The RegenNarration

Welcome to a new year of The RegenNarration. And what a year it’s shaping up to be. But before we get into that, I wanted to take a brief moment here to admit to feeling a little flat. And by extension, to explain the delayed start to the podcast this year. Some sad and in some ways seismic changes have consumed me in recent times. And really, these changes relate to everything this podcast is about. So this episode starts on that note, before leading in to a conversation spanning a spectrum of spectacular efforts to regenerate the systems and stories we live by.Kind enough to join me in this sweeping primer for the year is friend, supporter of the podcast, and masterfully accomplished director of That Sugar Film and 2040, Damon Gameau. We talk about some of what’s on, what’s coming on, and how we’re seeing the growing momentum towards regenerative tipping points. Dedicated to Dad.Title slide: Damon Gameau (supplied). Music:Faraway Castle, by Rae Howell and Sunwrae.The System, by the Public Opinion Afro Orchestra.Find more:The 2040 website. And you can find more of Damon and Anthony in conversation for episodes 30 (just prior to 2040 being released) and 38 (at the Perth premiere of the film). Send us a textSupport the showThe RegenNarration is independent, ad-free and freely available, thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to help keep the show on the road - and gain access to a great community and some exclusive benefits - on Patreon or Substack (where you'll find my writing). You can also donate directly via the website (avoiding fees) or PayPal. I hope to see you at an event, and even The RegenNarration shop. And thanks for sharing with friends!

We’re signing off for the year with our annual episode of highlights from our brilliant array of guests throughout 2020. If you’ve been listening throughout this unique and likely transformative year, enjoy the revisit. And for those newer to the podcast, here’s a snapshot of how the year played out on The RegenNarration.Track list:Welcome to 2020 (from ep. 53), to music by Jeremiah JohnsonDr Sheila Nguyen (from ep. 54)Mike Salvaris (from ep. 55), and Jo Chandler (from ep. 56), all to The System, by the Public Opinion Afro OrchestraAn intro from home as COVID-19 lockdown begins, and Alanna Shaikh (from ep. 57)Eugenie Stockmann (from ep. 58), from a live panel event at the Uni of Notre Dame in FremantleDr Eduard Muller (from ep. 59), Matthew Evans (from ep. 60), Hunter Lovins (from ep. 61), Zach Bush MD (from ep. 62), Kirsten Larsen (from ep. 63), Tony Rinaudo (from ep. 64), all to music by Jeremiah JohnsonJoel Johnsson and Dr Peter Barnes (from ep. 65), to On the Punt by Adam Gibson and the Aerial MapsDavid Pollock (from ep. 66), to the sounds of Wooleen StationDr Terry McCosker (from ep. 67) and Dianne Haggerty (from ep. 68), to music by Jeremiah JohnsonMark Taylor (from ep. 69), to the sounds of the millTyson Yunkaporta (from ep. 70) and Dr Charles Massy (from the extract to ep. 32, accompanying the Australian Story TV program on Charles), to Stones and Bones by Owls of the SwampDr Kate Auty and Dr Alessandro Pellizon (from ep. 71), Nicole Masters (from ep. 72), Amy Steel and Lily Brazel (from ep. 73), and Rosanne Scott (from ep. 74), all to Faraway Castle by Rae Howell and Sunwrae Allan Savory (from ep. 75), to Scotland the Brave by Eric M Armour (sourced from the Free Music Archive).Title slide: Rainbow over the regenerating landscapes of the Haggerty’s (episode 68).With thanks to all of the brilliant musicians who generously granted permission for their music to appear here.Find more:To access the full catalogue of episodes, head to our website  or wherever you get your podcasts.Send us a textSupport the showThe RegenNarration is independent, ad-free and freely available, thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to help keep the show on the road - and gain access to a great community and some exclusive benefits - on Patreon or Substack (where you'll find my writing). You can also donate directly via the website (avoiding fees) or PayPal. I hope to see you at an event, and even The RegenNarration shop. And thanks for sharing with friends!

