LBW 4.11 — Is it hot in here? How are YOU coping with the climate crisis?

Welcome everybody to Living between worlds for November 15, 2023. We began these calls in 2019 in the early days of COVID facing the challenge of what felt like living between worlds. And I was really struck by the many parallels between the COVID crisis and the climate crisis and the dynamics of the trends, in the way the planet was responding, in the need for coordinated global action at speed, scope and scale, and our various bumbling successes and failures along the way on both of those. We're approaching the end of our fourth year of these conversations. Really grateful to have you all participating. Some of you have been with us all the way through and others are new. And welcome to you for joining us today. I'm thinking particularly these days about climate, among other things. Of course, we haven't talked about climate in a while in these calls, so let's do that today. But in a particular way. All around us we see the rising signs of risk and damage. We also see the rapid growth in awareness in the penetration of renewables. We see huge policy shifts and huge shifts in global capital flows. New York State just announced this morning their biggest investment ever in renewables. CalPERS just announced $100 billion investment in renewables globally last year. 70% more invested in renewables than in fossils. We know from the work of Mark Jacobsen at Stanford and others that we could shift 145 countries. That represents 99.7% of global emissions. We could shift 145 countries to 100% renewable energy by 2050. Technically feasible given what we know how to do now. We could do it for an investment of $62 trillion, which may sound like a lot of money, but it's about what McKinsey proposes be invested in fossil fuels over the same period. Oh, and by the way, Mark estimates 17.7% annual return on investment. I don't know what your portfolio is doing, but mine isn't doing that. But you know, all of this is not enough. It's all too slow. There are lots of bold goals and commitments being declared and lots of some that are not so bold. But actual progress at a national level, corporate level, personal level, rarely matches the rhetoric. So the challenge is that we know what to do. We know how to do it, but we're not doing it. And so we drift in what Alex Steffen calls predatory delay. So let's explore together today what stands in the way of change and why don't we change? We can list lots of reasons, of course. Vested interests, right? Different interpretations of what's so different interpretations of what's possible. Economic systems and methods of financial management that can't distinguish between cost and investment, that exclude so called external reality from economic calculations. You know, it's like Students in Physics 101 excluding friction from their calculations. We can list reasons like, you know, Newton's first law of motion. A body at rest remains at rest, or a body in motion at a constant speed in a straight line will continue to do that unless acted on by a force. We can call out moods of blindness and resistance and resignation. We all know the stack from the Binet Gesserit litany against change. It's always been this way. Nothing can possibly change. Nobody can make a difference. I certainly can't make a difference. And yet change happens at all of these levels. What stands in the way of change? Of course, it's not just out there, it's in here too. Are there things for you that you want to change, that you need to change, that you're committed to change, and yet you don't? I know it's true for me. I know that if I'm lights out before 10 o' clock at night, I sleep better and I sleep longer. I know that if I plan my weeks well and if I plan my days well, I am both more productive and more serene in the face of the always possibility of overwhelm. I know that if I exercise vigorously and regularly, well, you know, you get the idea. I'm committed to these things, things that I know without any doubt are good for me, and yet I don't consistently fulfill these commitments. And yet I'm pissed off easily at other people and other powerful forces that don't do what they say they will do or what I think they should do. And yet, paraphrasing Rabbi Yisroel Salanter's observations some 200 years ago, all too often we cut ourselves slack and expect impeccability from others. So let's explore together. What does this provoke for you? Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher. His favorite book was a short book called the Ordeal of Change. And the first pages of the book he talks about being a farm worker and having to go at the beginning of the season from picking peas to picking beans. And so he's laying in his bunk at night and he's worried about the change from picking peas to picking beans. And then he goes, wait a second, there is no real change here. Why am I so worried about it? And I know for myself if, if I, if I'm doing a routine that I normally go through and there's a.

Jog.

