Nick Ritar, People of Purpose interview: Full text

A transcribe of the People of Purpose podcast interview with Nick Ritar, Milkwood Permaculture.

Male: Welcome to People of Purpose, a podcast series of interviews with people doing meaningful work and living with heart. The series is hosted by Johanna Scott and guests come from nearly every field you can imagine. People of Purpose sits under the website Make Do Co. For more content visit wearemakedo.com.au.

Johanna: Nick Ritar is a permaculture consultant, designer and educator with a passion to make permaculture ethics, principles and design ubiquitous. With partner Kirsten Bradley, Nick is co-founder and co-director of Milkwood, a crew of doers and makers dedicated to educating Australians in smart, simple, regenerative living. They offer short courses in permaculture design, backyard vegetable growing, natural beekeeping, gourmet mushroom cultivation, natural building and much more. What Nick doesn’t list out on his bio is the fact that Milkwood is one of the powerhouses behind the organic sustainable movement in Australia, educating and raising awareness among thousands of people every year in aim of creating more resilient and connected communities.

Nick, welcome to People of Purpose.

Nick: Thanks Jo.

Johanna: At TEDX in 2011, you asked the audience to stand and then you said, “I would like you to sit down if in the last 36 hours you’ve defecated in your drinking water.” And everyone remained standing. Then you said, “Oh, so none of you pooed in a flushing toilet in the last day and a half?” Which I think explains how disconnected most of us, including me, are from our water systems. Can you explain how the majority of Australian human waste is treated?

Nick: Minimally. Pretty much the best we can do nowadays is macerate it and put it in pipes and push it further out into the ocean. There is very little done, well basically nothing done to it in order to recover any of the nutrients which we could be using to grow our food and build our healthy bodies. Instead, we get those nutrients from mines and from turning fossil fuel into nitrogen. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs and we just do not do anything to try and solve that problem. We live by the ocean so that we can wash our hands of it and so that we can pretend that it isn’t a problem.

Johanna: So human waste goes out to the ocean and it could be used in the system but we take that water and then treat it and drink it, is that right?

Nick: We don’t do anything to it at the moment. In fact we take sea water and we desalinate it using huge amounts of money and energy in order to mix it with our shit to flush out into the ocean. The challenge isn’t so much ways of then reusing that sewerage. Once you create sewerage you’ve got a big problem. All that a wasted water but b you’ve now got it in a very heavy format. You’ve got the nutrients mixed with all this high value water, it becomes very difficult to reuse it at all. The challenge comes in changing people’s world view and encouraging them to think outside the box and use something other than a porcelain throne to get rid of their waste. Instead we need to look at dry toilet systems. If we don’t mix it with water it’s nowhere near the same scale of a problem.

Johanna: And the water that we’re using to mix with the waste is valuable water we could be drinking, it’s clean water.

Nick: Totally, it’s 300 litres a day per person in Sydney. So that’s a bathtub and a half per person in Sydney that just gets flushed, not all through the toilet. Obviously some of it goes down the shower and what have you but there’s a huge amount of high quality water that we’re wasting … but personally I’m more concerned about the nutrients that we waste. The story of where we get the nutrients to put onto our farmland is a horrific one. Nauru, the island of Nauru, the destruction of that island is the result of us trying to get phosphate fertilizers to power the green revolution. Fracking is where we get the natural gas to power the Haber Bosch process to remove nitrogen from the atmosphere to make urea which is the prime nitrogen source for our crops. By wasting this nutrient we are supporting fracking and the destruction of beautiful islands and beautiful land all over the world.

Johanna: So there’s this connection in the system where we need nitrogen and phosphorus and they can be found in human waste. We’re throwing out the waste and then we’re ruining the planet to get these sources from somewhere else.

Nick: By the way the waste is eutrophying the oceans – it used to wash up on the beach at Bondi. Now we chop it up into smaller pieces so you don’t notice it when it goes all over your skin.

Johanna: I think this is a great example and so unknown to people like this was news to me since doing your courses and it’s just basic yet fundamental links and we’ve lost these links in many ways in many areas of living and to me that’s what permaculture is about, the relationship between these elements. What’s the importance of inter connectedness in permaculture? Can you explain that?

