Futuresteading Jade Miles

Kirsten Bradley is one half of permacultures favourite educators MILKWOOD and she joins us as our opening night (very early morning actually) star in the spectacular line up of season nine guests.

We've had her in our ears before but not since she crossed Bass Straight to set up home and release her new book. The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook

We delve into how she has built her Huddle in the southern most state and how she contributes to the mycelium  of community that will form what is ultimately needed in the coming 100 years of skilled up, earth connected, community first folk who just keep showing up - which is easier said than done.

She talks about our duty of care to the commons and why we need to be comfortable as the receiver and giver in your local soup kitchen.
Love what you hear? Support the show
Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters
Show Notes:
Building a new life in Tasmania - here we are!
The forest school that runs along democratic lines with kiddos making decisions (but still have to do maths)
Teenagers marinating in different ideas and different thinking
Being confident to let your small human build their own vision and values
Upskilling FAST: Growing food, making bread, sewing, community connections
Rebooting our civic duty to be relational with each other
Changing the world, one habit at a time with her latest book: the Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook
Engaging in the commons - taking responsibility for the things which are held in common-wealth (beaches, waters, parks) scraps of land that are worth taking care of and starting a relationship with. 
Using your privilege for purpose - even if limited - use them to help those who don’t have them
Start by identifying your privileges and call out those who behave in a way that limits rather than supports others
The value of clever, open, respectful communication with those who don't align with your values
“No one is in anybody else's shoes so we don’t have the knowledge or the right to make judgments”
“Whether you’re the soup giver or the soup taker - in times of need, we all need each other and finding the common ground to be on either side of the table is a pillar of how we’ll live in the next 100 years”
Building partnerships in coalitions of the unlikely 
Mutual aid in her backyard, not just in times of crises but a community way of being
Making sure you’ve got some really big pots in your pantry to fire up a huge pot of soup if needed
The million ways to contribute to the community care systems we all need
Sharing your skills far and wide
How she’s made online learning as practical and useful as possible
Do one thing, make it a habit then choose one more thing 
Threading the various communities together to create a dynamic non 9-5 existence
Compassion speaks to creating futures with other people despite the overlapping crises
Holding peoples hopes, fears and making sense of that as a huddle.






Support the Show.

Dr Kate Luckins asks what shade of green are you? The answer is of little consequence and will most certainly ebb with the hokey poke of life - finding your own shade, in your own way is the secret…along with an audit or two of your cupboards, sheds, fridge and mind.  
With a doctorate in sustainability, this Dr knows a thing or two about how we can climb aboard the bandwagon and STAY ON, ultimately resulting in us living "More with Less (which is the name of her new new book) - as our own shade of green.
Love to Listen? ...Support the show
Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon

Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters
Buy Kates Book - Live more with Less

Pod References:
War on Waste
Urban Nanna
Well Nourished Georgia Harding naturopath
ST ethical eating guides
Show Notes
Even when you mean well - life is very busy so its really hard to bring this way of life to the front line
Crisis fatigue - why the looming Armageddon can cripple us.
Empathy for our parents managing teenagers who want to create the landfill of tomorrow
Experimenting with a clothing exchange 
Awakening the consumer in her with the birth of her baby
Bring unapologetically medium green
Not doing all the things at once
A medium, life friendly shade of green which maintains momentum
Building new habits that are awkward and unfamiliar slowly becoming part of your flow.
Smug stock stash being built in the freezer
1 in every 5 bags of shopping is incidentally wasted
Getting sucked into every foodie, fashion and fun fad
Life audits - fridge, wardrobe, third drawer down, 
Filling the gap between our concerns and our reality. 
Our cultural issue isn’t what to do its about how we make decisions in the weeds - what should our self expectation be.
Keeping the paralysis of eco fear at bay
Finding the times in your life that are well suited to bringing in more change
Treat yourself like you would a friend who is doing their best
Its not the people in govt who feel the most powerful its the every day eco heroes who feel enthusiastic and the actions they are taking.  Unofficial authorities in their own communities 
Leading by example is the most powerful way to bring systems change 
Diagnosing our reality and changing our language because of it.
Why the sustainability movement needs a theme song
More connection, more time, more community, less, consumption, less waste,
Finding your on ramp to get into this way of being
Start where your interests lie and don't worry about it being perfect or big”
The value of the imperfect
We often buy because we are compensating or obliged to buy…
Seeding the idea of ‘buying less and valuing it well’
Why its so bloody hard to raise kids today to be mini ecowarriors 
Buy less and live more in a society that is structurally designed to create waste and 
Find your door in - start with the things that interest you and your energy will be infectious - don't underestimate the ripple effect of 
Rewrite the normal - to include lifestyle upgrades like showering in dams
Support the Show.

