. Learning. Learning. Learning. These are all things that we can each do, and perhaps have to do, to forge a path forward.

So, am I not pretty enough to help save the world? You know that there are a load of rather unique looking animals, trees and plants in our eco-system, right? But, each of them is lovely in their own way and each of them, importantly, has a role to play in our ecosystem. This brings me to my final epiphany for this story, again, linked also to something that Sarah covered in the podcast interview: the “environmental movement” is actually about so much more than the environment. What we are all really grappling with is identifying and agreeing on what our future will be. You can’t ever be late to that conversation nor can you expect to have all of the answers — no-one knows for sure exactly what the future holds. The future is uncertain because it is unwritten and, therefore, as Sarah shows, isn’t it so much better, so much more exciting and so much more satisfying to jump in, learn all you can, collaborate with others, and help write it, in any and all the ways that you can.

“All we know is uncertain things are going to happen. We just don’t know what those things are going to be…it’s not necessarily going to be all bad and it’s not necessarily going to be all good, we just know it’s going to be different and I think, in that, lies promise. There’s the opportunity to do the things that make more of the positive things happen.”

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Is there an antidote to eco-anxiety?

COP 26 is on and I’m not sleeping

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“Last chance saloon”

“Too late for humanity to avert a climate catastrophe”

“Digging our own graves”

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3:00am: I am doomsday scrolling the headlines about progress — or lack thereof — of the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties, known as Glasgow COP26. Almost exactly this time last year, I had a similar pattern of behaviour. In the very early hours of the morning, I would obsessively scroll the headlines as the US Presidential elections unfolded. Post-election result, I purged all social accounts from my phone for a lengthy period of time to rehabilitate myself. This is a relapse.

3:10am: I stop scrolling just long enough to absorb this quote: “The antidote to eco-anxiety is action.”

3:11am: I momentarily feel better as I press the heart button. Action achieved.

3:12am: The satisfaction is short-lived. I descend once again into a (coal) pit of despair. Does liking the post really equate to action? If I share the post later today is that better action? What constitutes enough action, especially when “the house is on fire”?

3:14am: Despair morphs into outrage, the type of outrage that is only felt at this time of night/day. I could take all the action I could but that won’t be enough. It can never be enough. It is the decisions being made by others, i.e., the leaders at COP26, that are more consequential and influential than whether I remember my re-useable cup for my 6am coffee. So why bother.

4:10am: I think about how the Australian PM’s marketing team totally misinterpreted the message of Frank Sinatra’s “I did it my way” when they titled their 2050 Net Zero roadmap, “The Australian Way.” Somehow, I fall asleep.

6:00am: First coffee of the day. In a disposable cup. I wonder whether coffee will exist in ten years time. The doomsday scrolling begins again.

630am: I start editing a social tile for my podcast, Local Environmental Heroes, and I remember the second episode with Professor Mark Howden.

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My friend, Ryan, and I started a podcast five months or so ago, Local Environmental Heroes. It has a very simple premise: interview Canberra locals who are doing good stuff for our environment. We call these people “heroes”. Mark was our second interviewee and he is certainly a superhero of the climate world. In fact, after listening to him, I am sure you will agree with me that he is a superhero of any world.

In addition to many other roles, Mark is:

• the Director of the Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions at The Australian National University;

• a Vice Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (he has been a major contributor to the IPCC since 1991); and

• the Chair of the ACT Climate Change Council.

Mark has worked on matters related to the world’s climate for over thirty years, longer if you include the fact that he wrote an essay on climate change when he was in Year 11. He has covered climate variability, climate change and innovation and adoption issues, across research and science-policy roles. Mark has assessed sustainable ways to reduce emissions and helped to develop both Australia’s and the international greenhouse gas inventories. If all of that is not amazing enough, Mark also shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, and other IPCC participants AND has a signed letter of thanks from Barack Obama!

