Mars, Systems Thinking, Sustainability, Reflection

Dianne McGrath is an outlier, a visionary, a leader who biohacked her body to prepare for a fully sustainable one-way mission to Mars. She has a PhD in Environmental Engineering, Graduate Diplomas in Sustainable Practice, Environmental Management, and more. Listen in to hear a perspective like no other — from preparing to go to Mars, how to manage food, living sustainably, and how we need to look inward to fix what's outward. Unique conversation for sure!
  

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Transcript

Triple Bottom Line | Episode 30 | Dianne McGrath |

[Upbeat theme music plays]
Female Voice Over
[00:01] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. Here is your host, Taylor Martin.

Taylor Martin
[00:17] Hello, everyone. We have Dianne McGrath on today’s show. She is what I consider an outlier. She’s also a visionary, a leader, and a team player at the same time. What she also is is she is someone who prepared for a fully sustainable one-way mission to Mars. When I read that in her bio, I thought, okay, who’s Dianne? What’s this all about? This has got my interest highly. Okay, what’s going on? I also found out that she has a PhD in environmental engineering. She has graduate diplomas in sustainable practice, environmental management, and the list goes on and on.
Dianne, let’s dive right in because I want to know what was it like to prepare for the Mars One mission. I mean, you were 1 of 10 candidates, right?

Dianne McGrath
[01:00] Now, we were down to 100.

Taylor Martin
[01:01] Oh, down to 100?

Dianne McGrath
[01:02] Yeah. I was 1 of 100 candidates worldwide who were shortlisted in the Mars One mission, their program, which sadly closed its doors at the end of the year last year after more than seven years of progress, which is such a shame, but it was an incredible experience to be a part of. I was selected out of what was originally over 200,000 people that submitted applications. It’s phenomenal to be chosen that far and my interest in it. People often ask me, why did I apply to go one way to Mars? Not exactly the most common thing people do. I’m sure you can experience.

I signed up for a number of reasons. One of them was from my mother’s perspective. She always says, why not? It’s a heck of it, why not? I don’t know. I think the words why and why not – I come from a research background. As a researcher, you dive into why. You really focus in on a particular query or area of interest, but why not opens you up and allows for much more breadth of opportunity. My mom was always about what’s possible. I thought, wow, this is a phenomenal opportunity. What if we had to live on Mars, like live there permanently?
We couldn’t rely on resupply from Earth. It’s a seven-month journey one way roughly, from Earth to Mars. There’s no easy to access water or energy. You can’t grow food on Mars. The soil was not even called soil. It’s regolith. There’s no organic matter in it. I thought, wow, what a fantastic project? If we can find a way to live sustainably on Mars in this closed loop system, because you’d have to grow everything yourself, you’d have to have all your own renewable energy, recycling water, recycling everything, then perhaps that would drive us to make the changes here on Earth first.

Taylor Martin
[03:00] Amen. I love it. That’s not just circular. It’s like a circular idea. That’s great. It goes from there and comes back.

Dianne McGrath
[03:08] It’s orbital.

Taylor Martin
[03:10] It’s orbital. I love it. The why not has turned into what if.

Dianne McGrath
[03:14] Exactly.

Taylor Martin
[03:15] Yeah. I like your mom.

Dianne McGrath
[03:16] Yeah. She’s a bit of a legend. When she turned 70, she went and bought a bicycle because she decided at the age of 70, it was time to learn to ride a bike.

Taylor Martin
[03:27] Oh my God.

Dianne McGrath
[03:29] It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I remember standing at the doorway at home and watching her get on the bike and wobble down the driveway like a little child getting on a bike for the first time. I was terrified that she’s going to fall off, but she had the look at her face like the cat who’s got the cream. She was so excited and having so much fun. Why not? Pretty daring.

Taylor Martin
[03:53] That is awesome. Having gone through the whole Mars process and being whittled down to 1 of 100 people for the project, what were some takeaways for you that were eye-opening for? Because I mean, you have all this knowledge in environmental management and sustainability. What were some things that were big aha moments for you?

Dianne McGrath
[04:16] People, people, people. Often, it comes down to people, doesn’t it, and systems. The two together, these combines can have magnificent change or have a huge impact in a negative way as well. I saw the 100 of us as we evolved as a group after the different stage of selection. I saw adjoining of people that were extremely diverse that came into the whole process from totally different perspectives, personal objectives, but still had an overall belief and understanding towards the overall goals and vision of the organization. We found ways of working together that I think circumvented any major clash. We found ways of resolving conflicts that otherwise would mean very inflammatory such as in political senses.
You can imagine in the US sometimes, there are people who come from totally different political persuasions and they can be very fiery discussions that are held. We found ways of just overcoming that because of a greater purpose. That’s one thing that really reinforced for me. If we all as businesses, as a community have a greater sense of what we want to achieve, we can overcome the little niggly bits to try and make it happen. This is where climate change comes in of course. For me, we can do this. I’ve seen it happen. I see great success everywhere around the world of people that just get over the bridge. Build the bridge and get over it, and make something happen.

