S02E10: Waarom we moeten stoppen met veeteelt en hoe we dit kunnen doen. Met Brits schrijver, columnist en activist George Monbiot

Ja, we nemen op. Ja, hello allemaal. Welkom bij Verhit. Mijn naam is Ilonen van de oude. Mijn naam is Wouterlem. Dit is een podcast van Greenpeace Nederland, waarin we kijken naar wat we moeten doen om de klimaatcrisis tegen te gaan. En hoe we dit samen met elkaar kunnen gaan doen. Ja, vandaag hebben we met George Mombio gesproken. Kunnen we al zeggen een hele grote gast. Dit is ook onze eerste aflevering in het nieuwe inderdaad. We hebben opgevangen, dan weet je dat hij na de intro gratifijde inderdaad is. We exciseer ons zelf als het niet helemaal perfect klinkt. Sorry, het is anders zijn dan wat je van ons gewend bent. Ja, George is kunnen we wel zeggen, echt een van de headliners van dit seizoen. Jij wilde heel graag met George spreken, woud. Hoe voont je het? Nou ja, het was de gek. Je hebt gewoon binnen de klimaten in de milieubewegingen, heb je gewoon een aantal kopstukken voorbeelden mensen die echt het voortaal nemen. Ja, en die baanbrekend werk voor zetbaar. Precis, dan kan je denken aan Gretatunberg meer recent, maar ook Jane Goedal, meer over langere perioden en George Mombioot, oordor zeker bij. En hij kan sowieso fantastisch vertellen, hij heeft enorm veel kennis en ervaring van zaken, van vervuiling, van macht, van groot vervuiders, van landbouw, echt alle zaken waarbij ons ook dagelijks mee bezig houden. Ja, en hij kon echt waanzinig vertellen. Wat voor jij er van? Ja, ik vond het ook heel leuk om hem te spreken. Misschien gaan we het waar even vertellen. Waar was dus echt helemaal fan van hem? Ik had op de eenvond om neer. Ja, ik weet niet hoe het kan eigenlijk. Nou, het is ja maar ik ken hem niet zo. Goed, dus ik had niet, ik was niet Starstruck. Maar ja, hij praten heel makkelijk. Ik vind het echt prachtig ideeën. Hij kon naar rustig over vertellen. En ja, ik vond het wel inspirerend mensen. Ja, en we spraken hem over z'n nieuwe boek, Read Genesis. En dat gaat heel erg over landbouw. Hoe de landbouw eigenlijk de grootste oorzaak is van ecoside, of van het vernietige van biodiversiteit. En ook wat we daar aan kunnen doen. Nou, we hopen dat jullie het net zo een leuke aflevering gaan vinden als dat wij het vonden. Ween ze jullie heel veel luisterpresenteren. Ik vond het echt leuk. Ik heb een hart van vuur en een hoog volvreden verhijt. Welkom, George. Het is een heel mooi plaats te hebben hier. Als we het begin, we willen het te vertellen dat mensen die niet weten hoe je is. Je kan opet en een investigatief artikel voor de guardianen. Je kan ook echt, echt, echt een heel mooi profochtig en bevrijd boek. En ook een verhole, reval van land, zie en human alive en de echte consent. Een manifesto voor een nieuwe world order. En, natuurlijk, meer rezenten op wat we willen talken om dit te gaan. Een heel warm, welkom te je. En dank u zo'n beelden van de tijd voor ons en ons. Dank u zo'n moeilijk, het is een heel mooi bevrijd te vertellen. Ik moet het begin om te talken om je boek te verhijnen. Je hoeft het te verhijnen als de zingende, grootste strijd om de de natie te verhijnen. En het capaciteit om de restaar zelf te verhijnen. Hoe zou je het spijnen? Ja, ik heb het tappen om een andere standard te verhijnen om de andere inderteren te verhijnen. En als de andere inderterter is om wat de verhijnen op de leven te verhijnen, we worden absoluut verhijnen. Het is de grootste scherp van habitat, verhijnen en de grootste scherp van de deforestation van de wilde lifelijks, van de speciaalste extinie. conceits, kara d'r aank meaningful te operated, en �� en attractions. Waarom is het gelijk Victory. ciudans dublie кор Quinnenie de excited.' En land is de ongeveer de opgepast van de verantwoordende meestrijd. Het hele helft van land is voor hun purposes. Het helft van land kan niet gebruiken door de wilde-eakers. Het kan niet gebruiken door de raamstof, de andere deel van de wetlands, de savanners, de natuwe deel van de wilde-eakers. Het is op de wilde-eakers, de grote speciaalte te zijn, ervaring te zijn. En de verantwoordende meestrijdden die deel van de verantwoordende meestrijdden zijn. We moeten we opgeven, we moeten we opgeven, maar we moeten we in de verantwoordende meestrijdden in de verantwoordende meestrijdden, en de mensen die beter dan het doen vandaag. Dus de hele gelijkheid is te verantwoordende meestrijdden met de verantwoordende meestrijdden. En we waren verantwoordelijk, zoals je dit geeft, zo goed in je boek, maar hoe we hoe we het gevoelend van dit verantwoordende meestrijdden die dit verantwoordende meestrijdden, de grote speciaalte meestrijdden, eigenlijk. Nou, natuurlijk is het een beetje wat we het doen voor een heel langere tijd en natuurlijk voor de volgende paar thousand jaar, we hebben het in de verantwoordende meestrijdden, we hebben het in de verantwoordende meestrijdden, maar het is een heel langere tijd, maar het is een heel langere tijd, we hebben het in de verantwoordende meestrijdden, en dat is particulieren in de verantwoordende meestrijdden, maar het is een heel langere tijd, maar het is een heel langere tijd, maar het is een heel langere tijd, maar het is een heel langere tijd, but outdoor, we hebben het