Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast features the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
104 Judith D Schwartz on why our current economic framework is completely inadequate for regeneration at scale
The author Judith D. Schwartz joins us once again to discuss her new book, The Reindeer Chronicles, wherein she dives deep into regeneration at a large scale.
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The landscapes around us are a reflection of our consciousness and wealth is found in our functional ecosystems. Is it true that many of us secretly don’t believe or can’t imagine that abundance is actually possible? We dive into all that in this exciting episode with Judith D Schwartz.
More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/judith-d-schwartz-2/.
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Our landscapes are a reflection of our consciousness and wealth is functional ecosystems. Judith D. Swartz, writer of How Cows Save the Planet and Water in Plain Sight, is back on the show to discuss her latest book, The Reindeer Chronicles, where she dives deep into regeneration at scale, very large scale. Looking at examples in Saudi Arabia, Norway, Spain, China and Mexico to document it's absolutely possible to create abundant landscapes. So why are we not doing it everywhere? Maybe because many of us secretly don't believe or can't imagine that abundance is actually possible. Welcome to another episode of In March last year, we launched our membership community to make it easy for fans to support our work. And so many of you have joined as a member. We've launched different types of benefits, exclusive content, Q&A webinars with former guests, Ask Me Anything sessions, plus so much more to come in the future. For more information on the different tiers, benefits and how to become a member, check gumroad.com slash investingbridge.com. an egg or find the link below thank you Welcome to another episode. Today, we have back on the show, Judith D. Swartz, the writer of Cows Save the Planet, Water in Plain Sight, and a very, very interesting new book, The Reindeer Chronicles. Welcome back, Judith. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:Great to be here.
SPEAKER_00:And to start with a question, obviously, I will link to the interview we did in 2017, which seems six centuries ago now, which is still one of the most listened episodes we ever did. I will link it below if you want to know more about those other two books. But as you covered regeneration so much there, what triggered you? What made you want to write another book about regeneration, but this time the scope was just, and the scale was way, way bigger. What triggered you to go back to that subject, but take another look at it?
SPEAKER_01:Wow, that's such a funny question, as if I have a choice.
SPEAKER_00:You could write about anything else, no?
SPEAKER_01:Right. Well, as a journalist, well, it's what is compelling and the material and the developments around us and the need for a new story and for understanding where we are just so important. Okay, a few things that compelled me to continue in this vein. One was what I felt was a disconnect between all of the news out there about the environment that is relentlessly and aggressively negative. And that didn't quite square with what I was seeing out in the world. I mean, of course, I was seeing a lot of problems, a lot of crises, a lot of very alarming ecological developments, but I was also seeing incredible work that wasn't being highlighted in the general public conversation. So that was one thing. And then the other thing was the conversation about climate. What has been screaming to me is the opportunities that we have just kind of left dormant and The main thing is that so far in our conversations about climate, we have neglected the role of functioning, healthy ecosystems in climate regulation.
SPEAKER_00:And why is that? What's the root cause there? We had Walter Jena on the show and I don't know if it's out yet when this will be out. It depends a bit on the schedule, but like it's purely CO2. And he discussed that as well. Like, why is that that we're not looking at functioning ecosystems in terms of problem Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:well, Walter, of course, is someone who I've learned an incredible amount from, and he's someone that has really brought to the fore the role of the water cycle in climate. I mean, I'll give your listeners some coming attractions, you know, that really what drives climate is water-based processes. Now, taking that a step further is what drives those water processes, and that's And that is life. That is the activities and the behaviors of plants, animals, fungi, all of the living systems. And particularly, I remember when I finished my book about water, what I was left with, which was not what I expected at all, was the sense that plants drive the show.
SPEAKER_00:I remember that. Yeah, I remember we talked about de-vegetation, I think, in the first interview and plants drive the show. But I'm feeling that there's going to be a follow-up on that. So what do you currently see as driving the show?
SPEAKER_01:Well, we were talking about why the discussion around climate has stayed so CO2-focused. For this new book, for The Reindeer Chronicles, I spent some time in Spain with a scientist. My goodness, he's a meteorologist, climatologist, an atmospheric physicist named Mianne Mian. And it's really interesting to talk to people who have been around this realm for a while. So he's in his mid-70s, and he remembers in the 1970s, there was a line of inquiry about changing ecosystems and the effect on climate. Basically, changes in land use and climate.
