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My goodness, it's being Frank, where the only way to be is Frank. Hello everyone, and welcome to being Frank Ware. The only way to be is Frank. I'm your host, Frank Mbuono, and I'd like to thank you for joining us on what we like to call the Intelligent Conversation Podcast, where no conversations out of bounds, in all points of view are welcome. You know, we record live to tape. I give you the date so you have some context
and relevance. It is the twenty third of April. Just the day before the taping of this episode, we celebrated the fifty fifth anniversary of the first Earth Day, and I have a strong recollection of it. I was a sophomore in high school and remember the excitement it generated. There were speeches and events not only around the campus but in the country at large. There was a sense that it was time to stop the damage we were causing to our environment, and that if we worked at it,
we could build a better future for everyone. And we did work at it. Strides were made, while at the same time we acknowledged there was still a great deal of work to do if we were to truly save the planet. Still, one of the things that's always confused me then and still does was getting the greater part
of America to understand the urgency of this issue. While we have made gains in cleaning the air and water, there is a persistent resistance to the notion that poisons remain in our environment that are killing the very planet that sustains us. Particularly galling is the notion that some people still deny that global warming precipitated by the continuous use of fossil fuel is real. It's seen as some type of political scan aimed at limiting our personal freedoms.
This thinking has been exacerbated by an administration that is doing everything in its power to dismantle the hard work gains we made in protecting the earth. They have begun the process of dismantling the EPA aid in many of the programs that kept us safe. The President even had the country withdrawal from the Paris Climate Cord that would have continued the effort to limit worldwide pollution. But what
can we do well? Our guest took the matter, shall we say, personally, and dedicated his life to the cause of saving the environment. He left a highly successful career in the tech industry to experience life directly in the Amazon, one of the most important endangered ecosystems. By traveling there and living and learning at his own time and expense, that experience transformed him into what a recent article called
a global toxic avenger. He became an author and advocate, creating two very influential and successful organizations dealing with environmental issues, especially among poor nations and people. He continues his activism and is currently working on another book to save the planet. Please, welcome to being Frank for some intelligent conversation, mister Richard Fuller,
appreciate you. I know you're a busy guy, especially now we just finished Earth Day and it's Earth Awareness Month, etc. So I'm sure you're busy.
Well, it was a really delightful introduction frame, Thank you so very much.
Well, it's a pleasure to have you here now. And people they've heard you speak a little hint of an accent. So that you grew up in Australia. Who what were some of your early influencers mentors? Tell us about your life there.
I'm a Melbourne boy, so growing up in Australia as an ideal place to be. There's a lot of outdoor sports and recreation. It's not dirty at all. It's a great fun place. And I grew up through my university years and until I was about thirty really just having a great time. So it was around that time that I started looking at what was going on globally and thought maybe I could do something more. And you know, there's a there's this guy out there, Buckminster Fuller. Have you ever seen his stuff?
A little bit? Yes, I had, what's certainly in the name, Yes, so.
I had to, you know, read up on him because he's my namesake, though we're not at all related. And somewhere in some of his writings he was saying, look, you only get one life. How big could you make it? What could you do to make it? You know, really really as spectacular as possible? And there I was at IBM, enjoying, you know, the fruits of making lots of money and working in the computer industry, and I thought, Eh, what else could I do that would be more fun than this?
What else could I do that would push it a bit further? So that was kind of the start of it.
Was there any particular epiphany that you can recall, a moment you know, people see, you know, feels light bulb going off above your head. Was there any a moment like that where you made the firm commitment first in your mind then physically to do well.
It was a little bit like that, but it was more like a moment of saying, look, you know, becoming a senior executive at the white shirt, blue pin striped suit, big us company. Ah, that doesn't feel right at all. So grab a bottle of wine and sit down the kitchen table and start to think of what would be a good life. And I just wrote down a few things that I thought would be a life worth living, and a few things that I really thought I ordered
to do. So the fun things were. I thought, I really wanted to go skiing on the West Coast in the Rockies, right, I mean I.
