The IPBES Global Assessment summary is out and we're digging in to all 39 pages this week. The report lays out a grim picture of our current world in terms of life on earth, the ecosystems they create, and our relationship with them that our civilization as we know it depends upon. While not the full 1500+ page report due out later this week, this study is perhaps the most important look at the state of our world that we've ever seen - and if we don't act quickly to fix the problems it so clearly exposes, then nothing less than very the future of humanity may be at risk.
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(This is automated transcript, we'll add a human cleaned up version soon!)
Thank you Alexey for this fantastic transcript!
[0:07] I'm David Torcivia.
[0:09] I'm Daniel Forkner.
[0:10] And this is Ashes Ashes, a show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we're unlucky, the end of the world.
[0:20] But if we learn from all of this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be.
[0:33] David, two weeks ago you kind of let us know what we were going to be talking about to-day. And that's the new summary of the 1500 page report we're still waiting to be published, authored by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES for short. This is the IPCC of biodiversity: so where the IPCC deals with climate change, where we are to-day and what we need to do to mitigate – this deals is with the interconnectedness that is our Earth life system and where it is and how much it's degraded and what we might possibly do to reverse those effects. This report is 17 years in the making authored by over 500 people which does not in-clude the thousands of peer-reviewed research papers that it cites. And so we're just going to be kind of going through some of the bullet points that are covered in the summary until we can get to a larger show on the full report, throwing some rants in there, David, and then close out.
[1:42] Yeah, I'm here for the rants and I'm sure everyone else is as well. We wish we could have that full show on the entire report, I'm sure there's some jams in there. But as we mentioned in that update show a couple weeks ago, that won't be out for at least another six months. We'll see when they finally get the full thing finished and published, but until then there is a lot of information even in this little 39-page summary. And there's a lot of stuff to go over and there's a lot of depressing things in here even in their attempts to try and cheer it up and make it palatable to all the policymakers and business people of the world. But this is important stuff and I honestly think that even though this is not as popular as the IPCC report which, I mean, it's easy to talk about, Daniel, in terms of what the effects of world will be when you're just looking at a single thing and taking that single thing and us-ing that as a public metric of where we are. And that single thing, of course, is the temperature: how hot are we right now. And related to that is, you know, the carbon level. In fact today I think we cross over 415 parts per million, I saw a lot of articles about that. And so it's an easy thing for people to watch and engage and instantly see where we are in this process.
[2:56] But when you are talking, you about things like ecosystems, the environment, all the na-ture that is on this Earth – that's a lot more difficult to quantify, to track and to stay up-to-date with. But arguably this is a much larger impact on each and every one of our lives. So much of our everyday world depends on the success of the ecosystems. And the report does go into that, we’ll mention in a little bit about how that's the case throughout this episode, but this is the big one, this is the most im-portant report that scientists put out in terms of the future of humanity if we have one, that has prob-ably ever been compiled in the history of humanity. And I don't want to undersell this in any way, this is The Report. If you only read one thing, if you only ever get one thing on this entire show, it's this report and the findings in it. But you should keep listening.
[3:42] Assuming that the report gets it right.
[3:45] Assuming that the report is right and.
[3:48] Assuming that they encompass everything and assuming that their recommendations truly paint a path forward that's acceptable and adequate.
[3:58] Well, I guess we'll have to see about that.
[4:01] Right, we did have problems with that IPCC report.
[4:04] I feel like this is foreshadowing.
[4:05] Maybe something we can rant on. So okay, let's jump right in, David, and let me read from the report now.
“Past and ongoing rapid declines in biodiversity, ecosystem functions and many of nature’s contribu-tions to people mean that most international societal and environmental goals, such as those embod-ied in the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, will not be achieved based on current trajectories. These declines will also undermine other goals, such as those specified in the Paris Agreement adopted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Cli-mate Change and the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity. The negative trends in biodiversity and ecosystem functions are projected to continue or worsen in many future scenarios in response to indirect drivers such as rapid human population growth, unsustainable production and consumption, and associated technological development.”
So, David, it sounds like we are really off track.
[5:12] Who would have guessed?
[5:14] The sustainable development goals that they mentioned, those were signed by all United Nation member states in 2015, it tracks 17 different global goals for battling climate change, habitat loss, economic inequalities, sustainable cities – all these things and all for the purpose of achieving peace and prosperity for people and the planet. Going back to this report, according to IPBES, we are going to fail almost all of them, “taking into consideration that the Sustainable Development Goals are integrated and indivisible, as well as implemented nationally, current negative trends in biodiver-sity and ecosystems will undermine progress towards 80% (35 out of 44) of the assessed targets of goals related to poverty, hunger, health, water, cities, climate, oceans, and land.” All right, so with those bad news out of the way, David, let's jump into some of the specifics of these bad news.
[6:15] This is my favorite part, Daniel, and it's time for a little statistics.
[6:20] Stats and facts.
[6:23] Here we go. This is all since 1980. In this time up till now, and again, this report is recent, so up till 2018, global population has exploded while per capita consumption has increased by 15%: so that means not only are there more of us – each and every one of us is consuming more than we were in the past. Greenhouse gas emissions in the same period have doubled, plastic waste floating in the ocean has increased tenfold. Since the 1990s urban land has doubled. And urban land and land use, in particular, is one of the major factors in land degradation, all the disasters of this environment. 80% of current wastewater is dumped without any treatment at all. Just this is sewage, this is fertilizer runoff, this is industrial – whatever it's just dumped. A third of the Earth's land and 75% of freshwater sources have been converted to sites of food production. So this means less and less of the land on this Earth is being left in its natural state. A natural state, of course, is a state with these natural ecosys-tems and environments and the animals that depend on all of that.
[7:30] But it's not just surviving and living our lives that's doing all this. Some of our entertain-ment has negatively impacted all of the Earth and its ecosystems. Due to the rapid development of infrastructure and transportation routes, the carbon footprint from tourism has jumped 40% in the four years following 2009 and an estimated 8% of all greenhouse gas emissions come solely from tourism.
[7:55] I suppose that's kind of a snapshot of some human activity. And so if we look at some of the effects of all this including climate change, the report lays out some things that we should expect.
