00:02:20.180So I want to just begin this conversation in a recognition of the ways in which we continue to succumb to political and psychological divisions of this culture.
00:02:34.420And I wanted to bring this up with you today specifically regarding your book as it dispels one of the common myths that resides in the American psyche, a myth that really pegs ranchers, industrial scale farmers, commercial fishermen, CEOs as anti-environmentalism.
00:02:53.540So I'd love if you could share with us how in your career with the Environmental Defense Fund and in writing of this book that you experienced this myth to be untrue.
00:03:04.420Well, you've gotten really to the heart of the matter here and certainly the heart of the way EDF approaches the world.
00:03:12.740And for myself, it actually reaches all the way back to the beginning of my life when I grew up in Berkeley, California.
00:03:19.840So I grew up in an urban environment, but I spent a lot of time on a farm, a family farm in the Central Valley up near a town called Winters near Davis, California.
00:03:31.220And that was a hugely formative experience for me because that was my first introduction to the kind of broad consciousness that farmers often bring to the land, usually bring to the land.
00:03:44.740These are people who have often spent many generations on it and look forward to many more and so have a sense of connectivity and responsibility across time.
00:03:56.340They also have a tremendous sense of responsibility across space.
00:04:01.220This particular family was acutely aware and taught me about all the impacts they did would have downstream.
00:04:07.660They knew that any ways in which they were careless on their fields meant water pollution that would affect the communities downstream.
00:04:17.200They foresaw the water scarcity that California has been struggling with.
00:04:21.160And so they introduced me very early to this idea that some of the assumptions I'd grown up with in Berkeley already about people who worked the land, the story was more complicated than the one I thought I knew.
00:04:39.220I went to work for the Forest Service in Colorado.
00:04:42.200Most of my work up until then had been for the Sierra Club.
00:04:44.680I used to work summers leading trips into the backcountry for them and was certain that any chainsaws were just an evil thing.
00:04:54.460Cutting down a tree was necessarily an act of destruction.
00:04:58.620And when I started working for the Forest Service and came to understand how much more complicated forest management is and to really have to challenge my own certainties, that stayed with me the rest of my life.
00:05:12.340that experience of thinking I had full knowledge of a subject, feeling very righteous in that
00:05:19.460knowledge. And then when I actually invested the time to be in a place and know that place deeply
00:05:26.140and know the people who had lived there for a very long time and loved it and knew it with a depth
00:05:32.460that I couldn't begin to match, how much more complicated these stories became. And that was
00:05:39.360really what drew me to Environmental Defense Fund. It's an environmental group that absolutely
00:05:45.320believes in working across all kinds of divides. We do not apply litmus tests to our partners. We
00:05:52.000believe in working with partners who really have the reach to change the world at the kind of scale
00:05:57.760we need to change it. And as you indicated, we know that for the most part, we share enormous
00:06:05.140common ground that again the people who farm or ranch or fish these waters and lands have an
00:06:12.360investment have a stake in it that is the greatest stake of all they understand their livelihoods
00:06:17.940absolutely depend on these resources and they bring a kind of love and sense of responsibility
00:06:23.280that is really enduring and really deep and so I was inspired from the really almost the first
00:06:31.960week I came to EDF, I began to think about a project like Rancher Farmer Fisherman that would
00:06:37.980celebrate those unsung heroes, those people who not only go overlooked, but also often are demonized
00:06:45.620by people who tar them with a very broad brush as being destructive of the ecosystems they operate
00:06:52.260in. But again, if you look more closely, if you take more time, you listen, you read the science
00:06:57.760deeply, you find a much, much richer story. Yeah, I similarly felt a lot more righteous in my
00:07:06.520understandings of what it was to be an environmentalist even five years ago. And
00:07:12.380I now live in a logging community. And although I am not pro-logging, I see a lot of these loggers
00:07:21.560really love the forest. And it's not a separation for them. They may have grown up here,
00:07:27.280their fathers may have been loggers. It's a legacy for them. They're also seeing the destruction of
00:07:33.520the planet and their understanding that the forests aren't healthy anymore. And so I think
00:07:40.640that there are people that have used land in the past that have been destructive, even if they
00:07:46.500really didn't understand the extent to which their practices weren't healthy and are now trying to
00:07:52.400move forward, but still economically support their families. And you brought up that a lot
00:07:57.720of these folks are demonized. And I wanted to ask where, when, how, why do you think this stigma came
00:08:06.320from? Well, you know, I think you got at it in your first remarks that there is some sense of
00:08:15.540safety, I guess, some satisfaction. It seems like it's one of the less appealing parts of human
00:08:22.740nature that we do want to set ourselves against others and feel somehow more noble, feel right
00:08:31.060against other people's wrong. There's no question that there has been tremendous destruction done
00:08:37.340to these iconic American landscapes, most of it unwitting, as you indicated. When we went out,
00:08:44.800When we settled the West and we went out and we ripped up those prairies, everyone thought that it was a moral, noble thing to be doing that, that we were taming a useless wilderness.
