Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 13: Amanda Joy Ravenhill
This blog is a transcription of the 13th episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua.
In this episode, Gregory interviews Amanda Joy Ravenhill, leader in the regeneration movement and cofounder of Project Drawdown. Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher; or read the transcription below.
Gregory Landua: Alright, welcome to the Planetary Regeneration Podcast Amanda. I’m here with Amanda Raven-Hill. I’m so excited to get to talk. We don’t get to hang out as much as I’d like, but I always value the time that we get to spend together, so I’m super grateful for you hopping on and taking the deep dive
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Thank you so much for having me.
Gregory Landua: So there is so many different things that I’m excited to talk to you about. I was just throwing a few of them out but I’d kinda love to start with just you know, maybe sharing a little bit with myself and listeners about what gives you the most hope right now? What are you tuning into that when you tune into it, you just sort of feel your heart swell up and you’re like yes? Like it’s all happening in a beautiful way and there is hope.
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um, yeah it’s this notion that Janine Benyus offered to me. She is the author of Biomimicry, of course and she was the board chair at Project Draw Down in our early years and she spoke to how humans can become and have been a beneficial species
Gregory Landua: Hmm um
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: And that shift from this kind of global identity that we have of being a cancer and needing to be smaller and live simply so that other’s may simply live and kind of this just scarcity mentality that’s one goddess and the first here in the first place and then two permeated the environmental movement to the point that we haven’t gotten anywhere. That shifting over to we can be a beneficial species and the humans planted the Amazon and look at all of this amazing work that we’re doing all over the world in order to create healthy ecosystems and vibrant communities and you know better livelihood for those who have been historically oppressed and marginalized. There’s just so much good news about us doing a good job and I feel like I have a really unique and fortunate kind of crow’s nest on spaceship earth you know I’m like on top of this certain part of the ship where I’m able to see so many of these efforts and so many people having great success and I’ve shifted that identity that I know that I can be a beneficial you know keystone species and that we all can and that yeah, just brings me to life. Literally, brings me to life.
Gregory Landua: I love that and I so resonate with this sort of humans as a keystone species. As kind of like the guide the North Star for you know our era, this moment in time. What does that mean? How do we do that? Well, so I mean there’s a lot there. I mean maybe some of our listeners are you know maybe some listeners are betwixt and between different paradigms you know I myself from day to day sometimes I find myself kind of like pretty firmly rooted and you know humans as a regenerative keystone beneficial species and sort of seeing myself and my family and my community and other humans through that lens and sometimes I notice that I collapse back down into this sort of you know yeah as you described it, scarcity mindset where you know there’s sort of like a more defensive dent so I’m just curious what — maybe describing how — well, I mean let’s do this in a couple of layers like first what is the evidence, like the empirical evidence that you ground not that that’s the only way of knowing but what is the empirical evidence that you lean into that like reinforces the story of humans as a beneficial species?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um, yeah a lot of it comes from getting to know stories about traditional ecological knowledge or you know ingenious ways of understanding and managing life in the ecosystems so one that I mentioned earlier was humans planted the Amazon of course trees propagate themselves but there is a lot of evidence to show that the soil was built by and many of trees were planted by humans in this kind of symbiotic neutralistic dynamic and that you know Charles Mann wrote the book 1491 which was huge for kind of getting the bio-char movement started of like looking at the soil of the Amazon, this terra preta, this dark soil. Dark earth that included a lot of bio-char, you know we don’t know how many Native Americans there were before you know the genocide, but we know that there is evidence that humans were kind of a central part of that. So that was kind of you know centuries ago, now looking at today, eighty percent of the biodiversity in the world is managed by five percent of the people who are indigenous, so they’re doing it, it’s happening, it’s all around us. They’re under resourced which is partially what we’re doing at the Buckminster Fuller’s Institute is resourcing them and learning from them in the process. And then also if you look at the Americas and look at like the — you know the history of the Bison and there was sixty million it was the largest herd in the world. Sixty million Bison that were very much lived in this again reciprocal relationship with the indigenous people to the point where we had 50 feet of healthy soil. Fifty feet of it, so yeah, a lot of it comes back to kind of indigenous historical knowledge, but also looking at what’s happening now.
Gregory Landua: Hmm um, yeah awesome I know I’m — one of the more inspiring recent works that I read was I think it was called Cultural Forest of the Amazon. Which was this sort of pillar ethno-botanical work that was correlating long term in-habitation of this sort of refugia zones with the biodiversity hotspots in the Amazon and then which is sort of separate but connected to the terra preta story. Super exciting to think about and just have that image of humans in non-extractive relationship with the greater than human world. I really, that is, I so resonate with that as like the most hopeful image and — cool well, so now the next phase that question like so first I was asking you what’s maybe some of the empirical underpinnings of your hope, right? And so leaning strongly on emerging science and history and present day management outcomes of indigenous people sounds like it’s kind of at the top of the list. What are — at least in my experience, paradigm shift and sort of maintenance of paradigm or like how we’re approaching epistemologically ontologically a world and like our world view, our Cosmo vision, isn’t simply irrational, mental exercise it’s sort of full body somatic who are you hanging out with? How are? What practices do you connect with in order to shift your being state you know? So, maybe if you wouldn’t mind describing just like, how do you experience yourself, the shift between, you know the old paradigm you are inhabiting and the new paradigm? Do you experience that — like a back and forth, on what rhythm and what do you do or what do you notice supports you living from the paradigm that you would choose?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah, yeah it’s — you know I think this idea of we are the regeneration is this idea that many of us kind of came up with independently in the last ten years which is beautiful it’s like a — it’s proof that it is happening I think but it’s this idea that everyone who is alive today has this opportunity of being a part of this Omni generation everyone who is alive. That gets to kind of do this transition of an old school and just really only temporary old school, right? It’s like this five hundred year dream that we’ve been in or nightmare. We’ve been in of scarcity and my outback you know short term thinking and selfishness and everything into kind of this remembering what it means free in chanting with the world, so I think of everyone alive as part of this transition and its tough cause it’s — we’re so en-grained in linear thinking and kind of like these root causes of you know a lot of it’s based on scarcity and kind of enoughness and competition and it’s tough cause it’s so en-grained in us we don’t even know how often we’re using it. We’re using the language of reduction as — and yeah, I try to just on a personal level, just notice how often I can refrain you know and so
Gregory Landua: What does it feel like — what like for you, if you notice like if you could hold an image in your mind of a moment maybe recently that you like were — felt yourself collapse into the sort of scarcity mindset versus a moment where you were really clearly sort of like embodying the beneficial story. What — do you notice a different sensory experience in your body and you know like the quality of your thoughts?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um, yeah, there’s like an opening, it just happened this morning so we’re working on this project called Re-generosity which is about increasing the velocity of capital to regenerative projects all over the world while also learning from them. Breaking the power dynamic and instead of going out and thinking about one shifting it from we have a pipeline of projects to we have a watershed of projects so that kind of shift and then two thinking about going out and funding — and getting and fundraising versus going out and healing others
Gregory Landua: Yeah
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: That shift of like I need and they have to, we’re all in this together to heal and to evolve yeah it just felt like kind of like an opening and yeah I guess a shift away from fear
Gregory Landua: It’s interesting that re-languaging element I remember I watched a presentation by Sally Calhune who for listeners who aren’t familiar with her. She is a billionaire and really active funder in the regenerative agriculture movement and has started this initiative called the No Regrets Initiative which is sort of all about investing, you know like her foundation is mandated to burn down like they’re there to reinvest the capital right, into the roots of a new system and remember listening to her talk about her team drawing inspiration from living systems and starting to re-language this sort of like battlefield business language, of you know pipelines and target markets and all of this stuff to you know sort of like watershed and soil ecosystem and a microbial regeneration and like the inspiration and the shift that was and I sort of heard the echo of that in your answer which is you know you can tell by the language you’re using and it’s interesting I mean there is a couple of points there one is you know how do you build a bridge? Like how do you use language that is representative of a wholeness of being and thinking an approach without alienating and bifurcating from people who are using a different language and so that’s something that’s like a constant struggle you know how do you not just become an in crowd that’s you know sort of like using jargon and getting out into woo woo land sort of maintain rigor and you know so that’s one question I have which is you know how do you experience that in relating to? Because you’re a bridge builder so you’re building bridges between you know funders and doers and you know pioneers and those who want to support pioneers and pioneers in one another and sort of you know how do you experience this sort of question of creating common language and when to use the watershed metaphor and when to just hold it in your mind or something?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Right, yeah I think one kind of key to unlock that is humor Buckminster Fuller talked about how like humor exist at the like place between systems it’s like when you kinda can be in two different worlds yeah and I think you know this time that we’re in is what I call the awkward era of like the good news is getting better and the bad news is getting worst and there’s just like a lot of awkward times right now. And so to like lean into that as an element of humor and an element of being able to kind of you know humor can also go straight to the truth in a way right. Things are often funny when you find them to be true, you haven’t really realized they were true. So I think that’s one kind of key to unlocking that bridge between worlds and yeah it’s something I’m like taking a lot of clowning classes and learning about this year because I think it’s something I want to — I already innately love humor and all of that, but I want to get even better at it so that we can use it as a tool
Gregory Landua: So wait you’re taking clowning classes?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um yeah
Gregory Landua: Awesome
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah, and reading books about tricksters and just I think there is an edge there Buckminster Fuller himself was definitely a trickster and he’s basically a performance artist, you know just like this — our architect accountant guy, he wore an accountant’s outfit as a costume so that people would take him more seriously
Gregory Landua: Yeah
