 We're only going to come up here, or Emily and I agree to this anyway, if we had somebody of a rather younger generation that would come and join us because we thought, well, it might be a good idea if we had a little bit of a spokesperson, Sophie, from a younger generation who might be interested in food. Well, this is the last session for the day before we move into reflections, and just firstly thanks very much for joining us, Sophie. It's really cool to have you up here. It's my pleasure. And so what we thought we'd do here is just have a couple of minutes for introductions. I won't introduce on behalf or I'll let everyone here introduce themselves. Then I'll pose a couple of questions that have come out throughout the day, and in the remainder of the time we'll have an open collaborative discussion with the participants in the room in a co-creation session. So I'll start at this end and work our way down for the introductions. Kia ora. My name is Kay Baxter, and my life journey has been about health, basically. When I was in my late 20s, early 30s, I'd had cancer twice. All my teeth out, most of my thyroid out, full caesareans, ulcers, across both my scar tissue, across both my eyes, and I've spent my whole life researching what makes health, what creates healthy people. And I'm really excited about the journey that I've, I mean, along the journey, along the ways being like introduction to the p... Well, we did the first permaculture design course in New Zealand about 28, 29 years ago or something, 84. And, you know, saving seeds and heritage fruit trees been a lot of amazing things that have been part of my journey. But I think the most exciting part has been the last 10 years in my life, where I've been coming to realise and understand that... I mean, permaculture, which there's going to be much more talk about that, is like a design methodology. So it gives you a way to make sensible decisions, common-sense decisions, which work with the laws of nature. And so what I've come to understand is that when you, when we reconnect, we step back into that process of co-evolution, we look at the ancient patterns, we look at the principles of science, we look at the principles of ecology, and we look to see what works, and we start getting the universal... The energy of the universe starts to support us and work with us, and you can create something a lot more powerful that creates health for all. So my journey now and my life now is about sharing what it means to me to step back into that process of co-evolution, which is about working with the laws of nature. It's a really, really exciting journey and process. Kia ora. My name's Emily Williams. I grew up in a farm in Canterbury, a very traditional sheep farm. It's not now. It's all cows. So the whole landscape has changed considerably. We used to swim in a river close by us. The river is now totally dry. Totally dry. It's really heartbreaking. My journey into permaculture started when we decided, when we had a young family, that we wanted to bring them up in the country and we wanted to bring them up on an organic farm. We had a couple of mentors when we were living in a city area next door to us who really encouraged us along that path. So we moved to the country and we've started developing an organic farming system, also based with permaculture and biodynamic principles in it. So it's been quite an integrated farm development, and no doubt a little bit more we might hear about that as we go. It's a great journey. We continue to learn, and we'll never stop learning as we go. So anyway, I'll pass it on. Oh, I would have enough to sit down, aren't I? I went along with that journey. It was the same one. I probably had a slight different view of it, as we do. My comment in terms of who I am and where I'm at is that I actually feel somewhat in a different world to what I'm seeing around here or what I'm hearing around here, actually. I just do wonder what sort of world I'm in or where the world's going. I came off a farm as well, and my parents went right through the chemical system. By the end of it, when they retired, they thought this was the most ridiculous thing that's ever happened to farming. That's what my belief was, that industrial agriculture, I don't even want to hear about it. There's no solution there at all. I don't care how you adapt it. I don't care whether it's dirt plants, animals, insects, fish or whatever. It's a failed system. It's only there because of a flush of cheap energy, and it's not going to continue. So let's get on to the real solutions. We have nothing to do with industrialising, growing our food and giving ourselves a good nutrition. So we came into permaculture by osmosis, really. And then later on, I've got a little bit more formal education about it. But my background appeals to me about permaculture. This is why I see something that's quite difficult. I think it's hard to marry up agtech to me because it's very observational. It's very grounded in the place you're in. It's very specific to that place. There are no rules. There's no toolbox you can have a drop-down menu, I'm afraid. You have to be out there with it, connected to it, absorbing it, responding. It's very adaptive. It's been responsible. If you are sensitive, what's around you, you will respond. And response means responsibility. You take responsibility. You use your ability to respond. So I struggle a little bit in terms of where I am in this situation with you. So you can ask me some questions about that if you like. But as Emily really said, our main aim of changing from the city was to have a good environment for our children and a healthy one for us and our children. It was about that environment. And the only way to have health as people is to live in a healthy environment. And the only way to have a healthy environment is a very diverse environment made up of all sorts of creatures that support themselves and therefore will support you. So I don't know if that's to say as much about me, but that's OK. Hi, I'm Bob Corker, case husband. We've been on a similar long journey together. I grew up in a rural community in Northland. And we had a valley there. And some are similar to