I mean, if we wanna turn the death of the earth into capital, we're doing a good job. And then what do you do with that capital? I mean, what meaning does money have if it's an unlivable planet. (upbeat music) Greetings earth dwellers, welcome to the podcast. My guest today, back for his second appearance on the show is an icon, a true legend. One of the environmental movements leading voices, Paul Hawken. In addition to his profound work as a planetary change agent, Paul is also an entrepreneur. He founded both Erewhon markets and Smith and Hawken and author of eight books, including the groundbreaking New York times bestseller Drawdowm. Now Paul is back with an astonishing, beautiful new book called Regeneration, ending the climate crisis in one generation, as well as a corresponding nonprofit by the same name, regeneration.org, a collective work that together aims to guide and inspire the burgeoning climate movement. Paul is a friend, he's a mentor, he's a lighthouse and a man who has indelibly shaped my perspective, my philosophy and my actions when it comes to ecological responsibility. It's an honor to host him today. This is a remarkable exchange and my intention and hope is that this message will do for you what it has and continues to do for me. So please click that subscribe button and notification bell and enjoy my conversation with the great Paul Hawken. Well, let's talk about the environment. Okay. Let's talk about the environment. Should we do that?
Yeah. It's good to see you first of all. Really good to see you. Yeah, thank you for coming. I hear you so much you know, like I feel like I'm in your presence. I appreciate that. No, I am. Yeah, we had all these plans of getting together and doing all kinds of stuff and obviously the pandemic put that aside, but I'm happy to be in your presence today. Thank you so much, really. The occasion of course, being this beautiful, extraordinary new book, that's about to come out, regeneration ending the climate crisis in one generation, you gave me this gorgeous folio version of the book. Only a few exist in the world. Yes, Is that true.
That's true. I'm feeling very grateful for that. So thanks. Yeah, It just is a special people. It's exciting. It's been a minute since you've had a book out. Yeah, April 17 was the last book Drawdown and this one is coming out in about six countries almost at the same time, actually 54 countries right now in September. Right from the get go out of the gate that's unusual. That's too confident. Yeah. This time the publishers are. last time, they were kind of waiting and watching and looking. Now Drawdown is in 17 languages. Right. Well, that book was a ground breaker for myself and so many people. And I feel like this book is the perfect follow up to that in that it strikes perhaps an even more optimistic tone when it comes to solving this great existential crisis that we find ourselves in. But I think the overarching theme of it is inclusion like inclusivity. And it's very empowering in the sense that it's like letting us into all these amazing things that are occurring and how we can participate in them in so many different ways. Absolutely. I'm just like everybody else in a sense. I live in a world. I look at the world and try to figure it out. I mean, I'm no different whether I'm a journalist or not, doesn't make any difference. Everyone does that to a certain extent. And a journalist might do a bit more because they try to share what they see and what I have seen and not just since Drawdown was created, but before that, but certainly since then is a world is going into crisis around climate and more rapidly than was expected. And at the same time, even though I would say a majority of the people in the United States certainly and in Europe are empathetic, sympathetic, understand the basic cause and effects. They're not doing anything. They're not engaged. So how could it be, that you see the writing on the wall, you see this impending crisis, you're getting a very visceral sense of what's happening, on the ground and floods and cold and heat and drought and et cetera. And yet there's still this disengagement. And so regeneration was really about looking at that, not blaming people for being disengaged, but trying to understand why we are not. And I'll just clear myself generally, but what would engage us? And what's prohibiting it, what's stopping us and what would open up humanity to the idea of working together? Yeah. I think from a psychological perspective, there doesn't seem to be a meaningful on-ramp for people in the sense that I think you're correct. There's an overwhelming awareness now that didn't exist perhaps even a decade ago. And I think most people are good faith actors and wanna do the right thing and recycle or do what they can, but it doesn't feel like any of these things amount to very much, right? Like I can take personal responsibility for a certain subset of decisions that I make every day, but is this really moving the needle? So there's a lack of agency or connectivity to the solutions that would really get people emotionally engaged and feeling like they actually are making a difference. Absolutely. I think that there's so many things you covered right there. So break it open a little bit. It's got a connectivity, which is that the root cause of global warming is a massive disconnection between each other, between people, between people in nature and nature itself, which is caused by humans, habitat fragmentation, pollution desertification of the oceans and onwards. And so regenerating and reversing the climate crisis is really about reconnecting those broken strands. And that's what the solutions really are, as opposed to sort of standalone techniques or technologies, that is going to fix it. That word fix doesn't even belong in the conversation because it's not an it, and you can't fix it. The atmosphere is the biosphere that's the same thing and we are a part of it. And nature never makes a mistake only we do. So let's look at what we're doing. And regeneration is very much about alignment with the living world, with the way it works and always has. And so, as you said, what we've done conversationally and sort of declaratively and almost imperatively is individuate the problem, which is this is what you can do or should do. And it's true. Those are good things, recycling and use cold water in your wash machine, and try not to drive an EV if you can afford it, et cetera, et cetera. But I think people understand that even if they do them, they know it's not sufficient to the task at hand. And so actually makes people more disempowered in a funny way, even though they're actually participating in the kind of token way. And then they look to governments, they look to the conference of the parties, the UN framework on climate change. They look for these annual meetings, just one in Glasgow, in November for something to happen, like hoping that politicians will get together and solve the problem. If politicians knew what to do, we wouldn't be in the situation we are today. And that's just not gonna happen. Not to say we can say it. So then you feel like there's this gulf between these huge Meta or institutions, corporations and governments, and then you as an individual. And that's, again, what regeneration is trying to say, whoa, wait a minute. that's not where the solution is gonna come from. Right. Regeneration is sort of bedfellows with this idea of symbiosis. Like how can we live more symbiotically on the planet and understanding that, and really embodying that begins with really fully embracing and acknowledging that we are all micro systems that are part of a macro system. And it's sort of belying the idea that nature is over there and we're over here and we venture into nature and out of nature. And yet, fundamentally that's just a false, because the cells in our body and everything that we're made up of is of course part and parcel of this environment. And in terms of the solution, once you acknowledge that, I think what you begin to understand what the book kind of does a beautiful job conveying is the idea that there's this, the problem is systemic, that we can't truly move into, this more symbiotic regenerative relationship with the planet until we have some corrective measures with our systems at large, right? There's this gigantic misalignment of incentives across the board, be it by dent of governmental bodies or the tectonic plates of capitalism, all of these forces that the individual feels powerless to have any control over or say over that perpetuate the problem. So, short of revolution, like how are we creating better incentives for the systems that are in play? Or how do we create better systems with incentives that could supplant the systems that are leading us astray? That is the question. And I think that between the individual and meta institutions and global institutions is something else called agency. And agency is sort of been overlooked. There is no such thing as an individual. That's sort of a delusion we wake up with in the morning. And, but functionally, there's no such thing. And every person has agency. It's their family. As their friends, it's their community, it's their neighborhood, it's their churches or synagogues or school. It's where they teach, it's their city. It's their company, colleagues. It goes on and on and on. And we have a network we're part of networks. And that is where we have influence and where we can make a difference. And I think a lot of people have felt, come to think that, if we get renewables right, or we do this, we do that. that again, we'll fix it, but like there's some Archimedean solution. If we pull hard enough the problem is gonna go away. Right. And rather than understanding that the solution is everywhere, it's ubiquitous, it's local, regional. It's where agency exists. And that is everywhere on earth with every culture, every society and every country. And so that's the good news, which is that we can solve this, we really can. but we can't solve it, if we think someone's gonna solve it for us. Or if we come to believe that individuals are to blame and that the responsible and they'll solve it, we kinda know that one's not true. Right. I'm not saying we all have, we don't have personal responsibility. Of course we do. But that alone is going to be sufficient. And so when we look at the institutions with the perverse incentives that they have, the economic institutions, the political institutions, they are all extractive. That is to say every institution that we've come to know and trust or not trust, but buy from, or believe in, or invest in or own shares in, is extractive. And there was this taking life. And we sort of take that for granted that don't make a mess, we'll clean up your mess, that kind of thing. And that's sustainability in a way, but extraction is taking life. And when you take life, that's degeneration, that's what degeneration is when you take life. And so regeneration is really not about blaming and sort of demonizing those institutions or those economic sectors so much the same way. that road, that degeneration road doesn't go much further. That's everything's screaming at us, all the science, our experiences, and so forth. Like that road doesn't go much further. Why are we going down that road? And so regeneration is about a 180 pivot. Like, can we just stop and go the other way? Can we not regenerate the world and have a GDP and an economy and jobs rather than degenerate it? And the fact is we can, and it's really a question of healing, the future of stealing the future, because what we're doing is stealing the future. Now it used to be from our children. Now it's from ourselves practically. And so it really isn't like I could say something that what's happening with respect to climate is wrong or not at all. It's all great. What everybody's doing is fantastic. But unless we actually do address those institutional incentives, and actually assumptions that are so deep, that people don't even understand them as assumptions, then we won't have a chance at all, because the... one of the things to go back to the fix it thing, like bill gates and others, like John Kerry, for example, are saying, if we don't do nuclear, we're screwed, okay. And this idea that there is this one thing, but you could have renewable energy or nuclear energy for the whole world today. And we'd still be going right over the cliff because we're destroying all the living systems on earth. We're destroying our oceans, our fisheries, our land, our forest, our insects our pollinators. And so that has nothing to do with renewable energy or fossil fuel energy, that has to do with us. And so we have to see it, as you said earlier, as the system is whole, you can't silo it and separate it out and say, we're gonna do that and do this and do that. You can do that, but unless you step back and look at it systemically, you're not gonna get to the core cause or core cure. But the idea being with this, kind of typical optimistic flare that you have being that, we can create a non extractive relationship with the planet without having to, throw capitalism to the wind, like within certain confines of the system that we've erected, we can course correct and still create proper incentives. I mean the extraction would, I guess, would be the economic benefit that someone would get out of changing the relationship with the planet to be symbiotic and regenerative. Well, the capitalist system really takes life and turns it into money. Right. It squeezes every last... And being extractive by its very nature. Right. But you're saying that still within that we can move in a better direction here. What is that? That's a really good question because nobody invented the capitalist system. It was named after the fact in a sense economic systems arise. And then we kind of tag them later. I don't know what a regenerative economic system will be called. I don't think it'll be called capitalistic. It doesn't mean that existing institutions and businesses have to go out of business and we need to replace them. I'm not saying that at all, but the advent of the big core and the different types of corporations and so forth that have a very different priority in terms of their purpose. Yeah. And part of that priority is short-term gains over long-term. Right. You know, well-being for all, right? Absolutely. So that's a tough one to tackle. Well, I mean, if we wanna turn the death of the earth into capital, we're doing a good job. And then what are you gonna do with that capital? I mean, what meaning does money have if it's an unlivable planet? And so I think, but I do think you're seeing in corporations a real big shift. I'm not talking about the old commitment to net zero by 2050, all that sort of stuff. Commitments don't mean a thing. Goals don't mean a thing. They don't do anything. They're not actions. They're just commitments, just words. But in my experience in the last couple of years and even during COVID, what you're seeing, when you talk to CEOs of very large companies, very large ones, the largest in the world is their eyes are different. What I mean by that is they're not being nice and saying, yo, we have to renew our social license and