Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I learned that I met these amazing people and I started to shift how I was seeing things. It wasn't only about carbon being sequestered. Yeah, that's important.
But if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere tomorrow, we would still be at the bottom of a deep hole. Because what takes, what re regulates, what puts things back into balance is the carbon cycle, the water cycle, and the biodiversity.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: This episode of Roots to Fruits is produced and distributed by Be Connected, a social media management firm in Northeast Wisconsin.
[00:00:52] Speaker C: Foreign welcome to the Roots to Fruits podcast. I am your host, Kelly Williams. So today we're stepping into a conversation that asks one the most fundamental question facing our time.
What does it mean to heal the earth, not just slow its decline?
Most climate talk today lives in the realm of numbers and targets.
Carbon cutbacks, net zero dates, efficiency tweaks.
Those are important, yes, but they can also seduce us into thinking we've solved the problem when we barely understood it.
What gets lost in that framing is the living foundation beneath it all. The soil, the water, the webs of life that actually regulate our climate, grow our food and sustain our ecosystems.
My guest today approaches these questions not as abstractions, but as living realities.
I'm joined by Ananda Fitzsimmons, an author, speaker and longtime champion of soil and water health, regenerative agriculture and ecosystem restoration.
She's the president of the Board of Regeneration Canada and vice president of the board of the Eco Restoration alliance, two organizations working to bring nature based restoration into the center of climate and land use strategy.
She also founded Concentric Agriculture, formerly inococure, if I pronounced that correctly, Technologies, a company that manufactures soil amendments from beneficial microorganisms and works as a consultant promoting regenerative practices and landscape health.
Ananda's work in writing, community building and regenerative practice asks us to expand our view of climate solutions beyond emissions alone and to see water and living systems as active partners in planetary healing.
Today we're going to explore what it means to restore the pillars of life from soil horizons to water cycles, and why that restoration might be the fastest path not just to mitigation, but to resilience and belonging. To Ananda Fitzsimmons welcome to the show.
[00:03:08] Speaker A: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
[00:03:11] Speaker C: And usually on my shows I want to start with your story, but you said something to me in an email following our initial meeting that after digesting some of my work, you found it intriguing how two people arrive at the same realizations, yet from completely different places in the spectrum.
So tell us about your journey yeah,
[00:03:32] Speaker A: well, I guess what I found quite fascinating was that you came from a background of chemistry and, you know, materials.
You also had yoga as part of the mix, which was an unusual little tweak for a chemist guy, packaging guy.
My journey definitely came from soil and biology.
And although I do have a background not in yoga per se, but meditation, and I've been very influenced by indigenous people's spirituality.
So my journey began as a young adult when I moved out of the city and went back to the land.
And I was, I didn't know much about it at the time, but the idea was to be closer to nature, closer to the earth. And I started learning how to do organic gardening, grow my own food.
So I became very connected to the soil. And gradually throughout the years, I'm still living in the countryside. So I have developed a lifestyle of living close to nature, watching the seasons, having a, you know, because that's one thing is when you garden or when you live in the country, you have to do things at the rhythm of nature.
You have to be there to plant your garden at planting time and you have to harvest things when they're ready. Whereas people living in the city will be, well, I'm busy this weekend, I've made plans, I don't have time.
You don't do that sort of thing. So that really got me into that connection with nature and connection with food and where my food comes from and that, that builds your body. And so that was really the basis of all my learning. In the early 2000s, I moved to a place where they were, I live in the middle of orchards in orchard country.
When I first came here, I kept thinking I was in this beautiful apple blossoms. Apples, you know, it's like lovely. But the reality of app of, you know, fruit farming is that they're driving around with tractors all the time and they're spraying chemicals onto the fruits. And that was like, whoa, that's not quite what I was picturing.
And I knew that what I was doing with microbes, some of the organic methods I was using, could help them to reduce the chemicals. And that was my original impetus when I thought, oh, well, let's, let's start a company using beneficial microbes.
And so I ended up, you know, a little later in life deciding to start an enterprise, a corporation, and went on this wild 10 year journey developing this product, working with microbiologists, farmers, business people, you know, just learning a lot about how the world works and the business and everything like that.
