The Rich Roll Podcast - Paul Hawken: Ending The Climate Crisis In One Generation

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

In the words of today’s guest, global warming is not a science problem. It’s a human problem. When it comes to taking meaningful steps to redress the climate crisis, so many of us are left crippled. It’s a problem so huge, so existential, most people feel powerless to make a difference. But in truth, there are many substantive onramps to participate in the solution, and today’s guest is a wonderfully gracious, charitable, experienced, and optimistic cipher to explore these various paths. Meet Paul Hawken, one of the environmental movement’s leading voices returning for his second drop on the podcast, the first being at our big live event with IN-Q. In addition to his profound work as a planetary change agent, Paul is an entrepreneur who founded both Erewhon Markets and Smith & Hawken. He’s also the author of eight books including the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller Drawdown, and his astonishing, beautiful new work entitled Regeneration: Ending The Climate Crisis in One Generation,which aims to guide, inspire and galvanize the burgeoning climate movement. This is an optimistic conversation about our greatest existential threat. A conversation that extends beyond statistics, blame, and fear to illuminate what each and every one of us can all do now to support what Paul calls regeneration: a call to action that weaves justice, climate, biodiversity, equity, and human dignity into a seamless tapestry of action, policy, and transformation to live more symbiotically with the planet that supports us us We cover everything from the current state of affairs of the climate crisis, to the actionable steps we can all take to foster regeneration and most importantly, the state of mind we all need to maintain to heal our earth and secure the future of humankind. Paul is a friend, a mentor, and lighthouse. He’s a man who has indelibly shaped my perspective and actions when it comes to ecological responsibility, and it’s an honor to host him today. To read more click here. You can also watch listen to our exchange on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. My hope is that Paul’s message will do for you what it has for me—inspire and empower you to take action in your own way. Peace + Plants, Rich

What people are looking for is purpose and meaning and dignity. And there could be no more meaningful work in the world today which is to restore life on Earth. Regenerating and reversing the climate crisis is really about reconnecting those broken strands. And that's what the solutions really are, as opposed to sort of standalone techniques or technologies that's going to fix it. That word fix doesn't even belong in the conversation

because it's not an it and you can't fix it. The atmosphere is the biosphere. It is the same thing and we are part of it and nature never makes a mistake, only we do. I mean, if we want to turn the death of the earth into capital, we're doing a good job. And then what do you do with that capital? What meaning does money have if it's an unlivable planet?

The Rich Roll Podcast. Greetings, dwellers of the biosphere we call Earth. It is I, Rich Roll. This is my show. Welcome aboard. Returning today for his second drop on the podcast, the first being our live big event in Los Angeles a couple of years ago with NQ, is an icon, a true legend,

one of the environmental movement's leading voices, Paul Hawken. In addition to Paul's profound work as a planetary change agent, Paul is also an entrepreneur. He founded both Air One Markets and Smith & Hawken and author of eight books, including the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, Paul is also an entrepreneur. He founded both Erwan Markets and Smith & Hawkin and author of eight books,

including the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, Drawdown. Paul is now back with an astonishing, beautiful new book called Regeneration, Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, as well as a corresponding nonprofit by the same name, regeneration.org, which together constitutes a collective work that aims to guide and inspire the burgeoning climate movement.

A few more things about Paul and the powerful and empowering conversation to come, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment, an experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment and with that I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care especially because unfortunately not all

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Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Paul Hawken. I think part of the problem when it comes to talking about climate change, how to address it, how to solve it, really revolves around agency. It's a problem so huge, so existential that it's difficult for individuals, everyday people, to even engage with it in any kind of meaningful way, in part because

we feel just kind of powerless to make any kind of significant difference. But in truth, there really are many on-ramps to participate in the solution. And Paul is a wonderfully gracious, charitable, experienced, and optimistic cipher to explore these various paths. So this is a conversation that extends beyond all the statistics,

beyond fear and anger and blame to confront not only what needs to be done, but what each and every one of us actually can do now to further practical, currently available solutions, both individual and systemic, all of which orient around this idea of regeneration, which is essentially a call to action that weaves justice, climate, biodiversity, equity,

and importantly human dignity into this beautiful seamless tapestry of action, policy and transformation to live more symbiotically with the planet that supports us. So today we cover it all, including perhaps most importantly, the state of mind we all need to maintain to heal our earth and secure the future of humankind.

Paul is a friend, he's a mentor, he's a lighthouse, and truly a man who has indelibly shaped my perspective, my philosophy, and my actions when it comes to ecological responsibility. It's an honor to host him today. I think this is a remarkable exchange. And my intention and my hope is that his message will do for you what it has and continues to do for me.

So without further ado, this is me and Paul Hawken. Well, let's talk about the environment. Okay, let's talk about the environment. Should we do that? Yeah. It's good to see you, first of all. Really good to see you. Yeah, thank you for coming down to do this. I hear you so much, you know,

I feel like I'm in your presence. I appreciate that. No, I am. Yeah, we had all these plans of getting together and doing all kinds of stuff and obviously the pandemic put that aside. Yeah. But I'm happy to be in your presence today.

Yeah, thank you so much, really. The occasion, of course, being this beautiful, extraordinary new book that's about to come out, "'Regeneration, Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation." You gave me this gorgeous folio version of the book. Only a few exist in the world. Yes. Is that true?

That's true. I'm feeling very grateful for that, so thanks. Yeah, it's just a special people. It's exciting. It's been a minute since you've had a book out. Yeah, April 17 was the last book draw down. And this one is coming out in about six countries, almost at the same time,

actually 54 countries right now in September. Right from the get go out of the gate. That's unusual. Yeah. You must be very confident. Yeah, this time the publishers are. Last time they were kind of waiting and watching and looking, now it's drawdowns in 17 languages.

Right. This one starts out. Well, that book was a groundbreaker for myself and so many people. And I feel like this book is the perfect follow up to that in that it strikes perhaps an even more optimistic tone when it comes to solving this great existential crisis that we find ourselves in.

But I think the overarching theme of it is inclusion, like inclusivity. And it's very empowering in the sense that it's like letting us into all these amazing things that are occurring and how we can participate in them in so many different ways. Absolutely, I'm just like everybody else in this sense.

I live in a world, I look at the world and try to figure it out. I mean, I'm no different whether I'm a journalist or not, doesn't make any difference. Everyone does that to a certain extent. And a journalist might do it a bit more because they try to share what they see. And what I have seen,

and not just since Dharan was created, but before that, but certainly since then, is a world that's going into crisis around climate and more rapidly than was expected. And at the same time, even though I would say a majority of the people in the United States, certainly in Europe are empathetic, sympathetic, understand the basic cause and effects, they're not doing anything.

They're not engaged. So how could it be, you know, that you see the writing on the wall, you see this impending crisis, you're getting a very visceral sense of what's happening on the ground and floods and cold and heat and drought and et cetera. And yet there's still this disengagement. And so regeneration was really about looking at that,

not blaming people for being disengaged, but trying to understand why we are not, I'll just exclude myself generally, but what would engage us and what's prohibiting it, what's stopping us and what would open up humanity to the idea of working together. Yeah, I think from a psychological perspective, there doesn't seem to be a meaningful on-ramp for people

in the sense that I think you're correct. There's an overwhelming awareness now that didn't exist, perhaps even a decade ago. And I think most people are good faith actors and wanna do the right thing and recycle or do what they can. But it doesn't feel like any of these things amount to very much, right? Like I can take personal responsibility for a certain subset of decisions that I make every day,

but is this really moving the needle? So there's a lack of agency or connectivity to the solutions that would really get people emotionally engaged and feeling like they actually are making a difference. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that there's so many things you covered right there. So break it up, break it open a little bit.'s go to connectivity which is that the root cause of global warming is a massive disconnections between each other between people between people in nature and nature itself which is caused by humans you know habitat fragmentation, pollution, acidification of the oceans, you know, and onwards.

And regenerating and reversing the climate crisis is really about reconnecting those broken strands, you know. And that's what the solutions really are, you know, as opposed to sort of standalone techniques or technologies, you know, that's going to fix it. That word fix doesn't even belong in the conversation because it's not an it and you can't fix it. The atmosphere is the biosphere.

There's the same thing and we are part of it and nature never makes a mistake, only we do. So let's look at what we're doing. And regeneration is very much about alignment with the living world, with the way it works and always has. And so, as you said, what we've done conversationally

and sort of declaratively and almost imperatively is individuate the problem, which is, this is what you can do or should do. And it's true. Those are good things, you know, recycling and use cold water in your washing machine and, you know, try not to drive an EV if you can afford it, et cetera, et cetera. But I think people understand that even if they do them, they know it's not sufficient to the task at hand. And so it actually makes people more disempowered in a funny way, even though they're actually participating

in their kind of token way. And then they look to governments, they look to the conference of the parties, the UN framework on climate change. They look to the Conference of the Parties, the UN Framework on Climate Change. They look for these annual meetings, this one in Glasgow in November, for something to happen, like hoping that politicians will get together

and solve the problem. If politicians knew what to do, we wouldn't be in the situation we are today. And that's just not gonna happen, not to say we can't say it, but you know. So then you feel like there's this gulf between these huge meta or institutions, corporations and governments,

and then you as an individual. And that's again, what regeneration is trying to say, whoa, wait a minute, that's not where the solution is gonna come from. Right, regeneration is sort of a way that's not where the solution is gonna come from. Right. Regeneration is sort of bedfellows with this idea of symbiosis. Like how can we live more symbiotically on the planet?

And understanding that and really embodying that begins with really fully embracing and acknowledging that we are all microsystems that are part of a macro system. And it's sort of belying the idea that nature's over there and we're over here and we venture into nature and out of nature. And yet, fundamentally that's just a falsehood

because the cells in our body and everything that we're made up of is of course, part and parcel of this environment. And in terms of the solution, once you acknowledge that, I think what you begin to understand and what the book kind of does a beautiful job conveying is the idea that the problem is systemic,

that we can't truly move into, this more symbiotic regenerative relationship with the planet until we have some corrective measures with our systems at large, right? There's this gigantic misalignment of incentives across the board, be it by dint of governmental bodies or the tectonic plates of capitalism, all of these forces that the individual feels powerless

to have any control over or say over that perpetuate the problem. So short of revolution, like how are we creating better incentives for the systems that are in play, or how do we create better systems with incentives that could supplant the systems that are leading us astray? That is the question.

And I think that between the individual and meta institutions and global institutions is something else called agency. And agency is sort of been overlooked. There is no such thing as an individual. That's sort of a delusion we wake up with in the morning. But functionally there's no such thing. And every person has agency.

It's their family, it's their friends, it's their community, it's their neighborhood, it's their church, it's their synagogue, it's their school, it's where they teach, it's their family, it's their friends, it's their community, it's their neighborhood, it's their church, it's their synagogue, it's their school, it's where they teach, it's their city, it's their company, colleagues, it goes on and on and on. And we have a network, we're all part of networks. And that is where we have influence and where we can make a difference.

And I think a lot of people have felt or come to think that if you know, if we get renewables right, or we do this, we do that, you know, that again, we'll fix it, you know, but like there's some Archimedean, you know, solution. If we pull hard enough, you know, it's going to, the problem is going to go away. Right. And rather than understanding that the solution is everywhere, it's ubiquitous, it's local, regional, it's where agency exists. And that is everywhere on earth with every culture, every society and every country.

And so that's the good news, which is that we can solve this. We really can, but we can't solve it if we think someone's gonna solve it for us. Or if we come to believe that individuals are to blame and that they're responsible and they'll solve it. We kind of know that one's not true. Right.

