Thou Shalt Save The Fucking Planet

thinking about as I see this great Earth. I do, however, think they are small ways, like thinking about personal waste and being more conscious of how to take take take from the planet, and then they are more systematic, big ways that government and big tech can help us. Perhaps the problem is we can't agree on a simple thing. Just how important is nature to you? The Amazon is on fire as we speak. Why does it seem like half the planet cares and the other half much less so?

Michael and I talk about microplastics in the oceans all the time, and now we've started wondering about the fish we consume Poisson de plastique. Doesn't that sound delicious? Also, Elon Musk's mission to Mars feels like it's becoming a real possibility, So perhaps some are even less inclined to care about nature on the third rock from the sun.

But alas the future is here, and I think the future is now, we can agree that a productive, diverse natural world plus a stable climate have been the very basics that have formed our civilization's successes, And so recycling feels really good to me. When I go to my local farmer's market or popping at a farm stall, or when I shop at places like organic Farmer That's with a pH in case you wanted to look that up,

it does all feel fantastic to me. And I love that when I walk around Tokyo there are no trash cans, that it's my responsibility to take my trash home with me. But let's be honest, what does it really mean? What am I actually impacting as I trend all over the world with my sneakers made from ocean plastic that has been recycled. I do think we need to be talking about regenerative farming, and the best way to see this and understand this is to travel to places where it's

being done on big and small scales. In fact, we should be doing that right now. I hope that President Warren next year will start offering subsidies to organic farming when she takes office. That can be my side hustle organic farming lobbyist. Okay, so back to what feels utterly wonderful whilst I'm traveling. What feels really good is when I remember to bring my reusable water flask slash coffee flask.

I recently started counting how many plastic bottles of water get foisted on me during a transcond flight, and it's not pretty. Then for the moment, being part of the Paris Climate Agreement does also feel utterly fantastic. It is, in fact, Climate Week in New York as we speak. And just knowing that there are forces from all over the globe that are beyond my comprehension working on helping

this planet, well fuck, that feels sensational. As someone who's on board an aeroplane, often I realize that I'm also doing my fair share of harm to the planet. I'm also not suggesting we don't fly ever again with all some kind of perspective. So now, my friend Nick, who lives in San Louis, Obispo, plants a tree for every trip I take on a plane. Mother Earth thanks him actively so as a frequent frequent traveler, I'm clearly not doing enough, So what else should I be doing or

thinking about doing? I am recycling, I'm always shopping local. I do turn off the lights and air conditioner in hotel rooms when I'm not there, and of course I do not need my hotel linen and towels washed every day. I think about new ways to aid in this department all the time. Of course, I would love any suggestions, so please reach out. Eco tourism was a movement that

started to take shape back in the nineteen eighties. It's the oldest and most commonly used word for it, and now we say things like sustainable tourism or green tourism, Responsible, ethical, mindful. Ecotourism is essentially all about bringing nature and wildlife conservationists, with local communities and the responsible travel industry together to ensure development is focused on long term sustainability rather than

strong term profit. So let me tell you a little story about a dear friend's mother, let's just call her Lie Lie. Lie Lie recently told me that climate change and the destruction of this planet is part of the bigger plan. It will rid the earth of the glut of population, and it will make space for the right amount of humans to be here. It is, after all, natural selection, a sort of natural order of construction and destruction. When she said it, it felt so severe to me.

But there's something to it, and I just cannot stop thinking about it. Maybe the planet is saying, okay, enough parasites be gone. Speaking of Lila, well, she's extreme, but nobody's pushing the conversation forward the way she does. As much as I like Algon, he just isn't hitting the same notes that Lilac can. She's dedicated her whole life to all this change, and you know what shocks her most the fact that she thinks nobody's speaking out and

she's right, why are we not all speaking up? Last week in New York, kids took off school to go protest for the planet, and I feel that's crucial, but not enough. They may actually need to call lie Line to lead their march and be their mascot. She's charismatic and speaks her truth. In the nineties seventies, living in the original Venice Beach, she would pile the kids in the car and head over to the fast food chains

drive through. She'd pull up and the family would roll down their windows and yell at whichever ill fated teenager was earning minimum wage at the window. How could you use styr foam and all that clastic? Today she drives a tesla and she uses it for dumps the diving in San Francisco. She recently told me that people are discovering all her good spots, but she still does love it because, as Lilae says, they throw out all this ugly fruit that is perfectly good to use for jams

and who knows what else. I adore Lilae, even though she told me that my very expensive cologne was making her tongue tingle and it was probably not good for her by arm. She lives on hundreds of acres in Yosemite, and she has woofers, the World Organization of organic farmers, who come and work and live on her land. They learn how to go back to the land. And this

is where my travel thoughts come into play. Isn't this an amazing way to travel the world, Like let's go to a kibbutz and learn how farming is done in Israel? Or what have we traveled to Bolivia and see how Class Maya's teams are employing young people in LAPAs to learn to cook with native ingredients in order to rely less on imports, or what about going to farms outside Abu Dhabi and working on them for a day or two because who knew that the UAE even had serious

farming happening. Lila is inspiring, to say the least. In her extremity. She does somewhat push people away, but that's what the fringe does here. But without her, will all be ruining the planet every day with hardly enough regard for this life. Can some and please give this woman her own Netflix show or a podcast. She can kind of be the Murrie Condo of the environment. She would come into your home or your business, or your country and show you how to clean it up. Imagine this, No, no,

