 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. How is your anxiety level today? I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii is My Vandyon, live streaming every other Friday on Think Tech Hawaii and available thereafter 24-7 on YouTube and ThinkTechHawaii.com. When I begin to feel overwhelmed by the apparently catastrophic trajectory of human endeavors, one of my favorite things, comfort thoughts is Dr. Elizabeth Saturus' explanation of how we got here and nature's next logical evolutionary step. That's why the title of this show is Beyond Darwin, Saturus, Science, and Hope. Dr. Elizabeth Saturus is an evolution biologist, futurist, author, speaker, and consultant on living systems design. It's been a year and a half since we've been in the studio together. Come back, Elizabeth. So good to be here again, Kaui. So there's been in this year and a half just sort of reflecting, it's a different world and it feels like we've been put in a little bit of a pressure cooker as far as catastrophic events and unease. And not a day goes by when I don't have a conversation with someone about this upset and tension. And I always come back to your words. Recently, I heard an interview you did on Tree Sisters, which I'll post the link to on the comments of the YouTube once the show is up. But I loved your simple explanation of the organisms and how they evolved. Can you just take us right through that? Yes, it's interesting because in school we get taught Darwinian evolution and it kind of starts as though the first half of evolution was just a primal sludge and then it gets going when you've got visible sized creatures on the planet. And actually what happened in the first half of evolution is the most fascinating. The creatures of Earth that had the whole planet to themselves for half of evolution were bacteria, ancient bacteria. And they are more like us in a way. There are most ancient ancestors and they're more like us than any other creatures since because they're the only other creatures who actually caused global problems and solved them. And they were problems of hunger and of pollution, exactly the kinds of problems that we're facing today. So that's what makes their story so fascinating. And I call them as they evolved the bubblers, the bluegreens and the breathers, the BBBs because that makes it easy. Bubblers ferment things. They were the first ones. They fermented the free sugars and acids on the planet and they gobbled them all up in order to make their lifestyle work and they coated the whole planet. Well how did they solve that starvation process? They invented a new way of being which I call the bluegreens which was making your own food from what was left which was the minerals, the sunlight and the water. So they invented photosynthesis, bluegreens, right? And the oxygen that was their waste product then began to pollute the problem. It was soaked up by the oceans and by the earth and then eventually into the atmosphere and it was choking things off. Oxygen can be a deadly gas. So they had to invent yet another lifestyle which I call the breathers and we are breathers who use the oxygen instead of as a pollutant to break up food molecules. So where were they going to get the food molecules? They had to invade other big bloated bacteria where they could still find them and the bubblers and they took aboard the bluegreens to make food and the breathers developed motors so that they could sail this whole enterprise as cooperative into a sunlit water area. And so we find these bacteria creating these problems and solving them without benefit of brain and here we are billions of years later following in their footsteps and we are just now learning that we have far more bacteria coating our insides and our outsides and taking care of us being 80 percent of our immune system, keeping us out of trouble being the first line of defense against what we put in our mouths and on our skins. And a wonderful science author named Lewis Thomas quipped many years ago now in his book Lives of a Cell, maybe the ancient bacteria built us as big taxis to get around food in safely and it's looking more and more like he was right about that. That's beautiful. Okay, so something happened that they were that they these cells without the benefit of brain our brain they were allowed to I mean they were forced in a way to find another way so they adapted. So let's let's look at where we are now in our in our present situation of being pretty much all over the globe and not doing a really good job of keeping our house clean. And the possibilities for destruction are certainly bigger and better than they have ever been and there's a lot of anxiety around that. So how do we how do we change this? How do we tap into that that natural system? What's our next step? Yes. Okay. Do understand that what I found in evolution was not that Darwin was wrong but that the Darwinian theory only accounts for the youthful phase of species and that was those first two billion years while the bacteria were doing all these creative solutions and stuff they still hadn't done a major step in evolution. They were working out their own systems and stuff. But the big step came when the bubblers blue greens and breathers came together as a huge cooperative entity. When there were so many breathers and blue greens inside a great giant expanded bubbler cell that they became the nucleated cell that we are made of. Now that was the first time that the competitive phase most of their inventions happened during the competitive phase right morphs into the cooperative phase because it turns out that it's less energy expensive to cooperate than to compete. So what happened was when they formed the big cell first major leap in evolution they were new these new nucleated big cells about a thousand times bigger than the single bacterium right they were new on the planet so they had to go through their youth of competition for another billion years until the second big step happens and they cooperate as multi-celled creatures. Now you can fast forward through all the part you learned about the creature starting in the sea and coming onto land and the flowering plants and the dinosaurs and all that up to humanity because we know that part it's that early part that we have been missing. So here we humans are having to go through our youth and mature phases and what happened is that about six to ten thousand years ago humans started to develop the first villages that moved into city sized entities and when you look at a city from an airplane if it hasn't been built overnight in the Middle Easter or in China if it's grown naturally it is like a living cell on a substrate you see that nuclear hub with all the big business center and all and the transport systems and everything remarkably like a city is a cell. So that was our first time of building cooperatives usually at the crossroads between trade routes right and those some