this, but otherwise quite different. But there was five families in that valley. People had small farms. And I was part of that community. And over my lifetime, I've seen that valley go to a point where there's no farms and that valley now left at all. And when I came across permaculture, I was totally wrapped in it and I have been ever since. For me, it's just an amazing way of looking at the world. And as part of that journey, some of my energy went into, I was a co-founder of the Kong Institute and we put a lot of energy into supporting what I see as our biological, cultural biodiversity. And I've put a lot of energy into thinking about and experiencing and creating ways that we can integrate people back into the environment again. Because what I saw is that if we want to take a permaculture approach, so the integrated system approach to the landscape and the environment, then we need to get more people into that environment because the permaculture systems are by nature more knowledge-intensive, more experiential-based, more people-intensive, more management-intensive. So to create those systems, you need people and you need organisations of people. So that's been a major focus for me. We essentially have all the technology in terms of biological agriculture. That's not an issue. Our biggest issue is our social systems that we need to change. So that's where I'm working and we're in the process of creating the village up where we are. That's a kōtari village and part of that is risen out of our desire. We've got 90 hectares up there and it's being put in a trust and the trust basically says, let's create a model as to how we can have integrated land use and a healthy environment and a good place to live and productive and entrepreneurial community. So that's what the trust is about. One of my jobs is to make it happen. Later on, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what permaculture is. In two minutes, apparently. Kia ora. My name is Afeera Rooster and I've been doing very well in school and I've been having fun learning things and I'm happy to be up here. Thank you very much for joining us. So I've just got a couple of questions and then we're going to open it up to the floor. But I guess for the last two decades now of my life as a sustainability scientist, I've designated probably five to ten years learning about the biosphere. So all the layers of the biosphere, how soils, water, air interact. Then pivoting and learning everything there is about business and entrepreneurship and government policy and spending five to ten years learning all areas to know about that purpose for me deep diving into this is so that I can find the leverage points within the system where one small change in one thing creates a big change in everything. In order to do that, you need to understand all of the layers and the data sets. So what draws me towards permaculture and I guess the essence of my question is it seems to me given the principles and the methodologies of permaculture that we have the opportunity to be acupuncturists and have multiple beneficial outcomes that we seek in the world both for people and the planet. I guess there's three broad principles of permaculture which is care for people, care for the planet and return all the goodness back into the system. So just to give a bit of a framing from the wisdom that's on this panel I'm wondering Bob, quite a macro of you, if you wanted to give us a bit of an outline of your understandings of some of the principles and the methodologies about how permaculture has these multiple beneficial outcomes. Have we got that whiteboard pen? It's just down here. Do you want to hold that up for me at all? Oh, maybe I'll stand down here. Okay, so this is a classical sort of permaculture teaching tool. So in any system there's sort of energy in, so it's the source and then there's the sink, there's energy out and in any natural system there's a whole lot of elements within the system and they're connected in various ways. Basically they're all sitting around there saying, I want a slice of that energy. So in any natural ecology it's really efficient use of the energy and the energy source for us in the past has been the sun. So for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe millions, well, for billions of years. Oh, sorry. Okay, so for billions of years the ecology of this planet has been driven off the sun. That's essentially the only source of energy and all these different things, all these different critters and components of the system have evolved to use that energy in the most efficient way and to share it amongst themselves in the most efficient way. So that's a quick picture of how biological, ecological systems have evolved. So what's come along is all of a sudden we've found another source of energy. We've found another two sources of energy in a way. The first one we found was forests. So we found we could cut forests down and use those as a source of energy and put it into our system and we were doing that on an unsustainable basis. So over thousands of years we've slowly crept our forests away and then that took quite a while but then all of a sudden we found fossil fuels and we could do things a hell of a lot faster and this went into that system. And then what happened is we started to find that instead of having all these little dots here maybe we could just have one big dot and another big dot there and we could get just as much out of it. We didn't have to worry about all these lots of little dots and things that were there. But the problem with this is it essentially went against the principles of ecological behaviour that we've evolved with over millions of years. We were trying to do something that's going to cause us grief and this system of fossil fuels is only about 200 years old really and now we're coming to grief. What permaculture said and Bill Mollison came up with the idea of permaculture he looked at the original model because he spent a lot of time in the wild as a naturalist and he said well if nature can do that maybe we can do it too. So that's essentially what permaculture is about. It's saying let's design systems that have a lot of diversity