Oct 4

Oct 4 45 Many Seeds Make Light Work

Amanda muses about a workshop she is developing to help non-Indigenous folk connect to land, using the garden as a starting point. She employs exercises and ideas picked up from a recently completed Holistic Management course, Regenerative Agriculture processes and what she has gleaned from studying Aboriginal and Indigenous Knowledge Systems.

Amanda also shares a story about a morning spent with a bunch of local miners being lulled into a state of inertia by a mesmerising video presenting the latest in environmentally benign mining techniques.

It’s been a long time.

I have been a bit lax with the podcasts of late. Not sure why. It seems some things have ended, I have had to get my head around changes in projects and the people I have been working with.

And what has been consuming me of late is that I am delivering a workshop at the 2021 Big Sky Readers and Writers Festival in Geraldton at the end of September. I’ve called it Nature Speak. Here’s the blurb.

Bringing non-indigenous people back into relationship with the land is a process that involves shifting from an industrial, mechanical mindset to an earth-centred reality.

How do we embrace the language needed to support this paradigm shift?

Indigenous knowledge systems have a lot to teach us, as do the best of regenerative land management systems– words, language, the meaning they carry can re-shape our world.

For many of us, entanglement and connection with complex ecological systems begins in the garden: this is where we relearn our native tongue.

How to combine an unruly mess of stuff picked up from Aboriginal Knowledge systems, Regen practises and holistic thinking that has been enthralling me for months into a gripping workshop?

Well, with great difficulty, it has been an extremely organic process.

I started with the garden because own gardening practises have changed hugely after months of exposure to the mysteries of microbial life in the soil, regenerative broadacre cropping ideas and the latest iteration of animals as tools of landscape restoration. And it has been a brilliant season for all growers because of rain, rain and more rain.

HOW TO INFLUENCE FRIENDS

I was sharing all of this workshopping stuff with a friend I visited, recently. I hadn’t seen her in years and she had a newish house with a good-sized yard. Out the back was a big flat area covered with a monoculture of weeds – some kind of soil hugging broad-leafed plant, similar to a dandelion.

We started talking garden strategy and I gave her my best thinking: It’s winter and the rains are still coming, best year ever. Get a lot of seeds, anything you can get your hand on that’s cheap and available – birdseed is good because it contains 4 or 5 species. And annual greens like rocket, mizuna, silverbeet, marigolds, nettles, flax/linseed (most people seem to have packets of seeds they have bought from the health food store driven by the latest craze in super foods: quinoa, chia, linseed, chickpea, alfalfa). If you haven’t turned them into smoothies or green drinks or sprouts, best to plant the stuff. I added that seeds like alfalfa are gold because they are nitrate-fixing as well as having pretty flowers in summer and being perennial, coming up year after year like clockwork.

Once you’ve got the seeds, poke holes in the ground, or pull up a few of the existing plants to create space and get as many seeds into the earth as possible……

At this point I stopped talking as my friend was looking puzzled, pained even, and said: That sounds like a lot of work Then she added: will I be able to mow it?

It was my turn to look pained. Mow it? Why on earth would you mow it?And why would she think it would be a lot of work!?

I had thought the hard bit would be getting the seed, as most people don’t seem to regard seed collecting as one of the most riveting activities a person can undertake. Inexplicable, but true. I explained it would be 30minutes, tops, crouched and moving like a crab across the back patch, armed with a kitchen fork (my chosen implement) and a jar of mixed seeds. What’s hard about that???

My garden interventions fell on uncomprehending ears. Based as they were, and are, on underlying principles that my friend has never given any thought to.

My strategy was sound. Her soil, based on the evidence of the weed monoculture, is poor. Diverse plantings will start to change the soil profile allowing for less hardy plants to get a hold. All that diversity will boost soil microbial action, with the added benefit of producing fast-growing, annual greens for the kitchen table.

The different role annuals and perennials play in a landscape is another story that was new to her. Annuals are not heavily rooted and are geared to bloom in the growing season and wither, die and blow away in the dry months. By contrast, perennials have much deeper roots, excellent water holding capacity, and can be part of a strategy over the dry months to stop the backyard soil blowing into the house when the weeds and other annuals dry up.

