Hello, nature fans and adventure lovers, and welcome to Thin Ice. I'm Dan Smith, and our co-host, Robert Swann, will join us shortly. This is episode three, and we're shifting our attention from Antarctica and traveling north to the Dane Tree Rainforest in Northeast Australia. And the first thing we're going to do is change this music. This is a fine song for sinking ships and slugging across the Antarctic Plateau on foot, but I want something a bit more peppy. So let me look through the files here. And yeah, that'll do. So we'll be talking with Robert's 30-year-old son, Barney Swan, who will share his ambitious effort to restore a 527-acre section of the Dane Tree Rainforest. To help you follow along, I do need to provide a little bit of the backstory. Our previous episode, The Sinking of Southern Quest, ended with Robert's first march to the South Pole in 1986, which began his life mission to protect and preserve Antarctica. For the past 39 years, he's pursued that mission through improbable expeditions and adventures, such as, in May of 1989, he led a team of eight people from seven nations on a 700-mile walk to the North Pole. That feat cemented his place in history as the first person to walk to both poles. In 1992, he addressed 108 presidents and prime ministers at the UN's first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Then in 1998, a group of Dutch business leaders donated a 67-foot sailboat, outside the U.S., you'd probably call it a yacht, which Robert used to circumnavigate Africa in the early 2000s, promoting AIDS awareness, sustainability, water conservation, and recycling. Further sailing adventures ensued, and in the 2004 Sidney Hobert yacht race, one of the world's more difficult yacht races, he demonstrated the world's first sales made from recycled plastic bottles and the sales sported solar panels. This began a trend of demonstrating innovations in inhospitable conditions because if alternative energy works in those tough conditions, they can work in almost any condition. We'll put a more complete list of these expeditions on our website, thinice.earth. But the important point now is that a very young Barney Swan accompanied his father on many of these expeditions. And after 20 years of watching and participating in his father's commitment to Antarctica, Barney crafted his own commitment to rainforests, and he is using his project in the Dane Tree to develop models for regenerating other rainforests, especially in Southeast Asia. So with those tidbits on the table, let's begin the conversation. Barney and his dad were together in the Dane Tree when we recorded this, and the first question goes to Robert. Many people don't know that after you completed your walk across the Antarctic landmass in 2023, you spent much of the next year in the Australian rainforest, a totally different kind of climate. And it wasn't to get away from the cold, it was really about being with your son Barney, perhaps returning the favor because Barney had helped you reach the South Pole. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
SPEAKER_02When I reached the South Pole on episode one and two of Thin Ice, I was twenty nine years of age, and it took uh me a really long time to try and complete the crossing of the whole of the Antarctic landmass. In fact, 37 years it took. And Barney came with me, and without Barney, quite frankly, I would have not made the South Geographic pole. I was 68 years of age, and really I shouldn't have been out there, Dan. Uh but we made it on Undaunted.
SPEAKER_03Okay, sidebar. If you know Robert's story or want to skip the details, then go ahead and hit that 30-second fast-forward button a couple of times. But I want to explain that in Robert's 1986 expedition, called In the Footsteps of Scott, he walked 900 miles to the South Pole. That left 600 miles to cross the entire Antarctic landmass. Thirty-one years later, in 2017, Robert and Barney attempted to close that gap with the South Pole Energy Challenge. Barney was in his early 20s by then, and this expedition demonstrated solar ice melters for NASA, which could be handy on Mars someday, and they used biofuels made from waste to heat their tents and cook food. Unfortunately, Robert's hip gave out and he was evacuated with 300 miles to go. Barney continued the 50-plus day march with two older colleagues. Robert had a hip replacement and in 2020 embarked on the last 300 expedition. But with 100 miles to go, a slip on the ice pulled his new hip joint out of its socket. Uh-huh. I'm still shuddering about that too. But Robert had a second hip replacement, and the undaunted South Pole 2023 expedition proved the third time really is the charm. His father and son reached the South Pole together. It was a glorious and miserable experience.
SPEAKER_02We did it. And at the end of that expedition, I thought to myself, well, Barney's put in some serious, hard miles for me. I should go out to Australia and support what he's doing here in the oldest rainforest on earth. It was an exciting moment for me, and I have to underline it, Dan. It is considerably warmer here in the rainforest.
SPEAKER_03Rob is actually in Australia as we're recording this. I'm in North Texas. But Barney is with you. So, Barney, I want to welcome you to Thin Ice.
SPEAKER_01And an absolute delight to be here with Dad and you, and really delighted to get stuck into the uh family-oriented conversation of what it takes to pull together these sort of expeditions and indeed not kill each other in tents in minus 40.
SPEAKER_03Or in the rainforest heat. And that's really the focus of this podcast is the work in the rainforest. You were born in London, and at a very young age, your mother decided to move to Australia. Her mother was Australian. Can you tell us what it was like to be such a young child moving from a very urbane and urban environment like London to the remote wilds of Northeast Australia and Queensland?
SPEAKER_01Well, Dan, it was definitely a bit of a rude shock to go from Putney, which is uh very much in the greater city of London, to off-grid rainforest living. I think my mum had a very ambitious, somewhat idealistic perspective of what it was going to be like. And promptly on arrival, it was clear that we had an off-grid energy system that at the best of times might get your little fan running until about one in the morning, and then promptly from one o'clock until either the generator was turned on or the solar kicked in, you wouldn't have a fan. So just to be sweating at age six was definitely a bit of a humble reminder laying in a wet bed from being in humidity. And so many, so many lessons came from not having those luxuries per se of air conditioning and energy on demand. So it was definitely very humbling from an infrastructure perspective to move from London to the rainforest. And indeed, a cultural perspective.
