 Well good morning How's everybody doing so far? I'm amazed. I mean I have a sense that this is a very significant gathering an event that's happening here We'll look back at five years and say wow it all started then and I really want to thank Brian and Matthew For organizing this and for having us come here. I'm Sincerely honored and you know profoundly grateful. So thank you all and to Rebecca and Joseph as well who have been great to deal with I Wanted to acknowledge Nina whom everybody knows she's the co-founder of Bioneers and Joshua is over here our executive director So I guess most of the day is going to be about agriculture So that was what I was mainly going to focus on and Joseph had asked if I would just frame the bigger issues just a little bit But I have very limited time. So I'm just gonna keep that super short Which is all here. So here's the short version Basically as a species we've been acting like a rock star trashing a hotel room and it's the morning after only This hotel is planet Earth the guest rules are non negotiable And if we don't change our ways of living really fast, we're gonna get voted off the island So that's basically what we need to understand. You know the science is pretty well in on a lot of stuff Two-thirds of the planets ecosystems are in serious and accelerating decline. We're entering into uncharted territory For those of you who want to look at some of the I think the more Cutting-edge science right now the Stockholm resilience Center has done work on the nine planetary boundaries of which we've already crossed four The reality however on the ground here is that climate disruption is coming on bigger faster than even the alarmists predicted It's being called now the Anthropocene era the you know, we human beings have essentially become a force of nature This is completely unprecedented We there are no ground rules from here on out and what we know is we've set the big wheels in motion And we truly don't know what's going to happen now other than where there is going to be a very unfortunate Degree of suffering that was totally preventable So, you know, we need to do everything we can as quickly as we can and as you know Very intelligent and hopefully judicious choices that will make We'll get into a little bit later But from the perspective of Bioneers the solutions are largely present I mean we basically have a very good idea what to do right now or certainly what directions to head in What I'm witnessing is that we're in the thick of a revolution right now having watched the arc of this Solutions-based culture over the last 25 years. It's reaching a critical mass It's actually much bigger than people realize right now and infiltrating society at all levels very very quickly So, you know, the game is far from over You know as I mentioned yesterday, I think the coming years are going to make the 60s look like the 50s And that's here present in this room. It is a revolution it's a revolution from the heart of nature and from the human heart and We have four billion years of R&D from nature to learn from so You know, we've got a whole lot going for us at the same time I did want to say just one another note about the nine planetary boundaries is that they're all that there's a tenth planetary boundary, which is justice and The climate extremes that we're witnessing today correlate precisely with the extremes of wealth Which are unprecedented the concentration of wealth and power in the world. That is not an accident As our friends and you know Elders that in Iroquois six nations in the US tell us We will have peace with Mother Earth only when we have justice and justice is a process that never ends There will always be issues to address So we need to get really good at making peace and acknowledging justice and dealing with it, you know at all times So I just wanted to preface it. So why am I talking to you about agriculture? I grew up in New York City. My father taught at Columbia. My parents didn't even have a house plant You know, literally my mother has a black thumb basically any plant she touches will die just as soon as it sees her coming I'm not kidding actually So I was making a film in 1984 Called Hoxie how healing becomes a crime and it's about Medical politics and particularly the suppression and obstruction of unconventional Cancer treatments and the film is based around one case history a classic case history of this fellow named Harry Hoxie Who inherited his family's herbal treatment for cancer, which was actually discovered by his great-grandfather's horse reputedly and So I felt very deeply into the world of botanical medicine and I'm started to research, you know, everything I can learn about this particular plant medicine formula and in the course of my you know meanderings I met Christopher Bird who was the co-author of the book the secret life of plants, which is very controversial very interesting book at that time And I thought what I was doing provocative, you know, it's provocative herbal cancer treatment Chris was talking about plants having sentience and consciousness and communicating with each other and all that good stuff So anyway, he called me up a few months later and asked if I would make a film about a friend of his on an Indian Pueblo Just north of Santa Fe where I where I live and so sounded kind of interesting. It was a paying gig So I went and and it turned out Gabriel was a master organic farmer Who had studied with Alan Chadwick in California who helped bring biodynamic agriculture to the states? Chadwick told his students if you really really want to learn about farming go study with native peoples These are the people