Permaculture Transcript

Gabriel: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the polyculture podcast. Hello and

Lena: welcome to the polyculture podcast.

Gabriel: This is the podcast where we talk about all types of culture from permaculture to pop culture. And today we’re talking about permaculture. Lena, can you say where we are?

Lena: Yes, we are in the car. As you might hear, we are crossing through Connecticut that land now known as Connecticut on our way to the land known as New York city.

Gabriel: So the first time in a year and a half, we were in the same place and are just recording. As we have time and Hey, so that’s why we’re at a car

Lena: building on a long tradition of us being in touch wellbeing in

Gabriel: transit. So as, as always, we’re going to start the first part of the episode, talking with talking through some academic texts, to like define some terms.

Lena: And the second section we speak with Connor and Andy of the nuts and bolts nursery co-op, which is a worker co-op based in Providence, Rhode Island, practitioners of permaculture. And we chat with them a bit about what that’s like and what that means to them.

Gabriel: In the monoculture episode, we drew this single line of history Through industrialization and colonization to this universal singular practice of monoculture and permaculture and polyculture, these different agricultural practices or anti agricultural practices are very broad and most various and based in different places.

So we wanted to kind of look at a couple of different case studies that are all different in the plants they’re using in the systems that they’re creating and just to see what is common across them, whether it’s material or emotional and spiritual.

Lena: So when case study is from a chapter from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and she is an indigenous person, who’s also trained in more traditional like Western, I guess, less traditional Western biology and botany.

And she really brings both of those perspectives into her work. And the example I want to bring forward is, is her talking about maple sugaring. She lives in what’s now upstate New York. And what she describes is that her children wanted to gather maple sap from the maple trees on their land and distill it into maple syrup.

So they gather this app and it’s clear and viscous and must be kind of boiled off [00:02:30] and to, to become this kind of fixed European product that we recognize. And so she tries to stay up all night, firing this. Or this fueling this fire to keep the, keep this app boiling down and eventually she falls asleep.

And then what happens is she, she wakes up in the morning and the, the pot of syrup has frozen. And she remembers being told about a more traditional indigenous way of distilling the syrup, which is that during maple sugaring season, which is when there are warm days and cold nights, usually below freezing that’s when the sap runs.

That also means that if you leave out your bucket of sap at night, then it will separate and the water will kind of rise to the surface and then it will freeze. And then instead of, you know, boiling and firing a heat source, you can just break up the ice and pull it off. And that’s a great way of not using very much energy to distill this syrup and.

Part of the reason why this, this has really stuck with me since the first time I read the book many years ago is that this example makes it so clear that if you do things in a way that is aligned with the ecosystem where they’re happening, then you, the ecosystem helps you out. Like the only reason why.

Do this process of letting the syrup freeze and breaking the ice and letting it thought and letting it freeze again is that you’re doing it during sugaring season, which is when it’s warm during the day and cold at night. And, and I just think it’s a beautiful kind of self-contained system which is one of — I think the self-containment is one element of many that we, that we kind of have identified throughout these, these permit cultural examples and case studies

Gabriel: maple sugaring is, is an initiative of a practice.

And it’s one that Robin knows about through that upbringing that she has. And I really liked that. Like, even though she’s forgotten this aspect, because she’s doing it at this time of the year,

Lena: she’s being in the place, reminds her how to do it. And the act of paying attention to the place is what makes her remember.

Gabriel: Like it’s traditional knowledge, but it’s traditional knowledge that comes from the place. And even if you forget. What you’ve been taught, the stories you’ve heard, you’re still reminded by the place of what is this correct practice. And that theme of just like listening and observing is I think something that is common across permaculture [00:05:00] systems.

Masanobu Fukuoka is this Japanese farmer. And he’s written this book called The One Straw Revolution back in ‘78. That is kind of the result of this epiphany that he had that led him from being plant disease studier to this kind of permacultural farmer. And so one of the stories he tells is about how, when he first came to his father’s citrus orchard, his father had pruned all these trees into these vase like shapes that what allow the fruit to grow in certain places that makes it easier to harvest and to maintain and to resist pests by means of, you know, additional human intervention.

And so his first impulse is I’m just going to let these trees that have been pruned, let them just grow back and they’ll just, you know, do their thing. But what he realizes is that after being pruned, the trees grow in weird ways and get tangled up with each other and are so much more prone to disease and infestation and things like this and that by pruning the trees in the first place, you inhibit the tree’s ability to decide and to make its own decisions of how to grow.