SPEAKER_03And shoes were not part of the picture with your crowd there at the time.
SPEAKER_01Shoes were definitely optional to say the least, and if not encouraged to be better, the uh the the local youth were definitely um giving me a fair bit of grief, not only for my prisoner of her majesty accent, but indeed being a little bit too pasty white, not being able to navigate the uh the bush, and indeed wearing wearing shoes. And the little school I went to, which is Wonga Beach State School, which actually did a fantastic job catching me up from being not the most literate person coming from London. I think I slipped through the cracks a little bit. An amazing um teacher, Rick Wymer, actually was uh a huge environmental custodian locally and indeed taught me how to spell and to do basic numeracy. At that school, it was optional to wear shoes, but you got a detention if you didn't wear a hat, because if you're under twelve and get the UV light, you are uh are far more likely to get cancer, melanomic cancer, skin cancer. So the the government basically you don't have to wear food, but you definitely have to wear a hat, which was uh a pretty stark reality to long socks and and trousers in London.
SPEAKER_03It's interesting. I grew up in a small town in Texas, actually uh a few miles outside of a small town, and I had two friends who were somewhere in the neighborhood of you know the six houses that were that formed our neighborhood out in the country. And I remember when I was ten and we'd go wander off in the woods. We were lucky if we saw a snake, saw lots of birds on on a rare treat we would see an armadilla. But you had a far different menagerie, and it struck me as interesting that you and your friends would go wandering off alone. How did you learn about which animals to watch out for and which animals were okay?
SPEAKER_01Well, Dan, I think only after working on climate force for the last five years in this rainforest that I have actually understood how wild this place is for six, seven, eight, nine-year-olds to be running around camping in the bush, no phones, no backup plan, just the fact that we had each other's backs was very unique. And it was it felt like a very big rainforest, that's for sure, being a a young lad and being chased by giant guana lizards and hearing the Kasari call, which is basically a forest emu ostrich, which would make this guttural noise, it was like a As much as I admire Barney's impression of a Kasawari, this is what I found on YouTube for an angry Kasawari, one of the world's most dangerous birds.
SPEAKER_03Something you want to run into in the dark when you're less than four feet tall.
SPEAKER_01And if you heard that in the forest as a little one, and uh these birds were five foot, six foot tall at times, it was pretty darn terrifying. So it was actually only when I was 17, 18 and I got over a little bit of that fear and had a sort of Tarzan moment when I felt the fear creep in and actually was smashing rocks and getting pretty 2001 space odyssey to actually reclaim a bit of that childhood beer, which was needed because if you don't respect the forest, if you don't respect the ocean, you will be in trouble, not only in Australia, but a lot of natural places around the world. So definitely a good reminder to keep safe and remind you and everyone that the sharks, the snakes, the the big spiders, the leeches, the stonefish, the killer jellyfish, the crocodiles, uh this is their home. And really just got to tread lightly and respect that and not bring that that natural arrogance to think that we're the dominant force when you're living in a hundred and eighty million-year-old ecosystem.
SPEAKER_03Right. And then I look forward to talking more about that. But I wanted to address a question to Rob because I know that back at the time when Barney was a very young boy, you were still very much part of his life. You became a an in-demand speaker at climate forums and UN meetings and things like that. But you stayed in touch with Barney and you brought him on some of these expeditions. What were some of the places where you brought Barney along?
SPEAKER_02I think it's worth saying that uh one of the reasons that Barney and his mum came out to Australia is because I was very much an absent human being in the family, and I regret that. But that was the way it was in those days with me trying to preserve Antarctica and doing all the things, and uh Barney's mum, who is amazing, said, Look, you know, I I love you to pieces, but really it'd be nice to actually have a proper life. So I'm heading off to Australia and can I take Barney? And I said 100%. And I used a billion air miles to make sure that I came out to Australia, which is really quite a long way from London, to be with Barney and his mum and to try and make sure that I did have some presence in his everyday life, and it was my old ma that told me to do that, and and I'm really, really glad I did spend time with Barney here as he grew up, here in the rainforest, here in far north Queensland. But at the same time, I felt it really an opportunity for Barney to be engaged in in some of the things that we did, and I didn't force him to do anything, but I think he came at the age of seven to Antarctica on a yacht to help clear up all kinds of rubbish down there. And I think Barney was the only person that wasn't seasick on the yacht.
SPEAKER_03I hate to share family secrets, but Barney's actually told me that one of his first memories of an expedition with his father is the smiley face at the bottom of the ship's vomit bucket. The Drake passage gets everybody eventually.