put that down. That's far too much plastic, Daniel. You do not need to use single use gloves to touch that meat, Daniel. Are you going to use those vegetable scraps? They are very good for the manure, and those carrots and beach shavings they are perfect for coloring my hair. I hope you're planning to drink that urine, Daniel. It's very good for your immune system. We all need a little lie line in our lives. In all my travels, I find it difficult to always see and understand what

everybody's doing to save the planet. Lilac excluded, of course, A few places that stick out to me on my travels are Botswana, Guyana, and Costa Rica. Of Course, the obvious northern European countries I've been to, like Denmark and Sweden and Finland are also included. In Botswana, they took the country's entire military or defense budget and poured it all into conservation. Just think about the impact. If we slivered even two percent of our defense budget into conservation,

it could change the whole country. Costa Rica is by far the most eco conscious tourism place on the planet right now, with an endless amount of regulation around hotels and resorts being able to build and operate on principles that are good for the planet, less waste, less destruction. In Guyana, they aim to achieve one clean and renewable energy supply by and then I found this incredible travel app operator Utopia. They're based in Mexico and they're offering

biocultural trips. Utopia is a platform that will house travelers to search for authentic experiences outside the conventional routes. They access rural communities, especially the indigenous ones, with hosts who want to share the incredible natural richness of their land. They preserve the natural and cultural heritage of Mexico by revolutionizing tourism. Okay, so what is going to make the biggest impact. That's probably what we should be thinking about

on every trip we take. I try not to preach, but rather want to have an open dialogue and try and figure this all out. Together. We could save the planet, but first we need to find some common ground. I faint when I see photos of seals covered in oil. My heart caves when I see forests on fire. But that's not everyone's messaging. It needs to be something that affects everyone in their daily life. Okay, fine, let's sci fi this. Margaret Atwood's new book is out after all,

and I just flew out of Gile Lead. This is the Netflix series you've been waiting for. All humans get a horrible disease infected by the Earth from its very core, all at once. The more you do to help save the planet, whether it's banal recycling or big legislation, it all starts to heal you. The cure is to help the planet. If you do nothing, you just start wasting away, slowly dying, killing yourself every moment, and if you help, you may live. Maybe this is already happening and we

just don't know it. And now let's talk to Holly, my dearest friend, for some conservation history. I sat here being silent for minutes. He was so busy on your phone getting Costello ticket. Have a little chat. I did that before we started. Don't throw me into the kidding. These are very important things. But one of the things that you talked about was conservation, and it's an interesting subject because different areas of the world have such different

histories of conservation. And I thought we could talk a little bit about the juxtaposition between Western culture and then how conservation has been handled in South Africa because they intertwine during the colonial era and some interesting things happen. Do you know when the first national park in the world was created in America? No, do you want to guess what country? It's one you've been to. I mean, that doesn't narrow things down very much at all. In Mongolia, Oh,

I knew this. And it's interesting because there is debate over when people would say historically, the conservation movement begame it like a lot of people link it to industrialization, which is natural because there was a resultant reaction to that that there was concern over what we were doing.

But really what is often discussed as the first conservation document, at least in Western culture, dates back to sixteen sixty two, and that was paper titled Silva, or a Discourse on Forest Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty's Dominions, and that was written by John Evelyn and presented to the Royal Society, and that was actually at the urging of the Royal Society as the King was planning to build some more fantastic things and they wanted to consider

what that would result in in terms of the forestry. It's kind of interesting because he really does talk about things that we're still discussing today. There's a lot about deforestation in England and his concerns about it at the time, and he really was one of the first people, at least on paper, to introduce this idea of replenishment of forest resources. So as you're kind down trees for lumber, we need to be replacing those trees with saplings and seedlings,

and it was actually really successful. People weren't like, you're a nut, what are you talking about. They're like, oh, these are things we should think about. But really it wasn't, as I said, until the early industrial era that we really first start seeing people raised some red flags about it.

Prussia and France started looking at these problems, and as early as the eighteenth century, so in the seventeen hundreds, they were considering how they were going to manage their forests and how agriculture was going to be managed to not completely deplete the land of its options and its natural resources. And then the Napoleonic Wars had some other issues. That is actually when the first conservation laws came into being was during the Napoleonic Wars, which were specifically related

to teak trees. People were very concerned about them, and so that was the first time someone said, if a tree is smaller than this, you cannot cut it down, like they had to be mature trees only. And then, as you know, science developed, there was more and more information that people could kind of feed into the papers that they were writing in the research that they were doing, and slowly, over time we get more and more interest.

Theodore Roosevelt in the US was a big proponent of conservation at a time when the conservationists of preservationists were kind of at odds. In case anyone doesn't know, conservation is about management of resources. Preservation doesn't want to touch the resources, but just essentially cordon them off and let them be. But at the same time, if we turn and spend the globe a little and look at South Africa,

there's an interesting thing. So before colonization, before Europeans decided to move in and do their thing, there was kind of already a natural harmony with the natural world and the people, and they kind of just inherently understood that this is not a thing we should strip and destroy for our own benefit. There was a religious element to some of that, where they just naturally held certain things in a sacred space and so they would not touch them.

One of the things that is interesting is the idea of totem animals, like sacred animals could not be hunted at all, and that was they didn't need a law. They just understood that that was the thing that was off limits. And then scarce products were really just reserved for things like honoring people in the highest levels of society. They were not something like oh I he got and everything I want and everything. Let's get all the ivory things and then suddenly you have destroyed the ivory sources

the beautiful animals that produced them. And of course during the colonial period, westerners moved in and wanted to build all the things and did the same things that were causing problems in Europe. In the US, there was also a strange thing that happened, which is that conservation grew as an idea, but places that were demarcated for conservation

were also only for rich people to enjoy. In some cases, there were entire groups of indigenous people's that were moved off of land because they were like, no, no, we want to save this land so white people can go stand in it and have wonder. I know, you lived here a long time, but you go somewhere, which is kind of a really messed up way to look at it.