do more sustainability and blah, blah, blah. Which is what they've been doing, kind of, they get it, they have children, they have brothers and sisters, have family. That's a pretty big paradigm shift. It's a really big one. and they find themselves getting it so to speak, when they're at the helm of these extraordinary corporations that have hundreds of thousands of employees and they're in 42 countries or whatever, and going, huh. And so that's what I'm seeing now, as opposed to this suave, or shored, just we'll just keep moving along and we'll hire some more. Dusting of green washing on top to make sure that we take the press off our back or whatever, right? Yeah, no. And so you're seeing companies like Nestle, which talk about a bad boy reputation 20 years ago for baby formula in Africa. I mean just, but they went through a couple more CEOs since then, who really, really cleaned up their act. They've sold off all their plastic water bottle companies. Probably the biggest single use plastic manufacturer in the world. Coca cola. But now, their slogan is generation regeneration and converting 600,000 farms to regenerative agriculture. And this is really interesting because you say, well, they're doing that to be nice, no. I'm not saying they're not nice. I'm just saying, are they doing that to be responsible? No, they wanna be responsible. They're doing it because they're an old line company they've been around for a long time. These farms, some of them go back five generations. They've been dealing with the farms for five generations, these are relationships, and these farms in south America and Africa for cacao and coffee are hurting and they're hurting from drought, from heat. And so regeneration is about ensuring the resilience and the longevity of those relationships and their supply chain. It's like an infrastructure bill. Right. If they wanna continue doing what they're doing, They're gonna have to look at the soil and the wellbeing of the farm lands. Even the varieties, Arabica coffees, they're looking at wild varieties that can stand 5, 6, 7 degrees more heat than the extant ones and grafting those onto the trees and working with agroforestry and mixed cropping and all different ways to preserve water, capture more water. But what I'm saying is regeneration. Isn't like goody two-shoes. like we're doing this because it's the right thing to do. It is. But it actually is very practical. There is a bit of a race of foot though. Like those changes, I'm glad to hear that they're happening and certain large actors like that are moving in the right direction. But at what pace compared to the rate at which we're basically ridding ourselves of the Amazonian rainforest and dumping toxins into our waterways, et cetera, right? Like, is it fast enough to overtake the status quo? I think the similarity between climate change or global warming really is the right word. And what we're seeing on a corporate level is that neither are linear. And so they're not linear systems. And, but either is change on this level. And I think the big change has been the climate change was conceptual read about it, heard about it. We should probably do something. Don't you think? Yeah, okay. Right. Now it's experiential. And that is the big change. And so there's no question in my mind that the climate movement, whatever we should call it will be the biggest movement in the history of humanity. No question about it, but because of weather, not because there's a charismatic leader, not because somebody is... It's on our front doorstep. It's on our front doorstep. And so the question really isn't whether it will be the question is how do we work together? How will it be configured? How will we work together? And I think what everyone is seeing is that we need each other. This is not something where somebody is gonna be a hero or heroine, and like, hey, we did this. It's like we need to connect. We need to share, we need to cross fund. We need to collaborate, we need to cooperate. We need to support. And you're really feeling that in the NGO community and the volunteer community and citizen groups in municipal groups and corporations. You're seeing that, let's forget all those boundaries, so to speak. I mean, they exist for technical, political, financial reasons, but we need to work together. Forget the differences. What unites us is far more important than what used to divide us. Sorry to interrupt the flow. We'll be right back with more awesome. But I want a snack a moment to talk to you about the importance of nutrition. The thing is, most people I know actually already know how to eat better and aspire to incorporate more whole plants, more fruits, vegetables, seeds, beans, and lagoons into their daily routine. Sadly, however, without the kitchen tools and support very few end up sticking with it. So because adopting a plant-based diet transformed my life so profoundly. And because I want everybody to experience some version of what I've experienced, we decided to tackle and solve this very common problem. The solution we've devised, I'm proud to say is the plant power meal planner are affordable, all-in-one, digital platform, that sets you up for nutrition excellence by providing access to thousands of highly customizable, super delicious, and easy to prepare plant-based recipes. 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It had been leaked, so it was sort of being whispered about, but it came out today and it's strong, very, very strong. And it said for the first time unequivocally climate change that we are witnessing is caused by human beings. It always up until now, the fifth assessment all, and going back to the first one was equivocal. They actually kind of left a little space there to say, well... And what is the organization or governing body that puts this together? The United nations framework on climate change, the UN FCC, which does the conference of the parties every year and the 26th one will occur in Glasgow in the first week of November. And, but two things came out of it, which are some good news and it oddly enough, which is that, the science has changed. So now we know that as soon as we stop increasing greenhouse gases, that is net zero emissions that actually warming will level off right away. It used to be that up until this assessment that we were baking in increasing global warming for decades if not centuries, which kind of was a disincentive of , if we get it right, we're still screwed kind of thing. And now they said, no, no. So it's providing a very powerful incentive for countries and companies and people in cities to accelerate that move towards net zero emissions. The other thing it said though, which is the bad news, which is there are irreversible changes now in effect that can't be reversed. And one of them is melting of ice. One of them is sea level rise. And so there is no question that, low lying cities like the Miamis and others will be, Venice, unfortunately, will be flooded, will be underwater by the end of the century or before. And so our work is cut out for us, but I do think that the most important thing is that there's a hundred and I forget the number of 180, some other countries that are participating in this IPCC report. And it's called consensus science, and there's no such thing as consensus science is evidentiary. And what it meant was that the Vatican or Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or China, Russia could actually tamp down the language and the summary report and every country in the world signed on to this report. No dissent. No dissent. That's powerful. But then it becomes an issue of translating that into action. Yeah. And what the report said. Yeah. Report said that politics has no excuse from this point on. Every country the other thing is that every country is going to suffer. There is no place that will be exempt. I can think of a few American politicians who will find an excuse. Yes. You know what I mean? When they're indebted to their constituencies and the big corporations that exist in their route, in their respective territories, and the lobbying efforts that go into maintaining a certain status quo and kind of placating the public so that they can continue to push agendas and legislation that are corporate favorable and allow these bad actors to perpetuate their bad actions. No question. I think, however that at regeneration, we're working with a group of marketing people and communications people who, by their own words, left the dark side and went into the nonprofit world to work with social justice, women's issues, sex trafficking, voting issues, and they're working with us NGOarticlegroup.org. And what we're looking at is what figure ground shift can be precipitated that has occurred before. And one of them was for example, gay shame and gay pride. So in 2010, you could run for Congress in the United States and basically deprecate LGBQT. Get away with it, still get away with it. And then get elected. 2012, the same parties said, oh my daughter happens to be a lesbian. You know, I'm all of a sudden it was like, oh, well, they're okay. It's okay. I'm okay. Because you couldn't get elected two years later, or at least not reliably put it that way. I'm not saying there isn't tremendous anti LGBQT in the conservative, in the evangelism movement. There is of course, in other countries, but the last month was gay pride month. And so, multi-colored flags and this and everywhere you saw it. So what was that shift from shame to pride? It was well created by the community itself. Okay. So the same thing holds true with climate, which is that has been marked by shame, by the way, guilt, fear, threat, blame, that hasn't worked, and it's made people numb. It's made people tune out. It has created antipathies, like fossil fuel workers, who work at Chevron or some feel like, they're being blamed and so forth. And so what is the figure ground shift where people can feel that we are together and we all can make a difference in not just again, by your cold water in your washing machine better. I mean, by coming together, and the ways in which people have always come together, that's we are social beings. We're very social. And so that's what we're looking at right now, which is what is it that will bring us together around climate? And what brings us together is that when you start to parse the distinct solutions, even though they're systems they're connected is that they better life for everyone. They make a better life. So that if you looked at them in the absence of climate science or extreme weather, and said, good, not good. Should we do it? Not do it? You wanna do every one of them, every one of them. And I think what regeneration, the point it tries to make is that we have focused for so long on this idea that there's a small select, intelligent, informed finance group of people who are gonna solve the problem. And we've used the term future existential threat like this is a future existential threat over and over and over and over, like, you should do something cause, and that doesn't work and never has worked. And what regeneration is saying is that the solutions that address global warming actually address meeting current human needs. And what we've got to do is direct ourselves to each other. There's 4.1 billion people who wake up every morning. And the only thing they can think about is current human needs, their needs. It could be food, it could be income, it could be a job. It could be safety. It could be food security back to food, getting the kids to school, getting them in school, affording books. I mean, it goes on and on. This is what the bulk of humanity wakes up with every morning. They are not gonna be active in the climate movement. And we don't need quote people who are really trying to better their own lives to be active in the climate movement. But they do need renewable energy. They do need electricity, they do need clean water. They do need better farming techniques. They do need cleaner food. They do all these things that are synonymous with actually reversing global warming, actually reverses human suffering as well. Promoting equity for all. And that's a big part of the book, this idea of human rights and social justice and education and empowering women, because you have to raise the floor on people's sort of daily subsistence levels to create a situation in which they're not only benefiting from these changes that are being made, but then well taken care of enough so that they can become part of this movement as well. They, by de facto just by leading their lives, they become part of it. And in Drawdown one of my regrets about Drawdown is that we had educating girls as a solution, well solution. And then we actually looked at it in terms of carbon. That is if we actually provided schooling for the 145 million girls who are not in school, who could be, and what effect that would have on carbon emissions. And that goes to population deforestation, all these sorts of things. In this one, we didn't do that. And what I said is that actually most of these young women are in countries where they need to have a higher carbon footprint. They need more, they're in poverty and we and the privilege north or wherever, shouldn't be looking at them for changing their life. So that there's less greenhouse gas emissions. We should be looking at educating these girls as a human right. And it's just a human right. And stop there, don't go any further. And we really have to look at ourselves, the top 10% of income earners in the world. And that's over 38,000 puts you in the top 10% are responsible for 46 to 50% of all greenhouse gas emissions. So we have to work out it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So would you change that section in Drawdown, you could rewrite it. Yeah. Yeah. The there's a new ed there. They're going to stick to it, but I'm not. That's why I did. This has always attended to be the SQL to Drawdown. I don't know what they're gonna do with that, but the importance is to start to see again, I say anything if you want to understand poverty, look to see who's benefiting, right? That's a recurring loop. Nobody wants to be poor. And also poverty doesn't want to be fixed. It wants to fix itself. Explain that a little bit. It's called Pride, dignity, purpose, and people who are poor don't want a handout Don't want, shiploads of surplus grain to be dumped on the shores of some country and passed out. I mean, they may need it at that moment because of some sort of food shortage, but that doesn't solve anything because it's not addressing the conditions that caused it in the first place. And so all of regeneration is about creating the conditions for self-organization that's what your body does. That's what every living system does. It creates the conditions for self-organization. And so when we think about solving an intractable problem, like global warming, oh man, it's impossible. What can we do? And look all these mega institutions and political stupidity and ignorance and so forth. But if we step back and say, well, what are the conditions that create self-organization or self abnegation? That is that destroy that then that's where we wanna go. And that is the source of change. I mean, regeneration is innate to every living system. It's innate to us. We regenerate every day, we practice it every day. We do it with our bodies. We do with our dog, we do it with our children. We do with our friends. We do with our mom, we do whatever. We are actively trying to improve the life of others. It's so human, our 30 trillion cells, we generate every nanosecond or we wouldn't be having this conversation, right? Right. And they do it without our intervention. So planetarily, this is a combination of getting out of the way and allowing things to heal themselves and repair themselves. And on top of that, certain, sort of strategic surgical human interventions to promote that regeneration so that it can become self perpetuating. Yeah. It's not getting out of the way so much. It's not thinking hierarchically that you know what needs to be done. It's a matter of doing, not knowing what needs to be done. And then that's what we've done up to now, this needs to be done. And all of this needs to be done. This needs to be done, that the people wanna heal themselves. They wanna heal the society, the places they live in, and they wanna heal the land. I was once in the Northwest, this is years ago now. But when, there are hanging spotted owls in the back of pickup trucks, cause there loggers and the newcomers is so to speak of from the cities where just at pun intended, I guess, loggerheads, and fighting. 