The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Alexa Firmenich: "Biodiversity, Beauty, and Being"

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

On this episode, Nate is joined by Alexa Firmenich, whose work spans biodiversity advocacy, ESG investing, wilderness excursion facilitating, and podcasting/creative writing. Together, they philosophize on the importance of developing a connection to nature and understanding the - often overlooked - but critical function of biodiversity to the climate and other natural systems. Alexa also delves into her thinking about new economic and cultural models on human systems that could work within the biosphere. How can acknowledging our individual roles as a part of the Earth's larger system give us a new perspective on what it means to live among its other inhabitants? Why does a system full of external incentives ultimately disincentivize our natural human inclination toward pro-sociality? Will a future of lower energy throughput result in each of us rekindling the inherent connection with the land that we live on, leading to simpler lives - yet perhaps more fulfilling ones?  About Alexa Firmenich: Alexa Firmenich is an investor, consultant and facilitator focused on climate and biodiversity. She is the co-director of SEED, a new center of the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich. SEED is developing the world's most holistic measure of biodiversity that reflects multiple scale's of nature's complexity for any location on the planet, with the goal to steer financial and political decision-makers to crystallize the value of nature into the global economy. Alexa is also the founder of Ground Effect, an animist investment vehicle that supports early stage nature-based solutions, scientific research and new economic models. Parallel to this work she is trained as a group facilitator in leadership development and ecological pedagogy, designing multi-day learning journeys through her role at Leaders' Quest.  She is also an author, podcast host of Lifeworlds, a founding board member of Terra Habitus, a Mexican environmental fund that operates large-landscape conservation and watershed restoration, and a wilderness guide.  For Show Notes and More visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/106-alexa-firmenich  To watch this video episode on Youtube: https://youtu.be/4POPay2sIr8   

You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagan's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. I'd like to welcome my friend and colleague Alexa Fermanich to the program. Alexa is an investor, a consultant, a facilitator, an activist on the environmental crises, basically an all-in strategy on developing programs and interventions that repair our planet's ecologies. She is currently the co-director of seed biocomplexity, a new initiative with the aims of creating

the world's most comprehensive assessment of biodiversity for any location. on the planet. She also co-founded the animist investment studio called Ground Effect to direct capital on behalf of other species and shift worldviews towards one of interbeing with all life. It's no surprise. Longtime followers of this podcast know that my value system and ethics and what I care about, that Alexa and I found each other during the virtual. connection of people working on behalf of nature. This was at times a personal conversation. Alexa is a friend and she is a champion for Earth's future and I hope you enjoy this conversation. Please welcome Alexa Fermanich. Alexa, great to see you. Hi, Nate. How's it going? I'm good.

Winter started here and I can't bike as much as I do in the summer, but but trying to snowshoe and do other things. Boy, I've talked to you so much on our little WhatsApp channels. And when I met you in Europe, there's just so much to talk about. How can we get started? You have a long list of things that you're passionate about, you're interested in. Maybe you just start by giving a little bit of your background and what you're working on most recently. and I have lots of questions.

Wonderful. And Nate, it was such a pleasure to be with you in the mountains some weeks ago, months ago now, I guess, in my home country. And I loved our long walks and philosophical musings. Let me start with what I'm doing now, and then I can give it a little bit of background. I'm currently managing sort of two slash three main projects.

The first one is I'm the co-director of an initiative at the Crowler Lab, which is a very interdisciplinary ecology lab at ETH University in Zurich. And the initiative that I'm co-directing, we're building the world's most comprehensive measure of biodiversity for any location on the planet. So it's a super exciting project,

and I can talk more about that if you'd like. About five years ago, I launched my own investment vehicle investing on behalf of nature. It's called Ground Effect. And it's an animus investment vehicle, which I can also get into. And we have about 20 plus current investments across grants and for-profit,

all trying to support nature and obviously the communities who live close to the land to thrive and regenerate and do what they do best. And then lastly, I'm a little bit like you in that I do everything I can

to speak, share, create, as much as it is to keep myself sane. I don't know if you have the same experience, but I have a podcast called Life Worlds and I do a lot of writing and photography and I'm a wilderness guide. I bring people out. out into the land.

And so all of that kind of exercises my more holistic, creative, wanting to connect part of my being. I'm sure it's the same for you with your podcast. It is the same. And so just, yeah, I guess how I got here back to your question. I was thinking about this the other day. It's like if I were to teleport you back like 30 years ago, maybe 25 years ago, you'd find a very geeky, very kind of awkward and lonesome Swiss girl in the middle of the forest

in Switzerland. We live outside of the city, surrounded by tons of books. I love science fiction. I love these long epic novels that talk about multi-generational timeframes. A lot of them were animals, though, the Red Wall series, if anyone knows those. Video games, I loved so many different types of video games and adventure games. So I was very immersed in that, but it was always with this relationship to nature when I look back towards it. And then I studied political science because I was deeply curious about the relationship between human and natural systems and how human systems perpetuate themselves. I think you've been, you know, one of the leading voices in helping me to make sense of all

of that. I worked in journalism for a while and then I moved to Mexico for most of my 20s. And to summarize a long arc, I think it might be encouraging for some of your listeners to know, especially the younger ones, that I followed a very non-linear career path. And a lot of people around me, the word judgment might be a bit strong, but there was definitely curiosity around the different trails I took and paths, but they were always centered around wanting to understand the living world much more deeply and human psychology fundamentally. And that obviously leaks into what we do with human systems.

So I worked with many NGOs doing land-based regeneration projects, working with local communities, biocultural restoration. I launched a company myself that was guiding learning journeys for investors, CEOs, executives, into the land looking at regenerative economics and business principles. And that was because when you're working with an environmental nonprofit, for example, you often see that a lot of the damage is happening upstream in the economics and the mindset, right, of extraction, consumption, et cetera. So it was a very powerful tool. We ran that for about two years, brought about 100 people, 20 people through the process.

And I continue to be a facilitator and deeply committed to guiding those deep ecology experiences for people. And yeah, long story short, four or five years ago started the investments and joined the lab about a year and a half. go. So biodiversity, nature, human society and economics has been my big focus. So why are you focused on biodiversity and why does this specific ecological issue call to you rather than something more stream than just climate change writ large? I love this question, Nate, because I feel like this question is the basis of our friendship. Like fundamentally, like your love for all. beings and for life is I think the glue that connected us from our very first conversations through

to now. And so it's a question I would want to ask you as well. There's a series of emotional reasons and very practical ones. Which ones would you want me to start with? Whatever you are called. Take your guess. Take your pick. Yeah. The emotional ones. It's always interesting which ones you lead with first. For me, it's quite simple. I think that emotionally it's easy, right, to fall in love with, I don't know, a furry herod lemur or a Chinook salmon or a particular tree friend or tree that you have close to your home. Biodiversity is what we're in love with, right? Whereas in a way, carbon and climate has become almost like a deadening conversation around

a very abstract concept, a single molecule. Now, if you're a perfect animist, you can absolutely fall in love with the molecule of carbon. I would, you know, I would great merit to that. But in a way, they contain very different ways of relating to things. Like 80% of people have nature as their screensaver. You know, you work throughout the year. You save up, you save up to spend two weeks into, you know, spend two weeks going into the land. Like nature is, I think, fundamentally, we are all biophilic.

You want me to pose. Wait a minute. 80% of people have something on nature as their screensaver? Yes. What does that, just that one sentence, relative to the rest of the things in our economy. What does that say about our economic system and about us, really? It says a lot about what we value and what we find beautiful

and probably the dissonance when you look up from that screensaver to the other windows and the other things you're doing and maybe your cubicle. But it's a message about what we value. And so fundamentally, obviously, carbon and climate, they are one and the same with biodiversity, and most things that we've referred to as carbon are living beings. They are part of the natural world.

But for me, poetry is what gives us art and dance and music and culture and myth. And it's this rich, rich tapestry out of which human civilization and culture emerges from. And just try this thought experiment for a second. And like imagine a planet that had no more elephants. We just, the last elephant was gone. Or a planet that had no more tigers or no more, you know, place your favorite creature in the middle of the circle. Even if you had never met any of those creatures in your life come across them, wouldn't that, wouldn't that somehow inside of you create a fundamentally different feeling of the earth and what it is to be alive? like we exist because all of these other beings exist because these ecosystems exist.

