In this episode, we speak to the founder of the Woodland Initiative, a group of people who are looking to go off-grid in order to live a more sustainable life. We discuss how the initiative came about and how they are using their own resources and skills to make a difference to the lives of others.
00:04:00.000Give us a little background and kind of, I guess, how you ended up where you are today, running the initiative, the Woodlander initiative that you do and kind of what got you to that point?
00:04:07.880Well, I'm not going to go into my backstory.
00:04:21.880Two acres of woodland, two acres of woodland, two acres of woodland, two acres of woodland, two acres of woodland, which doesn't sound very much.
00:04:28.880It's a bedroom cabin for me and I went off grid.
00:04:36.880It was a steep learning curve, it was a steep learning curve, an eye-opener and opened up more opportunities than I thought it would.
00:04:48.300And so I ended up in a position where I was rent-free, and I had no outgoings or very, very little outgoings.
00:05:01.300So I had no electricity bill, and the big one is the mortgage and rent for most people these days, and I didn't have that.
00:05:09.300So it put me in a position where I could choose to work the same or longer hours and have a lot more income or to reduce the amount I worked and actually have much more time to spend living life and actually doing things I enjoyed.
00:06:55.300We managed to get 50 people in a location in the centre of the country at a time where you weren't allowed to leave your house or travel further than five miles.
00:07:06.300So to get 50 people to a location and book a hall and get us all in there took some doing, but we did manage it.
00:07:15.300And we spent the day talking about how we could do this as a group.
00:14:32.300I was going to ask you about that, too, because obviously we've had, you know, a bunch of stuff popping off with our wall and return to land over in the in the States.
00:15:47.300I sat on all different committees for them.
00:15:49.300And there was reasons for joining that party at the time.
00:15:53.300And I've been up front about what I'm trying to do now.
00:15:58.300So there's very little they can say, but all they do is throw the same old buzzwords, which is, you know, racist, fascist, Nazi, bigger, far right.
00:18:06.300But the difference in headline was good.
00:18:12.300And the content sort of talked about the stuff I just said there.
00:18:16.300So here's a group of people that want to associate with each other.
00:18:20.300They talk about ancestry, heritage and tradition.
00:18:24.300They want to get back to the land and to a traditional way of living based on traditional values, family and nature.
00:18:33.300They want to look after the land that they purchase and ensure that it isn't used for solar farms and wind farms and not taken out of use so that people can actually enjoy it and work it, which is how we used to live.
00:18:51.300To have that imprint by a mainstream source is quite a positive step forward.
00:18:59.300So I can't, as much as I doubt we'll ever get a reply or an apology from The Times, it is good to see that these smaller newspapers may be willing to listen.
00:19:15.300And I think RTTL in states and us are going to have to have, what's happening, there's an argument coming up about freedom of association.
00:19:56.300If they actually look at what we're doing, right, which is permaculture, sustainable living, growing organic vegetables, how do you knock that?
00:20:54.300The only thing they're going to be able to do is say, you cannot have freedom of association.
00:21:01.300And if they do that, it's going to be blatantly obvious to everybody.
00:21:08.300And I don't think they want to have that argument.
00:21:11.300I really don't think they want to because it's an unwinnable one for them.
00:21:15.300Yeah, it's that necessary step where, if nothing else, just to make it even more blatantly clear and obvious to everyone around who might or might not be observing this, right, when you do get the media pieces like this, to see what a different level, what a different standard that we as European stock, white people, the different ethnicities you mentioned that populate Europe, that we are held to compared to everyone else, right?
00:21:51.300But it's good to get that in black and white and get it on paper.
00:21:54.300And the more blatantly obvious it gets, it erodes any kind of question marks that people might have.
00:22:00.300And I spoke with Arwal about that, too.
00:22:03.300It's like, if nothing else, I mean, even if we start up these groups and they're shut down by government, even though, you know, and maybe we can show that it's unlawful in the way that they're approaching the topic, but they don't care anymore.
00:22:16.300They will go after us in this way and continue to set them up and continue to do it over and over.
