Faith is an important part of Carlos Vicente’s story.

“Faith is the foundation of my life.”

Carlos’ mother was from the northeast of Brazil.

“Her parents migrated from the northeast to the south. When they arrived, they were drawn into the slavery system, so my grandfather decided to return to the northeast. Even though their situation there was very difficult, they were free, they were not slaves. They took a ship to travel back to the northeast, but it was damaged along the way, and they needed to get off the boat in Cabo Frio, so my mother’s family started a new life in this very small town.”

At the time, Cabo Frio was a fishing town and a major salt producer. 

“It’s about 150 kilometres from Rio de Janeiro, so today it’s a tourist town, very famous, but it’s also a very unequal town with a lot of poverty with many descendants of enslaved people. When slavery was banned in Brazil, Cabo Frio still received many illegally enslaved people from Africa. My father came from a very poor family of fishermen and salt workers. He met my mother at a very young age, she was 18 when she gave birth to me.”

As a child, Carlos appreciated the world with an open mind.

“I loved new ideas, I loved new knowledge, I loved people who did interesting things, different things. As my interest was in knowledge and new approaches, one of the best parts of my life was when I went to school.

“The first school I went to was a Catholic school run by nuns. It only had four year levels, so after four years, I had to transfer to a public school. To get into the public school, I had to take an entrance exam, but when I went to see if I had passed, I didn’t see my name on the list. I remember it was a big wall with lots of sheets of paper full of names, and some of the papers were very high. I was very short and couldn’t read all of the names because I was there alone and had eye problems. So I went home, and in the evening, when my mum came home from work, I told her I hadn’t passed. She was desperate and decided to get help so I wouldn’t miss a year of school: she spoke to the headmistress of one of the public schools attended by the city’s economic elite and asked if I could study there for a year. The headmistress understood the situation and offered me the opportunity to study there paying half the tuition, but we didn’t have that kind of money, so my mum went to talk to the mayor of the town to ask for a grant that he then gave me, which paid for the other half of the tuition.

“So I went to this rich school and saw a new kind of world, totally different from the world I lived in. In this new world people had nice clothes, went on holidays, had birthday parties and had a very open outlook on life, whereas for most people in my world the focus was just on working to make sure we always had food. So I discovered at this new school that our life was very limited, and I developed the desire to live in this other world where you can focus your attention not only on how to have food, but also on enjoying the many other parts of lived experience.”

Carlos lived about six kilometres from the school, and his family couldn’t afford a bus or taxi, so his mother visited one of Cabo Frio’s tourist neighbourhoods “with big houses”. At the back of one of the houses she found what she was looking for, “an old bicycle”.

“My mum offered the owner of the house to exchange the bicycle for her service: my mum did their laundry for six months as payment for the bicycle, and she used that bicycle to take me to school for the whole year.”

The year at the elite school came with its challenges, but it inspired a belief in Carlos that he could aspire to a different life to his parents.

“When I was at the public school, outside of the classroom I felt inferior to my classmates because my school materials and shoes were of poor quality and worn out. I was the only black person in the school and I was very thin, so I was nicknamed mico, which is a type of small monkey. This made me feel very ashamed, and since I didn’t have any money for lunch, I stayed in the classroom during recess so as not to be exposed to bullying. But inside the classroom I felt different, I didn’t feel inferior to anyone because I was able to learn the subjects like the other pupils. It didn’t matter if I didn’t have any material possessions, what counted was my ability to learn and my interest in acquiring knowledge. The classroom was a place where prejudice and poverty didn’t affect me, I could travel in my imagination, discover a new world and learn to dream of a different life. The classroom was one of the few places where I experienced the thrill of feeling free. Outside of school, in the community where I lived, I suffered a lot of bullying too, not because I was poor, but because I was too thin. People made me believe I was abnormal and that I should be ashamed of my body.”

To help buy food for his family, Carlos started working at the age of nine: he sold popsicles on the beach, collected rubbish to sell, and worked at the market as both a vendor and shopper. This work at the market became his main source of income until he was 16.

“At the beginning of my last year of secondary school, I had a conversation with a friend who told me she was leaving our school to go to an elite public school, as she had plans to go to university and then do postgraduate studies abroad. As I was the first person in my family to have studied beyond primary school, I had no guidance on how to develop my academic career, but as I listened to my friend talk about her plans, I saw a window open in front of my eyes, showing me a horizon of possibilities that I had never imagined. I went home and told my mum that I needed to leave public school to go and study at the same elite school I had studied at six years earlier. She went with me to the school and the old headmistress was still working there and she got me a 50 per cent scholarship. I paid for the school myself with the work I did at the markets three days a week.”

Carlos wanted to be a doctor, but when he saw a film focused on medicine and saw the blood of a patient undergoing surgery, he became ill, and thus discovered he was not suited to this profession. Nobody in his family offered alternative recommendations, but on the final day of registration for a university scholarship, he decided on forest engineering. He knew very little about the job, but he felt a strong intuition that working with nature would be the right direction. His love of nature was a reflection of the comfort it had offered him.

“I was a very, very thin guy and I had low self-esteem in relation to my body, so when I went to the beach, I felt very ashamed. I would wait for the moment when I thought people weren’t looking at me, take off my shirt and get into the water and stay there for three or four hours enjoying myself. I discovered in nature I felt at peace, far from the atmosphere of prejudice that suffocated me, far from the stares and judgements. Nature was my space of freedom. So when I decided to go to university, I tried to focus on nature, because nature was my place, and I wanted a career that would help protect it, I wanted to repay the care that nature gave me.”

Carlos studied at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro. His days were not easy, trying to make his way without his family’s support.

“For a few months I had nowhere to sleep and nowhere to store my suitcase. I slept on the floor and even on a table in other students’ rooms. I only ate one meal a day, my immune system weakened, but I was convinced that this was the price I had to pay in order to try to have another life. 

“Two years into my degree, a friend recommended me for an internship at a large forestry company. The company was in the centre of Rio de Janeiro, 60 kilometres from the university. I travelled four hours each day (round trip) to get to the internship. This work was paid and it allowed me to stop receiving help from my family, eat three meals a day and buy books. I was working as an intern at Floryl Florestadora Ypê AS, one of Shell’s companies in Brazil. They had a forestry operation dedicated to planting eucalyptus and pine trees for the timber industry. Despite always being very tired, I managed to maintain good grades and my time at university was very rich, full of learning, but somewhat lonely because I didn’t want people to know about the difficulties I was going through, to not risk further prejudice and bullying.”

When Carlos finished his degree, he spent five months in Rio de Janeiro working for a consultancy.

“This company was very problematic and I decided to leave for ethical reasons, so I went back to my hometown. At the time, Brazil was facing a long economic crisis with high unemployment rates and hyperinflation. I couldn’t see any opportunities to work or change my life. I spent my days on the beach depressed because I felt there was no place in the world for me and I would be condemned to live in misery.”

Then life intervened.

“A friend of mine was sitting on a bus and overheard a conversation between the two men sitting in front of him who were talking about a job opportunity in the state of Acre. There was a man looking for a forestry engineer, and my friend overheard this and asked if they could write down the number of this man. My friend then called me, gave me the number and I spent four hours trying to call the man on a public phone. As I didn’t have the money to pay for an interstate call, I had to call collect. When the man answered, I explained my situation and said I was interested in the job. We chatted for a few minutes and he hired me.

“My friend who gave me the number bought the plane ticket from Rio de Janeiro to Acre and another friend lent me money for the first month’s expenses. So I went to Acre without knowing anyone apart from this man I’d met over the phone, but I knew it might be my only opportunity to escape the reality of my hometown, so I put all of my efforts into earning the respect and credibility of my boss in order to remain in that job.”

Carlos was working at the Technology Foundation of the State of Acre.

“The purpose of this Foundation was to develop technical studies and research for the sustainable development of Acre based on forest conservation and to promote better conditions for small farmers, rubber tappers and Indigenous Peoples. We were trying to create alternative technological responses to curb deforestation and improve the population’s quality of life.”

Carlos’ focus connected with the growing social and environmental movements in Acre.

“When I arrived, Chico Mendes was still alive, and together with Marina Silva they were fighting in defence of the rights of rubber tappers, Indigenous Peoples and small farmers, and for the preservation of the forest. I was very attracted to them and the social movement they were part of. My dream was to be part of this group of people fighting against social injustice.”

In the early 1980s, Chico Mendes and Marina Silva formed a labour union while also leading empates, peaceful demonstrations against deforestation and the expulsion of forest communities from their traditional territories.

“Six months after arriving there, I became friends with them and became part of this group. I took part in meetings and demonstrations. In Acre I found my place in the world and the people I wanted to share dreams and struggles with.”

Through the process of becoming closer to Chico Mendes and Marina Silva, Carlos made another important connection.

“Eight weeks after arriving in Acre, I met Raimundo de Barros, another leader of the rubber tappers and a cousin of Chico Mendes. He invited me to spend a few days in the Xapuri forest with him. It was one of the most important moments for me in Acre because we stayed together for a week, sleeping and walking in the forest. He told me lots of stories about the forest, showed me many different trees, and illuminated the relationship between animals, plants and the climate. It was like taking a new university course because my university studies were about plantations, not natural rain forests, and Raimundo de Barros gave me a very intensive course. This deep contact with the forest and its people opened another huge window in my mind and was fundamental in guiding my priorities and the development of my professional career.”

In 1988, Chico Mendes was assassinated in his home in Xapuri.

“The group that killed Chico Mendes wanted to elect a governor who would approve building lots of roads in the forest and favour the expansion of the agricultural frontier in Acre. This would increase social conflicts and deforestation. A friend of mine, Jorge Viana, who was director of the Foundation, together with Marina and the other people in our group, decided to run for governor, and I was part of his campaign team, responsible for the election polls. We didn’t win the election, but he got a lot of votes and two years later he became Mayor of Rio Branco, the capital of the state of Acre. So I decided to leave the Foundation to work as Jorge’s technical advisor.” 

After almost two years in this role, an incredible opportunity arose for Carlos to study abroad.

“After the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development took place in Brazil in 1992, the Costa Rican Institute of Business Administration (INCAE) created an MBA in Natural Resources Management. A friend from our group, who fought for forest peoples, had been selected to take part in the third class of the course in Costa Rica but he couldn’t go as he had been elected to the state legislature. He told me about the course and recommended me for his place. I took the tests and passed the selection. I was very impressed with INCAE because it was the second best business school in Latin America and I knew that business knowledge would help us in the challenge of creating projects, strategies and public policies to sustainably develop the Amazon.”

Carlos decided to enrol, but the cost of the opportunity was a barrier.

“The course lasted 18 months and cost $50,000 (USD). I raised these funds by selling my house and car, borrowing from friends, and through two scholarships — one with the Ford Foundation and the other with the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO).

“I wanted to acquire the technical knowledge and develop the cognitive, behavioural and managerial skills to create viable sustainable economic ventures in the context of the Amazon and its traditional communities. My initial university education didn’t give me these competencies and I knew they were important for structuring solutions so the forest bioeconomy could become a reality in the region.  Since arriving in the Amazon, I had participated in and learned of various projects that sought sustainable economic alternatives but failed. One of the causes, in my opinion, was our lack of knowledge about how to structure viable businesses in remote regions and how to deal with competitive markets.”

After completing the course in Costa Rica, Carlos returned to Acre with a clearer vision of how to connect natural resources and traditional cultures with the market. He then worked for two years as a consultant for various organisations. 

Marina Silva had been elected senator for Acre in 1994. She was the first rubber tapper elected to the Federal Senate and the youngest senator in the history of the Republic of Brazil. Four years later, when Jorge Viana was elected governor of Acre and adopted the slogan “Government of the Forest”, Marina suggested he create the Executive Secretariat for Forests and Extractivism, to structure public policies to support the development of the state, based on the sustainable use of biodiversity; and to support Indigenous Peoples, rubber tappers, river dwellers, small farmers and the traditional forestry sector. Marina also suggested that Carlos lead this work.

Carlos was faced with a challenge that seemed too great for him: despite the good reputation he had built up in Acre as a competent technician, he didn’t feel he was capable of fulfilling the vision of this new role. Carlos saw himself as a survivor of an unjust and unequal social system, but he also carried deep wounds in his heart, struggling with insecurity and low self-esteem. He didn’t see himself as capable of taking on a role full of historical and symbolic importance, as it would be the secretariat responsible for developing public policies inspired by the legacy of Chico Mendes and all the other martyrs who fought for the forest and its peoples for decades, facing the violence imposed by powerful economic and political interest groups. So Carlos decided not to accept the invitation, and he told Jorge and Marina. Then, on the day Jorge was about to announce the government team, Carlos had a profound and transformative spiritual experience with Jesus Christ, and he suddenly felt safe to accept the invitation and lead Acre’s forestry policy.

“Our work at the State Secretariat was both visionary and paradigmatic, because we created the first payment for environmental services in the Amazon, structured the production chains for various socio-biodiversity products and created Acre’s forestry legislation. The results came quickly to the point where we saw growth in the economic indicators for forest products and a reduction in the rural exodus by rubber tappers. This work began to attract national and international attention.” 

The New York Times published an article about their work. 

“We also supported the creation of COOPERACRE, which is currently the largest co-operative of extractivists and small farmers in Acre, and brings to market a large part of the state’s fruit pulp, rubber, nuts and other products, benefiting thousands of small producers. It is an excellent example of the viability of local solutions to protect the forest and improve the quality of life of the rural population.”

In 2002, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected the President of Brazil, and Marina became the Minister for the Environment when he assumed office in 2003.

“Marina invited me to join her team at the Ministry. At first I didn’t accept the invitation because I was very happy in Acre and saw many opportunities to expand the impact of the Secretariat’s work, since Jorge Viana had been re-elected and we had another four years of work ahead of us.”

It was in this moment Carlos had another strong spiritual experience, and he decided to move to Brasilia to work with Marina and Lula. Carlos worked as Marina’s advisor until 2008, when she resigned from her position in Lula’s government and in the Workers’ Party.

“We then decided to create a Marina Silva Institute, an organisation to promote awareness about the Amazon, climate change and protection of nature in Brazil, and I stayed as Executive Secretary of this Institute until 2017.”

During this time, Marina ran for the Brazilian Presidency three times and Carlos remained her advisor for each campaign.

“I had huge learnings about Brazilian society, about the politicians, about the institutions, because I was very close to her in those three campaigns, participating in the whole process. In 2018, when she lost the last election, when Bolsonaro was elected, I moved to the Senate to work as an advisor to five senators, including Joênia Wapichana, from the Sustainability Network’s Party, Marina Silva’s party.”

Carlos worked as an advisor until 2021, when he started his current role as the National Facilitator of the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative (IRI) in Brazil. Created with the United Nations, the IRI is an international, multi-faith alliance that works to bring moral urgency and faith-based leadership to global efforts to end tropical deforestation.

“We are working to help religious leaders have a clearer and deeper understanding of the seriousness of the climate crisis, the urgency of stopping the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, of protecting the rights of the guardians of biodiversity — such as Indigenous Peoples, Quilombolas and traditional communities — and the value of scientific and ancestral knowledge to overcome these problems.

“The absolute majority of the Brazilian population follows some kind of religion. Religiosity has a significant influence on personal values, the economy, politics and the functioning of the state. Caring for nature needs to become a civilising value above ideologies and political and economic interests. Religious leaders can make a fundamental contribution to this leap in civilisation, especially since all religious and spiritual traditions contain principles and teachings about human responsibility in caring for nature. For more than a decade, opinion polls have shown that the majority of the Brazilian population is in favour of environmental preservation, however this position has not yet become a generalised value in the hearts of most people. If it were, it would guide individual habits and choices and influence the quality of elected officials and parliamentarians, as well as the behaviour of companies.”

In an effort to help shape these values more quickly, the IRI invests in educating and training religious and spiritual leaders.

“If caring for the climate, forests and their guardians becomes a spiritual, moral and existential value for these leaders, millions of people could be influenced in the short term. They have the potential to educate and influence around 90 percent of the Brazilian population. This could drastically reduce resistance in political and business circles to strengthen socio-environmental governance in Brazil.”

The Initiative believes in working with all of the diversity present in Brazil’s social fabric. For this reason, it does not discriminate in any way and has managed to establish processes of dialogue and learning with leaders across the religious, ideological and political spectrum, supporting processes of dialogue and interaction with scientists, activists and public officials. 

“Here in Brazil, environmental issues face great resistance from economic and political power. We need to create an environment in which these issues can be understood as something of vital importance, which rise above political disputes, economic interests and ideological conflicts. We need to use the language of the heart, of emotion, of ethics and values so that we can all realise that we have no time to lose, that we cannot continue to repeat old ways that destroy the foundations that sustain life on the planet.

“I hope our work can help people develop a love for nature, for the forest, especially the Amazon rain forest, and for the Indigenous Peoples who have suffered for more than five centuries, who face a lot of prejudice. Most religious leaders, who defend laws and social justice, are not involved in protecting the rights of indigenous groups, so we are trying to create this link.

