Cathy Fitzgerald: A personal journey to Haumea Ecoversity and ecosocial values

Dr Cathy Fitzgerald is an ecological artist, creative entrepreneurial educator, and researcher with  a long interest in the potential of ecoliterate creative people in catalysing community and conversations for a more equitable, sustainable, and peaceful world. She co-developed Haumea Ecoversity, an independent online platform that has supported upskilling over 300+ mid-career creative and cultural professionals in ecoliteracy and values-based learning. Cathy is centred on the potential of the creative sectors role in promoting a significant cultural shift, to inspire communities to think and act for a better world. She is interested in sustainable livelihoods that align with ecosocial values and shares knowledge with those who  learn with her. To explore Cathy's work, visit hollywoodforest.com and HaumeaEcoversity.ie 

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

A very warm welcome to everyone who's joined us here today. The genesis for this is based on the idea of knowledge exchange and the idea of artists as cultural leader and exchanging knowledge. And it's funded by Russ Common Arts Office and a big thank you to them for their support and also to Creative Ireland in Russ Common who've backed this as well. So enormous thanks to them who've done a lot of work in promoting and thanks to Rona. I we met some artists to talk a little bit about I suppose practice and working what people were doing, but working rurally, but also kind of maybe the challenges of that, and just thinking about how you navigate that and how you make what are the things that might stimulate you, how do you get your network still active, and how do you feed yourself intellectually and what are the interests at play? So I suppose the three things that came up were one around kind of placemaking and artists as activists, artists within the environment, and activating that, and the second one, the second talk we had was around hospitality and the idea of um the offer to engage. So I'm delighted that you're here, Dr. Kathy Fitzgerald. And Kathy and I met years ago in Dunnery, but Kathy has a long history in the region, and I would first of all thank you so much. You've come from Carlo today, especially, and we're delighted to welcome you back. I'm really interested to know a little bit about your journey and your connection with this region, and you've come from New Zealand, but also you have a way that you'd like to introduce today and to welcome, thank people.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Yeah, yeah. Thank thank you everyone for turning up such a glorious day. Thanks, Rona, for being here. We've we've met online a couple of years ago, and I've met some of you online as well. It's always nice to meet in person. It's customary where I come from. My birth country is Ayotero, New Zealand, and all citizens of New Zealand are invited when they become educators or they speak in public to learn their ecological story. It's called a pepiha. And I'm just giving a really micro version because it gives an outline of the cultural shift that I'm part of, facilitating that, where we are going to think about caring for more, caring for more than the human, more for the planet, but also thinking about the future generations and all that we do. So we're moving more from maybe creativity and being concerned about the human, but really expanding that. So in the spirit of a pepe ha, I give thanks to my ancestors here and my family back in New Zealand, my friends and mentors. I give thanks to my the forests, the oceans, the good food that I supported my life in in New Zealand, but also here. I give greetings and gratitude for the community of practice that has come around me when almost five years ago I put on Facebook, is anybody interested in learning about eco-literacy? And it was I was really nervous about asking that question. And I'm here today driving up to Ross Common brings back a lot of memories driving through South Leitram. So when I came to Ireland in the around 1996, I came into Dunleary and I was working in a boys' high school that had the summer months off, and I knew I couldn't get work in my field of interest. There was, I think there was about 20% unemployment. My background was working in a science laboratory, but as a little child I'd always loved art. But somebody said to me, There's a summer job going in Mohill, looking after a little craft shop, and it's to do with native trees, and it might be of interest to you. So this was a very good art friend. I got a lift from a new friend in Dublin who'd never been to Leitram. She deposited me in Mohill and she said, I've got to go back. And I'd been promised residence above a little shop, which Sarah actually knows today. Um, and I get out of the car and there's nobody there to meet me. There's no mobile phones. Uh, the person who I was to work with, a forester, didn't turn up for two days. So the garage man over the road said, Oh, you seem to be in a bit of bother, can we help? And I said, Well, I don't even have a key. So they got a forklift, they couldn't open the front door. They got a forklift to get into my little what was going to be my bedroom. Um, but I fell in love with that little project. There was Jan Alexander who started Cran, was really involved almost a decade before going on the Late Late show. Antipodene, she's from Australia, like me, she noticed the monoculture here. She noticed the the shifting baseline, even though there's a lot, and this happens in New Zealand too, there's tourism that both Ireland and New Zealand are green countries. But when you see the intense farming and you you look a bit closer, you you understand there's so many species that are not here. So um Jan saw me in the little craft shop and she said, We're going to be friends. So uh I was painting green, I was trying to sell um crafts made from uh native trees in Mohill. This was well before anybody was thinking about the is it in Carrot. There's a fantastic craft shop there now. This is all before two, a lot of artists came into South Lectum and into this area in Ross Common. So um, but it was a huge cultural shock. So there were pubs there, there were churches, but I really connected with the small team of people, a ranger, Jan, the local forester. And part of behind the little craft shop, there was a tiny, tiny sort of what we called the library, which was just a collection of environmental books and things, and I was there to raise awareness about Irish hedgerows. So this is a calendar I made, and this is how I started. Um, with a ballpoint pen, the forester went out and got Irish rare trees and shrubs that were known to be at danger with all the hedge cutting. And here we are in 2023, and the story is still continuing in the debates. But it was an extraordinary experience for me to live that that maxim about thinking ecologically, but doing something locally, and it was also doing stuff together with other people. It brought in my science background, and then I could see a reason for my art as well. And there was a funny story with this. I actually put it in for an ESB Environmental Endeavour Award, and I I got an award, there was no money, but I was saying to Sarah, they must have thought, oh my goodness, there's this woman called Kathy Fitzgerald trying to do something about the environment in a calendar uh with rare heterogene, you know, trees and shrubs, and it went into a second printing. And this is before I went to art college, so I was hooked on trying to bring in ecological concerns, not just nature, because I had a really good idea that even back then we were in trouble. So it's been it's been quite a journey, and even some of the things you've been talking about with the previous people, that art of invitation is very current with my work. Having that community around you, that's that's how to be ecological. You wouldn't, in an indigenous culture, you wouldn't be working alone. Do you know? So it's pushing back against individualism. It's quite a number of the things that an art college, you're you're concentrating on your own voice and self-expression in the visual arts. Um and then the other so that led to a project after my master's, I moved to South Leacham, um, met my my husband to be, and didn't he have two acres of monoculture? Spruce. So he's quite certain that I married him for the trees, do you know? Yeah, but it didn't happen that I began an ecological transformation art project straight away. Eight years. We we built our place in the wood. It's tiny, two and a half woods, but the trees are very tall now, they're about 45 years old. But I kept in connection with the forest as I met with Crane, who then, Jan and other people joined this organisation called ProSilver. So she realized that she had been successful in motivating a lot of people and quilture to think about bringing back planting native species, but that's not enough. How do we bring back permanent forests? How do we manage forests continuously into the future? So I joined and I was part of that committee just up until a couple of months ago from 2009. And again, I brought my creative talents and I did the website for ProSilver. And I had on speed dial on my phone, I had access to the best ecological foresters to help maintain the little wood that I I share with my husband. But there was a lot of nerves about where do we start with inheriting a piece of woodland. You know, you have to you have to engage a forester, there's paperwork, there's money involved, there's there's long-term thinking. But it gave me a real on-the-ground feeling of how to, I suppose, talk about things about regenerating ecosystems and habitats, and then I was going to art college at the same time. So sort of bouncing between the two. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