they have a lot of interrelationship and they use the energy in the most efficient way. So as a permaculture designer my job is to go into any system and it doesn't matter whether the system is this building here or this farm or the whole valley or the whole of New Zealand it doesn't really matter it's a system we put a boundary around it and we call it a system. So my job as a permaculture designer is to say what elements am I going to put into that design that are going to maximise the use of that energy and to look after the whole system and provide a yield for everyone. So that's permaculture in a nutshell everyone clear on that now? It's a nutshell of the thought. So are we going to apply the same thing if we're looking at heritage seeds by means of garden or a farm or whatever? So a large part of my journey now is about okay how do we design integrated communities in the landscape? And we've lost most of those models and just the same as our friends from Taupo were colonised my ancestors were colonised I was chased off, my ancestors were chased off our land in Scotland and the reason why they were chased off is because the industrialists from the south were able to make more money out of using cheviot sheep and they had less shepherds and they didn't want all the crofters getting in the way so they chased them off. So it's the same story. The story that we've been sold over the last two, three hundred years is that industrial development benefits everyone and some of that story was brought into and because there were definite advantages but now what we're finding is industrial development has become a nightmare. We're actually dismantling the planet so we have to come up with something different and for me permaculture is one of the few things that really stood out and said, this is the way we do it. Now what we've got to learn is all the different strategies we know that we have an understanding of how we do the design now what we've got to come to understand is what are the strategies we use in any particular place and they're going to vary. It's not always going to be the same. So that's part of our journey and for me it's one of the most exciting things and we've got this challenge in front of us so we come from a totally different space than some of you here which is really interesting but I'm really looking forward to bringing our experience and our expertise to join with yours because the bottom line is we're all in this together. Thanks Bob. OK, I'd just like to cede a couple more questions before we open it to the floor. One that's been on my mind all day in various guises is this thing of yield. It's been raised all throughout the discussions today and I guess I quite like Scott's perspective as far as if we are undertaking a projection in scenarios of business as usual then we do know that we need to produce more food in the next 40 years than we have in the last 8000 years. WWF have just released this research. It's backed by a whole ton of scientists and data projections so given that scenario I'm wondering Kay whether you've got some views on yield with permaculture. My understanding is that there's a man called John Jevins in America who's probably the most anal systems analyst I know I mean he's anal about collecting information and data and he spent 40 years doing it and my understanding is that the bio-intensive system of gardening which is based on all the ancient agricultural systems which grew soil and civilisations is many times more productive than any other system on the globe and you can get up to 10 times more production for way less water, way less energy, way less everything it's like there's no system more efficient that I've ever seen or heard of and I've been practising that for 20 years or so and I'm totally convinced that there's no other system that comes anywhere near it. Just riffing off that is water and it's also well known that current agricultural practices are taking up 70% of the world's water resources fresh water resources. So Gary I'm just wondering you've got a reputation for your love of both two things and I've heard it from multiple people that you talked to Gary about water and spirals so can you just... Well they're the same thing Water moves and spirals into the context of spirals and I was very pleased where is she that did the thing about water Great, so often we talk about food and we forget about water that's water that makes all food digestible, makes all organic chemistry work makes the whole world work that's water and we sometimes think oh well I'm growing good food that's fine we've got to have good water, good vital water probably energised water and then sort of stepping back from sort of my point of view about water and I'm only allowed two minutes to talk about this which is ridiculous and then a few seconds we'll go on there Water is the basis of all that it's movement, life is about exchange it's about exchange, it's been something that's different and water facilitates exchange so everything it moves is to do with water and if it does nothing moves there's no existence you're just nothing and really life is about water combining with carbon which is a strange thing and they have all these combinations and other sorts of things on to make big long molecules and that's what life is basically so we really need to know what's going on with the water so one of the first things we need about the water is inside us, the water we take in and what's the nature of that and water is a very strange thing it's got all these strange anomalies that's why it can do all the things it can do it's not like other similar chemical molecules and so it's a nature of water in many different ways water is just not H2O someone tells you that water is H2O we'll just say what type of H2O or something because it's very different and it combines in all sorts of ways and does all sorts of marvellous things and so we need to think about not just this water and not just whether it's polluted or what is the actual nature of the water what is the water doing in this environment because that's the health of that environment we very much deal with the health of the water and that goes for the oceans