Original subtitles

(ominous string music)

- The current system has to go through a collapse

unless you believe that infinite growth is possible

on a finite planet.

The system is growth dependent, so there's gonna be

a collapse in one form or another.

- If you just look at what's happening in terms of

deforestation, resource overconsumption, waste streams

and climate change, and I mean, these are all phenomena

that are brought about by our overconsumption,

overexploitation of resources.

(unsettling music)

- We have to leave 80% at least of the fossil fuel

that we know about and that we know we could make money

digging up, we have to leave it in the ground

for the entire century at least.

- [Man] The ecological crisis comes from treating the earth

as an other, as just a bunch of stuff.

- We've been so powerful and we've impacted on so much

of the wild world around us that if we don't do something

fairly soon, the wild world is going to consume us.

(eerie string music)

- You know, these are the massive issues, climate change,

energy and food, all of these things that are converging

on us and yet, you know, you pick up the paper every day

and there'll be nothing about this stuff.

- If you look at our global economic system,

I'd guess you'd have to first think of it as a system

by accident, nobody sat down and designed this thing

and in a lot of ways, it's sort of the worst

of all possible combinations, because what you have

is something that is supposed to be based in the real world

but behaves as if it were in a fantasy world.

- It's really exploitive, extractive, damaging,

not only to people but to the environment

and to the economy too.

(somber music)

I think we're heading for some very deep water

if we don't make these changes.

- Being sustainable is not just a nice thing to do.

Being unsustainable isn't just a bit unfortunate.

It is an existential threat to our species.

People don't seem to get that.

We actually need to do something about it or we're gone.

- You've probably had those moments of despair

where you think it's just hopeless and the world

is always gonna be this way and anything we do is not enough

but there's also and I would say that this is more

of a heart knowing that understands that

a more beautiful world is possible.

(somber music)

(atmospheric music)

(gentle string music)

(somber music)

- The world is built on stories.

Or even a story, a mythology.

Every culture has a mythology

that answers the deep questions

like who am I, what is a self, what's real,

how does change happen, what's the nature of reality?

(string music)

Every culture answers that in a different way

and the answers that our culture has

and when I say our culture I mean the dominant culture

of this planet, the answers that have worked and guided

our culture for several hundred years now

and to some extent thousands of years

aren't working anymore, we're facing a crisis

in our basic way of making meaning about the world

and our understanding of the recipe for living life

and all of these things are in a state of crisis.

(somber string music)

- The problems that we face in terms of environmental

condition, degradation, overconsumption of resources,

a lot of social justice problems, really pretty much

all stem from a common cause and that's economics.

(somber string music)

The biggest problem it has for us right now,

the biggest implication it has for humans

and pretty much everything else on the planet

is that it's causing a lot of unsustainable growth,

it's causing growth to accelerate in a way that cannot

be met by natural resources or sinks on the planet we have.

(somber string music)

- The money system demands endless growth.

It compels endless growth, it encourages endless growth.

So in other words, it encourages the conversion

of nature into property, into profits.

- Now the problem with this growth, of course,

is that if the economy keeps growing,

sooner or later it needs natural resources

to support that growth.

(bombs explode)

(somber music)

- One of the big flaws in the current money system

is interest, we would probably only need to work

half of the hours that we do

and still be able to maintain the same standard of living

if it wasn't for interest.

Interest is hidden in so many ways.

The price of any goods and services,

most businesses have loans on which they pay interest

and they don't pay interest, you do.

I do.

And so that means that we have to work and work and work

and exploit Mother Nature as well in the process.

Way more than would be necessary if it wasn't for interest.

(somber music)

- For a lot of the things to keep running,

keep the finance engine ticking along and keep economies

moving, we have to have lots and lots of energy.

(frenetic music)

Energy for extracting natural resources,

energy for shipping things around the world,

energy for manufacturing, energy to promote them,

energy to keep them going, energy to maintain things

so it's a lot of energy used in the system.

(somber music)

- Fossil fuel energy is energy from the sun

that's been stored in plants or other living things.

And has been stored under the ground usually

for millions and millions of years.

When you dig it up, you get a free bonus, basically,

you get this amazing wealth of energy which you can do

all kinds of creative and amazing things with,

but the problem is, is that when it runs out, that's it,

it's gone.

The other aspect of that, of course, is the process

of getting it and digging it up is both destructive

and so expensive and requires energy to do.

(frenetic music)

- Peak oil is a concept that is quite simple.

What it means is that you have a finite amount of something

and if you consume it at a steady rate, then...

There kind of isn't a peak, you just consume it,

but if you consume it with an increasing rate

then you'll hit a point where you can't increase anymore,

that would be a peak, and then the consumption

would necessarily drop off in some way.

(somber music)

- The energy return on investment from fossil fuels

when we first discovered it was so big

and that's why we have the abundance that we have now,

as just that free energy and we've been having this

crazy party for a hundred years now on fossil fuels,

it's just a crazy binge that we've been on

and we're at the end of the binge now because the energy

return on investment is dwindling all the time.

That's how our food system works.

We talked about this green revolution that would feed

all these people, but it's not a green revolution.

It's an oil revolution.

(somber music)

- The entire system is hugely dependent on fossil fuels.

You pull those out and I guarantee you within days

the whole thing is gonna fall down.

(somber music)

- If you take into account fossil fuels and the transport,

the tilling, everything, the packaging, the movement,

the whole food system that we have in the developed world,

so called developed world, then...

You know, there's at least 10 units of energy for every one

we get out of it.

- Basing a food production system that's meant

to feed the world on something which is temporary...

Brings obvious problems.

As a result of that is the huge loss of biodiversity and

while not a lot of people care about bugs and all this

other stuff, biodiversity is critical.

So when you strip that away by having what we call

monocultures, then you get massive problems.

With monocultures, we are talking about growing one crop

or farming one animal and you don't see that in nature.

Nature doesn't work that way.

