Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration

Jason Bradford is a biologist, farmer, and the Board President of the Post Carbon Institute, an organization that provides individuals and communities with the resources needed to understand and respond to the interrelated ecological, economic, energy, and equity crises of the 21st century.

He notably authored The Future is Rural: Food system adaptations to the great simplification, which presents the case for reversing the trend of urbanization and towards re-ruralization.

In this podcast episode, Jason sheds light on the unsustainable systems that underlie and run our cities and why our perception that cites are more efficient and therefore, better for the environment, has been shortsighted; how we can re-ruralize without worsening urban sprawl or wild habitat loss; and more.

 

Featured music: Mining for Steal by Fuchsia

Episode notes: www.greendreamer.com/221

Weekly solutions-based news: www.greendreamer.com 

Support the show: www.greendreamer.com/support 

Instagram: www.instagram.com/greendreamerpodcast

What is Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration?

Green Dreamer with kaméa chayne explores our paths to collective healing, biocultural revitalization, and true abundance and wellness *for all*.

Curious to unravel the dominant narratives that stunt our imaginations and called to spark radical dreaming of what could be, we share conversations with an ever-expanding range of thought leaders — each inspiring us to deepen and broaden our awareness in their own ways.

www.greendreamer.com

Speaker 1:

Green Dreamer is supported by our listener patrons. And to be honest, my goal is to have at least 10% or just one in 10 of our regular listeners supporting the show, and we have ways to go until we reach that point. So if you've been finding our work valuable and you're able to support the show starting at just $2 per month, like a simple morning's cup of tea, you can head to greendreamer.com/support to learn more. And thank you so much if you're already a supporter of the show.

Speaker 2:

What you have in in cities, basically, is more analogous to putting animals in a feedlot. So take all those cattle that were on pasture, let's say, at a right stocking rate, jam them into dense urban centers, and now you've got to truck all of the food in and then you've got to basically somehow truck out all the waste. That's what cities are. Getting final services delivered to people in urban centers is really efficient. But that does not mean that from like a biomimicry perspective, it makes any sense.

Speaker 1:

You know how we currently have a trend of urbanization where people are increasingly moving from rural places to the cities? Well, our guest today believes that we'll soon start to see a trend towards re ruralization, which he also believes will be necessary to a truly localized and sustainable future. Jason Bradford is the board president of the Post Carbon Institute, an organization that provides individuals and communities with the resources needed to understand and respond to the interrelated ecological, economic, energy, and equity crises of the twenty first century. As I mentioned, we're going to discuss why he believes the future is going to be rural, why our perception that cities are more efficient and therefore better for the environment has been shortsighted, how we can reruralize without worsening urban sprawl or habitat loss, and more. Green Dreamer, if you're ready, take a deep breath, and let's dive in.

Speaker 1:

Hey. It's Kameya Shane, and this is Green Dreamer, a podcast exploring our paths to ecological balance, intersectional sustainability, and true abundance and wellness for all. If you haven't already, make sure to hit subscribe. And together, let's learn what it takes to thrive in every sense of the word. To preface our conversation today about re ruralization and your vision for a more sustainable localized food system, I'd love for us to get an idea of where we're headed right now and why.

Speaker 1:

So clearly more and more people are moving into cities and out of rural areas every year in places like The US, over 80% of the population live in urban spaces. What do you think has been the overarching key drivers of this national and even global trend?

Speaker 2:

Well, it's really related to the cheap energy we have available for fossil hydrocarbons. That has allowed cities to get so large and it's allowed for us to very economically replace human labor with machines that burn fuels. If you do the math on, say, the cost of a gallon of diesel, say $2.5 a gallon, and how many hours of human labor in terms of energy output is replaced by that gallon, it's about five hundred hours. So if you were paying someone $10 an hour, it'd be like $5,000 of work that you could get for $2.5 if you've got the machine that would be something similar. And so once you have an energy source that's that cheap, then human labor as a factor of production becomes very expensive relative to mechanized labor.

Speaker 2:

And that then leads to the ability to have all these specializations and develop a consumer culture. And then it just starts feeding on itself in this sort of positive loop of growing, growing consumerism and extraction. So that's really the key driver of this. We think of it as progress in technological advancement, but those are consequences of just finding this, winning the energy lottery.

