 Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Salkian. We are still on site at AAA, the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting. Very excited to now be sitting down with Dr. Duncan Earle. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it. Really looking forward to our conversation. Good. Let's give a background on Duncan. He's a professor and coordinator in global studies at Merrimount, California University for the last eight years. He's focused on global development, rural community livelihoods, resilient culture and sustainability. Prior to that, eight years associate professor at University of Texas El Paso, three years associate professor at Clark University, and also associate professor at Vanderbilt, Texas A&M and Dartmouth. So it's been 35 years of professing and teaching. Wow. PhD in Anthropology from State University of New York at Albany. He's an author. He also has had 50 plus publications. The book is called Uprising of Hope, accompanying the Zapatistas on their journey of sustainable development. And he's also works as an editor for the Library of Congress and an editor for Middle America Ethnography and co-editor of the University of Texas Press Border Series. And he is, students are currently involved in applied sustainability research with the Port of Los Angeles, as well as with a global carbon offset initiative, JADORA. To support large-scale rainforest preservation and sustainable community development in the Congo Basin. Really excited to talk about that carbon offset program. That's going to be really exciting. And yeah, that's crazy. It's 47 million hectares that are some of the largest rainforests in the world that you are working. I'm really excited to talk about that. I'm super excited to talk about just, you know, 35 years of research and professing. And yeah, let's jump into it. But even before we get into what's going on now, Duncan, let's hear about you as a kid. How the heck did you get involved in anthropology? Well, I did have a leg up in that I was a large family that was raised in the countryside in upstate New York, right next to the Anandaga Indian Reservation. So I went to high school with about a third of our school was Haudenosaunee, as they call themselves, part of the Iroquois Six Nations. A third of your school growing up was a Native American tribe. Yes. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. So we had the best lacrosse team in upstate New York, needless to say, and we were very integrated. And it wasn't a segregated situation because they were an integral part of our community, our rural community. And my father, who was a professor of landscape architecture at Syracuse University, he had been a kind of a bum artist in the 30s in Mexico. And it was part of the muralist tradition of Diego Rivera and Cisneros and them and actually worked as an assistant to Rivera for some time when he was painting the opera house in Mexico City. So as a child, we were regaled with stories about Mexico and my father was also a painter. So we had all these landscapes of other places. And then at a fairly early age during the summers, he started driving there and camping in Mexico with his whole family of seven kids. That's a big family. Yes. Whoa. In fact, in 1957, when I was five, we drove in a Volkswagen van all the way to Costa Rica. Whoa. And so every summer, he did this justifying it essentially as visual material for his classwork. He dragged us all through, my gosh, by the time I was a junior sophomore in high school, I'd probably been to 60 countries in four continents, mostly camping. That's a lot of culture exposure at a young age. That's great. And then I went back to my little home, you know, in some little hometown with half Indians and half rural farmers. And then when I was a junior in high school, my parents sent me on an exchange program and I lived a year in Barcelona where I learned to speak Spanish and really learned to have an appreciation for my hometown in a way I previously hadn't. Because by the time a year of living in cosmopolitan Europe, you come back to this little town and you go, wow, this is like a novel about the last picture show. So it gave me a very kind of cosmopolitan preparation for school. Then I went in to SUNY Binghamton, which was close by my home. I went close by rather than some of the other schools I'd been accepted in because my mother had recently passed on. And kind of was part time taking care of my family as well. And then when my father remarried, I ended up involved in a summer field school that took me to Guatemala. To do archaeology in Guatemala. And while I had traveled some, again, in the Mediterranean, I spent a semester in Malta and a semester back in Spain, the summer Guatemalan experience was new for me because unlike, say, Egypt or other places where the contemporary people are very different from the ancient people. In Highland, Guatemala, the Maya that were employed as workers on our archaeological site that I was an undergraduate grunt for, which I had an advantage over the others because I spoke good Spanish. I could see the workers talking with each other about artifacts. And in many cases, their interpretations seemed to be better than our archaeologist who was leading the dig. So I kind of left my romantic notion of exploring the mysterious ancient Maya and said, wait a minute, if I want to understand the people of ancient times, I'm not going to be able to dig up ideas or conversations. But I can learn the ideas and have the conversations with the ones who are alive now. And maybe that will illuminate more the past. While I was transitioning from archaeology to studying the present, Guatemala had a serious earthquake in 1976. And suddenly, thousands of people were without housing. Thousands more had broken homes and broken up houses and or were in fear of having more houses fall. Thirty-five thousand people died. And I suddenly started to sort of shift a little more towards, well, I want to learn from them about these esoteric cultural ideas. But I also really feel like coming from a privileged place in the north that I should be helping. So I suspended, or so I thought, my graduate research to work for Save the Children in a project that they had in Guatemala and nine municipalities, 103 communities. And we were doing things like reforestation, community organizing, helping people improve their housing so they wouldn't fall down in an earthquake. And at the same time, I got invited by the local mayas to live with them, not with the gringo, not with the ex-patriot group that I was working with. And I was a single guy. I was willing to live in a somewhat less fancy environment to live with the local people since we were trying to help them. I began learning their language, eating with them, going to the markets with them. And little by little, I began to realize from that why the aid programs were not working