Good Life Revival: Permaculture, Rewilding, Homesteading
74 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 3 years ago - ★★★★★ - 95 ratingsThe Good Life Revival Podcast explores the ways that we can align our core values and our daily habits towards a more sustainable, ecologically conscious way of life. Join host Sam Sycamore in discussion about living intentionally, finding purpose in the modern era, and taking meaningful action to heal the world by healing ourselves.
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Episodes
24. Naked and Loved by Mother Earth with Luke McLaughlin of Holistic Survival School
November 03, 2017 14:57 - 39.3 MBWhat makes humans unique among living creatures? How do we restore the human animal experience in its wholeness? For episode 24 of The Good Life Revival Podcast, I visited with earth skills teacher Luke McLaughlin in rural Weaverville, North Carolina, at the new base of operations for his Holistic Survival School. Luke radiates the kind of calm, patient confidence and wisdom that can only be gained through years of pushing his ability to survive in extreme conditions with nothing but the s...
23. Feral Appalachian Homesteading with Alexander Meander of Ardea Homestead Sanctuary
October 31, 2017 17:07 - 72.4 MBMeet Alexander Meander and Stacey Costner, self-proclaimed feral homesteaders and stewards of Ardea, their 60-acre homestead sanctuary in rural Kings Mountain, North Carolina. For today’s episode of the Good Life Revival Podcast, I traveled to Ardea to speak with Alexander and learn about how he and Stacey have designed a lifestyle and a livelihood for themselves through the intimate relationship that they’ve cultivated with their land. Alexander and I had a great discussion about what it ...
22. How to Participate in Your Ecosystem: Conservation Through Use with Sam Sycamore
October 25, 2017 15:49 - 40.7 MBOur culture teaches us from a very early age that there are two kinds of places in the world: “people places” and “wild places.” The people places are the cities and towns where we live and operate. The wild places are the parks and forest preserves outside of town where we occasionally visit for recreation. In our cities we observe herds of people, trash in the streets, smoke and fumes emanating from exhaust pipes, smells of human and industrial waste, and geometric grids constructed of c...
21. Traditional Lifeways on the Fringes of Civilization with Ben Belty
October 20, 2017 22:06 - 71.1 MBWhat is life like for the world’s few remaining cultures that haven’t been wholly erased by civilization? For the latest installment of the Good Life Revival podcast, I invited my friend Ben Belty to come on and tell us all about the trip he took earlier this year with the Maine Primitive Skills School to get to know the indigenous Saami people of northern Sweden. This is a culture that has been chronically traumatized for many generations now by the looming forces of civilization, but the...
20. The Great Forgetting: Totalitarian Agriculture & the Lies We've Inherited About Our Ancestors
October 07, 2017 20:55 - 61.4 MBWe modern humans have forgotten something profound about the way we live. Each of us understands instinctively that something is missing, but most of us have no way of discovering it through direct experience. Yet this forgotten knowledge is the foundation upon which our entire civilization is built. Daniel Quinn called it “The Great Forgetting.” What did we forget? In order to make sense of that question, we will have to reconsider everything we thought we knew about the dawn of agricultur...
19. There is No Time to Waste
September 12, 2017 16:08 - 11.6 MBThere is no time to waste. If you believe you will do it someday and you’re not working towards it today, then that thing you really want more than anything else will never arrive. To die having never lived is one of the greatest tragedies that can befall a conscious human being, and yet it is one of the most well-trodden paths taken in this era. I’m here to assure you that you can escape the fear of death by experiencing the exhilarating rush of a life lived to its fullest. When you walk ...
18. Embedded in the Landscape with Micah Wiles of Cedar Creek Farm
September 01, 2017 18:09 - 50.6 MBThis is my old pal Micah Wiles, a young farmer from the small town of Somerset, Kentucky with a passion for ecology that's matched only by the beauty of his work at Cedar Creek Farm. Micah has spent the better part of the last decade developing a food forest and silvopasture on the family farm where he resides with his parents, who run a homestead winery as their main enterprise. In the photo above, he's showing us some of the older trees in the first phase of his food forest design, which...
17. Eight Forms of Capital and the Ecology of Value Exchange with Sam Sycamore
August 13, 2017 16:03 - 116 MB“What if our financial system looked more like an ecosystem?” This was one of the big-picture questions that eventually led Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua to propose that money isn’t the only form of capital driving the human economy. By viewing the financial system through the lens of permaculture, Roland and Landua eventually settled upon eight forms of capital that they observed flowing between individuals and communities, each with their own unique currencies: Social, financial, livi...
16. Start Yesterday with First-Year Urban Farmer Greg Zimmerer
July 31, 2017 00:12 - 28.5 MBGreg Zimmerer is one of those people who forces you to rethink that pile of excuses you’ve accumulated to explain why you’ve been putting off that thing that you’d really like to work towards — whatever it may be. He farms 1/8th of an acre in his parents’ backyard to sell to local chefs and patrons of a new, up-and-coming farmers market in an underserved neighborhood in Louisville KY. This is his first season as an urban farmer, and he’s bringing in a respectable amount of money each week ...
15. A Beginner's Guide to Foraging with Sam Sycamore
July 09, 2017 01:34 - 19.8 MBIn an era when all the double cheeseburgers you could ever hope to eat are available to you at a moment’s notice, why bother going to all the trouble of learning how to identify and gather wild foods? The main appeal of foraging, for me, lies in cultivating a more intimate relationship with wild nature in all its beauty, mystery, and abundance. It’s one thing to spend some free time hiking and camping in the woods, but something else entirely to come home with a bag full of wild food from t...