And of course, eventually, particularly post apartheid, that's really when South Africa established it's more modern approach to like park management and looking at truly nature as something that needed to be cared for and protected and and how that kind of is still. I mean we are all every country, I think, with a few exceptions, is still working out the best ways to deal with things. Because this technology evolves and grows, we are accidentally depleting resources we weren't

even thinking about. Even in the early days of cold there were people going, this doesn't last forever. Do you understand that? But we're still having the conversation a hundred and fifty years later. But it's one of those things where you, I think the idea of conservation kind of gets lumped in as a by some folks, not everybody. It almost gets seen as like, no, this is a like a hippie dippie thing. This is nice to have a need to right, this is this is for those

people that are socialists commuters with nature. But what these people before colonization in South Africa inherently understood is that there's a symbiosis involved that you can't deny. And if you completely destroy an environment and the animals there for your own benefit, you are ultimately destroying yourself. Maybe not yourself and your generation, but your people behind you are going to reap the bad results of all of those those desire driven decisions that were made that ultimately hurt

both the earth and it's creatures. Well, like in South Africa, four happened. Nelson Mandela came out of prison and it became a democracy, and suddenly South Africa opened up to the world. Suddenly it became popular and at that point was the first luxury safari launches that opened Singita. They were like, wait, everyone's looking to South Africa. We should do an INCREDI doable place where people could come and

appreciate the wild and conservation. That's when Singita started and they started building these beautiful launches so that it wasn't just camping in the bush, think like Meryl Streep out of Africa. They turned it into a much more finessed experience. It's glamping with animals, well a little even more fabulous

than glamping. I mean, Singita has this u incredible footprint in South Africa and Tanzania and Zimbabwe, where they've had very wealthy founders and investors bring a kind of needed conservation element to luxury tourism and safari where if you want to go there's a huge amount of the money goes to conservation. I mean in Tanzania, in the Grammati Reserve, which is where the sinky is. They have nine hundred

full time anti poaches patrol rolling, which is incredible. So when you go to the right places, you realize that your money is going towards conservation where it's like a country like Botswana did this amazing thing where they took the entire military budget and put it all towards conservation,

which is incredible. And when you go there and you stay at wilderness has these incredible largest little mambo and mambo, and you spend time with some of the game ranges, they'll explain to you how every little element can now be funded by these projects. I mean, Africa is like so important because it hasn't been developed as much as a place like America has or Europe. Right the level of industrialization is just not there to create that right now for a slight respite. And I'll be right back

with everywhere after a word from our sponsors. You've just been somewhere, what say we go everywhere? Now? Well, I guess like the thing that we haven't talked about with all of this is that there's an element of global warming attached to all of this. The planet is warming, Animals are migrating in different ways. Land is changing, so the grassland may not be the same grassland as it was, and these animals are forced to move and where will

they go? So this is my thing. I mean, you worked at a zoo, right, So like I volunteered at an aquarium. I always say you work there, I mean, you volunteered at an aquarium. What's interesting for me is that in some ways, I feel very uncomfortable with zoos. I feel uncomfortable watching an animal in captivity. I'm used to seeing animals in I guess from a game drive vehicle, but not in a cage or large cage. I'm seeing them in a more natural setting. I know it's also

fenced in, but that's for antipoaching reasons. But I have a sort of uncomfortableity with zoos. I I like, I kind of appreciate the animals, but I feel like bad that they are in a cage. Yeah, And I mean I feel like we should acknowledge, right, there are much different levels of zoos and aquariums. Like good zoos and aquariums are often dealing with rescue animals, and there is a balance. I completely understand the desire to not see

those institutions exist anymore. There is a flip side though, right where at the same time, I think to the average person, it's a teaching tool to really drive home the message of conservation. It's one thing to look at a picture in a book or even look at a documentary. But then when you see one of these majestic creatures, hopefully in as naturalized an environment as possible, up close, it shifts you, like you realize really what we're fighting

for likely what needs to be saved. Well, when you go to Africa, that's the thing that hits you. It's impossible for not to write if you singing this animal in this state and you think, wait, this is with nature. It has to remain like this. Yeah, And the thing is right, like, not everybody is going to get the chance to go to Africa. And that's where I'm like, no, I get it. But again, it's very tricky and it it is one of those things where you want to

make sure that the animals are getting optimal care. And I mean, I've had the good fortune to speak to like veterinarians and facilities like that, and and it kind of breaks my heart because I know there are people who are vehemently against the very places they work. But when I see these people, they are dedicated exclusively to

really like their lives are about that work. I mean, they're like the people that sometimes don't go home for a week at a time, their kids don't see them because whatever animal might need their attention at any given moment, so they'll just sleep on the floor in their office. I mean, there's a side of it. I think that

people don't realize that. For the most part, people nobody gets into like becoming a biologist or veterinarian of exotic animals for the money or fame, right, And they're certainly not there because they don't love animals. So that's like the trick, right. It's not a high paying profession. It does require a lot of personal sacrifice, particularly if you're working in a big facility like that, because quite frankly, like a whale doesn't care if you have some stuff scheduled.

