Joshua Harrison: Art, Science, and Reconnecting with Our Roots in a Modern World

Out on a limb, they looked back wistfully from whence they came and wondered how they got there.

There was a time, long ago, before history books, when most of us were generalists, though we hardly thought of it that way.

Hunting, gathering, avoiding predators, finding shelter.

It was everybody's shared business to survive.

Firmly rooted in our natural surroundings, we had yet to assume the characteristic hubris of man.

Apart from nature, we couldn't ignore what we now call externalities.

There were no externalities.

Life had to get much more abstract for such a concept to make any sense.

The ancient line of human generations, stretching back into the misty hidden past, possessed their individual talents and predilections.

Just as today, they formed bonds.

They laughed and cried and made their way in the world as best they could.

But there were few lone wolves.

The greatest technology ever developed in the mind of Homo sapiens is arguably the ability to cooperate and adapt in large numbers.

Living on the edge of survival afforded a holistic perspective on nature.

Indeed, nature didn't exist, at least not the way we think of it now.

In our thermostat controlled context, there was only the world.

And we were enmeshed in the daily struggle of existence, just like every other living thing.

As Thomas Hobbes philosophized, life was nasty, brutish and short.

But we persevered, spread across the planet, discovered agriculture, built civilizations, science specialized and insulated ourselves from the edges, or at least did our best to ignore them.

We crept further out on the limb.

My guest today on Global Warming is Real, soon to be renamed Earthbound is Joshua Harrison, director of the center for the Study of the Force Majeure, based at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Though their work extends across the country and internationally.

Major is French, literally translated as major or superior.

In this context, force majeure think acts of God.

It's what.

What used to be a once in a century flood washes away your neighborhood again, and with it the hopes and dreams of its inhabitants.

It's the raging firestorm, the devastating hurricane, the oppressive, the deadly heat.

It's the planet pushing the edges of the Holocene, the edge.

And it's a belief that we had nothing to do with any of it.

It's messy at the edges, but that is often where change happens.

Harrison's approach is interdisciplinary and unsiloed.

It seeks the intersection of art and sciences, the edges, to reveal new ways of understanding and relating to the world, in part by reconnecting with indigenous wisdom and then using modern technology to engage the senses, intellect and emotions with our impact to the world philosophically and viscerally.

One of Harrison's projects is the Sensorium for the World Ocean.

What would happen if you could ask the ocean a question?

He teases.

The Sensorium is a multi year project that allows us to explore such ideas, merging art and science using immersive 3D, virtual reality and modeling technologies.

Visitors are invited to interrogate entities like the ocean to help create connections that are often unconsidered or hard to see.

What would the ocean say if you could ask it a question?

Hello, magnificent ocean, how are you feeling?

And be ready for what may be.

An unseen, unsettling answer.

Harrison's work seeks to provoke, inspire and unsettle, compelling us out of our isolation toward the boundaries where diverse communities, disciplines and perspectives meet.

Where change happens, the process helps stimulate our connection to the world that sustains us.

To touch grass, inspire new ways or recover old ways of understanding our place in the world.

And to remind us that despite how it may seem in the dark night, we all have agency and a role to play in making a better world.

Enjoy this wide ranging, motivating and insightful conversation with Joshua Harrison.

It's great to meet you, Tom.

Really happy to be here.

My name is Josh Harrison.

I run something called the center for the Study of the Force Majeure.

We're an art science environmental research collaborative.

We're based in UC Santa Cruz, but we work both on the west coast, the east coast and do some work internationally.

We use the term force majeure, which is a legal term, it's actually French for acts of God and it's what your insurance company relies on when your house is blown down in a storm and you go and look and ask them for money and they say, well, well, we'd love to pay you, but the storm damage coverage doesn't cover wind.

We consider wind an act of God, hence you're on your own.

So we look at that ecologically to say what are the things that have happened to us as a society?

Based on roughly 500 years of not paying attention to how we treat the landscape and the world and the last 200 years in particular of burning 200 million year old fossils to protect us from the infectious from anything we don't like.

That's how we got the name.

It's a bit of a mouthful, but that's why we did it.

But it's very important concept.

Talk to me about.

I'm very interested in the intersection of how art and science and activism can inform action.

Can you speak a little bit about that?

Yes, in the largest sense.

We've spent a lot of time understanding things in particular disciplines, getting very, very skilled and drilling down deeper and deeper.

Into various kinds of particularities about how things work.

It's been greatly successful in all kinds of ways.

But it's relied on us creating boundaries and borders and limits to what we think about.

And it's relied on us on ignoring the things that are outside of us.

So what art does at its best is it's about looking at perspective.

It's about looking at where things are being elsewhere, reimagining yourself.

And it's about breaking boundaries.

It's about connecting.

And if you think historically, this notion of art and science and everything being separated.

Has not always been with us.

And it's not always the way we think about it.

And lots of people think about it very differently.

And so what we're trying to do is bring back the syntheses.

Bring back the fact that it's the adjacencies that are pretty interesting.

What are the richest parts of the ocean?

Life?

They're the parts where there's an intersection between land and water, between a thermocline, between warm and cold.

You know, where are the most important parts of a stream, the riparian, the river's edge?

Where are the cities most?

Where the human society often at its richest.

It's where things mix.

It's where the boundaries are.

It's where the intersection between different people, places, goods are.

That's why trading cities like New York, like San Francisco, become such rich centers or earlier years.

That's where the big great cities of the ancient world have always been.

So one of the things that we look at and one of the things that art allows you to do.

Is look at things holistically, look at things without having to be an expert, but with having expertise.

It's like.

So you don't have to be academic or filled with the understanding the principles of something.

Without necessarily being tied to the formalism of the education that brought you there is one of the successes.

And we use a gallery space often as a place because it's kind of a safe place for a risky conversation.

It's not always a risky conversation about the environment.

But you can use it that way.

So you can talk about land planning and land use and political elements.

And how we live better in the world.

Without having to prove everything to the nth degree, but to create a provocation.

So we look at discontinuous in a certain sense.

Our process at the center has been.

We look at discontinuities things where things aren't where they should be and aren't where they could be.

And we sort of create provocations.

What if we did it this way?

What if we did it that way?

What if all that irrigated farming in California wasn't really necessary?

What if, in fact, if we let the waters in the, in the bay back up and go back up and recreate the great marsh and estuaries that used to be there 150, 200 years ago?

Well, you know, we, what do we know?

We know that marshland is even more productive than dry land, wet weight protein.

We also know that it grows on its own in great ways and we don't have to actually kill it all off to extract from it.

We can harvest from abundance.

And we also have a big city there in the whole Bay Area that could provide the nutrient base for a cycle.

So what's wrong with thinking about that idea?

Well, there's 25,000 reasons it's crazy if you went and talked to US Urban Planner, but 25 reasons it's not crazy if you don't follow the rules.

And that's where.

So we create a provocation and then sometimes we then go further into an implementation where people actually start to take it serious, start to take it seriously and tackle it on the ground.

What challenges do you have in talking to, let's talk about urban planning and what like I remember many, many years ago, I did some articles with Autodesk and their blm, their BIM Building Information Management and they were trying to advocate for more sustainable buildings and more sustainable spaces.

What sort of challenges do you face in creating more sustainable and more human centered buildings, urban spaces?

