Charles Eisenstein discusses carbon and environmental solutions with RFK Jr in this episode. Charles Eisenstein is an author, speaker, countercultural philosopher, and author of several books. His new book, The Coronation, comes out this summer. It is available here.
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| Hey, everybody! | |
| Charles Eisenstein is an American public speaker and author. | |
| His work covers a wide range of topics, including the history of human civilization, economics, spirituality, and the ecology movement. | |
| He graduated from Yale University with a degree in mathematics and philosophy. | |
| And I really wanted to talk to you this Earth Week, Charles, because the climate issue has really now been I've become the dominant and very, very polarizing issue in the environmental movement in our country. | |
| And you have a different take on it than a lot of other environmentalists. | |
| So I just wanted to explore some of your thoughts. | |
| Yeah, I want to say at the outset that there is a... | |
| Fundamental truth that is being expressed in the climate change movement and the idea of a climate emergency, which is that what we as human beings do to the planet comes back to affect ourselves. | |
| And that is a very ancient understanding, but for modern civilization, it's a new understanding that we can't just do with impunity whatever we want to nature and not have it affect ourselves. | |
| Our well-being. | |
| That said, we tend to frame the problem in familiar, comfortable, reductionistic terms. | |
| And this is a much larger pattern in our civilization. | |
| You have a problem, and you immediately try to find the one cause, the one thing to control or to go to war against. | |
| And that becomes a proxy for a much bigger, more complex problem. | |
| So this kind of us versus them reductionistic thinking can take the form of what I call carbon reductionism that reduces the global ecological crisis to one thing that we can measure and technologically control. | |
| And as in many other areas of our collective lives, The things that get left out from that singular focus come back to haunt us in the long run. | |
| And this is especially true with the global ecosystem. | |
| So I like to try to expand the conversation to look at, for example, the role of forests and oceans and species and wetlands and so on and so forth, mangroves, seagrass, meadows, whales, fish, etc., etc., as organs of a living being. | |
| Because then... | |
| We realized that when we degrade the organs, I mean, if we continue to deforest and to put out toxic pollution and to fill the oceans with plastic and to overfish the fish and to drain the wetlands and to dig enormous pit mines all over the place, then even if we cut carbon to zero, The planet still dies to death of a million cuts. | |
| So that's one aspect of what I talk about environmentally. | |
| I'll head it back over to you. | |
| These are issues that I've been struggling with for 40 years about how do you frame a debate? | |
| How do you actually solve problems? | |
| And, you know, carbon is a problem and not just... | |
| Or warming, but the fossil fuels that we use to produce carbon, to me, produce much worse outcomes. | |
| The ocean acidification, which is at this point, and there's no controversy. | |
| If you put carbon into the atmosphere, the oceans become the sink. | |
| They become more acid. | |
| The clams, the shellfish, the bivalves, and the zooplankton, which also have calcium shells, Become incapable of producing homes for themselves, and you get massive die-offs, which we're seeing now. | |
| To me, that's at least as frightening as the ice caps melting. | |
| I've been in the coal industry for many, many years, because all of the high-altitude lakes on the Adirondacks and the entire... | |
| Appalachian chain from Georgia up to Northern Quebec are now, and many of them have zero vision because of acid. | |
| We have ozone particulates, which cause a half a billion dollars in injury, mainly to children and lung injuries and medical costs just in America every year. | |
| And then the mercury that is emitted when you burn carbon ends up in the fish. | |
| We eat fish and we have less healthy children and less healthy lives. | |
| But it's hard to make political progress on those areas without kind of identifying a single culprit and then targeting legislation to address that and litigation. | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah, some issues have an easily identifiable single culprit. | |
| Like with acid rain, for example, there was a pretty linear cause and effect that you could identify. | |
| With climate change, I feel like we're... | |
| Projecting something onto a linear cause and effect that is actually not that linear. | |
| So even to take the example of crustaceans, not only do they suffer from ocean acidification, but their prior decline, which was massive. | |
| I mean, if you look at like the size of the quahogs, you know, the oysters and the clams and stuff a couple hundred years ago. | |
| I mean, if you look at the remains that the Native Americans left with these gigantic mountains of shells. | |
| I mean, the oceans, the estuaries, the coastal wetlands used to be teeming with life. | |
