Earth's Hidden Wisdom: Paul Hawken On Reframing Carbon, Consciousness & Why Hope Lies Within Nature's Intelligence

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33:08There's a humility that you have to have to appreciate those things. And I think humans, we wanna feel ourselves to be masters of the universe and we can solve all these problems. And there's a kind of egoistic piece to that, like a hubris that these problems can be solved by applying kind of the scientific methodology that we use to make sense of the universe. But that's by definition reductive. It's sort of like, here's a problem and we can identify the variables, isolate them and solve it. That applies to decarbonization. It's the same approach with medicine, looking at the human body and saying, well, here's a symptom and we're gonna, we're gonna throw this pharmaceutical at it.

33:55It's gonna resolve that symptom and the problem goes away without the humble appreciation for the complexity of the holistic organism. Like the same principles apply planetarily. And you're saying like, look, we have to appreciate this complexity, the beauty with a level of humility. And we can't continue to have this reductive approach of thinking like if we solve this problem, we're good, while we're still pursuing this extractive relationship with the planet at large. Absolutely. And the pharmaceutical example is really good actually, because if you see an advertisement on TV for a pharmaceutical, by law, they have to tell you all the side effects and dangers.

34:39And sometimes it goes on and on and on. I mean, it's comedic at this point. It is. I said, you have to start laughing going, you're going to swallow that? Okay. We don't have to do that with our climate solutions or even our solutions. We have a world that's doing this and doing this. What about the side effects of doing that? We don't talk about it. It's not known to us. At least when you take a drug, it's known and you know that it may absolutely it may do something for you believe this do that whatever but man you better watch out because a whole bunch of other things could happen to your body well the same thing about the current system whether it wants to just create more damage without talking about it or reconciling its actions with the effect or it's uh companies that are doing things that they think are good, you know, in the sense that this is going to help this, like direct air capture, you know, there's a whole world out there of financiers and engineers and big companies that are going to suck air from the atmosphere and, you know, take out the carbon, liquefy it and put it in geological formations, you know, and say that's a solution.

35:55And you're even seeing now the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change saying, we can't get there from here. unless we do that. And you don't have to be educated past ninth grade science, maybe seventh grade science to know that actually that'll never work, ever. It's about physics. It's not about belief. And that is that the gas, the CO2, what's up in the atmosphere is called entropy. In other words, you burn something and that's kind of its ash as well, which is the gas, CO2. The carbon was in the wood or in the coal or in the oil or in the natural gas, right? And you burned it, it's combined with oxygen and CO2 and goes up there.

36:41We know how CO2 reflects infrared radiation back down when it's in the air and we get a warmer climate. Well, direct air capture is these huge machines, gigantic and use amazing amounts of energy. They say, well, we're going to use renewable energy to do this. Okay, renewable is, we'll talk about that. But I mean, the fact is, it takes energy to take this energy out. So you're using entropy to cure entropy. It will never, ever work. And yet we're pouring billions of dollars into this. And we talk about hope. That's hopium. That's just ridiculous. And I'm not trying to be a smart ass. I'm just trying to say, do the math.

37:31and stop Buffalo convincing us that we can just live the way we're going to live far into the future. And we're gonna have these high tech bros out there figuring out how to take the carbon back out of the air that we're emitting as fast as possible. Yeah, maybe a more relatable example of that is just electric vehicles. Like these are a good thing. We're not putting emissions into the atmosphere in the form of exhaust as we always have. But fundamentally, it's still an extractive technology. We have to power these batteries up. The source of that power, you know, depends upon where you live, but it's not great.

38:14And we still have to create these batteries, which are extractive in terms of how we have to strip mine for these minerals, et cetera. So it's a step, it's a stop gap, but it's not a solution that is inherently regenerative in any way, right? So that's the real problem that you're getting at. And maybe to kind of like take a step back here, you talk a lot about like language, nounism, verbiage, the way we talk about the problem. But the book really begins with like how we talk about carbon itself. Like we think we know what it is, carbon's bad in the atmosphere, we need to remove it. but like, it's also the building block of life.

38:58And do we really understand what this is, where it comes from, why it's important and what it represents? Like you start off with just kind of blowing our minds with like the origins of carbon itself and reframe like how we should actually properly think about this. Yeah, I had to do that myself. Like where did it come from? And, you know, what does it do? and we know there's no other element like it. In chains, it has memory and stores energy. So carbon does that. Salt doesn't do that. Phosphor doesn't do that. Helium doesn't do that. Okay, but what we know is that its ubiquity is astonishing.

39:44And the best way to think of carbon is a flow like water, like a river, or the wind actually is a flow. it's the only way to understand it in terms of its presence and what it does and where it is every cell and you have 32 34 36 trillion cells you know in your body every single cell has 1.2 trillion atoms of carbon okay well what's it it's too many our brains can't no you can't handle it it's 44 octillion that's a number by the way but it's i don't know what that means No one else does either, including me. But the point being is what is the carbon doing in that cell? And well, it's chemistry, the same that you see outside of the cell.

