From Despair to Collective Action: John D Liu on Community, Survival, and the Path Forward

Okay, now we're on to something. Now we've gotten to a place where actually every human being has a role to play by learning more, by acting in the collective benefit of not only human beings, but of all life.

In this Klimagen episode, I speak with ecologist and founder of the Ecosystem Restoration Communities, John D Liu. We explore the insights that John has acquired from many years observing nature and humanity, whilst also pragmatically seeking collective pathways to a better tomorrow. Full of wisdom and inspiration, it's a pleasure to feature John on the ClimateGen podcast. In the next episode, I'm speaking with Sarah Housley about her newly published book, Designing Hope: Visions to Shape Our Future. Given we've been discussing war and systemic ecological and climate collapse in recent weeks, I hope these two episodes offer different perspectives and reinforce the agency we have to reject the status quo as we face the challenges of exiting the Holocene. Over the next two weeks, I'll be away in Greenland exploring the southern end of this vast consequential island. Guided by Professor Jason Box, whom I'll be recording discussions and be posting segments of these to the members area of YouTube and Patreon, connection permitting. Regular interviews are scheduled from mid-September. Thank you to all listeners, commenters, subscribers, members, and everyone who likes and shares content. Please do consider joining to help support the project, or as COP30 is on the horizon, you can order my book Cop Out to get an inside perspective of all UN COP summits from Paris in 2015 to Dubai in 2023. Thank you again for listening. So John, it's great to see you since Baku, and we had a lot of discussions at the COP. A lot of it was to do with your main project around ecosystem restoration communities, of which there's a lot around the world, and you're the figurehead of all of this. And what I want to start by asking you is how do these ecosystem restoration communities fit into this sort of global narrative around 1.5 degrees, the Paris Agreement, we're crossing 1.5 degrees much earlier than was forecast. People are very stressed about it. Biodiversity and ecosystems are stressed. How does your project and work sort of fit into that whole story, if you like?

I guess essentially what I've been noticing over the years and decades that I've been studying and documenting ecological function is that there is a big difference between theoretical and conceptual things and action. I think that where ecosystem restoration communities fits is in the difference between what is theoretical and what is action and how ordinary people can have a role in this. So if we go and consider the constant chatter about this, and then we consider, okay, we're worried about 1.5 degrees or more, but what are we actually doing? We're creating more CO2. When we talk about it, you know, we're not actually mitigating or adapting to what's actually happening. What we see is at the ecosystem restoration communities, people want to know, what does it mean to sequester carbon? How does carbon get into the soil? How does carbon come out of the atmosphere? And there's a lot of discussion in the conversations about technology, but those technologies are abiotic. And the question is, well, can we build factories to manufacture more abiotic systems and spread them all over the world and what, vacuum carbon out of the atmosphere and put it in a hole in the ground? And the fact is, we can't. It's— we're looking at something else at the ecosystem restoration communities, and that's a biochemical photoreactive process that evolved over billions of years that actually has created, constantly filtered, and continuously renewed the oxygenated atmosphere, the freshwater systems, the fertile soils, and the biodiversity. And when you understand that, then not only do you understand how carbon disequilibrium in the atmosphere can take place when you create more manufacturing facilities and you burn more fossil fuels and you do all this activity in the abiotic realm, and then you understand, well, it's, really the biology over prodigious time organized to alter the physics on the planet, to maintain the surface temperatures, to regulate the wind speed, wind directions, vortex activity, weather, and climate. And so if we are seeing massive dysfunctional systems that are breaking down then more abiotic actions are unlikely to change that because that's what caused this disequilibrium that we're having. And so when you start to learn that in ecosystem restoration communities, a big smile comes onto your face and you go, "Huh, look at that." There's nothing wrong with the Earth, The problem is we're making enormous mistakes in understanding what is true value. We're imagining that things which we extract and buy and sell are the basis of wealth and value. But actually, this is the only planet we know of that has an oxygenated atmosphere and a fresh water system. What's more important? What's more valuable than ecological function? So these kinds of lessons and exactly how people interact with the Earth, that's where we need to go. And that's what ecosystem restoration communities can bring to people.

You're right. You know, when you see these things in action, it's very hard to unsee it because it's almost like something's sort of revealed about the way soils work and the way the sort of the world is made. Why do you think governments, and you can take the UK government for example, is investing sort of tens of millions plus into the technology side of vacuuming the carbon out of the atmosphere and not trying to expand these kinds of sort of regenerative approaches, if you like?

