A Note from Nick Rose: The attached was sent to me earlier in the week and I have only just got round to reading it properly. It draws on what is clearly a very impressive piece of PhD research by one of Australia's regen-ag farmers and is an exceptional article, in my view. Charlie has given me his permission to send it to you and for you to share it if you wish, with the proviso that you reference him as the author and that it will be published as a chapter in book coming out of the Oceania Eco-Health conference held last December:
COLLECTIVE THINKING AND ‘COUNTRY’
1. Context
Part of humanity’s massive sustainability or ‘eco-challenge’ in this ‘Anthropocene’ era is the ‘food challenge’ (Lubchenco 1998; Rockström et al. 2009; Crutzen 2002; Horlings & Marsden 2011). Also called ‘food security’, this means ‘the ability of the world to provide healthy and environmentally sustainable diets for all its people’ (Godfray et al. 2010: 2767). To feed the estimated 9 billion by 2050 will conservatively require at least a 50% increase in food production (The Royal Society 2009). It will also require shifts in the management of food production and food distribution that amounts to a transformational change in the society we live in (Massy 2013; Evans 2009).
However, the engine of these changes – agriculture – has two massive problems. First, it is being hit (and will increasingly be hit) by a number of intractable and amplifying factors. These include the world running out of water, good agricultural land, energy, and essential fertilizers and nutrients; climate change impacting on production, with droughts becoming more prevalent; and farmers’ returns, available technologies, red tape, economic disincentives and market corruption escalating or deteriorating (Cribb 2010). And second, it is now widely recognised that the dominant approach of industrial agriculture is exacerbating the capacity of Earth to continue providing essential ecosystem services. This includes healthy and adequate food and water (Rockström et al. 2009; Massy 2013; Foley et al. 2011, 2005; Tilman et al. 2002; Jackson 2010; Scherr & McNeely 2007; Pretty 2002). ‘More of the same times two’ truly does presage massive ecosystem collapse. Therefore, as Foley et al. recently concluded, ‘to achieve global food security and environmental sustainability, agricultural systems must be transformed to address both challenges’ (Foley et al. 2011: 338).
Clearly, agriculture will need to be front and centre in confronting the ‘eco-challenge’ because it is both part of the problem and the solution. This means transformative change is an imperative. In this context, transformation is defined as ‘a switch to a distinct new system where a different suite of factors become important in the design and implementation of response strategies’ (Marshall et al. 2012: 1).
Against this background Australia is at the forefront of a new, broad-acre, ecologically-oriented agriculture that is both regenerating degraded landscapes and delivering high levels of healthy food and fibre production sustainably. Recent research into a diverse group of Australian regenerative agricultural innovators revealed personal transformation underpinned the shift to a regenerative or ‘Neo-Organic’ world-view, and away from the dominant ‘Mechanical mind’ (Massy 2013). Such a transformative shift in turn was due to collective thinking in both individuals and their disparate ‘communities of practice’.
2. A Clash of Hemispheres
The Australian continent is the flattest, driest, hottest and one of the oldest on Earth. The result of Australia’s long history is a plethora of distinct ecological systems and co-evolved traits. Many are different to those in other continents. This disparity particularly applies to the moist climates, young, rich soils and low evapo-transpiration environments of northern Europe and America from where both ideas and conquering invaders derived as they attempted to farm Australia after 1788. Australia’s continental age, in combination with a long history of constant drought and wind, means highly leached, nutrient-deficient soils, along with a legacy of mobile salt in soils and groundwater. When to this is added the mega cycle of non-annual climate change (driven by such systems as ENSO – El Niῆo-Southern Oscillation cycle – and the IOD – Indian Ocean Dipole system), along with an island continent that has sailed alone for the last 40 million years after the supercontinent of Gondwana finally segregated, then we have Australia’s uniquely adapted flora, fauna and ecological systems.
This doesn’t just mean a distinctive diversity of species, but an extraordinary adaptation among terrestrial species and co-evolved ecosystems to heat and dryness; to fire; and of systems where scarce nutrients are rapidly and efficiently recycled. That is, compared to northern Europe and America, many Australian environment have co-evolved more highly complex systems of cooperation, co-dependency and symbiosis (Flannery 1994; White 1986, 1994; Vickers-Rich and Rich 1993).
