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
346 Antonio Nobre - Why would one of the world’s leading earth scientists invest in nature-based unicorns?
In the second episode of the two-part conversation with Antonio Nobre, Brazilian agronomist by training and world’s leading Earth scientist, serving as the scientific director of the Biotic Pump Greening Group, we explore how he would invest $1 billion—and yes, it involves nature unicorns. We’ll dive deep into water cycles, the biotic pump, and why combining biotic pump knowledge with syntropic agroforestry is a match made in heaven. There’s so much more in this episode, including the latest advancements in genome research and how we can harmonize technological progress with ecological preservation.
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In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show 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. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
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In this second part we unpacked the biotic pump, the small water cycle, restoration and how he discovered syntropic agroforestry, which gave him hope again that agriculture could be part of the solution. We also covered the latest in gene and genome research and other massive surprises in science. Lately, for example, the selfish gene turns out to be not so selfish, and why he's excited about a lot of the new technologies, but why we have to be incredibly humble. And, of course, how would Antonio invest $1 billion and why money is like fireworks. 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 RegenEgg. That is, gumroadcom slash investing in Reg. Terms of not not to take away this train of thought, but I'm always curious. That's why we asked, uh, and then have another question on how we get this, this level of of awareness, into people without shooting everybody to space, which would be a nice solution, but in the medium term, maybe not so workable, unpractical, yeah.
Speaker 1:A bit unpractical, but let's go there in a second. One question I want to ask before which we usually call the $1 billion question or 1 billion euro question If you would be in charge of a significant like it's a lot of money and at the same time, compared to some other people it's nothing. But let's say you had this amount of money to put to work and I'm not looking for exact amounts, but I'm looking what would you prioritize? What would be a few things you would really say, okay, with a big bucket of money you could do. If invested, you could do a lot of, you could kickstart, as you say. What would you focus on if tomorrow morning you woke up and suddenly you had this kind of money?
Speaker 2:I would put to work, I would find unicorns, natural unicorns.
Speaker 2:Uh, you know, unicorn is the term used for uh for those folks who are creative and they invent new software, new hardware, new stuff, especially in the information age, in the information frontier, I would stimulate the emergence of unicorns in regenerative agriculture. Why? Because if I put one billion, one billion these days is really nothing. It's a very small amount of money. Just think about how much money was spent in the Ukraine war in the last two years. So one billion is floating around. I have heard from colleagues operating in the financial world that they say there is too much money to lead too few good projects. The people in economics, they are not aware of what is brimming, brewing into this so-called alternative agriculture, alternative ecology, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1:Forestry and they have….
Speaker 2:Alternative investment yeah, and they have discarded it. Basically, you say well, those guys are dreamers, they don't have the food on the ground.
Speaker 1:They're the hippies. Yeah, exactly, they're hippies.
Speaker 2:And what we see is that everything in nature that has a global reach has emit the exponential function. Exponential is the math of explosion.
Speaker 2:And you see if you look at the marvels of what the Chinese economy is doing in the last several years, it's like decades.
Speaker 2:It's basically dealing with exponentials. You know, thousands of years ago the Chinese built the Great Wall right to protect them from invaders, and they built 12,000 kilometers of walls, stone walls, without having the machines we have today. And they did this because they applied something the labor and the exponentials. Now, with the comeback of the Chinese civilization, you see they applying similar things. They have developed the fast train network in China. In 20 years they built 35,000 kilometers of bullet trains in China, and they're doing this with solar panels, with electric vehicles, with everything you name it. And I think this is a very good recipe that you invest your money to obtain a result, not only to obtain profit. Not only to obtain profit, because when you only look for profits and you can get profit, for example, from fluctuation of values, which is not necessarily something that is healthy for the planet you can make a lot of money in the stock market, but just because the price has fluctuated due to, you know, all sorts of uh irrelevant.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the best. In the best case you're not doing any harm, but in the worst case you're probably causing some yeah, somewhere, yeah you're definitely doing any bad. There are no benefits. There are no benefits.
Speaker 2:And right now we need desperately investment in natural, in systems that respect the superiority, technological superiority of nature, that realize that Gaia is well, well, well ahead of us. So when many people in the technological and investment minded uh world they think that nature is going back, it's like uh going to a primitive state which is nothing can be farther from the truth going to name going?
Speaker 1:how do we make them see that? I'm'm not saying it's to see them, but how do we Overview effect? The group of Chinese in charge.
Speaker 2:Overview effect. Even the Chinese need to learn some of this, Because for example the Chinese have invested for decades now almost three decades in greening. They have the Great green wall in china but they have met limited success. A study published in 2017 showed that only 15 percent of the trees planted by the chinese over the previous 25 years actually formed a canopy.
