Synopsis:

Prepare to have your heart blasted open. Charles Eisenstein joins our host, Daniel Schmachtenberger, to explore the many facets of humanity that will contribute to large-scale healing of our earth and civilization. We take a look at things we do every day that are contributing to the breakdown of our relationships with each other and with our planet. In order to restore our meaning in life, we need to take care to heal the root of our addictions and patterns and understand the interconnectedness of life and earth. Deep down, we all want what is best for ourselves and each other, but often sacrifice exposing the truth out of fear of losing our belonging and sense of security. Listen in to find out what kind of conversation needs to happen to create a more beautiful world for everyone.

In This Episode We Discussed:

• Protecting earth and its life out of love
• Re-ordering our priorities with environmental issues
• Lack of reverence for the earth is the root of our environmental issues
• There isn’t a single cause, but a matrix of causes
• A healthy relationship with water(and much more)
• Understanding the interconnectedness of life and earth
• Looking at the role of insects and animals on our environment
• The world can’t be reduced to just measurement
• An example: The thinking behind the pharmaceutical approach
• Underlying healing has to happen with complex issues
• Order of priorities in healing our ecosystem
• The role of addictive consumerism in environmental issues
• Relationships, intimacy, and nature > Money, investment and consumption
• Main cause of addiction is loneliness
• Which direction should we head? Secrecy and control OR transparency and community?
• Increasing symmetry of power with transparency and decentralization
• Issue of sacrificing truth to belong to a side
• Good guy vs. bad guy mindset
• Believing we’re on “team good” leads to the endless quest for power
• Let’s learn to unite over connectivity rather than over the enemy
• We need a unifying story to the meaning of life
• We can create synergistic solutions to polarizing issues
• Humility in conversation is the only way to get to solutions that work for everyone
• Inspiring history: Conversation style of the founding fathers
• How can we address the issues of polarization and sense making in our own lives?
• Courage in conversation
• Looking at one polarized issue: Vaccines
• Long and nuanced conversation is necessary, but platforms and attention span are making shorter and fragmented conversation most common
• Our attention span atrophies, if we don’t use it
• On being wrong
• What are some things people can do to increase the quality of their sense making?
• Take in a variety of perspectives to reach the truth
• The healing path for each person is different

Mentions 
Charles’s Site
Climate – A New Story
Sacred Economics Video
Charles on Oprah
Bohm – Wholeness and Fragmentation
How Wolves Change Rivers
On Being Wrong
Gabor Mate on Societal Drivers of Addiction
Tristan Harris
George Orwell
Niccolò Machiavelli
Gödel’s theorem

Full Episode Transcript

Charles E:Just to have an answer, why are we here? What’s the purpose of humanity? What am I a part of? I think we need an overarching story to animate the stories that give meaning to life. Like, what is ownership? What is capital? What is money? These are all functions of collective agreements. To me, the real question is, what agreements shall we have that define money and property? Not should it be public or should it be private, it’s what are the agreements that are consistent with the world that we all live in?

Speaker:Welcome to the Collective Insights Podcast, where we explore topics and technologies revolutionizing human well being. Charles Eisenstein joins Daniel Schmachtenberger for this episode to explore the many facets of the global issues we’re facing, and discuss what it will take to heal ourselves, our environment and our civilization. Charles is a speaker and a writer focusing on themes of human culture and identity. He is the author of several books, most recently, Sacred Economics and The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. Stay tuned as Charles and Daniel explore heart opening questions like, what does it mean to exist? How do we heal from our addictive need to consume? And how can we stop fighting each other? Thank you for joining us for this amazing discussion.

Daniel S:Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Collective Insights Podcast. My name is Daniel, I’m delighted to be here with Charles Eisenstein. Charles is a friend, a really insightful thinker and brilliant educator on many of the issues that are most critical and that I care about the most regarding humanity writ large. He’s the author of a number of really exceptional books, most famously, I believe, is Sacred Economics, which is a fantastic place to start. If you want the footnote’s version, it’s a wonderful like 15 minutes video that was produced on Sacred Economics, it is a good introduction beyond this to some of the ideas there. He wrote a book called The Ascent of Humanity, and recently wrote a book on climate change, and it’s called, Climate: A New Story. And in a way, it’s about issues associated with climate change, but it is also, in some ways, inclusive of many of the deepest thoughts that are up much of his work to date.

