Masters of Regeneration Radio

Stephen is a fire historian, and self-described pyromantic.  Now an emeritus professor at Arizona State University, he spent 15 seasons with the North Rim Longshots at Grand Canyon National Park.  He has written major fire histories for America, Australia, Canada, Europe (including Russia), and the Earth overall. Among his many books are Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire, and Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910.

In today's episode Stephen shares some wonderful insights on how we may rethink our relationship with fire.

His most recent book is The Still-Burning Bush, out from Scribe Publications in September 2020. Prior to academic life, Stephen also spent fifteen summers as a seasonal firefighter with the US National Parks Service.

What exploratory questions can we ask ourselves today to re-imagine what we live for, how we relate to ourselves, to others, to nature?

What do we need to see and understand that we have not seen to re-imagine the definitions that we give to our actions in the world? To the definitions we give to how we measure the collective values ​​of our species?

Essential questions such as: What is essential for living? What is development, the economy, money, the relationship of humans with the natural world, with this dying yet still prevailing illusion of separation from the world around us?

How can we understand times of great challenge, moments of stress as times of growth and re-birth?

In this episode we talk about healing our gut… about our micro biome and Earth's different biomes, about these gut-wrenching times our shadows, our personal truth, coming back to our belonging place, this collective healing transition, fermentation as an alternative to the textile industry and letting go of our dependency on oil, and giving Nature her rightful place at the table in our decision making process. Little did we know Nature was going to show us who's boss now.

Beth said something like: "Maybe there are more steps ahead that frighten me"… well here we are.

At home, like Mother Nature sent us all to our rooms to think about what we've done and reflect on how we move forward now, acknowledging what is truly essential in our efforts to bring back that vibrant world.

What is essential? Breathing… drinking water and eating foods that are alive, nourishing our body and mind with gratitude, awareness, presence, wisdom, patience, going within to listen to a knowledge beyond our human mental constructs.

We coexist with millions of other species living and adapting to an ever changing environment, and they do it in harmony with Nature. How about covid 19 for an accelerator for Sapiens? How about this for building global Unity Consciousness?

It takes a very different mindset than the mainstream one that has prevailed, to recognize all natural organisms we coexist with as beings, as people, just like us.

Beth Rattner is the executive director for the Biomimicry Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to helping current and future innovators reconnect to nature so that we may create more regenerative products and services.

She is a frequent speaker on how biomimetic design in products, cities, and agriculture can bring about a new level of repair and cooperation to our economy and ecosystem which in turn will spur new levels of social equity. 

Beth Rattner has been working in sustainability since 2000 and is currently the executive director of the Biomimicry Institute. The Institute brings the practice of bioinspired design to hundreds of thousands of people a year through its education and entrepreneurship programs. Beth speaks publicly on how biomimetic design of human products and systems can restore our economy and environment.   Prior to this position, Beth worked with William McDonough and Michael Braungart on The Upcycle, the sequel to Cradle to Cradle, before she helped co-found the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute and became its executive director.     An attorney by training, Beth was also a managing director for one of the first sustainability business consultant firms, Blu Skye, and business manager for Hewlett Packard's Emerging Market Solutions (EMS) group. This HP internal "start-up" championed a new lens on providing technology solutions to those who earn less than $2 a day. The team launched HP's first multi-user, daisy-chained computer for poorly funded schools and a solar-powered printer, providing microfinance opportunities for women who could bring photographs to remote villages for the very first time.     Beth lives in Marin County, California.

Our guest today is Lars Chittka. Lars is professor of Sensory and Behavioural ecology at Queen Mary, University of London, and has been a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study (WIKO) in Berlin. His book The Mind of the Bee (2019) is forthcoming with Princeton University Press.

Excerpt from https://aeon.co/essays/inside-the-mind-of-a-bee-is-a-hive-of-sensory-activity "Insects such as bees and ants are often held up as the epitome of the robotically mechanistic approach to animal nature. Scientists have long known that these creatures must possess a large behavioural repertoire in order to construct their elaborate homes, defend against intruders, and provision their young with food. Yet many still find it plausible to look at bees and ants as little more than 'reflex machines', lacking an internal representation of the world, or an ability to foresee even the immediate future. In the absence of external stimuli or internal triggers such as hunger, it's believed that the insect's mind is dark and its brain is switched off. But perhaps the problem is not that insects lack an inner life, but that they don't have a way to communicate it in terms we can understand. It is hard for us to prise open a window into their minds. So maybe we misdiagnose animal brains as having machine-like properties simply because we understand how machines work – whereas, to date, we have only a fragmentary and imperfect insight into how even the simplest brains process, store and retrieve information. However, there are now many signs that consciousness-like phenomena might exist not just among humans or even great apes – but that insects might have them, too. Not all of these lines of evidence are from experiments specifically designed to explore consciousness; in fact, some have lain buried in the literature for decades, even centuries, without anyone recognising their hidden significance. Consciousness, to the western world (and I am personally adding this since to ancestral cultures it is a different story) consciousness then, is an evolutionary invention like wings or lungs. It is useful to us; it's therefore most likely to be useful to other organisms with traits deeply homologous to ours. They share with us the difficulties of moving, probing the environment, remembering, predicting the future and coping with unforeseen challenges. If the same behavioural and cognitive criteria are applied as to much larger-brained vertebrates, then some insects are likely to qualify as conscious agents."

