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Despite the rampant disinformation and a huge number of skeptics online, the planet is indeed facing serious climate chaos. Carbon emissions are at an all-time high, greenhouse gases continue to warm up the earth, and climate change severely destroys biodiversity. Ecologist and author Mark J. Easter joins Corinna Bellizzi to discuss how regenerative farming can address this alarming global problem. They talk about what it takes to adopt better farming practices to produce nutritious organic food without causing a destructive impact on the environment. Mark also explains how the same regenerative approach is needed for producing animal products and why the burning of fossil fuels must be halted as soon as possible.

 

About Mark J. Easter

Care More Be Better | Mark J. Easter | Climate Chaos

Mark J. Easter (Fort Collins, CO) is an ecologist who has conducted research in academia and private industry since 1988. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 1982 and a M.S. in Botany from the University of Vermont in 1991.

Easter authored and co-authored more than fifty scientific papers and reports related to carbon cycling and the carbon footprint of agriculture, forestry, and other land uses. He contributed analyses to multiple reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In 2018 he was named a fellow of the Colorado State University School of Global Environmental Sustainability. Besides his scientific work, Easter co-founded the organization Save The Poudre and is a founding board member of the organization “Save the Colorado.”

He works with these organizations to help restore rivers to healthy conditions and protect rivers from water development. He loves to read, cook from his garden, hike and ski in wild places, and spend time with his wife, Leslie Brown and their dog, Bonny.

 

Additional Resources Mentioned:

How Regeneration Can Change The Future Of Farming And Winemaking With Carlo Mondavi

Farm To Table Pioneer Champions Sustainable Farming with Monarch Tractor - featuring Alice Waters, Founder of Chez Panisse

Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation with Paul Hawken

Proforestation featuring Dr. William Moomaw, lead architect of the first 6 IPCC reports

The Blue Plate: A Food Lover's Guide to Climate Chaos by Mark J. Easter

 

Show Notes:

The Blue Plate - 02:51

What made you choose to write The Blue Plate and in the specific way you've done it? Was it for food lovers like me?

Regenerative Farming - 08:59

That's one of the key aspects of regenerative farming where consumers can make a difference with that connection to local farmers when you and your neighbors go to a grower.

Better Farming Choices - 16:49

I wanted to offer you a moment to talk about how as a consumer or as somebody who cares about this and who's thinking about the intersection of climate health, your health, and your food sources.

Possible Solutions - 23:53

We have a certain food that we're growing on our own property but don't have the lettuces and everything else.

Integration Of Animals - 29:44

As you mention all of this, I can't help but think also of the integration of animals.

Seafood - 34:41

One of the most exciting examples is on the seafood side.

Fossil Fuels - 53:51

What I'd really love to do is offer you the floor to talk about perhaps a closing thought or two

Episode Wrap-up - 56:15

This wasn't my obvious honor to host this conversation.

 

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How Regenerative Farming Can Solve Climate Chaos With Mark J. Easter

Welcome to the show. In each episode, I invite you to care more so that together, we can create a better world as part of my commitment to create that better, greener world. I'm planting a tree for each new subscriber on my website, CircleB.co. When you join, you'll be the first to hear about new episodes, exclusive promotions, and more. Join our circle by visiting CircleB.co.

If you are a foodie who cares about the environment, you are in for a treat. I'm joined by Mark Easter. He's an Ecologist who has conducted research in academia and private industry since 1988. As part of a Colorado State University team of greenhouse gas accountants, his mission is to understand how greenhouse gases move into and out of our soils and plants on farms and ranches.

He has traveled globally to collaborate with farmers, ranchers, foresters, and others to learn how the ways people grow food and fiber make agriculture healthier and less damaging to our climate. He's here to connect these many dots as we explore his new book, The Blue Plate: A Food Lovers Guide to Climate Chaos, published by Patagonia Press. With that, I'll welcome him to the stage.

‐‐‐

Mark Easter, welcome.

It is great to see you. Thanks for having me on.

The Blue Plate

I'm so thrilled that you're here. I really do love that you've chosen to tackle one of my favorite intersections, which is food and the environment. What made you choose to write The Blue Plate and in the specific way you've done it? Was it for food lovers like me?

I started to write this book because I realized that I and my colleagues working on these problems of greenhouse gas accounting and agriculture were mostly talking to each other. We weren't trying to communicate with the public. At the time, the scientific community was really struggling with how to talk about climate change and the climate crisis to the world at large. We were mostly writing papers that we read that other people wrote and we weren't doing a good job trying to explain in relevant detail to the public what it all meant, what the dangers were, and what could be done.

I was working with colleagues at CSU, in particular, Sue Campbell and John Calderazzo, who had started an initiative to try and infuse the topic of climate change into the entire curriculum there. I realized I could play a role there, not just at CSU but also for the public at large. I embarked on this book with the idea that rather than making it a science primer, it needed to be about the stories behind the emissions but, more importantly, the stories behind people that I regard as heroes and heroines in the agricultural space.