Daniel S:And so, I’m excited for us to dive in on this topic, and he’s sharing an alternate narrative about how we approach climate change to the standard environmental narrative, that is, as a deep ecologist. And yeah, I’m excited to dive in. Charles, thanks for being here.

Charles E:Yeah, I’m excited also.

Daniel S:Climate change has become almost as polarizing a topic as like gay marriage or abortion in terms of how radically different political left and right views on it are, and you are bringing about a view in the book that is none of the standard narratives, and, well, discussing the perspectives of both, what people would call climate denial and kind of standard narrative climate change. Can you just share for people who haven’t read the book kind of high level overview, what is your primary thesis on climate change? How we think about it? How we approach it? How we could or might want to approach it differently? Yeah, what’s the kind of entry point.

Charles E:Yeah, there’s a few different entry points I could talk about. You’re right in saying that it’s not, not only is it not the left narrative or the right narrative, but it’s also not a compromise between those two narratives. But really off the spectrum, because you mentioned the polarization, what I find to be true in any polarized issue, is that, the key to resolving it or to understanding it, even, lies in the things that both sides implicitly agree on without knowing it, and on the questions that nobody’s bothering to ask. In the book, I’m offering a different framework, a different viewpoint. I guess, one way to talk about it, is from the living Earth perspective, the living Earth paradigm, which recognizes that the planet is a living being. That the forests, the oceans, the rivers, the water, the elephants, even the whales, the wolves, the salmon, the seagrass meadows, the mangrove swamps. Especially, the Amazon, the Congo, these are all workings of a living being.

Charles E:And that means, is that, even if we cut carbon emissions to zero and install giant carbon sucking machines in every city and go into negative emissions, if we continue to destroy these organs, then the planet will die of organ failure, whether or not that goes along with rising temperatures. It could even be a bypass in a good way, a bypass of entrenched political positions. That say, actually, you don’t have to believe in greenhouse gas induced global warming to still be opposed to say, seismic testing, seismic surveys of the ocean floor to drill for oil and gas, because, it’s deafening the whales and killing the whales and causing mass plankton die off. And those are … even if you’re completely, and this is another perspective I’m offering in the book, an invitation away from instrumental utilitarianism that values nature for its service to ourselves and holds it valuable only in what it can provide to us.

Charles E:And instead to say, so it’s not just that the planet will die and bad things will happen to us if we continue our ways, but it’s also calling on our innate biophilia. Like, suppose bad things don’t happen to us if we commit eco side. Suppose we could produce a future where we live in bubble cities and all of nature is dead, and we grow vat in foods and food in vats and we regulate the atmosphere composition with machines, and we have high definition VR experiences of the nature that’s been lost. Suppose we could do that, do we want to? Or, are the beings of nature valuable in and of themselves as objects worthy of love? And that connects back to the … Let me know if going on too long here, but that connects back to the living Earth paradigm, because, it’s totally irrational and delusional to love something that’s not even alive, or something that’s not a being.

Charles E:Like this kind of practical level where utilitarian level of, we better respect the organs of Gaia or the planet will die. And the heart level of, we love these beings, let’s hold them as sacred. These two are intimately intertwined, these two levels. So the paradigm shift is both a shift of our mental perspective and understanding, and also, a shift into a different heart relationship with the rest of life.

Daniel S:Okay, just even in that brief introduction, you touched on a lot of topics. I want to get deeper into the inadequacy of the utilitarian ethics and what love means beyond that, and the problem of over focusing on a few simple metrics and living Earth, rather than kind of geo mechanical Earth. Let’s take them one at a time.

Charles E:Okay.

Daniel S:I think, a lot of people who would identify as caring about climate change, and maybe identify as environmentalists, would say, “Yes, climate change is one of many environmental issues. There’s plenty of other environmental issues, species, extinction, pollution, but this is such a large and pressing issue that focusing on it doesn’t automatically mean we won’t have all the other problems, but it does need deep focus within a timeline.” And so, can you respond to, are you just saying climate change and other stuff? Or you’re saying something other than that?

