In last week’s episode with Dr Jann Hayman, winding up our series from the Osage Nation, I mentioned we’d just been on a tour of their astounding Greenhouse. The woman who kindly gave us that tour, Dawn Wormington, had been recruited for the job by the Osage. And in this brief bonus to the Osage series, we hear from Dawn about the unexpected, unintended gift that keeps on giving, out of the filming of Killers of the Flower Moon . If you happen to have come to the Osage series here first, you can...
Jun 24, 2025•4 min•Season 9Ep. 263
Dr. Jann Hayman is Secretary of Natural Resources for the Osage Nation . We’ve just come from a tour of their astounding greenhouse, after having had a powerful conversation with Chief Standing Bear. Jann’s graciously welcomed filmmaker Nicol Ragland and I for a chat at her office, amidst her busy end of the week. Both Chief and Nicol sing Jann’s praises loudly. Nicol calls her a powerhouse. And when she won the award from which I drew the title image for this episode, the presenter said ‘if you...
Jun 17, 2025•51 min•Season 9Ep. 263
As introduced last week, we’re about to have a very special meeting with Chief Standing Bear of the Osage Nation . The family and I made our way with friend and filmmaker Nicol Ragland to Osage HQ in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. How the Osage survived being marched to these lands by the US government in the 19th century, and ongoing brutality in the 20th, is a scene set in last week’s episode (if you’re not familiar with that back story, it’s worth ducking back to listen to that brief 13 minute episode f...
Jun 11, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 9Ep. 262
Welcome to the launch of a very special series from a very special visit to the Osage Nation . Some of you might recognise the Osage Nation from the recent Martin Scorsese film, Killers of the Flower Moon (have a look at this awesome live performance at the Oscars). Or from the book that was based on, by David Grann. Or indeed, from the podcast series, In Trust . They’ve all done a heck of a job bringing to new light and new generations what was done to the Osage back in 1920s Oklahoma. In this ...
Jun 03, 2025•13 min•Season 9Ep. 261
Christopher Brown is a celebrated science-fiction writer and decorated lawyer (and once co-hosted a punk rock radio show). His newest book, however, is described as a ‘genre-defying work of nature writing, literary nonfiction, and memoir that explores what happens when nature and the city intersect … [challenging] our assumptions of nature itself.’ It’s called A Natural History of Empty Lots : Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys and other Wild Places . The blurb of its publisher Timber...
May 27, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Season 9Ep. 260
It was difficult trying to choose the opening quote for this week's episode. My guest Lorenzo Washington articulated a handful of beautiful passages. So I thought I'd put the 'short list', as it were, together here. Let's call it a preview of ep.259, The Jefferson Street Sound: Preserving Nashville's Soul with Lorenzo Washington . One of my favourites. Title slide: Lorenzo and I outside the Museum after our chat (pic: Olivia Cheng). See more photos on the episode website, and for more behind the...
May 21, 2025•6 min•Season 9Ep. 259
Nashville's musical legacy extends far beyond the mainstream country narrative. Tucked away in North Nashville, the Jefferson Street Sound Museum stands as a testament to the rich cultural heritage of jazz, soul, and rhythm and blues that thrived from the 1940s to the 70s. Founded and curated by Lorenzo Washington, this museum isn't just a collection of artifacts – it's a living, breathing continuation of the African American music and community that shaped generations. We’re talking about artis...
May 20, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Season 9Ep. 259
Today we continue the new series Vignettes from the Source, featuring some of the unforgettable, transformative and often inexplicable moments my guests have shared over the years. This one is from almost five years ago, with regenerative agriculture legend, the founder of RCS Australia, Dr Terry McCosker. Terry and his family have become dear friends over those five years, but this conversation was our first at any length. And still stands as one of the most popular, and profound, on this podca...
May 14, 2025•42 min•Season 9Ep. 258
Springhouse Community School has been called ‘the most dynamic and promising experiment in education and community building’. It’s a K12 bilingual school, with adult programs, community networks, and even a print shop (that’s a glorious story in itself). It also works with a participatory budgeting and pricing model, and incorporates things like restorative justice and land regeneration practices. The school describes itself as an ‘intergenerational, vitality-centred learning community in Southw...
May 08, 2025•1 hr 27 min•Season 9Ep. 257
Last week’s episode on-location with a ‘community juggernaut’ restoration project in South Carolina drew some wonderful responses – like ‘I felt like I was right there’, ‘Giving me goose bumps’, ‘The future retrospective documentary idea is brilliant’, and ‘This kicks ass’! So here’s a 5 minute bonus to lift your spirits a little more. It starts as we were winding up, but with mic’s left running, capturing a stunning moment by an old oak tree standing on the original plantation house grounds. (A...
