Steve Mushin is an award-winning industrial designer and inventor, and an old mate from when we both were part of the team at CERES – the legendary community environment park in inner Melbourne. He’s also now the author of children’s book ‘Ultrawild: An audacious plan to rewild every city on earth’ (Allen & Unwin). Eight years in the making, it's an intricately illustrated book exploring visions for rapidly transforming cities to reverse climate change and species extinction. The book contains over 100 ludicrous sounding, and just maybe possible inventions, illustrated with over 1,000 drawings. It’s packed with curious facts on everything from how plants and fungi share resources and the soil engineering power of megafauna, to insect and mechanical flight, high-tech microbe-powered toilets and much more.
It took me a little while to pry the book from my boy’s hands for a read. And it’s fair to say my brain was bending with the force of Steve’s lens on the world - always a welcome thing. Equally welcome were the parts of our conversation here where we delved into how rewilding might square with the rapid mass deployment of industrial technologies like renewables, EVs and so on. As well as how it might square with a vegan or omnivorous diet, with Steve firmly in the vegan camp, and me? Well, long-time listeners of this podcast will have heard some of my journey from vegetarian to omnivore, largely through the experience of the podcast. Yes, here’s a bit of the George Monbiot/Allan Savory stouch - without the stouch!
Head here for automatic cues to chapter markers (also available on the embedded player on the episode website), and a transcript of this conversation (please note the transcript is AI generated and imperfect, but hopefully serves to provide greater access to these conversations for those who need or like to read).
Recorded online with Steve at home in Aotearoa New Zealand on 5 April 2024.
The RegenNarration podcast is independent, ad-free & freely available, thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. If you too value what you hear, please consider joining them by clicking the link above or heading to our website.
Become a member to connect with your host, other listeners & benefits, via our Patreon page.
Visit The RegenNarration shop to wave the flag. And please keep sharing the podcast with friends. It all helps. Thanks for your support!
Steve Mushin is an award-winning industrial designer and inventor, and an old mate from when we both were part of the team at CERES – the legendary community environment park in inner Melbourne. He’s also now the author of children’s book ‘Ultrawild: An audacious plan to rewild every city on earth’ (Allen & Unwin). Eight years in the making, it's an intricately illustrated book exploring visions for rapidly transforming cities to reverse climate change and species extinction. The book contains over 100 ludicrous sounding, and just maybe possible inventions, illustrated with over 1,000 drawings. It’s packed with curious facts on everything from how plants and fungi share resources and the soil engineering power of megafauna, to insect and mechanical flight, high-tech microbe-powered toilets and much more.
It took me a little while to pry the book from my boy’s hands for a read. And it’s fair to say my brain was bending with the force of Steve’s lens on the world - always a welcome thing. Equally welcome were the parts of our conversation here where we delved into how rewilding might square with the rapid mass deployment of industrial technologies like renewables, EVs and so on. As well as how it might square with a vegan or omnivorous diet, with Steve firmly in the vegan camp, and me? Well, long-time listeners of this podcast will have heard some of my journey from vegetarian to omnivore, largely through the experience of the podcast. Yes, here’s a bit of the George Monbiot/Allan Savory stouch - without the stouch!
Head here for automatic cues to chapter markers (also available on the embedded player on the episode website), and a transcript of this conversation (please note the transcript is AI generated and imperfect, but hopefully serves to provide greater access to these conversations for those who need or like to read).
Recorded online with Steve at home in Aotearoa New Zealand on 5 April 2024.
The RegenNarration podcast is independent, ad-free & freely available, thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. If you too value what you hear, please consider joining them by clicking the link above or heading to our website.
Become a member to connect with your host, other listeners & benefits, via our Patreon page.
Visit The RegenNarration shop to wave the flag. And please keep sharing the podcast with friends. It all helps. Thanks for your support!
Steve:
That's something that was so important when I created Ultra Wild was that it had to be joyful, because, you know, we're all so burdened At least everyone I know is burdened by what we're facing and I think in order to get ourselves out of this pickle, we need to have fun. We need to be joyful with ideas. We need to embrace joyful creative thinking on a massive scale.
AJ:
SM: We need to ramp up creativity to the max. AJ: G'day, A nthony James h ere in the Lincoln National Forest of New Mexico. Y ou're with T he RegenNarration, sharing the stories that feed the soul, challenge the mind and unleash the possible. It's ad free, freely available and entirely listener supported. So thanks a lot, MA, for your enduring support and Marlon Newling for becoming a generous monthly donor to the podcast. Yes, there are a bunch of ways you can show your support for all this. So if you're also finding value in it, please join MA and Marlon part of a great community of supporting listeners as a donor or a subscribing member on Patreon. Just head to the website via the show notes regennarration. com/ support and thanks again. Steve Mushin is an old mate from a time when we were both part of the team at CERES, the legendary community environment park in East Brunswick, melbourne. We recently reconnected and were mutually taken by what we'd got up to in the intervening years. In Steve's case, this includes the launch of his first book, ultra Wild, an audacious plan to rewild every city on Earth. Eight years in the making nearly killing him, he tells me. It's an incredibly intricate illustrated book exploring visions for rapidly transforming cities to reverse climate change and species extinction extinction. The book contains over 100 ludicrous sounding and just maybe possible inventions, illustrated with over 1000 drawings. It's packed with curious facts on everything from how plants and fungi share resources and the soil engineering power of megafauna to insect and mechanical flight, high-tech microbe-powered toilets and much more.