But then towards the end of my visit to the Corporate world.
I retired. I was bought out as a founder.
And that's when I took my retirement and I started to work with Regeneration Canada.
I was just naturally attracted to it. And that was around in 2015.
The.
There was an organization at the COP in 2015 called 4 per thousand, a French organization that came up with this idea that soil regeneration could mitigate climate change.
And this was like, whoa. This was the first time that that had really been said that all of the. If we could get four parts per thousand more carbon stocked into all this arable soil in the world, that would totally offset the carbon footprint.
So that was kind of my start. And that was what they were talking about in the Living soil symposium in 2017, which was organized by the founder of Regeneration Canada.
So I participated in that, giving a presentation about my microbial technologies.
And then after I took my retirement, I said, you know, the world is in a bad place.
I've got too much energy to retire. There's too much to do. So I started to work with Regeneration Canada at that point, and we were doing these Living Soil symposiums. We were spreading the message that it isn't only about getting carbon out of the atmosphere, it's about getting it back into the Earth.
And that was like a really inspiring message.
And then in 2020, we organized a symposium, because I started hearing from people like Walter Jenne and Michal Kravchik, who are both scientists who were saying, well, actually, the dynamics of carbon change, what really impacts climate change is more, actually more water than carbon.
And I was intrigued by that.
So we organized a symposium, one of the Living Soil Symposiums, about water and carbon and how those two things work together.
And in doing that, I got the opportunity to interview and to speak with many people that came as presenters to talk about the importance of water and how water actually controls climate, and started to realize that, you know, when we think about climate change, what we really see, what people are really experiencing.
I mean, aside from it being warmer, we're experiencing deregulations to water, the movement of water.
You know, we get droughts. It doesn't rain. The rains don't come at the time that they're supposed to come. And then they come and there's way too much and there's flooding. So there's this incredible cycle of flood and drought which is being experienced all around the world. And that is what people are saying, you know, this is climate change. This is what it is. It isn't just about.
It isn't just about it getting hotter. It isn't really getting, you know, systematically hotter. It's getting wild fluctuations with the average.
[00:11:11] Speaker C: Destabilization is the word I use.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. It's destabilization. Yes. It's getting gradually hotter if you take all the averages. But what people on the ground see is wild fluctuations of extremes, whether in the temperature, it goes way too hot, way too cold, all of these things. And these things are really controlled by the water cycle.
So, yeah, so I learned that I met these amazing people and I started to shift how I was seeing things. It wasn't only about carbon being sequestered. Yeah, that's important.
But if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere tomorrow, we would still be at the bottom of a deep hole. Because what re regulates, what puts things back into balance is the carbon cycle, the water cycle and the biodiversity.
So when people are saying that the climate crisis is a problem of carbon and greenhouse gases and the solution is stop making greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
And then there's this other crisis, which is the biodiversity crisis, which just happens to be happening at the same time.
They're one and the same.
These two things are one and the same. There is the greenhouse gases, there's a greenhouse effect, but then there's also how nature restores the climate, and it's the carbon cycle and the water cycle and all the cycles of life that. That do that job.
[00:13:02] Speaker C: How much of the. Because he. Like my understanding of regenerative agriculture is multifaceted, but one part of that is. And I've seen these maps, and you tell me these, I assume these are. These are scientific maps that show CO2 in the atmosphere as a function of the year. And you see that strong density in the fall and the spring tied to farming.
So tilling practices is. Is a. So that kind of does both. Right. You're liberating stored carbon and you're destroying the other delicate cycles. So to you, is moving towards no tilling and regenerative practices a big part of that?
[00:13:46] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely.
I mean, there's also forests, which play a major, major part in all of this, because we're clearing land and we're cutting down forests and the population of the planet is growing and we do need to feed people.
But I think that it's really important that the.
When we do agriculture, we try to do agriculture in a way that mimics those cycles of nature.
So there is no till. Yes.
But there's also the integration of agroforestry, like getting the trees back, because trees have a hugely important role to play. In terms of the water cycle. Because when you think about.
