Humans are in a constant search for the recipe to a good life. This is reflected in what we value, and we value what is nearest to our hearts and dreams. It seems, however, that to achieve the good life is quite a struggle. Most people don’t have access to the wealth or the space they need to live the life they would like to live. Furthermore, people are usually situated in systems that are based on logic that reduces their chances of living the good life.
This was my experience for years living in the city, dreaming of sailing and of a quiet county existence. From time to time, I had experiences of being in the rhythm of the sea or hearing wind through the trees and the smell of forest soil. The calm of these experiences was in stark contrast to how I was living. Like Cicero I came to conclude that “if you have a garden and a library, you have all you need”.
Over the years I gradually transitioned my life away from things that caused me stress and pain, and over to a far simpler life surrounded by natural beauty and creativity. I bought a small farm about an hour from Oslo and took to gardening. I spent my summers working outdoors on the farm, and my winters in the library. I came to see that what I enjoyed had little to do with owning or maintaining the farm and came simply from spending time immersed in a web of organic life to which I was deeply connected.
In 2015 the Norwegian Seed Savers had their establishment meeting at Gamle Hvam. I attended and was included in the blossoming network which gradually led to me breeding my own locally adapted variety of pumpkins and other vegetables. The next few years I gravitated towards self-sufficiency and eventually to market gardening. I dreamt of new designs for greenhouses that would be an improvement on the tunnel designs that are most common. What if we could make a fire inside the greenhouse in the evenings when the sun went down, and we could continue to enjoy being outdoors?
I thought endlessly about this dream of a new kind of greenhouse designed that would bring me closer to plants and closer to a stable micro-ecosystem. I shared this dream with Alvdal Ecovillage and designed a Wallapini for them which they built into the side of a mountain.
Thomas Snellman came to Hvam in 2017 to expand the Reko-ring movement, and we started Norway’s first Reko-ring. It was such a pleasure to see the movement explode all over the country in the following years. Finding new ways for farmers to get their produce to customers without long logistic chains, cumbersome contracts, and regulations, as well as creating the foundation for new food culture, became closer and closer to my heart.
I spent years co-evolving with many species of plants in the energy of the sun, water and soil. I would describe this change as a kind of dance which nature that generated a feeling I have since called ecosystems resonance. It is impossible to turn a feeling like this into words, and I wish it was something that could be experienced by everyone, as I am certain we would see a rapid cultural shift if people knew the joy of forming a deep resonant connection to a thriving ecology.
When you save seeds from the same place generation after generation, moving them to a new place is painful. Sadly, in 2021 my wife and I parted ways, and we had to sell the farm. I lost not only my family, but also the connection to the land and plants that have evolved together in a place over many years. I could now no longer afford to buy a new farm and tried instead to use the knowledge I had gained over the years of building up the ecosystem on my farm to form a new strategy for how to get back to that resonant feeling of deep connection.
Through a long chain of synchronicities, I ended up leasing land and renting a beautiful old farmhouse on Rolstad Gård. I spent the first winter there reading deep ecologists like Deloris LaChapelle and Sigmund Kvaløy Sætereng who wrote about the wisdom of ancient cultural practices and rituals grounded in a deeper connection to nature. This gave me creative energy to reimagine what I could do to form a new connection to a new land.
I began designing a new kind of mobile greenhouse structure. I did not want to invest in assets that tied me down after just experiencing the loss of my farm. In the spring I felled 30 young trees in the nearby forest and ordered a membrane form Artict Lavvo in Kautokaino. The result was a new mobile greenhouse inspired by the tipi.
The mobile greenhouse enabled me to grow a bumper crop of vegetables and gave us a lovely cultural space where we could enjoy evenings and nights outdoors in close connection to nature. I finally experienced the joy of a greenhouse with a fire in the center. By repeating ancient patterns of simple structures used by indigenous cultures around the Arctic for centuries, I was able to adapt the design to bring light and plants closer to the center.
This has since evolved into several new designs and linked me to the architect Margit Klev at Outline Arkitektur. She too had found the joy of bringing nature closer to her home by rethinking the walls that separate us from the elements. Together we started developing several new mobile structures which aim to make life easier for small farmers, gardeners and schools to connect to their lands.
Another set of synchronicities led me to attend a Nordic Regenerative Food Network gathering, inspired by a movement in South Korea called Hansalim. They were farmers who formed a circle of farms in 1986 outside Seoul which has steadily spread and now forms a web that covers 2300 households that grow and distribute organic, locally grown food for a million consumers. Hansalim aims towards a state of equilibrium between farmers and their farms, between consumers and producers, and between all the networks to which it is connected, based on a world view inspired by ecology. It is similar to Natural Farming, Permaculture, Holistic Management and Regenerative Farming, but the focus is more on healthy community.
