The Breakdown of Earth’s Systems, Regenerating Earth

Dave: [00:02:33 So my guest today is Joe Brewer. And I don’t know, Joe, if you’d call yourself an environmental activist, maybe that’s a pigeonhole you don’t want to be in, but you are certainly committed to doing what you can to reverse, mitigate the effects of climate change. And particularly, you’re focused in one specific area of mitigation Earth regeneration.

[00:03:00] You started out living in the Ozark region of the state of Missouri. And from what you told me, you grow up on a chicken farm. Somehow you went from the chicken farm to becoming a physics undergraduate at Southern Illinois University, studied physics, and then from there, somehow you went to studying climate science at the University of Illinois. And now fast forward to today, you are involved in something called Earth Regenerators, which is a group, a loosely formed group at the present time that’s loosely committed to regenerating Earth systems in order to reduce the effects of climate change. 

We talked a moment ago about intellectual bias, and I think at last count, I saw there were 135 of them, roughly 135 sources of intellectual bias that people have studied and documented. One of them you talk about is [00:04:00] we have evolved to be very poor at understanding threats that are not immediate. But the point is, you know, we react very, very quickly and very effectively If we think we see a snake out of the corner of our eye, you know, we jump because that’s very important to our survival.

But it’s another source of, I guess, intellectual blindness is we’re pretty poor at interpreting statistics. You know, you have to be trained to understand statistics. It’s not something that occurs naturally to most people. And even if you have been trained, your chances of misinterpreting statistics are fairly high. So you could take that bias that a lot of the scientific effects that you’re talking about are known or described or studied through statistics and probabilities.

The other is that the systems are incredibly complex with all these interactions that are very, very difficult to understand. And the other is that the threats until recently have appeared to exist in the future, right?  [00:05:00] So it’s very, very hard for most people to understand why we need to take action today for something that may be a problem five years, ten years, or 15, 20 years out.

Joe: One of the things for me that was really powerful was when I studied physics, when I got my undergraduate degree in physics, I learned a lot of specific information. What is the electrical charge of an electron out to the decimal point? You know, I had all this knowledge, like factual knowledge that I used to make calculations and to do the math, which later, when I stopped practicing in physics, I forgot a lot of that information.

But what I learned from physics that had a lasting impact was one of the most important things in physics. And the reason people tend to fail at almost all of their physics problems in the first year is because you have to learn a different way of thinking. And so the most important thing I learned from physics is how to set up a problem. In physics,

one of the things that you do is you say, okay, what is the phenomenon that I’m looking at? [00:06:00] What is known to be related to that phenomenon? What order of magnitude am I working on and which errors might I be able to allow by excluding or ignoring a factor, but knowing that it contributes only a small amount of error?

And there’s a way of thinking to set up a problem so that it can be solved using the knowledge from physics that’s available. And it turns out this way of thinking doesn’t just apply to physics. It was almost like a philosophy of knowledge or a mode of inquiry. So, for example, if I’m interested in something that’s approaching the speed of light, then I have to use relativistic mathematics.

And a good physicist would know that. Then I would use E equals mc squared, for how I get M for the F equals ma, which means for me to understand mass I have to recognize that mass changes as I accelerate. But the acceleration is related to this. [00:07:00] This very interesting relativistic thing, which is the speed of light is constant in a vacuum.

And so knowing the order of magnitude of the speed would determine which equations I would use just as an example, physics would help me know how to set up a problem so that I could get the right answer. And if I got the answer wrong, to then go back and figure out which assumptions I was using that were incorrect, and a good physicist would know how to do this kind of thing.

And so to me, that was really interesting because I was studying philosophy at the same time. So that way of learning to set up a problem was philosophically interesting. And now when we jump over into complexity science, one of the interesting things about complexity science is that when we’re dealing with a system that has a lot of interacting parts, we actually have very little detailed knowledge because we have errors all over the place and the details of the knowledge [00:08:00] and the errors can grow very quickly as we cross over tipping points or go into nonlinear feedbacks or have multiple feedbacks cascading.

And so what’s more important is the general behavior of the system, things like is it becoming more stable or is it becoming less stable? Is my knowledge of it increasing or decreasing as time goes on? Things that are actually more useful as heuristics to guide you. And so one of the powerful things about complexity science is that less knowledge with better parameters gives you better results than more knowledge that brings in more hubris because some of that knowledge is false.

Dave: Less knowledge with better parameters? What do you mean by better parameters?

Joe: Well, for example, let’s say I want to understand the density of energy and water that is moving at different speeds. And as water increases in speed, it goes from smooth flow to turbulent flow where there’s more mixing. [00:09:00] And as there’s more mixing, the density of energy becomes more different from one place to another, becomes heterogeneous. So I may be more interested in how quickly does the energy density change, which would be a parameter instead of how many eddies and micro entities are there in the turbulence, which I may have a difficult time measuring.