SPEAKER_02And uh amazing experience and all kinds of other adventures as Barney grew up. Nothing is easy when you don't have any money. But what we try to do is to say, okay, well, we've raised the money for an expedition, and Barney, would you like to join that expedition? And that grew to Barney spending a lot of time at sea on our yacht 2041 that sailed eight times round the world. Barney, I think, has been to Antarctica about eight or nine times in his life now. Uh, but it's not a question of signing a cheque to him and saying, well, carry on, young man, go off to Antarctica. Each of our things that we've done together are a part of expeditions that have been uh really hard, as you know, Dan, to raise the money to make them happen. And uh we're together now on an expedition in the rainforest to help Barney with what he's doing uh here. So we're kind of expedition people, and Barney could give you a list of sometimes doing things without me being dispatched onto a yacht in the middle of the Arctic with a whole group of Russians who didn't speak English. And Barney was there, I don't know, 18, 17 years of age, not speaking a word of Russian, and we always used to have a very good laugh that it was a bit like being stuck in the middle of a Russian film, but you were in the film and everybody sort of screaming and shouting at each other in Russian. He's had from his own choice some extraordinary experiences, and I think that has helped him in this really overpowering, very hard job here in the rainforest. Today it's raining outside, it rains here 20 feet a year, over three meters of rain here a year. It's not called the rainforest for nothing. So hopefully, all those adventures have helped Barney in some way to pull off something quite extraordinary here.
SPEAKER_03Barney, how did the interplay of your experiences with your father and growing up in the world's oldest rainforest, how did you kind of marry those two and come up with a mission that you were going to devote your career to restoring a damaged section of the Dane tree?
SPEAKER_01Great question, Dan. And I think that Dan and the lifestyle that he has pursued throughout his life has always been a firm reminder that from a system's thinking standpoint, micro and macro are often not very different. What's happening on a local level in Australia is obviously different, but there's so many similarities to what's happening in Nigeria, what's happening in India, what's happening in the Middle East, especially from an environment perspective and people's need for resources, people's need for consumption, people's need for food, water, you know, all of the basics. So I think that being able to see my father's influence on Antarctic expeditions, his work in Africa, and his work in India, his work throughout the world, I think has been a firm reminder that Act Local Think Global is so true. And I think that took me on a journey early on in my career to be an environmental consultant, to be going to the likes of the United Nations General Assembly in New York and these cop events and and feeling a bit sort of strange at the World Economic Forum due to that lack of relevance as someone who's under 35. I think that understanding and being able to sort of peel behind the curtain per se of what's happening on a macro level has really allowed me to feel inspired, grounded, and and very with a deep purpose to then come and support where I was raised in the beautiful far north Queensland and this ancient rainforest, which I work in daily now. So I think that nice duality between micro and macro has been one of the biggest lessons that dad and working with dad and seeing his network and seeing his legacy unfold has been a really important factor to now being grounded to to deliver something from the ground up, which then can go to the macro big system. Because if you don't get it right on a small level and you don't get your your local system right, how do you expect that to replicate and scale uh on a state level, on a national level, and indeed an international level?
SPEAKER_03Let's dive into that now. You founded Climate Force, and that's a charity, as they call it in Australia, or a nonprofit as we would call it in the States. You had grown up near this plot of land, not just a plot, 500 plus acres of originally wild rainforest. People had come in, tried to grow bananas, they had tried to raise cattle. You were on the land during some of those times, but then you went to California, you went to college. As you made your transition into adulthood, how did you come up with the idea or what inspired you to return to that land that you had grown up on and take on this notion that I can restore the rainforest here to its natural state?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think it's a dual-edged sword that on one side, seeing that international momentum, there was a lot of frustration that everyone was talking about big macro terms, trillions of trees, gigatons of carbon and megawatts of energy. It all felt like that there was too much focus on quantity, not quality, especially when it came to how do we restore nature, the carbon market, and indeed young people's and locals input to that. So I think that that frustrated me that there wasn't enough quality in the space of restoring nature around that 2018-2019 mark. And I think that there was a big need for more trust. I often say that it's easier to say you work at a mine site in Australia to say that you plant native trees. There's a lot of skepticism and almost default lack of trust within this space. So I think that those were two important factors. And as a young person in the agriculture space and natural capital space, it was pretty rare to have someone under 35 embark on a big project. And I think all of those things I mentioned sounded very altruistic, and I had this sort of idea of pioneering something that hadn't been done, but that the reality is then I've completely broken my brain. I've hurt my back permanently with blowing out two discs a few years ago and managing a farm that used to be a commercial organic banana farm that was owned by Dole, which is an American company. And that swiftly went downhill, I think, in 2017, 2016. And what we started to manage in in 20 uh 20 was a complete overgrown, dilapidated mess. We've cleaned up around 200 tons of rubbish and had to put an energy system in, replace oil pumps so we have water, put in rain tanks, and create a kitchen space, do a complete overhaul with nothing but a big shed in the middle of nowhere that was covered in cow manure. So altruism meets reality in grit. I got into this through some of those things that I said, and I think now the ambition that's keeping me going is making sure that what we do on 527 acres can be packaged up and can be supporting other people to make not make the same mistakes myself and the team have made. Our data collection, our methodology, our framework, if someone had shown me what we have now five years ago, we might have saved half a million dollars and definitely a lot of headache, blood, sweat, and tears. And to run a project at this scale safely and with good governance and with a good financial mindset is very, very difficult. So I think now it's about sharing our journey and making an open source platform that allows others to contribute to our data and our learnings today. I think altruism got us into it, and grit and relevance has kept me going.