very well. And it was largely because no one was really asking the local people what we were focusing on housing, for example, no one really asked the question, what does a house mean? We know what the physical object of a house is. And that's what we were all focused on. But Mayan houses are not American houses. They have distinctly different meanings. They're temples for the family, especially if the father is a shaman and the mother is a midwife, as in the case of the household I was living in. They're also granaries, places where people store their corn. And they point out that corn needs more babying than people. You know, he said, oh, one woman said to me, oh, my husband, he can go sleep in the cornfield if he's been out at the party and doesn't make it home. And I just go out at dawn and put his head on his head so his brains don't fry in the sun. But corn has to be taken care of. So we were completely misoriented because we were thinking of houses as we think of them as places to store our stuff in our crash pad. Whereas they were thinking of them more as a religious place and a place to store next year's seed corn. And women administratively kind of owned the house and the men owned the fields. So when we were giving courses to men about improving how to build a house, we didn't realize we were teaching the wrong people. Since men owned houses, we figured those were the people who would make the decisions about houses. This was not the case. Men decide about corn. Women decide about houses. And in the Mayan language, the name for your wife is rachauha, which is your house owner. Which had we known this at the start, would have perhaps reoriented us. But because these aid programs sort of commit to a plan before they really know much about what they're going to do because they never have money for prior research, because who wants to donate to prior research to help, right? How old were you here again? Early 20s, 23. Early 20s. So you're in your early 20s and you're starting to really discover that there are these societal differences among cultures and that really we kind of, we kind of, we push some of our cultures on other people and just assume that they have our cultures. Whereas their culture is completely different in the way you just describe the difference in a temple versus a crash pad, a place for next year's seed. That is so interesting. And then you also bring up this interesting point about with humanitarian efforts across the world, it's really important to go there, understand the culture, really get the nuance of the culture to know how to most have the highest efficacy of distributing resources through that place. And many non-governmental organizations use the excuse of we're in a hurry or donors don't donate for prior research to not do this. And this is why so often they fail. And I watch this fail and the more I told them about this, how this was not working, the more they marginalized me, right? Because this was a threat to their livelihoods and their operations. And eventually I quit and went on to live some longer time with this Mayan family and I actually was sort of an apprentice to a shaman. And really learn, although I didn't write my dissertation about shamanism or any of the Carlos Custonadian characteristics of things, I used what I had learned as a bottom rung trained shaman to understand why community development was not working. In other words, I learned from the most, what we might call the most esoteric dimensions of their culture to see why the most concrete efforts to improve their lives materially, we were approaching them completely wrong. Well, there's a whole different sense, essence of being when you're a shaman in Central America or South America than when you are a householder in the United States. Yes. Completely different. Completely different. For example, we built model houses to show them how to build a house that wouldn't fall down on an earthquake because most of their houses were adobe. And these were model houses we tested on a flatbed with pneumatic pumps underneath that recreated an earthquake. I mean it was technically cutting edge appropriate tech, as they called it at the time. But what we didn't take a note of at the time, and I learned through my time living with the people, was that you don't build a house that anyone would ever live in that is at a crossroads, which is exactly where we put our model so everyone could see it, because crossroads are where the spooks hang out at night, just like they did in the old South for African-Americans. And I don't know if you saw, oh brother, we're out there, that's how we learned how to, he met the devil at the crossroads. So this belief, which is a common one about where you don't want to hang out at night, there we put this model house. And on top of that, Mayas view their houses as temples, as they say. So they have to follow, they have to face and follow the direction of the sun. They have to have their back to the east and their face, the door and porch to the west. To the west. As it sets. Yes, as it sets. The porch in the rainy season, since it usually ends at about four in the afternoon anyway, you can sit on your porch and dry out, but only if it's facing the west. So there were practical dimensions and spiritual dimensions that match. Well they made the model house facing the east, which is the direction of death or the sun in the underworld when it's coming back. So I began observing that people would walk by our model house and cross themselves. So I took my old compadre up there and I said, Don Lucas, what do you think of our model house? He said, oh, very beautiful, very beautiful for gringos. And I said, well, would you like to live in a house like this? Oh no, not while I'm alive. And he said, we have one house like this and it's in the graveyard. It's where we pray for the dead. So if you wanted a model house for us to pray for dead people, this would be a great model. But to live in, plus he never asked a shaman for permission. It only cost ten cents and a chicken to do the ceremony of permission to put the house there in the first place. And so the owner of the earth is really going to be upset with his house because we didn't ask for permission and it's like a boil on his skin. Did you end up? Etc. Etc. Did you end up having deeply profound spiritual experiences with the shaman? Oh yeah. Yeah, so can we go run through some of those? Okay. One of the most amazing was there is a system of caves underneath a nearby archaeological site. In fact, my article in this book is about this cave because usually in Mesoamerica, ancient Mesoamerica, they made archaeological sites on top of places with caves like Teotihuacan. The main pyramid has a cave underneath it. But in the highlands of Guatemala, there aren't much in the way of caves because it's all volcanic deposition for a thousand meters down. So what they did, and this is