Using Nature-Based Solutions to Stabilize the Climate with Tim Christophersen

Nature is our balance, and nature is our home. Nature is our family. We are part of nature, and yet we treat nature as if we don't have a relationship. And it's become a very one-sided relationship where we just take, take, take, nature just gives, gives, gives. And this relationship is now coming to a dead end. Like any broken relationship, there comes a time when you realize you can't go on like this. And the thing for humanity is that nature can go on very well without us. So this is really about our part in the relationship. How do we give back to nature? We have to move from a transactional relationship with nature where we just take all the food we eat, all the water we drink, everything that we take for granted, like a stable climate. And we start— we have to start to give back.

Tim, welcome to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books podcast. I'm excited to chat with you about your brand new book, Generation Restoration. And my first question is a long one, so bear with me. On Page 30 of the book, you say that examining our relationship with nature is the central focus of your book. So why does our reliance on nature not figure more prominently in the minds of politicians, investors, and other decision makers? Because I learned so clearly, so clearly in your book that nature underpins all of our activities. as individuals and societies at large. So that's my first question. How do you respond to that?

Great to see you again, Nick, and, uh, thanks. I believe that as in any good relationship, sometimes you need to suffer a loss to know what you really have in a loved one or somebody who supplies you with everything you need, like your parents. As a child, you might take them for granted. They're just there. But when you start to feel a strain in that relationship, you suddenly ask yourself, well, what is it really that nature in this case does for us? And I mean relationship actually quite literal in the book. Nature's not a warehouse where we just go and take what we need, even though that's how we treat nature right now. Nature, it's not a line on corporate balance sheets. only, even though nature is that as well. Nature is our balance and nature is our home. Nature is our family. We are part of nature. And yet we treat nature as if we don't have a relationship. And it's become a very one-sided relationship where we just take, take, take, nature just gives, gives, gives. And this relationship is now coming to a dead end. Like any broken relationship, there comes a time when you realize you can't go on like this. And the thing for humanity is that nature can go on very well without us. So this is really about our part in the relationship. How do we give back to nature? We have to move from a transactional relationship with nature where we just take all the food we eat, all the water we drink, everything that we take for granted, like a stable climate. And we start— we have to start to give back because our nature bank account is overdrawn. If you want to use more of a business language here, our natural capital account is empty. It's in the red, actually. So we have to rebuild that, stabilize the climate, bring back biodiversity on which all our agricultural supply chains depend. on which most of the ecosystem services that even people in cities enjoy depend, even though they might not know it. So we need a new relationship with nature. It's broken, but we can fix it. It's in our nature as humans to build solid relationships. We are a social animal, and that includes also having a relationship with the other species we share the planet with.

There are so many things to unpack there, Tim, and hopefully over the next 45 minutes or so, we can unpack at least a few of them. One thing that you mentioned was we need to stabilize the climate. This seems to be a political issue. Is global warming happening? Is it our fault? Are we naturally warming? But either way, A stable climate benefits everybody across the planet. And so everything that we can do to stabilize the climate seems like it would be a positive activity. So talk to us a little bit about that debate and why, regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, this is an important subject to pay attention to.

So let's park that question for a while. If climate change is real and if we are the cause, well, the answer is yes and yes, but That's part of that because it can distract people from what's really important. For the past 10,000 years, all of human history basically that is recorded, everything we've built, roads in recent times, railroads, airports, train tracks across permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere, big cities by the sea, everything is predicated on the assumption that the climate will remain stable, because that means sea levels remain stable. It means we have a climate in which you can have agriculture in central India or in Africa or across much of the tropics. We need that stability because everything in civilization is built on that premise that that is sort of stable. Now, recently it's not stable anymore, and you don't really have to be a climate scientist to know that. If you open your windows one morning in San Francisco and you look out and the whole sky is orange because it's the 3rd fire of a century within 10 years, of course the climate is changing. Every farmer knows that. I live in a rural farming community here in Denmark. Everybody knows the climate is changing. This is not up for debate anymore. So the question then becomes, what can we do to stabilize it? And definitely nature plays a big role in how we can stabilize the climate. We could put enough carbon back into the soil, for example, something I talk a lot about in the book, the importance of soils for healthy people and healthy societies. We could put enough carbon back into the soils to really take all the excess carbon out of the atmosphere that is currently causing global warming. global warming, causing climate change, and we could turn that into agricultural productivity. So there are a lot of win-wins that we're not aware of because we have gotten so used to the rhetoric that we have to continue with business as usual, the path we're on, our dependence on fossil fuels, for example, that there's just no alternative. And we've been told that over and over again that we've become so used to it. But in fact, there are win-wins out there, and there are a lot of them in nature. So nature can teach us about collaboration, about win-wins, about tipping points as well, both positive and negative ones. So I've just learned so much from nature, and I tried to put a lot of that into the book, my 25 years of Lessons learned from nature.