00:22:20.300It's a Sisyphean task, if that's the right word for it in a sense.
00:22:57.300Even if they don't hurt us, they know they will affect the general public.
00:23:04.300So they will say fascist, racist, far right, Nazi, whatever, based on no information whatsoever, no research, but they know that will have the desired effect for them.
00:23:19.300And yet, the talk radio piece that was done about us last week had around 200 to 300 comments below it.
00:23:32.300And 96% of them were pro what we were doing.
00:25:13.300There's more, they call them small boat crossings, right?
00:25:16.300Because across the English Channel between France and England, there's more now than ever, despite all the rhetoric,
00:25:23.300despite all the nationalist parties, despite all the protests, despite the activism.
00:25:27.300And it's this interesting dynamic where, in one hand, they seem to concede on some of the points that it's almost permissible to protest some of these things.
00:25:35.300Maybe not protest, but at least speak up against it, right?
00:25:54.300They want you to burn down buildings and fight with the police because this is happening in unison with the emerging police state and surveillance state in the UK, right?
00:28:40.300Why on earth this bloke's allowed to go around saying that?
00:28:44.300And actually saying, you know, if this happens, and telling people, hit electricity stations outside cities.
00:28:53.300If anybody else was talking like that, they would be arrested and imprisoned.
00:28:59.300Yet this bloke is going around, he's doing podcast after podcast after podcast, dripping this into the national consciousness that there's a civil war coming.
00:29:12.300And people are now talking about it everywhere.
00:29:49.300It's going to be, you will not be allowed to protest.
00:29:52.300These political ideologies are no longer allowed at all.
00:29:58.300They'll use the online harms bill to police the Internet.
00:30:01.300They'll use the anti-protest laws, which are going through, some have gone through and some are still going through, to just criminalize even talking about immigration or anything else that they do not want you to talk about.
00:30:17.300And there's plenty we should be discussing, not just demographics, but they will use the same laws that they're bringing in to just absolutely crush.
00:30:27.300And they will have the excuse if violence starts on the streets.
00:30:33.300The annoying thing is that's how the British people are feeling, but they have no recourse apart from violence on the streets.
00:30:52.300It's interesting because obviously the anger is, as you said, not only justified, but it's a good initial step, right?
00:31:00.300It's kind of a necessary step, I think, for many to see, just visually see these images of angry Britons out on the street protesting, standing in front of these migrant hotels that are just costing millions and millions and millions of pounds, just pouring it down a black hole.
00:31:16.300And it's kind of like, well, what do you do?
00:31:19.300And obviously what you're doing then is saying, well, take that, take the energy, take the anger, take the resentment and the other disgust that we feel about those who have done this to us and put it to use instead, right?
00:31:38.300It's a good initial step, but it's about what happens after or maybe prior to it actually, you know, completely getting out of hand or something like that.
00:31:46.300I've got, I've got nothing against protest.
00:31:50.300I think we need to, I think we, and it helps inform a wider, a wider audience of people of the things that are going on because it is reported on.
00:32:00.300Even if it's done in a negative light, it does highlight the problems that we're facing.
00:32:06.300But, and this has been shown thousands of times, it does very little to change the government's mind.
00:32:55.300Was this the, maybe this is Epping elsewhere as well, but I remember a while ago it was the Ballymena, Northern Irish town, right?
00:33:01.300Yeah, that was, they handled it slightly different in Northern Ireland because it wasn't the government and the police that got rid of the people there.
00:33:10.300They just went round and asked them to leave.
00:33:16.300I mean, so the media had said like, oh, these racist riots here, you know, kind of thing.
00:33:20.300And I'm not sure how many they dealt with or whatever, but the Roma, the gypsies there, they basically concede like, okay, the quote unquote bad racist that they won were leaving town.
00:33:31.300Of course, that means that they go somewhere else.
00:33:33.300But I'm saying, from our point of view too, though, to push back against your idea a little bit there, it's like that, well, I guess that doesn't mean it's over, obviously.