Have that in my notes. I was going to press you on that.
Yeah, Oh you know, I just love skiing and I always wanted to see the Rockies. So that was one thing. And then another thing I wanted to do was I wanted to live in a foreign country and learn to speak a different language. You know, something that very common for Australians. We love traveling, but I really wanted to embed myself somewhere in a different culture and really really do that. And then the next thing is I was hearing a lot about rainforest depletion, so I'm like, I
got to find out what's that all about? All the Amazon rainforests, burning beef cattle, all that stuff that you could It was loud, very loud around this time because this is let me see, I was born in nineteen sixty so this was nineteen eighty nine more or less. So that was something that really sparked my interest. And then kind of all of that I thought got summarized. I thought, you know, I really want to make a difference in the world, at a kind of a global impact.
I wanted to have impact beyond just the people that I met. I wanted to improve people's lives, beyond just those that could actually meet and talk to. And so it was something strange like that that I felt would be really cool to do.
It's such strange, it's bold. Certainly you mentioned you were about thirty years old and without you know, prying olderly personal, but were single. What allowed you to be able to do that? I mean if you're committed, if you have family, and it's difficult to say I'm going to take off of the rainforest for six months.
Yeah, definitely single. So it's that.
Enables so okay, it was important to understand, but that you use that to further something greater than yourself. I think it's fair to say, right.
Oh, you know, you have to be single to do you have to be a little bit loco, you have to be a little bit out there, maybe a little bit crazy stupid too to think that you could do things like this, because it's really hard and actually it's mostly leads to failure. So you've got to be okay with a bit of failure to do this sort of stuff, you know.
I think that's important to bring up, too, rich as we get back into our direct conversation about the environment, but especially recently, and there were a number of keynote speakers at college graduations within the last year or two who revised their speeches. You can do anything if you put your mind to it, Yes, but then also you
should be able to encounter failure. No, these things are hard to do, so to set realistic goals, go for them, but realize at the same time Failure can be a big part of it, and you'll fail many times before it success. Would you tend to agree with that from your experience.
Oh, absolutely, Frank. I mean it's I mean you look at businesses. I think more than half of all businesses that have started fail within the first year. And then the non off it, well, the contributive side of things. It's I think five times harder than business. I've done both. I mean, I've started maybe six different businesses and two of them have been successful. And I've started, you know, quite a few ango processes and really really one and
then a second has has actually taken off. It's it's really tough work, not selling someone a product or or a service, but asking people to give their harder money up to do something, to do something that you know you can you can get their passion and inflamed about. It's really tough work to do that.
Yeah, we're going to talk in detail about those two organizations, Great Forest and Pure Earth in some detail. But I'm curious, what was your first impression. I've never traveled a bit. I went to China before it was popular. If it's is part there, certainly not to go to China spent a certain sense of adventure, but the rainforest seemed so far away. What was your impression of it when you first got there, Do you remember the first things that popped into your mind?
Being Well, I spent a lot of time there. I spent a good part of a year coming backwards and forwards to the US and spending a lot of time in very remote parts of the rainforest looking to set up extractive reserves. There are a kind of national park where there's a responsibility given to local inhabitants to self enforce the park. So instead of there being rangers, there is a local arrangement where people who are extracting materials from the rainforest in a way that doesn't cause any damage,
so they're harvesting rubber or brazil nuts. They're also given responsibility to kind of protect the rainforests from from from from real serious destruction. So I spent a lot of time working on setting those particular reserves in place. And I got to tell you, I call it the triple one hundreds. It's one hundred percent humidity, one hundred percent of the time, one hundred percent. I've forgotten what the
third one is. It's just hot. Oh, it's one hundred degrees one hundred percent humidity one hundred percent of the time. It's just miserable, you know. And you feel so small too, because there's so much insect life around you, not many
big creatures. You don't see them. Occasionally there'll be a wild boar that will charge somewhere off in the distance, and there's some quite a lot of birds and bird life, but mostly it's insects, and you know things that you sit on a log next to a stream you've just traveled for six hours, and you look down and there's like ten different types of ants and you know for sure that nine of them have never been classified or reviewed by science. And they're not crawling over you and biting you.
