#300 | Part One: Mother Earth, In Spite Of Everything

Bear with me on this.

I wanted to do something different, original, for this episode, this milestone of 300. As you will hear in my introduction, I will be releasing seven parts for this, covering numerous themes that I've explored over the past 100 episodes of Last Born In The Wilderness. 

This first part is quite substantial, in and of itself. Weaving together fifteen carefully selected interviews, I present a narrative that conveys one of the most persistent themes of my work: ecological catastrophe, climatological disruption, near-term extinction, ruptures in the life-destroying industrial model, and humanity’s capacity to reclaim our regenerative role—in spite of the outcome.

TIMELINE:

00:00: Introduction

16:05: Bill Schmidt (DMAL)

18:10: Commentary

20:42: Nicholas Humphrey (Climate realities)

33:44: Commentary

36:53: Timothy Lenton (Climate tipping points)

45:18: Commentary

50:12: Brian Mier (Amazon Rainforest fires)

58:06: Commentary

1:03:51: Shanna Swan (Declining fertility)

1:17:23: Commentary

1:24:08: Melissa Troutman & Joshua Pribanic (Rights of Nature)

1:37:07: Commentary

1:41:30: Will Falk (Militant resistance)

1:49:12: Commentary

1:57:23: Jeff Gibbs (Lies of green energy)

2:05:51: Commentary

2:12:09: Richard Heinberg (Energy grid)

2:23:09: Commentary

2:29:54: Roy Scranton (Existential questions)

2:51:05: Commentary

2:59:31: Stephen Pyne (Humanity’s relationship with fire)

3:09:44: Commentary

3:14:44: Khalil Avi (Invasive species)

3:25:54: Commentary

3:32:08: Max Paschall (Lost forest gardens)

3:39:58: Commentary

3:45:45: Steven Elliot Martyn (Sacred agriculture)

3:51:52: Commentary

3:56:14: Peter Michael Bauer (Collapse)

4:11:39: Commentary

4:16:10: Stan Rushworth (Loss of kinship)

4:34:05: Outro

Video Episode:

#213 | Sacred Gardener: The Seeds Of Co-creative Partnership With The Earth w/ Steven Elliot Martyn

Intro: 9:23 | Outro: 1:11:40

In this episode, I speak with Steven Elliot Martyn, author of ‘Sacred Gardening: Seeds for the Reemergence of Co-Creative Agriculture’ and ‘The Story of the Madawaska Forest Garden: Co-creating Integrated Polyculture’ and co-creator of the Sacred Gardener Earth Wisdom School.

In this discussion, I ask Steven to expound on his journey of becoming a “sacred gardener,” which has included years of deep intellectual and spiritual introspection and experimentation with agricultural production, gardening, and foraging — a journey that has led to him to a recognition of the roots of our dominant culture’s profound disconnection from the sacred roots of agriculture and land use. On this path of exploration (fleshed out more fully in ’The Story of Madawaska Forest Garden’ and ‘Sacred Gardening’), Steven has cultivated an intuitive and deeply expressed capacity of being able to truly listen to the spirit(s) of the land and the living beings that reside there, having gained superb insights into how to reacquaint our culture with our sacred roots of participation and co-creative relationship with the living Earth. Steven’s development of this intuitive knowledge has manifested into something that is altogether missing in much of the dominant culture’s conception of land use and agricultural production in the modern age (a culmination of our culture’s obsession with logic, or as Steven has called it, the “cult of Reason”). In this interview, Steven refutes the idea that the development of agriculture in human societies is the result of a “wrong turn” in our development as a species (a primitivist assertion), and instead asserts that the roots of agricultural land use is rooted in our intuitive, sacred, and co-creative capacities as cultural beings with the living Earth, and that deprograming ourselves from the overly-reductionist approach to land use is essential in reclaiming our right role within the broad matrix of life, both on the local and global scale.

Steven Martyn (M.A. in traditional plant use, B.F.A. honours) is an artist, farmer, wildcrafter, builder, teacher, writer, and visionary. Steven has more than thirty years experience living co-creatively with the Earth practicing traditional living skills of growing food, building and healing. Steven created Livingstone & Greenbloom in 1986, Toronto’s first green landscaping company. In 1996, he created the Algonquin Tea Company, North America’s premiere bioregional tea company. He has given talks and workshops internationally for more than twenty years and taught plant identification and wilderness skills at Algonquin college for 11 years, and at the Orphan Wisdom School for 8 years. In 2014, Spencer and his wife Megan started the Sacred Gardener Earth Wisdom School. Steven released his first book, The Story of the Madawaska Forest Garden in 2016, and his second Sacred Gardening in June 2017.

Episode Notes:

- Learn more about Steven and the Sacred Gardener Earth Wisdom School: https://thesacredgardener.ca

- Learn more about and purchase ‘Sacred Gardening’ and ‘The Story of the Madawaska Forest Garden’: http://bit.ly/sacredgardener / http://bit.ly/madawaskaforest

- The song featured in this episode is “Miguk'asha” by Eijra Woon from the album Fae: https://eijrawoon.bandcamp.com