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: So yeah and he’s my muse, so you know, I look to him for inspiration in a lot of different ways.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that sort of trickster coyote archetype a lot recently and just as it relates to leadership and seeing certain things happen in our sort of proximate environment you know seeing leaders either fail or followers of the perception that the leader is failing and how — whether or not it’s intentional, those moments are what create community strength you know like if a leader ceases to be the one that everybody can count on, people have to grow up and like take leadership and connect with their own intrinsic motivation about why they were there in the first place. So there’s this sort of like — I’m just been wondering, I’ve been starting to think you know in myself — and in myself there has been different moments in my life when I’ve intentionally — I’ve set intentions to sort of be a leader who fails or who like steps back, so that other people step forward but then in the middle of it, I forget that that was my intention and then I — when I’m in the middle of even, sort of a plan failure, it gets really like heartbreaking or challenging or shameful for me. I don’t know, you know, so anyway I’ve just been really thinking about that you know like what is the archetype I mean, or what are the archetypes of the leaders for the regeneration? What are the ways in which you know there’s a polycentric or plurality of leaders and then how do we show up in that and how is that different from old archetype of leaders in your mind?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah, it’s something I think about a lot and still verbally open to new ideas that’s not something I found a lot of insight around quite yet. But the one thing that comes to mind that kind of weaves couple of those threads together is this idea of a good stultz switch this thing that Buckminster Fuller use to do so well oh thought things were actually this way? They actually like zoom you know totally flipped around and I think that’s kind of the trickster archetype. But also you know kind of like a good leader of just like let’s just show you a different way of seeing and then allowing you to kind of walk into that new way. So one of the ones that I’m you know a big fan of is loving carbon, you know like carbon at the — you know at the elemental level hold hands and collaborates you know it’s like this like basis of all life. Well, almost all of life on earth and yeah I think just showing people oh wow I hadn’t thought about it like that as a leader and then letting people kinda go within that. Like kinda leader, as like insight or yeah, I keep on coming back to like trickster or gesture or just like seeing things from a fresh perspective but then not being like — and this is exactly how it’s gonna be from there and this is you know kind of more prescriptive of exactly what it means to be it’s more just like an opening and awakening as leadership
Gregory Landua: Yeah, yeah just thinking of this you know the old paradigm like style of leadership that I’m aware of or that sort of I feel innately or you know there’s sort of like this strength and capacity you know there’s like you have to be highly capable as a leader to maintain respect and you need to sort of like not be wrong and if you are wrong it leads to this sort of questioning of your authority and your capability and let’s find somebody else who is more capable, dynamic and then people sort of you know you see this even in bureaucratic structures where authority currently there’s this rapid undermining of authority where people no longer trust the old pillars of society to be telling the truth whether or not they’re like actively lying or they just can’t keep up or there’s sort of like a campaign to undermine them for other reasons or all of the above. There’s just sort of like disillusion of authority, it feels like in society more broadly, you know like people just don’t trust anymore in the places we’re used to source trust from and what I was hearing you talk about was you know the inspiration you drew from — draw from Bucky Fuller in his style of leadership which is more about asking a paradigm shifting question, a good stultz shifting question and then allowing people to make their own meaning and their own choices and connect with their own intrinsic wisdom and less about providing like a 40 point plan for how to get from A to B and I just really resonate with that and I think it’s interesting because that’s such a non-it’s such a messy style of leadership because neither the leader nor the led in quotes or maybe neither the provocateur nor the provoked or you know, however, the positions are — know what will actually happen, so there’s mystery in magic, there’s emergence, there’s the potential to meet the present moment but on the other hand there’s you know, the potential for things to go terrifyingly in some direction that you never knew or something like that. So it’s interesting that the magic and the release and the terror sort of like this psychological balance of that exercise of leadership in the present moment, it’s like release is the name of the game kind of
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah
Gregory Landua: How do you manage planning in an organization? How does BFI do like long term planning in a way that is infused with this understanding that we’re talking about?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um yeah so we do kind of like you know three year strategic plans kind of pretty traditional non-profit style but then we’re also actually doing a global plan inspired by Bucky’s work so he was asked that kind of question asking leader of you know one of his quotes is — you know I realized the answer because it’s a paraphrase I realized the answer to the problem by like eliminating what wasn’t you know and like really seeking always seeking truth and more depth, so those outside of it, but then he also had the world design science decade and this like world inventory of world resources human trends and needs and like of all of this very detailed not quite blueprint but like almost towards that plan of how to retool the world to work for 100 percent of humanity and now we are updating that for this next decade, we just kind of rekindled the design science decade for the twenties and now we have five two year phases that are really kind of like milestones and ideas of what needs to happen in what order depending on you know kind of an order of operations or dependencies of certain things and so it’s based on this kind of newer understanding and you know post scarcity kind of economics and that sort of thing but they also have some specific things in there so it’s kind of a balance of the two and just to briefly say cause we’re just writing this right now this is the first time I’m talking about it publicly. The five phases are reconciliation, restoration, resilience, regeneration and rejoicing and those are each five two year phases that obviously all interact with one another they are discreet but —
Gregory Landua: Beautiful
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: We are — we’re painting it all out because of you know this idea of like if you put things out there if you paint a picture for the future that is possible then people can start to weave in there threads into it so instead of every single detail being put out there we’re enabling this availability cascade which is this cognitive bias of like that which you have available it’s kind of like a shared vision that becomes a shared reality that cascades into being so we’re releasing that for the next couple months and throughout the year and a bunch of different events yeah
Gregory Landua: Say more about that —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: A combination of those two
Gregory Landua: Say more about that availability bias
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: What do you mean by that?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: So the availability cascade is this cognitive bias there’s also the availability puristic, they both inspired our work with Project Draw Down which I founded with Paul Hawkins six years ago. Now because no one was talking about how to solve climate change or if they were it was just climate energy as one word and not talking about the [inaudible 26:34] part of it and girl’s education and family planning and materials and all the other pieces that go into it. Anyway, so the availability cascade is this idea of like if we have these examples available to us of like what the future could possibly be then we’re more likely to kind of work — take actions towards making those possible, so an example would be you know, if you have four people in your family with PhD’s you can kind of see that’s like an available example to you. You can kind of see what steps they took in order to get those degrees there’s all sorts of layers of privilege and different elements there of course. But there’s an element of you knowing that a PhD is possible because you have seen other people kind of walk towards that and you’ve seen that that is possible in your realm, so that can happen in the future that you know you look at and see that other people are claiming we can reduce average global temperatures in thirty years
Gregory Landua: Hmm um
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Not everyone knows that that’s not being told out there but once it is we’re like oh wait how does that happen? Oh so these things need to happen we need to have this mass transfer of a trillion tons of co2 out of the atmosphere and into life through our soul and our trees and a little bit —
Gregory Landua: You know, I often times think that the biggest blessing in the next decade is that trillion tons of excess carbon in the atmosphere because —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: Otherwise all of the carbon that we just flushed into the ocean from soil erosion we wouldn’t have any way to put it back
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Right, right
Gregory Landua: Typically it’s —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: And get to bring it back in the ocean is through bringing our whales back through bringing our coastal ecosystems back our mangroves our salt marshes
Gregory Landua: It’s funny how —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Fish —
Gregory Landua: It’s funny how the old Bill Mollison principle and quote of the problem is the solution, right?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Right
Gregory Landua: The co2 in our atmosphere is the opportunity to turn into live that is the name of the game right now is turn all of that you know atmospheric carbon that was once life and fossilized and turned into petroleum and then we used it to turn — to create a global civilization a globe spanning you know force of geology
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: That is humanity right now. Now we have the opportunity to turn the entire global economic apparatus into a life building
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: Apparatus
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: With this quality of life and this access to information and all of these things that afforded us this sort of like brief blip in our — in the hall of seeing moment in which climate was perfect and —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: And you know we developed all of these its like — it’s all a miracle after miracle after miracle. Sort of crystallizing into this miracle in which our biggest problem is a resource that we can reinvest into life itself, it kind of blows my mind
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Right
Gregory Landua: And the fact that that isn’t the story that everybody’s telling is
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Right
Gregory Landua: Equally mind blowing
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um yeah and speaking of using like old and new language at the same time like we can mine the sky
Gregory Landua: Exactly
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: With the old school right? Language to create
Gregory Landua: Yeah
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: An abundant earth you know and restock life you know it’s like we’re a big grocery store we need to like restock the aisles with all of the insects and everything
Gregory Landua: Yeah
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: And we get to do so with all this technology. Buckminster Fuller said we build all the right — we will build all the right tools for the wrong reasons first, right? And so I’m obsessed with looking at these like I have this old tattoo on my shoulder that’s all about this it’s like we’re this chick Buckland’s refer says you know hatching from our eggshell and that we’ve — so much more capable than we know, we’ve built all these right tools for the wrong reasons and we’re going through this state change where we’re realizing what to do with our feathers and our wings and our claws and you know like a bird that’s been in this me me me land and now we’re like expanding out into the regenerative existence and like we’re using all the processing power that we built for war and we’re now understanding climate and ecosystems you know drones that we used for surveillance are now planting a poly-culture of trees and then inoculating the soil with microbes. We’re using you know space travel which started out as like looking beyond the earth it’s now like looking back and telling us how the earth functions you know, GPS there’s just all of these tools that mostly were built for war and weaponry and in a scarcity mindset that is now helping us go through this transition to a thrivable world
Gregory Landua: Yeah, yeah definitely I totally resonate with that I mean it part of the most amazing thing I think in this era is that retooling of geo- spacial earth observation capacity from, you know what once was just sort of the per view of government and spy satellites which is still scary to think about like the capacity, the amount of things that are open source now and like what the capacity must be, it kind of is mind blowing to me, you know like because there is still surveillance capacity of enormous potential and at the same time on the positive side of that, like we have every five days there’s a global data set of the entire surface of the planet at ten meter resolution that is publicly freely available to everyone.
