What Is Your Business Model, Local Government?
By Dr Emily Samuels-Ballantyne (Dr. Demeter), Magical Farm Tasmania | Regen Era Design

A Poem to Begin: 

“The Land of Forms in Triplicate”

 They paved the way with paper,
and called it governance.
Ink spilled where rivers once ran.
Strategies replaced stories.
Budgets replaced breath.

 In this land of forms in triplicate,
spirit became ‘stakeholder,’
soil became ‘asset,’
and the commons became a ‘commodity’.

Community is something to be ‘engaged.’
Healing, is something to be ‘workshopped.’
And care, is nowhere in the budget.

 But place remembers.
The roots remember.
The gardens and gutters, the creek behind the depot, they wait.

And we, people of compost and complexity are remembering too.
That governance is not a meeting: It is a meal shared, a neighbour helped and a harvest honoured.

 So we ask again:
What is your business model, Local Government?

Because if Local Government cannot hold the life of this place, it is not fit to hold our future.

Composting the Brief

For nearly twenty years, I’ve sat in fluorescent-lit rooms, usually across from a local government officer, clipboard in hand who looks me in the eye and asks: “What’s your business model?”

On the surface, the question seems reasonable. But when applied to regenerative projects such as social gardens, food prescriptions, community harvest festivals, First Nations land care, shared meals, it becomes something else entirely. It becomes a subtle but powerful form of erasure. Behind it lies an ideology that insists all value must be extractable, measured, and packaged for reporting. That care must be justified. That soil must have a spreadsheet. That festivals must become outputs.

After decades of working with, alongside, and occasionally in resistance to local government, I believe it’s time to turn the question around:
What is your business model, local government?

Too often, what I see is not governance, it is performance. Policy schemes are launched in Canberra, filtered through state policy teams, passed to local councils, and translated into glossy reports by consultants. Somewhere in that chain, the actual work, the living, breathing regeneration of people and place is lost.

“We are governed by a machinery of abstraction”.

These are not “projects” to be measured by quarterly deliverables. They are civic acts of repair. They nourish relationships, regenerate ecosystems, and rebuild the social fabric that holds communities together. They are precisely what public service should exist to support. Because taxpayer funds, from all tiers of government, are not just for roads and rubbish. They are for the shared infrastructure of life: food, care, culture, and belonging.

Or are they?

If the local government insists that its role is limited to “rates, roads, and rubbish,” then we must confront a hard truth: it is abandoning its purpose. But we must also look upstream. Because much of the abstraction, bureaucracy, and performance culture we see at the local level is a direct result of state and federal frameworks, schemes designed in distant offices, bound by KPIs, and filtered through layers of reporting and compliance.

In this model, local government becomes a delivery arm, not a site of innovation or regeneration. Officers are trained to manage grants, produce engagement plans, and commission consultants and not to nurture relationships, co-design with community, redistribute resources, or respond to real-world complexity.

So we must ask: if our current system of governance cannot meet the needs of this time, if it cannot support the work of resilience, justice, and renewal, then what is it for?

Because the deeper work of climate adaptation, food system transformation, and social healing cannot be boxed into three-year funding cycles or flattened into “outputs.” It must be rooted, relational, and long-term. And it must be governed by those who live it.

This does not mean we abandon public institutions. It means we transform their role. It means shifting from control to trust. From managing community to co-creating with it, which means there is a shift from performance to participation.

If local, state, and federal governments are willing to evolve, to fund what matters, to cede power where needed, to become stewards of community-led change then there is immense hope. If not, communities will continue to build parallel systems: land trusts, energy co-ops, food commons, healing spaces. Not as resistance, but as necessity.

This essay is an invitation…

The Machinery of Abstraction

Australia has 566 Local Government Areas (LGAs). In theory, these councils should be the closest and most responsive tier of government. In practice, they are often the most entangled in the bureaucratic performance of care, not the delivery of it.

Let us say a new federal scheme is announced and it is focused on “community resilience.” It originates in Canberra. State agencies translate it into frameworks, templates, and planning guides. These are passed down to councils, where internal staff or external consultants are tasked with “community engagement.”

Engagement is held, then reports are written, diagrams are made and rarely, if ever, is meaningful funding directed to the real work the policy claims to support. The idea becomes a product and its power diluted by process. As theorists like Guy Debord, Ivan Illich, and Henri Lefebvre remind us of spectacle, abstraction, materialism and performance culture:

• Debord wrote of governance becoming spectacle, performance over substance.
  
  
  

• Illich warned of tools turning into systems of control.
  
  
  

• Lefebvre described the rise of abstract space, where lived experience is overwritten by bureaucratic grids.

This is not a crisis of intention. It is a structural condition. But conditions, like soil, can be composted. And that is the work I’ve been quietly doing for well over a decade, redirecting policy briefs toward life.

A Tactic of Integrity: Redirecting the Brief

Twelve years ago, I began applying a concept I learned from the philosopher and design theorist Tony Fry: redirection of the brief. Rather than rejecting state frameworks outright, I learned how to bend them and reground them and in turn redirect them, so they served life, not paperwork.

One example: the Huon Valley Food Hub.
Originally, the council budgeted $70,000 for consultants to conduct “community engagement,” and just $10,000 for implementation. I flipped the model. We ran engagement and co-design in-house, and redirected funds into community activation.

With that $70,000, we delivered:

• Ten farm-gate blitzes across the valley
  
  
  

• A regenerative food prescription program for twelve families
  
  
  

• A First Nations-led garden activation at Sacred Heart College
  
  
  

• The Growing Together festival: four seasonal dinners, markets, and seed libraries
  
  
  

This was not just a budget tweak, it was a philosophical pivot which moved funds from consultation to participation in the community. Shifted the culture of outputs towards outcomes.

Grounded in Strategy: A Tasmanian Opportunity

The Future of Local Government Review (2023–24) presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shift how local governance works. With 37 reform recommendations, ranging from voluntary amalgamations and regional service-sharing to participatory democracy and structural review, Tasmania is on the cusp of change.

The Priority Reform Program (2024–26) charts a roadmap for implementation ahead of the 2026 council elections. It offers five key pillars: governance, accountability, democracy, funding, and structure. But success depends on depth, not just design.

The Local Government Association of Tasmania (LGAT) rightly warns that top-down reform risks eroding the very local nuance councils are meant to protect. Likewise, journalists and citizens across Tasmania have resisted forced amalgamations and centralised planning power. We must be careful. We must ask not just how government is structured, but why, for whom, and to what end.

The Officer as Facilitator: Beyond Structural Reform

It’s time for a wake-up call. How can council officers, managers, planners, executives continue to prioritise paperwork over place? Strategy over soil? Reports over relationships?

This isn’t a failure of individuals. It’s a failure of the system, but systems can change.

Too often, local government reform debates get stuck on “how things are carved up”: amalgamations, shared services, and administrative boundaries dominate the conversation. Yet the more fundamental questions about what local government actually does, how it does it, and why these essential activities remain sidelined.

I hear the refrain all too often: “Local government doesn’t have enough funds.” Yet I also see bloated bureaucracies, roles created to shuffle papers rather than nurture communities, and funding lost to endless consultants and reports that gather dust.

No one is calling out the elephant in the room: the culture of local government itself. If local government is to transform, it must start with honest reckoning: recognising waste, shedding performative practices, and shifting budgets away from bureaucracy toward community resilience. Public funds must be reclaimed to support the living, breathing work of care, not the maintenance of paperwork.

In a regenerative future, council officers are not gatekeepers of grants or custodians of compliance. They become facilitators of public trust, partners in community-led change, and stewards of resources that nourish people and place. This requires reform that moves beyond rearranging structures to transforming culture, function, and purpose.

Public money must not simply “deliver programs.” It must build capacity, belonging, and resilience. Here is my usual style I offer some imaginative and practical solutions through a design methodology of scenarios: 

Seven Regenerative Scenarios for Local Government

The following scenarios offer a regenerative expansion of Tasmania’s reform process, grounded in lived examples and place-based activation.

1. Local Co-Governed Food & Health Hubs
Reform lever: Reallocate “engagement” budgets into long-term community infrastructure.
Example: Huon Valley Food Hub
Outcome: Funding follows participation, not paperwork. Healing is enabled through food, culture, and care.

2. Community-Owned Energy & Infrastructure Commons
Reform lever: Enable councils to support community-led solar, battery storage, and energy hubs.
Example: Scenario Two: Powering Regeneration (Regen Era Design Studio)
Outcome: Energy becomes a local commons. Resilience becomes a civic responsibility.

3. Regional Planning Alliances for Liveability
Reform lever: Foster inter-council collaborations across bioregions and catchments.
Example: Greater Hobart planning alliances, extended to rural and cultural corridors.
Outcome: Planning is no longer siloed. Local government plans for culture, care, and country, not just roads and bins.

4. Scaled Shared Services with Local Identity
Reform lever: Share admin services while preserving localised leadership and identity.
Example: Regional hubs for climate adaptation, emergency preparedness, asset management.
Outcome: Economies of scale without cultural erasure.

5. Place-Based Co-Design & Workforce Development
Reform lever: Reform officer training; create new jobs rooted in facilitation, regeneration, and cultural capacity.
Example: Co-design fellows, Indigenous planning roles, food system facilitators.
Outcome: Councils grow talent that knows how to work with (not manage) communities.

6. Transparent Accountability & Participatory Democracy
Reform lever: Enshrine a “Charter of Place” in legislation.
Example: Community hearings, budget transparency dashboards, regenerative indicators.
Outcome: Trust rebuilt. Communities become co-authors of their future.

7. Living Policy Pilots for Regeneration
Reform lever: Bundle grants into flexible “living lab” experiments.
Examples: Healing yards, food festivals, seed libraries, tool shares.
Outcome: Pilots judged by lived impact, not admin metrics.

Reclaiming the Public Brief

The word “brief” once meant a letter of trust, an invitation to act on behalf of the common good. What if we reclaimed that? What if the next “policy brief” was not a checklist, but a compost heap: rich with place-based wisdom, complexity, and care?

Let us name what no longer serves: the over-reliance on reports, consultants, abstraction and let us grow what will: capacity, relationship, and shared stewardship.

So I ask again:
What is your business model, local government?

Because mine is this:
Care for place and people.
Participation that grows roots, not paperwork.
Regeneration that feeds both soil and soul.

This is not just a model. It is a way of life.

And if councils adopted even a portion of this approach, we would begin to see a new kind of public service emerge, one rooted in trust, and capable of holding the complexity and beauty of real life.