Those are the farmers and ranchers who had taken the risk and who were going beyond the prescriptive agriculture that many of them had adopted and trying to do things in a way that were healthier for the soil and healthier for the animals that they were raising and also producing healthier, more nutritious food ultimately for the consumer. I was delighted to be able to connect with all these people who I'd been working with for years and who generously loaned their stories to this book. I'm grateful to them.

I'm sure you know some of the people that I'll likely mention in this conversation. I was a speaker at a Soil & Health forum. It's a Soil & Health forum held at Terra Nova Farm in Petaluma. There, I got to meet Tim LaSalle who has been a grandfather in the space of regenerative agriculture. You've produced this book with Patagonia. Patagonia and Yvon Chouinard were pretty deeply involved in the development of a regenerative organic certification with part of the argument being that they could create food that was both healthier for the planet and healthier for you. I know the science has been somewhat unbalanced perhaps or not as definitive as we'd like it to be. With regard to that question, is it truly healthier for you, and so far, what is the nutrition profile that it offers? What can you say about that?

It's one of the places where it really means the most to the individual consumer. The evidence is mounting that food grown with these regenerative methods has a better nutrition profile. It's richer in the sorts of things that are important for human nutrition, vitamins and minerals. Beyond that, if you eat pasture-raised products, products that are produced outside of the confined animal feeding operations where the livestock are able to eat food that they evolved with as opposed to food that, in some cases, they’re being coerced to eat in order to gain weight more quickly and produce a fattier meat product or dairy products, those foods are not necessarily as healthy as what we see from products where animals are raised in what we are starting to call regenerative agricultural means. For plant-based foods, the evidence is really starting to show that it's healthier for people in the end, and in my own experience, it's more delicious.

I once got the chance to see Alice Waters speak. She's somebody who has helped to really bring forward more nutritious food, organic produce, and things like that into the world of restauranting with her restaurant called Chez Panisse, which is in Berkeley, California. She spoke at an event for Monarch Tractors.

Carlo Mondavi and his collaborators were bringing forward fully autonomous and electric tractors that could be used to maintain fields without using as many chemicals and things like that. They put laser zappers programmed on them. They go out and run a course and kill weeds so that you don't have to worry about weeds infiltrating your harvest and things along those lines. It’s genius stuff that they're tackling with this technology perspective in farming and doing so with electric vehicles.

She got up on stage and shared the story of being in France, going to a local farmer's market, and finding carrots that were so much more delicious than the carrots she was finding at home. Being a restaurateur who wanted to make a much nicer and healthier meal that tasted way better, she came back armed with that knowledge and was on a mission to then work with farmers locally to get a carrot that could be better like this. That then extended to the other herbs and produce that she bought for her restaurant.

It put her restaurant on the map where a discerning palette could be served with the best vegetarian meals you could ever imagine. I've yet to dine there myself, but I hear only great things. I feel it, feeling that story and knowing what it's like to pick a piece of fruit or a vegetable when it's at its peak ripeness and consume it on the spot.

Regenerative Farming

That's one of the key aspects of regenerative farming where consumers can make a difference with that connection to local farmers when you and your neighbors go to a grower and say, “Are you growing these things regeneratively?” The more they hear about that, the more incentive the growers have to take those sorts of steps.

When we go to the grocery store to try to find these foods, it can be much harder because we're insulated from the growers, sometimes by thousands of miles to buy the products. We may know a little bit about the story that's on the label, but we don't necessarily have the opportunity to reach out to them directly and say, “I love your product, but can you do this?”

Some of that will be changing. You have the ROC Certification, Regenerative Organic Certified, which was championed by Yvon Chouinard and the Patagonia team. They even have a regenerative organic-certified pasta that they're selling. Patagonia Provisions is the division, correct?

Yeah.

They have a team of people working to help bring these things to light. There's another certification, also led by Gabe Brown, which is the ReGen Certification. There are some differences, but ultimately, they're on the same track of trying to help farmers create more regenerative solutions. It's always helpful, especially if somebody's new to the topic, to define what that means. We can get into the meat and potatoes of it and talk about carbon sequestration and the life cycle of carbon within the soil, which I know you know a lot about, given your carbon accounting workshops and things like that.

When we think about regenerative farming, what we think is a carbon focus. That's abstract. We're really trying to focus on increasing and maintaining organic matter in the soil. More than anything else, organic matter in the soil and the ecosystem around it, the trees and the plants is ecosystem capital. If you think about a successful business, businesses that are doing well are typically well-capitalized, and they have a good income stream that matches their expenses and hopefully exceeds that. The more capital you have in the business and the more capital you have in the ecosystem, the better off it is.

Focusing on increasing the organic matter in the soil and in the ecosystem, which is what crop fields, pastures, and orchards are, these are all ecosystems. Maximizing the organic matter and carbon in the system tends to lead to healthier, more productive systems. They're more resilient. They tend to produce more nutritious food. That resilience extends onto a lot of different levels, from resistance to pests to resilience to drought. They can absorb more water during these increasingly common flood events.

