How Climate Change Is Making Us Sick And What We Can Do About It with Amanda Ravenhill

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

As above, so below, the plant is reflective, its micronutrient is reflective of the micronutrients of that soil. And when that soil is stripped from pesticides, you know, herbicides, fungicides, insecticides that are in the system, those nutrients don't get into the plants. And the microbiome of the soil is.

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Episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Just a quick note before we get into today's episode. We experienced some audio issues in the beginning of this interview. They resolve in the latter portion and we hope it won't interfere with your.

Listening to this important conversation.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy.

I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, that's Pharmacy Within Half a Place for Conversations that Matter. And today we're going to have one of the most consequential conversations we've ever had on the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm with Amanda Ravenhill, one of the leading climate activists and thinkers We are in literally the Drake Passage on our way to Antarctica to witness what is really happening there. We've already lost 3 trillion tons of ice from the Antarctic sheet. It's staggering to think about and we're really on the precipice. But the good news is there is good news and we have a moment.

Where we can actually transform all this.

And not let it be the disaster.

That it could be.

I want to tell you a little bit about Amanda. She's really extraordinary. She's one of my absolute favorite humans. She's the executive director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute who coining the term Station Earth, and that is dedicated to accelerating the development and deployment of strategies that.

Radically regenerate the Earth's ecosystems, which is about what we need to be doing, which is restoring and regenerating. She also held the role as co-founder and executive director of Project Drawdown, the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming because it was the only plan ever proposed to reverse global warming. She's a member of Sea Stars at Acapella Group, blending harmonies with new narratives of a future that works for 100% of life. She's an avid gardener, stewarding her small backyard farm to build soil, host pollinators, create medicines, and grow food. She lectures and speaks publicly on climate, biochar regenerative design, carbon drawdown strategies, mindfulness, and systems thinking. She's my kind of gal. She's also an active member of an international community focused on addressing imminent global challenges.

Welcome, Amanda. Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor to be here. with you here today and also on this boat with this incredible crew of folks facing the wow-ness of the now-ness, wow it's now in terms of the climate emergency and stepping into our presence and our wholeness as human beings.

Yeah, as background, this trip, this boat is not a vacation trip.

It's a trip of carefully selected humans who have the intelligence, the creativity, the.

Entrepreneurship, and the networks to actually make a real difference in climate. And we're here to bring awareness to ourselves and to the world. And it's gonna be quite, I think, an experience for us. And we're just beginning and we got over the throwing up part, the great pitch-ish.

But it's easy to get doomy and gloomy about climate change. We've had the author of the Uninhabitable Earth on the podcast and it's kind of depressing. But what's so beautiful about the re-imagination of climate from a solutions perspective is that even though it's worse than we think, it's also better than we think. And climate change seems sort of vague to most people. We hear about floods, hurricanes, fires, distant, not immediate, and a warming planet. We don't quite get it. And most people are not getting the personal impacts on themselves, particularly around health. So if you really care about health, which a lot of people listening to this podcast do, why should you also care about climate change?

Well, it's definitely complex, but I think it comes down to toxicity, essentially. So that which is toxic to you is likely toxic to other life around you. And solving climate change is about having cleaner air and cleaner water and a cleaner atmosphere, which all lead to better planetary health, better ecosystem health, and better health for all species and all of their offspring for all time. And what is possible now is not gonna be possible in 10 years in terms of what we're able to do to create that planetary health. Because of these tipping points like the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, we're making it, it's going to be harder and harder. Climate change makes it harder to deal with climate change because of these reinforcing feedback loops. And so what we can do now to create that planetary health, which then creates health for all of the cascading trophic levels of life really matters now. And there's also personal things like climate change makes disease worse. Dengue fever. Climate change makes malnutrition worse because of food shortages and crop failure. And then it's already such a fragile geopolitical moment. The Pentagon calls climate a threat multiplier. So you can tie, you know, the Syrian conflict and many other conflicts and the displaced people that come from that to climate stresses, to droughts, you know, the drought that happened in Russia that caused them to have fires, which caused them to not export grain, then led to- Food scarcity. Food scarcity, which led to- Violence. All sorts of food riots. And so, you know, how we limit our warming now, which is, you know, so critical, it really creates all of these cascading effects and these unintended consequences into the future, which, you know, there's so many different forms of health, right? But mental health, the IPCC, which is the largest scientific coalition ever to come together, which works on climate change, just came out with their sixth report around vulnerability, adaptability, and impacts. And they said that climate change is affecting now 100% of humanity's mental health. All of us are affected now.

So true. Well, this is such a powerful work that you've done, Paul Hawk has done. Paul has been on the podcast twice for Regenerate and for Drawdown. And the solutions are out there. So part of the problem is like, oh, I want to cure cancer. Well, I can't cure all cancer because we don't know how to do it. But what you're proposing is that we now have the science legitimate science that shows us if we collectively act in time, we can literally stop and also reverse or draw down carbon enough to reverse climate change. So we actually can go backwards. Maybe we can get back to even pre-industrial times if we implemented the solutions that now are proven that exist. Not talking about some new invention or new discovery, but actually what we already know how to do. So you really don't say this is a science problem, a human problem. What do you mean by it being a human problem?

You know, it's a lack of ingenuity and courage, and that's fed by some very specific disinformation campaigns from fossil fuel companies, and also the media cycle in our 24-hour media loop. When we first started doing Drawdown, we did an analysis of all climate change news out there, and we found that about 90% of the news around climate was around the future that we don't want. Now, if you look at psychology or if you look at motorcycle racing or airplane flying, you're not supposed to look at the thing you don't want to hit, right?

Right.

You're supposed to look, you know, power.

Of- Aim at the ball.

