Erik Ohlsen is a master of regenerative design, an internationally recognized Permaculture teacher, a landscape contractor, author, farmer, herbalist, storyteller, and practitioner of Nordic folk traditions. He is the founder of organizations that regenerate ecosystems including the award-winning design and build company Permaculture Artisans as well as the Permaculture Skills Center where thousands of students learn ecological landscaping and regenerative agriculture. Ohlsen has worked globally for decades repairing ecosystems and connecting people with the land.

In this interview with Arty Mangan of Bioneers, Erik talks about his activism and how a healing crisis redirected his life and put him on the path to become a permaculture designer and entrepreneur. He also shares his approach to landscape design and how humans can become a keystone ecological species and a positive force on the land.

ARTY MANGAN: In the foreword of your book, The Regenerative Landscaper, Permaculturist Penny Livingston wrote that when you were 19 years old, she saw in you certain qualities. These qualities are based on the “seven sacred attributes” from the Lakota Nation shared with Penny by Gilbert Walking Bull.

ERIK OHLSEN: It tickles me that she feels like she saw that when I was a 19 year old. I think I was able to show her my ability to perceive ecology and landscape without being told. Later Penny told me about the mentoring tests that she had for me. She said that she asked me questions, that she knew the answers to, as a test to see what I had observed.

ARTY: One of the sacred attributes is positive power, overwhelming heartfelt joy, childlike state of wonder and delight. How does that inform your work as a designer?

ERIK: I think it connects in the way that young male deer will hop around and lock antlers together, and the way that a butterfly moves from one flower to the next, and the way the fox kits will jump and bounce off a tree trunk. It’s how we move through the space of being in wonder.

From a design point of view, there is a good amount of data, like landscape data, ecological information that comes from the state of wonder. There is almost no better state to receive ecological information than the state of wonder. It unlocks all of your blocks and containers and boxes. It allows you to be in a momentary experience where the wonder of the world can enter into you, and then you know that you are nature.

ARTY:  Your approach to assessing a landscape that you will be working with is to look at a place not knowing, leaving the knowing behind. It reminded me of the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind book by Shunryu Suzuki, a Japanese Sōtō Zen Monk who helped introduce Zen Buddhism in the US in the 1960s. The message of the book is to see things with a completely open mind, a clean slate of mind, not judging.

ERIK: For me, one of the most foundational approaches to good design is not to be a designer; it’s to put design away. Put that self away. Look at all these little selves that come up. You’re the father, and you’re the teacher, you’re the interviewer, you’re the organizer, and you call upon those selves at different times. But when you go out on the land for the first time, if you put the designer self on, you’re going to miss so much.

But it took almost 20 years of doing professional design work to realize that. There’s an egoic joy in knowing, in designing, coming up with cool, creative ideas. Especially for a younger person or if you haven’t done inner work, what you’re after is to be seen for your creativity and what you bring to the table. But so much is missed when you do that. You only get an understanding of maybe 50 percent of a site, of an ecosystem, if that is the only way you approach it.

ARTY: Another sacred attribute is the sacred state of health, soundness of mind, body and spirit. You have gone through serious burnout; talk about this attribute in terms of your experience.

ERIK: I certainly carry chronic nervous system stuff, for almost 20 years now, and that still kind of dictates how I approach my day-to-day life schedule. I schedule around some chronic issues that I deal with. I don’t regret having a chronic health situation because the path that it led me down, in terms of inner growth, understanding, and learning. When I hit burnout, and my nervous system collapses, all of these symptoms come on. It is scary.

The first time the chronic health thing cropped up was in 2004, and between 1999 and 2004, I was a hardcore global justice activist, and bringing permaculture to the streets, and organizing and being part of civil disobedience projects around the world, following the World Trade Organization, or the G8, or the FTAA [Free Trade Area of the Americas]. Then we would plant big gardens in the streets, and do other things as a way to say there’s an alternative to global corporate privatization of water, seeds and food.

2004 was the first time that chronic health thing cropped up. What was terrible and powerful about that moment was that I couldn’t do activism anymore. I couldn’t go to the meetings. I couldn’t travel. My entire identity was shattered, and I went through a process of feeling like I was completely unworthy of the world because my whole identity was the guy who puts himself on the line. I sacrifice myself to do the good work. I put my body, heart, mind, and soul on the line for the work. But I couldn’t do it. My body said no, this isn’t sustainable; you have to do something different.

This was how my first business was born. For those four years, I lived off of activist fundraising. I started an organization called Adopt an Activist. It was an early form of crowd-funding, where people would adopt a frontline activist and help pay their expenses.

