Stephen is a fire historian, and self-described pyromantic.  Now an emeritus professor at Arizona State University, he spent 15 seasons with the North Rim Longshots at Grand Canyon National Park.  He has written major fire histories for America, Australia, Canada, Europe (including Russia), and the Earth overall. Among his many books are Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire, and Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910. In today’s episode Stephen shares some wonderful insights on how we may rethink our relationship with fire. His most recent book is The Still-Burning Bush, out from Scribe Publications in September 2020. Prior to academic life, Stephen also spent fifteen summers as a seasonal firefighter with the US National Parks Service.

Masters of Regeneration Radio

Stephen Pyne: A Fire Planet

What exploratory questions can we ask ourselves today to re-imagine what we live for, how we relate to ourselves, to others, to nature? What do we need to see and understand that we have not seen to re-imagine the definitions that we give to our actions in the world? To the definitions we give to how we measure the collective values ​​of our species? Essential questions such as: What is essential for living? What is development, the economy, money, the relationship of humans with the natural world, with this dying yet still prevailing illusion of separation from the world around us? How can we understand times of great challenge, moments of stress as times of growth and re-birth?

Tomas Rayes - Where We Go One, We Go All

In this episode we talk about healing our gut… about our micro biome and Earth’s different biomes, about these gut-wrenching times our shadows, our personal truth, coming back to our belonging place, this collective healing transition, fermentation as an alternative to the textile industry and letting go of our dependency on oil, and giving Nature her rightful place at the table in our decision making process. Little did we know Nature was going to show us who’s boss now. Beth said something like: “Maybe there are more steps ahead that frighten me”… well here we are. At home, like Mother Nature sent us all to our rooms to think about what we’ve done and reflect on how we move forward now, acknowledging what is truly essential in our efforts to bring back that vibrant world. What is essential? Breathing… drinking water and eating foods that are alive, nourishing our body and mind with gratitude, awareness, presence, wisdom, patience, going within to listen to a knowledge beyond our human mental constructs. We coexist with millions of other species living and adapting to an ever changing environment, and they do it in harmony with Nature. How about covid 19 for an accelerator for Sapiens? How about this for building global Unity Consciousness? It takes a very different mindset than the mainstream one that has prevailed, to recognize all natural organisms we coexist with as beings, as people, just like us. Beth Rattner is the executive director for the Biomimicry Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to helping current and future innovators reconnect to nature so that we may create more regenerative products and services. Beth directs the Institute’s strategic vision and mission to create a new generation of nature-inspired innovators and oversees the organization’s five programs: Youth Design Challenge, Biomimicry Global Design Challenge, Biomimicry Launchpad, Ray of Hope Prize®, and AskNature. The Institute is also the connective tissue for the Biomimicry Global Network, a worldwide network of biomimicry innovators. She is a frequent speaker on how biomimetic design in products, cities, and agriculture can bring about a new level of repair and cooperation to our economy and ecosystem which in turn will spur new levels of social equity.    Beth Rattner has been working in sustainability since 2000 and is currently the executive director of the Biomimicry Institute. The Institute brings the practice of bioinspired design to hundreds of thousands of people a year through its education and entrepreneurship programs. Beth speaks publicly on how biomimetic design of human products and systems can restore our economy and environment.   Prior to this position, Beth worked with William McDonough and Michael Braungart on The Upcycle, the sequel to Cradle to Cradle, before she helped co-found the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute and became its executive director.     An attorney by training, Beth was also a managing director for one of the first sustainability business consultant firms, Blu Skye, and business manager for Hewlett Packard’s Emerging Market Solutions (EMS) group. This HP internal “start-up” championed a new lens on providing technology solutions to those who earn less than $2 a day. The team launched HP’s first multi-user, daisy-chained computer for poorly funded schools and a solar-powered printer, providing microfinance opportunities for women who could bring photographs to remote villages for the very first time.     Beth lives in Marin County, California.

