43 Different Tribes, One Resource
In which Amanda struggles to make sense of her experiences on a patch of land in her home state of WA - and concludes that the environmental aspects of regenerative/holistic agriculture cannot be decoupled from its social, personal and political context; they are the same conversation. She pays attention to what is happening in her body and decides she needs to lay some ghosts to rest.
Last time we spoke I was a bit harsh on the Potentiality Industry – maybe took a more extreme view than I needed in the desire to get a point across, which was my re-ignited enthusiasm about human limitations.
Now I have got to fess up. I have been changed by the courses I have done and the people I have met – especially over recent years when I have allowed new information to shift the way I feel about things. I see it as a sort of tenderising process: I feel more and am conscious of feeling more. I embrace Michael Brown’s sentiments when he said in his book The Presence Process: It’s not about feeling better, its about getting better at feeling. ().
THE TENDERISATION
The Holistic Management course has been part of this tenderisation process. I have experienced subtle change – the sense of an expanded way of being that has been induced through the influence of this teaching.
On the surface it is hard to see how Holistic Management - a planning and decision-making process based around the latest iteration of grazing – has done this, made me feel as if I am operating with a few blinkers removed.
But the work goes deep. One of its central tenets is that humans make decisions based on feelings and the course is threaded through with persuasive examples that bring home the psychological and spiritual reality of this insight.
Over the three-parts of a four part session I feel I have been gradually softened up to feel and respond from a bigger picture. It hasn’t always been comfortable, but it feels like growth.
THE TROUBLE WITH FEELING
My experience of Muresk Ag College which is hosting the Holistic Management course is part of this story of expanded reality. Muresk occupies about 900 hectares of land 11 kms out of Northam on the Avon River about 100kms east and a bit north of Perth.
It is an imposing looking place with a number of solid buildings positioned at intervals over a large, sloping site. Impressive trees, well-kept lawns and garden beds, the site surrounded by working paddocks and flanked by the Avon River.
The red brick buildings shriek ‘institution’, not, to my eyes, a comfortable architectural fit for the low hills and shallow meandering river. I haven’t slept well on campus, despite the comfortable rooms and facilities and the many pleasures of the course. And struggled to have a functioning digestive system, but put it down to travel, unfamiliar food etc.
I just got on with it.
THE NOTICING
It wasn’t till the third month and the third visit that I really paid attention to the affect the place has on my body. I couldn’t ignore the damage.
What kind of subtle energy practitioner worth their salt ‘soldiers on’ in the face of such obvious, cumulative, embodied dysfunction? My experience didn’t seem to be shared by others in the class, but it was real for me and I needed to look at what was happening.
I shared my discomfort with another HM participant. She listened to my story and then sent me information. Muresk was originally a farm established by Andrew Dempster in the 1800s and it had been re-purposed and rebuilt as the Agricultural College in 1926.
This triggered me to look further– a bit stunned I hadn’t thought to do so before. A quick internet search showed me what I already knew – my connections to this area through my matrilineal line ran deep. My ancestors, particularly, John Drummond, who shared a deep history with the Ballardong Noongar, people, were active on this land.
Historical records report that in 1933 at the request of the Shire of Northam, 90 of the remaining clan individuals were removed to the Moore River reserve.
This event is not even a 100 years old. How could generations living past this fact make sense of this level of trauma? What scars remain in the land from this and previous acts of dispossession?
Northam has a Noongar Cultural and Education Centre Bilya Koort Boodja (BKB) and rang them up. The woman who answered the phone was encouraging. She was supportive of my request to open a conversation with her mob and promised to talk to some elders who might be prepared to share some of their knowledge of this patch of land.
My mind can say whatever it wants, but my body’s experience of Muresk is a deep reminder for me that the environmental aspects of regenerative/holistic agriculture cannot be decoupled from its social and political context. They are the same conversation.
WHO GETS THE LAND?
And it is not just about what happens on the land, it is about who gets access to the land in the first place.
Is this the story that my body is asking me to tell?
