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Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Guy Ritani and Toad Andrew Dell of PermaQueer.

Guy Ritani It’s the culmination of all the iterations and failures that creates a good system, and so, the most beautiful thing about permaculture is it's about getting it wrong. It's about getting it wrong and having that curious, compassionate openness to trying again.

Ayana Young PermaQueer is an ecological education project that focuses on accessibility to LGBTQIA & BIPOC folx. Toad and Guy who run PermaQueer teach Permaculture through a queer lens with attention to the decolonization of its practices with more inclusion and access to marginal demographics. To them, permaculture provides a method of accessing and managing resources that care for communities needs with relatively small financial inputs. PermaQueer actively apply a critical lens to the inherent heteronormative, colonial, patriarchal and capitalist, white supremacy systems entwined in a lot of sustainability movements. They are working to outline how practices such as permaculture, regenerative agriculture and other sustainability movements.

Well, thank you both so much for joining me on this really beautiful day here at Cougar Mountain, and I will just mention, I am doing this interview outside so you might hear the rustle of the wind in the redwoods and potentially my cat Roe coming up and nuzzing me as times, so yeah I love being able to speak to you both from the garden direct to source. Thank you so much for being with me today.

Toad Andrew Dell Thank you for having us. Ayana. My name is Toad Andrew Dell, like you said, and I come from PermaQueer, my pronouns are they/them and it, and I'm speaking to you here from unceded stolen country of the Yugambeh Nation in so-called Australia.

Guy Ritani And my name is Guy Ritani, my pronouns are they/them and I’m calling in from Wurundjeri country in so-called Melbourne on stolen lands as well.

Ayana Young Thank you for grounding us in that way. Well, I feel that many of our listeners are familiar with permaculture as a framework for ecological design, but to begin our conversation, can you share why you co-created PermaQueer and what teaching permaculture through a queer lens means to you? 

Toad Andrew Dell Thank you for that question. Yeah, why did we start PermaQueer? It was actually at the end of our PCD that we did together, in our final assignment, and I kind of put my hand up and I realized the people that I was seeing perform permaculture, were often kind of wealthy white landowners. And I was hearing all this amazing work about people doing it in the suburbs, squats, in all kinds of different and unusual ways, but I wasn't seeing that in my communities. I also saw how the benefits of permaculture could really uplift and enrich a group of people and I was seeing in how my kind of queer spaces, we weren't exactly having good access to food or community. And for me, I started it as kind of means to bring permaculture and  make it more accessible to queer folk as well as BIPOC communities as well.

Guy Ritani And I think as well, you know, being part of the beautiful queer community that we are and seeing the sort of the impact that permaculture can have, it was necessary for us to create a safe space, and initially it came out of creating a safe environment for our community. But with, you know, queer theory and gender fullness, and this concept that, you know, everything can be full of light and love, indifference, change and transformation, the sort of venn diagram of queer lens in permaculture started creating these fantastic environments, fantastic designs, and I think the way that the true benefit of permaculture through a queer lens has yet to fully unfold, but I, I feel so grateful that we get to be in this environment and, get to design in this way with our, our community as well.

Toad Andrew Dell One of the really beautiful questions that we got asked when we were starting to run some events, we were asking for some collaboration with Tyson Yunkaporta, and he asked us “Are you a bunch of queers doing permaculture? Or are you queering permaculture?” And that was actually a really great prompt for us to sit back and assess, are we just a bunch of queers doing permaculture? Or how do we actually queer and bring our culture into our, into these spaces? And this is still iterative and things that we're working on and sinking into as well.

Ayana Young Thank you both so much and I interviewed Tyson a few months ago now and I could imagine him asking you that question. But, yeah, I think more and more folks are meaningfully coming to the understanding that queerness is not just about individual identity, the physical body, gender, or sexuality alone, and so it makes sense that we see a rise in the call to queer many different spaces that have been inherently heteronormative as a by-product of society, but at the same time, I think about how this also means there is a risk for co-optation into practices that are shallow and marketable. I’m curious to ask, for those of us who want to continue uplifting queerness, how discerning do we need to be as well to ensure that this change in paradigm is truly something that is meaningful and long-lasting?

