Man, this might be my new favorite episode simply because it's at the epicenter of my wheelhouse. I could write a book (and I am) on this topic. Thank you so much for this amazing, practical conversation. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to unabashedly blabber about myself for a moment (as I do). I've been developing an agroforestry system for just shy of 20 years. First-hand experience has elucidated the breathtaking capacity of perennial systems to sequester carbon and cycle nutrients. Our site was a nutrient-devoid, drought-stricken, soil-stripped wasteland when my 23-year-old hands got ahold of the place (I'm 41 now). A well-traveled farmer visited yesterday and declared "This place feels like a tropical rainforest". Regarding the "eat, poop, die" aspect: we use (very humanely raised) rabbits to cycle nutrients. "Tree hay" and bamboo comprise 100% of their fodder. In turn, rabbit poop provides 100% of our farm's nutrients. A multi-tiered canopy and stratified rhizosphere effectively partition resources and plugs "leaks" in the nutrient cycle. It's a biological flywheel. I am not a fan of panaceas, however, I believe agroforestry is one of the more practical and efficacious response to the metacrisis. It heals; physically, ecologically, spiritually...it heals. As a Great Simplification O.G. I *INSIST* 💚 (kidding, not kidding) you have an agroforester on the show 🥲 (I might suggest Martin Crawford)
agroforestry is great but nothing on the algae ocean regeneration project. Glad it got mentioned again. Try interviewing Raffael Jovine for the near ocean "brilliant planet" algae farms. If we took algae seriously then we could sequester 100 gigatons of co2 a year!
I totally agree. I am much later than you but my farm is now well over50% agroforestry. I also agree algae is bigger, but as an individual I can't do much to increase it. My beaver ponds have plenty of algae though which drives the biomass engine of our stream.
Animal Poop Specialist PhD here. I love this. It’s my job to redistribute the 💩 from confined animal agriculture. Just doing my part to try to support Mother Nature’s natural systems in human-created unnatural systems.
@@anthonytroia1 No. Really. Confined Animal House. Literal reverse-evolution. Devolution if you will. The same ones post videos and the crazies run the show. Same as it ever was.
Every autumn when you see the morning landscape covered in dew glistening spiderwebs, you know that the insect population has hit it's yearly peak because the hunters are suddenly laying their traps to harvest the glut just before the weather turns. To see and understand that you have to be in the same mental pattern, you might be harvesting apples for juice, or chestnuts, or bringing in the pumpkins and the root vegetables to store those energies and poop them out during the winter...I still think we should have an education system that immerges people in subsistance farming for at least a year, so that we know where we come from. (And I would then have a full time job as a teacher, totally self interested)
Joe was so right when talked about stories as the way to convey the importance of these cycles. Indigenous societies and old religions all had stories to explain natural phenomena and place the natural world as central to human existence, however unscientific the specifics might appear today. Our dominant stories for centuries now in more 'developed' countries have been about acquisition of wealth and the injustice of wealth inequality leading to the modern get an education, get a good job, marry, have kids and retire with a good pension. Explaining our environment gives rise to stories of technological advances and how clever we are to manipulate our resources. This economic and technological focus will be very difficult to shift but there is a groundswell of interest in the younger sections of our societies (I'm 65 for context!) that gives me hope that we can develop new stories about our place in the world. Such stories will conjure a vision of how it should be as well as telling us how destructive we have been and then treading the path of how we can get back on the path of renewal. These stories will have greater scientific accuracy than those of old but will serve exactly the same purpose of creating a reverence for the natural world and its importance to our very existence. The sooner we adopt these stories, the sooner we will have a consensus on how to move forward. Bring on the storytellers!
The real-word, real-time wisdom that is disseminated by this podcast never ceases to amaze me. (I would use a positive "poop" analogy if I could think of one). Nevertheless, I can only hope that the intellectual nourishment that the Great Simplification provides will see a thousand blossoms bloom. Thank you for all of your efforts. The ARE greatly appreciated.
Definition of Insanity: Pooping in Potable water treated with chlorine/chloramine. Poop is the source of all life and we are turning it into garbage and polluting the water! Yikes! // I would like to recommend Dr. Elaine Ingham, professor and teacher of Soil Food Web concepts, methods, and applications in understanding soil health and bio-diverse agriculture. She has some videos on yt. Thank you, Nate and team for presenting science topics that show a new path. Your work/play is needed. Namaste.
people freak out about humanure composting. I called up our county planner about a year-round composting toilet. after a half hour I realized he didn't really understand composting at all. Then I discovered the Sludge Hammer inventor on youtube - it's certified for septic tanks. Essentially an air pump running on 60 watts with a mat of aerobic bacteria that eat up the septic sludge as compost effluence released on drip irrigation into the lawn roots. hahaha. The Sludge Hammer inventor is an ecologist and he points out how septic dudes don't even know what bacteria are in septic tanks. Vermont is trying to get a "composting toilet" law passed - that would be awesome if it goes through.
