Living Between Worlds #3.4—"Change is hard…" (with Josh Harrison)

Welcome everybody. Feel free to introduce yourselves. Name and location in the chat if you'd like people to be able to get in touch with you. Provide coordinates if you'd like. We generally don't send out the chat, so if you want to save it, use the three buttons in the lower right hand corner and grab that for yourselves at any time. And I'm going to call this gang to order. Welcome everybody. This is. Gosh, I've lost count. I think this is number 18 of this series that I began in the early days of COVID early 2020, my gosh, more than two years ago now, sort of marveling at the situation of the attention of the world riveted on a single focus and the possibility of coordinated action at speed and scale to deal with a common concern. And as you might imagine, it immediately echoed for me the climate crisis, where we have similar issues, similar challenges, and stunningly similar curves. If you look at the trajectories of infections and greenhouse gases and temperatures and heat deaths and so many things just matched each other as either what at that point looked like exponential straight up kinds of curves with the J curve that Silicon Valley favors, the S curve that we see in ecological situations of the growth and flattening and sometimes demise of populations. So we began this series of conversations to explore how we might live in this interregnum between a world that is vanishing, that was our declaration at the time, a world that we can no longer take for granted, and an emerging world that's coming, that we're coming to realize, frankly, with both terror and adventure that we can't predict. And the provocation I offered is how do we live in this space between worlds with grace and with dignity and with power, not with helplessness, not with false enthusiasm, not with bravado, and maybe not in the grips of the terror that is so easily available to all of us. Even more so now as this year has unfolded over the last couple of years, anybody thought they might be able to predict the future. That's pretty clearly off the table now. I've given up the hobby of prediction. I'm not concerned with trying to know what's coming next, but more about how to ready myself for being able to dance with what's coming next, to be effective, to act on the things that I'm committed to, to contribute well to the possibilities that we can hopefully shape and steer a little bit. I've always taken a lot of comfort from Alan Kay's declaration that the best way to predict the future is to create it. So that's sort of the background frame I'm struck very much lately. A couple of pieces in the New York Times in the last week. One observing that it's called the Kids Are not okay, looking at the enormous growth of despair and depression in young people today who see no possibility for the future that we are bequeathing to them. Another article a few days later said young people are angry and in motion and taking on elections and other issues in a significant way. And so you have these polls and a world, frankly, is mostly invisible to me. I don't hang out with young people to my own detriment. But it seems to me that the ready fall into despair is both because of the way the mediators play the game that they play with us, but also that we have a whole generation that's grown up blind to the history of change. Things that we take for granted that have been in our lived experience, from the civil rights movement to the women's movement to the environmental movement to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which no one anticipated six months before it happened, to a single high school student in a not major country who just decided to sit down on Friday afternoons and generated a global groundswell. And we're still stuck and we're still in a mess. But it seems that it's worth looking at the mystery and the history of change. When has it happened? How has it happened? Why? What's involved with that? Where do we see the levers and the points of action in that? So I've invited a guest today, as I did last time. I invited Josh Harrison, who's here on the screen somewhere. Josh, wave your hand in front of your jungle.

Hi all.

To join us in a freewheeling conversation. Maybe a little bit about despair, a little bit about history and engagement in particular, as we've been talking about for all these months, about a new engagement, a new human relationship with the world and the worlds that we bring into being with our words and how change happens and how changes happen in the past and how change might happen in the future. Josh and I have been talking every couple of weeks for the better part of the past year or so. And they're fascinating conversations. We thought we'd sort of open it up to all of you to both to hear us go at it for a while and then open it up to all of us to participate, just by way of quick background. Josh designs ecosystem adaptation projects and immersive environmental experiences at the center for the Study of the Force Majeure. I'll Put this in the chat and regenerates cities to find function as natural ecosystems through green technology@LeafIsland.org so Josh, welcome to the gang. Glad to have you here. Where should we start?

I don't know. I think hello everyone. I'm very happy to be here and to join with this group of really remarkable folk who sort of self organized and I think around, I think just the need for contact during the initial stages of COVID And I think one of the addresses as we sort of move through one world to another is just taking a moment for the remarkable powers of resilience that are unintentional both at the human level. And I think the example of Greta is absolutely profound. I'm not even sure she was in high school when she started sitting on those steps. She just said I'm going to take the power of withdrawal and I'm just going to see what that does and I'm just going to do it for me first. If it works, then we're all going to go further. That was completely unexpected and completely transformational. I think to start on the most optimistic note we can, or at least I can, is I think that process is throughout both human and all other natural systems. There's a power of regeneration that our rational minds can't really fully grasp and so we don't measure it very well and we're constantly being surprised. Particular dilemma in the policy field. You know, I think most of the policy actors that I that I deal with on a regular basis just find it inconceivable to make transformations on the level that in fact, in an odd way this country has always made. I mean, you know, we transformed our transportation system three or four times in a regular, within very short periods of time. We had canals, then we had railroads, then we had all trains, railroads and then we had cars. I mean all those transformations were actually relatively quick in a real world time frame and they were relatively massive in a real world time frame. So the idea that we can't make that kind of a change is bizarre to me. But I think you're right. It's a self blinded, self limited statement on the policy side, which unfortunately brings us back to the political economic constraints. But I'm also more taken with paradigm shift in general because that's when the requirements that you maintain the status quo stop being requirements and suddenly things open and things change rather rapidly. You know, I mean, I think crisis is a. Is a crisis is a particular.

