The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Living the Change: How TGS Viewers are Transforming Their Lives and Communities

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

A few months ago, we invited viewers to share the projects, initiatives, and lifestyle changes they've embraced after becoming aware of the global challenges facing humanity. In this special compilation episode, we're featuring just a few of the many inspiring videos that were submitted. The responses were diverse and surprising, ranging from community education and regenerative projects to small-scale repair shops and off-grid living. We hope these examples serve as inspiration for the kinds of prosocial actions we can each take in our own lives. Additionally, if you tend to listen to the podcast on audio platforms, we encourage you to check out the video version of this episode. Many of the listeners who submitted videos visually show their work, projects, and environments and there are some fun cameos of animals, as well. Many thanks to all those who submitted a video, and the reminder of how many actions are available to us right now to improve the initial conditions of the future. Most importantly, thank you to each of you for playing a positive role in our collective future(s).    Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

Back in February, I invited you, the viewers, to share the changes you've made in your own life or work after becoming aware of the topics covered on this podcast. Lots of you submitted videos of which my team and I have selected a few to highlight in the following compilation. In viewing these videos, I was honored, very heart warmed, and I was truly amazed by the diversity. of age, location, and professions who are taking on projects in their corners of this blue-green earth to respond to the human predicament. And I find it very heartening that while there seem to be an overwhelming number of global problems that are beyond our control, there's also many actions that we can take right now to improve the initial conditions of the future. Additionally, if you're listening to this on audio platforms, I encourage you to check out the

video version of this episode. Many of the listeners who submitted videos visually show their work, projects, and environments. There are some fun cameos of some spunky animals, which was very fun to see. With that, please enjoy these select examples of what the Great Simplification listeners are doing in response to what they've learned on this platform. Hi there. I'm Derek. I'm a biology and environmental science teacher in Minnesota. So one way that my understanding of the future has changed is that I've learned and realized that we not only need to reduce energy usage for mitigating climate change, it's also mandatory that we reduce energy usage because of resource constraints. So one concrete action that I've taken to prepare the youth around me for a resource constrained future is to develop a

high-quality energy unit in my environmental science class. So I have taken lots of language from the Great Simplification podcast and made it accessible to my students through this lesson. So for example, we talk about somatic and extrasomatic energy use. We talk about human labor equivalents of energy use. We talk about conventional versus tight oil extraction. We talk about supply chains, Goldilocks technology, and of course the four pillars of modern industrial civilization. That's steel, cement, plastic, and ammonia. These concepts and this language has really offered me a breath of understanding energy that I didn't really have before, and that has given me a lot of confidence to teach this new

unit. The final project of this unit, I have my students do an artistic response where they create a vignette of a future that they're imagining without fossil fuels. So they have to include essentially an 80% reduction of energy use to match that. I do love teaching this unit. It's one of my favorites that I teach during the year in all my classes. First of all, students really like learning about fossil fuels that surrounding their world and they know that they're a problem, but they don't have the language to talk about it. So I found them really brighten up and get curious during this unit. It's really awesome. In addition to this unit, I like to do an engineering competition where all the students in my class design and prototype and create solar cookers.

and we try to heat up water as hard as we can get it into class. So that's another concept directly inspired by an episode of the podcast. So I really appreciate everything you and the team do. Thanks. Hi, my name's Dr. Kim Liu here. I've been working as a doctor in Australia, in New South Wales, and my patients have been impacted by the floods, heat waves, bushfires, smoke for up to 80 days,

and had also are working the areas of Sydney where there is deep inequity. And the great simplification has helped me reinforce my advocacy work because I work with my groups, Doctors for the Environment, to help profuse the information of climate change and health and also the research from the scientists to our peers and to our communities. Because if individuals in the world, the community understand this problem will lead to more voices advocating for change and to encourage you know all the people work in the systems that can actually help with our transition are