40:32And so it's basically a chemistry experiment called the cell, you know, and eukaryotic cell. And so without carbon, there's no such thing. But everywhere we look in the world, both you know living and actually just you know geologic carbons there and um and in terms of the earth itself the flow of carbon is astonishing and beautiful and um but it's abstract that's an abstraction but what i'm trying to do is take it away from its objectification as it's a thing you know and we just figure out this thing we're going to fix it but actually that way of thinking as I said, cause the problem. We're gonna fix things, no or not.

41:20We're gonna live with things in a way that is supportive. You have this beautiful line in the book, speaking to the poetry of all of this. Carbon is presented as the narrator of life, the courier of existence, and the lattice that permeates cultures and organisms. I've never thought about carbon in that way. Right, yeah. And the origins of carbon itself. Can you talk a little bit about that? Well, sure, yeah, because it was commonly thought, I think until the 40s or 50s, that all the elements on Earth came from the Big Bang, which is 13.8 billion years ago. And Fred Hoyle, who is an astronomer in the UK, coined the term Big Bang because he thought it was just BS.

42:09He said the idea that everything, that we have all the elements and so forth, were created in a millisecond from an explosion 13.8 billion years ago. He said that was ridiculous. And he was proven right. And so most of the elements, we didn't know where they came from. They did not come from the Big Bang. Only hydrogen and helium did. But nobody knew where carbon came from. And just to get into chemistry, I mean, there's, you know, in hydrogen, you know there's hydrogen makes helium that's fusion that's the sun okay and uh there's an extra neutron that neutron creates an extraordinary amount of energy you know when they come together and that's why we have sunlight and heat and warmth but what hoyle wanted to know is okay but yeah great but then where did carbon come from because you would think uh if you count the protons and neutrons and electrons you think wow three times helium is carbon you know three times it's four which is 12 and uh you know and so carbon is 666 and helium is 222 and in terms of particles and that was accepted except what physicists discovered is that two helium can't make a carbon because of what's called resonance or vibration or gradients.

43:42They just can't mix into the other. They can't form. They can't fuse into carbon. So that was accepted, but no one knew where carbon came from. And they looked into space because you have these beautiful spectrometers. They can look out into space and then deduce what they're seeing by color, by the vibration of what's out there. And nobody could find carbon that way either that is in our bodies, is in your cells. And so Hoyle came up with a theory and it was basically when the stars are dying, they become giant red stars. And in that moment, beryllium, which is two helium molecules, can capture another helium molecule and that becomes carbon, right?

44:37But the thing is, it's a trillionth of a trillionth of a second that happens every 2 ,500 times beryllium is made. So you do the math on that one. It's like, you're kidding, and yet carbon is ubiquitous. It's in 99 % of everything on earth. It's in every living. Well, the math didn't make sense. you know like how could and yet hoyle insisted that was true and he went to caltech and he gave a talk about it and he was almost derided on stage people the physicists were going who invited him what's he saying this is you know and one scientist said there's the most outrageous prediction ever made by a scientist means it's the worst and but they he convinced people to test it And so they got a spectrometer to bomb nitrogen with protons and strip away and see if they could form the C12 that's everywhere in the world.

45:37And they did. Basically recreating, you know, what would happen out in, you know, the outer stellar galaxy to see if you could create the formation of carbon. It's astonishing that, you know, the universe conspired to create carbon in the first place. It's this unlikely event that can only occur under very specific circumstances. Yes, and to this day, really world-renowned physicists in Cambridge and Oxford and other universities say, like the chances of carbon being created in the solar system, in any system in the universe, is so incalculably small as it'd be impossible. And yet it's robust here on planet earth.

46:32Yeah. And so what do you make of that? Like, what do you infer from that? Ah, like, you know, in other words, the scientists can go all the way to that point, you know, of creation and describe it. And they know the resonances and the gradients and all the things that would have to be just right in order for that one single atom to be created. Okay, got that. But they can't explain the ubiquity and how much of it is in the universe or that it exists at all. And they accept it, they denote it, but they can't really explain how all the things came together. It's just the number, you know, 44 Arctillion, it's beyond that number.

47:19So, How, who, where, what, you know, the very fact that we don't know should give us some actually pleasure that life is something that is far more extraordinary than even we could possibly know or possibly understand. And yet there are, you know, trillions upon trillions of, you know, stars out there, you know, numbers we can't fathom. I would have to imagine there are other planets that have the capacity to host carbon-based life. Absolutely. And it's hard for us to scope the universe, how big it is. But you're talking about giant red stars. That's what our sun's gonna do. As it dies, it gets bigger and bigger and then it explodes into a supernova.

48:1286 ,000 suns explode into supernova every single day. in the universe. Wow. So now we can see the universe as actually kind of a garden or maybe that's not the wrong word, but, you know, it's a... A generative force. It's generative, yeah. And it's not just there like frozen, you know, in the Hubble telescope. You know, it's like, it's active when you look at it from that point of view and it's generating these super, you know, the supernova and then these clouds are huge and they float around for 100 million years and inside they're protected from cosmic rays and they're creating elements inside these clouds.