The other area that I learned, it was an oh my gosh moment, was in our food systems. I did an experiment. I went and spent two weeks in the Utah desert at the Mars Desert Research Station. I was there as part of a research group. At the MDRS or Mars Desert Research Station, that’s managed by the Mars Society in the US, and they allow groups of researchers to come there every few weeks to see what we can learn and help us to progress how we could go to space and live on Mars. I was doing a research project on food waste because I wanted to understand, if we were in such a closed system and our food – well, that’s integral to our health and wellbeing.

When we go to Mars to go and live, we’ve got to grow everything to survive. An apple doesn’t grow on a day. We don’t see lettuce growing in a week. It takes time. Initially, the early crews would be living off freeze-dried food or some unstable products like that. Any waste from that would become the compost, the nutrient system that feeds the plants. We had no one had done the research yet to work out what would we be feeding the plants at the start of that cycle. I did some research on that. What’s the first input into what would be a new system, a new closed system? It was unsurprisingly because it’s all freeze-dried food in the most part. It was much more salty than what people would expect, and so would have potentially a negative effect on the ability for those plants to be productive.
Also, we didn’t waste much food. There was not a lot of food waste, and so there wouldn’t be a lot of nutrition going into the soil either for that capacity. It would take quite some time to develop enough waste to be of any value. This is a challenge that I think NASA and all the other space agencies will also be facing. How do we ensure that we can put the right inputs into our system? When we start to use that systems thinking approach, then we can see where the hotspots are, where the challenges could be that we can actually attack and really try and make sure we can resolve those problems before they either start. Or in the case of climate change, we can come in and try and mitigate further damage or find some way to adapt or whatever it might be.

Taylor Martin
[08:12] I’ve been on this path to try to find packaging made out of mycelium or the root system of mushrooms and other things that are in the ground because it’s fibrous. You can make some – I was just thinking, if all the packaging was in that, would that be a solution? Could you actually use the packaging that’s made out of mycelium, and just grind it up, and use that as part of your nutrition?

Dianne McGrath
[08:35] I think so. I think not just mycelium, but there are so many other plants that are grown for on this planet, often just one function that have multiple functions. Mushrooms, for example, you’re talking about there. They have medicinal function, as well as nutrition function, as well as the potential for being able to be used as some sort of packaging. We need to think more broadly about what any resource – we use the word resource. It’s a word I don’t like in some ways because it often makes it – it makes me think of the [inaudible] in that particular plant or whatever is separate. Here’s this resource that I’ll bring in and use, and then it’s gone. It’s not that it’s an integrated part of the system. Without that item and the way it could be, I guess, optimized for all its potential, we won’t survive. I think that we’re so disconnected from our systems, our food systems, our water systems, our soil systems, all of our ecosystems that we don’t think about how they’re all connected and how they actually support other forms of life as well.

Taylor Martin
[09:42] That’s going to make me stop thinking about Mars, and then pick it, and now let’s look at the planet Earth, the one that we’re actually standing on.

Dianne McGrath
[09:49] On this one, right, okay.

Taylor Martin
[09:50] On this one because it’s like we are messing up so many different things on so many levels. What I heard when you said earlier about we need to get over the bridge, get over the hump or whatever, or just move on, and then we can all as a species start working on climate change. I feel like we’re getting there, but from my point of view, I just don’t feel like we’re there. I don’t think enough people are over the bridge to realize, okay, we need to start making some serious changes here. I love all the new technologies that are coming out. I love when renewable projects come online. I’m all in favor to all that. When I just focus on people, like you mentioned, and just trying to get them all over the bridge, how do you see, from your vantage point, where do you see us on that journey?

Dianne McGrath
[10:40] I think that whole view aspect of things is probably a good summary there, what you’re talking about, that whole – in space, there’s this thing called the overview effect. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. It’s where when astronauts leave Earth and go to space, to the space station, or when they went to the moon back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. When they looked back through the windows of the spaceship and they saw our beautiful blue planet in this blackness of space, they had an emotional, almost spiritual experience of overwhelming beauty and great dedication towards coming back to protect it. It was transformative for almost all astronauts.

