The 12th Monthly Dose of Climate Hope event took place on April 14, 2026! Sam Matey-Coste hosted an in-depth conversation with Premal Shah, co-founder ofRenewables.org, an innovative new nonprofit microfinance platform that allows investors to support solar development in the Global South with zero-interest loans! The YouTube recording is above! Below are some related resources.

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Tsung Xu is a serial entrepreneur who went viral in 2025 for designing and 3D printing a custom VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) drone capable of flying up to 130 miles. By himself, in his garage in California, while learning the relevant CAD design software. He’s since become the founder and CEO of Vight, a new U.S. startup planning to build human-carrying eVTOLs — electric flying cars. He writes on Substack at .

In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Mr. Xu’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

You rose to a degree of celebrity when you revealed last year that you had built one of the world’s longest-range homemade drones, an electric VTOL model that flew 90 miles, at home in your garage with 3D printing. While learning how to use CAD design software at the same time. Can you tell me how that happened? Because to use the buzzwords of today, that’s an incredibly agentic thing to be doing. That’s a really cool thing to just wake up and decide to do one day.

Yeah, sure! I should clarify that the goal was having to fly 130 miles. It didn’t fly 130 miles. It was capable of it, but I ended up crashing it before I had it fly that long.

And it wasn’t exactly celebrity per se. I wouldn’t put it that way. It did kind of go viral online in a sense.

What led to that was, I was looking at what startups I wanted to build in terms of the focus of the next 20 to 30 years of my life. I started to look into personal eVTOLs. And because of that, I thought, okay, well, if I actually like building drones and I find it enjoyable and get intuition about it, it’s going to be a really good starting point for me technically. Because, you know, I didn’t have an aerospace background.

So the small drone that you were talking about, the one that I built, the VTOL, that was the third that I’d built. I’d learned to 3D print properly to do it. I had designed everything myself.

Before that I had built a similar VTOL that was a similar size but actually made out of foam. That one I also managed to get flying at about the same amount of time, after about 90 or 100 days of work.

Before that, I’d assembled a reasonably sized quadcopter, 20-inch frame, where I put an obstacle avoidance system. It was LIDAR, point LIDAR and also vision-based obstacle avoidance as well.

It was definitely a massive stretch for me, that specific project, because I had never done any proper aerodynamic analysis before. There were just many things that I had to learn. But I was just really motivated and so that’s what sort of led me to it.

Now, I do not have the technical expertise to even come close to that. But I’m fascinated by the electrotech revolution, and I write a lot about just the emerging amazing range of stuff we can do with electric motors.

This is a very technically impressive thing that you just did. You mentioned that the files that you, a software beginner, made at home in CAD are actually export-controlled under U.S. regulation because a drone that can fly past a certain limit is categorized as a militarily relevant technology. And yet you literally designed and built this yourself from scratch.

Yeah, it’s an interesting clash of legacy regulations that weren’t designed with this tech stack in mind. The exact requirement I believe was 60 minutes of battery life to power flight. You design that, it’s technically export controlled.

People were telling me, why don’t you just put a smaller battery in it and release that open source? I just don’t want to have any legal issues, so I didn’t.

I mean, the tech stack now…there’s a few reasons. Because batteries are good enough now for that type of endurance, and then also electric motors are now power dense and torque dense enough such that you can have something flying with relatively light motors. In the structure, the airframe, on a small scale UAV, you can use 3D printed materials that are very, very light.

So yes, it’s very much possible to do that and it sort of has been for for a little while. But yeah, it is kind of crazy that something you can build in your garage can be export-controlled.

My brother has a DJI drone, just a camera drone for fun, and it’s import-controlled. It’s one gram under the maximum size of drone you’re allowed to import into the U.S. from China. I visited China in January, and I traveled around and wrote a bunch about some of the technology that’s spreading there faster.

One thing I was impressed by was their willingness to play around with the new electric tech stack. I actually saw a human-carrying eVTOL by EHang at their Suigang Wharf test site in Guangzhou and wrote an article about that.

What are your thoughts on the institutional culture around drones in the U.S. and what that’s been like to navigate as an eVTOL inventor? How much of a problem is it to navigate these export controls and import controls and so on?

That’s a good question. There’s kind of many parts to that. I’m focused on personal use manned details right now, but on the unmanned side, I can speak to that. “Beyond visual light of sight” was something where regulations in the U.S were not passed for a long time for commercial use, which definitely did hamper the drone industry.

I think on the manned side, though, in terms of manned eVTOL, you mentioned EHang. You know, China’s got a very different set of use cases for manned eVTOL. It’s very much about urban air taxi tourism. There’s very few people in China who have land. There’s very few people who have even a yard of any description to be able to land any VTOL, let alone like an acre or more to sort of comfortably land a manned VTOL.

So institutionally in the U.S., the regulations have actually been quite forward-thinking in terms of manned eVTOL, and I would say specifically for personal use manned eVTOL.

My startup now, Vight, which I decided to start after the drone experiments I did, is effectively a play on leveraging these new regulations. These new MOSAIC regulations that the FAA finalized summer last year. The means of compliance for those, basically how you certify against these regulations, will be finalized in the next few months.

Those regulations are world first. There hasn’t been another country in the world that has these these regulations allowing this class of aircraft with vertical lift capabilities to be built and designed and certified. I actually think the U.S. is quite forward thinking on this front. And yeah, that’s obviously very, very helpful for what we’re trying to do at Vight, my startup.

But certainly on the drone side of things, we haven’t been as forward-thinking in terms of the commercial use cases as I think a lot of people in the drone industry would have liked.

I’ve done some research on this, but I want to hear it from you because you have such an intimate experience, and I think you’d explain it for our readers very well.

Why are electric motors specifically, and the incredible exponential progress in battery technologies, so key to doing this?

Why was there no 1960s gas-powered flying car? Why are there no internal combustion engine-powered quadcopter drones?

What are the key things that are making this happen now?

That’s a great question!

I would say there’s two — well, there’s more than two, but two pretty important, obstacles that the electric tech stack solves.

The more obvious one that we’ve already spoken about is that the batteries and the electric motors are now power dense enough and have enough torque to actually be able to hover and fly an aircraft. It was just very hard before now, having a VTOL. There were experiments from the 50s, but they were very hard to control. With electric motors, you can now control them using software, effectively using motor controllers that allow power to be switched at very, very fast and very, very precise rates such that you can actually have motors able to spin up and spin down their RPM and hence their power very, very quickly.

Let’s say you just have a basic four-rotor drone. In that drone, the reason it can hover is because the rotors and the motors are spinning an constantly adjusting their RPM to be able to keep that drone in position, at the same altitude. Basically it’s a software and it’s a controls challenge, and those capabilities were really not available, both on the software side and on the hardware to control those motors, certainly in a cheap enough way, until like the last 15 years max.

I was speaking to a Stanford professor who was telling me like 20 years ago, he bought a controller to for a VTOL drone at the time. It was massive. It was, you know, $10,000 or more.

The software has gotten simpler. The hardware has gotten smaller, cheaper, lighter, better, and faster. You know, it shifts all these underlying factors.

And all these things that have helped computers get better have also helped a lot of this underlying hardware and software technology for drones get better as well, and for VTOL capable aircraft.

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8 months ago · 1009 likes · 72 comments · Packy McCormick and Sam D'Amico

Fundamentally, what you’re telling me is that electrons are much more controllable than molecules.

You can manage electrons with software and have them go down tiny wires to exactly where you want them. And with molecules, fuel, basically you’re setting a bunch of stuff on fire and hoping for the best. Which served us well for a long time! But a contained explosion is a lot harder to control than precise applications of electric current.

Yeah, and it is that.

It’s also that once you’ve got those controlled explosions, say in a helicopter. Say in a Robinson, like a helicopter that you might have for TV crews or maybe a helicopter a hospital might use, or for flight training.

You have these two or four seat Robinson helicopters and you have your internal combustion engine in there. Now, that engine is coupled to the main rotor and then a tail rotor with mechanical linkages. Those linkages are all mechanical. Without autonomous capabilities it’s actually really hard for a person to hover just a single rotor. Well, it’s technically two, but that takes quite a bit of practice and skill to do really well.

It’s actually impossible for a human to control a drone.

Without software organization, right? You’re basically providing inputs into it and the software takes your human input. You say “Okay, I want to move forward,” and the software’s going to take that and translate that based on where the drone is and what sort of disturbances it has in the wind and everything and then it’s gonna translate that into changes in motor RPMs for each of the rotors. It can do that.

So it’s not a direct one-to-one, whereas in a helicopter or an aircraft, you’re literally manipulating it via control surfaces. In a fixed wing aircraft, in a helicopter, you’re basically manipulating the RPM directly through throttle.

You can’t do that with four different motors or even like eight different motors on our manned configuration. It becomes just an impossible challenge to do without some sort of orientation and software

Fascinating. I hadn’t thought of it exactly that way, but you’re right. Humans can’t process fast enough to give little corrections to how fast each rotor should spin to compensate for wind speed. You just can’t do that.

Yeah, and it’s happening so quickly. The response time of those loops is now in milliseconds, running in a stable way.

Yeah, wow, that’s amazing.

So, now that we’ve covered some of the background, what is your vision for your current startup? Both in the medium long-term, like moving to full human-carrying testing, and the long long-term. In 20 years, if everything goes the way you want it to, what amazing stuff will be possible thanks to Vight? What’s your ideal future for this technology that you’re personally working on?

We can start with the vision and I’ll work back. We want to make door-to-door flying as normal as driving.

That sounds very challenging, and it is. It’s a very very hard problem. There’s nothing today that really allows us to do that.

But the technology is getting there. The regulations are there! So we see a path to make that happen.

On the first generation product and what we want that to be, it’s really going to be something that allows for folks who have access to at least one acre of land to be able to take off just with very very simplified controls. So just very easy to fly.

If any of your readers has ever tried to go on an introductory test flight in an aircraft, it takes some practice. It takes some skill. We want to like simplify that flying experience while making it safe for people to go to fly those things.

Folks with at least an acre of land, that’s sort of the primary target market for now for the first-gen product. We also want to focus on flight schools and flight clubs. Flight schools are using Cessna 172s for flight training, which are airframes from the 1960s and engines based on technology from the 60s. There just hasn’t been much progress in the types of aircraft that you can actually learn to fly in.

Those are sort of the primary use cases. And then also with flight clubs, it’s folks who buy a monthly subscription to basically access aircraft and flying aircraft. It’s a similar thing there to personal use, but you’re just basically paying for fractional access to that aircraft.

Again, it’s giving them just a very simple easy-to-fly thing. You can take off on land you have, with more control than a helicopter in a very small area. But also, you will be able to cruise over 100 miles per hour, 110 miles per hour. You can actually enjoy flying like you would in a fixed wing, and actually have useful range!

Initially the utility is more leisure focused. Like going out to a remote hiking trail or a golf course or a winery, or even just going for an hour joyride. It’s two seats, so it’s not just something that you do yourself, it’s something that you can take someone else on that experience with.

Over time, you start to actually get more utility out of this product. With a range of 75 miles, potentially a little bit more, you actually start to be able to do hops between where you live and then also a place of work or somewhere where you are frequently.

So leisure use cases and then also starting to have more utility, even in this initial product. And over generations of products, you actually start to get more and more utility as you can increase the volumes on the products that you’re building and then also drive down the cost.

You mentioned access to one acre of land for a safe landing space. I’m from Maine, and there’s a lot of people in Maine who own boats who don’t have waterfront property. You could envision people in the 2050s taking their electric car with a trailer to pull their flying electric car over to the town flying carport. Or maybe just storing it there like boats in a dry dock, and then just taking it out there to the common landing and takeoff space.

You could definitely see them being used at an airport, for example.

What we want to do, though, is more like this. One of the challenges of personal aviation is the dependence on airports. There’s only so many places you can take off and land from, and it’s a choke point.

In the air, there’s a ton of space. There’s no infrastructure that you have to stop at like you would on the ground for a car, but airports are that choke point.

So we really want to make it easy for folks to be able to fly without having to go somewhere else to fly. You can fly from where you are, whether that’s your own property or even other private property, you’ll be able to take off and land from any property.

And to your point about boats, we also want to have a water-capable version as well that can actually take off and land from water. That won’t be the first product but there’s certainly something there. You will take a slight range penalty, I’m going to say it’ll be slightly heavier, but you’ll be able to take off on land from lakeside properties, marinas.

It’s going to afford many different types of experiences that you can’t really get today. Use cases that you cannot really have today because technologies have not been integrated and developed into these types of products before.

What are your thoughts about the natural world? Even in existing large-scale aviation, bird strikes are a problem. You mentioned flying as common as driving. There’s currently a really, really high death toll, animal and also human, from car crashes on public roads. What are the thoughts you give to safety, for both the person in the vehicle and the people or animals outside the vehicle, to avoid collisions?

First of all, there is just, obviously, a ton more space in the area. Like, you mentioned bird strikes. Bird strikes do happen. It’s definitely a use case that we designed for, for the aircraft to be able to handle. Now, having said that, I would say that it’s very uncommon.

We want to design for safety. There’s several aspects of this. So we have a distributed electric propulsion system, which is basically what we’re talking about before, with multi-rotor. Having eight rotors means that you can have one rotor go out still fly to your destination, or if you can’t fly to destination for some reason you can find a landing spot nearby and that’s totally fine.

We also have redundancy in terms of the packs. We’ll be able to have one battery pack go out, out of many, and then with that pack out you’ll still be able to do that same thing where you’ll still be able to fly to a safe landing zone.

Then also we’ll have a ballistic chute able to deploy if for whatever reason you have more than one motor go out, but again, we’re talking about very, very improbable things that are very, very unlikely to happen.

Safety is absolutely really, really important for us. Designing a way to keep the occupants safe, to keep people around you safe.

When the aircraft is flying, it’s not that difficult, if you think about how hard it is for cars on the ground. For example, Waymo, to actually get their self-driving system, look at all the sensors that that car uses to be able to drive autonomously well.

It’s a much, much harder problem to solve on the ground. Where you’ve got a lot more obstacles, you’ve got a lot more people, you’ve got kids on the sidewalk, you’ve got cyclists, you’ve got unpredictable other drivers, and everything’s very close to the car. The car is operating very close to humans.

Whereas in the air, it’s a bit different. In the air, there’s a lot more space. You’re able to have a lot more space between you and other obstacles. Other aircraft, birds, the ground. You’re able to actually design that system. It’s much easier to develop that autonomous system than it is to develop something on the ground.

We’ll be developing with autonomous capabilities from the first-gen product. We’ll allow the aircraft to be as autonomous as the FAA and regulations will allow us to be! And that means a very high level of autonomy even in the first-gen product. You’re still going to have a license, but once you do, it’ll be a very, very seamless experience if you wanted to make it quite autonomous.

I’m guessing that includes collision avoidance software and stuff like that.

Exactly. We would have that type of software. Basically, it’s not the same but it’s similar in principle to that type of feature that allows a drone to hover.

As the world has famously seen with every other type of transportation technology ever, new transportation technology has military and national security implications. Just lately in Ukraine and Iran we’ve seen that small, fairly cheap-to-produce drones have become kind of a central weapon of war.

The U.S. even requested military aid from Ukraine specifically to try to deal with drone issues in the Iran War. And it’s been a source of U.S. security concerns that China makes an overwhelming majority of the world’s drones.

Yours is one of a relatively few really innovative new U.S. electric flight startups, right up there with Archer and Joby and the other ones like that. That’s just my perspective, maybe there’s tons of secret stealth startups I don’t know about.

Have you got any interest or concern from any kind of national security establishment?

We’re focused on the commercial and the personal private use for full-scale eVTOLs.

When I say full-scale, our aircraft is a little bit smaller than a Joby or Archer. A Joby or Archer is like two and a half to 3,000 kilos, like six to 7,000 pounds.

Ours is just under two and a half thousand pounds, about 1100 kilos, max takeoff weight. Because it’s designed for two seats, it’s designed to have that smaller form factor.

There’s a really large market here for personal use. If you think about the history of personal transportation, the biggest use cases of the internal combustion engine ended up being the car. That led to Detroit and that led to creating a Model T. It wasn’t a company making a shared use vehicle like air taxis are today. It wasn’t for defense purposes per se.

Obviously later you had defense use cases, like the Jeep adapted from a car. But I would say that for us we think the market is just absolutely massive when it comes to personal use. If you look forward, you think about shrinking that form factor, with various types of technologies where you can start to fold the wings or compact the wings on landing.

That technology is going to mature. Batteries are going to mature to allow those types of motors and propulsion systems to be used. We just think that personal use market is really large. The analogy being the rise of the automobile. It just ended up being such a massive market.

There’s also such an interesting range of ancillary benefits from a world where electric aviation is common, even just with drones.

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4 months ago · 18 likes · 1 comment

I really love the stories coming out of Zipline’s work in Africa, carrying blood transfusions and vaccines to villages that don’t even have road access. I’m really excited about that. This tech could be huge for Africa in general because it’s so hard to build roads there for a number of reasons.

And EHang, they just came out with a model of their crewed eVTOL that is designed for the Beijing firefighting department. It’s fire-engine red and everything. Even if it just has two seats, you can have one person driving it and one person being evacuated from a burning building.

They also came out with an ambulance model they tested in Spain, potentially in cooperation with the European Union. Again, even with a human-piloted two-seater, in a medical emergency, you could have the other seat be a person getting pulled out of a city to a hospital really, really quickly.

There’s a great quote, Isaac Asimov I think, that goes, “A good science fiction author predicts the engine, a great science fiction author predicts the car, a brilliant science fiction author predicts the suburbs.” What is the sort of suburb-level societal change stemming from this eVTOL technology that you think might happen?

This is a great question. I would say, firstly, it’s like what you said about Zipline, what you said about EHang. I think, over time, just as cars have become core infrastructure for everyday use, personal eVTOLs will become that new category of transportation. Zipline’s had that in Rwanda, where they’re now basically part of Rwanda’s critical infrastructure.

They’re doing some great work. I’m actually planning to visit East Africa in a couple weeks and I’ve been trying to get in contact with Zipline.

In terms of the societal impacts, when you think about this type of technology, what it fundamentally does is it just fundamentally compresses distance. Just like how after World War II you had cars quite widely adopted in the U.S., starting to be adopted in Europe and Australia. That led to the highway network, it led to the ability to have suburbs. You fundamentally created a new mode of living called suburban life. There was no way you could have that many people living in suburban areas without the rise of the automobile.

Similarly with personal eVTOLs. With a car, you’re driving at like 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 miles per hour. You’re fundamentally constrained in how far away your suburbs can be from urban areas. L.A. is the worst example, it’s very sprawled. And of course, in Europe, Australia, they’re a bit less broad, especially in Europe because of public transportation and other things.

In a world where you can fly somewhere in, you can fly 120 miles in an hour, and then over time, 250 miles in an hour, you remove the constraints of living in suburbs that are 20 miles, 30 miles away from, from your place of work. So the societal change I’m pretty excited about is that at scale, this technology allows urban design to look very different.

I was talking to an investor about this and he said, hey, so should I start buying land? You know, like 50, 100 miles away from urban areas, that is like actually really nice land and where people want to live, but today it’s just not close enough to an urban area to make sense for what we’re talking about. And I think that’s true. You start to get to a point of being able to live 100 miles away, 150 or 200 miles away in the future, from urban areas, but still having access to the same sort of work options that you would want today. Having access to dense urban locations. People will be able to move out further away and still and still have that, and what that means is you could have small walkable neighborhoods that are further away and basically be more distributed.

There will just be pockets of these walkable neighborhoods where you’ll be able to fly using your light eVTOL! You’ll be able to get services. Right now, you might have trucks and vans delivering a lot of things to a lot of people. Amazon and et cetera. But over time, that could be Zipline, could be other things where you actually have drone delivery for a lot of services that you need. You will have autonomous trucks that can take goods out to you.

So it really sort of decouples where people want to live from where house prices are very expensive. Because everyone right now wants to live in large metros or near large urban areas where there’s the most competition for homes and there’s the least supply and the least build-out. So you can actually like help alleviate some of that pricing pressure that younger people have when it comes to like buying your first home!

I think that’s going to be something that is just a really exciting thing for like how we reorganize and sort of reshape where we live. Because one of the big constraints for that has always been modes of transport.

Can you get where you want to go in that period of time, in the amount of time for your commute or for other things? That actually makes that place liveable for most people.

That’s really just a fascinating concept, this pointillistic pattern of flight-linked walkable villages. This might add up to much less environmental impact, much less sprawl than a car-dominated landscape. Because fundamentally. a flying machine doesn’t need you to build a track through the air. Roads are obviously critical transport infrastructure, but they’re also so much impervious surface. Stormwater runs off them and causes floods. Animals die on them all the time. You need to cut through tons of stuff to build them.

You could envision, in the future, totally different housing developments, in much the same way people would think you had to be within walking or horse distance of a city before cars. You could envision housing developments that don’t even have like roads to them. A bunch of cabins in the middle of meadows or desert or something, very bucolic, maybe just a footpath to the nearest village, but everyone has their eVTOL in their yard and they can just fly into the city for a nice restaurant or theater. That opens up entirely new integrations with nature in a way, because you don’t need the constant car traffic.

Exactly! Exactly. I’ll add two things on this one.

You mentioned having footpaths between distributed neighborhoods. One thing I’m thinking is happening is the un-bundling of the car, in some ways.

You see eVTOLs on one side where they’re faster, they’re going to have enough range. You’re going to talk about 300, even like 500 miles of range within 20 years. That’s the sort of range. Everybody at a 250 miles per hour cruise. So it’s fundamentally just, 5x or more, really like 10x faster, than if you had to drive a car and deal with traffic.

So you’re going to have that, but on the other side, you’re going to have like small micro-cars or something. You see this already, it’s quite popular in Europe, in some parts of Asia.

And in the U.S. even, there’s literally communities where everyone just drives electric golf carts! Teenagers love it too, because you can now drive this without having to have a full driver’s license.

I was living in an Airbnb in Austin, for about a month, sort of in the suburbs. and most people were just driving golf carts around the neighborhood. So I think you’re going to see more of that as well and more of that adoption.

I think that’s a really important part of this. Personally, it just allows for a very different way of living.

You’re also seeing stuff like CA Forever. They want to build a new city in California. But for that neighborhood to be able to access SF or Palo Alto, you’d want something that’s faster than a car to get you there, because now it’s about 100 miles away. eVTOLs start to make those types of new communities more viable.

And then the pollution and impact of roads. I think this is underappreciated by people. We just don’t really think about, “Oh what does the world look like if we don’t need so much like road infrastructure?”

What does the world look like if we weren’t constrained to driving on the ground? These are just kind of assumptions that people have about life um and how we live. But even in a world full of EVs, you still have pollution from brake dust, for example, and from tire wear driving along roads.

Also, you’re not having to use as much of your living space. Roads are part of our living space! But in these small distributed neighborhoods, you don’t need as much physical space in these neighborhoods for roads.

If you’re using golf carts and the evolution of golf carts in 20 years to get around your local neighborhood and you’re using vehicles to fly further distances, you actually make your neighborhood much more livable too.

And you’re not as constrained by having to have large roads with these large vehicles that most of the time only carry one person anyway. You generally don’t need that sort of size vehicle for what you’re trying to do.

Car culture, especially full car dependence like in some suburbs, is such a local minimum in so many ways. It’s this equilibrium we’re stuck in even though it kind of sucks. In my age bracket in a lot of states, the most common cause of death for healthy young people is car crashes. It kills a lot of people.

For example, motor vehicles are the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States, with about 92,500 injuries per year. And that’s just from collisions and crashes, not counting the massive toll of air pollution!

It’s right through urban centers, right near people’s front doors, right where kids are playing. And it’s fast enough to kill people, but not fast enough that you don’t still have to spend lots of time stuck in traffic and on board on roads.

And there’s all these secondary things, the brake dust like you mentioned and flakes off the tires, as secondary factors of pollution after the combustion engine. And the tertiary things. In Maine, where I’m from, vast amounts of salt are spread on the road every year. As my biology teacher used to say, you can see this little stripe of beach plants along every road because they’re the only ones that can survive the amount of salt that’s applied to roads and washes off it every year. And it’s just a vast amount of work to maintain roads, of course.

I really love the walkable community ideal. In the U.S., people pay vast amounts of money to go to Disney World, people often reminisce about their college days, and what those have in common is a walkable space where you can go between things on foot. People really love that.

I think that evolving past roads or evolving towards much less roads and much less crowded roads might really gain traction by the second half of the 21st century and might be something that just really improves quality of life for humanity.

I think even by the early 2040s, I think by like 15 years from now, you’re going to start to see the early adopters, actually. Where they start to price a lot of this in. If you if you look, already, even with COVID, I knew people that were buying cabins near Yosemite and in more remote areas because they could work remotely. They didn’t need to come to the city so much.

You’ve already seen a lot of this with a lot of folks wanting to buy RVs. There’s 300,000 RV sales per year in the U.S. It’s a crazy large market that’s purely leisure, and it’s a very large type of vehicle. You see electric RV startups, like Pebble and Lightship, rethinking what an RV is.

I think we’re already starting to see that. You’ve got services, you’ve got Starlink satellite internet, you’ve got solar and batteries, you can be off-grid or very close to being off-grid, depending on your energy needs.

Growing up, I got my first car when I was 16 and a half. I loved driving. I was in a suburb in Adelaide and it gave me that freedom to be able to go where I wanted to go. And before that, I was riding my push bike everywhere. This is, I think, just the next phase of that personal freedom where, growing up, you had a bike or a car or something, and that gave a really great sense of freedom.

But being able to fly and fly safely, from where you would want to use your vehicle, and not having to go to a vertiport and hailing an air taxi! It’s fundamentally much more easy to use if it’s somewhere where you can already have access to it. You have an acre property, you can just walk outside and then just get in your vehicle and fly.

That type of freedom is, like, just really, really exciting in terms of what that affords. It has a lot benefits especially as you start to scale up, as it starts to become part of the infrastructure.

That is really amazing. It would be great to add that to the mix of what we already have to replace personal cars, like buses and trains and increasingly driverless cars too. And cycling. The whole global bike lane movement has been huge!

I am definitely a bit of an anti-car person. I would love to reduce that death toll, reduce that massive pollution, reduce what is often a really crippling financial burden for people, and just make transport a palette of much more cool options. I think that in America in particular, one thing that might finally sell people on a life without a car is their own personal electric flying machine! It’s just such a cool thing that might really accelerate a transition towards a more sustainable form of transportation.

Exactly. You can’t ask people to give up something that they need to do something that’s, better for the planet. You have to provide something more compelling.

If it’s just as safe, there’s going to be an increasing number of people that find utility from that. You can’t just say, “You have to give up your car” and then you don’t have an alternative to that. That’s not going to work for most people. You have to give them something that’s better.

And in the U.S. in particular, and also in many developed countries, a lot of people own a lot of land. You already have that use case, that market. These people already want something that allows them to access services. A lot of people just don’t have access, aren’t even 30 minutes away from a hospital or even a grocery store. There’s food deserts, there’s hospital deserts in the U.S. You could make it easier for people to access services than they can today.

I think a lot of folks think this innovation has to start in cities and urban areas, but that’s often not the case. You can look at Zipline, going really well in areas where people don’t have as good access.

Rwanda with the hospitals, but also even now with their pilots in the U.S, a lot of that traction that they’re seeing is in areas that are further away from services.

I think the innovation happens on the edge with this type of technology. The Model T got more traction on farms, it was more useful for farmers to actually use for many reasons. In urban areas you already had street cars you already had the ability to hire a carriage. A lot of people think everyone had carriages. Most people didn’t have carriages, but they did have access to carriages, a carriage taxi type of service in cities. So there were a lot of different types of transportation options already in urban areas. The Model T had more adoption in more rural areas.

I think it’s going to be a similar thing out here where there’s the value, the benefits that are personal to more remote areas, and it’s just much more compelling at first.

The final boss for any transportation technology is the commute to the urban areas. You build towards that, but at first, you don’t want to just go after the commute. I think that’s what was really challenging for air taxi companies. They’re trying to go straight after the commute. They’re like, “okay we’re gonna go to Manhattan!”

And you face so much regulatory overhead, so much permitting overhead, so many challenges to do that. It’s very very hard to do. Whereas you really want to start with small markets. People don’t even think those are credible or realistic markets, but when you start with these small markets, you get a lot of folks very, very excited about the value there, and then over time, you go after that final boss, you go after the commute use case.

We’re coming toward the top of the hour. I’m going to ask the meta-question I always ask, which is, what should I have asked that I didn’t ask? What question do you want to answer that we haven’t covered?

I think we’ve covered a lot of the things I would have wanted to cover about Vight and what we’re trying to do! I’m not sure if I have something off the top of my head that we haven’t covered yet.

Well, thank you so much. I really hope that someday I’ll be riding in or even own a Vight eVTOL. I will watch your progress with considerable interest.

Thanks so much. And this has been great. I really appreciate you taking the time. It’s been fun!

Thank you. Live long and prosper!

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The 11th Monthly Dose of Climate Hope event took place on March 25, 2026! Sam Matey-Coste hosted an in-depth conversation with Kevin Chou, Executive Director and co-founder of Bright Saver, the nonprofit leading an incredibly fast-progressing movement to make plug-in “balcony” solar available across America! The YouTube recording is above! Below are some related resources.

This map shows the new state-by-state plug-in solar bill tracker from Bright Saver! It’s moving incredibly fast now as state legislative sessions hit their stride, with news now breaking daily! This is spectacularly fast work for a new clean energy movement.

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: March 12, 2026

TWENTY-FOUR U.S. states have now introduced new legislation in 2026 to empower their people with plug-in solar! It’s already passed the Vermont Senate and Virginia House. WOW…

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a month ago · 24 likes · 2 comments

A recent Daily Dose on plug-in solar advocacy. There’s been even more progress since! You can use this to contact your state legislator and help change the map above!

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Professor Ada Palmer is a leading scholar on Renaissance Italy and the author of Hugo Award-finalist science fiction novels. Her four-volume Terra Ignota fiction series chronicles a world war in the 2450s, with fascinatingly complex future world-building. Her nonfiction opus, Inventing the Renaissance, was a New Yorker Best Book of 2025. Her next work will be Norse mythology-based sci-fantasy. Dr. Palmer teaches at the History Department of the University of Chicago, where her fully immersive 1492 Papal Conclave reenactment course has been covered by the New York Times.

In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Professor Palmer’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

I’m a big fan of all your work! Thank you so much for being here, Professor Palmer.

Please, just Ada.

All right, thank you, Ada. To use the terminology of the Renaissance, you are an umanista of considerable renown, so I wish to show deference to one of the nobility of the Republic of Letters.

Well, I hope our modern Republic of Letters is democratic rather than oligarchic!

It’s a nobility of merit! You’ve earned it.

So, how did you come up with Terra Ignota? It’s like the most detailed future society system that I’ve ever seen. And there’s such a tradition in science fiction of really complex technological extrapolations, but still basically the norms of the time when it was written. A lot of the classic Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke stuff was basically projecting the 1950s in space But you actually looked at this and you’re like, okay, what if the 2450s, not just in technology, but in culture, are as different from now as the 1600s were? And that really ties into your background and your ongoing work as a scholar of Renaissance Europe. Can you tell me how that leap happened?

I mean, I became a historian because I wanted to write science fiction and fantasy.

Oh, wow. I didn’t know that.

I wanted to write science fiction and fantasy from my earliest childhood. My dad was a nerd. I was reading, Heinlein juveniles when I had to stand on tiptoe to reach up to the bookshelf to pull them down. And becoming a historian was the perfect training for it, because nothing teaches you to think about changes in society like studying changes in society, right?

I had that essay in Strange Horizons a few weeks ago about how I argue that all science fiction and fantasy writers are historians because we’re practicing the craft of making judgment calls about how the world changes. So I pursued history as the subject of my doctorate, knowing that it would resonate with and be symbiotic with my science fiction.

People often ask, you have two careers, right? Isn’t it overwhelming?

I say, yes. And if I weren’t also a historian, I would write more novels and they would be less good.

That’s very interesting.

Because it makes them slow. It makes them complex. It makes me work minimum five years on the world building, and ask all the questions a historian asks, right?

One of the core ones being, because I’m used to working in centuries, when I set out to do a world-build, I zoom out and ask myself, what is in flux now, that wasn’t the same 200 years ago and therefore will probably not be the same 200 years from now?

What is unstable?

And I’m not trying to guess exactly what it’ll be like, but I know it’ll be different.

So what are examples of things that are in flux? The family unit is in flux. The tension between the extended family and the nuclear family. So the family unit will be different.

Gender is in flux. Gender is all over the place right now. We don’t know where it’s going, but whatever it’s like, it’s not going to be exactly like this anymore. 100 years from now or 50 years from now it’s going to have moved in some way, that’s moving fast.

Marriage is in flux.

The proportion of the population that lives in urban versus rural environments and the fascinating and recent explosive existence of suburbs, which are incredibly unstable, are gonna be different.

Transportation is rapidly in flux and is going to be different.

Food consumption and food use and the food distribution networks are clearly in flux and are going to be different. You can make a list of say 15 major structures in the world that are young in their current form.

Another one is countries, right? Nationalism and the idea of country equals people and country equals culture is about 180 years old, has been developing a lot in that period, and is very much in flux. And then there’s the counter trend of the development of unions like European Union.

So what a country will be in 150 years or 300 years is definitely not going to be what a country is now. There will be further dynamism, both in the question of should country equal culture and the question of big unions like the European Union.

So I have another world built for a novel project that I’m co-writing with Jo Walton about an exoplanet terraforming mission. In that one, all of these same things that are different in Terra Ignota are different, differently.

And in that one, it’s a future world build where all of the units are geographic unions. The European Union and the African Union and the Central American Union and AOSIS, the Association of Small Island States, and the Commonwealth, all of these. All of these large multinational but still geographic political units that all exist now in like forms. The European Union is the most solid, although the Commonwealth is also pretty solid and the eldest.

And that’s a completely different hypothetical answer to the same question. The question being: countries are wonky right now. How will they change?

Fascinating.

Being a historian teaches you to ask very fundamental questions. Like, what is the staple grain and how are people getting it? And that has different answers in different times and places.

Then you ask the question, does that feel stable or unstable? So [that influenced in Terra Ignota worldbuilding] everything from the political system to the kitchen trees, where people have a programmable tree in their kitchen that produces the fruit that they’ve programmed it to produce s a distribution mechanism for produce. Because produce is one of the most inefficient and cost ineffective distribution networks we have right now, since the vast majority of produce is thrown away in transit or grocery stores.

Those kinds of answers are simply in response to, “What is clearly complicated or in flux in our society that wasn’t the same earlier, so it won’t be the same later?” Make sure all those are different.

I have a bunch of worlds that I’m world building for different projects. I’ve already world-built thoroughly the worlds for the next four series. And I’m working on the fifth one!

I can’t wait to get to know those worlds someday.

I have those worlds almost in order as on a conveyor belt, moving forward. Like assembling a circuit board on a computer, more and more ingredients and components are being put onto them as they come closer to the front of the line. So I will take the notion I had and then I’ll go to the first world I’m world-building and ask, does this fit in this world? Or is it incompatible somehow with being in this world? If it’s compatible, does it resonate with the other stuff I already have in this world?

And so as I was building my world with flying cars and non-geographic nations, I had each of those independent ideas. I went to that world and said, can the person who is a professional living doll live in that world?

Yeah, they could. Cool, what would that mean? It turned out that that character resonated really fascinatingly with the hyper-gendered world of what I was doing with 18th century philosophy.

So those two components cross-wire really well. But I thought of them independently and simply took the character idea and compared it to this world under development. Many components of the world also arose independently of each other but then had strong resonances when they connected up. And if a thing doesn’t fit in the first world because it’s incompatible, then I’ll go to the next one.

I love that so much. I’ve never really published fiction, but I’ve been world- building just in my spare time since I was a little kid. Drawn maps and worlds for fantasy or future settings, but I’ve tended not to have a plot or characters or the things people like to see in a story besides political arrangements and agriculture and climate and stuff.

To extend your Renaissance analogy, it’s like someone seeing a master at the craft that they want to apprentice at. I just love, love, love seeing the complexity and richness of what you write.

And I’m not surprised it takes a minimum five years, because it feels like a whole world. Most fiction feels like it’s sort of taking one aspect of the world and sort of pulling on it and maybe dragging the existing world out of shape in that direction, but it’s still fundamentally the same world. But you’re like, no, it’s been 400 years. Everything’s changed.

The Elysian

How we achieve the borderless future of Terra Ignota

This essay is by me, Elle Griffin, for CITY STATE, a collection of seven writers exploring autonomous governance. You can support the project by collecting the digital or print edition here 👇🏻…

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a year ago · 27 likes · 13 comments · Elle Griffin

I really personally resonate with the idea of the Hives a lot, because I am an American citizen, but I just moved to the European Union because I married a French woman. And I do freelance work, I’ve lived in a bunch of places around the world in my fairly short adult life so far. I literally just got off a call earlier this morning about the complexities of being a citizen of one country and living in a second country while doing remote work for a client in a third country.

That was the model for the Hives. I came up with them while I was in Florence at a research institute where everybody who was there was from all over the world. I was sitting there listening to a conversation, a couple where the husband was was Spanish and the wife was Australian. They had two kids, one of which had been born in the UK and the other of which had been born in the U.S., as they were traveling around research fellowships. And they were now living in Italy, discussing which citizenships their kids were eligible for and what the advantages were of each citizenship. Out of these five options!

And that felt so modern and so interesting and so beneficial for human beings, right? That was what made me think, what if there were a system like that where there’s a buyer’s market instead of a seller’s market for citizenship, and people get to intelligently and prudently make this choice?

And that is increasingly the case. It sort of gets a bad rap in some corners because some of the people who are most visibly multi-geographical like that are very rich people trying to avoid tax jurisdictions by going to Monaco or Dubai or something. But it’s also fundamentally an incredible efflorescence of human creativity and romance and innovation and creation to allow people to not be hemmed in by one by one geographical unit.

Yeah, and right now it very much requires a certain level of affluence to be able to take advantage of these structures that enable this, and there are many barriers, social and financial. But if those barriers are lowered by something like the history of the development of the [supersonic flying antimatter-powered] car network, as I imagined it, we can get to a world where that becomes more and more common.

You can see the effects, especially in Europe’s Schengen Zone, of people being able to travel so much more recently.

But travel isn’t the barrier, right? The barrier is employment opportunity.

Yeah, exactly.

The barriers to getting a job in the target place and then relocating to it. And the tax and regulation systems that different places have for whether you’re taxed a livable or unlivable amount, whether you’re being taxed by multiple countries at the same time.

We see more countries setting up structures to enable this, like digital nomad employment visas.

Italy just started one a few years ago, a new residency status that’s intended basically for self-employed people who work remote and want to live in Italy to be able to pay much more moderate taxes than people who are fully having their primary citizenship in Italy, with the assumption that that person is also having to pay double taxes for some other country. And that kind of structure multiplying is the kind of process that can enable buyer-market citizenship.

Since the crazy evil stuff that’s happened in politics, as the U.S. has started brutally attacking migrants and deporting scientists, the entire U.S. population might soon decline for the first time ever.

That seems like a massively consequential thing down the line. I mean, China’s entire current rocketry program was founded by one Chinese scientist who was deported from America during McCarthyism in the 1950s and had to go back to China and then developed nuclear missiles for China.

It is a massive mistake to turn away talent as a political entity, geographical or non-geographical.

Yeah. I mean, as Fix the News is constantly saying, every study we have shows the one problem in immigration is there isn’t enough of it.

Absolutely.

I love Fix the News. I interviewed Angus Hervey a couple of years ago.

I’m working with Fix the News now! We’re going to do a podcast together.

That’s amazing! I love that so much. And I am really grateful that you’ve come on this interview, because I’m trying to build my own corner of the wildly under-served positive humanistic news market, and you are a luminary in that.

One thing that I see a bit in Fix the News and in your writing and in a bunch of other things is that secular but religious-level intensity commitment to humanity and its biosphere making the world a better place. That’s very powerfully expressed in your Utopia Hive in Terra Ignota. People make a profound vow to devote their lives to “disarming Death blade by blade” and all of this stuff. It’s incredibly inspiring. I love your idea of the Utopians’ civilizational Infinite To-Do List. I love that the Utopians highlight to their members that sometimes the hardest thing to do if you really care about a cause is sort of forcing yourself to take a break. All the little things you built in with characters like Huxley and stuff.

Where do you see stirrings of Utopia Hive-style ideology today?

I mean, I meet people at cons all the time who either say they’re living by it or they wish they could live by it. To which I always say, if you wish you could live by it, that means you already are.

Beautiful.

And I think that’s all over the place. We want to be building a future. And it is in competition with the doomerist idea that you build the future by burning the present. Which is one of the tensions that the book looks at. There are people there who feel like you make or guard a better world by destroying this one. And the book ultimately comes down against that thesis, right? Those who assented too quickly to achieving this by war did so badly. But also that once there was a war, one of the goals of the book was to say, okay, one option for a better future is world peace. Another option for a better future is, okay, we have another world war, but almost everybody behaves better in it than in our past.

Your plot devices of the Peacewash, the prisoner exchanges.

Or even the uniforms, right? That moment where there’s this prisoner’s dilemma system where everyone will not wear the uniforms. And then MASON is like, wait, but maybe we will. Maybe we just will. Maybe we’ll actually pass this prisoner’s dilemma thing. And the answer is they mostly do, right?

And so what if the future is, we make sufficient cultural development and our values shift such that when we do have these conflicts, they are better conflicts? That is also a win condition. And that’s part of the book’s interest in something I think which is very important, which is exploring the fact that partial victories are real.

You haven’t lost the quest for peace when there is war. Then your quest for peace takes the form of, can we have the least war, the smallest war, the least destructive war? That is a victory for peace as well. It’s a partial victory. And all real victories are partial victories.

I’m trying in my writing a lot to cheer for the partial victories. Every new solar farm built, every new battery chemistry being researched, every new landscape preserved or ecosystem restored, every new malaria vaccine deployed, every little thing is a partial victory and they matter. They add up to incredible profound changes in the state of humanity.

In your Terra Ignota universe, it’s established way back in the first book published in 2016 that as part of the backstory for that 2450s world, the United States self-destructs in the 21st century and the European Union becomes the model for global democratic governance. And I remember finding this implausible when I first read it, but honestly, it seems more plausible every day.

Well, remember, I was world-building for ages beforehand, and I finished writing book one in 2008. So that was an idea I had in 2006.

Wow. So how does it feel in the year 2026 to see the European Union sending troops to deter an American invasion of Greenland, to see the U.S. making so many massive self-inflicted errors and the EU coalescing more than ever?

I mean, the answer is one could already sense in 2006 that the direction that religion and religiosity were moving in America was bringing America into a state of tension over the degree to which prominently visible religious movements were becoming politically poisonous.

One of the very formative things that I read that affected the development of Terra Ignota is a really interesting analysis of how in America between 2000 and 2006, in the percentage of Americans on polls that ask about religion, there was a massive swing away from answering Christian toward answering other. Not toward answering agnostic or atheist or any other organized religion, but away from answering christian toward answering other. “Christian” went down and “Other” went way up.

And when they interviewed people who had made that change. a lot of them said, “Well actually I’m Christian but I hate what the church is doing. I hate what the religious leaders are doing. I don’t feel comfortable around the organized religion people. I am still doing my version of Christianity, I’m doing it solo.”

And it was a big swing. Like 10% of the population had gone from saying Christian to saying other in five years. And that was to me really interesting.

And you see it in other religious spheres as well, right? So for example, if you look at a much more recent study, the percentage of Americans who identify as Norse pagan has skyrocketed, has multiplied by 20 in the past decade. There are now more people in America who say they are Norse pagan than Episcopalian. But almost none of them are involved in organized practices. It’s almost all private.

