Soul Boom - Is Climate Change a Spiritual Crisis? (w/ Paul Hawken)

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

What if climate change isn’t just an environmental or economic issue, but a spiritual one? In this eye-opening conversation, Rainn Wilson and environmentalist Paul Hawken dive into the philosophy of regeneration—a revolutionary approach to healing the planet while revitalizing our sense of meaning and purpose. Paul explains why fear-based activism is failing, how indigenous wisdom offers a roadmap for sustainability, and why reconnecting to nature is the key to saving ourselves. They also discuss the hidden intelligence of plants, the role of community in social transformation, and what a 23-year-old in Tulsa can actually do to make a difference. Paul Hawken is a renowned environmentalist, entrepreneur, and author. His work focuses on practical, systemic solutions to climate change that integrate ecological, social, and economic renewal. Order Paul's new book Carbon: The Book of Life - https://amzn.to/4kY2Nr2 MERCH OUT NOW! https://soulboom.com/store God-Shaped Hole Mug: https://bit.ly/GodShapedHoleMug Sign up for our newsletter! https://soulboom.substack.com SUBSCRIBE to Soul Boom!! https://bit.ly/Subscribe2SoulBoom Watch our Clips: https://bit.ly/SoulBoomCLIPS Watch WISDOM DUMP: https://bit.ly/WISDOMDUMP FOLLOW US! Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@soulboom Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: [e-mail] Executive Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Voicing Change Media Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to soul. I'm 23 years old. I don't know what to think about climate. This is not complicated. This is not rocket science. Okay, so spell it out if it's simple. People think it's an economic issue. It is not.

It's a spiritual issue. Wait, what, what? And if we don't understand that is the core, both the problem and the solution, then we're kidding ourselves. Regeneration is about bringing the plan. had it back alive. But the practice of it brings us alive. What the 23-year-old is mourning is a meaningful life. Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience.

I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. So Paul, I did this before on another episode. I'm a college kid. I'm 23 years old. I'm living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I don't know what to think about climate. I've got relatives who are like, it's a crock, it's a liberal conspiracy, it's just an excuse to increase government. This side of my family is very partisan. And on the other side, I'm seeing videos online. I'm looking videos online. I'm looking at some data and science that is coming to me through some classes that I'm taking. I'm looking at some TikTok influencers.

And I'm thinking, oh, maybe there is a connection between manmade emissions and extreme weather events and climate change. I've got a lot of mixed feelings inside of me. There's part of me that's kind of skeptical and reactive. And I've got kind of a wall up. There's part of me that is terrified for what this means. not only for me, because I'm young, I'm 20-something, but what if I want to have kids? What if they want to have kids?

What if I have grandkids and great-grandkids? What's it going to look like? And I'm feeling at the same time kind of hopeless because when I do look at the big picture of climate change, it feels overwhelming. It's like, what am I really? Me, just getting an electric car and reducing my shopping bags and recycling my milk bottles, that's really going to make a difference. Like, what the hell do I do? I'm just this kid in Tulsa and I'm 23 years old. So what would you say to that kid?

That's a perfect description, by the way, not just 23-year-olds, by the way, 43-year-olds and 63-year-olds as well. You know, have the same confusion. They've been bombarded with information or, I would say, warnings and cautionary sort of statements, if not fear-based statements, about what's going to happen, future existential threat. Your life is threatened. And in the last two years, especially two, three years, I mean, it's all over the media,

you know, warming and suffering, the floods, the droughts. I mean, this is not complicated. This is not rocket science. Okay, so spill it out if it's so simple. Yeah, I mean, we're warm, you know. We have an atmosphere. We can walk around and do things. And it's because we have triatomic particles called CO2 and H2 and H2O as well as, you know, methane.

And what they do is we're warm because infrared radiation comes. from the sun. And some of it stays here and some of it goes back into space. And so there's this wonderful balance, you know, in terms of cold, heat, warmth, et cetera, on the planet. And what happens is that infrared radiation bounces off the earth, not all of it, some of it, and goes right back out, but it gets caught by these, you call it greenhouse gases, but mostly CO2, which is a tri-atomic particle. The number one warming molecule is actually water. But anyway, that's H2O, 2 H's and O.

But they're just like a bird, and they flap. In other words, when the radiation comes back up from the earth, the CO2 flaps like a bird like this, and re-radiates the heat back to Earth. Okay, that's how it works. Thank God, that's why we're here. Now, if you put more greenhouse gases up there, more CO2 up there,

you just can get more heat radiated down. That's global warming. We've known this since the 19th century. Eunice Foote, Newton, a woman, 1859, discovered it. And she put carbonic acid, which was CO2, into jars. And other jars didn't have it in, and put them out in the sun. And measured the difference in temperature. And then she wasn't paid attention to because she was a woman

and women could not speak at scientific gatherings at that time. And so Joseph Tyndall, Irishman, 1863, supposedly not knowing about Eunice Foot Newton, probably maybe not, but did the same experiments. And he was so bollocks by them, he couldn't believe them, because he saw the same thing. And he just said, it doesn't make any sense at all. He did him over and over and over again

until he was convinced that, in fact, CO2, warmed the atmosphere. And then Svante Arrhenius, Swedish, 1898, said, I'm just going to do the math by hand. And he did. It took him a year. And he calculated and estimated that the Earth's temperature went by 5, 6 degrees

if we doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. He was actually spot on in terms of his predictions. And he thought it would be a good thing because he thought it would happen over many, many, many decades and centuries, you know. He had no idea the fossil fuels were coming. And that has happened over many centuries throughout the history of planet Earth.

