“I think my relationship with the earth has become very different in the last year that I've been living on the farm because I've spent the majority of daylight hours outside. And it means that it doesn't feel like the kind of separate entity that I was brought up thinking. You know, like, the environment as something separate from me. But here, it just dictates what I do every day. And also learning how to do manual labor every day in the market garden or working with Jenny means that it's just me and the earth hanging out in all my emotional states, rather than me kind of just visiting. If I was to go on a tramp or something, you're specifically like visiting the earth. I'm just like in it.

And I guess when my mind wanders in the garden, pottering away doing planting or weeding or whatnot, I think a lot about humans' relationship to the earth and how we've had such an impact. How with the Western framework, we don't know how to be in a relationship with the earth. Often we think the best thing for the earth is for humans to not be there, which is a really hard narrative to hold and to still feel a sense of belonging. And it's a narrative I know a lot of indigenous cultures are like, what? We are the earth, you can't separate that out.

So thinking about cultivating the earth in a garden and thinking about how we are creating beautiful soil and habitat for worms and bugs and food for the birds and slugs or rabbits, whether we want it to be or not.

I think people often romanticize gardening and be like, “oh, that's such a quaint thing to do.” But like, I'm face to face with ethics every day. And when I cut a worm in half when I'm weeding or preparing bed, it does not feel quaint or cute when it's just writhing on the ground. Why did I get to choose that? And why am I choosing to pull out all these plants? You can't remove yourself from that relationship at all.”

Neighbour Zine x Generation Zero: A series of conversations with friends