Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 16: Loren Cardeli

This blog is a transcription of the 16th episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua.

In this episode, Gregory interviews Loren Cardeli, founder of A Growing Culture –an organization working all over the world with small holder farmers to advance a culture of farmer autonomy and agroecological innovation. Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher; or read the transcription below.

Gregory: Hello and welcome to the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, I’m your host Gregory Landua.

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast. I hope folks enjoyed the last episode with Vinay Gupta and Lucas Gonzalez. If you haven’t gotten to listen, go check it out. I think it’s pretty insightful in today’s turmoil and at adaptation to the COVID-19, Corona virus. In this episode of Planetary Regeneration, we dig into what it takes to empower small holder farmers all around the world and why that’s important. A lot of theory and philosophy and semantics around movement building and the regenerative moment and ways that the regenerative is falling short of it’s imperative to include humans in the definition of regeneration and not just be focused on ecological regeneration. My guest was Loren Cardeli, who is the founder of A Growing Culture which is a fantastic organization that works all over the world with small holder farmers. What in previous ages would be called peasant of Campesino farmers who are really the backbone of the global food system and as Loren points out are some of the most innovative people out there. It’s very near and dear to my heart and the mission of Regen network and the mission of Terragenesis, the group that I cofounded about ten years ago to empower small holder farmers very similar to Loren’s mission with A Growing Culture. And yet there was ample room for some really dynamic dialog around big questions such as, “Do extractive corporations like Monsanto have a seat at the table when we’re talking about planetary regeneration and social transformation and what the food system of the future looks like. I will let you, the listener, draw your own judgements. Loren and I had some difference of opinion and a lot of share context and a lot of shared reality and I respect his work greatly, had a fantastic conversation. I love these conversations in which there is actually something real to talk about that we’re both passionate about. That seems to be commonly the case on this podcast. But I had another great conversation with Loren. So super grateful for his time. Super grateful for all of you listeners. I hope you’re staying healthy. I hope you’re staying safe. And I hope you’re out there, if you’re in the northern hemisphere planting some trees and planting your gardens and getting ready to steward this beautiful earth and grow an abundance of food and also whatever else you’re working on. I hope people aren’t going too stir-crazy with being on lockdown as we wait to see what’s going on with the Corona virus. I’m going to take advantage of a moment to just talk a little bit about the Corona virus. In the last episode there was some fascinating conversation. Obviously, we’ve all probably been thinking about it a lot. I’m cognizant of the fact that this may be one of the first real planetary crisis moments of our generation. And as such there’s a lot of challenges and a lot of potential latent in this moment in time. I was just on a phone call with my friends at Vitwit which is a fantastic software development company that we work with at Regen Network in India. And we were just noting the commonality of everyone who’s having this common experience all over the world and we all have to just get back down to the basics of healthy food, clean water, clean air, and our personal and community health. And just the radical awareness that we’re all going through this experience together. Every single human on earth is dealing with this global pandemic moment and understanding of what it means to recalibrate society. What are the most important things in a time of crisis like this? Just grateful for what I hope is an opportunity for humanity right now and also cognizant of the pain and suffering and death that this pandemic is bringing. And just sending our prayers for everybody at risk or not of health for everyone. Have a great time listening to this podcast with Loren. He and I barely referenced the Corona virus, we really just dive into our shared passion around small holder farmers and agroecology, and questions and critiques of the permaculture movement and the regenerative moment, and what it’s going to take for the western world and those of us who are privileged enough to be sort of sitting atop the societal pyramid of the moment. Of this present moment to take responsibility for structural inequities and oppression and the ways in which that’s inherent in our food system. So, I hope you have a great time listening to this nuances conversation and look forward to hearing your comments and reflections.

Loren: There’s a lot of judgments here. I’m just kidding. I know you always had a [ponytail]. All the pictures have the ponytail, right?

Gregory: Ponytail and a mustache this is my first week sans mustache in 15 years.

Loren: How are you feeling about it?

Gregory: I have mixed feelings.

Loren: I’m [a fan] of the mustache for your persona man. The mustache screams regenerative. I want to trust you. [inaudible 00:06:56] I’m like, “I don’t know about this guy. I don’t know if I can fully trust what he’s saying with just the flavor saver.” You know what I mean? There’s something about the mustache where I’m just like, “This guy’s telling the truth, let’s take some fucking notes here.”

Gregory: Respect the mustache.

Loren: I mean maybe this is good for social distancing.

Gregory: Yeah exactly. I shaved it — like my in-laws are kind of vulnerable and I foresaw that there’s possibly situations in which — mostly I’m just doing the full sort of like, “Our family’s isolated in our house and we go for walks and I’m not wearing a mask or anything.” But I thought that there was a nonzero probability that I would need to wear a mask in different situations. And that I would prefer to not to get stuck in a situation where I have to shave at that exact moment and so sort of was like, “Fuck it, I’m just going to do it.”

Loren: I hear that man, that makes a lot of sense. Maybe I should even think — I’m never not had a beard. I don’t even know what I look like without one so –

Gregory: It was a kind of good excuse, I get to see my face. I’m pretty clear that the mustache it’s just going to grow back.

Loren: I think there’s a good chance of that.

Gregory: Yeah, but for a brief moment in time. The Corona inspired new world that’s emerging out of the cocoon of the old, I thought I would just great that moment with a bare lip.

Loren: I think we’re all going to have to make some changes. So, I think you’re setting a good standard. Setting the trend. So where are you right now?

Gregory: I’m in Massachusetts, my family and I live in Western Massachusetts in the nice little town of Great Barrington, MA. Which is –

Loren: Oh yeah. My sister used to live there.

Gregory: Oh yeah? Cool, yeah. I like it. It’s a nice little town. I mean you don’t get a place that’s sort of as small as great Berrington that has — it feels like a couple of city blocks of Williamsburg Brooklyn just got plopped down in the middle of the hills of the Berkshires.

Loren: Just a couple blocks though.

Gregory: Just two. Just two blocks.

Loren: Yeah. And I see you’re hoarding toilet paper over here man.

Gregory: Yeah, you see all over the back there. We’re set.

Loren: Well I see a random roll in the corner here. It’s not a — you know. That’s some crazy stuff man. I think there is a lot of readjustment and — I keep looking for silver linings in this. I wanted to start this off by just saying that I am so grateful and have so much respect for the scientists, the truth tellers, and all the people that are reporting on the news and everything, about Corona because we do need to be informed. But my hat’s off to everybody who is continuing to do what they do best and provide alternative narratives, and not like alternative narratives to the truth, but we need to learn. We need to listen. We need to hear other stories than just the stories of the virus. And we can’t let that shut down. There’s so much amazing things going on in the world with small [holder] farmers and I think it’s more than important for us to share these stories now because people can’t just be listening to the things that are making them scared. I think it’s interesting to look through the lens of regenerative which I think we should get into because I have a lot of issues and feelings about even the term regenerative. But for now –

Gregory: Awesome, let’s get into that.

Loren: Yeah. I think right now it’s a great time because the ideas that were once impossible now seem so close that they seem the most practical, like Medicare for all. Everybody who doesn’t have insurance, they can’t help it, but that’s dangerous to everybody in the world. So, there needs to be a floor that’s raised. We need to take care of each other in so many ways and I think these things are starting to happen. Paid sick leave, workers’ rights, I’m talking about — I hate the UBI, I think that’s extremely dangerous, but right now it’s helpful in a time like this.

Gregory: Say more about why you think UBI is dangerous.

Loren: Because I think the — I haven’t heard this perspective really fleshed out, so I’m not particularly — I don’t consider myself to be a particularly smart person. I’m like a sponge. I listen and learn from the world and I synthesize it down. But my idea about UBI, my gut feeling tells me that real change is going to come from decentralization. When you have massive inequality and you have a food system which is basically the foundation of all social organizing and humanity — which is extremely centralized, right? The no solution is going to come from increased consumerism. What I see UBI as and what, from my limited point of view is that the people that are backing UBI are the technocrats and [bureaucrats]. Because as industrialization happens and as humans get more objectified and our value webs and supply chains get centralized, what happens is we are merely consumers. So getting us to be consumers, consumers, consumers so that the powers that be can still control the means of production and livelihood, but then this alternative side of the coin which is the previous working class which is now just paid to consume. I don’t think that’s going to create any systemic change. I do believe in social safety nets strongly and I believe in free education. I believe in support for healthcare and shelter and right to food and I think all of those things should have safety nets attached to them. But I don’t believe in cash outs directly for the purpose of consumerism and to get people out of the workforce and have them be alright with that. I think that’s marginalization and it’s pushing us away from areas where we should have democratization and collective control.

Gregory: There’s multiple dimensions of this conversation that you just brought up and I sort of want to go in all directions. Not necessarily at once, though. So, just pick one at a time. My first question is, you used a lot of terminology that I would associate essentially loosely with Marxism. Would you consider yourself a Marxist?

