Healing the World in 18 Months?! —Living Between Worlds 5.4, with special guest Bill Reed

Foreign. This is living between Worlds for April 17, 2024. We're in the fifth year of these calls begun in the early days of the COVID pandemic. As I was struck by the remarkable parallels of the pandemic and the climate crisis. And we talked about that many times in early calls. The frame and the name comes from the. Inspired by the Antonio Gramsci quote, Italian revolutionary of 100 or so years ago who said that the old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born and between those at the time of monsters. And I think of monsters not as like Smaug in Lord of the Rings, but as the unleashed primal forces bubbling below the surface, taking us Lord knows where. We're in a liminal time. We're in a time that's going to be looked back on some hundred years from now and be given a historic name. And here we are in the middle of it. And this is what it feels like when history is happening. How do we move? What do we do? So we've, we've covered many themes in these years. There's Archives on YouTube. We'll post the link in the chat a little bit later. But let me for right now introduce to you our special guest, Bill Reed. Bill is a friend of, gosh, probably three decades. Bill, colleague of almost that long. Former partner at Natural Logic. We've worked together on client projects ranging from industrial transformation to built environment. Bill is an architect to one of the founders of the lead green building rating system that many of you are familiar with. But I don't know how you describe it, Bill, I think of you as a lapsed architect. Not so much doing architecture anymore, but recovering architect. Well, hope so. And turn your mic up a little bit, please. Doing a lot of remarkable work with communities on both what appears to be design and development and real estate development processes, but is actually a remarkable approach about how to bring people together even when they are in profound conflict. And as you can hear, that's not just a matter of real estate development. That's a question for our times. We've talked about that many times before. So, Bill, welcome.

Thank you. Gil, what do you got to say? Great to be here. It's great to see so many friends on the screen. A lot of you know what I talk about. Anyways, you can leave. We'll just have the others who haven't heard me before. I don't know, Gil, do you want me to just dive in or do you want to.

Well, dive right in. Or I could ask you about this strange Topic title that we have on this call.

Let's do that. Ask me about that strange title.

Sure. So in, in our, in our prep conversation last week, Bill talked about a process for healing the world in 18 months. And it's outrageous thing to say. And I imagine that it has to do not with snap your fingers and the planet is transformed, but, but generating healing process that produces remarkable results in a really short period of time. So tell us Bill, what you mean by that and then take us as far into the story as you want to go.

Okay, thanks. Well, it's admitted, admittedly a teaser, but it's not a false teaser. I want to assure you of that. It comes from real experience. And what we observed as we were working on permaculture projects and ecosystem restoration projects is that within 18 months, when you work with nature on her own terms, self organization and resiliency or diversity of species begins to happen. Begins to be immediately within 18 months it becomes apparent. And we observed that over and over again. So that's a pretty hopeful thing. But what was really interesting is when we asked our clients the benefits of working this way in community and in larger urban areas, it is consistent, it's eerily consistent where people said well, we saved about 18 months on our land use approval. We got our community support within 18 months, we got our financing within 18 months. And a Jewish friend of mine said, well Bill, you know what that is in Hebrew? Well, I didn't and 18 is high, which means life. So I don't know, put that in your pipe and smoke it and see what happens. But I, I, it's, it's evocative anyway.

So it is, it raises a question for me. I mean, you know, human processes might be fairly similar across wide regions, political jurisdictions and so forth, but ecological processes, hard for me to imagine that if you're working in a desert environment or a northern arboreal forest environment that you're still going to see the same time pacing. Do you?

Yes, you do you see recovery now? Now recovery. What does recovery mean? It, as you alluded to it doesn't mean that we're all of a sudden, everything is hunky dory and we're made. Well, we just see self organizing happening, that there's new relationships building. And I think we have to explore the definition of what we mean by sustainability too. What are we talking about with sustainability? And I would say that what we're talking about with sustainability is sustaining life, living process, life's processes. And what's the indicator of health?

That's different than esg man.