Daniel Wahl explores ways in which we can reframe and understand the crises that we currently face and explores how we can live our way into the future rather than know our way into the future, how we might stop chasing the mirage of certainty and control in a complex and unpredictable world. How can we collaborate in the creation of diverse regenerative cultures adapted to the unique biocultural conditions of place? How can we create conditions conducive to life?

"Just 50 years ago, some 1,000 small and family-owned seed companies were producing and distributing seeds in the United States; by 2009, there were fewer than 100. Thanks to a series of mergers and acquisitions over the last few years, four multinational agrochemical firms — Corteva, ChemChina, Bayer and BASF — now control over 60 percent of global seed sales."

Michael Mazourek is co-founder of Row 7 Seed Company and an Associate Professor of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He first met the likes of the butternut squash, the cucumber, the pea and the pepper tending to his family's garden as a child; little did he know that the would later go on to specialize in these same crops. A deep interest in human health and getting to the root of how stuff works led him to the study of biochemistry, illuminating the links between plants and the important phytochemicals in our diet. Today he has the opportunity to strengthen these connections—and serve regional farmers—by breeding improved vegetables and training others in his craft.

Ethan has been working for years in regenerative agriculture. In our conversation he invites us to think deeply about the frameworks we decide to work with as opposed to following rules or practices. He invites us to think about generative questions we can ask about the land and our relationship to specific ecosystems and their potential, as opposed to thinking about problems. He invites us to think, rather than define, to relate rather than control, and understand ourselves as part of those living systems relationships and the intricate and unique story of each place.

Ethan Roland Soloviev is Chief Innovation Officer at HowGood, he'll explain what that is towards the end of the episode. He is also an owner of High Falls Farm. He is the author of "Levels of Regenerative Agriculture" and "Regenerative Enterprise: Optimizing for Multi-Capital Abundance."

Ethan is an international expert on regenerative agriculture, regenerative business, and permaculture design, with experience in 34 countries. He is the founder of the Regenerative Enterprise Institute, a member of the Regenerative Business Alliance, and an Associate of the Carol Sanford Institute (after this episode, if you're intrigued, jump to episode 20 of Masters of Regeneration Radio with Carol Sanford).

Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, author and activist who has dedicated his life to environmental sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. He is one of the environmental movement's leading voices, and a pioneering architect of corporate reform with respect to ecological practices. His work includes founding successful, ecologically conscious businesses, writing about the impacts of commerce on living systems, and consulting with heads of state and CEOs on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy. Paul is Founder of Project Drawdown, a non-profit dedicated to researching when and how global warming can be reversed. The organization maps and models the scaling of one hundred substantive technological, social, and ecological solutions to global warming. 

Founder and executive director of Nakawe Project, a non-profit organization that focuses its efforts on the protection of marine life. Growing up by the Mediterranean Sea next to Barcelona, Regi has worked in and around the ocean for all of her life. Currently, she works both in conservation & ecoturism Baja California Sur, Mexico. With massive persistence and courage she manages to gain access to places no one else has, rendering her an unmatched researcher for this project.

Being Sapiens means it is our responsibility to protect the natural world. And the world needs your observation. The world wants you to see a new reality for the planet.

We are symbolic animals. We represent objective reality with intangible symbols that are so powerful that we transform the natural world with them. We imagine, envision, we make, we transform. That's our superpower. But if we don't protect the body of the earth, we loose the memory of the world contained in biological information flows.

Because of how we evolved as a species, we have cared more about symbols than objective reality. Throughout History, human belief systems have come and gone, temples appeared and disappeared. We can do without them, but try and do without clean food, water, and air. We can't survive without them.

We live in the solar system after all. It's not called the christian system, the muslim system, the judaic system, the capitalist system, or the liberal system, it's the freaking solar system and the sun is what powers everything that's going on in the biogeochemical flows that are Life on Earth.

In this episode, I am going to share with you my thoughts on what we can do both individually and as a species in relation to the natural world, to understand why we are where we are, and what actions we must take moving forward. This is our time.