 Welcome to the Longmont Museum, a center for culture in northern Colorado where people of all ages explore history, experience art, and discover new ideas through dynamic programs, exhibitions, and events. My name is Justin Veach. I'm the manager of the museum's Stuart Auditorium, and we are coming at you live and direct from the Stuart this evening. I want to wish everyone a happy Earth Day, a really happy COVID Earth Day 2021. And I'd like to thank all of those who make our programming possible, the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, the Stuart Family Foundation, the Friends of the Longmont Museum, and our many museum donors and members. We simply couldn't do all that we do without you, so thank you. For more information about all that we do here or to find out about how you can support the museum's work, please visit longmontmuseum.org. Tonight, Earth Day, we conclude our four-part Big Picture Climate Change series with Earth, Ground for Innovation. So, co-presented by the mighty KGNU community radio out of Boulder, Sustainable Resilient Longmont, and the City of Longmont Sustainability Program. The series has been wonderfully co-curated, and the panel is deftly moderated by none other than journalist and co-host of KGNU's How on Earth, Susan Moran. All this week, the Stuart Auditorium has served as climate change central with each night dedicated to a different element. On Monday, we explored air, Tuesday was on fire, and last night we tussled with water. And tomorrow, tonight, we wind things up with Earth. Each program features a panel comprised of climate change scientists and other experts sharing what they've learned about these vast and shifting realms. The week's programming culminates with Sustainable Resilient Longmont's annual Earth Day celebration on Saturday, featuring virtual offerings for children and teens and ending with a panel discussion on climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusivity in the evening. That program will actually be broadcast in both English and Spanish. You can find out more info on Sustainable Resilient Longmont's Earth Day programming at srlongmont.org. All of our programming can be viewed on the museum's live stream page, as well as Facebook and local Comcast cable. For those of you viewing on Facebook this evening, you're invited to submit questions to our panelists in the comments field. We'll do our best to get to as many as we can during the Q&A portion at the end of the program. Now, without further ado, allow me to introduce the co-curator of the Big Picture Climate Change series and our moderator, Susan Moran. Susan is a freelance journalist and editor and host and producer of How on Earth, the KGNU science show. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Economist, Biographic, Nature, and more. Susan was an adjunct journalism instructor at CU Boulder for seven plus years. She has served on the board of the Society of Environmental Journalists, was a night science journalism fellow at MIT, and a TED Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at CU Boulder. She was previously on staff at Reuters in Tokyo, New York, in Silicon Valley, Business 2.0 Magazine, and other news orgs. She's got a couple of masters, one in journalism from Columbia University and another in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Susan Moran back for our grand finale of our Big Picture Climate Change series. Thanks so much, Justin, and thanks to the Longmont Museum and our sponsor KGNU Radio for making this series happen. I'm so honored to have this distinguished panel of folks who I'll introduce in a sec and also want to reiterate Happy Earth Day. It's a gorgeous day here in Colorado. So I want to start just with the ground beneath our feet. So as with water, our very existence depends on soil, a living regenerative system, and it's taken a heavy hit. In fact, I'm wondering how much we've learned since the dust bowl of the 30s. Last December, some of you probably know the Union of Concerns Scientists published a report that said the following, if soil continues to erode at current rates, U.S. farmers could lose more than eight times the amount of topsoil lost during the dust bowl. So much of our topsoils has been eroded by destructive farming, grazing practices as well as from drought and rising sea levels, and of course, rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. And we're experiencing unprecedented destruction of the Amazon and other tropical forests, widely called the lungs of the planet. And it's not just an environmental crisis. It's a human health and a national security crisis. Whole communities around the world are increasingly being forced to migrate from ravage in contested land and their safeties at risk. Meanwhile, we're in the middle of a so-called six extinction of wildlife species. But it's not all doom and gloom, as we'll discuss tonight. So tonight's panel is also going to explore solutions, those that are happening now or approaches and possible ones for the future, both on farms, in cities, and globally. Many folks, including those on the panel, helping to build a healthier future for our kids and the planet. So as we crawl out of this long, dark tunnel of COVID, this seems like an opportune time to take stock, to listen, to learn from each other, and to create new possibilities for living with nature, which really means living with each other. And we want to learn from you as well. So as Justin alluded a bit ago, please ask questions. I guess the only way you can is via Facebook Live in the chat. But we will, by 8.30, maybe before, start opening up to questions. So thank you so much. And I want to introduce this great panel. First we have, joining us from Mumbai, India, is Dr. Adrey Bhattacharya. And where I think the sun has just risen, hopefully she's caffeinated. I think it's about seven o'clock in the morning there. She's a research faculty at CU Boulder in civil, environmental, and architectural engineering, and in the Center for Asian Studies. Dr. Bhattacharya is also a visiting researcher and adjunct faculty at IIIT, or Indaprastha Institute of Information Technology in New Delhi. She's a paleoclimatologist studying the nature and causes of long-term climate variability, as well as the role of climate shifts in social upheavals, such as migration, displacement conflict, and epidemics over the long-term in semi-arid regions. And Dr. Bhattacharya is also a science writer, and she participates in educational and non-governmental outreach efforts focused on climate communication, climate sciences curriculum, climate literacy, and climate adaptation. So nice to have you. And next we have Dr. Keith Postian. He's the university distinguished professor in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and senior research scientist in the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University. His work includes modeling, field measurement, and development of assessment tools for soil carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions from soils, including right here in the front range. Dr. Postian was one of many recipients, including Al Gore, of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his role as an author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, report particularly related to land use, greenhouse gases, and climate change mitigation. Thanks so much for being on the panel. Thanks. And next we have Alice Madden. She is executive director of CU Boulder's Getchis-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources Energy in the Environment. She practiced law for a decade before running for the Colorado House of Representatives in 2000, very, very bold. And she won, of course, in 2001, well, 2001 to 2009, she served in the Colorado House representing the 10th district around Boulder. And from 2005 to 2009, she served as majority leader. She also served as climate advisor and deputy chief of staff to then Colorado governor, Bill Ritter, and later at the US Department of Energy, as principal deputy assistant secretary for intergovernmental and external affairs. Thank you so much. And finally, we have an actual farmer, Mark Gutridge. He and his wife, Kenna, who's in our audience, who is our audience today, at least the actual one. They own all in farms in Longmont, in fact, just a couple miles from here. And they grow 200 and something varieties of vegetables and sell directly to individuals and families, mainly through their CSA or community-supported agriculture. The farm has expanded to least property in Boulder County open space. Mark and Kenna have launched several programs, including one called Project 95, which we'll hear about tonight, to educate and inspire young farmers and to promote regenerative agriculture. Mark earned a master's degree in water resource engineering from the University of Colorado. He has said that he plans to farm for the rest of my life or until I can't move. Looks to me like he's moving a