06 Jacquie McGlade on hope from the Global South and the value of talk in international negotiations

In our online discussion, Jacquie McGlade chats about her unique perspective on environmental harms and solutions. She’s Professor at UCL in London and Strathmore in Kenya, is former Director of the European Environment Agency, Chief Scientist at UNEP (the UN Environment Programme), and is a resident of Kenya. 

She talks of hope in the Global South, and how the young of Africa will be future world leaders to get us out of modern polycrises. The North is brittle and fearful, where hope seems so easily dashed. In the South, “Hope always springs eternal.” She talks of national addictions to fossil fuels, and how with intent countries are changing fast. Jacquie was lead negotiator at the EEA and UNEP in international negotiations for COPs. Fundamental to all agreements and progress, she says, is talk. Talk is good. COPs are like large plays, three Acts, drama, ups and downs.

She says, “Living in a mud hut makes you endlessly happy.”

Her hero is Sir Crispin Tickell, climate negotiator and diplomat.

Her recommended book is Song of the Reed Warbler by Charles Massy.

Her top action: “Take one step, it’s how all journeys begin.” And then go outside, and “take a handful of soil, and smell it.”

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027. It is called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformative Stories for Climate and Nature Recovery."

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

It's a great pleasure to welcome Jackie McDo to the podcast today. Jackie has a unique perspective and experience on environmental harms and solutions. I think it would be fair to say, professor at UCL and Strasmore in Kenya, former executive director of the European Environment Agency, Chief Scientist of UNEP, and a resident of Kenya. So I thought we would start, Jackie, if it's okay, by throwing you a question about hope from the perspective of the global south. Things can look a bit, you know, we're in the middle of all these poly crises at the moment, and you know, they they seem to be getting worse. And yet there is hope emerging from a number of places. So how how do you see that when you're looking from the global south?

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Well, I think I have to differentiate between Kenya and other parts of the global south because you can imagine that um with nearly three-quarters of the population in Kenya under the age of 40, it's a totally different feeling than if maybe you're in other parts of the world. And that sort of speaks, I think, to the level of hope that people do have. Young people are inevitably ambitious. Uh, they want to, they're curious, they want to do things there. They themselves are seeing a very different world shaping around them. And I think they have made it very clear in Kenya that they have a voice and that that voice is being heard, sometimes with unfortunately consequences which go beyond simply shouting on the streets to arrests and elsewhere. But that sense of we're empowered and we have a right translates directly into hope. And it's just a wonderful experience borne out by living with the Maasai, who are inevitably the some of the happiest people, or contented, I would say, um, in the world, in the sense that you you walk out of my, I walk out of my hut in the morning and I'm greeted by just endless smiles. So even if there's no food and even if people are having troubles, it just seems to always translate itself into, well, that's life. Let's just move on. And I think that's where hope springs from. It's a view that they have a role in the world and that people are listening.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Yeah. So it would it be right to describe that as a kind of cultural asset that people have already and they're kind of holding on to that, irrespective of the kind of changes that go on around them. It's a kind of measure of the good life, if we wanted to put it that way, at contentedness.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Yes, and and I think it's well, I'd like to use the word resilience in the sense that you get these knockbacks. Of course, it's inevitable, you know, you don't have any money, people are incredibly poor, but that builds a different kind of resilience. It's not a resilience born out of moaning and thinking, oh, woe is me. It's it's born out of a resilience. Well, I've got to help myself, I've got to help everyone around me, my family. So you're you're never on your own, literally and metaphorically. You are literally helping others and bringing people up. And it's expected of you. And I think young people, as they find their way in the workforce, you'll see that many of them they don't have career trajectories like others in the world. They have, you know, a portfolio. They have five things going on, and any one of those might fail in a day, but there's something else to pick up. And I think it's that adaptability that really leads to the true meaning of resilience, which is diversity, gives you that sense of purpose, and you may arrive at it in many different ways from many different angles.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

That's interesting. And and is that is that wholly different to what we're thinking about when considering the, I say we, but sitting in the global north, um, uh what when we're thinking about the big picture when it comes to climate crisis, to nature crises, social inequality that plays in just in the way that you've just been describing. Language has changed a lot in the past 25, 30 years on these. How have you seen that language change and then the kind of ups and downs and how that plays into kind of hopes and fears as well?