So sounds lovel that's not great. Oh yeah, it makes everybody want to go. But that leads us to the next question, why is all of that important? Why do again? Part of my job is to play with the devil's advocate, So keep that in mind. Why should we save a place like.
Oh, you know that already, but they don't want to hear me say that.
Yeah, yeah, you're supposed to hear you say that.
You know, it's an enormous amount of biodiversity that's there. The more important is weather control. Weather management. There's a huge amount of carbon that's tied up there, and once you start to cut it down, it just shifts local and global weather pattern is such an enormous way, So it's a critical it's a critical part of the global global ecosystems.
Why do you think people here, particularly Americans. I can't speak for others around the world, but it seems to be fairly common to make the connection that all these things are connected, that the changing weather, et cetera is In other words, damage in a far away exotic place like the rainforest has direct effects if someone like us living in night you're a Nayakar as well, now affects us here in nayak People have a difficulty making that connection,
or many people do. Obviously we do, that's why we're here. But as I said in my intro, there's this constant resistance. It's a man made thing. It's not happening, it's not real. Why Why do so many people have so much difficulty making that connection.
That's a good question, Frank, I really have no idea, and I but the thing is, it's such a long distance away. We all think about our neighborhoods and our family and things that are miles away that are filled with insects. They don't seem that exciting. I don't blame people for not getting that excited. But it's not necessary for everyone to be worried about the destruction of the
Amazon rainforest. It's just literally not necessary. It's perfectly okay that there are some people who do who can go and do something about it and do it for the public good, for the general public. I don't feel that we need to have everyone in the US have a light bulb switch on and say, oh my goodness, you know I've got to do A and B and C. It's fine, give them, give everyone their voice.
Let's talk about the organizations. The two successful ones that you that you created are the first one, great idea, Great Forest about recycle recycling in large companies. What was the germ for that idea and how did you make that happen? Well?
I I was in the rainforest, working with local organizations, local village people along different rivers in the northern part of the Amazon, on the on the Rio Puruche and the Rio Jurroa and there were a lot of people who didn't really want these extracted reserves to get set up, and they were people who were pretty wealthy, had a lot of say over local politics, but not over the
the federal level politics. So my mandate I was working there with the United Nations Environment Program for the Ministry for the Environment at the federal level, but quietly doing this without really interacting with the state or the town municipalities who were very keen to see economic development, which meant cutting down the rainforest. They had a particular way of showing their dissatisfaction, which involved a cult revolver and
paying a guy to go out and whack you. And the going rate was dependent on how how highly placed you were. But you could, you know, you could kill a mayor for maybe a couple of thousand dollars and a peasant for like a couple of hundred dollars. So someone put a contract out on me. Wow, yeah, it's in my book, Frank, you should read it. You love it.
Oh yeah, I'm loving it now. Movie material based on a true story. It was really down personally.
Yeah, so we were I was in a restaurant and the group of people who were kind of we were kind of working together and uh uh, a guy, the chef comes out of the restaurant and and sus speaking very spot fast and Portuguese, says get out of here,
get out of here. And we raced out through the kitchen and they pushed my head down in the back seats so no one could see me because I was the white Australian, for God's sake, tall and large and you know, in the middle of what's a much smaller body Swadi kind.
Of everything there, everything they're not.
So these guys came in through the main door and started shooting out all of the windows and saying, where is the Australian from from the United Nations? You know, from and organized us, you know United. So so we I grabbed my stuff and I raced down to the to the local airport and found a guy who charted me in his one seventy two Assessina one seventy two, and I just paid him to get me the heck out of town, get out of Dodge.
We're talking filmy, I want the rights to this. We're on one record right here, but please continue with this great story.
