Sustainability from Childhood is InCreativeCo's new series aimed at exploring the relationship between our connection to nature as children and our dedication to our natural world, environmental strategists, mechanical engineers, herbalists and foragers speak their truth to power and together create a collection of imaginative and practical proposals for the action that we need in this moment of climate catastrophe.

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Video Transcript

Mackenzie Barth: Yes, we have the capacity to do great harm to the planet. But we also have the same capacity, if not more capacity to do good to create to add value to make a positive impact on our surroundings and so let's learn the skills to actually do that.

Gilian Rappaport: Welcome to the sustainability from childhood audio series initiated by Gillian Rapoport and commissioned by In Creative Company. Sustainability from childhood explores the relationship between our connection to nature as children and our dedication to our natural world. Environmental strategists, mechanical engineers, herbalists and foragers speak their truth to power and together create a collection of imaginative and practical proposals for the action that we need in this moment of climate catastrophe. Join us as we explore what messages about climate possibility, do we need to share with our communities now? 

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Getting Started 🎬

Gilian Rappaport: Can you talk a little bit about it? You know, as I mentioned, at the start of this, I'm really interested in the relationship between childhood and this work as part of a kind of broader purpose within ourselves and can you talk a little bit about your childhood and any connections you see between what you were interested in as a child and what you were exposed to? Or not exposed to? And what and this work that you're doing now.

Mackenzie Barth: Yeah. I love this question because I think so many of us have these moments from childhood of pure bliss and feeling I don’t know,  joyful and small moments in nature. I know I have at least, and I was thinking about this recently, there were two new memories that came up for me around my connection with nature and childhood. One was that I had this tree outside my window when I was a kid. And that was my tree that I would always see the seasons changing. So it was going from spring and then it would be in summer and then it would start to fall and get all white with snow. I grew up near Chicago. So we had all four seasons and I remember our parents made a renovation on the house.

We had to cut down that tree and I was devastated. I was like this tree represents for me like the changing of the seasons and this connection that I have to be outdoors. I also had this project in first grade that another classroom in first grade got to do a project on the rain forest and I remember feeling jealous. I was like wait, I want to do something in the rain forests and also like intrigue like, what is this rainforests? I saw they had big posters while the animals were in the rainforest and I remember so vividly, just really being intrigued by the rainforest. So it's funny just what keeps like flash, flashbulb moments from childhood, they keep coming, coming to me. But the most profound thing I would say, profound thing was that I went to overnight camp for seven years. So it was four to eight weeks, every summer, I would go to the NorthWoods of Wisconsin, and spend my days sailing or canoeing, or climbing or swimming or fishing and you know, just being outside all day, was so freeing. For me, these are the best moments from my childhood when I was at camp.

It really taught me about the connection between myself and the way that I feel free and connected in nature, like happy, joyful, free feeling. I could feel a lot whenever we left camp who would cry so much, it was just like, this was… yeah. When I'm more connected to nature, I'm more connected to myself and it wasn't until I went to New York after college and was living and working there for five years, and was terribly disconnected. I mean, in New York, it's so hard to feel like you're in anything other than a concrete jungle and so I had to have that connection taken away, or I had to take myself away from it, so that I could have the experience of how good it feels when I came back to it. So after New York, I started traveling in Central and South America and spending most of my days outdoors again in the sun and the air and I felt alive again in ways that I hadn't at all in New York and it showed me it brought me back to all those memories growing up outside and just feeling the sense of freedom and freshness and aliveness in nature. 

Gilian Rappaport: That's so beautiful. Thank you for sharing. Can you tell us a little bit about your project?

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Project Breakdown🌎

Mackenzie Barth: Yes, I'd be happy to tell you. So I'm working on a project right now called groundwork, which is a collaboration between me and Neil Haggerty, who is a permaculture designer, farmer. So I met him here in Guatemala and what we're putting together with groundwork is it's basically an education platform to help teach people the skills that they need to learn to live more ecologically oriented lives. Very practical skills, things like gardening, composting, how to actually do things with your hands that are adding valuable to your life and also to the planet and it's rooted in permaculture principles. We've both been studying permaculture, him for much longer than me, him for the last 15 years.