Speaker 1:

I feel like even in the environmental space, people often say that urbanization and building upwards instead of outwards is good for the environment because things may be done more so called efficiently. Public transportation lowers people's need to drive independently and there'd be less urban sprawl and the need to convert wild habitats into spaces allocated for urban development. What are we missing here in terms of the unseen costs and impacts of people living in condensed areas, perhaps from an energy, food production and also water transport standpoint?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly right. I'm so glad that you hit on that right away because that is really the challenge conceptually that people have with this concept. And I think it has to do with the fact that we are so disconnected from where all this stuff comes from that we consume in dense urban areas and the processes that sort of underlie it. Like if you were to peel back the layers of a city and look underneath the surface and look at sewer systems and water systems and electricity and natural gas lines And then imagine all of the mining and shipping that goes into replacing the concrete and the asphalt and the steel on the power plants that are located hundreds of miles away that have coal being shoveled into them or the dams with the hydroelectric turbines, you realize that basically the analogy that is used sometimes when you look at what's called urban metabolism, the urban system has a metabolism, like a body that we have to take food in and we then excrete waste. And at a city scale, that is enormous.

Speaker 2:

There's fantastical stories about like New York City having to get rid of its waste, whether it's the garbage system or just even the sewer system, but where that has to go and the history of that is fascinating. And if you were to look at an analogy from a rural perspective, if you were to have say a pasture that had enough feed being grown for a couple cattle on it, those cattle will eat the grass that's getting their food and they defecate and urinate and that helps the grass grow again. And that's all happening within that local environment. That's the productive bio capacity is being consumed locally and being and the waste is being assimilated and processed locally. What you have in in cities basically is more analogous to putting animals in a feedlot.

Speaker 2:

So take all those cattle that were on pasture, let's say, at a right stocking rate, jam them into dense urban centers, aka feedlots, and now you've gotta truck all of the food in, and then you've gotta basically somehow truck out all the waste. That's what cities are. Now it's very efficient to feed an animal in a feedlot from a labor perspective. So delivering those final services, if you're saying, oh, how much labor does it take? Yeah, it's pretty convenient to do all that.

Speaker 2:

So getting final services delivered to people at urban centers is really efficient. But that does not mean that from like a biomimicry perspective, it makes any sense. There's no place in nature where an animal the size of humans lives in such dense conglomerations because you can't without this cheap energy from fossil fuels that allows us to build this infrastructure and maintain it and run it.

Speaker 1:

That's a really powerful analogy. We've definitely talked about the environmental impacts of monocultures and factory farming that kind of separate out the elements of nature that are supposed to work synergistically together within a holistic ecosystem. And when we take apart all these elements, they then start having negative impacts with just everything being homogenized in a sense. So it's a really powerful analogy to think about how humans, in a sense, we're a monoculture. We've created monocultures of ourselves.

Speaker 1:

And part of the issue is that we haven't been seeing ourselves as one part of nature. And this is really a clear illustration of how by separating ourselves through urbanization, we're further perpetuating this idea that we're separate to nature and not one part of nature.

Speaker 2:

That's exactly right.

Speaker 1:

The premise of your work today is the argument that we're going to soon begin to see what you call re ruralization, where this trend of urbanization is going to reverse. In the preface to your report titled The Future is Rural, it reads, The future is rural challenges the conventional wisdom about the future of food in our modern globalized world. It is a much needed reality check that explains why certain trends we take for granted like the decline of rural areas and the dependence of farming and the food system on fossil fuels are historical anomalies that will reverse over the coming decades. What do you think has been this perpetuated idea of what our future of food will look like? And why do you think the trend of urbanization will and even needs to reverse in the near future?

Speaker 2:

The first part, do we think the way we do is interesting. I've been a subscriber to National Geographic, for example, for a long time. And they do all this work on like the food system. You see this special issues, every once in a while there's an article about the future of food. And in every case, it's sort of this ultra modernism kind of perspective where there's like, they're profiling all the greenhouses in Holland, And the robots that will go through fields, precision agriculture and all this.

Speaker 2:

And in every sort of instance where you see this work, it's this idea that cities are gonna get bigger, farms are gonna have less and less people and be more technologically advanced. And what's interesting is if you look at this from an energy perspective, almost every time we replace human labor with a robot or a tractor, you end up needing more energy to get the same amount of food. And so this perspective of the trajectory of higher tech, fewer people involved in the food system is one that we just have grown up with and it's been going on for decades. And so it's very hard for people steeped in that culture not to have the mindset that it's just gonna continue. And that's just because we're energy blind.