There has been times, because of volcanic eruptions and other natural events, that there has been massive amounts of CO2 and that we had no polar ice caps and Greenland was just a stone shelf and not an ice shelf. Well, I mean, the Earth also has the Milankovic cycle which rotates every 100,000,000 years.

And that's why you get glaciation and ice ice. ages and then it goes the other way and you start to get the glaciers receding and the forests start to go north and you get this oscillation and you know and you have these periods in between that and we're in one where it's warm and you get proliferation of forest and trees and life and so forth and then it contracts again this has been going on for a billion years and so people use that the immune period was the last one ppm the carbon in the atmosphere was 280 same as it was the beginning of the industrial age they see there's no such thing that has nothing to do with warming. Well, I mean, goodness sakes, you know,

they've ignored a basic fundamental fact of the Earth's behavior or geology, which is the Mankovit cycle, you know, with this rotation, slow rotation. But the 23-year-old in Tulsa, I mean, that poor kid, you know, because he and most people have been subjected to warnings, to cautionary statements. that are fear-based. And the reason for that, I think, is because when the science came out

and when did it come out, you know, it depends, you know, but in the 70s. 70s, 80s, 90s. I would say so, yes. That's my, you know. Oil companies had the information in the 70s or 80s. Yes, exactly.

But it's very conservative. Scientists are very conservative. So the way they spoke of it was very conservative. Well, the activists and NGOs and so forth and said, wait a minute, this means X, Y, Z, you know, we're in deep doo-do.

This is in trouble with this. And they use. fear as a way to try to excite people, to get them interested, to get money for, you know, fair play to them to be better activists and to educate and to lobby and to change laws and to change practices and to go after corporations. But it is all based on fear. It wasn't based on possibility. No one at that time said, you know, this is a degenerative economic extractive world we're in

right now and there's a lot of pluses to that and you know your lifestyle your car your home your heat your warmth your clothing your blah blah blah blah but actually we can see the end of that now we can see the end of that road that's what the headlines say right we can't keep going it's not sustainable not sustainable we're pulling carbon out of the planet whether it's from a peak bog whether it's in coal, whether it's in gasoline, we're chewing it up and we're causing all of this smoke and particulate and exhaust and that's putting it up into the atmosphere. And you kind of go like, well, sometimes we're going to run out of coal or running out of, you know, oil. We're running out of peat bogs. So, hey, opportunity. So is this what you would say to the 23 year old in Tulsa?

No, what I would say, well, yeah, opportunity. Yes, that that is, but I would say that if you do 180, Like if you know you're not going to go further down that road because it spells disaster. Let's forget the deniers for a minute. Okay. Let's just stick to science and to actually the headlines. And so you can't keep going that way. So where do you go? You do a 180 pivot.

In other words, well, degeneration isn't going to work if we keep doing that. Extractive. We've extracted so much of the living systems on Earth and transformed them into our lifestyle into our goods and services. And so regeneration is simply asking the question, how do we grow food? How do we make houses? How do we create the built environment?

How do we create mobility? How do we create clothing? How do we create the needs of human beings, right? And how do we create such a way that it creates more life as a result instead of less? That's all what regeneration is. That goes to possibility. opens up invention, it opens up the mind, it opens up creativity and the way it's

been communicated to the 23-year-old is you're screwed and if you're not screwed now you soon will be and and then he or she does not see any road out does no see's no pathway and know very well that they toss the cocaine into recycling bin it's meaningless I'm sorry it's meaningless has it's it's a gesture it may remind you that you are aware of it, but other than that, you know, and so what we've done and what business has done is trivialized it by saying,

oh, we use 50% of recycled plastic in our pop cans, you know. They shouldn't be selling soda pop in the first place, you know. It's criminal. It causes diabetes. They spend $5 billion a year basically making our children sick. That's a crime against humanity.

And they're talking about what's in the aluminum. I'm sorry. You know, so that's the kind of information. people are getting instead of Coke and Pepsi and everybody standing back and saying, you know. That's information that are getting from one side and then there's information they're getting from the other side. It's not a side. It's a belief. Okay. Yeah. There's information they're getting from another belief system, which used, go ahead.

It's not a belief system. I understand that. But for people that are skeptical about climate change, for whatever reason, because they're, you know, politically on the right and they just, have to sit in opposition to anything that they view is coming from the political left, that side, that belief system is very good at communicating certain things. Well, that's the United States, primarily. And there's also coming from farmers in Europe as well, no question about it, which is enlivening the right.

I've spoken to people that are very kind of center and center right, and they're so reactive to the kind of the fear-mongering on the progressive side that they're like, first of all, they were in great denial. And like, this isn't true and that's not true and that's not true. And there's still some denialists, but they've shifted tactics over the last 10 or 15 years very effectively to no longer being about denial. Like, this is not happening. They're saying to being like they're anti-climate extremists.

They're anti-like people shouting for the hills. We're all going to die and humanity is doomed. And they're like, slow down. Hold on a second. And you want us to give up oil and we're all going to drive electric cars. How's that going to work? And wait a minute. You know, this shirt has petroleum products in it.

That kind of science skepticism and climate skepticism is kind of a political fallback position. But it's really this kind of, it's a little bit an arrogant fallback position of like, cool your jets, you crazy lefty weirdos that want to change everything immediately. slow it down, slow your role, and they've been very, very good at messaging that. So I'm just bringing this back to the 23-year-old in Tulsa who has been hearing those messages since he was a kid. Yeah, and I'd say fair play to those people

who object to the catastrophization of the future because it doesn't work and it's not fair and it's not kind and it's not helpful. Most of the regenerative farmers I have worked with in my life and know are staunch Republicans. and staunch. And they don't buy anything on the left, you know, other, but they are pragmatic.

