Engagement Is Key to Solving Climate Change

Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. Paul Hawkins is an environmentalist and author. He's an entrepreneur, he's an activist. He's dedicated his life to environmental sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. And he joins us now on the phone from the San Francisco Bay area. Paul, it's really great to have you on the show. Congratulations on your most recent book, Regeneration, Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. How do we get how do we

do it? How do we how do we get to the point where we don't feel powerless? Well, I think we feel powerless, and thank you very much for invite amount of the program. We feel powerless because it was being told to us. And the climate narrative is we can call it that has been for quite a long time. Uh fun the science point of view, which is future existential thread and we don't do this if things are going to get worse, and it's great science and they've

been absolutely spot on in terms of their predictions. Um. And then what happened is that a tactic there was really adopted from tobacco, which was taken up by British Petroleum and there was individuated the problem, which is that we just drive, you know, oil wells and sell gas. You can calculate your carbon footprint, you know, as if you can solve the problem, you know, and so yeah, you can drive, Let's get a bike, recycle, use cold water and washing machine, put power strips in your home

entertainment center. These are some of the solutions that are coming out, you know. And what happened is individuals will listen to that and understand that that makes sense, that did lower impact. But unless you had you know, i Q loder in the room temperature, you know that they're

completely inadequate to the task at hand. Because you're reading the headlines, you know, right, it's like it's like sustainability theater, right, yeah, it's like you know, and it makes you feel disempowered as an individual, go oh man, this is worse than I thought. And so um and then people didn't turn

the big government. You know, government is big b the factor, but I mean government and just said, well, you know, you should do something, you know, but there's only certain things government can do and they should and they're not and they haven't been. But that's so I'm for that. Government is the slowest institution to move, not the fastest. And uh so to look the government to adopt policies you know that are complex, you know that actually would make a difference is kind of uh you know, it's

it's kind of a prior wearing in a prayer. And so then people feel like, well, if you know, they think that the only thing that can happen is between the individual, the individuated he she by himself herself, and then the government in its enormity, and whatever the generation talks about is actually the gold, the juice is in the between those two. You know, it's not the two opposites at all. And I mean sustainability theater, I feel

frustrated all the time. Whenever I get a paper straw in a restaurant, I think about all the carbon if the atmosphere. But Paul, I want to ask, where do we go from here? Because at the individual level there's frustration, Like you say, government can be slow to move. How do we ultimately get started and and fix this? Two things.

One is um right now, there's no difference between our climate denier and somebody who understands the problem and does nothing from the most point of view of the same people, you know. And so you have four people who understand it and we're doing nothing. You have ninety of the world just disengaged. And no matter how you see this, you can't read this science and not under standard. This is the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced, and probably will you know when you think about it. And so

how do you become disengaged? And that's your question reverse you know, which is how do we become engaged? And the way we do it is we've talked about it in a very different way, and we talked about possibilities instead of probabilities number one. Number two, the rhetoric that came out of science, which was good, which is about existential threat, which occasion fear activists took that over, got to science. Then they blamed, shamed, you know, and pointed

fingers and so forth. You know, you're the cause, you're the problem X and you're it, you know so and and then and then you then communicate to people with fear threat you know, shame, blame, you know, fingerpointing, and you know, cabin glaciers, and and then you expect them to do something. They're gone, They're off. That channel has been turned off, you know yet, Jaman, element is is very important. We're gonna talk more about it in just

a few minutes. Paul Hawkins, Sit tight, because we're gonna be back with you after we do some news. Paul Hawkin is environmentalist and author, also the author of his new book, Regeneration, Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. Let's get right back to Paul Hawkin, environmentalist and author. He's also the author of Regeneration, Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. The book came out yesterday. He's also the author of other books as well. He joins us

once again on the phone from San Francisco. Paul, I have the book in my hand right now and There are a couple of things that I noticed. One is it's it's it's it's very visually rich. There are lots and lots of photographs, beautiful photographs from all around the world in the book. The other thing that I noticed is how collaborative of an approach this book was. The first page is just a list of staff, researchers, contributing writers, says,

advisors to the book, to the project. Um, take us through your approach here, sure, because those books about climate, whether they're describing the danger, are the solutions, are pretty much somebody saying, look at I've done the research. I know you don't listen up, you know, and you you may want to do that for sure, and so forth. I feel like the conversations we need to have their constructive or or the we talking to we it's us

talking to each other in other words. And so if we don't have the world inside our organization, inside our board, you know, uh, inside the creation of this thing, then how can we trust ourselves to create a voice that is going to reach as many people as possible as a very diverse world now and um, and so it works better, it's more fun. Um, we have the book it does have a lot of photographs, and the reason is that goes to a different part of the brain