Speaker 1:Why? Because 1.5,. We're talking here 15. 15. 15.
Speaker 2:15% it was an incredibly waste of energy and resources, etc. Why? Because the Chinese do not know about the biotic pump. So if you go inland near the Gobi Desert and you plant trillions, zillions of trees and you don't take care of them, if you don't water them, etc. They die off. This has happened, for example, in China is one case, but you have, for example, in Senegal. They have planted billions of trees with money from the UN, etc. And eight years later you go back there and many of those trees were harvested for fuel wood. You know people didn't have fuel to cook, so they harvested the trees that were planted to restore the ecosystem. And so in China they didn't know about the biotic pump. You need to have a conveyor belt built from the shores inland, you have to understand the circulation, the atmospheric circulation, and you have to plant trees.
Speaker 1:So just for people that are now blanking and like, what is he talking about? Biotic pump, just to walk us through the science there and the dynamics of how you would do that differently, with way more success, if you took into consideration what we know now about the biotic pump, about flying rivers, about how water moves in in small and larger water cycles, just for people to. To repeat, we've talked about it a lot on the podcast, but I can't assume everybody knows.
Speaker 2:So let's, let's unpack that, yeah well first, uh, for for most of earth's life there were no, there was no vegetation covering the lands, so the lands were basically buried. And then life evolved out of the sea, climbed on land and colonized the land. It took millions, hundreds of millions of years for them to build, to invent plants, to invent trees and eventually producing forests and covering the land, and for a good part. Until, say, 12,000 years ago, when the Holocene era was starting, earth was covered with forests. You know the Egyptians. They crossed the Red Sea to log big trees in Saudi Arabia. You go into caves near Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and you see rock paintings showing giraffes and palm trees and elephants, etc. It was green. Sahara was green. It was green, sahara was green.
Speaker 2:Australia was green, not that long ago, not that long ago, 12,000 years ago, and more and more studies are showing that basically raising animals you know, browsing animals was the main source of deforestation and desertification for most of those areas. And we are now documenting it happening in South America, you know, the Amazon, as we speak, is being transformed into a desert, is being transformed into a desert by the forces that in the past they didn't have tractors, they didn't have chemicals, they didn't have genetic manipulation.
Speaker 1:So it took a bit longer, but yeah, now we're fast. Yeah, we are doing it exponentially.
Speaker 2:And it's very hard to convince those guys with the mentality of the Green Revolution that what they are doing is shooting their own food, because as you deforest you lose this biotic pump and then you lose the flying rivers and then you lose the importation of moisture. Inland nature took millions of years to colonize, bit by bit, you know, from the seashores, inland and greening the continent. And now this system works in a very it's kind of it's very complex, but it is not too complicated to explain. You have trees which have deep roots. They pump water from the water table inside the soil, out through the trees and through the canopy and into the atmosphere.
Speaker 2:In a tropical zone you have a lot of heat, so there's a lot of evaporation. Evaporation cools the surface, which is incredibly important for the trees themselves and for creating a very favorable environment for life in general, inclusive for agriculture in the surrounding areas. And this vapor, as it rises into the atmosphere, when it gets to about four or five kilometers, it meets small condensation seeds that are particulate material produced by the forest itself, spores, pollen, grains and also chemicals that are released by by the plants and those, but this is an important piece, this is those, those, those particles come from the forest it comes from the forest, just for people to remember, but they're not from somewhere else they come from a healthy forest.
Speaker 2:Yes, and and they're uh uh, they're invisible. So that's why I call the fairy dust or pixie dust, because there is a dust that is produced by the life itself, a highly, highly sophisticated mechanism through which the forests make the water vapor in the air condense and produce clouds. Those clouds are very healthy clouds. They are white, they reflect a lot of the sunshine, incoming sunshine, so they cool down the tropical area and they produce rainfall, plentiful rainfall, because they are low, they don't produce a lot of ice inside, basically water, liquid water, and so there are abundant liquid water, which keeps the forest going and thriving.
Speaker 2:When this water vapor that's in the air condensates, it disappears from the volume and produces droplets and then you don't have the water vapor gas anymore.
Speaker 2:So it lowers pressure and produces a suction, lowering pressure in on land, it's conveyed to the sea nearby and pulled moist air from the sea inland and then driving the hydrological cycle on land. And without this you have the opposite the air, dry air over land, because land is desert. It flows from land to the sea, not allowing moist air to come from the sea inland. You know, after all, the seas have 97% of all water on the surface of the planet, and so, even though the sea has salt water, when it evaporates due to sunshine, you have fresh water. The clouds over the oceans are made of fresh water and as they move inland due to the biotic pup, due to the vegetation effect, then they bring fresh water inland and this is what drives everything. Everything is driven. You know, agriculture, industry, the rivers, the ecosystems, everything thrive on fresh water coming from the sea due to the biotic pump. So this is the short explanation for this think it's.
