Paul Hawken: Carbon, The Book of Life

Paul Hawken is the legendary author behind myriad best-sellers, including most recently Regeneration: Ending the climate crisis in one generation, and before it, Drawdown: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming. Both books were accompanied by comprehensive online portals that continue to engage people from all walks, all around the world. Paul’s next book is a more personal volume – perhaps his most personal. It’s called Carbon: The book of life. And ahead of its release, it was my privilege to join him at his place just outside San Francisco, to talk about the book, and so much else, in what might be his most personal podcast too.

You might say the upcoming book puts carbon back into perspective, as no less than the centerpiece of life itself. If you’re anything like me, be prepared to have your mind blown. You won’t see, or perhaps more pointedly hear, the world the same way again. In some ways, this book feels like a legacy piece. And so too this podcast. Not that they’re the last we’ll hear from Paul (the next book is already in mind). But this feels like a very special moment in time with this extraordinary writer, journo, entrepreneur, consultant to world leaders, and so much more. And it culminates in a world premiere reading, of the rousing finale to the book – accompanied uncannily by some notable sounds from around the garden.

Head here for automatic cues to chapter markers and a transcript, also available on Apple and some other apps. (Note the transcript is AI generated and imperfect, but hopefully serves to provide greater access to these conversations for those who need or like to read.)

Recorded 27 April 2024.

Title slide: Paul & AJ in conversation (pic: Olivia Cheng).

See more photos on the episode web page, and to see more from behind the scenes, become a member via the Patreon page.

Music:
Green Shoots, by The Nomadics.

Regeneration, by Amelia Barden, from Regenerating Australia.

Cascade Falls in Mill Valley.

The RegenNarration playlist, music chosen by guests (thanks to Josie Symons).

Find more:
Hear the most popular episode ever on this podcast, my conversation with Paul on the release of Regeneration, for episode 96.

And my previous conversation with Paul, in late 2022 from the Kimberley, is on episode 145, Regeneration: A Year On.

Transcript

Paul: 0:00

We have these really strange phrases - net zero, net of what? And I mean what it means is that there's no more carbon going up than there is coming down. Good luck on measuring that one. Y ou can't measure, and that's what I was trying to say. Carbon is a flow and it's inextricably bound with all other aspects of life and that's immeasurable. Net zero is immeasurable.

AJ: 0:46

G'day. My name's Anthony James for The RegenNarration, exploring the stories that are changing the story. Ad free, freely available and entirely listener supported. So thanks a lot to very generous new subscribing members, Nicki Taws and long time supporter, Paul Cleary. Thanks, too, to Michael Gooden for your incredible support. If you're also finding value in all this, please consider joining Nicki, Paul and Goodo, part of a great community of supporting listeners for as little as $3 a month or whatever you can and want to contribute. Subscribing members get exclusive access to behind-the-scenes stuff from me, offers, tips and my great gratitude. Just head to the website via the show notes regennarration. com/ support - and thanks again.

AJ: 1:38

Paul Hawken is the legendary author behind myriad bestsellers, including most recently, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. A nd, before it, Drawdown: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming. Both books were accompanied by comprehensive online portals that continue to engage people from all walks all around the world. Paul's next book is a more personal volume, perhaps his most personal. It's called Carbon, the Book of Life. A nd ahead of its release, it was my privilege to join him at his place just outside San Francisco to talk about the book and so much else in what might be his most personal podcast too. Y ou might say

AJ: 2:28

the upcoming book puts carbon back into perspective as no less than the centrepiece of life itself, and if you're anything like me, be prepared to have your mind blown. You won't see, or, perhaps more pointedly, hear, the world the same way again. In some ways, this book feels like a legacy piece, and so, too, this podcast. Not that they're the last we'll hear from paul the next book he's already got in mind but this feels like a very special moment in time with this extraordinary writer, journo, entrepreneur, consultant to world leaders and so much more. And it culminates in a world premiere reading of the rousing finale to the book, accompanied uncannily by some notable sounds from around the garden. Here's Paul G'day Paul. PH: hey. AJ: how wonderful to be in your garden.

Paul: 3:29

Well, it's wonderful to have you. I listen to you so often. It's hard not to believe that you're a neighbor. Yeah, you know I mean, it's not that I'm talking back at you at podcasts, but I am silently listening, responding to the guests and taking notes sometimes from what I hear, and so to actually be with you, to see with you. I think it's been five, six years, right? Yeah, that's right.

AJ: 3:57

Yeah, exactly, and it is funny because I feel the same way. It feels like we're neighbors, such that this doesn't feel like it could be a once-in-a-lifetime rendezvous in person and hopefully it's not but we're making the most and the garden is singing. It's really called us in this morning too. We've just sort of been hanging out through the week, but this was the time we had to press record the morning's idyllic sun beaming down on the redwoods around us and here at your place in the garden. I thought I'd let you speak to your passion in this garden and bring listeners into it a little bit. Through your eyes, everything you see here is actually just grub.

Paul: 4:36

There's no terracing, there's no stones, there's no retaining walls, there's no deck, and it was full of pin oak and poison oak when I bought the house, anyway, when I bought the house, and so it just was step by step, you know, creating livable spaces and then terracing to create plantable spaces.

AJ: 4:57

Because this is a very steep terrain.

Paul: 4:59

I should point out yeah, it is, so I can't say it has had any intelligence besides. You know sort of a stochastic walk through the nurseries and I think the big thing in the last couple years is just to give it all the annuals you know that were pretty and nice and showy but and go completely back to natives. The only exception to that, of course, are the lemon trees and the apple trees and the nectarine and the orange trees, but other than that I think everything is perennial.

Paul: 5:37

Then nasturtium come and go, you know they just take over. Then they disappear in the winter. Then you think they're gone and then they just show up like a marching band and cascading over everything and eventually you have to sort of trim them back, you know, because, uh, they're just light seekers, as all plants, but I mean, uh, nasturtium are definitely, uh, you can't, they're so gentle and break so easily, and you know. But it's hard to think of them as aggressive it's not the right word but definitely busy, opportunistic, opportunistic.

Paul: 6:18

Well, they know, the light is that's right extroverted yeah, but the rest of humanity know that They'd be amazing.

AJ: 6:25

Yeah, that's right. And notable too for its bamboo stands.

Paul: 6:30

Yeah Well, that's my home raven there. No, seriously.

AJ: 6:37

Sounds different to ours. Nora Bateson thought ours sounded like goats.

Paul: 6:40

Oh, that's our raven. Bamboo, paradoxically or ironically, is for fire Really. Yeah, it's a fire break and it's so interesting that the local fire department I think of things that are going on in Australia has said basically, take it out, because it's paraphilic. I'm going I don't know what you're reading, where you're getting your information, but in Asia, in orchards or plantations and so forth, bamboo is planted as a fire break to stop the fire. You'll see Philostoccus nigra, I mean the and so, yeah, you'll see the Black Bamboo and you'll see the bamboos on all towards the mountainside where the brush are and that's where the fire will come from, if it ever comes.

Paul: 7:36

It won't come from to the west, because that's where the redwoods are, the water, so it's really clear where the fire will come from. It hasn't come through here for 150 years so it's not like you know embracing ourselves. But and it's also just so beautiful it's an extraordinary plant.

AJ: 7:58

And the way it's working in with the rest. It does feel like I'm almost at Walden Pond, as I hear the sound of the water cascading down the slope, down below as well, and and the wooden finish on your home too. And speaking of what's down the hill and out west, this had a big part in constructing what became San Francisco, and not once, but twice, after all.

Paul: 8:22

Yes, the town I live in is called Mill Valley because there was a mill and it milled redwood, and so virtually everything you see here on the property and down below is second growth Now. Second growth now you can't put your arms around it. It's huge in some cases, and the only first growth that was saved is called Muir Woods, by John Muir, who fought PG&E, pacific Gas and Electric, who were going to damn it. Oh really, yeah, yeah for electricity, wow, yeah, yeah. And you can walk to Muir Woods from our property. You just go up the trail and down.

AJ: 9:01

I'm looking forward to it Over the ridge.

Paul: 9:03

Yeah, and come in from the back. Right now it's so busy with tourists coming in from all over the world. You have to get reservations, but they clump up at the entry with their selfie sticks. You're looking at some of the most sacred I'm not decrying these people's visitation, I'm just saying it at some of the most sacred. I'm not decrying these people's visitation, I'm just saying it is one of the most sacred groves in the world, without exception. And then from our house you walk in from the back.

AJ: 9:35

It's a few miles.

Paul: 9:36

It's not like just backyard but there's nobody there. And so 99 point, I don't know percent of the people who come in in buses and all this sort of stuff from San Francisco as tourists, you know, don't get further than a few hundred yards and turn around. And I, you know, when I get down there and see it, sometimes you know, it's just like you'll never see anything as beautiful as this in a forest environment in your whole life. Probably, you know, most likely. And they just come in and out. It makes me wonder how much we've been educated. Maybe not educated is the right word, but Enculturated.