I'm not saying we all have, we don't have personal responsibility, of course we do. But that alone is going to be sufficient. And so when we look at the institutions and the perverse incentives that they have, the economic institutions, the political institutions, they are all extractive. That is to say, every institution that we've come to know

and trust or not trust but buy from or believe in or invest in or own shares in is extractive. In other words, it's taking life. And we sort of take that for granted. You know, well, don't make a mess. You know, or clean up your mess. You know, that kind of thing and that's sustainability in a way. But extraction is taking life. And when you take life, that's degeneration.

That's what degeneration is when you take life. And so regeneration is really not about blaming and, you know, sort of demonizing, you know, those institutions or those economic sectors so much as saying, wait, that road, that degeneration road doesn't go much further. That's everything screaming at us,

all the science, our experiences and so forth. Like that road doesn't go much further. Why are we going down that road? And so regeneration is about a 180 pivot. Like, can we just stop and go the other way? Can we not regenerate the world and have a GDP and an economy and jobs rather than degenerate it? And the fact is we can. And it's really a question of healing the future or stealing the future.

Because what we're doing is stealing the future. Now, it used to be from our children now it's from ourselves practically and so it really isn't like something that that what's happening with respect to climate is wrong or not at all it's all great what everybody's doing is fantastic but unless we actually do address those institutional incentives you know and actually assumptions that are so deep that people don't even understand And unless we actually do address those institutional incentives, and actually assumptions that are so deep that people don't even understand them as assumptions, then we won't have a chance at all because the...

You know, Richard, one of the things too, go back to the fix it thing, like Bill Gates and others, like John Kerry, for example, are saying, if we don't do nuclear, we're screwed, okay. And this idea that there is this one thing, but you could have renewable energy and nuclear energy for the whole world today. And we still be going right over the cliff

because we're destroying all the living systems on earth. We're destroying our oceans, our fisheries, our land, our forests, our insects, our pollinators. And so that has nothing to do with renewable energy or fossil fuel energy. That has to do with us. And so we have to see it, as you said earlier, as a system, it's whole.

You can't silo it and separate it out and say, we're gonna do that and do this and do that. You can do that, but unless you step back and look at it systemically, you're not gonna get to the core cause or core cure. But the idea being with this, you know, kind of typical optimistic flare that you have, being that we can create a non-extractive relationship

with the planet without having to, you know, throw capitalism to the wind. being that we can create a non-extractive relationship with the planet without having to, you know, throw capitalism to the wind. Like within certain confines of the system that we've erected, we can course correct and still, you know, create proper incentives. I mean, the extraction would, I guess, would be the economic benefit that someone would get out of changing the relationship

with the planet to be symbiotic and regenerative. Well, the capitalist system really takes life and turns it into money. Right. It squeezes every last- And being extractive by its very nature. Right. But you saying that still within that,

we can move in a better direction here. What is that? That's a really good question because nobody invented the capitalist system. It was named after the fact in the sense, economic systems arise and then we kind of tag them later. I don't know what a regenerative economic system

will be called. I don't think it'll be called capitalistic. It doesn't mean that existing institutions and businesses have to go out of business and we need to replace them. I'm not saying that at all, but the advent of the B Corp and different types of corporations and so forth that have a very different priority in terms of their purpose. Yeah, and part of that priority is short-term gains over long-term well-being for all, right? Absolutely.

Right, so that's a tough one to tackle. Well, I mean, if we want to turn the death of the earth into capital, we're doing a good job. And then what do you can do with that capital? I mean, what meaning does money have if it's an unlivable planet? But I do think you're seeing in corporations a real big shift.

I'm not talking about the, oh, commitment to net zero by 2050, all that sort of stuff. Commitments don't mean a thing. Goals don't mean a thing. They don't do anything. They're not actions. They're just commitments. They're just words.

But in my experience in the last couple of years, and even during COVID, what you're seeing when you talk to CEOs of very large companies, very large ones, the largest in the world, is their eyes are different. What I mean by that is they're not being nice and saying, yeah, we have to renew our social license

and do more sustainability and blah, blah, blah, which is what they've been doing, kind of. They get it. They have children, they have brothers and sisters, they have family. That's a pretty big paradigm shift. It's a really big one. And they find themselves getting it, so to speak,

when they're at the helm of these extraordinary corporations, you know, that have hundreds of thousands of employees and they're in 42 countries or whatever. And going, huh. And so that's what I'm seeing now, as opposed to this suave or, you know, assured, you know, we'll just keep moving along and-

A little greenwashing, a little dusting of greenwashing on top to make sure that we keep the press off our back or whatever. Yeah, I know. And so you're seeing companies like Nestle, which talk about a bad boy reputation 20 years ago for baby formula in Africa. I mean, just, but they went through a couple more CEOs

since then who really, really cleaned up their act. They've sold off all their plastic water bottle companies. Yeah, they're probably the biggest single use plastic manufacturer in the world. Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola. But they now, their slogan is generation regeneration and converting 600,000 farms to regenerative agriculture. And this is really interesting because you say,

well, they're doing that to be nice? No, I'm not saying they're not nice. I'm just saying, are they doing that to be responsible? No, they want to be responsible. They're doing it because they're an old line company. They've been around for a long time. These farms, some of them go back five generations. They've been dealing with the farms for five generations.

These are relationships. And these farms in South America and Africa for cacao and coffee are hurting. And they're hurting from drought, from heat. And so regeneration is about ensuring the resilience and the longevity of those relationships and their supply chain. It's like an infrastructure bill.

Right. They wanna continue doing what they're doing. They're gonna have to look at the soil and the wellbeing of the farm lands. Even the varieties, the Arapaica coffees, they're looking have to look at the soil and the wellbeing of the farm lands. Even the varieties, the Arapica coffees, they're looking at wild varieties that can stand five, six, seven degrees more heat than the extant ones and grafting those onto the trees

and working with agroforestry and mixed cropping and all different ways to preserve water, capture more water. But what I'm saying is regeneration isn't like goody two shoes, you know, like we're doing this because it's the right thing to do. It is, but it actually is very practical. There is a bit of a race afoot though.

Like those changes, I'm glad to hear that they're happening and certain large actors like that are moving in the right direction, but at what pace compared to the rate at which we're basically ridding ourselves of the Amazon rainforest and dumping toxins into our waterways, et cetera, right? Like, is it fast enough to overtake the status quo?

I think the similarity between climate change or global warming really is the right word. And what we're seeing on a corporate level is that neither are linear. And so they're not linear systems, and but either has changed on this level. And I think the big change has been the climate change was conceptual. Read about it, heard about it.

We should probably do something. Don't you think? Yeah, okay. Right. Now it's experiential. And that is the big change. And so there's no question in my mind that the climate movement, whatever we should call it,

will be the biggest movement in the history of humanity. No question about it. But because of weather, not because there's a charismatic leader, not because somebody is, you know. It's on our front doorstep. It's on our front doorstep. And so the question really isn't whether it will be,

the question is, how do we work together? How will it be configured? How will we work together? And I think what everyone is seeing is that we need each other. This is not something where somebody is gonna be a hero or heroine, and like, hey, we did this. It's like, we need to connect, we need to share,

we need to cross fund, we need to connect. We need to share. We need to cross fund. We need to collaborate. We need to cooperate. We need to support. And you're really feeling that in the NGO community, in the volunteer community, in citizen groups, in municipal groups, in corporations, you're seeing that let's forget all those boundaries,

so to speak. I mean, they exist for technical, political, financial reasons, but we need to work together. Forget the differences. What unites us is far more important than what used to divide us. What is your sense of where we're at now? I mean, it's been a couple of years

since we sat down and talked, a lot of changes have occurred and a lot of things are happening on the planet. You mentioned this report that just came out today, as a matter of fact, right? So give us a state of the union on planetary health. Well, the sixth assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

came out today, it had been leaked. So it was sort of being whispered about, but it came out today and it's strong, very, very strong. And it said for the first time, unequivocally, climate change that we are witnessing is caused by human beings. It always, up until now, the fifth assessment, only going back to the first one was, was equivocal. They actually kind of left a little space there to say, well. And what's, what is the organization or governing body that puts this together? The United Nations Framework on Climate Change, the UNFCC, which does the conference of the parties

every year. And the 26th one will occur in Glasgow in the first week of November. But two things came out of it, which are some, there was some good news in it, oddly enough, which is that the science has changed. So now we know that as soon as we stop increasing greenhouse gases, that is net zero emissions, that actually warming will level off right away. It used to be that up until this assessment

that we were baking in increasing global warming for decades, if not centuries, which kind of was a disincentive. Well, if we get it right, we're still screwed kind of thing. And now they said, no, no. So it's providing a very powerful incentive for countries and companies and people and cities to accelerate that move towards net zero emissions.

The other thing it said though, which is the bad news, which is there are irreversible changes now in effect that can't be reversed. And one of them is melting of ice. One of them is sea level rise. And so there is no question that low lying cities like the Miami's and others will be, Venice unfortunately will be flooded,

will be underwater by the end of the century or before. And so our work is cut out for us. But I do think that the most important thing is that there's a hundred, I forget the number of 180 some odd countries that are participating in this IPCC report. And it's called consensus science, and there's no such thing as consensus science,

it's evidentiary. And what it meant was that the Vatican or Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or China or Russia could actually tamp down the language in the summary report. And every country in the world signed on to this report. No dissent. No dissent. That's powerful. But then it becomes an issue of translating that

into action. Yeah, and what the report said. And what are the actions going to be? Yeah, the report said, politics has no excuse from this point on. Every country, the other thing is, every country is going to suffer. There is no place that will be exempt.

I can think of a few American politicians who will find an excuse. Yes. You know what I mean? When they're indebted to their constituencies and the big corporations that exist in their respective territories and the lobbying efforts that go into

maintaining a certain status quo and kind of placating the public so that they can continue to push agendas and legislation that are corporate favorable and allow these bad actors to perpetuate their bad actions? No question. I think, however, that at Regeneration,

we're working with a group of marketing people and communications people who, by their own words, left the dark side and went into the nonprofit world to work with social justice, women's issues, sex trafficking, voting issues, and they're working with us, AGO, articlegroup.org. And what we're looking at is what figure ground shift can be precipitated that has occurred before. And one of them was, for example, Gay Shame, Gay Pride.

So in 2010, you could run for Congress in the United States and basically deprecate LGBTQ. Get away with it, still get elected. And get away with it and get elected. Yeah. 2012, the same party said, oh, my daughter happens to be a lesbian. I'm all of a sudden it was like, oh, they're okay.

It's okay, I'm okay. Because you couldn't get elected two years later or at least not reliably put it that way. And not saying there isn't tremendous anti-LGBTQ in the conservative, in the evangelical movement. There is, of course, in other countries. But the last month was Gay Pride Month. And so, you know, multicolored flags and this and everywhere, you saw it.

So what was that shift from shame to pride? You know, it was well created by the community itself, okay? So the same thing holds true with climate, which is that it's been marked by shame, by the way, guilt, fear, threat, blame. That hasn't worked. And it's made people numb. It's made people tune out.

It has created antipathies, like fossil fuel workers who work at Chevron or something feel like they're being blamed and so forth. And so what is the figure of ground shift where people can feel that we are together and we all can make a difference in not just again, by your cold water and your washing machine, but I mean, by coming together, you know,

and the ways in which people have always come together. That's, we are social beings. We're social, we're very social. And so that's what we're looking at right now, which is what is it that will bring us together around climate? And what brings us together is that when you start to parse the distinct solutions, even though they're systems, they're connected, is that they better life for everyone.