That can throw me off. Right. And that's. That's sort of, kind of the ordeal of change. Even small changes, like the change from picking peas to picking beans makes people very, very nervous. We know what we're doing. We're running on this track. We've been running on this track forever. What do you mean? I have to do something. An infinitesimally small difference. That makes me nervous. Thank you. Two brief observations and then Gene, over to you. Sometimes change activates us, engages us, makes us interested. There's a Taylor effect in change management where perturbation will provoke new behaviors. But the main comment I want to offer, George is that that makes you nervous or makes people bus and such. I will assert that nothing makes anybody anything. And you may hear me say that again and again through these conversations. We. We have reactions to things, but it's not like we're servo mechanisms where a switch got flipped and something happens to us. Something happens, but I'm going to challenge that syntax. I've got. I'm sorry, Gene. I've got Felix first, then Gene, then R. Hi there. It seems to me that the issue of what can motivate people is at the heart of all this. I think as. As Gil was just saying, you. You need to feel like you need to do this yourself and you have to have gratification or validation or something that you get from doing that. And what I've been thinking recently, I've almost stopped talking about working on climate change and I've substituted the word regeneration. And I'm doing that because I think it's more fundamental and it really. Regeneration is more hopeful. Climate change, for any number of reasons, people can't feel good about their prospects, but the idea of regenerating our world, regenerating our relationships with the living creatures in the world, including all other humans and animals and species and plants, valuing that. Valuing all those things and then saying, what can I do to bring back life to those within that. I find that all the words I used to use about climate change, reversing, restoring, rebuilding, repairing, all those words are included in regeneration. And, And I. And I find that it. It actually, that word brings. Brings life to my life. Great. Thank you. Gene Dunaway. Welcome. I have become interested in hacking the Daniel Schmachtenberger's assessment that the generator functions of what's happening, our rivalous relationships, that we're all in rivalous relationships at all levels, plus exponential tech, and the combination of those two puts us all in Competitive relationships with each other that will eventually self terminate. So I don't know if you're familiar with that idea, Gene. What do you mean by that? You're hacking that. Trying to figure out how on earth we would transform global civilization into non rivalous collaborative relationships for the good, operating within the carrying capacity of the earth. I can't figure out how we would ever do that. All investment companies are competing with each other. If your company fails, figures out how to do something more cheaply, they're not going to share it with me because we're rivals. And if it's not as healthy, I end up in a multi, what he calls a multipolar trap. Everyone is trapped into a race to the bottom which, or, or in these win lose situations which eventually become lose lose. And the people with the most power control the politics and buy the new technology. Although we have anomalies, we have companies like Patagonia and IBM that have opened their patent portfolios. We have people like you who've been at this for decades and have not given up in despair. Something keeps you in the game. What is that? Well, when, when, when living a win win life where I collaborate with people and we trust each other and share new ideas together, like what we're doing here, I mean this is, it's just the, the transformation from those two that I can't get at a global basis. But here we have non rivalist relationships. Not just here on this call, but each of us in our lives and circles are cultivating those in various ways. Yeah. And all of our early relationships were tribal and basically non rivalous. Right. We were, we were. Or contained rivalry. Or contained rivalry. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Thank you. Rick Patello, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Gil. I just want to preface this by saying I just came from another zoom.

Call where.

Salim Ismail was talking and.

I had a question that I didn't have time to ask. And my question, this is sort of.

Generic question, apropos, what you're talking about, systemic change is how can we co create systemic transformations in accelerated learning for all. And the question that I, that I'll put in the chat box here is because it's a complex question and I wasn't able to ask the question, but.

I did go to There's a genie.

Called massive transformational Purpose Genie. It's a chat GPT.

I put the question in and I.

Said would you respond to this question as though you were Salim Ismail?

Okay. And for me the issue is how.

Can we actually generate much more effective ways of collaborative Learning to scale. And this question is complex. It's unapologetically complex because when we reduce.

Our language and questions, we actually are reducing our capacity for complexity thinking. So it's antithetical to all the business.

Training that people have had or whatever.

And so I'm going to put it.

In the chat box and you can.

Look at the link and decide whether.

That response was on target or not.

Wonderful. Thank you for that. Rick, would you also give us the link to that genie? Yes, it's there. Okay, very.

I think if you click on it, you can, you can get to it.

But let me know if you can, because I'm. I. I've just started playing with it.