Maybe they're sick, or maybe they're pregnant, or maybe they're you know, there are any number of things that might and those people will almost always just shut down their lives and be like, Okay, well I have to take

care of this thing, and that's all it is. So that's like the flip side of that discussion, is that one it does I think drive conservation for some people, and too, there are a lot of people behind the scenes you never see that really have put a lot of their personal lives aside just to make sure those animals are cared for. Well, Holly, have you ever been bitten by an animal? Oh? Yeah, tell me about your near death experience with an animal. I don't think I

have a near death one. I mean I certainly like I grew up when I was very young, we lived in airs Oonah, and when it would rain heavily, like, the tarantulas all come out, and I loved them, so I would just scoop them up and put them in like a coffee can and be like, this is my pet. I don't know why I always named them Bill, but I did. My mother was petrified and was always like at the very edge of her nerves, possibly going to lose her mind because I would walk outside and pick

up a tarantula without thinking. But I never got bit by any of those. I did get attacked by a pack of dogs when I was a kid. That was a little scary. Yeah, it was like in a completely not remote place. It was like in my neighborhood, but there was just there were a bunch of stray dogs that ran around and I was terrified of them. And

I'm sure that didn't help matters. But they chased me at one point down my driveway we had a long driveway, and tackled me and I was very scared, and my dad came out and fired a pistol and scared them away, of course he did. Well, thank you so much for being with me today. So in case you want to hear Holly talks and all, which she does all the time,

well bless you too. You can do that on stuff you mist in History Class, which is my regular history podcast that is at missed in history everywhere on social media or missed in history dot com. All the things you didn't know, We're fascinating. There they are. For my next interview, I'm with Governor of Washington State, j Ininsley. He recently ran for president but is now more focused on the environment. Tell me how are you on today? I'm great. I'm in a great state, the Evergreen State.

We got some nice rain yesterday which might hopefully suppress the forest fires that are increasing because the climate change. So that's good news. We like some rain on occasion, I'm complaining good. I believe there's a story of you walking and standing in some of the fires. The aftermath of the fires tell me a little bit about that. Well. Unfortunately, as governor, I have experienced firsthand the face of climate change, which is the most obvious one is the fires that

we've had, both in Washington and California. I've gone to the multiple communities here in Washington when we've had an emergency response where lives have been lost, been in California and walked through Paradise, California. It's the town of twenty five thousand. It's not just some little crossroads that burned

the ground. And I walked through at night with Governor Jerry Brown's emergency coordinator, and it was like we spent about an hour and there was nobody there and it was like the scene of a post apocalypse Hollywood movie. I've been to Seminar Springs where I've met a woman who really stands up out to me in this trail of disasters, women named Marcia Moss, who showed me her entire ownership was a little pool of melted aluminium which

used to be her mobile home. So I've seen that, and I've walked with people who have real tears over a real crisis. So this is not an abstraction to me. This is a real peep with real suffering. And I wish I could say it's just fires. It's the flood victims the Midwest who have met like Regina Haddeck who lost her nonprofit called Address for Success. They took your victims of domestic violence until her nonprofit was washed away by the floods. It's the people in the Everglades who

love the Everglades. Something like forty acres of the swamp was on fire. When your swamps are on fire, you know, you know you've got a problem. So I've had many walks with many people who are feeling this looming disaster. That's not a future thing, it's a reality today. So you can say, I know a lot of folks who have been affected by this. How do you think it affects travelers, people that are traveling internationally locally, whether you're

going to Disney or going to Denmark. I think it's important to look at climate change, like how do you think people engage with it? It's interesting you asked that question, because the only plus side I can think of from a travel perspective is it has encouraged some people to travel to locations they otherwise may not have because they realize it's their last chance. As you actually see people in some sense promoting the idea if you'd like to see a glacier, you need to come now because they

won't be here for another decade or two. The fact that Glacier National Park in the near future won't have glaciers is stunning lee damaging to me. I'm just heartsick about this. But other people have got off the couch and go and see the glaciers. So that's the best out side you can possibly think, if there is one.

But the obvious questions are as people are encountering this themselves, travelers in the heat of Europe this year, I've talked to some people that just were really troubled by the heat. It's ninety degrees and anchorage. For goodness sakes, if you want to go walking in the permit frost, now you kind of melting. You walk in the muck because it's melting.

There's real consequences to this, you know. The folks when you think about Malibu as a paradise in the coastline of California, not so much when people are now terrified and wondering how I'm going to live here? Actually, so it has real world impacts on people. Hopefully travel is helpful in inspiring people to get engaged in the effort to defeat climate change, because the more you see of the world, you more you understand. It's a very beautiful place.

It's very unique. There's one little blue planet hanging out in space and it's very gorgeous. And the more you travel, the more you understand all of multiple things that are threatened. The folks who would like to go to scuba Iland, coral reefs, very significant parts of coral reefs are very much endangered. You know, the Great Barrier Reef had tremendous bleaching events in our national parks, We've had huge bleaching

events of coral and that's the reality right now. So you literally are having the disappearance of major attractions in the travel universe featured around the beauty of the earth as we know it. So travel, I hope you can help by encourage people to get engaged in this mission statement. How do you think we make this real for people

to day today. Like the problem is that so much of it comes from a speech, but so much of it is like being you being told by your teacher and you being a mand boy, you must recycle, you have to do this after this, and people seem to especially America, when it's all about freedom of choice, it's all about the First Amendment, It's all about I don't want government to tell me what to do, Like, how do we get it into people's minds that this should

be important to People are moving very rapidly on this issue. The polling is indicated that, and the reason is it is not speeches by politicians. I wrote a book about this twelve years ago, and at that point it was an abstraction with people. Now it is reality. So that reality is changing hearts and minds, including the United States.

