Is Our Food System a Solution to Climate Change? with Paul Hawken

Most of us know that climate change is a real problem and what we need are real solutions. My guest on today's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy has spent his time studying fascinating solutions that are designed to reverse the damaging effects of global warming. Paul Hawken is an environmentalist and entrepreneur, author and activist who has dedicated his life to environmental sustainability and changing the relationship between business and environment. On today's episode, we talk about real solutions to our most pressing environmental issues including global warming. You may or may not be surprised to learn that food and the way we consume it, produce it, grow it, is a major cause of global warming and is the number one solution collectively to climate change. Drawdown is that point in time when the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere begins to decline on a year-to-year basis. And Paul's book, Drawdown, the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming, is truly one of the most impactful.

Books I've ever read.

I'm so excited to share this extended episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy with you.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy.

I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's Pharmacy F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And today's conversation really matters because our guest is Paul Hawken, one of the leading environmentalists and who's going to help us learn about climate change, not from the bad point of view of how it sucks and it's all going to kill us, but how to fix it, which is something that people really don't talk about. and he's got the street cred to prove it. He started out in Boston in 1966 with the first natural food store where they had whole grains in bulk and seeds where they had cold pressed oils, the first place ever sold vegetables. It was the first kind of whole foods in a way. And you went on to do much bigger work as an environmentalist, as an entrepreneur, as an author, an activist, and you've dedicated your life to environmental sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. And your books have been profound in that way, and I'm going to talk about them in a minute, but you're one of the Environmental Movement's leading voices. You're a pioneering architect of corporate reform with respect to ecological practices. Your work includes founding successful ecologically conscious businesses, writing about the impacts of commerce on living systems, and consulting with heads of state and CEOs on economic development, industrial ecology, whatever that is, we'll talk about that, and environmental policy. And Paul is now the executive director of one of the most extraordinary projects that's going on today in the face of our climate crisis. It's called Project Drawdown. It's a non-profit. It's dedicated to researching when and how global warming can be reversed, not just stopped, but actually reversed. The organization maps and models the scaling of 100 substantive technological, social and ecological solutions to global warming. These are things that actually exist right now that people are doing that can be scaled. Not to mention all the new innovative things that can also happen in the coming years. Now, Paul writes articles, op-eds, peer reviewed papers. He's written seven books, including four best sellers. the Next Economy: Growing a Business, the Ecology of Commerce, and Blessed Unrest. The Ecology of Commerce was voted the number one college text on business and environment by professors in 67 business schools. That is no small feat. And his book, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, co-authored with Amory Lovins and other environmentalists, has been read and referred to by several heads of state, including President Bill Clinton, who called it one of the five most important books in the world today. That is quite a pedigree. Paul, thank you for joining us today in the Doctor's Pharmacy.

It's a pleasure to be here with you.

So, what struck me was the first time I heard you speak at an event, you laid out a vision of climate that was very different than any I'd ever heard before. It was a vision that was hopeful as opposed to depressing and made you want to run hide under a table, which is what we mostly hear, that storms and floods and heating up of the planet and people dying and ice caps melting and polar bears dying. I mean, this is where we mostly reside when it comes to that. And then of course we have climate deniers and we have climate activists, and it's all a big mess. And you crystallize it into this extraordinary story narrative, which was that, hey, we can do something about this. Not only can we slow global warming and climate change, but that we can actually reverse it, what you call draw down carbon in the environment. That is a big statement, and it's something that most of us have a hard time grappling with. And yet these 100 solutions you mapped out were pretty profound in their ability to be implemented and literally save trillions and trillions of dollars and sequester giga and gigatons, I don't even know what's bigger than a gigaton, but many gigatons of carbon out of the environment, which is not how we normally think of it. So how did this idea come about and what inspired you to bring together 100 of the top scientists and researchers in the world to call out these solutions and make them practical?

It came about, I think, for the same reason that you just referred to, which is that primarily what people hear about is the probability of what's going to go wrong, how it is going wrong, how fast it's going wrong sooner than we thought it was going to go wrong. And it's about impact. It's about impact that's happening today more and more, but it's also about the impact that's going to happen. And that is the mandate of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-sponsored agency, really collaboration.

That was a new report they just released. It's even worse than we thought.

It's 30 years old today. It started in 1988. The sixth assessment comes out and just last week the 1.5 C sort of report came out, which is if we don't reach again very cautionary, very sort of apocalyptic. If we don't hit one, if we go over 1.5 C, we're in big trouble and we have very little chance of hitting it. That was sort of the report. And it really continued to repeat a pattern of climate communication which emphasizes gloom, threat, doom, fear, and lights up the amygdala, so to speak, and fight or flight. But it makes people disempowered. That's the most important thing about it. Not that the science isn't valid, the science is good. But it's kind of like you being a doctor, what if diagnosis is not prognosis? You know that. First, you have to do diagnosis. So, IPCC does a really good job on diagnosis, but it conflates everything else with prognosis.

Right.

And that is where people get basically not only disempowered, but numb, turn away, they'll deny it because this is really about life and death. And so, it's not surprising a lot of people say, Screw you, it's not true. I don't believe it, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, because the science is so hard to basically take in. It's very hard to take in.

It is.

And, From my point of view, I.

Saw Al Gore speak at a conference recently and he showed a slide, a picture of an octopus in a parking lot in Miami because the water levels have risen and now we see fish and seafood in the parking lots.

I mean, well, imagine somebody comes to you, you're diagnosed and they have four stage cancer of some organ. Okay, they come to you, and you say, Hey, John, you have four stage cancer. And that's it. And then John tells all his friends and they say, John, I heard you say Dr. Hyman, you have four stage cancer, liver cancer. He said, yeah. And every week and day they keep telling him, he has cancer, he has cancer. And after a month you see John say, God, it's been a month, it's probably worse because it's mitosis, that's what cancer likes to do. And John's never gonna get better. I mean, if it's third stage, second stage, he's never gonna get better because everything he he hears is about how sick he is. And that's pretty much what was happening with climate. And I was watching it for years and years, and I realized that every problem, every problem without exception, is a solution in disguise. In disguise. And the job of a doctor is to say, hey, this is the solution. The problem is symptomatic of a cause. This is the solution. to the cause, right? So that's true with every problem we have. And it's certainly true with climate change because it is the most super wicked, gnarly problem ever, you know, surfaced in the history of civilization. And therefore, within it is this plethora of transformative solutions that make this a far better place and world for everyone than the one we live in now.

Yeah, so you know, the Chinese word for crisis is two characters, opportunity and danger.

Yes.

So embedded within every crisis, like the climate crisis or health crisis, are these issues. And the thing that struck me about this is when most of us think of climate, we think of coal burning, we think of cars, we think of energy use, we think of all these things that are really about solving it through the energy sector, right? Wind, solar, nuclear, whatever. The thing that struck me was that the food system as a whole is the biggest solution when you aggregate all the solutions. And we're gonna go into each of these solutions during this podcast. So I want you to stay tuned. But it is stunning how many things are actually already being done that have been proven scientifically. 'Cause you didn't look at anything that was a hope. You looked at things that were actually measurable, whether it was data, where actually they could be implemented at scale, and they could save enormous amounts of money with little investment and actually sequester enormous amounts of carbon. So the food sector is huge. How did that sort of come about that you- When we started that insight. Because you didn't come in with a set of predisposed ideas. We did. Looked at the ideas.

Actually we did. I think everybody has them. And the same predisposed ideas you just spoke of, which is, well, you're going to solve the problem, it's going to.

Be solar and wind.

Elon Musk, right? Elon Musk, right. Before he'll be driving a Prius or a Tesla. Before he smoked a joint on Joe Rogan's show. And the point being is that we all thought of energy as and it makes logical sense because two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the combustion of coal, gas and oil. So, duh. But actually how you get back from where you came from is not the way you go. That is to say you can't just replace energy sources and solve the problem. They're crucial solutions.

So, because that's only putting less into the environment.

It's not actually, it's not reversible.

It's drawing down the carbon. Not at all.

It's not reversal at all. It's just slowing down. It's kind of like we're going to a cliff. Say, look, everybody slow down. They say, oh, great, we're slowing down. Where are you going?

Over the cliff. You're just going slower. And that's essential.

And so we call about chronic disease management, not reversal of chronic disease, which is what I'm all about.

We call it Thelma and Louise solutions. Yeah. Which is like, it doesn't make any difference.

You're going the wrong way. You know? And so-- so even you, when you came into this, you thought, oh, it's the energy sector. That's where the solutions are. Oh, my gosh, yeah. I mean, when we went into it, all of us was all, all five of us, but we had over 200, actually, other people. But we all had our bias. We all knew kind of what the top five or ten were. We could have written them down. We were all wrong. And what was interesting about that is that we kind of knew we were wrong. We didn't know what the top ones would be around Paris, around three years ago, and the Conference of the Parties, the Paris Agreement was created at that time in December 15, And I realized then that you had 30,000 people going to Paris who were climate experts, scientists, activists, politicians, government leaders, et cetera. And not one single person could have written down the top five or 10 solutions, not in order, to reverse and global warming. And isn't that astonishing, anthropologically speaking, that.

