“Valuing the marginal and looking at the edge of your either social groups, movements, or community, or garden, and understanding that that is where sometimes the most change is possible to occur, I think, is something to really keep in mind.” – Kirsten Bradley
How do we cultivate active hope through engaging in small, daily actions? What can we learn about social organizing and community building from looking at it through a permaculture lens? And what does it mean to re-establish our connections with land, water, and community — whether we live in the heart of cities or in more rural contexts?
In this week’s episode, I speak with Kirsten Bradley, the co-founder of Milkwood and the author of The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook.
Join us as we chat through how the permaculture principles relate to social change — and how we might dig our hands in the dirt to participate in that action ~
Highlights from our conversation I’m still sitting with…
This part on cultivating small, daily actions of active hope…
Kirsten Bradley: […] We breathe every day. We eat breakfast every day. We are making choices all the time. Ideally, that would be in a collective setting. Ideally that wouldn’t be in an individualist society.
But to get from where we are in an age of consumerism to where we would like to be in all those many ways, it is a one step at a time process. And I also think that big actions are great. I’ve been involved in a lot of really really big actions and they are absolutely essential, but they are a part of the whole.
I have a friend who says they’re like the mushrooms, we are all the mycelium and the big actions are the mushrooms of the fruit that actually burst above the forest floor. And that’s cool, mushrooms are great, mushrooms are not the whole thing.
And it is all the the care taken and the space held, and the toast made, and the tea made, and all the gazillions of other things that we each do every day that supports both our nervous systems to be able to keep going in all the ways that we need to fight and push and manifest new futures, if you like.
I wanted to speak just to the fact that there were so many little daily possibilities which will not change the world, but will also change your world, and in doing so, open up a whole lot of thinking about a whole lot of very oblique things, which then influence all sorts of decision-making, your voting, how you interact with other communities, how you interrogate your privilege. So many things can come from simple acts, and I don’t think we should lose sight of that, especially at this time.
This part on looking at social organizing or community building through the lens of permaculture principles…
Kirsten Bradley: David Holmgren has 12 principles that he defined as being part of permaculture, and they’re fantastic. Bill Mollison had a different set of principles. Lots of crossover between those two. I love all of the principles because I think they’re just really bloody useful. Basically everything from observe and interact, and just sit with it and learn about what the thing is before diving in and assuming you either have the answers, or that you know everything about it, is useful in every context at every level of resistance and world building.
Obtain a yield is one of the principles […] Having a win allows folks to keep going in whatever form that looks like. Whether that win is the fact that the peas actually grew, or whether you had a really successful community meeting, obtaining a yield sort of has to be part of either the struggle or the planting plan. Because, yeah, we are motivated by such things, and it’s much easier to keep going if something goes right along the way. So planning for small things to be able to go right are incredibly useful to our brains and hearts.
Integrate rather than segregate, which doesn’t work for everything in the world, but can just inform how we see resources, how we see organizations. It’s an invitation to go the opposite way to like everything in its box, everything’s separated, everything is individual. The multi-function of ideas, the multi-function of movements, the multi-function of physical spaces. The more we can consider what else that could be used for, the more possibilities there are.
And like all the other principles this is, it’s very much an invitation, and a lot of the times you might find that that’s rock solid and rocking on within your organization that you are doing these things. They can be used as touch points as well.
Another one that really springs to mind is value the marginal. The edge is where it’s at, so to speak. We know this in healthy ecosystems, and in unhealthy ecosystems, actually — where things change state quite quickly, has a lot of words including ecotone associated with it or you could think of the tide and the intertidal area… This is where the most ferment happens. This is where the most life can usually be found. There’s usually concentration of different species in this part of the ecosystem. And it’s where change happens.
So, valuing the marginal and looking at the edge of your either social groups, or movements, or community, or garden edges, and understanding that that is where sometimes the most change is possible to occur, I think, is something to really keep in mind.
On a city scale, you’ll often see that the non-shiny parts of the city is where all the action is — where the artists are, where all the families are getting on with it.
So yeah, I think the edges are important, boundaries are important. But it’s also that state and that space where there’s everything to learn from, and everything from evolution of species to dissidents in really important disagreement in movements usually comes from the edges. So respect them and be grateful that they’re there even though it’s sticky and tricky sometimes.
And this part on place-making and getting to know our watersheds…
Kirsten Bradley: The other thing I would say is that when you’re in an urban environment or a suburban environment, learning about your watershed can be such a powerful act of place-making for folks. Understanding what a watershed is — the boundaries where all the water drains down to maybe a certain creek or a river and then it flows out somewhere, maybe a lake or the sea or whatever it is, and just getting a handle on that and understanding where the water flows in your neighborhood, where it coming from, where it going to is a really excellent way, in any context, to get a better sense of the land that you on, as paved over as it might be.
Because there’s all sorts of histories and stories, of course, with all the histories of those rivers and the history of habitation — both settler habitation and previous habitation, within that watershed. And it’s so revealing about so many things, as well as connects your whole household with, oh, if we chuck that out the front and it goes down the drain, where does it end up?
