“Circular & square systems thinking” — a Maori perspective on regeneration
A conversation with Johnnie Freeland (unedited transcript!)
Johnnie Freeland: [Note by Daniel: I hit recording while we were already in the flow, so the opening is a little out of context.]Okay. I don’t have an issue with that, but just knowing that that’s happening in the background. Because, personally, I just wanted to have a reconnect with you, have a catch up. And certainly if… Because there’s some other things that are brewing around us that I’m keen to continue the conversation with you, especially with some of the work we are doing in Auckland around the climate change work. So the council were quite interested in looking at a doughnut approach, a bit like what Amsterdam’s done. But certainly, in terms of some of the conversations that I started in London with Kate [Raworth, see below for the context within which Johnnie and I met in October 2019], is the opportunity to anchor it in an indigenous way, especially some of her work acknowledging some of those indigenous thinking.
Regenerating the wealth of the Earth’s commons
Common Earth in support of the Common Wealth
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Daniel Wahl: This doughnut that has been going around just recently that was coming out of New Zealand, is that the work that you’ve been doing with Kate or is that somebody else?
Johnnie Freeland: Someone started to pick up on looking at the doughnut, and then Kate actually shared some of the conceptual things that I’d given her last year in London. And I’ve since connected with them, with their group and it just so happens that one of the Maori navigators is also a close relation of mine through my mom’s tribal people, but we hadn’t met physically until that piece of work brought us together. We said, “Oh, our ancestors must be guiding us.” Because a third person who’s come into the circle over the last couple of weeks is also another tribes person of ours from where my mother comes from. So there’s three of us of the same tribe that have found different pathways to this circular conversation. And so a lot of the underpinning thinking and values all align.
And certainly that iteration that came out would be what we call our Maori interpretation of the doughnut, because they translated a lot of the existing terms into Maori language. And where I was starting was a complete different sort of view because it was… Effectively what the doughnut picture represented was… Which is, I guess, for me, I saw a sea. Instead of looking for how do you connect the dots, so to speak, I always look at the space in between the dots and, actually, everything’s already connected. So what drew me into the doughnut was actually the space, and the inner circle for me represented the Earth Mother and the outer circle represented the Sky Father. And often, you need to sort of appreciate the total view of that relationship from the Moon. And so, often, it’s where you locate yourself in order to really appreciate the fullness of the symbiotic relationship between the two circles.
And because in what we call a whakapapa, or genealogical centered approach, is that the children of the Earth Mother and Sky Father, they become guardians of certain domains of nature, including humanity. And so the framing would be what I’d call a whakapapa centered or genealogical centered view as opposed to a human centered view, which is sort of more about-
Daniel Wahl: When you say genealogical, the way I understand it, and I’m really so new to it, I don’t even want to talk about it, the whakapapa concept or worldview is the worldview of life as a planetary process and us fully part of it. So it’s really in the kind of North American Native indigenous sense is the Mitakuye Oyasin, all my relatives [crosstalk 00:04:36].
Johnnie Freeland: Yeah. So it’s the whole living system interconnected by these intergenerational symbiotic relationships. And those bindings are what we call whakapapa. And in the connections are not… And that’s where genealogy doesn’t fully reflect, because what’s transmitted through those whakapapa relationships is knowledge, is essence, is values, also trauma. And they’re the bindings of the whole universe. So that’s why I like, in terms of your expressions and writings around whole living system, the whole planet, because what I hear when you speak and in your writing, you are talking about whakapapa in that sense.
And that’s why your thinking and framing really resonates with me in that sense because you’re bringing a real circular view, a regenerative view. And indigenous world views are circular as well. And the opportunity, and this is one of my learnings in London, the opportunity is to be able to create this binocular view where these two circle systems can actually sit together, and then it’s actually the shared view between the two binocular lenses that creates this third space. Because, certainly in the experience for Maori in New Zealand, we’ve had 200 years of a imposition of square systems through colonization, Westernization, and urbanization. And we’re still dealing with the long held impacts of that.
And in some ways, we struggle in New Zealand because the assumed view is the square, and all it’s done is, it’s been like an eclipse, it’s just gotten in between us and the circle view which is nature, which has always been sitting there. And part of our work is, especially with our disenfranchised, displaced Maori communities, which is prevalent across a number of indigenous communities throughout the world where there’s been a significant disconnection from our own circle systems. And so part of our own healing is the return back to circle systems. And, because the loss of language, loss of identity, our own native tongue can come across being jargon. It doesn’t mean anything because of that loss. So being able to utilize circular systems thinking is a means to help navigate, heal, and I think it’s something that the whole of humanity is seeking in that way.
Daniel Wahl: Let me ask you something there because lately, I’m [crosstalk 00:07:56] to think in… I had this wonderful conversation with Joel Glanzberg where we talked about this notion of… And I would love to hear your perspective on this notion of reindigenization, whether you find that quite off putting or whether it in any way resonates with you. Because, in my current thinking, I sense more and more that one of the original mistakes is to in any way assume that land can belong to us, rather that we are the land. We’re expressions of the land. We come from it. And this is so fundamental. We talked about this in London at that meeting at the Commonwealth for a bit, the notion of time, how that traps us, the Western notion of time. I love the way that you’re so willing to build that bridge of that binocular overlapping circles of-
Johnnie Freeland: Yeah.
Daniel Wahl: And I’m also wondering how are we all somehow colonialized in the mind with certain patterns that will make it really hard for us to even fully get back to this dynamic flow participation thinking. Because we don’t even, or I certainly… the Western culture doesn’t even realize how much just these thought forms already trap us in a kind of misperception.