And so then he comes to this conclusion that the way to actually do it is to just. From the start, let the tree do its thing and to not interfere from the beginning. And to just let the tree decide where it grows.

Lena: I love that example. It really illustrates how much we assume as animals with enormous brains that because we can measure and, you know, have all these tools and strategies that we have a better understanding of indicators, but actually plants have much more sophisticated understandings of, you know, temperature change and what to expect and how to protect themselves than we do from the outside.

And it’s just such a beautiful reminder that, you know, as much as we can look at plants and say, oh, it looks like you need to be pruned. The plant is often able to say, ‘Hmm, I’m not going to grow in this direction. It doesn’t make sense for me to do that.’ And that is, that is such a deeper wisdom than, and an internal wisdom then we can have from the outside.

Gabriel: It’s not an anti-scientific stance. Like Kimmerer is a botanist. Fukuoka comes from scientific [00:07:30] research. He talks in one instance:. So he has an orchard and he also does rice and grain planting. And he talks about how in his field. Like scientists have come and studied his fields in comparison to conventional rice growing.

And he talks about how these researchers came to his field and they were seeing that there were very few leaf hoppers in his field even though he was not using any pesticides. And they were wondering why this is, and then he goes out one day after harvesting and then laying all of the rice straw back onto the field instead of taking it away from the field.

And he sees the whole field covered in all of this spider silk from all of these spiders that have been living in the field and are now like have laid their eggs. And all of the little baby spiders are just using these webs to fly away and redistributed. And so because he, and because Fukuoka didn’t remove the rice straw from the field and didn’t introduce any chemical pesticides these spiders who are the natural predator of these leaf hoppers were able to also thrive and take care of this would be pest. And he didn’t do this intentionally. He just put the rice straw on the field because it’s easier to just leave it where it is then to take it away.

It’s this like, what, what can I do less of,

Lena: Which is so much like what happened to Kimmerer with the maple syrup. It’s like, I’m not trying really hard to figure this out. I’m just being in the place and responding to the kind of cues that this place is giving me. No farmer wants to do more work. Farmers already do so much work. Why wouldn’t you just leave your straw in your field?

Gabriel: And even like it’s because Kimmerer gives up. That’s a cool part of this story. When she rests and falls asleep, that’s when she learned something.

So the third little case study we want to bring in is this study by Carlos Fausto and Eduardo G Neves of Indigenous Amazonian agriculture.

Lena: At the beginning of the article, they acknowledge that. Usually when we talk about agriculture, we talk about domestication and they offer that. They’re going to talk about familiarization with plants instead of domestication of plants and acknowledged that the people [00:10:00] that they’re talking about elect to treat the plants and animals as kin instead of as property or something to be dominated.

Gabriel: The plants and the animals that these people are interacting with and surviving with like cassava or manioc, brazil, nuts, pequi trees are all wild pets, essentially. There’s like this mutual care, but there’s not the desire to domesticate and to control the reproduction of them. And this results in, in some really interesting things, again, when you like look at it through a scientific lens, you can see that a lot of the things that science can see as valuable are just happening because of this like loose relationship.

So they talk about how like cassava or manioc is planted vegetatively, which means that they take the roots and they just cut them and bury them in a new place. So it’s a clone of the plant. It’s not like you’re allowing the plants to have sex and create an offspring and mix their genes. You’re just taking the planting, cloning it.

But they also don’t suppress the sexual reproduction of these plans. And especially the – Within these cassava gardens they will clear forest and plant cassava, and then let like move on to another place and let this garden turn back into a forest over years and decades. And by just leaving all these manioc plants in the forest, they’re allowed to sexually reproduce and develop new varieties and things like that.

So there’s not this desire to just like, keep your cassava varieties that you’ve developed the same. Or even like, keep them, you just plant a garden and harvest from it. And then you would just kind of like, let the plants go and do their own thing.

There’s also this really interesting part where they talk about how this is incorporated kind of into the cultural and spiritual practices, where the forest is cleared, but it’s not gone. It’s seen as like a co-parent of what is raised in this garden. And so it’s like the humans who are one parent and that spirit of the forest or spirits of the forest or the other parent.

What are some of the ideas that [00:12:30] cut across all of these examples?