00:08:57.740If you read the works around the settling of the frontier, everything was about turning a worthless landscape to fruitful bounty, bringing order to chaos, realizing God's plan, enlightening the savages.
00:09:14.000It was all we had an idea of ourselves as doing something very good in the world.
00:09:21.400Some of it were companies like railroads that wanted to build business and so persuaded people that they should go and plow up areas in Texas and Oklahoma where it never rained, promising them that the rain would follow the plow.
00:09:35.720And some of it was carniism was marketing that was knowingly deceptive, but a lot of it came out of a particular worldview of that time.
00:09:46.540And the people did not begin to understand the destruction entailed when you tore up these grasslands that had roots that often went 10 or 15 or 20 feet deep.
00:09:59.360these roots that held these fragile soils together and kept them porous to water
00:10:05.120and sustained the most complicated ecology on Earth.
00:10:09.480Life in the soil is more complicated than a tropical rainforest.
00:10:13.200It's this amazing community of bacteria and fungi working in unbelievable symbioses.
00:10:19.800And then this incredible above-ground ecology, birds and foxes and rodents.
00:10:24.900And so we didn't begin to understand that when we plowed up the prairie that we were exposing those soils, we were destroying the life in those soils and we were stripping them naked and leaving them vulnerable to the kind of wholesale damage that happened in the Dust Bowl.
00:10:41.820So it's not out of nowhere, I guess, that the story of destruction comes.
00:10:48.780The post-war era brought in a whole new kind of destruction into large-scale agriculture
00:10:54.900because the 20th century was an era of believing that our science and engineering was superior to anything nature might contrive.
00:11:02.860And so after the Second World War in the 50s, we came home from this military effort with all these new technologies and these huge munitions plants that needed to be used for something else.
00:11:17.360And this idea that we could improve on nature by sort of stripping clean our croplands and treating them like a factory floor, stripping them down to nothing and then using our science to add the precise mixture of nutrients that a plant might need.
00:11:36.620And that did a whole other kind of destruction that, again, added to the death of all of this microbial life in the soil, and it created a lot of pollution from excess fertilizer, highly damaging.
00:11:54.740When it goes into the water supply, it creates algal blooms and giant dead zones in places like the Chesapeake Bay or the Gulf of Mexico.
00:12:02.560A lot of the chemicals that we were using were highly toxic.
00:12:06.620So, again, we did do another whole range of damage, again, coming out of not evil motivations, but of a time-bound worldview that didn't begin to be reformed until the dawn of the study of molecular biology and microbiology,
00:12:25.180when we began in the 70s to be able to really look deep into this tiny world
00:12:31.960and understand the complexity of the life there
00:12:35.420and the essential roles that those microbial creatures were performing.
00:12:40.620I mean, we still are just learning about the degree to which our own bodies
00:12:44.680are really just giant sacks of microbes
00:12:47.060and that most of our own functions are dependent on those beneficial microbes.
00:12:52.360And the same thing was true for our farmlands, that we didn't understand that we had actually killed off our greatest allies.
00:12:59.620And so this big movement is to restore those alliances, to restore those natural systems that are more powerful and capable than anything our engineering can do.
00:13:11.080The microbes in the soil, the farmer I write about, Justin Knopf, he understands that his first job is to care for those microbes and that they in turn will care for his crops in a way far more robust and efficient than he can ever do himself.
00:13:27.660That he would much rather have an ecology of plants that can fix nutrients like nitrogen and microbes that can carry those nutrients around and can respond to stress signals that a plant might emit and let the ecology really nurture his crops.
00:13:44.260And he ends up with much more stable yields, much higher yields, much lower costs, much healthier crops, a much healthier family.