Guy Ritani I think, you know, one of the big things that can happen, especially in organizations and businesses, when we try to have inclusivity, and diversity training, this whole concept of how do we bridge these things, it's important to make sure that the voices that currently exist in these environments are the ones being listened to. So you know, you can have as many queer people or, you know, gender diverse or, you know, depends whatever kind of diversity they're trying to integrate, but if they're on these boards on these decision panels, to just be there, that's not enough. And we find this happening more often than not, because you know, queerness, and these perspectives, they go against a lot of the foundational thinking that a lot of people are conditioned to. So we need to understand that it's not enough just to be in community with these people, we have to be asking, what is your opinion, what would they do differently, how would we integrate their lens into a culture that we can both have, and not have fear or frustration or any kind of pre existing prejudice that we may not even know that we have, that for some reason, we're not going to benefit from this collaboration of diversity. And I think it's an interesting line to walk, especially in organizations when things can be co opted, and sort of brutalized in an inauthentic way.

Toad Andrew Dell I think you've really hit a lot of it on the head there. You need to be able to bring your culture into it and this brings up to me the idea of liberation versus equality. Equality is, I as a queer person can be just as violent or appropriative or extractive, as the over cultural kind of systemic cis white maleness of it all. Whereas liberation for me is taking my queer culture and making it something that isn’t just “Oh I’m equal to you, we are the same.” It’s actually “I am different from you.” That is beautiful diversity there, that is different culture and experience, and kind of integrating that in these spaces to avoid co option would be to me bringing my culture into that space, not just “Oh, look, I am just like you except I’m queer on the weekends.” Queer for me is a way of being, and I think we’ve seen a lot of co opting which is a really complex thing, because we had queer liberation and then we  lost a lot of our teeth and our nails in the gay rights movement, where we saw a lot of us, a lot of the way that we were marketing ourselves to be more accessible, and less scary, was the whole, “We're just like you”, we’re just like, whatever, and for me queerness is kind of inherently anti colonial, because I see one of the big kind of principles of colonialism is homogeneity, and queerness is personal, gender is personal, sexuality is personal, it can't be often coined into these tiny little boxes that exist purely to be kind of in a reductionist lens. And it exists like my queerness is contextual as well. It's based on the context of my community, the land I'm living on, and where I am in my life. So I see a lot of it being reduced down to, like, marketable ways. And so when in that space, I always have to ask, are we appealing to our oppressors, and making ourselves more appealing to them by making ourselves less frightening and kind of falling in line with colonial violence? And if we are, that's not very clear to me, sorry if that's a bit of a roundabout way to answer that.

Guy Ritani And also on that notion of heteronormativity, it’s incredibly pervasive and another sort of misunderstanding that can happen is the belief that, you know, someone is gay, they fall under the LGBTQIA umbrella, and therefore, they are an appropriate representative of all things that are queer, but it's, so much more complex than that we have, you know, a huge issues of heteronormativity that's just really disguised in primarily cis white gay spaces, and that affords these spaces, the privileges and the power structures that come along with heteronormativity. But often, it's misguided in believing that, because we have, you know, this difference in sexuality, that somehow radically changed the ideology behind it, but we see time and time again, heteronormativity, just repackaging itself in a different way. And we have to constantly be critical about it. 

So to the, to the aspect of, you know, how do we make sure that this new paradigm is meaningful and long lasting? The same with permaculture. You know, you when you start your journey in permaculture, you just learn more and more context, you learn more and more tools, you learn more and more understandings, that's in a different way, similar to queerness, as well, because it takes more understanding, more education, more community to understand, what is it that we're getting at here? What does it mean? What does your own relationship with queerness mean? And that doesn't have to be you, you know, dressing a certain way or, or changing your sexuality or changing your identity. What queer looks like for you, and what queer looks like for someone else is completely different things. And when we start thinking about queerness as a verb and everyday actions and behaviors, this idea of questioning in a beautiful, loving way, how could something be different? How can something be unique? How can we adjust things? And how can we transform things? For me, that's the act of verbing queer, of queerness. And I think everyone, figuring out what that means for them, and learning more about it from the queer community can only benefit everyone. And I believe that's a huge part in ensuring that this paradigm shift is as meaningful and long lasting because people get their own relationship to what it is. And it doesn't belong to me, it doesn't belong to Toad, it doesn’t belong to PermaQueer, it belongs to everyone. 