48:54I mean, it's hard to look at it from that point of view and not say, is this alive? You know what I mean? You could say, describe it physically. It's all physical, but part of you has to say, really? It's like, is that all it is? It's just physics? So that's what Hoyle said. You can't explain it with physics. enough sufficiently. Well, what is true for the macro is true for the micro. In the same example that we were discussing about, how medicine treats the physical body and how we sort of diagnose the planet, the similarities with that, the idea that the galaxy would operate as this massive super organism that is generative is true.

49:42And yet at the very kind of microorganism level at the cellular level, these same things are happening at the, you know, all the way from the subatomic, all the way to the galactic, you know, universal or whatever. And this book is sort of like, okay, here's carbon, head explodes. Now let's talk about plants. Let's talk about animals, insects, fungi, food, farms. You kind of canvas all of these things. But the fungi to me feels like the most interesting. You kind of call it the dark, it's sort of the dark energy of, you know, planetary life because we know so little about it. And you have these crazy numbers about like, I mean, we only, I think we only have identified like 10 % of the fungal species that actually exists.

50:27Like we're just at the beginning of understanding what it even is, let alone the crucial role that it's playing with respect to our biosphere. It's interesting when I wrote that chapter, I call it the queendom. there's five kingdoms and one of them is fungi and the reason i called it the queendom is because without that queendom or whatever you want to call it there wouldn't be the other four kingdoms okay it that's the mother okay and so in merlin sheldrake who wrote a tangled life beautiful beautiful book about fungi is it fungi i always say fungi fungi doesn't matter fungi I fungal. Keep going, sorry.

51:09Anyway, he read the chapter for me and then he said, but I wouldn't call it queendom. I said, well, why not? I kind of love it. And he said, well, there's too much royalty in there already.

51:26You can't help but stratify it. Yeah. Even when you're trying to, you know, give it the feminine gender. He's English. and so we agreed on kindom which is it's the kin dumb you know so talk a little bit more about the role that it plays that we might not we don't fully know we just know what i explained earlier about you know basically connecting you know to the root systems of every plant uh almost everywhere though not quite every plant but there's some exceptions but virtually every plant on earth and then um and toby kears who's doing really amazing science uh in amsterdam she's actually from the bay area but um they're now be able to video the process of mycelium knows what's going on in there um and what you see is um two things you can you can hear it there's a clicking sound it's like making clicking sounds and then it's transporting nutrients but when you look at it though it's you would think okay it's you know like it's a highway you know it's going along it's no it's going in opposite directions in the same vessel the same mycelia things are going opposite directions why well like arteries and veins at the same time yes in one vessel In one vessel because they must be encoded in some way for this nitrogen to go here and this phosphorus go there and to that route into this plant.

53:03I mean, it's like a stock exchange or a marketplace or, I mean, except the dimension of it in terms of numbers is so fantastic and so unbelievable. so yeah and those clicking sounds adam adamasky at the royal society in london has been recording them for years and what he says is that actually they're making words there was there's there's patterns pattern recognition and they're repeating these things okay he went on to say and some mycologists disagree so i want to be really clear about that but he went on to say yeah but they're stringing these words together in sentences what we call sentences but he said and those sentences as complex as indo-european languages so let's step back and say he's not right but he's not wrong that is say there's something going on there uh you have to just really think well wow this is one crazy organism in terms of its capabilities and what's going on down there and the honest answer is we don't know we do know molecularly what's being transported in terms of nutrients that are being fed to the plants and the plants are demanding them by the way they're saying i want this i want this i want that you know it's not just here i got nitrogen that's all you're going to get i mean the mycelia actually are mapping out the territory knowing whether it's rich in phosphorus or rich in this or where i can get selenium which is not so common as a mineral in soils and then going right to the source or that requester, which is another plant somewhere, and doing the transaction and getting carbohydrates.

54:48So we do know that and we know that these fungal, what do you call them, organisms can be gigantic. One can be acres and acres and acres and acres, 50 acres can be one species, one organism. You talk about the Oregon National Forest, where I think it's like a four square miles of like fungal beds, I don't know what you call them, that have been there for thousands of years. It's one species. One species. This idea that there's such a, on first inspection, like a rudimentary life form. And yet the complexity of the communication and the functionality of this is mind boggling. Like, how is that even happening?

55:44Well, and the importance of it, because we have basically engaged in an agricultural system that effectively destroys the fungi in the soil. I mean, it's just been an afterthought, right? Like we just don't really think about it or consider it as important. It's just these weird things that sprout up when it rains. Well, yeah, that's the seed. That's the fruit of the fungi. But the mycelia are destroyed by plowing. They're destroyed by chemical fertilizer. They're destroyed by herbicides. But the roots of a plant depend on this relationship in order to be nutrient dense. In other words, for the food itself to be the most nutritious as possible.