Speaker 1:We cannot repeat it enough how fundamental healthy vegetation is in pooling or in triggering or bringing in moisture from the sea. Without that, the, the sea would still evaporate, and we've seen that actually in the mediterranean this summer the sea would still evaporate because it's still warmer and warmer, but the, the, this moisture doesn't go anywhere until it's being hit by. In this case, I think it moved. We remember the floods in central europe, um, at the end of the summer, like this. This evaporation still needs to go somewhere at some point, probably with quite destructive force, and but if there's healthy vegetation like if there would be healthy vegetation from the gobi desert to the sea, a lot of that moisture would be drawn in exactly piece by piece, not in one shot, but piece by piece to wherever we, let's say we're guiding it. But wherever it, it, um, it flies to, but you need that vegetation to also evaporate. It's not like the. We always remember this water cycle. Okay, there's evaporation, the wind blows it on top of the land and then it rains. Now that's that's fundamentally wrong.
Speaker 2:Without the land being healthy vegetated, it won't bring, it won't bring in the moisture from this sorry, it is fundamentally wrong for many reasons, not for just one, because, uh, first of all, the wind doesn't blow the the moisture from the ocean on land.
Speaker 2:Because there's no suction yeah except for a few places on the planet, exactly because the wind blows from land to sea. When you have a desert, right, that's what you see, you get a continent-sized piece of land like Australia, and most of it is barren. Because exactly of this, and you see this, there is a beautiful animation done by NASA showing in 3D the clouds forming all around Australia, and only the eastern border has a little bit, and you have, of course, rainforests. There in Queensland and in other places you have a little bit of wind that comes to the edge, but that's it. And the rest is basically the opposite. And, for example, in the lowest plateau in the central part of China, they have obtained a miracle there because they have been able to, first of China. They have obtained a miracle there because they have been able to, first of all, stop the erosion. They took out the browsing animals, especially goats, which were being very detrimental for vegetation in general, and they have invested heavily in greening the area. You know, all documented by our dear colleague John.
Speaker 1:Deere.
Speaker 2:And so. But what happened then? It was a confusion, because part of the lowest plateau was getting more rain Actually, it seems that most of it was getting more rain Actually, it seems that most of it was getting more rain and nonetheless there was lowering of the water table and the rivers started drying up. And that remits us to what Anastasia was saying, that if you put a lot of trees far inland and trees are pumping moisture from the soil up into the air, and the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, so to speak, between the combs in the wrong direction, then you lose that water vapor.
Speaker 2:you lose that water vapor because it goes into the Gobi desert instead of, and it doesn't pull anything in the back. Now, if we, instead of doing this greening effort, far inland, detached from the shores and far away from the sea we did that progressively from the sea inland.
Speaker 1:That's how you would do it. You would start at the sea, as life did in the past like step by step, meter by meter.
Speaker 2:And eventually you restore the biotic pump. I think Ernest Goetsch, who is this farm in southern Bahia in Brazil, he did exactly that. He's very near the ocean.
Speaker 1:I was going to ask how far is he?
Speaker 2:He's about 30 kilometers 30 kilometers. There are other small vegetation pockets here and there, and he reestablished the Atlantic Forest in a patch of land of like I think it was like 500 hectares, and during the peak of dry season not dry season droughts, actual droughts, episodic droughts His farm was the only one that was green there, you know, like Frozen, the movie from Pixar, yeah, yeah, and they have this snowman and a small cloud on the top of his head and snowing.
Speaker 1:It's always raining, it's always snowing yeah.
Speaker 2:And uh, that's what Ernest got in his uh farm is the only place where you have this uh, this uh rainfall, uh uh, more, more plentiful, and the farms around all basically broken, not produced, productive anymore, and his one is still with streams flowing, etc. So he he didn't know about the, the biotic pump, until we met and we started interacting and we we knew little about the centropic and we knew little about the syntropic agriculture that he proposed.
Speaker 1:How was that discovering that? Or how was it? Do you remember when you first saw that potential or saw that world of syntropy or syntropic agroforestry or syntropic silvopass?
Speaker 2:Well, I didn't have the syntropic agriculture, but I had the rainforest and so the extreme, yeah, the extreme version and I I tend to think that, uh, agriculture and, uh, a fully functional, uh, plantful, marvelous ecosystem were incompatible, that we could not combine the two, and that tended to be my view of this, until I heard about Ernst and I first met him in a farm in Sao Paulo in 2015. And he took us to a place where he was recovering that was degraded, and I saw a lot of weeds. You know, for an agronomist, usually weed is a bad thing. Uh-oh, yeah, weed is a bad thing. It's something that you say oh, this place is infested with weeds and you start thinking about how to remove those weeds, how to get rid of them. And I asked him. I said, ernest, how? I can see you have Tiririca, which is a common weed in São Paulo. So how do you deal with Tiririca? How do you deal with it?