Nick: Permaculture strives to be a holistic design science and holistic design process and tries to help people to modify their own world view so it can start to take into account the deep interconnectedness of all the biological, the physical, the chemical mechanisms that drive our planet’s ecosystems and the human habitat and our lives are deeply part of those ecosystems.

We try to resolve that disconnect that people feel. I often talk about the folly of that idea, that you want to try and get back to nature. We are nature. We’re deeply connected to nature. Every breath that we take, every bit of water that we drink, every bit of food that we eat came from natural ecosystems very very recently but we build these walls between us, mostly in our head between us and the natural world and we wear fancy clothes and we put on makeup and we sit behind a cathode ray or a LCD screen and behind glass and we build fences and we spray weed killer and we take antibiotics and we disinfect our bathrooms and all of this time we’re really just trying to protect ourselves from nature, to preserve some kind of difference. I think it’s a folly. We are complicated ecosystems ourselves and the world that we inhabit is deeply interconnected with us and I think a better understanding of that really drives a greater appreciation of the way nature works and therefore the ability to start to design human life and human habitats in harmony with the natural world.

Johanna: Because you’ve said that some of the biggest problems stem from ignorance and fear. It’s not necessarily knowledge or skill. It’s the fact that we’re afraid of nature.

Nick: No. We have absolutely no scientific or engineering challenges when it comes to sustainability. We don’t need any new engineering solutions or great scientific breakthroughs in order to solve human’s problems. All we need to do is change our habits. All of the things that threaten us as human beings are caused by many, many, many individuals taking thoughtless action and that thoughtless action potentially has the potential to make the planet earth uninhabitable. I mean, that’s catastrophic and to think that it’s as basic as changing a few simple behaviours that may threaten us.

Johanna: Well, that’s the thing. You often hear that technology might give us an answer and someone is going to find this technology or invent this technology which is going to save us and so from you knowing that we have the technology, we have the technical skills and knowledge to create an abundant future and seeing our government and various individuals taking steps away from that kind of knowledge and technology. That must be so frustrating.

Nick: It is but at the same time there’s this massive sort of global awakening which is happening now. People are starting to take more responsibility and starting to understand their own impacts and effectively this is the largest political movement in human history. More people are concerned about the environment, concerned about the way that the planet is heading now than were concerned about the emancipation of woman or the end of slavery. These issues are deeply felt by a vast number of people now. So, I’m quite hopeful and I know the solutions are relatively easy. They’re about how we grow our food, how we dispose of our waste, how we build our homes. Really simple stuff. Things that at most local government is in charge of. They’re not national governments. This is stuff that we can be empowered to make change in.

Johanna: So people don’t have to wait for permission to change things in their lives. There’s a lot they can do now.

Nick: Nobody’s going to give you permission to do it because there’s no money in it. Power doesn’t distribute power. Power doesn’t want to give power away. You have to take power and we can take power by making small changes in our life. Finding out where your food comes is the most basic thing. Don’t eat food that you don’t know where it comes from. There’s so much just in that statement and so many habitual changes that you have to make in order to make that kind of fundamental change to your life and I’m not trying to say that that’s easy, this is incredibly hard stuff. Trying to get someone to change, if you’ve ever been in a relationship trying to make someone change is almost impossible. It has to come from deep inside. It has to be a realisation that comes from inside people.

Johanna: I think like permaculture, it’s a design system that aims to work with the system so from an individual point of view it may be reassessing habits and looking at solutions and changing those habits but once that system can support, if someone can change their habits and design it into their life, then it becomes easy because it’s part of their life.

Nick: Yeah, that’s the whole goal. If it becomes habitual then you don’t have to think about it and instead of having a habitually negative impact on the environment or on your self or on your family or on your home you start to have a habitually positive impact. Habits are really powerful things, they’re hard to change but once you get them established they can be passed on from generation to generation. Culture gets built around them and suddenly now you have a way of living which is more in harmony with the natural world, and this is not a poor way of living by the way, we’re talking about a very, very rich way of living.

