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.

Synopsis:
This article offers a grounded response to the Australian Universities Accord Final Report, exploring how its promises of equity, Indigenous leadership, and structural reform might take root in practice. Drawing on decades of work across academic and community systems, it argues that true transformation will require more than policy it calls for place-based investment, relational governance, and a living-systems approach to knowledge.

Influenced by thinkers such as Tyson Yunkaporta, Arturo Escobar, bell hooks, Leanne Simpson, and Vandana Shiva, the piece outlines a framework of sixteen university futures and proposes an emergent vision of regenerative education. Written from the perspective of a designer-activist and farm-based educator, the article closes with a quiet call to begin prototyping a new kind of university one rooted in soil, story, and seasonal rhythm.

By Dr. Emily Samuels Ballantyne

This open letter to Naomi Klein invites a deepening of activism, beyond critique and toward connection, sacredness, and embodied care. Drawing on thinkers like Joanna Macy, Tyson Yunkaporta, Rudolf Steiner, and Levinas, the piece calls for a new wave of peace activism rooted in relational ethics, seasonal rhythm, and cultural healing and renewal. Rather than resisting harder, it urges us to feel more fully, act with integrity, and belong to each other and the Earth.

By Dr. Emily Samuels Ballantyne

This article explores the limitations of contemporary Green politics, highlighting its tendency toward urgency, reaction, and spectacle, which often disconnects it from the ecological wisdom it seeks to uphold. Drawing on Arturo Escobar's concept of the pluriverse, it advocates for design practices rooted in autonomy, emergence, and care, emphasising the importance of Indigenous knowledge systems in shaping sustainable futures.

The discussion delves into the physiological and spiritual significance of breath, referencing Rudolf Steiner's view of imagination as a spiritual organ of perception and the role of the vagus nerve in fostering relational awareness. It critiques the commodification of crisis, as analysed by Naomi Klein, and highlights the necessity of addressing the underlying spiritual wounds that fuel societal polarisation.

By integrating insights from thinkers like Vandana Shiva, Tyson Yunkaporta, David Abram, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, the article calls for a reimagining of activism and governance one that prioritises soil over slogans, ceremonies over campaigns, and listening to life itself. It culminates in a series of regenerative scenarios that envision systems designed for reciprocity, relationality, and belonging.

By Dr. Emily Samuels Ballantyne

Right now, Tasmania’s future is being shaped by a single, homogenous energy narrative “Battery of the Nation” designed and decided by a small group of stakeholders. This narrow vision risks sidelining the diverse voices, knowledge systems, and community-led solutions that are essential for a truly resilient future. In such a defining moment, we must ask: Who gets to imagine the future? A thriving Tasmania requires many scenarios, not just one. Scenario Two is an invitation to co-create not dictate what regeneration looks like, place by place.