I can see it in your face. So for me, these are the emotional reasons like why biodiversity. Whereas if I was to tell you, you know, 33 tons of carbon is the sequestration potential of a whale. 33 tons. It's just a different physiological response. So I don't know if you want to comment on that before I get into the practical reasons. But for me, that's why, again, biodiversity is what we're for, is what we're in love with. It's why we want to create these changes.

It's why we'll consume less. It's why we'll make the efforts to change our lifestyles. Whereas climate, unfortunately, has become what we need to abstain from, what we're doing wrong, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's a big tech focus, like it's an engineering problem as opposed to a values, deep humanity tethered to nature problem. Yes. Absolutely. So do you think that those emotions that people feel and the fact that 80% of our screensavers are something nature related? Is that related to people's experiences with nature as they grew up?

Or do you think it's something innate in who we are as evolved beings on this planet? Like you and I, you said that you grew up as a nerdy girl in the forest of Switzerland. I was a nerdy boy in the forests of southern Oregon, and that imprinted nature on us. But is that just waiting to be a seed germinating in all of us? And it's just been kind of squelched by our economic system? Or what are your thoughts on that? 100%.

I think, first of all, early childhood exposure is key because those neuronal connections that get made in early childhood with the living world. I had John Young, who's an amazing nature mentor, come on my podcast, and he's done a lot of work with the Eight Shields method around nature connection and mentorship. He trained with a Sandbushman and with a host of other elders. And he says, you know, there's primary connections that get made with the living world

in early childhood that is very hard to replicate, and you can't skip that step. And so part of the work that is upon us today is to recreate some of those experiences for adults, because it can happen. It can happen. And that kind of leads me to the second part of your question, which is, you know, E.O. Wilson, amazing biologist, ecologist, philosopher, speaks this thing called biophilia, which is also part of our core sort of investment thesis, if you will, ground effect. And you're checking if it's on your bookshelf. it's here somewhere close you'd better you better you better have some eo wilson oh i have all of his books but i actually have biophilia and it's it's close by but not on this shelf so that there's the answer to your question the innate love of life or of nature or you know put in your

ecological word that human beings have we are physiologically hardwired to connect the living world because first of all for thousands of years and going back through you know genetic history until when we were, you know, emerging from the ocean, our bodies are hardwired to sense the land, read the land, connect, listen, and feel. And when we do that, our bodies and souls drink from that. And so for me, it's, you know, people always ask me, how do you get so connected to nature? Why do you care about this? My answer is always, that potential is exactly the same in you than it is in me. I just have been fortunate enough and deliberate enough to cultivate it. So I think it's innate in every single human, which is why, despite all of the things that we're seeing around us today, I have great excitement about the future and our ability to restore and reconnect.

But maybe we can get to that after. I do want to get to the practical part of the biodiversity question, because I think for rationally our into listeners, it's also there are some important myths, I think, that are to be dispelled about the differences between biodiversity. climate. And so now we're moving out of the terrain of sort of psychology and soul and care and all these things and into some of the practicalities. Could I ask you one more question about the psychology and the care? Many questions. Because if I don't, I'll forget it later. Many, many, many. The statistics for biodiversity, as you and I are acutely aware, have been quite disheartening for a long time and accelerating. And, you. And I used to be obsessed with shows like Planet Earth and the BBC and nature documentaries.

And I can't watch them anymore. Even as beautiful as they are, it's a little painful for me. So my question for you is, yes, we are all have the potential to care and love nature the way you said. And I think that is a huge opportunity for a cultural awakening. but those of us in the scout team that have the empathy and the love and the um the diligence as you said earlier it it's it can become too painful at times um how do you how do you manage that dichotomy and do you think it's true that those who are more most empathic and feel what's happening to nature are doing great work but they have the risk of being overwhelmed

and saddened and burned out. There's many ways to approach that answer. Yes, and not just those who work in nature, but those who work in all of the meta-poly crisis space, there is incredible burnout. And I think one of the most important initiatives or series of initiatives that I'm seeing are how those who are on the front lines of this movement

or the backlines doing the brunt work of the brackets in cop or whatever it may be. I'm referring to the brackets when you're trying to fill out those, you know, those documents in the main halls. The ability to know how to self-care and regenerate and sort of internal renewal in order to go out and do this work is key. And so we can speak about this later, but one of the areas that we're looking into

supporting financially is all around climate grief, anxiety and care. And I did a podcast episode with Britt Ray on this as well. But personally, Rebecca Solnit wrote this amazing little book called Hope in the Dark. And in that, her definition of hope is the closest. The word hope always kind of sat strangely with me. Her definition of hope is the closest that I've gotten to understanding the way that I relate and I'm able to sort of greet the world with, you know, beauty and expectation of something better. hope is expectation of a different outcome without specifying what it needs to be.

And it's hope in the unknown and all the possibilities in quote unquote the emergence. Like she writes in the book, you know, inside of the word emergency is the word emergence. And so it's this notion that, I mean like Nate, how many times have you picked up a pamphlet or a book or some shred of information sort of fluttering across time that landed on your lap or you saw it on a billboard in, I don't know, Kansas or something. And something that someone wrote or did or spoke or sang at some point in time moved you, possibly hundreds of years later. And so in a way, I mean, she has this amazing quote.

I pulled out some of my favorite quotes for this podcast because I love, love quotes. But she has this amazing phrase, right, where she says, like, change can come upon us, like drops of soft water that wear away stone or an earthquake breaking center. of tension, right? And so in a way, change can happen slowly or suddenly or unpredictably. And when you look at all of the changes that have happened in our lifetimes, in the last hundred years, incredible things. So first of all, to all those who are despairing, I'd say yes, but we have no clue what's coming. We have no clue what these thousand points of light will bring. And there are thousands, millions of points of light. And quickly, the second thing I would say is

the grief, the fear, the pain, the anger, it's so normal. And also we have to feel it. Because if we numb that, if we can't watch the planet Earth episode anymore because it hurts us, then we're going to numb our capacity to rile up all the positive emotions, all the fiery emotions that have us actually, you know, do whatever ours is to do, right? Whether that's activism or journalism or reforming the financial system. So the depth of our pay. and the depth of our grief out of that arises a broken heart that will heal and help to do whatever it can in the world

and so actually psychic numbing and dissonance and denial and all of this all of these sort of counterintuitive psychological processes keep us further away from the actions of the world needs which gets us back to the need for healing and being kind to yourself and marathon not a sprint and some of the other things that you're involved in Yeah, while you were speaking and using Rebecca's quotes, it reminded me that word combinations

from some other human you will never meet and visual combinations have the ability to create magic, which is something that's unexpected. You can just with combining certain words influence another person's mood and their actions. It's quite something. It's one of our superpowers as a species. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, another one of my great mentors I've never met her, but has been Joanna Macy. And so I would encourage anyone, you know, badass, elder, Buddhist monk, activist.

She created a whole body of work that's called The Work that reconnects. And it's about facilitated group processes directly pertaining to your question on what do we do in order to feel it all in order to be able to act. And I think that the one thing that is so insidious and perverse about our current society is individuality in a way and isolation. So if you're alone watching planet Earth and we think, yeah, that's kind of hard. And maybe you have the psychological tools for that. But if you host a screening with 10 of your best friends and you know you're all a bit sensitive and you feel safe to weep together, like collective in the collective is when healing happens. individually it happens as well but it's much harder and so I think that

what I would love to see and what probably will happen as this crisis deepens and also expands in ways we can't predict positively will be collective places of grief and ritual and mourning which is a form of activism which is a form of hope but so I would encourage people there's tons of resources out there

and I've got a bunch on my on different websites and so do you train up and Khalid Gibran, an amazing mystic, wrote the deeper that sorrow carves into your cup, the more you can fill it with joy. So that has been my experience. I'm super gooey, and so I will break down and cry

and feel it, but the next minute I wake up and I look outside and there's a blade of grass, and I'm like, holy, we live in a world where a blade of grass exists. Like, how spectacular is that? Yeah, I hear you. And sometimes I think that energy surplus and the trajectory that we've followed, that material wealth has acted like an accordion to move us towards an individual experience of the world as opposed to a collective one. And I do long for a return. Just a question is, what are the externalities of that return going to be? But beautifully said, please continue where I interrupted you on the practical aspects of biodiversity. Yeah. No, no, I think it was a very important sort of, it's not even a tangent.