Yeah, for sure. And maybe I'm being overly simplistic, although I have tested this with various ecologists that the simple answer about sustainability is that life self organizes for greater diversity and complexity, which allows for a dynamic stability. And what we're facing on the planet right now is instability due to the monocultures. Well, I don't know if it's due to it, but certainly as indirect result of the monocultures we're producing so that we're creating a devolving situation. But life is, is this mysterious force, that light. As Robert Persic said, life runs up it, as opposed to the entropic second law of thermodynamic forces that face everything else that we do in the technical and infrastructure world.

So I learned why that is from Carl Henrik Robert, the founder of the Natural Step from Sweden. He didn't actually teach it, but it sort of distilled out of the conversations over many, many months that the reason life runs up on Earth is that we have an off planet source of energy.

That's right.

It's the sun, 93 million miles away. We harvest the energy here. If we were driving the planet with on planet energy, we'd be in the midst of the entropic process of those energy sources. You have to isolate the source outside the system. And that's why it works here.

That's right, yes. Yeah, yeah. You have to make the exception. We have the sun. Without that, this, none of, none of this works.

We have the sun and we have photosynthetic energy harvesters.

That's right. And the moon, don't forget the moon. Sun, Earth, moon system is all. Without the moon, it's a very different world.

It's a different world, but it's a different part of the process. The, the anti entropic story is sun, plants. Yep, look at all of us. We are solar powered, water cooled organisms.

The whole point of that is, is that if we align ourselves with nature's processes, we can have a healed Earth very quickly. So what's stopping us is the question, huh?

So Bill, what's stopping us?

Well, I'll answer that question then. So what's stopping us is lack of will. I think that's pretty much it. We divert our attention from, you know, we think, we talk, talk about dematerialization. How many of us are really willing to dematerialize as one of the major forces out there? The major, major issues facing us in, in terms of our use of, of resources. But I think that we are what's stopping us is that we think that we are in charge. For one thing, I think that we think that we, we think that we can fix things without having to sacrifice or without having to change the way we live. And all of that comes down to a combination of understanding how life works and the will to want to understand it. So that's a foundational premise for regenerative work, is that we need to build will in populations. And we have. Based on, not, not based on Elinor Ostrom's work, but because Elinor Ostrom actually really supported the premise is that we can't save the planet. It's too big, it's too abstract, there's no CEO in charge. But we, what we, what Ellen Rostrom proved is that we can save our places. And because we can see the ramifications of our decision making and we can actually enroll and inspire people in place to begin to think differently. And so the premise that I hold in our work is that we can't save the planet, but we can save the planet place by place.

And I would imagine doing that that very. You need people's will to do that, but I would imagine that that process builds people's will as a reciprocal life going up. Right?

That's right. And so how, how do we. Actually, I, I like to say that our work is about helping people fall in love with life again. And the, I mean, I think it's obvious. Love is a heck of a lot better motivator than fear or checklists. You know, we always hear this concept of. And by the way, I'm being really practical and pragmatic. This is not just wishy washy thinking. I hope to be able to present how this works because there is a process of inviting people into relationship not only with each other, but with the living systems that support us. And it's not very complicated, it's not hard, but it does require perseverance and it does require will on our part. And equally important to the idea of working with the potential of life, and I'm going to be talking about that word potential a lot, is the being and becoming state that we need to hold to allow for the system to catch up to whatever we've learned and for us to keep catching up. In other words, this requires us to change ourselves. This is not about us fixing what's out there. We cannot participate in evolution unless we're evolving ourselves. That's another premise. So that with the qualifications of building will, working with love, and working with, developing, not developing meaning in terms of developing Evolutionary potential of the systems that we're working with requires us to develop evolutionary potential inside of ourselves. And what's beautiful about it is all that can happen at the same time. We, we work with. I, in particular work with real estate and infrastructure projects. That's a very strange acupuncture point to heal the Earth. Right. It's people, I think, have a hard time getting their head around that, that we could do anything more than just limit the damage with our built environment.

And I'll tell you, I haven't. I don't hear the words will, love potential and developing ourselves very often in connection with real estate development or in connection with the corporate strategy land that I tend to play in, but you do. So let's get, let's get grounded here. What. Tell us what actually happens in a project. Pick a project.