Toad Andrew Dell Yeah, like queerness is so personal and diverse, that I'm sure that there will be people who will listen to this and think, well, that's not my queerness, queerness really manifests like this and that’s valid, and that’s part of the complexity of it all. And I think in colonial culture, we really like to kind of fit into these little boxes and like I was saying just being either homosexual, pansexual, bisexual, any or any kind of gender divergence doesn't also inherently queer you. Historically, to be queer in Western culture was to be extremely ostracized, it often radicalzed you considering the fact that you no longer had access to you know, community health care, safety resources, and so our community had to basically create community and challenge things. And this was predominantly led by people of color, and by trans women and this is unfortunately, these are often the people that we see attacked the most, both within “queer communities” and outside of queer communities as well.

Ayana Young Thank you both for that, and I know that you're very vocal about the ways in which ecological sustainability movements continue to perpetuate white supremacy, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and capitalism, and for so long, environmental movements have negated this charge because they argue that their pursuits and causes are objectively positive because they are on behalf of the so-called “natural world.” But we have to recognize that there is a direct relationship between these movements and colonization and capitalism, in fact, in some ways, we could think of these movements as a direct by-product…And it’s a big inquiry to take on because we know that so many folks come to permaculture because they are really disenchanted with capitalism and supremacy, but that isn’t enough. So I wonder if you could elaborate a bit more on how you see sustainability movements perpetuating inequality and what are some examples of how this remodeling happens?

Guy Ritani Gosh, I mean, you know, greenwashing is rampant when - and under Western colonial civilizations, and cities and countries, when, from the moment you're born, till now, the model of existence exists all around you, and that's capitalism and that's colonialism, and that's white supremacy, when the only models of existence exists under those power structures, no matter how hard you try to step outside of them, they are so central to how you think. And this is something we have to be critically aware of and we see this happen time and time again, in permaculture spaces where, you know, exorbitant charges and fees are put upon a course that is, you know, how can we liberate ourselves from these systems, but it's only accessible to upper class affluent individuals and these are people that don't need necessarily need help in this system and so when, when we have these insidious sort of roots of capitalism and colonialism come through, that actually shunt out the people that are already being oppressed, and ostracize and, you know, disadvantaged by the system, there's no actual feedback to correct that system. And we have this happen time and time again, where the people who are at the bottom, who don't have access to housing or funding or health care, if they can't make any structural change, and they don't allow the space, then it's just the same remodelling of this violence. 

So it's not radical if you don't have accessibility to people who don't have time, and who don't have money. And so that's an issue because it's like, well, you know, as a permaculture teacher, or as someone, you know, you have to be compensated for your labor, but that in and of itself has colonial and white supremacist tendrils within it. And so we really have to sit back and every single point examine what are we doing? And where's the core of? And unfortunately, we don't have the answers for that. But we do have a commitment to constantly bringing up that question. And we also have a commitment to constantly bring up that question more. And that's what we're trying to do here in PermaQueer, and we’re still on our journey. Everyone's on the anti racism journey, but it's about making sure we start getting onto that we start educating each other, and we start working as a community to move through that, but I'll pass that to you now, Toad if you want to speak too.

Toad Andrew Dell Yeah, I think we see some really insidious things, I'll speak to permaculture specifically. I was given these words by our permaculture grandmother, Tamara Griffith, these two words are spermaculture and permacolonialism. spermaculture is, we see a lot of gate keeping in our communities by wealthy old white men who are landowners, and kind of directing the narrative of what permaculture is, and this inherently ties into permacolonialism as well, I think, because a lot of what people are teaching sometimes as permaculture is Indigenous technologies around land use, being marketed as permaculture, you know, come to my land, and I'll show you how to dig swales and that's permaculture, when actually it's a systems thinking approach, and sometimes maybe these technologies are, you know, are relevant if with the right people in collaboration, if it's done well, but a lot of the time, it's just like I said, it's repackaged repurposed Indigenous technologies being sold by all wealthy white men who are landowners on stolen -