It is not well known outside Korea, but its Mosim and Salim Research Institute has recently begun collaboration with the University of Sussex to build links with others in Europe who share a vision for social-ecological transformation. Its vision is one of a new civilization that unites nature, society, and people as one and aims for a syntropic emergence of bottom-up solutions from networks of organic farms centered on healthy food, soil and community.
In essence they want to move culture away from the destructive entropy of closed systems toward creative syntropy in open organic farm networks. A system, says their Manifesto, “that remains isolated and cut off from its environment produces and accumulates entropy or used-up energy. As its structure goes from order to disorder, it eventually succumbs to heat death. So goes the dismal truth taught by thermodynamics.
Today’s industrial civilization is a world that resembles an isolated machine: it remains cut off from its environment, which is to say the ecological system. Living within such a civilization, humanity also appears to lead an isolated existence cut off from its social and ecological environment. According to thermodynamics, an isolated system inevitably experiences death. That the sad fate of industrial civilization, which is governed by the principle of entropy, can only end in destruction was thus already implied in the mechanistic model; its eventual implosion had been predictable from the outset. Still, what implodes and is destroyed is the outdated shell of mechanistic civilization, not humanity itself. That is because human beings represent life, which continues to evolve creatively.”
(Hansalim Manifesto: 2021)
“Hansalim” at Hansalim’s seed research centre
The Hansalim inspired Nordic Regenerative Food Network has been growing. It includes deep ecologists, the Slow Food network, schools and urban farming projects.
Reproduction of ecological knowledge and seeds is at the core of what I want to contribute to this growing network. Others will bring knowledge of agroforestry, carpentry, working with local materials, growing mushrooms, bee keeping and all the pieces that go into creating a community that is deeply tied to the land.
The Norwegian Seed Savers have spent the past few years focusing on historical gardens in the Schubelers Network. Now we are coming full circle and have formed a new guild that focuses on teaching seed saving and useful plant knowledge to schools and kindergartens. To link the wisdom from farms, museums and botanical gardens to the next generation is a form of knowledge reproduction that is truly needed. Elders who care for places of natural beauty should be linked to the next generation in webs of celebration of the life that we are all connected to.
I can see the evolution of this fledgling network mushrooming into a thriving culture that links up and shares resources of seeds, knowledge, mobile structures, and other resources in a way that is creative and linked to specific places. These places form islands that are linked into a kind of deeply connected archipelago.
These resonating islands converge around locally adaptive food culture which places syntropy, ecological health, cooperation, and creatively responds to the poly-crisis. I see this emerging culture not as growing towards an eventual upscaling, but rather to co-create spaces that turn ecological wisdom into an adaptive action network which has in it the seed to spread to form new mycelial networks which eventually can move the pendulum of culture. As the Nobel Laureate Illya Prigogine put it “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”
The poly-crisis we find ourselves in is rapidly headed towards dis-equilibrium. It behooves those who find themselves in this sea of chaos to form these islands of coherence and better yet, to link these islands up into an archipelago of calm despite the stormy seas. The coherence must be grounded in sound ecological knowledge and hands-on interaction with local ecosystems. locally adapted networks of people on farms working closely with each other and the ecosystem in place can emerge from the sea of disorder and entropy with creative responses that alone seem meaningless, but when linked into webs, will form a new culture that can bring about a higher ecological and social order. It is to the slow, organic, simple life that I have gravitated. Away from the world dominated by machines and toward a healthy vibrant community.
My path to the good life on the land has been a long one. Needing to make money to own a farm and then losing that farm has shown me that there are simpler ways of relating to a place that do not include ownership. A part of the wisdom of indigenous world views is that no-one really owns land. We are a part of it, and it is the forming of relationships to land and the ecology in places that matters.
With farmers struggling to pay their loans and city people wanting more connection to healthy food, a part of the solution is to design farms that bring more people to them in a system of cooperation and integration. If you have simple mobile infrastructure like a greenhouse, a two-wheel tractor, and basic gardening tools and combine their appropriate use with ecological knowledge and locally adapted seeds, you can grow all the food you need and live a healthy, meaningful life. The strength of this new culture is in its adaptability which, like mycelium, will spread organically to link life together, breaking down the dead and feeding new life in the process.
This article can be found in Norwegian in the book Lokal mat – Livskraft Fremtid by Ove Jakobsen (Koordinator økologisk økonomi Bodø 2024).