Yeah, I was in the car the other day with my dad, Tim, and I was talking to him about some of the tipping points that you highlighted in the book, points of no return, like species collapse. When you take a species like, I think it was Atlantic cod or something in the book, and you drive that population all the way down to less than 1%, it can't recover regardless of how much protection you put in place. And so those tipping points are really interesting, and I want to talk about some positive tipping points too. But first, can you give us some examples of win-win relationships in nature, putting more carbon back into the soil, planting 1 million square miles of tropical trees and rainforest, for example?

Yeah, let's take one of my favorite areas that I also talk about in the book. It's the Atlantic Forest of Brazil. So if you think about all the eastern seaboard of Brazil, it's a huge area altogether. It's about same size as 15% of contiguous US. So that whole area, which includes all the land between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo today, is degraded land. It's degraded pasture land. You see a cow once in a while, maybe one cow per every couple of acres. But that land once was one of the most fertile and biodiverse tropical forests. The Atlantic Forest was the 3rd largest tropical forest in the world after the Amazon and the Congo Basin. But of course, 500 years ago, people started to chop up the forest, till the soil, lose a lot of the topsoil. So the degradation, the erosion in this case, has been going on for so long that people have just forgotten what this looked like or what this could look like again. But if you restore some of that area with techniques like agroforestry, which combines the power of trees and agriculture and techniques like mulching, and you produce cocoa and coffee and dozens of other commodities that can come from agroforestry, it is a win-win-win for the climate, for the people. There's tens of thousands of jobs that could be generated for stable agricultural supply chains for our food security. Because right now, you take cocoa, for example, and I don't know if you like chocolate, but I do. Prices for cocoa have gone up about 400% since 2020. So at some point, raw cocoa cost $10,000 per ton. So we need to also stabilize those kinds of supply chains at a massive global scale. And the win-win here is we can restore the soil, the biodiversity, some of the species that have been lost, some of the rare trees in these huge areas like the Atlantic Forest of Brazil. And at the same time, we can secure our livelihoods, we can create jobs, we can make sure we have coffee and chocolate, which, you know, is very important to me, for example, and I'm sure many others. So there are a lot of win-win-wins here, but we have to have the imagination to know what we have lost, and how to get it back. And sometimes we suffer from this shifting baseline syndrome that I also talk about in the book. Every new generation takes the degraded state of the environment as the new normal, and they don't know. They don't know how rich we were very recently in terms of our natural heritage. But we can get all of that back, and maybe AI can help us generating some of that imagination and some of that vision for restored landscapes at huge scale, at planetary scale, really.

Yeah, the shifting line was a really interesting thing for me to read about as well. We've talked about that subject through a different lens on this podcast a couple of times. Malcolm Gladwell years ago talked about the broken window theory, where on a neighborhood street, If you allow a couple of broken windows, all of a sudden now you allow some petty burglary to take place, and all of a sudden spray paint starts to take over the side of buildings, and all of a sudden there's a drug dealer on the corner. And it didn't happen all at once, it happens gradually, but that shifting baseline just seems to take place like boiling a frog. And you admitted in the book that you had never actually boiled a frog, but we all know that metaphor. And you're right, it does seem like that's happening on the planet. So, Tim, for the average person that's listening, like me, who grew up in a suburb of a major city, like me, I grew up outside of Boston, Massachusetts, in a middle-class family. I never had to think about agricultural supply chains, the price of cocoa or coffee. Why should the average person be paying attention? What are some other examples like that where We're going to see the costs of products that we consume on a regular basis skyrocket unless we start to change our behavior.