Mark is in the enviable (or perhaps unenviable) position of seeing the findings from his research become reality although, as he tells Ryan and I, while his predictions have been pretty accurate, “climate change is hitting us faster and harder than…projected”. Given how much he knows does he doomsday scroll? And if he does, does he like posts? Does he share posts? Or, would he be like me at 3:12am and lie completely inert, pessimistically wondering if there is any point in getting up to take the kids to school: is education pointless if all that we are leaving for them is a dystopian future?

Mark does none of this. To be completely honest, I never asked him specifically about doomsday scrolling. I am just assuming, from everything he said in our interview, that he does not. Instead, because of what he knows, and certainly because of who he is, Mark has chosen to have his personal life be “congruent with my professional life” and has chosen to:

• switch to renewable energy with the installation of 28 solar panels, a big battery and, at the time we spoke, the imminent purchase of an electric vehicle;

• ride to work every day;

• grow his own vegetables (with two hydroponic systems and seven wicking beds), make his own beer and keep chickens for eggs; and

• urban forage, and harvest plums from the street trees for his Christmas plum jam.

Again, he chooses action because he knows.

There was a whole lot of goodness in the chat Ryan and I had with Mark. However, on my specific issue of late night doomsday scrolling and whether to linger long enough to press like and/or share or whether that, or any action that I do, being just one person, will ever be enough, I gleaned three really important life lessons from Mark.

Firstly, because I live on this planet, I have an obligation and a responsibility to act. I am part of the problem because “every bit of greenhouse gas that we emit is sheeted home to someone somewhere”, so said Mark. But I am also part of the solution. We all are.

“We need to recognise our own individual contributions, take action to reduce those because that is actually contributing the collective and climate change solutions have to be a collective action.”

Secondly, do not under-estimate the importance of signalling, (which includes liking and sharing posts on social feeds). By sharing my actions, (I planted a wheelbarrow on the weekend full of tomato plants btw), talking to someone/anyone about what I am doing (see my podcast), I help to normalise an action and, while my immediate network of colleagues, friends and family is small, the ripple effect can be huge. Who knows who I might encourage or inspire to take action and who knows who they, in turn, might inspire. By telling someone about what you are doing, you will lift the whole

“You always approach the whole thing [life] with respect: respect for yourself respect for others and respect for the earth.”

Thirdly, and this is a common trait across every “hero” that we have interviewed as part of our podcast project so far, choose to live with intent. Be deliberate and purposeful about what you do. Mark recounted the following anecdote to Ryan and I when we asked him whether he had a particular mantra that he lives by.

“I don’t have a particular mantra but one of the underlying things that I have lived with, which came from my Mum, was always the concept of ‘be useful’. Don’t live a life which is useless, actually live a life which is useful…from my perspective, usefulness is about purpose. That I leave a planet that is better off than it would have otherwise been.”

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Tonight, I will not doomsday scroll. But, I will still read things about COP26 because I have a responsibility (by virtue of the privilege of being here) to be more aware and informed. And I will share, in ways that will probably include pressing a thumbs up button. While this, in and of itself, is not be the biggest action one can take, it is an action nevertheless and my action just might lead to another action — by me or by someone else, somewhere else. In any event, I’m trying. And this effort (any effort) helps to live a life that is a little more deliberate. While it might not completely cure my eco-anxiety it might just help me sleep a little more. And I need my sleep because tomorrow will be a beautiful day, full of nature, beauty and wonder and I want to make the most out of it!

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Holding on tightly to the sense of wonder I had when I was 10

Canberra is a small city. A lot of people know a lot of the same people. This can be annoying sometimes, especially if you are at the shops and have not bothered changing your top since last night’s spaghetti bolognese explosion and you run into someone who knows someone who knows someone and you belatedly realise that switching out your tomato stained top for a clean top would have been a good idea but it can also be helpful for connecting people to people and placing people in context. In this case, during the the non-recorded, introductory part of my podcast, Local Environmental Heroes, I discovered that our guest, Dr Siwan Lovett, lives next door to friends of mine. They had lockdown drinks (over the fence) last week. I know her garden. My daughter knows her son. Placing Siwan meant that I immediately felt that the interview we were about to conduct would be a very happy conversation, despite the fact that there was a high probability that Siwan has seen me at the local shops in my pyjamas (as I said, Canberra is a small city). And it was joyful. There were many, many laughs. But there was also a serious side, a more contemplative conversation which resulted in me, post-conversation, making a list of other books and resources to read, spending a Sunday slouched in my blue beanbag re-reading The Wind in the Willows and writing this story.