The big thinking behind this is to use plants to shift the soil environment from low fertility – which is suitable only for pioneer species, commonly regarded as weeds – to higher fertility. Many seeds make light work. Get it? Light as in not heavy, light as in sunlight?

SOCIAL PAYOFFS

And what a metaphor for life! Diversity speaks to inclusion and liberation. For the seeds prepared to tackle the tough conditions, they have support from fellow seeds, both like and non-alike, and in the conditions developed by the first wave of sprouters arrives help for the ones who need stronger networks above and below ground, to thrive.

THE IMPORTANT QUESTION

I backtracked and asked her the question I should have asked first, the crucial one to do with context: What did she wanted to achieve with her garden? Answer: She wanted to have it mowed.

I could have noted, no compost bin in the kitchen – food scraps in with the general rubbish – out of season fruit hanging around…..no judgement… when has it ever been imprinted on us that eating food grown locally in the season it grows makes any kind of difference to anyone or anything? And is this even a relevant thing to be troubled out loud about as Stephen Jenkinson would say if it is a product like strawberries?

Anyway, I didn’t prepare the ground properly for a good exchange of knowledge. And me, a self-styled communicator on ag matters! Probably good that I’m getting into the workshop business. I’ll get to see what’s ‘landing’ from my hard-earned learning. For too long I have been occupying this rarefied zone of podcasting where I get turned off or listened to without having to suffer the eye-rolling.

HEY PESTO!

The conversation moved on. A more promising exchange emerged when she asked me about the ingredients of a small jar of homemade pesto I had brought as a gift. I listed the greens found in my garden: nasturtium leaves, coriander, rocket, mizuna, a few baby sweet potato leaves, tiny micro nettle plants, mint and the last of the Thai basil, just hanging in from the summer. That landed. Who couldn’t love something that abundant, cheap and nutritious? Add a clove of garlic and a handful of almonds, pepitas, sunflower seeds, peanuts, olive oil, parmesan to taste.

Had I inadvertently hit on the way to introduce environmentally-geared growing methods based on whole ecosystem thinking to the household gardener? Start with the humble green pesto? It certainly puts biodiversity front and centre of the discussion with the bigger idea of changing the environment in line with the movement of the seasons rather than focusing on the species and soil conditions or arguing whether something is a weed or not. I think I have the first workshop in the series….

WHAT IS TYSON UP TO?

Back to the one of the main themes of the workshops that I have been working with: the idea that ALL people need to connect to country.

Tyson Yunkaporta’s contention is this is how human beings, not just indigenous folk, are meant to live: nested, connected and entangled within a particular place, particular earth and sky camps. He advocates a coming to place in relational, rather than extractive ways of dealing with the world. Rightway: he calls it.

WRONGWAY

This is a good sequeway to wrongway. I went to a Saturday morning presentation where three Midwest mining companies spoke to a small group of interested locals.

They were there to showcase their businesses and practises to the community – all three were keen to be seen as useful corporate citizens: people who care about the environment and want to bring economic opportunity to local folk as they go about the business of digging stuff up.

All three are scouting for serious investment to take them past exploration and planning to the next stage.

SANDMINE

My favourite presentation was from the man behind VRXSilica.

This is what I learnt. Silica is a major ingredient in concrete and glass and consequently one of the most used commodities in the world. The presenter explained that beach and desert sands won’t work to make flat glass (as distinct from container glass) and that WA has a lot of the right kind of sand - granite derived.

Silica sand is easy to dig up, requires virtually no processing to be made export ready (just add water to wash the sand), has a huge market in nearby Asia, and this particular company has come up with the perfect environmental practise to persuade the EPA that this will not harm the environment. The Arrowsmith area, situated south of Geraldton, has an estimated 700 million tonnes of highly desirable silica sand just waiting to be dug up. They are looking at an initial tenement that is 12 kms long and 4 kms wide.