People who respect and like religiosity and are drawn to having a belief structure are seeing Christianity and Islam be represented by their most horrible faces, with the worst pundits and the worst rhetoric and the worst propaganda fore-fronted in what we see. Many people don’t want to be associated with that, so they’re reaching for a private religiosity, whether that private religiosity is a pagan revival religiosity, Greek or Wiccan or Norse, or reaching for a private practice of Christianity or a private practice of syncretism.

There has been this interesting trend away from group religious practice toward private religious practice from people who are disgusted by the very visible nastiness of central organized religion. Now, there’s tons of perfectly healthy religious organizations in America right now as well, right? You can find excellent Jewish organizations and excellent Muslim organizations and excellent Christian organizations all over the place. But there’s so much media about the worst faces, especially of Christianity.

There are versions, like the New Apostolic Reformation, Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalists, the Dominionists, the Seven Mountain Mandate, that are in many ways like American Taliban in terms of how they seek to dominate the state.

Even the weird, heretical American versions of Catholicism. Catholicism is a very well-established religion, and in calmer times, you’re not going to start large amounts of change in what’s happening in the local Catholic church.

One of the officials in the current regime’s DHS, one of the people whose day job is to organize mass surveillance and kidnapping to tear kids away from their families, just offered to lecture the Pope on Christianity. And he claims to be Catholic!

The American heresy. That’s its technical name. This weird American destiny thing that comes out of Calvinism but is infecting even American Catholicism.

So there’s a huge swing of people who are uncomfortable with the organized religion they see around them. And nonetheless, theists. Searching for, reaching for a private practice of various sorts. Which made me think about, okay, well, what does that person want?

What that person wants is a sensei. What that person wants is a structure that allows for the organized practice of solo religion.

How could one have an organized practice of solo religion? Well, one could use the therapist model. In the Terra Ignota books’ fictional future history, the organized public practice of religion became illegal [outside “reservations” like Vatican City] after the devastating Church Wars [and individualized “sensayers” act as private spiritual guides]. That again is born out of that trend. That’s really what I was thinking about and noticing this is happening more in America than elsewhere.

The rhetorical Christian versus Islam conflicts in the Middle East under Bush I and Bush II were also already there, right? The current moment is a descendant of that.

So I was able to imagine, what if this got worse? What if this got worse over time? What if America ends up being where the most toxic version of Christianity gets put in the forefront?

We have this increasing split between a fringe religious organization that nonetheless is trying to control government and a majority of people who want to be left alone and live in an abundance prosperity world and are more and more turned off of the other.

I visited the Masonic Lodge in Washington, D.C. and realized how much Washington, D.C. is, in a small-c conservative sense, more conservative than many American cities because it has old money and family stuff and ideas of old and hereditary structures of power inherited from founding father worship, right? You go to the Masonic Lodge in Washington, D.C. and there are stained glass windows of the founding fathers and the creepy animatronic George Washington that gives you a Masonic blessing. And I could see and feel how that, if it became exaggerated and crossed over with organized religion, could become a toxic structure that could drift farther and farther from where the majority of the American population would be.

So all of those as factor possibilities were clearly around, and not things I thought would happen, but things that I thought could happen.

One thing I really loved about your Inventing the Renaissance is the idea of how history doesn’t periodize itself like we want it to. Things overlap.

There’s that classic story of Poggio Bracciolini that was famously profiled in Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, the Italian bookseller widely credited with having some substantial influence on the Renaissance by obtaining that copy of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and getting it translated from Latin into Italian. And during his famous journey, he stopped at knightly jousts and passed through the Hundred Years’ War, and Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake. All this iconic medieval stuff was happening right at this key moment for the Renaissance.

I literally audibly gasped out loud when I got to that point in Inventing the Renaissance about Machiavelli’s annotations to Lucretius.

I think it is a real testament to your skill that you made it an absolute mind-blowing reveal of someone’s annotations in the footnotes in a copy of a Latin text in the 1490s, since you’d provided so much context on how important that connection was.

If I just started with “Machiavelli’s annotations were different from everyone else’s,” you’d be like, well, yeah, he’s Machiavelli.

But to show, here is the whole weight of the future resting upon this incredibly clear, quantitative, undeniable, proved fact, here he is being unique and being different…it’s bringing the storyteller’s art to history!

Starting with your Ex Urbe blogs, and especially after Inventing the Renaissance, I can’t believe how sympathetically I feel towards Machiavelli now. I had heard of him as the guy who was like, “princes should do whatever they have to do to remain in power.”

These people become propagandized into villains. Like the real Dr. Faustus, Fausto Sozzini, [Faustus Socinus in Latin]. Nobody ever is prepared for what the real Dr. Faustus really did.

The real Dr. Faustus founded a heretical variant of sort of quasi-Protestant religion [Socianism, an early form of Unitarianism], whose scary core theses were absolute pacifism, abolishing social class, and embracing egalitarian universal suffrage.

He went to a city full of heretics in Poland [Raków, or Racovia in Latin] and converted them to this and they tried to set up an egalitarian utopia.

And they prospered under his guidance for about a decade. The ones who were nobility renounced their nobility and labored alongside their comrades. Everyone took vows of absolute pacifism. The former nobility couldn’t cope with not wearing a sword, because it just felt naked without one, so they wore wooden swords as part of their commitment to absolute peace.

They tried having everybody cycle through all the different forms of labor so that everybody would farm and everybody would be a potter and everybody would be a hunter and everybody would be a smith. It worked disastrously, because all of these occupations required specialization so they gave that up after some unsuccessful experiments and did specialize in occupations. They ended up focusing on pottery as their major industry. Exported a lot of pottery, became financially self-stable.

And then this egalitarian utopia was so scary to its neighbors that the local populations of the nearby cities entered and massacred everyone.

Wow. Like a much more heroic version of that brief Münster commune in 1530s Germany.

Yeah. And for about a century, a saying for being on the road to disaster or someone having a horrific unthinkable plan was “You’re on the road to Racovia.” Meaning, if you do this, the next thing you know we’ll have equality and no nobility and pacifism! That’s the worst and scariest thing! Dr. Faust must have made a pact with the devil to advance such evil ideas as egalitarian pacifism!

Just playing on the name, that’s like if a couple hundred years in the future, all we remember of Dr. Fauci is that he was this person who wants to make your blood magnetic with diabolical instruments.

Faust was literally demonized, said to have made a deal with the devil, because the bad guys shaped that narrative of history.

I had never thought of Machiavelli as a founder of utilitarian philosophy before reading your work.

And I was so touched by that anecdote about him putting on his fanciest clothes to read alone, because he was entering the presence of the greatest minds of history.

You feel for the guy!

You describe him as “SPQF,” a patriot of the Florentine Republic trying to protect it by any means necessary in this time of crazy war.

I love this period that you write about, the sort of core Italian Renaissance period, roughly like 1480s to 1520s-ish, that period of Lorenzo de Medici and Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci —

I think of it as the period when most of the Ninja Turtles are active.

I love that!

So, many of the things people think about when they think about great culture. But it was a nightmare to live through, as you write in detail. There was constant war, plague all the time, normalized assassinations, political strife.

I think that that’s a really powerful message for our times. You might feel that everything is terrible, but maybe you’re the Michelangelo of this period. Maybe you’re the person who will be remembered 500 years later for building something so incredible in the midst of these terrible things happening that it’ll shape our entire planetary culture.

Yep! And we don’t know what weird moment, like Poggio finding Lucretius, the future will pick out to be like this. “This is what caused the 21st century - clearly it was the invention of reality television!” Something that we would be like, what?

One thing that I’d love to hear your opinion on, that I write a lot about, and that is absolutely in flux right now, is renewable energy. The situation has changed so unbelievably dramatically for renewable energy in the last 10 years.

Yeah. I mean, really in the last five. It’s over a really unstoppable hump of being unilaterally cheaper than any other option. And now just capitalism is on the side of a green economy.

Yeah! No matter how stupid the politics gets, it will not change that humanity now knows how to make clean electrons cheaper than any source of dirty electrons.

Like the Trump White House has held multiple fossil fuel lease sales now that have not attracted a single bid. They’ve tried to sell off the rights to mine for coal in Montana, drill for oil in Alaska, and no one’s interested. They’ve literally had to close auctions with no bids, not once, but several times. And this is a big part of the reason why I’m so optimistic.

Every so often, capitalism helps. And this is an arena where even capitalism is on the side of, “This just makes sense.” It’s the right call, and it’s going to happen.

One of the things people have been saying, correctly until recently, is that a downside of distributed energy, millions of solar panels everywhere and power generated everywhere, is that it means that when there’s a disaster you can’t redirect masses of power trivially the way you can with a big grid. One of the advantages of our old power grid is when there’s a big disaster somewhere, you can suddenly reroute enormous amounts of power from this half of the state to the other one. That redirection of power is much harder when you’re dealing with thousands of tiny systems, right? But now we have blimp wind turbines!

We could just make a fleet of blimp wind turbines and the blimp goes to the place and you plug it in. So we’ll even have flying power plants to solve this problem! Everything is fine.

And we have virtual power plants! Software to make all the little home batteries act as one to send power.

Which is why really, the biggest crisis that is causing the other crises to be on the scale that they are, is the news economy. The bad news, right? If you think about it, since 2016 mostly, a multi-billion dollar industry of crisis news voyeurism has developed. It’s way bigger than the coal industry.

And I don’t mean journalism. I just mean “bad news, crisis!” news. There are billions of dollars being made on having an emergency to report on every day.

And we see rapidly that demand for emergencies exceeds supply. There was a major controversy in the 2024 presidential election about an “emergency” of “Haitians eating cats” that just never happened. The political right especially will just gin up emergencies based on absolute lies.

That was deliberate propaganda on the part of racists. The one that I think is even more of a crystal clear example is the November 2024 release of the World Health Organization’s giant breast cancer study. Which confirmed that overall cancer survival rates have improved by 40 in the last 15 years! Just every number in every possible was way better than we ever imagined. We’re doing incredibly on breast cancer. A huge cause being that people are getting mammograms earlier. Younger people are getting it detected and then we’re taking action, and that early detection is is doing wonders.

Every newspaper that ran anything on this study ran it with a headline like “Young women are getting more cancer! What’s giving us cancer?!” That’s not what it is! They’re twisting better detection into bad news!

And that wasn’t any political party’s line, right?

The “Haitians eating cats” was political party propaganda. No political party propaganda, left or right or anything, benefits from “We’re getting cancer more.” It’s only the bad news industry.

I notice this so much with climate and renewable energy. Every single bit of progress for renewable energy is reported as “it might barely each pass the target this time, but can it keep it up?” Well, actually, we set an incredibly ambitious goal and then we exceeded it. That’s the actual headline here!

And that is causing despair! Which in turn is causing inaction and radical action and people feeling like the world is on the wrong track so the only way to do something is to burn it down. The bad news industry is feeding so many other problems, and addressing the bad news industry is in many ways one of our biggest issues.

That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to give people weekly roundups and daily doses of hope, of positive change. And there is really so much. It’s hope, but it’s also reality.

Yeah, reality. We’re not getting reality. We’re getting the opposite of rose-tinted glasses. We’re getting flame-tinted glasses that are recasting everything as if it’s on fire.

There’s a great author, Jason Pargin, who I interviewed a while ago. You’d love his work, I think. “The black box of doom” was his term for the opposite of rose-tinted glasses. And his most recent book is titled “I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom.” Technically it had no science fiction elements, but it felt very much like science fiction, if that makes any sense. It was describing real-world 2020s stuff in a sort of other-izing way that makes you see how weird it is. Things like, “in this pass in California in the 1840s, the Donner Party resorted to cannibalism after getting snowed in. In this pass today, in the same season at the same temperature, someone complained because their DoorDash tacos were late.”

And it had a really positive point. It’s exactly what you’re talking about. The whole arc is people realizing, both in the story and in a meta way that we have a black box of doom around all our heads and we’re seeing everything through a doom lens.

But, yeah, rose tinted glasses versus black box of doom.

The Ray-Bans of Doom!

One of the many incredibly inspiring concepts of Terra Ignota is the idea of the endless conversation of humanity, the Great Conversation.

I mean, this is Petrarch’s idea, right? This is an old one.

Yeah, but somehow it never quite gelled for me emotionally until I read your use of it in Terra Ignota. You really made it feel real to me, even though I know it’s an old idea.

I activated the idea.

Yes, exactly.

I’d read the Aeneid well before I ever read Terra Ignota, and that’s explicitly Odyssey fan fiction. Building on the past. I knew that intellectually, but I felt it emotionally in Terra Ignota, the way that your “Anonymous” characters view Voltaire as the First Anonymous.

Well, the 19th century especially gave us this negative idea of responding to past things, that makes it “derivative.” Everything’s derivative. It should not be a negative word, of course. We’re going to derive things from other things and build stuff on stuff!

It’s what Francis Bacon points out makes us the giants compared to the children who are the ancients, right? And yet, the 19th and early 20th centuries had this cult of originality and genius, which turned the word derivative into a slur.

And really, that idea of changing the world through through being derivative but in a productive way, through standing one level higher on the shoulders of the people before you, that Baconian idea is really what drove, that really is in a sense the Enlightenment. The idea of cumulative progress, not trying to recover the lost secrets of a golden age.

I’m trying to contribute to the Republic of Letters, trying to carry on the Conversation in my own small way. And that is just so deeply inspiring to me.

You know, one feature of our culture is that we always poised in a tension between attitudes which construct the past as better than the present and which construct the future as better than the present. And it’s easy to say “conservative” and “progressive” but that’s not really what that means. Because sometimes it will be the progressive movement that is like, “What we need is to go back.”

Like, “back to the good old days of unions.”

Yeah. Hippies were not conservative. But hippies were, “the past is better than the present.” Let’s reconstruct the past in the future in important ways.

And we have these constructions of which should be tried to turn the present into.

The present is always seen as the least good!

What should we try to turn the president to? Are we improving it by making it more like the past? Or are we improving it by making it more like the future?

Different flip-flops back and forth will make one or the other better. There’s that really brilliant moment at the end of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, where Ozymandias is looking at investments and is all poised to switch over from the nostalgia-marketed perfume to the millennium-marketed perfume at the moment that he knows that humanity is not longing for its past, but looking forward to its future.

Often that is the way you digest a big change, that will result in a flip-flop of thinking that either the past or the future is better. Though often you have groups at the same time who are celebrating the one or celebrating the other, but really both are celebrating both, right? If we think about the progressive movement right now, it wants awesome blimps with wind turbines in them, but it also wants awesome blimps with wind turbines in them so that the rivers and fields will be like they were, so that nature will be restored to its primordial state

Which is why you have so much hostility, for example, in the progressive movement to things like managed forestry. There’s this sort of “any interference with the forest at all is as bad as clear-cutting the forest” attitude that you get. Even a progressive movement will usually be a mixture of “these are the things about the future that we want, these are the things about the past that we want” and we layer them on each other, even as our primary allegiance is to future as opposed to past. A future in which the right parts of the past are back, right?

I love that example. I’ve written some petitions to Congress and state leaders about prescribed burns in forestry. In much of the Northern Hemisphere, there has been no forest since the last ice age that wasn’t shaped by humans. If you zoom back all the way to no humans, you’re back to glaciers, not forest. All of North America was managed by indigenous peoples. The idea of the totally unmanaged forest is itself ahistorical.

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: December 18, 2025

In July 2024, we wrote a Daily Dose post with an action urging legislators to pass the bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act to empower the U.S. Forest Service to protect woodlands with prescribed burns, scaling up traditional Native American land management techniques…

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Canada has been resistant to any suggestion of emulating Britain in doing managed forestry. But when you come and say Indigenous people were doing managed forestry for hundreds of years, let’s get back to the original primordial natural managed forestry. Then the same people who said no are suddenly saying yes. Because the British one is is framed as let’s start doing a thing that is new and the other one is framed as let’s return to doing a thing that is old.

So even that is about construction of past and future, as well as what is domestic versus what is enemy, right? Very, very interesting to see how, here are two examples of managed forestry, they do a whole lot of the same stuff. But if we prevent this managed forestry as coming from population A, it is negative, from population B, it is positive, how can we analyze why? One of them is tainted with ideas of interference and harm, and the other one is idealized with notions of authenticity and primordial-ness.

Speaking of the past versus the future, one parallel that I’ve grown really interested in recently, and you discuss it in Inventing the Renaissance, is the printing press as sort of the social media or smartphones of its day in terms of just how massively disruptive it was.

There were heresies, the Hussites, the Albigensians, there were heresies in Europe for centuries, but the heresies after the printing press spread really fast.

And people sometimes think of new communication technologies and the printing press in particular as inherently kind of progressive, but the witch-burning movement was also a product of the printing press, right?

Yeah. They accelerate how quickly something can spread. Accelerants are good and bad. They just accelerate it.

I also think people tend to think about the printing press as if it was one thing that happened once, so then suddenly everyone has the printing press, right?

If you’re playing Civ and you research a tech, the bonus for having that tech instantaneously kicks in across your empire the instant you have the tech. But in real life, it’s like, okay, the city where it was invented has it now. And then it rolls out every decade to another set of cities and then after X many years it has a new implementation, and then another new implementation. And suddenly it’s there.

Which is why people are not realizing that we’re living in the middle of one information revolution, the digital information revolution, and it’s having multiple phases, of which the computer is one and the internet is one and the cell phone is one and social media is one. They’re all iterations of the same tech revolution in the same way that printed books and then pamphlets and then pamphlet networks and then newspapers and then magazines were iterative consequences of the printing press. They were all part of one tech revolution that has many stages over decades, a century and a half

And we’re in another. This tech revolution is going to have many stages over decades and a century and a half. Everyone’s like, “unprecedentedly we have had 10 tech revolutions in the past 30 years!” and I’m like, no, you’re having one tech revolution. This is normal for a tech revolution. It keeps having iterations. What you’re having is the iterations as it saturates. And when people see that, they realize that the world we’re living in is much more precedented than people think it.

There’s a lot of idea that somehow we’re in unprecedented times. We’re in pretty precedented times. History doesn’t literally repeat. History rhymes. But we have an information revolution. It has phases and rollout. It has its political tumults as a consequence. We know how this works.

And I must say, reading about the Borgias in your Inventing the Renaissance felt very very similar to the current family in the White House, particularly the opulence and corruption of the Borgia pope Alexander VI. Fortunately none of the current president’s sons seem as formidable as Cesare Borgia.

I mean, all the Borgias are much, much smarter. But the sort of shamelessness, yeah. They’re attempting familial regulatory capture.

Yeah, and the norm-breaking. They’re just like, yeah, I don’t care if the Pope never does this. The Pope is now doing this. That feeling of, I will do whatever I feel like for my own family’s power.

But also the fact that it’s building upon earlier Popes having expanded those powers, right? Obama did a much quieter version of expanding the executive powers of the White House because he had an obstreperous Congress that was stopping everything. And so he found ways to do stuff by executive order. that would not have been done by executive order under an earlier president. He was super cautious and he was super careful and he was trying to be on his best behavior and so he did so quietly and subtly and gently, but he did create these precedents. In the same way you don’t get the Borgias way exceeding executive power without the precedents of Popes Paul II, Sixtus IV, and Innocent VIII, each exceeding it a bit. And then someone else saying, well, now there’s a precedent for exceeding precedent. I’m going to exceed precedent by more than the others exceeded precedent.

So that is also a contributing factor. When you expand executive power, you create a precedent for expanding executive power. In many ways this leads back to the universal political principle: If you create a power, it will be reused in future by people you disagree with during a crisis you cannot anticipate. Don’t create the power if it would be terrible if it were misused by your enemies in the future, in a crisis you cannot anticipate! Because it will be.

And it is in a way, to me, deeply comforting, that idea that we’re living in precedented times. I often find history, even or perhaps especially the history of terrible things, sort of strangely comforting just because it shows that all that happened and humanity got through it and we survived and even thrived. There has still been, since all the terrible stuff that has happened in the past, mRNA vaccines and space telescopes and mass access to cheap calories and all the great stuff that’s happened recently.

We’ve even seen the tragic corruption of a republic many times before, from the classic example of the Roman Republic to the Renaissance Florence that you write about.

You’re making me think I should write an essay sometime this summer with the title, “We Live in Precedented Times.” I just think as an essay title, it would be provocative.

It’s become a cliche. “We live in unprecedented times.” And it’s narrowly true. Like humanity hasn’t done this exact same thing before. But in the broader scope of what they want to say, it’s not really true.

There are many patterns that have shown up previously several times in our history.

Yeah, why do we reach for the claim that we live in unprecedented times? Why is that the claim that our instincts want to advance? Why aren’t we content with accepting that we live in complex but precedented times?

We’ve even dealt with, several times, catastrophic climate change. Humanity survived the end of the last ice age. There was the flooding of Doggerland.

I remember at one point seeing, I think it was when Twitter was still alive, some people were posting some doomerist stuff.

And you and I both know that we respond to doomerist stuff with, “Here are examples of hope! The doomerist position is factually wrong!”

But this person responded instead with, “Yeah, you guys think you’re so special that even though everybody who’s thought the world was ending has been consistently wrong for 5,000 years, you’re the special generation?”

Yeah, try the Copernican principle that you’re not the center of the universe.

Yeah. And that made me think about it differently, right? That it isn’t just a question of facts and factual refutation.

It’s also a question of why do people want to feel like everyone else has always been wrong that the world was ending, but we are finally right that the world was ending. Making me return to Eugene Webber’s brilliant book, Apocalypses, which is a history of our 4,000-year romance with the end of the world and how every time an end of the world is disproved or passes by, we immediately come up with a new end of the world. Because humanity loves fearing the end of the world. It’s very emotionally satisfying. And people find that counterintuitive. But it’s also just perfectly true.

And also, and I love this one just because of how clear a dichotomy it is, in the early 2020s, the world’s media turned on a dime from saying “due to population growth rates, there will soon be far too many people and it might cause the end of the world,” to “due to declining birthrates, there will soon far too few people and that might cause the end of the world.”

Well, remember, before that, they flipped the other way. In the 18th century, they think the birth rate is too low and the world is going to depopulate. And then when you get to the mid-19th, it’s, oh no, overpopulation is going to get us. And then it flips back again.

Yeah! Like, was there not one day that the consensus was that the population was doing OK?

Historically, there was an idea that humanity was under-breeding itself into non-existence because they were getting the numbers from Herodotus and believing them and believing that the population of antiquity was humongous.

Yeah! And I was like, wait a minute. If the conventional wisdom was worried about too much population growth in the past and too little now, was there any one day at any point where we felt it was an acceptable rate?

I wrote an article saying, actually, human population is pretty okay. Some people did not like it.

What do you think? China’s population has been shrinking since 2023. There’s been a massive shift in human populations. Do you think we’ll evolve towards that sort of pointillistic urbanism of Terra Ignota where there’s a range of city-states amid vast swathes of rewilded land? We’re already seeing abandoned suburbs and former farmland in some parts of Europe.

We’re definitely going to see a reclaiming of suburbs into other stuff. And farming is getting more efficient, so we need less land for it.

I do think we’re at a point where the population increase is slowing, but I think it’s going to still increase. The highest cause of slowing down population increase, the number one correlation with slowed population increase, is women’s education.

Yeah, women’s rights.

No! Not women’s rights! Not even abortion access. It’s women’s education! Even when legal rights suck, and abortion access is limited, if women are educated, they will make a plan and the birth rate will go down.

Everyone expected it to be abortion access or rights and discovered that it was in fact education, that even when rights suck and abortion access is limited, if women are well-educated, they will make a plan. And they will work at it and the population, the birth rate will go down. It’ll go down more if there’s easy access to rights and birth control. And it’s sure hard to stop women’s education these days. It’s got so much momentum, right?

I often think about, the founder of the One Laptop per Child program, his brother for a number of years was the first U.S. Director of National Intelligence, and later U.S. Deputy Secretary of State. And the two of them used to joke with each other about having a bet on about which of the two was changing the world more.

Which is such a brilliant debate to have. It’s just a neat way to think about it. This is the question of which is more powerful, power in the present or the creation of vastly more power in the future.

What else would you like to share that we haven’t covered that is really important?

We’ve covered a lot. I don’t think any other interview I’ve done recently gotten me talking about that interesting flip from Christian to other or from organized religion to solo religion. Everybody wants to talk about Machiavelli. I made him a protagonist of the book. Everybody’s been asking about him. People have not been asking about that as much.

And I think that revisiting that facet of that world-build and the thought process behind it is extra useful in this moment where indeed once again we are seeing atrocities being done in the name of a fringe bit of Christianity that therefore moves into the spotlight and is making people more uncomfortable and alienated.

Fascinating.

The increase in the pagan-identifying population has also been part of the same structure, right? Because this is the effect of, you’re a kid in America, you have myth storybooks, and you also get access to whatever the books are of the dominant Abrahamic religion around you. Some people it’s Christianity, some people it’s Islam, some people it’s Judaism. Then, as you grow up, especially if it’s Christianity, it embarrasses itself and becomes nasty and you don’t want to be part of it.

What do you then reach for when you still want to have a meaningful spiritual life?

There was a year when I was around 12, 13, when I tried to live by the precepts of every major world religion for a few weeks each. I remember when I tried Confucianism and said I would strive for filial piety, my parents were like, wait, the thing you’ll change is that now you’ll listen to us? What were you doing before?

But yeah, I think people are deeply attracted to new sources of meaning. I’ve actually written a few articles on my personal Substack wondering if the rise of neo-paganism in general might be adaptive in the age of AI and the climate crisis.

That’s one of the reasons I’m pursuing the Norse myth book project. By the way, the title has changed. The title of the first one is now going to be “And Loki in His Prison.” And the series title is Hanged God’s Game.

Awesome!

I’ve been thinking a lot, and one of the reasons that I’m working on that project and excited to work on that project right now is this. The Abrahamic religions, especially Christianity and Islam, prepare us very badly to think about climate change. Because they present an all-powerful creator who planned this is and who made the world for a higher end to which the world is just a means, right? The world is temporary eventually. We won’t need any more. It really gets talked about as if it’s the jar in which the caterpillar is living before it turns into the butterfly that is the immortal soul in heaven. Earth is disposable. If Earth has fragilities, that’s not actually the fragility. It’s part of the plan.

And we struggle to think in terms of the importance of being custodians of the Earth. None of that is in Christianity or Islam, right? Both of them say, if the Earth is failing, that’s the plan, or it’s a test, and the all-powerful father can intervene at any moment.

Which is not helping us figure out how to cope. We need to be able to think about the fact that the earth is fragile and is in our hands.

In Norse mythology, Midgard is a very unique, fragile, climate world surrounded by a universe of ice and fire in which the giants, which are personifications of heat and cold and storm, crash upon us. In which the gods have to work hard to defend themselves and defend the Earth. The gods need humans to team up with them to protect the earth against ice and fire and storm.

This is a perfect metaphysics for us to imaginarily visit to think about climate change more effectively.

Oh, yeah.

That worldview is really good for us to visit, to imagine. Enter a space in which we can engage with a metaphysics that helps us think about climate change in our custodianship, instead of making us want to shirk that and say it’s all on the omnipotent father figure.

And it’s different from the white supremacist gaze, which wants to imagine strength. But when you go to the real primary sources, what’s distinctive about the Norse gods?

It’s that they can be wounded.

It’s that they’re all maimed and beat up.

It’s that they have to make hard choices.

It’s that they’re constantly on guard against an enemy, and that enemy is storm and harshness. They aren’t like the Greek gods that are powerful and live in serenity. The Earth is fragile and as we feel ourselves to be fragile, nonetheless we’re part of the team that must maintain the fragile world where it exists.

So I think it’s an incredibly healthy thing for us to let ourselves enter the imagination space of the Norse cosmos. Not just to play around with these characters like Loki who are inevitably fun, but to actually enter the metaphysical world view and explore what it means for even the gods to be fragile and to need us.

That is amazing! I cannot wait to read this!

It’s for anybody who, when they were young, had D’Aulaire’s Norse Myth and loved it.

I had that!

This is that, I want it to feel that awesome, but at a grown-up level. So that’s what it is. We have millions of people who are saying, eh, I’m burnt out on the normal religions around me, but I really liked Norse stuff when I was a kid. Hopefully it will hit that niche and help a lot of people spend some time in an imagination space that helps us think of ourselves as custodians of our world.

This is incredible. This interview has been more than I could have hoped for. Thank you so much, Professor Palmer. Ad Astra!

Lifespeed.

Jessica Morgenthal is the host of the award-winning Resilience Gone Wild podcast, using a biomimicry lens to learn relevant lessons from nature’s solutions to problems.

In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Ms. Morgenthal’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

So, the logo for your Resilience Gone Wild includes a sea turtle. You mentioned how you had a formative experience with a loggerhead sea turtle that led you to found this biomimicry-focused podcast, discussing the lessons learned from the natural world for human life. Could you tell me that origin story?

Sure. It’s my favorite story!

My husband and I made a move in August of 2020, which was deep into COVID. We were living in New York. Our kids were graduating from college and had come back to the roost and were hanging out with us. We decided that looking ahead, COVID was going to be getting worse again. We were going to get locked down and it was going to be dark and it was going to be another season of darkness. So one night late in August, we decided to go online and buy an apartment on the beach in Florida, where we could see sunrise and sunset from our apartment and be at the beach with nothing between us and the beach. We knew a place that was relatively affordable. And so we moved to Florida a couple months later, put our house on the market.

It turned out that we moved to a place that is one of the densest sea turtle nesting beaches in the world. The next summer, we’re wandering the beach, and there’s just sea turtles everywhere! Loggerheads and greens, and, though we haven’t seen one yet, there’s also leatherbacks, and they’re making these incredible nests. It was right there! I’m actually looking out my window at a seawall being built at this very moment, which is a different story about resilience and living at the beach.

Anyway, we start hanging out with the turtles and watching them and there were all these rules. You can’t bother them. You have to have yellow or red lights, you can’t have white lights, because they could go the wrong way. We’re watching them do this, and it turns out that down the road is an incredible marine life center and turtle hospital, called Loggerhead Marinelife Center.

They run evening walks to go have this experience in person. and they show you exactly what’s going on. They teach you about what the turtles are doing.

So we both went to a turtle walk. And we’re just so blown away by this ancient prehistoric dinosaur-like creature. 300, 400 pounds. This mother who is never going to see her children.

She is building this magnificent structure that takes her an hour or two at least of such exhausting work. She’s on the sand. She’s not in the ocean where she can swim comfortably. She dragged herself in from the ocean. She’s chosen this spot because she was born there sometime 25 to 80 years earlier. Had come back from wherever she was in the world to find the spot, because it was the best chance of her children being able to survive this tough world, right?

So she comes back. Often the mothers will come on the sand and go, hmm, I wonder if this is the right place.

It’s a little too windy. The sand’s a little too wet. And they’ll go back in.

I might hear a predator. Something’s making me nervous. They’ll drag themselves back into the ocean and try again later or the next day.

This whole process just blew us away. And then after they built the nest, they spend like another half hour or an hour camouflaging it to protect it.

This can’t be only instinct. It has to be love.

And turtles aren’t the largest brain creatures, but there is certainly intelligence there. This combination just was so awe-inspiring.

So I decided of course to volunteer at the Marine Life Center. And I get assigned, after growing up in Manhattan, knowing absolutely nothing about fish, I’m assigned to interact and teach people about our aquariums and the marine world. I started hearing stories from the people I was working with, the aquarists who had lived in this space and had been all over the world experiencing this deep personal interaction with marine life. And then all the people who were coming through who were divers and anglers and children who were obsessed with learning about nature and learning about marine life and knew everything there was to know about sharks and all that.

I was having the conversations, and starting to have this total mind-shift in understanding how sentient every single animal that I was interacting with was. The whole species being sentient and intelligent and adaptive and resilient, each individual animal. It was crazy to experience this. It changed my mindset.

At the same time, I’m teaching and studying and and talking nonstop about resilience and about positive psychology and about happiness and all that stuff. And I couldn’t help but put it together.

So all I’m seeing is what these magnificent creatures have adapted and evolved to develop over millions of years. We’re sitting on this earth for like a really short time, like a blip in time, right? And we think we know it all. I’m learning about these incredible capacities of intelligence and adaptation that are happening.

The sea turtle and the nesting brought me there. And then the parrotfish really took it forward. My first real story was multiple stories about the parrotfish. I don’t know if you want to hear about the parrotfish.

Yeah, tell me about the parrotfish!

Okay! A parrotfish is actually called that because it has a beak like a parrot, one of the hardest beaks in the natural world. They differ in every color of the rainbow and live in every coral reef area in the world. Because a parrotfish’s favorite food is algae. And algae grows heavily on dead and diseased coral as well as healthy coral. But it tends to build up where there’s not healthy stuff going on. So parrotfish scrape the algae off the rocks and off the coral. Parrotfish clean it out. They’re absolutely vital to coral reefs. They clean out the dead and diseased coral to leave room for new growth.

Think about that as a resilience aspect. We need to clean out the old crap to make room for new growth. It’s doing that for the reefs.

And when it scrapes the algae with this super hard beak, it scrapes off this dead and junky rock and coral, which is hard, brittle to a certain extent, but hard. And it’s got it in its mouth. Now what does it do with it?

It has a second set of teeth in its throat, built to grind up this rock and this coral. And it grinds it all up. I’m watching these parrotfish in an aquarium and they’re pooping out what appears to be sand. And it turns out that’s what they do!

Parrotfish have this incredible role in the marine ecosystems. And they are the only ones who do it. We need them. They make about 85% of all the white sandy beaches in the world! And they make the sand that surrounds and protects coral reefs. That is the ecosystem that so many creatures live in, they live in the sand.

So I’m blown away by parrotfish, and I start to learn more about them. And somebody tells me this story about how, because they live this incredible purpose all day, and they work really hard, they go to cleaning stations.

Let’s just stop for a moment and talk cleaning stations! Fish go to organized cleaning stations that are manned by other smaller fish. There’s this symbiotic thing going on where there’s specific locations in coral reefs where they hang out and they wait for small. They come into these cleaning stations and they have a deal. I won’t eat you. You let me eat the stuff that’s bugging you, all the stuff that’s sticking to you, all the parasites and all the garbage that’s all over you, and I’ll clean you up. And they get to eat, and they get to not get eaten, and everybody’s happy. It’s kind of a crazy thing, right?

That’s awesome. Like the birds that clean crocodiles’ teeth, or oxpeckers for ungulates.

Yes! It is an unbelievable world that we live in, is it not? There’s so much symbiosis, and this one blew me away.

People talk about nature red in tooth and claw, and there’s an element of truth to that, there’s predator-prey relationships and a bunch of other stuff, but there’s also so many cases where stuff works together, knowingly or unknowingly, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly. And there’s so many analogs in human society, markets, civil society, even religions. There’s a reason that people talk about corporate ecosystems and niches. They’re using a biology term because different agents trying to survive, like corporations, are using a much cruder version of a template that animals have been evolving for millions of years.

Yeah. I’m a huge fan of nature metaphors as opposed to violent or war-oriented or human-tool metaphors. If we can use nature metaphor in positive ways, we can take so much better care of each other because we have a language that respects each other. It’s such a beautiful thing.

I’m working on finishing up an episode about coffee, and it’s just so interesting. This is a combo of the plant world and the animal world to a certain extent.

You should talk to Etelle Higonnet. She’s got a new coffee-related organization. She’s super great.

She’s on my episode! She’s my guest, and she’s the one who organized it. Did she do an article with you?

She did, yes.

Oh, my gosh. She’s the best. I’m glad you got to talk with her.

She is the best. She’s an actual knight! She was named a Chevalier of France by President Macron.

That’s so cool.

So coffee developed the molecule of caffeine over millions of years, because it has a very short life of flowering for pollination. It could be a few days at most, and it needs the pollinators to really like being there, so they’ll stick around and they’ll remember to come back. The molecule, the chemistry of caffeine was created by the plant, tested and eventually that’s what worked, so that the bees would get happy and energized and like it there. It would also boost their memory, so they would come back for the next few days.

Which is pretty freaking awesome, right?! We use caffeine to do the same stuff!

But it wasn’t made for us. It was made for the plant to be more resilient. Because it can self-pollinate, but it is much, much more productive when it has other pollinators.

So it’s got this symbiotic system. The bees get to eat this yummy nectar, get to get just a little bit high, love it. That’s small amounts in its nectar. In its leaves, it puts large amounts of caffeine, which in large amounts is highly toxic and deadly. And it also tastes bad. So anything that’s trying to eat the plant is not welcome and gets that sense that it’s not welcome and doesn’t come back and leaves quickly. And then the leaves fall around the ground. So coffee plants tend to have large areas around them that are safe from animals that are going to make a mess of it, that are going to hurt it, because they don’t want to eat. They don’t want to be around those toxic levels of caffeine.

I thought that was really cool in terms of symbiosis. It crosses over between plant and animal worlds!

The parrotfish, it has to be really healthy and get up each morning energized for it to do what it needs to do each day. It builds itself a sleep bubble.

It’s a mucous membrane that it takes about half an hour and a lot of energy to build and generate, and it covers its entire body in a bubble, a protective cocoon, every night. Not all parrotfish do it. Many do, and they only do it when they feel threatened, when they’re in a predator environment. A parrotfish will not do it in an aquarium, it won’t do it in an environment where it doesn’t have a lot of dangerous predators, but they do it in, in most other cases.

It builds this cocoon. It has the most incredible capacities. It has sunscreen. It has an alarm in it. If it gets popped, the parrotfish wakes up in a second. It lets oxygen come through, carbon dioxide go out, but it doesn’t let water through. It’s air permeable! It keeps the parasites out and the predators out because it doesn’t let the odor come out, so a predator doesn’t know it’s there. It’s sticky and kind of gooey.

The parrotfish lives in crevices, it sleeps in crevices of coral reefs at night. It stays in there and can stick in there and not move around with the waves and the current. It’s protective so it doesn’t get scratched up by all of the bumping around. It’s like living in a soft bubble, it has all these unbelievable things.

I took that and I was like, Ding ding ding! This is the metaphor that started it all. It’s that we need to create a sleep bubble for ourselves. We can picture the parrotfish when we’re having trouble sleeping and incorporate that story into the message of, okay, what isn’t working here? What do I need to keep away predators and parasites? What needs to get outside the bubble before I go to sleep so that I can have a calm night’s sleep? What do i need to have so that it\ doesn’t interfere with coming into the bubble at night. Like light, noise or whatever.

So you keep the worry thoughts and the to-do lists and stuff managed before you go to sleep. You deal with the environmental stuff. I had a ceiling fan that was noisy and a shade that wasn’t dark enough and things like that. And then, you know, your phone. I mean, it’s the biggest imposition, right? How do you make the phone not pop your bubble? You know, if you get up at night or whatever.

The sleep bubble became my first main metaphor. It became the center of developing Resilience Gone Wild.

That is really interesting. This actually reminds me of a book I reviewed a while ago, called What Would Nature Do by Dr. Ruth DeFries. I think you’d love it.

I’ve heard of it! I haven’t read it.

It’s right up your alley. It’s about exactly this, the lessons learned from nature. A lot of big meta-principles are really illustrated by nature. Very early-evolved lineages of plants like ginkgoes have sort of a hub and spoke model with lots of straight line veins coming out from the stem but that means that like just one tear or bite can take out a vein that supplies like a whole section of the leaf. If you look at a modern leaf, it’s tons of little like circles and nodes and different connections. Redundancy. That means that if one gets broken there’s tons of others nearby. That’s obviously got classic lessons for supply chains and all sorts of systems. And it’s exactly about the stuff you’re talking about.

I don’t know how much or if you follow this, but unbelievable stuff is happening in solar and battery technology. It’s now the overwhelming majority of all new built electricity capacity everywhere in the world. China’s carbon emissions decreased last year slightly! There’s crazy milestones happening everywhere.

The U.S has actually rapidly become kind of a laggard, with much of the world kind of leapfrogging us, due to our government.

Yes, I follow it, and I’m very aware. I think there’s so much there. It’s deeply resilient on a level that is really amazing.

There’s this one analogy from the great think tank Ember that really seems like one of your nature analogies.

Basically, we’re moving from hunting fossil fuels to farming the sun. Fossil fuel deposits are kind of like a Paleolithic strategy of hunting large animals for food. You go find a big chunk of resource, kill it or drill it, kill the mammoth, drill the oil reserve, and then extract it until it’s all gone.

But with farming, you can get a roughly more-or-less predictable amount of food from the same land again and again. And that’s kind of the shift that’s happening in our energy system. We can now farm the Sun with solar panels. Batteries are the grain silos. We can build bigger. We can immensely increase the amount of energy available to civilization. Bring Africa out of poverty, do amazing things with this huge upshift.

Moving our energy system to be less like an animal and more like a plant in a way. Less like a hunter-gatherer and more like an agricultural civilization.

We’re sort of getting rid of the middlemen. I think of it that way. We’re getting rid of all those steps that cost us so much destruction, extraction, cost. Everything that goes into that whole 99% of the system that we didn’t need, right? Because we can just use the Sun directly!

Yeah, on this planet, it’s all either solar energy or radioactive decay, right? Those are the two sources of energy. Fossil fuel is just ancient solar energy in the form of ancient plants and animals that got that through photosynthesis and eating stuff to photosynthesize and then died and then was compressed into fossil fuel.

Fossil fuel is just old sun and we might as well get new fresh sun. It’s amazing. I’m a big fan. You describe it and it sounds like magic. The Sun! You know what I mean? It is magic, right? It is the source of our life.

And if we don’t use it, it just gets wasted. That’s the thing about sustainable energy, right? Water movement, if you don’t use it, it disappears. And wind, if you don’t use it, it disappears. Like, how is it that we’re not all in?

Much of the world really is! Australia. I don’t know if you saw this, is starting to do three hours of free electricity per day starting later this year.

That’s so cool. And it’s interesting because it’s during the day when you need it the most. Usually we’re told to move as much energy use as we can to at night.

There’s just so much energy. There’s a huge amount of energy during the day when it’s sunny. And Australia also has government support incentivizing home batteries, so it’s even better than three hours! You can charge up and then run your whole house based on what you stored during those three hours of free power.

And it’s simple. I mean, you’ve got these balcony panels, anybody can put solar energy into it. It blows my mind! Right into the outlet, you just send it right into the outlet, it charges your whole home and then it goes back into the system if it’s not being used. How do you beat that, right?

Literally today, for Climate Action Now, I published an updated message that people can send to their state legislators trying to cut away the restrictions from balcony solar! It’s exactly what you’re talking about.

Oh, perfect. I’m all in. I’m with you.

I’m really enjoying this conversation. We seem to be thinking a lot along the same lines.

People sometimes ask me, why is your newsletter basically about either wildlife conservation or clean energy? And I’m like, it’s really not either. It’s the same underlying idea, which I find to be most commonly expressed in those things. It’s hard to put that into words, but you’re doing a good job of it.

One other thing I’m really interested by is, apropos of that solar panel/plant analogy, we’re also starting to see emerging integration of technological and ecological systems in some really interesting ways. There are some studies showing that a bunch of wild ecosystems, like dry grasslands and deserts, actually have higher biodiversity and productivity if you put solar panels on top of them! Isn’t that wild?

That is wild. And the shade and the cool. It’s the coolest thing. I love it.

Retaining moisture in the soil!

And that’s just incredible. That is so fascinating.

I mean, that’s not unheard of in the history of life at all. That’s like a beaver dam, which is an animal-made structure that creates a new wetland ecosystem.

I just love that. I love that we can contribute as part of the system to improving the system. It’s the win-win-win for everybody, right? We get to source our solar energy at the same time as we’re serving and helping the ecosystem overall.

Everyone kind of looks for the catch, the trade-off with renewable energy. Everyone jumps on any possibility that there’s some hidden bad thing. Because this often was the case during the last major stage of development, the Industrial Revolution, where you could solve horrible, grinding poverty by burning fossil fuels to power stuff, but that also caused air pollution and lots of other issues.

And no, actually, it’s just great across the board. It just is a win-win-win.