[8:09] In terms of species loss: 1 million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction, and that represents about 25% of all species in the animal and plant groups that researchers happened to examine. In the past century alone the average abundance of native life according to this report has fallen by over 20%. 85% of the Earth's wetlands have disappeared over the past 300 years, biomass of wild mammals around the world has fallen 82% since just 1970. By 2014 97% of the entire ocean was being impacted by human activity, and over half is currently being fished through industrial means and about a third of all fisheries are overfished in the ocean. Seagrass, one of the best sequesters of carbon in the world, David, declined 30% between 1970 and 2000. Coral reefs, the most productive ecosystems in the world, half of all of them have disappeared in the past century and a half. Some 40% of all amphibians are at risk of extinction. I mean, this list goes on and on we're not even scratch-ing the surface here.
[9:28] Yeah, I remember reading early on the report, Daniel, actually a quarter of all species that are currently known on Earth are facing extinction because of our actions. One-in-four. Could you im-agine if there's something threatening one in four people? Like what the response to that would be? But when it's all these species that we depend on for our livelihood, for the survival of our civilization, well, we just ignore it I guess.
[9:50] And really, there's no way for us to anticipate that. It really is incomprehensible. I mean, we don't even know all the species, we haven't cataloged all the species that live on this planet. I've seen estimates that we know anywhere from like 10% to 1% of all species on this planet. We have no idea what losing that amount of species means in terms of biodiversity and in terms of the way eco-systems function. I mean this is something we've talked about, everything is interconnected: one in-sect species goes away and all of a sudden the whole food chain collapses, all the sudden our food can't grow because we don't have those pollinators, there's so many unpredictable consequences of loss that we just have no way to anticipate.
[10:36] And that, of course, is just that identifying these species that we do know about like you mentioned. How many species have we already completely lost and never knew were there in the first place? All these ecosystem niches that they filled have been totally destroyed and we're seeing instead this homogenization of the species of the Earth. And this is actually one of thing this report talks about how not only are we losing so much life around the world, we're losing a lot of variety and it's being replaced by more and more of the same which set us up to be more and more fragile. Be-cause as we’ve talked about before, single species are highly susceptible to single pathogens, the sin-gle vectors of death and it can wipe out entire things all at once instead of small localized packets. There's so many different ways that this loss of life can impact us negatively, it's hard to catalog them all. And these connections are difficult to impossible see until things really start to fall apart.
[11:29] David. I forgot. I meant to mention in the beginning like before we started that it if the listener was having a bad day or a bad week maybe, you know, skip this episode for now, it's kind of depressing.
[11:43] Yeah, I think that that's a good idea. This one might be worth skipping. But come back to it, eventually.
[11:49] Come back to it when you're feeling good, feeling well. Then we might bring them down. Maybe it's better to listen to this when you're already feeling down.
[11:57] But you have like something really fun planned afterwards.
[12:00] Yeah, that way you can come back up. Yes, that works out. And so all these things, you know, that we've seen so far, this destruction – almost all of this has been a result of direct human activity, whether that our construction and development, logging and fishing, resource extraction, you know, from the soil, from fisheries, all these things. But we're in the turning point where the future is going to be much, much more grim than this because climate change will just put exponentially com-pounding pressure on species’ ability to survive. And all these direct human interventions into nature will have that much more of an impact because climate change is going to make everything more fragile: as habitats shrink, as things change so fast that the species have a harder time adapting. And the fact that they're already struggling because of all this direct human activity just means that cli-mate change is really going to take things over the top.
[13:00] Well, we’ve already started alluding to this a little bit so far, Daniel, where: yeah, we have all this loss in these ecosystems, but these ecosystems that we're losing also impact us. It's not just these things living off by themselves, we’re served by all these things we’ve defined as ecosystem services, which is a very pragmatic way of looking at how these ecosystems interact with our own civi-lization and society. I don't like it totally all the time because it sort of tries to quantify the effect and the usefulness of various ecosystems but it is important to understand these larger system ideas of how we interact with the ecosystems which all interact with the Earth and everything comes together. And there is a lot of value in that. And ecosystem services also serve ecosystems themselves, it’s not just a human relationship. But these are ultimately what starts causing the huge loss of life. Cause when these ecosystems start failing in their services then you see these cascading effects around the world that ultimately affect not just ecosystems but human civilization as well. So let's talk about a little bit of these. And the report goes into a lot here.
[14:05] I think you're right about, there's somewhat problematic language in quantifying ecosys-tem services. We did talk about this a little bit more in-depth an episode 34 - Irreplaceable but ecosys-tem services: this is how all life on Earth is supported, this is the foundation.
[14:23] We can't live without the services that nature provides. And so trying to quantify it into dollar figures is problematic. But from the report, it's estimated that in North and South America eco-system services provide $24 trillion worth of annual value. Which again, it's a little bit misleading if you're thinking like an economist because to them putting a price on something means that you know, you could take something like breathable air, exchange it for $24 trillion and call it a wash. B ut obvi-ously that doesn't really make sense right, but it could be useful to conceptualize how a dollar figure can be put on nature. The natural world absorbs roughly 60% of all of our greenhouse gas emissions for example. And that acts as downward pressure on global temperatures, which then decreases the risk of something like a deadly hurricane. And the coastal ecosystems that we have like coral reefs and mangrove forests, these mitigate the risk of Inland flooding. So when Hurricane Harvey came in and devastated Houston, Texas in addition to a number of other places to the tune of $125 billion which they are still recovering from and probably will never fully recover from. If there's a particular ecosystem that we could say can prevent a Hurricane Harvey then we might say that's worth at least a $125 billion dollars, right?
[15:46] Math checks out. Another really great example of ecosystems that give us a huge amount of ecosystem services, Daniel, is wetlands. And this is one of the most endangered ecosystems around the world today, I think at the report they mentioned at up to three-quarters of these are gone at this point. So, wetlands serve a variety of roles: they will help things like that storm surge that was so deadly in so many of these hurricanes that have struck and caused such giant bills. They filter the wa-ter that we drink. If destroying a wetland to build residential neighborhood results in the need for a $3 million water treatment facility, well then we can take a look at this ecosystem service as having a value of at least $3 million, because that wetland was saving us from having to construct this thing. Of course, I think maybe somebody who is pragmatic would say: that also prevented us from creating $3 million worth of jobs, so who's really the winner here? But I mean, obviously, figures like these are only looking at the most basic easily quantifiable version of this calculation. And it leaves out all this other stuff, they're hopelessly undervalued, nature is invaluable. Anybody who stood there and looked at something can say: there's no price for this. Destroying this, there is no value that is worth this. At least anybody who has a heart. Maybe developer might say something different. But I mean even be-yond that, if we got rid of this nature then that means war ultimately dooming ourselves to a de-stroyed world. And in that case, you can say the value is essentially infinite.