who have been doing it for millennia and have a very profound relationship with with growing so Gabriel started in Mexico and wandered down through Central America ended up in Latin America and As as native people, you know began to learn what's called T.E.K. traditional ecological knowledge a different kind of tech And as people came to trust him, which is not a small thing, you know that he that he had the integrity and the intention They began to share with him what for them is the most precious of gifts, which is the gift of seeds Because through the seeds speak the voices of the ancestors and each time that you plant a seed You become an ancestor for the generations to come. So it's a profoundly sacred transmission And he had gathered this extraordinary arc of traditional You know mostly food plants and herbs medicinal plants heirlooms and traditional indigenous Seeds and stuck them in the ground at San Juan Pueblo just north of Santa Fe So that's what I was up there to film it turned out and he gave me this tour of this astonishing arc that he had created Hundreds literally hundreds of varieties of corn including teosinte Which is this stubby little thing that you would barely even recognize as being corn. It's it's the mother of all corns Right from southern Mexico. It's where it all came from through the ingenuity of human plant breeding non genetic engineering you know and You know also just hundreds of varieties of tomatoes every size shape color you could be on what you could imagine I lived on a small farm for about six years But this was beyond anything that I had ever seen or imagined it was really my introduction to biodiversity and biodiversity in the garden and so as I filmed with Gabriel he also brought up the fact that these seed stocks were disappearing very very rapidly you know Genetic erosion the loss of the gene pool is actually the single greatest threat to agriculture on the planet We built this industrial system That's that's grows profits not food. That's really what it's there for and essentially Have engineered seeds well throttled seed diversity brought it down to monocultures Engineered those monocultures to grow with very heavy recipes of chemicals highly toxic chemicals the basis of all of it is Patents that's really what it is about is proprietary control and it was creating this catastrophic situation On which you know world food supply depends not a good idea So it became very clear to me in that moment how incredibly important it was and I thought I was there to make a movie You know it turned out I was there to start a seed company Which Gabriel and I launched in a couple years later in 1989 a company called seeds of change It was the first national organic seed company You know seeds are the first link in a safe food web But even today right now our seeds are not for the most part are not organic So that in itself is it don't get me started. That's a whole other discussion. We can get into but And then really the the idea was that you know The people who care about biodiversity are gardeners for the most part and we set it up as a commercial enterprise As a market partnership with backyard gardeners, you know, everybody's always leaning over the fence Hey, what's that tomato you got and how can I get some and can I trade you this and you know? that's really where the action was and It was it that's I won't get into the whole story of seeds of change but that was kind of where you know my my entry point into agriculture and then You know many of us in the early by the early 70s were highly aware of the collision course that Society was on with nature and that we really had to do something, you know It was no secret and so I didn't want to sit there kind of quivering in the dark You know being depressed and fearful So I just set out on a personal quest as a journalist and just a citizen actually To find out who was out there who might have real solutions to our major environmental crises and one by one by one Kind of during the 70s and 80s I came across all these different people who had really major fundamental solutions to you know huge global crises and The pattern that I started to observe Was first of all they were all systems thinkers, you know They took a solve the whole problem approach everything is connected, you know as John Muir once so beautifully said in nature Everything is hitched to everything else. Well, the same is true as of our society, you know as human beings We are nature. We didn't invent nature nature invented us We'd be wise to learn the ground rules that had a play by them and so And then the second principle really or pattern that connected all these people Was that they had looked to nature not as a physical resource But as a model a mentor and a metric, you know the basic disarmingly simple question being how would nature do it and You know boy, you can spend many lifetimes trying to understand that and that's what I'm so beautifully hearing people talk about here this morning so I was 1990 Nina and I started what became pioneers the idea was to bring together the you know the real social and scientific innovators To talk with each other and just like what's happening here this morning to begin to provide a platform to get these remarkable work out into the world and The entry point for a lot of it because of the association with seeds of change was around food systems And by the way, it was the biggest entry point into binaries at that time It still is today 25 years later food systems is often the entry point for people to develop environmental awareness So it should not be underestimated at that level what a profound educational