in de verantwoordende meestrijdden, maar outdoor, we hebben het in de verantwoordende meestrijdden, maar outdoor, we hebben het in de verantwoordende meestrijdden, en dingen kan lopen,其實, ruled. Je tas is ook 90 ensuite heavy. En ik ben aan de oude mensen in de gezegd zo'n grote gezegd capita. Maar het ses wel een heleعلad is wat je daar gemaakt hebt the in symbolsfunding. Alleen de gezegdement om te rien op te voorbij te laten zien. De zrat fouten ook 말ende autoして die senzacrowden die zu такую eilingsmoovyordee onder volledig supporting ze dan valleyverzoortBC. En dan gaan daar ons plenty van voor builder voor. Het is een bed voor de zrat, het is een bed voor de countryside. Kan je er explainen? - Ja, dit is meer dan een compact zetlement, een huising en infrastructuur om de zrat te spreden op de zrat, op de zrat, op de zrat, en dan een oude afgelaten. Не iets oud ver macaroni om te af件. Het moet ook toch geen binnende Tibetan meer zijn, maar Zoom meer zijn. Ik moet het niet aan hetーボ �lijven om Ish'm te verkoen dit gebouwd hubs zegen de kracht jest aan zonder andere componenten. Um het echte van hun manja bomen. Mariet is een pajättje en姚她erunnel, daarén hebben we een sens. Het is alles, het is 1% van de land. Het is veel van de land, het is opgepijt door de desert, door de manjten, door de eidskaps. Het is een verkoek, het is niet heel erg. Maar de grootste landhuur is de verkoek, het is 38% van de landhuur. Dat is een heel veel. Het is eigenlijk dat het de land niet kan opgeprenken. Het is nog steeds op het gebouw, het is een verkoek en de forest en die massive degradatie is bij het grootste deel van de bedrijven, het is meer en meer. Maar laten we het verkoeken op een beetje. Het is ook wel een feit dat we op het land of het land alle kropen ergens zijn. Het is ook wel een kropen van de land, maar het is ook echt een van de land die het al opgepijt Ja, daar emprezt hier ietsbard is. Zojes alsof het gebeuren aan de 1sec reakbetxember dat, het gebeurt niet gewoon snel hebben. En---- Je Cond resigned ziet these wereldsels die zorgen zijn dat veel mensen momenten die overственно naar één lijkt daar het acoustic Hanım Lee Naal. – Harg Heben tasting gaat dat niet capacities kan maar ook tijdens een masief, ecologische opportuniteit kost en carbon-opportuniteit kost. De opportuniteit kost is de kost, je incur, maar een andere is. En in dit gegeven moment kostt het kost van opgepijing alles dat land met je kijkers. battle or your sheep is that that same land does not support the rainforests and savannas and wetlands that might otherwise have been there. And because all of those ecosystems are much richer in carbon than the ranch lands that replace them, there's also a massive carbon opportunity cost which is the carbon you would otherwise be storing. And there's this pernicious myth which has become extremely popular that ranching stores carbon and that the way to protect the world is to ranch as much of it as possible. It's a bit like saying the way to protect the world is to burn as much coal as possible. It's literally the worst thing you can do. I find it so interesting because we spoke to somebody from the vegetarian butcher. It's for meatless meat actually. And he told us actually the same story like we have the idea that we have such an efficient system. But if you look at the calories, it's such an inefficient system. And you have a word for it in your book Ghost Land which I found very accurate. Go Stake is a particular issue when it comes to livestock fed on grain. Now almost all the livestock products that people eat are fed on grain. People have this storybook image of where their meat and milk comes from which bears absolutely no relation to where in countries like the Netherlands or the United Kingdom at least 90% of our meat and milk comes from which is factories. It's massive factories in which huge numbers of animals are packed in. Now if we treated our dogs and cats the way that we treat pigs and chickens we would literally be sent to prison. It would be an imprisonable offense. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, just as in the ordinary course of producing pork eggs chicken meat, rest of it we treat millions of animals with the utmost barbarity. And the great majority of those animals, yeah, they're coming from factories, they're being fed on grain, generally ground thousands of miles away. It might be soya from from the Amazon and the Sahado in Brazil. Yeah, because you have the land to use like for example in the Netherlands, but you need as well the land in Brazil to have full the soya. That's a good stake. And people to always the people say we're producing local pork and local eggs. Well sorry it's not local if the pork and eggs requires soya from thousands of miles away to be produced. And anyway the virtues of localism in food production have been massively overstated. People are obsessed with food miles. How far is this food travel? But actually food miles are a very small part of the overall carbon footprint and ecological footprint. It's far more important what you're eating. Anyway, so the great majority is coming from that. A very very small proportion of our diet is produced by ranching. And yet that has by far and away the