'cause the loggers felt that these city slickers or these liberals were tying to make them jobless, right? And I remember being in a city, was a town really, and to talk about the future. So I speak and the aisle is aisle on this side was all the loggers and the guys of the plaid shirts. And pickup trucks on this side was, the environmentalists and the conservationists and the people who really wanted to take care of everything. But I just ask simple questions and I said, how many people here want their rivers to have more fish or less fish in 30, 40 years? And everybody raised their hand like more, how many people want cleaner water, dirty water, and all always went out, not today, but 30, 40 years raise your hand. How many people would want their children if you have them to be able to stay here and get living wage jobs and stay close to the family, rather than having to go to the city? Everybody raised their hand. How many people want hunting to get better or worse? Everybody raise their hand. How many... just went on and on. I said, you're all in agreement. You agree on everything you want. So the question is, instead of talking about what you don't agree about is to work backwards from where you agree. But then it has to be about finding a way forward that isn't a threat or a perceived threat to people's livelihoods. Of course. Yeah, of course. Absolutely. So there has to be a just transition for coworkers, has to be a just transition for fossil fuel workers. There has to be compassionate. There has to be care. There has to be acknowledgement that these people are good people and they have families and they care about the world just as much as you do, they care about it a different way. They've been taught in a different way. They think in a different way. That doesn't make them bad. Doesn't make you good. And so absolutely. And that's what it means for us to come together. But the most powerful way you come together is to listen not to know. And so again, if you go at the climate as a know it all I know you don't listen up, it's gonna fail. Right. But if you look at it from the point of view of the inherent values, that we almost all uphold in terms of what it means to be safe, to be a family, to have children, to not have children. If that's your choice, to be a part of your community, to be respectful, we're in agreement and what the world wants is to me, and this is my belief is that we've created such meaningless employment for the bulk of humanity. I mean, they know it's meaningless, it's repetitive, repetitive, excuse me. It is kind of, it doesn't challenge them in terms of intelligence. It doesn't pay well, it's in poor working conditions. I'll give an example. I calculated how much a worker would make in 1800 and the dark satanic hubs in mills of England. And these are textile mills. It's a penny an hour. Okay And today's dollars because the penny was related to golden silver. Then it's 30 cents. It was 30 cents an hour. At that time in today's dollars. The average pay today for garment workers in the world is 30 cents an hour. So, in 220 years we haven't changed the pay scale for garment workers at all. So what people are looking for is purpose and meaning and dignity. And there could be no more meaningful work in the world today, which is to restore life on earth. So the book is very much about all the different, fascinating ways that that can happen. And it has a demonstrative important impact on reversing global warming, as opposed to, oh, get solar, get an EV, do this too. I'm not saying you shouldn't do that if you can, but for most of humanity, those are not options. And so we have to look at it from a much broader, more enlarging, more upholding way that relates to what people can do. And the other thing I think it's important to do is to stop thinking that this is what you ought to do. These are the top 10 solutions. You should focus on those. That was another thing that Drawdown did inadvertently was his to rank all the solutions by impact. And then people said, all looked at the top 10 or the top 15 and not to say that they aren't proportionally impactful. They are, but actually the most important things for you to do are the ones that light you up, where you just get excited. Nobody wants to wake up in the morning, and says I can't wait to mitigate today. Yeah. That was a similar message in Margaret's book, it was called like fighting the climate crisis or something like that. I don't know if you read that book. It's a good one. But I have her on the show. Yeah. And it's just how it's all about, like, how do you get people plugged into this? And you got to get them excited. And I think because we're so divorced from the natural cycle of life and the earth beneath our feet, finding a way to reconnect with that, that meets a certain person's enthusiasm is a great way forward. And it shifts the lens away from the idea that climate change is happening to us. To this idea that I know you've spoken about, which is the idea that climate change is happening for us. Like where is the opportunity here to reconfigure everything and create a completely different way of living for the vast majority of people who are so disengaged from the natural environment. Exactly. And the thing is if you... I mean, there's solutions there like beavers. I know I love that. I didn't know all that about beaver, right? It's like, if that excites you and it does, by the way, are people just love beavers. They studied them, they work. And they tried to, I didn't realize how many beavers there were. There are a lot of beavers and who trapped them in the cities and then not to take them where they will do more good, upstream, so to speak in mountainous areas and so forth. But if you doing something that just you love to do, you're very likely then to be open to other things that need to be done because now you're starting to see yourself as an integral part, an effective integral part to restarting life on earth, which is really what reversing global warming is about. It's about restoring life on earth. We've taken as much as we should, long time ago actually, we've passed that limit. And so again, you know, I define regeneration as putting life at the center very act and decision. I mean, that's what regeneration is. And so looking through that lens, looking through that... seeing the world that way then allows you to basically reflect, on what it is you're doing and what it is that you're a part of this being done and how it's being done. And it doesn't mean leaving it or quitting. It means can we change that? Can we change that? Have you thought about this? Is this possibility? Is there this way, can we, it's really about doing what you can in place, as opposed to finding some other place in the world where you can make a difference. you're most effective where people know and respect you. Yeah. When you say the word regeneration immediately what comes to mind for me is soil regeneration. And, there's been a massive explosion in terms of people's awareness and care with respect to how we're treating our soils. And, you can credit our friend Reiland for all the beautiful work that he's doing with kiss the ground and the documentary that he made, John and Molly Chester and the biggest little farm, like there are pieces of really powerful mass media that I think are shifting the paradigm and helping people to better understand this piece of the puzzle. But the book really canvases a much broader definition of what regeneration is and you break it down into all these different categories. You've got oceans and forests and wilding and land and people and cities and food and energy and industry. And within that, all these subcategories where people are doing amazing things. And you kind of explain why this is important, how you can get involved the new kind of operating modalities that are helping to heal the planet in these various capacities. And I think if you page through the book, you're gonna find that thing that's gonna make you enthusiastic, whether it's beavers or, urban gardening or whatever it is. And what was interesting is there were so many things in here. Like, I feel like I have a pretty good grip on this general landscape, but there was a lot in here that I didn't know anything about some pretty interesting things in here. Like I wrote down a few of them, like the Azzola Fern was one that I didn't know much about. Maybe you can explain that a little bit, trophic cascades, what are these things? They are and when you first see them on the page going, what does this have to do with...? I'm worried about the future, my children, and he's talking about a trophic cascade. He's talking about the beavers. Yeah. Same with beavers. Azzola Fern is a Fern and it floats, it lives on the surface of the water. It metabolizes nitrogen from the air. It fixes nitrogen from the air. So it doubles every two and a half days if it's cold, in two days, if it's warm, in three days, but approximately it doubles. And it is rich in omega threes, which is unusual for a plant and needed by this omega six world. We live in a junk food and it makes the oil and it sequesters carbon. And the reason we know that, not that any plant doesn't do that, every plant does, but there was an Azolla event, 49 million years ago. And at that time, that PPM of CO2 was 25,000. It was pretty hot and there was no ice in the Arctic and it was a freshwater lens. And you had these Azzola it's called the Azolla event, but there's all events where in the summer it would be covered with Azzola. And then in the cooler part in the winter, it would die and sink to the bottom. And then that happened. And within a relatively short geological time, it went down to from 25 to 6,000 PPM. And it is subscribed to Azzola, the presence of Azzola. Well Azolla can still do that. No reds. It can still sequester things very, very rapidly. So whether they're in lakes or wetlands, or even rivers and so forth or ponds, Azzola can sequester carbon, you can harvest it. You can feed it to animals, chickens, rabbits, goats. Right, it's like a very nutrient rich Very nutrient rich, you can put it in your salad. It's delicious, right? So, you can make oil out of it. You can have omega-3 eggs. If you're an egg eater and you want your eggs to be much more nutritious. And the rate of carbon sequestration, is quite extraordinary. And you could even, although I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't wanna do it. You could even put it in a river and then like the Missouri going into the Mississippi and then, it doubles and gets bigger and bigger and bigger then you could have it taken out. You're taking it out all the way down the Mississippi. And then when it gets to the golf, it dies. And it goes down to the bottom. The oil that's being drilled for in the Arctic today is due to Azzola Fern. Is it really? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Wow. And so the interesting thing about it, though if it's in a river is cleaning the river up from both hydrogen and phosphorus it'll. So right now what you have in the Missouri, Mississippi is runoff. And as it gets to the Gulf, it creates this huge dead zone. So you all go dead zone, feeding, algal, blooms, you know, and Sargaso sea for that matter, you're going into Tulum in Mexico. And so Azolla cleans that up. And so the possibilities with Azzola Fern are extraordinary. So why aren't we doing that? Well... Couldn't we create a massive reservoirs also, and just harvest this stuff while we're sequestering carbon. Hey, when I did Drawdown, we talked about asparagosis tax performance, which is this type of seaweed that if fed in very small amounts, one, 2% to ruminants, like cows obviously that would reduce methane emissions, from their digestion by 89%. Well, that was four plus years ago. And it's happening. In other words, there are a dozen companies now that did not exist at that time had patents, they have this they're competing, they're cultivating it or trying to also they're actually selling it is being used and so forth. So it took a very short time. I think Azzola is in the same place where we didn't discover it obviously that's not what we're saying, but I think it might come to a broader understanding and awareness now, so that people will do something that and there's so many imaginative ways that you can use it. And it has so many positive and beneficial effects. In our kind of dualistic way of looking at things though, I'm imagining like, we think this is some panacea and we'd dump it in the Mississippi. And then there's some downstream, ecological ecosystem implication that we're not foreseeing. Yeah. And it's invasive, but it can't invade running water because the water keeps going one direction. So, but I'm sure there might be. But if you do it at your farm, at your own reservoir, at your pond, that you sat, whatever it is, it's yours. And so there is nothing, there is no downside from that, but there's always got to look at these things very carefully. Right. We use a river analogy just to give people a sense of scale of undammed rivers. If there was an Azzola, what's it called? I don't know, it's not a company or whatever that was working with the state or the country, or hydrologists and everybody, they were all working together. You could be pulling off so much carbon, so much food. I mean, you'd be replacing the soy and the crap that's being groaned, that's causing the runoff with the Azzola, which is really extraordinary. Right. Cause it's a bio fertilizer, but it's also a great animal feed. Yeah. You can work it into the soil. You can work it into the animal... And it grows like crazy. It grows like crazy. So, it's like hemp, it's like this crazy multipurpose plant that we've overlooked. Yeah. What's wrong with this picture. It's hard to find out what's wrong with it. Wow.