Yeah, Nate, it's about developing elasticity, I think, for that pain and how we bounce back and feel and bounce and feel. practically and I see this a lot because of my work with the lab and you know you read this phrase which is kind of even incorrectly written which is we've you know corporations governments

are just wrapping their head around climate and now they have to do biodiversity how do we do this and so there's been this massive ontological physiological error in the middle of the climate or carbon movement if you will that has negated the role

biodiversity and nature at large, let's say. They are one and the same. So first of all, our economy is 100% dependent on nature, not 70, not 60, not, there's nothing, nothing that enables you and I to be here right now if it weren't for nature, food, water, close, air, like, you name it. So 100% of the economy is dependent on nature, and yet they've been approached as siloed problems, right? And maybe I can give like two or three examples of the ways that biological and life processes create the climate and how these feedback loops happen. First of all, maybe

some of your listeners know this, but one out of every two breaths that we take comes from the ocean, right? It comes from plankton, phytoplankton specifically. So every second breath is created by these organisms that are, by the way, dying out because we're packaging them up for omega-3s and, you know, it's crazy. But they also seed cloud formation. So about 60% of the clouds above in the southern oceans around the Antarctic are seeded by plankton because when they breathe, they create little molecules as molecules go up into the air and they seed clouds. So very practically, these plankton are seeding the clouds and seeding the climate. Another example, is the concept of keystone species, which I know that you know.

But these are essentially key creatures inside of ecosystems that activate a whole series of other ecological processes. So when you think of all of the animals that move and migrate through the earth, you have the wildebeest across the serengeti, right? And they're churning up soils and spreading seeds and making niches for other animals to live. And by pooping, they're bringing carbon back down to the soils. But they're moving across the land in these, like, massive vein-like corridors called wildlife corridors. And you must see them as if they were cells inside of your body moving through veins. It's the same with the salmon, right?

The salmon that take their annual migrations on looking out the window, like from deep out in the ocean, they collect all of the nutrients and they come back up nitrogen phosphates and they come back up. And they swim up river and they die, you know, hundreds of miles from the deep ocean, where they initially spawned. But those massive migrations, like movements of all these fish are literally feeding the forest.

So as all these creatures move, they're feeding the trees, they're feeding the carbon, they're cycling these ecological processes. And they are part and parcel of the carbon cycle. And so a paper came out a few months ago that maybe you can link in your show notes

that show that show that the reintroduction of a lot of these keystone species like the muscox and the bison, the wolf, certain fish can detonate huge cascades of carbon capturing inside of ecosystems. So salmon and wildebeests are keystone species. So not only is biodiversity important in its own right as a separate issue than climate change, but biodiversity

is part and parcel of climate change because of the sequestration and the ecosystem services. What happens if we start to lose a lot of keystone species? I think the easiest way of bringing this home is that the earth is like your body. Well, the earth really is your body. And if you look at all of the continents like organs, the creatures are the connectivity between them, all of the kind of connectivity, right? the amino acids, the blood cells, the whatever you name it.

And so these creatures are keeping your stability in check through feedback loops. So if these species disappear, it would be as if you're cutting off vital connectivity between your different parts of your body. So therefore, your body goes out of whack. So you may get invasive species coming in, you get disturbances, right? Ecological disturbances for, yeah. Keeping with your analogy of the earth as a body, what are the, dare I ask, what the implications are that we've lost 70% of the populations of animals, birds, fish, reptiles, and insects since I've been on the planet. The way that this functionality gets lost is very quiet until it's very hard for ecosystems to recover.

So in climate science, there's a concept of tipping points, right? These are states in which an ecosystem or region will just enter into a new state if enough changes happen to it. So you think of the melting of the ice sheets or the Amazon becoming a dry land savannah. The absence of these key cyclers of life, let alone for all of their other values that I spoke about earlier, means that nature's hanging by a thread. And however, rewilding is a movement that I am a part of and have supported. And it is astounding how quickly life bounces back. I mean, you bring back beavers to an ecosystem.

And, you know, within a few months, right, the pools are back. I have Derek Gow came on my podcast. He's an amazing kind of renegade rewilder from the UK. And he speaks about, you know, the lights come back on. And everything that can sliver, fly, or swim just comes back to those little ponds. and I think that we have friends who are reintroducing beavers and rivers sort of slightly illicitly because they were just like we just need to get the you know the beavers back. The reintroduction, especially of these keystone species and another paper came out last year,

this year, well, 2023 showing that there were way more keystone species than we even knew, right? And so the reintroduction of them, it is astounding how quickly nature bounces back. So yes, we have lost a lot and we need to get life through this bottleneck right now, which is why we need to conserve and protect many of these last wild places, and create the connectivity between them by allowing creatures the space to move. How successful or growing or is there a lot of momentum behind the rewilding movement? Can you give some other examples other than the beavers? I know that E.O. Wilson champion the idea of half Earth,

where humans live on half and wild creatures are undisturbed on the other half. And it's kind of a good Overton window to get us going in that direction. And there's 30 by 30 initiatives and stuff. But can you unpack rewilding as a cultural theme a little bit more? The word culture was important there. It can be a culturally contested word as well. In the UK, for example, there's a lot of tensioner on the word rewilding. A slightly perverse phenomenon has begun happening where rich landowners purchased large tracts of land to rewild them.

But it's not a sort of commons-based, democratically, you know, land redistribution kind of thing. So I think like with carbon markets or even biodiversity markets that are coming and we can talk about that. We need to be very careful. There's a few groups that do this amazingly. So I'd encourage anyone to check out the world of rewilding Europe, the work of rewilding Europe. It can be everything from restoring crayfish to the apennines in the Italian Alps so that all of those, you know, those streams and rivers get back their functionality to Bison. So Bison are being reintroduced. I was visiting some rewilder projects in Romania.

And the bison said the wildebeest, they turn up the soils, they capture the carbon, they clear out the undergrowth, more trees can come in. And actually, in the U.S. where you're based, the Wildebeest and the First Nations had the... very symbiotic relationship where they would migrate with the wildebeest, and the wildebeest would clear the land and they would, you know, plant in a way. I think. Sorry, Buffalo, Bison, exactly. Thank you. Wolves, you've got the famous example, obviously, of the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone. So these are all sort of examples of rewilding.

The separate, I think that rewilding in today's world has to come with a relationship to human, biobilding. cultural economy. I think some of the misinterpretations of the half-earth could be conservation, you know, 1.0, which was fortress conservation, which was kicking native people off their land to create these enclaves where only nature thrives. It would be ideal if we could understand how to create these corridors and there's lots of tools for coexistence between humans and the reintroduction of some of these creatures because they don't kill a lot of livestock,

but it takes one sheep being killed for fairly enough for farmers to be completely against. Since Switzerland we're about to cull quite a big portion of our wolf population, which is heartbreaking because of attacks on farm animals, but the attacks aren't so marked. But the question is not how do we sequester half the earth for wild creatures and we take the other half ourselves. It's how do we learn to coexist and share our land with those who came before and are our kin and are our ancestors? And obviously a lot of native communities or IPLCs have that knowledge.

But it's about learning to coexist with more of that wild and our doorstep. I have a couple of follow-ups to that. One is a story that recently happened to me. Like you, I love megafauna and all the different 6,000 mammals species on the planet, particularly African megafauna, like lions and leopards and elephants. And you read stories where Maasai warriors have to kill a lion for some ritual or they're protecting their village. And so they have to kill one of these beautiful.

animals and you get really upset about that. Like, why would they do that? And yet, a few months ago, a raccoon came in my barn and killed three of my chickens. And I was like, oh, dang it, I can't have that happen. Now, I didn't kill it. I captured it and drove it like seven miles away and let it go in some forest. But what is the difference between me and this raccoon and that raccoons are abundant here versus someone in another part of it.

of the world that has animals that we might deem as really important keystone species for our planet. You know, it's this coexistence and the boundaries of, of your moral compass and your daily life, you know? Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on that? Totally. There's a lot of kind of interesting initiatives emerging in terms of how we can use technology

or different tools to make those boundaries. more productive, let's say. So, for example, if you're thinking of Africa, which is why I thought of it, African elephants can often charge into towns, villages, or, you know, farmers' plots. And it's really an issue. Africans hate bees.