Toad Andrew Dell Can I pop in here as well? Another tangible piece is, people who have access to this information in a traditional sense, so Indigenous people, First Nations, they don’t necessarily always operate to the same degree as white people in white systems, and this is a structural inequality here because all of a sudden, you have you know, some farmer in you know, Southeast Asia who has been practicing this technique their entire life, they don’t have YouTube or Tik Tok or how this framework works, they don’t have an editing system, they don’t have the whole network of you know creatives and Western culture so that they can produce this gigantic, purely marketable, pristine, ready to sell packaged thing in the same capacity that someone who knows systems of white supremacy knows systems of financial flow and knows how to tap within that white market. And so therefore, someone who knows this, and practices this information does not have the same access to financially bankroll this technique in the same way that white people do. And we see this happening a lot. You know, what was this banana leaf something, soil building technique that this person on YouTube created, and it just became this big whole “Oh this is this technique, this is mine.” Meanwhile, farmers for time and millennium have been doing this, they just haven't packaged it and put it onto the market in the same way that this person had access to. So questioning constantly. Sorry, I jumped in there and hijacked it off of you, but I’ll pass it back to you. 

Guy Ritani No worries. Thank you. Yeah, that sums it up pretty well with that kind of aspect of spermaculture/permacolonialism. And then we also see, you know, green missionary work in permaculture, some work, I've seen some really incredible work by people like Morag Gamble and Rosemary Morrow who have done really beautiful work with refugees and displaced people and have always like, I think, in talking with them, they both always said like, I'm always questioning, how am I doing this? Am I doing it right relationship and just, I really have faith in those people. And then I've also seen people who have come from historically quite upper class have gone to I think this person went to Papua New Guinea, pumped a huge amount of family money into it and basically created a mini food forest, but didn't actually educate the locals on how to do it. So they became reliant upon this outside man's influence, to become, “self-sufficient.” Yeah, and that was, that was a really complex thing to hear and be in dialogue with this person about. And then, of course, they were also taking photos of “poor Brown people,” and then selling those photos in galleries to make money to raise money for them. So it's a lot of well meaning white people kind of taking advantage of marginalized people without even realizing it. And that's a complex thing to unpack as well, particularly, because like you have these people who are thinking that they're doing well, and can be taking advantage. And that is often a hard dialogue to have with someone.

Toad Andrew Dell And I think a really important thing to mention as well is what is the objective of what we're trying to do. And that's something that we have to keep on popping back in. And that's something that capitalism and colonialism doesn't tell you it just like subtly conditions here. And when it comes to land rights and land ownership, we, you know, in so many spaces, we see this acknowledgement to Indigenous people, we see this attempt at rectifying or asking for a treaty or whatever it looks like in a cultural context, but that doesn't get followed up with programmatic, giving back of land. And we need to really question in which part of our whole system and strategy are we planning on doing that? In our minds is this something that we're saying we're doing, we're signaling that we believe in, but we don't actually know how, because we don't view it as a possibility. And that happens a lot. And we really need to be looking at the reality that in a lot of these spaces, specifically here you know, the Indigenous First Nations people, Aboriginals of this land, lived in harmony with our environment for 60,000 years, time immemorial. This context that we live in, this climate crisis that we have has happened within the last 100-200 years. And still, for some reason, the, even in a lot of sort of permaculture and queer spaces, we don't, we don't have that core understanding that we need to shift land ownership land leadership, back to the people who know, culturally, this landscape, how to manage it. And, the structural aspect of that is buried within conversation, it's buried within plans, it's buried within, you know, agendas and meetings, and we need to constantly stop these instances, and have a conversation about what is our objective here, and realign that objective to giving land back, to recognizing where capitalism and colonialism exists, and all of our behaviors, and acknowledge that  it will always inform. Once we come from that perspective, from there on the decision making, we make that and the implications of our behavior actually starts to deal with it. And this is something that I'm not seeing, I'm seeing tokenistic, you know, virtue signaling about a desire to, you know, stop capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, but it's not actually backed up by behavior. And on top of that capitalism and colonialism has this toxic positivity that makes it uncomfortable for people to deal with the reality of this. And one of the most insidious things about white supremacy is it's kind of created this weird notion that being uncomfortable is wrong, and no one should ever be uncomfortable because that doesn't allow conversations to be had. That means when people within systems of white supremacy and white privilege feel uncomfortable, they don't respond in any useful and pragmatic way. It's pushed away. It's erased, and it's not dealt with and that’s a pattern that must stop.

