Futuresteading
Jade Miles
This is a conversation about the future. About creating a culture that values tomorrow. We reckon a slower, simpler, steadier existence is the first step - one that’s healthier for humans and the planet. We call it Futuresteading. Each week we chat to community builders, ritual makers, food growers, health wizards and environmental wisdom keepers, gathering practical advice and epic solidarity - so we can all nut this thing out together. Join our nitty, gritty, honest and hopeful convo every Monday during our 16 episode seasons. Support the pod by shouting us a cuppa >>> buymeacoffee.com/futuresteading
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Top 10 Futuresteading Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Futuresteading episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Futuresteading for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Futuresteading episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
02/14/21 • 57 min
Charlie Arnott is an eighth generation Aussie farmer, educator, regenerative ag advocate, podcast host, wellness dude and pretty darn enlightened dad in his spare time.
For all that, there was a time Charlie wasn’t such a conscious operator. His early farming career was characterised by all the conventional stuff; synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, a high input/output model, and a bitter ongoing battle against nature.
Today, he shares the epiphanies that led him to where he is today -- an award-winning biodynamic farmer who lives and breathes regenerative principles -- plus a veritable polyculture of stories, struggles and holistic thinking. A thought-provoking conversation with a visionary fella.
SHOW NOTES
- A blessed country childhood with a high bar for work ethic and a deep appreciation of farming
- Back on the farm from 1997, questioning the congruence of his values with his farming practices
- Interrogating chemical use, increased understanding in human health.
- “Once you’ve learned other ways of doing things, you can’t unlearn them, and I was searching for something to “go towards”. I had a new set of KPIS including ecology, well being, sense of purpose."
- Building a new community of intuitive, curious land managers.
- Changing the paddock between your ears!
- Why people are mean when they are scared.
- If you don’t have a few enemies, you're not having a good go.
- Making decisions through the lens of seven generations.
- Making the legacy attractive enough for the next generation to see it as desirable.
- “My sense of compassion and gratitude for the paddocks in my care is immense.”
- Practices that are ritualistic and foster a sense of reverence for our surroundings
- Engaging with the essence of our biome.
- Why we need to keep our food coming from places that are as close to the natural world as possible.
- Accepting those with different filters and ethics.
- Are plants sentient beings?
- Why using your credit card to abdicate responsibility for your actions isn't enough.
- The joy of not being an expert.
- Why it's OK to judge your former self but never others.
- A day in the life of Charlie Arnott
- Journaling for clarity and gratitude
- “Success is the confluence of preparation and opportunity”.
LINKS YOU'LL LOVE
Charlie Arnott -- Website, Instagram, Podcast
Sacred Cow: The case for (better) meat -- Documentary
The Secret Life of Trees -- Peter Wohlleben
1 Listener
05/24/20 • 40 min
Together, we’ve got this.
But we’ve also gotta make it happen, grabbing the moment by the short n curlys and becoming everyday changemakers.
This week we break our own rules of sticking to 20 minutes and blow out to 40. But we think it’s worth it, and hope there are ideas within that pique your curiosity and propel you to action.
We yak about a stack of ways to make change that each and every one of us can bring to fruition pretty much immediately. All simple, doable, impactful.
Again, we apologise for the odd audio crackle. This pod-via-distance thing isn’t ideal but we’ll get the band back together as soon as we can! Thanks for understanding.
SHOW NOTES
What can you change? Here are 20 easy-as ideas (for people who like lists)
1. Divest your superannuation away from coal industry supportive funds.
2. Join your local food co op & continue to actively participate (being willing to roll with the inconvenience of things sometimes being unavailable).
3. Stop using single use plastic.
4. Grow your own food and swap what you can't grow.
5. Make your own presents.
6. Buy less shit.
7. Drive less (“do I really need to go into town?”)
8. Always think local: holidays, presents, food.
9. Reframe 'luxury' as drinking fresh milk not visiting a spa.
10. Go slow: play with your kids, grow from seed, swim in rivers, make from scratch, draw, nana nap, write letters not emails, cloud watch, picnic, hand water.
11. Write to leaders demanding change: local, state & federal.
12. Teach your kids to be practical not digital: build, grow, create, learn.
13. Really live in the season: food, activities, clothing,
14. Connect more deeply with the natural world: seasonality, camping, bushwalking, river swims, bare feet.
15. Support the second hand economy .
16. Celebrate simple: actively seek simplicity over complexity
17. Share your knowledge: seek skills from the elderly and teach children your skills.
18. Redesign your house renovation to be smaller: less is more
19. Veto your work: actively seek projects that align with your beliefs
20. Commit to & value a home based life
LINKS
- To watch: War On Waste
1 Listener
11/15/20 • 56 min
Diego Bonetto, aka. The Weedy One, grew up on a dairy farm in northern Italy where it was still common practice to collect the wild bounty of the land.