I think that essentially we are into some very, very large concepts. For instance, infinity or eternity or billions of years, the universe. And then we try to bring it down to something that we can control, like I'm going to go to the grocery store today, or I'm going to take my child to school, or I'm going to exercise or play or I'm going to work. And this brings us down into a kind of manageable humanesque thing. It's comfortable because, oh, I know my alarm clock went off, my car is waiting for me, I'm going there, and look, there's food and there's there's stuff to do. Now, that's the norm. That's what we've come to believe in. And if we get real philosophical, then we kind of see things slightly differently. And we go, oh, you know, we were born on the earth and we're alive. For a short while, and then we die. And we are excited by falling in love, we're excited by holding hands and staring into the romantic beauty of the ocean or the sunset or something, and we're programmed to procreate, to go forth and multiply. And we grow old and we die. And when we look at this in relationship to what we're saying is important in the society, the traders on Wall Street screaming, Buy, sell, you know. The cars, go look at the motorways or the Autobahn or the highways, the interstate highways. And what is that? So if we look at that from a philosophical perspective, it's Maya. It's an illusion. It looks really compelling, like there is a big building there, there are lots of cars, there are many people and they're rushing somewhere. And yeah, for this moment today, it's there, but it's so ephemeral. Tomorrow it's gone. And we live for some years and decades and then we pass away. What is real? What is the meaning of our lives? When we talk about these things, big concepts, when we talk about, say, extreme and erratic weather events, what do we have to learn to understand what this means? So is weather the climate? Well, the climate affects the weather. But there are different aspects of this. So what we're failing to understand is the level of complexity that we're talking about. And we're not expanding our consciousness to understand this. We have somebody who's making a meme and saying, all right, carbon. Disequilibrium. The carbon was in the atmosphere, but over evolutionary time, it was absorbed by the living beings, and it was turned into carbon that was held in the Earth. And now, by releasing lots of carbon, not just through carbon dioxide, but all kinds of greenhouse gases, We've created a disequilibrium. What are we going to do about it? So now we're saying, well, oh, these people are politicians. They're in charge. These people are technologists. They're the scientists and the engineers. They're in charge of this. They have to solve this. Well, you have to analyze, is the problem a biotic problem? Or an abiotic problem. So if the problem is that over evolutionary time, biology, symbiotic living systems, co-evolved to alter the physics of the planet, and that's how we have the only planet that has an oxygenated atmosphere and a freshwater system, and fertile soils and amazing biodiversity. And now we say we have to solve this problem because through our few thousand years of history, we've altered the physics now by making all the machines, by using all the energy, by not listening to the earliest scientists who warned that, well, by the way, you know, if we massively alter the Earth systems, the life support systems on the planet, then we're going to have consequences. There will be consequences. And if we go to the ancient places where civilizations began and the cradles of civilization, as I did in the Luss Plateau or in Central and North— Northern Africa, the Middle East and the Mediterranean region, or Central Asia, or all over the world, if you go anywhere in the world, where humans began to take down the forests, alter the, the vast plains and steppes and savannas, alter the river systems, alter the coastlines. Well, what do you see? You see giant deserts. You see massive eutrophication of the hydrological cycle. You see die-off of aquatic life, die-off of birds, die-off of insects. Machines are not gonna change that. More machines, more abiotic thinking, more policy, more money, more talk is not gonna change that. What's gonna change that is a deep understanding of the relationships between living systems including human beings, and the biological systems we depend on for life, because we're breathing air, we're drinking water, we're eating food which comes from fertile soils, which means that there's other mechanisms which are making mineral nutrients bioavailable to plants, and from plants to animals and including humans. So, and it's sequestering the carbon and holding it in the soils. So these kinds of concepts have got to be understood. And then we come to the question, is that valuable or not? So we're saying that the corn and the soybeans and the trees that are cut down, they have, they, they, we buy and sell them. So when they're dead and we can eat them and we can take them, we take the minerals out, we take the whatever, we, we, we are consuming the earth. We need to realize that life co-evolved and that the only way to survive and become sustainable is to live in harmony and in balance with the Earth systems. And the fact of the matter is, it's our choice. If we continue to believe that the value is in the derivatives, in the things which are extracted and bought and sold, there's a lot to worry about. Because we're rapidly increasing our ability to mass-produce anything. But we don't need these things. Generally, we just believe we need them because we're trying to sell them. So we're just, if we sell them, then we get money. But if we understand that money is a concept, it's something that we created. It's not really anything. It's a means of exchange, a storehouse of value, and a trust mechanism. So if we understand that, then we can say, well, money's whatever we say it is. Well, if we understand that the value of ecological function is higher than the value of material things, then suddenly money should be based, our economy should be based, all human actions should be based on protecting existing ecological function. And restoring any degraded landscapes. And this is the exciting thing about what I've learned and what we've seen in restoration projects around the world. You can restore the hydrological cycle, you can restore the soils, you can restore the biodiversity. Well, if we do that, we don't have a problem with 1.5 or anything. The Earth will recalibrate because it's living in dynamic equilibrium. But if we continue to egregiously emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases, or if we continue to believe that the value is in the abiotic systems that we're buying and selling, or if we continue to believe that some people should own everything and that billions of people around the world should be desperately poor almost nothing. I mean, this is ridiculous, the idea that we're questioning whether living beings have birthright. You know, this is bizarre, because if you're born on the earth, you're a representation of all life since the beginning of time. It can't be any other way. So who among us is greater than God? Who can say, yeah, these ones we don't care about, let's just kill them or let them die in the street, or, you know, they have nothing. That's ridiculous.

