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Ep.127 Tending the Wild City with Josh Harrison
74 Plays14 days ago
Cities don’t have to fight nature—they can breathe with it.
In this conversation with artist–ecologist Josh Harrison, we explore cities as living ecosystems: cooling with plants, capturing stormwater, and designing with indigenous stewardship in mind.
We go beyond “green decor” to talk symbiogenesis, circular materials, and what shifts when we remember: I am nature, and I have a role to play.
You’ll leave with fresh language, grounded examples, and a clearer sense of how to tend your place—on the street you live.
What You’ll Learn About Ecoliving & Urban Ecology
🌱 Why urban rewilding works: evapotranspiration, shade, and soil as climate tech
🌱 How indigenous fire and tending create resilience (not chaos)
🌱 A practical look at green roofs, bioswales, and circular materials (upcycled “soil”)
🌱 The mindset reframe from “humans vs. nature” to “we are nature”
✨ Resources ✨
🌱 Expanded Show Notes
🌱 Leaf Island (green roof & circular soil innovation)
🌱 Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild
🔗 Connect & Explore More
🌿 Website
🌿 Contact
🌿 Shop Eco-Conscious Partners
Socials
📸 Instagram
📘 Facebook
💼 LinkedIn
▶️ YouTube
🎵 Credits
Opening + Closing music by @Cyberinga and Poinsettia
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Reconnect with Plant Wisdom
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, hello, hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Reconnect with Plant Wisdom. It's me, Tigreya Gartenia. Oh, I can't wait for you to hear this conversation. I am going to give you two fair warnings. One, um the very beginning part was maybe a little bit of technical, but trust me that um it's super interesting because this is about how technology makes it into the city.
00:00:23
Speaker
Nature inspired technology in particular makes it into the cities. And these are really some of the conversations we need to have because Josh has the right attitude necessary in order for us to not greenwash, but instead to look for solutions that that really are going to change
How does technology merge with nature without greenwashing?
00:00:38
Speaker
the paradigm. But more than anything, in the second half of this of this conversation, we really get into the meat and bones of who Josh Harrison is and why we need more people like him, people who are merging indigenous wisdom, people who have in their core
00:00:54
Speaker
the understanding that we are nature, that I am nature, and that as a being of nature, I have a role to play in the ecosystem in which I live. I don't just take from the ecosystem, I actually give, and I give through fire, and I give through cutting, and I give through a whole series of things.
00:01:10
Speaker
And when I approach it with that way, then the whole ecosystem, plants, animals, you know, humans, which are animals, bacteria, protozoa, everybody, everybody works well together. And I just I love these types of conversations because to see somebody like him.
00:01:28
Speaker
who has it so deep it within him that it's almost like you have to pull it out in order to recognize it. But this is the conversation we want to be having when we're talking about fire, when we're talking about drought, when we're talking about building cities. We want people who have this same level of foundation.
Josh Harrison's Background and Work
00:01:48
Speaker
So please stick around for the entire thing, because I guarantee you will walk out of it with a completely new perspective on life. So with that, I leave you to episode 127, Tending Wild City.
00:02:02
Speaker
tending the wild city
00:02:05
Speaker
Welcome to Reconnect with Plant Wisdom. I'm your host, Tigria Gardenia, nature-inspired mentor, certified life coach, and the founder of the Naturally Conscious Community. For over a decade, I've been known as a world ambassador for plant advocacy, working closely with plants to share their practical wisdom to help you consciously embody the elements of life that nourish your evolution.
00:02:27
Speaker
In this podcast, I delve into ancient and modern knowledge from biology to spirituality about the wondrous ways of plants. Together, we'll explore how ecosystem thinking helps you overcome limiting beliefs, understand the true nature of relationships, and live an authentic, impactful life.
00:02:47
Speaker
Josh, you were one of those people that um I wasn't sure you were going to be a great guest for the podcast, I'll be honest, when you and I first spoke. And then you and I had a conversation, I think five minutes in I was like, oh my goodness, I have to have this person on the podcast.
00:03:04
Speaker
ah Your like experience in wisdom is just, like for me, mind-blowing. So before we get into all of that, I'd love for you to tell everybody who is Josh Harrison.
Leaf Island's Urban Cooling Innovations
00:03:17
Speaker
Well, thank you, Degrilla. My name's Josh Harrison, as you said, and um I have a, wear a number of hats and I guess my primary hat is I direct a, an art science collaborative that looks at ecological thinking. It's called the Center for the Study of the Forest Mejeure.
00:03:35
Speaker
It's a complicated name, but we use it to sort of look at the many things we've done as humans over the last 500 years. that have alienated ourselves from the lives in which we live and have all kinds of knockoff effects.
00:03:49
Speaker
Like what has burning 200 million year old fossil fuel done in all kinds of ways we don't really expect. And some of those are very much in the landscape. Some of those are very much in the social structures that we live in. And some of those, we just don't really know and have to explore.
00:04:06
Speaker
um So that leads me into a lot of different parts of the universe. And I've had the fortune and experience of having done a bunch of different things, so it's a good intersection. As part of that, I also run a company called Leaf Island. And Leaf Island is based on the understanding that the planet's major way we cool things is the power of plants to to take the CO2, turn it into oxygen, and emit steam, water vapor, as part of that.
00:04:38
Speaker
And that's how the planet largely cools itself. It's actually much more important than CO2 and the atmosphere and the global energy accounting that we all have to do, not the limited energy accounting that we rush to.
00:04:54
Speaker
So looking at that, we you know I look at cities as prototype urban spaces that have metabolisms. They also breathe. They also intake. They also output.
00:05:08
Speaker
And how do we bring this the natural systems that allow life to survive into the urban fabric that's often in recent centuries been built without much regard to the world. Older cities, of course, had a much different respect to the environment because they didn't realize that they could go off on this energy
Can cities mimic natural ecosystems through biomimicry?
00:05:28
Speaker
diversion that they have. So they actually had to work with the cities. they So Iran has 4,000-year-old cities that lived in the hot weather and managed to be okay because they understood
00:05:38
Speaker
how to cool things. They also understood understood how to bring water in from far away. The Romans did the same. Many, many civilizations have done tremendous work at living and surviving in places that they wouldn't ordinarily imagine you could.