It's evolved diversity for resilience.

When you take that away, these systems become really brittle

and they're very prone to breaking.

Now we kind of stave off the worst of those effects

or we try to with fossil fuel inputs.

We put in fertilizers, we put in herbicides, fungicides,

pesticides, we go to great lengths to try and protect

these very fragile food production systems.

(somber music)

I think what a lot of people don't realize is that

our food system is incredibly vulnerable.

We do a pretty good job most of the time of getting food

where it needs to go, managing supplies, managing surplus,

transportation, all that sort of stuff,

but it is quite vulnerable to major upsets,

all kinds of crises, particularly economic crises.

(eerie string music)

If the shops, the supermarkets, stop selling food

for three days for some reason, how would you survive?

What would that be like?

How would that feel?

What would you do?

You know, it's happened to me in a major city just one day

and it really made me think, you begin to realize

that there is a series of things that all need to be

in place and all need to be functioning properly

all the time for things to run smoothly.

In a world of increasing climate volatility

and the economic pressures that that can bring,

it's really easy to see how a bad situation could develop.

- So this is the kind of scary reality and it's coming fast

unless we really, really quickly change our food system

and how we do it, you know, then there's gonna be huge

impacts on humans, and on the other animals on the planet.

(somber string music)

- To a certain extent, people who really do understand

the problem of climate change and resources and equity,

it's really easy to get focused on the miracle technology

solution to that because that's what we do,

that's what society's asking us to do.

- I think if technology could have

solved all of our problems

then it would have already solved all of our problems.

Theoretically we already have all of the technology

we need to live beautifully on earth and beautifully

with each other, but we have not lived

beautifully on earth and beautifully with each other

so something else has to happen.

(somber music)

- 100 years from now, every solar panel we build

will be rubbish, it'll be toxic waste, in fact, somewhere,

I hope somebody figures out what to do with it.

Every windmill we build now won't be running anymore.

Hopefully a lot of it'll be recycled, I don't know.

But the carbon we put in the air will still be there.

(somber music)

You're never gonna have air travel with renewables,

you're never gonna have steel with renewables.

You're never gonna have electronics with renewables

'cause you need diesel so making sure

that you leave some diesel for later

is kind of important.

I'm not disillusioned with solar or wind or anything.

I know that the substitution of those things for

fossil fuels isn't possible,

so as long as we keep telling ourselves the story

that it is, we aren't actually doing the thing

we have to do which is to just leave the stuff in

the ground, which means what, there's only one thing

you can do then, which is to use less of it.

(somber music)

If there's an industrial civilization out there

a couple centuries from now, then...

They're using fossil fuel.

Tiny amounts of it.

And they're using renewable energy

and that renewable energy they are using

is hydro and geothermal.

And wood that they are harvesting and husbanding

very, very carefully and what we notice most

about them is how little they're using of most everything.

That's what has to happen, it doesn't matter

how many solar panels you ever put on anything.

The only thing that matters is leaving the coal

in the ground, leaving the oil in the ground,

leaving the gas in the ground, all of it

and planting back every bit of forest that you possibly can.

That's the only thing that matters.

(somber music)

- The history of civilization

has been kind of like a history of an increasing power

to dominate and control the other,

the cultural other and also the natural other.

(frenetic music)

And this was supposed to bring us into utopia.

We were supposed to live in paradise by now,

a paradise of electrified comfort, robot servants,

space colonies, artificial food, infinite lifespans,

et cetera, et cetera.

The breakdown that's happening today in part is happening

because this glorious promise of technology

and also social engineering was never fulfilled

and in fact things are getting worse and worse

and in fact our technologies of control

now look to be seeding our destruction.

The breakdown of the ecological basis of civilization.

(somber music)

We don't know anymore what the answer is.

We don't know who we are.

We don't even know what's real because on every level,

the story that answered those questions is breaking down,

politically, economically and especially technologically

and in our relationship to nature so that leaves us

not knowing and it leaves us open to another story.

(somber music)

(hopeful music)

- If we want to solve health crisis, food quality issues,

economic issues, we really have to change the system

and the infrastructure of the system and we have to create

our own infrastructure.

(cheerful music)

I've been studying sustainable farming systems

for over 25 years.

There are no real issues, we can solve all of them.

There are really easy answers to grow food quality

and do that with good environmental care.

That's the easy bit.

We are in the position to do it properly

because of the CSA, our members allow us to create

that diversity, that other old system doesn't allow

you to create that diversity.

- CSA stands for community supported agriculture.

It means that a farmer starts growing food

and growing food, there's a lot of unknowns in there

and you have to start at the beginning of the season

and you don't know for whatever reason if you're gonna

harvest all the things that you plan to harvest,

that you started sowing months back.

So the idea is that a group of people support a farmer

so the farmer knows he's got an outlet.

And the members that we have, they know that every week

they're gonna get a box of healthy fresh foods

that have been harvested just before they got them.

For us it means we have stability in the fact that

the plants we sow, that they are sold.

We don't have the issue of food waste.

Because if a broccoli is small and it normally wouldn't

be able to go to a supermarket, we can give people two.

(cheerful music)

- As a farmer, you want to create healthy soils

and healthy plants and healthy animals and further up

the food chain, you make sure that you create a soil

that invites the right sets of microbes.

(cheerful music)

That for us means we have soil which is the mineral

component, in the soil we've got the microorganisms

which are governing the system, we just create

a habitat for them, then you got the plants growing

out of there, be it annuals, perennials, and trees.

(cheerful music)

Then amongst that you've got the insects living in there

and then we've incorporated pigs, sheep, cows, ducks,

geese, and I'm sure we're forgetting a few bits and bobs

and every single item adds value.

(cheerful music)

- So on the closed loop systems they will have tree crops

and all that, nuts, fruit, that kind of thing

happening on the fringes or in shelter belts.