When I explain this in my book, Pillars, the title of my second book is Restoring the Pillars of Life. And the pillars are carbon, water, and biodiversity. So, based on what I just explained, those are the three main things that work together.
But the way the water cycle moves heat is through evapotranspiration.
So the plants, all plants do this. But trees are the biggest plants that have the most root and leaf surface. So it's all about the root and leaf surface. Trees, through their roots, take the water up from the ground, from the groundwater, and then they use the energy of heat to do that.
So felt heat, heat that we feel at the ground, turns into latent heat as the trees suck up the water and then convert liquid water into water vapor. And water vapor is carrying latent heat. So it has the energy of heat, but it doesn't feel like heat.
And they move it up into the upper atmospheres, and then in the upper atmospheres, it's a lot colder up there. And, you know, so this heat moves up.
And so that makes all the difference where the heat ends up getting felt, because the heat isn't released until the water vapor recondenses.
And here's the other thing that's really important about the trees and the plants.
All plants do it, but again, trees do it the most because they're the biggest and densest, and they have more leaves and more roots, but they release little aerosols, which are a kind of microorganism that floats in the air.
And in order to condense and become a raindrop, the water particles need to cling on to a particle that's floating in the air.
And the best ones to do that are the particles that are released by the trees.
So it's really plants, but especially trees, and just the density of that mass that is keeping this heat moving from the surface of the Earth in the form of water and then falling back down to rain.
And so when we think about the disruptions of the water cycle, one of the best ways to restore that is to make sure that there's enough living plants on the surface of the Earth.
[00:17:30] Speaker C: I can't remember who I heard this from, but it stuck with me. I think I read it on LinkedIn, and it's probably a famous quote, but it's just always stuck with me that life doesn't create water, water creates life. And that's a really important part of it, because if you want, you. You start with, with. So it. It goes back to the diversity and the water cycle. And it's really frustrating to see. Not only, you know, I come from the packaging industry, so 93% of the world's paper comes from a process called the craft process, which uses a tr, one of the, I think the fifth largest user of fresh water takes like 17,000 gallons of water to make one ton of pulp.
And so the solution to pollution is dilution.
And it's very frustrating when you see these maps of deforested areas like a satellite image. And they say, but that's sustainable forestry. I'm like, well, if that were my pet's fur, I'd be taking them to the vet, you know, So I don't, I never. And then when we grow food, 48%, I think is the average harvest index. If 48% of what we grow goes into food, the rest is perfectly available bioma to, to, to use to make these things. But we've never developed a process that can take it apart and, and use it. We've just, we treated everything with fossil logic, hit it with a, with a chemical engineering hammer and create all of these things that we want.
And then something else that I wanted to, to maybe position and see what your thoughts are. I use 1950 as the, the important start point for the problem we've created with single use waste.
Because we turned the Haber Bosch process for making ammonia for bombs to making ammonia for fertilizer. So we started bombing our farmland and we started growing food at an unprecedented rate. Population explosion tied to this event.
And then over time, fossil based packaging became almost like the EMT on the scene. Because it wasn't about growing food, it was about preserving food long enough to sell it later. It was like futures of food. So now they're in this like chemical romance. You can't disengage them.
But the point is, we've been making fake food for so long and we wonder why there's a seventh new flavor of IBS with a new medication for it.
So we've been destroying our human gut biome as well as just the ecological biome.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, and that's exactly it. That the chemical fertilizers boosted the growth of plants. But what we didn't know at the time, because when all of these processes began, that was post war. It was in the post war period that industrial agriculture really took off and you know, plastics and fertilizers and all of these things.
And we knew nothing at the time about soil because the information about microbiome only started in the 1980s when they were able to, to sequence DNA.
And once they were able to read DNA, they were able to see that there were different species. Like, they would take a sample of anything and they would see that there were actually millions of different species in there. And so then they started to realize, because before that they thought that microorganisms were germs.
And you had to, in order to study one, you had to isolate it, and then you had to study what it did in a petri dish. But when they learned to sequence DNA, they discovered the microbiome.