A friend sent me an article examining attitudes to the rise and rise of Regenerative farming thinking in the USA that helped clarify my feelings on the matter. (https://flip.it/BaFUXR) The authors found that Regenerative farming is positioned as a white male settler idea. Native American Indians with their long history of living and thriving on the land, express frustration that they haven’t been invited to be part of the official story of this new/old way forward.
These first nation’s people should be front and centre of this movement, standing with farmers, strong in their cultural knowledge of living in custodial relationship with natural systems... but 97% of the land is owned by white settler descendants.
“Sustainability without justice is merely sustained injustice.” That from a Food sovereignty advocate from the USA, Maria Whittaker:
In the article they quote a bloke named Chappell who says the idea of a truly regenerative agriculture is one that embraces solutions that are: “low-carbon, high-human.” He adds “Rather than a chemical or a piece of equipment, we need to celebrate people as the key tool’.
Regeneration is a word that is getting a bad rap from many in agriculture at the moment. It triggers anger and defensiveness in some quarters. When we go deep into what has happened on this land beyond the draining of life from the soils, the word becomes incendiary. Regeneration has to be more than soil deep.
The report from the USA concludes that many farmers are possibly reluctant to take on the added cost and complexity inherent to the methods that cluster under the idea of Regeneration. It certainly changes the nature of the work, shifting the emphasis away from yield and toward the management of a functioning ecosystem. More importantly it broadens what the farmer needs to be concerned about.
CARBON AS THE GLUE
In WA I got wind of a potentially optimistic story on this front to do with Midwest indigenous people, pastoralists, and other players on country, drawn together by the economic lure of the Carbon Market. Could carbon become the currency that brings both economic opportunity and healing potential to our arid lands and peoples?
It came from a conversation I had with Hamish Morgan, long time Program Development Co-ordinator for the Central Desert Land and Community. He is based in Geraldton and for years has been travelling out to Wiluna to work with the mob.
GREEN COLLAR
Green Collar, an Australia wide carbon project development company has been operating in the Midwest and when I heard that Hamish’s mob were talking to this company I was intrigued. Who is this Green Collar I asked? Are they setting up projects that will encourage real changes in land management practises?
Hamish, a thoughtful soul, gave this question some thought. From his perspective there is a huge opportunity for Carbon projects to leverage real change in the Southern Rangelands. To set up projects in this zone, Green Collar must negotiate with Yamaji Traditional owners under a newly signed land rights agreement that gives Aboriginal people a say in what projects happen in the Rangelands. Green Collar must also negotiate with those, mostly white settler families who hold pastoral leases and those companies with mining rights.
The process of increasing carbon is under the methodology considered suitable for pastoral land, called Human Induced Regeneration or HIR. The idea is simple – to work out how to get more green growth on the existing trees and shrubs in the Rangelands. This means mainly acacias and other fast-growing natives, the tough pioneers that have become the main plant cover of inland arid zones since the settlers controlled the land. I asked how this can be achieved and was told there is no single solution, it is a paddock by paddock process over land bases that range from half a million to a million hectares. Destocking, controlling grazing pressure, rotational grazing, resting land….I don’t know.
As someone deeply immersed in the (to me) startlingly original learning on offer via Holistic Management it all sounds a bit vague – sitting somewhere between the discredited set-stocking regime of the past, but not quite reaching for the new intensive grazing program taught by Allan Savory’s mob….How is one meant to control the grazing pressure from roos and the ferals unless fences are constructed or shepherds hired or the labour force exponentially increased?
But the ink is barely dry on these carbon legislations and there is a drive to learn and experiment on the land that is heartening.
DIFFERENT TRIBES ONE RESOURCE
One thing I have taken to heart is that the greater the diversity of living entities in an ecosystem, the greater the capacity for resilience and self-organisation of that ecosystem. There is an air of excitement about this venture and it is because of who’s in the room.
This is a powerful coming together of different peoples - and this is why Hamish is inclined to be optimistic. His mob have a seat at the table, they can’t be sidelined. To his way of thinking Carbon credits are creating an economic opportunity under which settler, mining and Indigenous interests could be seen to have common ground in shared resources.
By starting the process to heal the land, they are starting a process that will heal relationships between people. The income stream created by carbon credits through changing land management practises might be exactly what is needed to steer us towards a truly regenerative future.