Paul: 10:17

Enculturated, yeah, to see nature as a thing and, oh, this is well, yeah, and then go home, you know, yeah, or whatever you know, or maybe take pictures and postcards, you know, as souvenirs, but but not like, not take it in deeply, you know, and I've gone there. They usually kick me out, but I would go in there at night and then just meditate, and you know, and they got wise to it. You know, and they got wise to it, you know, and started to look around with blessed lights, but but it's really where you want to go at night, it's where it's like, whatever you want to call them, nature spirits. I mean, there's all sorts of words for it.

Paul: 10:55

We don't have an accepted word, really, but whatever that presence is comes out at night, it is like it's not like the ants, you know, and and the hobbit or something like that, but it's, it's even better, uh, yeah, because it suffuses you, uh, and especially if it's a moonlit night, get out of here yeah, you know, with all our remote travel and particularly in Australia where there aren't so many towns and so on.

AJ: 11:26

In between, we noticed our young boy a few years ago would start saying, oh, there's no signal here. And you know, when you run a podcast and he's running one too. Fair enough, that's important. But we started to develop terminology around what you're referring to as spirit signal, saying that, oh yeah, there's plenty of signal around here. In fact there might be more, it's just a different variety. And so we put the terminology spirit signal on it and it's stuck over the years. And when you do get to a place like you're describing, perhaps more than ever, as a hummingbird just hovers behind you for a moment and takes off more than ever, it's time to put the electronic signal down lest it get in the way, maybe even physically, but certainly metaphysically, get in the way of you sensing into the ancient story.

Paul: 12:18

Well, without being reductionist and using a scientific term, it's all frequency. The whole earth is frequency and you know there's 3.4 trillion creatures and animals and birds and invertebrates, uh, that live here with us. We're 8.1 billion, so they definitely uh, despite what we've done in the 69% reduction in wildlife since 1970, which is just heartbreaking.

AJ: 12:46

Yeah, it almost requires stopping on for a second.

Paul: 12:49

Yeah, that fact is just shocking.

Paul: 12:55

Yeah it should be enough in itself in a way, yeah, but nevertheless, the fact is, who's left and there's a lot left, obviously are communicating. The whole earth is communicating all the time and we're just becoming aware of it. You know from the eco-acoustics and bio-acoustics and phyto-acoustics, and you know very sensitive recording devices and that are being placed in extraordinary places, extraordinary places around the world, and so this flooded with frequency. It is frequency and that are rarely audible, but sometimes audible, and we love the audibles. You know the birds, but not the bats, you know. But it doesn't mean what they're saying isn't as beautiful and as extraordinary as the birds. And so I feel like we're at a threshold. And Karen Bakker talks about this in Sound of the World beautiful, beautiful book, beautiful scientist, extraordinary woman who passed away unfortunately last, last year, at 53, you just think what would her arc be if she had been allowed to continue to stay here. But nevertheless, I think what we're coming to realize is there's a whole new way of seeing the world. It's actually hearing the world. But then that changes to an understanding, and I think of Antoine van Leeuwenhoek I don't know if I pronounce his name correctly, he's Dutch.

Paul: 14:35

In the 1600s he invented the microscope that really there was microscopes already, but he invented. He was a lens maker with a grade school education and he created microscopes that were ten times more powerful than existing ones, and he was the one who first saw what he called animocules, which are basically bacteria, microbes and tardigrades and rotifers and cellular multicellular organisms, and he was actually so afraid of being made fun of he said nothing for a while Because at that time and I think this is the point I'm getting to is that the world did not understand, cells did not understand. Obviously gut bacteria did not understand. Cells did not understand. Obviously gut bacteria did not understand that there is more microbes on you than human cells and that that is the living world.

Paul: 15:36

You know, and it came first, you know, and we evolved out of it I mean, even the Royal Society of London, you know, just like poo-pooed it and he sent it a paper finally and he said no, and then he invited them down to Holland. They came down and said, oh, they had to see it, they had to see it, and I think we're at the stage where the eco-acoustics you know the recordings that are going on right now I think the world has to listen, hear who we're here with and to understand that the intelligence that we are receiving may not be intelligible to us in our way of seeing thinking in the world. That is to say, it doesn't make them less intelligent. It makes us more respectful of the complexity and extraordinary breadth of intelligence on the earth, and we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that intelligence, right.

AJ: 16:44

Well, that's exactly where my mind was going as you were talking. I was thinking, if anything, it heightens our sense of intelligence, understanding how connected we are Like. Where do you draw the line as individual, given what you just said about all the little critters that constitute who we think we are, that if we're connected to that, that only continues to sort of, the more we do find out, boggle our minds, more then we become enlarged, if anything. By that logic anyway, it's so far from something to be threatened by. In that sense it's becoming bigger. But if I take my leave from there, there's something else you said, but it's related where you said he held on to that knowledge, this Dutch guy, for fear of being ridiculed. We know this is a big factor in general in our culture here today, and certainly in the field of eco acoustics. This has been true too. You, you've found that they're to a certain degree being laughed out of town for a while, but now starting to become irrefutable and catch on.

Paul: 17:50

Absolutely. I mean scientists like Monica Galeano in Australia when she first presented the idea of phytoacoustics. Those plants were, you know, signaling each other and she set up very valid scientific experiments where there was no other way of communicating except by vibration, by sound. So the results were irrefutable. The conclusion was refuted and made fun of and dismissed by her colleagues, who were male, by the way. Suzanne Simard, who coined the mother tree that idea of trees communicating was similarly dismissed.

Paul: 18:34

It's a way of seeing the world just to move a little bit out of gender. But it's a way of seeing the world that is trying to be introduced into a very reductionist, atom, know, atomistic scientific modality. You know that comes from the Age of Enlightenment and so forth where, you know, we objectified everything and started naming it, you know, and identifying it and studying it and writing papers on it and all good science. Nothing wrong with that. But it was really about I think we're at that same threshold in the 1600s where the discovery of microbial life opened up a whole new way of seeing the world. And I think we're at that threshold right now and of course people push back and resist, it doesn't matter, it's just true. And what does that do to us industry technology company.

Paul: 19:22

You know Part of extraction comes from the fact that what you're extracting from is seen as inert, as dead, as not valuable. It may move, it may have some habitat, it may have, you know creatures there, but you want the liminals, you know. You want the wood, you want whatever it is that you're taking and you know we're at the apogee of extraction. You know we're at the apogee of extraction, we're at the peak extraction right now. It's not like, oh yeah, we should chill after all the years of birthday and mornings.

Paul: 19:57

Not true. We're at peak extraction and so we can either peak by collapse or we can peak by revelation which is like oh my gosh, didn't know and I don't know what's going to happen. But I do know that I do. I don't know this at all. I believe that people, as the way of understanding the world, morphs and changes in the same way that the discovery of the microbial nature of life did and created modern medical science and so many other things.

Paul: 20:37

That's a very different world, a very different world. So I kind of smile when I say that, because I have no idea what will happen, how it will happen. So I kind of smile when I say that because I have no idea what will happen, how it will happen. But to me, we're at a stage where we've been doing all the talking for you know, especially settler colonists, particularly for the last 500 years, you know blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and I think we're coming to a threshold where, in a sense, we have to listen In the vernacular, shut up and listen, because we've been doing all the talking. But the cultures who do understand that very, very well are indigenous cultures. They've been listening all along.

AJ: 21:17

And there are even stories of some of them, their own stories of how they learned to listen. That it wasn't always thus, that's right. Yeah, dene people I've heard Lila June talk about this. In their culture, you know they were going bust in certain ways and learned how to listen. I've heard the same thing in some Aboriginal cultures too, back in Australia. Let's shine a light on some of what we're hearing, then. What stands out to you that you've heard?

Paul: 21:47

then, what stands out to you, that you've heard one thing is soil, which we think is inert, or you know it has life in it, even if it lives.

AJ: 21:51

We don't think it communicates. Wow, I guess we're coming on to it, aren't we?

Paul: 21:53

but go on well, in my the book I just finished, carbon, the flow of life. Uh, full of life. No, the book of life. I don't even know the title of my own book.

AJ: 22:02

We'll come back to this Carbon, the Book of Life.

Paul: 22:04

Yes, coming soon. You can cut that out of the tape.

AJ: 22:08

You know I like our bloopers, but keep going.

Paul: 22:11

Anyway, carbon, the Book of Life, chapter 14 or whatever it is, is called Dark Earth, and it explains that soil is organism. It's the wildest organism on the planet. It's not a thing, it's not a medium, you know, with things, worms and dung, beetles and other ants and things crawling through it, and so one of the most amazing recordings I've heard is really soil.

AJ: 22:41

Really yeah.

