A Vanishing Point

Joshua Rubin  0:08  

I remember Abraham took me and put me in a car and put a blindfold on me. And then drove me for hours. And I had this moment of realizing it was the first time since I was a child that I'd ever been asleep in a car not knowing where I was going. And letting go. And surrendering to the not knowing was really profound.

Joel Krieger  0:39  

What would it feel like to wake up immersed in a performance that was created just for you. One in which every single moment you encounter is crafted with an intimate understanding of who you are, and who you hope to become.

Pavani Yalla  0:57  

Odyssey Works creates performances for an audience of one. Each experience is custom-tailored to its participant and occurs not on a stage, but woven into the fabric of their daily life. The experience can last anywhere from a few days, to even a few months. And the results are transformative. Many of these people report to have changed jobs, relationships, or moved across the country. It's amazing how a single performance can alter the course of someone's entire life.

Suldano Abdiruhman  1:32  

I'm starting to see shifts in my work that I feel like directly are connected to it. One of them was quitting a job I had during the pandemic. And then I was thinking about what having a small business would look like, which turned into a real thing that I started with a close friend of mine, I think I felt this renewed sense of self. It was really like... it felt like a new beginning.

Joshua Rubin  2:04  

They had given me an ability to see the world in a new way. Anytime you can have these moments of brief awakenings, to the magic and synchronicity of the world, you're lucky. As a theatrical experience, it's hard to imagine anything like this comparable. Something that is being done and created for you. With you. It is bizarre and unique, and special.

Joel Krieger  2:56  

Welcome to Outside In. I'm Joel...

Pavani Yalla  2:59  

And I'm Pavani. Each episode we'll discover design in unexpected places.

Joel Krieger  3:04  

So these creators may not always call themselves designers, they actually go by many different labels. But they all have one thing in common. They create moments that have the power to change us.

Pavani Yalla  3:25  

In a world full of mass-produced objects and experiences that are designed for anyone, and everyone, Abe Burickson designs for someone. This episode explores a bespoke, more intimate flavor of experience design, where you throw out the need for something to scale to a mass audience, and instead, intentionally design for an audience of one, two, or even just a few.

Joel Krieger  3:53  

Abe and his partner Aiden have experimented with all these formats, from the one-person Odysseys that you just heard about at the very beginning of this episode, to a two-person online experience, called the Book of Separation. And finally to Abe's unique approach to designing custom homes, called the Long Architecture Project.

Pavani Yalla  4:15  

Joel and I recently experienced the Book of Separation. Although it's an online performance experienced while apart, we somehow were able to have a sensory, embodied experience that made us feel more connected than at any other moment during the pandemic.

Joel Krieger  4:31  

We start our conversation here with Abe describing the Book of Separation. And then we take a brief tour of some of his other work—exploring the transformative power of truly bespoke and participatory experience design. Enjoy!

Abraham Burickson  4:57  

The Book of Separation is a digital online experience for two people to have an experience of togetherness, while being incredibly, or not so incredibly, far apart. Obviously, it emerged from our separation during the pandemic, which is something that so many artists are thinking about. The Book of Separation was an experiment in trying to create a different kind of intimacy, a different kind of togetherness, utilizing our online systems that we're so dependent upon. Now, the essential way it works is you get a phone call, each of you, ideally, for people who haven't seen each other in person in a while, say you did Joel, and you Pavani, and you're interviewed about each other, you're asked, you know, kind of general speculative questions, and some more intimate questions. And this custom-built system called one thing takes all that information and custom designs, the other person's experience for them, that is a kind of collage of animations, audio tracks, and videos that take you on a journey, kind of around this fairy tale, fictional world, together. You bump into each other. From time to time you send each other postcards, you even talk to each other on the phone, the phone rings, and you talk to each other, all to create a kind of new way of going on a journey together. I was inspired by, I mean, it's just a small thing, but you know, I was inspired by this thing my wife did for me a long time ago, on my birthday, I think when we were first dating, and she just sent me... she just sent me a poem. Like it's just an email, it was some poem that somebody had written, I don't even remember what it was. She didn't write it. But she linked every word to a different online material. Maybe it was a YouTube video, or a song or a text or something like that. I mean, we've all done things like this, right. But there's something very unique about internet connectivity between people that happens with that. It's interesting, there's no other place where that really happens, sending somebody links. And I think when the internet first happened, people were super excited to kind of be doing that. Just like, you know, when I got my first cell phone, I was like, Oh My God, I can go to the most beautiful hilltop in San Francisco and have a conversation with somebody in a beautiful place? Right. And so we forget that, but I was thinking back on that and how that every mode of interaction and communication has its own quality of connectedness. Even think about letters, think about how intimate a letter is, even though it's really distant even though you don't have like, you don't have a face, you don't have a body. You have a different kind of intimacy than, say, an email or even like a voicemail, like there's something about it. And so the the medium of connection, the medium of relationality, changes what's possible, and we're in the middle of pandemic, and we're in the middle of everybody diving headfirst into zoom, and performances happening on Zoom, and all these things getting poured into what was essentially meant to be, you know, business conference room software, and trying to make it work, which is kind of awesome. Like, I love, I just love the way creative people break things and make them do new things. But zoom has this sort of limited potential. It's super torso focused, right? And it, it causes this very strange relationship to people via screen, and to looking and to a certain kind of self consciousness. And I had felt that we were trying to pour live performance into zoom into Internet connectivity. But maybe there was some emergent form of connection on the internet that we could find if we really got experimental. And so that was the experiment. And it took a year and a half.

Pavani Yalla  9:27  

Yeah, it was amazing. I mean, you mentioned the word medium. You are using paper and pen. You're using, like you said, the internet. You're using your phone. You're in your own home in your own room. Then you're directing us to do things physically with our body, to look in a certain direction, I mean, all of those things together, created the experience and I think that as a designer, I know that there is power in that but to actually experience it come together like that I think was very, very powerful.

Abraham Burickson  10:02  

Yeah. And you know, Pavani, there were so many iterations.

Pavani Yalla  10:08  

I'm sure. 

Abraham Burickson  10:09  

You know, in some of them, we had people like spinning around in the room. And, like one of the, one of the great challenges, I think, for digital experience is embodiment. And so we were thinking like about how, how the fact that people were alone in their rooms, and had some kind of power over that agency, could allow them to maybe be more embodied to engage their place more, you know, just the activity. You know, there's not much of a spoiler at the front. But you know, the activity of going and finding a book that reminds you of your friend, brings the materiality of your home, you're really interested in the weight of the book, there's something about holding the thing in your hand, and associating that with the other person both brings in this embodiment of like holding the book, but also makes this piece emergent from your home, and from whatever history you have with those books. And so I know a lot of times with digital experience, it's all here in the screen. And we're thinking, Well, why does it have to be, you know, certainly, it doesn't have to be like, there's the rest of your life. And there's all that randomness. And sometimes togetherness is the material culture of the space in which you live. So, yeah, it was an experiment. And in that as well,

Pavani Yalla  11:34  

I also appreciated how easy it was to follow the instructions. So for me, personally, and I was like, I told Joel, actually, I had called him on my drive home to get home in time to be able to do this experience in time. And he was like, gosh, I hope you get there in time. And I did, but all of that baggage of, I'm running late, and all the things that happened in the day I was bringing into the experience, but there was something about how it started and the instructions we received that totally helped me feel settled and feel excited, and feel, you know, embraced honestly, in that time. So you have to design for all the various contexts that people are bringing into the experience.

Abraham Burickson  12:20  

Yeah, there's a certain level of relaxation that you want a person to be able to have. And, and trust that that, like you said, is, is an embracing and I think it's taken me a long time to really learn that, you know, because I think a lot of people don't want to muddle muddy the waters with lots of instructions and reminders and things like that. But I found over time that it's okay. It's okay. It's worth being reminded. So you don't feel lost. You feel like you're in good hands. The other thing that you mentioned is so key and was one of the things that was sort of essential to this effort, which is the the way you had to drive home fast to meet Joel at the appointed hour. And digital experiences rarely are just more and more geared towards on-demand when you want it, which, which is great and convenient, and a lot of ways, but we have a different psychological approach to them like and when I say approach, I mean, the way we approach them is is different, it loses a certain kind of specialness, because it's not an event, right? Like I recall going to shows before pandemic a long time ago. And I would have great experiences at shows that weren't that good because I was sort of awoken and made attentive by getting there by showing up on time by knowing everybody else was getting there. At the same time that they were with me. There was an eventness to it. There was a bracket around that time that was powerful for my own attentiveness. And we wanted that here. And so you're excited. You made it like you made it home on time. Yeah, for the show. But you wouldn't have to do that for, you know, Stranger Things or something.

Pavani Yalla  14:22  

Right. I'm curious about the emotional arc of the experience and how intentional or designed that was.

Abraham Burickson  14:32  

Yes, I started less with an emotional arc than what might be called an experiential arc. It started with a bunch of diagrams like the conversations were all in diagrams at first. If this were an actual video conversation, I can show you the final diagram of the piece. What I was looking for was to be moving through the emotional and physical and narrative experiences of togetherness and aloneness. And the different emotional valences of those. And I won't give a spoiler, but like there are times in it, when you're sort of reminded of the great things about being alone and times when you're reminded of how annoying everybody is, and it's so great they're not with you and there are other times, you know, largely the sort of baseline idea is, you know, you're looking for togetherness, you're looking for each other. And so there was an arc to that. In the diagram, that began the whole thing, it was this sort of these kind of increasing loops of togetherness and separation, we sort of envisioned it like to, you might say, shoe laces that are sort of connected at the beginning and they get pulled apart, and then they get sort of wound together one point get pulled even further apart and break at one point and then come back together and get tied in a knot. And so the emotional arc of it could be sort of visualized that way. And then once I had done the, once I've done the diagram worked with my designer to make it look clear for everybody, we were able to use that arc, as kind of the guiding principle more so than the script itself. I use the arc to to do the script for the designer to design the images, the the composer, all those things, that's kind of the baseline.

Pavani Yalla  16:28  

So I'm smiling, because that totally worked. After Joel and I did the experience, we connected briefly. And I told him, there were two very, I'm just gonna try not to spoil it for others as well. But two very powerful moments in the whole experience for me. And one of them was very much where you feel the loss of separation and specifically with your friend, right? And then the other was, oh, it was surprising to me, like, oh, yeah, I kind of want to be alone. This isn't so bad. And I know you know exactly what I'm talking about. But those were the two most powerful moments and why I actually remember exactly what I was seeing on the screen when I experienced those feelings. So it totally worked on me and was probably what was most memorable about the whole experience is flip flopping between feeling alone in a good way and feeling alone  in a bad way.

Abraham Burickson  17:21  

I'm really glad to hear that, you know, one of the great challenges of the piece, and one of the things that we were trying to do, was to create enough of a story, a specific enough story that you felt like you were entering into the world, but a generic enough story that you felt you could overlay your own meanings onto it. And that was also iterative and a really interesting challenge, right? Because the idea was not that you come totally into my story, but that you and Joel together, create a new story with this framework.

Pavani Yalla  18:00  

Yeah, for sure. So I want to kind of switch gears a little bit. But it's, I think, all very related. You are most known for your Odysseys, right? The experiences that you've created for a single person or an audience of one. If you could briefly describe those experiences and how you know, what is the common thread between all of your work essentially and then how has it culminated in your most recent work?

Abraham Burickson  18:28  

So, Odysseys (which we started making 20 years ago, which is mind blowing) are day long, originally than weekend long and week long and month long performances for one person audiences. And they emerged from a kind of question about the ideal audience that my friend Matthew and I had been discussing for a long time. We're out in San Francisco, we're and we've gone down to Big Sur, we're going for a long walk on the beach, and we're talking about this problem. The ideal audience is just that one person who happens to get it. You write a poem, I was a poet and an architect, and he was a theater guy and a painter, you know, you do create your work, and you send it out into the world. And hopefully, there's that person who understands this, and it's perfect for them. And maybe you designed a building that was brilliant, but a lot of people thought it looked like a sewing machine, but you knew that embodied the truth of the world. And so you end up designing for that person, which is, you know, will hopefully show up we said why don't we just design for that person? What would happen? What would be the follow on effects? And so we did, we tried it, so Okay, let's just create the experience for one person and, and I will honestly say at the beginning, we had a kind of a notion that maybe sort of like that Michael Douglas movie, the game? Yeah, we thought, Oh, well, you can like perfectly craft, what they're gonna go through and you can understand you can totally understand them. And you can create this thing that is just like clockwork. And, you know, they have decision moments, but you can be like a Greek god and just kind of set send it down from on high. But I think what we discovered was that A) you can't 100% understand another person, and B) maybe it's more interesting to create something that is a dynamic relational thing about you, and that other person. Suddenly, we as artists weren't these kind of, I don't know, wizards behind the curtain, which is sort of how artists in the professional world tend to be treated, right? Maybe they're geniuses, but they're not in relationship with their audience in this kind of, you know, professionalized world like maybe they'll come out and take a bow after the show, or, you know, give a talk after the installation. But generally, if they're not in relationship, and it's kind of a funny thing, why not, you know, you sit around playing music with friends, you're in relationship, you paint a picture of someone you care about, that's in relationship, it's the way you see them. There's something about intimate, small and community based art making, that is inherently relational, that sort of emerges from relationality. And we found that when we got into doing things this way, the relationality was inevitable. And getting rid of the, the need for a mass audience, getting rid of the need for some kind of advertising that would appeal to everybody. So you get enough butts and seats or books sold or whatever, having 100% sold out shows because you only have one audience member. And always a satisfied audience in that sense, you put aside a lot of those kind of ways of being and you can really enter into relationship. And then what we found was, oh, well, then if this is relational, let's just expand the relationality of it. And we would bring on the person's friends and family and our own friends and family or the communities in a particular place or communities with a particular interest. And what we found was, instead of having hundreds of people coming to see a show, we would have hundreds of people connected to developing, creating, making the world of this piece at various different levels of commitment. And so we would make these experiences which were narrative, and aesthetic experiences that would enter into the life of our audience member, sometimes for months, maybe, you know, maybe it would start say with a children's book that our participant, that's what we call them, our participant's priest gave him a children's book for their four-year-old kid. And it was kind of a weird children's book, maybe it was about a secret room that the little girl in the children's book drew into her imagination by drawing on the sidewalk and opening the door and stepping in. It was a room where she could do any all these fun things that she wanted to do in private. And then maybe after this book had gone into bedtime circulation for a while the participant then got an invitation to his own secret room, you know, but of course, it wasn't a chalk-drawn door on the sidewalk. It was a 20,000 square foot shut down hardware store, downtown Brooklyn. And it goes in there. And there, of course, are all those things that he likes to play with, something to write on something to music to play books to read all the things that were in the children's book that have been planted months before that he'd been engaging with with his kid. Now he's engaging with it himself. His secret room and then maybe in the secret room, he reads a another story. There's a notebook. Somebody else has been living here. Every time he goes. He goes week after week after week. And every time he goes that notebook is there's a little bit more written in that notebook. And it's a story. It's a story of the person who's been there when he wasn't trying to hear the music of this incredible cellist again, and searching high and low and then maybe one day after he leaves his secret room. He sees me who he knows I'm the guy from Odyssey Works because he signed up with us. He knows who I am. But I'm that character, that character's really me but I'm also that character. And we go for a walk and we talk about music and he loves music. He's a musician. He's also a writer, but he's a musician. And we talk about having traveled to have powerful experiences of music and I tell him about how I was In, I was studying the architecture of this indigenous group in the Amazon and, and I went deep into the forests met this community. And they played this music on these stringed Western instruments. But the strings were out of tune, they were walking back and forth, and back and forth. And, and it obviously wasn't about the tuning of the music, it was about this experience, this drone, this being and if it's dark, there's like some candlelight or something I can't quite recall. But it was the eeriest experience of my life, it seemed to go on for months, or more, but it was probably only about half an hour. But it was an experience of having gone somewhere, and been totally about a musical moment. And then while we're having this conversation, we're in the car. And then we're at the airport. And then I open up the back of the car, and I have his suitcase and give him his suitcase. And I pull out of the top of his suitcase, his itinerary, his passport, and he looks at it and he sees he's on his way to Regina, Saskatchewan, and he goes on the plane. And on the plane, he's given by the flight attendant, something flight attendant thought he dropped, which is this weird score, which he can't make heads or tails of... some kind of postmodern musical score. And he's studying it as he's traveling. It's a long trip, it's like eight plus hours, something like that, to get even more probably to get to Saskatchewan, and then he gets there. And he doesn't know why he's there. And so border security is a little bit suspicious of him. And he gets into this whole long debate with them about whether it's okay for him not to know why he's there. And he says, I'm a writer, and they say, Sure, everybody's writer, he says, look it up on the internet, they say the internet is easily faked. Which is true. He says we could go down to a bookstore just got a book out. Finally they let him through. Did Odyssey Works plant that border agent? Do we have that kind of power? Did we make him define who he was in terms of his character in the world? Or was it just luck, and then he ends up at this hotel and he puts his stuff away and he comes outside and there's somebody waiting for him with a truck and he says let's go and they go and they go out of Regina, Saskatchewan, which is this kind of Emerald City sort of city, not that it's green and beautiful like that. But it has the there's like prairie on the outside and city on the inside. And they're right next to each other, which is not like the cities I know in America. And they go until the city fades into the distance. And when they when the city is gone, they stop at the edge of the field and they go for a walk through the field and he starts to see this weird structure, like a single room. It's a single room in a field. That's all it is. It's got a window on each wall. And he realizes he recognizes that window because there was a photo of that window in his secret room in Brooklyn. And he realizes Oh, the photo of that window. The picture on the wall was also an illustration in the children's book that months before he had been read and started reading to his daughter and gets closer and closer and hears the music. He hears the cello music which he realizes was on the CD player in his secret room already, and gets closer. And this is of course the cellist who's written about in the children's book. And then he goes inside and he sits there. And he sits there for two hours listening and watching her play this piece of music, which was composed for this moment. And this was two hours, this was two hours he spent there. But it was of course a month long experience to get to this particular moment, this particular relationship to this piece of music to this event, to go back to what we were talking about before to this event that was so built up to that he when he got there was so present later he said, he said I'll always have Canada, meaning he'll always have this moment. And this was a whole weekend just for this two hour experience. And they turned around, went back to the hotel, spent the night and flew home the next day, whole weekend just for that. That's the kind of thing that Odyssey Works does.

Pavani Yalla  29:24  

Beautiful. Thank you for that.

Joel Krieger  29:26  

Such a surreal gift. It's almost like you get to know these people so well. That the experience you craft for them has this innate transformational quality. I mean, people...how are people different on the other side of this experience?

Abraham Burickson  29:43  

Yeah, it's so interesting. You know, we have a kind of a point of faith. It's sort of simple maybe it's like an artist kind of creed and that's that powerful, artistic narrative. aesthetic experiences are transformative, that seems to hold true. People change their lives, almost universally, they move, they leave a relationship or start a relationship or fully commit to a relationship within the next within the following like three months quit a job. These major life changes tend to happen. I'll say that when an Odyssey was done for me, there were all these grandiose moments, you know, they were like I was conducting an orchestra of voices while blindfolded. And I had been listening to my favorite piece of music at the time was Gretzky's Third Symphony. And so I was just so in it, you know, I just been not, I just been you to just like non stop taking that piece of music in. And so then they knew that. And so all the musicians, everybody in the room sort of knew the piece of music and knew how to go to it. And they knew that I would, so I conducted them to play this piece of music live, they loved, I am not a conductor, I'm not even a musician. So that was it was kind of an amazing experience. But, the most powerful experience of that Odyssey, amongst other more spectacular things was when I was walking down Market Street in San Francisco. Alone, I had to go from point A to point B, simple transportation thing, go for a walk. And then out of one of these, you know, junky camera stores, came a friend of mine. What a surprise? And he just walked with me and didn't say anything. And then a few blocks later came another friend who walked with me and didn't say anything. And we kept going like that, till I got to point B. And it was all I really wanted, was to literally, and metaphorically walk with a friend, I didn't really realize that. I thought maybe I wanted to conduct a great orchestra of voices perform my favorite piece of music. But actually, what I wanted was that.

Pavani Yalla  32:13  

I'm imagining that there is a lot of research on the individual that goes into creating an odyssey in order for someone to know that that's what you needed, you didn't even know that you needed it, right? In order for them to make that happen. They need to really understand you. Can you talk about that process, that upfront research process just a bit? How do you get to know someone, so well?

Abraham Burickson  32:38  

It varies depending on honestly our budget and time. But at a minimum, it involves them filling out a questionnaire, that's about 15 pages long, it takes at a bare minimum, two and a half hours to fill it out. On average, somewhere in the six to seven hours range and not infrequently around 10 hours. So it's a huge commitment, then we do interviews with them, and as many of their friends and family as we can. And then we do things with them, maybe go to the sauna with them and have a conversation, spend time going for a walk in the woods together, finding out what it is to be together with them. And then we take the things that they've told us about themselves. Like, what music they listen to, and what's their favorite place, and what ideas are they interested in? We look at these things and then we try them out ourselves. We see how could we fall in love with this kind of music? What would it take? How might we learn to hate the subway in New York because it's so crowded and garbagey as she said she said it was garbagey... How can we hate the garbagey nature of the subway and love the symmetry of St. Patrick's Cathedral? And how much do we have to listen to this music until it's like familiar to us... second nature? What books do we have to read? We'd split up their reading lists so that everybody would read it. And if they're really into some particular idea like say sushi making, you know, we would go watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi and then kind of have long conversations getting into the idea of craft around sushi. The point being in a way to fall in love with the person and you know how when you fall in love with a person you start to see through their eyes? In part, you're motivated because you want to bring them something that like, right, you want to bring them happiness and joy. And in part because they've infected you, and they're opening their new world for you. And so that's what we try to do in order to enter into a kind of new subjectivity around them. And we have this marker, it's probably silly, but it's, it's also sort of, quite effective of when we're ready, which is, when one member of our team has dreamed about our participant, then we're ready, then they've entered them where at least then at least somebody has crossed the line into internalizing the other person.

Pavani Yalla  35:48  

Empathy is like the one word that comes to mind as you're talking, practicing empathy or to get to know this person and step inside their shoes. And I'm thinking about our day job, Joel, as designers in the corporate world, and how very little time we actually spend doing that. First off, because we're usually designing for mass audiences. And it's impossible to do it, we create these personas that are supposed to mean something. And it feels so freeing to be able to actually truly design for a single person.