as well it's a very interconnected water body obviously and life is very interconnected because it's all immersed in water and it's also an environment we tend to forget and surely in New Zealand we should not that's how a main source of food and both plant and animal or fish food actually it's hugely productive, it sees around New Zealand and actually our land is relatively not that productive in terms of its mineral base and the depth of topsoils so I just sort of want to bank a plug that you really think a lot about the nature of water its energetic levels its way at you know, I could probably say it here the way it memorises what's happened it's a very interesting thing about water memory just something that recalls what happened to it therefore it changes what it does that's what you do for memory, you know if you recall something happened in the past you change what you do if you use memory in that technical sense then water's full of memory and it remembers where it's been and what it's done so the nature of water is a really important foundation to me to life and so just make that plea again thank you Phil for the person who did that Paung about the use of water and how we need to look afterward and how we need to relate to it because as we relate to it it relates to us and it's a foundation of everything for me so one final question before we open things up so given that our bodies reflect the environment and the environment reflect our bodies and that they are interconnected I know that you have some unique views on this around the nature of that connection and that's something that we haven't discussed and it is at the heart of permaculture and that's love and I'm wondering if you can share a few words on your views on that Sure, I love food but what I love is good food and a lot of our food doesn't fall into that category and I love growing food in a good healthy way so that means really communicating with your soil and appreciating what really good soil is so I've fallen in love with bacteria basically after they've had so much brad press for years it's just fantastic to see that they're getting a bit of good press now we're still told to wipe them off the bench and dare I say it but I was just told women have been told to wipe their nipples before they breastfeed I mean, how ridiculous can I get? I heard somebody say that over there it's just crazy but getting back to food my garden is really important to me it's a meditation space it's my best teacher and I continue to learn from it all the time and growing food with love and with feeling is really important so that you're continually doing this communication thing with the soil, with the earth and then harvesting it in the same way harvesting it with care and with consideration thinking about what you're taking out and then what you're putting back in and replenishing what you've taken out so that you can continue this cycle of producing good food and then it comes on to cooking that food and cooking with love and thinking about the people you're cooking for and what you're doing with it and it's actually getting more complex of course to cook for people now because you have such a wide variety of diets we never used to have this vegan free, vegan and wheat free, dairy free and solanaceae free it's getting a lot more complex and I don't think we've got time to go into the reasons why necessarily for all of that but I think it's so important our food but it has to be done with love and we've got to get away from all this processed stuff and get back to it what really food is and grow it in such a loving and caring way so do you want to add to that? One of the really amazing things for me in the last seven years I've spent a lifetime learning about what makes healthy soil and how to grow healthy plants but I've only recently come to understand how our food communicates with our bodies and it makes a really big difference to a lot of things so that's come through the science of epigenetics there's a new science, the new biology called epigenetics and essentially what that science shows us is that you know the double helix spiral that we see in our minds eye when we talk about DNA well a very small part of that is what we call a DNA our scientists called the junk DNA because they didn't understand its function in our body and we now know that that is the part of our body that communicates with our food that's quite important with actually not just our food, our water and the whole environment that we provide for our body and so the quality of that communication between the environment which is largely food and water but also thoughts just the environment we live in everything the quality of that communication determines the strength or the weakness of the tags that the junk DNA places on our DNA which determines how our health how our bodies express in this lifetime and how the health of our children and our grandchildren and so on down and my understanding is that there are only three things that we know at this point that the junk DNA communicates with in our food one is minerals one is vitamins and one is traditional fatty acids, fats and oils traditional fats and oils so it's the levels and the quality of fats and oils and vitamins and minerals in our food which determine our health and the maintenance of our DNA and really quickly I just want to mention and so the only research I've ever seen in the world ever which shows what we need to maintain our health through generation after generation after generation is the work done by Western Price there's a lot of ideas about what will make healthy people but I don't see that any of them stand the test of time and I think as as an older person in today's world one of the things that I've learned is it's really important to look back and that's permaculture you go from ethics, principles and patterns to strategies and techniques and one of my big lessons having been a vegetarian for a long time was that there are patterns of what make healthy people and it's not about being a vegetarian or not a vegetarian or whatever it's about getting the right levels of minerals and vitamins and oils and so part of the whole health