And understanding those sorts of things and chatting with neighbors about those sorts of things can actually really start a whole lot of very necessary conversations about what it looks like to be stewards in an urban or a suburban environment of the place where you live
Green Dreamer Kaméa: I’m also curious, when you apply this sort of thinking — observing the flow of water and working with it — to a more social lens of like community building, what do you see as those things that we might offer more of our attention towards as an earlier part of the work of rebuilding community that could support the rest of the work to come together more cohesively?
Kirsten Bradley: It’s such a good question because it is a lot like the fundamentals of designing a place. You arrive in a place, it doesn’t need your design, it’s got all sorts of stuff going on obviously, but how you integrate into a place or what use you can be to that place, like holistic design where you’re like, okay, we’ve got to make sure the water is high, we’ve got to figure out where to put the structures, like, these things are fundamental, and then the chickens and the gardens and the community centers will come from those fundamental decisions that are usually informed by landscape and also resources and use and everything that you need to do there.
I mean, in communities, as you say, knowing the people around you, as scary as that is sometimes, depending where you are, is like doing early watershed work in the sense that it makes everything downstream potentially so much easier. […]
Sometimes you’ll be working with a community, or a community will decide to do some resource mapping, or they’re using the transition handbook, or that sort of thing to sort of figure out, okay, what what do we have? We have a river, we have a hospital, we have three bakeries, we have this, we have that, we have that. And everybody you know sort of maps the the basics, and also, what do we have as a community in terms of our resources and capacity? What is the average age, how many kids do we have here? How many quite elderly, elders do we have here that need to be considered in how we do things?
The very act of mapping all the richness, and sometimes the lack of bits and pieces that are in that town, I find often activate everyone who’s in the conversation into all these sorts of ideas. And the knowledge in the room just comes out as people start thinking about, oh, that’s closed down that laneway, but that was a massive shed and they used to do this there. And like, oh, there’s actually what is essentially a community kitchen underneath this business because the business went broke but there is, you know, a huge commercial kitchen down there.
It’s always really interesting watching communities get excited about how much is around them once you give them the opportunity to connect all the dots and encourage that. And I think that’s a really lovely way to do community building in communities that may not be so turned on by the idea, because everybody’s busy working or everybody’s what-evering.
Or if, as we have down here, we have quite a few industries that are sort of at odds. Some of the industries are quite destructive and some of the other residents in the town are like, there’s no way I’m talking to you about anything. So it’s interesting what brings people together and how you can both map resources that a community can build on, but also, you create a lot of mycelial threads between people that would otherwise so not be interested in talking to each other just by talking about what’s here and what isn’t here and what should be here and what used to be here and what could be here.
Cozy up and tap in ~
Tune into our full audio discussion with the embedded audio player on Substack or via Green Dreamer EP476; and join as a supporting subscriber to watch the bonus video version of our conversation here!
About our guest ~
Kirsten Bradley is the co-founder of Milkwood with Nick Ritar. Together, they’ve been teaching permaculture design and skills for living like it matters for more than 17 years. When she’s not helping folks to create meaningful change through their everyday actions, Kirsten can be found tending her backyard ecosystem of veggies, bees, berries and family, on melukerdee country in lutruwita/Tasmania.
Kirsten is the author of Milkwood (2018), Easy Peasy (2019) and The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook (2023). She can be found at www.Milkwood.net
Artistic credits ~
(B/c we cherish art from real humans!!)
Follow and browse more from our episode artwork’s illustrator: Haruka Aoki (Instagram @thecosmicharuka)
Jive to this episode’s musical offering: “Grandmother” by Ayla Schafer
Sink in deeper ~
Discover Milkwood Permaculture and find them on Instagram
Check out Kirsten’s Substack, Entangled Garden
The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook, a book by Kirsten Bradley
Read more about decolonizing permaculture and recognizing Indigenous knowledge
Learn about the 12 permaculture principles
Find out more about Brad Lancaster and check out his books
Discover the work of Craig Sponholz and the Quivira Coalition in New Mexico
Let the Water Do the Work, a book by Bill Zeedyk
Check out Mia Mingus’s work on pod mapping
Read the Transition Handbook from the Transition Network
Find out more about Dark Matter Labs
Check out Fieldwork Co-Culture
Rhizome out further ~
Zach Weiss: Restoring watersheds, revitalizing community (Ep470)
Helena Norberg-Hodge: Artisanal futures and economics of happiness (Ep398)
Questioning modern views of advancement using permacultural wisdom (Ep152)
Imagine, embody, alchemize ~
To support Green Dreamer and to translate our intellectual explorations into more embodied practice, I welcome you to join alchemize, our 12-week, audio-based program of daily imagination and creative practices — an experimental invitation to sit with the mess, stretch comforts and alternatives, and disrupt status quo ways of thinking, sensing, being, and relating. Learn more here.
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