Earth Calling #152

Ted Carter:

We should be taking this and stewarding this great opportunity that we have and this great blessing we have in a way that really sparks something in others.

Ellen Gunter:

Knowing is great and being willing is great, but you must do. You have to put your feet on the ground and do something. So that's what we're trying to do with Earth Calling.

Roger Doiron:

If you feel like you've really had a terrible day or you're feeling really down about the state of world affairs, you know, maybe, maybe go visit a community garden or visit a school garden and I suspect that you'll find some new joy after that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and podcast show number 152, Earth Calling, airing for the first time on Sunday, August 10, 2014. Summer is in full bloom and the Earth reminds us daily of the bounty that we Mainers enjoy. Today we speak with Ted Carter and Ellen Gunter, authors of Earth A Climate Change handbook for the 21st century and Roger Dwaran, founder and director of Kitchen Gardeners International. Join our conversations and learn how we can maintain and foster our relationship with the world in which we live. Thank you for joining us. A topic that I find quite important for all of us, but especially for myself and my family, is the environment and the earth on which we live and with which we live. Really Today we have two individuals who I think feel similarly and probably even more strongly than I do, which is saying a lot today. We have Ted Carter of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes. He is a landscape designer and contractor and also Ellen Gunter, who is a journalist and environmental activist. Ted and Ellen co wrote Earth A Climate Change handbook for the 21st century, which was released on Earth Day this year. Thanks so much for coming in and being with us today.

Ellen Gunter:

It's our pleasure.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I want to read there's so much in your book which is wonderful. And I think it's a great update for people who know. Ted has been a longtime supporter of our radio show and has come on as a guest several times. The first time, way, way back, was to talk about the first iteration of this book. This book is so different and so wonderful and alive, and reading it is like taking a breath of fresh air. One of the quotes that I read this morning was by Thomas Berry. Our moments of grace are our moments of transformation. And there is something very graceful about this book. It's a pause. Is that part of your intention in writing this?

Ted Carter:

The two of us, Ellen and myself, we are a good team because Elle is a fantastic writer and a journalist and environmental activist and a spiritual director. And I think that she puts a lot of heart and soul into her writing. And it definitely is. It's a call to action is what this book is. And we really want people to get ignited and start to go to town on this, because time is of the essence. And I don't know if I'm answering your question exactly properly, but this is really a call to action. It's in the Sacred Activism series of Random House, and it's really important that we do that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yeah.

Ellen Gunter:

And, you know, and we love that quote, because what he's talking about there is the moments of dawn and dusk, you know, and those are the moments where you kind of see the morning birthing and you see the day ending. And they're so brief and they're so regular. We can count on them happening every day. But everything in life is a transformation. Earth is all about cycles. So, yeah, it's there on many levels. This book is about transformation. It's about what we're undergoing right now on the Earth. It is transforming and in a lot of terrible ways. So each of us has a calling, has a role to fulfill, a job to do. And this is going to require a transformation of sorts from all of us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Reading this book is. It's not easy. It's not easy to hear about the things that are going on, going on right now and have been going on very recently and have been going on for decades, possibly centuries. It's not easy to know that this is what we've been doing. Let me read a little passage from the introduction. This is something that you wrote, Ellen. Ted once reminded me of a trip he had made to visit a Yaqui shaman friend of ours named Lensch Arcoletta, with whom he had studied nature and Earth spirituality in the Arizona desert. One afternoon, we sat on a bluff overlooking what appeared to be a distant dust storm. It wasn't. The bulldozers cutting deep swaths were making space for yet another subdivision. As we watched, Lensch told me his tribe had a name for us. They're calling us. They call us termite people because we are eating the earth's flesh. And by doing that, we are literally eating our future, our world. It is, he said, a form of madness, of suicide. And that really. That hit home for me, that what we're doing is eating into the core of where we're living. Right.

Ellen Gunter:

Well, Rachel Carson talked about this in Silent Spring. She called it biocide, ecocide. And that was in 1962. And she said if we. And what her, you know, her big platform was ddt. Silent Spring refers, of course, to the fact that there were no birds singing, because the preponderance of DDT after World War II was basically not just killing the insects that were, you know, bothering plants and, you know, troubling home gardeners, but it was killing the birds who were eating the berries and, you know, whatnot as part of the Earth cycle. And so she, you know, she basically was warning us about a world we live in now. And she was right. You know, I mean, we celebrate her now as being the person who really started waking us up. But this is obviously a very long process. That was 50 years ago. So it's time, you know, to kind of move to the next level, I think. And it is hard to recognize. It is hard to own this.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And she paid for it herself. I mean, she ended up dying of cancer. And they thought largely that there was a chemical contribution to that cancer. It's not easy to be the voice of conscience. You have a quote from Bill Moyers. The most important credential of all is a conscience that cannot be purchased or silenced. And to be that voice is tricky and hard, but important. So important.