00:13:53.840you know it benefits everyone all the way around but it did take understanding microbial life in a
00:14:01.480whole new way to arrive there so i mean one of the things that i loved is that it's alliances
00:14:06.080between human beings who thought they were enemies and it's also alliances between man and nature
00:14:12.740it's no longer this paradigm of control or of clearing nature out of our way it's understanding
00:16:32.760now I'm thinking to this farmer that you're speaking about that's in your book
00:16:46.520he clearly had an interest to learn about the soil and the science behind it and he has
00:16:56.560clearly a connection with the land to have a certain type of reverence and respect
00:17:01.740not this human supremacist mindset that man can do everything better than the earth is that
00:17:10.700something that you found a lot of you know when you're talking about growing up in Berkeley it's
00:17:15.640easy and to an extent to find like-minded folks who are quote environmental and I think there's
00:17:23.480probably even different languages you know different ways of speaking about it in other
00:17:28.360parts of the country and in different types of communities, but it's not to say that other
00:17:31.860people aren't environmental, even if they speak about it differently. So I'm thinking about this
00:17:36.740farmer and I'm like, you know, is he a rare bird out in those parts or are there others like him?
00:17:43.140And if he is a rare bird, do you find it when there are these folks that are spearheading
00:17:48.660this more earth-friendly way of working with the land, do they feel isolated in their own
00:17:54.900communities? That's a really great question. And I say in the introduction of my book that the
00:18:00.960people I write about are not outliers. They're not exceptions to the rule. That was, again,
00:18:06.360one of the discoveries Environmental Defense Fund afforded me. When I first started working on the
00:18:11.840book and I started to look for the characters that I would feature, the first thing I did was
00:18:16.800interview my colleagues at EDF. And my problem became an embarrassment of riches. I had dozens
00:18:21.800and dozens and dozens of stories I could have told, which represented actually hundreds and
00:18:26.720thousands more. When you look at the innovations that Justin himself, that the farmer has enacted
00:18:33.520on his land, and that includes he's given up plowing. He hasn't plowed his land in decades
00:18:38.120because soil is much healthier if it's left undisturbed. If you leave the dead residues
00:18:43.780of the previous crop on top of the soil to armor it. So he never plows his soil. He's added a lot
00:18:49.960more diversity in the things he plants on his soil, both the crops he grows to sell, but also
00:18:56.200what are called cover crops, a mix of plants he grows in between that introduce a whole other
00:19:02.460realm of diversity into the cropping system, again, emulating the diversity of nature.
00:19:08.220Those practices have now been adopted by about 20% of farmers across the heartland. These big
00:19:15.620farmers farming thousands of acres, growing wheat and soy and corn. 20% of them are now adopting
00:19:22.200these practices, and that is growing very fast. So to the larger point, this idea of feeling
00:19:29.920yourself a part of nature, not apart from nature, is absolutely something I found in every world I
00:19:38.380went into. The book is actually structured as a journey down the Mississippi River watershed,
00:19:43.340and starting at the Missouri River headwaters in Montana with a rancher there
00:19:48.560and ending with a commercial fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico.
00:19:52.120I chose that landscape for a number of reasons.
00:19:54.640One, the heartland is a center of most of our natural resources.
00:19:59.340It's been really critical in American natural history and also America's national history.0.51
00:20:05.940But also it really is red state America.
00:20:08.640And so I wanted to get very directly at this question of is conservation a value held only by coastal democratic elites or is it actually a deeply held near universal American value?
00:20:25.240And it's absolutely the second. It is a deeply traditional American value.
00:20:29.480The greatest environmental presidents in history have all been Republicans.
00:20:33.140The time we're living in now, where it's been set up as a democratic issue, this is the aberration. We've lost our way from a tradition that has endured from the beginning, because as Ronald Reagan said, this is our patrimony.
00:20:50.280This land is what defines America. It is what sustains us. It is what forged our character. There is nothing more patriotic than protecting majesties and fruited plains and shining seas. There's a reason our national anthems are about those lands.
00:21:06.380So I wanted to make very clear that the people I was writing about were, in fact, reflective of a huge movement, huge hidden movement, but a huge movement nonetheless.
00:21:17.340And in every case, with this sense that nature is, in fact, our home, it is our sustenance, we don't survive without it.