We've treated cities, certainly newer cities for, you know, for a long time, as if they were abstract structures that weren't part of the land and we're in it.

And earlier cities didn't get treated that way because people didn't have the tools to ignore the world around them.

They had to, they had to live with the, they had to live within the boundaries because they didn't have any ways around it.

Right?

They tested the boundaries.

We've always, we as humans have always tested the environment just like every other species.

We're no different than any other species.

Whether you're an ant or an insect or you know, a grazing animal, you're always engaging with the environment that you're in.

We just do it in ways that sometimes wreak havoc that we don't pay attention to.

But older cities lived within their means or they were Destroyed, they burnt down, they were flooded out, they starved.

For the last.

We've had a sort of a window of a several hundred years where cities didn't have to pay that much attention to, to that world.

But now we have to pay attention to it again.

And so I think one of the first things is to recognize that cities can be treated like living entities.

They have metabolisms, they have ways that they function so they don't need all those hard edges.

So they can become spongier, they can be softer, the boundaries can become less defined.

And by that I mean at the water's edge, you don't have to limit your connection.

You can absorb different kinds of seawater intrusions, you can absorb different kinds and you can recirculate your waste in different ways.

Any city that isn't reusing its byproducts is not only ignoring its own natural functions, it's creating its own demise.

Because nature doesn't waste is a human concept, has nothing to do with a natural system.

Every output is an input.

So what are you doing with all that glass, that concrete rubble?

What are you doing with all the effluent?

What are you doing with, you know, all of your non biodegradable materials?

What are you doing with your, how are you, how are you dealing with that as your urban infrastructure?

And then why aren't you recognizing that cities, particularly masonry and glass and steel, cities really have a lot.

They're a lot like mountains that freshly fallen from, freshly emerged from the sea.

They're bare.

But what happens to mountains?

Most bare mountains, granite.

Except it, you know, start to gain plant cover, they start to become living creatures again.

We have an opportunity to do that with cities.

And why would we even, why would we take that?

Not only is it aesthetically important, not only do we.

Everything we know says that people inside natural environments live much more, have much happier lives.

That's why we have forest bathing now in multiple countries as a medical treatment.

Both Germany and Japan, as well as many other places, as well as the long history of poetry, mythology and what does Wordsworth tell us?

Well, the pastorals, right?

Yeah.

But plants are the oldest technology on the planet for converting oxy pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.

They're the most efficient tool because they've had 4 to 500 million years to get it right.

And to be able to do this in all kinds of different places, why aren't we taking advantage of that?

Why do we have to assume you have to have a profit motive for every technology?

Why do we assume that if it's a natural technology that predates the profit motive, we can't take full advantage of it.

But that's how nature cools the planet.

It's not so much carbon dioxide, it's the water vape.

And the water vapor comes from a bunch of sources.

But one of the main sources is transpiration from plants.

And when you do that, every cubic centimeter of water vapor that emerges from a plant is 550 calories.

That's the same power of an air conditioner.

The amount of natural cooling that you get from trees, from all kinds of greenery is remarkably effective in reducing all kinds of elements in a city.

What's the greatest current cause of death for cities?

Unanticipated death.

It's the urban heat island effect.

2,300 people just died in the most recent heat wave in Europe that were unexpected deaths in Chicago was a couple thousand a few years back.

It's a huge crisis for city planners.

Not only that, particulate pollution is back up.

What do plants do?

Plants adhere to the sub 2.5 microns particles, the ones that are most toxic for everybody's lungs.

The ones that really.

The black carbon that comes out of the forest fires, that's really incredibly toxic for human anatomy as well as any other warm blooded enamel that breeds.

So why aren't we taking advantage of this?

And if you put.

Here's a lovely image that I'd like to try to convey to people.

If you take a city that exists, a city like New York City for example, and you cover it with this, because it's a city like New York, it's a city that's got, that's got high rises.

So it's got walls.

It's not just roofs and floors, it's also got walls.

If you take advantage of the roofs, the walls and the flat spaces of the city and you put the equivalent complexity of greenery that was there when Henry Hudson sailed up in 16, whatever, 1660 or so on the existing infrastructure that's there.

You don't have to take anything down.

You will get the same ambient temperature that were there before the buildings were there.

I see.

And you don't have to cover the entire city to do that.

You keep what's about 30 to 40% coverage will do it because of all the verticality that you can take advantage of in a place where there's high rises.

So at that point you're talking about living in a complex environment, returning the complexity of daily life into the urban fabric.

People are then.

And then you can bring food back in.

This isn't all decorative by any stretch.

You can bring food back in, you can bring recreational stuff back in.

You can bring the ownership, the pride of place.

You can have greenest block competitions where people are growing their own blocks and then sort of soft competing with each other for different kinds of things.

You can train the kinds of responsibilities.

Schools should be growing their own food.

In Japan, you know, all kinds.

In other countries, all kinds of people are doing all kinds of things that we can do.

I mean, we can go back to the kitchen gardens and the victory gardens that we.

That were dominant.

25% of America's vegetables were grown in backyards during World War II.

Why?

We don't have to run away from that.

We can bring that back.

And what does that all mean?

You know, all kinds of benefits come from that, from those things that are far beyond, you know, the mechanical benefits of cooling the air.

A couple of things that come to mind.

First off, you mentioned the victory gardens of World War II.

And then we got into the post war era and the manufacturing and production might of the United States had to aim itself somewhere.

And then we got into the 1950s and the great acceleration and plastic and TV.

It seems like we kind of lost our way a little bit.

Your commune couldn't have said it better.

I was a kid when there was an advertising campaign that was one of the most diabolical and effective I've ever seen.

It was called no deposit, no return.

I don't know if you're as old as I was, but when I grew up, I grew up in America, recycled its bottles.

Coke came in returnable bottles.

Everything came in returnable bottles.

We reused things.

We did all kinds of things that we think are impossible to imagine now.

And we did them through the 60s.

In the 60s, I mean, the 50s was one thing, but in the 60s they solidified the deal.

They completely severed the relationship between product and its life cycle.

Yeah, I actually remember I was a lad in the 60s in Little Lakewood.

Lakewood, Colorado.

And I remember there was a little wooden box that would sit on our front porch, right.

And we put our empty milk bottles in and the milkman would.

I mean, I remember that.

I remember my grandparents, they were in Columbus, Ohio.

And 60s sometimes I was born 58.

The bread man would come by.

It was just.

That's right.

A whole different approach to how we got things that we needed.

Right.

And it was way more connected to the Circularity.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Circularity.

We seem to have.

We had kind of an idea of a circular economy.

And then we lost it.

And.

Well, yeah, because, because you said it earlier, because there wasn't enough money to be made if you.

And this is this, this really, this idea gained through which.

And actually in the 30s in the car companies, they were starting to make cars pretty well.

And then they realized in the early 30s, oh shit, if we keep making our cars so well, they're going to buy a car and they're going to keep it forever.

So they came up with this again, extremely diabolical innovation.

They decided to create limited life cycles for their stampings.

So they created an expected life cycle of three years for their major car form.

Therefore, they would create this idea that you needed to replace your vehicles on a regular basis.

So they would have a continuously growing market.

Because a continuously growing market was something that even today we can't get away from.

Let me use another metaphor here that's literal and physical.

What is cancer?

Cancer is a healthy cell that has no boundaries on growth.