Johanna: Well, you often use the word abundance and I introduced you as a sustainability expert and I know that you have issues with that word because the idea of sustainable is sort of staying the same and that’s not very positive.

Nick: It’s such a low bar, just to be able to eke out an existence and sustain yourself. I want something much, much more than that. The positive behaviour isn’t necessarily rewarded in the financial sphere. I often say that you may end up working like a dog and you may not be very rich but gosh you’ll eat like a king. You can eat the best food in the world – and nowadays I’m stoked that there’s this whole MasterChef revolution or whatever you want to call it because people are starting to discover what really good food is. You can’t buy a mushroom as good as the one you can grow.

Johanna: I can’t wait to grow mushrooms.

Nick: You can’t buy a tomato as good as the one that you can grow yourself. Those habits of getting into cultivating your own food are ones that have massive rewards to your own health and your own family.

Johanna: Yeah and I think anyone who loves to cook. It’s just an extension of that. The idea of cooking a meal, of course it’s more work than buying it but it doesn’t even come into it if you enjoy cooking it. It’s not a question of whether it’s worth it or not.

Nick: It’s exactly the same with growing your own food. A lot of people will ask question, is it worth the effort? But the effort to do something that you enjoy doing and is good for your health even before you eat the food. The act of getting out and gardening is so enjoyable and good for you, and if you can create that into a habit and a hobby then you’re not working, you’re enjoying yourself.

Johanna: You’re living.

Nick: Living. Exactly.

Johanna: And so permaculture is very much practical. It’s about getting people to do things and do things in their own lives and take responsibility for their own actions. That’s been very powerful for me and I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you think the permaculture ethical framework could help us govern ourselves better or maybe it’s not even a question of governing. Maybe there’s some other political framework or community framework that comes out of it.

Nick: That’s a really good challenging question for a permaculturalist, because we as a movement have very much been about grass roots, about being empowering people to take action in their own lives and the political sphere hasn’t been a place where permaculture has made any serious efforts to be represented as permaculture. There’s a lot of people who are into permaculture who are very politically active but you don’t see that much organised action under the guise of permaculture. One example of that I suppose is the Transition Town movement which is an international movement of communities who are learning to deal with the impacts of an end to the use of fossil fuels and to climate change. That is a very political organisation, it engages a lot in local government and in trying to help navigate the directions that those communities will go. Now, transitions towns came out of permaculture. So it’s a permaculture teacher who started transition towns and it’s since flourished. There’s a bunch of these kind of political organisations, especially at the local level which have come out of permaculture but as a whole, permaculture ethics have been mostly focused on your individual worldview and how you think about your relationship to the world. Those three core ethics of earth care, people care and fair share are really not meant to be governing strategies as much as they are for self governance.

Johanna: Maybe that’s enough, the fact that if you ever take it away from the individual then it’s losing some of its essence of each of us participating.

Nick: Yeah I think so and I think that we’ve got so much work to do at that basic, personal level. I don’t know that we have to label all actions that we take under that permaculture umbrella. Permaculture is a really framework but it’s not a religion and it’s not a political science. It’s a design science for building sustainable human habitats and it’s some guiding ethics and principles for how we as individuals can live our lives to be abundant and happy and healthy while preserving or even enhancing the ecosystems around us.

Johanna: You hear a lot this idea that food security and accessibility is only really possible through the agriculture system that we have now. That’s an argument that’s often said to me, is that we’re going to have 9 billion people in the world, how are we going to feed them all? What is your suggestion for the future?