And they are regenerative farmers because it works better. Their costs go down. Their income goes up. Their children aren't being poisoned by pesticides and herbicides. The water they can drink again, or it's not going into their well water. I mean, they're doing it because it works. We talk about, you know, combating climate, you know. tackling, fighting.

We use these words, you know, like military, you know, aggressive male words. What's going on there? We're objectifying climate as if it was the thing. It's other. We're othering climate.

When the climate and the earth are inseparable in the same way, you have air in your lungs, you have gas in your lungs. That's part of your, and you have tendons and bones and skin and sinew. So the earth is no different. It breathes.

And so when you objectify it, that's the thinking that caused the problem. We've been objectifying the natural world and taking what we want in the way we want and not just the natural world, but from people, from cultures, right? From indigenous people, whoever was there happened to be there, tough luck. We want this. We want your trees. We want your resources, you know, or we want to put in sugar or cotton, whatever. And so I just feel like you brought up with sustainability.

Sustain what? What are you talking about? Sustain a current system to prolong it. Right. And so when you're talking to industry, you know,

they want to use the thing, well, we want to economics, you know, we can make it economically, we can do it, you know, we're going to

use market mechanisms, you know. And I'm going, oh, really, we've sold off the earth to the highest bidder for 500 years and look what,

look where we are. The market doesn't work. I'm sorry. it just doesn't work. And that's like, I mean, talk about farting in church, you know. I mean, to say that to the business establishment, you know, is like... But you can't say that to those regenerative farmers that you're talking about that are... No, they sell.

They buy cell. Buy sell is different than making the earth a marketplace. Okay. Yeah. Commerce is sacred. That's been going on for 10,000, 15, 20,000 years, you know. When Lewis and Clark got to the Northwest, they had Wampum, they had beef, beads. Some of those beads came from Patagonia. How'd they get there? Commerce. That's commerce.

Exchange, trust, credit means to believe. So I have nothing against commerce. I'm talking about how business is organized today. And it's enshrined the marketplace. And I'm just saying, well, if that worked, we wouldn't be in deep doo-doo now. If the marketplace works, it doesn't work. So what does work, you know? And people think it's an economic issue. It is not. It's a spiritual issue. And if we don't understand that is the core, both the problem and the solution,

then we're kidding ourselves because we're just rearranging things. You're singing my song in Soul Boom. I talk about climate change a great deal. And I talk about it as a spiritual shift in thinking, as a spiritual way of being about a re a reinvention of our relationship to the natural world, but going back to maybe our relationship to the natural world from a thousand years ago, learning from indigenous peoples, but treating Mother Earth as this beautiful breathing organism that we're a part of, not something separate from us, not something to be conquered,

something to be integrated with, something to find interconnection with. And I imagine there's a lot of people listening to me right now, rolling their eyes. I'm like, oh, God, Mother Earth, here we go again, hippie, schmippy, you know, petulie and moccasins and long hair and no showers. Like, what are you talking about? But dare I say, were the hippies right? I think the hippies might have been just a little bit right. But tell me more about this kind of spiritual revolution as pertains to revolutionizing the way we are with our planet and how this affects the future of our planet as regards climate change.

Well, regeneration brings is about bringing the planet back alive. But the practice of it brings us alive. and what the 23-year-old is mourning is a meaningful life. What most of the world lacks right now is meaningful purpose. Why am I here? And I read and like, what am I doing here? Or is my work meaningful? Most of the times it is not.

You know, and people know it. That's why they're gone at 501 from that job. You know, they're not hanging out. Why? Because it has no meaning. And so what regeneration does is provide a sense of purpose and meaning to people. Okay. And the idea that somehow the hippies discovered something,

there's 7,000 cultures roughly that we know about on planet Earth. Not one of them ever said Father Earth. They all said, Terramandre, Mother Earth, all of them. What did they know? It's her mother. It really is. It's the sort. right? So it's really not about thinking that, it's about feeling that. And I mean, I have a new book

coming out called Carbon, the Book of Life, but the point being is that carbon is not a thing. It's a flow. And that flow is so beautiful, so inspiring. I mean, it's... Carbon's not our enemy. No. There's 120 billion carbon molecules in... every one of your 36 trillion cells. Wait, what? What? 120 billion carbon atoms in every one of your 36 trillion cells. Wow.

So you see what I mean? Carbon is like, it's like, Tera Madre, it's mother. I mean, it's the only element that actually saves energy and has memory, it's carbon. Nothing else does that. So we don't even know what carbon is. We think it's like, you know, scrape it off a bottom of a frying pan

or, you know, something like that. No. It is just, it's beyond extraordinary. And again, if you look at the flow of carbon, which is what it's doing all the time right now between you and I. I mean, I have your DNA in me now. Hey.

Hey. Yeah, my, I'm sorry, kid. You mean exchanging breaths in the podcast room? Actually, no, yeah. Yeah, we're breathing each other's DNA. We are now brothers in that sense, right? And we'll talk about it later.

No, I mean, just the, you said it, this beautiful, intricate, exquisite interconnection that we have, of course, but all of life has, there's 3.4 trillion creatures here on the planet. they're not just waiting for us to wake up. They're communicating. They're talking.

They've always been talking. They're exchanging information. They're learning from each other, from their own species and from others. It's an evolving, beautiful, extraordinary planet that we live on. And the news cycle, what we get, what we see, what we hear, going back to communication, that 23-year-old is crap. I don't care if it's coming from somebody who really care. You know, and I believe them about climate, about the future, you know, that sincerely. But it's really bad communication.