Yeah, exactly. Aim at the ball. So, yeah, so it's really kind of a problem of ingenuity. And then all of that causes fear. And when we're in fear, we're in our fight or flight, on our amygdala, we can't, think long term and we can't think creatively. And so there's grief to be had and we all need to move through that grief, ideally in connection with someone else, in connection with the planet, be witnessed in it. And once there is loss, it's not all going to be roses. There's already loss.

Yeah, we're already, yeah.

There's billions of people hungry because of climate change already. There's people having to leave their homes, There's people who won't be able to return to their homes. There's baked-in sea level rise, and we need to grieve all of that and also move through the grief so that we can find creative action and not just get stuck in the apathy and nihilism that can come out of that. And I think that actually the apathy and nihilism is the most destructive and dangerous force on the planet right now.

And what's the medicine to fight that? You talk about having agency, but what is What is the way that we overcome apathy and feel empowered as individuals? Because it seems like such a massive problem. And like you said in your talk that you gave before, 90 companies are responsible for almost all-- Two-thirds. Two-thirds of all greenhouse gas emissions. And as little humans doing our little lives, actually, what can we do?

Yeah, I'm a big fan of nonviolent direct action or civil resistance. You know what Gandhi did and what a lot of the civil rights leaders in the US did. And basically it's non-cooperation with the current system. So maybe that looks like jamming the call centers of certain corporations. Maybe that means street puppet theater. You know, there's all sorts of different ways to do sit-ins and boycotts and just make ourselves be known. We have voices, they have money, but we have masses, you know, and we can really change things. And in fact, if you look at how things have changed in the world, that's the only thing that's really changed quickly, which is what we need.

The thing about abolition, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, they didn't start in Congress. They ended in Congress. When those movements got big enough, they were unable to sort of look back.

And you can do it out of loving kindness. I mean, you can for sure be angry. I am very angry at Exxon for knowing about climate change in 1977 and then investing in drilling rights in the Arctic. Very angry. But I also don't think Personally, I don't go into evil and I don't go into personal faults. I go into what is the larger system that that was an emergent quality of. And so in loving kindness, they need us to put pressure on them. Those corporations are all filled with individuals who want to do no more, who in their heart's heart know that they need to do more, but they're all stuck in filter bubbles and confirmation bubbles of, oh, it's an all above energy. strategy that we need and oil is needed because the poor people need to heat their homes, you know, and they just get stuck in these other narratives. So if we can come in with these 1.5 degree, you know, scientific research studies and give them another alternative, then they can step into that future.

Yeah, I mean, as a doctor, Amanda, I was interested in climate change personally, but I didn't really understand why it.

Was so important and why my patients were sick because of the things that we do in our food system. that as a consequence drive climate change, but they also, there's so many other things. It seems like the shocking fact to me was when I learned about Project Drawdown was putting together and clicking the dots that our food system collectively, we do across all the different areas of our food system is the number one driver of climate change and also the number one solution. And it's causing global warming, soil loss.

Poisoning of our environment, chronic disease, rainforest destruction, and killing your oceans. So can you unpack how our food and ag system does that? And then what are the ways that we can transform our food and agricultural system to regenerate climate?

Yeah, so I'll start with the second part. 12 of the top 20 solutions to climate that we found in Drawdown are food and land related, which we all have a lot more agency over too, right? You choose what you eat at least three times a day. And food is just one part of agriculture. There's fibers, there's medicine, there's materials. I think the future where we'll see us build growing so much of what we use. And we'll laugh at how much we wore virgin plastic in this time. Because it's just such a waste of that, you know, which could be used for kind of medical reasons and ways that we don't know how to otherwise use materials. So 12 of the top 20 solutions are food and ag related. And in terms of the emission side of things, actually more carbon has gone into the atmosphere from agriculture than energy production. And that's because essentially of tilling. So healthy soil is kind of like, you can think of it as a micro rainforest. So there's all of these beautiful interconnections, this biodiverse, just orgy of life that happens under soil. So much interchange of carbon and electrons. And when you go in with tilling, you're basically doing deforestation at a micro level. and releasing all of that carbon into the atmosphere and cutting all of the mycelial mushroom networks. The neural networks. It's actually a series of tubes much like the internet. Suzanne Simard calls it the wood wide web. And that's how sugars, there's the liquid carbon pathway, which is photosynthesis. CO2 then turns into plant sugars, which feed plants, and then they go down into the roots. and through the mycelial network, mycorrhizal, myco-mushrooms-rhizal roots, they go, those sugars feed into the soil. They tell the soil what the plant needs. The soil, all of the different mycorrhizal knowing goes out, collects whatever nutrients, and comes back to the plants. There's this incredible system of commerce that's happening that we're just starting to understand because soil is very hard to study in a lab.

I mean, plants have 20 senses, and.

They'Re constantly communicating with other organisms. And so they're giving the microbes food. The microbes are extracting nutrients that they can't extract themselves and giving them nutrients. This is beautiful symbiotic dance. And what we do is we just kill the soil. We kill it, we poison it with chemicals, and we create soil and turn it into dirt, which is dead, which is why we have to put more stuff on it, which creates this vicious cycle where we end up actually then end up affecting our health because the plants have much less nutrients than they did 50 years ago because the nutrients aren't in the soil, but because we killed the soil. So it actually can't extract the nutrients.

Yeah.

So the broccoli is 50% less nutrients.

Than it did 50 years ago. Exactly. As above, so below, the plant is reflective. Its micronutrient is reflective of the micronutrients of that soil. And when that soil is stripped from pesticides, you know, herbicides, fungicides, insecticides that are in the system, those nutrients don't get into the plants. and the microbiome of the soil is related to the microbiome of our gut, which we're learning so much about is a driver for serotonin and is a driver for so many different of our health systems. And so, yeah, the nutrient density piece of this, I think, is about to be a lot more popular.