“I don’t want to do anything in the next few years apart from this work, I think it’s the most important work of my life. In June I turned 60, and I have at least 15 or 20 productive years ahead of me, and I’d like to dedicate those years to this mission.” 

Considering the incredible achievements throughout Carlos’ career, his belief in this initiative emphasises its importance.

“I could have opted for a stable job with the comfort and security it brings. I passed the exam for Embrapa, the agricultural research company when I returned from Costa Rica, but I resigned as a researcher because I felt that life was calling me to other missions. Every job I’ve chosen brings together what is important to me: contributing to reducing social injustice and conserving biodiversity, especially in the Amazon. Of course, not having stability means constantly living with risks, but for those born into the poorest strata of society, dealing with difficulties, threats and adversity are skills that are learned from childhood.”

Carlos’ story highlights the power of belief, in humanity, spirituality and life itself.

“I am the fruit of dreams, persistence, solidarity and faith. My family lacked food, but not examples of love thy neighbour, compassion and solidarity. God gave me some friends who helped me in critical moments. These people helped me in different ways, rarely with money, but by giving me affection, words of encouragement, inspiration, solutions and contacts. That’s why I often feel the heart of people who are suffering from invisibility, indifference and feelings of not belonging. The situations I experienced have given me this ability, and I’m very grateful to God to be able to be a support for someone, just like people have been for me.

“I think that’s why I’m here, life has given me the opportunity to experience suffering so that I can recognise it in other people and other creatures, to help eliminate or minimise pain. To contribute to someone’s happiness is one of the greatest pleasures I have in life. I know this is love, and it is this value that orientates my way of being in the world and the work I do.”

It is the essence of reciprocity, and the ever-present need to support and believe in life itself. 

“We are part of a web of life, and we can only enjoy a meaningful life if we love life in all of its manifestations.”

Anton Rivette is a writer and photographer.

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Neocolonialism refers to the indirect control that powerful countries exert over less developed nations, primarily through economic, political or cultural pressures (rather than direct military or political domination). The effects of neocolonialism are visible in environmental and conservation efforts, as foreign entities often initiate and control conservation projects in developing countries. These projects typically prioritise global environmental goals over local needs, sometimes displacing indigenous communities and imposing western conservation models that may not be sustainable or beneficial for local ecosystems.

After centuries of Portuguese colonial rule, Cape Verde, an archipelago of 10 islands in the central Atlantic Ocean, gained independence on July 5, 1975. Sal, one of the islands in the archipelago, historically thrived on salt production, but in the late 20th century an Italian investor purchased the salt mines and began building hotels and resorts, effectively controlling the island’s economy. This transition from salt production to tourism altered Sal’s economic landscape, highlighting the impact of foreign investment on local communities.

“Sal has always been marketed as a sun-and-beach tourist destination, as if there was nothing else, portraying it as a desert island with nothing more to offer. Our goal was to challenge and dispel this notion, to show that the island holds much more ecological significance than previously acknowledged.”

In 2011, Albert, a biologist born in Catalonia, Spain, arrived in Cape Verde along with Berta, a marine biologist, to volunteer with a local conservation organisation.

“We continued to gain responsibilities until 2014. There were already other people who had also started working on the different issues endangered sea turtles face in the country: habitat loss, poaching, light pollution, plastic pollution, among others. With some locals, we decided to found a NGO, Projeto Biodiversidade. It was 6 of us when we started.

“The conservation NGOs that started here in Cabo Verde were mostly outsiders who came to dictate what needed to be done, and there was a missing element of making it more community-oriented. So our objective was to address this gap and start working on it. We aimed to collaborate as much as possible with the local population, providing employment opportunities and training. We wanted to empower locals to take on leadership roles with the clear goal that someday the project would be 100% nationally managed.”

As of today, there are 27 people working in the permanent team, and of that group only four are foreigners. 

The project started almost 10 years ago as an organisation to protect sea turtles, but it has always been much more than that.

“I believe it was more of a result of necessity, the outcome of an urgent need the island had. It was a group of individuals who met through sea turtle conservation and realised there was an urgent need to protect the island’s natural riches, to preserve and make people aware of them.”

With the expansion of preservation initiatives across the Cape Verde archipelago, in 2009 a national marine turtle conservation network was created, TAOLA. With the need to preserve whole habitats, conservation efforts expanded to include other fauna and flora. In 2022, along with five local NGOs, Projeto Biodiversidade helped to create TAOLA+ Rede Nacional de Conservação Ambiental, a network of organisations dedicated to environmental conservation, uniting environmental NGOs into a single, bigger voice.

“Only a few weeks ago, we held the first assembly. Now we are 14. It is becoming a driving force for conservation throughout the country, and that is amazing. Now, if you go to any island, you will find a fairly large environmental conservation NGO.

“There are also groups that are not that well organised due to paperwork, who cannot yet be part of the network due to bureaucratic reasons, but we also represent them. The idea is not to leave anyone out, to include everyone, and always add more.”

Through Projeto Biodiversidade, and now with TAOLA+, the goals continue to expand and evolve.

“Having an organisation connecting the NGOs gives much more strength to everything we do. We now work with plants, sharks, seabirds, ecosystems, dune restoration… We all do so many things. We needed to create something that encompassed everyone, all the NGOs. In the end, it’s the story of a bunch of people who came together in this place and said, ‘hey, let’s try to conserve and take care of this.’ That’s really incredible. Ultimately, no matter what you do, no matter where it is, it always comes down to the power of grassroots organisations for everything.

“I remember when I arrived here in 2011, the quad bike tours for tourists used to pass right through the middle of the beach, through a natural reserve in Costa da Fragata. Nowadays, we’re already discussing how far away from the dunes they can go. The whole picture improves when you value what you have.”

Things seem to be getting better, with a growing number of people involved and the government willing to protect the precious ecosystem of Cape Verde. Yet, like elsewhere, the ocean is often overlooked when it comes to active conservation, even in a country where 99.45% of the territory is water.

“The fishing agreement that Cabo Verde has with the European Union is the same as the one the EU has with the Canary Islands, the closest archipelago to Cabo Verde, yet the EU pays the Canary Islands millions, but here in Cabo Verde they give a pittance and come and empty the sea. There’s a lack of management of the fishing industry, due to lack of financial support and a lack of State strategy. There’s a lack of Marine Protected Areas and a lack of a clear vision that can guarantee the survival of the ecosystem.”

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are designated regions in oceans, seas and large lakes where human activities are managed and regulated to protect marine ecosystems and biodiversity. They are essential tools for conserving marine habitats and creating more MPAs is the key to the survival of ocean ecosystems.

“Here, there are Marine Protected Areas, and when we go there, the seabed is clean, they’ve wiped everything out, there’s nothing, nothing! Only in the places they can’t reach is where there’s quite a significant wealth, like the shallow coral reefs. But if we go a bit further away from the coast, we can’t find any life. Why? Because the existing MPAs are not managed. There’s a lack of a state strategy and the conviction to carry it out to the end.”

MPAs can significantly vary in their level of protection and the types of activities allowed within their boundaries, but Albert has a clear vision for Cape Verde’s waters to once again be a thriving, biodiverse ecosystem. 

“We have a large project with the objective to create new Marine Protected Areas and extend existing ones. The government didn’t want to know anything about it at first… but in the last year, they have become more enthusiastic.

“We are practically managing protected areas. We continue to monitor, fight against hunting, we place signs, restore dunes and carry out a kind of management of these areas. The difference is that we don’t do it with the government. There’s no document that says, you are the managers of the protected area. It doesn’t exist. But I believe that now, over time, we will move in that direction, NGOs will start to gain more relevance. We don’t talk so much about protecting turtles anymore, we don’t talk so much about the patrols themselves, we talk about beach management. We’re not just patrolling the beach anymore, now we’re managing it.”

The key to their success goes beyond the organisation, it’s something bigger.

“We need to change the paradigm a bit. We need to understand that the locals have been here all their lives, and now we or other people from outside are coming, and this is important. I believe our role here is about accompanying the development in the country to make it as sustainable as possible, rather than opposing or hindering it.

“We’re moving away from the conventional conservation idea of years ago, where you protect a species to the end and that’s it. We’re focused on the ecosystem level, the whole. It’s been an ant’s work, a constant effort and of always being present, not creating something with a start and end date, but something more permanent.” 

This is Projeto Biodiversidade’s biggest achievement thus far.

“Things change through persistence, laws don’t get created overnight. Laws have to be in place for a while, convince the government, then they make the law, then they implement the law. You have to be there and maintain it. And that’s what I believe our biggest achievement is, that people don’t see us as just an environmental issue, they see us as intellectual authority.”

Albert is proud of what they have achieved — as he should be — but more importantly, he conveys an idea that all activists should share.

“I arrived here as a volunteer, and there was an opportunity to help protect this ecosystem, we took it and now, well, we have something that is very big, that’s much bigger than ourselves. I believe what sets us apart is the conviction that we don’t do things for our own benefit, we do things for the common good, for something greater.”

What does the future of Cape Verde hold? Albert’s focus remains the same, to protect the archipelago often referred to as the Jewel of the Atlantic.

“I would love to see the organisation play a significant role in the management of protected areas, of no-fishing zones. I would like to see more reserves in a tangible way, because right now it’s all theoretical, isn’t it? I want to see this in action.”

Helena Constela is a photographer, videographer, producer and activist. She works in the media team on Sea Shepherd’s ships, while also managing social media for both eco-nnect and Seaspiracy.

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scroll down for the Italian translation

Chiara Vigo, is the last known master of the byssus sea silk. She lives in the southernmost tip of Sardinia, on the island of Sant’Antioco. She was trained as a master by her grandmother. In fact the Vigo women can trace back their lineage of byssus weaving to 500 years ago.

“A master comes, a master goes. It has been done in my family for 28 generations now.”

For millennia the secret of how the byssus sea silk is woven from the slime produced by a Mediterranean clam, the Pinna nobilis, has been passed down from grandmother to granddaughter with very strict instructions that the sea silk must never be sold and the knowledge must remain within the female bloodline. Legend says that whoever breaks this pledge will be cursed.

Earlier this year, I traveled with a few friends across Sardinia and we met with Chiara Vigo in her workshop in Sant Antioco. When we entered, we were three Italian women, following a thread: an urge to connect with the native mysticism that was buried by millennia of ecclesiastical persecution. Chiara greeted us warmly, like a grandmother welcoming her family. Her demeanour was gentle yet she spoke directly.

“Your generation is fascinating. You travel the world, to other cultures, to the Far East, to learn how to meditate, yet you don’t have to actually travel far, the knowledge is also right here in your home country. Do you know how to weave?”

She asked us simply. No, we replied in unison. Her workshop is home to her 200-year-old loom, an imposing and beautiful wooden structure that seems incredibly complicated to maneuver.

“In every culture across the world, women’s connection is through the art of weaving.”

Chiara only unveils the teachings of the art of byssus sea silk to her nine year old granddaughter, however she teaches weaving to everyone. Her door is always open as long as you’re not in a hurry, a sign on the door reads.

“A few years ago, it was about creating the thread that connected women. Which is neither given by the flashy dress, nor by showing off your brain. We don’t need to prove anything. As long as we are what we want to be. But what’s missing in my opinion right now is the essence, people just do things, but they don’t do it consciously.”

I asked, what makes byssus sea silk special?

“Byssus can never be traded, it can only be gifted. In the Old Testament when King Solomon says ‘the king went out at the door and at the sound his clothes were covered with gold’, He is talking about the byssus. There is no other fibre that changes with sound, how the vibrations hit the material the silk captures the light and makes it its own. This is why the byssus is placed in a sacred situation and how it becomes golden.”

Little is known about the Nuragic civilisation (1600-750BC) from Sardinia, yet the island is full of archeological sites from that era: from the tombs of the giants, to fairy portals and water temples. The Nuragic people were an oral culture, and no written accounts of their tradition have been found, only paintings and small bronze sculptures.

Every Spring, protected by nightfall on a full moon night, Chiara dives in a secret cove on the island to retrieve the pinna nobilis’ slime. It will take her about 100 dives to retrieve only 200g of slime, which becomes about 30g of yarn and 21 meters of thread.

The pinna nobilis is a species endemic to the Mediterranean. In 2016 a parassite known as Haplosporidian endoparasite spread to the Mediterranean via surface currents, which killed over 99% of the mollusc’s Spanish population. Since then, the disease has been slowly spreading across the Mediterranean. Today, it is a critically endangered species in desperate need of protection.

“The pinna lives for 25 years, reaches heights of one metre and ten, is the largest Mediterranean bivalve, and is stuck in the seabed for two thirds of its height. He has a jokester enemy: the octopus. If the octopus finds it open, it sticks out its tentacles, eats it and makes its home there, therefore she defends herself equipped with a sieve gland that is connected to her orifice. When she feels threatened, she swells the gland and closes the entrance with the slime.”

It’s thanks to the symbiotic relationship between the octopus and the pinna nobilis that we get the byssus, as without the octopus the pinna wouldn’t secrete the slime.

Chiara showed us a ball of byssus yarn, then told us to close our eyes and hold out our hand. She then asked us if we felt anything. No, we replied. When we opened our eyes she had placed a fist-size ball of byssus yarn on our hands. It is weightless, as thin as a string of hair.

“Once cleaned, it no longer has the weight and you can no longer feel it. Just cleaning this small ball of byssus can take 90 years, because when it comes out of the fin it is liquid, then as it touches the substrate it solidifies and becomes silk. To turn it into thread, you need to first clean it delicately with a brush. Imagine how much work goes into making a ball like that. So imagine how much work goes into making a shawl. What are we talking about? It takes years, unless you destroy half the Mediterranean, which is why I took the Water Oath.”

Chiara took the Water Oath in 1983. Her grandmother used to fish for the pinna nobilis by retrieving the slime and then eating the flesh, back when the Mediterranean was abundant with life. However, Chiara has had to adapt to the reality of the emptying seas, and with her oath she promised to retrieve the slime without killing the animal.

“Instead I chose to maintain through the Water Oath what it already was without modifying its essence. Naturally I have all the byssus of my grandmothers and my great-grandmothers to clean still. This ball is 300 years old.”

This makes me realise what a true Master Chiara is, she dives each year to retrieve byssus that she most likely will never weave. She is retrieving it for her granddaughter, just like her grandmother did before her, leaving behind a method that does not interfere with the ecosystem.

“Now I will use sound, I will change the fiber and make it capable of capturing the light, making it its own and becoming gold in light.”

Chiara walked over to her loom and began chanting a deep chant, in a mysterious unintelligible language. It reminded me of Buddhist monks, and I realised what she meant when she told us that we didn’t have to travel to the East to find truth.

“To me, making byssus is not using a spindle and it is not weaving. It is preserving for those who come what already was, without modifying it in the manufacturing and delivery ritual.”

Throughout Italy, a country synonymous with textiles and fashion, Chiara’s mastery has become a legend. Directors of large fashion houses have descended upon Sardinia ready to pay fat cheques for the mysterious golden thread. Yet if anyone else tries, the slime will not turn to thread, and the thread will not become golden. Chiara is a true testament to ancestral Italian wisdom, despite the contemporary capitalist and patriarchal Italian culture that surrounds her, the silk is not for sale, her mastery is only for her granddaughter’s ears. Yet her door is always open for those willing to listen to her wisdom, her integrity is as rare as the sea silk. She is a true master in a world where almost everything is for sale.

“If each of us followed what he has in his soul, there would be no climate crisis. If you love without ifs or buts, time passes peacefully. Masters of the arts should simply love and do nothing, love everyone as they are. Just take the beauty of each individual. We try to make the ugly become beautiful.”

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Chiara Vigo è l’ultima maestra vivente di bisso, la seta del mare. Vive nell’estremità più meridionale della Sardegna, sull’isola di Sant’Antioco. È stata iniziata come maestra di bisso da sua nonna. Infatti, il suo lignaggio risale al 1500.

“Un maestro viene, un maestro va. Nella mia famiglia si fa ormai da 28 generazioni.”

Per millenni il segreto di come si tessesse la seta marina di bisso, prodotta dal muco di un mollusco mediterraneao, la Pinna nobilis, è stato tramandato  da nonna a nipote attraverso istruzioni molto rigorose: la seta marina non deve mai essere venduta e la conoscenza deve rimanere all’interno della linea di sangue femminile. La leggenda narra che chiunque infranga questo giuramento sarà maledetto.

All’inizio dell’anno ho viaggiato con delle amiche attraverso la Sardegna e abbiamo incontrato Chiara Vigo nel suo laboratorio di Sant’Antioco.

Tre donne italiane all’insegna di una trama: l’urgenza di connetterci con il misticismo nativo sepolto da millenni di persecuzione ecclesiastica. Al nostro arrivo Chiara ci ha accolto calorosamente, come una nonna che accoglie la sua famiglia. Il suo atteggiamento era gentile ed il suo esprimersi schietto.

“La vostra generazione è affascinante. Viaggiate per il mondo incontrando altre culture, in Estremo Oriente, per imparare a meditare, ma in realtà non dovete viaggiare lontano, la conoscenza è anche qui, nel vostro paese. Sapete tessere?”

Ci ha semplicemnte chiesto. No, abbiamo risuonato all’unisono.