They discovered that most of these microorganisms were not pathogens. And in fact, they were helpers, that every living creature is, is actually a community of millions of microorganisms. And that, that's how we digest our food and that's how we maintain our health, by having a healthy microbiome.
So if you've got a healthy community of good beneficial microorganisms, if a pathogen comes in, it's easily fought off because there's this strong community.
But we didn't know that until, until, until the 80s, and that was after we had developed all these practices.
[00:22:06] Speaker C: Isn't that like, really let that sink in? We didn't understand our own bi, our own biome system until the 80s.
Yeah, it wasn't that long ago.
[00:22:16] Speaker A: It started in the 80s. It wasn't that long ago.
And so, you know, what we've learned in microbiology about this microbiome needs to revolutionize medicine and agriculture and ecology.
But science tends to be in silos. So agronomy, they're still not learning that soil is alive. They're still.
[00:22:49] Speaker C: Well, we'll get into the business implications of the problem in a moment, but kind of back to, to that, like what we've learned in that short period of time. Like, you see probiotics being marketed, it's like one probiotic out of millions of options. So it's like we kind of live in this, this false belief that, you know, we can take all the right things. But at the end of the day, the predominant amount of not only is the food grown with synthetic fertilizers, fake nitrogen, we in the beginning, and you tell me if I'm wrong, but it seemed like the beginning of genetic science. Seed science was not about making better nutrition, it was about being more resistant to insects and things like that.
But now we're seeing some of that come back because of our ability to engineer enzymes to, to start. So again, as we learn, we're getting better and better at, at this. So. But I feel like what maybe is keeping us from really making the turn? Like, I think there's a wider acceptance of what we're talking about, but a paralysis to do anything about it.
And I think that's just business practice. So you think of another drought and most people don't, don't know this, and I don't know how much this factored into Canada, but it's the United States. Again, you said the 80s and this came right to mind in 1989. Here there was an event because back then local savings and loan banks were like local monetary irrigation. That was the water of local business and families and farms where people could borrow to start a business in Main street downtown, they can buy their first home. It was all local money feeding.
They got into trouble helping people.
So the government didn't go in and help them.
They auctioned them off to the highest Wall street bidder.
And this term was born out of that event called private equity, which are professional extractors.
They scrape a business like a miner scrapes a hillside.
And we have been living underneath that problem for so long that even BlackRock are saying that natural capital is a major exposure to these companies. It's 55% of global GDP is natural materials.
So I feel like that awareness is coming, but still there's that paralysis about what to do about it. Yet we have these living examples in California, the regenerative farms didn't flood when everyone else's farm flooded. So I come from a compost forward. That compost isn't an end of life. It's where carbon starts, renewal starts in the heat of compost. And simply using compost in your garden, the benefits are extraordinary because you're putting, again, like you said, biodiversity back into it.
[00:25:30] Speaker A: Well, that's the basis of the natural method is a closed loop system. There's no waste in microbiology and ecosystems.
The metabolism of any microbe or creature creates byproducts, wastes.
But that waste is always something that is the primary food of the next creature.
[00:26:00] Speaker C: Anybody's leftovers is somebody else's meal.
[00:26:04] Speaker A: Exactly.
It's a really complex but very tidy system that recycles itself continuously. There's no waste in a natural system.
Every waste is the, is the primary food of something which keeps the cycle going around. And then when we broke that by taking, you know, making fertilizer and that whole conception in agriculture at the time, we know what plants need, we have to feed them and they grow really well, but when they do, they lose their ability to recycle what's in the soil. And then when the plants stop feeding the soil, the soil microbes die off, and then we add these poisons in on top of it, which further decimates them, and so they've lost that ability. You know, we kill off the soils, the food is actually less nutritious, and it costs more and more to feed what we've taken away into the plants so that they'll keep growing. It's a little bit like a drug addiction because the plants that have been managed this way, there's no resilience in the soil, and the plants are actually weaker. So they're just more susceptible to things. I'll tell you a story.
When I first bought my house here, I had apple trees in the yard, and they had been sprayed with the chemical products for their whole lives.
But when I bought the property, they left a couple of apple trees, and I didn't spray them and I didn't do anything to them.