00:05:57
Speaker
And we have a lot to learn from them. So how can we bring those two things back? So that's a little bit about me. And there was the there was exactly the beginning of our conversation because on the one hand, I am totally fascinated being a biomimic myself and having, you know, all of this love. I used my first kind of foray, you might say, when I started to get into more nature-inspired mentoring,
00:06:20
Speaker
was thinking about it from the perspective of nature in the city and how is it that we start to think of our cities in new ways and think of them as forests and think of them as these living ecosystems that need to be um constantly kind of in flux and in movement and yet at the same time have a series of stability and security and all kinds of different aspects to it.
00:06:42
Speaker
And then I was worried that I'm like, oh, my God, we're going to go geek out. We're going to end up in the super technical conversation that everybody is going to go off. And I have a feeling that is going to happen somewhat.
00:06:53
Speaker
But then as we were talking, you have this beautiful and I said it to you right before I hit the record button. And I want to reiterate it. There is so much greenwashing in the world.
00:07:04
Speaker
that I find that unfortunately, some of the people who are involved with companies that work on projects kind of the way that you mentioned it, really end up becoming so focused on the technology that they lose sight of the the real piece of it, which is yes, in one part,
00:07:22
Speaker
technoly technologically or physically, the urban space working more like a natural ecosystem. But there's also the connection piece that we kind of, to a certain extent, in my opinion, and this is why i love, you know, biomimicry instead of just bio utilization other aspects, because there's that ethos around it of the idea of how do I help people to reconnect to the natural world. And if I can do both at the same time, it's kind of a win-win. So it's not just let me model biology and yes, I'm going to get more efficiency and maybe I'll get less pollution and I'll get less sound noise and I'll get... all those beautiful benefits that we definitely need.
00:08:06
Speaker
So it's like better than nothing. But if we do do it with an ethos around it, we add the extra benefit of helping people feel again without having to intellectually tell them anything, that they are they are nature, that they are back into a natural ecosystem.
Innovative Use of Upcycled Styrofoam for Green Roofs
00:08:23
Speaker
It's almost like your body automatically starts to remember from the mirroring around you.
00:08:28
Speaker
And when you and I started talking, I felt like that like that was the part we started to go down because you have a lot of experience with that. Like that is part of your ethos.
00:08:40
Speaker
And I'd love for you to kind of share more about how did you get into Leaf Island? Like, I feel like it went through that route. It didn't just come from I need to do this technological thing.
00:08:53
Speaker
Oh, well, sure. I'm happy to to you share it. So Leaf Island came out of a long friendship that I have with one of those great mad geniuses, an inventor named Paul Mankiewicz.
00:09:09
Speaker
um And Paul
00:09:13
Speaker
is a man who was himself a student of one of the great, he has his own long background that's probably take more than the podcast to go through. But ah he was among many things, a biology student of ah of a woman named Lynn Margulis, who is or someone if you don't know about, should.
00:09:34
Speaker
go Go look her up. If you don't know who Lynn Margulis is, definitely go look her up. like Okay, so he was one he was a long-time, very close student and associate.
00:09:45
Speaker
And she, among other many things, co design they co-developed the Gaya Hypothesis with James Lovelock, who sadly only died ah last year, I believe.
00:09:57
Speaker
Yep. So... um So Paul's been in the business. He um was a part of a group of mercurial folk who designed the first green roof in New York City on the Church of St.
00:10:15
Speaker
John the Divine, which is an appropriate place to think about the first green roof with some yeah people who have been all over the environmental sphere since then in the tail end of the 70s during that first ecological push that we had. So he's, you know,
00:10:32
Speaker
an OG of this particular space, I guess. um And paul and i Paul and I were chatting at one point and he brought up about, you know, and he brought up um a competition that the city of New York was having um to do something about the Heat Island effect on at the Hunts Point Market, which is the central food market for New York City.
00:10:55
Speaker
which was once a market like many of the markets in Europe, now is a giant bunch of warehouses in the Bronx. And they're enormous, big, flat warehouses, million plus square feet each. And it's a they're stuck in the middle of a part of the Bronx that has a bunch of really working class housing projects.
00:11:17
Speaker
And there's a lot of truck traffic and there's it's both and there's a lot of Street accidents because trucks and people don't really coexist very well. And it's got a lot of it's got all of the problems of the urban the urban megalopolis stuck together. and Air pollution, heat, you know food debt even though it's the biggest food market, the actual community is in a food desert. So lots of things to look at.
00:11:42
Speaker
And so he Paul says to me, I bet we should enter this contest. I bet we could do something about it. I said, okay, let's talk about it. And Paul introduced me to one of the several things he's done over his life, which was this idea of
Origin and Challenges of Leaf Island
00:11:58
Speaker
a soil product he'd invented out of um upcycled styrofoam.
00:12:04
Speaker
And I said, okay, Paul, I'm here. I'm listening. what Tell me more. said, well, so first off, of course, styrofoam is about 90% of most landfills.
00:12:15
Speaker
Most of it gets dumped. We don't know what to do with it. It's an enduring product. So why not take advantage of the fact that we don't know what to do with it? Why don not take advantage of the fact that it's sort of
00:12:27
Speaker
Nature isn't about waste. Waste is a completely human concept. Nature is about every output has an input. So what are we going to do with this output? In addition to that, what are we going to do with the millions of tons, literally, of glass, concrete, rubble that that cities just like New York, which is a basically still a masonry city, have.
00:12:50
Speaker
to you know generate every day? Why are we sticking it around to bury it somewhere else? What can we do with it? So that sort of germinated this concept of this circular process where a city consumes, where a city takes advantage of its own output in some manner.
00:13:06
Speaker
And what can we do with that? And how can you turn that from a ne from an externality and a negative thing into a positive good and a positive virtue? so we um And of course, using styrofoam as a soil structure allows you to do a lot of things as you're creating an artificial soil substitute.
00:13:25
Speaker
and that art And that is to say styrofoam is not compressible. you can You can grind it into different categories You can coat it with organics. And then you end up having a soil that's not only lightweight, its structure allows the mycorrhizome layer to really flourish. It allows all kinds of air and generally nutrient transfer to happen in all kinds of ways that turn out to be way more efficient than standard soil at a much lighter weight.