Wait, I'm going to stop you, Josh. How do they stop becoming A requirement?

Well, I think, I think both internal and external factors. I mean, Thomas Koons writes extensively about this in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions when he talks about, you know, the old guard and the new guard. And one of his points is sometimes it's the old guard has to die off, but it's basically what happens in his view. And again, it's an incomplete story, but it certainly is suggestive and relative. Is there's a series of accepted tenets that as they stop being a complete answer to the problem they're trying to address, get held on to with ever more rigor by the prime adherents who have all the status in that particular discipline, while the people who are objecting, of course, tend to be newcomers and younger people without evidentiary status in that department. But as soon as something breaks, it's as if that new unknown paradigm has become the dominant one. Think about how Newtonian physics moved over first to Einsteinian and then to Quantum mechanics in 30 years. I mean, we go from, you know, we have massive transformations that are rather quick when they happen. And that's one possibility of process that I think is really quite, quite important. And you know, I think that so. But it doesn't necessarily have to be the old guard has to die to do this. That's one. That's sort of a limit. That's an example in the extreme right. But we have enough people and basically there has to be enough counterweight to make change possible. And the other one is external crisis. I mean, Covid is the most recent example. We had tremendous mobilization of capital and process and resources in no time at all due to Covid.

Covid seemed without anybody asking, can we afford it?

Without anybody asking, can we afford it? And that's an important, that's an important piece of the puzzle. We never ask if we can afford war. We always assume we can. And we'll figure out how.

We don't ask if we can afford infant formula or health care or housing for people, but we can afford in the blank check for certain things.

Right? And that's a deep social question we have to interrogate ourselves about why have we permitted a society and we're a nominally democratic world, at least for the next. Till the next election, we're nominally democratic, so small d. Why have we permitted ourselves as a collective agency to say, you know, essentially war and self defense are off the table in, if we define them those, those ways and everything else and everything else has to be measured in very, very minute and justifiable portions before we do anything at all.

Okay, again, I want to get out of the mire of the political process and the political economic process to look at how does change happen? How do either belief systems shift enough or political formations shift enough. So the game has changed as we have seen it happen before now, you know, and we could get into a lot of the mire of this year's electoral landscape. I'd like to suggest we not do that for now, but think about, you know. Well, let me get into it a little bit. The very visible mood of the Trumpian forces this year was not very visible at this strength seven years ago. Here it is now. And it's an example of profound change in the social landscape in a country not instantaneous, 50 years in the making. Sometimes overnight successes reflect a lot of groundwork. Greta maybe just sat down one afternoon, but Rosa Parks didn't just get fed up and sit down on the bus one day in Montgomery. That was part of a years of preparation and training campaign organized at a Highlander center to develop political strategy, train people in nonviolence. You know, look for a moment in which a precipitating action could happen that then had massive ripple effects that surprised a lot of people. But it was surprised. It was carefully produced, like, you know, like a Broadway show.

But I think that's really a powerful analogy and I think a really an appropriate one. And one of the things in that line that we're missing in a large sense, but I think is happening remarkably commonly in a much smaller sense is that sense of organizing, the sense of the ground roots, reorganizing society and moving in it without getting into the political side. Although again, I don't see how you can talk more completely about these without it. I think it's moving into those small social organizations. It's re accepting the fact that change from the ground up and change from the top down are possible when there's common alliance vision to do that, which the civil rights movement was a long, hard working example of and which I think the environmental movement has had real difficulty in finding its way towards a really common vision. Even though at the surface it's a level, it's a group, it promotes a vision that many, many, many people find quite appealing. Very few people say, I don't want to live on a healthy planet.

Well, let's say hardly anybody, hardly anybody. There are a few people, yeah, hardly anybody. And hardly anybody goes into their executive suite of their company in the morning saying, my goal is to make the world more toxic and more.

However, in that case, the five or six Companies that do do that have a lot of sway and the boardroom of ExxonMobil does exactly that and has done exactly that since at least 1984 when they fully committed.