Ayana Young Yeah, both of you said really powerful things in this last response and there's a lot there to sit with, and unpack and analyze, for all of us listening, our own personal attachments to these systems, and what is just for show to make ourselves feel better about ourselves, and what's real and tangible. And I wanted to bring up a post titled “Responding as a community to climate change”, Guy, you write; “We know the edge is where it’s at and to value the marginal. Our desire is to integrate all the deep pools of knowledge and open up other areas of humanity’s realm of acceptance so we can create this new future. We’re entering an era of science fiction at the moment, in that we don’t have a rulebook anymore for what's going to happen and the outcome will be only what we make it. Now is the time to open up all our borders and collaborate with people, ideas, identities, cultures and get as creative as possible.” And I’d like to now move into a conversation on how you are taking a nuanced approach to looking at the spaces and intersections of permaculture that provide really fruitful knowledge as folks begin to map out different lifestyles. Because I do think there is something to be said about the ways that environmental movements can be co-opted and used against people to further nationalism and the closure of borders, and how with this in mind, now is a really critical time to be making these interventions and taking a sort of DIY approach. What intersections of permaculture are you most excited about working with at this point in time?

Guy Ritani Well, I think right now, my biggest excitement in combating these, these issues that we have, and implementing the true power of permaculture and queerness starts from building a point of resilience and having a just recovery. And what that looks like is on a very small community, household and individual scale. What does this you know, decolonizing, recreating or creating sustainable systems, what does that look like in the most micro environment? So we're seeing surges of, you know, community, restorative and transformative justice, accountability protocols, and these things coming into play, and we’re seeing what it looks like to fill up our own cup. And so you know, the areas of social justice of community development of emotional understanding, and emotional intelligence development, and also dealing with traumas and healing as communities, these sort of ways that we build that and very, very small household community levels is how we build the capacity to actually collaborate on a larger scale. And so for me, it's so so exciting seeing all of these little initiatives and little networks pop up here in the neighborhood systems, you know, Food Network systems, a little trading bartering systems. And I'm starting to see this readiness that allows people to actually have the energy to collaborate with each other. And so, for me, I'm seeing a whole lot of push towards introspection, and what does it mean for us to shift and a huge part, especially along the continuum of, you know, colonialism, capitalism, in semi, I mean, it's not really a linear thing, but somewhere along the ideas, you know, kind of cultural capacity to transition. And then we have re-Indigenisation and Indigenous ways of living. And somewhere along the spectrum, we connect to what it means to be in community with ourselves, what it means to love ourselves, what it means to love our community and our family, and then also, what it means to be ourselves. 

So really shifting from colonial Western overculture that we know has a pattern of degeneration, and that's why we're in this climate crisis at the moment, and shifting into healthier culture that are in reciprocity with our environment that some of us have connection through through being Indigenous, BIPOC, or have connection to place, and some of us don’t. And what that looks like is figuring out what right relationship is with you and the environment. And a really awesome place to start and some place we're seeing a lot is finding out ancestrally where do you exist in this world? How do you exist in this boat? And what would that look like, in right relationship? And so we've seen this really fantastic intersection of people connecting to what it historically means, ancestrally means, to be that land practice, or geographic location in the world where they feel they belong, because a lot of, you know, a lot of our societies are just displaced people, deeply displaced people. And when we see people colliding with a sense of self and a sense of place on Earth, all of a sudden, the reason we use permaculture principles becomes a whole lot more valuable. The reason we decide to live in reciprocity becomes more personal than it was before. And when we're coming from these cities of, you know, concrete and exhaust fumes, when we know where our feet belong in the soil is on the other side of the planet, we've never even been there before. If you're able to connect to that culture in some way, shape or form, it's profound. It's been profound for me, I've witnessed it being profound, profound for a lot of people. And it makes me so excited to work in this space. 

So as PermaQueer, we’re really trying to develop PDC that can be culturally relevant to you, and that’s not us teaching you a culture that doesn’t belong to us, it’s how do we network between all of the amazing teachers that we have all over the world? And this is an issue that we’re having in some cultures, you know, we have amazing BIPOC teachers everywhere, they just don’t get the same lifeline as everyone else does. And so what would that look like in a way of collaborating? So I don't even know, I think I just ran right off from the question. But I get really excited when permaculture collides with what your identity is and what your identity means to you in terms of place.