AJ:
It took me a little while to pry the book from my ten-year-old boy's hands for a read and it's fair to say my brain was bending with the force of Steve's lens on the world always a welcome thing. Equally welcome were the parts of our conversation here where we delved into how rewilding might square with the rapid mass deployment of industrial technologies like renewables, evs and so on, as well as how it might square with a vegan or omnivorous diet, with Steve firmly in the vegan camp and me well, long-time listeners of this podcast will have heard some of my journey from vegetarian to omnivore, largely through the experience of the podcast. Yes, here's a bit of the George Monbiot-Allen-Savory stoush without the stoush. So let's join this award-winning industrial designer and inventor beaming in from his home in Aotearoa, new Zealand. Here's Steve. Let's jump into it, mate.
Steve:
It is terrific.
AJ:
How terrific it is that we have come back around to each other's company after all these years. And through this book I was so enamored by what you'd pulled off, knowing somewhat of the origins when we were working together at series. But let's bring the listeners into that. Hey, what burst this going back? Well, yeah, nearly a decade yeah, I think so.
Steve:
I think that that, uh, that infamous rafting trip was about 2010, wasn't it?
AJ:
okay now, now we have to bring people into this that we have our own wild adventure story. That nearly spelled the end there would have been no book. Bring people into that one first mate and then see how it leads to the book.
Steve:
Yeah, yeah, sure. So back in 2010, anthony and I were rafting down the Mitchell am I right? The Mitchell River, Mitchell in Victoria, the Mitchell River, the Mitchell in Victoria, the Mitchell River in Gippsland, and we were overly confident. We'd never been in a raft before at least I certainly hadn't. And it started raining and the river started rising and we were with some more sensible and experienced adventurers and they wisely hung back when they heard the roar, the rumble, the terrible, thunderous booms of a rapid, and Anthony and I boldly paddled on Not short of courage.
Steve:
Can we claim that yeah, I mean brute stupidity yeah, there's so many ways to describe it but we did end up getting sucked into what I can only describe as an enormous washing machine and spat out at various parts of the points in the river. I remember being in this giant washing machine, not knowing what was up and what was down and feeling very certain that I was going to die, and then being spat out and crawling up a bank and standing there shivering in the rain with no sight of Anthony the raft, anyone else, being certain that Anthony was long gone and unsure of where the other friends were. And I remember starting looking around and wondering how I could keep myself warm and I saw a paperbark tree and I started to fashion what I called a paperbark cocoon to keep myself warm for the night.
AJ:
Oh, we can laugh now, do you remember?
Steve:
Yeah, because by that point I think I'd been walking up and down the river calling for you, but you'd been spat out sort of 100 or 200 meters around a corner, Exactly.
AJ:
Well, that's right. So my experience 100 or 200 meters down the river.
AJ:
Thankfully, when I came out of the washing machine, I saw the raft, and so I swam my guts out downstream further to catch the raft which wasn't easy because I was weighing a ton in all this wet gear right and buggered from the flipping around and everything, but I'd managed to hold on to the oar, got to the raft just sort of swimming one arm to get to the raft with the oar still, pulled that over to the shore and then had the same sort of moment of like geez, I'm not seeing Steve behind me here and then had to bush bash back up those hundreds of meters and wondering, wondering, and then thankfully saw you and then felt envious because you were washed up so far, so much quicker than I was onto that bank.
AJ:
But I guess you had more time to stew on it. So there's that downside to it. But thankfully we were all good and we had our rafts, and so we made camp down where that raft was ultimately together yeah, unexpected but yes, never forgotten. But very fortunate to still be around, mate to tell these tales and for you to have produced the book, all right.
AJ:
So we're talking this era, we're back out of the Mitchell and we're back at series and we're doing our thing, and a lot of what you were doing at series was geared towards these sorts of ideas and really the ultimate mission hey, but how did it coalesce into a book? What was the sort of crystallizing mission that compelled you to produce this?
Steve:
Oh, it's such a good question and it developed so organically over so many years that I don't really have a clear answer. I mean, I've always drawn, I've always had sketchbooks full of fairly absurd ideas and I've always loved doing kind of fermi estimates, as they're known, or quick calculations on whether something could be possible or not. I, a lot of friends, are engineers and scientists. I've always loved jamming ideas with them and and trying to nut out whether outrageous ideas that I've come up with could be made. And, bit by bit, around the time that I was working at Ceres with you and we had the Zero Emissions Ceres project. So we had a suite of technology projects. We had concentrating solar dishes to produce heat for the cafe, we had large-scale composting, we had urban vertical wind turbines, we had EV conversions, we had hydroponics and aquaponics systems for intensive urban farming and we had a whole bunch of really, really cool things going on. And it was around that time. Well, one thing that I realized around that time well, one thing that I realized around that time was that the storytelling aspects of our work so taking groups around and and and showcasing the thinking and the exploration, the, the, the, the pitching of the ideas, telling of the stories was a real passion of mine, so, and I was kind of much better at that than the technical side of things. So, and this, and just to paint the picture a bit more clearly that there were about six of us five or six of us in a small team mechanical engineers, biologists, designers all working on these technologies, and so it was a really fun time, a beautiful collaboration, a really exciting time to be a series. And yeah, it was doing those projects, working on those ideas that I realized I just had to do more in terms of my storytelling and I wanted to exhibit ideas. I wanted to produce a book of ideas and it just grew over time.
Steve:
And in 2014, I had an exhibition in Tokyo and it was Spiral Gallery, which is downtown Tokyo, and there I showcased a bunch of drawings for transforming Tokyo into a self-sufficient city producing all of its own food and with a fair amount of rewilding incorporated, and that was a lot of fun and a great collaboration with that gallery. And when I came back from that, I had a meeting with Alan and Unwin in Melbourne and they asked would I produce a book with those concepts? And so I agreed and they said you know we can give you a year, and I said no problem, you know, I think. And they said you know we can give you a year and I said no problem, you know, I think. Apparently I said you know I could knock this off in a month or so I get it. But in that process I realized so that book, that book idea, began as a series of completely separate ideas. They were all discrete ideas, they were just various random concepts. And it was in the process of creating the book that I realized I really needed a narrative to bind the whole lot together. And at that point I wasn't really so much thinking about rewilding, I was more thinking about making cities self-sufficient.