This is an extract from episode 75 featuring the last half an hour of my conversation with regenerative agriculture and holistic management pioneer, Allan Savory. We pick up where Allan states the need for this to go mainstream now. He goes on to propose how it might happen, while laying down the challenge. And outlines why he believes the change is very close. We go on to talk about the largely ‘accidental’ way Allan’s life and insights have evolved, and the subtle but vital role ‘gut feel’ has played. Then close with a brilliant story, illustrative of what he’s learned most about how people best navigate change.Title slide: Allan Savory in trusted company (supplied).You can hear the rest of our conversation in the main episode, ‘Regenerating Civilisation: Allan Savory on holistic management, scaling & a sense of survival’.You’ll find a series of photos on that episode web page too. Send us a textSupport the showThe RegenNarration is independent, ad-free and freely available, thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to help keep the show on the road - and gain access to a great community and some exclusive benefits - on Patreon or Substack (where you'll find my writing). You can also donate directly via the website (avoiding fees) or PayPal. I hope to see you at an event, and even The RegenNarration shop. And thanks for sharing with friends!

This is a special extra to episode 75 with Allan Savory. We delve further here into a few areas that have been pivotal to Allan’s pioneering life. It starts with a little exchange on how wilderness and livestock-based agriculture can regenerate country together (and where they can’t). Then we turn to the wilderness within, going back to the incredibly formative time Allan experienced as a tracker. And another as the leader of the opposition party in Rhodesia, before being forced into political exile. All this unexpectedly led to meeting his wife Jody Butterfield, setting in tow a partnership that would change the world. We wind up with more on what success (and failure) looks like, including holistically managing government.Title slide: Allan delivering his famous TED talk.Music:Gone Clear, by William Tyler off his album Modern Country.Find more:You can hear the rest of our conversation in the main episode, ‘Regenerating Civilisation: Allan Savory on holistic management, scaling up & a sense of survival’. You’ll find a series of photos on that episode web page too. Send us a textSupport the showThe RegenNarration is independent, ad-free and freely available, thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to help keep the show on the road - and gain access to a great community and some exclusive benefits - on Patreon or Substack (where you'll find my writing). You can also donate directly via the website (avoiding fees) or PayPal. I hope to see you at an event, and even The RegenNarration shop. And thanks for sharing with friends!

Haul back through the spread of regenerative agriculture in recent decades, and Allan Savory is there. His global influence is hard to overstate. Here we chat about his extraordinary life, and the evolution of his insights that have proved so transformative for so many. Thinking holistically is one thing. But how do we actually manage our lives and societies holistically? And ultimately, how do we engage the institutions that we’ve come to so distrust, to enable regeneration at scale - in whatever our role or walk of life? Far from just in agriculture, but certainly not without it. Allan believes it’s possible, and proposes how it might be done. Allan’s the founder and President of The Savory Institute. He’s also Chair and co-founder, with wife Jody Butterfield, of the Africa Centre for Holistic Management back home in Zimbabwe. His TED talk has now been viewed over seven million times. And his most valued award was Australia’s esteemed International Banksia Award (there's a photo on the episode website linked below) for the person doing the most for the environment on a global scale.This episode marks what would have been the 77th birthday of the bloke who introduced me to systems thinking and living 20 years ago – a man who somehow did find his way in academia, albeit in notably different ways, the late Professor Frank Fisher. I couldn’t imagine a more fitting guest to mark the occasion than Allan. We met online for this conversation on Saturday 22 November 2020.Title slide: Allan Savory. You’ll see a terrific selection of other photos on the website (supplied).Music:Faraway Castle, by Rae Howell and Sunwrae.Scotland the Brave, by Eric M. Armour - Sourced from the Free Music Archive under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Find more:You can also hear a special extra to this episode with Allan.The Savory Institute, including Allan’s famous text and a new handbook, with courses, global network etc. The Africa Centre for Holistic Management. Allan’s 2020 Tony Coote Memorial Lecture for The Mulloon Institute (lecture starts 7 minutes in).And you can find my conversations with some of those mentioned in our conversaSend us a textSupport the showThe RegenNarration is independent, ad-free and freely available, thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to help keep the show on the road - and gain access to a great community and some exclusive benefits - on Patreon or Substack (where you'll find my writing). You can also donate directly via the website (avoiding fees) or PayPal. I hope to see you at an event, and even The RegenNarration shop. And thanks for sharing with friends!