We should start to think about these things because it is, first of all, very interesting to learn where your food comes from. If you start to dig into that, it'll probably lead you to all kinds of discoveries because food is how our relationship with nature can start. Even if you live in a city, you take breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and all of that comes from nature. So learn about, in this step towards ecological literacy, where does my food come from? Who's actually farming it? Are they using regenerative methods that make the land better, which is possible, or are they extracting nutrients and depleting the soil, which is also happening in many cases? And then the next question would be, where does my water come from? If you live in New York City, for example, there's a decision that the city had to take a couple of decades ago whether to— because they were running out of clean water— whether to build huge water sanitation facilities. And instead, they reforested the Catskills, this forest, mountain forest watershed that now captures enough water and then cleans it, filters it, and releases it gradually so it can feed New York City with drinking water. And knowing these things matters because if that forest goes up in flames or is degraded or eaten by pests and insects because it becomes destabilized by climate change, you're going to lose a water supply for a city of 10 million people. that matters to people who live there, also matters to the government, matters to the private sector and all these investments that we've made around these cities. São Paulo, 20 million people, recently had a very similar fate where they were running out of water. You run out of drinking water for 20 million people, suddenly politicians and investors, everybody who's involved, they really pay attention. It's no longer a nice to have, to have trees along the all the rivers around the agricultural areas in São Paulo. It's a matter of survival then suddenly. And this is, I think, where we're at now with nature. But I don't want to say that people should be alarmed or that they should be only concerned. I think they should rejoice that you can actually have a beautiful relationship with nature by learning about nature. Let's just listen and pay attention and learn about nature. I think that's the first step I call for in my book. I'm not asking people to all become vegetarians or only take the bicycle to work. I believe what is mostly needed in this new relationship with nature is that we listen to nature.

Yeah, you're highlighting something important related to human motivation and action, which is that of course some action can be driven from fear, movement away from fear. But the idea of getting excited about different ways for you to contribute as an individual, that motivates action as well. Rejoicing is a word that you don't really hear very often when you think about climate action. And so, you just highlighted something else that I wanted to highlight one more time for the audience, which is just asking the question where your food comes from.

Yeah.

I read a book a little while back, Tim, called Good Energy by Kali and Casey Means, talking about our bodies and the food that we consume and how it impacts our energy. And something that the author does once a week after she visits her local farmer's market is she lays out all the food that she's going to consume on the table. And she says, this food is going to make up my body over the next week. And how I feel? And am I okay with that? And her point was moving away from processed foods and into healthy, organic, single-ingredient foods. But I think that the question that you're asking, like, where does the meat that I'm eating come from? That's a scary question for a lot of people. And so tell us your opinion on meat, because it's not what I think most climate activists are talking about. You have a little bit of a different take.

Yeah, first of all, I totally agree with you that we are what we eat, and food is obviously very important to many of us, not only as sort of calories we take in, but it's deeply ingrained within human culture, and it is often also the food for building good relationships with other humans. And so Michael Pollan's books have really influenced me, you know, The Omnivore's Dilemma and Second Nature, and So we are, our family are what I would call flexitarians. We do eat meat. We have sheep on our farm here in Denmark, and we eat our own meat, also ducks and chicken. And so we know exactly where it comes from. We know exactly how it was raised, how it was slaughtered. We know exactly what happened to it. And that is, of course, you can't say that for all kinds of meat, but I think a good rule of thumb is, as you say, as little process as possible, as few transport miles as possible, and as little factory farming as possible. Because if you have smaller operations, they tend to take more care of animal welfare. So those are just general rules of thumb. As I say, I don't want to prescribe to people what they should do. other than that we all need to pay more attention to nature because nature is communicating on pretty much all frequencies right now. And we have to stop and listen because there's some emergency frequency being broadcast. And turning that into a positive relation is really what excites me about the book and also the title. Generation Restoration is also the hashtag of the United Nations decade on ecosystem restoration. And what makes me hopeful about that forward-looking, positive, action-oriented movement of restoration is exactly this. Yes, we can do it. We can be conditionally optimistic in really making a change.