A whole really diverse approach to farming

that is way more sustainable but also it closes

that nitrogen, that fertilizer loop

so you don't have to bring it in from the outside.

You just don't waste it.

(cheerful music)

- While eating less meat is a really important thing to do

it's important to recognize that you can't have

a healthy ecosystem without animals.

A truly environmentally friendly

and ecologically healthy food production system

must have animals because when you take animals out

of that system, all the jobs that those animals did

in that functioning ecosystem now needs to be done

some other way, whether that's by people or chemicals.

The health of these food production system is supported by

the natural and healthy interaction between plants

and animals and that can take the form of pest control,

fertility cycles, there's lots of interactions

between animals and plants which we can and should use to

support a healthy and resilient food production system.

So really what that boils down to is we need to eat

less meat, we don't cut it out, but the best thing

that anyone can do is try and find producers that are

operating systems which are looking after

the health of their environment, including the animals

and supporting them.

(eerie music)

(cheerful music)

- What comes out the back end of a worm is really good stuff

and then it's just really cool just seeing

this high field of fungus and it's just growing

on the surface of the soil.

(cheerful music)

And so holistic grazing is a management technique that's

been devised by a Zimbabwean man, Alan Savory,

and he was observing the large herds of buffalo

in Africa and the bison in north America

and just massive herds of ruminant animals

and these animals were constantly on the move

'cause there's generally some lions or something

just on their back and wanting to pick off any

of the weak ones.

We have large amounts of cattle that are shifted

every day but instead of lions keeping them

bunched together, we have electric fences

and each day they're going to fresh grass

and it's long grass and so they're not eating it all.

Some of it's getting trampled and with the dung

and urine and that, that's just all forming

that kind of compost heap on the ground.

Other farms might be looking at us and saying,

well, you're just wasting all that grass

'cause it's dry and stalky and what have you,

but my reply is that waste is a human concept.

Nature doesn't do waste and so we're using that pasture

as part of our first fertilizer program

because that's what's getting put down on the soil

and broken down and going back into the soil.

(cheerful music)

When the grass is grazed and with the holistic long grazing

system, it gets cut off short by the animal

and it also sheds its roots at that time

and that's what is releasing carbon into the soil.

And I guess one of the most exciting things

and drivers of what we're doing is the potential

that that has for...

For helping with climate change issues.

(cheerful music)

Some of those CAFOs that they call 'em in America

or the feed lot, cattle fattening operations,

are a climate disaster, but again,

under this system, they are sequestering more carbon

and are part of a natural cycle that is actually beneficial.

Conventionally farmers, it's all about

keeping the grass short

in a vegetative state so it's growing vigorously,

and that system works while you put on lots of

imported fertilizers, particularly phosphate fertilizers

largely from North Africa and a whole system that requires

digging up that fertilizer and tracking it and then

shipping it and then tracking it and then processing it

and then flying it.

On the whole it's a system that's not going to work and...

In a future with less fossil fuels.

(cheerful music)

What we're doing at the farm here is trying to reduce

the amount of fossil fuel that it takes to produce food.

We've got the cattle going around, we have hens following

along behind the cattle, there's pigs on this farm too

and we're milking a few dairy cows and all that

is really about using a perennial crop like grass, pasture

with forage from trees and that around as well

so we can produce eggs from the chooks and pork

without relying on so much of the annual grains

and all the energy that's involved in producing them

so just trying to get the fossil fuels out of our

food system as much as we can and producing

healthy, natural food.

(cheerful music)

- The powerful thing is that with regenerative agriculture

we can not only produce food and we can not only produce

an abundance of food, but we can do it in a way that

regenerates the land, that replenishes the aquifers,

that sequesters carbon,

that nurtures and supports biodiversity.

Regenerative agriculture, permaculture, holistic management,

there's nothing magical about the way that these things work

It's all based upon sound science and about having

a point of view that is looking at your ecosystem

in its entirety, not just individual aspects of it.

So really what this breaks down to is that anyone

who's looking after land, whether you're a farmer,

a gardener, whatever, you're an ecosystem manager.

(gentle music)

- My philosophy about what to do in the world

isn't to go to a pristine area and live there

and enjoy your life, it's to find a place that's degraded

and fix it up.

(gentle music)

- 23 years ago we started developing the food forest

system here.

We've got 480 different species of plant at last count.

That doesn't include the 80 different types of apples

and the 60 different types of gooseberries

and it's lovely to have that diversity

and it means that every time there's things flowering,

things giving fruit, you know, fruit crops you can eat

and so having diversity's special and that's what makes

a forest garden resilient.

(gentle music)

This property had been abandoned for probably 40 years,

no one lived here, an old house had burned down on the spot.

- And the top area, this area where the house is now was

completely covered in junk and the remains of the old house.

Most people would have not even crossed the threshold

of the property to have a look at that, I don't think,

because it doesn't look very appealing but to us it did

because I thought, well for one thing, nobody wants it

so it's probably going to be cheap and it was,

cheap to buy and secondly I thought I can fix this.

(gentle music)

- A food forest is a permanent planting,

so you want to set up just a like a fire system,

so a fire system can always be the big trees

and the middle sized trees and the bottom layer,

the ground layer, they work together, some plants

cap some minerals and give others back

and another one does something else.

- Growing out in the forest garden, aside from the native

trees which I used as a framework or a platform

for building everything else and those provide me

with shelter from the wind and also nest sites

for the birds and the birds are a really important player

in the management of the garden and the cork

or the cabbage trees that I've got growing there

and the starlings nest in almost all of them

and those starlings as they're feeding their youngers,

their babies, are flying out and finding any soft bodied

caterpillar or grub they can so there's our pest management

or that kind of thing.

And then as an understory or the second layer down to that

we have our fruit tree layer which is our heritage apples

and pears and plums and nectarines and peaches, apricots.

And then below that a layer of berry fruits and currants,

red currants, black currants, white currants, gooseberries,

woosterberries, all of those sorts of shrubby...