The above key factors – of time, climate and uniquely adapted biota and systems – then impacted on Australia’s indigenous peoples, who likewise co-evolved culturally and biologically over 50 millennia.
Leaving Africa sometime after 70,000 years ago, Australia’s first Aboriginals crossed Wallace’s Line on flimsy raft or craft by around 53,000 years or so ago. They entered Greater Australia or Sahul: the conjoined, low sea-level land mass of Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania. This expanded land mass (up to 25% larger than the current area) existed as Sahul for 80% of the time of Aboriginal occupation. Coming ‘Out of Africa’ and landing way ‘East of Eden’, these skilled survivors then quickly occupied every Australian environment by at least 35,000 years ago (Flood 2006; Mulvaney & Kamminga 1999; Clarke 2003).
Over succeeding millennia Aboriginal people encountered, and were shaped by, the most challenging of violent climatic oscillations. These included millennia of warmer and wetter periods; of giant inland seas and lush forests; of cold dry times and glaciers; but especially of long drought and wind-blown desert conditions: particularly at the nadir from around 21,000 to 15,000 years ago in the Last Glacial Maximum.
The result of such a huge span of adaptive occupation of Sahul-Australia left an unimaginably long-term perspective and indelible imprint on collective Aboriginal memory and cultural practices. This was not just manifested in the development of highly sophisticated societies, but also a unique and interrelated cultural development. This combined a deep practical knowledge of the environment with complex cosmological, religious, belief and kinship systems that resulted in highly skilled and sustainable management of their multiple ecosystems and ‘Countries’. Indeed, what existed by 1788 in Australia was one of the most sophisticated, most wide-spread and most complex of continent-wide, sustainable combinations of land-use practices devised anywhere on Earth (Gammage 2011).
It was this combination that had created a ‘cultural’, ‘farmed’ and harvested landscape, but without the damaging and non-sustainable simplification of functioning ecosystems that accompanies intensive domesticated agriculture. Indigenous practices, while garnering less food than industrial agriculture, nevertheless involved a ‘proto-agriculture’ (Clarke 2003). This included the active long-term assistance of food production (such as tilling for murrnong or daisy yams), fish and eel trap harvesting and management, the planting of seeds of edible food species, food storage and drying, and seed harvesting and unleavened bread production. However, the key land management tool was ‘fire-stick farming’ (Jones 1969). As Bill Gammage described, this patterned the whole of Australia ‘to suit the animals, plants and therefore people’, thereby creating ‘the right resources in the right places’. Such resources were therefore made ‘abundant, convenient and predictable’ said Gammage, and this was because ‘in ecological terms the Law was the same all over Australia’ (Gammage 2013, 2011). Crucially, fire management involved both burning but also non-burning of certain mosaics, patches and habitats so as to protect fire sensitive species.
Then it all changed with the coming of Europeans. Arriving after 1788 in an alien continent sparsely inhabited by mysterious and shy hunter-gatherers, and with a post-Enlightenment, ‘rationalist’ and European-embedded view of the world, unsurprisingly post-1788 invaders misinterpreted what they saw. First, they mis-read the uniquely evolved but ancient ecosystems and their functions in Australia. And second, they assumed Australian Aborigines merely wandered aimlessly across the landscape in a seemingly ad hoc manner, passively relating to the landscape as they vicariously harvested and hunted what they could find so as to survive. Like James Cook 82 years later, William Dampier in 1688 labelled the indigenous people of New Holland ‘the Miserablest People in the World’ having ‘no houses, or Skin Garments, Sheep, Poultry, Fruits of the Earth…’ (cited in Clarke 2003: 53). The fact that in 1788 Australia was already a sophisticatedly managed and modified human environment – a mosaic of cultural landscapes – is still little recognised today.
