Permaculture Life and Work - Matt Powers with Morag Gamble

In this episode of Sense-making in a Changing World, I am thrilled to share with you this conversation with fellow permaculture [pr]activist, Matt Powers who is based on the north west coast of the USA.

Matt Powers is an permaculture author, educator, seed saver, gardener, and entrepreneur focused on radically transforming the entire K-12 education system.  Like me, his world revolves around permaculture thinking and action.

Matt, a former public high school teacher with a Masters degree in Education, is the author of the first government accredited permaculture curriculum in North America (fully cited, peer-reviewed, & aligned to national standards), and his work continues to spread in schools, colleges, and universities globally with over a dozen books in 6 languages and 9 online courses.  You can download his Permaculture Education Standards.

Hi recent book Regenerative Soil is the ultimate book on soils for permaculture practitioners - one for your own shelf, and a special gift for a garden and soil-loving friend.

You can DOWNLOAD his book The Permaculture Student 1 for free and also access his E-book version of The Permaculture Student 2 for free too. Fabulous content.

Matt is a wealth of permaculture knowledge and experience offered so joyfully and enthusiastically. It was great to chat with a fellow educator and permaculture (un)homeschooler

Enjoy this conversation and check out all the free resources he has available in the links above.
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• Download this list of 10 of Morag's favourite books.
• Morag's 4 part introduction to permaculture video series.

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LEARN MORE ABOUT THE WORLD OF PERMACULTURE WITH MORAG GAMBLE

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Transcript

Morag Gamble: 0:00

Welcome to the Sense-making in a Changing World Podcast, where we explore the kind of thinking we need to navigate a positive way forward. I’m your host Morag Gamble.. Permaculture Educator, and Global Ambassador, Filmmaker, Eco villager, Food Forester, Mother, Practivist and all-around lover of thinking, communicating and acting regeneratively. For a long time it's been clear to me that to shift trajectory to a thriving one planet way of life we first need to shift our thinking, the way we perceive ourselves in relation to nature, self, and community is the core. So this is true now more than ever. And even the way change is changing, is changing. Unprecedented changes are happening all around us at a rapid pace. So how do we make sense of this? To know which way to turn, to know what action to focus on? So our efforts are worthwhile and nourishing and are working towards resilience, regeneration, and reconnection.

Morag: 0:56

What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation. In this podcast, I'll share conversations with my friends and colleagues, people who inspire and challenge me in their ways of thinking, connecting and acting. These wonderful people are thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and spark the imagination of what a post-COVID, climate-resilient, socially just future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to compost and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections and actions. Together we'll open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking community action, earth repair, eco-literacy, and much more. I can't wait to share these conversations with you.

Morag Gamble: 1:54

Over the last three decades of personally making sense of the multiple crises we face I always returned to the practical and positive world of permaculture with its ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. I've seen firsthand how adaptable and responsive it can be in all contexts from urban to rural, from refugee camps to suburbs. It helps people make sense of what's happening around them and to learn accessible design tools, to shape their habitat positively and to contribute to cultural and ecological regeneration.

Morag: 2:56

We'd love to invite you to join a wonderfully inspiring, friendly and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I'd also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I meet and speak with you today. The Gubbi Gubbi people and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging..

Morag Gamble: 3:27

It's my great pleasure to welcome to the show today Matt Powers. Matt and I live on the other sides of the world from one another, but we share the same passion for permaculture education and sharing permaculture with young people. So Matt has been doing some incredible work in this space at permaculture education. He's the author of The Permaculture Student 1 and 2 and has developed a K-12 Permaculture Curriculum Standards, which has been accredited through the national government in the United States. We also both love YouTube and online education. And I've also shared a panel at the permaculture UK conference about developing online material. So following on from his appearance on the global PERMAyouth festival recently, where he was interviewed by my 14-year-old daughter and also invited his eldest son along who joined in the conversation and played us some of his guitar, too. Anyway, Matt kindly jumped back online with me to talk more about permaculture education and also to explore what's in his new book, the incredible book on regenerative soil. I hope you thoroughly enjoyed this conversation with Matt. So I just wanted to welcome you to the show, Matt. It was wonderful the other day when you joined in with the permanentyouth and have that conversation with them. I know that they were absolutely buzzing from just hearing your perspectives about what permaculture is and what it can do in the world and how they can really activate and be involved. And so it's lovely to have this chance to kind of pick up off that conversation. I'll put links in the show notes about how, where people can find that permanentyouth conversation. So, what I really would love to explore with you because like me permaculture seems to be your entire life frame in a way. Now that might be sort of overstating it, but it's how you raise your children, how you work, it's the focus of your writing. It's, you know, everything that I see about you online, it's coming through that lens of permaculture. And so, for you, what is a permaculture life and how did you, how did you actually come to enter into that space of permaculture being the core. Or are there other parts as well that I'm not seeing?

Matt Powers: 6:02

No, I think you're spot on. I think the part that like is not well seen is because I was a high school teacher and I really wanted to respect all the different diversities within my group and belief systems. I kind of like know to bring certain parts of myself out to the audience. And that would be that I go to church on Sundays. I pray every day before meals. I relate everything to everything in a way, and that's like my strength and sometimes a weakness. For me I have to have a congruency. So my perspective, what we're all trying to do, whether it's in so many of the world's religions, so many of, with a good intentions and principle of the intention behind some of the good things that are misapplied energies and they get good intentions, but look at the damage they're doing, you know, all that kind of stuff. I really see that it's all just trying to take care of people, take care of ourselves, people care. We're trying to take care of the earth that supports us. And there's this unbelievable relationship with nature that humans have always recognized, always gotten this deep energy recharged from. And there's been these unnatural time periods where we've lost that connection and it's come back. And I think that that harmony with nature is the Adam and Eve story. I think that like we are living in a fallen state and we are not natural the with the way we're living and it hurts. And the way we treat each other is not natural and it hurts.

Morag Gamble: 8:13

It's true. There's a deep.. It kind of wrenches your gut when you open yourself to it enough and you feel it, and you feel the pain of the injustice, you feel the pain of the ecological destruction, you feel the pain of the species extinction, you feel the pain of the death that's happening now with COVID, you feel the pain so deeply. And I think it's that deep response to what you see around. Well, I know for me anyway, that ever since I was a kid, if it was this gut, it's like someone had punched in the gut. And unless there was some response that I could have that meant that I was able to do something about that, I kind of felt adrift and I would, I couldn't breathe properly, you know, and it wasn't until I could actually find a way to feel like I was actually making a contribution where I could breathe again and this knot would become fire. And that fire was what fueled the energy to actually keep going. I don't have a mental plan of where I'm going with my work. I'm totally fueled by this feeling that when you were just speaking, it's like, well, yeah, it's that, it's the injustice, it's the distraction. It's the hurt that you get when there's this violence against the thing, which you are, you are part of, you are part of all life. And when parts of it are being destroyed, it does hurt.