After moving to Australia in the 90s, Diego found that his practical foraging knowledge and weedy know-how was actually pretty rare. He lamented our modern approach to "weeds" -- a battle waged with poisons rather than a loving relationship that respects the valuable, nutrition and wisdom of the plants all around us.
So he became a weed advocate and educator, harking back to the dandelions, nettles, mulberries and edible mushrooms of his childhood and sharing their stories with those longing to return to their roots.
Diego's enthusiasm will inspire and move you, as it has done for the thousands of people who have attended his public and private workshops, events and weed walks. This conversation about belonging, sustainability, agency and food is just a glimpse of Diego's immense knowledge, and we encourage you to connect with him online or better still, in person!
SHOW NOTES
- Collecting wild plants, fungi, grains and berries as a child to supply seasonal produce to his family larder.
- Empowering people to recall childhood memories ; mulberries as lipstick, daisy chains to overcome fear and find confidence.
- Foraging does more than just give us free food; it’s our chance to experience gratitude, connect to ecology, anchor us all to the now. It cuts away our entitlement to resources and encourages us to engage in the gifts of the natural world.
- How to create steps to build foraging confidence, even in urban spaces.
- Basic rules of foraging.
- Foraging is not survival, it's establishing relationships of care-taking.
- Ocean foraging.
- The vast majority of foraging is handfuls for tasting rather than buckets of food.
- Are plants a living, conscious, feeling things?
- Why we should be up in arms about factory farming which is enslavement into a system of yield rather than being a wild species which fetches its own minerals and grows of its own accord.
- We are part of a system where we eat and can be eaten.
- Foraging foundation of being still, staying put and becoming part of a specific cycle so you can build knowledge.
- Stepping from observer to stakeholder to caretaker.
- Why “weeds” is an arbitrary term.
- The importance of acknowledging the services that plants play.
- Backyard medicine is the result of coevolution.
- Calling on the knowledge of our wisdom holders to maintain self care.
- Why mulberries and blackberries are wonderful foraging teacher species and part of our ecological symbiotic contract to eat the species.
- Putting humans back in the cycle of life.
LINKS YOU'LL LOVE
- Diego Bonetto on Instagram @theweedyone
- Diego Bonetto online
Photo credit -- Aimee Crouch
Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/futuresteading)
Ep 139 Sadie Chrestman - Farm schools, sharing white goods & building bloody great partnerships
Futuresteading
06/23/24 • 47 min
This episode is akin to being a fly on the wall as you overhear a convo... a warm, convivial, personal conversation to round out season nine.
Listening back, while editing - with the Sunday roast cooking - it felt intimate to be part of this natter between Sadie and Jade which was recorded in late Spring art the end of their respective days. They poured themselves a glass of wine and hit the recording button. Neither were in the mood to touch on doom-dom so they intentionally avoided consumerism, capitalism and colonialism, but unpacked many a worthwhile morsel to help us in our huddles - why do we all have our own white goods?
Join the chat for a little snapshot capture of two farming women who've created public facing businesses while they share what this experience has been like and where it might go to next...perhaps a school, perhaps a space for the community to activate, perhaps a collaboration of good folk bringing their best selves, hopes n dreams to the table to create a homegrown hundreds and thousands solution to land management.
References:
Fat Pig farm
Wife Drought - Annabel Crabb
Milk - Matthew Evans
Support the show
Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters
Show Notes
Checking in on our promise to invite a complete stranger for a cuppa
Being ballsy enough to open yourself to strangers & invite them in
The weight of creating an experience that people become very familiar with & in time take a place of personal connection.
The pressure of having to deliver when you are someone's bucket list
The pressure of being part of someone's integral nostalgia & memory
Moving away from being a restaurateur & stepping into full time farming & parenting
The importance of the person that holds all the pieces of a community, to drive, listen & manage cohesion
Are the answers going to be found in the weeds
Could they run a high school stream on fat pig farm covering everything from science to economics?