[17:14] Well, David, we're dealing with dollar figures here. And as long as we’re going to put a dollar figure on nature, we should take the discounted present value which any good economist would do. Which is, you just take all future returns of something discounted to the present value based on interest rates and all that, and the dollar figure for nature would still be infinite because, in the long run, we're all dead without it so.
[17:37] There you go, this is the economic defense for my rambling.
[17:40] You intuited it correctly.
[17:43] Well, this report did a much better job calculating this stuff out than I did right here. They considered data from over 2,000 studies on various ecosystem services, they grouped nature’s contri-butions to people in 18 different categories ranging from things like habitat creation, air and water filtration to things that you wouldn't necessarily think of it first like cultural services. And they found that of these 18 categories, 14 of them or 77% are currently in decline. And that's a threat to every-thing that we know in this world.
[18:16] One of the things that biodiversity and ecosystem decline threaten is agriculture, the very food that we eat to sustain ourselves as a modern civilization, David.
[18:28] Of all the domesticated species and breeds of animals that humans use for agricultural food production 25% of them are either gone or going extinct. This reveals how biodiversity loss means economic losses to the food industry. But more importantly, an increased risk of disease, zoon-otic diseases, which we’ve talked about, which originate in animals before ultimately jumping to hu-mans.
[18:50] It is kind of counterintuitive, David, how agriculture, problems in agriculture can increase the risk of disease for humans. But this is something we touched on in episode 20, our episode on pathogens, which is, zoonotic [zuh-on-o-tik] diseases are a class of diseases that originate in ani-mals before they jump to humans and these…
[19:13] I thought it was zoonotic [zoh-on-o-tik].
[19:16] I'm going to have to edit that, yes, zoonotic diseases are responsible for 17% of all infec-tious diseases. So, they causing 700,000 deaths every year. And that's going to only accelerate as our livestock animals become less and less diverse. Which means we will have to apply an even greater number of antibiotics which, as we talked about in that episode, will cause the proliferation of antimi-crobial-resistant strains of pathogens. In fact, if I remember one of the most resistant bacterial gene going around that's entering all these different pathogens came from most likely from a pig farm in which, you know, this antimicrobial resistance was allowed to kind of incubate itself because of all this, you know, condensed industrial animal raising that we’re doing. And obviously, the loss of diversi-ty in there is only going to make that worse.
[20:19] But maybe, Daniel, we can get people more interested if we identify some of these crops that might be lost or threatened by these ecosystem services, by the disaster that's happening all around us. I mean, 75% of global food crop types including fruits and vegetables and, like I said, some of these most important cash crops which include things like coffee, cocoa, almonds – all these rely on that animal pollination that is now being threatened by this loss of life and diversity.
[20:49] Reminds me of the papaya disease that destroyed the Hawaiian economy several years ago because there was no diversity.
[20:59] The papaya disease?
[21:01] Yes, you remember that? You know Hawaii grows all our papaya, it's not very genetically diverse, and there's this fungus or some kind of pathogen that just came through and just destroyed so much of their production, I think it's still a problem, but they're working through it.
[21:16] I know we talked about the loss of all one type of banana, the old more delicious type of banana because everything was a monoculture. And the current banana, what is it, the Cavendish is now being threatened by a similar disease, and they are worried that the current clones of bananas that exist all over the world will also all be wiped out. So, you can see very quickly how these not di-verse populations can be threatened very rapidly.
[21:46] Which means our culture is threatened, right? You know like in cartoons, David, when you see a person, they're walking and there's a banana peel on the ground and they step on and they slip and fall.
[21:57] In the future kids won't know what they're slipping on!
[22:00] Well, but even going back to the banana that went extinct, the whole reason that joke ex-ists is that bananas from the past, I think maybe it was the Big Mike that everyone loved, that peel was actually slippery. But our current bananas don't have slippery peels. So if you actually, like, think about it, it doesn't really make.
[22:18] I’ve slipped on a banana, I've legitimately slipped on a banana peel. Like if you drop it with the fruit side down, it's kind of like gooey and slushy, and I’ve slipped on that.
[22:29] Okay I redact my point. Or maybe you're just clumsy.
[22:33] I'm up definitely clumsy.
[22:35] Okay, back on topic, I want to come back to this point though about the loss of domesti-cated animals. There's something I hadn't really thought about but the report states, “globally, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are disappearing. This loss of diversity, in-cluding genetic diversity poses a serious risk to global food security by undermining the resilience of many agricultural systems to threats such as pests, pathogens, and climate change.” I wanted to come back to this because it reminds me of something that Wendell Berry wrote in one of his books about what goes on in adapting a flock of sheep to a single farm. And I think this is really important, because for us city folk, David, who think Cheerios grow from trees, we need more remind me of just how complex and involved local adaptation really is. And this comes from an essay entitled “Let the farm judge”.
[23:37] "Our farm, in the lower Kentucky River valley, is mostly on hillsides. Heavy animals tend to damage hillsides, especially in winter. Our experience with brood cows showed us at our farm needs sheep. It needs, in addition, sheep that can make their living by grazing coarse pastures on hillsides. And so in the fall of 1978, we bought six Border Cheviot ewes and a buck. Our choice of breed was a good one. The Border Cheviot is a hill sheep, developed to make good use of such rough pasture as we have. Moreover, it can make good use of a little corn, and our farm is capa-ble of producing a little corn. There have been problems, of course. Some of them have had to do with adapting ourselves to our breed. For us, at any rate, the inevitable source of breeding stock has been the Midwest, and many of our problems have been traceable to that fact. What I am going to say implies no fault in the mid-western breeders, to whom we and our breed have an enormous debt. It is nevertheless true that, for a flock of sheep, living is easier in the prairie lands than on a Kentucky hillside. Just walking around on a hillside farm involves more strain and requires more energy, and the less fertile the land the farther a ewe will have to walk to fill her belly. Knees that might have remained sound on the gentle topography of Ohio or Iowa may become arthritic at our place. Also, a ewe that would have twin lambs on a prairie farm may have only one on a hill farm. Similarly, a lamb will grow to slaughter weight more slowly where he has to allocate more energy to getting around. We once sold five yearling ewes to our friend Bob Will-erton in Danvers, Illinois, where on their first lambing they produced eleven lambs. On our farm, they might have produced seven or eight. We have noticed the same difference with cull ewes that we have sent to our son's farm, which is less steep and more fertile than ours. Our farm, then, is asking for a ewe that can stay healthy, live long, breed successfully, have two lambs without assistance, and feed them well, in comparatively demanding circumstances. Experience has shown us that the Border Cheviot breed is capable of producing a ewe of this kind, but that it does not do so inevitably. In eighteen years, and out of a good many ewes bought or raised, we have identified so far only two ewe families (the female descendants of two ewes) that fairly dependably perform as we and our place require.”
