 So this is a community food systems call on Monday, September 27th, 2021. We have with us a lovely and like super connected and intelligent guest, Ken Meter, who's been doing work on this topic for a really long time. And I think maybe an easy way to get a slide into the topic is, what's a way that we can see the world a little bit like you see the world? Well, I'd have to know more about how you see the world to answer that question. Oh, you don't want to get inside my head. That's dangerous territory. I didn't say inside your head, but I mean, my really main exposure has been a few snippets from Ann and also from listening to the webinar you did on Tuesday last week. So I think one thing that I think that you're doing, just like I am, is that my work has done is to really look at one of the system levers that will move the system to a better place in the US and global food system, where we're certainly asking those questions together. And obviously we're all wrestling with the issue of how to build better market power for farmers. And I think part of that is clearly in your world and mine finding ways to connect producers and growers and consumers more directly. And I'm happy to give you some more context for this conversation, for who this group is and where we're coming from. This is part of a larger thing that is not necessarily an entity more like a hashtag and a movement called Open Global Mind, which started by happenstance when lockdown started. And Open Global Mind means a couple of things. One of them is open-mindedness. The one-line mission is helping humans make better decisions together. And OGM, Open Global Mind, is not specifically about farming, agriculture, or food, or health care, or education, or whatever. But in fact, it touches every one of those disciplines in different ways. And part of what's interesting is how we explore our way across those issues. Because it turns out that all those domains have the same sorts of problems in common. They just don't necessarily know it. And then another piece of Open Global Mind is inspired by... So let me just share screen for a second. So this thing over here, which is a mind map called The Brain. I did not create this software, but I was on their first press tour 23 and almost 24 years ago now in December, it'll be 24. And this is mind mapping software. You've probably seen mind mapping software. Here's your crossroads resource center. When I click on something, it rotates into the middle. And I've connected it under local living economies. I should probably connect it more. And during this call, I will be feeding my brain as we go. But here's what I have, for example, under local living economies. Now, I've been feeding this by myself for these 23 years. You're looking at the same file that I started 23 years ago. And it has 475,000 things in it, like local living economies and you and the Preston model and the local economy solution and so forth, all linked up. But it's just me doing this. And Open Global Mind is like, what if we were all collaborating to create kind of a global brain, like a global sense making apparatus of some sort and that it didn't have to look like this brain software. For you, it could look like whatever works well for how you represent what you know and what you care about. For someone else, it could look like there's a systems diagramming tool called Kumu. Maybe it would look like that. I don't know. And for some people it might look like wiki pages after wiki pages after wiki pages. And I have a couple of friends who've been doing wikis for 30 years. So anyway, that's the context you've fallen into. Klaus has been the lead on our sort of food systems project and he is on fire, as you likely know about fixing stuff, having come out of the food industry, food services and been in charge of creating restaurants and all sorts of things in the food ecosystem and then becoming kind of painfully aware and Klaus forgive me for speaking for you. I'm happy to turn it over to you so you can explain a little bit more as well. But really becoming painfully aware of how broken the system was, in particular as we try to switch toward regenerative systems with all the different benefits that regeneration offers not least of which is carbon capture and maybe sort of some help with global climate change that it might be one of the biggest levers we have for helping on climate change. Klaus, anything you wanna add to that? No, just to say that we have been collectively on a journey for almost a year now, right? Which has taken many twists and turns and I posted yesterday this project chart that we ended up with and then realizing that we will need some more resources to really transfer that. So it was exciting to see you come on the scene Ken because you already have operationalized some of the things that we've been talking about. So yeah, that's why we're really interested to listen to you. Sounds great. Ann, do you wanna jump in? No, I'll just, a lot I feel like at this point I'm like a connective tissue in a way in the sense that like I connected with Jerry in class about the work they were doing and then a very good friend of mine who's a mutual friend of Ken's connected me and it was that realization that Ken, as we said has done this operationally and done it in multiple aspects, multiple locations across time and space. And I thought there's just so much value in learning from failures and successes in the past. And I just did this opportunity to connect his experience with the slightly different but still applicable experience that clouds to myself and Jerry and others bring. So I am literally just a connective tissue here bringing some folks together who care about the health of our planet and the health of our people, so. Love that. Anyone else wanna jump in just to offer context for where we are as we start? Jordan, do you wanna, I see you're reaching for the meal. Hello, dear friends. Yeah, good to see you. I'm good, I'll just listen and debrief but there's Ken I guess just there's a lot of organizations that are kind of gathering at the starting line and desiring to or I guess coming to the awareness you had long ago that we need to move and move with force to get things realigned. And everybody's kind of humbly recognizing that there's people that have given their entire lives to this so hopefully as we begin to talk we can help to align some greater resources and scalability and different things. So I just really interested to hear about you and everything you've been doing. So thank you. Awesome, thank you. So with that I'll turn the mic so to speak back to you Ken and just see if you can help us see a little bit the way you see. Well, sure. Let me just start by, I really, my main purpose for today was let you know about the book and the resources that that offers, but I should give you a little personal background to the book as well. My father was born at a farm in a log house on a farm in Nebraska in 1903. And he did everything he could to get as far away from agriculture as possible, but he also in his later years was really missing the sense of community had back in the farm even though farming was so terrible in his childhood. And that created a mystery for me that I decided I wanted to unpack. I really got involved in a lot of this work because of the Vietnam War and because of realizing that the war against Vietnam was also a war against our communities because it was taking resources out of solving problems that we had here. And I was lucky to live in Minnesota where we have a very strong cooperative grocery movement and cooperative movement. We have 10% of all the co-op groceries in the country are in Minnesota. And I helped start some cooperative businesses in inner city Minneapolis in the 70s that morphed into a career as a journalist and that interviews with farmers morphed into a conversation with scholars and with myself and with research libraries to learn more about the economics that farmers faced. The, you know, I think in the 1970s I was able to really encounter the regeneration dialogue mostly from the Rodeo Institute which was talking about regenerative agriculture at that time. And it's a term I started using when most people had no idea what it meant and really did not want to hear the term because it was strange to them. And that's really wonderful to see that term now falling into very general use. Although a lot of us are still not sure exactly what it means to different people but it's a big development in the last 50 years. Could you tell us what it means? No, I cannot. I can tell you what my definition is but I think that there's so many different definitions out there. I mean, I think what attracted me to the definition in the 1970s was that people talked about an agriculture that could regenerate itself. So essentially the inputs you needed were the inputs that you raised on the farm and the economic systems you needed to make that work where things you could develop within the community. And it was very much kind of local level grassroots definition of regenerative. It's a very different model than I hear a lot of people talking about today. But to me, the focus is on, especially looking, going to organic growers conferences back then when we had 600 people talking about this, it was the idea that you could grow your own inputs. You could actually create fertility on the farm. You could build soil health and that would help systems balance out and that was the heart of a, not only in agriculture but as I've grown older of food systems that we deserve to have. So I think that would be my sort of short answer to that question. But we've been having this discussion for several decades and I'm lucky enough to be able to go to the conferences around the country and California Eco Farm Conference in Wisconsin, the Moses Conference where several thousand people have been gathering every year for decades, trying to wrestle with how to grow food, how to build food systems, how to support each other in that process and so on. So I have a fairly keen awareness of what I've witnessed in that path. The chance came up a couple of years ago to start writing a book about this which is what I call Building Community Food Webs and there are three reasons that I wrote that book. One is that I wanted to really document this work I had done in many iterations for decades to really look at how the farm, even the food system and the commodity economy we have draws wealth out of rural America and to a large extent