May 05, 2025•5 min•Season 9Ep. 256
What to do when your prominent low-lying coastal city starts to go underwater, nigh on weekly on average, already? Charleston, South Carolina, is served by The Post and Courier. It runs a series called the Rising Waters Lab. And a couple of months ago, it featured a story titled, ‘The Southeast’s first urban eco-corridor aims to connect fragmented habitats in Charleston’. Welcome to The MARSH Project . What started as a personal effort among three friends to revitalise and steward an acre of mar...
Apr 29, 2025•58 min•Season 9Ep. 256
Today we continue the new series Vignettes from the Source, featuring some of the unforgettable, transformative moments my guests have shared over the years. This one is from a little over three years ago. It’s the first and last six minutes or so, bridged together, of my very first conversation with Kate Chaney . Kate was to become, just a few months later, the 7th new community independent – and WA's first – elected to Australia’s parliament at the 2022 election. Well, on Saturday week, 3 May,...
Apr 22, 2025•17 min•Season 9Ep. 255
In the landscape of Australian politics, something remarkable is brewing from the ground up. The community independents movement has evolved from a rural experiment to a nationwide phenomenon, reinvigorating democracy in my home country. At its heart, this movement isn’t about profile candidates, big funding or big media, but communities deciding they deserve better representation, and doing something about it. The results have been striking. Seven new community independents were elected in 2022...
Apr 13, 2025•1 hr•Season 9Ep. 254
A couple of episodes ago, I launched a new series on the podcast, Vignettes from the Source, to feature some of the unforgettable moments my guests have shared over the years. Continuing the series today then, is a passage of 7 or 8 minutes from my conversation with award winning filmmaker and photographer, Nicol Ragland . Longer term listeners might remember, Nicol was behind the very first Farmer’s Footprint film, among many others. Well, four years since she was on the podcast, we met in pers...
Apr 08, 2025•10 min•Season 9Ep. 253
Welcome to the fourth and final part of this special on-location recording with the 'land whisperer', Patrick MacManaway, in Burlington, Vermont. ICYMI, the full episode was played more than most in its early days, but given it was a little over two and a half hours in length, I also wanted to offer it in distinct parts, for those of you who prefer to listen to it that way. There have been plenty of takers too, so I'm glad this suited a bunch of you. We pick it up here where part 3 ended, at the...
Apr 02, 2025•43 min•Season 9Ep. 252
Welcome to part 3 of this special on-location recording with the 'land whisperer', Patrick MacManaway, in Burlington, Vermont. ICYMI, the full episode was played more than most in its early days, but given it was a little over two and a half hours in length, I also wanted to offer it in distinct parts, for those of you who prefer to listen to it that way. There have been plenty of takers too, so I'm glad this suited a bunch of you. We pick it up here where part 2 ended, as we wound up at the pub...
Mar 31, 2025•33 min•Season 9Ep. 252
We've forgotten the earth is alive, and it's killing us. That was one of the title prospects my podcast host served up for today's release. Another was 'reimagining our connection to land'. They're fair hints at part 2 of this special on-location recording with the 'land whisperer', Patrick MacManaway. ICYMI, the full episode was played more than most in its early days, but given it was a little over two and a half hours in length, I also wanted to offer it in distinct parts, for those of you wh...
Mar 29, 2025•42 min•Season 9Ep. 252
Last week's episode featured a special on-location recording with the land whisperer, Patrick MacManaway. It has been played more than most in its first week, but given it was a little over two and a half hours in length, I also wanted to offer it in distinct parts, for those of you who prefer to listen to it that way. Perhaps 40 minutes or so fits into your usual listening window better, or maybe that length will just give you time to digest the conversation. If you've already listened to the w...
Mar 26, 2025•41 min•Season 9Ep. 252
Welcome to a very special and unique episode. Previous guest on this podcast, Terry McCosker, co-founded RCS Australia 35 years ago. Fellow Australian legend and podcast guest, Charles Massy , is best-selling author of Call of the Reed Warbler. In that book he wrote, “When I look back over the rise of regenerative agriculture in Australia, I see at the forefront Terry and Pam McCosker and their RCS organisation. Today it remains a world leader in the field.” In light of that, I titled the first ...
Mar 19, 2025•2 hr 38 min•Season 9Ep. 252
The world isn't broken, it's trying to save you. That's where this one starts. But first, a couple of announcements. One, the launch of a new series on the podcast called Vignettes from the Source. And two, 5x New York Times best-selling author and great friend of the podcast, Paul Hawken, has his extraordinary new book, Carbon: The Book of Life , out now on pre-sale (with a few copies for paid subscribers). He’s also launching and chatting about the book at a few events in California next week ...