Ayana Young No, it's good. I love runaway responses, because you're being present with where you're at and what the question sparks in you. And that's what the questions are for, they’re diving boards into the deep end. So I appreciated it. And I'll say something that continues to come up for me, especially for those of us who are living in societies where rapid consumption is really pushed to uphold the economic system is the revitalization around ethics of frugality. And I'd love to hear how this personally shows up in your own designing ethics and lifestyle.

Toad Andrew Dell I think frugality and how it kind of comes into everything is when we begin to think about, in this culture we value the more and the more and the more we all know this and we all kind of know how this can negatively affect us to kind of just the expecting and entitlement and things like that. And frugality I think, for me, a lot of it is learning how to step outside of the kind of exponential growth model. And it's not just that it's not getting my dopamine and serotonin kicks from buying the new thing that will soon be outdated. It's learning how to rewire a lot of my - engage in neuroplasticity even, of being able to change how I relate to landscape and my community. Suddenly, I'm not looking to get that dopamine hit from buying something, I’m looking at it from being able to make olives or do this or do that. And it's basically it for me, it's changing my worldview almost, it becomes more experiential, it becomes more personal everything we do. It has meaning and importance, everything becomes a ceremony and ritual even. And I find that that's a really beautiful process. And I know at the moment when I was living, down Naarm, in so-called Melbourne, we had these really beautiful food systems in place, everything worked well, everything felt delightful to do. And I've moved up north, I'm in the process of resetting my systems and getting that all sorted on my food systems. But I don't have that at the moment, I'm not able to live in the one of the frugal ways that I wanted to. I am isolated on a mountain which requires fossil fuels to get anywhere. And I really feel how quickly everything becomes impersonal, my food supply, my pleasure, my everything, it becomes a streamlined process, which I don't even begin to question and I feel entitled towards. So for me, a lot of it is anchoring it back in the slow and steady solutions that really enrich us in a way that isn't just a quick hit. Do you have anything you want to add to that Guy?

Guy Ritani One part of that is the agency. And I think this is the most important part of frugality and, and thrifting is not the money you save it’s the agency in life that you have. You've realized that this pressure, this preordained need to have things or want to buy dinner, or coffee, or whatever it looks like, this weird process happens when you resist that urge, that dopamine hit or whatever it looks like, and then you’re suspended in this place where you don’t get what you thought you want, but then you realize you still have agency outside of that.  And, you know, consumer habits are a huge and powerful and very, very insidious way that capitalism conditions us. And so not only is frugality and thrifting about, you know, valuing, you know, sustainable sources of where our products come from, or ensuring that we're not spending things, money or resources that we don't necessarily need to. But we're also not constantly engaging in conditioning, conditioning of capitalism, conditioning of white supremacy, conditioning of materialistic, us versus them, and by us versus them, I mean, us versus objections. And this idea of us versus objects is othering us from our environment. And anything in this current crisis that we are in, that constantly others from living in reciprocity, and upholding the manner of all things around us, is damaging, and it's a part of the problem. And when we, you know, have these ethics and are frugal, we realize, okay, what do we actually need? All right, this is what I actually need, and then you still come through on those ethics, and you realize, are there sustainable sources for me to get that? And then all of a sudden, with systems thinking about how we can override these damaging systems to our environment? And the real importance of frugality and thrifting ethics is this systemic change that has the capacity of when we stop engaging with these systems, when we realize that we're not reliant on them and we actually don't need to be and we never needed to be. And how do we start prioritizing sustainable systems that care about the environment, that care about minorities that realize, the world doesn't have to be in this, you know, top down hierarchy, someone has to lose relationship, because that's not natural. But we believe it is. And the reason we believe it is, is because we keep on having these micro conditions of how we need to objectify things. And I believe that that is perpetuated through stray runaway consumer habits. And so while frugality and thrift, engaging in these ways of spending, or relating allows you to have more resources and engage in things in a more meaningful and transformative way. It also cuts you off from that constant conditioning, and in this culture in this crisis, that's it's crucial. It's crucial for our transformation as a society.

Ayana Young You’ve done a lot of organizing around permaculture in response to climate change, and this is such a big topic, but I always like to bring this up when I talk to folks involved with permaculture because I remember when I was in the process of learning these practices, such a big part of that journey was reading and studying about weather and frost times and then planning around that - and now we find ourselves living in a world where we can’t rely on this information to the extent that it was relied on in the past. How are you all thinking about this facet of permaculture, and our capacity to plan and develop, and cultivate resilience when climate change is very inconsistent?