SPEAKER_00:In the 70s.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. What was really interesting, he directed me to some publications that I'm trying to remember, like man-made impacts on climate or inadvertent human impacts on climate. And what was particularly interesting to me is that these publications actually developed out of a meeting that took place a half an hour away from me at Williams College in Massachusetts in the US. So Mian was kind of aware of how this conversation just sort of stalled. And as he put it in his cynical way, is that carbon is something that you can talk about endlessly and never do anything about. But once you bring land into the conversation, then you're dealing with issues like development, purchasing of land, taking marshland and turning it into hotels and bringing highways in and trade and where people want to live. So it gets much more messy politically. You wouldn't think so because our conversations about carbon have been contentious enough. But when you're in a situation where scientists are saying, no, you can't use that land the way you want to, then that gets very, very intricate and contentious.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Yeah. So land use has been deliberately left out of the conversation because it gets sensitive very, very quickly. And CO2, nobody sees it, nobody smells it. It's already politicized a lot, but way less difficult to handle.
SPEAKER_01:Right. So it's partly that. And then it's also that carbon is easily easier to measure. So when you're looking at water processes, I mean, you know, water is always on the move. It's changing form. You've got water vapor that's invisibly moving across the continent, as we talked about being driven by the, you know, by plants transpiring and the condensation process pulling the moisture down. All these really, really complex and hard to pin down processes. So one of the things that's interesting about Mian's work is that he has been able to directly connect land use changes with a very specific climate development, which is the loss of the regular summer rains in the Western Mediterranean. So that was really, really interesting. And I was able to have a journey through this region, going up into the hills across the continental divide above Valencia in Spain. And he would watch the clouds and tell us tell me and my husband because we were together when it's going to rain and it was uncanny his accuracy
SPEAKER_00:can you explain that like what's I mean I obviously read the book and I think it's one of the first times you see that so specific that connection we've known it we've heard it before I mean indigenous tribes have mentioned forever I think Willie Smith in Indonesia has shown you can create clouds and you can steer but it's always been a bit unconnected like it's The clouds are there and they're not really connected to what we do here on the land. And in this case, you show very, very clearly that connection is there, which means that whatever we do here influences whatever happens above us and beyond us as well, especially in terms of rain, which obviously for agriculture and land use is absolutely crucial. Not too much, not too little, not too often, not in one shot. But there is a very hopeful message there as well. But can you explain a bit those summer rains in the Western Mediterranean What has gone wrong there? What has changed there? And so what are also the opportunities to, I'm not saying change it back, but to have a positive impact there?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So over several decades, it was observed that the summer rains were failing. So in the past, near the Mediterranean and inland, every day in the summer, the ground would heat up, it would become hot and sunny. And then in the afternoon, the clouds would come in and then you'd get a rainfall fairly brief, and it would cleanse the air, it would provide rain for farming, and the farmers would depend on this rain. So this was the system that people had gotten used to. And then that started to change around, or maybe it was noticed, you know, I think it always starts to change before we notice it, but it was about the 1980s, 1990s that it was noticed, and Mian was asked to study this, which he did for a long time. And one other thing about Mian's work is that he has been involved for many decades in developing different technologies. So for example, he actually invented that machine you walk through that detects metal at the airport. This was long ago that he did this. He also invented COSPEC. I forget what that stands for, but that is what volcano specialists to be able to predict when tremors will occur. So he was measuring plumes of industrial pollution. He's been measuring this for a long time. And the reason I point this out is that what he says is that with many reports, scientists are using models and models are not the same as precise observation and documenting that
SPEAKER_00:observation. Which would make sense. Many farmers would tell you the same that are transitioning to regenerate. It's a very similar point. Like, yeah, but we see something else here. And we're observing and reacting to that, although the model tells us something else.
SPEAKER_01:Right, right. Not that models aren't useful at all, but it's important to understand that often the slight differences are averaged out. So anyway, so what he did was he measured the movement of moisture. And what he found is that over these decades, When the land was developed, when trees were cut down, when housing developments went up because these were very desirable areas along the coast, very beautiful. When marshes were drained for agriculture. So basically, there was less plant activity. There was less transpiration. And what he determined was that the moisture rising from the Mediterranean Sea and moving along the breeze inland, that was never a high enough concentration of moisture to generate a rainfall.
