John D Liu & Chris Henggeler on Kachana, China & A Blueprint For Restoring Earth

G'day there, Anthony James here for The Regeneration with the stories that are changing the story towards the regeneration of life on this unlikely miracle of a planet. Brought to you by listeners like you. Do subscribe if you can and help keep the show on the road. Today we're connecting from here in Perth over to the Kimberley in the tropical wet season of far north-western Australia and across the seas to a dry, wintry Beijing, China. That's because we've got two legends in ecological restoration on the line. Chris Hengler from Kitchener Station needs no introduction to listeners of this podcast, aside from perhaps letting you know that the ABC TV Australian Story episode on Chris and his family has now eclipsed 1.5 million views. And yes, We talk about the distressing tribunal judgment passed recently on Kachana and the opportunity still alive on that front. And probably also needing no introduction, a man Chris described as the David Attenborough of the regenerative movement, speaking to us from his long-term residence in Beijing, made with wood they milled on site nearly 4 decades ago and full of old footage from those decades and more in film is John D Liu, perhaps best known in recent times for his film on the extraordinary transformation of the Loess Plateau in China at the scale of France called Green Gold, and his pioneering work with what have come to be known as ecological restoration communities, now numbering almost 100 in dozens of countries around the world. We hear a heck of a story about how that started too. Chris and John spoke for the first time a week or so ago for a lazy 6 hours. And apparently there was plenty to go on with, so I suggested we do it here. There are some big ideas floating about and a proposal or two for Kachana. And John takes us out with a bit of guitar. Hey Chris, how you going?

Good, good.

How's John?

Ha! John's alive.

Just a bit of logistics there, Anthony. Unlike John, I have 37 degrees in the office and I've got a fan going. Is that interrupting? Is that— can I keep that going as is?

Oh, Chris, under those circumstances, I'm not going to tell you not to.

Thank you. Because otherwise it wouldn't be me crying, it'd just be the sweat coming off my head.

That's right.

Well, I'm gonna try to look like less like I'm in the Arctic.

That works.

It had good effect. Chris in the sweltering tropics and me down here in a sort of a Mediterranean 30 degrees and you dressed for the snow.

It's actually, I could try to do it outside. It's quite lovely today.

Funny you should say. I was actually going to start by getting you both to bring us into the ambience of where you are. So, if you want to, you could do a live cross.

It's harder to go to take it off the power and to— but otherwise—

but tell us about it.

It's a good day to do it in a way, if— but I'm lazy, let's face it. And I'm very messy too, so that's another problem. But, um, it's, it's sunny today and the temperature feels like 14 degrees, but it's probably more like 11 or 12, and there's no wind, and the sun is shining, and it's blue. There's not a cloud in the sky. So it's quite lovely. And it's interesting because it reveals, because I've been here now, I came to China in 1979. And so this is 46 years or 47 years coming up since I first came. Actually, that was in February. So yeah, 47 years. And what's interesting to see is at that time, there was very little vegetation anywhere. It was like the people had rushed over and you know, it was like locusts or something. People, there were so many people that the Chinese at the end of World War II and at the beginning of the, when the communists took over in China in 1949, I think there were 400 million Chinese. And now it's like 3 times, more than 3 times that population. And when I, it seemed like, and they had, they had some periods where they went through some disruptions, you know, these political pogroms and things. They would arrest people and run around, and it didn't make any sense. I mean, at the end of that, you know, everybody's— everybody's— all the Chinese people are Chinese people, and they all have the right to be here. And, you know, so, so it all kind of— it went through these phases, but they ended, you know. Like, they would persecute one group and then persecute another group, and then, you know, and then finally they went, eh, you know, like, that didn't really work, you know. So let's stop it, which I thought was, you know, that's kind of progress, you know. I mean, it's somehow progress. And then what— but during one of those periods, they had what they called the Great Leap Forward, and it was not based on science. It was based on, I don't know, whim, you know. It's sort of like what you're seeing maybe now in the United States, where It's not really a rational or logical or consensus-building or compassionate. It's just like, oh, let's do this, you know, and let's do that. And of course, it only lasts a day or two because there's the, you know, that'll be forgotten. And it'll also reminds me of like in Mongolia, they had something called the the haral, and it was just that it landed where all the people went— they didn't really talk to each other, but they, they kind of had some kind of telepathy. And then somebody would stand up and present, and, and it took a lot of courage to say anything because everybody's silent. And then everybody kind of looks at each other and And there's like a feeling that goes through the crowd that goes like, "No, maybe not," you know? And the person goes, "Oh," you know, and sits down. You know, it's like, it's clear. You know, nobody has to say, "Well, that's silly. You know, don't do that." And then the next person stands up and kind of pronounces something and the whole group goes, "Okay, yeah, much better idea," you know? And so suddenly it just lands and everybody knows that's it. And then it's like, okay. And then they walk away. They don't even really— it's not too much ceremony around that. It's just kind of like, we know. And it's amazing. And I think that kind of consensus or that kind of collective intelligence, that's really what we need at this time. If we don't get there, it's very difficult to have a collective intention. And what we need now is to have a very clear view of what's taking place, what's happening now, what is true. We have 8+ billion people on the Earth. We've got climate change, biodiversity loss. We've got the hydrological function. We've got the soil issues of living soils and regenerating soil, and we have toxicity, and we've got these political problems and financial collapse. It's just a poly crisis, really. And if we understood that and we just sort of sat down and said, well, maybe it's not the best thing to think that going shopping is going to fix this. It really is that we need to process and come to a collective understanding. And when we have a collective understanding, we can have a collective intention. We can say, look, we know how to recharge the lower hydrological cycle. It's connected to biology. And let's restore the biology and it will restore the hydrological cycle. And when we restore the biology and the hydrological cycle, it will change the physics on the planet. It'll change the temperature and the wind speed, the wind direction. It will lower the vortex activity and it will stop the solar radiation from directly hitting the surface of the Earth. And when we all kind of grasp like, well, if you don't understand that, let's sit down, let's repeat that again. And again and again. And at some point it's going to land because that's it. You know, it's not like it's like, what are you talking about? You know, that's your opinion. You know, no, it's not an opinion.

John, that's funny you should say repeat and repeat. I was almost going to say you've probably hit all the marks there in 5 minutes. We could just stop it here and put on rotation, but we're going to loop back to some of those threads for sure. Because, yeah, easier said than done, huh? But there are these cultural examples nonetheless. But yeah, let's bring Chris in. Chris, welcome. And first, hey, I gather you've got some things in your mind, but I mean, you've got a backdrop and that I remember very fondly of the gorge behind you, which actually is usually actually behind you. But you're in the office at the moment. It's figuratively behind you. But bring us into the feel of where you're at now in your day. At 1 o'clock in the afternoon?

All right, yeah, so that's, the cattle are standing, lying in the shade, which is the best place to be. It's actually, we've got cloud cover, high humidity. Here in the office, I've got 37 to 38 degrees, which is actually cool. I mean, if there wasn't cloud cover, it'd be up in the 40s. So the office is not a place to be in summer, not during the day. Try and do office work early in the morning. Good, but you do what you do. And, um, we've had a very good— we're in the middle of a very good wet season. We've actually had over 600 millimeters, which is the, the lower end of the scale is sort of somewhere between 400 and 600 millimeters for a whole season. So we've already beat the, the low end of the scale. And, um, yeah, we've— it's February or March tend to be the wettest months, so we'll see where we go.

So the land looks good?

Yeah, it's looking good. We can't complain. Ideally, we don't get too big, still bigger storms, and it sort of keeps on going the way it is. The fact that it's sort of started off slow, I'd like to hope it keeps going slowly. But each season has been different, and this is probably the third year in a row where I can say this is the best season I've ever experienced.

Wow.

And it's just in the areas which we've impacted, where we've created microclimate. I'm pretty sure I don't have to go very far across the range into the areas where we haven't got an impact, where it's, yeah, you've either got flood or just very, very hot.

And the rain, and sorry, the fire season you emerged from, how was that in comparison?

We were very lucky. There were quite a few dry storms with lightning strikes, And yeah, there were a lot of, there were a lot of conflagrations due to lightning. We had to respond to 3 of them, but luck was on our side. And yeah, we've said so, so we pulled through.