They make a better life. So that if you looked at them in the absence of climate science or extreme weather, and said, good, not good. Should we do it? Not do it. You want to do every one of them. Every one of them. And I think what regeneration, the point it tries to make is that we have focused for so long on this idea that there's a small, select, intelligent, informed finance group of people

who are gonna solve the problem. And we've used the term future existential threat, like that this is a future existential threat over and over and over and over, like you should do something, because you know, and that doesn't work. It never has worked. And what regeneration is saying

is that the solutions that address global warming actually address meeting current human needs. And what we've got to do is direct ourselves to each other. There's 4.1 billion people who wake up every morning and the only thing they can think about is current human needs, their needs. It could be food. It could be income. It could be a job.

It could be safety. It could be food security, back to food. Getting the kids to school, getting them in school, affording books. I mean, it goes on and on. This is what the bulk of humanity wakes up with every morning. They are not going to be active in a climate movement. And we don't need, quote, people who are really trying to better their own lives to be active in a climate movement, but they do need renewable energy.

They do need electricity. They do need clean water. They do need better farming techniques. They do need clean water. They do need better farming techniques. They do need cleaner food. They do all these things that are synonymous with actually reversing global warming, actually reverses human suffering as well. Promoting equity for all.

That's a big part of the book, this idea of human rights and social justice and education and empowering women, because you have to raise the floor on people's sort of daily subsistence levels to create a situation in which they're not only benefiting from these changes that are being made, but then well taken care of enough so that they can become part of this movement as well.

They, by de facto, just by leading their lives, they become part of it. And in Drawdown, one of my regrets about Drawdown is that we had educating girls as a solution. And then we actually looked at it in terms of carbon. If we actually provided schooling for the 145 million girls who are not in school, who could be, and what effect that would have on carbon emissions.

And that goes to population, deforestation, all these sort of things. In this one, we didn't do that. And what I said is that actually most of these young women are in countries where they need to have a higher carbon footprint. They need more. They're in poverty. And we in the privileged north or wherever

shouldn't be looking at them for changing their life so that there's less greenhouse gas emissions, we should be looking at educating and girls as a human right, it's just a human right

and stop there, don't go any further. And we really have to look at ourselves, the top 10% of income earners in the world. And that's over 38,000. That puts you in the top 10% are responsible for 46 to 50% of all greenhouse gas emissions. So we have to work on ourselves.

So would you change that section and draw down? You could rewrite it. Yeah, there's a new ED there. They're gonna stick to it, but that's why I did. This was always intended to be the sequel to draw down. I don't know what they're gonna do with that. But the importance is to start to see, again, I say the thing,

if you wanna understand poverty, look to see who's benefiting. Right, that's a recurring loop in the books. Nobody wants to be poor. And also poverty doesn't wanna be fixed. It wants to be poor. And also poverty doesn't wanna be fixed. It wants to fix itself. Explain that a little bit. It's called pride, dignity, purpose.

And people who are poor don't want a handout, don't want, you know, shiploads of surplus grain to be dumped on the shores of some country and passed out, you know, as, I mean, they may need it at that moment because of some sort of food shortage, but that doesn't solve anything because it's not addressing the conditions that caused it in the first place. And so all of regeneration is about creating the conditions for self-organization. That's what your body does. That's what every living system does.

It creates the conditions for self-organization. And so when we think about solving an intractable problem, like global warming, it's impossible. What can we do? And look at all these mega institutions and political stupidity and ignorance and so forth. But if we step back and say, well, what are the conditions that create

self-organization or self-abnegation, that is, that destroy that, then that's where we want to go. And that is the source of change. I mean, regeneration is innate to every living system it's innate to us we regenerate every day we practice it every day we do with our bodies we do with our dog we do with our children we do with our friends we do with our mom we do whatever we are actively trying to improve the life of others.

It's so human, our 30 trillion cells, we generate every nanosecond or we wouldn't be having this conversation. Right, and they do it without our intervention. So planetarily, this is a combination of getting out of the way and allowing things to heal themselves and repair themselves. And on top of that, certain, you know,

sort of strategic surgical human interventions to promote that regeneration so that it can become self-perpetuating. Yeah, it's not getting out of the way so much. It's not thinking hierarchically that you know what needs to be done. It's a matter of doing, not knowing what needs to be done. And then that's what we've done up to now.

This needs to be done and all of this needs to be done and this needs to be done. That the people wanna heal themselves. They wanna heal the society, the places they live in, and they wanna heal the land. I was once in the the northwest this is years ago now but when you know they were hanging spotted owls in the back of pickup trucks you know because the loggers and the newcomers you sort of speak of from the cities were just at

pun intended i guess loggerheads you know and and, you know, cause the loggers felt that these city slickers or these liberals were trying to make them jobless, right? And I remember being in a city, it was a town really, and to talk about the future, so to speak, and the aisle, it was an aisle, on this side was all the loggers and the guys with the plaid shirts

and with the pickup trucks. On this side was the environmentalists and the conservationists and the people who really wanted to take care of everything. What I did is ask simple questions. And I said, how many people here want their rivers to have more fish or less fish in 30, 40 years? Everybody raised their hand like more.

How many people want cleaner water, dirtier water? And always went out, not today, but 30, 40 years. Everybody raised their hand. How many people want their children, if you have them, to be able to stay here and get living wage jobs and stay close to the family rather than having to go to the city? Everybody raised their hand. How many people want hunting to get better or worse?

Everybody raised their hand. You know, it just went on and on. I said, you're all in agreement. You all agree on everything you want. So the question is, instead of talking about what you don't agree about, is to work backwards from where you agree. And then, but then it has to be about finding a way forward that isn't a threat

or a perceived threat to people's livelihoods. Of course, of course, absolutely. So there has to be a just transition for coworkers, has to be a just transition for fossil fuel workers. There has to be compassion, there has to be a just transition for coal workers there has to be a just transition for fossil fuel workers there has to be compassion there has to be care there has to be acknowledgement that these people are good people

and they have families and they care about the world just as much as you do they care about it in a different way they've been taught in a different way they think in a different way that doesn't make them bad doesn't make you good and so absolutely and that's what it means

for us to come together. But the most powerful way you come together is to listen, not to know. And so again, if you go at the climate as a know it all, I know you don't listen up, it's gonna fail. Right. But if you look at it from the point of view of the inherent values that we almost all

uphold in terms of what it means to be safe, to be a family, to have children, to not have children, if that's your choice, to be a part of a community, to be respectful, we're in agreement. And what the world wants is, to me, and this is my belief, is that we've created such meaningless employment for the bulk of humanity. I mean, they know it's meaningless. It's repetitive. It doesn't challenge them in terms of intelligence. It doesn't challenge them in terms of intelligence. It doesn't pay well. It's in poor working conditions. I'll give you an example.

I calculated how much a worker would make in 1800 in the dark satanic Hobbesian mills of England, and these are textile mills. It's a penny an hour, okay. And today's dollars, because the penny was related to gold and silver then, it's 30 cents, it was 30 cents an hour at that time in today's dollars.

The average pay today for garment workers in the world is 30 cents an hour. Oh, is that right? So in 220 years, we haven't changed the pay scale for garment workers at all. So what people are looking for is purpose and meaning and dignity,

and there could be no more meaningful work in the world today, which is to restore life on earth. So the book is very much about all the different fascinating ways that can happen. And it has a demonstrative important impact on reversing global warming, as opposed to, or get solar, you know, get an EV, do this, do that. Not saying you shouldn't do that if you can,

but for most of humanity, those are not options. And so we have to look at it from a much broader, more enlarging, more upholding way that relates to what people can do. And the other thing I think it's important to do is to stop thinking that this is what you ought to do. These are the top 10 solutions. You should focus on those.

That was another thing that Drawdown did inadvertently, which is to rank all the solutions by impact. And then people said, oh, look at the top 10 or the top 15. And not to say that they aren't proportionally impactful. They are. But actually the most important things for you to do are the ones that light you up,

where you just get excited. Nobody wants to wake up in the morning and says, I can't wait to mitigate today. Yeah, yeah. That was a similar message in Margaret Klein Solomon's book where it was called like fighting the climate crisis or something like that. I don't know if you read that book,

but I had her on the show. Yeah, and it's all about like, how do you get people plugged into this? And you gotta get them excited. And I think because we're so divorced from the natural cycle of life and the earth beneath our feet, finding a way to reconnect with that,

that meets a certain person's enthusiasm is a great way forward. And it shifts the lens away from the idea that climate change is happening to us, to this idea that I know you've spoken about, which is the idea that climate change is happening for us. Like, where is the opportunity here to reconfigure everything and create

a completely different way of living for the vast majority of people who are so disengaged from the natural environment. Exactly, and the thing is, if you, I mean, there's solutions in like beavers. I know, I love that. I didn't know all that about beavers. Right, I know, it's like, if that excites you,

and it does, by the way, there are people who just love beavers. They study them, they work and they try to- I didn't realize how many beavers there were. There are a lot of beavers. Yeah. And who trapped them in the cities and then not to take them where they will do more good,

upstream, so to speak, in mountainous areas and so forth. But if you're doing something that just you love to do, you're very likely then to be open to other things that need to be done. Because now you're starting to see yourself as an integral part, an effective integral part to restoring life on earth, which is really what reversing global warming is about. It's about restoring life on earth, which is really what reversing global warming is about.

It's about restoring life on earth. We've taken as much as we should a long time ago, actually, we've passed that limit. So again, I define regeneration as putting life at the center of every act and decision. I mean, that's what regeneration is. And so looking through that lens, looking through that, you know,

seeing the world that way then allows you to basically reflect, you know, on what it is you're doing or what it is that you're a part of this being done and how it's being done. And it doesn't mean leaving it or quitting it. It means, can we change that? Can we change that?

Have you thought about this? Is there this possibility? Is there this way? Can we, you know, it's really about doing what you can in place, you know, as opposed to finding some other place in the world where you can make a difference. You're most effective where people know and respect you. Yeah.

When you say the word regeneration, immediately what comes to mind for me can make a difference. You're most effective where people know and respect you. Yeah. When you say the word regeneration, immediately what comes to mind for me is soil regeneration. And there's been a massive explosion in terms of people's awareness and care with respect to how we're treating our soils. And you can credit our friend Ryland for all the beautiful work that he's doing

with Kiss the Ground and the documentary that he made, John and Molly Chester and The Biggest Little Farm. Like there are pieces of really powerful mass media that I think are shifting the paradigm and helping people to better understand this piece of the puzzle. But the book really canvases a much broader definition of what regeneration is. And you break it down into all these different categories.

You got oceans and forests and wilding and land and people and cities and food and energy and industry. And within that, all these subcategories where people are doing amazing things and you kind of explain why this is important, how you can get involved, the new kind of operating modalities that are helping to heal the planet

in these various capacities. And I think, you know, if you page through the book, you're gonna find that thing that's gonna make you enthusiastic, whether it's beavers or, you know, urban gardening or whatever it is. And what was interesting is there were so many things in here, like I feel like I have a pretty good grip

on this general landscape, but there was a lot in here that I didn't know anything about. Some pretty interesting things in here, like the Azolla fern was one that I didn't know much about. Maybe you can explain that a little bit. Trophic cascades, what are these things? Yeah, there are, and when you first see them on the page going, what does this have to do with,

I'm worried about the future of my children. And he's talking about a trophic cascade. We need to talk about the beavers. Yeah, same with beavers. A zolafurn is a fern and it floats. It lives on the surface of the water. It metabolizes or nitrogen from the air. It fixes nitrogen from the air.