Speaker 2:

It's like we're fish swimming in a sea of energy and we really don't understand it ironically. What's gonna happen though is that as energy becomes more and more scarce, which nobody is really prepared for or thinks is gonna happen, very few, that the systems will start to fall apart and all those assumptions will start to be called into question more and more. And so my report is basically kind of like trying to be a wake up call. Like this has profound implications for actually where people live. And over time, people will have to relocate back to areas of higher bio capacity instead of investing in building out Phoenix, Arizona, assuming you can just keep air conditioning people, pumping them water and you're shipping in their food, it's more like, well, we depopulated the Midwest and so maybe actually we have to go back there and repopulate it because that's where food is grown.

Speaker 1:

Part of your report also highlights that lessons learned from resilience science and alternatives to industrial agriculture provide a foundation for people to transition to more rural and locally focused lives. What is resilience science and what can we learn from it to understand our current challenges and most meaningful solutions going forward?

Speaker 2:

A lot of what I think resilience science helped me do was understand why there's so much resistance to change and why it's so hard. You say, Tasha, I'm making so much sense here. Don't you see the long term trajectory and how this won't work? But in resilience science, they talk about how systems lock in, that a system that evolves over time has certain processes and relationships that are kind of solidified. And it makes it very hard for that system to adjust unless there's It doesn't adjust with just ideas.

Speaker 2:

The system changes when the material conditions no longer allow that system to persist. And so what resilient science basically says is look, the system that we we have now, we're in a what's called maybe the late conservation phase of an adaptive cycle. And so we're very rigid. And when that system no longer has material ability to maintain itself, it will start to break down. And that's called in the collapse phase.

Speaker 2:

Now what is important though, the ideas that are important are when the collapse phase happens, you need ideas laying around that help pick up the pieces, so to speak, and reorganize in a way that's more now adaptive to the new material conditions. That means that all the ideas laying around about a regenerative agriculture are gonna have a hard time really penetrating the current system, but they're super important to hang around, to trial, to model. And when the industrial agriculture and food system starts to really wobble and then topple, the more people that are aware of these ideas, the more people that have practiced them at some extent, then the easier it will be or the less painful it will be to transition to a more resilient regenerative system.

Speaker 1:

Do you think we necessarily have to wait until the collapse of say the fossil fuel era and also the collapse of industrial agriculture for these new and more regenerative and renewable systems to come in to dominate this space? Or is there a way where we can preemptively transition towards these more resilient and sustainable systems?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a great question. I think that there's all of these movements happening right now, the food movement, where people wanna eat locally, people wanna buy organic, people are interested in holistic based livestock. Those are all good sort of elements of the current food system that are the leading edge, so to speak. But it's very hard for those components to really take over until there truly is a breakdown, I believe. Now it doesn't mean we can't keep growing those incrementally little by little, but there's such a lock in and such a dominance and such a sunk cost to what we have that it's very hard for that to just fully embrace doing things differently.

Speaker 2:

And as long as it's still working, as long as people still have jobs and still are making money in the current way of doing things, they don't see the real need to change. And they're gonna basically reject change because it's threatening. So I think we can keep building and growing elements of what's gonna really take over in the long run, but I don't think we can expect rapid transformation or large scale transformation within the current paradigm, so to speak. And that's kinda what you learn from Brazilian science. And it it helps you let go a little bit of trying to, like, prove yourself or be too eager or anxious because you can be a little more accepting of the status quo, understand why it is how it is and why it's so hard to change.

Speaker 2:

And you can then get to a task of actually just sort of when you if you have the opportunity to build something that is gonna be more viable long term, but not beat your head against the wall trying to like, you change, you change, you change. Like, sorry. You know, maybe you work on something and and let that other system kind of be in a sense.

Speaker 1:

Now have you noticed this trend of re ruralization beginning to take place in parts of the world today? And what can we learn from those examples where this is already starting to happen?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, this is a really interesting point. I dabble in this a bit in the report and I really, this is one of those things that I wish I had time to really explore more, but I see examples where in order to survive nowadays, in order to be part of the global economic system, you have to have a certain amount of money, right? If you have money, you can draw goods and services to you. And whenever a place loses its access to that kind of financial capital, it has trouble. And in The US, I give the example of the Upper Midwest where we had all these cities that were part of the steel industry and the auto industry.

Speaker 2:

And as we know over the last several decades, that went into a decline. And major cities in The US were powerhouses like Detroit have lost half or two thirds of their population. I lived in St. Louis for a while and there was elements of that there where North St. Louis, you could just drive through and there was just block after block empty.