biggest impact of all this massively disproportionate. The worst farm products anyone can eat. And how? Our pasture fed beef and lamb. And how can we change this actually false romantic image of ranch eating? It's very deeply embedded. In fact, I think it has the status of a root metaphor. An idea so deeply planted in our mind so we don't even recognize it as an idea. And this whole idea that the shepherd and his flocks or the cowboy and his cows are the seat of innocence and purity while the city is a cauldron of corruption and evil. This goes back in the secular tradition to theocratus in the third century BC. And in the biblical tradition, even further back in the Old Testament, Old Testament was written by the descendants of herding people who look back with nostalgia to the time when Abraham's flocks darkened the plains. One of the very first stories in the Bible is about cane and able. And it's about how the good guy able, the herder of beasts, is murdered by the bad guy cane, the tiller of the ground. And so, and from that point onwards, we've romanticized this notion of of herding animals as being the good thing to do. And that's because history is a propaganda of the victor. And these pastoral cultures were often highly aggressive warlike, very associated with dispossession, with land grabbing. And having grabbed the land and thrown everyone else off, they then told a story which favored themselves. And this pastoral tradition continues in the Wild West myths with the noble cowboys fighting those terrible Native Americans and killing them all. And isn't this great because we've pushed the frontier of civilization ever westwards. And this highly racist white supremacist myth was somehow turned into this cozy notion of these these noble cowboys, lying under the stars and singing their songs. And well, eventually having sex with each other, but that took quite a long time. And then feeding the world. And it's all just bollocks or bullshit would be more appropriate in this in this instance. What are possible systemic solutions are there to use last land and we wildest again? What can we do? Well, we actually have a great opportunity to do something really striking, really amazing actually, which is to just get out of livestock farming all together. I mean, there are two fundamental things we have to do to protect the living planet, to protect and restore the living planet. One of them leave fossil fuels on the ground. Right? The other one stop farming animals. Those are the two things, the two big things. There are more or less equal importance. They're both enormous. As an environmental movement, we're gradually coming around to the idea of leaving fossil fuels in the ground. It's taken us rather a long time, but hey, we're getting there. We're getting there. Yeah. But the idea of stopping animal farming, it's scarcely features. It's just amazing. In fact, the come across environmentalists even to this day who still try to justify this industry, which arguably is more damaging than fossil fuels because of the enormous multiplicity of impacts it has. It hits so many earth systems. Of course, there's also a very major contributor to climate breakdown, bigger than transport, global transport. So what can we do about it? Well, just as we need it, we have, I think, the potential to develop the most important technology, environmental technology ever produced, which is precision fermentation. Throughout the agricultural period for thousands of years, I'm on the way to that. So thousands of years, we've been primarily farming multicellular organisms, plants and animals. And we've bred them and we've done extraordinary and often terrible things to them. And we've found ways of making that process as efficient as we can in some ways like the horrible factory farming we were talking about. And we pushed it to its absolute limits and done enormous environmental damage along the way. And we've done a bit of farming of unicellular organisms too. We've generated yeast and bacteria to make our bread and our cheese and our kimchi and our sour crowd and other products like that. But what precision fermentation means is a slightly more precise form of brewing. It's been also used for a while for about 40 years to produce insulin and to produce kimmers in. If you eat cheese, you're almost certainly eating kimmers in, which is this product of yeast or bacteria, which are grown through precision fermentation in breweries. But now we have the opportunity to produce our protein rich and fat rich foods that way. And microbes have far smaller demands than multicellular organisms. In fact, my estimate is that if we were to produce all the protein that we currently get from animals, from microbes instead, we could produce all the worlds protein on an area of the size of Greater London. And what that provides is the opportunity for rewilding and ecological regeneration on a massive scale. Because all that land, that 26% plus half of the 12% roughly. So you're talking about 32% of the land area, all of which is land which would be highly suitable for ecological restoration because it has a certain amount of fertility and potential. That could all be rewilded. And in fact, it's reached the point now