Yeah, okay.

That's all cancer is.

It's a healthy cell that loses its signal for when to stop growing.

That's when it'll metastasize.

So what does cancer do?

It kills you.

What does the healthy cell do?

It survives.

What's the difference?

A healthy cell knows when to quit and stop growing because it has internal signals to do that.

We have let our autonomy become cancerous without recognizing what that means.

And so uncontrolled growth is not only mathematically impossible, we're living the effects of it in everything we do.

Whereas it's perfectly reasonable to imagine a wonderful life, a wonderful, fulfilling, sustained life without uncontrolled growth.

It needs rethinking, but there's ways to do that.

I mean, you know, I mean, the fashion industry is one of the great polluters now.

What?

Right.

We used to make clothes that last.

People used to.

Levi Strauss made jeans that were designed to be washed once a year, maybe twice a year.

Because if they had to go in a barrel to China to come back clean, you know.

I mean.

Yeah.

You know, and they were designed to stand up to that kind of wear.

Now, you know, we wouldn't necessarily think they follow all kinds of fashion stuff, but we.

Why, you know, nowadays not only are we aging our fabrics so making them pre softened with all sorts of stuff that adds microplastics by the boatload, we're creating this life cycle for clothing that's so short.

And of course, the people to make those clothing are working in slave labor, many of them, you know, so we have this multiple.

There are multiple problems in the whole chain, which could change if.

What if.

What if your shirt cost $100, but you didn't buy three, you bought one instead of three $30 shirts.

And that shirt actually lasted you 8, 10, 15, maybe indefinitely, depending on your care.

What if it was reparable at a price?

You could get it repaired at something that didn't cost the cost of a new shirt.

So you're looked at.

Yo, I could actually get these three buttons fixed, or I could buy a new shirt.

It's the same price.

That's insane.

Yeah, it is insane.

It's kind of an insanity that we're living in right now.

It's a kind of a mania that we.

That we're not letting ourselves get out.

Huh?

Right.

Yeah.

You know, there's so many examples.

You know, the.

Every year there's.

You.

You're encouraged to buy a new iPhone or something like that.

And that's another horrible.

The waste of the electronics.

The issue of waste is, I think, a critical one for Western society.

Yes.

And, you know, not everybody.

People recognize this in different ways.

I mean, the European Union, oh, I'm eight or nine years ago, started requiring all major appliances to be recovered by the manufacturer, whether it was cars, refrigerators, or washing machines.

That's a major step forward towards recircularity.

We should do the same thing.

But of course, that's.

That's.

Yeah, yeah, we.

There's lots of reasons that.

That we're not doing that, but that's not.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't.

And it's not impossible to imagine.

Last time I checked, most people in this country go to Europe and they think it's pretty cool place to live.

Think washing machines, for instance.

What do people want?

Do they really want to have a washing machine?

What they want is clean clothes.

So manufacturer responsibility, cradle to cradle in my work, you know, I hear people talking about it, but I don't really see a whole lot of change happening toward that idea.

Talk to me a little more about what you're thinking.

Well, like for.

Let's take the washing machines, for instance.

So we have a washing machine, it breaks down, it's our responsibility to replace it, fix it, get rid of it.

I think the mo.

Okay, so if it's our washing machine, it's our responsibility, Repair it.

But if we.

I think my point is that I don't necessarily want to own a washing machine.

Why can't I, the manufacturer?

I don't know how that business model would work.

I guess that's part of the problem here is we have a business model that's just focused on, on a linear economy.

You buy, you use up, you, you throw it away.

But if we could just buy, you know, it breaks down.

There still are in a lot of places laundry services where you have a centralized group, whether you do it at a laundromat where you're doing the work yourself or whether you drop it off at a laundry service and pay for somebody else's labor.

And that centralizes the number of, you know that, that allows the machines to be way more effectively used.

Yes.

Instead of being a single family and those is, you know, I mean again, there's a.

Washing machines are pretty interesting in all kinds of ways because it's really.

They were a major, major, major labor saving device and they, they took a particularly work that was supposed to be for women only and it was considered like my great grandmother, when she comes to the United States with a family of 11, she.

They're dirt poor, they came from Poland.

You know, I diagnose.

I.

It's insanely, it's insane even to imagine the process.

What did she do?

She took in laundry as a washer.

Okay.

What a terrible way to earn your have to earn your living.

Right.

But if it were well paid and in good equipment, it might be different.

And that's what a machine she had.

You know, this is 1880s, so she was hand washing.

There were no washing machines.

I don't, who knows?

I don't have, I don't even know the mechanics of what was going on.

But that's it, you know, that amount of.

At the same time.

And washing machines themselves are still pretty durable.

Most, most, most of them, they, some of them break down, but a lot of them, you know, that was the old Maytag.

Remember the old Maytag commercials where the repairman fell asleep?

Oh yeah, I do, I do.

Yeah.

We used to, we used to think that was a privilege.

We used to think that was a good thing that things lasted for durable goods.

Yeah, durable.

But, but the idea you're getting at, I think is a really important one.

There are things we can do collectively and social.

That's why mass transit is so much more efficient most of.

In most parts of the world, you know, and that's why, you know, they should get that train back up from Monterrey up to Santa Cruz to San Francisco again.

Yeah, I mean, you know, look, I don't think that highway is very appealing to many people when it's in rush hour.

Wouldn't it be nice to Have a.

To have a route, a way to take, you know, one.

Oh, yeah.

One well organized train can take a thousand cars off the road.

Yeah, yeah.

And you don't have to take all the cars off the road.

To transform the experience of driving, you only have to take 2 to 5% of the maximum.

And suddenly the road frees up in all kinds of ways.

So it's like, you know, these are not all solutions.

These are.

These are all complex things where you add multiple things because you're looking at the efficiency of the whole, not the efficiency of any one part.

Right.

And when you start to realize that, then you can do different things.

Not everything has to solve everything.

You can't.

You don't have to wait for an answer to be perfect.

Right, right.

A holistic approach to these solutions.

We moved from San Francisco about five years ago and didn't have a car in San Francisco.

And it was great.

Right.

If I needed a car, there was Zipcar.

You could do that kind of thing.

Ways to deal with it.

And it was, you know, for the first couple of years when you're in San Francisco, I did have a car, and what a pain in the butt that was.

You know, I had to park it.

I got tickets because.

Right.

Of course.

You know, it's just crazy.

You're fun, you're funding.

Because people who own cars are the most reliable source of income for any hospitality.

Yeah.

In so many different ways.

And then we moved out here into Monterey, which beautiful area, we don't drive much, and we bought an old used Prius, you know.

Right.

But you kind of have to have a car out here.

Right.

You know, because it was built that way.

Yeah, it was built that way.

And there's.

That's another area where it seems like we kind of had it 100 years ago or so.

There was a lot more mass transit.

Trains.

A lot more trains.

My understanding is the Bay Bridge there.

There were train tracks going back and forth.

No big urban infrastructure through the 50s was built without some acknowledgement of mass transit.

It didn't necessarily get implemented, but it was acknowledged.

You know, what happened?

Is it the economics, the capitalism?

How did we get here?

I think these things are really important questions, and I think they're wonderful.

I'm happy to noodle over them with you.

I have some thoughts about it that go to.