Okay, somebody else try that out and let Rick know so we can see if we're there. Harvey Stein, Welcome. I'm muted. Okay. Can you hear me? Yes, sir. Can you hear me? Wow. Very inspired to finally come to one of these meetings. I'm going to talk a little bit. It might sound a little bit like a. Like a pitch, but I don't mean it to. I'm a documentary filmmaker. Let me just ask you to keep it concise. We got a few more people in the queue and we want to get to breakout. So I want to give every everybody time. Thank you. No problem. I'm a documentary filmmaker and an impact film person. Briefly. I make short and longer documentaries that are meant to have a social, political impact. Our current one is on an amazing Israeli American solar energy visionary who's bringing solar fields to Africa where half of Africans have no power in their homes. Our plan, briefly, again, is we're making this movie. And then once we make this movie, we want it both to be accessible to the general public and theaters, but maybe more importantly, we're going to bring it in what are called impact screenings to communities all around the world. At the impact screening, we show a very short version of the movie which is meant to. Ari, let me. Let me time you out there. Put a link for this in the chat so people can track you down. Okay? Can I talk for one more minute? I think we need to move on. Just, please, one more minute. I mean, the point I'm trying to make is that emotional connection is the best thing. And when communities come together to look at movies together, they make connections. So I'm talking about movies as a force and communities coming together to make partnerships that may have not existed anymore. Got it. Thank you very much. Give us the link, people. Check them out. Thank you so much. Sorry. Thank you, Phil. And then Pam.

Hi.

So I was a personal trainer for.

A while and I noticed a somewhat perverse relationship between the level of motivation brought to exercising and the outcome. In terms of people reaching their goals, it tended to be the case that the folks who had the greatest sense of their own capacity, the greatest sense of their own agency, set for themselves more robust goals, spent for on them, on the pursuit of those goals, more willpower, and finally did not reach their goals. Whereas the clients who came in really with the more diminished sense of what they were capable of doing tended to set more realistic goals, tended to spend less willpower trying to accomplish those goals, and tended to accomplish those goals. So I think something that's bound up in all of this is the stories around our sense of agency, how it constricts, what we find rewarding. My sense was that the more ambitious clients tended to need more of a sense of accomplishment in order to maintain their devotion to the exercise, but at the same time had set the buy so the bar so high for themselves that they weren't going to get that feedback. And I guess you could chalk it up as a general perfectionist tendency that seems to be increasing in our society. But I think that a large part of this problem is that the agency we have, we have certain capabilities. Now there's things we can do to increase our capabilities, but overwhelmingly the things that constrain our capabilities are slow long term processes. And it's not very satisfying to accept that and construct those strategies in a more humble acknowledgement of what we really can.

It's a good point. And maybe so this is an age old debate about, you know, achievable goals and stretch goals and which work when. So thank you for weighing in on that, Pam and then Judith and then Jane and then we're going to go to breakouts.

All right, thank you very much for the invite, Gil. This is welcome, wonderful conversation. I've made a couple notes. I think you already named it at the top of at least a part of the answer to your question, and that is friction itself stands in the way. Change requires energy, it requires motivation and friction causes stress on the whole system. And so I think that there's a piece of that. I love the motivation question. I actually, if I wanted to get my PhD, it would be around motivation, what causes it and how, how to, to be in, how to have more agency. I love that term around my motivation. So I think that's another important piece. The other, the big point though that got me to raise my hand is competition versus collaboration. And I think that it ties in with our anthropological understanding of ourselves over history. The entirety of human history is that we see and we have had a tendency to create our history, our story, through, through competitive eyes. And there are more than one way to do history. And, and I've just been reading the dawn of Everything by the Davids, David Graber and David Wengro, and, and they really are busting their own cover and stretching to see history through different eyes than male competitiveness. So I just want to bring that in and the question, can we really see the past through a true lens? Does that even exist? But I love the idea of agency and personal responsibility. So thank you.

Thank you for that. You know, if we're going to be good biomimics, we're going to do competition as well as cooperation.

It's an interesting subject to delve into.

And we'll come back to that another time. Let's put it on the docket. Jane Bird, are you there?

Judith?

Oh, Judith first. I'm sorry. Yeah, Judith next. Thank you, Pam. You're muted. Judith.

Apologies for not getting. I had to get unmuted. Sorry.

There you go.