Ellen Gunter:

Yeah, it is. It is. And it's. You know, you really find out who your friends are, I guess. And, you know, there are lots of people that, you know in my family and my, you know, friend hierarchy who just can't walk with us on this, you know, and that's okay, you know, I mean, you really have to find a peace with it, because if it's something that's really driving you, driving your soul, you can't say no to it. So we like to say that righting Earth calling is our calling. This is what we were called to do. And when. I think there's a quote somewhere at the beginning of the book that if you're called on a journey. If you decide to take a spiritual journey, then it's okay to not do it. But if you do it, there's no turning back. It's a one way street. So Ted and I, I think we're of one mind of this, that there is no direction except forward. And so it's. We can't help ourselves. This is what we have to do.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How did you come to meet each other? I know we talked about this when you wrote the first book, Ted, but give me a little bit of background on how the two of you came to be working on this.

Ted Carter:

Well, as usual, things just sort of happen all together at the same time. And it was about 10 years ago that I was starting to go out to the desert to work with Len Chochilada, the shaman that you had read about. And he was getting me to see nature and the earth differently. And I met Ellen in that same time period. And we had been going to Chicago for. I went nine times a year actually to set up stage and to work with Carolyn Mace. And Ellen was a classmate of mine and she would do a narrative after we were done. And it was just incredibly written, beautifully written and very descriptive. And I just said, whoa, if I ever write a book, I'd love to have her work with me on a book. And sure enough, when I started reading a lot of the information about what was happening to our planet and the world, and it was making me very, very sad. A very dear friend of ours says, do the thing that breaks your heart. And I was very, very. It broke my heart. And Elle came up for her birthday in 2007 and said. And I said to her, would you write a book with me? And she said, sure. It was going to be a handbook, a little pamphlet, 16 pages. Little did we know it would be almost 300 pages for the first books. But, you know, so we've been. She's a great. There's a friend of ours out in California and he says, you know, there's friends that we know that we can climb hills with, and then there's some friends that we can climb mountains with. Ellen's somebody. You climb mountains with Ellen.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I really enjoyed the weaving of the work of Carolyn Mace, and not just Carolyn Mace, but really ayurvedic medicine about the chakras and talking about what different chakras mean. And I know this is something that's become part of our kind of communal lexicon. But at the time that you started doing this, if you're talking about chakras, People are kind of looking at you a little funny.

Ellen Gunter:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is a multi thousand year old tradition I think was begun by the Hindus and picked up by other cultures. But the chakras, of course, Carolyn is where I'd heard about these and I sort of had awareness about it because I studied Tai Chi for 20 years. So you get energy, you get prana, and it's, you know, prana of Tai chi and yoga and the chakra system, it's all the same thing. And so I had a kind of an awareness of them. But when we started studying with Carolyn, she relates it to your spiritual journey. You know, she talks about how in anatomy, the spirit that you can really track, you have a spiritual anatomy, and that these chakras are basically the foundation of that. So in the first book we wrote about how the first chakra is our tribal connection. If you do yoga and you sit down in a lotus position, your tailbone is the closest thing to the earth and that's the center. That's your first chakra. And when Ted and I first started writing Reunion, we said, our first chakra is broken. We have no connection to the earth anymore. That's one of the things that's wrong. We don't appreciate it, we don't see it, we don't hear it. We don't get how we can't survive. We are the earth. The Bible, to use one particular kind of mythology which, you know, a lot of us were brought up with when, you know, creation was begun with a handful of dirt. And so, you know, you, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, all that stuff, we, you know, we have that built into our culture, that we are the earth. So what? Just to kind of extend the metaphor a little bit, what Ted and I talk about a lot in here is we put the chakras in there because there is a very physical spiritual connection here. And your heart is what makes you feel compassion. Your fourth chakra, your heart chakra, your sixth is your head. It's your brain, it's both your cognitive brain and your intuitive brain so you can cognitively get the data. And your heart is, oh my God, this is really killing me. But the fifth chakra, your speech, your mouth, this is where you make choice. That's where the action part is. So that's how we tie all these things together in the book, by saying, it's like Goethe said, knowing is great and being willing is great, but you must do. You have to put your feet on the ground and do something. So that's what we're trying to do with Earth calling.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

A big chunk of the book is reviewing what has been going on. I think many people are now aware of climate change. I think it's less controversial. I think it's more widely accepted that this is an actual thing. But I'm not sure that people understand that. Some of the things that have been used as examples, they're things that have repeated themselves. I mean, you talked about essentially, what are Dust Bowls in China now because of the irrigation system changes. We were experiencing dust bowl issues in the United States century ago. Right, Right.