that I think this is our last hope. Only if we can create ecological restoration on that scale, both from land incidentally and at sea because we can replace the fish caught by the commercial fishing industry, which is the biggest threat to marine ecosystems as well. If we do that, then we do have a chance of stopping the sixth Great Extinction, stopping the collapse of Earth's systems. and drawing down very large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And how close is that technology in developing? Is it like a matter of 10 years, five years or within reach? The technology is ready. It's just waiting for regulatory approval. In fact, in the US and several other countries, you can already buy precision fermentation products. In the EU, it takes a bit longer. There's quite high regulatory hurdles to it. And in theory, it takes two years for novel foods to get approval. But if there are lots of objections, it can be suspended indefinitely. And the animal industry, the livestock industry, is mobilising and lobbying very hard to make sure that these unicellular foods, these precision fermentation products, don't get approval, because it recognises that's the end. If we can produce our protein-rich foods from microbes instead of from multi-cellular organisms, instead of from animals, then we can do it so much more cheaply and so much more efficiently and so much more environmentally friendly and produce foods which are much healthier than their products. That they're just a dead industry walking, they're finished and it's stranded assets. So they're going to fight tooth and nail to prevent this from going ahead. How do we think this could work? Because in your book, you talk about that you would like the more developing countries all over the world, to install fermentation tanks under local control. They find this unlikely, the technology developed under corporate control has been patented. Corporations driven by profits are unlikely to democratise control. And the technology itself is likely to be used by them to extend their reach over the natural world. What do you say to them? Sure. So it's absolutely right that corporations will try to seize control of these new food technologies, just as they've seized control of the existing months. And we should be resisting that all the way down the line. Antitrust laws should be strong, intellectual property rights should be weak. And that applies to every single sector and earth, older or new. But because of corporate lobbying, antitrust laws have been weakened and corporate intellectual property rights have been strengthened. We're gone in exactly the wrong direction. And that applies to everything. It applies to the current food economy. And they're not just talking about high tech. 90% of the global grain trade is in the hands of four corporations. So what do you do about that? You say, right, we've got to ban the global grain trade because of corporate capture. You say, no, you break up the corporations. If you ban the global grain trade, billions of people would instantly starve. Right. So, so we have to get we have to have a sense of proportion of this is not the technology, which is the problem. It's the control of the technology. And these systems have been created by humans. They can be changed by humans. These are political decisions and their political decisions we ought to make. And if we get this right, then we have this tremendous potential to create a far more distributed food system than agriculture permits because there are large parts of the world, including parts where many people live, where very little agriculture is possible because the land isn't fertile and there isn't enough water and the climate often is extremely hostile. And so many people around the world are dependent on imports from thousands of miles away. And that import dependency introduces a profound vulnerability. Yeah. They we've seen increasing disruptions to global food trade. I mean, the war in Ukraine is just the latest one. But interestingly tracking it since the 1970s, we've seen ever more shocks and deeper shocks to the global food system, which is probably a result of systemic frailty and loss of resistance in the complex system called the global food system, which almost no politicians have latched onto and is scarcely features in the global media. It's really been shockingly neglected. Now, if we can bring about a decentralized precision fermentation industry, which isn't controlled centrally by a few big corporations, and every town could have its own microbrewery producing protein rich foods tailored to local markets and they don't require inputs from elsewhere. Once you've set it up, if you're using microbes which consume hydrogen or methanol, then you can produce that locally from sunlight. And one of the characteristics of hungry nations is that the majority of them have a great deal of sunlight. And that's their agricultural feedstock. That's what they need to produce the hydrogen or methanol that the bacteria eat and then turn into these protein rich foods. And apart from that, you need a very small amount of water, tiny by comparison to agriculture's demand, some carbon dioxide, which you can draw directly from the