About the Author

Dr Emily Samuels-Ballantyne (also known as Dr. Demeter) is an eco-philosopher, farmer, and author of the forthcoming series The Spiral Shelves: Living Library of Magical Farm Tasmania. Her work bridges policy design, ecological healing, and the spiritual-cultural renewal of place. She works at the intersection of community resilience, regenerative governance, and embodied stewardship, inviting new myths and models for living well together in times of great change.

Dr Demeter – Here in the brushstrokes,the unseen becomes seen.

The cells of life speak in dots,
not isolated, but woven,
like the constellations above
and the mycelium below.

In this living tapestry,
each mark tells a story
as First Nations art has always known,
each dot a breath,
each curve a songline
of ancestors and stars,
of country and kin.

Look into the microscope:
life dances in fractals.
Peer through the telescope:
the cosmos pulses in patterns.
And here in the brushstrokes,
the unseen becomes seen.

This is a remembering,
a message passed
from sky to soil,
from pigment to presence.
It is not new,
It is always.

Con Viv

painting by Emily / Dr Demeter

The Tree That Spoke: A Living Message from the Roots

Dr Demeter: Listening to the land beyond sides, beyond slogans, toward wholeness.

In January year, as part of a land healing workshop, I found myself sitting beside a pomegranate tree. I hadn’t gone seeking visions or answers. I was simply sitting. Breathing. Letting the earth speak in her own time.

Then, without warning, something stirred. A soft, clear message emerged, not in sound, but in knowing:

“I am in misery,” the tree said.

This was not a metaphor, the tree was literally looking unwell. At its base, a fungal infection had taken hold. The trunk was split. And on one side, growing into the tree’s very body, was a piece of plastic, long embedded. A human intervention, likely intended to help, had become part of the wound.

As I sat with the tree, listening with more than ears, an image arose:

The left side of the tree was one people. The right side was another.

Two limbs of the same being. Split, but not separate.

The left was discoloured, twisted, compromised by synthetic interference. It held movement, emotion, and the ache of dispossession. The right stood straighter, more rigid, offering structure and strength, but needing the left to breathe, to flow. Neither side could live without the other. 

I asked the tree: Do you want to be pruned?
A firm no.

What was needed wasn’t division. It was healing. Not isolation, but restoration.

The tree gave me five messages from the left: change, loss, resistance, grief, yearning.
And eight from the right: resilience, stability, defence, safety, endurance, tradition, fear, and loss.
Then came the number six for both. A balance. And one word that pulsed through the roots:

Love.

Not sentimental love. Not conditional love. But the kind that lives in root systems. That remembers we belong to each other, even in pain. 

As a regenerative farmer and practitioner of biodynamics, I knew what to do. I prescribed a tree paste, a gentle, living salve made with yarrow, the warrior-healer plant. Not to remove the wound, but to protect it. To allow the tree’s own healing wisdom to rise again.

Because that’s the thing about trees: They don’t divide, they integrate. They don’t perform politics, but they live season by season.

We live in a time where people are expected to choose sides. To perform outrage or prove virtue. But the tree offered another story.

It said:

“The foundations of life are in the seed” (this was the clear message I channelled).

In reflection… “The foundations of life are in the seed” is not just a truth of nature, it is a radical invitation to reimagine how we live. From the outside, the seed may seem small, humble, even invisible, but within it lies a profoundly different resonance, one that carries the sacred codes of renewal, interconnection, and life beyond domination. This message is a call to shift our power source, from control and reaction, to reverence and regeneration, planting new ways of being that grow slowly, but transform everything.

What if we remembered that?

What if activism became a balm, not a blade?

What if we built peace the way we heal trees,
By tending the roots,
Not severing the limbs?

—
by Dr. Demeter
Eco-philosopher and regenerative farmer
Founder of Magical Farm Tasmania

A tree channeling by Dr Demeter…a message from the unseen

This is the Reckoning: What Ancient Wisdom and Living Systems Science Demand of Us Now

By Dr. Demeter, Magical Farm Tasmania

Con Viv

We were never meant to be alone,

The earth speaks still, in root and stone.

Four hundred years, the thread was torn,

But deeper truths are being reborn.

This is not the end, but a beginning of a reweaving,

There will certainly be much conceiving!

Of compost, courage, soil, and heart.

Awaken! It's time to wake up to life for a new start.

In a time when the earth trembles beneath our feet (the Fault Line Series I am writing certainly reflects this), ecologically, economically, politically, spiritually we are called to remember something ancient and vital: that we are not separate from life, but participants in a great, dynamic whole. This is not merely metaphor, but a cosmological orientation held across millennia by First Nations peoples the world over. And not only First Nations: all ancient cultures, from the Andes to Anatolia, from Aotearoa to Africa, held interwoven cosmologies in which land, life, spirit, and human were inseparable.

Four hundred years ago, with the birth of modernity in Europe, it was a moment often tied to the Enlightenment, colonisation, Cartesian dualism, and the scientific revolution; the ancient and woven interconnected worldview was systematically shattered. The world was reclassified as inert. The soul was extracted from matter and nature was rendered lifeless, and so it could be owned, measured, and controlled. This shift was not progress it was amnesia.

“We need rewoven philosophies of life, I often refer to Con Viv! But there are many others we can weave with”.

In recent decades, systems theorists have begun to glimpse truths that ancient cultures never forgot: that life is relational, dynamic, complex, and sacred. First Nations ontologies have long known this sacred knowledge through Country, kinship, songlines and Dreaming…and living systems science and theory is just beginning to name.

This essay explores the profound resonance between First Nations worldviews and living systems theory, and asks what it would mean to take these ontologies seriously, not as symbolic nods or ethical aspirations, but as foundations for redesigning our lives, institutions, and futures. This is not a polite invitation to explore, I propose it is a necessary reckoning…the time to wake up is now.

Living Systems and Living Country

James Grier Miller’s Living Systems Theory outlines seven nested levels of life: cell, organ, organism, group, organisation, community, society, and supranational system. Each level interacts through flows of energy, matter, information and is self-organising, adaptive, and open. In parallel, First Nations ontologies speak of relational flows between all things: humans, land, ancestors, animals, weather systems, spirits, and laws. In Australia, Country is not a passive backdrop but an animate, sentient being with agency. You don't own Country…you belong to it.

This worldview dissolves and mends the Cartesian separation of mind and body, subject and object, human and nature. It collapses the Western notion of the isolated individual and instead foregrounds what Miller would call the “relational interiority of systems”. You are not in relationship, you are relationship. And until we digest this perspective and live and feel it in our bones we will continue designing systems that kill what they claim to serve.

A Different Ontology of Time and Responsibility

In many First Nations epistemologies, the past does not lie behind us but lives within us. The Dreaming is not a closed chapter of history but a living, breathing force animating the present moment. Elders remind us that the Dreaming is at once ancestral archive and ever-unfolding story: law and pattern, song and relation. It moves in silence, in ceremony, and through those who embody its ways.

Margo Neale, editor of the First Knowledges series and senior Indigenous curator at the National Museum of Australia, does not proclaim the Dreaming with grand declarations but lives it through her presence. To her, Country is kin, not abstraction; those who walk beside her sense stories woven into her bones and guidance rising in her breath. As she moves across the land, Country itself seems to listen. Her enactment of justice is not about platforms or punishment but about reweaving the unseen threads that bind people to land, spirit to soil.

With Margo Neale, living systems are never abstract concepts but lived realities. She teaches without formal lessons, showing that the Dreaming is not confined to the past or to ritual, it lives in the way one sits by a river, listens to the wind, or speaks to a child. To carry the Dreaming as she does is to become a bridge across generations, across worlds.

This ontology of time and presence resonates deeply with living-systems theory: in both, meaning emerges through patterns, feedback loops, and relationships; the past and the future coexist in dynamic tension with the present; and the deepest form of knowledge is not mere information but embodied integration.

This is not mysticism but an urgent invitation to decolonise our land, our thinking, our language, and our institutions. It is time to relearn what our systems have forgotten.

Repatterning the Self and Society

If we took seriously the convergence of these two ontological frameworks, the implications are radical:

• The Self becomes less about ego and more about eco. We reinhabit our bodies not as private containers but as microcosms of place, memory, and spirit.
  

• Family expands from a nuclear unit to a web of intergenerational, multispecies kinship. Grandmother trees, river cousins, star siblings.
  

• Community becomes not a service recipient but a dynamic living system, held together by ritual, reciprocity, and shared story.
  

• Institutions must evolve from extractive bureaucracies to regenerative infrastructures. Schools become places of initiation into life’s patterns. Hospitals, spaces for soul-tending as much as symptom-management.
  

• Economy ceases to be a measure of growth and becomes a practice of nourishment. Circular, foundational, seasonal, and enough!!
  

• The Cosmos is not out there it is in here. Astronomy returns to cosmology; physics finds its complement in myth.
  

• The Soil is not dirt, but the oldest ancestor. We listen before we plant.
  

“To ignore these transformations is not neutral, it is violence by neglect. We must be fierce in naming the unseen systems that are severing the roots of life. And we must be bold in creating new ones”.

Implications for Design, Policy, and Praxis

To live as if this ontology were true because it is would mean a wholesale reorientation of systems thinking from mechanistic management to sacred stewardship. It invites the co-creation of what Colombian scholar Arturo Escobar calls the pluriverse: a world where many worlds fit.

We would reimagine:

• Education as initiation into living systems and Country.
  Governance as facilitation of local wisdom, not enforcement of central plans.

• Health as coherence across inner and outer ecologies.

• Justice as relational repair, not retribution.

• Economics as a layered and grounded foundational movement of resources an organ-sation of life, not a system of extraction.

• Activism as a regenerative force, not only resistance, but reimagining. Less protest against, more living for. A call to become composters of culture and midwives of the future.

• Art and Story as central nervous systems of collective transformation, no longer peripheral, but essential. Through image, sound, myth, and symbol, we reweave our imaginations and seed the futures our souls remember. as a regenerative force, not only resistance, but reimagining. Less protest against, more living for. A call to become composters of culture and midwives of the future.

Importantly, it is not enough to translate First Nations knowledge into Western terms. The invitation is to unlearn, to humble ourselves before epistemologies that have held resilience across fire, flood, invasion and genocide.

Returning to Belonging

We are now living in what the ancient I Ching calls Period Nine, a time of fire, vision, feminine leadership, and truth-telling. But it is also a time of composting. Systems are breaking down. Myths are decomposing. False certainties are decaying. This is not a crisis, it is a rite of passage.

At Magical Farm Tasmania and Regen Era Studio, we have committed to this work of composting. For nearly twenty years, we have been dreaming, growing, fermenting, and tending the conditions for a regenerative way of life to emerge. And now, as Period Nine unfolds over the next two decades, we recognise this as a planetary composting cycle, clearing the old to make fertile ground for what is to come.