I'm really interested in that actually, that that journey, so this drawing and this arriving into this new community that was to welcome you. Um and how all that grew and developed from sort of 1998. Yeah. Then you decided to go to art college. Yeah. And I'm really interested because I think um art college education is quite interesting because it does bring out the entrepreneurial mindset, the way you're conceiving, developing, and delivering projects. Yeah. You're very much a self-starter, you're a really yeah, ideally a great researcher, and you're interested in cultural change. And so, in a way, it's the ideal environment to hot house.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

It was type of thinking. All for that, that was all positive. Um what I found difficult was that art college is quite in it's part of the education system we have today, that's quite siloed. So the knowledge and and experience and the wisdom that I was getting from ecological foresters to bring that together with my art practice, that took years of searching, of finding a way of feeling that my creativity was was helping make a difference. I just didn't want to make illustrations of nature. So I was lucky enough at the end of my four years of my undergraduate to come across Professor Newton and Helen Harrison who work like I do. They work collaborate with foresters and local people, people who've got traditional knowledge in a way of rehabilitating our living will with place over a long time. And I got to meet Newton a couple of years ago, just before he passed. So it was a great, great privilege to come across that. But I didn't find art college easy for my topic because of this this conservative structure. And I think this is why I've bounced out of college, and maybe it's a little bit foolhardy, but I'm trying to make my own ecoversity, where we talk about ecology but also our our well-being. We talk about philosophy, that that this is a not just a crisis of I suppose too much carbon, but how did we get here? So I I would look back at cultures that are living more deeply in sync with the living world, you know.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