They would come back to Earth and wanting to protect our planet. They would often say, “I wish we could send our politicians up to space so they could look and see that this beautiful orb is protected by this thin band, which is our atmosphere.” It’s as thin as a rubber band around a basketball. It’s that thin. When you see that, it’s impossible to unsee it. What you also see from space is that there aren’t borders. The borders that we put between our nations completely constructed by ourselves, they don’t exist. We see oceans, we see rivers, we see mountain ranges, forests, deserts, but we don’t see those dotted lines that are on a map. They don’t exist. They’re a figment of our imagination.

If we can step away from what we imagine and look at what the reality is, then we can actually see that these things are all interconnected. One thing affects the other. When we start to understand that more, then perhaps we spend a little time looking at what we can see within our own sphere, our own orbit, perhaps that own little microcosm. If we look after that, then the macrocosm will also be looked after.

Taylor Martin
[12:32] I would love to have all of our politicians go up there and take a look at all that from way up there, and look down, and see that wonderful blue marble in the sky. I’m afraid some people would want them to stay up there, but I think it’d be great for them to get that perspective. I totally agree with you.

Dianne McGrath
[12:51] It’s absolutely true.

Taylor Martin
[12:52] We’re getting closer and closer to people taking trips up to space, and then be able to come back, so it’s possibility in our near future.

Dianne McGrath
[12:59] Absolutely. We see obviously Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, [inaudible] with all of these groups and individuals that are looking to put people up in space, either for tourism or because it’s just a fantastic thing to do because they’ve got billions of dollars. There’s always that challenge. Why do we spend billions of dollars? The NASA budget is billions of dollars to go to space when there’s poverty here on Earth. There’s infrastructure, which is being damaged constantly by climate change now. In Australia, we’re having – at the moment, in one of our states, we’ve got another one in 100-year flood. It’s our third one this year, one in 100-year flood, three of them in one year, and it’s only midway through the year. This is not going away. We have a chance to let sometimes the shock, the sticker shock of something which is right in front of you turn your perspective.

Taylor Martin
[14:00] I really do empathize and align with that 100%. I’m always taking notes of things that are happening around the planet just in terms of climate change, and they’re more and more frequent. If you just simple math, just do a little trajectory, okay, we had two this year, or four this year, and two last year, and one year before that. You just keep a little chart going and you’re going to see that the next three or four years, we’re going to have a very strong slap in the face here as humanity is going to face some very big challenges. At least, that’s again from my perspective.

Dianne McGrath
[14:35] It’s true. The IPCC put their reports out not that long ago on where we are with our state of the climate. It’s pretty harrowing to read and to know that we’re sitting – we are at a point where there is some irreversible damage that’s already occurred because of climate change. If we don’t slow down now, it’s going to get worse. If you can imagine get worse, it can get worse, and they’ll get a tipping point where these interconnected systems start having a multiplication factor where this – because of global warming, we’ll see oceans. We’re already seeing the oceans at their highest level ever now, as well as global temperatures on land surface at the highest levels ever.

If we put these two together, we’re going to see rising sea levels. We’re going to see more flooding. We’re going to see more people homeless. We’ll see more erosion. We’ll see loss of food systems. All of this will become a bit of a tipping point towards, I guess, that rolling stone that will continue down the hill. It sounds so doom and gloom. It’s like, oh my gosh, who wants to listen to this? It’s no point hiding. If we hide, we can we can put our head in the sand and pretend something doesn’t happen.

Taylor Martin
[15:54] Yeah. A lot of people are.

Dianne McGrath
[15:56] It’s true, and it may not happen for me. It may not happen for me. I might be fine, but it doesn’t mean my neighbor is fine. Sometimes I think, what responsibility do I have? I think in the past couple of years as we’ve gone through the pandemic, we’ve seen people step forward and do things to help their neighbor more than they ever have before. We know there is this positive aspect of humanity that always seeks to help in some capacity where they can. I think if we recognize this problem, if we understand the problem, if we [inaudible] that systems thinking, specify the problem, we really understand the problem that very first step, and understand that we’re all connected together in this problem, then you can’t help but want to do something, but sometimes it’s hard to know what to do. That’s the trick, isn’t it, for businesses and for our communities.

Taylor Martin
[16:44] We talk about climate change. We talk about floods, and tornadoes, hurricanes, and all those different things. When it comes down to our ecosystem of how we produce food – because I see famine as something that is somewhat inescapable in some areas of the world because they can’t – maybe they won’t be able to harvest as well as they did before. If they don’t, and then their neighbors don’t, and so on, there could be some serious famine in the world. Again, I hate to talk about something so bad, but I feel like that’s the number one thing that I’m focused on just because of loss of life. You’re expert in food management and food waste. How do you see that working out?

