Tasmania’s debates over aquaculture, forestry, and energy are framed in binaries: jobs versus environment, growth versus preservation. These divisions fracture not only politics but also communities and inner life.

Drawing on Rudolf Steiner’s idea of the hardening of the soul and Carl Jung’s call for the Third, this article argues for a new orientation beyond opposites. The Third space is not neutral but generative, where ideas compost into gardens, strategies translate into action, and governance is rooted in transparency and practice.

Through threefold social theory, cultural freedom, political equity, and economic mutuality the piece highlights how projects like food hubs, biodynamic farms, and cooperatives act as acupuncture points in the social body. Supported by eco-feminist perspectives and the symbolic guidance of yarrow, rosemary, and nettle, these initiatives show how imagination can become infrastructure.

This is not a time for mediocrity, so Tasmania has the scale and creativity to pioneer a regenerative future, reweaving narrative, soul, and community into politics, economics, and culture.

This reflective essay explores the middle east conflict, through a Jungian and symbolic lens, guided by the Virgo New Moon and the healing presence of Archangel Raphael. Rather than offering political solutions, it invites a deeper psycho-spiritual engagement recognising that much of the global discourse is shaped by projection, ancestral trauma, and collective shadow. Drawing on Carl Jung’s concepts of the Third, the Anima, and Chiron, the piece suggests that while the path to geopolitical reconciliation may be blocked, a healing space must first be cultivated within the individual and collective psyche.

It calls for discernment, humility, and the courage to hold paradox, to grieve both sides of the story, and to recognise how personal pain and moral injury are entangled in global reactions. The Virgo archetype, as a guardian of ritual, earth, and care, offers a path of slow healing through tending, presence, and sacred attention. The piece closes with plant allies Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) as symbolic and energetic supports for this inner work, yarrow for integration and boundary, rosemary for clarity and remembrance suggesting that healing begins not in resolution, but in the quiet act of soulful witnessing.

In an era dominated by viral outrage and moral clarity, progressive leaders face a critical choice: remain commentators or become architects of the future. This article argues that beyond calling out injustice, whether in situations of War, Tasmania’s salmon farms, or threatened forests there lies a responsibility to foster convivial governance. By inviting communities into genuine, participatory conversations, and using imagination as a core democratic organ, movements can co-create sustainable, inclusive futures. Drawing on global examples like Barcelona’s Decidim and EcoPeace Middle East, the piece calls on platformed activists to move from critique to collaborative scenario-building, ensuring that the “day after” belongs to those who build it.

About the Author
Dr Emily Samuels-Ballantyne (also known as Dr. Demeter) is an eco-philosopher, farmer, and author of the forthcoming series The Spiral Shelves: Living Library of Magical Farm Tasmania. Her work bridges policy design, ecological healing, and the spiritual-cultural renewal of place. She works at the intersection of community resilience, regenerative governance, and embodied stewardship, inviting new myths and models for living well together in times of great change.

In a world fractured by war and ideology, this essay explores the psychological, spiritual and manifested cost of binary thinking, especially in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Drawing from Jung’s concept of the transcendent function, Marx’s critique of alienation, Levinas’ ethics of eye contact, Escobar’s pluriversal design is not about flattening difference, but about making room for many worlds to co-exist and the symbolism of Chiron and Venus, it calls for the restoration of the “Third”, a space where paradox and pain can coexist without annihilation. Dr Demeter weaves personal reflection with collective insight, highlighting how language itself can wound or heal, and how imagination, as described by Steiner and Einstein, is a vital organ for integration and transformation. Yarrow, specifically Achillea millefolium, is offered as both a literal and symbolic remedy for those seeking to hold complexity, bridging intellect and embodiment, activism and reverence.

Ultimately, the essay invites a shift from slogans to soul, from splitting to staying, and from conclusion to container, where a new, reconciliatory future might take root.

This piece by Dr Demeter (Emily Samuels-Ballantyne) explores the urgent need to redefine who counts as a farmer in Australia’s evolving agricultural landscape. It highlights how current government support programs like the Farm Household Allowance largely exclude small-scale, regenerative, and community-based farmers, many of whom are young people building resilient regional economies through diverse, place-based food systems. The article calls for policy reform that values ecological health, social wellbeing, and cultural vitality alongside traditional economic measures, urging recognition and support for the farmers shaping a reenerative future.

In this timely and provocative essay, What Is Your Business Model, Local Government?, Emily Samuels-Ballantyne invites a bold reimagining of the role and purpose of local government in the face of ecological collapse, social fragmentation, and bureaucratic drift. Drawing from lived experience in regenerative projects, from community harvests to Indigenous land care, she argues that local councils are too often locked into transactional models that fail to nourish the communities they claim to serve.

The essay challenges the obsession with “rates, roads, and rubbish” and calls for a cultural and functional transformation: from gatekeeping to stewardship, from abstraction to grounded care. It critiques the superficial focus on structural reform, how councils are carved up, while ignoring the deeper dysfunctions of waste, performance management, and disconnection from place.