56:32And so what we're doing is by putting an NPK, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus in a chemical form and top dressing the soil with it, we get tremendous production. The plants are weak, tend to get infested. You keep doing that, the soil dies. We have to put herbicides because weeds then colonize sick soil. and we have glyphosate and so now we have pesticide glyphosate we have sick plants and so forth that are not nutrient dense right and all because we really destroyed the source of life which is soil and so in the book i talk about you know dark earth for sure and but soil is not to be seen as a medium just because we can take a bag or something and pour it into a pot and grow something we think it's just a medium but in the ground it's actually an organism it's one of the most complex it's the biggest organism on earth is the soil and it's alive and it makes sounds and you can hear it if you stick microphones down there and listen to it and um and the that life is what creates life right all life comes from the soil no place else and so that's why every single culture on earth that we know of has called the earth mother mother always no one said father earth because everyone knew that life came from the earth from the female and we're the one who the male, you know, basically, you know, Fritz Haber, the German chemist, invented a way to bypass all that.

58:20And that's the agriculture that we have today, which is, you know, polluting rivers and ocean that is killing the soil, that is producing tremendously greater amounts of food in terms of corn soy but so much so that we take 35 percent of the corn we grow and put into gas tanks as ethanol and then another i forget 70 percent of what's left goes to animals for CAFOs confined area feeding operations so we're growing all this corn and soy in a very very damaging way the second highest rate of cancer in the united states is iowa not surprised you know because of the chemical use spraying yeah spraying and so so but these are all things that we can change and are changing and that will produce more food healthier food a healthier environment healthier farmers um more resilient systems you know that aren't so subject to disruption from heat and water.

59:28The problem with global warming is that water is too much water, too little, too much heat or too much cold. I mean, it starts to whipsaw the jet stream up and down. So you get these strange anomalous things that are difficult for farmers to deal with. I mean, either flood the fields or kill the crops, whether it's too much water or too little. and so one of the things that has to be done is to look at agriculture because if we don't have food that's game over and so how can we create systems that are resilient because we all have to be resilient going into these next decades given the vagaries of a heating planet and the effects and impacts it's going to have on water river streams deserts fields crops oceans etc Gotcha.

1:00:20You've mentioned that things are changing and I wanna press you on that a little bit. It feels to me like, yes, there is progress in certain pockets, but short of overhauling our system such that it's premised upon an appreciation for the long-term incentives of restoring our soil and creating regenerative systems and doing all the things that you're talking about, we're stuck in a paradigm that prioritizes the short-term benefits and incentives. Like we're set up to be extractive, all of the incentives of our system basically emphasize that. And unless we blow up the system and create a new one, like how are we gonna get out of this kind of Ouroboros where we're just, we're eating our tail, right?

1:01:19Like we're never going to transcend this unless we reach some kind of tipping point, no threshold where we can't step back from, where we're actually grokking the fact that, we're not gonna be able to grow food anymore and kind of like a interstellar situation. I don't know, like it's hard for me to hold on to that level of hopefulness that you seem to inhabit. but two things there. One, I was talking to an indigenous person once and saying, we, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And he looked at me in the eye and said, who's we?

1:02:02good question because the rhetoric around what's going on is as if everybody thought did assumed knew what we're talking about and or was cause it was the cause or was the cause or was the cause and so I think we have to talk about the the state of the world and the actors who seem to be completely oblivious to where we live and what's going on from their actions you know corporate ceos companies the stock market capitalism and politicians who enfranchise that and so okay we can be aware of that and so forth but the we really want to talk about it in a in a different way and you talked about earlier about language and the language we we have inherited as english you know as students as in a culture and english in really all the european languages are very much about nouns german very much so english the most so because it's a kind of a language that just took words from five or six different languages but but words that came from the enlightenment that's about naming things and we are very good about naming to name something separates it it's a this and not a that that's what science does and then let's study this because it's different than that and okay great science but the indigenous languages and i point to them because you know their cultures go back now that i see in australia over 100 000 years but certainly 60 000 for sure and so how do they manage to stay there for all that time and if you look at those languages they're languages that are about verbs the verbs because verbs are relational they're about relation they're about connection they're about never losing that in our parlance and how we speak to each other or about the world uh in a way that separates us or separates you or separates us from each other or from the world that supports us, our mother.

1:04:13And so I think what you're seeing right now is a coming together of that intelligence and that wisdom with Western science. And there's amazing discoveries and understandings that are emerging from that. And you talk about hope. I mean, one of the things that I love right now is that science is just exploding with observations and tests and understanding of the world is completely different than what we were taught. What would be an example of that? I gave you some about roots, about plants, about butterflies, about, I'll give you more, you know, just like what's going on there? What we're discovering is what we don't know.

1:05:01That's what's so wonderful about it is that we don't know as opposed to, oh, we know, this is true, this is true, this is true. That creates the openness. That's empirical science. All those discoveries, like, holy shit, like we only are touching the surface of this. There's so much more to discover. And therein lies that humility that can put you on a different trajectory in your exploration. Traditional ecological knowledge really always looks at life as a complex system. And it is. And Western thought tends to look at systems as parts and pieces.