Nick: Well, to start with the seven billion that we’ve got now aren’t being fed by conventional agriculture. Conventional agriculture is highly reliant on fossil fuels. It’s highly reliant on mined nutrients which are then distributed into the world’s ecosystems, particularly the world’s oceans. These are one way paths. They’re not closed loops, that means that fossil fuels are being consumed and exhausted and the nutrients, the phosphorus, the nitrogen, the potassium, the manganese, all those different nutrients that are required to grow our plants. Those are also on a one way path from a source to a very diffuse and unaccessible sink. So, A: it’s not feeding everyone right now, there’s massive disparity in availability of food, B: it can’t continue as it currently is because of those limiting resources or limited resources. So alright, now trying to say that some alternative can’t feed the planet, well we’ve just shown that the conventional agriculture can’t continue to feed the planet so do you just want to give up? Right now, regardless of that, the vast majority of people on this planet are fed by small scale organic agriculture. The World Health Organisation came out a few years ago with a conclusive study showing that small scale organic actually is what feeds the world, not large scale conventional agriculture. Sure, in the West we eat mostly large scale conventional food but the vast majority of the world’s population isn’t in the same situation as us. It’s just another one of those times when we use our own experiences bias to think that that’s the way that the rest of the world works. Permaculture by definition is an attempt to make a permanently sustainable agricultural system. The alternative to that is one which doesn’t continue.

Johanna: So, there’s no alternative.

Nick: Yeah, but what is the alternative to a sustainable agricultural system? One that doesn’t sustain, which is giving up. In the long term any agricultural system which is here in a couple of hundred years time will be a sustainable one and probably permaculture.

Johanna: And in past courses you’ve given us the students examples of how much impact simply growing even a small amount of veggies can have on the world. I’m not sure if you even remember what I’m talking about.

Nick: Oh, I think I do.

Johanna: Sort of the amount of football fields that needs…

Nick: Sure. It may surprise a lot of people but the average Australian’s ecological foot print, which is the amount of land which is requried to provide all your needs. Housing needs, food needs, clothing needs, to treat your sewerage, to provide the energy. The amount of total land is the ecological foot print of each person and in Australia our ecological foot print on average is about I believe, it’s been a while since I’ve looked up the figures but it’s around 75,000 square metres. So, that’s 7.5 hectares. So quite a large amount of land is requred to provide for your needs. Now, of that nearly half of it, something like 45 percent is dedicated to producing your food. So the average person I think it’s around about 35,000, 36,000 or something like that square metres of land is required to grow the food that they need. Now, step back a little bit. What’s 36,000 square metres? That’s a 100 metres, as long as a football field by 300 metres or 360 metres. So it’s three football fields in size. That amount of land is dedicated to your food production if you’re the average Australian. If it’s done with conventional agricutlure. Now imagine that as an organic market garden with chickens and maybe a couple of pigs and a few goats and vegetables of every different sort and fruit trees and trellises and all kinds of beautiful food growing in that magical polyculture market garden type scenario and imagine that, three football fields, how many people could that feed? Not one, a lot, lot, lot, lot more than one. So, I give the example, basically you need about, if you’re prepared to modify your diet – you eat different food, eat healthier food and grow that food yourself. You could grow all the food to keep one average Australian happy and healthy on about 100 square metres using permaculture gardening techniques. So, about. Obviously different climates, different scenarios are different but around about 100 square metres. So, that means permaculture or sustainable organic agriculture takes about 100 square metres compared to 36,000 square metres that we currently use.

So which ones can continue?

That’s just one measure, that’s just a measure of land use but by measure of water use, by measure of fossil fuel use, by measure of capital investment like capital infrastructure investment, small scale organic wins every time. The only measure where it’s more expensive to do small scale organic agriculture is in human labour, and that is something which we value so highly in our society that it means that these kind of techniques aren’t commercially viable or aren’t as commercially viable. We have to pay more because there’s more labour involved.

Now, if you bring it back to the home level remember that labour wasn’t labour was it? That labour was fun and love and family time and getting back in touch with nature and getting some sun on your face. That’s not labour, that’s not expenses. You should be paying for that. We do.

Johanna: Many people are craving that.

Nick: Exactly.

Johanna: The opposite of the office and the fluorescent lights.

Nick: So if you can change that in your head, from that being work to that being the thing that sustains you and that gives you joy, now you’ve got a free input and now small scale organic kicks the arse of large scale conventional every single time.

Johanna: In 2007 you moved your family to a small block of near Mudgee.

Nick: Well, not that small. It’s actually pretty huge. Too big.

