00:00:00.000Howdy for the wild community, Ayana here. I wanted to share a few updates before we jumped into our episode with Janine Benyess.
00:00:08.600First off, this episode may sound a little different because we are recording on the road at South by Southwest where we premiered our first film, When Old Growth Ends, which is an experimental documentary short about old growth logging on our public lands in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska.
00:00:30.000I also wanted to let you all know that we are having an Earth Day celebration in Los
00:00:34.980Angeles on April 21st, and we'll actually be showing when old growth ends at this event.
00:00:42.400And you can get your tickets at ConsciousCityGuide.com.
00:00:47.000And last thing I'll mention is that we are about to launch our online education platform.
00:00:53.740So stay in touch and sign up for our newsletter to receive a discount.
00:02:51.720Undoubtedly the most recognized thought leader in the field, Janine's legacy includes inspiring
00:02:57.060millions through her work as an innovator, speaker, and as the biologist at the design table,
00:03:03.340using 3.8 billion years worth of brilliant time-tested solutions. So Janine, I am sincerely
00:03:11.540honored to have you on the show today. Your life's work energizing humanity to once again
00:03:17.740live humbly as a fledgling organism on earth is just truly incredible. And my deepest welcomes
00:03:25.280to you, Janine. Oh, thank you for having me. I just want to jump right into biomimicry and
00:03:32.120the idea to look to nature for innovation. And it really sparks awe of the brilliant
00:03:38.480adaptations that surround us in every ecosystem. I've heard you say that amidst such immense
00:03:44.960earthly diversity, life carries a hidden unity. So I'd love if you could begin by telling us some
00:03:51.340of the unifying principles of life and how our industrial approach to science and synthetic
00:03:57.200chemistry are fundamentally incompatible with such life-sustaining principles.
00:04:03.580That's a great place to start. I've spent my life in the natural world and reading about the natural
00:04:10.400world and writing about the natural world and there is this hidden unity in the diversity
00:04:17.680it's it's what gives me hope actually because we are part of nature obviously and so the impulse
00:04:25.340to do this is within us as well what organisms do is they find a way over long periods of
00:04:35.600evolutionary time. This is rewarded over and over again, this impulse, which is to continue life
00:04:42.720over the long haul and to fit in over the long haul. And what organisms are always doing,
00:04:49.820of course, is taking care of their offspring. But what they really do, the ones that have
00:04:57.620succeeded and have been here over this 3.8 billion years, they're the ones that have figured out
00:05:04.440that in order to take care of your offspring, not just in this generation, but 10,000 generations
00:05:09.780from now, the only way you can do that is to take care of the place that's going to take care of
00:05:14.740your offspring. So what life has learned to do is build soil, clean air, purify water,
00:05:24.840and cycle nutrients. And in that, in everything that life does, life creates conditions conducive
00:05:32.980to life. So that really, for me, is the design brief of our time. You know, if we, as a part
00:05:43.000of nature, and as you said, a young species on this planet, if we're going to become a welcome
00:05:48.600species on this planet, we have to learn to create systems that in everything we do, the byproduct
00:05:56.760is creating conditions conducive to life and life you know life does that in in life-friendly ways
00:06:04.460okay so you mentioned for instance how we make things how we relate to the material world
00:06:10.440life has to manufacture its shells and its its webs and its nests in the same in or near its
00:06:24.200own body. So in order to do that, it has learned how to use non-toxic chemicals and to create
00:06:32.800non-toxic chemicals, how to make materials at body temperature and in water. If you think about
00:06:40.860a spider's web, five times stronger ounce for ounce than steel. And yet it's basically the
00:06:48.160flies and crickets that fly into the web. And then those are manufactured at room temperature
00:06:53.960right at body temperature and in water using this safe subset of the periodic table when you start
00:07:03.120to see we call them life's principles we've basically looked at what do all organisms have
00:07:07.780in common or most organisms have in common and that's one of the things is how they make things
00:07:14.940you know they use current solar energy they make things in ways that allow them to live in or near
00:07:21.100their manufacturing plant. And you think about, well, could we possibly do that? And there are
00:07:26.800people working on that, working on these fields of green chemistry, self-assembly, water-based
00:07:33.280chemistry, rather than toxic solvents, low-pressure chemistry, low-temperature chemistry.