Loren: Not at all. My family — my grandfather and my father’s side was a socialist and fled Spain and was brought here by a good friend of him [Diego Rivera] and they started a socialist party so they were organizers in the early 1900s. So, that kind of runs in my blood. I was kind of fed a lot of those concepts from a very young age. I would find myself to be — if we were looking at the Spanish Civil War, I would have been on the anarchists’ side. Even though I don’t think that model worked there. I think the model that’s currently working in [Roba] is incredible. My political science teacher was a student of Murray Bookchin, so I find myself to be much more an anarchist and believe in communalism and collective power and so I’m really scared about the objectification of people. And sure, Marx was worried about that too. I don’t think Marxism does anything to account for the natural caring capacity of the planet. And that’s capitalism and Marxism’s fault. Whether it’s in the hands of public or private doesn’t change anything. It’s still consume, consume, consume, consume.

Gregory: But more like an Arco municipalism a la Murray Bookchin

Loren: I’m still a closeted anarchist and I didn’t even want to use that term because I think that’s the most misunderstood word.

Gregory: Yeah, everybody’s like, “Oh my god, mask wearing people throwing molotov cocktails.” Or something.

Loren: I think even when you read publications like the Guardian and the New York Times, it’s like they — and this is semantic imperialism at the very best. What they use is — they’ve been able to hijack the word anarchy and turn it into entropy. So it’s like instead of saying, “the streets we chaotic.” or “The streets were in chaos.” Where they could be saying, “Entropy was taking over” they say, “It’s total anarchy.” It’s just like people reading this over and over again, this is what we’re taught. Because whether we’re socialists, communists, or [public], or capitalist or whatever, the government is still necessary. I also think the government is necessary in an anarchist system. But I think there’s a lot more direct democratic control and collective problem solving and you’re absent from the hierarchies that plague us today. In total equality, I believe in direct action and communalism. So people don’t understand that an anarchist government especially is this deep social ecology models, is what we’re having highly — they’re actually very regulated, they’re very highly organized. And they have to be organized to be participatory and collaborative. It’s just about the sake of organizing for what?

Gregory: Yeah. I agree by in large with your analysis of — I mean I think anarchism has been used as a placeholder for entropy or chaos for a long time. I don’t think that’s a new piece and I think some of the early anarchists actually fed that. There’s a historical reason why that’s true. My understanding at least, of the history of certain branches of the anarchist family is they really were sort of like, “Fuck everything, the best thing we can do it tear it all down right now.” I don’t think they were thinking that. They weren’t conceptually making the case at all philosophically that there didn’t need to be structures and like what you said around a fully functioning anarchy, like Anarcho-syndicalism or whatever it might be is it’s super organized. You have to be really — it demands and enormous amount of participation from every member in order to achieve efficient responsive functioning of society. It’s not like an absence of structure. It’s sort of like pushing structure down to the lowest common denominator possible in decision making and whatnot, sort of subsidiarity or whatever the concept is. But we also have to acknowledge that Russian anarchists and European anarchists and American anarchists were — there was a wing of them who were — not all of them, there were wings of them who were — the same is true of communists and everybody. But I think there’s a reason why it got hammered into the collective psyche and became a placeholder because people were running around throwing bombs and that was the right thing to do at the time. Like who am I to judge? Shit’s been bad for a while. Clearly those people thought that they had an ethical imperative to commit terrorism, essentially, in the name of tearing down structures of oppression. That is true. It’s not like that was just made up. That is something that happened.

Loren: I think that goes to [supta] complex which I hope we can definitely touch on in this conversation of — especially when we talk about theorists such as [Freire] or [Fanon]. I think that’s really important. I think for the anarchist’s perspective, we need to recognize that any kind of system change was going to go through a process of scarcity. The theorists understood that a process of scarcity that would shift from this capitalist model to this collaborative model was necessary to create the solution. It like out of crisis comes solution, right? And that’s what we’re all, on our side of the coin, is looking at like, “Oh my god. Is Corona virus actually going to create the kind of society that we want? Are we going to be re-localized? Are we going to get decentralized? Are we going to take care of each other? We’re seeing this potential because of the chaos, right? It’s because it’s affecting rich and poor. It’s not affecting them the same, but it affecting everybody on a global scale. So, there’s a better chance. It’s not like an isolated earthquake or hurricane or tsunami or something that just affects one community. This has the potential to actually create a society that’s more collaborative and takes care of each other. But I think through anarchist models we understood that as long as power is [in the beat], you would never be able to implement a nonhierarchical model as long as people are in power. So there has to be that destruction of the old system and then give birth. That’s why I like [Bookchin ropers] post scarcity anarchy. They understood that there was going to be a transition and that transition wasn’t supposed to be beautiful, it couldn’t be beautiful. It’s bullshit to even think that it’s going to be an easy process. And look at the anarchist model that we’re all [leaning] to right now as a reference point, is where? It’s in fucking Syria. Out of the hotbed of the most religious fundamentalism, the most extreme patriarchy, the most refugee crisis in our modern history gave birth to a system not of xenophobia and fascism which we’re getting all over the west, but of inclusivity and gender progressiveness and environmental sustainability. I mean this is [inaudible 00:23:23] that anarchist model which is now we’re all looking to because it’s over three million people large actually functioning as a society and the most effective military against ISIS. They’ve been able to succeed in many ways. It was that crisis that gave birth to it. We all know that through a system change is going to have that. I would say when you were talking about anarchism being chaos and the kind of narrative that people were perpetuating. I think we have to be sensitive to that because you look at [Goodman] — you look at these people and they weren’t fans of war. They weren’t fans of violence. But they also understood that a system that oppresses, a system [that oppresses] this is straight out of [Wretched of the Earth]. A system that oppresses is already exhibiting violence, and when you take violence against a system that oppresses, the pressed retaliating are not performing the act of violence. The system that oppresses them is performing the act of violence.

Gregory: Well they’re both. They’re both performing an act of violence.

Loren: Yeah, but I think you can reduce the revolt. Because that revolt is liberating. That self-expressionism and that’s the quest for freedom. You look at the African context when they fought off the colonialists and they took arms to fight off the colonialists, were they starting the act of violence? No.

Gregory: I don’t disagree with you. I do think (break in audio) [inaudible 00:25:07]– getting into the game A) engineering crisis — had a little internet blip there. Hopefully I’m back. Getting into the game of A) Engineering crisis. Participating in engineering crisis. I mean, I completely understand how it logically makes sense, but I think that there’s ways in which it’s problematic as a theory of change. I also think there’s ways in which it problematic to assume that you can rest power from the powerful without becoming the powerful. That’s my analysis of how the world works, so if you A) Go about trying to engineer a crisis, it starts to look an awful lot like shock doctrine disaster capitalism works in some way and then if you add a layer of a struggle to rest power that you pretend is going to flatten hierarchies or change oppression. I think historically what we see is that you just replace the oppressor.

Loren: That’s [inaudible 00:26:36] that’s purely flipping the poles and we see this — I’m a Puerto Rican Jew, and I see this in the Jewish side of my faith. And I struggle with that. Which is flipping the poles from being the oppressed to the oppressor. These challenges are very common, but that’s why anarchism is so important because when you implement a struggle for communalism and for non-hierarchy at the very basis you’re implementing these safeguards like what’s happened in [Rahuga] or in the [Zapatista] communities. Nothing is perfect and the world is a laboratory and it’s up to us to meet these challenges and constantly evolve and perfect and grow, right? But what I will say is we haven’t seen many examples of anarchist movements that were successful to overthrow a oppressive system and then were able to be implemented without being hijacked. I think what we saw was across the world several Marxist movements and revolutions that were successful but then the power got isolated into a very individual. So, when we think of revolution, when we look at examples to reference, it’s Marxist examples. Or it’s the French revolution.

Gregory: Have you gotten to listen to the revolutions podcast at all?

Loren: No

Gregory: Highly recommended by [Tom Duncan]. He goes through in a pretty high degree of detail every revolution from the English revolution, which is the first one that kicks off, really. I mean there’s a restoration after the English revolution, but the English did revolt and take over. The round hats succeeded. Oliver Cromwell took power. They created a parliament. They kicked the king out, etc. Then there was the restoration. So, every revolution from that point rolling through and then he’s ending with the Russian revolution. Right now, he’s actually in the middle of it. It’s very interesting, I find. Because when you start to see the patterns of all of these political revolutions — I mean again, my takeaway is — I’m personally not interested in overthrowing power as a method of transformation.

Loren: No, I mean I’m not interested in violence and I’m not interested in necessarily overthrow, but I’m interested in decentralization.

Gregory: Right. This is a different — so there’s a whole new, I think, my thinking is there’s a maturation, I hope, of the movements — the impulse as you said eloquently towards freedom to understand that freedom comes with responsibility. So, it’s less important that we isolate, overthrow, or hold accountable those who are perpetuating a system of oppression. It’s more important that communities and individuals and supportive communities create as much sovereignty and as much high functioning participatory governance and as much sustainable or regenerative interactive action with their greater ecosystem as possible and keep progressing that and keep building capacity and capability in that and keep doing it. Because as I said, I don’t think we have to engineer shock, and so if you focus on building community capacity and individual capacity as the work, the shocks will come and the communities will then have the ability to respond — it’s just how an ecosystem grows through succession. If you go whack the forest down, you end up with a degraded version in a non-brittle environment, you end up with a degraded version of the same forest growing back up. If you want to actually transform the composition of a forest, you just have to take a different — in my mind at least, the theory for political change tracks very beautifully with low grading forest management style. Where you slowly are upgrading the diversity and the resilience and the health of the ecosystem there and that that is the, at least in my mind — it’s hard non sexy work. You can’t charge over the barricades and be a hero, it’s slow community building work that actually creates transformation. Because that’s what gets people prepared for shock. That what means that communities and individuals can step up and be the ones who are provisioning food, fuel, and fiber for themselves, and having local resilient supply systems, and solid health care responses, etc.