Speaker 2:And we say bad. How do you call that? Erva da ninha? I don't know how to translate that. It's a damning Weed of the devil. Yeah, like a damning weed of the devil. Yeah, it's like a damning plant or something he said. He turned to me and said damning plant, no miracles. Plant in a miraculous, miraculous plant. And then he got shocked because miraculous plants, what? What does he mean? And then, then he explained, he said look, this plant grows where no one else wants to grow. This is basically telling of its innate capacity to deal and to handle with a degraded soil, degraded environment. And it does it wonderfully and it produces green mass. That's what we are looking for.
Speaker 2:And then he developed this machine that looks like this old thing people use to cut hair. You know you have a I forgot the name. He developed a machine that's very light. It had a shearing stuff that was cutting the the, the weeds ahead of it, and then it was pulling it to the side and in the, in the food of those trees that they were. You were planting and there you had imagine you had. He was using the weeds to gain capital. Weeds were the ones who were converting nothing carbon dioxide and degraded soil into something organic matter.
Speaker 2:And organic matter in the food of those trees meant many things, among them, a deterrent to leaf-cutting ants, because leaf-cutting ants in degraded lands can be a problem. If you're planting trees, the leaf cutting ants come and they destroy all your, eventually kill the trees. If like fruit trees, all your solar panels basically, yeah, exactly, it's like you're losing value in your stocks. You know you have an investment there and there is someone who is predating it. Go during nighttime and eat all the leaves, but when you have rotting organic matter on the foot of those trees, the leaf cutting ants, like Ata SP, for example one species, it doesn't like it, it doesn't cross it, so it protects the trees. This is the first effect. Then eventually you have fungi growing out of the soil into this organic matter and it turns out this fungi is able to extract moisture from the air. They are hygroscopic, they can trap. This was so amazing for me.
Speaker 2:One day I went to visit his own farm in Bahia Not this one in Sao Paulo, but in Bahia, and it was after two years of drought, every cacao plantation in the's broom, which is a very bad disease that hits the cacao. He, he said, yes, I lowered the production. It's not as high as it used to be in a wet year. It was like 20% less, but still producing, and everything luxuriant and green. And you have this rainforest, this Atlantic rainforest, on top of cacao.
Speaker 2:And then I asked him about the drought, and then he raised this little layer and showed the soil. The soil was bone dry. It was like, you know, a powder. It wasn't really soil because it was so dry and I thought this is Harry Potter magic. This cannot be, because there is no moisture in the soil and the trees don't seem to be affected at all. What is happening here? And then he showed me again the little layer, this mattress of roots and mycorrhizae, and he said you see the fungi here. This fungi is extracting water from the air and feeding the trees where this water is extracting from the air. So this is absolutely revolutionary science. You know this is unbelievable, absolutely know this is unbelievable because, absolutely this is unbelievable.
Speaker 1:What did it do to you like in 2015 or 16, when you well, you can see, there is a book written about, uh, syntropic agriculture.
Speaker 2:uh, not the one by philippe and Diana, but another one from someone in Brazil, and they asked me to write a dedication like a back cover.
Speaker 2:And I told this experience and when he told me you know, agronomist, ecologist, I am an agronomist and an ecologist, and now I am an earth scientist and I and an ecologist and now I am an earth scientist and I work with holistic system, et cetera, and I did not know that agriculture was possible on those terms, that Ernest was creating and I was completely what. What? So weeds now are miraculous plants that are our allies and since then I have collaborated with Ernest and, of course, with Felipe and Diana for putting together this incredible competence of knowledge of Gaia, of life, together with how we fix the systems that have wrought havoc, like agricultural systems, and connecting with the water cycle. This is the thing that we bring from Anastasia and we are connecting the water cycle, the climate, the understanding of the Earth system as a whole, with the actual manipulation through the syntropic.
Speaker 2:And the thing about the syntropic agriculture syntropic silviculture, syntropic timber management or whatever you call it syntropic is that whatever you do invest there, it multiplies exponentially. That's the thing about life. Everything you do, it's true. I mean you put one seed of corn in the ground and you have thousands produced in the corn. You know when you harvest. That's true for nature. There's this exponential growth, but it's an exponential beneficial growth, not an exponential disease or destructive development Parasite. This is where, uh, I think we, we're, we we struck a jack jackpot.