People at least say we ought to do something about climate change, and so the public is now there on the vast majority of Americans that want to see action against climate change, it is unfortunately just one of the parties and politicians that have refused to act. Half of the Republicans the United States believe we should deal with climate change, but none of the Republican politicians are because

they're all afraid of Donald Trump's shadow. It's time to get rid of that shadow, get a president who will realize that when turbans don't cause cancer, they cause jobs. Climate change is not a hoax, it's a president reality that's burning down Paradise, California, and flooding Hamburg, Iowa, and making the shoreline of Miami Beach and an inndation zone. And it is true, this is our very last chance. We will not have another chance to deal with this

uh other than the next administration. So tell me something personal that for you set to work on this the longer term. Is my dad was a biology teacher. I grew up in the outdoors. My mother and father helped fix the alpine meadows on the shoulders of Mount Ray Near during the summers. I certainly fell in love with those alpine medals and forests early in my life, and I know that they're threatened right now. I have a picture in my office of a magenta paintbrush, which is

a little flower. The only place that grows in it Washington State, essentially, and it may be extinct an hundred years because the tree lines moving up with temperature changes which are crowding out the alpine meadows. So this is something that goes back to my youth, but it also on the other bookend of my life as a grandparent.

You know, I was walking with my grandson a couple of years ago on the beach and I was seeing him flip over rocks and looking at the little urchins and everything, and you just see his little face light up. When when you see a kid see a new life form and you see that connection, it's very exciting to watch. And I realized that that feeling he had was the same one I had when I was seven or eight. My dad would take me down to the shoreline or car keep park and I remember that feeling of seeing

limpets and urchins for the first time. So this is deep with us. The reason I've used travel as this vehicle is because it changes your possession, It puts somewhere else, and it falces you in so many ways to find humanity, to find connections. How do you think we have that discussion internationally? Well, you know, my friend Rick Steves, who's been doing tremendous work, I'm behalful of travel, and he looks at at this not so much as an industry, but he looks at it as a way of enlightenment,

and it is. And people bring things home much more than postcards. They bring home a new appreciation, a of common humanity. And you know, I know it's like perhaps a cliche, but it's true. The more you travel, you more I understand that we're all the same, right, So that's a cliche. But the most important aspect of travel. But as far as a climate changes, she you will find anywhere in the world today you go, you will see impacts of climate change. It doesn't matter where it is.

If you go to the Arctic, you will see melting glaciers and tunder If you go to India, it's too hot to go outside Paris. It's really uncomfortable to walk around just because of the heat. So we have a common humanity because we're all mother's father's sons and daughters. But we're a common humanity because we're all threatened by

a common threat right now. And I actually think that this has the potential to be one of the most unifying aspects of human history because it's the one thing we've all faced at the same time, every single human on Earth several billion people face the same threat at the same time, and it requires a joint, unified effort to defeat it. So travel could be a very important part aspect of that to give us a chance of success. And that's what we need desperately right now. Now, Everyone

for a time out except postpons. We'll be right back with more everywhere. Welcome once again to everywhere. Let's hark back to it. For my next interview, I'm with Sun John, the CEO of Conservation International. We are at his DC office overlooking Reagan Airport, talking about how important conservation is. I think at the core of most people there is a strong thread of empathy, and there's a strong thread

of wanting to be liked and like. And I think if you are really putting yourself on the line and you're saying something in a very honest and thoughtful open way, I think most human beings we'll find some resonance with it,

even if they disagree with you. I do think though, that for the vast majority of the world, the conclusion that I'm coming to any come to conservation or climate change or anything like that, that these changes are not going to happen because I'm telling someone they need to do it, They're going to happen because people are going to see that it's in their own self interest, their own, as I founder says, their own enlightened self interest to

make that change happen. And for me, that's been a big shift because when we learned about conservation, we learned about nature, and when learned about wildlife and the environment, the predominant language is the language of love. You watch David Attenborough read You're Wilson put Surprising author, you read any of these people, it's a it's an owd to love, the love of the world and the wonders of the world. And the truth is I feel that I feel that

throbbing in me all the time. I joke and say I have a little cabin in Montana because I like going for a walk in the words, knowing there's something bigger than me, greater than me, grander than me, older than me. They can come out of the words and take my head off. I kind of like that. But it's not a great value proposition for most of the world, save the forest, it might one day kill you. For most of the planet, I think it has to be

not just a language of love. It also has to be a language of value, and if people don't see the value in it, it's going to be hard to really motivate them to make those changes at the scale that we need to make those changes. How do we show people that value? So your question, I would ask you this is do you truly believe that we need nature? Do you truly believe that you truly believe that the world is better with wild places and with nature surrounding us?

I actually do, because I can't think of places the most environmentally damaged places also tend to be at the very bottom of the pet when it comes to every form of human development index. Go to Haiti and then go to the Dominican Republic. You'll see the difference in how nature is protected. And it's obvious to me who

has suffered part because of the destruction of nature. Right, So it's not like I've gone to a lot of places where they've done a great job of destroying nature and now it's a flourishing, amazing place with incredible intellectual stimulation and money and all that. It doesn't tend to work that way. It tends to work. I was just in Rwanda. You know, this is a country that has come through a cataclysm, and you look at the way they talk about nature. You took the way they take

care of plastics. You take a look at the way that they deal with waste disposal, or about conservation, about gorillas. You know, the head of the Ruanda Development Board was speaking to me and basically said, look, we're small country, and I'll protected here. It's a pretty small but we are still able to do quite a lot. And amazingly, we're actually expanding our Girla habitat this year because the gorillas are out of room. They've grown, the population actually grown.