So it's been quite a journey. And I haven't done any of that on my own. Again, I've collaborated. And that's also for a reason that I didn't I don't have the answers for this topic. I'm even this week I was full of doubt. There's a lot of there's a lot of overwhelm with this topic, there's a lot of inaction, there's a lot of science that I don't think has been communicated that well. I had the good fortune to be on a panel with the independent journalist John Gibbons, and he spoke truth to an audience at Create about the situation we're in. And people were robbed. Arts community was rocked. Why aren't we hearing this? So, but we can't talk about these things unless we have a safe space to deal with. We've got so much other things that we're dealing with. So I'm very lucky to be working with a philosopher who's also had over had an overview in his PhD with contemplative studies, how other cultures live successfully. And a lot of that's coming down to thinking about our values and and our attentions and work. So and I don't think this is going to be unfamiliar to a lot of us. Do you know we're we're searching for a better way? And it's it's very, very current. But this is this is lifelong relearning. And it's I was quite lucky during the pandemic, I applied for a grant from the Arts Council, it was a professional development award. And I thought coming out of my PhD, I'm quite introverted. I'm not sure how I managed to start up an online course with these Zoom things. I for six months, every every time I had my class, I was panicking because I could have pre-recorded my course, but there was something in me, and my colleague said, I think there's going to be something when we actually talk together once a week. And that was that came true. It became like a little salon, became where the heart and soul of the course. Um but yeah, the the part of that uh education thing I think has come from another um past work experience. Um, after I finished my master's, I worked for the local arts office. In the South East, there's a program called Art Links. It was the collaboration between five arts offices back then. I was appointed as an artist sort of director to give professional development courses to artists of all stripes, dancers, writers, poets, visual artists, a lot of these people I hadn't ever come across before. But because I was in the arts office, it gave me an insight to the common struggles that creative people are facing, whether it's writing proposals, getting funding. I asked the person who employed me, Rosalind Malloyer, I said, why on earth did you pick me to do this job? I'm not very confident. I know I've got some administration skills from my science background, but I said I don't really see myself as a director of this. And she said, No, you're an artist as well. And that's and she said, never lose sight of that. And even when I did my PhD, I was encouraged to do theory only. But I never forgot that comment. Keep your art practice alive. So, and today I'm trying to juggle, not juggle, but keep my forest transformation long-term art practice nourishes my teaching. And then the other thing that nourishes my teaching is that the people who come to my courses, they give me so much, I don't know, it's uh inspiration. There they are, they're coming together, they're starting to collaborate, and just to be paring over their shoulders. It it's really, really uh it's the most rewarding thing I've I've been doing, but the most scary too. And I I don't have it sorted as far as how to make it a viable business, because I'm doing a lot of things myself. I'm doing the little bit of marketing, trying to do the accounts, and then trying to build that. So I had a stage about four years in where I'm thinking, how do I build some supports around me?

SPEAKER_01 15:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

Going, yeah, the sustainability of my own livelihood.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

Yeah, yeah. And I suppose that thing that when you're pushing something that's so important, weighty, yeah, uh, and you're so passionate about it, actually, it's very easy to kind of deplete your energy. It is, yeah. And you've talked a little bit about the kind of importance of collaboration, and yeah, you have you work a lot with grace, yeah. But then there's a whole range of other people that come in, really fascinating sets of expertise that underpin some of the thinking.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