So what does a 23-year-old do to get in touch with regeneration of planet Earth? Right to me. I'll put him in touch. Okay. No, to not to other organizations, you know, regeneration.org. I mean, other organizations, people, you know, that are like him, you know, that are all over the world. Maybe he wants to go to Sierra Leone and work with people there or Kenya or maybe in New Zealand or maybe, you know, I mean. Yeah, but if he's got $117 in the bank and he can't fly to Sierra Leone. You do it in Oklahoma.

Okay. Okay. Because there's plenty of going on in Oklahoma. Okay. It's not that he has to, but I'm just saying is that when you're young, you should definitely leave home. Because then you can see home. You can't see it when you're in your home. You have to get away.

I went to Paris and then Europe for a year when I was. 17 is the best thing I ever did because I was doing Le Mans and I could see America for the first time the way other people saw us because we're in a bubble here. Well, you've gone back into time into the 60s now. What I want to hear about is you worked with Dr. Martin Luther King and his campaign and you started this whole journey working in racial justice. Tell me how you got involved. Probably because I grew up in Berkeley, you know, which is one of the three communist cities at that time, Berkeley, Madison, and Cambridge. Okay.

I was very leftist. So for me, I'm just saying I grew up in a thing where you're doing what the heck to black people in Alabama? It was like, it just was just non-credible. Now, it's not that I didn't see racism in Berkeley. I did, okay. But it was just attitude, you know. I was like, oh, come on.

But as a kid, you know, you don't have. have that. If you grow up with children and they're Asian and they're black or whatever, you know, Native America and so forth, you're just friends. You don't care about those distinctions. So when I heard about, when I read about what was happening to those children, the 13-year-olds who were crossing the, you know, the bridge, you know, marching to Montgomery. They went to March to Montgomery to George Wallace and say, hey, you know, and present, you know, for the Voting Rights Act eventually, but it was actually about what's happening to them in Selma.

And they got the crap beat out of them again and again and again. Yeah, fire hoses and dogs and you name it. And the heroes of the Marshall Montgomery, with all due respect is not MLK, it was so chilled. They were so brave and it was so incredible. So what did you do? You pack up a knapsack and go to Selma? Yeah, I drove down and I was three other people.

and, you know, a white kid from Berkeley showing up, and they said, oh, why don't you take care of this? This is a minor thing, which is to register the press. The press was starting to come in from all over the world. And the reason you registered the press was to make sure that they didn't get killed. That's why. So you had a registration. So they, it was kind of like what they did in, you know, Afghanistan and so forth, you know,

in the first, is you checked in, you checked out. I'm back, you know, I'm here. So that was why we did it, you know, not to get the names of people in the press, and the met a lot of people in the press. So it was a minor, minor, minor function, but it was extraordinary in terms of what I got to see and meetings I got to be in and sermons I got to listen to from James Bevel, from obviously Martin Luther King, you know, and others.

And I was just in awe. And I wrote quite a bit about it in a new book, because what you saw there was community, an African Methodist, you know, Bethel, Episcopal Church, you know, like the AME, in the Brown Chapel, in Selma. That was the center of the march. And there was preaching and gospel singing,

you know, starting in the afternoon and went right into the night, day after day after day, with these extraordinary people coming in like Martin Luther King. And I was just, again, this white kid, you know, up there in the balcony, watching and going, and I had never in my life felt or seen community like that. And there was, you know, a deacon who got four weeks earlier,

who got killed by Alabama state troopers in a cafe and yanked them out and beat the crap out of him and he died. His mom was in the church when I was there. And it was so much about forgiveness. I mean, it wasn't about we're going to go out there and do, you know, eye for an eye. We're going to love the people that have the fire hoses and the dogs and the trenches. Absolutely. Absolutely. And again, the cohesion and the joy and the main choirs that produced Aretha Franklin and, you know, amazing singers. The black church was an institution that

African-Americans understand very well, but I don't think why people understand what the black church was, but it was community of formed by enslaved people. And eventually formally enslaved or the relatives were, you know. I talk about that in Soul Boom. I talk about the how the civil rights movement was not only a spiritual movement for social change,

but a religious movement in the sense that the church has provided communication transportation, carpools, sack lunches, they fed the troops. You could sleep there. And the communication between the black churches in the South, it was that network that provide the kind of the arteries

and the blood flow to this entire civil rights movement. Yes. And the reason I wrote about it in the latest book, which comes out in March. What's it called? Carbon, the Book of Life.

Okay. I wrote about it because they said, if they can do this, in light of what was being done to them, where are we? Where's our community? Because all life is community. There is no such thing as life that is not community.

And, for example, there's no life outside of a cell. That's cowboys and comic books where you think somebody is like not part of community. But in fact, you know, it starts. with the cell. The cell is a community of molecules, atoms, you know, trillion, chemically interacting, but inside the cell, there is no life. It's a chemical. Inside the cell, there's no life. The cell is alive. Okay. Inside the cell, there's no life. The cell is alive. Yes. And we don't know. To this day, we cannot figure out how that happens. That's community. That's life. You talk about miracles.

You have 36 trillion of them. Miracles right now. Called cells. And all life. And so cells developed a long time ago, I mean, you carry it like cells, and they start to group together and, you know, make things and plants and professional and sort of stuff. I mean, but I mean, the fact is the core of all life on this planet is a cell. And that's the beginning of life.

And so it's a community. was at the black church and saying, you know, I, at Graham and Berkeley, that was not community with all their respect. My father taught at the university, but it was not community. Okay. It was interesting.