Join Jade and the tall, smiling pink haired  gem as she ponders the many right ways of doing things - when care, intellect & heart goes into the building of skills, earth care & people care we need to honour the effort which is more important than the approach taken. 
Learn why she actively puts herself in front of opportunities & why she uses her platform as an extension to her duty of care  - "Its not about me its about the issue”  
"While I have sadness in me about the heartbreaks happening across the world I choose to actively come back to radical hope. If you care for each other and the world we live in there’s no other option but to weave love and joy into life and weave hope into every single day"
References in the convo
ABC Gardening Australia
Gardening Australia Junior program
The Good Life - Hannahs first book
Good Life Growing - how to grow fruit and veg in any climate in Australia
Dan Palmer futuresteading conversation
Support the show
Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters
Show Notes:
The juggle is real - relying on friends to help us
Not doing all the things all the time
Why it’s harder to ask than it is to help
Take time to build deep relationships. Communities hold us through good & not so good
Finding people with common interests as the starting place to build a huddle
Building people care into property design - human behaviours & human nature 
Good permaculture design based on the individuals who are living & stewarding the landscape
Dan Palmer transformative for the Australian Permaculture community. He challenged & elevated it.
Bringing people along in challenging conversations at challenging times
Conversations which build community - “I don’t see the difference between hardened farmers and inner city hipsters” all I see is people who are enthusiastically food growing
The elusive ‘balance’ - “its doesn’t exist but she is getting better at scheduling so actively builds slots of quiet time to counter balance the external
The power of a routine
Putting yourself in the way of opportunities so you can deepen your impact
Every type of activism is needed but Hannah is best suited to solution orientated activism.
Don't underestimate the feeling inside you as your accurate guide
Ikigai formula
Creating a goat share  
We don’t have to be self sufficient but doing things with intention & love - living towards your values 
Seed saving magnificence - I’ve got the power
Energetically connecting to people
Life in front of the camera for ABC gardening Australia
Ulitising the tools & opportunities available to us in our modern world
Sometimes it’s about doing the things that are unnecessary (like dying your hair pink) to nurture our psyche
Learning in public - transparency about openly making mistakes to avoid being pigeonholed
I hope that in a decade I can publicly admit that I've been wrong about things.
She is happiest when she is IN the work - not about her but about the shining of light on things that matter to her…it’s just a tool to open a door to talk to people 
Her singular word - LOVE and ACTION






Support the Show.

 Maria Konecsky refers  often to her ancestral memory.  For her the way back to those who came before her has been through food. She says “Our food lines, hold our story, no matter what it is, whether its pretty or ugly, grand or humble it holds richness and grit and love and loss” It’s such a beautiful way to unpack our heritage - through food, in her case it’s sometimes ugly food made with love by her OMA who instilled equal part ritual and boredom into her childhood in just the right doses.  
Wherever you are right now, I encourage you to find the thread that links you to your own heritage and give it a tug - dive deeply  to understand how the patterns of the past are influencing the behaviours of today to form our own individual stories as part of the collective.
Referenced in our chat
Kindred - the book she wrote with her sister
Gewuzhaus - their shared spice store
Support the show
Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters
Show Notes
Food is an alternative language to the written or spoken word. Care love and power flows through our hands and into our creation
Food as opposed to ingredients are special 
We have to keep showing up to cook - especially as mothers - even when its hard
The magnificence of sharing a business with family - always a process, it takes 
To the nurturers, mothers, keepers of ritual
Her one word: HOME - connects her to her grandmothers.
Her kin: why writing a book was an opportunity to delve deeper into her ancestral lines, from all over Europe to ultimately coalesce in Germany
The importance of ritual, rhythm and routine in a life with young families - ritual helps to ground us and find commonality that we all understand.
The rituals of her childhood (Christmas in Germany) 
Out of boredom came an ingrained and repetitious focus and love on food. Embedded in their DNA
A 12 layered Dobosh - spectacular creation to mark special times across the year “more than just making a cake, it was a channelling of my ancestors into the cake to be there for those who need them”
Mushrooming in Autumn, Winter citrus - balls of colour during the wet grey months, Rituals remind us that life is full of cycles
Opening Gewurzhaus as a nod to her love of food
How a can do attitude has been foundational to their willingness to get stuck in and have a go at things that might fill others with fear
Letting your taste and senses take over to lead you on your next adventure
Spending 6 months cooking to really learn how spices work
Kraut holds her story - a much loved ritual that she only does alone - grounds and connects her to her food lines
Getting her 3 year old to drink kraut juice
Embracing ugly meat - frugal, hardworking, industrious individuals, 
Chicken broth as an analogy 
How grandmas habits which used to gross her out as a child now form tha backbone of her adult rituals.
Coming back to getting squeamish and getting past the complex to better understand each other, our food and how we eat it. 
Overcoming the disconnect of where our food comes from  - the value of tending life and then taking life.
Nurturing a shrooming culture via an annual mushroom hunt for mothers day
Support the Show.

