Are we part of nature?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, how are you?

Chris Oh, can I be honest? I'm low on sleep the past couple of days. Two nights ago, neighbors in our new building were playing loud, loud music till about 3, 4 a.m. And, you know, it's not the ideal way to meet your neighbors. Did you knock on the door? And then this kind of waft of smoke comes into the hallway as the door opens. So that was a couple nights ago.

Scott So did you take it as an opportunity as a political scientist to explain to them political theory about freedom? Where, look, you have certain libertarian freedoms except when your freedom impinges on my freedom. So your freedom to get stoned and party is impinging on my freedom to sleep.

Chris You know, I believe that you would have done that. I missed that opportunity. And now I want to go back to it. But you know what? Now... Now, my dread that this is going to be a recurring thing has been replaced with a kind of a hope that if it does recur, then that's what I can do. And provide... Just bring a little whiteboard.

Scott Just bring a little whiteboard. Like, class, all right, take a hit from the bong and say, class, I'm going to drop some dope knowledge on you right now.

Chris Because I think what's probably happening here is that we probably took different civics classes growing up.

Scott If they had a good civics teacher, somebody would have said, well, look, we're impinging on the freedoms of our fellow democratic, liberal citizens.

Chris What Alastair MacIntyre would say is that me and my upstairs neighbor, what we lack is a shared tradition in which we could embed a mutually intelligible set of virtues upon which we could draw So that was a couple of nights ago.

Scott We need to talk about that book, though, for our listeners. Chris and I have talked about talking about that book. It's called After Virtue. It's one of these seminal kind of books on political and social theory, and we will touch on it in an episode when we get around to it.

Chris I like that. It's a good idea. Yeah, we definitely need to add After Virtue to the list of great books that we draw upon more than once because it's tremendously helpful.

Scott It's a really fun conversation.

Chris Yeah. I thought it was great, too. I thought it was really good.

Scott A listener actually asked me, a friend of mine who listens regularly, asked me, what were the first two versions of Who Owns Your Story like? And I'm like, I don't even remember. I remember them being good. I think the third one was the best. I think, but I don't know. No, no, no. That wasn't the last one we did.

Chris The last one we did was just... No, I mean two episodes.

Scott Oh, two episodes.

Chris No, I was just saying... Oh, I see.

Scott The guy was talking about that. He wanted to know the backstory because we had referenced... This was the third time. And he wanted to know how the first two went. I was like, oh, my God.

Chris Like, keep notes on that.

Scott I got PTSD about thinking about it.

Chris Well, you know, we've been waiting for quite some time for just the right moment to dive into this week's topics. I'm really excited that your president, Joe Biden, gave us the moment because the question that we've been, you know, and this has been in the back of our minds for a while, and it's kind of everywhere. In the world right now, that in some ways I'm surprised we didn't grapple with it sooner. But sometimes it's the biggest and most obvious questions that are the hardest to pick up and to enter into. And explore, because the narrative that you're swimming in is just so pervasive that it feels like there's nothing to see. It's like oxygen. And the question that we've had in our heads for a while is, are we part of nature? And, yeah, so why don't you tell the story of why it felt like this is the week to plow into it.

Scott Yeah, so it's so interesting because, so I was, the other night, I mean, a week or two ago, I was, I went out with a bunch of friends, and we were gonna go out and have a nice night in the town, and so no one wanted to drive, so they called an Uber, and the Uber showed up, and it was a Tesla, right? And it was a big, a pretty big Tesla. It was a sedan, but we got in it. And I said, I heard pickup in these things is great. And we're on this secluded road. And she just hits the gas, right? Well, not the gas. She hits the accelerator, because there is no gas. She hits the accelerator pedal. And this thing flew. I mean, it was just like, it was unbelievable. And so we started talking about her. So, but you know, oftentimes I

Chris Tesla as accessory.

Scott Exactly. It's a Tesla look, right? Or it's a Prius look, right? And you can virtue signal. It's like Game of Thrones when the queen, when she's like paraded naked through the streets and everybody goes, shame, shame. You can look at all the gas diesel engines and go, shame, shame. But Ford made an announcement that over, I forget the exact date, but over the next decade or decade and a half or so, basically they're completely phasing out. Internal combustion engines. Internal combustion F-150s, the pickup trucks. Now, the F-150, for those who are not part of the American listening audience, this is this iconic, it's the best-selling vehicle in America. It's the best-selling vehicle in America. The number one selling vehicle, yeah. Now, again, some of that is just so much of the heartland, the farmland, the southeast, other places. I mean, we see them everywhere, right? And so... Ford announced that they're only going to be electric over the next decade and a half or so. I forget what the phase-out time is, but basically their biggest flagship in the foreseeable near future is only going to be electric. And Joe Biden kind of, you know, he drove one. He kind of demoed it, and he was great. So Joe Biden, he's like, I'm a car guy. This sucker's fast. The guy just looks like he genuinely enjoys life, which is, I think, someone who's been in the school of suffering like he has. It's amazing his capacity to really be a joyful human. So that has created this...