This is a sacred practice of continuity, rooted in land, love, and living systems. It is our offering to the cycle. And when Period One returns, it will not be as it was before but renewed by the compost of this time.

We are here to support the turning. We are not starting from scratch but we are remembering.

The convergence of First Nations ontologies and living systems theory is not just a conceptual insight. It is a threshold moment and a call to restore reverence, reciprocity, and responsibility. It asks us to remember that we are not systems managers, but participants in a sacred dance of emergence and decay.

When we re-pattern our sense of self and society through this lens, we begin to heal the split at the heart of modernity. We move from disconnection to belonging, from extraction to regeneration, from domination to deep listening.

In the language of my farm, we begin again with soil and soul.

Dr. Demeter is an eco-philosopher, farmer, and author of the forthcoming series The Spiral Shelves: Living Library of Magical Farm Tasmania. Her work bridges policy design, ecological healing, and the spiritual-cultural renewal of place.

GLOSSARY

Ontology
The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of being, existence, and reality, what kinds of things exist and how they can be grouped and related.

Epistemology
The study of knowledge: how we know what we know, the limits and sources of knowledge, and criteria for belief and justification.

The Fault Line Series: What Is Your Business Model?

By Dr. Demeter, Magical Farm Tasmania

For nearly 20 years, I’ve sat in fluorescent-lit rooms, usually across from a middle manager, clipboard in hand, who looks me in the eye and asks: What’s your business model?

The question appears benign. But when applied to regenerative community projects, like social gardens, food prescriptions with regenerative produce, food hubs, harvest festivals, and healing gardens, it reveals more than it asks. Behind it is an ideology that says value must be extractable, quantified, and packaged for reporting.

After decades of designing alongside, within, and around local government, both as a community builder and policy writer, I now feel it’s time to turn the question around: What is your business model, local government?

Because from where I sit, too often the business of governance has become a business of performance. Schemes are launched in Canberra, handed to state policy units, filtered into local strategy, and finally passed to consultants who produce reports. Somewhere in that long chain, the actual work of regeneration is lost.

But it doesn’t have to be.

The Machinery of Abstraction

Australia has 566 Local Government Areas (LGAs). In theory, these should be the closest and most responsive tier of government. In practice, they are often the most entangled in layers of policy choreography.

Let us say there is a new federal scheme focused on "resilience." It originates in Canberra, crafted with national objectives. This is then dispatched to state-level policy officers, who produce frameworks, templates, and research documents. These are then sent to the local government, where internal staff and external consultants are engaged to translate these frameworks into engagement strategies and planning briefs.

In this process, consultants are hired, community sessions are held, reports are produced, and graphics are designed. Yet rarely is meaningful funding directed toward the tangible outcomes that the policy itself claims to support. The idea becomes commodified, its meaning diluted through layers of abstraction.

Drawing on the work of theorists such as Guy Debord, Ivan Illich, and Henri Lefebvre, we can see this clearly:

• Debord reminds us that governance has become spectacle: a theatre of documents, dashboards, and launch events.

• Illich critiques the institutionalisation of care and life, naming how tools meant to serve living systems become means of control.

• Lefebvre speaks of "abstract space," where lived reality is erased by grids and schedules.

This is not a crisis of bad intention, it is a structural condition. But conditions can be composted. And that is what I’ve spent the past decade doing, and through Regen Era Design plan to do further composting work. 

A Tactic of Integrity: Redirection of the Brief

Twelve years ago, I began applying a concept I learned from Tony Fry: Redirection of the Brief. It means strategically redirecting the purpose of a project or policy, not to subvert it, but to realign it with life.

One example is the Huon Valley Food Hub. The original budget allocated around $70,000 for community engagement and only $10,000 for on-ground outcomes. I flipped that model. We ran engagement and co-design in-house, and redirected the funds toward community activation.

With the $70,000, we delivered:

• Ten farm gate blitzes across the valley
  

• A regenerative food prescription program for twelve families
  

• A First Nations garden activation at Sacred Heart College
  

• The "Growing Together" Harvest Festival featuring four seasonal dinners, markets, and seed library installations
  

This was not just a tactical shift, it was a philosophical one. From consultation to participation. From paper to practice. From performance to presence.

Deep Roots: Rethinking Governance from the Soil Up

Helena Norberg-Hodge has long critiqued the impacts of global trade and centralised systems. She shows how even local governments, under pressure to "perform," replicate corporate metrics and market-based models. The result is a hollowing out of public life. Seed libraries become KPIs. Community gardens become pilot programs. Festivals become outputs. But the living relationships that sustain a place? These are rarely recognised, let alone funded.

We need a shift in governance: not toward more management, but toward regenerative participation. We need a life systems worldview that sees communities not as service recipients, but as co-creators. This means investing in what is slow, rooted, and relational. It means resourcing the invisible infrastructure of care, trust, and local knowledge.

A New Brief for the Public Good

The word "brief" once meant a letter of trust, an invitation to act on behalf of something larger than oneself. What if we reclaimed that meaning? What if the next time we crafted a policy brief, it was not a checklist but a compost heap rich with complexity, local flavour, and the wisdom of those who live it?

So I ask again:

What is your business model, local government?

Because mine is this:

• Care for place, people and planet.

• Participation that grows roots, not paperwork.

• Regeneration that feeds both soil and soul.

• Local nutrient dence food supplied to schools and those who really need it.
  

And that, to me, is not just a business model. It is a way of life. Because ultimately, taxpayer funds are meant for the public good. Whether or not a project fits a conventional profit model, public funding should serve people, place, and planet not just generate documents and paperwork.

In future writing, I will offer more 'scenarios' for how local government might evolve toward regenerative practice. But first, we must begin the composting process, naming what no longer serves, and imagining what might grow in its place. And that starts by being clear about what the problem really is. Because ultimately, taxpayer funds are meant for the public good. Whether or not a project fits a conventional profit model, public funding should serve people, place, and planet not just generate documents and paperwork.

If local governments changed their business model even slightly to reflect this, our entire society would begin to shift. We would see the emergence of a new kind of public service: one rooted in care, participation, and tangible outcomes. This would mean a workforce skilled not only in administration, but in co-design and place-based activation design.

It would also mean that policy schemes must begin with ground-up knowledge not the siloed abstractions of policy wonk worlds, but the lived wisdom of those who know the land, know the people, and know what actually works.

Dr. Demeter (Emily Samuels-Ballantyne) is an eco-philosopher, regenerative designer and farmer, and founder of Regen Era, a consulting and design studio working to reimagine public systems for the 21st century. With over 20 years of experience in community economies, policy design, and ecological regeneration, she collaborates with local, state, and federal governments to embed place-based activation, co-design, and living systems thinking into public strategy. From community gardens to climate policy, she helps redirect the brief, away from paperwork and toward people, place, and planetary wellbeing.

An Ode to the Bread Man

by Dr. Demeter, Magical Farm Tasmania

A Poem to Begin
He came each week with bags of bread,
No trumpet sound, no words were said.
Just loaves for birds, for geese and hen,
And care unseen by policy men.
A quiet trade, a thread of grace,
The Bread Man’s gift to time and place.

For several years, a man has come quietly to share bread with my farm. He delivers bags of out-of-date bread, not for sale, not for waste, but for my chickens, ducks, and geese. His visits have become a gentle ritual, one of those small, consistent acts that knit together the fabric of community life.

This simple act such as bread for birds is more than just an exchange. It is a living expression of the circular economy in action. What would otherwise become landfill becomes nourishment. In turn, my animals fertilise the soil, lay eggs, and play their role in the symphony of regenerative farming. All of it kept in motion by a relationship, by trust and care.

But recently, I learned that the Bread Man’s family-run business is going under. Despite years of service, of quiet contribution to the community, there is no support. No government safety net. In fact, in some ways, the systems in place have actively made it harder for small businesses like his to survive.

While global corporations receive generous subsidies, navigate regulations with armies of lawyers, and get propped up in the name of “jobs,” small-scale, heartful businesses are folding. One by one. These are not merely businesses, they are stories and places of care. They are part of the hidden relational infrastructure that actually keeps life going.

Here, I think of Ivan Illich, who wrote of conviviality, not as a nostalgic return to the past, but as a radical reclaiming of tools, relationships, and knowledge systems that support human freedom and mutuality. Illich warned us decades ago that when tools, be they economic, technological, or institutional, cease to be convivial, they become destructive. They erode autonomy. They sever relationships. They make life harder under the guise of making it more efficient.

The Bread Man’s generosity is a convivial act. A countercurrent to the extractive logic of industrial food systems. He models what Illich called tools for conviviality: systems scaled to the human hand, embedded in relationships, rooted in place, and governed by mutual trust rather than distant authority.

The irony is painful: the very policies that claim to secure our futures are making it impossible for the people who actually care for life, be it through food, community, or craft to survive. Bureaucratic churn is replacing these beautiful human-centered businesses. Data replaces wisdom and compliance replaces care.

And so, this essay is a call: To bring relationships back into economics…To resist the seduction of streamlining and mechanisation and to honour the artisans, the growers, the givers, the oddballs, the ones who remember your name.

Let’s bring back the market stall, the hand-tool repairer, the baker who knows your bread. Let’s revive the practices that make life rich, not just efficient. The erosion of society is happening in these small disappearances. We must not sleep through it.

So here’s to the Bread Man!
And to every quiet contributor.
To those who still live and give with life.
May our choices, from where we shop to how we share, create a society that truly nourishes.
Not just profits, not just scale, but soul.

Con Viv in Bloom: Herbs, Community & Pluriverse Visions

By Dr. Demeter, Magical Farm Tasmania

For five consecutive years, a circle of us have gathered in the wilds of remote Tasmania: women, herbalists, permacultralists, earth-lovers, and seekers of slow, sacred ways. In these gatherings, under eucalypt canopies and beside crackling fires, we have shared food, stories, skills, seeds, and silence. Throughout the year, our connection continues through an online thread a lifeline of recipes, insights, tears, and laughter. What holds us together is not just our shared love of plants, but a collective inquiry: How do we live well and wisely in a world unraveling?

One evening, amidst this beloved circle, a question rose …. What herbs do we need to change the world?
“Comfrey,” said one herbal friend... “It reminds us of connection of knitting back what’s been torn.”…“Yarrow,” another offered…. “For integration it grows in the in-between places, like a bridge.” Then, after a soft pause, a wise herbal elder spoke. Her voice was slow and strong, rooted like a tree:
“We need all the herbs.”