Don't get me wrong. And fascinating. But I saw community for the first time, and it made an indelible impression upon me and profound respect for, and we think of, you know, African-American and so forth, these are indigenous people who were stolen from their home.

lands and they brought with them you know seeds in their hair how did they have the foresight to put that in their hair and hide it from their captors and that's why the best rice farmers in the south were black and when I started airline that's where I got my organic rice from black farmers in the south you know that's amazing yeah so you witnessed community and made an indelible impression. Talk me through how you go from the civil rights movement being there on the front lines. You started Erwan the series of like now high end organic grocery stores throughout Southern California. But how do you move from that to the work that you do in environmentalism? Curiosity. Really, I mean, all those things and what subsequent things

were about curiosity. Why is this happening? And why do people talk that way? Why do people act that way? You know, I really wanted to know. I spent a year in Europe as well and traveled to 12 different countries and, you know, Red Le Mans in Paris.

And so I could see America for the first time the way America did not see itself, but the way from the outside, which was a revelation. That's why I think travel is really important for everybody, you know, get outside of your bubble, wherever that might be. And that's good advice for the 23-year-old in Tulsa,

get out of your bubble for a little bit, in some perspective. Any way you can. And he's got $117, that's enough. Get the heck out. I mean, I had nothing. I had no money. And I got on a hopped on a freighter in Newport News.

It was carrying coal to Rotterdam. I hitchhiked. You know, I went into universities and, you know, they had cafeterias and I pretended I was a student. I lost a day. You know, I mean, and it's delicious, you know. Anybody can do it. Anybody can do it.

You don't need money. You need actually, you need curiosity. It's also hard to find community when you're doing this all day. You can't. And it's a fake community to think, like, oh, your TikTok followers or Instagram followers and their comments are a community. I'm saying this as someone, hi, soul boom. We're trying to create an online community at Soul Boom.

it's fake, don't believe it. Please continue to subscribe, but move outside of your comfort zone and find actual real community with people. But this is one of the great tragedies because it's a community killer and then we're disconnected and we're disconnected from others.

We're disconnected from ourselves and then, of course, we're disconnected from planet Earth. For the 22-year-old go to Nexus, N-E-X-U-S on regeneration.org And you'll find thousands of organizations, videos. And you don't have to be a hippie. You don't have to listen to fish. Oh, yeah, yeah, it's required.

You do? And you'll find connectivity to what's going on in the world. And furthermore, we're adding a list of organizations. Also go to regenerators.org in Australia. I can start to name, you know, go to Force of Nature. if you're young. I mean, what's happening in the world right now with respect to regeneration is extraordinary.

And you're not going to read about it in the Times, the Post, the Guardian, because it's small, you know? I mean, and it doesn't, what's the news? The news is they're joyful, they're happy, they're active, it's working, it's creating change, and people have a sense of meaning in their life. In Soul Boom, I talk about a very popular,

Baha'i phrase, which is that the world right now is going through twin processes of disintegration and integration. And both are happening at the same time. And this can be very difficult for the 23-year-old in Tulsa to see because you can sometimes just get overwhelmed like, everything's falling apart. Our presidents are being assassinated and, you know, environment and extreme weather and partisan toxicity and health care. everything's falling apart and it's easy to get overwhelmed.

And then there are these little sparks. There are these little spots of hope throughout the planet. Regeneration is a great way of looking at that. Organizations that are focused on some form of regeneration, building community, healing. And these are the forces of integration. So my advice for the 23-year-old in Tulsa, which goes hand in hand with yours,

is to look for the forces of integration. around you. And I don't want to say ignore the disintegration. You have to honor it. You witness it because we have for the past 500 years been working in ways that are not sustainable and that are damaging and toxic to ourselves, our mental health, our physical health, to our communities, and certainly to our planet. But find those points of light, those points of integration and join in. That's what you did in the civil rights movement. You're like, hey, great. injustice, disintegration happening here. What's integration?

Wow, the civil rights movement and the AME churches and Martin Luther King, the Southern Leadership Conference, let me go volunteer my time there. So that's another way of looking at regeneration is forces of integration. And for him or her to be in a room of peers, colleagues. Hippy, not hippie.

Roughly, their age, right? Who are excited, who are motivated, who are turned on about what they do and understand and see the same world that he sees in terms of like it's going to hell and a habesca. You know, uh-huh, uh-huh. But for me, it's more like, take it all in, okay? What's going on?

Take it in and then say, I got it. Now, this is what I'm going to do. But don't just keep taking it in, take it in, take it in, take it in, take it in. It'll kill you. It'll destroy you. It'll destroy your sense of faith in humanity. There's one thing that will do. You have one of the greatest titles of a book I've ever heard, Blessed Unrest.

Can you tell us what Blessed Unrest is? It's really a phrase from Martha Graham, the choreographer and dancer. She was saying she saw a performance of her dance and she thought it was so bad it was in New York, you know. And somebody responded to her about there is this blessed unrest, you know, of people, you know, who really are working towards a world that makes sense. You know, it's in the first quote of the book. I don't remember by heart at the moment.

It's a beautiful quote. But it was saying then, and it's true now, by the way, that the largest movement in the world has begun, and we don't see it. At that time, we had a donor who funded us to catalog how many organizations in the world that were working on regeneration, working on climate,

working on social justice. We came up with over a million at that time. It was almost one for every 60, 800 people. So you're saying part of this blessed unrest is that there is a movement happening right now. We may not see it. It may not be in the news cycle because it doesn't spark outrage, but there is a movement for social change going on all around us. Did you imagine soul boom six years ago when you were doing the office? I had no idea that there would be a hunger for people wanting to talk about a spiritual revolution, about reimagining how we do most everything. That both the book would be a best

seller and that the podcast would take off and that people were hungry for these kind of like deep human conversations. I really did not know that a handful of years ago. Right. Well, the world's just like you in that sense, which is that people reach this point of insight and reflection and they're not here for long and they change their life to be meaningful. We all want to feel like we have meaning to ourselves and to others. And you don't do that by making people afraid or by accusing accusations or by blaming. You do it by absolutely, you know, connecting.