empowered to do so thank you hi i'm mike i'm a mechanic and welcome to my repair shop it's a it's an unusual one nowadays because it's a general repair shop i purposefully don't specialize so So I repair an enormous variety of items, tools and equipment and small engines, motorcycles and scooters, cars and EVs, lamps, power tools, batteries for electric bikes, antique clocks, mixers, and sewing machines. Here you can see my queue of customer projects. I'm extremely busy. I set this business up in 2021. It started as a project. I was restoring a 1967 GMC step van, and during that time I came across Nate's 2021 Earth Day video, the Earth in

humanity, myth and reality, and I watched that three-hour video at least 10 times during that summer and fall. But it really inspired me to think bigger about that business and to expand its scope into something more, turning it into something that could serve the community and serve it in the way that I can best. So it was the next year. I went full time with it. I resigned for my 20-year career in electric utilities as a systems analyst and open up the shop. And And I've been super busy ever since. In fact, the demand is so high that I started a sister slash partner nonprofit. Its mission is to use this business and this space here and bring other people in with the same skills

and let them build their skills up and start their own businesses. The vision is down the road a dozen or two little repair shops all over Fort Collins, Colorado here. So we're on our way and let's see how it goes. So thanks a lot. My name is Kevin Howard, and I'd like to talk to you for a few minutes about how I have incorporated the lessons, Nate's wonderful lessons, from the great simplification podcast into my life. Three ways. First, how I live. I have, based on the lessons I've learned from the podcast, I have reduced my consumption down to what I actually use, as opposed to accumulating as much as I can, because I can. I basically buy as locally as possible. I have electrified everything I can. me and my wife share a plug-in hybrid that allows us to drive on electricity when we stay locally and only use gas when we go from town to town. We even subscribe to a community solar program for the electricity in our house.

So how I live, how I work. I've shifted my career. I was a 25-year commercial banker, and I shifted my career, went back to school and learned about climate risk management, climate risk. mitigation and now I consult financial institutions, businesses, and local governments on how they can mitigate climate risk. And so how I work is the second way. And then how I create is the third way. I've incorporated the lessons from the Great Simplification. We are narrative-driven people. And the problem with the narratives we've been told is that they have convinced us that we're separate individual people who are separate from nature, the environment that sustains us,

and from each other. And it's led us to the metacrisis that we face. So I am writing new narratives. I call them social commentaries, which rely on our shared experiences to remind us of who we actually are. We are one interdependent human family. And we are part of a beautiful, universe. And that the only way we're going to solve the problem, the only way we're going to achieve the great simplification, is by remembering that so we can pull together instead of competing and fighting against each other. All my commentaries, all my narratives are available for free on my blog page on my website at www.onward at last. Thank you so much for the opportunity to share. Hi there. My name is Deborah Willis and I wanted to send a

a video, first of all to say thank you because this podcast has absolutely changed my life. It has changed my view of our entire society. It has changed the way I approach my work as a writer. And it has helped and supported me as a parent, actually. But much more specifically, the episode on bioregiening helped me to find my way forward, to begin to find my way forward in terms of action that I can take. I had long harbored this kind of fantasy of returning to the land. but I do not have the skills or the means to go out and buy land and to live really. And I had also harbored this really overwhelming sense that global problems require global solutions. And I did not know where I as an individual could fit into such enormous problem-solving metrics.

So the episode on bioregiening allowed me to see that actually I could make small but perhaps meaningful differences within my city. And cities are very important. so many of us live here and they deserve attention in terms of biodiversity and so on. So I have begun the process of planting a food forest in my neighborhood, a permaculture food forest to increase food security, to allow a community gathering space, and also, of course, to increase biodiversity within the city. And this is an ongoing project. But the steps I have taken so far is to connect with a volunteer group in my community. that makes projects like this happen.

It turned out that there are wonderful people who know how to get permissions from the city and how to apply for grants and also to begin to make connections with the bioregiening group in my city. And I was amazed to learn that there already is a bioregiening group here and they have been doing amazing work for years.