SPEAKER_00:So it needed the life on the ground to also be fed.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. It was picking up that moisture. moisture as the breeze went over the land. And that was enough juice. That was a high enough concentration of moisture. To make it rain further. Exactly. So the beauty of this is that...
SPEAKER_00:We know what to do about that. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01:I was saying exactly that. So what Mian makes clear is that we can't just put trees in X location. and be assured that we're going to get rain in Y location. But rather, in that region, we can help to reinstate rainfall. I mean, the way he puts it is that it may be 70 kilometers downwind or something. He said that's, of course, another challenge.
SPEAKER_00:It begs the question, like how much, how many trees, what kind of trees or how much life or vegetation and where exactly? But that's a question to find out and to figure out. But it's a very optimistic question, instead of a very, oh, the climate changed and it stopped raining answer, which sort of finishes the discussion there.
SPEAKER_01:Right, right. This actually makes me think of something I haven't thought of in a while. I think at different points, we've talked about the biotic pump theory, the Russian scientist, Anastasia Makareva, and something that she, I can't remember if she said this to me, or she wrote that at some point, she believes that there will be a field of kind of healing of forests. So it's kind of like medicine for the earth, like a study of where and what kind of trees might we plant to be able to have the impact that would benefit the larger ecosystem.
SPEAKER_00:I don't think we're that far off. I have had those discussions quite a lot the last years. I'm going to say plural, but honestly, mostly the last year. Like what scale in terms of landscape regeneration, what do you need, what to plant where and why, what is the technology we need to even start answering that question what is the indigenous knowledge we need to start answering those questions because a tree is not a tree and a tree in a different place or a very nice cover crop field is fundamentally different where it is and how it's composed and which makes it very very very difficult and very context specific but also very very interesting because it depends it really depends where you're at but it's super optimistic and very interesting and very closely to water in plain sight only It was literally in plain sight, but like in a cloud above the terrain.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:So that triggered the book to a certain extent. But in the book, you cover in general these large, very ambitious, some would call probably crazy projects to bring back the reins of the Western Mediterranean and some others. What's the most... ambitious or craziest example you want to give out of the book, if it's not this one you just mentioned. And I say crazy in the most lovable way possible because I definitely think we need more crazy people.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, of course. Well, one of the craziest ones is the restoration of the Los Plateau. And I don't know whether you've addressed that on this show.
SPEAKER_00:It has come up a few times, yeah, but it's always good to repeat because I think it's such an extraordinary... I will also link the video of John Liu below in the show notes if you're interested But please, for anybody that is thinking, I heard about it, but I don't really know, what is the Los Plateau and what happened there?
SPEAKER_01:Right. So that was another inspiration for this book is that I could not believe that most people have not heard about this because it's such an extraordinary story that shows the incredible potential to restore large scale damaged ecosystems. So the story here is that the Los Plateau is a large area in China and the This is where agriculture was born in China around 10,000 years ago, about the same time period as agriculture emerged in the Fertile Crescent. So this was the breadbasket of China. This was the home of many important global civilizations and all of this. And over time, following a pattern that is common where ecosystems start to decline, the ecosystem started to decline. And this area is marked by a particular kind of soil, low soil, which is high mineral, but very friable, very dusty. So when the land started to erode, it went into the Yellow River and silted up the Yellow River, and that caused all kinds of problems, big deadly floods. and inability for navigation, all of these different problems. And in the meantime, as we moved through the 20th century, the land was so degraded that the millions of people who lived there were struggling to survive. So this was an area that was a real trouble spot for China. So the Chinese government realized that they could continually try to patch up this problem, or maybe they could step back and see how to restore the the ecology of the region. So they gathered together hydrologists, geologists, biologists, economists, and all different kinds of experts. And they spent years developing plans. And this was in collaboration with the World Bank and an incredibly ambitious task. And what they did was employ some fairly simple practices, but over a large extent. They hired villagers... to do the work of building terraces because by terracing the hills, the water would slow down. It wouldn't just rush off and carry all those nutrients, the topsoil, all that dust down into the river plain. So they did terracing, they did planting, and they penned the animals because the livestock, the sheep and the goats, were being allowed to wander freely and graze at will. So you had a situation where there might be like a few scraggly plants on a hillside.