Yes, I think we can. And it begins by raising your level of awareness, which is what a book like this Does. Of course, you're trying to inspire positive actions, but what you're really doing here is raising awareness. Something that you said to me before we pressed record today, Tim, and when we met the first time we talked, was that you didn't have a specific goal around a number of books sold, but you have hopes for this book that it's important that it's talked about 50 years from now. Where does that feeling come from?

That feeling comes from the timelines you observe in nature. Humans, we live fairly long for a mammal, but we live very short lives compared to nature's timelines and obviously the geological timelines in which some of what I talk about in the book unfolds. But even within a human generation, I think a decade on ecosystem restoration will not be enough. So one thing I call for in the book is a century of ecology, And why it's so important to me to have ecological literacy, that this is a very long-term plan. If you look at the root of the word ecology, it comes from ancient Greek oikos. It's our common home or our common household. And ecology is the knowledge of our common home. The economy, which we're much more used to talking about, is also coming from the word oikos. It's the management of our common home. So what we're doing right now is we're managing this place without really knowing how it works. And that is starting to show everywhere because we are running our natural resources into the ground. It's really destabilizing to the degree that we need ecological literacy. And I think it will take the better part of this century to rebuild that literacy. And fortunately, there are historical examples where humanity has managed this before to turn ecological collapse around into restoration. So— We wouldn't be the first civilization that manages it, but we are the one civilization with the most resources, the best technology, the best connectivity across the planet. So if the ancient Greeks could do it in turning the fate of Athens around, we could definitely do it today. This is not even very— it's not even very difficult nor very expensive. It just requires us to pick up the courage, the imagination, the inspiration, and that will create the political will for us to do it. So it's imminently feasible and it's already happening.

It is already happening, which we'll talk about in a few minutes. For those that are interested already in grabbing a copy of your book, where should people go? How do they get a copy?

So on my website, timchristopherson.com, I list all the various platforms. It's on Indigo and Barnes& Noble for the UK and Amazon, obviously, and Um, Porchlight, and I forgot all these names of the platforms. But of course, if you like your local bookstore like I do, you can also go into your bookstore and order it there.

Yes, absolutely. Support small business. And when you think about, Tim, when you think about the target customer for this book, when you were writing it, who did you have in mind? Who is the ideal avatar who should be getting a copy of this book?

You know, when I discussed this with my publisher, they have this stereotypical nonfiction trade reader in mind. And for some reason they call that person the well-read dentist. Now, I'm not saying that only dentists should buy my book, but what I think this means is I want to influence people who are not necessarily climate experts, not nature experts, who are not out there in nature all day, every day anyway, but who are interested and who like to learn new things and who like to explore new topics. So it is definitely written for an audience that is not an expert audience. I explain, for example, you mentioned the global changing climate earlier. I compare that to the human body, which—

Hmm.

What would the differences be in the temperature increase we see now if the human body became 10% warmer, which is what we have more or less, is the warming we have now on planet Earth. And then what would be the consequence if our bodies became 20% warmer? And those are pretty severe consequences, which are as severe for planet Earth as a living system. The Earth's body temperature is just a bit lower than ours, but it is these are things that are easy to understand for everybody. It's not rocket science.

Yeah, that metaphor stuck out to me when I was reading the book, and I thought about my son Levi, who has a fever right now, just a couple of degrees up from baseline, and how difficult that is for him to manage. And you think about the Earth experiencing the same thing, and you start to have a little bit more empathy, I think, for nature when you think about it that way.

Yeah, nature has been around for 3.5 billion years and is a very resilient system with many different buffers built into it. So I'm not worried about nature's overall demise, but what I'm worried about is the stability of our civilization because we are, in a sense, the part of nature that is most susceptible to these small fluctuations in Earth's temperature. So we really have to fix this for our own sake. And I think if doing something about it can be fun, can be action-oriented, can become your job if you're an ecopreneur and you are one of these— I've met, I think, more than 10,000 people who are now making it a startup business to fix nature, to restore nature, to stabilize the climate. So that gives me a lot of hope that there are all these We call ecopreneurs out there who are making it their life's mission, but also, you know, making it their life's purpose and making it a profitable business.