Il suo laboratorio è la sede del suo telaio centenario, una struttura bella ed imponente che sembra incredibilmente complicata da manovrare.

“In ogni cultura del mondo, il legame delle donne è sempre stato attraverso l’arte della tessitura.”

Chiara rivela gli insegnamenti dell’arte del  bisso solo alla sua nipotina di nove anni, ma insegna a tessere a chiunque. La sua porta è sempre aperta, purché non siate di fretta, recita un cartello sulla porta.

“Un po’ di anni fa, la mia intenzione era di tessere il filo che collegasse le donne. Questo non è dato dal vestito appariscente, né dal cervello che non funziona. Non abbiamo bisogno di dimostrare nulla. Basta essere ciò che vogliamo essere. Ciò che manca, secondo me, è l’essenza. Le persone fanno le cose, ma non lo fanno consapevolmente.”

Ho chiesto, cosa rende così speciale il  bisso marino?

“Il bisso non può mai essere commercializzato, può solo essere donato. Nel Vecchio Testamento quando il Re Salomone dice ‘Usciva il re sulla  porta ed al suono le sue vesti si coprirono d’oro’, sta parlando del bisso. Non c’è altra fibra che cambi con il suono, come le vibrazioni colpiscono il materiale, la seta cattura la luce e la rende sua. Ecco perché il bisso è collocato in una situazione sacra e diventa dorato.”

Poco si sa della civiltà nuragica (1600-750 a.C.) della Sardegna, eppure l’isola è piena di siti archeologici di quell’epoca: dalle tombe dei giganti, ai portali delle fate e ai templi dell’acqua. La leggenda narra che questa civiltà fosse un matriarcato molto evoluto, simile agli Etruschi nel Mar Tirreno, e con connessioni fino ai Fenici e agli antichi Egizi. Le Somme Sacerdotesse alla guida di questa società erano conosciute per indossare abiti con fili d’oro di bisso. La seta è menzionata in diversi testi sacri, incluso un’iscrizione sulla pietra di Rosetta tolemaica che risale al 196 a.C.

Ogni primavera, al calare della notte protetta dalla luna piena, Chiara si immerge in una baia segreta dell’isola per recuperare il muco della pinna nobilis. Le serviranno circa 100 immersioni per recuperare solo 200g di muco, che diventeranno circa 30g di gomitolo e 21 metri di filo.

La pinna nobilis è una specie endemica del Mediterraneo. Nel 2016 in Spagna, il parassito Haplosporidian endoparasite ha ucciso oltre il 99% della popolazione spagnola del mollusco. Da allora, la malattia si è diffusa lentamente attraverso il Mediterraneo. Oggi è una specie gravemente minacciata che ha bisogno urgentemente di protezione.

“La pinna vive per 25 anni, raggiunge altezze di un metro e dieci, è il più grande bivalve mediterraneo e si infissa nel fondale per due terzi della sua altezza. Ha un nemico monello: il polpo. Se il polpo la trova aperta di notte infila i tentacoli, la mangia e ci fa la casa. Per questo si difende con una ghiandola a setaccio collegata al suo piede, una valvola che attraversa il mantello e si appoggia nell’orifizio esterno. Quando si sente minacciata, rigonfia la ghiandola e chiude l’ingresso con la bava. Quando il polpo si rintana, spruzza il muco all’esterno che come tocca l’acqua si solidifica e diventa seta purissima, imprigioando tutto ciò che incontra”

È grazie alla relazione simbiotica tra il polpo e la pinna nobilis che otteniamo il bisso, perché senza il polpo la pinna non secernerà la bava.

Chiara ci ha mostrato un gomitolo di bisso, ci ha chiesto di chiudere gli occhi e tenere la mano tesa. Ci ha chiesto poi se sentissimo qualcosa. No, abbiamo risposto. Quando abbiamo aperto gli occhi, aveva messo un gomitolo di bisso nelle nostre mani. È talmente leggero da essere impercettibile, sottile come un filo di capelli.

“Una volta pulito, non ha più peso e non lo si sente più. Solamente pulire  questo piccolo gomitolo può richiedere 90 anni, perché quando esce dalla pinna è liquido, poi quando tocca il substrato si solidifica e diventa seta. Per trasformarlo in filo, devi prima pulirlo delicatamente con una spazzola. Immagina quanta fatica ci vuole per fare un gomitolo del genere. Quindi immagina quanto lavoro ci vuole per fare uno scialle. Di cosa stiamo parlando? Ci vogliono anni, a meno che non distruggi metà del Mediterraneo, ed è per questo che ho fatto il Giuramento dell’Acqua.”

Chiara ha fatto il Giuramento dell’Acqua nell’anno 1983. Sua nonna pescava la pinna nobilis recuperandone la bava e poi mangiandone la carne, quando il Mediterraneo era ricco di vita. Tuttavia, Chiara ha dovuto adattarsi alla realtà dei mari che si svuotano, e con il suo giuramento ha promesso di recuperare il muco senza uccidere l’animale.

“Invece ho scelto di mantenere attraverso il Giuramento dell’Acqua ciò che già era, senza modificarne l’essenza. Naturalmente ho ancora tutto il bisso delle mie nonne e delle mie bisnonne da pulire. Questo gomitolo ha più di 300 anni.”

Questo mi fa capire che tipo di Maestra sia Chiara, pura ed integra, si immerge ogni anno per recuperare il bisso che probabilmente non tessera mai. Lo sta recuperando per la sua nipotina, proprio come sua nonna fece prima di lei, lasciando dietro di sé un metodo che non interferisce con l’ecosistema.

“Adesso userò il suono, cambierò la fibra e la renderò capace di catturare la luce, farla sua e diventare oro nella luce.”

Chiara si è avvicinata al suo telaio e ha iniziato a cantare un canto profondo, in una misteriosa lingua incomprensibile. Mi ha ricordato i monaci buddisti, ed ho capito cosa intendesse quando ci ha detto che non dovevamo viaggiare verso est per trovare la verità.

“Per me, fare il bisso non è usare un fuso e non è tessere. È preservare per coloro che verranno ciò che già era, senza modificarlo nel rituale di produzione e consegna.”

In tutta Italia, un paese sinonimo di tessuti e moda, la maestria di Chiara è diventata leggendaria. Direttori di grandi case di moda si sono recati in Sardegna pronti a pagare grosse cifre per il misterioso filo dorato. Ma chiunque altro provi non riuscirà a trasformare la bava in filo ed il filo non diventerà dorato. Chiara è un vero esempio della saggezza ancestrale italiana. Nonostante sia circondata da una cultura capitalista e patriarcale la seta non è in vendita; la sua maestria è solo per le orecchie della sua nipotina. Eppure la sua porta è sempre aperta per coloro disposti ad ascoltare la sua saggezza, la sua integrità è rara quanto la seta marina stessa. È una vera maestra in un mondo in cui quasi tutto è in vendita.

“Se ognuno di noi seguisse ciò che ha nell’anima, non ci sarebbe la crisi climatica. Il problema non si risolve perchè non ci si vuole mettere insieme e collaborare. Se ami senza se e senza ma, il tempo scorre serenamente. Il Maestro dovrebbe semplicemente amare e non fare nulla. Amare tutti così come sono. Basta cogliere la bellezza di ogni individuo. Cerchiamo di rendere bello ciò che è brutto.”

Scritto da/ Written by: Isabella Cavalletti, tradotto da / translated by Carola Rovati

The post Chiara Vigo: the Master of Byssus Silk appeared first on eco-nnect.

Depending on how you define it, activism has a long history in so called Australia. 

When Arthur Phillip — a former whaler and longtime servant of the British Navy — attempted to establish a colony on Gadigal land, he was resisted by Bennelong, Pemulwuy and the many Eora people who fought beside them. The Colony was established in the settlement of Sydney Cove, and early settlers invaded the nearby land of the Dharawal, Dharug, Awabakal, Darkinjung, Gandangara and Wiradjuri peoples. The fifth Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie, effectively declared war on the “hostile natives”. Communities were massacred and native forests were felled, as settlements spread with the support of British agriculture and grazing methods that were imposed on the land. The Original Peoples of the Sovereign Nations that criss-cross the Australian continent and its surrounding islands, resisted an onslaught of violence and terror for over 100 years through a series of conflicts commonly referred to as the Frontier Wars. Musquito, Yagan, Windradyne, Tarenorerer, Tunnerminnerwait, Maulboyheenner, Truganini, Jandamarra and Dhakiyarr are some of the many figures of resistance who fought alongside their respective communities.

Eventually the colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, Port Phillip, Swan River, South Australia and Queensland united to form the Commonwealth of Australia. Resistance continued as communities lived in the face of the restrictions imposed on their culture and connection to Country by the newly formed state and federal governments. Foreign settlers also resisted British rule and imposition, reflected in the Rum Rebellion of 1808 and the Eureka Stockade of 1854, as well as the development of labour unions throughout the colonies in the 19th century.

Unionism also influenced the development of the first politically organised Aboriginal activist group, the Australian Aborigines Progressive Association (AAPA), formed in 1924, campaigning for rights to land ownership, citizenship, control of their own affairs and an end to the removal of Aboriginal children from their families. The AAPA was renamed the Aborigines’ Progressive Association and along with the Australian Aborigines League, they organised the first Day of Mourning on January 26 1938. It was the culmination of years of work, encouraging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activism across Australia, which led to the Yirrkala Bark Petitions, the Freedom Ride, the Wave Hill walk-off, the campaign for the constitutional referendum of 1967, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and the Mabo Case.

The worldview and cultural practices of the Original Sovereign Nations of Australia, particularly their connection to Country, is well documented, and the outcry for civil rights was intrinsically linked to the protection of their territories. As the Australian population increased through waves of migration, the native landscape was destroyed to make way for industries that supported the growing number of settlements, particularly agriculture and grazing, the extraction of natural resources, and the eventual privatisation of land. Despite the ongoing desecration of the environment across the continent, it took time for settlers to develop a connection to the landscape and thus develop an awareness of the need for its protection, as well as the rights of the indigenous peoples who have always called it home.

Although many settlers campaigned for the rights of the Original Sovereign Nations of Australia and advocated for the protection of native plants and wildlife, the history books suggest the Australian conservation movement began with the creation of National Parks in the late 19th century. It was with the near extinction of the thylacine — also known as the Tasmanian Tiger — that environmental awareness spread through the dominant colonial culture, leading to koalas being declared protected species in 1937 and Tasmanian Devils in 1941. 

The thylacine population of Lutruwita (Tasmania) was around 5,000 when the British settled there, but they were known to attack sheep and thus hunted by farmers. As the thylacine population dwindled, sightings became significant news, as standards at the time stated an animal could not be declared extinct until 50 years had passed without a confirmed sighting. In 1968, zoologist Jeremy Griffith and local dairy farmer James Malley conducted what has been described as the the most extensive recorded search for the thylacine in the history of Lutruwita. In 1972, they formed the Thylacine Expeditionary Research Team with Bob Brown, which concluded without discovering evidence of the thylacine’s existence.

“I’d read about the Tasmanian Tiger and its alleged extinction, and then I saw a black and white television program, I think it was Four Corners, on Lake Pedder.”

Nestled amongst the peaks of the Frankland Range in Lutruwita’s southwest, Lake Pedder was a once glacial lake adorned by a pink quartzite beach. It was often referred to as “the mirror of heaven”.

“I wanted to know more about what was going on, so I kept my eye out for a job in Tasmania. I was working on ships in the Pacific as a doctor, and I was reading a medical magazine, and there was an ad for a three month position in Launceston replacing a doctor who was travelling to England. So I came, applied, got the job and within a year, I ran into two guys who were looking for the Tasmanian Tiger.”

The search for the thylacine inspired Bob’s early explorations of Lutruwita’s famed wilderness. He travelled into the Tarkine and the island’s northeast, to places where the thylacine had allegedly been sighted.

“The sightings always led to some other animal which may or may not have looked like a Tasmanian Tiger. But this presumption that if you couldn’t identify something that you saw in the night, it must be a Tiger, needed to be met with a fair degree of clarity of mind, but the Tiger is extinct.”

Bob also became involved in the campaign to protect Lake Pedder. The Lake and its surrounding wilderness was protected by National Park status in 1955 but it was then revoked in 1967, as the Tasmanian government wanted to flood the Gordon, Serpentine and Huon Rivers as part of a hydro-electric generation scheme, which was pushed forward through the avid support of Premier Eric Reece (who was nicknamed “Electric Eric”). The eventual dam obfuscated Lake Pedder’s unique natural beauty, creating a sprawling reservoir that provides extra “storage” to Lake Gordon, where the power station is located.

“I took out a big ad in The Australian, it was over $1,000 at the time, saying Lake Pedder is another disaster for Tasmania… It was sort of a cry in the dark but it also alerted the Lake Pedder campaigners to the fact that this unusual doctor had arrived in Launceston, and I quickly got asked to stand for Parliament. I didn’t want to, but I did.”

The newly formed United Tasmania Group (UTG) is acknowledged as the world’s first environmental political party to contest elections. The party was formed during a meeting of the Lake Pedder Action Committee to field candidates in the April 1972 Tasmanian election. The founder of the UTG, a senior lecturer in botany at the University of Tasmania, Dick Jones, asked Bob to stand, as they needed a candidate in the north of the state. 

“I stood with him on a Senate ticket, I think I got 112 votes statewide. But I quickly learned that environmentalism is off the agenda in politics, even more so back then… This was a period of nascent organic farming, permaculture, a lot of things happening in Tasmania, and it was all viewed with disdain and arrogance by the Hydro-Electric Commission, which had no trouble running ads against the UTG to say our policies would lead to higher power prices and the loss of jobs and so on. So we learned from that for the Franklin campaign, which came a decade later.”

Wild “from source to mouth”, the Franklin River is in Lutruwita’s southwest, and the Hydro-Electric Commission coveted it to create another hydro-electric dam. Bob gathered a group of activists in his home — all of whom were either members of the UTG or had campaigned for Lake Pedder — to discuss the Franklin’s protection, and together they formed the Tasmanian Wilderness Society (TWS). 

“We discussed peaceful direct action. Some of the group had considered it but had decided against it because they didn’t want to lose public support by sitting in front of bulldozers. But we invited some Quaker activists from New Zealand to talk to us about the theory of direct action and communal direct action, and while some individuals amongst us hated it, it nevertheless was enormously important in the blockade that saved the Franklin River.”

The TWS coordinated the massive campaign against the Franklin Dam, which lasted seven years from 1976 through to 1983. The campaign was initiated by a film that screened on Tasmanian television stations, and was followed with blockades on the Gordon and Franklin Rivers, many public rallies, letter writing, widespread door-knocking and significant political actions. In 1980, 10,000 people protested on the streets of Hobart — more than three times the size of any public rally to that moment in Lutruwita — demanding the wild Franklin be saved. Through the strength of the campaign, the Tasmanian government backed down on its initial plans for a new site for the dam, but the Wilderness Society did not back down from its call for “NO DAMS” in the southwest of Lutruwita. Their stance was supported by the uncovering of cultural artefacts at Kutikina Cave, located on the Franklin River, which led to the creation of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area in 1982, strengthening the position of TWS and the protestors. After a deadlock in the Tasmanian Parliament and an eventual referendum, the sitting Labor government was defeated in a state election.

“It was then that the strong man of Liberal politics arrived on the scene, Robin Grey, he won the election over Labor in 1982. In every seat of that election we stood ‘Save the Franklin’ candidates, and in every seat they lost. Although Norm Sanders here in Hobart, in Denison, had been an advocate for the Franklin’s protection, he was, to my knowledge, the first environmentalist elected into a parliament anywhere in Australia, he was a trailblazer. But he resigned his seat in Parliament because of the mistreatment of the Franklin Blockaders that got tougher and nastier as time went on, it was a very clear the government was calling for harsher treatment.”

Bob was one of 1500 people who were arrested during the Franklin campaign and was one of 600 jailed, when he spent 19 days in Hobart’s Risdon Prison.

“The day after I came out of jail, I was elected to Tasmania’s House of Assembly on a countback. So I was suddenly in Parliament on the side of the Franklin ticket, while also being director of the Wilderness Society, helping to run the blockade that was happening on the Gordon and Franklin Rivers. But I said at the time when the Franklin is saved, that’ll be my political career.”

Through the support of the newly elected Prime Minister Bob Hawke — who had promised to save the Franklin in the lead up to the election — and intervention from Australia’s High Court, construction of the dam was stopped and the River was saved, yet Bob Brown remained in politics.

“We had parallel campaigns to stop wood chipping and the marauding of Tasmania’s forests, and it was accelerating at a great rate, and there were social justice issues that I wanted to attend to, because nobody else in the Parliament was giving them voice, so I stayed on.”

He stayed for ten years. During his tenure, Bob proposed legislative initiatives on gay rights, nuclear regulation and euthanasia (amongst others).

“In the 1989 election, we ended up with five Greens seats that allowed us to double the size of the World Heritage area and to get new National Parks. You could say I became a relentless driver for the environment, but to me it was just about relentless common sense, it was a priority that looked to the future. And in retrospect, I would have regretted greatly backing off when that opportunity arose. But after ten years, I’d had enough, so I resigned from the Greens and took three years out.”