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: It’s amazing yeah and then with planet every day at three meters not as publicly but —
Gregory Landua: There’s charge and mostly sell it to the you know NSA not to throw you under the bus planet but really
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: It’s a step in a larger process of having an earth observation control center but yeah, I mean but it is all scary, it’s like a frightening moment you know as a chick is hatching from its egg, it’s like you know a fly or die moment. But I think another thing that’s being shifted is like granting person-hood to corporations is now being used as granting person-hood to natural systems with the right equipment —
Gregory Landua: Watersheds and rivers that’s one of the — in the context of Regen Network and this sort of like douse and discos and sort of distributive organizations I’m so excited to you know have sort of you know durable digital representation and governance of living systems as sort of like entities as being nested together and you know creating [inaudible 33:53] I think it’s definitely one of the more sort of compelling and exciting opportunities that yeah I mean like cryptography again, an orphan of war that we’re adopting right? Cryptography was generated to encrypt signals, so that you could plan and coordinate across distances in order to attack one another and it fully military application and now you know cryptographic network technology sort of underpins this whole sort of peer to peer information technology revolution taking place.
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: Yes, so it’s just one thing after another, giant convergence of opportunity
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um, yeah, yeah and overall it’s like you know one way think about it, we’re moving towards a generous economy right? So we have like sharing economy elements of that, caring economy, people focusing more on like caring for one another and bringing that health into the economy and then like this access to information in a way that’s rooted in the rights of nature, can really enable us to be kind of — generosity is what ensues when you’re not in scarcity, right? It’s like if I know that my — you know my win is a win for all, then I’m gonna be in this much more generous mode and we’re seeing yeah, this convergence happening across you know from crypto to rights of nature to you know just how we’re treating information, open science, open source, all of these kind of open movements that are happening.
Gregory Landua: Yeah so what’s — what are you tracking in the rights of nature movement right now, that has you excited? Is there anything you know, I’ve noticed it’s been a hot topic in several of sort of the intersect — social intersections that you and I share. I haven’t necessarily been privy to anything new taking place for say, sort of like just a new group of people getting excited about it, but I may be wrong about that like is there something that’s moving there that feels like a sort of more solid you know iteration and prototyping of what rights of nature means beyond, what happened you know five, six, maybe ten years ago. I guess, it was ten years plus ago that you know Bolivia and Ecuador sort of did some constitutional work there and you know sort of there’s been some other legal work but is — what’s happening? What has you excited there?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah, I mean I feel like there’s just a constant stream of wins of you know nature whether that’s a watershed or a river or elves as being granted person-hood in also using this thing that is —
Gregory Landua: In courts so there’s like people passing — like people are through judicial processes winning person-hood for sort of nature essentially
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Right, yeah, yeah. I mean I’m constantly looking for like what is the flip of the root causes of the problems that got us here, right? Like one of my definitions of regeneration is solving problems while dissolving the root causes, right? It’s looking at the whole health of the whole system and so one of the root causes is definitely granting person-hood to corporations and money and politics and that just affects so much and so granting person-hood to nature is kind of like the flip, the root, the healing and whatever that would be of that root cause you know using the same tool for healing reasons. So that’s part of it, it’s just kind of the trickle of person-hood being granted to these natural systems and then the other part is this group called Jump Scale you may be familiar with in New York, whose put together a three year comprehensive plan of how to move the entire global economy over to a rights of nature economy and they’re working with a lot of indigenous people mostly across the Americas but I think opening from there in order to yeah do it right and they’re really spending this first year kind of exploring what they’re indigenous partners kind of do with their life plans for their bio-regions and yeah I’m really excited about that project and yeah look forward to them growing. There’s also somewhat on the side but I think interwoven with that of the decolonizing wealth movement of a lot more people kind of showing what’s going on with philanthropy of 94 percent of the philanthropy goes to white led organizations and there just seems to be first in awareness and now actually capital moving over to indigenous and people of color and unclear, in like other historically oppressed populations being able to lead these organizations and I think with that comes you know there’s so much intersection reality and awareness of one another’s you know things that we’ve overcome and resilience there that I think it’s gonna have — it will have kind of this you know complexity, gosh I’m lost in my own thought but the — it will be like this cascade of there’s so many inter-dependencies of kind of how the world will like thrive. I have this as — ok here’s a visual vision of it —
Gregory Landua: Yeah lay it out
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: There’s this vision of like we’ve been working on regeneration obviously there’s like the millennial long regeneration but like within the last couple decades a lot of us have been working on it and there’s kind of like a lag effect and I feel like a lot of the work to — whether it’s you know restoring salmon populations or using crypto to imagine new economies or you know making land more fertile, banning pesticides all of these things. I feel like in the design science decade we say it’s gonna happen in 2026 but there’ll be like this way of every generation kind of like all those pieces will start to kind of find one another and build this web of — yeah just global feeling and wealth and truth and thriving where they’ll kind of begin to build off of one another in this really beautiful world
Gregory Landua: Yeah, so may it be, so it is
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: Beautiful vision I’m sort of reminded of, there’s this I mean sort of random aside — I don’t remember which gosh which Kim Stanley Robinson book is it? It’s a — shoot, but anyway one of — one of Kim Stanley — are you familiar with Kim Stanley Robinson?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Only a little bit
Gregory Landua: Oh well you should —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Know of but I haven’t read
Gregory Landua: Oh you should definitely read all of Kim Stanley Robinson’s stuff. He’s the most epic sort of anarchist science regeneration sci-fi writer you know it’s all — all of his books are really amazing but there’s particularly there’s often-time there’s these scenes and characters of people sort of doing kind of like ecopolis, gaia-polisis sort of the economy of creation and in one of his books it just resonated with what you’re talking about. There’s like — there’s this essentially like worker own co-op whose job is in post climate change sort of like post sea level rise earth, they get contracted to rebuild beaches so they go and they like live there and they like regenerate and restore all of these coastal ecosystems and create — they’re recreating beaches cause when the sea level rises you no longer have for however many hundreds or thousands of years you’ve had the cycle of the ocean’s wave action creating sand and you no longer have that as sea level rises so like essentially I mean here’s a little motivation if people weren’t already motivated to you know get your shit together and go take place — go take some global regeneration action. The thought of losing our beaches I mean come on
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah
Gregory Landua: Ocean without a beach so anyway just like whole tribes of people, whole businesses, whole economies sort of dedicated to these essentially just life giving activities like hey we just go around making beaches that’s our life you know and it’s just a juicy sort of like vision of you know the community and sort of you know they travel around they’re all like highly skilled sort of environmental engineers and server bums, kind of funny, you know it’s like kind of just a cool lifestyle and I see that a lot I mean I see people starting to crystallize new innovative interesting livelihoods that are life affirming and life giving and combine, you know it’s skill [inaudible 43:57] my background is from the prima culture movement and there’s been sort of successive waves of prima culture, students, teachers and I don’t know what we’re in now like the seventh wave or something like that since the original sort of like itinerant sort of Bill Mollison spreading the prima culture gospel we’re like seven waves of sort of generations of teachers into this and I mean it’s just so fascinating to see some transfiguration happened in which the caliber and level and approach of people in prima culture is now such that you don’t even know that they’re doing prima culture and they’re like working in bureaucracies or they’re in high level engineering firms or they’re working at Google or all of these different places and they’re creating these little you know social ecological prima-cultures through their work and I think that’s happening you know I’m sure that’s happening kind of in bio-mimicry world and it’s happening in all of these places where all of a sudden people become artful enough that you cease even — it ceases even to be this sort of like — sort of outright movement and it just starts to be an intrinsic way of being. Somehow that feels like it’s approaching what it’s going to feel like as we get you know as you were saying in 2026 when there’s like such a critical mass of inter-connectedness
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: Like the mycelial inter-connectedness, the fruiting body just starts to pop up everywhere
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yes
Gregory Landua: You know there’s like — it just ceases to be a thing
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: It’s not the same anymore it’s just the way the economy works
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um yeah, yeah, yeah I see that totally and I think it’s also really important that we know that it’s — there’s trouble ahead too, you know and not like as and there’s a lag time of these things and to not lose hope. I think apathy and like you know unhealthy sicknesses is really dangerous right now and so we need to make sure that has we’re painting the picture of all of this happening we also are grounded in the fact that like extreme weather and like some really tough struggles are ahead as well and that we can’t let that like — we can’t let it wash out the fire but really like fan the flames right? So like how can we as Australia is burning really lean into like indigenous cultural fires and you know ways of managing the land that can help us build resilience and yeah I just think it’s important we paint the picture other regeneration happening but also know that like the fires, the floods, the eroding sea line, you know coast, the hurricanes and all the like political and economic security that could happen from those things are a reason to like dig into one another and not like stash the cash in bunker mentality and you know I’m gonna like hold my own while I can, thinking but really like how do we? You know with like all the fires in California recently it’s like do you — does everyone go out and build a — go out and test a power wall? Or does everyone get together and figure out what a micro grid is? You know it’s like those — the answers to those questions will determine our faith cause if everyone goes and just goes into like bunker mentality and like — and stuck — get stuck into the fear and the scarcity which is hard when it’s acute, when you’re feeling pain and you’ve lost it’s so important that we be generous in the face of that. Yeah, so like as we have an outline in the design science decade it’s like the first two phases — the first two years are about reconciliation, like reconciling with what’s happening, reconciling with our enemies, those who we’ve seen have created these mess, reconciling with the root causes during a lot of healing so that the next two year phases is all about restoration it’s just like mass tree planting, mass wealth transfer like restoring our different systems and then the next two year phase is resilience like as those extreme weather events are happening and insecurity you know continues to kinda press on us like digging into one another and then the regeneration happens in 2026. And then it’s time to rejoice.