Like I said, hardly anybody. But let me put that on the side for a moment. I want to call on Kevin Jones and then Jan Ballard in a moment because I suspect Kevin, I know at least is going to speak to this, but I want to recall that New York Times piece this week of a younger generation that maybe has no experience with this kind of organizing, with this kind of process. Maybe the environmental movement doesn't have experience with it either, although environmental voters and a few others and certainly local grassroots environmental initiatives have some of that aspect in a different way than the national organizations. So how does that consciousness resurface? Kevin, you've been doing a lot of work at local level, neighborhood economics in particular, and to my eye, a very keen eye for organizing processes that actually engage and move people. Want to say a little bit?

Well, one thing I've discovered is that most change is a complex contagion in a dense network of people, you know and trust, as opposed to a viral thing. So people say if I could just get people to watch Kiss the Ground, oh my God, it would open their eyes. Well, that's not how it's transferred. You know, the 50% of the firefighters in our progressive so called county who didn't get vaccinated did it because they heard from the other 50, the 100% who was at the fire station. There are these clusters that happen. QAnon does the same thing we've seen and I'm researching places where Donut Economics can help a group really work within their own bioregion, seeing how that's working in the UK and multiple places and some places in Brazil and we're doing something with it too. And it seems the dense local networks in a place where people care can really do something. As Wendell Berry said, it all turns on affection. You have to care about that place. We're looking to put in several donor advice funds as public utilities, which I can explain, but they need to go to a place where somebody cares about something and wants to make a difference and they have the right kind of ecosystem. You need a CDFI that's doing small business lending and realizes that it can't reach people. You need various things to be ready for that to work. But dense networks within a local place where people could identify seems to be really something that's working well.

So Kevin, why has QAnon been so successful at that and the environmental movement hasn't.

Well, because the environmental movement try to persuade people who aren't in the room who don't seem to want to do what the environmental movement does. And they imagine these people and they imagine that they will be changed by, you know, the, you know, this next thing from we as the enlightened environmental people to you as the unenlightened people who don't see it the way we do. I mean, it's just incredible arrogance, you know? Incredible arrogance.

I think we underestimate Ken. I think. Kevin, I think we underestimate that again and again and again. I mean, it is this notion that we're smart, we have good ideas. Why don't you accept them? Is a really weak organizing tool.

Yeah, yeah. But they get stuck in. And the other part is that environmentalists by their history are genocidal. And so getting them to care about economic justice is a real. You have to shoehorn it together. We've got a project that links social determinant of health to the health of the watershed just so that it'll be on their radar as we launch this marketplace. Because they will do huge things, things about de growth and all that stuff. And they won't talk about class or race or gender or economic quartile or anything like that. They just, they talked about climate. So I have to get these climate people aware of the people downstream that they're polluting on. That's one of the things I'm working on.

Yeah, I think that's a really important.

Joshua, this is really too much of a dialogue of two old white guys. So I will stop. If you want to keep talking, you can, but. But I'm not going to participate in a back and forth by old white guys when there's a lot of other in the room. So thank you.

Thank you. Kevin. I got. I got a younger white guy with a hand up. But everybody, please, if you want to speak, put your hands up. I'll take you in order, except if I hop around a little bit. John Ballard.

I think it would be great if a female person might talk before me, if anybody wants to. But if not, I'm happy to share. I think your question.

Let's give it a moment, a chance to reflect and maybe do that if they want.

Yeah.

Marilyn, Paul. Hi there. Welcome.

Thank you. I'll just say that I have been in the environmental movement for 50 years and what I notice and I would like to hear more about is a. What is going to be better for us? How is the world changing for the better? Really? I'm not kidding. For the better. Better than this entrenched, capitalistic, consumer oriented, isolating, lonely, aggressive. What's going to be better when we change the conversation and talk about the really good things that come from environment taking climate change seriously?

Well, that's a great tee in for me. And then I'm sure other people would have things to say to that. Marilyn, the first, I just want to appreciate, Gil, your persistence and hosting this incredible conversation and your question about what real change have we witnessed? And I will just say what's on my heart as I came onto this call today is I got to drive from Virginia to Georgia and Kentucky along the Blue Ridge about a month ago. I don't know if any of you know the magnificent forests that were on the east coast, but I have to say I'm still in pain from driving by hours and hours and hours and hours of second gross thrashed forests that have never I even interacted with a forest ranger because I needed directions and we just commiserated on the horror of the second growth thing that we've done to our forest. So that's a great example, Josh, of the point you were making about just extract and leave it to itself when it needs to be managed and brought back.

Kevin, you've been doing a lot of work at local level, neighborhood economics in particular, to my eye, a very keen eye for organizing processes that actually engage and move people. Want to say a little bit?