about 200 years before the arrival of the Spaniards, they built a cave. And what's better about a built cave than a natural cave is they tell you exactly what they want a cave to be because they've built it themselves. And this is still used as a sacred site by the shamans today. It's an archaeological site of 700 years of age that they're using right now as a sacred site. And so we periodically, in the right day of the Mayan calendar, would go and do offerings in this cave. And one time when we went, there were a few tourists around who ended up going with us into the cave. They wanted to see, you know. And my teacher didn't mind showing a few extranjeros, foreigners, about shamanic culture, and I was able to translate and explain things. So while we're in there... What are you offering? We're offering incense, kopal incense, which is from a special aromatic tree, the oldest incense in the New World. Also the resin of pine trees, they're tapped, a certain kind of pine tree, and candles and flowers. Because the concept, their concept is that we are in one world and there's another parallel world. And in that parallel world are the dead, the unborn, and the great heroes of history and other kind of powerful entities that shamans are able to connect with, contact, and sometimes employ. What's beyond the three-dimensional perception that we have in this world. Yeah, it's sort of like this other world right here. You know, we have this idea that when the dead die, they may go to heaven, hell, or to fertilizer, but they're out of here. They're somewhere else. The Mayan concept of the dead in Mesoamerica generally is the dead are right here. They're just in another dimension, but unless we're shamans, we don't see them. So, and they don't eat like we eat. What they like is light, aromas, prayer, good feeling. Which interestingly enough, this is a muscle. It's like when you go and shoot a basketball or you're an author or whatever you're practicing, the more you practice it, the better you get at it. So, the more that you practice the ritual of connecting to the dead to go through this process, the better you'll get at it and the more you'll be able to effectively communicate with what's going on in that area. And amongst the Maya, the communicator, the connector between shamans and this other world are a little dwarf-like spirit called Saki Kosol means white sparker, like flint spark. He's the flint spark guy. And he looks like a child. He's dressed in a little red or white uniform, a little hat. And he has a little axe that's a sparker. He's danced in one of their ritual dances. They re-enact him. And he's, so any shaman has this little duende, this little spirit who connects him to this other world. It's also represented in his medicine bundle. So, we're in this cave with our medicine bundles and our offerings of flowers and candles and incense. And what are the medicine bundles? Those are the, when you're initiated as a Mayan shaman, you get a series of 200 seeds, erythrina, what we call the mescal seed. They look like black beans, but they're bright red and they're poisonous. So they never fall apart or degrade. And with that, crystals and other things that you find during your initiation. In other words, it's like all of these seeds and crystals and so on are used to count out the days of the Mayan calendar. So it's your counting bag, in a way. And is there plant medicine used as well? Oh yeah, there's herbal medicines and there's non-ordinary medicines. And then which plant medicines are used? Mexican marigold or taguetes lucida, they call pericone. It's a natural aspirin, works slower, but it's more gentle on the stomach. And 200 other plants, but I'm just doing that one because it's where I, that's the first medical plant I learned to save my life when I got very sick there. Anyway, and the midwives know about those plants. The shamans tend to work in the non-ordinary world. And then the midwives or people who deal with bone setting, they do all of the physical healing. Because the idea amongst the Mayans is when you get ill, you need to have physical treatment, you need spiritual treatment, you need sociological treatment, who have you been fighting with. Yeah. And you need sort of psychoanalytic treatment. That illness is a total illness and healing is a total process. This is not just a physical thing, this is who are you talking to? What kind of a cultural setting are you actually doing? Did you have an argument with someone? Yeah, yeah. You know, are you and your cousin fighting about land inheritance after Uncle Jose died? Because that's going to cause lots of stress, yeah. Is this a majority of the kind of like the 20s for you is this study? And then did you also end up taking this into the next couple of decades? Oh yeah, in fact, I still do divinations. I ended up having to do a divination for a Hopi woman because her husband was a Navajo and they didn't trust either Navajos or the Hopis to do spiritual healing. Whoa. Because they're in conflict. So they brought me in as an outsider to do the healing process. And then is this a lot of what you've been teaching the last? No. No, no. I don't talk about this in the classroom at all. Interesting. Or in my publications. Interesting. Why? Because the Maya's explained to you very clearly, you didn't earn this. You know, all my publications I earned through hard research and so on. But I didn't earn my divining talent. I was born with it according to them. And they knew about it through divining that I needed to learn this. In fact, I needed to learn this if they were going to throw me out of the community. Yeah, yeah. Because I'd be a spiritual loose cannon and I might do something. Yes. I might whammy somebody without knowing anything. Something like that. So it's been part of my personal life. It has guided my anthropological life. But I don't write about it. Interesting. I mean, I talk about it in an interview like this because it's so much has influenced other things of mine. Exactly. But it's really become a part of me, not really part of my research. I've written a couple of very humanistic articles, like about when we went to the first higher shaman than my teacher, because I wanted a second opinion, because I didn't think a gringo should be learning this stuff. And they took me to a possession shaman. They're truly scary folks. Whoa. But back to the cave. We're in the cave. There are these other witnesses and tourists from Germany and France and the US, six or seven of them. And then while we're doing our ceremony, we start hearing laughing children, the voices of laughing children. And all of us heard this, not just me or just the Mayan shaman. And a couple of his kids were with us too. And we're going like, there's some little kids coming into the other end of this 200-meter-long cave. And we hear them getting closer and closer. And then when they were just about to come around the