Johnnie Freeland: Yeah. I think that… And I’d used this term, the recirculization of humanity is really critical. So our old people, our elders, are really taking on this term recirculization. Because, for me, language is really important. I think underneath that, the reality is about the reindigenization of humanity. And literally in a sense, and this is what our elders talk about… So my day to day work, I work for our state Ministry for Children. So we take children in state care from break downs in family, family violence. And Maori children are 80% of our population of state care. And that’s really a reflection of the impact of square systems, the impact on family, dislocation, disconnection. And so our elders talk about that in order to generate wellbeing for families and for children, that… Because we use this metaphor within the Ministry of… So we have this native flax bush. So the younger shoot grows in the middle and then you have the parent leaves and the grandparent leaves, so it grows sort of out. And so there’s this Maori saying about if you pluck out the young shoot of a flax bush, where will the bowerbird go and sing? And so the most important thing are people, people, peoples. So the flax bush is a metaphor for family.
And so, while there is a need to keep children safe, our practice actually strips the young shoot out of the family, and, in the indigenous sense, we take it out of an indigenous plant and go and put it in an exotic plant, in terms of care and non-kin care, foster parents, and all that sort of thing. What our elders have talked about is we actually need to uplift and transplant the whole bush into a better garden. Because it’s about conditions of poverty, disconnection, all those sort of things. So they talk about the garden. And so in that process of recirculization or reindigenization, we literally need to replant ourselves back into Mother Earth and allow those systems to heal ourselves as well as part of that process. Because we know in our whakapapa, in our history, that we were all indigenous at one point.
The biggest impact maybe’s been in the last 500 years or so. From Industrial Revolution, shifts of… And it’s in that time that we went from we to me, so from the value of the collective and family to the individual and property rights and all that sort of stuff. And, actually, it requires us to return to the we. And some ways, COVID-19 has presented that opportunity to start rethinking, reimagining. And so I think a reindigenization or recirculization is really critical for us all landing-
Daniel Wahl: The conversation with Joel back then, Joel also pointed out that he told the story of how, if you think of the colonizers that colonized North America, most of them were indentured people, were people who, because they were starving in Europe, in order to get the money to get into the new world, which was being stolen from other people, they had to commit seven years or longer of their life to work for the person who paid for their passage.
And in similar ways, the feudal system of Europe was also a system where the indigenous people of Europe were actually somewhat colonized or enslaved by the holders of the land. So, in some extent, this disconnection and this colonization of the mind has been going on for all of us everywhere.
Johnnie Freeland: Yeah.
Daniel Wahl: How do we enable people to… What you just expressed for me in kind of more Western design language I call it, that our job now is to redesign the human presence on Earth within the lifetime of the people there. That’s transplanting the bush. That’s planting us back into the living cycles of a dynamic system that keeps evolving, that is never static. This is how we’re going to do it and this is the design and the master plan because now we’ve figured it out. It’s always a process of learning, of a community, of how to be and fit in relationship with each other and with the wider community of life in that place.
And what I’ve realized is that so much of that has actually to do with the governance structures that enable… Because we had a long conversation about land rights and your people claiming back their rights for their territories and the whole process in New Zealand around that. It’s all of us. If we don’t enable, through some kind of change of governance system, true subsidiarity, where people in place have the rights and responsibilities to make the wise decisions about what matters to them in their place and what matters to their place, but in full responsibility of our global family and the whakapapa lineage of being.
Johnnie Freeland: Yeah, yeah.
Daniel Wahl: The one thing, we might all disagree on a lot of things, but the one thing we need to agree on is we are life and we have to create conditions conducive to life, in diverse ways, in each place. But that’s…
In this current system, I mean, New Zealand is very hopeful at least from the outside view. You’ve got a pretty inspired leader, you’ve got not so many people and you seem to be a lot further along on the healing between the First People and the people who arrived later. Even what I noticed with a lot of English roots New Zealanders that I know, I’m always impressed how learning the language, for example, has just become fully something that one does. But how do we heal systemically everywhere? How do we enable people to come back into community and ask those questions that your community is asking, but ask them anywhere?
Johnnie Freeland: I think certainly what we’re working towards in our space is shifting the whole operating system. So I’m involved in working on a regenerative program, which will probably end up being a 50 years piece of work around regeneration of a stream catchment in the southern part of our city, in Auckland, which also happens to be one of the socioeconomically depressed places. So, in our logic, the state of the stream reflects the state of the people, which is in not a good state. And so, working with council, what they’ve agreed to is to allow the whole operating system be anchored in indigenous systems thinking. Because they said, “Oh, why do we have to step into that binocular lens? Why can’t we go straight to one lens and let it be yours?” And that’s pretty powerful because that means that we help set the conditions of the garden. And so part of that is, using the garden analogy, is we’re helping prepare the garden and we won’t be around for the harvest in that sense.
So what we’re focusing on is what would a whakapapa centered approach be in regenerating those whakapapa connections to place, to nature, and people? And that we as the indigenous community, because we see ourselves as part of nature, as part of the land, that we just help provide the underpinning in order for those generations to then grow beyond that.
So in the sense of New Zealand, over time it’s reindigenizing or indigenizing our systems here, because, in a sense, we’ve had indigenous system and then we effectively had a Westminster system arrive. And I think over time, and this is about being conscious about how we navigate the space, is that there’ll become a time where we actually get to reindigenize the system. So we take the elements of the Westminster system, the elements of indigenous system, and then we actually create this third space which will end up being a Kiwi system, which is anchored in the land, anchored in nature, and people. And we’re seeing glimmers of that through the COVID-19 response in Auckland and New Zealand.
What’s really interesting is that now that it looks like we’ve not only flattened the curve but I think it’s our limit of 12th day in a row where we’ve had no COVID-19 positive tests. And so we’re talking about, maybe, the government decided next Monday on going to level one, which is sort of going back to normal but just closed borders. And so they were anticipating that we would be there in 28 days, just to allow for those cycles of the virus to reappear. And so we’re well ahead of the models.
But what’s really interesting is this tension that’s come through, and what we’re seeing is the strain between the opportunity of what a post COVID-19 New Zealand would look like in a circular way, versus the tensions of the old system still trying to hold on. And so you’re getting those typical focus on it’s about the economic impacts and we’ve got to get back to work and recover and it’s all about growth and all those sort of things.
So there’s been a failure, if you like, in some ways to recognize the window of opportunity that has been presented, and I think that’s part of that power of observation, of seeing the regeneration of natural systems, to see the resilience of our communities in the way of looking after each other and responding.
