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.

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 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.

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.