Steve:
But it was pretty early on that I realized through my research that rewilding was the thing that had to be the goal, that that was that.
Steve:
That that was so inspiring to me and it's so powerful as a, as a as a as an ecosystem restoration practice.
Steve:
And I just thought this has to be the goal. And it was when I was walking in a forest in Tulangi State Park in Victoria one of my favorite places in Victoria and walking amongst the mountain ash trees and looking up at these beautiful you know 20 or 30 story tall skyscraper trees that I started thinking, you know, what would it take to return these giants to cities, because, of course, in cities we don't have big trees. You know, you're lucky if you see a tree more than 20 meters tall. That's a giant for a city. And so what would it take to return not just those trees but all of the animals, all of the life that lives amongst those trees? And so that's really the genesis of the book. And then, you know, I still sort of thought oh, you know, maybe I need another six months to do this, you know. And then, you know, I still sort of thought oh, you know, maybe I need another six months to do this, you know.
AJ:
And it just evolved and evolved, and evolved, and eventually I got spat out the other end and here I am and one look at the book. It's not hard to see why it took the years it took. I don't imagine you necessarily had such an extravaganza in mind when you thought it might take a month. It really is an extravaganza in mind when you thought it might take a month. It really is an extravaganza. But, steve, I relate to so much of what you're talking about. In a sense that story piece is partly how I come to be doing this and how we come to be even talking in a public way today. And I also relate to what you've said about the rewilding thing. When you talk about imagine if we could have these trees back in our urban spaces where they were before we assumed urban spaces to not need them, probably even butenerate.
AJ:
Melbourne holds, you know, crazy in air quotes, dreams, goals of what if the Yarra River was swimmable again in the city, you know, not just upstream, and I remember thinking, probably back when we got to know each other, why would we be okay, even with the fact it's not, and even with the fact it's not drinkable.
AJ:
Why would we settle for that? What we've normalized in that sense is so impoverished, and sure we gained the fruits of industrialism, I suppose. But of course we're learning how we're shortchanged in various ways, significant ways, by those things. So I guess, at a time when we're looking to get back some of what we have lost in this way, I think it is powerful and to throw the what-ifs out there, that makes me then. What I'm curious then, steve, with you, is the part that is rewilding internally, so that we would even take seriously such propositions or allowing ourselves to imagine and even actually go for that sort of rewilding.
AJ:
Obviously, it requires a sort of mirrored transformation internally. Right, You've brought this out of yourself into the world. If we were to do this collectively in cities everywhere, what does it infer for us? What does it mean for us? What do we need to do for?
Steve:
ourselves. Look, I think we need to, you know, I think there are. The biggest challenge is embracing creative thinking for everyone to embrace much, much more creative thinking in their lives to enable you know ourselves to be able to envisage how our future could change, and change quickly, because we know that to beat the, you know, climate change and biodiversity loss, we need to radically change cities, and quickly. I think I run a lot of workshops with kids and with adults, and I teach drawing and rapid design skills and 3D drawing, and I get people standing up in front of the groups pitching their ideas and having fun with them, and so forth. I think we all have ideas. We've all got the ability to imagine different futures, but I'm not sure we live in a society that encourages it. I think we need to change our relationship to imagination and to creative thinking, to empower us all to be able to embark on the kind of flights of fancy that I've been on when creating this book.
AJ:
I think that's to me, that's what's so striking about your book and why I love it. You know, you've just been hauled over the coals in an interview just prior to this one with my young boy because he wants to know how are these things going to work and what if this breaks, and those details, whereas I'm looking at the point you've just made and how the book is an emblem of that. Really, just to take away the limitations, the self-limitations, but to blow them off is what this book is really communicating. And when I have so many other conversations in different spheres of life that do blow the lid off what we ever thought was what they ever thought was possible repeatedly, then it really illustrates the value.
Steve:
This isn't just an exercise in abstraction, and I should say that you know there are rewilding projects going on all around the world that are mind-bogglingly cool and that inspire everyone or anyone. I mean you don't have to be a nature lover to look at what rewilding projects achieve and be inspired. I mean it is just so cool and it really is. I just find rewilding to be one of the most positive and hopeful and exciting movements in the world today, and I think there's so much grief and despair around where things are going with climate and biodiversity and I think rewilding is is just such a beautiful yeah, beautiful contrast to that. Yeah, yeah, it's. It's interestingly, it's not a word that we use a lot in Australia or or in Aotearoa, new Zealand, where I live at the moment. We we talk about conservation, we talk about sustainability, we talk about sustainability, we talk about ecosystem restoration, but it's not often that we use the term rewilding. And I find that fascinating because I find the term rewilding to be exciting. I mean it just feels cool. You know, when you say sustainability or conservation, I mean these are important terms but they don't excite me, whereas rewilding, I mean I think most people are excited about the term rewilding. It feels a bit edgy, it feels exciting. It feels a bit scary, you know you start to wonder am I going to get eaten alive on the way to work? It's a cool concept and you know I think you mentioned before rewilding yourself. You know it's now a term that kind of self-help books are using. You know you can get books called, you know, rewild yourself. So yeah, it's a cool concept.
Steve:
Well, I live in Wellington and we have an amazing example of rewilding here. It's a former water reservoir, an area, a valley, that was fenced off for a century, which supplied the city with its water, and it's just two and a half kilometers from Parliament, so it's a stone's throw from the center of the city, and it is now a sanctuary for birds and reptiles and insects and native bush, and it has a 500 year vision. I mean, you don't need to know much more like how cool is that? A 500 year vision? That's the length of time it takes for the bush to reach maturity in this country. And it's really interesting because I remember this project beginning about 20 years ago and you know everyone thought it was cool to have a sanctuary of course, you know, in a city eco sanctuary.