The Wind in the Willows had entered my consciousness the night interviewing Siwan. I was digging around the internet, searching for tidbits of information that could be used as the basis of questions and I found this quote by Siwan:

I believe that if we had more meetings in boats and kayaks, floating downstream and appreciating each other’s views, we would do even better at sharing and managing our wonderful life-giving rivers.

A neurone — or many neurones perhaps (I know very little about neurones)— sparked deep inside my brain and I was transported immediately to my 10 year old self. I felt the bliss I remembered feeling back then (and perhaps only then or a very specific type of bliss that only occurs when you are 10) as I was curled up on my bed, delightfully devouring the adventures of Mole and Ratty, two central characters in The Wind in the Willows.

Along with the complete series of Anne of Green Gables, most of Ronald Dahl and all of Enid Blyton, The Wind in the Willows is a book that I have kept from my childhood. I have packed, unpacked, packed and unpacked it innumerable times over the last twenty or so years. While it has travelled with me, I don’t recall having actually read it over the last thirty or so years, (ten is really a long time ago now) but something about Siwan’s idea of meeting on boats on rivers fired my neurones right up and I found myself, close to midnight, flipping through the pages of The Wind in the Willows, stopping only when I located this line, said by Rat.

“There is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing.”

During the podcast recording the following day I repeated this line to Siwan and she laughed loudly, telling me that she loves the book. I was not surprised (I was also grateful that she did not think I was completely insane and nor did she mention having ever seen me in my pyjamas). The more we spoke, the more convinced I became that if Kenneth Grahame had not written The Wind in the Willows and the stories of Mole, Rat, Toad, the Badger and, most importantly, the river then Siwan absolutely could have.; Perhaps she still should write a sequel as the world needs to know — and then get on board with - Siwan’s love of rivers.

I spend my working life raising awareness about the importance of rivers for not only our economic, but also our social and spiritual wellbeing. This means that for me, water defines my life. It brings together the communities I work with who want to protect and restore their watery assets, and motivates me to continue caring for and celebrating the wonders water brings to people and places.

Siwan loves rivers but she also loves people and the communities in which people (we) all live. Earlier on in life, Siwan had thought she would be a social worker. Instead, what she has done, incredibly successfully, is to bring her two loves together into one career, based off a firm belief that “rivers and people need each other to thrive.”

“…rivers actually physically do something to you…we know that your heart-rate slows down…you become more attuned to nature…we are better able to relate to ourselves and our community when we are out in nature.”

It’s early on in The Wind in the Willows (the second page of Chapter 1) when Mole first encounters the river that plays such a central role in the book, so much so that it is itself a character. Upon seeing the river, Mole was “bewitched, entranced, fascinated.” These are such wonderful feelings to have — in every sense of the word “wonder”. Doesn’t everyone yearn to have some part of their day punctuated by moments of amazement and admiration? I do. Yet I worry (and I wonder) whether the bucket of emotions that the Mole feels is enough.

“The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories.”

Siwan focuses on fostering connection between humans and our natural world, seeing it as critical for forming a relationship with the river.

“It is only when you really connect with nature that you go, OK, I actually care about this.”

Connection is one of the three core values of the not-for-profit, Australian River Restoration Centre (ARRC), which Siwan is the Director of, having founded the organisation in 2008, (optimism and empathy are the other two values).

