Episode 61 - Hamish Evans - Middleground Growers - Prefiguration, Permaculture, Bioregionalism and land based transformation
Hamish Evans is a Permaculturist, Market Gardener, Regenerative Farmer, Community and Climate Activist and Co Founder of MiddleGround Growers and Weston Spring Farm in Bath, Somerset in the UK.
Hamish is another extraordinary human, who at 24 years old is bringing inspirational vision, energy, connection and healing to the lands of Bath and the communities here.
In this long conversation which is packed with insight from Hamish’s experiences we explored many many threads, including how to shift our grief and despair around climate and ecological action and social justice and direct our own energies towards creating projects with the potential to heal, bring people together and co-create new life sustaining systems. What Hamish calls Prefigurative action - building the future we envision in the belly of the destructive systems.
We explore new forms of activism, our relationship to the land around us, repairing our divided cultures and communities through starting with the ground we stand on, food cultivation, exploring shifts in diets and the foods we eat, how to open up land access to young, marginalised and new types of community growers, new forms of small scale regenerative farming, permaculture approaches and collective design processes which are inclusive, radical co-operation and new forms of food systems grounded in place, as bio-regions and shaping new types of local economies.
In short - how land itself could be the catalyst for the personal, cultural and systems transformations that are being called for.
And we dig into the question - what will it take for a city such as Bath to be able to feed itself when it comes to food security and food poverty and climate challenges ?
As we witness now in real time the effects of climate breakdown in the UK, with water shortages, soil degradation and crop failures now finally being talked about in mainstream media, the question of how will we feed ourselves becomes perhaps the post powerful call to action to step into service in these times, and the possibilities here for reimagining and redesigning our relationships with, food, the living world, with the landscapes around us and how we relate to each other is both profound and exciting.
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Show notes:
Hamish Evans dissertation on Prefigurative Action
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