Matt Powers: 9:56

And as a teacher and as a parent, as a generational thinker, as someone who deeply honors and respects and values the diversity of belief all over the earth, Permaculture provides a platform for mutual respect and reverence and a place for us to start building automaticity and social and like all the different layers of human habituation. The reason I think a huge part of the reason why there's so much strife in the world right now, there's so much psychic. Just, I mean, you look at the left and the right in America, it's like the worst qualities of both are coming out right now. And I think it's because we're living so unnaturally, I think it's because we are completely, lacking a overlapping culture that we can like nod to each other and be like, yeah, one of us. We're missing this relaxing routine of expectation of relations and I'm not gonna attach value to any of these things in particular, just going to list them. I mean, we had uniformity of our culture. We had uniformity of our education. We had almost, every male was in military service two generations ago, and they all could look to them. We went through it together, we'll get through this. And there's this, there's all these different things. There was the churches, there was afternoon play among the kids in the neighborhood. All these things are gone. And I mean there's church, but church attendance is down. There are community centers, but there's not as many we're. We're seeing the commonality, the overlap in that beautiful structure of permaculture that we value so much that overlap between cultures. That actually allows us to forget our differences for a moment. Be like, we're all in this together. We're one family is missing. And so for me, I'm like, this is the piece. This is the transcendent piece that like we all care about each other though, in the end, we all care about the earth in the end that I saw that linked back to the education, the social and I was like, if we could just teach kids this from a young age, we'd have completely different discussions, politics, governance, inventions, business. Does that make sense or did..

Morag Gamble: 13:00

It absolutely makes sense. Because the thing about those places of connections, and I was having a really great conversation yesterday about commons and the need for re commoning of.. It's like, where are those public spaces, those crossroads, where we meet and where those accidental discoveries of each other happen as well. So then it could be a place where we're just moving through and rather than it being a commercialized space, that those public places are common spaces that are designed and managed and imagined by people for people and a place where people just naturally gather in those interactions and relationships form. And because both where the conversation was going cause places like America and Australia are basically just big real estate developments where there's not really thinking about designing in those community spaces or even the food spaces for that matter, that we've kind of missed weaving into the fabric of our, the structure of our society in terms of the infrastructure, the places where that humanity and connection can emerge. And I think that, it really connects me back into the permaculture ideas is. What I love about it too, is the design focus of it, how it helps us to understand and see those patterns of connection and then actually design in a way that can allow them to emerge, not to kind of like go right! Bang. I know it. But actually to understand that that's where the richness is and to step back and create the conditions for those things to happen. And so design for me was a really important part of where permaculture comes to life. I did landscape architecture and environmental planning and all those sorts of design things in Uni. And I remember them telling me,"designing with nature is passe". And you're designed to make these big structures and I just wanted to design places for people. And so I stepped out, I never worked as a professional landscape architect. I just went straight into working with communities to help design community gardens. I actually didn't tell them that I was designing, just works. Because then people would then go,"Oh, you're the expert. You do it." Whereas that, I think also that kind of sense of democratization and inclusion rather than just participation and doing it for you. But anyway, I'm talking too much. So design, where does the design fit for you?

Matt Powers: 15:48

Because the design gives you the lens that allows you to have the analysis. Everyone knows from English class or composition class. Let's say, I mean, that's everywhere, but, where are you doing studying literature, studying, writing, studying composition, and grammar. You're going to learn the mechanics, the components and the interrelations and behaviors of words. And, and suddenly you're going to read things and you're going to be able to see them. You're going to be able to recognize how things were put gather, and then you're going to be able to do it yourself. And I think that's, what's so amazing is that it's so natural that you show this information to children and they go,"Oh yeah, I see the pattern". And then they see it everywhere because they're mentioned and, it just lights up. And I really do believe if we can get this, this lens of and I see it as a lens because you can design through it, but you also can diagnose through it. And so we look through this lens of permaculture and we see the world, we see the future, we see all these things that aren't there, that could be, and once they're there and this lens is common, it will be common sense. And it will be something that's implicit in everyone's basic education. I was writing a little piece maybe an email that I'm going to do about how it's like, imagine if the three ethics were taught alongside the golden rule in kindergarten. Like, what would that be like if everyone learned that if every business person, every investor, everyone, every politician knew that every everyone else in the world, in their world knew that this is what we value. These are the ethics, these are the boundaries. That would change everything. And it's so simple. It's so revolutionary. And it's, I think that, a lot of people get caught up in minutia about do swales work in every moment in time and place and work on the moon. You know what I mean? It's just like we have to calm down and focus on like the simple truths and the power that they can give us. And that's the same with with a lot of the philosophies and the amazing aspects of world religions. It's like, let's look at the simple truth that they're trying to bring. The simple things that they're trying to show, and we can honor those. We can like raise those up. And I think that that's what's missing, we're getting hypercritical. And I think part of it is because we're missing basics in our lives that give us the kind of grounding that a simple life can give. I interviewed Rob Greenfield recently, I haven't put this out, but spoiler alert, he explains how not having stuff opens up like a meditative space in which that's that thing like you could occupy. That's instead potential, raw potential, which meditatively is what we're doing. Like some of us, not all of us are doing that kind of meditation, but I meditate on the unknown and possibility and not what I know, because what I know is, I want to know what I don't know. I want to know what I'm wrong abou. I want to know what's possible that, I mean, thought about, and, and for me, that gives me the greatest peace when I'm meditating. And so not knowing, being ignorant gives me the greatest peace. So he, this was talking about how the simplicity opens up all this possibility. So I really feel like there's a lot to that too.

Morag Gamble: 19:58

Yeah, absolutely. And I think from what I see of the work that you do is that stepping into that space of the unknown and that I have to find your curiosity just opens up because you're asking questions and the questions that provoke interesting thoughts and research and connections and writings. But also what I see you doing too, is like, I don't know about this. I'm going to go and ask that person, or am I going to ask that person actually reaching out and not this thing about. Okay, I know so knowing is in the richness of the relationships of the people that we connect with and talk to and ask and be open also to sharing what the bits that we do know. And, and so I heard you a while ago going around and meeting up with all these different people and having great conversations. And I think that t oo, that t he knowing that we don't know everything, the knowing that we will enrich our understanding through having conversations with people who are as curious as you are, and as passionate you are about that kind of part of it and where we all kind of connect is where this amazing stuff happens. So some of t he people that you've spoken to, who have been some of the people m ore recently that you've spoken to that have just inspired you and t aking you to that edge of your like, Oh my gosh, this is amazing kind of experience.