Thank you. This was a great episode. And some of these comments... There are some truly wonderful people in this community. I'm so grateful I found your podcast, Nate. In it's way it's become like a liferaft for me in these exceedingly strange and disturbing times. Here, I know I will always find others who truly understand, care about, and love this world as I do and always have. Until now, this has been a rare experience in my life.
Good evening Nate and Joe What a wonderful shared educational conversation. Everyday I hope us humans get a little bit better at seeing past our own feckin noses. Happy and sad tears all at once. We can do better. Truly grateful. 😀 💜
This guy restored a tiny fraction of faith in Americans. With all the GEENOCIDES, destruction of the environment, greed, FALSE FLAGS and corruption.... this gem can come out and dedicated hes life to a meaningful cause. WE THANK YOU.
Nate! This is my favorite interview so far this year. I'm so heartened by the work being done. My favorite animals are butterflies and birds, but hey, whales are awesome, too! Early Eocene animals, most closely related to hippos. Or better, related to the common ancestor of whales and hippos, from what was then The Saharan shallow sea.
Nate, thanks for this one as someone who has spent the last 30 years in service to life along the same lines. It’s appreciated to hear you coined the phrase. Just watching the national news and seeing the catastrophe that is the global political system and looking at the clowns running the show, it’s a star contrast to see these idiots who are in service to blind power for power sake. You’ve mentioned a couple times now that we need a new institution, or perhaps a series of global institutions to give people the opportunity to come back to nature into ourselves into our communities using service to all of life is the excuse.keep picking the reptiles up and ushering them across the highway. It’s an important thing to do stay quiet so that you can hear when a goat has her head in the fence. Appreciate a goat, searching for her, lost baby and pray for the baby pigs, we get crushed the way to their mother during nursing. Keep up the good fight.
"How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through the fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas. It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul. The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders. Remaining silent about the destruction of nature is an endorsement of that destruction. I stand for what I stand on. Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself. The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see. There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere. The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial. ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all. There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed. Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth. Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion. An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed. Might does not make right but it sure makes what is. One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill. The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness. Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top. Why is it that the destruction of something created by humans is called vandalism, yet the destruction of something created by God is called development? An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human. The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature. All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred. We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, and trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails; all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth! The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space. At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, "thus far and no further." If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, "If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behavior. Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice. Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds." Edward Abbey 🐳🐋🐋 "We can learn a great deal from whales. It is the same lesson we can learn from our close genetic relatives, the bonobo apes of the Congo. Here mothers have a great deal of authority, there is very little violence (with no signs of sexual violence against females), and their society is held together by sharing and caring rather than by fear and force." Riane Eisler
@@TheFlyingBrain. You're certainly welcome. 🙏🏻 "Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder." Thomas Merton
In Washington state there are wildlife under passes and over passes for Intestate 90. You can see great footage of the animals using these crossings on you tube. Very fun to watch.
4% of biomass is wild animals? I love that the ratio is much higher on our little two acre plot. We do not mess with wild species if we can avoid it. We do knock wasps back away from the house. Same with ants or termites. Other than that, nature has freedom to be.
See also the book Farmers of Forty Centuries, by Franklin H. Kingfirst published in 1911 (and still in print and available). An American agronomist concerned about topsoil loss in the Midwest, goes to Japan, Korea, Manchuria, and China to find out how those farmers managed over so many centuries to preserve their soil's fertility. The answer: humanure. Interesting beyond the technical details, much close observation and insights into various cultures. Also, of course, Joe Jenkins' book The Humanure Handbook.
Both of those books are on my self. It's interesting to note that the solutions for rewinding and regenerating landscapes has been known for decades. I lived with humanuare for years. I think in the book he mentions the position is called "fecaphobia." We used "Holistic Managment" in grazing to control where the bovines deposited their poop and grew a small holding from overgrazed clay to 10" inches of deep dark carbon captured topsoil with zero runoff. See "Soil Carbon Cowboys." Got to get the manure out of the feedlots and into the pastures. We also managed stocking rates to account for the vole population which runs through a five year cycle from zero voles to about 10,000 per acre; we let them have the grass as they sequestered huge amounts of carbon, tilled the top 2" of topsoil and left tons of poop. I would also add to the Book list "Farming With The Wild'" Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches," by Daniel Imhoff. And my support for Humanure is that the fecaphobic society mixes a huge amount of fresh clean water with the common turd to move it away from themselves then mixes toxic chemicals with it to make it sterile. The nutrients in a persons waste stream is about equal to the amount of nutrients needed to replenish the soil with fertilizer. This is what the Japanese found in the 1900s in the book Farmers of Forty Centuries. Kudos Jim Allen for posting this.