Charles E:Yeah, I’m saying something other than that. I’m arguing for a reordering of our priorities, because I think, and this is where I get into trouble. This is where I deviate from the conventional narrative. I am not so convinced that we really understand the climate and the biosphere in general very well. I think that our quantitative models are inadequate and that the critiques of the skeptics, who actually are deniers in a certain sense, I could go into that later. They’re more hostile to what I’m saying than environmentalists, than climate activists are. But I think that some of their critiques have merit, and especially, the critique of science as an institution. I am skeptical of a lot of what scientific authority says or what scientific convention holds that’s true. It is, due to problems with peer review, academic publication, it’s kind of collective confirmation bias that, it’s not that I don’t think that greenhouse gases are dangerous, but the narrative that puts them front and center and equates environmentalism to greenhouse gases, I don’t trust that.

Charles E:Especially because, it sits so comfortably in our society’s customary ways of tackling problems. It fits so comfortably into an accounting mindset, where you have a carbon budget, and you add a little here, you subtract a little there, you evaluate policies based on metrics. You find a one cause of everything. I could go into more, like all the different reasons why I distrust that narrative. There’s also my interaction with indigenous people and their worldview, that they cite very different reasons why the climate is becoming deranged. Okay, that’s one thing, I don’t blindly trust scientific authority or scientific consensus.

Daniel S:Okay. I just want to say something before you continue. For people listening, I want you to notice as we go, if you have reactions, and notice if you might have certain kinds of confirmation bias. Notice if you’re running ingroup outgroup type modeling, where you just said, “Oh, he said that Earth is a living thing and he has problem with science. He is a pseudoscience hippie and he’s not part of our science’s way of making sense of the world ingroup, or, now he is part of our ingroup because he’s denying climate change which is awesome so we don’t have the environmentalists cause problems with the economy.” Just notice if you’re flipping between existing sense making scripts and trying to then say, “Okay, he probably didn’t do a good job of studying the research and he’s doing an irresponsible thing right now.”

Daniel S:You might not know until we get further what the degree of actual research into the science and literature that he’s done is. And so, I just want you to notice, because we’re actually going to be exploring very deep things here. Charles in the book writes about problems of the philosophy of science not as wrong, but as inadequate and of academic process and of political process and of economics writ large. We’re going to be addressing all kinds of like sacred cows here, so just buckle up and be ready for that.

Charles E:Yeah, yeah. We decide, is this guy on. You see on our side, you see on their side. Well, it’s hard to say because it seems like he really cares about the environment but he’s denying climate change, which I’m not, actually. What I’m saying is that, I don’t know for sure. But what do I know for sure? I had this interesting interchange with climate activists recently, who just, in a public forum, he just excoriated me as being a threat to the planet because I’m minimizing the urgency of cutting greenhouse gases. And I said, actually, as far as practical policies, we agree on almost everything. Like, from a living Earth perspective and from a perspective of reverence for those living beings that we call soil, that we call a river, an estuary, etc, etc. A Forest. Well, I’m opposed to fracking, that pollutes and insults the water. I’m opposed to offshore oil drilling, I mean, look what the oil spills do to marine life. I’m opposed to mountaintop removal, tar sands excavation, pipelines, down the line, every single thing.

Charles E:Functionally, the living Earth perspective also means, drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The result would be the same or even better, and this goes into the issue of what actually is greenhouse gas emissions a symptom of? How do you actually change it? What are the underlying conditions that generate endless consumption, endless economic growth, endless growth in the use of energy? If we want to change the expression, we have to look at the root. Yeah.

Daniel S:Okay. Before we get into the root of what drives some of the things that cause climate change and related issues, I don’t think anyone has or I don’t think most people are clear of what alternate narratives on the cause of environmental issues is. It seems like flooding and wildfires and coral die off are pretty obvious signs that that’s the main thing that we should focus on. Can you offer some alternate perspectives that are compelling for you as to how you explain those?