Paul: 22:42

And they'll stick very sensitive probes into soil, especially in biosphere reserves where there's been no farming, no meddling, no disturbance. And it's a sound, it's percussive, rhythmic.

AJ: 22:59

It tells you something.

Paul: 23:01

Uh-huh and it's just beautiful, you know, it's just like when you know what it is that you're hearing, it's like uh-huh. It's important when I've showed that to other people is to have a recording of industrialized commercial soil, corn soy, you know mechanized, you know soils turned up every year. You know, and NPK is applied, pesticides are coated, seeds are coated with, you know, neonicotinoids and there's herbicides and you know all that sort of stuff and in, as scientists have said, it's eerily silent. There is not a sound in the soil.

AJ: 23:42

Well, that's the original Silent Spring, wasn't it?

AJ: 23:44

Speaking of getting laughed at I was thinking of Rachel Carson in terms of being vilified at the time as limits to growth were as well. I mean, there's a pattern here and somehow we've got to improve too, to be to listen more to the possibilities that new things might have merit and yes they're. We're talking about women across the board too, in these instances, blokes too, with limits to growth, but obviously donella meadows amongst the crew, and we were at a farm recently where this was pointed out too, because, like your garden here, it was singing and the young guy there, sam, said silence is not a good thing. I mean, sure, there are different biospheres, like we have some deserts, but even the deserts are extreme. Sometimes they're biodiversity hotspots. Back home in Australia, we have this understanding of deserts being barren, so the singing sometimes, as you pointed out, isn't audible.

AJ: 24:36

Let's talk about some of the other things that have surprised people, then, that I've read in your book. That's coming down the line. I think you talked about the whales in the Caribbean being heard by other whales in the caribbean being heard by other whales in ireland. You talked about elephants too. What was going on with them, do you remember?

Paul: 24:51

just that they could communicate within 175 miles away you know they could touch in and communicate to each other yeah so, but that's not what we can hear.

AJ: 25:00

Then no, does that? Well, we can't no because we, we hear them, but we don't hear that we don't have the full spectrum. No, we don't have full spectrum. And there's turtles too. Similar, isn't it? That's right. It's when they hatch, they communicate to each other through the shells to coordinate their hatching. Are you kidding? I mean, it already blew my mind that they find their way. Mothers find their way back to the beach that they came from over thousands of miles. Yeah, I mean, how do you do?

Paul: 25:29

that. Well, just like the coral polyps and everything, it seems like everything is emitting sound and it's purposeful, it's not just whistle while you work. I mean, it is definitely there for a reason and it developed over millions, hundreds of millions, even billions of years. Right, and to see the planet as something, it's one thing to say it's all connected, you know, which is sort of like a lame phrase it is I'm not trying to make fun of anybody who says that, but I'm just saying is that when you look at the expanse and the complexity of what we're just touching into in terms of the Earth communicating to itself, to me it's just jaw-dropping and it just provides a very different perspective of what we're doing to harm it, what we're doing to ignore it and you know, I mean we're ignoring it what we're doing in a sense of objectifying nature. And even, with all due respect, even in some organizations that are about biodiversity and saving the earth and saving nature, there still is this objectification of the living world as if it's other.

AJ: 26:46

Well, the language betrays it, doesn't it? It does. That's saving the world.

Paul: 26:49

Yeah, I was just at this, this book, at a conference called Nature and Climate, and my first question is how did you separate? I'm curious, you can't.

AJ: 26:58

And, interestingly, you got a rapturous response to that talk too. So it resonates the idea that we've done this and it feels better not to Seems to be resonating more.

Paul: 27:08

But when we, in the same way, we've objectified climate as a thing. It's out there, we're going to fight, tackle and combat it and we don't want it to change, we're fighting change right, really Good luck. I mean, is the same thing. We're objectifying nature. It's like well, that's nature, we have nature-based solutions. That to me is just charmingly naive. But again, it reflects the underlying nature of our language and how we've been taught to see the world, see each other, see other genders, races, people, cultures, which is that they are other. So we're in the objectifying other genders, races, people, cultures, which is that they are other. So we're in the objectifying, othering world and we're othering the two most important aspects of this earth, which is warming the air, which is global warming, and obviously the living mantle of living beings that actually are the regulators of climate and always have been. And I think that what I say is like this objectification of the world is what caused the problem. So we're not gonna fight and tackle climate change.

Paul: 28:14

That's Don Quixote, it's silly. We're making it something. That's someplace else, somehow, in some way, and carbon is the culprit, and damn it. Hey, we have a civilization going here and somebody let loose the carbon. We're going to bring it back home and we're going to capture it and liquefy it and put it in the ground. And you know this is just tech psychosis. It's not climate tech, it's psychotic. And psychotic psychosis is when you're completely out of touch with your surroundings and the people you're with. That's psychosis is when you're completely out of touch with your surroundings and the people you're with.

AJ: 28:48

That's psychosis, you know. Conversely, I feel like stories like the one you relate in your book coming up about Monica, who I mentioned, we had met back in Perth before she left Western Australia in probably the darkest time of the ridicule, if I just call it that she was still happy and vivacious, I might add, to an amazing woman. But yeah, she was telling us about some of the stories that she was finding, and you've written one up that I didn't know when she was diving, because she's a marine biologist originally in the Great Barrier Reef, and you talked about the damselfish research she was doing. I bring it up because there was a moment where it was almost like Craig Foster's experience with the octopus my Octopus Teacher, the film that won the Academy Award whereby the communing with these damselfish as she was nominally researching them was so extraordinary or extraordinary by our default measure, maybe totally ordinary if we finally get used to it and tap in, but extraordinary in these ways such that when it came time to catch them, kill them and examine them. What would be more, completely, she went back in to do that job and they were nowhere to be seen that they knew.

AJ: 30:07

And I feel like that's such a powerful story because it's something that can naturally draw our human empathy. We can imagine being in that, in their fins, if you like, and to think that that's the feeling of I don't know, could we even assume hurt, at least rupture, that we might be causing across the board, without knowing the sort of thing we'd hate to do with what we do consider family, for example, or even you and me across this table. You'd hate the thought that you'd cause that rupture between us as identifiable kin, but that we're all kin to that sort of a degree. Wow, and perhaps it is these sorts of stories that can evoke a level of empathy to the whole, to life period, dissolve that distinction. Perhaps it is through these sorts of stories where that can ultimately resonate, do you think?

Paul: 31:06

I don't know. I mean for her it was experiential. Yeah, it wasn't, it's true she didn't see it coming. She's with the damselfish on the reef, the same reef every day for months, and so they got to know her and she always went in with gloves to make sure there was no bacterial transfer to the fish. But they would nestle in her hand, her hand, and she could close her glove around the fish and they would just like nestle in there.

Paul: 31:38

Okay, so that's what she was studying and she's studying, basically the effect of global worming on, basically, fertility and how does it change the fish, how does it change especially the female fish. And so she had come to be known on that reef and on the last day, when she then had to go euthanize them and then take them back to the lab and then basically cut them open and examine their organs be a good scientist, study it she went to the reef to say goodbye in the morning, just because she had formed a relationship and a bond and there wasn't a single fish there. And I think for her I mean there was grief and there was and this is her words, I mean, or her statement but essentially she knew, they knew. So what had happened is the taxonomic barrier of what we think of language and communication had been broken or opened you might say better had been opened.

Paul: 32:44

There was communication going on and so for her, she did go back, euthanized, did it, fulfilled her job as a marine biologist and then pretty much quit. She just stopped, yeah, and she said the ethics committee at the university had given her permission to kill the fish.

AJ: 33:03

but she said the fish never gave me permission wow, isn't that pretty you know it's like of course, and so that was it oh, and she went on to do this extraordinary well, continues to do this extraordinary plant research and and released a book on it which I can't read the title off the top of my head. This book, the plan, that's it. I like the plan.

Paul: 33:22

Well, the thing about the plans for her was that you could experiment, study, research and you didn't kill anything. Yeah, that was, that was in Munich, I listen. Yeah, big difference, big difference, yeah.

AJ: 33:35

Outstanding. You know, I wonder if Monica's experience was filmed if there'd be another Academy Award in the offing. But that's just to say good on Craig. He had the skills obviously and the equipment and he did it because it did break through like that. But maybe it is testament to what these stories can do generally. I'm glad it's in your book. What also entices me enormously is when I hear I mean now I just hear them all the time, but there are a couple more in your book about Indigenous folk and how they've experienced these connections over time and really sort of stand out acute stories like even the if I just pick locally here, the, the mega flood, if you like, of san francisco in 1862. That was so big, thousands died and a third of the property was destroyed and it geologically cycles. So possibly, particularly these days, won't be the last time we see this. But that is it the Maidu people, maidu Maidu people that they knew this was coming too Matter of fact, actually.