| You know, just to give an example of that. | |
| We have oyster middens up and down the East Coast, but even in the 19th century, in the early 19th century, New Yorkers ate more oyster meat than they did beef, chicken, and pork combined. | |
| There were thousands of oyster houses in Manhattan. | |
| We had a bivalve called the East River Oyster that had a shell that was 11 inches long. | |
| It had seven pounds of flesh in it. | |
| During the 18th century, there were so much lobsters washed ashore, just natural die-offs to fertilize all the coastal farms of New England. | |
| And there were riots in Massachusetts prisons because the prisoners were so sick of eating lobsters. | |
| Yeah. | |
| We have this kind of abundance that people cannot even imagine today. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And you know what the shells of all of those crustaceans are made out of? | |
| Calcium carbonate. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So when you have healthy ecosystems, then they're resilient to changes in atmospheric gases. | |
| They can take the, you know, from the tiny coxylophores all the way to the big clams and oysters, they're pulling carbon out of the ocean. | |
| And maintaining the conditions for their own thriving. | |
| And that's a general principle, which is life maintains the conditions for life. | |
| So when we destroy life, when we destroy the ocean ecosystems, even regardless of greenhouse gases, Then life becomes less able to maintain homeostasis. | |
| And we become very vulnerable to changes in atmospheric gases and temperature. | |
| Because if we had... | |
| Because there's so much really good information now just coming out on the capacity of the soils, of healthy soils, to basically absorb all the excess carbon that we're now producing. | |
| Right. | |
| If we actually had not wrapped the soils with glyphosate and all these pesticides and destroyed these teeming colonies of microbes, this whole agricultural microbiome, which was absorbing the carbon and providing that kind of resilience to our economy. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So let me make a political connection here, because earlier you mentioned the difficulty of framing something politically when you don't have an identifiable single culprit. | |
| But I feel like that's actually a little bit of a trap that we environmentalists have fallen into. | |
| Ultimately, the reason that I became an environmentalist, and I'm sure it's true of you as well, wasn't because of the bad things that'll happen to me if, say, the whales are extinguished. | |
| It's because I loved the whales. | |
| It's because I saw the beauty that I grew up in as a child being devastated. | |
| It's because my father told me about the passenger pigeons going extinct. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I think that most people are motivated, ultimately, as environmentalists, by love. | |
| So if we accept that the most important kind of ecological resiliency comes from thriving life, then the solutions, a whole different set of solutions show themselves, namely, to serve the thriving of life everywhere. | |
| And anywhere that you happen to be. | |
| So instead of an abstract global problem of carbon dioxide that lends itself to technocratic solutions and geoengineering and continent-wide biofuels plantations and the mega dams that are destroying African wetlands and gigantic pit mines to mine lithium and cobalt and silver, we can say, okay, let's regenerate the soils. | |
| Let's preserve any pristine ecosystem. | |
| Let's replant the forests. | |
| Let's restore the wetlands. | |
| Let's bring beavers back to the waterways of North America to slow down the water and create more life. | |
| And that's something that appeals. | |
| I think it goes beyond existing partisan ideological divides, which depend on you buying into a politically charged theory of global warming. | |
| I know people in the soil restoration movement, they go out to Midwest farmers and ranchers. | |
| And they get them to convert to regenerative agriculture. | |
| And they don't once mention climate change, but they mention restoring America's soils. | |
| And these farmers, they're living on the farm that their great grandfather founded, and the well is dry or it's poisonous. | |
| And all of the songbirds are gone. | |
| And they see with their own eyes the dying of the land. | |
| What I want to say is that this is not a separate issue from the global ecological crisis and what we call climate change, because it's part of the dying of the organs that maintain climate homeostasis. | |
| Who knows? | |
| We could see a pause in global warming, we could see global cooling, but if we continue to destroy the organs, We'll have climate fluctuations, we'll have worsening droughts, we'll have worsening floods and chaos, even if we convert the whole economy to electric vehicles and install huge carbon-sucking machines in every city. | |
| I mean, come on, that's not what we want as environmentalists. | |
| I'm really struck by your argument about the metaphors with the big debate over how we handle COVID. You know, do we do it by finding a technology to battle this microbe, which is, you know, a vaccine or something, or do we focus on helping people get their immune system strong? | |
