Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundation for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week's guest has been at the forefront of intelligent responses to the entire meta crisis for decades. I've known about Paul Hawken since he wrote Blessed Unrest, but I was quite late to this particular party. Paul has written in or been profiled in hundreds of articles in the biggest newspapers across the world. He's written nine books, six of which have become bestsellers. No, I'm not remotely envious of that. And other than Blessed Unrest, which you will have read, I'm sure, he's the author of 'Regeneration; Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation' and 'Drawdown', the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming. He's the founder of both Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration and the last of these is the world's largest, most complete listing and network of solutions to the climate crisis, describing by agency what each level of society can do, starting from the individual. If you're in the UK and waiting for Paul's new book to come out in August, then I would thoroughly recommend that you explore Regeneration as a good place to start. For those of you in the US, Paul's new book comes out on the 18th of March, so you can get your pre-orders in now, and I wholly recommend that you do.
Manda: The title is Carbon; The Book of Life, and truly, this is one of those books you will read in a single sitting and then pass around to all your family and friends so that they can know the things that you now know, that you didn't even know you needed to know. I learned so much in this book; how supernovas are formed, how some of the really brilliant people worked out the formulation of carbon, and how one of them was knocked off the Nobel Prize that resulted because he began to believe there must be some kind of organising principle behind the formation of life. And yes, we do talk about this in the podcast. I learned the horrors of how we are destroying the ecosphere in even more detail. But I also learned some of the wonders of humanity; how the Mi'kmaq tribe in Canada name stands of large pine trees by the sound of the wind moving through the branches one hour before sunset in October. And then they can come back decades later, and will know if the trees have been damaged by comparing their names to the sound that they hear. How utterly amazing is that? I learned how other tribes in Alaska can predict the weather two years in advance by listening to, engaging with, understanding the patterns in the web of life around them.
Manda: Even with modern AI draining us of electricity and water, we are really lucky to predict patterns of weather a week out. This book is full of things like this. It's beautiful. It's beautifully written. Often factual books can be quite dry; this is not one of those. It's written with genuine lyricism. As a writer, I actually loved the language, and it contains within it the seeds of hope that we speak of so often in this podcast; that human creativity and compassion endure and are our gifts to the world. In the podcast, I asked Paul to read from the start and end of the book, but I want to read you a little bit from just before the end:
Manda: 'A beginning is near a threshold and so too is an end. Without fail meaningful change begins with one person, one idea, one aspiration, one audacious dream. Uniqueness is your birthright, it is the seed of our community. Plant it and see what happens'. And if that's not what this podcast is for, I don't know what is. So people of the podcast, please do welcome Paul Hawken, author, wisdom bringer, thought leader, and the man who listens to a bird and believes that he has heard the voice of God.
Manda: Paul, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you this grand February morning?
Paul: I am grateful to be here, first of all, thank you. I am in the coastal foothills of California in a second growth redwood forest near the Cascade watershed. Which for the first time in 4 or 5 years, actually welcomed salmon back up the watershed. So it's been a good spring in that sense. To feel like you're living where life is emerging. And I feel like I morph daily. In my work, which is based on curiosity and learning and reading and hearing about the world in general, both what we call the living world, that is the world of so-called nature, but there is a better word for it than that. And then the political world. So I definitely go back and forth, you know, just pondering the ludicrousness of our sociopolitical corporate system and who's there, you know, what are they thinking? And then, on the other hand, going into wonder. Like I just read this morning how did wolves become domesticated into dogs? And the new study said it's because we started giving them treats.
Manda: Oh, cool! Positive reinforcement's been around for 10,000 years!
Paul: I remember during Covid we saw animals that we hadn't seen. They had been here, but they just didn't come out. And all of a sudden many came out. And we had a Fox with two little kits come to our house to the deck outside, and then I would give them some peanuts and things. And pretty soon they became very familiar, because they were young and they didn't have any fear yet. And one night we were watching something on television in the other room, and the living room was dark, it was a summer night, the doors were open. And we came back into the living room, and one was on the couch and one was on a chair sleeping inside the house, and they looked at us like, what are you doing here?
Manda: This is our house now! Fantastic.
Paul: Like, okay, then walked out, you know. It's where I live and it's what just absolutely delights me since I was a child.
Manda: And you write about that very movingly in the book. We might talk about that. About something that made sounds on the roof, which was just such a moving moment. Thank you. I would like to ask about the salmon, but maybe we'll get back to that, because that could easily take us off down rabbit holes, and we would forget to get back to the fact that you've just written a new book. I am very privileged to have an early copy, and those of you on YouTube will see that I really enjoyed this book. I don't always deface them with lots of yellow post-its; only when I'm going to talk to somebody, and I want to be able to find a page in a hurry. But this was genuinely a completely gripping book. I learned so much that I didn't know I didn't know, and it has a really beautiful arc of enthralment, imagination and enlightenment and that sense of glamour that's magical in the world. So we talked about this earlier; I would really like you to read the second paragraph of the book. You could read the first one if you really wanted, but I think the bit that starts 'to better understand the riddles' really gives the heart of what the book is about. So could you read that for us? And then we'll go from there.
Paul: I'd be happy to. Thank you so much for asking. 'Like you, I take in the news, the science, the confusion, the broken politics. A world unfurled, fearful, at wit's end, shrouded in shallow certainties. To better understand the riddles and luminosity of life, I chose to go far upstream, to headwaters, and look at the flow of life through the lens of carbon. Rather than bemoan the plight of the world solely through forecasts and portents, I turn to voices who see the planet absent the overlay of threats. Might there be wisdom domes as well as heat domes? There are women and men merging observational indigenous wisdom and Western science into a different understanding of our place on Earth. A perspective that reveals what we do not know. Certainties are dissolving. They are being replaced by unfathomable complexity. Though carbon comprises a tiny fraction of the Earth, a planet without it is a dead rock in space. Like a sky without stars, a symphony without sound. We have reduced carbon to an errant element, the culprit in a civilisation bent on self-termination. The crisis of a warming planet, rampant injustice and collapsing biodiversity form a whole. Carbon, people and nature are set apart as if they were independent. Carbon is a window into the entirety of life with all its beauty, secrets and complexity. When discussing carbon, people refer to atoms instead of magnificence, physics rather than sentiment. Life is a flow, a river, not isolated components. Stubborn beliefs, petty details, and irrelevant media can splinter our awareness. The flow of carbon provides better stories, other ways to see, visions of possibility different from the disjointed and chaotic narratives that engulf us'.