corner where we could see them, silence. And my old Mayan compadre turns around to me and says, compadre duncan. Those are my striker spirits. Those are my sakiko shot. They come to connect me, sort of to connect them, like telephone to the other side, telegraph to the other side. And we're all going, yeah, no, it was probably a school group that came in and then turned around before they got this far. They saw the smoke and decided to leave. And so the tourists fanned out over that whole site trying to find young people. There was nobody there. We asked the guy who takes tickets at the entrance. No school group, no children have come here anywhere. And we were all left with, you know, de-de-de-de. Who were those voices? We all heard those voices. Those were the kids that helped the shaman connect to the other side. They're like little miniature people that fly around and help the shamans do their stuff. And they're the ones that give the knowledge to you when you're divining. Because divination is not like about what you know. It's about how empty you can become. It's how much you're not there so that the non-ordinary guides your hand. Interesting. So if you can get past the ego that's so in control of this body, and if you can kind of treat yourself more like a channel to receive, then you can really tune into what is coming through. So I appropriated the shamanic vehicle to understand my world, my end world, especially better. But not as a vehicle for tenure and promotion. Not as a vehicle for writing up articles that would get me a better job in my discipline. That seemed wrong to me, ethically. I feel as though, even though you became more spiritual and very understanding of a lot of the shamanistic practices, I feel strongly about the integration of spirituality and mysticism with science and individualism and collectivism. And so if we were to be able to strongly merge those, because that's why I asked you if you were passing along some of that to your students, and so shall we venture into some of the dissertation? How'd you get from there to the dissertation? All right, so I write my dissertation essentially on why community development without prior depth research is a waste of time and money. That was essentially my dissertation. But I thought I was gonna only do it on Highland, Guatemala. But in the middle of that comes the political repression of the late 70s, and I find myself having to flee Guatemala. Not only has my life endangered, and this is during, as soon as Ronald Reagan got into office here, the repression started happening there. And when was it earthquake? 76 was the earthquake. 76, 75,000 people died. But by 79, they were starting to kill way more people than died in the earthquake. Because of the... For political reasons. So we're looking at El Salvador, they looked at the victory in Nicaragua. Ronald Reagan was giving them the okay sign that we weren't gonna worry about human rights anymore, as we had under Jimmy Carter. And so they began killing large numbers of native people in what they called a preventive counterinsurgency. Anyone who'd been involved in cooperatives, or with the Catholic Church, anything that in any way was seen as progressive, including development programs like our own, were being targeted. In the end, they ended up in about two and a half, three years killing something in the neighborhood of 200,000 Indians. Whoa. Mostly by hand, with machetes. Geez. Some they burned in churches, they put everybody in the church and set it on fire. They did horrible things. I lost about 100 of my friends. Some of them were skinned alive. So I suddenly, in the midst of my spiritual situation, got a real political slap in the face, and had to flee because seeing a North American talking to an Indian could lead to an Indian die, to a Mayan die. So I... One more time, it was a fight in the late 70s. It was a council because they wanted to prevent an insurgency. Yeah, there was some rebels in the northern part of Guatemala who were saying, we're gonna overthrow the Guatemalan government and we're gonna get the Indians to help us do it. And the Indians didn't know anything about it, really most of them. There was a few who joined the rebels, but not many. And so the rest of them were all caught in the middle. And I had to get the heck out of there. I remember selling my typewriter and my camping gear and everything I could to give bus tickets to the community leaders to leave the country. I mean, and I got the last, took the last ticket and went on the last bus out and got to this place in Mexico called the State of Chiapas, which at that time was a very quiet, calm, backward part of Mexico. And I came across, while I was there, through a third party, a guy named Gary Gosen, who was a professor previously from Harvard who was teaching at Santa Cruz, who was doing a research project in Chiapas. And I didn't really, it wasn't ready to go home. And he had a fascinating project of looking at Highland Mayas from that side of the border who had gone down to the rainforest and colonized it. And here was a case, a counterpoint to Guatemala, of people who were doing their own development. So it wasn't development imposed by outsiders who didn't know what they were doing culturally. It was local people who were the culture that was doing it. So my dissertation contrasted how people, when they do their own development, do it with what happens when it's imposed from the outside. And that was a pretty passable 500-page dissertation. And that's great because you had an exact contrasting dichotomy between when you think you know what you're doing and when you actually know what you're doing and the difference between humanitarian work in that sense. And it was very good that I was in a new cultural landscape because the last thing I wanted people to know that was that I was trained as a Mayan shaman. Because there are all sorts of different positions on that, even amongst the indigenous people, right? Never mind the mestizos and the government. So because some are evangelical Protestants, some are reformed Catholics, some think that the traditions are brujería or witchcraft. So it was much better for me to sort of keep that unless I came across a shaman there. And they always knew. But other than that, and they always kept it secret because they understood. But it gave me great perspective to look at this pioneer group of people who are mostly evangelical, Indian evangelicals. They were not following the old ways. And looking at how they had created for themselves a little paradise because they know how to develop themselves given the opportunity and the resources. And the Mexicans have this idea of agrarian reform that doesn't exist in Guatemala, where if you can pioneer some new uncultivated land after a few years of doing it, they'll give you title to it. And it's a collective title, not an individual title. So this was all