Paul: 34:44

Yeah, the flood of 1862 was 46, 45, 46 straight days of an atmospheric river, which we've had this year, by the way, in California, and river after river after river, you know just coming over Australia too.

Paul: 35:00

Yeah, and so the whole San Joaquin Sacramento Valley flooded and you know 10 to 15 feet of water and the state went bankrupt. A third of all homes and livestock were lost and you had to row. In Sacramento, you had to row the governor had to row in to the second story of the governor's mansion and things like that these stories, but you've told the current governor. Yeah, yeah, I have Like, by the way, keep your water wings just in case.

Paul: 35:40

But the thing about it is that it was reported in Nevada City Register, the newspaper there, that about two weeks before it happened the mitre started to move up into the hills and nobody thought much about it until after the fact.

AJ: 35:57

Same thing with the tsunami in 2004. The indigenous folk of the Andaman Islands went to high ground, all the old stories intact. They could map on went to high ground and we know what happened there. A quarter of a million died around the region.

Paul: 36:14

But they knew too Well. They knew because actually it happened before and that we know now from a geological perspective, that actually it happens every 150, 200 years, and we may not be sure why, but we know that it has a cycle. There is a cycle and it will happen again in California. But the question is not the question, but I mean the fact is that ecological knowledge we talk about traditional ecological knowledge from indigenous people but there's also traditional ecological memory, that is, they don't forget, and so I don't want to say they, but I mean I don't want to make them third person, I'm just saying that there are people on the planet who live by ecological, historical, cultural narratives that go back thousands and thousands and thousands of years, I think, most of which, if not all of which settlers and colonists, you know completely ridiculed or just dismissed, you know out of hand.

AJ: 37:21

Some didn't, of course, but they wrote about their records, but they were the minority and well, they were ridiculed for not ridiculing.

Paul: 37:27

Yeah exactly, but it's an interesting story because there was no, it was just a calm thing, you know. And they did say the Maidu did say the water will be there. They did tell people it was like 15, 20 feet higher the water will be there and they're going. What do they know?

AJ: 37:49

I mean, it just seemed ridiculously prophetic, and it just shows that if you ever needed reminders as to who we should be listening to now, in these times, I do want to also point out the extraordinary stuff we hear about and you've written a bit about as well the capacity of some farmers and even chefs today, and even what you wrote about the super smellers, quote unquote who can smell Parkinson's?

Paul: 38:16

in another person.

AJ: 38:17

Yeah, this sort of stuff, that this is happening and this is in humans in different cultures. It's very interesting.

Paul: 38:28

Well, we've been told and believed that we have a sense of smell, of course, as do all animals, but that ours is secondary compared to a wolf or a dog, and ours actually is the best in the world, and we can smell a trillion different scents. I know it's like what, and the reason dogs or wolves seem better smellers or better sensibility is because there's certain areas where they definitely are very, very sensitive, and that is about food, sex and conflict. They smell scat or urine and it's like oh, it's a babe around the body. Okay, I'm going to eat something. It's a prey, or I'm in a territory where there's maybe some other wolf.

Paul: 39:20

Pack you know, and I've strayed away and I have to think about where I'm going. So these areas, a wolf or a dog? It's very sensitive, but we are far more sensitive than any other animal and that's a discovery. That is like you know. We've lost it, of course, because of how we eat and our ill health and we use floral essences you know that are basically synthetic, that are emitted in our houses and our bathrooms and you know we just trash our sense of smell by what we emit.

AJ: 39:58

Yeah, yeah, well, it's another form of noise over the function that works so incredibly. Just get out of the way of it and get so much more reward. Speaking of which I have to bring this one up the Yamuna people is that in Tierra del Fuego in Chile, that the women would dive notable too in those cold waters without wetsuits, obviously, and that the europeans there would watch the sleet melt on the people's skin. And this reminds me of we talked about james nestor here, another californian, uh, with his book breath, and he talked about some of these stories, and another Californian with his book Breath and he talked about some of these stories. And Wim Hof obviously as well, where he'll sit in ice and the ice will melt. He won't get cold, yeah, and he's got his techniques for it. They obviously had theirs. So, again, just totally sort of not extraordinary to think that humans have that capacity to connect, but also sort of influence.

Paul: 40:58

Well to integrate with the environment, you know and live there. And it's ironic that when it was the age of Miss Beagle and you know it was coming through the Magellan Strait, where the sailors you know saw Well, it was, you know, Magellan before that, in the 1500s. But I mean watching the Selknam and the Yamuna people standing on the bluffs and they were virtually naked and they were covered with seal blubber, of course, seal fat, so they weren't stupid, but they knew that anything that would get them wet would cause pneumonia or something. So they shed water by being dressed, if you will, clad in fat, and that's how they adapted. But when the HMS Beagle went through there and saw these people, for Darwin, ironically or disastrously, he saw them as a proof of evolution because they were between a beast and a human. They were the, the link, they were the thing that. How could animals become human? Oh, here's the answer it's Yamuna, you know. He could see them.

Paul: 42:13

He brought four of them back to England and Vinnie Buttons and three others and instead of actually seeing the Yamuna people as a culture and just slow down everybody and it was testified to by the fact that when there was only 120-some-odd left from extirpation, they were shot point-blank. They were Subject to disease. They were put, had to put on wool which you know basically got wet and they got pneumonia. And there's only 120 summer left and they were within the missionary and the mission. And the missionary was a lexicographer from UK and loved words and started to create a dictionary for the Yamuna with the tribal chief only, and he wouldn't talk about cosmology women's, not women's issues but you know what?

AJ: 43:08

what we serve in Australia?

Paul: 43:09

women's business well, yeah, everything about the feminine. There's some things he wouldn't talk about. You know, I'm not going to share that with you because you were part of a massacre of our people. There was a massacre, anyway. So when the missionary passed, they were up to about 31,000 words 31,000 words and if you read the dictionary I have one there was about 300 printed. Finally, it's metaphor. I mean they spoke metaphorically. There's more verbs in Yamuna than the English language.

AJ: 43:46

Is that right yeah?

Paul: 43:47

More verbs. And it's Aristotle who said you know, metaphor is genius, but if you read it carefully, what the language is teaching you is how to be there, how to be in that land, in that place. So the very language that you're learning as a child is a teaching. And so, again, we're talking about connection. The connection between the expression, the vocal expression of the people and place was inextricably bound together. And that's kind of what I'm saying about what we're hearing from all of the living world. Regardless of what species they are, it's the same. Life on Earth is sharing what it means and how to be life on Earth, right?

AJ: 44:36

It's beautiful.

Paul: 44:37

Yeah, but at that time, you know, when Darwin was there, I mean, the Japanese language had 40,000 words.

AJ: 44:46

It's interesting, isn't it? Yeah? And that there's 40% of languages endangered today. That's why that matters, and there are reclamation efforts going on everywhere, and that matters. This is why oh, we could go on about all these things I want to take a little tangent. I mean through all this life, enriching, regenerating stuff and all the stuff that we sort of canvassed at the same time, the shadow theides and the and the not listening and and the transactional approach to the redwoods. You know, all these things it's all happening at once.

AJ: 45:22

But you did allude earlier to what I want to talk about here, and that is your sense that, if you like, I'll just put it glibly regeneration will probably prevail, that you have a faith in people, that, as these things come on, the penny will drop increasingly or more deeply.

AJ: 45:45

And I mean, I note in your book and we've talked about it here a little bit that you insert a little more of yourself in there, a little more of your story in there, little vignettes of it, and one was the profound experience you had with the Brown Chapel quote, unquote in Alabama, I think it was, wasn't it and the profound experience you had there of faith in people in the face of the worst assassinations of black folk and, of course, vilification and marginalisation. He had still a faith in people MLK was sort of his figurehead of it, but it was across the board and that was faith in white people who were doing those things still. So it seems like there was something you gleaned from that all those years ago when you were but a teen that maybe is playing through today in your faith in people still. Is that true?

Paul: 46:45

I think, um, I mean to say I have faith in people. It's one of those large, overarching kind of statements that I don't know who people are. Yeah, yeah, you know in a sense what I saw in Selma, alabama, which is the March on Montgomery, a famous march and that really precipitated the Voting Rights Act yeah, exactly Signed by Lyndon Johnson, and it had been preceded by really horrific violence against teenagers who started it. Actually, it was these teenagers who started to march over the Edmund B Pettibone Bridge or whatever it was, to Montgomery and they were beaten back. Beaten back Horses, truncheons, you know, and dogs, it's just horrible. And so people began civil rights workers from SLCC, southern Christian Leadership Conference, and others started to join in and then they were beaten even more viciously. So it grew and pretty soon there was videographers there, there was TV and you know it was on the nightly news and it was the first thing and you saw this just absurd. You see it still today, by the way campus protests about Palestine. And so it gathered more people to the cause of the marching to Montgomery for the right to vote in America.