Daniel Wahl: One of the great changes that will stay, no matter how quickly they try to bounce back, is that so much that, prior to this situation, was sort of trying to invite people into don’t you understand how it all interconnects and how quickly things can travel globally and how rapidly things can change? And people saying, “Oh yeah, that sounds very… Oh, you’re a systems theorist. You’re a futurist. You’re academic telling me these things.” But now you can always refer back to a embodied, real experience that has touched most people on the planet. And I think that will already help us to at least speak about inter being and interconnectedness in a different way.
And similarly, in terms of the response, all this, “Well, that sounds too grandiose and idealistic of a response. You will never get everybody to do this in that time. Change takes generations.” Now you can say, “Well, we did, under COVID, in six weeks more change than we did for many years before that.”
But I just wanted to come back to this. In this, what I’m slipping with so much is how… Buckminster Fuller said this wonderful thing, “If you want to change the way people think, don’t tell them what to think. Give them a tool, the use of which will change the way they think.”
Johnnie Freeland: Yeah, yeah.
Daniel Wahl: If you think that through, then it invites the question, for example, to what extent is the use of money, in the way that it works right now, a tool that conditions how I think about life and about relationships and about everything. That, whether I’m still connected to tribal indigenous origin or whether I’m just an earthling of being indigenous to this planet, it still influences behavior in a way that, if we don’t shine the light on it, even in this new synergy of bringing our ancestral wisdom back into the human family and using it to guide our navigation into the future.
What are the key things that, from your perspective, we really need to be careful with just continuing because the square system has established it and works globally, everybody recognizes it? For a few generations, we all grew up with these square structures and, therefore they run in the background without being questioned. Do you understand what I’m trying to get at?
Johnnie Freeland: Yeah, totally because it’s this unseen force. We use the term mata huna, which is hidden. So our ancestor for the winds, Tawhirimatea, is what we call a mata huna, is a hidden force. You’ll only see the impact, or you might hear the impact of Tawhiri, but you never see Tawhiri. It’s that type of thing.
So part of our [inaudible 00:24:54] mantra, it’s two things. You need to become aware of the square in order to be able to recognize the circle. And it’s like your point earlier about not telling people how to think, but you just start to help reveal things. And our young people and our elders are the ones that really switch onto that, because, in a sense, there’s this purity of thought and clarity in how they see complexity. And they become, almost, my test to what I call the whakapapa centered logic. If it makes sense to our elders and it makes sense to our young people, we’re on the winner. And sometimes you might have to frame it slightly differently for each audience, but, once they actually switch into the thinking in that way, they get it and then it’s like this revolution. So we’ve got our elders talking about recirculization. We’ve got our young people talking about recirculization. And what we’re talking about is… Because what they’re really recognizing is using this lens of what’s square thinking and what’s circular thinking. And what our elders get, because some of our elders grew up in the time of literal apartheid, where in some of our towns in New Zealand there were signs where only whites only, no Maori allowed, that type of thing. So that’s part of their living experience.
What they’re starting to recognize is that, back in that day, the square and circle was as clear and simple as Maori and non-Maori. What’s happened, generations later, is that there’s no ethnic distinction between square and circle thinking.
Daniel Wahl: Yeah.
Johnnie Freeland: And one of the challenges is that, in this post-colonial age, as the tribes and the government reconcile past issues and do these treaty settlements, compensation, reparation type things, is that the structures they have to create, and it goes back to your point earlier around governance, around leadership decision making type platforms, is they have to create a square system, governance system, to manage those things. And then that shifts the whole way of thinking and being from a circular system to a square.
And so we’re becoming really awesome about driving our own square within our own indigenous communities. And so, by being able to become aware of the square and recognize the circle, because… And I think COVID-19, climate change, it’s almost like, certainly in our context, for the last 200 years, we’ve had this eclipse occur where what we thought were our circle systems thinking and knowledge have been replaced by these square systems. But what’s really exciting is that eclipse is starting to continue its movement and we’re starting to see the circle reveal itself.
So that’s the thing, is the circle will always reveal itself because the circle is nature. It’s always there. It’s just the square has distracted us. And to the point it’s become so subconscious and so locked in we’re not aware of it. It’s like sometimes you drive to a place and you don’t remember actually the route or how you got there but it’s so ingrained, you driving. Because there’s some things we don’t think. We don’t think about driving, but we just get to places. So that’s because, in a lot of ways, we’ve lost the ability to observe, to see those signs through nature.
Daniel Wahl: As you were just describing this, I had this visual image of… In the English language, there’s this thing about trying to put a square peg into a round hole. And if you imagine the round hole and the square peg, the reason why it doesn’t fit in is that there are little corners that stand over the circle. They need to be shaved off to put it back in. And then, if you did that, there’s also bits of the circle that are free that weren’t in the square.
So it is two things coming together. But I’m so deeply interested in, and I think this is the exploration you now have with you… People saying, “Where’s the square thinking within us?” Is to find out what are the bits that stand over the corner that will actually continue to impede our refitting into reindigenization. The bioregionalists called it reinhabitation, reinhabiting the earth. And I think that all these notions are very similar. It’s a coming home, but it’s not from the outside a coming home, but from the inside-
… feeling native to the earth again.
Johnnie Freeland: Yeah. And it’s said that resonance, that sense of belonging, that sense of place that you feel in the depth of your soul. And I think, too, you recognize that in a lot of times where your soul takes you and where you end up being the place where you live and put roots through is that often it’s an old memory that’s drawn you home in the first place, in some ways. And so I think one of those key things being around that reanchoring, that recirculizing, in that way is about recalibrating our sense of time and we talked about that.
So there’s things like systems we use. So we very much had a lunar stellar calendar that we used up until the Gregorian calendar arrived and that tends to lock everything, fixed everything. And, as you said, nature’s dynamic. It’s movement, it’s all about movement, and that you actually got to move with the seasons, as opposed to regardless of what the calendar says. And so, using those sort of tools, what we’ve found is that, especially with our work within urban communities, is that what we call Maramataka, which is our Maori lunar stellar calendar, it’s unique to place. We don’t have a universal lunar calendar for New Zealand. It’s actually localized, place based, because it’s those local ecosystem, those local cycles, and even your location in terms of where you are in New Zealand, will determine the slight little times and movements. And one bay next to the other bay would have its own calibration.