Gregory Landua: I love it
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: That’s how I see it and I think the more we tell that story of like it’s complex, you know it’s not just like everything is going to be great. Its then people can kind of like prepare for that and if is something happens to them you know they can respond in a way that’s generous like it’s so critical.
Gregory Landua: So, yeah I mean what’s the — what’s the difference between? What’s the practical difference between getting a test? The power wall and building our community micro grid? Because I guess I’m not sure that that’s an either or — I mean sort of doesn’t — don’t community power grids rely on some amount of sort of distributed energy storage that it does sort of require some certain percentage of community members to participate in and investing in kind of like the battery storage and productive capacity of the community —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: Essentially?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah
Gregory Landua: So what’s the balance there? As a practical case study —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah
Gregory Landua: As a practical case study and in sort of like because I also think there’s a balance right? Between generosity and community engagement and ensuring sort of like when the plane goes through and you got put yours on first and then you put on your neighbor’s. So what does that look like to you?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um, yeah I think I mean just like you know power wall versus micro grid it’s like if you get to the power wall through having like having micro grid or like community mentality that’s one thing but if you first are like well I’m just gonna like take care of myself it’s kind of like yeah what is the reasoning behind that? Are you keeping yourself so that you can be prepared to take care of everyone else and like really being honest with yourself or is there kind of like an — a selfishness kind of bunker mentality stash the cash like protect my own unhealthy dynamic there. So it’s like Buckminster Fuller said: “In the end only integrity count” right so like where are you really actually being an integrity with making sure that the larger ecosystem thrives. So that’s kind of one the case study of it — of just like making sure that you’re balancing the two like what does it look like for the whole community to thrive so that I can thrive but also I need to thrive in order to help the community. There’s two things that come up within that. One is this idea of like, it’s not that competition is bad, it’s not that selfishness is bad, it’s just that selfishness needs to be like an island within an ocean of selflessness, you know whereas I think it’s often the other way around where we’re like you know mostly taking care of ourselves and then we have kind of like these islands of taking care of others so in terms like the ratio of the two
Gregory Landua: Hmm um
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: That’s one part of it and then also just looking at like the definition of life, you know like all of the nested hold-ons of like a cell and you know organism within a family, within a community, within a bio-region, there’s always like the definition of life is that — like that combination of keeping yourself alive versus contributing to your environment, so that your environment can keep you alive. You know and that’s like looking at ecology that’s like something we learnt, that’s a principle across all nested scales and so you always need to be zooming out what’s that next proximate hole that you’re keeping alive so that you can stay alive.
Gregory Landua: Yeah well I guess that was gonna be my — that’s exactly what was moving in my mind, which is the ultimate act of selfishness is to care for your environment
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Right
Gregory Landua: So, you know if there’s a way to — I just wonder like there’s probably a hundred different ways to — in different context, different cultures, different scenarios to make the jump between — there’s an instinct which I think is — it was in my mind its better not to fight the instinct for self-preservation. Its like — it’s better to work to expand it as it’s happening if that makes sense. So like if my first instinct and capability is all I feel like all I’ve got time for and I’m aware of all this stuff and I’m just like fuck it I’m giving five test of power walls. I’m going for it. What is the next step after that person has gone and done that? Which is understandable in the context although in isolation I agree it’s sort of like for them and their community not the best because they could be sort of like connected to whole neighborhood and you know they could be benefiting from potlucks and you know joy and getting to meet you know kids and maybe being a godfather or a godmother and, who knows all of the different multi-capital rewards and the safety net of having neighbors who care for you and are looking out for you when stuff happens and give you a call if they see something. All of those benefits which are like hard to account for but what’s the sort of like instead of saying people have to start there with that as the desire which they may or may not. I think it’s good if they do but what — how do we engage people who are starting from a more prepper mentality who are just sort of like I know I gotta — you know — I know I need to stock up on some food and some ammo and some power walls, cause I’m gonna you know — I’m gonna take care of myself. Do you have a sense of how to engage with those folks and invite them to see sort of like the vibrant potential of having a tribe, of having a community, of being part of an intact village that takes care of itself?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um, yeah, yeah couple things come up. One is like, my drive for all of this is my place in Maine. You know I love spending my summers on this little island in Maine, that’s where I spend all my summers, my whole life growing up around the world as a child of interpologist, it’s like my home base, my main home and it’s — my home is ten feet above sea level, and so, the best way I know to continue to have summers there for the rest of life and connect with the force that is me. It’s really scary to think about but the best way to do it is to like work on the biggest system I can because it is all dependent on itself, right. Like the — it’s every nested hole is within a larger hole and like if you want to be able to like have lunch at a restaurant with your daughter in thirty years like you need to be looking at the larger hole.