00:34:30.300It's a very difficult situation for them because if they take to the streets and they protest, they're labelled as, and this is why these labels don't work anymore.
00:34:41.300You've got normal families out in the streets saying, listen, we're worried about our kids.
00:34:46.300There was a 14-year-old girl that was sexually assaulted.
00:34:49.300Like, I've got a 14-year-old daughter and I don't want that to happen to her.
00:35:17.300What Eric's done in America with Return to the Land, and along the same lines what we're doing with the Woodlander Initiative, has opened up an argument that says, okay, we've got a group of people here that are pretty sick with what's going on in modernity, in modern society.
00:35:39.300And we don't really want to be a part of that.
00:35:42.300And we're sick and tired of fighting through the ballot box or standing up in hotels, outside hotels and protesting.
00:35:50.300So what we're going to do is we're going to build our own thing.
00:35:52.300We'll stay within the law and we'll stay legal, but we're just going to build our own thing and concentrate on our culture and rebuild that, a more traditional way of life.
00:36:03.300If they start to crack down on that, people are going to get angry because there's nothing wrong with that.
00:36:10.300And it's hard for them to point fingers and say, you shouldn't be allowed to do that.
00:37:16.300It's about, you know, prepping ahead of connecting the dots, seeing where this is going.
00:37:21.300And even if the outside world, in the way that they're shaping it, happened to be hugely successful and, you know, quote unquote, peaceful or economically, you know, great or whatever, which I don't think it's possible.
00:37:32.300But even if it was, I kind of don't want to live in that world anyway.
00:37:36.300We actually want to live with like-minded people that know what's going on, right?
00:37:51.300But having said that, what we're trying to generate with our organization, as much as demographics is the key issue at the moment in this country, and we recognize that and we understand that, there's also many other issues.
00:38:12.300There is the issue of that creeping technocracy, which they haven't been, you know, they haven't been shy about telling us what they want with a digital ID.
00:38:21.300And we know that you have to have that to go online eventually.
00:39:11.300In the UK, they're going to ban petrol and diesel cars 2030.
00:39:16.300That date keeps cropping up quite often.
00:39:19.300So 2030, you're not going to be able to buy a petrol or diesel car.
00:39:24.300They will find a way to get the older ones off the road as well.
00:39:28.300They're going to extend the MOT period, which is where they check the cars if they're safe, for two years, I believe, instead of every 12 months.
00:39:36.300And then what they'll say is, no, that's failed and it can't go on the road.
00:39:40.300So you'll have to have an electric vehicle.
00:39:42.300Not everyone's going to be able to charge them.
00:40:04.300Your access to everything will be controlled by your digital ID.
00:40:08.300If you're quite happy to live like that, then just sit around and do nothing because that's coming.
00:40:16.300But if you want another way to live, then you better start looking at organizations that are putting together something now because we're talking less than five years away.
00:41:13.300But at the end of the day, what you've got to do, and Eric was dead right just to take the bull by the horns in America and actually have the balls to do it.
00:41:36.300And I think you've talked about this idea too, but obviously just the idea of also then engaging with the outside world.
00:41:42.300Offer services, build businesses, engage in the economy outside, pull it into, you know, the community building efforts and expand more, build more.
00:41:52.300I mean, there's countless examples now of other ethnic groups doing similar things.
00:41:57.300I mean, in Texas, they have the Muslims doing it.
00:41:59.300I mean, Muslims are doing it in the UK, right?
00:42:01.300I'm not sure if there's a here is our land kind of thing outstate, but they can kind of skirt around the religious thing a little bit too, right?
00:42:09.300Oh, it's just a religious community, you see.
00:42:11.300And that might or might not give you different legal leeway as well.
00:42:15.300I'm not even sure in the UK if that's something that would be possible.
00:42:19.300There's a lot of intentional communities worldwide, not just in this country or in America.
00:43:32.300And I think what we're looking to do is retain our culture.
00:43:36.300And more than that, I think we have to rebuild our culture because there's so many people out there that they don't know what that culture is.
00:43:47.300It's being stripped away and replaced with something that I don't like to see.