In 11 questions and 11 minutes, Kiss the Ground CEO Evan Harrison interviews leaders in the Regenerative Movement. These authentic conversations reveal insights of Regeneration pioneers, as we work towards advancing a viable solution for human and planetary health.
When it comes to making sense of healthy soil, and the big picture, Paul Hawken has a way of making it click. He’s not just a climate guy or a soil advocate, he’s a compelling storyteller who knows how to connect the dots between our health, the planet, and the way we live.
Paul is the author of Regeneration and Carbon: The Book of Life, and founder of Erewhon, and that is just scratching the top soil.
He advanced the concept of regenerative agriculture with the creation of Project Drawdown in 2014—one of the most influential, scalable, and hopeful initiatives in the climate space. His work has shaped how farmers, CEOs, conscious consumers, and a growing audience think about the role of soil in solving our most significant problems.
We sat down with Paul for 11 rapid-fire questions—no geek speak, just real talk.
I grew up in the suburb of Walnut Creek, California. It was hardly a suburb at the time. There were so few houses. It was post-war, and there were a lot of soldiers coming back. My first experiences in nature were in the backyard, which was next to a canal and a creek.
To be frank, it was not safe to be in my home with my parents. I spent as much time as possible outside because that was where I felt safe. From pollywogs to wild ducks to bugs, I loved it. That fundamental childhood experience stayed with me until this day. When I am outside, I still feel safe with everything. Bears, rattlesnakes, whatever it is.
I was brought up in Berkeley, a hotbed of the free speech movement. Activists like Mario Savio, Jerry Rubin, and Joan Baez were at the forefront of freethinking. There was also a lot of pushback from the university to the students.
For me, this was home and natural to my way of existing, so it had a profound influence on my way of thinking. Mostly, the influence was the questioning. Not about “knowing,” but the capacity to question the conventional wisdom, thinking, or top down way in which society was being dictated to and controlled by corporations and politics.
I was always asking questions and was curious. It didn’t come out as condemnation or “screw you.” It emerged as a deep curiosity that began with my childhood wonder in nature.
The same thing happened to me at Berkeley in terms of sociological and political issues. I questioned everything, and that curiosity has stayed with me right to this day in my latest book, Carbon: the Book of Life. I am not a know-it-all or an expert. I’m just really curious.
Project Drawdown started in my mind in 2001. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had just released its Third Assessment. I noticed that people who cared and were concerned didn’t know what to do.
The Union of Concerned Scientists listed five things you could do on their website. For example, use cold water in your washing machine or plug a power strip into an outlet under your home entertainment center. The solutions were incredibly vacuous to the task at hand.
That is when I started talking to people about how we can map, measure, and model the most substantive solutions to reversing global warming. I wanted to stop talking about net zero. Let’s go way beyond that, which is to reverse global warming.
That is what drawdown means. I knew then I was going to write Regeneration. Drawdown was about saving life on Earth. Regeneration was about creating more life on Earth.
There are lots of ‘solutions’ out there, but many of them put lipstick on the pig of consumption. They do not go upstream to cause, which is the juggernaut extractive economy. The solutions and climate rhetoric are similar to the cause of global warming: objectifying the living world. The problem is not up there, but down here. The climate cannot have a crisis. Global warming is caused by the destruction of the biosphere—taking, destroying, and consuming. What are called climate tech solutions are different manifestations of the objectification of nature. Corporations are selling Band-Aid “climate tech” to the highest bidder.
We got a lot of feedback. I did 128 speeches in 20 months. I would get lots of invitations because we were on the cusp of something.
Drawdown opened up a conversation. It elicited a sense of possibility that people didn’t have. It became a NYT bestseller, was translated into more than a dozen languages, and was taught in schools, from fourth grade to MIT.
There are several reasons. Primarily, it is because big food dominates advertising, permeates our schools, and seduces taste buds with highly manipulated ultra-processed foods.
“Regenerative agriculture teaches us about resilience, the life of the soil, and pragmatics. It is not about labels. It is about creating a food system that withstands changing weather patterns, methods that will hold up in the coming years and decades where heat is increasing and water becomes more volatile—flash floods or droughts.”
What I see is a failure of the climate narrative. Journalists, newscasters, and activists say they are fighting, combating, or tackling climate change. These are male verbs. Men have been trying to solve problems with those verbs for millennia. The past 2,000 years have witnessed over 1,700 wars. We are at war with ourselves and the exquisite complexity of the living world.
Colonist cultures have been seizing and selling people, cultures, homelands, forests, minerals, and land to the highest bidder for 500 years. That is the origin of global warming. The climate crisis is an inhumanity crisis.
We see this in agriculture. Agriculture is an industry, soil is a medium, and food is a thing. It takes as much as possible from the Earth by using chemicals.