SPEAKER_00:Trying to survive.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And the animals would be eating them. And so no matter what the people did, the animals were eating the saplings and all of that and accentuating the ecological damage. So they penned the animals, which in holistic management terms would mean giving the land a chance to recover. So that's what they did. And over 10 to 14 years the land was transformed. So I really encourage your listeners to have a look at some of John Liu's videos because, I mean, one that I referred to in the book is Four Seconds. It's time-lapsed photography where you watch 14 years of change in four seconds and you watch this landscape go from dry and lifeless to bursting with green and vegetation.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the before and after is spectacular. You don't see many before and afters like that, I think. And of course, it continued. And looking at these gigantic projects or like the landscape regeneration and landscape restoration seems absolutely and is absolutely possible. What is needed to do it in a thousand landscapes, like WWF is saying, or what is missing now to really get, let's say, to the impact? We need to do it on a lot more landscapes. What have you seen with your travels and your research that is clearly missing? Because the tech or the approaches seem to be there and the examples are there, but somehow we're not all having this discussion. Like how can we regenerate the landscape I'm in now? Or how can we, et cetera, et cetera. So what's missing? What do you think?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so two basic things are missing. One is that people know that this is even possible because most people don't. You do because you've been having these conversations. But if we read the news, The nature of news seems to be that It's reactive, yes. That when something is a problem, it's news. And not that that's wrong, but since the news media frames our understanding of the world, the fact that the possibility is missing in the news means that people don't know it's possible. And the stories that we tell about the environment, I think that people tend to have a sense that landscapes are static unless they've They're stuck.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. They've always been there like that or they go down. Yeah, that's a good point. We never think that it could be full of life.
SPEAKER_01:Right. So that's one reason. And then the other is our larger economic framework. I mean, so here we are. We know there's work to be done. You know, we're talking about restoring landscapes, restoring ecosystems. We know that it's possible. We know that there is therefore this huge amount of work to be done. It's hard work sometimes, but it's also joyful work because what can be more rewarding than watching land heal? You know, we are land-based creatures. We evolved in ecosystems. We evolved in relation to our landscape. So there is a part of us that just hums to this kind of work.
SPEAKER_00:Have you seen that as well? Like the people you met, you talked to, you interviewed, you spent a lot of time with, you listened to him. That's
SPEAKER_01:an interesting question.
SPEAKER_00:I don't think I've ever asked that before, but in this case, it seems appropriate.
SPEAKER_01:I don't know. That's kind of a, I hum when I garden.
SPEAKER_00:Or do they seem to, like what you described, where, that's a different question. Are we made to regenerate? And do you see that when you meet people that are actively doing that? Do they seem to fit or seem to be in the flow?
SPEAKER_01:I see absolute joy. I see optimism. I see connection. You know, sometimes we think what we're looking for is happiness, but what we're really looking for is a connected engagement with what we're doing. And I think there's, we as humans have a drive to learn and to grow. And I think that for a lot of people, when you learn about, so I'm thinking, you know, mentally I'm referring back, I took a permaculture design course myself, and it was a very And, you know, it was during the pandemic. And so what we were able to do was have one day on site, social distanced and masked, and then two days on Zoom. But that in-person piece was just enough. To get a sense of what each of us is experiencing. that and felt a shift in themselves.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. I think we're at a very, I mean, obviously if you had access to that, you really, really appreciate it. The garden, the park, if you were able to go, the roof garden, the balcony with some life on it, but it's something we've never looked at so much because we always had the chance to go somewhere. And obviously, I mean, the farmers I know, many of the farmers I know said, yeah, nothing really changed because on the farm, I mean, distancing is relatively easy. I work continued as we are an essential job, obviously sales, et cetera, completely shifted. But being outside and being in landscapes, we hopefully appreciate a lot more this year. And being in vast landscapes obviously helps.
SPEAKER_01:Right. But our economic system does not create the opportunity for people to heal landscapes, at least at this moment. That's a huge problem. huge disconnect that there's work to be done, people who are underemployed and unemployed, and yet we can't seem to bring that together.