So, I’m just going to pause right there and just reflect on the fact that it took him 18 years upon initial-ly purchasing this breed of sheep to select for just two individuals that can give birth to individuals that are locally adapted to his farm such that they reach optimal productivity.
[26:39] And it just goes to show how complex and how specialized and how unique a local envi-ronment truly is. He goes on to write about the ways these ewes now perform on his farm which I'm going to skip.
[26:52] Back to the essay.
“The point is that, especially now when grain-feeding and confinement-feeding are so common, no American breeder should expect any breed to be locally adapted. Breeders should recognize that from the standpoint of local adaptation and cheap production, every purchase of a breeding animal is a gamble. A newly purchased ewe or buck may improve the performance of your flock on your farm or it may not. Good breeders will know, or they will soon find out, that theirs is not the only judgment that is involved. While the breeder is judging, the breeder’s farm also is judging, enforcing its de-mands, and making selections. And this is as it should be. The judgment of the farm serves the breed, helping to preserve its genetic diversity.”
I think about this story a lot. Any time we hear about how some new technology is going to radically reshape agriculture in a whole country or any time I hear about some new seed being developed by someone in a white lab coat, and I remind myself that the real work in developing farms, in steward-ing land, in protecting species, in selecting for breeds that are going to be resistant to climate change – this happens on the ground by people who are working that ground, who are living in that ground, who depend on the things that that ground produces. That's where that work goes on. And these big commercial products can only paint over that, and it would be a mistake and it has been a mistake to continue marginalizing the people who are doing this very important work. But back to agriculture,
David, continue.
[28:30] Another point made by the IPBES report concerning agriculture is that the diversity of nature and our relationship to nature is interconnected. “For example, clearing of forest for agriculture has increased the provision of food and feed and other materials important for people (such as natural fibres, and ornamental flowers: but has reduced contri-butions as diverse as pollination, climate regulation, water quality regulation, opportunities for learning and inspiration and the maintenance of options for the future. Land degradation has reduced productiv-ity in 23% of global terrestrial area and $235-577 billion US in annual global crop output is at risk as a result of pollinator loss.” And I think it's funny that they worked in there that materials important for people include ornamen-tal flowers.
[29:22] Big flower, David, that's the industry.
[29:25] They're the ones. Oh, yeah, it says right here on this report: sponsored by 1800flowers.com, so.
[29:34] I mean we joke but this is something that these reports actually do a good job of is includ-ing the fact that we get cultural significance from nature. And it's so easy to discount that in our very money-driven technocratic societies where we don't really care about the sentimental things, we only care about the dollars and the returns and all this. But it reminds me of episode FUBAR where we had Sophia Perez on. And she talks about the ancestral land that is going to be bombed by the US Military and how devastating that is for communities and how they get so much value from this island that, you know, they're connected to. And it's just another reminder that we're so disconnected from the land. OK, so we’ve hit agriculture, we’ve hit the ecosystem services. There's one other broad category I think we should hit from this summary and it's what the IPCC has done fairly well, at least you know we should give them credit for mentioning and this report as well, that indigenous people around the world, marginal people are threatened by all of these things whether that's climate change or ecosys-tem loss.
[30:47] The great injustice of global destruction is that the people who have contributed least to the problem suffer the most. This is the great injustice of our global civilization which is made possi-ble through capital accumulation, that's that the wealth of the few is funneled upwards through ex-ploitation and the barbaric treatment of the many. Yet when the hurricanes come, when the drought arrives, when wildfires, famine, disease, when these things spread: all is a direct result of this very system of wealth extraction – the ones who will be hit first are those who are already enslaved by this system. That means poor minorities in Miami being forced onto land previously grabbed by private developers but now vulnerable to coastal flooding from rising seas like we discussed in episode 2. It means people in the tropics reeling from crop failure or having to face climate-induced tsunamis and typhoons. It means towns and villages dependent on fisheries for their sustenance and livelihood go-ing broke and hungry from ocean acidification and overfishing as discussed in episode 6 and 42. It's no wonder, David, that all these international treaties and these coming-togethers of world leaders result in failure, it’s no wonder that we're completely off track on any sustainable development goals, any Paris agreement nonsense. Because none of those people are first in line to experience the horrible effects of the destruction that they are the principal cause of. Those who suffer most have no seat at the table, they have no voice that reaches the ears of power.
[32:30] And how much cruelty is born from all that, Daniel? From all that want that's inflicted on these people because that is where cruelty is born, from want, from those who want something be-cause they don't have the things they need as well as those in the top who want more even though they have everything they could possibly imagine. All of this is what creates cruelty. And for some rea-son, we've decided that we want to have a system that not only enables want to happen but depends on it for its very survival. And so, we've decided collectively I guess that by having this want-based sys-tem that we also want to create a system that allows all this cruelty to exist. And in fact, that cruelty is an important component of that system in the first place. But I think I'm getting distracted here. To turn back to the report just for a second. You're so right, Daniel, that the people who are most im-pacted by all of these tragedies, both climate and ecosystem-related, are the ones that are most vul-nerable. And the report goes into this at great length.
[33:30] "Areas of the world projected to experience significant negative effects from global changes in climate, biodiversity, ecosystem functions and nature's contributions to people are also home to large concentra-tions of indigenous peoples and many of the world's poorest communities. Because of their strong de-pendency on nature and its contributions for subsistence, livelihoods, and health, those communities will be disproportionately hard hit by those negative changes," that are happening right now and will come and increase as time goes on. "Those negative effects also influence the ability of indigenous peoples and local communities to man-age and conserve wild and domesticated biodiversity and nature's contributions to people. Indigenous peoples and local communities have been proactively confronting such challenges in partnership with each other and with an array of other stakeholders," for a very long time "through co-management sys-tems and local and regional monitoring networks and by revitalizing and adapting" these systems to work for their local environment. Meanwhile, these "regional and global scenarios" that we're constantly discussing in places like the West, they oftentimes lack "an explicit consideration of the views, perspec-tives, and rights of indigenous peoples and local communities" who have the most "knowledge and un-derstanding of large regions and ecosystems" that their own future depends upon.