Manda: Thank you. That's so beautiful. And we could easily spend the whole of the podcast just unpicking that paragraph. Let's instead go back to the beginning. What was it that brought you to Carbon? You've been part of so many other things. You've written a lot of books. You're part of Project Drawdown, part of Project Regeneration. What was it about carbon specifically that engaged your curiosity enough to go into how it's formed and what it does, and all of the things that you explore in the book?
Paul: Well, yeah. Project drawdown, I founded in 2013. And I had thought about it since 2001, when the IPCC report came out. And I went around to institutions, to universities, to NGOs, environmental NGOs and said, you know, this is the third assessment. Every one is more dire than the prior one. And even they're more dire than that, because the consensus science, and there's no such thing as consensus science, which means that basically the United States and the Soviet Union or Russia and Saudi Arabia are tamping it down,tamping down the science. But the thing I noticed then was that we didn't know what to do. There was no place to find solutions. So I kept talking about that for a couple of years and saying we should do a book, a website and really enlist the solutions that people can do, institutions can do, to make a big difference. So everybody basically said good idea, we don't do that. And so finally I just put that to bed until Bill McKibben wrote a really important piece in Rolling Stone. And it was shocking, actually. What happened was a Londoner, a carbon tracker, an NGO in London, he had calculated basically the assets that were in coal, gas and oil companies around the world. And he said these are not assets. This is unburnable carbon, because if we burn that, there is no civilisation. In other words, why is it given a dollar denominated value as an asset? Well, what Bill did was set a match to it in this article. And it was horrifying what would happen. It's the end of civilisation, the end of humanity. And people came to me and said, oh, my God, it's game over. And I remember that so well. Different people saying the same term: game over. Like we've tried, we've worked, we've done the best we can, but I'm giving up. I'm going to move to British Columbia, take the kids.
Manda: Because British Columbia is going to be safe or it's just a nice place to live out at the end of the world?
Paul: And that's when I decided to create Project Drawdown, which is to map, measure, model, the 100 most substantive solutions to reversing global warming. And I wanted to really make that clear, because the goals of net zero and others didn't make any sense at all. Why would we want to be net zero at 520/40 ppm in 2050? It didn't make sense. And that if we didn't name the goal, then we'd hardly have a chance of attaining it. And the goal was to reverse global heating, not to achieve net zero in our emission. So the word drawdown came out of that. And so I enlisted researchers from six continents, you know, young post docs PhDs in universities and we worked on the solutions. Then I wrote them up and that became the book, and that was Project Drawdown, which continues to this day. I knew then, though, that the next book was going to be Regeneration, because if we just focus on carbon emissions and sequestration, you're sort of missing the big picture. Those are good things to do, I'm not questioning that, but the thing is that what we have to do, we must do, is actually regenerate life on earth. Because basically the heating of the atmosphere and the loss of living systems are absolutely related, one to one.
Paul: And because it is the the Earth itself, the mantle of life that has always regulated the atmosphere and the climate. So we've separated them as if there's biodiversity over here and climate change over there, you know. So I knew regeneration was the next one. So after Drawdown came out, I did project Regeneration and pretty much in the same way with researchers, and I wrote it up and so forth. Why Carbon; the Book of Life? The reason for that is I felt that both with drawdown and with regeneration, the NGOs and activists and companies, were still acting out of a perception of the world that was the problem, not the cure. The problem is the objectification of the living world, of creatures, of systems, of the atmosphere, of gender, of race. I mean, that's the world we live in, you know, which is a world of really amplifying separation and disconnection. And so that's why Carbon The Book of Life is really important, because it's really about trying to knit that back together and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Carbon is not a thing. And that's really how it emerged.
Manda: Yes. Because you write very early a page after the paragraph you read for us: 'for industry, the changing climate is seen as an engineering problem, not a crisis of behaviour, consumption or disconnection. There is a tacit assumption that the current fossil fuel based energy system can be swapped out for renewables, and the privileged can continue to live the way they do. This is magical thinking.' And that should be at the front of every newspaper, every day, for the rest of humanity until we learn to think differently. And I'm wondering, in your talking to people, how many of the people that you connect with understand this? Effectively what you're saying is capitalism needs to end and we need a whole new system. We need total systemic change. And I find that even with people who are relatively aware of climate science, it's really hard to get the idea that total systemic change is not only necessary but possible into the conversation. Because their brains are not yet flexible enough. And one of the things that I'm thinking watching liberal democracy being destroyed with chainsaws by people who wear big dark glasses, it's a bit weird, but anyway, is that actually that's breaking down the certainties. I don't like it, but the old system did have to go, and perhaps people will find it easier to be more flexible about possibility when they don't think that they're going to keep paying their mortgage until they start getting a pension, or whatever it is that keeps people on the tracks. How do you find the conversations that you're having on your side of the Atlantic? And you're talking to people, I imagine, who are captains of industry. You talk in academia while there still is an academia to talk to. You're talking to some people who are quite high up the levers of change. How do they take the concept of that?
Paul: I would say that we're still, what's the word? Fairly immune to the sensibility of vast, complex, extraordinary interconnection in our lives, in our actions, in what we say, what we think, obviously. And this is even true with many friends who work in the environmental world, or even in some cases, biodiversity world or in the consciousness world or so forth. And somewhere in the book, I mentioned that a fraction of 1% of the people on Earth do anything on a daily basis with respect to the atmosphere, to global heating, to emissions. It's almost nothing, after 50 years of it being in the public sphere. And so I'm always puzzled by that myself, you know, which is my good friends are going, yeah, but then they'll drive and fly in a way that has a big impact, and is far, far and above the two tons per year of carbon dioxide emissions that the other 6 billion people on Earth are emitting. They're in the 140 to 200 tons per year and thinking somehow that they're doing good thing with their life, their travel, going to Costa Rica to Nosara and all that sort of stuff. And I'm now becoming kind of an outlier in my own community, saying I don't want to fly, I don't want to do that, I want to be here. And so I think on the larger level, in terms of industry, in terms of corporations, you can have a person who understands it but the impetus of economic growth is just so large in terms of their incentives, their pay, what they've been hired to do. What they're responsible to do, whether a CEO or whether they're just a department head or whatever it is, you know.