00:07:41.260There are people working on this. And when you learn how to do chemistry in that way,
00:07:46.620And, you know, that's the basis of everything that we make. You are starting to be more and more plant-like, right? You're becoming more like the organisms that are outside my window right now and in every moment are creating miracle materials silently and in ways that I don't need to wear a hard hat or eye goggles, right, or a gas mask.
00:08:10.720so that's our future if we're going to fit in here is to figure out how to how to do everything we do
00:08:16.980not just in making things but how we build and how we power ourselves how we grow our food in ways
00:08:22.280that create conditions conducive to life goodness thank you so much for that just beautiful
00:08:30.480introduction and this is a thought that i sometimes struggle with and i see that as there are infinite
00:08:39.020unique expressions of earth there's also infinite innovations to possibly develop
00:08:46.100but i question how we make decisions on where our creative impetus and energy is best put
00:08:54.640i'm so excited about biomimicry for earth renewal but i'm also wary of corporations and industry
00:09:03.440abusing biomimetic principles to perpetrate this over consumptive death culture. And I would just
00:09:12.300love to hear your thoughts on how and where we draw the line to ensure biomimicry is not exploited to
00:09:19.660prolong the unnecessary selfish comforts of human civilization, but instead helps humans find a
00:09:26.960harmonious place for the long haul? Let's look at that. I certainly do. 20 years ago when I started
00:09:35.740to see this field evolving, emerging, it was a very faint signal at that point. And I also thought,
00:09:46.700wow, is this going to be the next gold rush that we, as Frances Bacon said, torture nature for
00:09:54.520her secrets and then use that knowledge to build a more efficient well, a more efficient way to
00:10:05.260extract from the earth. I thought long and hard about what are the questions when you come to the
00:10:12.940natural world with a question about how shall we live here? The questions are, what would nature
00:10:22.540do here whenever you're about to design something? What would nature do here? And the here is very
00:10:27.180important because it has to do with what's appropriate locally, because the world is not
00:10:31.940monolithic. And the second question is, what wouldn't nature do here, which is just as important?
00:10:40.700So biomimics also look at what is not very common in the natural world, transgenic engineering,
00:10:46.460and putting, you know, finding fish genes inside strawberries to produce frost resistant strawberries.
00:10:54.280That doesn't happen. Right. And there's something teaching us in that.
00:11:00.280And the third question is after what would nature do here and what wouldn't nature do here?
00:12:35.520Does it fit within an ecosystem that will eventually regenerate the planet?
00:12:43.040And when we work with corporations at this time in history, you're working with the people who make our world.
00:12:50.260So they are us. We use what they make for us.
00:12:54.080So it's our system right now. And we believe that if we're not working there, we're not we're not going to get through this evolutionary knothole.
00:13:03.180I mean, we really, in order to scale these kinds of ideas, we have to have small companies, NGOs, municipalities, communities, and corporations starting to follow some of these design principles.
00:13:19.420Otherwise, I fear we'll lose a lot more of the biodiversity that we love if we're not working to change from the inside out.
00:13:28.460And I mean, from the inside of the person out, the people we work with, the champion adapters, we call them the champions inside of these companies, they're sort of roller skating in the halls of power.
00:13:40.620Many of them are people who want to see their grandchildren have a different life.
00:13:47.760So they're trying to change things from within.
00:13:50.440And for us, that means changing how we make things and also how we actually run the companies that we work in.
00:13:58.460What's interesting now is that can nature, can we ask questions like how does nature cooperate?
00:14:28.460So the question of what's worth doing with biomimicry is enormously important.
00:14:37.220And we answer that question by asking what would nature do here, what wouldn't nature do here, why and why not?