And so the insight that I just wanted to communicate in this video, as someone in Canada and I think it's probably the same in Europe and possibly in America as well, there is actually a lot of funding out there that you can access. So I have been just delighted to find that there are a lot of small grants and microgrants available for people who want to do community projects like this, to address climate change or to address environmental issues

and to address community cohesion. So that has been a beautiful thing for me to learn. It has also been wonderful for me to connect with members of my own neighborhood who are passionate about this kind of thing too and who are, much more knowledgeable than me. Thank you so much. What can we do to help the great simplification? Hi, I'm Gary. I decided to invest in a new form of capital, one that aligns communities and nature and biology. And yeah, I came from finance and I'm not trying to create a revolution. I'm trying to help lead an evolution. I think that those

of us who have a little change in our pockets are the only ones able to get off the hamster wheel. and by creating the seed capital to convert financial capital into local regenerative communities. We can actually create a new narrative, one that leads us towards a better world, not one that's going to lead us to Mars. We can do it. We've got all the tools to technology

to create a global story about creating the Garden of Eden everywhere on the planet if we just start now. Genetic diversity is the software of nature and by working with nature as one big, beautiful energy system that works without us, we can actually make things better rather than making things worse. And we can learn to value people and diversity of opinion as a strength. We not only evolve genetically, we evolve culturally, and we can make it work.

Let's just try to remember that we actually need each other and can like each other and find amusement with each other. and diversity is our strength. One episode that sparked a meaningful change in my life was the first one I found, the animated version of the Great Simplification. And as a retired educator and sometime communicator, I realized that the Great Simplification is not so simple

and that maybe my understanding of the Polly Crisis and my hope for answers, immediate answers, was not realistic, in fact, was fairly naive. Thus, I'm hopeful that I can come from that clever intellectual place to one of wisdom and one wherein I can help and contribute to others that are also hopeful of finding solutions before we do reach a place that is not recoverable. hopefully moving from being clever about things to being wise about things and sharing with others and creating community and creating ceremony, which I believe is an integral part to getting us to a heightened place of consciousness. I think that we can overcome these challenges and in fact we're designed to overcome these kinds of challenges.

So thank you very much for all of your efforts and for inviting. writing our input. My current project is a novel where I hope how I have captured a female protagonist that exemplifies the light triad qualities that you recently identified. So again, thank you very much. Every Wednesday, this modern monkey practices a ritual. I download your podcast, put you into my ear, and take your conversations with you to keep me company while I shovel shit from my horse yard. My body leans into the familiar rhythm. My mind can relax and focus while I mentally travel with you all over the world. You sow the seeds of ideas into my neural cortex. As I sow my seeds and fertilize my fields and become one with the land that I live on,

you draw my circumstance and the place I am attached to into the broader context and show me how it fits into the solid foundation for the coming great simplification. As the seasons change, the times change, what wealth we have is revealed. It emerges from the rich networks of interdependency we are part of. I have so many questions. Hi, Nate and team. I am super grateful for the great simplification. I'm from Sweden and live outside.

outside Stockholm on a small farm with four sheep, hens and a cat. I have four home birth children and now I live here with my husband and youngest daughter. I'm a biologist. I studied systems ecology and did my master's in India some 20 years ago. Here at our small farm we try to make a small footprint growing some organic food, only used fabric diapers and so on. I've arranged courses in natural building. We dig the pond and a bunch of other transition projects to hopefully spread some inspiration.

I've been engaged in integrative and natural medicine, and I also work with the Biodynamic Research Institute, looking at ecological recycling agriculture as a regenerative system. Another project that me and my friends have is Forest Guardiansians, We bought a piece of land to save it, explore responsible regenerative co-ownership, co-management, according to Eleanor Ostrom to build the land for future generations. For the last 10 plus years, I've been engaged in getting water management more sustainable. My parents are from up north, and by the Arctic Circle we have Sweden's biggest, most important hydropower river. that produces 10% of Sweden's total electricity.