Loren: Sure. You’re right that the shocks are going to come naturally, and I don’t think you need to engineer the shocks. But I do think that part of that perspective is also a privileged perspective. That we have –

Gregory: No, that is right, I am privileged. I make no [buts] about it. But it is a true perspective. So, privilege or not –

Loren: Every perspective is true, you know what I mean? If it’s your perspective, it’s your perspective.

Gregory: I wouldn’t go that far. Not every perspective is true — or that is to say, you can rate truth. Every perspective has truth, some perspective has more truth than others.

Loren: Sure. Absolutely, this isn’t like a half-truth kind of situation, but what I’m trying to say is that what is true to you is true to you, and so we have to own our feelings and we have to — and share our perspectives more. And that’s what I simply meant but that. But I do feel that people that have the ability to take the time in a system are the people that are also not the most oppressed within that system. And the challenge comes from, we live in a world right now where over a billion people go to bed hungry. We have a population of around 7 billion. We produce enough food for over 10 billion, so we basically produce food for one and a half times our population. Yet one seventh of our population still goes to bed hungry. 800 million go to bed really hungry. What’s worse is the majority of those are the ones who are actually producing our food. Small holder farmers. And when we look into that system this, to me, is kind of like the glazing over of the social dire that we’re in of the exploitive nature that we’re in that happens actually in the regenerative agricultural movement in some ways. Or the westernization of the food movement. And I’m sure we’re going to disagree on this so I’m choosing my words carefully, but I’m also kind of excited.

Gregory: Maybe we’ll disagree, maybe we won’t. I don’t know.

Loren: What happens is that for a large majority of this world, the burden of climate change is on them disproportionately to others. The burden of inequality is on them disproportionately high to others. Oppression and injustice and exploitation, right? We live in a world where Africa produces 80% of the world’s chocolate, but get less than 2% of the 100 billion dollar revenue. This is post colonialism. For every dollar of aid that goes into Africa, and I’m not talking about Africa as a country, I’m talking about as a continent, here. I know that’s very complex and nuanced for each country’s sake but as a whole for every dollar of aid that goes into Africa, 24 dollars is taken out. This is a post-colonial world. So, when we talk about working with the system [inaudible 00:35:38] to casually generate change because we are beneficiaries of an unjust system, we are remaining, at best, neutral to injustice which you could argue whether neutrality even exists.

Gregory: I do disagree with what you’re saying, I think. I don’t disagree with the facts. Nor do I disagree with the impulse or ethical imperative to essentially take a side and support systemic transformation. I think that’s all right on. I think though there’s a conflation that takes place between the urgency and reality of the ethical imperative and the super imposition of that into conversations that are essential to happen in order for that transformation to mature or change the currently dominant economic power nexus. In order to loosen that and transform it enough so that the shift can happen. There’s a process. There’s a developmental process of stages that have to go through, and when you start every conversation about food, fuel, fiber, soil, transforming American farmers with social justice warrior stuff, it actually turns into a goat-rodeo. And what I mean by goat-rodeo, this is a new concept that I’m really excited about. Was recently introduced to it. A goat-rodeo is when there are different methods and different goals trying to coordinate at the same time and you can’t actually achieve anything in those circumstances, it’s an impossible place to do work. You have to have — if you have shared goals and different methods, you can coordinate and you can cooperate. If you have different goals and the same methods, you can figure out ways to cooperate. And If you have the same goals and the same methods, you can cooperate. But if you have completely different methods and completely different goals — and this is what I see happening and what frustrates me, my heart — I’ve spent eight years of my life working with small holder farmers in Latin America, empowering cooperatives and essentially pouring resources in and not extracting profit in any sort of way. So my heart’s there, I identify that as a place that needs radical and swift transformation but, at least in my mind, the topology of work to be done, I think that can be true and we can have a conversation about regenerative agriculture with American farmers who essentially are sort of feudal lords over thousands of acres and all of the fucked upness. And we can concentrate with them about learning about soil health and transforming their practices and approach and transforming the downstream supply to reflect healthy soil without jamming those conversations in space and time into the exact same one which ends up in a goat-rodeo.

Loren: Yeah. I love that. I love that analogy. I’m getting a pen and paper here, so I can take notes. I love that analogy and I actually agree with a lot of what you just said. And I think that this is a collaborative movement. For it to be a movement, and not a trend or a brand, it has to be collaborative and there has to be people focusing on improving the oceans and the ecology and the biodiversity and there’s everything, and so it’s not just the social justice lens. It’s not just the social justice warriors. But I feel that we have to — I don’t think we need to come out swinging with social justice, because I think doesn’t always work. But I do think we have to be careful of our privilege and to remove the human element from the discussion should be something that we shouldn’t be doing. I think we have this kind of reductionism which tends to focus on environmental lens within our food system. So when you want to survey the followers of regenerative or organic or whatever. When we want to broad stroke and survey them, at that forefront is the biological practices of how to produce food. It’s at the forefront is the nonchemical, the non-pollution, and what is challenging to me is the shit –

Gregory: Just to pause for a second, I think I see exactly the name of the character that you’re identifying with the regenerative movement with that particular opinion. I would guess that you’re holding Tom Newmark in your brain as you discuss the archetype of someone who’s sort of like — I hear Tom time after time say the societal change comes second. The first thing we have to do is stabilize the climate and he said to me, “If that perpetuates a system of feudalism and oppression, I dont care. First thing’s first, it’s soil health and carbon sequestration. I think if he was to pop in right here, he would agree with that statement I just made. I’ve heard him say it several times.

Loren: I have nothing but respect for –

Gregory: Totally, I love Tom. I guess I’m just wanting to discern, as you’re noting there’s a movement. I don’t think it’s accurate that everyone –

Loren: I’m not trying to say everyone. I know. And granted there’s an amazing amount of people that we both are friends with that are in the regenerative movement that we both think are doing heroic and admirable work and that we both admire tremendously.

Gregory: Yeah totally. Just to be clear to all our listeners too. I’m not trying to call out Tom. He’s an amazing loving guy, and he happens to have an opinion that ecology comes first right now because it’s a crisis. And I sort of respectfully disagree. I’m guessing I’m going to fall on the side of the fence that Loren is about to articulate around how that actually has to happen to work well. But I don’t know, I haven’t listened to what you’re saying yet, so.

Loren: This is something that has been really challenging to me because I don’t want to broad stroke so it’s hard for me because the challenges to resist broad stroking society but when you go to conference after conference. Right? We’ve all been to those same conferences. When you read blog after blog that are not the academic outliers that we both extremely enjoy but the mainstream uses of these terms. What happens is the social lens is not in the equation. And if it is, it’s an afterthought. And that’s all I’m trying to say is what happens is there’s people that are interested in the brandification of regenerative. In some ways regenerative has been somewhat a brandification because when you look at the majority of people that grow our food are small holder farmers. The majority of the people that grow our food are probably not even white, right? When we have a perspective of the global [south], when they come together and they discuss our food system and look at the movements to transform our food systems, they come up with terms like agroecology and food sovereignty. We know that from the [inaudible 00:44:42] declaration. We know that. You and I have both worked in these communities. Those are the terminology that they’ve used. And these are the communities that are also most exploited within our food system. Now in the west, we like to develop new terminology rather than expressing solidarity with those communities. We’ve developed new terminology [inaudible 00:45:05] permaculture and I don’t want to get too deep into this, but in some ways was a whitewashing and a hijacking of indigenous and small holder practices around the world. It great to compile this and put this together but in some ways we have to address that reality of the truth. What happens is agroecology and food sovereignty are both at the epicenter social movements. They’re both social movements. Now what happens is — I’m just saying let’s, for one second step back where our own biases, where our own hearts fall, and let’s look at regenerative. There are people that want this to be a social movement, but to the most do you think it centers on social movements like the way that the global south [inaudible 00:45:52] terms do?

Gregory: I think it’s still a debate, I think. Honestly.

Loren: Who’s winning that debate?

Gregory: Well, it’s hard to know. I mean you have regenerative organic certification explicitly does it’s best in a very [ham] handed way to embrace the social element of things through it’s demand to incorporate fair trade into that certification and therefore their sort of definition or approach to regenerative and then you have other — and they’re the farthest along in terms of if you’re thinking about a supply chain and branding and other things. And in general it has the most support amongst brands because they were the earlier mover to coalesce that.

Loren: They adopted fair trade’s protocols, right?

Gregory: They adopted fair trade’s protocol. So, it’s like fair trade, [inaudible 00:46:51] plus a set of essentially more rigorous soil health

Loren: Because where they innovated was in soil health. They didn’t innovate with the social demands. They adopted somebody else’s.

Gregory: Totally. One, I would just like to point out our definition, for instance, of regenerative cacao– so there’s a couple things going on. One is, I think mostly agree, although I also would take exception to some of the things that you’re saying but for about eight years I’ve been working on trying to create a regenerative cacao participatory guaranteed system as an alternative to top down certification. As a protocol essentially engages with producers to create their own definition of regenerative, etc. That’s underway, it’s had mixed results in terms of our ability to market it and fund it. It has legs, there’s people buying, there’s shit happening. At this stage we’re mostly focused on upgrading and innovating an ecological verification because the marketplace in the north innovating and trying to compete against fair trade is sort of impossible, whereas competing against organic is easy. If you want to think about it that way.