Yeah. The other mindblower was this idea of rainmakers microbes in the sky. Yeah. So walk me through that. Sure will. It's been known for some time that like coastal development, like in Spain, the whole Costa Brava, the whole coast was developed in the last 30 plus years. I mean, it was Mediterranean coast beaches, and then it just got overrun by hotels and condos basically, for northerners wanting to come in own something in the south, in the winter. But what also happened is that the rainfall patterns changed completely inland the summer rainfall. And they know now why, because those structures all on the Southern coast of Spain destroyed all the wetlands. And so we have this idea that the long rain cycle is the cycle comes from the oceans, goes inland drops main, there's a short water cycle, which is the rain comes up on the land, moves and drops. And there's a story, not a story, but a scientific study that was done in Africa, in Malawi of tea plantations in a specific valley. And the study came about because it had the highest concentration of hail in Africa. And the question was why? I mean, it just didn't make sense, why here and not the next valley over or in some other country for that matter. And one of the scientists who studied it was aware that we used to think the water nucleates on dust. So in other words, how does a gas like, become a liquid? Well, it attaches, it has to attach to something that's called nucleation water attaches to water really easily, but it doesn't attach to other things so easily and gas. It doesn't become water. And so we just assumed for many years there's a lot of dust in the atmosphere. Now we know there's killer amount of bacteria in the atmosphere and diverse bacteria. So in Malawi, he actually took the hail, melted it and then basically looked at the bacteria that was in there and sequenced it and discovered that the bacteria that was predominant in the hail was specific to the tea plants in that valley. And only in that valley. in other words, the tea and the agriculture was creating the precipitation. So the atmosphere is literally a microbiome that's populated by the plant life on the ground. Absolutely. And always has been. And the diversity of the plant life, the quality of that plant life dictates what that atmospheric microbiome is. And in turn plays a large role in the rainfall, the extent of the rainfall, the quality of the rainfall. Just like the Sahara desert, which is now the opposite, completely dry dust storms come off the Sahara. You can see them. I mean, from satellites across the Atlantic ocean and they go south into the Amazon and the rainfall the Amazon benefits hugely from the dust from the Sahara. And so we are just discovering that, but science is discovering these extraordinary relationships. And what we do know is that the temperature that we experience 80% of that is caused by the hydrosphere, not by the atmosphere. And that is to say that hydrosphere is it can be the clouds, but it can be the fog, but it can be really the transpiration of the plants and the soil around us. And that can lower surface temperature by one to two degrees centigrade, and sometimes more and so forth. So the other aspect of that is that our deforestation, our over-grazing and our agricultural methodology, that industrial agriculture has desiccated the land. You're a runner. You know what happens when you get too dry? I mean, it is, you're in dangerous territory, first of all and you can't function well, the earth has been desiccated. And so what regenerative practices do, whether they're animals grazing, whether it's aforestation, whether it's agroforestry, whether it's regenerative agriculture actually is they change the composition of the soil because they start to sequester and place more carbon. And that carbon is food for microbes and virus and protozoa, et cetera. And that they start to eat each other. And they form globulin, which is kind of a humic acid and so forth. And it changes the structure of the soil so that when it does rain, whether a lot or a little, the soil can retain the water, soil, retains the water, then it's going to transpire the water when it gets hot. And it's gonna cool plants grow better when it's cooler in the summer, than when it's hot. So you're getting this amazing virtuous cycles by basically restoring degraded land. And there is an estimation of two to 3 billion hectares. That's five to seven and a half billion acres of land on earth that can be restored and not just the quest of carbon, but probably more importantly, it's a quest of water. Water yeah.
Yeah. That was one of the profound things that I noticed when I visited John and Molly Chester's farm, which have you visited? Oh, you haven't been there ? Oh you gotta go, it's just down the street. I know. Next time you're in LA you gotta see it I mean, they they're in your book. So I know you're very familiar with everything that they're doing, but when you're on their land, you're kind of at a high point, you can see the other farms that are surrounding that farm. And the difference is pretty dramatic. And just the colors alone, comparatively to the neighboring farms that are farming conventionally is unbelievable. And one of the things that they were telling me was when you get the rains, the rare rains in the winter time here in California, the water doesn't run off. Like you're not getting all this flooding and all the other problems that these other farms are having. Like the water stays there. Yeah. And it almost creates its own like little micro climate around the farm. It does. And the thing is like, again people, there's been a tendency to talk about the big solutions, they revolve around energy, of course, cause it's 76, 80% different numbers of the greenhouse gas emissions today are from the combustion of coal gas and oil. So of course, if we don't do that, we're goners no question about it, but that then has caused us to overlook the importance of what the Chesters are doing, what regenerative land does, what the degenerative land does what agroforestry, reforestation managed grazing does. I mean, those are just as important, and so that again, goes back to this idea. Well, I was just restoring, 2000 acres in the middle of the Australian not desert but so forth, but it's somewhere in Australia. Yeah. That's really important. There is, as opposed to thinking, well, it doesn't really make a difference. It makes a huge difference. And those are the differences, all around the world. And I guess my question is, how do we get that going? Right? I mean that's the $64,000 question, right? Like I would suspect that most farmers would rather be farming in the way that John and Molly are farming than the way that they're currently farming. Yes. But the gap from status quo to the situation that John and Molly are in is pretty vast. You have to create some kind of incentivization or transitionary situation to allow those people to free themselves from the kind of tyrannical situation that they're in, where they're in this basically an indentured servitude relationship with big agricultural firms that compel them to do things in a certain way and allow them to transition. Because, if you get anything from that documentary, it's how long it took to get it to a situation where now it's semi self perpetuating. There were some lean, very difficult years where most people would have bailed and gone back to the old ways. So you have to create an economic buffer for these people and an on-ramp. The way to understand industrial ag versus say, not opposed to, but compared to regenerative ag is simple and industrial agriculture started or really got going in the middle of the 19th century when chemical fertilizers were invented and then got nos on steroids. Once the Haber Bosch method of creating nitrates was early 20th century. And so industrial ag basically feeds plants, NPK, and then the macro nutrients it needs to grow. And when it first started to be used in the 19th century, there was a lot of bad farming in Germany and Europe. There was hunger issues there really were. And all of a sudden you put this powder on the field and these bright green plants that are taller than the ones you didn't get and go, hey, we're onto something. I mean, this is cool. And it just got better and better quote unquote, in a sense of phosphorus and potassium, and pretty soon that was how you grew plants. You could grow more of it. That yields are greater, et cetera. It always takes time. When you do that to realize that the plants are weaker because regenerative ag actually doesn't feed plants, it feeds soil. And for the 400 million years that plants have been here soil has always fed the plants. And so in essentially industrial ag is putting plants on an IV drip, that's what it's doing. And you take the drip away and the plants suffer because the soil has been degraded and it's really holding the plant up. It's not feeding the plant. So there is that transition. There's no question about it. And we do need a way to support farmers, because the reason I have never met a regen ag farmer, and I've met quite a number who did it because it was a right thing to do. Now, you say, whoa, why did they do it? They did it because they hit the wall. It's the same as people's health. What people don't change their diet because it's a right thing to do. They change it cause they hit the wall and said, this is not working at all. And then they turn to people to functional medicine, to you, to whatever. I mean, they turn into their, wait a minute. I don't know what to do. And so the farmers I've met, basically hit the wall. They were running out of money and they were feeling this squeeze between producing commodities, having the prices out of their control and being part of an over-producing system, then suppress prices and their costs were going up because the soil was getting poor, poor, turning into dirt as has been said, and then it needed more and more and more input. And it needed pesticides because the plants were so weak, the bugs were eating it and then it needed glyphosate because the weeds could out-compete the plant. And pretty soon you have basically modern ag. But again, as I said earlier, that was, farmers could see that that degenerative road ended, they could see the ending, it was called basically the bank saying pay up or we're gonna take all your equipment. Right, right. Yeah. And that's right. So the biggest fact that the biggest change in the farming community on regen ag is caused by farmers that farmers talking to farmers. Right. That's what I was thinking like pivoting from that blame and shame, modus operandi into empowerment and engagement. It's those farmers who have made that transition, who are the ones who are gonna be able to communicate to the other farmers there. They're not gonna want to hear it from you, or let alone me. I mean, God forbid, so yeah, like creating community around that, that's supportive and empowering to helping people make that transition. But also on top of that systems that are conducive to that being an economic viability. But there are things happening where the demand for regenerative to duly produce seeds, grains, and obviously meat as well, but are increasing faster than production. Sure. And so farmers are seeing a premium, their inputs are going down, their costs are going down, but actually the income is going up and you see 10X differences in profit per acre for regen farmers. And as Gay Brown famously said, he said, I got tired of basically signing the front of the check. And now I sign the back of the check, notice it shifted from an expense to income, and you don't go back from that. And so now there's companies and processes and techniques and satellites, and there is a lot of support now being created for regen ag in its true form. And it's being also done in some dubious forms as well. Yeah.