Paul: So, yeah, how to communicate that. And that's why I didn't really take on the, if you forgive it, but the stupidity of climate action in the world, the futility of it and the phraseology and the belief system that's embedded in the climate movement. Of bioenergy carbon capture systems and direct air capture and we're in the energy transition and I can go on and on in these beliefs that are now almost ossified within the non-profit/for profit world about carbon offsets. Now they have nature based solutions. I mean, I can go on with the lingo, but the lingo is really emblematic of a culture that doesn't really understand its disconnection, how it's objectifying the living world. Whether it's human suffering or whether it's the suffering of other creatures; that thinking is the cause of the problem. You know, in other words they're still, God bless them, I mean I'm not trying to demonise anybody, I'm just saying that what they've been taught, what they've been incentivised to do, what they have learned in their educational life and from media and from propaganda and so forth, that's the cause. That's ground zero, you know?
Manda: Yes. You also write quite soon after the bit I read before, there's so many quotable pieces here, people: 'In all Earth's multi billion year history, that which did not work, that which did not serve life was discarded. Why are we in that queue?' Which is again, another thing that should be on the front of every newspaper and every television. And much later on, when you're talking about exactly what you said about the futility of carbon capture and storage, which seems to be this thing that a bunch of blokes invented as an idea. And you said, actually, if everybody in the US who owns a tumble dryer just did one last tumble dry in their week, it would save as much carbon as this billion dollar concrete hulk is going to draw down. And Tom Chi, on Nate Hagens podcast in April last year, said he'd done a bit of calculation on the back of an envelope, and 200 beavers would sequester more carbon than the carbon capture and storage plant, and they come free. But you can monetise the carbon capture and storage plant. We could spend quite a lot of time talking about the futility and we'll probably come back to that at the end, because I really would like to look at behaviour change, but let's explore the wonder of this book. Because whatever people's politics and wherever they are on the spectrum of concerned to terrified, to total denial, I still think there's so much in here. I didn't know how carbon became. Tell us a little bit, tell us about Fred Hoyle and the guys pushing the the great big machine along the corridor using the tennis balls, because that was just such an amazing anecdote. Is that okay? Are you happy to share that?
Paul: Yeah. Carbon is one of the table of elements, of course. And early on, when we discovered the Big Bang, so to speak, 13.8 billion years ago, it was assumed that the Big Bang created all the elements.
Manda: Yeah, everything. The entire periodic table just materialised in that moment. Rupert Sheldrake says a lot about magical thinking about that. But what was interesting was that Fred Hoyle coined that term. I hadn't realised until I read your book. In the beginning, he believed that we were in a steady state universe and everything had existed forever. And he was using it to suggest that it was ridiculous there was this moment of creation. And then he began to believe in the moment of creation, except not everything is created all at once.
Paul: Yeah, that was on the BBC and that was a term of derision, the Big Bang, coined by Fred Hoyle. Like a 'you got to be kidding' kind of opinion. But then it was discovered that The Big Bang, no one is arguing against that, and so forth. That hydrogen and helium came out of that and the rest of the elements were created subsequent to it. And the question is then where did carbon come from? And we didn't know. And yet 99% of every animal, rock, substance on Earth has carbon in it, so obviously it's very important. And it's the basis of life, of course we've been told that as children, but the discovery of its source was still missing. And it was Fred Hoyle, who's really an astronomer who went to Caltech, he proposed that carbon was created in a giant red star. That's when a sun starts to die, it starts to expand and get bigger and bigger and bigger. And there's an astronomical moment, not in our time, but astronomical moment, where in a sense two helium alpha particles combine to create beryllium. And then in the trillionth of a trillionth of a second in which beryllium exists in a giant red star, another alpha particle, helium, combines and you get C-12. The math is perfect.
Manda: Yeah.
Paul: And that's where carbon came from. And he presented that at Caltech, a great university for physics, and he was basically laughed at and mocked, but he was insistent on it. And he said, let's test it here. And finally, Willie Fowler, a scientist there who was a deep sceptic, said, okay, we'll test it and we'll take basically nitrogen and go backwards and see if we can find the carbon that you are describing. And so they had this huge reactor.
Manda: I think it was a mass spec, wasn't it? Ten tons of a mass spec.
Paul: Yes. And they had to roll it down these hallways, putting tennis balls in front of it. And it took a couple days to move this thing into a room where they could test it, and they started bombing nitrogen. And sure enough, it validated Hoyle's theory.
Manda: They made carbon.
Paul: And that was the beginning, really of it. And so interestingly, the paper was published. It went out. Fred Hoyle was the lead author, Robbie Fowler second, and then there's two other authors. And it was published and later on, a Nobel Prize was awarded to Willy Fowler and the other two.
Manda: And not Fred Hoyle.
Paul: No, because after that, he said there's no way you can explain the gradients, the resonances of the creation of carbon, unless there is some intelligence in the universe. He was an avid atheist, and now he was talking about a higher intelligence. And he was just scorned by physicists, you know, scorned for that.
Manda: Which is really interesting, I find, because he had been scorned when he suggested that this is how carbon arose, and then they tested it and oh, okay, you're right. And then he said: a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming, as to put this conclusion almost beyond question'. And he's an atheist, and again, he's scorned. And he didn't get the Nobel Prize and the others did. And I'm wondering, I remember talking to Kim Stanley Robinson and I asked him what to me was a fairly innocuous question, and I got a real limbic response. And I'm wondering if it's particular to the United States where the suggestion that there might be some kind of intelligence within the universe is automatically locked into a particular worldview of a Judeo-Christian ethic. That goes on then to say 'and evolution doesn't happen. And the world was created 6000 years ago, and and this is the way it is', and there's no other broader concept that it's possible to suggest there might be a universal intelligence that has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity. Does that feel plausible? Because I'm thinking if Fred Hoyle was in Tibet and he said this, I mean he probably wouldn't have got a Nobel Prize because I don't think any Tibetans have got a Nobel Prize, but I don't think he would have been scored to the same degree. Does that make sense?