Well, one thing I've discovered is that most change is a complex contagion in a dense network of people you know and trust as opposed to a viral thing. So people say if I could just get people to watch Kiss the Ground, oh my God, it would open their eyes. Well, that's not how it's transferred. You know, the 50% of the firefighters in our progressive so called county who didn't get vaccinated did it because they heard from the other 50, the 100% who was at the fire station, you know, and so there are these clusters that happen. QANON does the same thing we've seen and I'm researching places where, you know, donut economics can help a group really work within their own bioregion and seeing how that's working in the UK in multiple places and some places in Brazil and we're doing something with it too. And it seems the dense local networks in a place where people care can really do something. As Wendell Berry said, it all turns on affection. You have to care about that place. We're looking to put in several donor advice funds as public utilities, which I can explain. But they need to go to a place where somebody cares about something and wants to make a difference and they have the right kind of ecosystem. You know, you need a CDFI that's doing small business lending and realizes that it can't reach people. You know, you need various things to be ready for that to work. But dense networks within a local place where people can identify seems to be really something that's working well.

So, Kevin, why has QAnon been so successful at that and the environmental movement has.

Well, because the environmental movement try to persuade people who aren't in the room who don't seem to want to do what the environmental movement does. And they imagine these people and they imagine that they will be changed by, you know, the, you know, this next thing from we as the enlightened environmental people to you as the unenlightened people who don't see it the way we do. I mean, it's just incredible arrogance, you know, Incredible arrogance.

I think we underestimate, Ken. I think, Kevin, I think we underestimate that again and again and again. I mean, it is this notion that we, we're smart, we have good ideas. Why don't you accept them? Is a really weak organizing tool.

Yeah, yeah. But they get stuck in. And the other part is that environmentalists, you know, by their history are genocidal. And so getting them to care about economic justice is a real. You have to shoehorn it together. We've got a project that links social determinant of. To the health. To the health of the watershed just so that it'll be on their radar as we launch this marketplace because, you know, they will do huge things about de growth and all that stuff. And they won't talk about class or race or gender or economic quartile or anything like that. They, they just, they talked about climate. So I have to get these climate people aware of the people downstream that they're polluting on. That's one of the things I'm working on.

Yeah, I think that's a really important.

Joshua, this is really too much of a dialogue of two old white guys. So I will stop. If you want to keep talking, you can, but. But I'm not going to participate in a back and forth by old white guys when there's a lot of other people in the room. So thank you.

Thank you, Kevin. I got, I got a younger white guy with a hand up. But everybody, please, if you want to speak, put your hands up. I'll take you in order, except if I hop around a little bit. John Ballard.

I think it would be great if a female person might talk before me if anybody wants to, but if not, I'm happy to share.

I think your question let's give it a moment, a chance to reflect and maybe do that if they want.

Yeah.

Marilyn Paul, hi there. Welcome.

Thank you. I'll just say that I have been in the environmental movement for 50 years and what I notice and I would like to hear more about is what is going to be better for us? How is the world changing for the better? Really? I'm not kidding. For the better? Better than this entrenched, capitalistic, consumer oriented, isolating, lonely, aggressive culture we have? What's going to be better when we change the conversation and talk about the really good things that come from environment taking climate change seriously?

Well, that's a great tee in for me and then I'm sure other people would have things to say to that. Marilyn the first I just want to appreciate, Gil, your persistence and hosting this incredible conversation and your question about what real change have we witnessed? And I will just say what's on my heart as I came onto this call today is I got to drive from Virginia to Georgia and Kentucky along the Blue Ridge about a month ago and I don't know if any of you know the magnificent forests that were on the east coast, but I have to say I'm still in pain from driving by hours and hours and hours and hours of second gross spirit, trashed forests that have never I even interacted with a forest ranger because I needed directions and we just commiserated on the horror of the second growth thing that we've done to our forest. So that's a great example, Josh, of the point you were making about just extract and leave it to itself when it needs to be managed and brought back. The two things that come up to me, Gil, to say in terms of real change that I've seen, I just want to shout out that I've made a living since the mid-80s as a facilitator of the technology of participation. I would imagine that very few of the people on this call have ever heard of the technology of participation, which we've affected many tens of millions of humans across the planet, brought in the notion of civil society, created the notion and done the professional facilitation profession. The ICA's origin story is that they were founded by a group of chaplains coming out of World War II who saw the Nazis institutional collaboration with the churches and decided to Deconstruct the Christian story. And they ended up targeting the leadership of the Southern churches in the Jim Crow regions. And they trained 50,000 people from 1948 to 1955. And by the early 60s, 100,000 people in religious studies won. And I had the privilege of actually speaking with Andrew Young, who came to this course with his minister on Friday night and was stuck there. He didn't even want to go. And Monday night he went to Martin's side and never left his side. So a group of people out of the University of Texas at Austin trained 50,000 people in a training that was so effective that Werner Erhart copied it to use the as a structure for the S training. So that's a good example of preparing the ground and going in and having all these leaders in the Southern black and white churches realize that the church was supporting segregation and if they stopped, it would go away or it would change. So that's one example that's affected our country and our world. The other thing is that I have actually done 120 engagements with the holistic accounting that I've invented. And I have watched CEO after CEO after CEO has shared with me and I have it all in writing in my cases that they've never seen people change so quickly and so profoundly than when I help them structure their own value creation framework and then start doing measurement games to learn how to apply the scientific method in their daily business life. I get to witness some of the greatest transformation, sustained transformation in human behavior that I've ever heard about. The Oklahoma Blood Institute, which I worked with in 2007 and 8, still does the conversation. It is possible in the context of organizations to create an almost overnight transformation and move them into flow by teaching everybody mature measurement skills.

