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Rex Weyler on "Solving" Climate Change and Living Simply
219 Plays3 months ago
“I believe there is something dangerous about our entire notion of what a solution to climate change even is. We’re trying to engineer our way out of an ecological crisis that we engineered ourselves into. Growing bigger and more complex might not help. We’re going to have to humble ourselves first.”
In this episode, we were joined by the one and only Rex Weyler - activist, author, co-founder of Greenpeace, and a veteran of the ecology movement - to examine why the early momentum for ecological change slowed and how our obsession with controlling nature has led us astray. He offers a compelling critique of our collective fixation on technological fixes, arguing that it blinds us to a deeper truth: we’re part of nature, not separate from it.
Rex challenges us to rethink what living sustainably truly means and to question the myths of “green technology” and perpetual growth that define our modern world. Instead, he advocates for a life rooted in simplicity and intentional choices, where individual and community well-being align with the rhythms of the natural world. Join us as we explore Rex’s vision for a society that is rooted in an ecological lens, and learn how living simply might be the most radical—and effective—path forward.
In this episode, we cover:
- How Rex’s childhood in wild places shaped his appreciation for the natural world.
- The radical origins of Greenpeace and the famous intervention that launched “Save the Whales”
- An exploration of why the environmental movement has been - in Rex’s words - “mostly a failure.”
- Why Rex believes we lost an important concept in transitioning from an “ecological” movement to an “environmental” movement
- How our fixation on growth undermines efforts to halt climate change.
- Positive examples of communities living in harmony with nature
- The joy and restorative power of living simply
- And much more...
More about Rex:
Rex Weyler is a writer and ecologist. His books include Blood of the Land, a history of indigenous American nations, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; Greenpeace: The Inside Story, an account of the first decade of the Greenpeace organization and a finalist for the Shaughnessy-Cohen Award for Political Writing; and The Jesus Sayings, a deconstruction of first century history and finalist for the BC Book Award. In the 1970s, Weyler was a cofounder of Greenpeace International and editor of the Greenpeace Chronicles, the organization's newsletter. In the 1980s, he founded the Hollyhock Learning Centre in BC, Canada. He currently works with the International Bateson Institute as an ecology researcher and teacher. He lives on Cortes Island in British Columbia, Canada.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Keith J. Nelson.
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Transcript
00:00:02
Speaker
We are not in
Introduction to Agrarian Futures
00:00:03
Speaker
control. This is not our planet to manage. We need to manage ourselves. And the fact that we're not in control is just a fact of the natural world. like No participant in a complex ecosystem on a planet is in control of that whole ecosystem.
00:00:21
Speaker
And the evidence is overwhelming because every time we try to control it, we screw up and we create unintended consequences that then are more problems for us to solve.
00:00:43
Speaker
You are listening to Agrarian Futures, a podcast exploring a future centered around land, community, and connection to place. I'm Emma Ratcliffe. And I'm Austin Unruh. And on the show, we chat with farmers, philosophers, and entrepreneurs reimagining our relationship to the land and to each other to showcase real hope and solutions for the future.
00:01:13
Speaker
Hi everyone,
Rex Weiler's Ecological Activism History
00:01:14
Speaker
it's Emma. In this episode, we had the honor of hosting a legend in the ecological movement, Rex Weiler. In 1971, Rex founded Greenpeace, an organization that used direct action to change the international conversation about humanity's impact on our environment.
00:01:31
Speaker
In the decades since, Rex has continued the fight. He is a writer, an activist, and ecologist with unparalleled depth and wisdom. In this conversation, you'll hear his insight into what derailed the promising early days of ecological activism and what a truly effective movement could look like today. Let's jump in, starting with the origins of his activism, culminating in the founding of Greenpeace.
00:01:56
Speaker
I grew up in places that were wild. I grew up in places in Colorado and Wyoming and elsewhere that I had an opportunity to be in a lot of wild places. And one thing I think I share with a lot of people is that I've seen so many beautiful, wild places that I knew when I was younger disappear under the blade of industrialism and be turned into parking lots and shopping malls and housing developments and so forth.