Ellen Gunter:

Yeah. And the Dust bowl was really, I don't know if you saw Ken Burns, you know, if anybody listening has seen, you probably saw that, you know, the Dust bowl show. And one of the reasons the Dust bowl happened was that Oklahoma was not ever meant to be used for the crops that it was used for. It was. It was prairie grass, which has very different root systems. But the Oklahoma land rush, and whenever that was the late 1800s or something, it brought. It was the kind of the last part of the country that needed to be settled. And they brought everybody in. And, of course, they started farming and cattle ranching, and they changed the ecosystem of the state so that when they had several years where it was very bountiful, but then all that nutrition and the soil ran out and it could no longer sustain that. So when you don't listen and pay attention to what the Earth system requires, then you have something like a dust bowl. But, yeah, you're right, there are cycles. And the dust bowls and the incredible amount of pollution in China is due to the desertification of a lot of their plains areas, a lot of their bread baskets disappearing because of overuse, because their water supplies are dwindling, because they have such a monstrous population they're trying to support with food. So, yeah, these things have happened historically. One of the things that's different now is that it's all happening at once, and it is a repeatable cycle that we cannot get out of. We have the heat, we have the drought, we have the floods, we have the wildfires, and they are now a part of our lives because we haven't maintained a balance with the Earth.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Ted, I know you have something to say about this.

Ted Carter:

Well, it's all about balance, really. And Carolyn has told me that last year I went out, I go out to her work in our gardens every year, and I said to her, boy, nature's always taught me about great abundance. But she said, Ted, she said, first you have to have balance, then you can have abundance. And we see that in our health. We see that in our way of life. When we're out of balance, we're out of sync. I mean, what's happening, what's so absolutely tragic, what's happening right now is that at the perfect moment when the worms should be available for the birds to eat for their offspring and everything like that, the seasons are all screwed up so you keep, you can't really get to those, it's off sync so that you can't, they can't be nourished in time to feed their young. So we're having die offs in animal populations and bird populations that are just part of an imbalance that we have set forth in nature. And what we're doing to nature is not natural. This is not natural. It's very unnatural. And what we're doing as human beings, as earthlings is also equally as unnatural. It's not natural to be this way. But I think greed and a lot of self interest drives this and we have to keep that in check and we have to sort of bring ourselves home and say, call ourselves home and say, what are we doing here? I mean, are we all going to let this beautiful ecosystem fall into this great abyss or are we gonna, are we gonna really do something about it? And I just can't, I just can't sit back and not do anything anymore. I just can't do it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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Roger Doiron:

The most important thing you need to begin a personal evolution is heart. To start your journey, you have to take the first step with your eyes and your heart wide open, open to new experiences and possibilities. Without this openness, your efforts, your path toward growth and positive change will be fraught with obstacles that seem insurmountable. So if you find yourself looking forward to good things to come, open your heart and take a brave step toward the future. If you're interested in evolving your relationship with your money, get in touch with us. I'm here to help. @tomapherdfinancialmain.com we'll help you evolve with your money.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

well, we're definitely going to talk about what you can do because that's a very big part of this book. So I want to go into that. I also, I know that as somebody who has really wanted to do good things in life, it has been overwhelming for me at times. And I know for people around me to see that you've no sooner dealt with Hurricane Katrina than you have another natural disaster over here. And I read the Barbara Kingsolver book about the monarch butterflies, and then it actually comes to be. You feel as much as you're composting and trying to walk instead of drive and doing your thing and not eating as much meat and, you know, not using as much water, it still feels so overwhelming. So how do you reconnect with what keeps you moving forward in a purposeful and mindful way?

Ted Carter:

Lisa, you are a spark, okay? Think of yourself as a spark to ignite the passion in other people, because your actions, they may seem very inconsequential, but you influence other people. And you're in a place to influence people through your radio station, through everything that you do. So just remember that we're like, you throw the pebble in the water and it ripples and you're touching a million other people. And especially people. Look, the poor and disenfranchised aren't going to be able to do anything. They're too busy surviving. It's the people like us that are really connected and that are running in this economy that can really do something. We have the resource, we have the influence. And we should be taking this and stewarding this great opportunity that we have and this great blessing we have in a way that really sparks something in others.

Ellen Gunter:

Right? And what you're talking about is network. I mean, this radio station, this broadcast, reaching out, is networking. As Ted said, you influence one person and you don't know where that goes because it doesn't just happen now. It doesn't just influence somebody now. That happens into perpetuity. This broadcast will be affecting people for a thousand years if we're still around just because of the nature of influence and because how memory works with our species, the collective unconscious, and a whole bunch of other things. But to get to the first part of your question, yes, everybody, it's frustrating. What can I do? What can I do? How can I act and that's really what the action piece is about because everybody's different. However many people are listening to this, every one of you has a different calling. And so, yes, we designed the book so that you could figure that out. First you reconnect, you get a. You resensitize yourself to nature, but then join a network, get involved with other people. That's where that alchemy of action comes in. That's where it generates and it is completely out of control. I've seen this time and again. I'm a big activist with the Keystone XL pipeline and that started out with 1253 people getting arrested over a period of two weeks. And now it reignited the environmental movement. There's no way these are, it's bled over into the fracking movement. It's all over the world now. So that was, you know, you never know how your, what your one action is going to do in the long term. So get into a network, join one of these organizations. The infrastructures are all set up already. And then that's that alchemy that begins.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You quoted as you're talking about stepping into your soul's journey. Teilhard de Chardin it would seem that our time is calling us to awaken from our benumbed and bewitched state to a wonder at and reverence for the astonishing, miraculous and mysterious creation of which we are a part. And I think this is important. I think that first we have to start with that wonderment. We have to start with that reconnection to get out there and really feel this in some way so that it's not just something that we're dealing with on an intellectual level.