When we've spoken before, we've talked about this idea of, it's almost like a societal memory that goes back to indigenous peoples, to much earlier parts of civilization. You're in China and China has this incredibly long history and, you know, I'm from the UK, it has a long history too. To— today we have science talking about tipping points. We're talking about thresholds upon which the Earth does change. And you've been just there in, in what you were saying. You were talking about if we can realize the true value of, of biological function, then we can start to change course, if you like. Now, it doesn't look like we're doing that at, at the structural level, at the political level. And we are heading towards COP30, which is in Belém, which is the entrance to the Amazon and so on. And at the same time, you know, there's journalists I've spoken to who are breaking stories about the incredible level of extraction from the Amazon, from the highway being built into it, and the fact that the Amazon rainforest itself is kind of at this knife-edge threshold point where it could really start to collapse at speed. How do you see where we are now, these thresholds between doing the right thing, getting people on board, growing ecosystem restoration as a sort of a much more mainstream culture? Where do you see that?

If you stare into the abyss, then I think you should expect to be terrified. Lay down and look up. Go to the eastern steppe of Mongolia in the summer. Lie down in the steppe and look at the endless sky above you, the stars stretching infinitely into the universe. And, you know, consider what does this mean? And it doesn't mean that the third quarter earnings of a corporation, which will eventually disappear and no one will remember, is the end-all and be-all. We will disappear, and we'll either disappear because we're too ignorant to understand the meaning of life, Or we will disappear because we pass on and the next generations of life come and replace us. Well, I think it's a better idea to have a good time while we're here and do our best to understand what it means to be alive and what our responsibility is when we learn something. So if you have no understanding of what regulates the climate, then I would say you're probably not going to be able to really help to change the situation. And arguing about it from a, you know, because you believe something which is untrue is not really very helpful. That's probably a good time to study. If you dig around in the ground, you're going to find like, oh, look at all these look at all these worms in a beautiful place that has very high organic material. And it's being processed by insects and worms. And there's going to be huge amounts of— I was just looking in our garden, and the worm castings, because of the relatively high rainfall levels, are just enormous. They're piling up everywhere. And I'm just thinking, oh, look at that. Now go somewhere else where there's no organic material, there's no infiltration and retention of moisture, and there's nothing happening. Now, you don't have to buy a factory and get energy and employ people to screw things together in order to get the worms to do their work. You know, they've been doing this for a very long time and they multiply and they're hardwired to propagate just as we're hardwired to propagate. So when you give them the conditions that they need, there will be fertile soils and that will make mineral nutrients bioavailable. To plants. And when that happens, the plants will cover everything, as they did, starting from nothing, from zero, from cell division, to totally colonizing the entire planet. Well, maybe we ought to think about that, as opposed to, like, how many gigafactories we can make. Because if we're gonna make more gigafactories, we're going to be destroying the systems. We're going to have to go to Mars because we've just— we've— and if we think we can terraform Mars when we've destroyed the Earth, you know, that's kind of silly, isn't it? So, so if we get our mind around what's happening and then we say, oh, look, it's much better to have clean water. It's much better to have clean air. Why do we— why is there so much cancer here and there? You know, why, what's— why are so many people getting Parkinson's disease? Or what, what's happening here? So as we start to understand these things, then we have to live in another way. So let's get up and have pancakes in the morning, and let's you know, let's have an easy lifestyle because we don't need a lot of the things that are being produced. We don't need plastic in huge amounts. We don't need vast amounts of everything. We need to be conscious that everyone is well and happy. And if we make this happen, because we can produce any number of anything, but we don't need it. So let's just produce exactly as much as we need. Let's produce at the level of need as opposed to produce at the level of possibility, because we can just spit out as much junk and we can have plastic goo gahs burying us. We don't need that. And that's what we have now. So let's stop that. Go the other way.