00:02:27
Speaker
And it's heartbreaking. And so I was conscious of ecological issues as a student in university. And that's when I read Rachel Carson's books, Silent Spring. And I had a bit of an epiphany when I read that book, realizing that the real challenge of our age was going to be the ecological challenge because the growth of humanity in our numbers and our consumption and our extraction of resources and our waste stream was overwhelming the ecosystems all over the earth.
Foundation of Greenpeace and Early Challenges
00:03:00
Speaker
And I realized that, you know, we had it at that time in the 1970s, we had a very strong peace movement in the world, very strong women's movement, a very strong civil rights movement, and so forth. But there was not really an ecological movement in the early 1970s, late 60s, early 70s. There were some conservation groups.
00:03:22
Speaker
oftentimes founded by duck hunters and fisher people, and we needed an ecology movement. That's how we felt, many of us felt. I had i came to Canada in 1971 as a draft resistor from the United States, and I met other peace activists in Vancouver, but many of us were concerned about the fact that there was no real strong ecology movement, and we wanted to have one. We wanted to start one. And we had done some actions in protest of nuclear weapons testing and peace protests, but we wanted to do something that would speak to ecology. So
Greenpeace's Impact on the Ecology Movement
00:04:00
Speaker
we added the name green to the concept of peace, and that's how Greenpeace got its name.
00:04:05
Speaker
And so the first big international campaign that we undertook, because we had learned from Canadian author Farley Moat, we had learned about the demise of the whales, that the sea mammal populations had been reduced to about five to 10% of their peak herds by 1970. And some of the whale species, the Atlantic gray whale was extinct, and others like the right whale were on the verge of extinction. So we thought that would be a perfect global action that would be able to communicate to the public. We need to pay as much attention to caring for our ecosystems as we do to caring for ourselves and gaining peace and human justice. All those issues, peace, human justice, caring for our human community, all those movements are entirely legitimate, of course, and important.
00:04:58
Speaker
But without any ecology movement, we could ruin it all. And we were ruining in it all. And that's really what inspired and prompted Greenpeace as an organization. And then in 1975, we set sail on a small fish boat from Vancouver to confront the whaling fleets. And we found the Russian whaling fleet off the coast of California that summer in June.
00:05:24
Speaker
And in front of them, it took pictures and film and those pictures and film went all the way around the world.
Ongoing Ecological Challenges and Industrial Growth
00:05:30
Speaker
And it became, in fact, what we had set out to do was as it became a message of ecology that went around the world and contributed a lot, I would say, to the modern and ecology movement. People were out there standing up, not just for human rights, but the rights of all beings on the earth and the rights of the ecosystem to develop and exist without human interference.
00:05:54
Speaker
So ever since then, 1975 to now, it's almost 50 years later, we're still engaged in this huge challenge. Of course, we're still engaged in human rights challenges and fairness and social justice. And we haven't exactly stopped the militaries of the world either. So all these issues remain with us.
00:06:17
Speaker
Yeah. And I remember you saying when I was on Cortez Island about that initial story around the whales, you guys went out and then a lot of the newspapers were aware of what you were doing and a lot of people were ready to like welcome you when you came back. And when you did finally sell and there was, sounds like hundreds of thousands of people waiting for you on the banks of Vancouver. In those days, we could not send a photograph from the boat. We didn't have the capability of processing film, there was no internet. We couldn't take photographs and send them off. We had to come back into shore to process the photographs and send them out. So we came back into San Francisco, which was the closest large city. And we were concerned that anybody would even care. We had already announced the confrontation over the radio from the boat. And I was talking to some of our colleagues in San Francisco and telling them we were coming in when we would be in.
00:07:17
Speaker
And I was asking them, make sure there's some media there. The television stations are there. And they just laughed. They said, are you kidding me? Everybody in San Francisco knows about it. It's all over the radio. It's all over the news. People will be there. Every media in San Francisco will be there. So when our boat came into Pier 32, I believe in San Francisco in 1975, there were thousands of people there and there were hundreds of media and the boat was swamped by the media. so One thing that we realized right away was the time is right that the world was ready for this. Everyone in the world knew we had to protect our ecosystem, except of course the governments, but the public certainly knew and were ready for an ecology movement.