This is an extract from episode 74 featuring the end of my conversation with the founding director and current Chair of Perth City Farm, Rosanne Scott. We’d just been talking about some of the powerful stories of Aboriginal heritage where City Farm is located. That lead to the exchange we start with here, about arts and culture being central to organising societies in holistic, fulfilling and effective ways. We go on to trace this theme through Rosanne’s life – from her childhood in Kolkata, to her early incarnation as a primary school teacher, and on through a host of divergent and extraordinary threads that led to City Farm, and beyond. We follow Rosanne through the Theosophical Society and Findhorn, to the PIA Wadjuri community and Wooleen Station in the Murchison, to Activate the Wheat Belt and the year of the pandemic. We end up at her life mantra, and some very moving and entertaining personal reflections.Title slide: Perth City Farm (supplied).You can hear the rest of our conversation in the main episode, ‘City Farm: From industrial wasteland to cultural icon, with founding director Rosanne Scott’. You’ll find a series of terrific photos on that web page too. Send us a textSupport the showThe RegenNarration is independent, ad-free and freely available, thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to help keep the show on the road - and gain access to a great community and some exclusive benefits - on Patreon or Substack (where you'll find my writing). You can also donate directly via the website (avoiding fees) or PayPal. I hope to see you at an event, and even The RegenNarration shop. And thanks for sharing with friends!

Last year was the 25th birthday of a cultural icon and regenerative hub, nestled into the inner eastern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. City Farm is an extraordinary place – an urban farm with a big vision. This half hectare block was a degraded industrial wasteland. But an inspired community transformed it into a place for organic food, farming, community connection, arts, enterprise and education that enables people to live richly and regeneratively. It’s first load of soil actually came from the original theatre production of another cultural phenomenon, Bran Nue Dae. So much of how City Farm came to be is an incredible story, often looking far from likely. And in the current context of the world, it feels like a powerful symbol of what’s possible, and an instructive experience for going about it.Rosanne Scott is a colourful, open-hearted visionary. She was founding director of City Farm for its first 17 years, and is now Chair. All the while, she has been a trailblazer across many other areas and projects, all over WA, and has been honoured by organisations across the political and cultural spectrum for her decades of pioneering work. Born in Calcutta to a South Indian Anglican Minister and accomplished Armenian mother, and initially a primary school teacher in Australia, not much of Rosanne’s story seemed particularly likely either. We met up at City Farm a couple of days ago for this conversation. Title slide: Rosanne Scott (supplied). See more photos on the website.Music:Faraway Castle, by Rae Howell and Sunwrae.Find more:Perth City Farm. Trillion Trees.Rosanne Scott.And the WA Museum dedication to Fanny Balbuk, the Aboriginal woman who continued to walk the Songlines as the colonial settlement of Perth grew.Send us a textSupport the showThe RegenNarration is independent, ad-free and freely available, thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to help keep the show on the road - and gain access to a great community and some exclusive benefits - on Patreon or Substack (where you'll find my writing). You can also donate directly via the website (avoiding fees) or PayPal. I hope to see you at an event, and even The RegenNarration shop. And thanks for sharing with friends!