out of urban America as well. And that's a story that's gotten me all around the country working in community level projects 144 regions and 41 states to date. And it's been an analysis that's really been very resonant and I've been able to see how that story plays out in very different locales across the country from Hawaii to South Carolina to Maine to Alaska. And the bottom line of that story in the book would just be that I'm tracking in a very conservative tracking $4 trillion being taken out of the rural economy in the last century. In inflation, just $1. And that compares with the entire value of the US farm sector today of only $3 trillion. So more wealth has been sucked out of the economy than the value of all the farms that are remaining. When you say sucked out, what do you mean by that? I mean, paying interest on loans that does not get returned back to the community. I mean buying inputs, for example, seed which used to be something that was growing in your neighborhood was now increasingly an output input from outside. Obviously fossil fuels, which are seldom mined or at least purchased right from a mine in that region. And machinery and other things. I can't track the machinery payments because we can't, we don't have data about that. It's actually $4 trillion, that billion. Oh, sorry, right. I was like, trillion, I don't know. Yes, trillion. So anyway, that fundamental analysis of that the economy, the food system we have as well subsidized as it is, as well supported as policy as it is, and as well as sort of dominance in the global markets, it's drawing wealth away from our communities. And obviously you can't have regenerative communities when most of your wealth is being taken away. And I think one of the things that informs my work is that every time I'm working I'm trying to really rebuild some capacity in the community where I work. I'm trying to partner with people in a very egalitarian way. And I'm trying to see my efforts to really leverage their work and to advance their own goals rather than coming in with a sort of outside agenda or paradigm to inflict on people. The second thing the book does is to cover case studies of eight really promising, I think really innovative efforts that I've been part of around the country. One in Montana, first of all, which really emerged out of the farm credit crisis of the 1980s and really represents a lot of learning that we need to go back to because the crisis we had in the 1980s is very similar to the crisis we're facing today with the digital economics we have and the pandemic and so on. So that's a very good example of 50 years of activity in one state to try to address moving towards more sustainable agriculture and more sustainable living profiles. Hawaii talked about how returning to traditional cultures was becoming a very potent way of getting out of the plantation economy which itself is now collapsed after a very small time on the islands. The third chapter or fourth chapter is Tucson, Arizona where a food bank is really committing itself not simply to handing out foods to low income people but to helping get them engaged in governance of the food bank and running for office and starting local business but really empowerment scenarios. The next chapter is at North Southeast Ohio, Athens, Ohio where a group of young people moved from the East Coast to Ohio because they thought it was a fertile place for communication or for connection and they started what ended up to be a business incubator center with the idea that low income people would have the opportunity to start businesses to. I'm waving my arms because I'm in a room that has a motion detector. I wasn't sure you wanted me to stop, so that's it. Yeah, no, I have subtler ways of asking you to stop, so. Yeah, okay, okay. You've gone. Anyway, I apologize. If you're a business incubator center and I'm a food business incubator in Athens, Ohio people imagine helping low income people start businesses so they could ramp out of poverty by becoming new business owners with some mixed success. Next, I moved to Northeast Indiana where a group of economic developers has first of all decided that they need to bring immigrants to a very white community in a very red state because without that workforce, they don't see the region surviving and they gave you food and ethnically identified food and local food is one of the ways they're going to attract immigrants and other people to come live in Northeast Indiana and they built with my assistance the Northeast Indiana Local Food Network which again is having mixed results. Next, the story goes to Phoenix, Arizona where the official county plans in Phoenix suggest that the amount of farmland in Maricopa County should be reduced to 0.4% of the land base in a region where billions of dollars is being spent buying food and there's an essential conflict because developers can get a tax bank by leasing money, leasing land to farmers they often do it on favorable terms but they have the right to pull that land back at any time they want to develop housing or commercial development on it. So several of the farms I interviewed to the farms have been either threatened with a relocation or had to relocate since I did that chapter alone and we have not penetrated the discussion in Phoenix to get them to really pay close attention to the need to have food produced in the region if the region itself is going to survive and there's obviously very tough water issues there as well, but I think one of the tools there was to show network maps that showed the isolation farmers felt and that was a very profound educational moment of its own. Next, we went to go to the book host of Brighton, Colorado where a group of two farmers started raising issue of how are we going to protect farmland and the historically strong farming community and I did some research there which pointed out that even the farms that were there as long as a hundred years in that community farming, vegetables that are very efficient, high large scale and exporting food across the country could not afford to buy farmland because it was too expensive. So they were essentially positioning themselves to move to further away where they could get less regulation and cheaper land prices in the future. And so that discussion, we basically persuaded the city and the county that the only entity that could buy that land, farmland and reserve it for agricultural use would be the county and the city themselves because no farmer could do it and no investor was gonna do that simply to protect the land that we knew of. And that's exactly what happened. They invested quite a bit of money in buying two properties and they hope to get up to 1500 acres over time where they're gonna be protecting that land. And then they use that as a foundation for actually branding the entire community around Historic Splendid Valley based on its agricultural heritage and talking about food as a way of branding the future development they'd like to encourage to the area. And the final story comes from Dakota County, Minnesota. It's a suburb of the Twin Cities work which has really dedicated self to creating what I might call a web of green space basically on the understanding that wildlife need quarters from the forest in the county to the rivers and wetlands and they're boarding on the Mississippi River. They were hoping this would help improve water quality in the Minnesota River. And a very dogged long-term process to build political support among conservative county commissioners to protect green space, to increase density in some places to protect green space elsewhere and to build this web, this network of wild areas which also become recreational areas which have made the housing values more higher and also attracted people to come live in the area. So those are all, they're not the only stories out there but the ones I thought I had the most purchase to tell briefly and the most information and the most connection with. The final part of the book I was very quickly say really covers some of the general themes that I've experienced in the work that I've done over the last five decades and just some of the ways that you can think about this work on building community self-reliance from an abstract perspective. And so that's also full of other lessons and other kind of case studies from around the country. So that's briefly about the book. I think I would just, I mean, maybe I'll just I'll just close by saying, I think that you know, one of the important lessons of my work has been that everywhere I go, I really start by learning the history of the place and I learn about the people who've already taken the first steps forward and I learn about the unique assets that are unique to that community and how to build on those assets and more importantly, not to undermine them. And that also involves learning about the unique liabilities or the challenges the community faces too. And learning that is really important to really putting your rudder in the right water in the right way to move forward. The book is essentially amounts to a critique of the commodity system and I'm more and more convinced as I do this work which is not popular with a lot of my farm organization partners. There's the commodity system itself that really makes a more sustainable regenerative agriculture impossible. And I think this really is a, this book is a testament to the idea that we have to really build connections between farmers and consumers if we're gonna have fair pricing, market power and sustainable landscapes. And then I think the final thing I'll say is I was reading a Facebook post from a farmer I know in the Midwest who is it actually scale that I consider scaringly large and he had an investor come to him to say can we take your model and take it to scale? And he said, it's not scalable if it is replicable. And I think that's a real, real interesting theme that I found in this work that there's a lot of people and one of the chapters of the book is about really questioning scale and saying there's some advantages in large scale. There's also some inflexibility and stasis that comes in when you have large scale systems and it's also very important to value and keep spaces for the small. For example, any healthy food system as places for you new emerging farmers to start on a small acreage and build a business. If it doesn't have that, it will not survive long-term. So I think some days I'm like a gold panor in the river like up to his knees, like