| Yeah. | |
| It's the same mindset. | |
| Exactly. | |
| I'm glad you picked up on that. | |
| You know, it's like there's... | |
| It can be resilient not just against one variant or one microbe, but against all microbes. | |
| I mean, we've survived for 4 billion years in one form or another in this planet by figuring out how to battle off any kind of hostile virus. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I'm making our immune system resilient. | |
| There's a connection there because, again, we've had, just as we've had a worsening ecological crisis, we've had a worsening health crisis for at least two generations, maybe more. | |
| And this has been happening for my entire lifetime, yet at no point did we say, oh my God, we have to change everything about the way we live. | |
| We completely... | |
| Re-engineered society for that because it fits the formula of find an enemy. | |
| And that's the same mindset that diverts so much of our environmental zeal toward this single-cause problem and technocratic solution. | |
| Another important point is that the kind of war footing, let's make war on carbon, has played into the hands of Of the kind of Davos billionaires who are proposing solutions that are repressing civil rights, | |
| repressing human rights, controlling humanity, And imposing these huge high-profit, high-capital geoengineering projects that will make them richer, that will make democracy weaker, that will screw around with things that... | |
| You have environmentalists who are looking at Bill Gates as a hero, you know, and looking at some of the Davos crowd, they're the ones who get a private solution, overlooking the fact that these guys are all landing there in their private planes, burning up carbon like hell, and really not doing any. | |
| You know, Gates is heavily invested in all the big carbon producers, and his solutions are all about geoengineering and Environmental movement has somehow allowed itself to get trapped into an alliance with these guys, other than the kind of solutions you're talking about. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I think that's almost inevitable when we frame the problem in terms of a number, because it lends itself to the same kind of thinking that, I mean, it's actually financial thinking. | |
| It's an accounting mindset. | |
| And it's the same as if you're trying to base social policy on maximizing economic growth. | |
| Anytime you base it on maximizing or minimizing a number, what gets left out is everything that doesn't fit into your metrics and Or the things that you choose not to measure because they don't redound to the interests of those commissioning the measurements. | |
| Or the things that are fundamentally qualitative. | |
| Those are assumed not even to exist. | |
| So it's a comfortable mindset to have yet another Policy that is based on numbers, which then, incidentally, can be connected, can be financialized, and incorporated into carbon markets and carbon derivatives trading, and you have the whole thing happening again. | |
| And I think that we just need a much deeper kind of revolution than changing the... | |
| Financial metrics to include embodied carbon. | |
| That idea of sustainability, the reduction of sustainability to carbon neutrality, really begs the question of what do we want to sustain? | |
| Is this what we want to sustain? | |
| The direction of our civilization? | |
| And just change our fuel stock to something else and continue business as normal, continue befouling the whole world, and living oblivious to the sacredness of biological life on Earth. | |
| I think we should actually, I mean, I'm not going to be the word police and say we should never use the word sustainability, but I mean, come on. | |
| What about asking what kind of world do we want to sustain? | |
| If we could keep carbon at manageable levels as the rest of life on Earth dies, We're good to go. | |
| Deforest and destroy the fish and ruin life on Earth. | |
| And we could make up for it with geoengineering and maybe someday live in bubble cities with a rising GDP and digital replicas of all of the life that has been extinguished. | |
| If we could do it, do you want to? | |
| No. | |
| So we have to ask, what do we want to sustain? | |
| Like, how do we want to live here? | |
| You know, I love what you're saying because, and I've instinctively, and I recognized this from the beginning, when I did my first environmental book, which was The Riverkeeper, I told the publishers of it that I wanted to write a book about the environment without ever using the word sustainability, without ever using the word environment, without ever referring to climate. | |
| Mm-hmm. | |
| And that the book was going to be about corruption. | |
| It was going to be about stealing public assets, destroying the commonwealth, and about subverting democracy. | |
| And that's really... | |
| And the solution, people have asked me for years, what is... | |
| I've always said the same thing as restoring democracy, restoring true free market capitalism, which a capitalism that values externalities, that values the destruction of nature, which has a value. | |