Here we are... 30,000 experts and they weren't looking at the right question.

Greatest problem civilization has ever faced and nobody knows what the solutions are. And it occurred to me once I was in Seattle and I was giving a talk and I noticed several times that to my right were these young lads, 14, 15 years old, you know, it was great that they were there. But when I said that, I turned to them and said, how old are you? And they said, oh, I'm 14, oh, I'm 15. I said, can you name the top five NBA teams? And they said, sure, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I thought, okay. And nobody in the world can name the five top looseness. So we did map, measure and model them. We had a methodology that offended and prohibited bias because there was 200 of us. And so our bias was fine, you could park it, but the method didn't allow it. It had to be peer-reviewed science, had to be multiple scientific reports on that solution, had to be scaling, had to be robust economic data from the IEA or the World Bank, FAO, Bloomberg Energy, IPCC. so the data in drawdown that we amassed actually isn't our data. We are actually holding a mirror up to the world saying, this is what we're doing, this is what we know, and this is what it costs. This is how much we would save. And what we did do is continue to scale scaling solutions already scaling until 2050 at a rigorous but reasonable rate to see if, in fact, we could achieve that point in the future. where greenhouse gases peak and go down on a year-to-year basis, that's Dr. That's.

What Dr. And that you think if these solutions were implemented at scale, it would be 2050?

Oh, well, we did it just, we just scaled them, and then we started to tweak them, say, well, let's just accelerate this one a little more and do this a little, you know, and so forth, and we can do it 2045, we can do it 2040. I mean, we can do it even sooner. It's interesting, but what we did is just took the scaling rates that were there, rather than sort of imposing or projecting upon them. And when we hit the total button, because you can't model a solution by itself. Nothing exists by itself. And every solution interacts dynamically with so many other sectors of society, you know? I mean, food being probably the most complex in that sense. And so two months before the book came out, April 17th, we had laid it out, we designed it, we had the plates, not the publisher, and we waited the last moment to put in the numbers. because you're never done with a model. Every single model is wrong. And every so often, you can make a model that's useful. We try to make one that is useful. It's about the future. Nobody knows the future. So we waited right until the end, because the model gets better and better and better, you know? And we hit the total button in February 2017, and we were shocked. We were so surprised.

We're going, How big a change?

Oh my gosh. Oh yeah. It was like this, When we get.

Down to pre-industrial times or how far back can we get? In what sense?

Well, if we implement all these hundred solutions.

Well, what I was trying to say.

Is that when we hit the total button, eight of the top 20 were food related. Yeah, food related. That's what I want to get back to. Food related. Who knew?

Right, exactly. That was a shock to me. I mean, I always knew that climate change was an issue, right? You hear about factory farming of animals and methane and the release of carbon dioxide, the way we farm. You hear about the use of energy through the fertilizers we use, the pesticides we use, we're all petrochemical, transporting food. So it's one fifth of all of our fossil fuels are used to fuel animal production and also agricultural production. So that's a lot, 20%. But I didn't think it was such a big solution. Like you said, it was a big aha for me and I've been in this business for a while. So I was sort of shocked to hear that. What you're saying is that the food sector isn't necessarily the biggest contributor to climate change, although it is. It's the second biggest, right? After energy?

After transport.

Transportation. Which is a lot of energy, right?

Cars.

Cars, yeah.

Buses, ships.

So that's pretty big. Number two. And yet it's the number one solution to climate change.

Which is... Because it's a twofer.

Yeah.

It does two things. One is when you change agricultural practices and move away from confined area feeding operations for ruminants and pigs, you not only reduce and avoid emissions, you stop putting greenhouse gases up there.

Yeah.

But you can actually sequester them back. And, you know, in regenerative agriculture, you know, food forests and goes on and on, you know, stable tropical tree crops, I mean, et cetera, et cetera. So, no other sector can really do that is stop emitting and pull it back home. Because all the carbon that's up there that's in question in the sense that it's greater than the approximately 280 PPM that was there up and down during the Holocene period for the last 10,000 years. That carbon, the extra carbon, which is now CO2 at 409 PPM, we put it up there. And so really drawdown is about can we bring it back home? Because it actually is ancient sunlight. That's what coal gas and oil is. It's ancient sunlight, it's ancient photosynthesis, and it's photosynthesis that can actually bring it back home and store it in the soil for centuries and thousands of years.

So I want to break the conversation down a bit. There's the big picture of what are the top sectors, and I just want to briefly go over those so people put it in context. Then I want to talk about the food sector in the sense of how is our food system contributing to climate change? What are those big things that are happening that we're doing in our food system that are making it worse? And then let's go through the solutions. So I'm going to walk you through it. But let's start with, from the big picture, you know, what are the top sectors that we're focused on in this book drawdown that you're going to sort of explain that are big drivers of-.

Well, food's number one. And interestingly, transport is number two in causally, that is to say in terms of emissions, it was last. in terms of a sector, you say, well, how could that be?

So we don't need to all drive a Prius, right?

It doesn't matter. Even if you go to EVs and electrics and plugins and so forth, the fact is that we use member out, we use other people's data. So we use the projections of the World Bank and the IEA as to what the economy would be like in the next 32 years. We didn't use our projections. We used these esteemed international organizations. And they projected vehicles will double in number by 2050. There'll be two billion vehicles instead of one billion. I personally radically disagree with that, but that doesn't matter what I think. That's biased. You think it may be? I have an opinion. Well, they're just thinking it's business as usual, but I see with AVs, autonomous vehicles, that mobility is becoming a service, not an ownership. And it's twice, three, four times more efficient. That's true. For everybody, it saves money.

Who wants to have a car in New York? Really? No, it's true. I mean, it's interesting. I heard this guy who was a top guy at Uber speak, and he said the future of cars is going to be completely different. No one's going to own a car. People might have one for fun with it. But they're not going to be what we normally do. It's like a car sharing environment where you just hit the button and an auto-driving car shows up and takes you where you want to go.

It's great. You don't have to pay insurance, you don't have to pay parking. And they're going to be smaller and they're going to be electric and be quiet and they're going to have Wi-Fi and everything else you need, and they're just going to go scoot around. and roads are going to get smaller and more public space is going to be made available that used to be taken up by parking lots and highways. I mean, it's going to be transformative to the cities, but that isn't what we used. We used the IEA and the World Bank data. So what happens is you double the fleet, there goes all your savings from changing from an internal combustion engine to electric. And so that is why it's the last sector. The second sector is electrical generation. which is wind and solar for sure. So that's renewable energy. Third was land use, which actually kind of is kissing cousins with food. But it's land use that's not productive of food, tropical forests, indigenous people's land management, coastal wetlands, peatlands, et cetera.

It's helping bring back natural lands to their original state, which helps sequester carbon.

And the fourth sector was girls and women.

Yeah.

Which I thought was fascinating because you said that.

Yeah.

Educating women and family planning.

Yeah.

Were combined among the top Solutions.

Number one.

Number one.

Yeah.

So food in aggregate is.

Well, top solution. Number one solution.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And food in aggregate, you said also.

As a sector is never.

Yeah.

Yeah. The girls and women is number four as a sector.

Yeah.

But if you combine girls' education and family planning together, which they really are because when you educate a girl, support her to get her education, she becomes a woman on her terms more or less, depending on the situation, but a lot more than when she's yanked out of school and married early or put to work to put her brother through school when she's 11 or 12 years old. And that girl has an average of five plus children. And we've known this for 40 years. this is not new data. But if she's supported to get her high school education, the equivalency of that, she has two plus children. And not only that, I mean, she earns more, she has a better education, she puts more resources into those children, have a better health outcome. This is the girl effect that's been talked about. And those children repeat their mother's behavior, boy or girl, doesn't make any difference. And so you have a very different vector in terms of growth of population. And so it's a pathway to family planning, but it is the pathway of empowerment. It's a very important verb. I remember once at UC Santa Cruz, I gave a talk, just said what I just said about Carl's education. At the end of a talk, a professor raised his hand and said, yeah, but how do we control population? And I said, lose the verb. Control.

Yeah.

Yeah. Lose it.

Yeah.

It's about empowerment. Yeah. And the fact is, when women are supported, they make decisions for themselves that are very, very sensible decisions.

And it's doable. I mean, I, I once heard the Queen of Jordan, Queen Rania, say Americans spend the amount they spend on pets in this country could ever educate every kid on the planet, which is a stunning statistic. Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, absolutely. So there's 98 million girls, by the way, who are not in school, who should be.

Yeah.

And not just in any school either, but a great school. It's a school with latrines for men and women, you know, boys and girls, not just one. Yeah. And, I mean, there's so many reasons that they are not enfranchised. Yeah. And none of them are good.

Yeah. So you got food, land use, energy.

Transportation, buildings and cities, buildings and cities, women, materials and. for it. Yeah, 7.7.