Good.

And it's amazing. It's amazing. Like there's these probably 2 months of the year where really you're just sitting on edge. You just know you're only one lightning strike away from a total wipeout. And then you have these lightning strikes hit, and then you've got half an hour to make $5,000 decisions. If you make, they may be for nothing. And if you get it wrong, they turn into $150,000 or more decisions. So it's a, we are hoping that we can sort of reduce that sort of adrenaline, loaded anticipation every year by being able to get funding to actually put in more fire breaks early in the year. You know, it's that, and that's probably what's been made it so hard all these years. We've never, we've always sensed what we should be doing early in the year because prevention is a lot better than responding, but we've never had the budget to do what we think needs doing. But that's given us more time to sort of make up our mind what needs doing. And then Scoop, now the young fella, he's like, he's in his mid-30s now, and we actually agree on a whole lot of things. And that's a good start.

Sure is. Yeah. I guess too, there's just expanding the model area.

Well, at this stage, we're just in a holding pattern for the last 8 years.

Yeah, with the donkeys.

And trying a whole lot of new things and learning, like, seeing how forgiving the country is, or the area is, that we took up to a certain level. And with set stocking or leaving animals in longer, just testing some of the theories and unfortunately confirming that, you know, poor management is not going to get the same results as tight management. You know, we really have to be in these landscapes. We have to be there. We have a part to play until they self-regulate. We're a long way from that, but there are, there are a lot of indications that we can get. I think self-regulation is absolutely achievable, but it's having to do the groundwork and consolidate what we've done. But back to what John was talking about, I literally experienced one scientist. John, you're talking about the penny dropping. I was flying a guy in, he's a carbon specialist, and we're flying low. I wanted to I wanted to appreciate the countryside. So we're flying low level at 1500 feet above the ground and we're flying over range. And as we got over the range, the aircraft just started bumping around and he sort of looked at me and I said, that's the burnt country. And so just by crossing that line, crossing that range from unburnt to burnt, just It's like within, within half a minute, just the difference in turbulence simply because we'd taken away all the vegetation and every little hill was— had a different little vortex of hot air coming up off it. And, and you— that, that plane was jumping around. And yeah, it— you could just— you really could see he's got it.

Yeah, geez, it's interesting that it gives you and that guy the visceral experience of what otherwise we don't get to perceive. Or, you know, many of us— you do because you're there, to your point. But, uh, I remember you said, um, Nathan Dyer, the filmmaker and journo that you had out there recently, and he said, for all I've heard about your place, I never really got it until I was here.

Yeah, he actually— he came out and he did one story on us, and, and he absolutely got our situation, but he wasn't what I was trying to communicate about the donkeys in the hillside. It was only when I actually physically got in that hillside and filming, that's when he realized, I didn't know what you were talking about.

Yeah.

And this is someone who actually understands what we were on about and is trying to understand. Yeah. And I don't think it's just my lack of communication skills. I think it's, we need people to be able to apply more than two senses. When they're in the landscape. We really want them to connect and use all their senses. And I think that puts them in a position where they can actually intuit as well, because when you hear something and you've spent a bit of time in the landscape and then something gets said and you've had your sensory experiences, well, all of a sudden you can intuit, yes, that sounds right or no, that sounds wrong. You can take it on board. It's what John D Liu was alluding to there, you know, all of a sudden information can drop into place because you've got the context where it can, can land.

If I were to add to that, as I started to learn about these things as a journalist, as, as a documentarian, I realized that actually often in academics we're abstracting what's going on, and we're then talking about it conceptually. But the reality is this isn't a conceptual problem. This is a physical problem of dysfunction to Earth systems. And so the interesting thing is if you study this, then you really have to apply what you've learned immediately. It's not like it doesn't do anything if we write another paper or we go and talk about it in Parliament or whatever, because it doesn't change the reality. So if the solar radiation is directly hitting the surface of the Earth, causing the changes in wind speed, wind direction, and and vortex activity. And of course, that's caused by the temperature differentials. So when you have the temperature differentials happening— and when I started to realize this, I thought I was crap at school. My father told me I was terrible and would have to just take over the family businesses because I was not able to, to grasp these things. And the, the thing that I realized later was they didn't tell me why we were doing this. They had abstracted everything. It's like, well, so that— so you can get a job. I don't want a job. I want to know what's going on.

I relate.

So education, it turns out, can be socialization or vocational training, but it really— when you get to education, it's about your ability to observe and to measure and to make a judgment, make an understand, understand the processes which you're observing and then what it means. So if then, so I think we've kind of lost logic somewhere. We have to talk about logic and we have to talk about ethics because it's not like, Well, the law says this, so let's do it. Well, who wrote the law? What did they know? When was the law written? What are we talking about? And if we're talking about the hydrological cycle, I don't think the law knows very much about this or the idea that people are saying, well, we have to add more money or tax this or do that for this. What are you talking about? The hydrological cycle is disrupted. You know, the flow of money is not going to change the hydrological cycle. What's going to change the hydrological cycle is when you understand that the moisture in the upper atmosphere and the moisture in the lower hydrological cycle are kind of two symbiotic systems. So it's sort of the same system in hyperlocal context or on a planetary context. So, well, regional, sub-regional, all that. But so you've got, you've got to look at it in this kind of massive way. And I have the feeling most people are not really, you know, it's, it seems that the only way to think about that is conceptually, but it's not. The way to really do it is to walk between the edges. So as soon as you walk out of the area that's been completely degraded as the solar radiation directly hits the surface, and then you walk under the canopy, well, the temperature is gonna be massively changed. Well, what do you think happens when the temperature is massively changed? So then you have to play the logic. And you play the logic again and again and again, and then it's absolutely crystal clear. And it's not an opinion. And when you look at the soils in the truly functional soils, the organic layer is enormous. You sink. It's like the best carpet you've ever walked on. You're really sinking. And I was in the Netherlands during COVID I was trapped outside of China for a while in different places. So part of the time I was in the Netherlands and in this one biodynamic place, they had 100 and some years now of protecting it with Steiner, Rudolf Steiner biodynamic agriculture and just stewardship. And what was interesting was they had a drought. They, you know, they're underwater. How can you have a drought in the Netherlands? It's kind of like, what? And so they were there having a drought, and you'd go outside and, oh, it's miserably hot, and everybody's kind of stripping down to nothing and, you know, walking around. I don't even understand them in the Netherlands because I'm freezing in the Netherlands in the winter and they're all walking around in t-shirts. I'm like, what is with you people? But at that point they're melting and I'm living in this atelier, an artist's atelier in the middle of this biodynamic garden. And it's dripping all the time. And when you step into the ground, you go down like a couple of inches at least, you know, as you go down. And there's moss all over everything and there's things, you know, it's wild. And people would come and see me. I just said, I don't want to go to Amsterdam. I don't want to go out of here. You know, I'm just going to stay here. And people would come to see me and they go, huh, you know, it's really like different. I go, yeah, you know, of course, look at this. You know, if you grow this organic layer it— then all the moisture that you have during the year, whether it— you have a 6-month dry period or whatever, it's going to absorb into the ground because everything is porous. And then that whole thing is a sponge, and it's going to soak up everything that you can, and it's going to give you a really functional lower hydrological cycle. And then the other part of it is that the solar radiation is interrupted by the canopy So the height of this canopy is critically important. How high is it? Is it one, you know, is it, I mean, if you have a grass canopy that's 3 inches or 5 inches or 6 inches, or if you have a canopy that's a grass canopy in a savanna or steppe or grasslands area, it's a meter and a half or 2 meters high. Well, that's completely different. And if you have a 6-meter or a 10-meter or 15-meter or how about a 160-meter high canopy, that's what climax equilibrium looks like. And when I started to understand these things, I started asking about it. They said, oh, we don't talk about climax equilibrium except in the past because that's what we had in the past. But they can never see, well, you can have it in the future if you just understand it and you protect it and you value it. But if you value going shopping more than you value the functional ecosystems, and then you cut it all down.