Johanna: The aim was to create a sustainable life for yourselves and to help others do the same and you were saying yesterday that it was actually your process of learning but it’s hard to imagine now because you have so much knowledge and you share this with so many people but at the time what was it like to take that step to sort of leave your life behind and go to the country and take a punt on this goal to…

Nick: Kirsten and I were living in inner city Melbourne at the time when we made this decision. Most of my childhood had been spent on or associated with the land on large national parks and big farms and quite remote locations. So I was used to, Kirsten not so much but she was as excited as I was to try this experiment of trying to live with less money and live producing more of our food and living in a home that we built ourselves. I suppose where we were naive was that we really thought that we could somehow live a simpler life by doing this and it wasn’t simpler, it was a lot more complicated. We moved to out near Mudgee but were still 45 minutes away from town and we moved out there with no money. We had access to land because it was on the corner of my parent’s farm but we all at once decided to get pregnant, build a house out of earth and recycled materials and start a small business all at the same time and we didn’t have any capital so it was very much a learning experience.

Johanna: Everything was in it.

Nick: Everything was a learning experience, yeah. I’ve said this plenty of times to students who are contemplating making a move into maybe a new location or a new business or a new lifestyle for themselves. There’s one way to guarantee success and that’s commit everything to it. If you can’t let yourself fail then there’s a damn good chance you won’t. It’s not particularly good advice because it is a lot of work and it can be quite challenging but we were lucky we had some family support which allowed us to be there and that is I think always one of the main things. If you’ve got somewhere with community that’s a really big deal.

Johanna: The emotional support is probably one of the most needed things.

Nick: Exactly, and a warm place to go and have a meal when you need it.

We didn’t know what we were doing but we did know how to do was run events and we were good with our logistics and things like that. So we thought well we’ll invite people who do know how to do this kind of stuff to our farm and we’ll get them to teach us and maybe other people will want to learn too and that became the template for Milkwood.

Johanna: And through that strategy you’ve brought some of the biggest names in permaculture, sustainable ag. to Australia, including Joel Salatin, Sandor Katz and Dr Vandana Shiva.

Nick: We wanted to learn from the people who knew the information the best. I think right from the start rather than Milkwood being the fount of knowledge and myself and Kirsten being the source of that knowledge we were quite keen to draw in the best people that we could and we’ve been incredibly lucky. We’ve had great permaculture teachers teach on the permaculture Design Course for us. Including Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. David teaches for us regularly. Rosemary Morrow — these are all incredible authors and sources of some of the root ideas of permaculture, obviously David and Bill. And we’ve pursued that continually, trying to bring new people across. This year we’ve got Jean Martin Fortier coming out who’s one of the most successful urban market gardeners in the world. He’s coming out from Canada and doing some short courses for us and each year we do the same sort of thing. We get the best people we can find to help teach the information that we’re passionate about learning about. It’s great we get to choose our own life from the amazing people around the planet who are doing this great stuff.

Johanna: It’s a great strategy. There’s such a need for it here and a desire to learn from those people and at the same time you’ve built up your own knowledge just through asking those people to come out and teach.

Nick: We’ve also put a lot of effort into opening up our courses to young teachers starting out and we run an annual permaculture teacher training course as well. What that has meant is that we’ve been able to connect a lot of people who are passionate about this stuff to their idols and that’s meant that then we get to sort of identity these amazing young teachers who really have the same ideals as we do.

Johanna: That’s great.

To another topic, we’ve talked about technology in permaculture and you’ve said that permaculturists are pro technology when it works for the system, and not through this romanticism for the past, it’s not necessarily about just looking to the past.

Nick: No.

Johanna: It’s a combination of it. But at the same time you’ve also brought up so many examples where skills that people have have been lost from our cultural memories, so you talked about some people who were able to sense the temperature of the water through their bodies and sense the changing currents and use that to navigate without ever seeing a satellite map of the world. Do you think our reconnection to nature requires a stronger connection to ourselves? Or has technology just changed how we’re going to manage this in the future?

