Paul Hawken: Ending The Climate Crisis In One Generation

In the words of today’s guest, global warming is not a science problem. It’s a human problem. When it comes to taking meaningful steps to redress the climate crisis, so many of us are left crippled. It’s a problem so huge, so existential, most people feel powerless to make a difference. But in truth, there are many substantive onramps to participate in the solution, and today’s guest is a wonderfully gracious, charitable, experienced, and optimistic cipher to explore these various paths. Meet Paul Hawken, one of the environmental movement’s leading voices returning for his second drop on the podcast, the first being at our big live event with IN-Q. In addition to his profound work as a planetary change agent, Paul is an entrepreneur who founded both Erewhon Markets and Smith & Hawken. He’s also the author of eight books including the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller Drawdown, and his astonishing, beautiful new work entitled Regeneration: Ending The Climate Crisis in One Generation,which aims to guide, inspire and galvanize the burgeoning climate movement. This is an optimistic conversation about our greatest existential threat. A conversation that extends beyond statistics, blame, and fear to illuminate what each and every one of us can all do now to support what Paul calls regeneration: a call to action that weaves justice, climate, biodiversity, equity, and human dignity into a seamless tapestry of action, policy, and transformation to live more symbiotically with the planet that supports us us We cover everything from the current state of affairs of the climate crisis, to the actionable steps we can all take to foster regeneration and most importantly, the state of mind we all need to maintain to heal our earth and secure the future of humankind. Paul is a friend, a mentor, and lighthouse. He’s a man who has indelibly shaped my perspective and actions when it comes to ecological responsibility, and it’s an honor to host him today. To read more click here. You can also watch listen to our exchange on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. My hope is that Paul’s message will do for you what it has for me—inspire and empower you to take action in your own way. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

  Eating well rarely falls apart because of one big failure. It's the daily question that wears you down. Like, what am I actually gonna make tonight? What's in the fridge? And it's exactly why we built the Plant Power Meal Planner. It's a personalized, plant-based meal planning program that matches you with recipes based on your taste, your allergies, your cooking skills, and how much time you actually have. You build, through this program, a balanced, nutrient-dense plan for your entire household in a few minutes. Then, it generates a grocery list for you with one click that plugs right into our delivery partners. All the recipes in the program are built by dietitians with culinary training. Plus, you get your own food coach to help you problem-solve along the way.

• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:05Paul Hawken?

  What people are looking for is purpose and meaning and dignity. And there could be no more meaningful work in the world today, which is to restore life on Earth. Regenerating and reversing the climate crisis is really about reconnecting those broken strands. And that's what the solutions really are, you know, as opposed to so standalone techniques or technologies, you know, that's going to fix it. That word "fix" doesn't even belong in the conversation, because it's not an "it" and you can't fix it. The atmosphere is the biosphere. It is the same thing, and we are part of it. And nature never makes a mistake, only we do.

• 1:50Paul Hawken?

  I mean, if we want to turn the death of the Earth into capital, we're doing a good job. And then, what are you gonna do with that capital? What meaning does money have if it's an unlivable planet?

• 2:11Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Greetings, dwellers of the biosphere we call Earth. It is I, Rich Roll. This is my show. Welcome aboard. Returning today for his second drop on the podcast, the first being our live big event in Los Angeles a couple of years ago with InQ, is an icon, a true legend, one of the environmental movement's leading voices, Paul Hawken. In addition to Paul's profound work as a planetary change agent, Paul is also an entrepreneur. He founded both Air One Markets and Smith & Hawken and author of eight books, including the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, Drawdown.

• 2:54Rich Roll?

  Paul is now back with an astonishing, beautiful new book called Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, as well as a corresponding nonprofit by the same name, regeneration.org, which together constitutes a collective work that aims to guide and inspire the burgeoning climate movement. A few more things about Paul and the powerful and empowering conversation to come, but first.

• 3:26Rich Roll?

  Okay, Paul Hawken. I think part of the problem when it comes to talking about climate change, how to address it, how to solve it, really revolves around agency. It's a problem so huge, so existential, that it's difficult for individuals, everyday people, to even engage with it in any kind of meaningful way, in part because we feel just kind of powerless to make any kind of significant difference. But in truth, there really are many onramps to participate in the solution. And Paul is a wonderfully gracious, charitable, experienced, and optimistic cipher to explore these various paths.

• 4:11Rich Roll?

  So this is a conversation that extends beyond all the statistics, beyond fear and anger and blame, to confront not only what needs to be done, but what each and every one of us actually can do now to further practical, currently available solutions, both individual and systemic.

• 4:34Rich Roll?

  All of which orient around this idea of regeneration, which is essentially a call to action that weaves justice, climate, biodiversity, equity, and importantly, human dignity into this beautiful seamless tapestry of action, policy, and transformation to live more symbiotically with the planet that supports us. So today, we cover it all, including perhaps most importantly, the state of mind we all need to maintain to heal our earth and secure the future of humankind. Paul is a friend, he's a mentor, he's a lighthouse, and truly a man who has indelibly shaped

• 5:18Rich Roll?

  my perspective, my philosophy, and my actions when it comes to ecological responsibility. It's an honor to host him today. I think this is a remarkable exchange. And my intention and my hope is that his message will do for you what it has and continues to do for me. So without further ado, this is me and Paul Hawken.

• 5:43Rich Roll?

  Well, let's talk about the environment.

• 5:45Paul Hawken?

  Okay, let's talk about the environment.

• 5:46Rich Roll?

  Should we do that?

• 5:46Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 5:47Rich Roll?

  It's good to see you, first of all.

• 5:48Paul Hawken?

  Really good to see you.

• 5:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, thank you for coming down to do this.

• 5:50Paul Hawken?

  I hear you so much, you know, I feel like I'm in your presence.

• 5:54Rich Roll?

  I appreciate that.

• 5:56Paul Hawken?

  No, I am.

• 5:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we had all these plans of getting together and doing all kinds of stuff. And obviously, the pandemic put that aside.

• 6:05Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 6:06Rich Roll?

  But I'm happy to be in your presence today.

• 6:08Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, thank you so much, really.

• 6:10Rich Roll?

  The occasion, of course, being this beautiful, extraordinary new book that's about to come out, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. You gave me this gorgeous folio version of the book, Only A Few Exist in the World.

• 6:24Paul Hawken?

  Yes.

• 6:25Rich Roll?

  Is that true?

• 6:25Paul Hawken?

  That's true.

• 6:26Rich Roll?

  I'm feeling very grateful for that, so thanks.

• 6:28Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, it's just such special people.

• 6:31Rich Roll?

  It's exciting. It's been a minute since you've had a book out.

• 6:35Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, April seventeen was the last book, Drawdown. And this one is coming out in about six countries almost at the same time. Actually, fifty-four countries right now in September.

• 6:47Rich Roll?

  Right from the get-go out of the gate. That's unusual. They must be very confident.

• 6:52Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, this time the publishers are. The last time they were kind of waiting and watching and looking. Now it's, Drawdown's in seventeen languages.

• 6:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 7:01Paul Hawken?

  This one starts out.

• 7:03Rich Roll?

  Well, that book was a groundbreaker for myself and so many people. And I feel like this book is the perfect follow-up to that in that it strikes perhaps an even more optimistic tone when it comes to solving this great existential crisis that we find ourselves in. But I think the overarching theme of it is inclusion, like inclusivity. And it's very empowering in the sense that it's like letting us into all these amazing things that are occurring and how we can participate in them in so many different ways.

• 7:39Paul Hawken?

  Absolutely. I'm just like everybody else in this sense. I live in a world, I look at the world and try to figure it out. You know, I mean, I'm no different. Whether I'm a journalist or not, doesn't make any difference. Everyone does that to a certain extent. And a journalist might do it a bit more because they try to share what they see. And what I have seen, and not just since Drawdown was created, but before that, but certainly since then, is a world that's going into crisis around climate and more rapidly than was expected. And at the same time, even though I would say a majority of the people in the United States, certainly in Europe, are empathetic, sympathetic,

• 8:24Paul Hawken?

  understand the basic cause and effects, they're not doing anything. They're not engaged. So how could it be, you know, that you see the writing on the wall? You see this impending crisis. You're getting a very visceral sense of what's happening, you know, on the ground and floods and cold and heat and drought and et cetera. And yet, there's still this disengagement. And so regeneration was really about looking at that, not blaming people for being disengaged, but trying to understand. Why we are not, I'll just clue myself generally, but what would engage us? And what's prohibiting it?

• 9:07Paul Hawken?

  You know, what's stopping us? And what would open up humanity to the idea of working together?

• 9:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think from a psychological perspective, there doesn't seem to be a meaningful on-ramp for people in the sense that, I think you're correct, there's an overwhelming awareness now that didn't exist perhaps even a decade ago. And I think most people are good-faith actors and want to do the right thing and recycle or do what they can. But it doesn't feel like any of these things amount to very much, right? Like, I can take personal responsibility for a certain subset of decisions that I make every day, but is this really moving the needle? So there's a lack of agency or connectivity to the solutions that would really get people emotionally engaged

• 9:57Rich Roll?

  and feeling like they actually are making a difference.

• 10:02Paul Hawken?

  Absolutely, absolutely. I think that there's so many things you covered right there. Break it up, break it open a little bit. Let's go to connectivity, which is that the root cause of global warming is a mass of disconnections between each other, between people, between people and nature, and nature itself, which is caused by humans. You know, habitat fragmentation, pollution, acidification of the oceans, you know, and onwards. And regenerating and reversing the climate crisis is really about reconnecting those broken strands, you know.

• 10:46Paul Hawken?

  And that's what the solutions really are, as opposed to sort of standalone techniques or technologies, you know, that's going to fix it. That word "fix" doesn't even belong in the conversation because it's not an "it" and you can't fix it. The atmosphere is the biosphere. It is the same thing and we are part of it. And nature never makes a mistake, only we do. So let's look at what we're doing. And regeneration is very much about alignment with the living world, with the way it works and always has. And so, as you said...

• 11:25Paul Hawken?

  What we've done conversationally and sort of declaratively and almost imperatively is individuate the problem, which is this is what you can do or should do. And it's true, those are good things, you know, recycling and use cold water in your washing machine and, you know, try not to drive an EV if you can afford it, et cetera, et cetera. But I think people understand that even if they do them, they know it's not sufficient to the task at hand. And so it actually makes people more disempowered in a funny way, even though they're actually participating in a kind of token way.

• 12:08Paul Hawken?

  And then they look to governments, they look to the Conference of the Parties, the UN Framework on Climate Change, they look for these annual meetings, you know, this one in Glasgow in November, for something to happen, you know, like hoping that politicians will get together and solve the problem. If politicians knew what to do, we wouldn't be in the situation we are today. And that's just not going to happen, not to say we can't say it, but, you know. So then you feel like there's this gulf between these huge meta or institutions, corporations and governments, and then you as an individual. And that's, again, what regeneration is trying to say, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, that's not where the, that's not where the solution is going to come from.

• 12:53Rich Roll?

  Right. Regeneration is sort of bedfellows with this idea of symbiosis, like how can we live more symbiotically on the planet? And understanding that and really embodying that begins with really fully embracing and acknowledging that we are all, you know, microsystems that are part of a macro system. And it's sort of belying the idea that nature's over there and we're over here and we venture into nature and out of nature. And yet, you know, fundamentally, that's just a falsehood because the cells in our body and everything that we're made up of is of course part and parcel of this environment.

• 13:36Rich Roll?

  And in terms of the solution, you know, once you acknowledge that... I think what you begin to understand and what the book kind of does a beautiful job conveying is the idea that the problem is systemic, that we can't truly move into, you know, this more symbiotic regenerative relationship with the planet until we, you know, have some corrective measures with our systems at large, right? There's this gigantic misalignment of incentives across the board, be it by dint of, you know, governmental bodies or the tectonic plates of capitalism, all of these forces that the individual feels powerless to have any control over or say over that perpetuate the problem.

• 14:21Rich Roll?

  So, short of revolution, like, how are we creating better incentives for the systems that are in play? Or how do we create better systems with incentives that could supplant the systems that are leading us astray?

• 14:35Paul Hawken?

  That is the question, and I think that between the individual and, you know, meta-institutions, you know, global institutions is something else called agency. And agency has sort of been overlooked. There is no such thing as an individual. That's sort of a delusion we wake up with in the morning. But functionally, there's no such thing, and every person has agency. It's their family, it's their friends, it's their community, it's their neighborhood, it's their church, it's their synagogue, it's their school, it's where they teach, it's their city, it's their company, colleagues, it goes on and on and on.

• 15:20Paul Hawken?

  And we have a network, we're all part of networks, and that is where we have influence and where we can make a difference. And I think a lot of people have felt or come to think that, you know, if we get renewables right, or we do this, we do that, you know, that, again, we'll fix it, you know? But, like, there's some Archimedean, you know, solution, if we pull hard enough, you know, it's gonna, the problem's gonna go away.

• 15:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 15:49Paul Hawken?

  And rather than understanding that the solution is everywhere, it's ubiquitous, it's local, regional, it's where agency exists. And that is everywhere on earth with every culture, every society and every country. And so that's the good news, which is that we can solve this, we really can. But we can't solve it if we think someone's going to solve it for us. Or if we come to believe that individuals are to blame and that they're responsible and they'll solve it, we kind of know that one's not true.

• 16:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 16:29Paul Hawken?

  I'm not saying we all have, we don't have personal responsibility, of course we do. But that that alone is going to be sufficient. And so when we look at the institutions and with the perverse incentives that they have, the economic institutions, the political institutions, they are all extractive. That is to say, every institution that we've come to know and trust, or not trust, but buy from, or believe in, or invest in, or own shares in, is extractive. You know, it's taking life. And we sort of take that for granted, you know, well, don't make a mess. You know, or clean up your mess, you know, that kind of thing. And that's sustainability in a way.

• 17:13Paul Hawken?