Regenerative farming maximizes the organic matter and carbon to create healthier and more productive systems. It becomes more resilient against pests and drought.

In the end, we're finding that growers tend to make more money. It's more profitable for them. They're able to weather the inevitable ups and downs in the farm economy because of variabilities in weather, market conditions, and things like that. Regenerative farming, from my perspective and that of a lot of other people, focuses on maximizing the carbon and organic matter in the system and focusing on the health of the soil.

When we think about this, you are sequestering more carbon. The soil is more rich in that carbon. The plants need that to grow. It helps them to sequester more water as well so that they're more able to withstand things like droughts or floods. Less topsoil washes away and into the gutters. You won't be as likely to have a septic root system develop. I'm trying to think of all the other challenges that can come up.

What it boils down to in terms of practices, farmers who are growing regeneratively tend to try to keep a living root in the soil 365 days a year rather than, let's say, for example, growing a corn crop or soybean crop. From the time it's planted to the time it's harvested, they try to get what we call cover crops established as quickly as possible after the crop is harvested or maybe come in and plant the cover crop while the corn or soybean crop is still growing.

It gets established, and as soon as the harvest is done, that crop is ready to take off and keep going. What you're really doing with that is you're maximizing the amount of organic matter that these plants are producing. They're photosynthesizing. They're building up biomass, but at the same time, they're feeding the microbes in the soil.

One of the most fascinating things about regenerative agriculture and carbon farming is the connection between the plants and microbes in the soil. They've co-evolved to rely upon each other. The more you have these plant roots growing actively in the soil and the biomass they create above ground, the more food you create for the microbes in the soil and the more effectively they're able to capture nutrients and cycle those nutrients to the plants. That's exactly what they're doing. The plants are feeding the microbes. The microbes capture nutrients in the soil and feed them to the plants in exchange for them. It's a fascinating symbiotic relationship. It's so mysterious.

I wanted to show people a picture from your book, especially those who are watching it on YouTube. This is a beautiful illustration. Farmers who have experience digging their hands in the soil understand this. The network of roots is almost like capillaries when you get into the soil. They are a network that helps the topsoil stay in place.

You also have the health of the other microbiota that are present there. That means the mushrooms and all of the little microorganisms that help to digest the sugars that are excreted on the roots of the plants provide organic matter to the soil. The worms eat them, and then they poop out the black gold that also helps the gardens to thrive. It's this entire beautiful matrix of living soil that can support the growth of these plants, but what we've done for so long is plow a field open. I'm here on the central coast of California. If I drive between my home and Scotts Valley to Monterey, I'm going through farmland for most of that. Those fields are plowed.

We've discussed this on the show before. I interviewed Paul Hawken, for example. He shared that you turn that soil from its beautiful matrix to dust at a certain point. The dust blows away with the wind or is washed away in the gutters and it ends up littering our waterways with the chemicals that are present in the gutters. Suddenly, we're polluting our ocean world too. All of these things are connected.

Getting something right on the farm means that the food is better. It also means that we can keep the rivers and waters blue and support that beautiful blue planet by having this beautiful blue plate serving it. I see this as a digestible textbook for the public, and I also see it as a research tool to learn more. You have this chart on page 89, which shows the vegetable supply chain in winter. Guess what? A lot of it comes out of California.

More than 90%. It's amazing.

We see things like Ukraine as the breadbasket of Europe. California is the produce basket of the United States and much of the world. When I go to Hawaii any time of the year, all the berries there are typically from Watsonville, California, or Mexico, depending on the season. This is where we grow a lot of our food, from the artichokes to the berries, the parsnips, the carrots, the heads of lettuce, and everything else. A lot of transportation has to bring it from where it's grown to where people consume it. How do we make better choices?

I've spent a fair amount of time on the Central Coast, the Salinas Valley, and other areas around there, talking with farmers and extension agents from the University of California and agents from the NRCS and others but mostly talking with the farmers. It's fascinating to learn about the economic pressures they're under.

One grower said to me, “The problem is the pressures are all in the wrong direction for us. They're working with land that costs tens of thousands of dollars per acre.” They are under so much pressure to get the crop out. I remember one fascinating story from a strawberry grower that mirrored what I heard from grape growers where the Palm Desert is. If they can get their crop out into the field or into the marketplace a week or two ahead of their competitors, it will triple or quadruple their profit margin because they can charge that much more. The early berries cost that much more.

The pressure that they were under prevented them from trying to plant a cover crop. If they did, these regenerative practices that we're talking about, getting the cover crop in there tilling less creates enough risk of them being able to get the strawberry plants established and get into the market earlier or at the start of the market season. They said, “I can't absorb that risk.” They leave the soil bare for months longer than it might normally be or it prevents them from trying to get another crop cycle or another crop in, like a broccoli crop or something else of high value.