Charles E:Yeah, the first thing I would say is to be wary of a single cause, an explanation for everything that appeals to one thing, that is so comforting for us. That’s what we are comfortable with because then there’s an enemy that we can address. So like, what about cancer? I mean, for decades, they’ve been trying to find a virus. If it were only a virus, then we would have something to kill, or a gene, then we would have something to alter, something to control. This mindset of find the enemy or find the cause, extends to politics, extends to criminal justice, the war, terror, medicine, yeah. And it also is part of the mentality of money, which is the one thing that will solve all your problems. If only I had this one thing, the unitary means to the universal end, I guess, you could say, or the universal means. That said, that’s my disclaimer, so then, I would look for a matrix of causes that maybe don’t distinguish all the time between what’s a cause and what’s an effect? What’s a symptom and what’s the cause?

Charles E:I cannot have a one thing, but I could talk about a few things. I think the biggest one is the water cycle. I think that, if we focus on a substance as the most important thing to change our relationship to, it would be water and not carbon. A lot of what is ordinarily blamed on global warming, I think it’s actually due to disruptions in the hydrological cycle, through deforestation and what I call soil abuse, which basically means plowing. Exposing bare soil, but also destroying the microbiota of the soil, destroying the earthworms, destroying the ecosystems that interact with soil and keep it alive and intact and able to absorb rain. In a healthy ecosystem, there’s almost no runoff, everything soaks into the earth, into the soil or down to the aquifers. And then, trees and deep rooted grasses, I mean, some grasses have roots that go like 10, 20, 30 feet.

Charles E:They transpire the water, long after the rainy season has passed. So they extend the rainy season, they stimulate the formation of clouds through their volatile compounds, through even bacteria that live in the plants, that seed the formation of clouds because they nucleate ice on them. I mean, it’s super, super complicated. But you cut down the forests, and the rain stop coming. Not to mention, not only do they recycle water back into the air, and then, it rains again and they keep the rain going, but they also bring in water from the oceans. Because, when this huge amount of moisture evaporates and then condenses, the condensation creates a low pressure zone that creates what they call a biotic pump, that’s responsible for the flying rivers of Brazil. That just draws in moisture they near from the oceans into the continental interiors. You get the sense of Earth as a physiology, there’s a physiology here.

Charles E:You cut down the forests or you destroy the soil’s ability to soak in the water, and you have flooding, because there’s no sponge anymore where you fill in the wetlands, that’s another big one. You have flooding, and then, after the flooding, there’s no water in the water table or in the soil, so you have drought. And rather than indict our agricultural practices, our development, the whole ideology of development of the whole relationship to the land, boy, it should be a lot easier just to install some carbon sucking machines everywhere. Do a little bit of geoengineering and continue business as normal, which is often what is meant by sustainability. Like, what do we want to sustain here? And I think that, in a way, the carbon narrative is more friendly to, at least, superficially, more friendly to the status quo, because it suggests that we can just come up with some other fuels and essentially continue business as usual.

Charles E:And I think, I guess, I’m arguing for a deeper radicalism that says, “No, no, no, what needs to change is our entire relationship in way of seeing the Earth. To hold every place, every by region, every ecosystem, every species as important, valuable, and even, sacred. Nothing less is going to bring health to this Earth.”

Daniel S:When you started with the hydrological cycle, someone could have almost got excited for a minute that you are shifting the focus from carbon to water, but there’s still kind of one thing to pay attention to. But then of course, what you said about the hydrological cycle wasn’t actually addressing water directly, it was addressing plants and soil and bugs and et cetera. When you say, water, you’re really paying attention to a cycle that depends on a lot of things other than water?

Charles E:Right, including carbon. I mean, the things that improve the hydrological cycle are also things that improve the soil, and which also happened to sequester a lot of carbon. If you want to look at it through the carbon, it’s not that the water paradigm is inimical to the carbon paradigm, they’re deeply, intimately connected. And that’s why, there’s actually a lot of overlap with, say, the drawdown perspective, which puts regenerative agriculture pretty high on the list.

Daniel S:You’re talking about understanding flooding, and then, understanding droughts and correspondently wildfires as not just a result of greenhouse gas based climate change. What about ocean acidification and coral?

Charles E:Yeah, here again, I don’t know. Let’s start with that, I don’t know. When I look at the ocean as alive and want to understand its physiology, then, I look at things like … I mean, there’s many perspectives. One would be the perspective of fish and whales. I read one paper that said that 50% of layer mixing in the ocean is generated by the kinetic mixing effects of fish and Wales, and just marine life in general. Life contributes as much as wind and geo mechanical currents to the mixing ocean layers as … I can’t remember the beginning of that sentence, but you get the picture. Life is really important to bringing the cold nutrient rich water to the surface. And you remove keystone species like the … I mean, populations of sharks, of bluefin tuna, like the big predators, orcas, sperm whales. I mean, the populations of these creatures have precipitously declined, due mostly to overfishing and to commercial whaling.