00:13:53
Speaker
And that weight is so light that the, and wow we're going to geek out a little bit here, but is that the- um told you it would happen. I knew it would happen. The wet load, that is to say, when the saturated load of about a six inch layer of, of my five inch layer of gas oil is loaded and it's then grown with a generally dense enough plant capacity, that is to say, to create what they call complex- green roof, you know, intensive green roof, which is the kind that delivers the ecological benefits because they're two essentially kinds, slight segue.
00:14:30
Speaker
In the green roofing world, the most of the green roofs that we see are big, large expanses of green. And if you look closely, they're largely, very commonly, a a plant like sedum, which is a hardy desert plant,
00:14:45
Speaker
It doesn't take much water. It doesn't take much care. logical sense. However, all those things that make it easy to care for are so are limitations on its ecological services that it provides and its ecological value. So you end up trading, and I don't want to call this green washing per se, but green roofing, let's call it. like That's why the concept of a of an of an intensive green roof was really invented and designed. That is to say, if you can actually bring a living meadow up into a roof, then you can actually get the benefits of having a living meadow. Yeah, and let's just just, you correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the problems with having a green meadow is, of course,
00:15:31
Speaker
that becomes heavy. And when you have it on a surface, because soil is heavy, then the plants themselves, the roof, and then add water, because the good thing about it is that they absorb and they take and they use the water and they move the water in a different way. But that also adds to the weight. So structurally speaking, a green roof has to be thought of very differently than just let me create a normal roof. And then let me throw some green stuff on top of it. It doesn't work that way.
00:15:58
Speaker
Exactly. that's exactly the That's exactly why styrofoam turns out to be so and such an ingenious part of the solution, because two things happen. get Getting back to the geeking out, that same square foot or of of soil with a styrofoam-based soil, like air soil,
00:16:19
Speaker
It turns out to weigh less than, with water, with plants, less less than 25 pounds per square foot. the roofing The minimum roofing standards for most roofs in the United States that are built to code is 30 pounds per square foot.
00:16:35
Speaker
So suddenly you have a soil that allows you to be to to go to building morphologies that wouldn't normally be able to stand up to what would be 80 to 100 pounds per square foot under normal conditions and require massive structural work.
00:16:53
Speaker
or be built to spec. You know, obviously you can build to any level of roof. The roof is, you know, generally speaking, not a load bearing part of a building. So most people get away with building roofs that are to their minimum standards.
00:17:08
Speaker
If you come here to Italy, basically you will notice that roofs are just a few shingles on the top or like some stones on the top and that's it. I mean, it's it's almost transparent. You can look through them and that's the way that they're built. i was like, how how does that work? But apparently they work.
00:17:26
Speaker
right Sometimes for a century. Exactly. Sometimes for a century, but you can't put any load on them. Right. and So so so that's where the that's where we sort of created a space.
00:17:38
Speaker
Here we can have a way to bring intensive plants to a lot of different spaces. And obviously the ideal space for a green roof from an engineering point of view is a big, flat, open space that that makes a memory basically lifts the meadow up, whatever, 30 feet, 60 feet, 90 feet, 200 feet, whatever whatever
What are the future shifts in sustainable business practices?
00:17:59
Speaker
that does.
00:18:00
Speaker
um so So, of course, we submitted something. And and the other piece of something like putting green back into a an urban desert is you bring all the benefits of that back in. And what are some of the other benefits of bringing plants in? Well, if you're in an area with a lot of truck traffic and a lot of or industrial traffic, you're generating an awful lot of air pollution. You're adding an awful lot of but microparticles. Well, plants are really beautifully and designed for microparticles to adhere to.
00:18:33
Speaker
So they suck in, the so particularly the sub 2.5 micron dimensional particles that cause most of the pulmonary damage. And again, what is the biggest health issues in some of these communities is pollution-induced asthma. so Right.
00:18:49
Speaker
So you're in a situation where you have a lot multi-hyphenate health benefits. the Another thing that the cities have, and we'll probably want to talk more about this in a larger scale, is cities in the United States and much of the world have sewage systems that were thought of by engineers in the 70s and redone. And those engineers basically understood that they needed to clean up toilet water.
00:19:18
Speaker
and maybe some sink water and some other water. And so they designed sewage systems that were basically the compare. They counted up the number of toilet sinks and trees and created an estimate and then built capacities of that plus some safety margin.
00:19:32
Speaker
Well, in New York, that safety margin is about 10%, which translates into about 7 tenths of an inch of rain an hour. And if you have more than 7 tenths of an inch of rain an hour, you're overflowing the system by design.
00:19:47
Speaker
And that's pretty much the model in most American cities, because that's the model EPA ah encouraged when the Clean Water Act, which is a brilliant and wonderful act in many ways, but was limited by the but the understanding, the engineering understandings of the time. so they're yeah So we don't have to do it that way, but we chose to it that way. It's already expensive to build these things, so why overbuild them from the point of view of back vats?
00:20:17
Speaker
So what that means is that anytime it rains heavily, you know your your sewage systems are over are over so are overwhelmed. So what else do green roofs do? They absorb water. what What else does styrofoam-based green roofs do?
00:20:30
Speaker
They're lighter than water, so they float, which allows you to create these basically holding tanks. So when the water, because your plant cover then can, but if it's in a container, it can actually rise as water goes underneath it. So you can create not only on roofs, but you can put this as much more, you can replace what they what they do now primarily is to solve water drainage issues is they create these things called swales. Swales are basically holes in the ground that cold water and bioswales are holes in the ground that hold water that have plants.
00:21:10
Speaker
Otherwise they're concrete holes in the ground. well The biggest expense in a swale, the way we currently understand it, is you have to excavate. And if you're in an urban area, excavation is complicated by, generally speaking, there's something there and maybe there's something underneath it and maybe there's people around it and all these other things that complicate you going in there with a big industrial piece of equipment and knocking a big hole in the ground and letting water flow into suddenly you put a, suddenly your swale doesn't have to be underground, but can be above ground and can be put together by anything from, you know, swimming pool, above ground swimming pool to blocks, to any kind of material you can use with a geotextile liner underneath.
00:22:00
Speaker
and can hold as much water as you design into it, then suddenly you have an opportunity and you can put it together in a matter of days, not a matter of months. And it doesn't require excavation, so it doesn't need a lot of permitting.