Steve:
But what no one foresaw happening, or at least very few people was what they now call the halo effect, and that is that when you and to provide some more context, this is quite a large space, so it's about two square kilometres in size and this land, this amount of habitat, has allowed a whole lot of previously very, very endangered birds, or at least endangered in the region, to thrive and to spread out and colonize other parts of the city. So there are now lots of different native birds around Wellington that just did not exist in the suburbs when I was a child growing up Wow, mate. And so Wellington is really a city that is being rewilded rapidly, all due to the incredible efforts of thousands of volunteers and scientists and community groups and working bees and all that building this amazing space in the centre of the city, and it's just transformative. It's so, so inspiring and cool.
AJ:
And it tells you that in a way, it's trigger points or leverage points, or some people even use the metaphor of acupuncture points- it's like if you just set off part of the system in those ways, it does the work. I mean, it's everything underpinning regenerative agriculture that I hear a lot about on this podcast too. It's where nature kicks in. You just get back to its threshold of functionality.
Steve:
That's right. You need to give it a helping hand. And you know, in the us they talk about cores and corridors, and so zealandia, which is the eco sanctuary I've just been talking about, zealandia is a core, so it's about built, it's about an area where species can build up critical mass enough to be able to, you know, spread out, spread their wings uh, excuse the pun and and and spread out, and so that's the core. And then the corridor is, of course, uh, areas of bush, corridors of bush that allow the creatures, be they reptiles or insects or birds, to, to, to migrate and to find other cores, and so this is very much what's now being talked about, using different terminology in this country. So you've got zealandia. Where's the next core going to be, and where's the next one, and how will these eventually all um, eventually link up?
AJ:
how exciting. You know you talked about how exciting rewilding is as a thing and you wonder why it's not more sort of used in our language, the reason why I'm so attracted to it as a concept. Well, besides, you know all the reasons you've just articulated in a way, but another one is the personal, is the social side, the idea that, yeah, sure, maybe, um, maybe getting uh eaten by a predator on the way to work might not be the the pitch to put to people in cities at the moment, but getting off autopilot, like yeah bringing back yes, our sense of being alive, when the mechanistic way of industrialism has, obviously, yeah, got us by the punch in punch out clock or even not even punching out clock anymore.
Steve:
Yeah, that's right and, and you know, I would recommend, uh, a book called feral um, published by or written by, george Monbiot, a big hero of mine and he. That book starts with that very idea. So he talks about he's a journalist and he talks about how he felt like he was kind of stuck in kind of domestic drudgery and he wanted to get back to his wilder self of his kind of early 20s when he was a journalist, traveling around the world, having adventures and and that that is a really, really interesting starting point to that book. But but it's a fantastic book about the rewilding movement around the world and it explores a lot of really cool projects. So I would highly recommend, if anyone wants to start learning about rewilding, start with George Monbiot's book Feral. It's fantastic.
AJ:
I also love how this is inferring a keep on to our assumptions, like I guess it's opening up. It's the other side, if you like of the imagination or the what if it's like being open to other people that perhaps you might not be thinking like or think you're thinking like.
Steve:
Yeah, the whole idea of autopilots that I talk about in the book. Is that what you mean? So, yeah, you know. We all know that as we get older, we tend to be less imaginative or we allow less time for imagination. We tend to be more resistant to change, more fearful of change, less open-minded. We become more conservative as we get older, and so the book starts with a section on the importance of thought experiments. Design thought experiments which is what the book is all about or just being playful with your imagination and how. Brain research suggests that simply flexing your imagination is a kind of mental yoga, so you can keep your imagination young by just practicing, in the same way that if you want to stay fit and healthy, you have to exercise. If you never walk or cycle or do anything with your body, it's going to atrophy, and the same thing happens with our imagination, and so I suppose that is a kind of rewilding or a continued wilding of the mind.
AJ:
Yeah, I love that.
AJ:
You know there was an episode I closed with last year with a bloke in New Mexico, jeff goble, who does consensus work, but like he gets thrown in as last resort in communities that in this case, for example, had come to arms that had got so bad, and in that case, in a three-day process I mean it was a three-day process culminating a whole bunch of previous work but bringing a community like that together over three days and did come to enormous like process of bloodletting, sure, but then coming together and actually coming out with resolutions that have been seen through again, it's almost unbelievable.
AJ:
Except that this is happening and he is one person doing this, has been doing it for 40 years. But what it also makes me think of is his sort of format, if you like, is laden with the what-ifs. So the what-ifs get us through or generate so much more than even what you might think is the value of having an alive imagination and and a life that's that's still creative or whatever. In so many ways is it the opening to connecting with people, to coming through as a polity, like actually instituting these things in our organisations and ultimately in our broader culture. That that's his mechanism for doing that too. It's the what if?
Steve:
practice if you like. Interesting, aren't you yeah?
AJ:
that's right. So, mate, I've got a couple of perhaps tension points with this stuff that I'm so curious about. Yeah, yeah, One is with the technological stuff and let's, I mean I guess in a way I take EVs as a standard bearer but I don't want to demonize EVs Like. Evs are so much better than internal combustion engines, Like yes, and you know, you might even remember all the work I was doing on transport at the time with my old mentor, frank Fisher.
AJ:
It was a lot about just the gross inefficiency of having driver-owned, driver-only cars. Sure, one 80-kilo person in a one-ton, now two-ton thing, yes, where the energy drives the thing around rather than you. But then I'm still so cautious with evs as I am, I suppose, with renewables even, let alone other things of this ilk. And the tension point that I want to explore with you is let's take that metaphor of being, of getting away from being on autopilot.