The elephants, African elephants hate bees, right? And so what they've, so initially some of the communities would put beehives surrounding the fields so the elephants would just stay away. but it's been shown that even just the sounds of the bees drive away the elephants so now there's a sort of bio-acoustic approach where people are placing the sounds of bees to keep the elephants away you can tag the creatures and have you know alarm signals

when they're coming in or you know warning signals so I think that there's ways that we can be intelligent about that that coexistence on a psychological level I think the separation that keeps us from, I think it's perfectly saying that you get angry when that raccoon kills all of your chickens, right? Like, and I don't know what ancestors would have done in some idealized 2,000 year history. Like maybe it would have been exactly the same thing. But there's something about coexistence here, which strikes me as well when it comes to how many humans will be migrating

and how we are going to have to let in our, you know, our human kin that may appear so fundamentally different to us, but who essentially also need home and place to live in. So it's a deeper question on how we begin to work on human beings, internal relationships to duality or otherness. And I would believe that the same skills we cultivate on a human level may transpire into how we relate to other creatures if we're deliberate enough about it. So on the emergence and hope rabbit hole, if it were possible to tap into the love for nature that you think resides in all or most humans, we still are in an economic system that's

based on profits, tether to energy, tether to extraction. And so that's the cultural goal. But I'm just wondering if there could be you can pay 5% of your taxes in this currency or in this thing. And that thing you only get by doing rewilding or regenerative activities in the area where you live. Could something like that happen from the ground up if there is the political change of consciousness in lots of people? Do you think is the question the feasibility of people? putting in a tax like that or that some kind of tax like that would change people's minds? Well, I guess I'm looking for a way to link the love for nature and the powerlessness we feel in our current economic system to exhibit our love for nature.

And this way is linking the incentives with the behavior a little bit. Michael Sandel, Harvard professor, wrote this book, The Moral Limits to Markets. and you're not like maybe you've read it and heard of it not read it yeah it's good read i recommend it he speaks about um some of the dangers of replacing intrinsic values with extrinsic motives so specifically i've been swimming in this because i've been concerned about the monetization of nature or um which is happening anyway but how do we design that more intelligently um time and time again it's been shown that if you replace a civic

desire to do something, if you replace a civic desire to do something that's coming out of, you know, collective restraint or some sense of duty to the common good with an extrinsic motive, namely money, the initial intrinsic or moral reasons for doing that erode. So for example, a town in Switzerland was asked if they would accept to be a nuclear, I don't call it waste site, but if they could bury nuclear waste in it. And initially something like 60% of the town said, yes, okay, we'll do it. And then the government said, well, let's try and get that a little bit higher as a percentage. And so we'll offer you also a financial reward on top of that.

And it's astounding the amount of people who consented actually dropped half because you replace the intrinsic good civil care with this sort of carrot, if you will. So that's a microcosm of our global situation. in ways, yes? Well, I think relating it to you know, if you know, heal nature and here's some money

needs to happen, this is the dilemma we're in. Like we have a very, very narrow window to get life through this bottleneck. And if we don't create financial mechanisms right now to protect and restore nature inside of this car and economy, then

we'll be losing a lot of our life support system, right? And all of the other things I stated earlier. But if we only do that, and if we don't think about the more fundamental psychological relationships we have to nature and also healing that divide, I'd be very concerned about the deeper humanness, if you will. So I think that putting in attacks, like the one you described, people may accept it or they may resent it because it wasn't chosen by them and it's not arising out of some deeper

intrinsic incentive. Well, it wouldn't be taxing people. It would be relieving tax if you did these pro-regenerative, pro-rewilding things. So it would almost be like a subsidy. I think we should do an experiment. I think we should an experiment on it. You know, there's also experiments being done on universal conservation income. So what happens when you give communities just UCI to look after ecosystems?

And what does that do to values? I think mapping the values inside of pilot schemes like that would be very meaningful work for someone to try and do. Okay, so someone listening, start that up, keep me posted. Yeah. But yeah, this gets at one of the core arguments within the field of ecological economics. There's a lot of people within that field that want to put prices on ecosystem services and include those in the market. And others are like those things are priceless. And once you monetize them and put a dollar marker on them, it changes their value to us as human beings.

And they become part of the economic extractive system. Granted with probably more accurate prices, but their prices nonetheless. So is this kind of what you're getting at? Being the natural world and the financial world, are they compatible at all? I think the question is less. are they compatible because with billions of humans on the planet we need some kind of system of value in exchange but it's under what conditions or what changes to the financial system

do they become compatible? Like what are some of the tennis that need to be upheld? And you know, I was curious about a few weeks ago that I didn't know the etymology of finance. Have you looked that up recently? The root of the word finance? No, the root of the word? I don't know. Yeah, right? It's interesting.

It's the repayment of a debt, if you will. It's having an obligation to something or restitution. Isn't that so interesting? And so... Well, so we... So the relationship of humans to the entire natural world of planet Earth is finance in a way because we have an enormous debt to nature. Exactly.

And so for me... And yet we're using debt to extract more and accelerate the destruction of nature. So the question is, you know, I think the Capital Institute wrote this paper regenerative finance, but it's more how do we design finance to pay that debt back more intelligently. And I think that we must think in terms of time horizons here. So in the short term, there are very meaningful schemes that we can develop and design that I think are important for ecological and social regeneration. And it's more about how those things are structured.

So for example, what do we do about the commons, right? Like finance has to answer the question of these ungoverned vast expanses of landscapes and how we incentivize their protection, considering that all harm can be externalized into them. That must be answered. We must answer what we can do about land privatization and ownership. Because if, you know, ecological economics or, let's say, I don't know, impact investment, goes in and you can start spitting a lot of money off doing things with land with biodiversity

and otherwise. How do we make sure that we naturalize in a way those gains is the way that I think about it, which is it's not just those landowners or those real estate funds or real asset funds benefiting from the income from that carbon or biodiversity, but it's cycled back into nature and communities in the same way that nature would have it. So I think these are all sort of design constraints that have to do with land tenure, land ownership, Biodiversity credits is a huge conversation that we're in the middle of because we're creating this measurement layer for biodiversity. And in terms of biocredits, the question there is, should we enable offsets at all?

Well, offsets have existed for 20, 30 years. What would a biodiversity credit offset? What physically would that be? Can you give an example? Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's a whole taxonomy of them. So there's about six different categories that a group that we work with Nature Finance has outlined, I can send you that paper later.

An offset can be everything from... Most offsets are hyper-localized. So you're a developer, you need to raise down a forest, or you want to raise down a forest, to build a shopping mall or an apartment building. Some ecological value will be lost there, and so you must recreate that ecosystem elsewhere, replant trees somewhere else.

That's a biodiversity offset. Or then you have biodiversity certificates, which are essentially... I'm Nestle and upstream in my value chain, I've replanted some trees or done some watershed restoration. And there's different ways now via MRV, which is monitoring reporting verification. So it's a combination of ground truth sort of sampling and satellites, remote sensing. You can show that you've committed some good deed in restoring that ecosystem. And you can essentially have a biodiversity credit, right, showing, hey, I have done a good deed.

Now that can just remain there. It's emitted, but it's never sold or trace. And in a way, it's a way of showing your investors or your stakeholders, you know, we're assuring ourselves, you know, and we're assuring the long-term viability of this business. It's not just a do-good action. That's the point. It's like protecting nature means you're ensuring the viability of your business in the long-term because you're supporting the very fundamental assets that your entire business depends upon.

A big question right now is whether biodiversity credits should be allowed to be traded, whether you should have secondary markets or derivatives and all of these financial tools on top of that. The argument for that says that for markets to generate enough money, they need to be liquid, right? And so the tradeability, let's say we plant 100 trees in the Amazon and that generates, I don't know, 100 bio credits. And let's say you have a profit share, revenue share with that local community whereby they get 80% of any future sales of a credit. which doesn't happen right now in some of the carbon markets. So it's sort of benefit sharing, if you will. If you can trade that once, that community gets 80% of the value once, right?

And then the developers get the other 10 or 20%, let's say, for the work that they did in developing and monitoring and reporting. If that credit can be traded 10 times, they'd get 10x money back. And so you can see why it's appealing. Which they would then go spend at Home Depot and Walmart and other places. on things requiring carbon and extraction. It's a good question, but you saw the results coming back from that UBI experiment, right? That, what the world's largest UBI experiment, where actually... Yeah, you sent me that.

People don't always spend on consumption necessarily, but more money doesn't always mean better for the planet, granted. So that's kind of the question on bio credits. I have an article that you could link to, which is called Selling Nature in Order to Save It. in order to save it. And in that, I outline a lot of super interesting arguments for and against this financialization of nature.

And I have a couple questions. First of all, I'm not a fan of the carbon trading schemes because I think they're mostly schemes, but at least carbon is kind of standard. But I would think biodiversity would have a biodiversity quality asterisk on just about everything. Because if you're going to develop a shopping center in Ecuador by the Galapagos and then buy some credits to buy some farmland in Kansas and put some trees there, that's a little bit different of biodiversity quality. Yes? Absolutely. And so in the conversation of offsets, there's a few working groups right now on this biocredit conversation that are sincerely trying to learn from the mistakes we've done in carbon markets and saying that biodiversity can't. be fungible in that way in an offset market across vastly different ecoregions.