We started NGO, the Water Council of Lula River. I'm the chairman and we tried to inform people how to make it at least a little green since our government is doing everything to avoid environmental adjustments. For years, I've been working on a book about this and the Great Simplification has really supported me in finding information to paint the bigger picture. So thanks for all your work. I'm looking forward to every program

and my husband and I enjoy discussing the different aspects of how to bend, not to break. Hello to the great simplification. This is Ian from Canada. You can sort of tell it's Canada if you zoom out and look at all the snow. I've been inspired to understand more about the future and the reality we're facing

and taken some concrete steps. I have a farm that I've created in the last couple of years. I'm creating a community of tiny home. I've got two tiny home families here now. What I've really seen in my part of the world is the housing crisis deepening and people really having a lot of energy and a lot of ideas, but nowhere to do it and no way to do it. So my inspiration has been to try to do this

in spite of all of the barriers of bylaws and building codes and all the crazy restrictions that made sense along. time ago, but don't anymore. I've built a couple of greenhouses and a lot of other infrastructure. So this is under the radar, but it's really inspired by Nate and the great simplification. You've answered so many questions. I know you always have lots, but you've answered lots of them. And I really appreciate it. I know many of us do. We need to keep going and we need to help each other. Hi, Nate. Thank you for your podcast and for this project idea. I became aware of what we were doing to this planet back in the 2000s when I read Derek Jensen's book, Endgame.

I quit my corporate job in 2008 and became a freelancer in 2013, and I try to work as little as I can to focus on activism protecting the planet. Recently, I've been involved in efforts to establish rights of nature in my county and failed, and then to protect a beautiful wild area from a massive mine, and failed, and now I'm trying to work to prevent offshore energy development here in the Pacific Northwest and the Salish Sea where I live. My favorite of your guests has been Tom Murphy, who I've been following for quite a while. I've also started working on populating areas with native grasses, wildflowers, and other native plants to encourage more wildlife. There are few native grasses left here. I also try to leave brush piles around rather than

burning them to keep the biomass around and provide habitat. A messy garden is a good thing. Finally, I've been teaching myself how to draw and paint and use my drawings as a way to invite others to care more about the natural world. I look forward to seeing what your other viewers are doing. Thank you. Hi, Nate. I'm Skip Schueter from Media, Pennsylvania, town just outside of Philadelphia. Go birds. It's also the ancestral land of the Lenny Lenape people. My eye-opening moment came from the Great Simplification animated film. That film, your podcast and interview series, were introduced to me by,

fellow resilience group working members, which is part of a nonprofit that I volunteer in called Transition Town, Greater Media. We have a very popular free store. We ran a time bank for a while. We collaborated with the borough council to create a residential composting program and plastic bag band for our busy commercial district. We have a native plant giveaway called the Green Wagon. We do tree plantings, biodiversity work. Check out our website to get a flavor of all we do. But prior to learning about the great simplification, I was largely locked into the view that an electrified future with solar and wind would help save our planet. And now I realize we are well into overshoot. I think about that old roadrunner cartoon in which Wiley Coyote runs past the edge of the cliff and for about two seconds, he's suspended in the air thinking everything is fine and then he drops.

What to do? Our response has been the study the community resilience reader from Resilience.org. We started a film series also in neighboring towns to recruit and educate people, like-minded folks. And our first was choosing earth, choosing life. We got about 40 people. And our next is the Great Simplification Animated Film. We have others in the pipeline.

We're also looking at conducting a community resilience assessment that can help inform our local government's comprehensive planning initiatives. We're pursuing a set of neighborhood block-level study groups modeled after transition streets and cool block programs that were started in the UK and California. And we've learned that this is very heavy and difficult work. It is not for everyone. We, as people, are abandoning vast and interwoven structures in our minds.

And the replacement structures, what will be, remains undefatified. and unclear. So as a result, we put together a workshop for our leaders we call Dancing Between Stories. And it's based on the work of Joanna Macy's work that reconnects and Vanessa Machado di Alivara's hospicing maternity. I know you've covered some of their very good work. We've also held grief circles around the fire and held each other in sacred love, providing strength to continue forward at this challenging time. Not everyone is eight, ready or able to do this work, but I was encouraged by your recent interview with Small Giants Academy in which you called for Islands of Coherence. We believe we're helping to create such

an island of coherence. We're encouraging others to do the same, and I want to thank you for all you're doing for our planning. Hello, I got to this podcast through the conversations between Nate and Daniel Schmachtenberger. I found them very impactful, hugely important. I'm an artist, I'm a painter, and I teach painting and drawing. My name is Jordan Wolfson. I live in Boulder County, Colorado. And I've been involved for about 10 years or so or more with questions about the importance of painting today

in our world, given where it's at. And I believe that aesthetic engagement in all forms is able to realign, rebalance our system and actually reveals and strengthens our shared being, and our actual interconnectedness. And I believe that aesthetic engagement is an untapped global power that we just don't know how to organize yet

and can really bring something to our situation and the conversation. And I would love to be in conversation with anyone who's interested in this aspect of our current situation. So thank you, Nate. I deeply appreciate it. All that you do and this forum.