To connect means you feel an association to something, and that feeling is critical for you to care. My clumsy summary of Siwan’s thoughts on care and connection goes like this: We need to connect. We need to care. We need to care about what we connect with. We need to connect with our rivers (and our plants, our animals, our soil, our trees, our insects, our world). We need to wonder. And around we go again

From the very limited amount I know, (and I am in no way trying to speak for others here), I feel this relates closely to caring for country. But I can’t speak to that. Instead, I recommend reading Tyson Yunkaporta’s amazing book, Sand Talk. I will, however, rely heavily on this Maori proverb: I am the river and the river is me.

I am the river and the river is me.

If I could draw, I would attempt to couple this proverb with Siwan’s thoughts. into a diagram of sorts. The diagram would essentially be a circle, with no beginning or end. It would — sort of — be like the water cycle itself where, in what is a very simplistic explanation, water is continuously collecting, evaporating, condensing and precipitating. It becomes impossible, or perhaps not even necessary, to understand where the beginning or the end is. Instead, the focus turns to the system, and the motion that takes place within it.

But we still have a problem here: you don’t wonder if you don’t connect, if you don’t connect, you don’t care but you can’t wonder or connect (and end up caring) if you haven’t experienced — or you have forgotten or you have limited access to — the thing that you need to care about. This is why we need Siwan, and loads of other Siwan’s — (and possible also the neurones from when we were ten) to help us join the dots.

Siwan fervently and passionately communicates — to everyone — the stories of our rivers. She wants all of us to understand just special our rivers and their contents are. Like fish. Siwan tells me that everyone needs to know “not just what they are but what they do and why we should look upon them with a sense of awe and wonder.” The description below of the river in The Wind in the Willows is another example of a piece of magnificent communication over the beauty and the power of nature.

“…this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver — glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble.”

When I was under water this morning (sadly the water source was only from my shower, not from a river) I thought for a second about cutting out or re-doing the introduction above. But then I realised that my long-winded introduction was actually relevant and had an important point to make. The connection I formed with Siwan at the beginning of the interview — based off the fact that I knew her front yard, that her son teaches one of my daughter’s best friend’s guitar and that there was a high probability that Siwan had seen me dropping off kids in my pyjamas—meant that I was super keen to ensure the interview went well. I connected and therefore I cared. The same rule applies for nature: we need all of us to connect for all of us to take care. All that remains is to add the wonder. For that, go back to your ten year old self when the world really did seem like a wondrous place. It still is that wondrous place. Perhaps you just have to take some time to reconnect. Take guidance from Mole and go sit on the banks of a river and be “bewitched, entranced, fascinated” about the world that is around you.

“…he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.”

One final thought. On the podcast, we ask all of our guests what the first thing is that they would do if they were elected President of the World. This is Siwan’s answer:

“…the first thing I would do would be to get everyone to stop what they’re doing. They would have to leave everything, leave their screens, leave their phones, leave their weapons behind and they would have to go and sit under a tree and they would have to have their back up against a tree and they would need to sit there for at least 15 minutes with no distractions and just reconnect with something nature and then look around themselves and go “ok what is it we’re here again for” and have conversations around that topic first.”

Nailed it!

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Three people, two quests and one mission

The story of regenerative agriculture told a little differently

A few weeks ago — when we were in-between lock-downs — I went on a drive to Cooma. It is an hour and a half away from Canberra and the drive is always pleasant. This drive was different though. It was more than pleasant. It was, one might say, magical. It was a frosty winter’s day, yet the sun was reluctantly shining just enough to infuse the grass pastures with a shimmer and the crackle of cockatoos with a glimmer. Couple these images with the fact that I was driving in silence to meet a giant of the regenerative farming movement in Australia — possibly also the world — led me to feel that this was not your usual drive in the countryside. Instead, I felt I was a hobbit, embarking on a quest down the Monaro Highway.