So it doubles every two and a half days if it's cold or two days if it's warm or three days but approximately it doubles and it is rich in omega-3s which is unusual for a plant and needed by, this will make a sixth world we live in junk food. And it makes oil and it sequesters carbon. And the reason we know that, not that any plant doesn't do that, every plant does, but there was an Azolla event 49 million years ago. And at that time, the PPM of CO2 was 25,000.

It was pretty hot. And there was no ice in the Arctic. And it was a freshwater lens. And you had these Azolla, it's called the Azolla event, but Azolla events were in the summer, it would be covered these Azolla, it's called the Azolla event, but Azolla events were in the summer, it would be covered with Azolla. And then in the cooler part in the winter, it would die and sink to the bottom.

And then that happened. And within a relatively short geological time, it went down from 25 to 6,000 ppm. And it is subscribed to Azolla, the presence of Azolla. it went down from 25 to 6,000 ppm and it is subscribed to Azolla, the presence of Azolla. Well, Azolla can still do that. In other words, it can still sequester things very, very rapidly. So whether they're in lakes or wetlands

or even rivers and so forth, or ponds. Azolla can sequester carbon. You can harvest it. You can feed it to animals, chickens, rabbits, goats. Right, it's like a pretty nutrient rich. Very nutrient rich. You can put it in your salad. It's delicious, right?

So you can make oil out of it. You can have omega-3 eggs if you're an egg eater and you want your eggs to be much more nutritious. And the rate of carbon sequestration is quite extraordinary. And you could even, although I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't want to do it, you could even put it in a river and then like the Missouri going into the Mississippi

and then it doubles and gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Then you could have takeouts. You're taking it out all the way down to Mississippi. And then when it gets to the Gulf, it dies and it goes down to the bottom. The oil that's being drilled for in the Arctic today is due to a zolifer. Oh, is it really?

Yeah, oh yeah. Wow. And so the interesting thing about it though, if it's in a river, it's cleaning the river up from both nitrogen and phosphorus. So right now, what you have in the Missouri, Mississippi is runoff. And as it gets to the Gulf, it creates this huge dead zone.

The algal blooms. Yeah, algal blooms, dead zone. It's feeding algal blooms and Sargasso Sea for that matter, going into Tulum in Mexico. And so Azolla cleans that up. And so the possibilities with Azolla for an extraordinary. So why aren't we doing that? Well, like, couldn't we create massive reservoirs also

and just harvest this stuff while we're sequestering carbon? Hey, you know, when I did a drawdown, we talked about asparagus taxiformis, which is this type of seaweed that if fed in very small amounts, one, 2% to ruminants, like cows, obviously, that would reduce methane emissions from their digestion by 80, 90%.

Well, that was four plus years ago and it's happening. In other words, there are a dozen companies now that did not exist at that time. Have their patents, they have this, they're competing, they're cultivating it, they're trying to, also they're actually selling it, it's being used and so forth. So it took a very short time.

I think Azola is in the same place where we didn't discover it, obviously. That's not what we're saying, but I think it might come to a broader understanding and awareness now so that people will do something that, and there's so many imaginative ways that you can use it. And it has so many positive and beneficial effects. In our kind of dualistic way of looking at things though,

I'm imagining like, oh, we think this is some panacea and we dump it in the Mississippi and then there's some downstream, ecological ecosystem implication that we're not foreseeing. Yeah, and it's invasive, but it can invade running water because the water keeps going in one direction. So, but I'm sure there might be, but if you do it at your farm, at your own reservoir,

at your pond, at your, whatever it is, it's yours. And so there is nothing, there is no downside from that. But there's always got to look at these things very carefully. We use the river analogy just to give people a sense of scale of undammed rivers. If there was an Azolla, what's it called? I don't know, it's not a company or whatever

that was working with the state or the country or hydrologists and everybody, like we're all working together. You could be pulling off so much carbon, so much food. I mean, and you'd be replacing the soy and the crap that's being grown that's causing the runoff with Azolla, which is really extraordinarily nutritious.

Right, because it's a biofertilizer, but it's also a great animal feed. Yeah, you can work it into the soil. You can work it into the animals. And it grows like crazy. It grows like crazy. So what's the- It's like hemp. It's like this crazy multipurpose plant

that we've overlooked. Yeah, what's wrong with this picture? It's hard to find out what's wrong with's like hemp. It's like this crazy multipurpose plant that we've overlooked. Yeah, what's wrong with this picture? It's hard to find out what's wrong with it. Wow. Yeah. The other mind blower was this idea of rainmakers, microbes in the sky. Yeah.

So walk me through that. Sure will. It's been known for some time that like coastal development, like in Spain, the whole coast of Brava, the whole coast was developed in the last 30 plus years. I mean, it was Mediterranean coast and beaches. And then it just got overrun by hotels and condos, basically, for northerners wanting to come

and own something in the south in the winter. Okay. But what also happened is that the rainfall patterns changed completely inland, the summer rainfall. And they know now why, because those structures all along the southern coast of Spain destroyed all the wetlands. And so we have this idea that the long rain cycle

is the cycle, comes from the oceans, goes inland, drops rain. Right. There's a short water cycle, which is the rain comes up from the land, moves and drops. And there's a story, not a story, but a scientific study that was done in Africa, in Malawi of tea plantations in a specific valley.

And the study came about because it had the highest concentration of hail in Africa. And the question was why? I mean, it just didn't make sense, why here and not the next valley over or, you know, and, or in some other country for that matter. And one of the scientists who studied it was aware that we used to think the water nucleates on dust.

So in other words, how does a gas like, you know, become a liquid? Well, it has to attach to something. That's called nucleation. Water attaches to water really easily, but it doesn't attach to other things so easily. And gas, it doesn't become water. And so we just assumed for many years,

there was a lot of dust in the atmosphere. Now we know there's a killer amount of bacteria in the atmosphere and diverse bacteria. So in Malawi, he actually took the hail, melted it, and then basically looked at the bacteria that was in there and sequenced it and discovered that the bacteria that was predominant in the hill

was specific to the tea plants in that valley and only in that valley. In other words, the tea and the agriculture was creating the precipitation. So the atmosphere is literally a microbiome that's populated by the plant life on the ground. Absolutely, and always has been. And the diversity of the plant life,

the quality of that plant life dictates what that atmospheric microbiome is, and in turn plays a large role in the rainfall, the extent of the rainfall, the quality of the rainfall. Just like the Sahara desert, which is the opposite, completely dry, dust storms come off the Sahara. You can see them, I mean, from satellites across the Atlantic ocean and they go south into the Amazon

and the rainfall, the Amazon benefits hugely from the dust from the Sahara. And so we are just discovering that we, but science is discovering these extraordinary relationships. And what we do know is that the temperature that we experience, 80% of that is caused by the hydrosphere, not by the atmosphere. And that is to say the hydrosphere, not by the atmosphere.

And that is to say that hydrosphere is, it can be the clouds, but it can be the fog, but it can be really the transpiration of the plants and the soil around us. And that can lower surface temperature by one to two degrees centigrade and sometimes more. So the other aspect of that is that our deforestation, our overgrazing and our agricultural methodology, the industrial agriculture has desiccated the land. You're a runner. You know what happens when you get too dry. I mean, you're in dangerous territory, first of all,

and you can't function. Well, the earth has been desiccated. And so what regenerative practices do, whether they're animals grazing, whether it's afforestation, whether it's agroforestry, whether it's regenerative agriculture, actually is they change the composition of the soil because they start to sequester and place more carbon.

And that carbon is food for microbes and virus and protozoa, et cetera. And that they start to eat each other and they form glomulin, which is kind of a humic acid and so forth. And it changes the structure of the soil so that when it does rain, whether a lot or a little, the soil can retain the water.

When the soil retains the water, then it's going to transpire the water when it gets hot and it's going to cool. Plants grow better when it's cooler in the summer than when it's hot. So you're getting this amazing virtuous cycles by basically restoring degraded land. And there is an estimation of two to 3 billion hectares. That's five to seven and a half billion acres of land on earth that can be restored. And not just sequester carbon, but probably more importantly, sequester water.

The water, yeah. That was one of the profound things that I noticed when I visited John and Molly Chester's farm. Have you visited? Oh, you haven't been there? Oh, you gotta go. It's just down the street. I know.

Next time you're in LA. I gotta go see it. I mean, they're in your book. So I know you're very familiar with everything that they're doing, but when you're on their land, you're kind of at a high point. You can see the other farms that are surrounding that farm.

And the difference is pretty dramatic. And you just, the colors alone, comparatively to the neighboring farms that are farming conventionally is unbelievable. And one of the things that they were telling me was when you get the rains, the rare rains in the winter time here in California, the water doesn't run off.

Like you're not getting all this flooding and all the other problems that these other farms are having. Like the water stays there. Yeah. And it almost creates its own like little microclimate around the farm. It does, you know, and the thing is like, again, people, there's been a tendency to talk about the big solutions,

you know, and they revolve around energy, you know, of course, because it's 76, 80% different numbers of the greenhouse gas emissions today are from the combustion of, you know, coal, gas and oil. So of course, you know, if we don't do that, you know, we're goners, no question about it. But that then has caused us to overlook the importance of what the chestnuts are doing, what regenerative ag does, what restoring degraded land does,

what agroforestry, reforestation, managed grazing does. I mean, those are just as important. So that again goes back to this idea well i just i would just restoring you know 2 000 acres in the middle of you know the australian you know not desert but so forth but you know how to somewhere in australia yeah uh-huh that's really important in other words as opposed to thinking well it doesn't really make a difference. It makes a huge difference.

And those are the differences, you know, all around the world. And I guess my question is, how do we get that going? Right, I mean, that's the $64,000 question, right? Like I would suspect that most farmers would rather be farming in the way that John and Molly are farming than the way that they're currently farming.

But the gap from status quo to the situation that John and Molly are in is pretty vast. You have to create some kind of incentivization or transitionary situation to allow those people to free themselves from the kind of tyrannical situation that they're in, where they're in this basically in indentured servitude relationship with big agricultural firms that compel them

to do things in a certain way and allow them to transition. Because if you get anything from that documentary, it's how long it took to get it to a situation where now it's semi self-perpetuating. There were some lean, very difficult years where most people would have bailed and gone back to the old ways. So you have to create an economic buffer for these people

and an on-ramp. An on-ramp. The way to understand industrial ag versus say, not opposed to, but compared to regenerative ag is simple. And industrial agriculture started or really got going in the middle of the 19th century when chemical fertilizers were invented. And then got, you know, it was on steroids once the Haber-Bosch method of creating nitrates was early 20th century. And so industrial ag basically feeds plants, NPK, and then the macronutrients it needs to grow.

And when it first started to be used in the 19th century, there was a lot of bad farming in Germany and Europe. There was hunger issues. There really were. And all of a sudden you put this powder on the field and you have these bright green plants that are taller than the ones who didn't get it. And you go, hey, we're onto something.

I mean, this is cool. And it just got better and better, quote, quote, in a sense of, you know, phosphorus and potassium, you know, potash. And pretty soon that was how you grew plants. You could grow more of it, the yields are greater, et cetera. It always takes time when you do that, of course, to realize that the plants are weaker

because regenerative ag actually doesn't feed plants, it feeds soil. And for the 400 million years that plants have been here, soil has always fed the plants. And so essentially industrial ag is putting plants on an IV drip. And that's what it's doing. And you take the drip away and the plants suffer

because the soil has been degraded and it's really holding the plant up. It's not it's doing. And you take the drip away and the plants suffer because the soil has been degraded and it's really holding the plant up. It's not feeding the plant. So there is that transition. There's no question about it. And we do need a way to support farmers because the reason, I've never met a RegenAg farmer, and I've met quite a number who did it

because it was the right thing to do. Now you say, well, why did they do it? They did it because they hit the wall. It's the same as people's health. Well, people don't change their diet because it's the right thing to do. They change it because they hit the wall and said, this is not working at all.