Loren: I think that’s a little bit of a copout because they’re both [inaudible 00:48:42] labels –

Gregory: They both suck.

Loren: — I think there’s ways to improve on both.

Gregory: No, I don’t disagree, but I’m just saying the — anyway. So, I also think it’s sort of like which foot do you put forward in what market? It’s less of a decision that I don’t think, at least how I hold this, this is an emphasis question and not a what do you do or not do because it’s part of one irreconcilable hole. The people and the place and the ecosystem are all a whole.

Loren: But that’s my point. Is that when we reduce the conversation to just carbon which is being done by a lot of people, and I’m not saying all. We all know people that –

Gregory: It may or may not be. I just want to — it depends because carbon as an indicator — carbon is an indicator can be a representation of a whole. I mean you do need a couple other terms in the system in order to meet the whole. But it’s like, if it’s an invitation to engage and then define another indicator that fits in a whole way, I think it’s a good — I think I’m in agreement with you, but I think maybe it’s a tactical disagreement.

Loren: I want to be careful of the tacticalness of this because Tom Newmark and those guys [can] kiss the ground, they’re right. That carbon is extremely important and I’m excited and happy that people (crosstalk) [inaudible 00:50:32] –

Gregory: If I was talking with them, I’d be probably arguing your point. All of my conversations with all of them are all about — you may have seen our, like terragenesis’s, definition of regenerative agriculture in which we explicitly talk about social things and we explicitly say this shouldn’t be defined and we explicitly say this is a play space conversation and we did that strategically to try and plant a flag so that we weren’t getting into this carbon maximalism reductionism [process].

Loren: I think that was smart but I also think in some ways it wasn’t as successful as we both wished it.

Gregory: Totally. People just blew right over it.

Loren: Of course, and so I’m going to step back before we dive deep into this because we do agree more than we disagree, but I’m going to step back and say what I spend a lot of my time on is wondering why we constantly remove the social element from our food system. When the Neolithic revolution was the greatest change to social organizing and to the way we live than anything else in the history of the world. That created social stratification, that created wealth, and private property, and it create classism, it created the peasant and the [inaudible 00:51:57], created the military, it created how to manage surplus and birthed politics, it created monogamy, it created all these things that we exist within. Came from 10,000 years ago. And this is amazing to me because agriculture is the most beautiful being because it’s a double edge sword. It could be the ultimate tool of extraction, pollution, and consolidation of control. Or it could be a tool of regeneration and healing. But it could only be a tool of regeneration if it’s mutually regenerative and that’s where I refuse to use the term regeneration anymore in any of A Growing Culture’s language. We always use the term mutual regenerative. Because we want to force people to recognize that’s our intervention, your intervention was different, you guys are brilliant and have a team like — I was able to just say, “we’re just using this term because we need to shift people’s point of view to start to look at the human element and so what I sit –

Gregory: That’s great. I mean I love that term and I think that that’s right on, is that regeneration has to consider the whole. And people and their place and their farms and the economy that manifests out of that are all [inaudible 00:53:14] — they’re all irreducible. Landless by what — like by private property — like as you said. I just want to say I sort of feel like — so if we look at the historical context or prehistorical context and we say, I think rightfully, that the Neolithic revolution catalyzed an enormous evolution of society that includes a lot of attributes that we can see are maladaptive and unhealthy for individuals and the earth and societies at every nested layer. There’s a lot of not good going on. I wonder, can you fight the avalanche, or what is the intervention point upstream the creates a transformation that is of the order of magnitude that the Neolithic revolution was? And how do you harness that to revolve society — to regenerate society so that it transforms? And it’s not going to be eutopia and we’ll create the problems of the future when we do this, but we need to change the products essentially. We need to have different problems. What is that intervention point? Can we just fight it? It’s like trying to swim upstream, but how do you change the course of the river?

Loren: I think, for me, the intervention point, this starts from the very basis of our conversation today was inclusivity. I think for me to think that I have the solution is absolutely absurd because I don have the solution and you don’t have the solution but together as a unit, we can cultivate that solution. So it’s about bringing the people together. Right now, the people that produce our food don’t even have a seat at the table. And this is the dilemma and challenge we’re in and we’re not even recognizing it as disadvantageous to us, we just think of it as disadvantageous to them. And we shouldn’t be asking for charity, this is parody. We need to create an inclusive society to bring everybody from the middleman to the brokers to the producers to the pastoralist, we need to come together as a society and create a food system that works for all. But we won’t do that by focusing just on the environmental — like factors of a food system which is what we do in the west and so the question –

Gregory: I agree with everything you say up until that point. I have direct experience that you can bring together all of those stakeholders to do a participatory redesign of everything about the whole system through an invitation that is environmentally centric. Because that’s the commonality. That’s the thing that everyone has in common. It isn’t just isolating in saying it’s the only important thing, but it is sort of like the objective reality of an intersubjective conversation that the land health and the common ecosystems that we all depend on is our objective anchor. Therefore, from my perspective I agree with everything you’re saying, I would just say I think it is exactly. That’s our hook and our perception and our work at Regen Network for instances is to just say, for me, I take for granted that there has to be participatory design of all stakeholder in any agreement that’s going to take place around earth ecosystems and land but the objective reality that everybody shares is environmental.

Loren: It is also society and humanity.

Gregory: But that’s another layer, it’s like we get into arguments about that where you can start people out [out commoning] you can start people out with mutualism. You can start people at a beautiful foundation of reciprocity if you get everybody to ground into the geological ecological environmental reality that we all depend on and then you can bring that up layers into the rest of the system. If you start at the other place, you start adversarial –

Loren: Do you think the peasants of the world would agree with that. Do you think the indigenous and the [lanuas] when you want to go talk to [MST] and Brazil or [LVC] around the world — Do you think they would agree with that?

Gregory: Some of them would and some of them wouldn’t.

Loren: I think it’s important to (break in audio) [inaudible 00:58:27] it’s like black lives matters. It’s like back lives matters wasn’t a movement saying that all lives don’t matter, it was a movement saying that we need to focus on this injustice that’s happening to black people. And –

Gregory: And look at the division — with all respect, look at the divisiveness and the — look at how black lives matter was used to buy powers that wanted to create division. Look at how it was used as a vehicle to divide and conquer.

Loren: You know, this is –

Gregory: I’m just saying, it is. What our intentions are and then the tactics that we use to — I think there’s a fear that if you start with Earth that you’ll just forget about society and it’ll be used as this veil for eco-fascism or something. I just don’t — some indigenous people would agree with me and some wouldn’t.

Loren: [inaudible 00:59:40] agree with you?

Gregory: Tom would agree that you should start with the [inaudible 00:59:47] –

Loren: And you said that you didn’t agree with that.

Gregory: No, I didn’t agree with — he was saying ends justify the means. I’m talking about a place to start in a living framework of how to orient participatory conversation around regeneration. I’m not talking about the ends justifying the means. Just to discern –

Loren: I’m talking about that when you have Trumpism spreading around the world. What this is, is the hijacking of populism. And there’s a healthy form of populism that exists that the left hasn’t learned how to engage and build upon and it’s that collective “we”. It’s that African term ‘Ubuntu’. “I am because we are”. There’s that term which we’re trying to use now in AGC which is, “If you don’t hunger for food, you should hunger for justice.” There’s that natural hungering that we all need to do to change this world. It’s not a black and white — it’s not an either or, but the dialog needs to be at the forefront, needs to be holistic and there needs to be this social element there with which is just as important as the carbon element and this is what is [scary to me] is that — I’ll ask you a question, in the west, why do you think we’re so scared of the social element? Why do you think the social lens is never used to look at our food system?

Gregory: I think there’s a couple of different ways that could be answered. Probably the most historically accurate is that the west is a big place, but by in large, the truth of the matter is that our agricultural reality is deeply entwined with slavery and colonialism and exploitation and has been the historical driver of, in quotes, “Wealth”. And people who have power and privilege would prefer to A) be blind and not have to think about it and B) if they do think about it, they’d like to preserve it. Preserve the status quo because they’re on top. And society and reality are seen as a class struggle. And if you’re winning the class struggle, and that’s the reality that you live in, then you’re going to do your best to keep winning at it. That would be my answer to the question.

Loren: I’m agreeing with you and I agree that maybe the most effective way to make change is to not focus on the social lens. And I’m going to tell you that marketing agencies know this and Kiss The Ground and the other regenerative folks that are pushing for the brand that aren’t focusing on the social — they know that because I think when you use a social lens to look at our food system, it forces you to hold up a mirror. And people don’t want that. They want to be blind. The affluent, like foodies, can get all behind this kind of movement, but they’re scared to look at their own complacency within a system of privilege. And when we need system change, there has to be an awakening to this — to privilege.