Collecting people & bringing them in to her place of nurturing
Why she isn’t the power behind the throne but a partner in crime to live her best life
Removing gender from the way we define our best selves
Walking in step with many, even when those many aren’t necessarily the ones you would select if given a choice
The long hard process of defining your no-go zones
Our greatest capability is to find solutions from within our community
Creating bioregional strengths that creates a culture
How do we get people off social media where the sound bite lives and the complexity gets lost
Complexity needs to be celebrated and continued - keep it alive and be ok with that
SAFE and HELD - is her one word that reflects HUDDLES
E68 Lisa Wells ~ Making a life at the end of the world
Futuresteading
08/29/21 • 46 min
Jade speaks with Lisa Wells, award-winning poet, essayist and author.
In her new book, Believers: Making A Life At The End of the World, Lisa seeks out and learns from trailblazers and outliers around the world who are pursuing radically hopeful lifestyles -- even in the face of climate despair.
There's so much to glean from this conversation: stories and lessons from those living the change, the treasures that await outside the norm, the beauty of bird language, the mess and wonder of non-tech-mediated human relationships and how to sow a fruitful future.
As Lisa puts it, it can take a lifetime to learn how to live -- but hearing from others who have made an art and science of living like tomorrow matters sure helps speed up the process.
SHOW NOTES
- It's not her first writing rodeo but it's definitely her first book; it took six years!
- She interviewed those who were on the absolute edge of convention. What can we learn from them?
- Do human beings have an innate capacity to be beneficial contributors?
- Growing up in a DIY sensibility
- Finishing her education at wilderness school
- Transformation inevitability
- Reckoning with the reality that we need to make significant change
- Pushing back on binary perspectives and stake-out positions
- Making our transformation more attractive: Living in community, re-wilding, growing, trial and error
- The physical intimacy of being on her knees in the dirt for the sake of future generations
- Recognising that we are just creatures on the planet with a very short lifespan
- Wilderness school: becoming rooted in her bioregion
- Learning birdsong as a foreign language
- Dismantling domestication
- Owning what it means to be in relation to others who you are reliant on
- Playing the role of translator for the 'outsiders'
- Managing balance as an empathetic person
- If you want to be in relationship, you need to be willing to throw some chips on the table
- Her vision of a fruitful future (without devices and with a whole lotta mess)
- Why it takes a lifetime to learn how to live
- Being freaked out by being immortal
LINKS YOU'LL LOVE
10/25/20 • 67 min
Kirsten Larsen + Serenity Hill are proof that two minds are better than one.
As the founders of Open Food Network, a game-changing open source technology at the centre of building valued and fair food chains, they think globally, act locally and are actively encouraging a culture where whole-self is present in the workplace.
Hear how these two values-aligned women brought their shared vision for fairer local food systems to life -- and why the rest of the world is excited.
*keep it rolling right till the end for Futuresteading listener shout outs*
SHOW NOTES
- Social justice from an early age
- The impact of ‘coming out’
- The freedom of the natural world
- The value of independent thinking as a central value
- Having the tools and empowerment to challenge the system
- The power of knowing you were loved as a child
- A desire for purpose is in every one of us
- From a broken state of deep ecology to a place of believing in the power of conscious capability
- Identifying technology as the missing piece for connecting eaters with growers
- Learning how to unlock problems by listening to the needs and filling a gap
- Structuring things to disable centralisation of power
- The critical role of aggregators/food hubs in a local food system that are locally relevant and transparent
- The power of collaboration for efficiency, capital ownership, accessibility, logistics
- The myriad of ways that all tiers of the food chain can embark on change
- The value of “open source” as a language which is not constrained in its ability to adapt and leapfrog
- Offering opportunity for knowledge commons
- The privilege of having the psychological knowledge that you have ‘back up’
- Transvestment - recognising that you are drawing money from the old economy and placing it into the ideological vision of a new future
- Getting to a point where work that conflicts with ideology is no longer needed
- Building space for others to step into positions of influence where they may not have previously had a voice
- Having a baby to ‘turn off’ from ideological responsibilities
- Consciously creating a culture where people bring their whole selves to the work place
- Creation of a ‘heart channel’ in the workplace for frank, open, personal story telling
- Being honest with kids about the truth of the world
- Evoking joy and aliveness in the next generation
- Nature based education as a central cog in our communities
LINKS YOU'LL LOVE
- Open Food Network
- CERES
- Food Connect Brisbane
- Joanna Macy
- Deep Green Resistance - Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay, Lierre Keith
- Treading Lightly - Karl Erik Sveiby, Tex Skuthorpe
E48 This homesteading life with Sarah Stutzman
Futuresteading
03/28/21 • 50 min
Come with us to a homesteading, homeschooling farmhouse in Pennsylvania where the days start early and the blessings are abundant.
Grab a yellow chair on the porch (to the tune of morning crickets) and meet Sarah Stutzman, the down-to-earth powerhouse behind Wellfolk Revival, a place to meet belly to belly and up-skill yourself, your kids and your community.