I just wanted to interject the thought that the whole question of self determination is governed in much part by the previous experiences of people in whether they've been successful in any dimension of self determination. And that's a really deep and complex topic. But I think it truly affects the resistance that causes people to step back from propositions that are new to them because of an, an intrinsic, not necessarily self aware, self doubt about how would they judge the rightness of this, how would they know whether they could take an effective action, how would they determine what effective action would be, and so forth. So there's a complex self determinant psychological piece of all of this that influences how we read and perceive everything in terms of information and how we evaluate that information for potential changing of our own viewpoint or taking action to assist in some transition.

Judith, what do you mean by intrinsic self doubt? Well, intrinsic, you mean already there or do you mean internal?

I think it's internal self doubt and I say it's intrinsic because each of us has a unique set of experiences that determines whether we've been successful at change. And not knowing in the audience you're dealing with what their perspective of self determination is, you can pitch the story completely wrongly and you can attempt to elicit responses that they'll put up barriers to because their own experience says, well, I can't change that kind of thing. And so I think it's intrinsic to an Individual, it's not intrinsic to a culture. But the complexity of that self determinism is a barrier for collective change.

Okay, thank you. Jane Byrd, are you there?

Yes. I'm sorry I'm not camera worthy today for video, but I deeply appreciate Judith's remarks. I think that she's put her finger on the crux of the issue about change for human beings. And an awful lot of that issue of self determination is linked in with, with personal experiences of shame and the need to maintain a sense inside ourselves that we are good, that our view of ourselves is that we find ourselves to be good. And everyone who experiences life in some way is good wants to maintain a self image or an ego belief that they are good. And so self determination and agency is so deeply much a part of the teachings of a remarkable climate scientist and soil microbiologist from Australia named Walter Yena. And he has been trying to refocus the global conversation around climate change to the level of understanding how the biosphere as a living system has regulated climate for millennia. And because the human 20th, you know, human industrial technological learning curve is such a fantastic mimic of nature, we've yet to be humbled enough to start revamping our mimicking to be closer to how nature's actually regulating things. Our understanding of how nature does it is lagging behind the crisis we're creating for ourselves. So I think there's a we're overawed by technology and we're under experienced in what nature's actually doing. And so the brilliance that Walter Yenny is bringing to the issue of agency is that how we manage land, land management and agricultural practices and restoration of the water holding capacity of the soils of the planet Earth really tie into the main greenhouse gas on planet Earth that's responsible for 95% of the heating and cooling dynamics of our planet. And no, it is not carbon dioxide, it's water vapor. And so healing the hydrologic cycles has everything to do with, with rapid transformation back to a livable climate and less climate catastrophes like these cycles of floods and droughts and drastic weather. So we have agency with land. Everyone who can have access to land decisions has agency in this.

You're also talking about agency in terms of the self assessment, self interpretations that you and Judith were talking about. Because Yenni is assessing human success by the health of the soil, not by the tons of concrete being poured. Yes. And so his assessment, are we doing good or not? Is a different story than what's happening in the boardroom at J.P. morgan.

Right. Are we creating deserts? Or is our business only in the service of creating deserts? Or is our business in the service of understanding the web of life and how to work with it? Seems like financial finance has run away with technology and ignored nature. And now we're coming up against the constraints of nature on our runaway love with technology to the exclusion of how nature does it. And we are part of nature, our technology is part of nature. And our ability to self consciously understand how nature is self regulating and conform our practices to those things is a vital part of nature's self regulation. Now because we're an evolved, we're evolving. We weren't always here. We're part of nature's evolution of this planet.

Thank you, Jane. Let's get back to the thread of the conversation. Ken, over to you.

Yes, sorry folks, we need to stop for breakout rooms here. I want to very briefly preface that by saying about a dozen years ago I went to Harvard and took a course on immunity to change with Robert Keegan and Lisa Leahy. I'll spare you the details of that, but they talk about competing commitments. You may have a commitment to lose weight, but you might as well also have a commitment to not feeling lonely. And if you don't have friends, you come home and so you eat in order to feel full. And when you look at competing commitments at the level of leadership and nations on earth, Saudi Arabia makes a billion dollars a day for every day there's a delay on climate change. So it's natural that they're going to continue that that's benefiting them.

We can't expect things to act as.

A unity because they're so fractured. There's so many different aspects of it. So how do we fit into that? There's 100 companies responsible for over 80% of global emissions. So don't blame yourself. You know, start to think about where's the leverage points, where can we start to exert some pressure that's going to make that change? I have a breakout room question for you here of what are some things that, you know, you could be doing, either personal or political, but that you're not doing and going to send you off into breakout rooms for about 16 minutes here and then we'll do another one and come back and open it back up to plenary. So let me just create the breakout.