John, could I keep going with you for the minute? Because the other walking between the edges thing I think about as I speak with you is that you had this have this extraordinary experience with making film, from being a correspondent making it for international news through to Green Gold and beyond, all these extraordinary stories of regeneration, and of course what became the ERCs, the Ecological Restoration Camps and now Communities.

I never use acronyms, just to be clear. Ecosystem Restoration Camps and Communities. Or ecosystem restoration communities, if you want.

So you've got these experiences that were entirely the practical, on the ground, and have exploded. Now it's a movement, a global movement, more than 100 communities, as I understand.

Almost.

Almost, okay. I imagine you'd also say the films had their impact too, hey? So there's like this, between the edges of conceptualization and story perhaps, and on the ground, that both affect us and both are necessary perhaps? What would you say?

Yeah, I would say that if we don't understand it, then the storytelling is urgently needed. And basically it's to achieve the concept of collective intelligence. So if we don't have collective intelligence, we can't have a collective intention. In pedagogic theory, let's say, you want to look at it from the point of view, okay, I'm trying to educate people. Well, I kind of came to the conclusion that you can't teach anybody anything. You can only help them to get to the point where they can learn. So if they're ready to learn, Then if that's how they encounter it, and so kind of it's like Easter eggs, you know, you need to hide the Easter eggs all over the place, you know, and if somebody will open the Easter eggs and go, oh, I found an egg, you know, like, and then they realize what it means. And so, but pedagogically, in theory, you have to tell them what you're going to tell them. Then you have to tell them, and then you have to tell them what you told them. And that's your task. And then as the educator or the storyteller, but their task is to run that logic about 17 times until it's in there and then test it. You know, don't believe it. Don't just go like, oh, carbon, you know, what are you talking about? Carbon's not a poison. Carbon's not, you know, stop it. You know, be smart about this. What does it mean? You're going to have to, if you look at the scale of the measurements in the IPCC reports or something, you know, get a grip. You know, you're going to really understand what's happening here. You're gonna have to really understand some very large I mean, you're going to have to get to the point where you can't really understand it because it's infinite, but you can understand the concept of infinity. And then you realize, well, that's a really long time, or, you know, that's, you know, that, that's a— so that's what you can know. That's true for sure. Infinite, you know, I, you know, what is it actually, you know, you know, heart, you know, we're gonna die. I'm thinking about mortality more and more as I age, you know. So the, the main thing we have to understand is we're not the end-all be-all. We're just passing through, and we should get a, get a grip, you know. Understand that we're here now, and we can see what happened before. That's, that's— we have a superpower. We can look and analyze. And we have another superpower: we can speak. And we can— and we also have this incredible technology. Now you're in Australia and I'm in China, and we're talking to each other like this, right? So we have the ability to communicate across large distances and from generation to generation. So after we're gone, people could be watching this conversation and going, well, what were they thinking about? What were they, you know, and that's good because we're here now. We have the advantage of looking and measuring and realizing what happened in the past. And from that, we can say, let's do this because this is going to determine the quality of life for all life in the future.

Right.

And that's where we're at. And Kachana is such a beautiful opportunity to focus attention. The courage and the determination and the scale of the vision that Chris and his family are showing is what the rest of us need to do. And so enormous gratitude and with the ability to participate in this, to reach the next level of understanding. And when we all— and we have to realize it is not Chris's understanding or my understanding or anybody else's understanding that's going to turn the tide, it's going to be when we have a collective intelligence and create a kind of critical mass of humanity says, let's do this together. And then I've watched this in China because China was the poorest country I'd ever been to, and I've been to more than 100 countries. So when I When I got here in 1979, it was desperately poor. And they've transformed in just this period. It's now 46, 47 years. And it's incredible what has taken place. But it also has to do, you have to look at, well, it's not all perfect. You know, look at the toxicity, look at the kind of idea of more materialism. But it is revealing the mistakes on a planetary scale. Like, okay, you have 8 billion people, you want to have 9, 10 billion people, maybe before the peak, and then you kind of go down. Because we know if we have women's rights, family planning, and access to contraception, then every country, every civilization that has that, the— it levels off and goes down. So get ready, you know, that's what can happen. But that creates a whole other set of problems that you have to analyze. But, but in this case, we have to kind of bring the population into, into some kind of equilibrium. And we know that if we do this with that type of of system of family planning and women's rights and contraception, it's going to work. And then, then we can then plan out what happens. But whatever we do, we have to restore the soils. We have to restore the hydrological cycle, and we have to restore the biodiversity because that's the basis of everything. So, and if we get this collective intelligence about that, then projects like Kachana are the front line. This is the highest level of service to humanity and to the earth that could possibly happen. And we need to bring as many people as possible. Like, I mean, not too many people, but let's say we bring 150 people to Kachana and they're the right people and they're not staying there forever necessarily, but some of them are. Some of them are setting up the processes that are needed to have continuous research. Rothamsted Research Institute, the Roth-C carbon models. They come because they had 150 years of measuring carbon in the same spot. You see everything in their experimentation because you can see pre-Chernobyl and post-Chernobyl because it's in the soil. Everything is there. And so basically, if we set up a research center and an experimental living laboratory, we can show exactly how to grow soils at— I mean, you could, you can make soils really quickly if you know what you're doing. And if we change the soil conditions in a microcosm in that climate, we will then know what is possible. There's technology that can lower the temperatures using passive or evaporation rates. And if you have 600 to 900 millimeters of water annually, you can infiltrate every drop.

Well, it's why you went there, wasn't it, Chris? That one of the fundamentals, there was going to be water and you've just had to find a way to harness it. Chris, I'm conscious that you guys I can see how, would have easily spoken for 6 hours when you first got together a couple of weeks ago, or last week even, I don't know when it was. But this is some of what came out of it, no, is what is the potential for you guys to collaborate to effect? And I guess, are we talking a kind of ecological restoration community prospect at Kachana? Film too?

I can unmute, but then you'll, you'll You can hear the sound there.

No, it's good.

It's pretty good.

So the rain doesn't bother you?

No, you keep going. I'll tell you.

Right. I'm very new to this. I'm new to John D Liu's description of things, and it really resonates with me. I've, for years, I've been inviting third-party rigorous scientific analysis because I'm convinced At this point in time, at least, I'm convinced by our own results and our own research, but I wouldn't want to tell other Australians, hey, this is what you've got to do. I want, I want, I want our hypothesis to be tested by rigorous science. So let's apply the scientific method. Let's get people here who've got no, no dog in the race, just actually having a look and making up their mind and looking at it from different, different angles. The beauty that I see about Kachana is if we get it wrong, we can still correct. It's not like, say, somewhere in China or closer to Sydney in the water catchments where if you get it wrong, all of a sudden thousands of people or millions of people are affected downstream. We are in the fortunate position that at this stage no one's affected downstream except of course if a bridge gets washed out, which is that's happening. But it's still, I mean, obviously we don't want to be foolhardy, but we can try new things. We can get different minds from around the planet saying, well, what would happen? You know, and we could test and we can afford small mistakes without having enormous consequences, which is something you can't do in a catchment, say in the Rhine Basin or, you know, on the Danube in Austria. Yanxi. And I think there's so many different ways we've got to look at it as well. I think it's, it's, it's, it's as John said, we've got to act, but we've, we've also got to be able to measure what's happening and respond if we get things wrong. So it's, it's the old— well, it's not only the scientific method, it's also how evolution works, you know, try or not things, and then nature will then select what's viable. And in different contexts something else may be viable here and that wasn't viable over there. But, you know, we need to be testing, throwing out variants, testing for viability. And, um, I'm, I'm very excited about the prospects that, that John's been talking about. I, I, I obviously— Anthony, you've been out here a number of times, and as, as John said, you know, 150 people, that doesn't mean they're all going to be here in one straight away and all at one time. You know, what I'm saying is you've got, you've got 100 or more minds scrutinizing the data and everybody coming from their side. And yeah, so, so obviously there'll be logistic challenges, but John used the word, um, a virtual university. You know, you don't actually have a campus that houses everybody. You have a sort of a small functional unit where researchers can come and do their research, evaluate it, and put it out for other people to see and comment on. But yeah, I'm only learning because this conversation is only new, and then John certainly has given me a lot of hope that we can maybe source the sort of young people who would, given the chance, make it a career to do land doctoring. And because, I mean, you know, history shows us that people have made a career, you know, they've invested, you know, 5 years of hard study to become— to join the medical industry and then healing in that. And then the reward only comes much later. And the same with the military, you know, career in the military, if you survive, it's only after about 5 years and you get your stripes that you actually get rewarded. But it's something that society rewards and it's looked up to. And if we want young people to commit, you know, 5 years of really hard work with very little payoff. And then, well, there needs to be a reward at the end, and certainly it needs to be honored by society. And I think that's where the communication that John was talking about is so important.

