Charles Eisenstein is an American public speaker and author. His work covers a wide range of topics, including the history of human civilization, economics, spirituality, and the ecology movement. He graduated from Yale University with a degree in mathematics and philosophy and works as a public speaker. In this episode, we discuss how to talk about climate change and how to deal with it as an environmental problem. We talk about the role of forests, oceans, species, and wetlands as organs of a living being, and how we can begin to address climate change as a threat to our well-being and our ability to live sustainably and sustainably on the planet. We also talk about how to address the problem of climate change, and what it means for the future of the planet, and why we should be concerned about it. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. The album art for this episode was done by our super talented Ameya Vellian and produced by our band, The Waterfront Project. Our ad music is by Haley Shaw. Thank you to our sponsor, Zapsplat Records, for producing the music for the intro and outro music, and our ad music, which was produced by Ian Davenport, for the beatbox, for which we also provided the mixing and mastering and mastering of the music was done in collaboration with the excellent Jeff Perla. and the rest of our thanks to the excellent engineering team at the Electric Light Orchestra, and thanks to our good sound design at the Ground Zero Project, and all of our patrons at the Pollinator Project. Thank you for all of your support and support at Audible. . Thanks to all of you for making this podcast and all the feedback and support we can't thank you so much to everyone else for making it great listening to this podcast, we'll see you next week for the music we can do better next week, and we're looking forward to you in the next episode, next week we'll send you back next week with more of your feedback. See you next Tuesday, next Tuesday! -- Thank you, everyone! -- The Best Fiend -- Cheers, and Thank You, everyone. -- Sarah, Sarah, Caitie, Sarah, -- and -- Cheers -- Yours Truly
00:00:01.000Charles Eisenstein is an American public speaker and author.
00:00:05.000His work covers a wide range of topics, including the history of human civilization, economics, spirituality, and the ecology movement.
00:00:14.000He graduated from Yale University with a degree in mathematics and philosophy.
00:00:19.000And I really wanted to talk to you this Earth Week, Charles, because the climate issue has really now been I've become the dominant and very, very polarizing issue in the environmental movement in our country.
00:00:35.000And you have a different take on it than a lot of other environmentalists.
00:00:40.000So I just wanted to explore some of your thoughts.
00:00:43.000Yeah, I want to say at the outset that there is a...
00:00:49.000Fundamental truth that is being expressed in the climate change movement and the idea of a climate emergency, which is that what we as human beings do to the planet comes back to affect ourselves.
00:01:02.000And that is a very ancient understanding, but for modern civilization, it's a new understanding that we can't just do with impunity whatever we want to nature and not have it affect ourselves.
00:01:18.000That said, we tend to frame the problem in familiar, comfortable, reductionistic terms.
00:01:26.000And this is a much larger pattern in our civilization.
00:01:30.000You have a problem, and you immediately try to find the one cause, the one thing to control or to go to war against.
00:01:38.000And that becomes a proxy for a much bigger, more complex problem.
00:01:43.000So this kind of us versus them reductionistic thinking can take the form of what I call carbon reductionism that reduces the global ecological crisis to one thing that we can measure and technologically control.
00:02:01.000And as in many other areas of our collective lives, The things that get left out from that singular focus come back to haunt us in the long run.
00:02:14.000And this is especially true with the global ecosystem.
00:02:17.000So I like to try to expand the conversation to look at, for example, the role of forests and oceans and species and wetlands and so on and so forth, mangroves, seagrass, meadows, whales, fish, etc., etc., as organs of a living being.
00:02:36.000We realized that when we degrade the organs, I mean, if we continue to deforest and to put out toxic pollution and to fill the oceans with plastic and to overfish the fish and to drain the wetlands and to dig enormous pit mines all over the place, then even if we cut carbon to zero, The planet still dies to death of a million cuts.
00:02:58.000So that's one aspect of what I talk about environmentally.
00:03:38.000The clams, the shellfish, the bivalves, and the zooplankton, which also have calcium shells, Become incapable of producing homes for themselves, and you get massive die-offs, which we're seeing now.
00:03:54.000To me, that's at least as frightening as the ice caps melting.
00:04:01.000I've been in the coal industry for many, many years, because all of the high-altitude lakes on the Adirondacks and the entire...
00:04:10.000Appalachian chain from Georgia up to Northern Quebec are now, and many of them have zero vision because of acid.
00:04:19.000We have ozone particulates, which cause a half a billion dollars in injury, mainly to children and lung injuries and medical costs just in America every year.
00:04:33.000And then the mercury that is emitted when you burn carbon ends up in the fish.
00:04:38.000We eat fish and we have less healthy children and less healthy lives.