Her words pierced something deep in me an echo of an ancient truth. They reminded me of the beautiful teaching of Arturo Escobar, who, drawing on Indigenous South American wisdom, speaks of “designs for the pluriverse.” He reminds us that healing will never come through one universal model but through many worlds, many ways, woven together in mutual respect and interdependence.

This circle, and this moment, encapsulate the heart of my philosophy: ‘Con Viv’ to live with life. Yes, I write often about the critique of the machine, the bureaucracy, the hollowing out of meaning by data and spin. But critique alone is not enough. We must also imagine, propose, and practice. And more than anything, we must listen to the more-than-human world. The plants our kin are not just medicine, metaphors, teachers and symbols.

To speak of comfrey, yarrow, chamomile, nettle, mugwort, elder, and calendula is to speak in the language of repair. Each herb is a thread in a wider tapestry, a mycelial strategy for healing. As fungi weave unseen networks beneath the soil, binding forests together, so too do we need a web of diverse responses to the crises we face: ecological, social, spiritual.

In that circle, we weren’t just naming herbs. We were naming possibilities. Remembering that diversity is resilience and it is not one solution, or one campaign, or one way of knowing that will heal this earth, but many.

All the herbs.

All the people.

All the ways of seeing.

May our gatherings, our gardens, our grief, and our gratitude continue to be part of this pluriversal healing. May we root deeply, reach widely, and remember that living with life means honouring complexity, not fearing it. The future is not yet written, but if we listen closely, the earth is whispering the next chapter through the plants.

With herbal hope,
Dr. Demeter
Magical Farm Tasmania

Whisper to the Earth for the World’s Wellbeing by Dr Demeter

A Blessing of Balance: Fire, Water, Earth, Air & Spirit. We gather at the edge of this moment…

By the light of Temperance,
we remember the sacred balance.
The gentle art of mixing what was broken
into something whole again. (Fire / Spirit)

By the warmth of the Sun,
we call forth joy without apology,
clarity without cruelty,
life without fear. (Fire)

By the hope of the Star,
we trust in renewal.
Even in darkness,
something luminous guides us home. (Air)

By the grace of the Waters,
we soften.
Tears, tides, and time all cleanse.
We bless the rivers, the oceans, the wombs. (Water)

By the roots of the Earth,
we come home to the body of belonging.
May our hands grow what is needed.
May our feet remember the song of the soil. (Earth)

We breathe into the ache of the Earth,
And offer our presence, not our panic.
From the East, clarity.
From the South, joy.
From the West, healing.
From the North, renewal.

May the children of tomorrow walk lightly.
May the elders of now speak gently.
May the seeds know we remembered them.

So be it.

By Regen Era Design Studio - rooted from Magical Farm Tasmania

“The Gate That Opened”

A quiet story of threshold and transformation. Amidst the winter stillness of Magical Farm, Dr Demeter reflects on an unexpected moment that opens something ancient in the heart, a remembering.
Through land, silence, and synchronicity, this piece reflects on the kind of presence that awakens us through resonance.

“The Gate That Opened”
By Dr. Demeter, Magical Farm Tasmania

There are some moments that don’t ask to be understood but only felt. Like a change in the wind, or the way light softens just before dusk. 

At Magical Farm, we speak of thresholds. Not the ones built with hinges and latches, but those invisible ones where a breath becomes a prayer, or a glance becomes a key. The heart knows when it has crossed one, even if the mind can’t explain how.

This one came quietly, a person, a pulse, a series of moments, events, synchronicities, patterns.
My body had a recognition, even an ancient memory before the event, amongst all the modern structures and routines. There were silent witnesses that have come to the surface, the land, yarrow kin, two whales, a special friend from Central Australia. These witnesses are from past, present across wide timelines, all woven together into a silent tune, a wayfinding song that is in my bones. 

A frequency, a tuning and a moment of warmth where my inner soil shifted and there was no turning back. 

What followed was not longing, but listening. To the farm, to the sky, to the parts of myself I had placed on a high shelf for safekeeping. They did not take them down. But their presence reminded me they were still there.

And so I walked more slowly. Breathed more deeply.  Planted seeds with less ambition, but more intention. The soil seemed to meet me differently, as if it too had heard something in that encounter.

Some people arrive like a storm and others like a soft bell. And some like a mirror you didn’t know you needed. They reflect back the part of you that longed for illumination and the large shadow that needed to softly dissolve.

At Magical Farm, we say the land remembers what we forget and in fact life, all life whatever shape, form or timeline can make us remember too. 

Conviv and Happy Winter Solstice x

Composting the Day: Energetic Hygiene in an Unwell World

By Dr. Demeter, Emily Samuels Ballantyne, Magical Farm Tasmania

There are days when speaking the truth feels like eating stones.

When your words, born from reverence and care, meet blank stares, passive aggression, or institutional walls. When the energy around you shifts not because you’ve done harm, but because you’ve revealed what others are unwilling to see.

The body feels heavy. Not with self-doubt, but with the imprint of unreceived presence.

In anthroposophical understanding, this is a kind of soul gravity. The astral body, when exposed to harsh energetic or moral dissonance, may recoil leaving the physical form to hold the echo. The ache. The weariness. The sense that something has landed in your bones that doesn’t belong to you.

Its important to find ways to release and renew and not resent. As we are all on a healing path and need to have compassion for the complexity we are living in. At Magical Farm, we call energetic cleansing work “composting the day”.

It is both a practice and a prayer: to take what was difficult, even degrading, and turn it into insight, humility, and fuel for the future. To remember that inner fire, like outer fire can both destroy and illuminate.

The Weight of the Unspoken: A Somatic Field Note

You are not wrong to feel heavy.

This is the weight of having integrity in a world that often rewards performance.

It’s not always our pride that suffers when we challenge dominant systems. Sometimes, it’s our nervous system. The sympathetic surge of being ‘othered’ in a meeting. The quiet adrenaline of holding your ground. The way the body holds that tension even after the mind has let go.

In anthroposophy, the body is not separate from the soul, it is its house and instrument. What we do not release becomes residue. What we do not compost becomes rot. So please compost!

🌿 A Ritual for Releasing the Weight of the Day

To support this composting process and digestion, I offer a small, simple ritual:

Evening Grounding Tea & Earth Offering

Ingredients:
– Skullcap (to calm the mental chatter)
– Marshmallow root (to soften the inner edges)
– Lemon balm (to lift the heart field)

1. Prepare a small pot of this blend and steep for 10–15 minutes.

2. As it brews, step outside barefoot if possible. Place your hand on the soil, a stone, or a tree.

3. Say quietly: “What does not serve may return to earth. May the energetic weight I carry become compost for the world’s becoming.”

4. Sip the tea slowly. Let the body feel received. Let the sky and earth take what is no longer yours to hold, they will support you to transmute.

Compost Prayer

Let the words I could not speak
sink down into the soil.
Let the weight I did not ask for
become a seed, not a burden.

May the ache in my neck and shoulders
be a sign I still care.
May the fire in my belly
light the hearth, not the war.

I give back what is not mine.
I keep only what roots.
The rest peacefully goes to,
to earth, to time, to stars.

and finally:

In the ancient Hawian Ho‘oponopono tradition, a profound practice of reconciliation and forgiveness is a traditional four-line prayer which you can repeat:

I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.

These phrases can be directed toward another person, oneself, or even toward land, memory, or spirit. In essence, it’s a practice of deep energetic cleansing.

Wayfinding Patterns Through the Eras

I have moments of deep grief about where our world is heading. But when I feel overwhelmed, I turn to deeper time for context, to ground myself in ancient rhythm and cosmic perspective. I wanted to share one ancient framework of Feng Shui that I draw on for love, courage, knowledge, and imagination.

Wayfinding Patterns Through the Eras is a reflective Solstice piece by Dr. Demeter that draws on ancient cosmologies, particularly Chinese Feng Shui to make sense of our current global moment. Exploring two full 180-year cycles, she reveals how the final fire phase we are now in (Period 9) offers not only cultural reckoning but the opportunity to compost 360 years of modernity. With love, courage, and cosmic guidance, this article invites us to dream forward a new Period 1 rooted in life systems remembered from ancient, land-connected cultures across the globe.

By Dr. Demeter
Founder, Magical Farm Tasmania & Regen Era Design
Winter Solstice Almanac Entry, Year Two of Period 9

Throughout this Almanac, I draw upon ancient her-stories and philosophies to orient us toward a future rooted in pattern recognition and planetary rhythm. While much of my regenerative work is inspired by Anthroposophical philosophy, particularly Rudolf Steiner’s great epochs of human and cosmic evolution, here I lean into another lineage of wisdom: Chinese Feng Shui, an art deeply rooted in astronomical and cosmological cycles.

As with many ancient cultures, the Chinese didn’t separate architecture, ethics, and astronomy; they saw them as one flowing mandala. Feng Shui was not just about interior design; it was a practice of attunement to heavenly bodies, earthly forms, and temporal rhythms.

Now, at the turning point of Period 9, we use this system not for fortune-telling, but for wayfinding for remembering that time itself is patterned, not linear. That our current crisis is also an opportunity to compost 360 years of civilisation-building and prepare for the spiritual return of water, community, and care.

Having these cosmic guidelines gives us hope that we are on the right track. We are meant to be letting go of what no longer serves us and dreaming forward a new Period 1 one rooted not in extraction, but in life systems that have long existed in pre-modern cultures across the globe. From Andean ayllus to First Nations kinship laws, from Taoist landscape harmony to the matriarchal rhythms of early Europe these blueprints have not disappeared. They are waiting.

Period 9 helps us see them again. Fire clears the way for memory to return. not for fortune-telling, but for wayfinding, for remembering that time itself is patterned, not linear. That our current crisis is also an opportunity to compost 360 years of civilisation-building and prepare for the spiritual return of water, community, and care.

Two Feng Shui Cycles: A Compass for Civilisation

In Classical Flying Star Feng Shui, time is woven into 9 periods of 20 years each, forming a grand 180-year cycle. We are now living through the final chapter of one of these cycles: Period 9 (2024–2044). But to understand the magnitude of this moment, we must look back two full cycles, 360 years of human transformation.

Cycle One (1864–2044): The Industrial Epoch

• Period 1 (1864–1884): Water ⛅️ — flow, birth — Dawn of modernity, mechanisation, steam.

• Period 2 (1884–1904): Earth ⛰️ — grounding, resource — Colonial expansion, land enclosure, railways.

• Period 3 (1904–1924): Thunder ⚡️ — uprising, youth — War, nationalism, cities surge.

• Period 4 (1924–1944): Wind 🌬️ — change, movement — Economic depression, fascism, mass propaganda.