And and and and I think there has been a sea change in the last five years. When I came out of my PhD, it's quite an I I live in a rural area, so I was a lot of time on the computer on my own. Poor husband put up with me somehow, but I didn't think that there was any future for my my work. And I I I went into my PhD from the arts office because that that funding sort of had had dried up for having a person involved. It's still still a supporting program for funding. But I really I really had the benefit of other people standing up. So when I got conferred with my degree, that's when Greta Thunberg stood up that month. That's when Extinction Rebellion, all of a sudden people were saying, Oh, that's what you're going on about, Kathy. And and then I I I even though in the last chapter I thought there's going to be such a need for education in this area, but I also had experience with NCAD. I'd I'd been invited to be on the board. I knew the financial constraints there is in education. I also know that most of the staff don't have the capacity to take on a new topic. So there's these pinch points. And so I have a sister who's looking at massive open online courses. Now, this is all before the pandemic, and she kept saying to me, Kathy, keep your eye on the online space. There's maybe a place where this is. So I put that into the end of my PhD, not thinking that I would ever have the ability to start to pursue that. And that led me off to think about how I could do that. And it really came from creative people coming to me. So I had a jazz composer who started. I wouldn't say she was stalking me, but I'd meet her at you know, sort of events. And then she said, Kathy, you know a lot about trees, and she said, You know a lot about this ecology. She said, I'm feeling I'm feeling really despairing. Can I chat to you about this? And I said, Well, of course. And I said, But I know nothing about jazz. I just it it's an abstract form, do you know, and it's quite an urban-based thing. But we met over bowls of soup. And from that she said, Kathy, you've just given me so much. And I also helped her think about forests at at my place in the trees. And then she turned around to me and she said, Kathy, you should be teaching this. So it was sort of these hints from people that I had accumulated so much, and I had sort of had a responsibility I felt to start sharing it. But I was just filled with so much anxiety, and I actually moved straight from from that experience into doing more or less online teaching. I I did one day's live teaching, that's my only experience. And I can remember meeting you, Sarah, and I was like being this Art Links director, and I was always like, this is not my happy space, but now teach the teaching space is my happy space. I am very happy about that. So that that was a journey to think about how I could develop an online course, and then it's only in the last year with one of the course participants saying, You and Grace would actually make quite a good team together. Um but I think I think there'll be other people as well. Like Grace and I have have done four or five things in the last year, and one thing that we've been doing recently, we've done talks in libraries together, morning talks. We did a three-day workshop for writers. So Grace been, you know, sort of an international recognized eco-poet, it was extraordinary. And I just said said to Grace, I've never done an in-person workshop, even though I've done the art things thing. So there was a lot of confidence building. Um, and in the last couple of years, I've been working with sort of, I suppose, contracted by three arts officers, Carlo, Kildare, and Mead County Council. And my knowledge that I have from even working with forestry, I can apply it to people who are working with wetlands. So I've been working with creative people and other people in the community who are coming to think about how do I get engaged with my creativity with Peatland Restoration. So it was a big grant from the Arts Council and it was called Invitation to Collaborate. And just in the first year, I would have offered my course, sort of an ecoliteracy and values, with the Earth chart, which I'll talk about in a second, to help help people just on the first step of moving to this journey journey about thinking about values not just for humans but also for ecological integrity, social justice, but also thinking about peace. So if you evolve a culture that attends to all these things, it's also evolving a culture of peace, which is coming even more important in the last few years. So a couple of weeks ago I was in Carlo, and some of the local authority staff were invited by the arts office to hear about the training that I'd given, some of uh Grace's own reflections and values. Absolutely gorgeous. She was talking about a new Celtic twilight, I suppose. What does she call it? Another Gaelic revival is happening, and it's happening with the land and our care of. Language. It also involved the the lead artists I'm I mentioned, and there was about 40 other people across those three counties. So there's this is about the Earth Charter. The Earth Charter was um is a a document that has been around that arose when the word sustainable development arose in the 1980s. So there was evidence coming from the 70s that the environmental problems were going to increase. So they came, the UN came up with this, oh well let's talk about sustainability, but then they added sustainable development. So in some ways that was like, we'll talk about sustainability, but it will be quite a lot of business as usual. At that time, there was a recognition that we needed to have a sort of a compass to start to talk about and consider not just the human but also the planetary and the future generations. So this came around from the UN Secretary General, so there was a lot of work done that Mikhail Gorbachev was involved to come up with an Earth charter. It's based on the Declaration of Human Rights, so it's got all of that there. And it's got all the body of knowledge from environmental scientists, bring it together with ethicists, climate scientists, activists, religious people. So there's a big spiritual dimension in thinking about this, I suppose, this new story about how we can live well on the planet. It didn't become a charter with the UN because the first pillar is care and respect for all beings. And we're still having problems caring and respecting for women, for children. So a lot of the things that the Declaration of Human Rights were still struggling with. So for some countries to even think about environmental things, it was it was far too soon, do you know? So the Earth Chart is coming into prominence more now, and I'm finding it a really good teaching framework to touch on different things that people might be interested in, whether it's social, whether it's to do with new immigrants coming. So this is available in 66 languages, and one of the course participants on my um course, Phoebe Cope, is a painter in a Gale course, she's translated it into Irish. So it's a way of just starting these conversations, and I'm I'm finding it useful as well. So yeah, it's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 24:23