"When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realise That You Cannot Eat Money" - Cree/Osage attributed Native American saying. Keep the ecology guests coming Nate🤔
I've often wondered about the mountains to the south of me. Pioneers talk about grass up to the belly of a horse, which is odd because it is largely desert with patches of pine trees. I know any tree larger than 12 was cut for lumber, vast groves of Juniper cut for fence poles, and it has been heavily grazed by sheep and cattle. We don't have photos or any real records of the area, so we have little clue as to how much it has degraded. Worse, when Idaho power built the first dam in Hells Canyon it cut off the migration of Salmon to all of southern Idaho and parts of northern Nevada. How many millions of pounds of biomass were removed from this ecosystem. It is largely dry desert a change like that must have been devastating. I've never heard another human mention the possibility.
I love this vlog! I teach chemistry and would love to share all of the info on nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) and the nutrient spreaders! Also, I am studying for CSET Bio and this is so helpful to connect the real world to textbook info! We need to teach this in school! 🤓😍😆 Most importantly, how do we build greener cities and urban centers that are sustainable by applying all of these insightful info and knowledge? How can we co-exist with all of our animal and plant friends? We have taken so much of their natural habitats in the name of progress and profits... 😓😭🤧💔🙏
Imagine what we lost with the extinction of Passenger pigeons. I live in the Pacific Northwest and often backpack in the summer. Long ago standing on a bridge over a remote creek at a low elevation between the huge climb on either side in the late afternoon sun it became intuitively obvious, watching the stream roaring down the valley and the hot air sweeping up loaded with Bugs! CLouds of them many species going up the mountain on the hot air.... then imagined the thousands and thousands of these streams and tributaries up every finger ridge valley of every mountain from Alaska to Patagonia.....and for millions of years. Swat- damn it what use are these stupid midges, gnats, mosquitos , no-see ums, black flies other flies, and more - the Devils work!
I really love the squirrels around me, they're like two year olds that are quite prudish in a observing but ineffectual way, unless that is observed and acted upon by a virtuous human of course.
We must help restore, or at the bare minimum protect and respect, the trophic levels. Natives have practiced taking only what they need. I feel we need to go back to that way of living.
The food chain consists of smaller and smaller creatures, constantly biodegrading and filtering nutrients into a particulate form that the plant realm requires.
A national service program term wherein an age group enters the field of restoration ocean, lands, air, etc. The service obviates student debt as does military participation. Post service raises awareness that only increases.
but does the service provide room & board, since we can't afford that either?! If no room & board is provided, does one in this service get paid a liveable wage? Because Americorps, is woefully inadequate for both participants and the service they provide to specific target community service areas & time in Americorps does not fully obviate student debt. Need an executive order for that.
You can quantify the impact of disturbance in calories and "cost of production" using these models - it's pretty illuminating. Also interesting, pre petrochemical energy - not only guano but tallow, the cattle produced pre whale blubber evonomy. This had a massive effect on places like california and completely revised the landscape. Now we simply constipate and confuse local ecologies. Also, biotransfer of nutrients and calories is an ecosystem service that maintains equilibrium and adjusts as needed.
The further you go with this podcast the more I think that the title needs inversing. What we need is a great complexification. The whale dives and brings up long buried nutriments that then get pooped out and feed phytoplankton that feed herring that feed seabirds that poop on land...THAT IS COMPLEXE. Those minerals cross the line between life and death a hundred times to get themselves back to mountain. The simplification is that we just dredge the ocean floor with massive hoovers and bag it up as fertilizer (please keep that quiet, THEY mustn't work that one out) 😂😂. The great complexification (without it sounding like a mental condition,) would be a more precise and accurate title.
About your porch bonsai plants getting attacked by raccoons, has bonemeal been part of your planting or fertilizer routine? If so, this may be the reason these plants are getting the unwanted attention. Love the information presented here. Thank-you!
We are in the process of "re-engineering" biological processes that required BILLIONS of years to achieve. As admirable and noble as that effort might be, is it not also the height of human hubris? To think that contemporary homo sapiens can, in the blink-of-an-eye, reverse or correct biological processes that took BILLIONS of years to achieve, would be laughable if it wasn't so simultaneously arrogant. The Great Simplification is a noble and benign imagining of what homo sapiens might become. Considering the well-documented history of the human species up to this moment in human "development", I feel fortunate to be old. I marvel at what we might have been.