00:04:45.000But it's hard to make political progress on those areas without kind of identifying a single culprit and then targeting legislation to address that and litigation.
00:04:58.000Yeah, some issues have an easily identifiable single culprit.
00:05:01.000Like with acid rain, for example, there was a pretty linear cause and effect that you could identify.
00:05:07.000With climate change, I feel like we're...
00:05:10.000Projecting something onto a linear cause and effect that is actually not that linear.
00:05:15.000So even to take the example of crustaceans, not only do they suffer from ocean acidification, but their prior decline, which was massive.
00:05:24.000I mean, if you look at like the size of the quahogs, you know, the oysters and the clams and stuff a couple hundred years ago.
00:05:32.000I mean, if you look at the remains that the Native Americans left with these gigantic mountains of shells.
00:05:38.000I mean, the oceans, the estuaries, the coastal wetlands used to be teeming with life.
00:05:46.000You know, just to give an example of that.
00:05:48.000We have oyster middens up and down the East Coast, but even in the 19th century, in the early 19th century, New Yorkers ate more oyster meat than they did beef, chicken, and pork combined.
00:06:02.000There were thousands of oyster houses in Manhattan.
00:06:08.000We had a bivalve called the East River Oyster that had a shell that was 11 inches long.
00:06:18.000During the 18th century, there were so much lobsters washed ashore, just natural die-offs to fertilize all the coastal farms of New England.
00:06:31.000And there were riots in Massachusetts prisons because the prisoners were so sick of eating lobsters.
00:06:49.000So when you have healthy ecosystems, then they're resilient to changes in atmospheric gases.
00:06:58.000They can take the, you know, from the tiny coxylophores all the way to the big clams and oysters, they're pulling carbon out of the ocean.
00:07:10.000And maintaining the conditions for their own thriving.
00:07:14.000And that's a general principle, which is life maintains the conditions for life.
00:07:19.000So when we destroy life, when we destroy the ocean ecosystems, even regardless of greenhouse gases, Then life becomes less able to maintain homeostasis.
00:07:31.000And we become very vulnerable to changes in atmospheric gases and temperature.
00:07:39.000Because there's so much really good information now just coming out on the capacity of the soils, of healthy soils, to basically absorb all the excess carbon that we're now producing.
00:07:52.000If we actually had not wrapped the soils with glyphosate and all these pesticides and destroyed these teeming colonies of microbes, this whole agricultural microbiome, which was absorbing the carbon and providing that kind of resilience to our economy.
00:08:15.000So let me make a political connection here, because earlier you mentioned the difficulty of framing something politically when you don't have an identifiable single culprit.
00:08:25.000But I feel like that's actually a little bit of a trap that we environmentalists have fallen into.
00:08:33.000Ultimately, the reason that I became an environmentalist, and I'm sure it's true of you as well, wasn't because of the bad things that'll happen to me if, say, the whales are extinguished.
00:08:56.000And I think that most people are motivated, ultimately, as environmentalists, by love.
00:09:03.000So if we accept that the most important kind of ecological resiliency comes from thriving life, then the solutions, a whole different set of solutions show themselves, namely, to serve the thriving of life everywhere.
00:09:26.000So instead of an abstract global problem of carbon dioxide that lends itself to technocratic solutions and geoengineering and continent-wide biofuels plantations and the mega dams that are destroying African wetlands and gigantic pit mines to mine lithium and cobalt and silver, we can say, okay, let's regenerate the soils.
00:09:49.000Let's preserve any pristine ecosystem.
00:10:06.000I think it goes beyond existing partisan ideological divides, which depend on you buying into a politically charged theory of global warming.
00:10:19.000I know people in the soil restoration movement, they go out to Midwest farmers and ranchers.
00:10:27.000And they get them to convert to regenerative agriculture.
00:10:30.000And they don't once mention climate change, but they mention restoring America's soils.
00:10:36.000And these farmers, they're living on the farm that their great grandfather founded, and the well is dry or it's poisonous.
00:10:46.000And they see with their own eyes the dying of the land.
00:10:51.000What I want to say is that this is not a separate issue from the global ecological crisis and what we call climate change, because it's part of the dying of the organs that maintain climate homeostasis.
00:11:07.000We could see a pause in global warming, we could see global cooling, but if we continue to destroy the organs, We'll have climate fluctuations, we'll have worsening droughts, we'll have worsening floods and chaos, even if we convert the whole economy to electric vehicles and install huge carbon-sucking machines in every city.
00:11:31.000I mean, come on, that's not what we want as environmentalists.