Within 100 years of European arrival after 1788 (or less than a fifth of 1% of the time Aborigines were here), white European invaders and settlers had rapidly destroyed the majority of the ecosystems so carefully managed by over 250 indigenous nations (Flannery 1994; Flood 2006; Clarke 2003; Mulvaney & Kamminga 1999; Gammage 2011; and on grazing systems: Productivity Commission 2004; Lenzen & Murray 2001; on soil degradation: ABS 2008, 2002; Pannell 2008; Malafant et al. 1999; on plant and animal extinctions, deforestation and ecosystem degradation: Malafant et al. 1999; Lindenmeyer 2007; Lines 1998, 1991; O’Connor 1998; Flannery 1994; Heathcote 1994, 1983; Powell 1988, 1976; Bolton 1981; Rolls 1969, and many others ). That is, this devastating damage wreaked on Australian ecosystems in a blink of an eye was caused by less than one million people. By contrast, it is conservatively estimated that in the 2000-plus generations of the long stewardship of the first Australians since entering Sahul, several hundred million indigenous people had occupied the continent (Clarke 2003; Mulvaney & Kamminga 1999).
The destruction of many Australian ecosystems was the result of a clash of hemispheres: of world-views on how humans historically conceptualize nature (Merchant 1980). The long-term, fifty-millennia view of indigenous people was ‘organic’: that of ‘the image of an organic cosmos’, of a living and spiritual Earth ‘at its centre’, and with an inherent value system that ‘paid recognition to the life and worth of all things, the concept of cyclical renewal, and the binding of nature into a close-knit holistic unity’ (Merchant 1980: xvi).
Behind the lack of recognition of indigenous people and their land management; behind the incomprehension of Australia’s distinctive ecosystems and their biota; and therefore behind the misapplication of northern hemisphere land-use practices and technologies was the mental portmanteaux that was carried by post-1788 Europeans. This was the result of three centuries of the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the rise of market-oriented capitalist culture, and which can be termed ‘the mechanical’. Such a mechanistic world view reconstructs nature as dead and passive: a belief that nature and indigenous people can ‘be dominated and controlled by humans’ (Merchant 1980: xvi; 125). The accompanying values meant that nature was no longer a revered, spiritual, nurturing entity, and thus not held in reverence nor treated with respect. Moreover, it held that humans and their societies did not need to live within nature’s cycles to bind together the self, society and the cosmos. As a consequence, there came the values of conquest, exploitation and linear forward progress, and thus of ‘competition, aggression and domination’.
However, 230 years of land-use by Europeans and their successors, and of the ‘mechanical mind’, has left positive legacies also. There has been outstanding biophysical, archaeological and other research work that has led to a better understanding of this continent and its first inhabitants. Patterns and infrastructure of a capitalist society have been established which, in agriculture and resource use, have supported a greater population both locally and globally, while social patterns of labour, legal and ethical systems and organisation have sustained this expanded population. And in only 230 years some of the new immigrants and their evolving legal systems have also come to identify with, be inspired by, care for, and thus develop systems to sustain and regenerate Australia’s landscapes, while also seeking to achieve reconciliation and reparation with some of Australia’s indigenous population.
Somehow, with this new knowledge and thinking, a bridge needs building between the two different world-views of the ‘organic’ and the ‘mechanical’. Unsurprisingly, agriculture – the source of the food we eat off our landscapes – appears to be providing such a bridge.
3. Regenerative Agriculture and Transformation
In 2013 we have to deal with the here and now. In Australia this means dealing with severely modified ecosystems and species loss; a marginalised indigenous culture, whose ancient, co-evolved, complex and sophisticated landscape management inheritance is largely unknown, unrecognised, and rapidly being lost; and the imperative to produce food in a global economic system.
Modern industrial productivist agriculture, while dependent on the functioning of natural ecosystems, and while feeding a burgeoning global population to date, nevertheless is recognised as increasingly destroying such systems (Gliessman 2007; Love et al. 1993). This is because its values are part of modern industrial capitalism and the mechanistic mind. Moreover, being heavily dependent on the use of fossil fuel, its key practices operate without regard for their long-term, unintended consequences, and without consideration of the ecological dynamics of agro-ecosystems (particularly the supreme importance of healthy soil – Gliessman 2007; Shiva 2007, 1997, 1993; Kimbrell 2002; Brown 2001; Altieri 1995; Pretty 1995). That is why the intensive practices of industrial agriculture are key factors in helping precipitate humanity’s current ‘ecological overshoot’ and its heavy ‘ecological footprint’ (Kitzes et al. 2008). Clearly, there is an urgent need to develop better ways of more sustainably producing healthy food and fibre.