The majority of us are living in cities, and the sad truth is that these highly inhabited hubs are food deserts.  Places where food certainty is uncertain and what we do have available is a rapidly homogenising food landscape. The Food Lab is a program based in Sydney and designed to find ways to bring people closer to the soil that grows our food. Creating networks that cross disciplinary boundaries and support the birthing of language and connection points for the influx of migrants unable to translate our food culture.
We chat about ways of introducing people from communities who have different cultural backgrounds. Finding catalysts to move outside of their communities to share knowledge, culture and business capability.
At the foundation of all of this food culture building is TRUST. Jamie says 'You can’t go and eat at someone’s table without trust". TRUST is at the centre of everything. When someone cooks a meal for you, you build trust. You can’t love someone without trust first.
"I have the faith that my brother loves me when he cooks for me"
Finally, his key advice is 'If you aren’t blessed with enough resources to travel, consider connecting to the cultural pockets in your own city".

Things we talked about
Food Lab
Beau Miles: Cook River episode on You Tube
Bread and butter project 
Support the show
Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters
Show NOTES
A lotta rockiness along the way but it grew & evolved with the participants needs
Particularly focussed on female, migrant communities
Marginalised communities using food to connect with one another 
Building the diversity of the food landscape in Sydney
Food is something that can be offered even when life is filled with utter newness
Eliminating the potential of putting too much debt at the outset of a business
“Assets are power in hospitality”
The food scene is in danger of becoming homogenised due to the cost of establishment
The power of mentorship to avoid the loneliness of business
The chicken and egg of being small and not well resourced but being flooded with applications for support
Providing a strong stepping stone to graduate people to their own kitchens
Impact multipliers - equipping people to support others
100% of the people will employ 4-7 people in the next 3 years
Why our urban centres are food deserts
Pomegranate molasses as a way to connect cultural groups
Normalising enough and not needing to be ‘excessive’
The power of sharing a meaningful recipe 
There’s something in recipes that lead people back to independence  - Food speaks to our identities, holds our stories, this cant be taken away from someone
As soon as you remove language you remove culture. When food is a language, it can’t be taken from you.
Everyone has a recipe they just want to share
What does it look like to belong to a huddle in a city -
You don't realise how rich culture is until you bust out of your safety zone and look in as an outsider
He feels shame for growing up in such a place of privilege which buffered him from the realities of other pockets in exactly the same city but with much less privilege.
“I grew up with a lack of multiculturalism but food can bridge that and connect you to communities you mightn't have had access to”
Singular word - TRUST
Support the Show.

SHOW SUMMARY
Join Billa, co founder of the Wild School, as we navigate back into our custodial selves. Where we use head, hands & heart to rebuild the connective processes that help us become deeply connected people to place & each other. This process requires us to not only think but to really feel, 'It needs to be remembered in the body at a cellular level. “In our bones as women we have generations of wisdom & the sisterhood brings this to life”
'We are designed to live in tribal sized groups & to take care of country but we lack the skills so it's time to unlearn & relearn.'
The right environment will trigger the hard wired settings to make us what we are designed to be & the process of relearning how to live together will be more than just building houses & spaces or owning land.
 Billa & her husband Chief have been doing this earth connection & village making work their entire lives & she is measuring her experiences against something in her bones.  She is doing this via 5 sacred pathways - these being food as medicine, nature connection, ceremony & ritual, village making & art is medicine. A pedagogy you cannot be schooled on, you need to embody them through experience.
The most potent experience of all she says is to have gratitude for the mother. Us two-legged humans form a story - “we are merely the current fruiting mushroom of the ancestral mycelium”. its time to be reminded of this in our modern day story.

Things we chatted about
Wildschool
Gaia University
8 shields movement - Jon Young
Tyson Yinkaporta - right story, wrong story
Support the Show
Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters
Show Notes:
Moving towards a life that moves in circles rather than being square & rigid - finding the sisterhood, herbal medicine, permaculture.
Women need women but we specifically need sisterhood where we share wisdom & DO together - craft, learn, share, 
DIY-ing her own home at 24
Intentional communities - are they a study in failure or can we really do this?
Permaculture has been foundational alongside womens wisdom
Being alive ‘in village’
Finding our way back through the cultural repair journey via the 8 shields movement & the 64 cultural elements
Connecting to country to continue as a species
Reconciling our history is foundational to rebuilding culture
You can’t ground community without the land but you can’t just buy land & assume the community will come - the truth of the land needs to be reconciled. 
What we eat is our relationship to the earth mother - it plugs us back in
Rebuilding deep connection requires all five sacred pathways to be present
Are we existing in captivity
Decolonising our body through food 
Building next level connection with our ancestors 
We’ve stopped knowing our bodies
What else comes with your DNA? More than height or eyes colour
The humble shall inherit the earth
Check in with what your ‘baseline’ is - very high in western culture
Taking care of the baseline & being able to appreciate it is freeing because you can let go of the noisy material things which takes up all the space & consume you.
White privilege blinkers - question what was taken in order for us to have this
Support the Show.