Host, Denis McCarthy, has been a conservationist and gardener since childhood. His Primary School headmaster was a keen conservationist and his father a lifelong gardener.
While an undergraduate he organised a University Exhibition on the Environment to coincide with the 1972 U.N. Stockholm Conference on the Environment, wrote a paper (1973) on the Club of Rome’s “Limits To Growth Report” and was WA Chapter coordinator of the World Future Society.
From 1977 to 1987 he was a close associate of Bill Mollison, the author of several Permaculture books on sustainable design for human settlements. He completed a Diploma in Permaculture Design at Stanley, Tasmania in 1980. He was co-recipient of the first Permaculture Community Service Award awarded in 1985 by The Permaculture Institute of Australia “for vision and work forming an essential and selfless contribution to the promotion of permaculture locally and/or global and toward the healing of the planet”.
During the 80s he was publisher of Whole Life Times, convenor of Health Expos and Lifestyle ConFests, a founding member of the WA Greens, a nonviolence trainer and community educator, before embarking on a 30-year career as a psychologist.
Now in semi-retirement, he is applying his long experience as a community educator, environmentalist and networker to the SED Talk podcast on Sustainability, Environment and Development, in order to make a valuable contribution to the mega crises confronting us all and to the opportunity for a global ecological and radical social transformation.