A small cadre of innovative Australian farmers are at the forefront of a new regenerative, ecologically-oriented agriculture that is producing food and fibre off millions of acres in all viable agro-climatic regions (Massy 2013). This movement has largely developed post the 1980s. It predominantly uses ruminant animal energy and time-controlled grazing management to stimulate natural regenerative landscape function (solar, water, mineral and biodiversity cycles – Savory 1988). The result is the production of commercially viable fibre, meat, grain and other vegetable produce in a sustainable manner and with a slashing of fossil fuel and chemical inputs.
A recent study examined a number of case-studies in this regenerative agricultural area (Massy 2013). These included holistic grazing management (the use of animals to catalyse ecological succession and healthy landscape function in livestock production systems, with a focus on high mob/herd density, rotation and planned rest periods) and pasture-cropping (a millennium breakthrough in agriculture that involves new cropping systems that utilize both directly-drilled grazing cereals and other crop species, combined with the energy and other benefits from holistic grazing management, so as to regenerate landscape function and synergistically produce crops with vastly lower fossil fuel and derived inputs use). Other cases included the active application of regenerative agriculture principles in such areas as Biodynamics, the use of edible shrubs for livestock, agro-forestry, Permaculture, land re-hydration, and biological agriculture (healthy soils by natural means), among other practices.
However, the focus of this research was on the social: of what were the factors behind the shift from traditional, industrial agriculture to an ecologically-based regenerative agriculture. The research showed that, across the different case-studies, the leading regenerative agricultural innovators had undergone personal psychological transformation. This involved a major shift in world-view, or what was a fundamental second shift of the modern mind-metaphor: from the ‘mechanical’ to the ‘Neo-Organic’ (the first shift centuries before having been from the ‘organic’ to the ‘mechanical’). By ‘Neo-Organic’ is meant thinking that involves a combination of previous ‘organic’ metaphor-thinking with new ecological and holistic knowledge (some derived from the ‘mechanical’ culture). This shift in regenerative agriculturalists was dependent upon a restructuring of their personal psychological construct systems, which led to a radical change in their world-view, values, ethics, behaviour, and land-use practices. (Massy 2013; Kelly 1955; Procter & Parry 1978; Bannister 2003; Fransella 2003).
What then emerged from this study was that personal transformative change (involving the reconstruction of identity and a new perception of ‘reality’) had largely occurred within a number of different ‘communities of practice’ across Australia (Wenger 1998); had been triggered by a life-shock or a cumulative series of disturbances (which is typical of transformative learning – Mezirow 1995); and, crucially, had involved transdisciplinary inquiry and holistic, collective thinking in the way they accessed and combined multiple knowledge cultures (Brown 2010a and b; Brown et al. 2010).
A key finding of this study was that for a significant number of these agriculturalists, the turn to the Neo-Organic created an openness to hitherto excluded knowledge cultures, including the ‘transcendent’ or spiritual. The process of transformative change was found to be often non-rationally based and bound up with high emotional arousal, and seemed to be a mix of the beyond-conscious and intuitive. Such ‘symmetry-breaking’ behaviour (Haken 1981) is known to accompany major mind-metaphor shifts when, in self-organizing terms, a new deep structure crystallizes (Gersick 1991). It also confirms Boyd’s work that transformative learning comprises a process of ‘individuation’: the freeing of an ‘individual from his or her unconscious content and reified cultural norms and patterns that constrain the potential for self-actualization’ (Boyd 1991 – cited Taylor 1998:13).