SPEAKER_00 4:13

I I think overall it's a language that in the north speaks very much of fear, of security, of brittleness, being on your own, you know, try the there's a loss of community. I think that's a very important element. And if I was going to contrast the two parts of the world, if we want to do it that way, then hope springs eternal in the south. And I think hope has been dashed in many places in the north. And I think young people are living under a sort of miasma of negativity, which inevitably has sort of driven a wedge amongst not only those who have and those who haven't, but also those who won't be around to experience the worst. And I think that's really the case. So it's it's not that people have lost hope per se, but they've lost a vision of where they could fit into a future which is very uncertain.

SPEAKER_01 5:05

Yeah. So in that kind of context, do you I'm thinking about how we talk about these kind of crises? And it's really easy to talk about how bad it is, because we know a lot about how bad it is and how bad scenario one, two, three, four, or whatever it is that you might be looking at in a scientific context might be. But to a certain extent, maybe we should be avoiding that largely and and saying, well, you know it's not good, but here's the way to think about something kind of more positive. And it might be something rather small about forming community, as you just said, or changing the way that that work is organized, or thinking about a simple policy that will make people's lives better, and hooking things around to the positive side rather than the more more easily kind of um uh picked up how bad it is, really.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Well, I think you you're in essence picking up on where the real challenge lies is that we have got ourselves into a narrative which is extremely um is channeled down to this negativity where blame is being apportioned and there are those who are sort of victims and so on. And yet, you know, if I think about what's happening in the global south, there's every every understanding of what's coming drought, floods, loss of crops, people die. I mean, it's endless the disasters that lie up lie you know in front of everyone. But there's a sense in which you you can move around, there's more flexibility, you can have a language of, well, okay, this might not be very good, but here's the opportunities, here's what we have to do. And it's almost like the sunk costs in the north and in the global north are too deep. It's you can't find yourself retrenching from it. Whereas in the South, okay, we haven't had the same level of investment and therefore, you know, less to lose and more to gain, but still you need a lot of bravery. You need to be able to make those decisions, and I think that's where the biggest difference lies is that when you are surrounded by 70% of the population in the same age group, you kind of get a pack mentality. It's like, okay, we're gonna do this, and it's time for change, and we are gonna make the change, and we are the continent of change on Africa. I mean, there's no doubt about it. So the global leaders, I'm sure, will come from Africa in the future. This is this is where they are, and they're born and bred out of a totally different tradition, a tradition which is with family or extended families, weird family structures, as you can imagine, even in the Maasai, very odd, um, but where there's an acceptance of many more differentiators. Um, there's not the sort of salami slicing, particularly around religion. I mean, that just isn't really the case. You've got, particularly in Kenya, you've got everything, you know, you've got all religions. Um, but you know, there's a limit to that, and I'm sure that people will find their way through it. But going back to language, um, there's a huge respect for language still in Kenya and many parts of Africa, because of the what I would say the it's not a hierarchy, but it's a respect for elders. And that is incredibly important. The respect for elders means that you approach with your language a different way of talking to your colleagues and your, you know, in shame or whatever local language, and when you respectfully go and talk to the chief and you go and talk to the elders, and that's exactly what people still do. They haven't lost touch with that.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

That's very interesting. Um, one a wonderful thought as to how um the best knowledge, the wisest advice, the the critical friendship, um, the the um uh the straight talking when things aren't working, how that gets built up over time and then transferred across generations through a respect for elders in that way. And a quite a contrast with what you were saying about that that in the north we've got all these plank ways of doing things around fossil fuels. Let's kind of take that as a natural thing, but also a symbol of something much more. And and people are finding it super hard to get away from them. I mean, they just, you know, economies don't want to get rid of it. They're addicted.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

They are we are addicted at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

And yet some of the leading countries that have made the transition to uh above 95% of their electricity systems being from renewables are are countries of the south, um, including Kenya. Now, it could be argued that that's that's kind of only part of the picture because people are not, you know, they need more electricity, but at least they've all got many people have got some, but they're going to need more as economies develop. But if you look at uh Bhutan, uh well, Albania is not a country of the South, but it's a small country in the north. Albania, Paraguay, Uruguay, Costa Rica, they're all at 100%. And they didn't do that by accident. They all did it because the people, the culture, the politicians at some point, the investment authorities, whoever, decided we're going to do this. And that kind of intent strikes me as perhaps kind of different. Is that's kind of one of the things, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 10:25