But there are other dangers. There are four main dangers, and we can quickly, quickly speak about them. But one is ecological. When you create these ecosystem service markets, the way that they're structured often incentivize the reproduction of very strange and artificial ecosystems that nature wouldn't have. So if you look at stream mitigation banking, which the U.S. did, which is the oldest ecosystem service markets, they prioritized.

There were rivers that didn't stray, that didn't erode. And the proof of a good river restoration project was that it didn't erode, which is ridiculous because rivers move. So the carbon tunnel vision or the optimization of any one ecological variable, for example, number of species or proximity to a protected area, means that you will begin to incentivize the overproduction of that one thing. So we could get monocultures of specific types of biodiversity, which is happening now, which is why the tool that we're building at the Crowther Lab is attempting and really will be

the world's most holistic metro biodiversity because we're taking in all the possible variables across genetic species and ecosystem level diversity to try and negate as much as we can that over-optimization for one variable of what we call nature. So those are the ecological risks of these markets. One thing that keeps popping up in my mind is a lot of this is happening fast and people are becoming aware and working on these projects and rewilding and regenerative agriculture and bio credits, etc. except it's just at the margin of this juggernaut of the Star Trek Borg of an economic system that is still optimizing extraction and profits and all that, the superorganism. And if those could be linked somehow, like in New York State, they're outlawing propane

stoves because propane comes from fossil fuels and it's bad for climate. The COP 28, they're trying to phase out fossil fuels. Without the rest of the world agreeing that that's necessary, it's like a conversation within its own little tribe and echo chamber. And yet, the value system of 80% of humans having screensavers of nature, if there is a way to link those so that it's a much more agreed upon thing, which is why I think your. work is so essential on this stuff, which is unpacking humans connection to nature as a value system, the consciousness of what you care about in your life, somehow that needs to be integrated with our incentives. And I don't know how to do it, but I think it would be much more scalable if people like you and working on these efforts for biodiversity, if that was

acknowledged as one of our cultural goals. I'd say that it's less fringe and mainstream than what it might appear. For example, this year we saw the launch of the TNFD, the Task Force for Nature Related Financial Disclosures. This was huge. It followed the TCFD, a very valiant effort of hundreds of people trying to calculate in impacts, risks, and dependencies of value chains on nature, so corporations. it's very likely that most global companies will have to disclose their impacts and risks and dependencies on nature in the coming years. So these are huge shifts within the financial industry, which is why this was the cop with the most amount of financiers, right? And the biodiversity cop that was in Montreal last year, the same.

There's a lot of initiatives underway right now to reprise sovereign debt, for example, linked to nature KPI's key performance indicators. Central banks, there's a whole greening the financial system movement where central banks are looking at, okay, how do we calculate it the true cost? And regenerative agriculture was niche maybe a few years ago, but I'd say now where we saw what was happening in this latest cop, which was the first cop where food was really hugely present, when 100 and X, you know, what was it, 60 country signing up to globally reform the food system. So I'd say that things like rewilding are still a bit niche, but fundamentally calculating in the costs and the impacts of this massive debt that we've incurred on the natural world and understand that if we don't do that, the whole house of cars comes tumbling down, that is exponentially coming into awareness. And I think that all of the natural disasters we're seeing and, you know, people forcibly having to leave their their homes, it's having us with. wake up. So luckily it's not, it's not niche and I'm surrounded by so many initiatives that I can't even count them. That's good to hear. So you also are an ESG investor or in that sphere of environment, sustainability, governance. Can you unpack a little bit about your work in that

field? Sure. Yeah. I think, you know, ESG is sort of, it can be a box. ticking exercise I think we've seen. What we do with ground effects is that we we invest with a worldview in a philosophy, which is this indivisibility that we have with nature. It's fundamentally saying if I would if I was this ecosystem or this you know this species what do I value? What does nature value? What are all of the voices that we're not bringing to the table from the other other kingdoms, let's say, of life. And so we're an animist investment vehicle. And for those who haven't come across the term animism,

if you think of an ecology as like a web of relationships, animism is the felt sense of those relationships. It's the sense that the world is alive, that we're embedded in this web of relationality, and that there are many other beings out there who are their own persons, and only some of them are human. And they are a genetic kin, they are our relatives, and they have just as much right to be here as we do.

So a lot of ESG or even impact investing, I see a sort of what can nature do for us and for the human economy and how can we keep thriving. And that's just not how I feel the world. The way I feel the world is how can I support the thriving and the regeneration of these other beings. And sometimes they value things that I don't necessarily value or that these. economy doesn't value but that are fundamental to the underpinnings of life right maybe a little gnat a little tiny fly it's serving a critical purpose that I can't quantify or understand but just because it doesn't make it into my calculation doesn't mean it's meaningful and so very practically we're

using financial capital money to try and turn it into something that nature values and we do that in a few different categories so we fund earth's living processes, so agriculture, food, soils, rewilding, biodiversity initiatives, large landscape restoration, preservation, core scientific research that really illuminates the awe and the wonder and this kind of ecological backbone of all life. So we've given some funding, for example, to the fungi, the mushrooms and mycelium that support everything we see above ground. We support kind of Gaian voices, if you will, are those who speak on behalf of nature. So advocacy and journalism, activists,

we've supported the rights of nature, which is giving other entities in the living world legal personhood inside of the human system. It's incomplete, because who are we to grant them our personhood in our legal system? But it's still a bit of a hack. It's like ecocide. It's like let's use the current legal tools

that we've got in order to encourage more of this life to thrive. And one of the latest categories that we're looking into for this next year is the development of human inner consciousness or wisdom. So the inner growth of human beings. And how do we embed a much more wise operating system inside of our human systems? It's so impressive. I am such a fan of your ethos and your work. And I'm realizing that we have not even got to half of the topics I wanted to cover and we're an hour in. So we might come back to the philanthropy and ESG investing, but I want to talk about you have a podcast.

It's called Life Worlds, which you started. And from the main page of your website, the podcast series, explores how to orient your life around nature. We discover the mindset, skills, and actions that are required to partner wisely with other forms of life and engage in acts of brilliant restoration. What inspired you to do this? And could you talk about your experience? It's always funny to hear something you've written read out to you.

Right? I guess two main reasons. The first is through this work, I was meeting such amazing. characters, probably a little bit like you. And it was like, I need more people to know about their work and have their voices and their initiatives and what they're doing in the world, right? And so initially, just the podcast was I want to give a platform to all of these incredible actors that are really, really pioneering different approaches at this moment in time.

But the reason why I chose life worlds and the focus I give to all of the episodes is that our culture is steeped in duality, right? in this I, them, me, you know, this othering, if you will. And as I mentioned earlier, my frustration with a lot of the climate and nature movement is it still for humans, on human, you know, for human sake, on our terms. And I believe, and it's pretty certain that the more that we think like ecosystems and take their interests in mind when we rewild, restore, do agriculture, do law, do finance, the more intelligent the intervention is, but also the more that we transform.

And so at the core of the podcast is this question on the human separation of nature. And so with all of my guests, they're not just exceptionally adept in their fields, but they are all cultivating a different worldview and relationship around nature, where there's a different relationality, the integration of constituencies of different voices. And in a way, Michael Abelman, who's an amazing farmer who came on with the front of the first episodes, says, you know, how do we make our way into the slipstream of the biological activity of all life and see ourselves as part of that system? And so what I ask with Lifeworld is how people cultivate their own internal worldviews and skills and being able to embody the perspectives of ecosystems, both because at least for more intelligent intervention.