Toad Andrew Dell I think what we largely need to do is kind of obviously look to and being collaboration, not appropriation, with what people are already doing traditionally on the land and that can be through dialogue and kind of whatever work that needs to be, but also not taking that fixed white anthropological gaze, knowing that cultures have migrated, cultures have changed how they relate to landscape. And it's kind of, you know, it's one of those permaculture principles of creatively responding to change. And to be honest, I don't have a lot of the answers. There's some really amazing people who are headlining this work, Daryl Taylor has really been focusing a lot of his life's work on us in Australia, and entering the Pyrocene, because we are starting to see out of control bushfires, like every year or every couple of years, things we haven't ever seen before. And so there are people pioneering this work, and you need to kind of get behind them. And yeah, do you have anything you want to add to that Guy?

Guy Ritani Yeah, I think this whole idea of, you know, unknown, walking into these crazy, unpredictable environments, it's really making us realize that we need to, like you said, develop resilience, and we don't have much time to do that. And so we really need to think about, you know, even off the back of that concept of frugality, you know, how do we create sustainable food network systems? How do we create sustainable communities? What does that even look like? And there's many, many examples of this working incredibly successfully all over the world. So it's not something that's impossible, but it's something that we need to tune into. And so you know, with changes and seasons changes and environment, obviously, there is a need for diversity of I mean, talking in a food perspective, we need to have a diversity of plants, we need to have a diversity of, you know, heirloom, you know, climatically developed plants that are conditioned to acclimatize to specific environments, and they are developing and receding every single year. And, you know, re-acclimatizing into that specific context. Now, if we don't have a diverse range of farms and a diverse range of plants, and, you know, responding biologically, to the environment, as it is changing, that's cutting off resilience. So, you know, to answer the question, we need to be realizing the systems we depend on, our food systems, our community systems, definitely our water systems are all our own responsibility. And if you're listening, and you're buying your groceries from the supermarket, and all of your water comes from a town tap supply, this is for you. These systems that these come from, are not sustainable. They're giant, giant systems integrated, and some of them are fantastic. But with the calamities that we are facing, and with the uncertainties that we are facing, unfortunately, it's not actually secure. I look at what happened in Johannesburg, with the whole day zero when they're running out of water. Fortunately, that shows the power of human transformation. But it also shows some things that we believe are given some things we believe we're entitled to, or not. And these are things that we're going to be dawning on when we face the reality of climate change. 

And so, you know, there's infinite ways that we can build resilience. I, you know, we could go through a whole bunch of them, but realistically, it's about what's contextually specific and culturally specific to you. And that's actually your responsibility. And so, if we have more people realizing, what does it mean to be responsible for feeding myself? What does it mean for being responsible for my environment? Obviously, privilege comes in hugely to that. And that's an ongoing conversation that we continue to have. But you know, we're having guerilla gardening, reclaiming government land so that we can have community gardens. And you know, that's an option. There are options. And it's difficult, but unfortunately, the opportunity costs of having to problem solve this difficulty is not problem solving. And the cost of that is just dealing with the fact that food systems might run out, water systems might run out, and either you're waiting around for that to happen, or you're pragmatically thinking and using what you can and what you have to make change. And that's a huge thing for me to say and a huge thing to say you have to do because obviously there's so many complexities in and around that. But until we realize that, it is our responsibility, and our government bodies and our corporate bodies are not and will not take responsibility for this, we gun on to something called agency. And I think that's one of the biggest things, that our agency is to realize that we have a responsibility to building resilience, we have a responsibility to understanding what that looks like in our community, our culture, and our landscape. And we have a responsibility to demand that. And I don't know what that specifically looks like. But I believe that that's how, you know, I don't know what's coming with these unpredictable weather patterns. And I can't say what will happen all around the world, but it's our responsibility to try and prepare ourselves.

Ayana Young Well, thank you for that response to a very complex question that none of us can fully answer. So as we come to close, I just have two final questions and they are very much inspired by some of PermaQueer’s reflections on the disconnection between solutions and actions. So I wonder if you could each share a piece of advice for folks who are just beginning to dip their toes in the world of permaculture, and then a second piece of advice for folks who are a little bit more embedded in permaculture, perhaps some wisdom that you wish you'd known in the past. And I know, the advice can't be too specific, because we're all listening in from such varying bioregions. But you're more than welcome to make this as practical as you'd like.