Yeah. And yet, I just, I was out of town the other day and just i was in an airplane yesterday and you look down and you don't see a lot of regenerative farms. You see giant swaths of square and round parcels Headed irrigation.
Yeah. Yeah, so where are we in terms of that becoming like reaching some kind of inflection point with this? I don't know. I don't know. I know that like the big, big companies are pivoting on this. They have the same questions which is, how do we make the transition? They don't, how did their farmers make the transition? And how's the brushes doing with rice general mills is trying to do with oats. But so many, like the clothing companies now are basically looking for regenerative fiber, primarily cotton, but other fibers as well. So you're seeing a supply demand dance. The consumer demand. I mean, I feel like Gen Z, the younger generation, they're up to speed on this stuff. And they're much more conscious about their consumer choices than our generation. Much more, I mean, when I started Erewhon, we are mom out all the time about you hippies you wanna feed the world organically, but we industrial ag have we take care of the children, we have a world of feed. You guys are sort of, self-indulgent almost narcissistic, and you're wanting things without chemicals and pesticides, and now I don't know how big the industry is it's so big that you can't get enough organic food in the United States yet. But the same thing is regen is not gonna go through that because you're seeing every major agricultural company in the world, Syngenta and Cartiva and Monsanto buyer and ADM and Cargill moving to regeneration. Now, I mean, keep your tongue firmly in your cheek on that one, because I feel like there's some co-ops going on there in terms of the term and the word, but as Franklin Roosevelt once said that sometimes the way you start telling the truth is by being a hypocrite at first. And so who knows where that's gonna go, but you do see indigo ag, which is all about regenerative farming from the get-go and not about chemicals, kind of like the opposite of a Monsanto doing really, really well. Working with not only with regenerative farmers, but in terms of, metrics in terms of measuring carbon and de commodification, that is connecting farmers directly to the buyers and getting the farmers out of the commodities business, where no matter how well you do, you're still, the price is the same for everybody. And so that has to happen. So that regenerative farmers can get a premium and that the food companies that buy that have a story and a narrative, that means something to Gen Z and everybody else who cares. Yeah. The story narrative piece, I think is big. I think most companies these days need something, there has to be a genuine, authentic aspect of doing business. Oh yeah. I mean, and I think they recognize that and I mean, we'll see what happens, but I think that we're in a period of tumultuous change. Some of it is threatening for sure and daunting. But I get the sense in the business community that the old ways are over. I really do. And I'm not praising anybody. I'm not to think finally business gets it. And I'm not saying that either, if anybody doesn't get it, I would say, it's the investors. They still want to put their money where they can get the highest return and the earth doesn't work that way. Right? Yeah. I mean, banking is a whole section in the book about that. Yeah, yeah. Where do you see the role of hydroponics in all of this? I mean, obviously this is that's growing plants in a manner that's divorced from the soil conversation all together. I suspect there's a great place for that in urban centers or places where there isn't soil, but how does that fit into the idea of regeneration? Well, it's interesting because plants suffer. that is to say, that they suffer because it gets too hot. It's too much sun, insects. They suffer for a lack of nutrient, for example. So they put the roots down deeper, the complexity of the taste and the phyto nutrients that are in plants are actually due to stress. So plants that are stressed are more nutritious. Right. When you do hydroponics, you're actually going back to industrial ag, which is, you're doing your as an IV drip into the roots. It's fine if you just Basil for salad or watercress or something for greenery in cities, the idea that that's going to produce nutritious food, I think is faulty because we have an nutritious food now everywhere. And we have food that comes from industrial ag. Both, whether it's row crops or in vegetables or whether it's in grains and seeds. And we have measured, we can measure the difference in the phytonutrients and minerals or the lack of minerals that are in these foods. So we haven't been able to invent a way to make a really super nutritious food without soil yet. And I don't think we ever will. What about the carbon sequestration piece of it? Of what? Meaning that if you're an urban centers and you don't have soil, but you have all these hydroponic gardens everywhere, is that moving the needle at all in terms of probably carbon? Probably not. I think it's... at the same time, we do wanna localize food production. We do wanna bring food into the city, into the peri urban areas, right around the city. And that does involve greenhouses that does involve all sorts of really ingenious techniques, to extend the season and to produce crops that people want. And there's nothing wrong with the crops that are grown hydroponically in terms of, but just not the idea that somehow that's going to replace the foods we need. They just won't, but it can produce very fresh and tasty. Like I said, parsley and basil and watercress and lettuces and things like that, which are not really, I mean, the major source of our nurture or nutrients. Let's talk about energy. Yeah. Why can't we get wind power? Like just rocking out everywhere. Like what are the impediments to really scaling that? Cause it seems to me that's the most viable best solution at the moment. I think the major impediment is sighting. In other words, people don't want people generally don't live where there is the high wind regimes. The Midwest is the winds blowing all the time, almost, and so their farmers love them, with their corn, they have two crops, kilowatts and corn. I think that the major obstacle is offshore wind. In other words, sighting offshore wind. And I think Heinrich, Starzl has Danish engineer has solved the problem. And he was the... when he was young, he started filling out with wind turbines. And the three blade configuration that you see today on the big turbines, he invented that and a farming supply company called Bestos heard about him. Because at that time farms had windmills. My grandfather's farm had a windmill on it for water. Right. And they bought the rights to his design. And Bestos is the biggest wind turbine company in the world today, 13 billion a year. And Stossel has invented a floating platform. They can go out far into the sea to areas where they won't interfere with people's view scape, where there's a lot of land, so to speak, but it's not land is water. And I think that that is going to come in at a price that is also less expensive than coal gas and oil and wind already is by the way, the new wind farm installations, solar is also lower cost than fossil fuel electrical generation. And I just think it's a matter of, I don't know, maybe two, three years, cause they're testing them right now. They're floating them. And Stossel is such an amazing engineer. I mean, his track record is extraordinary and when he does something, it tends to work. And somebody said, well, when he started this project over the flooding wind farms, Studies said, what if we can't afford it? And his response is we can't afford not to. So I think there is that again that inflection point where we're going right now, which is a week quibbling over a half a cent per kilowatt hour, that the coal is cheaper than it's not, but I mean are we gonna like, get, I mean, it's cheap, let's buy it. Let's do it, end of subject. Yeah. It just seems like there should be massive, wind farms offshore and then like sort of, areas of the planet where there's tons of wind and low population density and throughout the desert solar farms everywhere. There will be. I think there will be. The interesting thing about we think of things like death spiral, something, there's also other types of spirals, which is disruption spirals. And we're in a disruption spiral with wind and solar, renewable energy. Which is it's cost is going down. As this cost goes down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, demand for fossil fuel goes down as that declines, the cost goes up okay? For fossil fuels. It doesn't go down. It goes up if you use less of something than you're producing. And so as the demand goes up, it attracts more investment. More capital wants to go where something is growing of course. So the cost of capital goes down. investment in the fossil fuels, which is peaking and declining. The cost of capital is going up. So these are, this is a disruption spiral. This is going to accelerate the rate of acceleration that we're seeing in renewables. And most of the projections about solar and wind or renewable have been linear, the IEA, the International Energy Agency, the world bank, similarly McKinsey as well. And last year they admitted that they had been wrong every single year for 19 years. By undershooting it? Yeah, absolutely. Every single year. Absolutely you could count on them, to get it wrong. Every one of those institutions. And they did on batteries as well storage for EBS and for... and so I think we're on a threshold where we're going to be surprised at the rate of growth in solar and wind. And the only thing that is going to not prevent it because it's simply a capital formation and capital wants to go to it because it really pencils out. And the demand is there. A big piece with energy on this quest to electrify everything, which is a big point that you make in the book is storage, right? So we have these batteries, batteries are improving. They're growing in their capacity to hold storage, but they also degenerate and they require tons of mineral inputs, which of course have downstream impacts on the planet. Like there is no perfect panacea situation here if we improve our batteries and then everybody's got batteries for everything, we're pivoting away from drilling and fracking to just mining, which is what we're already seeing. And we're seeing a disproportionate amount of that we're seeing like China really capitalize on that in a big way right now that's creating kind of a geopolitical imbalance in terms of that certain economy is functioning. Yeah. There are things like neodymium that are integral to magnets and the magnets are integral to power generation and wind turbines. And the rare earth monopoly is almost China, not quiet really, but they really, 56 or 58% of Lithium has come from China. And so they definitely have control on that. What I'm seeing is that in the like storage area where it's primarily lithium ion, and there are some, I guess what I'm saying is that there's a whole bunch of innovators circling around that one solid state batteries, carbon-based batteries no lithium and startups that are brilliant and are pointing to material use and storage capacity and cost reductions that we've seen in every single area of energy on the renewable side. Nobody thought that solar or wind would be this cheap ever not in your wildest imagination. Did anybody think that, you'd be installing solar for less than 2 cents, a kilowatt hour in the Saudi Arabia of all places. I mean, but they're doing it at a profit. I mean, it's not like subsidized. And so the same thing holds true for storage, which is that I don't think we're locked in to the technologies that we're using right now. And I think you're going to see on this storage side, I think you're gonna see techniques, technologies basically that are still gonna use minerals and minerals that are ubiquitous and easy to get as opposed to Bolivia or in the Atacama desert or things that are more sparse or not so well distributed. That's encouraging. Yeah. I feel like the progress that's being made with batteries is similar to the history of the microchip, right? It's accelerating very quickly. And every year, EVs are coming out and the battery life's getting better and better and better and et cetera, like it does feel like that's getting figured out. Yeah, it is. And we're in a huge disruptive cycle in a good sense. I mean, we're the disruptive cycle that we're this causing it is climate, but there is technologically a rate of disruption that's occurring that is hold on to your hat. The rate of change, the players, the university's engineers, the technologists, the entrepreneurs, the capital formation is extraordinary. And so nothing that we, I think are projecting in the future is going to live up to what will actually happen is gonna be more, it's gonna be better. That doesn't mean by the way, though, that we should all have an electric car, I mean, we should live in cities, we don't need a car at all, right? I mean... The 15 minute city. The 15 minute city, We should, this isn't... I feel like sometimes when you listen to some companies or some people, so some politicians that the idea is to fix it so that we can just continue to grow our economy bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And we just have to get rid of this nasty little problem called climate. And actually... That's kidding in a way. That's just sort of annoyingly getting in the way of economic growth. We've got to get all right, get all... but the alignment isn't with nature, the alignment is with GDP. How can we get this? And that's a very much a JP Morgan, that's very much an investment banking way of seeing the world, which is okay. It is, how can we make money doing this and doing this and doing that. But what's underlying that is like the business as usual scenarios that are used by the IAA and the world bank and the APCC basically project an economy that's two and a half times bigger by 2050 and seven times bigger by 2100. And that is just ridiculous. It's so absurd to think that we can 2X, 7X, 5X, whatever, where we are today in terms of throughput and economy. I mean, and so really part of the innovation has to be, how can we do more with less? How can we fulfill our needs as human beings? And we have needs, and in a way that actually lowers our footprint, not just our carbon footprint, but our whole footprint. And so, I don't see that really coming into the conversation yet in terms of regeneration. Right. How long can the economy continue to multiply at that level? Like, is this going to go on ad infinitum? Is there any conversation about...? That's the ultimate unsustainability? Absolutely. And every price of every share with some exceptions on stock exchanges is based on assumed and projected rate of growth. And there are stocks that just pay dividends, like pipeline, just pay out. So there's a few, but 99% are based on growth and imagined projected, based on the past, based on, pipe dreams, whatever. It is weird that success is predicated this idea of growth. Like why is it not okay to just have a business that does fine and pays its employees and enriches its shareholders without growing? Because you can't amass capital. Right? And then that's capitalism. You could provide lots of good lives for everybody involved. Absolutely. It's called steady state. It's called there's lots of words for a steady state economy, steady state economy can take care of the whole world. What it won't do, is create multibillionaires. It won't create people like, Elon Musk must've got 6.7 billion in compensation. That was his salary this year. It just announced today. I mean, just insane, insane amount of capital. And what that capital is doing is destroying the world for the rest of people making, I mean, houses too expensive, real estate too expensive. I mean there's like the rich are pulling away from the rest of the world, Yeah, the wealth disparity gap is just accelerating at an unseen obscene rate and the pandemic just amplified it all. Yeah it amplified it. Yeah, and so I don't know where that is going to hit the wall, but it'll hit the wall again. It can't happen. It doesn't really pencil out. I mean, only in, somebody's bankers wet dream. So it doesn't need to pencil out ad infinitum. It only needs to pencil out for my lifetime. Yeah.