00:21:28.580the rancher in Montana, Dusty Crary. I was standing with him once on his ranch and a coyote
00:21:34.600trotted across the land. And I said, are you worried about him? And he just shrugged and said,
00:21:39.840no, he's just trying to make a living. And he raises his cattle alongside grizzlies and wolves.
00:21:45.500And in every case, he sees himself as another animal among animals, that he has no more right
00:21:52.160to the land than they do, but also no less right, that you don't get to conservation by just
00:21:56.660driving human beings out, you figure out how to live in harmony. And again, you trust these
00:22:05.000natural forces. In his case, he tries to graze his cattle in the way that the big wild herds
00:22:10.640of grazers used to graze, you know, the herds of buffalo who would bunch together and graze a piece
00:22:16.220of land really intensively, and then move on, often chased off by predators. So that's how he
00:22:22.220grazes his cattle, because again, it begins to click these ecological systems back into
00:22:28.260balance. The whole middle of my book is devoted to the CEO of a barge company and a Vietnamese0.87
00:22:36.420woman, a refugee who is the voice of the Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees who harvest most of the
00:22:43.220shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico. And they're both working on restoring the Mississippi River's
00:22:49.580ability to keep rebuilding the wetlands, the largest area of wetlands in the United States,
00:22:55.540which are absolutely critical for buffering New Orleans and the whole coast from hurricanes.
00:23:03.420They're critical for sustaining the largest fishery in the continental United States.
00:23:08.780They're critical for protecting our biggest oil and gas and petrochemical infrastructure
00:23:14.820They're one of the most complex and important ecosystems in the United States, but they're dying because the Mississippi was locked into these levees and could no longer dump all of its mud into them.
00:23:27.640So they're working on freeing the Mississippi, opening up the Mississippi so it again can start rebuilding those wetlands.
00:23:35.380Again, recognizing that the force of that river is greater by orders of magnitude than the most amazing machine any human being could ever build.
00:23:46.880When you're speaking about the patriotism and the connection to this land, and it's interesting, because I think even back to how a lot of wild land is actually conserved by hunters, you know, quote, conservative hunters.
00:24:03.280I think we'll have to continue to reconcile as a culture, this concept of how we make claim to
00:24:12.340land, whether that's, you know, this patriotic feeling or the concept of land ownership itself
00:24:18.840or manifest destiny. You know, I know in your book, a lot of people had strong ties to the
00:24:25.560lands that they're working on generations of stewardship, even. But I guess I'm wondering
00:24:30.700how this relationship fits in with the rights of indigenous people to their ancestral lands.
00:24:38.060Well, you know, unfortunately, on most of this land, that story was written so long ago. It isn't
00:24:45.360still in play. The exception to that is up in Montana. This cowboy that I write about, Dusty
00:24:51.240Crary, the first struggle that he really fought was he lives on what's called the Rocky Mountain
00:24:57.040front. He lives right beneath the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area and Basher National Park.
00:25:02.620The last unaltered multi-million acre landscape outside of Alaska, it's about 10 million acres
00:25:08.640that looks pretty much like it did when Lewis and Clark arrived and had those first encounters
00:25:13.320with indigenous people. Kind of the first fight he fought was there was an effort in the 80s.
00:25:18.740The BLM, the Bureau of Land Management, was selling a ton of leases, mostly to Canadian
00:25:23.660companies to come in and drill for oil and gas all up and down the rocky mountain front and they
00:25:27.980would have destroyed that landscape forever and it's the last landscape where for instance grizzly
00:25:34.360bears still can move between the mountains and the prairie it's really a rare treasure so dusty
00:25:40.480came back he was a rodeo cowboy he came home and he joined a bunch of guys who were working to push
00:25:46.020back and succeeded in stopping oil and gas drilling. And those guys have gone on to assist
00:25:54.660the Blackfeet Indians who are still fighting a similar fight even further north, up really close
00:26:01.660to the Canadian border in an area called the Badger 2 Medicine, which like the area that's
00:26:06.660threatened by the Keystone Pipeline and the areas that are now in jeopardy with the threat to shrink
00:26:12.460Bears Ears, it's an area of tremendous sacred significance to this tribe and also the source
00:26:19.720of their water supply. So certainly that community in Montana, who still do live alongside
00:26:26.660intact tribes, who are still living out their cultures, I mean, obviously, even they got moved
00:26:32.460off of the lands that they own, but they still have some remnant of that, are very committed to
00:26:38.360trying to help them realize those rights.1.00
00:26:41.340To me, it seems essential we've left the Indigenous people in this country0.99
00:26:47.020such small shards of what they originally not exactly owned.