Beth Rattner: Biomimicry

 LARS CHITTKA Our guest today is Lars Chittka. Lars is professor of Sensory and Behavioural ecology at Queen Mary, University of London, and has been a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study (WIKO) in Berlin. His book The Mind of the Bee (2019) is forthcoming with Princeton University Press. Excerpt from https://aeon.co/essays/inside-the-mind-of-a-bee-is-a-hive-of-sensory-activity ”Insects such as bees and ants are often held up as the epitome of the robotically mechanistic approach to animal nature. Scientists have long known that these creatures must possess a large behavioural repertoire in order to construct their elaborate homes, defend against intruders, and provision their young with food. Yet many still find it plausible to look at bees and ants as little more than ‘reflex machines’, lacking an internal representation of the world, or an ability to foresee even the immediate future. In the absence of external stimuli or internal triggers such as hunger, it’s believed that the insect’s mind is dark and its brain is switched off. But perhaps the problem is not that insects lack an inner life, but that they don’t have a way to communicate it in terms we can understand. It is hard for us to prise open a window into their minds. So maybe we misdiagnose animal brains as having machine-like properties simply because we understand how machines work – whereas, to date, we have only a fragmentary and imperfect insight into how even the simplest brains process, store and retrieve information. However, there are now many signs that consciousness-like phenomena might exist not just among humans or even great apes – but that insects might have them, too. Not all of these lines of evidence are from experiments specifically designed to explore consciousness; in fact, some have lain buried in the literature for decades, even centuries, without anyone recognising their hidden significance. Consciousness, to the western world (and I am personally adding this since to ancestral cultures it is a different story) consciousness then, is an evolutionary invention like wings or lungs. It is useful to us; it’s therefore most likely to be useful to other organisms with traits deeply homologous to ours. They share with us the difficulties of moving, probing the environment, remembering, predicting the future and coping with unforeseen challenges. If the same behavioural and cognitive criteria are applied as to much larger-brained vertebrates, then some insects are likely to qualify as conscious agents.”

Lars Chittka: The Mind of a Bee

Daniel Wahl explores ways in which we can reframe and understand the crises that we currently face and explores how we can live our way into the future rather than know our way into the future, how we might stop chasing the mirage of certainty and control in a complex and unpredictable world. How can we collaborate in the creation of diverse regenerative cultures adapted to the unique biocultural conditions of place? How can we create conditions conducive to life?

Daniel Wahl: Designing Regenerative Cultures

"Just 50 years ago, some 1,000 small and family-owned seed companies were producing and distributing seeds in the United States; by 2009, there were fewer than 100. Thanks to a series of mergers and acquisitions over the last few years, four multinational agrochemical firms — Corteva, ChemChina, Bayer and BASF — now control over 60 percent of global seed sales." Michael Mazourek is co-founder of Row 7 Seed Company and an Associate Professor of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He first met the likes of the butternut squash, the cucumber, the pea and the pepper tending to his family’s garden as a child; little did he know that the would later go on to specialize in these same crops. A deep interest in human health and getting to the root of how stuff works led him to the study of biochemistry, illuminating the links between plants and the important phytochemicals in our diet. Today he has the opportunity to strengthen these connections—and serve regional farmers—by breeding improved vegetables and training others in his craft.

Michael Mazourek: Seed Breeders

Ethan has been working for years in regenerative agriculture. In our conversation he invites us to think deeply about the frameworks we decide to work with as opposed to following rules or practices. He invites us to think about generative questions we can ask about the land and our relationship to specific ecosystems and their potential, as opposed to thinking about problems. He invites us to think, rather than define, to relate rather than control, and understand ourselves as part of those living systems relationships and the intricate and unique story of each place. Ethan Roland Soloviev is Chief Innovation Officer at HowGood, he’ll explain what that is towards the end of the episode. He is also an owner of High Falls Farm. He is the author of "Levels of Regenerative Agriculture" and "Regenerative Enterprise: Optimizing for Multi-Capital Abundance." Ethan is an international expert on regenerative agriculture, regenerative business, and permaculture design, with experience in 34 countries. He is the founder of the Regenerative Enterprise Institute, a member of the Regenerative Business Alliance, and an Associate of the Carol Sanford Institute (after this episode, if you’re intrigued, jump to episode 20 of Masters of Regeneration Radio with Carol Sanford).

Ethan Roland Soloviev - What is Regenerative?

Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, author and activist who has dedicated his life to environmental sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. He is one of the environmental movement’s leading voices, and a pioneering architect of corporate reform with respect to ecological practices. His work includes founding successful, ecologically conscious businesses, writing about the impacts of commerce on living systems, and consulting with heads of state and CEOs on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy. Paul is Founder of Project Drawdown, a non-profit dedicated to researching when and how global warming can be reversed. The organization maps and models the scaling of one hundred substantive technological, social, and ecological solutions to global warming. 