SPEAKER_00:There's more money in the world than ever before, and yet we don't seem to bring that together.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And I think particularly of young people, what this pandemic period is doing to them is sort of telling them that their efforts don't matter because there's no work for them. But yet there's all this work that needs to be done. So I know that you've spoken to people at Commonland. And in this book, I did visit the Spanish Altiplano project in Commonland. And I bring that up because what Commonland recognized is that there are places that are suffering from the lack of people. And so creating the opportunity economically for people to have viable work in those places. I know colleagues that that are doing that similar work in the United States, in Kansas, for example, which is suffering. I drove around Kansas after a conference, after Gail Fuller's field school in Kansas, and we were going through town after town that had nothing.
SPEAKER_00:I hear the same in Europe, many inland places. I mean, if you describe Spain, Italy, France, like the depopulation of the countryside, Eastern Europe, has been happening for a long time and is let's say not very helpful for regeneration because you need people on the land you need people observing you need hands you need a lot of you need a lot of life to create life and if there's only one guy or girl mostly a guy with a tractor that's doing I don't know many thousands acres just not going to work and that's yeah we need life to but hopefully with this year or the year just past we start to appreciate the city for what it is but also the countryside And hopefully, obviously not the super dry, very depressing and very empty, lifeless countryside, but start to see like there's something we can create there and there's good life there.
SPEAKER_01:And if it is dry and lifeless, we can create something there. We know that's possible. So I'll mention another amazing story from the book because, I mean, one of the things that does make me feel really hopeful is that some of the most dramatic examples of ecological So I'm thinking about Neil Spackman's work in Saudi Arabia. So Neil is an American, and he happened to study the Arabic language in university. So he had that And someone was looking for someone to manage a project working with the Bedouin in Saudi Arabia in a particular place. Now, the Bedouin, of course, are people who have always moved around with their animals, but the land had become so degraded that they were now living in cinder blocks and living in dire poverty. So Neil took the job and said that he would like to add an ecological component. So he did a kind of fast track permaculture study with Jeff Lawton in Jordan and Lawton came up to Saudi Arabia and they picked a site. So Neil had a team of the local people there. And this is a place where it may go a few years Thank you. But what's really interesting to me is how Neil defines a desert. You know that we kind of think we know what a desert is? A
SPEAKER_00:lot of sand, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:You know, we think that there's some sort of threshold of if there's more than this amount of rain, it's not a desert. If there's less, it is a desert. Neil says that a desert is a place where when it rains, it floods. Because when it rains and it doesn't flood, that means that the land is able to hold on to that rain. And then by definition, it is no longer desert. So in short, I'm leaping ahead, but that's what he was able to create. So what they did was they built a variety of water harvesting little components and they put in swales of the water would stay on the landscape, little earthen dams. And then when it rained, the water would be held. And then they could start to plant. So they planted out from where they were able to hold the rain. And they were able to plant trees and they planted grasses and the trees grew. And then here's where the story gets really amazing. In 2016, the project ran out of funding. So they could no longer do the irrigation. They turned the irrigation system off. Now, when they were irrigating, it was only from the water that they captured and held. They did not go into fossil water. Because as Neil says, you need to stay within your water budget. And the rain created their water budget.
SPEAKER_00:I love that piece of the book. Like the water budget discussion is absolutely fascinating.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So they turned off the irrigation. And then two years later, Neil went and visited again. And 80% of those trees survived without irrigation. Because through holding onto the water, which allowed the conditions for the soil to stay moist, for the microbial life to survive, for the trees to get established so that they were able to create their fungal networks, which would extend their ability to reach further away for moisture, those systems were created and were robust enough that the trees survived.
SPEAKER_00:And the The rain come at some point. Since 2016, did the water harvesting, swales, et cetera, were tested again?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So during that time, I think there was about a two-year period that they didn't get any rain. But then when they did get water, it was held in the landscape. So the other thing is, of course, that moisture creates more moisture. So when you have the trees that are established, those trees are creating moisture through the transpiration, through the small water cycle. So you're creating the conditions for more life and for more circulating
SPEAKER_00:moisture. I think I've seen a video about this project. I'll try to find it and put it in the show notes. But looking at all of these projects, what would you like investors to take away from it? What would you like it if they read the book, if they listen to this, if they see other interviews with you, if they see these amazing examples, what would you hope that the main message is that investors that are investing their own money or other people's money that are managing capital take away from the radio chronicles?