This is the bit I can’t get past. The presenter showed a short video demonstrating a conservation technique called Vegetation Direct Transfer – or VDT.

The video is animated and shows a machine with a wide flat mouth that is able to scoop up 150 metre square patch of vegetation to a depth of 400 mls. The animation modelled this adapted bulldozer picking up a patch of low heath country. We were looking at a wide mouthed dinky toy sliding under and lifting a flat pale green plane of colour and placing it in a matching patch of the same size where the mining had been completed. They demonstrated an environmental process so benign, clear, efficient, bloodless and entertaining that it seemed nothing could possibly go wrong.

It was mesmerising. So mesmerising that at the time I didn’t think to ask how deep they would mine. I phoned the bloke later. Six to nine metres – averaging out at 8 metres. So, they effectively plan to lift up a 12x4 metre slice of country like lifting biscuits out of a tray, to be returned theoretically in an exact checkerboard pattern at a nearby spot in the same format…. only the landscape has been dropped, or gouged out, to 8 metres below the current ground level. The reason why they don’t go deeper than this is that surface water lies at 10-12 metres and they want to avoid the complications of moisture.

Another questions I didn’t ask: can this be done all year. Wouldn’t the heat load on exposed sandplain in summer with no rain be too extreme to think about re-establishing plant life?

The presenter was proud of the process his mob had developed and it had been tested by Iluka, who play a part in this story in that they set up and monitored a number of sites to test this lift-and-place technique. It works, apparently – only one thing has been suggested by the botanist working with the group, perhaps the heath should be burned first to stimulate re-growth. The presenter was confident it would become the gold standard for this kind of mining. It will cost a fair amount to pull off, as all mining does - but a lot less than those mining outfits having to go deep into the earth, employing crushers and other post-dig processes to extract their ore and many miles from ports and markets.

And VRXSilica are alive to the opportunities for downstream opportunities. Close to two major gas pipelines, roads and a port (Geraldton), there is major potential to create a glass manufacturing plant that would bring skilled jobs and economic growth to the Midwest.

Huge and growing market, relatively easy mining close to roads and ports - sounds like a fine financial reward could be achieved. I even went so far as to look them VRXSilica up on the Stock exchange – so why they are currently sitting at only 22cents a share.

Our presenter said there are no land claims, no existing leases, nothing to stop extraction. Just lots of pesky environmental boxes to be ticked.

The three presenters – they were all friends and colleagues of many years standing – grumbled at the time needed to submit all the environmental studies, but did admit that mining groups do hamper the regulatory process as they tend to lure the best and brightest of the available environmental talent away from the government bodies to serve their own industry.

Have I described this properly, so you are getting the gist? It is really quite a disorienting and strange notion. To treat living country as if it can be picked up and shifted in mosaic, like a giant board game: Monopoly. Is this better than the massive gashes and heaps mining inflicts on the body of WA? Probably. Within the context of capitalism, this defines a best practise, peak performance extraction operation.

What wasn’t mentioned was this low heath country, called Kwongan by Aboriginal traditional owners, is world renowned for its exceptionally high species richness. It is unassuming, prickly, scrubby looking land and it contains a large proportion of the diversity of WA’s plants.

Part of the seduction of this morning was that these mining folk were having fun. They obviously enjoy what they do, love the problem-solving involved in engineering challenges and the complexities of playing the game amidst changing financial, social and environmental circumstances. As long-time players they have formed easy, supportive, collegiate relationships and are driving their extractive business models with as much sensitivity to social and environmental concerns as is possible within the low context, dollar-driven model they occupy. There are no villains here.

But what it we put this model aside for a minute and put the health of the earth, and all its living systems first…and tried to tune out Mark McGowan shouting down eastern pollies by telling them WA is keeping Australia afloat by dint of our skilful mining practises and seemingly untroubled exchange of ore and money with China. Weird.

With thanks to Tyson and, media theorist and writer, Douglas Rushkoff, presenter of a podcast called Team Human that inspired Tyson’s own podcast called The Other Others. And of course, Rory, for the fabulous recording and musical interludes.