And secondly, because that's one of the psychological and spiritual transformations that's really needed right now. Do you, in your experience, there's Mother Earth, and we're talking about Gaia and all the other species and the ecologies. Have you found that women and the feminine side of humanity is more in touch with that? Or is it 50-50? Or do you notice anything along those lines? I think the feminine in each of us is just waiting to be expressed. no matter what body or whatever you find yourself in. There is a feminine principle,

which is more nurturing and life-giving and tender and in touch naturally. Feminine leadership is something I exalt and only want to see more of in the world. And I would love that all of those who are more in their masculinity to also have the permission to be that. In a way, it's like indigenity. Like, we are all native to this planet. And so, yes, more feminine in the world, but more feminine in all of us. And in terms of the podcast, the guests are completely split along those lines. Because, yeah, it's more about cultivating a deep sensory skill set and acuities and perceptions

than necessarily the bodies that we're in. So one of the points of your podcast, is it's important to view the world through a non-human lens. And you and I, when we observe what's going on in the world and the ecosystems and the impacts, we do that? But do you ever actually go so far as to empathize and imagine some creature in nature you're looking at and imagine what it must be like to be a spider or a gopher or a squirrel or an orangutan or a leopard or whatever you're seeing,

do you go that far and try to imagine what life would be like living as such a creature? Come to one of my dance parties. No. I think that metamorphosis is a very archetypal and gutteral inclination of human beings. And so what I mean by that is

throughout time our ancestors, developed ways through ritual, ceremony, dance, song, beat, whatever you name it, to embody the life worlds of other beings. I think it is fundamentally part of human culture. I mean, you know, here in Mexico, I was in this crazy room the other day with about like 2,000 tribal masks from across the country dancing masks. And some were human, some were non-human, some you couldn't figure out what they were but our ability to shape-shift and take the form of other beings I think is has been culturally present in most continents of the world so do I personally do it there are nature reconnection exercises that can

train you in physically embodying the different acuities of another being. And it's quite interesting when you playfully give yourself over to that process and you don't, you're not going to do it very seriously sitting there, I'm going to become a wolf. But like, what would it be? And it's a fascinating process and we've done it with people you wouldn't expect, right? Like very A type C suite executives, but everyone has their own space. And we can tap into something very deep and very ancient. if we do this. In terms of an investment thesis quickly, because it's some part of ground effect, it's like a permaculturist where they say, you know, spend 12 months observing the land

before we make an intervention. I think that if you're trying to restore an ecosystem or create an intervention in any kind of nature-based context, imagining what it's like for that ecosystem to be, in the same way that if you're trying to design an intervention for a human system, right? Whether it's shopkeepers or farmers, what is their life like? It doesn't mean you have to wear their clothes and become them, but a sincere curiosity is critical, I think, in this work.

I agree with that. So do you think before organized religions way back in the day we were all, animists that that was just kind of the way things were? Many people, a lot smarter than me on this topic, have said yes. Animists just being, you know, we understood that there were energies and rivers and rocks and these, we existed within these cycles and life processes that also transcended our own planet, right? But these cosmological cycles of time, we've really lost that cyclicality.

and for me animus is also systems thinking it's like things lead to other things they're entangled there's emergence there's chaos you know it's all of the kind of systems 101 um and because we were so activated so animus would be the world philosophy most linked to systems ecology oof i would have to think about that one it's a big statement um no i think it's a good question let's entertain that for a sec um it's tricky i think because animism permeates a lot of world philosophies like I've practiced Buddhism for quite a few years and in a way animism is almost like a practice it's a world view of understanding that the world is alive as I said earlier and that things are entangled and that we can have relationships with them you know you I know from our conversations have relationships with your animals right that may seem silly but it's it's true and so they're my family they're your family only about half of my best friends are humans exactly I love that line

And so is that animist or is that Buddhist or is that humaning or is that being an earthling? You know, it's the boundaries aren't so clear. But being in our bodies and having sensory acuities to sense and feel the world is a fundamental part of systems thinking, right? Because you have to adapt. You have to watch how things move. And if we're cut off from that, from all of that sensory intelligence, we don't have. have access to a deeper form of knowledge. So that's the way I would answer the question.

So here's a bit of an aside, but given the limits to growth and the peak oil and the four horsemen and the other things that I talk about, I think we're approaching a cultural transition, both in our economies and in our relationships, everything, the great simplification. I predict that as things get more chaotic and uncomfortable relative to the past, that humans penchant for religiosity and for group cohesion around a purpose and a story that's larger than ourselves will become widespread. And I think there will be a lot of new religions that pop up from some charismatic person with a story, many of them will be untethered from reality. I think the animus story of we are on this

spaceship earth hurtling through a lonely, dark, lifeless universe, this blue-green planet is special, and the species that we share it with are precious. And this is what I ascribe my meaning to and my purpose. I think that will be one of the religions of coming decades. the question is, will it be just a tiny thing on the far fringe, or will it be serious and meaningful and maybe shifts our entire culture? I don't know. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, it's a very good question or thought.

I think the answer to it will be in relationship to how we're able to work on some of the things you spoke about earlier in the podcast, relating to grief and despair and tribalism, as the crisis upon us will lead to massive displacement and the breakdown of fundamental ecological systems, food, etc., we could tip the other way, right, and become deeply tribal and sectarian. That is a very possible outcome, which is why I think that supporting and working on the cultivation of,

much better human psychological tools and human wisdom and all of this inner work that some people think is woo but no it's just it's leadership it's like we need people to be wise leaders in this time if we're able to in a way you know ia wilson again like paleolithic instincts medieval institutions godlike technology if we're able to um take those paleolithic instincts and make them a bit more sophisticated um and that can constrain or bound our behavior in relationship to that technology and reform those institutions. I think we sound a very interesting chance. Something I have seen, and this came up a lot in my podcast, is that when we heal the earth, we heal ourselves. And we don't wait around to be a fully, you know, like, woke, enlightened

human being to start doing all the good stuff. It's like sinking your hands into soil, right? Like people who work in inner city farms who have had a history of drug abuse, you know, or substance abuse, just thinking their hands into soil is so deeply healing or the Chicago Green Corpse, right, like going in and, you know, under financially privileged communities who start to restore their parks, who never had a relationship with nature, suddenly become much more deeply connected. So I think that that feedback loop between human and land will happen because we have so much to restore and protect and the incentives around it are emerging and the initiatives are emerging and

is a movement. So we will see this earth religion happening. Now, something that I want to posit to your listeners is any system of faith needs places of worship. And I would love to imagine different urban centers who have like nature temples or it sounds kind of cheesy, but like where are places that we can go, which aren't linked to a current world religion, where we can sit amongst others or do things amongst others who care for the earth?

and when you're a Hindu or Buddhist or Christian, it doesn't matter, but we're here for our relationship to the wider whole. That, I think, is a very interesting artistic intervention, for example. So do you think it's important to be able to attach oneself to some piece of land, somewhere one might call home and considering and thinking about that place as sacred or even an extension of oneself? I mean, I've lived where I have for the last 17 years, and I'm used to it. And sometimes it seems almost mundane because I know the trails and the trees and the animals

because I have my wildlife card out. But I also become very deeply connected. And I know when something's different. And when I travel and I come back here, I can't wait to go on those trails again because I feel I don't own it. It's not that. It's that this is my place where I'm tethered. What do you think about all that and the importance of connecting to land?

Well, first of all, I think that whether you feel connected to it or feel that it's sacred, it is, first of all. So it is all sacred and you are all connected to it, whether you're awake to that or not, you know. The importance, Simone Weil has this great phrase. She says, you know, rootedness in place is one. of the most important needs of the human soul. And so fundamentally the answer is yes. Now there is a certain colonialist way of doing it, which is I arrived to this land and you're mine.

But there's this longing in my own heart. And it's to be claimed by a place, right? Instead of me claiming something, it's, wow, can some place in the world call out for me and have me come and tend to it and steward it and look after it. And again, as I said before, like we are whole by the nature that we make whole. And so the more that people can tend to a patch, it doesn't have to be like a glorious, you know, mountain rate. I mean, who has a mountain range anyway?

But it can be an unglorified, very unsexy kind of local place that you tend to. But it's a relationality between you and the world and a place you get to know, you get to know. you get to know what seasons, how it expresses in different moments. John Young, who I referenced earlier in terms of nature mentorship, he speaks of this concept called sit spots, which maybe you've come across. It's a very common educational tool for kids and for adults, really. And it's you find a place within 15 minutes of your home

where you can sit, it can be a park under a tree, but you're looking into the natural world in some way, you're there. And you go there if you can every day, 10 minutes. five minutes, you sit, 15 minutes. And you sit in that place and it's your sit spot. And I can't tell you, Nate, the amount of people I know who have been given this practice and now do it regularly. I'm talking like 50, 60 people. And their relationship to their sit spot transformed their lives. And as John Young says it, it's like initially your relationship is like a string. It's like a little string to the place. But over times and oversets, those strings become a rope. And then that rope binds you

to that place. And then if you're bound to a place, it's like all of this, this meta-crisis, even the word, it's like, what the hell is this? It's like this hyper-object I can't grasp. And so these local connections are doorways into caring. There are places that open the aperture for us to understand

and relate to and process what's happening in these wider systems. For viewers of this show that found what you just said as beautiful as I did, how would you recommend that someone just get started to cultivate that relationship where they are? Just find a sit spot within 15 minutes of where they are. Well, how else do you get started? So, I mean, you obviously have sit spot practices. There are tons of these practices. On my podcast, I have a bonus episode called Sensing Place.