Plants that like to grow in the semi shade.

And then wrapping around all of that are the biennial

and perennial herbs, some of which are edible,

some of which are medicinal, and then below that

there are bulbs and root crops that grow such as parsnips

and wild carrots, those kinds of things

and then winding their way up through these things

are vines like grape vines and kiwi fruit

and mint and gooseberries and hops and all sorts

of things which kind of bind everything together

and tie the forest together.

(gentle music)

- That's so peaceful when you walk about.

It's just all different flowers and the energy in action,

all the insects and the birds have their own life

and so the birds are doing all their thing up in the trees

and coming down and feeding and the insects

are flying around and having babies

and flying off on missions.

It's like being in an another universe, really,

it's just amazing, it's to me how life should be

with livingness and interconnectedness,

all the plants and the bees and the herbs.

(gentle music)

- In a forest garden like ours, the major player is

wildness, is, you know, the natural world

and all those things that happen in there

and my job is just to kind of mold that to suit our purposes

to a certain extent.

We are not separate from the world.

We are as wild as it is.

But we've worked towards a form that is not fitting in

with the wild world at all well

and it's going to realign us fairly soon

in my view unless we can recognize

that we need to be fully integrated into that world.

(gentle music)

- People in indigenous societies and tribal societies

or in agrarian villages, they were enmeshed in

a matrix of relationship that gave them a strong identity.

Everybody who they saw on a daily basis

knew them really well.

And we also were in intimate connection with the land,

we knew every plant, every animal, every bird,

we knew its song and when it sang and what bugs it ate

and where those bugs lived and what the soil smells like

where the bugs live and what plants grow there

and what medicine plants are used for.

We were in this web of inter-being.

We felt as if we were at home in the universe.

That is missing in our current society.

We're surrounded by a sea of strangers, people that we know

only very superficially, if at all.

(eerie music)

- For Maori people, the ancestors and the land

are all part of one, we come from the land.

And most people, humans on the planet relate to land

one way or another because they belong to it

and they forge their own identity out of it as well

and that will always continue to happen.

It's like a biological bond between a mother and a child.

You can't break it.

That bond is enforced with the genealogy of the ancestors,

the families, grandparents, there's emotion stored

in that person that they feel they belong here.

(acoustic music)

- Interbeing is a very natural term, it means more

than interconnection or interdependency, which kind of

suggests separate selves having relationships.

Interbeing is more of an understanding that we are

relationship, that my very existence depends or draws from

or includes your existence.

(people laugh)

My wellbeing is intimately connected to your wellbeing

or to the wellbeing of the river, the ocean,

the forest, people across the world and so forth

because I'm not really separate from you.

And that means that in the story of inter being,

I know that whatever I do to the world

will come back to me somehow.

So if our true being is the totality of our relationships

and includes everything in the cosmos, if we are truly

maybe a holographic mirror of all that is,

then when we cut ourselves off from any aspect of nature,

other people, we create a wound, we create a cutoff

and this is painful and we yearn to recover our wholeness.

However, due to ideology, due to the economic system

that we're immersed in, due to cultural factors,

due to many, many, many reasons,

the reunion that we long for

is unavailable to us.

That is good for business because it drives consumerism,

it drives acquisitiveness, it drives greed,

it drives all kinds of neurotic behaviors

that seek to compensate for the missing relationships.

(acoustic music)

- I felt myself being drawn into this materialistic world

because all the people that were around me

had material possessions and there was this wanting

and creating of attachment and wanting and wanting

more stuff so I sort of got swept into that in a way.

(acoustic music)

So yeah, I studied business and I was involved in finance

and more specifically the stock market, so we used

to help people manage their money and...

One of the organizations I worked with, we used to manage

hundreds of millions of dollars for people.

I wasn't from that background, from sort of a conservative

sort of upbringing, then all of a sudden, I'm involved with

guys that are driving luxury cars and living in expensive

house in Sidney suburbs, it's sort of a bit overwhelming.

A lot of the guys that I had worked with,

they were multimillionaires,

but 20 million wasn't enough, so they have to have

the three cars, they have to have the holiday home,

they have to have a boat and what happens is you can get

trapped in that lifestyle, hey.

(acoustic music)

So the idea is to, you know, have...

Native plants mixed among fruit trees

so we've got natives here, we've got a tamarilo here,

we've got minook and canook are in and piss borns,

natives, we've got a cabbage tree here.

This is a pine nut, so those really expensive nuts

you get in the supermarket, this is one of those.

It takes about 10 years to get any fruit on it

or any nuts, so that's a longterm project

and then over here we've got a fig tree which is fruiting

quite nicely and then for the monarch butterflies

we've got a couple of swan plants which they really enjoy

and we might be lucky to see one, here he comes now.

It was only after Beth, my wife and I, made the move

to New Zealand, we'd just had enough of the whole

corporate life and we wanted a slower, simpler lifestyle.

It was then the realization sort of hit home,

I started to research more, read, you know, hundreds

of articles and watched hundreds of documentaries

and all sorts of stuff, then I started to really understand,

well, wow, we've got some serious issues here

and no one's really talking about this stuff

and it's quite scary.

I guess with realization of some of the broader issues

such as climate change, peak oil, the resource depletion

and the extinction crisis we're currently going through

it's sort of like it's these massive issues

have been given lip services by governments

and organizations and it's like, aw, it just won't happen

or the system'll solve this problem

and that's what it sort of feels like.

So I guess that brings up a lot of emotions like

frustration and anger and guilt and it's like

why isn't someone doing something about this?

Here we go, here's strawberries, here's strawberries.

So here's a nice one, I can, look at the color

on that thing.

Then I started to research permaculture and realized that

it was an integrated approach to how we're living

so at the moment, our current society,

it's a fragmented approach to living

so everything is compartmentalized or separated,

whereas permaculture is a holistic approach

to how we're living.