fascinating. And Mexico is an interesting contrasting place to see a related group of Mayans. I had to learn a new Mayan language, but it was way easier than the first one because they're closely related like say Italian and Spanish. And then the Sapa Tista Uprising happens. But meantime, I had written my dissertation. I'd gotten a job at Dartmouth and I had moved from Dartmouth to Vanderbilt. And then on to Texas A&M where I'd also become interested in community development which had always been a theme for me on the US-Mexico border. And I liked the issue. I had been on the Mexico-Guatemala border and looking at border issues there. Now I was on the US-Mexico border in contrasting it. And I really like to look at what we might call controlled comparison contrasts where some things are the same and some things are not the same rather than all different. So I spent some time doing work with these poor colonias, we even out of Texas A&M built community centers for them because I came to the conclusion that the real help they needed in those settings was some central location that they could get together. But all the time while I'm doing that, I'm also going back to Chiapas and checking up on what's going on with the Sapatistas because I knew before there was the uprising, I knew these people, both those that supported the uprising and those who opposed it. And one of those visits I ran across this woman, Jean Siminelli, who had previously done work with the Navajo, with the Diné and she's a fabulous writer, like she writes novels at the same time. And I said, Jean, how about you and I do field work on everyday life of the Sapatistas? Well, it'd be like not talking to subcomandante Marcos or the luminaries of the movement. You know, this was heralded as the first post-modern anti-capitalist movement that arose, but that was all focused on their leadership, who had a very interesting alternative theory that wasn't left and wasn't right. It was kind of what we might imagine a kind of pro-peasantist position. And it arose against the North American free trade agreement. And so that was all one level of it and that's where most anthropologists and political scientists and others engaged. I wasn't interested in that. That was other people's work. I wanted to go live in Sapatista and non-Sapatista communities that were in the Sapatista region and find out what's the difference between living every day as a Sapatista and as a non-Sapatista Mayan peasant. What were your findings? Well, I found that everyday life amongst the Sapatistas it was fascinating because they have a belief in consensus, not in majority rule. So everything that they would decide to do, everybody had to, every adult had to agree to do. And so we would sit in on meetings that would sometimes take three days to decide whether they were gonna do a coffee dryer or a bread oven. But in that process, they were learning the process of everybody being engaged in their own self-governance. Completely opposite of here where governance is so distant from us. And good luck with that letter to your senator. Whereas here, people had taken on the processes of governing at every level, at the village level, at the regional level and at the top, based on whole levels of consensus. And they also were being very positive to their enemies. They literally loved to their enemies. They would have people who condemned them for joining the Sapatistas and then they'd come and leave them a plate of food. They enacted the best of liberation theology on a daily basis. Love your enemy, your turn the other cheek. We're all the same under God. And they saw in these Christian teachings which one could say were originally foreign to them, they kinda turned them into a Mayan revolutionary document. So this was utterly fascinating to me. And Gene and I wrote this book, which we wrote like a historic novel with dialogue, with character development, page turner chapters. And we even put a chapter about each one of us so that we wouldn't have the post-modern authorial voice problem, because we said exactly why we were doing this. And we wrote it in such a way that a freshman in college could read it, which were exactly the attitudes that we also found that the Sapatistas wanted us to promote that this wouldn't be some esoteric book that you need a very large anthropological vocabulary to understand, but something that anyone could read. I like that that we're all children under God, that we're all born from the cosmos and here we are finding ourselves as stewards of earth and how do we work together? How do you love people that even if they have an opinion that contradicts yours, how do you work things out through a consensus? And all of this showed me a model of community development that they themselves had devised for themselves. For an example, one of the great problems in community development is how do you develop female leadership? If women have to run the household as administrators, the reason why men amongst the mayas are end up being the leaders is the women don't have the time, because they have all these other responsibilities. So what the Sapatistas were able to do is first get the men to get more involved in taking care of things in the household. They would have these meetings only with women leaving the men at home with the kids. So they had to do it. And then second, they insisted that in Sapatista areas they have male stores and female stores. Now these are just rural stores that sell nails and boots and barbed wire and tomatoes and baby clothes, but they decided that they should have ones for men and ones for men. And as much as the first world feminists didn't really get this, the reason was because once women had stores of their own, they developed their leadership outside of the reach of men. So they didn't have to deal with male insecurity about women developing leadership, because it was all women. And it turns out the women who were the heads of these stores became very often leaders. I would have never thought of that. In fact, it would have run counter to what we think about segregating men and women. Yeah, so segregation, although short term. To reintegrate, but women with more power. With more power, that's very interesting. It was brilliant. And so rather than be someone trying to impose development on people as an outsider with donor money, I was now a student of their own development. So you can tell this made perfect sense for me because here I was getting a lesson and what happens when people really have the power to redesign their own society for themselves? What would they do? And they had, yes, they had help from non-governmental organizations and international solidarity and yada yada. But the way they set up their stuff was to solve the problems that they themselves perceived. And so we wrote this book on an uprising of hope because we thought, here's an example of how people do it for