[34:51] There's a great irony here too because it's not just that we should, you know, morally speaking care about an equality because it's the right thing to do which we should, but also, if indus-trial methods are the ones destroying the world then our future rests on those who maintain and cul-tivate holistic and sustainable methods of stewardship which is more often than not found in indige-nous populations. In fact, according to the report, almost all of the wild species of plants and animals that are left on this on this planet, on our land, those are found in regions stewarded by indigenous people. I want to read something that Wendell Berry wrote quotes.
[35:34] "The loss of local culture is, in part, a practical loss and an economic one. For one thing, such a cul-ture contains, and conveys to succeeding generations, the history of the use of the place and the knowledge of how the place may be lived in and used. For another, the patterns of reminding imply affection for the place and respect for it, and so, finally, the local culture will carry the knowledge of how the place may be well and lovingly used, and also the implicit command to use it only well and lovingly. The only true and effective ‘operator’s manual for spaceship Earth’ is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.”
[36:23] And David, I think we can go even further than that because many of the things that we enjoy today came directly from indigenous and local groups, their methods merely being appropriat-ed by corporations in this new model of economics. I want to play a couple clips from a talk given by Leah Penniman, who wrote a book called “Farming While Black”. And in this talk, she discusses how much of the innovation and agriculture came from the black farmers of Africa and the black farmers of the American South that were used as slaves and how much we take for granted in their contribu-tion to the modern way that we view agriculture.
[37:10] My Grandma's Grandma’s Grandma Susie Boyd in the 1700s was one of the 12.5 million skilled farmers who were kidnapped from their home and taking across the Atlantic Ocean to work for no pay on plantations in what is now the United States, the Caribbean, South America. And these farmers, particularly the women in the community, had foresight. They said: we don't know where we're going, we're not getting any report backs but we know that people are being kidnapped all around us and that our future is uncertain – what is most precious to us? And so they gathered up the okra, the millet, the cowpea, the black rice, the egusi, melon, the sorghum and all the seed that they've been keeping for generations and they braided it into their hair. They hid it because they be-lieved against odds in a future of tilling and reaping on soil and they believe that they would have de-scendants who needed to inherit that seed. Their example is what allows us even in the midst of really challenging times not to give up on our descendants.
[38:19] So, let’s talk about what was in those seeds. My sister made this incredible painting called “Foresight” about that moment of braiding. And anyone who has a braiding tradition in their family knows that while you sit and get your locks brushed out, you know, and the oils added and the braids added, there are stories that get transmitted, there's culture in their song that gets passed on. And in that deep, deep knowledge of how to be in right relationship with the Earth was transmitted. And so things like okra and Egyptian spinach, cotton, sesame, the black-eyed pea, eggplants, melons, rice, kale, a markell, specifically gourd, Jamaican Sorrel, spice basil, scented geranium, coffee, palm, kola nut, tamarind – these are all crops that came in the seed braids. And then there are many many more crops that were adopted, so the Georgia Rattlesnake melon or green glaze colored that were adopted by enslaved Africans. So many of the crops that we grow have these origins.”
[39:27] David, we mentioned that indigenous groups and exploited populations do not have a seat at the table of power. And one consequence of this is that societies, our cities, our towns, our populations of people: they've been collapsing and disappearing all around us. But we don't always notice because those voices are not being heard, it's easy to conceptualize the idea of the collapse of civilization as some future event, some clear moment where everything changes, something that we can prepare for. But in fact, I think, you know, as you mentioned like we’ve talked about this, is this more of a slow gradual process through which one day we're going to look around us and realize that the ecosystem services that we rely on, the agricultural groups that we have come to depend on for food – these faded away long before we even noticed. And it will be too late to get them back. But we didn't notice, we won't notice because when an economy is served through global extraction, the col-lapse of any one link in the supply chain just shifts extraction somewhere else. As we discussed in epi-sode 22 about fast fashion, that industry resulted in a literal building collapse in Bangladesh in 2013 in which 1000 exploited workers were killed.
[40:48] But that meant nothing to the clothing giants like H&M, Zara, all these companies. And if you were a consumer walking around the mall in America at the time, you would not notice anything different because the supply chain just shifted to another factory. It's the same thing going on with whole cultures, with whole people like the diaspora in the Mariana Islands that Sophia Perez dis-cussed. Or entire ways of preserving species such as community-run seed banks in Eastern Africa that we’ve talked about in episode 52. Or it could be communities in Alabama that are dying right now from hookworm because the state cannot afford to keep its citizens safe and healthy. Collapse is oc-curring all around us for people who those in power have decided are worth leaving behind. We only don't notice the effects because we're not paying attention, because our economy will continue to serve us, will continue to extract from this Earth, from its people, from its land until there is nothing left. David, I've got some counter-arguments though I want to throw at you and see how you respond, okay?
[42:01] Okay, I'm in the hot seat, let's go.
[42:03] All right. Counterpoint 1: we’ve been fine so far, so life always finds a way, we'll be okay.
[42:12] You right, things will go on perfectly for forever, technology will save the day. I have no counter-argument.
[42:19] Self-driving cars will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
[42:23] Will drive around pulling carbon dioxide out of the air and it will be awesome.
[42:28] There'll be little engines in our cars that do like direct air, carbon capture and storage it.
[42:34] Yeah and sequesters it in like little rabbit droppings and you just bury them when you see them. No, I mean, this is a question or a statement that I hear all the time, not just in relation to this report, like you just asked me here. But in terms of what the show talks about all the time like oh, you know, things aren't going to collapse, people have been predicting the end of the world for forever, it's always going on, what makes it different this time? Why you think you're right and all these thou-sands of other people for thousands of years haven't been? And, I mean, how can you say that this is what I would respond: how can you say that when you look around the world today? The world has changed so dramatically, our effect on the world has changed so dramatically. Who before in human history has been able to quite literally destroy entire cities with a single weapon? Who before in histo-ry has been able to reshape mountains to move them somewhere else? Who before in history has been able to travel halfway around the world or entirely around the world in just a couple of hours? I mean the amount of power that we've accumulated as a species is unimaginable. And in that same process, the amount of us who make up the species is also unfathomable compared to anything that we've seen in human history before. There is so much biomass, so much weight around the world that is either directly human from our massive 7 billion population to the huge amount resources we pulled out of the Earth, concrete that we built up, metal that ties all of our civilizations together. We’ve reshaped this Earth, you can see it from space. And we've looked down on Earth for the first time in history and can contemplate this fact.