You, you touched on a few things. I wanna come back to pancakes in the morning in a minute. But, um, you said, you know, if you're, you don't know what you're talking about, it's time to go and study. This is a critical point of everything in this discussion. It's a whole sort of raison d'être for this podcast is to speak to people who do study, who do learn things and, and share as much as we can. In China where you are, we see this incredible investment in education and is bearing fruit with the rate of Chinese knowledge and so on. In America, you see the current administration defunding education and trying to misinform. Now you, that's not only in the US, but it, you know, I'm trying to show the sort of the polar opposites of something that's critical. Based on what you've been saying to our roadmap out of here, if you like. It's something we are all having to engage with because of the internet, because of this proliferation of mis- and disinformation. The foundation of what we need to do is develop and share knowledge and un— understand, as you were saying, you know, how the planet works so that we can be synchronized to that or in balance with it. How do we get from this paradoxical mess? Because even in the production of all of the rubbish that you're talking about that we don't need, China is one of the main powerhouses in the world, but it's also the powerhouse of knowledge. So how do we end this destructive cycle?

Unfortunately, or fortunately, it's not up to a single individual to decide what humanity does. It's up to our collective understanding. So if we're not striving to have a collective understanding, but we're striving to be prejudiced against each other, then we're not really understanding that we are a species, that we're all one family. So the fact of the matter is humans have co-evolved on the planet together with plants and animals and insects. And birds and bacteria and fungi. And here we are. Now, if we believe like, this is all for me, it's all here for me, and it's like it belongs to me, this is mine. Well, that's a fairly stupid point of view because first of all, I'm going to die. So the idea that I own everything is a ridiculous idea. No, no one owns anything. We belong to life and we're going to give up our body so that each generation of life dies and gives up its body to nurture the the generations to come. And that's okay. You know, that's just, that's the way it is. You know, like, let's, let's talk about truth. You know, so when we talk about the truth, then we have to say, oh, well, it's not my opinion that moisture infiltrates and is retained in the organic layer. Or that this cycles the moisture in the lower hydrological cycle, which then moderates the wind speed and moderates the temperature. You know, it's not my imagination that the height of the canopy is where the solar radiation is blocked off and that at the highest point, that would be like 400 feet in the air or 450. So like 150, 160 meters high. Now, do you see any 165-meter trees around? I mean, you know, you can find them. Fortunately, there are a few remnants at the, you know, edge of, you know, remnant primary forest. But imagine if we understood this, that it is this biological moderation of the physics of the planet. Then we could arrange ourselves to be a little bit calm. Let's play more music. Let's have more pancakes. You know, let's take it easy. Let's dance. Let's, let's, let's, let's learn together. And that is to evolve. That is to, to, to come to a higher level of collective consciousness. If we come to that consciousness and we say, The value of the biological organization of the physics is more valuable than plastic googaws. Because now plastic googaws make you money, but the ecological function is zero in the GDP-style economy. And this idea that like, oh, carbon is more valuable because it's in disequilibrium. Or, you know, like, what are you talking about? Everything is valuable. Life is valuable. All the people who are being suppressed around the world whose intelligence and energy and creativity is not flowing as part of a collective intelligence, then, you know, they're being devalued. They're being said, you're useless, you're nothing. Unless you have money, unless you can buy plastic googaws, you're not a real human being. What? You know, what are you saying? You know, like, this is ridiculous. So Once we understand that, like, oh, if all the human beings were to suddenly— I mean, I don't want to talk about being woke, you know, but if all the people suddenly became aware, conscious, enlightened about what it means to be alive, that we are alive, we have agency, We choose what we do. And, you know, so I've chosen to study ecology. As soon as I saw the mass degradation of the cradle of the ancient civilization here in China, and then I saw like, oh my goodness, you can actually change that. That's, you know, if we understand the system, we understand what causes moisture to infiltrate, what causes fertility, what causes differentiation and speciation leading to infinite variety in genetics. Suddenly we are stewards of the Earth. Now we're not rapists. We're not just like, cut it down, you know, consume it, sell it. It's nothing. No, that's gross. That's ignorant. Let's be the stewards. Let's care for the living systems. Let's express love and gratitude and gratefulness for the abundance on the earth. That's what all the sacred texts in all the religions tell us. That's what all the indigenous people were doing when they were dancing around, worshiping the waterfalls and the sunsets and the beautiful trees and all the wonderful megafauna around the world. And so now we've changed this through mercantilism, through our concept, we are greater than everything, you know, like what? You know, really, you think? You know, it's like, no, we're not, you know. So stop it. You know, let's just, let's go play music. You know, you need to chill. And so, so everybody has to like have this