Matt Powers: 21:30

Yeah. You know, I think that Carol Sanford challenged me in all these interesting ways. It was really, she is the person behind Seventh Generation's Direction and name, and the whole idea of going out seven generations. She, I haven't even released this talk because it was, it was really interesting. She felt pressed for time and everything. I said, she'd be like, wait, but natural doesn't apply to humans. And I was like, wait, what's your definition of natural? And be like, got into this rabbit hole of definitions. And it was, for me, it wasn't even like the goal suddenly of the conversation to be a podcast. It was suddenly was like to orient myself in the world of understanding and be like, wait a second. She's almost 80. And she is one of the sharpest, most incredible women, minds, people, whatever energies in the world I've ever met or encountered. And her job is to ask questions, to poke holes in things she said, she's like,'so this won't be a normal interview'. And I was like,'okay.' And she just was like, humans are not natural. We move in and out of natural spaces. Natural is what is fixed. What is static. In place. What is place is natural? And I was like, Whoa. And she was like, this is where my grandfather taught me to think. And it was just, I love that. I love being challenged and like having that sea change of like, wait, explain it to me again. This is cool. I love it.

Morag Gamble: 23:24

It's great. Isn't it? It's that disruptive event. And I think we can see that in ourselves, we can see that in that communities, we can see it everywhere. I mean, there's this point where there's it's either a breakthrough or a breakdown, but we do like disruption. Nature is not just this stable, fixed thing. It's this constant, fluctuating flexibility whereas disruption is always pushing for further innovation to happen and creativity kind of really the source of yeah, that's right. And so we need to find a place to take.. If we ask you, I don't know if I always sort of sometimes feel like I'm feeling just a little bit too settled and everything's just kind of, I kind of need to open up the door somewhere else because it means that I've just got into that place of feeling just a little bit too comfortable and not challenging myself to find what the next.. I like also having that peaceful call, like you're talking about, but keeping the edges open, because like I said, at the edge where that happens. And the edge that is being opened recently, I think is the whole world of homeschooling. So I'm just kinda like jumping over there now because you homeschool. I homeschool and I have two that are homeschooled unschooled, really, I guess. And the world has all of a sudden become this homeschool world. And so there's a couple of questions that are kind of emerging as I'm starting to think about. One, is that, firstly, what is your experience been around homeschooling and why you chose to do that with your children and how permaculture has been woven into that in whatever way. And the other part is where have you seen have people started to be contacting you because you have this permaculture curriculum K-2 permaculture curriculum for now they're home and they're going, well, what am I doing? Is this something that you're seeing people are really reaching out for, or how the ways that we can support more people to know about this, because there's still thousands of thousands of thousands of children who are home. And I don't know, a lot of different questions in there. Feel free to go wherever you want with the homeschooling, unschooling, permaculture idea. Because some people feel quite uncertain thinking I couldn't homeschool. I wouldn't know what to do.

Matt Powers: 26:00

Well, okay, so there's one side of that. That's like you are the child's parent and no one can actually reach that child in the way that you can, because you're the parent like, there's that. That's like a truth. That's like the mirror neurons, there's the genetics, there's you recognizing yourself and your child. And knowing that you've got to work through that in order to work through them. And yeah, there's a lot of learnings stacked on top. It's not easy. It is not easy, but we all can do it. The, the K-12 experience deserves a closer look. It's called different things in different countries. And of course they have different programs, but the standardized education model is highly flawed. And at the upper echelons, it works. And so they keep doing it, but there's this thing called the private Dudek function. And yeah, of course it works for the people getting all the information. But if you're going to cut off the top 20% of key information out of the curriculum, and basically people's intelligence and like the lower order colleges and community college universities, those kinds of things, it's just wrong. So I learned when I was becoming a teacher, I was getting done dumbing us down, which is a book about what I just talked about, about how the system was designed to basically rob most of people our real education and award a very small select group of people. And, you know, that's a socioeconomic group, you know, traditionally in American history, if you study that. So it's really a messed up history. I was really lucky and I went to a Top 40 university. I went to a ton, I was like 40. NYU was like 44, 45 when I went to it in the nation. And so that was when I went to college, I was an English major. I went and taught in the 6th most violent County in America. And the 11th graders were like faking and read, hop on pop. And they were being like told crazy stuff and they weren't being motivated, given any kind of respect. And it like freaked me out. And then I noticed all the other teachers were homeschooling. And I was like,"Oh, my lord, you guys are homeschooling". They're like, yeah. And so it's like all the higher educated folk in our area of California are doing it all themselves. It's just like, you know, it's not what you would expect, but once you get under the hood and see what they're... I was doing my internship year, my student teaching here, I was in a classroom in ninth grade classroom. And they didn't know an outline was, and they called my, the outline, introduced the Powers outline, shared it among everyone. And I was mortified because this was fifth grade information. And so I was frightened. And so we started homeschooling. We started homeschooling the way they school. And we were like, Oh, my word, this is awful. My child literally can't take this stuff seriously because we always just talk to him like he was an adult. And so we started to doing all this adapted stuff, start doing project-based. So that was the best practices I was learning as a I was getting my master's degree. Then I started studying unschooling and seeing these people who weren't forced, who learned dialectically learned through experience, who learned through curiosity, who came through their childhood with intact curiosity and intact like emotionally in a way that we don't really see very much anymore. And so I just, and I met these boys that were home-schooled that were sweet. And I say sweet, because it's so clear when you've got a 12 or 13-year-old boy, that's sweet. And if you're a parent, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And I think it has to do with, when we have them in a mob situation, they start establishing hierarchy and like picking order among young males. And if there's not someone there to moderate, like in a boy's bathroom or locker room or something like that, you almost instantly, if the wrong elements are there, you develop this mindset and this culture that causes all these problems and makes them feel unstable. It makes them feel unsafe. So they can't feel like they can afford to be sweet. Fight or flight constantly. So I saw this and I was like, you know what? I grew up in a family of all boys. We were always constantly hitting each other, brothers broke each other's legs and arms put each other in a hospital stitches. I've got two boys. I want to get through this. And so I just was like, I'm going to figure this out, you know? And I was like, I really want my boys to be good, just sweet and good, wholesome, good. And they are. And it is a fantastic thing to have a 14-year-old boy who is just good, sweet. And he does mindless, forgetful things. And you're like, what are you doing? That was the last thing we ask. No, I mean, there's an automaticity. There's like, you know, it's, it's part of them[inaudible] to the back of the brain is what I've heard. But it's around like nine or 10. And they have to just be like retrained. It's amazing how fourth and fifth grade boys are so much more mature than seventh and eighth grade boys. And it's okay. It's something that we have to recognize and work around.

Morag Gamble: 32:59

Yeah I have a 12-year-old boy at the moment.