SPEAKER_03Speaking of grit, you mentioned the shed, and that was really a very Very large, almost a warehouse facility. And to say that it was covered in cow manure is probably being polite. After Dole bowed out, then it was a kettle rancher, I believe, who was trying to make the land work. And when he left, meth heads moved in. So you you have a vision. You also have this mess on the ground. And not only is the shed absolutely filthy and rat infested, but the rest of the 500 acres are overtaken by invasive species. What was it like when you actually rolled up your sleeves for the first time and said, I'm going to clean this up and make my dream happen?
SPEAKER_01Well, it was definitely overwhelming, Dan, to be looking at a huge property that had so many different parts of it that needed to be fixed and amended to just even have a functional baseline. I didn't know where to begin. And at that time was during COVID, so I'd just come back from the United States. I was staying with my mum in her little cabin, which I could only have a hotspot on my phone. So I'm trying to sort of fundraise, bring in attention and get people to support what we're doing on a hotspot on my phone that would completely stop working the second there was a storm front coming in, being covered in mosquitoes in your own office, and then to go down to an overgrown swamp that was covered in cows that would literally we would it was a zombie apocalypse situated in the shed. There was sort of bollards trying to keep out these cows, so we had to put up fences and bring in gravel so people weren't getting swallowed by mud piles. It was it was pretty much a full Som experience, obviously, without the devastation of war, but the attitude felt warlike. That going down in there, it was it was feeling like we were on the front lines on the trenches, especially for that first couple of years, and people thought that I was completely mentally out of control. Putting gravel onto a property that you didn't own and and just having this pipe dream that we could do it and that it would work out, and that people globally would would trust in what we were doing, but it was a full leap of faith then and just hoping that you would be caught before you hit the ground, basically. So those early days were incredibly difficult, and so many lessons of of make sure that when you slash somewhere that you cultivate up afterwards, it's easy to do this machine gun approach of trying to do everything at once, and so it's really taught me to step by step think of oh, if I unlock this, it will unlock this because it's very easy to get sidetracked and not focus on those 20% tasks that unlock 80% capacity instead of shuffling around with 80% of things to unlock 20% of capacity. It's definitely taught me to look after myself and to make sure that every little thing that we're doing aligns with a bigger vision that's coming to life.
SPEAKER_03You you mentioned that you did not own the land at the time. Did you have a lease or or any sort of claim on the land at all?
SPEAKER_01So when we started managing the property in 2021, March is when we formally had a lease, and it was just for the nursery space. So there were still 190 cattle being managed on the farm. And so it started with just managing the nursery space, and then from there getting an option to purchase, and then doing a fearful fundraising effort, and yeah, step by step we built it together, but the first year was just pure madness, and so grateful for early members of the team like Liana and Jack and some faithful volunteers who really got us through and were willing to take that leap of faith with us. It was very humbling to look back at what we went through together, and I think from a pride standpoint, it's not about needing anyone to know how grim it is, but just knowing that forsitude was in myself to pull it together to not give up because there were definitely moments just having fungi on my feet and covered in mosquito bites, and dad has the expression of going tropo when the humidity and the rain and everything just feels like you're going a little bit mad with cabin fever to not give up and to not go be a plushy consultant. Not say I've got many consultant friends and I consider myself a consultant, but be living in it, to be covered in mud, to be going a little bit mad, to to be just dealing with hundreds of tons of legacy rubbish that we're trying to clean up just so the place wasn't a dangerous mess. The stubbornness and tenaciousness to to persist when you really don't know why you're doing it. Definitely there was some big moments of that hitting strong in the early days of managing that project and turning it from an overgrown mess into now a very functional research thing.
SPEAKER_03So, Barney, we've talked about the land, but let's help our listeners out. Pretend that someone is is just walking up to the property for the very first time.
SPEAKER_01What is that experience like and what will they see? Well, I think the walk-up for for someone coming from Cairns, which is our local airport, it's a two-hour drive north, slowly going from a tropical city into Cane Land, into World Heritage, rainforest, and then finally reaching the Dane Tree River, which is a large salt border river covered in crocodiles, some of which can get to five meters in length, which is definitely a man-eater. And then from there, once you're north of the river, we're totally off-grid. So, aside from a dirt road, we create our own border, we create our own power, we manage our own waste. So, just that as a limiting factor to everything was a bit of a rude shock for people to be in the early days arriving in a place that without a 65 kVA generator, which is a very loud generator going, we had no power, we had no running water. So in the early days, it was a very basic shell structure, overgrown grass everywhere, mud sometimes as as high as your knee in places. We are between alpine wet rainforests, 180 million-year-old rainforests, which is the world's oldest. So we have a plethora of amazing endemic plants and animals, and then to the south of the property is the mangroves and blue carbon habitat river systems, and so we're really in this unique transect between alpine rainforests going into mangroves, and then the river and the reef. As a globally significant biodiversity hotspot, that all sounds great, but for what people see, especially in the wet season, is a lot of green, a lot of overgrown grass, and some very, very strange bird noises, some insect noises, and a plethora of amazing endangered species like the spectacle flying fox, moth, as big as as bigger than your head, the world's biggest cockroach. I mean, we have some amazing, amazing, amazing animals, insects, mammals, and it really is so starkly different. The the density, the complexion of a standing rainforest, and then in the 50s they bulldozed and burnt that forest, extracting the timber first to have cows down there. So the land really has transformed considerably in 75 years from a primary forest that used to be a hunting ground for the indigenous that had been in this area for 35,000 years. Traditionally, it was a hunting ground, and then in the 50s it started to be extracted through timber and then cattle and then the banana farm. And now what we're doing, which is a regenerative approach to making sure that we can get profit from this land, but not at the cost of the environment and provisions like soil.