of those still exist today as very functioning cooperative cities look at us in Honolulu we've got almost a million people cooperating beautifully we are an incredibly cooperative species right very few of us are misbehaving compared to all those of us who cooperate daily in so many ways. That's a really good reminder it's often we get sort of hung up on the on the outliers that are that are problematic but in general especially here in Hawaii I think we do have that cooperative spirit. Yes we do because we have an indigenous culture backing us up our aloha culture and that's the interesting thing is that the indigenous peoples of earth went through the maturation process into cooperative things like building those first cities but the cities were new on the planet so again they had to go through their youth and they started to compete and went into empire building so we had empires ruled by emperors and then they were followed by empires ruled by you know national empires and now we've got corporate empires which is the last phase of this empire building era in humanity. So if we look to the indigenous cultures who already figured out that cooperation is cheaper energetically or nowadays let's say in money because money is our current kind of energy system they got that but the industrial culture grew up in that competitive empire phase and we're in its last gasp so if you think of this as our adolescent crisis and we know that we have indigenous elders on the planet who still understand cooperation and community put those together and Hawaii would be the perfect place to really role model a sustainable cooperative future. Okay so a little bit so how did we get off truck? What was the end of the crisis darling? As an industrial species now a globalized industrial species we are an adolescent crisis right now we have to get beyond the competitive empire phase recognizing that it will be much cheaper for us to cooperate in friendly ways and we're seeing that for instance I just read that a thousand cities across the planet are now being called to do 100% clean green energy within the next couple of decades right here in Honolulu we're one of the 100 resilient cities that the Rockefeller Foundation has been sponsoring to solve our chronic problems and to build resilience against the climate disasters. When I was at the World Expo a couple of years ago in Milan they talked about the rise of the city as opposed to the nation state as the most important social and economic entity. So it seems to be absolutely because nation states are arbitrarily scratched boundaries on the planet right they're not natural boundaries. They're not natural boundaries they were built they were drawn out of conflict. Yes and they kept the empire business going you know by having nations take over other nations and build these big empires and now the corporations are doing kind of the same thing competing for territory and interestingly China now is going through a fascinating stage probably the last empire stage as real estate developers buying up land all over the planet and developing it rather than fighting their enemies so they've gotten that part that it's cheaper to feed your enemies than to compete with them to kill them off to bump them off and they're doing that they're building jobs along the way as they develop this real estate so they may be the transition phase between you know competitive empire and a cooperative world. So in the in the competitive trying to move that competitive empire out of out of that mindset that's going to what is that going to take? It takes a new story that's rooted in some of the ancient indigenous stories that understood cooperation understood nature but it has to be a story in which we get that the human economy can't make nature subservient to its growth but that we have to fit it into nature I call this ecosophy that means Sophia means wisdom the wise society the echoes which is household in Greek and from which we get the words ecology economy and now ecosophy I didn't invent the word ecosophy but I use it a lot and we have made economy superior to ecology we turn that around and fit our economies into our natural planet which we depend on right we can build a future of elegant simplicity that will be just fabulous if we make it a wise society and ecosophy. Okay that was a lot we're going to take a little break and let that ecosophy sort of sink into our bones a little. This is Think Tech Hawaii raising public awareness. Greetings it's me Angus McTech the long time host and star of Yubachi talk. 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welcome back to Hawaii is my mainland I'm Kauai Lucas and with me is Elizabeth Soutouris who is all things wise and wonderful and we we were talking about ecosophy that this is a beautiful term I'm gonna look it up when I get home and and find out more about it but somehow we have to change the the idea that that we're so focused on winning on the the competitive thing building leadership you know you all these programs for kids or it's all about leadership and and winning and how building up self-esteem how do we do that kind of empowering without making it competitive yes well my dear friend Hazel Henderson who has the website ethical markets long ago talked about shifting from win-lose societies to win-win societies that it's possible not to have the kind of competition in which some people win and other people lose usually few winners many losers but to build societies in which everybody wins in which everyone can flourish and there's no reason why we can't do that anymore but we're not but we're not doing it yet because we're in this transition phase from our competitive youth to our mature cooperative phase now I think we're going to be shoved kicking and screaming into the next phase by things like climate change which notice that every time that there's a disaster on the planet over 95% of people cooperate it's in our blood and bones to be able to do it you know we we are a highly cooperative species we haven't talked about that because of the Darwinian competitive model although the Soviet Union taught evolution biology through Kropotkin's work called mutual aid because they wanted individuals to sacrifice themselves to build community and we sacrifice community for individual interests and if you just put them together you get a whole picture okay so no maturity let's be using those models let's let's think about Japan which is a collectivist society but capitalist so I don't know how they managed to combine the two I think the better examples are the Scandinavian countries which despite their difficult climate where half the year is blacked out and here you can't sleep for the light and it's pretty cold they have economies in which people pay very high taxes as sharing your income with your community and then don't have to worry about education transportation health care all of those things are then