Thank you for that, Jan. And I'm going to. I want to distill a couple of things that I heard from that and I'll call on David Wilcox and whoever else would like to speak, but please put your hands up. In those conversations, you help people be clear on what they cared about. As part of the inquiry is what matters to you. Not just the cfo, but the person, the machine operator and the secretary and the janitor. Like, what do you care about?

And the ICA and the. In the Southern churches did the same exact thing.

Yeah, so. So one thing is what. What do you care about? One is how would you know that we're making progress toward that?

That's right.

How do we pay attention to that in a way that in. In. In my phrase, gives people A clear line of sight.

That's right.

That connects their actions with the impacts that their actions cause in the world and how those affect the things they care about.

Right.

But key to all that is actually listening to people. What? Listening to people's cares?

Well, you're reminding what's telling them what.

They should care about, but listening for what they actually do care about. Which echoes what you're saying about the civil. Early civil rights movement and what Kevin's been saying about the complex interconnections, not the viral and distant interconnections. Let me. John, let me move on.

Can I just make one comment before I move off? Just that I had the privilege of having one lunch with Doug Engelbart on a monthly basis in the last couple years of his life, and he developed the bootstrap, triple loop learning and everything we do with computers. And in some of our last conversations, I said, doug, I've really looked at everything you've done, and I think that what you missed was the fourth loop of measurement you didn't build into bootstrapping, how people could know whether they'd made progress. And he agreed that that was probably the way to get bootstrapping into a quadruple loop. So it is. The key is, what do we care about? And then if we're trying to change something, how do we actually all know whether it's changing? And thank you for doing this, and I appreciate everybody's listening.

I've got something to add, but I don't want to make David wait any more. Let's come to you and I'll maybe loop back. David Wilcox. Welcome.

This is my first time on this call, and I am glad I joined. I've sent invites to a few people, hope that they don't mind. I often end up working on things that I don't know much about. I've spent the last month essentially.

Trying.

To understand how many organizations are working on our political challenges despite the fact we want to move away from them. I can't. We've found over 100 organizations specifically targeted directly on those challenges. We found over 100 organizations that are bigger, organizations that deal with that, among a host of other things. Over 100 organizations that are uniquely using a particular ecosystem, universities, training centers, variety of others that I'm sure you can think of to attack the problem from different angles, and then another hundred organizations plus that are essentially trying to help those 300 organizations be successful. And none of these include the consultants. These are all dedicated organizations, not the consultants who are advising them. I guess when we talk about change, the problem is every one of these organizations is populated with change experts, not just above average. The people you would actually ask to facilitate a meeting are the leaders of these organizations. So, you know, it begs the question, you know, what are we just blind to relative to making anything actually happen? There have been, I think 15 attempts at what are called grand bargains. I'm sure this audience knows of several of them that we don't know of. But those what was learned from trying to do those was that that's kind of one of the only approaches that might work. And yet none of these organizations are working on that approach. Even though among the possible approaches that would be in the top three of ones that might work. And yet you're talking about 400 organizations that aren't zero are working on that particular problem.

David, what would be an example of a Grand Bargain? So we can just calibrate that to our experience.

So very simply you have to solve multiple problems at the same time. You have to exclude the problems that neither extreme will ever accept. Mainly economic or economically related problems end up being in the six. So health care, climate change, taxation would be three of the six. And then you have to propose a set of trade offs to the total audience that they can actually make. They can say, I agree to give up that in order to get this. And then in our political system we'd have to throw out all the extreme members and vote in the whole grand bargain.

So that's the how of it. But give me an example of a couple that have been successful.

The Senate had a gang of six that developed a Grand Bargain. I can't remember who was president. And then Clinton had a Grand Bargain. Sustainability. He didn't call it that, but it was called the Sustainability Clinton Sustainability initiative. And they had maybe two dozen people who worked on a Grand Bargain during the Clinton administration. And they actually brought the solution to the congressman and the congressman said they wouldn't vote for it.

Okay, so that doesn't sound like a success story. Exactly. Let me go on to Ken Hummer.

But at least it had the potential to solve multiple problems. It hasn't been successful politically.

Yeah, I'm going to push back on. You said this is the only thing that works. And I've asked you twice and you haven't given me one example.

No, no, I said it's one of the possibilities. One of the top three possibilities.

Okay.

If it worked, it'd be done.

Thank you. Okay, Ken, Homer.