Bob went on holiday, travelling the world until he was pulled back to land he loved. He was drawn back to politics, initially to campaign for the newly created Australian Greens, and eventually standing for election in the Federal Senate in 1996 with the provision that he could continue to be an activist. 

“It included, if necessary, breaking the law, even though under the Constitution that loses you a seat in Parliament, and the Greens were happy to accept that condition.”

He was the first Greens’ candidate to be elected to the Australian Senate.

“When I arrived in Tasmania and found this nascent Greens Party, I felt at home with their politics that was based on a humility for nature and a concern for all human beings, and that includes all human cultures. So taking that on and helping to develop it was important. Labor will always grab kudos for social justice, Liberals will always grab kudos for economic innovation, but what they don’t have is any kudos on the environment, except when it’s manufactured here and there, and so the Greens Party grew.”

Bob Brown was a sensible voice in the Senate, often opposing the conservative Liberal government of John Howard. He introduced bills to block radioactive waste dumping and to ban mandatory sentencing of Aboriginal children, he was vocal of Australia’s involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and he famously told John Howard to “relax and accept gay marriages as part of the future’s social fabric“. When four Greens senators were elected in 2004, Bob was formally named the first Federal Parliamentary Leader of the party. In 2007, he stated that coal was the energy industry’s “heroin habit” and suggested the ban of coal exports. He said it was an “appalling and disgusting failure” when Kevin Rudd failed to commit to strong carbon reduction targets in 2008. He also suggested tax revenues from the excess profits of the coal industry should be set aside for future environmental catastrophes in Australia.

In the 2010 election, the Greens achieved a historic result attracting 1.6 million votes, with the election of nine senators and one member of the House of Representatives. It meant that the Green held the balance of power in the Senate and Bob used this position to negotiate.

“We brought in probably the most advanced climate change legislation, of regulation and offsetting. We got it through with Julia Gillard as Prime Minister because we drove a very hard bargain. You might remember she’d said four days before the election, there’ll be no carbon tax under a government that she runs. Well 18 months later, they not only had a carbon trading scheme, but one of the best in the world.”

In April 2012 Bob stepped down as leader of the Australian Greens and then he retired from the Senate in June 2012. This time he stepped away from politics for good. 

“I endlessly quote Abraham Lincoln in 1857 saying that the corporations are coming to steal the throne of democracy from the people, and it happened. I watched our democracy become usurped by the wealthy and the corporate sector. That influence spreads right across the spectrum and there’s no greater example of that than the Murdoch ownership of the media here in Australia, which is corrupt and perverting of democracy. But one thing they all have great difficulty with is peaceful activism, and history shows that to be the case.

“I had seen that through the Pedder and Franklin campaigns, and our forestry campaigns — which I continued to be involved with while I was in politics — but a large component of the environment movement, which I love dearly, was trying to influence politicians by going to see them. I was very well aware they are no match for the corporate lobbyists who infested our parliaments, banging on people’s doors every day, particularly ministers doors, leading to this absurd situation we have now where 80% of Australians want native forest logging stopped and 80% of politicians want to subsidise it with even more public money. So getting out and focusing on activism was important, because politics doesn’t know how to deal with it. It cuts through.”

Along with Steven Chaffer, Bob decided to form an organisation with activism as its focus.

“I was in my late 60s and I recognised that it was a big thing to take on, but I had people like Steven. We started with nothing except a good idea, but we knew we had a lot of public sympathy out there.”

Their first employee was Jenny Weber. Jenny had grown up on Dharawal Country in Wollongong and experienced a lot of her childhood at the beach.

“I had this sense of awe about the ocean being bigger than I am, and the need to be careful in the ocean, it’s not something I took for granted, I had to learn to swim with the waves pummelling in. I was totally immersed in nature as a child.”

Jenny also grew up with the political leanings of her father, who was a member of the Australian Labor Party. He was also a teacher and part of a union.

“He was an organiser. I have memories faintly of my Dad organising or the teachers going on strike or always handing out how to vote cards on voting day. So really early on I was aware there was something going on with politics, to the extent there were politicians that for some reason were on the bad list. There was always a conversation about politics in my life, which was really influential in my childhood.” 

She liked punk music and helped organise concerts of visiting international bands at the local youth centre. 

“I think we were like 14, 15. It was a fabulous life, and it introduced me to a DIY style of working and giving back to your community, and it set the groundwork for the belief that if you want to get stuff done, you just need to get a few people to get together and do it.” 

At 17 she met her current partner, Adam, who was involved with the Wilderness Society and opened Jenny’s eyes to activism and the possibility of dedicating her life to the environment. Adam was living on Bundjalung Country near Byron Bay and took Jenny to a logging area in the Whian Whian State Forest when she was 18.

“I just could not believe it. And then I met the North East Forest Alliance, who were a bunch of activists pulling off blockades. It was a whole new thing, I was like who is this community of people who are getting together to resist the destruction of the environment? So I just immersed myself into that space entirely.”

Jenny was about to complete her university studies when Adam said to her, “I’m going to Tasmania, do you want to come? I was like, ‘not really, there’s no live music, I can’t swim in the sea. I thought that it would be freezing cold all the time. And then he was like, ‘I’m going to go anyway.’ So I had to choose between doing whatever I might have ended up doing in New South Wales and coming here to Tasmania, so I asked, ‘can we do a deal that it’s just for six months?’”

They drew a circle on a map between Hobart and the southern forests and they decided to move to Huonville.

“It’s a logging town in the middle of nowhere, we didn’t know anyone, it was a completely bizarre thing to do.” 

They initially volunteered with the Wilderness Society in Hobart, but Adam was inspired by his time with the Byron Environment Centre and the North East Forest Alliance and was keen on creating something similar in the southern forests of Lutruwita. 

“We set up this little place called the Huon Valley Environment Centre, which became our life for about 15 years. Being a forest activist, taking action, doing lots of blockading and forest protests. We had two beautiful children, we were living off-grid on 60 acres of wildlife reserve in a straw bale place we built, and we were there resisting non-violently in a town that hated us, being right there with the logging community.”

Jenny and Adam were living on the frontlines.

“I was shopping once with my little ones in Woolworths, and this woman just screamed at me and was like, ‘I’m going to lock-on to your trolley, that’s what you do to my husband,’ and it was a bit shocking. The same thing happened at the laundromat, people getting angry at me. I think it’s just being calm and trying to state your place or ignoring the situation completely. In the laundromat, the woman was a bit more aggressive and so I just tried to de-escalate and say, ‘look I’m just here for the forests.’ I also had a death threat against me. They said, ‘I saw her on the street, I should have run her down, I’m going to kill that bitch.’ So I went to the police, and the police handled it okay. But I never truly feared for my life. I’ve spent a bit of time in Sarawak, we have a company here in Tasmania that’s from Sarawak, and it opened up my life to the indigenous people there fighting for their forests, and my time with them made me realise I’m a white, privileged, educated woman who lives in a democracy, and I am so far from being threatened in my life because of what I do. So I’ve had a reality check a number of times.”

In 2012, the Tasmanian government struck a supposed peace deal with environmentalists and the logging industry, the Tasmanian Forest Agreement. 

“We didn’t agree with the deal, it compensated this Sarawak logging company to stay in Tasmania. And this was after we had achieved some great gains in the Japanese markets, and Ta Ann was going to leave Tasmania, and these environmentalists went into those markets and said, ‘no, keep buying from Tasmania, don’t leave,’ which was shocking, and so we lost, a lot of activists were disillusioned, they felt they had been sold out. We had a beautiful community of people who were all volunteers and hanging on by a thread. It wasn’t like they had paid employment, they were all dedicating their lives to the forests. And I witnessed when you have a tipping point like that, where you feel sold out or disillusioned, that’s all that needs to happen and it’s over. Why would I give my life up if I’m not going to be, you know, effective?

“So at that time I was really frustrated because not only did we have success and gains in unsettling a major company, we also had environmentalists who were working against us. Anyway, I saw Bob at an art exhibition in town. We used to run these art exhibitions where the activists would tell their stories through art and they were beautiful and confronting and intense. And so we had an exhibition and Bob came along and he asked about the Centre closing and I was like, ‘I’m so angry, I’m going to leave Tasmania, Adam and I are just done, we’ve had enough.’ And he said, ‘if you’re angry and you haven’t been angry until now, imagine what you could do if you keep campaigning, why don’t you come and work for the Bob Brown Foundation?’ And I was blessed in that very moment of my life, I had a blessing that people would love to have across this planet, to have Bob Brown take me under his wing and say, ‘let’s campaign together.’”

Tony Abbott had just become Australia’s Prime Minister, and he wanted to remove Lutruwita’s forests from their World Heritage listing. 

“Insane. So my first task here was to resist that and say, ‘no way.’ Incredibly it meant I went to Doha to the World Heritage meeting and was part of a team of people who were lobbying to not have the forests delisted. I thought I was just here at the Foundation for that little stint to make sure Abbott didn’t get his way. And we were successful, there was no appetite in the World Heritage Committee for that to happen. And when I returned, Bob said to me, ‘okay, now there’s a window of opportunity to have the Tarkine protected, so let’s dedicate you to the Tarkine campaign.’ Bob had been trying to get the place protected for 20 years, but it’s just so powerfully dominated by the mining industry and a little bit by the logging industry. So I was like, ‘yeah I’ll stick around with the Foundation.’”

There are now around 20 employees at the Bob Brown Foundation, supported by a dedicated community of volunteers whose activities include sending out merchandise, gathering petition signatures or, if they’re involved in frontline demonstrations, they might be locking-on to a tripod or in a tree sitting. 

Dr Colette Harmsen has been a consistent presence at the Foundation’s many protests and blockades. Colette was born and raised in Lutruwita to a Tasmanian mother and a Dutch father. They lived in the bush, so Colette lived a “sheltered and isolated” life immersed in the surrounding natural environment.

“As long as I can remember I was into insects and plants. I spent hours watching ants, building nests and doing that kind of stuff. I used to smear honey on the walls in my bedroom so the ants would come in and eat it. It’s funny, I haven’t seen that species of ant since I was a little kid, the insects seem to be diminishing.”

Her parents were part of the activist community of the time, attending protests all over Lutruwita, so it seemed normal to want to protect nature, “like it was normal that you didn’t want people to come out and kill the animals or pollute or destroy.” Colette eventually moved to Yuggera Country, to Brisbane to study veterinary science, but returned to her homeland to join the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program, where she worked for eight years. 

“My job was as a field veterinary officer, so I had a pretty good time of it working with the program, which felt worthwhile up to a point when I realised I needed to step up again, like just going to protests didn’t feel like it was enough. So I started locking-on to stuff. I think the first time I was arrested I didn’t even lock-on to anything, I think I stood with a group of other activists and we stood in front of a primary school and refused to leave. They were having a meeting inside about the pulp mill, politicians and local people and councillors, and we all got arrested.“

Since then Colette has been arrested 23 times. 

“Most of those times I have been chained to things like machinery gates, drill rigs, that kind of thing. I was up a tripod at one stage. When I do that I feel that it doesn’t matter what people say, I’m there and I’m not going anywhere, and they’ve got to physically come and cut me off and remove me, and if that doesn’t make people go, ‘why are people doing this, this doesn’t make sense,’ then I don’t know what will. 

“I guess the reality is that people don’t pay much attention, but the more we do it, I can see it’s making a difference, every step of the way it is making people ask ‘why are they arresting these people for? Like they’re trying to protect the planet,’ and at some point, someone’s going to make a decision and just say we need better environmental laws or we need better protection of forests.”

Having lived in Lutruwita for most of her life, Colette has seen firsthand how the forests are constantly threatened with destruction.

“The first time I flew to Melaleuca, which is in the southwest of Tasmania, to do a walking trip, we flew south from Cambridge Airport and we flew over Hartz Mountain and a lot of the southern forests and out towards the southwest wilderness. And when I looked down from the plane in the southern forests area, I could see a patchwork quilt underneath you: it was all the forests that were being logged and then regrowing at different stages. And basically Forestry Tasmania has all the forests available to them that aren’t in the Southwest Conservation Area or the National Parks, and all of that is just a patchwork of logged areas that are regrowing at different ages. And it’s devastating that we go in there to save one little patch, and it’s like the last old growth patch in the whole bloody area, and everything else is a bunch of plantation trees. And it just really hurts me to think that all of that would have been a continuous forest of absolutely pristine mosses and fungi and all the wildlife living in there, but now it has been chopped up into tiny pieces.”

It’s the loss of this natural heritage that pains Bob too.

“People need to recognise that the planet is finite, and that it’s amazingly intricate in the way in which it has evolved and supports life. There is a spiritual dimension to that, which I often shortcut for people by saying if you give a person a bunch of flowers, which is from wild nature, they feel good about it, but if you give them a bunch of plastic flowers, which look exactly the same — because they’re amazingly contrived these days — as they slowly realise they’re not real, it’s often a sign of insult. Why is that? You could write books and books and books on it, but it’s because we are creatures of the forest and the wild planet, and that’s where our soul as well as our body comes from, and we’re still linked to it, but we’re divorcing ourselves artificially, or cutting ourselves from it and destroying it at a great rate. 

“As a boy, there was a book called ‘The Big Snake Hunters’ that came out of England about the Amazon, and while it was the typical beagle stuff of those days, I was nevertheless imbued by this idea, which was then still true, that there were large realms of forest that we from the developing and invading world didn’t know about, and people lived in all of them and were completely encompassed in body and mind by them. That’s almost gone in my lifetime. And when I hear from the World Wildlife Fund that 70% of the mass of wildlife has gone since 1970, or the other statistic that 94% of the mammals left on the planet are human beings and what we eat, and 6% is wildlife, you get a picture of the complete desecration of the planet. 

“The thing about it is, while more and more people are becoming alarmed about it, it’s increasing in rate. And when you talk about a road going through the Amazon or the felling of ancient trees here, it’s all part of this onrush of materialism, capitalism if you like, which is quite absurd. It’s working in a finite system, which is the planet, and yet there’s not a government that I know of that doesn’t adhere to growth as being a central pillar of good management. And growth means increased exploitation of nature in a world in which we’re already using twice the renewable living resources of the planet. So every morning we wake up to fewer forests, fewer fisheries, less arable land, fewer species, more human mouths to feed, and generally more devastation and anxiety.”

These words relate back to pre-colonial days, when Tasmania was always referred to as Lutruwita, and the island was populated by Palawa people and was covered in the world’s tallest flowering plants. But it wasn’t just Lutruwita, it was all over the land called Australia that was covered in its native vegetation and teeming with ancient wildlife coexisting with the diverse and vibrant cultures of the continent’s Original Peoples. Can we ever know how much has been lost now that so much is gone? To paraphrase the Revolutionary Proclamation of the Junta Tuitiva, most of humanity maintains a silence that closely resembles stupidity. But fortunately there are still giants like Colette, Jenny and of course the great Bob Brown, who protect the giants of our ancient past so they will still remain as part of our future.

“We are so fortunate in this country but it is so easy to be complacent. I learned early on that we’re just passing patterns here, all species are a relay of life, and we’re part of a community. Capitalism, of course, makes the individual all important, but as human beings, we’ve always lived as communities, with the spirits of ancestors before us and the hopes of future generations in front of us. And it is incredibly important to honour those past ancestors, but to also be active, to put ourselves on the line for those coming after us, who can’t come back and undo what’s happening now. 

“Although the idea that there is no time, that we can do nothing else but be planet savers, can be self-defeating. It’s important that people find good companionship, have good relationships, have parties, have holidays, complete their studies and assume that there is time. You have to take time. And it’s very, very important for people to look after themselves. The idea that you can have fun in such a desperate and daunting planet seems contra intelligent, but nevertheless we are just human creatures, we do like happiness, and we have to find that in amongst this very fraught life we’re leading, waking the planet up and converting it against all odds into a global community that, above all, respects the planet and life on it and works to ensure that it’s here forever.”

As they say in parliament: hear, hear!

Anton Rivette is a writer and photographer. He leads storytelling at eco-nnect.

You might also like this story: Bread is not a commodity

The post Environmentalism is Resistance appeared first on eco-nnect.

Willem van Aalst worked in finance.

“I met a commodity trader with EF Hutton. I thought his lifestyle was interesting and exciting, so I decided that’s what I want to do.”

His career began with an internship in Chicago, which led to work as a correspondent at the European Options Exchange in his hometown of Amsterdam.

“I spoke French fluently, so I was responsible for selling seats on the exchange to French speaking countries.”

Although he enjoyed his job, Willem missed the USA and wanted to return. Eventually, an opportunity emerged through a training program with Bankers Trust.

“It was a lot of fun, I spent time in New York where I met my wife Kathryn in 1980. We were engaged in 1981, and we got married in 1982 in New Orleans, which is where she grew up.”

After the training program, Willem was offered a job with a posting in either Jakarta or Amsterdam. Again he chose to return to his hometown, this time to be close to his father who was sick with lung cancer. After his father passed, Willem left his role with Bankers Trust, enrolled in a MBA, and eventually took a job in London where he moved with his growing family.

