Kirsten Bradley: Cultivating active hope through small daily actions

Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration

Kaméa Chayne

Earth Sciences, Philosophy, Society & Culture, Science

4.8 • 694 Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2026

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do we cultivate active hope through engaging in small, daily actions? What can we learn about social organizing and community building from looking at it through a permaculture lens? And what does it mean to re-establish our connections with land, water, and community — whether we live in the heart of cities or in more rural contexts?

In this episode, Green Dreamer’s Kaméa Chayne speaks with Kirsten Bradley, the co-founder of Milkwood and the author of The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook.

Join us as we chat through how the permaculture principles relate to social change — and how we might dig our hands in the dirt to participate in that action.

We invite you to…

tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app;
tap into our bonus extended and video version of this conversation on Patreon here;
and read highlights from these conversations via Kaméa’s newsletter here.

Episode song feature: “Grandmother” by Ayla Schafer

Transcript

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0:00.0	Nearly every way you live on earth, there will be some little plants poking up through the cracks of wherever you are within five metres, ten metres, fifty metres sometimes.
0:13.5	But there is just so much to learn from those uprisings, from those instances.
0:20.1	And sometimes they are teeny tiny and sometimes they look like forests because they are.
0:34.1	You're listening to Green Dreamer, and I'm your host, Kamea Shane.
0:39.3	In this episode, we're speaking with Kirsten Bradley, the co-founder of Milkwood with Nick Ritarr,
0:46.1	and the author of Milkwood, Easy Peasy, and the Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook.
0:52.2	Together with Nick, they've been teaching permaculture design and
0:55.3	skills for more than 17 years. I was interested in speaking with Kirsten because I've been
1:01.7	inspired by her work and also curious to learn about what it might mean for us to look at social
1:07.1	organizing and community building through the lens of permaculture and its principles.
1:13.4	So that along with how we can build small habits of change for what Kirsten calls active hope
1:19.9	are just some of the topics that we explore in this episode. Before we begin, I want to quickly
1:26.4	mention that Green Dreamer is a listener-supported show.
1:29.5	So if you're learning from us, if our conversations have earned a place in your life,
1:34.2	please consider joining our Patreon or making a one-time donation at greendreamer.com
1:39.5	slash support. For now, I'd love to invite you to take a few deep breaths here if that feels supportive
1:45.8	to you, grounding yourself into the here and now. And when you're ready, well, let's dive in.
1:56.3	So to open up our conversation here, I actually want to start this interview a little differently than usual and ask you like, if you were to imagine our current collective social and cultural moment as a season, as an ecological season or a point within a season, what does that feel like to you right now from where you are?
2:18.8	And what might this season tell us about how we might move and show up?
2:23.7	Ooh, beautiful.
2:27.7	I feel that it would be a season that may have been known in the past, but is not yet named
2:33.9	in this current place and time.
	...

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