Gregory Landua: Hmm um
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: I would love to live till 2091 when I’m a 108 and I would love to be like in Maine that summer and the best way I know how to do that is to like figure out how this whole thing is gonna work, you know and I think part of it is that people don’t know that it’s possible, like people think it’s end times. So many people think it’s end times they don’t understand that it’s actually possible to transform in the next couple years into a world where things don’t have to be super critical collapse you know. I think like when you ask most people like how do you really feel or how do you really really feel or sometimes how do you really really really feel? It’s like three questions in, almost everyone I ask at that level, same things were actually just it’s dumb and so if we’re all walking around abandoned by the future then like how are we suppose to be investing in one another, you know like when you feel abandonment I mean almost all of us have abandonment triggers in some way or another, whether it’s handed down to us or something that we’ve had — you did not want to engage you know and so that most people I think are — need to heal that and need to see that it’s possible and for whatever reason I’m like the queen of silver-linings, that’s what my husband calls me, I’m like always looking for the positive and I can see — I can see it’s possible you know and I just want everyone to be able to hold that in their heart too, so that I can spend my summers in Maine
Gregory Landua: Yeah, totally, I resonate with that it feels similar through a — sort of like thought process I have. I mean I oftentimes, how would I put this? I guess I have no patience for fatalism —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah I think pessimism is like —
Gregory Landua: If I get it into the corner, if I get pushed into the corner and I get in my like — in my like you know whatever is closest for me to being a prepper I’m like throw those fuckers off the boat. Like seriously, like so I use to do mountaineering when I was at a loss, growing up and through college and what not and you know if you’re tired on a road to someone else on the top of a mountain and say there’s six people on a rope and one person starts flipping out and they’re gonna drag everybody else off the mountain, what do you do? And the same is true, I mean you know and so what are the attributes — sort of the psychological attributes of someone essentially being insane and essentially being like antisocial to the level of like inability to maintain the health and integrity of the rest of the community and you know and you were talking earlier about some of the hazards ahead and sort of preparing not just for this like beautiful vision but also for the challenges that are ahead and you know I don’t mean to sort of like get into a punitive you know off with their heads and you know ecocide tribunal kind of conversation but there is a real sort of like how do we balance the — you know how do you deal with behavior that threatens the existence of life on earth and in the broadest scale to how do you deal with behavior that threatens you know the individuals in a community through it’s — just you know negative expression? How do we deal with those people? Do we like make a seat at their — at our table and invite them in for lunch? You know, do you show up at your door with a shotgun? Do you call the cops? I mean I don’t know — I mean like, who are the cops in this case even? I’m just curious, like what’s the — what are your thoughts about that? What are the ethics of you know in this moment of sort of planetary crisis and opportunity, what are the ethics of kind of like holding together a healthy community and antisocial behavior?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah, I think I mean just using metaphors like that, in a way that just awakens people to the fact that like pessimism is actually a luxury of those enough who are privileged to feel it and it’s only useful in a less urgent time. We have no more — no more time for pessimism and being kind of like stern and like motherly around that I think is one angle that I haven’t seen our movement do, as well you know. We kind of tend towards like — soft and — you know and bringing people along I think there’s like a sternness that’s important there of like you are going to kill us with your pessimism. It’s like self-fulfilling and like as many stories and metaphors we can tell around self-fulfilling prophecies, the availability cascade if you want to make it into cognitive biases or whatever it is. But coming along with a lot of different language I think is important. The other thing that brings up is like narcissism is so rampant it’s like not what we call leadership in a lot of ways and narcissist mean to think it’s their idea in order for them to go with it. So how can we kind of like incept these ideas in so that you know I don’t know if [inaudible 1:03:08] has narcissism but I would suspect there’s some element there, you know how can we make it ten billion dollar fund
Gregory Landua: Billion dollar fund
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah as he’s giving this ten billion dollars away sure run with regeneration and like say it’s your thing I don’t care, I don’t need the ownership over it, I just need to have it happen — so there’s like — telling the story of you know the climbing analogy you just gave or you know we don’t — pessimism is a luxury of a less urgent time. Any of these things in multiple languages and then incepting it so that people can think it’s their idea. Having ownership over the movement you know it’s kind of old school but at the same time it’s like [inaudible 1:03:49] talks about like we need to play the last win lose game dynamic in order to win for all like we need to us the old game dynamics in order to like transfer over into the new one. So it’s like, those are the things that come up. Inoculation you know like bringing in the regenerative understanding in a way that people can feel like it’s theirs because they might need that in order to run with it.
Gregory Landua: Yeah no I think, I mean there’s a couple layers there one is I think Daniel speaks to this pretty well, I’m really grateful for what he’s — like the elusiveness he’s brought to the conversation around sort of the impossibility of continuing to play the win lose game and yet having to play it a last time and not lose while you’re creating the new game
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Right
Gregory Landua: I think is poinent and right on and I think that’s just maybe actually referencing this sort of hypothetical you know what you do with the hypothetical — what do you do with the person whose you know as you’re in a life or death situation like freaking out and complaining and making it all about them and not allowing the group to sort of like behave in an intelligent way, what do you do with that person? You know we have to maybe, what I’m just picking up here is that you can’t — you can’t lose to them. There’s like this very narrow band so you can’t let that voice derail the ability of an agile intelligent approach to whatever the hell is happening, right? You can’t like a clued your sensory understanding and creativity with this sort of like pessimism and you know naysayingness but you also probably can’t just like cut the rope and pitch them off the side because then you created another win lose cycle and then you actually end up losing
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Right, right [inaudible 1:06:23]
Gregory Landua: Because you’re not just pushing them off the mountain like that’s the complexity of the game.
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: The goal isn’t just to get some people up to the top of the mountain. The goal is to transform the whole meta-game that is taking place, so there does have to be this like sort of narrow sweet sort of like ethical approach or maybe, it’s even a moral approach that, you know. I don’t know what that means like in a metaphor I don’t know what that means, you know you tranquilize them and throw them over your shoulder and you haul them up the top and back down again and let them down in a nice warm place and tell them that they did a great job when they wake up. I don’t know — I don’t know what the metaphor is in that, you know like how the analogy holds I guess. But it does seem to me that that provocation is that you can’t. You actually have to do it like in a very narrow band — like there’s a narrow — there’s like you gotta thread the needle there
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: Do it in just right way, so that you mitigate the threat of everyone losing because of that
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: While keeping them from losing themselves
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Right, yeah. Yeah, I mean I think part of it is like. How do we deal with fear? We name it and then the other part of it is like — yeah, I’ll just start with that one. Just like my mom has always thought me whenever you’re like fearful or anxious how do name what is happening? Name it, explain it and then it’s like you know, if you need to like fame it or shame it. You know you can go from there, but once you actually name and explain what’s going on, it’s so much easier to navigate and I think people just don’t quite know how we got here or we’re like looking at the wrong things and blaming the wrong part of the system to like back to the root causes I think really facing our root causes of othering and racism and colonialism and you know all of these things that — that will continue to fester into more problems, if we don’t deal with them. I think that’s part of like the overwhelm right now it’s like oh there’s toxicity, and there’s climate change and there’s biodiversity loss and then there’s you know fascism and there’s just horrible, you know where do I start? Where — how are we ever gonna get out of such a complex mess? Like if we look at — we just calm down and look at the root causes and start to name and explain how we got here, then we can like look at how to heal those root causes, as we move along too. So how can we as we’re planting a beautiful, you know poly-culture food forest with the best of you know technology that we’re — that we are these war orphans that we’re talking about. How can we do that while also propagating what are the opposite of scarcity is? Showing that we have abundance. What are the opposite of racism and othering is? You know bringing people together and appreciating that diversity increases resiliency you know taking money out of politics and you know turning it into a democratic you know lottery system, like how do we look at kind of these root causes and shift — shift over and like kind of name and explain the larger whole because I think part of the freak out that everyone’s having is just that like people understanding wants a little bit more than we’re giving them credit for and so they’re like I don’t know recycling isn’t doing anything because the whole system’s f’d you know or like I’m not gonna vote because the whole system’s f’d. People understand that it’s more complex and so we need to kind of give them that education and what is the complex system that led us here? We’re in a process we can do all of the healing that’s required so that it doesn’t just fester into the next hyper object thing like climate change that we can’t put our arms around.
Gregory Landua: I love that — like I sort of feel like — there’s like this sweet, almost like motherly invitation that you’re making around the opportunity to offer people a deeper perspective than you know — and I sort of feel like my usual go to stance is more of a like you know like harsh father like archetype where I’m thinking more like just fucking grow up, don’t bitch to me about how you can’t vote figure what you’re gonna do and do it
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: I don’t want to hear it and it’s refreshing to have the — sort of like you know, this sort of like invitation of like okay, so that feels like it’s not a viable option, I hear that, so what might be some options, like why isn’t it viable and you know what are the root causes of its lack of viability and how are you going to engage with that? And how is that engagement going to improve your life? It’s a really like life affirming set of questions. Yeah.
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah and then there’s so much healing that will be done as we navigate this time and I think all of us being the — identifying as healers ourselves every conversation can be healing for us and for the people that we’re talking to and needs to be. There’s so much we need to untangle, so much unaddressed trauma, unaddressed self-awareness and so yeah, using a prima culture term just how can we stack functions you know with every effort here and do healing at every level, you know this definition of regeneration is improving the health of every system that we touch. Like how can we improve the health of our own psyche and our own trauma and yeah, just the layers and layers of healing that can happen in every moment. I think that brings me a little bit of trepidation it’s like a lot, but at the same time it’s what needs to happen in order for us to navigate this like key hole you know narrow — and narrowing window of opportunity of getting to this you know beautiful regenerative economy on the other side.