00:22:13
Speaker
um So you have this opportunity to capture water in all kinds of ways. So you have this ability to capture a stormwater, which is, for example, in a city like New York, which is relatively forward-thinking for the United States.
00:22:26
Speaker
They're in a position of demanding over the next 15 to 20 years that all construction manage every inch of rain that falls on the roof. That's one of their ways they're dealing with the sewage problem, saying, okay, well, we're going to make you the landowner responsible for capturing the water that flows on your land because here're so we love private property so much here.
00:22:48
Speaker
Own it. It falls on your land. Take care of it. So, there's another opportunity to sort of look at these
Integrating Indigenous Knowledge in Ecology
00:22:56
Speaker
things. So we went through this process, you know, which is long, you know, a long and shaggy dog story about how we got to, to leave filing went through this process. And then we actually won this competition so far. So good.
00:23:08
Speaker
Then COVID happens, everything breaks down, the whole city goes, and of course, nothing went on with Hunts Point. It still is, uh, In the talking stages, they're still interested, but of course, nothing nothing particular went on because all of the, then the mayor, then we've had since two elections and the current mayor is not particularly interested in all of this. But so we're, know, we're working against that particular set of political issues.
00:23:34
Speaker
um But so we realized that we had the formation of a company. So we then created Leaf Island based on sort of this competition that we won but couldn't really do anything with because the international COVID virus decided to take over the city. and Exactly.
00:23:54
Speaker
So here's a question, though. I'm sure people are asking, but it's styrofoam. Like you're encouraging plastic.
00:24:03
Speaker
It's a really good question and we get it in a lot of different ways. And let me just address it. for yeah The biggest answer is styrofoam's here and it's not going away. And most of it's already in landfills.
00:24:14
Speaker
And a big chunk of it ends up in water, in pieces granulated and particulated and floats on water. and Styrofoam is pretty stable. That's one of the reasons it blends up in landfill. But it does break down under certain kinds of heat and certain kinds of chemicals.
00:24:34
Speaker
So if you can keep it away from me heat, and sun and sun is one of the things that can degrade styrofoam over time.
00:24:43
Speaker
But if you put it if you take that styrofoam and you park it somewhere that's durable and stable and where it's not exposed to sunlight, then it's essentially stored indefinitely. And if that storage actually provides ah positive benefits, then what you've done is you've taken something that you've been forced to bury and take care of and turned it into a useful artifact of social and human life. So that's the general principle of upside.
00:25:12
Speaker
the specifics is styrofoam going to leak into the water into the air atmosphere, water is going to je degrade and create off microplastics. Not if it's covered. And not if it's protected from the sun. And under a gay soil conditions, the styrofoam itself is put into a mix where it's in fact covered in various kinds of internal films, organic films, and is not exposed to sunlight. There's a plant layer above it.
00:25:39
Speaker
There's an natural insulating effect that's going on in all kinds of ways. So it's not exposed to enormous amounts of heat and light. and it And it does not pass the plant root barrier and it's not entered into the plants. It's not entered into.
00:25:54
Speaker
So it's a pretty state. The reason it's stable turns out to be valuable as part of its thing. It's not, it doesn't take degrade. It doesn't break down. We're keeping it from,
00:26:06
Speaker
It doesn't create micro additional microplastics and particles because it's been stabilized. Whereas it were in a landfill, it would do all of those things. All right. I'm going ask any a challenging question, if you don't mind. You can, of course, you know politely decline. But here's my challenging question.
00:26:21
Speaker
So I get all that. And I think that you're absolutely right. Like for the plastic that we have today, the styrofoam that we have today, then having these types of solutions are super important. But we do know and that there is that risk that...
00:26:34
Speaker
Once you create kind of and a life for it, then companies that produce it say, oh, I don't need to work on other kinds of solutions for not introducing this amount of plastic into the world because of it.
00:26:49
Speaker
So I'm super curious, being the fact that all of you that are involved are people with that sort of, and we're going to get deeper into your personal connection. But the fact that you work with somebody who both, you know, thought Lovelock and Margulies came into the conversation makes my little heart flutter because one of the best compliments I ever had from somebody was a ah scientist that I worked with who said that I was one of the people helping to prove Lovelock's theory of, the you know, Gaia theory. So I was like, oh, I love it, you know, from the work that I was doing. So I have a very special place for Lovelock's work. in And so it's it just makes me very happy.
00:27:27
Speaker
But that being said, being the fact that you are people who have this kind of focus and that you're not just doing it to like, you know, whatever, just solely make money, let's say it in that way, even though making money is not a bad thing. But I'm just saying like you are doing it for a greater good.
00:27:43
Speaker
Do you find as you're building a business in this sort sort of age relating to this world that you do want to build in kind of a natural exit strategy into your like,
00:27:55
Speaker
you know, is part of also the work thinking of, okay, this is how I'm dealing with this styrofoam problem. But in a way that I know that over time, hopefully we will have less and less styrofoam, maybe as we go to mushroom styrofoams and other kinds of styrofoams that break down.
00:28:12
Speaker
And therefore I'm not building all, I'm not putting all my eggs into this basket in the sense of this should be a company that lives forever and ever, but this is maybe an interim company, or I'm also thinking already of how do I deal with compostable you know solutions or other kinds of solutions that are kind of come into that plastic world. Like, do you find that that's also part of the conversation and an important, I know you're still at the early stages, but is that an important part of the conversation?
00:28:42
Speaker
um I don't think that's a hard question at all. I think it's an essential question. Thank you for saying that. But for many people, it would be hard. But, you know, I'm glad that you said that. No, but I mean, i mean that's that's the, you know, what you're basically talking to is how do you create a a stable system and a steady state system?
00:29:01
Speaker
um So, and it's a problem for the all businesses that use and consume money. living elements or any kind of elements have to face. So I call it armadillo issue.
00:29:18
Speaker
You have a, you know, your snake's swallowing an armadillo at a certain point. You've got this thing, but you know, what else happens after that? Um, The first answer is that we're so far away from the demand and the supply and the oversupply and the excess that it's not a short-term issue in any realistic sense for this.
00:29:40
Speaker
Which is sad but true. yeah Sad but true. Right. The larger questions are very real. um And the the answer is to find other substitutes down the road for that deliver the same benefits. It's not tied to a material that happens to be a really useful source material should this thing succeed at the kind of scales where these things would be relevant.