Speaker 2:

And what has happened in some of these places is there's been this urban agriculture that's developed where people are saying, okay, I don't make enough money to buy any good food. There's no grocery stores in my area anymore. Well, let's grow food. So that is a kind of a back to the land in place within a city, which is really kind of odd to think about. But it's a city that went through a decline and a depopulation, so space came available.

Speaker 2:

And then in Greece, there was this austerity program. Greece was integrated into the European Union and the central banks there had trouble and they decided they were gonna really put the screws on Greece. And so the whole nation had an austerity program and people lost jobs in Athens. You know, that was people were flocking to Athens, the opportunities there. What's interesting about Greece is that a lot of young people though had ties to family farms.

Speaker 2:

And so they were able to say, Okay, I give up on this urban life. I'm gonna go back to my quiet village and at least I can milk some goats and pick some olives and have a kitchen garden and I can live. So that's an example in like a Western market economy. Probably the most complete example of a nation that went through a disaster was Cuba During the special period as the Soviet Union broke apart, Cuba lost access to its exports. It basically was the sugar producer for the Soviet Union and its empire.

Speaker 2:

And when it didn't have that outlet, it also was cut off and didn't have money to buy fuel on the global market. They got helped out by like Venezuela a bit, but it had a real decline in its energy available to support its industrial food system. And it had to then go back to agroecological methods. It was these university professors who had had these programs in sustainable agriculture and they had trials and had taught some people. And so that little group at that university was able then to get the ear of the officialdom and say, well, here's what we have to do if we don't have all these fossil fuels and these fertilizers.

Speaker 1:

We touched on this a little bit earlier, but with urban sprawl today or with people living in rural places, part of the concern is that people will be more reliant on cars to get around. So how do we at the same time re ruralize to localize our food sources, our lifestyles and lower our food miles, while weaning our own reliance off of fossil fuels and the use of energy trying to transport ourselves around? And does re ruralization necessarily equate with urban sprawl, which kinda has a negative connotation to it, meaning we may have to compromise habitat for wildlife? Or is there a path forward where humans can coexist with and even create habitats for wildlife?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a great set of questions. And I think, you know, from the, we have this bizarre situation in The United States where our rural areas have been so depopulated that now basic goods and services for those populations are really spread out. So it's like, there is not a local school, there isn't a local post office or in local grocery stores. And so if you look at miles driven by urban sorry, by rural people in The United States, it's horrible. But that is a consequence of actually having too few people in these small towns.

Speaker 2:

Small towns used to be vibrant, diverse, and you didn't have to drive 40 miles to go to the grocery store. And so part of the way that we will lower the transportation demand is by actually getting population density back into farming communities. At the same time though, you're right. We don't wanna then sort of just take over any habitats that exist. But I think what's interesting is that with industrial conventional agriculture, we've had the luxury of farming a lot of what's called marginal ground.

Speaker 2:

We've been farming areas that are probably wetter than they should be to farm. We've pushed closer to rivers and creeks than we should have. We've done all this work to get as many acres covered as possible. And we've had the incredibly cheap fuel to allow us to basically drive these machines everywhere. If you had smaller farms that were more intimately managed by people who live there, they would be able to say, gosh, that floods too much or those are poor soils.

Speaker 2:

These should be riparian buffers. These should be restored wetlands. And these are also then places where if you are thinking for the mindset of an agroecologist, you're gonna realize I want habitat there for the ecosystem services, the predator services of bats and birds and the pollination services of bees. I need those for my crops. So I think a new generation with a different mindset may view the landscape differently and view it more as sort of a partnership between people and nature.

Speaker 1:

On a similar energy front, you've said that renewable energy, although declining in costs every year and used more and more, may not be enough to compensate for the eventual decline of fossil fuels. Why is that? And what are some things that we may have left out of this picture that we need to keep in mind?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, this is a really key point too. I think people have the assumption that technology will come around to solve a problem. And we do see tremendous growth in like wind turbines and photovoltaics which produce a stream of electricity. The electricity is a very high quality energy source, but it's not the most portable or the most dense. We don't have dense forms of storing it.

Speaker 2:

So there's a few problems then. Intermittency is one. Right now we have intermittent sources of wind and sun. There's some predictability but they're not available twenty four seven like say, oh, I wanna burn that gallon of diesel. Okay?

Speaker 2:

If you got a gallon of diesel laying around, you can just decide when you're gonna use it. Not so for wind and sun. You say, okay, no problem, batteries. Well batteries, the problem is and you get into what's called the energy density problem. If you were to try to replace a 100 gallon diesel tank with, you know, that is used on tractors nowadays that allows you to go for twelve, twenty hours before refilling.