00:08:04
Speaker
Yeah, so I'd be curious to dig into that a little bit more, because I mean, it sounds like this is the Vietnam War era or post-Vietnam War era. Rachel Carson's book had had an impact on a lot of people. And it seems like, like you said, that the time was ripe in many ways, at least among people. And fast forward, you know, 50 years later, and we haven't really achieved any of our, you know, environmental goals. In in fact, we're probably maybe further away from it than we were even then. So what was it like in those early days? I mean, there was a lot of public support and enthusiasm and interest and Greenpeace was started and and it grew. How did it develop? And then how did the movement change while maybe not reducing the impacts on our footprint and the way that we had hoped it would? Yeah, well, one,
00:08:59
Speaker
thing, I would say that in in the 1970s, because the public was so ready for this and supportive, and governments began to change. I mean, and very quickly after that, suddenly there were environmental ministers and Green Party evolved and there was some movement in governments. And because the public was so ready for this, I felt that we would make much faster progress than we have.
00:09:28
Speaker
And so I was very hopeful that, you know, once people see what's going on and understand what's going on, they'll rise up and make this change. And to some extent they did. And here and there, we've had some improvements. We've saved some forest land in certain places. We've cleaned up some rivers in certain places. But we have not slowed down the industrial juggernaut of humanity, marching across the planet, gobbling up habitat. Species are going extinct faster now than they were in 1970 when we started.
00:09:58
Speaker
We're still losing 15, 16 million hectares of forest every year. So there's less forest than there was in 1970. There is less species. There's less wild nature. There are more toxins in our environment than there were in 1970. So we have to look back at 50 years of environmental activism and ask ourselves a question. Hmm.
Economic Systems and Ecological Solutions
00:10:23
Speaker
Well, what could we do differently or what do we need to do differently? why Why has progress been so slow? If you compare this to other movements, to the women's movement, to the peace movements, civil rights, we see similar trends and these movements take generations to come to fruition. The problem is with the ecological movement is that we may not have a lot of time to waste.
00:10:50
Speaker
our ecosystems are unraveling very quickly. And the ability of the Earth to supply decent lifestyles to 8.2 billion people right now, heading quickly towards nine or 10 billion people, and to help all those people lift themselves up out of poverty. Can the Earth afford that? Can the Earth supply us with all those resources? Can the Earth supply us with all the the farmland? and And I mean, we're mining the farmland that we have. We're not just using farmland. We're mining the carbon and the nutrients from that land. So in most agricultural regions, there's about half as much carbon in the soil as there was 50 years ago when we started the ecology movement. So no, we're not winning yet. And I would say that probably because of the ecology movement,
00:11:45
Speaker
We've slowed down some of the destruction and we've preserved a few places, but the net result is no, there's less forest, less species, more toxins, more CO2 in the atmosphere. We've had, Emma, we've had, I believe we're up to now 36 climate meetings. Since the first one, global warming meeting was held in Geneva in 1979. And since that time we've had, I believe,
00:12:13
Speaker
36 international climate meetings and from 1979 to now our carbon emissions have gone up every year, except a couple times when we had a recession or during COVID. The carbon emissions are higher now than they've ever been in human history. So what's with the meetings? What's with 45 years of meetings with not only no results, negative results?
00:12:37
Speaker
So our whole idea that we could meet as international governments and solve these problems, it's not happening. And part of the reason is not happening because actually at that level of the governments that are dominated by corporate interests, there's no intention to solve the problem. The intention is to pretend to be solving the problem while we carry on business as usual, making money.
00:13:04
Speaker
And those sort are of fundamental ideologies of our era of, you know, profit is the most important thing. Economic growth is the most important thing. If we don't change those fundamental ideals and ideologies, then we probably cannot solve our ecological crisis.
Corporate Influence on Environmental Movements
00:13:23
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. The other day we were talking to Dave Chapman, who has been very involved in the organic agriculture movement also since then the early 80s. And he was saying that within the agriculture movement, the organic movement really started as this kind of movement of idealistic people that wanted to grow food differently and you know, it was a very holistic view, you know, that was about different values and community and food and everything kind of integrated together. And that in the early 90s, as corporations came in, and as the first certification came from the government and the government got involved, it slowly got diluted and one would say probably co-opted into something much more stale and
00:14:12
Speaker
impotent, I guess you would say in certain ways. I'd be curious to hear in what way did you maybe see something similar happen within the quote unquote environmental movement and maybe even more specifically within within Greenpeace or other organizations like Greenpeace. Well, even the fact that it's now called the environmental movement is a problem. It was intended to be an ecology movement and ecology is something that is alive and living and changing and going through its processes all the time. And we are part of that. We're part of the ecology. We're not separate from it. We're not going to fix it. We have to participate intelligently in it because we're problem solvers. That's our cultures that we solve problems. We go to school and we learn how to solve problems either engineering problems or social problems and we identify problems and try to solve them. So we're trying to solve what we call the environmental problem, but we see that as environment is something that's around us. It's typically perceived of as being outside of us. The environment is out there. Ecology is something that we are inside of and our participants in.