So those are all the sectors. And when you looked at the food sector, it was stunning. You put some statistics in your book. So it's not just a bunch of narrative stories. You've got hard data. And I was struck by when you look at the food sector as a whole, that by 2050, if all these solutions were implemented at scale, you could reduce 321.9 gigatons of carbon out of the environment. It would cost 770 $7 billion, but you would save $10 trillion. Now that's a good investment. You know, that's almost, you know, more than 10 times your money. And so these are all implementation issues and they're political will issues and they're governmental issues and they're, there's competing political and economic and business interests that are opposing some of these ideas. But when you look at that sector, this just unbelievable to me how our food sector is such a big factor. And it's something that we actually have a lot of control over because we are the consumers of food. We are all consumers of food on this planet. And the choices we make, what we put on our fork, has huge impact not only for your health, but for your communities, for the environment, and clearly for climate. And it's staggering when think about it in that way?

It really is, and the thing is human health, soil, agricultural, health land health and the atmospheric health are in complete alignment. It's not like a divergence whatsoever. The healthier the soil, the more carbon it sequesters and holds. The healthier the soil, the healthier the plants. And if you eat the plants instead of eating the people, the things that are eating the plants, you're a hell of a lot healthier. than that. I mean, so it's kind of a solution that is emblematic of almost every solution in the book, which is that if we had no idea of the cause of extreme weather, if there wasn't even climatology as a science, and we were clueless as to the atmospheric influence on global circulation models and warming, we would want to do 98 of these 100 solutions because they have so many cascading beneficial effects on society, economy, on human health, on the future, on our children, on water, you just go right on down the line. So it is not as though we have this problem, so therefore we should divert, you know, and put these things away and go do that to save our ass, you know, which is kind of the kind of rhetoric that has been around climate. It's just the other way around. It's like, if we want to reverse global warming, let's actually save each other. Let's actually take care of each other. And all that comprises human need in this world. And that is how you reverse global warming. So it's a very different narrative than the narrative of alarm bells, you're ringing and you're in trouble. I mean, even Al Gore, and just an amazing spokesperson, and certainly his book, Early book in 1992 was his and Bill McKibben's book were just absolutely extraordinary in terms of sort of breaking the news, you know, within the balance was Al Gore's book. But to this day, he's still saying, you know, solar wind, solar wind, and EVs and so forth.

I actually just saw him two weekends ago.

Oh, did you?

And I said this to him.

Yeah.

I said, you know, it seems like you don't really focus on the food sector as a solution to climate change. actually, we are now starting to think about it, and we are working on this.

And I was like, wow, this is awesome. Now, yeah, it's that climate reality thing, but it's like, it's because of drawdown.

Yeah.

I mean, with all due respect.

Yeah.

No, it's, it's, it's, it's. People are saying, hey, hey, hey. Because, you know, they have the book. They're reading the book and going, you know, this doesn't comport with what we're saying. It's not, again, that wind solar EVs aren't crucial Solutions. Of course they are. But, I mean, the fact that when you go out into the public sphere and basically say, you know, wind, solar, EVs, you go, what do you, I hope they do it, whoever they are. Who's going to put up the solar farms? Who's going to put up the wind turbines that are bigger than Eiffel Tower? Who's going to make, you know, the electric vehicles?

Not going to be me. Right. And so therefore, it's another form of disempowerment. Yeah, right. You don't feel like, but your fork, you got that, right?

You got your fork.

Well, it's interesting, I just want to break down what you said, because there's so much in there. There is a lot of connection between climate change and health. And there are many articles in major medical journals like Lancet on climate change and health, everything from climate refugees, the effects of temperature and so forth on human health. But there's another level, which is the food we're growing and the way we're growing the food is contributing to climate change, whether it's depleting the soils through basically mining the soil, depleting our aquifers, really depleting our water supplies, which leads to floods and droughts. and on and on, and growing food that actually makes us sick. So, we're destroying the environment. We're growing food that makes us sick. 60% of the food that we eat in this country is commodities, basically soybean oil, processed white flour, and high fructose corn syrup turned into various forms of junk food. And the people who consume that are the sickest, and yet we subsidize that. So, our own government policies are perpetuating this cycle. And so, we've got a very real and tangible way to think about this. And it's not just some abstract idea. The quality of the food that we grow, how we grow it, impacts our health and is destroying our health and also destroying the environment.

Absolutely true. And one of the real surprising things, and maybe not so surprising when you think about it, but when we wrote the book, I mean, I wrote the book with Catherine Wilkinson, and because we had to author the book in such a way that it was readable, accessible, and that you wanted to read it, we had 60 six, seven fellows from 21 countries who did sort of white papers, thesis on each solution and 10,000 word thesis. So we had this amazing amount of information to draw from. But end of the day, you have to tell stories.

Because that's what people- 1,000 by 100, that's a lot of paper.

There's a lot to read. But in regenerative agriculture, one of the things that was true with almost without exception was a truly great regenerative farmers are very conservative.

I mean, they're not hippies running around.

With stocks and to the contrary, I bet you everyone we interviewed was a Trump voter. Every one of them hit the wall. In other words, they banked, the bank came and said, hey, we're taking your machinery or you got another year or they had two, three years of crop failure due to weather. I mean, every one of them hit the wall. as a farmer. And these are second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth generation farmers. You know, it's family land and pride and so forth. And it wasn't until then that they actually turned and looked at another way of doing it. In fact, I remember one farmer saying, oh yeah, well this kid in a baseball cap and tennis shoes came out here and told me I should be doing this and that. He said, well, I'll tell you something, I don't listen to kids in baseball caps and tennis shoes. Okay. And then almost without exception, every single farmer we talked to was a conservative, Republican, hardcore... Heartland. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And some of them actually even were disinterested in climate. But they had hit the wall economically. And their soil had turned to dirt, their profits had turned to losses, the bank was coming to take away their machinery, They're going to foreclose on their land. These are multi-generational farms where there's pride, family, familial pride.

And.

That is when they turn to other methods. And I remember one farmer saying, My wife said I should talk to this kid about regenerative agriculture. And he came out here with a baseball cap and tennis shoes. And he said, I don't listen to kids in baseball caps and tennis shoes. and then you see, he said, and like, I don't know how many years later, he said, I called that kid back. And his farm has completely transformed, and he's making so much money now that he's buying land next to him, you know, that has actually been degraded. And as Gay Brown said, he said, I got tired of writing, signing my name on the front of the checks. He said, now I sign it on the back of the check. In other words, it was a direct realization that where they were going was a dead end, economically agronomical, in terms of agronomy, no question about it, in terms of yield, in terms of quality, and they talk about my vet bills down 90-95%, you know, things like that. Because the soil is healthy, the crops are healthy, the process is healthy, the rotation is healthy, healthy. They don't till the soil. They got rid of the tractor that the bank wanted to get because they don't need it anymore.

Irrigation.

Oh my God.

Yeah, it's interesting. We actually don't farm. We mine.

Yeah.

We mine this soil. We got lucky in this country because we had 60 million bison generating tens of feet of topsoil. Peeking and pooping on it, digging around, moving around, creating this massive fertile country. tallgrass prairie. And all that soil holds carbon, all that soil holds water. And what we did was we started mining the soil. Now, I've heard that we may only have topsoil enough for another 30 years.

Yeah, I've had 30 or 60 years.

And the water, the same thing, our Ogallala aquifer, the massive aquifer in the middle of the country that does most of the irrigation. We're depleting it at 1.3 trillion gallons faster every year than replenishing with rainfall. That's not sustainable. I remember reading about Saudi Arabia. They said, we're going to be self-sustaining agriculture. And they have these, these fossil aquifers that don't replenish because there's no rain. And they just had agriculture for five years, and then they ran out of water and they have to buy their groceries elsewhere now. But it's, you know, we're in that situation. It's just taking a little longer. And the Beautiful thing about the solutions you're proposing is they're not solutions that are costing us anything. They're saving us money, they're saving health, they're saving soil, they're saving water, they're saving climate. It's a win-win-win-win all the way around.

Yeah, and again, when you think from a nutritional point of view, that type of industrial mining, AKA farming, is intensely demineralization. Yeah. And demineralizing, that is to say. And I mean, the mineral content in, say, apples or berries or wheat crops and so forth today are in some cases 30, 40, 50, 80% less than they were for the same crops 100 years ago. And so- and we're seeing health consequences. Absolutely.

Whether low magnesium, low selenium, or zinc.

And the human body is so extraordinarily complex, you can't correlate directly outcomes that you're seeing today in terms of children's allergies, autism, etc., etc., with a certain mineral or this demineralization of that food or that, you know, fake food or whatever. But you kind of, you step back and you look at the two and you go, our children aren't getting nourished and the mothers aren't getting nourished and, you know, and it's not their fault in a sense. It's not like their intention to be that way. It is the result of the type of food industry we have and the type of agriculture that the food industry demands it be supported by.

So let's dig a little bit into the way in which the food system today actually is driving climate change. We talked a little bit about things like transportation and the use of fossil fuels in agriculture. What are the kinds of things we should be aware of in terms of the food we eat and how would our choices in that make a difference?