Speaker 2:

And try to it with batteries, your tractor would just weigh too much and it would just cost so many more times what tractors today cost. And we miss construe the use of this technology. We say, oh, well, we can drive cars with batteries, so why not tractors? Tractors are using about 70% of their horsepower capacity and run for, like, twelve hours a day. When was the last time you revved your car to the near to the red line and did it for twelve hours straight?

Speaker 2:

Alright. I swear if you did that with a Tesla, the batteries wouldn't last that long. And then also drag steel and burn it on the rough ground. So there's really then these properties of the physics, chemistry that don't make all forms of energy substitutable. And so you get to then this problem, well, we don't, you know, liquid fuels, these liquid hydrocarbons are so valuable.

Speaker 2:

They're almost irreplaceable for transportation and running heavy equipment. Okay. Well, let's grow those. Why don't we just grow them? We can grow biofuels.

Speaker 2:

Well, yes, but there's literally not enough land available to both feed ourselves and grow the fuels that we're used to. So what this ends up doing, mean, you do all this math is you say, okay, it means that as fossil fuels decline, we will have less energy available to society. And that's something that we just don't expect. We assume technology will just come to the rescue without really understanding energy systems and energy properties and physics and chemistry in enough detail to question that assumption.

Speaker 1:

So basically, as we continue to transition towards renewable energy, the other part of that equation is also examining our own need for energy use because we've been taking it for granted. And clearly it's going to start revealing itself as something that we can't take for granted. We can't expect technology to be able to just solve all of our problems and allow us to keep going in the same direction.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly. And that's the hard message is like, we're gonna have to get by with less, but that's about less stuff. That's about less of these extreme forms of energy. And I think I've been fortunate enough to have traveled around the world using a lot of jet fuel kerosene. But what that did do was it showed me people living very different lives.

Speaker 2:

It was very jarring to go to Bolivia for a couple months and then come back home and then walk into a grocery store, see all the traffic. So I think most of the world doesn't live like we do in The United States and yet we're not any happier necessarily. We don't live lives that are any more meaningful. So part of this is actually then maybe figuring out and understanding, well, how has the consumer culture and all this high energy state led to sort of maybe some dysfunctions we have? And is there a way we can, as we go through this transition, start to appreciate what life is like with less material goods but maybe human relationships become more important and relationships with nature become more important?

Speaker 2:

And can't those substitute for sort of the hungry ghost of consumerism that never seems to satisfy? It'd be great not to be marketed to all the time.

Speaker 1:

I definitely feel like we have a deeply, deeply indoctrinated belief and ideas around what development is all about. And as you've said in an interview with the revelator, people in highly urbanized and globally integrated countries like The US will need to re ruralize and relocalize human settlement and subsistence patterns over the coming decades to adapt to both the end of cheaply available fossil fuels and climate change. And also that our highly complex and globally integrated societies will begin to take on forms that are simpler over time. That means less complex trade networks, less specialization in jobs, less bureaucratic hierarchies. What do you say to people who may immediately brush these ideas off as if it's going backwards or going against what our so called development has been about.

Speaker 2:

There was a paper that came out a couple of years ago that looked at the biomass of the planet. Like if you were to add up how many gigatons of biomass is in all the plants? How many gigatons of biomass is in all the bacteria and all the fungi? And it is one of the most shocking and sad papers I ever seen because there's this little animals are small percentage of the biomass of the planet. It's mostly green stuff and fungi that decay green stuff and lots of bacteria.

Speaker 2:

But we're an animal. And so if you look at the animal component and you really focus on terrestrial vertebrates, animals with backbones that live on the land, which we do. And you say, well, how many terrestrial vertebrates are humans and human livestock? And then you say, okay, let's compare that to how many terrestrial vertebrates are elephants and parrots and lizards. 95% of all terrestrial vertebrate biomass is either livestock or people.

Speaker 3:

Wow.

Speaker 2:

I know, the chicken is by far the biggest bird species in the planet. And so I just start tearing up when I see that. For anyone who says like I'm being unreasonable or don't understand the situation, state of the world, well, this is what we've done. This is what so called progress is. This is us as a species absolutely dominating and churning up nature and calling it progress.

Speaker 2:

And thinking that we have any ability to continue this for very long is absurd. If energy scarcity, which I consider one of our big Achilles doesn't nail us, well, what is it gonna be? What else is it gonna be? There's always something. We can't you can't have a planet where we are that dominant and basically decide we're gonna what?