00:15:30
Speaker
The problem with seeing the world as an environment that we're going to fix is that we're not in control. The world ecosystems are extremely complex systems and we don't really even know how it all works, let alone how we can interfere and intervene and fix it or make it better. So what tends to happen is that when you disturb a complex system, you don't necessarily get the result you want.
00:15:59
Speaker
complex systems respond to input in complex ways and unpredictable ways. So we're always facing the unintended consequences of our efforts. And most of the problems that we're trying to solve today are the results of previous attempts at solutions to earlier problems.
00:16:22
Speaker
and We wanted to grow our economy, so whenever we discover a new source of energy, we use it. Of course we we use it. It's pretty much a fundamental quality of life that living systems use all the energy they can access. And so when we discovered coal and oil, of course we used it.
00:16:41
Speaker
And we use it to solve the problems of poverty supposedly. We use it, many people just use it to get wealthy and get rich and enrich our societies, which has some value to human wellbeing. And it's understandable why we did that. But the consequences of that is that we've created this massive global ecological poly crisis. We've poured our toxic effluents into the environment.
00:17:09
Speaker
including carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but also endocrine disruptors in our bloodstreams and in the rivers and all sorts of toxins from our chemical industries and and so forth. And we've extracted the easiest to get resources from the earth. So we've extracted the biggest and best and easiest trees, the biggest and best and easiest fish, oil, minerals,
00:17:37
Speaker
rare earth, minerals, everything. We've used up the best farmland, in many cases, completely destroyed farmland by clearing it, growing food for a few years, and really draining the soil of its nutrients and carbon and so forth. And um we had a huge dust bowl in the 1930s because of that in the North America. It's just stripping down grass prairies.
00:18:06
Speaker
and turning them into farms, which then dried out and the wind comes and blows away the topsoil. So we've had the experience of completely destroying farmland with our methods because our methods are driven by growth instead of by awareness of ecosystems. I mean, if our farming methods were driven by how to effectively and sustainably produce products from a healthy productive ecosystem,
00:18:35
Speaker
and protect that ecosystem, well, we'd be in a much different position, but we're not because our our agricultural system is driven by the same things that drive the rest of our system. Profit, money, corporate power, and corporate power used to convert wild ecosystems and the entire earth into personal profit. And it it's not just the capitalist nations, by the way. I mean, look what happened in the communist nations and socialist nations.
00:19:06
Speaker
It's all about production. It's all about producing more stuff. So the farmland and the ecosystems have been destroyed in capitalists and socialist nations as well. We used to think in the early ecology movement that in a way ecology was something that could bring this whole right and left political squabbling to a close because in fact, protecting our ecosystem is neither a right wing nor a left wing issue. It's an issue of evolution.
00:19:34
Speaker
and living responsibly and well in an ecosystem without destroying it. It hasn't quite worked out that way. We haven't quite gotten rid of dualistic bickering in our political systems, but I think ecology has that power to take us on a different path politically as well.
Global Industry Impact on Ecosystems
00:19:54
Speaker
Yeah, and going back to the early days of the ecology movement, if you want to call it that then, you know, one could maybe argue that we that it seems like we've made some progress in the US, like in the time of Rachel Carson. I think that's when there were the accounts of the rivers on fire and things like that. You know, we've cleaned up a little bit what is visible to an American. But a lot of that went offshore. I don't know what presented how much we imported in the 19 50s and 60s and early 70s, but it's definitely way less than it was today. So to the extent that forests and ecosystems are more intact today in the US than they were then, which already I'm not sure that's even true, but to the extent that that's even true, that's because we send our trash to China and we have India
00:20:45
Speaker
you know, manufacture our clothes and dump the toxic waste in their rivers. So it's in a way, it's just more out of sight to us as Americans. Now, that's exactly true. That's exactly true. The US and Europe have exported their dirtiest industries. And of course, they didn't do this necessarily to clean up their ecosystems, but that was one benefit of doing that. They did it to get cheaper labor in Asia and Central and South America and Africa.