Then the second burnout happened in 2017, and I had to go on a sabbatical because it was just too intense. But burnout has been a great lesson because every time that I had burnout, I learned something great in my life—I learned a new skill, I learned something new about myself. And when I was able to come back out into the world, I could bring those gifts.

ARTY: It’s not easy to appreciate a healing crisis, and surrender to it. A lot of times people want to go to a health practitioner so that they can get well enough to go back to the things that made them sick.

ERIK: What’s fascinating about that is the first big burnout when the health crisis emerged, I spent two years in depression because of this shattering of my identity. At that time, all I could think about was how it felt before this happened, and how invincible I was, and all I could think about was: How can I go back to that? But I had to see through and find a totally different path.

ARTY: The wound can become an opportunity, if you surrender to it rather than resist it by wanting to recapture the past instead of following where it’s taking you. The disorder, or disease or malady is a discipline. By restricting you it puts you on a different path. But It’s hard for people to understand that.

ERIK: It really is. And it takes a lot of letting go and shedding. When doing the good work of restoring land and communities, the big question is: How do we sustain that without killing ourselves? I see it a lot. There’s a certain part in the activist culture which is actually pretty unhealthy. We’re actually not creating a culture where people’s bodies and hearts and minds are held in a sacred way.

ARTY:  At an Eco Farm Conference a few years ago, Valentin Lopez, Chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, talked about the Creator giving the Amah Mutsun a mandate to care for all creation. He gave the example of caring for the bear. And what that means is learning what they eat, and then making sure those plants are cared for. It is an expression of how ecological stewardship is derived from a spiritual cosmology that is based on interrelationships.

ERIK: In reality, we human beings are nature; we are a particular function of nature which is to be stewards, caretakers of the webs of relationships.

In my work, I talk a lot about relationship design. Instead of designing things, we design relationships and steward  those relationships over time, through cyclical time, through successional time, through evolutionary time.

A question that we often ask ourselves on a project is: When are we? This points to the idea that every site is in some sort of succession of evolution. Are we right after a fire has hit? If so, we’re in a pioneer phase. Are we inside an old-growth redwood forest that is at total maturity? When are we speaks to what needs to be cared for now in this particular moment in time, knowing it’s going to change and evolve, and then we’re setting ourselves up for that next phase.

That’s the beauty of the hands and minds of humans. We get to tend ecosystems as the choreographers of ecological relationships, and it’s a privilege. It’s a gift to be able to do that.

ARTY: This is a quote from the book, “When people understand that they are keystone species, they can learn to behave like a probiotic on the earth, restoring ecosystem health one garden at a time.” What does it mean for people to embrace their role as a keystone species rather than being an unaware, destructive force? I don’t think there’s many people whose goal is to destroy, but the collateral damage that’s being done by the way that we do things now certainly is catastrophically destructive.

ERIK: There’s three parts to this. One part is how traditional cultures live on the land in a harmonious web of relationships. Indigenous Peoples have been managing lands in California for 10,000-plus years. One way to be a positive force on the land is to lean on traditional knowledge.

Secondly, when we walk out on the land and be perceptive enough to know where our feet go. To understand where I step means something. A footstep is a powerful act. Do I crush a seed head with my footstep? Do I compact the edge of an eroding waterway with my footstep? These are very practical, tangible things. What direction am I taking through the forest or across the land? What’s my purpose? What’s my mind frame like? We have these bodies and senses that are powerful in their ability to perceive the connections and activities of nature. We are an instrument to understand ecological data and moment-to-moment changes in the environment. We have sensors all over our bodies that constantly tell us all this information. Do we use that or not? And if we do use it for restoration and integration as humans in nature, wondrous things happen.

But let’s face it, we’re not living in traditional place-based cultures anymore. Most people aren’t using the sensory powers of their body to be walking through the land as a web weaver of the ecosystem. So the third one is this: How do we embrace the power of the modern world to transition us back into some kind of place-based culture that can be a one that regenerates the world around us through the activity of living? And the only way that I have discovered to be able to do that, currently, is through economic means.  

Half of all Americans say they are living paycheck-to-paycheck. With that in mind, in the current context of our situation, I’ve come to a conclusion that we need an economic way of reweaving ourselves into the patterns of the Earth. I’m interested in harnessing the power of economic structures to become truly regenerative as a society, because if we can create an entire industry of jobs that are literally building soil, growing food, catching water, healing the landscape, healing the land, that is our path to being beneficial organisms on the planet again.

ARTY: What are some of the key principles for learning to listen to the land and to read the land?

ERIK:  As I mentioned, one of the most important principles is to put away knowledge, to put away knowing when you want to read the land. Step onto the land not as a designer. Step onto the land not as a scientist. Step onto the land with pure wonder in an open way.