Gregory: What I’m trying to say Loren, is that the pathway to awakening in my personal experience is one in which if you’re forced to look in the mirror, it creates a whole reactivity and a whole defensiveness that frankly just gets in the way and you can’t force to people. You have to create the circumstances where they choose to reflect and they feel safe enough to reflect around these really challenging things. And when we try to cram it down people’s throats, it’s another form — it is the power struggle. It’s the struggle –

Loren: Of course, but why do you feel this cram? I’m not talking about cramming, I’m talking about there’s –

Gregory: But other people are. That’s the impulse. If you’ve been oppressed for so long, you get into that situation, you’re going to just try to cram it down that asshole white richy fucker’s throat and that’s what happens, and if you create circumstances that that is the polarity and the dynamic –

Loren: But we’re feeding into that with this conversation of thinking of –

Gregory: (crosstalk)[inaudible 01:04:43] explodes.

Loren: — I think the true intervention has to be an understanding of both. I think it’s a social and the ecological lens that we –

Gregory: I’m not arguing with that.

Loren: I don’t think that has to be cramming. I don’t think that has to be militant. But I think that we need to have people understand — there are already people hurting. There are already people oppressed. It’s like to think that people can’t handle a social lens or to handle the [inaudible 01:05:15]. Sure, we have go to therapy, we have to struggle with what guilt or whatnot, but these are small prices to pay to real systemic change. And I’m just so scared. What reminds me all the time is this story about Cesar Chavez. I think it’s his birthday coming up. But Cesar Chavez said he was being followed by a new York times reporter — sent this reporter there for multiple days to trail Cesar Chavez and he went to rally to rally to rally working with the farm workers. And the reporter after a few days said, “Cesar, this is unbelievable. How do you explain the inherent respect that these farm workers have for you?” And do you know what he responded? He laughed, and he said, “The feeling is mutual.” It like an outsider is like how do all of these people love you so much? It’s because he loves them. And the food movement in general, and I know we don’t want to generalize, but we need to bring that element back. There needs to be something between food tank and La Via Campesina. There needs to be a gateway drug to get people there and you’re not going to get the gateway by ignoring all the social element. If you want to talk about militant and anti-neoliberalism, get on the [LVC] newsletters, but that’s not for everybody. We need to get people to understand this and there’s no way to get them to understand these issues without recognizing that Africa subsidizes everything. We’re our charity. Our aid to them is nothing, it’s a distraction for the subsidization of the products that we consume. This is colonialism that exists in the world today and that the peasant class, it’s existent. It’s 40% of the world’s population that peasant class is being oppressed. So yeah, we can take time to learn and to listen and to engage, but we can’t be ignorant to the reality of this situation and we need to move there. So, it’s not about this violent social justice warrior and I think that term should not be used because it’s so demeaning to people that actually are agreeing with you that the ends don’t justify the means. And that you have to.

Gregory: Well, I guess I’m trying to hold — in a similar way I agree with all of the points you’re making and what I’m trying to invite is a consideration about how to actually produce that transformation.

Loren: Yeah. I hear that.

Gregory: What I’m saying is I don’t think we produce that transformation by arguing.

Loren: We don’t. We don’t produce that.

Gregory: And we don’t — my experience in the food movement is that there’s these moments of opportunity that get blown when the anger comes first. And I know this is a shitty pill to swallow but if those of us who recognize this reality can’t manage ourselves to be strategic in those moments and instead of being angry, whether it’s a representative of La Via Campesina or whoever it is and in that moment there has to be an invitation for people to see themselves and every time a certain number of people will take the invitation. But if there’s a demand for people to see themselves we’ll keep getting this polarization and we’ll keep being in a fight with each other and we won’t ever get there.

Loren: You’re absolutely right. That line that you’re talking about that’s woven around this — people like you and I are spending our days trying to find that, because we know it’s not all the way at the reductionist point of view of just carbon or it’s not at the reductionist point of view of just social justice and human rights. It’s somewhere in between. We’re trying to find that pathway to get people there. And your intervention of writing that article because you were scared, you’re saying, “look at this movement. It’s taking off in a direction that’s not comfortable with me, that’s not agreeing, and I want to protect ourselves and our brand and I want to push people to start to look at this from another angle.” And not following to a trend or a branding of regeneration, but actually a popular movement. And to create a popular movement we need to be somewhat populous. And the food movement is really bad at being populous, and you know that by — we talked about American farmers. American farmers aren’t fans of the food movement, quote on quote, and that’s a reason, because it’s so void of the social lens. We need to find that.

Gregory: American context is complicated. But yes. I think American farmers would by in large be more alienated. There’s like this weird thing that happens. Not to fall into too many tropes and whatnot, but there’s this weird magnetism and occlusion I think of reality that takes place. American farmers, by in large, I mean there’s a lot of exceptions to this, but by in large they live [in quotes] the heartland, although of course there’s farmers everywhere. And by in large the bulk of the food that’s being produced is being produced by people who would consider themselves to be socially conservative and by in large, in quotes, white people. That is to say they’re the decedents of European immigrants. They’re usually German and Swedish and whatever so they came after the big sweep of colonization so they don’t identify with the reality of genocide that they built their livelihoods on. And part of that is willful blindness and part of that is ignorance. When they’re granddad came it was already — they were already giving out sections or whatever. They weren’t in a fight about it. So those people have a conservative. And that culture has it’s own beauty and the challenge is the food movement — to be specific, the food movement’s lack of ability to integrate with farmers is that the food movement tends to have epicenters around new York city and San Francisco. And it tends to be driven by people who don’t have any relationship fundamentally with farming necessarily, and it’s more of the culinary side of thing. And there’s a cultural — it’s unfortunately in the United States and it’s different thing in the rest of the world, but in the United States there’s this — it’s like we’re playing out this stupid trope around blue states and red states and costal elites and fly over country. And that’s what farmers are pissed about in the U.S. They don’t want more in the discourse. Like your average farmer from Iowa, they want less. Because –

Loren: I think we have to be careful about that because I think what Via Campesina means to an American farmer is very different than what a Via Campesina means to a Brazilian farmer or to the [inaudible 01:12:59] [LST] movement or whatnot. But there are chapters and family farm coalition in the United States is an [LVC] chapter and so I think there is a lot more in common — and what’s interesting to me is when you talk about having a language that’s divisive and that’s exclusive. I think when we talk about anti-industrial agriculture, when we talk about antipollution and chemical used in agriculture, what happens is that language is not exclusive to the people that we’ve been talking about but to rural farmers. It’s exclusive and I think when we look at the person and under Tyson contract growing poultry in a factory farm in Arkansas and we vilify that person, which the food movement would, that’s exclusive. And that’s what caused the American farmers to hunker down into their beliefs because it’s a protectionism, right? So what I’m going to challenge you on is that if you look at an argument framed around decentralization and worker rights and justice you would look at that farmer in Arkansas and want to protect him from the abusive and exploitive contract that Tyson is allowed to put him under and that becomes then inclusive of change. I think you have to look at this from two sides. So, I’m not saying about the social justice in a way which is just as racial justice, or west versus east, or global north versus the global south. I’m talking about decentralization framework and looking at the democratization of our food system where we focus on producer rights. I don’t think that’s exclusive. I think that’s inclusive. And I think farmers and people in Brooklyn and Bushwick and Oakland will get behind that too. And I think it’s up to us to create that narrative and to shape that and that is heathy populism. The populous movement that started this country was a black farmer [cooperatives] in the south that led those movements. So, I think we have to take a step back and realize our language is pushing away the people that we purport to serve.

Gregory: Yeah, I mean I think you’re right. About the opportunity to frame — I mean I often times wonder about how to really anchor the conversation for the benefit of the individuals who find their vocation being farming and being disciplined about that. I think that that’s an important piece and I think whether or not you’re — I think that that as a principle kind of cuts through the conversation. There’s sort of socioeconomic benefit and there’s also soil health benefit. So, that as a principle I think is just an important piece to keep up front at whether or not we’re talking about soil health and then framing it as an ability for people to get off of extractive relationships from chemical companies and have more financial freedom through their soil health or whether we’re talking about an increase of equity and trade power through intervening in extractive exploitative relationships that are allowed to exist between Tyson and their chicken growers. Frankly it’s everywhere. That’s that.

Loren: That’s the unifier. It’s the farmer and Ethiopia growing coffee that hasn’t got paid for two years and the Arkansas farmer under contract with Tyson. They are in the same struggle. And we need to frame that together.

Gregory: I agree and that turns into a social movement. And I agree that that’s important. I think we should recognize that whether or not it was the communists or the capitalists as you said, whether or not it was, whoever, historically there are very few, if any good examples of agrarian equality in civilization.

Loren: There’s never been. I’m not romanticizing the past. Injustice was baked into the bedrock of agriculture. Agriculture baked the injustice into the bedrock of society.

Gregory: That’s right. Therefore, if you’re talking about transforming, in my mind, this is where maybe we have a difference of strategy. In my mind, if what you’re talking about, which we agree is the complete transformation of society because if agriculture and society are intrinsically linked and from the very beginning 50,000 years ago or whatever that there’s oppression and agriculture go hand in hand somehow, which I think there are. We should get into a deeper conversation there, let’s just take that as an assumption. I think that there’s actually some work to do that may make more hope available there. But say that that’s true, then what we’re talking about is a complete regeneration, redefinition, evolution of the relationship between humans and earth and human and (crosstalk) [inaudible 01:18:56] –

Loren: We’re talking about food sovereignty.