• Period 5 (1944–1964): Earth ⛰️ — centre, planning — Post-war order, suburbia, welfare states.

• Period 6 (1964–1984): Heaven ☁️ — structure, vision — Cold War, fossil fuels, industrial peak.

• Period 7 (1984–2004): Lake 🌊 — reflection, pleasure — Neoliberalism, digitisation, global markets.

• Period 8 (2004–2024): Mountain ⛰ — stillness, retreat — Data capitalism, ecological warnings, burnout.

• Period 9 (2024–2044): Fire 🔥 — truth, purification — Cultural reckoning, illumination, spiritual fire.

Summary: This is the end of a civilisation forged by extraction, empire, and speed. We are now in the Fire Era, a time to burn what no longer serves and tend the sacred hearth of culture.

Another Begins (2044–2224): The Return to the Waters

• Period 1 (2044–2064): Water ⛅️ — spiritual depth — Return of wisdom, land-based healing.

• Period 2 (2064–2084): Earth ⛰️ — collective design — Bioregional systems, reciprocity, rooted life.

• Period 3 (2084–2104): Thunder ⚡️ — activation, youth — Decentralised tech, cultural renewal from below.

• Period 4 (2104–2124): Wind 🌬️ — storytelling, movement — Regenerative education, memory work, kin-making.

• Periods 5–9 (2124–2224): To be composted and dreamt. The unknown futures seeded now. To be composted and dreamt | The unknown futures seeded now 

Summary: This next cycle will not be built on concrete and code alone. It must be designed from the compost of care, memory, and place.

Regen Era Design: Tending the Fire of Period 9

We are one year into Period 9, the final 20-year chapter before the cycle turns. This is not just a turning of time, but a turning of civilisation.

Regen Era Design (Magical farm’s design studio) lives here:

• In the fire of cultural renewal.

• In the compost of old systems.

• In the preparation of vessels for the waters to come.

We are not trend-makers. We are future-weavers.

Let us design for 2044 with love, courage, knowledge, imagination and vision. It is the portal.

The Art of Peace: Activism Beyond Binaries and Performances

by Dr Demeter (Emily Samuels-Ballantyne)

Everyday Life Series; Piece 1

Synopsis:

This article examines the limitations of contemporary Green politics, particularly its propensity for urgency, reaction, and spectacle, which often disconnects it from the ecological wisdom it seeks to uphold. Drawing on Arturo Escobar's concept of the pluriverse, it advocates for design practices rooted in autonomy, emergence, and care, emphasising the importance of Indigenous knowledge systems in shaping regenerative futures.

Thank you to Ness Vandebourgh Photography for collaborating with me, for serveral years now.

The discussion delves into the physiological and spiritual significance of breath, referencing Rudolf Steiner's view of imagination as a spiritual organ of perception and the role of the vagus nerve in fostering relational awareness. It critiques the commodification of crisis, as analysed by Naomi Klein, and underscores the necessity of addressing the underlying spiritual wounds that fuel societal polarisation.

By integrating insights from thinkers like Vandana Shiva, Tyson Yunkaporta, David Abram, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, the article calls for a reimagining of activism and governance, one that prioritises soil over slogans, ceremonies over campaigns, and listening to life itself. It culminates in a series of regenerative scenarios that envision systems designed for reciprocity, relationality, and belonging.

This piece is particularly relevant activists engaged in environmental campaigns. It invites a reflection on how activism can evolve beyond reactionary modes to embrace practices that are deeply rooted in ecological and spiritual consciousness.

Breath as the Seed of Imagination

Breathe.
Not the scroll-breath of panic,
but the slow breath of soil,
deep, rhythmic, remembering.

This isn’t just a paper.
It’s a seed. A signal.
A call back to what we already know
but forgot how to carry.

The world is shouting.
But wisdom is quiet.
Roots do not grow in noise.

True activism is not reaction.
It is human.
A sacred belonging
to the human spirit and the living earth.

Let your body read this too.
Let your grief have space.
Let your breath find its rhythm.

We are not here to perform.
We are here to re-weave.
To root.
To remember how to live.

The Performance of Protest

I have stood inside campaigns. I have crafted some observations. What I witnessed, time and again, was a pattern:

• A crisis emerges.

• Campaigns react.

• Politicians gesture.

• The system absorbs the outrage.

• And the root remains untouched.

There is rarely room for the root causes: global economic entanglements, industrial legacies seeded in war, and extractive models that reproduce suffering. There is rarely space for social imagination, that precious power to see and seed a world beyond reaction.

Instead, activism itself has become enmeshed in capitalism. As Marx warned, capitalism absorbs its own critiques to perpetuate itself. Resistance becomes a brand. Dissent becomes a product. What begins as a movement can easily be co-opted as a marketing mechanism.

The capitalist system thrives on crisis. It commodifies unrest, turning rebellion into spectacle and symbols into products. As Guy Debord warned in The Society of the Spectacle, even our dissent becomes something to be watched, consumed, and sold back to us. We march, tweet, and purchase in a cycle that often reinforces the very systems we aim to dismantle. Activism, stripped of deeper relationality, risks becoming performance, loud, visible, but ultimately absorbed by the machinery of branding.

 Activism as Echo, Not Emergence

We now wear our identities like merch. Follow hashtags like liturgies. Perform concern, retweet rage, and call it change.

There is a commodification of dissent, the monetisation of suffering, and the branding of belonging, which have all distorted the deep purpose of activism: to reweave the social fabric. We are called to move beyond campaigns that perform change, toward cultures that become change.

The War in the Soul

The protest signs are louder. The camps are multiplying. The online declarations, more urgent than ever. But somewhere between the slogans and the solidarity posts, something quietly slips away: our humanity.

I write not from above, but within. Within the contradictions of activism, the ache of injustice, the mess of trying to live with integrity in a collapsing world. I know what it means to want to scream, to be furious at the systems that break bodies and silence truths. I’ve been there, policy rooms, protest lines, quiet kitchens where grief is folded into dinner.

And still, I offer a question:

What if the real war isn’t over there?
What if it’s in here?

What happens when the performance of suffering becomes part of the economy? When does conflict itself become a funding model? When causes become currency?

Campaigns Without Culture

What I have seen missing, over and over again, is a cultural substrate that holds space for dreaming. For visioning. For emergence. As Joanna Macy writes in Active Hope, we are called not to optimism, but to participation in the great turning, an active stance of courage and imagination in the face of uncertainty. Without this deeper orientation, we risk reproducing the very crises we seek to transform. Activism becomes reaction instead of relation. Movement without ground. Sound without song.

Well-meaning people within the system are often bound by its architecture. The political cycle does not lend itself to soul repair, soil restoration, or long-form healing. As David Suzuki has long warned, these systems are wired for short-term gain, not ecological wisdom. They reward control over care, and performance over presence. They cannot easily direct hundreds of millions to the commons because the system was never designed for nourishment, it was designed for extraction.

In contrast, Masanobu Fukuoka’s life work reminds us that true transformation arises not through domination, but through a radical trust in nature’s own intelligence. His “do-nothing farming” was not laziness, it was rebellion. A refusal to conform to systems that seek to control what is meant to be sacred.

We need a different foundation, one that roots in relational time, not reactionary cycles. We need to reorient toward the long time: the wisdom of seven generations forward and seven generations back. As many Indigenous knowledge systems remind us, true governance is not about immediate gains, but the continuity of life.

Without foundational investment in cultural imagination, ecological belonging, and social repair, we simply replicate trauma through new slogans. We must break the loop not through more data, but through deeper dreaming.

Reclaiming the Priestess Path

Before we had parliaments and party platforms, we had vision keepers. In ancestral and First Nations cultures, dreaming councils were held. Wisdom was gathered by listening, not just to the people, but to the stars, the soil, and the spirits of place. Not activists, but oracles. Not campaigners, but weavers of what was needed seven generations ahead.

Marg O’Neill reminds us that the First Nations imagination is steeped in thousands of years of sacred observation of plants, fire, astronomy, law, design, innovation, and Country. These are not abstract ideas. They are living technologies, rooted in ritual and place. This is politics not of identity, but of lore. Sacred lore.

This is not about returning to the past. It is about remembering your presence. The priestess path is not a role, it is a rhythm. It is the ability to midwife culture rather than demand policy.

Regenerative Activism as Social Imagination

As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.” We must dare to imagine again. Not simply as an escape, but as a method of survival and renewal. As John Lennon dreamed, "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."

We propose a new kind of activism:

• One rooted in long rhythms, not click cycles.

• One that composts conflict, not monetises it.

• One that weaves policy with poetry, land with law, economics with myth.

Let us fund scenario weavers, not just frontline warriors. Let us protect imaginative space, not just reactive media.Let us reallocate philanthropy toward the roots: storytelling, ceremony, scenario, soil.

Because without a culture that knows how to dream, we will keep mistaking movement for meaning. And yet, this isn’t only a systems crisis it’s a soul crisis. Beneath the policies and protests, something deeper stirs: the war within. To change the world, we must begin with the terrain of the heart.

Underneath the Outrage:

“The spectacle feeds on our attention. But healing asks for our presence”.

Breath: The Architecture of Becoming

When the breath is fast, we react.
When the breath is slow, perception changes.
The nervous system steadies. Imagination opens.
This is not performance. It is pattern recognition.

As Steiner taught, transformation begins in the etheric where breath, rhythm, and life-force shape what becomes manifest. This is activism as an organism. Alive to the seasons. Aligned with time. Rooted in moral imagination as a force of evolution.

In an age of outrage and fragmentation, the breath is revolutionary not metaphorically, but physiologically. The vagus nerve, the core of our parasympathetic system, connects brain, heart, lungs, and gut. It governs our capacity to rest, relate, and respond with presence. When we regulate the breath, we activate the body’s innate intelligence, its ability to discern, to digest, to connect.

Both Zen Buddhist practitioners and contemporary neuroscientists have arrived at the same insight: conscious breathing opens the gateway to awareness. Zazen, the practice of seated meditation, invites us to return to the breath not to escape the world, but to enter it more clearly, without illusion.

Rudolf Steiner, often miscast as merely esoteric, was in fact a trained scientist, a chemist and philosopher of deep empirical rigor. His understanding of the rhythmic system, the interplay of breath and heartbeat positioned this middle realm as the seat of human balance. When breath becomes conscious, the etheric body is strengthened, and the self becomes anchored in life. He recognised that in slowing the breath, we move closer to carbon, the element that connects us to the plant world. This isn't a poetic suggestion, it’s biochemistry. And it is sacred. 