Dianne McGrath
[17:31] I see food as a critical part of our survival obviously, not because of hunger and nutrition, so forth, but the changes we will make to our food systems to ensure that we can continue to eat will also have a really positive effect on the environment. For example, you talk about famine. We grow enough food on this planet to feed the world. My mind just went straight away to that. I don’t know if you remember the Bob Geldof, “Feed the world.” Remember that ‘80s? I don’t know if you’re a child of the ‘80s. Okay, all right. The Band Aid. Remember the Band Aid concert series around the world?

Taylor Martin
[18:05] Yeah, of course. It’s coming back to me. Okay, have a little senior moment here.

Dianne McGrath
[18:10] No, that’s fine. We do grow enough food on this planet to feed everybody. The challenge is in equity of distribution of that food, and of the loss and waste of that food. We lose or waste about a third of the food that we grow. We could be feeding these people, but we’re not. We need to readdress what we’re doing there, and we are doing this at a global level. We see the UNEP have a big focus on food obviously, and hunger. The Sustainable Development Goals focus on ending world hunger, as well as sustainable consumption and production of food.

That’s one of the things that the Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 said that we must halve food waste by 2030. That’s something that all of our governments have signed up to, the US government. I was one of the first ones to sign that to ratify that from the UN, and Australia did as well. We’re all doing our best now to start to halve food waste. We’ve seen dramatic changes in that, and a lot of it’s been driven by industry. Here is where business has done a lot of the work and will have the biggest impact. Sure, we can hope that government might regulate, but then we never want government to regulate, do we, really?

Taylor Martin
[19:27] Absolutely.

Dianne McGrath
[19:28] Because there’s always errors. There’s unintended consequences sometimes for regulation, but industry is leading change in this area. We have voluntary agreements on food waste reduction all around the world now. This is something which is having a huge impact, and we’ve seen 17% reduction in food waste in the UK based on this work. This is something which is really powerful, because if we can reduce how much food is being wasted, we’re also going to be reducing greenhouse gases, so greenhouse gas emissions. This can help us to improve our climate change picture just by not wasting as much food because we’re not putting as much food to landfill. When food goes to landfill and gets covered over, it creates methane, which is a very strong greenhouse gas, which is very different when it’s composted. Composted is aerated, and so quite a different system.

The first bit is like, let’s, number one, not make the waste at all. Number two, if we do it, let’s redistribute it to some of the social communities that might need it. Can we somehow redistribute short-dated stock that’s in cans to communities that might be in isolation somewhere and going through some relocation because of climate change and they’re in need of food? We do have food rescue organizations all around the world, who do assist in this stuff, in providing food for those in desperate need, and we had this.

What we’re trying to do, and in Australia, we’re doing this. We’re having a look very carefully about what our food rescue and distribution map looks like. Where are the needy? Where are the possible sources? What about the transportation? Because we’re a huge country. We’re the same size as the United States, but a tiny percent of the population. We’re only 26 million people, the same size land mass as in the US. We have a lot of open space to take food from A to B. This is something we’re in the process of doing at the moment is trying to understand where those, I guess you could say, food deserts are, and how we can help those people with what is a surplus at times.

Taylor Martin
[21:30] How do you see the technologies that are for indoor farming playing its part?

Dianne McGrath
[21:35] We see it’s being used already in a number of countries. The UK have been very clever and utilized a lot of old train tunnels that are not being used for and now putting indoor farms in there. I think as our climate changes as well, we’re not going to be able to grow the same food in the same place. It’s not just because of that. We’re also building – we’re an urbanized population globally now. More than 80% of our population are living in some urban space. Because of that, we’re building and we’re knocking down what was productive land for food, which is a real challenge. We need to find different ways to grow food.

I know like in New York, there’s rooftop farms. This is something that we’re doing already. It went all through Cuba when they were disconnected from the rest of the world during the fuel crisis as well. They realized they had to all of a sudden quickly grow their own food because they weren’t getting supply. They started doing extraordinary gardening on anything, on walls, on rooftops. Everywhere they possibly could, they were growing food. We have the capacity to do this. We often don’t have the drive or that lever to trigger us to actually take the action to do so.

Taylor Martin
[22:51] It sounds like we need to have systems in place.

Dianne McGrath
[22:54] Yeah, absolutely. Systems in place and people to manage the systems, or have an ownership or accountability to parts of that system, because you can have – it might be a not-for-profit organization, or maybe even a company that might produce indoor farming technology, or set up community gardens. If it’s not connected then to the supply, demand, if it’s not connected to the community that might need this, then it’s going to be a waste of time. It’s a waste of resource, and it won’t be optimized when that’s – it’s like sending something to Mars but not knowing what to do with it.