You know, electric spark of a, you know, forgive the, you know, it wasn't meant to be a play on words, but it's just electrified the conversation on this side of the pond around the future of renewables and... Right, and who is electric for?

Chris Because it's one thing to be selling, you know, and interesting how almost immediately in the Zeitgeist, the Prius became this kind of cliche for... A certain sort of person, right? You're kind of like we were talking about in our last episode. Nowadays, if you are an actively practicing Christian in the United States, that's a great indicator for a lot of your politics. And so too with, you know, either owning a Prius or a Tesla or owning a Ford F-150. And suddenly that this vehicle is going to become an electric vehicle. I think it messes up the zeitgeist. You know, I'm just looking right now on the Ford 150 website and just the language of how this vehicle is described. It's the toughest, most productive Ford 150 ever. This is what happens when you merge premium-grade muscle with intelligent designs. Beast with brains, relentlessly tough, high-strength, military-grade aluminum alloy body and torture-tested high-strength steel frame with new tech to help you work smarter and harder. I mean, you can hear the voiceover. When you read the language, it's so carefully parsed to evoke the heartland, right?

Scott Which is generally, you know, in the United States, it's generally conservative, votes Republican, feels alienated, you know, in some ways from what we call here in the States the coastal elites, right? Like, you know, the people that live on the East Coast in urban centers or on the West Coast. You know, there's this sort of like animosity or maybe tension is the right word. So it's like the gas-powered truck versus the Prius. But now you're going to have people who probably were Trump supporters and maybe still are.

Chris Or attempts to or suggests that there could be one where environmental issues cease to be framed as they have been for much of the past 50, 60 years as a kind of a political question. As if you're the Green Party, you're somewhere on left of spectrum. And why is that? Are we part of nature or aren't we? And we've had... We've had the luxury and the capability of choice to make that choice of whether these are issues that I consider important, that are going to make it to my policy agenda or the agenda of the people that I'm going to be voting for. And then actions like this are one way of saying, well, you might not have that luxury. That actually was never really a choice. It was never really a political question. We framed it that way in our society. But now, for various reasons, mainly the science and a growing sense of kind of urgency about some of the natural challenges that we face, that framing is going to be over.

Scott You know, it's interesting. I think this happened this year, right, where in your home country of Canada, the Conservative Party basically voted that climate change is not a real issue. I mean, I think there was a motion or something, because the new head of the Conservative Party in Canada, who is, is this O'Toole? Aaron O'Toole? He wants the Conservatives to take climate more seriously, and there was a motion to sort of take some mild steps to recognize it, and the Conservative Party says, no.

Chris And that's interesting. So I'll just ask you a question, let you riff on that. Like, think of what you've just said. You know, the leader of the party wants them to take climate more seriously, which still frames it as a choice. Right, right. Are you interested in climate? Are you interested in these environmental questions? Are you interested in policy reform to encourage innovation? Are you interested in lower taxes? Pick one, right? They're all kind of a menu that somehow gets balanced and prioritized. That's how we've been thinking about this.

Scott Yeah, and they said, no, we're not interested in that. So yeah, so it's sort of... And what's interesting about that is I think it belies something under the question. No other species that I can think of has an option really to even reflect on these questions. Are we part of nature or not? What's our relation to nature? If you're a badger, a dolphin, You take it for granted that you're in a kind of... Well, you don't even think about it. You're in a relationship with the environment and with the context of the planet you're on. And you're in a complex ecosystem.

Chris Just a quick side note there. I think from the late 1960s and photos of the Earth from space had a huge impact of us being able To frame that question. In the context of the planet we're on. Now we can see it. Nature has a boundary. It's all right there. Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt.

Scott It's funny, too, because I rewatched the Planet of the Apes movies recently. I can't wait for this connection to be drawn. One of the movies, I think it was... Is it the original one? No, no, the new ones. It was War for the Planet of the Apes. Andy Serkis. I think it was the last one in the new series. And Caesar, who is the kind of, you know, Abraham Lincoln founding the apes, he's reflecting on what to do about the humans, right? And, you know, the humans did something provocative. And the apes want to respond, and he's very cautious, and he talks about what the apes have built and what they could lose, right? And Caesar's this great leader, but these apes become human, right? So they're not apes anymore, really, in the sense of they're in a movie where they get human drama. And so even though they're apes, they think and rationalize with their interests like humans.

And now they can reflect on, for the first time, and they start building infrastructure, they ride horses, they do other things. They're starting to have a different relationship to nature, to the environmental context they're in, that looks more human, that looks more like, hey, we're not just part of a symbiotic... This kind of interconnected thing, we're able to sort of to bend nature to our will.