hell of a lot these days, so. Maybe this afternoon. I think he's with us for a while. So thank you all again so much. And we're gonna start by having all four of them give up to five minutes of opening statements with some really cool visuals. So Dr. Bhattacharya, how about you first? Thank you, Susan. Let me share my screen. Are you able to see my screen? We can't hear yet. Hi, everyone. Good evening. Good morning for me and happy Earth Day. It is certainly a time that we take a stop as we get out of this dark tunnel of COVID, as Susan said. And while we do that, I think it doesn't, it is not completely out of context to really think how small events that, you know, small risks can actually spiral out of control very quickly, but also can be contained fairly quickly. So on your screen is on the X axis, it's a figure of that shows average global temperatures over the last 500 million years, a little more than that. This is the entire time that the Earth was populated. This is the entire time that the Earth needed to populate it with its biodiversity that we currently have. In red are periods which saw warming. And in blue are periods that saw global cooling. And when we say global cooling, how do we know that it cooled? Because we have evidence that there are, there were polar ice caps in the cold world, we call it the ice house world. And there was, there used to be a world without polar ice caps. And if you notice, each of these greenhouse sort of world that we know, have a completely different, very unlike the world that we see today. Think about it, no ice caps. And each of these periods, as you can see, lasted several hundred million years. And those of you who can't quite think of million in time, that has six zeros. So temperatures rise and fall, but not over days or decades, but over millions of years. And it's a slow process. The Earth takes time of fast forwarding a little bit to more recent times. And by recent, this is 100,000 years. This is the time when the world became, started getting populated by migration from East Africa. In black here, you can see these numbers. These are the average ages when recorded migrations happened. And the red digits are those that, that tells us about halo groups or DNA markers that allow us to sort of understand where different groups of humans moved and how. On the bottom, you see reconstruction, isotopic reconstruction in ice core over the last 100,000 years. And you see some ups and you see some downs and you see the down. You know that that was cold and dry. And the ups was warm and humid. So all of these migrations are most, in fact, not all of these migrations happened or coincided with warm and humid phases. During cold and dry phases, particularly, it was very difficult for people to migrate. And we call these geoplimatic bridges or times. One of the things that we want to say is, you notice the last 10,000 years or so, you see that the world transitioned into a more stable, warm, humid climate, much like the one that we know today. When a lot of human society's civilizations rose, they were all agrarian societies. And primarily, they took advantage of the stable climate and therefore could devise techniques in order to till the land and live. And therefore, when we pass forward or zoom into this last 10,000 years, what we see is emergence of agriculture or agriculture, as we understand today. So you can see some of these earliest sort of phases where agriculture emerged, where China, they were in Asia, also Papua New Guinea, and then slowly sort of in the rest of the world. The most recent ones would be, as you can see, are Sub-Saharan Africa. These are all semi-arid today, but they weren't like this 10,000 years ago. For example, Sub-Saharan Africa was thought to be green. So small climate shifts within that last 10,000 years, which could seem today very little compared to the first figure I showed you, was good enough for reorganization, not just of agriculture or how we eat and store food, but for civilizations that rest on this principal agrarian idea. And there are two things that are very important for agriculture, water and soil. And civilizations, we have ample evidence over the last 10,000 years from archeological, climatological, and historical studies that societies that manage their water resource and soil resource well, were able to survive any sort of climate shifts and prosper in societies that did not pretty much spiral that of control in conflict and resulted in vast scale migrations out of those regions. So Susan said, today is Earth Day, and we need to think about water and soil. So if we think about this complex climate society interaction, as Susan said, that it's not just an environment of catastrophe, there's a human catastrophe today. And here is why. So the climate system in building to this climate system are long-term changes, which are exceedingly slow, and then extremes and hazards that come about randomly. And what does that accomplish? That really impacts biophysical effects on plant growth, human and animal growth, all sort of very important for basic agrarian patterns. And that has sort of complex, and I wouldn't say we understand it completely, all the details that it, but we do know that there are very strong economic feedbacks, demographic feedbacks, population moving, as I have just said, and then a small crisis now and then will have huge political feedbacks. I just mentioned conflict and crises when societies have not been able to manage their soil and water. So when we look towards the future, the way we're currently going, we are not on a good trajectory. It's expected that we will definitely have about two degrees Celsius, 1.5 degrees Celsius for sure, or like two degrees Celsius warming average temperature of the earth, which is the first figure that I showed you, and experts, hundreds of them, if not thousands of them have worked together to figure out that if we have a degree Celsius warming, small to moderate and perhaps meaning things we can manage, if we exceed the two degrees Celsius average, then we have moderate to high impacts, and that becomes unsustainable. At four degrees Celsius, high to extreme impacts, we quickly start seeing extreme displacement and migration conflict epidemics. Just to put some of the numbers on some of these extremes that are causing some of the first economic damages are drought, floods, high temperatures, untimely storms, biological disasters such as infestation, wildfires, and some of the biggest impacts are going to be in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Korea. So remember, these are the places that saw the earliest advent of agriculture and continues to be some of our biggest food producers, and agricultural sector is one of the biggest employment sectors in the world. Just to give you a sense of a two degree Celsius world, which we are most certainly going to see, on the top panel is the average population density across the world, and some of the most populated centers are also some of the earliest agrarian societies. So the peopling of these societies were very much tied to that climate stabilization that led to the agrarian culture. Dr. Bhadacharya, I'm sorry to interrupt, but can we hold some of this for the discussion? I just wanted to keep everyone's two five minutes to make sure we have enough time for conversation. Thank you so much. Next we have Dr. Keith Postian, take it away. Okay, thank you. Let's see, I don't want to queue up. Okay, well thank you again for the opportunity to come here tonight. I want to give a quick overview of agriculture and soil carbon greenhouse gas is and climate mitigation, how is agriculture really both contributing to and potentially a partial solution to some of our climate challenges? First thing to note is that most people wouldn't necessarily think of about it, but actually agriculture and land use activities are quite a large greenhouse gas source. And if you look at it collectively, it accounts for almost a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions on a global warming basis. And the other thing to note, so about 25%, about half of that is really due more to deforestation, often done as part of agricultural development in the tropics. But the other part is our gases that are associated with agricultural activities. And over on the right hand side you see a cartoon there that just really depicts the other thing to note. And that is that really agricultural activities give rise to multiple different types of greenhouse gases. It's a very complex picture and it's a challenge as I'll get into later on in terms of how do we quantify these. Where this plays in though is also looking at emissions going forward and here's a little bit of a complex looking diagram, but you see a red line there and you see a yellow line and this is really looking at global greenhouse gas emissions. And the yellow line at the top that goes and peaks sometime about 2050 or 2060 is kind of the business as