Gregory: Food sovereignty is just an outcome of this. and this is where my attempt to actually frame this out. Is that paper called the levels of regenerative agriculture? In which we’re trying to step up and talk about. The highest level that you could possibly imagine, it is a total transformation of the relationships between farmer and farmer, and farmer and consumer, and farmer and earth, and farmer and society. And if we’re asking how we get there, I hear that you’re painting a picture which I resonate with around the societal struggle to overcome oppression that is like the civil rights movement in essence. Which is like organize people and create a political movement and rest control out of the hands of people who are using it to maintain their hegemony and privilege.

Loren: Yeah. I don’t think that’s polarizing at all.

Gregory: But somebody’s getting the power rested from them.

Loren: Everybody is, no matter what change is going to come, this is going to happen. People are going to be threatened and I think when you talk about the injustice in the way that I was just framing it about that’s inclusive to the Arkansas farmer. I don’t think that’s polarizing. I think people want us to think that’s polarizing. And I think that’s the challenge. This social justice in everything — people are scared of land redistribution and all these things. Let’s talk about democratization of our food system. Let’s talk about decentralization of our food system first, and that’s what I’m saying needs to be inclusive in the regenerative dialog at the forefront [inaudible 01:20:58].

Gregory: Yeah, I just don’t know that I actually agree. I mean my experience is having had a very similar perspective as the one you are articulating in the past and tried for some years to work from that perspective to create change. My recent experience leads me to believe in what I’m currently trying on to see if it works is really like place sourced, wholistic, everyone negotiates and we don’t impose. My belief is and my experience has been that the social economic conversations automatically come up and you don’t need to presume — we don’t need to presume democratization and decentralization and impose that as a demand. That that is something that the stakeholders themselves will automatically talk about and if you let them talk about it, often times it’s even the people in quotes of privileges who are able to bring it up if you can create the right container in which it’s not a –

Loren: You look at the food deserts and the projects. You look at the farmers around the country that are being exploited. How farmer suicides are at an all time high. You look at people who are more [fluid communities] that want to fight this injustice and change the food system. There’s a unifier there. We’re all being screwed by the same people and so it’s about how you frame that conversation. It can actually break that divide and be inclusive and it can be depolarizing. Rural communities are being oppressed (crosstalk) [inaudible 01:22:38] –

Gregory: But in your statement you said the same people. It’s like they’re still in that statement, there’s a group who is, in that statement there’s always a group whose fault it is. And what I’m saying is it can be simultaneously true, in my mind, that oppressive nature of agriculture is inherent to civilization while at the same time that there’s a group of people who’s fault it is.

Loren: I think that the oppressive nature of agriculture isn’t inherent to civilization. It’s inherent to social stratification and hierarchy within society. When we have those systems, we’re going to get that. Hierarchy is the driver –

Gregory: What is our definition of civilization? In my mind civilization is stratified hierarchical society that relies on agriculture and complex economies in order to create said hierarchies and that’s civilization and then there’s other forms of social organization but that is what civilization is.

Loren: Sure. And I feel that if we take a step back and look at [cargo] DuPont and Monsanto of course with them. We look at the big agricultural corporations, do you think that the regenerative argument is scaring them? Or do you not think that Monsanto’s [inaudible 01:24:30] with regenerative?

Gregory: They’re definitely already branding with regenerative.

Loren: Of course, because it’s void of the social element. Because they can position themselves as precision agriculture, as sustainable. They can advance an organic model and still make money say, “We help farmers to use less [inaudible 01:24:47] with our GMOS.” What they don’t want is talks about equity sharing, they don’t want talks about democratization and decentralization.

Gregory: That’s my point. How are you going to make the change without them?

Loren: So, you want to work with these corporations to make the change?

Gregory: They have to be included. They have to be part of the equation. They’re part of society.

Loren: [I want to make them irrelevant.] I want a world where companies that [pad in life] is irrelevant and they don’t exist anymore. I want a world where –

Gregory: Totally, but you’re not going to get there by fighting them because they’ll win. We had a little, my internet kind of went there. I mean this is the heart of it. This is the heart of the strategic difference is that yes, I want those companies to be irrelevant. And my judgement is the only way to make them irrelevant is to take the much harder path of maintaining integrity while sitting at the table with them.

Loren: I want you to be careful there about the terms of maintaining integrity because you’re saying that people that aren’t doing that in the way that you view aren’t maintaining integrity. And so I think integrity is different for other people. There’s people that don’t want to sit at the table with them and create whole new systems and they’re still maintaining integrity.

Gregory: I don’t think the way that I phrased — I mean I hear that you felt defensive about that, but I don’t think that was what I was saying. I think the [inaudible 01:26:31] is on — I mean, to be frank I don’t think we can just create a system without those people.

Loren: I think if we begin to adopt localized systems, and of course we’re not going to have a global food system that’s 100% localized. But if we support localized economies, if we support agroecological farming and reduce our needs on hybrid GMO seeds to industrial petrol chemicals, what we’re doing is disempowering those corporations. What we’re doing is decentralizing, and I’m not talking about — boom all of a sudden we have a decentralized food system. I’m saying we have to work with the alternative and prop that up and support that to create an economy of scale that doesn’t exist within intellectual property rights and patenting of life within corporate control. Because these food systems are not about protecting the bottom billion, they’re about protecting their bottom line. It’s not about democratizing food system, it’s about centralizing control. And so (crosstalk) [inaudible 01:27:44] –

Gregory: But you’re missing my point, which that’s all good. And it should happen, but all of that can happen without being adversarial. It is by nature — like indirectly threatening business hegemony, but it can be done in a much more powerful and subversive transformative way if you allow and you understand the strategic power of — I shouldn’t be publishing this. We should be having this as a private conversation, but whatever, everybody can hear it. This is good. Transparency is great. If Monsanto actually thinks that they’re going to get a regenerative brand halo without engaging with the whole reality that includes people, I welcome their ignorance because it’s never going to happen. Because it can’t because it’s intrinsic to the nature of what’s going to take place. That they’re going to have to engage with a process of regeneration and decentralization that re-empowers farmers and transforms society. There’s no way around it. So, if you think in the short term, if you’re scared in the short term, I hear that. But I don’t think we can make them obsolete by fighting them. That’s what I’m saying.

Loren: No, I think we can make them obsolete by creating a model that exists without them which makes them obsolete. And I don’t think it has to be adversarial. I think it has to be opposite to what they’re doing. And I think what the movement is about, it’s creating systems that don’t create dependencies on their products or their control.

Gregory: (break in audio) [inaudible 01:29:45] that’s fine. But every way that you’re framing it as an adversarial “they”. I mean the reason that I started poking at that moment was that the language and the assumptions are that there’s an “us” versus “them”. Which I frankly, I think is an outdated model of reality. That’s what I’m trying to say. If you say that there’s certain things intrinsic to our society, the fabric of our society, then that means that both side [in quotes] in this battle, in quotes, between oppressor and oppressed are complicit in the same set of actually fundamental exploited of dynamics with the earth and with each other. And that if you’re going to transform that whole set of things, you have to have a higher order approach to transform it. It’s like the transformation can’t take place within that polarity, it has to be something that pulls both of those two things together and creates something new. And if you’re doing that, then you have to include the Monsantos of the world in your calculus. You can’t just exclude them because otherwise they’ll fight you and you’ll be stuck in the same polarity and you’ll be stuck in the same cycle.

Loren: But then if you include them, what about them getting stronger?

Gregory: I just don’t think that’s the — they’re not going to get stronger, they’re going to ger healthier. They’re going to transform so that they’re no longer oppressive. They’re going to be fundamentally you won’t be able to tell that they were. There has to be a path toward reconciliation and there has to be a path towards transformation.

Loren: On an individual basis I think there is. I just don’t think in these corporations that there is –

Gregory: But your assumption that Monsantos is somehow some evil thing is — the challenge I have with that is that every individual within Monsanto, within their world view, think that they’re doing something for the betterment of society.

Loren: I agree with that and that’s why –

Gregory: They think that private property is the foundation of a free society. And they think that markets are the foundation of liberty, And they think that innovating and transforming genes and agriculture through science is the foundation for progress and feeding all of the people everywhere. They have the same basic drivers of wanting to take care of the world and their neighbors and people that everyone has and so when we — and I’m not saying we should just be all hand wavy and avoid the social and ecological reality that actually gets created by those good intentions, but I am saying that we have to include them at the table for this transformation to really take place fully. And whether or not that’s Monsanto or the people within Monsanto, or whatever, that’s a tactical conversation. I’m not sure we’re at the level of actually be able to make a good design analysis about that. I’m not opining about that.