Abraham Burickson  36:25  

Absolutely. Right. I mean, of course, we're an ideal case, right? I mean, it's somewhere, we're somewhere, what we're doing is somewhere down the line of kind of an imaginary thought experiment. And, and when, when I think about, I also am a designer. I'm an architectural designer. And I do think about the function of such a thing in the world. And I often come back to this book about sustainable design called Cradle to Cradle, maybe you know it, when I first read that, just piss me off. I don't remember all the details in the book. But I remember it was like, largely impossible, I was never going to enact any of these things, right. One of the things in the book was, you know, this book, you can put it in a hot bath, and wash all the letters off and then print a new book on it. I'm like, That's ridiculous. This is not something that will happen. Right? That is just some way down the line, idealistic thing. But that was many years ago. And I've come back to that book a lot. And the ideas of sustainability in that book quite a bit. I'm not enacting any of them. But it represents a kind of a vanishing points of an idea of a way of thinking, and this work with Odyssey works. Even for myself, you know, these performances, these one person performances, my hope, is that it will serve as a kind of a vanishing point for empathetic, experiential design. And that when you're at your day job saying, well, that's just impossible. Like, I'm just designing for a mass audience, that can be somewhere in your consciousness, and have some have a little bit of a gravitational pull. I've been thinking about this a lot over the years. Because I, for a long time, had a fairly standard architectural design practice. And it felt like I was going in two directions, you know, I was doing residential design and, you know, making things that were looked good and I thought functional, the way I'd been taught, but I also had this other practice, which suggested that we can think of any particular thing, not as the thing, but as a kind of nucleus for experience. And that that experience can be understood, you know, perhaps in the UX way of thinking about experience or like, Oh, you do something, it's you have certain feelings, your body moves in certain ways. You are likely to like it or not, and do things, right. There's that kind of various sort of small concentric circle, small circle around that experience of the moment of engagement with it. But there's also the kind of follow on effects of that object. What, what are the follow on effects of putting a tray for your shoes by the front door? Right? Not only are you going to put your shoes in it, maybe, but maybe you'll have a different attitude towards the home. Maybe you'll start to have a different relationship between inside and outside. Maybe your understanding of warmth will change, maybe your understanding of clothing will change. How will that affect the way you're thinking about other things in your life? Right? These follow on effects are fascinating. And when you design a home, which is what I usually do, when I'm doing architectural design, you're creating all these things that have so many follow on effects, we know that we're always going back to home as the seed of ways of being. But when you do a standard architectural design practice, you sort of like, okay, well, you know, there's a work triangle in the kitchen and things need to be near each other, you have these six rooms, and there's a living room, which has to look nice, you know, all these kind of standard things. But we're not thinking about these follow on effects. And so started thinking about how to look at this other work and Odyssey works as an influence on this. And this idea of of home, which I was creating homes,

and to say what would it be to stop making things when I'm doing architecture, and to start considering the not just the big picture of a person's life, but the effect of a community, like a family as a community, but also the community in which the building exists? The effect that this intervention in their life will have, and suddenly it dawned on me, oh, my God, we we have this enormous opportunity to make the building of a home or even the renovating of a home into the most intentional moment in a person's life. Right, if I wish to be a an environmentalist, that sort of low hanging fruit, right, I can, you know, design a truly green house. But okay, am I going to do that like a LEED way? Am I going to do you know, all these checklist things? And I've done it? Or can I think about how the house will encourage me to live in a different way? Not just how's it gonna have a smaller footprint? But how will the house for instance, how do I think about sizing closets? So I don't buy as much disposable stuff? How do I think about the the way the garden works? And then what, what do I need as a person? Or what does my client need to remember their connection to nature? Because that seems to be in our conversations that has seemed to be what drove them to want to be an environmentalist, this emotional feeling this, this sense, this this aesthetic connection to the qualities of nature? What would it be to bring that in? Do we have to for instance, instead of running the rain outside of the house and away from the house, maybe we want to run the rain into the house and have it so that there's a fountain in the middle of the house? That trickles whenever it's raining? So you're not? So yes, you're protected from getting wet? But you're not isolated from the sounds that made you love environmentalism in the first place? Or maybe it's something else, maybe you're somebody who wants to develop a different a new kind of community, how does that? How does that live in the house? And so I'm sort of trying to build these in and I realized what we needed to do was have a phase architectures like very structured into these phases, right? design phases, and what if we had a phase before that, where the architect and the client together slowly and intimately explored questions of their, of the clients future of the clients impact of their aims and life in the world and community and family and esthetics and use that as the kickoff moment. And once I started doing that, with with my clients, it started to seem absurd to me the way I used to work, which is, you know, you show up somebody's like, oh, I want to, you know, house with like, good views and the kitchen. I'm like, Okay, here's some options. You good. We'll do that. Right. And then let's get into the nitty gritty of like, picking tiles and stuff. Right and totally disconnected from who they want to be, who they want to be what impact they want to have. And you know, it it's so rare that we have an opportunity to do anything that is related to that tends to be this, this abstract thing, but you know, the building of a house, or even the renovating of a house is an unbelievably an unbelievable outlay of resources, both Financial material, and timewise that it seems such a shame that we miss that opportunity to do it together.

Pavani Yalla  45:13  

Absolutely. I'm living this right now. So we just recently moved into a home a couple months ago, it was a new build, we didn't really get to, it wasn't like a custom home or anything. But there are so many details that I would have done differently had, we gone through that type of a process, which is so rare, as you mentioned. But now, you know, accepting the architecture for what it is even like, where we place furniture, what we hang on our walls, you know, all of that I'm obsessing over it now because I know the impact that it can have on our lives. As I was researching a bit for this conversation, I was looking at your website, and I discovered the long architecture project, which is I think what you're starting to talk about now, I had a moment where it's like, oh, my gosh, this rings, so true. We have a spot in our new home. Now, upstairs, it's kind of a common area between all the bedrooms, it's kind of like a landing, all the bedrooms open up into that common area, we never had that sort of a space in our previous home. And just having that space has now created a ritual of us being together before bedtime with the kids, you know, reading to them playing with them. And then we we go to bed, this space, something about it has changed how we interact with each other in just the last couple of months. And I'm seeing the effects of it. So it totally hits home for me right now. And I wish we could have gone through that type of a process.

Abraham Burickson  46:43  

Right? Yes, I wish everybody could write like I would, I would love it. If this were if phase zero was just inherent in every design process, it wouldn't be that hard to have a process at the beginning that says, Okay, let's think about how this relates to your aims in life. And so much of that has is this kind of hangover from modernism, somebody some brilliant person, having those answers for you that you even see it in sustainability, which is also again, the low hanging fruit about trying to live a purposeful life, most architectural design, that tends towards sustainability tends towards a kind of checklist approach. That is somebody came up with best practices, and you buy them or you don't, right, it sort of comes on down, right? It's it's a passive approach. And so much of design sort of encourages our audience to be passive. But what if it didn't do that? What if the design process was something that encouraged them not only to be active, but the idea that the design could activate the the audience, the user in such a way that they move into a way of, of embodying or projecting into the world, their best values, I think, becomes a kind of a utopian thing, all the so many of the utopias of the 20th and 19th century, in an America that I know of, were based on somebody had an idea that other people kind of bought into. But I feel like there's a there's a, there's a an alternative utopia, which is one that empowers people, to, to go to the place of their most ethical urge, and become that and be empowered to do that. Just imagine it, just imagine if every design thing that you were engaging with, from, from graphics to house to car to, to, to human resources, which is a design, which is right, was done in some way in relationship to your best ethical aims. How would the world be different? Sounds like chaos? I know. But maybe it's a good chaos.

Joel Krieger  49:21  

Yeah, it's a it's interesting, because I think right now a lot of people put a lot of effort into the aesthetic choices that they make when they're, say decorating the house. And so that scene from if you remember the movie, Fight Club, wherever Norton is like, the catalog and everything I've chosen, that that represents me and who I am. So it's like this, this pivot from these these choices as being a static thing that somehow represents some aspect of your identity. And these more kinetic choices that propel you to be more of what you say you are or what you say you want to be. That's fascinating.

Abraham Burickson  49:54  

Yeah, I think, you know if we can start to build processes into design that begin from this kind of idea of experience. And allow people to feel empowered, will move in that direction naturally. I think the tools are there. I think the ideas are here. And growing. When I first did my first Odyssey nobody spoke about experience design. But now, the word immersive is everywhere. Yeah. And the idea of experience. How, however it's being interpreted, is all over I teach at Mica. And we've started these immersive experience classes there mica in the art school in Baltimore. And somebody in the administration was like, can we get this word immersive, just into the name of the department?

Joel Krieger  50:59  

Got to ride the hype curve. Right.

Abraham Burickson  51:00  

Right. And, you know, you see it but you know, on the one hand, things get thinned out in terms become, sort of, they lose their force. On the other hand, it still represents an interest, especially now, God, what a moment we've been through, or still going through, where we've been separated from each other where we're, we're hungering for experiences, or hungering for embodiment or hungering to re approach the normal world except we knew there were all these problems. So there's this, there's this inflection point. It's the perfect moment to be having this conversation, I think.

Joel Krieger  51:43  

Yeah, it's interesting, because the, the word immersive. In what I was hearing, you talk about before, you're really interested in the relationships between things. It's almost sounds like a been reading a little bit about systems design. And it's like seeing the relationships between things rather than the things themselves. And to me immersive. It just sounds like it's a very singular, enclosed thing. And what I love about what you're expressing about your work is, it's always in relation to something else. And I mean, I snagged this quote from maybe your website or an article, it's it said, or you said, Does your design make the world more or less fair, encourage greed or generosity, these are questions that tend to fall outside the design process. And so I just love that this idea of, you know, thinking about the experience, but thinking about this dynamic web of connections that unfurls from it. And, and considering that in the process as well, which, which I feel like is quite quite a different than where the whole immersive scene is going.

Abraham Burickson  52:50  

I mean, that's the power of an idea, right? Like just the word experience, when you drop it, when you sprinkle it on top, like a little bit of salt or something, you sprinkle it on top of, of this word immersive, which Yeah, has, you know, it seems to largely mean that you walk into a room and there's Van Gogh to the left of you Van Gogh to the right of you, Van Gogh above you, right, there's Van Gogh everywhere, you're just inside that go. It's aversive. You know, that's, yeah, you're inside a thing. But when you take it, when you take the word experience into the word, immersive, when you take the idea that we've been talking about experience in the moment experience in an ongoing way, you really get into it. You start thinking, okay, there is physical immersion. I'm in this bathtub, I'm literally immersed in water. There is my room, all of these things, but then there's also a kind of psychological immersion, right? Am I You're telling me a story, do I care or not? You know, I walk into, you know, guests are there, walk into the bag that we went there walking, which I've never been to none of them. But I've seen the pictures, I walk into Van Gogh, and, you know, I love Van Gogh's biography, I just read it, I just read Van Gogh's biography, and in fact, I went to Sam Raimi to where he was in the, in the asylum, and I walked around and I imagined what it was like and so I'm immersed psychologically, in this as well as being immersed physically but then there's like this further step right. The experience of immersion Am I ontologically? immersed? Am I spiritually immersed, is this connected to what is meaningful to me when when you go to Mecca and you're a believer, it is all of those things. It is on it is physically immersive, spiritually immersive. narratively, you're in a story, you walk a story. You know, the journey tonight is you're not just going to that Holy haram, the the, the the stone that you circling doing this whole thing, you're reenacting all these narratives from the Quran, when you go to the, to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, put this put your prayers in the cracks. The story is they go up to having the stories, this was the, this is the piece of the of the Holy Temple, the only piece left, right, you're in the story, you're, you're narratively immersed. You're in this old city of Jerusalem with its aesthetics and its tensions and its violence and its, and its history. And so you're physically immersed. But you're also ontologically immersed if you're, if you believe in it, and it's connected to everything you've longed for in your life. And so, you know, yeah. The immersive industry makes some really cool looking things. And that's great. But when we think about it, experientially, we really dig into it, what are the other ways that it can be immersive? And oh, by the way, you know, all of these religious and political practitioners from the millennia have been thinking about this too, for quite a long time and have done amazing things with it. And we should learn from them. This is like a renaissance of those ideas rather than a new idea. Hmm,

Pavani Yalla  56:18  

love it. This is Joel like so in line with what we used to nerd out about.

Joel Krieger  56:23  

Yeah, I never thought about this before when you said the, the political and what was the other one? The religious? Yeah, of course, like, of course, immersed in a story. And what's more immersive than that, when you read when you fully inhabit this worldview, it it changes the color of everything that you see in every experience you have is informed and, and the meaning is made through that. So yeah, I just, that's a great connection there for me, and considered,

Abraham Burickson  56:56  

I decided to become an architect when I was when I when I was in college, and I left college. And I went to study the whirling of the Whirling Dervishes in Turkey. And I went to Turkey, to do so. And I was young and everything was new and different. I've never been traveling alone before, you know, during that night, so I would go to the dervish lodge. And during the days, what was I doing, I was wandering the city like a tourist and I would walk into those mosques, those incredible mosques in Istanbul, they were just they were everywhere, you know, yeah, there's like the Blue Mosque and, and the is Sophia, those are incredible. But, but you, but you just go deep into the city, and you happen upon another incredible mosque, and maybe, you know, there's something a little less, you know, there's not tourists going in there. And I would go in, at that time, I, you know, I was practicing and I would go in and enter into the space and be changed by it. It's such an amazing thing. Believe it or not, there's something that changes you about being in a sacred structure dependent you know, if it's one of these grand structures, but there's this ritual of going in, you know, you have to wash before you go in, you have to take off your shoes, you have to like enter into a posture. You know, like, just like when you go into a Buddhist meditation, you have to bow and, and you have to have a certain kind of quiet and then you go into the mosque, and there's an orientation on Earth, right, it points you it points you towards where the sacred is, it says this way to Mecca, which is to say it this way to God. And so the Earth has a different understanding now and there's this geometry to these buildings, which is very simple but sort of structures and understanding the world of heaven above and you below and you in the world and you in relationship to these axes of the sacred and and I realized I was somebody else I had different potential. I had different thoughts in my mind, I had a different set of tensions and relaxations in my body. This had changed me and I realized after that I wanted to be an architect. But what I really wanted to be was an experienced designer who made architecture.

Pavani Yalla  59:22  

Yeah. That reminds me a lot. So my family's originally from India, and growing up, we would spend summers there. And the temples, the Hindu temples that I grew up visiting, would often have similar effects. Growing up, I would always want to challenge the things that I was told about religion. You know what, what you should believe you should do this because something bad will happen if you don't, right. I think we all grow up with that to some degree, regardless of what the religion is. And so to be told, God is in this temple, we have to go there, just thinking that I want to Go there, if you don't actually then go there something bad might happen, right? Like these were all of the stories that I would be told. But then to go and actually experience something there, despite rebelling internally against the thought of it was very powerful for me. So specifically, there's, there's a temple in Southern India, that is a top seven hills takes about four hours to hike up to get to the temple. And there is, of course, a route that you could take by car, but it's better to hike up because you are going to attain something different. And we would try to hike up every single time. And initially, it would feel like oh, my gosh, I can't believe I have to do this, I have to go up to see God in this temple. But then every time we would do it, I just came to appreciate it differently. And we would do it without the hike, sometimes when we were short on time, and it would totally change your experience of actually being in the temple. And once it was raining the whole way. And we took our art, we had to take our shoes off, because that's the best way to hike up, right. And it was a spiritual experience for me. And, of course, I was older at the time, so is able to appreciate notions of spirituality. But everything you're talking about, takes me back to those moments. And there are many temples that I visited, but the architecture of the temple, but also the rituals and the ceremonies involved in how you approach how you enter what you do thereafter, all of it had the ability to change me or transformed me, even if I wasn't 100% bought into the notion that God is here. Yeah.

Abraham Burickson  1:01:38  

Wow, that's such a, that's such a great story. And it really points to I think one of the one of the things that seems maybe obvious when you spend enough time looking at it, but is is the notion that we need to be prepared for an impression, you know, the difference between driving up, as you said, versus walking up, as he said, versus walking up barefoot is huge. The thing at the end is the same, but you are prepared in a wholly different way. And the effect is enormous. And I think, you know, a cynic might say, Oh, well, that's what made it feel sacred as you went through all this walking, and you got tired and and your feet are hurt. But I think a more generous understanding of that is that we have a lot that's in the way of our fully receiving something that's in front of us. We have habits, we have a sort of timescales of attentiveness, or dis are in attentiveness. We expect for instance, a movie to be, you know, an hour and a half to three hours at most. And after that we enter into a different mode of being because we've left this kind of expectation. We only have, you know, I think the museum people say on average, you look at a painting for like 22 seconds or something like that, you know, we only we only have a certain amount of time we feel comfortable standing in front of an image a painting will listen to a pop song for three minutes, but not for 40 minutes. And and and there's something that when we're in our ordinary habits, we have our ordinary defences up. It's very unlikely that you know, an image of a of a cross or, you know, or starve David or something's gonna throw anybody I know, into a religious reverie. And right just looking at it in passing. But there's something about that walk up the mountain preparing you for that moment, just like we prepared Rick, for months to get to that moment in the cube in Saskatchewan. Would it have been the same if she had been playing on a street corner in New York? That weird piece of music? Probably not? Is that because the music was worse? No, it was because the preparation was worse. And I think, how shall I put it? There's mind blowing aesthetic experiences all around us that we that we are in no condition to see. We walk in a world of extraordinary beauty. And most of the time we're caught in our complaints, our defenses, our tensions, all of these things. And so I think one of the main things that that an experienced designer can do is think not about the thing itself, not about like, oh, you know, the color red, you know, but think about what are the conditions within which this can be really received what you had a spirit To experience up in that temple and there, you know, there, there are plenty of religious people who say, you know, at the end, all the religious, all the religions are kind of the same thing. They're all pointing in the same direction. It's just the road that you walk to get there. This is a refrain I've, I've heard a number of times, and what if that's true and the real, the real structure of various different religious or spiritual practices is the structure of making it possible for us to see what they have to offer? That's the non cynical answer, right? The cynical answers like, oh, you chant a lot, you're gonna get high, and then you'll feel like you're around God, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, learning from that there's so much to offer for, you know, take those, take those learnings and bring them to something that you wouldn't expect, like human resources. What can human resources do to help employees think about whether they're making something meaningful, or help them make something meaningful? Or see the value in the others around them? Can we take this idea, obviously, to architecture, but also to education? And what is the proper tempo of education? Do we want to just throw information at people every week in the same pattern? Or do we want to spend all semester preparing for one idea? What do you take away from college? Do you remember? And what if college was oriented only towards those few takeaways? And we got rid of the extra stuff and really designed an experience of deeply engaging with an idea? Would that be still as valuable?

Joel Krieger  1:06:44  

It's totally different way of thinking about it, that's for sure.

Pavani Yalla  1:06:46  

I was just thinking how many places actually think this way, or how many people think this way, and how awesome if that impact could could reach different fields and have a farther reaching? Transformation?

Abraham Burickson  1:07:01  

You know, we just started a new school. And we're calling it wildly creative title, the experience design certificate program, it's a one year program, we have our first cohort starting in January, we spent quite some time thinking about what it would be to create a school, a program that did the things we're talking about, that brought designers from all over the field artists and designers from wildly different fields together, under the umbrella of this way of thinking, originally, it was going to be an MFA. And then we thought, maybe, maybe we want people to still be able to be in their lives, and making things and that could be actually not like a concession, but a an essential element of the program. And it's really exciting. I just want to tell people this because I think, you know, we have these people coming from lots of different countries, lots of different practices for this experiment. And taking these expertise says, and seeing if we can change the way that these practices happen across these fields on an ongoing basis, our first cohort is 15 people, then we'll do another one in a year. And I want everybody to go and check it out. Because I want all of your brilliant listeners to apply next year, when we have our next call for applications, anybody's inspired by this way of thinking and wants to transform how graphic design works wants to transform how education works, wants to transform how human resources works, how art making how immersive theater works, inside a community that we hope will continue and grow building a kind of an idea base and a knowledge base and a community base for this way of thinking. To, to sort of take over, right to kind of start at least some small utopian practices in places where you wouldn't imagine them possible.

Joel Krieger  1:09:12  

Is it remote, or you said people are coming together is part of this in person.

Abraham Burickson  1:09:16  

It's low residency, so they come together, and then they go apart. And then they come together and they go apart. And this is very intentionally designed. You know, it's sort of like your trip up the mountain poverty. You know, like, there's a lot of walking involved. Like that's not the sacred moment, right. There's a lot of online time involved, which is really intentional, it's building. And then there's these heightened moments, this event newness to it, and so we've designed this program, around some of the same structures of experience that we designed the some of our Odysseys like that trip into into the room in Saskatchewan for for the weekend. And so it's all we're bringing together these ideas of experience design towards the aim of facilitating people in bringing the ideas of experience design into other fields.

Pavani Yalla  1:10:10  

That's great. We'll have to check back in a year. I'm just so curious. Yeah, well, of course that to come on in, because I'm thinking about like, Are most of us who call ourselves experienced designers like have come through different avenues of formal education. And then most of the skills I think we picked up are not through formal education, it's, you know, on the job or just the life right. But to have a have a program that is very much geared towards something that is, I think, true experience design, not some of the stuff we see out there. It sounds so, so awesome.

Abraham Burickson  1:10:50  

Yeah, poverty. I mean, it's right. Like we are, I don't know about you, but like, I think back on my education, like, oh, but that moment was really experienced design. Oh, there was that thing that there. But really what they're talking about was this. It's such an emergent field that people haven't been talking about it directly. There's not a lot of books out there. I'm working on a new book, but it won't be out for like two years because of publishing takes a long time. But but there's not a lot of people addressing it directly. And you have to kind of like lift up the veil and look at you know, think about the art of gathering by Priya Parker. Oh, we love. Right? That's, I mean, that's an experience design books on a specific topic. But you know, then you can even go further back, you look at Mircea Eliade is the sacred and the profane. And he's talking about the art of experience design through these these notions of inventiveness and ordinariness, like the and how those two work together, sometimes we call it the liminal and every day, and how you can design for instance, you can take these ideas and use them to design say, a certificate program, right? Yeah, an educational program where there's the everyday where you build your use utility usage of the thing and the heightened transformative times where you integrate in a new way, and you change who you are. And the relationship between these you just, there's so many people think about them the idea of performativity and architecture, which has been around for decades, you know, not thinking about the piece of architecture as a thing, but as a facilitator of ways of living. Isn't that experience design? It's been there. So it's, it's not like the idea wasn't around. But so many of us had to say, Wait a second. Isn't this all connected? Yeah. And that's what we're doing in the program. We're saying, yes, it's all connected. If you've been thinking that way, if you're one of our wandering souls has been saying, wait a second. Come join us. That's where we're

Pavani Yalla  1:12:47  

at. Love that. I have one final question that just came up for me. You've talked about design, you also talk about art. And I know people often will juxtapose the two or compare the two, do you have a point of view on those two things?

Abraham Burickson  1:13:05  

I think it's really interesting. And it has been helpful for me to think about these things in terms of experience. The art that I love is art that moves me. I'm, in many ways, moved into a different way of being, it has an effect it like gets inside of me, and changes something. I was just reading. George hoppin, who's my favorite sort of lesser known poet. And I just read this one stanza from one poem. And by the end of that stanza,

I had a different way of seeing the world around me. I was so grateful to that. And then I think about design like architecture. And it, it can do the same thing, except it's a little less personal, perhaps.

It can change me it can change the way I see things, but it tends to interface with the functionality of life. The design practices tend to be more connected to the quotidian, more connected to, you know, where I take a shower and how to figure out how to get to the exit. And you know, how do you put this IKEA bed together? One thing just to zoom back is of course, on the other side of it is how do the people who are making these think about their process? The way we tend to be taught is an artist has some kind of concept or inspiration. designer has a process. And so the way we're taught is quite different. And so On the one hand, I think it's a really important distinction between art and design, in terms of where we're coming from culturally and practice wise, and on the other hand, I think we can start bleeding them together more. What happens if the graphic designer tries to come from a place of inspiration? What happens if the, if the poet tries to think a little bit more about, you know, what is the conditions of listening to this piece of work? Why is nobody coming to these poetry readings? Why is a poem that's hard to understand? So hard to listen to on a first read, but so powerful on the 34th? Read? Why is the number of readings not embedded in the design of the poem? If we can start bringing the ideas and the working methods of of the traditional artists and the traditional designer into the room with each other, then the idea of experience can be the link. And I think it's liberatory. I think the idea of experiences formally and personally and ethically liberatory.

Pavani Yalla  1:16:22  

What's been top of mind for you? Like? What are some of the things that you've gleaned from our conversation?