Yeah, we've had a couple of authors on this podcast, Tim, talking about artificial intelligence and the impact that it's going to have on our planet and how so many jobs are currently being replaced by AI. And there are people out there finding themselves finding themselves with a clean slate. Hey, you know what? I didn't really enjoy that profession anyway that I've been participating in for 20 years, and I have a clean slate. What should I participate in now? What skill sets should I develop? What should I be paying attention to? What will even be relevant 20 years from now when so many of today's industries are automated by artificial intelligence? And I'll tell you what, If there is some type of basic universal income that gets implemented and people find themselves working less hours, there will be a big return to nature. In fact, so many people are stepping away from cell phones. Like for me, I do 24 hours once a week where my phone goes inside of this kitchen-safe timer and I can't touch it.

Good for you.

And I'm spending more time in nature. And so, why not use your time to improve our relationship with nature. And so ecopreneurship is a great opportunity. Talk to us a little bit more about some of the ways that people are dedicating their lives and their businesses to improving our relationship with nature.

You know, in my day job, I work for Salesforce, for a big technology company. So AI is a large part of my job every day. And you're right that if we can sort out some of the large questions around how we want to structure our society, this holds immense opportunity because there are— AI can potentially free us from many of the things that we don't want to do anyway. It could potentially teach us many of the things that we thought we could never learn, like, um, becoming ecologists with a PhD in ecology in your pocket and accessible anytime you're out in nature and you want to know what's going on. So, um, that's already happening. I believe that We can, of course, all find meaningful relationships in this joint effort that I call Generation Restoration. If you go to my favorite online platform for restoration projects, it's called restore.eco, restore without an E, dot eco. There are about 250,000 projects already up there. small, large, some of them huge, but most of them very small projects in neighborhoods where communities are taking restoration of city parks, of wetlands, of forests, of beach cleanups into their own hands. So it's a great resource, and there are some others. There's Patagonia Action Works. I list some of them in the book of where you can become active and become involved. But what I think in the age of AI becomes more and more important is relationships. It is our human relationships and I think AI is an important reminder for us that what matters in our lives are the relationships we build. And it's possible to have a meaningful relationship with nature, with the land that you live on, with the birds and animals and plants that surround you, as meaningful as it is with other humans. And so that really enriches our potential range of relationships so much that I think it's a huge gain if we can rediscover that. Of course, indigenous peoples all over the world know this very well and have lived like that for millennia, but I think that wisdom is still somewhere in all of us that we can rediscover that relationship with nature.

I think so too. I just brought up restore.eco. on my web browser, and it's pretty interesting. I mean, in the state of Massachusetts, there are hundreds of projects listed, uh, where, you know, kind of around where I live. So I'll check out some of these. Now, can you donate to them, or is it just bringing awareness to them? What's the purpose of the platform?

So Restore is like the LinkedIn of restoration. Some projects will have a profile where you can go and restore. We also work with another platform, Plant for the Planet, which is more a crowdfunding platform for local restoration projects. Then we work with, we that's in Salesforce, this is the work I do when I don't write books. We work with big conservation NGOs like Rare. They're building an agentic AI tool right now in Colombia to engage thousands of smallholder farmers in a vision for restoring a large landscape. And what you need in those cases is you need to really talk to all these farmers all the time with consistent information. You need to be ready right away when they have a question in their preferred medium on WhatsApp, in whatever language they want to ask it in. And all of that can be made easier by agentic AI. So also excited about that opportunity to build landscape relationship management tools to really scale up these restoration projects because often they involve hundreds or thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of people.

I love how positive your outlook is. I remember reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling a number of years ago and just remembering, wow, uh, there is so much more potential for the world to be positive than I think the general news landscape is willing to share. I mean, obviously human beings, we have a predisposition to pay attention to things that are extreme, and so there's a lot of negative and divisive content that gets shared because we pay attention to it. Content like this is just as extreme in the positive direction and deserves to be shared. So again, thank you for writing the book. I wanted to bring it— the conversation back to the book real quick. Um, as we talked about, Jane Goodall just passed away on October 1st, and she had written the foreword for your book. Talk to us about that experience and reading what she decided to say about your work.

