Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
321 Eduard Müller - Regenerative education is the answer, whatever the question was
A conversation with Eduard Müller, founder of University for International Cooperation (UCI) and leading Costa Rica Regenerativa, about regenerative education: what does it mean, and why is it so powerful to focus on educating people who want to learn more about regeneration? Eduard makes a very strong case against trying to convince the people in power, in industry, in chemical companies, in fertile companies, in large ultra-processed food companies, at the UN, etc. He has tried and failed, and he truly believes in on education and unlearning. That is why he started his own university 15 years ago. He started with online education in 1998, focusing on scaling regeneration in Costa Rica and showing the numbers and data behind it to reach the tipping point.
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Regenerative education. What does it mean and why is it so powerful to focus on educating people who want to learn more about regeneration? Wright, as our guest of today, makes a very strong case against trying to convince the people in power in industry, finance industry, chemical companies, fertilizer companies, large ultra-processed food companies, the UN universities, etc. He has tried and failed and makes a very strong and good case on focusing on education and unlearning on people that want to learn. That's why he started his own university 15 years ago and started with online education in 98, and is focusing on scaling regeneration in Costa Rica and showing the numbers and data behind it to reach a tipping point. The combination of underground large-scale regenerative projects with the science and data and the global reach of four and a half thousand alumni that can replicate it in their context of what is being learned in Costa Rica makes it extremely powerful. Enjoy this wide-ranging conversation around education.
Speaker 1:This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast Investing as if the planet mattered, where we talk to 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.
Speaker 1:Why my focus on soil and regeneration? Because so many of the pressing issues we face today have their roots in how we treat our land and our sea, grow our food, what we eat, wear and consume, and it's time that we as investors big and small and consumers, start paying much more attention to the dirt slash, soil underneath our feet. To make it easy for fans to support our work, we launched our membership community and so many of you have joined us as a member. Thank you. If our work created value for you and if you have the means and only if you have the means consider joining us. Find out more on gumroadcom slash investing in RegenAg. That is, gumroadcom slash investing in RegenAg, or find the link below. Welcome to another episode Today with the founder of UCI and leading Costa Rica Regenerativa.
Speaker 2:Welcome, eduard, thank you. Thank you, koen, for the invitation. It's a pleasure to be speaking with you guys today.
Speaker 1:And thank you so much for coming on here. First of all, a shout out to Fernando Russo, who made this happen, who speaks very highly of his time, first of all of your work and also of his time in Costa Rica. So I'm very curious to unpack your story and, of course, what you see from such an important country in this journey, a country that's leading in many ways, still has a lot of challenges, as everywhere, but definitely an example from many directions and the education piece that we're going to explore here. But I would love to start with a personal question. We always like to ask at the beginning how come you spend most of your awake hours and it's early morning for you? So thank you for doing that focusing on regeneration and soil. What path led you to what you're doing now today and this can be long answers, which is perfectly fine because we have time- I had the beautiful privilege of growing up in the jungle.
Speaker 2:I remember some indigenous people coming to trade spears with BB guns with my father, and all the animals around were brought to us. So I grew up really in contact with nature and walking in the forest. So I've always understood that we are nature. It's not humans and nature, humans are nature and nature is us. So this link and then, of course, becoming a father. I have two generations of kids older generation with some grandkids, and a younger generation, a 12 year old son, and, having worked for over 45 years in biodiversity, climate change, global change development, it's just too scary to know that he doesn't get to my age unless we do something. So, no matter what happens, I'm going to start and keep on going and try to build a better place, a future of abundance, a future of possibilities, and we're still on time to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what gives you hope? In that, I think a lot of people not have lost hope. But if you say, follow the news and don't dig deeper into amazing examples et cetera like how do you keep hope there?
Speaker 2:are a few great people I've come across. Some I've met in person, others I've only read, like Bucky Fuller. But Mr Fuller said if you want to change a reality, don't fight it. Build a better one that will make the old and obsolete. So I actually spent too many years trying to fight the system. I mean, I've sat on a table with Evo Morales and Lula. I've talked to congresses, I've talked to presidents, I've talked to ministers, I went to the UN, I was in the man in the Barsch advisory committee, the scientific advisory committee, I was a vice chair in one of the IUCN commissions. I was all over the place and I just got very, very frustrated because I came to the conclusion that the answers won't come from there. The build back better these phrases just don't work, um. But what gave me hope is that, in spite of all the warnings that nature has given us, we never paid attention. So I think she sent us our last little present guys, you're not going to be able to see me. I'm going to put you on your knees for a couple of years, think it over and let's talk. And we didn't. But at the same time she showed how resilient she is. We gave her four months vacation.
Speaker 2:I think one of the things positive memories of pandemic is every news outlet showed the nature thriving, exploding in life every single corner. Even here in Costa Rica we saw, you know, the Mediterranean with the dolphins and I could see here all the wildlife moving around. The fish stocks started increasing again. So it's like saying I'm still here and even if we've kind of destroyed most of nature and I think the blame to this is actually the science I come from a scientific background, I've worn the white gowns, I've been sitting behind electron microscopes for weeks in a row, so I come from that. But that reductionist science, we forgot to turn knowledge into wisdom, we forgot to understand and be able to look at complexity and the disciplinary approach got us into rabbit holes. And I see right now the whole system political, un, whatever focus on net zero, focus on reducing carbon emissions. I mean the legacy carbon in the atmosphere is already way above what it could be. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing these huge impacts already. So dreaming of a 1.5, which we already crossed, dreaming of, you know, all these long-term goals kind of like not positive Biodiversity loss is so important and it's not the most relevant in the discussions and we can see now that already in a country like Costa Rica, famous for its biodiversity, our insect populations are plummeting, our bird populations are plummeting, our amphibian populations are plummeting.
Speaker 2:The first reported extinction of a frog was here in Costa Rica in 1987. Latin America has lost 94% of the abundance of biodiversity. Latin America has lost 94% of the abundance of biodiversity. But again, the reductionist science, the reductionist approach, the disciplinary approach has us focusing on species. So we look at the panda bear. Let's put millions in to rescue the panda bear or the polar bear.
Speaker 2:Very few people remember that we had to scrape the windshield when we went out with the car to get rid of the insects. That's abundance and that's, that's gone. I've asked many, many newer generations if they ever had to scrape the windshields, and especially the the headlights, because of the heat. They get stuck. I remember having to get a gillette and scraping those off every time you're going out with a car into nature. That's gone. But people are not able to see that. We. We don't understand and the scientists are not able to see that because there's one working on insects, there's one working on the left leg of that rare bird, you know, and we just lost our connection with nature. But you ask me, why do I have? I can see how quickly nature comes back.