Yeah, so we got in this really cranky old aeroplane and and shot away, and they took me down from this local town in heil Bronco, I think it was, and then to a place that had a regular serviced a regular flight every day, going back to the de Rio de Janeiro. And I waited a few hours and jumped on that and ended that back in Rio, and then I looked for the first flight to get me to the US and ended up in Miami. So yeah, it was pretty it was pretty intense. And then so
I couldn't. I had had done a whole bunch of planning and created a whole bunch of extractive reserves and plans and things, and and I sent them all off to the to the minister, and most of them actually got created. So there's a lot of area under park as a result of all this work, but none of it with any you know, credit to me at all, because the other thing that they did was they put out a rumor that I had done something terrible to
a young boy. You can imagine, you know. So the minister wanted nothing to do with me, No one wanted to return my call. Was I was just persona non grata. And this whole year of work was like you know, and I spent on my own money too, So I was proke in New York.
With a contract on your head.
No, don't go back to break but they would they wouldn't.
Follow you from the rainforest necessarily, not these guys.
You know how they would prove that they've got you. They would cut off your ear and give it to the guy in a brown paper bag. That was like they would say.
That the showtime series, Yeah, how did that ultimately lead you to great forest?
Well, so I needed I needed to have a some income, and and of course I couldn't work for anyone because they didn't have a you know, a visa for a work visa. So I I found a person who was willing to hire me to help him do marketing on green products like he had. He had this diaper that was supposed to be biodegradable, you know, and he wanted also to sell recycled paper and things like that. So, you know, I was in marketing in IBM, and so I was pretty felt confident to be able to do this.
And he was going to pay me twenty bucks an hour or one hundred dollars a day or something like that. So what I did was I incorporated a company and I named it after the Amazon basin the Amazon forest, which is called La Grande Floresta that's whatever, and couser. They didn't call the Amazon, it is lagran Fleest. So I named the company Great Forest. And this guy paid Great Forest, and then Great Forest paid all my expenses,
like my rent and everything else. And that's how I got around, and eventually Great Forest sponsored me for a work visa, so then I could pay myself and actually pay taxes to That happened after about six or eight months.
And what was the connection with Great Forest? Ultimately I understood and from all of the research that I did with recycling and getting larger companies to participate, is that correct?
Right? So what it does and it's still around a large successful company now, is it looks at large office buildings and big corporations fortune five hundred size and helps them to set recycling and that helps them to manage all the contracts with the garbage hole is the recycling, and so like all of that and keep all of that intact and tight, and then helps the companies prepare all of the statistics that they need for their own corporate records and things so.
Yeah, you know, which we never think of. That is you know, we were a consumer and disposal for making that up society. But you know, we take it, we put it somewhere, and it's gone without giving a lot of thoughts of the process of removing that for the better or for the worse. It's for us, it's just God. But it's fascinating to see how much is involved with getting it gone and getting it in a way that it's it's not harmful, it could possibly be even beneficial.
But let's continue. Be aware of the time from Great Forest you left and then you started another organization that you have involvement with. You started in one capacity and you have a new capacity. But let's talk a little bit about Pure Earth. How did you what is it? When did you found it? And tell us about it? What is it about?
Well after about about let me see, now, about fifteen years of Great Forest and it started to really be successful. It went through that early phase of hard, hard work without much returning and eventually by this time I married with a couple of gorgeous kids and have a nice house in Tuxedo Park. You know, so living the good life and you know, doing doing good things and the staff of twenty people plus or so. But it was a bit dissatisfying in the end as well, because it
wasn't satisfying those things that I wrote down. I wasn't making a difference because when you look at recycling, it helps, it helps your carbon footprint, but only a little bit. It's not really a huge impact. It makes people feel happy when they do recycling, which is great, but it's not saving anyone's lives good, you know what I mean. So the impact is kind of a little marginal. So I said, okay, what could I do next to do
something that would have more impact? And we spent By this time I had a bunch of advisors and people who wanted to talk about it all, and we looked at the globe from different directions. We looked at it from the problems of climate change, and then from destruction of natural resources by university loss specifically, and then also about oceans, what was going on with oceans, and then
finally about pollution. And the thing that was the eye opener was to see were there nonprofit entities, you know, people trying to do good from the West, from high income countries, in low and middle income countries on those things, and there were for climate change, for oceans, and for biodiversity. There were a lot of very good organizations doing some pretty good work and they're still going and you know who they are, you know, they're all of the big groups.