Matt Powers: 32:59

Yeah! And even the homeschoolers and unschoolers understand, but I also had homeschoolers after I got into it that were like, what do I do with my boy? All he does is play video games. He's got no drive. James I was able to plug him in- I'm going on a tangent-, plug him in to his real curiosity. At first it was horses. Then it was metallurgy. And he was like searching. And we like, let him like follow those really deep. But now as a musician, he's always like played music. But now, I mean, he's not playing because I'm doing this, he'd be in that garage recording. And he is like fanatic, like a nerd, but at the best possible level, he is going to become professional in his understanding of these things. He is already professional. I mean, we record with Grammy winning artists for his first, his first song on his first DP, he in any, and he did that when he was 13, maybe 12. I can't remember maybe 13, but my point is that because I saw these things early on, I hopped into it. I saw what these unschoolers that's what my point was that I got unhedged from, I saw this guy, this French guy who was raised by a neuroscientist who purposely didn't teach him. Purposely. And the kids was brilliant. I was just shocked. And I just watched this and heard his explanation. And I was like, Oh, my word. I felt like all the different, like things I've learned. And I was like, I didn't see any contradictions in it. And that's the other thing I'm maybe unique in that I hold the things that I read in my head, literally. My mom can pull up paragraphs from law tracks, she's read and recite them in the middle of a debate. That's televised. She did this when I was a child. Try getting around that. Right. As a child. So, but I'm good at holding things in my head. And so I ran it by everything that I, I can't remember his name. It's Alexis like Sergio or something like that. But anyway, he is, I remember his line though. He was, my name is Alex and never been to school. And I don't like candy. At the Ted talk. And it's fabulous. I can't remember his name for the life of me, but he just was so spot on. So clever. So funny, so smart. And what he said was by the time he was 12 or 13, he was so eager, wanted to know that he had his parents hire personal tutors. And in seventh grade I went away to school where we learned 20 minutes, we condensed the classes to 20 minutes. You learn with one instructor, you have classes go like that. And then you hit the gym, you run outside in shorts and t-shirts in 20 degree weather. And then you see the rest of the day.

Morag Gamble: 36:19

You did that?

Matt Powers: 36:20

And I was, yes, I did that. And I was alongside Olympians, like in training and I was not in the Olympian and training. I was good. I mean, I would finals and states and stuff, and that's good. But my, my brothers were junior Olympians and my roommates went to the Olympics recently. And so like, like Bodie Miller, like the golden mountain medalist, the American skier like recognized me. And I didn't recognize him. He was like, Whoa. And I'm like, Okay. My brothers were really good. I just get to tag along. But I got to be immersed in this educational situation that gave me the understanding of what we actually have to do to help kids to learn. We have to mimic a one-on-one relationship, keep them completely accountable. And I tried to do that to a degree through the computer. And that's why I'm probably pretty good at it online w ith all my courses, because I was trained at an Apple-certified high school where we only have laptops, no textbooks. And the reason I'm good at curriculum is because I was always being trained w ith my m asters. I was literally writing new curriculum every day for four years straight because that's how I ran my class. I wrote the curriculum on the fly in response to the k ids' desires, dreams, proclivities, and prior understanding so that I could connect those things and pull them up faster. And I ended up t eaching them.

Morag Gamble: 37:54

Yeah. Yeah. I think the responsiveness is the key. And so bringing this conversation back into the, into your curriculum, your permaculture curriculum then so connecting that way of thinking about being responding, having that flexibility, meeting a child, where they are, meeting a learner where they are, whether they're a child or not. So how do you encourage people to use your curriculum then in order to be in that creative space and that responsive space?

Matt Powers: 38:32

I was explaining this to someone the perspective of like the teacher that goes in there and teaches out of the book but knows nothing of what they're talking about. Administrators are like, almost like these people cause they can pop them in anywhere. I like want to like be the person that goes into the temple and flips all the money changers tables over in that moment, because it's insane. You need fluency in the topic you're teaching to actually teach from depth and leverage, to relate to the actual pictures and prior understanding of the child's head. I was not nice to other teachers when I was a teacher because I am so deeply passionate. I feel like we're robbing the kids. Like outright of their opportunity for proper growth. And so I feel like everything should be a choice. Everything should be a menu. Everything should be a discussion from principles, from the core of why you're teaching this lesson, what the objective is, why it even matters, but do it in a way that feels natural, you know, do it in a way that actually resonates with that kid and that group of kids. And so I really I've designed all my curriculums to be these really in-depth menus and design with all the pieces so that they would understand that multiple kinds of learning can fit into this and will come out of this. And I designed really open-ended projects. So you can like very this part, very that part so that when you discuss it with the kids, they're like, Oh, well, I'm going to do this, this and this. And asked them, thinking that being like, Oh yeah, you can do a compost pile, probably a thousand different ways that thought alone, seeing the beginning, the middle, the end of the process and the modulation of them. That alone is a lesson. And the fact that they're holding in their head and they're making a choice about it means that they're saying yes to it before they've even done anything. The good that that does for their learning, their memory, their deeper understanding their ability to get their bodies to jump up and do things. So their body listens to their mind like that kind of stuff is what we get when we properly teach. So I, and not only that I try to really design my stuff so that like the K-12 course, as holistic as possible, I mean, there's, gardening, cooking, seed saving, plant profiles, and then design, you know? And so they see how this fits into the strategy of design and then they c an actually go do it. And they're like, this is g oing t o fit into there. I'm going to take this into the compost. A nd so I really try to do that so it's authentic because that's, it's.. I mean, it's difficult. Teaching is the oldest profession. And I would say it's the most demanding profession. So I wish I could make my online course, absolutely one-on-one but that's kind of why I love teaching the fa milies a nd the homeschooling environment. Ca use I ta lked t o them as group. They discuss it as a group. They started doing the things as a group. And that group discussion understanding ma y t alk about beautiful iterations, stepping up and down the scaffolding of understanding, yo u k n ow w h at I m e an, extending the approximately, yo u k n ow, understanding limits of o ur kids. It's all there. S and because of the mirror neurons, because we're the parents or the lo ng-time c are givers, we actually have that connection that they learn faster and hold it and value it totally different be cause t hey love you.

Morag Gamble: 42:40

And then when I also when I was in Africa, what was it a year before last working with some of the groups over there, part of what's trying to happen over there people starting up new schools, but having permaculture at the core, and I've heard them talking about your curriculum as well saying, you know we actually need to be able to rethink what our education is about because what we've got at the moment isn't working, it's not meeting our needs, the kids that are coming through this, you and I spoke to the young kids, their goals with either to become a corporate lawyer or to become an engineer, I think were the two main things that I heard. And there wasn't really much option and you look around and go, I can't even see a company we're in villages. And so that's that sort of that drive that you go towards this pointy wage of these particular professions and anything else is really not important to think about or to learn about and anything to do with putting your hands in the soil is going backwards and actually punishment was going out to the garden. And so trying to sort of flip that around with permaculture. And so the question within this is what kind of conversations have you been having with people over in countries like Kenya, Uganda was the place I was thinking like with Charles Mugarura. He was one of the ones who I know that you've had conversations with before as well. Yeah.