Paul Hawken: Fearless Responses to Our Objective Reality

Founder and executive director of Nakawe Project, a non-profit organization that focuses its efforts on the protection of marine life. Growing up by the Mediterranean Sea next to Barcelona, Regi has worked in and around the ocean for all of her life. Currently, she works both in conservation & ecoturism Baja California Sur, Mexico. With massive persistence and courage she manages to gain access to places no one else has, rendering her an unmatched researcher for this project.

Regi Domingo: Why Protecting Sharks Matters for Our Survival

Being Sapiens means it is our responsibility to protect the natural world. And the world needs your observation. The world wants you to see a new reality for the planet. We are symbolic animals. We represent objective reality with intangible symbols that are so powerful that we transform the natural world with them. We imagine, envision, we make, we transform. That’s our superpower. But if we don’t protect the body of the earth, we loose the memory of the world contained in biological information flows. Because of how we evolved as a species, we have cared more about symbols than objective reality. Throughout History, human belief systems have come and gone, temples appeared and disappeared. We can do without them, but try and do without clean food, water, and air. We can’t survive without them. We live in the solar system after all. It’s not called the christian system, the muslim system, the judaic system, the capitalist system, or the liberal system, it’s the freaking solar system and the sun is what powers everything that’s going on in the biogeochemical flows that are Life on Earth. In this episode, I am going to share with you my thoughts on what we can do both individually and as a species in relation to the natural world, to understand why we are where we are, and what actions we must take moving forward. This is our time.

Tomas Rayes: This is our Time

Almost a quarter century ago, Daniel Pauly, one of the most important scientists of the Anthropocene, introduced “shifting baselines syndrome” to explain our generational blindness to environmental destruction. It has since become one of the key terms framing climate change and other forms of planetary degradation. In his upcoming book Vanishing Fish, Shifting Baselines and the future of global fisheries, Daniel Pauly offers a devastating look at the state of today’s global fisheries—and a radical way to turn it around. He chronicles not only the arc of the fishing industry’s demise, offering insights into how and why it has failed, but draws on decades of research to provide an up-todate assessment of ocean health and an analysis of the issues that have contributed to the current crisis, including globalization, massive underreporting of catch, and the phenomenon of “shifting baselines,” in which, over time, important knowledge is lost about the state of the entire natural world.

