The Dr. Hyman Show - Working Together To Reverse Global Warming

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens and Beekeeper’s.   We are in a climate crisis. Although we might feel helpless and hopeless at times about this crisis, we actually have the ability to contribute to the reversal of global warming. It starts with our food choices and using our dollar to support companies that have plans to do their part and sequester carbon. In today’s episode, I talk with Paul Hawken, David Wallace-Wells, Jared Blumenfeld, and Tom Newmark about the urgency of taking action to stabilize the earth’s climate.    Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist who has dedicated his life to environmental sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. He is one of the environmental movement’s leading voices, and a pioneering architect of corporate reform with respect to ecological practices. Paul is Executive Director of Project Drawdown, a nonprofit organization dedicated to researching when and how global warming can be reversed. He is on a mission to present real, already existing solutions to reverse global warming.   David Wallace-Wells is Deputy Editor of New York Magazine and the author of the international bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, published in February 2019, which the New York Times called both "brilliant" and "the most terrifying book I have ever read." While the real truth about climate change can be scary, it’s a more important conversation than ever. Throughout our talk, David shares the history of climate change and the three major issues at hand: speed, scope, and severity.   Jared Blumenfeld is California’s Secretary for Environmental Protection. Appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom in January, he is one of America’s most innovative environmental leaders, with more than 25 years of environmental policy and management experience at the local, national, and international levels.   Tom Newmark is the co-owner of Finca Luna Nueva Lodge, an organic and biodynamic farm and ecolodge in the mountainous rainforest of Costa Rica that teaches regenerative agriculture. Tom is the cofounder and board chair of The Carbon Underground, cofounder of the Soil Carbon Initiative, and a founding member of the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative of California State University, Chico.   This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens and Beekeeper’s. Right now when you purchase AG1 from Athletic Greens, you will receive 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting athleticgreens.com/hyman. Beekeeper’s Natural have created B.Fueled Bee Pollen and B.Powered Superfood Honey, which I’ve been absolutely loving. Head over to beekeepersnaturals.com/HYMAN and use code HYMAN for 25% off. Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Paul Hawken David Wallace-Wells Jared Blumenfeld Tom Newmark

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boost all in one. If you're planning to travel or just looking for an all-around immune pick-me-up, check out this combination from Beekeepers Naturals and get 25% off with the code HYMAN. Just go to beekeepersnaturals.com forward slash hyman. That's B-E-E-K-E-E-P-E-R-S naturals.com slash hyman and use the code Hyman for 25% off. Okay, now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Fee and one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy. It's no secret that our climate is in crisis mode. The good news is that we are not yet at a point of no return.

While we will never have the same climate we had 30 plus years ago, we can make a positive impact on the future of our climate by taking action now. In today's episode, we feature four conversations about the stark realities of climate change and why we all need to pay attention. Dr. Hyman speaks with Paul Hawken about climate volatility, with David Wallace-Wells about how we can choose the amount of carbon we emit, with Jared Blumenfield about where we can find hope, and with Tom Newmark about holding companies accountable. Let's dive in. Climate change is sort of a, you know, stopping climate change is kind of a,

again, a misnomer in the sense that climate changes every nanosecond. It's going to change all the time. It's part of our complex physical biochemistry, biochemical system, you know, that produces, you know, our life and food and water and all these wonderful things and so forth. So we don't want to stop climate change. What we want to do is address the cause of climate volatility and disruption and weirding, which is what's happening when you get warming. And so that's what we want to do. Yeah, it's really striking. But, you know, when you look at this, the UN report, they're really talking about this massive cascade of destruction that's going to happen if we increase the temperature instead of to one and a half, which is already terrible. It's a two degrees.

It's only seems like it's a half a degree Celsius, but you know, there are real clear actions we need to take to avoid that half a degree. And what regeneration does is it really clearly maps out the research that can cut the energy emissions in half by 2028. And by using things like agriculture and the food system and forests, that actually we can make the earth a carbon sink instead of a source of emissions by 2027. That's only six years away. How do we get that?

What are those actions that we need to really stop this forward trajectory? Well, one thing, thing i mean the climate scientists started to turn to what they call nature-based solutions which i kind of find a humorous phrase uh the whole darn thing is nature it's called planet earth and i think the climate movement you know for years has been very technical, very much about renewable energy, which totally makes sense. Seventy four or five percent of our greenhouse gas emissions are for the combustion of coal, gas and oil. So it made total sense. But at the same time, you know, the even when I created Drawdown four years ago, I mean, people talked about regenerative agriculture

or the soil health and things like that. We're dismissed by many climate scientists as sort of a children's crusade. That has been sort of a radical shift in the last four or five years. And so now there is an acceptance that nature exists and that i'm i'm not trying to make fun of the past so much as i'm just saying yeah and um and that it is our getting a line getting an alignment with biology with nature is what the earth is really teaching us. I mean, and if we do that,

so many good things happen and no bad things. It's like, whether it's our oceans or forests or grasslands or wetlands, it's like no matter where we do it, if we do that, the benefits are cascading and the detriments are non-existent. And so this awareness and this understanding can be sort of summarized in a different way. And so let me give you a framework of optimism as opposed to a framework of, oh, we're screwed.

Yeah. Yeah, the science, I got it, you know it you know and so forth okay here's the thing so in our terrestrial systems there are 3300 billion tons of c carbon not carbon dioxide carbon okay that's about four times more almost approximate almost exactly four times as much carbon that's in the atmosphere okay so there's two ways to look at that if we continue to degrade our living systems our forests our wetlands or you know seagrass you know i mean if we continue to do that to our forests etc then as they die those ecosystems they emit carbon so if we continue to do that at the rate we're doing it, our PPM will go up from 419 to

519 just from land degradation alone. So parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Yes, so carbon dioxide. Thank you. But let's flip it. So if we restore nine, if we increase the amount of carbon by restoring our three billion hectares of degraded land, our existing forests, our grasslands, our wetlands, our mangroves, our tidal sea marshes, et cetera, if we increase the amount of carbon by 9%, 9%, we will offset all the emissions since the industrial revolution. Wow. We will draw them down. If now, the fact is there's going to be more emissions between now and 2050, let's say. So if we increase the content of carbon in our terrestrial systems by 14%, we will basically have not only offset those industrial emissions and the new ones that are coming forth, but we will be at the outset of drawdown and we will continue to see greenhouse gas emissions go down to a sustainable level in terms of climatic stability. So if you can imagine now, you're in Massachusetts, you can look out, you know, you can see a forest,

you can see trees, you know, look, and you can imagine, can I increase the amount of natural nature activity by 9%? Yeah, sure. Can we do that all around the world? Absolutely. And does it create employment for people? Absolutely. Is it meaningful employment? Yes. It gives people a sense of purpose and meaning and involvement,

which is what the world needs. And so we really need to reframe the situation, not to ignore the science, but so much as to understand that the science is bumming us out. And we can't be bummed out. If we're going to act, we need to act with certainly the acceptance of the science, but not the inevitability. Yeah, that's very true. And I think that the scale of the problem is just overwhelming for people. And it's been so abstract, but it's becoming less abstract as we see these changes that are happening in our backyard, in America, in developed countries, not just in developing countries.