SPEAKER_03You had mentioned in some of our prior conversations that it had been taken over by guinea grass.
SPEAKER_01Yes, guinea grass. We joke that the Latin name is Guinea's Maximus because it's a um an invasive species from Papua New Guinea. In two months, if you slash this down with a tractor, it's back up to seven, eight, nine foot tall above you. So this is incredibly invasive grass, which really takes hold of the cleared land. And often mainly conservative folks say, Oh, well, you know, you could just leave the land and the rainforest would come back. It's really not as simple as that in the tropics because once you clear land, you have invasive species that dominate and indeed keep that land from healing and returning back to primary native forests. So it really is a complex process to go from an overgrown grassy paddock back to something that is either a native forest or something that is profitable, like an integrated approach to bringing together food systems and forestry systems, and indeed, how do we work with this land to make livestock systems not hurt the planet? Because the reality is we can't turn all agricultural land back into native forests. There has to be that middle ground between industrial monocultures and pure conservation, and I think we're finally figuring that out after five years of managing that. What is that middle line and middle ground between the two?
SPEAKER_03Which is is critically important because you have a vision not just of res regenerating, restoring this particular section of the Dane Tree, but using what you learn here and creating a model that can be replicated in other devastated rainforests uh around the world, primarily Southeast Asia. As you're pursuing success in the Dane Tree, how do you see that unfolding around the world possibly?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think as a charity, what we've achieved in five years now is pretty remarkable. And I think the opportunity nowadays is to make sure that our process, our costing, our data sets are standardized and made into a system that is palatable, not full of acronyms, and trustworthy for folks in other rainforests in need to use, to adopt and to contribute to making our model relevant to their forests. Because obviously, if you're going to somewhere like Indonesia, you've got different labor considerations, cultural considerations, but the raw bones of it on how to functionally manage land, biodiversity outcomes, providing infrastructure to achieve that, and making sure that culture, things like healthcare, indigenous values, heritage values are considered within a full working system. And the fact that we're off-grid is a major pain in the backside because we don't get any help when the water stops or the energy stops or the waste starts to become a festering heap, even though it is a pain to manage everything. It's allowed us to be a lot more relevant to developing countries and developing places, including in Australia. There's a lot of remote communities in Australia that still don't have uh utility grade municipal things like order from the tap and energy provided from the grid or waste management services. But we're creating a model that is relevant because we're in that off-grid nature. And I think the future is going to be developing software that can support people in an open sense and delivering consulting, training, and ecosystem services on top of that. So I think it will be a blend of analog ways of supporting others through through good old consulting and and face-to-face interactions, whether that's digital or in person, and using some of these amazing tools that are becoming easier to adopt and integrate with the likes of AI, machine learning, and smart systems to really bring that trust in on that digital perspective. And I think that being able to use spatial mapping to really bring trustworthy layers to verify impact is the big opportunity right there right now, and hopefully we'll address a huge gap of trust within this space currently. If people can see it, they can trust it, even if it's from New York or Mumbai or London. I think it's gonna bridge that divide of of proximity and allow people to really feel good and trust in what's being done in places that they maybe not can just visit.
SPEAKER_03One audience would be people who can afford to help and and invest in biodiversity and regeneration. You also keep top of mind the economies that local people will depend on. And isn't that part of your model also of how do we turn biodiversity into an economic engine that becomes a virtuous cycle of supporting the people in the area while supporting the biodiversity and increasing biodiversity, in fact.
SPEAKER_01That is correct, Dan. And I think from an Australian perspective, natural capital, treat native tree planting, it's not considered a primary industry yet compared to the likes of banana farming or cattle ranching or sugar canes or things like corn. So there's a bit of a bridge that we have to get over. That mainstream government-coordinated industry doesn't consider native tree planting something that is an exportable product. Therefore, a lot of conservatives, old school farmers, they view it as a waste of space. You're taking good ag land, you're hurting our economy, bad, bad, bad. So we're trying to shift that narrative and explain that native tree planting isn't just a feel-good hippy-dippy tree planting thing, even though it does feel good. And I work with a lot of open-minded people. However, it's a mechanism and a financial instrument to optimize dead, fallow parts of their land. Having good modeling on horticulture, forestry, and livestock outcomes allows us to optimize a model for farmers, saying, Great, here's what you can do for biodiversity. You can make money from that, and it supports making your horticulture outcomes, your forestry outcomes, and your livestock outcomes more resilient, more reduction in the risk of disease, healthier water, healthier soil, and farmers and government and industry are really responding to that integrated model where biodiversity is a mechanism to allow more resilience, both from an economic standpoint and from an environmental standpoint, to allow these other more classic industries to thrive and to be done in a more diverse, regenerative fashion.
SPEAKER_03Another thing I learned from your website is that not only are you bringing modern technology to bear on this problem and leveraging minds from the developed world, but how are you working with First Nations people in the Dane tree?