We've had many opportunities in this country to rethink how we organize ourselves socially and economical, and they're generally a giant pendulum.

But we've always had unlike.

And I'll use Europe because it's our closest neighbor.

But you can find this in a lot of other places as well.

We've always had a very powerful strand in America.

That was what Richard Hofstadzer used to call the paranoid tendency in American life.

A group of people who really hated anything that was collective action.

They hated the collective.

They used a certain amount of moralism, sometimes out of Calvinism, to say that if everybody gets something, it's not worth anything.

They used.

Obviously we were built on two.

The country itself was built on two great, great terrible acts.

The act of genocide that killed the Native Americans actively and passively to acquire the land in the first place that people lived on.

And then the act of slavery that brough millions of people as chattel slavery to the point that at the beginning of the Civil War, the greatest single financial investment in the United States were the bodies of black people.

People that was capital, literally, not figurative.

And lying about both of those things has been essential to keeping our sense of the American presence.

So we're basically.

We've got a country that.

That doesn't look at itself accurately or honestly.

So we don't take stock of the larger value and we are often swayed.

Now, for example, it breaks in all kinds of ways.

After the Civil War, we had another wealth moment where the robber barons came in.

We then had the progressive movement.

And the Progressive movement in the United States had in some ways mirrored the progressive movements in other countries, but it didn't ever go back quite as far.

But it was, you know, we had some pretty violent political actions in the 19.

In the teens and 1920s and through then we had the, the great economic craziness of the twenties and the.

And the collapse of the stock market.

And then we had an attempt to build a social coherence.

And the New Deal in many ways was pretty much what people were doing.

You know, in Europe, they were building together a new society.

We call it economists, they call it the Great Compression.

We went from having a huge economic disparity to having a much smaller one.

We had 30% unemployment.

So we had a lot of socially motivated, like the Works Progress Administration did all kinds of things.

And we had, you know, you look through any national park and you see tremendous value that human labor did because it was being put to a good use.

We had.

But Roosevelt didn't stop there.

We had the Writers Project, you know, the Farm Labor Administration, the Bonneville, the Tennessee Valley Authority.

All of these different elements were coming together.

Well, there was a huge resistance to that too.

Among.

So every time we got close.

So we would have this other thing.

I'm throwing a lot of things on the table here because you asked for those giant questions.

Yes, sure.

That's great.

And we have these different things.

So you have somebody like Henry Ford who does things that are diabolically and diametrically oppositional.

It's hard to even imagine the same person doing that.

He's an industrialist in 1912.

He comes up with this incredibly smart and important concept.

If you want to actually build things and have a market for it, you got to pay the people who work for you enough so they can buy your cars.

Yeah, right.

What a brilliant idea.

It's an idea that actually created the idea that we can have a successful industrial revolution and that we can actually have the middle class that is in some ways the great American social invention as a broad middle class that we're of course dismantling as we speak.

Yes, yes.

At the same time, Henry Ford single handedly revived this dusty old antisemitic doctrine called diatribe called the Protocols of Zion.

Got it in published anti Semitic journal that every single person who bought a Ford from 1923 or 1924 through the end of his life and through the World War II actually, because that's when he had to stop.

But got.

Not only did they get a new car, they got a very conservative, blatantly anti Semitic newspaper as a gift.

I didn't know that he translated the Protocols of Zion into 26 other languages.

And the only American portrait sitting in Adolf Hitler's office was Henry Ford.

Okay, so, okay, so that's the guy that Ford is the guy who was very happy when all the mass transit lines in the third 30s were going bankrupt all over the world and in many countries they were taken over by the government.

And in the United States they were taken over by a consortium of General Motors, Akron, Firestone and a whole bunch of other rubber and oil companies and dismantled to be replaced with buses.

Wow, that's a bit of history.

Yeah.

I encourage anyone who wants a fun way to learn a little bit more about it to watch who Framed Roger Rabbit it, which that's the backstory of what happened in the la, the LA version of that.

Because la, this is going back to it.

LA wasn't built around cars.

LA was built first around stagecoaches and then it was built around light rail.

LA in through the 1920s had the most advanced developed commuter rail system in the country because it had all these different towns, you know, Beverly Hills, they were all connected by rail.

And then of course in the 30s, they got systematically replaced by cars and LA tried to basically erase any history of rail it had.

Now, of course, it's building a lot, but it can't replace what it destroyed, what it had.

They gave up their right of ways.

Kind of tragic that we had it and we destroyed it and now we're trying to bring it back.

But that's the piece that we actually have to do everywhere.

We have to learn from the past and apply it to the present and the future, not just our own past.

But the recognition is if we did it before, we can do it again.

I think the big failure we have of imagination, and this is a big failure in the States more than other places, is we have a failure of imagination.

Now we're a failure that we can actually do these things.

We're sort of.

We have this defeatist attitude.

But we didn't used to have it.

I mean, the Great depression, we had 30%.

Imagine we had 30% unemployment.

Now, I mean, we think we're in bad shape now.

They were.

But what did they do?

They responded in this complete.

And they did a.

There's a lot of ways that Roosevelt and the, you know, and the New Deal responded.

One of the things they responded was they tried a whole bunch of stuff and if.

And they threw a bunch of stuff against the wall and if it didn't work, they tried something else and they weren't scared of failing.

Yeah, how did we get rockets?

How did we get the moonshot?

Happened because Kennedy, he wasn't scared.

He hired a bunch of people at NASA who weren't scared of failing.

They didn't fail very often, and they did fail once or twice, pretty spectacularly, unfortunately for the astronauts.

But they weren't scared of it and they built it.

But they also didn't leave blueprints behind.

And so when Richard Nixon decided enough of that stuff and fired one third of the NASA engineering crew, all that intellectual capital just moved.

And hence the space shuttle, which is about one tenth as far as the Atlas rockets were coming, comes, comes into the next stage.

Yeah, yeah.

The space shuttle seemed like just kind of a Frankenstein of a vehicle in a way.

Well, it was, it was, it was a camel.

It was, you know, it was like.

It was, it was just, you know, they didn't have the resources and they were forced.

I, I will say this about the space shuttle as someone who as a kid had grew up among the children of NASA scientists.

So one of my great, one of the, the great pleasures of my 8th grade summer was going over to one of my friends houses whose dad was one of the chemists who was analyzing the moon rocks and seeing a bell jar on their kitchen table with a bunch of nondescript small little rocks and being able to say is that what I think it is?

And him saying wow, that would be so cool.

Yeah, that was totally cool.

That was just like blue.

Blue blew it away.

Basically they wanted to have human travel because it was sexier, so they were willing to cut corners and make do it on the cheap.

Ish.

Of course it's not cheap, but cheap cheapish to do that as opposed to what they probably should have done is stay with the non man travel and gotten a lot better.

We'd be on Mars and we'd be all over the place had we focused our real resources there.

But as you can tell.

Let me go back to where we're talking.

One of the reasons that I think disciplines have been overused is that we need this wide ranging conversation.

I'm a kind of what I call an inspired generalist.

So I stick my nose in a lot of different places and think about a lot of different things.

I rely on other people not thinking about a lot of different things, thinking about a couple of things very deeply so that we can have good interactions and engagements.

So there's a wonderful intellectual metaphor by the British philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin, and it's the hedgehog and the fox.

And the hedgehog knows one thing, but he knows it very, very well.