  But extraction is taking life. And when you take life, that's degeneration. That's what degeneration is, when you take life. And so regeneration is really not about blaming and, you know, sort of demonizing, you know, those institutions or those economic sectors so much as saying, wait, that road, that degeneration road doesn't go much further. That's, everything's screaming at us, all the science, our experiences and so forth, like, that road doesn't go much further. Why are we going down that road? And so regeneration is about a 180 pivot. Like, can we just stop and go the other way?

• 17:56Paul Hawken?

  Can we not regenerate the world and have a GDP and an economy and jobs rather than degenerate it? And the fact is, we can. And it's really a question of healing the future or stealing the future. Because what we're doing is stealing. The future now, it used to be from our children, now it's from ourselves practically. And so, it really isn't like something that, that what's happening with respect to climate is wrong, or, not at all, it's all great, what everybody's doing is fantastic. But unless we actually do address those institutional incentives, you know, and actually assumptions that are so deep that people don't even understand them as assumptions,

• 18:39Paul Hawken?

  you know, then we won't have a chance at all, because the, you know, Richard, one of the things too, go back to the fix-it thing, like, you know, Bill Gates and others, like John Kerry for example, are saying, "If we don't do nuclear, we're screwed." Okay. And, and this idea, you know, that there is this one thing, but you could have renewable energy and nuclear energy for the whole world today, and we'd still be going right over the cliff, because we're destroying all the living systems on earth, we're destroying our oceans, our fisheries, our land, our forests, you know, our insects, our pollinators, and so forth, that has nothing to do with renewable energy or fossil fuel energy, that has to do with us.

• 19:23Paul Hawken?

  And so, we have to see it, as you said earlier, as a system, it's whole, you can't, you can't silo it and separate it out, say, "We're gonna do that, and do this, and do that." You can do that, but unless you step back and look at it systemically, you're not gonna get to the core cause or core cure.

• 19:41Rich Roll?

  But the idea being, with this, you know, kind of typical optimistic flair that you have, being that, that we can create a non-extractive relationship with the planet without having to, you know, throw capitalism to the wind, like, within certain confines of the system that we've erected, we can course correct and still, you know, create proper incentives, I mean, the extraction would, I guess, would be the economic benefit that someone would get out of changing the relationship with the planet to be symbiotic and regenerative.

• 20:19Paul Hawken?

  Well, the capitalist system really takes life and turns it into money.

• 20:24Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 20:24Paul Hawken?

  It squeezes every last.

• 20:25Rich Roll?

  And being extractive by its very nature.

• 20:28Paul Hawken?

  Right.

• 20:29Rich Roll?

  But you saying that still, within that, we can, we can move in a better direction here.

• 20:35Paul Hawken?

  You know, what is that? That's a really good question because nobody invented the capitalist system. It just, it was named after the fact. In a sense, economics, economic systems arise and then we kind of tag them later. I don't know what a regenerative economic system will be called. I don't think it'll be called capitalistic. It, it doesn't mean that existing institutions and businesses have to go out of business and we need to replace them. I'm not saying that at all. But the, the advent of the B Corp and, you know, different types of corporations and so forth, that have a very different priority in terms of their purpose.

• 21:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and, and part of that priority is short-term gains over long-term.

• 21:22Paul Hawken?

  Right.

• 21:23Rich Roll?

  You know, well-being for all, right?

• 21:26Paul Hawken?

  Absolutely.

• 21:27Rich Roll?

  Right, so that's a tough one to tackle.

• 21:30Paul Hawken?

  Well, I mean, if we want to turn the death of the earth into capital, we're doing a good job. And then what are you going to do with that capital? I mean, what meaning does money have if it's an unlivable planet? But I do think you're seeing in corporations a real big shift. I'm not talking about the old commitment to net zero by 2050, all that sort of stuff. Commitments don't mean a thing. Goals don't mean a thing. They don't do anything, they're not actions. You know, they're just commitments, they're just words. But in my experience, in the last couple of years, and even during COVID, what you're seeing when you talk to CEOs of very large companies, very large ones, the largest in

• 22:14Paul Hawken?

  the world, is their eyes are different. What I mean by that is they're not being nice and saying, yeah, we have to renew our social license and do more sustainability and blah, blah, blah, you know, which is what they've been doing, you know, kind of. They get it. They have children.

• 22:37Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:38Paul Hawken?

  They have brothers and sisters, they have family.

• 22:40Rich Roll?

  That's a pretty big paradigm shift.

• 22:41Paul Hawken?

  It's a really big one. And they find themselves getting it, so to speak, when they're at the helm of these extraordinary corporations, you know, that have hundreds of thousands of employees and they're in 42 countries or whatever. And going, huh. And so that's what I'm seeing now as opposed to this suave or assured, you know, just we'll just keep moving along and we'll hire some more.

• 23:08Rich Roll?

  A little greenwashing.

• 23:09Paul Hawken?

  Greenwashing.

• 23:10Rich Roll?

  A little dusting of greenwashing on top to make sure that we keep the press off our back or whatever.

• 23:15Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, I know. And so you're seeing companies like Nestle, which talk about a bad boy reputation 20 years ago for baby formula in Africa. I mean, just, but they went through a couple more CEOs since then who really, really cleaned up their act. They've sold off all their plastic water bottle companies.

• 23:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, they're probably the biggest single-use plastic manufacturer in the world.

• 23:42Paul Hawken?

  Coca-Cola.

• 23:42Rich Roll?

  Coca-Cola is, wow.

• 23:43Paul Hawken?

  But they now, their slogan is generation regeneration. And converting 600,000 farms to regenerative agriculture. And this is really interesting because you say, well, they're doing that to be nice? No. I'm not saying they're not nice. I'm just saying, are they doing that to be responsible? No. They want to be responsible. They're doing it because they're an old line company. They've been around for a long time. These farms, some of them go back five generations. They've been dealing with the farms for five generations. These are relationships. And these farms in South America and Africa

• 24:25Paul Hawken?

  for cacao and coffee are hurting. And they're hurting from drought, from heat. And so regeneration is about...

• 24:39Paul Hawken?

  Ensuring the resilience and the longevity of those relationships

• 24:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 24:44Paul Hawken?

  And their supply chain.

• 24:45Rich Roll?

  It's like an infrastructure bill.

• 24:46Paul Hawken?

  Right.

• 24:47Rich Roll?

  If they want to continue doing what they're doing, they're going to have to look at the soil and the well-being of the farmlands.

• 24:53Paul Hawken?

  Even the varieties, the Arapica coffees, they're looking at wild varieties that can stand five, six, seven degrees more heat than the extant ones and grafting those onto the trees and working with agroforestry and mixed cropping and all different ways to preserve water, capture more water. But what I'm saying is regeneration isn't like goody-two-shoes, you know? Like, we're doing this because it's the right thing to do. It is, but it actually is very practical.

• 25:25Rich Roll?

  There is a bit of a race afoot, though. Like, those changes, I'm glad to hear that they're happening and certain large actors like that are moving in the right direction, but at what pace compared to the rate at which we're, you know, basically ridding ourselves of the Amazonian rainforest and, you know, dumping toxins into our, into our waterways, et cetera, right? Like, is it fast enough to overtake the status quo?

• 25:57Paul Hawken?

  I think the, the similarity between climate change or global warming, really is the right word, and what we're seeing on a corporate level is that neither are linear.

• 26:09Paul Hawken?

  And so, they're not linear systems, you know? But either is change on this level, and I think the big change has been that climate change was conceptual. Read about it, heard about it, we should probably do something, don't you think? Yeah, okay.

• 26:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 26:27Paul Hawken?

  Now it's experiential. And that is, that is the big change. And so, there's no question in my mind that the climate movement, whatever we should call it, will be the biggest movement in the history of humanity, no question about it. But because of weather, not because there's a charismatic leader, not because somebody is, you know...

• 26:48Rich Roll?

  It's on our front doorstep.

• 26:49Paul Hawken?

  It's on our front doorstep. And so, the question really isn't whether, it will be, the question is... How do we work together? How will it be configured? How will we work together? And I think what everyone is seeing is that we need each other. This is not something where somebody is going to be a hero or heroine, you know? And like, hey, we did this. It's like, we need to connect. We need to share. We need to cross-fund. We need to collaborate. We need to cooperate. We need to support. And you're really feeling that in the NGO community, in the volunteer community, in citizen groups, in municipal groups, in corporations. You're seeing that. Let's forget all those, you know, boundaries, so to speak.

• 27:32Paul Hawken?

  You know, I mean, they exist for technical, political, you know, financial reasons. But we need to work together. Forget the differences. What unites us is far more important than what used to divide us.

• 27:43Rich Roll?

  What is your sense of where we're at now? I mean, it's been a couple of years since we sat down and talked. A lot of changes have occurred and a lot of things are happening on the planet. You mentioned this report that just came out today, as a matter of fact, right? So, give us a State of the Union on planetary health.

• 28:01Paul Hawken?

  Well, this sixth assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out today. It had been leaked, so it was sort of being whispered about, but it came out today. And it's strong, very, very strong. And it said for the first time, unequivocally, climate change that we are witnessing is caused by human beings. It always, up until now, the fifth assessment, only going back to the first one, was equivocal. They actually kind of left a little space there to say, well...

• 28:39Rich Roll?

  And what is the organization or governing body that puts this together?

• 28:43Paul Hawken?

  The United Nations Framework on Climate Change, the UNFCC, which does the Conference of the Parties every year. And the 26th one will occur in Glasgow in the first week of November. But two things came out of it, which are, there was some good news in it, oddly enough, which is that the science has changed. So now we know that as soon as we stop... Increasing greenhouse gases, that is net zero emissions, that actually warming will level off right away. It used to be that, up until this assessment, that we were baking in increasing global warming for decades, if not centuries,

• 29:27Paul Hawken?

  which kind of was a disincentive. Well, if we get it right, we're still screwed kind of thing. And now they said, no, no. So it's providing a very powerful incentive for countries and companies and people and cities to accelerate that move towards net zero emissions. The other thing it said, though, which is the bad news, which is there are irreversible changes now in effect that can't be reversed. And one of them is melting of ice. One of them is sea level rise. And so there is no question that low-lying cities like the Miamis and others will be, you know, Venice, unfortunately, will be flooded, will be underwater

• 30:11Paul Hawken?

  by the end of the century or before. And so our work has caught out for us. But I do think that the most important thing is that there's 100, and I forget the number, 180 some odd countries that are participating in this IPCC report. And it's called consensus science, you know? And there's no such thing as consensus science. It's evidentiary. And what it meant was that, you know, the Vatican, or Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela, or China, Russia could actually tamp down the language in the summary report. And every country in the world signed on to this report.

• 30:55Rich Roll?

  No dissent.

• 30:56Paul Hawken?

  No dissent.

• 30:57Rich Roll?

  Hmm. That's powerful. But then it becomes an issue of translating that into action.

• 31:05Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 31:05Rich Roll?

  And what are the actions going to be?

• 31:07Paul Hawken?

  Yeah. The report said politics has no excuse from this point on.

• 31:14Paul Hawken?

  Every country, the other thing is, every country is going to suffer. There is no place that will be exempt.

• 31:21Rich Roll?

  I can think of a few American politicians who will find an excuse.

• 31:25Paul Hawken?

  Yes.

• 31:26Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? When they're indebted to their constituencies and, you know, the big corporations that exist in their respective territories and the lobbying efforts that go into maintaining a certain status quo and kind of placating the public so that they can continue to push agendas and legislation that are corporate favorable and allow these bad actors to perpetuate their bad actions.

• 31:54Paul Hawken?

  No question. I think, however, that every generation, we're working with a group of marketing people and communications people who, by their own words, left the dark side and went into the nonprofit world to work with social justice, women's issues, sex trafficking, voting issues, you know, and they're working with us, AGO, ArticleGroup.org. And what we're looking at is what figure ground shift can be precipitated that has occurred before. And one of them was, for example, gay shame, gay pride.

• 32:33Paul Hawken?

  So in 2010, you could run for Congress in the United States and basically deprecate LGBTQT.

• 32:43Rich Roll?

  Get away with it, still get elected.

• 32:47Paul Hawken?

  And get away with it and get elected.

• 32:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Paul Hawken?

  2012, the same party said, oh, my daughter happens to be a lesbian. You know, and all of a sudden, it was like, oh, you know, they're okay. It's okay. I'm okay, you know? Because you couldn't get elected two years later, or at least not reliably put it that way. And not saying there isn't tremendous anti-LGBTQ in the conservative and the evangelical movement. There is, of course, you know, in other countries. But the last month was gay pride month, and so, you know, multicolored flags and this and everywhere, you saw it. So what was that shift from shame to pride? You know, it's well created by the community itself, okay?

• 33:32Paul Hawken?

  So the same thing holds true with climate, which is that it's been marked by shame, by the way, guilt, fear, threat, blame.

• 33:43Paul Hawken?

  That hasn't worked. And it's made people numb. It's made people tune out. It has created antipathies, you know? Like fossil fuel workers, you know, who work at Chevron or someplace feel like, they're being blamed and so forth. And so what is the figure of ground shift where people can feel that we are together and we all can make a difference in not just, again, by your cold water and your washing machine, but I mean by coming together, you know, and the ways in which people have

• 34:25Paul Hawken?

  always come together, that's we are social beings, we're social, we're very social. And so that's what we're looking at right now, which is what is it that will bring us together around climate? And what brings us together is that when you start to parse the distinct solutions, even though they're systems, they're connected, is that they better life for everyone, they make a better life. So that if you looked at them in the absence of climate science or extreme weather, you said, good, not good, should we do it? Not do it. You want to do every one of them, every one of them. And I think what regeneration, the point it tries to make is that we have focused so,

• 35:09Paul Hawken?

  for so long, on this idea that there's a small, select, intelligent, you know, informed finance group of people who are going to solve the problem. And we've used the term future existential threat, like that this is a future existential threat over and over and over and over, like you should do something because, you know? And that doesn't work. It never has worked. And what regeneration is saying is that the solutions that address global warming actually address meeting current human needs. And what we've got to do is direct ourselves to each other. There's 4.1 billion people who wake up every morning and the only thing they can think about

• 35:55Paul Hawken?