Chris Right. We can transform our environment at a greater scale than before.

Scott Yeah. And the protagonists in the film, there's something beautiful about this, that the protagonists And they're kind of doomed. I mean, it goes back to our last conversation about Israel and Palestine. Caesar and this scientist that's a human, they've developed this real friendship, but they're just doomed because both the humans and the apes, there's this adversarial relationship kind of going on. I mean, it's just so intriguing though, but that's the thing that makes the apes humanized. Not just their family emotions, but they start to look like human society. They're starting to build things and domesticate other animals and stuff like that. And so that, it seems, is this hallmark thing about humans that part of our identity is we're not like the rest of nature. But we are. I mean, Kierkegaard says that human beings... I mean, this is a little crass for our listeners, but he says we're the gods that shit. I mean, like, basically... And he says you learn that.

Chris Another one for the show notes.

Scott Yeah, you learn that. Kierkegaard thinks, like, early on, developmentally, like, when you're a baby, you can barely speak, but you can cry and get milk. So you feel godlike power, but you can't control your bowels. And so this is the kind of eternal dilemma of human being, right? That we're the gods that can't control our bowels, right? And so we can harness new forms of energy. We've developed weapons that could basically ruin the planet for a lot of mammalian life, and yet we can't control our bowels. And you have a stroke and you're debilitated, right? So this kind of question of, you know, we can imagine, our imaginations have almost infinite sort of horizons. And yet we're trapped in infinitude, right? And I think, how do we deal with the kind of tension between our conception of infinity and our radical finitude?

Chris I remember giving a talk, it must be a couple of years ago now, in New Zealand, and it was... It was one of those events where I really felt privileged to be a part of it, kind of the gathering that came together. It was a number of sort of environmental leaders in New Zealand and, you know, from here in Europe, along with a variety of Maori and Indigenous and Pacific Island We all kind of came together and the theme of the conference was very much around like trying to integrate an understanding of nature and what I attempted to do in my keynote was sort of Tell the story of the evolution of Western thought toward the environment, and how did we depart from You know, a prehistoric understanding of, you know, just the oneness of nature. You're just a part of it. You know, sort of you're Caesar in the apes before you've been awakened by this, you know, strange chemical concoction. And so in some ways, there is no...

There is no distinction between self and nature. And then some kind of understanding of the self emerges. And then from there, you start to understand that there's me, the self, and a relationship to the world around me. And then you start to notice the world around you kind of works in cycles. And so you start to feel... Both a part of and you can respond to the seasons and you organize the planting and the harvest and the kind of rituals of society around an understanding of how the world works. But you're also kind of trapped within that mythology. And then you get to the ancient Greeks, you know, Socrates and Plato, who were able to say like, wait a minute, that's a mythology, that circle. We can also choose to kind of, you know, apply the sort of directed rational energy, you know, like more like a triangle, you know, my two eyes, the subject focusing on a point and object. And we can shatter that circle and create specific knowledge of specific things, of pieces of reality. And then, you know, we study these pieces, we're able to manipulate them and to create things that never existed in nature before.

And then we start to feel like these are our things. These are our creations, not nature's creations. And more and more of the world that we inhabit is full of... Our creations, not nature's creations. And I think you take that forward a couple thousand years, and that's sort of where we are today.

Scott Just to add to your story, though, I think the pressure point, or the real thing, is when you get, in early Christianity, you get the Socratic tradition fused with the Hebrew Bible. Okay, tell me more. It's funny because the Hebrew Bible is getting canonized and hammered out about the same time in the 6th century. When platonic stuff is getting hammered out, right? And they're not talking to each other. We're talking B.C. here. Yeah, B.C.E. Yeah, B.C. Sorry, B.C.E. B.C.E. That's the politically correct term. B.C.E. Yeah, B.C.E. Or we'll get canceled. Cancel us. Go ahead. Try it. So you get, like, in the early church... Temporal bigots. Temporal bigots. And it's not just the church. It's also Judaism does the same thing. You know, you have all these smart Christians and Jews who are not just reading the Hebrew Bible, but they're reading the best of Greco-Roman philosophy and stuff. And so you're getting this, what you're describing, right, with Plato and Aristotle, a really different understanding of our relationship to, you know, to, I guess what they would say, it'd be fair to say that Plato and Aristotle would call it the created order. But then also you look at, you know, the book of Genesis, which says, It's funny because when you look at the seven days of the creation myth, if you put them on two tablets, day one lines up with day four. Day two lines up with day five. So on day one, God makes the heavens and the earth. What happens on day four?