Paul: Yeah. I talk about Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies and from their point of view, the Big Bang, of course, it's happened a million times. It's like, that's the pulse of the universe, it expands and contracts and expands and contracts and they call it mahakalpa, which is the span between the time of an expanding universe and a contracting universe back to the Big Bang. And they said, oh, yeah, this happens. I mean, how would they know? But they do. A mahakalpa is a mountain 3 or 4 times bigger than Everest, and then it takes the time that a dove flying above it with a little silk handkerchief, rubbing the top of the mountain every 100 years. And when that mountain is reduced to dust, that's a mahakalpa. And there's been hundreds of mahakalpas in the universe, whatever, or countless. So it's just a different way of seeing a world than the way we see it, which is very reductive and based on scientific revolution, I mean enlightenment. Which is really about reduction and separation and naming. And you can't have Western science without names and separation. But it goes beyond that, because actually after that there's seven different resonances and gradients and conditions that would create the basis for carbon to be created. There's physicists right now in Cambridge and Oxford saying, hey, we cannot explain. It is incalculable the odds of carbon even existing in the universe.
Manda: Yeah. And yet, as you said, it's ubiquitous on planet Earth. It may not be ubiquitous anywhere else, but there's an awful lot of it here, because each of us could not survive if that were not the case. And it's been around for a very long time.
Paul: We have one Trillion carbon Atoms in every cell of our body. I mean, every cell has 10 trillion. Atoms and it's a big chemical chemistry experiment. I guess it's not an experiment because they live doing very well. But I'm just saying it's chemistry and would not be possible without carbon. And we have 32 trillion cells and you multiply that and you get a sense of the ubiquity, it's 44 octillion molecules. And that's just in a human being walking around. And so the wonder of carbon really we don't understand it. We just have to pay like homage to this thing. What is it? Yeah, we know what it is, we know what an element is from a physics point of view and no argument. But that's not all it is.
Manda: Yeah. And it seems to me the hubris of our time is that, first of all, we seem to think we know everything, and we seem to think we have to know everything. And because we think we have to know everything, then we can predict exactly what's going to happen and then we end up with geoengineering, which is the ultimate act of insanity. And I remember reading Meera Shivani's book. She basically began to understand that science didn't have everything, having done a PhD in neurophysiology. And she got to the point where she would go to some of her friends and go, I've been exploring all of these other avenues, and they're doing not just double blind tests, but quintuple blind tests, and they're getting these really interesting results. And now, will you believe psychic phenomena exist or something? And nope. It doesn't matter what proof you give me. I will never believe this. And science is a cult as much as anything else is a cult. And I think until we can get our heads around the fact that some things that come out of it, we are talking to each other across the planet because certain bits of science are really accurate and replicable, and that's great. And other parts of it are basically politics dressed up in fancy clothes. And that's not a useful thing to be doing. Let's move on a little bit, because you talk about light. And one of the things that struck me, you said earlier that during lockdown, we began to see the world for what it was. And we saw insects here, I live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, and we began to see insects that we hadn't seen for a long time. And what was happening? There were fewer cars on the road, there was less noise and there was less light pollution. And you've got a whole chapter devoted to sound and light. So tell us a little bit about how you how you thought to explore that. Because if I were writing a book on carbon, I'm not sure I would get to exploring the impact of sound and light on the natural world. But you got there.
Paul: Yeah. I mean, on the sound really bernie Krause, who's an amazing person, I've known him for years, he went out, I think starting 30 or more years ago, maybe more. But going out into unspoiled environments and recording what he could hear, which is very loud, birds and insects and animals and even the wind coming through the trees. And he has these recordings available to this day. You can buy them and listen to them. But what he noticed was that over time he would go to the same place and record it, and there was a diminution of the sound. And then he would go to places where, for example, a wetland where there's a whole cacophony at night, of sounds and insects and reptiles, frogs. And then he'd go back there and say a motorway was built nearby, and he'd go record at night and he noticed that certain sounds were missing. In the case of wetlands, it would be the frogs, the bullfrogs crying out at night, showing off to the female frogs, I guess. And the big trucks going across the motorway late at night, you know, da da da da da da da da da da da da da, occupied the same spectrum as the frogs. And the frogs are like, oh, there's a new alpha male.
Manda: We'd better sit quiet and not make any noises
Paul: And then, the frog population cratered. And so there's biophony, he named that, which is the sound of biology. There's Anthrophony, which is the sound that we make. Then there's just the sound of streams and the wind itself and so forth. But he was the one who really led that understanding. Then on the other side, many people, scientists, have discovered how light is so confusing. Especially to birds, of course, who were migrating, but also to insects.
Paul: And insects are drawn to light because they actually use the stars and the moon as a way to navigate and to orient themselves. And so in a way, we put up these artificial moons. These big stanchions of lights in parking lots at night or whatever, left on all night. And so that's why you see insects basically flying around them. And when they do, they become basically bait for bats and owls. So you have a whole food chain happening, which wouldn't happen normally at night. And the reason you see moths sort of flying herky jerky is because they have learned that's the best way to avoid bats and swallows earlier in the night, you know, because they jerking around. And so the bats can't get them so easily once they're going around the light. They're easy pickings. And so you get a collapse of populations and and even owls come in and eat the bats too, you know.
Manda: So everybody's fed for a little while and then the population just falls away as the keystone species are not there.
Paul: Yeah. And so you look at our cities and the way they're lit up like Christmas trees and really we should turn everything off at night and have little lights to wear for safety of walking, this and that. But they don't have to go up in the air. They don't have to go into the sky. So yeah, sound and light. We don't know how many insects we've lost because we don't know how many there were, but the estimates are that we've lost 60, maybe 70% of insects on Earth. This is pollinators. You know, without them many crops don't exist at all. So we're in a insect apocalypse. It's so unknown or it's not communicated to the world as a whole. But wait a minute, we need these insects, you know? And people think of insects as mosquitoes and scorpions and things they don't like. But 99.9% of them are extraordinary. And basically also without which there would be no life on Earth.
Manda: Yeah. And I listened to somebody the other day talking about a group, and they're very, very keen on alleviating suffering. And so they were trying to model what would happen if they exterminated all the mosquitoes. And they were doing it with the best of intentions, and it blew all my fuses because they'd got to the point of thinking, well, it probably wouldn't do any damage. And I think, well, the gulf between probably won't do any damage and actually won't do any damage is the gap between extinction and survival. And you don't know. Just because you can't measure it doesn't mean it isn't there. This is old archaeological stuff: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And you want to alleviate malaria. And I suspect there are much better ways of alleviating malaria than wiping out mosquitoes. And the hubris again, we come back to honestly, the world could balance itself out if we didn't keep interfering in the way that we're doing. At Harvard is trying to create robot bees. There would be better ways of pollinating things if we just didn't render everything extinct. And then you wouldn't need the robot bees. But as I understand it, I was listening to the Refi podcast a while back, there are large segments of the people who are developing these things now, who see the natural world, which they call nature, as an aesthetic option. Which means, by definition, you can choose not to have it. Because it's just, you know, you could change the colour of the paint on your walls, and you can choose not to have a natural world and everything will be fine, guys. Because we get our food from a supermarket where it's all wrapped in plastic and it has nothing whatsoever to do with six inches of soil and the fact that it rains.