Speaker 2:I've been working on regeneration now for about 15 years and during COVID I moved to the northern province in Costa Rica called Guanacaste Most of the tourists know it because that's where they all come and Guanacaste depended 100% on tourism. And when tourism got locked down and literally got locked down, they closed the airport, they kicked the tourists out, they didn't even let people surf. I mean, how ridiculous is that? Out in the ocean alone and you're caught by the police? Um, the companies that brought food for the restaurants, for the soup, quit coming and people were not producing any food locally because they depended on tourism. So we came in and started producing regeneratively, initially with family farms. When we got close to 200 family farms, it was logistically impossible to keep on, so we moved to community farms to keep on. So we moved to community farms. And then we noticed very quickly with these community farms and we used methodologies from Cuba where in the 1989-1990 crisis, when the Russians moved out, they were also left without food and they learned how to produce food very quickly, food very quickly, without using chemicals, and one of the creators of that food security program, felix Canet. He retired from Cuba. He's in his 70s but he's stronger than any bull around and his wife was Costa Rican. So he moved down and I hired him and, using his methodologies, we got to produce over 10 tons of food per hectare per month. 35, 36 different crops so abundant, so much food.
Speaker 2:I remember this woman where we came in the first time. She was crying. She was holding three little kids. They were horrible, their skin was brown spotted and she was crying because she was feeding junk food, something like Doritos, to these kids. Because those are the only companies I got there Coca-Cola and junk food companies. They still went to these local corner stores, local corner stores. And after two months I went to visit and she called the kids and said look how their eyes are shining again. That is impactful. That gives you hope. We can recover our chronic diseases. Just by recovering the soil microbiome, the plant microbiome. Just by recovering the soil microbiome, the plant microbiome and the human microbiome, we can get our health back.
Speaker 2:But then we started observing. Yes, we had a huge increase in insects, a lot of them bad insects. The first few weeks we used repellents with chile, with garlic, with onion and so on. But after about four months we had almost 200 species of insects and arthropods coming back. After six months, populations started exploding. After a year the good insects were at 94, 95, 97 percent and they controlled the bad insects, the wasps, the ladybugsugs and we put in flowers to attract these and we put. So we use nature and you, we use nature's system, nature's wisdom, I could say, and imitated her and got huge production and we didn't even have to use the repellents anymore because it turned into a living ecosystem.
Speaker 2:So when I hear that we cannot save the world and fao scientists, universities around the world are saying we cannot, if you know, feed a global growing population is going to get to 12 billion. I don't know where they're getting that dream, because we're actually going to collapse before that if we keep on doing what we're doing. Um, we, we can feed the world, but it has to be smaller scale, it has to be local. I don't want a product and I see one of the things, another thing we spotted um, and with this 20 fold increase in insect population, of course the birds and the bats started increasing, coming back to that place. So we're actually measuring bats, measuring birds, measuring butterflies, to see how we can actually establish baselines and see how quickly biodiversity comes back. And in the tropics it's amazing. I'm not saying you can do this up in the Arctic, but in the tropics it's amazing. So I know life will come back.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, the quality of the food, the nutrient density of regenerative food I mean forget organic this is really quality stuff. Even the other day I took these people to a regenerative farm and these news people and I had them try the mustard and they started crying. It was like putting a ball of wasabi into your mouth. You do not get that with mustard that's being harvested, sent into the central distribution area and coming back to you two or three weeks later. We brought cooks in to help these people cook the bitter stuff, because they didn't eat bitter stuff before. But they had a Christmas party and they said Edward, we have learned to eat the bitter stuff because that fixes our health. So we brought cooks in, taught them how to cook the bitter stuff because that fixes our health. So we brought cooks in, taught them how to cook the bitter stuff and eat it.
Speaker 2:But just the whole holistic view of a healthy community, healthy soil, healthy plants, um, there is no better hope, even for young people, to say we're still on time to build the future. We want Nature's still here to cooperate. We do not have to build back better, we do not have to adapt to climate change and this is me personally. I mean go ahead, all the people who are working on climate change adaptation, keep on going. I don't care. But I know, instead of sitting down and waiting to learn how to live in a collapsing planet, I am going to still put all my energy into making this planet work, and do it.
Speaker 2:We can do large scale. We're starting with large scale projects right now to demonstrate if I'm correct and I think I'm almost correct. The evidence we have now after three, four years of research will show that, with a cattle project that we're developing 30,000 hectares where I'm giving back a third of the land for biological quarters because I'm increasing the income for the farmers, I'm capturing carbon in farm land, not in the forest. And if we get 200 000 hectares, which we have planned for the next five years, depending on the resources we get to support this, I'll be capturing 25 percent of costa rica's carbon footprint by cattle alone. So the decarbonization strategy of this country is based on electric mobility. I drive an electric car because I like to drive an electric car, not because I have any clue of what I'm doing good for the planet by driving an electric car. It's not a solution. But by turning cattle into holistic grazing we can capture probably around 10, maybe even more tons per hectare per year. Giving back 30% of the land for water harvest, biological quarters will bring life explosively back and allow for insects to come back, allow for the birds to keep recovering their populations.
Speaker 2:The bats Half of our mammals. In Costa Rica are bats. Yesterday we were measuring bats. It's just nature's showing us it can't. So why should I not bet on this? That's the only bet I have. I have no other bet.
Speaker 1:Thank you first of all, so much. That was probably the best intro we've had in a in a long, long time and I I was reluctant to interrupt because it's just so good and it sounds like this experience in covet in the really shook you, or somehow because you said I worked so long in international development, in development in climate, and then this pandemic came. How was that experience to see, to be forced to see, because you moved to a northern area where there was suddenly no tourism and food needed to be grown? What's the conscience switch? Like, how did you you hired this retired but not really retired guy? Like how did you decide, okay, I need to work on local regenerative foods. Maybe you were already working on it before, but how did that accelerate that process If not in a potentially dying planet? I'm gonna fix this piece. See what happens, see the explosion of abundance, and we'll deal with it with the rest from there actually, um, yeah, covid.
Speaker 2:What it did was accelerate resources because a very good friend who founded one of the most important tech companies in the world, retired, moved out. His company was here with two little kids and he wanted to save his town from the pandemic, keep it still livable, so he put the money in. The difference was having the resources, which would not have come unless there was this emergency. But I started working with systems back in 1980 and looking at farming through the systems, lens, understanding Odom and other biologists, ecologists, how nature didn't have garbage, it didn't have waste. What was a byproduct of one component was food for the next component. So I moved into that space very early on in my career.