  Is current human needs, their needs. It could be food, it could be income, it could be a job, it could be safety, it could be food security, back to food, getting their kids to school, getting them in school, affording books. I mean, it goes on and on. This is what the bulk of humanity wakes up with every morning. They are not going to be active in a climate movement. And we don't need, quote, "people who are really trying to better their own lives to be active in a climate movement." But they do need renewable energy, they do need electricity, they do need clean water, they do need better farming techniques, they do need cleaner food.

• 36:35Paul Hawken?

  They do, all these things that are synonymous with actually reversing global warming actually reverses human suffering as well.

• 36:44Rich Roll?

  Right, promoting equity for all.

• 36:53Rich Roll?

  That's a big part of the book, this idea of human rights and social justice and education and empowering women. Because you have to raise the floor on people's sort of daily, you know, subsistence levels to create, you know, a situation in which they're not only benefiting from these changes that are being made, but then well taken care of enough so that they can become, you know, part of this movement as well.

• 37:21Paul Hawken?

  They, but de facto, just by leading their lives, they become part of it. And in Dradan, one of my regrets about Dradan is that we had educating girls as a solution. And then we actually looked at it in terms of carbon. You know, that is, if we actually provided schooling for the 145 million girls who are not in school, who could be, and what effect that would have on carbon, you know, emissions. And that goes to population, deforestation, all these sort of things. In this one, we didn't do that. And what I said is that actually, most of these young women are in countries where they need to have a higher carbon footprint. They need more.

• 38:07Paul Hawken?

  They're in poverty. And we in the privileged north or wherever shouldn't be looking at them for changing their life so that those less greenhouse gas emissions. We should be looking at educating and girls as a human right. It's just a human right and stop there, don't go any further. And we really have to look at ourselves. The top 10% of income earners in the world, and that's over 38,000. That puts you in the top 10%.

• 38:47Paul Hawken?

  Are responsible for 46 to 50% of all greenhouse gas emissions. So we have to look at ourselves.

• 38:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So would you change that? You change that section in Drawdown? You could rewrite it.

• 39:00Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, there's a new ED there. They're going to stick to it. But that's why I did. This has always tended to be the sequel to Drawdown. I don't know what they're going to do with that. But the importance is to start to see, again, I say anything. If you want to understand poverty, look to see who's benefiting.

• 39:24Rich Roll?

  Right, that's a recurring loop in the book.

• 39:28Paul Hawken?

  Nobody wants to be poor. And also, poverty doesn't want to be fixed. It wants to fix itself.

• 39:38Rich Roll?

  Explain that a little bit.

• 39:40Paul Hawken?

  It's called pride, dignity, purpose. And people who are poor don't want a handout, don't want, you know, shiploads of surplus grain to be dumped on the shores of some country and passed out, you know, as, I mean, they may need it at that moment because of some sort of food shortage, but that doesn't solve anything because it's not addressing the conditions that caused it in the first place. And so... All of regeneration is about creating the conditions for self-organization. That's what your body does. That's what every living system does. It creates the conditions for self-organization. And, you know, so when we think about solving

• 40:25Paul Hawken?

  an intractable problem, like global warming, oh my, it's impossible. What can we do? And look, all these mega-institutions and political stupidity and ignorance and so forth, you know. But if we step back and say, well, what are the conditions that create self-organization or self-abnegation? That is, that destroy that? Then that's where we want to go. And that is the source of change. I mean, regeneration is innate to every living system, is innate to us. We regenerate every day. We practice it every day. We do it with our bodies. We do it with our dog. We do it with our children. We do it with our friends. We do it with our mom. We do whatever.

• 41:08Paul Hawken?

  We are actively trying to improve the life of others. It's so human, our 30 trillion cells. We generate every nanosecond, or we wouldn't be having this conversation.

• 41:22Rich Roll?

  Right. And they do it without our intervention.

• 41:24Paul Hawken?

  Well.

• 41:25Rich Roll?

  So planetarily, this is a combination of getting out of the way and allowing things to heal themselves and repair themselves. And on top of that, certain, you know, sort of strategic surgical human interventions to promote that regeneration so that it can become self-perpetuating.

• 41:44Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, it's not getting out of the way so much. It's not thinking hierarchically that you know what needs to be done. It's a matter of doing, not knowing what needs to be done. And then, that's what we've done up to now. This needs to be done, and you know, all of this needs to be done, and this needs to be done. That the people want to heal themselves. They want to heal. The society, the places they live in. And they want to heal the land, you know. I was once in the northwest. This is years ago now, but when, you know, they were hanging spotted owls in the back of pickup trucks, you know, because the loggers and the newcomers, so to speak, of from the cities were just at,

• 42:28Paul Hawken?

  pun intended, I guess, loggerheads, you know, and fighting and, you know, because the loggers felt that these city slickers or these liberals were trying to make them jobless.

• 42:40Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:40Paul Hawken?

  Right? And I remember being in a, in a, in a city, it was a town, really, and to talk about the future, so to speak. And you, the aisle, there's an aisle. And on this side was all the loggers and the guys with the plaid shirts and with the, you know, pickup trucks. On this side was, you know, the environmentalists and the conservationists and the people who really wanted to take care of everything. And what I did is ask simple questions and said, how many people here want their rivers to have more fish or less fish in thirty, forty years? And everybody raised their hand, like, more. How many people want cleaner water, dirtier water?

• 43:23Paul Hawken?

  And always went out, not today, but thirty, forty years. Everybody raised their hand. How many people want their children, if you have them, to be able to stay here and get living wage jobs and stay close to the family rather than having to go to the city? Everybody raised their hand. How many people want hunting to get better or worse? Everybody raised their hand. How, you know, it just went on and on. I said, you're all in agreement. You all agree on everything you want. So the question is, instead of talking about what you don't agree about, is to work backwards from where you agree.

• 43:58Rich Roll?

  But then it has to be about finding a way forward that isn't a threat or a perceived threat to people's livelihoods.

• 44:06Paul Hawken?

  Of course, absolutely. So there has to be a just transition for coworkers. There has to be a just transition for fossil fuel workers. There has to be compassion. There has to be care. There has to be acknowledgement that these people are good people and they have families and they care about the world just as much as you do. They care about it in a different way. They've been taught it in a different way. They think in a different way. That doesn't make them bad, doesn't make you good. And so, absolutely, and that's what it means for us to come together. But the most powerful way you come together is to listen, not to know. And so, again, if you go at the climate as a know-it-all, I know you don't listen up, it's gonna fail.

• 44:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 44:51Paul Hawken?

  But if you look at it from the point of view of the inherent values that we almost all uphold in terms of what it means to be safe, to be a family, to have children, to not have children, if that's your choice, you know, to be a part of a community, to be respectful, we're in agreement. And what the world wants is, to me, and this is my belief, is that we've created such meaningless employment for the bulk of humanity. I mean, they know it's meaningless. It's repetitive. Repetitive, excuse me. It doesn't challenge them in terms of intelligence. It doesn't pay well. It's in poor working conditions.

• 45:36Paul Hawken?

  I'll give you an example. I calculated how much a worker would make in 1,800 in the dark satanic Hobbesian mills of England, you know, and these are textile mills.

• 45:52Paul Hawken?

  It's a penny an hour, okay? And today's dollars, because the penny was related to gold and silver then, it's 30 cents, it was 30 cents an hour at that time in today's dollars. The average pay today for garment workers in the world is 30 cents an hour.

• 46:11Rich Roll?

  Oh, is that right?

• 46:12Paul Hawken?

  So in 220 years, we haven't changed the pay scale for garment workers at all. So what people, what people are looking for is purpose and meaning and dignity. And there could be no more meaningful work in the world today, which is to restore life on earth. So the book is very much about all the different fascinating ways that, that can happen. And it has a demonstrative, important impact on reversing global warming, as opposed to, oh, get solar, you know, get an EV, do this, do that. Not saying you shouldn't do that if you can. But for most of humanity, those are not options.

• 46:55Paul Hawken?

  And so we have to look at it from a much broader, more enlarging, more upholding way that relates to what people can do. And the other thing I think is important to do is to stop thinking that this is what you ought to do, these are the top 10 solutions, you should focus on those. That was another thing that Drawdown did inadvertently, which is to rank all the solutions by impact. And then people said, all looked at the top 10 or the top 15. And not to say that they, they aren't proportionally impactful, they are. But actually, the most important things for you to do are the ones that light you up, where you just get excited. Nobody wants to wake up in the mornings and say, I can't wait to mitigate today.

• 47:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. That was a similar message in, in Margaret Klein Solomon's book. It was called like Fighting the Climate Crisis or something like that. I don't know if you read that book, but I had her on the show. Yeah, and it's all, it's, it's just how, it's all about like, how do you get people plugged into this? And you got to get them excited. And I think because we're so divorced from the natural cycle.

• 48:02Rich Roll?

  of life and the earth beneath our feet. Finding a way to reconnect with that. That meets a certain person's enthusiasm is a great way forward and it shifts. The lens away from. The idea that climate change is happening to us to this idea that I know you've spoken about, which is. The idea that climate change is happening for us, like where is the opportunity here to reconfigure everything and create. A completely different way of living for. The vast majority of people who are so disengaged from the natural environment.

• 48:40Paul Hawken?

  Exactly, and and the thing is, if you. I mean, there's solutions like beavers.

• 48:47Rich Roll?

  I know, I love that. I didn't know all that about beavers.

• 48:49Paul Hawken?

  Right, I know, it's like.

• 48:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 48:51Paul Hawken?

  If you if that excites you, and it does, by the way, there are people just just love beavers, they study them, they work and they try to.

• 48:58Rich Roll?

  I didn't realize how many beavers there were.

• 48:59Paul Hawken?

  There are a lot of beavers.

• 49:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 49:01Paul Hawken?

  And and and who trapped them in the cities and then not to take them where they will do more good. You know, upstream, so to speak, in in in mountainous areas and so forth, but. If you're doing something that just you love to do.

• 49:19Paul Hawken?

  You're very likely then to be open to other things that need to be done. Because now you're starting to see yourself as an integral part. An effective integral part. To restoring life on earth, which is really what reversing global warming is about. It's about restoring life on earth. We've taken as much as. We should a long time ago, actually, we've passed that limit. So. Again, you know, I define regeneration as putting life at the at center of every act and decision. I mean, that's what regeneration is. And so looking through that lens, looking through that, you know, that seeing the world that way. Then allows you to basically.

• 50:05Paul Hawken?

  Reflect, you know, on what it is you're doing, or what it is that you're a part of that's being done, and how it's being done. And it doesn't mean leaving it or quitting it. It means, can we change that? Can we change that? Have you thought about this? Is there this possibility? Is there this way? Can we, you know? It's really about doing what you can in place, you know, as opposed to finding some other place in the world where you can make a difference. You're most effective where people know and respect you.

• 50:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah. When you say the word regeneration, immediately what comes to mind for me is soil regeneration. And, you know, there's been a massive explosion in terms of people's awareness and care with respect to how we're treating our soils. And, you know, you can credit our friend Ryland for all the beautiful work that he's doing with Kiss the Ground and the documentary that he made, John and Molly Chester and The Biggest Little Farm. Like, there are pieces of really powerful mass media that I think are shifting the paradigm and helping people to better understand this piece of the puzzle. But the book really canvases

• 51:13Rich Roll?

  a much broader definition of what regeneration is. And you break it down into all these different categories. You've got oceans and forests and wilding and land and people and cities and food and energy and industry. And within that, all these subcategories where people are doing amazing things. And you kind of explain why this is important, how you can get involved, the new kind of operating modalities that are helping to heal the planet in these various capacities. And I think, you know, if you page through the book, you're going to find that thing that's going to make you enthusiastic, whether it's beavers or, you know, urban gardening or whatever it is. And what was interesting is there were so many things in here. Like, I feel like I have a pretty good grip

• 51:57Rich Roll?

  on this general landscape, but there was a lot in here that I didn't know anything about. Some pretty interesting things in here, like the azola fern was one that I didn't know much about. Maybe you can explain that a little bit. Trophic cascades.

• 52:14Rich Roll?

  What are these things?

• 52:15Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, there are, and when you first see them on the page going, "What does this have to do with..."

• 52:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 52:25Paul Hawken?

  "I'm worried about the future of my children." And he's talking about a trophy cascade.

• 52:31Rich Roll?

  Right, we need to talk about the beavers.

• 52:33Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, same with beavers. Ozola fern is a fern, and it floats. It lives on the surface of the water. It metabolizes nitrogen from the air. It fixes nitrogen from the air. So it doubles every two and a half days. If it's cold, two days. If it's warm, three days. But approximately, it doubles. It is rich in omega-3s, which is unusual for a plant, and needed by this omega-6 world we live in, junk food.

• 53:16Paul Hawken?

  And it makes oil. And it sequesters carbon. And the reason we know that, not that any plant doesn't do that, every plant does. But there was an azola event 49 million years ago. And at that time, the PPM of CO2 was 25,000. It was pretty hot. And there was no ice in the Arctic. And it was a freshwater lens. And you had these azola... It's called the azola event, but azola events, where in the summer, it would be covered with azola. And then in the cooler part, in the winter,

• 54:00Paul Hawken?

  it would die and sink to the bottom. And then that happened. And within a relatively short geological time, it went down from 25 to 6,000 PPM. And it is described to azola, the presence of azola. Well, Azola can still do that. In other words, it can still sequester things very, very rapidly. So whether they're in lakes, or, you know, or wetlands, or even rivers and so forth, or ponds, Azola can sequester carbon. You can harvest it. You can feed it to animals, chickens, rabbits, goats.

• 54:45Rich Roll?

  Right, it's like a pretty nutrient-rich.

• 54:47Paul Hawken?

  Very nutrient-rich. You can put it in your salad. It's delicious, alright? So, you know, you can make oil out of it. You can have omega-3 eggs if you're an egg eater and you want your eggs to be much more nutritious. And the rate of carbon sequestration is quite extraordinary. And you could even, although I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't want to do it, you could even put it in a river. And then, like the Missouri going into the Mississippi. And then, you know, it doubles and gets bigger and bigger, bigger. Then you could have takeouts. You're taking it out all the way down the Mississippi. And then, when it gets to the Gulf, it dies. And it goes down to the bottom.