And the fox knows many things, but he doesn't know any of them deeply.

But he knows how to get around and scamper around between a lot of different things.

And the world needs both hedgehogs, hedgehogs and foxes in order to have a feel.

So that sounds like it gets back to what we were talking about in the beginning is the intersection of art and science.

And that can open up people's imagination to think differently, which is what we really need.

Now you spoke of the loss of intellectual capital.

And it strikes me that we're in a period right now in the US where intellectual capital is being just.

Oh we're, yeah, no, no, we're.

We're in a brain reverse brain drain.

Now part of what makes this so painful is since we're in, in the era between the 1930s and six months ago, let's just call it, and January 21, 2025, the United States had built the richest, most productive intellectual apparatus the world has ever seen.

That's why people came to study here from all over the world.

That's why.

And it wasn't people just came to study here.

But how did that happen?

Didn't happen by accident.

Didn't happen because we were some magical place.

It happened because Europe was destroyed in World War I and World War II.

And so much of the great genius of Europe came over and found a foothold here in the States and was able to build.

I mean, you know, it's not.

You know, we.

We built the atomic bomb.

We didn't build it because Robert Oppenheimer by himself built it.

No, we built it because all of these great brilliant European scientists, many of whom were Jewish, came to the States because it was a haven.

And as long as we were a haven of free inquiry, a haven of exploration, we thrived.

Our universities, you know, I mean, yes, they're historical parallels, but they're unmatched in the present age, you know, so.

And that's what we're giving up.

And we're giving that to China, and we're giving that to Europe, and we're giving that to all kinds of places.

And we're doing it intentionally because we're run by the second coming of just an absolute grotesque misunderstanding of what society is and what it needs to lead.

And without getting too deep into that cause, I don't think it's too useful.

In the 1850s, the United States had a political party.

It's hard to imagine until you get to the present day that we could add.

They actually called themselves the Know Nothings.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

And they're.

And they had us.

They used to have campaign songs at the time.

And one of them had a refrain, we don't know nothing.

Yeah, it was one of the refrains of one of their campaigns.

And you can imagine just exactly what kind of people they were and what they did.

But they were a major voice.

And I think it's the 1852 presidential elections.

And they had the incredibly important Mr. Millard Fillmore as their leader at the time, who lives on in conservative life as a duck under the name of Mallard Fillmore in a comic strip that circulated.

A conservative comic strip that circulated among some newspapers around the country.

Some people may have seen.

So we actually.

That's part of that paranoid tendency that I mentioned earlier.

We've had a group of people who are perfectly happy to defeat because it's threatening.

If you know too much, you'll get in other people's business.

If you know too much, you won't accept the status quo.

If you know too much, standards of hierarchical discipline don't make a lot of sense.

If you know too much, if you're well educated, then you can start to question things.

So there's a lot of reasons why the authoritarian impulse hates a well educated society.

And we're seeing that explode right now in the last six months.

We're seeing a dismantling of what was basically 70 or 80 years of remarkable intellectual infrastructure.

Right.

A couple months ago I was in Phoenix with the Society of Environmental Journalists convention and I met a young man who is from Nepal, studying here in the US And I ask him, you know, how, how's it going?

And he's, he's kind of freaked out.

And what he tells me, you know, his vision of America, which has kind of been, if not destroyed, is pretty close now, is that if there, if you can think of America as a shining beacon on a hill, which, you know, this exceptionalism thing I think maybe is a problem.

But what made America great in his mind was the education.

You can come get an education.

And now he feels completely threatened just to be here.

Of course, you know, it's his very, his essential being is at risk.

Yeah, because he's not the right skin color, because he's not the right nationality, because he doesn't have the right paperwork.

Even if he has the right paperwork, it's not the right right.

And he, you know, yeah, he has the right paperwork, but everything else is wrong.

Yeah, right.

And what's particularly painful about that for me is that the United States was the first major country to provide universal primary secondary education.

The first country to provide free tertiary college education starting in 1846 in New York at the City College of New York and spreading across after the Civil War through all the land grant colleges, including the University of California, which you through the 80s cost less than $600 a year to go to school.

I mean that's like the kind of money that you could actually have a summertime job at a restaurant and pay for your entire college education and have a part time job that paid for your rent and you wouldn't get into debt for your whole life for college, Even through the 80s in the United States.

So we were that country.

That's what allowed us to become literate.

We needed that for the vast industrial machinery, the workforce, for that machinery.

We needed it for all kinds of reasons.

But it happened, we had an explosion.

Part of those free universities were what they used to call normal schools, which is an old fashioned name for a teacher's college.

But it also reveals a lot because what does it mean?

That's how we normalized all these different people from all these different places through education.

That's how we unified them.

That's how E pluribus unum became as effective a process if.

Except for the big great exceptions, if you were black or brown.

But for those of us from Europe, it was the.

And aspirationally for everybody, because who are the great patriots, who are the great backbone of the democratic movements in the United States?

So the people who've been excluded, who take that incredible statement that Thomas Jefferson only partly meant all men asterisks are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

And among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The Constitution changed to property, but which originally was happiness, you know, and that a decent respect for the opinions of mankind show that we should actually tell people why we want to do this.

Well, that's what people are drawn to, and they should be.

Those are pretty unique.

Yeah, those are.

Those are powerful, unique concepts at the time.

And, you know, as are some other concepts in the founding of the country, whether we lived up to them or not.

Of course we didn't.

We really.

We lived up to them more than imperfectly.

We lived up to them catastrophically poorly.

But that doesn't mean they're not good ideas that people get back to.

Yeah.

So we've really swung.

What does this have to do with ecology?

What does that.

Well, I mean.

Well, that.

That.

That's an interesting point because everything's interrelated.

You know, of course.

What advice would you give to people that want to do something?

I can understand where people can just feel like there's absolutely nothing I can do to make.

That's a really important and wonderful question, and I have a lot of answers.

But let me tell you a little bit about a project I have that specifically addresses that or tries to address that.

So one of the works I'm doing is sort of an art science installation.

It's called Sensorium for the World Ocean.

And it started from a very simple question.

The question was, what would happen if you could ask the ocean a question?

How would it respond?

And it probably wouldn't be very apt.

No.

Okay.

So now that we have.

And technology has.

And the object.

The second piece of that is we now have reached the point with technology that we have, we have visualizations, we have modeling, we have all kinds of sophisticated tools that allow us to approach that question very differently than we might have a while back.

So I've created.

So I built an installation.

It's A multi year project, but we initialized the first stage.

There's an art a great five.

Every five years, the Getty foundation does something where they find a whole lot of art institutions to do things across Southern California.

This past year, their theme was Art science collides, called PST 2024.

And there were probably 100 different museums across Southern California.

Santa Barbara was probably as far north as it got, sadly.

We talked to the Getty at length about why they're only dealing with half of California.

But that's a whole other conversation.

Yeah, okay, but in two of those, I had two different pieces of Sensorium.

One that was a more democratic virtual VR version of a 3D story about the ocean.

The other, which was an immersive space where you were actually in a virtual 3D projection environment using satellite data from NASA and NOAA and of other fleeting open sources of weather and climate and ocean data.

But the.

But it was immediately apparent that in Sensorium we're going to be raising a lot of emotions.

Exactly the kind you thought, oh my God, the emotion's beautiful.