Joel Krieger  1:16:27  

It's made me think a lot about how we live in a world that is, it's a world full of mass produced objects, and experiences. And I think it's precisely because these things are designed for everyone, that they're actually designed for no one. So the question that's been spinning on my mind is, you know, what happens when we start designing for very specific people, when you're designing for a mass theoretical persona, everything you're doing is abstracted. And when you're designing for one specific person, somehow everything becomes very concrete and real. And you have to move into relationship with that person, the person you're designing for becomes an active agent and a integral part of this design process. Like, for example, their process for doing the Odysseys a aid talks about researching the person, they do things together with them, I thought that was wonderful, you know, it's like, okay, you're actually going to go with a real person, and experience together the things that they love and the things that they hate. And through that, you begin to see the world through their eyes. And I think he said something to the effect of they're, they're basically trying to fall in love with this person. And my favorite part about this whole process was that they actually had a signal for when they knew that they were ready for the performance when the team member dreamed about the participant, and that's when they knew that they were ready. And I just, that just gave me chills. Because it's, it's kind of being in touch with this. With this intuitive side of yourself as a designer, I mean, I, I feel like in the world of deadlines and deliverables, there's this forcing, there's this rush, everything's rushed. And so much about doing a good job has to be getting yourself ready to the point to where you can do a good job. So it's like all that work of priming, and getting ready. And, you know, preparing the ground and your mind making it fertile, so that you can actually see the dots to connect them. That's important work. And yet, maybe you actually can't make a wonderful thing until you do all that work, and being in tune with yourself enough to know when you're ready. I just thought that was a wonderful, a wonderful insight and something that I think everyone can incorporate in some way to their own personal process.

Pavani Yalla  1:19:13  

Yeah. So I think you're talking about priming your own mind through this intense research process, right, which I think is powerful. I think Abe is also in the same interview talking about the importance of priming or preparing your audience for the experience that they're about to have. He says, There are mind blowing experiences all around us that we are in no condition to see. We walk in a world of extraordinary beauty. One of the main things that an experienced designer can do is think not about the thing itself, but think about what are the conditions within which this can be really received. That like for me, I think nailed it in terms of what we should all be doing, everything that leads up to the experience, the context surrounding the experience, so that the person is in the right frame of mind, to have the most, you know, epic version of the thing or the experience. You know, I was a few weeks ago in Mexico, we went on vacation, it was our first time leaving the kids back with with my parents. Every morning, I had set my alarm to wake up in time to see the sunrise over the Gulf of Mexico. You know, at the very beginning of this interview talks about event newness, the state of mind, you're in when you're, you know, anticipating arriving in time for something, I mean, I was totally feeling that. And then, when I did arrive, you know, I was like, the only one on the beach. And it was, it was an epic sunrise, not because of where it was. But because of the conditions within which I was receiving that experience. I just remember thinking like, oh, my gosh, this is a momentous event, look at what's happening, the moment the sun comes up, look at the sky, and it's like, we have sunsets and sunrises every day. There's nothing more routine than that. And yet, we don't, you know, experience that in that way, every single day. And so for me, that's just a simple example of I think, what he's talking about, which is that the stuff exists around us. Experience Design is really I think, even more so about designing those conditions, so that you can

Joel Krieger  1:21:44  

Yeah, I love that bit. You and they've got into at the end about religion, because what you're talking about in that whole segment, just really helped me to see why these structures exist, why ceremonial rituals exist? It's because it's all the things that lead up to the thing. Part of what this has highlighted for me, too, is, you know, I've always had an aversion to this whole desire to scale. You know, that that that was always the question that was asked to me is, you know, like, here's a, here's a cool idea. Yes, but how does it scale? Well, maybe you think shouldn't scale. I mean, that's what's so beautiful about Abe's work is that has nothing to do with scale. There's no way to scale this. There's a way to replicate it in a decentralized way. But scale abstracts everything, and it, it makes it to where, yes, you can affect a greater quantity of people, but in a much less personal and powerful way. And I think that's why so much of our design world feels so dead. There's no soul in it. There's no spirit in any of that stuff that's designed. But when you're designing for one or two or a few people, it's about that, that relationship that you can't have. When you're a designer designing for an abstract theoretical audience, you don't actually have a relationship with them.

Pavani Yalla  1:23:16  

Yeah, you know, you were saying it's hard to scale, a bespoke experience like what they've done with the Odysseys. But if you think about the book of separation, on the spectrum of bespoke to something somewhat mass producing, it kind of like starts to tip in that, hey, this is something you can put out there and a mass audience could experience it still, you know, intimately with just another person. But it's basically a formula or an a set of assets that they put out there. So I think that's smart, where they're using technology to help create still a personalized experience for more mass audience. So there's something there where I think for those of us who are like, how could I possibly applied some of this to what I do, because I have to design for a mass audience. It's like, okay, maybe you can't go off and create one person experiences, but you can apply some of the principles to your process. And he says it in the interview, too. It's not, you know, sometimes it feels like what they do is so far fetched. And so you know, niche, but you can still apply that to other fields and other kind of common practices.

Joel Krieger  1:24:30  

A lot of tech is trying to do this in a scaled way. So you think about Spotify, your personalized playlist or whatever, and I don't know how I feel about all that. Okay, there's an algorithm. It's, it's learning things about what you do and what you like, and trying to make the experience more relevant to you. But it's not doing the same thing. It's not able to really listen through to see something that you don't tell it. And that to me is what so interesting about the Odyssey work stuff is, it was the moment where he was having an odyssey done for him. And he didn't even know that what he wanted was to walk with friends.

Pavani Yalla  1:25:18  

Well, same thing with the book of separation, right? Because you and I both were in it. And your experience was shaped by me. And my experience was shaped by you. It was still much more personal than an algorithm. Yeah,

Joel Krieger  1:25:31  

That's true. Right? Yeah, I think it has a lot to do with because the, the only thing that was exploring was a relationship, again, between two people. So yeah, it's almost like what made it adaptive and responsive and live was the fact that it was two people exploring a relationship that they already had with each other. Also, um, I just thought of ask great questions. And I think that, as a designer, that practice of asking questions, tends to get lost in the shuffle. But really, it's the most important thing you can be doing. Because it's a way to help you really think and see the situation in a way that you you might not otherwise. So questions like, what if we stopped making objects and start making experiences. So let's stop thinking in terms of things, and focus instead on the experience that those things enable. And that's a different way of looking at things. So we're not we're not designing a house, we're actually creating an experience that enables daily rituals that help you achieve the goals in your life, and help you move towards the person that you said you wanted to be. In the interview, I mentioned a quote from Fight Club and actually dug up that quote, just a reference here. So this is a moment when Edward Norton is talking about his Perfectly Decorated apartment. And he says, like everyone else, I have become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct. If I saw something clever, like the coffee table in the shape of Ian and Yang had to have it, I would flip through catalogs and wonder what kind of dining set defines me as a person. And just think about that for a minute. That is the way that most people go about decorating their house. It's like this esthetic collecting of things where you attach your identity to them. And so I'm just offering this as a counterpoint to what he was talking about choosing to place a thing in your home. Because of the experience, it enables. Like I love the example he mentioned of the shoe tray. It's a seemingly mundane thing that probably an traditional architect wouldn't think about. But it's placed there. And he placed it there, because it helps you remember to take your shoes off when entering, which has following effects, like making the home field more sacred, and clearly defining, outside versus inside and so on. So I just I just wanted to call this out, because I really think this is a new way of looking at things. But you almost have to train your eyes so that everywhere you look, you don't see the thing, you see the experience of the thing. And I feel like that takes that's gonna take some work to begin to see the world in that way. Abe is like our kind of people in that he is a cross pollinator. That's where I relate to him so much as he's all about breaking down these silos. I mean, even the way that he thinks about designing a house, he's totally obliterating these edges, this boundary of what it means and pulling in all these other disciplines and ways of thinking about things.

Pavani Yalla  1:28:57  

That's the end of this episode. But if you're curious to learn more about aid, his collaborators and Odyssey works, go ahead and check out Odyssey works.org. And special thanks to Suldano Abdiruhman and Joshua Rubin for helping us understand what participating in an Odyssey is really like. You can learn more about their experience, and everything else we've mentioned. In the show notes for this episode, just head on over to outside in podcast.org and click on this episode page.

Joel Krieger  1:29:27  

Finally, we offer this podcast free in the spirit of the gift. It takes a lot of effort to produce each episode. So if you find value in them, please take a minute right now. Head over to wherever you listen to your podcast and give us a rating and review. Until next time!

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Outside In is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. If you find it valuable, please consider subscribing, rating or reviewing.

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Find the Others

Midi  00:01

I really feel it in since I've found my tribe. This one is exactly where I want to be at this time in my life. I think there is something in the fact that we're waking up. We're all waking up together.

PJ  00:21

Some people, when they find this network, you're like, This is the thing. These are the people I've been looking for. And some of these people have been looking for this stuff for a long time.

Benji  00:33

I feel like it's the first taste of the type of community that I've always been looking for. Really hard to put into words, actually, you know, it's so much of my sensemaking it's so much of my emotional and spiritual support.

JP  00:54

As regenerators was an island of sanity. Absolutely an island of sanity in a sea of chaos. We've had the complete breakdown of our sense making apparatus in the world. So to come together with people in this context has really helped me shift my attention away from all of that to what matters.

Kath  01:25

I have never been part of an online community like this before. That connectedness Yeah, it's it's a bit of magic. It's hard to describe.

Benji  01:38

It makes me feel connected, relieved. Inspired, energized. Support. Yeah, held in some way. You know, feel like I can take some chances in my own life.

JP  01:59

It feels like safety. It feels like home. It feels like friendship.

Midi  02:06

It's my capacity to accept has expanded. My capacity to listen has expanded.

Joe Brewer  02:20

And I think my capacity to love has expanded.

Joel Krieger  02:37

Welcomed outside. I'm Joel,

Pavani Yalla  02:40

and I'm having each episode we'll discover design in unexpected places.

Joel Krieger  02:45

So these creators may not always call themselves designers. They actually go by many different labels. But they all have one thing in common. They create moments that have the power to change us. Welcome to part two of the earth regenerator story. In the last episode, we talked to Joe Brewer about his on the ground work regenerating degraded landscapes in Colombia. Today, we're going to explore the other side of the coin, the virtual community that has coalesced around his work. What began in the midst of the pandemic, as a virtual study group for the manuscript of Joe's new book has evolved into something much more profound. Somehow, this seemingly random assortment of people from all walks of life from all across the globe, has formed into this thriving, coherent, self organizing online community. Now at first blush, the sheer diversity of its members feels kind of random. But there is a common thread here. This is a community of people who have taken the proverbial red pill, they are fully awake, to the reality that most of us prefer not to think about. That is that the earth systems that make human civilization possible, are unraveling. We have overshot the carrying capacity of the Earth, we've exceeded four of the nine planetary boundaries, we are in the midst of a planetary scale ecosystem collapse. Now there's a phrase used to capture the state collapse aware, those two words evoke a very different way of being in the world. Because once you know, once you fully understand the gravity of the situation we are in, you will never be the same again. And it's very common that this realization is followed by a period of devastating grief, mourning for what has already been and what will be lost. So to be honest, This episode gets a bit personal. Because this was my lived experience as well. My depression lasted for the better part of four years. And no matter what I did, I couldn't quite pull myself out of that bottomless pit, until I found the cultural scaffolding of this community. Now, I want to be careful here not to paint the wrong picture. This isn't a support group for depression, the knowledge that brought these people together may be dire. But somehow, this heavy burden has catalyzed everyone here, into a life of purpose and meaningful collective action. This group is the embodiment of what it means to live a regenerative life. And it's a source of hope and support for those who choose to walk this path of regeneration. So to give you a better sense for what this community feels like, and what it means to its members, I spoke with several of the folks I've encountered along the way at Earth regenerators.

PJ  05:58

For a lot of people, it's the only time where they've been able to even find other people to talk about, enter, acknowledge each other in the fullness of what they know, to be true. Regarding the state of our planet, and the things to becoming, it's sort of like one of the only spaces out there that is collapse aware, and embodies it in a way that is healthy. We work through the grief, and we hold it and we go into it and then help each other and support each other in that

Benji  06:33

when you were willing to accept the depth of the problem and really embody that, then I think it opens up a whole new world of of inquiry. And, and so you're able to ask the right questions that

JP  06:50

I feel it as a rebuilding of trust. It's a we're reweaving. Like the the things that broke a long time ago, in our relations, we are reweaving them heart to heart in this community.

Benji  07:11

Yes, community regeneration, it starts with how we come together, it starts with understanding how we've evolved in a certain direction, that has really led us astray. We don't currently have the cultural scaffolding, and mentality to be deemed stewards of our landscapes,

Kath  07:33

we can only face the challenges we are facing at the moment, like civilization or Empire collapse, the dying of Mother Earth, we can only face all challenges when we truly connect as people. There's like, no healing off the planet. And no turning point of we are not able to look at ourselves and how we relate to one another. That is happening at Earth's regenerator.

JP  08:03

what's so beautiful about a lot of things that are happening is done. Despite any attempts at design, things are working out organically anyway. They just they just kind of emerge. Many of us are like, let's just surrender to this. Let's see what happens. And, and there's enough trust at this point that we can do that, which is amazing.

Midi  08:31

There is this sort of collective mind there is this Global Mind developing. So if one group learns how to be coherent, internally coherent, that is actually influencing the field.

JP  08:45

We are smarter together, we are wiser together, we are more insightful together with the collective wisdom is informing more than just the project that's in front of us.

Midi  08:57

What we've actually got is I think the the real makings of the thriving of the individual within the community, and therefore the community thrives because it's individuals are all deeply motivated to to follow their own stars, but they're within this collective role. I think that's one of the great things about the network that we're we're really all encouraged to live into our gifts and our experience when our skills than to share them.

PJ  09:32

Empowered participation, people actually feeling like they are empowered to contribute and to own what's going on. The the feeling that you get from that is very energizing, and it's very inspiring, and it's very, like, like it fills you with meaning.

JP  09:50

communities come and go. They have blooms, you know, they blossom and then they fade and they go away. And so what was What fascinates me is what makes a community continue, what makes it last, what makes it sustain. Here, we have all the ingredients of a long lasting community, not just because we have project, but because we actually care about each other.

Joel Krieger  10:26

So as you just heard, the experience of this collective has been transformative for so many people. Now, this is not random happenstance. The design of this community is intentional. In the conversation that follows, you're going to hear about things like decentralization, co creation, emergence, pro social, and permaculture. My hope is that, at the end of this episode, we'll have glimpse the edges of what it takes to design truly regenerative human cultures. Alright, so let's go ahead and get into it. We'll pick up right where we left off in our conversation with Joe Brewer. Maybe this is a good point to kind of talk about how technology is now influencing the way we evolve. Because there's a whole part of your work that we just talked about that's on the ground. There's another part equally as important, I would say that's via the internet. It's this online community. I'm just so curious. How did this come to be? And and how does this fit within the larger ambitions for your regenerative work?

Joe Brewer  11:41

There's a really nice phrase that one of my mentors uses. It's David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist and gotten to work with him on a number of occasions. And he has this phrase, he says, We must become wise managers of our own evolutionary process. So we're not only in an evolutionary process, we're aware of it. We're not only aware of it, we understand how it works. And not only do we understand how it works, we understand how we are creating the conditions for it. And then we choose the conditions for how the evolutionary process unfolds. And then we are intentionally designing the evolution. And this is really important because the root cause of our planetary predicament of human activities, destabilizing the Earth's climate and these other things that are happening is that in the human lineage, something happened, you could say a Pandora's box was opened, something that couldn't be closed again, which is going back a few million years and our ancestors, history goes back a long way. Our ancestors cultural capacities, began to have a cumulative evolutionary capacity, not just an effect a capacity. So just as how the anatomy of our bodies was altered, through an evolutionary process that created things like brains, that could have social capacities that could also evolve and change our anatomy. And so what's happened for millions of years, in the human lineage, I take it back about 3 million years, the cultural evolution, the evolution of the cultural part of the hominids that became homosapiens. So for example, the control and use of fire which creates the campfire, what happens is campfires, storytelling, why is their storytelling language? Why is their language, larger brain capacities? Why is there a larger brain capacities, smaller guts, why are their smaller guts, pre cooking of pre digesting of food by cooking? Why? Because there was fire, you see, the cultural practice of using fire can change the anatomy of the organism, and change the evolutionary pathway for the descendants. So what's really been incredible and beautiful about humans is that our biological evolution continues, but our cultural evolution has come to be orders of magnitude faster than our biological evolution. And so in the short to medium term, cultural evolution now dominates. So, our future biological inheritance will depend on whether or not we manage cultural evolution. Because cultural evolution could drive humans to extinction, or cultural evolution could enable humans to populate other planets. Its cultural evolution that will determine it, not our biology. A reductionistic sense, even though our biology is always part of it. And so a big part of my work has been to try to figure out a scientific way to design for social change. What did the best social sciences tell us about how change occurs in human cultures? And then how do we use that scientific knowledge to guide and manage change? For social change? This is the work I've been doing for the last 20 years, in one form or another. And so what we did with this online community, first of all, it formed around a book manuscript that I was writing that I chose to give away instead of publish. So what happened was, I wrote the first 16 chapters of a book, I felt it was too timely and important to wait for it to be published, which can be one to two years. And so instead, I just put out a call to my social media networks and said, Who would like to join a study group. Now remember what I said earlier about D financialized. Ng, I was able to do this because I didn't care about making money off of my knowledge, or off of book sales. Because at that point, I already had three years of being supported on Patreon, by people who just appreciate me because I give all of my knowledge away. And I was able to afford to live in Colombia on my Patreon support. So I could give everything away and not expect a financial return, which my ability to give away my knowledge became a commons, for this new community, so that I could create a pattern of a gift economy, because the gift economy as a community and not a market, which means we could keep the dynamics of market out long enough for a real community to grow. And this is what social media is terrible about. Social media is almost always deeply connected to markets. And we create a space where we can protect from the market by creating a community gift economy, which started out with people freely reading the manuscript of my book, freely attending webinars that I was giving, freely reading and participating in discussions of different kinds of material and starting to meet each other, which kala social and information comments. And those who really valued me gifted me support on Patreon, or on PayPal, but it was never a financial transaction. And there came a point in the process, where the work was primarily about what I was offering. And so a member of the community, Diego Gali, who was a community organizer from Italy, approached me and said, We should really create Decentralized Governance and community leadership. And I said, Yeah, I've been thinking about that, but I haven't gotten to it yet. That's really a good point. Let's do that. And we brought in a process called pro social. And we use the pro social process, to cultivate and train 45, what we call community regenerators. People who facilitate the continued evolution, people who manage the cultural evolution of the community, using pro social group processes,

Joel Krieger  18:17

I think there are two concepts we should unpack here. Before we get further one is the pro social methodology, and then decentralization. Could you speak to both those

Joe Brewer  18:27

I'll start with pro social, pro socialism, as a convergent body of knowledge and practice. People often think of it as a framework or an approach. But really, it's the way of understanding why any social group works. And then any method that supports the functioning of groups, is pro social. And it's built on three bodies of knowledge, all of the research about how evolution has given rise to cooperation for ants, for complexes of plants. For humans, it doesn't matter wherever cooperation has occurred, you know, multicellularity of your multicellular body is cooperation. How does cooperation occur? How does it evolve? The second is contextual behavioral science, which is a body of research and practice, about how to help people create change in their own behaviors, on the behaviors of groups. So organizational management, group therapy, individual therapy, and related things. And the third is Elinor Ostrom 's work on how to govern a common pooled asset, or how to manage any thing that's shared in common. So pro social is the knowledge from those three domains, the three domains of research and practice, about how to create healthy, effective social environments. And then there are tools and methods for doing so that's what presidential is, at least in a brief introduction, because it's it's beautifully rich and complex. decentralization is related to a phenomenon that's widely widely studied now, which is the study of emergence. And emergence is the capacity of a dynamic system to create new capacity, the capacity to create new capacity. Classic example is how water tension, which is an electromagnetic interaction between water molecules is an emergent property of liquid water. You cannot find it within the individual water molecules. But if you have enough water molecules together, they're in liquid forum, they self organize, and surface tension emerges. So emergence is the dynamic interactions of a system that has lots of parts. That gives rise to a capacity that cannot be reduced to the parts. Decentralization as an element of this because decentralization is the capacity of the system to guide its evolution in whatever form that occurs through local interactions. So just like how the water molecules have an electromagnetic interaction, and water attention arises, water tension has emergence, because there's decentralization of electromagnetic force. Every water molecule has the capacity to interact electromagnetically with other molecules. So each of them is empowered to interact locally. Decentralization is any capacity to interact locally, spread out across the system, specifically for human groups, now it means something else, something more decentralization. Decentralization is intelligence spread out across the social system, the capacity for local groups, or local interactions within a social context, to gather knowledge, to discern what's happening, to identify problems, to recruit solutions, to take action to solve them. So just like how platelets are moving around in your blood system, to attach themselves to ruptured tissue, they're decentralized and spread out through your whole body. And there's intelligence and what a platelet does, how it, how it directs itself out, sticks out begins to interact. Humans have all kinds of intelligence, that we can apply locally, through interactions with a system, if we have the Empowered capacity, or if we have the sovereignty, to take those actions. So decentralization is about cultivating this distributed intelligence across the social system.

Joel Krieger  22:51

And this is something that is is probably very different than what most people experience in their daily life, because most structures in the civilized world are centralized. And I mean, can you give us some examples of decentralized human structures,

Joe Brewer  23:11

I'll give some from the earth regenerators community that emerged around the book. So I have this book manuscript, the whole manuscript is freely available online. And there was a group of women and our three generators, who really thought the book was great for creating relationships, that each chapter had topics that as they read the chapter, they wanted to talk to other people. And when they did talk to other people, they grew their relationships. They just came to me and said, Joe, would would it be okay, if we just create a book club, with your, with your manuscript, every Monday afternoon, they would meet for an hour, they would read a chapter. And then they come together, it's been an hour, and they'll just talk about whatever came up from the chapter. And that was their facilitation of the book club. And it was decentralized, because I didn't have to manage them as the author of the book. They didn't need to ask anyone's permission. But during that same time, another group of people wanted to create a curriculum from all of the reading materials and the webinars that I was putting together around the book. So a group of people are gathering like, Joe, we're learning so much from the way you've done this. But there's so much more. And we all have different knowledge about how we can do that. We would like to design curriculum. So we created a section of the platform that we were using for a curriculum design, and people started talking. Some of those people were in the book club. And they said, you know, the way that we're learning in the book club is great pedagogy. This should inform how we design the curriculum. And people in the curriculum design group, you guys might enjoy joining the book club. It's a great group. And this is just an example of two places where there was emergent intelligence within the community. And each of them was empowered to guide their own evolution, including to synergize, between the two, when I felt appropriate, and there was no top down gatekeeper or authority to tell them, they could or couldn't do it.