atmosphere, and a tiny amount of fertilizer. And you have a closed loop system so it doesn't spill into the living world. We absolutely shrinking the footprint, but greatly enhancing people's food security and food sovereignty. And one of the great ironies of this is that there's a sort of instinctive visceral reaction from some food sovereignty campaign that's saying, we don't want these new technologies. We just want to stick with agriculture. You say, well, how's that going to work in countries which are totally important to pendant where you just don't have the fertile land and water to grow their own food by agriculture? Do you want to shut off this opportunity for a genuinely local, locally controlled food economy in places where no such thing is possible under current circumstances? And I say to some of these food sovereignty campaigners, you're not food sovereignty campaigners, you're faking it. Yeah. I was wondering, I would like to assume it in a little bit on, as you said, also the systemic change of power, the power dynamics. So I'm very glad that you also say that it's not only technological fix, but also a very systemic power switch. You're naming anti-trust laws as an example, but as you say that that's also a power issue of how strong or how weak they are. How do you change that dynamic and also maybe you could zoom in a little bit on what role you see for the global movement of climate activists, traditional personal movements and indigenous activists? Sure. Sure. So the first thing I'd say is that we have to intervene politically in every single sector. We've lost interest in issues like anti-trust, which is why we've got Amazon and why we've got Google and why we've got Apple and why we've got Microsoft and Syngenta and Cargill and these other predatory corporations. In the middle of last century, there were very powerful anti-trust laws and governments around the world recognized that they were essential to democracy. And if you let corporations become too powerful, you cease to be a democracy, you become a plutocracy instead. And that is more or less what's happened and the global rise of neoliberalism has greatly accelerated that, but it's collapsed, it's failed. And we urgently need to bring in new political systems, which can put corporations back in their box and put the people back in charge. And when that's the case, all sorts of things that work against us can begin to work for us. And technologies which we might see as a threat instead become a promise. And that applies as much to social media as it does to new forms of biotechnology, for example. So it's all about the politics, it's all about the control, it's all about who is in charge. And we can't just ignore all that and pretend it's not happening and just talk about the technologies as if the only possible outcome is that big corporations control them. No, you know, that is the only outcome if we don't step in, if we don't get involved. The potential, the liberation potential for humanity, I think is very great. So if we look at ranching, for instance, it's by far and away, the greatest cause of the dispossession of indigenous people worldwide. And going on for many, many hundreds of years that ranching because it occupies so much land and because it's so strongly associated with politics of control and dominance and patriarchy and colonialism. It's been the big driver of dispossession and eviction in the Americas in Australia. And nowadays in Madagascar, in Myanmar, and in so many countries. around the world, even going back in Britain. It was the driver of enclosure in England. It was the driver of the clearances in Scotland. It drove people off the land and continues to do so on a massive scale today. It's going on in the Amazon right now. Yeah. Where cattle ranching is the great driver of Indigenous dispossession. Yeah. So, one of the things I want to see is the opportunity for Indigenous people and local people to take back their land. And we know that Indigenous people are the best environmental guardians. And that if the land is returned to them, then they are the people who can oversee that restoration, who can bring back ecosystems, but also bring back their far more sustainable and often far more productive economies. Yeah. That cattle ranching displaced. We spoke for the podcast. We spoke with a lot of people. And as I listen to you now, I think you both have the same idea. They all talk to us like, we should restore the relation we have with nature. Is that the you share that opinion? Oh, very much so. I mean, this is one of the things that frustrates me that people say, well, you know, if we stop farming the land, we won't have a relationship with it anymore. I think, well, your farmers have a certain relationship with the farmland they're farming, often a very destructive and abusive relationship. But what about the rest of us? We're excluded from that land because it is being farmed. And there are barbed wire fences and no trespassing signs around that land. We can't go there. We can't have a relationship with it. But if we can release vast tracts of the land from farming and produce our food by other means, or indeed just, you know, we would still be farming grain and still