kind of understanding and emerge, especially let's do that before we die. You know, so that, so we can like have a life, get a life, you know. Let's, let's live. Let's learn how to live. Let's not learn how to argue. Let's not learn how to suppress other people. Let's not learn how to manipulate everything. Let's learn how to, to live. And when we do that, then I think we're in another space. And the more and more people who get that. And so when you get to that level, like you'd like to be with other people who have that on their mind, you know. Like you don't want to be worried like, oh my gosh, everybody's going to kill everybody else because of that. You know, like, I don't know. No, that's not a good thing. Let's see what we can do to, become kinder and better. And, you know, we all have this opportunity. We all have choice. We have free will. I mean, maybe there are others who are saying, well, you don't have any rights and we're going to take away all your rights. Well, that's crazy. And I think they're headed for some quite serious karma. When they do that kind of thing. They need to see that civilizational evolution is real too. And philosophy, we've come a long way. Philosophy, psychology, consciousness, it's a thing. You know, we can become more conscious. We should become more conscious. We should be less selfish. We should be much kinder. We should, you know, try at least to do that. So, of course, you know, we can look back and we can say Thomas Jefferson, you know, he said, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Well, that's a nice thing to say and write down. But he was also the largest slave owner in Virginia. You know, so like, okay, wait a minute. This doesn't completely compute. But it's also true. And so thank goodness he wrote this down. It means that even if you can't achieve the highest aspirations, you can know what's true. And you can see it repeatedly. We're striving. All of us are flawed. But if we, if we try to do our best, then we're in better shape. If we devolve to the point of bestiality, which we're seeing, all over the world now. I don't think that that's— that's not going to change the climate. That's— that's— that, you know, well, it's going to change the climate, but not for good. It's really going to— you know, we have the ability to cause extinctions. And when you see an extinction event, the top of the food chain is the most at risk. Well, that's us. So calm down, go play music, eat really nutritious food, and be kind to one another.

You've mentioned agency, choices, collectives, pancakes, and communities. Can we talk a little bit about the work being undertaken by the ecosystem restoration communities and what sort of progress you're making in terms of where you are today?

We've now seen, so there are, I think there are 86 approximately that have been registered as part of this movement, but there are probably hundreds and thousands of permaculture ecovillages biodynamic farms. You know, there's people in communities all over the world who are doing this. At the highest level, you can see, okay, it's, it's possible to grow soils, and it's possible to make beautiful organic soils, and they're nutrient-rich. The The fungal and bacterial communities are what process the minerals from rocks or from the lithosphere and bring it into the pedosphere, which is this living layer where the soils are. So the soil is not rock, it's not subsoil, it's, it's It's a blending of the mineral nutrients that are basically processed by the bacterial and fungal communities and made bioavailable to plants. And this is a very interesting, complex web of life that is a type of commerce and a type of— so it's transporting and trading off fungus and can be fed by the carbohydrates which are produced and delivered by plants. And then they can run around and do their thing and return the bioavailable minerals to the plants. So that's an exchange, you know, that's a multiple species in an interaction, you know, and it's a complex symbiotic relationship. So when we start to think about this concept of symbiosis, then we're really getting close to what actually is happening. So we're all in symbiotic relationship with one another, and with Earth systems. So when we kind of grasp a little bit this concept, we can just keep playing with it and learn like, oh, where are the connectivities? When you really see that, you realize we're not even a single species. We're symbionts. We're in— we actually house— we are the housing for other organisms which we depend on. And if we don't have them, we can't survive. We are dead without them because they help us to digest our food and they maintain the regulation of our different hormonal secretions which provide us with immunity, and, you know, with vigor, with energy. So, I mean, once we understand some of these things, I mean, it's probably too complex to understand everything, I would say. So you get to a situation where it's like, okay, I'm okay that I have learned a little bit about this, and it's enough to sort of understand a little bit about what's happening. But obviously there's infinity, and I'm unlikely to grasp everything. But okay, I got this far. So I think that's where we need to look at in terms of historical analysis of where humanity is. So with soils, we can grow soils. With water, We can also deal with the water. So the water now is extremely polluted. We're in a process in some of the camps to create living water gardens, to use natural systems. Basically what we're talking about here is transformational change. So probably to go back to the earlier discussion and say, what do we need? We need transformational change. Change. You know, everything we're doing in terms of the climate and in terms of the materialistic economy is not helping. So we're going in the wrong direction. We're going fast in the wrong direction. We need transformational change. And that's what we saw in China, was transformational change.