Lena: A couple that jumped out at me from the ones that we’ve just discussed are things like listening to place and, taking cues from the place that you’re in and the place where the plants are growing. Also doing less work or reinvisioning what work looks like and excepting and valuing the work that plants are doing as part of the work. Later on, we’ll hear a little bit about efficiency and I think if you kind of draw a boundary around efficiency and you don’t include the work of plants that is giving you a very skewed assessment of how much work yields how much product. But if we allow ourselves to acknowledge the labor of plants as part of the work that goes into yielding food or a storage crop that can be used for fuel that really changes the equation in a way that is, I think very notable when capitalism is responsible for creating all these metrics that don’t actually reflect efficiency or efficacy.

Gabriel: Another theme I’m thinking of is, is acknowledging the agency and like celebrating the agency of the plants and animals that are interconnected, and, and even beyond the plants and animals, but the climatic forces thinking about Kimmerer’s experience of just the temperature fluctuation and how important that is.

As well as these Amazonians looking at the agency of not just the manioc plants or the pequi trees. The forest itself as an agent and Fukuoka, seeing the agency of the tree of the citrus tree of the rice plants of the spiders to determine their own destiny and trusting in that agency and that things tend towards mutualism. There’s no need to force production.

There’s like a, there’s a relinquishing of control, which is very hard to do, especially when we’re fed narratives of, we have to “feed the world” and save everyone from hunger and all these things.

Lena: And also when you have to make money to survive as a grower of stuff, which is already really hard.

Gabriel: I would say Robin, while welcomers experience of sugaring and the Amazonian agroforestry also both have very loose ties to like property.

And though Fukuoka is like managing land that he’s inherited from his father.[00:15:00] There’s an acknowledgement that he’s not the only owner of this land and that he’s just intervening here and there to scatter seeds, essentially.

Lena: Yeah, something we’ll hear about in the second half of the episode is the idea of stewardship and understanding stewardship as an alternative to farming and control in a permaculture practice.

Gabriel: So we’re going to have a little musical interlude and then we will be back in the second half with Connor and Andy.

Andy: my name is Andy. I use they/them and I’m a member of Nuts & Bolts Nursery Cooperative.

 The ideas, opinions and statements presented here represent at best the current thoughts and feelings of the person speaking them and not necessarily the position of nuts and bolts as a company or of any larger movement or collective or our thoughts and feelings at another time.

I’ve been exploring the world of permaculture for about four years, maybe five years and I’m really interested in regenerative agriculture and really reintegrating a culture with the ecosystem of which is a part.

Connor: I’m Connor. I use he/him pronouns. I’m also a worker owner at Nuts & Bolts Nursery Cooperative. I am so I identify as an anarchist still, but mostly an anticapitalist — kind of the way I found myself into like ecology in permaculture. Movements and stuff like that.

And particularly recently I’ve been really interested in the agroecology perspective on like social change within the food system. And so I work for a, but Nuts & Bolts is my part-time job. Our worker cooperative cause it’s really small right now, but I also work part-time at Movement Ground farm, which is like a social justice oriented farm in Rhode Island here.

And they do like a lot of environmental justice, food justice kind of social justice work. And they also grow food.

Lena: Does one of you want to just say a couple lines about Nuts & Bolts?

Andy: So. Nuts & Bolts is a small, a worker owned nursery that grows not trees, fruit trees, berries, perennial, vegetables, shrubs, herbs lots of different [00:17:30] perennial food and or medicine and or fuel producing plants in the hopes of creating a more regenerative and integrated, agroecology and with an attitude of trying to make these productive regenerative systems available to everyone and not just those who are wealthy enough to afford it.

Connor: Starting it as a worker cooperative is really important to us. So we all have like equal say in how everything’s run. We run most things by consensus, but we’re a small group of about five people so it works really well for us. And we just really wanted to have like, like a, a workplace where everyone had a say, so Yeah, just, just work or democracy, economic justice, like in the workplace in a, in a small, a way to put that forward into the world.

And it’s been really cool cause like there’s in our area of Providence, Rhode Island. There’s a lot of other worker cooperatives that have been starting up. And so there’s like this really like small, but growing solidarity economy.

Gabriel: So in this episode, the title is Permaculture, we’re framing it around permaculture, but we’re talking about practices beyond that as well.

As y’all already mentioned, regenerative ag and things like this. So I’m wondering if you would be interested in giving your own definition of what permaculture is and whether you would define your practice in and beyond Nuts & Bolts as permaculture, or like how, how would you say that your work fits in with this idea?