thing it all comes together and everything when you get it right it all supports the whole but there are some really important patterns coming out of science and coming out of the understandings of indigenous peoples which I think are really important for us to look back to Thank you Just before we take it to the floor Sophia did you have anything to add? I'd like to know like how the salad is produced in the vegetable gardens and how it works and stuff like that That's a great first question so does someone from the panel want to answer that? It was around how does the salads go from the garden to your plate Right? Very quickly What we put in our mixture of salads or when I go out to the garden I will harvest lettuce a multitude of weeds a multitude of other greens and put them all together and make a salad How I think it grows is that when we plan to seed it's really important that we choose a heritage seed because we need seeds that can communicate with the life in the soil and it's really important that we have highly mineralised soil the right minerals and the right relationships and that we have lots of microbes in the soil and the life in the soil the microbes communicate with the plants and the plant roots and the healthier the soil is the healthier that plant will be and if we have a really highly functioning healthy plant that's what we need to maintain our health so our whole journey is about re-mineralising the soil and creating highly microbially active soil so that we can create really vibrant hybricks plants so we can have health Can I Can I add something for that to Sophie and you may not realise it actually that inside you what you actually feeding is the microbes inside you down in your guts and here and there are very similar ones out in the soil so when that cell is growing out in the land and taking up all this information and energy and other things that's going into your body it goes into your body and very similar microbes down there that's why you ate dirt when you were young you went around ate a bit of dirt got those microbes down in your tummy you remember doing that sure you did I'm sure you did that that's what you feed your own microbes that's what you're doing Thank you all for contributing here I actually have two questions the first is the sort of modifications that you're experiencing to the permaculture approach due to the effects of climate change permaculture is obviously very grounded in the in being observational and on historical patterns but unfortunately we're facing times when historical patterns are no longer the best predictor so I'd just love to hear as we sort of try to apply permaculture techniques maybe how do we think that the next 50 years might look a little different than the last 50 the two strategies that I'd be working with around climate change is seeds if we choose heritage seeds they have and built into them the ability to adapt to climate change as long as they're grown in highly mineralised microbial active soils so the second strategy would be it's about carbon in the soil it's about building humus and life and carbon in the soil which gives the whole system more resilience and flexibility and ability to adapt and change Can I just make one comment too I mean if you just do the right thing and having a really healthy ecosystem and that's how you can your food from then it'll be resilient I mean nature does know how to adapt to these things if we give it a chance it's often enough we just got to get out of the road near the depth and the problem is we're in the road so it's not the nature doesn't know what to do we're just getting in the road so I don't see climate change is not a problem for the world or Gaia it might be a problem for us in terms of how we're going to adapt so all what we're going to remember is to be adaptive ourselves and that's what permaculture about it there's no ideology in permaculture there's nothing fixed because a door depends, depends on situation so whatever situation you're in you can still apply principles in the ethics because that's the foundation but the main thing is that you are continuing to adapt and that's what nature does, so should we I'll just add my bit so basically we're in a situation where we've either removed carbon from the soil and we've removed the plants that normally take up the carbon so most of the carbon's gone up into the air so if we agree most of the problems we're facing because of carbon, we just got to focus on putting carbon back in and sequestering it and there's lots of ways we can do that great the second question just to take up time or take my time, excuse me is just you know, you sort of mentioned the sort of different of perspectives different of perspectives, we're coming at this from very much a young student mind and I'm curious just if you were speaking to 10,000 engineers in Silicon Valley right now who were saying we want to build tools to enable the broader spread of organic bio-intensive farming what tools would you invite them to build based on your experience of knowing the challenges that you run into what I would tell them to do is take a year off and have an internship on a farm or in a forest or something or other thank you he echoed me entirely, I was going to say come woofing with us for a while if you like my take on that is we actually need to start creating models for how we could do things differently we've got most of the conceptual theory, we've got a lot of the tools and everything we need but we actually need to start putting together on a social level some different models and seeing how they perform and then at that stage we can either scale them up in terms of size or scale them up in terms of numbers that was a really big strong hand going up over here and you've got a t-shirt that says yeah yeah nah yeah so Kiwi I was just wondering I always thought permaculture was you needed a big farm but you said today that you can do it anywhere so I've got like 2000 square metres how do I start check out our website where we've got a 200 square metre urban garden model happening to show how you can feed a family of four all the nutrition that you need on 200 square metres and we just got