It's so key because the ways we farm using tillage and then glyphosate, which is on 70% of all crops, the number one agrochemical, it's basically a microbiome destroyer of our gut and the soil. And it creates this horrible downstream consequence for everybody about whether it causes cancer or not. And then nitrogen fertilizer, which is about 400 billion pounds a year we put on the soil, literally kills the soil. And not only that, it then causes nitrous oxide to be released, which is 300 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And if that weren't enough, it then runs it off into the waterways causing eutrophication, which leads to dead zones. And the Gulf of Mexico has one the size of New Jersey that kills 212,000 metric tons of fish. That's a lot of food. And there's 400 of these around the world. And just the nitrogen itself uses 1 to 2% of our energy for its production from fracking, which is methane. It's the biggest production of methane is from fracking, which is from the nitrogen, from the fertilizer, from the, and then all these fertilizer companies are creating climate smart agriculture, which means they're Why don't they use more fertilizer? It's just, it's the really horrible, it's like a horrible vicious cycle, but there is a way out.

Yeah. Yeah.

And it doesn't have to be like that. And it's scalable. Yes. Like, they'll say, oh, you know, nice organic farmer, that's nice for your hippies. But actually, the science is really clear.

That there is a way to regenerate soil, which other than the oceans is.

The biggest carbon sink on the planet. So how do we do that? Things that you can do are, you know, stop tilling, putting cover crops in, which then adds to pollinators coming and reseeding and, you know, more biodiversity, bringing in animals, you know, integrating livestock into your farms, which then also creates all sorts of nutrient density in the soil.

And by the way, we had 160 million rooming this continent in America before we all showed up, and they were pooping and peeing all over everywhere. using their saliva, which stimulates plant growth. And they built up to 50 feet of topsoil, which we've mined basically. We've extracted it, and now we're running out. And it's estimated that we might run out in 60 harvests, which is terrifying.

Yeah. Yeah. Not to mention we massacred that herd in order to destabilize the native communities.

Oh, there was that.

And they say Lai Lujun, who's a Dene activist, says that, you know, it wasn't just that the natives followed the buffalo, but the buffalo also followed the natives. They lived in such symbiotic harmony where the Native Americans were, you know, doing things like controlled burns and creating meadows, you know, and they actually all co-created the grasslands together. And it was done in such a state of reverence, you know, what other people call like a sacred way of being. of the wholeness of, you know, really understanding all the dynamics of the ecosystem that we're just not taught now, you know, we're taught... No, no. Not as important things.

No, I mean, I think they really.

You know, understood those intimate relationships and they even had a word for it.

Which means to all my relations. To understand they're in relationship to soil.

And the plant and the animals and the sun and the water and the air, all of it, it's all of our relations. And we've lost that because we've kind.

Of disconnected from our relationship to the earth.

And in the Māori units, they said, the land is us and we are the land. They get it and we've just lost all that intimacy with our environment in a way that we think we don't need it. But everything we do, all of our activities, all of our resources, everything we wear comes from the earth.

Right?

It's so hot. Yeah.

And Buckminster Fuller often talked about how Darwin was really misinterpreted. And it wasn't just survival of the fittest, but really survival of the fitness within your ecosystem. How much you give back, how much you cooperate, how much you live in that sacred reciprocity and cooperation that actually determines survival. And Lynn Margulis, who with James Lovelock came up with the Gaia principle, really studied this a lot. I highly recommend looking looking into her work in Symbiotic Earth, a film about her, where she talks about symbiogenesis, like the Genesis and evolution coming from symbiotic organisms coming together. And there's just so many different ways of knowing now that we can tune into that are very different than the kind of, like, mechanistic, overly reductionist way of looking at things. Yeah.

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There are many sectors that need attention. Energy sector, education of women, reproductive sovereignty. These are actually climate solutions because the power of women empowers the world. But there are really scalable practical ways that we can transform the way we grow food, which will impact our health, impact climate, environment, economy, social justice, in so many ways. So it's really this virtuous cycle once we do that and regenerates all those systems.

Yeah, yeah. And there's new labels now and certifications which weren't around a couple of years ago. So you can look for the regenerative organic certification, you can look for land to market certification, which came out of the Savory Institute. And there's more and more ways to shop and eat regeneratively now than ever before. And also just meet your local farmers. The more names of the farmers I know of the things I'm eating, I think it's directly related to health and happiness for me and all.

Yeah. Joel says, you know, know the face that feeds you. You know, that's really cool.

And I remember went to the local.

Farmers market, I bought a little regenerative lamb, you know, half a lamb and put it in my freezer. It was like, oh, this is right for my neighborhood.

Yeah, yeah. And just to say also in terms of regenerative agriculture, the potential, there's the 4 per 1000 initiative out of France that came out of the Paris climate talks, and it's just 0.4% of soil carbon. If we can increase soil carbon by 0.4%, everywhere in the world, it would offset all of emissions.

Say that again.

Just 0.4% of soil carbon if we increase that around the world could offset all emissions.

And regenerative agriculture can do much more than that.

One, two, three, four, five percent, even more sometimes.

Yeah, not to mention the water benefits and denitrification and increasing nutrient density and just more ethically relating to animals and plants. And I mean, there's just so many incredible, you know, welcome unintended consequences that start. There's kind of this runaway regeneration when you get it started.

I think we're in this exciting moment, Amanda, where I'm starting to hear real shifts in not only policy, but in government and actions, as well as private corporations. So the Biden administration should just partly through our efforts of Food Fix campaign and others working on this, put a billion dollars towards regenerative agriculture and farmers were penalized before if they put cover crops on to protect the soil. Now they're going to be incentivized to actually be carbon farmers. Nestle, which you think is one of the worst actors in the food business, actually is committed by 2030 to have 80% of its supply chain be regenerative.