Right. I mean, that's the mindset.
Or before I retire. Yeah, right.
Take away my millions and... Yeah, no appreciation for this idea of indigeneity which is another subject in the book. It is. Yeah. But I do think the consumption thing is something that really isn't being talked about. You know, now there's so much openness in terms of regenerative ag and renewable energy and more and more, people are forming around the idea that, we have to really take care of nature, which is kind of a funny revelation at this point, but it's true. But what they haven't done is actually think about, but how much are we using total? Like individually in our cities or our assumptions about what makes a good life and all that sort of stuff. I mean, virtually every one of my shirts has a patch on the elbow. I mean, Paul, you martyr. No, I think I'm proud of it. I should've worn one today so I gotta hold it up, but I thought, no, I'm going to be videoing with you too. I got three shirts that don't have patches. And, but the idea that it doesn't, it's never made us happy more. I mean, if you don't, if you're poor yes. More clothing, food, education, housing of course. But once you reach a certain level... It doesn't make you happy. Excess accumulation that has no relationship to happiness.
No, it doesn't. And meanwhile, amidst that consumption, there's a tremendous amount of waste, right? We're wasting food, We're disposing of our clothes. Everything is disposable. Yes. I mean, clothing is considered to be 8% of global emissions is due to the clothing industry. Yeah. That's shocking. It's the number two industry in terms of waste and water number two. I mean food. The new report came out just last week, that the number for food waste is 40%. 40% of our food is wasted. That's wild.
It's crazy, and... Where's the grave amount of that waste coming from? The greatest proportion is the farm, the second, but that depends on the continent. Meaning they harvest a portion of the harvest just gets tossed out because it doesn't look nice. And the grocery stores aren't going to buy it or whatever. Ugly food, this, that all sorts of things. But it depends, that's in Africa. But if you go to north America and the food is actually in the waste and supply chain at the consumer level. So it depends on which country, I mean, that's an aggregate number, but actually it's kind of deceptive because it doesn't apply to Europe the same way applies to Africa where you don't have coal chains. So, they don't have a coal chain that makes it hard to preserve. Sure, but in north America, in the transport, in the chain, from farm to grocery store, or what have you, somewhere along the line, stuff spoils Oh yeah 25% And then households throw away food restaurants toss out food. Yeah, they toss too much that they didn't cook. And then if you don't have completed finish your plate, they have to throw it away. Yeah, we did a podcast with this chef Daniel Hume in New York, and he's partnered with this organization called Rethink are you familiar with what they're doing? It's super interesting. I mean, I think the most interesting part of Rethink is the technological piece, because so much of waste, at least in the restaurant ecosystem is a function of lack of kind of communication and efficiencies that would allow, that waste to go towards something good. So if you can create like a network system where and sort of efficiencies for these restaurants to set aside whatever food is getting wasted so that it could be efficiently repurposed, it's an easily solvable problem with just a little bit of distribution effort involved. It's the same thing. It's reconnecting the broken strands. Reconnect the system. The way you heal a system is to connect more of it to itself. Whether it's your immune system, an ecosystem, an economic system, a social system, you connect more of it to itself and we're radically disconnected. And so when Daniel is doing there and Rethink is doing, is saying, wait a minute, here's a source, And here's the sync, here's a need and here's a use. Right. And like, what if we do this? What if we do this? What are the logistics? What's required? How does the staff have to be trained ? Once you make that shift, It works automatically. Right, you use like a human body analogy? It would be repairing neurons or basically stitching up arteries and veins. So these things can flow. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, or unblocking them. Right, yeah. Well, in invasive surgery though. You mentioned indigeneity and indigeneity is actually sort of the light motif of regeneration. Actually, I mean, there's a piece on it, but it actually it goes throughout. And the reason is that I'm white, I'm not indigenous, but actually if I trace my ancestors all the way back... You're indigenous to something. Everyone is. Everyone is. But not in my family's history or experience nothing got passed down to me about where I'm living and how to live there. Right. And the thing that we don't understand, and I think we're starting to of course, from the horrific way that indigenous people have and are being treated to this day, is that they were amongst many things. And I don't want to reduce it in any way, but there's some of the best observational scientists in the world. And most of the science we rely upon today is empirical science, which is, it's not science, unless you can repeat it. If not repeatable, then it's just an observation. It's just an happenstance. It's just an... and but the fact is in nature, nothing repeats, and there is no lines and there's no circles. And there's all the things that we rely upon, but there's pattern and there's pattern recognition. And pattern recognition depends on time narrative stories, oral traditions that pass on, what is known language in which the teaching of how to live in place is embedded in the language so that you have verbs that are essentially metaphors for how to know where you are. And it was Aristotle who said, metaphor is genius. And so when you start to look at the 5,000 indigenous cultures on earth, and you start to see that they had extraordinarily knowledge of the place that they lived. How do we know that? Because they'd been there for 10, 12 thousand years or longer in some cases and so forth and through changes in weather and all sorts of adaptation. And so we have been the opposite. We've actually, haven't lived in many places for very long. But even if we have, sorry to interrupt, like even if we had, let's say, we've lived here for thousands of years. We're not connected to the biosphere in the manner in which those cultures were and are. They had to be 'cause that's the only way they could survive. Is to actually know where they were. And so you see things like 3000 years ago on the east coast and Lyla June who is on our board, actually Denae and Cherokee activist, poet and scholar wrote a piece called the forest is farm. In what he talked about was that if you do core samples in Tennessee and around the east coast, you find 3000 years ago, a real shift in the pollen and what was being grown in different trees and different plants and animals and food plants, and like what happened and what happened is that native Americans, in this case, indigenous people transformed the forests into farms. It was, that's where they got all the food along with animals, all right. And I was on a plane to Alaska to give a talk at the university. And I was sitting next to a woman and we began to talk and she's Yupik. And the Yupik people live on the Bering Strait on both sides of Alaska and Russia. And she was going out there because her sister had died and she became the elder. And we started talking about it, how it is to live on the Bering Strait, come on. Right. And she said that to live there, they needed to be able to predict the weather two years in advance. What! I was like, wait a minute. I said, two years. She said, oh yes, she's very humble, quiet woman. And it wasn't, there was no bragging or pride, nothing, nothing. It was just matter of fact, I said, well, how'd you do that? And she started to name every single thing that they saw over a course of a year observed. And whether it was the color of the sea ice, when it froze in the fall and then melted in the spring, the depth of it, the extent of it, the type of velvet there was on the caribou, the fish, they could tell from the fish, how they had changed or subtle differences. I mean, she just started naming the clouds. They would look at the clouds. They will look, she just named every single thing in their environment. And over obviously hundreds and thousands of years, they began to say, well, this, you put this and this, when you've got those things, that means that in or in the future, or they had the memory of what happened two years ago. So they had this type of weather, they look back and say, yeah, all I can remember in one of my.... And so these, and she said, and they did it to survive. Is that there was no, and we can't predict it six weeks in advance here, even two weeks in advance. That's so wild So it was amazing to know... And so beautiful. Yeah. To be so intricately involved and immersed in your environment and to be so present and paying such close attention to the smallest details and to extract meaning out of that. But they're just not just, they're just one culture. Right, right. It's true. And to have Western culture be dismissive of that, because it doesn't meet the criteria of the quote unquote scientific method. Right. Exactly. And now of course, a lot of scientists are actually turning to indigenous people, but a lot of indigenous knowledge has been lost. I mean, the elders died and they were, you saw what happened in Canada, I think it could happen here too. Like their children were taken away, they were murdered essentially in Catholic schools, I mean, they were traumatized, they were belittled. They were taken away from their native foods. They were fed commodity foods full of sugar, fat and starch. They got obese, they got type two diabetes, they couldn't get jobs, I mean all of what we did to them, it wasn't them doing it to themselves. And so, yet in some way, in most places, they were able to maintain and keep this knowledge. And these oral traditions passed on generation for hundreds and hundreds of years, from being harassed and hated by the colonists. And so now I think we're realizing, gosh, this is Alexandria library of knowledge. that was right there all along, except we didn't listen. No, instead we dislocated them, marginalized them, stole their land and forced them into situations where they have to open casinos. Absolutely. Yeah. And so, I mean, part of regeneration people say, well, what does that have to do with climate is absolutely to make amends in whatever way we can today, not just to indigenous people, but actually, well, not to us, I mean... To the planet itself. But African African-Americans because they're indigenous people who were enslaved and brought over. There's 3000 different cultures in Africa. And when we look at the roots of regenerative agriculture in this country, I mean the initial roots came from Africa it didn't come from Asia. They didn't come from any place else. And can you imagine being a woman in Ghana and for whatever reason you've been kidnapped and then hurtled, and then you're put on a boat going to somewhere you don't know that nobody can explain to you that makes no sense at all. And somehow these women braided rice and seeds into their hair and brought them to so-called new world. and which is why the African-Americans were the best rice farmers in all of Southeast America. And when I started Erewhon and started to grow organic rice or get it grown actually for us, I work with two black farmers in Arkansas and their knowledge of rice was unbelievable. And it went back for almost 400 years. Wow! And so... That's a wild story. I know we don't, we have no idea where our food waste came from or where the knowledge came from. Of course, George Washington, Carver got that. Right. I noticed him in the book too. Like, talk about that a little bit. Cause that's, I did not know about this either. Well, I mean, he was the one who observed that the difference between black farmers and the results they were getting and why farmers who were mostly cotton farmers, cause it was the best cotton soil where they were Alabama and how they're they're playing out their farms they were killing the soil, killing the farm. And then on a nourishment level, then of course, on the peanuts, you're looking at groundnuts as a source of both restoring soil, but also restoring, inexpensive way