My podcast co-host, Ryan, had received the directions for the quest via email. The instructions led us: down one and half hours of a fairly straight, sealed road from Canberra to Cooma to the third exit at the second roundabout; to a left-hand turn at a double-named road; past a thickly timbered hill on the right; straight through the grassy open plains to another sharper left turn onto a dirt road; down another double-named road another a sharp left hand turn; through a creaky farm gate; over a cattle grid; down a narrow bumpy dirt track. We were to stop only when we reached the rusty brown ute parked out the front of a white brick farmhouse. And that’s where we met the really tall man, with a mop of white hair and a long grey flannel jacket, (if Ryan and I were really hobbits and we really were on a quest, then this man would be our Gandalf).

Apart from the difficulty in choosing whether I wanted the rhubarb or the raspberry muffin at the ski hire shop at Cooma, where Ryan and I met up, and almost missing the left-hand turn at the first double-named road immediately after the third exit at the second round-about, it was, as far as quests go, easy. Finding our way to the farmhouse, however, was only Part 1. Part 2, the “what comes after the drive” aspect of the quest, was what Ryan and I were both more anxious about, manifesting in non-stop nervous chatter between us for the time it took us to navigate the drive.

Ryan and I had different reasons for being tense: while we were heading to the same place we were on different quests. My quest was to carry out a purposeful, thoughtful and entertaining interview so that Ryan and I could legitimately call ourselves “podcasters”. My anxiety centred around professional angst: while Ryan and I had done our research, prepared a list of questions in advance and discussed an interview execution plan, I was cognisant of the fact that we were about to interrogate someone who had been interviewed millions of times by people who are paid, professional interviewers, (including by the iconic ABC TV program, Australian Story — see below), not two mates who had decided to do this in their spare time.

Ryan’s quest was more personal and his anxiety came from a more complex place. See, the Gandalf-esque man who was waiting for us as we pulled up to the rusty brown ute person was Dr Charles Massy and he is Ryan’s actual, real life, hero. (When we recorded the introduction to the interview, a few weeks after the event, Ryan validated my use of Gandalf, noting that Charles had always “kind of seemed mystical to me”.)

Meeting one’s hero is a challenging moment. There are loads of stories and advice written about why one should never meet one’s hero, mostly because the hero will inevitably let you down — so says the advice I read on the internet anyway. When I was 10, I thought John Farnham was my hero. I managed to meet him once and survived. It didn’t stop me from listening to “You’re the Voice” on repeat. Then, when I was 26 I met the actor Joshua Jackson, (better known as Pacey from the late 1990s TV show Dawsons Creek), on a London street post theatre performance (his performance, not mine) in London. I’m not sure he was ever my hero and meeting him didn’t affect me in anyway. I think that in the time that existed between John and Joshua Bono from U2 was most likely my hero (I have a notebooks somewhere in my filing cabinet with a list of questions that I am planning on asking him should I ever get to meet him). I think, based on this, it is fair to say that maybe I am a little “hero less” right now. This fact made it hard for me to understand what Ryan was feeling when we pulled up to the farmhouse. From the look on his face though, I’m pretty sure it was similar to how I was feeling, just for different reasons: we were both terrified and excited.

Charles, or Charlie, as he referred to himself in our email exchange setting up the interview, is a local hero. For the past ten or so years he has been on mission, which is a much bigger endeavour than a quest: a quest is a search for something whereas a mission is the taking up of an assignment, a vocation or a calling to do something. I was on a quest to interview Charles. Ryan was on a quest to meet his hero. Charles is on a mission to change the way we farm in Australia, and the world.

Using his 4500 acre sheep farm as a living lab, Charles has spent the past 20 years focused on farming in a regenerative manner, meaning that farming practices focuses on regrowing, renewal or restoration of the land, especially after being damaged or lost, consciously not pushing the land beyond what it is naturally capable of.

Charles’ 2017 book, ‘Call of the Reed Warbler. A New Agriculture. A New Earth’, is a series of regenerative farming stories that arose from his PhD research in Human Ecology at the ANU.

“Part lyrical nature writing, part storytelling, part solid scientific evidence, part scholarly research, part memoir, the book is an elegant manifesto, an urgent call to stop trashing the Earth and start healing it.”