Matt Powers: 44:19

Yeah. I get consistently reached out to from lots of different people in Africa, about permaculture and teaching it about having me come over there. And I think that the greatest education I got on it was on a podcast with Natalie Topa. Do you know Natalie? Well, because you're young, of course. I highlight your YouTube video in my course with Natalie because it's so good. Her balcony gardening gives, I think it gives all people in urban situations hope. She just was like, Matt, you have to understand that people are refugees twice over three times over. And, and I mean, I understand shock. I understand PTSD. I was in 9 11, I was at NYU when that happened, I lived there during the whole, ch eckpoints a nd all that an d m achine guns on the streets. And so I feel like that panic, and i f that kept happening, you know what I mean? I think like we wouldn't be able to do very much, and I think that's a slow motion thing of what's happening now in America. Which says a lot right about the strain that these, these cultures are taking. And as Allan Savory would say, what's social and economic is mirrored in the ecological. And I don't know if I have enough information to give wise enough answers for all the problems that I've been asked about in those regions, I do know that s tarting w ith permaculture showing those values, teaching it to kids, getting that local economy, that local food economy to start to sh ift, we can get them to shift and get them to start eating healthier food. How are you growing this food? John Kemp talked about how during the locusts attacking everything, the farms that we re u sing, h is methods of foliar sprays were the only ones that were untouched and everyone was coming to them and asking questions. And so it's like we have to find those edges start in and inoculate the consciousness, but I don't want to claim or assume that I have the answer, because I feel like people like yourself who have relationships and that deeper understanding of the place wi ll h ave a better understanding, but I I think that it starts with education. It starts with those three ethics as a basis of commonality and common understanding that generates the common sense that provides the boundaries of a culture that would be regenerative.

Morag Gamble: 47:45

And I think you're right. There's no way that you could possibly even know from sitting where you're sitting, what's going on there and even having been there. I only know what I know from the bits that I see, but it is exactly. It's the relationships and it's the connection and it's the offering. And so, you know, like the Permayouth event that we were both at the end of the day, within that group.. Oh, it wasn't that group. Cause I was at the wrong time zone for them. But the one before that we actually had groups that would be like a window and there'd be kids from a refugee camp in Uganda. There'd be kids from refugee camp n Kenya that connecting up and relating and having this these conversations opening up and saying what is it that you're struggling with over there? And then just starting to have this conversation, Oh, I know this resource might be useful. And then from them identifying what it is that they need and sort of helping to offer bits and pieces into that and then shaping it up. So there's some amazing how many youth programs are happening out of refugee camps that are now actually going out of refugee camps into the neighboring areas, because it's got such cohesiveness there, which is, it's just.. And again, you sort of can't plan it. You can feed it and support and relate and communicate and just be able to every day, just about having conversations with people, trying to.. Like I was on the phone last night to Charles because I know that he's got a group of teachers who can go and help, and there was another refugee camp in Uganda. And so he's helping to link them up with that. And I'm sort of helping to find what support I can. So it's just this global permaculture network, that's myceliating and responding continuously to that. And so just picking up again on a thread that you mentioned as you were, you were talking before was about, Allan Savory and holistic. From his holistic farm management and as I was reading through the copy of your new regenerative soils book, one of the last thing you talked about was holistic soil management plans. So we're just kind of like leaping out of Africa into soils because this is your new book, Regenative Soils, and this is soil or soils? Sorry. I think I got that wrong.

Matt Powers: 50:09

Regenerative soil.

Morag Gamble: 50:12

It is a remarkable book. I mean, thank you so much for being so rigorous in documenting, I guess your research and your curiosity, and you had so many questions about it, which we all have, and you've gone and done the research and put it down there for us. So we can all see what's going on in the soil. What does that mean? How does that work? What are the relationships that's happening? What does that compost actually do? What does that, what does that worm castings do? What all those things do, and then bringing that back beautifully in that last chapter, I'm really looking at what are the best ways to test your soil and how can you create a holistic of management plan? And I would love for you to just to describe what a holistic soil management plan is and how you got to that point of saying, this is what I reckon we should all be doing.

Matt Powers: 51:04

Well. Okay. So this is the thing is when I set out to write this book, I got wind to the research and then quickly got disoriented and realized that when they say we only know 1% of the soil microbes and that we know space better than the soil is true. And I was like, Oh wait. And I like realized that I had to go way deeper and go a way farther. And that this last section of the book that you're talking about was written after I talked to my peer reviewers, because I was like, how do I like tie it up? C ause it's like so much, like I'm going through all the cycles of all the essential nutrients for plants and that's never been done before visually. And so I had, I spent the longest period of time in this that was spent in documenting all the pieces for this book was creating the illustrations for the, just the basic ecological, like soil cycles for each element. Cause they didn't exist. And the ones that did exist were either like purely agricultural, like this was the fertilizer, this was the l eeching agent, like, or it was like ecological. Like this is what contaminants happen in a forest watershed. And so I had to like go through all the literature and find each piece in each instance and craft the actual connections into a visual thing. And sometimes it was soup and I had to like rearrange it until it actually created this movement that I could, that I could comprehend. And once that I felt like I could comprehend it, I felt like others could. Andluckily it remains the case that when I bring it down to w hat my level is, even an eighth grader understand that just as well. Y eah.

Morag Gamble: 53:22

Well that's, I love the way that you're communicating the book in a really accessible way because it does.. Soil science is one of those ones that you can actually get into and just start falling asleep before you get to page 5, because it's so dense and your mind just shuts down. Whereas this is not, this is opening the doors to soil science in a way that I've not seen before. Yeah.