• 55:31Paul Hawken?

  The oil that's being drilled for in the Arctic today is due to Azolifer.

• 55:37Rich Roll?

  Oh, is it really?

• 55:38Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 55:40Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 55:40Paul Hawken?

  And so, the interesting thing about it, though, if it's in a river, it's cleaning the river up from both nitrogen and phosphorus. It'll, so, right now, what you have in the Missouri-Mississippi is runoff. And as it gets to the Gulf, it creates this huge dead zone.

• 56:01Rich Roll?

  The algal blooms.

• 56:01Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, algal blooms, dead zone. You know, it's feeding, you know, algal blooms, you know, and Sargasso Sea for that matter, going into Tulum in Mexico. And so, Azola cleans that up. And so, the possibilities with Azola are extraordinary.

• 56:16Rich Roll?

  So, why aren't we doing that?

• 56:17Paul Hawken?

  Well...

• 56:18Rich Roll?

  Like, couldn't we create massive reservoirs also? And just harvest this stuff while we're sequestering carbon?

• 56:24Paul Hawken?

  Hey, you know, when I did a drawdown, we talked about Aspergopsis taxiformis, which is this type of seaweed that if fed... In very small amounts, one, two percent to ruminants, you know, like cows, obviously, that would reduce methane emissions, you know, from their digestion by eighty, ninety percent. Well, that was four-plus years ago, and it's happening. In other words, there are a dozen companies now that did not exist at that time. Have their patents, they have this, they're competing, they're cultivating it, they're trying to, also, they're actually selling it, it's being used and so forth. So it took a very short time.

• 57:06Paul Hawken?

  I think Azola is in the same place where we didn't discover it, obviously, that's not what we're saying, but I think it might come to a broader understanding and awareness now.

• 57:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 57:19Paul Hawken?

  So that people will do something that, and there's so many imaginative ways that you can use it, and it has so many positive and beneficial effects.

• 57:26Rich Roll?

  In our kind of dualistic way of looking at things, though, I'm imagining, like, oh, we think this is some panacea, and we dump it in the Mississippi, and then there's some downstream, you know, ecological ecosystem implication that we're not foreseeing.

• 57:40Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, and it's invasive, but it can invade running water because the water keeps going in one direction, so, but I'm sure there might be.

• 57:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 57:49Paul Hawken?

  But if you do it at your farm, at your own reservoir, at your pond, at your, whatever it is, it's yours, you know, and so there is nothing, there is no downside from that. But there's always, got to look at these things very carefully.

• 58:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 58:03Paul Hawken?

  We use a river analogy just to give people a sense of scale of undammed rivers. If there was an Azola, what's it called, I don't know, it's not a company or whatever that was working with the state or the country or, you know, hydrologists and everybody, hey, we're all working together, you could be pulling off so much carbon, so much food, I mean, and, you know, you'd be replacing the soy and the crap that's being grown that's causing the runoff with Azola, which is really extraordinarily nutritious.

• 58:36Rich Roll?

  Right, because it's a bio-fertilizer, but it's also a great animal feed.

• 58:41Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, you can work it into the soil, you can work it into the animals.

• 58:46Rich Roll?

  And it grows like crazy.

• 58:47Paul Hawken?

  It grows like crazy. So what's

• 58:49Rich Roll?

  It's like hemp. It's like this crazy multipurpose plant that we've overlooked.

• 58:53Paul Hawken?

  Yeah. What's wrong with this picture? It's hard to find out what's wrong with it.

• 58:56Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 58:57Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 58:58Rich Roll?

  The other mind blower was was this idea of rainmakers, microbes in the sky.

• 59:04Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 59:05Rich Roll?

  So walk me through that.

• 59:06Paul Hawken?

  Sure will. It's been known for some time that like coastal development, like in Spain, the whole Costa Brava, the whole coast was, you know, developed in the last 30 plus years. I mean, it was Mediterranean coast and beaches. And then it just got overrun by hotels and condos, basically, you know, for northerners wanting to come and own something in the south in the winter. Okay. But what also happened is that the rainfall patterns changed completely inland, the summer rainfall. And they know now why, because those

• 59:48Paul Hawken?

  structures all along the southern coast of Spain destroyed all the wetlands. And so we have this idea that the long rain cycle is the cycle, you know, comes from the oceans, goes inland, drops rain.

• 1:00:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:00:02Paul Hawken?

  There's a short water cycle, which is the rain comes up from the land, moves and drops. And there's a story, not a story, but a scientific study that was done in Africa, in Malawi, of tea plantations in a specific valley. And the study came about because it had the highest concentration of hail

• 1:00:26Paul Hawken?

  in Africa. And the question was, why? I mean, it just didn't make sense, you know, why here and not the next valley over? Or, you know, and or in some other country for that matter. And one of the scientists who studied it was aware that we used to think that water nucleates on dust. So in other words, how does a gas like, you know, become a liquid? Well, it attaches, it has to attach to something. That's called nucleation. Water attaches to water really easily, but it doesn't attach to other things so easily. And gas, it doesn't become water.

• 1:01:09Paul Hawken?

  And so, we just assumed for many years, there was dust in the, there was a lot of dust in the atmosphere. Now we know there's a killer amount of bacteria in the atmosphere, and diverse bacteria. So, in Malawi, he actually took the hail, melted it, and then basically looked at the bacteria that was in there and sequenced it, and discovered that the bacteria that was predominant in the hail was specific to the tea plants in that valley and only in that valley.

• 1:01:40Rich Roll?

  That's wild.

• 1:01:42Paul Hawken?

  In other words, the tea and agriculture was creating the precipitation.

• 1:01:47Rich Roll?

  So the atmosphere is literally a microbiome that's populated by the plant life on the ground.

• 1:01:54Paul Hawken?

  Absolutely, and always has been.

• 1:01:55Rich Roll?

  And the diversity of the plant life, the quality of that plant life dictates what that atmospheric microbiome is, and in turn, plays a large role in the rainfall, the extent of the rainfall, the quality of the rainfall.

• 1:02:10Paul Hawken?

  Just like the Sahara Desert, which is now the opposite, completely dry. Dust storms come off the Sahara. You can see them, I mean, from satellites, across the Atlantic Ocean, and they go south into the Amazon. And the rainfall in the Amazon benefits hugely from the dust from the Sahara. And so, we are just discovering, not we, but science is discovering, these extraordinary relationships. And what we do know is that the temperature that we experience... Eighty percent of that is caused by the hydrosphere, not by the atmosphere.

• 1:02:53Paul Hawken?

  And that is to say that hydrosphere is, it can be the clouds, but it's, it can be the fog, but it can be really the transpiration of the plants and the soil around us. And that can lower surface temperature by one to two degrees centigrade, and sometimes more. So the other aspect of that is that our deforestation, our overgrazing, and our agricultural methodology, the industrial agriculture, has desiccated the land. You're a runner. You know what happens when you get too dry. I mean, it is, you're in dangerous territory, first of all, and you can't function. Well, the earth has been desiccated.

• 1:03:37Paul Hawken?

  And so what regenerative practices do, whether they're animals grazing, whether it's, you know, afforestation, whether it's agroforestry, whether it's regenerative agriculture, actually is they change the composition of the soil because they start to sequester and place more carbon, and that carbon is food for microbes and viruses and protozoa, et cetera. And that, they start to eat each other, and they form glomulin, which is kind of a humic acid and so forth. And it changes the structure of the soil so that when it does rain, whether a lot or a little, the soil can retain the water.

• 1:04:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:04:15Paul Hawken?

  When soil retains the water, then it's going to transpire the water when it gets hot, and it's going to cool. Plants grow better when it's cooler in the summer than when it's hot. So you're getting this amazing virtuous cycles by basically restoring degraded land. And there is an estimation of two to three billion hectares, that's five to seven and a half billion acres of land on earth that can be restored. And it's not just sequester carbon, but probably more importantly, sequester water.

• 1:04:50Rich Roll?

  The water, yeah. That was one of the profound... Things that I noticed when I visited John and Molly Chester's farm. Have you visited?

• 1:05:00Paul Hawken?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:00Rich Roll?

  Oh, you haven't been there?

• 1:05:01Paul Hawken?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:02Rich Roll?

  Oh, you gotta go. It's just down the street.

• 1:05:04Paul Hawken?

  I know.

• 1:05:04Rich Roll?

  Next time you're in L.A.

• 1:05:05Paul Hawken?

  I gotta go see it.

• 1:05:06Rich Roll?

  I mean, they're in your book, so I know you're very familiar with everything that they're doing. But when you're on their land, there's a... You're kind of at a high point. You can see the other farms that are surrounding that farm. And the difference is pretty dramatic.

• 1:05:20Paul Hawken?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:20Rich Roll?

  And just the colors alone comparatively to the neighboring farms that are farming conventionally is unbelievable.

• 1:05:27Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27Rich Roll?

  And one of the things that they were telling me was when you get the rains, the rare rains in the wintertime here in California, the water doesn't run off. Like, you're not getting all this flooding and all the other problems that these other farms are having. Like, the water stays there.

• 1:05:42Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:42Rich Roll?

  And it almost creates its own, like, little microclimate around the farm.

• 1:05:47Paul Hawken?

  It does, you know? And the thing is, like, again, people... There's been a tendency to talk about the big solutions, you know? And they revolve around energy, you know? Of course, because it's 76, 80% different numbers of the greenhouse gas emissions today are from the combustion of, you know, coal gas and oil. So, of course, you know? If we don't do that, you know, we're goners. No question about it. But that then has causes to overlook the importance of what the Chesters are doing, what regenerative ag does, what restoring degraded land does, what, you know, agroforestry, reforestation, what, you know, managed grazing does, you know?

• 1:06:30Paul Hawken?

  I mean, those are just as important, you know? So, that's, again, goes back to this idea, well, I just... We're just restoring, you know, 2,000 acres in the middle of, you know, the Australian, you know, not desert, but so forth, but, you know, it's somewhere in Australia. Yeah, uh-huh.

• 1:06:48Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:48Paul Hawken?

  That's really important.

• 1:06:50Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:50Paul Hawken?

  In other words, as opposed to thinking, well, it doesn't really make a difference. It makes a huge difference. And those are the differences, you know, all around the world. And I guess my question is... How do we get that going?

• 1:07:03Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, that's the $64,000 question, right? Like, I would suspect that most farmers would rather be farming in the way that John and Molly are farming than the way that they're currently farming.

• 1:07:15Paul Hawken?

  Yes.

• 1:07:15Rich Roll?

  But the gap from status quo to the situation that John and Molly are in is pretty vast. You have to create some kind of incentivization or transitionary situation to allow those people to free themselves from the kind of tyrannical situation that they're in, where they're in this, basically, indentured servitude relationship with big agricultural firms that compel them to do things in a certain way and allow them to transition. Because if you get anything from that documentary, it's how long it took to get it to a situation where now it's semi-self-perpetuating. There were some lean, very difficult years where most people would have bailed and gone back to the old ways.

• 1:08:00Rich Roll?

  So you have to create an economic buffer for these people and an on-ramp.

• 1:08:07Paul Hawken?

  The way to understand industrial ag versus, say, not opposed to, but compared to regenerative ag is simple. And industrial agriculture started or really got going in the middle of the 19th century, when chemical fertilizers were invented and then got, you know, was on steroids once the Haber-Bosch method of creating nitrates was early 20th century. And so industrial ag basically feeds plants, NPK, and then the macronutrients it needs to grow. And when it first started to be used in the 19th century, there was a lot of bad farming

• 1:08:51Paul Hawken?

  in Germany and Europe. There was hunger issues, there really were. And...

• 1:08:59Paul Hawken?

  And all of a sudden, you put this powder on the field and you have these bright green plants that are taller than the ones who didn't get it. And you're going, "Hey, we're on to something. I mean, this is cool." And it just got better and better, quote, quote, in a sense of, you know, phosphorus and potassium, you know, potash. And pretty soon, that was how you grew plants. You could grow more of it, the yields were greater, et cetera. It always takes time when you do that. Of course, you realize that the plants are weaker. Because regenerative ag actually doesn't feed plants, it feeds soil. And for, you know, the 400 million years that plants have been here, you know, soil has always fed the plants.

• 1:09:43Paul Hawken?

  And so essentially, industrial ag is putting plants on an IV drip. That's what it's doing. And you take the drip away, and the plants suffer because the soil has been degraded. And it's really holding the plant up, it's not feeding the plant. So there is that transition, there's no question about it. And we do need a way to support farmers because the reason... I've never met a regenerative ag farmer, and I've met quite a number, who did it because it was the right thing to do. Now you say, "Well, why did they do it?" They did it because they hit the wall. It's the same as people's health. People don't change their diet because it's the right thing to do.

• 1:10:28Paul Hawken?

  They change it because they hit the wall and said, "This is not working at all." And then they turn to people, to functional medicine, to you, to whatever. Julie, I mean, they turn and go, "Wait a minute, I don't know what to do." And so the farmers I've met, you know, basically hit the wall. They were running out of money. And they were feeling this squeeze, you know, between producing commodities, having the prices out of their control.

• 1:10:56Paul Hawken?

  And being part of an overproducing system that suppressed prices and their costs were going up because the soil was getting poorer, poorer, turning into dirt, as has been said, and then it needed more and more inputs.

• 1:11:09Rich Roll?

  More inputs, yeah.

• 1:11:10Paul Hawken?

  And it needed pesticides because the plants were so weak, the bugs were eating it, and then it needed glyphosate because the weeds could outcompete the plant and pretty soon you have basically modern ag. But again, as I said earlier, those farmers could see that that degenerative road ended. They could see the ending. It was called, basically, the bank saying, "Pay up, or we're gonna take all your equipment."

• 1:11:35Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:11:36Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, and that's...

• 1:11:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:11:38Paul Hawken?

  So those... The biggest fact... The biggest change in the farming community on regen ag is caused by farmers, that farmers talking to farmers.

• 1:11:47Rich Roll?