Daniel Pauly: Time to Act Politically | Vanishing Fish

The Regenerative Business with Carol Sanford: What separates us from animals and the natural world? What unites us? Do you ever ask yourself these two fundamental questions? Here’s how I see it: the oldest language and text in the world, is the genetic code, and there is clearly language all over the world, in millions of forms, there is communication and information flows between all living things. Then came our species, and over eons, we developed this intricate form of language outside of ourselves. We pulled knowledge from deep inside our bodies and brought it out, we created the alphabet, writing, numbers, and the sciences that allow us to understand and make sense of how the world actually works, around and inside us. We are made of language. The difference between us and the natural world is that we took part of that knowledge encoded in our body, and externalized it. We created human language and writing and brought the experience of understanding to the realm of human reason. And we glorified reason, this tool in our heads, in our prefrontal cortex. A wonderful process that has taken place over thousands of years and also disconnected us from body wisdom and more subtle forms of understanding all the communication happening through us and within us. We are vessels of biological information flows, temporarily carrying genetic memory, environmental cues in our body, and passing them on to our children if we have any. What messages are we sending into the world? What messages aren’t we hearing? One thing we know for sure is that we define reality, and create our own reality through language. The words we use, the definitions we have for those words, and how those become ideas, and then collective belief systems are the most powerful tool on Earth (well maybe except geological scales of spacetime that make us look like tiny specs of dust in comparison). But, as Yuval Harari says, the objective reality of our planet today depends exclusively on the subjective reality of humans. So what stories are we telling ourselves, as a species? Today it matters more than ever to know yourself, and understand yourself both as an individual and as a species. And when the old systems, and the elders of the world are failing, we must collectively turn to the wisest elder of all: the natural world. I saw the other day this awesome post by Black Jaguar, White Tiger: The whole Universe except Humans communicate through Silence. Well, we do too, but we acquired an external installation that we call mind and it’s so noisy that it doesn’t let us pay attention to the Universe commands. That mind that we protect, defend and analyze is not ours, through Meditation techniques this can be realized. And when it is realized “Enlightenment” is what takes place, or again, realized. I call it The Ultimate Joke, because after so much effort through different lives, one finally realizes what one has always been, or more precisely, what one is not. When you see the mess that Humans have created it is only a reflection of that acquired mind. This is why babies are so magnetic, because they haven’t acquired it yet, and also, why Buddhas are even more magnetic, because they have transcended this external mind and have become wise. All those Animal migrations in Africa or the Monarch Butterfly crossing the continent are a product of this Silent Knowledge that Humans don’t pay attention to. And when we do, we call it luck, Magic or sixth sense. It’s just our Nature. We have to go back to Nature...” go check them out @blckjgrwhttgr The essence of life is process. If the processing of material-energy and information ends, life also ends. The defining characteristic of life is the ability to maintain, for a significant period, a steady state in which the entropy (or disorder) within the system is significantly lower than its non-living surroundings. I know, it’s hard in the city to realise you are part of cyclical biological information flows, that you are a process, in a dynamic living system. You don’t see concrete opening up to sunlight at dawn, or traffic lights following the path of the sun throughout the day. You don’t see a living concrete ground absorbing minerals, water, nutrients and toxins. You don’t see the billboards responding to the sweet breeze or fungi in the hard ground decomposing digesting the piles of trash in the city. You don’t see the city lights pulsating to call the females for reproduction or hear the honking cars and police sirens calling their mates in the sweet embrace of the night. The city however, is talking to you at all times, claiming your attention and entraining you to consume. The whole system, social networks especially, uses conditioning techniques of conductive psychology to own your behavior. It takes a lot of willpower to resist because perhaps you think your self worth depends on what you buy, or something outside yourself. Wake up. Your self worth lies in your ability to love yourself and all living things from the inside out. Your self worth lies in your right and response-ability to learn how life actually works, and to be a conscious protector of the natural world. There is a global regenerative revolution happening on Earth. It started about 50 years ago but only in the last 10 years the word regeneration, has taken centerstage. The world needs regeneration, it couldn’t be more clear, or so we think. Yet there are many perspectives to consider: regeneration of oceans and soil regeneration of our human management of natural resources (better called by scientists ecosystem benefits that nature gives us for free) regeneration of our understanding: what does it mean to be a homo sapiens today, and how do we design business cultures that not only provide change to our users and customers, but also to our team There comes the regenerative business and the responsible entrepreneur: a new breed of humans seeking to transform industries and even society itself. They challenge and refine cultural assumptions, laws, regulations, and event the processes of governance. This requires them to do and think far beyond what is usually required of business leaders. Responsible Entrepreneurs, individuals who want to use business itself as an instrument for significant change, seek the bold, sweeping moves that can benefit society nations, ecosystems and the planet as a whole. They think systemically about their value-adding processes, make their work increasingly beneficial to society beyond philanthropy, and do this as a direct result of their business activities. Our guest today is Carol Sanford, she has worked with Fortune 500 and “rock star entrepreneurs” for nearly forty years—creating significant evolution in financial effectiveness, meaningful market contribution, and transformation of communities and ecosystems. She contracted with many colleagues to participate in these events and used the events with clients to develop people in working with the technology based on living systems.  Carol is the author of The Responsible Entrepreneur; Four Game-Changing Archetypes for Founders, Leaders, and Impact Investors, The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success, and most recently, The Regenerative Business: Redesign Work, Cultivate Human Potential, Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes. Before we get started, remember to go to iTunes and give us 5 stars, your feedback and reviews helps us to grow more than you know. Sending you all love and gratitude, and a lot of patience and perseverance. Thank you for listening.