Speaker 1:Uh, in in a, in a conceptual yeah, because that combination, the combination of this the syntropic side with the water cycle and biotic pump piece, seems like a match made in heaven, because otherwise you just try to create these little islands of paradise if you even if that even works, if you're too far from the coast it might not even work because everything between you and the coast is not going to help you. And but combining that with the water cycle research, the understanding of how that works, the modeling we can do now, like the, the compute power we can bring to this and understand where to go first and how to create these hop island effects of water, seems to be really a jackpot, like you said.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know it's like. You know to use nature and nature resources and what Gaia has invented over. You know, gaia has dealt with an untold number of cataclysms over four billion years. So Gaia has developed incredible technologies to deal with these cataclysms. And it bounces back every time to deal with this cataclysm. And it bounced back every time. Every time there was like a big meteor or volcanism or climate change, etc. Before humanity, before even animals were on Earth, roaming on Earth.
Speaker 2:Gaia has invented techniques to deal with this and there is nothing simpler and cheaper for us today to resort to than to go back to this technology of Gaia developed over billions of years. This is the thing about economics that there is nothing cheaper than to go and take advantage of R&D from nature. R&d from nature is the one that we haven't. We're not even around when it was developed and it's there, it's still functioning, it's still there pumping all this incredible mechanisms, mechanisms intertwined, everything working wonderfully together. Until, of course, we come with a chainsaw. Until, of course, we come with a bomb or with things that, yeah, this is Achilles' heel of Gaia, achilles heel of Gaia that Gaia doesn't know how to handle chainsaws, or two bulldozers with a big chain, you know, destroying 20 hectares of rainforest per hour.
Speaker 1:Gaia doesn't know how to deal with it or to protect itself from it. I think we're feeling the, the result of that. You don't have to look very far, I think, um, as humanity, we're, I mean we're starting to seriously suffer because of that. It's not a direct like, we don't feel it so directly, but we see from, from, from health to all kinds. I mean we, I think we're being, we're feeling, let's say, the response of Gaia of the misuse of all of that, but it's an indirect one and it's going to hit us just probably too late to still fix it. But I don't think we'll. We're like a parasite, we'll be strutted off Earth very quickly, Eventually but this imagine that this is horrific.
Speaker 1:No, no. It is Many times I see people saying we are killing ourselves?
Speaker 2:Yes, we are killing ourselves, but do we want to do that? You know, to kill ourselves. It's like we have to have. We have to be able to be sensitive enough to the meaning of whatever we conceive and what we think and what we do, because imagine we have been. We are crowning, not trying to push the humans as the best, but we are in the top of a process that took billions of years to produce it. It's not out of chance. This is absolutely not out of chance. There is this incredible discovery every day. If you read the scientific literature, you learn things that are absolutely striking, for example, professor Dennis Noble from Oxford University. He has been a foe to Professor Richard Dawkins, also from Oxford University, because Dennis Noble is older than Hawkins, but Steve Hawkins, not Steve Hawkins, richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins is the author of the Selfish Gene, which, in my view, is one of the worst possible contributions to human endeavour on Earth that has ever come about.
Speaker 2:And recently there was a discussion between Denis Noble and Hesher Dawkins and I thought it was incredibly interesting because Denis Novel was basically denying that DNA is the sole and unique source of heredity in organisms and basically countering the central dogma of molecular biology. Central dogma of molecular biology said by Hesher Dawkins this is his expression that the DNA system of storing information and then reproducing and allowing organisms to carry on information from generation to generation, the Darwinian thing is a dogma for them, it's a central dogma of molecular biology. And so Hesher Dawkins would have argued with Denis Noble that if he could get Denis Noble DNA in a place stored for thousands of years, he could go back, get the Denis Noble DNA and build another Denis Noble. And so Denis Noble responded immediately said how would you? Where would you find my mother's egg cell?
Speaker 2:Because DNA doesn't have genes that define the membranes. You don't have life without membranes. Maybe you have in virus, but it's not really life. Virus is a different kind of information structure, but I mean anything that has metabolism, like a cell, has a membrane. Membranes is absolutely essential. Everything from the outer membrane of the organelles in the mitochondria and in the nucleus, etc. Everything relies on the pain of membranes. And the membrane you don't have from the DNA. The membrane comes from your mother, from the egg cell. Okay, so if you don't have the mother of Dennis Noble, you cannot build another Dennis Noble just from the DNA.
Speaker 1:Which means you cannot see any cell or any gene in isolation.
Speaker 2:No A gene, a gene.
Speaker 1:I put a link below.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a gene. I put a link below the discussion, but I didn't see it.