Taylor Martin
[23:29] Before we started recording on this podcast, we talked about the overview effect, the microcosm and the macro. Can you dive into that?

Dianne McGrath
[23:37] Yeah. The way we see our world is it’s really quite challenging. When it comes to climate change, it’s so daunting that it’s hard to see the forest or the trees. If we think about that as the trees, the forest as the macrocosm like the whole system, it’s hard to conceptualize all of the interconnected parts of that. If we focus just on the one tree in front of us, if we’re standing in the middle of that forest, standing in front of an extraordinary red gum or a beautiful big tree, then we can focus on one part of that, the microcosm. Because if we protect that, if we make sure that that particular tree has got all these nutrients it needs, has enough air, is also connected to the life that it supports as well, then that will expand out. We can see, by looking very carefully at the details of our microcosm, how we can have an effect on the macrocosm. Understand in detail what’s close to us.

Taylor Martin
[24:34] Yeah. I see that two ways here. One way, as you described, but the other way, I could see the tree being the forest that I have in my country, or my state, or my land, my area. I need to focus on my backyard, if you will, and make sure all my forest, my trees, my growing, and all that is taken care of because I’m taking care of mine and everybody else is taking care of theirs, and expanding, and growing all that stuff, then I feel like we’re making some progress.

Dianne McGrath
[25:05] Yeah, exactly. That doesn’t mean we’re ignoring the rest of the world or the impact we have on the rest of the world, but it does mean that we have to look at our own backyard before we can point a finger to somebody else as well.

Taylor Martin
[25:18] Can you dive into that template systems thinking approach?

Dianne McGrath
[25:22] Yeah. As an engineer, very much about systems thinking, so environmental engineering. It’s not about climate change adaptation, although I think it’s something we’re going to have to do a lot of. It’s about how we see the world in systems. To be a systems thinker, there’s really four steps you take. The first is to specify the problem, but really understand what’s happening. To understand it, and then by deep diving into it, asking the why, and then why, and then why.

In marketing, we used to do this five times. When you’re trying to understand the insights of a customer, you ask the five whys. Why did they do that? Oh, because of blah. Why did they do that? Because they believe this. Why do they believe that? You can really get down to the deeper insight. If we understand that problem so deeply, then we can prioritize what we need to attend to. The next step is usually to construct a hypothesis. All right, I’ve got a priority here. I need to start to look at water, or plastics, or whatever it might be.

Now, what if – this is where the what if comes in, part that we talked about. What if I did this, or what if we no longer did that, then what would happen? I think this might happen. You construct that hypothesis. You bring in the experts because you and I, we’re passionate about it, but we’re not the experts in maybe plastics or ocean acidification, whatever it might be. If we bring in the right people and that can help us to engage with the experts in that area, we can develop a plan that’s going to be effective. That’s where we do test something. We plan something. Testing is the third step in systems thinking. You test your hypothesis.

In business, it’s the same thing. It’s like market testing or pilot testing something. You market test something. Then the last step is to learn from that. You implement any changes from there. It sounds so simple. It’s a four-step process in systems thinking, but it encapsulates that whole element of understand, try, test, learn, and try again, because you’re not going to get it right first time. I don’t know about you in the world you operate in, Taylor. When I used to work in marketing, sometimes some of the campaigns I’ve used to put out weren’t effective. You’d measure it. If you don’t measure it, you’re practicing. You measure. Oh, okay. It didn’t quite hit the mark there. I needed to have that messaging instead. Then you change your program, and you do something slightly differently. This is no different. We are not going to succeed with everything we try when it comes to climate change, but it doesn’t mean we won’t learn from it and do it better next time.

Taylor Martin
[28:14] Absolutely. I wouldn’t say you’re failing, but failing forward. Even though we’re not failing, but you’re trying something out, you’re learning from it, and then you’re just going back and reassessing the what if. To me, I always say that the question is what drives us. What if this? Or if you ask the right question, what if certain – whatever. If you ask the right one, you might get the right answer. I think going through that system of thinking, you’re going to keep educating yourself to ask a better what if, and a better what if, and then a better outcome, and a better outcome until you get to the point in which you’re trying to accomplish.

Dianne McGrath
[28:54] Sometimes you don’t see the results straight away, which is a challenge. I know as a species, we like to have that instant gratification. We respond really well to immediate feedback. You see this with children, the very famous marshmallow experiment. How many children will have that marshmallow now versus two marshmallows in an hour’s time? Do you know the experiment?