00:21:15
Speaker
and to exploit people that didn't have civil rights and get factory workers who would work cheap. So they exported their industry and especially their dirtiest industry. So now all the stuff we import from China and from throughout Asia and Africa and Central and South America into North America and Europe, all that stuff carries an ecological debt that we have simply exported to these nations.
00:21:45
Speaker
and of course exploited the Middle East for its oil. So that's why ecologist William Reese and his partner, Lockernagle, the University of British Columbia developed the um ecological footprint analysis. That analysis allows us to look at the lifestyle and consumption of any community, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, any city, any nation, look at what they're consuming and more or less roughly calculate the ecological impact of that globally. And of course that's something that the corporations and the governments of the world refuse to do. So they would rather pretend than face the reality. But of course, this global ecological crisis reality is coming home to roost, not just through the global heating caused by the carbon dioxide, but
00:22:39
Speaker
Oxens in the systems, the the destruction of fish in the oceans, none of these impacts will respect anybody's borders. So the loss of fish in the oceans, the loss of forestry, forest cover around the world, the loss of grassland, all of this stuff impacts everybody. And in fact, one of the early ecological actions was in 1972, there was a environmental meeting, first international UN sponsored global environmental meeting in Stockholm in Sweden. And this was because the Scandinavian nations were noticing that they were experiencing acidic rain due to the industrial production of Western Europe in France and Germany and elsewhere was
00:23:31
Speaker
being pushed north by the prevailing wind currents into Scandinavia. And Scandinavia had an acid rain problem that was not coming from their nations. So it was beginning to dawn on governments that ecology is an international issue. You can't solve it nation by nation, that you have to have some sort of international government cooperation. And so that first meeting was held in 1972 in Stockholm.
00:24:00
Speaker
and Earlier, you made the distinction between an environmental movement and an ecology movement. and you know From what you're saying, an environmental movement is quite clear. It's this idea of us as still separate from the world and able to kind of fix it by identifying the one problem and plugging in a solution like the way you would with a machine to kind of oversimplify. I'd be curious to hear from you, what would an ecology movement look like on the grounds?
Rethinking Human Limits and Consumption
00:24:32
Speaker
Well, first of all, an ecology movement would have to acknowledge that we are not in control.
00:24:37
Speaker
This is not our planet to manage. We need to manage ourselves. And the fact that we're not in control is just a fact of the natural world. like No participant in a complex ecosystem on a planet is in control of that whole ecosystem.
00:24:54
Speaker
And the evidence is overwhelming because every time we try to control it, we screw up and we create unintended consequences that then are more problems for us to solve. The other thing we would have to do is recognize that our human population could not just continue to grow. There are limits. The ecology implies limits. In every ecological system, every growing thing has limits to growth.
00:25:22
Speaker
The limits to growth is not just an ideology or an idea that a few people came up with in 1972. Limits to growth is a very real concept of ecology, so we would have to accept that and understand that. And even the environmental movement, so-called today,
00:25:38
Speaker
tend to avoid the human population issue because they think, well, that's unfair. You can't tell people not to have babies. And some people even say, well, it's racist because you're blaming the poorest people in the world because that's where the population is growing the fastest. But it's not the population issue is none of those things. The population issue is just the facts of ecology.
00:26:01
Speaker
no No animal can grow unrestrained in any ecosystem anywhere. and In ecology, we call it overshoot. When a successful species overshoots its habitat, it just happens all the time. Wolves will overshoot the watershed they live in, they can kill off too many deer.
00:26:20
Speaker
or elk or whatever they're eating, then the wolf population will have to decline. And then that gives the deer or the elk an opportunity to grow. This is the predator-prey relationship, which is very common, very familiar. It happens with rabbits and grass. It happens with wolves and deer. It happens with lynx and whatever they're eating, rabbits or rats and so forth. Every species has a limit to its growth.