So being able to attune ourselves, recalibrate our relationship to time, and I think that’s one thing that COVID-19 forced. It forced actually slowing down of chronological time and you actually had to be in the moment and you had to be in the state of [Wah 00:32:32] to fully receive, have that time of family, all those things because all those other drivers around chronological time no longer existed or mattered. And so those families that were able to recalibrate their sense of time, their sense of relationships to place, actually did really well through the lockdown.
So it’s those sort of things about… And I think this is where some of our indigenous knowledge tools, if you like, can actually help. Because those are the things that almost help us connect into that space between the circle and what the square peg live. And we talk about the recalibration processes, we use the term location, location, location. So it’s how you locate yourself within a certain worldview, if you like. It’s also how you anchor yourself to place. And the third shift is how you locate yourself in the relationship with time.
As that sense of… I think the Greek used the Kairos, Chronos and Kairos is their… So the in that Kairos time, it’s where a moment can last forever. And in that time, you actually get to commune with your ancestors and your descendants to come, because it’s a time space type continuum. And this is where we’re seeing the deeper contrast, the depth of the colors of nature. You can look at green, but there’s depths of green because your view is shifting. And so we’ve done that with a lot of families. We have a Maori language version of our calendar, but we also have a non-Maori version because some of the families we deal with might be Maori, but don’t have language. So this is that first step of just recalibrating themselves back to those whakapapa systems.
Daniel Wahl: This is fascinating for me because a couple of weeks ago, I talked to a man called Martin von Hildebrand who lives in Columbia and has spent 40 years helping tribes living in the Amazonian rainforest to gain the rights over their territory and support them in their ability to continue their traditional ways. And it’s one of the few places in Amazonia where that [inaudible 00:35:24]. We’re talking about 35 million hectors of rainforest having been turned over to 35 tribal nations. And they were saying to him that in this storytelling, the traditions, the dances, the songs, everything communicated the circular patterns that you say the location based lunar calendar that is different from one bay to another. It may be expressed in a language that says you can’t go from that time to that time. You can’t go to this area because the spirits are there and there’s a story around the two spirits doing whatever. But what it’s also, and this is where the overlapping of the two lenses come, what it’s actually also doing, indirectly, is that, in that area of the forest, there might be some species in reproduction around that time, and if you want to replenish that…
So there are these layers that are wrapped in different storytelling, in different mythology, in different frameworks, that actually have enabled the oral tradition and the communication through much longer time than our Western civilization has lasted. In this conversation with Martin, he was actually saying how they’ve now come to him saying, “We have this problem that our young, if we do a three day ceremony, after a day and a half they say, ‘How much longer is this going to go on? Can we go and do this, that, and the other?’ Or, ‘Can I get my mobile phone again?’” In a slightly strange way, they turned into that skid and said, “Okay, you help us communicate this knowledge through your little video on the mobile phone to your friends. And if you want to create a YouTube channel because that’s what everybody does now.” And, of course, I find it a bit awkward because again, I’m wondering how much does the use of that tool change what is contained in that long lineage of tradition.
But how do we rediscover, in this globalized attention world, where, particularly if we don’t reregionalize economic systems as well as systems of governance, it will always pull our attention what’s going on out in the globe, but we have so much learning to do to get back to that kind of level of awareness of our participation in the ecosystem that we are. To retell the stories of knowing… Like here in Mallorca, it’s the diversity that created the security of having 150 species of almonds because they all flower slightly differently, depending on what the climate does. At least you have some almonds.
Do you find that you’ve found effective ways? Because you said if your elders talk about it and your young people talk about it, you’re onto a winner. How do you enable that?
Johnnie Freeland: So I think one of those challenges is how technology is an enabler, but every generation has had to deal with technology in some form. And I think about my ancestors when James Cook brought the potato to New Zealand, and that was one of the most transformational pieces of technology that, as an outcome, it enabled us to have two potato crops a year. It led to the creation of more settled villages as opposed to moving across our resource spaces on this cycle, from the sea to inland wares.
So I think each generation has had to contend with technology in some form or another. And when you think about indigenous people, I mean, I’m just thinking that, just with my mom turned 80 this year, and just in terms of what she’s witnessed in her 80 years. Because, when she was growing up on the farm, they walked eight miles on a gravel road, four of them rode a horse. And in her lifetime, she got to see someone go to the moon, a microwave get inv… All that sort of thing.
And, just in terms of… We’ve only had to experience this square system for 200 years, so we’re relatively young in that sense. Other indigenous peoples are a bit longer, when you think about North America, South America, and places like that. But we’ve had the consistency of the British in that time too. So, from a Commonwealth perspective, it’s been helpful in communicating with other indigenous communities because we’ve got similar English symbology, language, all those sort of things. So we can go to other parts of the Commonwealth and still feel at home in that sense because of the symbols of British Empire.
So I think the most important thing is the intergenerational transfer of values, because that’s what has maintained our resilience for a thousand years within New Zealand, on the back of 50,000 years in the Pacific, if you like. So that’s the critical part. And I think what we’re seeing is a displacement of values. So one of those things at the moment around dealing with climate change is around dynamic adaptive planning. What I find really interesting is it just focused on the future, it doesn’t really acknowledge the past as a way of helping anchor values, anchor fore… Because of that sense of connectedness over time. So our conversation with the young people is… And they fall into their whole thing like, “Oh, can we do an app? Can we do a Maramataka app?” And what we talk about is two things. The digital phone is really good like a diary for recording, observing, recording your observation. Camera, film, all that sort of stuff, talking diary. What it can’t do is you actually connect with nature. So it can help support that. And I say because there’s nothing like going to actually step outside and have a look at what the Moon is doing. The app’s not going to really tell you.