There are the things that populate this. When God makes the sea on the parallel day, if you put these out in tablets, it's the things that swim in the sea. Are you telling me there's a hidden code in the Bible? There is a hidden code. But the author is just basically saying it's not a hidden code, but if you were reading it the way they were... Right? On tablets. Right. It's set up in a way that looks like, okay, so the way that creation's ordered is that God first makes these, these thing, contexts for beings to exist. And then, at an appropriate time, populates the context. Right? So you go like, so day, day, the last day is dry land and you get creepy crawly insects and mammal, animal, or animals and stuff. And then humans come last. Like, we're the best for last kind of thing, right? And then day seven is the Sabbath, so it's this seven day.

It's kind of a cycle, but more linear. And so when you get the Hebrew Bible mixed with Greco-Roman philosophy, you start to think we're not just a part of this thing, right? In fact, God has even ordained we're not just a part of this thing.

Chris Right, this thing is for us.

Scott Yeah, although I think in defense of the Hebrew Bible, there's a stewardship kind of thing. I mean, there's not this sort of thing like abuse the earth or something. I mean, the author is trying to convey a unique presence for human beings, and yet to steward and be responsible, but yet there is still a kind of privileged space where Adam's naming the animals in the next chapter and all this stuff.

Chris Right, right. There's a chain of being. Yeah. And we're somewhere above the beasts and below the angels, but we're above the beasts.

Scott And I think that story has potential. I mean, some of my greatest friends and colleagues who are real ecological kind of activists and actors are from these religious traditions. But also, I mean, I think, and I say this as someone in the kind of religious tribe, I think people that use religious texts in ways that are ecologically irresponsible outweigh the people that read the text responsibly. I mean, that's just honest.

Chris So let's take... This is great. So now I feel like I have so much more understanding to look at this paper that I shared with you.

Scott A couple of days ago. By the way, this is what geeks do, if you don't know. Geeks share papers. Like, Chris sent me this paper. This is really making me... Stop everything. Stop everything.

Chris You have to read this PDF.

Scott You know, I was a geek. I read it, and I texted back. I'm like, this is fantastic.

Chris Right? Right. I told you so. I told you so. Well, we had... We did... We did not just an episode, but a series of episodes a few weeks ago about reframing and what does the frame make you see? And it was an opportunity to talk a lot about bias and implicit bias and things like that, but it was also an opportunity to recognize that there are so many kind of cognitive frameworks that That influence how we understand the world around us, most of which we're not even aware of. But when you can become aware of the framework, suddenly it brings all sorts of new actions into play. You can warp the frame, you can tear up the frame, you can change the frame, you can accept the frame. And I didn't realize until I read this paper, What the frame in my head around nature and specifically sustainability is, or maybe it was, because I feel now that the frame has changed. So that's a very bad...

Preface for this paper. Before we kind of go into it, what I think is so interesting, how it challenges what you've just now described is several thousand years of our edifice for how we think of our relationship with nature. But the context is this was sent to me by a friend just a few days ago. It was published just about three weeks ago. My friend is a senior politico, let's say, inside a large G7 government. And he sent me this paper, and he said to me, like, Chris, stop everything. You've got to read this paper. Why? Because this is the script. Now, this paper is flying all over the place. People like me, environment ministers, you know, senior government leaders all around the world, we're looking at this paper. We're reading this document. And we're lining up our thinking behind it and saying, yeah, this is the next step. This is what we're going to do next. This is going to be a big part of the global agenda at upcoming global meetings in 2021 and 2022. So read this paper. And then you open it up.

And you think, God, I'd love to write a paper that had that many presidents and CEOs and chairs, peoples and directors of mega institutions as co-authors of the paper. And it's called A Nature Positive World, The Global Goal for Nature. But I got to catch my breath. I'm so excited talking about it.

Scott Wow, this is, by the way, this is a very nature-positive podcast for all the nature lovers out there. We're just, we can't even talk about this without losing our breath.

Chris So, you know, I did a Google image search for sustainable development. And the picture that came up, and I realized, this is the picture in my head, is a Venn diagram. And there are three circles. And one of the circles is economy, and the other is society, and the other is environment. And sustainable development is the intersection of those three circles. And that just made sense for me. As I look back, Over the past many years, I look this week at the conversations that Joe Biden, like putting pedal to the metal on that Ford 150, prompted in your own politics. That is the picture. That is the frame in people's heads. They're saying, yeah, this environment stuff is important, but there are these other things that are also important.

Scott And if we had done this podcast a month ago, Let's say you and I just decide to do this. And we could have... There were other environmental stories. They're environmental stories all the time. We would have embraced the Venn diagram. I guarantee it. I mean, I would bet the farm. I would bet all the money in my pocket versus all the money in your pocket that we would have done that.

Chris How else would you draw sustainable development?

Scott Right.

Chris There is this contest between these competing sets of interests and sustainable development is finding the sweet spot, kind of figuring out the overlap between those competing set of interests and then try to stay in that sweet spot. And the stuff outside of the sweet spot, got to exclude it. And you want to stay inside and try to grow that sweet spot.