All right, I'm going to give you this, my standard small example because it's just, it's so pithy. So let me. I'm going to share my screen. Hopefully I can get this slideshow up here. And let me see if I can go to presentation mode. Don't know if that'll work. How's that, that working? Cool. Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna introduce this in, in this, in my kind of standard way. I think it would be useful. So we, this diagram many people are familiar with. Can you see my cursor floating around? Okay, so we're at conventional design. We build. Randy Croxson said we build our buildings one step better than breaking the law. So lead comes along. Or we. We decided in the building council we needed an indicator of how, how much better we can. How much better we can make buildings. In other words, how much, how, how much less worse can we make buildings? So slowing down the damage, and this is where lead comes around, comes from. We come along with the idea that, that Maybe this is 70% better energy savings and carbon reduction compared to conventional construction. And then we imply that sustainability must mean zero. And of course, zero doesn't really exist in nature. Until we are reaching this impossible point of zero, we are degenerating the planet, so we're slowing down the damage. Bill McDonough talked about, you know, sustainability is a slower way to die. So that's not a very motivating position to come from. And no wonder we have not gotten much traction in the environmental building movement, the green building movement, because all we're really guaranteeing, people, is that you're going to die more slowly. That's the subliminal text. Well, Then what are we going to do? That's not very motivating. What would be motivating? Well, how do we, what are we working with? Let's go to first premises. We're working with life. So how can we restore life? And restoration processes are vital. And then how do we work regeneratively? And I'm being very specific about how I'm using these two words and I'm going to wave the flag for precision right now. Because just like the word sustainability has been banalized, the word regeneration is now almost 100% banalized. We're using regeneration as a synonym for restoration. There is a really important difference. Restoration means that we are restoring. Sorry, I'm going to geek out here on a little geeky definition. Yeah, want to geek, Gil?

Please, geek. We're here to geek.

So restoration means that we are restoring an ecological subsystem, like a wetland, a beach, dune system, a forest system, a riparian quarter. We are restoring an ecological subsystem so that it has the self organizing capability to evolve. That's what restoration means. We're not restoring to an original condition because there is no original condition. Because of evolution, life is ongoing. There's no such, no such thing as static life. Life is always moving, always adapting, always perturbating. Regeneration.

Sorry, go ahead.

No, no, go ahead, Bill.

I was just gonna ask you where you're, exactly where you're going. How do you contrast regeneration?

Okay, that's where I'm going. So regeneration is about a continual process of rebirthing, understanding. Now a simple analogy would be a marriage or a partnership. You have an argument, you have a spat, what do you do? You're not going to restore that relationship. That relationship already has moved on because of that argument. But what you're going to do is regenerate it and hopefully into even something better. Because working through difficulties actually is, can be a source of creativity, right? So regeneration is a matter of participating in birth, life, death, rebirth cycles. And let's take it at the pace of a, of a, of a year. Then every year, New Year's is, is really an important thing, is that we are actually, we should be rebirthing our relationship with the places we live. How are we doing? Where did we fail? What, what perturbations came into the system? Whether it's a hurricane or a wildfire, an earthquake. How do we adapt into the future? So regeneration is a continual process of rebirthing a value adding relationship with life. Now how we work with evaluating relationship gets into a much deeper metaphysical construct. And we'll get there. But ultimately, at the simplest terms, let's move up to Carol Sanford's four Modern Paradigms to actually help explain this graphic. So at the lowest level is extract value. We rip ore from the earth, nutrients from the soil, spirit from employees, and bad companies. That's just an abusive way of living. And that's pretty much our paradigm. Then we get it to slow down the damage. This is where lead comes in and Green Star and Graham, and even living building challenges about slowing down the damage. Doing good jumps us. And doing good sounds really good. Except doing good can actually be terrible if we impose our idealized version of the world on. On a system that doesn't ask for it. So think about the World bank or the International Monetary Fund in Africa or the Southern Hemisphere, where we impose North American and European ideals of good. And we know how well that's worked out. So doing good at its worst could be a form of colonialism. I know that may sound shocking, but it's true. Doing good if imposed, doing good at its best is good. But so what does good positive mean? What does good mean? Well, positive rain in Santa Fe, New Mexico is different than positive brain in Boston. So doing good is always context dependent.