Well, first of all, what's the equivalent.

Of driving a Prius in terms of eating?

Well, first of all, I mean, there's about 10 calories of energy that goes into every one calorie of food. And so there's your quick calculation. And it used to be the other way around. It used to be we got 10 calories out for every calorie we put in. So there's been 101. If you go 10 times 10, it's 101. 100 times difference, 100x difference in the energy required to produce food. And it goes right back to what you're saying. Well, it can be diesel, it can be the manufacturing of the tractors and equipment, it can be the fertilizers, the mineral-based fertilizers, it can be the pesticides, the herbicides.

Which all, by the way, are made from fossil fuels. They're petrochemicals.

Right, and you're not even for example, the dead zones in the Gulf and other parts of the world from the runoff of nitrous oxide from the fertilizer.

The nitrogen that goes into the Mississippi River and ends up in the Gulf of Mexico.

It's so soluble. Dead zone the size of New Jersey. It's so soluble. Nitrogen in the soil doesn't exist in that way. The plants have access to it, but it's not soluble in a sense, the first rainfall, it's in the river. And so when you add all that up, I mean, now you also then have to go to processing, which is instead of eating whole foods or eating foods that are processed at home, so to speak, you know, they're sent to where they're sent to, you know, obviously the elevators are clean, but then they're sent to companies that mass produce, you know, white flour, hydrogenated oils, sugar, et cetera. Those are sent to companies that manufacture into Michael Pollan's famous food-like substances, which is not really food at all. And those things are then packaged in plastic and so forth and sent to distributors and those sent to stores and those are sent, people drive to the store and pick those up and take them home and either eat it, which is bad for them or waste it, which is bad for everything. So, I mean, this is the food system we have today.

Yeah, and people don't realize we're cutting down rainforests to grow corn and soy in ways we'll talk about that deplete the soil further.

Yeah.

Contribute to climate change and then produce animals that contribute further to climate change. Yes. To the CAFOS. It's like this horrible, I wouldn't say it's a virtuous cycle. It's a vicious cycle that leads to.

More and more degradation of the environment and degradation of our health. I mean, one of our solutions is women small holders, women small holders. And, and like, what does it have to do with climate? You know, I mean, and 70 of the food in the world is produced by small holders, which is defined by the FAO as a farm that is smaller than two hectares or five acres. And 40-43 depends, but 43-42% of that is women. Okay, those are the small holders. Okay, what we know is that Big Ag, you know, the CAFOs, the GMO soy corn, et cetera, that's Big Ag produces 27% of the world's food. And you would think listening to them that if we didn't support what they want to do, they would all starve. But if you actually look at what they produce, actually it's producing big pharma. Because it's producing obesity, diabetes, strokes, heart disease.

It's good for business for the drug companies.

And probably dementia and Alzheimer's too, because they're all interrelated, as you know, because they're all inflammatory diseases. So women, okay, let's go back to women, 43% of 70 do the math and so forth, they're producing 31% of the food. They're producing more food than Big Ag. And there is a solution in drawdown because if we give women, which we don't, the same tools, seeds, and support that men get, small holders, in other words, just equal it out, they out produce men. 10 to 20%. And if we start- If you go.

To those cultures, you see the men are just sitting, playing games, smoking, and the women are out there working.

Working, but they're better farmers. And the fact is then that's 200 million acres or hectares actually of forest that we don't have to cut down to produce food for a growing population. We have all the land we need in order to produce enough food for the 10.7 or 9. 8 billion, whoever, billion people are going to be here in 2050, but not.

Using the agricultural practices that we use today. Well, that's the propagandist talking point. How are we going to feed the world? There's not going to be enough food for everybody. We have a growing population. Yes, we have problems with agriculture, but it's inevitable.

We have to do it. I know.

In fact, that is not necessarily true. And there's been some interesting analyses of these. One was- Dramatically not true. Prince Charles gave a talk at Georgetown years ago and it turned into a little book called the Future of Food. And he talks about how do we, actually look at the truth of this? And is this an actual fact that we need these big agricultural practices to save the world? We don't. In fact, if we include the costs, the externalities that are not embedded in the price of the food, in the price of the food, or he calls it accounting for sustainability, it would be far more expensive to have industrial agriculture if you count the costs on health, the costs in the soil, the costs on our water, depletion of the cost on climate, the cost on the environment. Those are costs which are not in a can of soda, right? And maybe it should be $100 to have a can of soda. Or a grass-fed beef compared to a feedlot beef. The feedlot beef should maybe be $1,000 a pound. Industrial food is unaffordable.

Yeah.

And we are subsidizing it in the taxpayer. In fact, we subsidize it three times. I've said this before. We want to subsidize the food to be grown, wheat, corn, and soy in commodities. Those get turned into processed food, which then we subsidize for the poor to almost a trillion dollars every 10 years, about 85 billion a year for food stamps. And then we pay for Medicare, Medicaid- For their illnesses. For their illnesses. So we're triple taxing the taxpayer for the way in which we grow, produce and eat food.

And that's why it shouldn't be a surprise. People have said to us, the title of the book is the Most Comprehensive Plan Ever never proposed to reverse global warming. But actually we said that because no one ever proposed a plan. So we could say whatever we wanted. It sounds brash, but actually it was to make a point. And the second thing is it's not our plan. It wasn't like our little NGO in Sausalito had a plan, listened to our plan. What we're saying is the world in its collective wisdom does have a plan.

Yeah, these are solutions that people are actually doing.

They're doing it everywhere, all over the world, globally. And so that's when you said it's hopeful, the most hopeful thing about it is that we think humanity is on the case. When you read the headlines, you get a very different sense.

We don't have news, we have bad news. The good news doesn't get covered.

Right.

I mean, it's kind of like the fossil fuel team got spotted 72 points and it's a football game, okay. But I mean, they're way ahead because it's a 200-year head start. But having a 200-year head start doesn't mean that the movement to reverse global warming isn't going faster and growing faster than the movement to destroy the Earth, which is really what's happening.

Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a bit of fatalism out there. I think, you know, fear and fatalism and denial and, you know, just blah, blah, blah. I don't want to hear about it because it's hard to believe that we can actually do this?

People so often think, well, the most important thing is the answer to the questions. And we actually, I started this saying, no, what I want to do is question the answers. Because I thought the answers weren't working. Because the answers were disempowering people, disenfranchising them and turning them off. And I said, wait a minute, these aren't the right answers to the questions that everybody has, which is how do I take care of myself, my family, my community? and in a way that is supportive of them and everything else, which is all living life, you know, and that's really what all people want to do. I really feel that's true with some exceptions, you know, who are very rich, but I mean, most people on the ground want to do that. They don't know how to do that, and they've been taught how not to do it. And that's habitual right now. And so that's why drawdown really was about possibility, which is saying we got the problem, got it, exquisite, Two and a half billion data points, the fifth assessment, the sixth one's coming out next. I mean, we could have a better problem saving, you know? But now, can we just talk about solutions? Because repeating the problem does not solve the problem.

Yeah.

So let's talk about the solutions. The number three solution in the first food one in the list was food waste, which people don't really think about. But 30 to 40% of all the food we eat is thrown out and ends up in landfills. Yes. Which is stunning to me. And we go, we don't have enough food to feed the world. Yeah, we do. It's in the garbage. And we don't like to eat ugly food. You never see a crooked carrot. You never see a misshapen potato. You never see broccoli with a little brown on it. I mean, it's amazing. We only want to eat perfect food. And, you know, I went to this farmer's market around here in New York a few days ago and there was this beautiful display of apples and they were all beautiful and clean and looked great and pristine. And then I said, well, do you have any organic apples? And they said, oh yeah, there were a little bit over here and they have these kind of ugly little apples with brown and specks and little things on them and little warts. And I'm like, I bought those and they actually were really good. So, you know, we have this big food waste problem. Tell us, why food waste is such a problem? What are the wasted resources that happen when we throw out food or food gets wasted in our society?

Well, again, I mean, when we spoke earlier about the process of making food, you have to go back even further, which is you have a land and a tractor and diesel, so forth, growing seeds, actually. Growing seeds, those seeds then are cleaned and shipped to a farmer. The farmer does the same thing, which is he tills the soil or she tills the till. the soil, then they irrigate it, that's cost with pumping water, they use herbicides, they use pesticides, they use nitrogen fertilizers that are made from petroleum, so forth. And then they'll harvest it with a harvester, and then that harvest, they'll take that and they'll go to the grain elevator, it'll be cleaned, it'll be shipped, it'll be processed, it'll be sent to a food manufacturer, it'll be manufactured, it'll be put in plastic or cardboard or something, usually plastic now, and it'll be shipped to a distributor, it goes to a retailer, the retailer. You now are driving up to the thing and you get this food and then you take it home. So there's tremendous amount of human energy and effort and fossil fuel energy has gone into this food. Whatever it is. So if you go home and believe me, 40% of what you take home is wasted in America.

Think about it. If Ford or Toyota made cars and 40% ended up in landfills out of a factory.

40% of your income, 40% of your thing.