usual emissions of greenhouse gases. And the red line is really the trajectory in terms of emissions that we want to achieve if we're going to keep global temperatures below the two degree limit of global warming that the Paris Accords, for example, have done. So how we get there is interesting. It's going to require first this whole area that's in the light green color or fossil fuel emissions that need to be, we need to reduce, we need to get away from fossil fuels. But also there are other non-CO2 greenhouse gases and in order to really attain this red line we're also going to have to actively take carbon dioxide that we've already put into the atmosphere and take it back out and put it somewhere. And one of the areas that we can do that is by putting it into soils. And by putting it into soils is also going to be a tremendous benefit in terms of improving soil fertility and sustainability. So how do we manage soils to do this? It's all about managing the carbon balance. CO2 comes into the ecosystem via photosynthesis, plant residues, roots, etc. But then there's also a return through the respiration of micro-organisms that return CO2 out back to the atmosphere. But what we want to do then is really to increase the rate of carbon that we put into the soil, reduce the rate, increase its residence time there. And we can do this either with a lot of different conservation technologies in terms of how we manage soils. But we can also potentially do this with new things, new plant types, etc. to increase soil carbon. How much can we do? Well, that's a lot of people have written papers about this. We don't know exactly. But we can calculate from looking at experimental evidence that we have in field experiments. And somewhere on the order of about three to five billion tons of CO2 equivalents per year could be what we could capture and remove from the atmosphere. In order to do that, we're going to have to have farmers like Mark and others changing practices and really contributing to a new carbon economy, different ways to incentivize folks to do that. A crucial test for research though is to really be able to quantify greenhouse gases and carbon. That's part of the work that I do. And again, it's a complex system. We're going to have to use a number of different tools, measurements, models, remote sensing, etc. And so in order to do that, we're going to be really having to have a different kind of agriculture. And I think Mark will be talking out and some of the other speakers will talk about how we really are going to change our land use practices in order to achieve this kind of a goal. Thank you so much. Alice Madden's next. Well, hello everyone. Thank you, Susan. Thank you, Justin. I am smart enough when I'm following two climate scientists and preceding a farmer to stick what I know best. And that is policy and politics and hopefully how to get people to support better policies. So hopefully my slide deck will come up in one moment. But a question I keep getting is how happy should we be? We're in a new era. We have a new administration who there's a flurry of activity, executive orders. We're back in the Paris Agreement. Today was a huge day. But we still have a split Senate. So I am an optimist, but I also know how hard it is to actually get things done. But the message I want for the audience is this is no time to temper your expectations. We deserve to demand the audacious, the indomitable efforts that it will take. We are well beyond any kind of tipping point we have tipped. So it's no time to be shy. Keep marching, keep calling, keep volunteering, and of course keep voting. So a lot of people ask me, you know, there's, we know what we want to do. How do we get these things past? So I wanted to just mention a little bit about the homework you have to do when you're advocating for something. And you are, you're watching this, you're thought leaders. You might not know it, but by watching this you are thought leaders. And with that power comes great responsibility, as Spider-Man's uncle said. So don't forget that. And the important thing is when you are talking to someone you have to know where they are coming from. It's disrespectful if you don't. But think about how you communicate to them. There's social science that shows some people really are more comfortable with stability and conformity. So if you go in talking about innovation and creativity they shut down. You have to create relatable context. Why should I care about this? At the end of your conversation with someone you hope they stand up and say, oh my God, how can I help? And you might not be the right messenger. You might have to relate to other people or bring up other supporters. Like the Pentagon says this, or my uncle who's a farmer, or my minister says we have to be good stewards of the earth. So really think about how you will reach that person. And climate change is overwhelming and sometimes you feel like you can't do anything about it. So it's always really important to talk about that bright future. What is this all worth? What will it be like if we do everything we should do? And then provide that the pathway with real solutions that people can relate to. So I think you've all heard, and I made up this word, which I really like, Earth as sequester. You heard about 30 by 30, I believe. This is one of Biden's plans. We only protect about 12% of our nation's land and we're going to reach 30%. There's two big problems with, not problems, but concerns I want to raise is we have extraction of oil and gas in our public lands. And in 2018, 500 million metric tons of greenhouse gas were emitted from our public lands. And we have grazing on our public lands. And grazing cows are the biggest emitter within the ag community. So we need to think about what we're going to be doing with grazing. Ending deforestation, this is something that's so important. We must work on this. And I just jotted down a few things that you can do to help end deforestation. And I'll just note one, do not buy anything with palm oil. And the rest are sort of self-explanatory. And I wanted to just talk about some of the, it's hard, we think how do we get there from here? And one water number, and I know you talked about water already, but 89% of our consumptive use of water in Colorado goes to ag. 80% of that number goes to grow meat. So when you hear people talking about eating less meat, there's a reason. And agribusiness is huge. They control, they have a lot of power, they control where food moves, how it's processed. So when you think about why can't we change things, there really is an agricultural industrial complex that we are dealing with. I know Mark is going to talk more about this, but I just wanted to note that we've had this history that farmers have been led to this path that they have to feed the soil. And instead of the closed loop where you kept your biomass on the ground, we now use pesticides and fertilizers and we've become trapped within that. So I'm really excited to hearing more about the potential future. Mark's already doing this, and I'll talk a little bit later about how we can get more and more people to do this. Thank you, Alice. I love that there is no time to temper your expectations or actions. So with that segue, Mark Gutridge of Olin Farms. All right. Thank you so much for inviting me to be on the panel and for the Longmont Museum hosting. It was about 16 years ago that my wife, Ken, and I moved back to the family farm that I grew up on. And my grandma, Lee, bought that property back in the 70s. And she was a principal and teacher. I grew up there doing four-aged projects. And Lee was also a huge fan of the Longmont Museum and volunteered a ton when it was over across the street from the library. And I was thinking about her a bunch when we were driving here today and how proud she'd be to see the museum doing Facebook live things. It's just crazy to see how far things have come. And so we moved back to the farm. My background was in water resource engineering. I didn't think I wanted to be a farmer, but as we started having a garden for our family, I quickly realized that I was in love with soil. And Ken and I realized that the food we were getting out of the garden was just a lot tastier and seemed healthier and what was available at the store. And we were curious as to why that was. And it was all about soil health and looking at how the industrial food system has really kind of stripped all the micronutrients out of our soil and the diversity out of our soils and our food and choices. And so we realized it wasn't just about feeding our family. We really needed to make this available to the whole Longmont and Boulder County community. And that's when we launched Olin Farms as a business. And the focus is always on trying to produce the most nutrient dense food possible. Like really trying to look at food as medicine and realizing that if we're going to ever going to have a serious talk about our health or