What would a common cover crop be for something like a strawberry field if we were to envision it?

In general, I can't say explicitly for strawberry fields. I'd love to get some of those extension specialists and some of the growers who are managing to do this sort of stuff. Generally, you want as much diversity as you can get. You want as many different plant communities or plant families as you can. You want some grass. You want some legumes like peas, vetch, or things like that. These are plants that fix nitrogen. We want some brassicas like broccoli or canola. A really common one is buckwheat.

If you get a diverse mix like that, the cover crop is going to mimic what we see in ecosystems. The more diversity you have, the more resilience you're going to have to variability and conditions and the more biomass they're going to produce. It's that biomass and getting the maximum amount of roots into the soil that we're talking about that the farmers are looking for. As much nitrogen as possible that they can get into the soil before they plant their main crop means that much fertilizer they don't have to purchase. If they can do that, then that's that much less greenhouse gas emissions that are emitted from manufacturing and transporting that fertilizer onto the field.

Care More Be Better | Mark J. Easter | Climate Chaos

 

Much of the fertilizer that is used is ripe with petrochemicals themselves. If we start to think about wanting to limit our exposure to petrochemicals, which can also not make the water that runs off of fantastic quality, applying so many of these fertilizers can also mean that the water that gets into the table, if it's trying to be reused, its salt contents are too high. At a certain point, the crop doesn't like it, so then you have to use more fresh water.

You have to leach the salts out, and that creates pressure on rivers. There are greenhouse gas emissions that come from the irrigation reservoirs upstream, which creates more demand for the ecosystem in other places. We're squeezing the balloon in ways that are increasingly unsustainable.

It's one of the most heartbreaking things for me. I love being this connected or this close to a lot of the food that's grown. I drive through to go to Monterey and maybe visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium or go to Asilomar State Beach and enjoy some time by that ocean. I live pretty close to the Pacific, but I enjoy that scenic drive. I'll take it every once in a while.

You drive through and see the strawberry field and see the plastic sheeting laid down. Every season, they rip out the strawberries and put new strawberries in. I'm like, “Don't strawberries have better yields if they're left in the soil? Why don't they leave them in the soil? What are the questions behind this?” My mind cycles into a variety of other questions.

Part of this is that I grow strawberries in my front yard, and I have them as my own little cover crop. A tree that was planted before I moved in as a non-fruiting cherry. I would never choose to plant a non-fruiting tree, frankly. This is not what I would have done. In my backyard, I have a pluot, a plum, and another pluot that has decided never to fruit. That was why I had to get the plum in the first place. I also have an apple tree. One is self-pollinating, the other requires a friend, and they pollinate one another. Underneath my cherry tree, I have a cover crop of strawberries. When they come to their ripeness, my kids go and pick them and eat those sun-kissed beauties straight from the garden.

That sounds delicious.

Possible Solutions

It's amazing. Other than that, I mostly grow herbs. I also have two lemon trees because I love lemons. I can never have enough of them, apparently. We have a certain food that we're growing on our own property but don't have the lettuces and everything else. Much of those produce are grown in mono-cropped plots like the strawberries I described. This is a more conventional farming method, even if they're grown organic.

I frankly haven't seen as rapid an implementation of regenerative practices in so many of these farms in California as I would have liked to see or as I had even anticipated. I figured, “If you're already organically certified, why wouldn't you? This makes a lot of economic sense because you don't have to use the same level of fertilizers. You could be introducing new crops. You could also be integrating other resources without having to spend millions of dollars on the pesticides and fertilizers that are so common in conventional crop growth.” If they make this transition, there's a good business case for it. If they don't, they continue to plow.

We hear words like, “Our topsoil is degrading.” The last number I heard is something like 60 harvests before much of that topsoil is gone. I don't know how true some of these things are. I'm asking for a litmus test. Do you think we are at a point where this is emergent and we have to fix these systems now or do we have some time to get this figured out?

Focusing on your question from the standpoint of greenhouse gas emissions and the climate crisis that we face, the scientists within the IPCC, and this is studies that I've contributed to, and certain analyses indicate that we have to start drawing carbon out of the atmosphere back into the earth system. The least cost, most efficient way to do that appears to be through agriculture and, to some extent, through forestry.

The other technology out there, synthetic carbon capture or synthetic photosynthesis, is promising and exciting from a tech standpoint but requires a lot of energy. The costs are in the hundreds of dollars per ton of carbon pulled into this, whereas it's in the tens or certainly less than $100 per ton to do it through agriculture. It's also a technology that's available to us.

I've worked a lot in the policy space here. We don't necessarily have the right policy mechanisms to create incentives for growers. The technological assistance that the growers need in order to implement these sorts of things is not completely there. There are a lot of growers out there who are taking the risk and trying it out, but ultimately, what I hear from the growers is that there has to be a market there for them.