And then they turn to people, to functional medicine, to you, to whatever, Julie. I mean, they turn and say, wait a minute, I don't know what to do. And so the farmers I've met basically hit the wall. They were running out of money and they were feeling the squeeze between producing commodities, having the prices out of their control and being part of an overproducing system that suppressed prices and their costs were going up because the soil was getting poorer and poorer,

turning into dirt has been said. And then it needed more and more inputs. More inputs, yeah. And it needed pesticides because the plants were so weak, the bugs were eating it. And then it needed glyphosate because the weeds could out-compete the plant. And pretty soon you have basically modern egg.

But again, as I said earlier, those farmers could see that that degenerative road ended. They could see the ending. It was called basically the bank saying, pay up or we're gonna take all your equipment. Right, right, right. Yeah. And that's right. It's basically the bank saying pay up or we're gonna take all your equipment. Right, right, right. Yeah, and that's right. So those, the biggest effect,

the biggest change in the farming community on Regen Ag is caused by farmers, that farmers talking to farmers. Right, that's what I was thinking, like pivoting from that blame and shame, modus operandi into empowerment and engagement. It's those farmers who have made that transition who are the ones who are gonna be able to communicate to the other farmers.

They're not gonna wanna hear it from you, you know, let alone me, I mean, you know, God forbid. So yeah, like creating community around that, that's supportive and empowering to helping people make that transition. But also on top of that systems that are conducive to that being an economic viability. But there are things happening where the demand

for regeneratively produced seeds and grains and obviously meat as well, but are increasing faster than production. Sure. And so farmers are seeing a premium. In other words, their inputs are going down, their costs are going down, but actually the income is going up.

And you see 10x differences in profit per acre for regen farmers. And as Gabe Brown famously said, he said, I got tired of basically signing the front of the check. And now I signed the back of the check. In other words, it shifted from an expense to income, and you don't go back from that. And so now there's, you know, companies and processes

and techniques and satellites, and there is a lot of support now being created for RegenAg in its true form. And it's being also done in some dubious forms as well. Yeah. Yeah. And yet, I just, I was out of town the other day and just was in an airplane yesterday and you look down

and you don't see a lot of regenerative farms. You see giant swaths of square and round parcels. Tivet irrigation. Yeah. Yeah. So where are we in terms of that becoming, like reaching some kind of inflection point with this? I don't know. I don't know.

I know that like the big, big companies are pivoting on this. They have the same questions, which is how do we make the transition? They don't. How do their farmers make the transition and how's the brush is doing with rice? General Mills is trying to do it with oats.

And, but so many, like the clothing companies now are basically looking for a regenerative fiber, primarily cotton, but other fibers as well. So you're seeing the supply demand dance. The consumer demand. I mean, I feel like Gen Z, the younger generation, they're up to speed on this stuff and they're much more conscious

about their consumer choices than our generation. Much more, much more. I mean, when I started Air One, we were all the time about you hippies, and you wanna feed the world organically, but we industrial ag have, we take care of the children. We have a world to feed. You guys are like, sort of self-indulgent,

almost narcissistic, and you're wanting things without chemicals and pesticides. And now it's, I don't know how big the industry is. It's so big that you can't get enough organic food in the United States. But the same thing is Regen is not gonna go through that because you're seeing every major agricultural company in the world, Syngenta and Cortiva and Monsanto Buyer and ADM and Cargill

moving to regeneration. Now, I mean, keep your tongue firmly in your cheek on that one because I feel like there's some co-option going on there in terms of the term and the word. But as Franklin Roosevelt once said that sometimes the way you start telling the truth is by being a hypocrite at first and so who knows where that's gonna go but you do see Indigo Ag which is all about regenerative farming from the get-go and not about chemicals

kind of like the opposite of a Monsanto doing really, really well working with not only with regenerative farmers, but in terms of metrics, in terms of measuring carbon and decommodification, that is connecting farmers directly to the buyers and getting the farmers out of the commodities business, where no matter how well you do,

the price is the same for everybody. And so that has to happen so that regenerative farmers can get a premium and that the food companies that buy that have a story and a narrative that means something to Gen Z and everybody else who cares. Yeah, the story narrative piece I think is big. I think most companies these days need something. That has to be a genuine, authentic aspect of doing business.

Oh yeah. I mean, and I think they recognize that. I mean, we'll see what happens, but I think that we're in a period of tumultuous change. Some of it is threatening for sure, you know, and daunting. But I get the sense in the business community that the old ways are over. I really do. And I'm not praising anybody.

I'm not trying to think, oh, finally business gets it. And I'm not saying that either. If anybody doesn't get it, I would say it's the investors. They still want to put their money where they're gonna get the highest return. And the earth doesn't work that way. Right, yeah. I mean, banking is a whole section in the book about that.

Yeah. Where do you see the role of hydroponics in all of this? I mean, obviously this is, that's growing plants in a manner that's divorced from the soil conversation altogether. I suspect there's a great place for that in urban centers or places where there isn't soil, but how does that fit into the idea of regeneration? Well, it's interesting because plants suffer.

That is to say that they suffer because it gets too hot, there's too much sun, insects, they suffer for lack of nutrient, for example. So they put the roots down deeper. The complexity of the taste and the phytonutrients that are in plants are actually due to stress. So plants that are stressed are more nutritious. Right.

When you do hydroponics, you're actually going back to industrial ag, which is you're doing, you're as an IV drip into the roots. It's fine if you just basil for salad or watercress or something for greenery in cities. The idea that that's going to produce nutritious food, I think is faulty because we have unnutritious food now everywhere. And we have food that comes from industrial ag, you know, both whether it's row crops or, you know, in vegetables or whether it's,

you know, in grains and seeds. And we have measured, we can measure the difference in the phytonutrients and minerals or the lack of minerals that are in these foods. So we haven't been able to invent a way to make a really super nutritious food without soil yet. And I don't think we ever will. What about the carbon sequestration piece of it? Of what?

Meaning that if you're in urban centers and you don't have soil, but you have all these hydroponic gardens everywhere, is that moving the needle at all in terms of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere? I think it's, at the same time, we do wanna localize food production. We do wanna bring food into the city,

into the peri-urban areas, right around the city. And that does involve greenhouses. It does involve all sorts of really ingenious techniques, you know, to extend the season and to produce crops that people want. And there's nothing wrong with the crops that are grown hydroponically in terms of, but just not the idea that somehow that's going to replace

the foods we need. they just won't. But it can produce very fresh and tasty, like I said, parsley and basil and watercress and lettuces and things like that, which are not really, I mean, the source of, the major source of our nutrients. Let's talk about energy. Yeah. Why can't we get wind power,

like just rocking out everywhere? Like what are the impediments to really scaling that? Cause it seems to me that's the most viable best solution at the moment. I think the major impediment is sighting. In other words, people don't want them, people generally don't live where there is, the high wind regimes, the Midwest is,

the wind's blowing all the time almost. And so there farmers love them, with their corn, they have two, you know, with their corn. They have two crops, you know, kilowatts and corn. I think that the major obstacle is offshore wind. In other words, sighting offshore wind. And I think Heinrich Steisel, Danish engineer, has solved the problem. And he was the, when he was young,

he started fooling around with wind turbines and the three blade configuration that you see today on the big turbines, he invented that. And a farming supply company called Vestas heard about him because at that time farms had windmills. My grandfather's farm had a windmill on it for water. And they bought the rights to his design. And Vestas is the biggest wind turbine company

in the world today, 13 billion a year. And Steissel has invented a floating platform. They can go out far into the sea to areas where they won't interfere with people's viewscape, where there's a lot of land, so to speak, but it's not land, it's water. And I think that that is going to come in at a price

that is also less expensive than coal, gas and oil and wind already is by the way. The new wind farm installations, solar is also lower cost than fossil fuel electrical generation. And I just think it's a matter of, I don't know, maybe two, three years, cause they're testing them right now, they're floating them. And Stasol is such an amazing engineer.

I mean, his track record is extraordinary. And when he does something, it tends to work. And somebody said, well, you know, when he started this project of the floating wind farms somebody said what if we can't afford it and his response is we can't afford not to you know so i think there is that again that that inflection point we're going right now which is are we quibbling over a half a cent per kilowatt hour that coal is cheaper than, you know, it's not, but I mean, you know, are we gonna like get,

I mean, it's cheap, just buy it, let's do it. End of subject, yeah. Yeah, it just seems like there should be massive, you know, wind farms offshore and then like sort of, you know, areas of the planet where there's tons of wind and low population density and throughout the desert, solar farms everywhere. There will be, I think there will be.

The interesting thing about, we think of things like death spirals, something is, there's also other types of spirals, which is disruption spirals. And we're in a disruption spiral with wind and solar, renewable energy, which is its cost is going down. As its cost goes down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, demand for fossil fuel goes down.

As that declines, the cost goes up, okay, for fossil fuels. It doesn't go down, it goes up. If you use less of something and you're producing. So as the demand goes up, it attracts more investment. More capital wants to go where something is growing, of course. So the cost of capital goes down. Investment into fossil fuels, which is peaking and declining,

the cost of capital is going up. So this is a disruption spiral that's going to accelerate the rate of acceleration that we're seeing in renewables. And most of the projections about solar and wind and renewable have been linear. The IEA, the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, similarly McKinsey as well.

And last year they admitted that they had been wrong every single year for 19 years. By undershooting it? Yeah, absolutely. Every single year. Absolutely, you could undershooting it? Yeah, absolutely. Every single year, absolutely you could count on them to get it wrong, every one of those institutions. And they did on batteries as well,

storage for EVs and for, you know. And so I think we're on a threshold where we're gonna be surprised at the rate of growth and solar and wind. And the only thing that is going to not prevent it because it's simply a capital formation and capital wants to go to it because it really pencils out and the demand is there.

A big piece with energy on this quest to electrify everything, which is a big point that you make in the book is storage. So we have these batteries, batteries are improving, they're growing in their capacity to hold storage, but they also degenerate and they require tons of mineral inputs, which of course have downstream impacts on the planet.

Like there is no perfect panacea situation here. If we improve our batteries and then everybody's got batteries for everything, we're pivoting away from drilling, you know, and fracking to just mining, which is what we're already seeing. And we're seeing a disproportionate amount of that. We're seeing like China really capitalize on that

in a big way right now. That's creating kind of a geopolitical imbalance in terms of how that certain economy is functioning. Yeah, there are things like neodymium that are integral to magnets and the magnets are integral to power generation and wind turbines. And the rare earth monopoly is almost China,

not quite really, but they really 56 or 58% of the rare earths come from China. And so they definitely have control on that. What I'm seeing is that in the like storage area where it's primarily lithium ion and there are some, I guess what I'm saying is that there's a whole bunch of innovators

circling around that one, solid state batteries, carbon-based batteries, no lithium, and startups that are brilliant and are pointing to material use and storage capacity and cost reductions that we've seen in every single area of energy on the renewable side. Nobody thought that solar or wind would be this cheap ever. that solar or wind would be this cheap ever. Not in the wildest imagination did anybody think that you'd be installing solar for less than 2 cents a kilowatt hour in the Saudi Arabia of all places.