The book is, essentially, a story of hope. By telling the stories of others who are farming in a new, better way, Charles provides us with a glimpse of a more positive future. It is:

“a story of how a grassroots revolution — a true underground insurgency — can save the planet, help turn climate change around, and build healthy people and healthy communities…”

We asked Charles about the book, plus a whole lot more in the almost two hours that Ryan and I spent with him.

Here is a smattering of some words of wisdom from our conversation. Charles told us.

• If Charles was elected President of the world he would “mandate a shift to a sustainable, renewable global economy within five years.”

• Alongside the great environmental thinkers, such as Rachel Carlson and Paul Hawken, Charles’ environmental heroes include earthworms, fungi, birds, sugar gliders, marsupial diggers of fungi and river gums.

• Charles believes there are a series of actions that all humans should take right now: “Buy local food. Get a good bicycle. Walk everywhere. Build food gardens at school and in your backyard. Read the great environmental thinkers. Shift to regen ag.”

• Charles’ message to all of us is clear: “unless we want to destroy this unbelievably beautiful, functional and precious accident then we need to radically change our consumptive, destructive, unnatural behaviour and move from extraction and destruction to renewal, regeneration and recycling.”

• Charles has a vision of a “better” future for all of us. By 2030, he sees:

“…100% renewable economy, our nation a 100% food and energy self sufficient, farms, urban backyards, schools, towns, city gardens, a nation focused on planetary, regional and suburb survival, thriving and community. I see abandonment of harmful consumer culture — no plastics etc. recyclable clothes coming back, I see all junk food and sugar driven foods and aggressive multinationals banned…I see the main curriculum along with language and maths focused on planetary and regional and local health and community…I think it is a better one.”

A few weeks after we met with Charles, Ryan and I recorded a Sunday afternoon special edition of our podcast, to reflect on the process so far of making Local Environmental Heroes. At some point during our conversation, we veered into the territory of heroes, discussing our initial hesitation over whether to use the word “heroes”. Interestingly, almost all of the people that we have approached for an interview have responded with a qualified yes, with the qualifier always relating to the “hero” descriptor “Yes”, they say, “but I am not a hero.” I disagree. After meeting Charles and, after watching Ryan meet Charles, and, after taking time to reflect on the interviews we have conducted so far, I have two things to say about this.

First, let’s not be sheepish about being a hero. We (you) need to own it. Heroes aren’t necessarily larger-than-life characters. Heroes aren’t necessarily achieving freakishly impossible things. Heroes aren’t necessarily acting alone either. But — and this has been the common thread for every one we have interviewed so far —heroes will have chosen to live their life with intention, with a sense of purpose and with determination. They are somewhere on the continuum of shifting from a quest to a mission.

My second point is that having a hero — or even multiple heroes — is awesome and absolutely necessary if we are to shift from possibilities to probabilities. This is exactly what Charles did in his book “Call of the Reed Warbler” Through stories of farmers findings new, successful ways to farm that kept the land in balance, Charles showed us what is possible and, in so doing, helped led a farming revolution, not only across Australia, but the world.

Perhaps this is also the somewhat unplanned, but very welcome, outcome of our podcast: collecting a set of visions from local heroes may play a part in shifting the narrative of what our world in 2030 can really be. These conversations may help shift the possibilities into realities because, according to my theory anyway, if we align our hearts (hope) with our minds (knowledge) our actions will follow.

As Ryan and I drove away from the farmhouse, feeling deliciously full from a delightful conversation, I asked Ryan to reflect on whether meeting his hero had lived up to what he expected and what he had wanted. I was not surprised that Ryan unequivocally said it had. How could it have not? Charles is a thoughtful, community-minded sheep farmer with a deep love and reverence for the natural world around him. While I had, originally, been only on a quest to do a good interview, I left Charles’ farm having achieved success with a quest I didn’t know I was on: having found a hero all of my own. But I also left with a clear mission: to bring more stories of local heroes to you. The more stories we have out there, the better!