SPEAKER_01Amazing. Dan, thank you for bringing that up. And I think just to give clarity that it's a blend of working with traditional custodians and fourth, fifth, sometimes sixth generation farmers. Both spectrums have a wealth of knowledge, obviously, from very different perspectives. A few multi-generational cane farmers who are bringing a very colonial perspective of how this land has been managed over the last 140 years, and indeed working with both the our local Aboriginal Corporation, Jabel Binner, and a few other local tribal leaders to make sure that their knowledge, 35,000 years of knowledge of operating, living, and sustaining themselves as a culture in this environment, what's the middle ground between the two? It's very, very interesting to hear both the differences between how they both approach things, the multi-generation farm and indeed the indigenous people, and seeing the stark differences between the two. But there's so many things that are shared within their approach, and I think both of them share that mentality of what does seven generations ahead look like? To come to a farmer and explain, oh, we're gonna plant a lot of native trees here. A lot of them are being like, Well, that's great, but what are my kids and my grandkids gonna do? What is that perpetuity? How is what we're doing allow my family and our local economy to thrive seven generations ahead? And similar to the indigenous perspective, they are really wanting to keep their law alive, their L-O-R-E, not our consideration of law, LAW, they want to keep their traditional ways of living, their knowledge behind plants, their connection to country alive seven generations ahead. And I think that the the middle ground between the two is making sure that whether it's a thousand-acre cane property or tens of thousands of acres of land that's been handed back to a an Aboriginal corporation, how can both of them thrive, optimise, and make sure that they have perpetuity in their livelihoods for their family and for their community? That's the main friction point right now between both that fourth, fifth generation farm perspective and that indigenous perspective. And specifically working with First Nations leaders has been very humbling. It's required a lot of patience to sit, to not talk. I have a tendency to talk too much. I'm learning to talk less, to listen more, to ask more questions, and to build trust up because the reality is globally there has been a lot of extraction of First Nations people for the last 500, 600, 700 years, and so building that trust up that we're here to co-create and that we're here to make sure that they're a part of that legacy. Outside of the financial needs of all of us, I think the main thing that I I see a lot of indigenous leaders, both elders, past, present, and emerging, is that they want to be a part of co-creating a legacy, that they know that what they're doing today with Climate Force or or another group regionally, that their kids and their grandkids know that their dad or that their grandma was a part of creating that legacy. So a lot of similarities, and I think it ties in also to working with a lot of uh family funds globally, that intergenerational investing is a very big theme right now, and I think a big pivot from that sort of four-year rise up a business, exit, make a lot of money. Working with nature requires a lot of patience, it requires a lot of long-term thinking, and it's refreshing to have not only the funders coming from that multi-generational perspective, but also learning from the ground, what works from an indigenous perspective and a multi-generational farm perspective.
SPEAKER_03Let's talk now about what is actually happening on the ground. You have just completed your fourth planting for people come from all around and volunteer to help you. Tell us about plantings and how is that changing life on the ground, biodiversity in your section of the section you're caring for of the Dane tree.
SPEAKER_01The plantings really are the lifeblood to keep us going. And it's pretty amazing, Dan, from our first plant out session in in 2022. Some of those trees are coming up 15 feet tall already, only in in three and a half years. To see the butterflies return, the mammals, to be able to be tracking that with camera traps, with bioacoustics, listening to the insects, to be doing soil tests, to be doing water quality tests, to be tracking all of it with spatial maps from drones. We have so much data to capture, and we've done a really good job of that. But I think specifically with the planting and an opportunity is how do we track the social return for what we're doing? How does an indigenous person or a backpacker or an employee or a family fund member or a student, what is that return they get from contributing to planting some trees and to be contributing to doing an internship for three months, or for one of our employees like Liana, who's worked with us for four years, what are those social key performance indicators that we can track and can be bundled into not only our digital platform, but to be really making sure that this is a human-led project. I think with the likes of AI, right now, even though it's an amazing tool and I use it daily, there's a risk that it dehumanizes a lot of things and and we rely on a lot of data points that don't have validity and don't have that human connection. So I think with the tree planting, it really allows us to make sure that what we're doing from a software perspective, what we're doing from a blueprint perspective, we that we keep relevant and that we keep human focus. Just as a note on that, that it all sounds great often, Dan. I say the say our story to people in Europe or or in Dubai or in Singapore, and people don't understand how much risk is involved in doing this sort of things, how stressful it is as a leader to be having a team of six that all need to be paid every month, and that having volunteers is great, but they need to be fed, they need to be housed. It is exceptionally stressful. Continuing to take those leaps of faith. Regionally, there's often an assumption that we've got this sort of infinite pool of money, and to only have one or two months of runway left before the whole shot cuts is incredibly scary. And within that, to keep grounded and keep leaning on your community and leaning on your family, not for money's sake, but for why am I doing this, is really important. The hardest day on our South Pole Energy Challenge expedition in 2017-18 was day 45. I had frostbite on my feet. I didn't know why I was doing what I was doing. I felt like one of those monkeys with the symbols, just smashing these symbols together for the sake of smashing it. And I I had a bit of a hard moment earlier this year, feeling like I was an air conditioning system that was just left running in an open hot field. And that sense of purpose, that sense of reasoning behind what you're doing is a breath of fresh air, having 50 people giving their own time to come and plant trees from you. For us, for our future. It really reminds you of that purpose because we create our. Own purpose, whether it's day 45 and you've got two weeks left on a thousand kilometer ski expedition or year five planting more trees with not that much budget. Why are we doing what we're doing? What is that reason? What is that fire that keeps you motivated when you're feeling half dead in the morning and the coffee nut isn't working and the emails are stacking up and everyone's asking you what you need to do? What is that fire and that grounding that keeps you going? And I think I'm shifting from being quite frantic about raising money and keeping the ship going to really making sure that I remain grounded. And that doesn't mean I don't work 15-hour days, but franticness doesn't sell. No one wants to be a part of supporting a sinking ship. They want to see the sales flying high and things heading in the right direction. The tree planting really grounds our community and it grounds my sense of why I'm doing what I'm doing, which is indeed for the planet and for the frogs, but it's increasingly to make sure that people have a place that is safe and that they can contribute to and that really has that longevity mindset.