Speaker 2:I studied veterinary medicine in Brazil, but then I did my master's in Torealba and Catia here in Costa Rica, and I managed to become friends with one of the most influential persons in my life, who died very early, but he was a system thinker, a brilliant system thinker, and got me involved. So I've been working with systems all my life and that's the reason why I founded my own university 30 years ago, because I wanted a university that could focus on systems, a university that could understand complexity, and it wasn't easy. It wasn't easy finding teachers that were willing to work in complexity. It wasn't easy finding teachers that were willing to unlearn. That was the most difficult thing. Probably that's the most difficult one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I studied with so-and-so in this great university. You know this is what we're talking. I said you know I don't. We're taught. And I said you know, I don't know who in the hell thought it would be a good idea to spray food with poison when you're going to eat it. I mean you have to be dementious or just thinking on money. There is no way a scientist with soul should think of doing that. I don't. I don't see that.
Speaker 1:So I'm always curious at home, especially like the most vocal. We have some of these on linkedin that are super vocal on um, the absolutely essential piece of, of chemicals and and otherwise we cannot feed the world. And bloody, bloody, blah, blah, blah. And we all know I mean we all know it's still a very strong narrative and I see it with investors. We know if you look at the data it's not true. The abundance you can create not saying it's easy is definitely there, but I would always like to see, like look in their kitchen cupboard, like what are they cooking and feeding themselves? If they are completely convinced Glyphosate is okay.
Speaker 2:If they're completely like what should you feed yourself and your children? That that would. I remember that time, that interview with the ceo of monsanto when they gave him a glass of water and said it has glyphosate and since glyphosate is not poison, please drink it. And he refused and glyphosate, if you look, read the the label. It says does not produce chronic disease, chronic entire. Sorry, this is not acute poison. Okay, they never say anything about chronic.
Speaker 2:And the problem with with pesticides, with chemicals, with fertilizers is all the phd students and master students that do this research are for for one or two or three years. There never a long term study has done and there's nothing worse than killing the soil. By tilling it. You're breaking up the mycelium by poisoning it. With fertilizer. You get all the nitrifying bacteria disappear because there's too much nitrogen feedback. You add phosphor and it gets trapped by the soil, whereas if you go back to nature, the mycelium dissolves the phosphor that has been fertilized for years and dissolves other minerals from the rock. Mycelium turned Mars into Earth through the millions of years. Mycelium was the one that was responsible in the Great Plains in the US and in Central Africa, with 95 million bison walking in the US Central Africa with 95 million bison walking in the US with wolves to bring very rich soil, turning it into carbon-rich soil. For thousands and thousands of years we destroyed that with science, by plowing and by putting chemicals and by doing soil analysis to see what is missing in the soil. The mycelium takes care of replenishing what is missing in the soil and it's just following nature and we don't need any chemicals. That's what I'm doing today is demonstrating that we don't need it and showing it in numbers.
Speaker 2:But going back to your question, I've been involved at the Convention of Biological Diversity. I've been a national negotiator for Costa Rica at the convention, as I mentioned. I was in all these different positions and I think my biggest tipping point was gosh going up to New York for SDG 17. And the person who was coordinating started every single two-hour session by thanking Monsanto, syngenta, nestle, coca-cola for the tremendous and invaluable support. And you look at SDG 17,. And I'm not sure if the finger was pointing exactly at the wrong things.
Speaker 2:And I was brought into Miami by Spanish CNN for an interview the day the SDGs were being approved. Actually, when I got on the channel, evo Morales was giving his talk at the UN and what I ended up saying in summary was you know the Laudato Si from Pope Francis? Yes, I read it. It's a better document than the SDGs Because it gives actually the correct dimension of things and the way to move forward. And I'm not Catholic, so you take the language away from Laudato Si and it's a very powerful document that was put down by the system because it was published before the system. That should have been the base document for the SDGs, taking away all the religious things and the dogmas and everything you can blame on on religion.
Speaker 2:But so I was so um brought down and especially because, for example, for 2010, the Nagoya meeting from the COP10, where after 10 years, we had not gone to zero loss of biodiversity, which was a global promise by 2010. We worked hard to get the IT targets approved. We worked hard to get the strategic framework for biodiversity approved. It was so much work. That year I traveled 302 days, out of my own pocket, most of it and then just seeing how we kicked the bucket forward another 10 years and in 2020, the reports just showed that implementation was nothing. We were still dying. So am I going to stick to that world?
Speaker 1:now how do you respond to people that say, like I've also seen people draw that conclusion, not saying you did, and say, okay, I'm just going to produce, I'm going to focus on my own quote-unquote piece of paradise and then we'll see what happened? Like, how do you connect the not small but the local? How do we make sure that that narrative of abundance and the narrative of we're part of nature and the narrative of this makes way more sense with nature than any in any other way? How do we, how does that narrative break into the walls of the UN or into the walls of Wall Street? Or do we even want? That is the second.
Speaker 1:But like, how do we? Like, where are those? I'm always curious, where are those tipping points in people in, in power and also financial power? Like I've seen people work on farms and suddenly not see the light but suddenly be like oh, what I thought? Et cetera. Like those light bulb moments or those tipping points are amazing when they happen, but it would be nice if they happen slightly faster, let's say. So how do we bring that abundance experience?
Speaker 2:you had to more okay, when, when I decided to resign to my great position when I was 35 years old, at a national university, working with or for the German government, very good salary, a month vacation every year, all these benefits, I decided to resign and start my own university. I knew I needed a university to change the world. I knew we couldn't stay with pilot projects, okay. So when I decided that sustainability was gone, that opportunity, the train left the station and we were not on that train. We needed something else and I've been working with Biosphere Reserves, the UNESCO Managed Biosphere Program, for now 30 plus years, which is a bioregional approach where you have governance, local governance, and you have conservation, developments and living together and you have science and education. So, based on that, I developed my own framework for regeneration, which is a toroid, where at the base of the toroid is Mother Nature. At the other side of the toroid is spirituality, and when I used to talk about spirituality 25 years ago with other presidents of universities, they looked at me like what does this guy smoke this morning? Like what does this guy smoke this morning? Okay, and I think that's our biggest mistake in academia that we left the spiritual dimension, the quantum space, the deep consciousness, the capacity of the human soul, brain, mind, whatever you want to call it to go beyond. Uh, that is left out of science because it's fiction. So then we have regener economics and I've had the privilege of working with the best people John Fullerton, kate Raworth, christian Felber Regenerative societies, where we actually empower communities to make their own decisions, to plan their future, to work on their future, to build their future.
Speaker 2:You cannot do it without regenerative culture, because culture is the glue that holds us together. For many people in the North, culture is just theater, arts, music. For us, it's the glue that holds our communities together. It gives us identity, gives us pride, it gives us a reason for continuing forward as a community, as a group. We're not looking at the individual person right now. And then we have regenerative politics. Regenerative politics I wish I could have young women moving all the white-haired and yellow-haired men out of business. We need empathy, we need thinking about the bigger, the common, and not the ego. Men tend to think of the ego so we can change the political system to a true democracy and move away from all this AI, manipulation of voting and so on. We're in the wrong path there. So that can be done with local governance and in spite of central government.