But it's also the fact that we have a lot of choices often in the global north, which miss, which are missing in the south. So it's do you want electricity or not? It's not where do you want your energy to come from? And I think we're paralyzed sometimes in the north by that choice factor. So you often hear people saying, Well, is it going to be better if I take gas and then if I switch to this and I have low energy in the night, and then I charge my car in the day and the night and the batteries, and oh, and then should I get a heat pump and so on? So I think that choice factor is causing a kind of political paralysis because you don't really know what to incentivize people to do. You sort of know the better good overall when you want to get to it. Well, we hope they do, but how you get there sometimes is thwarted by too many opportunities being popping up all over the place. So sometimes you need a benign dictator, you know, to say, well, we're gonna do it this way. And in a sense, that's what's happened in many of the global south countries. You had that kind of vision and uh this is a singularity. This is how we're going to get there. Now, would that happen in food and food generally? Of course, I think we might be better off overall if there was clarity on you know how we're gonna how we're gonna grow the food to to look after ourselves in the future. That's kind of half of the problem, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 11:49

Yeah, it is. Well, could we jump into thinking about um conferences of the parties, the COPs, um, which are the international negotiating mechanism for uh for international treaties. But um we're thinking particularly about the climate COPS, um, but also biodiversity ones in recent times, and there have been some spectacular successes in certain areas and less good in other ones, um uh uh sector-wise. But the climate ones um have produced the Paris Agreement in 2015, um, and we're already just going over the 1.5 degrees that it was hoping to keep us to by 2050 or later than that. Um but how you you've been involved in some of these processes. Tell us a little bit about the kind of what do they feel like and um are they more than talk? And it struck me that actually maybe talk is the answer. Um that the you know, just getting people to talk, particularly when looking at the current kind of crises in the world, um, talking can be a really good thing because it can allow a little bit of space at least to create something kind of common and to smile at your your foes across the table or whatever the kind of context is. But um what about the cops and your your own experience of them?

SPEAKER_00 13:15

Well, I think you you've sort of put the finger on it, which is sometimes too much is expected of the UN. It somehow a lot of people misinterpret the role of the UN. They somehow think that it's the great governing decision body, the global decision body. Well, well, it isn't it isn't. The UN is the secretariat, it is it's at the service of its members, in other words, member states. And when you get to the General Assembly, of course, each country gets one vote. It doesn't matter if you're Costa Rica, Albania, USA, you get one vote. So worth remembering. And of course, we can tie ourselves in knots over things like the Security Council and so on. But what the multilateral um conferences have been able to do is to open up a space where people can have the conversations, they can disagree with each other. Um, we we like to have unanimity, but you don't always get that. But through diplomacy and through the language of diplomacy, it is possible often to craft um agreements, which from the outset you would think would never be possible. And sometimes I would in all the COPs I've attended, and the assemblies, the General Assembly, the Environment Assembly, all of these meetings that I go to, I often wonder whether one of the greatest roles in the COP and the UN itself is just allowing people to be heard. They sometimes just want to get something off their chest, or they want to sit with a group of people who think like them and feel that they're not sort of on their own, right? Yeah, and so what what the COPs often do is yes, they have a lot of yaya conversations and so on, but that is so critical to ultimately getting agreements. And if you don't have enough yay, then you don't get an agreement. Absolutely clear. And there's a sense of there's a little bit of FOMO of sort of fear of missing out. You know, you want to be in the pack, but you need to make sure that when people at home read the transcript, they see that you know you stood up and you said this, and the delegation really walked out when they had to walk out and then walk back in again through another door, all of those shenanigans. Um, and they're they're like large plays that play out over a number of days. You know, act one, we're all in the room, big announcements. Act two, in the trenches trying to figure out who's dealing with what. Act three, you hope you've got enough people to be on the stage to take the final bow. That's really what it's all about. And so that finale is made up of some very small little agreements. It might be an agreement on where a particular product is going to sit in the whole panoply of emissions and everything else. But it might be as important as saying, well, we're gonna have to have a target on, you know, bringing down a particular commodity or a particular way of travel and so on. Um, you can think about bunker fuels. So there's what I'd call satellite discussions going on in all the different bodies within the UN. So you might be talking about maritime fuels with the International Maritime Organization, but that will build up so that by the time you come to the climate COP, there's already a body of countries that are saying, yeah, we think we need to get bunker fuel out of the equation. So it's it's a kind of jostling place. And of course, with so many thousands of people attending, all wanting to have, yellow, hello, but look, come to come to my event, come to my event, you see. You have to be very careful about where you spend your time. The people who do very well are the ones who've got a single message, they bring their member states together, they clarify what it is, and then they put it into the main negotiations. So those are always very successful, but they take a long time to come up to the surface. So, on balance, I would say they are a necessary part of international negotiations, they are fundamental to getting agreements. Um, you can absolutely expect threats, some of them empty, others whatever. But on the whole, cops are where people behave very well. You do see the best diplomacy in the COPS. Unlike doing peace negotiations, a COP is where you stand in front of your peers or you sit in front of your peers, and if you're seen to be unreasonable, you don't you get short shrift. You know, you won't stay in the room for very long. Even if you're saying, Oh, but it's the I I've spoken to the capital and this is our stand, you know. Well, you know, the country next door is thinking, Well, did you really? You know, so it you you there's a level of skepticism amongst the member states, and the job of the UN and the COP is to get everybody moving in the same direction, and that's why it takes so long sometimes to get there.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