00:26:47
Speaker
So a serious ecology movement would have to accept the limits to growth, and that includes our economy. We cannot continue to grow our economy infinitely forever and our population. And because we deny both of those, we deny that there's any limit on our population as a society. We deny that there's any limit on our economic growth, and therefore we're just full steam ahead, pedal to the metal,
00:27:14
Speaker
cruising towards more ecological disaster. And we keep thinking, well, we can clean it up. We can get smarter. We can have ah smarter economies. We can have circular economies, et cetera, et cetera. But none of these schemes work because any efficiency gain that we've ever had gets gobbled up by growth. There's twice as many human beings on earth right now as roughly as there were in 1970. We've doubled the human population.
00:27:41
Speaker
So every ecological problem we have is twice as extensive and twice as difficult today as it was in 1970, because we have twice as many people. And every one of those humans wants a better life. Who doesn't want a better life? We all want a better life.
00:27:58
Speaker
We want to be comfortable. We want our families comfortable. We want to protect our families. We want to protect our communities. And so all of these instincts to grow and protect ourselves and have better lives, these are all reasonable instincts. They're animal instincts.
00:28:13
Speaker
We want comfort. We want food. We want security. But if we ignore the fact that the Earth has limits to supply us with the resources for all of that, we will fail. When we are failing ecologically. Yeah. I'd be curious to hear your perspective on what our economy, at least here in the US, s should look like. Because I mean, you talk about everyone, you know, naturally wanting a better life for themselves. That seems pretty reasonable.
00:28:43
Speaker
if you're from the quote unquote, you know, developing world, that seems very fair too. One could maybe say that they are poor today because we stole from them, but that's kind of a separate issue. But here in in the US, the mainstream middle-class American in many ways does have a relatively comfortable lifestyle already. Not that that's everyone, not that there's not many people that are still struggling just to meet their basic needs, but
00:29:15
Speaker
We are a pretty affluent society nonetheless. So, you know, as an American looking at our economy and what we have today, like what what should it look like? How should we think about the future if we want to resolve our environmental crisis? Well, a number of things. First of all, we have to recognize that really there is no separate U.S. economy. U.S. economy is part of a global economy.
00:29:40
Speaker
100% hooked in to extracting resources from virtually every corner of the world and consuming them and dumping our waste out into the world. And that is not fair. We're not being fair to the world. We're not giving, um after World War II, the United States stated and acted as if it was going to so-called bring democracy to the whole world and bring the wonders of the US democracy and economy to the whole world. But that's not what it did.
00:30:10
Speaker
What it did is it went out and tried to control governments all over the world and extract their resources, which is exactly what it did do. And Russia has done that somewhat in its region. China has done that somewhat in Asia. And Europe has been extracting resources from the whole world since the 15th century. So these modern wealthy nations have to accept that they are global economies and they are not treating the rest of the world, the humans or the ecosystems fairly. like Secondly, if we don't end the growth ideology, there's very little hope that we can solve the ecological problems.
Vision for Future Economies
00:30:48
Speaker
We have to find a way to be stable. We have to find a way to have a stable economy. There was a wonderful book written, I believe in 1980, The Steady State Economy by Herman Daly. That's a brilliant book. There should be a course on that book in every economic system in every university in the world, but there's not.
00:31:09
Speaker
Because the economic schools are controlled by the corporations and by the governments and by the desire for consuming more and making more money. But it's also been called the steady state economy or a circular economy or in a stable economy that is not trying to grow. If you're trying to grow, growth is an ecological at a certain point.
00:31:33
Speaker
Once the species is in overshoot all of its growth is an ecological and it's crash will be harder so by continuing to pretend that we're growing we're just creating a bigger crash for someone in the future our children are grandchildren are great grandchildren it's coming the collapse of this economy is in fact coming in fact.
00:31:55
Speaker
is already well underway, as we can see in most of the world. Now, we can fairly say that for the countries that are not wealthy, that are trying to develop some wealth, the best way to help those countries is to return to them control of their own resources, their own farmland, their own oil, their own energy, their own minerals, and so forth, and the profits, if there are any, from those resources.