be farming fruit and vegetables, but on a much smaller area of land, then there's far more land for the rest of us to engage with and build relations with, especially if that land is ecologically restored. Because looking at Britain, for instance, there are many parts of the country that were, actually, it's so horrible what we're done there that I can barely bear to look at it. It's just so depressing. It breaks my heart to see how it's been abused by the people who own it and farm it. So I live just on the edge of Dartmore, which is a national park in the south of England. And it's quite a famous national park and people go there walking in things. The great majority of it is so highly degraded that it's terrestrial dead zone. It's been completely colonized by a coarse grass called millennia, which once it's well established, prevents anything else from living there. And you get mile upon mile upon mile of land where you don't see a single bird, a single insect, a single flower. It's just quite extraordinary. And yet most of that land, what's temperate rainforests? Dartmore is a temperate rainforest region. It should be incredibly rich at Atlantic rainforests, absolutely swarming with life. The reason it's not is that every year the sheep farmers on Dartmore burn nature as it starts to recover. So if anywhere where you've got Heather or Gorse or young trees returning, they get in there, they spray it with fuel and they burn it to prevent them from coming back. And if you do so again and again, you get this monoculture of this coarse grass, this millennia, which is useless even for sheep farming. So it's a most short term approach. And they're knowingly doing this, knowing that this is going to be the likely outcome. But they say, this is our tradition, this is our cultural heritage. This is actually ecocide. It qualifies as ecocide because it's taking place across a vast area and it's deliberate. And if a law of ecocide is brought in, I would hope to see those people prosecute it. But instead we have the National Park Authority trying to justify the practice and trying to say, well, you know, this has always been done. Oh, and now they're claiming that it's necessary for fire control. Well, the only reason why this land is fire prone is that it's kept in this arrested, successful state. If the woodland comes back, you can't burn it. You can't burn the wet woods here. That's crazy. So it's just this horrendous self-perpetuating abuse of the land. And we're asked to celebrate this and we're asked to valorize it. And I kind of just, it makes me physically sick to see it. It's so depressing and distressing to see what we've done. But now you see there is a massive global movement of climate activists standing up and saying no to all of this. What's kind of role do you envision for them? So we need to be far more than climate activists. It's great that we're climate activists. That's brilliant. But we've got to remember that climate is just one part of the wider Earth system. The atmosphere is a crucial part of that. And but all the ecosystems on Earth interact with the atmosphere. There are no barriers in nature. We divide things into compartments and say, this is climate, this is water. This is terrestrial ecosystem. This is marine ecosystem. This is ice cap. This is ocean. Nature recognizes no such divisions. All these ecosystems and all these Earth systems are intimately connected and affect each other very strongly. It's a great 19th century conservationist, John Muir said, if you try to pull it out anything by itself, you find it hooked to everything in the universe. And so if we focus only on climate, we're focusing just on one part of a much richer picture. We should be ecological activists as well. We should be Earth systems activists as well. And we need to broaden ourselves activists. Well, exactly. Yes, yes, yes, Earth activists. Yes, activists. Yeah, yeah. And we need to broaden those horizons and understand that, you know, well, obviously what the fossil field companies are doing is horrendous and all the direct fossil based infrastructure is horrendous. Actually, it's about a lot more than that. And it's about looking at our total impacts on the living planet and getting informed, particularly about things, which as a society, we've tacitly agreed to ignore. And the biggest of those things by far is farming. What do you think, because you oversee a lot of things, you read a lot, you speak to a lot of people? What do you think is the current state of Earth activism in the world? I think we were really, really making progress before the pandemic. We were seeing a real head of steam developing, particularly with Fridays for Future, and with some of the global movements that built up around it. And it looked as if we were going to reach a kind of social tipping point, you know, where politics would really change. And we would start to put Earth systems at the centre of our politics and build politics and economics around Earth systems, rather than having to force Earth systems to adapt to our politics and economics. And then the pandemic struck, and we all had to go home, and we couldn't be in the streets anymore. And we've almost had to start all over again. It's