Yeah, I'm really interested if you could talk a little bit about more about kind of how you form the program that you teach, and like even the word equaliteracy, I suppose yeah, it's not a commonly no, you know.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

Actually, I after my PhD I wrote letters to the comp the the head of the arts policy people, and I think I wrote to the Tao Shock as well, and just saying this is an area that needs to be considered, and I was trying to do this, not thinking I should take responsibility to try and develop.

SPEAKER_01 24:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:55

I I asked myself what what I needed, what what didn't I get in my education? And so the first part of eco-literacy, we talk about the big context. How did we how did the dominant Western culture get into this mess? So this is where the philosopher really comes in handy. Thinking about how we habitually in the Western world put man at the top, women next, animals, minerals, and we're trying to move to a world. There's quite a famous illustration of this, where we're one species among everything. But every day we are bombarded by advertisements, by our current politics, by the stories we make about still being in this world, that we see nature as some background to our activities. Then we do another module on helping people think about their well-being and their self-care, which I've touched on before. It's such a big part. And I've I've really encountered this myself. I I've found some of the some of the like when ash dieback came, that affected my forest. So I was so excited. So we were thinning out the conifer trees, and the little ash trees were coming up everywhere, and then like like potato blight, the ash dieback came. So, and you know this is from how we've been trading trees all around the world, the levels of disease is uh part of the economic system. So I did a module uh leaning a lot on other people who've done work looking about our our mental health in this area. So that we do talk about grief literacy about this topic, eco-anxiety. There's term there's new language, solostalgia, the grief we feel when our home place is destroyed. I've got to know that philosopher over in Australia. But he's got he's got words for when we come together, how we can move into a space where we all start to stand up called solophilia. So, but for for people coming to this topic, sometimes the first thing they they go, gosh, isn't it a lot worse than than I imagined? Then another another thing that we deal with is helping people navigate the climate science more easily using some of the frameworks. We also give an overview of where the sustainable development goals from they were sort of a they were the the Millennium Development Goals rebranded. So and why why we why we're quite concerned that then there needs to be more than end goals. It's it's it's the journey that we take and the values that we will gather around. Then we talk about other people who are in this space, give examples of people who are who are poets or who are filmmakers. Um, and the arc of our eco-literacy course is to try and start to use some of these ideas in your own own work. Helpful for applications, but it's only until you start using these terms that it starts to shift your mind as well. And I I don't mean to to be prescriptive about writing, but I think we can we can intellectually know that some of these ideas are around, but until we start embodying them, putting them into our practice, starting to reflect on our creative practice, they they don't really come alive.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting. Yeah. Oh, we touched you touched on earlier on some of the speakers that you bring in, and yeah, and I'd love for you to talk maybe about a couple of them because I suppose they enrich um they're people at the forefront of research in different countries, they have yeah, obviously different specialties and um sites of expertise, but they must really enrich the program.

SPEAKER_00 28:46

Well well, I'd actually mention Grace first because she was up, she was I told her what I was trying to do, and she said, Oh Cathy, I'll certainly I'll come to your Zoom class course thing. And she was able to echo back that this was an important topic for all creatives, and I think she's been feeling that we haven't been going deep enough with our cultural policy in this area. So, and her work, and there was quite a nice connection there. She said, Kathy, the short videos you used to make about your forest work, they get they made me think about bringing video footage when I'm doing my public talks about poetry, eco-poetry. So there's been a nice cross-fertilisation in our creative practice. Other people that I've brought in. Well, I was saying before to you, Sarah, I had a psychotherapist come to do my course. Um, and I was quite nervous about that, even though I knew one of her family members, I am because I haven't got that background or skill set, I was relying on a collaborator. What would that person think about how I was approaching this difficult topic from a mental health, you know, a well-being thing? And she said, Kathy, you've taken you and NECOS have taken so much care over making sure that when people come together, that they arrive, they settle, you check in. And it's quite common now, I think, with education for sustainability that's going through schools, younger people are getting much more exposed to having practices of well-being. But I think it's our generation that's probably like really needing it, you know.