Ellen Gunter:

Right, exactly. It's that, it's that heart connection. We get it cognitively, we can get it intuitively. And that compassionate heart is what is awakened when you're in nature. I like to tell people, go out and sit outside. Nobody goes to Times Square to relax. They go out into nature. And your state is emblematic of that. You are the one, you are a magnet for this. So people are drawn here because it's so beautiful, it's so peaceful. It regenerates people, it heals them. This is, you know, it's just an amazing place to be. So go sit outside and just take some deep breaths. And when you sigh, that's when your cognitive side is giving way to your, you know, to your intuitive side. That genius of that is innate in us. So, you know, Matthew Fox says he's a modern day mystic and he says we are starved for Awe. We are starved for it. We want to be blown away by something besides video games and, you know, FX on movies. We want to see what's really there. That's part of our connection. That's what nature gives us. Nature is built in awe.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You also quote two individuals or two stories of individuals who listened to themselves and went on and did things that I think have become quite amazing. You spoke about Rudolf Steiner and the Biodynamics movement and also about Findhorn and anybody who has. These are names that come up over and over and over again. And yet these two groups of individuals, the caddies at Findhorn and Rudolf Steiner, they were considered a little bit loony. Yeah. Yeah. So why was it important to share these stories in Earth Calling?

Ted Carter:

Well, I'm going to. I have a Steiner garden. I have a Rudolf Steiner garden, a biodynamic garden at my home. And I work with. Ben Steele has been in here at the studio. And we've talked about the Rudolf Steiner journey. And really, you say, of course, Steiner was a savant, an incredible, incredible human being that comes around once every hundred years. These people, I think that we have to be the Katies, the Steiners. You know, all of us, we're a little bit different. You know, one thing that really hit home to me was a friend of mine said, you know, you. He said, ted, you're an eccentric man. And I said, do you know what that means? I said, well, that means I'm different. And he said, no, that means you live outside the circle. And I said, do you know what that people outside the circle do? And I said, no. He said, they changed the world. He said, how can you live inside the circle and change the world? And he said, you know, and then he was giving me a lesson that I needed to hear because I was trying to conform again, but I didn't want to conform again because that's not who I am. I've always operated outside the circle, and it takes a lot of courage to do that. But it's the place if you really want to do things in your life that really make a difference, you have to just go out there and make it happen.

Ellen Gunter:

Right. Well, and that's just who you are. You can't even help yourself. I mean, I've known you for what, 10, 12 years now, and that's who you are. When we were doing the first book, we went out to Northern California because Ted had met somebody doing. You were working with the Pfeiffer Institute, I forget which one. Which is where you learn about biodynamics and why you would want to do it. So he hooked up with this guy who was part of a French wine family, and he had left this. I don't know which one it was. It doesn't matter. But he had left his family's estate and cashed out. And he said, I just want to find out how I can grow wine. Grapes. Grapes. Without using pesticides and fertilizer. That's so unnatural. So, long story short, he ended up taking biodynamics and became very, you know, a practitioner, a master practitioner. We met him in Northern California in the wine country, and he took us on a tour of one of the vineyards that he takes care of, which was winning awards. And, I mean, you eat these grapes and you just kind of buzz. They're so fantastic. So we're up on a hill overlooking, you know, his biodynamic vineyard and all the preps and all the stuff that are part of that, you know, that discipline. And so I'm looking around, and I said, so all of these are, you know, because you have to have biodynamic certification. You have to maintain that to be able to call yourself a biod, you know, practitioner, or, you know, product. So I'm looking around at all these beautiful vineyards around him, and I said, so they're all biodynamic. And I'm not going to imitate his French accent, but he said, no, that's conventional, which means pesticides and fertilizer. That one's conventional. That's conventional. And I said, you're surrounded by conventional agriculture. How do you maintain your certification? All that stuff blows over here. And he just grinned at us, and he shrugged, and he said, because it's up to the earth. And Ted and I went, what? I mean, that was like our biggest lightning moment, because what he was saying was, we have the capacity to work with the earth, to make agreements with the earth. The agreement you make with biodynamics is you never use pesticides and fertilizer. You use the preps that are part of the, you know, the discipline of doing biod. And, you know, Ted could talk a lot more intelligently about that. You can find out more about it just by Googling Biodynamics. But this is what they were using in Finhorn, and nobody really knew what that was. But the point is that when you work in concert, when you are in partnership, when you are connected to nature and you make this promise, then this is what happens. This is what? Ted's garden is crazy. I send biod preps to Friends and they go, I have a lemon tree that I've had for 18 years and now it's putting out. It never even had lemons on it before. And I said, you can never use. This is your agreement. You make this agreement. Well, people think it sounds crazy. I will promise you it is incredible. It's just incredible. Doesn't matter if you believe it, just do it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, and in Findhorn you gave the example of enormous broccolis that were 50

Ellen Gunter:

pound broccoli that were haul out with a truck. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And this was in Scotland, I believe, on very rocky coast with not very much soil, but it was just the way that it was.