00:30:06
Speaker
um And of course, you know part of the research is, well, the first element of research is going to be to move from a unique artisanal development, which is where green technology still is. It's something that you do as a signature, as a showcase, so because you can want to and you can afford to do it, um to something that's actually scalable, which means it's got to be accessible in a mass-produced, low-cost-of-entry kind of way. And we can talk about the particular Leaf Island approach to that in a moment.
00:30:43
Speaker
But all environmental issues that are dealing, like, for example, mass timber, which is another really important product where you're taking some of the overgrown forests in the West in California, which is right now suffering massive, massive burnout based on the fact that we've so basically suppressed the natural processes that those forests have grown up with, which thinned themselves with human help. I mean, the native people and in most of the world that had Mediterranean climates, Italy included, it
00:31:17
Speaker
ah used to trim their forests. Now in Europe, a lot of that was done by the charcoal cleaners, you know, which is something that we no longer use charcoal. And as a result, nobody's there collecting the twigs and the branches and the small off wood and the brush and the scrub and turning into a fuel source, which is another version of styrofoam, by the way, another version of the styrofoam conversation.
00:31:42
Speaker
um
00:31:44
Speaker
And therefore the forest in Europe were not subject to the catastrophic burning that they are currently being subject to because they that particular niche in the social human environmental ecology and disappeared as a process of industrial evolution.
00:32:01
Speaker
In the West, it disappeared because of settler colonialism. We came in and we we basically, if we didn't kill off the people who live there, we forbid them from practicing the kinds of historical,
00:32:14
Speaker
techniques and processes. you know California has a little worse than other parts of the West because the Spanish came up to California 150 years before the gold rush. So therefore,
00:32:26
Speaker
The fire suppression started when the missionaries came and rounded people up into concentration camps. And if you look at California's native management of forest, where does the forest fire management endure?
00:32:41
Speaker
Well, in the areas north of the Spanish occupation.
Human Roles in Ecosystems: Past and Present
00:32:44
Speaker
So north of Sacramento and the Sacramento River, you know, the Yurok and the Hulak and some of the other tribes up there are the ones that have maintained consistent understanding of traditional fire management. And they're the ones, in fact, now teaching all the other native tribes and getting through this remarkable rebirth that's happening there. But the question of the snake and the armadillo is about if you take that wood And instead of burning it, you selectively landscape the land, which is now starting to be part of the process there,
00:33:18
Speaker
um and park it into buildings. You've done a really smart, and those bar buildings themselves then become the kind of social housing that California and much of the country desperately needs, multi-story transit-oriented housing that's small enough to be community but large enough to be dense, et etct cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and affordable, all these things, you've created a lovely circular economy, but you also have an endpoint because you're not going to be creating tree plantations.
00:33:47
Speaker
So how do you, so you have a huge oversupply now. You have basically 21 million acres down million acres, And you've got to take a million acres of that off of the fire targets a year if you're going to actually have any forest left.
00:34:05
Speaker
That's a huge amount. We're nowhere near that kind of level of of forest management, but at least they're thinking about it. But in 25, 30 years, you're going to have done that. And now you're back to a maintenance growth.
00:34:18
Speaker
So that's about 5% of what you're taking off now. It's not 70%, it's not 50%. So that's an entirely different industry. So you have to think about what that is.
00:34:30
Speaker
And in the West Coast, that's one industry. And in the Southeast, we have a lot more rain and you have a different forest mix. They are thinking about turning set that's much of the Southeast into giant forest plantations to take over from the paper industry. So how do you so that's a whole other conversation.
00:34:47
Speaker
And if we take that notion of mass timber and we take it in to other parts of the world, where are we managing the forest to do that? And how are we doing that?
00:34:58
Speaker
So these are really big, important questions of not just where we are now, but where are we going to be in 25 or 30 years? And how are we going to make that all work? And do we eventually transition from forestbased from tree-based products ah for industrial structures to hemp-based, to bamboo-based, to kinds of really short-term plant growth where you can actually create plantations and create different things? I don't know. that's what That's a big question that people are thinking about.
00:35:29
Speaker
But just one quick minute, I want to share one of our eco-conscious business partners because these also are the businesses that are building the world you want to live in. The first time i connected with a plant and actually received a response, I got chills.
00:35:45
Speaker
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00:36:04
Speaker
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00:36:20
Speaker
Check out the show notes and click on the link to learn more about the SHIFT Network. Consider enrolling in a course or two. Their programs are the perfect complement to your evolving, naturally conscious life.
00:36:32
Speaker
Yeah. and so there's a few different elements that you brought up here that I want to want to make sure i capture them all, because I think sometimes and if you're not in this world, kind of as much as you are and even myself, I'm feeling myself sucked back into a world that I had been in for a while when I was working on EU projects and I was thinking more biomimicry perspectives and all the kind of like nature in the city projects that I had been working on.
00:36:59
Speaker
I get really excited about the way I know it's not always easy, maybe for somebody, some of you that are listening to hear what Josh is saying with the same eyes or the same ears that I hear it, because what I hear is very much somebody who is so immersed into the idea of human as one element of nature, I have hands, therefore what am I good to do? I'm good to deal with fire, I'm good to cut.
00:37:27
Speaker
I have a series of things that I as human, but as a being of nature, am able to do. And if I carry out my role in the natural world, and it's only something that I started to understand better when I moved here to Italy, because as you said, the sacred woods temple here in Dhammenhur for example,
00:37:47
Speaker
was when we took it over that piece of land in around the 1990s. Basically, it was around 1992 when we started actively working with the forest.
00:37:58
Speaker
And it was a forest that is mainly a chestnut forest because a duchess in the 1800s had planted chestnuts, the 1700s. had planted chestnuts because this is an area that like there was a massive famine and chestnuts are really good brain food, you know, really great nutrition. Plus the poles of the trees, they're very straight. They grow very strong. They get stronger as they dry, made it very good for vineyards and for other kinds of uses. So there was this...
00:38:27
Speaker
influx of chestnuts, of European chestnuts here. At the same time, chestnuts are very acidic, so they kill off the underbrush of the area. And so you have a forest when it's left to its own devices where, you know, you have lots of chestnuts Birch and oak who grow very, very, very thin, very tall, not steady at all because they're trying to get sunlight and an underbrush that's basically dead because the acidity kills everything else off.