It integrates food, environment, with your lifestyle

and taking care of people, the planet and

the natural resources.

So a lot of people come over to our property

and have a look around, they go what about

all your fruit trees, do you get pests and stuff

like birds that eat them, and I say yeah, sure,

but we don't mind that, they were here first

and we're a part of nature and we have comments

from other people that live around near us

on the farms and they say I can't believe how much

wildlife and bird life is here and their properties,

just a few hundred meters away have almost no

wildlife or bird life.

(acoustic music)

So, we're attracting bird life and wildlife

through just letting nature be as opposed to just

wanting to control it.

Permaculture links into other aspects like collaboration,

localization, food resiliency and networking,

so it's not just about growing food,

it's about connecting a whole system

and integrating a whole system into one's life.

This lifestyle working on the land and doing permaculture

feels more rewarding and like I'm putting something back.

We also live a less consumerist lifestyle,

so we don't need as much stuff, so I haven't got

this constant craving for more and more things

to make me feel satisfied or happy.

So there you have it, we have homegrown salad,

fruit salad, a green salad and some eggs

and I can't believe still that...

I don't have to go to a supermarket,

we've grown all this ourselves in just three years.

I'm still amazed, so anyone can do it.

(acoustic music)

When I was living in big cities,

it was like I had to get away to connect with nature,

but when I wake up every morning, I come outside

and I'm immediately in nature here.

I don't have that void anymore.

I've just got this instant connection and satisfaction.

It's hard to explain.

(gentle music)

- I mean, maybe you've had this experience, feeling like

I'm not living my life.

I'm living the life I'm paid to live,

but what about my life?

So this is a different dimension of human nature that...

We need to invoke, we need to...

Implement, we need to create conditions

for that part of human nature to blossom.

(acoustic music)

- We had been living in Caty Caty and I was...

Working...

A regular job as a GP in the practice there

and then I just found these kind of warning signs

that I was started to get out of balance.

I'd be lovely with my patients, but I'd come home

and be kinda shitty, I...

Was feeling quite depressed.

Just kind of the internal...

Cogs weren't running together very well.

And...

We started talking about it and thought, well,

maybe we really need to kinda...

Radically rethink how we want to live.

(gentle music)

So the house is 20 square meters.

It started with a sheep shearer's quarters just to the

side of us here and that was maybe 20 years ago

that that was built, so our bedroom is the original cabin

and then this L shaped space is our kitchen, lounge,

library, office.

Day bed.

- Everything. (laughs)

- Everything, yeah.

20 square meters.

We've got a shower just adjoining

and a bit of a deck out the back.

A few months ago a friend of mine helped me

put a 300 watt panel up on the roof

and so that powers the broadband and telephone.

And a bit more light.

What else, now we can...

- Use the sewing machine, which is very exciting.

- The sewing machine is good.

A lot of people when they hear about it, they think,

oh my gosh, how is that with the baby

and even before that, how is that just the two of you?

- I think actually it's great with the baby

living in a small space in that...

Wherever she is she's never that far away.

So it's quite easy to be doing whatever I need to be doing

and keeping an eye on her and when she's sleeping,

she'll be close by.

(acoustic music)

- We have...

I don't know the term for it, like a work trade arrangement

with the owners and we've been living here

just over a year so about three or four days a week

I'm on the farm and then part time I work as a GP.

So our costs are...

Fractional to what they were living in town.

I don't have any stress about money which is a huge benefit

Emotionally I'm healthier.

(both laugh)

(acoustic music)

- It was a choice wanting to be...

More immersed in my environment and more directly

connected with my needs, where my food was coming from

and I love going out and seeing the garden each day,

seeing how things have changed and yeah,

it's like having a relationship with a living thing

or lots of living things.

- Regularly tending in the garden, I had this feeling

of almost being in love with the garden.

Which blew me away.

- The future of humanity is to return to that

relationship to nature and to all beings

and to all human beings too, to fall in love

with the world, its wellbeing is my wellbeing.

If we really were in love with the planet

and incorporated that love into all of our systems,

into our money system, we would not have

an ecological crisis.

- If an economy is operating outside

of ecological limits and the inevitable conclusion

is that it's going to completely erode the resource base

until it...

Implodes or collapses.

So really, the choice that we have is to design and

develop an economy that operates within ecological limits.

That's our only safe bet, that's our only bet at all.

- So if we think about the whole problem of deflation

and what could happen post collapse in a country

that experiences a sudden reversal and this loss

of liquidity where the money supply really really gets

chopped down, people still have needs, people still have

goods and services, they're gonna

find a way to exchange those.

What you want is the easiest possible way

to make this happen and this is where alternative currencies

would plug the gap, if a central government

were quick thinking, quick off the mark

and actually had a plan for dealing with this stuff,

they could introduce a new currency,

maybe a parallel currency, maybe a replacement currency

to counteract the disappearance of all the bank money.

That probably won't happen, though, so it's going

to be up to local and regional currencies to fill that void.

(piano music)

- I woke up one morning and jumped out of bed

without even being conscious yet saying,

I'm going to start a local currency.

And I just felt so much joy, there was just like

this energy moving through me.

Loaves stands for local origin

Ashurst voluntary exchange system.

It's one of those acronyms that you fit the words

to the acronym instead of the other way around.

It is meant to be a voucher system that circulates

in Ashhurst and the Bohomona valley

as a voluntary alternative to using money for exchange.

So Loaves is primarily trading

at the Ashhurst Community Market

and we have about a dozen or so businesses

that are accepting it there.

We've got the cheesery, we've got the fudgery,

we have several plant businesses.

We have a business consultant who accepts it outside

of the market and there's half a dozen others

that are accepting it as well.

One of the primary benefits of the currency in my mind

is the awareness raising that goes along with it.

We're after not the currency itself

but the relationships that come out of the currency

so one of the major things is this awareness campaign

around the benefits of buying local, the benefits

of having a commitment between customers and businesses.