Speaker 2:A gene is a fantastic thing in terms of gears, like a gear that works wonderfully for codifying the sequence of amino acids to build proteins, but a gene, if you have. As they found it that very few genes codify directly proteins, like 2% of the genome and the rest. For a long time the molecular biologists were calling just garbage. They called it genetic garbage. Of course, now it's changed. They don't call it garbage anymore. They discovered that genes, that the genes produces RNA, which is an intermediary which never produces protein, but they mediate chemistry inside the cell. It's incredibly complicated, incredibly complex, incredibly sophisticated. So even with all our knowledge about DNA and genomes and everything in connection, we should be humble. We know virtually nothing of this complexity and we are starting to touch the tip of the iceberg on this molecular complexity.
Speaker 1:Imagine how did Richard respond? Like how did that? Well, he didn't respond.
Speaker 2:Watch the discussion. It's really fascinating.
Speaker 1:I will watch it. He didn't respond.
Speaker 2:What could he respond to this? Because this is coming from the molecular biology field, research. It's not something that is uttered by a believer somewhere, it's from the molecular biology research itself. And the more you look into the metabolism, for example, initially in the 90s when the Genome Project was starting, it was full blown. They thought the. The belief was once the, the dna sequence was mapped, everything would be understood. This is a central dogma of biology, right? If you decode the central molecule, macromolecule, that codify for everything in life, then solved, problem solved. We will be there, yeah.
Speaker 2:And then the first disappointment was it was this only they could map only two percent that was actually codifying for amino acid sequences in proteins and they called 98% as garbage. Then they said well, we won't solve this problem just looking into DNA, we have to also look into the proteins. And they started mapping proteins and they found that because the original dogma was one gene, one protein, because one gene had the sequence of amino acids to produce one protein. One protein is like a small robot, you know, a protein is like enzyme and will mediate this and this reactions in the metabolism, et cetera, et cetera. So it was like a linear, univocal connection between genes and proteins, and then One in, one out and we're done yeah.
Speaker 2:And then they started mapping proteins and they found Well, they had found like 22,000, 23,000 genes in the DNA mapping and then they start in. The last number I saw was like 92,000 proteins mapped. So you had many more proteins and some suggest there is 400,000 proteins or even counting a million different proteins in the human cell alone. Imagine, inside this 20-micron ball of of water with those organelles inside, etc. It's like an industrial complex miniaturized to 20 microns. And this 90 or 100,000 proteins codified by only 23,000 genes. If that is the case, which is not necessarily so, then they start suggesting oh, then genes cooperate among themselves to codify different proteins. And then there is also a thing called epigenetics, which basically says that the environment is regulating what is happening inside the cell, not only the DNA.
Speaker 2:And the more you watch these explanations by Dennis Noble, the more you understand that metabolism is much more, is much bigger than the central dogma of biology with the DNA. Dna is important, but it's a minor part of the much more complex story. And then I go back to not back, but I go forward to native knowledge and the native knowledge they have. This is so for them it's easy. For them it's easy. They don't have this angst, anxiety about this complexity. They have reverence for complexity of nature. They have respect, they worship the complexity of nature, because the complexity of nature is where you have the solution for existence and for life, and that's. It's not a discourse for a religious discourse, it is a scientific discourse.
Speaker 2:I intend to be a scientific discourse and you have, you don't have to be a wacko to believe in those things. This is coming out of the best literature in molecular biology, etc. And we are making those connections of this complexity of life with the geophysical functioning of the planet, and that's the part that it's about time. We have means to do it. That's where investment comes in and people who have the ability or the sensitivity to understand what is you know, if in nature were a bank, it would have been saved already, right, and if we could use just? You said 1 billion euros, uh, I would say even less than that I think we can use a bit more.
Speaker 2:There's even less you, you can get okay, let's start humble, yeah, even less 100 million or whatever, and you get some of this knowledge spread out. You know multiplying like you're doing with this podcast, and you multiply this so that people get enlightened and they have this, don't worry, I think, think this episode will cause some enlightenment among the listeners.
Speaker 1:I hope so. I definitely think so.
Speaker 2:And this enlightenment will produce the effect that the astronauts experience. You know this, captain Kirk, from the TV series Captain Kirk.
Speaker 1:Star Trek Star Kirk. Star Trek Star Trek.
Speaker 2:Star Trek. He went to, jeff Bezos sent him to the space with this blue origin spacecraft and he came back crying. He was you can go on YouTube and put there Captain Kirk and going to space, he, he, he represented you know the adventure, human adventure in the space in the series Star Trek for decades and he had never been to space. And Jeff Bezos sent him to space 10 minutes, only 10 minutes, floating in the weightlessness of this trip.
Speaker 2:And he came back he was totally emotional, he was crying and when later he was explaining his experience, he basically mentioned that he felt the deepest grief anyone. He he didn't imagine there was this degree of grief as he felt because he was in the space. He looked back back to Earth. He saw this orb, you know, the glimmering, bluish, green, emerald orb floating on nothing. And he looked back to the space and dark desert of death. He saw death in the space and here life and there death, and this was overwhelming and he felt like grief. He felt the deepest grief because we are destroying life. He immediately he had this overview effect in a Hollywood scale, you know.
