 Thank you for watching Planet of the Courageous. From a Tibetan point of view, we chose to be on this planet because we have enrolled in a sort of graduate school for courage. Just that we may have chosen this adventure as a leap of logic. The question is, how do we spend and make sense of this precious human life? We are as a species extraordinarily successful, dominating the planet and now with planetary size problems that our existence itself has created. It takes courage to face not only the uncertainty of our life, but also the challenge of sustaining the gift of life for future generations. My next guest, an erudite, hard-working and good-hearted human being who has been hired by the Earth itself for a just approach. He is the lead counsel for Earth justice, a national non-profit that fights for causes to protect ourselves from some of our own short-sightedness. Her motto is, the Earth needs a good lawyer. And she has one in Paul Achitoff, a Harvard alumni and a grad from Columbia Law School. To save time for more sharing with him, I will highlight a few of his accomplishments. He has worked on issues from the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Hawaiian Water Code. He has been hired by migratory birds, endangered leatherback sea turtles, native streams and oceans, Hawaiian monk seal, and the air and land protesting genetic modified seeds and chemical dowsy. He is a true environmental warrior. Thank you for joining me, Paul. Thanks so much for having me on the show, Dean. It's always good to see you. It is nice to see you, Paul. It's something I was looking forward to. Sinjenta, $13.8 billion, Monsanto $15 billion, Dow Chemical. What I'm wondering is, was the story of David Glye, your favorite story as a child, you seem to take on giants. Well, I don't know. I think I just ended up taking on those companies and others like them because, well, when you see something that you feel isn't the way that doesn't seem just to you, you have an impulse to do something about it. I don't think it really matters the size of who's on the other side. The question is, do you think that what you're doing is right? So you do what you have to do. You've done some marvelous work. Tell us about the national organization altogether. It has, I think since 1965, it goes back quite a ways. Early 70s. Early 70s. Yeah. National policies it's taking on now, if you know of any of the big suits or do they vary by the locale? Well, they do. They vary quite a bit. Most of the work of the Hawaii office where I work is regional, not all of it, but most of it has to do with Hawaii or the Western Pacific or the fisheries in the Pacific. And we have offices in many locations around the country, from Juneau to Tallahassee to New York, Los Angeles, Denver, several others. And so, for example, we have lawyers that were representing the tribes in Standing Rock. We have lawyers who are challenging Trump's executive order with regard to not being able to enact regulations unless you revoke two others. We have lawyers who are doing everything from dealing with toxic waste in one part of the country to water pollution in another part of the country and so forth. So it's an extensive group, extensive docket of cases with more than 100 lawyers around the country. Let's do a little play imagination. If the earth had a voice and it talked about justice, what do you think it would say to us? I think the earth itself will do fine. That's my own view. Others may disagree. I think that the earth knows how to take care of itself. It's the people and animals on the earth that may have a more difficult time. And so, if the earth were talking, I think the earth might say, I'm going to be here for a long time. I don't know about you. I don't know about you guys. If you want to be around longer, maybe you should think more carefully about who you vote for. Or, I've been a good host, but I'm not sure you've been a good guest. Some of that gets down to, at least when I look at the broad stroke of this thing, has to do with values, what we value. For instance, from the Hawaiian point of view, I'm not going to do this well, but I want to say it in Hawaiian, which is, of course, our state motto. It says that the land and the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness. In the American Indian philosophy, they call the trees and their grasslands their cousins and their neighbors. And in the Tibetan point of view, the land is seen as profoundly interconnected and sacred. It seems like that message hasn't quite gotten through to some of the first world countries that were here as guests, rather than as to dominate and use as we wish. What would cause a shift in values, do you think, that you could go back to a much more planet-centric view of things? That's a very interesting question, Dean. My own view is that these distinctions between the earth, the people, me, you, et cetera, is essentially a creation of our own mind, and that in reality, there really are no such distinctions, and that we are all facets of a single entity, consciousness, whatever we want to call it. Life force. Yeah. Right. And I think that through experience, we sometimes are privileged to realize that whatever we do affects us, and I think this is in part because ultimately, whatever we do to somebody else, we are doing to ourselves in a sense. There is no, it's impossible for me to do something to you without it affecting me. It just can't happen. And I think that- Beautifully said. Like the Indra's net thing. Yeah. Absolutely. And so I think people through experience realize that, hopefully, that they're not getting away