Yeah.

That's staggering. That's the biggest food company in the world. And why is that happening? It's happening because as individuals, we're speaking out. We're voting with our dollars, we're voting with our voice, we're voting with our vote. And that is starting to be recognized as an inevitability. So that gives me a lot of hope.

Yeah.

A lot of hope.

It gives me a lot of hope. And I'm also super snarky when it comes to corporations just because they have such a bad track record. So, Yeah, we just need to make sure their version of climate smart agriculture, regenerative agriculture is truly all the way there and not just checking a couple boxes and maybe creating some downstream.

Yes, exactly. I think 60% of the Climate Smart Alliance is funded by the nitrogen fertilizer companies, which are massive.

Yeah, and are trying to own the data of all the farmers.

And their idea of kind of smart agriculture is pouring more nitrogen in the soil to grow more grains and beans for people in the developing world, which I think is a potential disaster.

Yeah, yeah. Not to mention, yeah, just all the insecticides. The insect apocalypse, not a fun thing to know, but it's happening. We've lost somewhere around 60% of the biomass of insects in the last 50 years. Yep. fairly alarming and that's very much tied to pesticides. I remember just even when I was young driving down the highway, you would have so many bugs on your windshield and it's not an issue at all anymore.

I used to be a gas jockey. That was my first job and my job was washing the windows. Every time it's like all the bugs and scraping all the bugs off. And now I'm like, I don't remember.

The last time I scraped the bug off my windshield. It's alarming. Yeah, yeah. So we need to make sure as these commitments are happening that they're truly truly regenerative and not just checking boxes off. Like I said, regeneration is a journey. And we really need to be constantly stepping into like, what does it mean now? What does it mean now? Because I think a lot of this work is multi-generational, you know, and we're, we need to be playing chess and we're just trying to play checkers and make it happen. But it's, it's so complex, you know, and I think we have the human ingenuity. We have almost eight billion of us, you know, creative humans. with so much heart and passion. And I think we're playing too small stakes right now. Yeah.

There are real political obstacles. There are corporate obstacles and there are human obstacles. But all of those are soluble. And I think.

As I begin to see the kinds of shifts happening, I do get hopeful. I mean, it is a bit of a hopeful moment. Even as we're sailing down to the Antarctic, where the West Antarctic Ice Sheet might just fall off and raise sea levels three feet in the next 10 years.

I still have hope.

Yeah, I do too. One thing that gives me hope, and this is going to sound funny from a climate person, is carbon. And I think the reframing, so much of it has been demonizing carbon and we need to decarbonize and all of this, but carbon is life. Yes. And there's more and more ability for us to take this extra, there's a trillion excess tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. And so we get to take that and turn it into life in our oceans. We only have 3% of whales left that we used to have. We're down to 50% of trees that we once had, from 6 trillion down to 3 trillion. We get to take all that carbon and literally make a more green future, a more verdant future. Like, what an opportunity that's so beautiful. And we get to bring it back into the soil and to just have more life. If you look at mammals, it's disgusting. 96% of the mass of mammals are livestock and humans. There's only 4% that are wild. And half of that, 2% of all mammals are cetaceans, or the whales and dolphins, just 'cause they're massive. A blue whale weighs 60 tons. So outside of whales and dolphins, there's actually only 2% wild mammal biomass. But we get to take the trillion tons and bring that back into life, like more giraffes, more zebras, more bugs, more nematodes, you know, all of them. That gives me so much hope. Yeah, falling in love with carbon. Reimagining- Collaborators are standing by. And they're dual carbon atoms who love to collaborate.

Just in the right place, right?

Yeah, atoms are like, let's hold hands, you know, and they can teach us so much. So I think that's a big shift that we can all go through. Let's fall in love with carbon. You eat carbon for breakfast, you are carbon. Let's go and really make this a moment of creating more carbon-based life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Amanda, we covered a lot so far. We covered how to reimagine agriculture to make it restorative and regenerative versus extractive and destructive. But how do we get that done? Because it seems like a lot of this has to do with policy and corporations. There are very few few corporations in the food industry, a few dozen, that drive most of the decisions and policies are really driven by governments that are influenced by industry in their lobbying efforts, which, by the way, agriculture and the food lobby is the biggest lobby by far, you know, dwarfing oil, gas, and other lobbies. So what's the role of government and corporations? in helping create solutions to the climate crisis at scale.

Yeah, well specifically with regenerative agriculture, I see three kind of buckets of barriers. There's cultural, technological, and financial. And policy can help with all of those. So as people are changing their eating habits, you know, right now 75% of our foods are 12 12 species, five animals and 12 crops. And so it's really fragile and overly centralized, and so we need to change cultural habits. And there's different things in the Farm Bill and other ways that policy can help influence that culture. Then on the technology side, there's just a lot to do from everything that's happening in Web3 and crypto to incentivize folks to, you know, just having the no-till tractors and other things. There's a lot on the technology side. I'm on the board of Regen Foundation, which is the foundation and nonprofit side of Regen Network, which is using the blockchain in order to create basically a ledger, a marketplace for ecosystem services that'll incentivize farmers and actually get them the financial benefits that they deserve for creating planetary health. So not just carbon credits, but beyond pollinator and watershed credits. And we have over 40 eco-credits in development that will incentivize all of this change to happen. And then there's all sorts of other financial instruments and new funds like Replant Capital, who you speak about, but there's a lot of other funds for black farmers, for different BIPOC coalitions of folks who are kind of taking the land back. There's a lot of land acquisition and land rights reform that needs to be done, and a huge role for philanthropy with incredible benefit. I think it's one of the most impactful ways that you can spend your philanthropic dollars is in regenerative agriculture.