Knowing what's available in your own community,

of going to town instead of the city when you need something

of supporting your neighbors and looking to your neighbors

and their businesses as a primary way of meeting your needs.

- The wealth generated by using our local currency,

100% of it stays here, there's no interest

and it just keeps circulating and recirculating

in the local community.

And rather than...

Being considered in competition with the national money,

it's actually complimentary to it.

(gentle music)

- So you strengthen these local connections,

of course, that's a very resilient thing to do

because it just means that if things are rough,

you've got friends, neighbors and people in your region

that are able to help one another out.

Timebanking is a very interesting development in that

it uses a very egalitarian basis, it says everybody's time

is equal, it doesn't matter how skilled you are

or what your qualifications are or what you do

for your day job, that your hour is worth the same

as my hour.

(idyllic music)

- I'm Maria Li from Te Mahi Kai at Diamond Harbor School.

Which is a gardening to cooking program.

So we teach the children how to grow everything themselves

and they plant the seeds and then look after the garden

and then when it's my turn, we harvest

what they've grown and turn it into lunch.

(gentle music)

So...

Today we're making kale chips and broadbean dip

and each week it's different.

The idea is just to teach them some basics of cooking

and in order for that to work, we use time bank volunteers.

And we couldn't do it without them.

Our volunteers are paid one credit per hour that they come

and volunteer for us so we take those from the school

time bank credit system and give it to them

and then they use that to trade for whatever they need.

(gentle music)

- It's always easier to build your barn while the sun

is shining than try to put it up in a howling gale

so if you put these things together now,

if you get the system up and running,

and especially with something like a local currency

where they may be some marketing involved,

trying to get buy in from people and all that,

you don't create one of these things out of whole cloth

and get it widely accepted overnight.

(gentle music)

- But there's no getting away from it.

A huge part of this is that we just consume too much stuff.

(eerie music)

Our entire economy is built on getting us to buy

and consume, dispose and reconsume things.

I don't think it's realistic that we can expect to live

in a world where we don't make things or use things

or use resources, of course we do, we need to use them

in a way that is smart, you know,

it's about intelligent use, it's about being efficient

and not wasteful.

- The notion of waste is something that wasn't around

two or three hundred years ago, you know,

we just didn't have waste, things had utility,

things had value all the way through

and if they reached the end of productivity,

they were reformed into something else.

Welcome to Bayswater Repair Cafe.

A repair cafe is a free popup event

where local community experts

in a variety of different areas,

offer their skills and services to other people

in their local community for free.

You know, every year, we send a crazy amount of stuff

to holes in the ground and this is about maybe doing

something to address some of that flow

but also in the process of doing that

bringing people together in a beautiful way that...

Connects people, creates some networks

and maybe even some friendships.

So we've got five different repair areas at the cafe today.

We've got an electrical appliances repair space

and that is overwhelmingly the most popular area,

so people bring in toasters and lamps and all kinds

of random bits and pieces.

We've got a clothing repair space

and we've got a team of seamstresses

and a seamster, if that's the right word,

who are mending clothes.

(upbeat music)

We've got a guy who is repairing wood and pieces

of furniture and we've got general repairs

and we've also got two bike mechanics.

I was speaking to the daughter of one of the volunteers

who helped out with the repairs and he was an older guy

and he said to her that he felt...

A real sense of...

Belonging and a real sense of feeling useful

and having purpose and...

I thought that was an amazing output from the day

to make someone feel good about having

shared their skills with local people.

This is a beautiful example of a community initiative

that brings people together and enhances connection,

enhances a sense of community and neighborhood and...

You know, we fix a lot of stuff,

but more important than that I think is the building

of connection and community.

(somber music)

- It's really important to remember that when you

dispose of something, you can't throw it away.

When you throw something it goes somewhere.

You might not know where that is,

it may be out of your sight,

it may be out of your mind,

but there is no such place as away.

(somber music)

- In 2007 we were really starting to think about our impact

that we were having, just our regular day to day actions

and one of the things we focused on was how much rubbish

we were producing, I mean, we could have focused

on anything, but rubbish was so visual and just every week

of rubbish bags filling up and so we somehow decided

to challenge ourselves, I don't remember whose idea it was

now but we did this crazy thing where we thought, right,

we're gonna try and make no rubbish for the entire year.

We were genuinely not green people.

We were putting out a bag of rubbish every week without fail

and we had literally never thought about it before.

we sort of, it came to us one day,

we went, oh my gosh, this is terrible.

- In terms of the challenge was to try and live

for one year with less than a city council rubbish bag

and most of it was made up of the items

that were out of our control, so the radiator hose

in our car burst and so we had radiator hose

and we tried to carry on doing things

that you'd normally do so we were renovating our home

back then and...

We had all the lead paint from scraping the weatherboards.

So in practical terms, that's what we had left over.

(acoustic music)

I think when we look at the average rubbish bin,

you know, what people are putting out,

at least 50% of it's generally organics and so

you take the biggest things out first, right,

so deal with organics is the no brainer.

If you do that, you're 50% ahead of the average citizen

and then there's another sort of 30% of recycle material

general these days in the rubbish bin so there's

the next thing, so you deal with the organics,

then you recycle everything you can and you're getting up

there by that stage, you've made massive gains.

People can feel overwhelmed and feel that what they're doing

doesn't make a difference, but most of the waste

we create or we're kind of...

Complicit in is waste we've never seen

so we'll buy something and there'll be a bit of packaging

around it that we see, but making that item,

that's when the bulk of the waste is created

so if you put out a rubbish bag, it actually represents

70 rubbish bags of waste that you've never seen

that's gone into making that bag of waste.

Consumers have it tough, right, a lot of money

goes into marketing and sending them messages

that you can buy our compostable packaging

and you're saving the environment

and of course, compostable packaging in the landfill's

just as bad.