Carol Sanford: The Regenerative Business

We are at a turning point in human history. The vocabulary we use to define the challenges of our time has to change now, and by the millions. We must stop blaming stuff around us. Instead of saying we must fight climate change and global warming, we need to turn our attention to how we humans manage the land. This is not about beans or beef. It’s about toxic feedlots and toxic agriculture, and gold mines poisoning rivers like the Amazon. The red tide in Florida, the sargassum crisis in the Caribbean, thousands of fish, manatees, insects and people are dying because of human TOXIC MANAGEMENT of the natural world, we have disrupted the biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus. That’s what we need to fight: our own blindness. And we must do this now. If there is one goal for humanity, it is to protect the natural world. This is what must drive us. Raise your ambition today, to become a hero for life on earth, a protector of the natural world. I don’t know about you, but this is definitely personal. We can no longer trust what we eat, drink, breathe, see, hear and on top of that, our oceans are flooded with billions of tons of plastic. No healthy oceans, no air to breathe, it’s as simple as that. Did you know plankton produces 1/2 the oxygen we breathe, and captures 1/3 of the excess carbon from the atmosphere? Again, we must be obsessed with plastic pollution, with climate change, and obsessed with redesigning our Homo Sapiens management of natural resources to a circular, regenerative model where the #1 overarching goal is always to protect the natural world. On today’s episode our guest is Linda Wang. Linda is the Maxine Spencer Nichols Professor in the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University. In 2011, a major producer of plastics asked her team to develop a method to recover polycarbonate from an electronic waste. They developed the first extraction method to recover high-purity polycarbonate and they also developed a new chromatography separation method to recover flame retardants from the waste. During this research project, however, she realized that the polycarbonate waste is only 1% of the total plastic waste, and the total amount of plastic waste has been growing exponentially over the past six decades. You can only recycle plastic so many times. What do you do next then? Linda and team have come up with a solution, using supercritical water to create fuel out of plastic waste. This episode, part 2 of our plastic series, is yet another example to show all of us that It is possible to change reality and tackle very objective problems. We just need to imagine a different role for ourselves, as managers of the natural world, roll up our sleeves, and get to work, since there’s a lot to do. Before we jump right in, and if you are enjoying our content, I would be so grateful if you went to iTunes or Apple Podcasts on your iPhone and gave us 5 stars and a great review, these help us grow and get this information to more people like you who are ready to support this global transformation, and share important knowledge and the stories of the heroes of our time.

Linda Wang: Turning Plastic into Fuel

On today’s episode our guest is Tony Rossi from Loop, Tony is the VP, Global Business Development for Loop (a TerraCycle company), a global platform that enables consumer product companies and retailers to shift from a disposable supply chain to a durable one, and to do that in partnership with some of the largest brands in the world, which are, it turns out, the ones that produce the most plastic, which many of us, if you’re buying toothbrushes, toothpaste shampoo and the like, are consuming. Coca cola, Unilever, Nestle, Pepsico, P&G, Danone, Colgate, and so on. This is awesome! And it’s important. Anthony has been with Loop for 18 months and TerraCycle for 7-years. Before leading the global business development team for Loop at their HQ in New Jersey, Anthony was the head of global business development for TerraCycle supporting the company’s growth in 21 markets around the world. Prior to joining TerraCycle, Anthony earned his business development stripes working in Toronto, Dijon, Budapest, and Vienna for some of the world’s largest professional service firms and financial institutions.

Tony Rossi: Loop

For nearly forty years, Alexandra has dedicated her life to restoring the balance between the people and wild salmon off the coast of British Columbia. When the salmon farms first appeared, they were told they would be good for them. Then the toxic algae blooms and sea lice developed, and the wild salmon die-off began. First the whales Alexandra was studying left, then the salmon populations crashed and then her community began to fade away. Today there are only 8 people left in the village and 27 Norwegian-owned salmon feedlots dot the area. Her website tells the story of an ongoing battle. It references science, activism, films like Salmon Confidential, and legal battles she has undertaken with the help of many to keep British Columbia alive and thriving. So here we stand up against biosimplification, for bio-diversity. That’s what life does, it evolves creating as much diversity as possible, to mute, adapt, refining itself into the best version it can. We tend to do to the environment what we do to ourselves. What we’ve done to vegetables and animals, we’ve done to ourselves: through reductive simplification of wild, dynamic, complex systems, we have gotten sick. It’s now time to heal.

017 - Alex Morton

MASTERS OF REGENERATION RADIO FEATURES THE STORIES OF THE GLOBAL HEROES OF OUR TIME WHO DARE TO RE-IMAGINE AND CREATE A NEW HUMAN RELATIONSHIP TO THE NATURAL WORLD. We embrace our responsibility as apex predators on Earth to promote and support biodiversity with our presence and consumption choices. To accompany people through this profound shift in which humans understand themselves as ecosystems and being part of biological information flows, and genetic memory. To change the narrative on being human on Earth and support the education of conscious consumers, the circular economy, and keeping life healthy on the planet. How do we achieve this? Not by criticizing existing models that no longer work for the planet and life as a whole, but by creating new models, new relationships with living systems that simply make the existing ones obsolete. "We are the land. The land is us" is not poetry. It’s biology.

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Masters of Regeneration Radio

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