swishing around looking for the little shiny nuggets. And I just feel like we've dropped into a stream where the nuggets per cubic yard of water are these really dense. Ken, thank you for, I was like, I wanna, I'd like to know more about that and that I should probably read your book. I've got a bunch, exactly. And I've got a bunch of questions that I'm sure everybody else does too. I don't know if you've read either of these books, The Big Thirst in Cadillac Desert, but your book format reminds me a lot of The Big Thirst where one chapter is about Las Vegas and how this little city in the middle of nowhere that really doesn't have enough water at all kept its visible water because the casinos are like, if we don't look like there's abundance here, we're dead. And so everybody turned around and tried to help with gray water recycling and a whole bunch of stuff, basically turning Las Vegas into like this, the international space station in terms of water kind of with keeping the water local and inside. Another chapter is about Fulton County and Georgia where the planners basically were just stupid as their reservoir drained to near empty and they did nothing kind of thing. So jumping from case to case to case around each of which highlights different kinds of things and brings a lot of, I really like your approach also on sort of local wisdom, local experience, local adaptations. I think that's a fabulous way to go about it. And then the water crisis seems to me to be very near to the food system crisis. They're clearly coupled in so many ways. And then Cadillac Desert because one of the many light bulbs that went off in my head about water in the West was that most of the land in the West really like was not meant to be cropland. It's maybe good for grazing but we then created all these water projects that delivered water to farmers for almost nothing per acre foot, which was costing us a whole bunch of money to get to them per acre foot, which was a gigantic subsidy which created all kinds of distortions, right? In the world. And I'm just wondering broadly between the distortions in the market and you were also talking about how the commercial food system, the commodity food system is in fact part of the problem. Are there large-scale levers for applying at that level? And then I'll open up for everybody else to jump in with other questions. Well, I think that, you know, I mean, I'm no expert in water issues at all but the sort of standard argument I hear when I go around the West is that the water rights are really terrible but we cannot legislatively make them better because they're so entrenched historically and the politics were so fractured today. My kind of thinking about that right now is that for Phoenix, for example, the tribes in the Phoenix area sued that many years ago saying that since they were guaranteed the land that they lived on, they should have the water rights as well. And they essentially, they do own the water rights that the city of Phoenix depends upon. And they, you know, they're very gracious about interpreting that as we're going to provide Phoenix with water but they're also saying we clearly own it by treaty. And in many ways, I see the most hope for tribes really asserting treaty rights and saying we're going to manage water in a different way and really go back to some of the traditional insights that fed life in the past. But that's an easier thing to say than done, obviously. Legislatively, it just seems like a really messy situation because those imbalances created by the irrigation you talked about also created power imbalances that make it very difficult to resolve them politically. Is there any politician or movement that's actually doing the right thing on these issues? Well, I mean, again, I'm not an expert in water. So I mean, I don't mean water here. I just mean sort of the policy levers for the big system, like what's broken the commodity food system, which is more your backyard. Like, is anybody out there with a policy platform you could totally get behind? Because they've framed it right and they've pointed to all the pieces that are broken in the system like, let's do this, even if it sounds impossible to do because everything else you just said. Well, there's several. And I think you're aware of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which is the group that I hang out with the most. And they have been very sophisticated in their work with the NDC and they are very well positioned very well positioned in the discussions in Washington from their strategic background. They're a very well networked with grassroots groups around the country. And I wouldn't say that their policies are perfect, but also I wouldn't say that I've been spending a lot of time doing in the policy arena. I've been much more focused on how do we make change at the community level, given the status in Washington. And obviously the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in the South has been doing cooperative development in the Southern States since the 1970s and a whole cluster of credit unions and cooperative banking and cooperative sales of fresh produce. They're very well positioned in the discussion right now with USDA now reassessing itself about its own racism in dealing with blacks and other minorities. Obviously there's been even probably a larger problem with how the US agency has handled tribal entities. And there's on a given issue, there's a whole wealth of very powerful lobbyists and organizers really raising good policy issues. And of course, one of the dilemmas being that it's so sluggish in that Washington DC you end up offering a little partial solution hoping you can get that through in this in this term. And then you often don't get it. And then if you are able to get it, you're not really taking this with kind of a broad brush that unifies everything. The four billion dollars that USDA announced that they're going to release for various projects like infrastructure projects like meat processing, like food hubs and so on is a pretty good effort to really say, let's take some big major investments and go after them. And that will be, I assume, released in competitive granting programs like the USDA community food projects which has been around for 20 years or more like the local farmers market promotion program, regional food systems development program and other federal programs that have been around a long time and are pretty savvy to what's happening in the trenches. But with this new money, we finally have the chance to look at this in a very holistic way and say, okay, here's a chance to invest in a major way at one time. The downside of that is that we have a lot of opportunities out there. And I've reviewed proposals for some of these programs and what happens is people who have no idea, no background and no vision and no written in this community end up applying for money and spending a lot of time and sometimes getting grants that really work against a community capacity building agenda. I'm not sure at all that the USDA or even our movement has the ability to weed out the wheat from the chaff in that way. I mean, the food hubs, especially is a very good one because most food hubs are cost centers rather than profit centers but people have been convinced to embrace them because it's been made popular by USDA because it's a term that can be sold politically. And that's causing a lot of people to spend a lot of millions of dollars nationally on projects that were not as lucrative as they thought and are requiring more important subsidies as much as 20 years at a time. The other group I point to unfortunately is gone but I mentioned this in the book but the Community Food Security Coalition was a very well developed effort to provide an umbrella for a lot of grassroots activity around the country. It folded in 2010, but it really is responsible for helping me get national visibility. And food security in their view is really about making sure everybody has access to healthy food. It's now being called nutritional security which is an improvement but also very hard to measure. And that coalition was a very interesting thing because it came out of a federal appropriation that formed both the USDA Community Food Projects and the coalition. And the idea was we needed a coalition of members to really keep the program whole over time. And there was a very strong effort to engage low-income people in setting policy and in solving their own issues for creating better food systems where they live. A really wonderful effort but unfortunately that organization is gone. Thank you. And did you want to jump in? You're muted again. There you go. I think I just want to add some anecdotes of some experiences I've had in the last several weeks as I've started to plug in to different groups. One is in the course of my networking literally across the country with people doing work that I'm interested in doing. Ken has been quoted back to me probably a half a dozen times. Like, oh, you should read this report. I'm like, yeah, I know Ken. I know he has this report. So like even if Ken hasn't worked in that area in the case of this one example in Alaska, I think Ken you worked on a project up there 10 years ago, they're still referencing that work. And I think what that highlights to me is there's not a lot of ongoing investment and looking at what's going on these communities. It's done on an intermittent frequency, five years, 10 years, which means you don't have the ability to pivot quickly or you don't have people who are well-informed to pivot quickly. So A, it's great to hear Ken quoted back. It gives me confidence of what's going on. But it highlights to me that there's more opportunity here for people like Ken to provide this insight into these communities. And then I think the second anecdote I wanted to share goes to what Ken alluded to with more awareness of the tribal communities and their solutions. I was in a conference for two days last week where almost every speaker acknowledged the tribal community lands that they operated on and or the community they worked with. And for, it was just really refreshing and it could have been a gesture and not true affiliation, but the fact that everyone made a conscious effort to acknowledge the tribal community that lived on the land that they were operating in, it just, it was very reassuring and felt like a sort of a ground-swelling of acknowledgement that maybe we will look outside of the traditional boxes of finding