Well, that's a beautiful description of a of a working system. I mean, isn't it? I mean, that's I think so. That that's what it's all about. So you were um uh um chief scientist at UNEP um for a while. So that was based in in Nairobi, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Um and so what kind of changes did were you seeing from the perspective of of UNEP looking into the UN system, but also um implementing projects, working with partners as an agency of one of the kind of key agencies of of the UN, um is looking in lots of different directions, not just policy or discussion, as we were just saying, for COPS. Uh they're doing an awful lot more than that. And resumably you were doing that as chief scientist as well.

SPEAKER_00 18:51

Well, yes, certainly. And there is a big difference between things that end with P, UNEP, UNDP, those are programs, and their budget is constrained by the Secretariat. So very, very tightly coupled to agreements by the General Assembly and by the Economic and Social Council, as opposed to the FAO, which is an organization, the WMO, which is an organization. So things with P are in the core, things with O's are out there doing on the ground work. So if you're a P, you tend not to be allowed under the one UN to interfere at the national level, which is why sometimes UNEP and others use projects to make an impact on the ground, because the programs have to remain very much sort of outside of the jurisdiction. They have to work globally. So as a chief scientist, I would lead then the GO. So this is the global assessment on the state of the environment. Um, I had to insist and then fulfill the requirement to have full participation. So doing a GO, 6,000 scientists. So it's a bit like IPCC times two. Yes. We were also the secretariat for the IPCC with the World Meteorological Organization. So we were co-parents of the IPCC. Um, so of course, you know, you see all the shenanigans, all the politics, everything. Um, so in my role, I had, you know, I had the privilege to be inside the tent, but also having left the UN looking in now, I realized that UNEP is quite often not seen. It doesn't have a foot on the ground sort of presence, even under the one UN, the new reform process. And I think that was a shame, but UNEP was really small compared to many other parts of the UN, and therefore it can't be on the ground everywhere. So I think some of the most successful parts, and one I happen to be involved in is this thing called TEB, which is the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity. And on that, I'm leading a program called the True Value of Food, and that really is on the ground, you know, 10 million hectares in Kenya, in India, and so on. And it's gaining success because it actually does bring change on the ground with ministers, with communities, and so on. But he it can't do that everywhere. So I think you know it has to be very careful about how it spreads itself out. And as the chief scientist, when I was there, there was always this tension between, oh, we've got to say something about batteries today, globally, okay, batteries, and then um, well, what about the river down the road? And no, no, we can't get involved in the river down the road because we've actually got to kind of keep slightly above and not get too deeply into each jurisdiction. And that was such a it was a little bit of a frustration. But the geo, uh, in my opinion, brought together a lot of scientific consensus where there was none. So that was very important, but it also allowed, because we did regional pictures, allowed regions to work together on science to address the biggest problems. And it wasn't always climate change. Sometimes it was food, water, you know. And so you began to see really globally how the world was seeing each other. And that was also very, very interesting.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

Very interesting. So and the the description of these comings together at COPS and uh as you were describing with with UN processes, um it's not just doing an assessment of land or water or forest, it's it's ideas, it's kind of paradigms, it's kind of the way we think, the way we talk about these things, the way that we share good stuff that's happening or point to new concerns that emerge that nobody has thought of before. And so that space for ideas must lie between people, and people have got to kind of move into that to help that happen. Presumably that's that's that's the kind of thing you're describing, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 22:53

I am, and I think what I loved about it was that having given legitimacy to the 6,000 scientists, they were then enabled to, so to speak, move their own national agendas forward. Because suddenly, if you're saying it, but there's 6,000 or 5,999 other people saying the same thing behind you, you felt very much that not only were we kind of making the careers of some of these young scientists, particularly, but we were also consolidating positions on behalf of those individuals. And that's so important. So it it brought people together, but it consolidated positions of science and then backed up those who needed to front it in sometimes quite hostile environments.