Matt Powers: 53:44

It was exciting and I felt like I felt carried by this excitement. And then it easy to write an exciting book because everything I was doing, I was like, this doesn't exist. This doesn't exist. And I'm like writing people. I'm like texting John Kemp, regen podcast guy. And he's like, no, that doesn't exist. And I'm like, it doesn't exist. See, I'm calling you right now. But it was this Pandora's box and I got to the end of it and I was like, okay, I got to talk to my peer reviewers. And John was able to like, what are the steps? What are the hierarchy? It's like, what matters most? What matters first? Like how do these things like these different clades influence each other when we're actually implementing them in a remediation kind of way. And he was able to walk me through it in a way that it's actually public it's in the podcast I did with them. And this will really actually show how my mind works because I took that and I turned it into charts and I boiled that conversation down into eight, well actually five essential elements. And that's really how it works for me. Like I need it to be basic to understand it to manipulate it, to be able to develop a fluency. Maybe this is why I was a bass player. Right. I need, you know, the whole note, but I broke it down into these key elements that make up regenerative soil and regenerative soil getsbetter and better every year. And there's specific metrics into that and that feed into that and they are the overlapping components. And so it's soil organic matter. It's the carbon levels of your soil, essentially. How much CO2 are the plants transmuting and bringing down into your soil, essentially, really. The minerals. If you don't have sodium in your soil and you're in the Midwest of America, you just don't have it. It would be great if it magically was there. It's just not. So you might have to add a teeny, teeny, teeny bit, a lot of these minerals. You don't have to add very much at all, but they're so critical in so many different ways as I cover in the book that to not have them just makes your plants disease-prone, makes your plants open for eating an or an insect. It is common and drain or a disease or fungal blight or anything. So minerals are really critical. There's something I didn't fully consider earlier on in my writing and thinking about all this space because I didn't encounter it. And it was actually David Holmgren's book, RetroSuburbia that I was like, why is David so focused on minerals? I feel conscious. So then it's really the life, the biology of the soil. And so we've gotten to the point where people have mapped a lot of the beneficials, but mapped because they were used for other purposes in the lab, like Bacillus megaterium is mega big. And that's why. I highlight this in the book so that people know that these are like famous microbes that like, Hey, these help plants, t oo, like Brewer's yeast is endophytic a nd plants all over the earth. So fermentation into alcohol is completely built in nature. It's a bio stimulant as well but it's endophytic. And so it's basically the life in the soil, in the plant, on the plant surface, understanding that and being able to lift that up is incredibly important and then cover crops. So these are essentially lenses, just like permaculture lenses. I think of these as lenses. So you can design through them or you can diagnose or them. And then there's plants because photosynthesis is better. Or if you have the best in the world ever documented compost, y ou're 24% in comparison to a 0.5% a year with annual soil organic matter additions with photosynthesis versus compost. I butchered that. But basically c ompost c an't compete with photosynthesis, not if y ou've got healthy plants and you could be doing the Johnson-Su compost, and the giant bioreactor and waiting a whole year. And you did all the work and then it's half as good as you just having a cover crop. Which if you've gardened long enough, y ou've s een like plants do t his stuff to the soil. And you're like, this is amazing soil. And you're like, these p lants just grew in i t. And there's this like realization you're like, these plants a re doing stuff a nd these plants and microbes are doing stuff. And then airation and hydration and air and water are complicated because so many of us live in really diverse locations where we might have like tropical settings where you won't have aerobic soils, you'll have facultative soils, there'll be regularly w ater l og. And instead of nodulating, they're really associated with nitrogen fixing microbes because there's no n eed, c ause there's all low oxygen environment to begin with. So I really want to like put that out there because I don't want to keep pushing along this idea that aerobic soils are superior. I mean, go look at the most productive rainforest on earth. You will not find t hese black, you know, aerobic soils. You're going to find very efficient facultative soils where you're not going to see nutrients flowing in t he water really, c ause t hey're g onna be handed off so efficiently. And this is something that's in that podcast with J ohn that blew my mind, that applies to so much more and c omplicate some things for some people, but opens up a whole door for us is that when soils are truly healthy, they don't test like they have nutrients. What's going on is the nutrients are trapped in the biology and t hey're handing it off hand to hand, t hey're like, here you go. The e conomy i s so efficient that they've sponged up all the loose stuff. No one's just like letting it out or no, one's dying. And then it's just going, it's all being taken in. It's all coded and partnered. And we can see the same thing with the atmosphere and carbon in the oceans. If we ramp up the engine that cycles carbon, we can handle higher carbon levels and get this. You won't even see it. The carbon is heavier than oxygen and it falls. And so we're exhaling it. If we're surrounded by a food forest, it w ant escape the fruit for us to i nfect those ice cores in Antarctica. No, no, no. It will stay within the engine of life and it will feed those plants. We must realize that if we bring back nature, we bring back the f orest, we bring back the kelp forest. We bring back the animals, all of it. We will find balance faster than we can believe all the metrics and all the scary things and all those things they could happen. Sure. But the reality is we have a clear path that has bumpers on the side that has safety at the end of it. And it's nature. Nature has full capacity to take all the c arbon in, to cycle it a t such a great level that it's simply disappears from, from the way we even test. And so anyway, I just w ant t o, I went on a tangent there, but I wanted to share that. And so airation a nd hydration. We g ot t o really recognize that these things a ren't are necessary, but depending on the crops, depending on the climate, depending on your situation, it'll be a little bit different. And I talk a l ot about that in there. And so if we look at these lenses and look at our context, got to keep that permaculture hat on, we suddenly see, Oh, well, I don't have soil organic matter. I don't have the minerals I need. Maybe you're in Australia and they never have nice sage. They never had those glaciers come and plow and make that rock f lower from the granite a nd a dd i t to our soils. You're g oing t o have that. Bring i n the k elp, b ring i the s ea minerals and all those different things a nd maybe do some testing, maybe do some plant sap analysis to see what actually is flowing because what's in the soil tests is not always what the plants uptake. And that's another l ike revelation of this book is that, John Kemp talks about this a lot too, if you're[inaudible] but seeing all these things in conjunction was what I did and I aligned it so that we could be like, how a re o ur soil organic matter levels? Where do they need to be? What are our minerals? What are we high i n, c ould be toxic in, what are we low in? What are we completely deficient i n? And when we analyze these things, when we think about what bio fertilizers we c an add, what indigenous bio fertilizers and I mean, bio fertilizers i s in the microbes. The fermentation big barrel biofertilizer thing is actually not in the scientific language. That's a slang term that got created. And you could combine the two, you c ould put bio fertilizer in the fermentation and have like a b io-reactor h appening a nd create more microbes that way. But when I say bio fertilizer, I'm specifically referring to a rchaea, fungi, bacteria that are going to stimulate growth and stimulate them. Stimulate immunological functioning of the plant t o h eightened. So you can build these things out from your own site and healthy soil a s you have it, or you could be bringing it in, or you c an be selecting it from farms around your wild spaces around you. I leave it wide open because I c an't assume. The w orld i s so diverse that I've really created a menu as always, right. Trying to honor the student, let them make the choice b ecause once they make the choice, they've already said, yes, they've already taken an action and they're doing it, not me. And so I think it's really critical. And so that's why I h ave charts and things that you fill out. You know, I have things that.. I have questions in this book. A nd so you would go through this holistic checklist and you would go back in the book to the soil organic matter solution section, t hey would go through the mineral amendments and you would see the overlap. A nd you're like, man, I need k elp. C ause it's going to hit four out of five. And when I put my kelp I'm going to do it with a compost tea, or maybe you're going to do it with you're g oing t o do an IMO m ixed natural farming. Maybe you're going to do a Johnson-Su. You're going to, you're going to do it all at the same time. And when you have that fluency, when you know the effects of each of these things, it allows you, it's like when you're teaching homeschool and you completely probably resonate with this. You're like, Oh no, no, no. When you do this thing that covers science and history and English, c ause you're going to write an essay about it. You know what I mean? And it's like, it's real. If you have that fluency, you totally can stack all these functions, stack all this learning. And that's what I really t ried to do is make it so that it's actionable comprehensible and anyone can pick it up and go, Whoa, I'm doing this. Like in, in 5-10 minutes, you know, maybe a minute of just seeing all these different lenses. So t hat's w hat I've tried to do.

Morag Gamble: 1:06:58

And so when is it available for people to, to access this amazing book of yours?