[44:08] And of course, we see these things falling apart now all around us and you can sit there and say: well, what makes it different this time? Have you had your eyes closed? Things are rapidly degrading, there are places, even within these non-collapsed areas, that are in collapse. We’ve talked about this before in terms of the poverty that we've seen even here in the United States where 1.5 million households still live on less than $2 a day, where there are open sewage pits in Southern Ala-bama that the UN has declared worse than many developing nations around the world, that this is the most intense poverty that they've ever seen. Here, at home, in the United States, this place that sup-posed to be an unimaginably wealthy country. If you don't believe collapse is happening, it's because you're privileged. And of course, if you're listening to this podcast, you are privileged. The very nature that you have access to this shows that you and I and everybody listening are the ones doing the dam-age to this Earth, unfortunately, it's a fact that we have to face. And we can limit that and we can try and back that up but I'm getting off track here, aren't I?
[45:14] No, I just don't want to discount that person who had to download this podcast, put it on like a, what are those tracks, those things called, the thing that came before CDs, were they called?
[45:26] Tape, an 8-track.
[45:27] Yeah, tape recorder.
[45:30] You’re not that young Daniel, you should know what the tape player is.
[45:33] Keep going, sorry.
[45:38] Well, I mean, I am getting off track here. The point is, this is different this time because we've never had this much power to affect our world in human history. And in human history, we've defined our ability in accumulating power as using it for destructive tools. And since we haven't been destroying ourselves directly at least on a giant scale at least for the past few decades, we've turned that energy to the Earth and we've been doing a pretty damn good job destroying it.
[46:05] Yeah, I don't have anything to add to that other than the fact of, just you know, the trends that are going on, the impact we're having on the Earth, is exponential. From the report, “in the past 50 years, the human population has doubled, the global economy has grown nearly 4-fold and global trade has grown 10-fold, together with driving up the demands for energy and materials.” 50 years, David, that's just a tremendous amount of change, that's a less than a generation. And this is the dan-ger of exponential growth, this is something we’ve talked about in-depth in our episode on population growth, Impacts of Growth, I believe it's called, which is with exponential growth everything is fine, and then all the sudden everything collapses. I know that kind of counters what I said about slow col-lapse, but because the bulk of the damage occurs at the very end that is: if you chip away at some-thing at a rate that doubles every year, that means each and every year you have an impact equal to the combined sum impact of every single year up until that point. Year 10 will produce an impact equal to the sum of years 1 through 9, right? And so to respond to this diversity loss catastrophe by saying: well, we've been fine so far, I'm sure we'll find a way – that's hopelessly short-sighted because what's right around the corner…
[47:26] Is death.
[47:24] Anything we have ever experienced in the history of human civilization in terms of ener-gy output, in terms of just about every single human-impact-thing you can track. Alright, let me hit you with another one, David.
[47:42] Okay, I like this, this is fun.
[47:45] The Earth, David, goes through lots of cycles, species go extinct, life adapts and humans are just another variable in the changing nature of the Earth and the life around it will adapt.
[47:59] This is another one.
[48:01] I mean, after all, we've had periods, right?
[48:05] It's true. Hot periods, cool periods. This could just be natural variations in the Sun and, in fact, don't you know we're about to enter the Maunder Minimum, Daniel, and we're going to actually be not a climate crisis of heat but one of cold. An Ice Age is coming, or at least that's what I've read on certain blogs online that I would not recommend checking out. This is another one I head a lot. And it sort of steps into this strange place, well, do we see ourselves, humans, as stewards of the world? Is it our job to try and protect all these species or should we let Darwin come in and then save the day? And that idea that you know, if these animals can’t cut it, well, then they shouldn't be here in the first place is such a naive idea and it's one that really shows a lack of understanding of evolution and also just how rapidly we’re changing things. The pace of this mass extinction that we're currently in the midst of it, and how crazy is it actually, Daniel, just to reflect on that for a moment, that we're all sit-ting here, recording this show right now and everybody sitting around listening, maybe you're driving your car, maybe you're at work and just like casually going on about our lives, while we're in the mid-dle of the sixth mass extinction on Earth. You know, the other ones were like comets come down and blow up the Earth and where there's like giant lava traps happening in Siberia that's changing every-thing or whatever it is that is decimating life on Earth. And we're in the midst of that right now and where everything is going on like nothing is happening. This is one of the fastest rates of extinction that has ever happened. What is is, 10000 times faster than the background rate and it just increasing as time goes on. And so, no, you know these things aren't naturally evolutionary processes. The effects that we’re having, those massive effects that we mentioned, that we’re having on this Earth are hap-pening so rapidly that, of course, things can't keep up. And even animals that should normally be able to evolve and find new niches in this process can't because we're changing things so rapidly. And then we come in and we're just maybe directly killing them too: we’ll just bulldoze all these trees, we ripped them out, well sorry this tree should have evolved to be stronger than a bulldozer but I guess it didn't. So that idea that this is a natural cycle, that these things happen is so far removed from what the actual situation is going on that I don't think the rest of that argument is even worth defending. But even if you think that: okay, you know, this is something that's going on, whatever, blah, blah, blah – the idea that we shouldn't be responsible for this is also profoundly ignorant in the fact that it doesn't realize how dependent upon we are of all these natural ecosystems, of the ecosystem services they provide and of the life that makes up these ecosystems for our own survival. If you’ve wiped out all life on Earth, well, and just left humans by ourselves, we would die. Basically, within a couple of days. We are as dependent upon the life on Earth as the life on Earth is being affected by our actions. And you can’t escape that.
[50:58] To add to that: it is true in a sense that life does adapt. But what has occurred on this planet and especially what will occur is not accurately summed up as change, it's wholesale destruc-tion. So in one sense saying: oh, species will adapt to the change. Well, that's true but what is the change they are adapting to? The change is that there will be less Earth to inhabit. Another way to think about it is like if you took a 10-story apartment building full of people and then just eliminated nine of those floors, would people adapt? Yes, in a sense, if you mean 90% of those people would have to move out. But since in this analogy the building is the entire Earth, there's nowhere else to go and adapting simply means dying.