Oh my God, yeah.

And for several reasons, one is habitual, which is like, and it happens in restaurants, it happens everywhere, which is, I'm full, I push it away. I did it today. Somebody complimentarily gave us a bowl of harissa and I don't eat harissa. And they just put it there and walked away. And it was a compliment. It was over the chef and going, I can't eat that. And so I felt really bad about it. I mean, you know, just like, oh, you know, and I didn't give them in time. And suddenly want to say, oh, no, we don't want your compliment.

But I mean, essentially, there's a bunch of climate activists I know who like dumpster diving. Oh, yeah. Because they go in the back. It's amazing these big food companies will actually, and grocery stores will actually police their garbage so that people don't steal their garbage. Why don't you let them take the expired this and expired that? Because it's, you know.

But then, I mean, besides that, there's restaurants where we push the plate away. That's the right thing to do, right? You know, I'm full. Thank you. That's enough. I didn't order that.

I ordered too much.

Sorry, I didn't think it was going to be that good. And we give people too much, you know? Yeah, we give too much. And then the other thing is, is we put food in the refrigerator where it goes to die.

I mean, that's really refrigerators do mostly. Yeah, that's my favorite thing is to go in the fridge. I do this with my wife. It shocks her all the time. I go and I hunt for all these different things. What looks like there's nothing in the.

Fridge and I make these delicious meals.

Out of all the almost bad food. I call it bottom in the refrigerator soup.

Yeah. Yeah.

I call it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like W-I-F. Whatever is in the fridge. Yeah, whatever in there. Yeah. But, but I mean, so. so it's extraordinary, you know, then in processing on the farm itself, I mean, when we get some romaine lettuce, all the real green leaves are left there. They just cut the inner core, which is not so green, not so healthy.

It's true. When you go in your garden, wow, this is what it looks like. Yeah, it's a big plant.

Yeah, you're just taking the little core.

Yeah, even broccoli, like when I grow broccoli in my backyard, I don't eat the head, I eat the leaves, all the leaves, you can cook them. The whole thing's edible.

Yeah, it's all edible. It's amazing. I know, so we waste it. But 40% of the United States, which is 133 billion tons of food, I mean, it's just ridiculous. And then, but in the rest of the world, in poor countries, poor people don't waste food. But, I mean, they can't afford to. But on their farms, they can't get food to market. It spoils, they don't have cold chains, they don't have the support. to actually preserve it, protect the food. Yeah, and so they lose a lot to, and they lose it to insects, they lose it to mice, they lose it to vermin, they lose it in transport. And so- and those are only in.

The front end inputs you're talking about, but on the back end inputs, when it goes into landfills, it ferments and it breaks down and it releases methane, which is far more powerful in terms of affecting climate change.

Well, it's interesting that- Food waste was the number three solution, We didn't measure the methanogenesis from landfilled food because we don't have the data. Ah. We know it's 28 to 35 times more powerful than CO2 in terms of CO2 equivalence. So you didn't even include that in the calculation.

So maybe it's number one.

Oh, it's number one if you do that.

No question about it.

Unbelievable.

No question about that one.

So how do we fix that? Well, you know, again, we might measure the model if we don't have good data, we could include it. It doesn't mean the data aren't there or that the fact isn't there. It is. It's certainly well known. But if we couldn't provide ample evidence of it being measured by a third party that was credible and recognized, we couldn't include it in our models. And this is an interesting point because it's not just food waste. The numbers you see in drought on are all very conservative. by intention. So the learning rate and everything, which is how fast did the price go down on say an EV or solar, you know, price per kilowatt hour or whatever. We almost flatlined that. I mean, we have very, very little projection of costs going down any further on wind, solar, EVs. That's not true. We know that's not true. We were very, very conservative on the science. So for example, if there was On a solar panel, it's not, you know the outcome in terms of electrons from a solar panel, it's measured done. But in land use, and particularly food, there's scientific studies all over the map, actually. Regenerative agriculture. And so we always did a sort of a median sensitivity analysis and took the low median. Always. We never took the high. And our purpose from the outset was- Overpromise and underdeliver. Was to be conservative.

Overdelivering under promise.

Yeah.

Specifically conservative. And the reason for that is that if we're going to get criticism, the criticism we wanted is that it's better than that. And that's exactly so far.

What's happened?

The only criticism we've gotten on our numbers is people saying, you underestimated, you undercounted. It was, it's better than that. And every time that happens, we go, yeah.

Which is impressive. It's staggering how good the numbers are.

Yeah. Because if we had made one mistake on any of the numbers and somebody busted us and said, oh, wow, you misplaced a decimal here or whatever, they would bring the whole study, the whole model into disrepute. And so we aired on the side of conservatives. So everything you see there is actually better than that in terms of the possibility.

Yeah, and there are companies out there that are innovating. Imperfect Produce is a guy who literally goes to the farm, buys all the ugly food and sells it direct to consumer. Watermelon water is a beautiful hydrating low sugar electrolyte drink that is made from misshapen or blanched or ugly watermelons. 800 million pounds of these watermelons are getting thrown out and now they're made into this delicious drink.

So there's people who are innovating around the margins on this. Yeah, there's a lot of startups in this space now, even in Silicon Valley. I don't mean Impossible Foods. the meat substitutes, I mean, in terms of very, very select niches in the food where there's waste and actually transforming that waste into something.

And it's amazing what we throw out, all the scraps and peels and everything. I went to this amazing dinner at Blue Hill where it was during a food conference in New York Times and Dan Barber created this meal of scraps. It was all the garbage that you throw in the garbage, like your potato peels and your peels and all the ends of everything. I mean, he made the most unbelievable gourmet meal and it's like, wait a minute, maybe we should be making soup stock. Maybe we should be not throwing stuff away. So on an individual level, there's a lot of things we actually can do. Yeah, absolutely. And then that sort of leads to the composting, which is another solution. I think Denmark for 25 years has not allowed any food waste to be going into the garbage and you just can't do it. And they have huge amounts of composting. San Francisco recently did the same thing. So if you have the right political will and the leader, you can actually start to make these changes.

Absolutely.

And- and I, by the way, I have to, I'm very proud. In 1979, I lived in a house in Ithaca with a bunch of friends, and when I went to Cornell, and we won the composting prize. And I've been composting ever since. And it makes me feel good. And I put great stuff to put in my garden. We got three gallons of Cornell ice.

Cream as our prize. That was before my dairy free phase, but it was good. Yeah, absolutely. and, I mean, you don't want to throw food away if possible, but if it goes away, and that can be the peelings or the scraps that you actually don't eat, absolutely. They should never go to landfill, they should be diverted and composted. And if you don't put it back to the land, the land doesn't thrive. But the number four solution actually relates to number three, too, which is plant plant-rich diet, which is very, very important. In other words, change what you eat, not just what you do with what you eat. Yeah. Or by implant rich diet is the number four solution, you know, which is really.

And that's different than a plant-based diet. That's a plant-rich diet. Meaning, it's what I always say with a Pegan diet is you want 60.

To 70% of your plate as vegetables.

Yeah.

It's. Well, we're, well, we were saying, we weren't trying to say you should be or your diet should be. We weren't saying that. What we are saying is that we should all be eating the healthful amount of protein, which is 50-55 grams per day. And in those countries where we're growing 90-100 grams per day, we cut that back. And in those countries where there's insufficient protein intake, we increased it so that we have a world where everybody's getting adequate protein content. Then next, we're saying we should shift a significant amount of that protein intake to plants from plants as opposed to, you know, cafos, you know, meat coming from confined area feeding operations. And so those two together produce that number of force. Yeah, number of force solutions.

Both for your health, it's great to eat more plants. That's always say you have a plant rich diet. But that sort of segues into the idea of regener AG and There's a bunch of solutions that are all sort of related. It's, you know, the conservation agriculture, there's managed grazing, and there's regenerative agriculture, and they're all kind of related.

They are.

Solutions that have to do with rethinking how we raise animals, rethinking how we grow crops, rethinking how we actually.

You.

Know, protect the land. So how can we then sort of move from from the idea of reducing food waste that you need to do to everybody should be composting. And you can do that in the city. There's now compost bins you can put in your kitchen. And in fact, I live in New York City and have an apartment and in Union Square, you can bring your garbage and compost and they will take it in Union Square. Now, we should have a city-wide composting program, but we don't. And I feel horrible when I throw stuff in the garbage in New York, but that's the kind of stuff we can innovate around. But what about this movement on regenerative agriculture because people are saying, well, if you scale this up and you do this kind of grazing where you manage the cows and livestock, you can actually begin to sequester carbon by restoring soils like the Buffalo did, that it could bring us down to pre-industrial levels. We don't know if that's true or not. How did you sort of come up with these solutions and what are they? Can you kind of go through them? What's regenerative ag? What's managed grazing? What's conservation agriculture? And how do we combine those to really change the way we farm and grow and have animals. Because animals are part of this solution, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Regenerative agriculture basically can include animals and I think it does in most cases, but is really about, first of all, never breaking the soil. No-till. That's the first thing, which is you don't, as soon as you break the soil, you're releasing carbon. And not only that, the microorganisms, soil microorganisms are dying. in the face of sunshine and heat.