Thank you. Hi, Nate. My name's Lynn Oliphant, and this is my wife Rhonda Shufelt. I'm a recovering professor from the University of Saskatchewan, and Rhonda's a veterinarian who taught anatomy there. When we first got together, we decided that we wanted to build a model for sustainable living in the northern Canadian prairies.

Winters are cold here. We're currently experiencing temperatures ranging from minus 40 to minus 50 centigrade overnight. Our land base is 160 acres. We built, with help from our friends, a passive solar, post and beam, straw bale house almost 30 years ago, and we designed it ourselves. It's all electric with an 18.7 kilowatt grid-tide solar panel

array in a wood-burning stove. We grow approximately 50% of the plant material that we ourselves consume. Chicken and eggs are grown and processed with friends and neighbors, and red meat consists primarily of wild venison. We have a 5,000 gallon water system and have reduced our total household consumption to about 20 gallons per day.

We have a composting toilet and a rubble trench gray water system. Our appliances and lighting are low energy, and we do not have a closed dryer, a microwave, a TV, or an air conditioner. We drive a 2013 electric vehicle and we no longer fly. There have been many spinoffs from our project, including two sustainable house projects, a green cemetery on our land, and a fair trade coffee business that Rhonda runs as a moneymaker for the Saskatchewan Environmental Society. Thanks for all you do, Nate.

A significant insight that I have garnered from the Great Civil Vacation is to be maximally impactful. Now, we have this idea as environmentalists that we just kind of need to sit on our hands, do less. Live in a hundred square foot house, be a vegan, and everything will sort itself out. Given the rate of change that's happening right now in the biosphere, we need to be maximally actionable ASAP today. This is not a dress rehearsal. The great simplification has caused me to transition from a hobby mindset to a this. This is the type of work that needs to be done mindset. I moved out to the woods at a very young age, 23 years of age, to do permaculture stuff,

just kind of as something to do, a hobby. And now at the age of 41, post-great simplification, learning about the great simplification, I have moved from this is a fun thing to do for generative design permaculture to this is the work that needs to be done right now. I have started building a passive solar. It is an effort to build a, what I see as a perfect or as close to perfect bio-regional structure, structure that emulates the biology, the geology, the climate of this region. I'm attempting to source as many of the materials as locally as possible to show what can be

done right here at home. I'm hoping that this demo building, I'm calling it, will have an impact on how architects, builders and farmers think about land use and what is possible with regards to design. One tiny step in that direction. Since being introduced to the Great Simplification, I have started seizing every opportunity I have to build bridges with my most proximally close neighbors, because we are going to need each other in a very real, tangible way in the not-too-distant future. The Metacrisis is a massively...

complex complicated thing, phenomena to wrap your head around, bite off small chunks that you are able to understand, that orbit your real house. For me, it's gardening and soil, water. I get that stuff. Economic stuff, energy stuff, I don't understand. And that's where Nate Higgins comes in. That's what the great simplification comes in. So focus on parts that you can get. Don't get overwhelmed with the whole gestalt that is the medic crisis and above all do your best to come back home to your sensations i.e. reality. You're too stuck up here because you'll make yourself cray cray and if we're all going cray cray we're not going to be very functionalable tools in weathering this model deck that we find ourselves in at present. Many thanks to all those who chose to record and submit a video.

We always love to hear about the different projects and lifestyle changes of our viewers. If you have any additional stories or resources you'd like to share with us, you can contact us via the form on our website at the great simplification.com, as well as access more information related to the human predicament. Thank you. I will see you next week.