People are like, oh, no, you have to mine for certain minerals to create solar panels.

It’s hundreds to thousands of times less mining than you need to keep burning fossil fuels! It’s an improvement.

People are like, oh no, it takes up land.

Actually, it turns out a lot of crops grow better under solar panels, and you can even put it in the desert and the desert plants do better because it retains moisture in the soil. It really is just a win-win-win.

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2 months ago · 34 likes · Sam Matey-Coste

I love how much you emphasize a win-win-win because people have a disbelief in that, but it really is that good. Sometimes there are win-win-wins in life! If we can just step away from thinking how I need you to lose so I can win, it changes everything, right?

I don’t think there’s ever a time when you can’t have a win-win-win. There’s always a solution so that we can all benefit if we just stop and take a little more time to do the thinking.

That really goes against people’s intuitions, because a lot of human history was defined by grinding trade-offs. In a subsistence agriculture-based economy, there often aren’t win-win-wins. But modern civilization is often defined by win-win-wins.

Most international trade today is positive sum. Both parties end up richer. And obviously the current regime in the U.S. just doesn’t believe that. They make both sides poorer because of their ideology.

People have this zero-sum mentality around so many things but often interactions in the modern world are positive-sum. Like, when people immigrate to new countries, they’re not taking away from some limited pie of housing and jobs. They’re growing the pie! They’re helping build housing, and creating new jobs. Things often are win-wins, and it’s sort of counterintuitive to human instincts and cultural vibes, but it often is the case.

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2 months ago · 97 likes · 44 comments · Jerusalem Demsas

Look at something like an agricultural system, which you brought up. I get the sense that you’re not as sold as I am that there’s always a win-win. Look at the transition to regenerative thinking about agriculture and farming. My favorite movie is still The Biggest Little Farm. I mean, just the idea that we’re going to think longer term, you know. Most of our monocrop agricultural world is only one season long, right? The seeds have to be replanted each time. Everything has to start over. That is not the way nature works. From what I understand, we can produce enough food if we transition the whole thing, get rid of all the monocropping. And we maybe eat a little less by the way. We’re wasting, right, with the monocrop world, we’re wasting some insane amount of what we’re producing because we’re just thinking short term.

I agree with you on half of that, but I’m also really not sold on the other half. I totally agree that there were many big problems with our existing monocrop agricultural system, that there’s way too much food waste, and I’ve written a lot about some really amazing new techniques that can improve things. There was a great study recently that found that much of the prairie provinces of Canada have transitioned to no-till agriculture, like in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and they manage to increase yields despite escalating chaotic droughts and stuff.

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3 months ago · 32 likes · 6 comments

But some people seem to think you can say the magic words “regenerative farming” and it’ll be okay. You almost kinda-sorta can do that for the energy system now with the magic words “solar plus batteries” but it’s really easy to screw up farming if you try to make a big change in it. Sri Lanka in 2021 passed a law essentially mandating a transition to organic farming within a year, banning pesticides and fertilizers, and it was an utter catastrophe. Brought down the government.

But that’s the problem. Everybody wants a quick fix. It’s the short-term versus long-term thinking. We can’t switch in one day. We need to learn, we need to develop, we need to have things grow. It takes five years for a new coffee plant to grow.

It’s a transition. It’s transformation. We need to think longer term. We need to think 5, 10, 20 years out, not one season.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that.

We can’t just make the switch, but we’re moving towards the switch. A huge percentage of the coffee industry is actually specialty coffee now. And look what happened to chocolate. The ecosystems can’t sustain the monoculture of coffee and chocolate. Look what happened with the droughts in West Africa.

I agree on the direction of travel. There’s been some incredible work on agroforestry in Africa, interspersing trees with cash crops like coffee and cacao

There’s a story that I absolutely love that in Niger, which is one of the poorest countries in the world, there was a completely grassroots, under the radar, not even known to the West until it was seen on satellite photos, agroforestry movement! Inspired by some Peace Corps volunteers decades ago and then hugely built on by the local people. They planted huge amounts of land, that was on the verge of desertification, with trees, so it can be both farmland and have erosion control and shade and all the benefits of trees.

We can and should move towards polyculture and regenerative agriculture. But simultaneously, kind of similar to how fossil fuels did a lot of amazing things for humanity in their day, the sort of monocrop mega grain fields we have now have led to the most food abundance in human history, and if you screw that up, that is one of the fastest ways that a country can really screw itself up.

I also read a really great book recently called Feed Us with Trees, which talked about how, and this was one thing I had never thought about before, tree generations are really long, but grant cycles are short. This goes to exactly what you were saying about the speed of things.

So almost all agricultural research doesn’t cover nut tree species, because it takes a long time to grow into a new tree. We have something like 50 to 100 times higher production in most grains than in their natural relatives, but more like two to three times as high production in nut trees. What if we had a really focused, intense research program to breed high production nut trees? Because you can grind up nuts and make flour. You can do a lot of things with nuts. We’re still using something pretty close to wild nuts. If you look at what we’ve done with other plants, it is very possible to breed plants that produce way, way more of the fruit or vegetable you want to eat. I would be really interesting if we tried to have more of a mixed nut tree savanna as a major calorie productivity landscape. That’s not soon, but that would be interesting. There’s so many historic examples of societies using chestnuts and acorns as a major calorie source.

It’s wild, isn’t it? Things that we just think are garbage are a major source of protein and fodder for nature, for animals.

I was thinking, I saw a video a little while ago about strawberries being produced by Dyson. Have you seen this? Dyson, the vacuum company. They are super productive and super water-saving and super for strawberries and stuff. So you can have local, so you’re not shipping strawberries across the world to be in season. They can always be in season.

Fascinating. Thanks for bringing that up.

It’s so cool.

I’m glad you brought up greenhouses, because they’re a great example. There’s a lot of countries doing amazing work with greenhouses. I saw tons and tons of greenhouses on the North China Plain recently. I don’t know if you saw my article series about that journey.

Yeah, I really enjoyed it! What a great opportunity for you to go to China and learn about what they’re doing. I mean, I want to go on that trip.

You can, actually. They just opened a 10-day visa-free period for Americans. So if it’s less than 10 days and a couple other conditions, you can do it.

No, I need somebody there who I can meet with. I gotta hear more about your trip, how you managed to get the quality of the experience.

Well, for close to a year before the trip, I tried to reach out to tons of Chinese scientists and stuff, but none of them responded. I suspect due to the political situation at the time. So I actually just went by myself and saw only publicly available things. I didn’t have anyone I knew on the ground at all.

Oh, that’s awesome. And things were working, and you could learn?

Yeah! There was a lot of really cool stuff. It was wild.

That was actually quite recently.

January!

I’m excited to read it!

There’s just crazy stuff going on in China.

Like, look at this. I took this picture.

It’s this human-carrying giant drone, essentially a flying car! Totally electric.

Wow, that carries a human?

Two humans.

Wow.

And it moves like it’s a drone.

You know, they’re doing a lot with flying cars in this country too.

Yeah! Like Archer and Joby.

It’s like, you didn’t grow up with the Jetsons, I grew up with the Jetsons. Isn’t there a line that there’s nothing we create hasn’t been thought of first by the science fiction writers who have the ideas, right? Like, it’s all out there, and we just need the creative thinkers to come up with the ideas, and then technologists can make it happen.

There’s always prior art. There tends to be, anyway.

So, greenhouses. If you intensify human activity on a small area, you can often free up a larger area. People look at greenhouses and they’re like, well, it’s this plastic or metal thing. It doesn’t look at all natural. It doesn’t look like a bucolic farm. But actually, like with the Dyson thing you just brought about, you get much higher vegetable production or whatever in a smaller area, and then that means you use less farmland overall.

Greenhouses in places like Spain, where there’s lots of white-roof greenhouses, actually have an albedo effect like Arctic sea ice, so they cool the entire surrounding area. There’s tons of just fascinating stuff like that.

Yeah, they save energy because they’re controlling the environment, right? So that it’s most ideal for what they want to do. So they’re not dealing with the heat in Spain and the dryness and the floods and all the rest of it. It’s a sealed ecosystem. It’s climate resilience.

And that also is sort of an analogy with the natural world. You often see really intense zones of activity by one species. Like an anthill, for example, that’s often viewed as an analogy for human cities. Or a termite mound. They can be a denuded, isolated area that doesn’t have, all the other little plants and bugs in the other surrounding area - although they do have myrmecophiles and stuff that lives just in the anthill, which is its own thing.

But that also is increasing the productivity of the whole ecosystem. Stuff eats the ants. The ants are cultivating aphids and doing tons of stuff like that. Leafcutter ants - sorry, I’m going on tangents.

No, it’s not a tangent. It’s the whole point, right? Nature is so mind-blowingly complex, and the closer you look, I love this concept, the closer you look and you magnify something, the more complex it gets. It’s the forest from the trees kind of thing. There’s just so much if you keep looking deeper and deeper. We just need to realize that we’re all connected. There’s so much opportunity to work with nature instead of against it.

Absolutely.

Are there any other examples you want to share? I saw that you interviewed Sy Montgomery. She was a real childhood hero of mine.

I’ve interviewed her twice! She’s fabulous. She’s amazing.

I did an interview with Sy Montgomery too, a couple years ago. She’s so amazing!

She is amazing! And she’s just the kindest, most generous person.

She is.

And low-key and grounded. She helped me out.

I had done an episode about...I was on a catamaran in the Virgin Islands, and I was watching these seagulls who were playing. It was mating season. I don’t know whether it was a mating ritual or it was just pure joy, in “flow.”

The two of them, and it was always two when I was watching, were on the buoys and they were trying to not slide down the buoys and end up in the water. It was like a game to see how much they could stay on the round buoy while it was bouncing and then not fall in. It went on for like a long period of time.

I wrote an episode about them being in flow. Sy Montgomery to me epitomizes the ability to get into flow. She just is all in on whatever she’s focusing on. And with such passion and joy and love of what she’s doing! It just is flow, right?

I interviewed her back in my first season about flow. And she had written a kid’s book about seagulls. It worked out well. And then we did an episode about one of my favorite books ever, her The Soul of an Octopus. She and I had a great conversation about the depth of their intelligence, so much deeper than instinct, and survival for an octopus. And then when interviewed John Elkington about hummingbirds, Sy wrote a book about hummingbirds and she loves hummingbirds. I wanted her to do an interview so I could mix it in with the John Elkington pieces about hummingbirds. Hummingbirds are so – have you done work with hummingbirds?

Not in person. I’ve seen them in person a couple times. I love Sy Montgomery’s book on hummingbirds.

Yeah, I’m a big Sy fan. I’ve met just the most amazing people in this whole chapter of moving into this natural world.

I just am blown away by the quality of my life. From the interaction I’ve had with, you know, people like you. I get to meet people who have so many interesting, like-minded, awesome conversations that they are bursting to have, right? And opportunities for growth and helping each other. It’s just so much fun.

I reached out to Sy when I read The Soul of an Octopus, and I just chased her down from her book tour. I drove up to Massachusetts, and we got to meet, and it was great. I think she was writing her turtle book.

Yeah, I love that one. Of Time and Turtles. That’s so inspiring.

That also does really tie back into how we began this interview with the Loggerhead Sea Turtle. The turtles have been pulling off successful survival strategies against extraordinary global change for tens to hundreds of millions of years. They survived the K-T extinction event that killed the non-avian dinosaurs. They’ve made it through a lot.

Interestingly, just as a tidbit of short-term versus long-term resilience, you’re talking about creatures that have been around for 10 to 100 million years, right? And because we’ve got this whole data collection thing going, we see that the last few years, as the oceans have gotten warmer, the turtles have been moving their nesting earlier. And that’s a very short-term response, right?

So they’re coming in a few days a week or a few weeks earlier and starting there because they want to get where it’s cooler to fill their nests and to have their children have the best possible results. They’re not all coming in earlier, but the shift is moving.

We had our first leatherback turtles last week on our beaches, the first one in Florida.

And last year was the earliest. It was February 4th last year. It was like February 8th or something this year. And it used to be March 1^st, the official day that turtles have traditionally come in. And that’s when you’re not allowed to go on the beach with lights and you’re not allowed to bother the turtles.

I mean, that’s weeks earlier than it was not that long ago. You know, even those incredibly long-adapted creatures that don’t seem to have changed are changing their behavior on a dime because they have to.

In a way, we’re lucky that the societal shift towards wildlife conservation and against the age of massive uncontrolled hunting happened before climate change got to really accelerating. A lot of species, from black rhinos to tigers to humpback whales to sea turtles, have actually seen their populations increase substantially in the last decade thanks to conservation and thanks to cracking down on poaching. Hopefully that gives enough breathing space to figure out how to adapt to climate change.

I hope so. That’s good, yeah. But then they run into new problems. Like, the whales go farther north, they’re moving to temperatures that are supporting the food systems that they need, but those are where the shipping routes are. We need to be responsive, recognizing that they’re changing their behavior and that if we set laws and regulations around where they were five years ago things just have to change quickly. Just as they are changing quickly.

Exactly. We need to adapt on, kind of, everything.

Yeah. Everything from energy to agriculture to wildlife laws as wildlife keep changing their movement patterns in response to surviving the climate. And humans are changing their movement patterns in response to surviving the climate as well.

It’s rather ironic that the same people who tend to say climate change isn’t an issue because we’ll adapt tend to be against immigration. Migration is how people adapt to climate change and how they always have.

That’s a great point. Across the board, you need to adapt. Resilience means adaptation. Resilience means being willing to change.

There’s a classic [possibly misattributed] Charles Darwin quote about that. It isn’t the strongest or the smartest species that survives, it’s the ones most able to change.

Yeah, I mean, Darwin wasn’t really saying survival of the fittest. He was saying survival of the most adaptive species.

Yeah, and the term “fitness” in biology, that doesn’t mean gym fitness. It really doesn’t. It means most able to survive, most able to pass on your genes, and often that’s by being adaptable.

How great is it to spend our days thinking about this? How lucky are we to have found these paths that this is how we spend our life and our mind?

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

Thank you for asking. What’s coming to mind is just the recognition of the intergenerational importance of nature for children, communities, and families. We need to get people back into nature for so many reasons at an earlier age, and in happy communities. There’s just so much opportunity for improved well-being, a win-win-win. Seeing and experiencing and processing the resilience you see, the adaptability that you see when you pay attention for just a short time to what’s happening in the natural world, changes everything. We need to give that opportunity for people to have those conversations. For that to be the way kids are learning as opposed to just feeding them information. It’s about stories and it’s about experiencing those stories and experiencing them in connection with the way the world really works. That’s a part that I’m very interested in, that I’m working on right now.

I absolutely agree. Nature provided some of the most formative memories of my childhood, some of the most amazing family bonding times of my childhood.

Whatever your formative experiences were, they created who you are. At a young age, you recognized that this is the world that you wanted to live in. That’s what we need more people to recognize, right? We have to start them young.

Jessica Morgenthal, you rock. Thank you for doing what you do.

This was so much fun, Sam.

You absolutely rock! Live long and prosper.

Thank you, Sam. Have a lovely day.

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The 10th Monthly Dose of Climate Hope event took place on February 3, 2025! Sam Matey-Coste hosted an in-depth conversation with Dr. , the world-leading data scientist extraordinaire who publishes at both Oxford’s Our World in Data and her own By the Numbers on Substack. The YouTube recording is above! Below are some of Dr. Ritchie’s recent articles we referenced during this event.

By the Numbers

Can we break the human development-environment trade-off?

A few years ago, I gave a TED Talk, titled “Are We the Last Generation — or the First Sustainable One?”. It was a brief summary of my first book, Not the End of the World. The original book title was actually The First Generation, and that’s what I assumed would be on the front cover throughout the entire writing process. We changed it quite late on, an…

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4 months ago · 353 likes · 41 comments · Hannah Ritchie

By the Numbers

The Electrotech Revolution: Some insights into a new way of thinking about the transition

I’m a big fan of the organisation, Ember Energy. They do a fantastic job of tracking changes in the electricity mix across the world, publishing open-access data not just year-by-year, but increasingly, month-by-month…

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7 months ago · 185 likes · 51 comments · Hannah Ritchie

By the Numbers

What happened on energy and climate in China this year?

If you want to understand what’s happening on global energy and climate, you need to be following China closely. It’s the world’s largest emitter. It has driven huge amounts of the growth in fossil fuels over the last few decades. At the same time, it’s deploying clean energy technologies at home far faster than any other country, while dominating the s…

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5 months ago · 202 likes · 43 comments · Hannah Ritchie

By the Numbers

Mining quantities for low-carbon energy is hundreds to thousands of times lower than mining for fossil fuels

Update (November 2023): This article looks at mineral use for the energy transition, using data from the Interational Energy Agency. These figures don't include the total amount of ore extracted, or rock moved to get this quantity of minerals. In a follow-up article…

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3 years ago · 83 likes · 27 comments · Hannah Ritchie

By the Numbers

The world is on track for record harvests this year

It’s not uncommon for people to tell me that global food production is already collapsing due to climate change. They are then surprised to hear that we typically hit record harvests year after year (even as things get hotter…

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7 months ago · 203 likes · 121 comments · Hannah Ritchie

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Kim Stanley Robinson is one of human civilization’s greatest living science fiction writers. Author of genre-defining works such as the Hugo Award-winning Mars trilogy, Locus Award-winning The Years of Rice and Salt, Nebula Award-winning 2312, Aurora, and the highly influential cli-fi novel The Ministry for the Future, he was invited to speak at the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26). Asteroid 72432 is named “Kimrobinson” after him.

I’ve had the great pleasure and privilege of previously interviewing Mr. Robinson in both early 2024 and early 2025. Now, I get to speak with him again in early 2026!

In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Mr. Robinson’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

I think we’re increasingly seeing that social media apps are sort of a novel cognitive drug. Online radicalization spirals can clearly captivate big chunks of the population. Very successful people can be highly vulnerable to this.

It’s an interesting validation of the way that we are all trying to supply ourselves stories. We’re now likely to overdose.

That’s a powerful way of putting it.

I’m so ignorant of these sites, having never joined them. I’ve never joined any social media at all. Just email. And Substack, which comes through email. I don’t feel like I need to speak through the various new Internet and social media things. I’ve got my novels. They are my speech. I want people to read the novels as if they have some autonomy of their own.

I rarely do editorials or op-eds. It’s not my forte. I do the novels. It saves me time to spend more time outdoors. In the garden, or running. I can write outdoors, and now I do, but it’s still sitting down and looking at screens. I do read a lot, both onscreen and off.

It’s not so much a philosophy as a mixture of practical habits for my own personal life.

I mean, really, I’m an outsider to social media and I don’t participate in it. You can quickly stupid-ify or enshittify your own information stream. Everybody’s got to make those decisions now. We’re all editors of our own information stream, but with algorithms forcing the issue on us.

I think that this is really a fundamental driver of the craziness we’re seeing in the second Trump presidency. That exact thing, their information stream and that of their voters is fundamentally enshittified. You’ve got policy actions that are clearly driven by and for social media, and a lot of it’s deliberate cruelty or insanity. Stuff that is just cartoonishly evil. The dichotomy of this is that you’ve simultaneously got horrifying stuff like ICE invading America cities one by one, like what’s happening in Minneapolis, but at any given time, most Americans are still reading about all these horrors through their phone and not seeing the government goons in their neighborhood.

ICE is doing horrible illegal stuff and murdering people and sending people to El Salvador without trial, but they appear to be not even deporting that many more people than usual, very far from the “millions” Trump threatened. They’re attacking city by city because they can’t hire enough people to beseige more than one at once. It’s an oppression roadshow. They don’t have enough goons.

It’s almost a performance of fascism more than actual fascism. Which is still bad and evil! But, they almost seem to be making Gestapo-themed videos in which they do Gestapo things rather than actually implementing a Gestapo everywhere, if that makes any sense. There’s a performativity to this that is just insane. A creature of the social media age.

Yes, I recognize what you’re saying, and I agree completely. I’ve had that same sense myself. In the science fiction field, we call it cosplay, costume play.

They’re cosplay fascists. But with real murders. An outrage, every day. It has to be daily. As Steve Bannon said, “Flood the zone with shit.” They have to get more and more inventive, or repetitive, or stupid, in finding something to do that will shock the liberals and delight their followers. It’s performance for consumption as media.

You can say “These are evil idiots. They’ll be gone eventually. I won’t let them take over my mental life.”

I don’t completely cut off the news. I scroll the headlines. I get a sense of what’s happening. I try to hold that down to about 10 minutes in the morning over breakfast. And then I focus my life on other things.

I think it’s impossible for anyone to completely escape world news, national news, but you can reduce it to trusted feeds. You can focus in on the sciences and what they’re doing, and you can just keep in control. Reality-based, rather than society’s spectacle.

The real reality, of course, does include some real ugliness. The attack on science is particularly crazy and dangerous, and it has ramifications that will last for years and even decades. The Trump administration’s attack on medical research, on cures, on life extension, profoundly and in a real way harms everyone.

These people who are attacking science, they will run to a doctor the moment that they feel scared for their physical life. They’re hypocrites, and we’re all hypocrites to one degree or another, but this particular hypocrisy is incredibly bad for humans now and for future humans. Reducing human suffering is one of the main positive goals of human efforts on this world. And it’s one of the main goals of science to reduce human suffering, increase our powers over adversity and suffering. So to attack that…

I think you need to begin to think of the Trump administration as a kind of a death cult.

Yeah.

The Gotterdammerung, Ragnarok. Old white men saying if we’re going down, we’re going to take the world down with us. This is a narcissism and a megalomania. If I have to die, I’m killing everybody too.

One thing that I’m really trying to share with people through my newsletter, and one thing that has really provided me with a lot of comfort, is that this death cult is not in charge of the whole world. In a way, we’re really lucky that it’s happening now and not at a different time.

If McCarthyism had taken power and evolved into this kind of death cult, if there had been a President McCarthy in the 1950s, it could have been so much worse because the U.S. was basically the center of science and industry for the world then. It would have blown up, like, almost all medical research. It would have devastated so much more of humanity’s scientific capacity. Even in the 1990s, the U.S. unipolar moment, it would have been, I think, worse than now.

But as it stands, there’s tons and tons of medical research coming out of China, and Europe, and India.

The Serum Institute of India is now mass-producing malaria vaccines for Africa! They don’t give a damn what RFK Junior says. In the age of globalization, science is more resilient. The rest of the world was not just blown up by world wars. There’s tons of labs and doctors and clean energy factories running elsewhere that are not under the jurisdiction of this death cult. That’s a lot of what I try to write about.

Yeah, and it’s so good to read it and be reminded of it. I mean, the United States is like 2% of the Earth’s surface and 5% of the Earth’s population.

There is an outsized power that comes out of the end of World War II. To take it back to World War II, what was obvious to people in World War II is that science had won the war. I’m talking about penicillin, radar, and the atom bomb. Science had an outsized influence in the American psyche as being these weird guys, who were inventing things out of nowhere that were profound influences on winning an actual war.

Then Vannevar Bush, George Kennan, a few others in the post-war American intellectual hierarchy said, we need to institutionalize a federal research program. So then you’ve got DARPA, NSF, National Institute of Health, everything.

The current White House does seem intent on blowing up the imperial power that America established for itself in the post-war period. So it’s perverse and bizarre, but if we keep our eye on the prize and try to look for the slender silver lining, to go back to what you were talking about, the world is bigger than the United States’ internal dysfunctions. There’s a lot going on! First of all, 95% of the world’s population is outside of the United States. Those people are interested in their own advancement, their own health and safety.

The current United States leadership may be, instead of making America greater again, it’s more or less the suicide of American hegemony, of empire. The dollar as the benchmark financial figure might or might not survive this. We might already going from petrodollars to…

Electro-yuans.

Yeah, exactly. And indeed, you’re going to be fascinated to see what you can see as an individual in your upcoming trip to China. It will, of course, just be the tail of the elephant, because no one person can see that giant system. But you’re going to see more of the rest of the world. You already have in your visits to India, your work in Madagascar. This is a big, various world, and in many ways, it’s got better mental health than America with its dreams of American glory.

On some level, I think that a lot of people in the U.S. just really don’t think the world can move on without America. But as the U.S. has pulled out of all these international organizations, the rest of the world’s still in them! And building more.

Like, a huge new treaty was just signed last year, the BBNJ Treaty, Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction, which allows the creation of international marine protected areas on the high seas. I’m super excited about it.

The U.S. signed under Biden, but it’s not ratified by the Senate. The U.S. didn’t even show up to the final talks. Big chunks of the world, including China, are on board.

There are so many more examples. The EU/Mercosur trade deal.

The Hefei nuclear fusion research collaboration. The new EU/China deal on Chinese EV imports.

The rest of the world keeps doing stuff even if America decides to flame out and not be part of any international accommodation. What they’re essentially doing is just just handing sort of leadership to China by default.

Well, that is happening. There’s a moral hazard that leads into complacency, parochialism. When you’re in the heart of the empire, you’re strangely provincial because you don’t know the rest of the world very well.

But even in America, the Trump administration is unpopular. A majority of the people are saying this isn’t what our country is about. And presumably with a wicked political fight to come, we will take back the vision of an America that is made up of immigrants from across the world.

What happens if you bring together everyone in one country? A sense that we all made it together, coming from everywhere else. If you keep to the oft-announced American ideals of democracy, you’ve got an America you can be proud of. Everywhere there are the problems of these forces, and you don’t want to, especially as an American, give up on America.

Following this line of thought, I am so happy to be a Californian. It is the American experiment going way better than much of the rest of America right now. More progressive, more multilingual, more multicultural. And the fourth biggest economy on Earth! America is special. California is special. It’s comforting to be here. We’re more realistic.

And reality bites. It’s the thing that doesn’t go away even if you don’t believe in it, and it can kill you. So facing up to reality is part of the project here. I like that California is doing a better job of that.

How we deal with decarbonizing in California will be instructive. Fossil fuel economies that desire to also be virtuous — Canada, Australia, Norway, the list could be extended — are trapped in the need to sell that energy. They haven’t yet completed the technological transformation to clean energy, but their people want to do it, their elected governments want to do it, at least in part.

Following like you do the good things that are being accomplished, you see the way that clean energy is now cheaper than dirty energy. That’s a crucial turning point in the decarbonization battle. It’s actually cheaper now! There’s no longer a green premium. You don’t have to pay more to go green. The game has been won. It’s just not over yet.

“The game has been won. It’s just not over yet.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

Bill McKibben’s recent book, Here Comes the Sun, was about this.

He said basically what you have just said. The energy transition game’s not over, but it has been won. This technology is now the cheapest source of electricity in history, and it’s just kind of inevitably going to be the vast majority of all new stuff built for the foreseeable future.

That is something which would have seemed like a utopian dream just 10, 15 years ago! Now it’s just sheer economics just driving this forward no matter how crazy the politics gets.

Yeah, I agree. And McKibben’s great, I learned from him a lot.

The discourse space gets into ferocious arguments about the minutiae between different projects. You want to remember there’s a bigger enemy out there, which is simply the fossil fuel dinosaur power trying to stay alive when its time has passed and wrecking the atmosphere, and therefore the rest of us by way of their efforts. So the battle is clear.

Yeah. Don’t shrink the tent.

And what’s interesting about that is just the lag time. It’s like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff. The number of major actors that’ll just continue acting as if it’s still an unending fossil fuel era, even when it’s so clearly not. One huge example of this was the military intervention in Venezuela, which sort of claimed to be an invasion and takeover “for the oil” but looked more like a kidnapping of Maduro that then left Maduro’s number two in charge. Delcy Rodriguez.

And the whole Republican apparatus is like, “Ooh, there’s more oil in Venezuela than Saudi Arabia.” But there’s no universe where it will be economical to extract that anymore. The world’s already in an oil glut!

Those huge Venezuelan oil deposits in the Orinoco Shield that everyone points to are tar sands oil, the consistency of cold peanut butter. Harder to refine than even the Canadian stuff.

They’re not like Texas or Saudi Arabia crude that’s easy to extract. It would cost hundreds of billions to develop this, and there’s no market for it. Even the ExxonMobil CEO just said that Venezuela’s uninvestable. It’s crappy oil, and the market already has too much oil anyway.

It’s a war for oil without even getting much oil! It’s a war for the memory of oil. And that social media performativity nonsense.

Well, again, it’s cosplay. And the unfortunate thing is about 70 people got killed. The White House is making snuff movies.

Yeah, that’s exactly what it is.

So this is ugly stuff and death cult stuff and irrelevant in the larger energy picture. You gotta just kind of set those people aside as being insane and try to overthrow them in the most efficient and legal way possible. As for the energy picture, it’s getting better and better.

That reminds me, though, Sam, I went to COP30, and I want to describe it as a utopian space. Really, you ought to go to one of these.

At COP30 in Belém, the city only had about 20,000 hotel beds, so they had to make up a lot of space for people to stay. The average age was much more your age than mine. I would say the average age was perhaps 40 to 45. There were more women than men by a slight margin amongst the delegates. There were a lot of indigenous people there from the Amazon. And they were all on fire with the exhilaration of talking about saving the world, talking about clean energy and the decarbonization effort that the Paris Agreement represents. So for me, it was a beautiful thing to see.

As a utopian writer, I think of it as like Brigadoon in reverse. For two weeks every year, a utopian space pops into existence somewhere in the world, focused on the cleaning up of the biosphere by getting rid of burning fossil fuels. And then it disappears. It has its utopian performative space. Again, in the society of the spectacle, it’s a beautiful thing.

In realpolitik terms, it is a cracked mirror we hold up to ourselves. We go, oh, my God, the COP system isn’t working, the COP system is stupid. That’s like complaining about the mirror for what the mirror is showing you of your own dysfunction. Several petrostates that are signatories of the Paris Agreement do not want to, and in financial terms cannot, stop selling their fossil fuels to other nations and therefore burning them. So they’ve got stranded assets but they’re not stranded yet and they’re going into fire-sale mode and they’re getting desperate.

Indeed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can be argued to be seen as a petrostate grabbing a neighboring breadbasket to feed itself after it can no longer sell its fossil fuels. There’s an energy explanation for world history right now that is very materialistic in the sense of being about the realities of food, of shelter, of electricity.

In a sense, COP is merely a mirror that shows us that we’re not succeeding fast enough. So you can’t complain about the COP system. It’s not going to be the result in itself. Even if at one COP all the nations on Earth signed really ambitious commitments to stop burning carbon, even then, it would be the stuff that happens back in the national legislatures and central banks and energy industries that would be the crucial parts of it. Not the promises, but the actual actions.

So COP is both structurally flawed and not relevant, and also at the same time crucially important and a beautiful sign that the world knows that it needs to decarbonize fast. It’s both at once. This is why the world press can’t report on it adequately, because they can’t handle that kind of a contradiction, that dual action of success and failure in the same room for two weeks.

It is really exciting and worth going to. The more people report on it, the better. No individual can comprehend the whole of it. It was just back in November, and it kind of blew my mind. I had to go home and think about what had happened to me and what I had seen. I’m not going to say the COP system is a huge success or the solution, but it is important and beautiful and inspiring. That’s what it’s for, and that’s what we have to pay attention to.

Fascinating. That’s a really powerful statement.

You don’t have to stay the whole two weeks to get a sense of it. What I did was stayed one week that was the middle of it. The opening tends to be ceremonial, the ending tends to be diplomatic and behind closed doors. I think it would do you good and it would do your reporting good to see this. I encourage you to go!

The Oxford Ministry for the Future is going to do an event in November called Utopia Now. That’s their idea, but I like it very much. This is a group of people at Oxford who are very energetic and dynamic, and they’re doing events about three times a year to bring to life and elaborate on ideas that have popped up subsequently to the publication of the book that are good ideas for making the world better. I love these people!

And now there’s going to be an Uppsala Ministry for the Future, at the university in Uppsala, Sweden. It’s not exactly a franchise, but it is an idea to work harder to defend the rights of the people of the future in this world of now.

The UN in September 2024 declared their Pact for the Future. Rather like Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, it’s a long list, an extremely long program of things we need to do to protect the rights of the people of the future from our own actions, to make sure that we hand on a healthy world to the generations to come. This is an idea where obviously its time has arrived. People want this idea, they want to talk about it more. They want to try to institutionalize and then create some legal safeguards for the people of the future.

So that’s one thing that’s going on. And then the other thing I want to talk about, another idea in Ministry for the Future that’s being followed up on, is the preservation of the cryosphere.

Yes!

We need the Arctic sea ice in order to keep the Earth’s albedo as high as it is, because if we lose that sea ice, then that sunlight lances into the ocean and heats it up, and we get a very bad positive feedback loop.

So the Arctic sea ice is actually severely problematical compared to the Antarctic. Because the Antarctic ice is on land and stacked up really, really high, the problem down there is not that it will melt fast, because it won’t melt fast, but that it will slide into the sea fast and then melt in the ocean. These are two different ice preservation problems.

I’m associated with a non-profit in the United States, an organization called Ice Preservation Institute. Their focus is on glaciers in the Antarctic. But now I’m talking to people at the University of Cambridge and a UK project called ARIA to fund research into all kinds of climate interventions. Not just solar radiation management, but more local, regional, and focused in on on keeping the ice around while we solve the larger CO2 problem.

So these are preservation projects, and I’m super interested in them. When I do my next novel, I’m thinking of doing something about the Arctic. And that will match up with my Antarctic work. I will have done both poles! I’ve never really written much about the Arctic, but now I’ve visited Svalbard and I’m doing the research to think about these things

I’d love to visit and write about either of the polar regions of Earth someday! That sounds like an amazing thing.

People think, Antarctica, it’s ice and only ice. There’s no wildlife. But of course, that’s not true because of the fringe. The aquatic life, the penguins, the seals. I certainly have seen more wild creatures in Antarctica than I probably have anywhere else on Earth. Around the fringes. Once you get into the continent proper, it’s another thing.

I do have a new non-fiction book about Antarctica that is done now and that will come out in November.

Oh man, I was about to ask about that! I’ve been super excited for that one I will 100% absolutely read and review it, I can’t wait

It’s fun! It’s called The Best Journey in the World.

A reference to Apsley Cherry-Gerard?

Yeah. It’s not just Cherry’s story, but all of the historical stories, and then the new story about trying to slow those glaciers down.

Well, calling them glaciers is wrong. These are ice streams. They’re the biggest glaciers on earth, but they’re often not running on rock beds. The reason the ice streams are moving so fast relative to their ice banks is under-ice movement by water streams.

There’s a natural precedent for stopping this movement, when the water underneath these big ice streams goes away by way of an oxbow breaking or something like that under the ice. Probably because the water underneath it was stolen, they call it, by some other watershed. The Kamb Ice Stream was going gangbusters over a hundred years ago until this happened and it slowed down, almost stopped.

If we could go down there and remove the water underneath some of these ice streams that feed into the Thwaites Glacier, the famous Doomsday Glacier,all around West Antarctica, you might be able to slow the fastest ice streams and even bring them close to a dead halt by human intervention!

“You might be able to slow the fastest ice streams and even bring them close to a dead halt by human intervention!”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

We channel rivers all over the earth. Indeed, it’s a special thing to be a wild and scenic river that’s left alone from the headwaters to the mouth. There are very few of those on earth. We engineer our rivers and now we’re going to need to engineer our glaciers. Because the sea level rise, if we don’t, could be really severe. And by that I mean, say, four meters. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a lot of it’s resting on ground right now but that ground is well below sea level, so it’s quite unstable. And it has been gone in the past, even three million years ago. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were to come apart, detach, float away. I don’t know what humanity would do. We wouldn’t go extinct, but we would be hammered. It would be so bad.

But, however, if you could slow those ice streams down and buy ourselves some time, we could do the decarbonization of the atmosphere properly, which will take decades and even centuries. At the end of that time, we could still have an Antarctica in place, as ice!

It’s a big project. It isn’t clear that it’s physically possible, but because of that natural precedent, it seems like it might be. It’s within our technological capacities right now to pump the necessary amounts of water. In fact, we drill through the ice in Antarctica to get to the bottom of the ice sheets quite often, so we know how to do it. It’s not like you have to invent something new. So this is why I’m enthusiastic about it

That is amazing! That is incredibly exciting on a number of levels! That sort of century-scale planning, the adaptation of a natural precedent. People talk about biomimicry. That’s geomimicry. That is so brilliant.

I like that. I’m going to keep that, Sam, “geomimicry,” because it’s true.

Now, this project idea is relatively innocuous. There’s no particular downside if this ice slowdown project doesn’t work. There’s not ramifications to the monsoon or any such side effects. There’s no downside to it. It’s definitely worth trying.

But it gets thrown into that same conceptual basket of “geoengineering” ourselves into the Earth’s natural systems. As if we haven’t been doing that our entire history as a species!

Exactly. We’re fully involved. “Not intervening to help” at this point doesn’t mean “not involved,” it’s just “involved in a worse way.”

Yeah, and your newsletter is often very pro-interventionist, “let’s do things!” The Anthropocene means we’ve got to do things to keep the biosphere healthy. You get my point. But the world in general and my fellow leftists and environmentalists in particular, they often have a knee-jerk reaction against interventions that attempt to repair the damage! So I need to argue to my own ideological crowd that they are making a fundamental category error.

We are interventionists at all points in human history. Agriculture! Women’s rights are a geoengineering move, because it reduces human population as a side effect!

“Women’s rights are a geoengineering move.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

You begin to hammer on the concept of “geoengineering” and say, let’s pay attention to each one of these methods and evaluate it for its own costs and benefits and values and dangers. Not put them all in one basket. Reflecting sunlight away from the earth up in the stratosphere is perhaps a dangerous thing to do, which in itself is worth contesting and arguing about, but just because that one is flagrantly global and spectacular doesn’t mean that these little regional efforts should all be judged the same. We need to take each one of these proposed methodologies and study it in detail on its own merits!

Next up for me is the Arctic sea ice to learn more about. because the Arctic sea ice is way harder. You can’t just go to one ice stream and pump water out. That is a very sensitive system that we could melt.

So I’m interested in studying now these efforts in the Arctic, which I don’t know much about, but I know there are people who are intensely interested in studying it. That’s my next pursuit.

That is brilliant! That is totally true, and it’s a great paradigm shift that people should think about.

Yeah, paradigm shifts are important now. One thing I agree with you on completely, and that’s why I so much enjoy reading you, is this sense of practicality and also an abjuration of purity. What the heck is purity? Nothing’s pure.

There should be a leftist geoengineering theory, of course. But you have to create that space, because it doesn’t match the ideological purity tests of the 1990s.

What was a moral hazard in the 1990s is now a practical necessity.

We have to learn from the past and say, oh, yes, that was true then. Now it’s different.

When your house is on fire, you don’t argue about the ethics of having a fire extinguisher!

“When your house is on fire, you don’t argue about the ethics of having a fire extinguisher!”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

I agree with you wholeheartedly! I am constantly writing about stuff like this. There were two articles just recently in the biodiversity realm that are about exactly this.

There was one great article on how researchers trying to save the last corals in Florida from warming seas are blocked by regulations intended to protect coral genetic purity.

A scientist trying to save frogs in Australia is also hampered by some similar limits. And both of those were to do with concerns about the concept of “genetic pollution” which is such an abstract thing, preventing more heat or disease-resistant strains.

Yes, let’s make sure we can do the right things and make sure to revise the regulations appropriately so that they still protect us and yet allow us to do the things that we have to do. Let’s just put it that way.

I feel like that’s what the emerging Abundance movement is about, switching over to the policy realm. It reminded me of your work, actually. It reminded me of the politics of Saxifrage Russell in your Mars trilogy, that sort of practical humanism.

Honestly, I love it. I call myself an Abundance Democrat. I try to use the word abundance as much as I can. I think it’s really positive.

I love Ezra Klein, he’s a fantastic interviewer and a good thinker and so on and so forth. So I don’t want to complain too much, but I will say this in terms of branding. Abundance is the wrong phrase in a world where people are starving in the richest country in the world. I’m really arguing with the branding. I think “abundance” does look like a kind of moderate business group saying “let’s just do more and we’ll be better and be even richer than ever.” I don’t like the word “abundance.”

I don’t mind the political project that Klein and his colleague are trying to express! I just think, let’s keep it to what makes the most powerful argument. Doing the necessary to get us saving the biosphere!

I get where you’re coming from. But we just got Trump elected two years after the Inflation Reduction Act. Clearly, a large chunk of voters are not on board with the idea of doing whatever is necessary to save the biosphere and are more about what’s in it for them.

I think that the hope is that “Abundance” gives a more friendly branding, for people who really don’t share our values. I think what they’re trying to do is point out stuff like how voting for climate action also means your electricity bill will go down because there’s more energy.

I think the idea is to evoke not a great struggle but a prosperous future, good for you and your family. I think the idea is to brand it as something that’s maybe less appealing to leftists but more appealing to a swing voter.

Yeah, I take your point, and that may be true in American politics.

What if you had adequacy as the measure rather than abundance? The income gap in the United States, the inequality levels are spectacularly bad. Really, corporate executives make 1000 times as much as the entry level workers. The emphasis should be on enough for all. You say a word like “abundance,” you’re talking like cornucopia-land, the land of Cockaigne.

But we kind of do have that relative to pre-industrial times. Like, a supermarket is Cockaigne.

Oh, yes, indeed. On their Substack, Andrew Dressler wrote a wonderful essay that every modern middle class American has the energy equivalent of 100 slaves working full time for them. That’s what electricity gives us.

The Climate Brink

You have 100 'energy slaves'

I haven’t been posting much in the last month or so because I am in the home stretch of finishing a textbook on climate risk. I plan to post chapters in the spring, but I thought I would post this section on embedded energy now. Read it and appreciate how much our modern energy system does for us…

Read more

5 months ago · 165 likes · 104 comments · Andrew Dessler

Yeah, that’s what I mean.

I still think that it’d be better to talk about adequacy for all, get everybody to adequacy and then put a cap on wealth. Because once you get to 10 times adequacy you don’t need more. A 1 to 10 wage ratio, 1 to 10 wealth ratio. The 1 is adequate, enough to have a decent life. And then you can have 10 times that and you’re the wealthiest person on Earth. Beyond that, you get progressive taxation.

I’m certainly open to that idea. I think it could have a lot of positive societal effects, but I think that’s really not what “Abundance” is about. What you’re talking about is sort of about dividing the pie, making sure there isn’t someone with half the pie and then a couple hundred people sharing tiny thin slices. Abundance is about making the pie bigger. It’s about having the pie include more electricity and more cleaner electricity and better batteries and more medicine and stuff.

And you say “Abundance” is an American thing, and it’s certainly an American published book. But my read of the book was that they were kind of describing the political/economic concept as mostly something that’s in practice happening more in China and that America should be doing more of, that America’s kind of ceded.

I still think “enough for all,” would be a better slogan by far. Much of the American populace is living paycheck to paycheck in the sense that they don’t have savings, they don’t have capital. They have nothing but their labor power. And if they don’t have a job, then they’ve got nothing, including no social safety net.

So here, even in beautiful Davis, California, a university town, prosperous and calm, a middle class town, we have about 250 homeless people. Once you drop into the cracks of the American system, and you don’t have a job, you don’t have a home, then your average lifetime is in five years from he moment you are homeless.

That’s actually a perfect example of what Abundance is about. California has much more homelessness than West Virginia, even though West Virginia is worse on kind of every other metric, like poverty and drug abuse and stuff, in large part because of single-family zoning and restrictions on building homes.

I think that a targeted and focused deregulation of the housing market would be immensely good for America right now. There’s huge swathes of the country where you can only build single-family homes! Just allowing the building of more apartment buildings there could really change the housing market for the better.

In many cases I think targeted and strategic deregulation allows redistribution because it allows you to build more of the thing that you can then redistribute.

Well, it isn’t deregulation to just change zoning codes. That’s one code changing out for another. That’s one regulation changed by another.

Well, whatever you call it —

Yeah. But whatever you call it matters. It matters what you call it. I would resist “deregulation.” I would say “zoning reform.” I would say “affordable housing.” But abundance crosses a line for me into a zone of “cornucopia.” It has connotations that just look bad. I think it’s the wrong word. Kind of like how I would argue against a leftist term, “degrowth.”