I stopped mowing a part of my property that was probably lawn for 50 years. In less than three years, upwards of 50 species of various plants just showed up. More than a dozen sedges, all sorts of wildflowers, little ferns and so on. More moths and butterflies and a range of bumble bees and solitary bees. If we all could just let nature work her magic, the world would improve so fast for all of us. Please, people, a little bit of European lawn is nice. Let the rest go back to what would be native in your region.
The problem with humans is that we put ourselves at the centre of everything and yet we know that we are pretty much the only species, that if removed, everything else would thrive. We need to step out in the world and be in awe of everything around us. Every life is valid and has a purpose unto itself, and it doesn't need any interference from us. To that end we must stop animal agriculture which is one of the driving forces of climate collapse.
NO! Farming in New Zealand (and Aussie) was not enabled by the removal of bird crap from some place else in the 1800's! Sure in time it would have added to livestock numbers growing. The reason for farming here, was the arrival of European settlers, who started arriving in numbers in NZ early-mid 1800's on and THAT is the reason for livestock (alongside grass seeds) arriving here and being farmed, not bird shit! I would guess the initial clearing of land by burning the bush would have added nutrients for the grass seed. As an aside for all the 'noble savage'/special indigenous knowledges'' promoters. NZ only had two mammals, both bats. It also had a large bird, the Moa, which the Māori hunted to extinction and such hunts were enabled through setting fire to the bush (large tracts were burnt) to drive them out
Nate! That raccoon digging in your bonsais is doing you a favor by digging up the insects, bill bugs, potato bugs and (moth)grubs eating the bonsai roots.
all the living things on this planet prior to the arrival of uprights had kept this planet as it was in its early day. uprights started the whole change the environment issue and we have never stopped messing things up hence. but, when we can do something about in many ways we did the unthinkable, we avoided those issues using all kinds of money making ideas instead. and how climate change a natural event became a global drama !!
Guest appears to not know the role of soil microbiota. They getcha all the nitrogen and phosphorus your plants will ever need, nitrogen from the air, phosphorus from the MINERAL element of the soil. Centuries worth anywhere you find sand, silt and clay.
Any shorter videos about this? I don't like podcasts, they wander around the topic. 10-20 minute videos can go in depth to some extent but also have to keep focused at the same time. Looked up his name but couldn't find anything under an hour, not a smart promotional distribution for his work. You want to mix shorts, my preferred 10-30 minute videos, and a few podcasts to go deeper.
@@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885 I'll just read his book. I'm fine with long-form content, just not podcasts because they are unfocused. Books are edited to remain focused and coherent.
@@HoboGardenerBen what I do on youtube - when I need information fast - is don't play the vid at all. Just scroll down to click transcript. Then toggle the timestamps. Then speed read the transcript. Boom - done with the vid in a minute because most of the information is just fluffy stuff. Most of these bourgeois career interviews don't really engage with serious reality. They gotta be brown-No$ers to keep their careers. So lots of smiles and fakery.
These long podcasts are more like conversations that we eavesdrop. Like hanging out with smart buddies. Scanning the transcript is a great way to just eat the main dish and skip the trimmings. Or buy his books!
Man, this might be my new favorite episode simply because it's at the epicenter of my wheelhouse. I could write a book (and I am) on this topic. Thank you so much for this amazing, practical conversation. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to unabashedly blabber about myself for a moment (as I do).
I've been developing an agroforestry system for just shy of 20 years. First-hand experience has elucidated the breathtaking capacity of perennial systems to sequester carbon and cycle nutrients. Our site was a nutrient-devoid, drought-stricken, soil-stripped wasteland when my 23-year-old hands got ahold of the place (I'm 41 now). A well-traveled farmer visited yesterday and declared "This place feels like a tropical rainforest". Regarding the "eat, poop, die" aspect: we use (very humanely raised) rabbits to cycle nutrients. "Tree hay" and bamboo comprise 100% of their fodder. In turn, rabbit poop provides 100% of our farm's nutrients. A multi-tiered canopy and stratified rhizosphere effectively partition resources and plugs "leaks" in the nutrient cycle. It's a biological flywheel.
I am not a fan of panaceas, however, I believe agroforestry is one of the more practical and efficacious response to the metacrisis. It heals; physically, ecologically, spiritually...it heals. As a Great Simplification O.G. I *INSIST* 💚 (kidding, not kidding) you have an agroforester on the show 🥲 (I might suggest Martin Crawford)
agroforestry is great but nothing on the algae ocean regeneration project. Glad it got mentioned again. Try interviewing Raffael Jovine for the near ocean "brilliant planet" algae farms. If we took algae seriously then we could sequester 100 gigatons of co2 a year!
I totally agree. I am much later than you but my farm is now well over50% agroforestry. I also agree algae is bigger, but as an individual I can't do much to increase it. My beaver ponds have plenty of algae though which drives the biomass engine of our stream.