to provide a balanced nutrient to people that they weren't getting at that time. And, but it wasn't just him. He had a whole bunch of other colleagues, Tuskegee, they work together and again, the roots of that, and the benefit of that is, throughout America to this day, and we don't recognize. Right. I mean, when you, I like not to keep bringing it back to this documentary, but when you watch the biggest little farm short of John and Molly finding some version of that, like somebody who's steeped enough in soil ecology to help guide them. They would've never been able to make it work there. And to think that there's this robust, unbelievable cannon, a library of Alexandria of this kind of wisdom and knowledge based on millennia of observing nature, that it's lost is crazy because anybody who would carry that message would be so valuable in so many ways to anybody who's looking to tread a little bit more lightly on the planet and to do things in a regenerative symbiotic way. And again, the other thing that we've lost, maybe lost respect for is the language itself, because there wasn't a written, so it's not really an add-on or whatever. And I remember being in Patagonia and grinders museum and the Yamanote south Vietnam people, depending on which name you use, but, and there was like, I don't know, maybe a few dozen left at that time. I mean, there had been extirpated basically by disease and by guns. And Bruce Chatwin wrote a book in Patagonia about the Yamen people and about their language. And then I have a friend who was, I grew up at the university of California libraries, where my father worked in my family, marrying the librarian was hero. She was really something. And so I spent a lot of time at the library. And so I understood from Bruce's book that there was a dictionary that there was a missionary who was down there who had nothing to do. And there was only a hundred or so Yamana people left and he was a lexicographer. So he made a dictionary and worked with the tribal chief but the tribal chief was really that killed so many people. He was like by default, but he wasn't. And so for many years, he made a dictionary of the Yamana language into English Dictionary. It was really amazing dictionary. And they got to 30,000 words and the missionary died. And the Yamuna wouldn't talk to them about cosmology, about women's issues and so forth. They said, no, we don't trust you with this knowledge, but they did talk about, and if you read this dictionary, it's like I said, it's a metaphor. And like depression, the word for depression is a crab that's molting it's shell, but it hasn't come off yet. I mean, get out of here. What! I mean, it's such an exquisite language, 30,000 words. And these are the people that Darwin called beasts because when they came around, Tero De Fuego, which it wasn't named then, it was like they saw fire and smoke and the foreign smoke was from the Yamana who carried fire with them everywhere. Cause it was cold, but they were naked because they put seal fat all over the body to stay warm. And they knew that clothing would actually get wet and actually caused them to die. So they were called beasts, right? And they acted in strange ways and so forth. Japanese has 40,000 words. This dictionary had 30,000 words and is incomplete. So... It's wild. So our understanding of indigeneity of indigenous people is so broken. And so... Well it's metered in condescension, essentially. They were not educated in the manner in which we recognize, so we're dismissive of them. Yeah. We don't have the right lens to understand. We don't have the right lens to see it, understand it, and frankly benefit from it. And we were basically, we saw them as beasts. We use that word, not just Darwin and as a subclass of species, a subclass of human beings. Well, yeah. I mean, when you think of somebody like Paul Stamets, who knows everything about mushrooms, and now we're seeing this resurgence of enthusiasm and interest in mycology and what we can learn from the fungal universe, creating foods from them and just appreciating how much more complex and amazing it is than we ever imagined. But in my mind, he's in furtherance of that indigenous tradition because he's so steeped in this one thing, right? So imagine thousands of Paul Stamets, who are experts in a wide variety of different types of fields that have to do with the cycles of the planet. Yes. And those people are coming and there was, there are respectful scientists now and the Uswar and the Waorani and they're in, in service, in honor of their knowledge and time then help also to keep out, the miners, the loggers, COVID as well for that matter in the Amazon, in Peru, in Ecuador. So there are some really wonderful things going on now because of the respect and understanding that was never there or was hardly there and now is really growing. And I think it also relates to a planet on fire. And so who are you gonna turn to? Obviously not Chevron, Exxon Odyssey, not the Republican party, and obviously not people who could care less and these people who are so I kind of, I don't want to be those people, people who live in a place and have cared for it so long, have something to teach us. About caring and about knowing, and that we've lost or that we never had. So in Paul Stamets, I mean, when you think of his career and think of it, I mean, he accidentally, boiled up a whole bag full of psilocybin. Somebody gave it to him, he said just take a few, he boiled the whole bag up and drank it and then went up a tree, he was, and then the thunderstorm came and he was in that tree all night, long blowing around, and it's for him to say, but to me, I mean, Paul Stamets was born that night. Right. He had a spiritual awakening. He did, he absolutely did. And his life path unfurled. And he stuttered up until that moment. And when he came down from the tree he did not, he no longer stuttered. Right. And so that he had in a very short night or maybe a long night, but you have to be out there. You have to be in nature. You have to turn off everything that's on and turn on everything that's off. to you it's not off actually, and so forth. And spend that time. I spent three months once in silence in the woods with nobody there. You did? Yeah, yeah. When did you do that? I did that about 14 years ago, 15 years ago, So you had kind of a Walden pond experience. I was just a caretaker at a refuge that was in New Mexico and it was during the winter and early spring and nobody was there. So I didn't speak to anyone. Cause there was no one to speak to. I mean, it was easy. So you weren't setting out to have that experience. It just was an occurrence by dent of... well, what do you do everyday? What do you do? So what I did every day was I would take off in a direction and try to get lost. I would just take off and I never got lost except once. That day I was like, ah, I don't know where I am is so interesting. Cause it's in this huge national forest, and there's no roads, there's no houses, there's no telephone poles. There's no cell phone towers. There's nothing to orient you. And, but it gave me such a deep appreciation for the place. And I remember once in the morning, walking along the stream rivers kind of right in between both and literally a bear and I almost ran into each other and the water was so loud. It was in the early spring. So it was rushing down through the snow and I couldn't hear anything. And I was looking one way, it was looking the other way. It was called cinnamon bear coat. And it had, it must've been eating termites from a dead log that had stuff all around whiskers and we moved, we met each other and going, oh shit. I was like... What do I do now? Yeah, we looked at each other And then we turned away. Cause you know, we both turned away cause you're not supposed to make eye contact, but you can see, you turn your head away, but you can still see the presence of the other creature. And it was so beautiful because it's a being, it's not a bear. I mean, it's a bear, but it's a being, you're a being, there's two beings there. And it's like, okay, And we both kind of made a circle around each other and kept going. And so, and I remember nights where I would just go out and then just lean against the tree all night and sleep or wake up and sleep all night just to... and listen to the creatures and the birds and in the morning at night, and not so much present and night of course, and I don't know what they were. I mean there just sounds. And those experiences are Denali Paul's in the tree and not, and so Simon, they're life changing. They're life changing. And when you hear terms like, oh, we have to practice nature based solutions. MBS is a called MBS is now by the client climatologist. It's like, excuse me, nature, nature, nature, everything is nature and the idea that there's nature based solutions as if that was what nature was there for. It's still that same colonial way of looking at the world, which others, the world that others nature, it makes other nature seeing like other, again, when I said about fixing it, like well, what's the it climates it really. Yeah. The idea that we're gonna organize the world in accordance to meet our needs. Like, and yeah, we'll make sure it's sustainable. But the, the notion being that, like we're even capable of that to begin with. Yeah. And the solutions exist for the benefit of us. And we othered indigenous people we othered them utterly. We've othered everything. Yeah. Everything I guess. Yeah. In that sense. And so that, this idea of regeneration, the core of it is to experience the inseparability of everything and each other, and to honor that and as I said, the most important thing to do is to listen, and nature as well and just the way we have led and been taught to lead our lives, has been so just fractured everything, just shattered all the connections that are actually intrinsically there. And regeneration is that rediscovery. And that's why I say, go, go to what is exciting to you? That's the thing you're gonna do best. And that's what's gonna turn other people on and get them lit up and so forth. And this idea and Andrew Huberman you... Right, I love that he showed up in the book. He sure did, he showed up because of... I felt like you pulled that paragraph right out of the podcast. I did. You're in this book, you're in this book a lot more than you think you are. Of course, I pulled that out of the part, listening to you and Andrew but the idea that beliefs change our actions, if that was true, we'd be in a very different situation today with respect to climate and the fact that it's actions that change beliefs. And so people, the thing to do is to do, go do, do whatever it is. Just go do, start doing, don't think about it. And for God's sakes, don't worry about the numbers. I mean, we have what I think now in the climate movement. And I think drought on is partly responsible is what I call climate voyeurism. If we outnumber this, oh, it's 8% of emissions is this or that is twice as that food is 34% of it. But that's actually doing something calibrating. Everything is actually solving the problem. Yeah. Indexing exactly. As like, well, I'm glad you know, it doesn't do anything. And watching a documentary on Netflix on climate doesn't do anything either. It's like, we have to make sure that we are actually doing something. And with all due respect to my colleagues and my friends and so forth, and I can say this all day long, they're still not doing anything. They're not doing anything. And that's why in the book, we have punch lists where we have a connection to the website, which says, hey, make a punches. Right. Yeah. A big piece of this is, we haven't even talked about it. The nonprofit that is associated with the book, regeneration.org, where there's this tool kit and all sorts of resources to help people move in that Huberman way from belief into the action Absolutely. One of the things that I learned, I did 128 speeches in 22 months for Drawdown. You learn nothing when your mouth is open and you learn a Q&A because the Q's generally are being asked for other people as well. Maybe one person is brave enough to ask it, but a lot of other people are going, hell yeah. I wanna know too. And so you learn from the questions, and I can't almost, without exception, somebody would say, well, what should I do? Or what should I do? I don't know what to do. It's interesting. And there's a hundred solutions in Drawdown. And they're asking that question and Jasmine, my wife, when I start regeneration said, if you don't tell me what to do in this book, I'm leaving you. (both laughing) I said, Got it. So the book