Taylor Martin
[29:19] Yeah, I do.

Dianne McGrath
[29:20] Yeah. Most children will choose the marshmallow now because to wait and expect to have a better outcome in a couple hours, that doesn’t override this single marshmallow now. We need to find the small wins. That’s a really important part of it. When you’ve got a huge challenge that’s going to take years to get to, you often have to break it down. Eat the elephant as they say. Break it down to the small wins and find other metrics that you can assess along the way that keep you encouraged. People do this in weight loss all the time, for example. There’ll be small changes where people might have a large amount of weight to lose and it might be a slow journey to do that, but there’ll be the subtle changes such as, oh, I can walk upstairs a bit faster, or my clothes now fit even more comfortably, or whatever it might be. There’ll be a number of metrics so you’re not just stuck on the one metric that’s 5, 10, 15, 20 pounds, whatever it is. It’s all [inaudible] along the way, which will help you feel, I’m making progress.

Taylor Martin
[30:27] It just reminds me like what you just said the old adage, if you don’t measure it.

Dianne McGrath
[30:32] Yeah. My undergraduate degree is in mathematics. I’m a statistician. While I don’t wear a cardigan and carry pens in my top pocket anymore, I still love statistics.

Taylor Martin
[30:43] Anymore!

Dianne McGrath
[30:45]. No, I never did. I’m just joking. That whole adage, we used to often refer to that joke about if you don’t measure it, then you’re just practicing. There’s no point in doing it. It’s just for fun.

Taylor Martin
[30:57] This little circular template, systems thinking approach to me, I think it’s great. I do that in my work, but it’s usually I don’t have to go that many radiations to try to find out the solution I’m looking for, but something big like what we’re talking about here. There’s going to be a lot of versions. Again, if you’re measuring it, then you’re going to see that growth. You’re going to see that improvement.

Dianne McGrath
[31:21] Exactly. Sometimes there might be some backward steps. I’ve seen it happen sometimes. I know for example – okay, so I’m going to jump back to the Mars journey for a moment if I may.

Taylor Martin
[31:34] Sure. Let’s go back to Mars.

Dianne McGrath
[31:36] Let’s go back to Mars. It’s part of my own preparation to go to another planet to live. You just roll that off your tongue. I started to biohack my bones because I knew that to go to space, I would be risking losing about 20% of my bone mass. All women that go through menopause will usually lose about 20% of their bone mass as well. I thought, oh gosh, a woman, 20%, space – what if that was truly 40%? I don’t know. That’s a big risk. That would be worse than osteopenic. I started doing biohacking to increase my bone mass. You can’t measure it very often, how well your bone is growing, or how dense it is. Because if you expose yourself to that DEXA scan, which is basically an x-ray on your bones, it’s not good for you. You only want to do it every year or two.

You have to trust that the process you’re taking – like I had to, basically every year, make sure, all right, well, I know the things that I should be doing in this type of exercise regime should be take me towards this goal. I’ll check in on that next year when I have my x-ray. In the meantime, I just need to see, am I getting stronger? How many jumps am I doing per minute? Or whatever it might be, my metric that I was trying to use to help me feel like I’m achieving this thing. Then one year – and I was increasing my bone mass year-on-year for a number of years. I was increasing it by between 1% to 3%, and it usually is decreasing 1% to 3%.

Taylor Martin
[33:08] Right. Exactly.

Dianne McGrath
[33:10] I did this for a number of years. Then one year, I actually had a drop of a few percent. It’s like, oh no, it’s not working. It dropped from being 118% of a 30-year-old’s bone mass, 214% of a 30-year-old’s bone mass. I was in my early 50s. You can take a drop at what was the context. The context was it was still fantastic. I didn’t get too disheartened by the drops like, all right, I’m still in a great position. I’ve learned that that thing didn’t work. That’s all right. I can keep going. Change that a little bit and let’s take another attempt in a different direction because let’s see if I can continue to build it. It might be that I hit a plateau. I don’t know. I might be stuck at 114% of the 30-year-olds. That’s not so bad.

Taylor Martin
[34:02] Biohacking is something that’s really growing tremendously these days, just because a lot of people fear that the type of food production that we’re growing is just not as nutrition-dense as it once was.

Dianne McGrath
[34:13] So true.

Taylor Martin
[34:14] My mom says something like, “Yeah, why do you eat all that funny organic food?” I’m like, “The funny organic food is trying to be half of what the food was when you were growing up because you had better fertile soil, you had better produce, you had less pesticides.” We’re just trying to do the best we can with what we got. I think people are understanding that and they’re taking these biohack approaches to their own body.