Oh, I would argue against that. That’s a terrible word.

But at this point, I guess we’re at the level of paradigms and slogans and words rather than actions in the world. Let’s take it back to the practical level of, “We’ve got a biosphere problem, we’ve got a human problem, what can we do to solve it in policy A, B, C, and D?”

And so the big slogans are often dangerous and I will never be happy about this term abundance.

That’s a really interesting perspective. To me, it sounds less cornucopian than practical. Also, stuff that seems cornucopian to one generation can soon become normal. Imagine you told someone in the 1700s that in the 2020s hundreds of millions of people each have the equivalent of a hundred servants made of tamed lightning? That’s insane. That is cornucopian!

But yeah, it depends on what you have abundance of. I really, really want abundance of solar panels very, very fast, and degrowth in anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. Like you said, I think we agree on the policies here.

Well, it’s interesting. I’m going to take all this in and try to be more generous to the idea. Different brands for different purposes. We’ll see what happens. I’m gonna try my best to keep making distinctions and suggestions.

It is a peculiar thing to be a novelist who is suddenly cast as a public intellectual, because these are not the same jobs by any means. I’ve been living in a different world since Ministry for the Future came out. The 2020s have been quite bizarre for me, but they’ve been quite bizarre for everybody. I’ve had to be learning a new skill set.

One of the novelist skills that is very transferable to the public intellectual is to keep listening, and keep imagining that you’re the other person. What would that feel like? Because that’s what the novelist has to do, sentence after sentence. So I’ll keep trying to stay that flexible in my public life, where you can end up saying the same things over and over again just because the same questions keep getting asked. And the proper answer in 2021 might not be the proper answer in 2026. Things are changing fast.

I agree. One example is permitting reform. Back in 2024 under Biden there was an option to pass the Manchin-Barrasso permitting reform bill that would have more or less unilaterally all energy projects from NEPA review. And in practice, at that point, already like 80 percent of the new energy projects being built in America were clean energy. This would have benefited clean energy disproportionately, more so every year, and it would have already unleashed tons of clean energy stuck in a weaponized permitting process where fossil fuel interests astroturf opposition.

But like you said, a permitting bill like that in 2004, or even 2014, would have overwhelmingly helped fossil fuels. In 2024, it overwhelmingly helps renewable energy. Maybe by 2034, it’s only helping renewable energy!

Well, that’s a good point, I have to go now, because I suddenly realize I’m taking my wife to the dentist.

It’s so fascinating talking with you! It’s been great. I’ve loved your books since I was a kid. I almost feel like an upstart chatting with you and debating with you like this.

We’re colleagues! We’re somewhat intergenerational colleagues in the same cause. I’m learning from you, and I learn from you and your columns every week, and so I’m loving it.

I always love talking with you! Thank you so much.

The 9th Monthly Dose of Climate Hope event took place on January 8, 2026! narrated an in-depth Story Map presentation on “2025 in Review.” The YouTube video is above!

Here’s the Story Map presentation! Feel free to share, cite, and present it yourself!

Dr. Rhys Lemoine is a Canadian ecologist currently working at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. His research focuses on the immense potential to regenerate rich, vibrant ecosystems around the world through megafauna rewilding. Dr. Lemoine has also published an excellent series of rewilding articles on his LinkedIn.

A lightly edited transcript of this exclusive interview follows. This writer’s questions and remarks are in bold, Dr. Lemoine’s responses are in regular type. Bold italics are clarifications and extra information added after the interview.

This interview is syndicated by both The Weekly Anthropocene and Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope.

Why is megafauna rewilding important? Could you give an overview of the role played by now-absent megafauna in many major Earth ecosystems, when and how they went extinct across most of the world, and why we should bring them back? What are we missing, essentially?

Today we think of large animals as being almost exclusively found in Africa and South Asia. Elephants, rhinos, hippos, all of the animals that can weigh over a thousand kilograms on average live in those areas.

But of course, that wasn't always the case, right? It used to be every continent had large animals of that size. And from a geological perspective, it’s only extremely recently that that has ceased to be the case. When I say recently, I mean between 5,000 and 50,000 years, depending on the location you're talking about.

I’m very much on the side — and I think the evidence is increasingly on the side — that this is an effect of modern humans moving out of the places where hominins evolved into places where there was no history of hominins. And then through over-hunting, other forms of exploitation, and habitat modification, causing extinctions amongst most of these large animals to varying degrees in different places.

Now, that's important because invariably the largest species tend to be some of the most ecologically important and to have perhaps the least redundancy. So you get the situation where ecosystems that evolved with many and diverse large mammals or other forms of vertebrate suddenly have far fewer, far smaller, or none.

You know, with varying levels of extremity. In Eurasia and North America, we still have bison and things like that, though much depleted. But in Australia, the largest thing is a red kangaroo, unless you're counting crocodiles.

And for the timescale on this, this is happening around the beginning of the Holocene epoch, around 11,700 years ago, and even before that. This is happening before serious agricultural revolutions. Stone Age technology was enough for humans to drive a lot of these species extinct.

Yes, absolutely.

What you described so far, I think people might easily confuse it with modern trophy hunting and poaching and stuff, but no, this is a long time ago. All of recorded history, more or less, has been since we’ve wiped out all these megafauna.

Yeah, with some amount of overlap. The last mammoths were around the time the Epic of Gilgamesh first popped up. But yeah, that's generally true, we are talking about pre-agriculture. There's a good argument to be made that agriculture sort of came in response to the fact that megafauna hunting became less viable as a result of extinctions.

Ooh, that's interesting! I hadn't heard that one before. Could you elaborate?

Sure. Let’s back up a few steps.

Okay, so humans are generally considered to be apex predators, but in one particular aspect, we're not particularly good at it, which is that only about 30% of our calories can come from protein. The limitations of our liver and other organs make it so that we can't eat more than that, or at least we can't effectively process more than that. And fiber, we can maybe only get 5% of. But that means the entirety of the 60 to 70% remainder has to be met with either fat or carbohydrates.

Now, pre-agriculture, fat was far more available than carbohydrates. Some research that's coming out now has found, as established by Ben-Dor and Barkai, that the most efficient way to get enough fat out of a primarily hunter-gatherer diet is to hunt the largest and most reproductively aged megafauna available in the system. Often specifically females as well. So what happens with that is that you can then make a living off of entirely megafauna, but as a result, it eventually leads to local extinction of megafauna.

The theory is that this started even before our species, Homo sapiens, existed, with species like Homo erectus. The idea is that Homo erectus was predominantly a megafauna hunter, that Homo erectus was exploiting things like rhinoceroses and elephants, in large amounts. So what happens is that as Homo erectus starts to have this sort of effect on the largest megafauna, then in response, in order to meet caloric requirements, smaller and smaller animals have to be hunted.

But, perhaps counterintuitively, smaller animals require a greater level of technology to hunt effectively than larger animals!

Like snares and traps and stuff as opposed to running up and throwing a spear at the big obvious thing.

Exactly. Some of the earliest extinctions that are attributable to hominins are large tortoises.

Oh yeah, that's really easy.

Yeah, so we actually see some extinctions in Africa and maybe South Asia that are attributable to Homo erectus, and it's always in the most large, slow-moving kind of species for this reason, including large tortoises. The theory is that this level of exploitation and subsequent adaptation towards smaller game actually is what drove the evolution of Homo erectus and similar forms into Homo sapiens as the level of intelligence required to make sufficiently complex tools increased.

Fascinating.

Then once Homo sapiens migrated out of the paleotropics — so tropical Asia, tropical Africa — megafauna hunting then became a viable strategy again, but with an even greater level of technology. [For example, it’s currently thought that Homo sapiens was the first hominid species to invent the bow and arrow, making them even better hunters than Homo erectus].

Following that, there would then have been another crash, even bigger this time, as megafauna were hunted to extinction. Leaving humans where they started, but now with the greater brain capacity to then figure out agriculture, which can support more people than hunter gathering because it produces carbohydrates. And as soon as megafauna are no longer in the scene, fat hunting becomes no longer a viable strategy.

That's absolutely fascinating.

Zooming forward to today, to me and you it seems obvious we should bring megafauna back because they're cool and awesome. But just from a utilitarian perspective, what benefits do we get with megafauna rewilding today? Everything from carbon sequestration to landscape management to all sorts of stuff.

I know we've lost huge high-productivity ecosystems like the mammoth steppe, there’s entire latitudes of the planet where we don't have big carbon cycling wildlife anymore. I want to get into species by species later, but just broadly, what are we missing?

Well, you covered a lot of it there, right? But yeah, a big one is nutrient cycling. And carbon sequestration. Like you said, large herbivores specifically cycle a lot of biomass back into the system and often into the soil where it's less likely to be lost through things like fire. And fire is another one, because herbivores reduce total [plant] biomass and increase heterogeneity and increase coverage of things like grass and herbs compared to shrubs and trees. Generally, they reduce fire intensity and severity in so doing.

In several studies, you can see the break in sporomelia, which is a genus of fungi associated with animal dung, you can kind of see where it peters off and then levels of charcoal in the system kind of go up as a result. Both are associated with an increase in people, because a reduction in megafauna is also associated with an increase in people.

So in the age we have now, with a hotter climate, we would really like a lot more carbon to be cycled into soil and we would really like a reduction in fire intensity. And also, incidentally, we have a global agricultural system that means most people are not desperate enough to need to hunt anything large and slow moving for food. It seems like we could really use some megafauna!

That gets us into rewilding, and the big case study, obviously, is Europe. There’s been a huge rewilding movement in Europe that’s led to a gigantic increase in many species’ populations, including megafauna like European bison. Can you give me an overview of what that's looked like in Europe, on a very broad level?

Sure. Generally, where it started was with the work of a Dutch ecologist named Frans Vera. who came up with the wood-pasture hypothesis. [Check out the Wikipedia page for the wood-pasture hypothesis].

And what Frans Vera hypothesized was that, in layman's terms, “Isn't it weird that most of the rare biodiversity that we have in Europe is associated with open and mixed habitats, not closed-canopy forest?” The idea being that it doesn't make sense that all of Europe would have been closed canopy forest or other sort of shade loving trees in the absence of people. Because then why would we have all of these things that are clearly not adapted to those conditions?

The hypothesis was that, well, those conditions must have been created by the original sort of wild herbivores that would have been normal in Europe. And he was mostly talking about Holocene stuff, so horses, aurochs, bison, these sorts of things. It's been debated whether or not he was correct in thinking that this works in the Holocene context, or whether these things are themselves remnants of the Pleistocene state, where you also had elephants and rhinoceroses. These things would also later have been encouraged by Neolithic farming and stuff like that.

The basic premise led to a lot of what are now called rewilding projects, which had all sorts of other names applied to them at the time. Famously in the Netherlands, with the Oostvaardersplassen, experimenting with high densities of cattle. horses, and red deer, and seeing what sort of effects they could have on environments where it was not considered desirable to have a lot of regeneration of trees and shrubs. Specifically, in this case, wetlands that were proving to be a very good habitat for geese and other wetland birds.

And so it was experimented with. Okay, could these species effectively stop forest encroachment? And for all the other things that people have said about it, that's certainly true. They can. They did.

So that's led to all sorts of other kinds of experiments in Europe, such that this has kind of become standard practice in a lot of places. It's actually a lot cheaper to have large herbivores in an area than it is to actively manage it for the same effect with machinery or tools or whatever like that. Ultimately, these kind of areas usually have more biodiversity value than if you simply let it turn into another closed canopy forest.

Yeah, that's one of the things that's really counterintuitive for people. We're used to comparing forests to an entirely human-dominated landscape, like when forest is cut down in Indonesia for palm oil or in Brazil for cattle ranches. So we in the environmental community are often like, “Forest good. Why would we want anything other than forest?”

And forests are great, obviously! But when you have that mosaic effect, that heterogeneity, like you said, in a natural context where animals are, physically breaking open the soil and doing bison wallows and all the stuff they do, you do get more biodiversity than just a forest without large animals in it.

That's a thing that I think people are surprised by. Because for a long time, in a low megafauna context, in a lot of places the choice has been forest or nothing, right? The choice has been either forest or a totally human dominated landscape. But now if we put some large animals back, we can have something even better, a mosaic with forest and also bits of grassland and wetland and other cool stuff that's formed and shaped by animal activities.

Yeah. Heterogeneity is very important. I think a lot of the time, not only do we over-prioritize forest in conservation and in restoration discussions, sometimes it leads to us promoting forests in places that shouldn't even be forest. Especially in dry areas, where ecosystems that might, both historically with human usage and prehistorically with megafauna usage, have been more like open woodland or savanna, are allowed to grow into these extremely flammable low biodiversity plantations, essentially. We don't always use that word to describe them, but it is kind of what's happened.

Let’s talk about pachyderms, the elephant family. You’ve written about the widespread potential for the reintroduction of pachyderms in North America, Europe, and elsewhere. I was lucky enough to see wild elephants last year for the first time in my life, Asian elephants in India, and you can really visibly see that mosaic-forming effect. They leave a corridor when they walk through the forest.

The world used to have pachyderms almost everywhere, and now we associate them with the paleotropics only, tropical Asia and Africa, like you said. Could you summarize the role that they played in North America and Europe and across the world and how important that was?

Okay, so first some context. Every continent except Australia and Antarctica had elephants of some kind. Now, whether or not we would call them elephants proper is sort of a taxonomic issue, but proboscidians in general, right?

You would have had not only your still-living elephants in Africa and Asia, but also other species of elephants, even in those areas.

Like in Africa and South Asia, you had Paleoloxodon species, which were even larger than living species and coexisted with them. They’re generally called straight-tusked elephants, which also lived in Europe and East Asia. [Here’s Dr. Lemoine’s in-depth post on straight-tusked elephants].

Then in tropical Asia, you had the Stegodon, which were elephant-like, but had these sort of pillar-like tusks that kind of touched together in the middle to create almost one super-tusk. Both palaeoloxodons and stegodons produced dwarf varieties on islands, the former in the Mediterranean and the latter in Indonesia.

Then, of course, in northern Eurasia, you had woolly mammoths and steppe mammoths. Towards the end, they're kind of hard to tell apart. Both had at different times moved into North America, with steppe mammoths having developed into Columbian mammoths there, which spread as far south as Mexico. They were maybe slowly displacing the last of what are called the gomphotheres, which were a more primitive family of elephants or elephant relatives that were still established in much of Central and South America, groups like Cuvieronius and Notiomastodon. And then, of course, you had the true mastodons, which were still very widespread in North America at this time.

Check out Dr. Lemoine’s article on historic ecosystem engineers in Alaska and the Yukon, published on rewilding site The Extinctions.

So pretty much almost everywhere had something like an elephant, often more than one! And this would have had an enormous impact on the environment, just like the removal of elephants from protected areas does today. They can have huge effects on things like vegetation regrowth, fire, heterogeneity, et cetera. Not to mention nutrient cycling and carbon sequestration!

Effectively, the past removal of these creatures from places like the Americas and Eurasia is functionally no different, only that it happened a slightly longer amount of time ago. We're in many ways still seeing the consequences of that.

So it seems like there's a pretty strong ecological case to potentially reintroduce existing elephant species or even de-extincted elephant species to the Americas and Eurasia, in places where people would very much not think of elephants. The elephant family is, in a very real sense, native to Italy and Iowa.

And we see that in the landscape! Like coppicing, the traditional European method of renewable wood harvesting, that started as an adaptation to elephants, trees evolved to be able to grow back branches after big chunks were broken off by elephants.

What are your thoughts on the historic ecological relationships like this, of currently extant species, like white spruce and magpies, with extinct megafauna? I personally have always found this particularly evocative, like seeing megafaunal "ghosts" still around in the landscape. To anthropomorphize a bit,the ecosystems of many developed countries today are kind of “waiting for elephants.” There’s a lot of stuff there that evolved to live with elephants. [See the Wikipedia page for “evolutionary anachronism.”]

Sure! The specific relation to elephants is more obvious in some places than others. In a lot of places, there’s still fruits that have seeds too large to be dispersed by any living herbivores in the area! South America in particular is a classic example.

Which fruits?

A lot of the ones that have been domesticated, for example squashes.

Yeah, that's an elephant-sized food. A tapir’s not swallowing that.

Avocados are thought to have been dispersed by giant ground sloths. You can kind of tell, their seeds are pretty big! That's actually quite common in fruits that were later domesticated, including some that would recently have been dispersed by living elephants. Like mangoes, that were domesticated in Southeast Asia and are still a favorite of elephants there.

That’s common because dispersal by large mammals is actually a pretty good dispersal strategy — if there are large mammals to disperse them. It's only once that group completely disappears that they become sort of refugee species that are considerably less viable. Assuming that they're not later domesticated by humans, which was actually quite a common thing for a lot of them.

Tell me more!

You're in the eastern U.S., right? I'm from southern Ontario, originally. There are actually quite a lot of temperate eastern North American examples that are thought to have been originally megafauna-dispersed. Osage orange is a big one, pawpaw, squashes. Several species of legume, like honey locust and Kentucky coffeetree. These all have traits that suggest they were not effectively dispersed at all by any living large animals or smaller mammals. Some maybe are occasionally dispersed by smaller mammals, but less effectively. Persimmon is another big one, and wild apples.

Even marcescence, which is when trees keep their dead leaves hanging on the branch in the winter instead of shedding them. That helps protect twigs from being grazed by large herbivores.

You’ve written about the relationship of elephants and magpies. Could you tell me about that?

There's some speculation that magpies may have themselves been adapted to megafauna-driven landscapes, because they're still very widely associated with livestock and with grazing lawns or short lawns created by people. They actually show a lot of traits similar to an African corvid called the piapiac, a bird that is primarily associated with large animals because they flush insects. Oxpeckers and other birds like magpies and piapiacs will eat ticks off of large animals.

Historically, in North America, magpies were largely associated with bison herds for a similar reason. Much like European magpies, they later made the switch to livestock. We see actually a lot of biodiversity that is now associated with livestock that was previously likely associated with megafauna. This is also true of plants as well! Mesquite in North America is well-loved and well dispersed by horses and cattle, generally not a favorite of many smaller fauna, or less effectively dispersed by them.

In those regions of the American West, mesquite roots go what, like 50 feet down? That's because they evolved to at least have a chance of surviving being pulled up by the strong trunk of an elephant, right? Elephants are sort of “meant” to eat mesquite. That's what they evolved to resist, which is why they're so tough to get rid of today.

Sure. Another classic example is in the 1800s, there was a brief experiment by the American government, shortly after the Mexican-American War, to explore large parts of the desert territory what is now New Mexico and Arizona that had recently come under American control. It was very difficult to do so with mules or horses, so there was a brief experiment to import camels. It was briefly very successful! It was stopped because the Civil War diverted attention and funding.

But in that brief period where they were experimenting with camels, it was found that they ate a lot of American desert plants that were not popular with other herbivores. Mesquite being a big one, but also sagebrush and creosote. And a lot of these sort of things that can actually be a huge over-shrubification problem in the American Southwest today.

Because camels are another one of those species that was also in North America before humans showed up there. There's that classic thought experiment, “where do camels belong,” right? They evolved in North America, disposed over Beringia to Eurasia where they got domesticated…

…and now they’re most commonly found in Australia! It's a good question, right? Both camels and horses evolved in North America and were there until, depending who you ask, 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.

We're sort of having an informal, unexpected wilding with the massive takeoff of wild boar descendants, feral hogs, in the United States. One out of the box option there would be to reintroduce a major predator known to preferentially prey on pigs. What are your thoughts on the potential to rewild jaguars in the United States?

Jaguars were once naturally present across a huge chunk of North America. as well as a lot of their current range now.

A separate thought, what's interesting about pigs is that a lot of their explosion isn't so much to do with a lack of predation, but with a huge access to anthropogenic food. Pigs normally are very limited by the fact that they have not very complex stomachs and have to live off high-quality, high-carbohydrate foods. But as soon as you introduce potato farming or garbage dumps or any of these sorts of things, suddenly that limiter can go away pretty quickly.

What has been noticed in some parts of South America is that where pigs are super-abundant in association with human settlement, they are a favorite prey of jaguars. Which makes sense, because they are similar to a lot of things that jaguars already eat, like peccaries, capybaras, just that size.

I learned from your article that jaguars once ranged as far north as Pennsylvania. Right now we've got a couple individual males coming across the Mexican border, but what’s the long-term habitat available? Would climate change expand their range? What do you think the actual potential is for jaguars in the United States within the next hundred years?

Well, it's hard to say. In glacial times, they ranged as far north as Oregon or Washington in the west and Pennsylvania in the east. But they generally didn't fill out a lot of the middle area, suggesting maybe they weren't really present in the Great Plains area or in the Rockies. That may simply be because they’re an ambush predator not really associated with open grasslands. Or that a lot of the prey was found more in the forested areas. They were probably eating beavers and giant beavers and tapir calves and giant capybaras, which were also present in the Southeast and West. Maybe some calves of some larger things, and deer.

It seems like their range kind of forked, so that they went up both the coasts but then didn't go up the middle. But even historically, they were found in southern desert regions and riverine habitats of Texas and Arizona and California. There's some evidence to suggest that they were driven to extinction there and then later came back up, maybe as a result of the huge sudden crash in human population following the introduction of things like smallpox. Which is actually maybe true of a lot of things that had become very abundant in between the original arrival of people from Spain in the south and the later arrival of British people in the east.

Shifting around the world, you’ve written that monkeys and primates generally are another group of species that until recently had a much bigger range than people think. Could you discuss the potential for monkey and great ape rewilding?

One of the ones I wrote about specifically was the Barbary macaque, which is still found in northwestern Africa and the Atlas Mountains.

And Gibraltar, right?

Yeah, although it's introduced there. But prehistorically, that same species, Macaca sylvana, was found across almost the entirety of Europe, at least during warm periods, and during cold periods across most of the Mediterranean. It's kind of unclear why they don't anymore, because in previous glacials, they simply retracted to the south of the Mediterranean, then expanded back. Monkeys are themselves important in a lot of seed dispersal and other habitat functions, and it's kind of interesting to imagine them as part of European nature today.

Macaque extinctions are attributed elsewhere as well. Macaques survive in Japan, but prehistorically it looks like the same species, the Japanese macaque, was maybe also found in Korea but isn't anymore. And of course there were native monkeys in the Caribbean which are now extinct, but island extinctions are kind of par for the course, they happen on every island.

As for apes, orangutans are the most obvious one, because they're the only living ape with an extensive fossil record. Currently, we associate them with Borneo and Sumatra, but the fossils suggest they were also naturally present on mainland Southeast Asia and in Java. Given how threatened all three living species of orangutan are today, it could be quite practical to reintroduce populations of them to protected areas outside of what we consider to be their normal range, which may in fact be sort of a relict range driven by past human activity.

Yeah! That’s another mega-trend, right? For surviving large animals, we often think, “Well, where we're seeing them, that's where they must want to live.” But no. Often that's just the inaccessible habitat where they managed to survive because we killed them all in the parts near human settlement.

Sometimes it doesn't even have anything to do with how good the habitat is. Sometimes the places they survive aren't even ideal habitat. It's just that they were less accessible or for whatever other reason had less hunting. Like, orangutans are often most populous in high-elevation areas. The same is true for tree kangaroos and koalas in Australia, even though that doesn't actually seem to be any sort of habitat limitation. When hunting of any of these species ceases, we often see that they start moving into the lowlands again. It's just that those high-elevation areas were the least accessible to people and thus afforded the most protection.

We think of giant tortoises nowadays as something super exotic, in the Galápagos and maybe a couple other places, but where else in the world used to have giant tortoises?

Pretty much everywhere!

Tell me more!

It’s honestly one of the best examples of the history of human-caused extinctions that you can give, because it almost exactly follows the pattern of human evolution and migration. In the early Pleistocene, there were giant tortoises in Eastern and Southern Africa but then they generally seem to have disappeared following the evolution of Homo habilis and erectus. Then in South Asia and Southern Europe you had Megalochelys and Titanochelon and Solitudo. They also seem to disappear following the arrival of hominins. With some exceptions, usually on islands that didn't have humans till later like Sicily or Timor, both of which held on to their tortoises approximately until human arrival.

In Australia, you didn't have tortoises, but you had meiolaniids, which were convergent with tortoises, but a much more basal group of turtles. They kind of had an ankylosaur kind of look to them. They had horns and spiky tails.

I hadn't heard of those guys before!

They were found in the tropical parts of Australia and also on several islands around there. Fiji, New Caledonia, Vanuatu. And their extinction is also very well-timed with human arrival, with the last populations of those having gone extinct following human arrival there.

In the Americas you had Hesperotestudo, which in the warmer parts of North America holds on until the end of the late Pleistocene when humans show up. And in South America you had continental forms of tortoises extremely similar to Galápagos tortoises, that again go extinct once humans show up there.

Tortoises are then only hanging on on islands, which also sequentially go extinct once humans arrive on those islands. The aforementioned examples, but also the entirety of the Caribbean, essentially, had Chelonoidis tortoises very similar to Galápagos tortoises. Historically, there were also tortoises in Madagascar, very similar and in fact ancestral to the Aldabra and Seychelles tortoises. And in the Mascarenes, Mauritius, Reunion, and Rodrigues, you had Cylindraspis tortoises, which were the result of an extremely old evolutionarily distinctive group of tortoises that have been isolated there for millions and millions of years.

But every time people show up to an island with tortoises, with the exception of the very purposefully protected Aldabra and Galápagos tortoises which people had to interfere to protect, tortoises go extinct anytime people show up. Or even pre-people, even hominids. It's one of the most glaring examples of the history of human-caused extinction that there is. The only exceptions are two places that were discovered, A, very recently, and B, where people interceded to protect the native tortoises. And in both cases, there were still extinctions. Because not every Galápagos tortoise subspecies survives, and Aldabra tortoises were completely wiped out from the Seychelles and then reintroduced from Aldabra.

But there has been huge success in rewilding Aldabra tortoises, right? We didn't lose all the giant tortoises! This is like if we still had giant ground sloths living on some island somewhere and we could bring them back. This is a big classic group of megafauna that we almost totally lost but didn't.

So today, where do you think we should put Galápagos tortoises and Aldabra tortoises? Where do you think, ecologically, it would make sense to reintroduce those species, the giant tortoises that we still have?

Well, it's already pretty well underway with a lot of Indian Ocean projects where Aldabra tortoises have been introduced! First reintroduced to the Seychelles from Aldabra, and then following that they've been experimentally introduced to Mauritius and Rodrigues as ecological substitutes for the not very closely related but ecologically similar Cylindraspis tortoises. More recently, there's a trial site in northwestern Madagascar.

Yes!

Yes, where Aldabra tortoises are being used as a ecological substitute for the two members of the same genus, which existed there until Madagascar's colonization around 1200 or whatever it was. It was weirdly recent, humans’ arrival in Madagascar.

Madagascar’s right up there with Greenland and New Zealand as one of the last landmasses on Earth that humans visited.

There were two large tortoises there that were related to the Aldabra tortoise. And one of them was probably ancestral to it, or at least close to it. Closer to the Aldabra tortoises than to the other Madagascan tortoise. So that's being trialed.

As for Galápagos tortoises, it's been proposed for years but nothing's yet happened, to experiment with introducing them to several Caribbean islands.

Ooh, that’d be great!

Because there were other members of Chelonoidis that were closely related to Galápagos tortoises that lived in the Bahamas and Cuba and Hispaniola and a lot of these sorts of places.

And tortoises in the Galápagos are so important for the conservation of dry habitats and browsing of prickly pear and things, the management of which is actually a conservation concern in a lot of Caribbean dry forests. It's been talked about for a while that tortoise rewilding would be a very low risk experiment to try. because tortoises are famously easy to remove.

Yeah, like every time. Even with big “swing for the fences” things like mammoth de-extinction. People are always like “I've seen Jurassic Park, what if it gets out of control?” Come on, we drove all these species extinct with Stone Age technology! It’s easy. They are not a threat.

There's all sorts of problems with the Jurassic Park comparison that I'm sure you already know.

A friend of mine, Ben Novak, who’s working to bring back the passenger pigeon, actually made a t-shirt subverting the Jurassic Park comparison, with a Jurassic Park-style illustrated passenger pigeon and the phrase “Conservation finds a way!”

So I'm sure you saw the news, Colossal Biosciences had a good funding round and now claims they will bring back the woolly mammoth [or at least an Asian elephant embryo gene-edited with CRISPR to express woolly mammoth genes originating from frozen mammoth tissue found in Siberia] in six years.

What do you think of the potential near future de-extinction of the woolly mammoth, thylacine, and passenger pigeon? And what other species beyond them would you like to be de-extincted? I think that could be a really good thing. It's at least worth pursuing.

I think it's good to be realistic about what's actually possible with that. Keep in mind, when we say we're bringing back the woolly mammoth, what we mean is we're putting a few woolly mammoth genes in an Asian elephant. Hopefully that will be able to fill the ecological role. And I'm all for that, generally!

I think sometimes people hear we're bringing back the woolly mammoth and think, “Well, we could bring back anything.” No, there are some limitations.

Because DNA degrades over time. You can’t bring back dinosaurs.

No. And honestly, even with DNA, we have to be able to modify something that still exists. We couldn't directly clone a mammoth because we don't have any living nuclei or, or living cells that could just be transplanted into a, an elephant host. Because we only have DNA, we kind of have to use that to modify a cell line that already exists. It's just very convenient that mammoths were basically the same elephants, right? I mean, they're closer to Asian elephants than Asian elephants are to African elephants. If we allow elephants to live in colder environments, that is essentially filling the ecological role of a mammoth.

But you couldn't do the same thing to a tree sloth to make it a ground sloth, you know? That would be a fundamentally different and greater undertaking. That's just where our current technology is at right. We also don't currently have the ability to clone birds, which is why Colossal is kind of pushing to get that technology to the point where we can. I'm sure that would also be of interest to the chicken industry

But yeah, that's just sort of generally a limitation. All I'm saying is that, while I think the de-extinction technology is very interesting, it does have a lot of limitations that people may not be aware of.

In fact, in the form it exists now, it essentially just is a conservation tool, right?

Right!

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a year ago · 5 likes

I mean, it can be used to increase the genetic diversity of living endangered species or to improve the ecological capacity. There was a paper, I believe sponsored by Colossal or somehow involved with it, but they came out in a good recognized journal, that estimated extremely conservatively that Alaska's North Slope could hold about 0.13 mammoths per square kilometer.

And that was extremely conservative. A lot of the weights they used were overestimates, and they didn't take into account that productivity rises when you reintroduce herbivores, and thus carrying capacity. So 0.13 at the minimum, extremely conservative. If you assume that to be the case for the entirety of the Arctic tundra, that's 1.5 million mammoths. That would mean Alaska's North Slope alone could support almost as many Asian elephants with slight mammoth-gene modification as there are Asian elephants now. [The paper estimates that Alaska’s North Slope today could support approximately 72,000 mammoths].

Yeah! And that could help save the world from melting permafrost, right? That could have huge ecological effects.

It's certainly a mediatory possibility. It's one of those things that only works if we're actually doing other stuff to address climate change. Basically how that works is that large herbivores, not just mammoths but also horses and bison and things like that, excavate snow, which allows cold air to come into contact with the permafrost, thus cooling it several degrees. That is a very useful thing, and one that we should be working on scaling even without mammoths. But mammoth de-extinction is a very interesting avenue and I do hope it has some success — and not just because I personally really want to see one!

I do think that de-extinction technology in its current form is essentially just a conservation tool because the only thing we can use it for is to improve the range and diversity of living cell lines. [E.g. by adding mammoth genes to closely related living Asian elephant cell lines]. We quite simply do not have the ability to create a living genome from scratch. [Yet.]

Even thylacines are a much bigger undertaking than mammoths, even though they went extinct more recently, because the amount of genetic changes to make a dunnart into a thylacine is exponentially more than an elephant into a mammoth.

With passenger pigeons, the closest living species is band-tailed pigeons, and they're pretty close too. The potential is just incredible.

What are some more out of the box ideas for rewilding? And/or some kind of genetic cell line enrichment slash de-extinction. I've brought up a lot of the rewilding ideas I'm aware of, but your articles often bring up ideas I’ve never thought of, like cassowaries or macaws or sirenians as rewilding candidates. What other rewilding options do you see, as an expert on megafauna, that we haven't discussed so far?

I mean, a lot of the cases are going to be maybe less interesting than that. It would be great if we could get more American bison and more European bison projects.

I think South America has a lot of potential, and there's been people who talked about this long before me. Mauro Galetti first proposed this idea that elephants and other larger animals could be rewilded on the Brazilian savanna. The reason behind that being that they are so amazingly fire prone, so flammable, and flammability in protected areas is actually a huge, huge concern. Ironically, in an attempt to protect a lot of these protected areas, cattle grazing and horse grazing was ceased within the confines of those parks, which of course meant that there was more biomass and everything was even more flammable.

Check out Dr. Lemoine’s in-depth article on rewilding potential for South America.

A lot of the most biodiverse ecoregions on Earth are naturally disturbed, are places where trophic impacts, so fire and herbivory, are crucial. We have this idea that if we just leave it alone, it will behave naturally, but that doesn't work.

Not only following the extinction of megafauna, but also following the breakdown of traditional management by indigenous peoples. Originally you had large megafauna remove a lot of the excess biomass, create heterogeneity, and reduce fuel loads. Then the megafauna are gone, but the people who live here understand that it's important to keep things open and diverse and to prevent larger fires, so they do burns and management of remaining megafauna in such a way that biomass still seems low. And then we have us now doing nothing. Having no megafauna and just sort of waiting for things to pile up and then explode.

Like in California.

I mean, if you look at La Brea, it was once like the Serengeti! That's Los Angeles now. It was a big open dry savanna filled with camels and horses and bison. Now it's a forest and it's going to explode. The same thing for the whole boreal region in Canada. Maybe this is too dry to be a forest. Maybe the idea of dry forest is itself kind of flawed, and we need to manage it more like open woodland or savannaor something like that.

Mauro Galletti proposed something like that for the Brazilian savanna, with elephants specifically coming up a lot. He was particularly interested in, this was not set up for this purpose, but there's an elephant sanctuary in Brazil that has former circus elephants and stuff in a sort of retirement. There's been a couple of people who were interested in seeing what their effects would be on, on fire proneness and nutrient cycling and all these things.

I think if there's going to be experiments with [seriously rewilding] elephants anywhere, it's going to be one of three places.

It's going to be in the Arctic following partial de-extinction efforts,

Or it's going to be South America in either Brazil or Argentina.

Or it's going to be Europe, where people have been talking about experiments with elephants in fenced reserves for actually a very long time.

Just to see what happens, right? It's an easy enough thing. There's been talk of setting up an elephant sanctuary in Europe as well for a long time.

I think regardless of how far we go with these kinds of ideas, it's important to have them and to experiment with them. Because it's unavoidable that almost every ecosystem on Earth evolved in the presence of not only huge diversity, but enormous densities. of megafauna.

The estimates for the Siberian mammoth steppe that have been published are something like one mammoth per square kilometer! Plus seven horses, five bison, fifteen reindeer — the reindeer were probably migratory, so spread that out a bit. But still, these are densities similar to or higher than what we consider normal for the African savanna.

People have no idea. Even where you have megafauna today, it's a percentage of a percentage of what you should have. You should have an uncomfortably high amount.\ And then people start saying, oh, no, you're not supposed to, because there's no predators. But people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what predation does. Predation does not reduce total herbivore biomass in a system with all herbivores present. What it does is shift it away from the smaller species towards the larger species. Predation does nothing to elephants. Often it has a much smaller effect on buffalo than it does on things like antelope and zebra. And that's part of what makes these things work, right? They will have a higher biomass of the largest herbivores, but these are also the most generalist herbivores, which are going to have the most general wide-ranging effects on the ecosystem without specifically removing some specific species of plant.

I see.

Whereas, if deer are allowed to become overabundant, that can happen because they're selective grazers.

Like the Kaibab case.

Yeah. We kind of expect deer to be controlled by predators, but we really don't expect it of a lot of larger herbivores. And in fact, that's a very important part of how natural herbivore systems work, is that some herbivores have sort of escaped predation. Certainly lions don't control [i.e. hunt and eat] rhinos, right? It's just not a thing.

And some things that are more in the middle, like buffalo, it’s extremely contextual and has something to do with how migratory is this system. Because migration also means that some herbivores escape predation entirely, including some smaller ones. That's why there's millions upon millions of wildebeest in East Africa, which is a migratory system due to precipitation differences. But in South Africa, where precipitation is much less spatially inconsistent, wildebeest are usually much less common because they never really escape areas where they would be subject to predation.

Fascinating.

To jump around again, could you tell me about your AVOTREX database? That seems like a really interesting project.

I should point out that I'm just a co-author. I am using it very heavily for something I'm working on now. The data set itself was created by Ferran Sayol, who worked in the same lab that I'm working in now. He was first author on the paper for that. I joined it later because I had some information about continental bird extinctions that were later added. It's a very important data set, and one kind of similar to some previous ones that I and other people had worked on for mammals, like the PHYLACINE Project and things like that. The idea behind it was just to assemble traits for as many modern and recently extinct birds as possible in order to have that data set be available to people looking to do macroecological studies.

This is primarily data on their physical form. This is not genetic data, right? This is data about what we know based on fossil records of the physical form of these birds.

Exactly. For all species, basically, it's just a collection of morphological measurements and a few other traits for... for living and extinct birds. I'm working on a project right now that has to do with co-evolution, and co-extinction. Basically, the idea is, there were bird extinctions in the Lake Quaternary. Considerably fewer than for large mammals. But those birds that did go extinct are largely associated with megafauna in some way. And so what we're kind of doing is looking to measure the effect of different traits on bird extinction. Just trying to determine statistically what traits make animals more or less likely to go extinct

Awesome!

I've also interviewed and visited the lab of a gentleman in Maine working to bring back the chestnut in America. That would also facilitate much higher animal biomass, and potentially the wood-pasture system.

Sure, I don't know the guy personally, but I'm familiar with the association.

I'm really hopeful that even as we face these unprecedented challenges with climate change, with the combination of humans who are less reliant on subsistence hunting than ever before, more efficient agriculture, maybe a demographic global demographic peak, and we've already had a peak in global farmland acreage…I'm hoping that we can right this 10,000-year-old wrong, and even in the middle of all the other challenges we're facing, bring back these megafauna to the world. We are seeing that in some places, and I'm hoping we can see it more. So thank you for doing the work you do!

A lot of the interesting stuff that's also being done now is trying to objectively and in a non-biased way look at the effects of already introduced megafauna as well. I have a friend and colleague, Eric Lundgren, who does a lot more of this kind of work. I would encourage you to look into it as well. He comes at it less from this sort of prehistoric angle and more from the idea that invasiveness is itself kind of a myth.

It is! I wrote a series of articles about that last summer, citing you. Very controversial!

Yeah, I read it!

What Dr. Lundgren does is, he's done a lot of interesting work to empirically show that least with large mammals, you can't use their nativeness to predict what their effects are going to be. There's no measurable difference really between what native herbivores do and what introduced herbivores do that has anything to do with whether or not they're native or introduced. Where this comes up a lot is Australia.

The whole concept of invasive species, it's not scientific, almost, in the sense that it’s not Popper-falsifiable, right? You can't actually consistently see the signal of native versus invasive in the data, at least for non-disease species on continents.

In fact, what you find is exactly the same thing I was talking about earlier, which is that the best predictor of whether herbivores are going to have a positive or negative effect on biodiversity is how selective they are. And that has nothing to do with nativeness. There's plants that are at risk of extinction in Florida because of white-tailed deer, and it's the same thing that happens where deer are introduced, right? It's because they're selective feeders, they can selectively browse those most palatable plants, and that can actually lead to the exclusion of those plants.

It's the same thing with feral goats or a lot of other similar sort of small browsers. Large generalist grazers, like buffalo, are almost universally going to have a positive effect on biodiversity. It doesn't really matter where they are. Really what it shows is only that plants are adapted to high densities of large generalist herbivores and not to high densities of small selective herbivores.

This is absolutely fascinating.

And with global warming, very soon, if not already, no species anywhere on Earth is going to be living in the same place with the same conditions it evolved in, right? The world has changed fundamentally. We're past 1.5 degrees Celsius. Nothing is the same as it was.

So, I think we should be much more proactive and less precautionary about introducing and reintroducing megafauna. Like, “We're not 100% sure what this animal will do, but we're pretty sure that broadly speaking, it's better to have it here than not.” Let's put tortoises in the Caribbean islands. Let's put elephants in a park in Italy. Let's do these things!

And there's been a little bit of movement on this. I don't know if you saw, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service changed their interpretation of Section 10(j) of the Endangered Species Act, which means they're now allowed to do conservation introductions outside of a species’ native range. And they’ve already done one!

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2 years ago · 9 likes · 2 comments

Sure! The nice thing about big things is that it's easy to experiment and easy to reverse the experiment if it has failed. Tortoises, elephants, easy to spot and remove. Maybe not easy to move, but easy to remove in general.

I think a lot of work has to be done with trying to, from an unbiased perspective, evaluate what's actually going on with mammals or other large animals that have already been introduced. And whether it's better to have the wrong megafauna than no megafauna.

I'm rooting for the camels in Australia and the hippos in Colombia, because it looks like they might actually be decent ecological substitutes, like hippos for toxodons, right? It looks like they might actually be having a really net positive impact in those ecosystems.

Yeah. I think it's also important to let go of the idea that something has to be a one-for-one substitute. Camels maybe aren't especially similar to anything that lived in Australia, certainly not taxonomically, but in terms of what their measurable effects on vegetation are, it's better to have them than to not have them. What happens if we don't have camels? We'll have more fires, and we'll have less browsing of introduced shrubs.

These are systems that are inherently dynamic, whether we let them be or not. Anywhere with intermediate precipitation like that, it needs consumers [of lots of plant biomass] otherwise it will be consumed [by fire]. It’s inevitable. We can try to choose to do it in a responsible way, through grazing and browsing or prescribed burning or ideally both in a lot of cases. I think it's a thing that we're going to see change a lot in the near future out of necessity.

Thank you so much. And also, I'm excited! I would love to see mammoths on Alaska's North Slope. I would love to see giant tortoises on Caribbean islands. I would love to see all of this. I'd love to see this this wilder world.

It's almost like a secular environmentalist version of original sin or something, in which the original ecological sin of the rise of our sentient species was driving this mass wave of megafauna extinctions. And now we can finally make that right again.

Sure, and it’s kind of like a dispelling of this idea that humans' negative effects on the environment are exclusively a recent thing, right? It's not like environmental destruction started 200 years ago. It's been happening for thousands and thousands of years, that we just forget.

Yeah! And the systems that we have now make it possible to do better on some of the problems we caused thousands and thousands of years ago.

Exactly! And we're uniquely able to address some of these problems now because we have our needs met in other ways, right? A huge thing that's gotten the rewilding movement in Europe going is that globalization has led to widespread land abandonment, because it's no longer profitable to farm in a lot of the warmer, drier parts of Europe.

Also just technological advancement! Fertilizer and stuff means you can get more food on less land. Yield per acre keeps going up.

Yeah, fertilizer, genetically engineered crops, whatever you want to do. Honestly, improving the yield of land does more to free land from agriculture than anything else!

What happens is you have large areas of Spain and Greece and Italy that people are leaving, because it’s not profitable to farm there anymore. All the children leave and go to the city. So there's just sort of these aging populations living in the middle of nowhere, it's not profitable to farm.

But a lot of these are dry areas, and so they get taken over by shrubs, and then they become fire hazards. And so the idea comes along. It's like, okay, we can't do traditional livestock rearing here anymore because it's not profitable, but there's no particular reason why we can't have wild game here doing the same thing and creating ecotourism!

Thank you so much for this interview.