I suggest that people wander. I’m a very big fan of wandering. If you want to learn about a landscape, let’s say you’re doing a design for a farm or a landscape or homestead, one of the first things I would do is wander, and then hang out and sit somewhere for a while, then get up and wander again. Don’t judge anything that’s happening; only absorb information. Have experiences. Follow birds. Follow insects. Feel the texture of the bark on a tree. Use all your senses in this process of wandering and exploration, because what happens through that process is when you don’t put anything about the land in the container of your mind, and you just experience it with wonder, that’s when the most important information is shared with you; that’s when the land speaks to you.

And the other one is to focus mostly on relationships. What are the interactions between things, not the things themselves? Think in terms of interactive processes, not just the shape. What does the shape do? How does the shape interact with wind, with terrain, with fur, whatever? That’s where the real information is.

ARTY:  You’ve said that biodiversity is the best measure of success. Allan Savory, the originator of  holistic grazing, has had some impressive results in Africa, for the most part, where he transformed arid places by significantly increasing biodiversity. He was criticized because he didn’t track the science and carbon sequestration rates and his success has been discounted in some scientific circles due to lack of scientific methodology in spite of the empirical evidence of regenerating ecosystems. Talk about biodiversity as the measure of success.

ERIK: Before there was science, people were living in relative ecological harmony around the world for thousands and thousands of years. They did so through their ability to be an active participant in the relationship processes of life. The reason why I say biodiversity is the measure of success is because it is inherently a representation of complexity, and the only way that a system can hold that level of complexity is because there’s more resources there and there are more exchanges happening between the resources, whether that be carbon, nitrogen, water, soil microbiology, sunlight, photosynthetic powers, whatever it might be. So when you have a system that before could only sustain three species of birds and five species of insects and three species of mammals, and all of a sudden there’s 75 species of birds, and where there was one type of butterfly now there’s four different kinds of butterflies, you’ve developed a system that’s so thriving in its ecological complexity that it can provide for that much life.

ARTY: In an era of unprecedented climate events that results in life-changing catastrophes, what are the most important ways to build resiliency in our natural world, and in our built world?

ERIK: The first and most important thing to do is trust nature; trust the wisdom of the ecology. When the big fires hit in Sonoma County in 2017, the town I grew up in, Santa Rosa, burned. I was west of Santa Rosa, and all my Santa Rosa family, my siblings and nieces and everybody evacuated to stay with us. A lot of beloved places burned to the ground, places that I grew up in.

The first narrative of that that came out, for most people, was this was unprecedented and never should have happened. But spending time with some of my Indigenous friends and being in a listening space, I learned that Indigenous folks had literally been tracking fire in that area for about 12,000 years. And my friend Red Bird said, “Let me show you something.”

So he took me to a place where the narrative is fire never should have hit this, the flatland. It came out of the mountain and blew out onto the flatland. He said, “Erik, do you know there were five square miles of dogbane that Indigenous folks have been cultivating for thousands of years? When fire comes through, it takes away competition and the resprouts of the dogbane are longer, straighter stalks. It takes about 60,000 stalks to make a family’s fishing net.” The local Indigenous people make their cordage out of dogbane. He took me to a place where about two2 acres of dogbane were growing, the remnants of what was once a five-square mile patch. “This is what’s left, that’s been preserved. This was specifically cultivated here to receive the fire.”

Think about a place-based culture that is so perceptive and in relationship to the local ecology that big disturbance events, like a wildfire, are actually used in a utilitarian way. That comes from an understanding that these events have been happening for a very long time. Clearly, we live in an accelerated process of climate catastrophe, but some ecosystems may survive the extremes of climate change.

So what do we do? First of all, we continue to do the things that serve life—managing water in an ecological way, managing the cycles of plants and seeds in a way that continues to thrive and build biodiversity. These all become buffer systems. In cities and towns, from an emergency preparedness point of view, we need to be growing food in our backyards and in our neighborhoods; we need to have stores of freshwater, which could be rain caught water; and we need those social relationships and the kind of mutual aid that we saw during the pandemic, when neighbors came together caring for each other. These are all part of our resilience.

But from a natural point of view, the Earth has been changing and evolving forever. There’s never been a time where it became stagnant. And now that process is being accelerated, and we are moving away from mitigation to adaptation. Ten years ago we were talking about mitigation. But the climate crisis seems like a runaway train now. So how do we adapt?

If I’m going to have the weather of San Diego in Sonoma County by 2080, I’m planting avocado trees. I’m figuring out what Indigenous folks in San Diego were doing to live for thousands of years, and I’m applying that methodology in Sonoma County, and I’m teaching my children that.

We can be the keystone species that supports an ecological transition as climate shifts and use that role to establish a new way of being with climate as we move forward.