Speaker 2:At 10 minutes yeah in a Hollywood scale scale because he is an artist and he was powerfully touched by the overview effect and he said look, we're destroying it and people have no clue what they're doing. They should go to the space and look, like I did. And he felt grief because some people say, oh, you felt happiness, here is Captain Kirk finally going to space. No, he felt grief, yeah, yeah, because he realized what is going on and, I am sure, the more people. The thing is that we have our life. I don't know if it's the last words, but I would like to come to a conclusion. Please take it.
Speaker 1:Please take the last words First of all.
Speaker 2:We have all the means. We have the financial means, we have the technological means. We have the knowledge means to change our state here on Earth. We have this right now. Knowledge means to change our stay here on Earth. We have this right now. And, to make matters easier, we have all this confluence, conversions of information in the internet. We have artificial intelligence to help us derive all of this, some things that we can absorb. It's not like drinking water from a fire hose. We don't have to drink water from a fire hose. We can slowly understand and absorb this.
Speaker 2:And I have been many times mentioning that we need to go forward to the native knowledge, because native knowledge has in it it has not lost the connection with Gaia, has not lost the connection with the complexity of nature. And they have simple ways fable, you know, like fairy tale ways of reporting on how do you connect back to nature, how you connect and respect nature and live in harmony. And on top of that, we have now new technology. We have invented new ways that we can tap, like this wood technology, that we don't have to destroy all the forests in the world. We can plant silviculture you know, syntropic silviculture. We can reform agriculture, through regenerative agriculture, through syntropic agriculture. We can do this in.
Speaker 2:We can do social engineering develop a way of dealing with people in the world that we will bring people together through love and not through competition. Only Competition has a role, but it's not, it should not be the main one. It should not be the main one. A collaboration is what we need. We have a sinking ship. You know the way we are dealing with the planet Earth is making it sink. We are destroying the habitability of Earth and we are learning very fast that organ failure doesn't happen slowly. It's like you have a yeah, exactly, it is a sudden, abrupt death. It's not something that comes gradually. It is progressing gradually.
Speaker 1:The threats Until you hit it, until you hit it until you hit it, yeah, tipping point, and we have.
Speaker 2:we are hitting tipping points when you see, for example, this floods that happen in spain, in in in congo, or in southern brazil, in in the? U and in Central Europe, as you mentioned, etc. People say, oh, why is this happening? Now, it's because the equilibrium of circulation oceans, forests and soils got to a point where the self-regulation broke down. I like the idea of people ask what is this self-regulation broke down. I like the idea of people ask what is this self-regulation? I said look, imagine that you have 209 bones in your body, 209 bones. When you have a skeleton without flesh, without muscles, and it doesn't stand only on the bones, it's an unstable equilibrium. When you have flesh and muscles and your brain, etc. We stand up through feedback, through self-regulation, you are continuously equilibrating. When youregulation, you are continuously equilibrating. When you walk, you are falling forward.
Speaker 2:right, you are falling forward which is a good metaphor for what we are doing following forward and if you are standing still when someone comes and pushes you from behind, you get a jolt Without thinking.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Your brain will do all what is required, and your muscles and your lungs, etc. For you not to fall crashing down. You know you start running forward, etc. When the push is too strong, then you overcome the capacity of the human body to standing still and then you come crashing down. That's what we are doing with Gaia right now. We are giving it a kick that is so powerful with chainsaws and pollutants and everything that we're doing. You know, uh, greenhouse gases, etc.
Speaker 2:That a system is eventually crashing down and when it starts crashing, and we see it, yeah, you didn't anticipate that, because if you were watching someone being kicked and a person always recover, always recover, always recover, you have the illusion you have the illusion that person will never fall down and crash to the ground.
Speaker 2:And we in our group, we have been able to predict this array of the climate in a global scale because we had this notion of life and self-regulation, which most of the IPCC didn't have, most climatologists didn't have. They are not life scientists, they are physical scientists and they were basically using statistics. So they were watching the behavior of Earth's system while the system is still functional, so it's still self-regulated, still equilibrating the abuse. Excess CO2 absorbed by the ocean, excess winds, the canopy of trees are diffusing that energy, that energy. Excess moisture is raining somewhere before it's becoming really damaging, and so on, excess drought is dampened by vegetation that produces moisture, etc. But if you start removing all the regulation mechanisms, like ecosystems, destroying it and polluting the system, then eventually the kick will be too strong and the system comes crashing down.