I, I think that, um, really, we— it's the, the storytelling, the theoretical study, the measurements, they're all critical. But what we're really looking at is the difference between these analog kind of thoughts, like this is what we're talking about, or this is what we're arguing, you know, this is what we're researching, or, you know, we're reading the data, or we're, you know, whatever, we're measuring this and that, we're modeling it, or we're whatever. That's an analog. We're telling the story. That's an analog. We're talking about it in the podcast, or we're writing an article, or we're doing this. That's all analogous. The reality is the hydrological cycle is dysfunctional. The soil is disrupted, which is what disrupts— and the biodiversity is disrupted, and the height of the canopy is disrupted, and that's what causes the disruption to the hydrological cycle. And it's, you know, so when we abstract it to say things like it's carbon, like it's global warming and it's carbon, but we actually don't know. It's human impact on climate systems is what it is. And we don't know what that impact will be. It could just as well be another ice age. So it doesn't necessarily have to be— it's not linear. It's the nonlinear outcomes that you really need to be afraid of, kind of. So, I mean, the linear ones, well, you know, here it comes, get ready, you know. Do you need a sign? You know, like, here's a sign. No. Well, God, you know, and you could look at it from the point of view of spirituality, you know, like, we need a sign. Is humanity doing the wrong thing? And then, you know, like, here's a city destroyed, you know, and then here's an island destroyed, here's another island destroyed, here's the same island destroyed another time, you know. How many signs do you need? You know, like, it's like, all right, look, how many bridges? You ask for a sign, you got another sign, you got, you know, how many signs do you need? And what does it take? It doesn't take, in a sense, the storytelling has to stop in some, you know, so this is what happened to me. I'm a journalist and I'm thinking every time I got to know what was going on in the stories, I'd be reassigned to some other story. You know, so it was obvious that the people who were directing me to do my job didn't think we were supposed to solve the problem. We were just supposed to, you know, report on it and then get out of there. And, you know, that, that as a young curious person and a bit obsessive, I would say there are certain people who are obsessive. They start to follow something and they're not going to stop. That is a trait that that we might want to consider is sort of important in these things. So if someone shows that proclivity, you know, we might want to say, well, you know, why don't you take a look at this? You know, because that means as soon as that person goes down that path, they're going to go as far as they can on that path, and they're going to learn. And that's exactly what we need to do. So all these young people who are ready to do this, we need to say, come on, you know, here you— and so that's what I see for the ecosystem restoration communities that it's in Nepal. You've got every river coming out of the Himalayas that you can imagine, you know, all the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Meghna, the Yangtze, the Yellow River, you know, they're all coming flying out of there. And so that's the highest water tower in the world. Is it disrupted? Absolutely. They call it the third pole, the people who are studying it. It's like there's the North Pole, the South Pole, and the third pole is Everest. And so when you think about this, And you, you look at the situation, obviously in the news we're talking about the political situations, we're talking about the economics of it, we're talking about the social issues. You have anthropologists, you have all of this kind of study, but really what's going to determine all of those things, the politics, the economics, the, the anthropology the sociology, the psychology, everything is going to be determined by the ecological systems. Because if you don't have water, we're causing the disruptions to the glaciers.

We could actually say it's dominated by function. The issue is that we are part of that function. We somehow think we're just observing it, but we've got to understand we are part of that function and we can be beneficial, or we can be inert, or we can actually have a negative function. And that's, that's, that's the awakening. And then what you were saying earlier on, John D Liu, about all these reports and all the reporting and all this dialogue happening, if that's happening and people are not connected to the subject matter and they aren't realizing that they're actually talking about their own life and and the function that they're part of, it's just disconnected, you know, it's just not real. And for us just to make it real, people have to be reconnected and yeah, we have to reconnect.

Well, this is— I'll continue with you, Chris. So you've got some research happening, you've got a young person researching there, or at least one, hey, on a PhD. And of course the supervisor, Arian Wallach, who's been involved longer term. So that's building. How's that going? And of course, you know, everyone listening is waiting for an update on the donkeys and so forth, to which this is related. What's the update on, on that front for us?

Well, she's— I think it's about— all up will be about 5 years. She's, she's in, in her third year, and she's now— she's collected a whole lot of data. Now she's— I think she's going to put out her first paper to the public shortly. But, um, she's now the, the next the next few months are going to be just number crunching and analyzing. And obviously there's only so much you can do, and the PhD student has to choose their own area of specialty. So it'll be interesting. So this, um, Aryan Wallach is the person to talk to. But I say at the moment there's nothing public yet, but it's, it's at least there's one, one bit of research going. There's, there's some of this, and it's interesting. It's, it's very interesting for me to watch the whole process. You sort of— they ask a lot of questions and they get camera traps and there's a lot of photographs and whatever. And you sort of ask, well, I look at it from a practical point to say, well, hang on, what, what's all this about? But Arianne told me, well, you've got to start somewhere and, and get the baselines and whatever. So Probably be a while before we get all the sort of research that, that us pastors want. And but, you know, there's always more that we don't know than what we ever will know. So let's start finding out more about an area where things obviously aren't working well. And then with— as we start building a bit of a pool of knowledge, we can start asking better questions and then direct, more targeted research from, say, for example, pastoral point of view, fire management point of view. Once we have something to work with, once we start identifying trends and have that data, well, then it allows us to go about it in a better way. It's, I've just got, I printed out this morning the goals of the International Year of the Rangelands and Pastoralists.

That's this, let's make it clear for listeners that that's this year.

That's this year. And there's 4 goals that are very close to my heart. So these 4, it's increase the public awareness of the societal value derived from the rangelands at Bucerellis. Well, even us living out here, we've, we hardly know what these societal values are. You know, let's, let's find out about it. You know, I mean, It's like we're like the fish in water. What's water? You know, if you've got enough water as fish, who cares about water? But it's when you realize that there's fish in other parts of the planet that are running out of water, then you realize, hang on, maybe we should understand this area. So it's the same with the rangelands. You know, there's rangelands that are being threatened. And John sent me a film of in Mongolia and then about what's happening there. And then I realized, hang on, they have the same issues that the Maasai have. You know, in the edge of the Serengeti. So we, you know, we have some major issues in these areas that are still considered to be pristine. So, you know, it's high time. So that was a point one, increase the public awareness of the societal value derived from the rangelands and the pastoralists. But the other one is promote pastoralist knowledge, innovation, and coalition building to meet contemporary needs, you know. You know, just even at a local level, just what's my neighbor doing? Why is he doing it? And what's the history? Let alone what is someone in my latitude doing in Africa or somewhere else? You know, there's so much time with this technology we have today. We could be talking to, to peers on the other side of the planet and comparing notes without actually having to experiment everything on site and reinventing wheels. And then number 3 is the one that's probably closest to my heart, and that is advocate For evidence-based policy and legislation that supports sustainable rangeland stewardship and pastoral livelihoods, which is, you know, this whole donkey saga that we've been going on for the past 8 years. You know, if we can have evidence-based policy, wow, and legislation that supports sustainable rangelands and stewardship and pastoral livelihoods, it tells me that there's actually an opportunity for everybody to come to the table at eye level and we can compare notes, we can be working with each other. So like, I don't have a problem with the need for regulation and regulation by nature is top-down and will always remain top-down. But the pastoral, the growth and the healing and regeneration is bottom-up. It begins at a cellular level. And we need to be, we need to have legislation and regulation that is in line with how natural systems work., and if we have new information, well, that needs to be taken aboard. And if we, if we actually believe in evolution, well, then we actually are ourselves involved in evolving systems. So it only makes sense that our regulators keep tap of the changes. So, you know, regulation needs to, to stay relevant. It needs to stay aligned with the evolution or the changes that are happening in an environment. Indeed, talk about climate change. You know, these things are changing. Animals are going to respond, birds and vegetation are going to respond. Management applications are going to have to respond. And I read a real beauty the other day, and I don't know if I get it right. Someone said, if a soft system starts going wrong and your response is linear, the fallout is going to be exponential. And I think that's what we're seeing.