I mean, but they're doing it at a profit. Yeah. I mean, it's not like subsidized. And so the same thing holds true for storage, which is that I don't think we're locked in to the technologies that we're using right now. And I think you're going to see on this storage side, I think you're gonna see techniques, technologies,

basically that are still gonna use minerals, but minerals that are ubiquitous and easy to get as opposed to Bolivia or in the Atacama desert or things that are more sparse or not so well distributed. That's encouraging. Yeah. I feel like the progress that's being made with batteries

is similar to the history of the microchip, right? It's accelerating very quickly. And every year, EVs are coming out and the battery life's getting better and better and better and et cetera. Like it does feel like that's getting figured out. Yeah, it is. And we're in a huge disruptive cycle in a good sense.

I mean, the disruptive cycle that's causing it is climate, but there is technologically a rate of disruption that's occurring that is, hold onto your hat, the rate of change, the players, the universities, engineers, the technologists, the entrepreneurs, the capital formation is extraordinary. And so nothing that we, I think are projecting

in the future is going to live up to what will actually happen. It's gonna be more, it's gonna be better. That doesn't mean by the way, though, that we should all have an electric car. I mean, we should live in cities where you don't need a car at all. Right.

I mean, so- The 15 minute city. Yeah, 15 minute city. We should, this isn't, I feel like sometimes when you listen to some companies or some people, certainly some politicians, that the idea is to fix it so that we can just continue to grow our economy bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

And we just have to get rid of this nasty little problem called climate. And actually- That's getting in a way, that's just sort of annoyingly getting in the way of economic growth. So we gotta get it all right, get it all. But the alignment isn't with nature,

the alignment is with GDP, you know, how can we get this, you know, and that's very much a JP Morgan, you know, that's very much an investment banking way of seeing the world, you know, which is, okay, let's, how can we make money doing this and doing this and doing that? But what's underlying that is like, you know,

the business as usual scenarios that are used by the IEA and the iea and the world bank and the ipcc basically project an economy that's two and a half times bigger by 2050 and seven times bigger by 2100 and that is just ridiculous it's so absurd to think that we can 2X, 7X, 5X, whatever, where we are today in terms of throughput and economy. So really part of the innovation has to be, how can we do more with less? How can we fulfill our needs as human beings?

And we have needs, you know, and in a way that actually lowers our footprint, not just our carbon footprint, but our whole footprint. And so I don't see that really coming into the conversation yet in terms of regeneration. Right, how long can the economy continue to multiply at that level? Like, is this gonna go on ad infinitum?

Is there any conversation about it? You can't. I mean, that's the ultimate in unsustainability. Absolutely. I mean, every price of every share with some exceptions on stock exchanges is based on assumed and projected rate of growth. And there are stocks that just pay dividends like pipeline,

you know, just pay. So there's a few, but 99% are based on growth and imagined projected, you know, based on the past, based on, you know on pipe dreams, whatever. It is weird that success is predicated on this idea of growth. Like why is it not okay to just have a business that does fine and pays its employees

and enriches its shareholders without growing? Because you can't amass capital. Right. And then that's capitalism. You could provide good lives for everybody involved. Absolutely. It's called steady state. It's called, there's lots of words for it.

A steady state economy. Steady state economy can take care of the whole world. What it won't do is create multi-billionaires. It won't create people like, you know, Elon Musk got 6.7 billion in compensation. That was his salary this year. He just announced today. I mean, just insane, insane amount of capital.

And what that capital is doing is destroying the world for the rest of people, making, I mean, houses too expensive, real estate too expensive. I mean, there's like the rich are pulling away from the rest of the world. Yeah, the wealth disparity gap is just accelerating at an obscene rate and the pandemic just amplified all that. It amplified it, yeah.

And so I don't know where that is going to hit the wall, but it'll hit the wall. It can't happen. It doesn't really pencil out. I mean, only in somebody's, banker's wet dream. Yeah, so it doesn't need to pencil out ad infinitum. It only needs to pencil out for my lifetime.

Yeah. Right, I mean, that's the mindset. Or before I retire. Yeah, right. Take away my millions. No appreciation for this idea of indigeneity, which is another subject in the book, right? It is, yeah.

But I do think the consumption thing is something that really isn't being talked about. Now there's so much openness in terms of regenerative ag and renewable energy. And more and more people are forming around the idea that we have to really take care of nature, which is kind of a funny revelation at this point, but it's true. a revelation at this point, but it's true. But what they haven't done is actually think about, but how much are we using total, like individually in our cities,

our assumptions about what makes a good life and all that sort of stuff. I mean, virtually every one of my shirts has a patch on the elbow. Paul, you martyr. No, I think I'm proud of it. I should have worn one today so I could hold it up. But I thought, no, I'm going to be video.

I got three shirts that don't have patch. But the idea that, you know, it's never made us happy more. I mean, if you're poor, yes, more clothing, food, education, housing, of course. But once you reach a certain level. It doesn't make you happy. Excess accumulation has no relationship to happiness.

And meanwhile, amidst that consumption, there's a tremendous amount of waste, right? We're wasting food, we're disposing of our clothes. Everything is disposable. Yes, I mean, clothing is considered to be, 8% of global emissions is due to the clothing industry. That's shocking. It's the number two industry in terms of waste in water, number two.

Right. Food, the new report came out this last week, that the number for food waste is 40%. 40% of our food is wasted. That's wild. It's crazy. And- Where's the gravamen of that waste coming from?

The greatest proportion is a farm, the second, but that depends on the continent. Meaning they harvest, a portion of the harvest just gets tossed out because it doesn't look nice and the grocery stores aren't gonna buy it or whatever. Ugly food, this, that, all sorts of things, but it depends.

That's in Africa. But if you go to North America, then the food is actually in the supply chain and at the consumer level. So it depends on which country. I mean, there's an aggregate number, but actually it's kind of deceptive because it doesn't apply to Europe

the same way it applies to Africa where you don't have cold chains. So, you know, they don't have a cold the same way it applies to Africa, where you don't have cold chains. So, you know, they don't have a cold chain that makes it hard to preserve. Sure. But in North America, in the transport, in the chain from farm to grocery store or what have you, somewhere along the line, stuff spoils.

Oh, yes, 25%. And then households throw away food, restaurants toss out food, et cetera. They can't. Yeah, they toss too much that they didn't cook. And then if you don't complete it, you finish your plate, they have to throw it away. Yeah.

I did a podcast with this chef, Daniel Hume in New York, and he's partnered with this organization called Rethink. Do you, are you familiar with what they're doing? It's super interesting. I think the most interesting part of rethink is the technological piece because so much of waste, at least in the restaurant ecosystem, is a function of lack of kind of communication

and efficiencies that would allow that waste to go towards something good. So if you can create like a network system and sort of efficiencies for these restaurants to, set aside whatever food is getting wasted so that it could be efficiently repurposed, it's an easily solvable problem with, just a little bit of distribution effort involved.

It's the same thing, it's reconnecting the broken strands, reconnect the system. The way you heal a system is to connect more of it to itself, whether it's your immune system, an ecosystem, an economic system, a social system, you connect more of it to itself and we're radically disconnected. And so when Daniel, when he's doing there

and Rethink is doing is saying, wait a minute, here's a source and here's a sink, here's a source and here's a sink, here's a need and here's a use. And like, what if we do this? What if we do this? What are the logistics? What's required? How does the staff have to be trained?

Once you make that shift, it works automatically. Right, to use like a human body analogy, it would be repairing neurons or basically stitching up arteries and veins so that these things can flow. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, or unblocking them. Right, yeah.

Removing the blockage. A little invasive surgery there. You mentioned indigeneity and indigeneity is actually the sort of the light motif of regeneration. Actually, I mean, there's a piece on it, but it actually, it goes throughout. And the reason is that I'm white, I'm not indigenous,

but actually if I trace my ancestor all the way back. You're indigenous to something. Everyone is. At some point. Everyone is, everyone is, but not in my family's history or experience or nothing got passed down to me about where I'm living and how to live there. Right. And the thing that we don't understand,

and I think we're starting to, of course, from the horrific way that indigenous people have and are being treated to this day, is that they were, amongst many things, and I don't want to reduce it in any way, but some of the best observational scientists in the world. some of the best observational scientists in the world. And most of the science we rely upon today is empirical science, which is, if it's not science, unless you can repeat it, if it's not repeatable, then it's just an observation.

It's just a happenstance. And, but the fact is in nature, nothing repeats and there is no lines and there's no circles and there's all the things that we rely upon um but there's pattern and and there's pattern recognition and pattern recognition depends on uh time narrative stories oral traditions that pass on you know what is known language in which the teaching of how to live in place is embedded in the language so that you have verbs that are essentially metaphors

for how to know where you are. And it was Aristotle who said, metaphor is genius. And so when you start to look at the 5,000 indigenous cultures on earth, and you start to see that they had extraordinary knowledge of the place that they lived. How do we know that? Because they've been there for 10, 12,000 years or longer in some cases and so forth. And through changes in weather and also adaptation.

And so we have been the opposite. We've actually haven't lived in many places for very long. But even if we have, sorry to interrupt, like even if we had, let's say we've lived here for thousands of years, we're not connected to the biosphere in the manner in which those cultures were and are. They had to be,

because that's the only way they could survive is to actually know where they were. And so you see things like 3,000 years ago on the East Coast and Lila June, who's on our board, actually a Denean Cherokee activist, poet, and scholar, wrote a piece called The Forest is Farm. And what she talked about was that if you do core samples in Tennessee and around the East Coast,

you find 3,000 years, a real shift in the pollen and what was being grown and different trees and different plants and annuals and food plants. And like what happened and what happened is that, you know, native Americans in this case, indigenous people transformed the forests into farms. It was just where they got all the food, along with animals, all right? And I was on a plane to Alaska to give a talk at the university, and I was sitting next to a woman, and we began to talk, and she's Yupik.

And the Yupik people live on the Bering Strait on both sides of Alaska and Russia. And she was going there because her sister died and she became the elder. And we started talking about it, you know, how it is to live on the Bering Strait. Come on. Right. And she said that to live there, they needed to be able to predict the weather two years in advance. What? Wait a minute. I said, two years in advance. I was like, wait a

minute. I said, two years? She said, oh yes. She's very humble, quiet woman. There was no bragging or pride, nothing, nothing. It was just matter of fact. I said, well, how'd you do that and she started to name every single thing that they saw over a course of a year observed and whether it was the color of the sea ice when it froze in the fall and then melted in the spring the depth of it the extent of it the type of velvet that was on the caribou, the fish, they could tell from the fish how they had changed or subtle differences. I mean, she just started naming the clouds. They would look at the clouds. They would look, she just named every single thing

in their environment. And over obviously hundreds and thousands of years, they began to say, well, this, you put this and this, when you got those things, that means that. Or in the future, or they had the memory of what happened two years ago. So they had this type of weather. They look back and say, yeah, I like it.

Remember? And so they did these. And she said, and they did it to survive. They said there was no, and we can't predict it six weeks in advance here, even two weeks in advance. That's so wild. And we have the most amazing planet in the world.

And so beautiful. Yeah. To be so intricately involved and immersed in your environment and to be so present and paying such close attention to the smallest details and to extract meaning out of that. But they're just, not just, they're just one culture. Right, right.

It's true for everyone. And to have Western culture be dismissive of that because it doesn't meet the criteria of the quote unquote scientific method. Right, exactly. And now of course, a lot of scientists are actually turning to indigenous people, but a lot of indigenous knowledge has been lost.

I mean, the elders died and they were, you saw what happened in Canada, I think it happened here too, like their children were taken away. They were murdered essentially in Catholic schools. I mean, they were traumatized, they were belittled, they were taken away from their native foods. They were fed commodity foods full of sugar, fat and starch.