This is one of those rocking chair chats that offers a glimpse into someone else's world; their daily habits and ways of thinking. Their challenges and triumphs. Their personal paradigm.
And even if you don't aspire to be a modern day homesteader, this convo could very well revive whatever latent life dreams you've got hiding in there. Time to action them?
SHOW NOTES
- Raising kids in a “new normal”
- The value of community sufficiency
- What is homesteading?
- Her childhood on a Christmas tree farm surrounded by exotic animals before moving to life in a subdivision
- Accidentally homesteading via a desire to know where her food came from
- Using skills to teach people how to start a garden, grow their food and take baby steps
- Building community
- Resources needed for up-skilling
- Craving community
- Bringing people around the table to learn
- Pivoting business around Covid
- Eating organ meats and head cheese
- Embracing the chaos and imperfection
- Blowing the romance perception and keeping it real
- Be the ripple effect by inviting people to your real house (messy and all) at any time and encouraging them to share their new skills with others
- Getting the kids involved so the foundations to hold them during the rebellion phase are strong
- Letting kids feel their own way and encouraging them to learn through mistakes
- Getting past our own failures, focus on our successes
- Integrating with the local Amish, traditional farmers and new wave of micro farms
- Connecting!
- Reconciling the process of taking life to sustain our own nutritional needs
- Counting the things on your plate that you have a connection to
- Avoiding the throw away mentality
- Using the ENTIRE animal to honour the WHOLE and not just the best parts
- Looking for the blessings in between the constant hard work
- Nourishing our bodies with good food and our minds with beautiful things
- Stopping and embracing the simple moments as a measure of success
- Seeing success through the eyes of a child
- The power of pulling out other people's gifts and talents
- Avoiding the overwhelm of the emergency by doing the small things every day
- Haste makes waste so just make pace
LINKS YOU'LL LOVE
- Wellfolk Revival online + on Instagram
E34 Anthia Koullouros : Apothecarian, slow living maven
Futuresteading
11/22/20 • 57 min
For all the fad diets, juice fasts and dogma out there, few health advocates keep it as real as Anthia Koullouros.
Anthia is one of Sydney's original nose-to-tail, soil-to-plate, no-BS Naturopaths who was questioning supplements and sipping bone broth before it was cool. She's an author, speaker, educator and Apothecarius (listen in to see what that brilliant term entails) who weaves science, spirituality, feminism and self care like an absolute master -- yet never takes herself too seriously.
This chat with Anthia was particularly timely, catching her right on the cusp of big business and life changes which she was gracious enough to share with us.
You'll leave this convo feeling like you've received a big, warm bear hug from a wise woman who just gets it.
SHOW NOTES
- Her instinctive herbalism spurred by Cypriot ancestors
- Her apothecary origins where women could be healers
- Her attraction to the humble weed and the essence of healing wholly
- Breaking into naturopathy when it was a ‘fringe alternative’
- Why we should be applying our food seasonality sensibility to herbs and opting for the real deal rather than pharmaceuticals
- Her concerns that holistic medicine is becoming more like western medicine in how it is used and expected to perform
- The growth in holistic health since covid
- The role ritual plays in recentering and reconnecting with yourself and community
- Why she shuts the door at work between 4 and 4.30
- Taking care of herself as the ‘bow and arrow’ foundation of self
- Creating a symbiotic relationship with the natural world
- The value of reconnecting with the nervous system before making decisions
- The spontaneous desire to autocorrect
- The difference between head and heart decisions
- Tools to get out of ourselves so we can get into ourselves
- Why the natural world has a place in everyone's healing path
- Craving simplicity and reducing over-complication
- Normalising ritual - especially for women
- Having the discipline to NOT get on your screen to fill in the gaps
- Actively doing things differently in business
- Why she is here to be of service - to bring clarity, to unscramble the confusion, at human scale
- Why success is in the sublimely simple; connecting, longevity, belonging, the beauty of truth
- Avoiding groundhog day
- Moving into new chapters without feeling overwhelmed
- Cooking weed pie
LINKS YOU'LL LOVE
How to Get Well -- Paavo Airola
Anthia on Instagram
Apotheca by Anthia
Anthia online
11/15/20 • 56 min
Diego Bonetto, aka. The Weedy One, grew up on a dairy farm in northern Italy where it was still common practice to collect the wild bounty of the land.
After moving to Australia in the 90s, Diego found that his practical foraging knowledge and weedy know-how was actually pretty rare. He lamented our modern approach to "weeds" -- a battle waged with poisons rather than a loving relationship that respects the valuable, nutrition and wisdom of the plants all around us.