a crowd funder filled 100% the other two days ago a week ago to take it to another level and do it in really tiny spaces and actually if I can just add to that one step at a time one square metre at a time just take your lawn liberate your lawn put a few plants in it you can eat you know and don't try to convert the whole lawn at once and just make a mess of it you know learn small in the web address sorry www.koanga.ga.org.nz Nick thanks very much I found your contributions really refreshing and it seems to me that's like the some sort of question in my mind has been really the collision between the art and science and the trade-off between it you know so to me the responses and your comments have been really about saying you know life is an art and how I use the land and how I grow my food is actually an art and I developed that art over a period of time and you can't just immediately lock that into a scientific scientific model to scale it and you know I think it's a story that I've received a lot from various farmers around New Zealand and I think it's an important point for us to realise that actually perhaps we're talking about something that isn't purely about science epigenetics is fantastic I've been studying that in Amsterdam basically the DNA that we inherit when we were born is only 10% of who we become 90% of it's contextual the inputs, the food and everything so are we actually scientifically based ourselves I'll have to answer that it's a nice philosophical question between the whole science and the rational we are irrational creatures and I say that sincerely and that's a very good thing with irrational because the world actually lives on irrationality or non-rationality so science can be helpful evidence can be helpful but like most things it's the add-on one of the things that frustrates me about our education system to take it slightly differently is we pump people full of theory from the age of 5 to 25 and when you put these poor creatures out in the real world and I think they can do something all real teaching is done by experience first theory later put a framework around it put another framework around it so there's nothing wrong with science it's a bit of a framework for our observations but we have been farming for quite a while without too many high tech science or something and the issue to me is that when we have used technology and high science we've made a bloody mess of it so put it mildly and that's the reason therefore science is not useful I think an evidential basis is very useful trying to make sense of your observations is very useful planning is a very useful thing to do particularly in a temperate climate season feed yourself in winter and all that sort of thing well first I really wanted to honour all of you our farmers and people who take care of the land are some of our greatest heroes and heroines and you should be on the celebrities but in that world we won't have celebrities so so thank you all and I was talking with Kay at lunch briefly about seeds and the dilemma of seeds because part of what's happened is basically we've commodified life that is at the core of this and objectified it and we used to have something called a commons and if anything reflects that it's our seed stocks this is our collective heritage and something that belongs to everyone to no one at the same time and I think that this is something that is not addressed by our economics at large that's representative of the kind of discussion that you're having here and the kind of work that you do and there's even a layer that I'm hearing of what you're doing beneath that which is really what's called ecological services or ecological functions which is what runs the show on planet earth oxygenation, pollination riparian zones, clean water farming is actually at a different level it's a byproduct of all of that if you're taking care of your ecological functions you're going to have extremely healthy and productive food systems at large we had a fellow at a couple years ago John Liu who took the largest 35,000 hectares on the Lus Plateau in China that was utterly degraded I mean it looked like the moon basically after centuries and centuries of bad land management and in 15 years by restoring the water flow basically the hydrology they created a garden of Eden that is also an incredibly productive local economy and food system so I think that you guys are really working with those underlying ecological functions and I just wanted to name one other quick thing which is that so much of this does come back to the economics in many ways and one of the dreaming New Mexico things that we found because how do you sustain small and medium sized farms over time particularly in a commodity based economy which is very erratic at best and one thing is long term purchasing contracts so we discovered the state of New Mexico actually spends 10% of the total food purchasing in the state so we negotiated with them to make long term commitments to buy local food I mean very straightforward kind of a deal there's a cooperative in Cleveland Ohio in the states also called the Evergreen Cooperative which has set up a model of anchor institutions they have been building local businesses that are often minority owned or for disadvantaged communities or work cooperatives and so forth so they have long term stability it's what's called EDS and MEDS they went to the schools and they went to the hospitals the health care system who are anchored in the community who are not going to cut and run as a corporation often will and they built long term contracts in the state of New Mexico and they built a community that is for at risk youth and for all the right people basically so I think we need to look at the economic side of that too of how do you rebuild community in the economy that's built to last so anyway I would really like to make comment on that because I think this is going to go on over time a little bit more but I think it's really critical and I came off a farm and I went to the city and I learned a few things there but one of the things that's really sort of got to me over first of all was the economy and the fact that it was totally corrupted