“Kathryn was pregnant with Sasha, my daughter” — she also gave birth to two sons, Nicholas and Philip — “and we lived in London for the next 12 years. I worked for Smith Barney first as a bond trader and salesman, and then with Salomon Brothers, where I was a bond salesman to Dutch and Scandinavian insurance companies, pension funds and the like.”

Willem was then offered a job with Lehman Brothers.

“It was when the structured finance business took off and I got heavily involved in that, which was extremely profitable.”

In layman’s terms, structured finance refers to the sector of the financial industry that is concerned with leverage and risk. 

“Basically, if you are a fixed income investor, a bond investor, and you’re only allowed to buy bonds, but you also want equity exposure, then a bank can create a bond and its redemption or its coupon is linked to an equity market. So essentially it’s an equity, but you’re allowed to buy it as a bond investor, because it’s structured as a bond.”

Does this make sense to you? It didn’t make sense to Willem.

“It is totally bogus and that’s what the financial industry is all about. The financial industry is essentially a big bunch of lies” and structured finance, and specifically the mortgage backed securities market, is what led to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

“What got us into the financial mess of 2008 is greed, basic greed. I mean, the financial industry is a very, very greedy environment. People were paid ridiculous amounts of money, including myself, and when that happens things go awry. I was working for Lehman Brothers in 1999, which led to a personal burnout caused by being responsible for a large sales force, about 45 people, which was extremely stressful.“

Willem quit and he returned to Amsterdam with his family. After a few years of running a radio venture with a friend, he was pulled back into the finance industry.

“I started working for a very small investment bank here in Holland, simply because I wanted to go back to something I knew. I was talking to my old clients, old institutional investors, and they were talking a lot about hedge funds and that they wanted to invest in them. So I said to this small company, ‘we ought to start a hedge fund because it’s what our investors want.’” 

After a few years working for that company, Willem received a phone call from an old friend. 

“We used to work together at Lehman Brothers, he was a trader and he asked, ‘can you help me set up a hedge fund, because I’m sick and tired of working for Lehman Brothers, I think the world is going to hell in a basket, we’re going to have a huge credit crisis, and I don’t want to be in dollars, I want to be in emerging markets, I want to protect my own wealth and that of others, so I need a fund.’” 

They started a hedge fund in London in 2003. 

“It was a very successful, very large fund, and I was splitting my week between London and Amsterdam. Then in September 2007, when the first cracks of the credit crisis started to appear, when the Bear Stearns hedge funds went belly up, we lost quite a bit of money, around 6.5%, which is not enormous in hedge fund land, but it was twice what we had lost before in any given month.” 

He and his business partner discussed the position of the fund and felt to make different choices, which ultimately led to them parting ways.

“People took advantage of a system based on trust. Trust was put in the rating agencies believing they were doing their job correctly, rating all of these instruments according to the true quality of the underlying assets in those structured transactions, but they weren’t. And people were buying three, four or five apartments financed by mortgages, which they never should have gotten, but the salesmen who sold those mortgages were making so much money on commissions they would have sold them to their dying grandmother. It was a market on steroids. It was fraud.

“In splitting from my business partner, I realised how ruthless the financial market is and how little it actually adds to anybody’s wellbeing, other than making a lot of money for people that are thus motivated. The finance industry, for me, was not an end, it was a means to an end, it afforded me to live a certain lifestyle, to do certain things. I was running after money for money’s sake and I think that’s basically how the financial industry works. If you are not motivated that way, I don’t believe you can actually function in that environment, because it’s eat or get eaten, it’s not pretty, it’s not good. So I became very, very disenchanted. I mean, what do we need a bank for? We need a bank to lend us money when we need it, or transfer money to different accounts, that’s it. We don’t need banks to speculate, we don’t need banks to make huge amounts of money of their own accord.”

In 2008, Willem left the finance industry. 

“It was the second time I quit, but this time I decided it was going to be for good, which meant I had to find something else to do. I had made a fair bit of money in the hedge fund business, so I could afford to take time to think about what I wanted to focus on. I thought if I do something that I’m passionate about, that I really care about, it would probably be alright.”

Willem had fished and hunted his whole life and had always enjoyed the time he shared with Mother Nature.

“I felt an enormous amount of support and trust from the environment.” 

Willem was looking online and he came across Geoff Lawton’s permaculture program. 

“I liked him as a teacher and as a storyteller, I liked his project, I like where he came from, with Bill Mollison, one of the original thinkers of perennial and permanent structures. I did two courses with him that taught me to look at land in a totally different way, to look at mountains in a totally different way, to look at valleys in a totally different way, to look at the keyline aspect of how water flows down these valleys, and how incredibly potent water is, not just potent in the sense of giving life, but also destructive if it’s obstructed by human intervention in the wrong way. Water will destroy anything that’s in its way.”

He then came across Mark Shepard, the author of Restoration Agriculture, again through the internet. 

“That was an eye opener for me. I put the system he described in his book into a spreadsheet, and I did some calculations and I asked myself, why is there anybody in the world not farming like this? Why are they all doing something different in terms of monoculture and stuff like that? It does not make sense when you look at those numbers, which is an incredibly profitable, multi-crop, multifaceted system compared to an acre of corn. The acre he describes in his book, with chestnuts and apples and berries and chickens and pigs and cows, you name it, that acre you can live off. But this other acre you can’t live off, you just have corn, you will die. And the acre of corn has all of these inputs like fertiliser, pesticides, herbicides and all the crap that you don’t need and you certainly don’t want to eat. And it is far more expensive than the acre that takes advantage of the symbiosis of interconnected nature.”

Willem travelled to San Diego in the USA to study with Mark, and on his return, he stopped by his wife’s hometown of New Orleans.

“We flew over the Mississippi Delta and I saw the lushness and the beauty of the Delta, which I’d spent an enormous amount of time in, hunting and fishing. And right on those edges where salt water meets sweet water, where forest, marsh and mangroves meet the land, in those edges of nature life is palpable, it jumps at you, it is teeming with life. And so flying in, looking over that, I thought, that’s beautiful, that’s where I want it to be.”

His wife Kathryn’s family are one of the owners of a large property on the Atchafalaya River. 

“It’s a very interesting property. You have a polder, a diked piece of land, and then you have pure marsh, it’s about 7000 acres in total. It’s a huge property, and they found oil underneath it in the 1930s, they put all sorts of pipelines under it and exploited the hell out of it. About seven families owned it, including Kathryn’s family, but the oil is now dry or at a depth that’s not feasible to actually exploit. And from the original shareholders, it now has 107 shareholders, and it’s not bringing in any money, or at least not the kind of money that they were used to through oil. So I looked at it and thought if I build a regenerative farm there, a very diverse regenerative farm, it’s going to be incredibly profitable.

“I researched it for five years. I got Mark Shepard to come over to have a look and discuss what we could develop, and we came up with a beautiful system of mounds and meadows with water in between. It was not only an incredibly beautiful system, but it was also going to be — I did calculations — it would have made millions once that system got running, because it was mostly perennial structures and animal structures that were self-sustaining. It would have been stupendous, but the shareholders didn’t want it.“

During this period, Willem continued studying, shifting focus from the restorative agriculture of Mark Shepard to regenerative agriculture with Allan Savory. It was through his friendship with Allan that he met Will Harris.

“Will was a fourth generation farmer who decided to do things differently. He says he has got 100,000 beating hearts on his property, which means he’s got beef, pigs, turkeys, chickens, geese, vegetables, you name it. In the ten years that I’ve known him, I have seen him take over neighbouring industrial farms and regenerate them and generate revenue off them. He has 154 people working for him, he inspired change in the town of Bluffton, where his farm is.  I saw the accounts and I talked to him about it and it works, it feeds people, it builds a community, it builds territory, it builds land.“

It was Will’s example of regenerating land, as well as communities, that inspired Willem’s next venture.

“I had been baking sourdough bread for 12 years. It started when I was studying permaculture and realising there is no difference between my biome and the biome out there in the fields, where healthy food grows. If it’s healthy, it feeds me and I am healthy, if it’s not healthy, I get sick. If you don’t care about the food you eat, you’ll get sick. If you don’t know where your food is coming from, you will get sick. I mean, there’s no two ways about it because the microbial fungi in the soil is no different from the microbial fungi of our intestines. And so realising that I realised that yeast is a bad thing, I realised that fermenting is a good process, I realised that fermented bread is a good thing, so I started baking for my family and my friends.”

Willem had returned from his American Dream and it was during the Covid lockdowns when his son Nicholas saw an ad on Facebook. 

“It basically said, is there somebody who wants to bake in my bakery? My son saw it and responded ‘my Dad’, and that’s how it all started.”

In October 2020, Willem began baking with his other son Philip and his daughter Sasha. A longtime Ashtanga yoga practitioner and teacher, Sasha was drawn to the energy that was growing between her father and her brother. She recalls this first period of baking as “a little mad scientist’s experimental kitchen”.

“It was very spontaneous. Through my brother Nicholas, Pap got access to a little space and he remembered the bread, because my father didn’t do it for a while, he was so focused on the swamp in Louisiana. And then my brother Philip got involved and helped evolve his process into something bigger. It was during the lockdowns, and I needed something of the earth to connect to, with other people and with my hands, and it gave me that. We were just opening the garage door, baking for people and selling lots of bread. It was very playful in the beginning, it was just an experiment from October 2020 until April 2021, something like that.”

Willem had set out to understand how to nurture nature, and it seemed that nature was now nurturing him, as this small venture with his family started to expand. They decided to commit to what it was becoming and they found a bigger space, a storefront on Ceintuurbaan in De Pijp, which is now the home to their family bakery, Bakkerij Mater.

“When we moved over here, it became a whole other thing. This was much bigger and I felt like rolling up my sleeves and bringing some feminine energy into this place. And when we arrived here we just realised we could connect it back to everything, to this whole bigger story for him, but to my story too.”

Through teaching yoga, Sasha appreciated people’s need for community and had experience in cultivating it through her shala. So when the bakery started to evolve, and eventually opened to the public, she saw how her own experiences could support what she was creating with her father and her brother. For Willem, it is a continuation of his journey since leaving finance. 

“The baking is a result of the passion for nature. I see the bakery as a platform to continue to work in this transition of agriculture and to continue to work in spreading the word about how concerned we ought to be about how we treat Mother Nature. The bakery enables us to tell the story of what’s important out there, as baking is on the edge of the most destructive agricultural practice in nature, ploughing.

“If you look back in history, basically every civilisation that disappeared, disappeared because of the plough. The plough is a tool for industrial farmers to turn over the land and make it barren so that they can easily sow into it. What it does is it hurts nature, because when they plough, they plough in the early stages of spring, they turn the land upside down, exposing the biology of the land in the sun for it to bake and die. It becomes dust, and so they kill the biology in the soil, and they need to add biology to grow anything in it, so they add fertiliser, pesticides, herbicides and all that crap. Also, when they are ploughing at that same depth, continuously, year in and year out, they create a hard bed that water cannot penetrate. When rain drops on that land, it will go through the soil and hit rock, and that rain streams out to wherever it wants to go and pollutes surrounding environments with the herbicides, pesticides and all that they’ve thrown onto that land. 

“How can we produce wholesome, good food on land that does not have biology? How can that biology that feeds the plants, that creates the symbiosis through all those nematodes and all the bacteria and all those things in the soil, which bring in the sugars and the nitrate to the plant to make it grow strong and give it nutritional value, how can that happen in a ploughed field? It can’t. So what you end up having is land that, after a while, is basically no longer feasible for farming and basically the Egyptians, the Romans, you name it, they disappeared because of it.”

Willem has been collaborating with local farmers, sharing his knowledge of nature to ensure the flour and dairy used in their baking nourishes the community and the landscape in and around Amsterdam.

“Bread is the essence. If it’s there, it’s a life supporter, and if it’s not there, well, look at what happens in Gaza or any other troubled land. When they don’t have flour, they have famine.”

Bread has long fuelled healthy societies, and for Willem van Aalst, it has brought together the wisdom from his long journey in a small yet significant way.

“Bread is a commodity that is not just a commodity, it’s the essence of life.”

Anton Rivette is a writer and photographer. He leads storytelling at eco-nnect.

You might also like this story: Planting is Love

The post Bread is not a commodity appeared first on eco-nnect.

“I come from a world very sick, full of fear, full of greed. I focused the first part of my life following a path to make my family and myself secure.”

Olivier Stulmacher worked in finance.

“Finance people say there are economic models that explain our world, but this is totally wrong, all of the models fail, all of the models turned into crisis, to more people starving, people poisoned, to the devastation of nature. So this is the result, and why is that so? People believe these models reflect the world, but in reality people created these models. And on the inside of the models are these core feelings of fear and greed.”

These emotions fuel the capitalist system, but they also fuel the way we interact.

“The more you feel fear, the more you’re going to feel greed, and the more things you try to possess, the more you’re going to feel afraid. It’s an insatiable, infinite circle. And when I realised that, I realised I had to reverse this inside me, not inside others, but first inside me.”

This journey Olivier had embarked on was observed by his son Benjamin.

“My Father was unsatisfied with the life he was living. It was through a series of events, which brought a lot of pain to him. And so he was looking in all of these intellectual ideas, and then someone ended up giving him a book written by a tantra master and it started a whole process of changing his life and entering this world of self-development, and focusing this process on himself.”

Benjamin’s mother Nathalie started to share Olivier’s interest. 

“It was a search for what is true, what is the meaning of life, a search for happiness.”

Benjamin eventually joined his parents at a lecture by Benki Piyãko, political and spiritual leader of the Asháninka people from the Amazon rain forest, who was travelling through France at the time.

“I was living a normal Parisian life. I was a bright kid so I studied a lot, politics and finance, and I was looking to develop a lot through reading books and watching movies. I also liked to party. And I had not seen someone like Benki before. I had not seen someone saying, I speak this way because I believe it’s the truth, because it’s my truth. I had not met someone who had this inside, this strength.”

Benki spoke about the importance and wisdom of the forest and the Earth, and our responsibility as humans to nurture our natural environment, which supports humanity so generously. Benjamin had just finished his studies and was looking for a job in the movie industry, but listening to Benki and understanding his perspective shifted something inside.

“I understood a lot of things, that everything I was feeling since I was a child was true, that there was not a problem with me, there was a problem with the world. We are supposed to love, we are supposed to help each other, we’re supposed to take care. I felt I needed to take care of the land also, of Earth, I needed to find a new way.”

Benjamin travelled to the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute to focus two weeks on learning from Benki and the environmental regeneration and protection project he founded. Benjamin then returned to Paris to sell sandwiches and, as he says, “wait and find what I had to do.” After some time, he decided to journey to the Institute for a second time, for another two weeks, and while he was there he felt a path emerge.

“I imagined some kind of project like Benki’s, but then I told myself, this is not your world, you’re from the city, you’re going to find a way to help Mother Nature in your way. So when I got back to Paris I started to work in a foundation that was planting trees. It was really nice to have a purpose in what I was doing, but eventually it felt like my whole life was in front of a computer and I knew I couldn’t continue doing this. So I decided to see if I could spend more time with Benki, because I felt truth, I felt that this was the direction I had to take, and I went there and this time I lived in the forest for five months.

“I was planting trees almost every day, and I don’t remember if it emerged suddenly, but I knew by the end of my trip that what I had to do was to was go back to my country and do the same thing that they were doing at the Institute, which is taking care of of the Earth and planting trees. So I came back with this feeling that I am going to find land and plant trees and take care of nature and develop myself like this, and I told my parents about this project and they said, ‘let’s go, we will help you buy the land.’”

Olivier was happy when Benjamin shared his idea.

“I wanted to use the possibility that was given to me by my old life, focused on money, to make a better world. The land was his mission but it was my mission to help him achieve it.”

Olivier’s mission was to also support others to understand a different path in life is possible. 

“For example, I’m teaching in a business school, but unlike most of the teachers who are academics, people who never left the education system, I was in the position to say, ‘okay what you want to achieve, I achieved it, I know what it’s like.’ So it was possible for me to explain how it really was, because of my past.

“A part of me knows that I am responsible for the current  situation on Earth. And one of the greatest sadnesses I feel is to see that most of the people I meet my age or older cannot accept that they are responsible. Because if all of us who are older than 50 accept that it’s our responsibility, things would change like that. So today it’s one of the messages that I’m trying to pass on, to help people to recover this consciousness of care. One of the main impacts I have on young people is the fact that I’m old and they’re used to older people telling them exactly the contrary to what I am saying. They say not to follow their instincts, they say not to follow their feelings, they say not to follow what is true, to follow instead what is going to protect them. And I realised as well that my mission was just to pass on a different way.”

Understanding a different way was supported by witnessing the path that Benjamin was walking, having returned from the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute with this idea rooted in his mind.

“I started looking for land but very slowly, there was no hurry, because I knew I had to do things slowly, but while I was looking I needed to be occupied, I knew I had to stay in nature otherwise I would not be happy. And I wanted to learn how to do things, to start studying the trees and what projects already existed, so I was looking for internships and woofing on different farms. I was most interested in places to plant trees, because I felt what I had to do was to plant trees. So every time I would find somewhere I could plant trees, I would go there, because planting was developing my energy. The more I planted the better I felt. So this is what I wanted to do, I wanted to plant trees to be happy, and also for the Earth.”