00:38:58
Speaker
Why do I say all this? Because as human beings, our job was how do we bring back the diversity of this area? And given the fact that it is a human plantation to a certain extent, like humans planted this, but we don't want to do the rose perspective.
00:39:14
Speaker
We want to selectively cut And that's been our firewood for years, right? Selectively cut in order to ensure the health, the overall health and replant in our case, because of course the chestnuts were introduced.
00:39:28
Speaker
So we needed to replant in order to recreate the biodiversity that needed to be done. Of course, as humans, sure, nature could do some of this, but I am nature. And therefore,
00:39:40
Speaker
If you go in with the mindset that is not, like you said, clear cut, which is one of the biggest problems of the timber industry that we know. if you have, if you think of yourself as like, i'm going to come in and clear cut, then you're going to, yes, you're acting as an intruder, as a colonizer, as, you know, something destructive for no use.
00:40:00
Speaker
But if instead I come into that and I say, forest, I'm going to, I am your arms. I am your fire source because I can manage, move fire in a very specific way.
00:40:12
Speaker
i am your cutting saw. Tell me where to go. What do you need? Right. And you form that relationship. And I stepped back in to the forest as a being of nature.
00:40:24
Speaker
And I say, tell me what you need. Now i am a connected i am acting as part of the ecosystem. I am my own piece in the overall ecosystem services, and I no longer am thinking of ecosystem services on my behalf, but I am performing ecosystem services for that.
00:40:44
Speaker
And so I think that the way that you're describing stuff, which, you know, relating to how do I instead of thinking of styrofoam or instead of I'm thinking of clear cutting or instead of thinking of that, I'm instead thinking of how do I use what the force offers? Because, again, every input has an output and every output has an input, you know, type of perspective.
How does fire management reflect indigenous practices?
00:41:06
Speaker
And I then become in relation, which means I build in relation to the space. I build based on what is readily available to me, what makes sense. I don't I create to in to enhance that diversity and enhance the relationship rather than and I think that that's.
00:41:26
Speaker
It's so ingrained in you in the way that you probably because of the indigenous relationships that you've had. It's so ingrained that that sort of circular way of thinking, you can I can hear it that it just sort of is the way that you think about doing things and you think of it as a mass scale.
00:41:44
Speaker
But but that's a relationship. That's you. And I just want to call it out because it is a beautiful thing and we don't hear it very often for people who are in the types of industries that you're in unfortunately.
00:41:56
Speaker
and And again, I've worked with a lot of different people in the building and in in forest management and a whole series of things. And when you hear it, it's so it's so beautiful, to be honest, to hear how somebody.
00:42:09
Speaker
is thinking human because I am human, but at the same time as a being of nature. And these are the paradigms that I think we're missing. We don't have a lot of examples of when people start acting in that way. Does that make sense, what I just said?
00:42:27
Speaker
it makes total sense. And I think it's beautifully stated. um I would highly recommend you read ah book, if you don't know it already, called Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson.
00:42:40
Speaker
Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson. Who describes precisely what you're talking about in terms of a close examination of California indigenous ah practices.
00:42:52
Speaker
And she was the first person to actually, ah from a Western scientific perspective, to analyze the ecological values of native behavior and forest management. And she made very strongly the case that this is really stewardship.
00:43:12
Speaker
And ah i I would only add to what you said that all living organisms of any kind interact with the outside world that they're in.
00:43:25
Speaker
It's just, you can't. Everything that breathes oxygen can had some kind of an impact around it. And they all manipulate the environment socially to their own individual and mutual advantage.
00:43:38
Speaker
Why? Because otherwise we don't have evolution. And then if you follow with, you know, Lynn Margulis, we mentioned earlier, her one of her many great insights was that evolution is not necessarily competition.
00:43:56
Speaker
evolution and she um she coined a term called symbiogenesis yep where in fact ah elements in nature collaborate and that that collaboration is often more efficient and effective than what we would consider a survival of the fittest might be so We humans are part of that. And humans, from the first time the bipeds came out of the Alduvai Gorge and out of the, you know, from the forest into the savannah, they were working with fire.
00:44:30
Speaker
Fire for food, fire for land management. Much of the Great Plains, whether it's the Pampas and... ah yeah South America or whether it's the Great Plains in the United States, as you look back on it, there's a fire inflected thing but because people learned how to burn the plains off to ah provide better forage for the buffalo or the other large grazing animals that came through. Those herd animals in turn so created the, with their hoofs and their manure, created this new ecology where they everybody benefited, you know the the the local inhabitants, wherever they were, they got food, they got shelter, they got all the animal products they needed, the yeah the landscape benefited from the various interactions that happened.
00:45:14
Speaker
And in the forests, in most of the world, they emerged, the latest version of forests emerged after the last ice age. In the West Coast, okay, so what else happened after the last ice age? And I'm just saying in the West Coast of the United States, but you can imagine similar things everywhere else.
00:45:34
Speaker
Well, the population went from thin to rather robust. lotsson yeah There were people there before during the ice ages, but once the ice started retreat.
00:45:44
Speaker
So people and forests arrived at the same time. And people's engagement with forests arrived. And what is the best, my best understanding of indigenous science is it's based on several things together. It's based on and enormously close understanding over generations of landscape.
00:46:04
Speaker
Very, very, very clear understanding. At the same time, that understanding, that intuition, that it has to be communicated consistently so that multiple generations down the line, they still maintain that same basic understanding.
00:46:20
Speaker
And then the third piece of that is how does that happen? That happens through culture, through religion, through society. That happens through... This idea that there are larger things than the individual that are more powerful and are bounding forces in how you go. whether there's And they have to be spiritual. They have to be otherworldly because they have to transcend your basic interaction, which ah has to and allow for people's selfishness, short-sightedness, all kinds of things that we do as humans that are not particularly...
00:46:51
Speaker
admirable and in the short term, but still we have to create long-term survival techniques. What indigenous science and indigenous understanding and fire knowledge is a wonderful example of it, is it allows all those things to happen allows people to be human and to fail and all kinds of social failures that we have, while at the same time providing some kind of, you let me extract it into a not particularly religious, some kind of rule-based structure, some kind of permission structure for looking at how to engage with the world around you. I think Kat Anderson, who, but again, Tending the Wild, there's yeah they also made a
00:47:30
Speaker
but some kind of a Netflix documentary about it, which she's not very pleased with, but I think people who watch it will get the same general idea of what she's talking about.