They got obese, they got type two diabetes, they couldn't get jobs. I mean, all of what we did to them, it wasn't them doing it to themselves. And so, yet in some way, in most places, they were able to maintain and keep this knowledge and these oral traditions passed on generation after, for hundreds and hundreds of years, you know, from being deracinated by the colonists, you know? And so now I think we're realizing, gosh, this is Alexandria library of knowledge, you know? It was right there all along, except we didn't listen.

No, instead we dislocated them, marginalized them, stole their land and forced them into situations where they have to open casinos. Absolutely, yeah. And so, I mean, part of regeneration, people say, well, what does that have to do with climate? Is absolutely to make amends in whatever way we can today, not just to indigenous people, but actually, well, not just, I mean, but-

To the planet itself. African-Americans, because they're indigenous people who were enslaved and brought over. There's 3,000 different cultures in Africa. And when we look at the roots of regenerative agriculture in this country, I mean, the initial roots came from Africa. They didn't come from Asia. And when we look at the roots of regenerative agriculture in this country, I mean, the initial roots came from Africa. They didn't come from Asia. They didn't come from any place else.

And can you imagine being a woman in Ghana and for whatever reason you've been kidnapped and then herded and then you're put on a boat, going to somewhere you don't know, that nobody can explain to you, that makes no sense at all. And somehow these women braided rice and seeds into their hair and brought them to so-called New World, which is why the African Americans were the best rice farmers in all of Southeast

America. And when I started Erewhon and started to grow organic rice, or get it grown actually for us, I worked with two black farmers in Arkansas, and their knowledge of rice was unbelievable.

And it went back for almost 400 years. Wow. And so- That's a wild story. I know, we don't, we have no idea where our food waste came from or where the knowledge came from. Of course, George Washington Carver got that.

Right, I noticed him in the book too. Like talk about that a little bit. Cause that's, I did not know about this either. Well, I mean, he was the one who observed that the difference between black farmers and the results they were getting and white farmers who were mostly cotton farmers, cause it was the best cotton soil

where they were, Alabama, and how they're playing out their farms. They were killing the soil, killing the farm. And so, and then on a nourishment level, then of course on the peanuts, you're looking at groundnuts as a source of both restoring soil, but also restoring, you know, an inexpensive way to provide a balanced nutrient

to people that they weren't getting, you know, at that time. And, but it wasn't just him. He had a whole bunch of other, you know, colleagues, you know, at Tuskegee, you know, they worked together. And again, the roots of that and the benefit of that is throughout America to this day, and we don't recognize it. Right, I mean, when you,

not to keep bringing it back to this documentary, but when you watch The Biggest Little Farm, short of John and Molly finding some version of that, like somebody who's steeped enough in soil ecology to help guide them, they would have never been able to make it work there. And to think that there's this robust, unbelievable canon, a library of Alexandria of this kind of wisdom and knowledge

based on millennia of observing nature, that it's lost is crazy. Because anybody who would carry that message would be so valuable in so many ways to anybody who's looking to tread a little bit more lightly on the planet and to do things in a regenerative symbiotic way. And again, the other thing that we've lost,

maybe lost respect for is the language itself because it wasn't written. So it's not written or whatever. And I remember being in Patagonia and going to this museum and the Yamuna Selk'nam people, depending on which name you use. But, and there was like, I don't know, maybe a few dozen left at that time.

I mean, they had been extirpated basically by disease and by guns. And Bruce Chatwin wrote a book in Patagonia about the Yamuna people and about their language. And then I have a friend who's, I grew up at the University of California Libraries where my father worked. And in my family,

Marian the librarian was a hero. She was really something. So I spent a lot of time at the library. And so I understood from Bruce's book that there was a dictionary, that there was a missionary who was down there who had nothing to do. And there was only a hundred or so Yom and a people left

and he was a lexicographer. So he made a dictionary and worked with the tribal chief but the tribal chief was really, they killed so many people. He was like by default, but he wasn't. And so for many years, he made a dictionary of the Yamuna language into English. This dictionary is really amazing dictionary. And they got to 30,000 words and the missionary died

and the Yamuna wouldn't talk to them about cosmology, about women's issues and so forth. They said, no, we don't trust you with this knowledge, but they did talk about, you know, and if you read this dictionary, it's like I said, it's metaphor, you know, and like depression, the word for depression is a crab that's molting its shell, but it hasn't come off yet. I mean, get out of here.

What? I mean, it's such an exquisite language, 30,000 words. And these are the people that Darwin called beasts because when they came around Terra del Fuego, which it wasn't named then, it was like they saw fire and smoke. And the fire and smoke was from the Yamuna who carried fire with them everywhere because it was cold, but they were naked because they put seal fat all over their body to stay warm.

And they knew that clothing would actually get wet and actually cause them to die. So they're called beasts, right? And they acted in strange ways and so forth. Japanese has 40,000 words. This dictionary had 30,000 words and is incomplete. So- Yeah, it's wild. So our understanding of indigeneity,

of indigenous people is so broken and so... Well, it's metered in condescension essentially. And they were not educated in the manner in which we recognize so we're dismissive of that. Yeah, we don't have the right lens to see it, understand it and frankly benefit from it. And we were basically, we saw them as beasts. We use that word, not just Darwin.

And as a subclass of species, a subclass of human beings. Yeah, I mean, when you think of somebody like Paul Stamets, who knows everything about mushrooms. And now we're seeing this resurgence of enthusiasm and interest in mycology and what we can learn from the fungal universe, creating foods from them and just appreciating how much more complex and amazing it is than we ever imagined.

But in my mind, he's, he's in furtherance of that indigenous tradition because he's so steeped in this one thing, right? So imagine thousands of Paul Stamets who are experts in a wide variety of different types of fields that have to do with the cycles of the planet. Yes, and those people are coming

and there's then there are respectful scientists now and the Ashwar and the Warani, that they're in service, in honor of their knowledge and trying then help also to keep out the miners, the loggers, COVID as well for that matter, in the Amazon, in Peru, in Ecuador. So there are some really, really wonderful things going on now because of the respect and understanding

that was never there or was hardly there and now is really growing. And I think it also relates to a planet on fire. And so who are you gonna turn to? Obviously not Chevron, Exxon, obviously not the Republican party, and obviously not people who could care less. And these people who are so,

I don't wanna be those people, people who live in a place and have cared for it so long have something to teach us about caring and about knowing, you know, and that we've lost or that we never had. So, and Paul Stamets, I mean, when you think of his career and think of, I mean, you know, he accidentally, you know, boiled up a whole bag full of psilocybin, I mean, when you think of his career and think of, I mean, he accidentally boiled up

a whole bag full of psilocybin. Somebody gave it to him, he used to just take a few and he boiled the whole bag up and drank it and then went up a tree, and then the thunderstorm came and he was in that tree all night long blowing around. And it's for him to say, but to me, I mean, Paul Stamos was born that night.

Right, he had a spiritual awakening. He did, he absolutely did. And his life path unfurled. And he started up until that moment and when he came down from the tree, he no longer started. And so he had it in a very short night or maybe a long night, but you have to be out there.

You have to be in nature. You have to turn off everything that's on and turn on everything that's off to you. It's not off actually and so forth. And spend that time, I spent three months once in silence in the woods with nobody there. You did? Yeah, yeah.

When did you do that? I did that about 14 years ago, 15 years ago. So you had kind of a Walden Pond experience? I was just a caretaker at a refuge that was in New Mexico. And it was during the winter and early spring and nobody was there. So I didn't speak to anyone because there was no one to speak to. I mean, it was during the winter and early spring and nobody was there. So I didn't speak to anyone cause there was no one to speak to.

I mean, it was easy. So you weren't setting out to have that experience. It just wasn't an occurrence by dint of- Well, what do you do every day? So what I did every day was I would take off in a direction and try to get lost. There was just take off in a direction and try to get lost. That was just take off. And I never got lost except once.

That day I was like, I don't know where I am. It's so interesting, cause it's in this huge, you know, natural forest, you know, and there's no roads, there's no houses, there's no telephone poles, there's no cell phone towers. There's nothing roads, there's no houses, there's no telephone poles, there's no cell phone towers. There's nothing to orient you. But it gave me such a deep appreciation for place. And I remember once in the morning,

walking along the stream rivers, kind of right in between both, and literally a bear and I almost ran into each other. The water was so loud. It was in the early spring, you know, so it was rushing down from the snow and I couldn't hear anything. And I was looking one way, it was looking the other way.

It was this, what I call cinnamon bear, this coat. And it had, it must've been eating termites from a dead log because it had stuff all around whiskers. And we met each other and going, oh shit. What do I do now? Yeah, we looked at each other and then we turned away because we both turned away because you're not supposed to make eye contact,

but you can see, you turn your head away, but you can still see the presence of the other creature. And it was so beautiful because it's a being. It's not a bear. I mean, it's a bear, but it's a being. You're a being. There's two beings there. And it's like, okay. And we both kind of made a circle

and around each other and kept going. And so forth. And I remember nights where I would just go out and then just lean against a tree all night and sleep or wake up and sleep all night, just so you know. And listen to the creatures and the birds and in the morning at night, not so much birds at night, of course,

but I didn't know what they were. I mean, there's just sounds, you know, and those experiences are, they're not like Paul's in the tree, not until some of it, they're life some, but they're life-changing. They're life-changing. And when you hear terms like, oh, we have to practice nature-based solutions,

you know, MBSs, they're called MBSs now by the climatologists. It's like, excuse me, you know, nature, nature, nature, everything is nature, you know? And, you know, the idea that there's nature-based solutions as if that was what nature is there for. Right. You know, it's still that same colonial-

Hierarchical. Hierarchical way of looking at the world, which others the world and others nature. It makes nature seem like other. And again, what I said about fixing it, you know, like, well, what's the it? Climate's it. well, really? Yeah, the idea that we're gonna organize the world

in accordance to meet our needs. Like, and yeah, we'll make sure it's sustainable, but the notion being that, that like we're even capable of that to begin with. Yeah. And that those solutions exist for the benefit of us. And we othered indigenous people. We othered them utterly.

We've othered everything. Yeah, everything, I guess. Yeah, in that sense. And so that this idea of regeneration, the core of it is to experience the inseparability of everything and each other, you know, and to honor that. And as I said, the most important thing to do is to listen, you know, and nature as well, you know,

and just the way we have led and been taught to lead our lives, you know, has been so just fractured everything, you know, just shattered all the connections that are actually intrinsically there. And regeneration is that rediscovery. And that's why I say, go do what is exciting to you. That's the thing you're gonna do best. And that's what's gonna turn other people on

and get them lit up and so forth. And this idea and Andrew Huberman. Right, I love that he showed up in the book. He sure did, he showed up because- I felt like you pulled that paragraph right out of the podcast. I did, you're in this book. You're in this book a lot more than you think you are. Of course, I pulled that out of the podcast. I did, you're in this book. You're in this book a lot more than you think you are.

Of course I pulled that out of the listening to you and Andrew, but the idea that beliefs change our actions. If that was true, we'd be in a very different situation today with respect to climate and the fact that it's actions that change beliefs. And so people, the thing to do is to do, go do, do, whatever it is, just go do, start doing, don't think about it.

And for God's sakes, don't worry about the numbers. I mean, we have what I think now in the climate movement, and I think Drawdown is partly responsible, is what I call climate voyeurism. If we outnumber this, oh, it's 8% of emissions, it's this or that, it's twice as that, food is 34%. But that's actually doing something. Yes, it's doing something.