So I think these things go hand in hand. I think it's pretty good evidence to show environmental destruction happens. It then followed by human misery. So what is your plan as a person and your plan for conservation international? Wow, that's a big question. I like my big questions. That's a really big question. I genuinely believe that we have ten to twelve years to sort of forget this equation. Right.

It doesn't mean that in twelve years the world blows up, but it does mean that the path we're on is the path we're on, and we're not going to be able to jot the world into a path of sustainably after that time. The science shows that the data is pretty strong on that these are the best years of my life. I look at my team around here. You know, half our staff of millennials. You know, I don't want

them to live a wasted life. I really don't. So for me, my my plan, my plan for myself personally, but also the team that I surround myself with is let's not live a wasted life. Let's go all in, let's go for it. We're never going to regret it. I know that, I know that we're not going to regret it. So Contrivation International is built on a very simple premise that people need nature. We truly believe that humans thrive when nature thrives. What we are pushing really

hard are three things. At first, is we want to protect all of nature. That is most important to climate. It turns out to the destruction of nature, particularly force, particularly tropical force like the Amazon. Turns out that the destruction of nature is about thirty of the contributions of

greenhouse gas missions that's going up into the atmosphere. Put another way, if you look at the worst emitters in the world, if if before station was a country, it would be China would be the worst, the United States be right there. Then it would be deforestation. That's what we want to tackle. We want to end the destruction of intact forests and big tropical force systems. Two, we want to massively increase how much ocean is under conservation protection.

The oceans have got very little little of our attention. They're hugely important to people on the planet who depend on it for their primary source of protein. They are vastly under protected. So we want to massively increase the amount of oceans under conservation protection and conservation management. We were planned for doing that. And the third it's more in a funny way, in a more subtle way or more interesting problem. You know this word sustainability, and we

throw it around all the time. I can tell you commodities that are sustainable, like this coffee that I'm drinking actually right now is actually sustainably grown, and that it's grown in a way that doesn't tend to damage the environment. I can't tell you a place that is sustainable. No one will fully agree what that actually means. We want to demonstrate that. So there are sixteen places around the world where we are working with governments, communities and companies

to demonstrate sustainably at scale. And what I mean by that is people can grow things and live a better life without destroying nature that they need. So if I can show you coffee production going up fullfold while before station going down by half, I say that place is approaching sustainability. Something that we need to talk about is how do we translate conservation into a travel sphere. So to me it's obvious. You pack your banks, you get on the plane, and you go to Costa Rica and

you see funck Man. They're doing something differently here, Like, how do you understand the importance because I don't think people do. We talk about sustainability, as you said, so loosely. We talk about being green so easily. But how do we tell people to travel to see this, to understand this. I don't have an answer, fair enough, I have a thought. I love your thoughts. We live in a hyper disconnected world.

The more connected we are in some ways, the more disconnected we are, and there is no sense of geography anymore. There's no sense of place. I think one of the wonderful things that travel does, even though I fully appreciate the environmental cost of travel, and we can talk about that. One of the wonderful things it does is it, if done right, it really reconnects human beings. It connects them to each other and connects them to place and connects them to nature. And I think that's a very very

powerful thing that we have lost. And we haven't lost it for centuries. We've lost it for probably the last a hundred years, eighty years, and we need to find that again. You know, I can sit here in my office and fire off emails and buy things from all over the world and just get it delivered at my home in this weird sort of landscape that never had

existed anytime before in human history. You know, we're sitting here on the banks to Potomac River, right so we're here in Crystal City, just you know a couple of us. Up here is old Town, Alexandria, and just beyond that is Mount Vernon, and I bit that route almost every day I live up there. George Washington founder George Washington would take his wares from Mount Vernon and tundled them down a cart path right along the river to that

Alexandria Pharma's market every Saturday and sell it there. Imagine that sense of place and what you would get and the food and the environment. Imagine that kind of seasonality playing a real role in people's lives. That's lost today. That's completely lost today. I think one of the most beautiful things about Traveler is it just it makes you human again. You know, we would you and I love Africa, and I was just saying to you, you know, I

would just in quite literally the crazle of humanity. You know, maybe thirty miles from Old of I where they found the footprints that, at three point four million years old, the first direct evidence of an upright hominid, actually a pair of them at least walking across this landscape when a volcano was probably lovers. Maybe certainly you could see the Tilton one. They think it was because the female, the smaller of the footprints, was carrying a baby on

her hip. But it was a day that we know it was raining because you can see the little drops of rain. There were hyena tracks and jackal tracks and guinea foiul tracks criss crossing their footprints. Same thing animals I see today. You stand on that soil, you smell that air, You want to look at those umbrella shaped trees and you think there is cellular memory here. If you've never even ever been to East Africa, if you're a human being and you're in that landscape, you go,

oh my god, I feel like I'm at home. The air is about seventy degrees, the breezes relatively dry. Their landscape of short grass, coupled with those umbrella shaped trees is exactly what we make our lawns and our golf force courses to look like. And if you quint and see some baboons in the distance, they look like a bunch of guys playing golf way up there, you know, poking around with a little stick in the dirt, right, and and you're like, I'm home, even if you've never

been there. So there is something real about humans that makes us want to connect to place. And I think we've been unbelievably disconnected. With some benefits. Of course, I think it's time to reconnect to me. That's the best part of travel. So I want to talk about my darling friend, Madigan's mother, who I'd love you to meet. Her name's Maybel. She lives on I think two acres on the edge of Yosemite, and she is the most extreme environmentalist I have ever met, and she thinks the

warming is good. It's gonna rid half the planet of people who don't deserve to be here, and they'll be space so we can grow and farm again. She dumps the dives in San Francisco. I'm gonna go dumps the diving with her for one of my episodes because she's like, I know where all the good spots are people like her. It's too extreme and people can't hear it and it pushes them away. But somewhere in the middle there needs to be a path where people would want to trend along.