Paul: 48:19

But the center of it was the Brown Episcopal Methodist American church it's called AME, I think, and that was the headquarters. So people who had come from the outside, like myself, in very, very, very, very minor roles, I just I don't want to, but would gather there during the day and it became just, it was almost 24, 7, you know it's like, and there was preaching from the pulpit and there was Martin Luther King, and there was James Bevel and Andy Young and amazing group of black pastors, eloquentquent, extemporaneous, and there was a church, and the church itself had been there since 1868 or 1848, but had been there quite a long time, and the parishioners were right there, you know, and just the way the black church evolved, you know, was out of basically slavery, you know, and so it's a very special church in the terms of the amount of singing and it's a very vibrant, vibrant environment. Jennifer Hudson, all these beautiful singers emerged from the African church, you know, and became famous. Whitney Houston, you know, and so forth, aretha Franklin, aretha Franklin, you know, I mean it just goes on and on.

Paul: 49:44

And so what I was saying about that was that there was a community, a sense of community that I had never seen, and all life exists in community period. End of subject. And every cell in your body is community and there's no life outside of a cell. So and I had never really seen community like that I grew up in Berkeley University and all that stuff. So it just made a big, big impression upon me. And just four weeks before you know, one of the deacons at the Baptist Church you know had been killed just up the street.

Paul: 50:27

Assassinated by Alabama State Troopers, essentially lynched, but only with their fists and guns and truncheons, you know, killed. His mom was in the church when I was there, you know, and so there's a sense of continuity and grief and also hallelujah and hand-waving and just this fierce, fierce movement to stop what was happening in terms of segregation, you of segregation, and the marginalization of anyone, but in this case particularly African Americans. I just never seen anything like it before. It actually kind of put to shame our stuff in Berkeley and our political rallies and all this other stuff.

Paul: 51:12

It's interesting, everybody self-congrats with her and then they go home, yeah, yeah. And then, oh, we're going to do this and march to the Oakland Draft Board and this and that. But you know, I compared that and I just felt like, okay, there's community. And the reason it was important to me and I put it in the book is that I don't ask anybody who's working on top-down solutions for the Earth to stop. It's not that it's futile, but I don't think they work Because nature is not top-down and what we're talking about here is changing the Earth, changing the very firmament well, I shouldn't say firmament, but I mean the fundamental nature of this place we call Earth.

Paul: 52:01

You do that in place. You do it where you are. You're most effective where you are, with whom you are with, as opposed to organizing to change from the top ESG corporations and this thing and it's not that people should stop that. That pressure is really important and wonderful, but I don't think it results into real change, and real change comes from community, because that's what life teaches us. So what I love about your podcast and the reason it means a lot to me here in America listening to it because much of it is really about Australia. It's almost always about community. Yeah, I don't think you say that, I don't think you have to. No, it says it itself, doesn't it's place? This is happening here and this is happening here and this is happening there. Yeah, we're going to talk to so-and-so and then and it's never individuals, much less heroes- it's never that you know.

Paul: 52:52

Charismatic white male, vertebrate shit.

AJ: 52:56

In fact, they're standing out for their humility.

Paul: 52:58

if anything, yes absolutely, and the huge respect for country and for integration of it too, in terms of the dialogue and people and what's going on there, and I just absolutely it's not even belief. I know to the core of my being that if we reverse global warming, if we actually reverse the loss of life on Earth, if we actually start to regenerate as life regenerates automatically so it's not like we're going to make, but if we start to participate in that and stop basically degenerating our homeland, it will look very much like this amazing set of communities that emerge. And I think for most people who start that it's almost inadvertent. You know, it's not like they have this idea, a mandate. We're going to start a community, we're going to change.

Paul: 53:50

No, it arises just like everything else we see in the living world. It arises of its own rhythms and connections and communication and nature and people, and that's it. And to me, you know we have a teacher and we have a really big teacher and it's called weather and I always said that. You know, climate change is really, it's a nudge, it's like hey, it's the earth talking back to us, saying this is a teaching. It's actually very gentle.

AJ: 54:25

You think oh, there's hurricanes and tornadoes.

Paul: 54:27

No, no, it's very, very gentle, and it's just a question of how long it takes for people to say understand, realize that. You know, I think I'm going to go play with those people over there, because this is not fun and they're having more fun and they seem to be doing something worthwhile. It gives them a sense of dignity and purpose, and I think the thing that is most lacking in the world today is purpose for people. They're working at stupid jobs, doing stupid things, making things we don't need and getting money that barely allows them to live week to week or paycheck to paycheck. Even the ones that get money.

AJ: 55:04

I mean, you've been a fan of David Graeber's work. He talked about even the ones that get money, the bullshit jobs phenomenon Most jobs. If they weren't there, how much would it matter? And he found that there was a minority and phenomenon Most jobs. If they weren't there, how much would it matter? And this was the people saying it themselves, not his judgment how much does your job matter?

Paul: 55:23

When it comes to the partnership, I think about a third of people felt like it mattered. Wow yeah, there's work to do, but it's work that provides meaning and that enlivens you. When you sleep at night, you go ah, this is a good day.

AJ: 55:40

That kind of work, hallelujah, yeah, yeah exactly there we go, let's start singing, yeah, yeah, so you know, when you do talk about place and it's interesting, the podcast came to your mind because for me've often wondered. I mean, you know, a trophy, would you believe, sits out front of our apartment. We're ground level. We received this trophy from the local government after winning a campaign, if I just use that language. I don't think about it in terms of winning, but we stopped a state government paving roads along the beachfront in I don't know. A throwback to the, the 50s. Yeah, well, at least post war, yeah, and it was so bad that it was, in a sense, the easiest campaign to run, community campaign to run, because everybody, just about everybody, thought it was stupid, but the government was so belligerent they were going to do it anyway and they were doing it in other parts and it had already started happening in other parts and we thought, oh wow, any day the bulldozers could rock up and that'd be that At least it would destroy the joint. Thankfully that government had gone so rogue. The timing of an election worked for all of us, really. Even that place they'd destroyed as being repl being replanted. Roads weren't paved, our place wasn't bulldozed. The road reserve that was adjacent is now not a road reserve, so a change of government was fortuitous in a way. But it was also a beautifully positive, lively, regenerative, focused campaign. It was every bit of that community vibe and and by the beach, so it was our coastal community vibe. Then we get this actually beautiful recycled metal sort of trophy and I thought, all right if it's been sent to my place. I've ended up with it, right, I'm going to put it, overlooking the dunes that it commemorates the moment, and I believe actually there should be more signage like that community saved this and and this is what's it, how amazing is it? Etc. Because, wow, the things I got to learn while we were saving it, quote unquote, the things I got to learn about the place. Oh, it was similarly mind blowing. And I didn't know, and that's where I'm from.

AJ: 57:51

There was that, and you know I was even asked would I go on council at that stage? Would I contest? There's a richness to it? Is there an obligation? I don't know, but it ultimately there was another call that I felt like no, my role. My role pans out and cross, pollinates and connects and all this sort of stuff that I'm doing. But it's still interesting because it it's still. You know I hear you speak about in your place. I'm like, yeah, so how does my bloody role I guess I'm always reflecting is this what I should be doing, and all the more to be sitting here with you in your place? But it feels like for some of us, I guess in a positive media sort of role, that this is part of it, even though I'm not anchored to place. What do you think?

Paul: 58:46

What you're talking about is connection. It is. You're making connection. Yeah, and that word can easily be belittled, because the fable, current modern fables, are all connected. We're not. The internet has not done that.

Paul: 59:04

Social media has not done that. Now we have to talk about what does connected mean? Yeah, if you have 96 people in a slave ship all chained together, are they connected? If they're from the same culture and tribe, they are, but not because of the chains. Yeah, yeah, and so we have to understand we're chained in many ways the world by the use of the technology, of the technology, and it is almost certainly inhibited but almost prohibited in a sense. The real connections between people who are proximate, live together, share at least a beach, an Indian ocean and a beach. There's many other things that we share, and I think that understanding and the need for each other is overridden by big government, which has a mind of its own, which has also really responds not to people individually but to, frankly, corporations.

Paul: 1:00:12

Maybe subtly or maybe hiddenly. It's not obvious, but it does like. Who benefited from the road? Yeah, well, a friggin road company, did you know? And? And who benefited from that?