This is an extract from episode 73 featuring the end of my conversation with Amy Steel, former Australian netballer, global EcoAthletes and Sports Environment Alliance Ambassador, and Senior Manager | Sustainability and Climate Change at Deloitte; and Lily Brazel, now former Australian hockey player, global EcoAthletes Ambassador, and founder of Stature Clothing (including its podcast The State of Us). We pick up here with Lily’s bombshell, letting go of her lifelong dream of playing for the Hockeyroos at the Olympics. And we follow the threads through navigating change and our deeper purpose, empowering sports people to step up on what matters most, and the stories that connect us to our genuinely ‘super’ human nature.Title slide: Amy Steel and Lily Brazil playing their new roles for the bigger team (supplied).You can hear the rest of our conversation in the main episode, ‘The Biggest Sports Story: Climate, business and a sense of ultimate success’. You’ll find a series of photos on that web page too. Send us a textSupport the showThe RegenNarration is independent, ad-free and freely available, thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to help keep the show on the road - and gain access to a great community and some exclusive benefits - on Patreon or Substack (where you'll find my writing). You can also donate directly via the website (avoiding fees) or PayPal. I hope to see you at an event, and even The RegenNarration shop. And thanks for sharing with friends!

Amy Steel and Lily Brazel are outstanding international athletes. Well, Amy was. Until a heat stroke after a pre-season game prematurely ended her career. Still suffering the effects today, she’s set upon a path of working with big business to help achieve perhaps humanity's greatest milestone - meeting the Paris Climate Agreements. Amy’s quickly established herself as Senior Manager, Sustainability and Climate Change at Deloitte, while also being a global Ambassador for EcoAthletes and the Australian Sports Environment Alliance.Lily’s a slightly different story. Still at the outset of her international sports career, as part of the Hockeyroos – the successful Australian women’s hockey team – Lily was in training for the postponed Tokyo Olympics. This was a lifelong dream. But dropping a bombshell just prior to this conversation, she revealed she’s resigned from the team. In Lily’s case, it was the start of her international career that was transformative. And living by her values is forging a changing path. That path includes founding a business called Stature Clothing, a sports clothing brand with the mantra to ‘repair, repurpose & regenerate – that waste is not an option’. Leading into the next Australian summer here again evokes images of last summer’s horror fires. Caught up in that cataclysmic event were mass cancellations of sporting events, and extensive damage to sporting facilities and clubs across the country. Since then, the northern hemisphere fires, and of course the related pandemic (another symptom of destabilised planetary conditions), rammed home the message - just how vulnerable we are on our current trajectory. That has spurred another level of engagement by sports people and organisations everywhere, to help us change that trajectory. Sport is such an important, enlivening and powerful part of societies everywhere, so the value of sport in this transition can’t be understated. Amy and Lily are two international athletes who have felt all this acutely, and are stepping up in brilliant ways. Title slide: Amy Steel and Lily Brazil at the height of their international sports careers (supplied). See more pics on the episode web page. Game sounds at the start of the episode are from the 2011 Trans-Tasman netball championship win that Amy was a part of (source).Music:Faraway Castle, by Rae Howell and Sunwrae.Find more:Amy Steel.Lily Brazel and Stature Clothing.The AusSend us a textSupport the showThe RegenNarration is independent, ad-free and freely available, thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to help keep the show on the road - and gain access to a great community and some exclusive benefits - on Patreon or Substack (where you'll find my writing). You can also donate directly via the website (avoiding fees) or PayPal. I hope to see you at an event, and even The RegenNarration shop. And thanks for sharing with friends!

This is an extract from episode 72 featuring the end of my conversation with author, systems thinker and regenerative soils educator, Nicole Masters. We talk about what she’s seen of human transformation, particularly where people have been navigating change pro-actively, as opposed to responding to trauma. We go on to chat about where the regenerative movement is at, her changing focus, and the powerful marriage of story-tellers with the regeneration happening on the ground. Title slide: Nicole Masters (supplied).You can hear the rest of our conversation in the main episode, ‘Restoring the Metropolis of Living Earth: From the chemical paradigm to nature’s paradigm’. You’ll find a series of photos on that web page too. Send us a textSupport the showThe RegenNarration is independent, ad-free and freely available, thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to help keep the show on the road - and gain access to a great community and some exclusive benefits - on Patreon or Substack (where you'll find my writing). You can also donate directly via the website (avoiding fees) or PayPal. I hope to see you at an event, and even The RegenNarration shop. And thanks for sharing with friends!