Love ❤ ❤ this comment, thread -- and podcast!
Me too! 💚
On the earth science front I would like to recommend Ferris Jabr’s recently published book « Becoming Earth: How our planet came to life. »
Animal Poop Specialist PhD here. I love this. It’s my job to redistribute the 💩 from confined animal agriculture. Just doing my part to try to support Mother Nature’s natural systems in human-created unnatural systems.
You work in the House of Representatives?
@@therealdesidaru LOL
@@anthonytroia1 No. Really. Confined Animal House. Literal reverse-evolution. Devolution if you will. The same ones post videos and the crazies run the show. Same as it ever was.
A PHD now to shovel shit, times have sure changed.
@@antonyjh1234 gotta have a PhD or inherit several hundred acres to actually get paid a liveable wage working in Ag.
Every autumn when you see the morning landscape covered in dew glistening spiderwebs, you know that the insect population has hit it's yearly peak because the hunters are suddenly laying their traps to harvest the glut just before the weather turns. To see and understand that you have to be in the same mental pattern, you might be harvesting apples for juice, or chestnuts, or bringing in the pumpkins and the root vegetables to store those energies and poop them out during the winter...I still think we should have an education system that immerges people in subsistance farming for at least a year, so that we know where we come from. (And I would then have a full time job as a teacher, totally self interested)
Joe was so right when talked about stories as the way to convey the importance of these cycles. Indigenous societies and old religions all had stories to explain natural phenomena and place the natural world as central to human existence, however unscientific the specifics might appear today. Our dominant stories for centuries now in more 'developed' countries have been about acquisition of wealth and the injustice of wealth inequality leading to the modern get an education, get a good job, marry, have kids and retire with a good pension. Explaining our environment gives rise to stories of technological advances and how clever we are to manipulate our resources.
This economic and technological focus will be very difficult to shift but there is a groundswell of interest in the younger sections of our societies (I'm 65 for context!) that gives me hope that we can develop new stories about our place in the world. Such stories will conjure a vision of how it should be as well as telling us how destructive we have been and then treading the path of how we can get back on the path of renewal. These stories will have greater scientific accuracy than those of old but will serve exactly the same purpose of creating a reverence for the natural world and its importance to our very existence.
The sooner we adopt these stories, the sooner we will have a consensus on how to move forward. Bring on the storytellers!
The real-word, real-time wisdom that is disseminated by this podcast never ceases to amaze me. (I would use a positive "poop" analogy if I could think of one). Nevertheless, I can only hope that the intellectual nourishment that the Great Simplification provides will see a thousand blossoms bloom. Thank you for all of your efforts. The ARE greatly appreciated.
I love episodes like this. Thank you!
Definition of Insanity: Pooping in Potable water treated with chlorine/chloramine. Poop is the source of all life and we are turning it into garbage and polluting the water! Yikes! // I would like to recommend Dr. Elaine Ingham, professor and teacher of Soil Food Web concepts, methods, and applications in understanding soil health and bio-diverse agriculture. She has some videos on yt. Thank you, Nate and team for presenting science topics that show a new path. Your work/play is needed. Namaste.
people freak out about humanure composting. I called up our county planner about a year-round composting toilet. after a half hour I realized he didn't really understand composting at all. Then I discovered the Sludge Hammer inventor on youtube - it's certified for septic tanks. Essentially an air pump running on 60 watts with a mat of aerobic bacteria that eat up the septic sludge as compost effluence released on drip irrigation into the lawn roots. hahaha. The Sludge Hammer inventor is an ecologist and he points out how septic dudes don't even know what bacteria are in septic tanks.
Vermont is trying to get a "composting toilet" law passed - that would be awesome if it goes through.
@@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885That's great, where feasible composting toilets are excellent.
Awesome video.
Thank you for your time and your content.
Thank you. This was a great episode. And some of these comments... There are some truly wonderful people in this community. I'm so grateful I found your podcast, Nate. In it's way it's become like a liferaft for me in these exceedingly strange and disturbing times. Here, I know I will always find others who truly understand, care about, and love this world as I do and always have. Until now, this has been a rare experience in my life.
Fantastic talk. Thank you, Nate.
Another great episode. Encouraging action without flinching away from reality.
Good evening Nate and Joe
What a wonderful shared educational conversation.
Everyday I hope us humans get a little bit better at seeing past our own feckin noses.
Happy and sad tears all at once.
We can do better.
Truly grateful.
😀
💜
You hit my sweet spot and long time obsession- Thanks Joe and Nate! Kudos!
Loved this episode - thank you Nate and Joe!
This guy restored a tiny fraction of faith in Americans.