  Right, that's what I was thinking, like pivoting from that blame and shame, you know, modus operandi into empowerment and engagement. It's those farmers who have made that transition.

• 1:11:59Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:00Rich Roll?

  Who are the ones who are gonna be able to communicate to the other farmers.

• 1:12:02Paul Hawken?

  Absolutely.

• 1:12:03Rich Roll?

  They're not gonna wanna hear it from you, you know, let alone me, I mean, you know, God forbid. So, yeah, like, creating community around that that's supportive and empowering to helping people make that transition, but also on top of that, systems that are conducive to that being an economic viability.

• 1:12:22Paul Hawken?

  But there are things happening where the demand for regeneratively-produced seeds and grains, and obviously meat as well, but are increasing faster than production.

• 1:12:36Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:12:37Paul Hawken?

  And so farmers are seeing a premium. There was... They... Their inputs are going down, their costs are going down, but actually, the income is going up. And you see 10x differences in profit per acre for regen farmers. And as Gabe Brown famously said, he said, "I got tired of basically signing the front of the check, and now I sign the back of the check." You know, in other words, it shifted from an expense to income, you know, and you don't go back from that. And so now there's, you know, companies and processes and techniques and satellites

• 1:13:22Paul Hawken?

  and there is a lot of support now being created for regen ag in its true form, and it's being also done in some dubious forms as well.

• 1:13:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And yet, you know, I just, I was out of town the other day and just, you know, I was in an airplane yesterday and you look down and you don't see a lot of regenerative farms. You see giant swaths of, you know, square and round parcels.

• 1:13:49Paul Hawken?

  Pivot irrigation.

• 1:13:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So where are we in terms of that becoming, like, reaching some kind of inflection point with this?

• 1:13:56Paul Hawken?

  I don't know. I don't know. I know that, like, the big, big companies are pivoting on this. They have the same questions, which is how do we make the transition? They don't. How do their farmers make the transition? And how's the brush is doing with rice? General Mills is trying to do it with oats. And, but so many, like, the clothing companies now are basically looking for regenerative fiber, primarily cotton, but other fibers as well. So you're seeing the supply-demand dance.

• 1:14:36Rich Roll?

  Right, the consumer demand. I mean, I feel like Gen, Gen Z, you know, the younger generation, they, they're, they're up to speed on this stuff and they're much more conscious about their consumer choices than our generation.

• 1:14:47Paul Hawken?

  Much more, much more. I mean, when I started... Everyone, we are maumout all the time about you hippies. You know, you want to feed the world organically, but we, industrial ag, have, we take care of the children. We have a world to feed. You guys are, you know, like, you know, sort of self-indulgent, almost narcissistic, you know, and you're wanting things without chemicals and pesticides, you know. And now it's, I don't know how big the industry is, it's so big that you can't get enough organic food in the United States. But the same thing is, Regen is not going to go through that, because you're

• 1:15:26Paul Hawken?

  seeing every major agricultural company in the world, Syngenta, and Cortiva, and Monsanto buyer, and ADM, and Cargill, moving to regeneration. Now, I mean, keep your tongue firmly in your cheek on that one, because I feel like there's some co-op going on there in terms of the term and the word. But as Franklin Roosevelt once said, that sometimes the way you start telling the truth is by being a hypocrite at first. And so, who knows, you know, where that's going to go. But you do see Indigo Ag, which is all about regenerative farming from the get-go and not about chemicals, you know, kind of like the opposite of a

• 1:16:08Paul Hawken?

  Monsanto, doing really, really well, working with, not only with regenerative farmers, but in terms of, you know, metrics, in terms of measuring carbon and de-modification, that is, connecting farmers directly to the buyers and getting the farmers out of the commodities business, you know, where no matter how well you do, you're still, the price is the same for everybody, you know. And so, that has to happen, so that regenerative farmers can get a premium, and that the food companies that buy that have a story and a narrative that means something to Gen Z and everybody else who cares.

• 1:16:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The story narrative piece, I think, is big. I think, you know, most companies these days need something. That has to be a genuine, authentic aspect of doing business.

• 1:17:03Paul Hawken?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, and I think they recognize that. I mean, we'll see what happens. But I think that we're in a period of tumultuous change. Some of it is...

• 1:17:18Paul Hawken?

  Threatening, for sure, you know, and daunting. But I get the sense in the business community that the old ways are over. I really do. And I'm not praising anybody. I'm not trying to think, oh, finally, business gets it. And I'm not saying that either. If anybody doesn't get it, I would say it's the investors. They still want to put their money where they're going to get the highest return. And the earth doesn't work that way.

• 1:17:46Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah. I mean, banking is a whole section in the book about that.

• 1:17:50Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Rich Roll?

  Where do you see the role of hydroponics in all of this? I mean, obviously, that's growing plants in a manner that's divorced from the soil conversation altogether. I suspect there's a great place for that in urban centers or places where there isn't soil. But how does that fit into the idea of regeneration?

• 1:18:20Paul Hawken?

  Well, it's interesting, because plants suffer. That is to say, they suffer because it gets too hot, there's too much sun, insects. They suffer for a lack of nutrient, for example, so they put their roots down deeper. The complexity of the taste and the phytonutrients that are in plants are actually due to stress. So plants that are stressed are malnutritious.

• 1:18:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:18:53Paul Hawken?

  When you do hydroponics, you're actually going back to industrial ag, which is you're doing, you're, it's an IV drip into the roots. It's fine if you're just basil for salad or watercress or something, you know, for greenery, you know, in cities. The idea that that's going to produce nutritious food, I think, is faulty. Because we have unnutritious food now, everywhere. And we have food that comes from industrial ag, you know, both whether it's row crops or, you know, and vegetables, or whether it's, you know, in grains and seeds. And we have measured, we can measure the difference in the phytonutrients and minerals, or the lack of minerals that are in these foods.

• 1:19:38Paul Hawken?

  So, we haven't been able to invent a way to make a really super nutritious food without soil yet.

• 1:19:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:19:45Paul Hawken?

  And I don't think we ever will.

• 1:19:46Rich Roll?

  What about the carbon sequestration piece of it?

• 1:19:48Paul Hawken?

  Of what?

• 1:19:50Rich Roll?

  Meaning that if you're in urban centers and you don't have soil, but you have all these hydroponic gardens everywhere, is that moving the needle at all in terms of

• 1:19:58Paul Hawken?

  Probably not.

• 1:19:59Rich Roll?

  pulling carbon out of the atmosphere?

• 1:20:00Paul Hawken?

  Probably not. I think it's, at the same time, we do want to localize food production. We do want to bring food into the city, into the peri-urban areas, you know, right around the city. And that does involve greenhouses, that does involve all sorts of really ingenious techniques, you know, to extend the season and to produce crops that people want. And there's nothing wrong with the crops that are grown hydroponically in terms of, but just not the idea that somehow that's going to replace the foods we eat. It just won't. But it can produce very fresh and tasty, like I said, parsley and basil and watercress

• 1:20:40Paul Hawken?

  and lettuces and things like that, which are not really, I mean, the source of, you know, the major source of our nutrients.

• 1:20:49Rich Roll?

  Let's talk about energy.

• 1:20:51Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:52Rich Roll?

  Why can't we get wind power, like, just rocking out everywhere? Like, what are the impediments to really scaling that? Because it seems to me that's the most viable, best solution at the moment.

• 1:21:08Paul Hawken?

  I think the major impediment is seeding. In other words, people don't want to, people generally don't live where there is, you know, the high wind regimes. You know, the Midwest is, the wind's blowing all the time almost, you know. And so there, farmers...

• 1:21:32Paul Hawken?

  Love them, you know, with their corn. They have two crops, you know, kilowatts in corn. I think that the major obstacle is offshore wind. In other words, citing offshore wind. And I think Heinrich Staisl, Danish engineer, has solved the problem. And he was the, when he was young, he started fully around with wind turbines. And the three-blade configuration that you see today on the big turbines, he invented that. And a farming supply company called Vestas heard about him. Because at that time, farms had windmills.

• 1:22:17Paul Hawken?

  My grandfather's farm had a windmill for water. Right. And they bought the rights to his design. And Vestas is the biggest wind turbine company in the world today, 13 billion a year. Wow. And Staisl has invented a floating platform. They can go out far into the sea to areas where they won't interfere with people's view escape, where there's a lot of land, so to speak, but it's not land, it's water. And I think that that is going to come in at a price that is also less expensive than coal gas and oil. And wind already is, by the way.

• 1:23:02Paul Hawken?

  The new wind farm installations, solar is also lower cost than fossil fuel electrical generation. And I just think it's a matter of, I don't know, maybe two, three years. Because they're testing them right now, they're floating them. And Staisl is such an amazing engineer. I mean, his track record is extraordinary. And when he does something, it tends to work. And somebody said, well, you know, when he started this project of the floating wind farms, somebody said, what if we can't afford it? And his response is...

• 1:23:40Paul Hawken?

  We can't afford not to. So I think there is that, again, that inflection point I'm going right now, which is, are we quibbling over a half a cent per kilowatt hour? That coal is cheaper than, you know, it's not, but I mean, you know, are we gonna like, I mean, it's cheap, just buy it, let's do it. End of subject.

• 1:24:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it just seems like there should be massive, you know, wind farms offshore and then like sort of, you know, areas of the planet where there's tons of wind and low population density. And throughout the deserts, solar farms everywhere.

• 1:24:18Paul Hawken?

  There will be, I think there will be. The interesting thing about, we think of things like death spirals, you know, something is, you know, there's also other types of spirals, which is disruption spirals. And we're in a disruption spiral with wind and solar, renewable energy, which is its cost is going down. As its cost goes down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, demand for fossil fuel goes down. As that declines, the cost goes up. Okay, for fossil fuels, it doesn't go down, it goes up. If you use less of something and you're producing, you know.

• 1:25:02Paul Hawken?

  So as the demand goes up, it attracts more investment. More capital wants to go where something is growing, of course. So the cost of capital goes down. Investment into fossil fuels, which is peaking and declining, the cost of capital is going up. So these are, this is a disruption spiral that's going to accelerate the rate of acceleration that we're seeing in renewables. And most of the projections about solar and wind and renewable have been linear. The IEA, the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, similarly McKinsey as well.

• 1:25:45Paul Hawken?

  And last year, they admitted that they had been wrong every single year for nineteen years.

• 1:25:51Rich Roll?

  By undershooting it?

• 1:25:52Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, absolutely. Every single year. Absolutely, you could count on them to get it wrong. Every one of those institutions. And they did on batteries as well, storage for EVs and for, you know. And so I think we're on a threshold where we're going to be surprised at the rate of growth in solar and wind. And the only thing that is going to not prevent it is simply capital formation, and capital wants to go to it because it really pencils out, and the demand is there.

• 1:26:28Rich Roll?

  A big piece with with energy on this quest to electrify everything, which is, you know, a big, a big point that you make in the book, is is storage, right? So we have these batteries. Batteries are improving. They're they're growing in their capacity to hold storage, but they also degenerate. And they require, you know, tons of mineral inputs, which of course have downstream impacts on the planet. Like, there is no perfect panacea situation here. If we improve our batteries and then everybody's got batteries for everything, we're pivoting away from drilling, you know, and fracking to just mining, which is what we're already seeing. And we're seeing a disproportionate amount of that.

• 1:27:11Rich Roll?

  We're seeing like China really capitalize on that in a big way right now. That's creating kind of a geopolitical imbalance in terms of, you know, how that that that certain economy is functioning.

• 1:27:22Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, there are things like neodymium that are integral to magnets, and the magnets are integral to power generation and wind turbines. And the rare earth monopoly is almost China, not quite really, but they really, fifty-six or fifty-eight percent of the rare earths come from China. And so they definitely have control on that.

• 1:27:47Paul Hawken?

  What I'm seeing is that in the like storage area where it's primarily lithium ion and there are some I guess what I'm saying is that there's a whole bunch of innovators circling around that one. Solid state batteries, carbon based batteries, no lithium. And startups that are brilliant and are pointing to material use and storage capacity and cost reductions that we've seen in every single area of energy on the renewable side. Nobody thought that solar or wind would be this cheap, ever.

• 1:28:32Paul Hawken?

  Not in the wildest imagination did anybody think that, you know, you'd be installing solar for less than two cents a kilowatt hour in Saudi Arabia of all places. I mean, but they're doing it at a profit. I mean, it's not like, you know, subsidized. And so the same thing holds true for storage, which is that I don't think we're locked in to the technologies that we're using right now. And I think you're going to see on this storage side, I think you're going to see techniques, technologies, basically, that are still going to use minerals, but minerals that are ubiquitous

• 1:29:11Paul Hawken?

  and easy to get as opposed to, you know, Bolivia or in the Atacama Desert or things that are more sparse or not so well distributed.

• 1:29:21Rich Roll?

  That's encouraging. Yeah. I feel like the progress that's being made with batteries is similar to the history of the microchip, right? It's accelerating very quickly. And every year, you know, EVs are coming out and the battery life's getting better and better and better, et cetera. Like, it does feel like that's getting figured out.

• 1:29:42Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, it is. And we're in a huge disruptive cycle in a good sense. I mean, the disruptive cycle that's causing it is climate. But there is technologically a rate of disruption that's occurring that is, hold on to your hat, the rate of change, the players, the universities, the engineers, the technologists, the entrepreneurs, the capital formation is extraordinary. And so, nothing that we, I think, are projecting in the future is going to live up to what will actually happen. It's gonna be more, it's gonna be better.

• 1:30:27Paul Hawken?

  That doesn't mean, by the way, though, that we should all have an electric car. You know, I mean, we should live in cities where you don't need a car at all.

• 1:30:35Rich Roll?

  Right. The 15-minute city.

• 1:30:37Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, 15-minute city. We should, this isn't, I feel like sometimes when you listen to some companies or some people, certainly some politicians, that the idea is to fix it so that we can just continue to grow our economy bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And we just have to get rid of this nasty little problem called climate.

• 1:31:04Rich Roll?

  That's getting in a way, that's just sort of annoyingly getting in the way of economic growth.