Paul: 1:00:24

well, people make tractors, and so there's a whole lineage there brought up power structures yeah of, and it wants to keep going, yeah, and it wants to keep plowing and paving and things, because that's what it does and that's its identity and that's what the shareholders want and all that sort of stuff. And then somebody says, oh, look, we can do roads along here, there'll be shops and little things and surfboard rentals and everybody will be better off. So the momentum of the extraction of the extractive industry, extractive way of understanding economic well-being is so, so deeply embedded and taken for granted and government becomes in a sense the apostle of it, without knowing. You know, it's an apostle of a religion that doesn't really realize that it's just a lackey, it's not the leader, even if it's voted in, because the mechanisms of candidates being elected and so forth, is so bizarre. Frankly, I think that going back to community what happens in this community? But going back to community, what happened was community where you are, it's community. But that community depends on respect too, respect for you, respect for each other. The voices meant something, because the voice already meant something before the incursion was being proposed. So again, that's why I say you're most effective where you are and you don't have to go someplace you know to be effective. It doesn't mean don't travel or don't learn or don't go. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying in terms of restoring life on Earth. You can't save the Earth, by the way, that's just forget about that. You know it's going to save itself, doing very well, thank you very much. You know it's going to save itself, doing very well, thank you very much. You know it has a long history and it will have a long history, you know, into the future.

Paul: 1:02:23

I really love what Ayo Akamalafi said in his graduation speech to the Pacific Institute here At the very end of the speech you know it's a very unorthodox speech. The whole thing is very unorthodox and completely different. As somebody who's given commencement speeches, I was gobsmacked by the originality and the poetry of it. But at the very end he said whatever you do, do not leave here and go try to save the world here and go try to save the world. He said consider that the world might be trying to save you. In other words, it's trying to change you. Don't change it. Yeah, it's just like that. So take it in. You know what happens when you really take it in. Just I mean, grief happens good. You really take it in. Just I mean grief happens Good. You're feeling it Well. There's no grief without love. So if you feel grief, you're touching in to the very most important part.

Paul: 1:03:26

Somebody asked me at a meeting I forget. They said what's the most important thing to do about what's the most important principle of regeneration. I said, oh, kindness. Kindness is the number one thing. People get down into details. You gotta do it this way and that way and till and no till. I mean back up, what are we talking about here? And it's actually kindness to self, by the way, and to that which is not self.

AJ: 1:03:56

If you can find what is not self, exactly asterisk oh, you know, my old mate, frank, was only kept alive, blessed, by public hospitals in australia because of the nature of the way his health situation played out chronic disease and well, and riding his bike everywhere, he'd say. I kept alive by those two things. And, yeah, I remember. One day he saw a particular sign. He got to see all different hospitals, right, and one of them had something on the wall saying their mission was excellence and another one had their mission on the wall was kindness and he said give me kindness any day. Reminded me of of that.

AJ: 1:04:36

It also reminds me of something I talked about with kate chaney before I left, that has gone out on the podcast, where even in this nominal net zero report that's been produced by community, with her in the seat of curtain back home, kindness was a thread and literally a page of children's art. It took a child, perhaps it was love, all about love, touchstones. So just to weave the thread around the book that's coming, the Book of Life. This is where it came from, because you've done these big compendiums Drawdown and Regeneration. This is more the essence of this volume, I gather.

Paul: 1:05:17

Yeah, I mean, like you and, I'm sure, all your listeners, we're looking, we're reading, we're watching, seeing, thinking, reflecting, wondering, experiencing different emotions from is this really happening or is this person really saying what they're saying? Because it's just so diabolically stupid to just poetry and beautiful art and dance and music and expression and beautiful, some, some really beautiful books. I'm gonna call out Karen Bakker again because you're calling out Rachel Carson.

Paul: 1:05:57

Yes, yeah, I mean there's some women here who are just making like Suzanne, leaping ahead of let's call it male science or male-dominated science. Monica Galliano, I just see that I'm not trying to be a good guy about gender just because of my white male vertebrate, it's just obvious. We're all different, we all take it in, but for me it's the same really. I read and sort of voraciously and try to take in the world as it is presented by other people and it just takes me back to the things we've been sharing and talking about, which is where does change originate and where does it get it wrong, itself wrong, and what I see and I don't want to get too genderish, but the fact is what I see is a climate movement that is dominated by a male way of seeing the world, and the science was very male-dominated climate science, and so the language has come out of it and, even with due respect to what you're just talking about, it's just so full of net zero, it's so full of jargon and jargon.

Paul: 1:07:17

Yeah, yeah, and jargon is very useful. If you're a surgeon and there's two surgeons there and you have somebody who's going to die if the surgery isn't right from a car accident or this or that you can speak in jargon. You're not going to speak in full sentences, so jargon is very, very useful. I mean on the footy, I mean they're not talking in sentences, they're not using adverbs, I mean it's declarative, it's imperative, you know. So that's jargon, but we've used it for climate and we have these really strange phrases A net zero, net of what? And I mean what it means is that there's no more carbon going up than there is coming down. You know it's like good luck on measuring that one. You know you can't measure, and that's what I was trying to say. Carbon is a flow and it's inextricably bound with all other aspects of life, and that's immeasurable. Net zero is immeasurable. Now, the goal is admirable, so I want to make a distinction.

AJ: 1:08:22

What's the distinction? Yes, as a metaphor, sure.

Paul: 1:08:25

As a metaphor? Yeah, but how about carbon neutrality? Excuse me, I should have said carbon neutral. I thought about that one for a long time. I said oh, I know, have said carbon neutral.

AJ: 1:08:36

I thought about that one for a long time I said oh, I know what's carbon neutral Mars.

Paul: 1:08:40

Yeah, yeah, but it's like, how can carbon's not neutral?

AJ: 1:08:42

Yeah.

Paul: 1:08:43

It's everywhere. There's 120 billion carbon molecules in every cell of your body. Is it going to be carbon neutral? What does that mean? You know it's like. So we have used this language, you know, in fighting, tackling, combating climate change. You know all these sort of you know, male sports metaphors. You know to talk about the future of life on Earth I don't know where it is exactly do nothing every day about the most serious threat to civilization and human well-being that has ever occurred on the planet. We have languaged it in such a way as to guarantee non-response and ignorance of it. Ignoring it, I should say not ignorance, because our language is all wrong. It doesn't connect, and this is what we're talking about. You know connection, connection requires listening and hearing, receiving compassion, kindness we talked about already Reciprocation, you know.

Paul: 1:09:50

Yeah, and to meet where there's commonality as opposed to top-down. I know you don't, we should, you shouldn't. I mean, all these things are logically true, you shouldn't, you know, but drive a dune buggy and other things, I mean, of course, but it's not how we're going to reach each other and we're not reaching each other that way. And again, you know, I'm not trying to just to just, you know, butter you up or something like that, but when I listen to your podcast, because of the groundedness of it and the honesty of it, of the people and what they've learned and what failed and what's succeeding and and how difficult it is, by the way, like this is not easy, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else.

AJ: 1:10:37

Yes, exactly.

Paul: 1:10:39

And that's where we all have to go.

AJ: 1:10:40

Yes.

Paul: 1:10:42

Everyone, the whole earth.

AJ: 1:10:44

And in that sense, why wouldn't you, yeah, yeah, and you close with a really rousing like the whole book in that sense is a. It's a book of wonder in many ways. It closes with a genuinely rousing finale, like a call. I mean, I guess it's that sort of call that you've just made and to feel that from you I don't know it feels really powerful that after all these years and all you've seen and all that that you've seen, even that you still you feel life and its innate regeneration at work and you're calling us all into it.

Paul: 1:11:22

I think I'm recognizing it as opposed to calling in. I mean, I just feel like my life is about curiosity. I'm not a scientist. I write, I learn. I'm not a scientist, I write, I learn. I wrote Drawdown and did it because it didn't exist. That's why not because I thought it was a great idea. I had the idea for 13 years before I started. Is that right? Well, no, actually more than that. It was about 13, 14 years. I kept going around like Diogenes, like saying why don't we have a list of the solutions? I mean to universities, ngos, government officials and so forth. Well, you know. Third assessment, fourth assessment this is a serious problem. What are the solutions? And you know, like the Union of Concerned Scientists at that time had five of them. One of them was get a power strip for your home entertainment center. I'm not kidding.

AJ: 1:12:19

Yeah, I remember that this is a Union of Concerned Scientists going.

Paul: 1:12:22

I don't have a home entertainment center. Should I get one? So?

AJ: 1:12:26

I can put the power strip on To make it good.

Paul: 1:12:28

You know use cold water in your washing machine. It's like, and you know we're screwed if those are the solutions. That's how Drawdown came out. But it was more of just like goodness sakes, we know a lot. We had staff at the Paris COP, where the Paris Mandate came out of, with Christina Figueres. They went around at my suggestion. I didn't go and just say asking people can you name the top five solutions to reversing global warming? Some people would say what does it mean to reverse? That was drawdown, that's what it means. I felt at that time. Can we start talking about net zero? I mean, I don't want to get net zero in 2050 when PPM is 550 parts per million of CO2. That's climate hell. Hey, we got there, we're successful. No, we're not. Unless our goal is to reverse it, then I don't know, are you talking about just your lifetime?

AJ: 1:13:32

Yeah, I don't know. You know, are you talking about?

Paul: 1:13:33

just your lifetime, yeah, somebody else. I don't know, you know, but we asked them and these are people. Both copies divided, you know, into the green and the blue, and the blue are the official delegates and the green are all the NGOs and where the action is.