Oh my God, it's a catastrophe.

Oh my God, there's so much here.

I'm overwhelmed.

And I really wanted not to leave people from that experience feeling that way, way.

And in a real sense, I call it sort of ironically the Al Gore effect, which is in An Inconvenient Truth.

I don't know if you remember the first you saw it.

Well, the first time I saw it, there's this remarkable, very compelling set, statistically driven narrative of where we are with climate and weather.

And there's this hockey instant and it just goes way up into nowhere, Right?

Yeah.

Asymptotically going off into infinity.

And then the film ends on that note of terror and you get a screen with like 500 scrolling different organizations and then a chance to sign up for his group, which I felt always was exactly the worst possible way.

Now, I have several friends who gone through his climate action groups and feel that our.

I really unfair to Al Gore and I'm not, you know, I really am not giving.

But the emotional piece that he left me and many of the people I've spoken to, absent the dozen or so people I know who worked through it and worked with Al Gore to great positive effect was they got frustrated, they got overwhelmed and they got lost.

So I wanted to create what I call a guide to the perplexed for that.

That's good.

So what is it?

Which is, you know, that's a.

That's an old Jewish tome for by a great rabbi named Maimonides who lived in North Africa, I don't know, 14th, 14th or 15th century.

And the religion was so complex.

I don't, you know, there's so, there's so much, there's so many laws and so many regulations and so many things that he just sort of said, wait a second, what do you really need, you know, to live an honest and open life?

So he wrote what he called the Guide to the Perplexed.

How do you actually make sense of this complex?

And I've used it as a lodestone for many things because there's many pieces of our lives that are overwhelmed with detail.

So what I'm doing now is I've created, I've started to work with some high school kids and I've asked them to map locally various projects around them to define that they think are resilient.

And we're starting to geolocate those together on a large map.

Because the real, one of the real problems is we think we're alone.

We don't think anybody's doing anything.

And in fact we aren't alone.

There are tens of thousands of people ranging from individuals to small collectives that are self organized, to large institutions to even to some countries that are doing all kinds of things.

We just have a really broken set of ways to understand that that's going on.

So there's that piece, we're not alone and the other piece, how do I connect?

And so we're connecting, you know, using a very simple rubric.

As we get more of these that I heard from Elizabeth Ayala, who's a brilliant environmental thinker, you know, what do I love, what am I good at?

What needs to be fixed.

And at the intersection of that Venn diagram is what you can do.

Yeah, that's good.

Building that tool.

So I'm building.

That's my, my response to your larger, that's my particular response to your larger question of what do I do when I'm overwhelmed.

Well, I'm working with young people because they're the future and I'm helping them do very specific place based identification.

I started with a group called High Tech High in San Diego and I'm going to continue the work with Pajaro and I'm hoping to get a couple of groups in Santa Cruz as well.

And I'm starting to work with some people in Germany and some other places and we're starting to, to build this hyper local yet universal connection what's going to be paired to a rubric based on that sort of Venn diagram that I just described so that I only have a couple of hours a month that I can spend, and all I want to do is just get my hands doing something.

So I clean up a beach, clean up a, Clean up a backyard.

That's great.

No, I'm really concerned about fire.

I want to work with a group that, that's thinking through big policy issues.

No, I want to do something.

It allows you to find your spot and then it connects you to groups that are connected to your interest.

Some limited number, like two or three or something.

So it's more than one, but not overwhelming.

That's my particular response to the very important question of how do we, we disambiguate ourselves from this really incredible morass that's complicated by the fact that the most powerful countries in the world don't want us to know anything.

The oil companies have spent 50 years throwing mud at everything we think of that we could do.

Telling us first, it didn't happen, it wasn't real, it didn't matter then, okay, it's real, but it's not going to affect you.

Okay, it's real and it's going to affect you, but there's nothing you can do about it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So they're spending more money than Croesus on that.

And we have to still find our way through to a place that's human and humane and work our way through it because it's a real problem and we have to work on it.

And then we also have to recognize, and I want to just say this last thing is that individuals are important, but it's a system problem.

So the other guilt trip that the.

In that the industry does is saying if you're not doing all the right things yourself, you're failing.

Failing, yeah.

Mind.

A deep, A deep mind.

You should not be seduced into inaction because you aren't being perfect.

You can't be perfect in an imperfect world.

Exactly.

I, I agree with that.

I, I think, you know, recycling comes to mind.

You have to recycle, and if you're not recycling, you're bad.

And the fact is, recycling is good.

I'm not, not guessing recycling, but the way it's set up now, it's really dubious how much you think your recycling is actually being recycled.

And it was set up by people who wanted it to fail.

And it's a mediocre system.

Yeah, exactly.

But we really, because we never addressed the world that you and I both were in as Kids where it's.

Reduce only, you know, use less in the first place.

Reuse, repurpose things and only as a last resort, recycle it.

So recycling is the final.

Is the last threading.

It's the final sieve.

It's the final sort.

After you've won, reduced how much you're doing by using fewer things that are better, better quality and fewer.

Right.

You know, the stuff you can't repair, you then repurpose in some other way.

Do you have a rag bucket in your house anymore?

I don't think so.

But you used to.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In San Francisco.

I know we did.

Right.

See, you know that.

That wasn't even a question.

You know, it's just like.

Of course.

Yeah.

Right, right.

And nowadays.

Nowadays, you know, I see that you can buy rags because the idea that we would take our own clothes, but our clothes aren't made of cotton fiber anymore or they're made of linen or they aren't made of.

They're made of some weird sort of techno.

Yeah.

Techno fiber that doesn't soak up dust or.

But you can't really use as a.

That.

So we did.

We.

We've defeated that natural life cycle process.

Or paper.

Do you remember that people used to.

The ragman.

You know why the ragman used to collect rags?

For paper.

For paper.

Linen paper.

Oh, okay.

The best quality paper was made not from wood fiber.

That was the cheap stuff.

It was made from natural fiber.

Other fibers.

Yeah.

Cotton and linen, where they were waste.

Made waste of your paper.

That's why they collected them.

They could actually make money reselling the rags to the.

To the.

To the paper bills.

They used it for.

For higher quality paper, which is, you know, is artisanal now.

It makes me think of a quote with this.

I think it's.

Gary Snyder is find your place in the world.

Dig in and take responsibility from there.

I saw your podcast.

I love Gary Snyder.

He's.

I had the good fortune as a young man to work in Olympic National Park.

Park as a backcountry aide.

And his poem on Dodger Point to the boy who was a lookout on Dodger Point was the first time I got to work setting up the de.

Winterizing Dodger Point was just like an epiphany.

My pal and I, we just got up.

We made it up to the top.

We got up to the firestate and we just like read Gary Snyder.

That's great.

In reverence for.

It was like, oh, my God.

And you know.

And you know.

And it was like.

But yes, No, I think he's.

That's.

Gary talks about that.

He also.

And he talks about the point of place.

You know, one of the things that we're connected to place, but we don't like it very much in this country.

We pretend we're always on the move.

We pretend, but in fact, we don't move as much as a lot of other people do anymore.

We might have at one point, but people, you know, I mean, I see this in.

In, you know, for example, in Santa Cruz.

An awful lot of the people I work with and know in Santa Cruz are in Santa Cruz natives.

Now, you didn't normally think of that as California, that you thought people were much more transient.