00:32:21
Speaker
The fact that the wealthy nations of the world have confiscated and extracted those resources from all those nations is one reason they're poor. The other reason that there's so much poverty in the world is that the Earth cannot provide North America European lifestyles for eight billion people. It's not physically possible. I mean, even if everybody agreed, which they would not agree,
00:32:47
Speaker
The governments would not agree to share the resources fairly. Even if we did that, our average lifestyle would be what we currently call on the edge of poverty. It would be very simple lifestyles. If we're going to have 8 billion people using all the current resource stream fairly, then we're all more or less living Central America, Cuban lifestyle, farming, growing some food, living modestly.
00:33:14
Speaker
possibly, you know, having a few electronic conveniences, but we're not living a North American lifestyle where we get hot showers every day and three meals a day and get to travel and have multiple vehicles and multiple homes and all of that crap. That is not possible to supply that to the whole world. And the captains of industry know that this. This is not a big secret. The governments know this as well. They talk about equality and talk about sharing.
00:33:44
Speaker
but they know they can't. And they can't do that and also maintain their current lifestyles. I mean, we're on this absolutely unsustainable, ridiculous growth mentality, and it's unecological. It won't work.
00:34:00
Speaker
And also I keep repeating myself because the problems are always the same. The problems are we cannot grow forever. We cannot consume forever. We cannot grow our populations forever. And if we don't solve these fundamental ecological mistakes, we can't solve the ecological problem. So we just go on pretending that we're going to solve global warming, which is one symptom of the ecological problem.
00:34:22
Speaker
We're going to solve global warming with electric cars and windmills and solar panels. And we've had 20 years of a boom of production of windmills and solar panels and electric cars. And our carbon emissions are higher than they've ever been. So we're not solving those problems with electric cars and windmills and solar panels. What we've done with windmills and solar panels is simply add on more electricity, more power to the human community. We haven't subtracted a drop of hydrocarbons.
00:34:52
Speaker
because of growth and because we don't really understand ecology and we think we can grow our economies forever and we cannot.
00:35:03
Speaker
I'd be curious to know if you kind of throughout your years or even today have come across any movements or our communities, whether indigenous or else, that you have learned from and that you admire for maybe having a a more holistic and hopeful view towards the world that you think that, you know, we as Westerners could learn from.
00:35:30
Speaker
Well, yeah i've I've seen lots of small examples. I've been in indigenous communities that live off the land they live on and have done so for thousands of years. I've been in rural communities where people live simply, have simple tools, fix those tools. I've been in Eastern Europe where people live very simple lives and work the land and protect their soils and build soils and try to put nutrients back into the soils.
00:35:58
Speaker
I've been around and been in intentional communities in Europe and the United States and Canada, where people are attempting to live modestly, live simply, grow food, take care of the soil, take care of each other, and live in an ecological way and live in a reasonable way. There's lots of examples of people attempting to do this. And of course, every one of those examples is struggling against a global system which mitigates against them.
00:36:26
Speaker
and sometimes often lures them away with promises of riches. So it's very difficult for all of those communities, but many of them maintain themselves. So yes, I see lots of examples. The deep challenge that we face is, in many ways, it's power, it's control, it's the super wealthy governments, oligarchs, banks, corporate leaders,
00:36:54
Speaker
whose entire lifestyle ideology is about making more money and getting richer and and acquiring wealth and oftentimes with good intentions. I mean, they want to get wealthy and protect their family and help their children and give give that wealth to their children and they feel like they're being good people and in some ways they are, but they're delusional if they think that that is sustainable. Yeah. So there are examples. There's lots of examples, Emma.
00:37:22
Speaker
And by the way, I think in the future, there will be more because the only way we're going to have an enduring human presence on earth is to live way more simply. And I think the industrial systems are going to erode and collapse. They're already eroding and collapsing. And we keep propping them up. But if we think longer than a five year plan or and to the next election in four years, or even a 15 year plan or 20 year plan, if we start thinking in terms of generations and hundreds of years and thousands of years, imagine what kind of human civilization will be here in thousands of years. Now, some people think that we're going to colonize Mars or fly off in spaceships and find other planets to live on, but I think those people are delusional. They just do not understand how important Earth's ecosystem is to everything they do every day. We don't have the energy or resources to start flying off to other planets.