themselves and from which we could learn great lessons. What were the other great lessons that you learned about how they were building their society that we could learn from? That the process is as important as the product. How you come to a decision about something is really important because you don't want people going around saying, well, I wasn't, I didn't support that, right? Because peasant societies, they're poor. They're very subject to divisions and conflict because they're competing with each other for, you know, scarce land and scarce everything. So when you bring people together and say, we're not going to make this decision unless you all agree with it, it's, to us, sounds very inefficient. But that long and laborious process leads everyone to understand why anyone is making this decision. They all own it when they're done. So the time that's invested in it, the immense amount of time that's invested in making consensus decisions is all medicine to their social relations. Interesting. So there is a geopolitical arms race that is occurring on the planet that prevents us from allocating the needed time to properly communicate with one another to reach consensus. And that is a huge hindrance for us progressing in a way that doesn't make it feel like people are being left behind. Yes, yes. And all the divisionism, even within our two political sectors today, we don't have consensus within those sectors and we certainly don't love our neighbor across them. Right, so they're a great lesson to us. They have turned the tables on our political lives because they're showing even us right now a better example. And not that everyone is reading my book and understanding this, but they haven't lowered the price of it on Amazon yet. So somebody's still buying it. Those are awesome lessons from the book. Now, give us a rundown of the, okay, the 35 years of professing. Now, as you've done that, what have been some of the profound takeaways from working with students and also with some of the lessons that you've learned that you are teaching? Well, I teach a course, for example, on management for sustainability to business students. The last thing you think is anthropologists teaching in a business school. But if you really look at business, the people who rise to the top have the people skills. It's not about numbers. It's about being able to interact with people. And second of all, there's a huge area arising in business that if you wanna get into it, doesn't have as much competition as regular business. It's what we might call green business or sustainable business, where you're being socially and environmentally sustainable. My students get this very quickly. Now, mind you, it's a Catholic school, so they're taught to be socially responsible. And my pitch to them is to say, imagine you could have a business which improves social life, which improves the life of the planet, and you make money. And now, don't you think that would take market share away from a business that just did what it did, but doesn't have any positive social or environmental aspects and in fact might have negative ones? I said, so if you want to start in business and be successful and take market share away from other less responsible businesses, this is how you might do it. So I have four projects that students are working on right now. One of them is looking at how property managers could be greener and then compete better with other property management operations because they're green. Like putting solar panels on the roof. And appropriate insulation so that people go there don't have to pay such high utility bills, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's a hundred things that an average building could get better if it were greener. So one's doing that as he's an intern in one of these property managers. And he has two other students from my class helping him by researching the competition and looking at how to make a building greener. The second group is doing a craigslist for our community, our student community and alumni and so on. So that the community recycles internally to itself. So you build community through exchanging goods within the community through a university based craigslist that they have actually finished in this term. The third group is looking at electric golf carts to replace cars in beach communities in LA. And that's going great guns. In fact, they have too much work at this point. They'll never finish it all by the end of term. And that may be a new popular modality of transit in smaller communities. That doesn't produce greenhouse gases that uses less energy generally and is more appropriate for the environment, that the setting that they're in. And then the fourth one is taking the ideas that I've been using in my Congo project that we haven't talked about on carbon offsetting and applying it to Mongolia. I'd had several Mongolian students previously I learned about their problem of that climate changes undermined the migratory patterns of their herding. So that half the herders are now in a, what we call in Latin America, the circle of misery around the capital city. But they don't wanna be there. They'd like to go back and raise animals in the countryside. But they don't really know how to do it anymore because climate change has messed up the patterns. So their project, and it's a project that we hope to follow through on, is to figure out how we might through various technologies map in real time where the weather patterns are operating and get the herders to be able to go back out on the land. How do we pay for that through carbon offsets? Basically, a lot of people don't know this but traditional grasslands, like the old prairies in our west, midwest, the steps of Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and the savannas of Africa, which by the way are way larger than rainforests, absorb about half as much carbon when they're healthy as a rainforest, mostly in their roots. In fact, there's plenty of that going on right here in California. But if they're under-grazed or over-grazed, they can end up producing carbon. So we have a financial incentive to optimize animal management in Mongolia to pay for them to do it right. That's great. And it can be done in such a way that you can have investors who make money off of this, the people who are doing it can make a profit at it. And yet, all of the people who are working on it also benefit from it. So they're working on that project right now and I'm hoping to go to Mongolia in June. I got $60,000 for startup to actually do a private sector project of putting vast quantities of the grasslands of Mongolia under conservation for carbon offset purposes. Yes. So then these four projects they're really powerful and they're diverse and that's great. And then they share with each other what they find. Yes. And it's good to have lots of young minds working on the projects and