The search for land was focused around the centre of France.

“I wasn’t looking too much in the south or near to the Atlantic Ocean and not in the mountains, so it was more or less in the centre, my heart was calling for this region.” 

This process was slow, and during this period Benjamin met his now wife Rosana, and he returned to the Amazon rain forest, to the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, to continue his studies in environmental regeneration. 

“When I came back to France, I saw this announcement online, about the land where we now have the farm, and I got a strong call from my heart and I felt I had to go see this. So we arrived, we planned to stay for two weeks in the region to look for a property, and we come to the farm, we arrive in the car, we sit in the kitchen, we talk with the the owner, we had not seen the land, and we just started a tour of the house, and we walked up the stairs and I felt we are going to live here, because my heart knew, it was like the land called me. Eventually we phoned the owner and found an agreement, and on June 30 in 2020, we signed the papers and moved in.”

Benjamin and Rosana became the custodians of the farm, which is named Vernessac, 88 hectares of mostly empty fields with little vegetation.

“I saw some places with already a lot of forest, but no, my destiny is to plant places where there are no trees and to work on this.”

For Benjamin, the first step was to observe and connect with the land. 

“Nature is different wherever you are, so to know how to engage with it you need to connect with the trees, with the waters, with the birds, connect with what is here. I had read a lot of books, I studied a lot of videos, I learned from what other people were doing, and I also remembered what I learned in the forest, but I still had to find my own way of doing things. And I had some worries, because I was like, it’s so big, what am I going to do? I don’t know, I don’t know that much. But the process was to plant, and the process was to learn, so I was always calming myself down, we’re here to learn.

“A lot of projects are kind of an Occidental response to the environment, linked a lot with science. I have not seen everything, there are some things that are really well done and there are a lot of projects that I admire a lot, but I want to do something here that is connected to the indigenous strength I learned from, with their vision of life. It’s linking with the spiritual and talking about love, not only saving nature but in developing love and conscience inside of people and inside of ourselves through planting and learning. Because we have to do things with love and compassion and really connect with nature, not only producing, not only putting trees in the ground, but making our conscience grow, our love grow, our joy grow.

“It’s a connection. When you look at nature, when you’re able to feel nature, you feel what she is, which is love, which is joy, which is peace. You see a tree, there is wind moving it, there are animals eating it, yet it stays with the same peace, and it gives, it gives, it only gives, without complaining, just growing in its rhythm. And I think when you plant a tree, you connect with the spirit of the tree, and you’re getting stronger in who you are and what you want to do. And I don’t know about all the mysteries of life, but I want to be happy, so I’m doing this because it makes me happy, and I believe it can make a lot of people happy.“

There is a deep, embodied intelligence to Benjamin’s approach to planting and regenerating the land at Vernessac.

“The first time we planted it was a line of trees. I went to buy, I think, 150 fruit trees. I had read everything about them, the space in between that is needed, the kind of soil, the design that needs to be done, and my head is becoming a bit crazy about how I am going to organise this plantation. I was in my house with all my papers, I’m going to do it like this, I had the plan. And I went out and I go to the place I want to plant, and it’s so big and there are only a few trees and I’m looking at it, I’m with all my papers and I was thinking this one needs this much space, this one needs this. And then this feeling comes to me, stop everything, you want to plant trees, go and connect with them. And I went to the place where I kept the trees and I connected with the trees and my thoughts stopped.

“The next day we planted and then it was planted. We don’t need to know everything, it’s the planting that matters. If it is not right, we can do it again, we can correct it, we can change it, but we will have planted. And each day, each year we learn more, we do better, we organise better, and we learn and we develop these things. Sometimes it feels like we are being guided, as if we have this connection with the land and it’s slowly giving us the means to develop as it wants to be developed.

“We need to evolve to listen more to how nature works. The first year we planted one way, the second year was already a bit different, the third year was more different, because the more time we spend in nature, the more we observe, the more we see, the more we understand, and the more we develop the ways we want to do things. What’s important is that we are not scared, because there is no reason to be scared, mistakes are human and we just need to do.”

Although there is an emphasis on activity, the project is not focused on productivity.

“I wanted to keep out of my head an emphasis on money, because if I’m focused on money, I’m not going to take care of nature. The way I did the things here is we are going to do things for nature, because nature is giving us all that we need: air, food and water. And if we need more, nature is going to give us more for us to sell. Everybody wants money in society, but taking care of nature is another world. So I thought, you cannot carry any worry, this is the way nature works, and taking care of nature you will always have, your kids will always have. That was my thinking, and that was what I always had to remind myself when I started to worry or feel overwhelmed by everything that had to be done, or has to be done, because there is still a lot to do.”

A key focus for the work at Vernessac is biodiversity.

“We’re planting with the most possible diversity, because it is what is going to make the nature here strong. Feeding all kinds of birds, animals, insects with all kinds of plants, feeding plants with other plants, feeding ourselves with the most diversity we can. This is how you make something strong. Why are the oldest forest of the world so strong? Because they are diverse. It’s the same thing with a human community, when people are diverse, they hold up their strengths and they all support each other, they help each other. When one is down, the other is up, and they just help each other, and that’s what we are trying to do here.”

It’s easy to feel inspired by Benjamin’s approach to planting, and the tangible connection he shares with the land. There is a simplicity and truth in the words that he shares, and a humility in all of his actions.

“If I can do it, anybody can do it, because I didn’t know anything. Most of what I share, most of what I know I learned from Benki and the community at the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute. And something they taught me was that everybody can do this. Everybody can be happy, everybody can plant, everybody can take care. Of course I had money that led me to buy this big place, which is a responsibility I am going to expand.”

This expanded vision is through the association that Benjamin and Rosana have formed, Les Jeunes Gardiens de la Foret, the Young Keepers of the Forest. The focus for the association is to teach people how to plant, to regenerate land and to support more projects like the one at Vernessac.

“This project is an answer to what we are feeling from the Earth right now, how we are seeing the land suffering, people suffering, all of these climatic events, everything that is happening. A big part of what we are doing is assuming our responsibility as a human being on this Earth, which has always given to us, so we have to give back to ensure the future of the generations to come.

“This project is to plant trees, but also to inspire others. As Benki said, ‘we are planting trees, but we also hope to plant a seed in the hearts of others.’ Especially children and young people, to encourage them to assume this responsibility and live the happy way of planting. This is why our farm will be open for others to visit, to learn like I learned from Benki and from the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute. We want to transmit these teachings so more projects can emerge like this and maybe we can save the future for the generations that are coming, maybe we can save the Earth like this.”

In the four years since finding the land, with the support of a growing community, Benjamin and Rosana have planted more than 25,000 plants.

“Even with no money, we can plant trees, we can take care of nature. Everybody can do it. It’s not difficult. The only thing we have to do is to want to do it, to find the courage inside of ourselves to do it and not be scared. It’s not difficult, we create the difficulties that exist, they are in our mind, all of the difficulties are in our mind. But if we stop a bit our mind and find a tree and plant it in the ground, then it’s already a big victory.“

When I listen to this story — and I listen to Olivier’s search for truth and of Benjamin’s experiences planting — I appreciate how both the landscape and the Stulmacher family have regenerated together. Olivier’s father was financially very poor. 

“His obsession in life was to get money and to create safety for his family. He was really obsessed with that. But he had a very difficult childhood, he was hidden during the war, and it was really difficult for him, and with all that was given to him he did his best. I look at my Father, with absolutely no faith in God, just fears and love for his family, but a lot of fears, and I see Benjamin overcoming fear, and that’s enough for me because I know if he’s like that, I did my part, which is the most I can do.“

Benjamin now has a son of his own, Joseph. I ask Benjamin what he wants to pass onto him?

“I will always try to transmit to him what is necessary for a happy life, which is to have love, have peace, have joy, be nice, be kind and give help. And to take care of what is giving life to you, take care of Earth, of the waters, of the animals, because they are your life, they give you air, water, food, and also happiness.”

Anton Rivette is a writer and photographer. He leads storytelling at eco-nnect.

You might also like this story: Debating Biodiversity: the Nature Restoration Law

The post Planting is Love appeared first on eco-nnect.

When people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a storyteller. People often respond by asking what that means, if I tell stories to kids, if I write novels, or if I make films. It seems to me that a lot of people associate stories with technology like television, cinema, books or podcasts, forgetting that a story is its own form of technology. Humans have long shared stories to connect with one another and their surrounding environment through oral traditions passed from one generation to the next. According to Thunghutti and Bundjalung man Warren Roberts, stories are a relational tool.

“We say today storyteller, but it’s more or less how we make sense of the world. As we share stories, our collective trust strengthens and our relationships grow.”

Warren grew up surrounded by his Elders.

“They were always sharing stories, they did everything in relationship. I learned from them and how they interacted with people. My Nan’s brother said to me, you are just continuing what Elva and Patricia were doing, what you do is a continuation of what our Elders have always done.”

His Nanna, Elva Taylor, was one of nine sisters and three brothers, a remarkable family of Aboriginal organisers and advocates widely known for their significant achievements.

“They were community organisers, working with our community, bringing people together, having cups of tea and cake. I can show you photos of my Nan, Auntie Pat and all the Aunties having big dinners with their friends and the community. You see what they did and you’re like, that’s deadly, maybe we can do that a little bit different, or do the same thing they’ve always done and scale it up because those look like deadly experiences and we should create more of that. It’s about relationship building.”

Warren’s Elders always affirmed the importance of relationships.

“We got taught growing up to make friends, because you can rely on them, they can be around all the time. If you make friends, you’ll live a good life.“

It was his Elders’ way that inspired Warren to create YARN Australia. YARN was founded in 2007 at the University of New South Wales with the goal of uniting the Original Peoples of Australia and non-indigenous Australians through workshops and events held within safe and respectful spaces. These spaces were initially focused in universities, but have since expanded into community, corporate and government spaces across the continent, as well as online. During its near 20 year history, YARN has gone through different phases, organically evolving alongside Warren’s life.

“At first we would ask each other questions, and if we didn’t know the answer we would do research and share what we found with the group. We started to create a curriculum, but we then shifted our focus onto running events with a community group in Sydney called Sixty Thousand. Our first event was at 107 Projects in Redfern, and it made us think about what we needed to do to hold a safe space for everyone who was attending, especially with some of the stories that might come up. That’s where the safe space idea came from.”

Creating a safe space is a key part of any YARN event. After people enter the space, they have a cup of tea and connect with the other attendees, then they gather as a group. There will be Welcome to or an Acknowledgement of Country, and then Warren will ask attendees what is a safe space and what makes a space safe for them.

“When we started doing events I would ask what are some values and ideals that you grew up with that you’d like to share with us? But now safe space is whatever they feel to share, it could be anything, it could be what you’re feeling now, it’s very flexible. But it’s important because when you hold space for people, you have responsibility for them.”

While this belief is rooted in the customs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island communities, it was through his experience of attending boarding school in regional New South Wales that Warren appreciated the importance of emotional and cultural safety. 

“I was one of the only blackfellas in my school.” 

Blackfella is a colloquial term used amongst Australia’s Original Peoples to refer to other Original Peoples, both individually and collectively. 

“There was one other senior blackfella when I first got there, but he was in high school and I was only a kid, I didn’t know him, and when he graduated, it was only me, the only blackfella around. I think when you experience difference like that and know what it feels like, I don’t want anyone to feel that, because I felt that the whole time I was at school. When we had our ten year reunion, the other students said you’re different to when you were at school, at school you were quiet, but today you’re very talkative, very confident. When I was at school it was just full judgement, everyone judging everybody. 

“When my mate came to YARN and he spoke about witnessing racism at school — he saw the senior boys being racist to local Aboriginal people — he knew it was wrong, but he didn’t quite know what to do. There aren’t really spaces for us to reflect on those experiences, where we can speak openly and be our true vulnerable selves. They don’t exist. There are anti-racism or multiculturalism courses, but these rarely allow for people to talk about their lived experiences, it’s all preaching and pointing fingers and white guilt. But what about my mate, where was he going to learn about handling racism without having a space to speak about this experience he had?”

After safe space, a YARN will shift to focus on the theme of that particular event, which could be related to the time of year, the location of the event, or the significance of the date when the event is held, like Mabo Day. In-person events like this were the focus for YARN until the COVID Pandemic, when people could no longer gather and, like all of us, Warren was forced to adapt.

“Before that we never did anything online, we never recorded anyone’s story, we refused to involve technology in YARN, but then we couldn’t meet in person so we evolved with it. Now the majority of YARN is online, using technology and recording stuff.”

Warren now runs online storytelling workshops with the goal of inspiring one million Australians to become intentional storytellers by 2028. Using the old curriculum as a foundation, the workshops were designed to empower participants with the skills and confidence to intentionally share stories by creating a safe space to reflect on their personal and cultural experiences, and sharing tools to articulate these experiences through storytelling. The workshops also focus on the cultural practices and lived experiences of Australia’s Original Peoples. Each workshop has a specific theme.

“In one of the workshops we talk about tension, and I give participants the option to reflect on and share their experiences of interacting with Australia’s Original Peoples. These are the stories I want to listen to, because there are so few spaces to talk openly about these things, and it’s where the biggest learnings come from. It’s like how it’s challenging to speak to people about money. Shouldn’t we have confidence in talking about that? Why is it that we become awkward and sometimes destroy a relationship because we talk about money? We should have solid relationships where we can talk about anything, so we need to create the spaces to explore the tension that is often present in our social interactions.”

While YARN is a space that explores difficult topics, it is also a space focused on listening.

“We had a couple of YARNs with the Aunties, and they were sharing their truth and everyone was like, oh that’s heavy. But one of my Elders said, you created a safe space where they felt like they could share that, because they felt listened to and that’s rare. I was always told growing up that not everybody has a Christmas, not everybody has someone supporting them at home, or they don’t have a positive person they can yarn with who encourages them. So I always think maybe they don’t have someone who can encourage them or to support them, and I remember this whenever I create spaces for others, because we’ve got to do things together instead of doing our own thing. That’s what is wrong with this world, we’re all doing our own thing, we’re all in silos, we are all avoiding each other. 

“We want to do the opposite of that, we want to know everyone’s passion and actually work with each other in our strength. We don’t need a devil’s advocate, we don’t need the one that sits on the fence, we just need to know what we each bring to the table, that’s it. But where can we develop the confidence to say this is my story or this is how I’m feeling? Can we create spaces for that? Most people don’t know how to create that space, and so most people don’t know how to share how they truly feel and who they truly are. If we can create a space of positive energy and encouragement, and allow people to have the flexibility to say whatever they feel or want to see in the world, that’s what we need. It’s not about interpretation from the outside, it’s about what they feel within.”

As with a lot of Warren’s wisdom, this comes back to his Elders, particularly his Nanna.

“I was with my Grandmother, I was a little boy, I don’t know how old, just old enough to understand what she’s talking about, to understand what she’s saying, but not to understand the bigger picture. She looked down at me and she said you’re going to be the best. I didn’t quite understand what she was talking about, I was like, oh really, mad, I’m going to be the best. It’s just that belief, right? You’re going to be the best, she kept saying it, and she said you’re going to grow up and people are going to say a lot of things, people are going to talk, but remember they don’t know your story. No matter what anyone else says about you, only you know your story, because other people don’t know, they are just thinking, oh he’s great, but they still don’t know your story. Or everyone’s ready to cut you down. Everyone’s ready to cut down Gina Rinehart, John Howard and John Laws, but we don’t know their yarn, who are we to say what they are and what they’re not. Same with what my Grandmother was telling me, you’re going to be the best and no one will know your story. But if the relationship is there and it’s solid, if we have a few cups of tea and plenty of cake, and plenty of disagreements, we’ll get to some of those deep stories, we’ll share those deep yarns.”

There is a simplicity to what Warren shares. I have read powerful books, witnessed great plays, and watched incredible films. I’ve had great mentors who have taught me important skills and methods, but it’s the simple wisdom that Warren shares about storytelling that I always come back to. Warren speaks of the essence of all stories.

“The way I put it, and I’ve always put it, is I’m just doing my work, that’s just what I do. It’s not about ticking a box or being noticed or anything like that, it’s about relationships. If we have solid relationships, who cares about an award? Are we good? If we’re good, that’s all that matters. And that’s what I say to the storytellers in the workshops, this is not just this YARN thing you’re doing for three years, we’re friends forever. That’s what this is all about, making this massive world really small, because it is really small, it’s not a big place. You start to build relationships with people, it’s a small place, time and distance doesn’t matter because the relationship is there. That’s the recognition, the continued relationship.

“I always say at the end of every YARN, I look forward to hearing your story and walking with you, and walking together. Once we build the trust and understanding and connection, anything’s possible. And that’s why we set up YARN, to do that, we’re the ones who have to create the spaces for that, this is what’s missing in the world. We all should reflect on our story and have places where our stories are valued and respected. We should have people who walk with us on our stories, who support us and encourage us and all of those things. No marketing ploy, no box to tick, no incentives, just friends. Anything’s possible when you have friends. You have no friends, forget it. We live in a planet where life is not easy, it’s pretty full on, it’s hard, difficult, challenging, but it’s way better if you’ve got friends.”