When there is fear, reaction, and outrage, the breath becomes short and shallow anchored in the chest. But when there is love, courage, and knowledge, the breath deepens. It moves from the belly, from the soil of the body itself. This shift is not just emotional…it is biological. It is the difference between surviving and regenerating. To breathe with awareness is to refuse the pace and violence of a system that thrives on disconnection. It is a radical act of remembering: that we belong to the soil, the body, and the living field between.

Beyond the Spectacle: Reclaiming Green Politics from the Hollow Centre.

And here lies the great irony: we call it Green politics, yet so often it is driven by urgency, reactivity, and spectacle detached from the ecological wisdom it claims to honour. It speaks of the Earth but forgets to listen to her. It campaigns in weeks and quarters, while the land speaks in seasons and centuries.

Here I offer a woven basket of ideas in offering to change and decision makers from wise ones from all around the world:

As Vandana Shiva has long warned, environmentalism that fails to ground itself in soil, seed, and sovereignty risks becoming another expression of control. When Green politics aligns with corporate interests or trades spiritual depth for marketable messaging, it drifts from the Earth it claims to defend. Shiva reminds us that true regeneration begins beneath our feet with biodiversity, local knowledge, and reverence for life.

Tyson Yunkaporta pushes us further, exposing how even well-meaning activism can reproduce the logics of empire. In Sand Talk, he challenges the binary thinking of left and right, and instead calls us into pattern, relation, and kinship with land and time. “Real change,” he writes, “doesn’t look like slogans. It looks like a ceremony, like sitting still long enough for a tree to call you kin.”

David Abram, too, asks us to slow down and feel the pulse of the living Earth through our own bodies. In The Spell of the Sensuous, he reminds us that ecology is not a field of study, it is a field of perception. That the breath, the wind, the scent of soil—these are our first languages. To speak of green futures without recovering our sensual, embodied relationship with the more-than-human world is to speak in abstraction.

And Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, with luminous clarity, invites us to move not through reaction but through resurgence. For Simpson, real transformation is not policy reform, it is a return to Indigenous relationality: to land-based knowledge, to stories encoded in place, to ancestral time. “Our theories,” she writes, “are in our practices. Our practices are in our bodies.”

So what might Green politics become if it truly centred ecological systems and the worldviews of First Nations peoples?

It would move at the speed of trust. It would prioritise soil before slogans, ceremonies before campaigns. It would honour the migratory memory of whales, the slow language of fungi, the fire cycles held in Country. It would resist the performance of progress and listen, instead, to life itself.

Let us build peace like we build compost: with what we’ve lost, with what’s rotting, with what still holds life. Let us remember that true transformation is not viral. It is relational. It is embodied. It is slow.

Imagination as Organ of Design

True imagination is not escapism, it is the seedbed of form. As Rudolf Steiner taught, imagination is a spiritual organ, capable of perceiving and shaping reality through inwardly active pictures. In this sense, design becomes a moral act: not merely arranging matter, but expressing meaning, relationship, and intention.

As Arturo Escobar suggests in Designs for the Pluriverse, we must design “for the real and possible worlds envisioned by those who struggle for autonomy.” Not through domination, but through emergence, reciprocity, and care.

If the current architecture is built on control, we must imagine new foundations, an architecture of belonging. One that centres care, culture, and the commons. Where governance is relational, not extractive. Where food, energy, housing, and health are stewarded as sacred responsibilities, not commodities.

This is not utopianism. It is what Masanobu Fukuoka called “the path of return”, a remembering of our place in the web of life. As David Suzuki warns, systems built on short-term gain cannot regenerate long-term life. And as Joanna Macy teaches, Active Hope invites us to move not from optimism, but from the courage to participate in the Great Turning.

Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that true regeneration is rooted in reciprocity: with the land, with each other, and with time itself. To plan for seven generations is not a poetic gesture: it is a practical, necessary act of love.

And so, offered here are these 16 scenarios not as blueprints, but as seeds. Not as forecasts, but as invitations.
Each one asks:

• What if our systems were designed for reciprocity, not extraction?

• What if policymaking began not with profit, but with place?

• What if we remembered how to belong?

16 Scenarios for Regenerative Rebellion

These are not prescriptions. They are seeds.Sketches of a new spiral. A vision for seven generations forward and seven generations back, held in the palm of now.

These are the kinds of futures we must fund, not as utopia, but as necessary departures from collapse.Not from blueprints, but from living designs. To imagine differently is not indulgent…it is urgent! 

Design, in this context, is not aesthetic. It is cosmological. It is the courage to enter unknown morphic fields. To follow the intelligence of mycelium; decentralised, adaptive, relational. To let forest thinking shape our policy making. To let imagination root into governance like compost into spring soil. This is not fiction. This is what ecology has always known.That regeneration begins in pattern, not just in protest.

1. The Listening Feast
In a peri-urban eco-village, disillusioned activists host a seasonal meal with farmers, elders, and teenagers from opposing views. Each guest brings a story, not a solution. The feast becomes an act of rebellion against the algorithm.
Dialogue becomes resistance.

2. The Seed Library at the Edge of Town
An abandoned petrol station is transformed into a solar-powered seed and tool share. Once a site of extraction, now a sanctuary for regeneration. Graffiti becomes mural. Concrete cracks give rise to calendula.
The commons rise again.

3. The Spiral School
Children learn maths through moon phases, history through ancestral songs, and ethics through compost. Parents attend too, relearning what it means to relate, not just regulate.
Education becomes initiation.

4. The Boat with No Flag
A hand-built wooden boat sets out not with slogans, but with musical instruments, soil, and stories. It docks in coastal villages, offering healing songs and seasonal seeds. It follows the whales, not the war.
Movement without conquest.

5. The Mourning Hut
On the edge of a burned forest, people gather in silence. No phones. No speeches. Just grief, held by song and smoke. Activists light beeswax candles for every extinct species remembered.
Grief becomes a ritual of repair.

6. The Rewilded Union Hall
Former labour organisers, artists, and healers reclaim a derelict building and declare it a Rewilding Hub. Pay is in harvest. Power is by consensus. Strikes are sacred days of planting.
Solidarity with soil.

7. The Pomegranate Tree Circle
In a courtyard between histories, a pomegranate tree grows. Once a site of tension, the land becomes a threshold. Elders from many lineages, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druze, sit in a wide circle beneath its fruit-heavy branches. They bring stories, recipes, lullabies, seeds. Children play between the roots. The tree holds their silence and their singing. No slogans, no sides…just the slow weaving of soil and soul.

Peace here is not a treaty, but a tending. A return to what was once shared: water, land, song, shelter.

8. The Whale Choir
A circle of intergenerational singers gathers under the full moon near sea cliffs. They mimic whale calls, transmitting them across radio waves, into homes and hearts.
The ocean sings us home.

9. The Ghost Office
Former public servants, burned out by bureaucracy, form a shadow working group to write visionary policy from the margins. They channel the future in poetic briefs.
Governance with soul.

10. The Temporal Embassy
A bus painted like a mycelium network travels town to town. Inside: a listening booth, a tea station, a storytelling couch. People offer memories and visions to a growing archive.
Time becomes terrain.

11. The Ex-Banker’s Garden
In Berlin, a former hedge fund manager turns his villa into a permaculture site. He hosts underground salons where whistleblowers, economists, and Earth stewards plot financial transitions.
Capital composted.

12. The School Beyond Sanctions
On the edge of a war-torn zone, women and elders build a bilingual school from the rubble. They teach literacy, herbal medicine, solar cooking, and peacebuilding rituals.
Education becomes sanctuary.

13. The Desert Treaty
In North Africa, nomadic farmers displaced by climate collapse gather under tents. They trade seeds, stories, and seasonal wisdom. Enemies become allies through legumes.
Food becomes diplomacy.

14. The Underground Orchestra
Beneath a global city, youth form a rebel orchestra in a decommissioned subway. There are no lyrics, only drums, strings, whale-song and rhythm.
Culture becomes counter-infrastructure.

15. The Spiral Embassies
In global capitals, Spiral Embassies arise, hosted by elders, peacebuilders, and ecologists. They hold ritual, dialogue, and belonging for displaced people and dreamers alike.
Borders dissolve into being.

16. The Earth Council Rebellion
In a forest clearing, under planetary transits, a group gathers, scientists, mystics, farmers, coders, and storytellers. They plot not a protest, but a planetary council. A parallel framework.
Realignment with Earth law.

These are not fantasies. They are frequencies. They hum in the soul of those who remember what it means to belong to Earth.This is not a return to the past. It is a return to presence. A rebellion not just against injustice, but against disconnection.

In the words of Steiner, “Imagination is truth.” And in the whispers of ancestors and starlit seeds alike: We are already becoming the future.

Let us meet war in the soul with warmth in the soil. Let us compost the empire with ritual. Let us become the force we’ve been waiting for.

 May we rage into ritual.
Grieve into growth.
Rebel into renewal.

Dr Demeter

Magical Farm Tasmania and Regenera Commons

www.magicalfarm.org 

www.regeneracommons.org  

Dr. Demeter | Emily Samuels Ballantyne is an eco-philosopher, regenerative designer and farmer, and founder of Magical Farm Tasmania and Regenera Commons. She is the author of the forthcoming series Soil & Soul. Since the age of 11, Emily has been active in the global peace network Asian-Pacific Children’s Convention, serving as a Junior Ambassador, later as a Peace Ambassador in her twenties, and as a chaperone for children in her thirties.

Festive Agriculture: A day of fostering community food resilience at Magical Farm Tasmania

by Jacob McCormack, Interdisciplinary creative and story-teller www.jacobmccormack.com

Helena Nordberg-Hodge has become renowned globally for the time she has spent taking action locally. Her pioneering shift from global to local economies began in her time spent living in Ladakhi community in Northern India. The decades spent there, as well as her studies in linguistics that in fact led her to Ladakh resulted in the creation of Local Futures – an international charity that empowers communities to regenerate ecological and social wellbeing. This is proposed mainly through shifting the economic structure and hyperlocalising such, but what remains paramount in the process of gravitating towards localisation is food. 

Food is the meridian that connects all. It allows humans to connect to earth, to the soil and the biome that generates or supports all life. It also acts as a pillar for conviviality, that is the sharing of food as a means of celebrating life. Yet food can also act as an alternative to currency, radically shifting the globalised monetised paradigm of contemporary society. 

On March 23, 2025, Festive Agriculture was hosted at Magical Farm. It was birthed by the implementation of food as connective tissue and Helena Nordberg-Hodge attending as an esteemed guest. Within the name Festive Agriculture resides the very notion that food, particularly when it grows from an agrarian application, requires celebration. This event acted as just that, but it also offered the opportunity to come together as a community and build resilience through localisation. 