SPEAKER_03Would you describe yourself as optimistic, Barney?
SPEAKER_01It's uh in there. But I I'm not sure to be honest, Dan. I think I'm I'm a I'm pragmatic and I'm realistic, but I'm definitely curious. I think there's a there's an optimism to my curiosity, but I'm curious how are we gonna get ourselves out of this kerfuffle as a species? How do we redirect 110 trillion US dollars worth of global liquid GDP towards servicing our planet and servicing the two billion people without water? And I am not necessarily optimistic, but I'm fierce at breaking down silos and making sure that relevance and breaking down hypocrisy and this sort of siloed reality of Donald Trump's face on one side and Greta Thunberg on the other, and the reality is we're on one planet and we're one species, and we're we're dealing with billions of years of worth of evolution, and then we all have a responsibility to clean up our mess and to make good business out of doing that.
SPEAKER_03If not optimism. What your father inspired in me was hope. What are the elements that give you hope?
SPEAKER_01People often put down in a box which he definitely isn't in, and he comes back to survival often, whether it's getting to the South Pole with no radio or doing some of the things that he's done that have required that leap of faith and that hope. But I think bottom line, the fuel is often survival. And I think the default for a lot of people is self-preservation instead of the survival of your regional culture or your family or your country, or indeed the biosphere in which we all share. So I think survival is a very powerful currency, hence why wartime innovation has spurred so many things that we all enjoy today, because war, even though it's very grim and I and it's devastating to see what's happening throughout the world right now in a lot of different front lines, but wartime mentality sparks innovation because survival really does put a fire up your backside to get out of bed and to push forward. But within that, you don't want to burn out, you don't want to be cynical. And I think hope is on one side, cynicism and being cynical is on the other side. And so, how do we remain relevant? Because talking to hope with a person who drives a trench truck or a nurse who's working double shifts, or a stay-at-home dad who doesn't have much time for himself, or a mine side operator, or a plumber, or a roadside operator, or or the industry folks who keep the world running, talking about hope's a bit rich when you're waking up at five o'clock to work a 14-hour shift. Survival as a word is relevant to those people. And I think that there's an immense opportunity right now to bridge that relevance. And we've seen in the United States and and globally a sort of de-woking of sustainability per se. We've got to shift the narrative from climate action to resilience, from sustainability to future-proofing. And if we can shift the narrative to something that's a 25-year, 10-year, 30-year plan away, to how do we survive today? How do we enact change and put our money into systems that allow perpetuity to be realized today? Survival as a narrative is something that both billionaires and people who are struggling to pay their rent for the week. It's a narrative that I think we could all get behind. And within that, if it's delivered well, it creates hope.
SPEAKER_03With that, let me turn a question to Rob as as we begin to wrap this up. I know personally how proud you are of Barney, but you're also an advocate for Barney around the world. What do you tell people about climate force when you are out there also pursuing your particular mission of advocating for Antarctica?
SPEAKER_02It comes down to one moment really, and that's when we were walking to the South Pole on undaunted. Uh, I was suffering badly with hip injuries, all kinds of problems. I was too old to be out there. And I remember looking ahead with Barney pulling his sledge in front of me with quite a lot of my weight on his sledge, which is a really embarrassing thing to land on anybody when you're struggling as as much as we were. And I remember looking at him just grinding away, pulling his sledge away. And I think being proud of family is wonderful, but I think I think I'm impressed by what Barney's doing, and there's there's a difference in that. What I say to people is that Barney, because I'm much more simple, you know me, Dan. I mean, I'm not very complicated. Listening to Barney sometimes I sort of wonder, is that really my son? You know, he knows all this stuff, and I've no idea what he's talking about sometimes, but it's incredible. What I say in a very simple way is that Barney is creating a blueprint for other rainforests indeed for farmers, which is very understandable when you think that people don't cut down rainforests just for fun, they're doing it for money. So, what Barney's doing is showing people how you can actually make money survive as a family by not cutting down all of the rainforests. It's a very simple equation, creation of a blueprint, and using today's technology to help them do that. And I also feel that what Barney doesn't really explain, you know, he mentioned the nursery in what he was talking about earlier. Barney actually plants proper rainforest trees, sixty odd species, I think, in total, and that requires growing the trees from seed, getting them ready to plant, getting all these fantastic volunteers to go out there, cutting down that dreadful guinea grass, ploughing the field, creating the holes for the trees, and which he has not mentioned, any gardeners here will understand what I'm about to say is that he does the whole thing organically. I promise you, it's much easier to get an enormous spray gun and just spray all the weeds under the trees. The trees are gonna survive, but Barney's doing it organically. Why? Because it's the right thing to do, and also that the runoff from Barney's property goes straight into the ocean, and three kilometres away is the most extraordinary thing, I believe, on earth, which is the Great Barrier Reef. He's showing not talking about it, and I think that his endurance and I I don't really like the word, but resilience to keep going on this is a great example to us all, including me, because sometimes I get a bit down in the dumps trying to save Antarctica and no one really cares about it. His resilience to keep this going, and it's especially the young people's team. All of these people are young people that have got together to do this. We're about to welcome a small group from Singapore, aren't we, Barney? That I think the average age is about 16 or 17. They're coming down to support Barney and what he's doing. So what Barney's real really all about, and what I say to people is yes, hope is a really good word, but hope is not a plan. So what Barney's doing is showing that you can have hope, but with a plan.