How do we get people to do that with us, to believe in what we're doing and not feel like, oh, it's nonprofited world, I can't engage, or it's maybe oh it's so extreme, I can't engage. Great question. Look, I have a lot of respect for folks who live a particular kind of life because they truly embody this notion of don't preach, just live it and do it yourself, and you can learn a lot from that. It is difficult, though,

to scale that. There's an old story about how narrow you know the first Prime Minister of India once lamented that it took a significant part of his treasury to keep them Hatma meaning Mohamma Gandhi to keep the Mahatma in poverty. And what he meant by that is every time Gandhi had to travel somewhere, they had to bring like two goats of spinning wheel, a whole bunch of rise, you know, like he needed the accouterments to create the

illusion of what he was trying to do. Because he was a symbol, he'd be sort of transformed into a symbol. So and I understand that, and I understand the value on then and what you can learn from that. But I don't think that the way to solve the world's problems is to sort of you spend time in Boulder. Boulder has the sort of attitude that I'm gonna get in trouble with people in Bolder, and they know what

I mean. Like there's this sort of general feeling like if we just solve boldest problems, the world will be fine. And it won't be fine because there are people on the other side of the planet who for whom a plastic bottle which we don't want anymore. And don't want to have is this only way in which they can carry water. You literally drive around some parts of rural Tanzania, their kids on the side of that street literally asking you to chuck out a plastic bottle because they want

that container. So that you know, it's a big, complex world, and so what we try to do. What I try to do is find a way to seek inspiration from folks like Maple or Boulder, but understand that the challenge we have is how do we scale without scale? And that's you know you talked about your test I mean that's really what Ellen was willing. You know, he could have stayed at trying to create a boutique car at a very high price point, and he could have created

a successful company doing that forever. The minute he just decided, no, no, I don't need this. What I really need to do is get these batteries into everything they have to completely change the model. That is the future. It's not having a hundred thousand dollar Testla, it's having genuinely a thirty thousand dollar electric vehicle that can do the amazing things. Tell me a personal story, something personal, then it inspires you or you think about conservation because of some experience.

There's an image that sticks with me and it happened on a journey that I made. When I made the first documentary film that I was in. It was called While Left in a war Zone and I did it for the BBC, and what I did was I retraced the footsteps of David Attenborough. So we grew up with David Attenburg, still growing up with David Attenborough. But back in the day, you know that guy, you know, was the only model we had on television about what someone

who cared about animals did. What most people don't know is that his first beginning into television was actually in Syrileon. It was actually the same village that I grew up in, quite literally, so I went back to syrian and sort

of retraced his early footprints. That was the show. One day during that show, we were traveling through a rainforest, very difficult terrain, trying to climb into a mountain which even he didn't actually have a chance to explore, and we needed a place to camp, and there's a little village and we kind of got to it just as dusk was setting and set up little tents on the

surrounding edge. Of the village. And I walked into this village and I saw a gaggle of boys eight, nine, ten years old, maybe about half a dozen or so of them, and they were crowded around a little smoky fire. And as I got to them, I could see that they had a white piece of metal tin that had clearly cut from some signboard that you know, you see on all those African streets, and they're using that tin to frantically fan the flames of this very smoky, dirty fire.

They had something that they were roasting on top of the fire, and as I got closer, I realized first that was a monkey, the dead monkey that these boys were burning the fur off and roasting kind of by hand. The second thing I noticed was the white piece of metal that they were using to fan the flames had a logo on it, and the logo said World Food

Program w FB. I have a photo. I snapped a little for I didn't really fully understand the implications of what I had just seen until later that night, as I was sitting in my tent with the rain dripping on it and looking through these images. Here's a bunch of kids in Africa who are going to share a very small monkey as their primary source of protein, and they're faring the flames with the sign board for the World Food Program. And it struck me like a bolt

of lightning. If there was those light light bulb moments that when when governments fail, when civil society fails, when even nonprofits flee, it's nature that provides the ultimate safety net. It's nature that holds. And that was a revelation to me that you cannot protect people if you're going to do it on the at the expense of nature. It has to be that nature has to be that underlying safety net for all of us. Mhm. It's so beautiful. What makes you um very angry about this business? Because

it's tricky. A lot of this is tricky. I really wonder what people are doing with the enormous amount of wealth that they have. It doesn't make me angry as

much as it makes me really sad. You know, our chairman at our last board meeting made a very interesting comment and he basically said, I look around this table, and I think about the first board meeting we had, and if I just think about how much those individual people who are sitting around the table, how well they have done in life and compare it with how much this organization has grown while we have grown, and we're

grateful for that personal wealth is galloped ahead. And that's the piece that I really kind of get both frustrated and angry and sad about that we are going to have a generation that is wealthier than any generation that has ever come on the planet, and that generation is going to turn over. People are gonna die, and that money hasn't been put to the service of the planet. You think about this really just a simple point. Nature is never going to be as cheap as it is today,

so there's no point in waiting five years. You're not going to get a bargain next month. So if you have something and you want to do something to save the planet, do it now. You know what makes me angry Giant endowments. Giant endowments make me angry. I don't get that. I don't get how you're saving so much capital for some future when the crisis is happening right now.