These Neo-Organic thinkers firstly exhibited key traits of imaginative trans-disciplinary or collective thinking: such as creativity, new insight, vision and originality. Here collective thinking means the harnessing of multiple ways of understanding an issue, thus releasing the full potential of each individual. In turn this enables different minds to understand each other in establishing a collective society (Brown & Harris 2013). The second thing Neo-Organic thinkers exhibited was a strong ethical approach that linked, in Watson-Gegeo’s terms (2004: 342), to ‘the recognition of the strong human seeking for transcendent and immanent meaning’. That is, there was recognition of a knowledge culture that the ‘Mechanical’ mind has expunged from daily reality. Crucially, Watson-Gegeo likewise found such a ‘recognition’ and ‘seeking’ is strongly linked to the ecological. This is not news to Australia’s indigenous people.
Confirmation of the transformative nature of this major metaphor shift to the ‘Neo-Organic’ was widespread evidence among different communities of practice of an open and inclusive language: support of Brown’s contention to this effect (Brown 2010b). Importantly, when compared to the lexicon of the ‘Mechanical’ mind in industrial agriculture, the ecological language of the ‘Neo-Organic’ mind was more biophilic, empathic, integrative, nurturing, feminine, collaborative, sympathetic and loving, and more holistic and inclusive (Massy 2013). It is and was a language more conducive to reflection, learning and integrative-holistic or collective thinking.
4. Commonality of the Australian Indigenous ‘Organic’ and the ‘Neo-Organic’ Mind
Both are examples of collective thinking. The Australian indigenous ‘organic’ world-view and mind is profoundly ecologically based; is encapsulated in their idea of ‘Country’; and is a clear example of collective thinking. Their integrated use of knowledge cultures includes the ‘individual’, the ‘family’, the ‘community’, a sophisticated ‘natural science’, the ‘transcendent-spiritual’, and the ‘holistic’. Their natural science incorporates acute observation and deduction, and inherited cumulative knowledge. All this is unremittingly tested in the harshest of survival crucibles, and verified far more strongly than any number of human peer-reviewed journal articles. As we have also seen, the transcendent-spiritual (via a complex cosmological, religious belief and kinship system that hinges upon the Dreaming, The Law, Songlines, totems and so on) is at the very centre of their extraordinary long-term, ecologically sustainable survival over an immense period of time. Such an ‘Organic’ mind is epitomised by their concept of ‘Country’.
5. The Australian Indigenous Concept of Country
It was and is the ecological and spiritual concept of Country that enabled, over many millennia, the indigenous creation and maintenance of diverse, healthy and regenerative functioning ecosystems continent-wide. There therefore must be profound lessons here in a philosophy which, in Bill Gammage’s words, held that ‘Land Care is the main purpose of life’ (Gammage 2011:131).
Every indigenous person has a Country, where one’s ancestral land has both spiritual and universal components as well as the practical and local. As Gammage encapsulates, ‘Songlines distributed land spiritually; “Country” distributed it geographically”’, and where ‘narrowly defined, land, water and their sites and knowledge’ are ‘in the care of a family under its head’ (Gammage 2011:130). There is thus a network of Countries that form an interlinked, natural continuum, where each spiritual and cultural inheriting land-owner is obligated to care for their own Country. Debbie Rose points out that ‘the relationship between the Countries ensures that no Country is isolated, that together they make up some larger wholes ~ clusters of alliance networks, Dreaming tracks and ceremonies, trade networks, tracks of winds and movements of animals’ (Rose 1996:12-13). As just one small example of this organic-holistic view, Oyster Bay people (on Sydney harbour) called trees ‘Countrymen’ (Gammage 2011:125).
Given that indigenous people depended on land for long-term survival; were obligated to care for it; and had deep ecological and spiritual knowledge of their Country, they thus developed intimate associations with their Country. They ‘felt intensely for their Country. It was alive. It could talk, listen, suffer, be refreshed, rejoice.’ It was like a living, nurturing friend, parent, lover: ‘they knew it and it knew them’ (Gammage 2013:3). It was in Country where ‘their spirit stayed, there they expected to die. No other Country could ever be that…Country was heart, mind and soul’ (Gammage 2011:142; and 2013). That is why indigenous people feel bound to their Country and not just its best parts.