And I think the critical thing goes back to the storytelling. So the storytelling is really the form that the code is delivered in, and it’s the code within the stories which is the important stuff. So you’ll point your mate around the outers saying, “Look, we don’t go to that part of the bush at that certain time because of the spirits.” Now, underneath that there would have been, like we said, some other reason why the story just creates that, because it’s about stopping people going over there at a certain time of the year. So, and this is part of that language, so the way the Western square system have said, “Those are just myths and legends,” whereas actually they’re the holders of the code.
And so the opportunity is how can the next couple of generations, in their context, be able to encode the stories with the code? Because it’s about the code. And, if they’re able to share the code through YouTube or whatever form in order to help connect the values, and that’s the most important thing, because, often, we get caught up at the surface level of this technology. If we put that technology within a circle system, then that’s all good. It’s sort of that methodology and method. So using square methods in a circle methodology, but that’s all good because of the context that it sits in and how you’re using it. And as opposed to square technology in a square system. That’s the risk and that’s that shift displacement of values. So it’s not so much the tech itself, it’s a system that the tech sits in. And that’s how we explain what the whole operating system, whole systems, are, is that you can have different models of practice that are like apps that sit within either Apple or Microsoft operating system, and it’s really about describing the circle system in that way, as that you can have all these different tools, frameworks, but it’s the actual system that it sits in and where you use it, and that comes down to your values.
And what we’re driving with council, in terms of the decision making, is that when we’ve gone through the climate change risk frameworks that are being developed, they’re all human centered. And what we’re saying is actually, “What is the risk to nature? What is the risk to land, not just the risk to people?” And at the heart of it, “What is the capacity and the ability of the land to care for nature and people? What is the capacity and ability of nature to care for land?”
So when you start to think about the types of decision making we need to be thinking about is putting all those things in balance. And more recently, what we’ve seen in a treaty settlement type process between some of our indigenous tribes and the government is the creation of legal personalities for a river and, for where my mother comes from, a mountainous region. And when the government and our tribe were negotiating what the settlement look like, the government offered joint management of a national park, and our tribe said, “Actually, that’s not a national park to us, that’s our ancestor, and we don’t want to jointly manage our ancestor.” So their negotiations got suspended for almost two years because of this impasse of world view. And some creative person then turned around, “Well, why don’t we create a legal personality and what we’ll do is we’ll share care of this ancestor.” So, in a sense, the rights of nature have been acknowledged. And so, when we think about equity and equality, it’s not just from a human sense, it’s also the… And that’s at the heart of the reciprocity between humanity and nature in the way that we care for each other. And-
Daniel Wahl: I find it fascinating to see how much agility you have in the way that you’ve worked with the square system. Even observing the wonderful work about the Auckland Bay climate response plan. I know from us talking before that we both agree that climate change is, and just as you were saying COVID-19 is, a message that we need to change our ways, otherwise the messages will get harder, you said earlier before we started recording. Climate change is… We are on the path to the message is getting extremely hard.
But we’ve both met at this meeting of exploring regenerative development within the Commonwealth, and talked a lot about working with Ben and Bill and Regenesis Group. One of the things that they always invite people to start from is not to start from these problems of, “Okay, we’ve got a community breakdown, we’ve got youth unemployment, we’ve got climate change. Now we have economic issues.” And to actually start from reframing and start from potential.
And in a way that you’ve framed the overlensing, that the two world views coming together and forming some kind of vesica piscis in the middle where we can learn something new together. That is speaking to potential.
Of saying what would happen if we learned to reconnect to that ancient lineage of knowledge that understands that the land is our ancestor, that we come from this earth? And then very carefully, not as a rejection of all technology, but as a real soul searching inquiry into how do we use this technology wisely so it doesn’t become our master, rather than it stays in service to us and through that, in service to the land and to life?
This is a beautiful example you just gave, in terms of how, in that process of saying, “No, we don’t want management of a national park because we don’t manage our ancestor,” to get to inviting the square system to arrive at a point where they can understand that, to then do aikido with their system, create legal personage for the land. It’s a wonderful shift, in terms of how that land is related to, but the powerful shift is that you’ve actually changed the minds of the square system, or of many people in the square system who have to engage with that way of thinking. It feels like these sort of things need to happen really place sourced and place based.
Johnnie Freeland: Yeah. I think too, because I think what’s really critical and what is that we do have a Western system called regenerative development and thinking, a circular system. And I think things like climate change and COVID-19 is driving us to at least become aware of circle systems thinking. And I think that what has been working well within Auckland is that, and this is the impact of the work that Bill and Ben have been doing around Regenesis, is that we’ve got quite a significant number of regenerative practitioners and thinkers. And, albeit at the moment, it’s being tied to place making, which is a ironic term in itself, because place sort of shapes you, not the other way around, but it’s a North American, urban development term. And so that work, the program that I talked about, probably a 50 year program, is this opportunity. And so what we’re doing is we’re partnering with two circular systems approaches, the regenerative thinking and indigenous thinking. And I think that’s the key, is that, if we can start to recirculize square systems, it’s that square peg, round hole. And climate change, COVID-19, economic recovery creates that window for us to reimagine, reframe, and reset that thinking. Because if we can get two circle systems… In Maori culture, when we greet each other, we rub noses and have a hongi. So what we’re wanting to do is to have those two circles have a hongi.
Daniel Wahl: Lovely.
Johnnie Freeland: And then by literally recalibrating with the binoculars, you actually start to develop the shared view in this new space with new knowledge. And this is where the indigenization of knowledge and systems will occur. Because of past, because of history, the trauma we all carry, we need to find our way of at least coming together to do a hongi so that we start to share that essence. And then that’s recognizing the third space.
So in our thinking, we have this formula of one plus one equals three. And then together, the two binocular views actually creates that infinity. And so a lot of your framing resonates that type of cycle thinking, of sharing knowledge. And I think that, like what you’re saying, it’s not about telling people how to think, it’s inviting them to look down the lens. And say, “Hey, look at that space over there.”