SPEAKER_01 23:36

Exactly. Have a little story about going to FAO towards the mid-end of the 1980s, and somehow, as a young researcher, meeting the Director General, and we were talking about the importance of sustainable agriculture, thinking of agriculture with a sustainable um uh phrase at the beginning of it. And he said, um, uh, we don't do the environment here. Um, we're we're the food and agriculture organization, you need to go to UNEP if you're if you want to do the environment and that kind of separation. And I kind of realized there was quite a long way to go at this point. But I mean, I've 15 years later I was writing their their policies on sustainable agriculture. So sometimes it takes a while, and you need these little um kind of beach heads of of stuff to kind of get into organizations and ideas kind of build and brew and spread. And that wasn't certainly not at all down to me separately, but but that was a kind of when you see the territories of organizations, but then the need to bring stuff together, you're in that has to happen through intent. Somebody want to do it, yeah. Yeah, um, lovely. Uh uh another area that you've been working a lot on is on kind of regenerative agriculture methods um to increase carbon in soils uh and to pay farmers for the sequestered carbon. Um and um this is in no way uh uh a kind of means of saying, oh, we can carry on polluting with carbon because you're sequestering it, saying we've got to suck up stuff as well as stop using stuff. I mean, the two things have to go together, don't they? But tell us a little bit about uh how this is working and what's been happening from your perspective. How are farmers taking to the idea of farming for food and for carbon, if we can put it as simply as that? It's not quite simple, but I mean that's the idea, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 25:39

Well, I think it goes to the root of everything. I mean, I often say, why is soil so important? Well, we live on a planet called Earth. I mean, this is the point, right? So, okay. Uh-huh. But the the challenge, I think, is in the broader public to understand that growing food in the way that we have is like a big experiment. And it's a short-lived experiment, it's like the last 50, 60 years of chemicals. I call it chemotherapy. I mean, you think something's sick and you're going to pour some horrible chemicals at it. Whereas we've had several thousand years of growing food without that. And you know, obviously the excuse has been more population growth and so on and so forth. And so it's it was been kind of an anathema to say, well, main job of farmers, grow food. Oh no, now we want you to sequester carbon. But of course, go back 50 years, and that's what farmers were doing pretty much all the time. They were, because they were putting organic matter into the ground, the harbour bosch system hadn't quite delivered fertilizers on the industrial scale that we have today. And so they were much more aware that what generated yield was very healthy soils which have got a very large aliquot of carbon in it, and with that you grow soil. You know, you in the normal way of things, you know, a ton is lost through erosion and a ton is gained through soil building. Excellent. But we have soils all over the world where you can have as much as 50 tons a hectare being lost from erosion, and that's just poor management, sheet erosion, gully erosion, wind erosion, you name it. So the idea of changing practices to not just restore land, but to go back to food production that's high in quality, that's got high nutrient density. So these things all go together. And so I tend to say to a lot of farmers now is don't get carried away by offers of money to pay for carbon. That is not the point. Know how much carbon you have and how much you potentially could have, because the more you've got in your soil, the better your soil is going to be, the more resilient it'll be. Oh, and by the way, the food will taste much better. So, in a sense, the motivation is still growing food of higher quality. And I think that in the last two or three years, the big flurry of let's make all farmers carbon farmers is a realization, particularly at the European level and by many countries, that actually farmers can be carbon farmers, but that they don't need to sell it. In fact, probably many of them don't want to sell their carbon. They want to put it in the ground, but they want to be recompensed by it. They want to have a premium, premium price that will say you're doing a good job, carry on. And we're going to measure you by how much carbon you have in your soil. And that is emerging. Um, I have a company called Downforce, and that's what we measure. And it's quite extraordinary. In, for example, cotton, there's a price premium because the cotton growers that we have, not only are they reducing the amount of water, they barely use any chemicals, they reduce their emissions, but the amount of carbon they sequester has meant that they can now genuinely demonstrate they're on a net zero journey. So they are legitimately carbon farmers, they're growing soil, they're growing a crop, so they're doing a huge amount. And in that comes biodiversity and water and everything else. And we see it again and again, you know, whether you've got cattle production, we've seen phenomenal changes in landscapes by really, really effective cattle management. So hyper-local grazing management where you keep moving the cows, you know, every hour they move to another hectare, another hectare, another one. Beautiful beef comes off it. But you look back and you see water in a dry landscape has now been restored, grasses are back and so on. So I think farmers, as they've got into this, after that first flurry of, ooh, you know, let's get 20 tons, 20 pounds a ton, 60 pounds a ton for our carbon, it's now, no, this is a valuable asset. And that's why I call it the true value of food, because that's where we want to see people actually compensating or recompensing farmers for the work they do to keep all of us on a safe planet. That's actually what they're doing.