With all the GEENOCIDES, destruction of the environment, greed, FALSE FLAGS and corruption.... this gem can come out and dedicated hes life to a meaningful cause.
WE THANK YOU.
Excellent. Thank you.
My most favorite interview of all. Thank you for a most wonderful 1:32:32
The story of the Ott3ers is incredible! What a great story of regeneration and how quickly that can happen! If we restore them.
Great podcast!
Such an amazing podcast, as are so many!
Nate! This is my favorite interview so far this year. I'm so heartened by the work being done. My favorite animals are butterflies and birds, but hey, whales are awesome, too! Early Eocene animals, most closely related to hippos. Or better, related to the common ancestor of whales and hippos, from what was then The Saharan shallow sea.
Nate, thanks for this one as someone who has spent the last 30 years in service to life along the same lines. It’s appreciated to hear you coined the phrase. Just watching the national news and seeing the catastrophe that is the global political system and looking at the clowns running the show, it’s a star contrast to see these idiots who are in service to blind power for power sake. You’ve mentioned a couple times now that we need a new institution, or perhaps a series of global institutions to give people the opportunity to come back to nature into ourselves into our communities using service to all of life is the excuse.keep picking the reptiles up and ushering them across the highway. It’s an important thing to do stay quiet so that you can hear when a goat has her head in the fence. Appreciate a goat, searching for her, lost baby and pray for the baby pigs, we get crushed the way to their mother during nursing. Keep up the good fight.
"How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through the fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas.
It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul. The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.
Remaining silent about the destruction of nature is an endorsement of that destruction. I stand for what I stand on.
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.
The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see. There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.
The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial. ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all. There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth. Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.
An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
Might does not make right but it sure makes what is. One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill.
The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness. Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.
Why is it that the destruction of something created by humans is called vandalism, yet the destruction of something created by God is called development? An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human. The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature.
All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred.
We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, and trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails; all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth!
The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.
At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, "thus far and no further." If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, "If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behavior.
Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice. Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds."
Edward Abbey
🐳🐋🐋
"We can learn a great deal from whales. It is the same lesson we can learn from our close genetic relatives, the bonobo apes of the Congo. Here mothers have a great deal of authority, there is very little violence (with no signs of sexual violence against females), and their society is held together by sharing and caring rather than by fear and force."
Riane Eisler
Thank you. These quotes made my heart explode with happiness.
@@TheFlyingBrain. You're certainly welcome. 🙏🏻 "Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder."
Thomas Merton
In Washington state there are wildlife under passes and over passes for Intestate 90. You can see great footage of the animals using these crossings on you tube. Very fun to watch.
Thanks, brilliant interview.
I would love it if you had the Pleistocene Park guys on. Great conversation between you & Joe Roman!
Thank You
4% of biomass is wild animals? I love that the ratio is much higher on our little two acre plot. We do not mess with wild species if we can avoid it. We do knock wasps back away from the house. Same with ants or termites. Other than that, nature has freedom to be.
I like the way you think.
algae is only 1% equivalent of land biomass but it is 50% of Earth's photosynthesis. Abrupt global warming is all about photon radiation energy.
See also the book Farmers of Forty Centuries, by Franklin H. Kingfirst published in 1911 (and still in print and available). An American agronomist concerned about topsoil loss in the Midwest, goes to Japan, Korea, Manchuria, and China to find out how those farmers managed over so many centuries to preserve their soil's fertility. The answer: humanure. Interesting beyond the technical details, much close observation and insights into various cultures. Also, of course, Joe Jenkins' book The Humanure Handbook.
Both of those books are on my self. It's interesting to note that the solutions for rewinding and regenerating landscapes has been known for decades. I lived with humanuare for years. I think in the book he mentions the position is called "fecaphobia." We used "Holistic Managment" in grazing to control where the bovines deposited their poop and grew a small holding from overgrazed clay to 10" inches of deep dark carbon captured topsoil with zero runoff. See "Soil Carbon Cowboys." Got to get the manure out of the feedlots and into the pastures. We also managed stocking rates to account for the vole population which runs through a five year cycle from zero voles to about 10,000 per acre; we let them have the grass as they sequestered huge amounts of carbon, tilled the top 2" of topsoil and left tons of poop. I would also add to the Book list "Farming With The Wild'" Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches," by Daniel Imhoff.
And my support for Humanure is that the fecaphobic society mixes a huge amount of fresh clean water with the common turd to move it away from themselves then mixes toxic chemicals with it to make it sterile. The nutrients in a persons waste stream is about equal to the amount of nutrients needed to replenish the soil with fertilizer. This is what the Japanese found in the 1900s in the book Farmers of Forty Centuries. Kudos Jim Allen for posting this.
"When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realise That You Cannot Eat Money" - Cree/Osage attributed Native American saying.