Considering eco-nnect is a website focused on humanity’s relationship with our environment, I ask Warren how this connects to the natural world.

“We’re a product of our environment, that’s who we are, we’re not separate. What do we eat? We eat the environment every day. It’s part of us, we’re part of it. We can’t continue in this world without eating and it all comes from the Mother. That’s what our people say, we look after the Mother, the Mother looks after us. We’re not separate to nature. The West might make you think that, that we all separate, but we are all one and the same. There’s no us and them. There never was. It’s just us. We’re in it together.”

Anton Rivette is a writer and photographer. He leads storytelling at eco-nnect.

You might also like this story: Connecting with Country

The post The Art of Relationships appeared first on eco-nnect.

The term globalisation describes how local cultures and economies became interdependent through technology and trade. It is a process that developed over centuries — through military, cultural and government imperialism — which led to our current global society and the dispersion of goods, services, money, culture and people across national borders. While this global society is now ubiquitous, there was a time before the proliferation of affordable air travel when the step-by-step process of globalisation was visible, and Helena Norberg-Hodge bore witness.

Helena grew up near Stockholm. Her childhood was immersed in the wilderness of Sweden, and she developed a strong relationship with the environment. 

“I always had a deep love of nature, but it took time for that to translate into being an activist. I wasn’t aware of the developing changes and issues.”

Her family was spread across Europe, exposing Helena to different cultures at a young age, while also developing her ability and interest in learning languages.

“I learned to speak languages mainly by spending time in different countries: I learned Italian in Italy; Spanish in Mexico; and because I was Swedish, English and German, I learned those languages earlier on. I appreciated the different lenses they gave me to see the world.”

At the age of 29, she moved to Paris to study French, the sixth language she spoke fluently. She worked with a company creating language education programs, and word spread through the artistic community of Paris of her linguistic ability.

“A German documentary filmmaker knew that I picked up languages very quickly and had worked with sound, so he wanted me to join a small documentary film team to go to this unknown place called Ladakh, to pick up the language and communicate with the people there.”

Nestled amongst the high peaks of the western Himalayas, close to Pakistan, Ladakh is an alpine desert spread across India and China on the Tibetan Plateau.

“I thought I was going for six weeks, but I was completely blown away by a very rare situation: a culture that had not been transformed by missionaries, that had not been affected by colonialism, and that in the mid 70s, had still not been affected by modern development.”

Due to its remote location, and the many conflicts for control of this territory, Ladakh only opened to tourists in the 1970s.

“I had an incredible privilege of learning to speak the language fluently at a point when the people I was engaged with never described themselves as poor, backward, or in any way inferior. I realised that many indigenous and traditional peoples who had contact in any way with the modern world, developed this sense of inferiority. The people I met exhibited the most incredible vitality and joy and sparkle that was so magical, and I fell in love with both the people and the place, so I decided not to go back when the film was finished.”

Helena documented the spoken language of Ladakhi with the written word for the first time, a process that brought a lot of lessons of oral communication and its role in society. 

“Oral communication works with the flow of life in a way that the written word doesn’t. When we’re communicating, we’re always communicating in the context of knowing whom we’re communicating with. Through face to face communication, there is all kinds of wealth for us to understand, it’s experiential knowledge, the knowledge in the here and now, in the living context of complexity. It’s not knowledge that has been transmitted to us about things from the outside world that we may have never seen and have no idea about, and this has been a very dangerous process through modernisation.”

Helena ended up staying in Ladakh for a few years before going back to Europe, and seeing Western culture in a very different light.

“I realised all the cultures I had come to know had been shaped by modernity, and by shaped I mean pulled away from the experience of deep relationships with nature. I also realised when I went back to my native country of Sweden, why there was already serious issues with depression, alcoholism, even suicide. People living in high rise apartments, the majority having been pulled away from smaller towns or villages into the main cities, where nothing is alive and often one person lives alone, sometimes with plastic plants and literally no contact with the living earth. That sense of deep loneliness and alienation was so clearly the main cause of depression.”

These realisations were inspired by witnessing the process of modernisation and globalisation in Ladakh. 

“The process of development and growth was destroying the local economy. I saw butter in the local market in Ladakh, which had been transported over the Himalayas in diesel fuelled lorries for two weeks, and it would sell for half the price of the locally produced butter that was available five minutes walk away from the market. It opened my eyes to this artificial economy, where global traders have been given rights, they have been supported from the beginnings really, going back to pre-economic thinking, with the help of missionaries and traders, forcing and imposing production for export. Later on that was formalised with the basic principle in economics, the principle of comparative advantage, which says it’s not in your interest to produce a diversity of things in your region or your country, you should focus on production for export, and then you can import everything else you need, and that was a trick on the part of global traders to enrich themselves and to impoverish local economies worldwide.”

This new understanding sparked a deep interest in the dynamics of the global economic system.

“I was alerted by friends from Malaysia in the mid 80s, how the process that had started after the Second World War — when the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund was set up — was a process of continuous trade treaties, it was all about ‘free trade’, and individual countries, including individual ministers and the greater population, were led to believe that supporting global trade was the only way to grow the economy, it was in everybody’s interest. The environmental movement and the general public were asleep, not aware that ‘free trade’ was about freedom for global corporations and banks to come into a country and do as they please without any rules. And those same companies were of course not paying taxes, and around the world, in virtually every single country, the local, the regional and even the national businesses, and the activities of charities, they were being heavily regulated and taxed. So you had this completely crazy situation where the only winners were those who benefited from global trade.” 

Helena was learning a new language, the process of globalisation, which has been a focus throughout her life.

“I realised over the many, many years in Ladakh — I was there for part of every year for about 40 years — inherent to the language was that it carried a profound respect for experiential knowledge, and that means local knowledge, it means knowledge about the specific trees, the water, the soil, the people that you engage with. It’s a deeper contextual and holistic knowledge. And I saw what happened when the modern world and modern education brought in a simplistic map, and we’re now understanding this leads to a very superficial understanding of the infinite complexity, the constant movement and change in the living world.

“I think it is vital for anyone who wants to contribute to health and life on Earth to understand the dominant system better. I was forced to become aware of it, when I saw this black and white transition, as modernity came in step by step. I saw the link between schooling and urbanisation, I saw the link between the destruction of the local economy and urbanisation. Urbanisation and its dependence on faraway trade is really the enemy, which is completely structurally linked to monoculture, to biological and human monoculture. This is an economic path to death, it truly is, by trying to extinguish the key characteristics of life, we are extinguishing life itself.”

Helena was invited to speak across the western world, to share her insights on globalisation and her experiences in Ladakh. This led to writing a book, “Ancient Futures”, and making a film (with the same title). She went on to teach at an interdisciplinary department focused on energy and resources at the University of Berkeley in California, which supported a collaboration on renewable energy projects with the communities in Ladakh.

“Some people thought we were trying to improve the traditional culture but no, we were trying to present alternatives to what the government was bringing in, the corporations were bringing in, which was fossil fuel based. So we did small-scale renewable and particularly passive solar for water heating and space heating, and also some very small hydro projects to demonstrate there was an alternative.”

This was part of Helena’s focus on promoting what she calls “the economics of happiness”, and led to her founding a non-profit organisation Local Futures, to encourage ecological and social wellbeing by strengthening communities and local economies. During this period she also helped establish the Global Ecovillage Network, which links and supports intentional communities across the world who live harmoniously with their environment. Through connecting to these ecovillages, Helena and her husband John decided to live this way themselves. A friend recommended they visit Byron Bay, on Bundjalung Country in Australia, a town renowned for its beautiful landscape and a community that has embraced a nature-based lifestyle. Helena and John fell in love with the area and decided to call it home.

Helena’s work was centred on rebuilding the fabric of community and its connection with nature, and in Byron Shire she focused her efforts on creating a local food economy.

“I was and still am very committed to encouraging what I would call ruralisation, instead of urbanisation, and during the Covid Pandemic this partly happened around the world. If people don’t understand the global, they often think localisation is just about supporting a local business or a local farmer, which overlooks what the market is. Often people support the local with no attention on creating systems that respect diversity, and that’s the key. When we don’t respect diversity, we don’t respect the quality of the food and for that you need to have a more direct communication with the market, you need to be closer to the land. This central focus on food and farming as part of localisation is key to what we’ve been doing.”

Soon after arriving in Byron Bay, she was asked to give talks where she met members of the community who were interested in her ideas. This led to the formation of a group that eventually formed the Byron Bay and Bangalow Farmers Markets. Several years later they established the New Brighton and Mullumbimby Farmers Markets. It was at the Mullumbimby Farmers Market where we met for this interview. My family lives nearby and through visiting these markets, and learning how they were formed, I first heard of Helena and her work. 

The farmers markets in the Byron Shire are an essential thread in the fabric of the community. Not only is it the place to find good quality produce, it is where I meet with friends when I’m in the area. We often get something to eat from one of the many food stalls, and sit and listen to the different musicians who play music each week. If my friends bring their kids, there is a craft tent where children are supervised. I’ve visited farmers markets across the world, and there is something unique about what Helena and the community have created in the Byron Shire. 

Helena and I were seated under a large fig tree, near the kids craft tent. As we ate the fruits of her work — I had purchased a bucket of fresh blueberries we were enjoying as we spoke — I could feel the experiential knowledge imbued in each of her words. I asked Helena what she felt we had lost through the process of globalisation.

“Humanity has lost countless species, languages, cultures, a wealth that we were never even aware of, so we’re not even sure of how much we’ve lost. And we’ve lost time, which is a very precious wealth, because everything that’s important, in terms of nurturing others and nurturing ourselves takes time, and that’s extremely dangerous. 

“We need to be aware that this loss of time and space means we’re more vulnerable to respond to very simplistic, top down solutions, and we shouldn’t be wasting our time on that, we need to take a deep breath and take the time to understand more deeply and broadly the system that’s working against us, and now it has an army of algorithms that support the war machine, that support ill health. Just looking at the global food system and the localised alternatives is one of the best ways to understand what I’m saying. When you see it as a system, you see truly that it’s contributing to our early death. Literally now, through the fake foods that are being pushed through, the generation that is growing up are going to die younger than their parent’s generation, and that’s in the most affluent countries.”

I finally asked what we have gained.

“We are gaining ever more awareness and we can see it, there’s a huge cultural turning that has been going on in reaction to a dominant economic, econometric, technological trajectory for hundreds of years. And there has been a reaction against it, there is a cultural turning of more appreciation for nature, more appreciation for the indigenous, more appreciation for the feminine, more appreciation for animals. There’s such a hunger to reconnect to life, to the living, and that’s translating into a broad shift in cultural values, particularly when you look at the map of it, it comes out of the urban industrial experience. The more people have experienced that, the more they want out. 

“Our bodies and our souls are speaking to us. Our minds are still being drawn to the system, particularly through the help of very centralised, top down tools of social media, of the internet, through the way things are being framed. But we are making progress towards nature, towards life, and I think we now have to cultivate it in our hearts and our bodies through a reconnection to others and to every form of life, to the animals, to the plants. We can become part of a genuine community with all forms of life.”

By affirming all forms of life we affirm our own. It’s a simple yet complex way of being. But if we are to go on living, it’s our only way forward.

Anton Rivette is a writer and photographer. He leads storytelling at eco-nnect.

You might also like this story: The Wild Soul

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Petrine McCrohan is a wild soul. 

For her, a wild soul allows the mystery of their inner world to truly meet their external world, our environment. Through her work, Petrine facilitates individuals to meet their environment, supporting this interaction through nature-based activities with intention. Petrine runs Wild Soul Experiences across Australia, together with her facilitation partner Terry Hewett. The focus for both Petrine and Terry is to reconnect people with their inner wisdom through a powerful shared and supported experience in the Australian landscape, which is steeped in natural history and Ancient Aboriginal wisdom. This connection with landscape has been with Petrine throughout her life.

“I felt this connection as a child on my grandfather’s farm, but I wasn’t cognisant of it. But I think that’s where my unconscious goes back to, and as I’ve become more cognisant of it, it has become so important, because that’s what helped me since my childhood. Nature and animals.”

So when did she become cognisant of her connection with landscapes?

“I think when I was working with Aboriginal people on Country, because for them the dream state and having things come to you in dream, and for that to be reflected in landscape and songs and ritual, to them that’s life, there’s nothing unusual about that. I’ll give you an example. I was driving on the Great Northern Highway, past a sign that said Mimbi Caves, and I was fascinated by that, I thought what is that? And I kept driving past that sign and within a few months I had a dream that I was in a cave system, and I was with a very tall Aboriginal woman, and she was in a uniform of some sort, and I went and told this dream to the community I was working with.”

At the time, Petrine was lecturing and working in cultural tourism. 

“The custodians of that particular part of the country, they went okay, we know who that is, we know the caves, that’s Mimbi Caves, and they told me the name of the woman I saw and explained she used to work there as a guide. It was all very matter of fact to them but I thought, woah, that’s wild.”

Wild experiences like this weren’t always a part of Petrine’s life. In 2000, she was living in Melbourne, experiencing the monotony that often defines people’s day to day life in a city.

“Over 20 years ago, I was out to dinner with a friend and I asked him, ‘is this it?’ I was standing in a shop, day after day, earning money to live, which meant more days standing in the same shop earning more money. I guess I wanted more from my life. But it actually goes back a bit further. Have you ever heard of the Mungo Man?”

The Mungo Man is the name given to the remains of an Aboriginal man found near Mungo in New South Wales. Petrine was friends with the daughter of Jim Bowler, an Australian geomorphologist — an ancient lakes expert — who discovered human remains at Lake Mungo in 1969, while doing fieldwork for his PhD at the Australian National University.

“During his research Jim came across the bones of what turned out to be an indigenous woman they called Lady Mungo, and then five years later, while still exploring the area, Jim came across an entire skeleton. They later worked out that the man that once used this skeleton had been covered in ochre, and the way he was buried signified some kind of ritual, the oldest record of such a practice. When they dated the bones, it pushed back the amount of time that science believed Aboriginals had been living on this land. 

“Anyway, Jim and his daughter took me to Mungo, and we were walking through the sand dunes with an Aboriginal woman, and when we were walking near the spot Jim discovered that skeleton, the woman fell to the ground and started wailing. And I froze, I didn’t know what to do, I hadn’t experienced anything in my life that could inform a response. So I just sat down beside her, not touching her, just sitting there, being there. After a while she told me her story: she was one of the traditional owners of that land, a Mutthi Mutthi elder, a direct descendant of the Mungo Man, and the excavation of his body brought a lot of pain to her community.

“I felt so ignorant in that moment. It felt like I had been living in this cultural bubble, and that feeling stayed with me. I guess it broke the bubble in a way, it changed me, and slowly Melbourne stopped satisfying me, and finally one day I was eating dinner with my friend and I asked, ‘is this it?’ And the reality was that it was, that was what my life amounted to in that moment, but I didn’t want it to, so I needed to change it, and I felt that I could, I could learn, and not just through books, but through experiencing an entirely different way of life.”

Petrine decided to leave Melbourne. Following a non-rational, intuitive process, she ended up in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. She initially found work, two hours each week, as a Personal Growth facilitator in the Bachelor of Counselling degree at the local university, eventually coordinating the entire program. After a year, she left this role and started training as a tour guide. It was through this period that the seed of Wild Soul Experiences began to root.

“I first had the idea of bridging the internal and external landscapes in Melbourne, back in the late 90s, through my understanding of astrology and mythology and symbolism and Jung and all of what I’d studied. It was then that I first thought how nature is reflecting our internal reality, which is why I wanted to become a tour guide, so I could explore the landscape. And when I was training to be a tour guide, I went down through a cave system, and the non-indigenous guide was talking about this ancient painting and I had a full on bodily reaction, I couldn’t stand there, I had to move away, I knew something was going on. That’s how I got into being a cultural tourism lecturer, because one thing led to another and I was in someone’s office and asking why non-indigenous people are interpreting and going to these sites, why aren’t Aboriginal people doing that, and there was an Aboriginal man in the room who asked if I would be interested in being a cultural tourism lecturer. I said ‘sure’.

“Eventually I found the traditional owner, a Bunuba Elder named Dillon, and we eventually worked together, and he eventually interpreted that site with his young people. We developed a tour there. He said to me the ancestors told me to do that, they gave me that bodily sensation, and then everything that happened as a result of that was the ancestors telling me that I had to connect with Dillon, so that I could then help him and his family build a tour that took people through that cave. And it’s actually helped to stop non-indigenous people, or anybody for that matter, apart from the people who were supposed to be doing it, from interpreting any of the sacred sites. But that was another key experience of connecting with the powers of mystery. I met mystery and the mystery of what can happen if you follow these feelings.”

Through her work as a lecturer, and then after, when she left this position and worked more directly with communities as a consultant and facilitator, Petrine deepened her relationship with Aboriginal people and their wisdom of relating to landscape.