For me, it's relatively new the last couple of years, I've been diving deep into the permaculture world and what I love so much about it is that it provides this like framework and this philosophy for life that is aligned with how nature works already. So what permaculture does is it looks at how are ecosystems operate in nature, healthy ecosystems, specifically, and how we, as humans, learn from healthy ecosystem design and start to incorporate that into our own lives. So whether that's with a land project itself, like designing an actual piece of land, and making sure that it's healthy and thriving, and creating tons of biodiversity for life to thrive, or it could be your own personal life, your relationships, your business, your organization, your community, there's so much richness in the principles from permaculture that we're excited to share with people as part of groundwork. So starting with things like training people on how to do ecological things like gardening, composting and land design, development and becoming more food, sovereign things like that and in the future, I can see it really evolving into business design, and organizational design and community design with these ecological principles in mind throughout all of it.

Gilian Rappaport: That's so great. Thank you so much. So can you share a little bit more about the people specifically that you're referring to who you're offering your teachings to?

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The Teaching and the Audience📚

Mackenzie Barth: Yeah, I feel like we're in this time right now. Or there's a lot of people who keep hearing this, they're, they're in their jobs, or they've been doing their traditional way of living and there's this pole that they feel getting back to nature in some way. Whether that's through work, or just through personal and going for walks outside and starting to experience the outdoors is an amazing first step and I hear a lot of people who want to go deeper and oftentimes, it starts with something as simple as a garden, or something as simple as composting.

Realizing that your food scraps are going to waste when you're putting them in a landfill, do something different about it. So it feels like the person that we're talking to is really this person who's transitioning into a more ecologically conscious lifestyle and is ready to do something about it, and do something about it more than just buying bamboo straws, but really like putting their hands in the earth and understanding how nature works, learning how nature works, and applying that to their to their lives and I liked the name groundwork too, because it suggests that there's work involved, it's not so easy the stuff that you do in the land, it takes time, it takes effort, it takes intention, it takes a lot of things that require a lot. It's not as easy as going on a computer and like clicking around, it's like you're really doing work and it's the groundwork that is the foundational work that we all need to do to set ourselves up for success in the future, too. So that way, I think it's super fulfilling.

Gilian Rappaport: Yeah, I love the emphasis on the ground. So I'm curious, what have you learned about that community so far that you're offering? Is there anything interesting that you can share about your interactions so far in offering education to this community that's sort of interested but maybe not super engaged yet? 

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What Has Been Learned about Community👫

Mackenzie Barth: Yeah, we've had a few immersions here in Guatemala, where we've, it's either been a two week immersion, or a nine day immersion, teaching people permaculture and gardening, things like that and the one thing of course, we believe, with a lot more knowledge and education and know what to do when they go home. But the thing that stood out the most for me is the community that's formed from people who are finding their people like finding their like minded humans, who are also hearing the call to get back to nature and we come together, and we're in a learning space together and we're asking important questions about why things are the way they are and what we can do about them and it's a space where people get to feel really seen and their own maybe like, what they meant, what mainstream culture might think is weird, or friend or something and they feel so, so welcome and so like a sense of belonging.

It's so fulfilling for me to be able to create these spaces where people can find the people that they want to collaborate with. They want to talk to you about these crazy ideas they have, and people who are empowering themselves to do something and that's one of our main messages too, is like so many disempowering messages out there, like climate change, and all that feels so big and so hard, but we want to empower the individual to do something and you can, like it's a collection of individuals with changes has changed. and culture throughout all of time, that's how it works one by one by one by one, it starts to really change things on a massive scale and so we like to say that, that humans, yes, we have the capacity to do great harm to the planet. But we also have the same capacity, if not more capacity to do good to create to add value to make a positive impact on our surroundings and so let's learn the skills to actually do that.

Gilian Rappaport: Yeah, definitely, I have so much of what you said really resonates with me, especially the idea of messaging around climate change, and, and, you know, making the space to really discover what those messages of hope are, and how to best share them. That piece of it really resonates and then also just, I just feel a lot of curiosity around like what your messages are resonating for people and really feeling empowering for people, what have you found so far, in your research? 