Keep the ecology guests coming Nate🤔
I've often wondered about the mountains to the south of me. Pioneers talk about grass up to the belly of a horse, which is odd because it is largely desert with patches of pine trees. I know any tree larger than 12 was cut for lumber, vast groves of Juniper cut for fence poles, and it has been heavily grazed by sheep and cattle. We don't have photos or any real records of the area, so we have little clue as to how much it has degraded.
Worse, when Idaho power built the first dam in Hells Canyon it cut off the migration of Salmon to all of southern Idaho and parts of northern Nevada. How many millions of pounds of biomass were removed from this ecosystem. It is largely dry desert a change like that must have been devastating. I've never heard another human mention the possibility.
I love this vlog! I teach chemistry and would love to share all of the info on nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) and the nutrient spreaders! Also, I am studying for CSET Bio and this is so helpful to connect the real world to textbook info! We need to teach this in school! 🤓😍😆
Most importantly, how do we build greener cities and urban centers that are sustainable by applying all of these insightful info and knowledge? How can we co-exist with all of our animal and plant friends? We have taken so much of their natural habitats in the name of progress and profits... 😓😭🤧💔🙏
Wonderful 💛☀️💛
Another clear sign of human overshoot
Imagine what we lost with the extinction of Passenger pigeons. I live in the Pacific Northwest and often backpack in the summer. Long ago standing on a bridge over a remote creek at a low elevation between the huge climb on either side in the late afternoon sun it became intuitively obvious, watching the stream roaring down the valley and the hot air sweeping up loaded with Bugs! CLouds of them many species going up the mountain on the hot air.... then imagined the thousands and thousands of these streams and tributaries up every finger ridge valley of every mountain from Alaska to Patagonia.....and for millions of years. Swat- damn it what use are these stupid midges, gnats, mosquitos , no-see ums, black flies other flies, and more - the Devils work!
I really love the squirrels around me, they're like two year olds that are quite prudish in a observing but ineffectual way, unless that is observed and acted upon by a virtuous human of course.
I do like the title and agree. Now what? Life is too short for distractions that don’t truly matter
Now that's a motto i could live by
thanks
We must help restore, or at the bare minimum protect and respect, the trophic levels. Natives have practiced taking only what they need. I feel we need to go back to that way of living.
The food chain consists of smaller and smaller creatures, constantly biodegrading and filtering nutrients into a particulate form that the plant realm requires.
A national service program term wherein an age group enters the field of restoration ocean, lands, air, etc. The service obviates student debt as does military participation. Post service raises awareness that only increases.
but does the service provide room & board, since we can't afford that either?! If no room & board is provided, does one in this service get paid a liveable wage? Because Americorps, is woefully inadequate for both participants and the service they provide to specific target community service areas & time in Americorps does not fully obviate student debt.
Need an executive order for that.
You can quantify the impact of disturbance in calories and "cost of production" using these models - it's pretty illuminating. Also interesting, pre petrochemical energy - not only guano but tallow, the cattle produced pre whale blubber evonomy. This had a massive effect on places like california and completely revised the landscape. Now we simply constipate and confuse local ecologies. Also, biotransfer of nutrients and calories is an ecosystem service that maintains equilibrium and adjusts as needed.
Dilution is your pollution solution. The difference between a food, drug or poison is simply the dosage and tolerance.
The further you go with this podcast the more I think that the title needs inversing. What we need is a great complexification. The whale dives and brings up long buried nutriments that then get pooped out and feed phytoplankton that feed herring that feed seabirds that poop on land...THAT IS COMPLEXE. Those minerals cross the line between life and death a hundred times to get themselves back to mountain. The simplification is that we just dredge the ocean floor with massive hoovers and bag it up as fertilizer (please keep that quiet, THEY mustn't work that one out) 😂😂. The great complexification (without it sounding like a mental condition,) would be a more precise and accurate title.
Not from economic perspective
@@thegreatsimplification I always forget that you're an economist. 🤦🤦
Scat there!
Can you please show me sources for the distribution of animal mass on the planet?
About your porch bonsai plants getting attacked by raccoons, has bonemeal been part of your planting or fertilizer routine? If so, this may be the reason these plants are getting the unwanted attention. Love the information presented here. Thank-you!
YOU SOUND SO MUCH LIKE PAUL RUDD.
ANT MAN RESCUE THE WORLD 💙
We are in the process of "re-engineering" biological processes that required BILLIONS of years to achieve. As admirable and noble as that effort might be, is it not also the height of human hubris? To think that contemporary homo sapiens can, in the blink-of-an-eye, reverse or correct biological processes that took BILLIONS of years to achieve, would be laughable if it wasn't so simultaneously arrogant. The Great Simplification is a noble and benign imagining of what homo sapiens might become. Considering the well-documented history of the human species up to this moment in human "development", I feel fortunate to be old. I marvel at what we might have been.