Nice one.

And then just number 4 is to foster ethical investment to address challenges confronting the rangelands and the pastoralists in the 21st century, which is once again another area where, thanks to someone we met last year, we've become aware that they are, you know, they're at the corporate level, people are talking about putting environmental health on the balance sheets. That it doesn't make sense for a huge corporation to have all their factories and not understand that they are at risk of having everything washed out. Maybe to maintain their bottom line, they actually have to take an interest in what's happening upstream in the catchments and maybe do part of that. And then certainly the insurance assessors might be interested as well. So yes, there's a whole lot of very interesting things happening. And As I said in a conversation with John the other day, you know, where I stand is as long as water drops out of the sky and the sun shines every day, it's too early to give up hope.

Yeah.

But John has dropped out there for a while and he's back with us. So Anthony, back to you.

Yeah, before we leave you, given we got started on that train while you dropped out for a bit, John, before we leave you, Chris, we've alluded to it enough without giving the update on the donkey situation. Can you just briefly encapsulate where that's at, and including of course the Section 214 that you're sort of pinning a bit of hope on.

All right, well, we've updated it from our side on our website and on Facebook. People can read up our latest commentary, but to put it bluntly, we were very disappointed with the SAT decision, and that is after 8 years of 8 years of holding a holding pattern, then the last 4 years were— we had the— or 5 years was the SAT process. And yes, the ruling was a disappointment. I actually believe it sets a dangerous precedent, but I don't want to go into that. On the positive side is that there is a window open that suggests that we could collaborate with, or the departments could collaborate with us, and we can actually analyze what's actually going on in these landscapes because that wasn't Apparently that wasn't— people weren't interested in what the donkeys were actually doing. It was just whether or not donkeys were a pest or not. But, but so my practical approach there is as long as we still have a viable population that's functional and out there in the landscape, and as long as there's still a window open to collaborate, let's be optimistic. Let's work on it. Creating collaboration. Let's, let's, let's try and make decisions as informed as possible. The D-Day is gonna— well, middle of this year is, I guess, when, when we'll know, you know, is the— is, is that slaughter going to be— take place? And are we going to lose, you know, 100 years of locally selected genetics and 30 years home team advantage where we've been experimenting with them? With a rangeland management tool which we believe is absolutely, is going to be critical if we want to maintain these landscapes where pastoralism, conventional pastoralism is not viable. But as I say, Kacharna is no longer in the debate. The SAT ruling ruled on the side of the regulators saying they're entitled to proceed with demanding that slaughter, and that the slaughter has been postponed. By a year, August at the latest. And we're saying is, well, we've done our part for society. Say we've delivered 30 years of stuff there that can be scientifically analyzed and whatever. Let the science prevail, I guess, and then let integrity and uncommon good sense prevail. And I certainly, what John was saying earlier on, you know, that we need these discussions to be grounded in reality is crucial because I, you know, I still remember $68,000— sorry, $68 million to replace the Dunedin Bridge, $200 million to rebuild Turkey Creek, half a billion dollars for the Fitzroy disaster. You know, I'm saying we're getting these escalating costs just all because directly relatable to deteriorating rangeland function. Perhaps not only that, perhaps there are other things as well. This is once again, we know we need to find out, but there's certainly a direct correlation between the dehydration of the landscapes and then the flooding.

Is there an opportunity to invite some of the people that hold the metaphorical trigger to Kachana, to see, to be there, to have Nathan's experience?

Well, we've done that right from the start, and you know that the metaphorical trigger is held down 2,500 kilometers away. Yeah, the people who actually held the trigger up here, we've been working with them, we work very well with them for 16 years because they understood it's just upline, no one's come to have a look at it. And this is the point point that Nathan Dyer said, you know, it's, it's only when he was physically there filming it and looking at it and listening that he actually realized, ah, right, now I see what you're saying. And so hopefully with the medium of film, maybe we can get people out there. But now the invitation is definitely out there, so come and have a look at the evidence. Hmm. We didn't choose this position. It just so happens that we've got prime seating. We're in perched in the top of 5 river catchments. And we've had rainy seasons from anywhere between 400mm, 440mm to 1600mm depending. Yeah. So every season is different. So you see all sorts of things and we're just saying, hey, come and have a look and see if what the landscape is telling us, if that's true and what's it telling you.

Yeah. And Relevant to say that there are many folk rallying now to get ahead, best case, of that would-be slaughter with anything they can bring, be it story or research or participation in other—

Well, actually, apart from the research, probably the, the most important thing would be to actually conduct full risk assessment. We need a collaborative risk assessment where everybody's at the table, where we look at all the risks, all the fore— advantages, so we can actually make informed decisions. Because so far the decision-making has either been made based on beliefs or the extrapolation of data which was pre-collected pre-2016, or just a one-off impression by someone who's stepped on the ground for the first time on Kachana. It's, we do need to, if we want to make informed decisions, I think a good place would be to start with a risk assessment. But that's certainly something that we, that Kachana is still, you know, people ask us what is needed, that's what we're suggesting is whoever can plead for a collaborative risk assessment with different departments because even within the departments people aren't agreeing. You know, and there's some people on our side or batting for us or at least listening to us and some people who are bringing very valid counterarguments. So yes, let's argue this out. I mean, that's what science is about, is you don't defend your hypothesis and your theory, you challenge it.

Yes, which is partly why people like Ariane are so enthused to continue this and to not have it circumvented circumvented by the slaughter. Yeah, we're just opening the door now. And, and that's consistent too with other people who've been working at it for 30 years that I know too, Chris, in different parts of the country, that a lot of things are breaking through now. And yeah, it's not the time to circumvent these efforts. John, could I come to you with— obviously there's a prospect of you indeed coming to Kachana, but also I'm, I'm so curious that the, the learning you have had over the journey with the ecological restoration communities where You've seen an extraordinary takeoff. I believe, to go back to the outset, I believe it was another case, no, that I hear quite often from other people too, that you never expected this would happen the way it has. But having started it, you've got this nearly 100 communities. What is it that does attract young— because a lot of them are young as I understand it— young people to give their lives into this in such a way?

Well, I think it's all ages, actually. And there are cases where large numbers of older people are terrified by the situation that's happening, and they feel some responsibility. I mean, I'm a baby boomer, you know, and I think the young people are saying, it's all your fault. I mean, sometimes that's kind of like, I don't think you can say that about me. But you know, you know, that's, you're going to have a hard time making that stick, I would say. But, but the one thing that I would say is it's a roller coaster in a way, you know, when you, when you start to understand that, oh, this changes everything. This is the understanding that makes you realize we are part of nature. We're assigned a role. We're called to do something about this. And then the majority of people have been socialized or conditioned to believe and go in another way. So that there's this abiotic response, like we have buildings, we have computers, we have airplanes, we have telephones. Well, think rationally about that. You know, in 100 years, where are the airplanes that we have now going to be? Where are the telephones that we have going to be? Where are the computers and the houses that we're going to have?

We have.