And the first year after, without being sprayed, they looked dead. Like they, they just. There was hardly any leaves on them. The leaves were full of diseases.
They were just awful. I thought, oh, these, these, these Macintosh apples, they can't live without the, the chemicals. But the next year they were a little better, and they were a little better. And then I started spraying them with compost teas and things like that and, you know, got them so that they actually came back. But they had to detox.
And the entire, the soil microbiology was wasted from the chemical products.
So it does take time to rebuild that, which is one of the problems for farmers, because if you take an industrial farm that's been managed with chemicals for decades, and then you, you, you know, it takes a little bit of time to rebuild that soil biology.
[00:29:10] Speaker C: What, what are, what's like the top three or four things for, for someone to keep in mind for what it takes to detox your soil, detox your trees, your plants. Like, how do you build that or that, that community back into the soil?
[00:29:26] Speaker A: Well, well, sometimes, like, especially if you're a commercial farmer, you might have to do a gradual transition. Like, you might have to sort of like take away the chemicals slowly as you rebuild the soil. But I mean, the main thing is biomass.
You know, you're talking about, you know, taking everything out of the soil.
You know, what soil eats is biomass.
You know, and in one of my books, I tell the story about the, about the desert in China where they did, in the Loess Plateau in China, they did a rehabilitation thing. They took a desert and they dug some trenches in the sand and Then they put straw into the trenches and then they waited for it to rain.
So when it finally rained, and it doesn't rain very often in the desert, but when it does rain, it tends to rain a lot all at once.
So the straw got soggy.
And then the microorganisms that were on the dry straw woke up because they had carbon, which was the straw, and they had water from the rain.
And just from that, things started to grow in the straw.
And then birds started to come back and bugs started to come back and, and that entire area in this desert returned to life. When it had carbon and water, know that that microbial started to regenerate.
So I mean, it'll. It take. It takes a while when it's that dead.
[00:31:23] Speaker C: If anyone has not seen the pictures of that before and after, it's. It's stunning. Simply stunning. Yeah, it gives you a lot of hope, doesn't it?
[00:31:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:33] Speaker C: Nature doesn't do anything fast, but it always gets it done and it doesn't make waste in the process. So anytime waste is part of a human process, it is a design failure.
Because waste means management, and management means you're resisting entropy. Entropy is the force that spreads everything out.
It means you flow with it and you flow with it. When you realize that every human being is like a water molecule, you're no different than any other water molecule. It's all a coherent relationship.
It's no different.
So we don't manage restoration. We participate in it. And I feel like anybody can participate. So we don't have to solve it all at once. We just each have to participate in our.
[00:32:14] Speaker A: It doesn't solve it all at once, but it actually solves it surprisingly quickly. Which is why I'm a big proponent of regeneration. Because if we had to wait to cut the greenhouse gases down and we had to wait for what is left of nature to reestablish our climate system, it wouldn't happen fast enough.
[00:32:46] Speaker C: I agree completely.
[00:32:49] Speaker A: We're done. It would take too long to do that.
But when we start regenerating the carbon cycle and the water cycle with nature, with natural regenerative processes, we see a huge difference.
Within a decade, if we just cut our carbon emissions and didn't do any of that, we wouldn't make it through.
But, you know, within a decade, we can see measurable effects. We can see the soil coming back, we can see the plants growing.
I think I referred to the Loess Plateau. Like there's before and after pictures of the Loess Plateau.
And you can see 10 years later there's this green, thriving landscape where it was all parched and dry.
So yeah, it takes time, but not, not hundreds of years.
[00:33:49] Speaker C: So for these big commercial farms, I have to think that these large food brands that are orchestrating such a large part of farming, they get this, they understand it. But I've heard stories like it's hard to convince farmers to go on the multi year process of transition.
But I mean, at some point it's there, it's, it's this increased destabilization and you know, one bad season can really ruin a lot. So you would think they would be very motivated to build better protection into the soils for that, for economic viability as opposed to.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: Yes, and it does, it is motivating. Especially younger farmers who are kind of more receptive to these ideas. But they need support because, you know, farms don't have such big margins that they can afford to take a risk and try something new that they don't know. So they need funding, support because sometimes you have to modify your equipment.