Scott And can we just say for our listeners again, I forget the three, that's economy, society, and environment, right? Or nature, I guess. Or nature. And so practically we would say, okay, we're building a factory, right? Society is, we need energy, right? We just need to keep the lights on, right? We need people.

Chris You know, we need educated people. We need well-fed people. We need healthy people.

Scott And then the nature voice would be, well, what are the emissions and other kind of environmental effects?

Chris We need raw materials.

Scott And then the third one would be, what would be the example there?

Chris Well, the economy. We need products. We need services. We need customers. We need money. We need these things to make it fit together. And I thought that made total sense. And now I see it. Now I see the limitations of the frame. Because, interesting, so the question that we're asking today, are we part of nature? That Venn diagram says, well, no, nature is a part of this thing. Nature comes in. And given the context of what you've laid out, The Greco-Roman Hebrew origins of how you and I at least think about our relationship with nature. I don't know if this paper could have been written. 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 100 years ago, 250 years ago. Nobody would have understood, yeah, so what do we do with that? But the frame that it introduces is to say, okay, this economy, society, environment, forget about the competing set of interests. Forget the Venn diagram. These are not competing interests. What we are talking about here is a hierarchy.

And there is economy. And society is the context in which economy happens. Economy is an aspect of society. And the environment is the context in which society lives. And so it's never about making trade-offs. It's always about Creating the most, the most, I'm looking for the adjective, the best context in which economy and society can flourish.

Scott Yeah, or having the most awareness of your situatedness. In the sense of like, we're situated, things are situated in different contexts. And I think the eco-friendly reading of the book of Genesis would be that in Genesis 1, the context gets built and then humans are in it, right? And so humans come last, and they're one of the most fragile things in the context, right? And so that kind of idea that, look, we're not, nature isn't an interest group, right? But that's the thing. It's almost like we reify nature and economy, right? So we make nature and economy conscious agents almost with the diagram. So they're acting, and then it's like nature has its lobbyists, right? And the economy has its lobbyists, right? And so we give it this sort of anthropomorphized face where I think that what the paper does really well is saying, no, no, no, no, no. Nature gives birth to... This really weird and fascinating thing called human society, you know, millennia ago.

And then we figured out economies, right? Once you get out of hunter-gatherer, All of these kind of realities where everybody does everything and the economy is ultra localized. If you could even call it an economy, right? But no, we trade with the tribes and do all these things and then states come about. So we have this thing called economy that exists in this very fragile thing called society, which exists in a thing that seems not fragile. Nature just doesn't seem fragile.

Chris And so we can take it for granted and take the services that it provides to humanity for granted because there's nothing really we can do to interfere with the supply of those nature-provided components.

Scott You know, it's funny, Mark Twain famously, he's got this great quip where he says, When I left home at 18, my father was the most ignorant person I'd ever met. When I came home at 21, I was shocked at everything he learned. This thing where nature, it's this thing where I think in late modernity, we're seeing its wisdom and its significance.

Chris Well, I think we're seeing... And now there's even a TLA, there's a three-letter acronym now for this, which is NCP, Nature's Contributions to People. And now in the scientific community, I think there are 18 different categories of nature's contributions to people. They're what they call like regulating, These are things like creating habitat and maintaining it, pollination, dispersing seeds, air quality from forests, climate, fresh water, soil formation, all these different things that we basically rely upon for... You know, food and materials and, you know, whether that we can grow things in and survive in. And then there are these, so there's this regulatory layer, regulating layer that nature provides us. And then there's this material layer, which is things like energy and food and feed and, you know, animal companionship and labor and, you know, medicinal products and genetic resources. And then I find it interesting that scientists, if they've classified a non-material nature contribution to people, which is things like inspiration and physical and psychological experiences, but all of this now is a kind of attempt to systematically Take that, you used a beautiful word, not robustness or strength of nature and kind of recognize its elements. Recognize all of the ways that that context makes possible this kind of, you know, these other aspects of of our lives, like the society we're in and the economy that we're in. I'm trying to figure out the segue and I can't, so I'm just going to skip to it. So why isn't it just obvious?

So if you think of the Venn diagram of sustainable development, and yeah, these are competing interests, economy, society, environment. And we've been trying to figure out the balance of those competing interests. And then you realize, whoa, that's not it. This isn't a competition, this is a hierarchy. And it makes total sense. It's actually blindingly obvious. And so in a sense, there's nothing in this paper. There's nothing but a lot of words and statistics and references. It's a very highly referenced paper.

Scott But there's a great diagram. There's a great diagram.

Chris Right? But it's all of this fancy language, and a lot of it is sort of the rarefied language of international policymaking, to say nothing new. And yet... It's profoundly unsettling in a good way. So can you help me understand what's going on there?