Julian Gough is an independent cosmological philosopher, novelist, musician, and poet. He is the former lead singer and lyricist of Irish indie rock band Toasted Heretic, and author of several novels, two BBC radio plays, a popular series of children’s books, and the End Poem in hit video game Minecraft.

In recent years, he’s assembled philanthropic funding to work full-time on further developing theoretical physicist Lee Smolin’s landmark theory of cosmological natural selection, which Gough believes has implications that may explain many unsolved anomalies in human civilization’s space telescopes’ observations of the universe without requiring the existence of long-theorized dark matter. Mr. Gough’s model has experienced a burst of attention since it correctly predicted the James Webb Space Telescope observations of supermassive black holes much earlier in the history of the universe than was predicted by the standard dark matter model.

He writes about this work on Substack at The Egg and the Rock.

THE EGG AND THE ROCK

Novelist Julian Gough (author of Minecraft's End Poem) redescribes the universe.

By Julian Gough

This interview is well outside this newsletter’s normal focus area — a speculative new model of cosmology! This writer is not knowledgeable enough in theoretical physics to properly evaluate it, so I can’t “vouch” for its plausibility from a place of expertise as I can with the clean energy and biodiversity information I write about. Nevertheless, I find Julian Gough’s model of cosmological natural selection to be absolutely fascinating. Whether it’s best described as brand-new science, in-depth science fiction, astronomy-informed philosophy, or even a new form of theology, I think it’s worth discussing!

In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Mr. Gough’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

It is very interesting that you’ve developed such a complex cosmological philosophy without formal scientific credentials. Out-of-academia ideas like yours tend to get lumped in with pseudoscience, generally deservedly. But if you look back at the history of science, a lot of great scientific breakthroughs have come from oddball people pursuing their own weird ideas. The case studies in the book Abundance really illustrate that science is too regimented. We need more people with sort of weird, bold ideas, like Katalin Kariko’s mRNA ideas that were ignored for decades but then turned out to be the basis for COVID vaccines.

We have become, I think, very defensive of science, understandably given that it’s under attack by powerful crazy people. But that feeling that we need to limit science to scientists can end in not giving scientists room to do cross-disciplinary thinking, and makes ordinary people feel uninvested, feel that science is some separate caste.

I find your ideas very interesting and philosophically compelling.

Well, thank you. I think you’re right that there’s a huge problem in science. And it’s a problem of success! The reductionist paradigm has been so successful, and specializing and specializing has been so successful. But the trouble is, there’s a point where you’ve so divided science into sub-specialities, where the amount of work you have to do to get your PhD is colossal, but it’s all inside a very narrow field boundary. You’ve ended up in a situation where science is full of brilliant people with astonishing depth of knowledge, but no width. And the trouble is, great ideas get siloed in these specialist jargons and there’s no mechanism for making them available to the scientists three fields over who really could benefit from that idea.

So we have a huge amount of production of science in these extremely specialized fields but we don’t have a mechanism of discovery that can spread those ideas across all the fields that would benefit from them. We don’t have synthesizers. I think that there’s a huge invisible crisis in science which is there’s an absence of people who can synthesize information from multiple fields and put together a bigger picture that makes sense of all of this data.

In a way, I got dragged into this when I realized that, oh my god, here is a gigantic, obvious, classic example of sociological failure where a brilliant idea crosses too many field boundaries and nobody takes responsibility for it because nobody feels qualified to investigate it.

Even mRNA therapy, the example in Abundance, was like that too. It was too weird. It was a mix of advanced genetics with some traditional medical treatment stuff. It didn’t fit in anyone’s grant categories.

Yeah, exactly. And the theory, I mean, it’s very kind of you to say I’ve put together this amazingly coherent cosmology, but I’m building on the work of others that was essentially ignored. I mean, it wasn’t totally ignored, but it might as well have been, you know.

Your theory’s fairly complex and very interesting, and I want to get into lots of aspects to it, but first I’m just going to say in my words, a super brief summary some of the differences, and then we can expand on that.

Basically, you think that the universe is more like an egg than a rock, that it’s the result of evolved processes and could arguably be described as a life-form in some senses. You agree with the observed evidence of the standard model, you agree with everything that we can see with telescopes, but you have a different explanation for it. You have a different explanation that produces the stuff we’ve observed, that has, in some cases, made better predictions than the consensus model.

There’s a couple points about the current consensus model of cosmology that just always seemed weird to me, which is part of why I was attracted to your work. And one of them is that to explain the distribution of mass in the universe that we see, the way those equations work out is that the current best available theory is that 96% of mass in the universe is hypothetical stuff we have never seen or observed, known as dark matter and dark energy.

And I personally am like, wait a minute. We’re just filling in the gaps in our knowledge by positing the existence of this massive universe-dominating force that we don’t know about? People say, maybe dark matter is made of weakly interacting massive particles, but we’ve never detected those. We’ve never seen or identified dark matter. We just suppose it’s there because of the effects that we think we observe on other things.

To me, this sounds like phlogiston. This sounds like élan vital. Humans have a habit here. It’s a well-known intellectual failure mode, making up a big invisible force that explains all the things you don’t understand.

We’ve seen this movie before. One reason I find it fairly easy to believe that all of cosmology might have made a terrible mistake is because it has done about 12 times before. It keeps happening. I’m a novelist by background and novelists are very good at pattern recognition. And I see a lot of patterns here. This is miasma, this is phlogiston, this is the ether. We’ve done this again and again.

Yeah, before we detected photons, we were like, oh, light must travel in this medium, the luminiferous aether!

There’s always an invisible thing that we cannot detect that explains everything. That’s because there’s always a bunch of mathematically plausible, mathematically non-self-contradictory explanations for the phenomena you’re looking at. But that doesn’t mean that they are the explanation.

What tends to happen is we get over-invested in one of these, and then entire careers get spent exploring it and then eventually you’re teaching people this one model, and it becomes very difficult to get out of that local minimum. You get stuck and that’s what’s happened, I think, with cosmology.

Dark matter and dark energy make for a perfectly good theory. You can use them to explain a lot of stuff. I can totally understand why it became a dominant theory. But I don’t think it’s the right theory. You can see all the things are happening with dark matter, dark energy that happened with these earlier “invisible thing explains everything” moments.

The dark matter theory explains a lot of stuff! It does.

If you’ve got big masses of hard to detect stuff that influences the rest of the universe through gravity, that does explain a lot of the stuff we observe. But it’s also getting weird. It’s getting to the point where to make the math work, you have to have the vast majority of the universe be made of this stuff that we’ve never seen.

Yeah. And it also breaks down in interesting ways. It has the characteristics of the epicycles problem that you had when we thought that the Earth was the center of the universe. With enough epicycles, you can really make that theory work. And when the new Copernican theory came along that maybe the Sun is the center of the solar system, that theory didn’t work as well, at first, as the Ptolemaic epicycle system!

You needed Kepler’s orbital mechanics!

You needed Kepler to figure out orbital mechanics to explain how that worked.

You needed to know that it’s elliptical orbits, not circular orbits.

Yeah, exactly. The original version of the Copernican theory had circular orbits, and it didn’t actually give you as good results. It really struggled to get traction.

We’re still adding a lot of epicycles. And the new theory doesn’t explain everything yet, so it can’t be right. But we’ve seen this movie before.

And if you look at it, the dark matter approach, you can make it work for almost anything, if you tweak it slightly, but then it starts not working for something else at the other side. I sometimes compare it to a duvet that’s just a little bit too small. You can either cover your chest and shoulders or you can cover your feet, but you can’t cover them both.

So you can make a dark matter explanation work for large galaxies, but then it stops working for small galaxies. You can make it work for small galaxies, but then it stops working for large galaxies.

So at any given point, you can get a version of the theory that explains what you’re looking at, but it’s very hard to get a version that explains absolutely everything coherently and that predicts anything.

And the thing that makes me feel that I’m onto something, and there is a real problem here that needs to be solved, is that it didn’t predict the early universe that we are seeing now.

No one can explain what’s coming out of the James Webb Space Telescope!

We’re seeing more complex structures all over the universe than almost anyone thought possible. Much earlier structure, much, much more efficiently assembled!

Now, the thing is, they can eventually, by tweaking enough parameters, shuffle the theory so that it doesn’t break fully. But they didn’t predict anything that we’re seeing. Now they’re adding more epicycles to somehow get the theory to do that. But that’s a huge failure of prediction.

And also, I’m not necessarily saying that cold dark matter doesn’t exist. I don’t want to go there because every time I say that, I get into big arguments with astrophysicists and astronomers. I don’t want to argue with you guys! I love you guys. I want to help you guys. What I’m saying is it’s clearly not sufficient. It didn’t predict the early universe accurately. There’s something missing.

Now, it’s possible there’s some kind of hidden mass thing that’s explaining some of the stuff, but it’s not enough on its own, and there’s something huge missing. I think that the theories I’m exploring can fill in that gap, and my secret feeling is that dark matter will eventually evaporate. We will eventually explain everything using baryonic matter, using the forces and particles that we already know. But I can’t do that yet.

I totally get it that people will want to understandably look very skeptically at my approach because my approach explains certain things that cold dark matter explains, but it doesn’t explain everything. I totally own up to that. I totally accept that this is not a complete theory of everything that replaces cold dark matter. What I do think is the cold dark matter model is trying to fix about five different observational anomalies.

I suspect that those different observational anomalies, which are, you know, rotation curves of galaxies, and some of the cosmic microwave background radiation stuff, various phenomena like gravitational lensing; they will probably have several different explanations.

It’s going to be more complex. Trying to solve everything with one magic particle that has ultra simple qualities isn’t going to work. That’s what I’m predicting here. There may be some missing mass stuff that’s going to explain some of what we’re talking about. I’m not saying there’s no sterile neutrinos or whatever, though I secretly think there probably aren’t, but I’m not arguing for that. I’m not claiming I can replace cold dark matter.

What I am saying is, you can do a fantastically better job of explaining specific observational anomalies using the approach I’m taking, using cosmological natural selection and the “blowtorch theory” that comes out of that. They’re giving you better predictive results in the early universe.

I think given those facts, sure, I could be wrong, but so could cold dark matter theory. Meanwhile, God knows how many thousands or tens of thousands of people are working within the cold dark matter framework, on dark matter detection experiments, dark matter computer simulations, etc. And I think I’m literally the only person on Earth who is actually paid full-time to work on cosmological natural selection. And that’s crazy! I was astounded when I discovered that cosmological natural selection wasn’t just badly under-resourced, it wasn’t resourced at all, anywhere. So I put together a research fellowship to do that.

The second major point that attracted me to your theory, after the dark matter question, was singularities. We’re pretty sure the universe formed from a singularity. We look back in time through telescopes due to speed of light delay, and we see that the universe got smaller and hotter and denser. We know due to neutrino decay and stuff that the universe formed between 13 billion and 14 billion years ago. And I know you agree with all those things.

I’m not disagreeing with any of the observable evidence or any observational data, yeah. I’m an unbelievably conservative heretic, you know.

Yeah, you’re an unbelievably conservative heretic! That’s a great line.

Al Gore has a line in his Inconvenient Truth where he’s like, “When I was a kid and I looked at South America and Africa, I went, did they ever fit together?” And they said no then, but later plate tectonics and Alfred Wegener figured out they did.

I’m like, okay, so we’re pretty sure the universe came from a singularity. And we have observed exactly one process that creates singularities in our actual universe, black holes, collapses of stellar-level mass to form an infinitely small point.

Did they ever fit together?

Is the one process we know that creates a singularity the thing that created the singularity that we’re pretty sure the universe came from?

And put like that, it sounds like it should be explored.

John Wheeler said this in the 70s. [John Wheeler was a Manhattan Project theoretical physicist also renowned for his work on black holes]. This has been an idea since the 70s, and it’s so brutally underexplored!

That’s the setup, the dark matter question and the singularity question. Those are two points by which people can connect your theory to the standard model and see how it might explain things better.

So, tell me why you think black holes are the universe’s reproductive organs. Maybe that’s a too-biological metaphor, I don’t know, But tell me about the model of cosmological natural selection as you understand it!

The basis of this theory isn’t mine. I’m building on work that goes back to the 70s, mostly to the 90s. The original idea was exactly what you’re talking about. John Wheeler, great American physicist, back in the 70s, said that there’s these two problems involving singularities, and they look like the opposite sides of exactly the same thing.

Mass-energy collapses to a point in a black hole and vanishes from our universe.

And mass-energy appears from who the fuck knows where when a singularity expands out in a Big Bang to form a universe.

They look like the opposite sides of the same phenomenon. And we don’t have an explanation for either. But if you put them together, you have an explanation for both. And that’s a very elegant explanation!

About 20 years later, Lee Smolin, another great theoretical physicist, had been reading evolutionary biology. He’d been meeting Stephen Jay Gould and Lynn Margulis and people like that for fun, just in his spare time. He realized that if the child universe had a slight variation in the basic parameters of matter, rather than a large random variation, which Wheeler thought might be the case, if there was a slight variation, then you get inheritance and you get Darwinian evolution of universes! And that just makes so much damn sense!

That explains the anthropic principle and so much else.

It blows away the anthropic principle. You don’t need the anthropic principle anymore in the more extended version of this theory, because most universes are going to self-complexify and self-order and generate intelligent life!

Now, that’s not entirely obvious from Smolin’s original version of the theory, but it becomes obvious, as I’ll explain in a while, it becomes obvious that in the slightly more complex model I’ve been developing, along with Clément Vidal and John Smart and various other people, most universes will end up with intelligent life.

The anthropic principle argues that, well, there’s probably a lot of very random universes. And eventually, if there’s enough of them, if there’s an infinite number of them, you’re going to get one really complicated one, just randomly.

That’s a horrible, horrible, horrible explanation! The natural selection of universes gives you a mechanism to ratchet upward into complexity, especially when you realize that intelligent life would actually help universes reproduce.

All intelligent life has to do is optimize its energy production, which is what every life form does. Every life form wants to optimize its energy production, but intelligent life that can wield technology, that can manipulate matter, should ultimately be able to technologically manufacture small black holes, which would be the most efficient energy source in our universe.

Now, could you explain that just for a bit? I think many people would hear that and think, black holes destroy matter and energy, right? Wouldn’t that be the most efficient garbage can in the universe? How does that become an energy source?

Well, it’s a great way of getting rid of your garbage, but you will also get a huge amount of energy back from throwing your garbage into it.

From Hawking radiation and so on?

No, not even that. I mean, that’s fine, but Hawking radiation just comes from the black hole. The energy source I’m talking about is when you just drop stuff down the gravity well.

The gravitational energy is insane! You drop matter into a black hole and it accelerates, disintegrates and sheds shit-tons of energy. All of the brightest things in our universe is stuff falling into a black hole. We do see that, with quasars and stuff!

Everything bright, everything crazily bright that we couldn’t explain because it was so crazily bright, when you go past just stars, turns out to be stuff falling into a black hole. Quasars, blazars, Seyfert galaxies, radio-bright galaxies! It’s always a very messy disposal.

It’s spinning as it is sucked in by the black hole, and stuff’s being whipped out all the time. The gravitational force is literally ripping stars in half and big chunks of that are getting thrown out of it as big gobs of mass and energy.

Yeah! If mass falls towards a black hole, it ends up, because angular momentum is conserved, it ends up spinning unbelievably fast in the immediate vicinity of the black hole. It’s spinning at close to light speed. So you get an accretion disk. An accretion disk is just a disk of matter that builds up with accretion. As it falls in, it as falls towards the black hole.

Now the “throat” of a black hole is very small, it actually eats matter quite slowly. But while while the matter is queued up to get “eaten” by the extremely small “throat” of the black hole —

The singularity?

No, the event horizon. It’s bigger than that, but it’s not crazy big. The matter that’s circling around it gets unbelievably hot and energetic and sheds enormous amounts of energy. It’s super super bright! That active galactic nucleus is super super bright. It also, by the way, sends out relativistic plasma jets of energy at close to light speed. Which I will come to later, because they’re a big part of how I think the universe assembles itself.

I just love this idea. I write a lot about energy, right? Sustainable energy sources. We’ve now gotten to a very interesting point in the energy world, that I think most people aren’t aware of. If we got infinite free nuclear power tomorrow, like magic nuclear fusion energy or a black hole in a box or something that just produced endless electrons for free, it would still not be cheaper than rooftop solar panels can be right now! Because the price of building out power lines from any sort of centralized electricity generating facility at all is more expensive than the price of putting rooftop solar on your own home. We’re actually at this sort of fascinating point where solar is close to functionally unlimited energy in markets where it’s deregulated enough to be economical, places like Australia or Germany. The U.S. has a lot more limits on solar power.

This black hole thing would be, if you’re correct about cosmological natural selection, kind of the ultimate sustainable energy source.

You put stuff, mass-energy from this universe, spin it around and it generates lots of power while it’s falling into the event horizon. And while doing that, while creating ungodly cosmic amounts of energy, maybe to build Dyson spheres or Matrioshka brains or whatever, you’re planting a new universe at the same time!

The thing is, just to give you the figures on this so that people can see it in their heads, with chemical energy, burning stuff, you only get a little bit of power out. The great thing about solar is there’s just so much of it coming out of the sun. So it’s free.

We get as much energy from the sun every five days as we would get if we burned all accessible fossil fuel reserves ever. Every five days we get another planet worth of fossil fuels!

I’m a huge fan of solar! The energy efficiency thing is interesting here, because nuclear fission gives you 0.1% of the mass turned into energy. 0.1%. Nuclear fusion gives you up to 0.7% of the mass turned into energy. But small black holes, if you drop stuff into a black hole, you can get up to 42% of the mass turned into energy. It’s unbelievably frugal!

I just can’t resist calling out the inadvertent Douglas Adams reference there.

42%! Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s cool.

So it’s unbelievably frugal. If you imagine just as a thought experiment for the fun of it — it’s ridiculous and silly, but for the fun of it — imagine how would a life form survive, produce energy, keep its ecosystem going, keep its biosphere going it wants to have a biosphere, if it’s doing that kind of thing still, for the longest possible part of the lifetime of the universe. After the suns have decayed. Trillions of years.

What do you do after the stars go out?

Small black holes will keep you going for just trillions and trillions and trillions of years. You can keep life and consciousness and whatever you’re into, whatever you love — I don’t know, rabbits! If you want it to survive for trillions of years —

As opposed to just plain old billions.

Yeah! As opposed to plain old billions, you’re going to have to tap into small black hole production.

There’s already big natural black holes and you can use them, but the trouble is they’re very far apart, and there’s no point creating energy that is 100 light years away from where you need it, because it’s going to take 100 years, even if you’re at the speed of light, to get it anywhere that you can use it.

So obviously you have to make a lot of small ones rather than use the existing big ones. And that, of course, will help the universe reproduce.

Because if black holes are generating offspring universes, then any universe that has ever evolved into the possibility space where life forms are able to manufacture small black holes artificially in a way that nature on its own couldn’t do by just bumping stuff together, then universes that develop intelligent life will reproduce much more than the universes without intelligent life. Because the natural power source will be a way to plant orders of magnitude more universes!

That’s so cool.

Isn’t it great?

I really love the concept. It’s ultimate cosmic sustainability.

Yeah. It’s so frugal compared to any other power source!

Because of E equals MC squared, because it’s spinning it around in an accretion disk in a way that’s converting a big fraction of it to energy and there’s vast amounts of energy per unit of matter.

Yeah. Huge amounts of the mass, including some of the mass of the nuclei of the atoms, gets converted into energy! Just way beyond, like 60 times more than happens with fusion. Plus, fusion requires certain kinds of isotopes and so on, it’s a little bit finicky. Black hole, you can throw anything in it, just throw rocks in, throw your garbage in. Anything. All you need is mass. So it’s very, very forgiving. It’s very frugal. It’s very sustainable.

I know it sounds slightly hyper-tech to say, just build small black holes and drop things into them. But it’s actually the most sustainable thing you could possibly do on the trillion-year timescale. It’s not a problem right now.

To be clear, because it’s the Internet and people are going to be reading this and there’ll always be someone who’s confused, we are talking, you know, a million or a billion years from now, once we have a space-faring civilization. No one’s advocating building one on Earth! We don’t even know how to build those yet.

Definitely don’t build it on Earth, because if you drop it, it goes to the center of the Earth!

Exactly, yeah. But somewhere in the future, out in the Oort cloud of the solar system or something, this might be a worthwhile way to produce power that could outlast the death of our Sun.

Yeah. We’re just saying that, given that we are life-forms exploring the possibility space for being life-forms in this universe, if there’s still human beings or the descendants of human beings or if life-froms from other planets that want to endure for a tremendous length of time, eventually they’re going to run out of power. Eventually their star will burn out. Eventually they will face an energy crisis. Solar power is great, but what do you do when your star is at the end of its life?

Forget peak oil, you’re talking about Peak Sun, billions of years from now.

Eventually you hit Peak Sun. And where do you go from there?

I think you have to go to small black holes. And you’ve got billions of years to master the technology to do that. Because right now that technology is completely beyond us. I’m not saying this is something we will do or can do or should do in any kind of time frame that means anything to us.

But I think ultimately, anything that’s not physically impossible, we can eventually do it. And this isn’t physically impossible. It’s technically possible, but unbelievably difficult. So give us a couple of billion years! We’ve gone from the first steam locomotive to where we are now in quite a short period of time.

Do you believe in the future or not? I kind of do. We might screw it up. We might not make it. But I think we have a chance of making it. And that I think is somewhere we would end up going. And you can see then that such universes [“born” from technologically produced small black holes created by civilizations as an efficient power source] would be very, very common. They would be much more common than any universe that doesn’t produce life and therefore small technological black holes.

Any universe that just produces stars and stellar collapse black holes, that requires an entire star to have one child is just going to be...There’s just going to be less of those than the universes that, with that star-amount of matter, can produce hundreds of millions of small black holes.

We are already seeing that intelligent life can do weird, cosmically relevant things. There have been recent points, if I understand correctly, where the coldest and hottest known points in the universe were in human scientists’ labs, experimenting with absolute zero or quark-gluon plasma. We have done many things on Earth that have that have never been done by nature.

Yeah, no matter how big the universe is, nature cannot achieve the kind of bottom temperatures that we achieve. And it can’t achieve the top temperatures that we can achieve now, although it did just after the Big Bang. The quark-gluon plasma just after the Big Bang, I think they just actually worked out the temperature in the last month for the first time, and it’s like 3.3 trillion degrees. We’ve created nanomaterials that have never existed before.

We’re actually created high-atomic-number elements that likely never occurred in nature, like tennessine and oganesson. And if we ever reach the island of stability, we might create long-term viable super-heavy elements that might not have ever been viable in nature.

Maybe. There’s talk that there might be islands of stability even higher up the periodic table that have never been reached by nature, but maybe we could reach them eventually. They’re not sure, it’s pretty theoretical, but they think there might be islands of stability higher up the periodic table, yeah.

I think we’ll do amazing things that are kind of inconceivable to us right now, in the same way that we are now doing things that would have been inconceivable to our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Absolutely!

And I like that! I’m glad you quoted the book Abundance earlier, because we’ve become very scared of the future.

We have. That’s what I’m trying to fix with my writing.

We’re acting like we’re on a down curve.

Yeah. And I don’t think we are. I think we’ve got this sort of fin-de-siècle malaise after the wild events of the 20th century. It’s sort of like what you read in the 1890s, eminent physicists like Lord Kelvin saying that they were really confident that heavier-than-air powered flight is impossible. You see people after big waves of technological progress going, “Okay, this must be it. This must be the top plateau of history.” And it’s so not! It’s just at the beginning.

Yeah, it’s just at the beginning!

When I was a kid — and I was a weird precocious kid — I thought that modern human civilization might fall in my lifetime. I looked at climate change predictions and I’m like, oh shit, this is just a terrible dynamic that we might not ever get our way out of. Renewable energy is not economically competitive, we’re going to have to keep burning coal to power the air conditioners and build the seawalls that’ll protect us from the effects of burning coal, so the effects will get worse, and so on and so forth. I really thought there might be a catastrophic civilizational collapse.

But in the last 15 years, even as I think most people got more negative about climate change, seeing renewable energy grow cost-competitive just made me go, “Oh, man, we’re going to make it!”

Solar is going to completely kick coal out.

It is. Absolutely. In some ways it already has. It’s already the vast majority of new-built electricity-generating capacity right now. I’m writing about this constantly, and I’m just like, oh wow.

We now have sheets of glass you can point at the Sun to get cheap clean power!

We’re just at the beginning of history! We’re on a new Agricultural Revolution or Industrial Revolution level upscale to access huge amounts of new energy! That is incredible, and that’s what I write about.

That also makes me think more like, yeah, we’re actually going to have a far future.

Yeah, we are!

I think one of the sad things about what’s happened over the last century is I think we missed an energy transition, which I think has screwed us up a little bit. You know, I think life-forms want to move up the energy scale. They’ll start with their own muscles, they’ll use animal muscles, then they’ll burn things and use water wheels, eventually they’ll get to fission, they’ll get to fusion, eventually they’ll get to small black holes. And I think we got stuck on coal and oil and gas, we didn’t go to nuclear because we set off the atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and scared the shit out of ourselves.

Yeah.

And I think we traumatized ourselves. I mean, then we over-regulated nuclear. Nuclear would have killed a lot less people than coal and oil did.

Oh, gosh, yeah, I’ve written about this several times. We could have avoided the whole climate crisis if we’d built out enough nuclear power plants early enough.

And there would have been probably a couple of accidents that would have killed a small number of people but not nearly as many as the people already killed that we get from coal and oil.

Eight million deaths a year from fossil fuels’ existing air pollution effects alone.

Matt Yglesias had a very interesting article where he posited that World War I in some ways irretrievably screwed up history because it meant that Central European nuclear scientists were dispersed to the Soviet Union and America where they ended up building bombs. He wrote, imagine if the World Wars didn’t happen and, the physicist community in Austria-Hungary, which was very advanced, invented peaceful nuclear power plants in the year 1940.

Slow Boring

The case for the Austro-Hungarian Empire

This is a post about the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a weird subject, I know. But before we get to the Habsburgs, we need to take an even weirder detour into the philosophy of history, which is barely a real subfield of philosophy but is absolutely something that I took a class on in college…

Read more

4 years ago · 245 likes · 140 comments · Matthew Yglesias

Oh, it could have happened! We could have had this [nuclear science] as a peacetime breakthrough, without the world broken up into these blocs by crazy world wars that meant you immediately optimized for weapon development. Then we could have had a peaceful sort of glide path up the energy curve.

But we didn’t.

Yeah. we just didn’t adjust fast enough while we developed. Our weapons technology overtook our moral technology.

But on the other hand, we’re doing pretty well. Extreme poverty is declining.

Diseases are being eradicated. There are big problems in the world. But now with one of the biggest ones, climate change, we’re having an incredible new source of clean energy that we can face it with. So I believe there will be a far future.

I think it’s at least possible that some human descendant being, something we can’t even imagine, billions of years from now, will create these small black holes and help the universe reproduce, if the cosmological natural selection theory is how the universe works.

Yeah, and I think we will. I think we do have a future.

Should I actually explain the theory to your readers?

Yeah, absolutely. Let’s get into your blowtorch theory, the model of how this works.

Just one other aside. There’s an astronomy textbook that my dad has from when he was a kid, and it says “We may never know if there’s water anywhere but Earth.” That was true when he was a kid, and now it’s like there’s water everywhere. There’s probably subsurface oceans on, like, ten different bodies in our solar system alone! Moons of Jupiter, moons of Saturn, Kuiper Belt objects.

And we just discovered the Cheyava Falls rock on Mars that has some weird chemistry which on Earth we would take as evidence of life.

The more we learn, the more it looks like the universe is optimized to produce life. That’s pretty exciting.

So yeah, explain the theory!

Okay. So, Wheeler suggested that maybe black holes are how universes reproduce. Black holes bounce to form Big Bangs. Lee Smolin said, if there’s slight variation, you’re going to get Darwinian evolution. The next stage in the development of this theory came.

So, Wheeler in the 70s. Smolin in the 90s, he wrote a paper called Did the Universe Evolve? and a book called The Life of the Cosmos. Smolin comes out with that in the 90s. He ends up in a bunch of arguments with the string theorists because they want to preserve the anthropic principle, because the anthropic principle is very useful to to string theory. It helps back up string theory and Lee Smolin’s idea of cosmological natural selection just destroys the anthropic principle in a lot of ways. You end up with a fine-tuned universe that isn’t randomly selected from a random 10 to the 500 range of string theories. So he got a lot of pushback from string theorists and from people like [“father of string theory”] Susskind.

And he kind of retreated from it and went back into working on quantum gravity, which was his main thing. He just did this as a little side project. So it gets abandoned for a while.

Then people like Clément Vidal and John Smart and Louis Crane, who are from different fields, you know, philosophy of science, mathematician, futurologist, with a systems theory background. Various people from different fields got interested in playing around with this theory.

I should explain that the original impulse that Lee Smolin had to think this theory might be true is because it explains fine-tuning. It explains why the basic parameters of matter are at values which allow the universe to grow more complex over time and for complex structures to emerge and so forth. And it’s not obvious that a universe should do that.

Stuff like the properties of water, which seem like ridiculously well attuned to enable life. Cosmological constants, a bunch of really basic stuff. All of this seems perfectly aligned to allow life to form.

The anthropic principle posits, well, if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be here to wonder about it. But cosmological natural selection provides a method by which the universe could be evolved to be fine-tuned.

Smolin’s interest in this was just in fine-tuning really at the physics level, and why matter is stable. He didn’t go as far as why life would be selected for. He felt that life was a side effect. This is probably another reason the theory didn’t take off at the time; it didn’t go far enough. He didn’t understand the implications of his own theory.

So the people that teased out some of the implications of his theory were Clément Vidal, John Smart, Louis Crane, and others. And they realized that the intelligent life, if it did develop, could produce small artificial black holes.

Now, Smolin himself didn’t actually like this idea. He thought it was too science fictional. But I think that was a really important breakthrough, an understanding of why life would develop. Why would that be of benefit to the unit of selection that is the universe?

And that gives you an answer, right? I think that the original proposal was more kind of, “life-forms could do it, therefore they might do it, maybe they do it,” sort of out of interest. I don’t think they made initially the strong claim which I’m making, which is, they’re going to almost inevitably do it! Because it’s the logical endpoint if you just want to optimize your energy efficiency and sustainability.

I don’t think that was quite obvious in the first versions of that extension of the theory into why intelligent life has developed. I think there’s actually a very strong argument that intelligent life will converge on this, even if intelligent life of all different kinds appears on all these different planets. As long as it’s able to manipulate matter, you’re going to converge on small black hole production eventually. It doesn’t matter what the life-form thinks it’s doing or wants to do, it’s going to do that because that’s where because the ones that don’t do that will die out and the ones that do do that will will continue. So over billions of years, there’s selection

If you imagine an advanced life form that had unbreakable religious objections to black holes or something, they could survive for five billion years of civilization until the death of their star. After that, they might die out if they don’t have small black holes.

Yeah. And someone else will eventually, maybe a hundred billion years after that, you know, trudge their way into that solar system and say, “Oh, everything’s dead here. Let us throw some stuff in small black holes and build a delightful new civilization.” So it’s going to get done.

So that was cool, but again, it was speculative and it was, it was future oriented. You can still dismiss the theory on the basis that it’s all speculative and it doesn’t make that many predictions.

Like, the MoNA and LISA neutron detectors made a couple of predictions with the original version of the theory, mostly about the maximum mass of the neutron star. If you were optimizing for black hole production, then neutron stars couldn’t be above a certain mass because they would no longer be optimizing for black hole production.

That actually doesn’t work anymore if intelligent life is going to make small black holes. You have to be optimizing for the the total number of offspring over the life span of the universe. So you’re no longer optimizing for stellar-collapse black hole production, you’re optimizing for small technologically produced black hole production, because there’s gonna be far more of those. So even his initial predictions stop working if you extend the model to a two-step model, where there’s two types of black hole production, one is stellar collapse, and one is small artificial technologically produced black holes.

My contribution to the theory was to make it a three-step model. Again, what happened here was, I decided to think through the theory from first principles. It’s always a useful place to start. Think through the implications, right? And I realized there was an implication that nobody had actually teased out. It involves supermassive black holes.

I did this because the James Webb Space Telescope was going to come online and it was going to show us the early universe. We’re going to get information from the first billion years of our universe, which we’ve never had before because light from that far back has been so redshifted by the expansion of the universe that you couldn’t see it with any Earth-based telescopes. You couldn’t even see it with the Hubble. You needed an infrared telescope that was chilled, so that you weren’t picking up infrared, which is essentially heat radiation, from the surroundings or from the telescope itself, which would drown out the signal. You’re looking for these very faint infrared signals.

So the James Webb Space Telescope was designed to do that. And it’s floating, close to absolute zero, with heat shields protecting it from the Sun about a million miles from Earth.

But as they were launching that and it was moving into position and going that million miles away, I realized, this is a fantastic experiment. We’re going to get data on the first billion years! If cosmological natural selection is correct, then we should be able to make predictions about the early universe based on cosmological natural selection that you can’t make based on the cold dark matter model on its own. Predictions that the existing paradigm doesn’t make.

So I thought it through from first principles. And I realized that that you had to engage with the problem of, how did the first universes along our evolutionary line reproduce? Because obviously they didn’t reproduce through small technological black holes built by highly advanced civilizations, because you can’t start with highly advanced civilizations. We’re trying to explain why the universe is fine-tuned to allow highly advanced civilizations. You need to explain how it got fine-tuned to allow that. There have to be earlier generations of universes that are not doing that, that are not fine-tuned to do that.

Do they start with stars? No, because stars are complicated too. Stars require relatively complex matter to do relatively complex things over a relatively complex life cycle. And at the end of it, they collapse to form a black hole. You need billions of years of nuclear fusion to get a stellar-type black hole. You need to produce a whole bunch of complicated things like stars and ran them through their life cycles and then reproduced.

That’s not how life... We know from DNA life, that’s not how you start. You don’t start with a complicated organism for the beginning of an evolutionary chain. You can’t start with a bacterium that has organelles and is complex. You’ve got to go even further back. So you’ve got to go back to prokaryotic universes.

That’s a damn good science fiction phrase. Prokaryotic universes!

You know, prokaryotes are the first bacteria. They don’t have a nucleus. They’ve just got a ribbon of DNA in them. They don’t have complex organelles. There’s nothing much going on. Prokaryotic bacteria just reproduce. And that’s pretty much all they do.

Now, you can actually go back even further because when I talk about this to biologists, biologists will say, “Yeah, but actually prokaryotic bacteria are pretty complicated.” Fine. Go back to autocatalytic sets.

Or RNA life, viruses.

Yeah, simple. The precursor to prokaryotic bacteria was probably something like autocatalytic sets, which are sets of chemicals that are able to copy themselves, but there isn’t a membrane yet. There isn’t a DNA encoding the thing. There’s this chemistry going through catalytic loops. And maybe they did that on a smeary old rock, they created a gunky surface and that acted as a membrane and eventually…You can see how you can maybe get to a prokaryotic bacterium from auto-catalytic sets.

So what’s the autocatalytic set equivalent for universes? Let’s assume there was always something. How primitive can it get and still reproduce?

You basically have to have some kind of measure that’s much simpler than our measure [of stars forming, maintaining nuclear fusion for billions of years, and then collapsing into black holes] that doesn’t go way off into the distance. You just have something super primitive, and it has to collapse to form a supermassive black hole. The only thing that it needs to do is reproduce.

How does a universe reproduce? Mass-energy collapses to a point, bounces to form a new universe. All it has to do is collapse. So you have some primitive matter that collapses. It doesn’t have to collapse millions of times and produce millions of times. It has to do it, like, once. And then eventually it has to do it twice.

It produces two new universes. There’s two direct collapses that bounce to form new big bangs, new universes, right? And there’s no structure. There’s no complexity. But that’s a direct collapse forming supermassive black holes.

That has to be how the earliest universes reproduced without complex structures. All they have to do is just a cloud, just collapsing. Directly collapse the cloud. No fancy nuclear fusion or stellar masses.

And they would have been big. We know we have supermassive black holes in our universe. We’ve got one supermassive black hole at the center of every galaxy.

The Milky Way’s is Sagittarius A prime, right?

Right. We’ve got a supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way. And Andromeda has a really big supermassive black hole in the center of it.

Could you just explain to people, because this always confuses me a bit, what makes a black hole supermassive if all singularities are theoretically the same sort of infinitely dense point, by definition?

They might be the same size, but they’re not the same mass. It’s about the amount of mass that collapsed to that singularity.

A stellar collapse black hole happens when a star gets to the end of its life. The star eventually stops fusion, so there’s no longer radiation pushing out against the gravity pushing it in. And the gravity takes over and it collapses.

Now, if it’s more than a couple of times bigger than our sun, that collapse will keep on going and form a black hole. What will happen is that the collapse will be so big, the amount of mass is so great, it is able to just keep on collapsing. It’s able to crush everything close enough together. Well, you actually get a bit of a bounce, you get a supernova explosion.

But some of that mass-energy just keeps on collapsing until it forms what we think of as a singularity.

Now, a singularity is, all we’re saying there is, we don’t know what the fuck happens. What we’re saying is the theory of general relativity, the theory of quantum mechanics, the two good theories we have, the big scale one and the little scale one, they both break down in a black hole. We don’t really know if it goes to an infinitesimal point or if it goes down to some Planck length and something weird happens when you put a star’s worth of material at a Planck length and then it bounces. We don’t know. We don’t know.

But we know that our theory breaks down at that point.

Yeah.

Okay. A stellar collapse, the black hole might end up with the mass of two or three or four or five times our Sun. We’ve seen stars come to the end of their life and blow up and there seems to be a little mass left and it’s a black hole. Supermassive black holes, we haven’t seen how they form, right? They’re just there. We’ve never seen a supermassive black hole form.

We even got the first image of a black hole accretion disk a couple of years ago! We have some images of black holes.

We have images of supermassive black holes, because they’re really big and we now have imaged them. We hadn’t seen them before. We know because we can see stars whizzing around them, from the orbits of things going around them, that some of them have masses of millions of suns and some of them have masses of billions of suns.

Billions of suns.

Those are essentially big chunks of a galaxy collapsing in on itself in terms of mass.

The biggest ones are in the 30, 40 billion sun range. Imagine 30,000 million suns, like our sun, all collapsing into a point. That’s how big the biggest supermassive black holes are. Very, very hard to explain that. What’s the formation mechanism there?

When Smolin wrote his book, he didn’t know that there were that many supermassive black holes. We knew, there was about five or six of them that had been found at that point, but they were still weird anomalies that we couldn’t explain. It was assumed that they were formed by lots of stellar-collapse black holes merging, that somehow lots of stars would collapse and form black holes so they’d merge and you’d eventually get a supermassive black hole. Maybe they were able to feed so fast that they could get bigger and bigger.

As we look further and further back, we run out of time for that to happen. They’re still supermassive, no matter how far back you look.

And there was a theory developed 18 or 20 years ago by some excellent astronomers, Priya Natarajan and Avi Loeb and Martin Volentieri, I think, where they thought, “Oh my god, I think it’s theoretically possible that you can actually form supermassive black holes, these really big guys, by direct collapse.” You can just have the smooth gas and plasma collapse in one go to form a supermassive black hole without forming a star on the way down. No stars required.

That’s fascinating.

Yeah! You need very smooth gas for that, because if it’s not smooth enough, if there’s little density variations on the way down, those little density variations will sub-collapse to form stars, and you won’t get a supermassive black hole. So that’s quite smooth.

But that was a minority theory. There was about seven different theories about how supermassive black holes formed, and that was one of them, just one of many.

I realized when thinking this through from first principles, the earliest universes have to reproduce through the direct collapse of huge amounts of matter, and therefore form direct-collapse supermassive black holes. And if we have supermassive black holes in our universe, they’re gonna form by direct collapse, because that’s the original mechanism for making them.

And evolution isn’t gonna come up with a whole brand new method to do that, right? Given that it’s already got a perfectly frugal way of doing it. It’s not gonna come up with a really complicated way of doing something that it can already do very simply. It’s gonna conserve that, and therefore, the supermassive black holes in our universe must form by direct collapse, but the only way they can do that is if they do it before star formation. They have to do it very, very early, because once you’ve got lots and lots of star formation, you don’t have a smooth enough gas to have a huge territory of it collapse smoothly to form a supermassive black hole without breaking up into stars on the way.

So I predicted this from cosmological natural selection, not from cold dark matter. It’s an evolution prediction about what you would see in the very early universe when the James Webb Space Telescope came online. You would see supermassive black holes form first by direct collapse, and then they optimize the conditions for galaxy formation. They form the galaxies after the supermassive black hole is formed first. And you will see rapid, efficient galaxy formation. This is what I predicted back in 2022. Rapid, efficient galaxy formation around supermassive black holes that dominate these early galaxies!

So the further back you go, the bigger the supermassive black hole is going to be in relation to the mass of stars in the galaxy. And over time, there’ll be more and more stars, and the supermassive black hole will be relatively smaller than the galaxy. But as you go further back, you’re going to end up at a point where it’s just the supermassive black hole.

And THAT’S WHAT WE’RE SEEING! That’s what we’re seeing. When the James Webb Space Telescope came online, they saw shockingly early galaxies with shockingly early structure around shockingly large supermassive black holes. This was relatively soon after they started getting the images back. They realized that they’d found one galaxy called UHZ1 where 50% of the mass of its galaxy is in the supermassive black hole. It weighs as much as all the stars in the galaxy.

Even more recently, a couple of months ago, they discovered a supermassive black hole with a mass of 50 million suns that doesn’t even seem to have a galaxy!

That implies it’s the smooth gas one, just a big cloud collapse.

Yeah. It has to be direct collapse of a big smooth gas cloud. That’s incredible. We’re seeing exactly what the cosmological natural selection first principles’ implications said you would see!

And can I just say, that is pretty damn impressive that you personally predicted, on your blog, what the world’s most advanced telescope would see, better than the generally accepted model of cosmology could.

It’s particularly impressive because I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about in a lot of respects. My grasp of magnetohydrodynamics was poor at the time!

But that really is strong evidence for the theory. The theory is incredibly powerful if someone like me can use it to make very accurate predictions about the early universe. That means you’ve got a frame theory here that is so powerful, that even in its early, crudest form, where it hasn’t been formalized or mathematized, it’s still able to make stronger predictions than the mainstream. That’s very strong evidence for the theory. It’s not evidence that I’m brilliant, it’s evidence that the theory is brilliant.

Just on a deep intuitive level, and deep intuitive feelings are a terrible way to make scientific judgments, so I’m discounting this, but on my personal deep intuitive level...it feels right. It just seems to match the broader trends of what we learned about the universe. We learned with the Copernican revolution that we were less central to the universe than we thought. It would make sense if the universe is part of a long evolutionary procession. It would make sense if our universe is so special for intelligent life because it evolved that way. It would make so much sense. It would explain a lot.

Yeah. I am stunned that this is not a mainstream theory. I am shocked. There has been such a sociological failure in science. I get it. It’s nobody’s fault and there are no bad guys here. Everybody is just so siloed.

I’ve been having really interesting conversations with some really interesting scientists in the last year or two, partly because this theory started to blow up a bit.

Below is a YouTube discussion with Julian Gough and Tufts biophysicist Chris Fields.

I want to help with that!

Yeah, please do!

I had a great conversation over lunch with Denis Noble, who’s a brilliant biologist, a wonderful, extremely highly regarded, award-winning biologist. And he’d never heard of this theory! It’s an evolutionary theory of universes. and he’s a great evolutionary biologist, and he’d never heard of it.

And he loved it! He was fascinated by it. I got invited back to the senior common room to continue the discussion because lunch wasn’t enough. It’s just tragic that his mind has not been playing with this problem for the last 30 years.

I actually had a one-hour conversation with Roger Penrose.

Wow, okay! [Sir Roger Penrose is a Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist who among other accomplishments published fundamental work on black holes in collaboratiuon with Stephen Hawking].