“There is such a depth of culture, which is focused on the interconnectedness between the nature of dreams, of stories, of the dreamtime, of the shape of a river. They’d take me to a place where there were these egg-shaped rocks on top of each other, and to anyone else, like to a tourist passing by, they’d think this was just a bunch of rocks. The Elders would take me there — and this is just an example — they’d say these are the eggs of the serpent that comes down this river, and you just go of course they are, they are eggs, it was like a nest, and that kind of thing happened frequently. And then they’d take me to the meeting places for different tribes, and it would be at that place they wouldn’t war and where they’d all come together and they’d do things, they’d exchange ideas, maybe they’d talk about intermarriage, they’d trade, they’d do all of that. And you could feel it in the landscape, you could feel these energies because people were doing the same things in the same spot for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and there’s an energy that gets embedded there, and that’s what they were constantly trying to teach us, these places are sacred because something was done here over and over again.”

After working as a lecturer, Petrine started freelancing as a consultant and facilitator, often with Stepwise, who developed the Stepping Stones facilitation method to support Aboriginal communities to create their own businesses in their way. This work connected Petrine with the Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Culture Centre (KALACC), who she has been working closely with for over 10 years. KALACC exists “to assist and promote the ceremonies, songs and dance of Kimberley Aboriginal people, to encourage and strengthen their social, cultural and legal values and ensure their traditions a place in Australian society.” All of the projects Petrine worked on with KALACC and Stepwise were centred in the cultural framework and worldview of the communities she worked with, from the Indian Ocean on the Kimberley coast, across to the Tanami Desert in central Australia. Petrine was based in Broome until the end of 2019, when she felt to share more time with her Mother in Corryong, Victoria. Again led by her intuition, Petrine was guided to enjoy her Mother’s presence through the unforeseen last months of her life. 

This time of grief coincided with the pandemic, which gave Petrine time to reflect on the many experiences of her life, and the beliefs that fuelled her journey. She was drawn back to the feeling to bridge the internal and external landscapes, focusing on the relationship individuals share with their environment. She began reading books by Bill Plotkin, a depth psychologist focused on the relationship between the human psyche and its natural environment.

“His ideas have informed a lot of what I do, as well as working with Elders on Country. Because a lot of the ideas around the nature-based map of the psyche are not new, indigenous people and spiritual traditions have been doing it for a very long time. Indigenous ways of thinking is that there is a spirit in everything, there’s spirit in the landscape, the landscape holds spirits, it holds knowledge, it holds us, it holds everything. And Bill Plotkin’s ideas were in resonance with the human psyche being involved with nature, that nature is part of our nature, and one reflects the other. And so he goes into an enormous amount of detail in a lot of his books.”

Petrine was inspired. Lockdown was over and, just like she felt 20 years earlier, she was drawn to connect with the Kimberley landscape. This is how she connected with the co-facilitator of the Wild Soul Experiences, Terry Hewett.

“Terry runs Adventure Out in the East Kimberley. I’d met him a couple of times. Originally I went to talk to him about working on an indigenous business in the local community, Doon Doon, just south of Kununurra. And he knew I had worked with this community, he knew I had a connection, I’d done the Stepping Stones with him years before. And so that was it, that was the beginning, I went to Terry and said, ‘I’m here, I’d love to go out on a walk’, and he said ‘yes by all means come out’. And as we walked, we talked, we shared, and it was almost like by being out there in that wilderness area, it started to evoke this impulse to do something with him, because I started to describe what I’d been through and he too saw the wilderness as a temple, as something really special and sacred. Anyway, it really came out of that meeting and from then I started to do some research into the nature-based map of psyche, I started reading and writing and mapping out my own booklet, and it just went from there.”

In 2022, Petrine and Terry guided their first Wild Soul Experience.

“I hold space for people to invite themselves into their own process, and I create a symbolic representation of that: I gather some items from the natural world or draw a little circle or create a little altar. And we sit on the Earth and set an intention, what’s the intention of today, why are we all here? And people speak to that if they feel too, and then we invite them to walk. People go off and do their thing. The whole idea is to move out of your head and to allow your senses to operate as strongly as they can in the environment. And then we return to the group and we usually sit in a circle and we share, ‘this is what happened to me’. 

“I have certain activities that I run to give a bit of structure in between the walks, I have little rituals that I do at different moments. Like every morning I do dreams, who’s had a dream, let’s have a look at any dreams that have come through. There’s also journalling, there’s artwork, there’s active imagination activities. And during their walk, participants can sit, they can write, they can journal, whatever feels right in the moment. And after, when we reflect on the experience as a group, when people are speaking, there’s no need to say anything to them, we don’t interpret. That’s one thing I find really interesting in the world that we live in, how everyone feels compelled to jump in and fix things or say ‘oh I’m sad to hear that’. And in my view the whole power of the interaction is being present for it, to be in the circle with that person and what they are saying. In the Wild Soul Experiences, it’s important to allow Country to speak, and to reflect on that interaction with the participants.

“Basically the whole intention of Wild Soul Experiences is to uncover access points to the unconscious mind, so that people can take away tools to interact with the external and the internal world in their daily lives. Because if we’re not doing this, if we’re not interacting with the external and the internal at any given moment, we’re dissociating.

“I’ve got this thing with feathers, feathers often arrive in my path, and it’s just something I notice, the feathers are there for me, it’s always the same colour, and it’s not all the time, it’s in particular moments. So when I see the feather I think what was happening in my body and what was I thinking about at the time that I saw that feather? It’s synchronistic, it’s the internal psyche and the external world coming together, there’s less of a gap with the unconscious. Because when we develop a relationship with the unconscious, we develop a sense of wholeness, and disperse with the idea of perfection and growth. I’m so over growth, I’m done growth. I’m into depth. 

“I see the unconscious as something we need to drill down into. We’ve got to get to the bottom of things. This whole growth thing, I’m going to do this so that I can do some more personal growth, it’s like going to exercise classes. If that’s all you can do, exercise classes are great, they’re wonderful, they’ve been really helpful for me, but I do a lot of nature work as well. I’m trying to get people away from this kind of personal growth culture of keeping fit. There’s a depth there, an unconscious mind. You cannot have a full life without a relationship with your unconscious mind, and that’s the way I see the natural world, it is a reflection of our unconscious. If I choose to listen to it, to nature, it always provides me with information about what’s going on unconsciously.”

It’s a courageous and powerful way to live, not seeing a separation with nature and listening to our environment and all it has to teach us. It has certainly guided Petrine to experience the beauty, meaning and mystery embedded in life.

Anton Rivette is a writer and photographer. He leads storytelling at eco-nnect.

You might also like this story: The Humble Way

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Three months ago, I boarded a Sea Shepherd ship, the Sea Eagle, in Paola, Calabria, in southern Italy.

Sea Shepherd Global is an NGO that protects wildlife and combats illegal fishing in direct-action campaigns around the world. You might have heard of them as the good pirates of the sea. Today its fleet, also known as Neptune’s Navy, is made up of eight refurbished fishing vessels a one custom-built ship, each one is crewed by volunteers that share a deep love for the ocean and defending its voiceless creatures.

I had traveled by train from Florence and by the time I made it to the ship it was nightfall,  past dinner time. Most of the crew was already asleep but the First Officer, Yuval Elroy, had stayed awake to greet me and offer me some delicious vegan food. As I ate, we got to know one another, and towards the end of our conversation, I asked Yuval what was the plan for the following day?

“Removing longlines from dawn ‘til dusk.”

For the last six years Sea Eagle’s Operation Siso has been focused on removing abandoned or illegal longlines, octopus traps and FADs (fish aggregating devices) from the Mediterranean. Since its inception the campaign has decreased illegal fishing in Calabria by 70 percent. When I boarded the crew was searching for longlines, a very harmful method of fishing, where floating nylon lines connect a buoy to the seabed with several hooks and baits attached to it. Once attached fishers go and check, every once in a while, to see whether a swordfish has taken the bait. About 300,000km of abandoned longlines are currently floating in the Mediterranean, which is the same distance between the Earth and the Moon. As a result, the population of swordfish in the Med has decreased by 90 percent. Every day, the deck crew on board the Sea Eagle work tirelessly to remove thousands of abandoned longlines that, despite not being in use, still catch hundreds of marine wildlife as bycatch.

The following morning, the core team met at 7:30am on the bridge where the Captain suggested the plan for the day as well as locations of possible abandoned longlines, then everyone flocked to the dining room to share a nutritious vegan breakfast. Apart from the core team, everyone else onboard are volunteers — from the oiler to the deckhands, the cook and the photographers — exchanging their time and work for food, shelter and an experience out at sea. After breakfast, everyone dissipated to their respective work areas and the day began. It felt as though every crew member has an important role to play to keep the ship afloat and its community safe and healthy, just like a buzzing hive, where each working bee is aware of where they have to be and what they have to do to ensure smooth sailing.

We set sail in search of longlines. Once we anchored, I joined the deckhands pulling longlines out of the water on the bow. Finally, I had a longline in my hands, actually touching what had been an abstract fishing method until now. Only twenty minutes into pulling, we found a dead swordfish.

There’s a conceptual dilemma in ocean conservation that is referred to as the “out of sight, out of mind” problem. Arguably, only a tiny fraction of the world’s population has a direct relationship with the ocean and an even smaller number has actually spent time out at sea. This is exactly why the fishing industry — which now numbers over four million vessels — can get away with destructive methods of fishing: nobody sees what they’re up to, except for the volunteers of Neptune’s Navy.

After spending the morning working on the deck, I approached Yuval and asked her about her experience in several Sea Shepherd ships. Over the past six years, she has worked with Sea Shepherd in almost every ocean: the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, the Southern Ocean of Antarctica, the Atlantic near West Africa, the Pacific near Latin America, and the tranquil blue Seas of the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. I asked her what have been the most intense operations she has worked on?

“When I was working on the campaign in Peru, all the time I kept thinking this is so far away from the public eye, I can’t believe that I’m witnessing this brutality. I couldn’t believe the amount of fishing vessels, probably more than many other countries combined. In Peru fishers are mostly looking for tuna. I remember being on watch and at some point our radar was packed with vessels coming in and out to sea, at least a few times a day. Each time they were probably taking between 200 to 300 tonnes of fish. That coast has a huge population of seals, and of course they were attracted to the tuna the fishers were catching, and they just kept coming in until there were thousands of them, and they were constantly getting caught in those nets. I remember looking with the binoculars and watching them trying to escape from the fishing nets, their heads popping out of the water under the black nets, trying to find a way out that they will never find, because that’s it, it’s over. And all of this is just because the fishing industry gets away with killing thousands of other animals as bycatch. Few people realise how much damage they’re truly causing.”

Bycatch is a term used to describe animals that are not intended to be caught by that fishing operation. An estimated 300,000 cetaceans and 500,000 turtles are killed each year in unintentional entanglements, but the real number is probably higher.

Where else did you see a lot of bycatch? I asked.

“While in Mexico during Operation Milagro, patrolling the Sea of Cortez, when we were out spotting gillnets.”

Gillnets are another destructive method of fishing, they look like floating curtains that are anchored to the seabed and attached to buoys on the surface. They entangle anything that tries to swim through it, from small juvenile fish to whales.

“Those nets were full of marine life, as the Sea of Cortez is known to be as the aquarium of the world. It is just so rich, it’s teeming with life. Every night that we were pulling in nets we found tens of caught marine animals. Sometimes we would pull those nets and we could tell that those carcasses had been there for a long time. Probably the fishers took what they needed, which was the bladder of the totoaba, and just left. It’s frustrating because they don’t clean up after, it shouldn’t be the end for more animals, but the nets become ghost nets and keep killing. Every day we pulled between 10-14 nets. When we’d find a dead animal we’d put the carcass in a tarp in the bow of the ship. I remember one day that tarp had about 20 stingrays.”

In Chinese medicine, the swim bladder of the totoaba fish is thought to cure ailments. Due to overfishing the totoaba can’t be found anymore in Chinese waters, increasing the price of one bladder to nearly $20,000 – $80,000 per kg. In Mexico, the intense fishing of the totoaba with gillnets has caused the quick decline of the world’s smallest cetacean, the vaquita.

Technically, since 2017, the use of gillnets has been banned in Baja California in an effort to save the elusive vaquita porpoise. However, laws out at sea are hard to enforce, which is why Sea Shepherd works with local authorities to support the enforcement of fishing regulations and apprehend illegal fishers. Sea Shepherd’s presence in Mexico has encouraged more regulation in the sector, as they have provided strong evidence against destructive forms of fishing. Last October, Sea Shepherd managed to secure an agreement with the Mexican government to help expand the protection area for the vaquita porpoise and therefore expand the area where they can patrol and operate. I asked Yuval, where else has Sea Shepherd successfully worked with local law enforcement?

“In West Africa we collaborated quite closely with the local governments: we provide the ship, the crew, the fuel, and the country will provide the local authorities to make all the required inspections and investigations that are needed to tackle and eventually apprehend illegal fishing operations in the water. With each operation we are showing the area that illegal fishing is not tolerated, giving the fish and the animals and the ocean the opportunity to thrive again.”

So what happens when you find an illegal fishing vessel?

“When we find a ship suspected of illegal activity, we board with the local authorities to begin the inspection. Usually our field medic will also join as workers’ conditions on these ships are horrible, they lack basic safety gear and hygiene. So the first thing our medic does is to treat wounds, infections and cuts — many fishers are not even allowed to leave the ships, there’s a lot of forced labour out at sea, essentially modern day slavery. Then our media team joins us to capture footage as evidence of what is happening onboard. What is really shocking to witness is how much bycatch is caught in these fishing vessels that just goes to waste. For example, we’ve found shrimp boats that throw away 90 percent of their catch, hundreds of fish and marine life are just thrown overboard, it makes no sense.”

Shrimp trawlers are notorious for having the worst bycatch ratio, the standard amount is shocking: for every pound of shrimp caught, six pounds of bycatch is thrown overboard, including sharks, turtles and rays. In September 2021, during Sea Shepherd’s Operation Albacore, a trawler was arrested in Gabon that had an even worse ratio of 0.2% shrimp to 99.8% bycatch. Gabon’s Minister of Fisheries Maganga-Moussavou was present during the arrest and was completely dumbfounded by the waste:

“It was important for me to see firsthand the impact of the shrimp fishery off Gabon’s coast. These wasteful practices cannot be tolerated in Gabon. I have commissioned an official inquiry into the shrimp fishery and pending the outcome of the investigation, I am prepared to suspend the fishing season until a solution can be found to the bycatch problem.”

Yet 65 percent of the world’s seas don’t fall under any jurisdiction, the high seas or Antarctica are no man’s land, places where Sea Shepherd can’t apprehend vessels with local authorities. In those areas their strategy is different. Last winter, Neptune’s Navy’s newest addition, the Allankay, headed to the Southern Ocean for Operation Antarctica Defense to document the fishing industry’s furthest endeavour, supertrawlers catching krill. Yuval was onboard.

“There are several supertrawlers that are out there looking for krill, and one of the biggest challenges in Antarctica is that this is perfectly legal, because they are licensed by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). So the best thing we can do is to go down there and just do a lot of documentation and show the world what happens when they choose to consume krill.”

In the last five years, krill fishing has increased five times. Krill are vital for the survival of the Antarctic ecosystem. As a keystone species they are the main source of food for whales and penguins. In early 2023, the Bob Brown Foundation joined the Sea Shepherd’s Antarctica campaign to dive deeper into this topic. Their research shows that one supertrawler catches around 50 tonnes of krill per day, that’s enough to feed 30 whales.

“Mainly, krill is used for the colouring of salmon in fish farms or it’s used for omega 3 supplements. I think few people are realising how much this industry is decimating Antarctica’s marine life. This is a marine area that is so rich with life, whales, seals, truly the last wilderness on Earth. Yet these supertrawlers are huge, huge floating factories, and they are literally taking food away from those animals’ mouths.”

Technically, the CCAMLR is also supposed to protect Antarctica’s wildlife and nature. Last year, the krill industry was directly lobbying CCAMLR in an effort to increase their yearly catch allowance. Thanks to the Bob Brown Foundation’s report and Sea Shepherd documentation of Antarctica’s destruction, the CCAMLR rejected the krill industry’s request, a win for the whales and the world.

It was another success for the replicable system that Sea Shepherd has created, which can actually protect the ocean from its worst enemy: industrial fishing. Sea Shepherd’s campaigns support local law enforcement, encourage more regulation, deter illegal fishing activities all while showing the world what is happening out of sight and out of mind on the High Seas. One could say that they’re the much needed eyes watching our oceans. This has made Yuval, along with the rest of Neptune’s Navy, a key witness of the fishing industry’s shady and murky business: from slavery, to absurd amounts of bycatch and destructive and senseless methods of fishing in giant floating factories. The sad reality of how the fishing industry operates is miles away from their idealistic marketing image of a fisherman with his rod.

Thanks to this passionate and global community of volunteers, the oceans and its creatures finally have some protection. After four days, I disembarked the Sea Eagle with a heart full of hope and admiration for this floating crew of dedicated activists.

Isabella Cavalletti is a storyteller and co-founded eco-nnect.

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