Debbie Rose evocatively defined Country as ‘a nourishing terrain’. She summed this as Country being ‘a place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or represented, it is lived in and lived with’. ‘Country’, she says, ‘is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life. Because of this richness, Country is home, and peace; nourishment for body, mind, and spirit; heart’s ease’ (Rose 1996:7).
Echoing President Roosevelt’s famous speech in the midst of the 1930s Great Plains Dustbowl disaster, that ‘a nation which destroys its soils destroys itself’, Debbie Rose concluded in 1996 that ‘[t]he interdependence of all life within Country constitutes a hard but essential lesson ~ those who destroy their country ultimately destroy themselves’ (Rose 1996:10). This is in stark contrast to the dominant ‘Mechanical’ mind which celebrates current ‘dominion’ thinking in Australian land-use.
6. Evolving Concepts of Regenerative land-Use Implies a Reconciliation with Traditional Owners and also with Country
If we are to regenerate land and belong on it and with it, then what is needed is a new view of Country for non-indigenous land managers and consumers. Clearly the complex indigenous and integrated ‘Organic’ practical, cosmological and spiritual view cannot be wholesale adopted. Yet some regenerative agriculturalists, in their move beyond the ‘Mechanical’ mind, have experienced, adopted or practiced some elements of the ‘Organic’.
Almost without exception their approach is strongly ethical and ecological. This usually involves a strong sense of, and affinity for, ‘place’, and, being collective thinkers, this is linked to openness to other forms of thinking and transcendence. In many cases, therefore, there is a spiritual element. This is either manifested via traditional beliefs and practice in Western religions (such as a Christian faith), Eastern religions (such as Buddhism), other cosmological beliefs (such as Rudolf Steiner’s work), or an openness to a living nature spiritual world (Massy 2013). As an example concerning the latter, in almost all indigenous peoples their very existence is drenched in daily living in a spiritual, animistic (a belief system whereby all natural objects are believed to have a spirit or soul) and often totemistic world (whereby a totem involves a spiritual link between people and their natural universe – Flood 2006:4). Such totems act as symbols in a belief system ‘linking the human, natural and super natural worlds’ (Flood 2006: 136). Elements of such beliefs have carried on into Western cultures, such as Celtic views on ‘fairies’ or nature ‘sprites’ and such (Frazer 1974). A number of regenerative agriculturalists have either encountered nature spirits (including photographing ‘orbs’), or have come to firmly believe in their existence in the Australian landscape (Massy 2013).
It would appear that, being a recent development, ‘Neo-Organic’ thinking is only just moving into a new space, and that because of a capacity for collective and transcendent thinking and transformation, there is the potential for continuing to evolve a Neo-Organic and sustainable-regenerative long-term view of Country. Key elements of this could include:
- First, reconciliation with, collaboration and learning with, and partnership with indigenous peoples previously dispossessed of their particular Countries. i.e. Modern Australian land-owners have yet to come to terms, yet to be reconciled, with the truth and implications of dispossession and the deep loss of Country for previous indigenous occupier-managers: a loss that Bill Stanner describes as the loss of ‘hearth, home, the source and locus of life, and everlastingness of spirit’ (Stanner 1969: 44-45).
- Second, as this dispossession also involves the enormous loss of millennia of ecological knowledge, then from a recognition of the deep, deep loss of Country for indigenous people could then come a reconciliation with, and thus a healing and regeneration of, Country itself. That is, why should we discount the millennia-old indigenous view that the entire organic living and inanimate entity of a Country knows, feels, breathes and is alive in both the physical and spiritual realms?
- And third, building on a sense of place and the above two elements, the ‘Neo’ in ‘Neo-Organic’ collective thinking can be strengthened by an ever deepening ecological literacy that builds on traditional natural ‘science’ in combination with modern systems-ecology and similar scientific and other knowledge. Thus, while modern non-indigenous Australian farmers may not be able to replicate the indigenous world-view and deep religious and spiritual intimacy with, and understanding of, Country, yet with indigenous partnership and help they could move towards the idea of ‘nourishing terrains’: where holistic ‘Land Care’ and regeneration in perpetuity is the underlying principle of all goals, and ethical, moral and spiritual behaviour.