Fantastic, just such a lovely man. And we talked for an hour mostly about this, you know, and he was fascinated that the theory had come so far, because he’d only heard the early version of it 30 years ago. He didn’t know how developed it had become, how much better it had become at making predictions. He gave me his contact! He said, stay in touch.

This is fascinating.

You know, it’s just tragic that Roger Penrose didn’t know that this theory has actually been developed because it’s been developed in this kind of ad hoc way by people in their spare time. There’s no journal devoted to it, there’s no department devoted to it. The Wikipedia entry for cosmological natural selection is 20 years out of date, it’s a disgrace. I assume what’s happening is there’s some editors who don’t let anything get added to it.

There’s almost been…how can I put it? Science has sort of ossified in a lot of ways, and much of that has been in response to genuine crazy nonsense. Like, the anti-vaxxer movement in the U.S. just got a crazy man to be health secretary to put made-up claims on the CDC website to try to stop people from vaccinating their babies against deadly diseases. The U.S. is on track to lose its status as a measles-free country very soon because of that!

And that’s bad! And heroic people are trying to defend science. Wikipedia has been a great resource to protect science in the United States against stuff like that because it’s got that distributed editing model that means the administration can’t just go in and change it. But that same defensive capability is sometimes what prevents sort of new theories from making their way into the mainstream. Because mainstream science has got bigger, tougher walls around it now because it feels like it’s under attack. And it is!

But there’s also opportunities to grow in new directions that might be cut off by that. I think one way of thinking about this is science has a very robust immune system. And over the past decade or two, the immune system has grown even stronger, because it needed to, because there’s a lot of attacks on science.

That’s a great way of putting it.

Yeah. There’s been a lot of pseudoscience and there’s been a lot of flaky bullshit and there’s been a lot of conspiracy theories and there’s been a lot of outsiders or rogue insiders who’ve been kind of doing damage to science, and the immune system for science has become extremely sensitive to anything that even hints at pseudoscience.

Now we’ve got an immune disorder, maybe.

So what we’ve got is an autoimmune condition.

Exactly! That’s exactly what I was going to say. So science now is brilliant at keeping out bad ideas. Unfortunately, it’s also keeping out some good ideas because it can’t tell the difference.

And in a way, that’s not science’s fault. It’s got a heuristic. If this sounds weird, it’s from an outsider, and it’s mixing ideas from different fields, 99% of the time, that is nonsense. And they’re nearly always right! They’re nearly always right. So I totally get it. They’re nearly always right.

But in this particular case, I think they’re wrong. I think they’ve got an autoimmune condition, you know. Because it’s making accurate predictions! It’s making accurate predictions about the early universe. And that’s what you want from a scientific theory. It’s making more accurate predictions than the dark matter model of galaxy formation has.

The fact that your blog has recently been the best available predictor of what the James Webb Space Telescope will see yet is an objectively insane state of affairs. And it’s very impressive on your part, but it’s wild.

I mean, of course it is still possible that I’m completely wrong. That I just got lucky, I was accidentally correct, and there’s some other explanations. But, you know, use Occam’s razor here.

I have a theory.

It has implications.

The implications predict what we are seeing.

There is a mainstream theory.

It doesn’t make these predictions.

It did not predict what these things are seeing.

The obvious answer here is there’s something to this new theory.

It’s almost certainly wrong in some details. I’m definitely wrong in some details. I have to be. Ridiculous. I do not remotely have so high an opinion on myself that I think I’ve got everything right here.

But I think I’ve made a first crude attempt to explain something that is working really, really well.

There’s something I’m about to publish, which I find brilliant.

I can’t wait to read it!

It’s a galaxy formation thing, which I wasn’t able to do back in 2022, because I didn’t have enough of a grounding in magnetohydrodynamics.

Building off the Blowtorch Theory thing?

It’s part of Blowtorch Theory, yeah. It’s Blowtorch Theory, plus I’m doing a bit on galaxy formation in particular that’s completely fascinating. But yeah, it comes out of Blowtorch Theory. It’s a bit you haven’t seen yet, because I haven’t published it yet. It’s Blowtorch Theory 2, it’s about spiral galaxy formation.

Could you just recap your Blowtorch Theory for the readers real quick? I know that that’s saying, “recap this thing that you spent months and months thinking about and wrote 10,000 words on,” but yeah.

THE EGG AND THE ROCK

The Blowtorch Theory: A New Model for Structure Formation in the Universe

For scientists interested in citation, this post can be cited in Chicago style as follows…

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a year ago · 200 likes · 38 comments · Julian Gough

Okay, so the essence of Blowtorch Theory is a set of implications that come out of cosmological natural selection and the idea that supermassive black holes form first, before galaxies, before stars, by direct collapse.

If they do that, they are going to attract plasma, generate accretion disks, and those accretion disks are going to generate a huge electromagnetic field, which is going to generate jets of plasma that shoot out from the north and south poles of the supermassive black hole.

And we’ve seen those jets. We’ve seen supermassive black holes and jets. We know that’s a thing.

Yeah. This is a totally normal thing that happens if matter falls into a supermassive black hole, it gets an accretion disk and it fires jets. That’s totally normal. We know that happens. It’s going to happen.

But what’s new here is my argument that all the supermassive black holes form first by direct collapse in the very early universe in the first couple of hundred million years.

Which implies that those jets are some of the biggest, most powerful things going on, very early in the lifespan of the universe.

Very early in the lifespan of the universe! Yeah. Those jets are going to be firing into incredibly dense plasma so early, when the universe is so small.

Wrap your head around how small the universe is at these extreme redshifts.

As the universe expands, light from far-away stars and galaxies is stretched, making its wavelength “redder.” Since light takes time to travel, looking at very far-away galaxies is like looking back in time to near the beginning of the universe, as the James Webb Space Telescope is now doing. Higher “extreme redshifts” mean we’re looking at incredibly far-away galaxies, and thus seeing light emitted near the birth of the universe has been extremely “redshifted” by expansion since. Here’s NASA’s page on cosmological redshift.

When you go back to redshift 25 or so, the the universe is 17,000 times denser than it is today. Because it’s 25 times smaller along each axis, X, Y, and Z, so the volume is 17,000 times smaller. So all the matter is jammed into this much smaller universe. If you go back to redshift 35, it’s like 45,000 times smaller! It’s a really small dense universe.

So if jets are firing into the plasma at this incredible force, when it’s that small and that dense, the cavities they generate are going to be proportionately enormous compared to those generated by a similar jet today in a vastly expanded universe.

Which explains the huge voids between galactic clusters that the current theory doesn’t explain.

Which I think can explain voids and filaments!

Because I think if the jets, and the maths works for this if you run the maths on this, sustained jets in the very early universe on that scale with like a trillion or hundreds of billions of supermassive black holes, one for every galaxy, if they’re firing sustained jets for maybe tens of millions of years into the plasma of the extremely dense, small, early universe, they’re pushing out huge cavities.

They’re creating huge cavities and leaving huge electromagnetic trails from the jet, because jets have a helical magnetic field. Obviously, jets are plasma because they’re charged particles moving at close to light speed, generating a huge electromagnetic field. And it’s helical because they’re coming out of a spinning supermassive black hole.

So we’re spinning at close to light speeds, close to the current limit. And that twists the field lines as the jet goes up. They’re twisted into a helix. So you’ve got this stabilizing helical electromagnetic field!

When the jets die out, they leave this trail of plasma with this helical electromagnetic field. And they’ve pushed a huge amount of plasma into these reservoirs that you can think of as the filaments later on. But they’ve pushed it out of the areas that you can think of as the voids.

So essentially, you can get void formation and filament formation if you have enough jets firing early enough, which the cosmological natural selection model says is going to be the case. And that gives it to you.

Because we know that there’s 80% of our universe is void. [Not an ordinary “outer space” kind of void. Interstellar space in the Milky Way would not be part of a void under this description. An intergalactic void is even emptier than that]. There’s almost no matter in it. It’s like well under 10% of the mean density of the universe in the voids. There’s not that much gas. There’s not that many galaxies. Filaments are where most of the mass is.

Filaments made up of thousands of galaxies, to be clear. I feel like “filament” generally refers small things. This is more a “trunk of the Yggdrasil” kind of filament. This is a gigantic thing.

Yeah, filaments are huge rivers of gas and galaxies.

And again, this is not your theory. Filaments are a thing we’ve observed that will be explained by your theory.

Oh, this is what we’ve observed. And we were very shocked to observe it. Like, we didn’t expect this. And we’ve used a lot of dark matter to pull everything into shape to make sense of this, but I think you can just do it earlier and easier with jets.

So, 80% of our universe, we know from observation, is voids. We only worked that out in the 1970s when we could actually get distance measurements for galaxies and work out where they were.

Then we realized, holy shit, there’s these dense areas and then there’s these extremely empty areas. So about 20% of the universe is filaments, which are full of gas and galaxies. They flow towards these nodes where nearly 50% of the mass of the universe is just in these nodes. Galactic clusters and super clusters where loads and loads of galaxies cluster together and hydrogen, gas, plasma flows from the filaments into these clusters where most of the galaxies are.

Okay so you’ve got this very interesting system. It’s like a circulatory system, and what that allows is a fresh flow of hydrogen constantly coming in from the filaments to feed star formation in these galaxies in these galaxy clusters And that fresh hydrogen, which is very pure, gets enriched by the supernova explosions in the galaxies that it’s flowing into.

It gets enriched by all of the elements that the stars have built by fusion over their lifetime. When they go to the end of their life, they collapse, they explode in a supernova, build a little black hole. They explode a lot of the elements out in a supernova explosion. That enriches the hydrogen flowing into the filament.

And that allows the next round of star formation to condense out of that enriched hydrogen and build out stars that have even more heavy elements in them! And once you’ve done that by two or three generations of stars, you end up with the full periodic table built and distributed,

Only then, really, have you got the elements built out to build out planets and moons that are capable of biospheres, capable of developing any kind of life. That requires a lot of the periodic table, and it has to be built, distributed, and assembled. And you see this happening in a way that looks incredibly like an evolved organism.

Now, I’m not saying the universe is an animal, but I am saying the universe has many of the characteristics of an evolved organism.

It self-assembles, it self-complexifies, it has a complex circulatory system that builds out complex structures step by step that help it to reproduce successfully. And that’s amazing!

What a thought! I love that idea. Just zooming way back down to our own little third rock from a G-type star, that feels like the kind of thing that could inspire generations. That could become a mythos that could inspire entire new waves of societal and sociological progress. That’s almost like a religious-level sense of meaning from an entirely scientific perspective, the belief that we’re part of a universe’s reproductive system. A big old purpose and long-term meaning to humanity’s place in the universe.

Exactly, exactly. I think it actually heals the divide between religion and science. I think it fixes that problem because a universe that is self-ordering, self-complexifying, membrane-bound, that reproduces, that is super fine-tuned to produce creatures like you and me that are intelligent, that have emotions and feelings and thoughts and are good and bad and want to make choices that have good consequences, and sometimes they do make choices that have bad consequences.

We are part of this huge organism that’s kind of going somewhere, it’s kind of doing something, and we’re at the point where it is going somewhere and doing something! Human beings are the point where matter has self-assembled and self-complexified to the point where it can make consequential decisions that will affect the entire future of the universe! It’s awesome!

That idea is so cool, I kind of want that to be true.

Yeah, and we’re not constrained in some kind of deterministic way in what we do with this power and this freedom. The universe is evolved to create intelligent life, and then intelligent life does what it does. I would like us to do nice things that lessen unnecessary suffering. I would like the world to get better and better. I don’t see why it can’t. I think it can get better and better. For us, and for the other life forms on this planet. I think we can have an unbelievably...I’m not preaching some kind of utopia, but I’m saying...

You could imagine a horrible dystopian empire creating small black holes for power that seed new universes, or an incredible utopian federation creating small black holes for power that seed new universes. This is a technology prediction, not an ethics prediction.

Yeah, but it’s up to us to provide the ethics. We do have ethics. Let’s use them! It’s up to us to decide, is this a universe that you can be proud of or a universe you should be ashamed of?

What sort of civilization, in this model, built the small black hole that is in your model statistically likely to have been the origin of our own universe?

That’s a great question. If you’re generating universes, do you have a moral responsibility to try and produce a universe that minimizes suffering or that is in some moral framework good rather than bad?

Can you? In this model, where there’s a process we don’t understand yet where black holes can transmit information to their descendants in the form of fine-tuned cosmic parameters, can the civilizations producing them affect that? Some alien/god/AI with a clipboard making a call on, like, “Well, the waste product from our new energy system is an entire universe, what kind of decisions should we make about it?”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a big open question and it’s very, very interesting because you do get into a totally scientifically plausible world where you have something like a parental universe that has godlike creative powers and that has a responsibility to its offspring. That’s a really weird and interesting place we’ve ended up just from thinking through evolution applied to universes. We’re not adding anything here, but we’re ending up in this really interesting place.

And one thing that’s also really interesting about this is that we’re also learning about the potential that quite a lot of life might not be on open worlds exposed to a star like we are. We’re learning about, just in our own solar system, all these subsurface oceans. Europa, Enceladus, Pluto!

And as you pointed out, and I wrote about this in my newsletter too when it came out, we just learned that there’s “dark oxygen” being created on the floor of Earth’s ocean by naturally occurring electrochemical systems, which is pretty freaking amazing.

THE EGG AND THE ROCK

The deep ocean floor is covered in naturally-occurring batteries that make oxygen... Wait, WHAT?!

A truly extraordinary paper has just been published in Nature Geoscience: “Evidence of dark oxygen production at the abyssal seafloor,” by those doughty warriors for truth (…deep breath… people who put all that work in deserve to have their names mentioned when that work is being discussed… OK, here we go…

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2 years ago · 99 likes · 8 comments · Julian Gough

So maybe most life in the universe is under hundreds of miles of ice. Which could even mean, like you said in your “Stanets and Ploons” post that I really love, that they could be in Jupiter-mass systems without stars or nuclear fusion, like planets around a brown dwarf or a Jupiter,

Most life might not be exposed to a star.

Which, and I’m just sort of building on that idea a little bit, maybe what’s really special about us, humanity, is that maybe we’ll be like the sex hormone or the puberty or something that wakes up the whole life-producing system of the universe.

Maybe our, not destiny, but our possibility, as one of the weird civilizations that grew up seeing the night sky, is to go out there and contact all these sentient life forms under ice moons and wake them all up and show them the universe and help them build a bunch more intelligent small black hole-producing civilizations.

Wouldn’t that be cool?

It could be. Yeah. Because, just to explain to your readers, we’ve only discovered recently a couple of really interesting things that have huge consequences, that I tried to spell out in that post you mentioned, “Stanets and Ploons.”

THE EGG AND THE ROCK

Life Without Stars: Stanets and Ploons

Note: I've been fiddling about with this post for a year. It started out short. I was young, and full of hope and dreams. Two false starts and fifteen drafts later, it is now long. I am no longer young and full of dreams. Yes, I need a more efficient writing system. Someone apparently posted a paper on a similar topic recently (which I can’t track down…

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a year ago · 63 likes · 25 comments · Julian Gough

One is liquid water. The key thing you’re going to need for any kind of life form is probably liquid water. It’s very hard to replace that with anything else. Liquid water seems to be the sine qua non of biological evolution.

And most of the liquid water in our solar system isn’t on the surface of rocky planets. Because we’ve got four rocky planets and three of them have been cooked or boiled or messed up and lost their water if they had it.

And only one is hung onto it, which is Earth.

But we have a lot of icy moons, and most of those icy moons seem to have liquid water oceans.

Because the mechanism for keeping them liquid is a much more frugal and efficient method, which is the tidal friction from going in a slightly eccentric orbit around a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn. That keeps a steady source of heat, and the ice holds it in.

You don’t need to worry about magnetospheres or losing your atmosphere or stuff like that.

It’s protected, yeah. So the tidal friction pulling the core of the icy moon differentially as it goes round and round warms it up and keeps it liquid. And so you have this. Liquid, huge oceans, a lot more water. There’s enormously more water on Europa than there is on Earth.

That’s amazing. And the same tidal energy thing means it’s possible that there’s tectonic activity, hydrothermal vents, the kind of thing that you’d expect to be the kind of energy source that could produce chemosynthetic ecosystems that could give rise to complex life.

Yeah, there’s almost certainly hydrothermal vents in that because they’re going to have a hot core. It’s got to be shooting nutrients up into the water. And we know this because we’ve sampled the water from Enceladus, the moon of Saturn.

And it has phosphates!

It has phosphates, yeah. One of the moons of Saturn is a very small icy moon, and it’s small enough that the tidal friction actually cracks the surface of it, and you get these ice volcanoes where the liquid water ocean literally gets squeezed out of it up through these volcanoes.

That far away from the Sun, water is like lava! It’s this crazy hot substance from underground.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it squirts up, and the eighth ring of Saturn is basically made entirely out of the ice crystals from the ice volcanoes coming out of Enceladus.

So we flew the Cassini probe through that, we sampled it and we’ve been reanalyzing the data from that sample where we flew through.

Those definitely exist!

Yeah. This definitely exists. We’re not making this shit up. And in advance of this discovery, there were predictions made by well-known mainstream scientists — one of them was Avi Loeb, oddly enough — he the other authors on that paper said that they wouldn’t find phosphorus in any appreciable quantity in the liquid water ocean because it was chemically very unlikely to happen and it would all get locked into rocks. And it should have a couple of orders of magnitude less phosphorus than you see on Earth, so life wasn’t very likely. That was their prediction in advance.

What we actually found was the amount of phosphorus in the water that we captured as ice with the Cassini probe was a couple of orders of magnitude higher than you find on Earth!

Loads of phosphorus, which you need for life! It was the one chemical bottleneck that they thought they might not have in these liquid water oceans.

So it looks like the conditions for life are really, really optimal in liquid water oceans on icy moons. And icy moons is a big one. They don’t even need a star. They just need to go around a big gas planet. They just need gravity. They have to be quite far from a star or it’ll melt the ice on the surface and fuck them up!

And we’ve discovered recently by looking at the stellar nursery in Orion’s Belt, which is the nearest one to us, I think we can get the best pictures of it, that many of the stars forming in the stellar nursery aren’t stars. They’re Jupiter-sized planets.

Planets without stars.

But if they have icy moons…and why wouldn’t they? All the gas giants we’ve seen have icy moons. Then you could potentially have far more Jupiter-sized planets than there are stars, with far more icy moons than we can see now possible. There could be a colossal number. And all of them with liquid water, because the energetically frugal way of heating and keeping the ocean liquid is by gravitational friction, tidal friction, which means that most of them should have liquid water ocean.

So the conditions for life are probably far more common than we think and we were misled by our local neighborhood. When we just looked at Mars and Venus and Mercury and Earth and said, “Oh, it’s very rare to have life in our solar system,” we weren’t looking in the right place.”

There’s like ten liquid water oceans in our solar system alone!

Yeah, but if that’s the case, there’s something psychologically fascinating. What the hell is a civilization that develops under 100 kilometers of ice inside an icy moon like? Doesn’t even know the universe exists.

Yeah, they could believe that the universe is a bubble shape and it just extends into ice in every direction.

It extends into ice in every direction above them, so it’s very hard to climb out of it. You have to actually go above your own ocean and tunnel upwards against gravity for 100 kilometers to get through the ice to find there is a surface, to find out there is a universe.

That’s like if our sky was a giant ball of steel, if we had to drill through steel to get out of orbit, and we wouldn’t even have a reason to believe there was anything beyond there.

Yeah, exactly. If there was 100 kilometers of steel over our head, how would we ever know there was a universe?

Yeah, there’s no night sky.

Isn’t that wild?

And that also sort of maybe implies that maybe the long-term most important profession of humanity is marine biologists! I love this sub-genre of science fiction, intelligent life on icy moons. In the far future, maybe marine biologists are incredibly important to try to make contact with hypothetical intelligent life, that could grow up to make small black holes, now living under the icy moon oceans that might be the most common source of life in the cosmos.

They might be, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think we definitely need to start getting the AIs to help us learn whale language and dolphin language. Just get ready!

There’s a live project working on that in the Caribbean, Project CETI!

Yeah, yeah. It’s so cool! I think that’s very likely to have major breakthroughs. The pattern recognition capabilities of AI are absolutely designed to solve that kind of problem. I think we should be talking to whales and dolphins relatively soon. And it’s great practice, yeah!

Absolutely. And the nation of Tonga in the Pacific actually announced that there’s legislation pending in their parliament, with support from their royal family, to recognize whales and dolphins as sentient beings, which would be a world first. They would assign a legal guardian council, similar to what we do for children or developmentally disabled people, to represent them in human courts and stuff.

It can seem like this weird niche side thing, the oceans. It’s almost tangential in a lot of science fiction. But maybe that’s what most life in the universe is. Maybe it’s really, really important to get a good relationship with sea life after all.

We know that’s where life evolves, so why wouldn’t it evolve on all the other liquid water oceans?

Like you’re saying, maybe we have a particularly weird role. We’re the surface guys. The surface guys are rare and weird and maybe a bit early.

Which would help with Fermi’s paradox. We might be this universe’s first stirrings of small-black-hole-making civilizations, or something. Like, we’re the ones that might first get to the black hole reproduction point and might stimulate other civilizations in other parts of the universe body to reproduce in their own way.

Yeah, it’s very likely we have some function. One of the nice things about this whole approach is things have a function, things have a meaning, there’s a reason. Universes don’t put all this work into something as complicated as us if there isn’t some kind of payoff. I mean, the payoff has to be for the universe, that the unit of selection is the universe, probably.

But at this point, given that universes contain consciousnesses, given that conscious minds probably generate most universes under this model, it can get very interesting and rich and complex.

There’s a lot of philosophically interesting questions raised by all of this, which nobody’s exploring.

I’m trying to set up an evolutionary cosmology working group with a bunch of folks. I want to get people in from different fields that can all help me work on this, because we just need more minds on this problem. I want to run a couple of more formal workshops in the next year or two. I’ve got a little bit of funding for this and I’m probably going to move to the States and there’s a lot of scientists I want to work with there.

Awesome.

It’s starting to become, well, basically I’m trying to generate a new field, which I’m calling evolutionary cosmology because it needs a name. And from scratch, because we need one. We have to bridge evolution and cosmology and put them in one room much, much, much more often. If you ever look at the graphs of who cites who in papers, you get these interesting graphs. They show scientists and how they cite each other.

Yeah, I’ve seen those, yeah.

Evolutionary biology just has no connections to cosmology. Literally nobody is citing people from these opposite sides of the scientific world. They’re just out of sight of each other. And they have to be put in the same room, because I think this is the most exciting and underexplored theory in any of the sciences right now.

And I think there’s at least a chance that this turns out to be one of the most important things that I personally ever publish. That maybe one of the first lines of my Wikipedia article someday is “early discusser of evolutionary cosmology theory.” I feel like I want to help spread this because even if there’s a 1% chance that it’s true, it’s one of the most important things being discussed in the world right now.

Exactly. I will keep saying this — it might not be true! But that’s true for string theory. That’s true for dark matter. That’s true for a lot of things that get a huge amount of investment. Why isn’t there any investment in this unbelievably intriguing and potentially true theory that would change the entire conceptual infrastructure underlying all the sciences?

That may well be why. It may be that it doesn’t get investment because it’s too big, because it would change the entire conceptual infrastructure underlying all the sciences. Because most things that promise to do that are bullshit. So it sort of gets tarred with the brush of too much like religion, too complex, too unprovable.

But this theory is now actually doing the science things. It’s making predictions that better explain the observed results.

I’ll run you through the new spiral galaxy formation model that I’ve been working on. This is really interesting. And I didn’t have this in Blowtorch Theory, and I didn’t have this in my original predictions. I was like, I’m learning as fast as I can. I think I say in the post that I’m writing at the moment that I’ve taken in so much magnetohydrodynamics in the last year that I’ve got stretch marks!

So if you have the jets, this happens before the very long jets that are doing the voids and filaments. The very first jets that come out of the very first supermassive black holes that have just formed by direct collapse, those very first jets are firing into very, very dense plasma. Because not only is the plasma 30,000 to 40,000 times denser, the mean average density is many times what it is now in the compactness of the early universe.

That’s still vacuum. It’s a lot thicker vacuum than ours, but it’s still pretty “vacuum.” But it’s going to be a lot thicker than that again, because as the supermassive black hole collapses, a lot of plasma is collapsing along with it that doesn’t end up in the supermassive black hole, but ends up in the immediate vicinity. So it’s much, much thicker than that. Several orders of magnitude more thickness.

The jets are going to be firing into this very thick plasma that’s essentially at the same kind of density that you see in star-making regions in contemporary galaxies.

And what happens when you fire into plasma that’s that dense? The jets stall. Maybe they go a couple of kiloparsecs, but they stall. Kiloparsecs are three and a bit thousand light years.

So they go a decent distance, but they’re pushing plasma out of the way, and that’s taking energy out of the jet, and they’re compacting plasma ahead of them, and eventually they stall. They can’t go forward anymore, but there’s still plasma coming up the base of the jet, right?

That has to go somewhere, so it backflows and it spills off to the side of the jet and pushes out a huge mushroom-shaped cocoon, or balloon. And plasma continues to come up the jet and overpressures that cocoon, so you blow up this huge mushroom-shaped or balloon-shaped over-pressured plasma blob.

As it’s pushing that, by the way, it’s pushing any existing magnetic field lines along its boundary, and you get what’s called draping, where essentially you’re pushing a kind of electromagnetic membrane around the bubble. [This electromagnetic draping is a known scientific phenomenon, not a novel idea of Gough’s theory]. Eventually, you’ve overpressured that bubble so much that it cuts off the jet. The jet can’t keep pumping into it anymore. There’s too much pressure in the bubble, right? So the jet cuts off.

Now you’ve got a huge bubble, an overpressured plasma bubble. It cools very rapidly in the extremely early universe, because the photons from the cosmic microwave background radiation, the initial flash of light which comes from when matter condenses out and releases photons about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, that’s still around in this very compact dense universe. So there’s a huge number of photons floating around, like half of all the photons that have ever been emitted in the lifetime of our universe were emitted in that flash! So there’s a lot. And the photons will help the electrons in the plasma shed their energy very efficiently and rapidly and then the electrons help the protons shed theirs. And so you get a rapid cooling.

And this is normal physics. We know this is going to... If this happens, this will happen. If it’s happening at this era, in this density, with that amount of photons, this is going to happen, it will rapidly cool. And once it’s cooled, it can then collapse.

It wants to collapse under gravity, but it can’t initially because the thermal energy is too high. But then you cool it down, and it will then collapse. It’s going to collapse into a disk.

Here’s the thing. As the jet peels off to make that balloon, it’s peeling off its helical magnetic field, which I mentioned earlier. It’s got a helical magnetic field. So you’ve got a helical magnetic field peeling off along with the plasma into the balloon.

When you collapse a helical magnetic field down to a disk, what do you get? You get a spiral magnetic field. You get a very strong spiral magnetic field. I’ve run the maths on this and you should get something that’s in the milligauss range.

Now, that’s a thousand times stronger than the magnetic field in our Milky Way today, right? A milligauss field in a plasma disk that’s just collapsed is gonna be enough to freeze the plasma into solid body rotation! And it’s going to do it over a couple of orbits.

The Alfvén speed in a compact disc just collapsed with that density of plasma and that strength of magnetic field. [An Alfvén wave is another known phenomenon, a plasma wave in response to a magnetic field].

The Alfvén speed is pretty high and you’re going to get, within about a couple of revolutions, within a few million years, or a few tens of million years, depends on the size of the disc, they’re going to be on a power law distribution. You’re going to get the whole disc frozen into solid body rotation! Because the magnetic field lines don’t want to be stretched, so that they transmit energy from the inner region to the outer region of the disc and they stabilize it.

So it spins like a vinyl album. It spins like ABBA’s Greatest Hits. Everything’s moving at the same speed, they’re all going around at the same speed.

Then the disk relaxes over time, because you can’t maintain that crazy high magnetic field forever. You’re going to get turbulence and polar diffusion. Some of that plasma is going to cool down and become neutral, it won’t be locked into the field lines anymore. It’s going to disrupt them. It will drop over time.

When it drops enough the the plasma is liberated and the plasma is now is traveling fast. A lot of energy has been put out. So at different radii, all those radii of plasma will move out to where they’re now stable again, where the centrifugal force will balance the gravitational attraction.

They’re all moving at the same speed, right? Because they were locked into solid body rotation during the early phase. So they’re all moving at the same speed no matter how far out they are! Any stars that form from that plasma will be moving at the same speed as each other! You have a flat rotation curve.

A GALAXY!

You have a spiral galaxy with a strong spiral magnetic field and a flat rotation curve, which is what you see in spiral galaxies! It’s the original observation by Vera Rubin that led to the invention of the dark matter explanation because they couldn’t explain how you could have the stars moving at the same speed despite being further out or further in!

Why were they rotating at the same speed as each other? This explains it from the start!

Now, I can’t explain how it’s maintained over the subsequent bunch of billion years. So if the cold dark matter people want to have it maintained by cold dark matter, they can, but you can make it, you can start it off without cold dark matter. And I do think that we will come up with a purely baryonic electromagnetic explanation for the maintenance of that flat rotation curve.

That’s just thinking through, again from first principles, what is the logic if the supermassive black holes form first and fire jets into plasma that’s that dense.

Which the James Webb Space Telescope imagery sort of increasingly implies, given how old we’re now seeing them.

Increasingly implies! Then they’re going to stall out, build an electromagnetic bubble that will have a helical magnetic field that will cool down rapidly in that era. It will collapse to form a disc with a spiral magnetic field so strong it will lock it into solid body rotation, which will then, as it releases, allow the plasma to stretch out, cool, but maintain a flat rotation curve. And the plasma in the center of it will fall back onto the supermassive black hole. So the spiral field there will be disrupted because it’s falling back onto the accretion disk. It’s going to get heated and then chaotic. The thermal energy will be too much for the spiral magnetic field in that region immediately around it, so you get a bulge with a chaotic kinematics at the center, and you get a disk with a spiral magnetic field and a flat rotation curve!

Which is what we see in real life with galaxies!

It’s what we see, and it automatically falls out of the math when you think through from first principles what would happen if supermassive black holes formed first. Isn’t that fucking crazy?

That’s amazing.

That is amazing!

I’ve never seen anyone put these things together. I’ve never seen anyone put this model forward. It’s just sitting there. I’m working on the post about this right now. This one, actually, I will probably put up on arXiv as an actual paper because it’s mathematically so clean. And also, I realize that I have to talk to astronomers and astrophysicists and cosmologists on their own territory. They’re not really going to wander over to my blog and read it. Some of them do, but I need to legitimize it for them. I need to make it easier for them to cite me without looking like weirdos.

And can I say, that is part of the role that my personal newsletter is intended to play. It is intended to be a reasonably reputable but still semi-informal publication where people like you, who have some cool new idea, can get an article published and say, look, I was interviewed here, and then you get interviewed by more people. Something to point people to other than their own website.

I’m trying to be like that Baconian honeybee, you know, connecting people in the sciences, weaving together people who are specialists in one thing, but interested in other things. That’s what I’m trying to do, to be a little booster for new ideas.

Yeah, well, that’s an exclusive for you, because I haven’t been able to publish that yet. It’s taken me months to just get it all written down, but that’s the guts of it there.

Well, I’m honored! I’m honored by such a cosmic scoop.

I just want the ideas out there! The thing is, another beautiful thing about it that is it explains the little red dots.

Because the little red dots are where the plasma fell on top of the supermassive black hole!

You end up with a puffy jacket of dense plasma. It’s around the same density as the corona of our sun. It’s not as dense as a star, but it’s much denser than free plasma just floating around. It’s about corona density. It’s several light-months thick.

Little puffy microgalaxies.

Little puffy core! It’s gonna appear as a point source in the James Webb, because it’s only a few light months across, it’s not even a light year, it’s small. [In my theory] it’s the core where the plasma disk has collapsed onto the supermassive black hole, and in the center, it’s been thermalized by the accretion disk and by the X-rays coming out of that around the supermassive black hole.

But that maps exactly onto the spectra we’re seeing from the little red dots. They’re the collapsed cocoon cores of this model I’m talking about!

THE EGG AND THE ROCK

The mystery of the Little Red Dots has been solved – and once more Eggiverse triumphs over Rockiverse!

A thrilling new paper, after much writing and rewriting, has finally passed peer review and been published, solving the mystery of the “Little Red Dots”: very early, very compact, very bright galaxies that, to the great surprise of the vast majority of astronomers, cosmologists, and astrophysicists, popped up in startling numbers in the background of ev…

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a year ago · 47 likes · 6 comments · Julian Gough

And if I’m right, there should be a spiral disk or a proto-disk around those little red dots that we’re not able to see yet because the brightness of the central core is so many orders of magnitude higher than in the disk that it’s wiping it out.

Because, you know, there’s the the point spread function. The point spread function in telescopes is a technical problem with any telescope, including the James Webb, where a point source essentially will spill over into nearby pixels. It will never register as a point. Because [the core of the “little red dot”] is spilling over into the nearby pixels, you can’t see the disk right now.

But I’m predicting that as our imaging gets better, you’re going to see around those little red dots, a dimmer spiral disk. And you’re going to see it develop from solid body rotation to spreading out into something that’s a bit more like the kind of galaxy we see today, with a flat rotation curve. And this, I think, explains how compact some of the small early galaxies are and how they spread out later. It’s the relaxation of the initial very strong milligauss spiral magnetic field to something that’s closer to what we see today.

Well, thank you. Thank you so much for your incredible work on this. I’m so glad that there’s some human on Earth who’s spending all day thinking about the possibility of cosmological natural selection.

Thank you very much! This is great. It’s been a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. I’m also delighted that there are now philanthropists who are tuning into this and want to fund it. There are scientists who want to talk to me now, which is great. It feels like it’s starting to come in out of the darkness and towards the campfire.

I think it’s gonna be okay. I think this theory is gonna find its audience and then find people that can actually work on it in a more professional way. Because really, it’s kind of bananas that I’m the guy working on this, you know. There’s so many things I’m working on where I would love to hand it over to a domain expert.

Well, I want to help with that.

That’s the message I want you to put in it. Get in touch with me! If you’re a scientist who’s intrigued by this and has any ideas at all, get in touch with me. Let’s talk, because this territory needs exploration. This is a frontier that is almost completely unexplored.

That is the most inspiring possible ending for this article. You are amazing! Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. I’m delighted. It’s great to communicate. Great to talk. I really like the sound of your Substack. It’s great to be optimistic on the climate side of things because most people are so depressed.

People don’t realize how much has changed and how fast. Things have changed immensely just in the last five years. Between COVID and politics and stuff, people haven’t paid attention, but there have been some extraordinary technological breakthroughs on clean energy that have really made me personally the most optimistic I’ve ever been.

Good. I’m glad to hear that! We’ll talk again.

Great! Thank you.

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The 8th Monthly Dose of Climate Hope event took place on December 10, 2025! hosted an in-depth conversation with Daan Walter1, physicist and energy analyst. Daan is currently a principal at Ember, the world-leading think tank covering the clean energy revolution. The YouTube recording is above!

Here are a few key graphs from Daan’s brilliant recent report on the battery storage revolution! It’s titled “Silos for Sunshine: we’ve mastered harvesting the sun, but storage is the gamechanger.”

Daan details how the incredible technological revolution in grid-scale batteries is just at the beginning of an exponential rise to transform human civilization. In 2024, humanity deployed 160 gigawatt-hours of battery storage, which is about as much as was deployed in all of human history before 2024. Costs fell by 40% that same year! Oh, and we’re now rapidly scaling up sodium-ion models that don’t use rare minerals.

In the medium to long term, power transmission lines will become unnecessary, as grid-scale batteries can simply arbitrage clean electrons across time instead of space. As this newsletter has been saying for years, solar plus fast-advancing batteries makes the intermittency issue obsolete!

This has created an incredible civilizational virtuous cycle. Better economics for solar leads to more and better solar being built, which leads to good economics for batteries, which leads to more and better batteries being built, which leads to good economies for solar, and so on and so forth. We’re just in the first few years of this, and the possibility-space for solar and battery chemistries is so gigantic that we’ll likely see immense continued progress for the foreseeable future.

Every five days, our Sun provides roughly as much energy to Earth as the planet’s entire estimated fossil fuel reserves. The potential is extraordinary.

Ember puts it well: if the photovoltaic revolution amounts to humanity moving from “foraging for fossil fuels” to “farming clean electrons,” batteries are the grain silos! Here’s their Substack. Spectacular work, chronicling a new planetary revolution!

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The 7th Monthly Dose of Climate Hope live event took place on November 13, 2025! hosted an in-depth conversation with Brett Walter, founder of Climate Action Now, a scrappy startup working to revolutionize U.S. climate advocacy with rapid-civic-engagement software. CAN is the organization for which I write on Substack! The YouTube recording is above.

Our CAN Action Carousel is now available in a web browser in addition to our app. Any organization can embed it in their site, and/or curate custom local actions!

Help CAN Survive:

• Do you value our work? Help us continue it by becoming a CAN member at the benefactor level!

• Reverse your share of emissions from flying for the holidays with Trees for Travel!

• Plant trees for holidays or a loved one’s birthday with Give the Gift of Trees!

Help scale up the CAN Action Carousel:

• Tell a group leader about the CAN Action Carousel!

• Are you the leader of a group that could use the CAN Carousel? Sign up to get your own CAN Action Carousel here!

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Patricia Quiñones is the Cash Transfers Manager for a pilot conservation basic income program paying the adult population of three Indigenous villages in Peru for the work they do conserving their part of the Amazon Rainforest. The charity she works with, Cool Earth, has developed this world-first program in partnership with two local women-led Indigenous organizations, ONAMIAP and OMIAASEC.

In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Ms. Quiñones’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

Can you tell me about your journey to working with Cool Earth? How you learned about how their model works and started leading its development and implementation?

Perfect! Well, I’m Patricia Quiñones. I’m an anthropologist and I’m working in Cool Earth around three years. Sorry if my English is not the best.

Es mucho mejor que mi español.

Perfecto! So, I’m an anthropologist. I started working in Cool Earth around 2022, so it’s already quite a long journey, three years and a half now in the organization.

I came from the development sector. As an anthropologist, I work a lot as a consultant for international NGOs. I’ve been part of different projects considering development in rural areas, working with indigenous populations for conservation. I came from that sector.

And when I found Cool Earth, I saw that Cool Earth is a very different type of organization compared to the others I worked with before. As you know, the mission of Cool Earth is not just conservation, but it’s people. For me, that is very important. With indigenous populations, in many projects or initiatives, people are out of the equation, it’s more focused on trees, carbon sequestration, forests.

This was something that really caught my attention with the mission of Cool Earth: the proposal of working to conserve a forest but considering people. I was kind of disappointed with all the traditional models that are always very related to goals and budgets, but forget about the process.

I found that they were looking for a manager for the basic income cash transfer pilot. I had a lot of experience working with indigenous populations in rural development governance, but not much with cash transfers, actually. Cool Earth trusted me to develop this pilot with two indigenous organizations, and I started my journey in Cool Earth with the idea that we can do a model that is more respectful, more straightforward, and have both goals, conservation but also social outcomes. That’s how I started in Cool Earth.

Spectacular! Tell me more about that model now, about how this works.

Conservation work, like much other work in the developed world, has become absolutely strangled by red tape. Excess monitoring and evaluation, a zillion conditions on every grant. Often the models that we see succeed in other contexts, like venture capital, are just “give out a lot of money, then give more to the ones that are clearly doing good things with it.” A more agile, fast-moving approach. So could you tell me more about how Cool Earth manages this?

Yeah! Before I joined, Cool Earth already had experience delivering communal cash transfers here in Peru. Cool Earth has around more than 15 years delivering direct cash, but at a communal level — group cash transfers. And of course, these have been very successful, but also have a lot of learnings.

At a certain point before I joined, they started internal debates on this concept of conservation basic income, around 2021. There was an academic discussion about conservation basic income, how you can join basic income, with a conservation approach.

So they start looking at this new model, but of course, implementing this in Amazon areas in Peru, it’s very complicated. It’s not as easy as it can seem. The first thing was trying to explore if it was possible in terms of safeguarding, security, in terms of all the challenges and limitations that we have in Peru.

We’re also still doing our previous model, which is communal cash transfers to Indigenous communities. You do a direct cash transfer to these communities so they can invest in things like improving the facilities of a small school, or improving some communal assets. That model is the common one.

The “give money to communities” model is a relatively common philanthropic model. The new “conservation basic income” pilot is giving money directly to people, and Cool Earth’s basic income project is the first such project in the indigenous Amazon.

I don’t know if you have any questions.

Can you tell me more about ONAMIAP and OMIAASEC, the female-led Indigenous groups you work with? What is the role of those groups and the structure of those groups?

When we started our conservation basic income pilot, we decided that we have to start from scratch with Indigenous organizations from the design. We searched Indigenous organizations that work in the same area that us, that is the central jungle of Peru. We knocked on doors and we started talking with Indigenous organizations that have their own governance and their own structures. ONAMIAP is an amazing woman-led organization at a national level, but also has a regional base in the same area that we work, OMIAASEC.

So we approached them. We talked about the idea that we want to test a different model. At first, the conversations weren’t easy, because the idea of basic income causes a lot of mistrust. They didn’t buy the idea immediately. So we start conversations. Then what they realize is that they are also arguing in different spaces for direct cash to the indigenous communities that are in the front line of the climate crisis, that need adaptation but don’t have the resources or the support from the government or other organizations.

So they started with not much confidence, then started talking about basic income, and they decided to go with it, to try the model. But they were very clear that this is not an NGO model. This is a co-implementation process where we have to be completely clear that the most cash is going to the people and not to the organizations.

Yeah, those soft costs in the middle can eat up a huge amount of donor funding, using a lot of the money before it gets to the ground.

Yes, yes. So our design includes all the actors, the three organizations. OMIAASEC, that is the regional Indigenous organization, ONAMIAP, that is the national Indigenous organization, and Cool Earth. The good thing is that indigenous organizations have a governance process. They have a structure, they have consultation processes, and they have trust in the territory. When you work with indigenous organizations and you are co-implementing, you are working from a base of trust that is already there.

So we started the same process. We had a budget for around 300 people to fund with this idea of conservation basic income. The indigenous organizations said, “We should do cash, but plus. We should go to the communities, to talk about rights, to talk about governance.”

So this model of basic income is cash, but it’s also a cash-plus program that is co-implemented with some of the workshops by the Indigenous organizations so they are strengthening their presence and their governance. Because an NGO will work some number of years and then will go to another territory. But Indigenous organizations, they will remain there. So if you enhance the capabilities and resources of the Indigenous organization, that is giving sustainability to different initiatives that are going to be run by the Indigenous organization.

So can you tell me more about what this looks like on the ground?

I was involved in some community reforestation work in Madagascar some years ago. Because most people in the area didn’t have any kind of digital banking access, we’d go to a bank in the nearby town of Mananjary and literally come back with huge bags full of cash, Malagasy ariary bills, to pay the people who’ve been working on conservation and reforestation projects. I’m guessing it’s a bit more streamlined these days.

I heard a lot of initiatives that were developed like this, going with the cash. But in the Amazon area now, we have a lot of illegal economies, we have a lot of risks to our team. That wasn’t an option for us, because of the security of the team, especially because we are a woman-led team. We are in a very patriarchal society, traveling on empty roads. We could be assaulted. There can be a lot of violence. Money in our hands wasn’t an option.

I understand.

We also discussed this with ONAMIAP and they agreed that in terms of transparency, they didn’t want to be the one delivering the money, because if anything happened, they as an organization will be questioned. What happened with the money?

What we agreed as an organization is that we should do cash transfers through the bank. Most of these communities now are connected to small cities with at least one outpost of the national bank.