And what we're requiring is a systems approach to think about this. And it's very much like functional medicine. The body is a complex adaptive system and we need to create balance and figure out how to regenerate health. And that's the science of health is what functional medicine is. And what you're really mapping out with the book Regeneration is the science of regenerating our entire ecosystem and the people that live on it and doing it in a way that creates all these secondary benefits of equity and justice and dignity and biodiversity and obviously drawing down carbon and climate reversal and improving health. So to me, that's what regeneration is. And it's such a powerful idea. The challenge that I see is when we start to talk about these things, it's a little overwhelming. And I think that one of the beautiful things about the book is that it sort of breaks it

down into really bite-sized chunks and looks at all the areas and solutions and things that we should be thinking about, but does it in a way that creates, at the end of the book, particularly this beautiful guide on how to create action and connection. And in the book, you talk about all the areas we need to focus on. It's not just our food and food systems or forests. It's our oceans. It's the forest. It's our wilderness. It's how do we reimagine our approach to land management, to humans and people, to urban environments, to our food system, to energy production and industry? And how do we put all those threads together so that we create a different world? And, you know, the challenge for me when thinking about this is that a lot of the things that you're proposing are science-based, they're common sense, or they make sense. And yet there seems to be a lack of political will and inertia. I was speaking with John Kerry the other day about, you know, his role

in climate. And he's like, well, if, for example, China doesn't want to step up and do it, it's going to be a problem because they're one of the biggest emitters. We are too, but they also are. And there's just a resistance to this kinds of scale of change that has to happen and the speed that needs to happen at. And I know you're hoping that the book will catalyze that, but how do you see us, you know, taking this concept and scaling it up into policy and to business innovation, into transformations in our food systems and policy, even in our political choices. Well, the end of the book is called Action and Connection, but really it's a wormhole to the website, which won't be up until September 14th when the book comes out. And it's what? What is the website? Regeneration.org.

Okay. Simple. What I noticed after Drawdown was published, and I gave 128 talks or something like that, and was inevitably and invariably, actually, people raised their hand and said, but what can I do? They were actually,

I said earlier that 98% of people don't, aren't engaged, even though they're maybe, you know, many of them may be sympathetic, but actually, if you really ask people, they literally do not know what to do. And yes, they can change their diet or this or that and so forth. And you're also quite right. This is functional medicine for the earth. It's absolutely the same as what you and your colleagues are doing with respect to the human body you know basically

as my wife says you know we're mostly bacteria learning to be human and now we have to be humans learning to be earthlings right to live on this planet right for? For sure. So what we have in the what to do section is not like these are the top 10 things you can do and check off your list. One of the things that you want to do that light you up, that really turn you on, that are fascinating, that you can get engaged in,

that's what you should be doing. And so that's why we don't, in a sense, give a hierarchy of what it is that you should do. If somebody, if you're not doing something, you can be shown somebody else is. Don't worry about that. Where you can be most effective is where you're lit up and where you're engaged and learning and curious you wouldn't be the doctor you are today if you weren't extremely curious and you still are yeah okay so we all are that way but just not in the way that's prescribed to us by the climate movement or climate science and so forth so what we have in the website is a complete thing clothing is eight to ten percent of global emissions who know i mean it is the industry

yes yeah and like you want to do something about it and you go to the website and it'll tell you what you can do as an individual what you can do do as a school, as a college, as a company, as a city, who are the players, the good players, who are the ones that are really fast fashion companies that are incentivizing our teenagers and young people to change their clothing every few weeks, you know. And we have one, for example, on the boreal forest, you know. And again, the boreal forest is the greatest stock of carbon in the world. In Canada, it goes across Scandinavia and Russia. But in Canada, you know, their mountaintop clearing, they have Canada, you know, they're mountaintop clearing. They have the tar sands. They're cutting down virgin ancient timber to make toilet paper for Procter & Gamble and Kimberly Clark and so forth. And so it says here are the CEOs.

That's their name. Here's their email. You can do this. So here's the influencers. Here's the NGOs that's their name. Here's their email. You can do this. So here's the influencers. Here is the NGOs that are kicking ass. You can get involved with them. You can support them. Here are the great videos and books on this thing. Here are the Native Americans, First Nations up there, you know, who are really taking charge of their traditional tribal lands and so forth. I mean, so you can look at it and say, oh, man, okay.

And here's a Washington Post and the New York Times and my publisher who buys paper from the same companies that are trashing the boreal forests. And so you can have just a whole menu of how to get involved and what to do and how to be effective and also to influence the policymakers. What John Kerry was talking about, that is to say, here are the policies that are up there. Here are the people who are working on those policies. has a law which is being rabidly opposed by Canada that says it cannot buy paper products unless they have come from lands or where the tribal and the traditional owners of the land have approved of that logging and the paper products. And that's going back and forth in the legislature so so that's what we're trying to do mark is is actually get people excited about all the possibilities in the beauty of the of nature and of this earth and the complexity in the best best sense of the word, and then find a place where you want to make a difference.

And to understand that you're not an individual, that an individual does not exist. We all have agency. And when you start to connect to the different people who are involved or you get other people involved with you, your classmates, your school, your company, your classmates, your school, your company, your colleagues, your neighborhood, your family. That's who you are.