Joel Krieger  25:12

The community is thriving. I mean, I've been a part of it for gosh, I don't know, maybe six months at this point, there are so many types of things happening, initiated by so many different types of people. And you can just see it building on itself, the momentum is there. And you know, I have to step back and say, is something like this even possible, if the founder were to require control, or ownership over how it unfolds, and it's not just, you just don't see that very often, at least, I haven't seen it in, in most of my encounters with human groups,

Joe Brewer  25:49

I want to step back and make an observation first, and then start to talk about this topic. What I found over and over again, is, most people who might do design, whether they're professionally designed or not, do not have a supportive environment, to design holistically. And so the absence of context is why regenerative design does not occur. So the design of this community was about creating contexts for co creation, which is contexts where everyone can be a designer, and they can design toward whatever they care most about. So there are very important considerations for social norms, very important considerations for models of leadership, very important considerations for economic patterns, economic processes, like one thing I had to be very careful of was that I was never potentially competing for funds with anyone else in the community. If money is raised in the community, it goes to the community and it never comes to me. And it cannot come to me, or it will destroy this principle. So I have to be very, in a sense, altruistic, I have to give away my knowledge, not be paid volunteer my time and role model, that kind of leadership, or else we cannot create this kind of community, which means I have to be privileged and empowered and supported to freely do that. So you see that there are elements of this that were years in the making, to make it possible for me to facilitate the emergence of this community. And one of my goals with the first cohort that we did the pro social process with, with was I said, I want to kill the mythical leader. And everyone is like, Joe, no, we don't want you to go away. We need you. But no, no, you don't understand. What I mean is, if you see the Buddha on the path, kill the Buddha, this is a same by Buddha, which is the idea that there is a centralized leader is not true. What is true is that there is any emergent wave of leadership, empowered through the way I role model leadership, the primary thing is, I am empowering others to be leaders. And that's why I look like a good leader is the the felt sense of the community is I see Joe, and there's all this stuff going on Joe did it. That's the mythical leader. Because that's not actually what's happening. What's happening is we're having a lot of small group conversations with a lot of creative leadership moment to moment. Like, in one moment, someone steps in and says, We need to talk about this. And I'm like, great idea. And everyone else was talking about it. That person during that time, was the leader. And the leadership is so ephemeral and so emergent. And so moment to moment, that all you can see is the stereotyped narrative of the guru, which is the mythical leader. And so I had to actively kill them ethical leader. And so there were a lot of moments like this where my understanding of cultural evolution and cognitive science, I knew what I needed to do as a designer, because I was designing the context in which design could occur. And I had that power as a leader, because I was setting norms as the initial leader and then amplifying it and the cultivation of the first and second waves of laters.

Joel Krieger  29:33

Yeah, there's this really beautiful symmetry, I think, to the design, the on the ground work, and this online community here because when you described listening to the land, kind of observing, it's kind of this real time instead of having a preconceived notion about a thing you want to make, being in relationship to the system, paying attention, and giving it nudges giving it support where it's needed as it evolved. It's It sounds like very much the same process for this online community. I'm curious, you started out with some, some principles like decentralization and the processional methodology. But how much of this in your mind was? Well, I think I think I know what we need to build versus this act of dance as it unfolds on its own.

Joe Brewer  30:21

Because of of a very diverse experience. And so I've worked in a lot of different contexts. And I've seen how organizations don't work. And I've done a lot of crowdsourcing and crowd funding and community work with online activist communities. And so I have a pretty good understanding of where organizational structure kills community, because I have a lot of experience of it not working. So one of the things I needed to do was plant cultural seeds for the future the same way I plant seeds for a tree. And this goes back to one of the great historic controversies of Western philosophy, which is teleology. For those who don't know, teleology is purposefulness is end directedness directly toward an end. Aristotle was the first person to articulate this in a way that was recorded when he said the acorn wants to become an oak tree. That's teleological thinking. The teleology or the purpose of the acorn is to become an oak tree. This has been very, very controversial in the history of Western philosophy, what I found in human culture because of our semantics, because we live as stories, and we live in the stories, that if I understand the narrative logic of a story, I can begin the story and I know where the story can or cannot go. So if I begin a story of decentralization, it cannot go to a place of a despotic leader, the community will rebel and destroy the community well before that could ever happen. And so the story is logic pulls things forward. And so one way that I was able to create these contexts was that I studied cognitive linguistics. And I understand how minds make meaning. And I understand how minds make stories. And I've read narrative psychology, research and other fields to help me do this. So as a designer, I brought all of that knowledge about narratives. And I would create a context where people could feel themselves entering a narrative that they would then create. And it's because the self select activity of the narrative is what causes people to participate in the first place. And there was a point about a year and a half into this when I did a Google search for the phrase, Earth regenerator Earth regeneration, regenerate the earth. And I was sort of surprised like, a lot of people talk about regeneration, why am I the only human on Earth talking about this? The reason I think, I have a hypothesis is that there's so much trauma and grief that people have about ecological crisis, that they have not processed their grief enough to be able to believe the Earth can be regenerated. So they don't think about it. It is not even possible for them to conceive that humans could regenerate the earth, when they can't yet believe that humans can destroy the Earth. Like I see how how bad humans are, they can't accept our power, and see the beauty of cultural power as potentially beautiful. They see its destructive power. And when I realized that the function of this narrative is to create enough cultural healing, that people can believe the Earth can be regenerated, so that they become a regenerator of the earth. And so just by naming it Earth regenerators it already selects away anyone who's not open to the idea that people can regenerate the earth. I strategically framed the community around the idea that humans can be Earth regenerators from day one, that was December 29 2019. When I created the study group, I called it are three generators. And this is really key because the power of a story is, if you fall asleep when the story is not done, you'll keep making it in your dreams that night. I mean, we know that some great stories, stories are so great, because they capture us and we become servants to them. And we fall in love with them. We're servants to them the way we be servants to to a lover when we really really love them. We want to care for them and nurture them and cultivate them. And we can be lovers to a story. And this, I think, has been the subtle part of all this because when someone steps forward and says, Joe, we need this to be more decentralized. Why? Because the story demands it. And the story would end, if Joe was an egotistical leader would end, it would crush the dream of that story. And so every step of the way, I have to support the control and power of the story that I don't have. I don't have that power or control. I never had it. I'm a humble servant of the story. The story requires it. There's a congruence between story and experience. And this is what user centered design and usability design are all about. There's not congruence between the story and the experience, it's broken. So I had to create the Embodied Reality of the story with people moment to moment for the story to exist. And now that's happened in the bodies of enough people, that it's almost at the place that can continue without me. And when that happens, when it no longer needs me, I will have killed the medical leader.

Joel Krieger  36:18

Yeah, it's, it just strikes me how important philosophy is, in all of this. It's active. It's not just these these ideas that float around, I mean, there's a kind of underpins all the actions that are that are taken as this community unfolds, I want to give people a better sense of everything that's happening here, because I don't use this word lightly. It really is a thriving community, could you just kind of describe the landscape of the different types of things that people are doing here.

Joe Brewer  36:45

So on the earth regenerators platform, the book clubs still exists, but now they watch movies together and do other things, but they gather around some piece of content, and they discuss it. And that's still continuing. There is another activity that's been really powerful called campfire talks, which is inspired by the Aboriginal practice of yarning, which is sitting around a fire and talking in a way that weaves human beings together. So there's a particular set of design heuristics for how to manage a campfire talk, they don't have an agenda, there's a sharing of time for how much people contribute. And there's an openness to non judgmental co creation of the story. So the campfire talks are happening. We run learning journeys, where, for two months, we form a cohort of people and spend two months taking them through a pro social process. So at the end of two months, they love each other literally, they say, they fall in love with each other. I'm not making that word up. That's what the members say about their participation. They love each other so much, they can't stop. And they find ways to continue interacting with each other after the learning journey is over. And we found that as a design practice, two months forms the cohort, then the cohort dissipates and the relationships continue. And then we give people other ways to stay engaged. Our first learning journey led to the birth of the regenerative project incubator, which holds weekly advisory circles, where anyone can propose a project and go and have a group of very smart people with diverse backgrounds, critique and support, and help them to improve their projects or even join it. And so we have the regenerative project incubator, we have teachings by experts on different subjects like right now, there's Charles up to him who is an amazing landscape restoration expert working with water retention. And about two hours, they're doing a session on, on how to return water to arid landscapes. So teach ends on really strong content, and no one is being paid. By the way, every bit of this is gift economy. There's also design sessions to explore common challenges between projects that occur on a regular basis. And we also have work groups that have formed around crowdfunding, we created the Bari Chara regeneration fund, and are enabling territorial design of regeneration in Colombia, with money that was raised and with volunteers that have come from the global network. So people physically come to bar HR and work with me. But even more powerful than that, there's an increasing number of photos of people from the earth regenerators community standing with their arms over each other's shoulders, because they're looking for and finding each other and hanging out physically. Which to me is like, one of the best measures that we have a real online community is they have to meet in person. I'm waiting for the first marriage from two people who start dating and waiting for now that'll be a little while. And then also, we have because of the project incubator. people's projects are becoming woven into the community and individual people who have been through learning journeys before and have cultivated leadership are now on pathways of personal transformation. They're sharing regular updates with the community, and then creating pro social processes for other members of the community to join them. And so these are just examples of organized activities, ongoing social events, personal life transformations, and everything is weaving. I use the metaphor and one of our community calls the other day, that we're like the way that you roll the dough to make bread, you flatten it and fold it back into itself. We spread out and refold and spread out and refold our community activities continuously. And that's why it is a vibrant community. The vibrancy and the creativity, and the felt sense of engagement is truly invigorating. Because it's real community.

Joel Krieger  40:53

I'm just reflecting on my own experience of encountering it. And everyone here shared a basic worldview, that people in my physical proximity do not. And I think that's one of the beautiful things about the internet is only because that's here, I can't describe it. But it is it is like a very quick hop, skip and a jump to becoming very tight friends with a lot of these folks. And I think so much of it has to do with a shared worldview. And the shared philosophy that even if they can't articulate it, there's this alignment there. And

Joe Brewer  41:30

then there's the additional pieces. When you people, when you bring people without affinity together, they enjoy being around each other. And they start to have fun. We've had conversations about planetary collapse, and people still have fun and moments. Because they feel so good, to be supported and to be able to support people like themselves.

Joel Krieger  41:54

Most people are familiar with a nonprofit and what it means to be a volunteer. And I don't think this is the same thing. Can you help us understand what's going on here? How does the gift economy work? Why is everyone feel so invested in wanting to contribute in this way,

Joe Brewer  42:12

one of the aspects of Commons that I mentioned in the pro social framework is that managing the Commons is part of that framework. One aspect of a commons is that the members of the group that manage the comments, need to have sovereignty, set another way that jurisdiction, the limits of who makes decisions and how they're made, needs to be the same as the membership of the group. If you're ever in a group, or someone else makes the decision that affects you, you do not have that jurisdiction, and you do not have that sovereignty. So to manage a commons, those managing it must have sovereignty. And anytime there's a nonprofit organization, there is a separation of management from volunteers, and management makes the decisions. And that is the fundamental structural difference. There are other things too. But one thing I learned about creating a comment or creating a gift economy is you have to create a commons first, which is why I was careful to say that I was able to give away everything in Earth regenerators because I was supported on Patreon. I was the commons. And by being a commons, my relationships with people could be an act of as David Bollier says, We were commenting just the verb, we were living as though we were a shared Commons. And by doing that we were in a gift economy. And a lot of people don't realize that the commons allows gift economies to occur. And markets privatize and destroy and extract profit from Commons. This is another way that markets and communities are at odds with each other. So you have to create a non market, a post market, a pre marketing something other than market built as a commons. And then people have to have sovereignty to make decisions. And as they do that, they start to feel empowered, and they amplify the spaces of creativity, because they actually have creative influence. And as a creative person, I'm sure you know this that it's frustrating as hell, to not be able to run with your ideas. But what's even more frustrating is to have ideas that you're running with, but you're alone. So the best is when you're creatively playing with someone else, like think of jazz musicians, after you've mastered technique to just get to riff with someone is the funnest thing ever. It's like making love. It's so awesome. And so people who are in a co creative empowerment, not an individualistic empowerment, a co creative empowerment, find the joy in writhing together. Which is why this is more improvisational like jazz. And I'm like surfing and there are a lot of improvisational metaphors we can use that would apply here. because they will be correct, that the co creation was deeply joyful. And you feel you feel an intimacy with someone when you're creative together. It's beautiful. You feel loved and accepted and seen and validated and how, and you're able to give to something and to someone you love and all these things increase our humanism make us feel good. So yeah, that vibrancy is as a natural outcome of cultural regeneration.

Joel Krieger  45:29

The mainstream mainstream culture really celebrates the idea of the individual genius. I mean, you see it everywhere. It's so entrenched in our way of thinking. But what you're describing here, and what I've witnessed is collective intelligence, which is something that I really believe is real, it's a real thing. I've seen it happen. Most people who work in creative disciplines where you have to collaborate with other people to do your work, you have seen it, you have felt it. Some people describe it as flow state, it is magic, and that that's happening here. Can you talk a bit about collective intelligence and what this means what's the bigger significance here for this community

Joe Brewer  46:13

will give the biggest significance first, which is the planetary level significance. There's a hypothesis put forth by James Lovelock called the Gaia hypothesis. And he named it after a goddess intentionally, which is he observed that living systems, because they're regenerative, they try to reproduce the conditions of being alive, he hypothesized that the entire planet does it. It's sometimes called the Goldilocks phenomenon, you know, not too hot, not too cold, not too acidic, not too basic, that as soon as there was life on Earth, there's continuously been live for more than three and a half billion years. So the hypothesis was that the biosphere of the earth maintains conditions conducive to life for the entire planet. And there's now very solid evidence that this is in fact, the case. And scientists who don't like you know, god and goddess language, called the Gaia hypothesis, the more technical name of Earth System science, but it's been very verified scientifically as true. So collective intelligence for humans, in the context of Gaia hypothesis, so we have a planet that maintains a temperature. So there can be all three states of water at the surface, liquid solid and gas, which is necessary for maintaining the biospheres integrity, it never gets too hot or too cold for all three states of matter to exist somewhere on the surface of the earth. That's an example of this Goldilocks phenomenon. Wow, within that, three and a half billion years of life on Earth, arose a particular kind of primate that has a social capacity for collective intelligence. So when we put satellites up in space, and put sensor networks on rivers, and we have all this intelligence capacity, to process information and create intelligence, we actually can be a collective intelligence for the entire planet. And we can help the planet to maintain this Goldilocks homeostasis, this balanced place, which can allow for complex human societies to exist. And so the real power of collective intelligence is that the evolution of the cosmos gave rise to a planet that could have life. And the evolution of life on that planet gave rise to a species, an organism within the planet that is capable of consciously participating in and CO creating with the self regulation of the planet. And this is why humans can regenerate the earth is that if we can get into this flow state and a small group of people and do something like design a website, then we could do the same thing for a river. We could do the same thing for a coastal estuary. We can still do this for floodplains. We can do this for landscapes. And there's actually a lot of evidence that people have. So this practice of being in these pro social groups is the practice of being collective intelligence, so that we can form the nested levels of collective intelligence all the way up to the planetary scale. And we do it by starting small and local, around a worldview alignment for people using a digital platform, like Earth regenerators, who increasingly organize themselves physically in space, around structures of their landscapes like reversions or watersheds. And as they do that they become collective intelligence of those landscapes. Notice the word of implies that it's part of. You don't do regenerative design on the watershed, you are the watershed managing itself. And this is the capacity of our collective intelligence. It is an evolutionary, the technical term is evolutionary transition. It's a new capacity that evolution created. There's also this beautiful phrase, the evolution of Evolve ability. Evolve, ability is whatever capacity a system has to evolve. Evolution of evolvability is that the evolvability can change. Well, now that we have conscious human cultural evolution, we have the ability to intentionally manage cultural evolution, which is collective intelligence, we have that capacity. So now the planet can guide its own evolution with her humans, if the humans don't go extinct. And so this collective intelligence topic is really interesting, because it reveals the gift that the Earth gives herself, by keeping us from going extinct. It's not the arrogance of human superiority. It's the humility of being the gift, and acting in service to what that the responsibility means. We can be collective intelligence. And therefore, when millions of non human species might go extinct because of collective stupidity, we have to learn collective intelligence. And we have to practice it with excellence.

Joel Krieger  51:44

Well said, this has been wonderful, Joe, I feel like that's a great place to leave it. Is there anything else you want to share with the listeners about your projects or how they can support or just anything else you want us to know?

Joe Brewer  51:59

I just want to say that the biggest absence in my life before this community emerged was that I didn't have a space to co create with others. So if anyone out there feels like, you don't have that supportive social environment, you can join us to learn how to create it, or find some other way. But please, for the sake of the future of humanity, I'm not being melodramatic here. For the sake of the future of our species, find or create it. Because Gaia is calling us, and we have work to do.

Pavani Yalla  52:55

I absolutely loved this episode. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, both episodes, but something about this one, it just song, you know, I was listening at the end of it, I was like, No, don't add, there's more, there has to be more. So it was really good, good job. I really loved that we unpacked this other aspect of Joe's work, which is very important. It was really clear that there are parallels between both the work he's doing and you said this, to him, the work he's doing in the field, as well as the work that is being done within the online community. It is. He's again, creating the context, getting things started, and then allowing it to emerge. He's starting the story, and then he's pulling back because that story kind of unfolds on its own. And the folks that are invited to participate or that choose to self select, in that story, generate the story themselves. And what's powerful about that is that when you let folks have autonomy or agency over something, they in turn feel empowered, and therefore, invested in the work and in each other.

Joel Krieger  54:16

I'm glad you liked this one. Yeah, it's it was you know, it's interesting how when we started out this podcast, our intention was to go experience the things ourselves as much as possible. But that turned out to be totally unrealistic with the pandemic and everything. But this is one that actually I've spent a lot of time in, maybe the best way to get after it is to just talk about the felt experience of being in it. And to compare contrast that with other common group organization models that people will have experienced, like, like a company. You know, the first one is age diversity, and this one's so so fascinating, because if you think about our experience, from the minute we're little kids, they silo us off, and you're only with people your age. And that's how it is all growing up. And then you get into the workplace and you only hang out with people that are your age. I mean, what does that do to us? Well, this community, one of the most striking things about it is, there are people here in their early 20s, all the way up to their 60s 70s, and even 80s. I mean, and there is something about having the wisdom of the elders with a spark of youth, that is just magic. And you don't see that anywhere.

Pavani Yalla  55:43

You know, that reminds me of extended families. And again, this is a practice that is slowly waning. But when I think back to my family in India, there are many intergenerational families that live together, you have grandparents, and grandchildren, coexisting, and quote, you know, just living life together long term. And I, I didn't get to experience that, but I got to see glimpses of it whenever we would visit. And I would have to imagine that that would tremendously change your experience of life. And what you can do. As a result,

Joel Krieger  56:21

it changes the entire group dynamic for the better. My experience is, this has a lot to do with the health of the community. The other big thing is hierarchy. So most people, what you've experienced, is hierarchical organizations that work off of a command control base model. Someone once told me, the reason why this is so pervasive in corporate culture is that after World War Two, all of the people that were in the war, then flooded the civilian population and went to work for companies, and basically just took that hierarchical control type practice into the business world, which is fascinating. It makes a lot of sense. Of course, of course, it's why that it's that way. But is that the right way to go about managing creative human endeavors? I mean, it feels gross to me now to be in the organization once you've tasted something else. That type of hierarchical control type environment just feels toxic. But that's what most people day in, day out exist in, in the default world. And this is actually part of what gives me a lot of hope. What we're describing here is a decentralized self organizing system. There's not really any hierarchy, Joe talked about it himself killing the fictitious leader. This is why organisms like anonymous, you know, the hacker group, they're so hard to pin down because there's, there's no leader what is where does it exist? How does it decide the intelligence is distributed through every person that's a member of it? I honestly believe that hierarchical control based systems cannot compete with decentralized self organizing systems. It's an it's an exponential level of intelligence above. A lot of it is about control versus letting go. Alan Watts has this concept called Huawei talks about Huawei, which is the art of not forcing, just letting things happen. Just noticing and kind of nudging and letting things emerge. And I think so much of a hierarchical governance model for groups is about force is about making things happen. And this is about creating the conditions for the right thing to emerge.

Pavani Yalla  58:51

Yeah. I mean, I think that's how we've gotten ourselves into this pickle to start, right. Yeah, control

Joel Krieger  58:58

control. Also, like motivations are really interesting. So when you think about people in a group, everyone's going to have personal interests. But there's also a collective interest at the group level. And how do you integrate those two? What one of the ways that this is done is there's a methodology that Joe talked a little bit about called pro social, which I'm actually taking a course in right now. It's, it's pretty fascinating. It's based off the work of Elinor Ostrom. I think she was a Nobel Prize winner. And it's all about the cognitive science, the behavioral psychology, whatever you want to call it around highly functioning groups, healthy groups, what are the conditions that make it possible for that to happen? So there is a real methodology being applied here, and it's working. It also begins to hint at something that we touched on just briefly, which is the gift economy, which is people's motivations for doing things. And when you think about a traditional group organ relational model, you're doing it, especially in a company. Yeah, like the, you know, they talk about purpose. But whatever you're there, because you're making money, you're there because you're trying to fulfill your own needs. But in this group, the gift economy really is at play, there's no money being exchanged, they want to contribute, they want to share their gifts with the group. And that is, feels so elemental, it just feels like how it should be. And it's so beautiful to watch people blossom, to watch people because everyone has gifts. And most people aren't able to express them in a normal group structure. Here you can. And it's just amazing, all of the wonderful things that that are probably suppressed and hidden in other types of group structures.

Pavani Yalla  1:00:47

Yeah, when he was talking about the, the power of co creation and collective creativity, the metaphor he used was, I think, jazz music musicians, were there riffing off of each other. And it's just joyful. And I think we, we know that to be like collective flow. We've experienced that with creative teams. And it is a magical place to be in like I crave that often. That generates a lot of energy towards again, the right things.

Joel Krieger  1:01:22

You know, when you think about why people get into a creative field, I think it first is because they get into individual flow state, and the end time fades away, and they just get totally lost in this act of creation. Then, if you're lucky, you get to experience that with other people. And something different happens. It's it's another level of experience. Because you and I have seen this happen plenty of times, within groups within creative teams. What I've seen happen here is different. Because it happens more frequently, it happens longer. And I think a big part of that is the reason why everyone's here. And their motivations. It allows that to happen more, it's almost like because everyone here and you'll feel it, you know, if you if you contrast being in a meeting, and just pay attention, a normal meeting, just pay attention to how there is no empty space, every bit of empty space is filled by a word. Everyone wants to get their point across. Everyone wants to show how smart they are, get credit for my idea, there's no space, you attend these meetings, they're actually filled with silence, there's a lot of silence in between. Because what's happening is everyone is there in service of what wants to emerge. So they're only going to speak, if they feel like something came to them that's in service of this beautiful thing that's bouncing around the team. And it's because we're getting reacquainted with how to listen to each other. And it's because the intent is pure. It's exhilarating. I mean, when you're in that space, where several people have somehow merged into this sentience organism, it's now its own thing. And other types of things are possible orders of magnitude more complicated and impactful than what you could do on your own.

Pavani Yalla  1:03:27

I told you earlier, this episode gave me goosebumps. And there was a specific spot where that happened. And it was towards the end of the episode where he talks about the Gaia hypothesis and the Goldilocks phenomenon, you know, like, it is such an energizing thought that we might be here to play a very critical role in the earth, you know, maintaining life and maintaining itself. It's a very different way, I think, to, to think about it than I was used to before where we tend the narrative, I think the dominant narrative is like, Oh, crap, like humans have messed everything up. We've destroyed the planet, which, you know, might be true, but it's not. It's not an energizing thought. And this narrative, what he's talking about, which I think to be very true, I can like feel it in my bones. And it just through the conversation, I already feel it, right. The thought that we have a purpose, and I don't know if he used the word purpose, but as he was speaking, like, I was just, I got goosebumps, because I was like, Oh, crap, that's why we're here. That's why Earth, Earth created us or we're part of this right? For this reason to play this role in. And I think it's an inspiring energy. It's one that gets you. It makes you want to get up and go do something. So I think that is the power of This narrative.

Joel Krieger  1:05:03

Yeah, it's it's important for people to have a story to live into a reason, a bigger reason for why we're here. And I think a lot of the old stories, they don't serve us anymore. You know that bit that at the very beginning, where Mindy, who I interviewed, she says, we're waking up, we're all waking up together. That's what it feels like, it really does feel like that. You should come hang out.