SPEAKER_01 29:53

Yes, exactly. It's very interesting that the the description of the multiple benefits that you've just made there, you know, that it's it's growing the soil and it's growing the food and it's doing it with minimal inputs, and you're holding the water in the landscape, and it's good for biodiversity. This goes against a kind of common paradigm that that is still prevalent, which is that there are inevitable trade-offs between economy and environment. That if you want growth, you need to be happy with tracking the environment. Um, so we're going to do this, this government stuff, rather than try to do both things together. Um, and it and it and it given the amount of evidence that shows uh suggests and shows that that doesn't need to be the case, and the experiences in lots of different sectors, not least in the remarkable stuff that's happening in agriculture. Um, I wonder why we're just not able to get that across, or how, or maybe it's the deep hold that that that kind of line of thought has that we'll deal with the environment when we've got the economy sorted out sometime in the future. But of course, that doesn't work because just trash the planet and it's all going to go to beginnings anyway.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

Well, I I think the I think the level of shocks that are coming down the line have now really undermined that argument because the system as it is just can't withstand it. There's no resilience left. And if I look at some of the farms in the UK and I see the drought and the effect, a lot of them just went over the cliff, yield went down, soil organic carbon collapsed. The farmers that are doing regenerative kind of farming, that restoration, they all held up, their yields held up, they've got wheat, they've got water, and so on. So you don't need too many seasons to make that point come over. And once you've got the attention which we have of government here, that we have a food security problem. I keep saying, well, let's put us, let's put the country on a food resilience footing, like a war footing. Let's put us on a resilience footing that come what may, we will be able to grow food. It might be seasonal, we might be able to grow everything, but we'll at least be able to grow things on the land that we've allocated for agriculture.

SPEAKER_01 32:07

Yeah, exactly. And meanwhile, um, I mean, there you've been involved in uh examples of regenerative agriculture using new mechanisms like biodiversity net gain in in Essex and elsewhere to say, well, look, here's a little bit of extra resource, a bit like the the carbon that's not going to uh allow farmers just to stop what they're doing, but it's going to be a little bit of a top-up that allows this kind of shift in practice where you get the regenerative ag and the increased biodiversity running alongside, and those those rails are kind of parallel, they're all going in the same direction.

SPEAKER_00 32:45

And that's they are, but I also, yeah, but we also have great evidence that shows more and more that the landscape in which your farm sits is really affected by the biodiversity in the landscape. And I genuinely see from the results that we can have, which is that where the carbon, you can almost see it trailing in from the forests into the field. So the yields are benefiting from that surrounding biodiversity. This is no longer folklore, these are actual data and evidence, and that's fantastic because who wouldn't want to have nature doing a lot of heavy lifting? That's the whole point, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 33:20

Yeah, exactly. And it's doing it for free, by the way, once you put it in place. I mean, you've got to do some but but you're not investing hugely in it. No, exactly. Fantastic. Well, could we just shift back to to Kenya a bit then? Yes, Jackie, and tell us a little bit about uh uh about your life in Kenya with uh Martai, a little bit about that. There's a lovely online piece um on KTN's at uh Pertil Takeawa um uh um talks to you about your life and goes to your village and your hut and looks in your kitchen. She looks a little bit kind of aghast at the size of the topic. Uh but it's something about you know, she sort of went through a transition of of right before our very eyes. Um uh but you and you mentioned the Maasai earlier on and contentedness and a kind of a worldview that is determinant in terms of you know how people are responding. So a little bit about that, and I think you've got an object as well. The object that people often bring to the podcast, and you're going to show us your object.