That's who we are. The individual is just a delusion that we are minded as soon as we wake up in the morning. But in actual fact, we are powerful in ways which you don't understand. And the most important thing you can do actually is local, where you live, the people you know, the ecosystems that you interact with, the municipalities that you vote within, etc. This is where you can make the biggest impact. And you can watch the government sort of waffle and be corrupt for sure. And you can listen to all the things you should do about recycling for sure but where you're effective is right where you are and in this sense it's exactly the same as the human body who is in charge no one is in charge of the human body you're in charge of what you drink eat smoke

and think and and exercise but you're not in charge of the human body and we're not in charge of the human body. You're in charge of what you drink, eat, smoke, and think and exercise, but you're not in charge of the human body and we're not in charge of the earth. And so when you understand that the power to make reasonable, informed, and substantive action rest within your network, within agency, within your place, then you can sort of let go of some of the grief or stress that you carry about what's not happening. Collectively, as a planet, as a species,

we are doing this damage now. And that's the flip side of the incredible speed that we're doing this damage to the planet, is that it's in our control. We can choose to do less damage. We can choose to emit less carbon if we want to. We can choose to do less damage. We can choose to emit less carbon if we want to. We can hopefully choose in relatively short order to totally zero out on carbon. But ultimately, the damage that we're doing to the planet, in addition to being terrifying, is a reflection of how much power we have over the climate. If we get to some really hellish scenarios, which we're going to, I'm sure, talk through soon, it will be because of what we do from here on out, not because of forces beyond our control. So we're not at a point of no return. We're never going to return to a planet

that is as climate peaceful as the planet was 50 years ago. But no matter how hot it gets, it will always be up to us to determine the climate future of the planet. And that will be done by how much carbon we emit. So even if we get to three or four degrees, which will be quite terrible, we will still have before us the choice of taking action and avoiding future warming or not taking action and creating more warming. That dilemma will always be in front of us. So scientists of the world, I'll talk about this a little bit more, talk about this threshold, two degrees of warming, which is about twice where we are today as the threshold of catastrophe. It's a level that the island nations of the world call genocide. Yeah, because they'll all be underwater. Yeah. And there are many, many other impacts beyond that that are quite terrifying.

I don't think there's any chance that we are going to stay below two degrees of warming, but staying at 2.4 degrees is a lot better than staying at 2.9 degrees. It's a lot better than staying at 3.4 degrees. It's a lot better than staying at 4.3 degrees, which is where we're headed by the end of the century. So what you point out in your book at the end of the century will be probably at four degrees if we don't do anything. That'll mean there's palm trees growing in the Arctic. And there'll be parts of the planet that are hit by six climate driven natural disasters at once. There'll be $600 trillion in global climate damages, which is twice as much wealth as exists in the world today. There'll be twice as much war as

we have today because there's a relationship between temperature and conflict. It's hot, you get pissed off. Yeah. No, it's amazing. It maps out at the state level where famines and droughts produce some kind of social disarray, but it's also true at the individual level. So rates of domestic assault and rape and murder go up when it's hot out, which we all sort of know because we're familiar with the idea of the summer crime wave. Same phenomenon would be happening globally. But just to get back to the misconceptions of permanent- First is the speed. The second is the scope. Yeah, exactly. So I, you know, it sounds deluded. I've lived my whole life in New York and it never really occurred to me that we're on the coast here. We're going to have to deal with sea level rise.

Also, you don't get to the beach very often in New York, but it's here. We got some beaches, but yeah, when I walk down the street on these concrete streets, I look up at these steel buildings and I think, I'm not living in nature. Why do I have to worry about climate change? I knew it was an issue that we should be worrying about, that our leaders should be focused on, but I also didn't think it was coming for me. And I certainly thought

that while sea level rise would be an issue if it happened as the scientists were predicting, it was also the case that we could escape that by moving inland. The more I learned about the science, the more I learned about the economic impacts, the effect on war, the effect on public health, the effect on agriculture, which could mean by the end of the century, if we don't change course, our grain yields could be only half as bountiful as they are today. And we'd be using that half as much grain to be feeding probably 50% more people. So less food, more people. More people. Not a good combination. The more I learned about all of these different impacts, the extreme weather, wildfires, hurricanes, flooding,

the more I realized that this was a total system touching every life on planet Earth, no matter where you live, no matter where you are. There was no escaping it. And life of all kinds in every way would be impacted by this force no matter what we do. By the end of the century, it's possible we will have taken dramatic action and avoided almost all of these terrifying scenarios. But even if we do that, the planet will be full of solar plantations and carbon capture plantations. We will have totally reinvented our methods of travel, our infrastructure,

the way that we grow our food, the way that we eat. All that stuff will be completely transformed, which means even if we avoid catastrophic warming, the planet will still be transformed by the threat of warming. So whatever we do, life will be completely changed. And I like to think of this in terms of the long history of humanity, which is to say, we are already now at about 1.1 degrees of global warming, outside the range of temperatures that enclose all of human history. So no human has ever walked a planet as hot as the one that you and I are walking on today. And everything that we know of as human history, the development of agriculture, the development of civilization, even the evolution of the human animal to begin with, the development of everything we know of as of modern life,

of civilization, that happened under climate conditions that no longer prevail. It is as though we've landed on an entirely different planet. We've brought our culture now, even if we're at four or five degrees of warming. But it will be dramatically transformed by that force of warming. And we will have had to- There may not be enough Earth to support all the people. There might be- I mean, the UN says that by just 2050, we will have 200 million climate refugees at

least. They say it's possible we could have 1 billion climate refugees by 2050. 1 billion is as many people as live in North and South America today combined. And I think those numbers are a bit high, but even if you take the lower number, 200 million, and divide it in half, it's 100 times as big as the Syrian refugee crisis that has totally destabilized European politics. So that gives you a sense of just how dramatically transformed, for instance, our politics will

be, but also literally our geography. If the equatorial band of the planet has become close to uninhabitable, what will that mean for all those people? What will that mean for the civilizations that are anchored there? The traditions, the communities that trace their lineages back over centuries, those people will have to be displaced en masse. Those entire worlds, those empires will be no longer attached to the landscape in which that gave rise to them. And those people will be having to navigate totally different- And we're seeing that today, right? Totally. There are climate refugees today.

There are people displaced by natural, quote, natural disasters. Yeah. I mean, much of the immigration from Central America that we're seeing that's causing so much American political disarray is increasingly being understood as a response to climate impacts in Central America, which is concerning in part because it means there'll be considerably more of them coming soon. And we already see what a difficult time we're having responding to those people with empathy. So I want to go through the scope in a minute, a little more detail. But there's a third thing you say we're not thinking about, right? Speed, the scope. And the severity. Severity.