Nick: Technological change is always going to come. It’s been happening forever, as human beings we experiment, we learn and we come up with new ideas. We rarely have the ability to foresee the impacts of those technologies before we come up with them though. The people who invented the automobile could never have conceived how much it would have come to dominate our world as what it has. It’s impossible for you to foresee the consequences of any new technology when it’s developed. I don’t think that there’s any point railing against the innovation. Innovation will happen, innovation is a value. The challenge is that the real change doesn’t come at the point of innovation. It comes at the point of adoption and whether we choose to adopt new technologies without considering their impact is really where I think the work needs to be done as far as how we think about those new technologies.

My background is Computer Engineering, Computer Science. I’m a geek. I’m just as likely to get lulled into or seduced into the excitement as anyone but the reality is most of the fundamental things that we do aren’t that high-tech. Where our food comes from isn’t that high-tech. Where our shit goes isn’t very complicated at all, it isn’t very complex. How our clothes are made, it’s not that complex.

So I suppose when it comes to the really important things about how humans inhabit this earth, I don’t think technology is as important as habit and as the way humans think about their world.

Johanna: And the permaculture ethics provide a nice framework for considering whether a technology is useful or not.

Nick: Yeah. Totally. As well as the ethics, the principles as well. David Holmgren’s principles are a great set. There are many sets of permaculture principles but I particularly like David’s. They provide a whole bunch of different, simple questions that you can ask about any choice. One principle is obtain a yield. Straight up, is this going to be worth you doing? It’s really simple stuff like that.

Johanna: It’s probably a relief to some people to hear in fact it’s required that a yield is made out of this effort.

Nick: A lot of people come to permaculture I suppose with preconceived ideas about how alternative and how perhaps impractical it might be just because the first people to take it up were hippies and people interested in alternative lifestyle but the reality there’s a lot of really common sense, basic ideas in the principles — Value diversity. It’s not saying that we always maximise diversity because valuing diversity and obtaining a yield can sometimes be in conflict with each other but that’s okay, we’re intelligent beings. We can deal with those kind of dilemmas but you should make sure you obtain a yield and you should make sure you value diversity.

Johanna: So my last question is finishing on a permaculture principle, designing from patterns to details and in the course once you talked about… So this has many implications in permaculture design and practical implications but you also talked about taking this principle in terms of life design and you asked us a group to really design our life from patterns to details and consider what kind of life we wanted to live and how we wanted to live and then work out the details from there and that’s really stuck with me.

And so my question is what would you say to people who wish they could live differently but they don’t think it’s possible in terms of their jobs or their lifestyle or their options?

Nick: I think it’s really about stepping back and considering what’s important to you. There’s an old saying, nobody ever gets to the end of their life and rejoices on the fact that they spent an extra weekend at work, where they may well regret the fact that they didn’t spend that weekend with their child. I encourage people to step back a little bit and really deeply consider what is important to them. What gives them joy? What makes their world a better place for them and their community and their family? And then go alright if I want to build my life out of those things, what changes do I need to make to my lifestyle in order to support that?

And I have always had a problem with this idea of deferring life until you’re too old to live it. Just so many people defer their life on the basis that when I have enough money I will be able to live the way that I want. When if the way that you want to live doesn’t actually cost very much money, why would you need to defer your living? I’ve never been able to get that.

Johanna: Yeah, there’s no sense in it all because you may not live to an old age.

Nick: So start living life now. Live in a way which makes you truly happy and for me the things that make me truly happy is harvesting my own mushrooms or my own tomatoes. Spending time with my little boy in the garden. Going for a swim in the river with my little boy. Chilling out at home eating good food and having nice friends around me. These things don’t cost money. These things are practically free if you’re prepared to put a bit of time into them. Guess what, if you spend all your time working you won’t have the time to do any of those things.

Johanna: Exactly. Well Nick, thanks for your time today but more importantly thank you for all the work you’re doing in Australia and the passion that you and Kirsten put into Milkwood is so inspiring for all of us.

Nick: It’s my pleasure. Thank you.

Male: Thank for listening. If you enjoyed this interview you can find more at wearemakedo.com.au.

Access the original information and interview: Nick Ritar, People or Purpose.