care system, first we need to have a serious talk about our soil systems in this country. And so for the first 10 years it was like a quest of how do we make that perfect soil microbiome? And it's really about physically growing new topsoil. When we first started farming the carrots we're kind of short and nubby and after years of we're working the soil and making it fluffier and balancing the minerals and getting the carbon in there and getting the microbes in there. And now we have like these foot long beautiful carrots. And so that's what carbon sequestration always is to me is like physically building new topsoil. And there's a lot of techniques that can be utilized. I think NRCS, I mean we talk about this as farming of the future, but these techniques have been around for decades and decades and decades. NRCS has five principles of soil health really that we model a lot of our systems on and that's number one minimize disturbance of the soil. That's when you hear more about kind of no-till farming or transitioning more to perennial crops or not having to go out there until the soil and reset that soil microbiome every single year. The second is planting a diversity of crops or really adding diversification to the the farm and the crops. And I really look at that as diversification in the wildlife that's visiting the farm as well. It's so important to understand that the biodiversity collapse is just as critical to this this planet as the warming and the crazy climate chaos that's going on. So we really look at the farm as how we can increase the wildlife traffic through our farm. The third is armoring your farm keeping some of the soil covered. Nature hates bare soil. That's why if you see naked soil that means the carbon's leaving and the weeds are about to move in and then that's not what we want. But we have an industrial food system that leaves the ground naked half the year in many cases. The fourth is incorporating animals into the system being able to have animals on the farm and really make them the cornerstone of your nutrition program on the farm. And we do that through composting, through moving our animals around, rotational grazing of our sheep, and then finally keeping a living root in the ground. And that's just key. If you don't have that living root something green above then you're not photosynthesizing. You're not taking that free awesome energy coming from the sun and capturing it and using it to fuel the carbon cycle in the soil. So there's all these practices that have been known for decades and for early on Ken and I went to a lot of meetings and government and city-state meetings trying to advocate for more of this on open space, more of this in the state. And I realized that at the end there's just a huge disconnect where there's just not much economic opportunity for farmers to be doing these practices and that's why everybody's still, our food system is still really geared toward the other side of annual tillage and heavy chemical use. And so I realized after many years that we weren't going to be able to change through policy maybe or through, or it was just taking too long. We were, Ken and I were getting really frustrated and so we decided that we were going to spend all our efforts in just like building one example on the south side of Longmont and through the land that we own and through another 160 acres of Boulder County Open Space that we lease. We've launched Project 95 which is partnering with NRCS to make conservation plans so we can layer multiple conservation practices across those properties. And more importantly it's really getting a direct connection with the community to help fund big perennial tree plantings, to help fund education programs, to help get volunteers out there planting in the ground. And it's been totally amazed in the last couple years we planted a couple thousand perennial shrubs, a couple hundred trees, tons of cover crops and we've really seen the amount of wildlife and diversity just increasing on the farm. And it's been awesome to see and we'll talk more about how people can get involved. Thank you. Thank you so much. Wow lots of not just optimism but actually such cool stuff on the ground. So I wanted to start on a global level. Alice, you alluded to this today that there was at least several bits of good news today, meaning President Biden in his summit with several international leaders leading up to COP26 in Glasgow in November pledged that the United States would slash its greenhouse gas emissions at least in half by the end of the decade and that would be twice as ambitious as President Obama's pledge and he's called it an economic opportunity of a lifetime, at least of the presidency. Thumbs up, skeptical, I mean we've had so many pledges, pledges so far into the distance most of the presidents will be dead and not accountable for their pledges. Nonetheless, Keith, start with you. Thumbs up? Yeah, I think definitely thumbs up. You've got to have ambition. I think one of the things that you see happening increasingly is two things. One, with respect to fossil fuel use, you know we have technologies now that we didn't really, at least I never thought we would have this far advanced by this time, so I think that's part of it. Could you give just a couple examples there? Well, you know, electric cars, electrification, the fact that solar energy now is cheaper in many ways than fossil fuel is and so it's, you know, I think that's key that it be, you know, to really speed adoption of renewable energy is absolutely key, but I also think that companies, that the general public, but particularly I think corporate America, you know, there may be a certain amount of, you know, of popular pressure of maybe even greenwashing, but I do think there are some serious commitments from corporate America that are starting to, you know, they see climate changes, it's real, right? And we've got to do something and their futures are in there too, so I think you see movement to commit to reducing emissions throughout their supply chains and there is now over the past, you know, just two or three years it seems like also an understanding about the idea of carbon dioxide removal, we need to take it out of the atmosphere, there are different ways to do it. I think agriculture and the stuff that Mark had talked about is, has huge advantages in the sense that it can't do it all, but it can contribute to carbon removal and it can have huge co-benefits in terms of, you know, biodiversity, soil health, soil fertility, sustainable ecosystems, the kind of things that Mark was talking about, so that's why there is a lot of interest really in soils and climate change mitigation, you know, it's challenging, but it's, you know, I think it is a reason for optimism. You mentioned the corporations, a lot of greenwashing for sure, but I thought it was interesting today that as part of all these pledges, it was that richer nations reward countries, particularly developing nations, to put a stop to destroying the tropical forests, and, you know, which has been a huge carbon sink, obviously, and as part of that, all these private companies including, what was it, Amazon, Airbnb, Bayer, Glaxo, McKinsey, Nestle, Salesforce, Unilever pledged to commit, I think it was 1 billion plus to this end, not just the corporate side, but generally this kind of pledge saying, not only thou shall not destroy the forest, but right, we should be, we the richer nations, maybe the companies as well, but should be part of pain since we're a huge part of the problem. Since you're hooked on policy, Alice, what do you think about that, Alice Madden? I definitely give thumbs up to what President Biden was talking about today, and just so folks know how important this is, the topic tonight, between agriculture and deforestation, we're talking about one quarter of the globe's greenhouse gases. So if you make progress there, you're really, really putting a dent in it. And as I mentioned before, when you do deforest, you're taking something that actually sequesters carbon, naturally, to carbon emissions. I mean, they're largely for cattle farms, palm oil, and growing food for cattle. So deforestation is something we really have to address, and it takes the world because the Amazon is surrounded by people who are living sometimes at subsistence levels. So it's easy for us here to say that. And then, maybe someone goes, has a steak this weekend, and they're saying that Amazon should not be, they should not be cutting down those trees. So you really have to walk the walk yourself. And here in the United States, our two biggest sectors are transportation and electricity. And we've heard, we've made great strides there. So I began with, I'm an optimist, and even though I'm sticking to it. Yeah, I'm sticking to it. Thank you. And I try to try, I want to bring you in here because some of the images you showed of human migration related to drought, related to conflict, largely because of drought, and