Scott So I think this is like what we try to do on this podcast, and they did it really well, right? It's what happens when Socrates emerges... And the scene in Greece, and she says, you know what, like, really, couldn't we do better than Homeric deities for finding the true, the good, and the beautiful? I mean, most of us think the gods are problematic. I mean, the Euthyphro Dialogue is my favorite thing to throw at undergraduates, when basically you ask... This is another book for our list. Yeah, the Euthyphro Dialogues. Basically, it's... Euthyphro is going to prosecute his dad for something he did to a slave. And he thinks he's really pious. And Socrates says, well, I mean, you're prosecuting your father. I mean, is that pious? And he's just asking questions. And the whole thing winds up in this big question about, is something good because the gods love it? Or do the gods love it because it's good? And it's this meta question that basically intellectually destroys These kind of traditional Zeus, Thor, Odin paradigms, right? And it really sets Western philosophy in a different, flawed and problematic, but I think most of us would look at it and say it's an evolution about how to think about what the good life is and what human flourishing looks like. And I think there are these moments where, when we get stuck, You start asking questions, right? And you look for new frames and you look for new stories that make sense because the old stories just are really crackling and are not.

I mean, servicing people, again, pragmatically, existentially, intellectually. And so this paper, like, it's funny that, like, I'm kind of surprised. I mean, I'm an environmental guy. Like, I mean, look, I try to live a sustainable life and stuff like that. But I was pretty surprised. And reading through the paper, reading through the paper, and when I saw those pictures, And we'll put those in the show notes or we'll link to them. We'll have to. It's fascinating because when you look at the Venn diagram versus what this UN paper is proposing... It's like, oh my gosh. You know those things that used to be popular in the 80s and early 90s where you stood at those posters and if you looked long enough, an image emerged from it? I mean, that's kind of the thing, right? You're looking at the image and something emerges that's really powerful. And it actually has more explanatory power. It's a paradigm kind of shift in the sense of what happens with paradigms...

Is one paradigm replaces another. It doesn't totally discount everything the other paradigm had, but it kind of disassembles it and reassembles it in a story that just tells a bigger, fuller, more robust story. And I think that, I mean, that's the thing that it's amazing that, like, that... Well, this is why they need to hire you, because I feel like if the UN hired you, you could tell a story about this paradigm instead of a 30-page position paper.

Chris Well, yeah. So, you know, the paper is for the geeks like us. They do tell a story. Actually, we should say the website for all of this is naturepositive.org. And I just checked it out and the paper is there. It's the first item on the list. And if you're even more geek than me, you can also read the summary for policymakers. Although, no, no, no, no, no. The summary for policymakers, that's the one pager. Boring.

Scott Who wants the one pager? We're going to get this podcast on the list. We're going to tell them. That's right. Put us on the list.

Chris If you want to create engagement with your paper, you need to add this as the preface. This like rambling exploration of how Joe Biden really popularized his paper. I've got to reach out to some of my friends in his administration and say like, this is what you need to do. But listening to you just then, you answered my question. Why is something so obvious It's obvious, but it's not our present paradigm. And that's why the obvious is profound. And that is why... It wasn't that... It wasn't that, how to say this? The problem is that the Venn diagram is so useful because rather than upend the present paradigm, it named nature as a stakeholder in the existing competition. Of, you know, of policy of interests. And so like, yeah. So, so when, when, uh, got to talk to somebody who was like there in 1972 at the Brundtland commission or something like that. And, you know, like the, uh, I think what, what, what were like the key dates in, in sort of like the modern establishment of an environmental thinking framework there is, um, There was the Stockholm Declaration in 1972. There was the Brundtland Report in the late 80s.

There was Rio in 1992. But I'll bet that before they had the Venn diagram, they had some kind of dyad, right? There's economy and society. And so the big breakthrough was, holy shit, nature is a circle too. The environment is in this picture. And that was the big framework. We are not talking about this at all. We've got to put it on the table, and it's one of these interests we've got to start incorporating into our negotiations on everything that we do. And now this is sort of the next evolution of saying, that paradigm was wrong. The paradigm before it was wrong. We're trying to recover That original oneness that we possessed for free as prehistoric animals by saying like, no, no, no, no, it's a nested, it's Russian dolls is basically what the new picture is. Anyway, that was a bit of a ramble, but what you just said hit me so profoundly that... Yeah, it's obvious, but it's not how we presently think, and that's why changing it is profound.