with anything. The name of my organization, Earth Justice, it does suggest that maybe there is justice in some places and not justice in others, but in my own view, things are just and it's very hard to see it, that ultimately everything is the way it has to be, the way it is supposed to be. But that somehow doesn't, I think, preclude us from trying to do what we feel is right. And that may be difficult to think about, but that nevertheless is how I see things. Paul, mind you, Zazuki Roshi's famous quote that, you're perfect the way you are, and you could use a little help. Yeah. Well, he certainly puts it better than I can. Oh, you can put it. I want to get into some hot button topics, or this one's straight for my wife. So I hope it's about the EPA, and they just did a pretty decent article pro and con in the paper yesterday. But your own organization sent out a pretty alarming flyer a couple of weeks ago about the cuts that the Trump administration is proposing, a 31 percent cut, the largest one to any organization. So it raises money in some disproportionate places, but just really pretty much guts the, I'm sorry, that's hyperboil. It cuts the EPA by a third. I want to know, like you just mentioned that you have lawyers who are stomping some of the president's capricious, you could say, signatures, you know, where he just has a good day or bad day and decides to sign something that's kind of, and our own Hawaiian justice is saying no way to a huge piece of legislation in the immigration app. What I'm asking, I guess, is the EPA, what kind of force do you have, does your organization have, do the people's voice have to say, no way, Jose, we don't want to turn back time on environmental issues? Well, to the extent that the issue is the budget, you know, individuals may not have a direct path to changing the budget, but the other than the same path we have with respect to every political decision, which is to let our views be known through our legislators, through protesting, through letter writing, et cetera, just as I think the voices have been heard with respect to the travel ban, with respect to the healthcare legislation. I mean, these things didn't just happen in a vacuum. They happened against a backdrop of outrage of people expressing themselves. And I think that with respect to the budget, that's the way it will work. That there's still a lot of negotiation, and a lot of voices to be heard. Oh, absolutely. I think that legislators are, they want to be reelected, and I think that is the bottom line. Why did the healthcare bill that was designed to get rid of Obamacare, why did that fail? Well, because legislators want to be reelected, that's why. And that's how you change budgets, that's how you change votes. There's something near and dear to your heart. I asked you about what was, is there any good in GMOs and genetic modified organisms? I think your quote was, sometimes it makes money for the stockholders. Well, let me be clear if we're talking about genetically engineered foods, which is what I have been dealing with. genetically engineered corn, and soy, and sugar beets, and those things. My view is that, well, there is, in a sense, in the short term, there's a convenience for some farmers. In the longer term sense, in the environmental sense, and a number of other, a number of environmental senses, and economic senses, I don't believe that these products are a good thing for anybody. But does that mean that I'm necessarily against genetic engineering of any shape or form, regardless of the context? No. Actually, if we were talking about a medical use for a genetic engineering technology, would I sort of have a knee-jerk reaction that, no, it's genetically engineered, I don't want it? No, not at all. To me, it is a technology, it's a tool that is being used by certain corporations in the food context to make money, and that's why I believe that it serves that purpose for them, but it doesn't serve a useful purpose for everybody else. Right. I mean, really, kind of wisely and judiciously said, I mean, there is like, I think his name is Ernest Borglin, he's called the father of the green evolution. He created a wheat-resistant, drought-resistant, or pest-resistant wheat in the 70s. It's said that his efforts alone, he also changed modern farming practices in Mexico, Pakistan, and India. He said that he maybe went to the grave knowing that not only was he a Nobel Peace Prize winner, but that he saved a billion lives on the planet. There are sometimes things that are just so profoundly good for mankind on the GMO. Do you agree with that, or is it...? Well, I would say that the so-called green revolution in farming is controversial, and I don't think that everyone would agree that it was a wonderful thing. I'm not saying that it wasn't good for some people in some places. I'm just saying that I don't think it was the unalloyed, great thing that it sometimes presented. As far as genetic engineering is concerned, of course, the pitch from the companies is we're feeding the world, but I think that if you scratch below the surface of that, you realize that's just hype. It has nothing to do with feeding the world, and that is the problem with hunger in the world is not that we don't have genetically engineered crops. It isn't even that we don't have enough food. It's that we have... The food is not distributed to people. We can't get it to the places. We could. We don't get it to the people who need it because of their corruption, primarily people putting in their pockets money that should be going to other places and so forth. An actual transportation, spoilage. Personally, I