It’s important to note that amidst the catastrophic weather events of flood and drought at opposite ends of Australia the flaws of a national (and often international) supply chain system have been pronounced more than ever. Not only is it vital to create food systems that afford security in their localised form, but a localised food system also allows for connection to growers and minimised environmental damage due to fewer miles expended in order to access food. 

Festive Agriculture invites us to reclaim farming as a living celebration, one that honours the cosmic and seasonal rhythms weaving through soil, sky and society. Drawing on Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamic insights, ancient harvest festivals from Shinto rice-planting to Andean Inti Raymi, and Indigenous sky-country calendars, this practice understands each farm and community as a unique spiritual individuality, attuned not only to material needs but to planetary forces and ancestral wisdom. By hosting solstice celebrations, seed swaps and communal meals, Festive Agriculture weaves food into the very fabric of cultural resilience, grounding modern localisation efforts in ceremonial and convivial joy and ecological stewardship. In the southern hemisphere, it challenges us to reinterpret northern-based festivals through local seasonal arcs and First Nations cosmologies, offering fertile ground for co-created rituals that nurture both place-based identity and regenerative futures.

The day itself allowed for a full expression of what contributes to community. Palawa man Jason Andrew Smith welcomed us all onto the land with a smoking ceremony, inviting us onto it to create a new story throughout the course of the day. A musical welcome ensued, led by Arcana Rose and her accompanying harp, only for an invitation to engage in a day-long weaving exercise instructed by Bindi using local weeds and New Zealand flax. A crop swap led by Cygnet local Kate Flint introduced many new-to-the-concept folk to an altruistic exchange of all things, specifically food. This particular aspect of the event provided a focus on how it is that seasonal gluts and high quantities of resources can allow for equal abundance and sustenance for all the community.

It was then time for a communal meal as an interlude to the day’s unfurlings. A pot-luck style feast truly exemplified the potency food carries to enact and foster connection. A brimming success that transitioned into a conversation with Helena Nordberg-Hodge wrapped in the openness of a circle. Urgency was emphasised in the need to build resilience in community, especially when it comes to resources such as food, water and habitat, and yet as the conversation allowed many found the opportunity to contribute in ways that honoured them.

This discussion spilled into the mycelial exchange – a market-type arrangement of varying stalls that showcased local farmers, artists and organisations such as biodynamics Tasmania. The exchange provided further opportunity for connection that led to closing discussions and a collective moment of music and song. 

It seems easy to become tethered to the current system that disempowers and fractures the community, after all it has been set up that way intentionally so. However, events like this and adjacent expressions of communal connection allow for the true potential of life to be experienced. There is a brightness in a future ahead that presides in localisation.

Film: Festive Agriculture: Returning to the Rhythm of the Earth

Filmed on the regenerative and biodynamic grounds of Magical Farm Tasmania in lutruwita, the Festive Agriculture film by Anna Mata weaves together soil, seed, silence and story, capturing a season in the life of a farm that is more than a place: it is a living being, that can be part of transforming community life and economies.

Filmed at Magical Farm Tasmania during the inaugural Festive Agriculture Day, this short film captures a profound gathering of community, culture, and land. Anchored by a collaboration with renowned localisation pioneer Helena Norberg-Hodge, the film offers a quiet yet powerful portrait of what happens when people reconnect with food, place, and one another.

Through weaving, seed swapping, shared meals, song, and ceremonial welcome, Festive Agriculture reminds us that regeneration is not just a technical process, it is a celebration. Set against the backdrop of Tasmania’s heart-shaped island, and interwoven with biodynamic and First Nations wisdom, this film invites viewers to reimagine agriculture as a living festival of place, story, and possibility.

Phenomenology of Life: Plants, Planets & People

Dr Demeter had the pleasure of being in magical conversation with visionary astrologer Jaime Lee from the USA. Jaime Lee | Intuitive Astrology with Jaime. In our conversation we wove a tapestry of interconnected ideas with each other about plants, planets and bio-dynamic agriculture.

In relation to our conversation about science 'catching up' with sacred cultures, arts and agriculture this quote resonates:

““The New Story emerging in quantum physics tells us that the whole universe is a unified field. Our lives are part of a cosmic web of life which connects all life forms in the universe and on our planet. Every atom of life interacts with every other atom, no matter how distant. We are not only connected through the Internet but through the infinitesimal particles of sub-atomic matter. We are part of an ‘Infinitude of Consciousness’ which sustains not only our world, but the entire universe. This restores the original cosmology of the Great Mother at a new level of understanding.”

— Anne Baring

For thousands of years across all cultures humans have had an intrinsic interconnection with the stars, their agricultural practices and with their own bodily rhythms. Modernity has brought a mechanistic and industrial way of living that has disconnected us from our innate connection with life. We are now at a crucial point in our planets ‘herstory’ / ‘history’ to define are role as humans on Gaia.

Gaia, The Oxford English Dictionary defines this as “the global ecosystem, understood to function in the manner of a vast self-regulating organism, in the context of which all living things collectively define and maintain the conditions conducive for life on earth”.

Through my practices of herbalism, astrology and biodynamics, I am observing the tangible interconnectedness of life systems, as above so below. The diagram below is an illustration of just some of these connections and an exploration into the beauty and phenomenology of life rhythms. I look forward to continuing my observations, learnings and beautiful experiences through my connection to these activities.

The interconnectedness of Life, through practices and lens of astronomy, astrology, biodynamics, herbalism and holistic health.

“Lovelock’s Gaia theory states that, for much of the past 3.8 billion years, a holistic feedback system has played out in the biosphere, with life forms regulating temperature and proportions of gases in the atmosphere to life’s advantage”

— Nature Journal

Earth system science is now firmly established as a valuable intellectual framework for understanding the only planet known to harbour life, and increasingly vulnerable to the unthinking actions of one species. Colleagues and co-authors acknowledge that the argument continues, but endorse the importance of Lovelock and Margulis”. Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01969-y

Planets and their dance around the Earth

Biodynamics agricultural practices offer a tangible way for engaging with Gaia and the Cosmos.

Herbalism is another way of engaging into life systems. Plants teach us the ‘way’ of Gaia. As illustrated in the following meme, books can teach us in theory about the phenomenology of life and the medicinal benefits of plants. However plants growing around us go that extra way of teaching us about life systems, leading to us going deeper within ourselves and connecting to life in new ways than before. This is one theory about why ancient cultures knew which plants were connected to each planet because of being tuned on intuitive levels as well as more subtle observations about planetary positions and plant activations in correlation.

Food Forest Emergency? Or Tissue Emergency?

By Dr Demeter

Emergency?

What Emergency? Oh…didn’t you hear…we are having a major shortage of tissues, paper towel & toilet paper. Check out this quote :

“This increased demand is once again putting added pressure on supply chains, drying up tissue supplies, and leaving many shoppers frustrated.

One frustrated shopper took to Twitter to ask why more people weren’t discussing the “great tissue and paper towel shortage” of 2022. I can’t believe nobody is talking about the great tissue and paper towel shortage in supermarkets at the moment. Are people using tissues in place of lettuce or what?” the shopper wrote” via this mainstream link https://au.news.yahoo.com/woolworths-and-coles-shelves-stripped-of-tissues-as-flu-season-hits-054233896.html

Meanwhile local government authorities are telling us to spray and weed-out Mullein aka “Cowboy toilet paper” - not only can you wipe your fundament with this amazing plant, you can also make herbal teas (and more) that are of benefit to your lungs. This plant can grow beautifully among a diverse array of other beautiful plant species that also bring benefit to our wellbeing and helps us to avoid having to go to the supermarket for many items.

Quite seriously, the emergency we are facing requires acton not as “shoppers” but as co-creators with our environment; whether you are rural, urban, suburban - the critical thing to do right now is to grow a food forest!

Below I will share with you some research on food forests and its not just because my pen name is Dr Demeter that I am advocating this. Its just commonsense to face the complex challenges of the world that we have right now integral solutions, and unfortunately for the tissue and toilet paper industry they are not going to cut the cheese on these issues.

Lets explore what a food forest is and lets get to work and make one in our community, home or school…

The people in the below video eat 70% of their food from their food forest!

What is a Food Forest… according to Project Food Forest

“A food forest, also called a forest garden, is a diverse planting of edible plants that attempts to mimic the ecosystems and patterns found in nature. Food forests are three dimensional designs, with life extending in all directions – up, down, and out.

Generally, we recognize seven layers of a forest garden – the overstory, the understory, the shrub layer, the herbaceous layer, the root layer, the ground cover layer, and the vine layer. Some also like to recognize the mycelial layer, layer eight (mushrooms). Using these layers, we can fit more plants in an area without causing failure due to competition.

A food forest does not have to be re-planted year after year. Once it is established, it is generally very resilient. Wildlife might come and munch some of the herbaceous edibles in some areas, for example, but other species will not be palatable to them or will be out of their reach. Or perhaps some children will come running through the area in wild play, running off path and possibly causing some damage to the ground cover and herbaceous layers. Not only will they usually grow right back, since many will be perennials and have healthy underground systems, but the trees, shrubs, and vines should be undamaged.”

“In summary, We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

— Albert Einstein

The industrial supply chain does not have the capability to solve the complex issues we face - however taking a living systems lens on the way we design our life can be a way to address challenges such as social isolation, physical health, local economic development. Covid has shown us we need to take back more autonomy over our lives and toilet paper or lack there of must NOT the priority focus of our attention … !

Tarkind Community Art Project Reflection

Words by DR DEMETER

Photography by NESS VANDERBURGH PHOTOGRAPHY

““Ecology becomes poetic when the creative expression of other beings stirs our own desire to become expressive, to unearth words, pictures, and melodies for this sublime experience of aliveness. When you encounter the azure plumage of a peacock, you enter a creative exchange. It is not passive, but is instead an invitation to participate in the radical poetic beauty of the world… it is about entering into and participating in the world that lies before and among you with a profound level of engagement and care”

— Andreas Weber

On Sunday 5th of June, the first annual Tarkind community art event took place to celebrate takanya/Tarkine. Tarkind initiative is all about Heart, Art and Science with the takayna / Tarkine forest in Tasmania. Our values go further than the forest: We are creating a community who values kindness for living systems: ourselves, one another, all ecologies, past & future generations. We host an annual children's art & citizen science initiatives. Go to www.tarkind.org for more information.

Reconciliation Week had just completed on the 3rd and World Environment was on the 5th. A special time to convene with Gemma O’ Rourke (an Artist, Healer and Yoga Teacher. She creates and teaches drawing on her Shamanic connection to Mother Earth and the wisdom of Celtic and palawa ancestors). And Dr Keith Martin-Smith invertebrate biologist who is a passionate teacher and photographer. Tarkind is an emergent project, my family and I met Dr Keith Martin-Smith in takanya/Tarkine in late 2021 as a part of the Bob Brown Foundations Bioblitz. Over the Summer we connected with Gemma O’Rourke and from here Tarkind was born.