00:14:44.860Because life on Earth has figured out what works, what's appropriate, what lasts, and also what's worth doing.
00:14:53.880the deeper why lessons why are we doing this can also come from the natural world that's what we're
00:15:00.380trying to bring to innovators everywhere i think about how we can do things on scale with integrity
00:15:08.240and it's a question that i think we need to ask ourselves just like how you're saying
00:15:15.420what would the earth do why would the earth do in what way and it feels so necessary
00:15:23.460to be able to bring those questions in when we are designing the systems that we want to live in.
00:15:31.820Now I'd like to ask you about biomimicry and regional landscape and urban design.
00:15:37.080And I was just astounded to read about the project you worked on in Lavasa near Mumbai,
00:15:45.060which receives 27 feet of water during monsoon season.
00:15:48.860And from what I understand, the development, which was inspired by the native forest capacity to withstand such intense rains without significant erosion, yielded a 30% reduction in carbon emissions, 65% reduction in potable water consumption, and a 95% reduction in waste sent to the landfill.
00:16:11.480So would you tell us more about or how this design came about? And then how does it emulate
00:16:17.560the native forest? And does it incorporate the concept of a circular economy, which is guided
00:16:23.760by waste free flows in the natural world? This was a development, and it was a master plan for
00:16:31.240development. And we've been asked quite a bit in the last 20 years to work on city planning,
00:16:38.160urban planning, all the way down to the building scale, regional urban planning all the way down
00:16:43.060to the building scale. And the question became, what is a biomimetic community? What is it?
00:16:49.660And for us, if you want your community to function like an ecosystem, the gold standard for that,
00:16:57.820the ideal for that, would be to look for local ecosystems, the healthiest local ecosystems you
00:17:05.200can find, the wildland next door. Go there and ask, what are the ecosystem services, that is the
00:17:14.360beneficial services being produced by this healthy ecosystem? Because really that's the exhale of a
00:17:20.500healthy ecosystem. It's the signature of a healthy ecosystem is what it gives away. So clean air,
00:17:26.980how much air does it clean a year? How much per acre? How much water does it clean? How much water
00:17:32.620does it store in a storm? How much sediment does it retain and keep from eroding? That's what we
00:17:39.080do. We call these ecological performance standards. We say that a community should be functionally
00:17:45.740indistinguishable from the wild land next door. And that's a really aspirational goal for any
00:17:53.480community. I mean, right now, you know, Living Building Challenge and other things are looking
00:17:58.820at net zero, basically meeting your own needs on site. The next step is, can we actually produce
00:18:06.520positive ecosystem services? Can the air leaving our community be cleaner than it was when it came
00:18:12.560in? It's just incredible. Can we create corridors for wildlife? Can we store the amount of water
00:18:20.020that we need and then some to send on more water downstream? This is what ecosystems do.
00:18:26.400right so we're challenging ourselves to meet those metrics we call them generous cities
00:18:32.620because we see ecosystems as being generous you know what we did in lavasa one of the cool things
00:18:39.860we did know we our reference habitat our healthy habitat was the western gods which is an ecological
00:18:45.040hot spot that's been heavily um studied thank goodness for us the land that we were working
00:18:50.860with was a very hilly area and again in these monsoons just rivers of red earth would run into
00:19:00.000the lakes and paint the lakes red literally they were bringing bulldozers down into the lake
00:19:04.880dump trucks and getting the sediment back and bringing it back up on the hillsides it was
00:19:09.320incredible but when we went to the western gods we saw that there was even in these monsoons there
00:19:13.920was very little erosion so that became 100 erosion control became the goal of this so that they
00:19:22.780changed the way they did the foundations they changed the way they did the roadways all kinds
00:19:30.020of things on the landscaping to make sure that there was you know there were awnings and the
00:19:35.320buildings and the ecostructure or the green spaces we asked those cumulatively to produce
00:19:41.580these ecosystem services, right? So we were saying, okay, well, one of the ways that this
00:19:46.560rainfall is intercepted is in all the layers of the moist, deciduous forest. So can we recreate
00:19:53.880that layering in our buildings with awnings, with kinds of landscaping that's going to cover the
00:19:59.980ground completely, and also the kinds of vegetation that's going to intercept
00:20:04.800raindrops so they lose all of their damaging energy? So that became really a design model
00:20:11.400for the development but the coolest thing was that we realized that the moist deciduous forest
00:20:18.920from the top like if you were flying over it you'd see this rolling canopy of dark dark leaves right
00:20:26.880and trees at different heights but they have this rolling appearance and what happens is that wind
00:20:33.380going over that during the monsoon up to 30 percent of the water is turned into water vapor
00:20:40.620and is volleyed back up into the clouds.