Rooms here and clarify clarification on the question.

Yes, says what are some things, you know, you could be doing about what?

With regard to climate. Sorry, yeah, sorry. We, we, we. It was in our head that we were talking about Climate So that that wasn't a nice things you could do about climate. Or maybe there's some things that you are doing that you actually know are not contributing to making climate better. And there's no judgment here. We all have things that, you know, we're challenged by. All right, enjoy yourselves, folks. We'll see you in a few minutes. Welcome back, folks. Hope you had a good time. We have another question for the second breakout room. Let me make sure this is going. Everybody grab that. Hold on one second. Okay, just quick thumbs up, thumbs down. How was that last conversation? Good. That's not so good. Yeah, no, not so good for Michael. Okay. Gene's nester. Okay, well, let's see if we can pick it up. So here's the question now. What would you need or need to do to move things forward on those fronts in terms of actions you're taking on climate, Would you need or need to do to move forward on those things that you know you should be doing? All right, welcome back. Hold on one second. Oh, Judy is back. Okay. She just texted me saying she wasn't. Get in. Okay, sorry. We were in a breakout room there and by the time I got to it, we were closing anyway, so. Well, we are very interested to hear what this converse, these last few conversations have evoked for you. So please use the raise hand feature and show share with us what's come up. Jan, go ahead, please.

I was so appreciative of your questions and actually I've had my hands raised before because I just wanted to say that I think a big contributor to what we're all. The question that Gil is asking is that so much of our knowledge and wisdom is. Is tacit, and it remains tacit, and we're conditioned to keep it tacit when it actually, we have so much wealth and so much resource that's not defined and not. It's not capitalized, it's not described. There's a Harvard book about it called Deep Smarts. And so I just loved in the conversations I was in how myself and each person something that's right there. Your. Your question, basically, Ken is asking, you know, what is the tacit thing that's right there that you have that you're not using? So I just, I. I thought it was a marvelous inquiry and it was just amazing when I was going to bring up the subject and then you just implemented.

So well done.

Thank you. Emily, I don't know if you're still here, but thanks for coming in. I know we lost a couple of folks along the way, but it's great, and I'll just share. The thing that's in the way for me is I'm still driving an internal combustion engine vehicle, and I could go ahead and buy an ev, but that would mean buying another car, taking out a loan, you know, and it's. It's hard, you know, I don't want to do that right now. So it's. The system where I live is set up. If you are not a commuter, you really can't use public transit very effectively. And, you know, I don't want to go into debt again in order to pollute less. So it's a little bit of a. Of a bind for me. Bonnie, please. Nice to see you. Would you please let us know what's on your mind here?

Like John. Like John, I had my hand up.

And.

And similarly, both of the sessions kind of just validated what I was going to say earlier, which is that, you know, for me, when. When you asked, you know, what. What I could be doing that I'm not doing, I. I felt like it was kind of listening. Listening more, listening to myself, listening to what the. The real needs are, because I think sometimes they get confused and. And I get distracted by everything that's happening. You know, I. I'm still back with, like, Gil's first question, which is, you know, what does change bring up for you? And, you know, I've always been a person that kind of embraces and loves change. I've always been like, oh, put me in a new place, put me with new people. I'm a happy camper.

And.

And yet, you know, like, more recently, when, you know, the things have happened in the Middle east for the first time, I was like, wow, this really. This one could actually be World War Three. We could. We could. We could do this. And. And it's. And it brought up interesting, interesting things to listen to and feel in my own body of just like, wow, is that fear? Is that. You know, what is that? And I listen. I heard a Thich Nhat Hanh or a podcast the other day, and it was really profound and powerful for me because what it said was that much the same as my focus is on mindful or conscious consumption of goods in the world. And I. I teach it and I preach it, and I. And I try and live it. I. I think that the focus was mindful consumption of information and media and to really be much choosier, be much more selective about the sources of information and. And where I go and what I listen to, and maybe, like, don't watch all of that graphics to stuff and. And read about their culture and their songs and their history and. And if I want to know more about those people and. And empathize. And then the second was taking care of myself, and the third was acting wisely. So, you know, you ask questions essentially about that. I do believe I. I act pretty wisely, but I am. I just wanted to say that that's what came up for me.