14. You Have to Learn How to Take Care of Yourself
May 28, 2017 00:55 - 3.21 MB"You have to learn how to take care of yourself. No one is going to do it for you. You can wallow in despair with the knowledge that help is not on the way, or you can accept reality as it is and learn how to provide for yourself." This is the motivational speech I wish I could've heard when I was an adolescent or a young(er) adult. I can only hope that some impressionable youth will stumble upon it.
13. Is Permaculture a Political Movement? with Sam Sycamore
May 18, 2017 22:49 - 7.87 MBDoes the permaculture movement have a political agenda? In this episode of the Permaculture Lifestyle podcast, I explore a wide range of opinions and perspectives on the question of whether practicing permaculture is an inherently political act. Is it a leftist extension of the environmental movement? Is it perhaps libertarian, anarchist, or anarcho-capitalist in nature? Is capitalism a valid tool in the toolkit of the social permaculture designer? One of the most appealing things about p...
12. The 4 Pillars of Modern Homesteading with Sam Sycamore
May 11, 2017 20:07 - 7.38 MBOne reason the idea of homesteading is so appealing to us is because we all instinctively know that we way we organize our work lives—and thus, our lifestyle as a whole—just doesn’t make sense. Why on earth would any of us want to give up the majority of the hours of the majority of the days of our lives to do something we don’t want to do, isolated from the people we care about? Who would agree to that? And yet that’s exactly what we do, because it’s what we’re told we have to do. Well, ...
11. What is Your Mythology? with Sam Sycamore
May 04, 2017 14:54 - 7.86 MBWhat are the stories, traditions, rituals, beliefs, and rites of passage passed down to you by your family and your culture?
10. Why We Changed Our Names Together with Brooke Sycamore
April 10, 2017 22:57 - 14.6 MBAn interview with my partner Brooke about the search for meaningful work, and why we changed our names together.
9. Leaving the Modern World Behind with Sam Sycamore
March 28, 2017 23:25 - 3.83 MBWe can change our world, and we can start right away. In this special audioblog edition of the podcast, I share my thoughts on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as it relates to our dysfunctional modern culture -- and how we can respond as individuals in a meaningful, productive way. What is an "audioblog"? Well, you could say it's kind of like an audiobook, except that instead of a book, I'm reading my blog post Leaving the Modern World Behind to you. Get it? This was the very first post I wro...
8. Think Globally, Act Intentionally with Sam Sycamore, Live at the Louisville Permaculture Guild
March 18, 2017 15:12 - 15.6 MBWhy do we practice permaculture? Because we feel a moral imperative to improve the world around us, and we recognize that change begins with the individual. In this live presentation from the Louisville Permaculture Guild, I explain how I came to permaculture as a terrified ecology student, and I offer my definition of “permaculture” from the perspective of ecological awareness. From there I share my views on the three core ethics of permaculture, and propose a fourth ethic that I believe is...
7. Liberation Permaculture: Make Yourself Illegible & Irrelevant with Sam Sycamore
February 25, 2017 16:38 - 15.2 MBWhat does it mean to be illegible and irrelevant to the dominant culture of destruction and exploitation? It means reclaiming a greater sense of autonomy, a self-directed lifestyle, freedom from the rat race and the pursuit of financial capital. It means rejecting the distractions and false narratives that are manufactured to divide and conquer the non-elite classes of the world. It means rebuilding our divided communities and taking direct interpersonal action to achieve harmony through th...
6. Nature Deficit Disorder and Ecological Literacy with Sam Sycamore
February 11, 2017 17:08 - 9.76 MBAs a culture, we've lost our fundamental connection to the natural world. This has led to a surge in dysfunctional behavior, like attention issues, depression, anxiety, and obesity, and in general I believe that this disconnect explains a lot of the suffering that we observe in the modern era. We all feel the detrimental effects of nature deficit disorder, but most of us just aren't aware that this is the source of our troubles, because we've been so deeply conditioned to accept the status q...
5. Good Intentions vs. The Culture of No-Place with Sam Sycamore
January 28, 2017 19:34 - 9.97 MBWhat is a culture, and how do cultures relate to their environments?
4. What is a Weed? Or, the Limits of Reductionism with Sam Sycamore
January 21, 2017 19:36 - 9.24 MBHow does our culture relate to wild, unwanted, and invasive species? And what does that say about how we view the world at large?
3. The Value of Voluntary Simplicity with Sam Sycamore
January 14, 2017 20:03 - 7.07 MBToday on the show I explore the concept of intentional simplicity, and offer some guidance for putting this life philosophy into practice. Visit permaculturelifestyle.com for more on lifestyle design, health and wellness, producing your own food, and learning the skills and traditions of living in tune with the rhythms of the natural world.
2. Permaculture Ethics as a Moral Compass with Sam Sycamore
January 07, 2017 20:08 - 7.34 MBOur increasingly globalized culture is in dire need of a basic moral compass that we can all agree upon. Permaculture offers one such solution. This podcast aims to apply the principles and ethics of permaculture to our everyday lives; to align our core values and our daily habits towards a more sustainable, ecologically conscious way of thinking and interacting.
1. What is a 'Permaculture Lifestyle'? with Sam Sycamore
December 30, 2016 20:08 - 7.61 MBIn this introductory episode of the Good Life Revival podcast (fka Permaculture Lifestyle), I introduce myself and explain my reasons for starting this podcast. Then I offer a sketch of what a "permaculture lifestyle" might actually look like.