SPEAKER_01:That wealth is in functioning ecosystems, wealth and resilience, climate resilience and Resilience amidst weather extremes, social resilience, that we can bring resilience back to our communities, and that... landscapes that we think of as wastelands are opportunities because they are.
SPEAKER_00:And then flipping the question, what if you wake up tomorrow morning and you turned into an investor and you manage a crazy amount of money, let's say a billion, a billion dollars, and you have complete freedom to invest it in whatever you feel has most impact or whatever you feel fits best. It's not a grand facility, so it has to come back at some point, but It could be a very, very, very long time. It could be without any return. It could be just a principle. But if you would be managing a billion-dollar investment fund, what would you focus on?
SPEAKER_01:I would look for where these disconnects are and try to address them. So, for example, work that needs to be done, connecting that with people who need work. Because these are opportunities just waiting to happen. And we know that's possible. We know, for example, during the New Deal in the United States that unemployed people were given jobs Work opportunities and some of those work opportunities were not merely, you know, creating projects, but regenerating culture. So the cultural piece is so important. And that is one of the things that I was most impressed with about Commonlands programs with the four returns. So usually in business, we're trained to look at one return, you know, as if life were of one return. dimension, and that's the financial return. So looking at the return of nature and ecosystem function, that is huge and essential. And then the return of social capital, of the revival of communities, that's huge. The extra piece that Commonland has focused on is the return of inspiration and which I see really connected to, well, connected to all of it actually, but very connected to the social capital. I mean, how many people all over the world just feel that their communities have been left behind? I mean, that's a backstory. I don't want to get into US politics, but it's one of the backstories of US politics right now. And I also can say that with some understanding, living in a rural area myself.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. In many cases, it has been left behind.
SPEAKER_01:In
SPEAKER_00:the news, in everything in culture and politics has been focused on cities and only the big ones even. And the rest is sort of considered. Yeah, once every four years or five years when you need to vote and suddenly it becomes important and in between it doesn't, which of course, if you look at climate, if you look at food, if you look at ecosystem services, it's not happening in the cities, it's happening out there.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And those are all opportunities. And, you know, when I think of here in southwestern Vermont, people feeling disconnected from the landscape and feeling that the landscape can't provide for us, that life is elsewhere. You know, that's tragic. And it wouldn't take much.
SPEAKER_00:So what would you do then? Let's say you would be limiting yourself to investing where you're based and doing a place-based focus. What would you focus on in your area if you had that fund upon
SPEAKER_01:you? Okay, well... smiling, partly because a colleague of mine is actually doing something like that, creating a regenerative food network here. It will be around New England, but based in southwestern Vermont, because that's where he is. This is Jesse McDougall of Studio Hill Farm. They've already bought a meat processing facility, which will mean that farmers no longer have to travel several states away to get USDA-approved slaughtering. Exactly. So that's one thing. So what would I do? We are so wealthy here in terms of land and the potential of our land and the biodiversity of our land. So I would just help people rally around our landscapes and start food programs, permaculture programs, sites and food forests and creating the opportunities for people to celebrate what we have rather than focusing and lamenting what we lack. There's a lot that we lack right now. This is an area where several colleges have closed in the last few years. And so those colleges could be centers for regenerative agriculture.
SPEAKER_00:So you would focus on seeding a lot, planting a lot of different seeds and see what comes up, which is a very regenerative agriculture approach to seeing what emerges.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. And then also, and this is something that came up again and again with the people that I interviewed in this book, the focus on abundance rather than scarcity.