Thank you. For those who are interested, Thich Nhat Hanh has a book out called For Future To Be Possible, Commentaries on the five wonderful precepts. And the fourth precept is about mindful consumption, which is not just taking in intoxicants and, you know, sugars and stuff, but also engaging in certain conversations and looking at certain kinds of media. So it's really. It's a short books. Really, really interesting. Klaus, please.

Yeah, thank you. I was actually struggling with the question a little bit because I was thinking, what am I not doing that I should be doing? And. And actually, you know, that's probably on the personal level, some things. I mean, I have a pickup truck and a fifth wheeler, and so there are probably some consumption issues that would qualify here. But in the second conversation, actually.

We.

Had now four people doing four completely different things to engage. And the challenge that, I mean, on a very personal level have is that on the one hand, I'm working at a very abstract level on the advisory council for the Farm Bill legislation and all this stuff, but then I want to go to the local food bank here and to the family kitchen feeding homeless people and figure out why they can't source local. Know what's standing in the way to this. And I'm finding myself profoundly ineffective, you know, to. Because you have to put on a completely different hat. Right? I mean, because you have to engage with people by. By getting into their mindset, getting into their worldview, understanding, you know, so. So you can't come in there like a Ferrari and. And have all sorts of ideas and. And proposals. You know, it's just. You just have to, like, totally chill out and, And. And get into the space. Yeah, and that's really. That's a skill set. You know, that. Because before I worked, you know, corporate, and I was always pretty effective in communicating across the entire range. But you're still the boss, right? I mean, it's a different thing. So I have to relearn, and I want to get better at that. And the other thing that sort of came to mind is by default, not that we Want to. But by default, we're all in a silo, right? Because we are living within our, our personal context. And the most difficult thing to achieve at this point in time is for us to connect across, you know, across the spectrum. And so when we're in this silo.

Every once in a while you have.

To, like, stick your head up and see what else is going on around you, you know, and, and how you can. And how, how what you do impacts others and how others are impacting you and how you can communicate this, you know, and so that in, in, in. To make that possible, it's really, really helpful to have, like, a big thing that everybody agrees to. So what my hope is that soil and water can be the big thing that everybody understands, right? Because it heals everything. If we heal the soil, you know, we heal nature, we'll heal our own society, we heal our own hearts. And so to have something big like this now that unites us across the spectrum, then can make us become aware of each other.

Thank you, Klaus. Gil, were you going to say something there just before.

Jane, if you give me a moment, because I want to respond to Claus. I really appreciate what you said, Klaus, and what I heard. I heard you say that you don't feel very effective, but I also hear you remarkably effective in observing that you need to be able to listen to different people, people who have different perspectives on these things, that you need to find places where there's common, not just common agreement, maybe more common attraction or common concerns. Something that people can all be motivated about together. You're recognizing that it's a different game that you're in than when you were in corporate, where you could instruct people what to do. And here you can't instruct. You have to invite and, you know, so, so you're learning. You're not. I don't hear he was not effective. I hear he was learning. You're in a new environment, discovering things, starting to build a new map of meaning, find testing actions. And you know, you, I. I've known you for, you know, several years now through this little. Through these little boxes on screen. But you're enormously dedicated at this and you're persistent and you're learning. And as you learn, you'll find, I predict, I suspect, your effectiveness is going to shift. But it's not like you can walk in and, you know, order a department around and say, here's the money, let's do this. It's a different game that you're in now. So thank you, Jane. Thanks for waiting.

I wanted to report that I've done a slightly better job on not wasting food since the last call and especially because you mentioned that it's the primary impact that most of us have as a contributor to CO2 emissions and methane and so on is, you know, Project.

Drawdown says it's, it's for an individual basis. It's the number one greenhouse gas emissions for each of us personally, far and away more than the second, which I didn't know.