And the ability to change that trajectory so much within our grasp every day that goes I the freedom to move, the freedom we have to operate and change trajectory gets much narrower. But basically, we don't want to put money to warrants things that we cannot see. To me, there's the fundamental issue with conservation. I can't see it. I'm sitting in Washington, d C. Show me. I can't see it. The trees looks fine, that it looks lovely, like all

the planes going, everything looks fine. I need to see how fucked we are in order for me to care, I think me, But no, I think you're right. I think we need to visualize that. We need to see it,

We need see the impact of it. We also need to see the impact of what we're giving to because the spending that we do today, I mean, you know, the amount of money, private money, private money that goes into ocean protection is less than you know, the last Marvel movie, right, that's insane to me, right, Or Or the amount of money that goes into the Amazon, right, private money that's going to protect in the Amazon, which

is on fire right now. It's on everyone. Actually, the pledges that have been made less than like two of these planes that we've just seen take off right by here. The scale of the problem is so much bigger than the goodwill that we're generating, and so we have to think about this a little bit differently. We have to work on one people who have the ability and capacity to convince them that they can do something great and

important and good right now. And I genuinely think I mean, I think that for most folks, it's not a question of how much can they give, It's a question of how much can they imagine? You know, people will put a hundred and fifty million dollar gift to build a building at a university that has a you know, thirty billion dollar trust fund sitting behind it. But that same kind of cathedral thinking doesn't seem to happen with the environment.

The second thing is we've got to be able to show We've gotta be able to show that we're making progress in a real, meaningful way. My last questions you, which was on my mind, is you call yourself Asian, which I love. How is it to be Asian? And serily o, did you think about it? Did you feel Asian? Did you feel different? We thought about it every day. I've always felt like I'm a little bit of a stranger in a strange land. I've never fully felt like

I've actually ever fit anywhere really well. Probably the closest and strange that the probably the closest have come to a being completely at ease in my skin is either in East Africa or interestingly, in Montana. It is a very wide place, but there's something about that lands, given the people who I surround myself with, this sort of rural part of Montana, Granite County, that I find honest love.

We're always aware of uskin color. And you know, people who say that they don't see color sort of insane because you always it's raised just saying it because they I think they're saying it in sort of a way to sort of say, I'm not by implication, you are if everyone who's off color sees color all the time. Being in Asia, when we left Sri Lanka to come to Africa, we had never seen I had never seen a black person. I don't think my mother had either.

The only portrayals we had was on television, and imagine what that was like in the seventies. So you know, it was a huge cultural shift to all of a sudden have our doctor being black African, or the pilot who flew the little plane that would drop supplies off to be black African. That was an amazing shift. It really helped open my eyes to what makes it similar rather than what makes this different. So good news about that kind of childhood is that it makes me a

bit of a chameleon. No matter where I travel, I can usually slip in. It also makes me always little bit feeling like I'm a little bit of an outsider. New York taught me, for the first time in my life to feel okay in my own skin because I was just part of all this. In in Africa, I felt of the place, but also an unwelcome visitor, you know, being white, And I felt that my parents were fierce anti apartheid employed people of color, helped people of color,

But we were also part of the problem. As much as we were not directly the problem, we were indirectly the problem. What was weird is like I used to think, why does no one else have black friends or Indian friends or Asian friends. It was just me. I was the only one, like of the kind of realm the white kids hung out. I hung out with everybody. But it's complicated, you know, it's it's you know, prejudices are strange things. They're literally learned over small periods of time.

You know, I have a baby daughter, brand new ten weeks old. I didn't know this, but babies can't see color. They really are color blind, and they learned to see color somewhere between like two months to four months. So it's clear to me that certainly color prejudice is learned to behavior. There's no adaptation for that in evolutionary terms, right, So you will learn it, and just like you learn some of these things, you can unlearn these things too. My theory on a lot of the stuff is, let's

talk about grace. I'm going to suck it up. I'm going if there's a wrong thing, but let's talk about it. Correct me, shame me, whatever you want to do. But rather let's talk about it and let me feel uncomfortable because it helps me on my path. Yeah, and I've to be you know this. This could be treading into dangerous waters here for me. But I will say that some of the reactions one gets on social media and stuff like that not just what I've seen people say

who have fully acknowledged that they are learning. It just seems like people want people to be born perfect and perfect meaning in their own mold, and we're not. We're humans. We have huge histories that we come with, and it's our ability to believe those at the doorstep and transition that's what makes it special. So I'm really a bit saddened and really dismayed at the victual that is thrown at anyone who kind of stumbles and pretending that we're perfect.

You know, I love to stumble. I stumble all the time. It's perfect. I stumble and then I think my husband helps me get back up and he's like, everything's fine. And I love that, you know. I think that the stumble is almost better than the idea of being perfect completely. The best stumbles is when you when you're on the road, and the stumbles you make during travel is what makes those journeys special, whether it's through life, whether it's through

a physical journey. Thank you, thank you well. I had a good time. I hope you did too. If you'd like to reach us, go to Everywhere Podcast on Instagram, Everywhere Part on Twitter, or the website everywhere podcast dot com. Thanks for listening. I'm Daniel Scheffler signing off. I'll be seeing you Everywhere. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.