So, you know, I was following this story pretty closely and I heard a lot about this two degree level, which I mentioned earlier, the scientists of the world call the threshold of catastrophe. And they would always say we have to do whatever we can to avoid it. I think the lay reader would have been totally justified to process that to mean it's a worst case scenario. But in fact, practically speaking, it's about our best case scenario. I think if there was a global dictator who could command the world's economies and turn them on a dime today, we could probably stay south of two degrees to about maybe 1.6 or 1.7 degrees. But when you factor in all of the human obstacles that we face, I think literally a best case scenario is about two degrees. But when you factor in all of the human obstacles that we face,

I think literally a best case scenario is about two degrees. And what we're on track for is four point three by the end of the century, which will bring us all these horrors that I mentioned before, you know, the war, the natural disasters. You can take beach vacations in the Arctic. Yeah. But, you know, all those beaches, every beach you've ever been on will be underwater. And it takes millions of years to produce new sand. Yeah. Brightening. So let's go through each of the areas.

The first is, and the threats. The first you call heat death. In 2003, there was a European heat wave that killed 2,000 people a day. That sort of pales in comparison to the kind of stuff that you were talking about in the book that would be the consequence of the heat. So what do you mean by heat death? And what is the scope of that problem? Well, basically, the human body, there's a natural limit to how much heat the human body can take. Technically, it's about a combination of heat and humidity.

It's not just heat. But in the same way that we get hypothermia and can die from that if we're exposed to horrible, hardly cold conditions, we can also die sort of in the reverse way through an exposure, extended exposure to heat and humidity. And there's- And you said in your book, if you were in Costa Rica and it's 90% humidity and 105 degrees, you're dead in a few hours from cooking. Yeah. And those conditions will be relatively common, which is maybe even to say every day in parts of South Asia and the Middle East during summer as soon as 2050, which means that some of these cities that today hold 10 and 12 or 15 million people in them, you won't be able to

walk around outside without risking heat stroke and possibly death. Now, that's not to say that every single person in Calcutta in 2050 stepping outside their door will die immediately, but it will mean that the business of the city, as we understand today, will mean dramatically more heat death than we have now. So that European summer that you mentioned in 2003, it's expected that that will be a totally normal summer at the end of the century if we don't change course, which means that an event, an outlier event, a summer that was unusually warm, exceptionally warm, could do considerably more damage to that. And that's in relatively northern latitudes. That's in France and Russia. The impacts in places like Saudi Arabia are going to be much more dramatic. You won't be able to go on pilgrimage to Mecca in the next few decades

because it'll be lethally hot. Now, it's an interesting question. How will we respond to that? Will we change the schedule of that pilgrimage so that it's in wintertime rather than in summertime? Will we start to think of dying on pilgrimage as a holy calling and rewire the way that we think of my book where I get sort of, I know we want to spend a fair amount of time on the science, but I sort of turn the page on the science and think about, well, what will it mean for us to be living in a world that is so transformed by these forces? What will it mean if 200 million climate refugees are moving northward? What will it mean if tropical mosquitoes that have always been relatively constrained in their footprint are flying as far north as the Arctic Circle. Yeah, you just had something that struck me. By 2050, there'll be 5.2 billion people at risk for malaria, which is a tropical disease. Yeah. And I think that's people at risk. So a much smaller percentage will actually get it. But now, if you're in New York, you don't have to worry about malaria. And in the decades ahead, we will have to worry about it at least. And that's leaving aside some of the more obscure public health risks. I write in the book about all of the diseases that are

frozen in Arctic ice. Yeah, the climate plagues, you call them. Yeah, this is- The ebonic plagues, the flu virus of 1918. It feels like it's totally out of, out of a horror movie. And you know, it's, it's probably the case that most of these diseases that are frozen in that ice, when they, when that ice melts, won't come out and immediately kill everybody. It's not going to be like that, but we have already seen instances of events like that happening on small scale. A few years ago in Russia, um, reindeer that had died about a century ago, but their carcasses had been frozen in permafrost, that permafrost started to melt and the reindeer had died of

anthrax and that anthrax was released when their carcasses started to melt. It came out of the carcasses, infected a huge number of reindeer and even infected some humans and killed at least one Russian boy. So we already have at least a death toll of one. And that anthrax was there from first half of the 20th century. There's a lot of Spanish flu from 1918 that's frozen in that ice. It killed like 50 million people, right? Unbelievable, catastrophic, really dramatic, almost as significant a health event as the Black Death. And even more straight out of a horror movie is the fact that there are diseases frozen in that ice that predate human existence, which means that our immune systems have never reckoned with them, have no training to respond to them.

And maybe most of them, maybe almost all of them will be able to respond to. Who knows? But it's an open question. And on that point, the scariest story in the whole book to me, it's not about humans. It's about the experience of this particular category of antelope called a saiga antelope, which is a dwarf antelope that lived mostly in Siberia and happily for millions of years. And in 2015, I think, an unusually hot and human summer wiped out the entire species. This happened because the temperature conditions, the climate conditions changed the behavior of some of the bacteria in their intestines and turned what had been a kind of friendly symbiotic bacteria into an enemy, a villain, attacking the antelope from the inside out.

And that totally wiped out the species entirely in the space of a couple of weeks in what's called a mega death. Now, we know we've learned so much over the last couple of decades about how humans are complicated creatures too, with millions, possibly billions of viruses and bacteria in our bodies. And I think- Brilliance. Almost all of them are unlikely to be changed dramatically by a temperature rise of one or two or three or four degrees. But the chances that a couple of them are, are certainly not insignificant. Well, what's more frightening is what you described is the effect on pregnant women,

on babies, on the risk of ADD and autism that are connected to climate change, which most people are not linking. Yeah, not at all. I think that these are, from an advocacy perspective, really underutilized storytelling mechanisms because I think public health is something that everyone recognizes immediately as a personal threat. And yeah, I mean, you can see the number of days that a child was in utero where the temperature was above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. You can see that number. You can see that number on their lifetime earnings. How do you do that kind of study? Like looking at the temperature of exposure when they're in utero and their lifetime earnings.

Just using data sets that include both the temperature range of their, when they were gestating and then using their tax returns, I think. I don't actually know the details about that particular study. Fascinating. But it's really amazing to know that those kinds of conditions can have such an impact. And the even more dramatic impacts, for me, come through small particulate pollution, which- Yeah. So you call that the unbreathable air. Yeah.

So we've gone through climate plagues, heat death, and now we're into unbreathable air. Yeah. So we've gone through climate plagues, heat death, and now we're into unbreathable air. So this is, you know, it's not narrowly an impact of climate change, but it's produced by the same thing that produces climate change, which is the burning of fossil fuels. And this is just to me, some of the most harrowing, eye-opening material in the whole book. There's a study just studying the impact of air pollution between 1.5 degrees and two degrees. So just that half degree addition of warming, the authors of the studies say, just through the impact of air pollution would kill 153 million additional people. From air pollution?