Charles E:These organs of the ocean aren’t functioning anymore. Of course, things are going to go awry. Of course, all systems will become less resilient. I mean, the trophic cascades, you know that start when you remove all of the workers, or you dredge the ocean with drift nuts. Who knows what kind of effects that they produce? And again, I’m not denying that higher atmospherics’s carbon dioxide contributes to ocean acidification. But also, some of the literature I read was just about the incredible abundance of wildlife before colonization. You had like in the Chesapeake Bay for example, just massive quantities of shellfish, just unbelievable amounts. You had oysters that were a foot long, a foot across. [inaudible] was removing vast amounts of carbon in the form of calcium carbonate from the water and when you have healthy nutrient transport, you have kelp beds that alkalies the water, and then, you have different fish and shellfish feeding on the kelp and sequestering, where fish even excrete calcium carbonate as well, you have a physiology that’s functioning.

Charles E:I think that, I mean, basically, my perspective is that greenhouse gases are putting additional stress on a seriously weakened physiology. I’m not saying that they’re not a problem, but I think if we had resilient robust ecosystems, if we hadn’t destroyed half of the mangrove swamps in the world, and 80% of the seagrass meadows, and have two thirds of the rainforests, etc, etc, etc, down the line, then, changes in greenhouse gases would not be much of a problem. I could go more as far as these causes of ecological degradation, toxic pollution, pharmaceutical pollution, pesticide pollution, we’ve doused the entire land surface almost with pesticides for 90 years. I mean, what does that do to insect life? To bacterial life? To the mycelium networks? And then, there’s the electromagnetic pollution. I’ve just been starting to look into some stuff around 5G and what that does to humans, but also, what does it do to insects. Yeah.

Daniel S:This is a really good point when you mention ubiquitous pesticide use and even things that aren’t intended as pesticides that end up being pesticides. Like glyphosate, which is intended as an herbicide, but it’s also an antibiotic and anti parasitic, which also means anti bug. And you look at the graphs of the usage in tons per year, and then you look at the correlation of species extinction of flying insects, their pollinators and there’s a strong correlation. And this is a good example of 50% of die off of flying insects in the last decade, is more concerning to me as an ecological crisis than atmospheric CO2 levels. And so, one of the things that you bring up is, hey, that doesn’t get that much attention because we’re saying all the environmental attention has to be funneled into carbon sequestration or cap and trade on emissions. And so, not only might there be more critical environmental issues that are going but the approach to climate change won’t even work because to the degree that animals are actually serving a role in the carbon cycle or the hydrological cycle, there’s a deeper process.

Daniel S:You mentioned the topic of trophic cascades, and I just want to say, anyone who hasn’t studied trophic cascades. The classic example that made this famous was the Yellowstone wolves. Just go to YouTube and check out the video, how wolves change rivers. It’s mind blowing how a single keystone species, the top of a predatory ecosystem ends up changing the whole ecologic nation. So the reintroduction of wolves not only increased all of the species, but because of the way that the trees stabilized the soil, it changed the actual hydrology of the space, the river dynamics. Now, when Charles was talking about what we have done to large fish species and the ocean, and you start to get a sense of like, “Oh, yeah, there’s very little whales left. And if the whales are bringing nutrient rich water and then coming up to the photic range and defecating and that’s a part of what allows for the kelp blooms that are part of what supports the coral.”

Daniel S:And also, even if you look at the hydrological cycle, and you say, “Whoa, it’s not just water going into the atmosphere, but it is bacteria that end up being a part of cloud seeding.” It’s not even like we can say, “Okay, well let’s study nature better to then find a couple more active metrics rather than one, let’s make three metrics and try and optimize for those.” How does a complex self organizing system actually self organize? And how do we support that as opposed to think that it’s broken and override it?

