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The Living Earth Festival (Mullumbimby, NSW, Australia)

A seed to plant in the ground and the mind

If there is going to be a revolution, it must be a revolution of consciousness, so the saying goes. Fortunately, these words are slowly becoming a realisation as many conscious communities across Australia and abroad come together to make a change. Among them, are the people behind The Living Earth Festival.

Coming into the third cycle of its yearly spring event, Mullumbimby’s Living Earth Festival is ready to showcase, educate and inspire. This year, having found its feet in previous years, the festival will be introducing keynote speakers such as Costa Georgiadis and Jerry Colby-Williams from ABC’s gardening Australia.

President of the Mullumbimby Community Garden, Sarah-Jane reveals that the festival’s driving force is to "galvanize the community." Calling on a population of more than 30,000 people in and around the Mullumbimby area, the intention of the festival is to "demonstrate what it would feel like to function harmoniously as a sustainable community, to provide tangible lifestyle solutions to the contemporary life we live in, and to show that people’s aspirations to live more consciously can be actualized, at least for one day."

This year the festival will feature a massive variety of skilled people in a diverse range of modalities. Some of which include; workshops in living organic, permaculture courses, cooking demonstrations, live percussion and music performances, street performers and youth activities, children’s workshops as well as a section devoted to biochar and the development of soil health and remediation technologies.

There will also be a Social Permaculture workshop that will demonstrate how permaculture principles can be applied to the community as a whole, functioning as a new and more holistic approach to the healthy growth of plants as well as people.

This year, the festival’s focus is about simultaneously planting a seed in the ground as well as in the mind. The festival aims to affect the current social and environmental climate. Featuring ephemeral art to provoke and inspire change on an unconscious level as well as providing comprehensive sustainable design structures and permaculture courses for practical results.

In reaction to a number of devastating issues in our current global situation, the concept of this year’s festival, Sarah-Jane admits, was born of a vital necessity for change. "Whether consciously or unconsciously we have an awareness that we have reached a fork in the road," she says, "we can head down a gloomy path or we can embrace our creativity and skills and create a sustainable lifestyle."

The concept of sustainability has been described as one diamond with many facets, "we wanted to demonstrate what the diamond paradigm might look like," says Sarah-Jane. By constructing an environment that is conducive to this paradigm, The Living Earth Festival aims to encourage a new cycle and a new consciousness. Most importantly it will unite the community at large and celebrate in a common and simple ideology — which is, to transform the fate of our future on this Earth.

For more event information and to see the full festival lineup, please visit The Living Earth Festival website:

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