00:26:53.260I know most of them had a different feeling about their relationship to the land.
00:26:57.400But the idea that we would continue to violate those lands,
00:27:01.220I mean, I hope everyone listening to you will write their congressman right now
00:27:04.840and ask them not to allow the shrinking of the Bears Ears Monument,
00:27:32.740And the response was so intense that it was one of the first things we saw reversed, and they kept that ban intact. And so I do think that citizen voices are more important right now than they've maybe been, at least since I was a little girl in the 60s. I think that this is a time where we absolutely have to make our voices heard. It's really, really important to stand up for those rights as bashed to the ground as they've been.
00:27:59.460Yeah, it's another complicated discussion of this land ownership and private lands and indigenous lands and public lands and who has control and how did the control get into those certain people's hands and what can we do about it now?
00:28:21.060So many treaties have been broken. Public lands have been taken by oil companies. And it's really a big mess that we're in. And it's just interesting, I guess, to mention within the discussion on private lands, their role in creating habitat connectivity and sustaining greater ecological health.
00:28:43.780And, you know, that's really clear in the story of Dusty Cray, the Montana rapture that you've been talking about, and the biodiverse ranches that provide crucial forage habitat for grizzlies and elk and deer and public, you know, governmental protected areas aren't enough to maintain healthy populations.
00:29:01.220And so I'm wondering if you could elaborate on this call for the environmental movement to not only focus on protecting public lands, but to also work with private landowners to realize large scale conservation.
00:29:13.780Yeah, it's absolutely critical. There's only 1% of Americans who now ranch or farm or fish, but they manage 70% of America's lands. They fish the largest waters on Earth. America actually controls more of the ocean than any other country on the planet.
00:29:31.580So the responsibility that they hold is immense.
00:29:36.280So it's absolutely critical that they step up and meet that responsibility.
00:29:40.620I mean, most of them are living pretty close to the edge financially.
00:29:45.220So it's really critical at a time like right now when we're debating a farm bill and where we're going to put taxpayer dollars,
00:29:51.700how we're going to use those to help support agriculture,
00:29:54.660that that money go toward facilitating better practices on these farms,
00:29:59.780the practices that keep pollinators alive, mitigate climate change,
00:30:04.260and keep the water clean while also keeping us fed
00:30:08.560and minimizing the growing footprint of agriculture.
00:30:11.580Agriculture now hovers a part of the planet equal to the size of South America and Africa combined.
00:30:17.840We have given over as much of the planet as we can afford to food production already, and so it is really critical that the land that we've already sacrificed for those purposes be used as efficiently as possible, that we really have high productivity farms, but done in a way that are really regenerative.
00:30:37.860And as you noted, up in a place like Montana, during the homestead days, it was mostly the rich river valleys that were settled by people, because that's where you have water, that's where you have really fertile soils, that's where you have weather that you can survive, not only in the summer, but also the winter and these really harsh landscapes.
00:30:57.680Well, for all those reasons, those landscapes are just as vital to animals.
00:31:02.980That's where elk and deer come to have their babies.
00:31:06.300It's where grizzly come down to gather berries and roots along the riverbanks.
00:31:11.460You know, when we started protecting wilderness, we tended to preserve what people call rock and ice.
00:31:17.920We like these super dramatic, really high-altitude landscapes that play a role in the life cycle of a lot of these animals,
00:31:25.920but only for part of the year. They aren't able to eat at 12,000 feet either in the dead of winter.
00:31:32.620They need to be able to come down to low elevations so they can get food. They need sheltered places to give birth and raise their young.
00:31:40.680They need to be able to move over vast landscapes so that they can meet animals that are not their relatives to breed with.
00:31:48.440And after Dusty fought the fight against oil and gas, really his second fight was to try to get the huge historic ranches all along the Rocky Mountain Front.
00:31:59.900Some of them, you know, they range from a few hundred acres up to thousands of acres to get them protected from development.
00:32:09.300That land was looking really appealing to people who wanted to cut it up for subdivision and, you know, sell little ranchettes.
00:32:16.940And once you've done that, you've completely destroyed its wildlife value.