But no one was doing anything about pollution. And it was like, oh, we've dealt with pollution in the West, but I know from my travels that the rivers are stinky and the garbage is everywhere. When you go to the poorer countries, it is horrid. That's how we started out. Realized that's the gap, right.
What what what have you put in place to be able to deal with that? How? How what kind of improvements have you institute are you looking to institute?
Well, the first thing that we did trying to be a little bit methodical about it, Frank, we chose four countries that were all anglifiles. I didn't have to worry about translation the Amazon and learning Portuguese. Man, I didn't want to have to do that again. And my wife is a Latina, so she so I learned Spanish, so
that was that was plenty. So it chose four different countries and myself and a partner visited them and went through all of the critical things that you need to worry about if you're going to be managing pollution properly. Have you got sanitation systems in place you know you're managing your poop. Have you got good regulations for clean air and clean water? Even if they're not being complied with, you actually have the regulations in place. Do you have
wasyts of handling really toxic nasty stuff? Is that sorted out? Okay? They're being managed at all? Do you have a civil society who can do on scream when things go real bad? You know those sort of questions. And so we would go and like evaluate this in a bunch of different countries and see what we could do. And I started
doing little projects ten thousand dollars. It's taking money from the recycling business and funneling it ten thousand at a time to different people to try and fix different things. So in Thailand, I funded a couple of guys to get on a boat and go and dig the garbage out of the klongs out of the canals in this one area that was just oh filled with rats and horrid stuff. And they just picked it out and then carted it off to the landfill and they for ten grand.
They did that for about six months and it cleaned up the whole area around it was fantastic. And another place we found a place where there was all this lead from a battery recycling facility and we had that shipped away and moved somewhere else, so it wasn't poisoning the kids that were downstream from it at all. So little things like this, to see what would work with someone who could, you know, work from a wealthy country, maybe go and raise money and do more and more
wanted to see what would be effective over time. The thing that kept coming back more and more was that the highly toxic sites were really the big problems out there, and there are cities where the level of toxicity is so bad from different kinds of chemicals. The life expectancies back in the thirties and forties, you know, people just get sick and die because there's so much lead or
kinds of pesticides, all these sort of things around. And so you have to focus to be good at being an NGO, You have to have as best a focus as possible because when you have something that's very specific that you say you can achieve, then people want to
give you money to see that happen. Right. People will give you a certain amount of money with just a broad general idea, But if you want to get the big bucks, you have to be very, very tight and have something that you say you can actually do that will improve people's lives substantially. So we first we started on toxics and toxic sites, and I got money from the European Union, then from the World Bank, then from USAID and others, and we started doing an inventory of
acute toxic sites. These were places where minimum two thousand people were being poisoned at levels where you would see hundreds, if not thousands of deaths a year. And that data set is still there and growing, and that's that project still keeps going and it's and so that was our first focus, whereas where are the big toxic sites and big toxic problems. Then the next thing was we started to look at all these sites. We had five thousand sites in the database after a while, and we thought,
holy crap, half of them are lead. Lead is a big deal. We worry about lead here. Lead and paint right, nasty stuff damages children's brains, right, causes them to be less intelligent, more problems with learning and the rest of it. You didn't know also that it causes heart disease, and the latest science is the lead causes almost as much heart disease as smoking does. That's new. People don't know that as well. It hurts adults just as much as
it hurts kids, but that's new science. But we found lead being so predominant that we started to put all of our attention just on lead. So Pure Earth has now become the organization that's leading the charge to reduce lead exposures around the world. So like already in the US, we've done so much on lead that levels are down really at a low level, at a level that's pretty good. And whenever a kid ends up getting lead because they ate the wrong apple juice or whatever, people come in
and pay attention and they try to stop it. But overseas in the poor countries, lead levels are ten times higher. No one's measuring, no one's paying any intention, no one even knows where the lead's coming from, and there's a huge amount of premature death, brain damage, loss of productivity. Ever runs a little dumb than they should be. Everyone's like five IQ points dumber than they should be in the majority of the world. So we say the threshold in the US ought to be three point five. This
is the number that doctors look at it. If you're below three point five, you're okay. Well. In the poorer parts of the world, more than half of them are above three point five. More than fifty percent of people are above three point five.