SPEAKER_01 30:26

Yeah. Yeah, I was um listening to a programme a couple of years ago and it was talking about that thing that we all do in human nature is just you know the the the desire to just ignore. Yeah, you know, that yeah, and I think possibly everybody is feeling like that at the moment with war, so many injustices, um violence, or and then sort of witnessing all of the impacts of that and the environmental it's difficult to look at these subjects.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

It's difficult, and the other thing too that that's quite important is I've never I've never pushed anybody to do my course. So it's it seems a bit of a backward thing, but unless you're ready to lift up the rug and start to look at some of that stuff and and think about some of the structures in our society, I I I I think I'd be pushing too hard. It just wouldn't be right. But the people who are coming to the course are starting to think this way themselves, and they just need they just need a bit of a community, they need a a safe space to start to talk about it. And when and when we come together, that's when the the learning accelerates, not just for them but for me as well, because I'll get things thrown back at me. And I've had people come to my course and say, Okay, um, I'm really shy, I'm not gonna say anything in the Zoom. I said, Well, that's fine. I can't stop them talking at the end of the yeah, you know, and I one person who said that um I actually went and visited her, and she has now formed a local community group. She's tackling the council about some paths, some biodiversity stuff. So it's just like she had it there, and she also had it in her personal life because she had a garden. She was also aware of Mary Reynolds's work with the ark, so she just needed a little bit of a this can be part of a creative practice as well. And working with your community can be part of an ecological practice, yeah. So sometimes I use the word eco-social because when people hear ecological, they just hear, oh, she's just interested in nature. But no, it's it's it's definitely a very holistic people, people matter. This is the thing that unless we get people on board, how are we going to restore these these places?

SPEAKER_01 32:43

Do you know what I mean? I was gonna ask you that actually, what's you know, so you they you you're coming together, exchanging, talking. Um there have been outcomes or projects that have amazed you, or things that kind of are pointing or wayfinding that kind of give you hope, or yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:03

Well, I'm I'm looking over the shoulder of of artists involved in the wetlands project, and three three artists were given, I suppose, more support to to develop quite early stage developmental work, and my colleague and friend Jules has started to think about, I suppose, cultural history with the wetlands. So she was saying that butter used to be stored in in peat, and then then she noticed that the particular bog that we're involved with in Carlo is surrounded by the farming community who would have put the little bog and not looked at it, or a cow might have fallen into it. We've done a local history, oral history project recently. But what she did was she got a butterfur, and her event that she's sort of developing is inviting people to have stories or share stories about how we used to make butter, and just to go back to that slowness and also the time it took to actually make something from the land and caring for animals. So it seems very subtle. This is a particular community in South Carlo that's never had any, I'd suppose, creative projects going on. So um, yeah, I've been quite fascinated. And another person I'm working with, some people might know Monica de Barth, she's quite involved. Uh, she has a formidable practice around weaving. And just recently I've noticed her weaving bridogues in community, and and then the stories will come out. So I I keep thinking back to that there there aren't say so much um art objects at the the end of this type of work. This is a shift in conversation, and this is work from Professor Harrison. It's it's you're trying to shift the paradigm of what we're living in and what we care about. Yeah, so that's a that's a tricky one where when you normally go for art grant funding, what's your outcome? I'd be quite happy with that shift in conversation and more of a that conviviality bringing people together. So recently Jules and I worked with a potter to make a series of plates around the wetland project, and we pressed in wetland plants because we're noticing when people are coming into the little community hall, the most important part is the cup of tea and the sharing of the food. And then we had Kate's wonderful bog layer cake, another Dr. Kate Flood. Um, she's done a strategy for the Community Wetland Forum. So she's made this bog layer cake, and I was fooled she put spinach in it, but I actually thought she put sphagnum moss, but it was such a talking point. So now we've got these these plates, and so that brings it nature onto the plate, and then it's just that really community by community. Um yeah. So I'm really, I'm really um, I suppose inspired by by these small conversations. Because there would be an ecological thinker that I've really inspired by Thomas Berry, and he said it's all a question of story. We're lacking a really uh we're we're lacking stories about how we fit into the world, do you know? So that's the big that's the big alienation that I say though. The fundamental thing if you in one sentence about why is there an ecological crisis, it's because we don't live well with the community of life. Yeah. Yeah. We don't, and there's and there's such richness to that. The other thing is to look back at our language. I know this from Maori culture, also the Earth Charter. There would be Earth Charter scholars who and activists who are going back to all the folklore to look at the values of living well or living more slowly, more living more carefully, caring for their fishers' rivers. Yeah, so that's really beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 37:01

Um well it brings it back to what you were saying, Grace was saying about the Celtic revival points too, or you know, and you can see that in the line, there's a lot of really interesting projects happening, yeah. Um, revival and interesting language.