Manda: And the disconnect is potentially fatal. I'm hoping that the extinction of humanity doesn't happen, but if it does, it's that level of disconnect is what's going to take us there. That was just a bit of a rant on my part. Because I got to the bit in the book where your friend who did the recordings went back to a big tree somewhere, and in 2023 there was no sound at all. And it was just so heartbreaking. It was heartbreaking just reading it. He must have been completely broken, I imagine. Just to have been going back and back year after year, and the sounds are getting less. But then you get there at one point and there's just nothing.
Paul: Right. That's nearby me where he did that recording, by the way. I grew up sometimes on my grandfather's farm in the Valley, and I remember that cacophony at night.
Manda: Tell us the story of hearing something on the roof, because that was so beautiful.
Paul: Well, when I was a child, I loved to play in wetlands and creeks and things with water boatmen and salamanders and frogs and pollywogs. That was my world. I felt safe there and I felt like I had friends. But anyway, once when I ran out on the street, I found a frog, maybe a frog I felt I had known, whatever, but it was just flattened. It was flattened, like a pancake by a car or truck or something had ran over it. I thought it was the ice cream truck that went around the neighbourhood playing the cuckoo waltz. And I took it home anyway.
Manda: This flat frog. Like a piece of paper.
Paul: Yeah, like a piece of paper. And I showed it to my mom, I was so proud of it. And she grabbed it and threw it away and said, go wash your hands, you know? And later that day, or I guess the evening, I went where she threw it away and I slowly retrieved it and put it into my treasure box, which was under my bed. And the treasure box had lizard tails from when I tried to get a lizard and a tail detached, you know. And butterfly wings that I'd found and this flattened frog, these are my treasures. And so one night I was at my grandfather's farm and sleeping, and I woke up and I heard a frog on the roof. And it was a corrugated tin roof, and I listened. I thought, what? What would a frog do up on a roof. And so I ran outside in my pyjamas and I looked up, and this bird was there imitating frogs and jays and the squeaky gate and weather vane and other. It was just going through this whole process of imitating things. But I was just stunned. And I thought, this bird must be, really I had this experience of well, this is God. This is God. And who knew she was a bird?
Manda: Speaking to you from the roof of the house. It sounds magical.
Paul: I think when you're little, you know, the divine is very close by. It's not like some distant concept. And you have to go to catechism or church to get to make God really distant. But when you're young, she or he is right there. So I was just beyond thrilled. And who else? Because it was jumping up and down, too. The bird was jumping up and down just joyously and all that sort of stuff. And anyway, I went back to bed and I was so excited. I told my grandpa in the morning and told the whole story, and he listened, nodded and so forth, and then finally he said, son, that's a mockingbird.
Manda: Which we don't have in the UK. So I didn't know that punchline was coming. But it's still God. God is a mockingbird, I think that's perfectly fine.
Paul: Absolutely.
Manda: I wonder, because where you live now, the salmon have come back. And there are places in the world, towards the end of the book you come to Knepp, to the place that's been rewilding in England, which is now a place of great pilgrimage for a lot of people, because they took 3500 acres and basically said to the natural world, okay, we haven't done so well farming this, do what you feel you want to. And I have friends now whose children are at school near there. They have the naturalist from Knepp comes to their school for one afternoon a week, and it's genuinely magical. And I read something about a fungus that's evolving near Chernobyl that's actually basically feeding off radioactivity. I think the natural world is genuinely miraculous if we give it the space and the time. And I wonder, what have you done in the world near you such that the salmon are now coming back to your river?
Paul: I think opening it up where it was blocked. Second, no pollution, nothing draining into the creek. Third I think has to do with the, I wouldn't call it trash, but I mean just things that had fallen into the creek. Maybe just wood or branches or things like that. There are obstacles, especially when it goes through town, because the stream had been channelled as it went beneath the city. And you can see that to this day, I mean there's concrete, there's things and so forth. And those are areas where blockages could occur and the water would still be flowing but from a Salmon's point of view, it blocked access.
Manda: Okay. They couldn't get up.
Paul: Upstream there's no farms, there's no pesticides, there's no chemicals and so forth. At least for where I am and where I saw the salmon this year. And so it's just a long process of citizens getting together really to restore the watershed. And we did that and it's fun and you work together. And then you learn about the watershed, you learn about what's happened to it, where it came from. There's a dam on the watershed.
Manda: A beaver dam or a person dam.
Paul: A dam that's been abandoned. So that was an obstacle and that still is there, by the way, it's where we used to go swimming at night. But it's not used for municipal purposes, so now you have to create a way for the salmon to get up the dam and then beyond. So all those things really together recreated the ecosystem, you know. The cascade is what it's called, by the way.
Manda: But it was human intervention. It was deliberate, conscious, we want to make this water system healthy. Clean water, clean air, clean soil. Really basic. Okay. I've got a couple of places I want to go, and then I want to kind of look at where we might go towards the end. Because you have a chapter 'Eating Starlight' on food, which is good. Food like substances that we seem to be making. And you have a wonderful quote from Congressman Earl Blumenauer I think he said, 'we pay too much to the wrong people to grow the wrong food the wrong way, in the wrong places'. Brilliant. And he must have said that in front of people who were listening, because he's a congressman, I would like to think. And and again, I'm wondering in terms of the narratives, we speak a lot in this podcast about regenerative agriculture and its value, and healing the soil, and that it's perfectly possible to feed all 8.5 billion of us without resort to industrial agriculture. And that industrial agriculture, even if we were to zero the carbon or even begin drawdown tomorrow, my understanding is the oceans would still be dead in a very short space of time if we keep pumping out the glyphosate and the NPK into the land. Because that's what's killing the water and as you point out further in the book, phytoplankton produce half of our oxygen, so dead oceans means the air changes quite significantly.