AJ:
Like if we go to driverless electric cars, on autopilot, as it were? Does that contradict? What we're trying to actually bring out in ourselves.
Steve:
So you're referring to the early part of the book where I talk about that. That's kind of that sets up the the, the, the design project for rewilding cities, is that we're referring to?
AJ:
oh nothing nothing, even that specific mate. It's sort of in a way in a way. Another way I could come at it is you talk a lot about the reverence for old knowledge, right? In ancient knowledges, and I'm lockstep with you. Of course, You've actually got some lovely phrases around that too. But that spirit and kinship, it's all part of this rewilding theme. And so then I wonder, okay, what part of that enlivening of spirit?
AJ:
and connection with land implicit in the story you told us about Zealandia. It feels like it gets more complex when we start talking about industrial machinery for rewilding sure.
Steve:
Well, yeah, yeah, and that's so. So rewilding as a philosophy doesn't is not a is not a philosophy of, of technology, it's. It's very much about, you know, as we've mentioned, it's about giving nature a helping hand and then, importantly, it's about stepping back, so it's about letting nature thrive and repair itself, and that's an important distinction between rewilding and and you know, typical conservation practices and I and it's so fantastic, you know it it when you allow nature to return by itself and to thrive by itself, it will come back stronger. It may take longer to come back than if you were to throw enormous resources at it and fertilizer and people power to manage everything, but if it's left to its own devices, it will likely come back stronger, and rewiring projects around the world have shown this. And so, because my book is about cities and cities are, of course, they're not true, they could never be wilderness, as you know, in the true sense of the word, and so you can't really rewild cities. And so I wanted to be playful with this concept and I didn't want to. I didn't want to do an injustice to the concept of rewilding. So that's where I came up with the term ultra wild, and so ultra wilding is my term for rewilding cities as places for humans and all species, and it's about doing it as fast as technologically and biologically possible. So it's a kind of bastardization of the rewilding concepts, mainly just for the fun of being playful with ideas.
Steve:
So so you know, to give the listeners some more context, you know I start off and I say it seems likely that with new technology that's on the horizon, especially autonomous vehicles, that we could free up a large amount of cities, because so much of cities is taken up by cars and things associated with cars car parking spaces, car park buildings and when you look at how much of a road is actually used by the person inside the vehicle, it's a tiny, tiny percent.
Steve:
The vast majority of roads are just empty all of the time. And so once you start moving people around in a more efficient way, which is theoretically possible with autonomous vehicles and of course many people argue that no autonomous vehicles would just mean there'll be even more vehicles on the road. But if we're to use that technology in a smart way, we could and I've quoted some numbers in the book just how much we could reduce roads by. But we could sort of reduce roads to kind of 20 or less of their current size. So if you suddenly freed up all the space and cities, what could you do with it? That that's kind of where the thought experiment begins and your question, you know, like I, I mean you sort of imagine people moving everywhere in these autonomous vehicles that are, you know, mind controlled with chips in our brains and there's all kinds of awful ways that could go.
Steve:
You end up in the sort of wally movie exactly yeah, we're all unfit, kind of blobs and these kind of like chairs, automated chairs, moving around, and you know that's not the future that I want.
Steve:
Um, I, I very much want the. Yeah, I, I want the to live in the exciting city full of people and human things, but I also want to be surrounded by millions of other species and I want to be fit and I want to be able to climb. I mean, right now I'm a pretty puny human being. I'm not an agile climber, I can't run fast, I couldn't survive a day by myself in the bush, and those are the types of things that I aspire, and so ultra wild is a fantasy, but it's a fantasy that, in many ways, could be achieved through various means and in various styles and fashions. I certainly think that we could design cities and that we will design cities eventually for all species, that we will welcome back a lot of the species that we've driven out of our urban spaces, and I think we can live in a much wilder way, even if we're spending some of the time cruising around in autonomous vehicles.
AJ:
Indeed, we totally could. And of course, yeah, my vision is married up to yours. And of course, yeah, my vision is married up to yours. As ever, I'm so conscious that that rewilding of ourselves is essential lest we do just industrialise our way to WALL-E oblivion.
Steve:
The machines won't do it for us, but yes, if we do it in lockstep with country regenerating itself, enabling those functions, then yeah, yeah.
AJ:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. So note right. Another one of these you mentioned, george mombio. He's almost my. I rarely mention names because I don't. I don't want to personalize these things but I'll just take it as a launch point for for this matter, because he has become the poster child of the anti, is this fair, anti-livestock view of.
Steve:
Yeah, sure. So his recent book, regenesis, is all about. In his opinion, we will see the end of farming as we know it, in terms of livestock farming, fairly soon, within our lifetime.
AJ:
Yeah, and in terms of the industrialized methods, again, hands down, can we? And as soon as possible? Not even I mean in some ways, I think, especially when it comes to animals. But wow, mate, I've seen vegetable farms that are horrid and and horrid in terms of the dust bowls they leave, but also in terms of terms of the chemicals and in terms of the slaughter of, you know, pests. Quote unquote.
Steve:
Sure.
AJ:
Yeah, but what I've also seen, and indeed there's an episode that by the time we go out, this one will have gone out and it's one of the legends in regenerative agriculture David Marsh and he perhaps more than others when you go to his place he stopped his cropping because he realised he was turning it to desert. He turned to livestock. But in the way that you've talked about megafauna even, and your enhanced megafauna I'll leave people to read about that but in that way, right, and even in the way that Indigenous folk managed the wild herds of megafauna where he is so hands-off now, after 25 years or so, he as a farmer, it strikes you more as a rewilding project on his farm, even though it's a working now only quote-unquote livestock farm, where trees now seed themselves. There's 1,500 of them currently. It's a self-seeding nursery. The functions have kicked in the water being held in the soil, the microbiome actually so thriving it almost bubbles up into the surface, you know, with the dung and so forth and the dung beetles.