Because often, what happens is the two systems are so caught up in challenging each other, the best way to reconcile that is find the third space that we need to work together towards, and almost helping turn our way from each other to that other opportunity. And it is about potential, and I think that, for us, everything we anchor is on wellbeing. And in our system’s thinking that wellbeing is a given if your whakapapa system is whole, you’re anchored in place with nature, and as people, that triangulation. Because if you can get that anchoring, or that reinhabiting, the replanting in that sense, because what we’re doing is calibrating those whakapapa relationships, calibrating the reciprocal values that go with that, because they almost, like I said, are reciprocal obligations, responsibilities, that we have with nature and nature has with us, that symbiosis.
Daniel Wahl: I would love to hear your reflection on something that one framing of this relationship that we’re all in. Bill Sharpe, who was a friend of mine, from the International Futures Forum, who, [inaudible 00:54:48] my book the Three Horizons Model, he was the guy who wrote the book on that, he expresses it in a lovely way of saying that, “All life is intention between being for one’s self and being as part of a larger whole.” And it’s the same. It’s not either I’m self or I’m eco, like either I’m ego or I’m eco, it’s I am ego and eco at the same time.
And as Western people are starting to wake up of the shortcomings of the square system, one of their thinking traps like you’ve heard us talk about a lot about the big paradigm shift. It’s a pendulum swing. Again, it’s a square system way of framing it, of we’re moving from this thinking that is no longer serving us to this new thinking that is so much better because all that old is not worth it anymore. The last time we did that swing, we forgot all indigenous knowledge and called it primitive.
And so I would love to hear from the wisdom that your lineage carries, this ego, eco relationship that people so often talk about. If we actually embrace ego in a different way, like… What I’ve learned from working with the way of council, which comes out of the North American indigenous tradition, is you always ask three question. Does it serve myself? Does it serve my people? And does it serve the whole, or life?
How do we get into a healthy relationship with providing for our families and our personal immediate needs, but in the spirit that that is the base work that we need to do of the doughnut, of the ground, of Mother Earth, that then enables us to be resourced to be in service of the relationship between Father Sky and Mother Earth and the larger system? How do you relate to that from your perspective?
Johnnie Freeland: Yeah. That really resonates with me and you picked it up in our video. In that last bit where it talks about [foreign 00:57:20], which is you, me, and us together. That’s that same thinking. And I think that it’s almost like that visualization of ripples in the pool. We’re all of the same pool and, as it ripples out… And I think it’s the understanding that the greater sense of me is in the we.
So that’s that sense of self. And that is in that sense of I’m part of a wider family, my community, but also, that is nature, place, and people, not just my human community in that sense.
Daniel Wahl: And the minute that isn’t just an intellectual, “Oh, how nice. We’re all one and we’re all part of nature,” like the way it’s sometimes said in Western institutions. Like Arne Næss with deep ecology spoke of the ecological self. It’s a real, embodied, fully understanding one’s self as life. That with that comes the different perspective of time as you were saying earlier, the 50 year project that you won’t see finished.
The minute one understands one’s self as life, there’s actually a connection to a certain immortality.
Johnnie Freeland: Oh totally.
Daniel Wahl: Because…
Johnnie Freeland: Because that’s what whakapapa is. And that’s why I think one thing that, it sort of sounded controversial in our… I think it was a committee meeting with council was I said, “What you don’t understand is that you’re all fighting for your survival as humanity. The thing, though, is that I’m really confident that my whakapapa is going to last forever because my DNA is made up of stardust.” So I will still be around or my DNA will still be in some form. I don’t have any control over that form. That’s for our ancestors to determine in that sense. Because when you think about our whakapapa as humanity, that the form we are now isn’t what the form we started with and over hundreds of thousands of years. And that’s what I love is there’s that our essence in the stellar level and a cellular level, it’s the same DNA, it’s the same whakapapa, and the whakapapa that we share with nature and other…
That is that, I guess, goes back to seeing the space that connects us. Our ancestors were able to navigate across the pacific over thousands of years because their view was the water connected all the islands. They weren’t aiming for this island. It was actually the water that connected everything. So it’s that sort of view of connectedness and understanding. So when we see that whole living system of the universe, that… So we look to the black of the space, not all the sprinkly of the stars. Again, those slightly different worldviews of what I would say a circular worldview, systems you as actually recognize the importance of space. So even to the point that our ancestors had names for the space in between atoms or within a atom, an ability to describe what that was. Early maps that our ancestors drew in the 1800s was almost this bird’s eye GPS view of the form of the land, and when the cartography of that time was still almost picture type one dimensional sort of view, it wasn’t the bird’s eye view.
So, again, it’s that whole ability of where you can locate yourself to appreciate that view, a perspective. And that’s why I always come back to the view of Rangi and Papa, the Sky Father and Earth Mother on the Moon. And it’s one of the images I like using in my presentations as, if you’re able to… And I guess that’s one of those opportunities, is that it’s enabling people to have a view from the moon to really appreciate the whole, and that relationship of Rangi and Papa, because when we’re earthbound, we only see this up and down view, and whereas when you step to the side and you see the full appreciation of that relationship. And obviously, it’s how we…
We’ve almost got to do it as three generations. We represent that middle generation, in terms of when you think about our parents, grandparents, with a now living memory, and then you think about our children and our grandchildren. So, within three living generations, we influence another two or three beyond it. So we need to move through this journey in that way where we’re doing it in an intergenerational way within our families, because that’s where the transfer of values occur from generation to generation. And being in our modeling, we’re teaching our children to be good grandparents in that way. But they’ve got to do it within their context, within the tools they have within their life. But it ultimately is about the transfer of those values and the value of those whakapapa relationships, which I think is the key to reindigenizing humanity. And whatever language you use, at a fundamental base level, we’re really talking about those intergenerational symbiotic relationships.
Daniel Wahl: You just made me tune into something that I think particularly… Earlier when you spoke about if you think about it in the Pacific sense, your ancestry goes back 50,000 years and it’s all Pacific islanders. It’s a particular type. You could almost say that there’s the ocean lineage and the land lineage of our ancestry. And you’re representing the ocean lineage. And this image that you… Just recently, a friend of mine who last winter sailed to Antarctica, she had a map of the world that is ocean-centric. So it’s basically the land is just a little bit in between.