[51:46] Climate change and habitat loss does not mean the species have to adapt to warmer temperatures and changing weather patterns – they have to adapt to the fact that their forest does not exist anymore or that the wetland that they evolved in is now a desert. They have to adapt to the fact that the very foundation of their diet, the insects and the things that ate those insects, those have disappeared. That's what we're adapting to, it is just destruction. And piggyback off one thing you said, David, you mentioned we are dependent on ecosystems, we cannot survive without the life on this Earth.
[52:21] This is something we touched again on episode 34 so I won't go into too much into this. But we can never stop harping on the fact that biodiversity is what makes humanity possible, we love to think of humanity as this inventive species and it's true: we do create a ton, we're very creative species – but it's a mistake to think that our technology and our inventions separate us from nature because it is the exact opposite. Our inventiveness comes directly from nature: if you took a handful of the world's smartest scientists and, you know, gave them all hammers and dropped them on the moon with the instructions to invent food, they'd fail because the Moon is just a rock, there's nothing there for them to create with. Our ability to create and things, whether it's food, medicine, construc-tion materials – all of this comes from our ability to combine, reorganize and play with that which na-ture freely gives us. The genetic engineering breakthrough that was enabled by CRISPR happened be-cause researchers discovered something that a bacteria cell does naturally. The innovation is taking that, cutting it out and pasting it into something else.
[53:35] We didn't invent anything. We took something nature invented and applied it to her own use. The acting ingredient in Aspirin comes from the leaves of a tree, our buildings are made primari-ly of naturally occurring crushed rock. And when that naturally occurring crushed rock runs out, we don't have the economic ability to make our own. And all of a sudden building things out of concrete becomes uneconomical and unprofitable.
[54:03] OK, well enough of this hot seat thing, Daniel. I think we get the point of what you're try-ing to get across here. And I want to turn towards the final part of the report where they try and talk about what can we do, which is the same thing that we try and do at this show. So, Daniel, let me just pull this up real quick the report, we’ll navigate to the section where they talk about the things we can do. I want to pull up this one here, D2, for those of you reading along and I don't know why you are. They call this the five main interventions or “levers” that can generate transformative change by tackling the indirect drivers of major deterioration. Okay, are you ready for these, Daniel?
[54:42] Hit me with lever number one.
[54:45] Number one, “incentives and capacity-building.” Oh, that's a little bit disappointing. Let’s move to number 2, “cross-sectoral cooperation.” Okay, well that's a big wet fart. Number 3, “preemp-tive action.” Well, fucking duh. Number 4, “decision making in the context of resilience and uncertain-ty.” Do they just literally list out a number that said we should make decisions even though that we don't entirely know what's happening? I guess. Number 5, “environmental law and implementation.” This is my favorite one because I can solve this problem right now with number five. I'm going to pro-pose a law, Daniel, that we make it illegal to kill the Earth.
[55:28] Done. Number five – check. We took care of that. No, but I mean seriously, these are all just trying to scapegoat and get around the real problems here. Where they talk about, and they go in more depth on this, I'm selling them a little bit short and it's not entirely fair for them. But if you go through and you read this section, you can see they're all just very much trying to sidestep around the fact that any real change that we want to do, any actual fixes for these problems are going to be hard and require large systemic change. But they don't actually talk about what that systemic change might be, they don't talk about the actual mechanisms of implementing that sort of systemic change or even if it's possible in the first place. And remember, this is a paper put out by an intergovernmen-tal panel, it's organization with 130 member states, so these are the governments of the world for our coming together to write this, to publish this and this is the version that is going out for media and policymakers, this is what your politicians are going to be reading.
[56:25] To be fair, we haven't seen the full report.
[56:27] Well, yeah. This is actually technically the unedited advance version. But I mean your pol-itician is not going to read the 1500 or 1800 page or whatever it is full version. They're going to read something that is more or less like this advance, that's 39 pages. And nothing is laid out here, nothing really valuable that can actually put forward substantive change is explained. Because these types of things are hard, these are the types of choices that would have to be made that say, well, you know, and they do go into a little more detail, but it’s things like, we need to optimize for natural resiliency instead of… and they never say this in these types of words but – profit-seeking motives. But who's going to be the business or the company that says: you not allowed to do this because even though it serves your profit incentive, it is bad for the Earth.
[57:15] That is never published on how that's going to happen, how you're going to change the economic system it’s just suggested that we have to realign our values and whatever. But that is not how the Earth functions right now, that's not how we decided to build this world. Remember, that we were talking about, we want a world that is depended upon want, to push things forward. And from that want we bare cruelty. And that is a fundamental nature of the way that we’ve decided to interact with each other in the economic system. And in that cruelty we're being cruel to the Earth, we're de-stroying all this stuff because we have to fulfill those wants. And there is no solution for eliminating that chain, that cycle in this report. It's just about mitigating and it making it worse. Something that strikes me when I read this to the end, is this assumption that we will always be unsustainable and we can just slow down this process. The idea of being sustainable isn't even sort of seriously put forward. And I'm not talking about sustainable in like small notions but I mean completely 100% sustainable where we are not taking more than we're giving.
[58:12] But it's possible to give more than you take, there are communities around the world who enrich the soil, who make their environments better. We’ve talked about this with some soil builders on this show before. If you remember Chris D'Alessandro on here, Daniel, way back in episode 16 who spends so much time trying to get carbon back into the soil, to make it healthier, to add all these other weeds, things that we would consider weeds, into his ecosystem, to make these permaculture forests that is better than what was there before. And he's the person who is working on trying to give back more than he's taken out of the soil. And he does get to take things from it, he gets food, he gets re-sources but he puts more back in. And I really like that notion that there is a world that it is possible, where instead of each one of us taking from the world, where each one of us burns this much carbon, we have a budget where as long as you don't go over this, we won't destroy things quickly. But instead to say, well, here's my negative impact, I'm not harming things, I’m making them better. And that's never even part of the discussion anymore cause we can't even imagine a world where that's possi-ble. Even though, and especially in these indigenous communities, in the small local communities that you mentioned earlier onto this thing, the stakeholders as they were called in the report – that exists in many places but it's not profitable. Because the profit is based on this extraction, this debt from the future that we’ve talked about where that's the only way we can get something to actually appear profitable, but in the end that profit is an illusion. Because nothing is actually profitable unless we are borrowing on the life and the health of the Earth and of our future.