• 1:31:09Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, so we gotta get it all right, you know, get it all. But the alignment isn't with nature, the alignment is with GDP, you know, how can we get this, you know, and that's very much a JP Morgan, you know, that's very much an investment banking way of seeing the world, you know, which is, okay, that's how we can make money, doing this and doing this and doing that. But what's underlying that is like, you know, the business-as-usual scenarios that are used by the IEA and the World Bank and the IPCC basically project an economy that's two and a half times bigger by 2050 and seven times bigger by 2100. And that is just... Ridiculous, it's so absurd to think that we can 2X, 7X, 5X, whatever,

• 1:31:54Paul Hawken?

  where we are today in terms of throughput in economy. I mean, and so really, part of the innovation has to be, how can we do more with less? How can we fulfill our needs as human beings? And we have needs, you know, and in a way that actually lowers our footprint, not just our carbon footprint, but our whole footprint, you know?

• 1:32:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:16Paul Hawken?

  And so I don't see that really coming into the conversation yet in terms of regeneration.

• 1:32:27Rich Roll?

  Right. How long can the economy continue to multiply at that level? Like, is this gonna go on ad infinitum? Is there any conversation about?

• 1:32:36Paul Hawken?

  You can't.

• 1:32:38Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's the ultimate in unsustainability.

• 1:32:42Paul Hawken?

  Absolutely.

• 1:32:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:32:44Paul Hawken?

  Every price of every share, with some exceptions, on stock exchanges is based on assumed and projected rate of growth. And there are stocks that just pay dividends, like Pipeline, you know, just pay. So there's a few, but 99% are based on growth. And imagined, projected, you know, based on the past, based on, you know, pipe dreams, whatever.

• 1:33:14Rich Roll?

  It is weird that success is predicated on this idea of growth. Like, why is it not okay to just have a business that does fine and pays its employees and enriches its shareholders without growing?

• 1:33:27Paul Hawken?

  Because you can't amass capital.

• 1:33:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:33:30Paul Hawken?

  And that's capitalism.

• 1:33:32Rich Roll?

  You could provide good lives for everybody involved.

• 1:33:35Paul Hawken?

  Absolutely. It's called steady state. It's called, there's lots of words for it, a steady state economy. Steady state economy can take care of the whole world. What it won't do is create multi-billionaires. It won't create people like, you know, Elon Musk got 6.7 billion in compensation. That was his salary. This year, it just announced today. I mean, just insane, insane amount of capital. And what that capital is doing is destroying the world for the rest of people. It's making, I mean, houses too expensive, real estate too expensive. I mean, I mean, there's like the rich are pulling away from the rest of the world.

• 1:34:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the the the wealth disparity gap is just accelerating at an obscene rate. And the pandemic just amplified all of that.

• 1:34:25Paul Hawken?

  It amplified it, yeah. And and so I don't know where that is going to hit the wall, but it'll hit the wall. It can't it can't happen. It it doesn't really pencil out. I mean, only in, you know, somebody's, you know, banker's wet

• 1:34:45Rich Roll?

  But yeah, so it doesn't need to pencil out at infinite. If it only needs to pencil out for my lifetime.

• 1:34:52Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:52Rich Roll?

  Right, I mean, that's the mindset.

• 1:34:54Paul Hawken?

  Or before I retire.

• 1:34:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:56Paul Hawken?

  I'll take away my millions and

• 1:34:58Rich Roll?

  No, no appreciation for this idea of indigeneity, which is another subject in the book, right?

• 1:35:05Paul Hawken?

  It is, yeah. The the, but I do think the consumption thing is something that really isn't being talked about. You know, now there's so much openness in terms of regenerative ag and renewable energy. And and more and more, you know, people are forming around the idea that, you know, we have to really take care of nature, which is kind of a funny revelation at this point. But it's true. But what they haven't done is actually think about, but how much are you we using total? You know, like individually in our cities, our our assumptions about what makes a good life and all that sort of stuff. I mean, I mean, virtually every one of my shirts has a patch on the elbow, you know.

• 1:35:53Rich Roll?

  Paul, you martyr.

• 1:35:54Paul Hawken?

  No, I think I'm proud of it.

• 1:35:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:57Paul Hawken?

  I should have worn one today so I could hold it up. But I thought, no, I'm going to, I'm gonna be videoing. I got three shirts that don't have patches. And, but the idea that, you know, it doesn't, it's never made us happy. More, you know? I mean, if you don't, if you're poor, yes, more. Clothing, food, education, housing, of course.

• 1:36:21Rich Roll?

  But once you reach a certain level.

• 1:36:23Paul Hawken?

  It doesn't make you happy.

• 1:36:24Rich Roll?

  Excess accumulation has no relationship to happiness.

• 1:36:27Paul Hawken?

  No, it doesn't.

• 1:36:28Rich Roll?

  And meanwhile, amidst that consumption, there's a tremendous amount of waste. Right? We're wasting food, we're disposing of our clothes. Everything is disposable.

• 1:36:41Paul Hawken?

  Yes, I mean, clothing is considered to be, 8% of global emissions is due to the clothing industry.

• 1:36:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's shocking.

• 1:36:49Paul Hawken?

  It's the number two industry in terms of waste in water. Number two.

• 1:36:55Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:36:56Paul Hawken?

  I mean, food, the newly part came out this last week. The number for food waste is 40%. 40% of our food is wasted.

• 1:37:07Rich Roll?

  That's wild.

• 1:37:08Paul Hawken?

  It's crazy and.

• 1:37:10Rich Roll?

  Where's the gravamen of that waste coming from?

• 1:37:14Paul Hawken?

  The greatest proportion is the farm, the second, but that depends on the continent.

• 1:37:19Rich Roll?

  Meaning they harvest, a portion of the harvest just gets tossed out because it doesn't look nice and the grocery stores aren't gonna buy it or whatever.

• 1:37:27Paul Hawken?

  Ugly food, this, that, all sorts of things. But it depends. That's in Africa.

• 1:37:33Paul Hawken?

  But if you go to North America, then the food is actually in the, the waste is in the supply chain at the consumer level. So it depends on which country. I mean, it's an aggregate number, but actually it's kind of deceptive because it doesn't apply to Europe the same way it applies to Africa, where you don't have cold chains. So, you know, if they don't have a cold chain, that makes it hard to preserve.

• 1:37:57Rich Roll?

  Sure. But in North America, in the transport, in the chain from farm to grocery store, or what have you, somewhere along the line, stuff spoils.

• 1:38:06Paul Hawken?

  Oh, yeah, it's 25%.

• 1:38:07Rich Roll?

  And then households throw away food, restaurants toss out food.

• 1:38:10Paul Hawken?

  They can't. Yeah, they toss too much that they didn't cook, and then if you don't complete it, finish your plate, they have to throw it away.

• 1:38:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I did a podcast with this chef, Daniel Hume, in New York, and he's partnered with this organization called Rethink. Are you familiar with what they're doing? It's super interesting. I think the most interesting part of Rethink is the technological piece, because so much of waste, at least in the restaurant ecosystem, is a function of lack of kind of communication and efficiencies that would allow, you know, that waste to go towards something good. So if you can create like a network system where, and sort of efficiencies for these restaurants to, you know, set aside whatever food is getting

• 1:38:59Rich Roll?

  wasted so that it could be efficiently repurposed, it's an easily solvable problem with, you know, just a little bit of distribution effort involved.

• 1:39:10Paul Hawken?

  It's the same thing. It's reconnecting the broken strands. Reconnect the system. The way you heal a system is to connect more of it to itself, whether it's your immune system, an ecosystem, an economic system, a social system. You connect more of it to itself, and we're radically disconnected. And so what Daniel, what he's doing there, and Rethink is doing, is saying, wait a minute, here's a, you know, source, and here's a sink, you know, here's a need, and here's a use. And, like, what if we do this? What if we do this? What are the logistics? What's required? How does the staff have to be trained? Once you make that shift, it works automatically.

• 1:39:48Rich Roll?

  Right. Right. To use like a human body analogy, it would be repairing neurons, or, you know, basically stitching up arteries and veins so that these things can flow.

• 1:39:58Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, or unblocking them.

• 1:40:02Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:40:04Paul Hawken?

  For moving the crap.

• 1:40:07Rich Roll?

  A little invasive surgery there.

• 1:40:09Paul Hawken?

  You mentioned indigeneity, and indigeneity is actually the sort of the leitmotif of regeneration. Actually, I mean, there's a piece on it, but it actually, it goes throughout. And the reason is that I'm white, I'm not indigenous, but actually, if I trace my ancestor all the way back.

• 1:40:31Rich Roll?

  You're indigenous to something.

• 1:40:33Paul Hawken?

  Everyone is.

• 1:40:33Rich Roll?

  At some point.

• 1:40:34Paul Hawken?

  Everyone is, but not in my family's history or experience, or nothing got passed down to me about where I'm living and how to live there.

• 1:40:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:40:44Paul Hawken?

  And the thing that we don't understand, and I think we're starting to, of course, from the horrific way that indigenous people have and are being treated to this day, is that they were amongst many things, and I don't want to reduce it in any way, but some of the best observational scientists in the world. And most of the science we rely upon today is empirical science, which is, if it's not science unless you can repeat it, if it's not repeatable, then it's just an observation. It's just an happenstance.

• 1:41:25Paul Hawken?

  But the fact is, in nature, nothing repeats, and there is no lines, and there's no circles, and there's no things that we rely upon. But there's pattern, and there's pattern recognition. And pattern recognition depends on time, narrative, stories, oral traditions, that pass on what is known. Language, in which the teaching of how to live in place is embedded in the language, so that you have verbs that are essentially metaphors for how to know where you are.

• 1:42:07Paul Hawken?

  And it was Aristotle who said, "Metaphor is genius." And so when you start to look at the 5,000 indigenous cultures on the earth, and you start to see that they had extraordinary knowledge of the place that they lived.

• 1:42:28Paul Hawken?

  How do we know that? Because they've been there for, you know, 10, 12,000 years or longer in some cases and so forth. And through changes in weather and all sorts of adaptation. And so we have been the opposite. We've actually haven't lived in many places for very long.

• 1:42:49Rich Roll?

  But even if we have, sorry to interrupt, like even if we had, let's say we've lived here for thousands of years, we're not connected to the biosphere in the manner in which those cultures were and are.

• 1:43:02Paul Hawken?

  They had to be because that's the only way they could survive, is to actually know where they were. And so you see things like 3,000 years ago on the East Coast, and Lila June, who's on our board, actually a Dineh and Cherokee activist, poet and scholar, wrote a piece called "The Forest is Farm", and what she talked about was that if you do core samples in Tennessee and around the East Coast, you find 3,000 years ago a real shift in the pollen and what was being grown and different trees and different plants and annuals and food plants and like what happened. And what happened is that, you know, Native Americans in this case,

• 1:43:46Paul Hawken?

  indigenous people transformed the forests into farms. It was this way they got all the food, along with animals, all right? And I was on a plane to Alaska to give a talk at the university, and I was sitting next to a woman. And we began to talk, and she's Yupik. And the Yupik people live on the Bering Strait, on both sides of Alaska and Russia. And she was going there because her sister died and she became the elder. And we started talking about it, you know, how it is to live on the Bering Strait? Come on. And she said that to live there,

• 1:44:28Paul Hawken?

  they needed to be able to predict the weather two years in advance.

• 1:44:33Rich Roll?

  What?

• 1:44:34Paul Hawken?

  Wait a minute, I said, "Two years?" She said, "Oh, yes." She's a very humble, quiet woman. It wasn't, there was no bragging or pride, nothing, nothing. It was just matter of fact. I said, "Well, how'd you do that?" And she started to name every single thing that they saw over a course of a year, observed. And whether it was the color of the sea ice when it froze in the fall and then melted in the spring, the depth of it, the extent of it, the type of velvet that was on the caribou, the fish, they could tell from the fish how they had changed

• 1:45:19Paul Hawken?

  or subtle differences. I mean, she just started naming the clouds. They would look at the clouds, they would look. She just named every single thing in their environment. And over, obviously, hundreds and thousands of years, they began to say, "Well, this, you put this and this, you got those things, that means that." Or in the future, or they had the memory of what happened two years ago, so they had this type of weather. They'd look back and say, "Yeah, I'll look at memory." And so they did these. And she said, and they did it to survive. They said, "There was no..." And we can't predict it six weeks in advance or even two weeks in advance.

• 1:45:58Rich Roll?

  That's so wild.

• 1:45:59Paul Hawken?

  The most amazing environment in the world.

• 1:46:01Rich Roll?

  And so beautiful.

• 1:46:03Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:04Rich Roll?

  To be so intricately, you know, involved and immersed in your environment and to be so present and paying such close attention to the smallest details and to extract meaning out of that.

• 1:46:17Paul Hawken?

  But they're just, not just, they're just one culture.

• 1:46:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:46:22Paul Hawken?

  It's true for every...

• 1:46:23Rich Roll?

  And to have, and to have Western culture be dismissive of that because it doesn't meet the criteria of the quote-unquote "scientific method."

• 1:46:33Paul Hawken?

  Right, exactly. And now, of course, a lot of scientists are actually turning to indigenous people, but a lot of indigenous knowledge has been lost. I mean, they all just died. They were, you saw what happened in Canada. I think it happened here too, you know, like their children were taken away. You know, they were murdered essentially in Catholic schools, you know. I mean, they were traumatized. They were belittled. They were, you know, they were taken away from their native foods. You know, they were fed commodity foods full of sugar, fat and starch. You know, they got obese. They got type 2 diabetes, you know. They couldn't get jobs, you know. I mean, all of what we did to them, it wasn't them doing it to themselves.

• 1:47:18Paul Hawken?

  And so, yet in some way, in most places, they were able to maintain and keep this knowledge and these oral traditions passed on generation after, for hundreds and hundreds of years. You know, from, from being deracinated by the colonists, you know. And so now, I think we're realizing, gosh, this is Alexandria library of knowledge. You know, it was right there all along, except we didn't listen.

• 1:47:49Rich Roll?

  No. Instead, we dislocated them, marginalized them, stole their land, and forced them into situations where they have to open casinos.