think that small organic farms on a global level are a great deal more important to feeding the world than genetically engineered soybeans. Interesting. I mean, great perspective. I appreciate it. We're going to break now. We'll come right back. I've got the Beagle Sisters here with a healthy tip. We encourage you to enjoy the food you eat this holiday season and keep it local and healthy. Yeah. Eat the rainbow. Eat the rainbow. And if you need any produce, come to the red bar on the north shore. Aloha. My name is Justine Espiritu, and I am the co-host of Hawaii Farmer's Series. This is my co-host, Matthew Johnson. And we are live with you every Thursday at 4 p.m. at thinktechhawaii.com. And our show focuses on Hawaii's local food community. We feature not only the farmers that are producing our food, but we also feature the supporters and other folks involved in the community that are trying to promote local agriculture. Okay, Paul, this one's for Walt Ordway, a farmer in Iowa. A man that I went to college with. And after a wonderful life, he retired to his homestead. It's a quite large farm. Down in Soldier, Iowa, which is in southwestern Iowa, it really is the corn basket of America. The farm's down there, sometimes 5,000 acres, so big one. And his mission, his last years when Walt took on a mission, it was not a pretty thing always to be around. So he was actually interviewed in a Wall Street Journal. There were movies made about him. I promised him, at some level, I would ask this question. It's about seed ownership and genetic coding. He protected a 100-acre plot with other lands to try to bring it up to the standard of organic farming, which isn't easy when everybody around you is using chemicals. But his real bandwagon was to wake people up to the fact that a few corporations were owning the seeds, actually owning the title of the seeds. And this is not me saying it. Monsanto was actually forcing the farmers to never reuse the seeds. They owned the seeds, they were given the seeds, and they had to buy them every year. It was just like this stunning thing that farmers couldn't produce their own seeds. So I wonder if you would kind of weigh in and jump into this one a little bit for Walt's sake. I agree that much of what is behind the genetic engineering seed industry, genetically engineered seed industry, is about seed ownership as much as anything else. Because these seeds are patented. Up until a few decades ago, you couldn't patent life in this way. But now you can. And these companies have taken advantage of that. And so as you say, farmers for millennia have relied upon saving their own seed and replanting it the next year and making hybrids and doing what they want with their own seed. And with genetically engineered seed, you never actually own the seed. You buy seed subject to a license agreement that you have to sign with Monsanto or Singento or one of these companies which prohibits you from replanting the seed. And in fact, if you do or they imagine that you do, they may sue you and they have done that many times. And so the whole idea is one of ownership. Essentially, you have a vast amount of the commodity seeds in this country and increasingly elsewhere being owned by a handful of large corporations. Essentially, they are trying to, and succeeding to some extent, own the food supply. Because the crops that they own, the seeds are the ones that go into so much of what we eat, corn, soy, canola, sugar beets for sugar, alfalfa. These are the crops that people eat every day, whether they realize it or not. And somebody owns that. It's just wild. And then our own genetic home, our own genomes. Now, I've studied a little bit. There's been suits and countersuits. Like my genetic code, for instance, it's naturally occurring, can't be patented. But if they modify it in some ways, now it's not naturally occurring, then they can patent it. And there's been suits and countersuits. I mean, this has been going on. I mean, I have to tell you, when Walt brought this to my attention, I thought he was prone to maybe smoking things that weren't working. But he wasn't in, this is not hyperboil. And what was it, Quade's movie? Dennis Quade did it at any price. That movie was in, set in his town or in Iowa. Yeah, I didn't see that one. It had to do with just what you're talking about. And he was a seed salesman. And there was an underground revolution going on within the farmers. So this whole thing about genetic code is just fascinating that it can be oil. It really is. And I think that control is a key element to the whole genetic engineering industry where people are locked into not only buying the seeds year after year, but buying the pesticides that are specifically designed to go with those specific seeds, roundup with roundup resistant seed and so forth. It's a kind of these, those products were specifically designed to work together. And of course, Monsanto Roundup is a huge moneymaker for Monsanto. So they designed seed that was immune to Roundup. So they would sell you the seed and then they would say, oh, and here's the Roundup that you get to spray on it without killing it. So they make money coming and going, right? And then they tell you, and it's easier for you. What happens, what we found is that if you spray Roundup or the same herbicide of any sort over and over again on your field, there are going to be some weeds in that field that will survive. They will survive naturally. And so the next year, those few weeds will now be a lot more because they don't have any competition and the Roundup isn't going to kill them. Here we go. And