No, people are less transient.

And that's fine.

That's neither a good nor a bad thing.

But to understand it means that that's where we get our great wisdom.

We get a great wisdom from being from a secure base.

And being rooted to place is one of the strongest ways to develop a secure base.

Knowing that what's around you is part of you, knowing that you're connected to it, knowing that in some way your life is built on caring for and maintaining for the things that attract you to the place, whatever those happen to be.

That kind of integration to place.

We.

One of the many things we did politically as a country was we spent a lot of time trying to pretend that wasn't.

And so they, you know, if you didn't like someplace, just move on.

Right.

Just move on.

Yeah.

A sense of place is important, and.

It'S how we learn.

Yeah.

And that you do work with indigenous cultures, indigenous knowledge?

I do.

I do some.

I'm in some allyship with a couple of members and people in a couple of tribes, mostly around five Fire, mostly around recapturing how we look at fire, how I'm working.

One of the projects I'm working on, we call Fire Brings Water.

It's an old Washoe saying.

The Washishu are the people from the lake of Lake Tahoe.

Of course, they have no land left on the lake.

That was their ancestral homeland.

But they're.

And they were another of the many tribes for whom fire knowledge was suppressed.

So there are just in the early stages of recovering cultural burning.

So we're working with a number of young, building.

Building a. I wouldn't call it a curriculum, but building connections, building kids on and off reservation ways to connect and ways to reconnect with the food, the processes, the growing cycles, and of course, how fire works and how fire is part of it.

So you Know.

So part of what that experience really talks to is an observation that's very simple in one sense, but it's profoundly different than the way we imagined it.

And that's that the native people, the large population growth in California of indigenous people came as the Ice Ages receded.

Well, what replaced the Ice Ages?

The forests.

So people and the current western forests arrived same quantity at the same time.

So people have always engaged with forests.

And the prime tool that California people, in California, much of the west used, and much of the rest of the world too.

It's not just local deer is fire.

And they used it in the sense that we would garden.

There's a wonderful book by a great person out of T. Davis, Kat Anderson, called Tending the Wild, where she was the first person to actually use Western environmental science to quantify how native people worked with fire and show the ecological values and the ecosystem benefits that their use of fire did.

And what did they use fire for?

They used fire to help promote food plants that they liked, you know, the meadows.

And what did they.

They used it to promote basketry and material plants.

They used it to promote the certain kinds, sacred and medicinal plants as well.

So it was really fire for a purpose.

And the purpose was intimately connected to their society and their religion and their view, their.

Their view of the world, their epistemology of how they.

Their place in the world.

And it was built from a deep and profound and repeated understanding of a very, very specific location that they looked at over generations.

And what happened.

They learned how to communicate what they understood good, not just to their children, but in ways that their children's children's children's children would still have it, you know, and that's the core of.

At the core.

And they.

And they also had really important, powerful guideposts to how that worked, because you can't make those changes without rules about what's okay without.

Without a.

Without a spiritual understanding that says this.

You're part of the.

You know, in this case.

In this case, it's.

You're part of the world.

Don't do things that harm it.

You respect.

These are all boundaries.

They created spiritual conditions that conditioned how they understood the world and conditioned how they behaved in the world and behaved in the past tense and behave in the present tense.

And what does Western science do?

It's universalized.

It's about things that are true everywhere, without exception.

What does that mean?

That means.

Means.

That means rules, boundary conditions are an anathema to Western science.

That's part.

Goes back to your cancer question.

Yeah, we can't visual.

We can't visualize the fact that there are problems with everything we do because our thinking is, well, if it's true here, it's true everywhere.

If it's good over here, it's good everywhere.

Whereas indigenous understandings, epistemologies and science say it's good as long as it does this, it's good up to here.

It's good under these conditions.

And how do we do that?

Well, we listen to what's going on, we have a feedback relationship, we're giving, and we have an exchange relationship with the world we live in, where we give it stuff, it gives us stuff.

And as long as we each respect that, we can live in some kind of balance.

And that's what we're exploring in ways to figure out how to recapture some of that and bring that to places like the Geospatial Observatory at USF and analysis lab there and to some of the fire scientists that we work with.

Because, as they say, I know what causes fire, I know how it spreads.

I just don't know why, because science doesn't teach me why.

And what does.

Working with nature, native tradition, traditional ecological knowledge, it brings the why conversation.

Yeah.

And what does it get from Western science?

It gets a lot more information about the how, the how and the what.

And so those two, they talk to each other.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's the convert.

That's kind of the work I'm doing in working with kids and talk and getting, you know, kids to kids to come back in contact with the land, but also understanding how Western science can learn from and be informed by.

By tradition.

It's a.

It's a give and take between.

Yeah, it has to be.

It has to be.

Yeah, it was interesting.

I interviewed, I don't know, a couple, two, three weeks ago, Kelly Ramsey, who wrote a book.

Oh.

The point is that she was on a hotshot crew for a couple years.

20.

20, 20, 21.

A couple of pretty big years here in California for fire.

And she talks in the book about how getting back to fire management, the indigenous knowledge of fire that we've lost, and so we've allowed the forest to become overgrown.

Staggering.

It's staggering when you think about it.

I mean, there's a lot to it.

And I'll try to leave you with this if we brought.

California suffers a little bit more than other parts of the west because the Spanish were here earlier.

So we've been suppressing fire In California since 1707, when juniper ocera first showed up in San Diego and went north.

So that's one of the reasons.

But if you look at a, and if you look at a sort of a mountain hillside, whether it's in Santa Cruz or whether it's in the Sierra, and absent a marble granite dome, you see a hillside covered with trees, most of us out of the western tradition look at that and say that seems like it feels healthy.

A lot of green, it's covered.

And if we were in Germany, where the first silviculturals that informed our as far as science work, we'd be working right.

And if we were in England, we'd still be right.

And if we were in New England, where it's very wet and rainy, we'd still be right.

But in California, where we have a culture of fire adapted forests because we have wet winters and dry summers, unlike the weather patterns in those earlier places where we learned how to think about what we think healthy landscapes are, it's not healthy.

In fact, what they, you know what that tree side looks like, it's got to have that kind of coverage, but they figure it's got between 350 and 400 trees on an acre.

Okay.

So what they know about healthy forest, this is before climate change reduces this number, is that hillside in an adapted forest.

Again, depends on whether you're the north side, the west side, the south side should have 35 to 40 stem pounds.

Okay, yeah, not 350 to 400.

That's an order of magnitude more biomass on.

That's what's overgrown, that's what's burning uncontrollably.

That's what nature is rebalancing, whether we like it or not.

It's burning down to a more sustainable, to use that term, level.

And that's why our forest crisis is a really interesting one.

Because what we have to do is selectively log in a way that mimics gardening, not in a way that mimics lumbering to get that wood off the ground.

And then of course we have to figure out what to do because wood is heavy and you know, a cubic meter of soft pine or a cubic meter of hardwood, roughly a ton.

And most of that's carbon.

So basically a 30 foot tree is like 30 tons of carbon and it's 30 tons of weight.

So if you cut that down because you don't want it to burn, you got to think about what happens next.

And you've got to, and what does that.

And that's a whole.

That's another conversation of circularity.

It's another conversation of what you want to do with it.

But, but that's where you need to get to the forest.