Gregory Landua: So, I mean like I guess I feel like the conversation could go in one of two places now. You know one is, I might start of make a provocation around okay, so that all sounds good, maybe it’s a little touchy feely what are the like technological fixes that we have to do? Or like what’s the — you know what’s the rational materialist road map towards you know — you know it’s sort of like more. like sort of like holding the — like everything that we’ve both been saying is true, but maybe coming at it and answering a set of questions that aren’t necessarily near and dear to my heart but has a big — playing devil’s advocate I can sort of hear echoing around like okay, like that’s all fine and good but what about this sort of like you know engineering, deterministic [inaudible 1:14:10] logical progress and how are we gonna weave that in? So that’s like a question or a voice that at some point I wanna sort of like invite in and speak to and maybe we just maybe yeah I mean you can speak to that. And the other is, I also want to kind of hear your — hear a little bit about the role of burning man in your life and in the movement more broadly, in your perspective and like what it does and does not serve? And so those are two things that I feel you know are big conversations or like whole sort of directions I’m not completely sure where to go? I would tend towards maybe the former like first answering this sort of like devil advocate like let’s imagine that there’s like I leave and then I come back and I’m sort of like a techno optimist sort of like market libertarian and I’m basically like Amanda that all sounds nice and like rainbows and bunny rabbits are great but like give me like the market driven, technological reality of how in the next five years, we’re actually going to make — we’re gonna turn the shit, so that my rational brain can relax out of this emergency story that I’ve been telling myself about the end of the world and my dooms day preparations
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um, yeah I’m with you, I had the same question when I was teaching at [inaudible 1:15:56] graduate school I taught the kind of keystone course which is called the Principles of Sustainable Management in which I had to teach you know just how far up shit creek we are and also how to navigate back down it and found myself just constantly looking like how are we gonna solve climate change? It was like a big kind of like you know hyper issue right now if we don’t solve all of that then everything else crumbles. I’d experience that directly before moving to [inaudible 1:16:26] I’ve been working on this amazing poverty elevation project in Bolivia really like building the foundation of the — you know economic household of all these families and then the physical foundations of their homes were washed away in a landslide and I realize that climate change was this kind of multiplier effect that if we don’t deal with it everything all else that we’re working on is gonna wash away. So I dedicated myself to climate change solutions worked [inaudible 1:16:56] and then carbon world room and then just was looking like what’s the plan? Does anyone have a plan? How are we going to get there? What’s the technology? And so united forces with Paul Hawken, we built Draw Down which is a different kind of assessment model than others looking at climate change solutions in a couple ways. One it looks beyond just energy which most people had been looking at back then in 2016 or 2013 and also it looked at what’s possible to most other assessment models were like how do we stay below 2 degrees or how do we reduce emissions eighty percent by 2050? Ours was just looking at like what is optimistically plausible? We have this technology what’s actually possible considering you know kind of the physical constraints of how do we build an EV market of you know how do we build battery storage? How do we you know expand agro-forestry systems? And we found that it’s actually possible and the new draw down numbers just came out that it’s actually possible to stay below 1.5 degrees with the technology that we have today scaling it at a rate that is totally plausible
Gregory Landua: Whoo
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah, yeah so 2053 is when temperatures will go back down again, 2043 is when we’ll reach draw down which is the point at which the concentrations of the greenhouse gases start to come back down again in our atmosphere
Gregory Landua: Hmm um, so that’s the moment where there’s actually we go from like a neutral to —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Expanding four hundred points below [inaudible 1:18:32]
Gregory Landua: In the negative
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Four hundred and fifty then down back again towards 350 maybe even 280, yeah which is the parts [inaudible 1:18:41] co2 in the atmosphere it’s the kind of — it’s not all greenhouse gases, but it’s kind of this equivalency that we speak to that tracks kind of where we are in this blanket of pollution that’s strangling our ecosystems right now aka global warming. And so yeah, basically read the book look at the new draw down 2.0 numbers which were just released February 20th and take a look at what’s possible you know, it’s a variety of technology fixes that are you know becoming cheaper and cheaper. There’s Swanson’s law which is this law it’s kind of like the [inaudible 1:19:22] law once you increase 20 percent more, you know solar panels in the world their cost goes in half and so you know solar panels are now 98 percent cheaper than they were when they were first brought out, look at like you know it’s equivalent to a good dvd player when it first came out it was like a $5000 investment and now you can get them for under a 100 bucks, the same thing is happening for this technology there’s market forces that are kinda just taking and running with it. Actually there’s a new report out about market forces and climate change solutions that the authors don’t even want to put it out because it’s such good news, because they don’t want to like you know put out the fire of the climate activists. So market forces are here to take this technology there’s so much money we’ve made Draw Down found that it’s a seventy four trillion dollar business opportunity. Yeah, it’s happening, it’s totally happening and there’s yeah just so much wealth of all kinds to be made in the process.
Gregory Landua: Seventy four trillion total like between now and —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: 2050
Gregory Landua: In 2050
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah, hmm um, yeah and that includes diversity is not just kind of your traditional technological fixes if you add up all of the agro-forestry solutions of Draw Down it becomes the number one solution obviously we know that all sorts of different kinds of capital that we can — that’s just financial capital that seventy four trillion dollar number you’re looking at agro-forestry obviously there’s all sorts of different kind of capital returns on investment there. Biodiversity, livelihoods, communities, environment
Gregory Landua: What role do think payment for ecosystem services or you know like belt and chain style reward currency or carbon credits schemes or cabin trade are sort of like general sort of like climate finance mechanism is gonna play in all of this. Like is that — is that pivotal, is it site central and pivotal or is it something that will just support it? Or is there — like will we just get there kind of without innovative climate finance mechanisms?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um, everything is completely pivotal I mean by some measures is already a third of the global economy has some sort of price on carbon it’s here it’s not really well navigated or not really well narrated thanks to the totally broken economic or political system of the US and our lack of leadership but it’s here and payment for ecosystem services and being able to see that ecosystem, you know the verification of ecosystems changing I think will be absolutely critical to kind of be you know like a pigeon language you know a language that navigates two different other languages in order to talk about ecosystem services and pollinator habitat and watershed health and you know all the things that we all know to be true wealth, well-being of the planet to kind of your more often myopic you know short term scarcity model capital that we’ve more versed in now
Gregory Landua: Is there a scenario in which we hit 2050 and we’re you know back to 350 or below that, is the future that you don’t want to live in like where carbon has been sequestered but the larger social economic and you know ecology biodiversity elements have been dropped out and we’ve just done an analyzed techno fix? Is that something we need to wary of or can it simply not happen that way because of sort of the way the world works that we have to approach it holistically, what’s your sense of that?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um yeah there’s definitely a fear of like what Charles Eisenstein calls carbon reduction-ism for like just if we only look at the carbon then you know all sorts of other things could not be focused on I find carbon personally to be this kind of welcome mat to systems understanding and kind of a more regenerative view you know that is what happened to me I got interested in carbon and I got interested in bio-char it’s a great way of doing bio through engineering and then I was like whoa soil well complex the inter-dependence that fuels life you know it was kind of like this entry point for a greater understanding of — a beautiful living planet I think people will find it in a variety of ways I think you know the future will have kind of this like beautiful diversity like a plurality of ways of understanding the earth it’s not like we’re all going to live the same kind of like rainbow gathering you know lifestyle there’s going to be all sorts of crazy different ways of living. Some people will live in like zeppelins cycle around the world and they’ll just be like steam punky and you know there’s gonna be all sorts of different ways of living
Gregory Landua: Can’t wait for the zeppelins I’m so thrilled for the zeppelins when I retire from Regen Network I’m going straight into the sale transport and zeppelin transport business
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: It’s gonna happen we’re cloud cities you know we have the ability to do this thing Buckminster Fuller saw which is like create these islands in the sky these bubbles in the sky there’s gonna be like some really wild ways of growing it’s not gonna be — we can’t even imagine how many different types of living there will be and through going through navigating this time of understanding the global carbon cycle and everything else it is connected to which is everything. We will understand kind of these underlying principles that we can’t exploit anymore, you know we can’t exploit one another, we can’t exploit the earth, we can’t — we can no longer you know control nature we have to live as is with it and then there’s this idea of the circularity, so it’s like the singularity but the circularity it’s this moment that everything all of our materials will either be recovered for like mine or landfills and just you know use all of the recovered trash, plastics from the oceans and everything or regenerative so every material that is being used for these zeppelins or for these crazy you know floating islands, nations you know all these different ways of seeing the future that are very kind of maybe Kim Stanley Robinson-esque. All those materials will be circular and we have that in the design science decade as happening in 2029.
Gregory Landua: That’s very soon
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: I know it’s all gonna happen so much sooner that we think, it has to
Gregory Landua: It’s gonna happen before or after the clouds city?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Lingering off of the cliff I don’t know if you’ve noticed the glacier and some other large catastrophic events that are around the corner. It’s a dramatic time we need to dramatic solutions and dramatic positive visions to match it.