What do you take from that that you think is applicable to the ecosystem restoration projects. Is there anything in that approach, the idea of change, the idea of—

Well, most definitely rapid prototyping. Each of the ecosystem restoration communities is a living laboratory. So this is a place where like, okay, we're facing an existential threat from climate change. So, well, let's get to work. You know, what are we doing here? Let's not talk about it. That's just going to create more CO2. You know, let's sequester, not just be a source of CO2. So how do we do that? So we learn about soils, we learn about water, and we learn about biodiversity. And we learn about collective consciousness. Collective intention and collective activity. So if we have a collective understanding, that allows us to have a collective intention. And if we say, I'm the boss, I own it, it's mine, you know, and then, you know, like, well, you know, nobody wants to work for me. Nobody wants to, nobody cares. But if we say, okay, this is for everyone, this is everybody's, it's self-organizing, self-governing, and autonomous. And so this is your ecosystem restoration community. This is your chance to contribute to a global problem. But guess what? This is your local problem because if you're getting drought or floods or wildfires, or you're hungry, or you don't have a job, or you don't have a house, well, maybe you ought to try this, you know, because if you work together, you can build houses together. If you work carefully and well, you can turn the infertile soils into very fertile soils relatively rapidly. And if you know how to grow food and you also understand that probably monocultures were not invented by, um, an agronomist, they were invented by a Neanderthal with a sharpened stick. And, you know, he, that Neanderthal, I call him Og usually, he thought, ah, look at that. There's this one plant that has all these seed pods. That's the one I want. I can gnar gnar gnar and eat it. Then he learned how to dry it and cook it and, you know, do all these other things. Anyway, that's the one I want. So, What are these others? I don't know. I want to kill them. I'm going to kill them as far and big, bigger and bigger and bigger, and I'm going to spread these seeds, and then I'm going to get a monoculture. He created plowing and monocultures in one go. Well, what can— what could go wrong with that, you know? And we're still carrying this idea that the value of all this grain is supposed to be higher than the value of the ecological, the symbiotic ecosystem that gave life to the plants. Well, I have news. It's not. Because if you just use, you know, monoculture, industrial monocultures and you have more and more and more inputs, you're making a desert. You cut down the Brazilian rainforest to make soybeans or corn, you're going to have a desert. You're going to create the Sahara because that's what maintains the hydrology. And if you lose the hydrology, then you're going to have a desert. And somewhere else, there are going to be massive floods. So what are we seeing? Massive droughts, massive floods, wildfires, mudslides. All of those things are endemic now. So we don't want that. So we're going to have to restore the ecological function. It's not by making a machine. That's by getting people to understand we need this. And how do you understand that? The community comes together and says, well, if you— if we don't understand that, let's study it together. Let's study it as a collectively. If we study it collectively, then basically if you know more, then you're the teacher. If you know less, you're a student. And eventually everybody gets the same level and new people come in and learn more and everybody learns more and everybody learns together, and you then— that allows you to have a collective intention. And you say, oh look, our stream is polluted, our lake is polluted, our ocean is polluted, you know, like, oh, we did— what can we do? Well, you can do a lot, you know. If you— once you understand this Then you have to have a plan. What are you going to do about it? Well, let's work together. Let's do this. And then when you understand the value of what you're doing, it's not externally, it's internally. You understand the value. And when that reaches critical mass, that's the basis of your economy. Then you suddenly realize, oh, it wasn't those products. It wasn't the derivatives. It was the function. And now let's make our money come from the function. Let's pay everybody to do this work because this is more valuable than making plastic goo-gaws and buying and selling them. Okay, now we're onto something. Now we've gotten to a place where actually every human being has a role to play. By learning more, by acting in the collective benefit of not only human beings but of all life.