They have to be able to sell the product to a marketplace that is going to pay a fair and equitable rate for the product, and it has to meet a certain quality standard that the marketplace expects. Those are difficult hurdles. It's a maze of different barriers that are in place. I see time and again that growers want to do these sorts of things. As soon as a market emerges, they step in, or as soon as they're able to create the market themselves through co-ops and other sorts of things like that.

One of the exciting things that I see is how compost is starting to become more available, the opportunities in leveraging compost in these systems, and what it means for the climate. California is a real leader in this space. They’re keeping the food waste out of the landfills along with yard waste, directing that into the compost streams, and then leveraging compost on grazing lands and into cropping systems like the strawberries you've been talking about. There's a great opportunity because we're not avoiding greenhouse gas emissions by keeping the food waste out of the landfills where microbes produce methane.

By directing it into composting programs, we're avoiding those methane emissions. Not only that, we're building carbon in the soil. We're feeding the microbes, which are going to do a better job of transferring those nutrients to the plants. It generally requires less fertilizer. When you require less fertilizer, it requires less greenhouse gas emissions to manufacture fertilizer. It's one of those things where the benefits build in layers, and when you add them all up, it's really significant. It's a big deal. It's exciting to see that starting to happen.

Care More Be Better | Mark J. Easter | Climate Chaos

 

I know there are other practices. There's a tremendous amount of work being done by the University of California, CSU or Colorado State University, and other places around the country and around the world to try to help proliferate these processes into the farming system. We’re hungry for solutions. We're hungry for urgent improvement. These things don't feel like they're happening fast enough, but they are happening and they are moving forward.

Integration Of Animals

As you mention all of this, I can't help but think also of the integration of animals. Many will ask the question because they hear that a vegetarian diet is more earth-friendly. Instead of having to grow the crops to feed the animals and then have to also handle the methane production that they put into the world, especially when they're grown in these Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs, if we can omit that piece or reduce our reliance on so much animal meat production, then the primary food will be the vegetation that we're already growing anyway and that soil can sequester carbon. The bigger question is whether it is possible to eat a sustainable meal while still eating meat. If so, what does that look like?

I spent a lot of time talking about that in a chapter in the book titled The Cow in the Room. For me and for the scientific community, what we seem to be converging on is that beyond the enteric emissions, the famous cow belches, the methane that's coming out from cattle, sheep, and, to some degree, other animals, there are tremendous greenhouse gas emissions that are produced upstream of the cow to produce the forage to ship the corn, soybeans, hay, and other things where the cattle are being fed, whether it's in a feedlot or in dairies. It’s not just cows but pigs and chickens. There's a really significant burden associated with that.

There's also a deforestation burden associated with that in order to produce soybeans for an increasingly meat-hungry planet. Let’s say, for example, in South America, forests end up getting cleared in order to create the cropland, and grasslands end up getting plowed in order to create the cropland. When you do that, we have very large carbon emissions that come off of those forests. We're losing that ecosystem capital that I was talking about before. That's increasingly problematic.

There's an important study out there that I'll plug. It was written in 2017. It's titled Grazed and Confused. It came out of the UK, but it includes authors and scientists from around the world. They spent a number of years working on this. What they conclude is that the earth system can't really continue to keep eating meat at the rate we're doing. We probably have to start eating less of it. The meat that we are eating, we have to start raising it in more sustainable ways.

The earth cannot continue eating meat at the rate we are. We must start eating less of it and raising it in more sustainable ways.

There's another important, interesting aspect to this. When it comes to raising food in our own foodshed, if we're going to eat locally in many parts of the world, we can consume a 100% plant-based diet. For me, the vast majority is plant-based. In some parts of the world, it would be problematic ecologically and for watersheds and airsheds to try to grow crops. There are many examples in California, including the coast range, Marin County, Sonoma County, and places like that. You simply don't want to be plowing the soil there to try and grow potatoes and wheat. They tried that early on.

The agriculture systems in those areas have evolved around grass-fed dairies to the extent that they are consistent with trying to protect the soil, water, and air there and support local wildlife. Those are probably the most effective agricultural systems in that area if humans are going to live there and are going to eat from their own food shed.

There are many other parts of the world that are like that. There are parts of Africa, like the Sahel. It would be a disaster to try to grow staple crops like millet and sorghum in parts of the Sahel. The only thing that is sustainable in that area is to raise grazing animals in ways that have evolved over millennia in those regions. Here in Colorado, there are parts of the state where the only thing that's viable to raise if you're going to raise food is going to be grazing cattle, sheep, goats, and other sorts of livestock.

Seafood

Pivoting to other sorts of alternatives, such as lower carbon emission meats like pastured poultry, is a way to help reduce those emissions where they are viable. One of the most exciting examples is on the seafood side. What we're discovering is that if you're going to eat animal products, probably the lowest carbon emission animal protein is going to be farmed shellfish. In particular, mussels, oysters, clams, scallops, and those sorts of things have so much utility in terms of supporting the ecosystem.