Just from air pollution. So how does air pollution and climate change connect? When you burn coal, when you burn wood, it produces small particulate pollution. And so it's a byproduct in the same way that carbon is a byproduct. Yeah, I mean, you write in your book in China in 2013, one third of all deaths in China were from air pollution, from air quality that was so bad. And you say that 300 to 500 is considered don't go outside ever, it's going to kill you.

It was 800 in China at the time. And it was from Arctic melting that caused this shift in the climate that led to- Yeah, it changed the weather patterns so that they had sort of been polluting into a kind of a jet stream that would clear the pollution out over the ocean. And so they didn't have to breathe it in. But the weather patterns were changed because of changes in the Arctic, such that the pollution just sat over Beijing and it was really catastrophic. And by the way, we are one connected planet. If you live in Seattle, where it should be the pristine Northwest, you're exposed to

mercury pollution from the coal burning in China that passes over the oceans in the climate and then rains down into the city. And the smoke from wildfires traverses the whole globe. So, and, you know, that's really an important impact from an American perspective. But at the moment, you know, China's cleaned up a lot of its air pollution because it had so much public health trouble with it in 2013. Today, the worst hit country is India. Delhi, the air pollution is now so bad, they haven't just canceled planes because you can't see, they've canceled trains because train conductors couldn't see and they thought it was unsafe even though you're following a track. There's air pollution

that collects in the lobbies of buildings in Delhi. You can see it in the lobby. And people go around outside wearing surgical masks and having headscarves wrapped around their mouths. And it's connected to everything. I'm sorry, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, obviously respiratory diseases, asthma. Yeah. And down to the development of children. So cognitive performance is really dramatically impacted by it. ADHD and autism. The impact of this small particulate pollution that we're talking about on premature birth and low birth weight is so dramatic that when you put in E-ZPass, which meant that cars didn't idle for a while and therefore didn't produce more smoke,

they could just drive through. In regions around those interchanges, low birth weight and premature birth declined by about 10 or 12%. That's wild. Unbelievable. That's pretty wild. Most places in America don't have such dramatic air pollution issues now, although many places have unsafe levels. They're not nearly as dramatic as people in the developing world are. There's so much hope when you look at the solutions out there. There's not a lack of knowledge about what to do and how to do it. But there is a challenge dealing with the business of large corporations that profit

from doing the wrong thing without being held accountable to the real costs of their activities. And I think that's what you've done in terms of the work that you've done. Let's just talk about climate for a minute, because I think it's becoming more and more of an issue. I think Joe Biden just announced a $2 trillion climate initiative that he talked about as being a source of jobs and economic revitalization. Do you sort of sense what's happening globally in this country and in California as moving in the right direction? Are you hopeful? Do you feel like you're seeing signs of us dealing with this effectively?

Some days I'm hopeful. I mean, just in our world, in my job particularly, I mean, we just had four million acres of California burn. We're in the middle of COVID and we have a $54 billion budget deficit. So some days I feel a little more positive than others. I think bold action is needed. The incremental working in the margins is not where we have to be. We have to be bold actions that result in meaningful reductions quickly. It's not just about people having electric cars and changing their light bulbs and recycling. You're talking about much bigger actions that are needed. We have to transform our economy and decarbonize it. So decarbonizing, if you imagine carbon in every aspect, from fertilizers all the way through the energy we produce, the cars we use, the transportation, the entire system is built upon fossil fuels, and we have to decarbonize.

And the pace of that, if we're going to have a chance of living on a habitable planet, has to be between now and 2045. You saw China recently commit to 2060 carbon neutrality. Last week, South Korea and Japan both committed to 2050, the European Union. There's more and more commitments. So the commitments are hopeful. I think what California offers is a model of once you've committed, what do you do? And it really isn't going to be one thing. It isn't just going to be electric vehicles. It's going to be the entire way we think about the distribution of products in commerce. So the goods movement system is huge, and that's going to involve not just passenger vehicles, but trucks all the way through ships and planes and locomotives.

And then thinking about how we build our new homes. Should new homes have connection to natural gas? Should we be having homes use natural gas in 2045? Like, how do we, if you work back from what we need in 2045, which is zero carbon emissions, we also then need to look at sequestering carbon. Because we're not going to get, we're're going to try but we're unlikely to get to zero carbon emissions in 2045 healthy soils um you know the more carbon you have in soil the more water is retained in the soil um we we basically have emitted so much carbon into the

atmosphere and into the oceans and ocean acidification is an issue that is often neglected, but where the calcium carbonate in the ocean is getting removed through the carbon dioxide that's being absorbed into the oceans. So there isn't any room left for carbon anywhere other than the soil. The soil has an incredible potential to absorb.

But when I think about hope, I think the large corporations, thanks to things like the UN sustainability goals and millennial goals, large corporations have stood up and made commitments to sustainability. They're now finding that they actually have to make good on those, that they're going to be held accountable. So corporate behavior is changing. I think the debates that we saw, you know, last time between Hillary and Trump didn't even mention climate change. Now it became a big issue. For Democratic voters, NPR poll recently showed climate is the number one issue for Democratic voters in this election. Incredible. So it's. So the level of consciousness has increased as the impacts have increased.

We used to think here in California that we'd be dealing with the impacts of things like drought and wildfire and sea level rise 40 years from now. That climate-related impacts are in the future and we can plan for them. Our agency alone spent $2.5 billion last year cleaning up from wildfires, just to clean up. That isn't rebuilding the homes. That's just getting rid of the destroyed landscape and

allowing homeowners to go back in. The costs of not doing anything, Mark, are so huge, so huge right now that I think everyone's realizing the cost of taking action is going to pale in comparison to not taking action. And so I am hopeful. I believe that we have momentum. We have to capture that momentum. And we also have to be really thoughtful about helping communities, whether it's the Appalachian coal miners or oil and gas workers in Texas or California. We need to have a plan for a just transition so that the industries that are most affected by us decarbonizing have a pathway so they see a job in the future. And those jobs definitely exist. In California, for instance, the ratio of clean energy to fossil fuel energy is about five to one. There's five times more people working in solar and wind and energy efficiency than there are in fossil fuels. That's extraordinary. You said something that sort of caught my attention,

which was the need to decarbonize our economy, which means a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. And that's essential. It's difficult. But you also mentioned the soil. And I've heard a lot of different stats thrown around, even up to the fact that we could remove 120% of the current emissions if we scaled up regenerative agriculture and recarbonized the soil. And the striking thing to me that I learned

I didn't know was that a third of all total greenhouse gas emissions that are in the atmosphere of the 1 trillion tons, a third of that has come from the destruction of our soil and the release of stored carbon in the microorganisms, literally the microbiome of the soil. And that is because of our industrial agricultural methods. So I guess what I'm asking you is how, as the EPA Secretary of California, are you communicating with the Secretary of Agriculture to talk about how to use California, which is the nation's largest agricultural state, to be a model for the world to transform from a extractive, destructive agricultural system that adds carbon to the atmosphere to a carbon sink that literally can stop climate change.