And it's all about connection. It's all about reconnecting to self-first. And that's what spirituality is about, you know, is like, who am I? And if you have allowed yourself that, I, to be defined by your external environment, by those inputs, by that phone, by comments, you're lost. You're confused.

And most of that confusion is deliberate, is coming at you, by the way. You're seen as an object and to be manipulated. So the spiritual life is one of just, wait a minute, that's not who I am. discovering who you are is why we hear it's our whole life. It's not like, oh, now I know. No, the discovery, the openings, the connections, the insight. And I would say the awe and the wonder. And they're like, oh, my gosh, you know.

And the compassion that comes out of that. And love for self, because if you don't love yourself, nobody else is really going to. I mean, they can see it right away. You hate yourself. You want me as your friend? I love what you're saying because you don't necessarily have to have God in the equation. You don't necessarily have to have organized religion or faith in the equation.

But all of these beautiful, gooey, source words that you're talking about, meaning, you know, connection, awe, love. That's the spiritual goods. and that's something we can all agree with. You can be spiritual but not religious, you can be an atheist, you can be born again Christian or Hindu. It doesn't really matter. We can focus on connection, meaning awe, wonder, and love. Absolutely, and that's why they call that practice,

because you practice every day and you don't take it for granted. What's your practice? My practice. Oh, being outside. I love that. No, I'm serious. Yeah. I really do love that.

Yeah, I mean. I get that. I used to sit a lot and I once for three months silently with no one around me. You sat for three months with no one around you silently like under a tree or something? No, and actually it was a refuge. Air one parking lot? No, no. It was a refuge in the mountains of New Mexico and I was a caretaker.

Nobody was there. I'm snowing, this and that and so forth. So I was in silence for three months. What did you get out of that? I recommend it to every day. I recommend it to everybody. Did you start talking to like the bees and the ferns and stuff? Well, first of all, you have to shut up this, this, the mind.

I mean, because it's talking like crazy. Oh, yeah. It's panicking, basically. Yeah. Because where are the inputs? Gibber jabbing. There was no radio. There was no telephone.

There was no electricity. There was no input. There was no mail. I mean, it's far away, you know. And so my companions were simply what flew and what walked and, you know, what slithered along. and, you know, it swam. I mean, and the trees and so forth. So those are my only companions for three months.

And slowly you start, things start to sort of fall away, you know. I remember, like, one morning it was walking up this river. And no, it wasn't big rivers, but it's like a very loud rushing stream because it was always melting, you know, and so it was loud. and I was walking up and I almost ran into a bear. And we were both, it was, we were both so embarrassed. Both, the bear. You were embarrassed?

Yeah, yeah. We were both. The bear is shitting in the woods or something? No, no, the bear's walking along down. I'm going up. And you don't look at a bear. That's hostility. And I knew that.

So I was looking to the side and the bear was, And I could see enough to see that the bear also was looking away, going, you know, like, how did I not see this thing coming at me? And how did I not see this thing? Because it's sound. We couldn't hear anything. And then, you know, there was that pause and that thing. And it was okay. And then we sort of moved out a little bit and sort of away.

And then walked past each other, right? So forth, you know. And you can have that experience, you know, at a shopping mall. You mean, you have to go where... It would be pretty cool if there was a bear in a shop. I would know. It would be very good. I would love to see what happened.

I want to see that. Well, it would be cruel to the bear, but, you know, but everybody else would definitely have an experience. A bear loves a good food court. But it's ultra-processed food, so it would be bad. Yeah, you're right. You're right. But being there three months is that I, when I got back into Taoist, Mexico,

and for the first time I heard people talking, I was just fascinated by what they were saying. And I realized that, me too, by the way, everyone is talking about themselves. That's all they talk about. Now, I don't mean I went to the movie and did this, I think this, No, you can say, I think that person is, fill in the adjective, you're talking about yourself. It's how you see the world.

Everything you say, speak, share, communicate. Yeah, we've talked about it on this show before, the insistent self. Insistent self, exactly right. And that, I was experiencing it for the first time. Oh, my gosh. And I felt like everybody was walking around naked in that sense. I had no clothes on, but it wasn't clothing. It was just their awareness, their consciousness,

the way they saw themselves, was patently obvious. And it was so humbling and like, oh my. So how do you connect on a daily basis and your daily practice of being outside to connect with that beautiful three-month period? I have a garden and I live in the woods, but you never see it the same.

It's never the same. you see creatures and bees and pollinators and butterflies and so forth that are just what's had? And why does it go to those blooms but not have one? Yeah, I just saw today in my yard there's a tree growing up over a wall and then vines came over the tree. And then leaves are poking up, but then other vines are on those leaves. And then there's other. And I was just, I really stayed in awe for like three minutes of like, what the hell is going on here?