covered for them so they have a very strong social network kind of economy but they also have individual enterprise so they're practicing capitalism and communism and balance as a kind of socialism and they're not huge multinational I mean they're obviously they're not multinational they're not huge multi they're not even very multi-ethnic there it's it's changing now that is that is the one thing that you can say that it was easier for them to do because they have a more harmonious population but that's story to their their their story strong story yeah yes but the fact is that on all the polls the people are happiest they're more happy there than anywhere else in the world which is why I brought up that this combination of taking care of each other through you know a social welfare inclined government and having the capitalist entrepreneurship going we can do that we can bring those things together so that they work for everyone and if those capitalist economies or endeavors were actually incentivizing the things we want instead of this sort of strange it's incentivizing profit but not not including in the profit that the costs of the the damage of cleaning up the you know we we we're still buying styrofoam plastics we're trying at Cheminade University in the business school to change things a little bit on that score I had the privilege of working with Kauila Clark and Ramsey Tom well known here who of course are of the native Hawaiian culture and together with Dean Scott Schroeder and myself the four of us designed four new programs as an optional core curriculum in the MBA program at Cheminade called island economies and we're looking at what will it take to make Hawaii sustainable and thriving in a future where climate change will cause our beaches to go underwater and much of Waikiki and Kakako and our our north coasts and things will be going underwater and there's no way to stop that anymore you see the hotter it gets the more the ice melts right ice melts the hotter it gets that's a positive feedback loop that can't be changed through any of our technologies although we might be able to slow it down a little bit by getting carbon dioxide out of the air and stuff right now that's a big fight because our government just doesn't believe that climate change is happening so if we can take the Hawaiian values of community the ahupua divisions of land where everybody had farms that went all the way from the mountaintop forests through the agricultural fields down to the ocean for sea supplies in food and stuff much more equitable kind of arrangement and also fitting the ecosystem so that it was it was a more natural way of living but so we have to talk about how much of our native food supply can we bring back how much food can we grow for ourselves how many products with this wonderful new ways of recycling things to produce more building materials and we can grow bamboo and hemp and things to make a lot out of so that we're not so dependent because as we lose our beaches we also lose our peers and our airport so that means it may be very hard to get imports and we have to think about the fact that here we are in the middle of the biggest tectonic plate on the planet on the top of its highest mountains right we're not going anywhere but we're going to lose the seacoast we're going to have to move uphill let's not do it with big concrete glass and steel high rises up there in our beautiful forests let's build appropriate natural more natural architecture let's look at all the things we can do for each other is there some discussion in in there of the the allotment of resources or or how you control population I mean do you do you get into that and will from a values point of view how does that work I don't think population control is going to be the issue its resource consumption is always the issue in those terms you know we are far more consumptive true enough it takes anyway 60 people in India yes we'll be I think we'll be doing much stronger self-governance here and so we will be talking about all those things why right now can't we a lot land and very simple housing for the homeless which would be far cheaper than the social services that we have to give people by keeping them in the streets and that ungodly practice of sweeps where you destroy everything they've built and then let them forage again from start is crazy it's very expensive for our city and there are cheaper ways of housing people and getting them into the culture with appropriate treatment and all those things so I think we've we've all seen no room in paradise so there's so much to do here in Hawaii and so many people already working on it that if we just come together cooperatively and recognize that we hit we're in one canoe here and we're right now sailing through the perfect storm of crises that we've created for ourselves I think Hokulea I think Malama or Nua or the other way around so we can do it we've got Papahana or Mokoakea going we you know we're concerned we can build new food supplies in the ocean in clean greenways but we have to we have to want want be satisfied with the the fish and the food that we grow here and not insist on having you know apples from South Africa well you can assist all you want but they're gonna stop coming in so I do think we should have great food variety here I don't think we all want to live on poi right yeah so are you saying that wonderful as those are as staples we can continue great variety here what's the problem we can grow things all year round you know we can have pretty much anything we want so in the last two minutes I just I would like to thank you because literally it is it a daily exercise that some somewhere in in my day I start getting depressed and then I and I think of your okay where it's just we're just being immature we're just being immature it's time to evolve and that gives me a little little moment to take a breath and have have the energy to go on but Elizabeth what is it that that gives you you are one of my favorite octogenarians I must I must say and it's always a pleasure what where do you really source your your joy and your energy well I think of wonderful comedians like Swami beyond Ananda who in real life is is an economist talking about what we need now is a great upwising is my version of maturity and what I like to say to people is find something you really love doing that can somehow contribute to a better world and do that don't make it oh I have to do this I have to sign this petition I have to go do this no whatever if you're a poet or a gardener or a computer repair technician or whatever you are find ways of promoting a story of a cooperative world knowing nature's on your side here you know this is just the natural next thing to get through this adolescent crisis into this upwising and to recognize that this planet is here to support us in happiness and thriving thank you so much up wise up why is up why is up everybody