Yeah, so I often like to think of the fact that the dirt under our feet can save the earth. It really can. And, you know, there's, I think, more than 200 different types of soil in California alone. So soil type, obviously, you know, and then the application. So there's rangeland where you have cattle, there's row crops, there's all kinds of different soils. So we spent a lot of time and the Secretary of Agriculture, Karen Ross, has been a dairy farm in Visalia that I visited, fourth generation farmer, Dino Giacomazzi.

And Dino, you know, is a libertarian. Very, you know, these aren't, you don't have to be a progressive Democrat is my point to believe in these practices. And he started with no till agriculture so your point is every time every pass over the land where you're digging up that soil um and the way that we think about agriculture is you know he went he said from 17 passes on his field for corn to one so basically disturbing the soil and you lose the carbon by tilling, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You just imagine, yeah, you've got that piece of farm equipment and you're pulling behind it something that rips the soil up and turns it over. To your point, if we've got a third of the carbon in our atmosphere from doing that,

it releases it each time. So we want to keep the carbon in the soil and no-till practices are incredibly effective. And if you're a farmer, you just save the labor mark of paying someone to go over that same field 17 times. Now you're paying them once to do it once. So you reduce your labor costs. The gasoline or diesel that you're using, you've saved significant money. So a lot of these practices, farmers are starting to realize, wow, they actually save us money. And here in California, it isn't carbon that is attractive first and foremost.

It's the water benefit. So for each percentage of carbon that you add back into the soil, the water retention benefits are huge. And so I was just at- It's like 25,000 gallons per every percent of organic matter in the soil, which is a lot. Per acre, right. Per acre, yeah. Yeah.

And so I was just with the governor in Winters, California with a farmer McNamara and, and his walnut farm, because of increased just he said it went from I think 1% soil carbon to five. Wow. So in in 20 year period, he doesn't have to water his walnuts for a month and a half longer than the neighbor who has poor soil health. That amount of water is money. We're living in an era of really scarce water resources. So on every level, how do you do that? As you know, one of the ways which is is really interesting in California, is you take food scraps. So about 25% of all the fresh water in the United States is used annually, Mark, to produce food that we throw away. Whoa.

Yeah. So a quarter of all the water that we use, which is a scarce resource, is used to grow food that we throw in the garbage. Correct. So, yeah, upwards of 40% of the food that we buy. And that produces methane, which is 71 times more potent than greenhouse gas when the food is rotting in the landfill than CO2. So if you took that and composted it and then apply it to land, that's actually how you create the sea state change in the soil for it to be able to absorb the carbon. So taking that urban food waste, composting it, putting it on the soil is actually a recipe for planetary health. It's unbelievable. And I think, you know, the

innovations around ways in which government can get behind farmers to do this, and it's not a Republican, a Democrat, a libertarian issue. It's really about the economic viability of farming. It's about addressing the risk of food insecurity because of the way we're farming will prevent our ability to grow food. It will really, when you look at it, it's just sort of like a no-brainer. And I'm just going to sort of list it for a couple of minutes for people to understand the potential of this. It's not just about soil carbon, which is important, but it's about the biodiversity of these lands that brings back pollinators and wild animals and increases biodiversity, which we need to thrive.

It increases yields. It increases the nutrient density. As a doctor, what I care about is the food my patients are eating. And if you're eating broccoli today, it's probably 50% less nutritious than it was before. If you're growing food in a rising climate temperature situation, you're actually putting more carbon in the plant, which creates more starchy vegetables and more starch in the food, which makes people gain more weight. Doing regenerative agriculture will create resistance to climate shocks, to drought and floods and reduce the risk of wildfires. It'll actually create more jobs and farm workers will be healthier and happier. There'll be reduced reliance on agrochemicals, which will prevent the destruction of a lot of

species through pesticides and agrochemicals and nitrogen fertilizers, which pollute our waterways and create climate change as well. It's 300 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And farmers, you said, make more money. They make up to 20 times more money. And these rural communities will come back to life. So it seems like if you present this to a policymaker, they're like, this is a win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win. Why isn't there more effort driving this movement through policy across the country? Because it just seems so obvious to everybody who's looking at this.

There's a great book, Mark, that you should read. It's called Food Fix. And in that book, the guy's got the same name as you, actually. In that book, I mean, the reason is that there's a lot of interests vested in the status quo of farming. Like farmers are actually innovators. Farmers, every small farmer that I've met, small scale farmer in California, they're eking out a living. They're worried about why their kids don't want to become farmers. They're feeling overwhelmed. They're trying to just make a living, but they're adapters, right? They're feeling climate change right now.

And they want the tools. They want the incentives. I mean, we're talking, you know, things like crop insurance. If you have crop insurance, you can only get it for conventional ag. You can't get it for conventional ag. You can't get it for regenerative. That's a problem. If you don't have the equipment to do no-till ag,

then you're just going to use the old equipment that you have. So we need to help support farmers. This is really about not demonizing farmers. Farmers, I think of as conservationists, they're environmentalists. And often, I think there's been a temptation to make them seem like the bad guy. Farmers want to do the right thing. We want to give them the tools to do the right thing. And that comes in the farm bill. But how you make sure you get the right incentives in a massive piece of pork, like the farm bill is tough, but some of them are in there. And there's even federal agencies, even during this terrible four-year winter that has been the Trump administration, the Department of Agriculture has actually been the one still talking about climate change, still talking

about soil health, even in this administration. So even in these times, I think farmers are realizing climate change is real. They want to be part of the solution. And one thing that I know you're very bullish on that also helps with soil health is your microbiome. Like if we are sterilizing the soil, that same piece of broccoli that you eat is going to be sterile as well. And so understanding this whole relationship with the soil is important.