extreme weather events, has gone on since millennia ago. How, how does what's happening now, and you could probably point to Darfur and so many of the migration, so many of the conflicts related to climate change, not just human conflict, but are we in that much worse state now than many years before? What sort of outlook do you have? Well, that's a great question, Susan. So in my work on just looking at historical documents, as well as working with communities, so I also do climate impacts from a community perspective, I think we are at a larger risk today because we use, for example, the same land and water. For example, in semi-arid environments, we plant and so water intensive cash crops. And that makes an entire community, entire economic powerhouse of regions very, very successful to even natural climate variability, which is primarily semi-arid, for example, in that area. So we have, I think somewhere down the line, maybe 150, 160 years ago, with expansion of colonial economy, we have started prioritizing sort of money over land and water and put ourselves in a box where we are very, very vulnerable to small changes in climate shifts. And they're really not ready for the kinds of climate we are going to experience in the near future. So, and we see people migrating just today, because the land is no longer being productive, that people are not being able to take multiple crops. And therefore, this problem is not historical, but really modern and future, which is why we look at history to understand what these connections are. So, yeah, I think, no, we're not safe. We are, in fact, unsafe. We are far more people to feed. We are in a globally connected food chain. And lives and livelihoods are being lost, cultures are being lost. People are feeling a lot of discomfort with these changes. And mostly people, when you ask indigenous communities, they see that there is a lot of injustice in the world. That's how they perceive the whole thing. So, I think these are all really problematic things that we need to understand and start addressing in a concrete and comprehensive way. Yeah, thank you. And Mark Gettridge of Olin Farms, you alluded, and I want to get to a lot of your farm practices, for sure, but you alluded to a lot of this USDA practices and funding that happened after the dustball. What's happened with that? I mean, there's obviously still these programs, but from a policy level, legislative level, bring it down to the ground, we need a heck of a lot more funding for the kinds of programs that help support, you can define regenerative ag, you know, more, not just sustainable, but super healthy agriculture and cannot be possible on big ag scale. I think, well, it's going to have to be possible with time. It's our only path forward, really. But yeah, it's just underutilized program, the EQUIP program, and a little bit underfunded, and it really takes... And you decode that, first of all, NRCS, people may not know... NRCS is the National Resource Conservation Service, and they have an EQUIP program, which cost shares whenever farmers are doing... Under the USDA. USDA, yeah, whenever the Department of Agriculture cost shares whenever farmers are doing conservation practices that increase soil health. So things like planting hedgerows, or starting on-farm composting, or getting fences for rotational grazing of animals, but they're just not utilized by farmers. It's a lot of paperwork that cost shares still makes it questionable whether it's going to be profitable for your business as a transition. So we really need to find other ways to build on those, and help them grow, and really just get funds and support directly to the farmers on the ground. That's where I see most of the change taking place. And I think it's great to see policy statements being made and reports coming out, but I feel like sometimes that there's been a lot more statements and reports than there are trees actually getting planted. And what can we do to make sure that we're actually getting those trees in the ground, and actually getting those cover crops planted on larger scales is what Ken and I really are focused on, is trying to find systems to make that work on the farm. I think one of the things even more that makes me more hopeful than policy statements is the youth. I see so many young college kids, early 20s, getting out of high school, getting out of college that are so interested in building soil and doing something regenerative for a career. And it scares me because I don't see that many jobs for them. There's some, even CSU has degrees in like conservation, ecology, conservation. CU has great environmental stewardship degrees, but all these kids are coming out of there and where do they go to work? There's not farms ready to hire them and put them to work or on soil. So we have a lot come to volunteer on our farm and I'm trying to work with them ideas, but I see a flush of new people willing to do the work for the first time in 50 years. We have young people really ready to get their hands dirty, but we don't have a business system set up to provide employment. So talking about long term climate goals means nothing to me if we can't get these kids working. First of all, so what do you think is driving that trend line, which sounds on the surface really positive, more people wanting to get into it? Kids get it. Kids realize that the effects of climate change more than adults. So talking to our own daughters and the youth, the generations are so much more heart connected to the earth and to each other and the environment than our generations ever were. We just have to find ways to foster that and provide them space to be creative. We're not going to come up with the solutions. The kids are going to come up with the solutions and that's what Ken and I are trying to provide a platform from preschool age farm tours to learn about five colors on your plate. We have a group of CU engineering students designing smart systems for different parts of the farm right now to high school interns to just research partners and it's so important to get these kids involved because they're really the ones that are going to do the work and carry this forward. We can plant the seed like my grandma planted the seed in me and got me excited about gardening and it blossomed over time. We're just trying to do that same thing for these kids. Well thanks and Alice Madden. I just, as I did research for this today, I found a page on the USDA website for new farmers. It was really cool. It's like young farmers, women farmers, and so I started looking for sustainability and carbon farming. You're looking for job Alice? No, no, no. I was looking like are they teaching people about this and that was completely missing. I know there's other programs but here it's a page dedicated to new farmers and what a great opportunity to introduce them to that idea right from the beginning and there was nothing. Well I'm going to note that to somebody so maybe that'll change. What about another indicator might be at Colorado State University? Are you seeing more or fewer students actually wanting to pursue it? Whether they're going into soil science to get PhDs or to become farmers or both? So I guess one thing I can report is in my department, Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, we're actually launching a new regenerative agriculture major as part of the curriculum. So that's been something that's been going on and this is, you know, sometimes universities are a little bit behind the times. We look to innovative farmers and others sometimes to lead the way but I think there are a number of universities that are picking up on this. It takes a lot of different forces to turn the ship around, so to speak, to really change things. You know, part of it is, you know, if consumers start to demand the kinds of foods and the kind of products that come from regenerative farming, that will, you know, that'll make a difference. You know, governments subsidize not only in the US but really around the world called conventional agriculture primarily in a really big way. I was in a conference with somebody who was fairly high up in the World Bank who said something that shocked me at the time. He said, because we're talking about, you know, how do we incentivize producers to shift to more conservation practices, regenerative practices? And a lot of times they say, well, we need to have more funding to, you know, to help support, you know, adoption of these practices in the Gaffer and the World Bank said, you know, we already globally subsidize agriculture with $500 billion a year and those subsidies go to degradative practices. Maybe we can take that social investment in agriculture and funnel it into regenerative practices, conservation practices, things like equip other things that Mark mentioned. And so there are levers out there in terms of, you know, consumers and preferences and government supports and education and things like that. So