Ellen Gunter:

Gorson Broom is what they call it. Yeah, it was sand. It looked like there was no nutritional value in it. They grew this insane garden and people came from all over the place, I forget, you know, from horticultural societies. They did analysis of the soil and it was completely rich in everything that was needed because they worked in, where they worked in concert with nature.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So this gets me to, I think, a really important question, and that is, how do people. This is Earth Calling, a climate change handbook for the 21st century. This is a call to action. You want people to work in concert with nature, with themselves, their lives, the Earth. Where do people start?

Ellen Gunter:

Well, you know, it's spring. It's spring and so, thank God, finally, I live in Chicago. So, you know, we're having a very late spring right now. You know, one of the first things I would say is what's available to you right now? What's available is gardens begin to garden. We recommend that you get heirloom seeds. You know, we have a whole thing in there, as you know, on GMOs and you know, we're very much opposed to those. They're not natural, no matter what they say. So. But, you know, we were asked that question the other day and, you know, yes, just go out and start putting your hands in the earth. Start there, start there and just do some potted plants. If you don't have a garden, then, you know, go work in a garden. Go to the farmers markets, get your, find the seeds, seed purveyors there. Once you start investigating, a whole world opens up to you. This is, this is not weird and it's not specialized. It is becoming the norm. It is becoming the norm. Everybody is getting this. Eat local, buy local, find out who is where your meat comes from. You know, if it's coming from, as Ted said, if it's coming, if it says it's grass fed, does that mean it's being grown in Brazil on what used to be rainforest. You don't want to support, support that. And you don't know what they're doing to the grass before you know the cattle are eating it. So, I mean, I think our book is a really good prep. You know, we spent a year before we wrote Reunion, we spent a year doing nothing but reading and researching. And when we finally got to the point where we kept reading the same thing, kept no matter what the source, we were finding the same sorts of opinions and ideas and data and statistics and in long term tests. And we said, okay, it's time to start writing. We have maxed the information for now. We read dozens of books, thousands of articles, hundreds of blogs, and we researched and researched and we never took any resource as first blush. We always investigated. So there is so much to do and you can just start as simple as sticking your hands in the earth, growing, you know, getting an organic tomato plant and growing some tomatoes for yourself.

Ted Carter:

Also, I'm going to interject about children. If you're a young mother, you're a young father, get your children involved. This is stewardship.

Ellen Gunter:

That's right.

Ted Carter:

My mom and dad from when we had our little suburban home in Chicago, you know, they were out landscaping on the weekends. I was mowing the neighbor's lawn. We were outside all the time. Put the computers away, put the cell phones away, put all that technology away and go out and play in nature and participate in what this beautiful Earth is all about.

Ellen Gunter:

Right. Well said.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, Ellen, we're fortunate that you flew in to be with us here in Maine. I know that you're flying out again, back very soon. You're going back to Chicago.

Ellen Gunter:

I am. Back to Oak Park.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Back to oak Park. And 10, I know you're extremely busy as well. It's a very busy time of year for you. So the fact that you both took the time to be with us in the studio and have taken the time to write this book, Earth Calling, it says a lot to me. How do people find out about Earth Calling and how do people.

Ellen Gunter:

Well, it's distributed by Random House, so it's the easiest thing to do is to go to Amazon or go to Barnes and Noble. I know there are a few bookstores around Portland that are starting to carry it, so you can request it and they will order it for you, but it's widely available. It's also a Kindle, so you can just go on Amazon and in three minutes it'll be on your Kindle or your iPad or whatever.

Ted Carter:

I'm gonna give Longfellow Books a plug because they have been very supportive of this book and I'm going to be doing a reading for them. So and I love Longfellow Books, so that's what I want to say.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, we love Longfellow Books here in Portland too. So people who live in the Portland Greater Portland area, Longfellow Books is a great place to go for Earth A Climate Change handbook for the 20th century and to read more about the work that Ellen Gunter and Ted Carter have been doing. Thank you again for everything that you're doing and for all that you will continue to do.

Ellen Gunter:

Thank you.

Ted Carter:

Thank you very much.