So how do you strategize to make that scalable in a sense? Because there's a lot of people, especially in today's environment, today's sort of social environment, where the idea of living with nature or being closer to nature is very attractive, but it also feels a bit ideological. How does it become realistic and scalable to include more people?

I think music and pancakes and theater. And so right now in Britain, we're working on a place which is— it's we're theorizing, we have already got a pub in place. We're thinking about other types of restaurants, but we're also thinking about food, not as a commodity, but as a right. So we're planning and building out facilities to store food for the wider community to process foods. And also we're looking at the concept of perennial polycultures instead of annual monocultures. So if we shift to perennial polycultures, then we have to harvest in a different way. We basically have to harvest every day. Something will come ripe. And so you just, take a walk in the woods and you get everything that is edible, you leave some for the animals and the birds and insects and so on, but you bring back what you have and then you have to look at it and you go, what do I have today? And you're going to, I have fruit, I have nuts, I have vegetables, I have leaves, you know, and they're all edible. And so, and then, I mean, you can do annuals, you know, in the edges or something, if you, things that you want, but you better not have it be dysfunctional. So when you do that, then we can also have collectively the ability to process things. Imagine you have fruit and nuts. And then you have honey and you have, you know, this kind of stuff. So what is the best protein bar you've ever had? Imagine that you gather all the fruits and the nuts and you, you dry them, you dehydrate them, and then you make them into— with honey and grains and, you know, you have oats and you have and nuts and things, and you make it into protein bars. These are gonna be delicious. And if you go to the organic grocery or something, or you go to any grocery, it's gonna cost you 3 pounds or 5 pounds, who knows, to get one. But we can make them for, much less. We can make them because we go out and we can also have a cooperative that is purchasing things that we can't grow and bringing them in at wholesale prices. And then the co-op can store it and then it can help feed the community when there's hunger. And we can invite those people who are hungry to become healthy, and we can invite them to go harvest in the perennial polyculture and help with this and be part of it. And we can also have music and theater, and they can have music and theater, and everybody can have a good time. So this is— we can build houses for each other. We can work together on the legal structures of, for instance, community land trusts. So these are not real estate deals that you can flip and, you know, you're going to build a McMansion to sell to the richest, you know, purchaser. You're building a community for your children to grow up in where everybody is caring for everybody else. And it's not a wild west place where murders and things are going on. It's a kind place where everybody's having a, you know, going to the theater and going to the music camp and swimming in the clean waters. And, you know, it's a different thing. That's not up to me, and that's not up to individuals. It's up to communities coming together and having a shared a shared understanding, a shared intention and shared action.

When you look across the, you mentioned, I think it's 86 around the world at the moment. What's the typical size of the community and is that where it is? Is that going to stay like that or do you see that growing?

I don't think there are any typical sizes. They're all different. There's a You know, and you see some that are incredibly active. Lately I've been dealing with in Borneo in Sarawak, a Malaysian group. They're very active. And there's a group forming in Nepal. And it's Bhutan, Nepal, and also India and China. So, I mean, it has influences. From the region, really. And I think that could be enormous. I think some start around schools, others start around agriculture. I think there's a big question about agriculture. There's also agroecology, or there's— And there's ecological tourism kind of places that emerge. Those who partly— there's diversity, people who are interested in animals on the edges of places where there's megafauna. And there's, for instance, in Sekhem in Egypt, it's an enormous community that began in 1977. And so this is a biodynamic community, and it really was ambitious. It was starting in the middle of the desert, and now it has a university and a hospital and lots of businesses and thousands of people, and it's transformed big areas of the desert. And they also have a They have what's called the Economy of Love. It's a 30% subsidy that goes to the biodynamic agriculturalists because— and they get it from carbon trading because the biodynamics doesn't use any chemicals, uses lots of compost, and increases the soil. Carbon. So because of that, they can—

they—

and but they were seeing that if you try to sell the food for, you know, the biodynamic food for more than the, the, the regular food, the industrial food, then people go like, I'd really rather have the, the, the biodynamic food, but I'd rather pay the price. Of the cheaper price. So they sell the food at the same price in the market and give a subsidy of 30% to all the biodynamic things. And then that means once they taste the difference, they always want to buy the, the biodynamic, which encourages more of the industrial agriculturists to become biodynamic agriculturists, to not only because that's what the people prefer, but also because they want the 30%.