Mar 12, 2025•43 min•Season 9Ep. 251
Welcome to a special 250th episode of the podcast! Are we on the cusp of a revolution in the nutritional content of our food? One that could change everything? Dan Kittredge thinks so. And he’s about to launch his next global effort to that end. When you get a chance to speak with the man who’s been called the global steward of nutrient density in food, the man who developed the very term ‘nutrient density’, you don’t necessarily expect it to go as big and broad as this conversation did. But the...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr 28 min•Season 9Ep. 250
‘School of Rock’ meets ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. Damon Gameau, director of award-winning, chart-topping documentary films 2040 , and That Sugar Film , takes eight kids on the ultimate school excursion: a road trip across Europe to challenge powerful leaders and find solutions to our greatest challenges. That’s how the bill reads for Damon’s new feature documentary film, Future Council . The group’s mission was to take the conversation from the streets, into the boardrooms of some of the world’s l...
Feb 18, 2025•54 min•Season 9Ep. 249
Last month I had the honour of being a guest on the podcast of the legendary independent US media outlet Mongabay . It was a unique conversation, with US-born host Mike DiGirolamo based in Sydney, and me over here in the Americas, talking about some highlights from the seven months me and the family spent travelling across the USA last year, and relating it back to the seven years we’d travelled around Australia with the podcast before that. Mike produced a unique patch up too, interspersing our...
Feb 11, 2025•47 min•Season 9Ep. 248
Welcome to a new year and new series of The RegenNarration! You might remember me talking last year with prominent author, documentary maker and farmer at Fat Pig Farm , Matthew Evans, in the lead up to the new festival he’s founded back home in Australia, called GROUNDED : the Food and Soil Festival . Well, that festival happened in early December, and a couple of weeks later I got back online with Matthew to talk about what happened, how it happened, and if it might happen again. And hearing h...
Feb 04, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Season 9Ep. 247
Time to take a punt this year! I've just launched a Substack . Essentially, after 25 years in international and community development, and nearly a decade creating TheRegenNarration podcast, I began to feel something missing – the stories between the stories. The ones that don’t get on the podcast. And the ones that connect it all up - the themes, the people, the places. I started to wonder if writing some of these stories would be fun and useful. All the more after hearing Rebecca Solnit affirm...
Jan 30, 2025•11 min•Season 9Ep. 246
Clinton Walker is a Ngarluma/Yindjibarndi man and Traditional Custodian of Murujuga (or Burrup Peninsula), on the north-west coast of Australia. You might recall my conversations with archaeologist Peter Veth and the co-authors of Songlines, Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale . They all related back to this place – where the Songlines start, as Clinton puts it. So as my family and I headed south from the Kimberley at the end of 2021, Clinton and I met up to record a yarn for the Clean State podcast. Th...
Jan 28, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Season 9Ep. 245
Jess Beckerling was Campaign Director of the WA Forest Alliance (WAFA) when we had this conversation (she’s currently put all aside to stand at the 2025 WA state election ). Jess is a highly respected figure in the southern reaches of Western Australia, by both those who would traditionally have prioritised conservation, and those who might not have. I spoke with Jess back in July 2021 for the Clean State podcast. At the time, WAFA was seizing the opportunity it sensed to finally end native fore...
Jan 25, 2025•42 min•Season 9Ep. 244
Simon Wallwork and Cindy Stevens live with their three kids on a farm in Corrigin, in WA’s wheatbelt. In 2019 they joined a group of other producers to found AgZero2030 , an agriculture-led movement progressing positive action on climate. Their goal? That agriculture achieves net zero emissions by 2030, and the drawdown of emissions after that. In other words, that agriculture go from being a key contributor to global warming and its increasingly catastrophic effects, to being a key contributor ...
Jan 22, 2025•30 min•Season 9Ep. 243
A brief but profoundly beautiful bonus episode of previously unreleased material with Maria Novac. Maria was a single mum with a family who had unexpectedly found herself in need of social housing, and landed in a neglected hot box. A chance encounter resulted in her becoming one of the social housing recipients whose life was transformed by Stephen King and the Australian Insulation Foundation. If you’ve come here first, tune into the main episode 242 with Stephen King: ‘ The Insulation Revolut...
Jan 20, 2025•5 min•Season 9Ep. 242
Stephen King is the founder, CEO and Head Installer of the Australian Insulation Foundation of WA (AIFWA). While working in his insulation business, Stephen found social housing tenants were desperately in need of insulation, but had no means of getting it. So he set up a charity, added a little premium to his main service, and provided housing insulation for social housing tenants free of charge. One such resident is Maria Novac – a single mum with a family who unexpectedly found herself in nee...
Jan 20, 2025•25 min•Season 9Ep. 242