And so it actually relates to the problem of measurement that as you try to characterize the behavior of a system, you have to make measurements to characterize the behavior, but then you have to create simulations. And this is always done with computers. You have to create simulations of the behavior. And it turns out that there are numerical errors in the computations.

And so if you put in too much information, meaning if you put in more information than you have, you’re actually will put in more errors than if you assumed more ignorance. Meaning by using less information to characterize the behavior. [00:10:00] And this is somewhat counterintuitive until you try it. If you actually try this out and say, okay, I want to try and predict this computer model of the fluid flow of a river at different rates, and you’ll find that you’ll create more errors by what’s called overtraining, which is basically just prescribing more detail than you have.

And so it turns out that having diverse kinds of information that converge on similar insights about the behavior of a system is more powerful than more detailed information about the system. But that’s only true for complex systems. So if you’re dealing with something like the weather you might care more about, whether it is generally getting hotter or generally getting colder than how much is it going to rain.

And this exact location instead of in this like five square kilometer area where you’re averaging across. [00:11:00] And so you have less knowledge because you’re using statistics to spread out your knowledge, but you actually have better predictions of the future by not overprescribing what’s going to happen. And so that’s just a general sort of philosophy of knowledge with complexity.

But it starts to play out in things like, you know, how do we know about the planetary system? How is it doing? And this is why I love the planetary Boundaries framework of the Stockholm Resilience Center, is they identified that there are nine self-stabilizing processes of the planet that maintain this sort of warm, stable period that we call the Holocene when all civilizations that ever existed have occurred.

We’ve now left the Holocene because we’ve crossed several of these boundaries. And what’s interesting is that you actually can’t isolate one of them from the others because they’re all interrelated. So, for example, climate change is one of these planetary boundaries, but also ocean acidification is a different one. [00:12:00] But climate change causes ocean acidification. You increase the CO2 in the atmosphere, more carbon dioxide is absorbed which acidifies the ocean.

So even though there are two different dynamics stabilizing processes, they’re related to each other, and so the same would be true for the loss of biodiversity, which is a third one, The loss of biodiversity changes where carbon is stored in the environment because all living beings are carbon. And if you deforest the landscape and wipe out the biodiversity, you’ve also moved the carbon and released it into the atmosphere causing climate change.

So these things that are, each of them stabilizes the planet in its own ways, but they’re also interrelated with each other. And so if you see all of them becoming less stable with time, like right now, we’ve crossed seven of the nine planetary boundaries that as time goes on, we cross more and more and you see the direction for all of the different data.

[00:13:00] They’re all showing us that planetary stability is going away. It’s going away more quickly. It’s affecting more different parts of the planet and it’s affecting them in a compounding and accelerating way. And you can see a very clear direction with all of them. But if you just looked at biodiversity or just looked at carbon dioxide levels or just looked at deforestation, you wouldn’t see that converging direction, which in complexity science is called a dynamic attractor.

The dynamics of the system are attracted to a type of instability, a type of behavior. And this is why my training in complexity science was so important for understanding this breakdown of the stability of the planet. Because it’s not a single data center or a single data trend, and it’s looking across as many as I can find and seeing that all of them are not only destabilizing on their own, they’re destabilizing each other because they’re interrelated. [00:14:00] And that’s what the real story of planetary change is at the moment.

Dave: I do want to allow enough time to talk about your work with Earth Regenerators. I think to summarize the recent few minutes of our conversation, you are deeply concerned about the future. You believe that some kind of a collapse of our natural systems is imminent, whether that means five years or 25 years, or 50 years, you don’t know because of the complexity of these systems, but it’s probably closer to 25 years than it is to 50 years in your mind, is that correct?

Joe: Yes. And I would add one edit to that, which is that this collapse process has already been well underway for at least 150 years, and we’re very far into it. So while some of the most intense changes for humans are in the future, some of the most intense changes for all of the rest of the planet have already accumulated in the past hundred years up to the present.

Dave: [00:15:00] And when you look at the changes that are occurring that affect humans, again, they’re unequally spread, right? So many of the changes that are already occurring that would point toward the state of collapse are occurring in the Global South, not so much in the northern temperate zone.

Joe: That was correct up until about 15 years ago, but now it’s intense and abrupt and severe everywhere on the planet.

Dave: So this is based on things that we’ve discussed in the past, but your view is that this collapse, it began, as you say, more than 100 years ago. It’s kind of like a rolling collapse. It’s not like a Jenga game where you pull out one stick and the whole thing quickly tumbles. I mean, that could happen as we reach tipping points and things start to fall apart at an accelerating rate.

But what could happen is that it might just be a sequence of collapses that roll into something that doesn’t [00:16:00] look catastrophic until you’re looking at it in retrospect. Is that a fair statement?