00:47:42
Speaker
And we were talking about symbiogenesis by, which reminded me and and which reminded me of, as you were talking about all of that, you reminded me of a talk that I recently heard by Emanuele Cochia.
00:47:55
Speaker
And he's a, um he spoke about how in the Amazon, he he was talking about how the Amazons are actually ah curated gardens from the same principle that we were talking about and how in his belief system and how he's, you know, in his study and work, he's like a plant scholar and and design and a whole series of things. He says, he says the cities were actually curated. So while we curated the gardens and like the Amazon, because of course it's the co the co-creation with the native peoples,
00:48:27
Speaker
And he says cities were born out of the they are the gardens that the Amazon built for humans to keep the humans close.
00:48:38
Speaker
So in order for the humans to be close enough to like work in the Amazon and do their part of the ecosystem, that's why cities were born. I loved it because it flips the whole concept and it got us out of the thinking that humans, unfortunately, often say, which is humans are bad, you know, blah, blah, blah, humans, humans. it's It's like, that is not true. Like we are nature. We have roles. We have parts that we're so supposed to play. We're just another piece of the same cog. And i think the piece that we're missing is, you know, we're one of 12 million species and we have to get back into that concept of that. We're one of them. We're not apart from them.
00:49:17
Speaker
um And no, I think that's beautiful. It reminds me, and I think also of one of the, really great insights that I i recently read, which was what the when the Europeans came from to the East Coast of the United States, they didn't recognize that they were looking at garden forest, that they were looking at gardens, that they were looking, because they couldn't distinguish the forest gardens that they encountered from wildlife, wilderness.
00:49:57
Speaker
Their notion of gardens was very orderly, very, you know, walled gardens and very curated spaces. Very controlled, very dominion. And they didn't have the same understanding of curation.
00:50:09
Speaker
Right. And so a lot of what turned out to be well-designed, know, long-term human collaborations with the landscape were utterly invisible.
00:50:23
Speaker
Part of that blindness is what happened in the West, which, you know, so those are the wetland forests where there's plenty of rain and there's lots and lots of biodiversity and things are growing quite ah quite well. When you get to the West and the dryland ecologies, they also didn't recognize what a healthy forest was.
00:50:42
Speaker
So part of the fire suppression blindness that came out was a complete misapprehension of what what a valuable and healthy forest looks like in a you know Mediterranean climate, which is very different from what looks in a climate that has rain all summer.
00:51:02
Speaker
Right, ah right. And so, and here's an here's an example that I think really shows the level of misapprehension apprehension. If you're looking at a Western mountain landscape and it's, ah aside from like a granite open rock crest, it's covered with green, most of us, and we have to unlearn this, most of us have this assumption that if it's covered with green and we're looking at it from this, it's actually, so well it's a healthy experience for the landscape.
00:51:38
Speaker
that translates roughly to about 350 to 400 tree stems per to cover an acre with full leaf cover like that well turns out and i had the good fortune to spend about 10 or 12 years at the sage hen creek forest research station which is a joint venture by uc berkeley and the US Forest Service, it's most heavily researched academic forest in, certainly in the United States.
00:52:15
Speaker
And it's where they really finally in the early 2000s stopped beating around the bush and said, what does climate mean? What does a real, what does Sierra Nevada really look like? And they did a remarkable long-term project called the Sagehen Project, well worth looking at.
00:52:30
Speaker
um
00:52:33
Speaker
where they discovered that a really a healthy forest does not have those 400, 350 to 400 tree stems, a really healthy forest in the kinds of and conditions that were faced in 2000, and it's only gotten worse with temperature, is about 35 to 40 tree stems an acre.
00:52:52
Speaker
That's an order of magnitude difference. And all of the a adjacent biomass that goes on in the forest cover in the mid story and the ground story and the up All are attended to that.
00:53:06
Speaker
And that's what's burning. It's not just a little bit. It's an order of magnitude too much. That's why the fires have gotten so bad. And what's happening is a leveling process.
00:53:18
Speaker
You know we're burning back to a level that the landscape support. Right. Unfortunately, because it's so big, we're burning back to a level beyond what the landscape can support. And it's got to regrow and reestablish itself.
00:53:29
Speaker
And in a hot, dry climate, which is getting hotter, fewer trees are going to be able to survive. So much of the lower land forested areas want to become scrub.
00:53:41
Speaker
And so the mission, actually, the gardening mission is actually to enhance the natural processes of forest creating so that you can get trees back on that landscape and they can out-compete the shrub till they can maintain themselves.
00:53:56
Speaker
So that's the sort of absent the current Trump administration's desire to hate all things environmental in all ways possible and destroy every system we possibly have in any way they can they can manage to do, limited only by their own corrupt incompetence.
00:54:14
Speaker
um you know, we, you know, that's the big forestry mission is how not only to garden and work with the overgrowth of of tree stems to allow the healthy trees, just like a garden. And this is Kat Anderson's main point too, is a gardener in a garden. If you have too many plants, you prune the plants that are overgrown so that the ones can survive,
Philosophical Shift: Humans as Part of Nature
00:54:40
Speaker
they can get light and water so that the water and air and other resources that you're providing can be distributed most effectively to the, to the healthiest and most and yeah survivable plants because you have a purpose.
00:54:53
Speaker
you know And that purpose you want to create nutrients and nurture for your community. or you want to create you Or you want to create straight growing willow trees, redbud willows, so you can build your baskets. Or you want to you want to help the acorns, the acorn growth of your oak trees in the oak savanna. So all of these and you want all of these things are reasons why you want to encourage fire as one of your main tools of maintaining the landscape in all kinds of parts.
00:55:24
Speaker
not just in the forest, but in the fields and savannas and plains as well, and by the lake shore and the Tule. So these are all really
00:55:34
Speaker
critical engagements where, as you said earlier, as we understand we are part of the world we're in we've just engaged, we're still engaging with it. We're just engaging with it in destructive and stupid ways.
00:55:46
Speaker
We need to come back and re-understand how we engage in ways that benefit not only ourselves, but the landscape we're in One of the One of the the the metaphors that we use at the center is we're looking for ways where the harvest improves the system.