But it seems also there's financial and that are there that are also good. And then, you know, when innovation is driven through financial reward, it actually accelerates a lot faster than philanthropy, right? So it seems like, like, whether it's tree plant capital or other groups that, you know, hurt are helping farmers bridge the gap between converting from, you know, factory farming to regenerative farming. There's a lot of change that have to happen. They have to get out of that toxic loop of of crop insurance, the bank loans, and the agrochemical seed companies basically holding the hostage in ways that prevent them from actually doing the right thing and making more money and restoring soil and preserving water and conserving water in their soils and increasing biodiversity. So it's like the right thing to do is actually the most economically beneficial thing to do, but the system actually prevents farmers from doing it.

Yeah, so many farmers are locked in to basically being indentured servants to Tyson and whoever these larger conglomerate.

I met people who are actually creating private equity innovations where they're actually bridging the gap of funding for farmers because they see the profit on the back end. And it's actually more profitably regenerative farmer. So they're actually doing it from private industry when the government is not doing it. Which is kind of cool.

Yeah, there's a called Jubilee Justice that's working specifically with Black farmers in the South on sustainable rice cultivation. That's a really exciting one, too. Yeah.

So you see the beacons of hope out there in business and innovation and farming and technology and crypto spaces and philanthropy that are all sort of driving in the right direction. I mean, clearly it's not happening fast enough, but you feel like we're kind of at a tipping point. point when things are going to start to move faster.

Yeah, yeah. I like to talk about, you know, there's the runaway climate change, you know, kind of doom and gloom part of it, but something we need to look at. And then there's a runaway regeneration on the other side of like this, you know, kind of upward spiral of what I call cascading benefits. So they're not just co-benefits, but they're these like virtuous loops, these virtuous cycles that then reinforce previous things. So if you invest invest in women smallholder farmers, they produce 30% more yields. And when women have more income, they invest it back in their local economy, which creates that small and medium-sized enterprise economic churn, which then further decentralized the overly fragile, centralized global economy that we have right now, which is just ridiculous. I mean, we're bred for commodities in the way the economy works right now and it's extremely, extremely fragile. And it's a remnant of colonization where we were going into, where settlers were going into these new countries and just, you know, designing the agriculture system for export back to their countries. And so all of the kind of global economy around export is actually a remnant of colonialism, which is, you know, obsolete.

There'S a very good book on this called Enflamed, and we've had Rupa Marya and Raj Patel on the podcast talking about their book Enflamed and the Colonization of the Food System. And essentially the decolonization is about empowering local communities, local farmers, to actually create thriving regenerative ecosystems that support not only the food but also restore the communities. And right now, most rural in America are just so degraded and beaten down and we're seeing epidemics of opioid addiction and violence and, you know, abuse. It just, it just, it's so tragic.

And.

The downstream consequences and the side effects of doing this are all good.

Right, right.

So a lot of people say, well, the economics aren't there, cost too much money. And, you know, one of the most striking things from Project Drawdown was the economic of all the solutions. So how much did it cost and how much did it save or how much did it make? And it was shocking. So maybe take us through a little bit about the beneficial economics of a regenerative system of agriculture and of a regenerative mindset of creating wealth and value through actually doing the right thing.

Yeah, yeah. So the bottom line with Project Drawdown from the initial analysis was that solving climate change, getting to drawdown, where concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere decline, 10 years later temperatures decline in about 2050. All of those solutions combined is a $74 trillion business opportunity.

Say that again. $74 trillion will be made from fixing climate change.

Solving climate change.

It's not gonna cost us. It's gonna save us.

Oh yeah, yeah. And that's not even measuring all the, you know, kind of hard to measure benefits of happiness and well-being and joy. Yes, exactly. And doesn't also take into account the business as usual track, which is, you know, with three degrees, $550 trillion in and damages. Yeah.

So it sort of doesn't account for the $550 trillion that would not be spent because we do the right thing. So it seems like a no-brainer. So why aren't governments and why aren't industry leaders just running after this?

I think a lot of it is because essentially what we call the oligarchy. Princeton did a study five or six years ago around whether the US was a democracy or not and analyzing kind of interests and what lobbying groups and what laws and policies are passed. They declared it's an oligarchy. And then if you look at what companies are actually influencing, like Exxon and ReX Tillerson becoming our Secretary of State, which, you know, if you just said that about another country, like, the, you know, the head CEO of, you know, became their number three of their, of their government, you know, you would laugh and be like, oh, the US should invade. You know, they're really not doing a good job with it. Anyway, so basically, they're just, our politicians are in bed with our companies. And Buckminster Fuller calls them supranational corporations because they have surpassed, they're actually more powerful than nation states. So I think they've purposely seeded doubt around climate change and they have just again and again not proven themselves to be trustworthy in this. And many corporations, even as they are starting to get into this, spend more money talking about what they're doing than what they're actually doing on green or sustainable interventions. And so, yeah, I think a big part of it is just the entrenched interests and lobbyist cycle and government that we have in this country and others, which is just all based on elections and politicking and getting elected again. So one thing I'm really excited about, which is one of the demands of Extinction Rebellion is citizens' assemblies. This idea of governance through ordinary people getting elected through lottery or a jury duty system.

To local posts or to federal?

It'll start with local, but I think it could go all the way on up.

I mean, you're hitting on something that really is important. We've talked a bit about on the podcast before, but the kind of economics of government are a challenge because of the way the lobby laws work and Citizens United actually allowing corporations to pour huge amounts of money into campaigns. These policy makers want to do the right thing often, but they're so locked into their reelection cycle that depends on the money from industry. And campaign finance reform form, it's probably one of the most important things we could possibly do to fix all of this. And yet it's almost an impossible task. It's like it needs to be, you know, it needs to be kind of kind of a thing, but it's not, people really barely talk about it. Right. Some politicians bring it up here and there and now, but, yeah, I mean, John McCain said it. I heard him talk. He's like, this is just such a corrupt system. And, yeah, a friend of mine's Congressman, he says he spends 50% of his time on the phone or in person raising money. And I'm thinking about, wow, Congressmen are half of their time is raising money, not governing our country. That's insane.