Ellen Gunter:

Thank you sir.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marcy Booth from Booth, Maine to help me with my own business business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marcy when was the last time you took a break from what you were doing? From the work that was piled up on your desk and just looked up? I know that during the course of my days I often forget to take a moment or two to just breathe, look up at the sky and dream. Terrible that I have to remind myself to breathe. But when I do, I I feel energized because in those moments I'm able to let go of the daily grind and think more about what I want to accomplish, how I want my business to grow. Sometimes those are the aha moments. If we all took a few moments out each day to stop what we were doing and dream a little about our business futures, not only would we feel a great sense of calm, but we may come to realize that these dreams can in fact, come true. I'm Marcie Booth. Let's talk about the changes you need. Boothmain.com

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

ago I watched a very interesting TEDx talk by a local man who's doing good things in the area of local foods and in fact, personalizing and localizing the food supply. Today we're speaking with Roger Dhawaren, the founder and director of Kitchen Gardeners International, a Maine based nonprofit network of over 30,000 individuals from 120 countries. He is taking a hands on approach to relocalizing the food supply. Thanks so much for coming in and

Roger Doiron:

talking to us Today, it's my pleasure. Thank you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Roger. I was inspired by your TEDx talk, which I believe was held. Well, I know it was held right up the street here in Portland because it made gardening seem so accessible. You said that. I believe you saved several thousand dollars by planting your own garden and eating your own organic food in your own house. And it just made it seem like something that any us could do.

Roger Doiron:

Well, that's really my life's work. I'm just trying to help more people to grow at least a little bit of their own food. And you're right, it is accessible. It's not rocket science. It's a question of putting a seed in the soil at the right time and giving it a little bit of care and then cultivating that plant once it starts to poke its nose through the earth so it doesn't have to be complicated. And it can be done with very little space. And if you happen to have a little bit more space, you can actually grow quite a bit of food and save quite a bit of money.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

There was a big effort that dealt with quite a big space, actually, with President Obama and his wife several years ago when he was inaugurated for the first time. And you had a part in that.

Roger Doiron:

I think I did have a little bit of a hand in that. I continue to give 99.9% of the credit to First Lady Michelle Obama, because she's the one who actually stepped up and said, let's plant this. But my organization, Kitchen Gardeners International, had run a campaign called Eat the View, which was a social media campaign to really build support and enthusiasm for the idea of having a kitchen garden planted at the White House once again. And it proved to be successful. We got a lot of attention, but I think primarily we got a lot of people excited that we could actually get this garden planted.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This seems to be something that more and more people are interested in. I'm seeing more chickens in people's backyards. I'm seeing more beehives in their gardens. For a while, though, we gave away the power. We let somebody else create our food for us. How did that happen?

Roger Doiron:

Well, that's sort of one of the things that I was addressing in my TEDx talk, which was titled A Subversive Plot. And what I said was that I think that gardening is sort of a subversive activity in the sense that by growing a little bit of your own food, you're doing something that's socially subversive in the sense that you're taking some power into your own hands and you're also at the same time automatically taking that power away from some other forces in the world, which I think tend to be these bigger forces, like multinational companies that have been sort of enabled by our political system, but also by ourselves. We need to sort of own our own actions. We've allowed the Monsantos and the Krafts and the Coca Colas to not only find their ways, but into our supermarket shelves, but also into our schools and places like that. So I think, you know, we've sort of gone astray over the years. It's been more of a slow train wreck as opposed to just a violent car crash. But the fact is we really are on our way back. We're in the midst, I think, of a full blown local foods revolution right now. And that's where I'm putting my energy.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Are you originally from Maine?

Roger Doiron:

I was born in Chicago, so I'm not officially a real Mainer, but I moved here when I was about 2 years old, so I'm pretty close.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So you have been. You have experience with attempting to grow things here in Maine for quite a long time.

Roger Doiron:

I did grow up in a family that had a garden, so I'm pretty tuned into the seasons here and what works and what can't. But I'm also one of those people who doesn't take no for an answer that nicely in the sense that I'm continuing to try my artichokes every year. I think over the past three years I've had like three artichokes. But I think that that's part of the fun for me is just to push the envelope a little bit and to see what we can get out of our soil and our seasons here in Maine. And what you ultimately find out is that we can get a lot.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You and your wife have three boys?

Roger Doiron:

That's correct.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And how do they help you out with gardening in your household?

Roger Doiron:

Well, they help quite a bit with the eating. So they're ages 14, 16 and 22. And they have been actively involved over the years with really all the different stages, just because I thought it was important to give them that education as well as their more formal academic education, just to know where does food come from and to feel some empowerment in knowing that they could actually grow a potato if they wanted to. Or they know sort of the life cycle of a bean and they know that it doesn't sort of come pre chopped in your plate. You have to do some work actually after the harvest too. So they know their stuff pretty well. And in fact, my two youngest Sons ran a farm stand from our front yard, not last summer, but the summer before, just because they were too young to get sort of a real summer job. And I said, you know, why don't you just have a go at it and see what happens? I don't think they're going to go on to become professional farmers, but I think they really learned the value of a dollar and learned the value of hard work and understood also how to run a small business. It's not just this type of thing where you show up with your freshly cut salad greens and suddenly the market is there. You have to actually get out there and let people know that you've got something for them. So, yes, they've been involved, and I'm trying to keep them involved, but they're getting into their teens now, and they're very active in their own little things, too.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yes, I had that experience when we. My family tried to have a community garden plot, and my son was far more interested in Little League than he was in weeding. But it was nice because whatever small amount of touch he was able to have with the garden, he appreciated it. And his younger sisters did, too. So as long as we didn't get too stringent about requirements for the garden, it felt like it worked okay.