Hello everybody. Gil, it's nice to be here again. I Think we're due for another walk soon? I'm thinking about this. You know, when you asked, how does change happen? I think we need a more. More specificity around that question, because how does change happen at the individual level, at the family level, community level, and what our friend Pete Kaminsky calls the hyperscale level are all very different. When we're talking about really large systems, change is very different than when we're talking about individuals. So I just want to throw that out there. And I wanted to tell a really short story that had a change that helped me to change. Part of what helps rule change is seeing things from another perspective. And oftentimes when there's a blockage where. What's the old saying, it's difficult to get someone to see your perspective. Their paycheck depends on them not seeing it. So how do we tell stories that get this in. So the brief story is there's a man who's very hungry, and he's walking down the street. He hasn't eaten in quite a while. And he walks past this restaurant. He smells these amazing aromas coming out. And he sees a sign that says.

All you can eat.

Your grandchildren will pay the bill. And he goes in, and there's these huge tables filled with all kinds of foods, everything you could possibly think of. And the waiter comes over and says, here, take a plate and help yourself. And he. He loads up three times, and they come by with the dessert card, and he has amazing desserts, and they bring him coffee and port, and he's, like, stuffed. And he. He gets up and starts for the door, and the waiter comes over, says, excuse me, sir, your bill. And he says, no, no, there's some mistake. It says that my grandchildren will pay the bill. He says, that is correct, sir. This is the bill for your grandparents. And I think that we live in a world where we don't recognize we're paying the bill for our grandparents. And when we can start to have that shift in our temporal perspective that we are not here as us, we are here as part of the continuation of humanity that goes back millions of years and hopefully will go forward billions of years. When we start to think in those terms, we might start to see some of the kind of change that we're talking about.

You know, we used to. We did used to for maybe for most of human history. We used to. Maybe in the last, you know, I don't know, couple hundred years. Some people know better than me what the time frame on this. We stopped doing that.

I would say, in My lifetime actually it really shifted big time. So there's always been a threat of that. But in the last a thread's been there, but in the last 60 years, there's been a really big shift towards narcissism.

Big time in your lifetime. In mine, you know, big time. In the last 50 years when Milton Friedman told, told us all that the, you know, the purpose of business is to maximize profit and that became short term profit. And then we're, you know, we're in the trap that we're in where you can be, you know, you can be sued if you don't do this. But it's not just the mechanisms of capitalism, it's the mindset that that has produced in all of us, which is that the future doesn't matter. Ken posted in the chat a link to a fascinating interview in the New York Times with Vaclav Smil about his book called how the World really Works. And I really encourage people to have a look at it. It's rich and provocative and I disagree with some of the things in it and I'm chastened by some of the things in it. But one of the things he observes is that you look at the complexity of the climate challenge and what we need to do that we're not doing fast enough for many different reasons. Even if we did everything fast enough now, the benefit is 50 years out. It's people in 2070 who are going to benefit. So are we going to invest now for the benefit of people in 2070? What bill are they going to pay from the meal that we ate?

Right.

And for anyone who doesn't have access to New York times, email me kenhomersonic.net I will send you the article. I have it in email ready to go. So you can read the whole thing.

And we can, if there's time, we'll come back and talk about some of the more pieces of that. But that's one that stands out very dramatically. You know, he's challenging us to get real on the complexity of change, on just how much has to move, at what scale, how quickly in order to realize the possibilities that we want to get to. Marilyn, back to you.

I just want to say that the story that we are sacrificing now things that we really want so that 50 years from now someone's going to benefit is not very persuasive. My question is, and David Gershon talks about this in his Cool Cities project, what can we get now for us that makes our lives better? For example, Gershon Talks about we connect with neighbors, we feel less lonely. Maybe we work through our aggressive consumerism. Maybe we find that life is better when we walk or take the bus. Why? Because we're more in touch with our locality. If we cannot tell a story about why life will improve today, we're not going to do it. Unless. Please tell me I'm absolutely wrong, that everyone will make lots of sacrifices for the world 50 years from now. And I can tell you how my life has improved by engaging politically in my local Berkeley. How walking rather than driving actually improves my life. How eating more sustainably, more plants, being more aware. I feel like that has drastically improved my life. But I'm not. So more of us need to tell those stories more often. Rather than getting the tisk tisk, you're driving a big gas guzzler. You're ruining the life. This narrative must change, in my view.

Have a great time.

It must. You know, it's even weirder than that, Marilyn, because there seems to be this. Could people mute if you're not speaking, please? Thank you. There seems to be this weird perspective on what I'll loosely call the environmental left. That sacrifice is good and noble. And the more you sacrifice, the better person you are. And if you're not willing to sacrifice, you're not as good a person. And that. That song doesn't play with a lot of people who see themselves as not having enough of what they need. And as you say, it's not necessary because a lot is better. I mean, in. In my work with businesses, I'm confronting again and again, executives. We talked about this last month. Executives who say we can't afford to do sustainability, when in fact they will be much more economically successful if they commit their company to the future. In the living world and the well being of all people, there's actually more money to be made than not. But the belief system is that it's either do good or do well. It's either now or the future. It's either me or you. And yet I think you put your finger on something right at the heart of the matter.