• 1:47:59Paul Hawken?

  Absolutely, yeah. And so, I mean, part of regeneration, people say, well, what does that have to do with climate? Is absolutely to make amends, in whatever way we can today. Not just to indigenous people, but actually, well, not just, I mean, but

• 1:48:19Rich Roll?

  To the planet itself.

• 1:48:20Paul Hawken?

  African Americans, because they're indigenous people who were enslaved and brought over. There's 3,000 different cultures in Africa. And, you know, and when we look at the roots of regenerative agriculture in this country, you know, I mean, the initial roots came from Africa. They didn't come from Asia. They didn't come from anyplace else. And can you imagine being a woman in Ghana? And for whatever reason, you've been kidnapped or, you know, and then herded? And then you're put on a boat, going to somewhere you don't know, that nobody can explain to you, that makes no sense at all. And somehow, these women braided rice and seeds into their hair.

• 1:49:08Paul Hawken?

  And brought them to so-called New World. And which is why the African-Americans were the best rice farmers in all of Southeast America. And when I started Erawan and started to grow organic rice, or get it grown actually for us, I worked with two black farmers in Arkansas. And their knowledge of rice was unbelievable. And it went back for almost 400 years.

• 1:49:35Rich Roll?

  Wow. That's a wild story.

• 1:49:38Paul Hawken?

  I know, we don't, we have no idea where our foodways came from, or where the knowledge came from. Of course, George Washington Carver got that.

• 1:49:46Rich Roll?

  Right, I noticed him in the book too. Talk about that a little bit, because that's, I did not know about this either.

• 1:49:52Paul Hawken?

  Well, I mean, he, he was the one who, who observed that the difference between black farmers and the results they were getting, and white farmers who were mostly cotton farmers, because it was the best cotton soil where they were, Alabama, and how they're playing out their, they're playing out their farms. They were killing their soil, killing the farm, you know. And so, and then on a nourishment level, then of course on the peanuts, you're looking at ground nuts as a source of both restoring soil, but also restoring, you know, an inexpensive

• 1:50:33Paul Hawken?

  way to provide a balanced nutrient to people that they weren't getting, you know, at that time. But it wasn't just him, he had a whole bunch of other, you know, colleagues, you know, at Tuskegee, you know, they worked together. And again, the roots and the, of that, and the benefit of that is throughout America to this day, you know, and we don't, we don't recognize.

• 1:50:58Rich Roll?

  Right, right, I mean, when you... Not to keep bringing it back to this documentary, but when you watch The Biggest Little Farm, short of John and Molly finding some version of that, like somebody who's steeped enough in soil ecology to help guide them, they would have never been able to make it work there.

• 1:51:19Paul Hawken?

  No.

• 1:51:19Rich Roll?

  And to think that there's this robust, unbelievable canon, you know, a library of Alexandria of this kind of wisdom and knowledge based on millennia of observing nature

• 1:51:34Paul Hawken?

  Right.

• 1:51:34Rich Roll?

  that it's lost is crazy. Because anybody who would carry that message would be so valuable in so many ways to anybody who's looking to tread a little bit more lightly on the planet and to do things in a regenerative symbiotic way.

• 1:51:52Paul Hawken?

  And again, the other thing that we've maybe lost respect for is the language itself, because it wasn't written. So it's not written.

• 1:52:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:52:01Paul Hawken?

  And whatever. And I remember being in Patagonia and going to this museum and the Yamana Selknam people, depending on which name you use, but and there was like, I don't know, maybe a few dozen left at that time. I mean, they had been extirpated, basically, by disease and by guns. And Bruce Chatwin wrote a book in Patagonia about the Yamana people and about their language. And then I have a friend, who's I grew up at the University of California Libraries, where my father worked. And in my family, Marion, the librarian, was a hero. She was really something. And so I spent a lot of time at the library. And so I understood from Bruce's book

• 1:52:44Paul Hawken?

  that there was a dictionary, that there was a missionary who was down there who had nothing to do. And there was only 100 or so Yamana people left. And he was a lexicographer, so he made a dictionary and worked with the tribal chief, with the tribal chief. Was really, they killed so many people, he was like by default, but he wasn't. And, and so for many years, he made a dictionary of the Yamana language into English. This dictionary, it's a really amazing dictionary. And they got to 30,000 words, and the missionary died. And the Yamana wouldn't talk to them about cosmology, about women's issues and so forth. They said, "No, they said, "We don't trust you with this knowledge." But they did talk about, you know.

• 1:53:27Paul Hawken?

  And if you read this dictionary, it's, like I say, it's metaphor, you know. And like depression, the word for depression is a crab that's molting its shell, but it hasn't come off yet. I mean, get out of here.

• 1:53:40Rich Roll?

  What?

• 1:53:42Paul Hawken?

  I mean, it's such an exquisite language, 30,000 words. And these are the people that Darwin called beasts. Because when they came around Tera do Fuego, which it wasn't named then, it was like, they saw fire and smoke, and the fire and smoke was from the Yamana, who carried fire with them everywhere, because it was cold, but they were naked, because they put seal fat all over their body to stay warm. And they knew that clothing would actually get wet and actually cause them to die. So they're called beasts, right? And they acted in, you know, strange ways and so forth, you know. Japanese has 40,000 words. This dictionary had 30,000 words and is incomplete.

• 1:54:25Rich Roll?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's wild.

• 1:54:28Paul Hawken?

  It's so, our understanding of indigeneity, of indigenous people, is so broken and so...

• 1:54:36Rich Roll?

  Well, it's, it's, it's metered in condescension, essentially.

• 1:54:40Paul Hawken?

  And the wrong metrics.

• 1:54:41Rich Roll?

  They're not educated in the manner in which we recognize, so we're dismissive of that.

• 1:54:46Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, we don't have the right lens to, we don't have the right lens to see it, understand it, and frankly, benefit from it. And we were basically, we saw them as beasts. We use that word, not just Darwin. And as, you know, a subclass of species, a subclass of human beings.

• 1:55:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, when you think of, of somebody like... Paul Stamets, who knows everything about mushrooms. And now we're seeing this resurgence of enthusiasm and interest in mycology and what we can learn from the fungal universe, creating foods from them, and just appreciating how much more complex and amazing it is than we ever imagined. But in my mind, that's, he's in furtherance of that indigenous tradition, because he's so steeped in this one thing, right? So imagine thousands of Paul Stamets who are experts in a wide variety of different types of fields that have to do with the cycles of the planet.

• 1:55:50Paul Hawken?

  Yes, and those people are coming and there's, then there are respectful scientists now, and the Ashwar and the Warani, that, you know, they're in service, you know, in honor of their knowledge and trying then help also to keep out, you know, the miners, the loggers, COVID as well, for that matter, in the Amazon, in Peru, in Ecuador. So there are some really, really wonderful things going on now because of the respect and understanding that was never there or was hardly there and now is really growing.

• 1:56:33Paul Hawken?

  And I think it also relates to a planet on fire. So who are you going to turn to, you know? Obviously not Chevron, Exxon, obviously not the Republican Party, and obviously not people who could care less. And these people who are so, I don't want to be those people, people who live in a place and have cared for it so long have something to teach us.

• 1:56:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:59Paul Hawken?

  About caring.

• 1:57:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:01Paul Hawken?

  And about knowing, you know, and that we've lost or that we never had. So, and Paul Stamets, I mean, when you think of his career and think of, I mean, you know, he accidentally boiled up a whole bag full of psilocybin, you know? Somebody gave it to him, he used to just take a few, and he boiled the whole bag up and drank it and then went up a tree, you know, he was, and then this thunderstorm came and he was in that tree all night long, blowing, you know, around, you know? And it's for him to say, but to me, I mean... Paul Stamis was born that night.

• 1:57:38Rich Roll?

  Right, he had a spiritual awakening.

• 1:57:40Paul Hawken?

  He did, he absolutely did.

• 1:57:42Rich Roll?

  And his life path unfurled.

• 1:57:44Paul Hawken?

  And he stuttered up until that moment, and when he came down from the tree, he no longer stuttered.

• 1:57:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:57:50Paul Hawken?

  And so, he had it in a very short night, or maybe a long night. But you have to be out there, you have to be in nature, you have to turn off everything that's on and turn on everything that's off.

• 1:58:05Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:58:06Paul Hawken?

  To you, it's not off, actually, and so forth. And spend that time, I spent three months once in silence, in the woods with nobody there.

• 1:58:14Rich Roll?

  You did?

• 1:58:14Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:16Rich Roll?

  When did you do that?

• 1:58:17Paul Hawken?

  I did that about fourteen years ago, fifteen years ago.

• 1:58:21Rich Roll?

  So you had a kind of a Walden Pond experience?

• 1:58:24Paul Hawken?

  I was just a caretaker at a refuge that was in New Mexico, and it was during the winter and early spring, and nobody was there. So I didn't speak to anyone, because there was no one to speak to. I mean, it was easy.

• 1:58:37Rich Roll?

  So you weren't setting out to have that experience, it just was an occurrence by dint of...

• 1:58:42Paul Hawken?

  Well, what do you do every day?

• 1:58:43Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:58:44Paul Hawken?

  What do you do? So what I did every day was I would take off in a direction and try to get lost. There was, just take off.

• 1:58:54Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:58:55Paul Hawken?

  And, and I never got lost, except once. That day, I was like, "Oh, I don't know where I am, it's so interesting." You know, because it's in this huge, you know, national forest, you know? There's no roads, there's no houses, there's no telephone poles, there's no cellphone towers, there's nothing to orient you. And, but it gave me such a deep appreciation for a place. And I remember once, in the morning, walking along the stream rivers, kind of right in between both. And literally, a bear and I almost ran into each other. The water was so loud, it was in the early spring, you know?

• 1:59:40Paul Hawken?

  So I was rushing down through the snow, and I couldn't hear anything. And I was looking one way, it was looking the other way. It was this, what I call a cinnamon bear, his coat. And it had, it must have been eating termites from a dead log, because it had stuff all around it, whiskers, you know? And we met each other and going... Oh shit! It's like...

• 2:00:04Rich Roll?

  What do I do now?

• 2:00:05Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, we looked at each other, then we turned away, because you know, we both turned away, because you're not supposed to make eye contact, you know? But you can see, you know, you turn your head away, but you can still see the other, the presence of the other creature. And it was so beautiful, because it's a being. It's not a bear, I mean, it's a bear, but it's a being. It's, you're a being. There's two beings there. And it's like, okay. And we both kind of, you know, made a circle and around each other and kept going.

• 2:00:42Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 2:00:43Paul Hawken?

  And so, and I remember nights where I would just go out and then just lean against a tree all night and sleep, or wake up and sleep all night, just so you know. And listen to the creatures and the birds and in the morning and night, not so much birds at night, of course, but I didn't know what they were. I mean, there's just sounds, you know? And those experiences are, they're not like paws in the tree, not until some, but they're life-changing. They're life-changing. And when you hear terms like, "Oh, we have to practice nature-based solutions," you know, MBSs, they're called MBSs now by the climatologists. It's like, excuse me, you know?

• 2:01:26Paul Hawken?

  Nature, nature, nature, everything is nature, you know? And, you know, the idea that there's nature-based solutions, as if that was what nature was there for.

• 2:01:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:01:36Paul Hawken?

  You know, it's still that same colonial...

• 2:01:40Rich Roll?

  Hierarchical.

• 2:01:41Paul Hawken?

  hierarchical way of looking at the world, which others the world, that others nature, it makes other nature seem like other. Again, what I said about fixing it, you know, like, well, what's the it? Climate's it, well, really?

• 2:01:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the idea that, that we're going to organize the world in accordance to our, to meet our needs. Like, and yeah, we'll make sure it's sustainable, but the, the notion being that, that like, we're even capable of that to begin with.

• 2:02:10Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:10Rich Roll?

  That those solutions exist for the benefit of us.

• 2:02:14Paul Hawken?

  And we othered indigenous people. We othered them utterly.

• 2:02:17Rich Roll?

  We've othered everything.

• 2:02:19Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, everything, I guess. Yeah, in that sense. And, and, and so... That the, this idea of regeneration, the core of it, is to experience the inseparability of everything and each other, you know, and to honor that. And as I said, the most important thing to do is to listen, you know, and in nature as well, you know. And just the, the way we have led and been taught to lead our lives, you know, has been so, just fractured, everything, you know,

• 2:02:59Paul Hawken?

  just shattered all the connections that are actually intrinsically there. And regeneration is that rediscovery. And that's why I say, go, go do what is exciting to you, you know? That's the thing you're gonna do best, and that's what's gonna turn other people on and get them lit up and so forth. And this idea, and Andrew Huberman.

• 2:03:23Rich Roll?

  Right, I love that he showed up in the book.

• 2:03:25Paul Hawken?

  He sure did, he showed up because of-

• 2:03:27Rich Roll?

  I felt like you pulled that paragraph right out of the podcast.

• 2:03:30Paul Hawken?

  I did. You're in this book. You're in this book a lot more than you think you are. Of course I pulled that out of the, listening to you and Andrew, but you know, but the idea that beliefs change our actions, if that was true, we'd be in a very different situation today with respect to climate and the fact that it's actions that change beliefs. And so people, you know, the thing to do is to do, go do, do whatever it is. Just go do, start doing, you know, don't think about it. And for God's sakes, don't worry about the numbers, you know? I mean, we have, what I think now in the climate movement, and I think Droidon is partly responsible, is what I call climate voyeurism. If we outnumber this, oh, it's 8% of emissions, it's this, it's that,

• 2:04:13Paul Hawken?

  it's twice as that, food is 34% of-

• 2:04:16Rich Roll?

  But that's actually doing something.

• 2:04:18Paul Hawken?

  As if that's doing something.

• 2:04:19Rich Roll?

  Calibrating everything is actually solving the problem. All it is is indexing it.

• 2:04:23Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, indexing, exactly. It's like, well, I'm glad you know. Doesn't do anything. And watching a documentary on Netflix on climate doesn't do anything either. It's like, we have to make sure that we are actually doing something. And with all due respect to my colleagues and my friends and so forth, and I can say this all day long, they're still not doing anything. They're not doing anything. And that's why in the book, we have punch lists where we have a connection to the website, which is, "Hey, make a punch list."