Charles E:Yeah, that’s very well said. I came across another good example of trophic cascades in a conversation with Brock Dowman, he co founded the Occidental Arts Educational Center, what’s it called exactly? Anyway, he was describing the effect of dams on creating forest fires. Because, the dams prevent the salmon from coming upstream, so the salmon are no longer available for the bears and the eagles to eat. So the bears and the eagles are no longer defecating nutrients from the ocean into the forests. The forests, which he says, some of them, isotopic analysis says that half of their nitrogen is coming from the ocean. The forest now become less resilient and more susceptible to forest fire. How do you encompass that in a metric? And then, of course, they’re going to release carbon dioxide. And then, once they burn, no longer holding down the soil, so the soil oxidizes and runs off and etc, etc.

Charles E:Okay, how are you going to encompass that in your metrics? It’s almost impossible. The metrics as far as dams go, they allow the generation of electricity without fossil fuels, so dams are of benefit in the existing metrics. The metrics based mind wants to extend the metrics and say, “Well, let’s take into account, the methane from the areas inundated by the dams and balance that off with …” like, you can extend the metrics to some point, but, how are you going to extend it to the salmon, or beavers, or wolves, or whales? Because, their effects are so diffuse through the ecosystem, through the highly nonlinear cycles of cause and effect, you can’t do that. And the delusion that you can, that gets to one of the deeper metaphysical principles of science, or maybe it’s more of a … Well, it starts with a metaphysical principle that the whole world can be reduced to number, and is therefore, if you ignore chaos theory, that is therefore amenable to prediction and control.

Charles E:And that, the improvement of the human state depends on improving our ability to measure and control everything, and that we are becoming better and better at that. And that progress consists of extending our measures to a greater and greater area. But in practice, what happens, is that, the things that you can’t measure, you just don’t bother to measure. And they get left out, even if they turn out to be more important than the things you do measure. Or, you decide not to measure the things that are going to harm your personal economic self interest, or that of the institutions you’re working for. It’s very convenient to leave certain things out, if they harm your profits. So, forgive me for being a little bit cynical, but I think that it’s not just a matter of including more in our metrics thereby preserving our quantitative decision making processes, but it’s really to … And it’s not to abandon the quantitative method, it’s not to abandon science, it’s not to ignore those things, but it is to put those methods and that way of seeing the world in its proper place. We could talk philosophical about that, but yeah.

Daniel S:Yeah. Okay, people who have listened to this podcast historically will recognize that what Charles is talking about is something we’ve talked about quite a lot, and particularly, in the area of health care. And because, setting a body, which is obviously a living self organizing complex system, is a really good way to pay attention to this. We try and reduce health to some small set of metrics. We end up doing things like saying, “Okay, we’re going to pay attention to your cholesterol, to your low density lipoprotein. And then, we’re going to give you a stat.” And to lower it, and it actually worked. And yet, it increases liver toxicity and neuro toxicity and a number of other things. So, the question is, can I sink of low density lipoprotein or LDL HDL ratio, or whatever increased metric complexity I tried to look at, as an adequate measure for health?

Daniel S:Because, in that stat and approach, pharmaceutical approach in general, we’re not asking, “Well, what else is going on associated with the LDL being high? What are the underlying causal factors?” Maybe it’s not only one, maybe there’s a number of them. “Why is the body not self regulating as well as it used to? How do we support its own self regulation? Nope, the number is too high, we’re going to give something external to lower it without paying attention to what else that might have been a symptom of, and now the fact that we just made the regulatory system week or independent on that intervention.”

Charles E:Yeah, perfect example. It’s so congruent to what we’re doing to the environment. Yeah, you extend the metrics further and further, and then you look at, well, who benefits from those metrics? And who benefits from the entire metrics based approach? The entire approach of find a number, find a thing that you can control. Obviously, it’s the purveyors of technologies of control, i.e, the pharmaceutical industry. They’re really happy if you can find a biological marker that in a confusion of cause and effect, they can identify as the cause. And then, you take that sucker down, you reduce those levels, problem solved. And like you were saying, see, so at first, it was cholesterol, right? Just cholesterol levels, and then, it was LDL, and then, it was something else. And the whole time, higher levels of cholesterol that could just be a symptom of like chronic inflammation caused perhaps by the very unsaturated fatty acids that were being prescribed as beneficial.