They need technical support, they need people that can. And some of the big companies that are getting into regenerative agriculture are providing some of this in their supply chains. They're investing in their supply chains to help the farmers transition to regenerative. So we can't leave anybody behind.
They need that support. And really large scale farmers have a whole system that's set up and the entire ecosystem around that is set up for the status quo. So in order to change the status quo, we can't just, you know, wait for the farmers to take all the risks and do it all. Like we need the whole, we need the consumers, we need the food processors, we need everybody to play a role in that.
[00:35:53] Speaker C: Since brands and retailers have such a strong part of this because it involves food and packaging, there's just so much, so many industries tied to that.
Consumers have so much influential power over that if they just knew what to rally around. So hopefully they get something out of this conversation to do that. But on a slightly same topic, but a different application I wanted to throw out because it's something that really drives me and my wife completely bonkers when we see it. It's everywhere. It's pervasive new construction. They'll go into a wooded area, clear it out and build this pretty sidewalk and little pear trees that are perfectly symmetrical or a hillside. They'll rip it out and wonder why it keeps falling into the road when it rains. Because you ripped out what you. So what, what do we need to do to stop Ripping out nature just to rebuild. And like there's enough to build on, there's buildings already there. It's because of the liability risk of getting a property that's been poisoned because of the same thing. Then nobody wants that risk of taking an existing property and rebuilding on it. They just go clear out new land and somehow we gotta stop clearing. Right?
[00:37:06] Speaker A: Yeah, well, and it's also our dependence on the machines because a lot of things are set up to use these really big machines. Like a lot of farms, they have massive big machines.
So they need big plots, you need huge plots.
And it doesn't take that many people to drive these big machines.
It's the same thing with construction. You come in with big machines, you clear the land. You're not trying to work around these little trees and things like that.
[00:37:46] Speaker C: That's a really good point.
A new combine. My son loves equipment. He got to ride in one last and I, it's, I mean those are six figure machines that run on satellite. It's pretty amazing. From growing up a farmer myself and combining corn boy, they've come a long way. The combine I grew up with, the wheel fell off once and my uncle went flying into the road like that's how.
But now these things are just beasts that are. Gee, it's just, it's crazy. So that's a great point. We've built equipment for that that.
[00:38:19] Speaker A: Well, yeah, the whole system is set up to the labor. Every part of the system is set up. So it's hard to change it.
It's challenging.
[00:38:31] Speaker C: Built for extraction and everybody knows it.
But my hope is that even though capitalism or capital itself, with that much private equity, which are professional extractors, even with all of those almost irreversible realities, I, I, the, the, the truth remains, natural capital is, is the essential risk for all of them. And if they don't start doing it right, they're, I mean it's so I, I, I feel like there's a sense of urgency to figure out a pathway.
Yeah, I could not agree with you more about how much more climate change benefit we get from taking care of this problem, which we can do in our backyards. We don't have to worry about carbon counting, it's important.
But just again, stopping tilling, that's one of the largest sources of CO2 is Tilling Farm fields.
And we haven't talked about our protein addiction because my understanding is it takes a hundred calories of grain to get like 3 calories of beef or chicken. It's like that ratio is incredible. And like, 70% of the food we do grow is to feed our protein needs.
So another opportunity to rethink.
[00:39:43] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. But I think that there's. In regenerative agriculture, we have a maxim of like, yes, we do eat too much protein, but cows and beef get blamed for that. In regenerative agriculture, we like to say it's not the cow, it's the how.
Because prairies are really important ecosystems in the places where they are.
And in my second book, Pillars of Life, I talk about the natural biomes because the whole planet has adapted.
So the nature evolved to suit the way the weather system adapted. You know, so there's different belts, there's tropical zones, there's places that get more water than other places.
And in the interior of continents, quite frequently they get less rain, especially if there's a mountain range, like all through the Americas. There's a huge mountain range on the west coast that goes all the way up from the Rockies down through the Andes.