sharing, like you said, and being an inspirational piece for other young people to get involved in similar projects. So. And saving the planet and helping people. Yes, exactly. Exactly. What they call the triple bottom line. People, planet, profit. Profit, yep. People, planet, profit. Now, yeah, because a planet, we're profit without people and planets, ridiculous. Duncan, tell us about Jodora. Okay. When I was between jobs, between my work at Clark and out here in California, I got called up by a former student of mine from Vanderbilt who was working for T-Mobile up in Seattle and he had a good friend who has a business background and an environment background. And he began explaining to us about this notion of a carbon market. That there are markets, both volunteer and compliance markets that pay for people to preserve environmental services that absorb greenhouse gases. So you could get this, for example, in California, the Urock Indians of Northern California. They had a big piece of reservation filled with forest but they didn't want to turn it into condos. They didn't want to cut it down and sell the wood but it wasn't providing them any resources, any income. So the state of California calculated how much those trees absorb in carbon and pay them annually out of the California carbon market to not cut those trees down. That's beautiful. And it comes in every year because every year they've absorbed that much more carbon. As a way of encouraging more trees or more anything on this planet that will absorb the surplus carbon and other greenhouse gases that, as you know, we have way too much of in the atmosphere. The non-deforestation initiatives and the carbon offsetting initiatives. So this guy, very charismatic guy, also loves what we might call a charismatic megafauna. He likes big animals in Africa. And who doesn't? Yeah, like who doesn't. So, and was very upset about the reduction of their ecosystems so that they're dying out, not just from being killed for food or for their trunks or whatever but that their environment is shrinking. And the last big place where the environment has not much shrunk, where the last really intact rainforest in the world and the second largest after the Amazon is the Congo River Basin. It's about two thirds the size of the Amazon. The Congo's the third largest river in the world. And it's only about 4% cut down. Wow. This is so much to say. Now, sadly for all the wrong reasons, it's not cut down like bad development, no roads, abject poverty and 10 years of war. But- Those people have been distracted away from cutting it down. Yeah, it's cutting it down. And basically lack of development that would have led to the Amazon solution. Wacking it for cattle and for soy and so on. So the only damage that's being done is local farmers cutting down slash and burn and planting very inefficient plants there. So we calculated that if we could get those farmers to stop cutting down rainforest for maniac and bananas and so on and get them to plant those things on already cut land with improved seeds and improved methods. And then in the forested areas to plant coffee and chocolate, which are way, way, way more valuable plants, we could get them to become wealthy while taking care of the rainforest. They would be incentivized to keep the rainforest because they were making lots of money from it. And meanwhile, we could make money to run this program and to expand it through getting the carbon offset costs out of the carbon market. So it's an educational piece first and foremost of humans, we think that we know what we're doing with deforestation or the way that we plant certain crops and the way that we get yields. But really when we're educated by people that have already went through this process, they can tell us that we can plant certain crops in other areas, we can get financial incentives from non deforestation. And that is really awesome and that can be applied in so many other places in the world. And of course, what we're really doing is sustainable community development. The very thing where my dissertation started in Highland, Guatemala. And so I knew immediately we could not impose a system, we had to come and learn from them what would work. For example, we realized that fish are very popular along with unfortunately, bushmeat, all sorts of wild animals, but fish could be sustainably grown in ponds. So we now have over 40 tilapia ponds and they're able to eat a wild food, but domesticated, which is a transition back into agriculture. The reason why they're eating wild animals there is after the war, the only people that survived are the ones that ate wild animals. Now they need to transition back into a more sophisticated form of agriculture. So, tilapia is one of the ways and the other way is caterpillars. Who knew these guys eat three months in a year they eat caterpillars. And so we planted all the trees that grow these caterpillars all around the villages that we're willing to be part of our conservation project. And now they get free protein a third of the year raining out of the trees that are around them. So they used to be in remote places in the rainforest and put women and girls at risk even to go out there. So we have learned from them the conditions of their lives. We use a profit motive-based system so that they don't think that we're do-gooder charitable types are gonna disappear tomorrow. And we enter in and make a deal. You do this for us, we'll do this for you, which they understand perfectly. And we'll employ quite a few of your best and brightest to work in our company to make sure it happens. And oh, those guys who are the best hunters, we want them as our forest rangers. We want them to hunt the hunters. And we'll pay them twice whatever they were making hunting to do so. So that project is ongoing. It's a little bit on the shelf right now because we're having political difficulties in the country. But we're hoping in the long term that will work. And that's why I'm now putting some energy into this Mongolia one. To say it another way, you might ask why am I not continuing to work with the Mayan people? I've learned their languages, I've learned in depth about them. They're kind of doing okay. Certainly the Sapatis are doing just fine. But I'm in a point at this point with the condition that the planet is in, that my feeling is I really need to put the last of my anthropological energies into trying to save this planet. Yeah, the sustainable community development. And non-governmental approach has always been tiny. No scale. You know, we helped save the children. We helped nine municipalities. What about the other 2,000 municipalities? They're just gonna resent us, right? Whereas now in these projects, we're talking about large areas. Our target is 57 million hectares. That you can see from outer space very clearly. In Mongolia, maybe twice that, maybe 100 million hectares. That is a huge