| And it's the undervaluation of those public trust assets that allows us to use the environment wastefully. | |
| And it really is just about corruption. | |
| It's about destroying democracy. | |
| And there's a connection between all of these things that are intangible assets, but really are spiritual assets. | |
| God talks to human beings through many vectors, through each other, through organized religions, through the great books of those religions, through wise people, through art, literature, music, and poetry. | |
| But nowhere with the kind of texture and And lucidity and joy and detail as a creation. | |
| That's the way God talks to us, through the leaves, through the wind, through the songs of the birds, through the sounds of the crickets, and seeing a fox or watching a hawk. | |
| All those things have spiritual messages for us. | |
| And when we destroy nature, we diminish ourselves. | |
| We impoverish our children. | |
| And, you know, even stuff that nobody will see, it's like, you know, if you destroy the Mona Lisa, every human being would be diminished. | |
| If you destroy Yosemite or if you destroy the last of a species, all of us, everybody on the planet is diminished by that. | |
| Yes. | |
| Even their capacity, you imagine, is constrained. | |
| Yeah. | |
| One of the critiques I have of environmental rhetoric these days is to make it all about whether we're going to survive or not. | |
| Because I think if these geoengineering things work, then maybe we could have no more Amazon rainforest and still survive. | |
| Yet, as you were saying, something in us would die. | |
| If any species goes extinct, if any place is ruined, even if we don't literally die, something inside of us dies. | |
| And it's the valuing of that that really escapes economic logic altogether. | |
| Like, I think it is maybe a positive step to put a value on ecosystems to internalize ecological externalities and so forth. | |
| But what finite value can you put on creation? | |
| I remember reading an article saying... | |
| It's tough to quantify in money in dollars and cents. | |
| Yeah. | |
| If you quantify it, you're already reducing it. | |
| So say you value the Amazon, its ecosystem services at $10 trillion. | |
| By that logic, if you could make $20 trillion by cutting it down and turning it into a gigantic pit mine, then you should do it, if you've agreed that it's worth $10 trillion. | |
| So we have to have some way outside of quantitative logic to make our collective decisions. | |
| And not only about environment, it's also true of public health. | |
| Like when you let the epidemiologists make the public policies and what they include in their metrics is about mortality statistics and so on and so forth, cases, but doesn't include the value of hugs and seeing our full faces and conviviality and children. but doesn't include the value of hugs and seeing our learning about emotions by seeing adults' faces I mean, all of those things that you can't measure. | |
| Does it include those? | |
| I think this is one of the big points of emergence for our culture now, is how do we incorporate qualitative values Into our civic lives. | |
| Because it's all been about the science and science is about metrics, science is about data, science is about quantity. | |
| And I don't have an answer to this question, but I want to say that I want to affirm its importance and the part of all of us that recognizes that we can't live life by the numbers, personally or collectively. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Like there's stuff that's sacred. | |
| Like let's at least agree that it's sacred and say, and I don't know what to do with it, but it's important. | |
| There's a part of pretty much every human being that loves nature, that recognizes its sacredness, and that is facing dilemmas. | |
| I don't know if you ever met Polly Higgins, who passed away a few years ago. | |
| Amazing earth lawyer in the UK. She was one of the big forces behind rights of nature. | |
| And anyway, she once described a meeting she had had with a coal company executive. | |
| And he said, you know, Polly, you're right. | |
| I agree with everything you say. | |
| But I can't say that publicly because my board of directors would fire me and middle management would rebel and they would replace me with somebody even worse. | |
| Well, at the same time, the board of directors might be privately entertaining thoughts like that too. | |
| And same with middle management. | |
| And so basically we have to recognize that we're all stuck to some extent, at least stuck in a system that no one in their hearts actually, or almost no one, when there are strong ideologies of Progress through the conquest of nature that the technocracy embraces to some extent, but most of us, at least to some extent, feel alienated by the system and the values that that system embodies that we live in. | |
| I suspect that that coal company manager was probably Jim Rogers, who runs Duke Energy. | |
| I was suing them for so long, for many years, but when you'd sit down with him, he would make those arguments. | |