And the other thing is, for example, something very right in front of us. Cut back on food waste. The average American family can save $2,000 a year. How do you cut back on food waste? You have to be more conscious of the food you put on your plate. You have to be more conscious when you shop for food. You can't just keep tossing out that arugula that you never get to. But that's good. It actually improves the Quality of your life and you save $2,000 a year, which in 10 years is $20,000. But that conversation again is not very visible.

And Marilyn, for those of you who don't know, writes books about these kinds of things, so check her out. Thank you, Marilyn. I'm going to go to Doc hall and then Kevin Jones and then whoever raised their hand next. Doc, over to you.

Listen to this with interest.

And I see a pretty good split even in the. In the environmental community. There are good many who think that if we make a few technical adjustments, life can go on much as we have had it.

And I doubt that because we're just not that smart.

And we see that time after time and the depth of the change to go through is considerable. If we're going to do something else, Maryland, I think hit it pretty well that this is being satisfied with something other than more and more consumption being the key to enjoying life. And I'm a little bit hopeful on this because I see a number of young people that are rejecting that not.

Going to work two jobs for some.

Future that isn't really there. I would like to have a life right now, not way out there somewhere where maybe I could get a home and whatever, do the American dream.

And that's what makes me a little.

Bit hopeful that a truly different kind of future life enjoyment is possible to convey to people. I think the. The situation is ripening to do that.

Thank you, Kevin. Kevin Jones. Sorry. It's a great following.

My message is to Doc Hall. The giant green tomato behind you seems to be getting close. The thing behind you seems to be getting closer as you talk. I think it's moving your way. You should watch out for that thing. You're on mute.

Doc.

Doc, if you're responding, we can't hear you.

I'll try not to let the thing overwhelm me. That's just a green screen behind me. Buzzed. That's all I had to say.

Okay, thank you. Anybody who hasn't spoken yet. Brad?

Yeah, I've been loving reading all the comments, by the way. And just again, when it comes to change and everything that we've all said, unless somebody can convince me otherwise, I firmly believe that all change has to start with the individual. You can't change a family unless the mom, and I'm assuming the mom, dad and kids. Okay, forgive me for going conventional, but.

I'll just call that a family for the moment.

Unless the mom, the dad and the children individually all agree that they are going to change. I don't think the Family dynamics will change. The father can insist, the mother can punish, the kids can revolt. But the dynamics of the family, at.

Least from observation, from what I've seen.

Can'T change as a family unit unless all the individuals change. Take that up to the next level, say a community. Unless individual people go and vote to put somebody else in office or vote for a particular law, the law doesn't get passed, the new person doesn't get elected, and everything stays the same. So I keep coming back to it's up to each one of us individually to do whatever we can on whatever level we choose to do it on. But if we don't individually change, I don't have a whole lot of faith that things are going to change or systems are going to change. Changing systems to me is about changing individuals first. And when you have enough individuals that change, a system can change.

Yeah, well, the individuals are changing in conversation with other individuals. By the way, I hate the word individuals. Somewhere along the line in my lifetime, we stopped calling people people and started calling them individuals. But that's a rant for another time. Lisa Friedman and then David Grossoff.

Hi. So there were some other things I was thinking about, but just in terms of individuals, I think we're always being. We're in a consumer culture and we have just experts marketing to us and selling us ideas. So to say that we want what we just thought of independently. So did I really need to do everything on a device like this before somebody made it for me, made it easy, made it beautiful, made it stores where I could get it? So I think there's a lot of things where if you want individuals to change, you can get them to change. Like in cool cities, I put up some information about that which get people on blocks together and people get to know their neighbors. I'm on zoom with people from all over the world. Often during my workday, I actually don't know every single person on my block. So that's been interesting to try to go to know the people on the block and start to change together.

Lisa, hold the thought for a second. How many people here know their neighbors and know the people on their block?

All of them. Like, I know most of them.

How many people share your work and your concerns and your organizing activities with the people on your block?

Every single neighbor.

No, I'm not asking just you. I'm asking all of us. It's, you know, there's an opportunity there. Right? This is the stuff Kevin Jones was talking about back at the beginning.