doesn't exactly do that by the way, what it does is the last eight pages is a wormhole to the website. And there we have what to do. You wanna know what to do? It is the complete, almost abbreviated manual of what to do for challenges and solutions. Challenge would be the boreal forest. The biggest stock of carbon on earth is being depleted with plush toilet paper, open-pit mining, tar sands, et cetera. Okay, that's a challenge, that has to stop. Okay, a solution is electrifying everything. And that would mean putting in a heat pump in your house to replace natural gas, or it could be oil in the East coasts, whatever, for heating, for water, can even be for cooking, using an induction cooktop, that's a solution. But what it does is like, okay, this is what you can do as an individual. Okay? This is all of the different levels of the agency. This is what you can do as a neighborhood. If there is something you can do, this is what you can do as a school. This is what you can do as a company or ask companies to do as agents and so forth and onwards, these are the influencers who are causing problems. Here's the email for the chairman of partner and gamble who makes plush toilet paper. You might want to write to him and say, stop taking Virgin trees and making toilet paper out of it. Bamboo works better anyway. I learned that in the book. Yeah, bamboo or recycled paper works a lot better and cheaper. And then here are the NGOs that are just kicking butt. I mean, really are effective and influencing and making a difference. Here are the first nations who are rising up speaking up, talking about these are traditional tribal lands that the first nations are dealing with in the boreal. This they know the land better than anybody. Here are videos, cool videos. that'll teach you. Here are books. Here are the great books on the boil and so forth here, et cetera. So every solution and challenge has whatever you wanna know, or all your entry points. We're not saying these are, these are all the access to all the ways you can actually be effective in this area. That's what the book is sort of a neurotransmitter to the website. I mean, that's powerful. The level of like practical advice that you can give people and they can plug in wherever they're enthusiastic. Yeah, its my Huberman. That's your action, mood follows action. How's your mood. Your mood is good, right? Yeah. What is the thing that you're most like, I put that question to you, like, what is the thing that you're most enthusiastic about? I would say, the thing that I'm most enthusiastic about is the rate at which people are rediscovering land in all its myriad forms. I shouldn't say, I didn't know, but we researched it and found out the terrestrial systems that is, forests and grasslands and farmlands and coastlands and mangroves and wetlands over those hold 3,300 billion tons of C carbon, not CO2, C the atmosphere holds one fourth of that. It's four times as much carbon that's in the atmosphere. Okay. So there's two ways you can look at that. Those systems are being degraded and there was words we're continuing to deforest. We're continuing to use industrial ag. We're continuing to overgraze. We're continuing to dissertify the earth, et cetera, to cover up our wetlands, et cetera. So every time you do that, then the life on the soil or in the soil, perishes that's got C in it. when C perishes, it combines with oxygen produces carbon dioxide. Okay. So in other words, it's emitting CO2, the greenhouse gas. All right. Okay so, if we keep doing this, right, another 10% of loss of our terrestrial systems that will increase PPM from 419, what it is today, 418 to 519 like that It'll add a hundred PPM, not reduce it. Okay, now let's flip that. Let's talk about a climate of optimism for a minute, okay, Instead of pessimism. So that means if we add 9% more C into all those systems, 9% is not a lot. Then we sequester all the carbon we've admitted since 1800. Wow! And if we go to 14, 13, 40% depends. We will also account for all the carbon that is planned to be emitted by 2050. So if you look at any place you live, any place you love, any place you've seen and say, can we have a 10 to 12%, 14% improvement here? Like more trees, more grasslands, or can we change the grazing strategies and technologies? Can we change the farming strategy? Can we undesertify the two to 3 billion hectares of land and so forth? Heck yeah! We can. So that's just in protection. That's not technology, that's not energy. That's, there's many other things we can do that are solutions that we've talked about. It's just political on community well, but if it's not asking a lot, if every community could incrementally improve by 10% through a variety of measures, it seems. highly achievable. Very achievable. And so it's important that we have, rather than the big pictures that came out today from the IPCC about whoa, it is here, it's irrevocable. I mean, it's no question. And you go, ah, I mean, at the same time, it's important that we have the opposite, which is like, yeah. And got it. Thank you for sharing. Thanks for such fantastic science. Let's go to work. And this is the work that can be done everywhere, by everyone. And we can absolutely meet the challenge. No question we need both. And so it's not that the science, or it's understandable that the science has been couched and threat and fear and all that sort of stuff. I mean the scientists didn't know how to communicate an activist took the science and used blame and shame and finger pointing as a way to thought they thought maybe that would make a difference. I don't know, but both were right. It's not that, but they didn't conform to neuroscience. Right, it's a natural, psychological reaction to not being heard, right? It's just frustration that builds into anger and it's well-intentioned, but it doesn't actually change minds or hearts. No. I think we're seeing that shift across all forms of activism because i mean you spoke about the gay rights movement. I mean, you see that in the vegan movement, like, all these sort of tried and true methods that have been used for years that just make people angry and divide people. We're now realizing, Hey, that's not such a good approach. Exactly, in fact, another figure ground shift from my point of view was vegan the plant rich. Vegan polarized, I mean, eat eggs. I mean, but plant rich, like I don't know if I coined it or I know the first time I used it, I hadn't seen it anywhere, but that was in Drawdown, which is rich. Like, first of all, that's a great word and plants... It's like gardening. Plants is a great word. People love plants, And so plant rich diet, is like, so that's an invitation come on in the water's fine. Find your way into the world of plants. You decide, you figure it out. But again, it was like a figure ground shift away from something that could cause people to resist to something that was invitational. And that's what regeneration is an invitation to participate is not, that's what it is come on in. It really is fine. It works. And why are you here at this point, at this time, given what we know, what's your purpose? What gives meaning to your life? That's the question everybody's asked. Yeah. we gotta end this in a couple of minutes, but I can't let you go without pulling on this last thread, which is, and it's related to the psychology piece that we were just discussing. How do you, let's say somebody is listening to this. They're super enthusiastic. They're good to go. They wanna translate that sort of emotionality into action. Like we talked about, but they're surrounded by a community of people or family members or colleagues, et cetera, that are unreceptive to this. And they wanna be able to communicate effectively their passion for this to be a change agent for others. So, given what we just talked about, what are some strategies for helping people communicate more effectively? Don't use the word climate, don't use the word global warming. Those are macro issues and are conceptual. And mean almost nothing to everybody really. I mean, we use the term, but they have no meaning. And most of the jargon and acronyms around climate have no meaning. They're completely conceptual. If you say somebody, 1 5C, what does that mean to anybody? Nothing. I mean, somebody can understand it, even do it to 2.7 F, I'm making, figure it out still means nothing. And so to move completely away from climate speak, because it's meaningless to most people and to speak in ways that are meaningful to the people who surround you. And to the thing about carbon sequestration, for example let's go back to soil, farming, which is the purpose of regen Ag is not to sequester carbon. That's an outcome. It's really important to understand the difference. The purpose of regen farm farming for a farmer is to actually change their life, to get out of debt, to stop using poisons, to poison their family or themselves, and so forth, to increase their profitability, to be proud of what they're doing to absolutely become more resilient to drought in too much water so that the soil can be a reservoir instead of dirt. I mean, you to create, to increase the pollinators for your crops, which are now dead and gone. I mean, it goes on and on and on, by the way, the outcome is more life in the soil and that life is measured by C carbon, okay. But that's an outcome, if somebody's paying for it. Hallelujah. It's another crop you've got going for you, but that is not the purpose. And so the same thing with climate, our purpose is to really take care of each other, to improve the wellbeing of humanity on this planet and all living creatures, all of life. And we do that. We reverse global warming, but if you start with reversing global warming, you've lost most people, right there. Because you're putting the outcome before the value. The value, purpose. But the thing that connects that doesn't connect I mean go to a party and somebody said, oh, what do you do? I'm a climate activist. And they're going, oh, good. Or just immediately. Everybody has some association with that negative or positive, right? Baggage comes into play. And everybody's made up their mind how they feel about it before the conversation even begins. I mean, I like what you said earlier, when you were talking about that town hall and just having people raise their hands and identify what their values are. Absolutely. Through that you discover this commonality, this like, shared sensibility that we can unite over. If you're sitting next to somebody and you say I'm a climate activist, I'm trying to save, the rainforests they are going, oh, cool. If you say like, oh, I'm trying to save the world which even more ineffective. But if you say... you sound like an asshole. Like( chuckles) Well, there's so much hubris in that. What are you doing? I'm saving the world. That's all for us, but you can't do anyway. But if you say I discovered this way, if smartphones are being thrown away. And what I started to do in this place in Peru, I started to nail them up to trees and connect them together with little tiny solar cells kept them charged. And that way the indigenous people there could hear every time a chainsaw started up and go with and find exactly where it was and stop it. Right. Then you're like, tell me more. What is that forest? And how'd you figure that out. And I mean, it opens up the conversation, but you're doing something and there's specifics to it. And that's what somebody is doing by the way. I'm not saying that. And so it again, it's really about reconnecting, and you can't connect by thinking that somebody should connect to the place where your head is. We have to connect where our values are common. No, you're a beautiful man Paul Hawken. I love being with you. Thank you so much. You are a gift to humanity and the planet. I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours. And I really appreciate you coming here today and sharing your wisdom and experience. Thank you and I have to say again, your wisdom and your drawing out of wisdom is in the book. I appreciate that. I really I'm humbled by that statement. No, it really is. I listen, I mean, and it's made a really big difference. I'm glad to hear it. Yeah. And I'm excited for people to check it out regeneration Ending the climate crisis in one generation comes out September 16th 14th, 14th whatever. You can get it now though. Yeah you can pre-order it now it's a beautiful book. And I think it's gonna really inspire a lot of people into the action piece, right? Right. Cool. Well come back and talk to me again sometime. All right.
All right Peace plants. (electric guitar playing)