Speaker 2:So, going back to your question, as an academic I said I'm not going to fall into the trap of the academics, of publishing a beautiful book, getting well known, getting invited to speak all over the world without having a clue of how to put it into practice. So in 2018, I started uh with costa rica regenerativa. So it's a country-scale initiative in spite of government uh to show that regeneration can happen, and I just need now to keep on scaling it. So, as I said, cattle we have 1.3 million hectares of cattle. I am working now this project through replanetorg in the UK with funding out of France. It's the carbon tunnel vision carbon funding, but we're bringing in biodiversity and we're bringing in the human aspect so we can do this project. Initially, 30,000 hectares. I'm sure the moment farmers are going to start making more money are going to see the difference in their farms.
Speaker 2:This area when I was a kid, most of the rivers were flowing all year round. Now they're dry for seven months a year. I'm totally convinced that if we scale it up, we'll have the rivers flowing all year round and we have a spot Ohancha where we worked back in 1996, 1997. It's a community-led program. We did not lead it, we just supported some things. They now have a river flowing, they have a forest, they have nature back, so I know it can be done. So by the time we get this, I'm sure we can export everything out, and the way to export this out is by education, and that's where my university backs us up. I've heard people asking me what's the secret? And the secret is the teamwork, a beautiful team being accused of collecting people. How big is the?
Speaker 1:university. What should we imagine? We're in an audio medium. Of course we're small. We're 50 people, 5-0, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I transitioned to online in 1998. So we've had students. Yeah, but I transitioned to online in 1998. Wow, so we've had students now in over 60 countries. All our programs have been innovative and we launched the first certificate in regenerative entrepreneurship six years ago and every single student that has gone through that has changed their life Every single one, from 22-year-olds to 60-year-olds. The 60-year-old was a businessman. He had tourism companies, he sold everything off, he sold his hotels and he put up a foundation to work with regenerative tourism at the community level. A girl who was doing a banking career in Sydney quit and set up an organization to help place kids into regenerative jobs.
Speaker 2:Now, the way to scale this at the global is what I'm working on now. We need a global platform for education and the trick I found is based on this certificate, which is now in the sixth cohort, which is absolutely fantastic. I wrote 30 emails to people I knew Some I didn't know too well at the time, but I thought I'd get maybe five responses inviting them to be lecturers in this program. I'm talking about Alan Savory. I'm talking about Kate Raworth. I'm talking about John Fullerton. I'm talking about Stuart Cohen from Buckminster Fuller Institute. I'm talking about Ben Haggard, carol Sanford, very, very heavy players. We ended up with 57 speakers, wow. So what I'm setting up now is a platform where all of these people can set up their courses. They're not going to be synchronous, so it's off. I mean, you can do it whenever you want, at the pace you want. So young people don't want to fix curriculum anymore, they want a flexible learning pathway. So I'm going to have, I hope, by next year we hope to be launching January, february. I'm still missing some resources, important resources to get the whole thing running, but I'm working on that.
Speaker 2:If we have 150 courses, from tourism to public policy, to agriculture, to environmental aspects, you know, and students can then go and say, okay, the system will recommend you first start with a biomimicry course so you learn how nature functions, then do Edward's course. He'll talk about planetary boundaries, he'll talk about the deep concepts of complexity, and then you can do this course on regenerative tourism, one and then regenerative tourism you didn't like it. You can move to cultural innovation and regeneration and then you can do a business course, but you can do your own learning pathway and we'll have certifications at the end. Certificates so one, two, three, four, five stars. A student clicks on one of the courses, he has to pay. We want to do low cost, so we need large numbers, but the moment he clicks, the person who's setting up the course who set up the course will get 40% of the payment right away.
Speaker 2:So, one, I have a global group of the best teachers in the world without being on my payroll, but they're getting paid right away. Then I have a network of mentors around the world who help students with their practical programs and their projects. And third, a layer of bioregions with their practical programs and their projects. And third, a layer of bioregions. So we launched, also in 2018, with John Fullerton, with Stuart, the Regenerative Communities Network, and this is a network of bioregions that are doing regeneration. And we also have the Biosphere Reserve Network. We have other bioregional approaches, ecovillage and so on. If we can bring these together all into a cooperative network, and then we have a global network of students studying with the best teachers in the world, with mentors across the continents and with bioregions where students can then go and click on the planet and say oh, wow visit and I'm going to go and visit.
Speaker 2:I'm going to go and do my project and one of the dream projects we had, and we launched this with ubiquity, university and humanity rising for the cop in glasgow and we did not get one single dollar. We were setting up a fund to fund the students' projects. I have a graduate now in Ghana who is turning his village into a food forest, with the kids that don't have school, that don't have employment. This is hope for these kids. Let's turn our village, which is dry, has no water, has no shade, it's hot into a food forest where we can feed everybody, bring down the temperatures, harvest water and create livelihoods for all the kids involved. This person would probably do well with $15,000 to accelerate the process.
Speaker 2:We need to support this type of investment and it will bring back so much in terms of planetary change. If we get these startups all over the world, imagine the example they set for their neighboring villages. It's just going to go wild. So that's how I have faith. I'm not working on small pilot projects. I'm actually educating that regeneration is possible, it is financially viable and so it's good business and it's good for our health. It's good for the planet's health. It's putting life at the center, and that's my definition of regeneration putting life at the center. We need to bring humanity in service of life, all life, not only our life.
Speaker 1:And how does a physical university fit into this? How important is the university in Costa Rica? Or is that? I'm not saying replaced, not replaced by? Is that not even overshadowed? But let's say that the bigger impact is the online piece, because you've been very early with that.
Speaker 2:How do those two relate? I think the key to this is we're not teaching online, we're helping learn online. It's a different paradigm. Two, we're not using textbooks to teach. Yes, we do have textbooks. Yes, the students need to read textbooks, but a lot of it is out of experience and demonstration and having done the things. So I do not have permanent teachers that are sitting on academic desks. I have CEOs, I have experts around the planet serving as teachers because they like to teach, but I don't have any teachers sitting 12 hours a day in their office reading books and teaching what's in the books. So these are real life experiences.