What emerges is a clear-eyed case for a regenerative model of governance, one that centres community resilience, shared meals, public trust, and the radical possibility that local government could once again be a site of hope, not just administration.

The Reckoning by Dr Demeter diagnoses how linear, extractive institutions, from governance and justice to economics, fracture our ties to Country, ecologies and Life. Drawing on First Nations ontologies and living-systems science, it shows how current models rely on linear time, resource extraction, and punitive logic that sever relationships and ignore ecological feedback. The essay threads together:

• Ancient Wisdom, as found in songlines, ceremony, and relational practices that view time as cyclical, land as kin, and history as alive in every gesture.

• Living-Systems Science, which sees ecosystems, societies, and economies as self-organising networks of feedback loops, patterns, and interdependencies.

By weaving these perspectives, The Reckoning calls for a shift from top-down bureaucracies and extractive policies to participatory, place-based co-design that honours Indigenous law, restores relational justice, and regenerates soil, spirit, and social fabric. Its core prescriptions are to decolonise thought by dissolving the nature–culture divide; reweave reciprocity through restorative, relational practices; and value embodied integration over mere information.

In closing, the essay issues an urgent invitation to remember the ancestral balance our systems once held and to co-create new governance, economy, and justice, an urgent reckoning with what we’ve forgotten and what the world now desperately needs.

In this sharp and grounded essay, Dr. Demeter (Emily Samuels-Ballantyne) turns the common bureaucratic question, “What is your business model?” back on local government itself. Drawing on two decades of lived experience as a community builder, policy designer, and regenerative farmer, she critiques the top-heavy policy pipelines that reduce care to documents and engagement to output metrics. With references to institutional theorists like Guy Debord, Ivan Illich, Henri Lefebvre, and Helena Norberg-Hodge, the essay explores how public funding is often diverted away from tangible outcomes into layers of abstraction and consultancy. Through the lens of her own project, the Huon Valley Food Hub, Demeter offers an alternative approach: the redirection of the brief toward grounded, co-created, and regenerative public work. The piece concludes with a call for a new kind of public service, one rooted in care, participation, and a living systems worldview.

Synopsis of “An Ode to the Bread Man”
By Dr Demeter, Magical Farm Tasmania

Each week, a quietly steadfast figure, known simply as the Bread Man, rolls up in his supply-chain truck, his lanky frame clad in a beanie and workwear, to deliver unsold loaves for the farm. What might have gone to landfill instead becomes nourishment for Emily’s geese, ducks, and chickens, whose droppings then enrich the soil. Over years, this humble ritual knits together a living circle of trust, reciprocity, and shared care.

Yet beneath its gentle rhythm lies a troubling irony: the very policies that champion “efficiency” and large-scale job growth are squeezing out small enterprises like the Bread Man’s family delivery service. While massive corporations thrive on subsidies and armies of lawyers, this heart-driven delivery driver faces closure. Drawing on Ivan Illich’s concept of convivial tools, those scaled to human hands and rooted in relationship, the essay contrasts the warmth of community-rooted exchange with the cold grind of industrial mechanisation.

Ultimately, the piece is a call to action: to reclaim economic life as a web of stories and relationships rather than a blind pursuit of scale. It urges readers to choose convivial alternatives: garden stalls, hand-crafted wares, neighbourhood bakeries and deliery services that nourish not just bodies, but soil, trust, and the very soul of place.

In this reflective essay, Dr. Demeter shares a tender moment from a long-standing women’s herbal circle in remote Tasmania, where the question “What herbs do we need to change the world?” sparks a profound conversation about connection, diversity, and healing. Weaving together insights from herbalism, lived experience, and the pluriversal design philosophy of Arturo Escobar, the piece becomes a call to move beyond critique and toward regenerative imagination. At its heart is a reminder that no single solution can heal our world, we need all the herbs, all the voices, all the ways of living-with. Through story and vision, the essay invites readers to see plants not just as remedies, but as kin and co-creators of a more just and life-giving future.

The Fault Line explores the quiet violences embedded in the language of peace and the structures of power that claim to pursue it. Drawing from lived experience across institutions, activist circles, and community life, Dr. Demeter reveals how dissent is often silenced not by overt oppression but by the subtle enforcement of strategic conformity, identity politics, and credentialed authority. The essay critiques the performative binaries of left and right, calling instead for a deeper, grounded practice of peace rooted in relational repair, place-based wisdom, and regenerative imagination. It invites readers to stand in the fertile imagination, so be gardeners of a new paradigm. The essay is illustrated with striking visualisations that depict both the fractured fault lines of the present and luminous visions for a more just and life-giving future.

Tasmanians deserve more than top-down slogans. We need a genuine, strategic vision, Scenario Two: A Living Island of Renewal grounded in community ownership, climate resilience, and economic dignity. Imagine a $1 billion public interest fund (matched by the Commonwealth to $2 billion) powering food hubs, care infrastructure, and publicly owned renewable energy projects. This isn’t a boom-and-bust model: it’s about durable, locally rooted jobs: green energy technicians, regenerative farmers, care workers, and cultural craftspersons. By redefining progress beyond GDP and megaprojects, we can build a Tasmania that flourishes in body, mind, and spirit.