00:20:44.140And those clouds go to inland India and water inland India.
00:26:15.560And what happens is during the rainy season, they do have shallow roots as well, and they take in the water from the shallow roots, and they actually push that water down the root, counterintuitively, down the root, and then out into the soil where they bank that water.
00:26:33.82010% of all annual rainwater is banked in this way.
00:26:37.360And then during the dry season, that water moves into the taproot. It goes up and it goes out the shallow roots of these shrubs, thereby watering the forest around them.
00:26:52.860And the bioirrigators are throughout the forest. And, you know, I can imagine a time, especially in a climate-stressed world, where we would begin to plant bioirrigators, you know, in our landscape, now that we know about them.
00:27:06.880I mean, this is what I mean by generosity, is that these bioirrigators are not just keeping the water, they're pushing the water out into the soil around them, the upper layers, and watering the trees around them, which is really interesting.
00:27:26.680It goes against this idea that, you know, nature read in tooth and claw, as Tennyson said.
00:27:32.200It looks more like, as we learn about the wood wide web and things like bioirrigators,
00:27:37.380it looks like the system, you know, creating conditions conducive to life in the system
00:27:43.180has been rewarded by natural selection over long periods of time.
00:27:47.680Our new move in agriculture, for instance, for a long time we've been focused on the plant.
00:27:55.620so focused that we're even genetically engineering the plant and i think the next stage for us needs
00:28:02.580to be to learn to help the helpers you know those myriad microbes that are in symbiotic relationship
00:28:10.120with plants and helping them do everything from germinate on time to resist pathogens to get
00:28:17.500phosphorus and water and exchange alarm signals among plants i mean these helpers including the
00:28:24.380bioirrigators, maybe our job is not to quote unquote manage any longer, but rather to be in
00:28:32.160this role of helping the helpers. What do the microbes need? What do the bioirrigators need
00:28:38.160to do the job that they have done over long periods of time, right? To keep the system0.97
00:28:44.520healthy and humming. It's a different role for us as Western industrial humans, you know,
00:28:51.700but we can learn it gosh that hits on this question that i've been sitting with so long
00:28:59.240in the one million redwoods reforestation project really questioning what is our role in large scale
00:29:10.580restoration of damaged ecosystems whether that's reforestation of redwoods or working in
00:29:18.440the juniper forest of new mexico i mean any ecosystem really that has been damaged which
00:29:25.140the majority of them have and how do we not keep that human supremacist mindset on the ways that
00:29:36.180we even try to help and it's something that i've been really sitting with and i love this
00:29:41.120thought process of helping the helpers supporting those who do it best and that's not always the
00:29:49.060human many times it's not it's akin to us now starting to take care of our microbiome in our
00:29:57.460own gut right um and i'm really happy about that because it gives people an analogy that they can
00:30:02.480understand um and they can you know a good metaphor to warm their hands around the biomimetic process
00:30:10.960is you know if we want to learn for instance how to create a low energy desalination we ask
00:30:19.240how does nature take salt out of water you know every fish in the ocean is living on fresh water
00:30:24.200but living in salt water so the answers are there and in the same way when we're working at a
00:30:32.560systems level this idea of going to a healthy ecosystem quieting our cleverness listening
00:30:39.680Literally saying, what is it that makes this so healthy?