Like I couldn't tell what was a leaf, a tree, a fern, a branch, a vine. And it was really uplifting. I was talking about Stefano Mancuso, who is Italian and writes about plant intelligence. And the plants have 20 senses. We have five. There's Cecil,

which means they can't move. Animals can move around. So they're completely different. You know, they don't have organs, interior, you know, so if we do, we could be killed like that. You can cut a plant and we'll just grow back. He point out that plants actually in trees can see movement, literally. In other words, it kind of to shower away, you know, but see something moving past it, the plant. And I have 27 redwood trees outside to the south of my property. And summer have, you know, eight-foot circumference,

and they're 80 feet tall and some are smaller. And I have a pathway through the woods to the carport. And I've walked out all the time. You know, the redwoods are the great, you know. And I walked, that day I walked to the carport. I realized all the trees are noticing me. And I had never noticed them. But they were noticing me.

When you understand that when you go into a forest or a grassland or, you know, mixed grassland with oak trees and all this sort of stuff, you are known to everything that's there. You think, oh, I'm busy, I'll go right, it doesn't matter. They are aware of you. And what we know about plants now is you touch a plant, the whole plant knows instantly.

How big it is, doesn't matter how small. It knows. It's not like, you know, just like if we scratch ourselves, Our whole body knows it. It's not like just a hand knows it, but we have nothing else. We know it. Plants are the same. And plants are communicating.

They're sharing information. As you speak with such love and awe and wonder and science about this world, I'm thinking like if all seven billion of us were that connected to the natural world around us, this wouldn't be an issue. So the disconnection from the awe, beauty, wonder, and divine spirit of nature has really led to this situation that we're in. To make a world we're saving, we have to save our brothers and sisters. And I mean to create the conditions in which they can absolutely save themselves because nobody wants to be saved. I mean, that's sort of patronizing.

What I mean is create the conditions. in which they, the father, the mother, you know, of a family, you know, can transform their lives into one of security, of resilience, you know, do something for their children they never had before, you know. And this has to do with food security, health, clothing, education, mobility. I mean, these are the things we have to address for people. I am in love with, you know, nature and plants and so forth. I have all my life, you know, since I was a kid,

don't even pretend to understand what's going on in nature, by the way. I don't. But I was so impressed. There's a new book called Lighteaters by Zoe Slender, and it's a beautiful, beautiful review of all the latest discoveries and papers peer-reviewed in botany about plants. And she's very, very circumspect. She's a really great journalist, you know.

it's one of the most important books out there right now, in my opinion, called The Light Eaters. And she said the botanists who can't come out because they don't want to lose their privilege in the university and so forth. But privately, they say the only way, given what we know about plants, the neurology, the neurobiology, the communication.

skills, their adaptivity, their knowledge is the only way we can describe a plant, the whole plant, is that it is a brain. The whole plant's a brain. Because we keep thinking, well, it can't think, it can't communicate, and I can't do that because we have a separate brain and then we have a nervous system and, you know, here's, you know, I pinched my finger and I feel, you know, I touch, you know, a lot. Plasts don't work that way. We can't even imagine anything different than ourselves when we look out on nature and what the beauty of what's going right now.

I think in science is scientists both Western but also indigenous wisdom. It's starting to merge into an understanding of the world that tells us what we don't know, not what we do. that is an opening, not a closure. And being so cocked sure of what a plant is and what it isn't or this and that and so forth is closure. And again, when we think about regeneration, like what does that mean? Well, regenerating what and where?

And to what end? And then you start to go in to the state of the art in terms of what we are discovering about ourselves, about the living world and so forth. Mother bats speak a separate lingo from other bats, from the male bats. Then they name their children. It's like, and they teach them.

Like, oh, and 24% of all mammals on earth are bats. And they're sacred everywhere in the world except in the West. And somehow people understood that about bats is like they were sacred. that they're amazing spirit messengers. I'm just saying, when you start to get into regeneration, trust your curiosity.

Trust yourself. Let it lead you. Let it lead you. So is that the philosophical framework of the new operating system that civilization needs? Gosh, you know, when I wrote that, I probably wouldn't say it that way because it sounds like it's a manual

and I was trying to make fun of the fact that I think I said, you know, the manual would say, you know, don't touch the thermostat and leave the thermostat alone and so forth. But the thing is that what I do say later, the human body, to paraphrase, Buckminster Fuller,

is that most people don't know they're in the human body, just like we don't know we're in a spaceship. It's called Planet Earth, going a million miles an hour. and you don't need first class, you know, it's seating for everyone, and the food's really great. But most people now, because of the way they've grown up, the way they've eaten, you know, 73% of food is not food.

It's called UPS, ultra-processed food. It's crap, it's making it sick as hell. And it's causing cancer, and cancer now is rising in children at a spectacular rate, if you could call it spectacular. Autoimmune diseases. Autoimmune. I mean, it's just crazy what's happening to our health.

And as Wendell Berry said, we have a health system that doesn't care about food. We have a food system, and we don't give a damn about health. And so those two industries, right, control, really, what's happening to our planet and to our children, 30 plus percent of all greenhouse gases come from the food system. Number one, it's number one, more than transport is food. It can be the opposite.

with regenerative food, if we have local markets. Right. We can be taking carbon from the air and putting it back into the earth. Yeah, we can reduce it. You know, transport costs, packaging, plastic, all that sort of stuff, you know. We need to limit carbon emissions.

No question. And we need to clean up air conditioning and construction and cities. We need to plant trees. We need to kind of reforest. We need to kind of reinvent how we do agriculture. You talked about how the, huge ecological footprint that the healthcare system leaves.

We need to do all that. But that is not enough in and of itself. We also, at the same time, need to be completely reconfiguring how humanity relates to Mother Earth. Actually, how humanity relates to itself. Okay. Social justice.