Speaker 2:Felix, when he teaches a course, it's different, because we went to El Salvador way before COVID, a group of women that was damaged by the large killing of people back 30 years ago. There were a few survivors and then this is generally a whole impact in these villages that were killed because of land grab by the coffee industrial, coffee growers and so on. So these communities never really recovered and Felix was asked by a woman who was donating the money from her daughter, which had died, to do this. He went in and asked the ladies oh, I see, what you eat is pupusas. That's a Salvadorian type of tortilla filled with stuff. And they said, yeah, pupusas are our main dish. Okay, let's prepare pupusa. So he sat there with them preparing the pupusa and so he said, okay, let's grow every ingredient your pupusa needs. And that's where he started the home gardens with these women for them to grow all the ingredients for the pupusas. Can you imagine the impact of that? Because they immediately saw the benefit of planting their own food and planting their ingredients for the pupusa. First, they didn't have to buy it from outsiders and second, they could control the quality and avoid all the chemicals and pesticides and GMOs and stuff like that. So it had an immediate impact and these women immediately took up. I mean, it was a course was planned for two weeks. After four or five days, felix called me up and says they're ready, I can go back. And I said no, just stay with them for the rest, because you know. And then they came over here to look at more projects. This is a type of impact that when you tell a student this story, it's immediately a different focus. It's not learning and memorizing for an exam. It's understanding what life means and how, through learning, we can change the world, we can change our life. We can change our company and, yes, we've been accused of many things.
Speaker 2:One of the biggest banks here. The human resources person was a graduate of ours and she called me a few years ago. She said, edward, if you keep on putting all this BS in the brains of your graduates, our bank is not going to send you any more students. I said why is that? They're criticizing our corporate responsibility program? And I said, yeah, in what way? They're saying it's greenwash. And I asked her is it greenwash? And she couldn't answer and I was really proud of my graduates. But yeah, there's a pushback. You know these people. They declared carbon neutrality and the only way they could do it was by moving their jets off the bank to a separate corporation and then renting the company to fly their own jets so that carbon footprint wouldn't go into the bank footprint. And one of the students brought that up in a document and of course the bank didn't like it, but I was proud. So, yes, we do have pushbacks, but I'm sure this is a growing.
Speaker 2:We have over 5,500 graduates. I have some that created ministries of environment. I have others that have transitioned their companies. It's just amazing the feedback you get from real conscious learning processes. I mean, we launched the first master's program in sustainable tourism management in 1997. People didn't know what sustainability was, even less sustainable tourism.
Speaker 2:We coined the term regenerative tourism. I don't know, maybe 10, 12 years ago. Now you Google it, it's all over the place, but we don't stay on the definition. I mean regenerative tourism is about local development. It's about experiencing. It's moving away from interpretation, which is beautiful. Ecotourism. You go with a guide and he tells you the sloth comes down to take its poop every three days and then it goes back up into the tree. Beautiful, what did I learn with that? Yeah, nice. But regenerative food is about interaction. So you go and you learn from the community. You live with the community and the community has benefits. You eat the local. I mean the restaurants are buying from the neighbors, so the neighbors are included into the economy. Local development is about reducing the gap and Costa Rica has been increasing its Gini proficient. We're moving away from equality.
Speaker 2:I grew up in a country with 80 percent middle class. Today that middle class is disappearing and we're being gentrified by the invasion of billionaires and millionaires coming to buy up all the land and that is taking people out of their homes. So, yes, we have huge challenges, but if we can activate this and I see the efforts in one of the technical schools we went to an area this area which actually regenerated area, this area which actually regenerated it's actually the area that still produces some vegetables in this part of the country, but they were all chemical agricultures, Everything was chemical. They came from the Central Valley and we couldn't change their habits. So we went to the technical school where their kids studied and we taught regenerative agriculture there school where their kids studied and we taught regenerative agriculture there. And we asked them ask your parents for a piece of land. They did some got 20 square meters, some got a thousand square meters. But the moment the parents saw that they were producing better without spending 40 percent of their income buying stuff from outside poison from outside, they poison from outside they started saying, hey, you want to extend your area, let's do an experiment. You know that's the way you shift things by showing, by demonstrating, not by talking about it.
Speaker 2:And most of the academic institutions, universities and so on, are still fixed in curriculum that are not viable, not fit for purpose anymore. With AI changing the way everything works exponentially, with planetary collapse being exponentially, with climate change being exponential, we cannot waste 10 or 15 years to design a new curriculum. So either we wake up to the reality and we start being very flexible. And I have to go here against what the Ministry of Education says If I submit a program and they take two years to analyze and approve it, it's gone. I mean, the opportunity is gone. We need to have very flexible programs where the kids, the students, actually are part of developing their own curriculum, their own experiences, co-creating solutions across the planet at bioregional level. That's where I think we can change the planet and that's where we're heading to.
Speaker 1:And why now? I think that's always an interesting question. And why now? I think that's always an interesting question investors or people in general, like entrepreneurs, before starting, a lot of this knowledge, I think, has been known or is known in a lot of different circles for a long time. Maybe not regenerative, et cetera, et cetera. But what makes it different now? Apart from that, we're in complete planetary collapse, so the necessity is there, but that doesn't mean we're doing anything. So why do you think it seems to be not happening now?
Speaker 1:But the interest for this kind of education, interest for regeneration, the interest for the narrative of being part of nature, like we see it with the podcast years ago, the last few years have been very different from eight years ago. I can tell you, in terms of simple interest, in terms of if I talk to investors or people that are managing wealth, like even the narrative that soil is important wasn't there 13 years ago when I started following this space, actually through grazing, and now, of course, course, within a bubble. But let's say that has sort of seems to have shifted. But I don't want to fall into the trap saying, oh, now everything is different. This will be different than 20, 30 years ago than 100 years ago when the organic movement came up. Like that's dangerous as well, I feel what's your feeling? There is. Is it different now? Are we on a moment of change?
Speaker 2:It is different.
Speaker 1:Will we look back to it?
Speaker 2:It is different. I've been giving conferences. In the first 40 years it was face-to-face. I do 80 conferences in 25 countries a year. My carbon footprint was huge. I did manage to save several hundred thousands of hectares of forest, so I had my footprint well compensated. Maybe 20 years ago, what I managed to get was people crying in the audience.
Speaker 1:It's not a I said okay, it's not a bad response, necessarily it's a response.
Speaker 2:It's not a bad response and that means they were moved. I talk to universities in many different countries and I always ask them and who wants to be a politician? And none of them maybe one of them raised their hand. Over the last years, the space has changed. People are interested, people are wanting to, youth is already recognizing that the way it's going, they're not happy and they don't have hope. Um, what I did learn and actually my wife helped me a lot in this, because I was very I worked for some time with algor, even as a one of those climate change speakers, and she said start with hope, start by giving the good news, don't? I mean?
Speaker 1:nobody wants to hear any more of the bad news, and we hear a lot of it. Probably.
Speaker 2:I mean, we don't hear a lot of it, yeah, and I think people by now are convinced, and the ones that are not convinced is because of dogma or religion or whatever. I mean, my brother-in-law has a beautiful program called Curiosamente in Mexico. Millions of kids listen to it. It's about science, communicating science. He was shut down on Facebook by people that believe that the world is flat and they complained to Facebook and Facebook took his channel down.