Loren: I think what’s — I mean this is brilliant because the only disagreement is whether we can make change within the system or outside of the system and that’s where this conversation (crosstalk) [inaudible 01:33:48] –

Gregory: I’m saying both. We have to do both–

Loren: That’s where we’re at right now and I tend to come from the point view that the powers [in me] are not going let real systemic change happen and I see that — I mean, you read Winners Take All. I mean, you read The Divide. You look at literature and the history, it’s like these people are invested in protecting their interests. So, I want to not bring out the guillotine, but I want to create alternative models that exist where they are relevant and they are obsolete. That’s where I’m focused in. We work with farmers all over the world because nobody even knows what the Growing Culture is on this podcast right now, so I’ll share that. We work with farmers all over the world to support ingenuity. These farmers are faced with unimaginable adversity. Social, economic, they’re dealing with climate change that’s more harsh than what we’re dealing with in temperate environments or whatnot. This is major adversity. And what do they cultivate? Is unbridled ingenuity and they create these solutions all over the world that are changing our food system. And that solution is not just, “How do I deal with this pest management” or “How do I build soil?” but it’s, “how do I deal with domestic violence or a middleman that hasn’t paid me? How do I get my kids to school? How do we create democratic processes to be involved in government and to vote — “

(break in audio)

Loren: — difference between the ecological world and the social world. They’re one in the same. They’re interwoven. Did we lose each other?

Gregory: We lost you for just a second. I lost you for just a second right before you said the ecological and social world are interwoven. There was a couple words that I lost.

Loren: I’m saying for these [communities], there’s no difference between the ecological, the social. It’s the same. When you look at biodiverse hotspots of the world and you look at lingual hotspots of the world which shows cultural diversity, you see [their] overlap. Without cultural diversity, we don’t have biological diversity and vice versa. These, at that epicenter and intersection, is hotspots of ingenuity all around the world where peasants, agrarians, and indigenous are producing the world’s food. So, what A Growing Culture does is work to support grassroots groups organizing and incubating innovation, solutions. Those are both social and ecological, they’re solutions. The carbon solution is just as important as the participatory government solution. And that’s what I’m saying. There’s no division there. Then we support (break in audio) [inaudible 01:36:37] [farmer] groups [inaudible 01:36:39] groups to share that knowledge, spreading across the world. We advocate for those solutions because those are destructive technologies. Those are destructive technologies and when you have a world where academia or [inaudible 01:36:58], when you have a world where we think innovation comes from people that look like you and I, Gregory. They think innovation is happening in Silicon Valley, or Wall Street, or Cornell, or Iowa state. All over the world these farmers are producing in unbelievable, innovative ways, but they’re not getting recognized. And I’ll give you two brief quick examples of this brilliance, which is what I spend my life advocating for, and I want to tell you I’m advocating for the inclusivity for these farmers and what they care about. I’m not advocating for soil carbon or for social justice. I’m advocating for these peasant growers to have a say in shaping the food system. That’s what I care about deep down. Last year in Germany they developed a technique to sex an egg. Believe it or not, they didn’t know how to determine the sex, gender, of an egg before it was hatched. So, what happens in Germany alone, 45 million male chicks a year are culled because they’re born into hatcheries, there’s no need for them. If they knew they were male they would sell them as eggs. So, this is major waste within our food system. So, they developed this technique, syringe goes in, extracts the DNA, marks it, calculates the DNA and then they can [inaudible 01:38:14]. It’s extractive industrial model that costs a lot. one of our partner organizations, [ProlaNova], who’s been working with participatory (break in audio) [inaudible 01:38:25] develop innovation since 2011 has a woman. You can all go on YouTube, sex determination, Kenya. Google it. This is open source public knowledge. This woman developed the technique to determine the sex of an egg. They brought in researchers, it’s 90% effective. That’s unbelievable. And all she does is map the curve. She maps the curve of the egg. This is the brilliance, but then that knowledge and inventions become whitewashed as we celebrate these white German scientists. And this industrial egg model which only centralizes power versus the model that democratizes power. Now I’m going to give you one more example of an innovation that I think has unbelievable scale but also helps point the story about — and advocate for the argument the I’m providing for you. Pig farming. You’ve been into an industrial pig house, right?

Gregory: I’ve never visited an industrial pig house no.

Loren: Or have you been even into a non-industrial pig house? Like an indoor pig house?

Gregory: I’ve definitely been in plenty of different pig operations, mostly very small.

Loren: So, you know pig stench is the stench that’s worse than cow stench?

Gregory: Yeah you can’t get rid of it either.

Loren: Yeah, pig, it’s a major odor issue. Pigs conventionally are raised on concrete, indoors in pig houses with a pretty high stocking density. The floors are sanitized, they’re disinfected, they’re sprayed with water and bleach and the runoff becomes a pollutant and the runoff is the pig waste which in a regenerative or permaculture system would be seen as a nutrient. Now it’s concentrated and turned into a pollutant. Unbelievable odor, disease, everything. In Vietnam, A farmer that we work with had developed a technique and I come visit this farmer. This farmer is wearing a suit polished up it’s unbelievable, I’m like, “Wow this farmer.” I’ve been hearing about this farmer for months when I was living in Vietnam it took me a long time to find this farmer, and so finally I was thinking that this was going to be some genius farmer of folklore that I was thinking and he was but he didn’t look like it. He was wearing a suit because he was so excited that I was coming to see his farm. It had a conventional pig house for Vietnam standards, maybe not as big as Iowa, North Carolina, or Canada or China. But this was pretty good size, conventional looking on the outside. He had an organic farm all surrounding it, but there was this big pig house with probably 300 pigs in it, I don’t know. As soon as we walk into the house, he puts his hand on my chest he stops he goes, “Smell that?” I say, “Smell what?” and he goes, “Exactly.” And I said, “Holy shit.” So we walk down the aisle on both sides pig pens. He jumps over with suit and his polished shoes and he gets into the pig pen. I’m like, “What the fuck is this guy doing?” I went to college and I worked in a pig house in college. So, I cannot believe it. He sticks his hands into the medium and holds it up and he smells it and he goes, “Come, smell it.” So, I jump over and I smell, and I said, “It smells sweet.” He goes, “I haven’t changed that bedding in six years.” In six years, he hasn’t changed that bedding. What he did was take byproduct from industries. Straw for the rice production, bamboo dust, wood chips and sawdust, he inoculated it with lactobacillus microorganisms and [EM] or indigenous microorganism like the Korean method. Dr. Cho. He inoculated with these microorganisms. He cultivated them from around this farm himself by burying rice. And then had — the medium was about 70 cm high — he inoculated it by spraying all these microorganisms and this yeast and sugars, and then he brought the pigs in. The urine was immediately broken down. The feces, every other day the farmer would come in and turn them. There was no odor, no flies, no rats, no disease. Why disinfect when you can coinfect? Create competition and collaboration. Right?

Gregory: Yeah. It’s great.

Loren: Zero runoff from day one. Zero runoff. Zero pollution. Think about all of the low-income communities around North Carolina, predominantly African American, who live around these pig farms that can’t even sell their house anymore because nobody would buy them because the stench is so bad. This model can be adopted into conventional models. You can do it in an indoor pig house. But the big thing is, what we started doing with these farmers is saying, “Every half a year or year let’s harvest 75% of that medium and sell it as activated compost.” You’re creating another market, it’s economic. And then you bring 75% and you use the bottom 25% that you saved as a starter kit that you saved to inoculate it. And you’re keeping that culture alive. Because this farmer was like, I don’t grow things, I grow microorganisms. That’s the beauty, that’s an innovation. That’s not going to happen from Cornell or from Iowa state. That’s a true disruptive technology and it’s going to happen in these areas that we’re not recognizing as innovators and solution generators. This is what I’m talking about. It’s not charity, it’s parody. We treat the global south peasant farmers as beneficiaries of aid not active innovators. We need to change that right away. We need that built into the model that we’re working in. The alternative needs to be inclusive. It doesn’t need to vilify, it doesn’t need to objectify or dehumanize it, but it needs to recognize that the centralized powers isn’t what we want. We want to decentralize our food system and we need that broken into the dialog that we’re creating. We’re looking to support farmers and to support people in low income area with no food access. We’re working to support people to grow food because we trust people not corporations to grow the food. This is all it is. And that doesn’t mean that healthy businesses aren’t [incubated]. A lot of our workshops have kickstarted farmers to then export coffee here or — we’re not saying don’t export or only localize, no. you have autonomy, you have control. Create the model that serves you, your culture, and your soil.

Gregory: Yeah. That’s amazing. It’s super important. Everything you’re saying. And those stories of how people brilliantly innovate when given the chance are super exciting and inspiring. I’ve seen some similar circumstances, and I think that farmer [peer] innovation network and [peer to peer] markets and the whole layer — I mean I strongly agree. I’m in heated agreement that decentralization and a focus on empowering the edged, pushing power out to the edges is essential. There is no way around that. And it also has the added benefit of transforming a lot of the social dynamics that we spent a lot of this call talking about. Because if that Vietnamese farmer, as you’re saying, has his own cultural context and his own [familial] and social responsibilities and if he’s deeply empowered to build a business and a vocation and an agroecosystem that representative of his place and his family and his society without it sort of being perverted by strange disembodied exterior economic forces. He will do a brilliant job of taking care of all of the things that he needs to take care of. And that’s one of the most beautiful things, I think, about human nature, actually. Is that humans, when not otherwise perverted, are great stewards and great community members. And building vocations around that kind of stewardship is beautiful work, and I’m so glad that you’re doing it.

Loren: Thank you I appreciate that. And when we’re doing these workshops to incubate innovation, this is all capacity and agency building. Those workshops that are creating those collaborative structures and that peer to peer learning, that’s generating capacity because there’s no environmental resilience without communal resilience. That’s the [stride]. The community has to constantly be evolving and adapting and as diverse as the farm their sowing. This is so important. So, when we’re doing these workshops, there’s no vilifying. There’s no fighting the corporation. It’s just focusing on the positive and creating real capacity for its success. Did I lose you?

