Happen Films Podcast

In Episode 7 of the Happen Films Podcast, Antoinette is joined by Tina Ngata (Ngati Porou), advocate for environmental, indigenous and human rights. Tina is based in Tairāwhiti, East Coast, Aotearoa New Zealand, where she’s a busy community leader working for the rights and wellbeing of her whanau/family and community.

For many years her blog, the Non-Plastic Maori, documented her journey reducing her personal dependence on plastic, a journey that led to her deepening her understanding of the wider issues of plastics consumption and waste and becoming a prominent activist in that space and beyond. She has spoken for Maori and indigenous rights at the United Nations and in conferences around the world, has published a book of her collected work opposing the continued celebration of colonial history, Kia Mau: Resisting Colonial Fictions, and is continually writing, speaking and protesting for justice for humans and Papatuānuku/Mother Earth.

The intention was for this episode to be Happen Films’ contribution to Plastic-free July – Tina being one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s waste resistance heroes – and the idea was to talk about waste within the context of environmental, indigenous and human rights. And we do… but the focus of the conversation turned out to be colonisation – it’s history; it’s day-to-day presence – and what decolonisation might look like. That’s an appropriate conversation to be having at any time and feels particularly resonant right now, within the extraordinary context of this year, 2020, and everything it’s bringing forth to challenge our thinking, our history, our practices and our plans for the future.

As Tina says: “Anti-colonialism is not just for indigenous people. Anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and anti-racism is for everyone – we’ll all get well-being out of deconstructing the ways in which we believe that we have entitlement to each other’s spaces and places and bodies.”
We hope you enjoy listening to Tina’s wise and profound words and come away as inspired as we have!

** Follow Tina **
Website: https://tinangata.com
Support Tina on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tinangata
Watch Tina’s talk during the Claim the Future webinar (July 2020): https://vimeo.com/440273174
Buy Tina’s book, Kia Mau: Resisting Colonial Fictions (digital download – please koha/gift if you can): https://tinangata.com/2020/06/14/kia-mau-resisting-colonial-fictions/

** More about Happen Films ** 
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Website: https://happenfilms.com 
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Instagram: https://instagram.com/happenfilms 
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In Episode 6 of the Happen Films podcast, with Jordan away spending time with an unwell family member, Antoinette is flying solo for the first time. She had the pleasure of speaking to Nate Hagens, someone we’ve been following for a while now because we love his deep knowledge and insight into the interrelationship between the environment, energy, and finance.

Having begun his career on Wall Street, Nate has a deep understanding of finance, but his career took a change of direction in the early 2000s as he began to understand the repercussions of peak oil. His personal research led him back to university and a PhD in Natural Resources and he’s dedicated the last 20 years to educating himself, freshman students and the world at large about what he terms The Human Predicament.

Now, instead of Wall Street being the hub of his universe, he states: “Our real stock market is our air, our soils, our forests, our oceans, and the biodiversity we share the planet with. This stock market has been going down for over a millennium and has been in slo-mo crash mode [for decades].”

How did we get to this point, and how do we move beyond it in a way that ensures the planet and humans will thrive?

We hope you enjoy the podcast. Check out the links below to dive deeper into Nate’s research, writings and videoed talks.

Follow Nate Hagens:
- Website: http://www.energyandourfuture.org
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/NJHagens
- Book: The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century: Essays on the Systems Synthesis of the Human Predicament by Nate Hagens & DJ White
- Ecological Economics issue 169: 'Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’ by Nate Hagens

** More about Happen Films ** 
 Support our work: https://happenfilms.com/support 
 Website: https://happenfilms.com
 Twitter: https://twitter.com/happenfilms 
 Instagram: https://instagram.com/happenfilms 
 Facebook: https://facebook.com/happenfilms

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Episode 5 of the Happen Films podcast we speak to Brett and Nici from Limestone Permaculture Farm. We’ve made two short films about Limestone, we shot the first one in 2015 and the second in 2019. There’s a heap of learning, growth and wisdom shared across the two episodes, but a short film is just never enough, even two of them!

We wanted to do a follow-up interview with Brett and Nici because during that second shoot there were massive bush fires on the horizon and the farm was in the middle of a long-time drought. How have they come through it all and what’s keeping them going? We’ve also included some questions asked here on YouTube and over on Instagram. Thanks for asking, folks!

Enjoy the episode.

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In this episode we speak with Dr Susan Krumdieck. Susan is an American-born, New Zealand-based Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Canterbury University. Her research has developed novel methodologies and tools needed to rapidly downshift fossil fuel use while recovering real value for people and environment. 

Over the course of her research she has worked on development of every type of renewable and alternative energy technology, culminating in founding the emerging field of Transition Engineering. Transition Engineering actions social responsibility and sound science to deliver change projects that down-shift the exposure to fossil fuel supply and climate change risks. Transition Engineers work in the gap between fossil fuelled expectations and constraints of flourishing.