Dianne McGrath
[34:40] Often, so many of them lean back towards the way that our grandparents and great-grandparents used to be. Go back to natural ways of eating organic and biodynamic because that’s what they had. They didn’t have the fertilizers that we did. They had to make do with what they had, and they realized they were much more connected with the food system because they had to grow their own. My grandmother, she had – they used to call her quite the green thumb. She could put a stick in the ground and it would sprout. It was amazing. She grew everything. She even made her own butter because they had a cow. Everything was from that region. Whereas if we have a look what does our food miles look like in our household, it would be interesting as an experiment for someone to look in their refrigerator, which is where fresh food should be. I say that in [inaudible], “fresh food.”

Taylor Martin
[35:36] Air quotes there, yeah.

Dianne McGrath
[35:38] “Fresh food.” Then theoretically, that hasn’t traveled very far, theoretically. If it has, then how on earth has it managed to stay so fresh if it’s had to travel so far? Has it been gassed if it’s a piece of fruit or vegetable? Maybe it’s had air transportation, so it’s been brought to you very quickly. What about those emissions that are from travel? Because that’s one of our largest creators of carbon dioxide is emissions is transported, as well as energy. What does our own home look like? Once again, come back to what you’re saying before, Taylor. Let’s get our own backyard in good shape because the little changes we can make at home, or the little changes we can make in our business can be an inspiration for other people to try that too. When they find out like, oh, I’ve started going to the local markets. This guy that grows his own lemons in this small orchard around the corner. It’s fantastic. Look how fresh they are and they taste amazing. Then someone else will try it, and word of mouth, positive word of mouth is extremely powerful.

Taylor Martin
[36:43] I can’t agree with you more. I have a local co-op that I go shopping at to buy my groceries, and there are more organic produce on the shelves that are mostly local than any place I shop anywhere in town. I love that co-op. I go there and I don’t have to go anywhere else. I get everything I need right there, and it’s also, any productized products that they have aren’t full of unreadable items on their ingredients list.

Dianne McGrath
[37:12] Yeah. We still don’t have to go places as well to buy this now. There’s a great app that’s called Ripe near me. You probably have something similar in the US where you might be in a city or an urban area and you open up the app, and it will show you who might grow in their own backyard citrus, or they might have a glut of spinach, or something like this, or rosemary, which grows like wildfire. They’ll put it up on right near me, and you can come and collect it from their home. Sometimes it might be a donation. You’d give them gold coin or whatever it might be. Other times, we just got so much of, please take it, please take it, and this composting swapping system. All this stuff, it’s already in our communities that we can connect to our local food systems very simply through some of the apps that are out there now.

Taylor Martin
[38:03] Now, did you say Ripe, R-I-P-E, or did you say –

Dianne McGrath
[38:07] R-I-P-E as in foods ripe.

Taylor Martin
[38:10] Okay, that’s what I thought. I just want to make sure I heard it right.

Dianne McGrath
[38:12] It’s in Australia. I don’t know if it’s in other countries, but it’s in Australia.

Taylor Martin
[38:15] I’m just looking up online here. There it is right there. I see it. I’m just going to type in my ZIP code real quick and see what it gives me back.

Dianne McGrath
[38:23] I wonder if it’s in the US. That’s interesting.

Taylor Martin
[38:25] Oh, it says in beta.

Dianne McGrath
[38:26] Oh, that’s exciting.

Taylor Martin
[38:29] It’s showing me, I think, nothing. It tells me that it’s probably not –

Dianne McGrath
[38:33] Nothing yet. It’s just Australia at the moment.

Taylor Martin
[38:35] Yeah. I’m looking at the About Us. It is just Australia. I think so many things in terms of sustainability throughout my whole life. I usually find something that is from Australia and I’m like, man, those Australians, those people are very sustainably sensible. They’re always making things or building things that are sustainable that I want.

Dianne McGrath
[38:57] We’re an island, have to look after us in some ways.

Taylor Martin
[39:01] I know, but you take initiative and you actually do it.

Dianne McGrath
[39:05] The doing.

Taylor Martin
[39:06] Speaking about the doing, we’ve talked about Mars, we’ve talked about biohacking, we’ve talked about template system thinking, and how to get that approach for businesses to think that way, and how to create better things for better outcomes. What do you see is the biggest problem right now from your vantage point, knowing everything you know? When you look out at the world of sustainability, what does your mind usually gravitate towards as like a linchpin in sustainability?