We couldn’t do that for the communities that are, like, twelve hours by boat. But for communities that are two or three hours from a small city, we could do it by bank. And because the government had experience implementing mainly conditional cash transfers to many rural areas in the country, we had a certain percentage of people that are already part of the bank system because of those. Around 60% of participants we worked with already had a bank account, which they usually never used, but they’ve been part of the bank system. For the rest, we’re holding financial education workshops, giving information to the communities and help setting up all this process that is very complicated to the remaining percentage of people that weren’t part of the system.

Alright, so folks from the communities can go on their own time and just use that bank account, borrow against it, so on and so forth.

So your new model basic income, is it per person or per village? Is it in the name of the community government and, like, allocated person-by-person to spend, or is it individuals’ bank accounts at that bank?

Individual bank accounts. That’s why it’s a basic income model, because it’s going to all adults of the community!

We had this discussion with, as you know, woman-led organizations. Usually, unconditional cash transfers focus on women. They explained to us that this can be problematic in terms of gender relations. Because when you just deliver to women, you are adding more pressure to the already-high pressure that women have in rural areas. From care work, to expectations of them being the ones managing the money also. So ONAMIAP agreed that it was better to deliver to all adults, women and men.

All right, excellent. Fascinating.

You mentioned on your website that you couldn’t name some of the villages you work with for security reasons. What can you tell me about the villages? What kinds of forest ecosystem are they located in? More upland forest, wetland forest, terra preta forest? Along main branch rivers, smaller tributaries?

The three communities are located inside the Bosques de Neblina—Selva Central and Avireri-Vraem UNESCO biosphere reserves. These reserves are recognized because they are rich in terms of biodiversity, but also in terms of cultural diversity. These three communities are part of the Yánesha and Asháninka indigenous groups,

Fascinating.

They are both in the tropical forest. They are, of course, close to rivers.

As I mentioned, we test the model with communities. We are piloting. So we decided with ONAMIAP and OMIAASEC to have a criteria for selecting these communities.

So for example, ONAMIAP said, these communities should be interested in conservation. There’s a lot of “romantasy” that all indigenous communities are interested in conservation. Communities are changing, interests are changing.

So ONAMIAP wanted to support communities that are aligned with taking care of Mother Nature, that have primary forests, and that also are interested in gender topics, because as a women-led organization, they didn’t want to work or pilot with communities that didn’t recognize women-led organizations. There are certain communities that are not aligned to recognize that women want to be leaders, and they are more critical with women-led organizations.

So these are very general criteria that we entrust to ONAMIAP and OMIAASEC as the organizations that know the territory. They know where it’s better to invest or support, because they have clarity in terms of who is aligned in conservation.

What I want to transmit is that trust is important while you are designing a project that is related to conservation. Hearing indigenous organizations and of course validating data on the ground. That’s what led us to these three communities.

That is fascinating.

On the ground, what are the impacts of your basic income, just since you started it? What are some of the personal stories and effects on the ground of that income flow to those communities?

It’s very interesting. When you start working with unconditional cash transfers, there is that fear of many donors and founders of the idea. “Wow, unconditional, how you are going to check that they are using the money for basic needs?” This was the fear, I think, for all of us at certain points. “Okay, how people are gonna invest or use their money?”

There’s this misjudgment of indigenous people, the stereotype that they don’t know what to do with their money.

But our data is showing that no, of course they know. Because they have basic needs that are not covered. There’s a lot of basic income pilots in urban or peri-urban areas where the trends are the same. Of course, the conditions of poverty and the conditions of inequality in rural areas are terrible. So the trends of use are very clear. Education, health, and food.

In a climate crisis, the agricultural cycles are being impacted, rains are coming differently, diseases are coming to your crops. You need, in terms of adaptation, cash to let you respond to those risks or threats.

So in the three communities, we are waiting for the final evaluation, but we’ve been monitoring through the two years of the pilot with collection data from the field. The trends are the same. Education, like investing in your kids’ education to go to the school, buy a bicycle so they can go without walking two hours. Invest on buying food or healthcare. That is so important. I know that the state should cover these services, but the reality is that doesn’t happen in Amazon areas.

Are people going into the cities, putting a bike on a canoe and then bringing it back to their village? Where do you buy durable goods if you live in an Amazon village?

It’s important that now many of the Amazon villages are connected by roads, not like a highway, but certain types of roads. So rural areas and urban areas are very connected. These communities go by transport, like motorbike or by bus. There are services, not every day, but there is a connection between urban and rural.

To go and take the cash transfers or buying stuff in the cities, they have buses, maybe one per week. In one community, you have to go some of the way by road transportation, and then cross a river in a small, basic boat, and then again take the road to go to the city.

There’s been a lot of changes in life in the Amazon recently. Roads, like you just said. Starlink has brought Internet access to a lot of these communities for the first time. The Achuar in Ecuador and some communities in Peru have been trialing solar-powered boats to reduce reliance on diesel. What kind of societal and technological changes are you seeing in the indigenous Amazon?

The Amazon is very diverse, so what I’m talking about is just the communities that we are working with. I think that is very important. When we talk about “the Amazon” there are areas that are very well connected, there are others that are very isolated.

In terms of these communities, as you mentioned, cell phones and the Internet are going to a lot of them. And this is changing communication, of course.

This is a good thing also for a model working with cash transfers. We have a collaboration with AidKit, an American software that works with cash transfers in the United States.

AidKit is a software that gives you a platform to register all the cash transfers. In terms of safeguarding, it’s very important. It has portal so you can — when you enroll the cash transfer participants, many of them now have a cell phone. So we have a direct line with all users that have cell phones to communicate messages. Like “Okay, the cash is out. When you want, you can go to the city to collect your cash.” So it’s important having this access to the Internet, to cell phone lines, because it gives you more safeguards in the background to implement this type of pilots.

Also, what is changing is the road access, of course. Amazon areas have been transforming in the last 20-30 years. Roads are improving, the state is creating these roads.

I think education in the last 30 years, it’s been also a quite big change. A lot of people now have at least access to first years of primary school. So many indigenous groups are bilingual now compared to 50 years ago, for example.

Bilingual in Asháninka and Spanish?

Spanish and Asháninka or Yánesha.

And also, of course, one of the bigger threats now is the pressure of illegal economies, but also legal economies. Soy or ginger monocultures want to produce ginger because there is a high demand, so these companies want to rent the territories of indigenous groups so they can produce ginger. When you don’t have the cash to cover the basic needs of your family or your community, at a certain point you accept that deal, because you need cash to secure some basic things for your family. So monoculture is a big problem in the Amazon Rainforest, as well as of course illegal mining and illegal logging. Illegal gold mining, in many communities, not in the ones that we are piloting but in a lot of different communities, is a big threat.

A lot of what you’re doing is essentially making a financial bid on behalf of the rainforest. There’s some indigenous groups in Brazil, like the Kayapo Project, that have done super-proactive defense of a large indigenous territory, sometimes with physical force, as a de facto law enforcement agency. The Asháninka do similar forest monitoring work.

But in this case, you’re primarily in an economic role. Just giving people an income stream that means they don’t have to sell or rent their forest to farms to get money for their family. Just providing that option is already a huge action for the forest.

That’s the importance of working with indigenous organizations. Because they are also developing other type of projects, for example community mapping, so they can identify what they really want to protect.

I think the cash transfers, the pilot, it’s important. I’m really a believer that no one isolated project or isolated initiative is the answer for conservation. The state should have a more proper role in conservation, but while the state improves their operation, we cannot wait. I think that the pilot is a great initiative.

What are your plans for the future? What is the length of this pilot program and how do you plan to expand beyond that?

Yeah. Well, because it’s a pilot, the importance is to evaluate the pilot. We gather data, quantitative and qualitative, with an internal monitoring program that we have. But we wanted to have a proper evaluation. We had a grant with the University of Bath in the UK, they are leading the evaluation with some Peruvian professionals, so there’s an external evaluation of the pilot to see the learnings and what we can improve. We are going to wait for that evaluation as organization.

Up through now, what we are seeing is that the trends are very positive!

But we want to wait for the evaluation to see what are the following plans. We want to keep working with ONAMIAP and OMIAASEC. They want to keep working with us. After evaluation, we will need to change things. And then we are going to do a consultation process again with ONAMIAP and OMIAASEC to see to which other different communities we can scale.

Meanwhile, we will keep working in other communities with our communal cash transfers, as we’ve been doing for around 15 years already.

So that’s the plan. Wait for the evaluation, change things in the model, keep raising money for this idea. I think that it’s improving. We’re very motivated to see how both things can work together. “I want to conserve my forest, but I also need to sustain my life and my basic needs.”

So we have to keep thinking about how we’re going to scale in these communities. We’re already having conversation with ONAMIAP and OMIAASEC about identifying potential new communities.

We want to evaluate, rethink the model with indigenous organizations, and keep scaling in a more horizontal way.

What are your current funding sources? Primarily small donors? Have you got any corporate partnerships or government support?

No, we don’t have any government support. We don’t have support from states or big funds. The pilot has been delivered and designed with the support of trusts and donors and small direct funding that also contributes to our work.

We have campaigns, we raise money from individuals, but we have also the support of some organizations. For example, the People’s Postcode Lottery was supporting us in the first years of the design, and other donors or trusts have helped us to run this pilot.

Also, in the implementation, we have the grants of AidKit. That is very important when you talk about cash. And also with the University of Bath, they give us the grant for the evaluation because this is the first basic income pilot in the Amazon area. Usually pilots have been developed in urban or peri-urban areas.

That’s a great point. All the previous basic income stories I’ve heard of have been in urban and peri-urban areas, like you said.

So how far do you think this can scale? What is your sort of long-term like ideal vision, if you got everything you wanted, for five years or ten years in the future?

Well, I think that the idea is to combine models, if we have all the resources. A basic income approach, but continue with the communal cash, because I think that both models work in different ways, at different scales. The idea is keep developing if everything works, keep enhancing this model in Peru.

As you know, Cool Earth also works in Papua New Guinea, we are delivering cash there. We are also supporting a pilot in Colombia. So go forward in Peru, Colombia, and the other territories that are linked with the organization.

I know that you work in Peru and you’re a leader in the Peru project. What thoughts do you have about potential interconnections with some of that other work that Cool Earth is doing in other areas of the world, like Papua New Guinea?

I’m not too related with Papua New Guinea project. It’s a different model. They are also doing individual cash, but there’s not a model that is co-implemented with an indigenous group because there’s not an indigenous organization there. So it’s a little bit different, and I don’t have much information because it’s not part of my scale of work. But yes, we are also working on individual cash in Papua New Guinea.

What else would you like to add that we haven’t covered?

Well, I just want to emphasize that innovative solutions have been to be part of the climate justice agenda. I think that we have a lot of discussions in terms of mitigation, but what we’re seeing on the ground, it’s not just mitigation, it’s also adaptation. We have to have a climate justice approach to really think about indigenous groups that are being really affected by this crisis.

It’s very comfortable for us talking in hotels or congresses at these very big events, but the speed of what is happening in the territories, it can’t wait, you know? Organizations have to start thinking more from the territories, more from a community-led perspective. Now it’s like a word that you read everywhere, “community-led,” but I think we have to really implement those approaches, not just discourses. I will suggest that if there are more organizations that really want to work directly with indigenous organizations, now is the time. We can’t wait more for these changes in the models and in the projects and in the system.

Absolutely. And at this key moment, what you’re doing has a certain beautiful poetic justice to it. The idea of paying indigenous people for the work that they’ve been doing, often in the face of genocidal violence, for the last several centuries, trying to defend the forest that they live in and the landscapes that they’ve cultivated and protected.

Yeah, I think it’s a reparation. Even though ONAMIAP, for example, they don’t like to talk about reparations because for them, it’s important to say that not everything will be repaired with money.

And I like that approach. Of course, cash is a tool. It’s a way of helping the ongoing processes of indigenous organizations. But it’s not just a silver bullet solution, and that’s important. The state in Peru needs to have a role. We all have a role in terms of mitigation and adaptation. It doesn’t matter if we are working here in the territory, trying to support indigenous groups, but if the model at a worldwide global level is not changing. Like with carbon markets, people think that if you are paying but not changing, business as usual, everything’s going to be okay.

And carbon markets. historically, have mostly sucked and were bad at their job. There was that recent meta-analysis in Nature finding that less than 16% of offsets sold even reduced emissions at all! It’s structurally flawed.

But your pilot, paying people a basic income to protect forests, that’s a new model. That’s something that seems to me to be a lot more promising.

Yeah. Also, the last thing that I want to say is that the process matters in terms of climate justice. The process matters. How you implement matters. How you are supporting local and grassroots organizations matters.

I think that it’s a key message for me, and what i learned in these three years is that it’s been not just a pilot for validating an NGO model. It’s been a learning process with two amazing organizations, ONAMIAP and OMIAASEC, that are really committed to protect Mother Nature, and that are really committed to protect their ways of life. And I think that that is motivating. It’s not just trees, it’s ways of life. I think that’s been a very important journey as an organization and for me at a professional level.

Thank you so much for sharing this.

What kind of impacts of climate change are you seeing in the forest these days? What are indigenous people reporting in terms of changes to the ecology, changes to water flow, stuff like that?

Many. We have an internal list of natural disasters, flooding, winds, speed of winds, changes in ecology. For example, there’s been a lot of floods, heavy rain in short periods of time, and these have problems in their villages, but also in their crops. It increases the rate of diseases in their crops. There’s one type of disease that they knew how to manage, but now they can’t manage these diseases.

Also health issues. There’s a lot of colds and coughs because the change of weather. You can see this in health, in terms of natural disasters, in terms of economic activities. And the ways of support. We collect a lot of data on this. There’s this common idea of “don’t give people the fish but give the tools for fishing.” But as the people we work with once told me, “Yeah but now you can teach us how to do crops better, but the following season, we have diseases and rains and all our work disappears. It’s not that we don’t want to work. It’s that the ecosystem, the changes are challenging our ways of living.”

They do not always have the information to be prepared for that.

Yeah, absolutely.

What kind of wildlife are present in those particular primary forest areas around your pilot communities? Is this jaguar habitat? Spider monkey habitat? What kind of species community lives there?

The growing of the cities has pushed many of the animals more deep in the forest. You still can find monkeys in these three communities, but this is not jaguar habitat. These communities are still part of natural corridors for many species. I’m an anthropologist, so I’m really not very familiar with scientific names for species.

Just tell me what you saw.

I’ve seen toucans. I’ve seen monkeys. Opossums. I’ve seen so many different types of birds that I really don’t know the names. For trees, you have caoba, mahogany in English, a native type of ancient trees. During the 80s and 90s, there was a lot of logging in these areas. A lot of the biggest trees there were cut down, but you still have certain types of native old trees.

Well, thank you so much for sharing this. I am honored to share the story of the noble work you’re doing. What I’m trying to do is provide a supportive press for people doing great work, and that’s what you’re doing at Cool Earth. So thank you so much.

Thank you very much. And thanks for being interested in this type of work and for the work that you are doing also, sharing stories. I think everything matters, where we are.

Thank you very much. It was really interesting talking with you.

It was a great pleasure talking with you too. I want to thank you for doing this great work. It’s a really noble thing. You’re fighting to make the world a better place.

You are doing an amazing work too in showing all these stories. Thank you very much. And keep in touch.

You too! Have a lovely day. Thank you.

Dr. Edward Louis is a conservation geneticist and founder of the Madagascar Biodiversity Partnership (MBP). MBP works to protect lemurs, including several of the most endangered species in the world, with development-boosting community conservation and reforestation work in rural areas of Madagascar, one of the most impoverished countries in the world. His wife Susie Louis runs a partnering international NGO, Conservation Fusion, focusing on community education.

Madagascar Biodiversity Partnership

In summer and fall 2019, this writer worked as a volunteer research assistant at MBP’s Kianjavato Ahmanson Field Station (KAFS) in the eastern rainforests of Madagascar. It was a transformative experience, about which I wrote ten reports from the field.

MBP research at KAFS includes studying the greater bamboo lemur (Prolemur simus), the black-and-white ruffed lemur (Varecia variegata), and the aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis). MBP also administers a wide network of community reforestation nurseries that employ a numerous local workforce collecting seeds in the forest, growing seedlings in the nurseries, and planting seedlings to form new forest corridors.

Here, I’m reconnecting with Dr. Louis after six years to catch up on how the Madagascar Biodiversity Partnership continues its work!

In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Dr. Louis’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

Note: between interview and publication, Madagascar experienced another revolution/coup.

Africa is the future, it has the highest growth. The rest of the world, population growth is around 0.001%. It’s almost nothing. But it’s 4% in Madagascar. When I started working there in 1998, there were 9 million people. Now there’s 30 million plus. And when you look at the age brackets too, it’s a very young population.

This is something that I try to write about. Demographically, much of the future of humanity is from Africa.

The future of global emissions determines on how Africa industrializes. The future of so much is dependent on Africa. And the current U.S. administration has just destroyed all ties to Africa, cut aid, barely even funding embassies. That’s just a massive geopolitical screw-up. Our foreign aid was less than 1%! The money was getting there. These countries, and the people there, were being saved by this money.

Could you tell me about your progress in the region around KAFS, about your “Big Dipper” reforestation plan, and about the multi-decade arc of what you’re working towards building in Madagascar?

We have four field stations, and they probably couldn’t be at farther points within Madagascar.

We have one all the way up north, in a dry deciduous environment at Montagne des Français. Our field station there is called Tangalavaka, TAFS.

We have another one in moist evergreen forest in the Alaotra Mangoro region, Mantadia area. It’s called the Grewcock Ihofa Vohitsara Bioreserve station, GIVB, or Torotorofotsy.

Then there’s the Kianjavato Ahmanson Field Station, KAFS, which is Southeast Madagascar, in the rainforest.

And finally we have Lavavolo Field Station, LAFS, which is in a spiny forest in the Southwest.

They’re all doing reforestation. Last year, we planted 1.6 million trees between all four stations!

That’s great for climate resilience. The trees create microclimates. I really believe that you might not change the world, but you might change the climate in one area. That’s beneficial. I know what the difference is of driving through a rain forest on the road. Madagascar can be in really hot weather, then all of a sudden you’re driving through Ranomafana, and it’s just cool. It’s like somebody turned the air conditioning on the planet. So that’s obviously the benefits. It’s tangible. It’s not something that we have to wait for, it’s easy to see.

The Big Dipper project came about with Susie and I a long time ago, when we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do with our program. I looked at the map and I said, “Well, if I connected all these forest fragments to each other, it would look like the Big Dipper.“ And that’s what we’re trying to do.

Reforestation is really hard to maintain over time. We’ve been doing this since 2012. We’ve had the ups and downs of the pandemic. We planted 660,000 trees that year. We paused a little bit and we got reorganized, started doing face masks and doing soap and water. That’s why that’s the only year we didn’t make our planting trees goal. We were short 90,000 trees, which is a lot of trees, but it’s also not that much when you can plant a million.

So we started connecting forested areas. That’s the idea. We create corridors. We’re really working on one of the main ones, which is the top of the cup, between KAFS and Vatovavy. We’re starting to have it documented. Because, right now, it’s just a piece of paper, an idea. But we’re working a lot, trying to get these corridors actually laid down.

Madagascar’s done a tremendous job of protecting the remaining forest, as far as establishing protection. It’s hard to do when you’ve had so many tragic things happen over the years, especially the last six years with the pandemic and with inflation that’s still rampant in Madagascar, and the political changes going on now. It’s really difficult to maintain things and poverty is not getting better. Besides on climate change, reforestation provides income to local people!

You can really see how deforestation happens in places like Lavavolo, which is the poorest place in Madagascar. A lot of people have immigrated from there to other regions, trying to find jobs and income. They usually take jobs that other people won’t do. Like go and burn forests down to plant corn or peanuts over and over again. Some places have lost a lot of the conservation zone because of this agricultural shift.

In the U.S., I live in the middle of the corn belt. Fields of corn here need a lot of fertilizer and a lot of water, but in Madagascar that’s not necessarily part of the climate. A lot of people think it’s all wet, but it’s not really that wet. People here eat more rice than any other country in Africa. So they need their water to cook their rice.

The reforestation plan

So that’s the reforestation plan there. We’re planting the main corridor, and trying to get it officially established. That’s the problem, there’s no paperwork or legal process to get protection for land that will eventually be restored with rainforest. So that’s one of the things we’re having a lot of discussions on. How do we go about it? How do we get people involved? Because it matters if we can get them involved. At every hillside, the people that live around there could start actively terracing things. We’re just going to see how we manage that hill and how we can help them have a good income and live with nature.

Bamboo lemurs actually do better in young forests

We just published a paper last year with a former student, Dr. Ando Rakotanahary, who completed her doctorate and then post-doctorate study with the MBP and now works for us full time. We thought the Greater Bamboo Lemur, Prolemur simus, was an obligate bamboo eater, but it’s not true. We named 18 things they ate and that’s not even all of them. They’re very flexible.

They actually probably do better in secondary forests than they do in primary forests. You can sort of see that’s what’s happened to Ranomafana National Park. There was a village there. But in 1947, when there was an insurrection and it got put down, a lot of people lost their lives. They moved away, they left it alone. And over the years, it’s matured and matured. When I first started working in Madagascar in 1998, there were a lot of bamboo lemurs in the area, but the forest was mostly guava and bamboo. It wasn’t a lot of mature trees. Over the years, the forest has gotten more and more mature, and now there’s only one bamboo lemur left in Ranomafana. However, there are many in the surrounding region in substandard or secondary growth forest!

Drones will make tracking animals easier

I love drones. We do a lot of really great things with them, and the technology is great. There’s a dynamic researcher from Brazil that gave a presentation at IPS. His name is Dr. Fabiano Melo, he’s been working all over the world now. They’re using these thermal drones, they’re the one that I’ll probably end up trying to get. They fly during the day, so everything’s in black and white, you see the lemurs on the background of black, and then you can switch over to real time where you’re seeing the forest and the primate.

You can zoom without having to fly the drone close. It just zooms in and takes pictures or videos of this primate. It’s just amazing. They’re doing a lot of countings in reintroduction programs, which they used to have a hard time doing. In a big, vast area, trying to find animals to count the population could take six months before, but now they can do it in a couple weeks, drone fly, and they quickly double the number of individuals they find.

Even in our area, we could start flying drones and start tracking. Trying to follow these animals gets hard because we have a lot of migration now, a lot of regrowth, so there’s animals moving and shifting. That technology is already doing a lot of great groundbreaking work.

Cyclones and Resilience

We had a lot of damage because of cyclones. In 2022 to 2023, we had three cyclones hit. They devastated the forest and the population. There can be up to 150 mile-per-hour winds. For the population living in little tiny huts, it’s terrifying. We’ve had to rebuild all the huts.

That’s a good lesson about reforestation too, because I have got videos and pictures of the the forest of the corridor before and after the cyclones. The first one [Cyclone Batsirai] hit Madagascar on February 5th, 2022. It just looked like a bomb went off. The forest and everything was gone, just shattered.

Then about 17 days later, we had another cyclone that hit [Cyclone Emnati]. And then a year later, the third, Cyclone Freddy, that set the record for longevity. It developed between Indonesia and Australia, went across the Indian Ocean, and the first landmass that it hit was Mananjary right down the road from Kianjavato. And bam, hit us again.

But we had a lot of lessons learned, and we did a lot of work with Re:wild and their Re:wild Relief Fund. We started talking about climate change and building back more resilient structures. We taught them how to use a plastic bucket to create a cement footing around the wooden frame, which is usually buried in the ground permanently so it won’t rot away and make their home very unstable.

What they used to do is they’ll take squared wood, usually like 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter, to create the frame. They put it in the ground. That’s stabilizing. It’s okay for a couple of years, but after three or four years, it rots. So when a cyclone comes, it pushes it and flattens it. I have all these videos, all these structures with metal roofs just flattened.

So we take a 20-liter, five-gallon bucket, bought a bunch of them, and we cut the bottoms off, take the handles off and put them in holes dug in the ground. To build the huts, we put the square wood in, we put rebar around it with cement and gravel rock, and this way the structure is stronger., and this way the structure is stronger. And then, if a house is not knocked down completely, but leaning, we could straighten the house up by doing this too.

We also taught them about adding angled support beams, like wooden buttresses, but we also linked the houses at the top of the wall allowing them to support each other. So that they’re actually making the individual houses stronger as a group than as an individual building!

Cyclones and the Forest

That’s also true about the forest. We see a lot of examples of cyclones coming in, and our area has been hammered.

Back as late as 1986, Kianjavato had a huge, beautiful forest. During that time and until 2010, the people that lived in that area just cut it.

What you have left is a lot of big trees that didn’t get cut, but they’re standing alone. In a natural forest, you have a lot of big trees. They gather, and they act almost like a wall. So when the wind comes and it’s going uphill, it hits that forest and goes over the top for the most part. If you look at Ranomafana, the forest was not damaged that much because it’s like a big block or wall of trees.

In our areas, we have so many trees that are standing alone above everything else. Those are more vulnerable. One cyclone, and they get knocked down. Big trees, two or three meter wide trees just got knocked down. It just shows that you can plant eight million trees like we had done, but it doesn’t matter, if we’re going to be constantly getting hit every decade with some type of category three or five cyclone. If they get that intense due to increased ocean temperature as part of climate change, it’s not going to matter, they’re going to knock everything down with that kind of intensity.

I grew up in Texas, on the Gulf Coast outside Galveston. I’ve been going through hurricanes my entire life, and now I’m going through cyclones too. They’re not to trifle with. If I was living on the Gulf Coast, or near a hurricane, or a cyclone, I’d rather just get out of there before it makes landfall. Problem is most people do not have the option or means to pack up and leave.

We’ve already started working on this. It’s reflected in the success we had during Freddy [Cyclone Freddy in 2023] when we had a lot less homes damaged and a lot less homes knocked down. People put stuff on their roofs: sandbags to keep the metal down and things like that, so they’re very much better prepared for cyclones.

It’s going to happen, it’s just a question of when. Madagascar gets hit by a lot of cyclones. They had two this year in Lavavolo. That’s the first ones that I’ve seen make landfall there since 2000, and we had two cyclones hit us down there that caused massive flooding.

They used to never get hit by cyclones. I remember when I first went there, I was talking about building a program. I asked the people “Are there a lot of cyclones? Cause I’m worried about damage.” They said “Oh, we wish there was a cyclone, we’d get rain!”

I was not prepared for that answer! But nowadays, they’ve had so much rain they had standing water on the limestone ground!

We live in a very dynamic world now. We see it all over the United States and we see it all over the world. We have these floods that will drop 20, 30 inches of rain in one day or in 45 minutes. With the flood in Texas, it was only 45 minutes and went 13 feet high. It’s unbelievable.

Reforestation: Cyclone Protection

We had storms before, but it was not the same intensity. I grew up in Dickinson, which is 25 miles from Galveston in Texas, in between Houston and Galveston, really close to Clear Lake and NASA. And I always knew how the storms would dissipate once they hit land, but they still were really powerful. Our house got flooded several times. I’ve known three floods where we had five feet or we had water up to the second floor. So we’ve lived on a bayou and things like that.

It’s the same thing in Kianjavato, it’s 42 kilometers from the coast, so about 25 miles, and if you’ve got a big enough storm, it will get hit. If you see imagery of cyclones hitting Madagascar, it’s not hitting a little. The cyclones are clockwise, so when it hit just north of Mananjary, that whole punch went right down that alley of Kianjavato to Ranomafana.

To have that happen three times within a year, it was crazy. You have to rethink about how you’re going to do anything from now on.

So our reforestation program is now really focused on the east side, because that’s the side that we need to protect, because that’s going to be the one that takes the hardest punch.

In Kianjavato region, despite the Malagasy people not having the opportunity to get a college education, they still realize that the trees we planted took the energy out of that storm. That’s what happens. They actually take the energy of cyclones and hurricanes!

With the loss of primary forests everywhere in the world, storms are becoming even more devastating. All these things are adding up. We don’t really think of this until it’s too late.

We really want to put a lot more trees on the east side, and still do some other planting other places, but we really want to do it, as fast as possible. It’s a numbers game, we want to put as many trees in the ground as we possibly can, because we have a short time.

We’ve got to get these trees established and in place for the next storm, and to deal with climate change. So this is a lot.

We got to a million trees. It was amazing. We missed it the first year, by 9,000 trees. But the next two years, we got two years in a row of over a million trees. And I’m really looking at the future.

The whole plan (and it’s all dependent on funding) is that we would like to keep KAFS as the centerpiece of the program, because KAFS is in the middle of that whole region. Then put a substation at Vatovavy and another substation at Tsitola and then replicate the program: monitoring aye-ayes, Greater Bamboo Lemurs, and Black and White Ruffed Lemurs through each field station or substation with Vatovavy in the east, KAFS in the center, and Tsitola in the west. And manage the reforestation program from each station, so we have an even better relationship with the communities.

We’ve got 22 nurseries in the Kianjavato area. They are really dense on the East side and the middle, not so much in the West, but we really need to add more nurseries on the West side so that we’re not having to drive trees there. We want to be able to do a kilometer circumference of planting around each nursery.

I’ve always struggled with “Okay, we’re planting a million trees, but that means we have a million plastic pots, and those plastic pots are not reusable.” So we’ve been adding a lot more smart pots to the program, and I’ve got a container that we’re going to be shipping over very soon. We’ll end up having 36,000 one-gallon and 6,000 five-gallon smart pots for GIVB, plus 15,000 one-gallon and 1,000 five-gallon for KAFS. I’d really like us to be able to get the fabric cloth, the geotextile, so we could make the smartpots here.

During Covid

When the pandemic happened, I left on the 19th of March 2020, on the last flight out of Madagascar before there was an 18 month international ban flying there. We have this conservation credit program where women bought sewing machines. Susie did a fundraiser. We gave them a pattern to make surgical masks and coverings. And then we got them the fabric. They made the masks that we actually implemented at all four field stations to cover people’s faces and protect everybody.

We had this rule that we increased the distance between planted trees. We made a rule that only one person could be at one bamboo stake, which is where the mark of the hole was. So if you needed some more compost, that person would step away from that hole and the compost guy would come up with their mask and put the extra compost in. They would walk away, and the other person would plant the tree.

That worked really well, to make everybody as safe as possible and still continue to work, because that income was really important. Besides not being able to travel anywhere, which is impactful in anybody’s psyche, and being stuck in the same place in the same house or whatever you’re doing during the pandemic, it wasn’t financially so much of a burden because people were earning reforestation money.

We’re still putting a lot of money into the community, thanks to our donors, our collaborations with Arbor Day Foundation, MK Lemur Foundation, and Re:wild. These are the folks that have been funding our reforestation programs. Without them, we can’t do this.

That’s a long story to say that to do all this, you’re going to have to get the population on board. In some places, like a lot of Lavavolo, people are bought in. So we’re going to be expanding that program.

I said this, when I was talking about doing reforestation in Lavavolo in the spiny forest: “I know the history of reforestation programs, and they haven’t been that successful. They haven’t been successful at all. But my mind’s changed, because I’ve seen what they’ve done. I’ve seen the topography change. And I see that it can be possible.”

I put one tree in the ground in June 2015, then took a picture of it in 2019, standing next to it. It was two meters tall. And then I took another one when I went there in 2024, and it’s five meters tall now, with branches coming off. So it can grow!

So we’re doing that and we’ve now expanded a lot with Re:wild’s help, Arbor Day Foundation’s help, and Conservation Fusion’s help. We planted 136 000 trees last year and we’re on pace to do that again this year. We’re adding more infrastructure by adding in another nursery too.

Goat problems

It’s really hard to do reforestation when you have free-ranging goats too. So we have to put a lot of fencing in, just so the goats can’t get to the trees. Some of the tree species, like Fatsiolotse and Sono (Alluaudia species) and Samata, are so spiny that the goats don’t eat them. But, the other shrub trees and stuff, they will. It’s like a salad bar if you don’t have a fence to protect them. And even when you’ve the got high fence, you’ve got spiny trees and branches around the fence, they still probe it all the time trying to get in. They’ll climb a tree and jump down off the tree onto the ground inside the fence. And then we’ve got to chase them out. So it’s not a fun thing.

I’ve got a great video from a drone of about 100 goats going past our nursery fence line. The only thing that’s not brown is behind that fence. Everything else they’ve eaten.

Adapting the strategy

We’re dealing with poverty, lack of jobs, lack of education. But there’s always challenges specific to the region. So you can’t just do one playbook and expect it to work. You have to adjust. I’m a conservation geneticist — if I don’t evolve, I’ll go extinct! I feel the same way about what we do. We have to adjust. We have to change our tactics constantly to address this issue or that issue. And listening to the people. Susie’s always great about that. She’s done a lot of research and a lot of efforts and trials.

You’ve really got to listen to the people. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to give them everything they want. Some of it you just can’t, you only have so much money and time. But trying to get them involved and feel like there’s ownership there. That’s the key. We’re not there yet, but we’re moving that way.

After the cyclone

I’d say that because of the cyclone, the population health in Kianjavato went down. We’re still recovering. We have a lot of immigration to the area, because everybody hears about all the money that people are making from planting trees and stuff. So we have a lot of people moving in. And they haven’t gone through our conservation programs, they haven’t gone through the education programs at the schools and stuff. So they just say, oh, there’s forests. I’m going to go up there. I’m going to cut this forest down and plant bananas. And that’s what happens again and again. They just take out a piece of land and just put bananas. You lose all that ground structure. You’ll have a lot more land slides, which we used to have at the beginning, which we stopped. But now we’re starting to see them again a little bit because people are moving into the area. There’s rules and regulations, but there’s not a lot of people following it.

I think that’s the hardest lesson people need to understand. If you see people doing things that are not right, but they’re in a position of power, well, how do you expect a person who’s not in a position of power to follow the rules that these other people won’t?

I try to be as obtuse as possible when I’m talking about this, but it is a problem. There’s not a lot of responsibility. There’s not a lot of prudence. People are robbing from each other, it’s just very strange. We’re working on that, Susie and I.

Wandering male aye-ayes

We probably know now like 30 aye-ayes that we’ve been studying.

The males will do these walkabouts. After a while, they just take off and they walk. We had one that walked 21 kilometers and just kept on walking without eating. We think they’re looking for territory. I think they’re looking for females because females are not seasonal breeders. They can breed any time of the year

So they’re looking to procreate. What’s going on with aye ayes, it’s gotta be a stressor, but there’s so much variation between our sites. We do have deforestation or some type of habitat destruction at every site but it’s different levels and we have different types of forests. One, which has had a lot of habitat destruction, that’s southwest coast spiny dry forest. We’re in high altitude evergreen forests at GIVB, and it’s really beautiful. And then we have Kianjavato, which is more forest from the top of the mountains, ridge line forests, with a lot of secondary forests.

Incredibly, the MBP has documented and monitored 22 aye-aye births by seven females from four ecoregions in Madagascar. All of them males. So I don’t know what’s happening. It’s got to be something that’s shutting off. Get to these regulatory genes [in the embryo], turn it off, and you become a male. Something’s causing this to happen, where you’re just having males. It’s ideal if you’re in a bad environment, because males can migrate long distances. We have an aye-aye with a territory of 3000 hectares, and he could run his whole circuit in a week where he would go from our place to Torotorofotsy and up to the conservation zone, and then come back around in a week. It makes it that much harder because the guys have to follow them at night. The aye-ayes leave the nest at 6:00 or 6:30 PM and they go back around 4:30 to 5:00 AM, and they do that every day. It’s not much of a life if you have to do that every night, so we usually do three nights a week. If I could, I would put somebody on it every day and have different teams and rotate them out.

When the teams are on holidays, we mainly just make sure the animal’s okay, but we don’t really follow them that much. It’s always the scary part. The holiday between December and January is always scary for me because we have a lot of animals that are not really being monitored every day, and there’s people in the forest knowing that, so it’s always a scary time.

Mixed land use

We’re really going to work with the people that live there, that own the land, but they don’t usually have tenure because it’s so hard to get tenure in Madagascar for land. But we really want to work with them and do this whole concept about doing a permanent forest on the tops of the mountains. Then as you go down the mountain, you do timber-use forest. And at the bottom you do rice fields.

I want to have more commercial crops. Don’t just do banana. Because one of the things that most people in Madagascar planting these bananas don’t understand, is that bananas are on top of the list to be affected by climate change. They’re probably not going to be eradicated completely, but the productivity is going to decline. It’s one of the highest utilized crops in the world. There’s going to be some die-off and that’s going to be money that people are not going to have. They just grow their bananas, they don’t have to really tend to them.

We realized that women are really great about doing stuff where most men would consider a monotonous job and not do a good job about it. Planting is one of those things. Most of the planters are women in our programs, because they’re the ones going to the market picking the vegetables and the fruit, they’re the ones looking at it. It’s the same type of mentality that they’ll look at when planting. They’re doing a better job than men will. The men do all the heavy lifting and they bring the compost in and the plants up and all that.

Banana fields are tended so much differently in each country. And I think it’s reflected in the growth. People will go in there and then walk the bananas, two bunches on a stick, a really far distance to get it to the road, then load them in the trucks that get filled and taken to the big cities. I don’t think they’re exporting any of it out. It’s all in country. It’s amazing the amount of bananas that is being produced in Madagascar and consumed in Madagascar too. It’s a crop that’s going to be in danger. Not only from climate change, but from disease, because there’s that fungus that kills off Cavendish [the most common banana cultivar].

The right trees for the job

We were doing a lot of work at the beginning of this reforestation program with Acacia mangium. It’s considered borderline invasive, from Australia. It grows fast. In about eight years, you can have a good timber piece of wood. But then I’ve come to find out that they don’t like it. It’s good for furniture inside the house, but it’s supposedly not really good to go outside the house, as exterior wood, which I thought is funny because it’s a tree outside. That didn’t always click with my brain. But the thing is, it’s never actually evolved to be in cyclone environments. During Cyclone Batsirai, most of the acacia got snapped in half. Big trees, just snapped. And that landed on the ground, on other endemic trees that we had planted in between them, because we’re using the shade covering method.

We were also using it as a legume. It also leaves litter with nitrogen back in the soil. They had a lot of trees that didn’t get knocked down, but they were cracked. So the next storm, they would fall onto our elevated walkway or cabins or something or someone.

So we cut those down. I got a team in there, and we were topping all of these acacia at five meters. Any time it goes up, we just top them. So the trunk’s getting wider, so hopefully they’ll have a better chance of surviving and not getting snapped in half.

But the major change that I saw was that all the endemics that were sort of underneath all the acacia suddenly had sun. And we’ve seen this here with some trees, here in our house. We live in a forest. We had two of these linden trees that got topped within a year. Really tall trees but got just snapped in half and so the whole top of the tree fell. Well, there’s a hackberry that was only about four meters. It just shot up to eight meters because you finally had the sun. It occupied that space really quickly. So it’s really interesting to watch evolution of trees and how the forest works and manages itself and how things change.

So the crops you’re planting are primarily timber trees? Not so much other sorts of edible species?

Yeah, well, everything’s got fruit in Madagascar. For a black and white ruffed lemur, 90% of its diet is fruit and it eats it whole. We looked at these things and we discovered that there was not a fruit species there that had less than 50% dry fiber. Everything was above, up high, like 70 or 80% dry fiber.

We looked at their feces, and in the wild, they’re not compact, they’re all over the place. Their gut transmission is so quick, faster than a goose. Lemurs really process this outer coating of the seed. And then there’s some species of tree where if lemurs don’t eat it, it doesn’t germinate. So lemurs really process a lot of seeds.

We do a lot of collection of lemur poop. Which is always a weird job! But it’s actually a very rewarding one because we get [seeds of] species that we would not even think about. We get a lot of palms that you don’t see the seeds of, they’re so small. They pop up in our germination units, so we plant them.

Endemic trees are better for reforestation

But to do climate resilience, we had to shift from acacia. I didn’t want to use it for a pioneer anymore because it’s not evolved for that. I said, these endemic trees have been pounded by cyclones throughout their evolution. So they’re a little more resilient, a little more flexible. They bend. They don’t break.

So we looked at trees that could be planted out in the open field and less than ideal areas, without shade, and we have a list of 10 that do excellent.

We have species where the black and white ruffed lemur eats their fruits, and aye-ayes eats their seeds for high protein. So we use those trees as pioneers and it’s funny, because you hear people say “we did pioneers and then we planted endemics today.” I said, it’s funny that we refer to those trees as pioneers and the other ones as endemics, because they’re all endemics.

We should probably try to change the terminology that we’re using. Pioneers, and then the trees that are going to be planted later. Those are going to be the understory trees, and the ones that don’t do so well in direct sunlight.

But we can do this. We can plant. We’re doing a lot of commercial crops.

Which crops?

We’re doing Ravintsara, which is used in aromatherapy, you take the leaves and they do extractions from it for essential oils. We do cocoa, and we’ve been approached by the chocolate companies to plant cocoa in our area. Currently, most of the chocolate is grown on the northwest, where that rainforest goes to the whole east coast and then it crosses up at Marojejy and goes to Tsaratanana. It is near Ambanja where cacao is harvested extensively. It’s up in that northwest area. It’s rainforest. It’s really wet. And they grow it there.

But supposedly from the climate models, climate change is going to impact that Ambanja area tremendously. But if you look at the models for our area, the lowland forest area, even though it’s mostly gone along the east coast, it’s not going to be affected as much by climate change. It’s already going to affect it, I guess, in many ways. And so we want to create large plots planted with Albizia lebbeck (bonary), a tall canopy tree, and then put coffee and cocoa all underneath it.

But it doesn’t happen in a day. You’ve got to grow the bonary canopy trees. It grows fast, pretty fast. And so we can start doing that. We can produce a lot of cocoa. Well, there’s a lot of cocoa being produced in the area, but it’s not really marketed yet. It’s like all of our crops there. We have litchi [aka lychee, a popular fruit], a tremendous amount of litchi, and we do that.

Culture of bamboo and interference with lemurs

We grow bamboo, because bamboo is a source for the baskets. So when we have litchi, the large container trucks go all the way to the coast to Manakara and Mananjary, unloaded and empty, but they buy baskets on the way down.

They come back, they load those baskets up filled with litchi, and they drive them to the center part of the country to the larger cities like Fianarantsoa and Antsirabe. The litchi matures from the coast first, and then they move inland to about just east of Ranomafana.

The problem is that the price of a basket was like 400 ariary a basket, and it skyrocketed. It’s like 2,000 or 3,000 ariary a basket now. So they’re going to the forest in the same places that the bamboo lemurs are. They’re collecting the growing bamboo that’s coming up at the same time that the offspring of the Varibolo, Prolemur simus, the greater bamboo lemur, is being weaned.

We know that a Prolemur simus juvenile has about a 50% chance of surviving its first year. And we’re wondering, because we don’t have any other information, is this human driven? Because we’re competing for the same very source of food that that baby, that juvenile simus needs to survive. We haven’t solved that problem.

At Sangasanga Mountain, FOFIFA Kianjavato, an agriculture station for coffee, they cut all the bamboo out. So when the storm hit, they lost a lot of big trees. They cut those up into made planks and they sold it to the community. They made squarewood and they did a lot of other agriculture stuff. So the bamboo lemurs pretty much left Sangasanga.

The MBP built a suspension bridge now over the Fotobohitra River to access FOFIFA and there has always that clump of bamboo right across the river that the people use as a toilet, but the bamboo lemurs lived in that too. They cut it down because too many people were using that as a toilet, so they got rid of it. It’s probably a health hazard for the animals too, because we have Bilharzia in the water, we have Cysticercosis, that would be human tapeworm. And then we have malaria. So when they cut that down, the lemurs lost their source of food there. It was also a place for them to hide in the protection of those bamboo clumps, and a place to live.

So we’re talking with FOFIFA right now about revisiting a lot of plans of what we want to do.

Ecotourism

We’re talking about putting some treehouses for tourists up in Sangasanga. We could drive up in a solar powered golf cart, fix the road, get them up there so they don’t have to walk in, and then that’s where the aye-ayes are, that’s where the black and white ruffed lemurs are, that’s where the scientists are located. You could go up in the treehouse, have a place to eat, wake up in the morning, maybe have a walk to the top of Sangasanga and watch the sun come up. It’d be a really good tourist trip!