This is a topic that fascinates us both. The first time we met Susan was in 2016 when we interviewed her for our film Living the Change. It was a game-changing conversation for us, as while we weren’t exactly ‘techno-optimists’, we soon realised how little we new about the realities of the mainstream renewable energy story. Susan might break your bubble about that story, but she does it with great passion and always with a tone of what we called ‘hopefulness’ and she calls ‘purpose’.

Susan’s approach to renewables, and that of Transition Engineering, is to begin with our vision for the future. These days, rather than simply researching new technologies to make renewables more efficient, she is rethinking how we use our technology, how much of it we even need, and what alternatives exist to technology itself that could improve our lives while reducing our exploitation of the earth.

Support the Happen Films Podcast at https://happenfilms.com/support

Book: Transition Engineering: Building a Sustainable Future, by Susan Krumdieck

Follow Susan:
– Website: https://www.transitionengineering.org/
– YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/signsofchangeconf
– Blog: https://susankrumdieck.blogspot.com/

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In Episode 3 of the Happen Films podcast we speak with regenerative agriculture coach Jono Frew. Jono started his working life age 11 in farming and he’s been passionate about the industry from Day 1. But his career took an unexpected turn a few years ago and it’s impacted not just how he approaches farming, but how he approaches life.

As he moved from conventional agriculture to regenerative agriculture, Jono learnt not only that true farming solutions don’t come from a bottle, he also learnt how to cry freely, how to connect with his kids, how to share himself, and how to help fellow farmers steer a new, regenerative course for their own farms and families.

Jono’s an inspiration to us, a beautiful example of how reconnecting with the soil upon which all life depends can also reconnect you with your family, your community and your very self. Have a listen and let us know your own thoughts about the future of farming.

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In episode 2 of the Happen Films Podcast we’re joined by a Dude Making a Difference, Rob Greenfield. You might already be one of Rob’s hundreds of thousands of followers; if not, we’re delighted to introduce you to him because he’s one of our favourite people out there working to make the world a better place.

We’ve been fans of Rob Greenfield’s work for years, and had the opportunity to catch up with him while he was under lockdown in France during Covid-19. With this interruption to daily life giving many the opportunity to reflect on the type of life they’d like to lead, it was interesting to hear about Rob’s personal journey.

“It’s been about a decade now since I really shifted my life. I was living a very materialistic life. I wanted to be a millionaire by the time I was thirty. Then I started to listen to other perspectives and I just woke up to the fact that my life was not what I thought it was at all. I was buying into all these lies that corporations had sold me on what I needed to do in order to be a happy, healthy, successful human being and I pretty quickly decided that I was going to radically transform my life.”

Rob has gained notoriety around the world for some of his extreme campaigns – wearing all his own rubbish as he accumulated it over the course of a month (there was a lot to carry!); foraging or growing 100% (100%!) of his food for a year. Rather than fulfil his desire to be a millionaire, his financial vows see him donating 100% of his media income to grassroots charities and his financial net worth kept to the very bare minimum.

Rob is a great inspiration. Not because we should all choose to live this way – he acknowledges it’s not for everyone – but because he lives his truth in a way that fulfils him, in a way that he can be proud of, and in the way he truly wants to. That seems to us to be something to aspire to, for each of us in our individual ways.

Enjoy the podcast!

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In our very first podcast episode Meg and Patrick of Artist as Family join us for a conversation on community resilience and the opportunities for change that the pandemic presents.

You might remember Meg and Patrick from our film Creatures of Place that we made back in 2018. Today they're joining us from their home, Tree Elbow, on Djaara people’s land in Victoria, Australia. We love the way these guys choose to live and interact with their community – they’re inspiring role models for us and they were the obvious choice for first guests on our new podcast.

One of the critical things we talked about was the difference between self-sufficiency and community sufficiency.

Meg: “How do we practice community sufficiency, what does that look like when it’s just us here, how do we look after each other in a non digital way in a very, very real practical sense? We’re so privileged here to live like this. How do we share that? In a time where everybody is physically distanced, what does generosity look like?”

Patrick: “Resilience is community sufficiency it’s not self sufficiency, so while we have twelve years of preparing for collapse on this particular lot in Central Victoria and within the community gardens and the community forests that we’re involved in and there’s food everywhere … feral foods and the huge amount of learning over the last twelve years we’ve put into edible flora and fauna and fungi – it’s so good to have that, that’s our main bank apart from our seed bank, our cellar and our garden and our community, but to be shut off so radically from community at the moment is definitely a… I feel a sense of vulnerability with that.” It was really great to talk about that vulnerability with two people who are, despite feeling the vulnerability, deeply resilient in so many ways. We can’t all be prepared for every situation the future might bring, but we can choose to live in a way that is positive and loving and supportive of our selves and all the beings around us.

Support the show (https://patreon.com/happenfilms)

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