Charles E:You get into a morass where you don’t know, you can’t find one thing that causes it. So yeah, I think it’s [crosstalk 00:37:23].

Daniel S:Okay. Let’s play with this example. Let’s say, we look at the pharmaceutical approach. We have a regulatory system, where the FDA says, in order for a doctor to use something to treat a disease, first, we have to diagnose the disease and agree upon disease diagnosis process. We’re treating disease, right? We’re not promoting health as first kind of thing. And then, we have to have an FDA approved process to treat the disease. And so, then, the drug or whatever it is, has to go through FDA approval, and the process of doing that is an expensive process, right? I got to do phase three clinical trials that cost us to a billion dollars, sometimes more than that. And where does the money come from to do that? Well, it comes from patenting a molecule that I’ll be able to, because of the patent, sell for price much higher than if I didn’t patent, then there could be competition on it once I had invested all the research, and it makes sense.

Daniel S:If I’m doing a billion dollars with a research to get it through, so I’m only going to study patentable molecules. Then we look in patent law, and we say, “Well, we can’t patent molecules that occur in the body naturally, or in the environment naturally, only synthetic ones.” I’m not going to look at what was happening in the body differently when it was young and healthy, or things in the environment that we call evolved, and then, I’m look at synthetic sheet that was never part of a healthy human being, or a healthy environment because it’s the only stuff that I can patent, that I can make the money back on to get to the FDA trials. You say, okay. This is nobody’s fault, actually. Actually, not the pharma companies, it’s a system that is oriented in a way to do a thing. And there is actually, like say, I want to study an herb or I want to study diet. I can’t get it through FDA approval because there’s just no way I’m going to get a billion dollars from, for something I’ll never be able to make money back on.

Daniel S:Well, I can sell the herb, but everybody can sell the herb and undercut my price, because they didn’t put the $2 billion up front, right? Now, we’re starting to look at, okay, well, that’s … And then we say even deeper, we say, “Well, it’s also the fact that the high cholesterol didn’t necessarily have one cause. It might have been partially inflammation from eight different things, it might have been mycotoxins affecting the vascular system, it might have been …” Now we recognize it, inadequacy of the epistemic approach to medicine. Now we just set our underlying epistemic approach, and our regulatory systems, and our fiscal incentive systems, and our patent law are all part of the problem. And so, what is the solution? Well, that’s kind of like a deep civilization restructure that is necessary, because it’s all those things. Now, that’s a pretty obvious example because most people don’t have a hard time thinking about the body as a living interconnected system. Now, as we start to look at the plan and say, “Well, it’s actually pretty interconnected.”

Daniel S:Whether someone takes the metaphysics of, it is living or not, we just say, “It’s very interconnected.” We’ll get to the living part in a moment. And it is self organizing, actually, ecosystems are self organizing. And so, we get that distinction of complex versus complicated, right? There isn’t an external blueprint that built it, like there is a laptop, there is this ongoing set of interacting generator functions. We really do need a different way of approaching it writ large. So what you’re bringing up here is, there’s financial incentives associated with what drives climate change, and there’s regulatory issues, and there’s epistemic issues.

Charles E:That’s right, it goes all the way to the bottom.

Daniel S:And it’s actually, no bad guys fault.

Charles E:Right.

Daniel S:It’s not like the oil company is a bad guy, it’s like, they economically can’t do something very different than they’re doing in the presence of anyone else who would do that thing, and the nature of regulation, and the nature of market supply and demand.

Charles E:Right. I would say I would be in favor of a carbon tax, but I understand that it’s not going to work. Because, if you have a system that constitutionally requires more and more input of energy, especially, concentrated portable energy like oil. It’s like trying to go on a diet without changing the underlying drivers of your cravings. It’s like, if you’re an alcoholic and trying to quit cold turkey when nothing else has changed, when the trauma and the wounds and the pain that you’re medicating with alcohol is still there, no amount of willpower is going to be enough to stop yourself for very long from drinking. And the same thing is true of our addiction to fossil fuels. Yeah, it’s a fool’s game.