7. Collective Thinking at a Wider, Societal Level
Following a seminar on regenerative agriculture and transformative change in May 2013, a process began at the ANU’s Fenner School of Environment and Society to form an Alliance of across-discipline researchers, academics and practitioners so as to recognise and build on the importance of Neo-Organic thinking and the emergence of regenerative agriculture.
This as yet non-formally constituted organisation is called ARLASH: an Alliance for Regenerating Landscapes and Social Health. It has as loosely affiliated members a range of leaders in their fields: of regenerative agriculturalists, biophysical and social scientists, education and policy professionals, indigenous leaders, health and environmental management practitioners, and research students and others across a number of different universities, research institutions, and NGOs. Following two workshops, the organisation is moving towards a more formal structure and the inclusion of other interested parties. Subscribing to the oft-quoted observation that ‘the thinking that has got us into the mess won’t get us out of it’, there is a recognition that new thinking and solutions are required for complex, emergent problems. ARLASH’s intent is thus to invest in human capital to harness the collective knowledge in the minds and experience of those with an influence and an interest in land and the connection to society health inherent in regenerative landscape management. A necessary key goal is to therefore develop new forms of thinking, collaboration and doing so as to regenerate both our landscapes but also, as a consequence, that of societal and human health (both physical and mental). This follows increasing evidence that food produced off intensive, chemically-treated industrial landscapes is less nutrient-dense and carries more toxins than food from healthy ecological agricultural systems. This is supported by evidence that alienation from nature has severe mental health consequences (on the bio-physical side see Weis 2010; Fan et al. 2008; Schümann & Elsenhans 2002; Johal & Huber 2009; Engdahl 2007; Seralini et al. 2012; Wilson & Tisdell 2001; Hungerford 2006; Lockie 1996; McLaughlin et al. 1996; and many others; and on the mental side see Moore et al. 2007; Schirmer et al. 2013; Chivian 2001; Gorrell 2001; Irvine & Warber 2002; Pretty & Smith 2003)..
In keeping with this new thinking, the intent of ARLASH is to re-design the traditional top-down Western approach to knowledge generation, extension and learning, and to do so in an integrated, holistic and collective way. Under this new model, regenerative agriculturalists would be recognised as experts in their field, to be empowered as teachers, where their practices are deemed worthy of research and their eco-systems as viable models; and that the food off these ecosystems, along with the systems themselves, should be examined by the best bio-physical researchers. From this can flow education and research at all levels (primary school through to post-graduate and the general community); across-discipline teams could collaborate on the ecosystem linkages to the health of humans and animals; major policy implications could flow from the new Alliance. In short, the Alliance could provide a key pathway to turn our unsustainable society in the Anthropocene into one approaching a Neo-Organic society with accompany ethics, values and practices focussed on regenerating both landscapes, Countries, and people for perpetuity. Whilst early days and in a new creative space, ARLASH is emerging as a wider working model in progress and an exciting development in applied collective thinking.
Conclusion
History teaches many lessons. One constant that should engender humility is that the marginalised, the ‘innocent’, and those possessing or subscribing to non-mainstream knowledge in modern industrial capitalist society may instead have valid experience, answers and solutions that paradigmatic ‘mechanical’ thinking has discounted (Freire 1970; Saul 1992; Illich 1971; Gammage 2011; Rose 1996; Flood 2006; Clarke 2003).
It would appear that if humanity is to address the mess of the Anthropocene era then a new collective type of thinking is required which generates a Neo-Organic world-view. This thinking puts first a moral, ethical and perpetuity approach to the regeneration of landscapes, Countries, people, their suburbs and cities, their societies. A pathway to this thinking is being provided by those not recognised in the traditional social structure and therefore the mainstream avenues of power: by dispossessed indigenous people, by regenerative farmers, by those redesigning liveable cities and food systems, and by those who think in a Neo-Organic, collective way. Perhaps it is time we listened to them and our suffering yet forgiving, abiding Earth and its marvellous self-organizing systems.
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