then you end up with a field full of Roundup resistant weeds. And this has happened actually on tens of millions of acres of farmland in this country. So now we have a new generation of genetically engineered seed that's designed to be immune to not only Roundup but 2,4-D, which is a component of the Vietnam era defoliant Agent Orange, which is designed specifically in this formula to kill the weeds that Roundup no longer is able to kill as a result of the use of Roundup resistant seeds. So it's this cycle of more and more pesticides. Yeah, this is obviously very disturbing. I mean, to actually figure out who that ownership could be in the hands of a few of giant companies that are food sources themselves. But I want to kind of switch again to something that what I'm wondering is, it seems like what I want to get to is cooperation or other people helping earth justice. And what I'm thinking is like one of the things you talked about art is seeding. This is on our right up in the elevator. This chemical has been used widespread in agriculture, particularly in the Midwest, I think you said. And it's now polluted many streams, rivers, ground water, et cetera. Do you see cooperation coming from, so there I'm going, OK, wetlands. Is Ducks Unlimited calling earth justice and say, can we join you? Can we put some money behind you? Are we seeing cooperation in the grain movement? Well, I can't speak about what Ducks Unlimited is doing. I don't know. It was just an example. But in term, I'm just saying, I mean, certainly there are people that donate some of them substantially to operations like earth justice and others that are doing work to control these issues. So yeah, people are stepping up. And that's the only way that we can do what we do. I think another place my mind went on this is that I'm a Norwegian bachelor farmer from Lake Wobegaard. And part of our training was at that point that we were to be stewards of our earth. It meant that in the Hawaiian terms, the earth was our kuleana. We couldn't walk away from any part of it. I'm just wondering if you're seeing the green Christian movement come and say, hey, we've got to become better stewards. We're looking at extinction rates that are just profound at this point. 50% of our primate ancestors that took on the level of 500 million years maybe will be extinct by the end of the century. The amphibians, the frogs, the distortion, and reproduction. I mean, this is happening now. I'm just wondering what our stewards, where are our stewards showing up, particularly with that green Christian movement? I personally have not represented green Christian groups in my work, but I believe that other earth justice attorneys have in their work. And I do notice with interest that the pope has been outspoken on some of these issues in a way that I have not experienced in my lifetime. I think he understands some of these issues better than I imagined a pope ever would, just because based on my previous experience. But I think he's said some remarkable things. Isn't that just a ground changing? There's men speaking up and saying, let's look at this in a sensical way. This is a small globe, a small planet. A precious spaceship, as Buckminster Fuller said. Which I think it's very encouraging that someone who is as deeply religious as he obviously is sees no incongruity between his faith and stewardship of the earth. We have a few minutes left, so let's take on a small. So I want to hand this one off to you a little bit. Because you're doing some sensational, this work that you're doing. You actually have a class action suit against the EPA for discrimination for the disproportionate amount of chemicals being shuffled to our indigenous peoples. I know I'm not doing a good job of trying to tee you up for that. Yeah, let me straighten that out. Actually, I'm not suing the EPA. Actually, I filed a formal complaint with the EPA and asked them to open an investigation, which they subsequently did, into what I consider to be violations of the Civil Rights Laws, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which against our State Department of Agriculture and our State Agribusiness Development Corporation because of the things that they are doing and are failing to do in protecting, or in the case of what they are doing, exposing Native Hawaiians to pesticides in a way that is not, you know, that I'm not being exposed to, you're not being exposed to, they're being exposed to it on West Kauai, on Molokai in areas that have many Native Hawaiians are cheek by jowl with these extensive fields that are being intensively sprayed with very, very powerful pesticides that drift into those schools, into those homes, into those yards. And the State has been doing squat about it, and so that's why I've turned to the EPA. And they have opened an investigation. That's just wild because it could open up all kinds of not just losses, but just acknowledgments that poor people suffer an imbalanced proportion on these things. The chemicals come down to Flint, Michigan, or whatever. Yeah, there's no question in my mind that if someone were spraying a powerful pesticide next door to Punahou, and kids were coughing and taken to the hospital, that that wouldn't happen again. And yet that has happened repeatedly at Waimea Middle School on Kauai because those kids don't go to Punahou. Paul, we're out of time. I want to again thank you. It's really always a pleasure to be with you in whatever the circumstance is. And I think my sign-off has always been the same, you know, be kind, be courageous, do some good, and mostly just have some fun on the planet. Aloha.