solutions. So those are just two things I think I'd like to add that are more like anecdotal experiences to align with what Ken has already shared. Thank you, Anne. Yeah. Anyone else with questions? Yeah, class, please. Yeah. I would like to pick up on this comment of scalable versus replicable because that's really what we have been working on, right? We have an understanding that each community is unique. Each community has unique, not just because of soil and climate and water, but also because of the socioeconomic circumstances of any community. So that's best replicable because you're finding customized solutions. Scalable is a support structure to assist communities to develop an understanding of their system and the tools and support structures they need and make those available on a scalable level. So I really see this difference, right? Replicable, yes, understood, but then there needs to be an overhead structure in place that supports the communities in their attempts to replicate someone else's model. First of all, finding a success model that applies to that particular condition and then have access to resources. And Ken, what God has excited about your work is that you have identified replication models. So the question now is, how can we bring those to scale so that there is a organized, concerted effort to reach out to communities and assist them in this process? Does that make sense? Well, I think there actually, I mean, there is a process in most metro areas of some food planning, a food planning council of some kind or some entity that's trying to coordinate that. Typically they are not well-funded and they are typically going project by project and they're coordinating more informally than formally. And most political leaders I know of are thinking only in terms of the next election cycle and not making long-term plans for how do we create the best system for our community over the long haul? There's a, I mean, I think one of the, I think one of the reasons I've had the impact I've had is because my work has been very small scale and it's been very highly mobile and very flexible and been able to sort of intervene in very discreet ways a little bit more like an acupuncturist than a medical doctor in terms of looking at the specific nodes or leverage points that would make things better. And I think mostly I hear people talk about going to scale as if that's always going to be an answer when in fact it's large scale systems that have caused the trouble that we have. And the idea of having a sort of well-funded, permanent planning capacity and coordinating capacity in each metro region and in many rural and most rural areas is really attractive. But also it's a very expensive process and it requires a lot of capacity building in every region I've worked so far. And it also requires sustained resources over time which is very difficult to mount politically right now. So there's some good challenges in doing that but it's certainly a very desirable goal to really be able to create that infrastructure that makes this work better over time. It involves tax policy as much as anything. Doug, please jump in. Who's that for Jerry? You. Oh, for me, I sounded like Ted. Oh, sorry. Here's a thought that I've had for a long time is could we do better with small scale agricultural projects if we combine them with habitat so that people would live on the land that they work and own? I think of the Italian hill towns. And the way the farm is right outside the back door. Well, there's actually some several immigrant communities who have exactly that vision in their mind when they're moving to the States right now. And there's a group of Somalia Bantu farmers in Maine that I met with several years ago and they have now been able to obtain money to purchase an item of land, a plot of land. And the working diagram for their vision would be to have a cluster of houses clustered together, farmland around them so they can live in a village more like the way they're, you know, they're accustomed to living and also not be isolated on a farm a mile from everybody else. And, you know, the monk community here in the Twin Cities has had a similar vision, but they're not, they're more pursuing a commercial vision right now because of the realities they face. And as I go in the book, I think in some ways to have a healthy food system, we need to go back to sort of an indigeneity which is really a matter of people living close to land, sharing insights about what they see happening on the land and learning together and, you know, giving food to people because they need the food, not because it's a commercial venture. And I think we'll have a lot to learn from the indigenous food practices of the tribal nations as we open ourselves more to that as well. So, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. And, you know, in terms of low income communities now, most of the programming I've seen is dedicated to giving food handouts rather than developing places for people to work together to learn about growing food together to be, you know, to expand their skills in growing food together. Because a lot of low income people have been doing this for decades already anyway, but really supporting that with policy infrastructure and tax policy and, you know, grant programs and investments that really make that as strong as possible. Because I think essentially what you're targeting is that, you know, unless you're someone who knows how to work the land and knows how to garden and knows those things practically, it's very difficult to learn how to eat well. It's very difficult to learn how to treat other elements of the food system well. And that's really the core of making things better, I think. And that's why my definition of regenerative generations is a very kind of primal definition of the sense of being able to produce the inputs that make farming possible and food system possible from within the community that you're talking about. One of the things I learned about sort of the process of Indian removal was that as we moved Native Americans off onto smaller and smaller plots of the worst and worst land, we would also subdivide that land into plots. And any plots that, then they would send land agents back later and any plots that weren't being used, they would just reclaim, they would play like that, you're not working the soil, so we get it back. So the reservations were basically chopped up and cut up and taken away piecemeal by land agents. And this is one of 50,000 ways in which we basically, you know, cut away their form of subsistence. But also one of my big ahas from reading 1491 and 1493 by Charles Mann and Dart Emu and a few other things about aboriginals is that most Natives in continents before colonization managed the landscape together, they didn't have plots of land. The idea of ownership of a small chunk of land was completely foreign to them and was not what they were doing. And so the changes we brought on this entire system are so profound and so hinder sage management of the landscape and the soil and the people on it that large movements like land trusts or other kinds of things seemed to me like maybe they're smart, I don't know. Like, you know, in Patagonia, Yvon Schwinnard and his buddy who passed away buying up huge chunks of land, I don't know what they're doing with it but it could be that managed well that could actually be a good thing. But, and then Samid is putting in the chat here that, you know, Gates is the largest farm landholder in the United States. What is up with that? Right? So there's these gigantic issues swirling around farming that go back forever. My favorite book about the land issue would be The Relentless Business of Treaties by Martin Case who's a Minnesota writer. And it really describes how the treaty process itself was a process of declaring the land alienable for private property. And, you know, the most dramatic thing about that book is that most of the people who signed treaties on the white side were basically signing the treaties with their relatives, with their business partners. And it was a very incestuous system where you would totally not pass any conflict of interest test we might have today. But essentially people were signing treaties with the Indians and then acquiring the land because it was now private property instead of being communal property and then selling the land to other settlers at a profit. So that the whole business of speculation was built into the whole settlement system from the get-go. And of course William Cronin also has done some wonderful books about the ways that tribal people took care of the land in New England. And his book on natures metropolis is a wonderful book about how forestry, farming, beef ship, cattle shipments, railroad industry all shaped the growth of Colorado, of Chicago. It's a really phenomenally, phenomenally research and very in-depth critique and not critique but kind of a description of how all of that played out in one city. Love that. Doug, did you want to jump in? Yes, in my childhood growing up the word farmer had a kind of negative cast to it which I think still exists. And the word has its origin in fixed rent or fixed lease. So you're paying a big part of the crop to lease the land. And the person who did that was a farmer. So it implies from the beginning a kind of class structure that's not so attractive. So I'm wondering if we need to play with that word. Yeah, I mean, actually in German the word farmer is close, I'm sure it's a bit better than I do but it sort of has a condition of working the land. It's sort of, it's Bauer someone who's building or was kind of working the land. And so it's very true that the farming industry has very caught up in land rents and who gets money from the farmer's labor. What I'm excited about now is a lot of my friends who are young emerging farmers are posting on Facebook pictures, one farm family shows pictures of them snuggling with their hogs and really getting down and kind of, you know playing with the animals and feeling very much kinship with them. And I think that what I'm seeing among some of the emerging farmers released to our privilege enough to do this is a real sense of we're farming because we're having a good time and we're connecting with directly with buyers who support us to do that. And I'm not, I mean the word, I'm not sure English has a better word than farmer but if we find one we should certainly use it. I will say that when I often use, I work at a farmer's market and a farm is grower. I do hear a lot about grower like, you know and the way my farmer I work with talks about her plants is kind of like how I talk about my kids to Ken's point. And I mean grower, I think has a slightly more positive connotation or at least can be reinterpreted in this context to maybe be about like raising your plants, growing your plants. Although in some farm communities grower is more of a person who's bigger and more kind of vested in the system and distinguishes themselves from farmers by being larger and being kind of above being a farmer. So. And this is why I value Ken's experience. I only know my farm. He knows a lot of farms. I remember being disoriented when I first moved to California at high Ken a long time ago. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that people, I heard people say grower not farmer. I was from the Northeast. I was used to farmer and the grower was disoriented. And I think you're right, and that it does, to me it lands like more of a manufacturer than a steward. I like steward a lot. A steward doesn't imply necessarily growing or raising anything, but for me, the steward works really well. Stewards of the land. And if you ask some people what they grow, they said like I grow soil or grass and actually there's animals feeding on the grass, but it's really the cycle around the grass. Wendell Berry wrote beautifully about this years ago. He said that farmer grows soil in the community of the food is the byproduct. Yeah. Jordan? I just wanted to get your sense Ken on based on what you're seeing around the country. There's some, there's a growing consensus around this need to completely change the way we produce and consume food as a human species. And there's some timeframe in which we need to do that in order to have the best shot at the total regenerative project of our planet. And I'm curious in your mind, you've been working, you talked earlier about these little partial solutions that aren't taking the broad brush that unifies everything into a total solution that might actually work within the amount of time that we have. So I'm kind of curious from your perspective, what's out there that has the best shot at succeeding at that total broad brush that unifies everything into something that might actually work within this decade and how comprehensive in your mind does that need to be? From what I'm hearing from Klaus, there's very small sub 5% of our food system that's actually local regenerative. And so it seems like it's a total halt, like overhaul that needs to happen within a single decade. And I'm not really seeing that we're on track for that. So can you shed any light just on that total project? Well, I think, you know, it's been urgent for an entire time in my career and I've never felt these changes could be made a single decade. And I think mostly because resistance is so strong in the political system we now are coping with. And typically big ideas don't get an opportunity to flourish until there's a major crisis where the kind of the obvious prevailing solutions have fallen away. I think that the efforts to build a food system and to really, you know, think about food system construction are pretty rare. Even people who talk about systemic answers are still mostly talking about we like this farm, we like this food business, we like this initiative because that's what people have control over right now. You know, if I get much larger than that discussion, there's very little political support, there's very little money and there's very little vision to really keep that moving forward in a sustained way. So I don't think that there's a single place out there where there's someone who has the idea and we should just fund them to make it happen. I think it's happening in thousands of ways around the world in ways that are small and marginalized and need higher visibility and much stronger financial resources to pull it off. I don't see a 10-year timeline being realistic given my background, watching change over 50 years. But I think that the fact that you have foundations now saying how do we build systems rather than how do we fund programs, that's a hopeful sign, but few of them really understand what that means. The fact that we have a food systems partnership at the grant at the USDA shows thinking about systems, but again, it doesn't really play out in practice very well yet because most people are sort of content to support a single firm, a single good person, a single idea rather than really sitting down and building the trust and constructing systems in a sustained way at a local level. And this goes back to the question I was asking you earlier, Ken, which is like, is there a politician or a movement that kind of has the right answers to a lot of these systemic questions, even if the hope of their achieving them is like near zero, but has anybody got that? And so you said, like, not really, and now you sort of said it again. And it's just making me really, Jones, to have at least a policy map for what that could look like, a good description of what things one could implement and what things one could do to make that all work. Let me go to Doug in class. Yeah, Ken is you're thinking that climate change might force this time to happen more rapidly. If we start getting breakdowns in the supply chain, the local communities are gonna demand new ways of doing things. Well, I hope it will. You know, obviously we've had very strong signals about climate change for decades that we've been ignoring. So our capacity to ignore those is quite high. The pandemic certainly pushed many communities I work with to think much more carefully about planning for the future of food in their own communities. I'm actually thinking the pandemic is having a stronger impact than the climate change because it's been more immediate to so many more families. And I really feel like we're most vulnerable in terms of, you know, immediately in terms of viruses or other illnesses that may break out because of the bad conditions we're living in. But I mean, it's essentially, you know, obviously young people have really mobilized around climate change in a very effective and wonderful manner. They don't have much put purchase politically yet. And we have, you know, huge funders trying to prevent all the nations from really addressing climate change effectively. You have some communities that have gone totally off the grid or have found ways to be carbon neutral in the next 20 years at the community level. So you have this whole ferment of activity is happening wherever it can happen. And, you know, I mean, if climate change doesn't scare us we're going to be dead, but the pandemic may get us first and it's scared some of us, but not all of us. And it's also caused this reaction that we're also dealing with at the same time. So it's a very complex reality we're all coping with. Before I pass the floor to Klaus, I think it was Ray Taylor who was briefly on the call who sent me an email earlier today and give me an acronym, not an acronym, but an abbreviation that I hadn't seen before. I'd never heard of multiple bread basket failure or that it has like MBBF. And I'm like, holy crap, because, you know, we're seeing already sort of exaggerated weather events and the thawing of the tundra and a bunch of other things happening where what used to grow here doesn't grow here anymore et cetera, et cetera. So is that just a specific example of how the climate crisis might actually precipitate change? Are there other things in that? I mean, it also points to really dark scenarios where there isn't enough food to go around. Well, and we're having, I mean, we've had not and I haven't had enough food to go around in most of the United States for as long as I've been alive. And that has not resulted in us making, developing a system to make sure that everybody had enough food. Do you agree with the statement that we have enough food that's just not distributed? Like we waste a third of the food, et cetera, et cetera, all those stats like we're producing enough food to feed everybody it's just not getting to the people who actually need food or is that wrong? Well, I think it's wrong. I mean, I think first of all, the food waste issue was sort of surface because it was a softer way to challenge the food system than to try to really go after a commodity policy per se. But most farmers are raising raw materials for industrial processing. They're not growing food for humans. And the amount of food being imported in the United States is rising steadily. We're importing most of our produce right now from Canada and Mexico, even though we have very large productive produce farms in the United States. And that's why the commodity industry is so problematic because it's really not raising food for humans. And I think we have now built entire metropolitan regions with millions of inhabitants that is assuming that food can be imported and not raised on local farms. And the infrastructure supports very large scale of exporting of food abroad and very large scale importing of food from abroad. And what's really ironic for me is that in Hawaii, Alaska, South Carolina and Maine, it's the same reality. We have communities that are importing 85% of what they eat and exporting 95% of what they produce. And that's just a massive, and again French system that's paying a lot of, paying a lot of political leaders, that's paying for a lot of chemical industry and machinery industry. And until we sort of dismantle that, where there's a good discussion now at USDA about dismantling the monopolies in the food industry. And that's it's way overdue to have that conversation because we've known that for several decades. But I think we're at a time where that will be at least addressed by a democratic administration for the next year or two. If they get anything passed, Congress, Klaus, what was yours? Yeah, on the political front, there is a lot of energy, pinkery, coca, there are a number of bills floating to shift the agricultural system. The big thing of course is in the farm bill. So NSAC, the National Sustainability, Sustainable Agricultural Coalition in partnership with the Sierra Club, Kistekwant and so on. We're pulling together an umbrella structure to engage with the farm bill because the allocations, the cop insurance program, for example, and the entire subsidies are going all to the commodity farmer. And they're maintaining a system that is as inefficient as the energy system is. So you see