In people seem share. That has long lasting effects, not only health, with economy because as you mentioned, the intelligence level is lesser, so people can't achieve on the same level because they're physically and then ultimately also mentally not as healthy as others. That's incredible, it really is.
And there's a there's a relationship between intelligence and how much you earn in your lifetime. So for every IQ point you lose, it's like I don't know how many thousands or tens of thousands of dollars you earn less, so you're less productive. So the economy shrinks because of this five IQ points throughout the entire country that's been lost.
It's incredible. Let's know, you have a new role. You founded it and you were cheap executive assume in the beginning, but you have a new role at Pure Talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, So you know, the organization has grown now is to the point where we're spending say ten million a year funding from many, many different sources, and we're about to double in size and then potentially a triple in size over the next few years. So one of the one of the problems I had was I got some horror disease on one of these trips to one of these countries, and as it left me a little disabled. So I've got an autoimmune now from from from these trips.
So I turned the management of the organization over to a fantastic guy, Drew mccata, and he's doing a brilliant job in managing the organization. And I'm staying on in making sure we do the right strategies to reduce blood levels as cost effectively as possible. So I'm the chief research and strategy kind of guy at the organization. It's a good role for me because I don't have to
work seventy hours a week. I can just work thirty hours, which is as much as my body can handle at the moment, and it works out well.
Great. Let's talk about some of the key successes that Pure Earth has had so far, What would you like to crow about? Give you a chance to do that?
Well, you know a lot of this to be successful. First, you need that type focus because people are attracted to making a difference. It's something that they can measure. But also you need to have a network. You need to have a lot of people who were enrolled in the same idea who want to move things along. And the biggest community out there, you know, is the United Nations and all of those groups, the United Nations Development Program and you in Environment Program and wh O and all
the rest of it. So I wanted to get them worried about pollution broadly. And to do that I did a really significant report in the Lancet. It was a commission, you know, one of these commissions and Lancet publisher. It's called the Commission on Pollution and Health, and it came out in two thousand and seventeen, I think, and it
was the It was just a groundbreaking report. It showed that seven million people one in six deaths because of pollution, air, pollution, contaminated soil, all these sorts of things, and it was just an eye opener for the whole UN system. They all started to think and work on pollution, and I'm
really proud of that. And then similarly, when we started to focus just specifically on lead, I wrote another report, this time with UNISEF, and this one was about the overall impact of lead in the world globally, and that one's called the Toxic Truth, and that was also one of those things that shifted the whole way that all of these different agencies to focus specifically now on lead. And it's really worked, It's really worked.
Let's talk a little bit about your book. We got one coming up, and we talk about that after the break, and we also want to talk a little bit about some of the changes I mentioned the administrations trying to backtrack, if you will, some of the hard work that you've already done. You mentioned us ai D and many of the other the EPA that is potentially suffering serious cuts, and I want to know what effect that might have. But we'll put that off the way after the break
and discussing your new book. But before that, let's talk a little bit about the Brown Agenda. Your book. Tell us about it.
Well, it's a book I wrote after all of those adventures in the rainforests and starting up pure earth and the rest of it. And it's a nice read. It's got a lot of good entertaining stories in it, from being chased around by the mafia in New York City as well as you know. It doesn't do with that.