00:38:19
Speaker
That's a real sad delusion of our of the people of our world today that are just obsessed with technology. I heard
Learning from Sustainable Communities
00:38:27
Speaker
a person not too long ago, a few weeks ago, very wealthy, very successful corporate person, actually say this, technology is God. Can you believe that? And I have a feeling this person actually believed that, that somehow technology was our salvation. People who believe stuff like that,
00:38:47
Speaker
just don't know the history of technology. I mean, humans have had been advancing technology for 5 million years since the first chopper was carved out from stone. And we've been advancing our technology. Our technology is part of the problem. It's part of what allows us to extract and destroy the earth and wipe out other species and take over habitats. And nothing against basic technologies. But like I said, I've been in communities where people live simply with simple tools.
00:39:16
Speaker
that they could fix and repair and build themselves. But our sort of modern computer chip world, it's not sustainable. I'm sorry to say, I mean, I know many people, they're just in love with technology and think that somehow this is going to save us. But ecologically, I think if we really understand ecology, we'll realize, no, not really.
00:39:39
Speaker
We have to learn to live simply in simple agriculture, simple taking care of ourselves, growing food, but simple agriculture includes returning nutrients back into the soils, which is very rare except on very small scales. So yeah, those are the issues that I see. And this is why I feel like the so-called environmental movement is failing to be effective because it doesn't actually like the rest of the culture doesn't really understand ecology and understand what the limits are.
00:40:10
Speaker
Well, and maybe this is naive of me, but people talk of living simply as like a sacrifice that we have to make. But we're also, we might be though in America, are some of the wealthiest people on the planet and have all sorts of computers and TVs and Netflix accounts, but we're not happy. And most people are not happy.
00:40:32
Speaker
you know, working eight hours a day or more on a computer. So I don't think this like living more simply and necessarily is a bad thing for us anyway. It's not, I agree. It's not a sacrifice. It's like we used to ride train. People used to ride trains to work. It's much more pleasant to sit in a train and ride into wherever you have to go to work. And you can read the newspaper. You can talk to your neighbors. You can sleep. You can you can eat your breakfast. You can have a cup of coffee.
00:41:02
Speaker
It's actually very relaxing to ride a train. Then we all have cars and we're all in a lineup on the highway, competing in and out of work where we're going to work for eight or 10 hours a day. It's driving people crazy. No, simple lives are not necessarily a sacrifice. I think that we will discover that the simpler our lives, you know, actually the more pleasant those lives and we will be happier.
00:41:26
Speaker
They've actually done these kinds of research where they ask people on their deathbed what's given them happiness in their life. They never say my wealth, my money. Happiness comes from friends and family and having moments of being creative and walking in the woods. People remember the times that they were on a beach somewhere or in a forest. These are the things that bring happiness or just working in your garden, being humble, being on your knees, working in your garden, helping your tomato plants be productive.
00:41:55
Speaker
dealing with your compost, building soil. I think simple lives are better and I think we will be happier. Yeah, we get enamored by our technologies and our Netflix and our entertainment, but I think psychologically, no, those things don't necessarily make us happy. They make us addicted. Well, that seems like ah a great place to end on a positive note. Yeah, and there's many other positive notes. I know that for some people hearing this little sound,
00:42:24
Speaker
depressing because we're talking about something that's not sustainable, which is human enterprise, as it's currently conducted. But I have a lot of hope long-term in people. People are basically very decent. and I've traveled a lot around the world. People are decent and will treat each other well. And I think as the power structures collapse, people will be better off.
00:42:49
Speaker
And I also trust nature. I trust wild nature. And I think that over time, when I think in terms of thousands of years and millennia to come, I trust the natural world and I trust evolution and things will unfold. It doesn't mean there won't be pain and suffering for many humans. There will be, but nature finds a way. Absolutely.
00:43:09
Speaker
Well, Rex, thank you so much for this conversation. My pleasure, Emma. And thank you so much. It's an honor to do this with you and to be able to speak to your audience and bless your hearts for the good work you that you're all doing. And we shall endure and carry on. We shall endure.
00:43:30
Speaker
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Keith J. Nelson. If you enjoyed this episode, please like subscribe and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice. As a new podcast, it's crucial for helping us reach more people. You can visit agrarianfuturespod.com to join our email list for a heads up on upcoming episodes and bonus content.