And how broad is the exchange between communities? You're obviously aware of what's going on in quite a few different ones. You visit a lot. What's the exchange between them? Is there a glue that binds them together?

Yeah, I think the internet is helpful. There are many that that talk with each other often and a lot. There's courses that have been created. We're actually working on new coursework. And several of the, several of the communities in Europe have been working on making a course. I think it's freely available, so you can look it up. There's a camp in Ireland and one in France and one in Italy. And these three teamed up together and they got a grant from the European Union to like kind of like an introduction or how to start an ecosystem restoration community and what it is, what it means to have an ecosystem restoration community. So that, that you can find and get now if you, if you're looking at that and You might look and see if there's a community near you or somewhere that you're interested in. You know, they're in Brazil. They're both near Rio and near São Paulo and into the Amazon. They're in Mexico. They're in the United States. They're in you know, really, I mean, they're in Sweden and they're in Holland. And I mean, they're just everywhere. They're all over. They're in India. They're in, you know, Canada. They're in—

What if you want this to thrive and continue to grow, etc.? What are the critical next steps that you're really focused on at the moment as you look forward?

I think what we're seeing is that the ecosystem restoration communities are like the anecdote to despair. So if you just look at what's going on, the metrics of like, okay, it's terrible. We're all, things are falling apart. Yeah, they are. And maybe they have to. Because if they're just filled with mistakes and they're inefficient, ineffective, and wrong-headed, well, you know, the first thing is like, let's try to save it. You know, like, no, maybe let's try to decide instead of like trying to save what's wrong, Let's try to decide what's right and do what's right to address this. So if we want to address this, we don't do more of what caused it. We do less of what caused it and more of what we know is ecologically correct. So if we're talking about how do you infiltrate and retain moisture to reregulate the hydrological cycle, or how do you sequester carbon? It's basically through photosynthesis. So you have to increase the percentages and total amounts of organic material. And then if you do that, each generation of life dies. And so that's increasing the necromass or the decaying organic matter. So you want to do both. You want to increase the living organic material and you want to increase the decaying organic matter. And so as you do that, you go, oh, well, that's not so difficult. Actually, we can do that. And the problem has been that the economy doesn't say that that's worth anything. But now if you look at, like, if you ask the question, if we're facing an existential threat from climate change, what is the value of natural mitigation and adaptation to climate change? It's ridiculous. It's vastly more valuable than anything you can make and everything that human beings will ever make. This is more valuable than everything. So if that— if then— so if this is true, that when you're facing an existential threat from climate change, then it means that functional ecosystems which mitigate and adapt to climate change are the most valuable thing you can do.

Huh.

That's where the economy should come. All those people who are doing this should be compensated. And then you have to— then it takes you to the concept of transformational change. So if we're saying that money comes from buying and selling plastic goo-gaws and how much how much fossil fuel we can rip out of the ground and waste or use, then maybe we've made a mistake. Maybe that's not the basis of wealth. Maybe the basis of wealth is actually life itself and the fact that these symbiotic biological systems self-organize, self-replicate, and are eternal. Maybe that's the basis of wealth, and that's the basis of value. If that's true, that should be the basis of our economy, and that means that all human efforts will go to protect, and where the systems have been degraded, to restore ecological function on a planetary scale. And that is the way that human beings could survive, and not only survive but thrive in the future. I've called it the great work of our time, and I've also called it the flourishing path. This is the way to see how the abundance of life on Earth is the basis, is the basis of life, and it's the basis of wealth and health. So we want health, we want wealth, we want life. Choose this.

Well, look, we've been talking for a long time and it's been absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much. We are going to speak again, no doubt, but it's been really good to reconnect and cover quite a lot of ground there.

Okay, thank you so much. Good to see you.

If you are concerned about the future, then why not travel with me through every COP conference from COP21 in Paris to COP28 in Dubai by ordering my book Cop Out: How Governments Have Failed the People on Climate. In Cop Out, you'll gain insights into what is actually going on in these supposed world-saving conferences and how we have ended up in this dire era of dangerous consequences. You can order Cop Out via the link in the notes or on any online bookstore worldwide in paperback or audio version.