And our goal, I think, as policymakers needs to be to raise it up because, yeah, it is a win-win, win-win, win-win. At the same time, you meet with a lot of resistance. Amazing. And people are willing to fund a lot of other things before, unfortunately, soil health. And they don't connect it. People will immediately connect, Mark, yes, we should incentivize electric vehicles in California. But when you say, how should we incentivize farming practices that lead to healthier soil?

People kind of think it's too technical, too complicated. And it's going to take a big education campaign to get people to the level of awareness that we need them to be at. And we just don't have time for that. Once companies are awakened to the existential threat to their profitability, to me, if I were the CEO of a major food company, I would be imposing a key performance indicator on everyone responsible for the ecosystems that are producing the foods that I am selling. I would require those managers every quarter and every year to report on how much carbon the company is responsible for resequestering, how they are recharging the ecosystem. I mean, imagine a person responsible for the supply chain of a multi-billion dollar corporation acting in a way

of burning down the production facilities, of poisoning the production facilities, of guaranteeing that the company would be out of business in 10 years or in 20 years. I gave a presentation a few years ago to a major clothing company. And I asked- It grows cotton. Won't be naming the company. But my partner in the carbon underground, Larry Copald, and I asked in this meeting,

are you, in your risk management, taking into consideration the likelihood that in 20 years, there will be no world supply of cotton if agricultural practices don't change? And to the credit of that company, their management said, we are aware of that risk. Companies are smart. The CEOs of major international corporations, they're not stupid. No. They are appreciating the planet to manage the environment in a way that recharges the productive capacity of the land that is giving that company

the ability to make a profit and to give shareholders their return. Every shareholder, every investor should be demanding of corporations that their supply chains convert to regenerative agriculture. And there ought to be a divestiture movement. Just as there is a divestiture movement asking that major universities and pension plans and trusts divest from fossil fuel companies. People should be divesting from companies that are refusing to get on board with regenerative agriculture. Industrial agriculture is killing the planet. Regenerative agriculture is the hope for the future. Shareholders, investors, hedge funds, private equity groups, they should be organizing a campaign to get their investment targets on board with regeneration. So Tom, when are you announcing your candidacy for presidency of the United States for

2020? That's what I want to know. know what's interesting there are at least there are at least two candidates now in the democratic field that are explicitly identifying regenerative agriculture as part of their environmental strategy yes this is percolating one of them is a good friend of mine and i have been speaking this in his ear for years. And as a result, he wrote a book called The Real Food Revolution. Tim Ryan was on CNN, and his last line on the CNN town hall was, it's about the soil. We have to fix the soil. And he was one of the folks to whom I was referring.

I know. And I am a big fan. Yeah, he's a good guy. He's a really solid human being, and he gets these issues. I mean, it's a good guy. He's a really solid human being and he gets these issues. I mean, it's a crapshoot who's going to win or lose and almost doesn't matter. But he's putting this out in the debate. Right. But that's what I mean. It's like the fact that it's in the conversation is what matters. And that's what I care about. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. It's so incredible. So, we're talking about changing the behavior of big corporations. We're talking about changing the behavior of big corporations. We're talking about changing government policies. We're talking about a global movement at a high level to rethink finance and investment and divestiture. That all seems great and big and grand, but the average person listening is like,

well, what the heck can I do? You know, like, is it relevant to me or do I just have to wait and hope everybody figures out or just lights out? Can the individual take actions in their life that helps us solve this problem? You know, what are the theories of change?

What are the levers of change? And that's what we all talk about. And what is it that led to the success of the non-GMO movement? Was it corporations getting enlightened? Was it the media picking up on the issue? Was it scientists? Was it consumer groups? It's a concatenation, a combination of all of those forces.

So I don't think consumers should feel disenfranchised and powerless, because they can start asking in their farmers markets, and they can start asking in their phone calls to the brands that they love. They can start the conversation. The conversation of regeneration, 10 years ago, no one was talking about this at the natural products expos and the food gatherings in North America. Now whole days are being devoted to the concept of regeneration. So consciousness is stirring. There is an awakening to this on an individual level. Individual level, yeah, people should be looking at their front lawns and their back lawns. And they should be looking at the fact that the number one agricultural system in North America is grass being grown.

It's where we're dumping more chemicals and more pesticides. So, yeah, people have an individual ability. So turn your lawn into a garden. There should be an agroecological permaculture awakening. Yeah. Ron Finley, you probably heard of him, the gangster gardener from South Central LA, took that little strip between the sidewalk and the road in front of his house and turned it into a garden. And he got cited by the city they had a subpoena for

his arrest until he was growing sunflowers and he started a whole movement of urban gardening in spaces awesome yeah in spaces where nobody was gardening and growing food and there's a whole urban agriculture movement so i think all these bits matter and even uh insofar as they help you produce better food, enhance your community, reduce some of the carbon footprint of our ag system. They'll certainly help draw down carbon, but we need this at scale on 5 billion hectares. We need it at scale. And I have told people, if you have the opportunity to be in a presidential debate forum, or if you're hearing a candidate, ask the candidate,

what are you going to do about the fact that there are 60 harvests of food left and then there's no more food? Just a simple thing. You believe that we have a climate crisis. Well, what's your strategy? What's your bridge from 415 parts per million to 350 parts per million. Let's start asking our political leaders simple questions. This is not a partisan issue. Whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or whatever you are, we're facing a climate crisis. What's your strategy? And how are we going to rebuild the productive capacity of the United States, of wherever you are in the world. We in the Carbon Underground are working with major corporations because to us, that is a

locus of power. If there is a corporation that represents, controls $100 billion of food commerce, I want to work with them. Larry and I will come meet with your board. The Carbon Underground is ready to help you reconfigure and regenerate your supply chain. And we're doing this around the world. And it's a net financial win in the end. it is well it separates your supply chain from uh uh imminent impossibility i mean supply chains are collapsing i'm giving a talk but you're also talking about like this method of farming isn't just something we have to do because the climate is going to hell it's actually a better way of farming because it causes more yields more productivity three times the amount of animals you can grow on the food, on the land.