Daniel S:This is an interesting example. If we think about someone who’s got a drug addiction issue that is actually related to numbing some pain they don’t know how to resolve, and we see military veterans come back running PTSD from their pain or traumatic brain injury or whatever, and now, they have an opioid addiction, an alcohol addiction. We can’t just willpower them off of it or shame them off of it, there’s actual healing that needs to happen. So, you’re describing something like healing that has to happen at the level of the collective.

Charles E:Yeah, because, it’s not that those military veterans are bad, nor are their drug dealers bad. They’re functional necessity of the system, they’re generated by the system, it’s unavoidable that you’re going to have people playing that role. Yeah, I mean, that’s the question, how do we change the system? Can you repeat what your question there was?

Daniel S:When you think about the underlying healing that has to happen, there’s a reason that you discuss story and narrative a lot, but also systems. It sounds like one could take what you’re saying as, “Oh, that’s a good critique of the inadequacy of the carbon tax approach with no good suggestion.” How do you suggest we actually approach? Acknowledging the complexity of the issues.

Charles E:Yeah, well, there are different approaches. One is on the level of narrative, and the other is the approach of healing, I would call it, and they’re related. But on the level of narrative, I think that, as a replacement for the carbon narrative, it is the living Earth and sacred Earth narrative, that also corresponds to systems theoretic thinking. There’s a chapter of the book that’s very, very concrete, it says, “Here’s 17 Priority, 17 things we need to do.” And then, I’ve condensed them into four. Number one priority is to preserve any pristine ecosystem that is still left, especially, the Amazon and the Congo. As long as they are intact, there’s still hope. Because, to use more woo woo terminology, Gaia’s memory of health resides in these places. They are biodiversity reservoirs, the dream of the planet is still intact there. And health can radiate out from these places as long as they are still there. That’s top priority.

Charles E:Second priority is regeneration. So first, conservation, second, regeneration. Which means, reforestation and regenerative agriculture, rebuilding soil, restoring wetlands, undamming rivers, reintroducing beavers. And I guess, establishing marine sanctuaries, over at least half the ocean would be necessary too, yeah. So that to strengthen the planet on the organ and tissue level. And third priority has to do with the pesticides, the herbicides, the toxic waste, electromagnetic pollution, etc, etc. And in number four, is cut greenhouse gases. However, that is already a side effect of the first three. You cannot treat earth as sacred and continue to develop fossil fuels. It is really, really practical, but it still brings up the same question, how are we going to do those things when we still have this addictive need to consume? And to recognize and then start to ask the question, where does this addiction come from?

Charles E:I like to take the addiction metaphor seriously, and not to translate it into just a vector of blame. Usually, when people talk about our addiction to fossil fuels, they say so in terms of disgust. Like, “Oh, we’re just addicted, we’re just addicted.” There’s some self hatred there, which is just an internalization of the search for an enemy, which has everything to do with the polarization that we were talking about earlier. I mean, this is all tied together in one big tangle. But yeah, so to find the bad guy, that’s not the solution. That is a false solution, that is a diversion from actually changing of circumstances from which the bad behavior arises or from which the addiction arises. I think that, I mean, not to oversimplify it, but I think that you could say that the driver of our addictive consumptive society is disconnection. Disconnection from place, from community, just being alienated. Looking outside and how many of these trees you’ll actually recognize?

Charles E:A few hundred years ago, pretty much anyone would have been able to even in wintertime, name exactly, which tree every single one of them was, and the qualities of the wood, and what kind of bird nests in that tree, and what are the seasonal habits of those birds? And what kind of soil does that tree grow in? And what kind of other plants grow in that soil? Indigenous people can still do this, if they’re truly indigenous, truly of a place. And to be alienated from all of that, leaves us so hungry, so desperate to recover our lost beingness, which is a function of relationship. And this goes down to the ontological level, like what is it to exist? Is existence a single predicate? No, actually, it is a relationship, it’s a function of relationship. The more cut off we are from relationships, from intimacy to place, community, nature, et cetera, the smaller we are, the less we exist. And so, this hunger to exist, to recover our lost beingness, that feeds consumptive habit’s acquisition.

Charles E:And the insecurity we get from not belonging, that feeds the quest for a substitute, which is money, investments. Now, I feel that I’m okay here. But really, what we need is to be imprisoned in nature and community. And then, there’s also the ideological level, the ideological cut off from nature, that says that, yeah, it’s just a bunch of