SPEAKER_00 37:16

Yeah, I went on the Trailblazery course because suggesting to my friend Phoebe that she translate the Earth Charter, I thought, oh my goodness, I thought responsibility I've been here 25 years and I didn't know much Irish at all. So um and can you see a lot of parallels from your home place to your new home place? I'm actually more impressed recently with Ireland. I think we we do benefit being close to Europe. Um but but in the last week I the just politically in Ireland, in New Zealand, sorry, there's been a change in government. We've lost Jacinda Adun. She hit she progressed a well-being economy idea. She she was wasn't afraid to use the word compassion, but there's been a swing against that. The pandemic didn't help. So and a lot of oh, and we've had our biggest extreme weather event in New Zealand a year ago. So that hit my home area, 15 billion in damages. I think 11 people died, 30 bridges later, no mobile phones for a month. Can you imagine? This is a first-bull country, and that was an economic shock as well. So I think there was a lot of fear. So anyway, so the government has moved, but there's been an unpacking of there's been more racism and more it's like what's going on everywhere. I don't want to, you know, down New Zealand, but I've been quite surprised how fragile progressive policies can be. So the one thing that I do really, I suppose, really revere is that there is another cosmology in New Zealand with the Maori people. So just in the last few days, if you look at The Guardian, a Maori activist has said, I'm not waiting for the government anymore to act on climate change. Myself and a legal team, we're going to try the legal method of taking some of the biggest uh industries in New Zealand, taking them to court. Got thrown out at national level, but didn't it so and so they thought it was not going to happen. Then it got transferred to the Supreme Court in New Zealand and it's been allowed to proceed. So it's just like wow. Yeah. And that could be again, New Zealand has been at the forefront of giving legal representation to a river, to a forest. So, and that that had a connection to me. My great-grandmother, who was an artist, lived on that that river is one of the first white white women up in that area, and she was a painter, and she painted, she painted plants, but she also painted the deforestation of the early settlers. Just these really sweet little images, and she's painting stumps of of beautiful bush that was cut down with that mentality of yeah, we'll just make this into sheep land, do you know?

SPEAKER_01 40:06

So interesting company as well because um the indigenous population in South America were also successful in pursuing some cases. Um it is really profound that it's the early cultures or the that have that sensibility. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:24

A couple of years ago, the UN uh summit for biodiversity gathered, and um I think it was, it's I think it's got a Chinese name, I've forgotten the name of it, but because of the pandemic, that it had to be moved to Montreal. That so it's the Montreal Biodiversity Declaration, and that was the first time that they recognized Indigenous people's extreme contribution to the wisdom of living well, and they're doing that because 85% of the most biodiverse regions left on the world are tended by Indigenous people. So there's there's a big story for our culture to listen more, to being humble. Yeah. And and to think about some of their cultural practices that keep reminding them that all life is sacred. And for me, listening in a more modern world, there's people missing from the table. We've got politicians and climate scientists, but but where are the philosophers? Where are they creative? I know we've got Creative Island, and I know it's an inter, you know, it's across the government departments, but I I I think we need much more, do you know? So maybe it's coming.

SPEAKER_01 41:34

And that that kind of empowerment and bravery and taking the space to speak out. Yeah, that's the thing.