Yes, Jane did write the foreword for the book, for which I'm immensely grateful. And even though it was a bit of a cliffhanger because her team kept asking for more time and the publisher was pushing me on the deadlines, but she did send a foreword that is really, I think, powerful and moving. And she calls for that next step in human evolution that we need to have a relationship with nature that is meaningful because nature has nurtured us for millennia and now she needs our help. So let's come to nature's help. And that call from Jane, I think, is probably going to be timeless, I hope, because it's really about our role as humans on this planet. Why are we here? What are we doing here? Of course, that's a bigger question than I answer in my book, but at least part of the answer can be found in nature because nature is so magnificent and beautiful and miraculous that we've forgotten that awe and wonder, because everything— our world has become so secular and also so science-driven that we expect an explanation for everything. And even though most people don't really understand, even though, you know, even how an iPhone works, I certainly don't. But we take it for granted because, you know, somebody has explained how it works. Nature, there's still many things that we don't know, and we don't actually know how they work. We just know they do work. So there's a different sense of— there's a different perception we need, more one of curiosity, but also of awe and of humility. We need to be a bit more humble in the face of 3.5 billion years of research and development that led to something like a tree. If you were to build a machine like that, nobody would be able to do it. A tree is so wonderful also to stabilize the climate. It takes all the harmful gases out of the air, only releases clean oxygen, stores, cleans, filters drinking water, makes wonderful construction material, looks beautiful, is self-maintaining, self-replicating. And they just found a tree in the mountains of Utah that I talk about in the book, Pando. It even has a name, which consists of 47,000 aspen clones. So it's basically one giant tree that weighs 6,000 metric tons. And Pando is apparently up to 80,000 years old. So between 16,000 and 80,000 years, which means that tree has survived ice ages, meteorite hits, forest fires, and it's still there. No human machine or invention can do anything even remotely like that. So let's take a step back sometimes and say, wow, we know some stuff, but we know next to nothing when it comes to nature's way of working. But we can learn.

But we can learn. And it's humbling, like you highlighted. It's humbling to realize that Nature is so infinitely complex, and, uh, so are our bodies. I mean, they're, they're only scratching the surface in terms of what we realize about the human body, and that is a massive industry with a lot of research being done. I wanted to highlight real quick something that Dr. Jane Goodall wrote in the foreword that I think was a good, a good sort of summary of her thoughts. She said that Nature, when given the chance, has an incredible capacity for regeneration. Forests can be restored, rivers can run clean again, and animals, even those on the brink of extinction, can be given another chance to return to their restored habitats. And I think that when people think about Jane, Tim, oftentimes we think about animals. And so is there a— I mean, you have a lot of animal stories in the book. Is there a story that— sticks out that you'd like to share with the audience to give a preview for either what we've done or what we could do to sort of restore an animal species?

Yeah, it's one of the great success stories of conservation of the 20th century. And there are many, but, and it continues to be an even more successful story. And that's the reintroduction of beavers. Beavers, both in North America and across Europe, were almost hunted to extinction. 100 or more years ago. And in the last few decades, they've made such a phenomenal comeback because of conservation restoration efforts. And that is so important because beavers, like humans, are amazing ecosystem engineers. So their role in the ecosystem changes the entire landscape. It changes the entire composition of the water table, the species, the different interactions between species. It can restore entire degraded landscapes. It can bring back a lot of other species. And they are on the advance across Europe and North America, which is really promising. Not everybody loves beavers because they also tend to mess up your field planning if you're a farmer like we are here on our farm. But they bring back so much nature and the fact that we could bring them back Makes me really hopeful that we can also be powerful, benign ecosystem engineers because we are the gardeners of this planet, the guardians of the rest of creation. We're not just a species like any other. We have a special role, but that role is not to take and destroy and eat everything else. It's to be a benign steward of creation. That is our role.

It is our role, yeah, to be a steward. The beaver story stuck out for me as well. I don't have the statistic highlighted in front of me, but wasn't it something like a 16,000% increase over the last 100 years?

That's right. Exactly, exactly right. Yeah, it's a phenomenal increase. And, um, yeah, and they're happily, uh, moving also up now through the UK, which— where they've been absent for over 100 years, and And many other areas. So they're coming back in force. Hmm.

Outside, I mean, we've highlighted a few things that I think the average audience member can take action on today, such as asking, where does my food come from? And being a little bit more conscious about it. What else? What are some other basic action steps that somebody listening today can go do to raise their awareness level?