tool it is And so we very quickly began the you know the seeds of change crew all these seed heads as we called ourselves at the time We're just the Olympics of gardening. I mean these guys were absolute maniacs and you know deep deep into esoteric farming methods of all sorts so we began to provide a platform for permaculture for biodynamics for John Jebens for West Jackson and you know perennial Prairie Prairie culture and on and on and on and really try to bring the major schools of alternative agriculture together and to provide You know a platform to get the word out about all of that So we've had the tremendous privilege of being able to learn from all of these people and also to cross pollinate these many important You know schools of knowledge because no one there is no one magic bullet or one solution It's a suite of solutions and it's there's so much knowledge yet to be gained We're very humble in what we don't know, you know, that's what keeps us up at night So just to give you a few examples a few stories of some of the kinds of things But Nina mentioned to a smaller group yesterday about our friend Paul Stamets Paul's a mycologist up in the Pacific Northwest in the US Who you know I studied a lot about the medicinal properties of herbs and as an ecologist He began to wonder well, what is the the medicinal function, you know the the healing function that that mycelia play in the landscape so he got a chance to test that when there is a very large diesel fuel spilled near his little farm and They the state of Washington invited a bunch of people companies to come in and kind of rode You know take a crack at this contaminated soil. They set up these cells of dirt About 20 feet by 20 feet. I think you know They stank horribly putrid from you know hydrocarbons and it was just pretty much dead dirt at that point when it happened So Paul decided to have at it along with all these other companies And he inoculated the spore of oyster mushrooms into his cell of dirt and they all covered it up And I think it was about six or eight weeks later They came back and one by one by one they ripped the tarps off these things and still the stench of hydrocarbons I mean if the other treatments were working at all it was very very slow They were using enzymes the usual heat beaten treat, you know If brute force doesn't work you haven't used enough You know that was basically the mentality and then they get to Paul's little cell of dirt rip the tarp off And it's completely blanketed with oyster mushrooms some of the foot foot and a half in diameter They tested the soil. There was absolutely no residue of diesel. They tested the flesh of the mushrooms Nothing there. So this is not changed. This is transformation something the mycelia knew to had it You know in nature. There is no waste everything is somebody's lunch of either food or energy It's very simple the mushrooms treated the oil as food the reason that I bring this up is it has profound implications for agriculture because Most of our fertilizers are oil-based as our herbicides and pesticides When if we talk about large-scale transition to organic farming We're dealing with highly contaminated soil all over the planet It can take a very long time to you know to detoxify that the official length of time is three years to transition to organic But even if you've done that the soil realistically is still going to be contaminated Mushrooms and mycelia could fast forward that entire process It takes months not years and you can actually completely bioremediate the soil at the same time that you're building the soil health So this is and you don't need an engineer. You need a gardener to do this stuff This is gorilla stuff I mean I think many of us become frustrated by bureaucracy by government by regulation all this kind of stuff This is stuff that could be done by gorilla gardeners worldwide over the planet all around the planet effectively its citizen science in action You know, this is one of the things I think that we should move on quickly to actually just enable people to do this on much much larger scales Let's see So another thing that's a really important point is you may have seen the new Rodale Oh, by the way, let me just finish that story with one little thing which is that Paul who's basically an old hippie got contacted by the Pentagon Because forget Saddam Hussein the US, you know the late Saddam Hussein the US has by far the biggest stockpiles in the world of chemical and biological weapons and There's no good way to get rid of them They wanted to incinerate them in Arkansas and other places and of course the people did not want that It just goes into the air and you know spreads So they asked him if he had any mushrooms that might have an effect on this So, you know, he's a pretty serious scientist and he took 28 samples that he gave them blind samples one through 28 Didn't tell them what they were sent it off to the Pentagon. This is for sarin nerve gas Which is right up there with plutonium right a human made super deadly and indestructible basically So he kind of forgot about it. They give him security clearance all this stuff six eight months later He got a callback sure enough two of the mushrooms had worked. They completely Metabolized the sarin no trace left whatsoever One of them is the turkey tail mushroom which Paul also used on his mother for breast cancer stage four breast cancer Successfully it's now going through trials at the NIH And the other one which he doesn't know if and say publicly which was the super performer was psilocybin mushrooms magic mushrooms, which were the super performer for detoxifying, you know Sarin vx