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1:09:29I forget which culture it is in the book that you talk about, but a culture that would name all of the trees based upon the sound that the branches would make at sunset in October, right? So you're somebody who's keyed in to nature, you know, probably more than anybody I know, and you walk past the redwoods without really paying too much attention. These people, you know, are taking it to a whole other level, right? They did. But like, are we gonna do that? Like if Paul Hawken, you know, walks past his redwoods, you know, on the way to the carport and has to remind himself to pay attention, you know, where's the hope for the rest of us?

1:10:15Well, the native Canadians were referred to as a Micmac. And what they did was extraordinary, which they can name the sound the tree was making, not the sound the wind was making. We have words for that. Right, but the tree rustling, when the wind blows, what the branch is making. The tree had a specific sound, like we have a sound, our voices have a specific sound. You know, you can close your eyes. oh that's rich you know like you can you have a very distinctive sound and these trees did too but the thing about it was they could hear it but they could name it they could give it a specific name right and remember the name that was the name of the tree that sound it made in october you know and every year and so they could go back five years later ten years later and listen to the sound and know that the tree had suffered or changed or was good doing good that was they could tell the condition of the tree from the sound and they didn't write it down they remembered the name of the sound we with our million words in english we have no such word for the sound a tree makes the tree makes you can say softing that's the sound the wind makes so what do we get what do we get from that just like this extraordinary understanding of the living world if the living world is all you have you don't have anything else nothing's being imported there is no nobody's gonna rescue you save you you become very very aware and that awareness i think is again i use the word exploding it's probably the wrong word but just is burgeoning all over the world um from the interaction between western scientists and traditional knowledge holders in uh indigenous cultures around the world and it's just marvelous and beautiful to see that exploration, the understandings that are arising.

1:12:18And again, what is arising is like how much we don't know. And that's a really wonderful thing because it's discovery, it's delight, it's possibility. And I just think if people can imagine such a thing, because it's true that there is a world emerging you know despite the best efforts of you know greed hate and delusion corporations and profit making and extractive economies um i think it's important for us to know that you know to to be aware of what's happening and how ridiculous it is in terms of our stewardship of the earth but at at the same time, something's happening. Right. Yeah. Beauty persists with a resilience that is remarkable.

1:13:13And to your point around awareness, like it proves the adage that, you know, on some level, like all the answers reside in, you know, our capacity to develop our awareness to like be present, whether it's the nature of our own minds or what's happening right beneath our feet by slowing down and actually like being present and attuning our focus and our attention to things we often overlooked. That's where there's all this mystery to be explored. Like in meditation, when a thought pops up, where did that thought come from? I didn't think that thought it simply arose. And then what happens when it vanishes, where does it go?

1:13:58And where is all of this happening? Like these sort of more existential questions of what it means to be alive and be a conscious being apply in the same way to all of the unseen things that are happening all around us all the time. I have this experience. I've only been invited once to talk to writers as a writer, a conference, they have writers conferences. and I described something there, which I hadn't ever said out loud before, but sometimes when I'm writing, I'll write a couple of paragraphs, and fiction writers often write a thousand words or something, then go look the next day and see if it's any good.

1:14:45I write a couple of paragraphs, and go right back to the top and edit it. I'm going in like this, all the way down. I kind of do that too. It's not a recommended approach. No, it's not, but I do it. But there's times when I go back to the top and I start to read it and going, I don't know, I didn't write that. I have no recollection of writing that or having those thoughts.

1:15:13So it doesn't make me special. In fact, it's the other way around. It just makes me observant or aware that when you're writing, it's not just disgorging what you think. okay and what you believe or what you've read or what you have learned there's something else going on or it's possible certainly that's true for poets we know that but great literature i don't know i don't talk to that many writers about the process but it's definitely not a deductive on you know deliberate and process it's something different yeah it's a download from the a unified field of consciousness, Paul. Thank you. Now I know.

1:16:01And yet, you can take credit for having - Sat there. Yeah, sat there and given expression to it. But it is interesting. Like this is a very different book. Like the last two books were these big books that were almost as much manuals as they were books. But this is like a book book. This is a literary poetic kind of adventure that you take the reader on. yeah it because that's where i that's where i wanted to go i mean i wanted to go into the mystery and and i went to you know ed young and carl zimmer and merlin and uh lizabeth colbert i mean i mean other writers really beautiful writers you know and just absorbed i i almost want to put on the back of the book these are all the books i read you know um just to open that up I may do it on a website.

1:16:52Just say, look at this one, look at this one, look at this one. And I'm not the origin, but I am storytelling. And what's emerging, again, I'll say this, I mean, from observational science is just heartwarming and beautiful and breathtaking. Anthony James was a person in South Africa, and he had a reserve, a wildlife reserve, in an area in South Africa where elephants had been extirpated a long time ago. There was no elephants around. And somebody called him and said, I have from another reserve in the south, I have eight elephants that are just acting so badly that we're going to shoot them all.