00:30:44.980And learning about a healthy system and all the design principles within a healthy system, all the players, the actors making this work well.
00:30:56.060and then creating conditions conducive to their lives in the systems that we are,
00:31:04.320the human-influenced, settled, and systems that we're working in agriculture and in forestry.
00:31:10.360It's the stage of going to the healthy system with our notebooks open and our ears and our
00:31:19.340hearts open and learning that's that humility step is also it's the new scientific method for
00:31:27.540me it is the method of going and learning from a healthy ecosystem not just about it there's a big
00:31:37.180difference there and biomimicry really the definition of it is that you're learning from
00:31:41.720not just about that means a whole different set of questions it means a different way of watching
00:31:48.220different way of observing it actually means we we call it internally in our company we call it
00:31:54.780muddy knees and epiphanies and that's what we try to to help our our clients we do a lot of
00:32:02.720workshops in natural areas um and we bring people who design our world we bring architects and
00:32:08.420material scientists and chemists and and um physicists out into the natural world
00:32:16.220costa rica and south africa and montana places that they normally wouldn't go and we have them
00:32:23.700immersed for a week and muddy knees and epiphanies is what happens right we take them and we we take
00:32:30.340them to like for instance in costa rica we'll take our folks to all these designers people
00:32:35.360who have been building the same skyscraper for 30 years right over and over again not the same one
00:32:40.240but it looks the same. And we bring them outside and we bring them to eight different
00:32:47.300habitat types. So we bring them through the mangrove forest. We bring them and we say,
00:32:52.260what are organisms here faced with? What are their challenges? What are their opportunities?
00:32:59.440What are their limitations? How do they adapt? And then we'll take them to a breeding bird colony
00:33:04.560with the sun baking down on rocks and how are these organisms handling this heat and this intense uv
00:33:12.120rays you know how did we'll go we'll snorkel with them right underwater how are these organisms
00:33:18.780meeting meeting their needs right we go to eight different places we wind up at a 12 000 foot peak
00:33:24.000in the paramo in costa rica where it's you know an alpine fog cold fog forest and everything is
00:33:32.800getting down on your hands and knees and looking with, you know, hand lenses. And seeing that what
00:33:40.060these organisms face, and what they do with the riches that they do have, it really changes
00:33:48.360people, they, they do have epiphanies. And the number one epiphany is that, you know, organisms
00:33:55.460are not all that different from this human homo sapien organism, right? We're, we're all trying
00:34:01.980to find something to eat, build our homes, power ourselves, put our kids to bed at night.
00:34:09.720And therefore, that opens the way to this different kind of scientific method, which
00:34:26.740And when you see a switch go on in people, that sort of humility switch, right, where their lens is forever shifted, they now see the natural world as full of consummate organisms, consummate, consummate engineers, you know, consummate architects in the natural world.
00:34:45.640that stance of respect also changes the way they make things in ways that we can't even
00:34:53.460that's the intangible it changes the way they design for sure but it also changes
00:34:59.660you know the heart with which they design because now nature has become mentor to them
00:35:45.640Blossoms of rich and woe will soon confess
00:35:54.300Cause I live in a garden, a garden of dreams
00:36:02.460Where the midnight sun shines down its blessings
00:36:09.820As I live in a garden, a garden of trees
00:36:18.580Where the midnight sun shines down its blessings
00:36:39.820This question arises for me that our over-stressed and over-simplified agricultural systems,
00:37:02.560they speak to the toxic and competitive paradigm that has left countless biological relationships
00:37:08.580compromised or or just lost entirely and it seems that biomimetic agriculture is often
00:37:16.520less about innovation and more about humans learning how to once again be mutualistic
00:37:23.780facilitators like you've been speaking of and for example restoring the fungal plant relationships
00:37:30.160in localized polycultures which in turn it uses less water it builds soil enhances resilience
00:37:37.080And so I'm curious, what is your opinion on restoring historic biological partnerships in light of all that we don't know that's been lost?