The soil is alive and you're literally killing it when you run a till through it.

Yeah, it's the most complex living organism there is, by the way.

Yeah.

And we still don't know what's going on down there. And so that's number one. Number two is cover crops, which is complex cover crops, you know, not just clover or vetch, but I mean 10, 20, 25 seeds in the drill box, you know. So you're planning a real complex ecosystem that is interactive with itself, that fixes different minerals, that fixes nitrogen of course, you know, in terms of leguminous crops, cover crops, you know. And so you're bringing down nitrogen, you're putting it in the soil, but also you're creating tilt, you're creating the roots are breaking up the soil, and you're creating greater water retention because there's more carbon in the soil and carbon is life, and so you're producing that. And then using perennial crops or deep-rooted crops, that is to say crops whose roots go down instead of laterally. There's called labile carbon, which is the first six inches of the soil. But actually, when you have deep-rooted crops, the carbon goes down about 40% of it goes down into the roots. And that carbon is in the form of sugar. It's not like a carbon molecule. And that sugar feeds the microorganisms.

The rhizomes and the mycelium.

Yeah, the mycelium.

And.

It'S food. And so the plant gives the food away. Those things in turn break down the minerals, that is to say the rocks and the salt, sand or whatever in there, breaks it down and makes those minerals bioavailable to the plant, which makes the plant healthier and grow. And both together then create soil that retains from three to ten to 20 times more water. And so it gives them- that's why.

We'Re seeing all these floods and droughts because- Right, you can't absorb the water.

You can't absorb it and can't keep it. But on the other hand, if a farmer has that kind of soil, you do have a drought, you actually have a crop that's still gonna make it, as opposed to being perishing right away because you have no water in the soil. So you create a water bank, which prevents flooding. At the same time, you create a.

Water bank which protects crops. yeah. And the water is a huge issue. I mean, I remember being at a talk by Jim Kim, who was the head of the World Bank, and he said, the wars of the future will be fought over water, not oil. And when you think about it, five percent of the Earth's surface is fresh water. One percent is in Russia under Putin. So who knows what's going to happen to that in Lake Baikal? At least four percent for the rest of us. And we're depleting it at Rapid rates that are unsustainable. And I mean, imagine if we run out of water.

But look at the good side though, which is that global warming produces more water in the air. And that's from the ocean.

You got a hurricane.

No.

So if you have an agricultural system that is much more retentive of water, I mean, I remember a farmer we talked to and he pointed to some ground over there. He said, you know, we would get half an inch of rain and it would pool. It would pool right on that that land. He said we had 13 inches, you.

Know.

And we didn't pull it all. And so we can actually do something which is very interesting, not talked about so much, which is create an agricultural system that brings the water back. And when you rehydrate the soil, you cool the earth. Just like we perspire, right? And we cool the body. well, the earth is the same. So when it's dry, which is, it's getting very dry, right, then it gets hotter. If it's full of water, you know, and then it respires.

Yeah.

And it cools it off.

Well, the other part of this whole soil story is that the soil, if it's not holding the carbon, then it's releasing in the environment. And I think of the soil as sort of the rainforest of the prairies. It goes in the environment and it goes into the oceans. And then you get the death of a phytoplankton, which produced 50% of our oxygen. So not only we're going to overheat and die from the heat, we're going to actually suffocate because there's not enough oxygen for us to breathe.

Yeah, and you're kind of going to where everybody else is going, which is all the things are going to go wrong.

But the fix is fixing the soil. That's the whole thing.

The fix is fixing the soil, but also it's fixing our relationship to the oceans, which is the oceans can be farmed in such a way that transforms. Right now the CO2 is going into carbonic acid and acidifying the oceans and then killing off phytoplankton and other things. And so we can start to look at the oceans as places that can be farmed. Kelp is the number one sequestration organism in the planet is kelp, not bamboo, it's kelp. And I just had a kelp salad.

The other night, it's great.

Yeah, well, when Drake went up the coast of California to Oregon, Washington, the Explorer, British Columbia, Sir Francis Drake, I mean, they described the kelp beds off Cascadia, which is what I call that whole area, but Cascadia, as the eighth wonder of the world. It went out 40-50 miles. It was just sea otters everywhere. You could almost pick the fish out with your hands. It was talk about a rainforest. It was an oceanic rainforest. And what happens, that's gone today. So bringing back help and bringing back oceanic life actually is actually not so difficult. it takes intention, it takes design. But there are now companies working on marine permaculture, which is like, in a sense, regenerative ocean farming.

Yeah.

You know, where you not only bring back, you know, phytoplankton, zooplankton, you know, algae, kelp, but you bring back feeder fish, forage fish, you bring back, you know, whale sharks. I mean, you, the whole trophy cascade is brought back and you can bring it back within weeks if you bring up the thermocline, if you bring up the cold waters that are now being suppressed by these heat blankets caused by global warming. And if you produce like these marine permaculture has self-actuating pumps, you know, they're just actuated by the rise and fall of the water tubes down to the thermocline, you bring up the cold water, you have frames there, recycle PET, whatever, so forth, and the ocean regenerates itself and sequesters more carbon per acre per hectare than any any other single source in the world.

Regenerative farming in the oceans.

Exactly right. Exactly right. And we can do that.

So I want to get into a little bit of a sticky issue, controversial, which is the whole idea of meat. Because on one hand, I think we all agree that CAFO farming, because of how the food is grown that depletes the soil and water, is industrial farming and the CAFOs themselves where the cows release methane and contribute in all run off. That's just a big mess. No one thinks that's good. But when you start thinking about using animals to restore soils, to restore water and to dry down carbon, should we be eating more meat or should we be eating the right kinds of meat that are grown in that way? And what are the arguments for and against that? Because some people say, oh yeah, if we do regenerate our agriculture at scale, we can have lots of meat. It's not gonna be as much as we have with CAFOs. it still will be able to supply the world with meat, but it'll actually reverse climate change.

Well, regenerative agriculture does and doesn't have animals. I mean, I think the healthiest regen farms I've seen do use pulse grazing. That is to say they use ruminants and pulse grazing is just what the Buffalo did that you talked about earlier, which is basically they graze and move, graze and move, graze and move, graze and move, and they don't stay in the same place and destroy. They manage grazing. And furthermore, they have perennial grasses, prEnial grasses or deep rooted grasses and when they're bitten off, so to speak, by a cow goat or sheep or whatever, it stimulates root production and so it comes back stronger and it stimulates carbon going deeper into the soil. So it is very much regenerative when you have that. If you just crop it, crop it, crop it, crop it, crop it, then that plant just gives up and dies. Okay, so and you go to annuals and you plant annuals. and annuals don't do a darn thing for the soil, frankly. So, but so this idea of me not me, what we know is that all grasslands in the world co-evolved with animals. They didn't just happen by having grass there and blowing in the wind and plant replanting its seeds. They co-evolved the great soils and prairies, the Serengeti and all those grasslands were even a subarctic circle, which was heavily populated by ruminants and wolves and buffaloes and Yakutian horses and the woolly mammoth and elk and things that could survive minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter. And they could survive and they ate grasses and browse and produced a very healthy ecosystem. They were exterminating 12,000 years ago. So all the lands that we have co-evolved with animals. You take the animals off the land, there goes the land. Bye, see ya.

So- That's what happened. How he went from 60 million bison in the 1800s to almost none and then the dust bowl in the 30s.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Buffalo Common was extraordinary in its fertility and productivity. But so the idea of eat meat, not that's a personal decision. what we do know is that in order to regenerate grasslands, which hold more carbon than the forests of the world.

Yeah.

Wait, wait, say that again.

Which hold more carbon than forests.

So the grasslands are more powerful than the rainforests in holding carbon. Something we never talk about.

No, we don't talk about that. And so those grasslands cannot persist or be healthy or actually increase their sequestration rate of carbon. unless they have animals. And not just animals sitting on them, but animals graze, manure's grazing and so forth, pulse grazing. There's lots of words for it. The one thing I would say is that, you know, somebody has gone on, give a TED talk, said we can reverse global warming if we do that. That's just scientific puppycock. Sorry.

The Savory Institute.

Yeah, exactly. And Allan's a fantastic guy, brilliant man, has done amazing things and really popularizing the idea of this land animal relationship. But we have to be careful that there is no silver bullet, because it really isn't. It's a system that caused it. It's a system that cures it. And so we don't want to burden a system with saying, oh, if we do that, then this is gonna happen. We're gonna save our, you know, it's not true.

And what I hear you saying is that animals as part of the cycle are critical.

I agree with Alice here. no question about that.

The quality of the meat's better and it promotes better health and it has less obviously.

Oh, it's very different meat.

The quality has higher omega-3 fats, more minerals, more antioxidants.

Absolutely. But it doesn't mean that being vegan.

Is right or wrong.