So that was one end of the spectrum about the individuals, but then also how do you get individual individuals to want certain things. The other side of the spectrum that I've seen recently was I been reading a book by Peter Fikowski, who has wrote a book called I'm on Blur. So I don't think you'll be able to see it. But anyway, it's climate basically says climate restoration. And he has a foundation for climate restoration, so a nonprofit. And what was interesting about it was he basically, he's looking at. So there are things that individuals need to do, but what are the big things that if our problem with climate climate is we need to get carbon and carbon equivalents, we need to draw them down out of the atmosphere. And he makes it simple. Like he would say it's a trillion tons, which I find easier for most people to understand than a thousand gigatons, right? So we have a thousand gigatons in the carbon up there. 1000 doesn't sound like so much what's a gigaton? But you know, if you say it's a trillion tons, more people kind of understand what a ton is. So that it just. You say, okay, here's the number. This is what we have to get out. Here's the date, we have to get, get it out by here. And he shows the research on what are the four most at scale and cost effective ways to get that carbon out and lists those four ways and says, if we at least started while people are working from the bottom up, neighbor to neighbor to neighbor about what our emissions are, what about the people who are kind of drawing down the carbon at the same time, which are going to be the ones that save us? Because we're already having problems now with the carbon that's up there. So it's things like iron fertilization in the ocean that gets microalgae and then they are the phytoplankton that draw down the oxygen. I mean, that draw down CO2 and give off oxygen. How to get synthetic limestone to draw down the carbon and put it into limestone. So all the new ways of concrete and the numbers on how much concrete gets used every year is stunning. So if we had that concrete all be carbon negative, something around seaweed permaculture, how to get seaweed farms out in the open oceans and then methane oxidation. And he really describes each one and makes it logical. I like the bottom up that people are working bottom up and then in cities and then people who are doing the research to say, how do we get these big initiatives funded for drawdown.

Thank you for that. Strikingly missing from his list is is soils. And I point people to the work of Walter Yenny out of Australia. I'll put his name in the chat. Who says that the fact that we've denuded 40% of the land area of this planet from vegetation and lost the ability of plants to take in carbon dioxide, fix it into the soil, have a soil that is. That has a sponge that can hold water and affect the water balance of the planet. Water being a more significant greenhouse influence than carbon dioxide is hugely important and overlooked. But then the question is, how do we impact that? How do we as individuals impact the big game? Slim, in that New York Times article, points out that the world runs on four major materials. He's a big guy around material flows, and he says if you look at the material flows that sustain this world, he says cement, steel, plastic and ammonia. Interestingly, he doesn't have petroleum on the list. I do not know why. That's maybe a defect in his game. But then he looks at the trend among environmentalists, maybe people on this call here who are eating less meat but were happy to get on a plane to fly to a conference. And each of us makes the accommodations and makes the choices and chooses our priorities, but with little understanding of where the net impact is. The funny thing is that meat may not be the issue if you have a kind of agriculture that's designed to build soil and sequester carbon and raise cattle in a way that cattle are meant to live. So, you know, we can spend a lot of time at the big policy and strategy level. Again, I want to bring us back to the question of how change happens, how we have changed, how we influence change. And with that, perhaps I'm going to toss the mic to David Grossoff.

Thanks. I don't have any great expertise about environmental movements, but I think I can talk about applying history in the discussion of issues with a lot of scientific and technological complexity, whether these credentialed experts. Earlier you were talking about how environmentalists come across, and I was much reminded of the chapter in history that I know best, which is the efforts by atomic scientists, mostly in the United States, but really forming an international community after World War II to say we really have to control fissile materials. It's quite possible now, it won't be possible later. And it's an existential threat to humanity and in the United States and to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom, because now it won't be possible later, and it's an existential threat to humanity and in the United States and to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom. Because the physicists didn't understand that their first job was to be trusted and to understand what their audience thought of them. They, they thought their job was education, not persuasion. The physicists didn't understand that their first job was to be trusted and to understand what their audience thought of them. They, they thought their job was education, not persuasion and attacks on their goodwill or claiming they're a bunch of garlic breath, egghead intellectual foreigners who don't know what the real world is like. They, et cetera, was enough to reduce their influence substantially. And they were so clueless that in the magazine that they used to talk to themselves A Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It wasn't until 1950 that someone even raised the question of why they and attacks on their goodwill or claiming they're a bunch of garlic breath egghead intellectual foreigners who don't know what the real world is like, et cetera, was enough to reduce their influence substantially and weren't being trusted. And that being trusted was a crucial issue. And that wasn't even written by one of these very, very, very smart, eager to help save the world physicists. And I think there's anytime anyone. So as a result of my study of this anytime I hear anyone talk about education, I correct them, I'm rude and I interrupt and I say do you mean persuade? And it's a different attitude just to frame it as a job of citizen to citizen persuasion. And they were so clueless that in the magazine that they used to talk to themselves A Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It wasn't until 1950 that someone even raised the question of why they weren't being trusted. And that being trusted was a crucial issue. And that wasn't even written by one of these very, very, very smart, eager to help save the world physicists. And I think there's other than expert to, you know, plebeian communication. And there are other episodes in the history of technology controversies that can be brought to bear. But I really wanted anytime, anyone. So as a result of my study of this anytime I hear anyone talk about education, I correct them, I'm rude and I interrupt and I.