Shellfish were major parts of the ecosystem. Wherever you have a coastline, there are shellfish there. Shellfish populations were virtually wiped out by industrial agriculture with sedimentation that came in and wiped out oyster beds in many parts of Chesapeake Bay and other parts of the East and West Coast. Restoring those through farming methods is cleaning the water. It's also providing a viable source of protein there.

This is the thing that is so fascinating. In the shells, they're taking carbon dioxide out of the ocean from the atmosphere through the ocean as a vector and fixing it into their shells. They're turning CO2 in the atmosphere into rock for all intents and purposes. What can be better than that, producing a food source that sequesters carbon and turns it into rock that unless you drop it in a bath of hot sulfuric acid, it's going to remain in rock?

We need more of that. Otherwise, the water continues to acidify. You get too much carbon in the water. Suddenly, mollusks can't develop their shells in the larval stage because the water is too acidic.

Exactly. That's a great risk to the shellfish growers I spoke with and I talk about in the book as well.

I love that. That's a fantastic point. I, myself, have transitioned to mostly whole foods and plant-based eating. I still eat bread and I still sometimes put butter on my sourdough. My family as a whole is not vegan but I'm pretty close. I call myself not-militant. In part, this is because the meat I loved to consume the most was fish and sashimi. The more I continued to learn about how our oceans are doing, the more troubled I became.

I also don't think we have figured out the proper way to farm the fish we've chosen as our primary eating staples, like tuna, salmon, cod, and bass. Those are the four fish we're farming the most. We feed them corn and soy, which is ridiculous to me. These are aquatic creatures. Why on earth would you feed them corn and soy? After I interviewed Simen Sætre with The New Fish and learned how dismal Norway's salmon fish farming operations truly are, I lost a taste for it. I still desire it, but I lost a taste for it.

What I will say overall is in this week’s course, we're doing an assessment of what your favorite food is. I frankly don't have a favorite food from a vegan palate yet. I still feel like sashimi is my favorite food. I chose tuna to look at. You, in your book, in a couple of spots, reference the carbon cost of fish. One of them that was the highest was shrimp. I want to dig into that in a minute, but first, I'm going to start with the tuna.

Better Farming Choices

Tuna was among the lowest. In fact, it was less than chicken. It's almost like they herd the tuna into what will be an open net where they continue to feed it so that it can go from its juvenile state to a more market-sized fish that could weigh up to 1,500 pounds and command a lot of money. They're still able to feed them from local food sources, like sardines that they might have captured from a purse seine net or something to that effect.

There's not a huge transit of those locally caught feeder fish to the tuna. Once the tuna is butchered and then fileted expertly, it turns into quite the financial harvest, too. They're expensive fish. When you think about how much you pay for sashimi, you start to understand this. The amount of space that they're taking up in the ocean is not incredible, but still, when we look at the tuna as one, for instance, they're at 5% of what their peak biomass was. We call this sustainable. I look at it and go, “Who's calling this sustainable? You have this MSC-certified tuna. Why is that even possible?” My hackles go up and my skepticism is on high alert.

That's good. You're paying attention. That's something we all have to do. You mentioned the Monterey Bay Aquarium before. They were ground-breaking and producing an app. I can’t remember the name of the app. Forgive me.

Seafood Watch.

Thank you.

They also have it as a little card that you can take away with you, put in your wallet, and bring out.

I have it in my wallet. I've got the app on my phone. Whenever I'm in a restaurant, I have a Portlandia moment with the waiter or waitress. I ask them, “Where's it coming from?” If it's not on the app and listed as sustainable, I pass it by. What's so fascinating about this is that part of the reason that tuna is relatively low carbon is that previously, the stocks were high, and it was relatively easy to catch and extremely productive.

As pressure on the wild fishery increases, more incentives are being created for people to use the farming method that you described. That puts more pressure on the bait fish, the anchovies, sardines, menhaden, or whatever it is. There are emissions associated with that, but there's also pressure on that. We could be eating the sardines and anchovies as well or leaving those stalks available for wild fish to feed the wild fish. It's fascinating that aquaculture is a relatively new industry, or I should say industrial conventional aquaculture. On smaller scales, it goes back thousands of years, but we're talking about growing fish in rice paddies or growing in.

It’s like prawn fishing.

In Hawaii, these fascinating systems involve the interaction between fish that move back and forth between the estuaries and freshwater. They're farmed there effectively. It has transitioned into these large systems. In many parts of the aquaculture industry, they've translated the beef, dairy, pig, and chicken CAFO to net pen farming.

It’s certainly what we've done with salmon.

It's being done with a lot of other things. The shrimp story was especially troubling for me because, like billions of people around the world, I love the taste of shrimp. Unfortunately, the way shrimp is being farmed now, and it was much worse previously, but it's still a big problem, is it’s farmed in coastal areas. The most productive areas to farm it are in what used to be mangrove forests. Mangrove forests are the most carbon-rich ecosystems in the world, next to the redwood forest in California. There are mangrove forests with more carbon than some redwood groves. It's fascinating.