And there I share some different practices people can do. one of the basic things is like learn where you are like understand your watershed like literally like map out your watershed like where does the water come from where does it go when it leaves my tap where are the reservoirs where does my waist go like situating yourself in a place and then looking at it across time as well like what did it used to be you know in the regenerative institute that train you how to be regenerative practitioner it's a great course there's a concept called the story of place

and in the story of place you look at geological time processes migrational human and animal every single place has this latent identity or potential just like every human has their own unique

flavor their own little charisma way of being their own color and so get to know that part of your place you can do a story of place for example

and just committing to being there and, you know, pollinator pathways and all these things that sound very, can sound very trite and kind of parochial are actually, I mean, some of the wisest and most grounded people I have met who I trust the most are people who are embedded in their place through some of these very humble daily acts. And is this available to everyone or is this a little bit of a little bit of a. a privileged elite western society where those have access to wealth, have access to parks and such? Or can anyone in the world start this in their local place? It is a privilege to have access to green spaces. I think, for example, I was reading a statistic about the UK recently, and it's abominable like inner city, underprivileged communities don't have access to a green space. And ironically, the most privileged people are the ones who spend less time and place and who move around from place to place and are the least binded.

And so it's interesting because it's like a function of privilege, but it also correlates negatively sometimes. But to answer that, I don't know if during COVID you saw this phenomenon of weed watching. It became viral. People became obsessed with the weeds that grew like under their house. No, I didn't see that. Yeah, there's a whole, I did a whole episode on Urban Ecologies. And it's like there are ways even in the city to create those threads and those ropes and those cords that I described earlier.

And, you know, in that episode, in one of those episodes, I speak about the Chicago Green Corps. And I think that if we can support neighborhood revitalization programs or inner city developments for some of those communities to just begin to participate in, you know, creating parks, which by the way, we will need because of climate mitigation adaptation. like we will need more nature in cities because otherwise they become these heat domes and so even a few trees really shifts the temperature in a microclimate in a city. So it's incredible

because both psychologically and spiritually this is important but climatically there are all the right incentives to do this and water catchment and you know erosion and flooding and all of these kinds of things. I'm going to put you on the spot with a hard question And this is a question that I might do a Franklin on later today, because it's just suddenly become a bee in my bonnet.

A bee in your bonnet. I love it. You and I have spoken on the issue of the superorganism and Mollock and the surplus created from agriculture and then fossil carbon and then currencies, world reserve currencies and now AI. And it's just accelerating this power dynamic in human systems. And of course we need bottom up value shift and all the efforts that you're working on and many other people. Those are critical. But I sometimes wonder if the main thing to shift this planet away from the, uh,

wildly coyote cascade moments ahead is to somehow shift the consciousness of one to two thousand elite people in the world away from consumption extraction status power into recognizing that well first of all they're going to lose all that on the default path but secondly that we have arrived at a species level conversation it's not their fault that we're here but it is we're within their power and their fiduciary, given where they reside, to maybe make big changes. That's a big question. Do you have any thoughts on it?

I think if we don't attempt to do that with the right few thousand people, the damage that is happening will be greater, right? So for me, it's not a question of if, it's a question of how. It doesn't mean that that consciousness shouldn't come at the expense of, you know, the, you know, just average people and, you know, everyone else. But I think that people who today steward disproportionate influence in power and capital possibly, if they can have some deep embodied and, like, there's no going back kind of notion of some of the

things we've been discussing here, everything that then bursts forth from that place will be different. any action they take because it's not self-interessed, it's something deeper. And we need people who hold that to understand and redistribute and serve the whole more greatly. How we do that, I don't think it's through facts. I think it's through, you know, David White said poetry is the thing against I have, against which I have no defenses. Poetry is a thing against which I have no defenses. It's through something aesthetic and poetic and point. and embodied.

And people can experience this in a midlife crisis. In a way, these are rites of passage. And, you know, if you were to tell me, like, one thing that you wish everyone on earth could do once in their life, I would say hopefully when they're younger and they're teens, but bring everyone through a right of passage, like a vision quest in the land, which is a transformational moment when you realize that you're embedded in and depend upon systems much wider than your own self or your own ego. So this is how I would begin to go about something like that.

Have you witnessed that with people that you've brought through your nature expeditions and such? Yes. Yes. Well, maybe you need to have those nature expeditions for those 1,000 to 2,000 elites. Sign up. Come with Alexa. I would not call them elites because that's already stroking the ego. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if we could draw up a list of people who are willing to take four or five days to go deeply into the land and listen to actually some of their deepest callings of what they are, I would love to draw up that list with you.

Let's do it. But these things are happening. I mean, there are people who are working on this, right? And so I think it's just about also skillful action and how we give those same people the tools once they reemerge to sustain that consciousness shift. Because I've seen it. It's equally destabilizing. And some people have it after like planned medicine journeys. You return to the default world to your job and you're like, what do I do?

And many times, you're tasked with stewarding a system of thousands of people. So you can just overnight say, I'm going to close down Monsanto because people are reliant on that. So for me, it's not just what's the experience, but what's the follow-on and what's the viable alternative for them to exist within. So you mentioned the importance of poetry to which we have no defenses. And then based on what you just said, is there a way that we can incorporate science and art together? What do you think the role of art and creativity is for the metacrisis space and specifically biodiversity and the things you're working on? I think that science helps us know what we need to know, and I think that art moves us into doing it or understanding it. So they're both necessary.

Absolutely. Art, I understand almost as culture, right? in a way our arts have emerged from culture or co-create culture, which emerges originally from nature itself. But culture is the edifice that we build towards, right? It's the gods that we build edifice is for. And so if the biodiversity, nature movement doesn't become a cultural movement, an artistic movement, a vocal movement, think about extinction.

extinction can be silent and just devastatingly heartbreaking. But what about if we had public spaces a morning or the Memorial Day to Lost species, which does exist, right? It's what are all of these ways of expressing the things that the science is telling us in order for it to become visible and undeniable and real? And you and I were together in this, what was it called, Scandinavian Impact Safari, that small giants created. And one of my big takeaways from that safari was, you know, make it real.

Like, let's make all of the examples of how we can live differently, physical and tangible and touchable, how we live together, how we farm, how we do urbanism, how we do energy. And for me, that is art, that is culture. It is embedding something that is a philosophy or an idea into something real and lived for daily people's lives. Thank you.

I happen to agree. Um, you've listened to some of my podcasts so you know some of the closing questions, uh, that I, that I may ask you. I might mix them up a little bit. Um, I, I'm just so impressed by the work you're doing and I spent enough time with you that you are, uh, such a machine in, um, machine is not the right word, but you're just so productive and on the ball and, and capable. Uh, I just wish there were thousands or, um, Hundreds of thousands of humans like you. The world would be a much better place.

For people listening that are resonating with your words and are aware of what we face, do you have any personal advice on how to be alive at this time, how to cope, how to engage with these challenges? By the way, Nate, right back at you. Right back at you. Yeah, I think there's three things. That's kind of my mantra. One is learn to see beauty. The other one is join your comrades and the other join your comrades, your friends.

And the third one is contemplate death. So very briefly, learn to see beauty. This world is astounding, even in the depths of the war and the crises that we're facing. The fact that you and I are here alive, like the, the malgamation of different things that had to come together for this to be, for friendships to meet, in form for the ocean to be. So cultivating that beginner's mind and learning to see the world anew every day with the eyes of a child or the eyes of an alien, just like descending upon the earth and saying, how did this come to be? Right? Because in a way, that beauty is what sustains us. And so, like, Nate, go back and please watch your planet Earth shows and cry and see the beauty

in them and don't shy away from that. The second one, I think, is I join your comrades, which is there are so many good people working on brilliant stuff. Like, if you're ever bored, there's something wrong with you. Maybe you're being deliberately bored, which is also important. But like, there is so much that you can do and so many things that you can join. And you're not alone in doing that. There are incredible people out there doing this work. And so just go join them.