the energy sector still gets billions of dollars in subsidies. Here's the same in the agricultural sector. So there is a lot of energy in the political process, but as everybody knows, this thing is totally paralyzed and there are two distinctly different directions that the industry is pushing into. Now, you have this whole Gilgates and impossible meats, Monsanto, by pushing into a direction of taking protein and putting it into the lab, basically taking plant-based protein extracts and turning them into meat-like substances. That is a perpetuation of an industrial system that reduces the harm on nature, but it doesn't change, right? It's not regenerative. It's simply lowers the amount of damage that's being done. And we're beyond this because we have to now really regenerate. So then there is an effort and this is what we have been working on, which is really spreading across a number of platforms. And this is to assist communities to take ownership of the ecosystem, to take ownership of their water supply, of their biodiversity and their health of their environment. And that starts with food. You have to really get into food. And the whole notion is that in order to restore soil, you have to apply that at the regional level because soil is unique. The types of soil, condition of soil, you're dealing with climate, with water accessibility, with socioeconomics and so on. That is unique to each community. So there are no top-down solutions possible. So the idea that we can not get a bill out there in Washington that somehow fixes at community level the food system, it's not going to happen, not in a regenerative fashion. So the system has to be turned upside down to where solutions are coming from the bottom up. But at the same time, you need a support structure. So once we have identified here is what we need in this community, then you have to be able to find access to resources. That's one thing. And then even more important is access to the supply chain. And so until the industrial, agricultural system, the supply chain decides to support these regional and local efforts in a way of we guarantee will buy your product. And then you have to change out the crop because you're out of water, you need to put nitrogen into the soil and things like that. That is the key issue. So what we are suggesting is to work within communities where for example, the local school system, the hospital system, corporate caterers are starting to engage at the hyper-local level for sourcing and assist in rebuilding a supply chain because it's not just a farmer. Now you need an aggregator, you need a processor, you need logistics and so on to pull all that together. So that's basically where we have been pushing away with across a number of NGOs and a number of attempts to put this to the test. And one, a couple of sections of my book that I like would talk about the way that farmers have interacted with grocers and what I'm experiencing in my consulting practice is that the only grocers that are reliably going to purchase locally are independently owned stores who really have the farmers as their constituents and who I really have a reason to say we're connecting with the farmers who are around us. There's a very important story in the book about Whole Foods in Omaha, Nebraska where a group of organic farmers asked to supply the Whole Foods store and there was a very supportive buyer, a young woman who was trying to make good things happen at her store and she was able to get a very good display for the local farms in the middle of the entryway. So every time someone walked in, they were walking by local produce from Iowa farmers across the river. And the problem was that as soon as that was well-established, her bosses basically told her we need to, we found another source that's just cheaper, we need to cut out the Iowa farms because we have a local, we have another supplier that can do it with less cost. And that person who was the good buyer decided to move on and the store made it clear that they were not being committed to that. And essentially, as long as the store is owned by people from a distant community who are responsive to shareholders and to cutting costs more than building a strong community, there's really no way that can last over time. And you saw Whole Foods as it was positioning itself to be sold to treat farmers worse even before the sale happened because they wanted to show that their margins were as low as possible to be attractive for sale. And again, that's when the dilemmas are trying to go to scale too quickly. And now they're Amazon, go ahead and go. Yep. That lower price might be a penny. Yeah, right. Or a fraction of a cent. I mean, they will move billions of dollars based on tiny differences that are really significant for farmers' growers stewards, but you know, you know differently than for them. So Ken, there's a big gap in the story that I want to invite you to speak into. On the one hand, there's efforts like yours, classes and others, and others on the ground to generate and support sensible, rooted in place, rooted in relationship systems that actually work. And that's great. And then on the other end of the scale, we have Whole Foods, Amazon, Cargill, et cetera, et cetera, that whole story with its interwoven relationships with public policy and taxpayer subsidy and so forth. There's a big lot of gap between those two. I don't think, well, I don't know. I don't think that you think that growing pockets of 50 or 100 or 5,000 of these small things shift the big system. What does? What gets us from here to there? What enables not just the proliferating horizontal scale of well-connected community engagements, but what changes the most in the game? Is that something that you think about much or does that you figure that somebody else's job to think about? Well, I mean, I think about all the time, although I've mostly found that the action is more productive and more fulfilling at the local level because people are self-organizing rather than kind of creating a broader structure that's really focused more on imagery and political imagery especially and in short-term political cycles. But you have, say, Cargill and General Mills investing in production of more sustainable grains and you have the Kerns of Thing, which was mentioned in the webinar last week. And those are very positive steps forward, but also the success of those depends on making the commodity system more responsive to a new perennial grain. And it still means farmers are locked into a commodity system and perhaps locked into trading with Cargill rather than in a system that they have some ownership of. And I think the policy answer to this right now is that's really screaming right now with the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition is breaking up the monopolies because as long as the monopoly power is held so strongly, there's no answer within that system. It's going to run by its own logic and it will not be permanently responsive to the needs of people who are trying to feed actual folks in their communities. But that's a tough issue. I certainly hope it succeeds but it's gonna be the, if we don't break up the monopolies policy that really keeps people small, we will basically have, we'll make a commodity system a little bit more responsive, a little bit friendlier and with the face of regeneration without the reality of it being managed by the people who need to run the system. Well, we did break up the monopolies 100 some odd years ago. I guess we just got to do it again every now and then. So I appreciate you raising that. I mean, for me there's two direct values of the small scale work that you're doing. One is that it's good for the people involved obviously. It's actually real benefit for real people. The other is that it's the proof case that the big guys always say, oh, the little stuff's not possible. The organic stuff's not possible. The sense of the sensitive stuff is not possible. It has to be done the way we do it because it's the only way that works. And this gives the lie to that which is a powerful, powerful force to have, have examples on the ground that show that. So thank you. Well, thank you. It means a lot to you for that from you after all the years I've been following your work as much as well as I could too. And I wanted to tell a quick story about this. The, oh, if I can remember it now. I'll have to come back to it later. For people who wonder what we're chatting about, Ken and I met like a half a hundred years ago when I was at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and he was doing this work then. And I'm just really impressed with how deeply and thoroughly you've stuck with it. Thank you. Thank you for the inspiration you gave me back in those days as well and the way you stuck with what you do. You know, the Alfonso Morales is one of the people who did a blurb on my book in the back. And he has a book out which I think is really interesting but it's quoted in the book too but he said, you can't build communities solely by cutting margins. So I think that's a really wonderful way to think about this because basically as long as the economic discussions about how do we reduce costs, you can build successful businesses that way and you can compete with your other businesses that way but this idea that you can somehow build community or builds resilient communities or build regenerative communities out of that is just really a fallacy. So what does it take to build regenerative communities? What are the underpinnings? What are the infrastructures, superstructures, other sorts of things that are needed? Well, you know, I hopefully Crossroads Resource Center becomes a part of the infrastructure that helps us to happen. The, you know, I think ICIS is a process of self-organization if you look at this from a systemic perspective, you look for people to self-organize answers that are suitable to their place and time given the unique assets of their community and the limitations and obstacles they face. And it's, you know, and that's really the promise of democracy is we self-organize to make our lives better for the broader good. And that means supporting self-organizing. At least that's what it says on the box top of democracy, right? On the box top, yes. You know, of course, the European Union has a lot of flaws but they do have this concept of subsidiarity where you basically try to best decision-making power at the local level as much as possible so that local people can make