AJ:
I guess, having been immersed in this for the last five years, I see those cases and I think, wow, there's no contradiction here. This is utterly on the rewilding page. Yeah, and what a shame it is that there's such conflict and binary stuff going on at that level. You know, the savoury Mambio collage is the pin-up of it. But even more broadly, I wonder what you thought about that.
Steve:
Well, I mean. Well, first of all, one thing that is ultra-wild is really imagining a vegan future. So, although it's never mentioned the the end, the final kind of concepts for the city, the envisaged rewild cities and ultra wild, are vegan. So I mean, I do talk about, I talk about a collaboration with the world's 33 billion chickens, and initially I talk about we give them food scraps and we get eggs from them. But but if you read through that chapter, we get to a point where I realize that actually what you're much better to do is is is allow the chickens to be them, while their wild selves, and collect their manure surreptitiously, without them noticing, to use to produce um, to produce bioplastic, and then to use that bioplastic to help build cities and also to um to to to to grow algae to turn into um, alternative proteins. So um to to, to be able you to to to to create algae-based eggs, um, instead of taking the chicken's eggs. So the book is actually vegan. It imagines a vegan future and that's very much. I mean. I believe in a vegan future.
Steve:
I think really the and I'm very much a fan of George Monbiot's take on things with Regenesis. I think that the use, the amount of land that we use to produce food for humans is really the biggest environmental impact there is, because it's about the opportunity cost. For every field that you turn from ancient forest into soybean plantation, you're removing areas for land for other species. So in Ultra Wild, I don't discuss in any detail ideas for feeding the world with carbohydrates or protein, feeding the world with carbohydrates or protein but I do.
Steve:
I do look at, um I I do a few numbers on whether we could, on how much we could, reduce the, the amount of land that we currently use for farming. So, um, yeah, and a lot of those ideas are based upon concepts that George Monbiot is interested in. So he talks about, for example, microbial processes for producing protein and the amount of land that you could liberate if you were to produce all of our protein using microbial processes versus, say, farming livestock. So I'm I am interested in in all of those ideas. Um, I haven't gone into it in a huge amount of detail, but that's certainly the future that I imagine is one where we use vastly, vastly less of the world's land to feed humans yeah, I'm so glad this has come to this spot.
AJ:
Steve, I remember when tammy jonas said to um, do you know, tammy? No up near um, oh crikey, I'm not gonna remember exactly which up near dalesford, I think. Yeah, she runs a pig farm. I met her at collingwood children's farm, so sort of around the same time.
Steve:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I don't.
AJ:
I don't know how far advanced the enterprise was then, but she runs a pig farm and other things and does the butchering on site. And again with this whole idea that it's not the industrialized model, right, it's it is done like kin and and regenerating land and so forth at the same time.
AJ:
So this is tammy. She was on zach efron's down to earth netflix series right, and one of the hosts with zach is a is vegan, and there was this lovely moment where, you know, he, he sat out some of this right, and there's this lovely moment where the two of them were walking in the field and they talked about having a radio show or something about the butcher meets the vegan or something, and so that is beautiful to be able to have these conversations rather than I mean everything we talked about at the outset, the ability to remain open and curious about other people and caring about other people when you can talk across these divides and so what?
AJ:
what it makes me think, then steve a couple of things. One is if we're talking about rewilding, I wonder how much processed food again period, whether it's grain or fake meat or whatever that the lab produced food. Is that a contradiction?
Steve:
or are you just seeing?
AJ:
net gain because of land liberated. Like, how are you seeing it?
Steve:
yeah, so there's a spread in my book where I look at the amount of land that is used currently to feed humans, and I imagine that land divided up by the world's buildings. So there's roughly two billion buildings in the world and what I imagine is this massive multi-story farm on top of every building in the world, producing the food that we need. And what I talk the reader through is the effects if we first of all reduce waste, went vegan, and I mean the effect is enormous, absolutely enormous for both of those things. You know, a world where we no longer farm animals for meats, we are able to liberate enormous areas of the world's land for other species. And it just to me, given the biodiversity challenges that we face species extinction and climate change to me it's a no-brainer and I think the value of land for other species is just too great. It just doesn't make sense to use the amount of land that we do to feed humans yeah, because when you mentioned before the, the soy fields and so forth, you're totally right.
AJ:
And even the like. When I'm in the kimberley, for example, and I'll see I mean not just, but you know, when you see that the set stocking cattle operations going on, where they're just spread to the winds and eating out the place, I see that play out.
AJ:
But when I see something like David Marsh's place, and it relates to what Bruce Pascoe's talked about too. Yes, in other words, I wonder if our task is more to farm differently and perhaps not even necessarily less Like what if, what if, what if? Here we go, the what if exercises mate. What if it's about diminishing the dichotomy that we created out of industrialized farming, where it was over there and done unbelievably badly?
AJ:
and we just, you know, took the food in through the supermarkets at cheaper prices and externalised all those losses. What if there's a way of farming that's akin to maybe what it was on this ancient estate, with eating, obviously, with? Eating and harvesting meat, in that you live amongst and so do all these other species. It's wild and so farming and this is obviously what Bruce has gotten to pickles about the idea that farming not be so dramatically distinguished from life itself. Yeah, yeah.