Speaker 2:So can you believe, in Mexico, a group of people that think the earth is flat and Facebook complying by shutting down his channel? I mean, we still have these people, but then do I waste time with them? No, they're obsolete already, bucky Fuller, just ignore them. They will fall into their place, and they are already falling, and I think that's what this system is reacting now, I see, like a drowning person. If somebody goes to save them and doesn't know it, he'll get drowned because that person will try to pull him down to save herself. So this is what the system, the establishment, whatever you want to call it, is feeling it's losing, it's fit for purpose and it's dying. And my good friend, kate rayworth says we need to help them die. We need to help them go in peace. And they're going to go in peace, okay, how do we do that?
Speaker 1:how do we work with the existing system to? I'm just Because that's not what you're saying. You're saying help them die. How do we do hospice care?
Speaker 2:I don't think I have the ability to do it, nor the energy If you had how would you do it If you had the energy in a parallel universe?
Speaker 1:and you're like, how do we do that?
Speaker 2:with respect, Because I'd give them alternatives. I'd give them alternatives, of course. A company like Monsanto has no alternative. A company like Coca-Cola has no alternative. They know they're selling poison. They know they're killing young people with diabetes. They know they're selling poison. They know they're killing young people with diabetes. I mean, I think it's three out of every eight people in Honduras have diabetes since early age and it's because they drink Coca-Cola every single day. So these are companies that don't have. I mean other companies that you know produce baby food and 100% are contaminated with glyphosate. These companies should be closed, but they're companies that are doing an effort and I think we just need to provide them with the evidence on how to do it differently.
Speaker 2:I don't think people are mean just for being mean. And another thing which has worked and I learned a lot from Alan Savory. A lot of people know about Alan Savory because of his cattle and defending the cow, but Alan Savory is a real holistic thinker. He was a politician and he was president of the opposing party in a country in Africa and he managed to get to a peace agreement for three years because he moved people to think forward. So if you ask anybody no matter if they're red or blue to describe what they dream of in 20, 30 years. It's not very different, independent of your religion, of your political tendencies. Okay, so we actually forget our current challenges through that and we can concentrate on the real issues. So that's one of the things I would do I would get them to think as people, not as a ceo of cold company, but as people that have kids, as people that have a life.
Speaker 2:How would you like to be living in 20 years? And that's a question I ask in every one of my presentations how do you expect to be living in 20 years? And a lot of this is coming just across the room, no matter who's sitting in the room. So we work towards that and say how do we get to it? Is it by poisoning life? No, is it by enhancing conditions for life? Yes, okay, let's see how your company can now move to enhance conditions for life.
Speaker 2:So, yes, there are companies that will fall out and we cannot deal with everybody, but there are a lot of companies that can do the transition and we're seeing it. So I would say that is the best way to move people forward. The most difficult part, as I said at the beginning, is unlearning. So a lot will reject the information just because it will make them uncomfortable coming out of the comfort zone which they learned from a blessed expert, phd from this university. But again, if we move into the future and start analyzing and using nature's wisdom, we need to learn how to learn from nature and with all this movement. Going back to your original question in this part, you can see on YouTube today people like Zach Bush. I don't know if you know him, look him up YouTube today. People like Zach.
Speaker 1:Bush. I don't know if you know him, Look him up. We had a show, and at Groundswell last year I was lucky enough to host a session with Ann Bickley, who wrote with David Montgomery the book on what your food ate, and with Zach, which was a true gift.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and these people are now popular, popular. So that means that people are listening to alternatives. Why do I, why should I get alzheimer if I can correct myself by eating good? Do we need a company that produces yogurt to put 30 ingredients in it for money? No, we don't. A yogurt has to be bacteria and milk. So we don't need the pink and the red colorings, which are producing cancer in kids. We don't need the starch and the corn syrup. We don't need all that crap.
Speaker 2:So if we educate the people and this is another way to convince corporations by educating the people, and this is another way to convince corporations by educating the people If people and my wife and I read all the labels and I hardly ever go with my wife to the supermarket but she'll take two hours but she'll read every single label and not buy the stuff that's going to poison my kid label and not buy the stuff that's going to poison my kid. If we get that level of consciousness, companies will not produce food with titanium dioxide in it, as all the M&Ms have, or the orange juices have titanium dioxide. For Pete's sakes, who is going to buy titanium dioxide or go to any of these other cookies? And they're poison. So people are conscious of that and we have a lot of people listening to Zach Bush and all the other ones around the world talking about this. We will make companies change. Yes, they might reduce their gain by 0.1% if they don't put starch into their yogurt, but the benefit for people will make them better clients, are you sure?
Speaker 1:I mean, we've seen such an explosion of the ultra-processed food and we're going to hopefully have Chris on who wrote, chris von tulick, who wrote ultra processed people, of course based on research from brazil and in the us, but really became a a hype in terms of book, at least in the uk and some other places. But there the argument is very strong like where this is? This is like hard drugs, this is so addictive. We cannot expect the companies to, we can't expect us to not eat that anymore because it's just too cheap and too good in terms of snack. Keep on, keep on eating because it's designed to just be super addictive.
Speaker 1:And he calls very strongly for for regulation. You're saying consciousness will lead us to check the label and say, oh my god, I don't want 35 ingredients in a, in a yogurt and it's not an exaggeration. Like people, please do check. Because I see like, oh, you have this sandwich. You'll be shocked what's in your sandwich in a so-called healthy food chain. How do the two super strong forces? Of course, more consciousness will help reduce that or, let's say, increase the label watching. But there are whole companies specifically designed to make us addictive, addicted to the stuff and they're really good at it, as we are as society. And yeah, what, what do you? What do you see there? It seems like we're having a moment around ultra-processed food, by the way luckily, finally, but we also have known that for a while and it's like so strong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, again, you asked me what I would do if I could. I'm not interested in working on that dimension because it's wasting my time again. I wasted enough time discussing with scientists. I resigned from the Scientific Commission for Climate Change appointed by the previous president, because the decarbonization strategy of Costa Rica was going to be electric mobility, and I tried to organize, at the pre-cop in 2019, a side event. I organized a side event on soil carbon and my other nine scientific partners in this committee said we don't have enough evidence that soil is relevant for fighting climate change. Okay, I'm out.
Speaker 1:very clearly don't waste time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's I'm not gonna waste time. These are phds sitting on a microscope all day long in the most renowned university in the country. I am not going to waste my time because I won't convince them Now. What we need to do is cross a chasm. 13%, if I can get to 13%. I could give a fair guess that we're at between 4% and 6% right now of people already in the process of changing.
Speaker 1:We're not talking 30, it's 1-3. So we're starting to get in reach. We double again and we're there.