amount of land. We're not owning it. Totally. We're just renting the right to conserve it and get the carbon offsets for it. Which we cannot get unless we help the people do it right. Yes. So we don't get paid unless we do development right. Yes. And if we are getting paid, we're also saving the planet. Yep. You follow the relationship? Yes, it's so beautiful. So it's a business model ultimately. Me, the last person I ever thought the shaman becomes the businessman, right? But the business model in essence incentivizes the right behavior to scale. Yep, yep. So it's the ultimate sustainable community development at a planetary scale. Yep. And that's where I've ended up starting with little family in Highland, Guatemala and an old shaman and an old midwife. And now I'm trying to save the planet. With large chunks as I can get. It's the, it's so beautiful because it's the sustainable community development. Those three words are just, they're perfect, sustainable community development. The more that we can pass that down over time to children on earth, the better we'll be off. And I'm really happy that you're leading this in the Democratic Republic of Congo and then from there, Mongolia and then from there. Kazakhstan maybe or? There's so many places in the world where we can do this. I'm really happy that you're working on that. And I've also trained up a bunch of students who are helping me with this. And when I go retired to my black, blue elderberry farm and in Northern California, they're all gonna carry it forward. Exactly. So I don't have a feeling that it was, you know, my little one shot deal and then it's done. And we have their generation and the following generation working on sustainable community development. Give us a quick bit on the elderberries. Okay. When I was still fairly young and raising little children, I ran into some health food hippie type of guy in Austin who said, if you don't want your kids bringing colds home from the daycare, try black elderberry. And so I went and bought them and made my own little syrup out of them and gave them to the kids. I never had colds anymore. And so since that time, I have used it myself and have had very few and I have spread the word to other people because it's not in the cold section of your drug store. It's usually in the airplane travel section or whatever. You know, big pharma does not want you to know there's a cure for the common cold. And so my son moved up into Northern Central California in an area that is basically rednecks and pot growing hippies. And so I've decided that once I retire, I'm gonna move up there as well and try to bring those two warring populations together around a replacement for pot because pot eventually isn't gonna be worth very much. Now that it's legal and big corporations are gonna grow vast quantities of it, the price is gonna go down. But I have taught a lot of medical anthropology along the way and one of the things I know very well is, A, it's all about the immune system because people get diseases when their immune system is not up to par. Diseases that don't kill us. Like I tested positive for TB almost every time I came back from Chiapas. But in a few months it was negative. Why? Because I have a really good immune system because I'm fed well and I have good exercise and I live healthy. But in the future, as our pharmaceuticals are less effective against evolving bugs, it seems to me where we're gonna need to put more of our emphasis is on a healthy immune system, not drugs that are gonna kill a buck. And it turns out the best kind of- The plants, plants of the earth. Yes, and who knew that the best elderberries, not the black elderberry of Europe, it's the blue elderberry that's native to California. Interesting. So I've already got 20 trees up there, three years old and they're starting to produce and the idea is to be a kind of Johnny Apple seed of elderberry, which I predict in 10 years will be worth more by the pound than pot. Awesome, blue elderberries. And that will bring the red necks and the hippies together because around health and around revitalizing the rural countryside, replacing trees that would burn in fires with blue elderberry, which is a bush and doesn't burn very well. You guys heard it here first from Duncan, the blue elderberry. Yeah. And get behind it, go check it out and get behind it. Duncan, whoa, this has been super fun. Fun for me too. Yeah. I came back an extra day just to do this. So nice of you. Awesome. And there's just, there's too much to unpack about the sustainable community developments, what you've learned throughout your time when you're explaining about how you can do a temporary segregation to empower women. That's so interesting. I see some of that happening today with our friend groups. There are these groups of women that are living together inside of the Homes in Santa Cruz and the North Bay in the Bay Area. And then they get super powerful and concentrated. And then there's no men there distracting them either sexually or whatever. Right, undermining their authority and anything. Exactly, all that kind of stuff. So I'm actually, this has been, there's so much good points that came from this and I'm happy that you're running those four projects. They're very important projects for Earth. Because anthropology is not just about exotic places far away. Anthropology is about all of us on this planet. And it's a planet we need to save and we're not gonna save it if we can't provide sustainable community development for the people who live on it. And lots of the people in the world have a way lower carbon footprint than we do. Like the Mayan peasants that I lived with. And they're ready to save the Earth. Why are they ready to save the Earth? For them, the Earth is a religious concern. The Earth is a living spiritual element. So when you trash the Earth, it's not just a bad intellectual idea or against the science of the environment. It's a sin. It is, and it is a sacred place and we have to have the proper stewards of it. You know, I always say, if you believe in God, what about God's creation? If God is sacred, why is God's creation not sacred? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yup, it's a great way to put it. And also, once we can get completely carbon-free forms of energy, potentially things like nuclear fusion at it's absolute optimal, we can sustain on this planet forever, very effectively and even out into the cosmos. Wow, such a pleasure. Thank you for coming to the show, Duncan. This has been super fun. Everyone, go check out Duncan's links and the bio, also check out triple A's links in the bio. Give us your comments on the episode. We'd love to hear your thoughts about everything that we talked about. Give us your thoughts. Go and build the future, manifest your destiny into the world. Everyone, much love and we'll see you soon. Peace. Bye, fellow Earthlings. See you, Earthlings.