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“They want to talk to you about these crazy ideas they have, and people who are empowering themselves to do something and that's one of our main messages too.” - Mackenzie Barth

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Findings in the Research🔭

Mackenzie Barth: The in person experience is more than a message itself or words, we can say it's really the in person experience where people are learning tangible skills in a community of other people. That is, I think, makes a difference between people feeling intimidated to learn new things and try something new and empowered, that they have proof through their own experience, that they can, and when they start to open up and work with the earth, and and use the permaculture principles, one of which is like receiving feedback, so being open to receiving feedback from what happens when you do something with the earth. There's this constant learning process that goes on that is so enlivening, and so inspiring for people like, “Oh, I do this thing, and I get feedback. So I can learn and do something different or the same and get more feedback.” Yeah, in personal experience, there's nothing like it.

Another thing I was just thinking about is something else we keep hearing from the students that we're working with is that it's more than just doing something with the Earth, there's an immense, internal shift that happens to people. It's like the best therapy you could have, I think, like doing a garden, calling outside, working with the land, it not only teaches you so much, but there's an inner transformation of remembering our rightful role as humans in an ecosystem and that's something that I think that we've lost over these last few years is with this narrative of humans being bad. It's like, wait, wait a second, we're actually part of this ecosystem, we have a positive place here and having that physical experience and reminding yourself if that's true, it's so empowering for people and just so it's so transformative, transformative in the inner landscape, too. 

Gilian Rappaport: Yeah, that's really beautiful. Do you have any specific memories or experiences that you can share around that, where are experiences that people have shared with you that really speak to that sort of transformation, or even any of your just favorite experiences, favorite memories from working in this program?

Mackenzie Barth: One thing that we do at the end of our emergence is we do design projects, where we have people apply what they've learned in the program to an actual project. So in one of the courses, it was a land either that somebody had owned or we had a couple of pieces of land around here that we went through the process of actually designing a piece of land and it was such a rich experience by the end for people to actually be able to incorporate everything that they've learned from the course and apply it directly into creating a map and what that shows me is that there's a shift in, in the brain of what of the way that you see the world from, “oh, I'm gonna put a house here because I like this place.”

To, “let me actually look at all of the energy flows that are happening on a piece of land” as the first thing that I do is a different way I call them permaculture goggles. It's like you put on your permaculture goggles, and you start seeing things differently. So instead of seeing a mountain as a mountain, you start to see how the water flows on this mountain? How is.. where's the sunlight hitting this mountain? And that's how you design from looking at your surroundings and looking at nature and using nature as a guideline to figure out the house goes less. It's like nature will tell you where everything should go if you learn to look at it like that and so to be able to see people's design projects by the end, and see them having internalized these teachings and now start to see land and the earth completely differently.

That is super cool. That to me is like this ecological foundation that we didn't really we weren't really taught growing growing up, but it's so fundamental for the way that we move in the world to see the Earth for what it's actually doing instead of just this like, you know, surface level view of worship of my house. It's like there's all a lot of things happening under the surface that are affecting all of us. Permaculture helps to show you how to actually see that.

Gilian Rappaport: Yeah, and who out of curiosity? Who are the people who are coming to take your workshops? 

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Workshops Vibes 🎵

Mackenzie Barth: Who meaning like..?

Gilian Rappaport: Like, where are they coming from? And where are they going back to?

Mackenzie Barth: We've had people, it's a mix, it's a lot of people from the States, just because that's where my network is. The states in Europe, Neil is from Ireland, I'm from the States. So between our two networks, we've had people from both the States and Europe come, a few people from Guatemala City, which is not too far from us, it's about four hours from us and what's happened is some people come here just to learn and and go back to their homes and bring the knowledge back to their surroundings. Some people are traveling through and are looking for their future homestead and want to come and learn the skills that they need and how to look at land when they're going to shop around for land and then a lot of people came for the immersion and never left.

Like they're still here they came and they saw that there's a different way of living here, which is way more, I think empowering to the individual than maybe some other places where they've lived before and they stay and they're creating, and they're actually they're either volunteering on the farm, or they're buying land and building something there or they're designing our own gardens. So you kind of have this mix of travelers, people who are relocating, people who are coming in for a quick experience of going back home, homesteaders, future homesteaders and then people who are just like in that early transition phase two of just being curious about permaculture and wanting to improve their skills and their knowledge.