Pavani Yalla  1:05:37

Like tearing up? Yeah. Yeah, it's one, it was one of those conversations where I was listening to it. You know, when you you know it to be true, it rings so true. And you know, you haven't really lived into it yet. But you know, you have to,

Joel Krieger  1:05:58

it's, it can be very overwhelming and very dark. And I do feel like that is just part of the journey that you have to go through to get to the other side. But on the other side, what's there is pretty beautiful. Because there is an excitement in knowing that something is happening right now really profound. And it's happening everywhere. It's not just this community, these types of groups are springing up all over the place. And they're all informing each other. But it's happening, and to be a part of it just fills me with so much joy and meaning. This is the only experience of social media I've ever had that is healthy. It's amazing to be able to contrast that because you see how design decisions in building the scaffolding of the community have everything to do with how people interact with each other on it, which is why Facebook and Twitter feels so nasty.

Pavani Yalla  1:06:57

Yeah, that's, you know, that's That's it, isn't it? It's the scaffolding, if you can get that, right. If that's designed, everything else just emerges, and it's in the right direction. And it's joyful, and it's meaningful, and purposeful. And you just have to get the scaffolding, right. And I think, unfortunately, many of us are doing a lot within the wrong scaffolding. And it's like we're swimming upstream or whatever, because the scaffolding itself is not.

Joel Krieger  1:07:26

Right. That is so true.

Pavani Yalla  1:07:29

That's what I feel like, right? Like, that's what I feel like my lived experiences, in many ways where I have the best intentions, and I want to do good work. But it's all kind of like it's a lot of energy that's expended within the wrong construct. Yeah, I think that's why this was such a, something I've known to be true, but also yet another episode where it's like, you look inside a bit and have have some awakenings.

Joel Krieger  1:08:01

Essentially, what this two part series expresses is the inner work and the outer work, yes. And Joe, on the landscape, regenerating a forest in a river is the outer work. But it's not complete without the inner work, which is really what this online community is all about. I mean, we can't physically do anything together, because we're all, you know, virtually scattered across the globe. But what's happening, there is absolutely inner work, but it's happening together. Yeah. You can't have one without the other. There's got to be tangible action that happens in the outside world. But it won't be potent, it won't be effective. If the inner works not done as well.

Pavani Yalla  1:08:50

You know, that's actually a theme, as I'm thinking back to all of the people we've interviewed. We touched on that in many of them. Laura Kim talked about that. Kevin Jones talked about that. So many of them as a part of the stories that they told us talked about some of the inner transformation that they had to go through the inner work in order to do the outer work. So yeah, I think that's a really keen observation. And so we're doing the same,

Joel Krieger  1:09:16

the same. This concludes our two part series with Joe Brewer and Earth regenerators. So if you're a kindred spirit, who's been looking to find the others, look no further, just drop in on one of the many open virtual sessions over at or through generators. There's a project incubator, a book club, campfires, learning journeys, all sorts of happenings. You can find the trail heads to these things and more over at Earth regenerators.org. Also, you may want to check out Joe's new book, The design pathway for regenerating Earth I'm halfway through it right now, it's really important in such a powerful read, you can pick up a copy over at Chelsea green calm. As always, we'll have direct links or everything we talked about in the show notes for this episode, just head on over to outside and podcast.org and click on this episode page. So one last thing. We offer this podcast free in the spirit of the gift. And it takes an enormous amount of time and energy to put each episode together. So if our work resonates with you, please help us out. Take a minute right now. Head on over to Apple podcasts and give us a rating and review. This will help us out more than you know. Special thanks to all the amazing people who took time to speak with us about their experience here. Our gratitude goes out to Midi Berry, JP Parker Benji Ross, PJ Connolly, Kathleen Martsch, Pamela Woodland, and of course Joe Brewer. Okay, so in tribute to the earth regenerators community, we thought we close with one of Joe's favorite sayings; “onward fellow humans”.

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Regenerate, Renew, Rewild

Joe Brewer  00:06

The collapse process has been happening since well before we were born. The loss of biodiversity, the impacts due to climate change the increasing human population, I mean, you just go on and on looking at the major planetary scale changes that are being driven by human activity. Much of what's coming, and the next decade is kind of inertia that we can't avoid. Things will be lost that are sacred and we have to accept it. Once we accepted how complex that changes, and overwhelming it is, this basic starting point was the chrysalis of transformation. For realizing how much power we have to create regeneration and healing of ecosystems, including human communities. Regeneration is the only way to come out of overshoot and collapse. We've gone too far across planetary boundaries. This is the time for us to boldly ambitiously learn how to collaborate, to regenerate the world.

Joel Krieger  01:35

Welcome outside, I'm Joel.

Pavani Yalla  01:38

And I'm Pavani. Each episode we’ll discover design in unexpected places.

Joel Krieger  01:43

So these creators may not always call themselves designers. They actually go by many different labels. But they all have one thing in common. They create moments that have the power to change us.

Pavani Yalla  02:01

Tucked away deep in the Andes Mountains of Colombia, Barichara is a small town in the heart of indigenous quani territory. Long ago, this was once home to the only high Andes tropical dry forest on Earth. But looking out from atop the mountain vista in Barichara, you wouldn't know it. Today, the forest is almost completely destroyed. And the river system has long since dried up.

Joel Krieger  02:31

In 2019. Earth regenerators founder Joe Brewer moved his family here to realize a dream. His aim was to liberate this land from colonial models of private ownership to use watershed and permaculture practices to restore the forest and the water sources at the top of this tributary.

Pavani Yalla  02:52

He named the project Origen del Agua, which means the “origin of water”. By learning how to live regeneratively they intend to transform a community and a landscape, all to bring a river back to life.

Joe Brewer  03:11

Hello, everyone. This is Joe Brewer here at Origen Del Agua in Barichara, Columbia. Today I want to show you how well our Gabion systems are working for retaining water in the land. The sediments that have been gathering from the rain are still moist and are holding water. And there are some places here on the land where these areas start to actually look like little rivers. But if we go down just a little further. And you can see here that this is a really degraded stretch of land here. So we still have a lot of work to do. But if you look at this section down here, right there, you can see that it's all moist, and it actually looks like a river. So simply by building all of these stone walls, these little stacks of rocks, or creating little tiny river systems, accelerating the process of absorbing water to create slow release to begin to give birth to a little river or a tributary at the top of the ridge line. And within just a few months we're already seeing visible effects across the land. This really does work.

Joel Krieger  04:21

What you just heard was the voice of Joe Brewer out in the field. Every day Joe can be found somewhere in Barichara, getting his hands dirty.

Pavani Yalla  04:28

His on the ground work is informed by years of scientific study. While pursuing a PhD in atmospheric science. He switched fields and began to work with scholars in the behavioral and cognitive sciences with the hope of helping to create large scale behavior change.

Joel Krieger  04:46

Now Joe's worn many different labels over the years; change strategist, complexity researcher, cognitive scientist, but the most fitting I think, is that of culture designer.

Pavani Yalla  04:58

Joe has devoted his life life to helping humanity squeeze through the sustainability bottleneck, and at Origen del Agua. He's setting a bold example. This pilot project is a living demonstration for how to restore planetary health at scale. And in the process, it's also giving birth to design school for Earth regeneration.

Joel Krieger  05:21

So let's go ahead and get into it. Here's Joe Brewer.

Joe Brewer  05:31

When I was a kid, I thought there was something wrong with me. It took me a long time to figure out that the way that I felt different was because I was in a very unhealthy culture. I grew up in rural Missouri, and like a working class poverty, industrial scale chicken farm. And what kept me different from a lot of people at the time, was my deep connection to what is alive, and the feeling that it should be cared for. So I would watch like a kid that took a firecracker, stuck it in the mouth of a frog and blew it up because he thought it was funny. And I would just be like traumatized and for days, be bothered by what happened to that poor frog. While everyone around me laughed, and just thought it was funny. And I couldn't figure out at the time, how I would hurt so much by being sensitive to things that a lot of people around me weren't sensitive to. And I think that, just that probably genetically inherited capacity for empathy is where my work and regeneration began. And one way that it was expressed in the early days, again, in my early childhood, was I would get away from people and go out into nature, to recover from how I felt when I was around people. And that's strange to hear. Now, when people see that I'm really extroverted. I'm really social. I have a lot of friends. So this wasn't because I was a shy, quiet kid. It's because I was a really open, sensitive human body. In an environment filled with dangers to someone who's like that.

Joel Krieger  07:29

But then the last several years, you made a pretty big life change a pretty big move, you kind of packed up and taken your whole family to bar char Colombia. How did how did that come about? How did you get from there to this point?

Joe Brewer  07:47

I'd like to start that story by going back to 2003. When I was in an atmospheric science graduate program, and learning about what I now call the planetary predicament, or the ecological crisis, I started really learning a lot of what was going on in the world. And my new girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife have we been married for more than 15 years, we began a journey that started for us in 2005. It was as we were in this learning process. We moved away from where we lived in Champaign, Illinois, to Prescott, Arizona, and lived in a cabin 18 miles away from the nearest town, and spent the next year hiking, camping, doing bike touring, and trying to figure out how to live our lives in alignment with our values. And what we kept finding was all of the pathways available to us, brought us back to cities, and brought us back to civilization. And so we did things like we got rid of our car and started riding our bikes and things you can do in a progressive city. But we always felt a really deep inadequacy, and how we were responding to the global crisis. All of that changed. In January of 2017. When our daughter was born, we stared into the face of future apocalypse of possible human extinction. You know, I'm trained in Earth System Science, I understand how serious the situation is. So we delayed for years, should we bring a child into the world knowing how dangerous it is. And when we committed to having a child, we committed to a life of transformation. At the time, we were living in Seattle, which is a beautiful place to be a young, young working professional, and a pretty difficult place to be parents. Very expensive. It's really conducive to that fast paced corporate life. And so we already made plans that when our daughter was born, we'd moved to Eugene, Oregon, a place we lived before we were married in an old growth forest near there. And, and it was a lot less expensive. So we could move from two incomes to one income, and still devote ourselves almost full time to raising our child for both parents to be present. While we figured out the next step, it took us about a year living in Eugene, Oregon, for an opportunity to emerge for us to go live off grid in a tropical rainforest and a biodiversity hotspot in Costa Rica, helping to create the intention at least helping to create regenerative economic systems, and to create communities of people who bring the economic activities that are in into harmony with the rest of the natural world. We found a lot of greenwashing, we found a lot of problematic personalities. We found that we were not specifically in a place that our community and we still visited a lot of amazing projects. It's really mixed space. And we came out of our 10 months that we stayed in Costa Rica, feeling like we needed to spend a year traveling to different locations to find the community where we could raise our child. So while we were in Costa Rica, I was helping work with an organization called regenerative communities network. And we were building a network of regenerative economies. And I helped launch the first of these projects in Colombia as a convener just I helped convene a meeting, organized by local Colombians. And while I was at that meeting, I met someone who shared my vision for raising children within the mindset of regeneration, while embedded within a community reforestation project. And so I told my wife about this. She was like, that's what we want. And we came to Barichara Colombia, in the Northern Andes of Colombia, to, to explore if there was community here. And within two months, we were working on getting our visas like this place has so much community, has so much going for it. This is the place we can plant our dream and fertile social and ecological soil. And we've been living here now for almost two years. And it's like Alice in Wonderland, the rabbit hole just keeps going.

Joel Krieger  12:27

That's a great way to put it, you said something that I think is really key there, this, you left the place Costa Rica, which I think a lot of people think of is this eco paradise, the perception, at least from the outside is oh, they figured it out there. But you found a lack of community, which seems to be the foundation you need for basically everything that we're going to talk about today. It's really all about community.

Joe Brewer  12:52

It's really about community. And also it's really about something that is inferred and the story that I just told, which is de-financialization. How to take money pressure away from how you make important life decisions. And this is something that is a thread that weaves across everything that we do when people ask, how did you do that? Are you rich? Are you privileged, I'm like, I've got a world class education, privileged. I'm a white guy from of European descent, privileged. But I'm also working class poor kid, with very few social connections to rich people. And so what we've done is found a way to live that a lot of people can also do you don't need a lot of money, actually, you need to remove the need for money. And so that's something I think, is part of community in a profound way. Because which we can unpack this if you'd like, I'm going to make a provocative statement. The dynamics of markets are inherently destructive to community, and vice versa, the dynamics of community inherently undermine or destroyed markets. And so we had to remove ourselves from the dynamics of markets, intentionally and consistently, to be able to do what we do.

Joel Krieger  14:16

Can you unpack that a bit? Does this have to do with the kind of the need for markets to commoditize? You know, everything into a product or service, you know, basically transforming relationships into something that can be bought and sold, or is there more to it?

Joe Brewer  14:30

Well, that's a big part of it. But there's more. I'm going to draw upon the work of David Fleming. So anyone who wants to know more about this, Google the book surviving the future, by David Fleming and just go and grab it, your life will be changed. I'll give one example. Efficiency. Efficiency in the dynamic of a capitalist market is the ability to extract as much profit off of a transaction as you can. Efficiency is measured as reduced cost value to money. So they're, you know, water is worthless unless you can sell it. You know, good relationships are worthless unless you can sell them. Everything is about money. And when you myopically measure the world by money, and you ask, How can I get the most money out for the least money? And how do I minimize the costs, maximize the gains. And one thing that comes out of this particular version of efficiency is waste is defined as loss of profit. Okay, now, look at what a community theater project does, you have a group of people who are not going to ever get paid. So we spent a lot of time and energy and use a lot of material resources, with makeup, clothing, lighting, construction, set design, and they build the whole thing and run it for like one day or three days. And then they dismantle the whole thing. From a market efficiency point of view, it's absolutely insane. But from a community point of view, everything is about deepening social relationships, exploring meaning, finding power and experience and taking inequality that exists in the community. patronage. Now, the patrons who support their community theater, and distributing and community processes that destroys the excess inequality, experienced as community wealth. So the very logic that would say all of this as wasteful in the market is exactly what makes it valuable in the community.

Joel Krieger  16:37

It's almost like in the dominant view, if it can't be measured, it doesn't matter. And you can't quantify some of these things that you're talking about. It's the whole qualitative aspect of an enjoyable life in community, right?

Joe Brewer  16:53

Yeah, yeah. And also, mutual indebtedness, is the nature of friendship. If you're friends with someone, you feel like you want to do something for them, you feel like they've done more for you, you feel gratitude, you don't feel like I want to get the best price for this transaction, which is just offensive to the idea of friendship. It's exactly that same tension between the logics, the logics are incompatible with each other. For de-financialization is a process of de-commodifying your life, but even more fundamentally, it's de-marketing your life and its communities in your life. So you have to make up fake words to talk about this. Because we don't have regular words for this.

Joel Krieger  17:39

And I got to imagine this was a process for you. Because I mean, I think a lot of people listening would think about what you did and say, Gosh, that's so aspirational. I would love to do that. But I just don't feel like it's possible. How do I unhook myself from this thing? It's all that I know. I mean, what was that process like?

Joe Brewer  17:57

Part of the way I did this was a design process, designing semantics, defining how we make sense of things, and how things come to be meaningful for us. And so this process was partly recognizing what was soul sucking about my life. And feeling in my body, when I felt healthy, when I felt passionate when I felt alive. And then creating what you might call design heuristics. Just a felt direction of what does it mean, to move away from something or to move toward something. And now, I know a lot more about how that works. And we can talk in a little bit about the framework of prosocial it, there are ways to design this very clearly, with very good understanding of the mechanisms. But at the time, what I was doing was more intuitive. It was more like the design method was aesthetic. It was about feeling into my lived experience, and seeing what made me feel alive and what didn't. And then to the best of my ability, removing the things that got in the way, and doing more of the things that that's helped it to happen. And it was a series of small steps, with a very long period of time, feeling socially isolated. People couldn't understand what I was doing. Couldn't really relate to me like I for about 10 years. If I was at a party, and someone went up to my wife and said, Jessica, what is Joe do? Instead of answering them? This is my wife, who knows my work better than anyone, right? She wouldn't even answer she would just walk them over to me and say, Joe, explain what you do. I can't even explain it, would you explain it? And because what I was doing didn't fit within the semantics, or the aesthetics of how most people are making choices in their lives. My motivation for a lot of this time, really came out of despair. And I grew out of a promise I made to myself when I was 16 years old. I told myself that I wanted to lie on my deathbed at the end of my life and have no regrets. Which is a pretty high bar. And I really shaped my decisions a lot. And I was feeling time passing. And I felt regret coming about what I didn't do for the future that I knew was coming. And so a lot of what I do now is healing land, healing landscapes. And I mean, like very tangibly, I take a pickaxe, I go out in the rain, I dig a channel, like a little swale, a little ditch, that is level, so water can enter it and stay there, and the water will be absorbed to help the plants grow. And so in a very practical way, like, right in front of me with mud on my fingers, I am healing a place on the land. And so one thing that we're doing that has been a profound change for us, is instead of talking about what needs to be done with some mythical audience, how do I get people to listen to my ideas, and do what needs to be done. I'm the crazy guy who grabs the pickaxe and goes out in the rain by myself and just digs the damn ditch. And I don't care if anyone understands what I'm doing. And so part of this is, we move to a place where there is land that is stewarded by a community that if I actually dig that ditch, no one's private interest is going to come in and dig it. If I plant native trees, no one's going to come and cut them down to build their mansion. And so a big part of this was finding community that protected and cared for land that I could give myself to for the long term. So my wife had the dream of creating a food forest, which is a holistic economic system built around knowledge of local, native forest. And it's a permaculture process of regenerating landscapes to build forests. My passion was about designing for a living economy across an entire territory, and creating a design school where people can come and practice and learn how to do this. And so while I do practice digging those ditches and pulling invasive grass and planting native trees and collecting native seeds, and I'm doing that work, but also, I am creating a beacon of light. For everyone else who has the same dream for themselves. How could anyone else become a designer of transformational change for an entire territory? Because when we look at things like global warming, or the mass extinction event that's starting to happen, or micro plastics, in the ocean, pick any massive, overwhelmingly complex challenge. And we ask, How can what I'm doing locally, ever make a difference? And the answer is fractal. The answer is the little bitty thing I can do with my body right here is nested within something bigger, which is also nested within something bigger. And that nested thing like you know, Russian dolls have one inside the other, that nested-ness is what makes a difference. And so I can align the purpose of my action with the nested-ness. So what we're doing in Barichara is mapping out a territory, we're doing this collaborating with a lot of local people who know more about this place than we do. So that we can create an agenda for regenerating forest on anywhere between 50,500 1000 hectares of land. We're using ecological connectivity across the landscape, drainage basins for water migration patterns for animals, local biological corridors, and other parts of the landscape to organize our activities in nested levels. And we're raising money and buying private land and turning it into community projects, while also volunteering on existing community projects. And we're doing all of this work. And so the the thing I think is really powerful about this is I do it more than I talk about it. And I document how I'm doing it by telling stories about what we're doing, so that the narratives can connect other people to doing it.

Joel Krieger  24:43

So can you talk about some of these? Because I've watched a good number of these YouTube videos. I think one of the recent ones you're actually starting to see the effects of some of your work there with the river specifically. Maybe you could tell us a bit about that story.

Joe Brewer  24:58

Yeah, we bought this piece of land with crowdfunding, and we named the land Origen del Agua - Spanish for origin of water. And this is up at the top of a ridge line, heavily degraded erosion channels that are 10 feet deep. I mean, it's, it's in bad shape, it looks like a desert. Why is it the origin of water, because it's at the top of the ridge line. And as the air flows over, if there's an interaction with the land surface, that is the right kind of reaction, then clouds will form and rain will come. And if rain comes, it will be absorbed into the landscape and fill the river system below. But it doesn't do that now it just runs off and takes whatever's left, there's no topsoil takes the clay and rock at this point and washes it away. So what we've been doing is incredibly simple in its implementation. And that's what makes it profound is we just start at the top. And there are a lot of rocks on this land. So we just pick up rocks and make lines of rocks, where we see the erosion channels. And the erosion channels are like a language, they tell us the water is carving the land there, the water runs there. So if we just put a line of rocks and make a little barricade wall, and it could be six inches tall, there's a line of rocks, that as the water moves through during a rain, all the sediments that are carried in the water gets stopped. It's like a filter or a sieve. And they collect and build up and are dammed by these little piles of rocks. And what's interesting about doing this is we've now done enough of them, we built 70 or 80 of these little lines of rocks. And as you watch the way the water has already carved the landscape, it's like a serpent it spirals and curves, and where the sediments settle, because they're held by the rocks. The sediments have been ground up and pulverized by the water as they're dragged against the rocks during the rain. And so they're more porous, they're more aerated, they're softer, they're not compacted. And if they're any native seeds, they can actually take root and grow. So in just six months, during the rainy season of building these, we now have green serpents of native grass, where the sediments built up on the lines of rocks are allowing the germination of native seeds just because they stay put and because moisture stays below the surface. And I mean, like an edge below the surface, these are really small. But they're already doing this well enough that they're now creating a spongy layer of roots for the grass that is amplifying this and holding even more water and slowing down even more water and slowing down even more erosion. So the key is to understand, like I said, I was sort of describing nested-ness in space, there's also nested-ness. In time, I could do a little intervention and then repeat it and then repeat it do this from the top of the hill down. And as I do this, I create a fractal network of rainwater catchment, and are already organized the way the water flows, because I did it where the water was already flowing. And I'm taking a basic understanding of ecology to watch the birth of a little green channel of marshland in a desert, and this has happened in the span of six months. So and this is really tiny, I'm talking something that's three feet wide, making a little, you know, serpentine pattern, going down a piece of land over maybe five or 600 feet of land surface. Although we've done this in multiple places. Each of them is really small, but they're part of a tributary of a big river. So there's also a fractal in space. These tiny little rivulets are going to help restore an entire river that is more than 100,000 hectare catchment. It's a big it's a an entire plateau. And this is one of 15 major tributaries, we're sitting right at the top of it on three hectares of land, making tiny rivers of sediments with lines of rocks.

Joel Krieger  29:13

And right now, there's no the landscape is so degraded, right? There's no There's no river,

Joe Brewer  29:18

no river, it's gone. It's gone. It's been gone for decades. The long term vision for this land can be described in multiple ways. So I'll just pick one for now. There are children here, who were born in a degraded environment. And one dream that I have is for the children to grow up watching rivers come back to life. So that they just believe is part of normal common sense. Yeah, humans can bring rivers back to life. I actually know that they can, because there are a lot of examples, and I've studied those examples. So I know that it can be done. These children don't yet no, it can't be done. And I just want them to experience that it can. By playing with those same rocks that were piling up they're playing with them making little sandcastles and all kinds of, you know, things that kids do. We're growing a river, and they're gonna learn how to do it. And one way to think about this is just like how we carry baggage from our past that weighs us down as we move into the future. We can imagine a future that is so attractive, and so beautiful, that it pulls us forward in time, we’re drawn to it, that we need to help create it, that we need to live out and happening. And when I stand on this degraded land, and see those scars in the landscape, instead of feeling the pain of what was lost, when I'm looking at it from the past, if I sit there and look at it from the possible future, I'll start doing what I need to do to make that future happen because it's so alluring, and so attractive. And I know that I start by picking up rocks, and stacking them in the ditches, already carved by the water. And then just watching what happens, and learning from what the landscape teaches me as it changes. So what I'm documenting in the YouTube videos, is what the land is teaching me as I continue iterating, these very small, very simple interventions, with an understanding that that land is part of a complex adaptive system. It's dynamic, it's interdependent, and it's evolving. And now I am an agent of change within it. Because I can pick up and stack the rocks. Or I can take my pickaxe and dig a ditch. And so just like if I'm playing a video game, I'm world building in a video game. I can world build a river, from erosion channels and rocks.