You know, are we building them? I mean, I go back to Europe and I find 700-year-old buildings which are made of straw, mud, stone, and wood, and they're beautiful. They're kind of like, oh, that's kind of cute. And then I come back, if I go to the United States, or I look in some of these other places, China too, we don't know how long. I mean, I remember buildings that were built here in the '60s or in the '80s, they're already being torn down for other buildings, you know. So how long do these things last? And when we, we think about evolution, then we have to think about, well, 3.8 billion years since the beginning of cell division, apparently, you know. I mean, I, I'm, I'm not there, and I don't— that's not my area of study, but, you know, kind of sounds like that's— yeah, as far as I know, you know, I can't I can't say that that's not true. I can see the later parts of evolution are true, and, you know, we learn more about stem cells or, you know, DNA and so on. But another thing about that is I was asked by the Congressional Conservative Climate Caucus— these are congressmen in the conservative, so basically Republicans mainly. And they asked me to go speak to them. And the speaker's bureau said, "Are you willing to go talk to them?" I said, "Of course." You know, they probably, I didn't even know that they, I thought they didn't believe in climate change. You know, they need to hear this. And so it was very strange when I spoke to them. Because I told them what I'd seen and what I thought it meant. And then I also said, you know, there's so much evidence when you go looking about evolution, because there's all this fossil evidence and, you know, sort of sedimentary evidence. You can go look at core sampling and you see all these different changes that have taken place, eras of of different kinds of life forms and the transformations. And I said, you know, I grew up and there was sort of a heavy doctrine, indoctrination, or processing of the creation myth. You know, God created the earth in, you know, 6 days, and on the 7th day he rested, you know. And I was kind of thinking like, All the stuff that I see, and then of course, humans arrive in paradise. It's beautiful. He's created paradise— God, or she, or he, or whatever it is. I haven't really, at 73, completely understood the whole pronoun idea, but anyway. The situation is that human beings arrive in paradise, and I told them, I said, You know, if you consider that potentially, um, you have 4.567 billion years, which is considered Earth time, and 3.8 billion years, which is considered evolutionary time. So if you consider 4.567 billion years in God time might be 7 days, you know, then actually there's no difference between the creation myth and evolution. So there's not an argument here. There's just this one phenomenon that human beings emerge in paradise. And then maybe you need to look at the second half of this cosmology because it says human beings sin, and then they're kicked out of the garden. And, you know, if you look at the abiotic nature of the cities and of the industrial stuff and all of the material things, and then you look at the ocean and the rivers and the air and the amazing biodiversity and the wildlife and so on, then it's quite clear. That yes, paradise was created. And then there was a mistake that took place. And that, that destroyed paradise. You know, I was like, oh, gosh, you know, like, well, that's not such a good thing. You know, let's not do that. You know, I mean, and the fact that we have free will and can choose. So basically, it's our choice, you know, like, are we going to say, "Oh, I prefer going shopping. I prefer all this abiotic stuff and breathing the toxic fumes and eating and drinking the toxic chemicals." And you know what? No, let's not do that. And then we have to come to another issue, which is what is wealth? What is this concept of material wealth? Is it really true? And what are the rights of life? Now, many places are talking about the rights of rivers and so on. And but we're so far gone that lots of people have no rights, you know. So it's not like it's not just like the rights. It should be birthright. It's the right to life. Every living being that exists on the planet is a representation of all life since the beginning of time. It can't be any other way. You just look at the DNA in your own body and you'll find like photosynthetic DNA. You've got a reptilian brainstem with a cortex, you know, covering it. Well, thank God we have a cortex, you know, otherwise we'd You know, we would be reptiles, you know. So, all right, we've evolved beyond this. And now we have this situation and we need to realize that we're part of this whole thing and that it's not all there for us. Like, this is— I own it, it's mine, you know. That is a kind of sick Nuss, that we can see all the way back in history. Homer is talking, you know, every great piece of literature or philosophy, it's all about hubris and power and, you know, that how corrupting all these things are. Maybe we need to think about that, you know, like if every one of our major You know, things which are beautiful and wise and enlightening are telling us that probably you might want to think about that. Now, then you can look at advertising or pornography or those girls, and it's like, ooh, you know, no, you know, like this is really where we need to go. And so when we think about that, we see, all right, we know too much to believe in this corrupt— these corrupt systems. And we need to ask, what is true value? Is the pornography and the advertising and the buying and selling and a few individuals hoarding all of this stuff? I mean, if you hoard the material things of the earth you're actually causing a kind of constipation, you know, because it's really like the circulation of all these things.

I was thinking heart attack, but run with constipation.

You were thinking what?

Heart attack, coronary block.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true. Yeah, all of this is, you know, it's just wrong, you know, it's just absolutely wrong. We're laughing because otherwise it's heartbreak.

Wow, this is so tragic.

You're talking about millions of people's lives. I mean, there are millions of people. I don't know how many, you can't even count now anymore, but tonight there will be people who are hungry amongst such incredible abundance. It's ridiculous. Yeah, it's ridiculous. And then to say like, no, they, I think I was telling you the other day, you know, like there must have been a moment in time, you know, the hunter-gatherers and the semi-nomadic herders, or, you know, and then somebody says, "I'm sorry, but do you have any money? Because if you don't have any money, you can't eat." And it's like, I'm baffled, you know, suddenly today, now I can't eat, you know, I ate yesterday, I ate, you know, I'm alive, you know, surely that counts for something, you know. But no, no, no, no, you have to have money, you know. If you don't have money, you don't count. Like, what? Who, who are you? Who's— who, who among us is saying that to somebody else? You know, like, you know, like, is that creepy or is that my imagination? That looks like that's the, you know, ooh, that's the devil, you know. Like, if you go back to that that cosmology, that's evil, that's wrong. And so we need to kind of like, well, that's not us. I mean, remember when Gandhi— it was kind of, kind of a funny pairing, but you know, Churchill and Gandhi, you know, so Churchill was like, yeah, with the empire, you know, yay! And Gandhi, and then And then it's like the end of World War II, the end, like, uh-oh, colonialism. You know, like, well, you really got to— how about that? You know, what do you think about that? Oh, not good. You know, like, not so good. And then so they have to bring Gandhi over to negotiate the end of India being part of the British Empire. Churchill says, "We've got to bring Gandhi over." Gandhi has taken a vow of poverty. He's wearing a dhoti and he's making wool on a thing and he's just in a sublime state. Churchill has got his cigar and his bottle of cognac or something. And he has to send a ship for Gandhi. And so, Churchill says, "It certainly takes a lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty." But he spends the money, brings the ship over, and Gandhi sits there in his dhoti. So, he doesn't like put on a barrister's clothes, but he could, you know. And he doesn't wear a wig. He doesn't, you know, do all that. He wears the dhoti and he says, you don't even believe in this yourself. You know that going into another country and putting a gun at their head and saying, well, now your land is my land is not really the right thing to do, you know. And, you know, there's nothing you can say to that. Wilberforce also did that about slavery. And these kinds of things, we're there now.

Yeah.

And the economy's false. It's corrupt. You couldn't have built individuals with more wealth than several African countries and think that that's okay. It theoretically could be legal because the law serves those who wrote the law. But it can't possibly be right. And so, so now we're looking at this. Now think about this. Everybody's talking about the value of carbon or the value of biodiversity and so on. Just realize that functional ecosystems are more valuable than anything that human beings have ever made. And everything that human beings will ever make. And because of that, it has to be the basis of our currency, of our money. This is value. This is true wealth. And when that, when that ecological function is recognized as the basis of wealth, We can't degrade, we can't pollute, and everybody's work can go toward restoration if it's degraded or conservation if, if it's still intact. And in doing this, this is the best possible outcome for human beings. This is our choice now. And the real value is to understand that we're all alive for a few decades and then we're going to pass away. And we're just, we're just passing through. We're borrowing this.