1:17:44He said, you can have them if you want. He said, I'll take them. well he got them there somehow in trucks and he made a special place for them to kind of season them into the property you know they couldn't get out, it was electrified and this and that and he just tore the shit out of it everywhere on the property and then he tore down the electric fences and they had to go capture them again and it was just hell but he got them back and he spent years and he had a Land Rover and he'd go park nearby and just with the Land Rover. And they could see it and they'd watch. At first they'd sort of come near it like it was a threat but then eventually he realized it wasn't a threat and then he would get out and stand there just next to the Land Rover.

1:18:39And then as time went on he would actually move out further from the Land Rover and then closer and they began to trust him as a person, as a human being. Obviously, they had been treated really, really badly by human beings. You don't become that destructive as an elephant for no reason. And eventually, they started to come up to his house and all of them, all eight of them, and his wife is a French chef and they would take everything in the garden because they didn't know it was a garden. They just ate it. But they got used to that. And then one time he was on Durban and the elephants were coming to the house and he called his wife and said, the plane's been canceled.

1:19:34And she noticed right away that the elephants stopped and turned around and went away. Okay. he died someplace else he didn't die there on the land and the next day he had 18 elephants by then they surrounded the house and stood there all day a year later on the exact day they came back stood around the house right for the whole day and so it went so what we're talking about is what do we know how do they know how do we know what they know we don't and so that's the world I'm talking about which is not the world that I know hey read my book I can explain everything I don't explain it at all I'm ignorant but I care about discovering where we live or where I live and discovering what I don't know.

1:20:45And we know there's 3.4 trillion creatures, you know, on land and ocean. And every single day they're communicating, not just once a day, by the way. They're communicating. They're making sounds. What are they saying? They're talking. Those elephants were obviously talking to each other. but we have no idea and so we live on a planet where just fused with intelligence and sentience from creatures we never thought had any sentience at all we know now that insects are sentient they have feelings it's like oh come on some entomologists will go that's crazy, no we do know that from Lars Chica work and other people's work so I'm just trying to like open the curtain a little bit for the reader and going this you know and verify it there's notes there's footnotes there's sources you know you can look it up yourself it's not me I'm not the source and just like what happens to you when you know that's the world that we're losing and that's a world we've never really understood and that's the world we thought was dumb as a rock.

1:22:00I mean, it may have four legs and a tail, but we never gave it any thought that it had language. Mother bats speak a dialect in their ultrasonic thing. And they name their children. And they teach their children to avoid certain male bats because they're not cool, right? That's, they call that motherese, that language. They don't know what to call it. And if you take that ultrasonic sound, which we can't hear, and you slow it down, so in the audible range, it is so beautiful. It's one of the most beautiful sound you've ever heard. And we are the only culture that demonizes bats. They're sacred everywhere else in the world.

1:22:49And so maybe they're not demons. it's just that trying to open up just that way of seeing where we live I mean the scorpion came into my house this week I am so gentle with that scorpion I do not want them in my house I don't want to be bit by one I know that one but I don't kill it I take it out to its ecosystem which is not my house and that came from just seeing the insect world in a new way. And like, I just can't kill mosquitoes very easily, but I will kill a mosquito. I mean, I confess if it's keeping me awake, but I can't kill anything else. I'm not surprised to hear that. But you ready for this?

1:23:42Yeah. The story that you just told of the elephants actually came up on the podcast yesterday. Anthony James? That same story. And it came up in the context of a discussion around a lack of appreciation or a hubris that we have around the sentience and emotional intelligence and interior lives of our fellow creatures. But it was in the context of a larger conversation about something else altogether different. I was hosting a podcast with the host of this podcast series called Telepathy Tapes, where she spends, I don't know if you've heard of this, she spends time with non-speaking, neurodivergent autistic people.

1:24:29And it's this exploration of the possibility of extra perceptual abilities. But in the context of this, take what you will from that. But just to ask the question is also to expand your horizon of appreciation for the complexity of other living creatures. And she talks about Rupert Sheldrake and like his experiments with animal consciousness, et cetera. And that story of the elephants like comes up as an illustration of that point. Like we think we know, but what do we really know? And when we look up and we see the swarms of birds who all pivot at the exact same time and never collide with each other, or the migratory patterns of whales and the way they communicate across vast distances.

1:25:20Like all of these things would go, yeah, wow, that's crazy. And then we never think about it again, let alone like try to get to the root of like how this is even happening to begin with, that these organisms could be collaborating and communicating with each other in a way that we have a hard time believing is possible because of the simplicity of their brains. Not so simple though. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody, I forget, did a calculation. Why can bees do the waggle dance and do all this stuff and convey all this information to each other? And the bee brain is very, very small compared to our brain, except at any given moment, it can have a million different connections within that brain.