Manda: I still don't understand why there are people who seem to think that extinction is not a thing. That, you know, lots of people will die, but there will still be plucky bands of people who have stored enough cans of beans and enough weapons or whatever it is that they've got, and they'll survive. And 9% oxygen is not a great amount to be breathing. Maybe they'll be making oxygen with their robots? How do you see agriculture evolving such that we are not paying the wrong people, the wrong stuff to produce the wrong food in the wrong way.
Paul: I mean, a very good question. I do work with some really big food companies and I focus on that. A couple of things about regenerative agriculture, because a lot of people or organisations talk about this is a way to sequester carbon. You know, carbon goes in the soil. And what I say to them is that's not the purpose of regenerative agriculture. That's the outcome, no question. But the purpose is life.
Manda: Thank you.
Paul: In the book, I talk about the soil being an organism as opposed to a medium in which life does or doesn't exist. And so once you understand that, then how you treat the soil, how you relate to the soil becomes completely different. And of course, since haber-bosch and the invention of NPK, basically making cheap chemical fertilisers available to farmers. You know, it was a revolution. And farmed out soils in Europe and even in the United States and so forth. I mean, all of a sudden you had big, robust green things popping up out of the soil, and it was like, whoa, here we go. And of course, what happened is those are the macronutrients for plants, no question. But also there's many, many, many other nutrients that plants need to be really fully healthy, just like us. I mean, we can eat junk food, but we're going to pay the price. And so the same thing is true with soil, which is we paid a big price. And basically NPK is top dressed, it goes on the surface, you get the rain, you get irrigation, whatever and that goes down into waterways, into rivers, into oceans. And there's 500 dead zones basically in oceans today and they're growing in number and scope. Where there is no life, except there is some jellyfish on top and there's some anemones on the bottom and nothing in between because there's no oxygen, so fish can't live there. And so that's an outcome of that fertilisation technology that came out that is still practised by 90 I don't know what percent of farms in the world today. What I talk about in terms of regenerative agriculture, I love the term, I wrote a book called Regeneration; that also is an outcome. Regeneration of life became more life.
Paul: But what I talk to you in terms of agriculture, farmers, and these companies, is resilience. You need to focus on resilience because it's getting hotter. You have what's called the evaporative draw, which is the hotter it is the more moisture leaves the soil. And if the soil is not alive it doesn't hold water very well in the first place, and then it leaves very easily. And with soil, a lot of organic matter and so forth can hold water much longer and much better and more of it. And so I actually feel like in this area there is a transformation coming. And even the big, industrial chemical ag companies, the Monsanto, Bayer, Corteva, you know, you name them, who profit by selling glyphosate and profit by selling insecticides; neonicotinoids, which is the number one insecticide in the world, which is persistent for five years. It's just used to coat foods, and then it goes up systemically. Insects eat it, birds eat the insects, they all die. Bees. I mean, it's unbelievable that we put that on our seeds and our soils. Those practices of killing insects and killing the weeds and so forth, they're moving away from these companies. Subrosa, they don't talk about it in the public, but they realise that the only agricultural system that's going to persist in the future is biological, not chemical.
Manda: That's interesting.
Paul: Yeah. Because it's just factual. It's not like oh, we think it ought to be this way. Well, of course it ought to be that way. But not like a belief system. It's how life works. And if you kill all the life in the soil, then it costs a lot of money. You need the fertilisers, you need the pesticides, you need the herbicides. Because actually weeds love to colonise bad soil...
Manda: They're trying to regenerate.
Paul: They're healing the soil. And if you get a Canadian thistle, actually it tells you where your soil is sick. It really tells you what's going on in the soil. It's a beautiful relationship. So that's where industrial agriculture is now. There are defenders of it and this and that, yeah, but underneath I have to tell you, Manda, it's really changing there. And there's some really interesting technologies that are coming out that are bio stimulants and sensors that will provide small holders and big farms too, of course. But I mean, most of the world food is created by small holders, by people with 2 or 3 hectares, not people with 2 or 3 thousand hectares. And these are sensors, just like they go in the ground, and they will give farmers real time feedback on their soil every morning, every week, whatever, right on their phone. It'll just tell you what is going on for soil; inorganic carbon, organic carbon, nitrates, moisture, bulk density, microbial life. All right there. And so now for the first time a farmer, she or he can see well okay we did that over there, we do this here and look at the difference! Look at the difference.
Manda: And quite soon the AI will just interpret all of that and tell you what to do.
Paul: And then there's biostimulants. That actually the soil is a biome. We have a biome. So actually it's like oh wait a minute, we want to feed the biome it takes very, very little to do that, because it propagates itself. And so forth. So that is where we're moving and I have a lot of hope, I guess, is the right word, but that we're seeing a revolution in agriculture now. Does it show right now, do you read about it? No no no.
Manda: No, because it would have to be quiet or politically it would be shut down. But this may well be my projection, because I hear the word Monsanto and I translate it into evil incarnate. They are still embedded within the predatory capital death cult. They still need to make profit or frankly, they'll lose their jobs. The people themselves might be perfectly decent human beings, but the system is designed to destroy. Are they simply going to move away from glyphosate NPK inputs into other methods of extraction and destruction? Because I'm thinking that the unintended consequences are going to be just as bad, we just don't know what they are.
Paul: I think it's a little different than that, which is that from what I'm sussing out, because I've been involved with agriculture all my life, is that excuse my term, but it's more like, Holy shit, This isn't working.
Manda: Right. We are actually killing the world. Whoops.
Paul: And people want less of it. And we're selling it. And laws and banning. And this is working. How is it working? Where is our place in this? And so yeah, they're trying to create products for sure, that correspond to big AG and what farmers will need and so forth. So we're going to watch this play out. Because it's going to a biological understanding of soil and plants and roots; what really happens and what really works. That they don't have the scope to create something that's actually going to damage and hurt, because it's antithetical to what it is designed to do, which is to create yield. But I think they are asking the same question, in a different way, which is it doesn't look really good for us; how can we maintain our status and the dependency that farmers have upon us right now. Because soil, I mean, half the life on Earth is underneath the ground. It's not above the ground. We see what's above the ground we don't see below. And so because food is so crucial to human well-being.