Yeah, yeah. There's a great documentary that's gonna come out this summer all about citizens assemblies called Called Upon to Serve. It's by a nonprofit called Join by four and definitely recommend checking that out. They did a prototype of it around COVID in the state of Michigan and showed that diverse people can come together and actually come up even with something so controversial as COVID with a set of policies that they all agree upon. Yeah, so I think a big transformation is about to happen there.

So it's sort of decentralizing government.

Decentralizing government. Not just having normal, ordinary people that are actually reflective of the people who are part of this country representing and governing.

Wait, wait, wait. A representative democracy? What a great idea.

Yeah.

What a great idea.

Yeah.

But then I also look at corporate personhood as Fuller said that we would build all the right tools for all the wrong reasons first, right? And so now corporate personhood is being used as a way to grant personhood to rights of nature. Yes. Right? And so what are all these things that we built in a kind of, you know, weaponry, you know, growth for growth's sake, mindset that we're now kind of upcycling these social and otherwise technologies into this new living systems, regenerative paradigm, which is not new. Ancient wisdom traditions have done for a long time, but we're remembering how to live as nature again.

That's true. I mean, You know, the amount of, you know, the amount we spend on the wrong things is staggering and the economics are all shifting to actually make it work so we can have the right profitability from what we're doing.

Yeah.

And now we're stuck in the vicious loop.

Right. And I think we really are at this tipping point. That's why I have this tattoo on my shoulder around, Buckminster Fuller says that we're like a chick just hatched from our eggshell and that fossil fuels was actually this embryonic fluid to teach us all of these different tools and build all of this different technology. But like a chick inside of an egg, it was just growing for growth's sake and didn't really know what it was doing. And then now it's a fragile moment, right? Birth can often cause death. But we actually are far more capable than we know. If we use, you know, the psy-ops, you know, psychographic analysis that got Bolsonaro and Trump elected to actually do real climate action. Wow, we could change things overnight. You know, we're using GPS instead of for spying, we're using it for monitoring the biosphere. We're using drones for planting trees instead of just weaponry.

And overall, Bucky called it weaponry to living roots. So sort of taking things that we built that maybe haven't been used in a way that creates good, but actually transmuting them into the good.

Yes.

Like you said, the corporation, our people, personhood, yeah. But now nature can be an entity. Like Lake Erie was so polluted by the runoff from nitrogen fertilizers that created the algal blooms or eutrophication, basically sucking all the oxygen out of the water and killing the fish that they made actually Lake Erie a person and it has the ability to sue and actually get its rights accounted for, which is pretty amazing.

Yeah, it's beautiful.

So a lot of what you're talking about seems like a win-win-win-win solution, which is really not how we often think about climate change. It's always the winners and losers. The oil industry's gonna lose, big ag's gonna lose. How do we map out a future that's a win-win-win that is focusing on solutions and regeneration and get out of the despair and help the facilitation of working together to really create the change.

Yeah, I think again calling on Fuller's insights, Bucky talked about how we had crossed this threshold in the early '70s of actually going from scarcity to sufficiency. That we actually do now have all of the food we need, all of the materials we need to take care of everyone on the planet at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. And all of our entities or institutions are wrapped up in I can only profit at someone else's expense still. A win-lose, zero-sum game. When in reality we can be in this win for all. Like not only can I help you and you help me, but in the process of helping you each other, we make it easier for everyone else to thrive. And he said in early 70s that it would take about 50 years for all institutions to catch up. There would be this moment where it would kind of feel like everything was crumbling, but it was actually just this reorientation in our education system and our health care system and our food system, et cetera, over into this, there's actually enough. And I think from there, from that understanding of of a non-zero sum game or positive sum game, however you want to call it, game dynamic, there's a generosity that comes up. That's the emergent quality from it. And so when we can all act in generosity, which is very much how nature works across the board, not in every case, but then we can live in a whole, whole different way that is more joyful than I think any of us could really imagine.

That's beautiful. beautiful future you're painting.

And I think it's, it's actually possible. So everybody listening is thinking, God, what can I do? You know, these big corporations, there's oil companies, there's the food industry, the agricultural industry, healthcare industry are all taking us down the wrong path. And, you know, what can I do as one person? How do I not fall into climate despair and, you know, just get drunk and wait till all over.

Yeah.

You know, how do we start with our own lives to support regeneration or climate?

I would one, just start by spending more of your time outside. I think there's so much to learn by being a part of nature and recognizing your role as nature instead of apart from it. And with that kind of gain this kind of systems orientation and see yourself as more verb than a noun. Just like kind of see yourself in this dynamic, you know, co-arising, ongoingness that is the world and less in this kind of like cause and effect mechanistic way of understanding the world that we've been trained to do, which ends up in kind of a lot of blame and shame and just perpetuating the patriarchy. And so what are ways that you can experiment with different ways of being that might not sound very very tangible to some folks that might have struck a chord with some. Another thing to do would be to read Project Drawdown, the book that we created, which has 100 different solutions to climate change. And find one in there that sings to you and develop a passion project around it. And whether that's working at your kids school or doing advocacy around it, there's so much work to do. There's so many shots on goal required for every one of these so just get involved in the solution side of things and then watch what you're reading and listening to, you know, because we are what we read and we are what we listen to. And so how can you step into that future that works, into that future that is regenerative? And then once you're in that, you'll kind of change your purchasing habits and where you're spending your time.

Yeah.