Gregory: I’m still here, I just shut off video because I kept getting a little bit — yeah, the bandwidth for whatever reason I think my internet is not doing so great. So what I’m getting from you, Loren, is just this really beautiful image, I think, for our listeners of what it looks like to essentially focus instead of generally the aid industrial complex and the way that our agronomic and as you’ve said a couple of times neocolonial and we could say neoliberal economic order functions is you have these experts, these academic experts and they try to push out their innovations out to subservient farmers who are consuming that information and then just sort of cogs in a big wheel that produces food in a particular templated way that as we know has generated a huge amount of eternalized environmental and social costs. Degradation, degeneration, and pollution. What you’re offering people is sort of a glimpse into a model in which that’s been transformed and instead you’re looking and your organization, your network, your clients, and supporters are looking for the farmers themselves, the land stewards to be the ones who are — where innovation is being sourced from and what they produce both the food and the other multi-capital assets, intelligence, experience, ecological health. They’re getting to define that and offer that and kind of had a mirror held up to them and where they’re venerated, and they understand their vital role in society. Is that an accurate [summary]?

Loren: Yeah. I think that is accurate. There’s something that happened to me that I thought was pleasantly illuminating which is, I don’t know four or five years ago, I was asked to do a lecture at Columbia University. And I was presenting on our process of innovation development, participatory innovation development. I was talking about solutions and how communities need to be at the helm and shape their own food systems for themselves. My sister, who is an extreme trauma practitioner and expert she leads and designs therapeutic programs at refugee camps across the world. She consults with — brought in to lecture in the Homeland and the Pentagon. She leads a department that’s connected to Harvard in Boston. So, she came to listen to my presentation. She had never seen me talk about my presentation before. And at the end of the presentation she got to me and said, “That’s so crazy, when I’m dealing with trauma in these refugee communities, I’m dealing with people that have lost their legs to landmines or watched their families get murdered or raped, and the most extreme situations. She says, “We have the exact same approach. It’s about capacity building. It’s about [inaudible 01:52:21].” That was so unbelievably revealing to me that my sister and I are actually doing the same thing.

Gregory: Same work, yeah.

Loren: As we’re talking about this — and it’s interesting because we spent the first part of this call on this dialog about systemic change and asked ourselves where we’re drawing like lines in the sand or creating some kind of accidental or incentive, but polarizing kind of sides to an argument. What I realized is that when you go onto A Growing cCulture’s website, you don’t see anything about Monsanto. You don’t see anything about industrial agriculture, you see everything about farmers’ rights, about capacity building, about the people around the world having solutions and working together and you see case studies for those solutions and you see [language around that]. There is no negative tone and we made that decision to stay not negative. And I think the solution doesn’t have to vilify or to create enemies, but we do need to exist outside of the industrial model to create this solution. And I really think that these farmers all around the world, when they’re creating these models, it’s and act of self-liberation. They’re pulling themselves from the industrial food system that has oppressed them and they’re existing and taking autonomy over their own agricultural models and that’s so important and part of what the food movement needs to do is to build in a vocabulary for that healthy populism, for that healthy understanding of individual and collective empowerment.

Gregory: Yeah, I mean amen. I guess I continue to see — I love the focus on capacity and agency, I think that resonates very strongly with the essence of what I feel like what we’re doing at Regen Network which is essentially creating a decentralized economic infrastructure to facilitate governance of an economic system that takes into consideration all of the forms of value that are generated by good land stewardship instead of just — and to me, when I hear you talking I filter it through my own lens and my own perspective and frameworks and what I hear is the fundamental shift that needs to take place is from this mechanistic industrial perspective in which it’s even possible to exploit (crosstalk) [inaudible 01:55:29]. Where people –

Loren: Or that’s economically advantageous to exploit.

Gregory: Then it comes out as economically advantageous. My whole crusade right now, is to transform that so that it is no longer economically advantageous to exploit. Exploit workers, exploit ecosystems, exploit the economic — that we can recalibrate the value flows of reciprocity and mutualism and exchange in stores of value to be a more accurate representation of living health. That my perception is that everything that you’re saying resonates in the way that if you think of farmers and you venerate them as whole living community members nested in a community of place which includes other humans and the greater than human world. And you think about them as whole beings and you really do that and you really consider them that way, it becomes impossible to ethically make exploitative decisions.

Loren: That’s what we need to do. Yeah.

Gregory: That’s the foundation of perhaps and probably a lot of my listeners are like, “What are you talking about Gregory? Fuck Monsanto, we should just..” whatever. Maybe my provocation here, being a little bit of a provocateur is to say, “I sort of believe that at the end of the day, all of society or at least a critical mass of society needs to go through a process where our fundamental paradigm shifts from — and this maybe a little hand wavy or cliché but shifts from this mechanistic exploitative to a living regenerative perspective and the ethics and the arithmetic of reciprocity and the ways that the value stream produce a web and societal roles all have to shift with the paradigm. I think what you’re talking about is a [harbinger] of that reality. It like preparing the soil and showing people it’s already possible now, people can create networks of solidarity and an economy of solidarity now. There is nothing in the way besides our own mental state. There’s no technological restraints here in order to transform. All of the innovation and tools exists latent as you’re sort of inviting us to consider in the amazing genius network of farmers all over the world. It’s all there, we (crosstalk) [inaudible 01:58:27] –

Loren: Or the potential [is there]. Yeah.

Gregory: The potential is there, and all the food exists to feed all of us and more. All of these things are latent. What is demanded of us is to say yes and engage in the transformation essentially.

Loren: Yeah, the world’s most renewable resource is human collaboration man. And this is really important to me. But we need to recognize these individuals, the role they play, the system that they’re caught in, and the potential for change that comes from them. And that’s about agency building and that takes that mixture of social and economic lens. So, our workshops are 100% collaborative because the revolution might not be televised, but it will be open source. And everything is open source because we build off of each other’s knowledge. Farmers do not adopt, they adapt. When one farmer learns about that pig process and that farmer, she then implements it on her farm, what happens is she’s building upon that innovation.

Gregory: Life itself, it’s evolution. It’s how it all works.

Loren: This is how we create the domino effect of real systemic change is by reigniting our own agency and our authority and our autonomy over ourselves and our operating systems. What I strongly believe is that our relationship with the environment is a reflection of our relationship within society. That we cannot create an environmentally regenerative or a sustainable future as long as we still have injustice and patriarchy baked within our society. So, we’re both looking for the same thing. (crosstalk) [inaudible 02:00:18]

Gregory: I’m just flip it on the head though, it’s sort of like a yes and. It’s like the two sides of the same coin.

Loren: Yeah sure. I think so, but I do think — can we agree that as long as there’s exploitation, we’re not going to have sustainability?

Gregory: Yeah. Well I don’t really use the term sustainability so much — or that is to say that I do use it, I just have a specific definition of it. But yeah, I think what I hear you say is, without transforming our social relations, we can’t transform our relationships with our biosphere, our ecology (crosstalk) [inaudible 02:01:05] –

Loren: How we engage with nature is a reflection of how we treat each other.

Gregory: Vice versa, I guess that all I’m trying to say is that part of it — there’s like a non-dual thing there which is that our exploitation of — because humans are nature.

Loren: Sure, it’s the separation of ourselves. Which is — a lot of these communalistic and polyamorous societies saw themselves as part of nature.

Gregory: When we see ourselves as part of nature, it transforms how we treat each other and it transforms how we treat the world.

Loren: Absolutely

Gregory: I mean there’s a bunch of — I want actually kind of hoping to get to some — maybe to be continued. I would like to know more about if and how Regen Network and A Growing Culture might meaningfully collaborate to accelerate the transformation — mutual regeneration that’s needed and underway. So maybe we can either do that offline or in another podcast if it makes sense. But I am so grateful for your time Loren, I’ve had a great conversation I hope our semantic dialog was useful for other people as it seemed to be enjoyable for us.

Loren: Yeah, I absolutely loved it it’s like we should have been doing this over a beer years ago.

Gregory: Totally.

Loren: Everybody that knows us has always been pushing and so I want to say thank you so much for the opportunity. Thank you so much for engaging and entertaining my craziness and for challenging me, it’s really refreshing and helpful. I also do want to say how much I respect the network that you’re a part of and Terragenesis and the regeneration folks. I mean I’m a big fan of all of them. I think we can do this. I think we can make a change and I hope from this conversation we all get a takeaway of not getting too down into the weeds about drawing lines where we’re different and finding ways to work together.

Gregory: Yeah. I mean ultimately most of the differences is either semantic or youthful tensions that don’t necessarily have answers but serve to be powerful questions to deeply consider. Where there is not a right or wrong, there’s a tension that exists that we have to hold in how we’re approaching this work. I really respect your work in the world. Thank you for hopping on. I’ve got to hop straight into another meeting here unfortunately, so I think we’ll wrap up with that. And you want to share a quick note to our listeners about where they can find out more about A Growing Culture and your work.

Loren: AGrowingCulture.org

Gregory: Awesome, thanks so much Loren.

Loren: Yeah man, thank you Greg. I really appreciate it. Have a great day man.

Gregory: You too.

[End of Audio]

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