Andy: So my interpretation of permaculture is that it is a framework for thinking about designing systems that focuses or really puts central the idea of interactions between elements within the system. And so I’m thinking about integration and redundancy and yeah, just the way that things interact with each other. And so that’s obviously very vague and for me, that’s intentional because

from my experience, permaculture is a diverse movement and permaculture is a movement that emphasizes diversity. And so there isn’t really, at least in my view, you can’t necessarily say this is what permaculture is because permaculture is a plurality and it means different things to different [00:20:00] people. But in general, there is an ethos of diversity, redundancy, and integration

and yeah, absolutely. I think what we do with Nuts & Bolts is, is permaculture. And also it is other things,

Connor: I think Andy hit it pretty well. I think it’s a general design philosophy for an ecological society.

But I think a lot of permaculture, like literature now has focused specifically on the suburbs as a space in which to try and build this like ecological society. So that also includes a lot of like social relationships. And stuff like that, in a, maybe more theoretical sense I see like permaculture as like, particularly relevant for folks in like English speaking countries, particularly the U. S. Australia and the UK and a way in which people that originally might’ve had a historically had an agrarian culture or culture though, is deep, more deeply connected to the environment and ecosystem there.

And then they became industrialized where they separated from that. It’s like an attempt among those folks to reconnect to like an agrarian past or an agrarian culture.

Gabriel: It fits very well with this podcast that you were talking about permaculture not only as, a way of growing food or way of farming or not farming anti-farming. But also as a cultural project that involves societal changes as well.

And I think as well, the fact that you brought up the it’s the UK, the U.S. and Canada. Australia. Yeah. Where these places are, is interesting to me because these are colonial spaces most of them with indigenous cultures that have struggled to survive. And like, there’s, we’ve talked a lot about in this podcast of like white folks and for the descendants of colonizers, like trying to heal this rift with land,

Lena: like trying to get back the thing that was lost in deciding to colonize, instead of maintaining a healthy relationship with land, like you must break that relationship with land in order to accept colonization as a way forward and I think, yeah, this point about trying to reclaim some meaningful connection is really — has come up a lot in our conversations in one of the things we, we read. There’s, there’s just this discussion of like keeping wild pets instead [00:22:30] of domesticating. I’m wondering if one of you wants to talk a little bit about how you conceive of the plants that you work with and what their agency or identity is,

Andy: I spent a lot of time working with the plants and all the other organisms that are involved in the production systems that we cultivate lots of fungi, insects, plenty of mammals, more microorganisms than anything else.

I believe that each one of these organisms has and agency and an ability for self-determination and also that we are all linked in a collective identity and behave collectively, make decisions collectively, and have our destinies collectively defined. And so the very nature of that relationship for me means that there are things about the system that can’t be understood by any subset of it.

So what that means in terms of the work that I do is that sometimes things happen and I don’t understand why and I let them happen. So maybe, you know, certain plants pop up in places and I’m like, I don’t, I didn’t put this here.

So this hazelnut pop-up. Here. And it’s in a really great place because it’s protected from browse by this oregano.

And sometimes I’m like, oh, this actually really contrasts with the plans that I had. And maybe seeing that, observing it, thinking about it a little more, I’m like, wait, actually, maybe this is a better place, you know, or this is, this is who should be here, let them do their thing. And sometimes like, Nope, pull it out.

 So for me, it’s about being intentional with those interactions and also giving the space for other beings to have a say in the interaction. And so this balance of not thinking I get to make every decision about what happens in this environment, but also not saying I don’t get to have any decision as to what happens in this environment.

And trying to frame it as how can my decisions help me and help me help all of the other organisms in the best way. So thinking of it as a team effort, where me, the plants, the, deer, the rabbits, the arthropods, the microarthropods, the fungi, the bacteria, the protozoa, everything, we’re all working together to [00:25:00] create an environment where the most of all of us can thrive.

Gabriel: Yeah. That’s like the perma- bit, not your letting things grow forever; The permanence is like, you’re trying to find of relationship that last.

Andy: And I think I’ve kind of grown a little bit averse to even using the word permaculture recently. And I think part of it is because of that the word permaculture and that it comes from this conjunction of permanent culture.