very frustrating. And I totally accept that we needed to protect ourselves from the pandemic. But starting a game now is hard. But the fact that we came so close should also give us hope. The fact that we were, I think, very, very close to seeing that global transformation we needed as a result of the great upsurge of public concern. And we can do it again. We have to do it again. And this time we have to take it all the way. Yeah, so we have to go move forward from this point. You have been, I wanted to say, environmentalist advocates, but I'm going to change that into an Earth advocate. For a long time, how do you stay motivated? You just told us we were so close to a tipping point. Then we lost that point because of the pandemic. How do you say motivated? Well, there are two things which pull me along. One is the recognition that human beings are much better than we're told we are. Our dominant values are empathy and altruism. We're constantly told that selfishness and greed is just not true. The dominant values of those who tell us that might be selfishness and greed, because by and large, we're a society of altruists governed by psychopaths. But that's not the dominant values of the great majority of people on Earth. We're good people, constantly told we're bad people. It's a lie. And we have to realize our good nature and bring that to the fore. And because it lies in the great majority of us, because the great majority of us are fundamentally good people. They want good outcomes, not just for ourselves, but for everybody else. Who care about other people, who care about our families, our neighbours, our communities, but also the world as a whole. Most people are like that. That constantly gives me hope. But we have to overthrow the psychopaths who have sort of truncated that potential. And the second thing. is a similar source of hope I guess, which is the ability of living systems to restore themselves. Sure, if we push them too far and they collapse into a new equilibrium state like those grasslands on Dartmoor, then it's a real job to get them back into a healthy place and it takes a lot of work by human beings to do that. But if we haven't pushed them quite to that point, they can bounce back with amazing speed and force and we can see nature surging back in places which have been highly depleted and degraded. So the hope is tangled up with frustration because I can see the potential is there and it's been there all the time. And I want to go around in the streets and seize people by the collar and say, listen, it's so close, we can do this so easily. Exactly. Keep pushing. Yeah. Yeah. And what would you say to our listeners, we have a message for them. I would say, you know, we are endlessly told that there is no hope, that despair is the only option. And of course, that self-fulfilling, you know, if we believe that, it becomes true. And yet that too is a lie. And I've seen so many people go straight from denial to despair. They go from saying, it's not happening, it's not happening too, it's happening in it's too late. And at no point between those two positions was a moment when they said it's happening and we need to do something about it. So despair is another form of denial. Don't succumb to it. The Christians say that despair is a sin and I think they're right. I'm not a Christian, but I think they're right about that. Okay. Thank you so much. For me, this was like a small wish of an activist coming true to speak to you. So thank you so much for making the time for your great book, for your great message on against farming, but also for the solutions on it. It was a great honor and absolute pleasure. You wrote again a very compelling and important book, Regenesis, to all our listeners. We say you can buy this book at your local bookshop. Go do that, of course. And so you say thank you and maybe hopefully next time on the show, maybe. Yeah. Fantastic. Brilliant. Well, it's so lovely to talk to you both and thanks very much for having me on. Great. Thanks for making time for us. Yeah, and this was the end of our second season. Over a couple of months we're back with new experiences. So we're going to share some of the experiences and things here and there. But for now, we want to thank you for the live. The FED podcast is an initiative from Greenpeace in the Netherlands. Have you not yet subscribed yet? Do the Dammatain and your favorite podcast? Then you see a new experience. Do you want to see questions or share them? Of course, share them. My name is Via for Hit and Greenpeace.nl. For now, thank you for the air and until the next time. , bye. I'm going to hit. I have a hardful fear and a hardful question for Hit. We have just finished our last episode of this season with George Montbjot or Pjop Montbjot. But this is not only the last episode of this season, it is also the last episode together because you have news, Ilona. Yeah, I'm not very happy. That's not true. No, I have news. I'm going to one month. If you hear this, it's all over. I'm going to go to Greenpeace and I'm going to work with Amnesty International in Amsterdam. Yeah. And that's very hard because it also means that it is coming to the end of this podcast. So there we also use this moment