Gilian Rappaport: Can you talk a little bit about the role of like indigenous epistemologies and indigenous frameworks for working with the land when which I know is like, so much of the root like, so much of the root of permaculture knowledge predates the word permaculture. Right. So yeah, and especially being in the place where you are. Can you speak a little bit to your relationship with those cultures and communities?

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Relationships with Culture and Community 🙏

Mackenzie Barth: Yeah, the founders of permaculture studied a lot of indigenous communities to see how they were interacting with the land around them, and were able to kind of distill principles they saw across a lot of different cultures into what we know is the permaculture principles now. What indigenous communities, we’ll just look at the word indigenous to start, right, indigenous means of a place, it means, at some point in all of our family histories, or all of our families were indigenous to a place, right, and in the last several 100 years, people started moving around and lose that connection to the place. So when I think of what indigenous means, it's like people who who are connected, so connected to the place that they live to the land around them, to the weather patterns, to the animals, to the bugs, to the sounds to the everything around them, they're so connected in this web of life, and therefore, place themselves in this web of life and know how to navigate it with a certain level of respect and harmony and balance that keeps the ecosystem in check.

Because when you are that connected to your ecosystem, you realize, “oh, if I'm taking too much, that means I'm not going to have more in the future.” And that's a simple thing that you learn when you're operating in harmony with nature. But the issue that a lot of modern cultures have, or experiencing now is that we're so disconnected. There's so many people and chains of things between us and our food for one example, that we don't know what's happening between the seed going into the ground and it getting onto our plate and if you start to look at it, it's it's insane, like the amount of resources it requires to get lettuce to my table, when I could otherwise just grow it in a garden nearby, and it's fresher, and healthier, and less, you know, resource intensive, all these all these things. So we're just not even connected to the things that are in our area that can actually provide nourishment for us in the way that indigenous people throughout all time, were very well aware of and so this is I think a huge opportunity with Permaculture is for people to reconnect with their local ecosystem for people to become indigenous to where they're living, again, to start to notice like, what are the plants that grow here that can provide medicine for me? What are the foods that grow here that are perennial that I can plant and that can sit back and they'll provide food for me all the time?

Like, what are the animals here that can be hunted, you know, sustainably that can provide me with nourishment? And these are the questions I think we have to start asking is like what's going on in my immediate environment? And so, this is what I've learned a lot from my studies of indigenous communities and traditions. I've spent time in South America and with some communities and also in North America. Go as well and they speak and live the language of nature. There's no separation like there is in the more modern cultures, there's just this. We're all part of this web of life. And that's embedded into these, the cultures of people who have been connected in the head, and have that experience are all the time that I think we need to get back to today. And then it's an interesting situation here in Guatemala, because where I live is a traditional Mayan community, and the small town maybe like 2,000 people and you can feel very much the effects of colonialism here, for example, well, it's beautiful, they are still there, they speak their native language, they have their beautiful native clothes and you can feel what has happened as a result of many years of war and depression and it's a town where many people are living in poverty and with abuse and in Guatemala, specifically, like a lot of malnutrition, it's a big problem here and so that's kind of the community that we're coming into and, and they're, they're connected to the land, still, they have names for the different neighborhoods based on what the land is like. So it's like, this is the area of the mud.

This is the area of the steep hill, this is the area where it's more fertile. So you can sense those roots. But so much has been lost also, in just the way the world has been so much has been lost and so one of my interests is to find ways where we can come together as these international communities and go back to what I was just saying, what are the perennial foods that grow here? What are the recipes, like reviving recipes? What are the recipes that maybe the ancestors of his land were making, because of all the food that was abundantly available to them? Based on different seasons based on different parts of the land? How can we create an agricultural cooperative with everybody, so that everybody can have good nutrition to start, I think, is really where it starts. And so one thing that we've done with our retreats is that, at the end, we'll do like a service project and this last one, we took what we learned gardening, immersion, and we built a garden on a local person's land and planted some perennials and planted the garden with them, taught them a little bit about how to plant and how to take care of the plants. And that exchange was so awesome.