And it’s this idea that we’ll create a way of being that can be sustained indefinitely. And I just don’t think that that exists. And I also don’t think that that is necessarily a good goal. You know, I think everything is constantly in flux and. We’ll always have to change and adapt, and that it’s actually okay.

If the human species doesn’t live forever, if life doesn’t go on existing forever, I think the value is not in immortality. The value is in the relationships here and now.

 I think, you know, with regards to like that idea of something being out of control or invasive, all of those things imply a preconceived notion of what the system should look like. And so that is going to be based on the values of the interpreter of that situation.

I think the first thing we should be looking at there is why is it doing so well? What is it doing here? What are the conditions that have allowed it to thrive? Because it is thriving and thriving is, is good, right? Like that’s, that’s what we’re going for. So what is it doing? And what can we learn from that?

Connor: Yeah, one of my favorite ”invasives” and air quotes is the Wineberry which is so tasty. If you’ve all, I mean, it’s like a raspberry, but on the farm that I work at it grows everywhere and it’s so good. But I think originally from Asia, like China, Japan, Korea

but like the language that people use about it particularly I think like government agencies and stuff is like, oh, it’s an invasive. And then it’s like, it’s a foreign invader like we need to eradicate it, it doesn’t belong here. What plants get labeled like that. Right. Like I think roses aren’t native to Rhode Island but I think they were brought over by like European settlers and [00:27:30] colonizers, but they planted roses everywhere.

And now they’re doing really well here and it’s just like, no, one’s like, we got to get rid of the roses. Because it’s like, yeah, cause they like roses and it’s a part of culture of what they deem as acceptable plants.

Gabriel: Just a couple of thoughts on this whole invasive conversation. It’s interesting how you brought up roses and things like this you could also talk about boxwood, which is a shrub from Europe that is still planted on a mentally and has a habit of taking over places and it’s thorny so it doesn’t get eaten by deer and things like this. It’s making me think of the fact that this exchange that started with colonization to the Americas from Europe is like referred to as the, as the “great exchange” historically of all of these species crossing the Atlantic ocean that previously had no way of doing so and it’s just, it’s defined the way that we eat and live and, and view ecosystems now. And I’m wondering if these, because there are so many, like the Japanese beetle, the Harlequin lady beetle,

AKA the Asian Beetle there are all of these species that are crossing the Pacific now because of increased trade. And a lot of it is discussed as like this weird xenophobic anti-Asian sentiment in the language around it. But it is, it’s like another great exchange.

That with increased trade there’s another vector for ecological transfer. And it’s not that things like the Emerald Ash Borer and these predator species are not bad. They’re certainly bad for Ash trees and things like this. But I think what you’re both saying is that instead of just defining what is good and bad, we need to step back and like, listen a little bit. As they said, like, look at it in a different timescale than just this very moment.

Andy: Yeah. And that’s not to say that, you know, we shouldn’t completely step aside and do nothing. You know, obviously there are lives at stake: human lives and non-human lives. But just taking a moment of reflection on what it is that we’re afraid of, what it is that we think we want. And what is it that [00:30:00] is happening here and, and why and just taking that pause, that moment of reflection and then I think from there we can take better action.

Connor: That’s like what gets me sometimes about conservation folks in terms of this is like, I feel like their ideology about environmental management, if like incompatible with dynamic world of international trade and capitalism. And I’m totally cool with that. If they say, yeah, maybe we should slow down on this whole capitalism thing like, let’s, let’s do that, but I don’t think they do. I think they’re like we should have free trade and markets and can carve out these places or keep these ecosystems static. And I think it’s incompatible illogical But that’s a different culture than permaculture.

Connor: Why we keep harping on conservation kind of ideology related to nature, because I think [00:32:30] permaculture in maybe not the most advanced form of it, but it’s kind of in antithesis of that sense of environmental management, where it looks at things like as more dynamic,

Gabriel: just one last kind of topic and question to discuss. We talked a lot about in our monoculture episodes, the use of fertilizer because that’s what I’ve been researching about metrics and numbers, which is kind of how conventional agriculture defines itself.

Like we were putting this many pounds of fertilizer, this many gallons of water so that we get this much yield out of this field, which is this much more than last year and, you know, we’re able to feed this many people. And I’m wondering what your thoughts are on a system that defines itself so numerically and tries to quantify everything in different ways and then how you and your practice would contrast that. Or if there are metrics that you find important.