Manda: Yeah. And healthy food, not food like substances, which is what they're producing at the moment, as you point out in the book. I'm trying to get UPFs recategorized as industrially produced semi edible substances, in the hope that people would actually stop eating them. But what I gathered when we talked to Erin Martin is that there's the food deserts, where Walmart is actually the only source of anything to eat. And that has to change also. So not only do the big companies need to be producing food that's actual food, they need to somehow be making it available to people such that we're not just giving everybody chronic diabetes.
Paul: Well, even Walmart actually has a whole organic line, and they reduce their margin on the organics compared to regular things, so that they're more affordable for their customers. So Walmart are not committed to UPFs. They're not committed to **** food. Excuse me. They're committed to providing food. And as people change, as demand changes, as agriculture changes, they're going to be right there. They're not standing up for McDonald's and all the crap, that's not their position. So I do feel that this is where people can make a really, really big difference right now, in terms of being the consumer, but also being the producer. And also going obviously to local production, to farmers markets, to really creating community around food, as opposed to having the food being a commuter into their landscape, you know?
Manda: Right. I saw, it looked like AI generation, but if it was real, Ikea was producing a kit which you could not fit together in your house with an Allen key, but it was a many tiered city farm where you could bolt it on the side of your high rise and grow enough food. You know, depending on how big your high rise was how many layers you could build, and you would be able to grow food for everybody in your apartment block, which certainly is not a bad idea, actually. If we're going to make transitions from where we are to where we need to be, we have to we have to localise food production. And how do you localise food production in a city of several million people? You grow some of it in the city?
Paul: Well, the thing is that there's been roughly, anthropologically 7000 cultures on this planet. Every single culture said Mother Earth. No culture ever said
Manda: Father Earth.
Paul: No, no.
Manda: Oh, so Germany had the Fatherland, but that was a political space. It wasn't a reference to...
Paul: And so every culture has known that the Earth is the mother of life. Men don't have babies, okay. So the sacredness of the soil, of the land and so forth is embedded in all those cultures. It took Western science to try to undo that and figure out that, no, we have a better idea. Or to create that distancing from a feminine idea of the Earth to its ecology is this, it's blah, blah, blah, blah. And we're coming back to that. We're coming back because that's just fact. That's just true. And it's inviolable. In other words, you destroy the soil, you destroy the culture, you destroy the people. So, you know, listen up! That's lesson number one. And so I feel like that is feedback that transcends social media, newspapers and political nonsense. That's feedback.
Manda: Okay. Alrighty. So I would like, if you have it, for you to read the last paragraph of the book, and then I have a couple more questions.
Paul: I have it right here.
Manda: So starting at where you are is where you are most effective.
Paul: 'Where you are is where you're most effective. The power to act does not lie elsewhere. Fundamental human rights and needs must be met. Everyone on earth comes first. There is no second. Revive, honour and nourish the wild and bountiful lives that forever astonish us with their splendour and grace. The movement to restore life on earth is not a repair job. It is transformative, an entirely new experience of self; the visceral awareness that our life is coincident with every being on the planet. Our intention and reward are the same. We experience and express the irrevocable connection to all being. It is our only way forward'.
Manda: It has to be the best closing paragraph of any book I have ever read.
Manda: And we could leave it there, but I am really curious to know, given the chainsaws being taken to the Constitution in the US; the old system is broken, I don't think we'll ever get it back. And to an extent it was not fit for purpose, if that fit for purpose is a continuation of complex life on Earth. And your whole book is about complex life on Earth. If you were to design, in the unlikely event that Musk take another dose of ketamine and wakes up and decides that he actually wants a world where humanity survives, and he came to you and said, Paul, we can make anything happen. What do we need to happen to take us forward towards a world where everything thrives, where we're living by that last paragraph of your book. Have you got a sense of the steps that we could take?
Paul: Well, there's the steps that individuals can take. And that's in that paragraph: you're most effective where you are. Because all change starts with one person on that level; not in nature but in human society and without exception. But one becomes two, becomes four, becomes eight. And really community arises inside from leadership, from kindness, from connection, from sharing, from compassion. That's where community arises. It can arise in other ways, too, by the way. But all life is a community. There is no life outside of community. Your cell is a community and all life exists within cells. Nothing exists outside of a cell in terms of what we call life. It doesn't exist. And so in a sense, we're wired already to reimagine, recreate and restore and regenerate life on Earth. We're wired all that way. And our grief that we feel when we read, see, hear, or be subject to the political whims of corporations and governance. The grief that we feel, which is so painful, is really a wonderful, wonderful thing because it can only arise from love. That is, you cannot feel grief unless you love something. And if you don't feel grief, I mean, you're sort of disconnected from that heart. And love can only arise from the heart. It doesn't come from anyplace else. It's the organ, it's the part of us that absolutely tells the truth and we never lie.
Paul: So how do we further amplify or accelerate the changes that are needed to stay here? We are. We're doing that. We're doing that by ruining the place, by killing, by the politics, by the apocalyptic nature of what's happening right now. This is us, humanity, basically having this climactic moment in our civilisation, where we realise we went the wrong way. And we were taught the wrong things and we learned the wrong things, and we acted inappropriately to ourselves and to other. And that is all coming up into the surface right now. All coming up. An apocalypse is actually a blessing, it's not a curse. Apocalypse is the beginning of transformation. And it can't happen unless you have this apocalyptic moment. Now, do I welcome it? No. Do I feel tremulous and fear and concern? Yes. Just like any other person. Do I wince when I open up the The Guardian, the post, the Times in the morning and read, and I can't believe I live here and this is what people are saying. That experience is a good experience for us, because it's touching back into our true nature. And I feel Manda that basically what Carbon is about, the book of Life is just to see ourselves in this broader, wondrous, extraordinary, complex world that surrounds us, that feeds us, that gives us life, that gives us song and little foxes coming in and eating peanuts in your living room or whatever.
Paul: You know, the beauty of butterflies landing on your hand, dragonflies looking at you right in the face and going, who are you? And all the wonders that we are cut off from, not just because of urbanisation, but because of what we've chosen to do, how we've been chosen to be, how others chose to educate us. And because that's the way you make money and so forth. But all these things are dissolving, all these things are breaking down, you know, and we see it. And within that is new life. And when I was young, I was a firefighter. I don't know why they use fight, but that's what we did, we had fires in the Sierras, and then we'd go out and there was techniques. You know, we were never downwind, things like that, like how you deal with the fire. But you get this charred, burnt thing like you have in Los Angeles right now. It just looks like, oh my God, that looks like an apocalypse, like a war. But actually in the spring you go to the same place, all this beautiful green grass, greener than you've ever seen because of the ash that fed the plants.