It doesn't mean you need to eat meat. That's a moral choice. It may not be. It's moral and for some people, you know, I mean, we talked about this once before, you know, people in the tropics have very long intestines, people in North and South, you know, who live in cold inclement climates have been meat eaters for generations, have very short intestines. People with short intestines go vegan and actually kind of starve. People with long intestines are going to all to all meat or, you know, like a keto diet don't do well at all. And so this idea that one diet fits all just isn't true. It's not true.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, the best indicator is you. I would say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body. Yes. And if you listen whether you're eating meat or not, I mean, people know.

Yeah.

And I think that's key. But I think the argument that, you know, we should never eat meat because it's bad for the climate isn't the true story.

Meat produced industrially is bad for the climate.

Yes.

And that meat should be assiduously avoided, no question about it.

And the other type might actually help.

Yep.

Yeah. So there's a lot of other interesting solutions part of this, which I thought were kind of fascinating things we don't really think about, like how we grow rice around the world. Rice is other than wheat is one of the is staples and yet the way we grow rice around the world contributes to methane in the environment and these big rice paddies which look so beautiful, you take your pictures when you go on vacation, but then you know, you're like, whoa, maybe actually it's not so good. So tell us about the rice cultivation.

I will and then I'll tell you about how we are a learning organization, drawdown, the research is not done, it's never done, it's ongoing. There's two methods to grow rice that are differ from conventional rice growing, whether it's organic or non-organic, which is you take the water off the paddy and you return it to an aerobic environment. Because when you have water on it's anaerobic, in an anaerobic environment, same as a food landfilled, then you get methane production. And so rice cultivation is a major source of methane in the world as a food crop. And so there are two methods in order to reduce that by about 50%, which have a major impact on methane emissions. And those methods both increase yield and decrease the cost for the farmer. So it's kind of a win-win-win. Okay. Having said that, last month, a paper came out that said, hold on, hold on. That's all true. But when take the water off the paddy, you get increased emissions of nitrous oxide.

Oh, that's not so good.

Right, so now we're looking at that.

Oh, maybe it wasn't the best solution.

Well, it is a solution, it's in there, but I just want to say we're all learning. We're all learning. And that science didn't exist when we published and when we did our research. And we'll look at the science. It doesn't mean it's true or not true. It may be that science was done on California patties that are heavily fertilized with nitrogen fertilizers and therefore it's bioavailable and is emitting or does that mean the farms in Bali, the traditional methods where you have fish in the patties and I don't know what it means. I'm just saying is that- We're still learning. Well, that's what we intend to be, yes.

So one of the things that sort of, I find very fascinating is, the whole area of how to restore farms that have been sort of depleted. Farming, Mr. and, you know, we think, oh, it's the industrial agriculturists that have done this. But often, you know, we humans are often pretty destructive, you know, and even if you're a smallholder farm, you might be using practices that just are not so great. And I read this book called Sapiens, which made me a little disillusioned with the human race, because I think it had this idyllic view that we were these great people we had this indigenous cultures that lived in harmony with the land. But the truth is we were raping and pillaging and destroying and we'd go through and ruin some place, then we'd go find some other place. Now we ran out of places. That's the problem. And I found fascinating in your book, the story of how we can take some of these farms that have been depleted that are now wastelands and actually restore them using more innovative practices. And this can be regenerative agro, but this can be done with small farmers all around the world who do produce most of the world's food. I mean, that was a shocking stat that, you know, if 27% of the food is produced by big ag, that means that, you know, 63% is 73. I'm not so good with math. I'm a doctor. You know, 73% is, is produced by everybody else, which are the smallholder Farms.

Right. And, and that goes to education, because I think smallholders would be the first to want to farm in such a way that was less costly, more non-productive. And that is what regen does. And furthermore, there's a billion acres of land that's been abandoned. And abandoned because it's not productive, it doesn't work, it's dried out, it's been destroyed. And so what we need, though, is a way for people financially to make that transition. Because that first two years is a money loser. And so that's why that land has been abandoned, because you can't make any money on it. So why farming. It doesn't matter what the crop is, whether it's sheep or goats or whether it's corn or maize or soy. It doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. It just doesn't work financially. So we need a way to support people to make that transition. Once they make that transition, they could even pay back those loans or some of those. So you gotta have that bridge. We had to bridge and we have to recognize it. And that's true for American farmers. There's American farmers who are hitting the wall and they can't afford can't afford to make the transition to regenerative agriculture. So there are some NGOs and people starting funds that will actually work with farmers to make that transition, but it needs to be financed. The same way that many people need help on healthcare costs, right? They need help. They can't do it themselves. If they get good healthcare provider, then maybe they'll start being preventive in terms of, as opposed to palliative, but nevertheless, that's where we are on farmlands around the world.

Now, you have been doing this for a long time and you published the book in early 2017. And it's not just a book, it's a movement. And you've been then called around the world to talk to leaders about how to start to implement this. What have you seen since you published the book and are speaking about this all around the world that's given you hope? What are the kinds of solutions and things that are beginning to happen? been catalyzed by this?

Well, there are several things that were set, I set out in the beginning as sort of principles or ethos, you know, ethics and how we go about things. One was we wanted to create the conditions for self-organization around Drawdown, as opposed to be as top down.

You want to be decentralized.

Well, yeah, because top down is too slow.

Yeah.

Doesn'T work anyway. And because you say you're right, you know, that means someone else doesn't know and they're not right. I mean, that is not a good way to communicate in the world. So number one, we don't say we're right. We don't say that. We say we think it's approximately right. And here's the data and here's our sources and help us. So number two, we're deeply collaborative. We're a small we of 220 some odd people, scientific advisors, advisors and then research fellows who are scholars, scientists, PhDs, postdocs, et cetera, working together really to create the data points. And then a small group, me and Katherine Sober actually wrote the final copy, but that came from a copy that was written by over 60 people around the world. So we're deeply collaborative and so we are a small we talking to the bigger we, reflecting back to the bigger we. This is what we know. this is, we know this, not we, our little NGO and Sausalito, but we, the big way. So it's important for people to understand that this is about our collective understanding of wisdom as opposed to a small group knows this and you didn't. Okay, right. So that's number three is language, is that we use language that is not divisive, that isn't sports and war metaphors. So we don't tie combat and fight, you know, and win. And, and, you know, it's like, or I was just walking up Central Park West last night and said, Curb your dog. And people say, Curb climate change. And I'm going, that's what they do in New York with dogs. You know, it's like, don't, you can't curb it.

And you just go sit on the curb.

Yeah.

And the thing is, like, the idea that climate change is something we can curb, fight, combat, you know, Crusade, I mean, all those metaphors are so stupid because climate change is a miracle. And it's the last thing in the world you'd want to fight. The problem is warming. That's the problem. And warming is caused by us. And warming changes the circulation models. All climate models are about how you can't model climate. All you model is the circulation of these rivers of air in the North and Southern hemispheres. And those rivers of air bring rain, or they move and they bring drought. And so we know from the predictions that were made that as it gets warmer, the jet stream gets more wonky. And so you get more rain or you get hydrological weirdness, which is no rain. So you get drought and flood instead of the more conventional rains that were there every year. So we are very careful not to other than...

Using the right language.

Well, not to make it other, because making it other is the problem. That is not the solution. To think of climate as a problem, to teach our children that climate is a disaster when they should be learning how to fall in love with it and it's a miracle. And so one of the things that's come out of Drawdown is that it's taught from fourth grade all the way to graduate school.

It's amazing.

Same book.

Curriculum that actually can empower people.

Yeah, I'm going to Mega Institute this weekend to talk to teachers from fourth grade to graduate school and historically black colleges, indigenous people, you know, so forth. And because they're using it as a template to understand what they can do in their communities, in their social political boundaries in their states and cities and their schools and to teach children. So teachers are paying attention, but also.

Governments are paying attention.

Governments are paying attention. Oh yeah, we have, and so we have drawdown cities. We have drawdown countries. We have drawdown Australia, drawdown Switzerland, drawdown Nova Scotia, drawdown Toronto, drawdown. And we didn't create any of these. Okay? We didn't create them. We were in touch with them and we talked to them and we love them and we see what we can do to help them. But what you're seeing is drawdown organizations start up spontaneously around the world because they have the toolkit. They have a toolkit. And what you're also seeing is the model being coded from our little kludgy way into Python into the cloud and then be downloaded all over the world. So people can model India or, you know, Victoria if it's in Australia or Toronto if it's in Canada or Botswana if it's a country. So they can look and Benchmark and see which of those Solutions are applicable, what do they cost there, whereas the where do you get it? How do you do it? Here are the resources. Here you want more? This is education. This is activation. So people around the world, they want those tools. So that we're definitely in the process of doing that, working with Penn State and MIT and Georgia Tech and University of Washington, Imperial College, ANU in Canberra, Terry and Hyderabad, 22 universities around the world. And we cut it off because we'll work with them and then it'll be available to any any university or any institution in the world, so that the model then becomes applicable to that place, whether it's a physical boundary or social political boundary, whatever it is, those people decide. And that means anybody then can go into the model and then change it, work with it, play with it.