the decisions they need to make for their own lives. And then you have higher level policies at the municipal level or the county level or regional or European level which shape the framework that allows those policies to flourish very thick, very critically right now. I'm not saying it's a model policy but the concept of subsidiarity is something we barely talk about in this country. And I think that would be a really essential part of any regenerative paradigm. I would think that in terms of fostering community activity with serious resources, so people aren't spending two thirds their time raising money for the next program. One thing I'm talking to mention to Anna in a conversation this week, we have thousands of food core volunteers all around the country who are getting paid minimum wage and they're doing most of the difficult work. I mean, the terrific thing would be to leverage of what they earn with, you know, another 50% of what another double what they earn and make sure they have living wage jobs so they can keep doing that over time but also have long-term operational expenses for groups that are formed, that are diversely representative that it really include people of color with a strong voice that include low income people with a strong voice and are really addressing long-term food planning in a very sustained way where they live. That would be the policy infrastructure I'd like to see. We don't have that with the USDA now and we also have to adopt policies like I said to break up monopolies and break up the institutions on the political systems that really frustrate that self-organizing activity that really allows us to do systemic work, moving the levers of change we see as they change over time in each community where we're working. Isn't that a brief question? Is there some kind of solution to the very difficult traveling salesman-like problem of what to grow, where and when, given commodity market pricing, given all the different variables associated with what's happening because some crops take a long lead time, some trees take years to mature, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's these crazy global markets where if all of a sudden most of Asia decides to build shrimp farms, suddenly the price of shrimp plunges to nearly nothing and then most of them, many of them are underwater for example, so literally and figuratively. So is anybody working at the systems level to try to even out the flows, make it so that farmers can actually choose wisely? What to do? Or is it just like, hey, let's roll the dice this season? And for the first thing I'd say is we're all working at the systems level because we're all feeling, we're all facing systems and there's no like single global systems level that we can sort of tap into. It's really a necessary series of global to very, very local, to hyper local that are all systems, all changing rapidly and all kind of throwing us surprises on a weekly basis. And that's one of the reasons that Policy Center in Washington DC seldom works because how do you write a policy that works for Maine as well as Arizona? It's a very, very, it's a really impossible task. But the key is obviously to have resources in the locale that stay in the locale, that allow people to invest in what they understand to be an answer at some level in the global trade thing. And again, we've been arguing this in the World Trade Talks for decades as well that we need to have the ability to protect our boundaries. And I don't mean in terms of building a wall around the country, but there's a becoming a discussion with the World Trade Organization which I'm not close to, but I'm hearing some signals of it which that nations should be free to set their own food policies and that the commodity policy, which is global should have less regulation and should be less, should be more about what we call free trade, but that basically every country and I would guess I would argue every bioregion has the responsibility and the need to have a boundary around itself so it can insulate itself from global pressures where people step in and do something too rapidly, too big that undermines my work in one part of the country or one part of the world. Thank you. Jordan and Pals? You wanna go, Chod? Sure, sure. So I come from a different background in that I've spent a lot of my career building things. And so when you are building a roadway or a dam or one of those things, you have an intention and you have a set of existing conditions and you have a timeframe and a set of constraints in which you have to transform from what is to the different intention. And I'm really concerned, I'm really hopeful as I get further into these conversations to hear about the tremendous number of heroic good people like the thousands of food core volunteers you just mentioned and your work can. I'm also a little bit concerned that we're in a mode where we can recognize that what got us here, that no additional amount of doing that will cause the transformation that we're talking about within the amount of time that we have to get it done before my daughter and her children are suffering in the dystopia that we'd all like to prevent. And so it seems like there's growing awareness that any idea that there'll be any political solution to this or any movement of Gates Foundation or the Cargill's doing more sustainable things or big policy shifts to break up the monopolies like those things aren't gonna happen in the amount of time that we have. And so I guess the other hypothesis is that we need to do something like what we're all talking about but we need to completely take responsibility for building it ourselves. And it probably needs to be a combination of the pieces of it that we're all seeing. It seems like every individual, like I think everybody's aware that the, that this is a process of relocalizing and recomplexifying all the systems because that's the only regenerative pattern that there can be is ultimately the restoration of that individual and local sovereignty. And so if you imagine that, and that if that only happened in one out of 195 nations in this decade or this 20 years, it wouldn't matter because the whole living system's connected. So it's like, okay, well, we have to completely change the patterns of production and consumption in millions of different locales around the world simultaneously within 10 to 20 years and we can't rely on any politicians or any elements of the existing corporate, religious or political structures to get it done. So it can only come through the individual sovereign action of individual and local communities. However, what we're seeing in all these places is that when individuals wake up and they realize this, they all lack the resources and the infrastructure and the ideas and the training and the capacity to be able to do it on their own. So I guess this is what Klaus was saying a little bit earlier was it seems really apparent that there's a need to think through the infrastructure. It's like if it's each individual's responsibility to transform their individual and local system, it's our job collectively to create those ladders to success. And so just one, I guess the hypothesis that some of us are coming to is we need to create a massive and widespread international movement of individuals who are going through some kind of a educational and orientational experience to wake up to the realities that were fundamentally accelerating with technology, the rate that we're applying destructive patterns and that we need to individually change the way we produce and consume in order to reverse those patterns and start modeling new patterns. And there needs to be the creation of some very sophisticated infrastructure so that any individual or local community can go through kind of the mapping processes like Ken and Klaus have been talking about to go in and be empowered to self-organize and do their own individual local assessments but then based on the results of those short-term blueprints being connected up by the global community to the resources they need. And so I'm just, and I guess my hypothesis is it's the people on this phone call that need to somehow come together and get that done. We've all got a lot of great starting points. Ken's got a lot of examples. We've got legal infrastructure and organizational infrastructure and people. We've got technological platforms built to empower people to learn together and implement their own self-organized local instances of the patterns of success that they find that might be applicable. And I'm just, I'm concerned that we're all looking for the organization that's gonna do that. It's not out there and we're gonna need to do that if we're gonna succeed. That's probably like Klaus's ideas. Yeah, if I may just pile on on this. I mean, I've given up some time back and I'm very engaged in the political process with business climate leaders and citizen climate lobby and I'm actively meeting the senators and Congress people and so on. And you realize that this is not going to happen, right? I mean, this is going to take way too much time. But Ken, you wish just saying that what has to happen is the development of networks, people self-organizing, right? And just as you said right now, this brings us back to the replicable versus scalable idea here. Replicable totally realized that each community has unique needs. At the same time, we can also see that there is a great hunger in particularly the younger generation to have meaningful change happen. So it takes a multi-pronged outreach to educate participants in the market to help them understand where the trigger points are and the leverage points are but then provide resources, training and advise expertise for communities to develop here. And much of that is not so much technical as it is socio-economic because you have to have people understand that in your community, your local zoning laws, your regulatory frames that you set up in your community are preventing us from implementing vital changes that could easily lead us to adaptations that we can't even fathom right now. We can't sit back and wait for some solution from Washington. It's not going to happen. So it has to be bottom up. Everything we need to do, we know. Your book basically outlines it. We know what needs to be done. So it's now a matter of mustering the energy, the will. And I'm at the same page with Jordan. We are, you know, last call here. We can't miss another coin season because the industrial agriculture