SPEAKER_00 34:24

I will show you our object. So hopefully that stays in. And I'm going to lift it up because it's got lots and lots of pieces with it. So this is um what's called a marriage collar. Um, it's got cowries and it's made of seeds and cowries and cattle uh leather from a cow. Um, so that's made for you when you when you get married. Um, cowries are very valuable, but they're often used in the exchange amongst families and so on. Um, yeah, I mean, living people often ask me, you know, why soil? And then, of course, it occurs to me, well, I live in a mud hut. That's why soil. No, but seriously, it is the most amazing material. So my house has stood for 10 years and it's still waterproof and it's just gorgeous. It's 16 foot by 16 foot. Um, those ladies who do, you know, the decluttering who come and clear out your life, yeah, I think they would love the Maasai because you just have what you need. So I have a I have a very luxurious, I have a bedroom, I have an office, I have a living room, and I have a kitchen, like a little galley kitchen. And everything can be done in that way. That's it, you know. And I put solar into the village. We built a whole new village. Um, so we took the fire out of the houses because of all the smoke, and we've put um I've put electricity in every house, so everyone's got four light bulbs, you know, inverters to charge things, and there's water at the back, and there's toilets and showers and so on. So, as best I can, I've made it a sort of 21st century fit-for-purpose village. Um, each house cost about $200 to build, so not bad. And um, yeah, so people really have a great life, but just to sort of everything feels um kind of in harmony is an interesting word to use, but it's like it feels that living in a mud house and living in the bush makes you a different person. It forces you to be a different person because you're surrounded by trees that are frankly filled with medicines. You're surrounded by children who are endlessly happy. I I you know, literally, people do not moan. Um, you have animals like cows and goats and sheep, but the Maasite cows are incredibly placid. So, you know, the everyone's sort of moving around. You've got dogs that are protecting you, you've got warriors whose job it is to protect. I used to think they sat around and did nothing. No, no, no, no. They're actually sitting, gazing at the landscape, checking out who's where and so on and so forth. And they've got their spears and they've got their bows and arrows and all of that. Um, and you know, I do my best, I bring sort of elf to the village, and now all the children go to school. So the idea really is to make sure that every child finishes all of their education, and by that I mean secondary and then hopefully going on to university, and you have to pay for that. So we have to make a bit of money. So we've opened a hotel, um, a little boutique hotel, so people can come and stay. It's very luxurious, and they can come to the village and have a naming ceremony. So we want people to be in our community and to experience it genuinely, not just sort of like an hour visit, but to feel that they're surrounded by the Maasai and to have that sense of living with animals, living with wildlife, respecting wildlife, um, and at the same time looking to a future where some of these people will become leaders, but they have a different root, they're rooted in a different way in the landscape. And so knowing the stars, knowing the landscape, when you're there, you feel, oh, now I understand this is where humans came from. Because you literally, at two and a half thousand meters in the Rift Valley, surrounded by that world, it's like, yeah, this is this is home. Yes, and that's why the president said, Welcome home to everybody. We would deny nobody a visa. Come to Kenya.

SPEAKER_01 38:15

Yeah, that's right. And that's where the in that area of the Rift Valley is where the skeleton of Lucy was found, one of the earliest um uh hominids that was walking, she was walking on two lakes, and that was kind of an early part of human evolution.

SPEAKER_00 38:32

Yeah, and you feel it when you're there, you really do. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:35

I think that idea of allowing people to because um all communities are going to need, and we talked about it with agriculture just now, you're going to need to produce stuff in order to get resource, in order to deploy that resource in in other kinds of ways. You're going to need to get access to money. So if we can get people to come and stay and they're willing to pay a little bit extra for that kind of experience, a couple of nights, but that's very different when you stay somewhere, when you stay overnight, you settle into the landscape a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 39:09

Um and there are many ceremonies that are important. So Enkai, God, is deeply rooted in everything. But there's also another element where, particularly amongst the elders, they think that if you put a hole in the earth, you destroy the planet, which is why they don't farm. Traditionally, that's why they're pastureless. Yeah, so so plowing up the land is not good. Now, there are some Maasai who now do do that. But when I introduced hydroponics, oh my gosh, that was wonderful because they didn't have to make any holes in the ground. And they can grow vegetables. How interesting.