SPEAKER_03Climate force is an excellent example of creating a plan that moves beyond economic success through extraction, taking things from the environment, and moving to a higher vision of a living economy that rewards contributions to our environment.
SPEAKER_01Well said, Dan. And I think that it's important to consider as well that we're planning for the future, not just for what we're doing from a land management perspective, but also the future of technology. We have data that we can't even process yet. It's so detailed and it requires so much computing power. I'm on a 128-ram MacBook Pro, and we still can't process our drone footage to make it into a 3D render and a point cloud file. But in five years, we'll be able to do that. In five years, our data will be able to be processed in a whole different way. So I think it's planning for the future, and the fact that Nvidia and NTT and all of these big data centers around the world are preparing for adapting to the AI revolution that we're on the bell curve of right now. And even though that's daunting, and there's a lot of power use and there's a lot of energy use, how as a blueprint our property can be relevant to APAC on a human level makes me excited. And being prepared and knowing what's happening with this tidal wave of AI and commute power and machine learning and quantum computing, it's all coming, but it's not yet on the farm. But we know it's coming, therefore, we're designing a system that will be ready for when it catches up. And that's forward thinking, but it's also not getting too stuck into this kind of Silicon Valley go go adapt, burn, and repeat. We're working on a property that will be yes, you were right, Dan. We planted 65 species of native trees. We've got 190 species of native trees in our nursery, and we've planted 45 exotic food-producing species so far. Some of those native trees, including the red cedar, can live to over a thousand years old. So to think of what we're doing and how that tree in a thousand years will still be growing, that's also long-term thinking. So it's long-term thinking from an adult perspective and that multi-generational family perspective, but also long-term thinking on how what we're doing now will be able to actually contribute to the systems that will be coming online in five and ten years.
SPEAKER_03If someone wants to learn more, or better yet, if someone wants to participate or contribute party, how can they do that? Where should they go? What should they do?
SPEAKER_01Well, we can send through a package of materials. I'd recommend getting in touch with myself and our partnerships director, Jojo, directly, but our website tells a fraction of the story, unfortunately, because there's a lot of back-end data, a lot of back-end magic that's going on. And similar to the example that Dad just shared, actually coming out and visiting the property really allows you to see both the magic and the opportunity of what we're doing and where it's going. So digitally, I'd be delighted to connect. Our website is at least for the time being a window into what we're doing. We have our impact dashboard where we've geotagged all of our trees. You can see which ones died, which ones survived. So bringing down our impact to a unit base of individual trees is again an example of why we're building our trust. And we can't just purely remain as a non-profit charity forever. It's hard work to say the least, and having this sort of chicken and egg situation of relying on that next pool of donation to keep the shit running for another year, another month. God, a year would be good, but another month or two months. So as we're built building out our software applications, our consulting ecosystem service pathways, it's going to be exciting in this next year to see our blended finance bloom. And uh being a blended finance example of how do we build on six years of development funds, of charity nonprofit funds, and indeed start to create ROI valuation and internal return rates within what we're doing. So it's an exciting moment, a scary moment, especially with everything happening with global markets. But I'm incredibly confident that what we're doing is globally relevant with a focus on Asia Pacific short term, and very relevant to our region, which has just lost its local cane sugarcane industry at the beginning of last year. There's around 15,000 acres of sugarcane that the farmers don't really know what to do with. They all want to go to cattle or to do run things like maize, but there's a very, very, very big economic opportunity to have that blend of forestry, of natural capital, of food, and indeed livestock all harmonizing together to create up to a 10x increase in annual revenue for these farmers. So what we can do on our 527 acres will ripple to our regional opportunity, our national opportunity, and indeed that Asia Pacific opportunity. So whoever's keen on learning about that journey, happy to jump on a call and I think our website and just getting in touch.
SPEAKER_03Well, my friends, there you have it. But I encourage you to learn more at the Climate Force website at climateforce.com. Tell them the nice at you. I also invite you to visit The Nice of Earth. That's our website, and we've posted pictures of Barney's last planting, as well as his last walk to the South Pole with his father. If you enjoyed the show or at least appreciate the content, please tell your friends and leave a review. The Nice is produced by Robert Sullen and Dan Smith, and as always, thanks to Bernadette Daciano for keeping us on track, and a special shout out to the Climate Force staff Jack Leaver, Liana Toth, Tom O'Rourke, Jojo Jackson, and John Hardigan. If I overlook someone, please know that the Dame tree knows and says thank you. Until next time, keep Earth wild, be kind, and chill out.