so go enjoy your own conclusions, but they don't call them magic mushrooms for nothing So The Rodale study that has come out recently. They've been doing very careful trials for about the last decade Agriculture is basically responsible now for about 30% of of GHDs of global greenhouse gases, right? This is it's the single most destructive human activity against the environment Farming it's death by farming and what we have done this so badly. It's almost, you know, it can be hard to do it worse in a Lot of ways So what do we do with that? Well ironically agriculture is a huge part of the solution basically the Rodale research is showing that a large-scale shift to Or what they call regenerative organic agriculture, which is an important distinction Could suck up more than a hundred percent of the greenhouse gases that are out there right now So this really needs to be put at the top of the list Again on a very large scale in many cases. You don't need government. This is actually in some ways more about engaging the business sector Then the government in that regard But I think this is an area where going to scale makes tremendous sense to do it and without going into some of the Biology behind it, but I don't think there's much question that this is largely true And if we wanted to stay below the 1.5 centigrade level, you know, two degrees is actually too high We've got to stay even under that from what we understand You know, who knows what's going to happen here But if we transitioned about 55 percent of our farmlands by 2020 that would take that would take it down I would take it down by if we did half of that we would take it down by 55 percent Which would keep us below 1.5 centigrade So this is really really big stuff that we're you know looking at here And this works it at all scales and the tropics and the temperate zones, you know and so forth When we talk about bringing things to scale it can be confusing because it doesn't always mean getting bigger In many cases, especially if we're talking about resilience It means multiplying spreading these things at smaller scales, you know, like distributed energy is a very good analogy for that You don't want one giant centralized solar power plant in Navajo Nation that provides all the electricity for the whole US You want distributed energy all over the country. The same is true of farming. The issue there right now Is that what we are growing is really not what we need when you go to the farmers market, for instance It's pretty much fruits and vegetables and artisanal product products. That's not what we actually eat Michael Abelman has talked a lot about this. We need grains. We need legumes This is what really needs to be scaled up at the mid-range level What we also we did a whole project in New Mexico that I'll mention just briefly called dreaming New Mexico To look at local food sheds and what's really needed But there's what's called farming in the middle, which is farms that are about a thousand acres to three thousand acres Those are often the ones most under threat Those are the ones we actually most need right now that is scalable to spread that and to conserve Whatever we do have right now to not let those farms go down or that farmland to be lost So that's something we really need to be looking at in a much more analytical way is what should we be growing and that mid-range scale is Actually, that's those are large farms. If you've ever been on a farm 1000 to 3000 acres is a lot So I wouldn't underestimate it at the same time small and medium-sized family farms are absolutely not going to feed the world I mean, let's not kid ourselves So I think we need to be extremely reality based here and we're dealing with you know beyond urgency We're an emergency from here on out pretty much So we need to act very quickly on some of these things. So there's a really important book called world agriculture By Jason clay at WWF. This is I don't know about 10 years ago that Jason did this We first had binaries at Jason at binaries. I think in 91 or 92 Genius grade. I mean he's work that he does but anyway what they did is they looked at the 15 major global agricultural commodities To understand whether we could transition production at that scale You know of agricultural commodities and with green practices and what they found is absolutely It's doable. The book gives case history after case history of how it can actually be done Shrimp rice, you know cotton and weed and all of it and The most interesting takeaway from the whole thing was the most successful models Where ones where workers had a stake in it Duh, you know, I'd like to form one more nonprofit before I die called the duh Institute, you know We'd have plenty of work. That's for sure But but that work it's it's already been proven out, you know again It needs to be we need to understand what are the triggers that are going to now make that into an actual reality And make it happen, but we cannot ignore large-scale commodity production And as I said, the world is simply not going to be fed by by small family farms Most of you here are probably are pretty familiar with holistic range land management as it's now called But you know the meat industry clearly is a huge problem in the way that it's done now We definitely eat too much meat and same time meat production is not going to go away I know that Christiana is going to be talking about this later, nor should it necessarily go away and Back to kind of by an years world in biomimicry the idea of imitating nature Essentially what holistic range land management does and I'm sure other people who are far more knowledgeable about the