Paul: 1:13:55

And we asked both and nobody could name five, nobody, and nobody could name them in order. And that's what we knew when we were onto something. Yeah, I mean this is conference at the parties calling for the Paris mandate One and a half degrees at that time, you know, to limit warming to 1.5 C, and nobody could name five solutions. Now, that was then. That was like nine years ago. So we've come a long way since then. We have, we have Jorn Rockstrom, we have, you know, we have all Kate Raworth, and I mean we have a lot is going on. A lot is going on In a very short time.

Paul: 1:14:32

It's true, yeah, yeah, but for me it's always about curiosity. You know, like I was really curious. It wasn't like you know you should do that. Why aren't you doing it? Yeah, that's stupid. No, it was like I want to know, not like I don't mean selfishly, but you know it's like I wonder what they are, I don't know. We asked people and staff. I knew quote, quote and I air quotes the top 10 solutions. And then we did the math we had 60 researchers. I was wrong. So, even though I was very close to it, I could with assuredness say these are the top solutions. And now, when I look at it today, they aren't, because they're global solutions and there's no such thing as a global solution. There's no such thing.

Paul: 1:15:26

So Perth and Botswana and Belgium and Boston are very different places, right? And so, again, this is about place. It doesn't mean that there aren't. You know, there's an atmosphere that is global? Of course there is, yes, but the solutions aren't global.

AJ: 1:15:41

Where you're going to hear it to full circle, where we've been, where you're going to be able to listen to it. Yeah is here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: 1:15:51

Beautiful. So you asked about, really, the latest book. It's just like going back to listening, watching, reading, hearing and seeing the evolution and emergence. You know this extraordinary movement and I do mean it. I've spoken a little bit harshly about top-down sort of government stuff, but this is the most brilliant, thriving moment in human history right now. It's extraordinary and what I mean? Inventive and extraordinary.

Paul: 1:16:23

I'm not talking about AI. I'm talking about people really discovering who they are and where they live and who they live with whom they may not have understood, by the way and respect, and coming together and connecting in ways that endure and mean something and being learning-based creatures, going back to being a learner, not a knower, being a listener, not a teller, being a receiver, not somebody in command, in charge. I mean this quality of human being is emerging everywhere in the world and they understand that if we're going to stay here, we have to restore life on Earth, that we have to go the other direction from extraction. We can see the end of the road. That's very clear.

Paul: 1:17:10

Just pick up the newspaper any single day. Any movie, any movie. Yeah, I mean they're everywhere now and that reversing global warming, reversing the loss of the living world in its extractive condition is like. I mean, people get it, they understand that, and so I think we have to exalt those and learn from them and point to them, as opposed to put our hopes and prayers into politicians, governments, fossil fuels, esg banks. I don't think so. It doesn't mean we should stop speaking truth to power. No, not at all.

AJ: 1:17:57

Do do, please absolutely more, but in terms of making fundamental change no, it was from your book and, if I get this pronunciation right, the Arctic Inactitude, how they saw the role of the storyteller in a different way, and it was stories that create a state of being in which wisdom reveals itself. Stories that create a state of being in which wisdom reveals itself. I've thought a lot about that.

Paul: 1:18:33

I'm going to continue to. And you're a storyteller. Well, this is why I'm going to continue to. I think it's very telling.

AJ: 1:18:35

Well, that's yeah, this is why I'm thinking about it and thinking about my role if it's not back on full time at my little, in my community, in that community anyway, I feel like there's a community that's around this podcast, now that you're part of that. So, yeah, in in wrestling with my or grappling with my role in it all, think about that. But I think there's a lot to that and I think it's some of what you've tapped in your book here too. The other thing to make note of is that you are about to go to a different place yourself, because you've been working with the ceos of some major companies, who you're also finding increasingly receptive. So, speaking of those, I guess, larger hierarchical structures, you're still finding meaning in connecting there and assisting there.

Paul: 1:19:27

Well, I think there's a tendency I won't just say for the left, but for those who look at corporate hegemony completely interlinked with the financial system, with banking, with the stock market, with concentrations of wealth etc. And all the assaults really that emerge from that that I think it's important to understand that we're just people, all of us, that's it. Yeah, it's not like these people in positions of power and influence who may be benefiting very much from their role, which is visibly destructive to somebody who's being just objective. I think that they're like us and they have children.

Paul: 1:20:22

What I see is one by one, because I don't see much, but what I encounter is that the penny drops it really does. How could it not? I mean, they're charged with being if they're a CEO of an organization that interacts with the world in multiple ways, and so they need to know what's going on in the world. And it's not about reading tea leaves, it's about reading a morning paper and listening. And so what I'm observing and this is not true in banking, it's not true in fossil fuels, it's not true, actually, even in climate tech I feel some people in climate tech are just as driven and profit-motivated as fossil fuel companies, but what I see is people finding themselves having changed, because it was their daughter or their who knows what influence precipitated their realization that, oh my gosh, you know, oh my gosh, we can't keep going where we're going, and they find themselves as the head of a large company and they have a choice To drop out, of course, and to go pursue something else, and many do, by the way.

AJ: 1:21:50

Yes, you've seen that.

Paul: 1:21:52

Or to stay. Yes, because they know if they leave, it's not going to go away, it's going to still be there. And so if they stay, then what can they do to transform? And what I see is in the CEOs I'm working with, which are companies or household names. They don't talk about it, they don't publicize it, they don't brag on it. They know just do it and do it and do it, as opposed to hey, look at us, look what we're doing. You know we're, you know we're green and we're this and we're that.

AJ: 1:22:30

Well, that's interesting when the greenwashing phenomenon is in some ways spiking. But there's another way.

Paul: 1:22:37

Well, it spikes, and yes, it is, but the ones I work with do not do that, absolutely not. I mean, they know how ridiculous that is and how pointless it is, and I feel like there's some really, really, really good people out there. Nothing is what it appears to be in the sense of how we get information. It's just not.

AJ: 1:23:04

It's not. It's why I do what I do. Yeah, and I guess why you do what you do.

Paul: 1:23:08

Yeah, I mean, you can have local politicians who are involved with who knows what to get the road in front of your beach and you just say what you know to get the road in front of your beach, you know, and you just say, well, ah, but it doesn't mean that that is ubiquitous, no, that's the thing, that state of confusion, or even corruption, you know Exactly.

AJ: 1:23:29

Yeah.

Paul: 1:23:29

Exactly.

AJ: 1:23:30

Yeah, all right, I feel like winding up drawing a thread back to your experience as a teen in alabama, in a way, where you witnessed a form of spirituality, if you will, and was so taken by it, and it was so distinct from your background and we share some of this. Maybe we'll talk about this another day altar boy histories. That could be fun or not. I wonder how you think about your spirituality today oh gosh, the easy question. Well, we warmed up.

Paul: 1:24:17

Actually don't think about spirituality Really, yeah, I mean because it's a word, sure, spirituality, and it's like a, it almost feels like a thing. You know that you do or you don't do, or you're involved with it and all. I guess true, but I think more of the different aspects of my presence in the world connect to all other aspects properly. In other words, am I living an ethical life? In other words, am I living an ethical life? Am I kind to others? Do I listen? Am I respectful to self? Do I honor those who've come before the?

AJ: 1:25:08

wisdom keepers.

Paul: 1:25:09

Do I stay open to things I might have resisted or still do resist? That's kind of how I see it, as opposed to you know, I practice X and I do this every day, or whatever I go here to this place.

AJ: 1:25:28

I've been to there, so you do have practices too, though.

Paul: 1:25:30

Mm-hmm.

AJ: 1:25:31

Yeah, yeah. Is that where you just remind yourself of these things?

Paul: 1:25:37

Well, I think any practice is really about recognizing the mind as being. They call it a monkey mind, for good reason. They say 30,000 thoughts a day and there's nothing you can do about that except get drunk. So again, the Book of Life is about flow. It's about carbon is a flow, but those are a flow too. Those thoughts are a flow. And to recognize them as that, as opposed to trying to control them or identify or sort them out and to see suffering my own by the praise or criticism or, and to take in all the vagaries of what it means to be a human being and not get attached, you know, to see it as the flow actually, but as the, and that's not who you are. That's not who you are. That's not who you are and that's a difficult thing to do. And there's so many different practices and teachings and exemplars. You know who really help people see that. But then you know we talk about James Nestor. Even he does and just came into it from a completely different direction.

AJ: 1:27:16

Yeah, as I did with this.