Right. And so maybe you're buying a tomato that's 40 cents more, more because it's organic, but you're realizing that by doing that, you're supporting that organic farm and you're supporting that person that's working for the organic farm and they're going to make a bit different purchasing. And so there's this multiplier effect, this ripple that goes and it's way more than 40 cents, right? If you track it, it's, you know, tens of thousands of dollars that you're putting into the future that you want. Or, you know, not less climate oriented, but ecotoxicity oriented. when you're getting a bag of chips or getting a can of soda. What's going to happen to that afterwards? Are you making a five-second decision? Are you making a 500-year decision? You know, is this convenient for right now? But thinking, you know, just training yourself, giving yourself that like long-term stamina of like what is the geological impact of that?

So our little choices make a difference.

Is what you're saying. Huge difference, huge difference, yes. Especially right now because the best case worst-case scenario and the worst case scenario have never been farther apart. Not just for climate change, but for biodiversity, for ecotoxicity, for phosphorus, just so many of these planetary boundaries that we're staring in the face. And so what happens now, the slightest change can make this huge delta in the future. And so everything that we do, including talking to others, I think we all underestimate the influence that we have over our families, over our friends, our colleagues, our alumni organizations. We have voices, whether we have many fans or followers or not, all of us have influence over people. Our uncle or our uncle's friend who happens to be a VP at JP Morgan or whoever, go out and talk to these people. And just be honest. You don't have to know all of the answers, but just go honestly with your full heart and say, there's something here that we should be talking about. And then honestly looking within, you know, how am I being a hypocrite and not being scared of that because it's a hypocritical error.

It's impossible to not be, right? I mean, everybody has, no matter how good your heart is and your intention is, you know, making the right choices is really hard because the default environment we live in forces us to make the wrong choices all the time. I'm thirsty. I'm giving a podcast. There was an I had a water bottle, part of that was on me. I'm like, got a can, it's an aluminum can, it's recyclable, and hopefully it will be recycled, but we all are subject to those challenges every single day. And if we make incremental changes, it makes a difference. I mean, food waste is part of Project Drawdown was the number three solution. So imagine if everybody just started a compost pile, and there's even urban devices to make compost in your apartment.

Right, and then take that compost and grow food and realize that food is medicine.

Yeah.

You know, not to mention all the medicinal things that you can actually grow to make your own medicine. There's so many great knock-on effects for doing that sort of thing.

We turned our whole backyard in college into a garden. We just took out the lawn and we made a backyard. And then we, you know, Ryan Finley, who's a self-sustaining South Central LA turned food deserts into food forests by planting, literally planting in the sidewalks, the grass strip in the sidewalk. And they got penalized and fined by the city of LA and went and changed the law so they actually could grow food in their urban environment. So there's little things that can happen. And I think that, you know, wherever you're called to act, wherever you're linked to whoever you know. This is all hands on deck moment. We're about to arrive in Antarctica, and most people don't understand what a critical role Antarctica plays in the entire global ecosystem and climate. But we're already seeing massive shifts and 3 trillion tons of ice lost, and we're looking very realistically losing the entire West in our ice sheet, which could raise sea levels three feet within 10 years, which means that billions of people will be affected in one or another. And I mean, I think that that's sort of sobering. And it both makes you want to both run and hide, but also stand up and scream. And I think you kind of have to fight that for everybody has to figure out where's their little place that they can show up and do something that matters.

Give yourself the space to stand up and scream and go and hide, but try to find some connection so someone can hold you in those tears, because the grief needs to be expressed. But through the grief, we can find whatever's next for us. It's going to be different for all of us. But if we cringe, it's like giving birth. We're giving birth to a new world. If you cringe during labor, I don't know. I don't have kids, but from what I've heard. You've delivered 500 plus babies. What is it like? How can we learn from labor as women?

Breathing, relaxing.

Giving it space, giving the pain space. And so I think that's what we need to do with our climate grief, is like metabolize it so that we can birth in this new world.

I mean, you say you're a What is it, an optionist?

An option. I'm optionistic. Instead of optimistic. Yeah.

And I think listening to your work and what you've been doing for the last decades, it's very inspiring and it actually kind of shifts the conversation from one of despair to one of hope and even the whole that we could end climate crisis in one generation. So if that's true, where should we start? Finding and supporting and learning from the.

Grassroots leaders around the world who are already doing it. So that's what we're doing with Buckminster Fuller Institute and Regenerosity. Yeah, talk about Regenerosity. Yeah, so Regenerosity is a coalition between Buckminster Fuller Institute, Lush Cosmetics, and the UN Development Program. and their equator prize. So all three organizations were running prize programs trying to identify the bright spots, kind of the lighthouses and the regenerative paradigm people who are doing everything from nurseries of heirloom seeds in the Amazon to teaching permaculture to refugees in Uganda to food forests in India. And we are networking them together in learning groups and then also funneling financial capital from larger family offices or corporations to them so that they can strengthen and become their own network of peer-to-peer regenerative leaders around the world. So our principles behind this is that we're trying to do so in a decolonized approach to philanthropy. So rather than saying, oh, we have wealth and are likely white and from the West, as philanthropists, we have the right answers, you know, apply to us and maybe we'll give you funding and you know, instead of that old model, which is basically neo-colonialism, we come in and we say, what do you need? You've already won one of our prizes or been shortlisted for one of our prizes. We trust you, you're verified, we've done the due diligence. We've spent over 15 years and $6 million finding all of these organizations. So now it's about helping them thrive and then doing flow funding experiments of direct giving to them, and then they become grantors to their networks.

Wow.

So it's really about-- It's a multiplier effect. It's about direct giving, but it's about reparations. It's about putting the money and the power in the hands of people who have been exploited and oppressed and marginalized by the patriarchy for way too many generations.