practicalities than I am But it mimics the original patterns in the US of migratory herds of ungulates mainly the buffalo in the United States And the key hallmark is what's now called in management move them and mob them The real problem is keeping the animals in one place for too long and as a result the grass cycle never gets to complete So the animals graze it down to the nub and it's simply unable to regrow it causes soil erosion You know many many many problems what huge water problems because the animals are stuck in one place So basically instead of having coyotes and wolves to chase the you know the herds of ungulates What they use are electric fences mobile electric fences which get moved and the cycle of the grasslands You know is able to regenerate appropriately and what they find which is what you know when the when the Europeans first came to North America In the Great Plains the grass was chest high literally and there were huge herds of buffalo So what it turns out is the buffalo co-created that ecosystem they created the grasslands which brought the rain Which you know and fertilized the soil and you know it's a complete food web and a hub but the animals actually co-created that So that's being done very successfully a number of places around the world now You can do large scale meat production in that kind of a setting while you're also actually regenerating the ecosystem at the same time The question of how much meat we should eat and all the other health consider that's a whole another discussion Practical terms this is a really significant thing So I wanted to mention one other cup two other things but we did a project called Dreaming New Mexico My partner tragically died of cancer you know about six seven years into the project Peter Warshall whom I honor in this moment Who is a polymath and I mean blindingly brilliant incredible mind but so the idea was very simple Which is that dreaming the future can create the future and most of us as people seeking change and as activists End up in a position of resistance most of the time of just trying to stop all the bad stuff from happening And it's an endless struggle I mean it's always coming at you right and it's you got to resist But what happens is we don't step back and ask what it is that we really really want you know what it's actually our dream If we what does success look like right you know if we really got what we want instead of settling for what we think we can get What would the world look like so that was the premise we started with and no one had ever done this that we were aware of Anyway at a state level of trying to take a systems view of what that would be for so the year is 2020 We've done everything right what is the age of local food sheds look like right what would that actually be And so I'm sorry the materials didn't arrive but we can make sure that they do and it is all online but we created future maps And we created actually a shadow think tank as we called it of the you know top people we could find across a very diverse spectrum of Both areas of activity as well as perspectives and kind of worked with them to develop co-develop all these different dreams And then we started a mapping process of literal mapping and when you look at a state like New Mexico It's really just lines on a map that have nothing to do with the reality on the ground right with the actual ecology So what we discovered very quickly if you're talking about local food sheds and this was Peter Warshall's first innovation Was these are actually agro eco regions New Mexico has six different agro eco regions they're quite distinct They're defined by the watershed first and foremost and then of course by climate and micro climate They're also defined by what we call culture sheds which people often don't look at but you know that that's a significant part of it So I think that in looking at this kind of mapping it's tremendously important to start you know from both the ecology But then also to integrate the culture and you know oftentimes people in the local food movement get a bit carried away Which I understand I appreciate the passion but you know every we got to be 100% local right well great Would you like to give up coffee or chocolate or mangoes or you know where do you want to start so so that's just not going to happen So that was one of the things that we tried to really confront in in this meaningful way of well how do you deal with that With the fact that in fact what you're doing is going to be limited in that regard and the conclusion that we came to Which we actually put to the governor was that New Mexico should become the first fair trade state that we are going to find sister communities With kindred values and practices and we're going to trade for the things that we want because if we went 100% local in New Mexico Which we couldn't do anyway we'd be putting out a business hundreds of small farmers in Mexico subsistence organic farmers Is that the intention of course not you know so why don't we instead trade with them So that was a really really important thing another thing you probably are familiar with local economies it's called the lowest model Lois local ownership import substitution right those are really the two primary cornerstones of what you're looking for So what more widely distributed local ownership but the import substitution okay very interesting question So we went you know there's we have a pamphlet with it with the age of local food sheds that you'll see just as incredibly rich with data And what we found was the data did not exist for a lot of things that we were trying to find so the state of New Mexico