Matt Powers: 1:07:03

I have approved the cover and we are in the final stages. I'm just waiting for them to say that they're printing it. I have approved of all the bits, the printers have it. They also have forgotten food forest, which is about a 3-000 year old food forest in Morocco that's real. And I had this cause, you know, I got boys. So I imagined these two brothers fighting, getting lost and separated from the family. And then this sandstorm comes and the food forest saved them. So get that book right now.

Morag Gamble: 1:07:36

Yes I saw that It's amazing. After you've answered this question about when people get this new soils book, something, you can say a little bit about your writing process. Because this is something that always impresses me that you're able to take these ideas and not just be teaching them, but I'm always so impressed with your capacity to do them. I wonder what is your writing process? Do you have a few key writing tips?

Matt Powers: 1:08:14

Well, okay. So here's the thing. I was the exploratory creative writer, right? Which you feel you're learning, Oh, this is happening. I just wrote this. I didn't even think I was going to write this. I did all that. I crashed and burned. You could probably find some of my short stories online and read them. And I became an English teacher and I had put away my writing and I had stopped writing and I just started writing curriculum. And I got to this point where I have a teacher voice and I can write with my voice, but it's also like, I don't want to share anything unless it's like true and very valuable. And, and it's, so I've like, I've like done this thing where I've stripped down. Like I just stripped down to like everything down to like the bare bones and like, what do I need here? What would be the least like best possible thing to do? That's why I ended up becoming an illustrator with this book because I couldn't pay someone enough money to do the drafts than I did. When I say it took two to three months. I literally spent, and I did it on keynote. So we're not talking about Photoshop. Here are the pen. I'm like click. And then I grabbed the thing that, the line that I made and I'm bending it out and I'm bending it down and then I'm bending totally different weird way of drawing, but I spent three months doing this. And it's building out that understanding and basically like putting my complete understanding into like a visual in and then using as little words as possible to describe it. And I see a kind of like, like a craftsman wood, like a wood cutter or like a sculptor would. Yeah. And so I love writing. It's definitely like a.. I have a writing course even. Some of the people that I referenced in my books have taken my course. So wild. But yeah, no, I like love teaching. I love thinking about the, the mechanics of writing. My son right now is writing a book, two books and I'm helping him. And I've, I consulted with numerous people who've gotten like book deals online. I helped create their outline for them. I just love it. So I really feel like you need a plan. The number one thing is you need a complete outline. An outline that's so exciting that you're like, I just need to fill in this then I'm done, it's going to be amazing. And then that pairing it down and being authentic, like talking to your voice and that, you know, that takes time.

Morag Gamble: 1:11:16

Yeah.

Matt Powers: 1:11:16

Yeah. Um, but to dive back to the question of regenerative soil, the printer has it, it'll be 2 to 3 weeks before I get it. If the long lines are long, maybe 4 weeks, but then I'm shipping it out to everyone. And I have like a surprise about it. And I haven't like told anyone about it. Maybe like this is like a moment that I could share. But I'm really seeing that hard cover. And I haven't told anyone.

Morag Gamble: 1:11:51

Oh my gosh. So everyone's going to get these like, like in my mind, in my mind, I'm like, these things are going to be indestructable. Like, this is the first time I'm going to be shipping books around the world on and be like, this is going to be fun. I am so excited. Like, cause that's like the thing that mortifies me, like if someone gets a damaged book like books on the shelter, you can see all those purple boxes are mine. They've got ding corners. I'm too much of a book person. I'm not going to turn it over. I'm not going to turn the computer around. But I am surrounded by these library of books that I've collected for years. None of the mine. One day I want to write a book, but I books is my thing. And I absolutely love sitting down and just absorbing different perspectives. And, that idea, that idea. It's like this, there's a world of ideas that are surrounding me. And it just, sometimes I can go to my favorite latest ones. This Rob Hopkins one Animate Earth. That GAIA theory with Stephan Harding from Schumacher College. And then t here's Kate Raworth's book about Doughnut economics a nd y ou k now. It goes on and on. I love it. Absolutely love..

Matt Powers: 1:13:21

Have you heard about how they've been drilling into the deepest holes in the earth and they're finding diamondized water and there's life inside the water and they were expecting to find magma that close to the..Yeah. It's fascinating. When we talk about our living earth and Gaia and the new, and I'm referencing a seeker video, you look on seeker and type in diamond water or type in new form of water. You'll find it. It's fascinating because it opens up like again, more Pandora's boxes of curiosity. So that we can like see all these different metaphors play out through all of our traditions, all over oldest religions in texts, living waters. Life comes from living waters inside the poles of the earth. What?! It's really. So I just get really excited. And in fact, this library that's out is a secret. And this is something that I do when I'm writing a book is I only leave out the books that I'm working with and I put away all the other books that might distract me and take me on tangents. And I honestly don't have enough shelf space for like all my libraries. I have them in boxes, but yeah, if you really want to dive into something, create a library around it, read the books and develop a fluency. And so what I have like papers printed out and catalog, I've created my own like library of published journals that have printed off online and done all of this with. And that was like part of my process of writing as well. So yeah, that's what I would say. Andthe book, the idea behind the book is that I would get it to everyone before the holidays so that they could give it out as a gift. That's still my goal and we're on target to do that so that folks could share that. And the crazy, unbelievable thing I think about this book is that whatever you are into now, this will only enhance it. It's going to give you more options. It's going to allow you to understand the other guys and gals. It's going to allow you to understand there are different way of doing it. Because I mean, if you're like, Oh no, no, I'm a pure[inaudible] way of doing compost, too. Now they're like let's get into it. Let's have conversations. Let's look across the board and follow these actual formulas. So we know the biochemistry. Knowing the individual microbes and enzymes. So we know what actually these things can and are doing. It opens up a door to the reader, to you, actually making these decisions and choices and perceiving what's actually going on. And I find that incredibly exciting. And it's, again, it's me giving the menu, giving the driver's seat over to you because I honestly feel like, it's like the people in the context in permaculture are going to make the better decision t han the designer from another country who, you know what I mean, it's empowering those local people. Those people who have been born there. Who've t astes that water, you know, care about that tree care about that, you know, landscape.

Morag Gamble: 1:16:55

These need, they need these options now and they need this kind of information. That is what I'm hearing all the time every week is that our soil has been destroyed by chemical agriculture, our governments and extension offices only suggest that we do that. Because of the way that their land was closed during colonization and taken. And that the shifting agriculture was because it used to be shifting agriculture. And when that changed the land didn't get a chance to regenerate. So when you sort of stop in one space and then you just do the one thing over and over and over, and it's depleting the cells, it's like we're left with this, this soil that's dead. And what do we do? What do we do? To be able to share this, like, okay, here's a menu of things you do look around. What can you find in your environment that you could use to actually start to activate the life back in this soil and not about like, okay, you need this ingredient, this ingredient, like, what is it that's around you? Like, look, and with that structure of the information and the sort of the pattern of the information, I think then that's going to help to unlock so much potential in all these different contexts. So I hear you also gonna run a soils course. Tell me about that?