Roger Doiron:

Yeah, I think that makes sense. Really good sense, because it's meant to be a pleasure. I also sort of have to pull myself back a little bit and remind myself this is supposed to be fun, so don't sort of set yourself up in such a way where it just becomes another task, because that takes the joy out of it. So I think you're right. For children in particular, you need to teach them the value of work. That is not going to just happen on its own, but you also have to keep it light and keep it fun.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Your background is not just with local foods and with gardening. You also have a background in journalism, in activism, in business, and I think, international relations as well. So how did you pull all of these together and create this 30,000 member organization, Kitchen Gardeners International?

Roger Doiron:

Well, it. And I am a work in progress in that I'm still trying to pull it together, but I think I've sort of landed where I'm supposed to be in the sense that I did study international relations and diplomacy and got a master's degree in that. And so I think I'm sort of an ambassador for the garden world now, just trying to spread the good news about what kitchen gardens can do. But to answer your question, it was just really a lot of Hard work, basically, but a labor of love in the sense that I really enjoy what I'm doing. I'm lucky to be able to do what I'm doing, where I'm doing it, and to see the results, not necessarily on a daily basis, because there are a lot of days where you just work sort of in the void without necessarily getting the feedback. But with the work that we're doing in particular right now, I think we really are changing a lot of people's lives. We're really trying to focus on. Instead of the campaigns that we did for the garden at the White House, we also did some campaigns to protect the right to garden in one's front yard, which got a lot of national attention and some international attention. Our focus now really is helping other people who would like to grow their own food to do so, especially working via schools and through community community gardens and churches, prisons, libraries, sort of all the above by providing mini grants to those organizations so that they can grow gardens.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You also have a wealth of information on your website that is very practical. You know, people ask questions about how do you store seeds? And having kind of poked around there. I think that's very helpful because I think there's a barrier if you haven't grown up gardening. There's a barrier between somehow putting your own fingers in the soil, you know, getting to that place.

Roger Doiron:

I think you're right. That's part of the enabling that I'm referring to in the sense that, you know, we're providing some money and some seeds and supplies to people to help them plant gardens across the country and around the world. But there really is this missing piece, which is the education piece, too, because as I think you know very well here in the United States, here in Maine even, we're one, two, in some cases, maybe three generations removed from growing a substantial part of our own food. So we need to think about sort of the social structures that we have in place to allow people to kind of get back to that. And if you're lucky, you grew up in a family where you had a parent or maybe a grandparent who could teach you some of those things. But there are a lot of people who aren't so fortunate. But. And so we have to set up other ways to sort of pass on that know how, whether it's a website or whether it's, you know, writing an article for a magazine or, you know, becoming involved maybe in a local garden club or just, you know, sort of reaching across the white picket fence to your neighbor and saying, you know, I see that you're, you know, having a go at raspberries this year. You know, how's that going? You know, is there something that I can help you with? Maybe?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

There's also something very healing, in addition to sort of healing the person physically by eating locally grown organic food, which is, of course, good for the body. I've noticed on, I believe it's your blog, people are writing in and saying, I was a soldier in the war, and I've come back and I've done this gardening, and it somehow is a savior to my wounds, really.

Roger Doiron:

That was a project that we helped fund in New Orleans. I think it's actually on a Marine base. And it was once again through this program called Sew It Forward. And that's the type of story that I just find so refreshing and makes you want to sort of get up again and really go for it the next day. Because you do see that people really are getting a lot more than simply vegetables out of kitchen gardens. For some, like that Marine who had done two tours of duty, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, that that garden really is very important for him. It's about sort of getting back to a better place in his life. But we've also given out grants to prisons, and the stories coming out of those places, I think, are just as powerful, where people are realizing that their life, for whatever reason, went off on the wrong track, and maybe they did some harm to others through their lives. But the garden was like a way of reconnecting with themselves, reconnecting with the earth, and trying to get things right in their lives. So I think I at least feel like I sometimes need to remind myself of that, that I love food. So I always think of the garden in terms of food. But the garden can be much more than just food.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yes, I know that when I. There was always a woman that would put flowers out by the side of the road and I would go running by them, and the flowers were free. So she'd say, free flowers. And I'd go running down the road with my bouquet of flowers. And it just. It, like, made my day. It made my week. It made my year. I mean, to know that here's somebody who is, out of the goodness of her heart, cultivated these beautiful things that were going to end up on my table. And even though I'm not as much of a gardener, it was just this little bit of beauty that really touched my day.