00:37:49.460Does it make sense to fixate on restoring historic partnerships that now may be obsolete as the climate changes?
00:37:56.640or is it more valuable to try and create conditions where opportunity for mutualistic
00:38:04.520adaptation, you know, adaptation of interspecies relationships is the greatest?
00:38:11.640I think it's the latter. I think we're at the point where, you know, just if you think about
00:38:18.740how many species are on the move right now as a result of climate change, you know,
00:38:24.360They're moving, you know, the meta studies have shown us that they're moving from south to north in order to get cool, you know, because it's getting too hot.
00:38:34.300In other words, they're moving from lower elevation to higher elevation.
00:38:37.760The higher elevation organisms are having a really hard time.
00:38:41.760When you have that kind of movement going on, not everybody's going to get there at the same time.
00:38:48.060That's the fear, right, that a flower moves and its pollinator doesn't yet, right?
00:38:52.980So you're going to have, and it's bloodlessly called ecological decouplings.
00:38:59.900And those are the things that really, really, really worry me.
00:39:04.600When I work and I do for climate change, I'm on the board a drawdown, a project drawdown, which is a project to reverse climate change, actually, it brings back to Holocene conditions.
00:39:14.800I do it as a biologist who knows that the world that we're in right now did evolve to excel in
00:39:24.140these conditions, right? And organisms are adaptable. Yes, they will move around, but not
00:39:28.880all of them will make it. So those historical landscapes, they can teach us a lot about
00:39:37.360what that land would be, what would be growing there. But I think we have to be a lot,
00:39:43.160lot more cognizant of the fact that the organisms that are inhabiting these places now may be
00:39:50.780somewhat different. And they're trying to work out their mutualistic couplings. You know,
00:39:55.960they're trying to imagine moving up into a new range and all of the adaptation that you have
00:40:02.160to do, right, to that climate changing condition, including the organisms that are in that habitat
00:40:07.960with you. So creating healthy conditions for them is really, I think, what we can do. I think that
00:40:16.180there's a move towards looking at functional traits of plant life, for instance, rather than
00:40:24.340fixating on species types. So when we're working with our urban planners, for instance,
00:40:32.020we're looking at what are the landscape attributes we have an ipad enabled app that allows us to go
00:40:39.680into the reference habitat look at landscape attributes that are causing things like cooling
00:40:45.100temperatures in the summer it's a certain amount of shade cover certain amount leafy ferria index
00:40:50.480and then when we go back to the built world site we say look try to create this amount of leaf area
00:40:56.560index, right? And you can do that with perhaps different species, right? But the functional
00:41:03.820traits, and of course, using natives as much as you possibly can, because they are food and nesting
00:41:09.340and shelter sites for organisms, that is super, super important. But the functional traits now,
00:41:15.700a lot of restoration ecologists are looking at these. Do you have these functional traits,
00:41:20.200Even if you're, unfortunately, the kind of tree that used to be able to survive there doesn't survive there, can't survive there anymore.
00:41:29.540You know, in the Southwest, they're saying we've got 40 years before the pignon pines are gone.
00:41:33.740So what is the function of the pignon pine?
00:41:36.180And we have to get really smart about that.
00:41:39.460It is a changing, it's a changing world.