And the third one is about contemplating death. And this I take from the Buddhist practice, and it's a plum village practice, but it's a thousand millennial old teaching. And it's every morning I wake up and I do my meditation and my little morning things. And I contemplate that I am of the nature to grow old. I am of the nature to get sick and I am of the nature to die. And that everyone around me is of the nature to grow old to get sick and to die. And everything that I care for and everything that I love will one day die.

and you sit there and there's some guided meditations online you can find or I can send them to you and you contemplate profoundly what it is to slowly slowly have all those things vanish and disappear yourself included and if you do that on a daily basis the wonder that you have and the sort of self-arizing gratitude you have from just being here right now today in your senses is profound do you do that every day or repeatedly Yeah. Wow. Wow. I've done it a couple times, and it was profound, also quite scary, but I never thought you'd do it every day.

Wow. Okay. On that note. No, no, no. I'm going to both do that, and I'm going to find a sit spot on the land here later today. What about young people? I mean, you work at ATH Zurich. You're surrounded by a lot of young people.

What advice do you have, especially for young humans who are resonating with deeply with what you're saying about the natural world but are aware of all these things? Do you add any others to the beauty and the joy and the meditating about loss and death? I can only speak to things that have helped me because I don't know what it's like to be 18 or 19 year old today. but there are youth movements that are growing that are wonderful. I would, you know, if I was in those shoes, I would join some of these youth movements and, like, educate myself profoundly on all the ways that I've been, you know, or unlearning, if you will. So I love reading arcs of deep history, you know, going back, you know, thousands of years. I love reading biographies of people who have built movements who change the world.

I think there is so much historical context and precedent that can get lost. in today's runaway world of AI and tech and all the social media. So as much as we can, like situating ourselves in those longer arcs of history and human evolution and those who've come before, I think is probably incredibly important. And another thing I would say, which I mentioned before, is like, don't be scared to feel and find context and containers that will help you through that process and where you can help others as well. Do you have any specific one, two or three book recommendations on the grand arc that were meaningful, helpful to you? Yeah, for sure. I really liked Louis Mumford,

techniques and civilization. He speaks about the ways that psychology form, you know, shapes forms and technologies and vice versa. Very interesting, very interesting. I really love Jason C. Scott's books, like seeing like a state or against the grain, that kind of contextualize the great simplification. Actually, Nate, his books are about simplification, like, deeply. So, I have against the grain. Seeing like the state is, is almost better. And then, gosh, I can't even give you a third one, because there's, I would even say something even like a Fridip, Fridiof Capra book, like something that speaks about systems dynamics and spirituality and these wider arcs. In terms of biographies, I'll come back to you because there's almost too many to name.

You could send Lizzie a list and we'll put them in the show notes. Do you know Fritov Capra, by the way? Not personally. Okay. I'm trying to get them on the show. I don't know anyone who knows them. Okay. Awesome. I'm not going to ask you what you care most about in the world because I already know unless you want to add to that. Yeah. I mean, what I care the most about in the world is that everyone can wake up and realize their own divine nature. It sounds super cheesy, but we are all spectacular beings. And if people could wake up and perceive their non-duality with each other and with the world, like fundamentally, and that they are fine how they are, we don't have to consume, we don't have to strive, we don't have to postulate, we don't have to step on other shoulders.

Like this feeling of like, you are enoughness and rightness. If I could just like create a bar, and like place, like curve that around that glow behind you around the world, just for everyone to wake up with that feeling, I'd be deeply curious what would happen. So you are at a university, and I think there's 240 million college students, humans, around the earth. And the university has good programs

and is moving towards environmental and system stuff slowly. But I think young humans, postdoc sort of people have huge potential to weigh in on the research and the questions where society really needs to address. Do you have any suggestions there on research questions or programs or how the academy can be more support to a living world in the future? Yeah. So one of the things would be research on a post 1.5 degree world. I know it sounds a bit of apocalyptic and it's not necessarily what you'd expect me to say, but if we're looking at two plus degrees, which might be just a reality, okay, what makes the most sense to do today?

Because I think that a lot of the global niches we're seeing are not based on that understanding. And I know that you agree with this, right? Because so much of your work is around this. How would we think about food systems differently? Where would the food growing belts be? How would we think about, you know, voluntary migration of people already now? How would we start designing social systems? Like, there's a whole lot of planning that we could be doing that we're not because

business as usual, a little bit more green is the name of the game. It changes everything. And energy depletion changes everything. So within the academy, we have climate people looking at we might be headed for a one and a half to two degree or higher world. But that doesn't make it into the rest of the academy and the law and the ecology and the agriculture and everything. No.

That's a great point. This would be critical research. Like I've been looking for a map. Please tell me if you have it, if any of your listeners do. Let's take 2.5 to 3 degrees. What can grow where food wise in that? What are we planting today that doesn't make sense for that? What should we be planting differently, food and forest?

obviously. And the human implications of that are obvious. I don't have to state them. So this gets to the heart of one of the dichotomies in our world, which is evidence at Dubai the last couple weeks, is for the academy, for a tenured professor to get resources to fund that and be an acceptable research project within his or her university, there has to be like a phase shift in the thinking of the higher ups and where the money comes from and everything, it's almost no, we don't want to go down that path. That path is because if that research is needed that it calls into question all this other stuff, I hope it can happen, but do you see what I mean?

There's like two conversations going on. I do. I would be curious to hear from people who have wanted to study that agenda if they've struggled. And I could imagine that there would be academic or other homes to host that work. And it could be inside of foundations, for example. I mean, the role of philanthropy is not to be underestimated. So maybe it's not inside of academia, but it's finding some good researchers to do that.

And very quickly, the second thing I would get people to study is sort of climate or biodiversity psychology. And like, how do we really move people and how do we create incentive systems that are differently than what we've been doing before? because things aren't working so well. How does the communication really work? And yeah, a lot around that like human collective processing capability. I think a lot more concrete research on that, on the psychological component would be critical. So when I asked you what you most cared about, you kind of used your bomb to change people's recognition of what they're capable of. But instead of a bomb, if you had a magic wand, is there anything you'd like to add to that to change the default trajectory of humans in our

planetary future if you could change one thing. Yeah, I knew this question was going to come and I really don't have an answer for it. I hope that in the last hour I've answered it in different ways. God, because it's like, yes, let's give people vision quests, but then that seems trite when there's war happening. So then it's okay, what do we do about peace and justice? But that emerges out of a non, you know,

out of a dual mindset. And so it's like, okay, well, let's tackle non-duality, which is at the core of religion. but then religion can become tribalized. So I don't know. You've heard a lot of these answers, Nate, over the last, you know, I don't know how many episodes of your podcast. What would you do? What would be your wand at this point in time?

Well, Kate Rayworth just asked me that on episode 100, and I said, very similar to you, that we need a change in consciousness to focus on the weave versus the me. and to recognize that we're part of this interconnected natural world and that life is precious. And if more people had that deep understanding, I think there would be ripples throughout the system vertically and horizontally. And then better decisions, better research, better incentives, better institutions would emerge. Of course, there is no such magic wand that would do that. but we have podcasts we have videos we have conferences we have education and and work like people like yourself so um we're we're doing mini magic ones in our in our efforts can we crowdsource solutions

from your listeners can you create like a one website google forum that's just what is your hack for the consciousness shift and see what people respond there's so many opportunities like that i mean i we have three people here on my staff and i need to grow it. But that's a wonderful idea. Also, another thing that I'm thinking about, and I don't have the tech expertise to do this, but I'm sure some people do, to do a discord on the great simplification so that in a city in Switzerland or in Mexico or in Kenya, those people that are listening to this and engage with it can connect with each other and form some local initiatives. Because I think you're right, when we find others who are working on this stuff, it is uplifted.

and it gives a deep sense of meaning and purpose and it will have impacts on the natural world. So, yeah, I agree with you. Yeah, absolutely. I have so much more I want to talk to you about. So you have to promise to come back. If you did come back, what is, in addition to the topics we discussed today, is there one topic relevant to our collective futures that you are passionate about and would be willing to take a deep dive on? Thank you for the question.

I'd want to deep dive on some of the solution sets around nature or let's say approaches versus solutions. So nature markets, investments, initiatives, sense make together, like which ones make sense, which ones don't, what are some false solutions that seem to portray themselves as salvation? and yeah, like let's sense make some of the ecological approaches that are emerging at this moment in time. Let's do it. Do you have any closing words for this whirlwind overview of your work on behalf of the natural world? I'm very grateful to have had a chance to come on this and speak. Thank you so much, Nate. Thank you, Alexa.

Good luck with everything, and I'm sure we will be in touch. you. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform and visit The Great Simplification.com for more information on future releases. This show is hosted by Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and curated by Leslie Batlutz and Lizzie Siriani.