Yes. And for. I've told people that I'm interested in coming out from behind your shadow. You cast a long shadow as a career in sustainability and I've been your wife and thought partner all these years and for a decade a cancer patient. And I'm sort of coming out from under that learning curve of managing my own health processes so that I'm approaching near complete remission and wanting to devote myself to becoming an effective healer of soil and human hearts and the hydrologic cycles of the planet so that we can work on that 95% of cooling and heating dynamics called water vapor that's our most important greenhouse gas to regulate healthfully. So the little sessions were helpful for me and I hope for, for others in, in their own way too. So I appreciate it. I appreciate them and appreciate their listening and tolerance, especially of me.

Thank you, Jean. Who else would like to share with us what's come up in this last hour and a half together?

I'll just go ahead and share that. That I love composting and soil enhancement. And I lived for 15 years on a property where I could do that with the whole property and really feel like I was, you know, charging the water table and just doing a bunch of stuff. And I've moved to a place where I don't, can't do that in my own yard. And I just realized that it doesn't mean, you know, I can't still be doing so that it nourishes me. There's something about it that's really good and I can go to a neighbor. I can. There are many ways I could go and, and have that experience and be able to do, do that little piece that besides, just because my own yard isn't, isn't it anymore. So it just got me thinking, you know, how I would, how I would do that. So thank you.

I'm going to drop a recent post by Hunter Levins. Probably some of you know Hunter, how she combats climate despair. I just put that in the chat. It's really, you know, I, I find personally That I live in a world where a lot of people are incredibly concerned, like on this call, about what's happening in the world. And. And we. It can get really heavy and oppressive. And so every now and then, it's good to take a little break and recognize, despite the fact that things are continuing to get worse, in many ways, they're also getting better and better. And it's happening at quite an extraordinary rate. If you look at the rate of adoption of alternative energy sources, clean energy sources, and the rate of efficiency on that, really extraordinary what's gone on in the last 20 years. And it does feel like we're going to fall short. And yet at the same time, if we don't take the time to appreciate what is happening, what is working, it can lead to a sense of despair. And I think despair is probably the number one enemy that we all face, because what FDR say, the only thing we have to fear is for itself. You know, when we fear the future, we live into a future filled with fear. And when we say, you know, the hell with the torpedoes, I'm moving ahead anyway, then we actually have a chance to create something that we'll be proud of and that will feel, you know, worth working towards. Other folks. Love to hear from you, Michael Linton. Did you want to.

You.

You gave a thumbs down when I said. How was the last conversation when I talk about that? I'm not calling you. You don't have to, but, you know, I'm curious. You got me curious. Bait.

Curiosity killed the cat.

That's how I have nine lives.

Yeah.

I thought it was a satisfying process because it was so frustrating. That's. That's about it. That's about all I got to say about it.

Okay.

I'm sorry. I can't let that one pass that easy. What. What was frustrating about it. Was the pro. Was it the process or the question that was frustrating? No, it wasn't the process and it wasn't the question. It was the.

The way we dealt with the question.

Okay, good. Can you say more about that? There's a tendency to fall into the personal trap by being authentic in some way, which is sort of almost virtue signaling on the.

Look at me.

And I. I felt myself drawn by that. I sensed it in others at different parts. Interesting. It was just. It was an attractor. Did raise issues. That's why.

Good.

Frustrating because I didn't like the issues it raised. Good. Thank you for that. I. I heard a version of that, which is that, I guess more in the first group than the Second, people interpreted the question as, what do I need to stop doing? A kind of virtue signaling or virtue correction. What are the bad things that I'm doing, where I'm contributing to the problem and I should stop? And in the second group is more about creative actions that people are doing, whether at a personal level or at a social and political level. And that shift was really striking and something I didn't think it was in the question itself, but something in the question and the conversation space and who we are in the culture we're in took us to what do I need to stop doing? Which, if you look at the question, wasn't what we asked, but it's where a lot of us went.

If I can go back to immunity, change for a minute. Keegan and Leahy's work, the point of examining, you know, you say, this is my goal. Let's say I want to lose weight. And then the next thing you do is you list out all the things you're doing and not doing that. That work against that. So I might be eating two desserts. I have dessert after lunch, have dessert after dinner, eat a brownie in the afternoon. So much whatever, you know, or. And it's not so you can judge yourself as I'm bad. It's to say, what is the competing commitment? And if I'm someone who is lonely and food is my only friend, then I'm committed to not feeling lonely. Or, you know, the idea is to unpack what's underneath and find out what's the competing commitment. Not so you can judge it, but so you can check and see. Is there an assumption here that actually if I test, I might find I don't have to eat to feel lonely? Or if I come from a big family and my mom keeps offering more food, I can say, mom, give me smaller portions so I can have two portions and I won't. I, you know, I don't want to insult you. Well, is mom going to be insulted if I ask her to enroll in helping me to lose weight? So this is a way to start to get away from the judgment and get into curiosity. What else is going on here? Because by exploring that, we might discover a real place of leverage to make some. Some effective changes.