00:11:34.000I'm really struck by your argument about the metaphors with the big debate over how we handle COVID. You know, do we do it by finding a technology to battle this microbe, which is, you know, a vaccine or something, or do we focus on helping people get their immune system strong?
00:12:01.000It can be resilient not just against one variant or one microbe, but against all microbes.
00:12:08.000I mean, we've survived for 4 billion years in one form or another in this planet by figuring out how to battle off any kind of hostile virus.
00:12:21.000I'm making our immune system resilient.
00:12:25.000There's a connection there because, again, we've had, just as we've had a worsening ecological crisis, we've had a worsening health crisis for at least two generations, maybe more.
00:12:38.000And this has been happening for my entire lifetime, yet at no point did we say, oh my God, we have to change everything about the way we live.
00:12:49.000Re-engineered society for that because it fits the formula of find an enemy.
00:12:55.000And that's the same mindset that diverts so much of our environmental zeal toward this single-cause problem and technocratic solution.
00:13:06.000Another important point is that the kind of war footing, let's make war on carbon, has played into the hands of Of the kind of Davos billionaires who are proposing solutions that are repressing civil rights,
00:13:31.000repressing human rights, controlling humanity, And imposing these huge high-profit, high-capital geoengineering projects that will make them richer, that will make democracy weaker, that will screw around with things that...
00:13:52.000You have environmentalists who are looking at Bill Gates as a hero, you know, and looking at some of the Davos crowd, they're the ones who get a private solution, overlooking the fact that these guys are all landing there in their private planes, burning up carbon like hell, and really not doing any.
00:14:11.000You know, Gates is heavily invested in all the big carbon producers, and his solutions are all about geoengineering and Environmental movement has somehow allowed itself to get trapped into an alliance with these guys, other than the kind of solutions you're talking about.
00:14:29.000And I think that's almost inevitable when we frame the problem in terms of a number, because it lends itself to the same kind of thinking that, I mean, it's actually financial thinking.
00:14:42.000And it's the same as if you're trying to base social policy on maximizing economic growth.
00:14:49.000Anytime you base it on maximizing or minimizing a number, what gets left out is everything that doesn't fit into your metrics and Or the things that you choose not to measure because they don't redound to the interests of those commissioning the measurements.
00:15:03.000Or the things that are fundamentally qualitative.
00:15:08.000So it's a comfortable mindset to have yet another Policy that is based on numbers, which then, incidentally, can be connected, can be financialized, and incorporated into carbon markets and carbon derivatives trading, and you have the whole thing happening again.
00:15:25.000And I think that we just need a much deeper kind of revolution than changing the...
00:15:31.000Financial metrics to include embodied carbon.
00:15:34.000That idea of sustainability, the reduction of sustainability to carbon neutrality, really begs the question of what do we want to sustain?
00:15:48.000And just change our fuel stock to something else and continue business as normal, continue befouling the whole world, and living oblivious to the sacredness of biological life on Earth.
00:16:01.000I think we should actually, I mean, I'm not going to be the word police and say we should never use the word sustainability, but I mean, come on.
00:16:08.000What about asking what kind of world do we want to sustain?
00:16:12.000If we could keep carbon at manageable levels as the rest of life on Earth dies, We're good to go.
00:16:39.000Deforest and destroy the fish and ruin life on Earth.
00:16:43.000And we could make up for it with geoengineering and maybe someday live in bubble cities with a rising GDP and digital replicas of all of the life that has been extinguished.
00:17:03.000You know, I love what you're saying because, and I've instinctively, and I recognized this from the beginning, when I did my first environmental book, which was The Riverkeeper, I told the publishers of it that I wanted to write a book about the environment without ever using the word sustainability, without ever using the word environment, without ever referring to climate.
00:17:39.000And the solution, people have asked me for years, what is...
00:17:44.000I've always said the same thing as restoring democracy, restoring true free market capitalism, which a capitalism that values externalities, that values the destruction of nature, which has a value.
00:18:01.000And it's the undervaluation of those public trust assets that allows us to use the environment wastefully.
00:18:08.000And it really is just about corruption.
00:18:12.000And there's a connection between all of these things that are intangible assets, but really are spiritual assets.
00:18:20.000God talks to human beings through many vectors, through each other, through organized religions, through the great books of those religions, through wise people, through art, literature, music, and poetry.
00:18:33.000But nowhere with the kind of texture and And lucidity and joy and detail as a creation.
00:18:43.000That's the way God talks to us, through the leaves, through the wind, through the songs of the birds, through the sounds of the crickets, and seeing a fox or watching a hawk.
00:18:54.000All those things have spiritual messages for us.
00:18:58.000And when we destroy nature, we diminish ourselves.
00:20:22.000If you quantify it, you're already reducing it.