Matt Powers: 1:18:22

Yeah! So whenever I write a book. I see it as as pairing it where I finally can teach. I didn't write a full curriculum that was, it was actually standards-based until I created the permaculture standards and had it vetted. I need that kind of structure. And so now that I've created the book and I have all the pieces, now, I can teach it. And so this winter, I'm going to be creating the course. I have absolutely advanced permaculture student online starting in three weeks from yesterday or two days ago. So I've got that starting, I've got this book shipping happening, and I've got to film a mini course, an inter course and 12-week course version of regenerative soil for my kickstarter. So I'm doing that this winter. The fires have made a lot of disruptions for me. We've had to be evacuated. We've got a trailer, we've got everything in boxes. I mean, there's boxes behind me because this, those into the, you know, and just, we go, at a moment's notice. And so I'm not going to lose anything. We're good, but it's been disruptive. We've, I've not been able to do as much as I want it to do. And, and it's been stressful. So we're gonna enjoy our Christmas break and then I'm going to dive into it. Actually, it's so funny. I haven't even mentioned this. But I have our future January 20, July 14 through 17, which is an online free regenerative entrepreneurship conference with incredible speakers from all walks of regenerative businesses, all walks of life. We have William Padilla-Brown, the mycologist. We have Neal Spackman of the Al Baydha project, you know, g reen the desert i n Saudi Arabia, but h e's designed it so that it would be a profitable business. We have all these incredible people. I think that there's 16. Vinny C oco who's if you w atch shark tank, you've definitely seen him. He's the Coco taps guy. He p atented a zero waste c oco taps, so that you can put this tap into a coconut, use it, and then take that, and you can even put it in the ocean. And within 30 days i t's f ish f ood. So he designed it to be zero waste. He's the one w ho, one of the other speakers. We have Antoinette Marquez, creator, founder of A ma S ea beauty who takes seaweeds and creates incredible skin products. So there's all these regenerative entrepreneurs that w e'll be having teach us how to start our own businesses, how to work with what we've got in our bioregion, follow our passions, follow our dreams. And I'm designing a curriculum for that as well. You know, this is what I do. So that people, as they go through it a re filling out this curriculum at the end of i t, t hey've got a business plan, they've got their goals, they've got t he direction and they've got, you know, a rationale for why they're doing it and that's happening in January as well. So there's tons of things happening. And in the midst of that, I'm going to start filming. Or just after that, perhaps I'm going to film those soil courses. So expect that to be in the spring that I have that available or our spring, your fall. So that's when that will be available. But the book is so rich th at y ou could read it until then and have more to talk about and learn.

Morag Gamble: 1:22:21

Fantastic. I think so, I'm going to put down the links to all of these different things in the show notes, because there's so many things that you just build off then, I mean, you probably forget that you are, there's so much you're offering to the world, which is just it's such a gift and thank you for doing what you're doing, and it's not just about you and keeping it, everything that you're learning to be passing it on and to sharing it out because.. How would you describe your bigger picture about what you do, what you do and how would you describe it?

Matt Powers: 1:23:06

I mean, it probably sounds like grandiose, right? But I'm really trying to reshape the culture and the world so that my children can have children and grandchildren on, into the future in an ethical regenerative world that gets better because I grew up thinking the world was supposed to get better and better. Like, the generation.. Things get better. And I don't, I don't think that's wrong. I think that's what nature is always doing. It's always improving upon itself. It's always reacting to what's there making the best of what's there and yeah. And I just, I really feel like we deserve, we really deserve better. We deserve so much better. I look at this and it hurts me because the kids in schools o r my kids, I don't see a d ifference. My kids and those kids, I taught them I taught for years and it hurts. You know what I mean? Knowing that like, yeah, because the situation we're in, it's g oing t o suck bad for a lot of people. It's going to be deadly for even more. And it's like, we have to do better. And if we don't do better, how can we go to bed at night? And so maybe it's because t his stuff th at a ttacks my pricks my integrity, or maybe it gives me anxiety or I don't know, but, u m, I have to respond to it. I'm impelled to respond to it. So that's why I give away my books for free. The Permaculture Student 1 and 2 That's why I've got so many little free courses that share so much because it's, I feel like this is a human right. This becomes common sense if we do the right thing, we create stable cultures, if we do the right thing. Yeah, I mean, that's why I'm doing it. That's where the energy comes from. It comes from the connecting the greater need to my own personal need for my children to be okay. You know what I mean? Ca use t hey are connected. To think that they're not disconnected as insanity. Yeah. I mean, we live in a world that's showing us every day, how closer and closer connected we are in a system that's showing stress, which means that a system that's healthy, we have more and more connection along the same lines of healing, benefit, buffering, resilience. So, so yeah, I feel that's, that's, that's my wire on that.

Morag Gamble: 1:25:58

And I love the way you're talking about working towards a new type of common sense, because I think that's what I've always felt about permaculture. It just makes good, common sense and that it only makes common sense when you're, when you have that exposure to it. Like he's talked about before. And when you were talking about how you grew up with this sense that the world is getting, gets better. I think that's, I also felt that, but there was this, there's this definition of what is better and what is progress and what is changed. And so we've been heading on this development model, like, this is what humans do we develop, we improve, but what we need to shift that from the development model to the regenerative model, so that it is, it's not really necessarily that much of a shift in consciousness in terms of like, well, we want to support, you know, to get better than that, but it has a different foundation that has that those ethics at the core of it and with care, people care, future care. So, you know, I think, you know, sometimes it, it seems like I talk a lot about the ethics as well, and then maybe I spend too much time there, but no, it is. That is kind of the, like what you're saying, the foundation of this deepening understanding or the kind of the basis for different time of communication to happen in a different type of pattern to emerge in all different realms of society. So my gosh, we've been talking for an hour and a half. Maybe it's been such an absolute delight to talk with you today on so many wide ranging topics from, from the soils to, to the classrooms to reasons why and the ethics and all sorts of things in between, it's been such a rich conversation. And I just want to say, thank you so much for your openness in sharing and the gift of your time today with us. And I really look forward to being able to share out your book for so many people. And I will let everyone know about our future world and the soils course all of these different things that you have available because you know, it's a gift into the world. And it helps everyone to understand how we can become more regenerative and caring for the earthand humanity. I think it'swonderful. Thank you, Matt.

Matt Powers: 1:28:37

Thank you so much for having me, I had a lot of fun.

Morag Gamble: 1:28:44

Thanks for tuning in to the Sense-making in a Changing World podcast today, it's been a real pleasure to have your company. I invite you to subscribe and receive notification of each new weekly episode with more wonderful stories, ideas, inspiration, and common sense for living and working regeneratively and core positive permaculture thinking of design interaction in this changing world. I'm including a transcript below and a link also to my four-part permaculture series, really looking at what is permaculture and how to make it your livelihood, too. So, join me again in the next episode where we talk with another fascinating guest, I look forward to seeing you there.