I mean, it's sort of- And it will be more beautiful. Yeah. So if there's nothing other than the biophilia of loving a rich, abundant, biodiverse environment, for all of these reasons, farmers will make more money, ranchers will make more money, the ecosystem will endure, our children anders will make more money. The ecosystem will endure. Our children and grandchildren will be able to inherit from us a planet that is biologically recharged. It is a win-win. And therefore, rather than talking about the end of times and we're

facing inevitable calamity, right? I mean, and that's all true maybe, but there's still hope. There's still an opportunity. And this is what the regenerative agricultural revolution represents. And when the carbon underground goes to local, state, and federal governments, different nations around the planet, which we are, we are in conversations with national nations around the planet, which we are, we are in conversations with national leadership around the world of how they can enroll the tens of millions of farmers in their nation in the regenerative revolution. This is how we get the footprint that we need. Please, all of the folks listening, in your backyard, be regenerative.

In your wallet, in your shopping cart, shop regeneratively. In your political conversations, be asking about the regeneration of soil and the strategies for bringing carbon back down and reversing climate change, but recognize that there are also major corporations and governmental leaders who are on board, who get that it is in their corporate and governmental interest to have a recharged and well-fed and well-nourished and beautiful populace and ecosystem. Amazing. And this revolution is happening. It is inevitable.

And we need people to get on board. Well, that's so hopeful. I mean, people are interested. They can go to the Food Policy Action Network, where every single one of your congressmen and senators is rated on how they vote on food issues and agriculture issues. And you can reach out to them through their websites. And you can comment. You can ask their websites. And you can comment. You can ask them these questions.

You can advocate for ideas that you want. And let me tell you, they listen. It matters. Yes, they get funded by big food and big ag and by big corporations. But you vote for them at the end of the day. And they're going to start paying attention when you start asking these questions. And you look at all the movements that have happened that have changed laws. I mean, things happen not starting in Congress, but ending in Congress, whether it's

abolition or civil rights or women's rights or gay rights. The Dreamer Act, I mean, that just passed in Congress. That all started from people raising up their voices and speaking together and changing and challenging the status quo. And that's what we have to do. And it's not easy. It's not one solution. But what you're saying to me is really striking. One is that most people have no clue that the soil is the answer to climate change.

Correct. It's probably the most important answer. Right. It's the cheapest answer. It's the most effective answer. It's the answer that provides multiple beneficial side effects for everybody. And it's something that is very little understood, very little appreciated and certainly not being implemented at scale. And it's ready right now.

And we don't have to wait. Correct. That is it. And there's no barriers to entry. And if you've got a land mass and a shovel and some seeds, get to work. And the one gap, though, I would challenge you on is that right now we're seeing most of our farmers are like late 50s, early 60s, and they're aging out of farming. And young farmers are not entering into the space because of access to land issues. There's been the financialization of land where the land is worth more for its property value than for its agricultural value. And these issues of the youth

being obstructed because of various land policies and other issues from actually going in or the costs of starting a farm are prohibitive. So even if people want to do it, we have to solve for that. The government needs to implement policies to help train and and actually convert these farms there needs to be a much bigger initiative around helping the transition because it's not an easy transition to go from a factory farmed industrial agricultural model to a regenerative model it takes a number of years until it switches over it's profitable and it starts to reap the benefits so i think that's an important point people need to remember. You've mentioned that I've been active in Greenpeace over the years, and I'm proud to be a part of that organization.

And environmentalists in the big environmental organizations need to start really appreciating and celebrating the role of farmers in the climate movement. Rather than lamenting the destructive forces that industrial agriculture now represent, we can be encouraging the policies and the practices where farmers become the front lines of the climate resistance, of the climate revolution. Farmers are our allies. Absolutely. And you have millions of people that tune in to your podcast. This is a platform

that is highly influential. And I would ask everyone who was listening in, please get the word out to all the farmers, to all the policymakers. We in the environmental movement recognize, are starting to recognize. Annie Leonard, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, and I just wrote an article on the story of soil and how soil is an indispensable part of the climate solution. We are reaching out to farmers now. Please, we recognize you. This is not an urban-rural divide. This is not an East Coast, Midwest. Forget all of those. It's like in the musical Oklahoma, can the farmers and the cowboys just be friends? We need to all be friends here. We have to all pull together here. And I can't wait to have meetings where Republican conservative farmers and progressive liberal Democrat industrialists

are getting together, shaking hands and celebrating the rebuilding of their ecosystems and their soil. The soil is our common ground. It should not be something that is politicized. And the farmers are an indispensable part in this country of the climate response. Well, I think you're right. I think it's easy to vilify farmers because, oh, they're doing industrial agriculture. It's actually not their fault. It's not their fault. They're being dictated to by the fertilizer companies, the pesticide companies, herbicide, the seed monopolies.

And by the regulatory regime of the crop insurance programs. And there was a systematic effort starting in the 1920s to eliminate the small farmer. Earl Butz, Nixon's ag secretary, said, go big or go home. There's a wonderful book called Foodopoly, which explains the legislative political history of suppressing, of eliminating the small farmers and the rural communities. So what we need to do is we need to recharge and regenerate the rural environment. And the political leaders who get that, who understand that rather than viewing the rural areas as a flyover zone between the coasts, these rural areas, the Great Plains, can be made great again through regenerative agriculture. We need to start doing this. And this is a wonderful political, environmental, social opportunity to recharge and regenerate. But let's not be too limited to just the United

States because there are more than 2 billion smallholder farmers around the world. Smallholder meaning that their plots of land are typically five acres or are smaller. There are more than 2 billion of them, the majority of those being women who are feeding their families and feeding their communities. This could be a wonderful expression of the divine feminine manifesting on the planet where the women of the world taking care of their families and their communities through regenerative farming, through the more than 500 million small farms around the world. So yes, in the United States, we tend to think big, but there's also power in the big numbers of all the smallholder farms.

So the smallholder peasant farming collaboratives and cooperatives, we need to enlist them in this as well. And they've been also pressured through the green revolution to change their farming practices to use big ag seeds and big ag chemicals. So it's an important thing. And they're being driven out of their lands and they cannot afford it and then they're suffering the climate effects of you know droughts and floods and they're becoming climate refugees themselves or they're committing suicides at incredible rates because they can't right maintain the debt or the the productivity of their farm so it it's really a crisis situation. But the good news and the hopefulness that I feel after this conversation is pretty big. Because it's easy to get discouraged. It's easy to listen to the news about climate change,

the doom and the gloom and the disaster and the projections and go, we're screwed. I told my wife after I interviewed David Wallace-Wells for the podcast on climate, I said, let's just spend all our money, just party till the end of time, and that's it. But what you're saying is, no, we shouldn't. We actually need to think about this differently and that we can use this beautiful thing called soil to change the world. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introduce to you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff, from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses

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