The other thing that is fascinating about it is that they are the nurseries of the ocean. There are hundreds of fish species that depend directly upon the mangroves to be able to come in and mate, breed, and produce offspring where the offspring live before they go out into the ocean. In order to create the ponds where the shrimp can be grown, the mangroves are cleared, and the ponds are created. Shrimp that previously were being raised in these native ecosystems, such as the mangrove forest are grown. They're replacing a wild ecosystem that produced the shrimp with a farmed, more intensive system.

That's why the cost is then estimated to be so much more than the other fish sources because of what it replaced.

It carries that legacy. It's five times the legacy of many other fish sources.

There is a chart in the book for people who are interested. It is on pages 148 to 149. The big bar in the middle is the shrimp.

The gray part of that at the bottom is the loss or the emissions from the deforestation of the mangroves.

I was very curious to see that. The farmed shrimp is very high on that front. That's the doom and gloom of it. We've got to get to a point where we are in more of a solutions space and where we are smarter about this stuff. Box one, which we should check, is to limit our consumption of food that has grown in CAFOs. Seek out those local sustainable growers of produce. Maybe it's a local CSA program that you're a part of.

Shop at the farmer's market. That stuff is local, fresh, and in season. That's going to be at its peak ripeness and its peak nutrition profile. It has a lot going for it. We don't make time and space for that as much as we perhaps should. That's more challenging if you're living in a space where you don't have a lot of local farming occurring, but more people are even creating urban gardens. I'm encouraged.

I understand that you interviewed a number of food producers while you were writing this book that are already bending the climate emissions curve and contributing to climate solutions. In fact, you told a story of some of those urban farms within the setting of your book. I'd love for you to talk about some of that so we can get a vision of what the future could look like.

In summary here, the way that all of us can play a role in this is relatively straightforward. For those of you who are fans of Michael Pollan, he wrote the book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. he opened the book with this saying, “Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.” Wasn't that wonderful?

Care More Be Better | Mark J. Easter | Climate Chaos

It's so clear. The American waistband has expanded quite a bit. This is not just the United States. It's pretty much everywhere in a more developed world where we're spending more time in front of our computers. I have a standing desk. As I conduct this interview, I'm standing. Even the simple action of standing as opposed to sitting all day is much better for your health and for your body. I do go to the gym every day. I take my dogs for a hike. I'm out in the wilderness.

Even if I do all those things and I'm consuming too much of the wrong thing, guess what? I get quite chubby pretty easily without trying too hard. Part of this is metabolic, and part of it is aging. It really gets down to the fact that we're not consuming as many whole real foods anymore. We tend to eat more processed stuff.

The processed stuff has a lot of hidden not-so-great things in it, like a lot of salt, sugar, and processed oils, some of which can be trans fats or hydrogenated oils. They are put in these formulas that are irresistible. They say, “Pop the top. Can't stop.” That's the jingle for Pringles. At any rate, we have these alliterations for a reason. It becomes increasingly hard for people because they're trying to manage their health, too. It can seem like it's daunting. You’re telling me I have to cook everything myself and eat only the foods my grandmother would identify, which means I'm baking my own bread in the kitchen.

It is the difference between what Michael called food and food-like substances in his book. I want to acknowledge, first of all, that as hard as it is for a lot of growers to adopt the regen model and try and deliver those healthier, more nutritious foods, it's equally hard for the consumer in a lot of places, especially where there are food deserts and especially for people who are working 2 or 3 jobs to try and make ends meet.

They've got kids. They're trying to live a good life. They're trying to provide for their families and make sure that things are better for their kids. It can be so hard in the food system that we have to try to find those alternatives. We really need to work towards a more equitable food system that makes that possible and easier for people. This diet that's better for ourselves ultimately is better for the planet as well.

We need to work towards a more equitable food system that will make it easier for people to adopt a healthier diet.

It's interesting. As the US economy and most other developed nations have evolved, individual consumers have become more separated from where their food has grown and from the farmers. In the developing world, and I've worked a lot in Africa, Asia, and South America, people every day or every few days go to the local farmer's market or go to the actual farmer where they buy their food. They know who's growing their food in most cases. It’s not in every case. They know them by name or they know the farm.

That's one of the things that really separates us, those barriers. As we become more affluent, as a society, we've either demanded or accepted the foods that are being produced and sold to us in grocery stores for convenience and a lot of other reasons. There are so many benefits that come from it. When we're able to take those steps and move forward with our own health, those benefits accrue upstream to the ecosystem around us and to the planet as a whole.

One of my favorite spots to visit in the world is Paris. I love Paris. My last time there was several years ago, before my first child was born. I would often stay and les allées piétonnes, which means the walking alleys. What was beautiful about this section of Paris, and I'm encouraged to see more cities becoming a little bit more like this, is that they close the streets to traffic most of the time. They only open it for an hour in the mornings before the businesses open up for deliveries. Other than that, it's for walking.