[59:42] What a beautiful idea, David, the fact that we could give back to the Earth more than we take. You mentioned something about how these reports, these types of intergovernmental panels al-ways fail to really push fundamental change to the structures of our politics, our governments, our economies. Here something they say from the report:
[1:00:05] “You can’t just tell leaders in Africa that there can’t be any development and that we should turn the whole continent into a national park,” said Emma Archer, who led the group’s earlier assessment of biodiversity in Africa. “But we can show that there are trade-offs, that if you don’t take into account the value that nature provides, then ultimately human well-being will be compromised.” First of all, laugh out loud at the idea of the western world telling Africa that it needs to take into ac-count the value of nature. Meanwhile, you know, the entire wealth of the western world today is fi-nanced by the resources that are directly stolen from an African land, previously stolen from Latin America, still to this day. So that's a ridiculous statement. But I think there's also this false either/or choice being presented here, this false dichotomy: oh, we can either have economic development or development or growth or good things, or we can just turn everything into a national park and we can't do that, so we must find some compromise, middle of the road like you said, how can we pre-serve profits?
[1:01:16] I want to play another story from Leah Penniman’s talk, that kind of reveals a little bit of the hypocrisy here.
[1:01:25] Is anyone here do crop rotation? Yes! I know you're not raising your hand cause it's so obvious that, of course, you have to for your organic certification. What do you think this picture is of? Slash-and-burn. So, slash-and-burn is a sort of derogatory name that some folks give to swidden agri-culture. And so I studied environmental science in college too so I thought it was like the worst thing you could ever do to the land, like you know, burn it down and reap the soil with its nutrients and all that, that's really how I understood it. What I didn't realize is that's swidden agriculture in its incep-tion, which was practiced by African Farmers as well as indigenous farmers in Asia and on Turtle Is-land, is about on average of 26-year crop rotation. So you burn an area, release the nutrients, that kills the pests and weeds and pathogens. The least is all of that and then you grow the food for a cou-ple of years and by the time you make it back in rotation, it's been almost a generation. The problem is that when you steal people's land and force them into a small territory of marginal soils and you try to practice swidden agriculture, you get the environmental devastation that we see all across the de-veloping worlds. Because the rotation is reduced to two or three years which is not enough time for that below-ground biomass to form, for all that carbon to be captured, for those deep roots of trees to pull up the minerals and really regenerate the soil. But in its inception, this is the proto cover crop-ping. This is what we do when we have a rotational fallow and we plant legumes in between, it’s swidden agriculture.
[1:02:56] This is an important story because going back to this earlier concept of indigenous con-tributions to society and our dependence on local knowledge and land stewardship as a way to slow the trends of this biodiversity loss, we need to restructure the economy, we need to rethink the very foundations of modern life. And this example provides evidence, in my opinion, for that. Because, for one, it reveals the flaw of something so fundamental to the modern economy which is property rights. The western world entered the African continent with models of economy, of organizing around these hierarchical institutions, around this narrow conception of property rights, and the result is, in this ex-ample, the inability for people to continue a holistic and sustainable method of stewarding the land that they have been carrying on for generations and generations. And now, today when nonprofits and these other do-gooder institutions look at the farming practices of some region they consider develop-ing and they want to tell these people how to do things better, the great irony they failed to recognize is that it has been that type of direct intervention that has resulted in so many bad land practices in the first place.
[1:04:11] This whole idea that we shouldn't own property privately, this is a universal indigenous concept that's been documented in Russia and Southeast Asia, in Africa and South America right here. This very pretty new idea of enclosure came about in the 1400s, we can thank the British for that idea that we should fence everything and own it all by ourselves. But there was a group of black farmers in the 60s who said: how do we take white man's law and make it work for communal land ownership? We really want to figure that out. So they traveled around the world, they saw kibbutz in Israel and other systems and they came up with the idea of a community land trust. The community land trust where you have an organization that collectively stewards the land but the ownership of the struc-tures, the equity in the structures can be owned by the individual and be passed on through genera-tions. Brilliant legal model, there are now thousands of community land trust and we can thank the Sherrods, Shirley and Charles Sherrod and the 500 black farmers who founded new communities on 6000 acres in Albany, Georgia in 1969 for the idea of a community land trust.
[1:05:20] Going back and to just reinforce what you said, David. New policies, new reforms that will incentivize one thing or another: maybe that will have a mitigating impact in the short-term, maybe there's a way that we can incentivize profit-seeking companies to be a little bit more green. But in the end, that's not going to get us there. That is exactly why we are failing, all of these sustain-able development goals, all of these plans from these governments because we are not changing the system that is destroying this Earth. So what can we do: recognize that, recognize that our politicians will continue to fail us, our corporate leaders will continue to fail us, and that the future of this Earth is in local sustainable stewardship of the land. And any way we can support that, encourage that, in-centivize that, any way that we can be a part of that is a way forward. Whatever that means to you, to each of our ability, to each to their contribution. What's that quote, David, do you know what I'm talking about?
[1:06:30] You mean: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need? I think. [What Daniel quotes initially is: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his contri-bution.” David takes that into a more Marxist direction with “to each according to their need”] I've got another one actually, Daniel, and this one I seen graffitied all over New York for the past cou-ple years, but really, whoever's been doing this, has been doing it more and more. And I think it's a great personal mantra to ask yourself all the time and I know I do every time I see it. And I may have mentioned it on the show before actually but it's worth repeating. And that's just two statements:
ARE YOU HELPING
ARE YOU HURTING
That's a lot to think about.
[1:07:06] As always, David, but think about it and do something about it, we hope you will.
[1:07:12] You can read this full advance unedited copy of the report as well as a couple of articles about some of the takeaways from it on our website, as well as a full transcript of this episode at ashesashes. org.
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[1:08:30] Has anyone ever heard of permaculture? Alright, this usually makes me kind of unpopu-lar, but permaculture doesn't exist. Permaculture is the theft of indigenous knowledge and rebranding it for profit. One example of “permaculture” is the idea of these permanent agroforestry systems. In Haiti, one of them is called jaden lakou but there are many, many dozens of them and they all de-serve their own stories. So in Nigeria 26 different agroforestry systems have been documented by western scientists. I've been trained in jaden lakou which is when you put, you know, beautiful big trees of Moringa and Limon and fruit trees and then around them you have aromatic herbs for pest repellents, you have berries and bushes, you have your annual crops, it's all fenced in with a cactus that's really resilient and then you can choose when you want to let your chickens into forage and your goats and when you don't and so on. This is a nursery that we helped build in Haiti in the com-munity of Bigones for people to use, for it to replenish their jaden lakou, their house garden and everybody has one. Agroforestry is pervasive. So we can thank blacks farmers and other indigenous farmers for what we call “permaculture”.