Scott It's really interesting. There's this hymn that I love. I mean, hymns are funny because you don't get to sing them all the time. And they're only powerful when you sing them together. So you just wait for your favorite hymn. It's like karaoke or something. You go to church and you wait for your favorite hymn, and then you sing it with gusto. And maybe you're sitting next to someone that can't carry a tune. Do you have a favorite hymn? Well, I have a couple, but this is one called All Creatures of Our God and King. We'll link to it. And it starts like, All creatures of our God and King, lift up your voice and with us sing, Alleluia, Alleluia. And then it goes particular. It says, Thou burning sun with golden beam, Thou silver moon with softer gleam, O praise Him, O praise Him. Alleluia, alleluia. And it says, Thou rushing wing that art so strong, He clowns that sail in heaven along. Oh, praise Him. And they just say, Thou rising moon, in praise rejoice. Ye lights of the evening, find a voice. Thou flowing water, pure and clear, make music for thy Lord to hear.

And then they praise fire, like, Thou fire so masterful and bright, Thou givest man both warmth and light, Dear Mother Earth, who day by day Unfold this blessings on our way. And they talk about flowers and fruits. And they even talk about death. Like there's this line that says like, ye who long and long pain and sorrow bear, praise God and on him cast your care. And now most kind and gentle death waiting to hush our latest breath. And then the last line is thou, That leadeth home the child of God, and Christ our Lord the way hath tried. Let all things their Creator bless, and worship Him in humbleness. But there's this beautiful thing that's not... And it starts with, it actually starts with the UN paper. It starts with sun and moon, right? So it's the circle. And it gets even to the most particular human experience of death, right? And so... You know, what I've never thought about is singing that hymn, and I've never thought about the people that were mourning when we sung it. But even mourning, right, the human experience of mourning, M-O-U-R, is only possible by mourning, M-O-R-N-I-N-G, like the dance of the sun and the moon. And these kind of things, I mean, it's the power of like... And I think that hymn, I think, goes back to, in legend, St. Francis of Assisi, who used to spend all this time in nature, right? And people used to say that he was kind of a little crazy. He would like dance, pretending he was playing a flute.

With like birds and deer and like he would just run around. I mean, there's a beauty to that though, of a song that can reframe. And this is in all traditions, right? Like a lot of indigenous people groups have these sort of songs and chants and rituals. And I don't know how we find a new story.

Chris Sometimes we go on these conversation journeys and I don't quite know where we're going to land. Where I've landed today is appreciating, and this is your gift, what is the question that sets us forth? And this question, which you crafted for us, are we part of nature, is Is absolutely the question for all of us to be thinking about, especially when you're geeking out on, you know, like an uber influential policy paper that just got launched. Oh my God, the ink is still wet. Because are we part of nature? I mean, obviously we aren't. And that's why, you know, this Venn diagram was developed to say like, hey, it's there. We're not, we're not with it. So we got to kind of bring more of that into our reality because we are not part of nature.

Scott And yet obviously we are. And what I like about that hymn though, I'm imagining like some mythical choir director saying like, and the sun and the moon sing their part. And they're all singing in parts. And that's what the Venn diagram doesn't do. It's like, well, these people aren't going to come sing a hymn together. Society's got their hymns. The Wall Street hymn is, Oh, Dow, you are the greatest thing. Or something like that. But this kind of, with the UN paper, I feel like unveils is this ancient wisdom from lots of traditions There's an organic relationship, and it's messy and complex. But also, the gift of being human is we can tell a story. A badger can't tell a story. A swallow can't tell a story. I mean, hippos, which are the fascinating thing. I would love to just play with a hippo. I've seen videos where people play with hippos.

I'm sure they're in reserves and stuff. But only human beings can tell the story of nature. It can actually be nature's mouthpiece. And in some ways, maybe that's the... Does nature have a mouthpiece? And that's kind of us.

Chris Right, but in some ways, that's part of the tragedy, right? In that all of this is kind of coming to the fore. From crisis, from a necessity to articulate and make explicit the ways that all that we have built, all that we are in attempt to sustain, relies upon This natural context being there in the paper. The paper, it requires that it finds the language of economy and society to explain these things. There's statistics like something like half of global GDP is moderately or highly dependent upon natural services is a statistic there. And it's all just trying to find language to make compelling What is real? And so there is a kind of tragedy that we are the ones who can tell nature's story. And yet it seems that the dominant mode is still to treat nature as silent. And that's the problem. So we've missed this glorious opportunity.

Scott All of our listeners should just go watch Star Trek IV because that is an underrated film where this probe shows up and it wants to talk to whales because whales are older than we are. And they go back in time, and it's great, because Spock, who died and was resurrected and is trying to find himself, but he can talk to the whales. Like, he mind melds, and the whales are unhappy. And they want to help. And the whales want to help human society. They're kind of like, we would go with you to the future.

Chris Bonus points to any listeners who can tell us the name of the whales. George and Glacey.

Scott What? It's Gracie. Is it really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris I can't give you points.