Joel Krieger  32:08

And you do this every day. I mean, this is part of your daily practice, right? You're out there

Joe Brewer  32:13

It’s essential to my daily practice. Because I know enough about the world to be pretty depressed. I know enough about the world to be really hurt by how much loss has already happened and how much is now unavoidable. Now there are these estimates given that a million species will go extinct by the end of the century, which don't account for interdependent abrupt climate change, which we now know is happening. We're talking about the hollowing out of the Earth's biosphere. And if you want to think about that, in human terms, imagine everyone you've ever known and loved, and go back in time and prune away all those relationships before they happened. And how deficient your life would be. That's what will happen if humans don't form relationships with the abundance of non human life that we are losing, or we're not going to get to relate to. So I can sit in the pain of that, and contemplate suicide and not want to watch it, not want to see more of it. And it's so painful to be hurt by the future. So I have to protect myself from my own knowledge. And the way I do that, is by turning the same knowledge that lets me see the destruction. I turn it into healing. And then I see the healing happening and it heals me continuously. And there's actually something I learned from ethnobotany research. And and this is explored nicely and Wade Davis's book, one river when he tells the history of ethnobotany. But all psychedelics that are used as medicine, plant medicine, or fungal medicine, and indigenous cultures, every one of them without exception is poison. Because whether something is poison or medicine depends on the context, and the quantity and the process for how it's used. And so what I'm realizing is that, you know, for example, aspirin, which numbs the tissue in your body, as a side effect of the toxicity or the of the poison is what allows you to do surgery or to tolerate pain. So the medicine is a poison. It depends on the dose depends on how it's used and so on. If I turned the poison of ecological destruction, and the poison of ecological despair into medicine, what happens is, I take my sensitivity, same thing that separated me from the other kids when I was little, and I use my sensitivity to connect to land and instead of feeling the land being destroyed, I feel the land being healed and regenerated. And it because it's my body feeling it, it creates that in my body. So this is something really important is that not only are we not separate from the process, we must enter our own bodies deeply into an A felt experience of the relationship to do the work. For me to see the water moving to create the erosion after see the water moving to create the river. It's the same movement. It's the same dynamic, but it's how do I feel as an agent within the system?

Joel Krieger  35:39

How is this expanded out from your individual actions? I got to imagine it first. People are looking at this stranger, he's out there digging holes in the rain. What's going on here? And at a certain point, you know, you built these relationships. I mean, how has this project began to change the community of Barichara?

Joe Brewer  35:59

I want to tell a specific story about the purchase of the nature reserve, after we've crowdfunded and raise the money. And I want to celebrate my friend Margarita is from Colombia. She is a psychologist who specializes in cultural trauma. And we were meeting with the family to buy to talk about buying the land, and we visited the land together. So here we are on this absolutely destroyed land. And this is the family that stewarded its destruction. And Margarita said to them, I'm ashamed as a Colombian, that a white guy from the from North America had to come here and care for our territory, that we don't care for ourselves. And it was like slapping the owners of the land in the face. I couldn't have said this. I'm not from here. She said it. And this is something that I've seen is people are so quietly ashamed. I think this is relatable all over the world, people are so humiliated by their own participation in things that they can't find joy, and caring for those things, and opting out of care. Because I am not ashamed of the destruction of that piece of land, I can enter that piece of land and start to heal it during the period of time, that would be awkward for them. Until eventually, they start to see the healing, they start to see the land coming back to life. And they start to feel differently about their own land. And this is something that's already been happening. We've been here for about two years. And I like walk through the town with mud on my clothes. And some local people have even started calling me Tarzan, because I got a long wily hair, and they don't know what I'm doing, who's this crazy, dirty white guy who doesn't shave enough looks like a dirty hippie, dirty hippie. But, but what they didn't understand at first was that I was doing something about what they talked about. Everyone would complain about how there's not enough water. And the water scarcity is really chronic. And everyone's a little ashamed that they don't do something about it. But after a while they see me doing it. I don't judge anyone, I don't really even say anything to anyone about what I'm doing unless I'm asked. And obviously they're the specific people I work with. It's a different story. But I'm just talking about people in the community who see me walking around and going shopping in the stores and stuff. But gradually, the word is starting to spread, that I'm just putting water in the ground, restoring the water table, building soils, planting trees. And they start to feel proud that their territory attracted someone like me, who is this person from the outside that looked for a place worth healing, and they came to our territory, because I am in a very special territory, and they know it. But they're ashamed of how they've cared for their own territory. So I give them this parallel path where it's like alchemy, they can take the same parts of their, their feelings and feel differently about how they relate to me doing it as an outsider compared to how they feel about them not doing it. And so there's been this accumulation, it's still going, what two years and we're now people you know understand more of what I'm doing. It's like the rumors have been spreading. That guy's dirty a lot because he's up working in the community, good for the community. Be a part of the forest project reforestation project. And like and we're so glad because we love and treasure that place. We're so glad he's there doing it.

Joel Krieger  39:57

Yeah, have people started to join you yet?

Joe Brewer  40:00

People have been working with us locally, off and on since April of last year. So fairly early in the process. We actually formed a water brigade during the most intense lockdowns of the Coronavirus pandemic. And we would go up with groups of between five and 15 of us and, and dig some of these water retention systems together. So that happened before they reopened the tourism market. And like I said earlier, once the tourism market came in the community was destroyed and everyone had to go back to their shops to sell to tourists. So I've had very little volunteerism from the local community because everyone's so busy serving the market. Or when the market was like quite literally, barricades were set up and tourists were not allowed in. They would not allow the market to enter for about eight months. And during that time, community thrived.

Joel Krieger  40:55

Doesn't that tell you something right there.

Joe Brewer  40:58

And since tourism opened up again, in September of last year, I've had volunteers from the global community, because we have the online or three generators network. And people have been coming as volunteers and doing work. But it's been mostly people from outside coming in working with me because the locals are servants to the local market.

Joel Krieger  41:19

Actually think this word regeneration may be new to a lot of folks, can you help unpack what that means regeneration and regenerative design? What does that mean to you?

Joe Brewer  41:31

Yeah, it's really an important topic. Because regeneration, if you just take the parts generation to generate, to create the context for something to be made, so to regenerate as to reproduce the context that enables something to be made. It's just sort of like literally breaking down the word. So a biological organism expresses its body its existence, by reproducing the conditions of being alive. It does this by taking in food and other nutrients. And by expelling waste. And there's this continual generation of the body, that is reproducing the conditions to generate the body. So think of like the cells on your skin that every 30 days, your body reproduces every skin cell regeneration is this dynamic pattern of a living system, to reproduce the conditions of maintaining the ability to be alive. So a living organism is alive, and maintains its ability to be alive while at the same time reproducing those conditions. And so regeneration is the quality or capacity of any living system to keep itself alive. So if we work with regeneration, what that means is, we work with those aspects of any living system to help increase the capacities for aliveness within that system. So there is an environment that has five kinds of trees, three kinds of bushes and two kinds of grass. Maybe after doing permaculture practices on that land, there are 50 kinds of trees, 30 kinds of bushes and shrubs, seven kinds of ground covers, and an additional 50 Different kinds of birds 30 Different or 100 Different kinds of insects, measure however you want. But the capacity for aliveness. And the capacity for the living system itself has been amplified by working with the dynamics of the living system itself. So regeneration for me is it's a process. And it's a process that we can design with. And design as we are living systems. I'm a living biological creature, I can design as regeneration, while designing with and designing for regeneration, those are not exclusive terms. I can do design as for and with all at the same time by understanding how the dynamics work, just like how I understand that setting those rocks down build sediments, which creates the conditions for the native seeds to germinate.

Joel Krieger  44:18

This is something I'd love to dig in a little bit because this is actually quite a different way of understanding design than I think a lot of folks who practice design in the default world see it. Can you help us understand how this is different? kind of compare and contrast regenerative design, with design as I think most people understand it?

Joe Brewer  44:42

I think the most fundamental shift between design within a civilization. I'm not going to use that word very intentionally and design within a biosphere. I want to draw the distinction at that level. because what happens in the models, every model of civilization is that they begin with agriculture. And agriculture is domination and control of the fertility of land. It's a domination control and extraction of fertility of land, is how agriculture works. And that's how every civilization works, that within the context of I exist, because someone is dominating the fertility of land, and extracting life from it, so that my body can be fed through some Market that brings it to the city, that any kind of design I do is in service to the system that is extracting from the land, because the survival of the system depends on it. So I have to work and make money so that I can pay taxes, and so I can buy things in a consumer economy, I have to serve the system for the system to keep me alive. And so all design that happens within the mindset of civilization, any civilization is the mindset of design and service to the systems that keep us alive. But because the systems are built on domination and extraction or exploitation of fertility of land, there's inherently an oppressive separation. Just I cannot care for the land. And as a kinship relationship, I can't treat the land of my family, and then do that to it. Now, if I think of design in the context of a biosphere, a living ecology, a web of living relationships, that my survival depends on the thriving of that ecology. If the ecosystem I'm a part of is unwell, I'm likely to be unwell. And so all of my design, all of my conscious effort to address problems and improve the world, you know, whichever design approach I take, is in service to systemic health of the whole because it's grounded in a, a multi dimensional way of relating, which is I relate to the air that is excreted from the plants that are produced food through photosynthesis, that I depend upon micro organisms, and fungal networks in the soil that enable all those plants to grow. That I depend on the niches created by those forest ecosystems. For all the plants that I might forage or all the animals, I might hunt. My relationships are a web, a multi dimensional web of family. We're all part of the same holistic health or holistic pathology. And my design is in service to that. And so I think the fundamental difference between regenerative design and other kinds of design that are not regenerative is regenerative design recognizes that all of your design occurs within a life system. And by being within that life system, your relationships to the rest of life are mutual. I depend upon other other organisms, other species, other ecological processes, I depend on them being healthy for me to be healthy. A really clear example of this is Don't piss in your drinking water. You need that water clean to be able to drink it. So the bogs and the marshlands and the sand beds and the beaver dams and anything else that's cleaning and filtering the water in the river. Its health is why you have health when you drink the water. And so this mutual understanding of collective or systemic health is a natural byproduct of seeing yourself as part of a living system. And I think that's a fundamental difference because people can design aspiring to do things that are good for the environment. But look at the construction of that sentence. I do something good for the environment. Separate, yes, why are they separate? Because if I'm exploiting and raping the fertility of the Earth, just metaphorically, the mother of all if I'm exploiting and raping my own mother, I can't let that enter conscious awareness and do design. And design is so strongly based in empathy, to do good design, that I cannot do really good design, when I have a bad relationship with something as fundamental as the life giving processes of my own planet. Which is why all design within civilizations that is not regenerative. It's going to be different, because it cannot accept the sensitivity to Where the harm is being done? Which is exactly where we have to go to do regenerative design. So those places

Joel Krieger  50:08

you know, I've been wondering, at what point because this is the natural arc of how things usually go. These movements sprout up, like this happened with the word sustainability, and eventually gets co opted by the default kind of mainstream culture and gets distorted, gets green-washed gets, loses its meaning. And I, I, something feels different about what's happening with the regenerative movement to me, that almost makes it, I hope, impossible for this to happen. But I've also been a little concerned about it I've actually been looking at when, when am I going to start to see corporations use this word? Do you think that's going to happen? And if so, how? How do we keep sharp eyes out so we can spot it when it's when it's inauthentic.

Joe Brewer  51:03

It's already happening. It's primarily happening with regenerative agriculture. Agriculture is the wrong word. So they already have the wrong word without knowing it. And that's because there are two concepts, agriculture and agro ecology. And very few people have heard of agro ecology, so they don't even know that there's a better word, or not the word, there's a better concept. So there's already an ignorance of, of sustainable ways of growing food. Because all agricultural systems are not sustainable. There's never been an agricultural system that sustainable, just like there's never been a civilization that sustainable. Every one of them in the past its collapse, this one will be no different. And so this is where when Monsanto and Bill Gates owning his 100,000 acres of land, or whatever it is, huge amount of land. And they're taking organic, like how organic has been co opted, and they're doing the same thing with regenerative. And they're going to succeed within the mindset of people who are part of the civilization. But they're going to fail with the people who decolonize their minds, and no longer think, like part of a civilization. And so the key is not to protect the word, regenerative, that's impossible. People can twist and distort words to meet all kinds of things George Orwell told is this in the 1940s. But they can not contaminate what regeneration means as a web of familiar relationships to someone who's not in the mindset of a civilization. And so the work is not about the branding of the word. The work is about cultivating worldview mindsets mindsets about worldview, and people who see the world as ecology. And those people will be immune to propaganda, at least to this propaganda.

Joel Krieger  53:00

Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point. Yeah. It's just a label that describes something that is a universal truth. That's what it is.

Joe Brewer  53:07

Yeah. And also, when I entered this territory, and Barichara, one of the first things I needed to start becoming sensitive to, was who the indigenous people were that lived here. And if they lived here for hundreds or 1000s of years, how are they sustainable? Because if I want to create a sustainable economy here, one of the best things I could do the fastest way to it is there were people who did it here before, how did they do it? And you might have to change, something's a little different. But you know, to overlook that part of the design space, how did it work for the people who did it here would just be like ignorant and foolish. Like, as a designer, you'd say, what are the best ways someone's done this before? Let's go look at that. And so what I started to do was to become sensitive to how the conquistadores destroyed local culture, and exterminated the local people. And then only after that, did they destroy landscapes. And if I want to regenerate the landscapes, I have to go in the reverse order. Start restoring this indigenous mindset about the place, or at least, restoring awareness and knowledge about it. And then look at how they manage the land. And look at how they're related to the land, and then start to regenerate the land in a way that's similar in spirit, if not in practice. If you can't find the information about the practice, then you do it in the same sentiment. But if you can't find the practice, might as well try it out. It's probably a good practice.

Joel Krieger  54:51

Where do you look for this wisdom? Because it seems like a lot of the indigenous ways have been lost. I mean, how do you Where do you where do you even begin?

Joe Brewer  55:03

It helps that I'm trained as a complexity scientist. So I understand how complex systems work. And that's helpful because I care less about authentic history. Meaning, like where I live, the culture was destroyed 300 years ago. And mostly what we know is from archaeology. So there's a lot that's not known. I can't really know the authentic history very well. It's incomplete. It's like the fossil record for paleontologist, a lot of it's been lost. And I can piece together stories and they can guide me, but I can't fully know. So in the absence of that authentic history, what I can do is look at functions and capacities. So for example, a capacity that the local people had, was to use local plants to make all of their textiles. They had the capacity, they knew the plants, they know how to use them, they know how to process them. Because this was a place of famous weavers. Basket weavers, clothing weavers, they made fishing nets and fishing lines, because there are several rivers near here. And they couldn't go fishing without weeding. And they couldn't do weaving without knowing the plants. And we know which plants they were, because that part of the history is known. So there's a local type of agave plant, the local name is Fica. And on the long green branches, that's got these big, long, broad leaves on it, it's got this this textile that is extremely strong, rigid, yet flexible, I've got a little pouch I used to carry things in with it. That's, that's woven in the in the pattern of the indigenous people in this place. And when I put something big in it, it stretches out. But unlike cotton, which cotton is also from here, if I take the heavy thing out, it retracts. I have smart memory fibers from a native plant, because the indigenous people used it. And so part of this is understanding the functions on how their economy worked. And one of the functions was they made all their construction materials and all their clothing came from local plants. So I need to look to whatever remaining knowledge there is of local plants. And ask, who still knows how to do that? Who still knows how to make this, this Fica handbag. And now I have one, I'm learning how to use it. And part of my design practice is to try using what the indigenous people use to learn what it feels like. So the local name for this handbag is mochela. So I have a mochela, made of Fica. And as I use it, I've stopped using my backpack. Back when I lived in Seattle, and went backpacking all the time. And I engage with what I carry differently, using a mochila than I would using a backpack. And in subtle ways my body is learning the capacities of the local culture. And I don't have to know that I'm right to know I'm going in the right direction. And so this is a big part of, like I said, the design ethic and within regeneration is I'm part of a living system. So I need to experience it with my own body to be able to design within it.

Joel Krieger  58:19

Yeah, it really is. It's a it's like a philosophy, a way of being. I mean, it's eventually it affects every aspect of who you are and how you interact with others. Right?

Joe Brewer  58:28

Yeah, and that is, that is true. And that is the process of decolonization. Like I've learned there are all these stone paths that connect the villages, and I walk between them. And by walking, I feel the rhythm of the landscape. And I hear the chorus of music from the insects and the birds at different times of day. And I learned ecology simply by walking instead of riding in a car or a motor taxi on the highway. And so the indigenous life way is a an immersive training environment. It's an ecosystem of learning.

Pavani Yalla  59:28

So this was such a treat for me, because I actually didn't get to interview Joe. Right, which typically we're both talking to the person and to be able to listen to your conversation after the fact. It was a very different experience for me. And also it was special because I felt like I was getting a glimpse into something that you've been close to for quite a while now. And that has been a significant part of your life that I we haven't talked about at length But I kind of got this like peek inside or under the hood. So that was great for me. So as I think about the things that stood out as I was listening to it, the first one is the fact that he talked a lot about just doing it versus talking about it. And I think for many of us, as included on this podcast, we do a lot of talking or pontificating about the things that we want to do, or the change that we want to see happen. And we spend very little time actually physically doing anything with our hands, right? Joe's very different. He's like, he's the one out there digging the ditch by himself. And I think part of that part of the power that he leans into is that he knows that it is actually fun and joyful to do that work. And many of us maybe haven't experienced it enough to actually realize like, oh, yeah, this is amazing. This is energizing. And this is what life's about. The design part comes in, I think, where he's very strategic about the things that he is doing. So he is picking the actions that he takes. They are, he talks about nested-ness in time and space. So he's doing things that he knows are going to have this kind of like rebounding, generative effect. And the river is a beautiful example of that when he was talking about, it's really simple. We're just stacking stones, and then look what happens, right? So he's designing his actions in that way. But there's also there's a multiplier because of what he's the specific actions he's selected. But there's also a multiplier because, and I wrote this down, he said, I do it more than I talk about it. And I document what I'm doing so that the narratives can connect others to doing it too. And so the other multiplier is that he is documenting it, and he is sharing that and is an inspiration and like a beacon, you could you could say for others to follow suit. And so he's very strategic with what he's doing. The time that he spends physically doing stuff, so that it has that kind of multiplier effect. I thought that was very cool.

Joel Krieger  1:02:14

Yeah, it’s fractal. Yeah.

Pavani Yalla  1:02:16

Yeah, that was the word he used, right. Yeah. Yeah.

Joel Krieger  1:02:19

Yeah. So true. I think he said something to the effect of, it's not about creating awareness for some imaginary audience out there, which I think all of us have fallen trapped to. It's just kind of what we're trained to do. And, you know, I think we both thought that this was it for a long time. It's like this thought of wow, you know, if only we could create a critical mass of awareness, if only we could convince enough people. And that's not it at all. It's about just doing it. And it doesn't have to be so serious, like you said, yeah, like the, the overarching topic of what what encloses this is a little dark and dire. But you can take joy in in this act of healing, you know?

Pavani Yalla  1:03:02

Yeah, I mean, I think that there has been the sentiment for a while also about like, hey, let's just go do something or every action counts, but maybe not always directed towards the right actions. So if you think about just like planting a forest, anyone could probably go out and plant a bunch of trees. But the knowledge that he brings to the work that he's doing the knowledge from, you know, whether it's ecology or other fields, he's bringing all of that together in a way that you're doing, specifically the work of regeneration. And that's what's going to have that fractal quality. So I think, I think there's two messages here. It's one is yes, go do something, don't just talk about it, but then do the right stuff. To right, like, be aware of what to do. Yeah. So what else stuck out to you in this first episode?

Joel Krieger  1:03:57

When he was talking about developing his own design heuristics and listening to his felt experience of like, what, what feels right, what do I want to move towards? And what do I want to move away from? I feel like we can all relate to this if you if you just take a moment to examine your felt lived experience in this broader system that we live under. And you know, deep in your bones, that the system is unhealthy at every possible level. And it's hard to find somebody who doesn't dream of finding a way out of it. But like, where do you go? Most people can't imagine themselves actually running off and like joining a hippie commune, they're not going to do that. But what makes Joe's example so powerful, is that he actually did what most people only dream of he untethered himself from the system and just simply walked away. What people really need it is a plausible and preferable example for another way of being to choose from right now there's just no choice. And it's not just one, we need multiple. And Joe's out there, making it real, as are so many others right now. I mean, this is happening all over the place. And it's really exciting. So that that really spoke to me, just this, acknowledging this thing that we all feel, we all feel it, but we're not acting on it. And we need to act.

Pavani Yalla  1:05:29

Yeah, that was actually the second most major thing that I noticed as well, which was the fact that he designed his life. You know, I think most of us just sleepwalk through life, probably. And that's the harsh way of putting it. But to some degree, I think we all do it. And this actually reminded me a little bit of episode one with Shelly, and, you know, the work she does to live an intentional life and help others do so. And so I was thinking about how he has designed the context surrounding himself, such that he can do this work, and it can be an accelerant, the context and the environment, the people who's surrounding himself with are amplifying his ability to do this work. And it made me just think like, Okay, well, is it really, it feels really difficult, but in some ways, it's actually quite simple. It's just the who and the where, right, like, who you do life with, and where you do it. If you can choose those things carefully, then everything else just emerges, right? Everything else becomes part of that journey that unfolds towards the direction that you want it to go. So you have to have the vision for what you want. And then you pick the context, you design the context around it, and you just fall into it. And I think that's what he's, he's done. So that's inspiring. It's still big. As I think about like, the who, and the where it's like, oh, wait, do I uplift everything? But that was kind of interesting to see that he's applying the same principles in the field to his own life.

Joel Krieger  1:07:05

Yeah, it's so true, don't they say that you are basically the average of what like the five people you hang around with the most? Yeah. And you are absolutely a product of your environment. I mean, you you are not separate from where you are. So creating that construct is such a huge part of it.

Pavani Yalla  1:07:24

I think we we do it to some degree, within what I guess you would call, I've heard you use the term default world, right? When we're thinking about, well, what's the next job I want? Or where do I want to move? Or what house do I get? So we are doing that to some degree. But if you kind of zoom out of that, all of these constructs that we've created within civilization, he's just kind of zooming out and thinking about it in a broader context, which is what, what's so powerful about it?

Joel Krieger  1:07:54

One thing I'd like to touch on for a minute is this phrase regenerative design, because you know, you and I are both designers. But we were trained, we came up through practicing design within the system. When I first heard about this phrase, regenerative design, it had me because it combined two of my most favorite things, nature and design. I'm like, I'm all in this is great. It's but it's such a different way of thinking about design. And when you when you think about how practicing design, within civilization, within markets, there's a hidden context, there's a foundation that you almost don't even see, you just take it for granted. But the way you think about doing what you what you do, is completely informed and constrained by that underlying world, the needs that you're serving the motivations that play, the whole dynamics of the system. And what that produces is a very siloed way of looking at design, that's all about the product, the service, and it doesn't really take into account the system's the relationships. And to me, that's what's so interesting about regenerative design. And you know, I'm still very early in my journey of learning about this. I've read a few books. I still feel like I'm beginner's eyes here. But it's it's really exciting to begin to think about design in this other way, which is less about making and forcing, and influencing. And it's more like a dance. It's like listening, and watching and then nudging and then listening and watching and nudging. It's about it's about a new way of seeing where, instead of seeing objects, we see the relationships between them. It's just a beautiful way of seeing the world. One of the books that I've been reading I think it was maybe Daniel Christian wall he was talking about, can an object be beautiful? Like take the iPhone? Can that object be beautiful? Really? If the design of it involves horribly extractive mining processes, toxins in the ground, slave labor, can that object really be beautiful? I don't think it can. But most of us don't see that. And that is that web of relationships that surround the design of that product. So to begin to think about design, in a completely different way, that really focuses on the relationships between things is just been so inspiring to me. I'm going to lay out a spectrum, which I've read somewhere that really helped me to understand, regenerative how it sits along some other words that we know and understand. So the default system is an extractive system. It's all about, you know, taking, taking from the land taking from people. And it's inherently destructive. It's a self terminating system, then you have sustainable. And the idea behind that is, well, what if the human presence could cause no harm could leave no trace? It's not bad, but it's not good, either. It's just neutral. Then you have regenerative? What if the human presence could be a positive effect on the environment and the people? What if the effects of human activity could actually create more conditions conducive to for more life to emerge? That's, that's such an inspiring way to look at the role of people in the world. I think a lot of people have have definitely gone through a period where they see the human presences Oh, it's like a cancer people are, people were awful. Like, it's not, it's not in our inherent nature, there have been 1000s of cultures that have existed. So it's not people, it's just this culture. It's just this monoculture. There have been plenty of cultures that have found a balance, found a way to exist, that is regenerative. So it's actually not something new in many ways. It's like returning to what was not everywhere, but in some places. And so I just think it's so important for us to have an inspiring vision for what what is the purpose of our species? Why are we even here? What's our proper role in the web of life? And that's why I think that this movement is so important. And like you said, it's so important to have people like Joe, who are not just talking about it's not just theory, there's enough theory out there. We need practice. We need people out there doing it. We need bold examples. Yeah, I mean, what's your take on the whole regenerative thing?