If we're not, if that isn't top of the pile, it's not going to happen. Over 99% of humanity does nothing on the daily basis about climate. And a significant number know that there is global warming and some of them know the mechanism or basic science. And two-thirds of Americans, by the way,

two-thirds believe that extreme weather events are caused by human emissions. Yeah, and they don't do anything. That's my point, they don't do anything. Okay. They can answer a poll. So, yeah, doesn't mean they do anything on a daily basis. But they don't know what to do.

That's my point. the fact is that they don't really try to find out what to do either. Okay. Sure. And the way, going back to the beginning of the program, the way it's communicated to them is absolutely broken. And so again, going back to regeneration, the book the follow drawdown is, wait a minute, can we relate to each other in a different way? And can we look at this in a different way? It doesn't preclude or occlude anything that's in drawdown. It just opens it up, It opens up the aperture to understanding of one's self in relationship and connection to the living world. The living world includes human beings and children and mothers and fathers and poor and poverty.

And so to not make that, again, that dichotomy, you know, oh, there's people, let's get our air conditioning right or let's get a this right or let's get, yeah, get it right. Reduce carbon emissions, all that sort of stuff, go to net zero. But if you do that and really ignore what we, we are doing to each other, it's Katie Bar the Door, it's over. We can't get there from here. In regeneration, you have a quote from the legendary Jane Goodall, who is one of the greatest human beings to ever walk the earth. And she talks about her experiences in the Gombe National Park.

And she says, people were living unsustainably. farmland was overused and spent. Trees were cut down to make room for farming and charcoal production, which happens all across the developing world. People were struggling to survive. That's when I realized that if we can't help these communities find a way of making a living without destroying their environment, we cannot protect the chimps. You cannot save an animal species unless you protect its environment, which is not possible without the participation of local communities. And that will not happen if they are living in abject poverty. So based on the quote, what would you say to our kid in Tulsa?

Well, the first thing I'd say is listen to that quote. You know why I asked Jane to write the introduction to regeneration. Yeah. That sort of knowledge and deep, deep experience, you know. It's like, oh, I want to save the chimpanzees. Oh, but I can't save them without saving the environment. Oh, but the community is having unsustainable farming practices. Oh, why are they doing that?

Because they're in abject poverty. we have to fix poverty before we can fix the environment and save the chimpanzees, and that relates to climate change. And you have to build latrines in the school for girls. Otherwise, the girls can't go to school once puberty starts. I mean, it's all connected. And we are profoundly disconnected from each other, frankly. She says, in that quote,

what I've been trying to say for two hours, which is we have to connect. You know, and the thing about Jane is, in my opinion, so forth, you know, she's so gentle and kind. And I think, you know, activists sometimes think that if you're just gentle and kind, you know, that you're not going to be listened to. That's not true. That's not necessarily true. It's who is speaking. Who is speaking?

And she has had such a profound influence on children and people. I don't know how many tens of thousands of people out there who are activists because of Jane Goodall. Right. You just think you can't make a difference? And who is speaking here at the Soul Boom table? Unemployed, overweight, rapidly decaying, former sitcom actor. Yeah, but I tell you about sitcom. Let me tell you something.

Comedy has been used for centuries as a way to say things to people that the establishment. that the establishment doesn't like. Otherwise, you can't hear. People can't hear. Yeah. Comedy is extremely important. And I am working with an organization called Climate Base Camp. We work with Yellow Dot Studios and some other places that are, we're trying to use comedy

to further the conversation about climate. Absolutely. And to reach the movable middle, to reach that confused 23-year-old in Tulsa. If anyone wants to get involved, check out Climate Base Camp. Yeah. And. Modern. Media del art day.

Yes. That's what you're talking about. That uses satire for social change. That kind of skewers a lot of shibboleths. Yes. A 23-year-old is laughing and giggling. Yeah. That's where you want him.

Yeah. Exactly. And he sees things. He couldn't see if he was looking through the eyes of fear. Yeah. I'm sorry. Your self-description. I don't buy it.

What you're doing is extremely important. as opposed to, you know, what did you just said, oh, I don't buy it. But I think also for folks listening that feel, again, for our friend in Tulsa, male or female, whoever they may be, I love them so much. And they may feel, well, I don't, I'm not a TV actor. I don't have a big social media following and millions of dollars in the bank. So what the hell can I do? But again, we all have a role to play.

Well, that's why it's very important that she, he get conditioned. to others in the same cohort who are out there and they're just like him. Community. Yeah. And people that are. And alone we can do so little together, we can do so much.

Helen Keller said that. Yeah, yeah. And so, and these are people, who do you wanna hang out with, the people who are creating something or the people who are hitting each other in the school yard. You wanna be with people who are making a difference.

Will you go to Tulsa with me? Absolutely. Will we find this 23 year old together? Yeah, yeah, and it's gotta be comedic. Okay. Okay. All right. I'll take my shirt off.

Well, that won't work for me. I'm going to dress you like a clown. Okay. That'll be fine. I nose, big red nose. Paul, I love your work. I love your brain. I love your heart.

And I've wanted to meet you for so long. This is an honor. Thank you. Likewise. And I am in honor, not in awe of that comedic talent. Because it is so important and overlooked by so many. But I think it is crucial. in this transition.

And so I think your role has been and continues to be and will be something that is like Jane. Jane doesn't know those 10,000 people or tens of thousands of people who were inspired by her work. You won't know them either, by the way. Yeah.

But you know that you have this gift, this skill, this ability to make people laugh. Well, it's like what they said about the Velvet Underground. They only sold 5,000 albums, but every single person who bought one of those albums

started a band. And that's how viral community begins. Yeah. So thank you for what you do. Thank you so much. The Soul Boom Podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts,

and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.