I didn't even know you then, I promised, So I highly recommend it.
It's out there on Amazon. It hasn't been a huge best seller, but it's very it's you will enjoy it, and it's, uh, it's not technical. It's more about, you know, what I've done in the world, and then what are these problems really? Like? What is it this problem with mercury and gold mining, for example, and how does that work? What's going on with these acute pesticides. So you learn a lot, I think, just from reading it, and I promise you it will not be a heavy lift. It's
much more fun than that. Cool.
Well, tell a little bit about the title, the Brown Agenda.
So it's called the brown Agenda because the Green Agenda is about biodiversity. The blue Agenda is about seas and oceans. I don't know what the climate agenda color that is, but the Brown Agenda makes sense I think for the toxics side of things. So that's how I named it.
All right, We've got more to talk about, including your new book, Fixing It, and we're going to find out how you're going to fix it. Put you on the spot a little bit, No, yeah, it's a little bit. I'm sure. After the New York Mafia and the Brazilian Amason for your life, I'm sure you can handle me. This has been absolutely great so far. I also want to get your take on some of the changes that we can expect with cut funding. How how what's the
strategy to keep moving forward? I think you your opinion on that will will certainly hold some weight. So you want everybody to stay with us. This is Being Frank. I'm your host, uh and we'll have more right after these brief commercial messages. Please don't go anywhere yet.
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Welcome back to Being Frank the Intelligent Conversation Podcast. Thanks for sticking with us. I'm your host, Frank Nibono. As always, our engineers the mailman because he always delivers mister Neil Richter. You know, we bring our audience a fresh topic just about every week and stream from Hudson and River Radio, located and beautiful and historic Stony Point, New York. But remember, you can catch Being Frank anywhere you get your favorite
podcasts like Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio and all the others. And because every Being Frank is archived, you can listen to any of our programs anytime you like. Find the link to Being Frank on the Hudson River Radio Facebook page or at our website Hudson Riverradio dot com. Just click and you're there. Let's get back to our conversation with Richard Fuller. He's an environmentalist and activist and author and so much more. We've have great conversations so far, and
we teased your new book that you're writing. It's called Fixing It tell us about.
Oh, I think it's too early to talk too much about it, but tease us. Yeah. I think what I've learned from having, you know, started this work that now has grown into an international movement is a few key lessons in what you need to do to make a difference. You know, we all all want to make a difference in the world, have impact, and there are certain important
things that one can focus on. And when I started to think about this a bit, I realized that if I hadn't known some of these things, I might have been able to get to where we are now, maybe five years or so quicker than the twenty five years that's taken. So I thought I ought to get that out there. So it's it's in early draft stages and quite a way to go, but we'll we'll slowly plug away and give it a year or two and we'll have something out there and I'll let you know.
Uh, Richard, there these are tough times to kind of navigate through. There's been so much that's happening. Cuts here, changes there, personnel moves. How do we continue to move forward? How do we navigate to a more healthy way of living for everyone, not only for Americans but internationally. There's so many marginalized communities that that have gotten forgotten. How do we keep it in people's minds and that change has to continue. We have to move this forward or
we could lose the planet. How do we do that?
Well, you know, we keep doing what we're doing. I mean, there are setbacks and having us a I D shut down is you know, really a big one. But there is a lot of people out there who really really want to see the world get better and focusing specifically on something and working towards it. There are a lot of ways to work that you can do outside of government,
outside of needing financial contributions from the government. There's been so much wealth created in the last couple of decades, especially on the West Coast, that people are really sitting on big pools and reservoirs and money and very little that actually has started to go out into its philanthropic eventual routes. You know, most of the billionaires have signed on to the Giving Pledge where they say they'll give away for common good most of their money before they die.
Very few have actually done anything about it. So there is there will be, you know, financing money over the next decads to come because of this enormous wealth created through the Internet that we'll see. And it's a matter of working out how to tap that and working out an idea that's important and then working out how to tap it. And I don't say it's easy, but there is always resources if you've got something good.