We're—

and we're stewards. We're called to make sure that we can— that the future generations can live in the abundance that is possible on the Earth. That is here for us. So this is where we are at this moment. We have to understand this. I would only add one more thing. The story of Kachana should be told in May at the Global Earth Repair Convergence. So this is where a lot of people who have been thinking about this for a long time, and when, when we talk about storytelling, I would also say that we need to realize that people are hearing this, that there's a call, and that call has been going on for some time. But perhaps many are called and few are chosen. And those who are chosen, they're choosing themselves. They're choosing to recognize this. And it's a very hard thing to make that choice. Because it means you're basically going in a different direction against everybody who's going in toward the abiotic systems. But you're going toward the biotic systems and recognizing that this is the determining factor. This is the indicator and the determinant for functionality. And that all production follows function. So it's the functional systems which are more valuable. The products are less. And when you understand that the products are less, then that's not the basis of economy. More products is not going to help us. More piles and piles of crap that has to be sold is not going to help us. And the growth rates that we can have by increasing functionality, that's where the real money is. When you finally do this, and the money has to be shared and has to circulate in order for humanity and the Earth to work. And once we understand that, then we realize, okay, if we do this, I mean, we're seeing it kind of in Scandinavia, in some places around the world where like, well, everybody needs to go to school. Okay, education is free. Everybody has to go to the doctor sometimes, but maybe health is better than sickness. So let's, let's, let's, let's make sure that everybody's healthy rather than like make money off the people who are sick. You know, like, what are you doing? Now, if you think about the ecosystem restoration communities, I think that these are people who are going, I, you know, I can't take it anymore. Really, I don't want to go to work in a cubicle to buy and sell plastic junk that comes across the ocean in a polluting ship. And, you know, it's just the billions of rubber duckies or whatever they are. And it's irrelevant. It's meaningless. And if we can put our lives to work to ensure that future generations will be able to breathe and have clean water and clean soil and clean air. That's really what our task is at this time. And it's hard to get your mind around these numbers like infinity. But I mean, it's hard to get your mind around the idea that there's over 8 billion people. But if you realize what this means, you go, well, if we don't do this, if we don't realize that everyone has the right to life, then there has to be some kind of event which takes out a pretty large number of people. And are we ready for that? Is that what we want? Do we choose that? And I mean, by not choosing ecological function, what are we choosing? You know, so you, you really have to understand that We don't really have— we have choice, we have free will. We can choose to do the right thing or the wrong thing, and basically that's it. Yeah, and within the wrong thing, we can do lots and lots of things wrong.

And vice versa, no?

Well, yeah, but in the right thing, we can do a lot. So there's diversity within that, but it's joyous.

Yes.

And it's for everyone else. If you work for the good of all, it's also the best case for you. So, there have been two Nobel Prizes, one to John Nash and one to Elinor Ostrom, which basically say the same thing. If you pursue individual interest to the point that it erodes the collective interest, it's not in your interest anymore. I guess there is one more thing I would say. I think I think that experimental status for Kachana in able to prove the information about natural regulation of hydrology in this particular biome is critically important. And there are certain people who are working on that around the world. And to have mass collaboration and mass participation with everyone who wants to do that. That's the ideal outcome. So then you, there's one group called the Weather Makers that I'm working closely with. And they're doing really good work, but they're very small, but they're, and they've gone through a number of disappointments because they, they have a really very good possibility, but then whenever it gets close to, they understood the continental divides and the hydrological cycles and the differences between the temperature differentials and this causes, and they know how to do these restorations. At scale, and they were measuring this and theoretically modeling the restoration of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. And they got very close to implementing a very big experiment. They had funding from the European Union and, or from European countries, and they had, they had the Egyptian government on board and they had the science community vetting this over a long time. And then of course, war breaks out in Gaza and it's just all disappears. So they're kind of— so we've been looking at how do we make experiments that are at scale but tell us and show us what we can do. So if we bring that kind of experimentation to Kachana, then they know how to lower the surface temperatures indoors in controlled areas and outdoors using passive evaporation systems. Well, if we experiment with that in Kachana, one, you're not going to be sweating during your podcasts. And two, you're gonna be able to produce different kinds of vegetation and even produce during this extremely hot periods, which is going to allow you to incubate the legacy genome from all over that region and then spread it and then you're going to get a canopy, which is going to cool, and you're going to get circulation in the lower hydrological cycle, and you're going to stop some of the meta impacts of having the moisture go into the upper atmosphere. You're going to keep it close to the soil and close to the Earth. And so I think this is what— I think this represents what you already know, is possible. But by having the scientific experimental status for the area and having support from engineers and scientists and people— so now imagine that we have camps. So we saw the first camp in, in Spain, and it was ridiculous. Because people started coming there without even being asked. We just started talking about the idea of creating camps. And then we talked about the idea, well, we could put a camp in Spain in the high altiplano. And we started talking about, you know, some of the people who were speaking on it. And at some point, vans filled with people from other countries started driving up. And saying, okay, we're here, we want to build the camp. You know, it's like, really? We didn't ask for anybody to come. We didn't even tell anybody where it's going to be. You know, how is this possible? And now it's like 8 years later, 9 years later, and thousands of people have gone through there. And these concepts are being discussed and they're being reinforced. And the peer-to-peer communications is much more powerful than having anybody else try to talk to the people because they know exactly what they need to know because that's how they got their recognition of these issues. And pretty soon you get that 100th monkey idea where you don't have to tell anybody because everybody knows this. And that's really where we need to get to. But we have the WeatherMakers, and there's also WetSys.

This is—

you should look at WetSys as a potential partner. And I'm sure that there are institutes within— in Australia that will want to be part of this. And I think that this is the status that makes it possible to study this and enough scientists and engineers saying, this is important, we have to learn this. And there's no way, just like in the Loess Plateau, where I started to look in China, if they hadn't done it, we wouldn't know that you could do it at scale. And if you destroy the ability to, have continuity after 35 years of research on this. That's ridiculous. Can't allow that to happen. So, this is the idea that you can go from someplace far away. The Chinese learned this, actually, that they were trying to centralize everything and tell all the farmers all around the country from Beijing what they should plant and what they should do. And they found they had no productivity. As soon as they dropped that thing, they doubled productivity, and then they doubled it again, and they just kept growing for decades now. So once you get this in mind and you make better and better decisions, that's good. And so that's our task, I think, to understand that and get to that situation. But it's not theoretical. It's a physical thing. We have to do it. With people and with policymakers and with engineers and with scientists. We have to do this all together. We all have a role to play. And it's a great opportunity in Kachana, absolutely.

Chris, do you want to bring us home with final thoughts?

I think what John has described is pretty well what we were aiming for. We never— we were just looking at doing it just at a small family level and just hopefully, you know, convince the neighbor and grow out that way. But given the time that we're in and how some of this degradation has escalated, and we don't have time for people to start inventing things on their own. I think it really is important that we— we can't afford to look for a common denominator that suits everybody. We've got to look for highest locally relevant common denominators fast. And I can't see a better way than doing that. And also, I think the powerful message that is easily missed is that what John says, it has to be translated to action. I will argue, and I don't just from gut feel and intuition, I will argue we have enough local knowledge to start. And if we start now, by the time we've gone 3 years down the track, we'll have the additional knowledge as well. Just because we can't see everything we want to do that needs to be done in a 10-year horizon to turn things around doesn't mean— doesn't give us an excuse not to start. And then, and, and yes, I think every, every, um, every season we don't do, we don't start, is, is going to take even more longer, longer to catch up on because of this exponential thing. It is— we, we have, um, Our degradation has now reached exponential speeds and intensities, and we really have to reef it around. I still believe we have a sporting chance, but the horse has bolted, but we have a sporting chance to rein him in. But it needs collaboration. No, it goes beyond a single pastoral operation. It goes beyond a single family operation or individual players just It doesn't matter how talented and lucky they are. We do need collaboration at the level that John was talking about and translate that to ecosystem function.

Yes, you're writing there, John, cross-fertilization, mass collaboration, mass participation, collective intention. There's something about the— well, what you've done writ large, no? Even if you stumbled on it, creating the spaces and the opportunities for people to to do that, to opt for it, to choose it?

Well, I think ultimately the society will decide. You know, this is what I've noticed because, like, I'm not very good at raising money and nobody really wants to support the work. But they— and really, I think it's because most, like, corporations or institutions they want to take care of themselves. They create like a bureaucracy or something else. I see it more like it's service, that actually it's not about an individual institution. It's not about one local place. I mean, we have to work hyper-locally, but we have to do that simultaneously on a planetary scale. I mean, go— going to the COPs, the convening of the parties of the climate change meetings or the biodiversity meetings or the desertification meetings, it's kind of important. But as soon as you go there, you should look at it and go, well, actually, how many of these meetings do we need? You know, and if we're, if we're going to have meetings in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates or Egypt or something, and we decide we're gonna have tents, and we're gonna put diesel generators outside of the tents using gigantic air conditioning, or driving gigantic air conditioning units that are blowing directly into a tent in the desert, why are we doing that? 'Cause I mean, it's kind of ridiculous to discuss emissions restrictions in a tent where you're blowing a diesel generator, you're using a diesel generator to blow air conditioning in a tent in the desert. I mean, if we want to do that, let's all wear bikinis and Speedos or something. And that'll be an exciting thing for all the— look at all the politicians and everybody in there. In their bathing costumes, you know, like, okay, but all right, you know, that's a thing. But it would actually, then we wouldn't use the energy and we'd come to the conclusion it's not a theoretical problem. It's a physical problem. We have to answer it. We have to, and we know enough to do a huge amount of things. We're not doing any of the things that we know. We're saying, well, let's have some more technology. What we need is a vacuum cleaner to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and put it in a hole in the ground. Well, that's ludicrous. How many, how many of these machines are you going to have? You're going to have to blanket the Earth with these machines to suck carbon. And then, then what? You're running— what fuel are you going to use to run the machines?