So is it possible to learn and change without judgment?

That's a trick question. I don't think it's possible to. I don't think it's possible to look without judging. Can you be aware of the judgment?

Is it possible to have a lighter hold on judgment? Yeah, maybe part of what's in there. I mean, things arise. Things just arise. They arise and they arise and they arise. And what do we clutch and what do we hold on to? And what do I, what do we identify with?

With.

Yeah, as opposed to say, oh, that's interesting. When, when I do this, this happens. I don't like what happens. Maybe I can try something differently. I, I mentioned in one of the breakout groups that for me, one of the, I look back over my entire career, one of the consistent plays that I have found effective is to try to show people examples of things that, things that are unexpectedly working because once you see something, you can't say it's impossible. You might say it's not good for me. You might say, I don't like it. You might say, I don't think it'll work in such circumstances. But you can't say it can't be done if it's there on the ground in front of you. And this is something all of us, I don't know everybody here on this call, a lot of the people on this call have been involved in creating examples of something different and better and then sharing it and showing it or selling it or propagating it or writing about it or speaking about it. And it's a powerful way that change happens, in my experience. Jan.

Feeling really curious about a dynamic that I'm noticing. And I just, I just, I don't, it's not like a conclusion, but, you know, my work is in transparency. And the fact that there's been a cash scene statement in accounting for 37 years that actually tells you what collections are and no one ever looks at it. It's not in QuickBooks, it's not in, in Great Plains. It's not in any of the accounting package. You can't even select a cash statement that has collections and expenses paid on it. And it's just so interesting how at, at this massive level, every business person in the United States is not asking the most fundamental questions about being in business. And, and, and there's been a statement that tells the truth about the bank account for almost 40 years and no one looks at it. I just, I see it so often that somehow the truth is, is scary and resisted. And it's like it's so easy to.

To blow our own hearts and so to have something big like this that unites us across the spectrum then can make us become aware of each other.

Thank you. Koskiel. Were you going to say something there just before.

Jane, if you give me a moment because I want to respond to Klaus. I really appreciate what you said, Klaus, and what I heard. I heard you say that you don't feel very effective, but I also hear you remarkably effective in observing that you need to be able to listen to different people who have different perspectives on these things, that you need to find places where there's common, not just common agreement, maybe more common attraction or common concern, something that people can all be motivated about together. You could instruct people what to do. And here you can't instruct. You have to invite and, you know, so you're learning. I don't hear he was not effective. I hear he was learning. You're in a new environment, discovering things, starting to build a new map of meaning, find testing actions. And you know, you, I, I've known you for, you know, several years now through this little, through these little boxes on screen, but you're enormously dedicated at this and you're persistent and you're learning. And as you learn, you'll find, I predict, I suspect, your effectiveness is going to shift. But it's not like you can walk in and, you know, order a department around and say, here's the money, let's do this. It's a different game that you're in now. So thank you, Jane, thanks for waiting.

I wanted to report that I've done a slightly better job on not wasting food since the last call, and especially because you mentioned that it's the primary impact that most of us have as a contributor to CO2 emissions and methane and so on is, you know, Project.

Drawdown says it's, it's for an individual basis. It's the number one greenhouse gas emissions for each of us personally, far and away more than the second, which I didn't know.

Yes. And for. I've told people that I'm interested in coming out from behind your shadow. You cast a long shadow as a career in sustainability and I've been your wife and thought partner all these years and for a decade, a cancer patient. And I'm sort of coming out from under that learning curve of managing my own health processes so that I'm approaching near complete remission and wanting to devote myself to becoming an effective healer of soil and human hearts and the hydrologic cycles of the planet so that we can work on that 95% of cooling and heating dynamics called water vapor, that's our most important greenhouse gas to regulate healthfully. So the little sessions were helpful for me and I hope for, for others.