Steve:
What do you think? So I mean, the big challenge is that there's 8 billion people on the planet. The big challenge is that there's 8 billion people on the planet and so for us all to live in a traditional, quote, unquote lifestyle, for us all to be, say, hunter gatherers, the world just cannot support 8 billion people. It can support a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the world's population. You know, for every person you need a vast area of land to support yourself in a natural ecosystem. So yeah, I mean, I'm certainly no expert in these areas, but I can tell you about what I looked at in Ultra Wild, and in Ultra Wild I've got the book in front of me here. I just wanted to pull it out to make sure I get my numbers right. But to give you an idea, if we're to take all of the world's land that is used for producing food and producing materials so producing food as well as, say, timber that we use for the building houses you'd need 163 stories. Sorry, you'd need 270 stories on top of every building in the world of land to feed us. So you imagine. So let's just give a bit more context to this. So in this scenario, here we are rewilding all the world's farmland, all the world's productive land, and we are taking all farming into cities. So whatever is now a farm becomes a wild space for other species and for us to have adventures, and all of that productive land gets stacked on top of buildings inside cities. So in this way, humans, human world, is largely contained within cities, and then everything else is for all species and for us to have adventures. Okay, so that's us getting tough and fit and that's us chasing wild animals and being chased by wild animals and, um, you know, and it's about indigenous peoples reclaiming their lands and it's about us know, it's about indigenous peoples reclaiming their lands and it's about us reclaiming, it's about us rewiring ourselves. But it's not going to be possible for 8 billion people to support themselves on that wild land living traditional lifestyles. It just isn't the amount of space on earth. And so what I've done in the thought experiments is I've taken all of that land and stacked it on top of buildings. So if you were to take all of that land now, stack it up on top of today's 2 billion buildings that's the current estimate you get 270 stories.
Steve:
Now, if we're to reduce waste, so if we're to reduce the vast amount of food waste that we get through industrial farming, industrial processes and also just wastage that people have in their fridges and everything else. If we're to live in a, in a very efficient society, we can reduce that 270 stories down to 163 stories, so we can almost halve it by by, by just being more efficient. Then if we're to go to a, to a vegan diet, so we're to get rid of all of the livestock farming, which is a very, very inefficient way of producing food, we can get down to 70 stories. So from 270 stories to 70 stories through reducing waste and through going vegan. And then if we look at currently available technologies for producing food very efficiently so, for example, using hydroponics to grow vegetables and all kinds of other things that grow food very efficiently we could probably and this is very, very theoretical, of course, this is me just digging around, looking at various case studies, having chats with various farming experts and so forth we could probably get a 10 times efficiency gain. So we could get that down to seven stories. So you go from 270 stories on top of your house to feed you and you get down to seven stories, which is a building you can kind of imagine. We can all imagine seven really cool kind of vertical gardens, like Gardens of Eden, stacked on top of a house. That is what we would need to support ourselves in a very efficient future scenario.
Steve:
And then I kind of take one enormous leap and I look at the, the microbial processes that george mombio was really excited about, and I say you know, if we all had a bioreactor under our beds that could produce burgers, and also, you know, plastic compounds for making shoes, which all of which is possible.
Steve:
Then you get down to, you know you could produce everything you need in your house, and so so this is just it's about saying you know, I mean, this is a.
Steve:
All of these are huge what-ifs, but it's about could we actually rewild the entire world? And this is the kind of second leap in the book. So initially I start talking about rewilding cities and then I kind of go hang on, let's take this, you know, let's take this thought experiment one mega step forwards and let's say could we rewild the whole world? And in that vision, whether it be the seven stories of Garden of Eden above your house or whether it be a super high-tech bioreactor in your bedroom, in that world I'm imagining that we are running around living our wildest selves in the rest of the world. So it's about saying, hey, let's provide most of the world for all species, and in these little pockets that are cities, we're just going to have some super high intensity ways of growing all the food that we need and then, yeah, we go play in the rest of the space along with all the other animals and look if we do get eaten by a lion.
Steve:
Well, hey, you know you got a breaking egg. You know you got a breaking egg to make an omelette, right in all seriousness.
AJ:
I confront that question every day in the ocean. We haven't managed to do away with our predators and bless, we've tried in the ocean, I take it on their terms and, thankfully, have continued to make it out so far.
AJ:
I love these what-if exercises, stephen, I love that we're having this part of this conversation too.
AJ:
When I hear you talk, I think I can't help but imagine how much of those extrapolations are with the dastardly forms of livestock farming that I have also seen, versus what I certainly hadn't seen prior to the five years ago or so when I got out around the country to have a look. I'm thinking, for example, of Woolene Station in the Murchison. You know it's 400,000 acres. Cattle is managed there to bring it back. I mean their emphasis is on like a station in the Kimberley. They actually call the cattle land doctors and they don't export for food but they eat it there. The Murchison is still a cattle station, the Woolene Station but it's about rewilding that land and it's having extraordinary outcomes and because of those 400,000 acres it relies on a megafauna and of course it was done by a variety of other animals and originally on this continent, by big megafauna too, getting out there and harvesting, if you will, and then being food, obviously for ancient cultures on this continent as opposed to.
AJ:
Well, you certainly can't grow crops, and why would you? You'd destroy it Because there are plans, right, there are plans to bloody irrigate the Kimberley and grow, yeah, so it's not that. So that's what makes me wonder if, on the broad scale, you know a continent like Australia, let's just take us, because if you didn't do that, you would have to institute at least massive scale fire stick burning, which, yes, let's have that back with them.
AJ:
Let's, as you say, the, the having cultures have their places back again, and uh, and, and those techniques, but also the way it used to happen, of course, was with the animals that they would eat the meat of, and and I certainly the indigenous cultures I mix with today are still oriented that way, like there's just millennia in their bones, obviously, yeah, yeah and I I wonder, if there's a mix, then if a combination oh and look and look, I'm not.
Steve:
I should be really clear that I'm not suggesting that the world is forced to be vegan or vegetarian. What I'm suggesting is that high-tech food-producing cities of the future will produce alternatives that will replace, by and large, the meat that we eat today for most people. If you want to run out in the wild lands and go hunting, by all means and many people will, just as they do today, but the vast majority of people will probably want to take the more easy approach and will kick back with a, you know, with a mammoth burger. You know, um fake fake. You know, meat mammoth burger or whatever they're eating that is is produced by effectively, through vegetable proteins, et cetera, or through microbial processes. That very closely emulates the meat we eat today, but just doesn't require all of the land.