and it does show things that are quite beautiful. And one of the reasons for that is to try to help people fall in love with the living world. Because they've disaggregated climate fund the living world. They think it's a thing. It's not a thing. It's part of the bias here. Um. You know, you hear in terms like we're going to fight it and battle it and combat it and mitigate it. And that doesn't work. Nobody wakes up in the morning since I can't wait to mitigate today,

you know what I mean. And and so we're behind you to ReLit that together, that sensibility that the um, the climate is not wrong, it is perfect. It is responding exactly to the bias the biasor is creating climate. Nature never makes a mistake. We do. And what we're getting is homeschooling. We're getting homeschooled by the planet every day. And say, take a look at this. What do you think about this? Yep, that was a bad one. Uh. You know, I'm not trying to minimize people's loss or something,

not at all. I'm not laughing at that. I'm just saying, is that when you look at from that point of view, then it's feedback, and any system that ignores feedback parishes. And so we're a system. We're called humanity, were called civilization. We live here on this beautiful planet and it's giving us feedback, and our response has been really inadequate, and we're trying to change that. So that regeneration, the term has big arms and enlarges, is what we are. We

are regenerative. All of life we generate. It's what you know, All thirty chillion cells in your body right now, every now a second are regenerating. I mean, you wouldn't be having this conversation as that wasn't true. So regeneration is innate to us as people, as families, as fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts. You know. It is like this is what we do every day, you know. And so I wanted to take the climate conversation and and

not to dismiss the technological solutions. It was certainly not to dismiss renewal energy, which is vitally important, but to break it open to in a larger sense that people feel like that impetus they have innate to them. To regenerate life on earth not only creates more life, but it brings us ourselves back to life. And so, Paul, let's talk about the regeneration process. Because I'm looking at page two forty nine of your book. You've laid out

a few guidelines. I mean, what principles should people be keeping in mind? As you know they try to regenerate, which, like you lay out, our bodies are doing every day, every minute. Well, the first principle is to understand just a working definition, which is mine and you can do it yourself, your own definition, but mine is to put life at the center of every act and decision. Nor

harm life or does it increase life? Pretty simple question really, But but how do you answer a question like that, because you know, I think about it from the perspective of you know, what what I'm gonna do for dinner tonight? Right? I think We're gonna order pizza? Does does that hard? You know it's going to be delivered on to us? Um how in a bicycle? There you go? Which is which I guess? Is it? You know? But but does that harm life? Does it does it reduce life? Does

it help? Should I have gone to the grocery store. Should I not have ordered groceries online? Should I go walk by foot to groceries? I mean, there are all these questions that we can try to answer with that checklist every day, and we don't necessarily know the answers to them. Of course not. Let's just turn the question around and say, do you want to degenerate lifeliners? I don't think so. That's not your purpose, that's not why you're here. And that's what the entire economic sector does.

It extracts life. If you just go down a supply chain, you'll find when you get to it not very far, that it is taking life itself, you know, removing it, killing it, you know. And the fact is that that's degeneration. So the book of saying, well, that road doesn't go much further. We can see the end of that. That's the ocean of certification. That is extreme, whether that is fires we can't even put out, you know, not not not just the fire, is not just the northern hemispheres

on fire. We don't even know how to put the fire out anymore. They're so big. And so we can see, like we don't want to go down that road any further, I don't think so. So we generation is just a one eight is a pivot, and it is step by step, bit by bit. But at least the question is there, for example, if it does it or does it not? And does it create more life or reduce it? Does it most importantly, does it steal the future or does

it heal it? And we have this idea of the world economic system works the way it does and makes so much money for so many people, blah blah blah blah because it works well, yes, and it is also stealing our future. If it wasn't stealing our future, there wasn't be all these headlines about what's happening to the environment, people, et cetera. And so we pose the question as what would it look like to have an economy that heals

the future. That would be a GDP two. That would be revenues too, that would be companies as well, but very very different orientation. And it is a question. But

you have companies. The biggest food company in the world is nest Lee and tomorrow they announced that their motto going ahead is generation regeneration and and they're taking very seriously about Okay, we need to pivot the regenerative agricultural systems if we're going to continue to exist as a company, as a food company, in this world, in this at this time. Paul Hawkins is an environmentalist and also the author of Regeneration, Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation.

The new book came out yesterday. Paul joined us on the phone from the San Francisco Bay area. He's also an entrepreneur and activist. He's dedicated his life to environmental sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. Paul Hawkins, thank you so much for taking the time