- It's the sort of thing that actually needs

to be composted at very hot temperatures

so it really needs commercial composting to be done properly

One of the biggest problems in my business is

that I have to go vendors and say, I'm sorry,

I know you've paid more and you've been promised

that this is eco and compostable by the person

that sold it to you but they didn't actually go

and do their product stewardship and find out

whether the composting industry can take it

in every place.

- I think we've actually got consumers

that want to do the right thing,

we've got businesses that are doing amazing stuff,

and we've got a government completely missing in action

in terms of providing a framework to encourage

those behaviors more and more.

- So when you do buy a container at the supermarket

you make sure it's a reusable container

and then you wash it out and you take it into

one of these stores and you get them to weigh it

and you fill it up with whatever you want

and they take the weight of it

and you've just stopped that plastic packaging.

- If people combining composting and learning

how to recycle and they're just putting a bit

of extra thought into how they're shopping,

particularly considering their packaging...

(gentle music)

It's that choice when you're at the supermarket

or at Buntings or whatever, thinking about the item,

essentially if it's plastic or got other composite

materials in it, what can you do with it

at the end of life, not much, it's gonna be rubbish,

it's gonna be around for thousands of years.

Every time you spend a dollar it's a vote.

We have so much power, so much more power than what

we realize, so it's like keep on that knife edge,

yes, see, there's these big issues, but also yes,

we can make a difference.

(gentle music)

- Like there's part of me, you know, when I go to recycle

my bottles or compost my waste...

It's like, well what good does it do?

Now I'm just subtracting one plastic bottle

from the enormous trash heap that gets shipped to India

and is making new mountains in India and China, you know,

of waste, like what does it matter?

One bottle different?

You can say well if everybody did it, then it would make

a difference, so you have to do your part,

but part of you will say, well, I'm not everybody

and if everybody does it, then it doesn't matter if I do it.

So we have to have another reason.

For me it comes down to relationship and ritual.

I like to save my compost and use composting toilets,

for example.

Not because I've done some calculation that...

This is gonna save the world but because it's a different

kind of relationship with the beings around me.

(gentle music)

- Composting toilets, like composting your own shit,

processing your own toilet waste is a real basic fundamental

thing that we should all practice, it's a...

Simple way of being, of demonstrating self responsibility.

- So with a flush toilet basically you take really nice

clean drinking water and our shit and mix the two together.

Both wonderful resources, when you mix them together,

you create a toxic problem.

So with a compost toilet system,

you're able to capture that amazing resource and...

Take care of it and treat it in a way that removes

any pathogens or problems and create a wonderful resource.

(gentle music)

- Okay, so welcome to our toilet, for a start,

it's a composting toilet bucket bench system.

We've got cover material which we use old sawdust

from the mill, it's already got bacteria and a bit

of fungus in there.

So you go make your deposit, (clicks tongue),

put a bit of cover material on, leave it.

And then when we've got a certain amount of buckets

we go to the compost and add straw and garden waste

and kitchen waste.

(upbeat music)

And this is one I did maybe a week ago

and we'll put the compost thermometer in here

and see what we're looking at.

It's still looking at 50 degrees, it's going up,

we've got up to 65 degrees the other day,

I recorded it.

- You know, there are pathogens you have to consider,

there's roundworm eggs and all these different kinds

of worm eggs that can exist in your manure.

If you do a hot compost, that's the safest way

because you can nuke all those things within hours.

(upbeat music)

- And over here...

Is...

What you get.

I put it in a bag, but you don't need to. (grunts)

That there is about a year old,

it's got lots of worms in it.

We put all our garden waste and all our kitchen waste

in here, but the worms are a good sign.

If you've got worms, it means it's not too acidic and

(sniffs) mmm, yum, good stuff

and that goes straight on the garden

and the plants love it and we love the plants. (laughs)

- When it's finished composting it doesn't look like

or smell anything like poo.

It's just beautiful black compost.

So we have monitored it closely,

we've watched the temperature,

we know all the pathogens have been nuked,

we feel confident in our process

so we feel safe to use it in our garden.

Anyone can do this, it's just really a matter of being

engaged and wanting to do it and getting the knowledge,

it's a knowledge based system, it's not technological

or anything really advanced, I've seen people do it

in cities with a wee backyard, small backyard.

Yeah, and I've seen people do it in really rural settings.

It's just a matter of being engaged.

- Yeah, it's for everyone, everyone,

everyone who wants to take more

responsibility for themselves

and not pass it off.

Everyone who values their poo. (laughs)

I value my poo. (laughs)

I value your poo too, so you're welcome to leave a deposit

before you go, it's sort of expected,

actually, no pressure. (laughs)

(gentle music)

- I've come to see that in order to be part of the solution

we really need to use our everyday choices to change

our behavior and it's a cultural shift

that needs to happen in order for us to at least

sustain ourselves, which isn't even enough, of course,

because...

What are we sustaining? (laughs)

And so that's something I've really been putting

a lot of time into recently, is designing my work

so that it's actually regenerative.

(upbeat music)

Sort of out of necessity I started this organic waste

collection.

Check this out, whoa!

Now we're currently picking about two and a half tons up

each week from local businesses and instead of that

all going into a hole in the ground, it gets returned

back to the way of wind row erodic composting.

So we currently have around 45 businesses on the Why Waste

collection, and they have a number of bins or buckets,

mostly wheelie bins and some have up to five

wheelie bins at their business and every week

Why Waste comes and picks that up and we take it to,

we weigh it, we record all the data, things like that,

we take it to a composting facility and so yeah,

we're in partnership with them so that we can return that

waste back to the soil.

Recently, one of my clients rang me up

and they were super stoked because they were able to cancel

this big, like, skip bin for their rubbish, you know,

and now they just use a 240 liter wheelie bin

which is much, much smaller and that's as a result

of all of their...

Compostable waste going back to the soil.