like most places The only thing that they track is exports right because that's cash in the bank that's how the the mentality of that economy So what do we import in the way of food that we could substitute for so we had to actually construct that data as best we could And just to give you one small example that blew our minds but okay suppose you wanted to have all organic dairy in New Mexico cheese and milk and so forth It turned out it would take one medium sized organic dairy to supply the entire state I mean that was it So you know it's that kind of thing same with chickens it would take a couple of farms you know so the stuff once you dial in on the granular It's it's a whole it's much more doable than anybody really thinks so I know my time is almost out I just wanted to close with two short very short stories So Peter Warshall did a lot of consulting in the 90s for major food companies and everybody sustainability was kind of the first wave of corporate sustainability you know consciousness at that time So he had spent about a day and a half with Paul Hawkin with a giant food company I forgot I think I can't remember who it was maybe anyway but So they went through sustainability 101 and not deprive future generations of what we have now and leave the world a better place and blah blah So finally they asked okay anybody got and can you tell me one product in your company you know that you would consider to be sustainable It was kind of a long pause finally guy raises his hand he says well we have this breakfast cereal and it has a shelf life of six months So we got a lot of education to do still you know and then my theory of social change is that so because of plantation agriculture we're good cacao You know the basis of chocolate is under tremendous threat and within probably less than 10 years we're going to see a worldwide chocolate shortage So my theory of change is I believe that at that moment the women of the world are going to rise up and take over and do it right May it be so So I think I'm out of time is there Q&A at all or we need to keep moving I really enjoyed the stats and the nuances and the key themes and ideas that you raised there We are quite short on time but I know people will be really eager to ask questions so we thought we'd allow time for two questions So first two hands up get the prize You're a winner Wonderful talk I'm wondering if you could tell me the how far is the reach of Monsanto I have started a library garden and I've been working it for the last six years You know I get seeds from different companies and I'm going to look your company up Do you know the reach of Monsanto? I've been told by workers that I've called certain seed companies and they say they get their seeds from Monsanto Various vegetables Well actually it's you know it's more political and economic reach that they have in a lot of ways but you know they're informally called Monsatan I mean they're truly a bad actor and you know I people you know I'm for the death penalty for corporations They are given a legal charter they're a legal fiction they exist only on paper they're not a person I mean we all know this So I think that we're reaching the point where there may be an international criminal court that actually you know goes after this But Monsanto the destructive capacity of that company in particular is unimaginable So I think that it's going to have to reach that point but you know I'm not sure exactly what your question was The reality on the ground is that genetic engineering of plants and the way that they're doing it is very brittle When you think about the vulnerability of a monoculture what they've done with genetic engineering is to take that an octave further This is the ultimate monoculture where every single plant is genetically identical So particularly as climate disruption comes in these things are super vulnerable and we're going to see really big crashes There's also a ton more research coming out about now about glyphosate and water pollution and all kinds of health effects from that So I mean I think there's a fuse lit and you know that whole aspect of Big Ag is going to crash and burn But a lot of it is really political not biological in that sense so I'm not sure if that's what your question was about Okay thank you so we've got one more question before we do some stretching exercises from the lovely Jess Hi Kenny, when I went looking for the most sustainable free-ranging meat I could find It turned out not to be at the grocery store at all it was actually raising itself in the forest and treating itself rather well comparatively And so it took up hunting of venison in America and have been sort of dumbfounded ever since that Apparently none of that meat ever makes its way to the grocery store any restaurant or anything The actual role of a professional hunter is outlawed in America there's no such thing it's just a recreational pastime And in California suburbs there's herds of deer walking through people's backyards while the meat that ends up on the table has come from a concentration camp What's going on? You know I think it's a really great point to raise Josh and there are absolute pests on the east coast of the US as well I mean tremendous hazards with driving and roadkill and all that so I think it's a really valid point in light of the conversation this morning about pests I mean there's overpopulation because the predators are gone and the whole natural balance has been upended So I think that kind of question is really valuable to raise as to why we aren't doing that So I know I've got to get off the stage here so thank you thank you I really appreciate it