Celebration of the artists works with the Tarkind banner by Gemma O’Rourke.

the day in reflection

We gathered in the takanya inspired part of the Hobart Botanical Gardens with Gemma O’ Rourke, who shared a beautiful welcome to country, sharing stories with us about the sophisticated and loving connections First Nations people had with the land for approximately 60 thousand years. The cultural story is a significant one when we talk about takanya - it is hard to express and comprehend the depth of connection First Nations people had. Feeling with our hearts into this space and imagining how profoundly different the world can be if more people had this connection. We have deep gratitude to Gemma for her sharing. In reflection: how can animistic cultures guide the process of western self-decolonisation?

Biophilosopher Weber articulates that love - the impulse to establish connections, to intermingle, to weave our existence poetically together with that of other beings is a foundational principle of reality. The fact in modern life there is a disregard of this principle, lies at the core of a global crisis of meaning and ecological devastation - leading to the avalanche of species loss and in our belief that the world is a dead mechanism controlled through economic efficiency - hence the state of takanya today, which is threatened by destruction by mining and logging.

Following our Welcome to Country we went to the POD where Dr Keith Martin-Smith gave an insightful presentation about life in the forest, prior to making art.

The first art activity was a group Reconciliation canvas led by Gemma O’Rourke. Each person placed their hand on the canvas and imprinted it with chalk and reflected on what Reconciliation meant to them.

As part of Reconciliation Week this piece of art will be gifted to the Riawunna Centre at UTAS.

Artists then began to paint their own pieces based on the knowledge shared with them from Gemma and Keith about takanya. What emerged was a beautiful process of creativity, connection, collaboration and clarity!

A beautiful process and much to celebrate.

We will now run an exhibition on Saturday July 2nd, 2pm - 5pm at KIN CREATIVE SPACE at Kingston Beach Hall, Tasmania. Thank you to everyone for making the day so special and creating awareness about takanya. Thank you to Gemma O’Rouke, Dr Keith Martin-Smith, Tatjana Pejic, Emily Wood, Danielle Gilbert-Beynon, Jodi Henry, Yehuda Samuels & all parents for making it such a special day.

Introducing a project close to my Heart: Tarkind

by Dr Demeter

Friday May 6th 2022

https://www.tarkind.org Launch by Magical Farm

Tarkind: Education, Storytelling & Exploration about Living Systems

The Tarkind vision and mission is to connect with takanya / Tarkine forest in North West Tasmania as a community with a heart, head and hands approach of education. We will host an annual collective art project based in Hobart and a citizen science project based in Corinna in the takanya / Tarkine. Both of these initiatives will connect our participants to the interconnected and cutting edge wisdom and science of living systems.

Living systems are all around us, at a microscopic level all the way up to a planetary level. Within living systems wisdom we can uncover critical knowledge for the design of regenerative systems. At the heart of the Tarkind project is to educate on this topic. I am passionate about this subject area, the people I meet in the process and the emergent possibilities that we humans can create to design a better world.

As Fritjof Capra describes: “Throughout the living world, we find living systems nesting within other living systems.” Linked to this thinking is The Gaia Hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock (1972) suggesting that living organisms on the planet interact with their surrounding inorganic environment to form a synergetic and self-regulating system that created, and now maintains, the climate and biochemical conditions that make life on Earth possible. Lovelock described in 1979 “the entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.” – Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth.

As Capra describes: One recurrent theme discussed by systems practitioners is the question of why it is so difficult to help people make the jump from a mechanistic world view to a networked world view. In this new systems view of life, we have to change our understanding of living systems as machines to a view where cognition plays a role in dynamic and autopoietic processes.

Cognition, then, is not a representation of an independent existing world, but rather a continual bringing forth of a world through the process of living. p256 A Systems View of Life, Capra

The notion of “bringing forth a world” can be compared with the way in Capra and Maria describe as holonomic thinking.

I believe as a heartfelt and caring community we can connect in a practical way through art&science and with the forest to create better understanding, empathy and even strategies to address the critical problems we need to solve in the future. I am looking forward to going on this journey with you, First Nations people and with the forest, in dialogue and in kindness.

We will be launching Tarkind on Sunday 5th of May at the Hobart Botanical Gardens in the POD. There will be two art sessions run on the day. Between 10am - 12midday and 1pm - 3pm. We will be painting art with guidance from local artist Gemma O’Rourke and biologist Dr Keith Martin-Smith.

Tarkind project collaborator and advisor Gemma O’Rourke local artist and Melukerdee woman shares the process of development of this art piece for Tarkind. “it was inspired by a brief that wanted to portray inclusiveness, friendliness, kindness and particular engagement for children…It is hand drawn with chalk and pastels. The chalk/pastel look I feel is very approachable and endearing for kids. They feel a sense of ownership... I took inspiration from the Moss Beetle (Dr Keith Martin-Smith’s Photograph) in terms of colours and form, weaving her into and around the TARKIND name, intermingled, interwoven , interconnected, vibrant matter. The colurs and patterns from her exterior reflecting cosmic shapes to the wildness of down deep Tarkine terrain.

Background information about takanya / Tarkine

“takanya / Tarkine is a vast expanse in a wilderness wonderland of wild rivers, dramatic coastal heathlands, button grass plains, bare mountains, ancient Huon pines, giant eucalypts and myrtles and extraordinary horizontal scrub. It is home to rare and endangered birds - like the orange-bellied parrot and the white goshawk - and countless animals such as the eastern pygmy possum. 40,000 years takanya has been home to the Tasmanian Aboriginal tarkiner people who inhabited the Sandy Cape region of this island’s wild west coast. The name Tarkine means belonging to, or of the tarkiner”

— Tarkine by WWF / Discover the Tarkine

The Tarkine is the second largest temperate rainforest in the world and the largest temperate rainforest in Australia, with over 400,000 hectares of virgin wilderness. Here are some facts to share about this beautiful forest:

1. There are three plants that are a direct link with South America’s Patagonia, New Guinea and New Zealand, with which Tasmania was connected to as part of the super continent Gondwanaland.

2. Over 2,000 hectares is covered by wet eucalypt forest areas, where trees grow to be taller than 41 metres high! These areas are said to be “large enough to be self-sustaining and support ongoing evolutionary processes”.

3. The Tarkine is home to more than 60 species of rare, threatened and endangered species.

4. The world’s largest extant carnivorous marsupial, the Tasmanian Devil, lives in the Tarkine rainforest.

5. The Tarkine is home to the world’s largest freshwater crayfish, Astacopsis gouldi, also known as the Giant Freshwater Lobster.

6. There are almost no introduced predators.

7. The world’s only known insect fossils were found in the Tarkine rainforest, found in sediments of true glacial origin.

8. Fossils between 100-700 million years old, algal stromatolite fossils, were found around the Arthur and Julius Rivers and are Tasmania’s oldest known fossils.

9. The Tarkine is a mix of rainforest, wet and dry eucalypt forest, mixed forest, riverine, heathland, moorland and coastal ecosystems (Reference: https://www.tasmanianexpeditions.com.au/Blog/top-facts-about-the-tarkine).

Community Art Event Details

A community art project takayna / Tarkine held at the Hobart Botanical Gardens. Lets come together as a community to express our love for this forest.

Sunday 5th of June, 2022.

Educators including a local artist and biologist will support children and teens to create a piece of art work for the Tarkind Exhibition (approx. one month later date TBA).

The presentations from educators will inspire children and teens to engage in this unique place which has the largest areas of Aboriginal archeology in the southern hemisphere and is also the largest temperate Gondwanan rainforest in the Southern Hemisphere.

takayna / Tarkine is one of the few remaining pristine wilderness' in Australia, it needs to be protected for current and future generations - by engaging in this vulnerable forest and its sacred living systems living systems we can redirect the current destruction occurring into opportunities for regeneration.

We look forward to meeting you. We are creating a community who values kindness for each other, our own self, the forest & future generations.

Link to book for the Tarkind Community Art Project.

Notolioon gemmatus (Byrrhidae) Photography by Tarkind project collaborator and advisor Dr Keith Martin-Smith.

Retreat Two: Autumn Yoga, Ayurvedic Food and Herbalism @ Magical Farm, March 2022

Written by Dr Demeter

Photos by Jessica Cherrett and Emily Samuels-Ballantyne

Starting in the sacred circle a group of intentional women convened at Magical Farm to take part in the Autumn Yoga, Ayurvedic Food and Herbalism retreat two. We shared our intentions for the day and reason for being present. A theme that came up was ‘taking some time’ as well as a moment to reflect on ways our individual lives can be lived in a holistic way. We then took part in an hour yin yoga class in the big tent, and finished with some breathing exercises. Autumn is an important time in Ayrveda to focus on the large intestine and lungs. So the yoga practice supported poses for the digestive system and the lung region. The breathing exercises we used as a way to ‘let go’ of anything that we need our bodies to release - as the leaves drop to the ground and let go of their excess, we also are going through the same process.

Following the yoga we moved onto food! We fermented some Kim chi with some beautiful organic local produce - and reflected on the Ayurvedic benefits from these foods. India is one of the only counties in the world who include ferments in their ‘national nutritional recommendations’. Very important food for the digestive system. Then as our Ayurvedic designed lunch was prepared Jess Cherrett began her herbalism workshop. We were so lucky to receive so much wisdom from her. Throughout the herbalism workshop we learnt how to make a heart tonic with Hawthorne, rose and elderberries, a cough syrup filled with natures goodies for the winter season, lip balm to keep our lips lubricated during the winter time and a fire cider to support our immune systems.

We had many discussions about ways herbs can support health and how they are so important for people to connect to so they can empower us to take care of our own bodies.

Autumn sees the decline of the pitta dosha and the rise of the vata dosha. As the fire element of summer gives way, the air element of autumn comes to the fore. Prana, the vital breath, is everywhere. To balance vata (dry, cool, windy, irregular and light), it is important to cultivate —wet, warm, sheltered, grounded, heavy, slow and regular. Our retreat enabled a nourishing moment in time to convene together as community in our ‘new shelter @ Magical Farm’ (still to be completed cob house from the natural building retreat one!) and connect to nature wisdom in herbalism, yoga and food to support ourselves in this season and into the winter.

If you are interested to attend our Winter workshop please be in touch via our email info@magicalfarm.org

Please see our groups research and sharing from the day at this SHARE link.