Steve:
So I am imagining in this book a future where there are people living traditional lifestyles. There are people living off the land, as they've always done in parts of Australia or many, many parts of the world, hunting animals, et cetera. But the industrial farming that goes on today, which I think most people can agree, is awful, and I don't think anyone can visit an industrial farming, you know, industrial farm of the type that you and I are talking about, and and not be repulsed by by what's going on, and so it's that type of thing that I think we can replace with really interesting new technologies that are that are already here and that are rapidly being scaled up. Um, yeah, yeah, I I wonder how much?
AJ:
I guess yeah. When I wonder how much, I guess yeah. When I wonder how much connection with country is important for rewilding self. You know where we started Huge, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess what you're postulating is going to be in these urban spaces as well, like get out there, sure, but it's going to be here too.
Steve:
Oh yeah, that's right. So in my book I talk about just how much I'm just going to click the relevant page how much of the world's cities we could rewild, and I'm just going to jump on that page now. Broadly speaking, I am guessing that about 90% of cities, in terms of the surface area, could be rewilded. So that means building roofs, the road space, etc. I mean I talk about crop production as well, in kind of indoor vertical gardens. But then I talk about wilderness on the walls of buildings and on top of the greenhouses.
Steve:
And by and large I'm imagining a city which is a kind of three-dimensional, multi-story jungle where you've got bike paths and raised roads for EVs and electric scooters and all kinds of things all weaving throughout each other.
Steve:
But the main concept is that the ground space that is currently dominated by cars is given back to nature. So it's kind of I used to love the principle that Hundedvasa proposed, which was that humans own the vertical and nature returns to the horizontal. So it's a bit like that, so that what is now a road in my rewilded or ultra-wilded cities vision is wild space. So the cities are packed full of other species happily living amongst us, and then we live in these kind of vertical spaces and we can interact. I mean, you can go for a wild adventure being chased or chased. You can chase a wild animal or be chased by a wild animal. You know, right outside your doorstep, right downtown. You know that that is the world of of my ultra-wilded cities, but there are also places of very intensive food production and you know commerce and retail and all the things that we do in cities today.
AJ:
I'm going to quote you back to yourself at this point.
Steve:
Yeah.
AJ:
I love this. You say it's probably as difficult for us to imagine how quickly humans could repair the planet as it would have been for our ancestors to have imagined how quickly humans would trash the planet as it would have been for our ancestors to have imagined how quickly humans would trash the planet. I love that we've done a bit more of what your book has done and blown the lid off possibility and some of the what-ifs and yeah, for our part, explored across divides that I lament are so big out there that I wish were more like this mate. So thanks so much for having this yarn with me and and well bloody done on the book, thank you. Thank you so much. So to go out, yes, I close each episode by asking my guests a piece of music that's been significant to them.
Steve:
What would if we could play something?
AJ:
would we go out with?
Steve:
So my dear friend, jim Moynihan is a musician who goes under the moniker Spoonbill. He makes the most outrageous and eccentric and joyful music I think it's possible to imagine, and he has inspired me as long as I've been hanging out around Oz back to uni days. A nd he, yeah, he has a song called Mirari and it's just so wacky and awesome and it's. I have listened to a lot of Spoonbill while creating this book and so I feel like it gives a sense, a taste of the type of fun that is going on in my mind while I'm listening to him and doing my drawings. And, yeah, I just think it's a, it's a kind of, it's a taste of the sort of creativity and joy that I, yeah, just want to see more of in the world. AJ: Oh, me too, mate. SM: I mean, you'll love his stuff, anthony. It's totally nutty, it's bonkers's, completely just, it's just crazy sounds and it's it's. But the main thing is it's joyful and that's that's something that was so important when I created Ultra Wild, was that it had to be joyful because, you know, we're all so burdened or at least everyone I know is burdened by by what we're facing.
Steve:
And I think you know, in order to get ourselves out of this pickle, we need to have fun, we need to be joyful with ideas, we need to embrace joyful creative thinking on a massive scale. We need to ramp up creativity to the max. And yeah, that's what Jim's music is about. So he's a dear friend. We shared a studio together when we were about 21. We renovated an old warehouse in Brunswick along with other mates and we built the coolest pad design pad, music-making pad. It was just the best time ever, and he started making music at the same time as I started drawing. So he's a dear friend who just blows my mind with his creativity.
AJ:
Ah, even more poetic, I think. Thanks, Steve, it's been brilliant speaking with you again.
Steve:
Thanks so much, anthony, lovely to chat with you.
AJ:
That was Steve Mushin, industrial designer, inventor and author of Ultra Wild, an audacious plan to rewild every city on Earth. For more on Steve, Ultra Wild, the book and website, see the links in the show notes. Steve's friend, Jim, was kind enough to send us the track Steve was talking about too, so that's what you're hearing now. A nd for the kids' version with Steve, stay tuned to our y oung f ella's podcast Yeshe Interviews coming soon. Thanks, as always, to you, the generous supporters that made this episode possible. If you're not yet a supporter of the podcast, I'd love you to join us. Just head to the website via the show notes regennarration. com forward slash support and thanks again. Thanks also for sharing the podcast when you think of someone who might enjoy it. The music you're hearing is Mirari by Spoonbill. My name's Anthony James. Thanks for listening.
And do veganism & meat-eating need to be at odds with each other? (inc. ref to George Monbiot, Alan Savory, David Marsh, Tammi Jonas, Darin Olien, Bruce Pascoe, Wooleen Station, Kachana Station)