Joe: That’s a fair statement. And just as an example, the Roman Empire took 300 years to collapse, it had moments of decline, moments of up and down, of coming back together and falling apart until it was completely gone at the end of a 300-year period. So the planetary collapse is much, much, much more complex than the collapse of the Roman Empire.

So in some ways, we could even say it goes back eight or 9000 years to the early days of agriculture. So there are different levels to it. But what I know we want to move into is what do we do about this place of collapse and this idea of Earth regeneration?

Dave: And in fact, in my opinion, that’s the most fascinating element of it, because we have looked over the edge, sort of into the precipice, the existential precipice. And you said, oh my gosh, we’re standing here. [00:17:00] We may see just amazing disaster ahead of us, which could include certainly the extinction of the human race. Right. And yet you’ve chosen to take action.

And that’s fascinating. Please tell us about the action you’ve chosen to take and your work in that regard.

Joe: One thing that’s been foundational for me in building up the framework of action that I work within is that I have a child. Knowing what I know about the world, having looked over the precipice, I chose to have a child. And so I had to make a decision earlier in my life. One, do I believe humans have a future or not? I was like, Oh, it looks grim, but it’s not that we have no chance. It’s that there’s a real chance we could go extinct. And even a chance of it is too much. Even the possibility is too much. And then the other thing was that I had to ask myself very deeply, Are humans a plague or a scourge on the earth?

Would the Earth be better to rid herself of us like a virus? [00:18:00] And as I sat deep into myself with my love of science and my love of art and music and theater, my love of the world and the love of nature, that I was just deeply moved by how beautiful humanity is and how I feel in a profound way that the world is better off with humans in it.

And I say in it because we’re inside the Earth’s atmosphere, we’re inside the Earth’s carbon cycle, we’re inside the Earth’s hydrological cycle. We are part of the dynamics of the earth. And so what I came to was that there needs to be a way for humans to bring ourselves back into harmony with the rest of the planet.

And as I started looking for how to do this, and this was a journey of 15 years, it wasn’t an instant thing, I eventually came to realize that there is a natural scale of human culture that is able to self-organize and become sustainable. [00:19:00] It’s what all sustainable human cultures have ever done in the past. And it’s interesting to notice that while not all indigenous cultures are sustainable, all sustainable human cultures that we know about are indigenous.

And so when you look back in time and say, well, every empire and every civilization without exception, all of them have collapsed. About 300 of them have been documented, and 100% of them collapse. The current civilization will do the same thing. It’s already showing every sign that it’s well into collapse. And so the question becomes, well, what does a human culture look like that is sustainable? And human cultures that are sustainable… I’m going to be very simplistic just for conceptual clarity. I’m going to name two things that every one of them has. One of them is that it’s organized into an entire landscape at a scale called a bioregion, which is the scale at which the entire human culture can integrate itself into its landscape.

[00:20:00] This might be a river basin or a watershed, it might be a coastal estuary. It might be a semi-nomadic trade network, like going from the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains and back to the Great Plains. But there is a well-defined geography, a geographic range, and a landscape scale at which human cultures exist. That’s one thing. The other thing is in their spirituality or their ethics or their worldview, whichever way you look at it, it’s the same thing, which is that they would personify the rest of nature.

They would have a kinship relationship with the rest of nature. They would treat the non-human people as sacred and they would honor their relationships. So the river is a person and you treat the river with respect. The mountain is a person and you treat the mountain with respect. And there are a lot of psychological and anthropological reasons why personification is so important.

The way that my friend Michael Dow describes this, that’s really simple to state and powerful, [00:21:00] is that they have a pro-future relationship with the ecosystems they depend upon for their survival. If you need clean drinking water, then you need to behave as though you want that river to be healthy in the future. And so this is built into the ethics and their behavior, and it’s built into their spirituality, their religions.

It’s shaped into the behaviors of their economics. And this is true for every sustainable culture in history. And so the approach that we’re taking is to identify for ourselves in different parts of the world. What are our own bioregions, what are our own landscape scale capacities to integrate humans into the landscape? And then form these deep relationships with the ecological functions we depend upon for our survival as though they are sacred and should be protected for the future.

Now, in simple Missouri language, I would just say, if you’re going to drink that water, don’t piss in it. [00:22:00] Right? It’s like, it should be obvious that in the future you want that water to not have piss in it. And so being pro-future is actually pretty simple to understand, but it requires an intimacy and a familiarity with the landscape to know, what is the health of the river, what is the health of the soil.

You know, what is the change in the behavior of the birds? And what does that say about the health of the forest? And so what we are doing in Barichara Columbia, where I’ve been living for the last three years, is creating a living experiment, a living laboratory at the scale of a million acres, 500,000 hectares, which is the size of the entire regional climate system, which has been 95% deforested by monoculture, industrial agriculture in the last 80 years.