00:48:22.580You know, when you go into your neighborhood kitchen store,
00:48:25.740you'll bring in a spatula that's broken they'll put it into the 3d printer an enzymatic bath will
00:48:31.320take that and then instantly it'll be brought back to life as a spoon or as another spatula
00:48:37.840with little leakage of material you don't see a lot of leakage out of a healthy forest you know
00:48:44.840it's using the material and reusing it over and over that again is biomimicry at the at the
00:48:51.140systems level it's not about creating more and more stuff we for 20 years now we've been trying
00:48:59.320to answer you know what would nature do here and asking you know how does nature working for people
00:49:04.340like patagonia and saying you know how does nature repel water it doesn't use teflon you know and
00:49:09.100then we go and we learn in as many different ways as we can amoeba through zebra we call it
00:49:14.340how do bacteria repel water how to fungi how to plants how to right and and then we bring those
00:49:21.660to the to the inventors but those incredible design principles are our scientific heritage
00:49:27.440they are our commons we feel really strongly about that so it worried me to think that you
00:49:34.300know people might be learning how a gecko walks on walls and then they might want to patent how
00:49:41.300a gecko walks on walls and then be the only one who can make a tape or whatever, a non-toxic
00:49:48.260adhesive. That would be an example of patenting the scientific knowledge. And I was worried about
00:49:56.220that because, you know, we can bring a bacterium to the patent office. And if we've changed one
00:50:01.960gene, we can patent it and own it. How do you keep this from happening with nature's ideas,
00:50:08.680with nature's designs so what we were told early on when we asked a lot of lawyers this
00:50:15.280is that you know the way a gecko walks is written up in the scientific papers but it's not published
00:50:22.360in a design context there because it may just be a paper about geckos and how they attract mates
00:50:29.140and on the side it might be talking about how they walk right how they stick to walls
00:50:33.760so they said what you want to do is you want to publish that scientific information in a design
00:50:41.920context and then it becomes prior art what's called prior art which keeps people from patenting
00:50:49.180the method of how a gecko walks they can patent a tape that they make but they can't patent
00:50:55.980the gecko itself or the way it walks and so that's when we started asknature.org
00:51:01.840which is a website that tries to, we're trying to organize biological information by design and engineering and management function, by functions.
00:51:13.560So how does nature cooperate and up comes biological strategies or how does nature adhere to surfaces, up comes the gecko.
00:51:20.880The fact that we have it published in a design context protects it.
00:51:25.900so we are trying so i would encourage everybody it's a wiki kind of a form and you can also
00:51:33.320upload strategies of organisms that you love and just by putting them in a design context that is
00:51:40.460what might we learn from this the minute you answer that question it becomes protected that's
00:51:46.420important to us so important thank you for sharing that i feel like a lot of people in the audience
00:51:52.580need to know that i think a lot of people in general need to know that information and it's
00:51:59.740really something that we believe in it for the wild is open source information especially when
00:52:05.780it's for the betterment of the entire earth so thank you for making sure that we heard that and
00:52:12.900to go back to carbon sequestration i would just really love to hear your thoughts on why
00:52:20.820industrial reforestation is not the most effective way to sequester carbon? And how
00:52:27.480can reforestation efforts be more biomimetic? Unfortunately, you know, this idea of plantation
00:52:34.920growth, trees and plantations, right? This is part of the human, our tendency is to focus on
00:52:43.180one parameter like growth or growth rate as you know as a proxy for sequestering more carbon
00:52:54.240well we now know it's it's more complicated than that right and that if you want if you want healthy
00:53:01.300soils which is what where actually the lion's share of the carbon will be stored you need
00:53:10.240deep rooted species. You need a variety of root lengths and depths. You need a diverse
00:53:19.440amount of species that are in turn feeding their sugars and starches to a diverse
00:53:25.840microbial ecology. It's that diversity that allows us, that will allow us to store carbon
00:53:32.500even in years that are dry or unusually wet.
00:53:38.680There's two kinds of diversity in natural ecosystems.
00:53:42.380And one is response diversity, which is there's enough diversity of different kinds of species
00:53:48.440that with different kinds of capabilities, some of them are really good in dry conditions.
00:53:55.540Some of them are really good in wet conditions.
00:53:57.660That response diversity is what we need.
00:54:01.220So having one species of plantation tree is not the way to do that.
00:54:05.820The other kind of diversity is called functional diversity.
00:54:09.420And that's looking out at my pasture right now, native grasses.
00:54:13.840And if we just had native grasses, it wouldn't have functional diversity.