Each day, you have the local breadmaker who sets up their displays, local produce, and all of these things. You walk through and you buy your daily produce because you live in this very walkable neighborhood. It's on your way to the metro or your office. It’s a more walkable situation. I do see that we're starting to get into that kind of lifestyle. That's part of the solution, not to say it's all of it. When we are encouraged to bring in the fresh harvest from that day, from that half of the week, or whatever and we have easy access to it, then suddenly, that solution becomes the apparent one. It'll be easy to adopt that.

When those people who are selling the retail are connected directly to the growers as opposed to having the giant semi that pulls up and unloads the pallet into the restaurant, the grocery store, or something like that, establishing those tighter food chains and creating food sheds around where we live is part of the solution of establishing that connection.

There'll be less space because you're only gathering what you really need into those systems, too, because you're not planning to fill an entire giant display for stuff that's got to be there for three days.

Ideally.

That's another issue entirely. I have two topics that I don't think we were able to make enough time for, but I would love to connect again to dig more deeply into this concept of pro-forestation, perhaps the role of forests, and even things with some of the degraded forests because we've created more pasture land or we're creating more cropland for something like soybeans.

I was reviewing some research on what is called the ecosystem wilting point threshold. I don’t know how much you know about this, but I'm starting to understand some of it. It's almost as if the forest got too small to be able to support its own water cycle, and therefore it crosses this threshold where it starts to wilt. Plants are meant to wilt when it gets really hot in the day, but then they come back as it gets cooler. If we don't get them water at a certain point, guess what? They fail, too.

I'm starting to develop concern for the redwood forest where I live because so much of it has burned down. It’s beyond the point of recovery in some neighborhoods where there's nothing left. I'm personally seeing on my morning hikes that the redwoods themselves seem drier and that the ground squirrels are starting to cross the road from the chaparral into the redwoods, which is an early indicator from the fauna perspective.

The ecosystem is changing.

Fossil Fuels

I've lived in this spot for over a decade and I'm noticing the change. It's very gradual, but it's happening. We could think more broadly, and I could spend many more hours talking to you about this, but I've so enjoyed what you have shared thus far. What I'd really love to do is offer you the floor to talk about perhaps a closing thought or two, or if there was a question that you wish I had asked but hadn't gotten to, you could ask and answer it.

I've really enjoyed this time with you. As a closing thought, what the scientific community has coalesced around is the firm understanding that we have to stop burning fossil fuels. It's necessary. We have to do that as quickly as possible. There's no way around that. With that, the critical cousin to that practice is we have to draw carbon out of the atmosphere back into the earth system. There is simply too much carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere and other trace gases.

We have to reduce the emissions that come from the farming systems, but we also have to draw the carbon down. There's no way to keep the climate from warming past what is firmly believed to be dangerous levels, even though it's already becoming dangerous. In order to do that, the best way that there seems to be is through agriculture, reforestation where it works, afforestation, and these sorts of things like planting trees.

Regenerative agriculture appears to be one of the best ways to go about that. It's a very hopeful process. It's a hopeful vision that I see coming from the farmers and ranchers who are doing this sort of thing. It seems to be a win-win across the board. It's a no-regret strategy, helping to cool the planet while producing more nutritious food and creating a more profitable agricultural system that's more resilient and healthier for watersheds, healthier air, and better for the livestock raised there. There don't seem to be downsides despite the challenges. I'll leave you with that hopeful vision.

Right on. This has been my absolute pleasure. I invite you to come back at any time. I'll invite you back soon. Thank you.

Thank you. It's great to be here.

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Episode Wrap-up

This wasn't my obvious honor to host this conversation. I want to encourage each of you to pick up your copy of The Blue Plate: A Food Lover's Guide to Climate Chaos. You'll learn a ton. It operates as a resource and there are hopeful stories peppered throughout it. You may even do a simple review of what you're eating and see how you could eat a little smarter for the climate. Solutions like choosing the oyster over something like the shrimp can make a big difference in the long-term.

I also encourage you to visit the blog page on CircleB.co. As Mark described earlier, the mangrove forests are one very important point of the ecosystem that we need to protect and preserve. One of the things that we're doing with our collaboration with ForestPlanet.org is to work with them to restore those mangrove forests.

For every person who joins our mailing list, we are planting a tree. You'll be the first to know about these new resources like this book and hear from people that I interview on the show. You'll even have some special promos along the way as well. While you visit our website, I encourage you to poke around and view some of the other episodes that we've had here, including our interview with Paul Hawken or even our interview with Dr. William Moomaw, who was the lead architect of the first six IPCC reports.

When you visit CircleB.co, keep in mind that it's also a cause before commerce education resource and marketplace. You can browse around and find some gift items, even some coffee or tea that are regeneratively grown, organic, and delicious. With that, I want to thank all of you for joining me on this journey. Thank you for being a part of this show and this community. Together, we can do so much more. We can care more. We can be better. We can eat and live better and reduce our carbon load along the way. Thank you.

 

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