Publisher & Editor

Whole Life Times has always reflected the interests of its Publisher and Editor, Denis McCarthy, but it has never been intended as a personal platform. From the beginning, Denis has seen his role less as that of someone presenting a finished worldview and more as a person who helps bring together ideas, people, resources and conversations that may help readers understand themselves, one another and the wider living world more deeply.

That orientation began well before Whole Life Times itself. Denis trained and worked as a reference librarian, including at Murdoch University in Western Australia, and this early experience profoundly shaped the way he came to think about information. To him, librarianship was not simply the care and organisation of books. It was the practice of helping people find their way through knowledge, connecting a question with a source, an idea, an organisation, another person or a line of inquiry that might open something new.

While working as a reference librarian at Murdoch University in 1977, Denis came across the work of Bill Mollison, co-originator of Permaculture. He subsequently invited Mollison to the Down To Earth Association's Cambray and Nanga ConFests on alternative and holistic lifestyles in 1978 and 1979, and organised a lecture tour through south-western Western Australia in 1978. That tour helped stimulate the formation of the Permaculture Association of Western Australia, and Denis later became a founding director of the Permaculture Institute of Western Australia, which ran some of the state's earliest Permaculture Designer Diploma courses.

The relationship with Mollison was part of a much wider immersion in the alternative-lifestyle, environmental and personal-growth movements of the 1970s and early 1980s. Denis was involved with the Down To Earth Association in Western Australia, the Moontime School for Alternatives and related activities that brought together ecological living, community, psychology, spirituality, education, appropriate technology and social change. These experiences helped shape the integrative outlook that would later become central to Whole Life Times.

In 1980 Denis spent time in North America and attended the Omega Institute's Summer School, where he also spent time with Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan. He later organised Pir Vilayat's first visit to Australia in 1988, including a public lecture and workshops in Perth. The universalist and contemplative dimensions of Sufism became one of a number of spiritual and philosophical influences that informed Denis's approach to life without leading him to see any single tradition as possessing all the answers.

When Whole Life Times began in 1982 as a free tabloid publication, these different strands came together. Denis was interested in holistic health, psychology, ecology, spirituality, community, personal development, social transformation and the growing field of sustainable living, but he was even more interested in the relationships between them. Whole Life Times became a way of making those relationships visible and of extending the community-education and reference-library role beyond the relatively small circles already involved in alternative movements.

Publishing was accompanied by practical involvement in the distribution of books and recordings. Through New Age Media, later NAM Distribution, Denis distributed material from Tagari Publications and other publishers, music labels and producers of educational audio and video recordings. This was another expression of the same underlying impulse: helping worthwhile ideas and resources travel. Some of that work continues today through WholeLifeResources.org and Wellemart.

By the late 1980s Denis's professional life was also moving increasingly into psychology. He commenced clinical practice in 1987 and, after regular print publication of Whole Life Times ceased in 1989, undertook postgraduate training in clinical psychology. His subsequent decades of work as a Clinical Psychologist added another important dimension to the Whole Life perspective, particularly an appreciation of the complexity of human development, suffering, resilience, relationships, anxiety, meaning and the different ways in which people attempt to understand and change their lives.

Psychology did not replace the interests that had shaped Whole Life Times; it deepened them. Over time Denis became increasingly interested in humanistic and transpersonal psychology, consciousness, systems thinking, ecological psychology and the relationship between personal and planetary transformation. The questions that interested him as a younger librarian and publisher—how people find reliable knowledge, how apparently separate subjects connect, and how information can contribute to constructive change—continued to accompany his clinical and educational work.

Whole Life Times eventually re-emerged as a digital publication, allowing Denis to return to publishing without recreating the limitations of the old print model. The digital environment made possible something closer to the original aspiration: a free magazine connected with an expanding archive, interviews and dialogues, learning opportunities, books, resources, organisations and other pathways through knowledge. The publication could once again serve as a community reference service, but now potentially for readers anywhere in the world.

This renewed publishing work has gradually expanded into a wider group of related initiatives. Whole Life Times Dialogues provides a way of engaging directly with thinkers, researchers, practitioners and change agents. Gaiarcadia and Gaiarcadia Academy extend the work into dialogue, education and gatherings concerned with humanity's relationship with the Earth and the possibilities of an emerging ecozoic or Gaian civilisation. Whole Life Universal has become a broader field within which publishing, education, resources, projects, ethical commerce and participation can increasingly connect.

Denis's role within all of this remains deliberately integrative. He is interested in specialists and depends upon their knowledge, but his own instinct has always been to look across disciplinary boundaries and ask how the pieces fit together. He is drawn to the generalist task of connecting health with psychology, psychology with consciousness, consciousness with culture, culture with economics, economics with ecology, and ecology with the larger evolutionary story of life on Earth.

That same outlook also helps explain his continuing attachment to Fremantle, where he has lived since 1981, and to the practical side of ecological living. His interest in gardening reaches back to his father and was reinforced by his friendship with Bill Mollison. Denis recalls Mollison sitting at his back door in 1981, looking into the yard and saying, “Denis, plant it!” The garden that followed has never been a finished demonstration site so much as an evolving form of urban permaculture—something continually changing, being observed, experimented with and learned from.

There is a similar quality to Denis's approach to Whole Life Times. He does not regard WLT as a completed project with a fixed doctrine. It is an evolving publication and field of inquiry whose purpose is to keep learning, making connections and bringing forward people and ideas that may be useful to others. As Publisher and Editor, his task is therefore both editorial and curatorial: to ask questions, listen, research, write, interview, connect, publish and create pathways through which other people's knowledge and experience can be encountered.

As Whole Life Times enters its next phase, Denis is increasingly interested in what can be preserved and passed on. Decades of magazine material, interviews, books, recordings, research interests and relationships can now become part of a much richer searchable field of knowledge, eventually assisted by The Whole Life Universal Guide. The purpose is not to create a digital replica of Denis or to present his views as authoritative, but to contribute what he has learned while connecting it with a much larger body of knowledge held by the many people, traditions and disciplines that have shaped Whole Life Times.

In that sense, the role of Publisher and Editor today is still recognisably connected with the young reference librarian who first became fascinated by the possibility of helping people find ideas that might matter. The tools are different, the field has become much larger, and the questions are more urgent, but the underlying impulse remains much the same: to help knowledge travel, to help connections become visible, and to contribute in whatever modest way possible to healthier people, more compassionate communities and a flourishing living Earth.