I think the, you know, the levers are there but it's, you know, it is going to take a lot of work to do but it is something that I think is possible. You know, we just have to put our shoulders in the wheel. It sounds like it's been aspirational for decades. Would I be asking you this question in 10 years and get the same answer or is there actually more happening? Like I know there's been momentum to try to build into the infrastructure bill more funding for NRCS type practices. Do you see any momentum or is it more kind of on the edges, important ones which we'll get into in regenerative ag? I can speak on that and especially at the higher level NRCS there's definitely a shift towards soil health and this was even under the previous administration probably unbeknownst to the president. There was some, the last farm bill that passed under the old administration put more focus on soil health and directed more funding that way but I agree completely. Like the subsidies is kind of the shift and the American public is there for the last 50, 60 years. We've been paying farmers to grow cheap calories and whatever environmental or health costs is byproduct of that no problem as long as you're pumping out those cheap corn and soy and calories you're fine and right now we're ready to as a public to start paying farmers to grow health ecosystems instead of cheap calories. The hard part from a policy standpoint is it's very hard to say in numbers what does a healthy ecosystem look like going forward and these are the things I know that Keith thinks about all the time too. Like how do we put hard data on what an ecosystem moves going forward and it's not just the carbon's just one piece of it. You're getting carbon in the ground. How do you measure biodiversity? How do you measure water holding capacity and how do you layer all these measurements in a very holistic way which policy is not set up to think holistically at all it's like this many pounds of calories in out perfect pay the farmers ready to go but we don't have models to really show this is what a farm ecosystem looks like moving forward healthily so that's why as part of project 95 we're looking at a lot of different data collection techniques a lot of different sensors in the field that's one of the advances technology that's actually allows us to be there because now that sensors have become so cheap we can really not you mean you like to measure soil moisture exactly above the ground below the ground we can know exactly how much a rain storm is infiltrating just by moisture sensors and so how do we get these things calibrated on farms where gender practices are taking place so that we can start gathering the data and show like hey here's the numbers what it looks like as soon as we have those numbers that show this is what the ecosystem looks like moving forward we'll be able to shift the policy but and speaking of numbers and I don't want to reduce farming as you just alluded to carbon but we are talking about carbon and what a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions agriculture has been and what a potential sink it could be or an increasing a larger sink so I wanted to ask you Keith postion what is carbon farming and what some of the data you are producing both I mean you and your colleague Mark Easter and your team and a bunch of other folks I think are doing a lot of work in this area sort of pilot projects with farms but sort of give the gist of what is carbon farming and what does some of the data show in terms of soil carbon sequestration healthier soil healthier more nutritious food well you know mark in his introductory comments really you know talked about these five principles about keeping a living root in the soil keeping it covered you know maximizing your productivity and integrating livestock etc and I alluded to that with that simple kind of a box diagram right with the carbon in and carbon out and really in a sense that's a big part of it is you know as you capture more carbon through photosynthesis that's also energy that's feeding the ecosystem you know that's really important and reducing the disturbance and and the other things that we talked about so you know that the carbon farming in a sense is both you know is is I would say it's producing your regular agricultural products but it's also enriching the soil it's producing other things you know we refer to it as ecosystem services right but those are things like carbon if if if microsoft wants to offset its emissions and it can't do that entirely just by going to renewable energy then it is looking to you know can can they incentivize carbon dioxide removals and there's different ways of doing that companies might want to say well we will invest in regenerative agriculture as a component of of carbon dioxide removal so it becomes you know part of a incentive part of a product that the farmer is producing not only you know not only grain and vegetables and stuff but it's also you know clean water carbon sequestration you know biodiversity pollinators lots of things like that so it is a it is a much more holistic way of looking at things and you know and we're trying to it's really being led by the farmers themselves to a large degree and that have done it and learned on the ground but you know we're trying to also you know capture that knowledge put it into systems you know my group has developed a something called comet farm which is is tries to quantify carbon greenhouse gas but also you know water holding capacity and and other kind of ecosystem processes that allow farmers to evaluate different practices and get an idea of what might work in it in a you know one situation another and I think if we take those kind of tools because we need metrics right to manage if you take those and marry them with the kind of boots on the ground understanding that farmers themselves have then I think and the sensors and so it's almost like marrying modern technology with you know common sense and and sort of you know hands-in-the-dirt knowledge of of of the system then I think you you've got a way to you know to you know communicate and and and yeah and and move forward our knowledge of these systems and how to how to best you know design and implement them so obviously not all soil is alike you know so varies as we talked about before not only by region but in a much more granular temporal level so just give an elevator pitch to a let's say pretty large-scale farm farmer why should they employ these practices and what is their economic incentive as well I'd say Keith postion and then we'll mark you can tell you yeah well do you trust do you trust his elevator pitch which he's kind of given you know and it's hard like it it's hard to scale and that's one of the problems with the hard to scale you're saying in space like a lot of these are general practices like moving animals every eight of different paddocks there's a ton of moving fences around and it's and if we look at boulder county open space as an example where a lot of our parcels were hundred to thousand acre parcels run by one or two farmers with one or two tractors like it's going to be hard to just shift away from that chemical use and find alternatives and there's ways to talk about like once the soil health ecosystem goes you'll have your nitrogen inputs decreased and there's a lot of these farmers get it they're bringing their horses or cattle in and fertilizing their fields like they understand the principles but to me it has to be economically driven like if we're going to have a conversation with the farmer it comes down to money at the scale they are taking their if they're going to do extra and put extra effort and then resources into it they need to get a higher value for their product and right now we don't have the infrastructure to support those systems where all the grains go into the same grain mills out of the county and how do we are the same feedlots out of the county and how do we be able to like provide an economic pathway for farmers as they're scaling up so that's kind of what we're looking at on the project 95 where we're taking over 135 acres and putting half of that into to pastured beef that won't go to like the same beef feedlot as the packing houses everywhere else but it'll be sold for a little higher value to people looking for grass-fed and higher quality kind of meat products we're specializing a lot in our putting in plums and different perennials as wind breaks within the field and still growing veggies in between but looking at over time how do we get crops from those those perennial trees that we're getting some cost shares to plant and make like a gooseberry jam or gooseberry wine and then use like innovation and marketing to really yeah I've got to go to that farm so I want to open it up to questions and we have several but first I trade you about a chariot I want to ask you since you've done so much work on a global scale and in sub-saharan Africa and