Gregory Landua: Yeah
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: I’m so enthusiastic about how beautiful it can be and how much faster it can happen you can’t possibly imagine
Gregory Landua: So what was the glacier that you were mentioning? The weight glacier?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Weights it’s a very large glacier in Antarctica that if it slips into the ocean will cause about a meter or so of sea level rise everywhere in the world, it’s obviously a complex models but it’s slipping and we need to cool down as fast as possible yeah it’s traumatic
Gregory Landua: Yeah that’s a big deal — that would be a big deal. Yeah and you know sort of methane in Siberia and [inaudible 1:27:26] in North America and yeah there’s a lot of potential sort of cascading feedback groups that we’re right on the cusp of but it is — but it does feel to me that it’s now or never in some ways but in other ways you know I wonder and I’ve heard like Charles [inaudible 1:27:49] says things similar to this I’ve long wondered about this sort of like amanatized the [inaudible 1:27:57] kind of end of days paradigm of thinking way of seeing that’s seems like it’s been around for about as long as we’ve been sprinting towards the perceived edge. You know it’s like as long as we’ve been sprinting towards the edge, we’ve thought that we were right on the edge if that makes sense
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: So like how much — how much of our perception of doom is a figment of our imagination that actually is driving us to have destructive behaviors versus motivating us to prepare you know like it feels there’s something that always feels little Judaea- Christian about the climate collapse narrative that feels very similar to like — like the end of days are coming and when you know go to heaven or hell it’s this or that and it is all right now and you gotta just fucking repent which feels very similar to how I sense the discourse get sucked you know like even with Regen Network and how we message things and sort of like hey there’s this like — there’s this market opportunity and there’s this urgent potential and that’s what’s driving things and we’re gonna meet the need you know it’s like it’s the same thing and so I’m just wondering what are you? What’s your sense of that you know like what’s your sense of Charles’ critique of the climate emergency being or dominant narrative and the ways in which that may be problematic and how that links to previous paradigms which weren’t climate and weren’t science but have an echo —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: Like there’s an echo taking place
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um yeah, yeah I mean climate change is one festering wound of a whole unbalanced system and we can’t just look at it and we can’t just do climate alarmist messaging at the same time the earth is warming and we have never ever experienced this many ecosystems about to collapse and they’re all connected and if the elms doesn’t have enough water it’s gonna turn into a desert and then we won’t have our water cycle, our global water cycle. There’s like I don’t know how many a times more water in the rivers above the — in the atmosphere above the Amazon than in it. With the methane similar story, we’ve never been this hard up against this many ecosystems collapsing, you can’t — sure nuclear war super scary it could happen in 15 seconds — 15 minutes we’re all gone yes that is a different type of alarm. This is completely different and it’s fucking alarming
Gregory Landua: Hmm um
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Pardon my French, and it’s not just climate — climate is a festering wound of a larger kind of unhealthy unbalanced system and all sorts of root causes that we’ve already gone into and maybe all of that alarmist training in the past has been training us for this moment. You know and like regeneration is partially a Christian word of coming back and being born again as God as one with the three spirits of being born again with Jesus as our savior what if regeneration now is being born again with Jesus as life. As like oh we are one with nature you know
Gregory Landua: [inaudible 1:31:49]
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Same paths these same rituals, these same traditions, these same things that are in our hearts as a way to yeah to listen to the alarm and find a new way. The window of opportunity is narrowing by the day it is becoming less and less probable that we can make it but it’s still possible and the more that we know it’s possible, the more possible it becomes.
Gregory Landua: What’s — is there a point of no return? Is there —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah
Gregory Landua: That we go past and we’re certain
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: We won’t know it for many decades so
Gregory Landua: Yeah we won’t know. So we have to be behave as if it was yesterday and we just made it and now we have to keep going because it’s today again. Like it’s every day, like every day is like we have to just sort of be on point essentially and behave that way. How many people —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: But be driven by the beauty of it but not by the fear of losing it. One of huge insights recently was I lost my dad when I was fourteen and for so long it was like I want to protect everyone in the world from that kind of heartache and just recently I was like no I want everyone to live the love that I had with him. You know and that flip is like what we need to be really aware of in our messaging of just like we can try to protect one another from the loss but we can also like be thriving and striving towards the beauty and the security and the safety and the fun. Like it’s gonna be so fun if we make it.
Gregory Landua: It is so fun
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: We can have such an amazing celebration for the circularity, we’re gonna have such an amazing celebration when the salmon come back.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, yeah
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: The best parties in the history of humanity
Gregory Landua: So speaking of great parties
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Burning man
Gregory Landua: Tell me about burning man and what’s — you know I — would you self identify as a burner?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um yes
Gregory Landua: Yeah, so in 2020, moving into the twenties I love saying we’re going to the twenties the roaring twenties
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Roaring, soaring twenties hmm um
Gregory Landua: Here we go, the regenerating twenties
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: The boring twenties —
Gregory Landua: What is the role of burning man? This boring twenties, nice
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: [Inaudible 1:34:28] the role of burning man there’s a couple different elements there. One it’s a prototype community you can go there and experience generosity, experience a different kind of economy, a different type — way of relating with one another that you can’t honestly you can’t unfeel, the way it inoculates people you know scores that kind of way of living into people. There’s also so much waste and it’s really disgusting you know and my husband and I have done a lot of work around that we started a petition to the board and got them kind of you know we’re one of the many kicks in the pants to get them to do an environmental kind of proclamation and now they have this beautiful 2030 plan, obviously we weren’t the only triggers in that, but we were part of kind of this like this needs to happen movement. Part of that 2030 plan is working with 146 communities of burners around the world for them to be ecosystem restoration camp like communities you know and maybe even partnering with the ERC we were just on a phone call yesterday with burning man and ERC and BFI and ecosystem restoration camps is John Lu’s work for those who don’t know. So there’s this ability for burners who have this you know access to you know financial wealth in a lot of ways but then also access to incredible creative wealth and our community leaders and kind of just courageous in their ability to build into imagination that I’m really excited to see what burners do around the world in their local ecosystems to —
Gregory Landua: Burning man needs ecosystem restoration camps is a very exciting idea
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: It’s happening it was just a phone call I was on yesterday with John Lu and Chris Reid Love from Burning Man. Yeah, we’re doing a big event here April 18th here in the Bay area it’s been a prototype it
Gregory Landua: ERC could use it?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um yeah yeah it’s definitely a synergy
Gregory Landua: In both ways, Burning man can use it?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so lots more on Burning man but you know I think people identifying as artist, a lot of people who go are like not traditionally kind of trained those artist are identifying as artist and they become an artist through going and I think you know artist are like the ultimate systems thinkers living together. Different elements of you know different holes and also seeing a larger context and trying to communicate that so there’s so many beautiful things and it’s also so wasteful and I get so annoyed by how many people buying new shit for it. We’re starting a new campaign that’s new eww why are you buying something new? That’s so eew
Gregory Landua: Awesome
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm yeah so I could go on and on but I’m [inaudible 1:37:34] without borders it’s an amazing camp we work all over the world to kind of bring a lot of this a big activation to life through you know creativity and the intersection of biotechnology and ecology
Gregory Landua: How has Burning man changed since you’ve been going?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: The — it used to be more counter-cultural but I think it’s done a good job of getting out into the world to the point where it doesn’t really seem as bohemian or like alternative anymore but I think it’s because we’re winning you know we’re kind of bringing that culture back into the world. It’s changed just in the last couple years I’m seeing more and more people kind of pop up and say like what’s our responsibility as burners and realizing the privilege of being able to go and see what we can do. The other fifty one weeks of the year with what we do there’s a lot of camps kind of giving their infrastructure to humanitarian disaster relief programs and building art to be extended beyond just being used at Burning man, then people from Burning man from the organization are being asked to come to see these all over the world and help them rethink what the future cities are you know like that’s now what they plan to do when they started over 30 years ago
Gregory Landua: Right
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: But now that’s what they are, they’re kind of culture builders for the future of cities, entire earth and yeah that’s a beautiful force and it’s not without it’s difficulties and yeah super frustrated with how wasted it is and we aren’t using our potential as creative people out there. We’re still using so much so many waste yeah
Gregory Landua: Hmm
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah
Gregory Landua: Will you be a burner for life?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah, I’d say so
Gregory Landua: Oh
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah this will be my twelfth year
Gregory Landua: Hmm um, so what that — what was your first year?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: 2009
Gregory Landua: 2009
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Evolution was the year where I told everyone that Darwin didn’t actually say: “It was the survival of the fittest”. He said: “It’s the survival of fitness within your ecosystem that actually determines your survival”. For what we were talking to earlier, it’s about making the larger environment thrive in addition to making yourself thrive that actually determines your evolution and your survival.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, definitely make yourself — I’m drawing a blank on the — irreplaceable, make yourself irreplaceable and you won’t be replaced. In your ecosystem, in your community, in — for the earth. If humans become irreplaceable because we’re doing such a good job of stewarding and thriving regenerating ecosystems and we’ll be good. Good to go
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah
Gregory Landua: Yeah I first, I — the only year I went to Burning man was 2007 and it was quite an experience it was a lot of fun, yeah totally. Lots of fun, I got — I was privileged enough to stay I was camping with Star Hawk and [inaudible 1:41:11] from Guy University.