Pavani Yalla  1:12:56

One thing that was refreshing for me when I was listening to Joe talk about regeneration was that it actually made me think about regenerative design, like everything that I thought I knew about regenerative design, or what I had heard about it was very much still within the context of civilization and the default world. Right. So it kind of shook up for me what I thought I knew about it. And now, I think this would be the beginning of a, hopefully for me, like a, an inquiry, and, and learning more about it. Because, yeah, even when you think about some of these design disciplines that are trying to practice regenerative design, like it's still all within right within the context of the the norms, yeah, the constructs that we have accepted within this world, and I don't think that's what he's talking about. So,

Joel Krieger  1:13:54

absolutely. And that's why I think it's so important to really spend some time talking about this, because what society does what civilization does is it co-opts the stuff. What it does is instead of fight against it, it usurps it, it takes the word, it takes the label, and applies it to all sorts of things that it's not, which then waters down its meaning, which is why it's so important for us to be able to to discern what is regenerative and what isn't. I think more and more, we're going to start to see this word, regeneration, regenerative design, we’ll start to see it pop up. And it's going to be applied to all sorts of things

Pavani Yalla  1:14:32

that makes us feel better about ourselves, right? Yeah. Yes, self care is important. But if we can, and we get into this probably more in the next episode, but just like, once you go through the motions of understanding what's really happening, and you go through the grief of it, and then you emerge on the other side, that's really only when you can really truly I think apply those practices. because otherwise you're still living within the illusion of this world. I think that's probably why you see that happening everywhere because people have not gone through those motions yet.

Joel Krieger  1:15:14

That's a keen insight.

Pavani Yalla  1:15:15

I haven't gone through it myself, right? Like I don't let myself go there. I would rather just put band aids on things and, and call it a day. And that's why I relate so much to these episodes, and I hope that others will as well. I think we're all kind of a different parts of that, that journey.

Joel Krieger  1:15:43

This wraps the first chapter in our two part series with Joe Brewer and the Earth Regenerators. In this episode, we took a local on the ground perspective, and in part two, we'll explore their virtual presence, we'll unpack what it takes to design regenerative human cultures. By taking a look at the intentional design of the earth regenerators community itself, we'll learn how a disparate random bunch of people from all across the globe somehow formed into a coherent, thriving online community. So if you're curious to learn more about Joe's work in Barichara, you may want to visit regeneratebarichara.org. And we're excited to share that Joe's new book, The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth is now available, you can pick up a copy over at Chelseagreen.com. As always, we'll have direct links for all these and more on the show notes for this episode. Just head over to outsideinpodcast.org and click on this episode page. Okay, so one last thing. We offer this podcast free in the spirit of the gift. It takes an enormous amount of time and energy to produce each episode. So if our work resonates with you, please help us out. Take a minute right now. Head on over to Apple podcasts and give us a rating and review. This will help us reach more kindred spirits like you. Okay, that's it for now. We will see you again in part two.

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Poacher or Protector?

Gail Koelln  0:05  

I walked in. And here's this little short lady wearing a minister's collar, avian scrubs with parrots all over them, colorful parrots.

Hector Orlando Portillo Reyes  0:22  

Something that I respect is the respect that she has for everybody... for the ant, for the bird, for the parrots, for the elephants... for everything. The respect for life.

Gail Koelln  0:38  

I call her the Jane Goodall of parrots, the project literally has taken people who are poaching and made them into protectors... and passionate parrot protectors.

Hector Orlando Portillo Reyes  0:49  

You know, we have been face to face with drug dealers, she's not afraid. she's always tranquil. She's always in peace and thinking about very positive.

Gail Koelln  1:00  

She's got an element of hardiness and bravery, that I think is not typical of your average ordinary person.

Hector Orlando Portillo Reyes  1:10  

She consults to the people, what do you want? What would you like to do? How can I help you? In the process I've seen that the people have changed, from poachers, to protectors.

Gail Koelln  1:27  

Some of the most awe-inspiring things for me were to see and hear the wild parrots flying.

Hector Orlando Portillo Reyes  1:36  

You just lift your head and see they're flying... the beginning, 50... next year 60... and next year, 100. That means that the population is growing. It's the only place in Honduras where we have naturally, in the wild, red Macaus. And that's given me satisfaction... that I am collaborating to recover a population that is declining, almost in extension.

Gail Koelln  2:11  

Before I met her it never even occurred to me that parrots shouldn't be pets. And now I'm totally the other way. LoraKim really did change my life. She really did.

Joel Krieger  2:30  

Welcome to Outside In. I'm Joel.

Pavani Yalla  2:32  

And I'm Pavani. Each episode we'll discover design in unexpected places.

Joel Krieger  2:38  

So these creators may not always call themselves designers. They actually go by many different labels. But they all have one thing in common. They create moments that have the power to change us.

Pavani Yalla  3:00  

Alright, so today we are talking to LoraKim Joyner, who is a conservationist, a wildlife veterinarian, a Unitarian Universalist minister, and many other thing. The voices that you heard at the beginning of this episode, those were Gail and Hector, two of her really close collaborators at One Earth Conservation.

Joel Krieger  3:23  

This episode is about understanding how to transform poachers into protectors. If I had to categorize what type of design this is, this is a story of community design and culture design.

Pavani Yalla  3:39  

You know, if you're a designer who's ever practiced Human-centered Design, you're probably going to learn a thing or two about it here in this conversation.

Joel Krieger  3:49  

Yeah.

Pavani Yalla  3:50  

Also, I love that we talked about science and spirituality. In popular culture, I feel like those are polarized. 

Joel Krieger  3:59  

Yeah, they are. 

Pavani Yalla  4:00  

They tend to be put in different buckets. But the fact that we are, in our conversation with her, kind of hitting on these big topics together, I think was fun for me and significant.

Joel Krieger  4:11  

Those two things should go together like peanut butter and jelly... 

Pavani Yalla  4:15  

But they don't

Joel Krieger  4:17  

Yeah. Alright, so let's get into it. We join LoraKim telling us a story from her time in Honduras.

LoraKim Joyner  4:27  

One story that I say so much, and it had such a profound impact on me, sort of in my middle career was the story of Tomas Manzanares. He is an indigenous Mosquito leader in Honduras. And I first went to Honduras in 2010, like just several months after the coup there, and it was somewhat of an unstable region. And what was happening in Honduras in his area and still is, is the encroachment of illegal land invaders and mostly driven by the narco trafficante, we say driven by the drug trade, wanted the land and wanted to protect their land. And so they didn't want outsiders in and they were taking over the indigenous villages, they were burning them down, they are assassinating people. A matter of fact, over 49 indigenous people have died since January in our area, but on the other side of the Nicaragua border, so it continues to be hot. And Tomas said, I'm tired of this, the government's not doing anything I'm going to... it's called a denouncement. I'm going to turn them in. And I'm going to give names about the people who are taking our land and taking our logs. So he turned in the names of the people. And as typical, the government doesn't have the capacity or the will, or the lack of corruption to enforce the laws. And so the people whose names he turned in, waited for him down at the river to kill him when he took his daily bath in the Rus Rus River. And he was shot four times, and had to be airlifted out and nearly died, and had to abandon his home, the whole village had to flee during this is in 2009. And so I went in 2010 in April, and he came back. Everybody warned him don't come back into the area, it's dangerous. Everybody was packing guns, we picked up the military on the way in because it was a hot area. And we were just investigating to see if we could work with these indigenous people. And so on the first morning, he takes us down to the river where he was shot, and he takes off his shirt, and he tells the story of what happened to him. And he's got scars where the surgeries were in, they're still pink and healing, he's still limping and in some of the places they're still bullets inside of him. And so he tells me the story. And I say, Tomas, why are you willing to risk your life for the parrots. And he said, Doctora, everything is at risk. So I'm willing to risk everything. If the parents don't make it, neither do my people. And that was in 2010, when he told me that story. And I said, OK, I'm in for the long haul. You know, these, this is the kind of solidarity with all of life and with each other that... these are the kinds of communities with whom I want to work. And so I still work with Tomas, he's still in the area, and still has threats against this life as do the other leaders, but they really feel that their way of life is at risk. So that is the story that taught me so much about being in solidarity to take risk and discomfort and messiness of human relationships so we just got to bear up and do that.

Joel Krieger  7:50  

I'm curious, what's the connection between the people and the parrots? Why is the work of protecting the parrots, so important here?

LoraKim Joyner  8:00  

Why would people be interested in helping parents is maybe part of that question. Many reasons. It's their cultural background, it's their wildlife, they grew up with parrots, so people, you know, they want parrots free flying, perhaps, cultural stories, there is myths around parrots, there's a lot of reasons why people want parrots in their environment. And also parrots are maybe not only integral to the Spirit, and the culture of the local people and the Internationals who work with various groups, is that parrots are seed dispersers, especially the really big parrots, the macaws, they carry really big seeds. And of course, they poop them out, and there's a fertilizer effect. So they're known as the farmers of the forest. So if we lose the parrots, we lose the health of the forest, it's sort of like losing the top foragers of various species of Monkey, so we need them. And for that reason, spiritually, as well as just ecologically, we need the parrots, but maybe what you were getting at, the really big connection is the same drivers of socio economic dysfunction that are leading to extraction economies, and are destroying the parrots, wellbeing and their ability to raise and sustain a population are the same drivers that are decimating the people's cultures and villages and lead to poverty and consumerism and domination mindsets. So that's, you know, that's the real core, that if you are going to an area where parrots are in trouble, the people are in trouble too. And so, you know, what can the conservationists do to get and transform the society that's causing all this and that's where it seems so overwhelming and hopeless because who are we we're just little people out there, trying to come to emergency band aids for the people and the parrots, knowing that it's that entire internal and external transformation that has to happen. Parents are like a gateway species that help us see the connections between domination extraction economies and how it relates to the wellbeing of all of us. We sort of see them as a gateway experience for how we want to live in a transforming way.

And can you tell me more about why they're endangered? I mean, I'm guessing it's some combination of you know, habitat destruction with development, and then also the wildlife trade...the pet trade?

Yes, that's exactly right. And depending on the species and the region, it may be more one than the other. And I come down really heavily that if we didn't poach them illegally, they would mostly survive. For instance, in Honduras, Scarlet macaws are only remaining free flying in the mosquito region, they've just been reduced to the most remote region. And that's where most parrots end up in the most remote regions, where it's the hardest to extract them and poach them and sell them. So parrots, many species are fairly adaptable, and they would do okay, if we would just quit poaching them, or they would, they would, they wouldn't be decimated nearly as much as they are. Because we've seen that Scarlet macaws can nest in the palm tree right next to your house. And they can be somewhat adaptable to food. So I come down that it is the illegal trade. And it's international demand that's fueling that there's also a domestic demand. A lot of these cultures like their pet parrots, and it's also legal, and in two countries in South America, it's legal to export them. And in a third country, it's legal to hunt them for pleasure. So that's in the Guiana Shield and South America. So we also have a legal trade issue as well.

Pavani Yalla  11:50  

Switching gears a little bit, could you tell us a little bit more about One Earth Conservation? You know, what is your mission and maybe what's unique about your approach,

LoraKim Joyner  12:01  

It's styled along the ideas of what we think parents and people need right now. And so our mission is to go where other people aren't where there are marginalized communities where people aren't doing parrots, or at least the big organizations aren't, and just show up, and just be with the people witness to the story of losing the parrots and losing the the cultures and the way of life and just show up, and then see if other people are excited about parrots, and then see what a plan we could do to be in solidarity to help them with their parrots and livelihoods. And then what would be fun for us and what we can offer and what is meaningful for us. So our mission is to be in relationship with people and parrots listen to them, and see what calls to us that we could do together. And that's what leads us to so much traveling and so many areas, because there's so many areas where people are not doing parrots, and don't even realize the parrots are in trouble.

Pavani Yalla  13:06  

Yeah. You mentioned being in solidarity with people. You've said that a few times. Is that an approach that is unique to you know, One Earth Conservation or I understand that it is probably one way of going about doing conservation? Can you talk a little bit about that approach and why it's or how it's maybe different or how you've shaped it,

LoraKim Joyner  13:28  

How it's grown on us, or how the world shapes us with the invitation to be aware that we are in unconditional solidarity. It's not like we even have a choice. It's what life outlines for us, you, you are, you are a combination of cells and viruses and fungi and your DNA is not even from one complete mammal species. It's pieced together. So you are a community, you are in solidarity with life in this earth and the ecosystems. There's no no way around that. And what we forget that we, with our cultural overlays and our  need to survive and be true to our closest families and friends. And so we forget that background truth or I do. And so the idea of saying it out loud of unconditional solidarity is basically saying that all beings have inherent worth and dignity. And we want to live in a way we want to structure our lives and even more so our society in such a way that reflects that. conservation is changing, it is realizing that it's about the people more and more. If you if the local stakeholders aren't involved in flourishing, then there's, you have a really hard time with sustainability. And the results are better with local stakeholders involved. And then this idea of transformative conservation is and decolonizing conservation. These sort of some of these bigger words is a way to say it can't just be European privileged people coming in and saying quit shooting your gorillas or quit poaching your parrots. That's beginning to have more force in conservation saying that's, that's the old way we need to transform that, and, and live in just ways for people and for parrots. So unconditional solidarity is another way to tweak that and get at that

Joel Krieger  15:29  

What you're saying really resonates with me, especially about this, this idea of solidarity, you can't really protect an animal species without considering the people. And this was actually a pretty recent aha moment for me personally, because for a long time, I've been interested in and participating in, I guess what you could call more on the end of nature conservation. So you know, caring about the sixth extinction event, that's unfolding all around us, and kind of viewing people as, you know, part of the problem, the problem. And it's kind of interesting that you can't really separate them. All these issues are so interconnected. And if you really want to save birds, or any other type of animal or a forest, you can't really do that without considering the people. And then there's this whole aspect of just what is the word conservation that's like, you know, it makes you think of setting aside and protecting. And while I think we need areas that are, you know, off limits and, and wild and preserve them as they should be. There's also something nice about conservation that integrates and includes, because I think when people don't see nature as something separate from themselves, but as something that's fundamentally a part of them, as you were saying, then that's when that magic starts to happen. I mean, what's your experience been with that?

LoraKim Joyner  17:07  

Well, it's interesting that, you know, we do work on the idea of transformative conservation. And isn't that a paradox? We're conserving and we want to transform, you know, what's, what's, what's going on with that. So I actually liked the Zen sense of that, there is a beauty that we want to sustain and keep going. And we also have to just change everything. At the same time my spouse is very into Zen Buddhism. And so he appreciates that paradox as well. And we look forward to perhaps setting up a Transformative Conservation Center, an intentional community in a couple of years. And we think about changing the name because conservation is so weird, it's not conserving, it's something else going on. But we like the paradox, we like the critique, why do you use the word conservation sort of regeneration? Why do we do that and it just, it plays with the brain a little a little bit. Now we also get criticism, Joel, for, it's so interesting of being too human-centered, or being too parrot-centered. And and so what you were saying about how we really can't separate them is the message and the approach. And it's hard for us to understand that I don't know about you all, but don't you sometimes want to choose one species over another.

Joel Krieger  18:36  

Yes, this is it's a real challenge because it's almost like the problem is so complex, so enormously complex, that you almost it's too much and so it is a natural tendency to say okay, well where do I feel I'm just gonna focus on this one thing and then you and then you find that this one thing is connected to these other things. And so it's it's it's really it's complexity is what it is, it's almost like embracing that is a part of the work right.

LoraKim Joyner  19:03  

It's so hard. And that's the transformative piece. You know, the sort of the, the piece of the transformation that happened in me going from everything is black and white, white, suburban, privileged, North American to going... wait a minute, things are way more complex than I thought... and I have, I have to shift, I don't have a choice. And in that internal transformation that opens up so much beauty and so much confusion. You have to let so many stories go. And I don't know about you all but I’m still letting stories go. I know that humans are story driven. That's how we come together and have cultural expectations and bonding. But sometimes I feel really lost. Because there isn't a story. There's just showing up in the moment. And not knowing what's going to come or what should come or how to even live this life.

Joel Krieger  20:06  

Well, I can definitely relate to what you're saying about losing stories as you get older. I mean, I think there are a lot of cultural, you know, meta-narratives that you don't even see, it's like the air you breathe, you can't even see them, you just take them for granted. And they inform everything about your worldview. And then the more experiences you have, hopefully, throughout life, it pushes you into a place where you have a zoomed out perspective. And you can see those, those cultural stories for what they are, and a lot of them are just fundamentally wrong, you know, our understanding of how life works, for example, our understanding of ourselves as separate from this thing out there called nature. So yeah, I feel like it's totally part of the transformation is letting go of old stories and embracing new ones. I'm thinking maybe this is a good time to switch into the work itself. And, you know, maybe one place to start would be kind of rewinding to our, our conversation about, about people as a part of conservation. So you've written a lot about understanding the needs of poachers. And I think that's really interesting, because often, I think, in any sort of activism, you can get caught up in this war-like mentality, it is like, we are against this, we are fighting against this. But this to me speaks to a really it's not a fight, it's we need to understand why these people are doing, what they're doing, why they believe what they believe. And so I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit on that, and how that's impacted your conservation efforts.

LoraKim Joyner  21:52  

So in the younger years, I was pretty mad at poachers. You know, Diane Fossey was my anti-hero. And always realizing that she maybe didn't have, at least the story says she didn't have the best relationships with the local people. And may have even been part of how she ended up being murdered in the field. So I had that question. I've been really mad at the poachers. We chased them, got people with guns. We yelled at that. We did all kinds of things. We were against the poachers in Guatemala in those years. And yet, there was this nagging piece that... they're people. But I didn't understand. So there was that. But you know, who I was really mad at even more than the poachers. I was mad at people like me. I was mad at the colonizers, the North Americans that have caused such havoc in the States of America, the consumerism, the extraction economies that was killing the people I loved and the people I love. And the wealthy Guatemalans that I worked with, and do that were part of this devastating lifestyle for wildlife. And so that's who I needed to forgive. The poachers, yes, but really the rest of the world, the rest of the world that wants to put parrots in cages, because we're lonely, and they're beautiful. And we want them around us, I understand that. So pet owners, breeders of pet birds, that was my whole community before I moved to Guatemala. So I had to come to terms with the international community of people who look like me and have the privilege to extract economies and put other beings at risk. So that took a lot of work. And I knew that was part of my inner work was to not hate anybody or anything because that's not wholesome. And it's... I don't think it gives much resilience. So that's constant work. reframing that judgment story. And nonviolent communication was very helpful for me in that, yes, we want to hold the poachers responsible. We want to hold the government responsible. We want to hold the drug traffickers responsible. But I also know that they're acting out there, the same needs that I have. And so I try to bring that up in the conversation, as people go off with machetes and guns and try to find the poachers.

Pavani Yalla  24:31  

What are some of those needs?

LoraKim Joyner  24:35  

Belonging. Worth. Family. Respect. Mattering. Being heard. For some poachers, it's sustenance and security. A lot of the poaching families they're making more money. I mean it's income. A lot of poachers like being around wildlife. Not all... some are... seem fairly disconnected and centered on the human species, but a lot of them just like the hunt, they like the risk. They like climbing the trees, they want to hold them, they want to be around them, they like being good at animals. And how is that different than a wildlife veterinarian or conservationists? We're just doing it with cameras and tools to measure bird's nests, but we're all driven to wanting to be outdoors with the animals.

Pavani Yalla  25:31  

So for you, then is it a matter of trying to pivot or work with those needs and help people understand there are other ways to fulfill those needs? What goes into the craft of actually transforming someone?

LoraKim Joyner  25:49  

I wish I had the power to transform people. So in many of the areas, out of the extraction economies, maybe the entire community, climbed trees and took parrots. I had illegal parents as a child growing up, they were sold in pet stores. So I was part of it. So part of the transformation is to be in solidarity with the people where they are. Why do you poach parrots? What's going on? What's your life, you know really feel like you're on their side. And you really have to be on their side, because they can tell you if you're not on their side. And many of the people who were involved in the trade around the trade, they really don't want to lose their parrots because they love them, you know, or they have a strong tie to them. So it's just being in the space with them to say, Yeah, I understand you, you want to feed your family and you want matter and respect. What if we try hiring you as a Parrot Ranger? How many of those needs could you meet, and you'd also keep parrots in your area for your children to come. And that seems to be fairly attractive is offering stipends and hiring people... pretty quick conversion, because they get so many needs met... team work, being rough and tough, mattering all that great stuff out there with parrot conservation, and, and it gives them some economic leeway to experience different choices. And to see if they could, could live in that way. It gives them the space. I get angry at conservationists who say don't pay people, they should just want to volunteer and commit to... it's their parrots. Don't pay people. That's wrong. Yeah, it's wrong motivation. Well, that's usually being set by conservationists that are making $100,000 a year. They're getting paid to do conservation. So why do we expect the most marginalised amongst us to volunteer their time when they're already sustenance farmers, it seems to be an inherent racism. That I see, that's some of that meta-narrative, that we expect them to do the hard work of conservation and sacrifice, their time and their leisure and their extra, somewhat disposable income to be able to buy a Coca-Cola. And instead of never having something sweet, we expect them to give that up. But we're not willing to live in a way to give it up. So I would say livelihoods is a really important transformer. And if we want to say, well, they don't, they're just doing it because they're getting paid. Well transformation for them maybe is having enough to eat and being able to afford medicine and having some choice about what goods they consume and how they consume them. Maybe that is transformation for them.

Joel Krieger  28:50  

Yeah, it's really interesting to think about, you know, there's almost 8 billion people, something like that on the earth. And yeah, if you can't meet your basic needs of providing food and shelter for your family, you're gonna do whatever you need to do to meet those needs. And so like, once you look at it that way, you can kind of easily see how well this becomes a it's not even a question. It's like, if you don't have a lot of choice, if you don't have a lot of opportunity, and this is one way out of your situation, then yeah, it seems like a reasonable thing to do to most people, right?