And so when the, when the cold breezes come off of the ocean, the clouds have to rise up to get over the mountains. And then they drop all their rain on the coastal side, and then the inner side, there's no, you know, they don't get nearly as much rain. It's just naturally drier because of the land formation.
And so prairie, that's the places where the great buffalo used to roam, right?
And all these herbivores and those were really important.
So now they're taking out pastures to grow food to feed the animals. And those are annual crops.
So they're taking out the annual crops.
And those annual crops don't nearly preserve the functions that sustain the carbon and the water cycle in those areas.
So, yeah, it would be a really stupid idea to cut down the Amazon rainforest to grow corn and soy.
But it's also a really stupid idea to take out the prairies to, to, to grow, you know, crops for people, annual crops for people, because you've got the plowing and you've got the fertilizers and you got all this. Whereas in the olden days, herbivores used to take care of that prairie, and they maintain the carbon cycle because they've got perennial grasses with deep roots. You know, there's parts of the world that benefit really well from, from, from cows. And it's, it's how you move the cows, it's how the, the cows actually feed and stimulate the prairie lands, which was nature's design, you know, back when it was like herds of. Herds of bison that used to roam
[00:43:02] Speaker C: the Americas, which were even better because they bite at the, at the root, they don't pull the plant out. The plant doesn't have to regrow fully, it only has to regrow partially. So I always remember hearing that. But that is a great point and I love that saying, it's not the cow, it's the howl. And when you follow like kiss the earth or kiss the ground, Kiss the Earth has that great documentary about some of the regenerative farmers on the west coast and how they move animals around, chickens, cows and how they.
It's like a map, you're always tending to something in it. But it's more than just today. I'm going to, till tomorrow, I'm going to fertilize plant like it. So it is a more dynamic environment.
But the benefit is you're, you have more diversity. They're growing different food types and again
[00:43:50] Speaker A: goes back, yeah, they're trying to rebuild that, that natural closed loop system, you know, with, with agriculture with different, diverse, as you say, diversifying the species, looking more into, you know, how the wastes of one become the, the primary material of the next one in the cycle.
[00:44:12] Speaker C: So if you were to give the average person 2, 3, as many as you would like pieces of advice not to live more sustainably themselves. Look, people, I think the average person genuinely believes this is important.
Their heart rate changes when they get serious about thinking about it, but they feel helpless.
So it can be what can they do to in an active way? Or like what advice would you give people to help raise this awareness and do something about it?
[00:44:43] Speaker A: Well, I think that just, I mean the whole narrative around climate change, which is so focused on things that the average person can't do, you know, it's like, face it, everybody can't afford to buy an electric car.
And decisions on emissions into the atmosphere mean that's mostly corporations and governments that can do something about that. But you know, regular people like to get really anxious about your carbon footprint.
You know, as little pieces add up, that's a good thing. But I think when people start to understand that its nature has a huge role and that was like one of the whole purposes of my second book, Restoring the Pillars of Life, was to give a lot of examples of regular people that were anxious about the state of the world and found something and then built on that something that they could do.
And they're very different things. Like all the people that I interview in the book are in different parts of the world and they're doing really diverse Things, but just understanding that these natural cycles that there's a lot you can do in a really simple way in between what you do in your backyard, what you communicate in your community to the people around you, like trying to save a local wetland or trying to save a local forest.
Just realizing that that is a form of climate, that that is going to make a difference. And you know, young people particularly are so anxious and depressed about the state of the world and they feel really powerless.
But I think if everybody realized that with the skill sets they have and just influencing and doing things within their own community.
When you see it isn't just about things that only governments and corporations can regulate, but individuals can do something too. It's what, you know, what foods you choose, you know, get to know, get to understand where your foods come from and how they're produced.
Because you know, for example, I will never buy meat in a grocery store. I buy regeneratively raised meat from people that are raising their animals in a way that I understand and know it's helping the environment, it's not harming it.
So it's your food choices, it's, you know, whether you mow your lawn, it's, you know, what you have in your backyard, it's, you know, incur, you know, preserving wetlands. You know, why are wetlands so important? You know, teaching kids about, you know, the creatures that live in the water and you know, what grows in the forest and getting closer to nature. There's really so many things that we can do to change the awareness around it and just do it in our own communities.