00:32:21.020And so he put his own ranch into what's called a conservation easement, where he basically sold forever the right to develop it.
00:32:32.220And he persuaded many, many, many of his neighbors to do the same and ended up protecting several hundred thousand acres of ranch land as native grassland.
00:32:41.860A ranch is a pretty light-touch way of producing food.
00:32:47.300If you're grazing cattle on native grassland, that's about the most minimal way that you can feed people and still protect native ecosystems.
00:32:56.580And then the third piece that Dusty fought for was to also protect the public land.
00:33:01.220There has been this fight. As you mentioned, there is this push out west led mostly by people like Rob Bishop in Utah, Congressman of Utah.
00:33:11.860They call it take-back land, but in fact, the reason that those Western states have such big tracts of public land, meaning land that belongs to all of us, to every American citizen, is because they were territories.
00:33:25.780They weren't colonies, they were territories.
00:33:28.180So all of their land belonged to the United States of America, except for land that was specifically granted to the states.
00:33:36.140So there's no taking-back land that was never yours to begin with.
00:33:40.580And the fact is that we've seen that if you want to protect these shared national resources like forests, like minerals, like water and rangeland, that the best protection comes from keeping them federal.
00:33:56.900that turning them over to the states or certainly selling them off to private entities
00:39:02.080And we also work heavily on fisheries around the world.
00:39:05.100And in both of those efforts, we absolutely agree with you
00:39:09.160and recognize that the indigenous people,
00:39:12.520the work that we've done in the Amazon
00:39:14.380has really been led by indigenous partners
00:39:17.540who turn out to be by far the best protectors
00:39:21.240of those rainforests against illegal incursions and logging.
00:39:26.400And so we've worked really hard to make sure that they remain masters of that land.
00:39:31.960And similarly, in fisheries, we're very focused on nearshore fisheries where most of the world's poor, many of the world's poor, get their proteins.
00:39:41.420You know, these are sustenance fisheries where communities with few other resources really depend on them.
00:39:47.900And again, our strategy there is to try to ensure that the local community, the indigenous community, really has the secure right to those fish, that they aren't being poached out from under them by distant water vessels.
00:40:02.460And again, they invariably prove to be the best stewards of that resource if they're given a secure right to that resource.
00:40:10.580In terms of conservation easements, it's a pretty simple transaction that is very widespread across the country.
00:40:19.760It's used particularly heavily, I think, in the West, but basically a landowner or someone who owns a big ranch can find a partner.
00:40:30.020It's most often a group like a land trust or the Nature Conservancy.
00:40:34.720they can calculate the difference in the value of that land if you were to subdivide that land
00:40:41.480versus to keep it intact that you are giving up some monetary value that you might gain if you
00:40:47.260were to carve it up and sell it in small pieces so a group like the nature conservancy will actually
00:40:51.860buy those rights from a rancher so the rancher doesn't have to sacrifice the inheritance he
00:40:59.800thought he might be able to give to his kids for the benefit of everyone doesn't have to take the
00:41:03.980hit personally, but can then keep that land intact forever. It generally allows a ranch house to
00:41:11.500remain and the current uses to remain, but you can't cut the land up. You can't drill on the
00:41:18.640land. You can't do sod busting. You can't plow up native prairie. You can't drain wetlands. So I do
00:41:25.160think, and this is actually getting a little beyond my knowledge, but I have heard of instances where
00:41:30.580people that were conservation easement did provide protection against eminent domain because it does
00:41:37.200have built into the contract. But we're getting kind of out of my depth here. So many of the
00:41:43.240topics we've covered today are really bridging so many different groups together to create
00:41:49.180protection for land. And there's many different thoughts on how to do that and different ways to
00:41:55.620do that some are more successful than others and you know I think a lot about the ranchers and the
00:42:02.080farmers and the fishermen that you've been able to talk to and it's challenging to bring people
00:42:08.200together to really agree with one another like for instance I interviewed Sylvia Earle recently
00:42:14.360who's an incredible marine biologist and she is against fishing at all you know she's anti-fishing
00:42:22.120because her studies have shown that there is complete overfishing and the populations are
00:42:28.140collapsing. And then there's people in small fishing communities that are going, well, this
00:42:33.140is our whole economic way of life and we need to support our children and we need to eat. And then
00:42:39.340the statistic that what you said, the poorest people in the world, that's the protein for0.70
00:42:43.360these people is fish. There's all of these global disagreements. There's local disagreements.