2 things I would highlight. One is, and this might sound counterintuitive because there are a lot of books out there that sort of have long lists of to-do lists of guidance and things you should do. My book doesn't have that. It's basically one ask: spend more time in nature, spend more time with nature, and listen. Listen to nature and start to give back because that will build a relationship That will then change a lot of other behaviors and things you might learn over time. But that is individual to every single person on the planet. I don't want to prescribe to anybody what they should eat, but I think once there's a stronger relationship with nature, automatically and naturally, our diets will evolve and change to be more plant-rich and more local and less processed. So I think there's a lot of things that will happen from that new relationship with nature. That's my main ask. And then the second thing is just find other people around you who like to learn the same. Don't do this alone. Do it with your family, your community, your school, your neighborhood, your office colleagues. And I think at the end of the day, you will find out that this is really, really popular already. You go to Instagram right now, I think there's 140,000 #GenerationRestoration. These are all projects that are happening under the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration that I was part of starting when I worked for the UN. And it's really encouraging when you see, oh, wow, there's lots of other people who are doing this. Can I join with them? It's really a powerful movement that is on the way.

Yeah. One of the routines that my wife and I love every single week is there's a There's a bird sanctuary about a mile from where I live, and it's protected land, and there are some great hiking trails. And we bring our dog and he's off leash and he's having a great time, and we just love to be present. And there was a period of time, and I really need to get back to it, where every day for months, every single day without fail, I was out there for an hour at least with the dog. Before anybody else was awake. And I just felt in tune, you know, I felt grounded, I think, literally grounded. And I need to, you know, now we're only going about once a week, and I need to get back into doing it more regularly. I think there's probably a direct correlation between how I feel and how much time I spend in the woods.

Oh, there are many studies about that. Spending at least 120 minutes in nature per week It is great for blood pressure, for cholesterol levels, for your overall well-being, for vitamin D levels. So every doctor nowadays will tell you you should— they sometimes even prescribe forest bathing or walks in nature for many different ailments. So it's definitely good for your health, but it's also good for your soul and for your inner well-being. So I'm glad that you have that experience. are in tune with nature. It's really something very precious.

Yeah, I think that the US needs to catch up to the rest of the world, uh, as far as prescribing forest bathing and things like that. The traditional US medical system, I think, uh, is a little bit separate from nature still. But—

It is changing though. There's, I think there's about 35 of the US states where this is already starting to be prescribed. And it's of course much cheaper than, you know, anything else that doctors usually prescribe, which Can cost a lot.

Yeah, absolutely. Get out first thing in the morning. You know, we interview, uh, a whole host of health-related experts as well, Tim, and just the advice of waking up early in the morning, getting outside as the sun is coming up before you consume any caffeine, take your shoes and your socks off and let your feet touch the actual earth and just breathe. I think that If every— and none of those things cost any money. Sunlight exposure, uh, grounding yourself, you know, it's very inexpensive and it makes you feel amazing. Well, Tim, this has been a great conversation. As we get ready to wrap up today, one more call to action. Who is this book designed for and what are some of the benefits of reading it?

This book is for everybody who loves nature and wants an even deeper relationship with nature, and for everybody who does not know much about nature and wants to get to know nature. And what this will trigger, I hope, is that we also understand how much we have in common when it comes across the political spectrum, when it comes to nature, because everybody likes clean air, everybody wants a green future, everybody loves forests, everybody likes clean water. I think this is something we can all agree on. This is a very nonpartisan book and we need everybody's help. This is not a book for left or right or people of one political leaning or another. I think we can all come together over nature and restoring nature.

I think so too. And one more time, where can people go if they'd like to get a copy of Generation Restoration?

Amazon, of course, and Indigo and Barnes& Noble, Porchlight, and your local bookstore. That's my favorite place to get it, I think. You can order it in your local bookstore. It's published by Wiley. It's a fairly big publishing company and Generation Restoration, no other book of that title yet, so should be easy to find.

I'm excited to see how this book rolls out over the next 50 years of my life. And, uh, thank you, Tim, for being a positive light in this world.

Thank you, Nick, for all the work you do. Thank you.