Paul: You see wildflowers that hadn't been seen for 50 or 100 years because it takes intense heat for the seed to break open. And so we can look at that as a kind of a metaphor for where we are right now. It's on fire this culture, these assumptions, the greed, and the harm. It just goes on and on and on. Harm is a mild word for what's happening. And yet that is the fire. And that fire creates new life. And here we are together, talking to each other, caring. I love the guests you have. To me, as a writer, I go to Accidental Gods for inspiration to understand how broad and deeply informed this, I'll call it the movement, the movement to restore life on earth, is. And it's growing rapidly everywhere in every country. And so we can give thanks for that. We know that we have brothers and sisters out there in the human world and of course, in the creature world, too, and they get it and they understand and they're doing the best they can, and it's difficult and they wouldn't do anything else. If you gave them $1 million. I'm going to do this. And that's what I really love. I want to say thank you for what you do.
Manda: Thank you.
Paul: I'm not trying to pander to my podcast host. I'm just trying to say that as somebody who writes, I need food, right? And just like any organism and that provides food for me. So thank you.
Manda: Thank you. And your book, I said before we came on air, for me it's so rare to read a non-fiction book written by someone who genuinely knows how to put heart and soul into a story and bring it alive. And I learned so much from this book, Paul. It's fantastic. And it had a narrative arc to it. We start at the beginning, we've gone on through to the end. Everybody, honestly, this is a beautiful and brilliant book and you will come away from it feeling more alive and brighter and exactly as you said, more connected to those who do care about the survival of complex life on earth. And I will go away internalising the fact that some of these people are in Monsanto and Kraft and Bayer and that this is not impossible. So thank you so much. I will put all of the ways to connect with you and ways to download the book into the show notes. Everybody, please don't buy from the giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity. But when you have bought the book and read it, please go back to the giant vampire squid and leave a review because that's still, sadly, remains one of the places where any writer that you read and and like, the number and the quality of the reviews on Amazon makes a distinct difference in the publishing world. We don't like this, but if you want a book to succeed, that's one of the ways you can do it. So please buy the book, please read it and please go and review it. Paul, thank you so much.
Paul: I want to underline that, by the way, I do readings for the book in bookstores.
Manda: There you go. Go if you can.
Paul: And we need those bookstores. I need them. Yes. Thank you very much.
Manda: Yes. And almost every bookstore I've ever been in, the real local, proper bookstores. The people who run them love books. And it's so important that that continues. So, yes, go to your local bookstore and buy it from a real human being who loves books. That would be a good thing. Fantastic. Paul, it's been such a delight. I hope this book sells all around the world to everyone who cares. Thank you so much for coming on to Accidental Gods.
Paul: Manda, thank you so much. I've said my thank you already, but I can't tell you, that gratitude is unending.
Manda: Thank you. And that's it for another week. Huge thanks to Paul for inviting the foxes into his house. For turning a river into somewhere that the salmon could return. And I know none of these things happened alone, but Paul opened the doors to our knowing about them. And that, the opening of doors, feels to me so important at the moment, as everything that we knew is being taken apart. The cracks are where the light gets in, and Paul is one of those who is offering such bright, bright light. All of his books are amazing. Carbon is one of those books that is going to change my life. There are just so many different bits in it, so many bits we didn't get to. So much about language, about sound, about light, about soil. I think that I know about regenerative agriculture, but Paul manages to find things that I haven't heard before. And frankly, if he's right that some of the big, big people in suits who I think are just there to destroy the ecosphere, are actually there to begin to restore something of our connection to the web of life; that has to be a good thing, too, right? I would like them to be doing it because they're actually connected to the web of life, not because they can see that it's a way to make more profit.
Manda: But we'll take the steps on the way that we can get, while the rest of us reconnect to the web of life, one breath, one heartbeat, one new bit of understanding at a time. And I am going to be spending time out there in the last week of October, listening to the trees, trying to find are there words that I could imagine for the sound. So that the people in all of the years and the decades and the centuries to come, would know that there was a difference. We need to plant more trees for that to be a thing, I think. But we're doing that, too. So people in the US this book comes out on the 18th of March, in the UK it comes out in August. Wherever you are in the world just go and pre-order it from your local bookstore, not from the giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity. I hope we made that clear. But please do go and put your reviews for whatever you're reading at the moment that you enjoy onto the places on the internet that people take notice of. And before we go, I mentioned Tibet. There's a wonderful anecdote, paul mentioned it, of an amount of time. Which is the amount of time it takes a dove carrying a silk handkerchief flying across the top of a mountain three times higher than Everest once every hundred years, to wear it down to dust.
Manda: And this is an amount of time that we can't really measure. And it takes several of those for the universe to do its pulse in and pulse out. And in the middle of all that I said, Tibetans don't get Nobel Prizes. And I did not mean that Tibetans are not worthy of Nobel Prizes. I just meant that if you cast your eye down the list of people who have got Nobel Prizes, there are certain patterns that will leap out at you. And particularly if you start looking at what they got them for. So there are straight white men who got the Nobel equivalent of the economics prize for telling the world that global warming didn't matter because there was a three degree difference between Florida and I think Michigan and Florida's GDP was only very slightly less than Michigan's, so therefore global warming wasn't really going to have an impact on the world. The person who stated this utter nonsense got a prize that Kate Raworth, who designed and wrote The Book of Doughnut Economics, has yet to get. So that statement was nothing to do with suggesting that people in Tibet are not worth Nobel Prizes. It was all about who is given them, who is part of the club that is deemed worthy.
Manda: And actually, if that is part of the old system that is disintegrating now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. So there we go. Please pre-order Paul's book. Please read everything else that he has written, and go off and find the places on the web where he's active. He knows whereof he speaks, and he's a truly lovely human being. And then we will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot. To Allen Lowell's of Airtight Studios for the production. Thanks to Lou Mayor for crafting our videos, to Anne Thomas for sorting out the transcripts, to Faith Tilleray for the website, for all of the tech that makes everything work on our side of the screen. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. And if you know of anybody else who wants to know more about the wonder of the world that we live in, please send them the link to this and buy them a copy of the book. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.