ripping open the entire, all of the soil, you know, letting the carbon steam out of the soil screwing up the entire water cycle on a planetary level. We don't have a lot of time to fix that. There are no 10, 20 years going as we are right now without leading this to a shipwreck. So we need to mobilize. And I know that's, I mean, my gosh, I spent 40 years in the corporate world. The idea of mobilizing, even five years ago, I would have thought, you have lost your marbles here, but we need to mobilize. I mean, we absolutely need to muster the will and the energy to engage here at a serious level because we're in serious trouble. Two things before passing them to Gil. One is, I may need to watch some cute cat videos at the end of this call just to like bring spirits back up because this is just, it's heavy, it's hard. And then second, Ken, I think you were about to jump in. I was gonna ask if you wanted to jump in as we're getting near the end of our call time. I just wanted to say that, I mean, resources have to be mobilized, but there are people all over the world doing this and they have been doing it for decades. And there are tribal people in remote places that have been raising crops for themselves or bringing quinoa back or bringing heritage potatoes back. And there are people in Alaska who are bringing back traditional ways of raising potatoes that date back tens of, 14,000 years, perhaps. It's not that we have to sort of start from scratch. Mostly none of this is visible in the media. None of this is visible to the political systems. And it's all under resource because of this extraction of wealth that my book describes. And it's really more a matter of knowing what's happening out there intervening in ways that are appropriate to that and supportive of people who have taken those steps having power over their own work and not simply coming in with a model and sort of dominating that discussion because someone has money or someone has political access. That's the challenge I think. And that's why the conversation about mobilization makes me nervous because it's being mobilized and it's underway already all over the world. And it's more a matter of sort of untapping that self-organizing and giving it resource that is really the issue in my thinking. And then once we've done that then we have to talk to those people who will develop structures that are pretty sensible to themselves. And also very locally adaptable because this this emergent thing that's happening all over the place is very nicely adaptable locally if we allow it the freedom in the elbow room to adapt. I mean, in many cases, there's legal restrictions for doing a bunch of things or farmers are in debt so that they actually don't have a lot of options for what to do or name your restriction. But if we can figure out how to loosen their bonds a lot of local activities might actually get somewhere. Gil, you need to wave the magic mute wand. There you go. You're amazing. See, cool, I like it. I posted a little further up in the chat sort of flippantly that maybe it's time for us to reread us some Murray Bookchin but I'm taking myself even more seriously listening to Klaus and Ken here. For people who are not familiar with him check him out, anarchist, ecological writer, profound critic, one of the source fountains for Institute for Local Self-Iliance. And Jerry of course has him in there. Okay, you've taken over my screen so I can't read something. I'm sorry. Murray was also one of the source fountains for the Kurdish anarchist resistance that is not well known in the United States but it was actually an anarchist sub-nation, ecologically oriented feminist and fierce sacrificed by President Obama when he didn't deal with Assad, they were wiped out when the US support was withdrawn. In Murray's book, The Next Revolution, an article called The Ecological Crisis in the Nietzsche Remake Society, he argues that the most fundamental message of social ecology, that was his term of art that he used, that social ecology advances is that the very idea of dominating nature stems from domination of human by human. For an ecological society developed first, the inter-human domination must be eradicated, capitalism and its alter ego, state socialism have brought all the historic problems of domination to a head and the market economy if it's not stopped will succeed in destroying our natural environment as a result of its grow or die ideology. So, aside from the flag waving of all that, what there is in his work and in the communities that have built on that work is very real practical examples on the ground of the kind of voluntary collaborative coordination that Ken and Klaus have been talking about and I think we would do well to dive back into that. Thanks Gil. I remember long ago deciding to read up on these anarchists, crazy anarchist people and so I picked up a book by Kropotkin and I'm like, oh good, he's like a crazy, crazy anarchist, right? And I read the book and like the first half of the book is all about cooperation and nature, how termites cooperate, how wolves cooperate and I'm like, ooh, this guy's really frightening. Frightening what? He wasn't frightening at all. He was like totally talking about really sensible stuff. It was like separately, one of my favorite books in the world is The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi and at one point I read a refutation instead of it was a critique of the book by Murray Rothbard who's the head of the Mises Institute which should give you a clue and I read Rothbard's letter about Polanyi's book and Rothbard commits every one of the sins he's accusing Polanyi of committing, none of which are committed by Polanyi and I realized that this letter by Rothbard is basically waving to his followers to say don't even go read this evil, vile, filthy thing. It's dangerous to you, don't touch it because if you actually open it and read it you'll be like, oh, this is pretty sensible. He's not trying to get us to go back to the noble savage. He's trying to say, hey, look what shit capitalism brought and industrialism brought when it started and it totally makes sense but these works have been demonized extremely effectively the way that democratic socialism is being demonized this very moment very effectively. It's especially demonized by Mises and his folks because if you come forward with a libertarian impulse which is who Mises speaks to, you have Murray talking about the same, sort of the same sort of libertarian human freedom voluntary association impulse but taking it in a collaborative rather than an individualistic direction. See, if only we could have a cage match between Murray and Mises and all those that'd be entertaining and everybody would learn a lot. Well, you must have some holographic WWF producers in your... And we've got like GAN algorithms and GPT-3 that could reconstitute their writings, right? So this could work. We could just haul some modern technology out and do a cage match. Well, I think I've decided on this call to organize a reading group. And part of what I'm hoping OGM can do is weave some of these things together. And I realize that this is like a bun it's like a hairball inside a hairball next to a thorny thicket of twine. But if we can make our way through it making some sense together I think we can actually piece together some of these arguments so that everybody doesn't have to read all of BookChimp, for example but rather we can make use of what he showed up with and the eco feminists and native practitioners and Tyson Yungaporta and kind of bring it together into understandable digestible narratives that people can pick up and go, oh, I'll have what they're having. Ken, it appears that you are going to have the last word on this call unless someone else wants it but still I'd like to pass the mic back to you so to speak because this has been really fascinating and I'm thrilled that you've been with us here. Well, it's wonderful to connect with all of you and thank you for taking time to listen to that. So I guess my last word would just be that I hope some of you will read the book and spread the word around because I think it is a valuable way to kind of both have some stories for inspiration but also some ideas for how to do this work in the most effective way. And I look forward to some other conversations down the road as we have a chance. Thank you, same here. Gil, is that you raising your hand again? Nope. Okay, that's from before. Well, we're still not quite at the half. Anybody else want to chime in and last word and put a bow on this? Dan? I'll just say I really want to extend my appreciation that everyone made the time to listen to Ken. I think I was really grateful to have been introduced to him and to have read his book. It's been part of this journey and I think that's the one thing I would say I really appreciate is the folks who are working in this space really want to lift anybody up who wants to work in this space and their willingness to lean in and collaborate and help bring people along with what's been done and bring you with them as they move forward. It's just, it's a really positive community. I have yet to come across anybody who has not been that way and Ken I think exemplifies that. So just I really appreciate him making the time and I appreciate you all making the time to talk with him and listen. Along those lines, Ken, any recommendations for where we can join conversations, participate, learn more, that kind of thing? I mean, I think NSAC is probably a pretty good place to plug in as far as that goes and the Federation Southern Co-ops is having a webinar pretty soon about cooperation because they're one of the pioneers of cooperation. One final story I wanted to pass on to, I was thinking about Ken Wah as I mentioned that and I got a contact from some people in Central America who were trying to raise Ken Wah and they basically were told that we will invest in you if you pull the warehouse to export the Ken Wah but not if you wanna feed people who live in your community and that's the sort of nexus of where we are. People all over trying to do that and just finding the obstacles are kind of this bureaucratic normal thinking and that's what we have to cut through. Crazy, we're living crazy times. May we all survive them and may our children's children have a better world than we do. Thank you all. Thanks everybody. Thank you, thank you. I will post this call on YouTube and send the link out and we'll lather rinse, repeat. Thank you. Okay.