Speaker 2:

Are we gonna double our economy? Or the plan right now is to double the size of our economy every twenty five years. And every time we do that, we chip in further to that little bit of nature that's left. So something's gonna give.

Speaker 1:

Well, to come to a close, how can we support this vision and this vision of re ruralization and really localizing our communities and our lifestyles. How do we support this vision and specifically for people who don't live on a farm in the country or have no interest in farming and stewarding the land? What can people do to prepare for and support this more sustainable, and equitable future?

Speaker 2:

I don't know if it's the simplest thing to do, but I think one of the most important things that people can do is to really take a look at what they eat and really align what they're eating with their understanding of the world. You can do a lot to learn how to cook meals that are supporting your local, really regenerative minded, organic, sustainable, whatever you want label, farmers and ranchers. There's probably a lot in your area that are doing great things. And a lot of what they need is they just need the community around them to support them. And you'll learn tons because it's fascinating.

Speaker 2:

We've gotten so used to just, I mean, I'm like this myself too in many ways where I, Oh, it's Taco Tuesday and so I'm gonna make this. But very few of us are really mindful of the seasonality of where we live adjusting what we eat based upon that, but still making it something that's just awesome. Like the creativity that could be unleashed with we're saying, we're gonna mindfully develop a food culture which is place based seasonal. That could be great. And what we have nowadays is all this interchange of species which has both downsides but potentially upsides.

Speaker 2:

The exchange of flavors and cultures and crops from around the world is fascinating and gives us an opportunity to really create something new that's place based but moves us forward with this palette of experience that's global. So I think that would be a really interesting thing for anybody to do that would be very helpful.

Speaker 4:

They're mining for gold, but all I see is still. Could it be part of the deal? Because she's sweet as sugar, but wait until it rains. She can turn very bitter

Speaker 3:

a flame. Spitting words in the atmosphere they breathe in monochrome. White collared criminals will reap just what they sow. And now the fields are barren. Where do we go?

Speaker 3:

Where do we go? From here From here

Speaker 1:

What's an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?

Speaker 2:

The Limits to Growth books, which I actually are beautifully written and fascinating. That was by Meadows and and Randers. And then there's three of them. I think I've read I've read two because they came out '72 and then '92 and then 2005. Limits to growth, the thirty year update.

Speaker 1:

What do you tell yourself to stay positive and inspired?

Speaker 2:

I have plenty of beauty around me and great family and friends. It's hard to stay down. I think I just rebalance if I get upset. So most of the time, I'm just enjoying the day. I do grieve about the world and I think it's important to do so, but it's hard for me to stay in that place if you just stay active and connected.

Speaker 1:

What's one thing you're working on right now for your health?

Speaker 2:

I'm practicing meditation.

Speaker 1:

What are you working on right now to elevate your positive impact for our planet?

Speaker 2:

Talking to you, that's good. Oh, I've got a podcast I work on with my colleagues, Cher Mill and Rob Dietz at the Post Carbon Institute. It's called Crazy Town. So that's another thing I really enjoy doing.

Speaker 1:

And what makes you most hopeful for our planet and world at the moment?

Speaker 2:

Oh, the planet will be fine in the long run. Life is gonna persist for another few hundred million years or so until the sun kind of goes too big. I guess it helps sometimes to have this deep time perspective and not get too caught up in trying to save ourselves.

Speaker 1:

Well, Green Dreamer, to learn more and stay updated on Jason's work at the Post Carbon Institute, you can head to www.postcarbon.org. You can also follow them on Facebook at Post Carbon, Twitter at post carbon, and on Instagram at post carbon institute. I'll have all this linked in the show notes as well that you can find at greendreamer.com. Jason, if our listener would like to get involved with and support your work, what cause to action would you like to share?

Speaker 2:

Oh gosh, I think we all have unique talents and passions that can be applied to make the world a better place. And I don't think what you do is as important as making sure that aligns with those talents and passions so you're effective and that it comes from a place of love and compassion, not only towards everyone around you, but all forms of life.

Speaker 3:

Because all that glitters isn't always go where's the credit in what they sold. Glide in the silver line in rivers far away. It streams in the youth as they line up by the gates. And now the fields are barren. Where do we go?

Speaker 3:

Where do we go? From here, from here, from here, here from from here

Speaker 4:

They're mining for gold, but all I see is steel could it be part of the deal?