Fritz Haber accidentally developed chemical fertilizers and pesticides to make better bombs and poison gas for WW1. The soil is our mother. Everything we have, need, and treasure comes from the Earth. The term Mother Earth is not an accident or a sentimental aphorism. It is absolutely true. She is our Mother.
We are killing the life of the soil to grow food, and that is upside down and backwards. The underlying principle is that when you create more life in the soil, you get healthy plants, people, and animals.
“The climate crisis is an inhumanity crisis.”
Erewhon was created because there was a buyers’ co-op in a basement on Newbury Street in Boston. Nobody wanted to take care of it, so I said I would. It was a little store with doughnut bags, rolled oats, rice, beans, and things like that. I loved it because practically nobody came into the store, and I could read. One day, somebody came in and asked, “How do you know your oats are organic?” I said, “I get them from the Mennonites in Pennsylvania. They would never use chemicals.” And then another person asked, “How do you know the HAIN oil is cold-pressed?” “It says so on the label,” I said.
I realized I didn’t know if either were true. I inspected the main bag of oats in the back of the store and found out they were actually from The National Oat Company, Des Moines, Iowa. I called them and asked Betty to tell me about their organic farming program. She listened for a while and finally said, “Honey, we just buy oats and roll ‘em.” Hain wrote to me saying there is no such thing as cold-pressed seed oils. “The oils were cold-processed to remove the cloudy stearates, and all the seed oils were solvent extracted.”
I was pissed off that I had unknowingly lied to my customer. I decided to replace everything in the store with products from a farm I visited, walked around, and spoke with the owner. I wanted to verify that every single thing I sold was organically grown. In hindsight, most of it was regeneratively grown. These were not farmers who converted overnight to sell to a market. They had been farming that way for decades, and they just never went over to the chemical side.
I think many viewers of Kiss the Ground are the same—they take in a lot of information about what is going wrong in the world politically, socially, culturally, and ecologically. I take in that information every morning because I have to know the zeitgeist of the world that I am writing to. Otherwise, I’m writing into some fantasy world.
There is new troubling information every day. Instead of getting me down, I say thank you to the people, the activists, the scientists, and the researchers. I check the news every morning, but at some point, I have had enough for that day. I tie a ribbon on it and focus on what we can do, what’s being done, and the possibilities.
If you stay on the bad-news side all morning, you’re paralyzed all day and not very helpful to the world. Your best self is trying to squirm out of that narrative. The child who sees, wonders, and is enthralled is in every one of us. We need to embrace that aspect of being human if we are going to have a life that is meaningful, connected, and honoring to the three trillion earthmates who live on this beautiful planet with us.
Regenerative agriculture really arises from an understanding that life comes from healthy soil and health comes from those plants. It is a process of discovery. You see, big companies are starting to discover regenerative agriculture but not with a true understanding. That will fool people for a while.
The term regenerative agriculture is going to be misused for a while. That is why it is important that organizations like Kiss the Ground tell the truth. It is not about criticizing or putting down agribusiness as much as it is just being truth tellers.
One of the things that is missing in the media is the goodness that is happening all over the world. We see the bad and shocking headlines, which set our brains to be alert and respond more to fear.
After a forest fire is extinguished, you notice the grass and wildflowers beginning to grow again in the spring, nourished by the nutrients and minerals from the ash. You also see flowers that haven’t been seen for 50 or even 100 years. Those types of seeds remain dormant for decades until they receive a specific amount of intense heat, a process known as fire-triggered succession.
Where we are right now is where fire and the fire-triggered succession are happening at the same time. The world is on fire literally, ecologically, and socially. At the same time, there is this fire-triggered succession.
Movements are arising worldwide to protect our children, forests, cultures, land, and seas. Right now, hundreds of thousands of activities worldwide are regenerating life on Earth. This is the wildflowers emerging from the fire.
I would invite Aldo Leopold, Vanessa Machado de Oliveria (author of Hospicing Modernity), and Alba Bermeo Puin (Pregnant Ecuadorian activist murdered by mining companies). I would like to thank her on behalf of all people who care for the Earth).
We would eat California cuisine: toyon berries, cream bush berries, rose hips, blue elderberries, snowberries, huckleberries, and grapes. Some hazelnuts, walnuts, and pine nuts. Cluster lilies, native tulips, camas, fritillaries, desert parsley, evening primrose, and cattails. Vegetable greens would include monkey flowers, sage, clovers, violets, mule ears, redbud, and cottonwood flowers, as well as wild peas and grass seeds. Teas might be lilac, self-heal, or fir, sweetened with maple syrup from bigleaf maples. From the rivers, lamprey.
We would start with Jacob Collier singing “Wild Mountain Thyme.” Then to Mahler’s Symphony #2, the Resurrection Symphony.
Written by: Luli Harrison
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