1:26:06Okay. So it's not size. Size does something too, for sure. But we have been reductionist in the sense of the smaller brain, the smaller intelligence. And that doesn't play out. Also reductionist in what we consider to be intelligence. Yes. We're intelligent because we can do these certain things, but perhaps it's more intelligent to not live in an extractive relationship with the world but more in a symbiotic one of harmony where, I mean, if you're a dolphin cruising around with your family members, having a good old time, like that's probably a better life. Most of us are living. Well, we're the only species that dysregulates the climate.

1:26:56There's 8. They say four or five, six species, million species. Okay, we're the only one. The rest of them don't do that. And so intelligent, I question that. i mean if we're so intelligent why would we destroy the atmosphere we know it i mean and we know it since the 19th century and we know it very well the science is locked no argument about the science and because it's really simple the science you know it's really about how to try Pyatomic molecules, you know, re-radiate, you know, heat back to Earth. It comes up from infrared. I mean, this is so simple. It's like Climate 101, you know. So we've known that since 1856.

1:27:45Eunice Foote demonstrated that a woman scientist in the United States, 1856, demonstrably. And she wasn't listened to because she couldn't go to scientific conferences because she was a woman. Scientists didn't allow women in the conferences. but so i mean and yet we still do it so it's really interesting to see what is intelligence in this context you know i mean are we brilliant yes no question about it and i would say also not to be a gainsayer but i mean we live in one of the craziest stupidest times in history in terms of our relationship to each other and to the living world but i also think we live in the most brilliant time in history so both are happening at the same time and there is a brilliance in the world that's arising and emerging and present today that is so heartwarming and so inspiring and so extraordinary so i'm not here to you know i'm here to be curious and observe i see both at the same time um and what will emerge what will finally happen what will we survive I've even, I don't know, but I know that I wanna be here and do whatever I can, you know, and so doing, it just changes my life, you know, and who I meet and what I read and, you know, everything and where I live, all that sort of stuff.

1:29:10And it can change everybody's life. It feels like part of the problem has something to do with our proclivity for pursuing self-interest. Like the idea that what's important is like what I wanna do and what I need to get and like how I'm gonna get it as opposed to what's good for the commons. And I don't think it's a genetic wiring that we have when you look back on indigenous cultures and you talk about this in the book, like it seems like people were really all about the commons back then. It's systems that have been laid on top of us that have tweaked and thwarted our better interest and deluded us into believing that getting what's ours is really what life is about.

1:30:00Yeah, Nate Hagans, who is a podcaster, talks about the carbon pulse, that really when we discovered coal, gas, and oil, it was a huge change in human civilization because of what it gave us in terms of fossil fuel slaves. I mean, it used to be we'd have to have a person do work for us, and each person could only do the amount of work they could consume in terms of calories. And that was it. And then wood helped, and that was kind of a breakthrough, but it didn't really change what a person could do. Fossil fuels, oil, coal, change what a person could do, what they could make, and what we could make, and so forth.

1:30:42And so the carbon pulse is this increase in the use of carbon-based fuels to this day, to this minute. We have increased. It doesn't level off. It doesn't, oh, we have enough. No one's ever said that. And so if we don't recognize that, then we're going to pulse ourselves right out of our civilization. and we have these fossil fuel slaves and we're taken for granted. We grew up in it. We have our cars, we have our gas stations. Everywhere I drive, you know, I'm in LA, just look at the patterns of retail, the patterns of the consumption, the patterns of at the airport and so forth, you know. I mean, and the increase in convenience and speed and quickness and facility and convenience, that impels the culture.

1:31:39All those increase the footprint that we're having and the impact we're having and so forth. Along with our entitlement to that footprint. Of course, we grew up that way and I'm going to take care of my family and this and that. So that's all left-brained thinking and what's happened historically, if you look back over the last 2 ,000 years, you get these kind of shifts in humanity to the left brain, which is a problem-solving brain. But the right brain is synthesis, is really different, quite different, and looks at connections and systems and looks at the whole. We look at systems. The right brain looks at complex interactive systems.

1:32:27Relationships. It's always about relationships. and so we're all look at we have a presence all left brain it's all about getting taking wanting you know and and and so we're there how do we get there I don't know I don't know how matriculated that way but I do know that there are some just extraordinary people who are walk amongst us who are doing fantastic things and I'll if I was a betting man I'd put my money on that side than the one that's in power now. That's good to hear. Cause it is, I agree with you. It is a situation in which, you know, we're kind of escalating, we're hurtling towards, you know, catastrophe on one level.

1:33:11And then kind of on a parallel track, we're the acceleration of technological innovation and like kind of first principles thinking in terms of problem solving and, you know, a more expansive appreciation for, you know, the natural world, like all of these things are kind of all happening at once and they're all speeding up together, but it is a ticking clock. Like there is a deadline here. We're sort of quickly approaching this precipice and it's like, which version of ourself is gonna get there first before it's too late. It's weird how it's like, everything feels really sped up though. Well, the existing system is self-terminating.