00:20:24.000So say you value the Amazon, its ecosystem services at $10 trillion.
00:20:32.000By that logic, if you could make $20 trillion by cutting it down and turning it into a gigantic pit mine, then you should do it, if you've agreed that it's worth $10 trillion.
00:20:42.000So we have to have some way outside of quantitative logic to make our collective decisions.
00:20:49.000And not only about environment, it's also true of public health.
00:20:53.000Like when you let the epidemiologists make the public policies and what they include in their metrics is about mortality statistics and so on and so forth, cases, but doesn't include the value of hugs and seeing our full faces and conviviality and children. but doesn't include the value of hugs and seeing our learning about emotions by seeing adults' faces I mean, all of those things that you can't measure.
00:21:20.000I think this is one of the big points of emergence for our culture now, is how do we incorporate qualitative values Into our civic lives.
00:21:33.000Because it's all been about the science and science is about metrics, science is about data, science is about quantity.
00:21:38.000And I don't have an answer to this question, but I want to say that I want to affirm its importance and the part of all of us that recognizes that we can't live life by the numbers, personally or collectively.
00:22:33.000But I can't say that publicly because my board of directors would fire me and middle management would rebel and they would replace me with somebody even worse.
00:22:42.000Well, at the same time, the board of directors might be privately entertaining thoughts like that too.
00:22:49.000And so basically we have to recognize that we're all stuck to some extent, at least stuck in a system that no one in their hearts actually, or almost no one, when there are strong ideologies of Progress through the conquest of nature that the technocracy embraces to some extent, but most of us, at least to some extent, feel alienated by the system and the values that that system embodies that we live in.
00:23:18.000I suspect that that coal company manager was probably Jim Rogers, who runs Duke Energy.
00:23:27.000I was suing them for so long, for many years, but when you'd sit down with him, he would make those arguments.
00:23:34.000He'd say, look, I have the biggest coal fleet in the country.
00:23:38.000In terms of coal burning power plants, they're all fully amortized, which means I can generate power for $0.02 a kilowatt hour when everyone else is doing it for $0.11, $0.14 a kilowatt hour.
00:23:55.000And I'd like to close down those coal plants because they're acidifying every lake in North Carolina and they're contaminating a fish with mercury.
00:24:03.000And I don't want my kids to grow up there.
00:24:06.000I've gone up to Congress and said, make me pay for those externalities.
00:24:13.000Make for us so that we can no longer produce free energy from these plants.
00:24:17.000We actually have to pay for our externalities.
00:24:23.000And so his narrative is, I am forced to do this because if I close one of those plants, any one of my shareholders can sue me and they will win that lawsuit because I'm wasting corporate assets or something.
00:26:14.000And imagine that I'm neglecting him and I'm not feeding him and he's locked outside at night, you know, and I'm just treating him terribly.
00:26:21.000And you come to me and you're like, hey, Charles, you know, you better take better care of your kid.
00:26:27.000And you say, well, if you don't, then when he grows up, he won't take care of you and your neighbors are going to think ill of you and you might, you know, get put in prison for child neglect.
00:26:42.000I'm not going to take very good care of them.
00:26:44.000But if you are able to connect me with, hey, this is my family, this is a sacred being who you love, then I don't need those threats.
00:26:54.000So the question for me is, what has happened to us that we do not recognize the rainforest or the soil or the rest of life as part of ourselves, as part of our family, as a sacred being?
00:27:11.000And I'm not saying let's abandon the struggle and just do that spiritual work.
00:27:19.000But if the struggle does not include that spiritual work and the work of reconnection and the knowledge of how painful it actually is to be disconnected, how poor we have become for not being in intimate relationship with the plants and animals around us and the places and the hills,
00:27:38.000And to not be immersed in a web of stories and relationships with all of these beings, if we don't recognize that poverty, then when we address our opponents, we're only going to be in an oppositional relationship.
00:27:55.000We're not going to be able to say, hey, I want to make it better for you, too.
00:27:59.000That's what I want to bring into the conversation.
00:28:08.000The answer for you would be different.
00:28:10.000You're an attorney with vast experience in suing corporations, so the answer for you is going to be different than for me or for my brother-in-law.
00:28:19.000What's important is where the unique answer to you comes from, and it comes from Affirming what I just said.
00:28:28.000It comes from affirming your knowledge of the sacredness of life, affirming your knowledge of yourself as being put here on earth to serve life and beauty on earth.
00:28:39.000Once you know that about yourself, then you gain courage and you gain clarity and you become aware of the opportunities to fulfill what you know about yourself and the world.
00:28:51.000Charles Eisenstein, where can people follow you?