and exploited if and privileged and all that sort of thing so like take some things out of commodity make land no longer commodity put it back in the commons or in trusts or whatever take it out of private ownership but the other thing that really I've also come to realise is that in the end we've got all these things we even know how a good economy could work that would actually support the people and the environment and be just it's the decision making the collective decision making to get there what I think is really missing is the question of governance the question of how we make decisions collectively to move from one thing to another because we can't move until we can make collaborative decisions as a collective not as individuals and I think that's what I'd like to see a lot more sort of thought and even visioning on about and I'm trying to do my little bit and I've got some propaganda if anyone wants any I'm a pamphleteer I'm not a bloggist I don't go on the internet but I do it it's a real book on paper and so I think that's a real issue governance as well and if we have that collective vision we can all work in our different parts of the world in order to build that vision in those pathways so we've got one more question and Christiana's been very patient so say I build a robot and I mean because artificial intelligence is really I was challenged recently in a tech workshop where they were saying artificial intelligence is going to be able to write the most beautiful songs like it's going to be able to create art and beauty and all of these things not just perform automated tasks so imagine like a few years down the line I build a robot and that robot is fully trained with all the permaculture principles but it also has observational capacities to notice the different dynamics as they're the light energy sunshine soil moisture and then that robot can build a permaculture garden like everybody in every apartment with their little deck of 50 feet can have a permaculture garden that their robot maintains for them and then delivers the fresh produce and harvests it into their fridge and it's a good thing for biodiversity and it's a good thing for carbon sequestration because every rooftop and every patio and everybody has a permaculture garden is that a bad thing? Will it be the end of life on earth? Yes! It's all about different mechanisms of co-evolution and what we want people doing enough robots but the question what affects you is think of the energy required to run that robot and how is it you know what Bob said at the beginning but the whole energy flow you think of a robotic artificial intelligence one you know that's the issue isn't it isn't a better robot a nice person you could talk to you know and that's what I was going to say it's like do you love gardening why let the bloody robot do it and just on that as well I've just read some research that this thing of feeding the world with permaculture and some of the most recent research has come out that has said you know only 1% of the population is currently involved in farming and if we move that to 10% of humans who are actively working the land through permaculture methods that we would have enough food to feed the world even on businesses usual scenarios so can I just make a comment too in terms of where most of our food is growing and I'm sure you would know a person called Vandana Shiva who's a activist in positive solutions in India based around small farms she was here in New Zealand just had a conference last weekend and she made this point that 75% of the population gets fed from farmers who are on small farms 75% of the population of the world gets fed by farmers on small farms highly productive diverse things most of them and that's where I think the future is I mean I think we've just gone down a wrong alley for too long and whether technology can help us get back into the small farms supporting the small farmers they're the most productive ones Bob says it might take a little bit more people as we want don't we want to be involved want to be connected know where the food comes from cool I'd just like to thank you so much yeah it feels good what you believe is the future of the seed collection that I knew I thought that might happen and I was kind of dreading it and kind of hoping it would happen so we've got this collection of New Zealand LMCs which is about 800 different seed lines and we've saved that collection because a group of people mostly our age who are now in our mid 60s have worked for nothing for 30 years basically and we can't do it anymore because there are other things we need to do in our lives so I'm actually I only really and this wasn't in my mind when I left home to come here but it feels like I need to say that I actually asked Kenny at lunchtime so what happened in America because I know that he was really involved with all that stuff on America and he basically said straight back to me it's the commons and everybody has to pay for it the government has to pay or someone has to put we actually can't do it anymore so unless there's a group of people who want to save the seeds for the whole they won't be saved yes I think that's a message and so you know the people who are asking from the technology world they're asking for something because they're adjustable you guys have amazing wisdom that they really want they don't understand and they grew up in a different world we need to translate it to their world so they can actually help we'll need you to help us do that we don't have the same I don't have the same I don't know their world I really feel for K on this and I was recently talking to somebody else that said this is a herb place in New Zealand called Fragrant Herbs and they're in the same situation they've been saving seeds and saving plants for many years but they're getting to the stage where they can't do it any longer who's going to step up and take it over and it's a big problem all over the place we really can't do it it's a job for the nation and who cares enough we've been asking that question for a long time it's in the real world out there in the soil we've got to do it thank you very much for the work all of you do