1:33:58There's no question about that. And it's accelerating that we're in the self-terminating system. And period. So I'll give the example about growing up and fighting fires. I'm not sure I like the verb, but you dealt with fire where I lived up in the Sierras. and I was a teenager and I lived in Nevada City with the family who took me and I didn't have a home and you'd marshal everybody who was able-bodied to fight the fire, we didn't have a big brig in the farm in there, couldn't afford it and they taught you what to do and everything like that and afterwards you tamp it down with your boots and make sure there's no hot spots, there's nothing there's no embers in there and you find them they're embers, you know, like a manzanita will stay hot for a long time, you know, and the ash is over it so you don't see it.

1:34:54And then you get a wind that night and then blow embers, restart a fire. So you have to walk the fire where it burned and then you eventually go home or whatever, you know, and you look at this wasteland. It's all black, the trees, you know, everything is just gone, you know. But I do also remember, like in the spring, the grass is greener than you've ever seen because of the ash feeds it those are nutrients and you see wildflowers that you've never seen before you or i was told they hadn't been seen before because there's certain wildflowers that only break open the carapace under extreme heat they're not annuals and so i use that today as an analogy for what's happening the world's on fire it's on fire there's no question about it but at the same time the fire and the wildflowers and and and the emergence is happening at the same time not sequentially and it's easy to see the fire it's harder to see the birth the emergence because it's not centralized it doesn't have a voice it wasn't elected it doesn't make the news cycle it doesn't light up the amygdala for click-throughs it's it's the best of humanity and there's a lot of it out there i feel this extraordinary human beings in communities and angels and villages all over the world who actually see the fire they're singed by the fire and they're coming together and i use the regeneration but restoration renewal uh whatever word works for it doesn't matter but they're creating more life for themselves their children their future their land um and not only more life on a biological level but also in terms of schooling education the welfare of the children the welfare of all the creatures and animals and that live around them that they have that they now, I guess, value in a way that they never had before because they never knew they were, they were never threatened before and now they are.

1:37:21Well, that example of that you just provided, illustrates this notion that like everything is an opportunity for rebirth and regrowth and hidden within whatever name your crisis, You know, there's some possibility for something to blossom that couldn't have otherwise. And you're nothing if not hopeful, like hope is a, you know, recurring sort of theme or strain in all of your work. And I can't help but think like in this particular moment that we're all experiencing right now, where there's so much political division and uncertainty for somebody who's listening to who does find themselves doom scrolling and feeling a lack of agency or struggles to find anything to hold on to, to feel that hope and identify that wildflower.

1:38:19Like how does one go about doing that? Like, what are you really trying to say in this book to the reader? It doesn't have to be a wildflower, it can be a child. the suffering around us of children is extraordinary the suffering of migrants is extraordinary um you know talk about if you're going to use the word regeneration which i have of course you want to do it as with the biggest arms as possible because if we're not restoring renewing the lives of the six billion people who wake up every single morning on earth

1:39:04facing existential threat. It could be food, it could be security, it could be school, it could be jobs, it could be money, it could be income. And this is in the United States too. This is not some other country. And the bulk of humanity is waking up every morning with that. and you wonder they're going to do something about climate or biodiversity no they're not they have to take care of themselves and their family and children first so if there is to be a genuine climate biodiversity slash movement and i think people do understand this who um mentioned earlier you know uh you have to do it in such a way that improves the lives of those six billion people you know who are not you know basically they're extractive but that's because they've been forced to they have no other choice you know because they're right there at the margins you know but um so it's it's not about butterflies it's not about it's it's about whatever you see ever you know whatever you care about whatever causes grief is your pathway and grief is like the gift of the angels because grief can only come from one place and that comes from love.

1:40:22You can't feel grief if you have no love. And love comes from the heart and the heart is the organ that infallibly tells the truth. Never lie to you or anyone else. And so I don't mean to say, oh, it's out there in nature somewhere. I'm just saying that everything that we have taken for granted in terms of the living world is sent in alive communicating just as we are but not destroying its habitat not destroying its children not destroying others and um and so it's just so much to take in and learn and so forth but you can do it right in your neighborhood right where you are and the thing churches have kind of got a bad rap especially in the last election cycle because but let's put that aside you know a mosque and synagogues and and and churches you know forget what happens on Friday night or Saturday or Sunday okay all the other time what do churches do they take care of people they care you know and that's what all religions have done and so forth so you can gain say religion for all the things it's done they're really stupid Catholic Church which probably lead the pack on that.

1:41:46But you can't say the fact that the parishioners and the people, the attendants, people who worship, the people pray five times a day, they actually do things besides that, which is to take care of other people and other places, you know? That's us. That's also us. And that's kind of overridden or not looked at, you know? I think that's a really beautiful place to end it. Like I feel like I have a lot of other questions for you, but that was such a poetic way to punctuate what is a very poetic book, a deeply soulful book. Like you're a soulful guy, right? You've written all of these amazing books that really get into the brass tacks of the problem and the solution with respect to the environment.

1:42:36But this is your soul song. And I think what you just said is a really eloquent way of encapsulating the message that you're trying to carry. It's really a beautiful thing that you've created. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Rich. And it's lovely being here with you always.

1:43:01That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at mealplanner.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.

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