So great. I mean, you now have taken us from being in a hopeless place to a hopeful place.

I think we can do it.

From a disempowered place to an empowered place, both on a local level and a community level, on a social political level and even a global level with governments. For those people listening, they're probably wondering, okay, this is all great, but in this set of solutions, what are those things? What are those actions that I can take that are going to make the biggest difference?

It's so interesting.

Is it composting?

I was so interested in that question. Because — what is it? Because it talks you know, that's the question I get, you know? Okay, now it's a question and answer.

Maybe tonight there'll be one. Because it's a change in your light.

Bulb, like, oh, or sad, or what is it? No, they'll say, well, what can I do? And I say, we just met, you know, like you're raising your hand, we just met. I have no idea what you can do. I should do. Only you know that. And I guess what I'm saying is, you know what I'm saying? If I tell you what you should do, you should run. Okay. because that's bullshit. And the thing you should do is what lights you up. The thing you should do is where you get turned on. The thing you should do is the thing.

Gardening, whatever.

Whatever it is. And so forth. And you can be sure if you're not doing something else, somebody else is. I can assure you, because we know that factually. But the thing about it's nice to.

Know the multiple choice of, oh, these are the top 10 or 20 things.

They are the rage. They're ranked.

By?

Well, I mean, I'm not going to be planting a multi-level forest in my backyard, but I might compost my food or I might eat more plants or I might, you know, put a solar panel.

So what should I say to you? See, I wouldn't say what you should do. You know, you see the ranking, you have the book, you know, like, wow, wow, wow, wow. And so for you, right away, you can look at waste, you know, number three.

That's for easy.

Right.

I mean, because some of these solutions are things that require, you know, a different level of action that someone as an individual can do. But a lot of these are actually things you can do and make a huge difference. And I always say the most important thing every day is three times a day is decide what you put on your fork because it affects you. I agree. It affects your health, the planet, the climate. It affects the political environment, your social environment. I mean, this is what my next book is going to be on. We talked about this. I call it the food fix as opposed to the food fight, which some people want me to call it because it's not about what the fight is.

About what you can do. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And that is the number one solution because you do it three times a day at least, and hopefully not too many times. But you buy or consume food. And so that is the number one solution because it's a cascading solution. It's not just not wasting food. It's what did you eat, where did it come from, who made it? I mean, it goes way, way out. And so forth. So food is definitely number one. It's eight of the top 20. But what we avoid doing is call to action telling people what to do. And the interesting thing about it is that people say I was very hopeful, but I can tell you- 10 steps.

To reverse climate change in three weeks.

Exactly. My next book. The thing is that when we started it, I had no, and therefore we had no idea whether Drawdown was even possible. So we didn't go into it to prove it was possible. We didn't go in to demonstrate that it's possible. We went in and did the math. Yeah. And people say, well, it's a very hopeful book. I said, no, it's not. It's a reality project.

Yeah.

We are about reality. Numbers. It's very sober.

It's very interesting.

And so forth. And so people say, well, it makes me very hopeful. I said, great. But that means reality makes you hopeful.

Yeah.

There's no rhetoric. No, it's amazing. It's.

There's no rhetoric in there. There's no politics. But the stories. The first solar panel went up in New York City in 1884. Yeah.

Who knew?

And it was just two years after Edison put up the first coal-fired plant.

I mean, it's amazing. I mean, you know, I, I was in the Middle East recently and I met with one of the top Royals and guys who runs the country and he's like, yeah, we, we decided to invest in solar. And it was, you know, whatever it was, 20 cents a kilowatt or whatever. It was, like, not really very cost effective. He says, now it's one cent. And now we desalinate all our water. I said, why don't you use oil?

He says, this is cheaper. Oh, Wow, that's unbelievable. Yeah.

Yeah.

What's happening?

Yeah, and again, it's like, I think also, absolutely every individual should understand what their relationship is to the earth, to food, to systems, to, you know, energy, everything. At the same time, there's been this overemphasis on what you can do, you, you, you, you. And it's really the only way we're going to solve this is be a we.

Yeah.

And to come together and collaborate. And that's what we tried to model is to be a collaborative. It's about listening, it's about sharing, it's about not being right, it's about permeability, it's about, you know, I would say rigor, you know, in terms of let's make sure this is right, this works. But it's not about, you know, if you don't do this, then something bad is going to happen because that actually, again, puts people into kind of empowering thing.

Well, you're also making a series on this. Is it Netflix or something? It's going to be running.

Well, it looks like Nat Geo now has a series on Netflix and they're doing a two-hour special on Drawdown and probably sponsored by AT&T. It's interesting because AT&T said if they sponsor it, every ad will not be about getting a new phone, but actually what they are doing. with respect to energy. In other words, everything will be about their initiatives internal to the company to reduce their carbon footprint. That's incredible.

I mean, it's all happening in the catalytic aspect of your book and the environment, I think, can't be understated. I encourage everybody to go get a copy of Drawdown, go to drawdown.org, check out what's on there. I mean, you almost don't need to buy the book. There's so much information on the website. I was like, whoa. He's giving away the store, but it's good. Absolutely. Yeah, we gave it away.

It's pretty amazing and it's beautifully presented. I think it became a best seller though because the book is something people give to others. They give it as a message and it's in 12 languages as of the end of this year, you know. From Finnish to Arabic to Vietnamese to, you know, French, Dutch and Italian, German, all those sort of things. And it's just spreading around the world and we didn't have anybody out trying to sell the book. people are, want that book for the same reason, which is they want a roadmap and the tools with which they, as communities, as schools, as individuals, as agency type of individuals, but some individuals are city managers, some people are CEOs, some people are, and so it depends where you are and what you can do.

So one last question, and maybe we've already answered this, which is if you were king for a day, and you could change anything and maybe you've already done the work to do what you're doing, what would it be that would have the most impact?

The most impact would be to get corporations out of the media.

Out of the media? Yeah. And not politics?

Well, that is politics.

You mean Citizens United or do you mean commercial?

No, not commercial.

That's marketing.

That is that the media is actually true media. Now, right now you have Sinclair buying every small station there is in the country and you have, you know, we don't get- you- mean a free press.

Is what you're asking for?

A free, a free true press.

Now, we don't know about this, but there was something called the Fairness Doctrine.

Oh, yeah.

Which was repealed under Reagan, which, because the government owns the airwaves, they license the airwaves and they changed the regulations to remove the Fairness Doctrine, which stated that all the reporting and all the information had to be fairly presented according to the facts. And that led to the rise of all these polarizing media on there where you don't even know what you're reading. You watch Fox News and you watch CNN, you feel like you're in two different planets.

Exactly, and that's corporations, both corporations, both making money. But they're making money basically off the they're neuroscientists there and they know how to actually make people addicted to that form of news. It doesn't matter what's left or right. And the thing is, you cannot have a democracy unless you're fully informed. It doesn't matter who you vote for. Unless the polity is informed in a fair and objective way, then they cannot make decisions. I have a lot of faith in human beings making good decisions. if they have good information. But without good information. And so I feel like the thing that's holding us back is that, however, at the same time, the thing that's going to push us away is that climate change is not a linear system. I mean, the rate at which CO2 is going up is very linear. It's almost a straight line. But climate change is a complex adaptive system that changes in a nonlinear way, and you can have regime changes. where like this year the jet stream broke. It not only went down deep, deep south and baked everybody, but it actually broke. It's never broken like that before. How can a jet stream break? It's like a river stopping. And is that a regime change? Is that permanent? Or are we gonna go back to the old gesture even next year? I mean, so I think you're gonna have like, you know, Mexico Beach, you know, and you the Gulf Hurricane Michael, I mean, I think you're going to have extreme events, you know, where regions by region, by region, by region, too often the poor, unfortunately, but basically get it. And they didn't get the science, they didn't get the news, they didn't get the information, they may not have the literacy that required to make a decision or even the economic wherewithal to do so. But they're going to have, you understanding that everybody who was a denier, everybody who was basically fobbing them off and so forth, was dead to rights wrong. And that the true climate movement is about caring. It's about heart, it's about going back to community. It starts here and goes out. And that really the people who really want to, you know, care for all of life, not just humanity, but all living creatures and bacteria and microbes and mycelium and so forth, you know, are the ones who are at the forefront of this movement. And that's really what it's about. It's an extraordinary thing.

It's a beautiful sentiment, you know, that.

We'Re all in this together.

We really are. And so that's one organism and we're all connected.

Whether we like it or not. Well, that's why we try to, we avoid all polarizing language. We avoid all, I mean, the MeToo movement is about we made women other.

Right.

Okay. Fighting climate change is the same mind that made women others, making the climate other. You know, it's us. It's all connected and it's us. And what would you do to yourself? Oh, thank you, Paul. Thank you, Paul.

What an amazing conversation. I hope you've all enjoyed it. You've been listening to the Doctor's Pharmacy with Dr. Mark Hyman and Paul Hawkin. And if you like this podcast, please leave us a review. review and a comment. Share it with your friends and family on Facebook and social media. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Thanks so much, Mark.

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