Dianne McGrath
[39:37] It’s interesting. This is going to sound a little unusual maybe. I think it’s selfies. We’re so focused on ourselves. The camera looks towards us, and yet we’re not really seeing ourselves. We’re seeing a version of ourselves that we project to the world, but that’s not who we are. Who we are is much richer and deeper than that. I think that’s what – if we could turn that selfie around to the camera around and see ourselves in the context of who else is in that room with us, and then we would behave very differently, both with how we use our resources – use is not the term. We would share a lot more if we knew that somebody else also might have a need for this thing. I think the whole thing about selfie – and it’s not about Instagram world, although Instagram’s lots of fun. It’s more about that’s being very self-focused without being self-reflective.

Taylor Martin
[40:37] Yeah. You’re talking about really changing the mental mindset of the human condition to help us, again, going across that bridge to get to the other side so we can start doing the work that’s going to be needed.

Dianne McGrath
[40:51] You think, how do we do that? It’s a difficult thing to do. How do you bring people out of that vision of themselves? Sometimes it’s as simple as just asking a question. What if? What if that person next to me also had this problem? If businesses did this more, we would see businesses collaborating, and solving problems, and developing precinct-based solutions. We saw this in Melbourne. There’s a cluster of cafes in these really cool, really funky alleyways, great graffiti artwork on the walls like dark, and dingy, and cool lighting, and the best coffee in Melbourne, brilliant stuff.

They’re so small that they didn’t have any space for bins so much, their trash in the stores. There was always overflowing bins out in the alleys, so it was not an attractive place to go. What if there was something that was nearby that they could always take it to? The council, region created a precinct-based local recycling center or depot underground in a car park in the middle of the city of Melbourne where these businesses could take their rubbish, their trash, and straight away go to recycling the paper, recycling the cardboard, recycling the cans and bottles. Also, they had a composting system, so there was zero waste going to landfill, zero, from these businesses because they couldn’t do it themselves. If a solution was there for all of them together, then it was going to be worthwhile. What if someone else had the same problem as me? I wonder if we could come up with a solution together.

Taylor Martin
[42:36] My what if is thinking, what if we can get people to stop thinking so globally and focus on that one tree, their backyard, their town? Let’s say their town. Let’s just say everybody in your town, you people, you townspeople, get together and you figure out what you need for your town. Fix it in whatever way you can to be more sustainable, more global climate conscious, circular economy, all that stuff. Just let everybody else do the same, and someday we’ll get there.

Dianne McGrath
[43:08] Yup, absolutely.

Taylor Martin
[43:10] All right, we did it. I think we just solved it, right?

Dianne McGrath
[43:13] Solved it. Now, we turn to world peace.

Taylor Martin
[43:17] Oh, man. Let’s have another concert, another Band Aid. Dianne, is there anything else that we didn’t cover that you want to cover? Because we did talk about a lot of different things. We could have dove down into so many other things that I think we didn’t get on our plate today.

Dianne McGrath
[43:35] I think we’ve got a lot of great content for so many of the people listening today, whether they’re a business, whether they’re an individual in their home, or maybe even a policymaker. There’s lots of different things that could stimulate ideas to make a difference.

Taylor Martin
[43:51] Yeah. I think it’s a great idea though, the circular thinking that I like to call it. That just mixed in with working on your own city, your own backyard, and yourself, changing yourself, and maybe helping that friend of yours that maybe too selfie-like, expanding their mind and broadening their perspective. I always tell people that traveling to me is the eye-opener. When I first traveled outside of United States and I saw other parts of the world, I really had an aha moment of, wow, life is very different in other parts of the world. I have since, I always have to travel. I have to go and see other cultures and experience different ways of thinking because I see it as something that enriches my vision, my life in ways that I could not put my finger on. It’s countless.

Dianne McGrath
[44:47] Yeah, absolutely.

Taylor Martin
[44:48] Yeah. Sometime, maybe I can get down there to Australia and meet all these wonderful people that make all these wonderful things, and technology, and all that kind of stuff. Dianne, do you want our listeners to follow you or anything? I know you’re on Instagram, aren’t you?

Dianne McGrath
[45:02] Sure. I am on Instagram, so dr_damcgrath. I also have a website, diannemcgrath.com.au. That’s M-C-G-R-A-T-H, and Dianne has two Ns. I say that because it often gets spelled wrong. Some of the work we’re doing in voluntary agreements for food waste in Australia is at stopfoodwasteaustralia.com.au.

Taylor Martin
[45:26] That’s excellent. Dianne, thank you so much for being on today’s show. I really have enjoyed this conversation immensely.

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[45:33] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is Founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you’re logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.

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