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Beautiful
Gregory Landua: It was so fun, yeah it was a blast and Jay Ma from Living Mandala and other places yes so we had our little permi camp and a permi exhibit and it was the year that the eclipse happened. It was a ‘Green Man’ was the theme and it was the year the eclipsed happened and somebody climbed up and burned the man down like almost a week early, like on day two or something like that
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Right
Gregory Landua: It was pretty crazy
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: And since then I’ve not gone back I definitely sometimes had the desire to, but it’s never been a — it’s never — it’s like there’s been too much else to do
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um, yeah
Gregory Landua: And it’s such a — too much else to do and also that for many years that conflicted with a pre-existing commitment that I have every year at that same time. I think these days that’s not a conflict anymore but for yeah for like six years or so that was — it wasn’t even viable — that last week in August
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: That’s a difficult time, it’s the beginning of the semesters. One amazing regenerative opportunity within the Burning man community is that the Fly Ranch which is the local property that Burning man acquired that a bunch of my friends have been involved with
Gregory Landua: Hmm um
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: For years now has started a new competition for regenerative design so they’re looking for people to come up they did it with a land art generator initiative so it’s a prize for coming up with new ideas around waste, and water and compost and regeneration art and design for how to really build amazing kind of prototype community right next to Burning man that can then go and regenerate the whole larger ecosystem there — there’s a lot to be done on reforestation, and bringing back fish stocks and working with the local [inaudible 1:43:27] native Americans for their — and yeah create opportunity right now I think the first deadline is in May for that initiative
Gregory Landua: Yeah I’ve been excited to see Fly Ranch sort of coming into being for quite some time it’s been a slow methodical beautiful just sort of process to get that land and maybe sort of get grounded I know some of the folks involved too. It’s exciting, I’m excited how that’s going to kind of percolate out into the broader community to have a place that isn’t — that transcends — leave no trace and is like leave a positive trace. That was always my vision — for [inaudible 1:44:19] for a triumphal return to Burning man has always been that I’ll show up with a herd of camels and we’ll shit all over the playa and leave. As my sort of — my art exhibit and you know leaving a trace of camel poop in the desert
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah
Gregory Landua: I pour some people some tea and what not like do a whole but —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Right, but that does speak to kind of like this you know this piece of regeneration of like it’s not about doing less bad you know
Gregory Landua: Exactly
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: So much of what the environmental movement has been trying to communicate so like just do less bad, just do less bad, like you’re an awful thing just do less of your awful thing and for the beginning of our conversation where we start at being a beneficial species it’s like oh no wait actually do more of the good stuff and that like we’re far more capable than we know of doing that and we have the technology and we have the will and we’re starting to come together and yeah
Gregory Landua: Make the waste you leave is beautiful and regenerative
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: Take care you know it’s like cows. What would the world be without cows, you know who turn — who magically turn grass into carbon rich soil, what would the world be like?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: When they are grazed properly, no more KFOs, no more industrial hack
Gregory Landua: When they’re cows, animals and KFOs aren’t actually cows, they’re some perversion of cows
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Right, right and then cow walks onto the beach. One of my favorite Draw down solutions, if we feed them this red leafy algae, we can actually bring up their methane on top of it
Gregory Landua: Yeah there’s a few super cool startups working on that I always wonder if that isn’t going to perpetuate KFOs but —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: No no no, we’re smarter than that I think we can eliminate KFOs while also encouraging regenerative agriculture I don’t know why people are so overly simplistic in their messaging
Gregory Landua: Well I mean I wonder — I guess I wonder if — some amount of KFO-ness isn’t like so, grain finishing in animal is it — you know it’s inconclusive — I mean at least, according to some people it’s inconclusive how horrible that is in certain circumstances especially if you have some red allergy, some red seaweed in the mix. I mean I’m sort of setting aside the sort of humanitarian animal right
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: That’s not regenerative, we want to increase the health of every system we touch there’s no [inaudible 1:47:14]
Gregory Landua: I think you — I — it may or may not be. I actually think there could be a case made for feed blocks in a regenerative animal system if it’s done in a particular way it’s like it’s all about how it’s done right
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah we can’t call it the same thing. If you’re gonna change it to a point where it’s increasing the health of every system then you have to call it something else. But —
Gregory Landua: What if it just did it?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah
Gregory Landua: What if the economic imperative is so strong that it just happens, do we have to change the name? This is like getting back to our original question about you know we first start with around language and you know to what degree do you subvert something and it just becomes a regenerative solution? People don’t even know that that’s what happen and a regeneration just sort of how things happen
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah
Gregory Landua: Versus sort of it being sort of a vaunted celebrated transformation or revolution in the way that things are happening
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yeah, yeah like we said don’t fight forces use them so yeah. There might be some cases where we need to keep the name of something or you know kind of covertly go about that yeah I just needed to make sure that it’s not just incremental change because that’s not gonna get us there.
Gregory Landua: Well I’ve been having that conversation a lot with people so what is the — are we worried that we’d get stuck in an incremental change? I mean this is the — can you have large transformative shift without starting with incremental change like can you achieve a watershed moment or a snowball effect without that first like little what looks to be small steps?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um, I guess it’s just stopping with the incremental change if an incremental change is within a larger you know complex transformation you know then I don’t see it as incremental change but there are, yeah it’s gonna be step by step. It won’t happen with incremental change I just don’t want us to say oh look you did this thing, pat ourselves on the back and feel like we’ve done it
Gregory Landua: No totally but I guess the shadow side of that, that I notice that I do and I also notice more broadly in sort of the regenerative movement is that we will belittle and or push away small steps towards progress as not being the whole thing and sometimes I wonder if we’re not actually short circuiting a process where it looks like it’s a small but it’s you know like it looks like a small little bit and we’re worried, we’re scared that it’s just half measures and half steps but really it’s creating the conditions for that full transformation and systemic shift to take place and yeah. Yeah we’re just having that conversation in the Regen Network telegram where people were like people were sharing the good like Jeff Bezos’ ten billion dollar commitment and all these other things. Microsoft’s carbon neutral and paying off their carbon debt and all of these other things, is like yeah, this is happening, we’re gonna do this, look at the market potential how exciting is this? And other people are like fuck that they’re just a bunch of corporate who are just like it’s just incrementalism and it’s just maintaining the status quo and I sort of was wondering if that isn’t part of the challenge that we have to address right now is like tuning down our it’s not good enough filter a little bit
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um, yeah Hunter Evans use to teach at the [inaudible 1:51:29] and she often said: “Hypocrisy is the first step”. So it’s like hypocrisy happens and then you get called out and then you move to the next step, you know and so as long as we’re calling out, you know as long as we’re balancing it and seeing the larger context and being in like that dynamic tension around it and not just celebrating without looking at like the nuance and the complexity but still celebrating — it’s really important that we celebrate we can’t just be like trudging through this whole thing
Gregory Landua: Celebrate and I love the — I love the re-embrace of hypocrisy in a way because what hypocrisy comes from is actually having a moral compass and set of and a mission and a set of goals that are aspirational and aren’t just easy to meet and if you don’t have and if you’re denialist and have no goals and you don’t care what’s happen you can never be a hypocrite and so the attachment to you know there’s something there — there’s something really rich there, I think to contemplate around like how do we hold hypocrisy as something that’s inevitable? And something to sort of celebrate overcoming, not celebrating being a hypocrite, but celebrating finding out you’re one and then evolving. That, that’s somehow is like something that’s really beautiful to vaunt and sort of hold up high and celebrate as a community.
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: Yeah well we’re getting up towards the hour here and I know you probably have a busy day ahead of you saving the world and [inaudible 1:53:21]
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Lots prayers
Gregory Landua: It’s been such a pleasure to have you here. Do you wanna share any resources where people could just sort of check out BFIs work, your work, opportunities for engagements?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um, yeah yeah, of course so Buckminster Fuller Institute definitely check out bfi.org. Faith Flanagan and I are the stewards of BFI right now, she’s a really wonderful powerhouse operations ninja visionary alongside [inaudible 1:53:57] organization and we have launched Trim cab space camp which is a systems thinking booth camp. An online course to learn about systems. Right now we’re learning about [inaudible 1:54:06] systems with David [inaudible 1:54:08] whose recently on this rapid prototyping from Tom Chee sense making [inaudible 1:54:14] and then from a [inaudible 1:54:15] movement Pandora Thomas and then, we also have the design science decade that we’re putting out really excited to hear how people want to leap into that movement and then re-generosity which is about moving yeah capital over to regenerative projects all over the world. So that’s the BFI side of things and then on my side amandajoyravenhill.com excited to be out in the world and yeah kind of have this motherly energy that you tuned into right around this movement, just like, I have been just offered a unique and very privileged path on this earth and I acknowledge that and I really want to kind of offer healing in a way that brings people alongside and yeah, give us the opportunity to just have a maximum fun future.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, and you do speaking engagements and —
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Yes
Gregory Landua: Workshops and things like that, all over the place?
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um, yeah exactly yeah and I’ll finish with a Buckminster Fuller quote
Gregory Landua: Yes
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: So he said: “It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. No longer is you or me, selfishness is unnecessary, war is obsolete. It is a matter of converting our high technology from weaponry to livingry”.
Gregory Landua: Beautiful
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Hmm um
Gregory Landua: Thank you so much.
Amanda Joy Ravenhill: Thank you Greg.