SPEAKER_00 41:40

And and I think too, um, when I got that award from the arts council, I don't know if I finished that story, I was doing a six-month course online to, because I hadn't taught before, to give myself more confidence. And it was this learning about how to teach about sustainability is called education for sustainable development. And we've got a strategy for that here in Ireland, but through the Earth Charter, and I thought, oh, people seem to be keep mentioning the Earth Charter. But the thing about the Earth Charter is that there's leading educators in sustainability who've been contributing to that for over three decades. So it gave me a whole another field of feeling supported. And next month I've been invited to present in Florida at the Earth Charter Summit. So I'm right going to meet some of these people. So one of the people who's on my spot, he's he's worked with the folk and the story collective across the world. And I'm interested not just for myself, I don't really have a background in folklore, story scholarship, but for some of the people that I'm teaching. I want to make some links there. And I've noticed that there's a bit more activity about the Earth Charter in Ireland. Um so yeah, no, it's it's quite a thrill. It's it's not um inexpensive to get there. So that that's but it's really uh amazing that sometimes if you reach out um the people that will come back to support you, do you know? And and Miriam Vella, who's been the executive um person with the Earth Charter for many decades, she gave a a webinar one time. She said you can try and maybe influence policy, but she said you're better to introduce ideas around values, Earth Charter, on the ground. And she said there's something about the Earth Charter, it never became a UN charter, it's not a top-down thing, it's it came together through people deeply thinking about what they wanted to care about going forward, you know. So it's quite beautiful, and it's open to interpretation for any creative. Yeah, well that's so my my husband Martin, who you've met, has tried carving one of the principles in stone, do you know?

SPEAKER_01 43:49

So yeah, yeah. I suppose I'd like to just maybe bring you back a little bit to how you live and where you live and the Hollywood forest, yeah, because I suppose that's Sustains and feeds you and helps you to do your work. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about living there?

SPEAKER_00 44:06

Yeah, I I've had the pleasure of visiting you. I know, I know. I'm envious of the water here. My husband's a geologist and sculptor, so he has a great love of Mount Leinster. It just needs to have a big piece of rock near. But it's it's beautiful. So to many people living in a monoculture citrus spruce plantation, it wouldn't be their ideal. And even today, even though we've been thinning it out with a professional forester, the understory is still yet to come up. So it still looks quite dark in places. But moving out from the house now, we've got a lot of lovely regeneration. Holly, hazel, we've got jays. I haven't seen the jays because they're very secretive, but they're planting the oaks. We've got other birds who've been delighting in our plant of cherries when we first came, and now they're planting, there's a little grove of cherry trees, do you know? And the other thing to supplement creatures that would eat the really tender young plants is we've got two rescue lurches. So they they take the place of a wolf. So we so there are one of the biggest problems in Ireland with afforestation at the moment. I know this from the foresters I work with, is the number of deer. So we're at nothing if we don't get some measure behind that. But that's because we took away a predator. We took away, so we've destabilized so many systems. But anyway, my lurch is run around at night. There's no, there has been a deer or two have come in and they've quickly bounced out again, do you know? So no, it is it's it's a real joy. And then so it's not when people think that I live in a forest, they might have an image in their head that I'm living in oak trees and that. So it's very much a forest that's gonna take maybe another 150 years to come back to that state. So it's all about quite a slow creative practice. But last year I was amazed, and I I thought my forester, who's also a New Zealander, Sean Hoskins, Kiwi Sean, I'd say, Wow, Sean, I don't know how you did it, but once you thinned some of those trees, I've got a whole little lawn of violets. So I've got some slides, and it's my big conifer trees, and there's this patch of violets, not just the yeah, so there's these dark delights. But I do know with the teaching work over the last four or five years, my attention has not been as much on the forest as I'd like to, you know. So, but hopefully I can bring that back in to you know, because I think that's a story that feeds my teaching, is that I'm still struggling along trying to figure out how to practice a better type of forestry. Well, that uh that's so that's hopefully everyone's stories. Yeah, yeah. It's all evolving. And and and like we've had wind throw, you know, these stronger winds we're getting. And yeah, there's stories about with the warmer winters we're getting, I don't know if people know, but there's aphids that attack some other sicker spruce. If you drive around, sometimes you see the conifers going a bit orangey. And if they get that successively over seasons, a bit like in the flu too many times, yeah, we've had a few mature trees die, and so they're but we've left them because we do, we we've got we've got our first woodpecker. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, no, it's been it's been quite a journey in lots of different ways. But I'm not I'm not saying it's been easy to, and I have really had to fight against my own, I suppose, shyness and lack of feeling adequate to do this, Stephanie.

SPEAKER_01 47:40

Yeah. Well, it's been just great talking to you, yeah, and thank you for your all the stories and the it's brilliant to hear about your two projects as well and all that you've achieved. And we'll put up some details of the websites and things as well. So thank you, Kathy.