So he became a weed advocate and educator, harking back to the dandelions, nettles, mulberries and edible mushrooms of his childhood and sharing their stories with those longing to return to their roots.
Diego's enthusiasm will inspire and move you, as it has done for the thousands of people who have attended his public and private workshops, events and weed walks. This conversation about belonging, sustainability, agency and food is just a glimpse of Diego's immense knowledge, and we encourage you to connect with him online or better still, in person!
SHOW NOTES
- Collecting wild plants, fungi, grains and berries as a child to supply seasonal produce to his family larder.
- Empowering people to recall childhood memories ; mulberries as lipstick, daisy chains to overcome fear and find confidence.
- Foraging does more than just give us free food; it’s our chance to experience gratitude, connect to ecology, anchor us all to the now. It cuts away our entitlement to resources and encourages us to engage in the gifts of the natural world.
- How to create steps to build foraging confidence, even in urban spaces.
- Basic rules of foraging.
- Foraging is not survival, it's establishing relationships of care-taking.
- Ocean foraging.
- The vast majority of foraging is handfuls for tasting rather than buckets of food.
- Are plants a living, conscious, feeling things?
- Why we should be up in arms about factory farming which is enslavement into a system of yield rather than being a wild species which fetches its own minerals and grows of its own accord.
- We are part of a system where we eat and can be eaten.
- Foraging foundation of being still, staying put and becoming part of a specific cycle so you can build knowledge.
- Stepping from observer to stakeholder to caretaker.
- Why “weeds” is an arbitrary term.
- The importance of acknowledging the services that plants play.
- Backyard medicine is the result of coevolution.
- Calling on the knowledge of our wisdom holders to maintain self care.
- Why mulberries and blackberries are wonderful foraging teacher species and part of our ecological symbiotic contract to eat the species.
- Putting humans back in the cycle of life.
LINKS YOU'LL LOVE
- Diego Bonetto on Instagram @theweedyone
- Diego Bonetto online
Photo credit -- Aimee Crouch
10/07/24 • 58 min
This gent who goes by the name of Das is eccentric, passionate, articulate & intelligent so strap in for this fast paced, heady conversation framed through the lens of equal rights for species other than humans to the very resources we are destroying. His voice grins, setting a positive tone & his true love of the natural world is just a tad intoxicating.
We leap from the truth that adaptability trumps strength for resilience. We quip about how the finance sector is filled with animals, we both agree that animals are more sensible than human beings - they don’t go about destroying the landscape that keeps them alive & we ponder how we came to be a culture that thinks we can click our way out of the quandary we find ourselves in. We ask if you're suffering from 'Prognostic Miopia' where you are so focussed on the near term things you don’t connect with the real long term consequences of our actions. We suspect the very culture we all swim in, means we all suffer & rather than feeling the weight of this, taking the approach of finding our own, individual ways to swim out of it.
It covers a lots and its a cracker!
Links You’ll Love
Aldo Leopold - The Sand County Almanac
Wild Quests by Das
Barry Lopez - Arctic Dreams
Loved this Ep....Listen to:
- Damon Gameau
- Dan Palmer
- Helena Norberg Hodge
Support the Show
Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters
Show Notes
Defining what it means to be human through studying animals
Coming face to face with a grizzly bear in Alaska
Failing our natural world as its guardian
Our need for 1.7 earths
"Human eyes need more pixels than there are in the universe to capture the beauty of some animals"
Going to the root cause of the problems rather than bandaid-ing
Human beings as mere hosts for bacteria & viruses
The danger of our reliance on tech
"Humans address every problem with Paleolithic emotions, medievil institutions & godlike technology - a dangerous recipe
Reading your landscape
Entering the phase of populism for answers
Moving our problems into the future
"Ultimately the worth of our species will be measured by our acceptance of our true role within the complex web that is life"
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FAQ
How many episodes does Futuresteading have?
Futuresteading currently has 164 episodes available.
What topics does Futuresteading cover?
The podcast is about Society & Culture, Skills, Personal Journals, Community, Podcasts, Agriculture, Farming and Homesteading.
What is the most popular episode on Futuresteading?
The episode title 'E10 Futuresteading Shortie : Right-now-easy Ways To Make Change' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Futuresteading?
The average episode length on Futuresteading is 54 minutes.
How often are episodes of Futuresteading released?
Episodes of Futuresteading are typically released every 7 days.
When was the first episode of Futuresteading?
The first episode of Futuresteading was released on Apr 11, 2020.
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