And increasingly, like last week, I was invited to put some input into a workshop that The Ocean Race, which is the former Whitbread Around the World and the Volvo Ocean Race, now it’s just called The Ocean Race. They’ve put this idea of supporting ocean health at the center of their communication strategy, using the race around the world and all the media attention to really highlight the issue of ocean health. After the last race around the world, they did a lot of research on ocean plastics and really helped to highlight that issue. And they began to realize that that’s a problem centered approach and, actually, using the concept of health is much more circular already. And, in the context, I learned about a man that I’ve… Do you know Glenn Edney? Have you heard of… It’s an organization in New Zealand called Ocean Spirit.
Johnnie Freeland: Oh yes. Yep.
Daniel Wahl: He wrote a book about… I can’t remember. So The Ocean is Alive, or something. And, as you were just speaking, I was thinking to some extent, if we want to refit our human family into the wider family, paying attention to the fact that life is animated water, that we are from the oceans, that our tears are ocean, that our blood is ocean salinity. And also understanding in the more problem focused conversations around climate change, I think we need to urgently put the ocean at the center because that’s been the big buffer, but it’s also the long term… If we don’t protect the oceans, and of course we can only do that if we change how we deal with the land as well, we’re not going to avoid cataclysmic climate change. How do you bring into the climate change conversation, the Auckland climate change adaption plan, this whole shift in perspective towards how critical the ocean is to life?
Johnnie Freeland: Yeah. So we’ve, I guess, anchored on water in that same sense, because, in terms of part of our creation narratives, what we call [foreign 01:07:24] which is the life giving waters but also our spiritual essence we refer to as [foreign 01:07:33], the two waters that flow within you. And so it’s just that whole reflection of the importance of water, the water cycle, the whakapapa of water in that way.
So the big transformational pathway we’ve got what we call two short, two medium type shifts, and three big shifts that are framed as five key drivers, if you like, in terms of certainly our Maori response to climate change, but also advocating to council. So the two short term medium shifts is really about a recalibration of business as usual to realign to that wellbeing focus. The second which often isn’t being talked about, and you talked about just that paradigm shift from here to there, no one talks about the incremental shifts. So we’ve talked about how do we prepare communities for the shift? And so there’s this key piece of work around educating, informing, developing the tools to enable the shift.
So if we’re going to talk about a shift in land use, how are you going to talk to our farmers on what that is about? And imposing new legislation around emissions. It’s either a blunt stick or a carrot type, where it’s actually shifting the agriculture system to behave for what we call a kaitiaki, a guardian custodian of those reciprocal whakapapa relationship, not just about land as a resource, but land as a ancestor. And some of our economic thinkers here are saying that, if businesses and that adopted the ethic of kaitiakitanga and treated… shifting away from natural resource as something to manage, to harvest, to actually what we call [foreign 01:09:50], your relationship totally shifts with the clear of looking after that, as opposed to resource to manage.
So there’s this piece of work around preparing for the change. And the three big shifts, one is what we’re calling the regeneration of ecological systems, and that’s looked at a whole catchment approach, but with a specific focus on parts of the catchment. So we talk about, basically, the ocean, the harbor, wetlands, and then the upper catchment, that the work you need to do as a whole system catchment. But what we’re looking at is the cycle of water in those whakapapa relationships from the ocean. And the importance of wetlands within that context, because in our narratives, the wetlands are actually a domain that… Because some of our ancestors, like Tangaroa, who’s our equivalent to like Poseiden or Neptune… So in our pantheon of ancestors, they live in the darkness of their parents embrace, and then some bright spark said, “Oh hey, why don’t we separate them so there’s more room for us?” And then some of the siblings took sides with the parents, some didn’t want them to be separated. Some, “I’m going to go with dad.” Others are going to go with mom. And that created another ruction across the siblings. And so we have a narrative to why climate change exists in that context.
And, basically, Tangaroa, who’s our Neptune, Tawhiri, who’s our ancestor to the winds, Tane, who actually separated the two parents, he’s one of our ancestors for humanity, for the forest, birds, all that type of thing. But he’s also the provider of human knowledge. So, basically, those siblings had this battle because of the issues they had with each other and the separation of their parents. And what happened was two ganged up on one, which was Tawhiri and Tawhiri limped off the battlefield, and saying, “Well, okay. You won this time but I’m going to take my wrath out on your children.” So the name Te Tāruke-ā-Tāwhiri, our Maori name for the climate plan, refers to the struggles or frustrations of Tawhiri.
Daniel Wahl: Wow.
Johnnie Freeland: But also Tangaroa, the ocean, is biting at the heels of Tane, in the way of erosion and all those sort of things, so a big storm events. So what we’re seeing is witnessing this battle occurring between our ancestors. But what’s happened is part of the reason why they’re battling is we’ve caused this generation’s issues. And so until we start to reconcile of our ancestors and make peace, that we’re going to be caught in between this battle, between-
Daniel Wahl: It’s fascinating because ultimately what you’re hinging the whole frame on, in terms of a circular system restoration of the water cycle, that is so much more upstream response to climate change. Because, basically, it is the denuding of the land in so many areas around the world, that, ultimately, climate change is an upset water cycle. Like if we-
Johnnie Freeland: Yeah. So the water and the ocean’s really critical in that. So when we start then looking from a Western science view and locate the reduction of sedimentation or the reduction in emissions and target reduction in carbon, what, we see in that circular view, is that they become important because to get to that level, what we’re creating is breathing space for the ancestors to start regenerating because we’ve seen it in COVID-19.
So those targets, in a circle context, they’re important because, for our human effort, what we’re trying to do is shift our behavior, shift our impacts to a point where those whakapapa systems can regenerate themselves, because they don’t need humans to do that. What we’ve got to do is manage our behavior in a way to help minimize the impact so that those systems can actually regenerate themselves, because they’re the ultimate whakapapa, not us. And who are we as humans to say, “We’re going to fix up nature”? We can reciprocate. We can play our role. And that’s the biggest thing through COVID-19 is watching globally the regeneration of those systems because of the fact that humanity got locked up a bit and put away for a while.