The whole region’s rapidly becoming a desert and we are with a lot of people in the community. [00:23:00] It’s not like the white guy from the North who went to Colombia. A lot of people in the community already had projects before I arrived, but they were not integrated with each other. There were little islands, just like academic departments at universities, and they needed to become woven into a tapestry.

And now we’re engaging in watershed restoration, the building of soils, reforestation, the protection of native species, while at the same time building a local economy and the material flows of textiles and food and medicinal plants, construction materials, all with indigenous traditional practices from those native plants and native animals. Gathering and preserving cultural knowledge and putting it into practice in the local culture.

And the element around being pro-future is that right at the heart of our work, there are a lot of different groups to work with children helping the children to form deep sacred relationships with land and forests and rivers and birds and specific trees [00:24:00] so that they will care for and protect them in the future.

Dave: Why Colombia and why specifically Barichara Colombia? Why not somewhere closer to home?

Joe: Two reasons. One is idiosyncratic. We stumbled on to the beautiful gift and secret that is Barichara, as a place where there was community work being done to bring forests back. A lot of work with children. And we were looking for a place to raise our daughter in our community, where people were working together at the community level to restore their ecosystems.

So we stumbled into Barichara as a place to do that, but there was no way we could do it in the U.S. Because the U.S. and Europe and many places that are deeply entrenched and the infrastructure and the culture of consumer capitalist economies are so far removed from nature. Like here I am right now talking to you from the Chicago suburbs [00:25:00] where I go from a house to a car to a store, to a car, to a house on highways where it’s just houses and housing developments and strip malls. And the entire landscape has been turned into a carpet of concrete.

Dave: If you wanted to do anything at scale and have to negotiate with hundreds or thousands of different landowners to do it. 

Joe: Yes. And it’s deeply entrenched in the infrastructure of the politics, the policy domains, the zoning, the regulations where it’s very, very hard to make even a modest change. But to make a transformational change requires this entire system to collapse because it’s so strong. There’s no stopping it. But because it’s like a terminal cancer patient, it’s already killing itself. And eventually, it will collapse enough that it’ll become possible to restore the amazing Illinois Prairie.

But right now, just housing development will destroy landscapes faster. You could pick five acres of land to regenerate [00:26:00] while 10,000 are destroyed in the same amount of time. Because of the sheer scale of the economy that’s taking action here. So the other part of the answer is entrenchment, which is that the developmental process constraints and structures and forces a direction that you can’t just automatically reverse, you have to undo.

But the amount of work to undo it makes it impossible to achieve in practical terms. And there’s no turning the U.S. economy around when the U.S. economy is the most wasteful, consumerist, individualistic, nature-destroying culture in human history. So that’s not the best place to start. But going to some places like the Northern Andes and Colombia with lots of intact indigenous cultures.

There are 6000 people in the town of Barichara. It’s rural countryside all around us. We can just climb over a stone wall to talk to our neighbors about planting trees together and there’s very little infrastructure that gets in our way.

Dave: [00:27:00] Good answer. Lots of lots of good reasons for not doing it closer to home. Listen, we have so much more to talk about here. We’re only just beginning to talk about your work in Barichara. I know for a fact that despite the litany of reasons why you said you thought it wouldn’t be effective to pursue these kinds of activities in the United States, I know for a fact that you are linking up with people who are pursuing these kinds of activities in the United States.

That’s a whole other topic of conversation. I’d also love to talk to you about specifically what you’re doing at Barichara and what principles or lessons you’ve learned from that that could be applied elsewhere, what recommendations you might have for people who want to follow a similar path to yours, but maybe a little bit closer to home. How would somebody like that connect with other like-minded people?

So these are all the kinds of things I’d love to talk to you about in the future. For now, would you please just tell me and our listeners, [00:28:00] if they’re interested in learning more about your work, what are the best resources you could point them toward?

Joe: The two places I would direct them are to a platform that is a mobile app of Mighty Networks. The community is called Earth Regenerators. So I would say go look for Earth Regenerators and download the Mighty Networks app, which is free to use. It’s an online courseware app and then go and look at the materials and join the community.

There are 4300 members of Earth Regenerators and it formed around a book that I wrote in 2019 and 2020. So that would be the first place. And the second place would be to find my YouTube channel where I have about 200 recorded webinars that are publicly available and they can dig to their heart’s content into a variety of topics related to the solutions to how we regenerate the Earth.

Dave: That’s a great note to end on. Joe, thank you so much for your time and I hope that we’ll have an opportunity to talk again and follow up on this super interesting topic.

Joe: [00:29:00] Yeah, please, let’s do another round, maybe two, and let’s just document this. It’s really lovely to be here with you, Dave, and so enjoyable to find all of our connections and get to have these conversations.

Dave: Thank you so much for your time, Joe.

Joe: All right. Take care.