Speaker 2:10 years ago, actually in 2005, I gave an interview to Vicious, a big magazine, a weekly magazine in Brazil, and they were asking and I said, what was coming? What was coming? And back then even my colleagues called me radical. You know, I was radical because I was predicting things to be much faster than they were actually progressing at that time. And then, in 2009,. I gave an interview to a financial journal in São Paulo. It's called Valor Econômico, and they asked me again how bad was the situation? I said terrible. We are in the eve of, you know, disasters in Syria.
Speaker 1:Mass disruption.
Speaker 2:And then they asked me how many years we have. I said well, about five, six years before the disaster started in exponential 2014,. There was a massive drought in São Paulo. I wrote a report called the Future Climate of Amazonia and I did a review, a scientific review, but using language that people can understand and telling what was coming. And I was basically alone. I altered it alone, this report, and my colleagues thought I was too radical because I was thinking that things would be Norway to give many talks in Oslo just two weeks before the Paris Agreement. And one talk I gave there was a minister of environment from Norway and the delegation that was coming to Paris. And Norway is very active in protecting forests. They've given $1 billion to the Brazilian.
Speaker 1:Amazon Forest.
Speaker 2:Fund and I gave my talk mostly on the Amazon, but in the end I made the connection with the Paris Agreement and I basically said that from a diplomatic, governmental, political, even, let's say, economic and business perspective, it was a fantastic achievement. You know, it was genius because in 2009, the COP in Copenhagen was a disaster right. Failure Complete failure, and so in 2015, complete success from diplomatic perspective.
Speaker 1:However, I said however, I hear a but coming.
Speaker 2:However I say nature cares about the laws of math, physics, chemistry, biology, geology. It doesn't give a damn about economics or politics or diplomatics.
Speaker 1:You look from the moon. You cannot see the politics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, nature doesn't pay attention. And from that perspective, from nature, nature perspective the pairs agreement is a failure, complete failure. Uh declared failure. And so the minister of environment from norway she was uh distressed, I could see she had, she was not happy and she basically said, antonio, you're not, you're not valuing all the efforts we put in this. I said no.
Speaker 2:I said in the beginning I value enormously, diplomatically, it's a fantastic success, but it doesn't matter for nature, nature only. The only thing that matters for nature is the loss of nature, the loss of humans, the social motivations in humans. Nature doesn't care. Of course, our motivations produce effects only upon nature, but those are the ones that nature cannot protect itself from. So we ended that exchange. Basically, I proposed to her, I said, look, you don't have to trust me, you just pay attention on the scientific literature in the next years and in five years we sit back down together and then we'll see whether you give me reason or not. Five years later it was COVID, right, 2020. And COVID basically brought the awareness that we could yes, we could stop, we could ground our aircraft.
Speaker 2:And, of course, lots of people died, like 20 million people, not too many if you consider the size of humanity, but it basically was the laws of nature. In this case, the biology is a virus, is a particle that you need to enlarge 70,000 times to see it in the microscope, and grounded the whole human it in the microscope, grounded the whole human enterprise on the planet.
Speaker 2:So why can't we use our best judgment and our best money to invest in things that will basically change our course? China is showing it in a way. I mean US, All the.
Speaker 1:Other places are showing it as well.
Speaker 2:Look the artificial.
Speaker 1:I think it's a perfect.
Speaker 2:Artificial intelligence look how it's miraculous the kind of things that are emerging from unicorns in US and elsewhere. It shows the way we can do it. We still can do it. That's my last positive message. We still can do it, but we cannot do it forever. There is a phenomenon called death where, beyond that, you cannot do, unless, of course, you are Jesus and you can bring someone back from the death. But I don't think we can bring Earth, gaia, back from death, and that's what we should avoid and it's not. We don't have forever. Usually people say oh no, we should do this until 2100. Forget it, forget it.
Speaker 1:We have a couple of years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Actually, the time has passed already. The best time to do what we should have done was like 30 years ago. The second best time is now. Today is not in 20 years.
Speaker 1:Today it's not in 20 years, and with that I think it's a perfect way to. I mean, we could go on for hours and we might do that in the future. I think there's a lot else we should get into, but for now I want to be conscious of your time, even though we're more than two hours in, and thank you so much for this wild ride, maybe not as wild as going into space, but definitely close to that. We've discussed a lot and I think and hope I'm pretty sure actually this will enlighten many people listening to this. So thank you so much for, first of all, the work you do, how you spend your waking hours and your not waking hours dreaming about space, and for coming on here to share about it. Thank you, antonio, so much, and hopefully this wasn't the last one.
Speaker 2:Thank you, it's been a pleasure I hope it won't be the last one on earth and we will be here many years and celebrating the turnaround and the exponential response and the good way for fixing all the mess.
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.
