Learning community resilience from Black Saturday, with Daryl Taylor (17 October 2017)

Greening the Apocalypse (RRR FM)

We speak with Daryl Taylor, a survivor of the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Kinglake. In 2009 when that enormous tragedy hit, Daryl already had over a decade’s experience in community and organisational development roles. And since that day in February he has been involved on many informal and formal community based recovery and advocacy projects. His work has been acknowledged with 13 state and national awards and best practice commendations. And his experiences in the aftermath of the fires deeply inform his work now – and have lead him to reflect on the creative chaos of bottom up community-led responses, compared to what he saw as poorly fitting and disempowering government responses. In 2015 he completed with his colleague Helen Goodman a two year report Place-Based and Community-Led: Specific Disaster Preparedness and Generalisable Community Resilience which he hopes can help communities learn from Kinglake’s experiences.

Later in the show we talk with small farmer Tammi Jonas about her battle with regulators that consider her and other free-range farmer operations legally the same as huge battery operations. She mentions this petition.