So this is sort of a marketplace for people who are already acting and doing the right things that are gonna make the big difference to change things. And Regenerosity is a platform for people to access a way to support those existing innovations that are already making a difference.

Yeah. Support and also learn from, right? 'Cause it's all about reciprocity instead of saying, oh, I have financial capital. It's saying, Everyone is rich. Everyone is a wealth holder. We just hold different forms of capital. And these people have natural capital, experiential capital, intellectual capital, cultural capital, social capital, all of these things, but they can't play in the modern economy because we all care about currency. And so it's about kind of recalibrating to these eight forms of regenerative capital and reorienting and rebalancing, which is partially what we try to do at Regen Network as well.

That's great. You probably know more about this than almost anybody on the planet. In the top, probably 1% of the amount of stuff you know about this, which could easily make you go to bed and never get out of bed. And yet, you're kind of hopeful. Talk about your vision for a hopeful, regenerative future.

You know, it's easier to laugh in public than cry. But I cry almost every day about this stuff. It's, yeah, it's at once the greatest joy I've ever experienced to work on this work and also brings me such tenderhearted but wholeness, you know, of recognizing and facing where we are with the world. and so I think it's holding that shadow and light both that enables me to stretch into the light. And yeah, like I said before, I'm optionistic. You know, the grand variety of futures and, you know, multiverses ahead, most of them point to a lot of disaster, if not collapse. And 60% of climate scientists are saying somewhere between three and four degrees by 2100 and they're not even talking about declines of temperatures, you know? And so it's actually only a small portion of us who are talking about 1.5 even still being possible. 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels of warming. And so we still have that option though. It's still possible. Even though it's the window of opportunity continues to close because we're not even slowing down on a lot of these trends yet, even though we've known for generations now. But there's still an option. There's still an option. And so that's what gives me hope. And it's more of kind of an engineer's approach of like, we need to maintain homeostasis in order for all of these other things to be able to exist in the world. And so that's kind of the base foundation of it all. And so there's an option, let's go. It's like an exit path, you know, through a burning building. Yeah.

In doing that, it generates value, as you said. So as I think about this conversation, sort of makes me kind of think a little bit about our healthcare system because, you know, our healthcare system is, you know, one in one in $5 of our economy. 80% of that, $1 in $5 of the $16 trillion is completely preventable. And if we fix our food, and if people ate healthy, These are completely preventable conditions. And so we're literally throwing money out by not doing the right thing and continuing to pay for all the downstream consequences. And the downstream consequences of not addressing climate change right now are even far more drastic than what we're facing in healthcare. And yet the flip side is that by doing the right thing, it really can be solved. And solved in a generation.

It can be solved in a generation. I mean, my hope is that my nieblings, my nieces and nephews kids will never have to know how scary it was right now. Yeah.

Well, I'll be laughing and having fun.

Yeah. Yeah. And that by doing this work too, by doing it in a good way, we're unwinding capitalism and colonialism at the same time, right? It's not, it's like all three C's, right? Not just climate, but colonialism and capitalism.

The old ways of doing things just don't work anymore. And that's why we're seeing all these.

Different kinds of governments and threats to democracy and capitalism. It's really interesting. Right, right. And climate's a threat multiplier on top of all of these really fragile geopolitical conditions right now. And so, you know, how do we look at the whole system? Climate is but a symptom of a series of broken systems upon one another.

And so we're in the, you know, a pivotal moment where if we all act, individuals, governments, business, philanthropy, we really could shift this. And it sort of-- but it actually can be shifted by a very few people doing the right thing. To quote Margaret Mead, who said often, never doubt that with a small group of highly committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. And so I always feel like, you know, where am I gonna do my one thing? Where am I gonna give my value? And if I ask myself that question every day, how can I make the world a little bit better place? What are the choices I make differently? How do I reimagine my life? How can I be regenerative in my life instead of extractive? And my choices and my votes with my dollars, my voice, my vote, it does make a difference. It really does make a difference. And we've seen massive movements, you know, in cultural shifts that we could dare imagine. Slavery, we think of slavery, for example, our entire economy was based on slavery. I mean, it was a civil war because of it. Hopefully we won't end up in that situation. But that, the entire economic fabric America was based on slavery and now it ended. So this is not an impossible thing. So I think we're in this really beautiful moment and I just thank you for your work. It's so selfless and dedicated and I know it's cost you a lot in many ways of your emotional well-being. But I think I hope at the end of it we're gonna see a place where we can all dance and celebrate together.

Yeah, I like to talk about In 2053, when the Earth cools, according to the latest raw data model, that will have the biggest party ever. So instead of being apocalypse preppers, we could be party preppers.

Party preppers, I love it. Okay, and people who can learn more about your work can go to reddit.com/Generosity.World and help support that.

Yeah, also regen.net to find out about that marketplace for ecosystem services. drawdown.org.

Read, read Drawdown.

Definitely a mandatory reading.

There's another book, Paul Hawken called Regenerate, which is also quite good. And I'm featured in that a little bit.

And if you're into sci-fi, Ministry for the Future is really good and has gotten quite a bit of play by Kim Stanley Robinson. And a new one kind of in that same genre called Embedded just came out, which is more, you know, the coming-of-age, novel, a little bit more for young adult fiction, but it's for all ages really. And that's just a really beautiful, amazing, beautiful fiction that opens your eyes to what's possible. Amazing.

Amazing. Well, Amanda, thank you so much for being on the Doctor's Pharmacy. If you've been listening to this podcast and it moved you, this is one you really should share with your community, with your friends and family on social media. Everybody needs to hear this story. It's both terrifying and hopeful. And I think we have, we really have to use our collective voices to spread the word. So please, particularly this podcast, share it. Leave a comment, what are you doing? What are the creative solutions you found? I mean, we don't have all the answers. We need everybody's ideas, hearts and minds on this. And of course, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

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