• 2:04:52Rich Roll?

  Right, right. Yeah, a big piece of this is, we haven't even talked about it, the nonprofit that is associated with the book, regeneration.org, where there's this toolkit and all sorts of resources to help people move in that Huberman way from belief into action.

• 2:05:12Paul Hawken?

  Absolutely. One of the things that I learned, I did 128 speeches in 22 months for Dr. Dharan. You learn nothing when your mouth is open and you learn a Q and A, because the cues generally are being asked for other people as well. Maybe one person is brave enough to ask it, but a lot of other people are going, "Hell yeah, I want to know too." And so you learn from the questions. And I can't, almost without exception, somebody would say, "But what should I do?" Or, "What should I do? I don't know what to do." It's interesting.

• 2:05:54Paul Hawken?

  And there's, you know, 100 solutions in Dr. Dharan, and they're asking that question. And Jasmine, my wife, when I started Regeneration, said, "If you don't tell me what to do in this book, I'm leaving you." I said, "Got it."

• 2:06:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:12Paul Hawken?

  You know, so the book doesn't exactly do that, by the way. What it does is the last eight pages is a wormhole to the website. And there, we have what to do. You want to know what to do. It is the complete, almost abbreviated manual of what to do for challenges and solutions. Challenge would be the boreal forest, the biggest stock of carbon on Earth is being depleted with plush toilet paper, open pit mining, tar sands, you know, etc. Okay. That's a challenge. That has to stop. Okay, a solution is electrifying everything.

• 2:06:56Paul Hawken?

  And that would mean putting in a heat pump in your house to replace natural gas, or it could be oil in the East Coast, whatever, for heating, for water. It can even be for cooking, using an induction cooktongue. That's a solution. But what it does is like, okay, this is what you can do as an individual. Okay, this is all of the different levels of agency. This is what you can do as a neighborhood, if there is something you can do. This is what you can do as a school. This is what you can do as a company, or ask companies to do as agents and so forth. And onwards. These are the influencers who are causing problems. Here's the email for the chairman of Procter & Gamble,

• 2:07:40Paul Hawken?

  who makes plush toilet paper. You might want to write to him and say, "Stop taking virgin fruit trees and making toilet paper out of it."

• 2:07:48Rich Roll?

  Bamboo works better anyway, right? I learned that in the book.

• 2:07:51Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, bamboo or recycled paper works a lot better and it's cheaper. And then here are the NGOs that are just kicking butt. I mean, really are effective and influencing and making a difference. Here are the First Nations, who are rising up, speaking up, talking about, these are traditional tribal lands that the First Nations are dealing with in the boreal. They know the land better than anybody. Here are videos, cool videos, it'll teach you. Here are books, here are the great books on the boreal and so forth. Here, etc. So every solution and challenge has, whatever you want to know, or your entry points, we're not saying these are,

• 2:08:35Paul Hawken?

  these are all access to all the ways you can actually be effective in this area. That's what the book is, is sort of a neurotransmitter to the website.

• 2:08:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, that's powerful. The level of like, practical advice that you can give people. And they can plug in wherever they're enthusiastic.

• 2:08:53Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, it's my huberman.

• 2:08:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's your action. Mood follows action.

• 2:08:58Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:59Rich Roll?

  How's your mood? Your mood's good.

• 2:09:00Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:01Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 2:09:01Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:02Rich Roll?

  What is the thing that you're most, like, I put that question to you. Like, what is the thing that you're most enthusiastic about?

• 2:09:11Paul Hawken?

  I would say the thing that I'm most enthusiastic about is the rate at which people are rediscovering land, in all its myriad forms. You know, I shouldn't say you know, I didn't know, but we researched it and found out. The terrestrial systems, that is, forests and grasslands and farmlands and coastlands and mangroves and wetlands and so forth, those hold 3,300 billion tons of C, carbon, not CO2, C. The atmosphere holds one-fourth of that, it's four times as much carbon that's in

• 2:09:56Paul Hawken?

  the atmosphere. Okay. So there's two ways you can look at that. Those systems are being degraded. In other words, we're continuing to deforest, we're continuing to use industrial ag, we're continuing to overgraze, we're continuing to desertify the earth, etc., to cover up our wetlands, etc. So every time you do that, then the life of the, on the soil or in the soil, you know, perishes. That's got C in it. When C perishes, it combines with oxygen, produces carbon dioxide, okay? So in other words, it's emitting CO2, greenhouse gas, all right? Okay.

• 2:10:34Paul Hawken?

  So if we, if we keep doing this, right, another 10% of loss of our terrestrial systems, that will increase PPM from 419, what it is today, 418, to 519, like that. It'll add 100 PPM, not reduce it. Okay, now let's flip that. Let's talk about a climate of optimism for a minute, okay, instead of pessimism. So that means if we add 9% more C into all those systems, you know, 9% is not a lot.

• 2:11:11Paul Hawken?

  Then we sequester all the carbon we've emitted since 1800.

• 2:11:18Rich Roll?

  Oh.

• 2:11:19Paul Hawken?

  Okay. And if we go to 13, 14%, depends. We will also account for all the carbon that is planned to be emitted by 2050. So if you look at any place you live, any place you love, any place you've seen and say, can we have a 10% to 12%, 14% improvement here? Like more trees, more grasslands? Or can we change the grazing strategies and technologies? Can we change the farming strategies? Can we undeterify the 2 to 3 billion hectares of land and so forth? Heck, yeah, we can. So that's just in protection. That's not technology, that's not energy.

• 2:12:02Paul Hawken?

  There's many other things we can do that are solutions that we've talked about.

• 2:12:07Rich Roll?

  It's just political and community well. But it's not asking a lot. If every community could incrementally improve by 10% through a variety of measures, it seems highly achievable.

• 2:12:19Paul Hawken?

  Very achievable. And so it's important that we have, you know, rather than the big pictures that came out today from the IPCC about, whoa, you know, it is here, it's irrevocable. I mean, no question. And you go, ah, you know, I mean. At the same time, it's important that we have the opposite, you know, which is like, yeah, and, got it. Thank you for sharing. Thanks for such fantastic science. Let's go to work. And this is the work that can be done everywhere by everyone. And we can absolutely meet the challenge.

• 2:13:01Paul Hawken?

  No question. We need both. And so it's not that the science or it's understandable that the science has been couched in threat and fear and all that sort of stuff. I mean, the scientists didn't know how to communicate and activists took the science and used blame and shame and finger pointing as a way to thought they thought maybe that would make a difference. I don't know. But both were right. It's not that. But they didn't conform to neuroscience.

• 2:13:32Rich Roll?

  Right. It's a natural psychological reaction to not being heard, right? It's just frustration that builds into anger.

• 2:13:42Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:42Rich Roll?

  And it's well intentioned, but it doesn't actually change minds or hearts.

• 2:13:48Paul Hawken?

  No.

• 2:13:49Rich Roll?

  I think we're seeing that shift across all forms of activism. Because you spoke about the gay rights movement. I mean, you see that in the vegan movement. Like, you know, all these sort of tried and true methods that have been used for years that just make people angry and divide people. We're now realizing, hey, that's not such a good approach.

• 2:14:09Paul Hawken?

  Exactly. In fact, another figure ground shift from my point of view was vegan to plant rich. Vegan polarized, you know?

• 2:14:17Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 2:14:17Paul Hawken?

  I mean, I eat eggs. I mean, you know, and but plant rich, like first, I don't know if I coined it or I know the first time I used it, I hadn't seen it anywhere. But that was in Drawdown, which is rich. Like, first of all, that's a great word. And plants is a great word.

• 2:14:34Rich Roll?

  It's inviting.

• 2:14:35Paul Hawken?

  Plants is a great word. People love plants, you know? And so plant rich diet, you know, is like, so that's an invitation. Come on in. The water is fine, you know? Find your way into the world of plants, you know? You decide, you figure it out. But again, it was like a figure ground shift away from something that could cause people to resist to something that was invitational. And that's what regeneration is, an invitation to participate. It's not, that's what it is. Come on in. It really, it's fine, you know? It works. And why are you here?

• 2:15:12Paul Hawken?

  At this point, at this time, given what we know, what's your purpose? What gives meaning to your life? You know, that's the question everybody should ask.

• 2:15:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah. We got to end this in a couple of minutes, but I can't let you go without pulling on this last thread, which is, and it's related to the psychology piece that we were just discussing. How do you, let's say, somebody's listening to this. They're super enthusiastic. They're good to go. They want to translate that sort of emotionality into action, like we talked about. But they're surrounded by a community of people or family members or colleagues, et cetera, that are unreceptive to this. And they want to be able to communicate effectively their passion for this, to be a change agent for others. So, given what we just talked about,

• 2:16:04Rich Roll?

  what are some strategies for helping people communicate more effectively?

• 2:16:09Paul Hawken?

  Don't use the word climate. Don't use the word global warming. Those are macro issues that are conceptual and mean almost nothing to everybody, really. I mean, we use the term, but they have no meaning. And most of the jargon and acronyms around climate have no meaning. They're completely conceptual. If you say somebody 15C, what does that mean to anybody? Nothing. I mean, somebody can understand it, even do it to 2.7 F, you know, make and, you know, figure it out, still means nothing. And so, to move completely away from climate speak, because it's meaningless to most people, and to speak in ways that are meaningful to the people who surround you.

• 2:16:50Paul Hawken?

  And to, the thing about carbon sequestration, for example, let's go back to soil farming, which is, the purpose of regen ag is not to sequester carbon. That's an outcome. It's really important to understand the difference. The purpose of regen farming for a farmer is to actually change their life, to get out of debt, to stop using poisons, poisoning their family or themselves and so forth, to increase their profitability, to be proud of what they're doing, to absolutely become more resilient to drought in too much water

• 2:17:31Paul Hawken?

  so that the soil can be a reservoir instead of dirt. I mean, to increase the pollinators for your crops, which are now dead and gone. I mean, it goes on and on and on. By the way, the outcome is more life in the soil and that life is measured by C, carbon. Okay. But that's an outcome. If somebody's paying for it, hallelujah. It's another crop you've got going for you. But that is not the purpose. And so the same thing with climate. Our purpose is to really take care of each other, to improve the well-being of humanity on this planet and all living creatures, all of life. And we do that.

• 2:18:16Paul Hawken?

  We reverse global warming. But if you start with reversing global warming, you've lost most people right there.

• 2:18:24Rich Roll?

  Because you're putting the outcome before the value.

• 2:18:30Paul Hawken?

  The value, the purpose, the thing that connects, that doesn't connect. You know, I mean, go to a party, and somebody said, "Oh, what do you do? Oh, I'm a climate activist." And they go, "Oh, good."

• 2:18:44Rich Roll?

  Well, just immediately, everybody has some association with that negative or positive, right? Baggage comes into play and everybody's made up their mind how they feel about it before the conversation even begins. I mean, I like what you said earlier when you were talking about that town hall and just having people raise their hands and identify what their values are, right? And through that, you discover this commonality, this like, you know, shared sensibility that we can unite over.

• 2:19:13Paul Hawken?

  If you're sitting next to somebody and you say, "I'm a climate activist. I'm trying to save the rainforest." They're going, "Oh, cool." If you say, like, "Oh, I'm trying to save the world," which is even more ineffective. But if you say...

• 2:19:26Rich Roll?

  Well, you just sound like an asshole.

• 2:19:29Paul Hawken?

  Like, I say the world-

• 2:19:30Rich Roll?

  Well, there's so much hubris in that-

• 2:19:32Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, what are you doing? I'm saving the world and so forth, which you can't do anyway. But if you say, "You know, I discovered this way of, you know, smartphones are being thrown away." And what I started to do in this place in Peru, I started to nail them up to trees and connect them together with, you know, little tiny solar cells that kept them charged. And that way, the indigenous people there could hear every time a chainsaw started up and go with, and find exactly where it was and stop it.

• 2:19:59Rich Roll?

  Right, then you're like, "Tell me more."

• 2:20:01Paul Hawken?

  How'd you do that? What is that? And which forest? How'd you figure that out? And, I mean, it opens up the conversation, you know? But you're doing something and there's specifics to it. And that's what somebody is doing, by the way. I'm not saying that. And so, again, you know, it's really about reconnecting, you know? And you can't connect by thinking that somebody should connect to the place where your head is. We have to connect where our values are common.

• 2:20:29Rich Roll?

  You're a beautiful man, Paul Hawken.

• 2:20:31Paul Hawken?

  I love being with you.

• 2:20:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, thank you so much.

• 2:20:33Paul Hawken?

  Thank you, Richard.

• 2:20:34Rich Roll?

  You are a gift to humanity and the planet. I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours. And I really appreciate you coming here today and sharing your wisdom and experience.

• 2:20:44Paul Hawken?

  Thank you. And I have to say again, your wisdom and your drawing out of wisdom is in the book.

• 2:20:51Rich Roll?

  I appreciate that. I really, I appreciate that. I'm humbled by that statement.

• 2:20:55Paul Hawken?

  No, it really is. I listen, I mean, you know? And it's made a, it made a really big difference.

• 2:21:02Rich Roll?

  I'm glad to hear it.

• 2:21:03Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 2:21:03Rich Roll?

  And I'm excited for people to check it out. "Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation" comes out September 16th.

• 2:21:11Paul Hawken?

  14th.

• 2:21:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:13Paul Hawken?

  You can get it now, though.

• 2:21:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you can preorder it now. It's a beautiful book. And I think it's gonna really inspire a lot of people into the action piece, right?

• 2:21:23Paul Hawken?

  Right.

• 2:21:24Rich Roll?

  Cool.

• 2:21:24Paul Hawken?

  Right.

• 2:21:24Rich Roll?

  Well, come back and talk to me again sometime. All right. Peace.

• 2:21:29Paul Hawken?

  Peace.

• 2:21:39Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review

• 2:22:22Rich Roll?

  and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated, and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic

• 2:23:04Rich Roll?

  and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiate. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.