Toad Andrew Dell I think for people who are getting into permaculture for the first time, it's exciting, it really is and it feels like the whole world is opening up for you. And I think it's important to kind of try and embody a sense of curiosity around it all. And also being critical. I don't think that these two things can be mutually exclusive. We always need to be questioning is this in service of the people who are living on this land? Is it in service to the community? Is it in service of the actual land itself? Oh, it is. That's fantastic. Just approaching everything with a really curious desire to learn more. And understand that we are all in iteration. This entire process that we call permaculture is in iteration. So it's good to challenge things, it's good to question things. And that isn't an attack. That can only enrich us by questioning things and asking the sometimes difficult questions. And I think, you know, it's often the people who come with the freshest eyes that turn things up the most, that challenge old guards and challenge old ideals that should be challenged. And when you're in a culture for a really long time, sometimes you can't see them. So I think our permaculture's greatest assets are the people who are coming to it for the first time, who still hold that really deep curiosity and joy that, you know, we try and foster as we learn more and more, but that fresh eyes are actually so valuable. And I think to people who've been embroiled in permaculture for a longer time, I think I would say one of the things that we forget the most is that the social ecology is as complex and nuanced and requires as much skill to work with as the actual landscape based ecology, you know, with the, you know, the traditional permaculture dream of, we're all gonna buy land and start an eco village. People do that. And it's not that they can't get the crops to grow. It's that they can't get along. We need to be more trauma informed, we need to be able to relate better, we need to have skills and conflict resolution. How do we deal with harm? How do we deal with abuse? How do we receive and give critique? These are all things that we really need to kind of sink into and be able to, to hold better, I believe. Would you want to speak now Guy?

Guy Ritani Yeah, I'd say to people joining permaculture, permaculture looks like so many different things. Permaculture is a toolset, a design system that helps you think about things in a way that is truly sustainable. And what permaculture might look like for you, is completely different for somebody else, and know that whatever your passions are, there's a way that you can fit their culture into that. So in one sense, you know, don't construct your idea of what permaculture can be to anything, because that stops you from being able to queer the capacity of how you use permaculture in terms of design. And secondly, the biggest forgiveness that's given by permaculture I believe is the concept of iterations and in societies that we come from, especially when you're just learning about what permaculture is, you know, chances are you may be coming from colonial Western, capitalist background and one of the biggest things that's imposed on us in this in this space is that things kind of have to be perfect, things have to have to be ready, they have to be on time, they have to be this end product. And that's not how nature works. That's not how permaculture works, and it's the culmination of all of the iterations and failures that creates a good system. And so the most beautiful thing about permaculture is, it's about getting it wrong. It's about getting it wrong and having that curious, compassionate, openness to trying again. I'll tell you now your systems will fail and the test of whether or not you can become good at designing things, is how you can listen to that failure, and how that failure can inform you moving forward. Just the same way we're watching the failure of all of these systems around the world and how well are we going to listen to that. And what I'd say to people already embedded in permaculture is that you have a responsibility, you have access and practice in a fantastic realm of design that has a huge amount of transformational capacity and I want people to know what that responsibility looks like when they're further along in our journey. You know, we have more understanding, we have more capacity. And I don't want people to ever forget that things are new, things can always be created. And if you've been here for a while, know that you have more of a capacity to have an impact. And whatever that means for you. I challenge you to enjoy that. And I challenge you to lean into that. Because we need more of that in the world.

Ayana Young Absolutely and before we say goodbye, I'm wondering how folks can engage with and support PermaQueer?

Guy Ritani So we have PermaQueer on Facebook, it’s just PermaQueer. And we’re also on Instagram at Perma.Queer, we're currently we're developing our open source network website but that's not out yet. So just those two socials for now and we will probably give you our contacts to put in the links or something.

Toad Andrew Dell Yeah, that's it and thank you so much for having us on this podcast Ayana, it was really, really lovely to be able to speak and share kind of our experiences of PermaQueer.

Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to another episode of For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Eliza Edens and India Blue & Joshu. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, and Francesca Glaspell.