It was like, Yeah, we're sharing food, this transcends culture, transcends socio economic status, transcends everything's food, it's the most human thing we have. And how can we share knowledge with people who are connected to the land and have some knowledge loss, like the ways that the cultivation of food is, has been lost? Right now there's monocropping corn, and to do that, they cut down the trees, and there's not an education about the impact of that, right. But we have an opportunity now, having the education of permaculture from a more intellectual perspective that now we're applying to the land of us coming together and bringing back some of this, this old knowledge and working together as an international community to be in the land again, and revive the things that have been lost.

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“There's so many people and chains of things between us and our food for one example, that we don't know what's happening between the seed going into the ground and it getting onto our plate and if you start to look at it, it's it's insane, like the amount of resources it requires to get lettuce to my table, when I could otherwise just grow it in a garden nearby, and it's fresher, and healthier, and less, you know, resource intensive, all these all these things.” - Mackenzie Barth

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Gilian Rappaport: Yeah, yeah, that's really beautiful, and, and complicated, but very, like heart centered work. So thank you for sharing it. I'm just I'm wondering, so is the intention to stay rooted there where you are in Guatemala, or is are you is the is your vision to be based in the states and be creating sort of like a center for learning about permaculture that's, that's in multiple different places, or just curious.

Mackenzie Barth: Right now I'm half and half here, half in Colorado. I moved to Colorado about a year and a half ago, and I love it because half the people who live there also share this love for the outdoors and so it's a really nice environment because of that, but I also bought a piece of land here last year and so I'm in the process right now of developing that into a little retreat center, teaching space to bring people here to teach them about permaculture and beyond. I also want it to be just this cornerstone for food, art and music which I feel like are three things that can connect people across all cultures and all time so we're already growing a lot of the food on the land we have had these like huge terraces and, and the food and the gardens like love these stones the sun heats up during the day and then it releases at night. So food goes really really well there. I installed some ponds so we have now water storage on the land.

The first structure is almost built, which is going to be a cafe and so I'm really yeah I'm planting roots here for sure and finding ways to to create something that adds a lot of value to both my life like the way that I want to live the way that I dream of my happiest life. I want to create that here and to welcome other people into that to experience it, too. That was, that was a big turning point for me actually, a few years ago, when I was in Costa Rica, I went to this retreat center, permaculture retreat center and I felt so alive. Like it was the aliveness in me that I hadn't hadn't touched before quite yet and it set a new bar for me for what's possible in my life and since then I'm like, Okay, I know this is possible, and how can I shift and adjust and change my life so that I can create an environment that allows me to feel that way and I feel like I'm getting closer and closer to that with this project and I'm excited to be able to create a space for other people to visit and also have that like a light bulb of “Oh, wow. So it is possible to live like this and feel happy and fulfilled and part of nature and all that.”

So that's what's happening here and then, in Colorado, I've enjoyed practicing my permaculture skills in the backyard. So we have a garden there, chickens and ducks who I miss dearly, and a compost system and that, to me, is the kind of demonstration site for backyard permaculture, where I get to experiment with different things, do it on a small scale and we're going to be having a gardening course there this June, bringing people into the backyard and actually getting in the dirt making gardens together and showing people that they can do it, too.

Gilian Rappaport: That's so beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing. Do you have any questions for me before we close out? 

Mackenzie Barth: No, not that I can think of.

Gilian Rappaport: Okay. Great. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Mackenzie Barth: Thank you for having me.

Elaine Gazzard: And when you smell something, you can't really be too engaged in the outside world. It's very intimate with ourselves. And it's a nice way to help me shut it off for a moment.

Evan Landau: How, can you turn that into something that's productive? Instead of damaging? Why can't we just take everyone's garbage and turn it to something else? Why can't we have things that people consume? Can we have those be beneficial to the environment as well.

Latoya Ramos: I'm very fascinated by water and the ocean one because of just the ebbs and flows the waves is tranquility that the tranquility that it provides, but also, it's so powerful.

Mackenzie Beth: Yes, we have the capacity to do great harm to the planet. But we also have the same capacity, if not more capacity to do good to create to add value to make a positive impact on our surroundings and so let's actually learn the skills.

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