You need to bring the forest back into a condition where you can bring back what foresters before they decided to listen to native people used to call good fire.

Now that's cultural flood fire.

Right.

We're now understanding that those two are connected.

But intentional fire was for a long time was what they used to call it.

Now it's, then it was good fire.

Now it's cultural burning.

Because we want to have the, we want to understand why we want to do it and where and how.

And if you do that, then you can get back to a California that when the Spanish came used to burn every square inch of California burned every seven to 10 years, some places every four to seven, seven years.

But they weren't so bad.

They weren't.

The fires were smaller.

They were, they were.

And they had all kinds of beneficial effects.

They, they cleaned up diseased plants, they, they cleared the groundscape, they allowed new, new trees to grow because the brush got cleared.

They did all kinds of.

And then they were, they helped promote certain kinds of plants if you directed the fires in certain kinds of ways.

They helped the oak trees grow, they helped the oak savannah, they helped the Thule, they helped all the different plants and plant constellations that people lived by and lived with were all in some way or other promoted through indigenous intelligent use of fire to selectively manage the land.

We completely sabotaged all that.

And we had a bunch of overgrown weeds in our forest and we used to fix it by saying, well, we'll just clear cut a bunch of these weeds and burn them.

But then that stopped working because we realized that strip mining the forest wasn't a good thing.

And we didn't have a solution for it until the last five or ten years.

I mean, but it's changed, but the language has changed.

You know, in 2015 when we still, when we had the dead insect, dead tree problem, we had big crisis and Governor Brown had understood we had a big forest crisis and had several states of emergency.

I had the remarkable opportunity to have a three hour meeting with him completely by chance on this forest, forest issue, where it was really clear that the only thing that mattered to him at that time was an economic solution.

Yeah.

But now if you talk to the people in forest management at the state, they understand the environmental issues, they understand the echo.

There's an almost 180 degree change in policy thinking.

We don't have the will yet to enact it at the scale it Needs, but we're thinking so.

So it's completely different thinking.

And it happened very quickly.

It took four to five.

Within four or five years it changed from a completely mercenary extractive process to how do we actually build a long term forest life.

So from the policy level, a lot of the pieces are in place, but the implementation is still, of course, way far behind.

Well, it sounds like it's progress though.

I mean that's.

Oh, it is.

I think that is good news.

Yeah, it is.

No, I don't think it's bad news at all.

I think it's frustrating on the other side because we're not willing to take the risk.

The big risk is, look in Los Angeles, staying away from state land in Los Angeles, they're looking at 350 to $400 billion of damage.

If they had spent somewhere under a billion dollars, I think the latest estimate was $900 million.

In following the recommendations that, that were put into place after 2018 set of fires, they would have avoided a significant chunk.

So the real question is why are we still unwilling to invest now in the observation that an ounce of prevention is really worth a Ponty cure?

It's not just some pie in the sky statement.

It's not just, you know, it has borne itself out.

It's apparent many, many, many, many times.

It's not just one shot.

It's like every single time we don't do the.

We get kicked upside the head, hence force majeure.

Right?

Yeah, we get kicked upside the head and we still won't learn that lesson.

That was a very small price to pay relative to the cost of that whole area being devastated.

And so anyway, that's an interesting piece there.

It gets back to the idea of reimagining how we can be in the world and what.

So I don't take too much more of your time, but what would you like to leave listeners with as far as reimagining all the things we've discussed?

What are the big takeaways for you?

Well, for me, I think I'd like people to recognize that we have more agency than we think if we take advantage of it, that we do not have to be the only person, person solving the problem.

It's not our responsibility to make everything better.

It's our responsibility though, not to make everything worse.

It's our responsibility to connect with other people.

And particularly in this age of rampant wannabe authoritarianism, we owe it to ourselves as humans and to our community to build community.

And one of the strongest ways we can do that is to reconnect with the world in which we live.

Reconnect with and reconnect not just as individuals, but with other people.

So I think those are important.

I think that in a very real sense, education of the young, they're the future.

We really have to be honest about the fact that we need to be taking care of our young people.

We need to be doing the social pieces, whether that's childcare, whether that's, that's all kinds of things, whether that's.

Realistically looking at what does environmental literacy look like in the schools.

California's in a pretty good place again on paper.

They have massive input into environmental literacy going on.

Every single elementary school in California is under mandate to do lessons about what existed on the land and that the school physically lives on before that school was there.

These are opportunities to bring kids back in.

I think we should be encouraging as you.

Some of the, some of the simple things we talked about.

Food gardens and schools everywhere, kitchen gardens and people everywhere.

You can imagine it, you know, looking at reclaiming community, places that are, you know, all these things that are really social organizing, but social organizing with a sense of sense that we're all in it for the long run and we're not going to just, you know, and we don't.

And that these things become self organizing and self fulfilling because the more, the more you do.

Okay.

I guess one of the things to think about is there's a.

When you use traditional infrastructure and traditional economics, it has a notion you build something and it has a finite life cycle and it depreciates.

So it's a diminishing good over the time.

No matter what it is.

If you think about things environmentally, they appreciate over time.

With maintenance, as long as you're taking care of it, as long as you're tending it, it gets richer, stronger, better over time.

So it's an appreciating asset.

We need to treat our world as an appreciating asset, as a thing where our, through our care, through our tending, through our intervention, we, we are making things better and stronger over the long haul.

Whether it's a city, whether it's a community, whether it's a place where nobody lives, whether it's a farm, whether it's any of these places.

And if we think about things in terms of our work adds value, our value adds additive value, then we're doing something that is countervailing to a lot of what we actively do, but is utterly in line with what we, we say we want to do.

We want to build a better world for ourselves.

We want to build a better world for our children.

We want to build a better existence for all of us.

And the ways to do that are to think about how we approach things in a way that builds it up and doesn't tear it down in a way that returns, in a way that gives back what we take as much as we take.

So that's, I guess, what I would say.

Those are great words.

Words, I think, to leave this conversation with.

I really.

Hopefully people can listen and take that to heart, because that is really what we need right now.

There's so much.

I don't know how to put it, but it's such a challenging time that we live in right now in so many different ways.

And just to build community and to understand that everybody can do something right.

And the thing about it is it feeds on.

On itself.

I mean, the minute you start doing something, it pays you back, and then it starts to pay you back more.

And it's that same process.

It's.

If we.

If we're doing it right, we know we're doing it right because it's added.

Yeah, yeah, you get the feedback.

These are feedback loops.

Yeah.

You know, we just have to be part.

We have to reconnect with.

Yeah, reconnection.

That's.

That's another important point I think, is.

Is reimagining and reconnecting with ourselves, our community, our sense of place, and getting back to Gary Snyder.

Find her place in the world, dig in and take responsibility from there.

There you go.

Sounds great.

All right, thank you very much for the conversation.

I appreciate your time.

Tending and care for the long haul.

Reconnecting as individuals and communities.

Communities working to add value, not extract it.

As the Beatles sang decades ago, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

Check the show notes to find out more about Joshua Harrison and the center for the Study of the Force Majeure.

If you like what we're doing, please like and subscribe to the podcast.

And if you can spare a dollar or two, feel free to leave a U.S. a tip to help keep us going.

We always appreciate that, and thanks for listening.

We'll see you next time on what will soon officially be Earthbound.

We'll see you then.

Sa.