Daniel Wahl: One last thing. You said this earlier and now you’ve said it again. Of course we need much more humility of who are we in this larger cycle and change the narrative away from we’re trying to save the Earth. We’re really trying to save our future to some extent. Gaia or whakapapa is going to continue in her cycles. And I’m reminded of, as you know, when I started writing my book, one of the key questions that I came back to was a question that a mentor of mine, David Orr, had asked me 10 years before I started writing the book, which was… When I asked him about really the spiritual dimension of the shift that we now had to do as a species, he said, “Before we can answer the what we need to do and how we might be able to do it in order to create a sustainable or regenerative human presence on earth, we need to answer a deeper question, a much more difficult question. We need to ask why are we worth sustaining. What is it in us that is worth it that we are continuing as part of whakapapa?”
And, for me, I would love to hear… Because on the one hand, I completely agree, we need much humility and not take ourselves so important, but there must be some wisdom in your lineage that also speaks to what is our role. Why are we here? Because otherwise, maybe we should just bow out as quickly as possible and let the rest get on with a healthy-
Johnnie Freeland: Yeah. I think, and this would probably resonate with our Amazonian indigenous communities too. And in one way, well, there’s two ways. One, because we’re just part of that system of whakapapa. And if you think humanity is a awesome example of multicropping that Papatūānuku, Mother Earth has done, because the diversity of humanity in the different locations across the planet and the way those places have shaped us, both in terms of… And that’s why I go back to this term around ecological cultural perspectives, because that’s what whakapapa is. It’s the ecological cultural element.
So that’s one thing. Why? Because the Earth Mother and Sky Father have deemed it so that we’re here long. The other thing I think, and certainly from an indigenous perspective, because of that close association and knowledge and wisdom over generations of those systems, is that we are just a human manifestation or the human voice of this particular ecological system that my ancestors are anchored in. And the same way that our Amazonian relations are the voice.
And so I made a comment when I spoke in London, was that if the Amazon are the lungs of the earth, then indigenous people are our spiritual consciousness. And I think that the opportunity in the reindigenizing and recirculizing of humanity is the return to that.
Daniel Wahl: In the Western world, there are a lot of people who speak about our role as human beings is, to some extent, the universe becoming conscious of itself. It’s the ability of that whole to actually take enough of a perspective that then, through this full separation, that dynamic of being for self and being part of whole, actually creates a perspective that will always be limited, but in our storytelling, we can come together as human beings and create this multiple kaleidoscopic experience of the whole from within. And that is ultimately the purpose of us.
But then I think understanding all of life as conscious and, even beyond that, possibly the rocks and the rivers and trees, it, well, trees are life, it is that everything has a perspective on the whole as being in that dynamic between being for one’s self and being part of the larger whole. And we, I guess we do bring in, and that’s where the timing is interesting, we bring in that awareness of patterns that we then turn into our ancestry’s storytelling and myths and so on. And therefore we create, to some extent, through this observation of the system we are, we also create the capacity for some form of foresight. We might not know what’s coming at us but to be wisely prepared, to be able to respond to future transformations comes with that awareness. And so maybe this is where we’re waking up to that role with now the dangers of climate change and endangering our own species and so many other species with it, is to say, “We need to return to trusting the feedback that Gaia is giving also through us.”
Johnnie Freeland: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I totally agree with that. An, if anything, through that observation, it’s the… Because the cycles and patterns are really important. And just so, in terms of some of our knowledge, is that we’ve been able to constantly observe those patterns and cycles over many generations, so in that observation. And I guess it’ll be observation in what you see, feel, and hear. And so there’s a deeper sense of that feeling and what you’re observing. Observing spirit and movement, all those sort of thing.
And I think that one of those things around observation is the ability then to actually hear the different voices of nature. So we use the term te reo, which is language, but we have our human language, the trees have their language. So the ability to tune into what the perspectives are saying, from their view, from their point of view. And I think that’s the key is that ability to locate ourselves in those different… and appreciate those different views. So the view from the mountain, the view from the river, the view from the ocean. And so, as all living beings and living elements, they all have their own consciousness in that sense. And you see that in nature. You see it in the way water responds to contamination and other things. And that’s where it comes back to that focus on wellbeing. The wellbeing of those connections, the wellbeing of those systems. And then it becomes that greater self of me within the we.
And in my upbringing, I’m very much a why and how person. Because listening to our elders means something came into the meeting or whatever they would ask those two questions, the why and then the how. So the why is what is this? What is this opportunity? How does it relate to us, our system, our way of thinking, our way of seeing, our way of knowing? And then the how is how are we going to respond to this opportunity, challenge, or whatever it is, within the context of practicing our values. And so often, people are getting caught up on the what and then the who. Like what you said, actually we need to answer, or at least ask the why first.
It’s not even about the answer. It’s just about asking the question first. So those two questions our elders used to ask I’ve held onto. So every situation, even doing my masters and I’m now preparing for a PhD, those are almost the two fundamental questions of why and how. Because if you can get those two elements right, then it doesn’t matter, the what. The what doesn’t matter, because whatever you’ll be doing is all going to be aligned to the why and the how.
Daniel Wahl: And the what is very often, like, again, coming back to that conversation I had with Joel Glanzberg, it often speaks of the systems and the structures that we actually see our monetary system, our governance system, the houses we build, the roads we put in. They’re tracks. The process is really behind it.
When you want to change something over time to just work with the tracks, design another building, change the layout of the city. It’s just working with changing the tracks again rather than the process behind it.
I’m conscious that we’ve talked for 90 minutes.
Johnnie Freeland: No, no. That’s good, yeah.
Daniel Wahl: But it’s been really wonderful. I’m going to stop the recording now to give us a brief moment to catch up on some of the other things we want to talk about. But thank you so much-
Johnnie Freeland: Yeah, cool.
Daniel Wahl: … for this.
Here is the recording of the conversation that the above is an (unedited!) transcript of:
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Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures
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