SPEAKER_01 39:43

So you get hydroponics, they just grow it above ground with water and away you go.

SPEAKER_00 39:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's all it's all kind of you can modernize the Maasai to be able to eat all the fresh vegetables that you need, and of course they have livestock for there for all of the other products. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:00

Oh fantastic, lovely. Um uh would would you like to it sometimes it's a kind of troubling word, hero and heroine. Um, but is there is there a heroine or a hero or a community, somebody you look up to in your own experience that you'd like to kind of point towards who's helped to shape you or knowing about them has helped to kind of inspire you? Who do you point to?

SPEAKER_00 40:27

Unfortunately, he has passed away. So it was Sir Crispin Tickel. And he's okay, you know, white-haired old gentleman by the time he passed away, but he was a phenomenal diplomat. Oh my gosh. He taught me more about how to be a diplomat than I think anyone else. And he was the one who showed me how to undertake my duties, and it was only when the person had left the room that they realized that the fatal blow of the spear had been given. And and and he showed me how you can make change. And of course, he was Margaret Thatcher's climate negotiator in the UN. And I learned a lot about how to get the Paris Agreement because I was also working on the sustainable development goals. Um, and I did the environment pillar of that, I had to lead on that. And so there were many times when you know he really his words used to come back to me about how to, you know, finesse things within the diplomatic world. So I would say, yeah, from a diplomat's point of view, he would be, he would be my uh person I think I got most out of. There are many others who've influenced me, but he, for one, was was uh he was a master at the at this at the uh at this at the science, the source, I don't know what you'd call it of diplomacy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:38

Yes, yes, the art perhaps as well.

SPEAKER_00 41:40

The art of diplomacy, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:41

I met him when I was working at IIED, the International Institute for Environment and Development. Um uh and uh yes, he was just exactly as you've described, somebody who you realised had these great kind of capabilities that were going to be deployed in effective ways.

SPEAKER_00 41:56

And he was passionate about passionate about the nature and the environment. I mean, of course, you know, David Attenborough, I mean, the king himself, you know, dealing, you know, working and interacting with all these people. But um, yeah, I think he crispins of encapsulated a lot more than just that.

SPEAKER_01 42:12

Yeah, marvellous. Um, a key book or cultural item of yours to recommend. I mean, you've just shown us one gorgeous cultural item, the your your marriage collar or wedding collar.

SPEAKER_00 42:24

Um wedding, I think, would be the would be the the one to do that. That you'd recommend well the song of the warbler, and um I don't know if anyone else has ever chosen that particular that particular book. So um I think uh it's a book about a landscape that was, I guess, really looked after. Um and it was uh Charles who who wrote the book, he he was somebody Charles Massie, he he was somebody who he lived and breathed that landscape and he brought it back. And so is this idea that you walk into nature, but it takes a long time. But um I know him, I've met him, and I think you know, again, his contribution, both in writing style, but also that commitment, just enormous commitment, is something that you know I I have great admiration for. But I love the writing in it, I think it's gorgeous.

SPEAKER_01 43:22

I I I completely agree. There's this kind of long arc of a journey, and somehow um able to be be kind of persistent and optimistic through through the arc um of bringing nature back and the read warbler comes back as the symbol of this.

SPEAKER_00 43:38

Exactly, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 43:41

Um there was a there was a uh one moment that I I talked to him about this um where his nine year old grandson says, Um, why do we have to kill things in order to grow things in the landscape? And I thought, ah, there you go. Out of the mouth out of the mouths of babes. You know, he really really kind of hit upon uh what what Charles and other regenerative farmers were were trying to do. Yeah, um strongly recommend that as well. Um uh a top action. What do you think people should do? Um sometimes it feels as though um small actions are not worth trying because the problems are so big, but I think we all kind of understand that a long journey's got to start with at least one step and then another step.

SPEAKER_00 44:28

Um I would thoroughly recommend if you haven't already done it, go outside wherever you can, park your house, your garden, whatever, take a handful of soil and smell it. And if it doesn't smell, fix it. Look after that. And if it smells, go and find another place where it doesn't and help people to bring dead soil to life. That for me is the action.

SPEAKER_01 44:52

Right, fantastic, brilliant. That's that's great. Thank you, Jackie. Well, it's been a real pleasure to talk to you today. Um, Jackie McGlaid, thank you so much indeed for coming on the pod. Um and uh all the very best. Thank you. Thank you.