Speaker 2:We're there and once we get into that chasm, it's going to go.
Speaker 1:And these companies have put 23, 30 products in. They don't study systems change. Why 13? Is 13% so important?
Speaker 2:Well, that's science. I'm not against science. So statistically, there's this chasm where you get, you have the early adopters and you start moving forward and it gets to a point where people just adopt it. It could be more exponential if we get somebody like I don't know I'm out of date with the names of these singers, but, yeah, any of these which I mean. I remember when I was working in ICN and we got a video out and we were so happy we had 100 hits, 100,000 hits. This was the first time that a conservation video had 100,000 hits and somebody in the audience in this meeting said, yeah, I can't remember who it was Britney Spears or who brought out and she had 2 million hits in 30 minutes and we had a hundred thousand in one month. Okay, if we can get any of these Taylor Swift, who's already a bit there, and these other actresses I can't remember her name right now who's already a bit there, and these other actress I can't remember her name right now who's working on this we get any of these to join us and communicate.
Speaker 2:I wish I I talked with some of the advisors of greta thunberg and I told them let's get greta to give solutions so she can stop pointing fingers. If we could have done that, she'd be in a different place today. Imagine a person like Greta telling all kids her age look, let's stop complying to this corrupt system, to these corrupt companies, to these corrupt governments, and let's build our own. We still have a chance to build the future. Let's do it this way Stop buying these products. Start growing your own food. If you cannot support the neighbor, that can grow your own food. Let's do co-ops. Let's move forward. If she could have given these recommendations, she would have made a huge difference. But pointing fingers to blame won't get you anywhere. The same as discussing with dogma. I mean, there's so much mix of religion with all this lack of capacity to think broader it's not worth fighting. It's too much energy.
Speaker 1:And so what would you tell the financial world? I mean, you're getting them visiting you for sure, people that are investing their own wealth, people that are in in positions of wealth where they decide investments are going left or right, or at least they are nudging. Let's say, um, let's say we do this in the financial heart of costa rica, or in in at wall street, etc. In a theater we get people very inspired, very excited in front of a live audience, but of course people forget. And if you want one thing, like one seed to plant, and, and they would get to work the next day. So not just I'm super inspired in my private life. No, actually, how do you use your capacity, your awake hours in work? What would be that seed you would like to plant? What would be your message for for the financial world from what you've seen, what you've experienced, what you've learned?
Speaker 2:I've dealt with a lot of potential donors, philanthropists, um, over the last years and months. Um, it's very hard for this work to be done if they are looking for immediate returns. It takes time, and especially for a university. We survived COVID maybe because we were already online, but we did suffer a lot. 70% of our students, who are Latin Americans, quit paying because they lost their jobs and so on. I mortgaged the building to keep the university running. We lost only 27 students out of 600, and some during COVID.
Speaker 2:And then we go into this gentrification process in the country, where there's so much dollar being put in from these people buying everything from outside, that the dollar went from 700 colones to less than 500 colones and our income did the same. So we're right now in a really difficult spot financially and I have not been able to convince investors to help train thousands of people who can actually save their kids' lives and save their companies in the future, because we need to revert the process of planetary collapse. So money in return at the short term is not that easy to get. Yes, we found mechanisms like the cattle producers we can double their income so they can pay, but the biological quarters who's going to pay for that and it's the only insurance for life in the future, bringing biodiversity back to its levels. But that phase of recognizing the importance of life and their own life because they feel protected in their world.
Speaker 1:But that's not the case even in Costa Rica somebody say yesterday, like the only thing family offices or investors in general cannot hatch, cannot hatch against, is societal or ecological collapse, and but it doesn't, hasn't landed enough. I think with people like without this, this is the base, like there's nothing else matters. If, if, um, if ecology doesn't, if biodiversity doesn't flourish and ecology doesn't flourish, but that hasn't landed enough yet.
Speaker 2:And you can look at it as a temporary investment. I mean, if I had enough funding for the next 10 years and I could demonstrate that we can reverse climate change, we can reverse biodiversity collapse, we can get rid of all fertilizers, we can start reverting Alzheimer, autism and all these chronic diseases, we can bring life conditions back, we can flourish After that. I'm sure we can make a business model out of it, but at the beginning it's almost impossible. So we need long-term investments. We need to look at this as the biggest return is bringing life back. What does that mean to me? What does it mean to me that my kids have actually an opportunity to live in the future? Is that important? These are questions that have to be answered by these people. Or the other question question is your money going to save you? Is all those zeros behind the numbers in your bank account going to assure you against planetary collapse? Is it going to make you live better? Are you going to be able to enjoy your beachfront house when the sea level is five meters above? Are you going to enjoy your life when all food is produced in a lab and you have no microbiome gut left? You have no immune system left. I mean, we're talking about building great conditions for life, every type of life, including these business people, and I don't have the argument that I have not been successful. Everybody's saying, yeah, we want to help, but, yeah, we want to help. But you know, or they take for ages processing data and looking at numbers and seeing my cash flow. You know this is not about cash flow. I mean, I decided not to be rich when I was less than 20 years old and devote my life to making other people capable of doing things. I'm not in this for money, so it's hard for people to understand when I'm not in this for money. So it's hard for people to understand when you're not in this for money and they don't understand the real reasons behind it, which is I have a son who's 12 years old. He won't get to half my age unless I change the conditions. Isn't that scary? Just look what happened this week in Switzerland, in Italy, in the US, in Mexico. Just look what happened this week in Switzerland, in Italy, in the US, in Mexico, around the world Cities in the Alps that had waterfalls going above their buildings. I mean, we are there. How much money is required to rebuild these places. If that money could be invested in bringing the conditions for the planet back.
Speaker 2:We have too much carbon in the atmosphere. Let's pull it down and put it beneath our feet. We can do that with cattle, we can do that with agriculture. We can bring 150% of the carbon emissions of today's economy every year into the soil just by producing food in a different way and fiber. So the fashion companies can also be part of this. We can do it, but we need to demonstrate it. So we we need the measurement, verification and reporting, the mrv for these companies, not for the farmer. Uh, I brought an indigenous wisdom holder in agriculture, mel Landers, to work with my team. We're now mixing the Cuban system with indigenous agriculture to actually be able to allow the farmer not to bring anything from outside his farm and produce abundant food. And he always says a farmer needs permaculture without the yoga.
Speaker 1:That's a really good statement. Actually, some people can also use the yoga, probably, but let's not make a suggestion of that.
Speaker 2:I agree, but we're talking about farmers that have to put food on their plate and other kids don't eat that day.