Let's talk about a vision for the future, a realistic vision. I mean, we're all you know in our head. Perhaps you're flowing streams and mother nature and butterflies and et cetera in a perfect utopian world. But what does a healthy real world look like Richard from an environmental standpoint.
Well, I mean, the first thing you've got to know, and everyone needs to if you just remember, there's one thing. The world has gotten enormously better over the last fifty years. You know, the rivers are cleaner, the beaches are cleaner, the cities are safer. The level of education of people in general has gotten enormously better, including goals. Goals are almost as well educated as boys these days. Life expectancy has gone up enormously. So we've already had incredible success
in making the world a better place. So it's not that we are definitely not on a path in a negative direction. This is a little bump that's going on, but overall, the trend over the last few decades has been ones of incredible success and incredible positive outcomes for pretty much most of the world. There are pockets, of course, where things are in terrible shape, but in general, you really got to got to look at the statistics to understand that.
When does Richard Fuller get to a point where he says, ah, I've done what I've set out to do.
I can read It'll be the last breath. It's really fun and interesting to do all this work, Frank, I really enjoy it. It could go get a little slow that there's there. You know, one doesn't stop doing this just because what would I do play golf again?
I never did, so can be had that conversation, you know, Richard. People can't see us, unfortunately, we only trains. We only stream the audio and not the video. But I wish people could see the big smile on your face and how truly happy you are to have done this and to continue to do it. It means a lot, really does.
I'm glad and I feel very fortunate that I've had success, that things have gone well, and this area is burgeoning, and it's a kind of an extraordinary feeling that there's there's roughly three or four million people who died from lead poisoning every year. You can compare to malaria. Malaria is around I think five hundred thousand deaths a year. So if we can even reduce the amount of lead poisoning by twenty you know, that's already more than malaria deaths.
It's an incredible opportunity to be able to make the world a better place to focus on this particular issue. So I feel really lucky and fortunate to have turned it over so the world can see it and work on it, and now to have so many fantastic partners and people working on this, brilliant staff, brilliant other organizations all around the world working on this issue. So it's a real satisfycing real satisfaction.
Can can you give us a website of some of that may be Pure Earth or whatever? People do want to know more, get more information, get involved. How can yeah?
Pure Earth dot oig is our main website. There's other sister organizations, the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution g a HP dot net and e T also is a great organization doing doing phenomenal, phenomenal work in all of this. Another one called the Lead Elimination Project LEAP. I think it's I think it's I don't know. It's website off hand, also fantastic. There are great organizations in this space doing great things.
Anything one to order the book again?
Given another Amazon the Brown Agenda, rich Fuller, and look it up on the Amazon and yeah, you can even get a download audio of it if you want to.
Yeah, you're from Niac too, So there's a lot I like about you, Richard. I don't know if that's a good thing or on your point of view, but really, this has been a great conversation. I certainly learned a lot, and I really appreciate you taking the time out of a very busy schedule.
My pleasure. It's fun to do it.
Thank you both, oh more pleasure. Of course. We offer special thanks to our listeners who take the time to give us a voice in their lives. We offer a fresh topic every week. Catch us wherever and whenever you'll get your favorite podcasts. Can also check us out on the Hudson River Radio Facebook page. We also ask you
that you consider sharing being frank with others. You always leave you with two last little callum nuggets for lack of a better word, closing slogan that I think is appropriate, and a little bit of original music, usually composed and performed by some friends. This one is from Albert Einstein and he says our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living
creatures in the whole of nature and its beauty. All right, We've got some great music written by, as I said, some friends and performed also by these friends. It's written by Steven Swan who performs along with David Snyder and Sarah Eller. And how perfect the song is. Save the world or Engineer Neil Richter. I'm your host, Frank Lubono. We hope to have you join us for the next being. Frank, We're the only way you could be is Frank. Thanks?
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