[00:48:06] Speaker C: I'll give you three things that we do at my house that I think might be great examples for this.
We have two sumps that go out the same side of the house. And during the wetter seasons it gets really sloppy. We got two big trees, trees there, but they just can't handle the. Because the earth wasn't. It's a very clay rich area here that I'm. That I live in. So we started a B and butterfly garden, compost driven. And we add on it every year. It's gotten quite, quite big. And that is the healthiest soil around. There's no wet spots. It's just, it's a very healthy, dynamic environment.
Another thing that we do, and I never knew this, my wife enlightened me on this and, and, and this, this past spring was a great example. I had two neighbors say, do you need me to mow your yard? I said no, do not mow my yard because you gotta wait for What? I think four, three or four days of a certain temperature so the bees have a chance to wake up and get moving again. If you mow too early, you have just sliced the Achilles heel of your local biodiversity. By doing that, you've gotta give those bees a chance to get up, wake up, and get moving again. Just little things like that that anybody can do. You don't have to have a compost in your backyard. But you know what? I'm seeing community compost facilities and composting popping up all over. Participate in it.
[00:49:29] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Like things like grocery store waste and stuff like that. There's so many opportunities.
Yeah. And I was like that. You know, that bee garden, like some people make rain gardens in places like that in their yard, just, you know, planting a diversity of plants that do well with having their roots wet for a period of time.
[00:49:55] Speaker C: And native, really key to be native.
[00:49:59] Speaker A: Exactly. Because the pollinators. The pollinators, you know, adapt. You know, they need those species. They need those native species.
[00:50:10] Speaker C: Well, Anand, I think we could talk about this forever. We're kindred spirits in this regard. And, you know, growing up as a farmer, I knew tractors and tilling and spraying and the dope in the tank. And I grew up raising tobacco, actually, was one of the things that we grew up growing. But I think you're right. The average person, particularly young people, really want it to change, and they feel helpless. And this is one way to feel better about it.
[00:50:37] Speaker A: Possible, like, what you're doing, you know, just the innovation, like to try to create different types of packaging materials or, you know, to think about how to change the system. And I think, yeah, young people, like, there's plenty of cause for creativity when you. When you realize the diversity of actions that you can take to restore nature.
But it is hard because the status quo reinforces the.
The way it is. The system, Everything feeds into everything else. It's an ecosystem, too, and it's hard to change it.
[00:51:11] Speaker C: And maybe a good way to end this is like, if you want to think about how many young people do you know that have an autoimmune issue or a thyroid problem or they're allergic to eggs. I know people that in their 20s suddenly became allergic to something.
I know a guy, severe gluten allergy.
He goes to Europe, he eats gluten, no problem.
It's not the gluten that's causing these gluten allergies. It's the fact that we allow spraying chemicals too late in the season. And it's your immune system tagging that gluten, which is fine to a problem because of its chemical attachment.
So, you know, so if you want to think about how to fix our gut biome, it's biodiversity. So even, even the turkey we eat, there's no diversity. The plants we eat, popcorn that we eat, it's all like they're streamlining monoculture for growth and efficiency. And we've lost the air. The heirloom, the, you know, the variety of that has been gone.
[00:52:14] Speaker A: Yeah. That's why there's such a great local agriculture movement with the smaller organic farms and the markets and the agroecology. That's.
[00:52:25] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:52:25] Speaker A: Wonderful things developing.
[00:52:28] Speaker C: So anyway, Ananda, thank you so much. This is fun. I can't wait to. To read your books. I'm going to order those. I can't wait to read them because those stories, I am really excited to read those individual stories because I think there's a lot there to. To learn from.
And with that, I'm going to end the show the way I always do, which is kind of that soft bond community way, which is bond soft, build strong.
Thank you, Ananda. It was a pleasure.
[00:52:57] Speaker B: Thanks for tuning in to Roots to Fruits. If this conversation resonated, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share it with someone who's ready to grow with us. Let's build something lasting together.