SPEAKER_00:Can you go into that a bit? Because I had a lot of those conversations actually the past week. Somehow it constantly was about abundance versus scarcity. What do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_01:It's a worldview and a lot of indigenous cultures focused on abundance rather than scarcity. So I don't know whether many of your listeners have read the book Breeding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Throughout the book are examples of the abundance mindset. So when you Give. You're creating a relationship with who you're giving to. You're creating a relationship with, let's say, she opens the book with strawberries. So you're giving to the strawberries through your appreciation. And when, if you're just dividing out, you know, like, well, I need to save this and not give any away with a scarcity mindset, you're actually depriving yourself of the opportunities to give and to share. And that diminishes your experience. So what's interesting now is we are seeing a kind of like end point of the scarcity mentality in all the hoarding. So in the United States, we're seeing billionaires, like their wealth is growing dramatically, even as the ordinary person is struggling more and more by the month. So this is sort of what I see as the endpoint of the scarcity mindset. I need to keep accumulating because this is scarce. Wealth is scarce. And if I don't build my wealth, someone else will.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's a zero sum game mindset, but I think it comes back from another point you made before that we see landscapes degraded or stuck, but not the potential that it could be full of life. Like we see a lot of things like to see the abundance, you also need to see the possibility of regeneration, specifically in food, but also in wealth. Like if you see an incredibly degraded landscape, you almost automatically start hoarding water and fuel and food, because if you cannot see the potential of that landscape. And what you see in the book is the potential of those landscapes is actually way more than we could ever imagine. And actually relatively fast as well, which sort of automatically gets you to like, wow, actually you can grow way more than we ever imagined. Like the growing of food is not the issue. It's the distribution. And it's potentially not even the money is the issue, but it's the distribution. But it's a very tricky mindset because it's very, I wouldn't say natural, but very easy to go back into the scarcity. Like I need to take this because there's not enough or there won't be enough.
SPEAKER_01:That's how we're trained. What I'm learning more and more is that not all cultures began that way. And the scarcity mindset has, I guess we could say, served us in that fear or that competitiveness has led to advances. But I think we can broaden things out and ask, Is it serving us now?
SPEAKER_00:It would be competitive in abundance and see in terms of creating life instead of hoarding billions. That would be very interesting.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Sometimes I thought that if biodiversity was a status symbol, creating biodiversity, so let's say wealthy people on their estates or whatever, that it would be seen as cool rather than having the biggest house or the fanciest car to have the most life naturally emerging. Would that prompt a shift? I don't know. I'm thinking of a scarcity mindset there too, of status. But just wondering, you know, just thinking about the drivers of people's behavior and wondering if that would make a difference. But yeah, to the point of when you see a degraded landscape, one automatically thinks about scarcity and hoarding and keeping what I have and making sure that there's enough. That what John Liu, and just to clarify, we've mentioned John Liu, that he documented in film the restoration of the Los Plateau. And that's what allowed us to see in such fabulous detail how this project
SPEAKER_00:succeeded. Which is something that doesn't happen often. Like a lot of these projects, you never see the before or the during. Like it's very rare that somebody, in this case, luckily he was, I think, hired by the World Bank or something. But luckily there was somebody there that is a great documentary maker that actually documented this. Otherwise, your four seconds of time lapse wouldn't have been there. It would have been one second at the end, but would be way less powerful.
SPEAKER_01:Right. No, that is so important and it's so fortunate. What he says, our landscapes are a reflection of our consciousness, which I think is a really powerful understanding. And so when you have a degraded landscape, we can't help but feel a sense of scarcity, of lack. Whereas If we're in a flourishing landscape, we're more likely to feel a sense of peace, a sense of balance, a sense of connection with our surroundings, and vice versa. So if our consciousness is organized around what will I have, what can I gain, how can I compete, as opposed to how can I share, who might I cooperate with, what can I be in relationship to that might generate something different anyway it's just an interesting thing to think about
SPEAKER_00:I think it's a very very powerful message to end this conversation I want to thank you so much for writing the books you do the research you do the storytelling you do because it's fundamental and of course thank you to come back on the podcast after so many years and for sharing this and I'm I don't think you're done yet with the regeneration piece I'm very much looking forward to your future work as well I don't think so either Yes, stay tuned. If you found the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast valuable, there are a few simple ways you can use to support it. Number one, rate and review the podcast on your podcast app. That's the best way for other listeners to find the podcast and it only takes a few seconds. Number two, share this podcast on social media or email it to your friends and colleagues. Number three, if this podcast has been of value to you and if you have the means, please join my membership community to help grow this platform and allow me to take it further. You can find all the details on gum Thank you so much and see you at the next podcast.