LoraKim Joyner  29:30  

It does. And so some of the work that I have to do and that maybe we all have to do on the inner transformation is what is fueling the extraction economies is the demand. So it was the demand in the US and Europe that wiped out the parrots in Central America. And because that's where most of the parrots were going in the 80s. And then that set up families and lineages of poaching as a way to get cash income because they had not had it before. And now the markets have just shifted. They're, you know, Arabia going east, and they're still going to private, wealthy collectors illegally. So it's that demand that is putting those choices on the people. It's our way of life where the wealthy, the wealthier can extract and pay people to destroy their culture, in their environment, and their parents for their own benefit. So the transformation that we need to do is we can work with the local poachers and livelihoods, that's great. We have to work with the whole society, this demand and privilege and entitlement to extract other people's wildlife to have in their homes. Columbus did it on the very first trip. You know, he ended up in the Dominican Republic. And he took back people he enslaved and he took back three Hispaniola parrots. It began right away, people and parrots together. 

Joel Krieger  31:02  

I'm curious... you have a really unique background. So you're a wildlife veterinarian, a Unitarian Universalist minister, a certified trainer in nonviolent communication. And so all of these things inform your work and your practice. Could you speak a bit how these experiences have affected your work as a conservationist?

LoraKim Joyner  31:26  

I would say a lot. Yeah. A great deal. The nonviolent communication piece is a practice founded by Marshall Rosenberg that can help us reduce our use of violence in our conversations. And it can help us get along better with people because they feel like we're not judging them that we're actually on their side and the center components are is translate everything that you think and say and hear into feelings and needs of the individual. So it's constant in the moment mindfulness practice, of translating, getting out of your loops of judgment. And so being in a constant judgment, space is not only taking away energy, it, it puts me in a space where that actual moment of conflict and confusion moves from being a draining resource to a powerful resource of adjusting me so that I see people where they are, and I believe it, I don't have proof of this, I believe it helps the conservation it helps the relationships for me to just kind of you know, with all my body language and everything I'm saying, Don't judge the poacher don't judge the rich person. Instead, it becomes more embodied of going oh, well what's going on for you. And that was all practice that was all practice that allowed it to be embodied instead of formulaic so that that informs it quite a quite a bit that that basic lack of judgment and empathy. And the Unitarian Universalism ministry, that came about because I just couldn't do frontline conservation anymore. I just I didn't I was burned out. But I realized that I could do conservation through working with the human heart and so I was looking for a way to do that to heal my own and to help others for transformation in their own heart. And in those days we didn't really have the field of human dimensions of conservation and conservation psychology it wasn't there. So I took a class in Divinity School and said well that's the language of the heart and transformation and justice I'll go do that. What I really want to say is what the work in ministry does is it gave me space to be healed  and to have a community and also a community of faith and a story that says other people and other beings matter, and that's what we're on this earth to do. So it's a kind of a religious story. But that also informs and inspires me to stay present with the work. I'm not so involved with Unitarian Universalism anymore and not so involved with NVC. My regular spiritual practice has faded. It's not as intense. I get up and do conservation all day. And is that not a spiritual practice?

Joel Krieger  34:35  

Yeah, well said. Yeah. And how does that manifest in concrete ways on the ground? I mean, can you describe like what's actually happening? What are you actually doing with these people? When you go to these places?

LoraKim Joyner  34:53  

The concrete work, here's the weird thing. I spend most my time teaching people how to count parrots. People don't know how to count parrots, they don't know that their parrots are in trouble. And so we need those statistics to say parrots are in trouble, what percentage are young chicks coming out. And by counting parrots, you have to focus on parrots. And so all of a sudden, you have to understand their biology and ecology. So you can get young people, poachers, all kinds of people. And all of a sudden, they're super excited about trying to understand their parrots so that they can get a good, accurate number. And so it's team building and citizen scientists, they fall in love with the parrots by counting them. So often, when I go in into the countries, I'll go show me your parrots, show me your parrots, and tell me stories about your parrots. And then let's count them, I'd like to count them. You know, I'd like to know what's going on. And then they'll help me count them. And then usually you can find people in the government, other organizations and indigenous communities that might say, Oh, my gosh, our parents are in trouble. I say, well, maybe we should try to protect their nest, what do you guys think? Maybe I can help you guys do that. And, so then we move on to nest protection, it's urgent. And I think we've got to protect the nests. And so we drop off counting and we start hiring people to find nests and report their outcome and protect them. And so that chicks actually do fledge and with those statistics, we can tell the world and granting agencies that we have 100% poaching in this country, or that you barely have any macaws left, because nobody knows nobody's recording it. So. So that's just that's a huge, a huge part of the work that I do, and also looking for funds to pay local people. And developing and growing a project because we're very small, and growing capacity, and then inviting other people to come in who could help support financially and through networks, the local efforts. So usually just starts with one village, one organization, and then we try to build it out from that to have a greater impact within the region and the country.

Joel Krieger  37:08  

Yeah, it sounds like, so much of this has to do with being with the community, getting to know the community, building relationships, building trust, I mean, this takes time, I'd love to hear about, you know, structures, and any intentional decisions you've made about how we bring these people together and how we get them engaged

LoraKim Joyner  37:36  

And all kinds of people, right? Yeah. Because of demographics and interests. So one is to just share and make available my natural enthusiasm and sense of appreciation for the people and their birds. Just that is a design element. Because it's motivating, it's fun to be around. I'm mostly sincere the internal drama is most days kind of low. And so I think that is a design piece that says, you can trust me, you know, I'm gonna admit to being white, cys, heterosexist, middle class, I'm gonna admit to all of that. And let's go look for some birds. And so I think that's a design piece, putting people that they feel appreciated and heard. And let's go do something fun together, let's just go have experiences together. And that's where the trust in the relationship comes out as shared experiences in nature. People also seem to appreciate... I'd be interested to see how this fits in the design world... I'm surprised at how people appreciate not only the softer pieces of empathy, and presence and enthusiasm, they also appreciate competence. People like science all over the world. They like knowing stuff and knowing their birds and they, and they like learning stuff. They like sharing their knowledge. So knowledge and production of knowledge and lifting up your own knowledge and sharing it and pulling it out of other people seems to be a fairly exciting creative force. And so again, in any science, I can bring and pull out of them.  People seem to really enjoy that space.

Pavani Yalla  39:31  

Education is empowering, right?

LoraKim Joyner  39:34  

And learning together and sharing learning experiences together... just wow. Our minds seem to really enjoy that. I also travel with a full medical kit... diagnostic lab, I've done a lot of teaching in veterinary medicine, because that's part of teaching people that birds matter. So I always figured at least a small kit if not a full kit, so there's always a stethoscope. So if we have sick birds in the field, everybody gets to listen to their heart. And they go, Oh, you treat birds just like people? Yeah, they get the same diseases we do. They matter, let's treat them. And let's treat them with care, with high quality veterinary care. And that's often new for people to go, oh my gosh, and so to be able to listen to the heartbeat of a wild parrot, some people have told me it's been the most transformative moment in their lives, to be able to hear the heart of another bird, they're usually young birds, so they don't mind too much it's like babies, they're sleeping through it. So it's not usually a stress for the birds. And and so offering that connection, for joy for people, resilience for people, and to make the connection to parents. So by being a veterinarian, I can do all that and say, oh, let's birds matter. And we've got all these medicines and surgery we can do for them. And it's just really a witness that birds matter. So I think about all those things where I show up with people.

Joel Krieger  41:03  

That's wonderful, it just kind of points to this work can be disarming. And, just human. I mean, I love how you said, let's go, let's just go have a fun experience together. And that's a way for people. And then towards the end of the process, you know, hopefully if everything goes well, there's change that happens. There's a change in the people. There's a change, hopefully, in the parent population, maybe stabilizing, maybe resurging. I'd love it if you could share some examples, just anecdotal stories of the types of transformations that you've seen through this work.

LoraKim Joyner  41:46  

So cultural change takes longer than I'll be alive and present in any one area. Right? It just takes generations. And so the short term success that we see in some countries where there's a leadership core that is interested and capable, and even can raise funds to do their parrot work. That's just tremendous. And it's very fragile. So let's take Nicaragua, they have an island there called Ometope Island. It's two volcanoes. It's gorgeous. Nobody knew what was going on with the parrots there. And I said, Well, not my country. But let's let's go show up, and started working with some local people that were kind of counting parents a little bit. And so that was in 2013. Now, we brought in a really big international organization that has a strong presence in Nicaragua. They got some major grants in the last couple of years. And so they're hiring people that I had volunteer eight years ago, they're hiring them full-time throughout the year. And, I'm still their science advisor, but they're just doing it all. And it all started with me just showing up counting parrots for two nights back in 2013. And they're just like, on their own, I still meet with them for science and write up some of the papers with them. But, what's gonna happen when that money goes away? Or if they're not going to get the funding, there's maybe 100 young people that are really involved and committed, but the people who are poaching are the communities, the people taking the forest down are the communities. How do we fix that? We have a really strong crew, but there's no guarantee that that whole island community is going to change, especially if you look at what's going on in Nicaragua now. You know, it's a dictatorship. You know, people are dying, trying to get president Ortega out of office. And there's just no guarantee there... no guarantee whatsoever, that when money moves and goes away, that that core group of committed people are going to have the resources and the safety and security to keep their parrots on that island. So that's a great success story. But it's so fragile. And that's why we need to find sustainable ways to accompany people for 50, I used to say 25, now I say 50 now I say more than 50 years because you have to weather out these really hard socio economic ups and downs

Joel Krieger  44:33  

Yeah

LoraKim Joyner  44:33  

That was a really positive story. Do you want to hear anything...

Joel Krieger  44:38  

Yeah maybe a positive story of transformation. Yeah.

LoraKim Joyner  44:41  

Yeah, well so in Honduras, well, I talked about fragile... I mean, we just don't know when that we're going to lose the forests, when there's going to be another coup. When  someone else is going to get assassinated there. I mean, it's really, really fragile. However, we went working with the local people 100% poaching them, Scarlet Macau nests in 2014. And it's been up and down, but it's stabilized around 10%. So they're starting to see Scarlet macaws, where they haven't seen them for decades. And it's the local people that, you know, I helped do the finances, the capacity training, but they're out there, risking their lives trying to protect their nests from international interests, and narco people and corrupt officials. And they're doing a huge, it's amazing, 1.1 million acres of 11 indigenous communities in an impossible, impossible area to work in. And they're doing it... this year, I don't know about five years from now, when we have less money, and the political environment changes. But for right now they're saving lives, and they're saving parents. So it's very much a success story this year.

Joel Krieger  45:55  

I wonder very much about how, how we make this leap from you know, it's almost like there's this arresting phase, this kind of slowing down or pausing the extraction and the destruction. And it sounds like that's done in a way that's... you use the word fragile. And it also sounds like temporary, because the reason that these people are able to not do that is because they're being paid to do something else. So I wonder, you know, is, a lot of these countries get sucked into this, you know, the big development, global development, here, we're going to lend you money, and there's no way you're ever going to be able to pay off this debt, therefore, you are going to be tearing down your forests, you're going to be allowing mining. And how do you get out of that? I mean, it almost seems like there's got to be, it all comes down to money. It all comes down to, you know, some other plausible way that their economy could be supported. I'm just wondering how you think about maneuvering around that tricky pivot It seems like we have to make?

LoraKim Joyner  47:06  

Yeah. And how do we tell the story where we're all saying we have no hope we're just witnessing the destruction of the parents and the planet? But how do we live in that space that we're holding on to a remnant? where maybe the miracle can flow out of it? How do we have we turn around that huge, destructive? economy? I don't know I'm not sure I have much hope that we can do it, or we can do it in time. But we know we can do it today. And we know in the way that we interact with each other in our organization, and with other organizations we know, we can live the dream, we can live the transformation now, today, and is that enough? No, most days, it isn't. But it keeps one engaged to go today's enough. Today, today is enough to do that. How to turn it around. One thing I tell people... quit taking drugs. You know, it's the cocaine habit that we have in this country that's fueling so much of that corruption in the Americas. The big money that's that flows for the officials, and it's the danger risk as well. So the demand for drugs, not just wildlife is part of this. And if we need to all just cut it out. And I don't know, I don't know how to do that either. I don't know how, because drugs is an extraction economy. They grow it, they move it. We leave the violence there, and we extract the product. So it's that whole piece. But how are we going to turn around the cocaine trade soon enough. So we don't have that money flow for corrupting the governments where there's no power to keep the forest from coming down.

Joel Krieger  49:04  

It's another illuminating example of how interwoven all these issues are.

Pavani Yalla  49:11  

One thing that I hadn't maybe put as much emphasis on is the responsibility that we all have, outside of just not putting birds in cages, we could be complicit and not even realize it. And so that is that overwhelming feeling for sure. And I'm sure everyone... people are at different stages of that, of that understanding. One question I have for you is for folks who have different levels of awareness of what's going on and then how complex it is, what are different ways that you all engage, transforming, not necessarily the poachers, but everyone else, right. I also remember reading about your nurture nature program, you know, the call for, for birding, you're working a lot of different angles. What is your approach there? It feels like a pretty big thing to take on.

LoraKim Joyner  50:12  

The nurture nature program is, it's sort of getting at the big picture piece, that we need healthy people that connect strongly to other people and to nature. If they are able to care for themselves, care for others of all species, and if they're able to undo the cultural construct that says humans are separate from others, or that some humans are better than others, or species are important and don't have inherent worth and dignity. So this was our attempt to get out the big picture piece to support people where they are to help them connect and nurture nature, which means it goes back to nonviolent communication, really caring and loving and accepting everything that is, so you're present in the moment. And paradoxically, so you have more strength and power to change what is actually in the current moment. So it's like any other mindfulness intentional social action piece. And so we're really subtle about it. I mean, bird walks are heavy pressure for social justice. But we've experimented with all kinds of ways that what we're good at and what we love to do, can help other people come into full realization of the beauty that connects them to all of life. And maybe out of that comes some social change. And so that's what our program is. So what does it actually do? It's writing books, it's giving webinars, it's taking people on bird walks, it's not heavy duty, all the birds are dying and suffering and blah, blah, blah, it's all because we're into drugs drinking coffee, it's not like that. It's just this is a space for us to see the worth and the interconnection of life around us, and maybe a safe space to try a few of these topics about how there's fewer birds than there used to be, and why is that? And how can we use our time together as a birding community today, to do some changes, to have a little more energy to hold the complexity without a demand. Without saying, you must repent. You must no longer... you must drink bird friendly coffee, and bird friendly cocaine, you know, whatever, you know, it's without a demand. So it's, it's a gentle message. If it comes up, it comes up as a shared message of what we're experiencing together as we see a bald eagle flyover.

Pavani Yalla  52:51  

Yeah, that's amazing. So last weekend, I went on a walk with my children, and we saw an owl. And it was huge. And I've never seen an owl like that, you know, in the wild. A few other people were kind of gathered around with binoculars looking at it. And my children were amazed. They were like, their eyes got big, and they're just like, Oh my gosh, because they read about owls in books. And to me, like, it's like capturing that moment, or that type of moment and replicating it. I would love for them and myself to have more of those moments. And I'm imagining that that's part of it... it's just kind of a an innate understanding that there is awe and wonder and then that you're connected, and just reminding yourself of that, that would then eventually to your point be the start of a transformation or maybe a journey, but not a heavy handed approach

LoraKim Joyner  53:44  

To hold the whole complexity. I used to lead bird walks when I lived in, outside of New Mexico and the congregation's children came up for the day and we were going around with all this bird watching and telling bird stories. And one young boy had been born with a cocaine addiction with his parents and he was kind of all over the place, little little, little hard to focus. And we came across a pond of snow geese, and it was a bright sunny days. So they're white, and the sun's reflecting and it's beautiful, which is pretty amazing. So we're all there. And then the snow geese all took off at the same time like a clap of thunder right over everybody's head. This young boy jumped up and down and screamed and ran right into the arms of his grandparents. And they held each other as the birds went over. And of course, all the other children had a very similar response. I didn't have to do any teaching there... little Joey knew that this was awesome and wonder and love and connection were his responses to that. And so those are the kinds of experiences that can help us all maybe grow in resilience to hold the complexity and confusion of being alive on this planet.

Pavani Yalla  55:06  

Well said.

Joel Krieger  55:08  

As you were both talking about the stories of birds, and kind of watching birds I was thinking about... so I feel very fortunate that I live in a very wooded neighborhood. So there's a lot of birds in the mornings, I like to have a cup of coffee out on the back porch, and just you know, it's just very peaceful, just the birdsong. I just think collectively, we take it for granted. I've been thinking a lot about how much of our existence is mediated through man-made environments, man-made objects. And that is shaping who we are, you know, we, we designed our environments, we design these objects, and they're designing us. And so we have stepped out of the community of life. It's not working on us anymore. And that is such a part of this, this struggle that we have is just the simple things, noticing. There's no more time to notice. And sometimes, I think that if we just had more openings like that, for people, if we could only have more of these extended moments, where we remember what it's supposed to be like, what normal really is, then we'd be in much better shape.

LoraKim Joyner  56:28  

And slow down, don't need to read a book, or make more money, or have a teacher, we just need to slow down. And, you know, maybe that's the way to bring it back to the community conservation, the offering stipends, the showing up in solidarity slows us all down and say, let's go look at parrots and give some money so there's some spaciousness around paying attention to their, the animals and around their lives. And so they can slow down, we can also go down together and say, this is what's important. Let me tell you, when you're in a three hour count, and you can't move, and you're in one place, you have to slow down. You have to watch and observe. And so. So I think that maybe sort of is our message is just slow down and be aware of who we really are. We are the earth.

Pavani Yalla  57:31  

What was exciting for you about this episode? What stuck with you since our conversation with LoraKim?

Joel Krieger  57:38  

I don't know I want to be a conservationist. I know, right? Yeah, sometimes I just want to quit my day job and go work in the field. Yeah, I suppose it's the interconnected nature of the work. You know, at the beginning, she was telling the story of Tomas. And he said, if the parrots don't make it, neither do the people. And I was kind of like, well, how can that be? How are they so interdependent? You know, we realize that in order to save the parrots, you got to first save the people. And LoraKim said that conservation in general is starting to realize that it's all about the people. So if the local stakeholders aren't involved, and if they're not flourishing and thriving, then you're gonna have a really hard time. I think she described the work of transformation here is to be in solidarity with the people where they are, you know, don't judge the poachers. maybe ask them, why do you poach parrots? And I thought it was really interesting. She said, you really have to be on their side, and they can tell if you aren't on their side. And isn't that familiar? You know, this idea of transcending sides. It reminds me a lot of what we learned in the last episode with Kevin Jones, you know, asking what is it like to be you? Trying to have compassion, and understand the poachers and understand why are they doing this? They're not bad people. In fact, if you were in their position, you'd probably be doing the same thing. All they need is a decent job, and a fair wage. And so that's why giving them a job protecting parrots is so effective. It's like they can support their families, and they now belong to something bigger than themselves. They matter. I thought that was a really important point. It's that emotion, that feeling of belonging?

Pavani Yalla  59:39  

Yeah. Yeah, the whole time she was talking about understanding the needs of poachers, I couldn't help but think about, you know, what we in the design community, call Human Centered Design, and design thinking that initial phase of like empathizing and understanding your audience or your users, so that you can design for them and solve their problems, right? That is very familiar to me like she was talking about all those like, Oh, yeah, you're thinking about what people are thinking, feeling doing, what do they need. And so she is applying design thinking, again, whether she calls it that or not to the work, and I think in a much more pure way, to be honest, than most of us do. Because they don't really teach us and I don't know, I mean, it's been a while since I went to school for this kind of thing, but they don't really teach you how to truly empathize with your audience and understand their needs. And I think we often come to it as designers with our own objectives, whether they're individual, you know, I want to do this project, because I want it, I want to check off these skills, or I want something in my portfolio, or you come to it with the objectives of the business that you're working for, or the industry that you're a part of. And so there are I think, preconceived notions and judgments that are baked into all of those. Whereas what she's doing, and I think her unique training in nonviolent communication, as a minister, those have all helped her show up in a very different way, when she's doing those early phases of the design process, where she's actually really, truly in solidarity with folks and trying to understand what they need, what do they want to do?

Joel Krieger  1:01:31  

Yeah, there's a really emergent process you described there, where it's almost like she's coming into these communities without necessarily a preconceived notion of what has to happen. But it's almost like the formula is: go there, get to know the people build relationships, and together, figure out what needs to happen. Which to me is very different than how a lot of design is done, it's almost forced... I'm going to create the circumstances to force the thing to happen, to make a thing happen. Well, this is a more organic way to let things unfold.

Pavani Yalla  1:02:05  

Yeah, for sure. You know, the other thing that was interesting to me, as we think about that process of just showing up and understanding what people really need. One of my favorite moments in the interview was when she said that people say, it was such a transformative experience to hear the heartbeat of a parrot. And it reminded me of some of the work we used to do, you know, educational work, experiential education, like learning by doing. So what she's doing is providing knowledge, but experiential knowledge. So it's not just theoretical, where she's going in and teaching people about parrots and telling them that they're endangered, and you need to help. But she's putting them in situations where they feel it in their bones, they feel the loss innately. And it starts with, like she said, getting them to count the parents, right? Like, she probably knows that there's parrots, the numbers are down. But she's getting them to count their own parents so that through that process, they realize, oh, wow, we are in trouble here, right. And then they're invested in, in a problem that maybe they weren't thinking too much about before. And then the experiences that she has with them where they are, you know, treating the parents feeling the parents, these are all very hands-on experiences that get you to feel invested in the problem, but also understand the problem in your bones in a way that you wouldn't if you were just being told something, I think it's very effective.

Joel Krieger  1:03:35  

Yeah, I was thinking about the job that they give a lot of the former poachers is the job of a parrot counter. And it makes me think about the significance of attention. It's a slow, very meditative thing, you're going out into the jungle, and you're watching, and you're observing. And in a way, it kind of directs their attention to the parrots in a different way than they've been looking at them before. So they, it's almost like this job gives people the space to just notice the beauty. You know, before they may have seen it as a commodity, as a dollar sign. And she actually said, they fall in love with the parrots by counting them. So, you know, it just brings us back to how very little of our attention we give to the natural world today. You know, maybe that's really just all that's needed, at the start, anyhow, is just to notice.

Pavani Yalla  1:04:33  

Yeah. You know, I was thinking about the notion of time, also. Thinking about, gosh, it's gotta be hard to go into this work, to be doing it for not only years, but for decades before you start to see the fruits of your labor. Yeah, how do you first, motivate yourself but also motivate others, to commit to this type of work when, you know we live in a world now, where increasingly we rely on instant gratification, whether that's in our careers or in our day to day. So, how do you do that? That just feels like a really hard thing to solve for to get people to commit to something that is a big problem that you don't actually see change. Change is slow. And it takes a long, long, long, long time. And as I was thinking about that i was also remembering some of the things she was saying about how nothing is permanent, right? Like when we were her asking her about transformation and what's happened to some of these places. She says, you know, today, this is working, but we don't know five years from now, 10 years from now. So she acknowledges that, but I didn't sense despair. And maybe this is where her spiritual training helps where you focus on each moment. And you focus on the now. There's no despair about the future, because it's very much about the experience in the present moment. And so maybe for her motivating people to work on this type of stuff isn't all about... hundreds of years from now, parrots will be here, but it's about... this is fun, in the moment, right now. You're enjoying doing this work. This is the type of work that you can be engaged and be fulfilled in the moment, regardless of what might happen in the far future.

Alright, that's it for this episode. But one quick note before we wrap. The work that One Earth Conservation does depend so much on the livelihoods of the indigenous people who are putting their lives on the line for the parrots and their people. Please consider donating to their cause by visiting the One Earth Conservation website at oneearthconservation.org. Here you can also learn more about the organization, LoraKim, and her collaborators. And special thanks to Hector and Gail for providing their perspective on One Earth Conservation and the work that they do with LoraKim.

Joel Krieger  1:07:00  

And as always, if you like what you hear, and we really hope that you do, please support our work by giving us a rating and review. Or think of one person in your life who would find value in this podcast and share it with them.

Pavani Yalla  1:07:16  

See you next time.

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