A Call for Justice and Regeneration in Australian Universities is both a reckoning and a renewal. Drawing on two decades within the university system and the insights of a national inquiry, Dr. Emily Samuels Ballantyne reveals a crisis not just of contracts, but of conscience. Behind the statistics lies something deeper: the erosion of dignity, creativity, and care in places once imagined as sanctuaries for learning.

Yet this is not only a critique…it is a vision. The article offers a pathway for transformation rooted in truthfulness, courage, and responsibility. It imagines universities not as factories of credentialism, but as living communities of knowledge and moral purpose. Here, education becomes an act of regeneration, of land, people, and the future. Tasmania, with its spirit of independence and possibility, could lead this renewal.

In this deeply personal and vision-led essay, Dr. Emily Samuels Ballantyne, writing as Dr. Demeter steps beyond the binaries of left and right to offer a politics rooted in care, community, and the living systems of Earth. Drawing from her years of grassroots work, spiritual practice, and institutional rejection, she shares the story of forging a life-systems politics: one that honours the household (OIKOS), values real contribution over performance, and sees regeneration not reform as the task of our time. This is a politics born in gardens, women’s circles, herbal gatherings, and quiet acts of solidarity. It is fierce, gentle, and grounded in love. A call to compost what no longer serves, and tend to the beautiful, emerging future that already lives in our communities, our bodies, and the soil beneath our feet.

An article about transmuting the weight of the unspoken….
By Dr. Demeter (Emily Samuels Ballantyne), Magical Farm Tasmania

This reflective essay explores the emotional and somatic toll of speaking truth in environments that resist it. Drawing on anthroposophical perspectives and embodied awareness, Dr. Demeter examines how soul-level dissonance manifests physically when our reverence is met with rejection. She introduces the concept of “composting the day” as a healing ritual transforming pain into insight through tea, earth connection, and quiet ceremony. With poetic power and a regenerative lens, the piece offers a gentle yet radical invitation to transmute the residue of moral injury into nourishment for personal and collective becoming. It closes with a prayer and the Ho‘oponopono practice as pathways for inner reconciliation and energetic release.

In On Being Told Not to See, Dr. Emily Samuels Ballantyne reflects on a moment of institutional dismissal being told that drawing on First Nations knowledge systems was “romantic” and even “damaging.” in relation to the reforms we need to make to policy and our society. In response, she gently but firmly shares how these systems of law, astronomy, fire, design, and kinship are not only intellectually rigorous but vital to reimagining our futures.

Through the lens of the First Knowledges series and her own place-based practice at Magical Farm Tasmania, Emily explores how listening to these ontologies has shaped her seasonal rhythms, ecological design, and regenerative community work.

This is not an attempt to replicate or appropriate, but to honour, to learn, and to unlearn. The article asks: what might shift if we stopped seeing these knowledges as peripheral, and instead treated them as central to how we build, grow, and govern?

Written with reverence and responsibility, this piece invites deeper listening, to land, to story, and to those who have cared for this continent far longer than most of us can imagine.

Wayfinding Patterns Through the Eras is a reflective Solstice piece by Dr. Emily Samuels Ballantyne that draws on ancient cosmologies, particularly Chinese Feng Shui to make sense of our current global moment. Exploring two full 180-year cycles, Emily reveals how the final fire phase we are now in (Period 9) offers not only cultural reckoning but the opportunity to compost 360 years of modernity. With love, courage, and cosmic guidance, this article invites us to dream forward a new Period 1 rooted in life systems remembered from ancient, land-connected cultures across the globe.

This article proposes a bold, community-led alternative to Tasmania’s energy future. Instead of pursuing extractive, investor-driven projects, Dr. Emily Samuels Ballantyne calls for the creation of a Tasmanian Foundational Fund, a $1 billion public interest fund sourced voluntarily from local superannuation. This fund would invest in regenerative infrastructure: locally governed renewable energy, affordable housing, regional food systems, and care hubs.

Grounded in economic data and inspired by Tasmania’s history of public ownership, the piece argues that care, place, and energy must form the core of a just economy. Island Almanac invites Tasmanians to reclaim their agency and transform the island into the Living Heart of a Regenerative Commonwealth, not the Battery of the Nation.

Artwork: Regen Era Design Studio

Synopsis:
This article explores why Dr. Emily Samuels Ballantyne (Dr Demeter) writes the Island Almanac as a living design journal, a poetic manifesto, and a tool for transition. Drawing on the wisdom of Rudolf Steiner, Arturo Escobar, and Tyson Yunkaporta, Emily outlines how scenario-based thinking and design-led prototypes can help regenerate our core systems: food, housing, energy, sacred activism, convivial governance, community life, and economics. Writing becomes a spiritual and strategic act rooted in land, rigour, and imagination inviting others to co-create a pluriversal future aligned with life.