I mean, just the energy we've spent talking about these vacuum cleaners and putting into the air. Like, we've heard these, this has been a discussion for at least 10 years. If that— Oh, no, no, much longer, much longer. If that same energy had been used to just achieve results in the landscape and work with nature, we'd already be, we'd already discovered half a dozen new ways of doing things.

Well, I was working with the UN and the World Bank, and they're always saying nature-based solutions.

But they've been—

or that's recent. And then they just have another name and they create another name and then they have another story to tell. But the question is like, no, it's understanding and it's choice. So it's collective intelligence leading to collective intention leading to collective action. And the faster you get to collective action, especially in this experimental stage because at the experimental stage, we ought to go real fast. That's also the message from China. They do rapid prototyping. That sounds like a good idea. Send some donkeys out there and let's see what happens. Well, okay, we've seen what happens. The vegetation comes back, the microorganisms and the soil fertility and the movement of the cutting of the soil, opening it up with the hooves is needed. Otherwise it just degrades further and it erodes further and it becomes impossible. It becomes a hard surface where any water that comes to it will run away. The problem is that we don't, we haven't got the fact that the donkeys and the biology of the microbial communities and the fungal communities are the precursors to soil creation. That soil is not the subsoils, that's the lithosphere. The soil is the pedosphere where the sedimentary materials are mixed together with the decaying organic material, and it's the habitat for many, many, many essential organisms.

Yes.

So once we understand these things, you know, like I have to repeat this again and again and again. If I tell my family we have to have biomass, necromass, and accumulated organic material, which is necromass, and biodiversity, they go, Dad, John, stop talking about that. You always repeat that. I say, and they say, we know that. I said, if you knew that, you'd be outside right now. And you'd be massively increasing the amount of organic material as fast as you possibly can. And you'd be repeating this to everybody. I mean, at lunch, you're going to be talking about toilets and you're going to be talking about like, how do we, how do we stop? I mean, we have eutro— look all over Europe. You have eutrophication. You have red tides in all the estuaries and outflows into the ocean systems. What's that? You're losing the fertility. Why the— why do you think you're having massive blooms out there? You've neutrophied the, the water. All of that nutrients has to be in growing soils. Think how many soils we just— you know, just every time I see an algae bloom, I go, hey, what's going on? Stop it. And we need to do that with people's understanding and people's action. Now imagine if the true value of ecological function is appreciated by the society, then anybody who works in this field should be rewarded financially. They should be paid to do this because that's more valuable than plastic goo-gaws that get shipped across the world. The young couple. Now, I know I'm of an age, Chris is younger, you're younger. But, you know, can you imagine if every young couple that got married, then the whole community came around and said, "Hey, you know, congratulations, you're getting married. You know, we're going to come over. You know, here's a nice place. Look at those beautiful trees here. And, you know, this area, we're going to come over there." and we're going to build a house, and that's your house. And we all go there and we build this most beautiful house. And a few, you know, with like a swarm, you know, it's like it's a flash mob. And they go and every master craftsman puts their little touch to it, and it's just beautiful. And the two kids go in there And they're so happy. And you know, how many people are getting divorced because I can't pay the mortgage or, you know, I'm completely upset because I've got to go over here and do this and that. Why not just have that and then grow soils, you know, grow food, grow natural systems, because that's true value. Now we're getting somewhere. Now we're proving what it means to be civilized. I mean, if yet more naked women is civilization, then, well, Babylon and ancient Rome, and what's the difference? It doesn't matter. So 2,000 years ago is now? No, it's not now. We know enough. Read Homer, read Voltaire. We know this, you know, stop it. Read, read, uh, uh, Émile de Voltaire, you know, we, we know this, stop it.

Funny you should end there because when you mentioned Gandhi before, I remembered what the press asked him as well, which was, what do you think of Western civilization? And he said it's a good idea. Yeah. Well, John, I'm wondering, as you know I'm wondering, we always end talking about a piece of music with whoever my guest is, but I wonder if instead of talking about it, we might get some action. You might play something.

Yeah, let me, let me, I'll, I'll see if you can hear anything. I'm not really positive that this will work, but I can do it separately and from maybe outside too because it's a beautiful day out there.

Well, there you go.

And you can see the Moon Gate. Let me see where we're at. Can you hear that? Can or not? You can?

Yeah.

Well, all I do is noodle.

Love it.

Yeah, sweet.

Well, that's what I think everybody should be doing at the ecosystem restoration communities. They should be Playing music, I recommend rehearsal, rehearsal a lot, you know. So it's like, rehearse like you're performing and then perform like you're rehearsing, and it works very well. And then, and then the other part is we should be having meals. We should have central kitchens So that everybody comes back kind of tired from restoring the rivers and the grasslands and planting and whatever, dealing with the animals and so on. And then they come back hungry and tired and it's like beautiful, great dinner, diverse, local foods harvested daily, you know, perfect everything, and everybody's having fun. And then music afterwards, good movies afterwards, just have fun, have a, have a really good time. That's the anecdote to the despair that's like really taking over the world, it seems like. It's like, oh, I'm an old newsman, but I can't watch the news because it's so horrible. You know, it's like, I don't want to know that. Oh God.

There is a Kachana brew that I can recommend when you get there as well, John D Liu.

Yeah, the Mongols have mare's milk, which is fermented airag. It's the champagne of the steppe.

Right. That's great. Yeah, the mango ice cream is pretty good actually at Kachana too. Oh, you've got so much to look forward to.

Excellent. Excellent. Well, let's have a rotating cast of characters. So all the people who want to restore the earth should come down to Kachana and help out. There's 70— what is it? 77,000? What did you say?

77,500 hectares.

77,500 hectares. So, I mean, making the waters flow carefully to infiltrate, increasing—

I think I worked it out. Even in a poor season, we're still looking at 2.5 liters of water per day per square meter. We should be able to hang on to our water. It's what Nicole Masters says. I only— when I read a book, that's the writer. What the farmer should say when he's asked, how much rain do you get? You should be able to say all of it.

Yeah, that's it. Yes. And, you know, and it's inshallah, God willing, you know. Yes. You know, it is a miracle that we're here. We live on the only planet we know that has an oxygenated atmosphere.

You've got two options. You can say it's a statistical improbability. What are you going to do about it? Or you can say it's a miracle. Thank you. Let's go for it. Yeah.

All right, you guys, it's been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Anthony.

Thank you, guys. And, and I know there are many grand plans afoot for what this year might see. So perhaps we'll meet again soon amongst all that.

I hope so.

Terrific, thanks Chris, thanks John.

Thank you both.

That was filmmaker and pioneering force behind the ecological restoration communities, John D Liu, alongside pioneering regenerative force in the East Kimberley of Australia at Kachana Station, Chris Hengler. Incidentally, John is also bringing together a media collaborative currently, so there's another thing to reach out about. If you're inspired by any of this. With great thanks to you generous supporting listeners for making this episode possible, including Mike Moritz, Reuben Parker-Grier, and Rob Scott for backing this in for 4 years now, and for 3 years Robert Staley, Robert Pekin, Adam Scott, and Maryanne Anderson. And for increasing the amount of your subscription, thanks so much Vicki. I know for many it's rough right now. I've heard it from some of you who've had to cancel your subscription, so just if you can, please consider joining these fine folk to help keep the show on the road. There's a discount to the upcoming Grounded Festival available right now to subscribers too. Thank you one and all. The music you're hearing is Regeneration by Amelia Barton. My name's Anthony James. Thanks for listening.