00:42:49.380And even, you know, there's might be some farmers who won't do till, but they'll use pesticides. And that goes downstream. And so as we are trying to figure out solutions, there's going to be a lot of trials and tribulations along the way with how we move forward.
00:43:08.860You know, it's really just heartening to hear stories from your book of how people are learning to set aside these divisions and then come together in the service of conservation and earth.
00:43:19.860But then, you know, I wonder, you know, there might be people who really agree that they don't want oil drilled on their, you know, shared boundaries on their ranches, but they may still have conflicting values about, let's say, LGBTQ rights or immigration or government intervention or reproductive health.
00:43:38.560and the list goes on and on. So I guess I'm curious how you've witnessed these shared
00:43:43.600conservation values intersect with any of the social controversies of today.
00:43:50.180A lot of these guys talk about what they call the 80-20 rule. And there's really two parts to that
00:43:55.760rule. One is that you start with the 80% of people who are actually really interested in
00:44:01.500finding solutions and in hearing one another, that you be pretty sure that at both ends,
00:44:06.000you're going to find about 10% of the people who really just want to hear the sound of their own
00:44:10.980voice or have those pleasures of self-righteousness and shout other people down. And so you start by
00:44:17.860finding the 80% who really want to hear each other and try to find some pathway forward. I mean,
00:44:22.660that's really what democracy is after all. And democracy is alive and well out in America,
00:44:28.360even if it's maybe not so alive and well in Washington, D.C. And then once you have that
00:44:33.64080%, then you focus on the 80% that unites you. And you leave the 20% that divides you out of the
00:44:39.980room. Because otherwise, there's just no progress to be made. If you focus on what divides you,0.76
00:44:46.420then you sabotage the opportunity to build solutions out of the 80% that unites you.
00:44:52.360And I think that that's a really wise way to proceed in the world. People just don't
00:44:58.500have to talk about everything. When you're in a room trying to figure out how you're going to
00:45:02.620protect this critical grizzly bear habitat or these critical heartland soils or the fish in
00:45:09.700the gulf you don't have to also bring every other issue into the room you can really focus on the
00:45:14.98080 that unites you know that also requires recognizing that there are trade-offs in any
00:45:21.800decision you make and i think you know you reference no tillers who end up using pesticides
00:45:27.160and if you look at someone like justin and that's a really important theme in particularly in that
00:45:31.960chapter but again throughout the book that justin has to make choices you know when you're farming
00:45:37.520a piece of land it means you're trying to raise a crop and you have turned everything else into a
00:45:42.300weed and somehow you have to address those weeds and historically farmers did that by plowing them
00:45:47.940under well once you understand that plowing can be the single most destructive thing that you do
00:45:54.780to soil ecology you have to look for other alternatives so what justin constantly weighs
00:46:00.460is, okay, what is the least harmful alternative here? There is no perfect way to farm. The
00:46:06.980smallest, most local, most organic farm has a tremendous array of environmental impacts,
00:46:12.440and you have to face those forthrightly. You have to be honest about the trade-offs, and
00:46:18.300every juncture you have to weigh, what's the least harmful path I can choose here?
00:46:23.340So I think getting away from this idea that if people were just better, you know, if farmers
00:46:28.780weren't so greedy or evil. You know, we see cartoons put out there by companies like Chipotle
00:46:35.020or by some advocates that suggest there's an idyllic solution, and there isn't. Every farm
00:46:41.680exacts impacts, and if you're not being honest about the impacts that you're creating, then you're
00:46:46.680not really working to reduce those impacts. I wanted to say one thing about fishing. I mean,
00:46:51.940I admire Sylvia Earle to the moon, but there's also a lot of evidence in the chapter on fishing
00:46:57.140in my book how if you can get fishing policy right fish can actually recover incredibly rapidly
00:47:05.160and sustain people that you can both have more fish in the water and more fish on the plate and
00:47:13.500livelihoods for fishing communities if you get fishing policies structured properly and again
00:47:19.960those go to making sure that the people in that community have secure right that these fish aren't
00:47:25.840being fished out from under them. So I have a more optimistic view, I guess. I think that you don't
00:47:31.340have to make a choice between leaving people hungry or erasing the fish on the planet,