00:56:05
Speaker
Where the act of doing... Which is very much an indigenous, you know, model. You're in. Yeah, it's very much an indigenous model to go down that path. And I think that this is, and ah and ah I've been trying to as I was listening to you, and just recently, I've been having lots of thoughts of like, why was it that E.O. Wilson kind of in the end of his life went towards this idea of half earth, the idea of let's leave half of the earth uncompletely touched. And I, at first, you know, of course, it sounds really great, because if humans are destructive, and all these pieces, and then
00:56:35
Speaker
Then we have conversations like this and says, well, wait, that doesn't make any sense because we as humans are part of the earth and we should be. But then I realized that I feel like there's a part that he he needed to give time for humanity to re-engage. And at a minimum, we have to start these types of conversations because it's not the conversation.
00:56:55
Speaker
The dominant conversation is humans bad, stay out of you know nature. But I'm like, that just perpetuates the distance and the separation. And yet what the conversation needs to move towards is, okay, I am nature.
00:57:08
Speaker
What is my role in the ecosystem in which I live, which is very different depending, as you said, whether I live in a temperate rainforest or I live in a wetland or I live, you know, in other, you know, the tundra, right?
00:57:21
Speaker
My role and my relationship with this changing landscape is very dependent on place, which unfortunately is something that most humans have lost, like that sense of place, that sense of understanding and knowing my landscape, the fact that I am one with the earth and therefore I enter into the rhythms of the earth.
00:57:42
Speaker
For example, for myself in this period, I find myself you know resting during the day because it's hot. And that is the normal for my tropical body is you know who comes from a climate where you take siesta and you take siesta because it's hot.
00:58:00
Speaker
And that's climate, that's being comfortable and being a part of my environment, not me being lazy, not me being off. And so I feel like it's going to take some time. And I'm really grateful for these types of conversations as we wrap things up.
00:58:15
Speaker
um Because if not, you know, I feel like we're going to go on and on and on, which is wonderful because these are the conversations. And it honestly is one of the reasons why I love the naturally conscious community, because I myself by myself would have never been able to come to this realization of, oh, my goodness, half Earth was not because E.O. Wilson, at least this is my belief, not only because E.O. Wilson thinks humans bad stay away, but because incubate safety, give some space while we as humans figure it out, which makes sense because Stephen Keller, which was his partner, right, in the whole biophilia and the definition and the coining of of biophilia, Stephen Keller instead, if you read Birthright, which is one of my favorite books of all time, describes a city in which human beings
00:59:02
Speaker
you know, human, plant, animal connection is all intertwined into the very fabric of the city. And the city is designed for migrations of certain animals that pass through there in certain parts of the years.
00:59:15
Speaker
And there are parts that he very much goes into cities should be for all species. And we need to rethink the way we design them based on the land in which they are.
00:59:25
Speaker
And what is the natural flow of all of the animals, including humans, in that area and the natural like, you know, flora that grows there? And we need to be thinking in those terms.
00:59:39
Speaker
And I just don't think that, you know, E.O. Wilson was was thinking we would get there fast enough. And so we needed to kind of think about it. But I'm very happy that we've had this conversation because I think it's Yeah. Kind of shifting that lens from the idea of climate change, bad, stay away, stop doing bad things, which is, of course, a part of it, but more of no, no, no, wait a minute.
01:00:01
Speaker
Rethink humanity as beings of nature. And what is my play? What is my role in the place? Well, I think there I think all of these things are a continuum. yep And and that's really i mean, I think, you know, Wilson's sort of rewilding is one part of the continuum that needs to happen. And, you know, one can quibble about percentages, which is kind of not the conversation really you want to having.
01:00:28
Speaker
But the... the the the The basic sense of place being your guidance and of learning how to reconnect with place is really important. And i think, I just think that ah the conversation we're having is one of the ones that I think are really essential to be having. I think we...
01:00:51
Speaker
indeed you know are Our biggest challenge, I think, both is you know in all of this is we have an economic system that values money, exploitation, and extraction.
01:01:01
Speaker
And we have to change what we value in order to change what we do. In other words we do what we think is important. We do what we value. I love that.
01:01:12
Speaker
my mission in terms of the environmental work that I do, in terms of the educational work that I do, in terms of all the business work that I do is to try and look at how we can renegotiate the sense of what's valuable and what's important, change the discourse from something where we're always taking to something where we're giving back, something where we're exchanging, where there's a reciprocal rely.
01:01:36
Speaker
relationship and we're we're looking beyond our own immediate self-interest and self-gain because we have kids and because those kids are gonna have kids and because we want our children and our grandchildren and their children to have a world in which we can all thrive.
01:01:53
Speaker
And the only way we can do that is if we think of their thriving as critical to our success. So i'll I'll end with this. I'm often drawn ah to an old Greek proverb that is starting to see starting to get a little bit more public. it's And it's, a society grows great when old people plant trees in whose shade they know they will never sit.
Conclusion and Resources
01:02:20
Speaker
and love it. Josh, that was fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much. And to everyone who's listening, I just take those words to heart. Of course, I will include links to Josh, to everything that we spoke about, to the various books in the show notes. So please in, you know, go down, look at them because this is one of those conversations we need to have. And if you want to be a part of these conversations,
01:02:46
Speaker
The naturally conscious community is the place to have them. We have discussions like this every single day. And this is a place for us to start expanding, experimenting, exploring, and looking for new ways to shape the the paradigm.
01:03:00
Speaker
So come on in. Everything is in the show notes. And thank you so much, Josh. And for everybody at home, remember to resist the urge to hold back your emerging green brilliance.
01:03:12
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of reconnect with plant wisdom. To continue these conversations, join us in the naturally conscious community, your premier online ecosystem for plant reawakening and accelerated evolution and co-creation with other kin.
01:03:27
Speaker
Here you'll find expansive discussions, interactive courses, live events, and supportive group programs like the plant wisdom book club and the sprouts writing and creativity group. Connect with like-minded individuals collaborating with plants to integrate these insights into life. Intro and outro music by Steve Shuley and Poinsettia from The Singing Life of Plants.
01:03:47
Speaker
That's it for me, Tigria Gardenia, and my plant collaborators. Until next time, remember, resist the urge to hold back your emerging green brilliance. I'm out. Bye.