Roger Doiron:

Well, beauty. It sounds like generosity, too. And I think that's one of the things that I particularly enjoy about the work that I'm able to do is that I just realized that there are so many people out there who are just doing this because they know it's the right thing to do, either for themselves or their families or their communities. And I sometimes refer to them as garden angels and I think they're just sort of fluttering amongst us and they're volunteering at their school with a school garden project or they're planting an extra row for a food pantry. So I think that that's if you feel like you've really had a terrible day or you're feeling really down about the state of world affairs, you know, maybe go visit a community garden or visit a school garden and I suspect that you'll find some new joy after that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I remember reading something that I can't remember the name of the book, but it was about asparagus and it was about how it's like a three year cycle, something like that, to get to an actual asparagus stalk that you can put in your mouth and eat. There's some patience that is required.

Roger Doiron:

There is a lot of patience with asparagus. We've sort of moved asparagus out of our garden plan, but I remember when we did put it in. If you've heard of the international movement called slow food, well, asparagus should be sort of the poster child for that in the sense that it does take three years, but after you've got your bed going it can last a long, long time. So it's one of those things where it does pay off in the long

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Term, there are other things that are still growing that people started the process with years and years ago. We interviewed somebody on the show who really enjoyed doing work with apples, heirloom apples in Maine. We seem to have a lot of different varieties that have been planted quite a long time ago that we are able to access now.

Roger Doiron:

Well, there's a lot happening with. With apples and Maine. We've had it all going on for a long time. But I'm very enthusiastic about some of the new things. In terms of people starting to make cider, hard cider. I think there's like a whole economy that can be built around some of these things. And yes, I mean, apples are one of those great investments. I think there was another quote about when the best time to plant an apple Tree was probably 10 years ago, but the second best time is today. So put the effort in and five years from now you're going to have a great harvest and it's just going to keep on going if you put the work into. To prune your tree and things like that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think I remember seeing something on either your website or your blog about Alice Waters.

Roger Doiron:

Yeah, she's one of my heroes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And she's. And she's one of my heroes, too. And I think of her as being someone much like yourself, who really has had to work at this thing for a long time, really needed to sort of start planting that garden and start talking about local foods so far before anybody else was really thinking about it.

Roger Doiron:

Yeah, she's been at it for a long time, and she's very charismatic and very persevering. Actually give another talk these days called Gardening Our Way Back to the Future, where I go through some of the milestones really over the past century. And I have a lot of pictures in that. And I found this one picture from 1970 of Alice Waters waiting tables at her own restaurant, Chez Panisse in Berkeley. And I mean, I knew that she was this towering figure in the American food system, but it was just. It really touched me to see her as a young woman In 1970, obviously very idealistic and full of good energy, but just putting the work in. Putting the work in of doing the very unglamorous work of waiting a table, but doing it probably also just because she loved it and she wanted to see what was going to be the reaction once the customer started actually biting into her creation.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It seems like for you, this is also a labor of love.

Roger Doiron:

Very much so. I mean, I love gardening and I love that I can get paid for doing what I think is good work and the right work. And it's one of those things maybe that wouldn't have been possible, let's say 10 years ago or 20 years ago here in Maine, because you would have needed to be in a much bigger city, maybe next to some bigger foundations and philanthropies and things like that. But now because of the Internet, you're able to do all kinds of things and build your support base pretty much anywhere you want to. So I do consider myself really lucky to do the work that I'm doing, where I'm doing it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Roger, how can people find out about Kitchen Gardeners International and the other work that you are doing?

Roger Doiron:

Well, you mentioned that we have a website, kgi.org and it's a website that has a lot of bells and whistles built into it in terms of social networking tools so that people can add a blog post or a photo or a recipe. But we also do get involved in the social networks like Twitter and Facebook. We have a very big Facebook population. So people who are really Facebook people should just check us out there and join the conversation. We really encourage people to share their know how as well, just because while I might know a thing or two about growing a tomato in Scarborough, my knowledge isn't necessarily going to transfer over to somebody who wants to do the same thing somewhere down in the Deep South. But somewhere among our 30,000 plus people, you know, we'll have somebody who can probably help you out.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Roger, it's really been a pleasure to have you in today. I told you before we started that you have been on our list of people we want to talk to on our radio show from the very beginning. So I'm thrilled that you took the time to be with us. We've been speaking with Roger Dhawaren, the founder and director of Kitchen Gardeners International. I encourage anyone who's listening to go back and find your TEDx talk. It's quite interesting and amusing also to look at your website and perhaps take a few steps in the direction of doing their own gardening.

Roger Doiron:

Well, it's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you, Lisa.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and podcast show number 152, Earth Calling. Our guests have included Ted Carter, Ellen Gunter and Roger Duorin. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit Dr. Lisa. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on itunes. For a preview of each week's show, sign up for our e. Newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page, get Twitter updates by following me as Dr. Lisa and see my daily running photos as Bountiful One on Instagram. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Earth Calling show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.