| He'd say, look, I have the biggest coal fleet in the country. | |
| In terms of coal burning power plants, they're all fully amortized, which means I can generate power for $0.02 a kilowatt hour when everyone else is doing it for $0.11, $0.14 a kilowatt hour. | |
| And I'd like to close down those coal plants because they're acidifying every lake in North Carolina and they're contaminating a fish with mercury. | |
| And I don't want my kids to grow up there. | |
| I've gone up to Congress and said, make me pay for those externalities. | |
| Make for us so that we can no longer produce free energy from these plants. | |
| We actually have to pay for our externalities. | |
| And Congress wouldn't do it. | |
| And so his narrative is, I am forced to do this because if I close one of those plants, any one of my shareholders can sue me and they will win that lawsuit because I'm wasting corporate assets or something. | |
| And so we're locked into this. | |
| So you said, Bobby, thank you for suing me to make it easier to do what my heart really wants to do. | |
| Right. | |
| I've had people tell me that before. | |
| So sometimes, yeah, my shareholders would sue me, etc., etc. | |
| That can be kind of a convenient excuse for what's really a lack of courage. | |
| Because I think that however trapped we may seem, there's always a natural next step that's at the edge of courage. | |
| That we can recognize, we can distinguish what is an excuse for For not making a change. | |
| And what's something that is actually possible. | |
| Maybe it's audacious, but it's possible. | |
| And I'm scared to do it, but I'm ready to do it. | |
| I think all of us face those moments in our lives where it's the moment to take a new step of courage, motivated. | |
| And then the word courage speaks to the source of To its source, which is love, right? | |
| Courage means literally a capacity of the heart. | |
| So to kind of loop it back into environmental strategy and rhetoric, I just keep coming back to we have to root it in love of life. | |
| And not as much fear of the bad things that will happen to us. | |
| Like imagine, here's a little story. | |
| Imagine if I've got a nine-year-old son, right? | |
| I do have a nine-year-old son. | |
| And imagine that I'm neglecting him and I'm not feeding him and he's locked outside at night, you know, and I'm just treating him terribly. | |
| And you come to me and you're like, hey, Charles, you know, you better take better care of your kid. | |
| And I'm like, oh yeah, why? | |
| And you say, well, if you don't, then when he grows up, he won't take care of you and your neighbors are going to think ill of you and you might, you know, get put in prison for child neglect. | |
| And I'm like, okay, Bobby, you're right. | |
| I'll take better care of him. | |
| There's a problem here. | |
| I'm not going to take very good care of them. | |
| But if you are able to connect me with, hey, this is my family, this is a sacred being who you love, then I don't need those threats. | |
| So the question for me is, what has happened to us that we do not recognize the rainforest or the soil or the rest of life as part of ourselves, as part of our family, as a sacred being? | |
| And I'm not saying let's abandon the struggle and just do that spiritual work. | |
| But if the struggle does not include that spiritual work and the work of reconnection and the knowledge of how painful it actually is to be disconnected, how poor we have become for not being in intimate relationship with the plants and animals around us and the places and the hills, | |
| And to not be immersed in a web of stories and relationships with all of these beings, if we don't recognize that poverty, then when we address our opponents, we're only going to be in an oppositional relationship. | |
| We're not going to be able to say, hey, I want to make it better for you, too. | |
| That's what I want to bring into the conversation. | |
| How do we get from here to there? | |
| Is it just a million acts of courage? | |
| How do you get there? | |
| The answer for you would be different. | |
| You're an attorney with vast experience in suing corporations, so the answer for you is going to be different than for me or for my brother-in-law. | |
| What's important is where the unique answer to you comes from, and it comes from Affirming what I just said. | |
| It comes from affirming your knowledge of the sacredness of life, affirming your knowledge of yourself as being put here on earth to serve life and beauty on earth. | |
| Once you know that about yourself, then you gain courage and you gain clarity and you become aware of the opportunities to fulfill what you know about yourself and the world. | |
| Charles Eisenstein, where can people follow you? | |
| How can we support you? | |
| Where can they see your writings? | |
| Thank you for asking. | |
| I have a substack, charleseisenstein.substack. | |
| I have a website by my name. | |
| I'm coming out with a new book called The Coronation, which compiles some of my writing from the last two years. | |
| And yeah, I'd be very happy if people took a look at those things. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Thanks for joining us today, and thanks for your work. |