Where the Leaves Fall #9
The themes for this issue are collaboration, community and consciousness, alongside a series of dialogues.
A COLLECTIVE WISDOM
In our first theme of this issue, we feature Australian academic historian Bill Gammage and Australian Aboriginal writer and farmer Bruce Pascoe discussing traditional Aboriginal practices and sustainable farming; photographer and artist Liliana Merizalde’s collaborative project with Indigenous women from Vaupés, Colombia, who have experienced violence and displacement; and we visit Ocupação 9 de Julho in São Paulo, Brazil, where an occupied building with a community kitchen has become the centre of a social justice movement.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHANGE
In our second theme writer Thin Lei Win explores how the benefits of nutritious school meals, together with the introduction of school gardens, can impact and elevate whole communities and play a hugely important role in our future relationship with our planet. As US educationalist, Claudia Barker, says in the article: “Our only hope, really, is to be able to educate the next generation about the connection between what we grow and what we eat, and the environment.”
THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF BELONGING
In our final theme, writer Bernd Brunner’s investigates the resurgence of traditional orchards as natural and cultural assets, introducing new and forgotten flavours; and André Tranquilini, the estate manager of Waltham Place, a 220 acre organic biodynamic farm in the UK, talks to OmVed Gardens’ head gardener, Vicky Chown, about the importance of observing the rhythms and cycles that affect the land “to allow the nature of what is being observed to reveal itself”.
DIALOGUES
Fertility awareness educator Isobel Ripley examines how menstrual cycle awareness can provide a blueprint for imagining a world beyond the ecological crisis. Sonia Rego reports on the premature death of vultures around the world, and how that crisis that impacts us all. And Madeleine Bazil describes how the writing of US nature poet, activist and farmer Wendell Berry can provide solace when faced with anxieties about the state of the world.