But Madagascar only has around 300,000 tourists a year. And you look at Mauritius, I think that’s 4 million. Kenya has like 11 million or something like that, I know that South Africa has like 8 million or 11 million. I think it’s 2.5 million for Kenya and Tanzania. But they don’t have tourism coming there.

And a lot of it is just that the infrastructure is not built. The roads have gotten worse. They’re terrible. They were really bad in 2000 when I started working there. And they got them fixed. They built the road to up north, and they just didn’t maintenance it. So we went from five days to driving up north during the dry season to a day and a half. And now we’re back up to three days. The roads are bad. Even going to Kianjavato, it used to take us 13 hours from Antananarivo. The worst part is actually a part that was historically good.

It’s not being maintenanced. So you can go from Kianjavato to Ambositra in a pretty good normal amount of time. But then it takes you nine hours on the drive to go from Ambositra to Tana [Antananarivo, the capital city], which used to take five. And the wear and tear on your vehicles and everything else. Who wants to spend two days of their vacation sitting in a car just bouncing around? So a lot of groups are trying to charter flights to cut that down.

Solar adoption

I was impressed by your solar power adoption at MBP!

All four of our sites are off the grid! At GIVB, we had to pull water up from the water reservoir that is 200 meters down the hill. We had to go up the steep hill to get it to the platform where the field station is located. And then we had to move it across the half length of a football field to where all the buildings are located. So now we’re using solar to do that.

We have to have backup, because sometimes we have rain for three months, because it’s in a high altitude rainforest. To be able to provide the showers and the flushing toilets and the lights and the power for everyone, there’s some cost. In Madagascar, most hotels, even in the industrial areas, they have backup generators, because of the unreliability of power with the national company.

There was a great report by Ember recently, showing that solar panels from China are started to be imported in really large, transformative numbers by many African countries, because it’s gotten so cheap. And one of those countries is Madagascar. Outside of your projects, in the towns, the cities, are you seeing more solar adoption?

You see people with panels, leaning against a chair against their house, to charge their little hut. You see that everywhere, more and more. There’s actually some conservation facilities and hotels that now on the West Coast are putting up solar arrays that are so big that they can charge a washing machine and dryers. That’s a lot of power to do that. And they’re doing it!

In the south, we could certainly do it, and I can’t wait to do it, but again, it’s always about money, everything we do is about money.

We’re a Malagasy NGO, so it’s it’s not like a normal U.S. 501c3. We’re not that. But we have a close relationship with Conservation Allies, and they’re helping a lot of Malagasy NGOs. You can go onto their website and you’ll see all these organizations, and you can donate to this one or that one. We do great, I wish we did better trying to get money, but it’s still hard right now, the economy is so scary for so many people. I have a hard time saying “We really need some money to help do this”, and I realize everybody’s in the same boat, they’re all wanting some stability in their lives. So we’re always looking for funding, and we put it to good use. Every dollar we get gets used to build in sustainability. I don’t look at it any other way.

I’d love to hear more about your solar use.

It’s really cool! We have a solar tarp. It’s solar panels that are just a tarp. It’s on top of the KAFS building right now. And it’s a tarp. It was so cool because you don’t have to buy all the metal framing and everything else. You can take it off if you want to. Maybe if a cyclone’s coming, so it doesn’t get ripped off and blown away.

Solar, it’s the technology I wish we were doing more in the United States. I wish we were continuing to do it. There’s a bright spot that was happening, but now we just sort of shut everything back down. They’re not paying attention. And everyone who says they care about their grandkids and their kids in the future, I just don’t believe them anymore because they don’t realize it’s not a joke. It’s real.

When you see flooding and you see it’s happening and it’s going to be too late, you think “we should have done this 10 years ago.” So, I worry about Madagascar. Lots of countries like Belize, Costa Rica or Brazil are really embracing this idea of environment and their future, and hopefully Madagascar will too.

Are you seeing more of a Chinese presence in Madagascar lately?

China’s definitely in Madagascar, with the U.S. pulling out. They’re everywhere. They’re mining for various minerals, and they do a lot of the roads, which only last a couple of years. So they’re here. There’s something to say about showing up. It matters. I wish we were still, as a country, doing the good work in the world, because it matters. You need friends. We all need to be friends and we all need to be joining together. And I think we’re alienating everybody, unfortunately. That’s my opinion.

I’m there, in Madagascar, a lot. I’ve been there almost 30 years. I’ve been there this year, already, five and a half months. When you have so many people, it’s kind of hard to get to everyone and really connect. If we did one-to-one relationships and one-to-one conversations, it would take us years because there’s so many people now. You wouldn’t believe, driving that winding road going down towards KAFS and past it, there’s almost wall-to-wall houses now on both sides of the road. There’s so many people and so many kids.

When you go to the market, there’s somebody with a little table, and on that table is a bunch of peanuts, pistachios, and they have a little empty can that’s cut and they use it to measure it, and they sell it. But right next to them is another person with pistachio and peanuts, and another person. How do they make profit? Everybody’s got their own clientele that comes only to them. There are all these stands of families, and we stop and they’re all yelling at us, come to me, come to me.

So we always have this rule that we start at the end and then every time we come by, we buy the next one over. Because they all have the same stuff and it’s all good quality. We buy a bunch and they say “buy it from me!” I said “I got enough, I can’t buy it just because you want me to buy it, that’s going to go to waste”. That way of doing marketing is always powerful to me because any product is perishable, you harvest it and get rid of it, give it to somebody else, and it’s their problem. You make your money and go.

We’re doing a lot more agricultural stuff. We had Nancy Scott, who’s a master gardener, come over and she does a lot of stuff with the monarch butterfly. In the short amount of time she was there, she just impacted how we were growing stuff, what we were growing. We started feeding ourselves.

Susie’s working in Lavavolo, it’s the only place in the South that’s actually producing romaine lettuce and tomatoes and everything. And they’re doing it. But it took them 10 plus years or longer of failing and failing and failing. Finally, the soil’s good enough, after making compost, that they can grow anything. And they’re growing enough to sell to the market at Itampolo, which is five kilometers away. And enough to feed everybody in the family in the village. You could do that.

Our aquaponics is always smoldering, it’s always there, but it’s never really exploding. People are growing all kinds of stuff on aquaponics. I’ve seen a papaya tree in the middle of an aquaponics system. I wish we could do that. We can use the solar to do the water pumps and things like that. And then hopefully, if you manage it and you take care of it, it pays your family and some.

The big message

You know, in the morning, I’ll wake up and I’m all ready to go. And then at the end of the day, I feel like I’m beat down. Because I get this email or that email and it’s really frustrating. Sometimes I don’t really like to look at my messages because one thing is going to set me off and go, “my God, this is not going to work.” But like I said, my wife and I just have a lot of people on that staff over there working hard. Trying to make ourselves more profitable and more self-sustainable and self-reliant.

I think that’s the big message. Somebody asked me a long time ago what I thought I would want. And I said, well, there’s two things.

If I’m not too old to fly all the time and too old to do this again and again every day, every year, I’d like to go back and I’d see a forest that I started.

And the other thing is, I would love to see that all the students and people are successful, that they want to work with vazahas, the foreigners, but they don’t have to because they’re making their income. They’re doing it on their own. They’re standing on their two feet. They don’t have to be begging for help. And that’s what I’d like to see us complete.

That’s why Susie and I are still going there. It’s been pretty close to 30 years now. I’m 65. I’ve been doing this a long time.

Well, I want to help share your story. And this is really what I’m trying to do with my writing career. I’m trying to connect the stories of people like you who have put so much work that makes the world a better place!

Thank you.

Li An Phoa is the founder of Drinkable Rivers, a Netherlands-based movement that advocates for rivers so clean as to be drinkable. Their tools include river walks, nurturing “river families” to care for their watershed, a book, films, a citizen science programme, and an action guide.

Drinkable Rivers

In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Ms. Li An Phoa’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

I first learned about your Drinkable Rivers project in the Netherlands, at a conference that I was invited to by Johan Sturm in early 2024 about Dutch water management.

This was in the Topshuis, part of the Oosterscheldekering flood barrier. Many people at that conference recommended that I should talk to you and write about your amazing work, and since then I’ve wanted to interview you. I’m excited to get a chance to interview you today!

Nice! That’s why I connected to you on LinkedIn, you had already written an article where you had integrated a link to our work. Probably based on this moment when you were visiting the flood barrier.

Exactly. So, I would love to hear from the beginning the story of Drinkable Rivers, how you started this amazing endeavor and what got you interested in water management and water quality.

I first experienced a river being drinkable when I was 24 in the northern part of Québec, Canada. For me, it was a beautiful experience, a touching one, to drink straight from the river. That deep experience of beauty gave me all kinds of insights. Wondering “Why can’t I drink from my own river anymore?” These questions have informed me since then, but I have to combine them with the fact that not even three years later, I returned in the same place and it was not drinkable anymore. Fish were dying and getting deformed, and people were getting ill.

We canoed for a month on that Rupert River in Canada as a form of a protest paddle against the building of a megadam for hydroelectricity. The building of this dam had started in those three years’ time, and that changed the flow and the self-healing capacity of the river. The mercury that was used in the silver mining industry became a problem, and that’s how fish were dying and getting deformed and people were getting ill.

I gained a lot of information from that experience. In only three years it changed from a healthy and beautiful river to a diseased river, due to our choices and changes in the landscape. Whereas when it happens over multiple generations and say 100 years, you take it as normal somehow. This is called the shifting baseline syndrome.

I was noticing then that I had almost taken a polluted river for granted and normalized that. But I saw that we have the choice to say, what is our norm? Do we choose a polluted river to be normal, or an ecologically healthy river?

It’s not only that we humans should be able to drink from it, it needs to be ecologically healthy to be safe for us to drink from. It’s not the same as drinking water, that’s a very different set of norms and parameters. But it’s an ecologically healthy river. You might think a drinkable river is utopian, but for many different species it’s a given to drink from rivers. Since then, it became my guiding principle and informed me to make my third study, which is whole systems ecology.

After studying business and philosophy, and after about 10 years, I announced it more publicly. I shared with a larger group of people that I’m committing my life to a world with drinkable rivers.

Tell me about your river walks, your walk of the Meuse or Maas. That must have been a fascinating adventure.

I had been walking already a long time. I had set up, for instance, a nomadic school called Spring College. I was already inviting people on joining the walks. Walking is what makes my heart sing! It’s such a tangible way of getting to know landscapes and communities.

I decided to start with the Meuse, that was the river that had been feeding me with drinking water all my youth. The tap water that comes out in Rotterdam, near which I was born, comes from the river Meuse surface water. So I walked it from source to sea!

It was over a thousand kilometers, in 60 days, so no rest day, and staying with local people every night, which gives you an opportunity to really get into the local fabric of what I have been calling, since the River Meuse Walk, the river family.

The river family extends beyond us people. It’s the trees, it’s the fish, it’s the birds, it’s everyone who’s participating in that water journey. Water becomes like our bloodline, it’s linking all of us directly. While walking, I was meeting children, who were doing the citizen science that I first collected for this walk.

I saw that it was such a success with the children, that they liked it, that they got a chance then to experience their water, deepen their understanding, grow their love. I thought, this is the basis for taking care of the water.

We then upgraded the toolkit, made a manual, and made a data platform. Now we are a community of 96 organizations in 25 countries!

Besides those numbers, I met all kind of local communities as well as local decision makers, so mayors and aldermen, experts, professionals, fishermen, guides, artists and historians. Meeting that river family gives you a deeper insight to what the river means.

By saying that I walk for a world with drinkable rivers, and for a drinkable Meuse, it got people thinking. What does the river mean for me, but what can I mean for the river as well? So because of these walks, the river family becomes more visible.

It’s always there, right? It’s a given that we’re connected in that way and that we are participating. But if you’re not aware of it, not making it explicit, how are you then participating within it? That’s what I do with the walks. I make it visible that you are a river family.

We have a choice. Every day we already make a difference, but it is up to us to see what kind of difference we make. Here too, it’s up to the river family, and what degree they are participating in that self-healing quality, that regenerative quality of the river or not.

Does our behavior help towards the drinkable river or not? It seems that it’s very novel to approach us as being part of a watershed, as part of a river family. It’s taking a lot of my time and effort to follow up on this new kind of governance structure that is not institutionalized, the river family, but is a reality. Mayors recognize this: they realize that besides being a mayor of their city, at the same time you’re also mayor of part of their river. They realize that they are dependent on all their upstream neighbors, and that they’re responsible for all their downstream neighbors

To think in terms of a bioregion, essentially.

Well, yeah, but “bioregion” is still quite an abstract word. You know, you need to explain it to people. This is why I love “the river basin” or “the watershed,” because because they are more commonly used words that are place-based. Even in our language, we say a watershed moment, right? You can discern the main watershed and the sub-watersheds. The sub-watersheds are those tributaries to a big side river of the mainstream.

In a watershed, or river basin, all the little tributaries are always moving towards the mainstream. The small is making the big, that’s a very important lesson that I learned from the rivers. Each person is part of their watershed. Wherever, whatever you are doing, it’s part of that journey from your little tributary or sink to the mainstream river and finally to the sea.

After the Meuse walk, I have been continuously walking. In the past 10 years, I walked 21,000 kilometers! After the Meuse, I walked three other Rhine tributaries, but this year there have been two additional ones, which were organized by others. That’s a new pattern that’s happening within the decentralized movement that Drinkable Rivers is becoming. These Rhine tributaries are the IJssel, the Vechte and the Berkel, that I walked completely from source to the main arteries. And then this year also Oude IJssel, and the Nederrijn. So those are the five Rhine tributaries. With the Meuse I started at the mainstream, with the Rhine, I started at the tributaries.

But in the meantime, besides the mainstream, we walked the Dommel and the Mark as tributaries from the beginning of the river to the confluence.

I also walked the Thames and the Danube, and this year, the L’Escaut or the Scheldt until the flood barrier.

So did people in Britain or Romania organize the Thames and Danube walks and then invite you to them? That’s that decentralized aspect you were talking about?

No, those I still organized myself. The ones that I said, the Oude IJssel and the Nederrijn, those two Rhine tributaries, were organized by others, like by Youth for Drinkable Rivers. We have a group of young professionals who take the initiative to do all kinds of activities. One of such activities is organizing a river walk. Those for the Meuse tributaries called the Mark and the Dommel were also organized by people from Youth for Drinkable Rivers. But with the help of local partners, the Thames and the Danube I organized myself.

The Danube is part of a Danube 4 All project. It’s a European project with over 50 organizations collaborating in the 10 Danube countries. They have asked me to develop a guide for people to do a river walk themselves, so that’s what I’m working on right now.

I have been able to coach the Youth for Drinkable Rivers on how to do it, but now the guide will hopefully facilitate that. Coaching people takes a lot of my time too, so we’ll make a little booklet to guide people in the different countries of the Danube watershed to walk their river.

It’s the same as with the citizen science, when we experience our waters again. If you do that, whatever you give attention to, you will deepen your understanding, grow your love, and that that will be the basis for taking care of it. Hopefully the river walks might be a tool to grow and deepen that love.

The Thames walk we organized ourselves, because we have an English book out. Our book is called “Drinkable rivers, how the river became my teacher.” It’s about adventures and insight that have shaped me; it’s about how my thinking evolved; and how this integrative way of looking at and being in the world has developed and how it now culminates in what I do with Drinkable Rivers. Recently our book was awarded book of the year by a community in Woodstock.

Oh, that’s amazing!

I’ve been really impressed by some amazing river restoration projects recently. Many rivers, like the Seine in Paris or the Chicago River in the U.S., are seeing big bounce-backs in their ecology. I’d love to hear what you think about that.

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7 months ago · 20 likes · 2 comments

I also love that you’re not afraid to push for an ambitious goal. The river shouldn’t just be not poisonous or not stinking, it should be drinkable, it should be really, really clean! I love that you’re pushing the envelope and putting out an aspiration for people to push even more, beyond just resolving the crisis. So where do you see your work in the arc of the river restoration efforts that have already succeeded? And what are the next steps?

We always have been saying that the swimmable river is the phase before the drinkable river. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in his book Citadelle said “if you want to build a ship, let people long for the the smell of the sea”. So rather than asking them to pick up nails and wood and saying, this will cost us so much and it will take five years to build the ship, you have to instill that deeper why.

I think if you choose something that is very understandable and yet still embraces the complexity, it doesn’t undermine the complexity, it doesn’t simplify it, but it makes it simple, you feel it. And with swimming and drinking it becomes intimate to us.

It is not to make it focus on only humans, it’s much broader than that of course. And it’s not only to make it very functional, like “we should be able to swim in it and we should be able to drink from it.” It is showing that from that very intimate space that we understand, it gives way to all these life-giving qualities for all life, from the tiniest microorganisms to the animals and the large old trees. That if we are managing to have a drinkable river, it will be an indicator of this whole watershed that is vibrant and alive and healthy.

In the old days, seafarers were used to navigating by the northern star, so we know how it is to have a point that can clarify your direction constantly. But for the rivers, it’s not the same as with the stars. To be guided by a drinkable river means that we might be able to concretely get there as well. Wherever we are now, we can see whatever choice we have to make to go in that direction.

One of the things that is at the roots of many of our choices, and also how we are designing ourselves, is that the way we are designing our economic system is still geared on economic growth, which was basically looking at how to get out of the depression of the two world wars. That’s what we are still doing. And that needs to be radically, from the word radix, from the roots, changed. Because it leads us to a very amoral outcome. It doesn’t take into account whether we now are polluting our waters or not, or if we’re cleaning them, it only counts the gross domestic product.

Yeah, it doesn’t account for the negative externalities.

Exactly. And in order to account for the externalities, you have to have more morality, more of a guidance in our economic behavior that attunes to how life works rather than depleting it.

If we are able to incentivize that internally, everything will look different.

Now we have so many rivers that are too warm, too straight. The valuable fresh water is getting to sea too quickly. We have landscapes that are not sponge-like anymore, they are not cooling our systems anymore, they’re not buffering the water extremes that we’re faced with, both in terms of drought and in terms of high floodings.

Plus all the the substances that are now in our living environments: the people who are giving permits cannot manage it anymore, neither the new or the existing ones. So we have to make it much more simple, and not say “we will not allow the substances that are proven to be unhealthy”, which is the rule now. We need to make a 180 degrees shift. We can only allow substances that are not harmful. Because once it’s approved, it’s too late, as it’s already in our public (common) environments. All the plastics, the medicine residues and so forth.

One thing you touched on a bit with higher flood volumes or sponge landscapes, is the intersection of what you do with climate change. Because climate change is a lot of what I write about, and one thing I’m really struck by is that it’s often really hard to communicate about climate change because it’s not intuitive to people.

The shifting baseline syndrome, like you said, but also the fact that CO2 is a colorless, odorless gas, right? You don’t see it. But what you do is an immediately visceral thing that really engages people. You can see when a river is polluted, and everyone knows what it means to be able to drink from a river without being sick. That’s a vision, like you said, that gives people that dream of the sea that they want to move towards.

And the work you’re doing is also climate work. It’s building wetland landscapes, protect cities, absorb floodwaters, restore healthy rivers that people can hang out by and drink from, or temperature refugia that cool down people during a heat wave.

There’s a huge amount of overlap with that. And we’re even now starting to see some really interesting studies, about how the renewable energy build out, like solar farms, can actually help biodiversity. There was a study coming out recently that floating solar farms on ponds and pools often see water birds making their nests on the little pontoons that hold the panels.

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a year ago · 11 likes

Can you talk about some of the overlap between the river preservation and the renewable energy transition and emissions reduction? Because I think there is a lot of overlap and you’ve started talking about it already.

Let me first clarify, I prefer to talk about climate destabilization rather than climate change. When you are talking about climate destabilization then people understand better. A good example is with 37 degrees (Celsius), we ourselves feel healthy. But if we’re at 36 degrees or 38 degrees, we already feel not so well.

Then people can feel that it’s a very small range where we feel and are healthy. Luckily, we don’t need to think about it or collaborate with others about it, that’s our immune system that is able to bounce constantly to the stabilized state. In the morning you might be 37.5 and in the afternoon you might be 37.1, it’s constantly fluctuating, but it’s going to be in this stable zone. But once you are out of it, when you’re not having an immune system anymore for instance, then that becomes destabilized, and that’s where we are in right now climate-wise, and that gives already much more sense of being able to understand what we’re talking about.

So the fact that water is the base for climate is unfortunately not much talked about. There’s a film by Portuguese filmmakers from the community Tamara called Water is Love. It’s a beautiful film that makes a very interesting animation about how water is the basis for climate.

I’m also one of the protagonists in the film Our Blue World. It’s made by two Irish filmmakers and Liam Neeson is the voiceover. Water is all across the world, all the different continents are in it. You are introduced to the idea that water is really one of the drivers for climate, for cooling it down, for buffering. Because the clouds, the water vapor is the biggest greenhouse gas.

[Context: water vapor is indeed the biggest greenhouse gas, but we don’t worry about it from a climate change perspective because it doesn’t keep accumulating in the atmosphere — it falls back down really fast as rain or snow. The average residence time of a water molecule in Earth’s atmosphere is 9 DAYS. For methane, it’s 12.4 YEARS. For carbon dioxide, it can’t be easily summed up in one value because some CO₂ molecules are absorbed by the ocean very quickly while some stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, but it averages out, broadly speaking, into impacts for CENTURIES].

In Our Blue World is also Professor Kongjian Yu, the founder of Sponge Planet. He unfortunately passed on a week ago. It’s very dramatic that two of these great souls have passed on, but he was way too young. With Jane Goodall, we knew, she was very aware of her next adventure and that was dying. But Kongjian was only 62 and he was, at that moment, still making a film about wetlands. He was above the Pantanal wetlands in Brazil, actually, when that little plane broke.

Anyway, that’s one thing that is lacking in the narratives. And that makes an immediate link with our landscape use. The wetlands, the amount of green that is there, is very much the base part of having a healthy watershed. Then linking that with energy. Energy got a lot of attention, I think, much more than water and much more than land use.

I think what we need to talk about there is also that we are addicted. Our generation is addicted to cheap fossil energy sources, and also using more and more of our energy. Now with AI and all the data storage and transfer, it’s not so visible. If we were still needing to build a fire, we would know what it would take to grow a tree, to cut the tree, to make the first spark of flint and to get the fire. Matches were such a luxurious invention. And then the whole invention of electricity is huge. Now we made a similar kind of jump with AI, but underlying there is an addiction that just grows and grows. I think it’s important for us to, while we are looking for alternatives, to also see what can we learn perhaps from people who are experts in therapy of getting off addictions, to not just accept that it’s getting more and more and more and more, because we also see that from another type of health that we are experiencing. We are having overloads in many ways. We go way too fast.

That’s why I love, for instance, walking. It goes on a pace that we evolved in. It’s so linked with the speed that we are at. But we’re getting beyond a speed that could evolve with you.

It’s only this generation that is doing that, and we don’t know yet those effects, but you do see a lot of mental health issues. All these societal choices are linked to a more public health affair, and it’s not only an environmental health affair, but also much deeper. I think it’s important to make that link, not to separate the cultural and public health and miss that. That’s why, if I’m only seen as an environmentalist or an activist, it’s way too shallow. It’s much more about how are we living and how are we contributing towards our own health, but also towards the health of our places that are keeping us healthy.

I agree with much of what you’re saying, but on the other hand, what we’re seeing is that telling people to consume less leads to massive backlash. My own country, the U.S., is ruled right now by a crazy evil person and a cabal of crazy evil people. And part of that, and we see this in far right movements in the U.S. and in Europe too, is people who are angry at environmental politics.

One thing that I’m kind of trying to square that circle with is renewable energy and providing more alternatives. Like your country, the Netherlands, just made a really inspiring investment in alternative proteins, like plant-based meat and lab-grown meat. I think that one thing that might be helpful for environmentalism is — and this is just a rhetorical thing, and it’s kind of from a place of desperation, given how utterly the political environmental movement has failed in my own country lately — to frame it as almost another aspirational consumer good that people can consume. Even if that’s not as philosophically friendly for us. Just say, “You deserve to have the best environment,” not telling people to not be greedy. Because even if it’s true, a lot of people don’t respond well to that. Just to say, you deserve abundant energy from solar power, you deserve great food from plant-based food, you deserve healthy, clean, drinkable rivers that you can swim in and enjoy.

Because in my country, at least, I think that we’re trying to retreat to a defensible position in the environmental movement. And telling people that they’re greedy, even when it’s true, especially when it’s true, it’s bad politics.

Yeah, I’m not talking about communicating to people now.

So you were in your question asking me about the overlap between the Drinkable Rivers and energy.

I agree, I was just making a comment there.

So I was not doing that. It was much more about seeing how, on a fundamental, societal and also institutional level in a very philosophical way, how we are addicted to more.

But I’m not proposing to say consuming less. I will never talk in those terms, that it’s less. But I do talk about the health, right? About how to promote health. And I do think that it’s not necessary to say you have to do things less, but instead to show you can do them differently.

Like by me showing the river walk. Someone can interpret it as — I don’t see it much like that, but others will interpret it — I’m doing a communication campaign! I’m showing that you don’t only need to do it via social media or via an advertisement. No, I’m just doing a walk. And I’m inviting people to walk along. And as I walk, journalists come and I get almost every day either on local radio or local newspapers or on national ones. Embodying that things could be a different way that is much more linked to our singing heart. For instance, we grew to this community of 96 organizations in 25 countries who are adopting our citizen science. This was not based on any advertisement, it was purely that people had been seeing what we were doing and doing it too.

I agree with you. I was just posing that question to hear your response. I agree with what you’re saying. What you do is beautiful. Like you said, it is what makes people’s souls sing. The idea of walking along a river and being able to drink from it, that speaks to something powerful and primal in humanity. That is something we evolved for. We want to be walking along rivers that we can drink from. And that’s the beauty of what you’re doing, of your vision, that it does attract people to it because it is so deeply, intrinsically desirable. And I really admire that.

Well, what is next for you? What are your plans for future riverwalks? Do you have more riverwalks already planned for more rivers in 2026, maybe?

I’m finalizing this guide for for next year, it’s not yet in English but it’s in the the languages of the rivers. We are making an English version now, and making it river independent. There will be something like this as well for the river walks.

Myself, I will walk the river Amstel. I already walked it before, it’s only two days, but it will have a lot of visibility because it includes Amsterdam.

It’s mainly working on releasing the River World guide and seeing how others are adopting it, because it’s not a race for me to get a new one every time.

At the moment I am also following up with seven different watersheds. On Wednesday two municipalities signed the river intent of the river Scheldt. So now I’m following up on how can it grow, how can other mayors and aldermen and also other organizations follow in that.

And much work also with our book and this film of Our Blue World.

But it’s mostly working with the river families, how to make them grow and thrive, how they adopt the philosophy. And then bringing the guide into being.

Fascinating. That is incredibly noble. Thank you so much. Is there anything else you’d like to share for this interview?

One of the things that people ask is, what can I do?

From that individual point of view, like you mentioned, the plant-based diet, could be a big win. But I think in the coming two weeks, there has been this EU proposal to regulate words related to meat. There were some things like the name “burger,” for a vegan burger, now they are lobbying to say “burger” belongs to the meat world. There was a petition going on for that, to say stop it, and give the freedom that also the vegan or the plant-based things can be called a burger and so on.

But also, in your home, to see your sink as as an actual source of the water. What kind of detergents are you using, and how? If you have a the privilege of a garden, to let more rain water penetrate, infiltrate the soil, create your own compost, try to eat as local and as without poison as possible, those kind of things.

And of course that’s the individual, but if you have your own community with your street or a club, if you have a hobby or something, then you can have much more impact. You can think about what you can do as a community: to green your rooftops, that’s what we, with our neighbors, are trying to do. Not everybody will join, but if you make it very beautiful, then after the first group there might be a second one coming.

Try to think in terms of how can you create more of these kinds of communities, and then as a professional, well, the guide shows different things that you can do. This is mainly written in terms of what you as a mayor or alderman can do in your municipality, but it has different levels.

So those are some things that people who would like to participate could do.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for your work. Very nice meeting you.

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I recently had the honor of interviewing (by email) the Energy Act for Ukraine Foundation, a truly noble and heroic organization founded in 2022 to help power Ukraine’s resistance against Russian atrocities by providing solar power and battery storage to critical infrastructure like schools and hospitals.

The Energy Act for Ukraine Foundation

In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, the Foundation’s responses are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

Could you share the story of how you launched the Energy Act for Ukraine Foundation following Russia’s vile invasion?

The history of our foundation began when the first regions of Kyiv and Chernihiv were liberated from occupation and the whole world saw how devastating its consequences were. That’s when I realized that I couldn’t stay uninvolved in the reconstruction of the country. I wanted to take this reconstruction to a whole new level so that when children returned to school, they would see that their schools had become better than before the destruction. I wanted this to restore their faith in a better, brighter future for themselves and for Ukraine.

With my experience working at the Energy Community and DTEK, I decided to start my own charity. We set an ambitious goal for the next five years—100 solar schools and 50 solar hospitals—and immediately started building the first hybrid solar power plant at a school in the de-occupied city of Irpin.

At that time, there was no talk of blackouts or damage to the power grid. But after the completion of the first facility, during its official opening, a blackout occurred. Ukrainians began to experience prolonged power outages, and we received additional confirmation of the relevance and importance of our work. After all, we provide our facilities with a stable power supply.

Yes, of course, Ukrainians found a quick solution in the form of generators, and many purchased them and use them in case of power outages. But when it comes to social and critical infrastructure facilities, first of all, a generator is an expensive, environmentally unfriendly solution, and secondly, it takes time to start it up, approximately a few minutes. This is more or less acceptable for schools, but for hospitals, especially intensive care units, it is critical.

While implementing our ambitious plan of “100 solar schools and 50 solar hospitals” last year, we realized that these two areas do not fully cover the energy needs of citizens during the war. This is how the third area of the foundation’s activity, “Solar Water Utilities,” came about, because uninterrupted access to water is one of the basic human needs, and our overall resilience and endurance in the fight against the enemy also depends on it.

Therefore, our Energy Act for Ukraine Foundation is installing hybrid solar power plants with energy storage systems for social and critical infrastructure facilities to provide Ukrainians with uninterrupted access to education, medical care, and water to meet their basic daily needs, as well as to promote positive change in Ukraine on the path to a sustainable future.  

Even in a crisis period such as a full-scale war, we recognize the importance of education. Therefore, in the first school where we built a solar power plant, which has now been scaled up, we are conducting a training course for children to help the younger generation understand the value of green energy, how it is generated, and how it is used in critical infrastructure facilities.

Despite the fact that solar energy is actively developing around the world and solar panels have already become part of our everyday life, the biggest challenge is finding qualified, experienced personnel. There is currently a severe shortage of such personnel in Ukraine, as the war is taking people from all professions, and this is also the crisis facing our industry.

Therefore, we decided to realize our long-standing ambition as quickly and efficiently as possible—to attract women to this industry. In a global sense, this is about gender equality, attracting motivated and talented personnel to Ukraine’s energy sector, and new opportunities for professional fulfillment for women during the war and in the future.

What are the effects of Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s civilian grid infrastructure and ordinary life in Ukraine?

I have updated quantitative data on this:

Since 2022, 70% of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been damaged. 80% of thermal power plants and 50% of hydroelectric power plants have been destroyed, which is equivalent to 40 GW of losses since 2022. In August 2025, power outages lasted from 3 to 10 hours in some regions of Ukraine.

In addition, 4,063 schools were damaged and 387 were completely destroyed. As for medical facilities, 2,354 were damaged and 311 were completely destroyed.

Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure have massive, destructive consequences for everyday life, the economy, society, and security. These consequences include frequent and prolonged power outages when power plants are destroyed or the network is damaged, as well as disruptions to the water, heat, and sewage supply. There are also problems with internet and mobile communications. For hospitals, this means an increased risk of shutdowns or interruptions in the operation of vital electrical equipment. For schools, it means forced interruptions to the educational process because distance learning requires internet access and electricity, not to mention the need for classrooms and shelter in school buildings.

What is the value of decentralized clean energy as a tool for freedom and resistance, in Ukraine and around the world?

Decentralized clean energy, including solar stations, wind turbines, small hydroelectric plants, biogas plants, and energy storage facilities, is important for environmental, economic, and strategic reasons. It is a tool for freedom, sustainability, and resistance.

In Ukraine, this has become especially significant since the Russian invasion began, as the enemy has destroyed residential buildings, cultural and educational institutions, businesses, social buildings, and critical infrastructure in an attempt to deprive our people of the opportunity to live, work, study, receive medical treatment, and ultimately meet their basic daily needs.

Solar power plants on the roofs of schools and hospitals and on the grounds of water utilities are a testament to the Ukrainian people’s resilience and steadfastness and our collective ability to find light in the darkness of war.

Could you share some case studies from your amazing 100 Solar Schools project?

In order to provide the younger generation with a high-quality, stable education, Ukrainian schools need a continuous, reliable power supply today. One effective solution is to install a hybrid solar power plant on the school roof. Therefore, we launched the “100 Solar Schools” campaign, which aims to provide 100 war-affected schools with electricity over a five-year period.

We are installing solar stations with energy storage systems that have a capacity ranging from 10 to 30 kW, depending on the school’s needs. Additionally, the “100 Solar Schools” project aims to promote green energy. Together with experts in sustainable development, the foundation conducts optional classes as part of the “Sustainable Development” course for children, teaching them about sustainable development and renewable energy sources.

For instance, we installed hybrid solar power plants in two educational institutions in the Kyiv region: the Lyutizhsky Lyceum and Lyceum No. 1 of the Gostomel1 Village Council.

This project was made possible thanks to the support of the Stabilization Platform, a program created at the request of the German Federal Foreign Office. This is an important step in supporting education and sustainable development in Ukrainian schools.

This support is part of efforts to restore and strengthen resilience in Ukraine through German government programs, such as the Stabilization Platform and GIZ Renewables for Resilient Ukraine (R2U). In both cases, the solar stations power the entire educational institution, except for the food service area. This makes it possible to maintain the educational process during centralized power outages.

I would also like to share the context of the reconstruction of Lyceum No. 1 of the Gostomel Village Council. During the occupation, the invaders lived in the building while forcing civilians to hide in the basement. The occupiers caused significant damage to the lyceum by burning and destroying anything inside related to Ukrainian identity, including educational materials such as textbooks on Ukrainian history and literature, as well as art books. They also stole all computer equipment and other valuable items.

However, the material damage is not the worst thing. Unfortunately, many people were injured and killed. It pains me greatly to say that these were the circumstances surrounding the reconstruction of this educational institution. This is our reality, and we must remember it and tell the world about it.

I am impressed by how this school is thriving: nearly all students displaced within Ukraine or abroad have returned. The school provides a modern, high-quality education and prepares its graduates to enter higher education institutions at a high level.

This is impressive, especially considering that the director of the institution suffered a personal tragedy—he lost one of his sons during the occupation. Despite such a difficult personal experience, he continues to work selflessly, doing everything in his power for his students.

Could you share some case studies from your amazing 50 Solar Hospitals project?

To ensure uninterrupted treatment for hospital patients and adequate conditions for women and infants in maternity wards, we are equipping medical facilities with solar power stations. Since hospitals consume a lot of electricity, our goal is to ensure that the solar power plants can supply electricity to the intensive care and surgical wards in particular. For example, one hospital requires a solar power plant with a minimum capacity of 50 kW and storage systems.

For example, the hybrid solar power plant we installed at the Koryukivka Central District Hospital allows the hospital to operate autonomously for up to four hours, even during blackouts. Thanks to this plant, 70,000 patients have experienced positive changes.

Another example is the Kozelets District Intensive Care Hospital. Thanks to its hybrid solar power station with energy storage systems, the hospital can operate for up to 4.5 hours without a central power supply. The hospital provides care to 97,500 patients per year.

Another example is the Mykolaiv Regional Children’s Clinical Hospital. It is the leading institution for treating children in the region and the main medical institution in the Kherson region. The hospital has 15 specialized departments with modern equipment that requires a constant power supply. Additionally, the hospital’s premises were damaged due to hostilities and rocket attacks near the buildings.

Against this backdrop, the hospital needed a reliable source of electricity to ensure an uninterrupted environment for treating patients and an autonomous power supply. Thanks to donor support and our efforts, 35% of the hospital’s annual energy consumption has been provided by solar energy since May last year. As a result, the medical facility has saved significant funds and used them to purchase necessary equipment, including 13 cardiographs for better diagnosing heart problems in young patients.

I would also like to share another example that illustrates the importance of the solar power stations we have built for medical facilities. Last year, we launched a hybrid solar power station for Kharkiv Regional Hospital. This year, the station saved the day—and possibly someone’s life.

From 11:20 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., the hospital operated entirely on power generated by our station. Peak consumption was 16 kW. The hospital operated uninterrupted for six hours, even during a complete power outage.

In the evening, from 6:25 to 7:55 p.m., the hospital lost power again and was once more kept alive by the energy we helped accumulate. Most importantly, our station powers essential departments, such as surgery and intensive care. This allowed doctors to work without interruption during these hours. That means lives were saved. It’s not just kilowatts and batteries. It’s our response to today’s challenges. It’s what we do together for people, doctors, and those who critically need light and electricity.

Could you discuss the recent Norway and UNDP-supported project to fund solar equipment for hospitals in the heroic city of Kharkiv?

A total of 23 solar stations will be built in Ukrainian hospitals with funding from the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). Our partnership has already enabled the construction of a hybrid solar power plant at a medical facility in southern Ukraine. It will combine solar generation and backup power, allowing the hospital to operate even in conditions of energy instability caused by constant Russian shelling.

The experience and support of this international humanitarian organization have provided a powerful impetus for the implementation of important energy initiatives in Ukraine. Our partnership is a contribution to patient safety, the uninterrupted work of doctors, and a future in which energy works for people.

What are your plans for future Energy Act for Ukraine projects?

Considering our five-year global plan, “100 solar schools + 50 solar hospitals,” and the country’s need for solar water channels, we plan to open 10 more facilities in these categories by the end of this year. In addition, as I mentioned above, we have launched a new area of activity—solar water channels. We also plan to develop this area.

As you can see from everything I have said above, the vectors of our activities are constantly expanding, the scale is increasing, and we are not going to stop, because we see hybrid solar power plants as a great benefit and support for Ukrainians and Ukraine in these difficult times.

We are also working on developing educational activities for children: we are looking for new formats and considering other age groups. We believe that children need to be taught about green energy and sustainable development, so we will expand this area not only quantitatively but also qualitatively.

Right now, we’re thinking about a career guidance program for school kids in solar energy. We’ll also be mixing up the learning formats, which could be movies, cartoons, and books. The main goal is to make sure kids find this info interesting and easy to get in formats they’re used to.

In addition, we will soon be launching a project into which we have put our heart and soul, the best intentions of our team, and the professional experience of our expert trainers: the Solar Step project management course for women, aimed at increasing human resources in the solar energy sector by retraining women.

In four weeks of recruitment, we received over 800 applications for training. Unfortunately, we can only train 50 of them at this time, so we will select the most motivated and interested candidates for this profession. Therefore, our top priority for the near future is to ensure that the rest of those who wish to participate have the opportunity to do so.

But, of course, not only project managers — we plan to cover other professions in solar energy, so we invite interested donors to join us in implementing these important initiatives.

What do you think of the future potential for agrivoltaics in the rich farmlands of Ukraine?

I believe that agrivoltaics, as a combination of solar power plants and crop cultivation on the same plot of land, has enormous potential for Ukraine — strategic, economic, and even socio-political. After all, Ukraine has the potential to become a key partner for Europe in the agricultural and energy sectors.

In a global sense, agrivoltaics for Ukraine is not just a technology, but a double resource of freedom: it simultaneously strengthens the agricultural sector and creates an independent energy sector.

The office and laboratory of the Ukrainian Agrivoltaics Association was destroyed by a Russian drone in early 2025. Nevertheless, the work continues.

What do you think are the prospects for Ukraine’s heroic defense now that far too much of American leadership is listening to hateful Russian propaganda?

As the head of a charitable organization, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on political issues. Thank you in advance for your understanding.

What can readers of this interview, living in other countries, do to help Ukraine?

Powerful volunteer activities are ongoing in Ukraine. You can support the collection of essential supplies for our defenders by making a financial contribution or spreading the word on social media.

The Energy Act for Ukraine Foundation

If you share our values and believe in the importance of our foundation’s work, you can become an ambassador, talk about our activities in your country, or join our distinguished list of donors.

What would you like to discuss that I haven’t already asked? What story would you like to share?

The last facility we opened was a water canal, so I want to share my fresh impressions. Recently, we opened a SES at a strategic water canal in the Kirovohrad region. During the full-scale war, it repeatedly faced the problem of power supply during power outages. As a result, 15,000 local residents who receive water from it were left without water supply for several hours, days, and sometimes even weeks.

Later, the company received a generator and fuel for it, which helped to provide people with water, but this was a rather costly and environmentally unfriendly solution — in order to at least partially stabilize the situation, 7,840 liters of fuel had to be used to operate the generator, which cost the community an additional 700,000 hryvnias.

Thanks to international funding, the water utility received a hybrid solar power plant (SPP), which was built by the Ukrainian charitable foundation Energy Act for Ukraine Foundation as part of the Solar Water Utilities project. This SPP was built with the support of the international humanitarian organization Mercy Corps. Thanks to the station, the city now has an uninterrupted water supply even in the event of blackouts.

The SES [solar energy structure] in Kirovohrad Oblast is expected to generate about 141.45 MWh of electricity per year, which will allow the community to save more than €24,000 annually on electricity bills. In addition, the station has an important environmental mission, as its operation will reduce CO₂ emissions by almost 44 tons over 25 years, which is equivalent to planting 2,200 trees.

Thus, our Charitable Foundation continues its important mission to increase Ukraine’s energy independence, expand its areas of activity, and provide specialized education for children and women.

The Energy Act for Ukraine Foundation

I sincerely thank you for this interview, for giving us the opportunity to talk about our foundation and its activities. It is thanks to publications, posts, stories, and other media formats that our partners and donors learn about us, and when we are talked about in Ukraine, the communities that need to join our initiatives learn about us. Therefore, information, the work of journalists, and your work in particular, are a great help to our team and a guarantee of the continuation and expansion of our activities. So, it was very pleasant and important for me to answer your questions and share the experience and plans of our team. I am always happy to talk, please come again!

Thank you.

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The 6th Monthly Dose of Climate Hope live event took place on October 8, 2025! hosted an in-depth conversation with Victor Mwanga, founder of EarthLungs, the largest reforestation NGO in Kenya. The YouTube recording is above. This was a follow-up to a previous interview with Mr. Mwanga in October 2024.

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: Interview with Victor Mwanga, CEO of EarthLungs Reforestation Foundation

Victor Mwanga is the founder and CEO of the EarthLungs Reforestation Foundation, which has planted over 32 million trees across Kenya. When Climate Action Now members earn trees for taking actions in the CAN app, EarthLungs is the group planting those trees. Here’s their story…

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2 years ago · 37 likes · 4 comments

Give the Gift of Trees

Lassor Feasley is the CEO and co-founder of Renewables.org, an innovative new nonprofit microfinance platform that allows investors to support solar development in the Global South with zero-interest philanthropic loans.

Check out Renewables.org!

In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Mr. Feasley’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

Climate Action Now is actively working on partnering with Renewables.org.

I am super excited about Renewables.org, and I would love to hear from you the story of how it came to be! What is it? What’s the model? How did you get involved? And why is it incredibly awesome?

Thank you!

Yeah, so Renewables.org is the online Global South solar investing nonprofit. Anyone can invest as little as $25 in Global South solar and get repaid as they generate and sell clean electricity to the grid. When you invest $25 in Renewables.org, we lend that money to Global South solar developers. And those solar developers go out and fund and build new commercial solar projects.