you're working in India where do you see the equity issue come into this and in what way can more sustainable ag practices including at scale at larger scale help prevent what seems like this increasing climate driven migration and food insecurity it sounds so abstract but those who can't reach or can't afford like it's one thing to say stop eating meat or eat meat once a week and from a climate perspective obviously that'd be a good thing but what about from put of a poverty and social equity standpoint how do you how do you see things well Susan I think I'm kind of relearning as you pointed out that my work as a period climate scientist has been primarily looking at natural archives things where human beings did not impact things but over time I've sort of moved into more recent times and more local and one of the things that I'm finding out is the answer lies in asking members of the community were impacted that's that's something that's largely missing in our discourse I feel we tend to assume a lot of things and when I go out in the field and talk to people I get a completely different answer and and I think that a solution space should start start with getting people involved in formal sort of studies and understanding and that I think would be very critical but doing so in for example this work in semi arid regions in Maharashtra in India my my my learning has been that most people tend to think of dams that restrict lower waters and only make water available to the rich farmers tend to be reasons why people leave the land and leave and go away so some of our solutions may be quite simple and local and policy level where we can think of infrastructures from all communities upstream downstream far away from water sources or any other natural resources that would be a way to think about the solution and at a local level rather than a global level that could be my two cents on this thank you what's a huge point starting whether you're a researcher or not but what does this community need what do people actually need besides prescribing from above so I want to open up to questions I think we have several and let's see what you all have to say and ask thank you Justin what do we got we have a question from martin or yeah martin on facebook he says the allen savory institute in boulder is making frankly unbelievable claims that their holistic management and planned grazing can reverse climate change do you have evidence either way great question with us i can eat postion you want to take it so well what i would say is there you know there's a lot of interest in uh you know in in improved grazing systems that can potentially increase so carbon there there are a recent study that has been been funded by a number of different folks that have looked at and you know looked at carbon storage and it does look like you know this kind of regenerative or sorry rotational kind of intensive grazing it can in some cases increase so carbon significantly i do worry that uh you know a lot of times people are looking for silver bullet solutions they say hey you know if we just did all organic agriculture if we just did you know savory grazing everywhere that's enough to you know to offset all our emissions and things like that and there really is you know we need to be careful to to reduce emissions to you know stabilize the climate is going to require that we do just about everything we can in all different sectors you know whether it's from renewables you know dietary changes conservation practices halting deforestation you know it's going to take all of those different levers and there's not one single uh you know activity or intervention that is going to is going to uh you know solve the the climate problem it's it's really going to be you know everything we can can muster in in all activities of you know of the economy i think that's going to take the Grand Canyon Trust is a site that martin might want to look at too they're doing some really cool studies say that name again so grand canyon trust and you can think about the land that they're grazing on but they're not only gathering that information they're sharing it with all the other ranchers in the area so i'm sure you can look that up pretty easily thank you and i treat vatacharya you had something yes i wanted to add on to that he just mentioned that it's not one single solution and those solutions would be very very specific to communities at a local scale and that would have to come from their livelihoods where how they perceive the land changing and therefore they're i completely agree with you there's no one solution but sort of these bags that we know work and is also corroborated by communities but it really has to come from those communities rather than us telling everyone what they should be doing so great point next question on that note tom wants to know what's the best way to incentivize farmers to use healthy soil practices great question alice would you mind putting up my last slide um this was i had a slide about the government role and um and i actually wanted to point out kind of a problem with that so i couldn't believe this number 90 percent of our farms are family farms some are bigger than others um and you you think about you know how government can help one thing is grants and there is so much money in the federal government um for farming however you you know do you have do you have a grant writer on staff i mean that's the problem these farms don't always have the capacity to actually get to this money so it's almost might as well not even be there so we have to really think about meaningful access to money and of course the other thing is continuing to fund research and development so i just wanted to make sure um folks just kind of thought about some of these conundrums thank you next question um and richard on facebook wonders if it would help if more people planted their own gardens and use community gardens rather than purchasing produce from the store yeah i think you have something to say about that absolutely um it's going to take a community effort there's no one solution but the but it's just a frame of thinking like boulder county wants to be sustainable and i think 10 years ago and they did a study less than two percent of the food we actually eat here comes from here that's an f minus minus minus on sustainability like until we can be get serious and start growing a lot of our own food locally and be more resilient um and that's going to start with the home garden it's going to start with going and finding local farms doing good things and supporting them going and volunteering on farms even investing in farms like we do have had some government grants men rcs funding but it is it's a ton of paperwork it's a ton of time it's often receipts submitted and then you get money at the very very end where some of our private donors that provide pollinator seeds is boom we got them in the ground the next week so some of our private donors that sponsor a couple interns to work at the summer through the farm all summer boom we have people on the ground that summer getting things done so really it's the the communities where i see the most groundswell and actual change taking place and it can be in your raised bed garden behind your house to doing some gorilla um pollinator planting around your neighborhood and don't tell your hoa like just we just got to all work on it together and and support the people that are doing and and put the tools in their hands that need to get it done oh so you're saying only two percent of food we eat in boulder county how much is grown in probably pretty typical you think nationwide i mean depending on the outside of california probably and then there's the carbon equation it's not necessarily bad that it's transported but i'm talking about more from a resilience standpoint next question okay here's one from michael since meat production is such a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption and water consumption it would make sense to quickly eliminate much of that production however the path to quickly reduce reduce those emissions by eliminating such activity would devastate the industry and thus the multitude of employees ranchers etc similar to what has happened in the coal industry what are ways we can effectively and quickly reduce this type of emissions while providing for the financial and employment well being of the many folks that would be affected that's such a great question and so important to look at the economics the communities the livelihoods who wants to take a first crank event i will not that i have an answer but um it is it is so difficult to shift away i mean we hear this same problem with uh natural you know natural gas you know what what are we going to do oh um we're going to hurt this industry uh if we you know force a shift to renewable energy well just today i was talking to someone we have all these uncapped wells that occasionally explode and kill