Calibrating everything is actually solving the problem. All it is is indexing it. Yeah, indexing, exactly. It's like, well, I'm glad you know, it doesn't do anything. And watching a documentary on Netflix on climate doesn't do anything either. It's like, we have to make sure that we are actually doing something.

And with all due respect to my colleagues and my friends and so forth, and I can say this all day long, they're still not doing anything. They're not doing anything. And that's why in the book we have punch lists or we have a connection to the website, which is, hey, make a punch list.

Right, yeah, a big piece of this is, we haven't even talked about it, the nonprofit that is associated with the book, regeneration.org, where there's this toolkit and all sorts of resources to help people move in that Huberman way from belief into action. Absolutely, one of the things that I learned, I did 128 speeches in 22 months for Drawn and Pokai.

You learn nothing when your mouth is open and you learn a Q&A because the cues generally are being asked for other people as well. Maybe one person is brave enough to ask it, but a lot of other people are going, hell yeah. I wanna know too. And so you learn from the questions, you know,

and I can't, almost without exception, somebody would say, what should I do? Or what should I do? I don't know what to do. It's interesting. And there's, you know, a hundred solutions in Dwaran and they're asking that question. And Jasmine, my wife, when I started regeneration said,

if you don't tell me what to do in this book, I'm leaving you. Got it. Yeah. You know, so the book doesn't exactly do that, by the way. I said, got it. Yeah. So the book doesn't exactly do that, by the way. What it does is the last eight pages is a wormhole to the website. And there we have what to do. You want to know what to do.

It is the complete, almost abbreviated manual of what to do for challenges and solutions. Challenge would be the boreal forest. The biggest stock of carbon on earth is being depleted with plush toilet paper, open pit mining, tar sands, et cetera, okay. That's a challenge, That has to stop. Okay, a solution is electrifying everything.

And that would mean putting in a heat pump in your house to replace natural gas, or it could be oil in the East Coast, whatever, for heating, for water. It can even be for cooking, using an induction cooktop. That's a solution. But what it does is like, okay, this is what you can do as an individual.

Okay, this is all the different levels of agency. This is what you can do as a neighborhood if there is something you can do. This is what you can do as a school. This is what you can do as a company or ask companies to do as agents and so forth. And onwards, these are the influencers who are causing problems.

Here's the email for the chairman of Procter & Gamble who makes plush toilet paper. You might want to write to him and say, stop taking virgin trees and making toilet paper out of it. Bamboo works better anyway, right? I learned that in the book. Yeah, bamboo or recycled paper

works a lot better and it's cheaper. And then here are the NGOs that are just kicking butt. I mean, really are effective and influencing and making a difference. Here are the First Nations who are rising up, speaking up, talking about these are traditional tribal lands that the First nations are dealing with

in the boreal this they know the land better than anybody here's here are videos cool videos it'll teach you here are books here are the great books on the boreal and so forth here etc so every solution and challenge has whatever you want to know or your entry points. We're not saying these are all the access to all the ways you can actually be effective in this area. That's what the book is sort of a neurotransmitter to the website. Yeah, I mean, that's powerful. The level of like practical advice that you can give people

and they can plug in wherever they're enthusiastic. Yeah, it's my Huberman. Yeah, that's your action. Mood follows action. How's your mood? Your mood's good. Yeah. Right?

Yeah. What is the thing that you're most, like I put that question to you, like what is the thing that you're most enthusiastic about? I would say the thing that I'm most enthusiastic about? I would say the thing that I'm most enthusiastic about is the rate at which people rediscovering land in all its myriad forms. I shouldn't say you know, I didn't know,

but we researched it and found out um the terrestrial systems that is you know forests and grasslands and farmlands and coastlands uh and mangroves and wetlands and so forth those hold 3 300 billion tons of c carbon not co2. The atmosphere holds one-fourth of that. It's four times as much carbon that's in the atmosphere. Okay. So there's two ways you can look at that. Those systems are being degraded. In other words, we're continuing to deforest.

We're continuing to use industrial ag. We're continuing to overgraze. We're continuing to desertify the earth, et cetera, to cover up our wetlands, et cetera. So every time you do that, then the life on the soil or in the soil perishes. That's got C in it. When C perishes, it combines with the oxygen,

produces carbon dioxide, okay? So in other words, it's emitting CO2, greenhouse gas, all right? Okay, so if we keep doing this, another 10% of loss of our terrestrial systems, that will increase PPM from 419, what it is today, 418 to 519, like that. It'll add 100 PPM, not reduce it. Okay, now let's flip that.

Let's talk about a climate of optimism for a minute, okay, instead of pessimism. So that means if we add 9% more C into all those systems, you know, 9% is not a lot. Then we sequester all the carbon we've emitted since 1800. Wow. Okay.

And if we go to 14, 13, 14%, depends. We will also account for all the carbon that is planned to be emitted by 2050. So if you look at any place you live, place you love any place you've seen and say can we have a 10 to 12 14 improvement here like more trees more grasslands or can we change the grazing strategies and technologies can we change the farming, can we under certify the two to 3 billion hectares of land and so forth? Heck yeah, we can. So that's just in protection. That's not technology, that's not energy.

That's there's many other things we can do that are solutions that we've talked about. It's just political and community well, but it's not asking a lot if every community could incrementally improve by 10% through a variety of measures, it seems highly achievable. Very achievable. And so it's important that we have,

rather than the big pictures that came out today from the IPCC about, whoa, it is here, it's irrevocable. I mean, no question. And you go, ah, you know, I mean, at the same time, it's important that we have the opposite, you know, which is like, yeah, and got it. Thank you for sharing. Thanks for such fantastic science.

Let's go to work. And this is the work that can be done everywhere by everyone and we can absolutely meet the challenge. No question, we need both. And so it's not that the science or it's understandable that the science has been couched in threat and fear and all that sort of stuff. I mean, the scientists didn't know how to communicate

and activists took the science and used blame and shame and finger pointing as a way to thought, they thought maybe that would make a difference. I don't know, but both were right. It's not that, but they didn't conform to neuroscience. Right, it's a natural psychological reaction to not being heard, right? It's just frustration that builds into anger.

Yeah. And it's well-intentioned, but it doesn't actually change minds or hearts. No. I think we're seeing that shift across all forms of activism. Because you spoke about the gay rights movement. I mean, you see that in the vegan movement, like all these sort of tried and true methods that have been used for years that just make people angry

and divide people, we're now realizing, hey, that's not such a good approach. Exactly, in fact, another figure ground shift from my point of view was vegan to plant rich. Vegan polarized, I mean, I eat eggs. I mean, but plant rich, like first, I don't know if I coined it or I know the first time I used it, I hadn't seen it anywhere,

but that was in drawdown, which is rich. Like, first of all, that's a great word. And plants is inviting. Plants is a great word. People love plants, you know? And so plant rich diet, you know, it's like, so that's an invitation, come on in the water is fine. You know, find your way into the world of plants.

You know, you decide, you figure it out. But again, it was like a figure ground shift away from something that could cause people to resist to something that was invitational. And that's what regeneration is, an invitation to participate. It's not, that's what it is, come on in. It really is fine.

It works. And why are you here? At this point, at this time, given what we know, what's your purpose? What gives meaning to your life? That's the question everybody should ask. Yeah. We gotta end this in a couple of minutes,

but I can't let you go without pulling on this last thread, which is, and it's related to the psychology piece that we were just discussing. How do you, let's say somebody is listening to this, they're super enthusiastic, they're good to go. They wanna translate that sort of emotionality into action, like we talked about, but they're surrounded by a community of people

or family members or colleagues, et cetera, that are unreceptive to this. And they wanna be able to communicate effectively their passion for this to be a change agent for others. So given what we just talked about, what are some strategies for helping people communicate more effectively? Don't use the word climate.

Don't use the word global warming. Those are macro issues and are conceptual and mean almost nothing to everybody, really. I mean, we use the term, but they have no meaning. And most of the jargon and acronyms around climate have no meaning. They're completely conceptual. If you say somebody 1.5C, what does that mean to anybody? Nothing. I mean, somebody can understand it, even do it to 2.7 F, you know, make and figure it out, still means nothing. And so to move completely away from climate speak,

because it's meaningless to most people and to speak in ways that are meaningful to the people who surround you. And to the thing about carbon sequestration, for example, let's go back to soil farming, which is the purpose of regen ag is not to sequester carbon. That's an outcome. It's really important to understand the difference.

The purpose of regen farming for a farmer is to actually change their life to get out of debt to stop using poisons to poison their family or themselves and so forth you know to increase their profitability to be proud of what they're doing to absolutely become more resilient to drought in too much water so that the soil can be a reservoir instead of dirt. I mean, to increase the pollinators for your crops, which are now dead and gone. I mean, it goes on and on and on. By the way, the outcome is more life in the soil

and that life is measured by C, carbon. Okay, but that's an outcome. And if somebody is paying for it, hallelujah, it's another crop you've got going for you. But that is not the purpose. And so the same thing with climate. Our purpose is to really take care of each other, to improve the wellbeing of humanity on this planet

and all living creatures, all of life. And we do that, we reverse global warming. But if you start with reversing global warming, you've lost most people right there. Because you're putting the outcome before the value. The value, the purpose, the thing that connects, that doesn't connect. I mean, go to a party and somebody said,

oh, what do you do? Oh, I'm a climate activist. And they go, oh, good. Well, just immediately, everybody has some association with that negative or positive, right? Baggage comes into play and everybody's made up their mind how they feel about it before the conversation even begins. I mean, I like what you said earlier

when you were talking about that town hall and just having people raise their hands and identify what their values are, right? And through that, you discover this commonality, this like shared sensibility that we can unite over. If you're sitting next to somebody and you say, I'm a climate activist, I'm trying to save the rainforest. You're going, oh, cool.

If you say like, oh, I'm trying to save the world, which is even more ineffective, but if you say- Well, you just sound like an asshole. Well, I sound like, I say- Well, there's so much hubris in that. Yeah, what are you doing? I'm saving the world and so forth, which you can't do anyway.

But if you say, you know, I discovered this way of, you know, smartphones are being thrown away. And what I started to do in this place in Peru, I started to nail them up to trees and connect them together with, you know, little tiny solar cells that kept them charged. And that way the indigenous people there could hear every time a chainsaw started up tiny solar cells that kept them charged. And that way the indigenous people there could hear

every time a chainsaw started up and go with and find exactly where it was and stop it. Right, then you're like, tell me more. How do you do that? What is that? How'd you figure that out? And I mean, it opens up the conversation, you know, but you're doing something and there's specifics to it.

And that's what somebody is doing, by the way, I'm not saying that. And so again, it's really about reconnecting and you can't connect by thinking that somebody should connect to the place where your head is. We have to connect where our values are common. You're a beautiful man, Paul Hawken. I love being with you.

Thank you so much. You are a gift to, Paul Hawken. I love being with you. Thank you so much. You are a gift to humanity and the planet. I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours, and I really appreciate you coming here today and sharing your wisdom and experience. Thank you. And I have to say again, your wisdom and your drawing out of wisdom is in the book.

I appreciate that. I really appreciate that. I'm humbled by that statement. No, it really is. I listened. I mean, you know, and it's made a really big difference. I'm glad to hear it. And I'm excited for people to check it out.

Regeneration, Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation comes out September 16th, 14th. You can get it. Whatever. Yeah. You can get it now though. Yeah, you can pre-order it now. It's a beautiful book. And I think it's gonna really inspire a lot of people into the action piece, right?

Right. Cool. We'll come back and talk to me again sometime. All right. Thank you. Peace. Plants. plants. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed

today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com.

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Peace. Plants. Namaste. All right. Thank you.