Paul: 1:27:19

Yeah, exactly, and I feel like having met some of the more quote-quote famous teachers, my feeling is there's teachers everywhere and we don't recognize them. Miguelito picks up my garbage 16 years Miguelito Miguel is a teacher to me. He is such an amazing being, so cheerful, so happy, so kind, so respectful, so joyous, and we have such a good time together and so forth. So I feel like, as opposed to somebody who's got lots of followers and acolytes and this and a temple or something and flies around in privates, you know like I'm not saying they're not teachers too, I'm just saying that they're everywhere, they're everywhere. They're everywhere, they're everywhere, and to try to be the person who can see it and recognize it and honor it and enjoy it. By the way, beautiful yeah.

AJ: 1:28:29

Do you think about mortality?

Paul: 1:28:31

All the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. I mean I think about it too, because sometimes I say it and people say don't say that, don't say that. But I say the new arrivals are asking, the ones who are leaving so I'm leaving soon, you just got here and they're saying what in the were you thinking you can fill in the blank there? I just got here and this is a mess, you know, and you guys are so eff up and confused and I'm just curious to know what were you thinking all this time? And I'm saying, well, that's a fair question, it's a fair question. And as somebody who's leaving soon, you know, and my wife, and says, don't say that, don't say that I said look, that's just a fact.

Paul: 1:29:20

you know, whatever you can, whatever soon is, I mean, you can stay here and still be, you can leave, you know, just because your mind is gone the battle brain, or you've stopped, yeah, yeah.

Paul: 1:29:33

But I see it from that perspective. So it's more like mortality in the sense of oh, you know I'll die. No, it's mortality in the sense of it gives you a completely different perspective. And if you add the number of years you might possibly live, given where you are now and you know, I'm so, so, so grateful and I'm in perfect health and I don't know why completely, but I mean, I've certainly attended to it. But if you subtract how long I could live from now to that number, is that a 10-year-old, 17-year-old, 23-year-old? I don't know. And what they see and what they're experiencing your son, you know, he's 10 years old how they see the world and to look at it from that point of view, and what should I? Maybe not, should is not the right word, but what do I want to say? Be do, offer to them, because we're all the same and we come and go.

Paul: 1:30:45

And there's a beautiful thing in Mary Oliver, just an incredible poet. And when she says, I'm not quoting exactly at all, I'm paraphrasing. But she's saying I see the world today and I know I'm going to die, as everybody is, and to see it with that sense of preciousness and beauty and just like, and there's a Buddhist, I don't know what to call it teaching, whatever it is, but that being alive is so, so special, so extraordinary, so rare to be in a human body and to enjoy what that means to live here on earth. It's as rare as a sea anemone walking out of the ocean, going up a tree, finding a little hole in the tree and setting up shop. That's about how rare it is to be a human being and if you look at that, at our existence as being, this is, you know, incarnation, reincarnation. I mean, it is so special, you know, to be alive. So that's what mortality is about for me.

AJ: 1:32:11

I said to someone on leaving Australia that I'd been privileged enough to read a draft of the upcoming book and that it was incredible. You know you've done it again. And she said how does he do it? And I said I know it's part of his genius and it's just to say you, certainly in terms of what you're passing on to the next generations, you are a manifestation of that wonder. It's really something.

Paul: 1:32:37

It's amazing because my way of looking at it is a little different. You know, my way of looking at it is like is this good enough? Of course, no, no, it's just. I mean I'm really, I'm bad that way, I mean I'm not a good, I'm not so good to myself in that way, every step of the book and reading it and changing this and that I'm going, oh my god, this, this book is going to fail, you know. And who's going to read it? My friends will, maybe. I'll just say they read it, you know. By the way, chapter two is like thanks, paul, thanks for sharing, but you know it'd be right now, because it doesn't come out until February 25,. It would be fun to just read the last paragraph, if you want.

Paul: 1:33:24

Do you want to yeah?

AJ: 1:33:25

Yeah, if you'll let me. Totally Okay, all right, take your time.

Paul: 1:33:29

Okay, ready, yeah, okay. The cascade of troubling information about the future is staggering and dispiriting. Great damage has been done to the whole of the living world. There is, and will be suffering. Chief Oran Lanz of the Onondaga Nation described a prophecy, foretold a time when the earth became biologically degenerated and the purpose of humanity was lost. There would be two signs. One the wind would howl and blow as never before and the envelope of the earth would be ripped and torn apart, caused by the activity of humankind. The second sign would be the children. Throughout the world, millions of children would be homeless, hungry, exploited and ignored. This is no longer a prophecy. This is heartbreak.

Paul: 1:34:25

Most of us turn down the dial to function. Quote consciousness, the great poem of matter seems so unlikely, so impossible. And yet here we are with our loneliness and our giant dreams, writes Diane Ackerman. People sense something momentous is happening. Barry Lopez wrote we feel ourselves on the verge of something vague but extraordinary. Something big is in the wind and we feel it. We know that if we mean to make this a true home, we have a monumental adjustment to make. We must turn to each other and sense that this is possible If you are afraid of what might happen in the future.

Paul: 1:35:10

Find the person you respect who does not act out of fear. If you feel overwhelmed, read the biographies of Sojourner Truth or Cesar Chavez. If you think being kind, respectful and polite is ineffective, listen to Jane Goodall or Robin Wall Kimmerer. If you feel ineffective, mentor a child, ineffective mentor a child. Help heal a wounded animal. If you are weary of chasing hope, read original instructions written and edited by Melissa Nelson, a member of the turtle band mountain band of the Chippewa, to stop the mind from caving in on itself. Go outside. Replace digitized awareness with direct experience. Mend and revive a verge, some solid land, a habitat, your backyard, a relationship. Reintroduce native plants that provide food and sanctuary for pollinators and birds. Learn their names and stories, as Wendell Berry counseled. Be joyous though you know all the facts. As Wendell Berry counseled, be joyous though you know all the facts.

Paul: 1:36:16

Although we face what appears to be an insurmountable endgame brought about by ignorance, aggression and greed, we also live in the most brilliant period in human history. Breakthroughs arise from breakdowns. Renewal results from disturbance. Regenerating the world is the journey to possibility. Vistas open, the extraordinary diversity of voices, social organisms and entities emerging in the world are rehearsing the future. As I wrote this sentence above, a swallowtail butterfly flitted about the window and came in its wings, gently fanning the air above my fingers and keyboard.

Paul: 1:36:59

Change and wonder, doubt and fear walk hand in hand. This is the nameless era it was predicted, but the common fate of prophecy is to be ignored. The juggernaut institutions that lay waste to sea, land and people cannot endure. Top-down solutions for regenerating life on earth will fail as well, because nature does not work that way. A beginning is near a threshold and so too is an end.

Paul: 1:37:31

Without fail, meaningful change begins with one person, one idea, one aspiration, an audacious dream. Singularity is the birthright of the planet and every cell, it is the seed of community. Plant it. Doom and gloom are cobwebs. Brush them aside. We seek rapprochement with Mother Earth, the vast and mysterious primordial intelligence that steadily gives birth to all that exists, that sustains all that is. Beliefs do not change our actions. Actions change our beliefs. Complex realities begin as simple acts enchantment, humility, respect, imagination and constant gratitude Greater openings to the aperture of the living world.

Paul: 1:38:21

Monica Galeano suggests we stop playing God and instead play midwife. We can't save the planet. It will save itself. The planet is innately regenerative and we are invited to join. The invitation is to create a world that's worth saving. Living species are rapidly dwindling in number. We eat, drink and breathe because of this mantle of life. Do we keep it or lose it? You can't be both cautious and courageous, so choose Focus on what is in front of you, give yourself permission to fail, leave room for foibles and giggles. Find a restorative movement you can sing and dance to lest creation plays to an empty house elsewhere. Fundamental human rights and needs must be met. Everyone on earth comes first. There's no second. Revive, honor and nourish the wild, bountiful lives that forever astonish us with their splendor and grace. Our intention and our reward are the same To experience and express our irrevocable connection to all beings. It's the only way forward. So you can take whatever you want.

AJ: 1:39:44

I'll be taking it all. PH: Anyway. AJ: Wow, I was just listening to the garden singing as you spoke and I thought, yep, the garden singing there too. PH: Yeah. AJ: what a great privilege to share.

AJ: 1:39:57

PH: Oh yeah, it was lovely to be with you. AJ: That was Paul Hawken, bestselling author and dear friend and supporter of the podcast from almost the very beginning. For more on Paul, his broad array of highly influential bestselling books and other work and how you can take next steps on the regeneration website - t hat's his website, a ctually spelled Regeneration - see the links in the show notes. There are a couple of photos on The RegenNarration website - t hat's my website, The RegenNarration - and more for subscribers on Patreon. And it's thanks again to you generous supporting listeners for making this episode possible. If you've been thinking about becoming a member or other kind of supporter, please consider joining us. Just head to the website or the show notes and follow the prompts. Thank you, and thanks also for sharing the podcast as usual and continuing to rate it wherever you can. The music you're hearing is Regeneration by Amelia Barden, and at the top it was Green Shoots by The Nomadics. My name's Anthony James. Thanks for listening.