Speaker 1:No, no, you cannot argue. If you're in the red, you cannot like. There's no argument there. So if we switch the conversation and you are an investor let's say a billion dollars, us dollars or whatever better dollars in your case what would you do? What would you focus on? This could be very long-term, but it has to be invested. I'm not asking for dollar amounts. I'm asking for big buckets, like what would be prioritization for someone like you to seen so much, has done so much and would be in a position of an investor to to put money to work, which is not always a good thing, like, actually, it could be quite a burden, but I still want to ask the question.
Speaker 2:So, um, in 2017, an article was published which um said the agriculture, or the way we produce our food and fiber, is responsible for about 80 percent of planetary collapse, the planetary boundaries being exceeded. So agriculture is a low-hanging fruit If it's the fault. If it's the fault for obesity, it's the fault for diseases, it's the fault for biodiversity loss, for water contamination, for deterioration of soil and land and landscapes. It's the lowest hanging fruit to tackle to revert the damage. Tackle to revert the damage. So what we need is large-scale implementation of regenerative agriculture and cattle, if I can get to 10 million hectares measured with. We are developing sensors through the Soil Information Company that can measure soil metabolism, so we don't have to do the soil sampling and send it out. We can actually measure real time the soil. These should be in the soil, these sensors, by sometime later this year. We can get measuring the biodiversity, how it's returning. We can show that this is successful without having to worry about writing grants every three months to keep on the funding process, and we couple it with an educational system that shows this to thousands and thousands and thousands of people around the world farmers, students, professionals that want to change and they can start applying it and have a network where exchanges can happen, where we can bring in visiting students from Indonesia and we can send students to Norway and farmers and have farms that are demonstrating this in real time.
Speaker 2:I work here with Rancho Margot. There's actually a documentary Dying Earth from Al Jazeera. It just came out a few weeks ago. Rancho Margot is portrayed there Very good. Yeah yeah, this is a place where tourists come because they want to see what changed their kids' lives. So students come in with their groups from universities or colleges and they go back home as different people and the parents get curious what changed the life of my kids? Who did I send back? What experience? Someone else?
Speaker 1:came back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I want to go visit. That's how he gets his tourists. That is the impact we need, and it just will grow and grow exponentially. We can get 100 Rantamar goats around the world working and networked with educational platforms, networked with all these geniuses in regeneration teaching directly, so we don't have to read their books on them, we can actually ask them questions. That's the way to change it massively.
Speaker 1:give me 10 years and then these new businesses will come up, new opportunities will come up so the combination of real implementation, observation and sharing with a massive audience, because any of those independently are sort of irrelevant. They're very relevant but they're not going to have the impact.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and education. I've seen the change. I've seen the change. I've seen you know. There is this group now on regenerative tourism global regenerative tourism group, whatever it's called. These are all former students of UCI who got together and set up this organization to promote regenerative tourism. They've been working in Europe all over the place. These things happen and these are motors of change.
Speaker 1:So it's not a theory. We've demonstrated that it can happen. So bear with me, um, but if you had a magic wand and you could change one thing overnight, so no longer in charge of the fund, but a magic wand which potentially is more powerful or less powerful, depending how you uh frame it what would you change? Could be anything, but only one thing I've changed the whole educational system. I had an idea, yeah.
Speaker 2:You were going there. Yeah, we're working with this Peruvian friend, joaquin Lejia, who developed a system in Peru where he brings in Mother Nature as a teacher into schools. He moved to Costa Rica to work with me and we're developing this new center for training teachers from around the world on how to bring nature into schools as a teacher. The impact this has on young kids is amazing. I can see it in my kid. We're living on a farm. He goes out and collects snakes and scorpions and tarantulas and knows how to identify them. He goes out with his mother's cell phone and identifies the birds singing and then he gets his camera and goes take and he is understanding how nature works. He will be one of the future edward mullers because he is understanding the importance of nature in our lives.
Speaker 2:We need to then move to high school. Is it worthwhile calling soft skills soft when they're the most critical skills that are needed? Is it a technical training that's going to save the planet? No, kids can learn on YouTube, but they cannot get their soft skills and critical skills from YouTube. You cannot do that.
Speaker 2:Leadership. We need to move away from competition and in kindergarten they already have the student with the best grade or the student who plays the best soccer. No, we need the student who is the best classmate, who helps the other classmates move forward. So we need cooperation instead of competition In high schools. We need to have students that are able to join in community work and build community-based projects, not individual startups that are going into egoism, but actually collaborating, building a better future In universities. We cannot keep on teaching kids that we need to put pesticides on the food we're going to eat. We cannot train food technicians who think that putting poisonous colorings into food is good because it will be prettier to it to eat, even if it's dangerous. We cannot keep on teaching that. So, yes, we need to change the educational system, and there is no change in planetary conditions if we do not re-educate the people.
Speaker 2:And when I start the university I use a term which I was convinced to quit using it for obvious reasons I said I'm going to recycle the professionals that are coming out from traditional universities Of course, that wasn't a good word to use, but students that go through our programs. They think differently and that's what we need. We need people to be able to think differently, to understand complexity, to understand that if we go back to nature and use nature, understand nature and work with nature, we can build a better future. And the biggest mistake we made and I asked my staff in 1997 not to use the term environmental education. And people thought it was crazy and I said no, environmental education has been wrong. We're teaching people that we have to take care of the planet. The planet takes care of itself.
Speaker 2:If we would have taught people that if nature is not happy, nature is not healthy, nature is not functioning, we don't exist, that would have been a different power structure. So if people would have understood that Descartes was wrong we cannot separate spirituality from materialism that Newton was even more wrong, because the system does not work by the forces that components exert against each other. In nature, one plus one can be 20, so we can actually go all the way. Back to the greeks, I was taught that you need to identify one question, one hypothesis, and the scientific method was to find one answer. That is the worst thing that could have happened to humanity, because in nature there are 100 questions and 100 different answers. So this has to change and the only way to change this is if we work, bringing in the spiritual, the consciousness, the earth, charter principles understanding of nature, working with nature and getting nature to function again, so we can function again.
Speaker 1:I think it's a perfect wrap-up of this conversation. I want to thank you so much for joining us here in challenging a health moment and, time-wise as well very early morning or early morning for you and, of course, for the work you do and sharing it here with us to share with our audience. I will put a lot of links in the show notes below. If you're interested, please reach out, get in touch, go and visit. I have not done that yet, but I heard amazing stories, so definitely, if you have the means, do that, and thank you so much for joining us here today.
Speaker 2:It's been a pleasure. I know you guys that work in communication are probably the most important people right now, because we need this narrative, we need this new narrative, we need to give hope and it's your audience who can receive this message of hope and join by doing things and not sitting down and waiting for somebody to do them for us.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. For the show notes and links we discussed in this episode, check out our website investinginregenerativeagriculturecom. Forward slash posts. If you liked this episode, why not share it with a friend or give us a rating on Apple Podcasts? That really helps. Thanks again and see you next time.