Connor: I think for a lot of farmers that practice monocultural practices, their first concern would be to maintain an income and not to say that they don’t have a relationship to the environment, but that’s not their first priority, whereas it might be with a permaculture farmer.

And I would say that would be true of us with Nuts & Bolts too. Like we would love to make an income and be able to survive in this current system of capitalism. But I think our first priority when it came to this was that we want to have a better relationship to the environment and we want to steward the environment.

Gabriel: I guess the bigger question I’m asking here is conventional agriculture has so many ways to define its success, it can talk about yields. It can talk about efficiency, all of these things. What, how can you say that your practice is successful?

Andy: Bacteria that are converting certain minerals into forms that other plants can use. You have fungi exuding, digestive enzymes that literally break apart minerals and free up these nutrients as ions and allow them to travel, having healthy soil ecology, high soil organic content, which is destroyed by tilling, both of those things are destroyed by tilling, is what allows for these nutrients to be cycled something called cat ion exchange capacity. And that is promoted by soil organic content, which is driven by microorganisms. So we can take samples of, you know, if you want numbers, we can take soil samples and look at the diverse community of microorganisms in a permaculture versus monoculture system. We can take a look for numbers of biodiversity, how many [00:35:00] different kinds of species are living in these ecosystems?

And then we can do our calorie counting and maybe adjust for different kinds of calories and human bioavailable nutrients because our food is deficient in nutrients. We can look at soil quantity and then when you get these numbers of, oh, and then also all of the externalities, right. You can say, all right, well, the carbon footprint of making these fertilizers was this.

Okay. How about the acute pollution in the ecosystems where the factories are? How about the mining operations, where they get the you know, the different raw materials to produce these fertilizers and dietary supplements. And then how about all of the supply chains and political structures necessary to maintain those supply chains?

And when you look at all those things, it’s a much fuzzier picture of quantification. I think even within the realm of trying to rationalize everything and put a hard number to it, there are definitely metrics that we can apply that could show permaculture systems as being more productive in a more generalized sense. And then of course, there’s the mental health effects of being engaged in these systems. There’s the effects on your body of being engaged in these systems of not having all of this pollution of having, you know, a, a better diet.

And how do you, how do you quantify those? How do you weight all of those very qualitatively different phenomenon and come up with a number of, well, this is a 0.7 on this scale, and this is a 0.4. So this one’s better.

Gabriel: It’s not necessarily a rejection of metrics. It’s saying that the metrics of conventional agriculture are far too narrow and far too few to give it an accurate. And like Kimmerer talks in her book about like that agricultural products or not products they’re gifts. And when you think of them as a gift, it doesn’t matter how, you know, the number you’re just grateful that you were given something.

It was really lovely to talk to you both. Would you mind, just saying very quickly where people can find you on the internet or elsewhere. If they want to hear more of what you have to say.

Andy: I dunno, you can find me walking around the streets of Providence or yeah, we have a, we have a social media at Nuts & Bolts Nursery Co-Op on Instagram or nutsandboltsnursery[at]gmail.com. Send us an email.

Connor: We have a website with a blog to nutsandboltsnursery.com. So stay tuned. [00:37:30] We’ll probably be posting the link too. And just talking to him about our experience, which has been really fun with you all. So we’ll probably do a little blog post about that.

We’re, we’re based in Rhode Island, we farm at a farm called Revive The Roots. It’s a public park/farm. So you can go at any time that the sun is up. So you’ll see a little sign for us there.

Lena: Thanks so much to Connor and Andy for joining us on the permaculture episode of the Polyculture Podcast. Thank you for listening to us. Talk to each other in a moving vehicle and hopefully get some joy out of the fact that we are not recording from thousands of miles away from each other, but in fact, just a couple of feet.

Gabriel: Well, if you back in your feed very soon, hopefully with an episode on urban culture. So stay tuned.

This episode of the Polyculture Podcast was created and edited by Lena Greenberg and Gabriel Coleman. You can find out more about the sources we pulled from in this episode, in the podcast description. Our theme is by Gabriel Coleman and our musical interlude this episode was by Merle Schuster, also of Nuts & Bolts Nursery Co-Op. Find out more about all the fine folks at Nuts & Bolts via the link in the episode description. If you have a song or a sound piece you’d like to share, shoot us an email or send us a tweet because we would love to feature it. We’re especially looking to work with BIPOC and queer creators.

Thank you so much again for listening. You’ll hear from us again soon.