Scott Yeah, you can't give me points. But I love when they beam the whales up and Scotty goes, Captain, there'll be whales here. No, but the beauty is like this advanced society that has eliminated war. It's multicultural. It's interplanetary. I mean, there's always others, right? Romulans, Klingons. But, you know, charitably, I mean, it's an advanced human society. And it shows that, oh my gosh, we built this society, and because we killed whales, we endangered ourselves. And the beautiful thing at the end of the movie is... They bring the whales into the San Francisco Bay and Kirk just goes, Spock, why won't they sing? And they start singing and the probe leaves. It was the whale song that saved the world. So, I mean, you want the biggest choir you can get, really. With as many voices as you can get. And whales do sing, and it's beautiful. You can go on YouTube and listen to them sing.

Chris I had, as a kid, I found this archive. Someone had thrown them out and I took them home and was so proud of them, of National Geographic's old National Geographic magazine. They had one from 1930-something and it was always so fun to look at the advertisements with these like, you know, ancient cars and weird appliances. But one of them had a, like a special, This was a gift, which was a flexible record, like an LP, of whale songs, of whale music. It was an insert in the magazine. I remember playing that whale song. I should find the edition of the National Geographic that had the whale songs and see if I can recover it from the library. It's just this magical experience.

Scott What was magical about it?

Chris I guess I had never listened to nature in quite that way before. And I was a young kid and it was almost like my first meditative experience, maybe. In a time when there wasn't a language and a culture here, you know, Dharma had not sort of moved west the way it has today. But just to pause and to think of... of nature and whales as producing music and to appreciate it. I guess in some ways it was the first real returning to my status of ape. And recovering some of the intuitive connection to my environment, to my context that the ape in me has. I wasn't thinking all those things. I was like, oh, this is cool shit. I found a record. Does nobody else understand how amazing it is? Somebody had just thrown away all these magazines. Look, Mom, I've brought them all home. Now, where can I put them? I don't get why other people didn't understand how exciting a discovery that was. I like this paper and I really appreciate that it was sent to me and then I sent it to you and then we had a conversation about it. And so my recommendation is that read the paper. We'll put the link in the show notes. Don't wimp out and read the summary for policymakers. Go all the way in. Get the proper paper. And as you're reading it, I think a great question to ask is why is something so obvious so profound?

And I think it's a great and really valuable insight into how unnatural Some of our paradigms of thought can actually be... And I think the power of recognizing that inside ourselves, if we can develop that muscle, it can be the most... Like radically liberating and inspirational and kind of like font of genius capacity in us to be able to notice the frames.

Scott Maybe also I'd recommend... If you read it, talk about it with a friend, if you can. And there are people in the Basecamp community. You could join Basecamp and just post and probably get to know some people that are thinking on these kind of wavelengths. Because I think the power of it... Join us in our clubhouse on Mondays. Join us in our clubhouse on Mondays. Just come in and talk with us. Because I think... Had I not talked with you about it... I would have missed, I mean, TSLA has this great thing, this quote, we had the experience, but we missed the meaning. And I think some of this is also just like life is not, life is a team sport. And you find people that you can connect with in meaningful ways. And yeah, so this is the kind of thing where like, I think you grappling with it, With someone who you know from any kind of context, social media, a neighbor or something, will help.

Chris Totally agree. I mean, yeah. Because on another level, oh, it's just a paper. It's the intention we bring to it. And the... The refinement or reframing of our own thinking that we do in dialogue with it and with one another, I think is cool. The other thing that is just kind of just, you know, yeah, I mean, again, we're geeks, so not for everyone, but for me is cool is you read this and you realize that, I mean, there are, There's a set of extremely influential minds around the world right now who are reading these exact same words. You want to know what it's like to be a person in a formal leadership position of power in major countries or giant corporations? Read the paper. That's what they're doing. Same thing. Scott, I really appreciate the experience of reading this paper with you, and I had no idea. That it was going to just open up such significant reflections on the human condition and the history of now, how we've come to be where we are. It's been a great journey for me, so thank you for it. Thank you, my friend. As always. It was a good one. I can't wait for the next one. Yeah. Which I think we're going to talk about money, which would be, you know, that would be a really good, like, kind of, I don't know if it's an Aikido move or a jujitsu throw to really kind of careen from one part of that Venn diagram to another.

And we've been talking for a couple of weeks now that You know, with everything that's going on in this, you know, all the buzz around cryptocurrency and for a lot of other reasons, it's time to kind of grapple with what money means.

Scott Yeah, because money is value in our culture and we need to think about the relationship between money and value.

Chris Well, I've got a whole bookshelf now of, I'll unveil it when we talk about this next week, but you think about like everyone from, you know, Marx to Hayek, Who have talked about the role of money in society, measures of value. I think there's a lot for us to unpack there. So we'll wait for a really timely moment. Either it'll be a big dip or a jump in Bitcoin. Maybe Elon Musk will say something about it.

Scott And when we do it, I will reveal the strategy where you can win every monopoly game with your family.

Chris Great chat. Great chat. A lot of fun. Got to go.