people you know you could train people who work in natural gas industry to help cap these you know hundreds of thousands of abandoned wells out there um with with with the cattle industry you know again you have a lot of family ranches some bigger than others um you know the the the deal they get to graze on public land is a pretty darn sweet deal so if you think about free market approaches one of those would be to actually charge you know what a market price would be to to to graze on our land that's what you know we pay our taxes for so just shifting some more truly free market approaches um would i think you know start creating a shift in that industry i'm not a vegetarian but i don't eat very much meat at all anymore um and just because i know that the the huge dent this puts um in our any attempt we have to deal with this so um but there are i think some more sustainable um growth practices part of the problem is if you fed your cattle something else that didn't take so much of don't darn water to grow that would be a huge part of the problem but they're not doing that so they grow water intensive plants and crops to feed the cows that's something you could shift and that's something the government could help shift i just added that i i also think that there's a you know there is a place for livestock but probably you know from an environmental or ecological standpoint it's you know i i think if livestock can be more integrated into the into the production system and mark alluded to this it's you know if you have livestock there you can utilize and and and make a profit from growing cover crops and things like this that otherwise if you if you don't have an animal there to consume that and turn into protein turn into products then the farmers aren't able to to to use some of those tools in the regenerative toolbox so and i and i'm not sure if if it would necessarily have such a huge impact on labor but you know for sure industries are going to have to shift um and and you know i guess that's the role of government to try to to help ease the you know the social pain and difficulties with those kind of transitions but it's the same as you said natural gas petroleum you know if we're going to get away from fossil fuels in you know in in 20 years or whatever there's going to be a lot of folks that that we're working in the oil patch that need to do something else or like the coal miners it's not uh you know it and it sounds flippant but for sure i think it's always been that way as as industries change transition uh you know we've got to we've got to deal with that in a in a in a way that that you know that that benefits people that they can change into you know new careers new jobs it's it's not easy but you know we're going to have to do it somehow so in closing i want to give each of you a chance to just share something that is particularly inspiring you these days or keeping you up at night along these lines uh dr but acharya how about you first difficult to say one thing for scripture but i well in 30 seconds you could say three things sorry what i said you can have 30 seconds you could say three things if you want but in closing yes uh so the first thing is uh i think in bolder we have a unique advantage that there are so many scientists so many practitioners who are working on different sites of this to be really plugged into that kind of resource that we have that public lectures workshops symposiums uh that would be one thing the second thing would be to understand your communities why do people do the how do people use resources what is the cultural dimension of why they do it and the third thing would be really conscious of the fact that water and soil are non-renewable in many ways for example soil takes a million years to form and the and the faster you erode it or the you're pretty much losing soil so really thinking about how you manage soil uh how's your diet impacting is it is your diet local are you sourcing stuff from local places those would be sort of from the big picture to immediate household stuff that i would thank you mark got rid of all on farms one or two things 30 seconds or less sure i think um the thing that inspires me is just the interest of people to to get involved and help out on the farm to make a change i think i'll put a plug for a wildlands restoration volunteers is wrv as they're known locally uh i think they have decades of experience about leading volunteer activities traditionally it was like doing trail reconstruction in the mountain so they have a wing right now that's really focused on getting on local regenerative farms and doing and bringing big volunteer groups to knock out projects and we've hosted like three big perennial plantings with them already and have more on the calendar if you go to their website you can see how to get out on the farm and we always start those days with me kind of explaining exactly what we're doing and why we're doing this people can take those skill sets back home and learn all about biological inoculants and fungi and biochar and lava rock and cover crops pollinator stuff we go we go through it all real quick so if you are interested in the practice techniques look up wrv come out for a volunteer day at own farms we're going to be doing them all summer long all covid safe everybody wrv brings us their own shovels their own tools it's a super easy way to get involved and make a difference and for those of you in other states perhaps and certainly other counties there are farms doing this kind of stuff maybe that was well but find your local opportunities around Alice Madden how about you so we know what to do we just often lack the political will to do it and you think about the change that has happened to this country in the last year because some horrible events but the awareness of racial injustice and the change that was demanded by americans that same energy that same sort of commitment if it turned also to environmental injustice and climate injustice i think that would help force elected officials make the decisions they need to make in a timely manner because again as i started we don't have a lot of time and we need to help our policymakers get there as fast as we can thank you keep posting yeah i well i think alice and and mark and i know everyone's said it said it well but i you know to me it's it's we need to really be bold at our thinking we need to kind of fundamentally reimagine what our landscapes can look like and and it's a huge lift right but in a way if we don't have that kind of imagination then we're not going to get there and i i think it's it's fundamental you know education awareness it has to be to a large degree i think it's got to be a bottom up kind of an approach that that eventually you know leads to to changes that in policy and and and you know and governance as part of it but you know i think we really need to have this imagination and and kind of awareness and yeah and and just just like was was said before you know we really need to to do that transformation and it'll be a huge lift but at the end of it you know well there's there's reason to be optimistic because it can be a much better world in the end if we can achieve some of these changes end of that well i want everyone to join me in thanking our panelists so much we have dr i tray by the charia good morning to you in mumbai and dr keith fostian from colorado state university alice madden of cu the geches wilkinson center i won't say the rest of it and mark gutridge all in farms thanks so much everyone and thank you justin beach and the longmont museum our sponsor k gnu and mostly all of you it's been a great week and thank you susan and for all of you for tuning in there are a bunch of people i want to thank before we close out our big picture climate change series for 2021 um i want to thank all of the panelists who have joined us over the past four days uh sarah shirazi and k gnu community radio sustainable resilient longmont the city's sustainability program and especially the co-curator and moderator of the big picture climate change series susan moran you're a total pro attuned every little detail your considerable interview skills have been a wonder to behold over the last four days and we're all the better for it thank you i'd also like to give a special shout out to the city's climate action task force and peter wood who provided the vision that inspired the series otter onus rot francy jaffy and lisa knoblock with the city of longmont for their support and encouragement the staff at the longmont at longmont public media thank you museum staff including scott stewart scott yo ho jim fladmark and our intern obry press which thank you out there for tuning in happy earth day thank you thanks justin sorry say that again that is a great way to start the day it's it's less it's less exciting than taking a run outside but it's next best thing well thank you so much yes me as well take care you have a great evening