Ooh, what's that, ooh, tasty muffin. (laughs)

(upbeat music)

I'm really passionate about composting as a solution of

minimizing our waste and our impact here on...

This one planet that we have. (laughs)

Food scraps and biodegradable waste takes up over a third

of what we send to a landfill.

When biodegradable matter biodegrades, anaerobically,

it produces a lot of methane which is 23 times worse

than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas

and not only do you get that gas going to the atmosphere

but you also get a liquid version of it

leaching into our soils, into our water table.

(upbeat music)

So what we're trying to achieve here is build

a really hot compost around this drum and also

all of this, build all this irrigation into it

so that when that aerobic hot compost heats up

we should be able to pump water through the system

out and over to these bathtubs over here

and have free biologically heated hot water.

The reason why I'm so enthusiastic about compost is that

it's fertility in its purest form.

This is how nature builds soil and that enables us

to grow more food and...

If people are conscious of composting,

they're probably gonna become more conscious

about what they're eating and if they're opening

less packets, that's good for everyone,

that's good for the planet, that's good for our people,

if we can get people to focus on eating better,

then we're actually able to produce a lot less landfill

waste and a lot more biodegradable waste,

which in turn can be turned into more fertility

to produce more food, so the healthier we eat,

the better our waste is and much easier to manage

and return to the land.

(upbeat music)

People talk about thinking global, acting local.

I suppose I'm really sitting in that truth presently.

I'd rather think local and act global,

but we've got to start somewhere, you know?

And so...

Yeah, that's the change that I'm wanting to see in the world

so I'm being it the best I can.

(upbeat music)

(somber music)

(upbeat music)

- I see a lot of people who are very sensitive to...

The devastation, the damage or just civilization

and it paralyzes them and that's sad

because we need those people, all of those people.

You know, there are a lot of things that could depress you

out in the world, but if you take each negative act,

there's almost like an opportunity or a provocation

to do your thing, which is the opposite of that,

give more life, then it's fun, it's a winnable game,

that's how I see it.

(gentle music)

- Wouldn't it be awesome to see our country

before human contact?

You know, the thousands and thousands, millions of birds.

Huge, huge Cody trees, it's just unimaginable.

I think we all have done a misjustice to the (speaks Maori).

My ancestors weren't exactly the best conservationists

either but we now have a chance to revive

and recover those landscapes before it's too late.

- Over a three year period we planted 85,000 trees

and the majority of those are New Zealand native trees

which are now flourishing and really transforming

the landscape.

I just sort of would love to see what this place

looked like 1000 years ago, which is such

a brief period in ecological time

and in that time we've sort of stripped

most of the native vegetation and done a whole lot

of damage and we've gone about as far as we can

down that road and so now it's time for us

to try and find the balance and restore those...

Ecosystems but find a place for humans

living harmoniously within it.

- You don't realize this, but this used to be

pastoral desert.

- It was just grass.

- Yeah, and...

This is what people can do. - Mmm.

- [Man] You can create heaven on earth.

(birds chirp)

- Start growing food, food is central to the way we live,

our health and our whole ecosystem, environment.

Even if you're in an apartment, windowsills, pots,

whatever, you can start and that's the first step.

Once you engage with growing and experiencing nature

then things start to happen.

- I get asked this a lot, what can somebody do

if they're not a farmer, if they're not on the land,

what can they do to change it?

Well, they can do a lot, the best thing that anybody can do

is to vote with their wallets.

While in some cases it may be more expensive,

do what you can, you know, you can see

people in your area that are producing food that is

ecologically healthy, they're doing it in a way

that is looking after the environment,

then that adds up, you know, the more people

that do that, the less expensive it will become

as that becomes normalized.

(gentle music)

- You know, from an individual's point of view,

the biggest change by far that we can achieve

in our own by changing our own lifestyle

is to reduce the amount of meat we eat.

That will have a much bigger effect

than what we do transport wise, almost anything else.

- It's a lovely poem that talks about, we don't have to be

good, we don't have to walk 100 miles on our knees

repenting in the desert, we just have to do

what the soft animal of our body loves

and I really like that, I really like that.

For me this turns out to be what I love and I have

a suspicion that this is actually the blueprint

and there's something when people get to it,

everybody would want to live this way, I suspect, but...

It might be a really long journey for some folks

to get to that knowing.

- Last year, I made a submission to...

The council of longterm plan that I thought climate change

was by far the most urgent and important issue

that council should...

Be concerned about and...

They said, and what would that look like?

I got a reaction.

So I ruminate on that for a while

and I took it back to a group that I was part of,

called Project Wairarapa, and...

They said, yes.

Let's do this.

You should've heard the buzz at that first meeting,

it was fantastic and that feeds me, that encourages me.

That I'm doing something useful, it's my time

to give back to the community that's been so good to me,

where I've raised my kids and had such a good life.

- So my vision for the future, I have to be really clear,

it doesn't have anything to do with things working

the way they do now but with renewable energy.

That's actually not a possibility.

Working on renewable energy and being quite different

from what we do now, evolving into something else

is the vision I see.

Now how well that's all working, how high a quality

of life that is, how fair it is, how equitable it is,

how stable the governments are, how much war

has come between now and then completely depends

on what we do right now.

(gentle music)

- I think that the place that we're going

is a place that we cannot see from where we are.

It'll only emerge or become visible as we move toward it

so I'm not gonna say, okay, here's the blueprint

for the future system, I've thought it all out

and so now I'm gonna tell you what it is,

but I do catch glimpses sometimes, you know.

One thing that comes to me is that in the future,

we'll feel really at home in the world, we will be

intimately familiar with the landscape around us.

We will be in rich communities.

The best experiences you've had in your life,

the most authentic, the most vibrant,

those don't have to be exceptions.

Trust what feels loving, trust what feels good,

trust what feels aligned with who you really are.

If you live by that and spread that vibe

and other people start living by that

then the whole planet is gonna change.

(hopeful music)