New Food Order: Learning from our regenerative past

Australian actress and activist Nathalie “Nat” Kelley is probably best known for her role in the movie, “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” and various television series including “Body of Proof,” “Unreal,” “The Vampire Diaries,” “Dynasty” and “The Baker and the Beauty.”

But Kelley, who sits on the nonprofit boards of the Fungi Foundation and Kiss The Ground—a regenerative agriculture-focused organization that offers farmland scholarships and created a Tribeca Film Festival award-winning documentary—is also an advocate for Indigenous peoples and regenerative agriculture.

In “New Food Order,” a new podcast that explores the business of tackling the climate crisis through food and agriculture, journalist Louisa Burwood-Taylor and entrepreneur Danielle Gould discuss with Kelley, who was born in Peru, ways to learn from our regenerative past as a solution to climate, water and health crises.

Although regenerative agriculture is a big buzzword that’s frequently thrown around, there’s nothing new about the concept. It’s been around for centuries.

"Thinking that regenerative agriculture is some new solution to some new problem is ignoring the millennia of experience that Indigenous people have had—and the success that they've had—in their own food systems, some of which have lasted 5,000 years," Kelley says. "And we have a lot to learn from people who have created food systems that continuously feed people for 5,000 years."

Related:New Food Order: Is the world better off with your business in it?

Comparing the devastating wildfires of Australia and California, Kelley says, "In both places, we've removed the Indigenous peoples from their land, who traditionally had ways of dealing with fires by having a relationship with fire and using fire as a regenerative tool." Combining poor land management with the atrocious agriculture industry practices—using over-tilling, chemicals such as glyphosates and factory farming—creates the conditions for the global catastrophic fires.  

“We just need to remember our regenerative past,” Kelley says. “We've been regenerative much longer than we have been degenerative.” 

Listen to the podcast here.