Animals are better than people!
People are animals too.
The biological pump is not just twerking.
I stopped mowing a part of my property that was probably lawn for 50 years. In less than three years, upwards of 50 species of various plants just showed up. More than a dozen sedges, all sorts of wildflowers, little ferns and so on. More moths and butterflies and a range of bumble bees and solitary bees. If we all could just let nature work her magic, the world would improve so fast for all of us. Please, people, a little bit of European lawn is nice. Let the rest go back to what would be native in your region.
It's just so sad to listen to this, I was in tears several times; Ecocide is a crime let's get the perpetrators convicted and jailed.
they can't because they have to brown-no$e the corporate funders. Raygun made corporation donations 100% tax deductible to universities.
People still go moose watching in northern New England. Deer are boring now, but moose still have charisma for tourists.
The problem with humans is that we put ourselves at the centre of everything and yet we know that we are pretty much the only species, that if removed, everything else would thrive. We need to step out in the world and be in awe of everything around us. Every life is valid and has a purpose unto itself, and it doesn't need any interference from us. To that end we must stop animal agriculture which is one of the driving forces of climate collapse.
NO! Farming in New Zealand (and Aussie) was not enabled by the removal of bird crap from some place else in the 1800's! Sure in time it would have added to livestock numbers growing. The reason for farming here, was the arrival of European settlers, who started arriving in numbers in NZ early-mid 1800's on and THAT is the reason for livestock (alongside grass seeds) arriving here and being farmed, not bird shit! I would guess the initial clearing of land by burning the bush would have added nutrients for the grass seed.
As an aside for all the 'noble savage'/special indigenous knowledges'' promoters. NZ only had two mammals, both bats. It also had a large bird, the Moa, which the Māori hunted to extinction and such hunts were enabled through setting fire to the bush (large tracts were burnt) to drive them out
Read 1493 for the story on bird poop harvest in the 1800s
A racoon getting into your bonsai is nothing at all like a man scaring off a lion. 😂🎉
why have the sea otters not been able to compensate for the seastar die-off that has ruined kelp forests ?
Nate!
That raccoon digging in your bonsais is doing you a favor by digging up the insects, bill bugs, potato bugs and (moth)grubs eating the bonsai roots.
In Australia the problem is feral animals. How do we factor in the animals that have ended up in the wrong place but are still thriving.
An essential comma
You are messing with the birds when you save a worm. 😂
Do y’all think the gaia hypothesis is real?
AS they say, it matters to that night crawler! I do the same thing.
ask him about two-headed depleted uranium babies from u.s. military "research."
all the living things on this planet prior to the arrival of uprights had kept this planet as it was in its early day. uprights started the whole change the environment issue and we have never stopped messing things up hence. but, when we can do something about in many ways we did the unthinkable, we avoided those issues using all kinds of money making ideas instead. and how climate change a natural event became a global drama !!
Guest appears to not know the role of soil microbiota. They getcha all the nitrogen and phosphorus your plants will ever need, nitrogen from the air, phosphorus from the MINERAL element of the soil. Centuries worth anywhere you find sand, silt and clay.
Everyone i talk to wants to "preserve the environment," then gets in their car to go to the beach to pick up trash. 😂
don't worry about the hypocrisy of modern human "civilization" - mother Nature is taking revenge in an accelerating manner.
we eat poop before we die? hold on now!
Restore animals! What a laugh! Wild animals make up 3% of the biomass on earth now.
Any shorter videos about this? I don't like podcasts, they wander around the topic. 10-20 minute videos can go in depth to some extent but also have to keep focused at the same time. Looked up his name but couldn't find anything under an hour, not a smart promotional distribution for his work. You want to mix shorts, my preferred 10-30 minute videos, and a few podcasts to go deeper.
2x youtube vids and start 10 minutes in to get past the obligatory social greeting stuff.
I’m glad I’m old.
@@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885 I'll just read his book. I'm fine with long-form content, just not podcasts because they are unfocused. Books are edited to remain focused and coherent.
@@HoboGardenerBen what I do on youtube - when I need information fast - is don't play the vid at all. Just scroll down to click transcript. Then toggle the timestamps. Then speed read the transcript. Boom - done with the vid in a minute because most of the information is just fluffy stuff. Most of these bourgeois career interviews don't really engage with serious reality. They gotta be brown-No$ers to keep their careers. So lots of smiles and fakery.
These long podcasts are more like conversations that we eavesdrop. Like hanging out with smart buddies. Scanning the transcript is a great way to just eat the main dish and skip the trimmings. Or buy his books!