to just look back, so that it's nice to end the season, but now you're almost the best because you're going to stop there. Yeah, the fun to do. Yeah, so if we look back, because we now think of something from 24 or 25 events. Yeah. What do you think? I think it's fun to do. I've always worked with Greenpeace. I've always worked with him for almost all my best, I've had a lot of innovations. I think I've had to try new things. This was also for Greenpeace to do. I had your help to set this up and then you say you're really against it, but you're also going to present to me. That was not the first plan, but I think it's very fun to do it. I have to say, I have to try to do it myself. I think it's a bit awkward. You're a bit easier to explain that. But yeah. What do you think is leftist? Yeah, I thought, well, this has to be out, but yeah, I think that's a good idea. So I think with all our guests together, this is just a theme. I think women, they're just a bit less likely to do things themselves, or think that they're good in there, they have to be a bit of a bit of a bit of a twist. So that's what I can start with a little bit. I hope, for you not as a guest, that I'm now in a good mood. Yeah, I think the long list of people we've talked about is really comfortable. We really have really fantastic people. In the eight year that I worked here, it's the society that's talking about climate change, it started as something that was happening. And actually, it's now something that's happening. We have two zombies. We really have extreme weather here in the Netherlands. When I started in December, when I was in the Paris climate agreement, that was very hopeful. And then it's actually been very long, it's very little happening. But then they also said that you were starting to have a bit of a bit of a bit of a twist. And actually, that's the word. That's very mainstream. You have that now more about climate crisis. And then of course, it's a way to say that they would have a climate change. So that's what we're going to be for, so that's what's coming from what's coming. That it's still important to be done. So that's also the word that we used there. We're also different. I have to say, with all the gases we've seen, I saw a really line in the beginning. I also had an idea of how we should bring all these gases together. And they could just be the whole problem that is now. All the crises can be taken care of me. They have been doing a lot for so many things. And who has you most often lived with? Oh, that's. I also have a training session. You tell me now the campaign question. Yes, because you don't want to know what the question is from. If you have a lot of children, who are you? Who are you? You don't have them. Well, maybe more or more. Or are there certain explanations that you really mean? Yes, I think Mariam Minnesmage wants to talk about our first lecture. And that was actually a little post-coronating. Dat was uit mijn hoofdspraak waarin het najaar van 2021. Ik ging toen prachtig bij haar cijfers in uit China. En toen zei ze tegen mij dat je moet naar China kijken. Je moet gewoon kijken naar je eigen achtertuin. Het is zo makkelijk om iemand anders te kijken. Dat was toen bijna komt de horen. Het is me wel echt bijgebleven. Ik heb daar wel van geleerd. Ik probeer dat nu altijd wel te doen. Ik had een paar keer in mijn eigen omgeving als iemand dan. Ja, maar duitslond, dit, dat. Daar heeft geen zin om naar duitsland te kijken. We moeten eerst zorgen dat we zelf goed doen. Dat doen we nu nog lang niet. We zijn op heel veel lijstjes aan bungelen we onderaan. Zolang we onze eigen tuintje niet aangeharkt hebben, heeft het geen zin om naar andere landen te kijken? Nee, heel mooi is dat. Dat is me echt bijgebleven. Zelf vond ik het altijd leuk als gasten heel veel energie en passie hadden. Dan vond ik echt dat zo'n uitzending echt ging vliegen. We hadden geen nou wel zin in, en dat had waar het soms niet minder was. Vond ik het wel hard werken om een goed gesprek te hebben. Ja. En ja, het heeft me ook wel veel geleerd over intersectionaliteit. Over eigenlijk allemaal groepen die op in manier. En ja, zeg maar niet, voel er aan de rij staan dat die harder getroffen worden wat ik klimaatcrisis. Ja. Dus dat ik klimaatcrisis eigenlijk vergevond rechtvaardig is. Ik ben al over corona, zeg ik, maar corona kijk niet of je arm of rijk bent, corona. En daar heeft iedereen last van met de klimaatcrisis dat niet zo. Klimaatcrisis is corona kijk te zeker naar of je arm of rijk bent. Dat is hier zo'n mooie zin die gebruikbaar hier werd. We zitten allemaal in dezelfde storm, maar hebben allemaal. Zit weer in een andere boot. Zwaai hier in Nederland hebben we een hele luxe hi-tech boot gemaakt door de besten-ingenieurs van Theodelft. Maar mensen, bijvoorbeeld van de global South zitten echt in een heel anders soort boot en die moeten wel door dezelfde stormvaren. Ja. Dus dat. En onze doel van onze podcast is ook geweest om. We hopen om niet te zien of om te negen te zomd te worden, om niet om te zomd te worden, maar om hopen om te blijven. Hoe is dat voor jou? Dat is deel zo'n gelukt. We hebben eigenlijk heel veel mensen gehoorlijk sproken die met echt waan zinnen. Goedien dingen bezig zijn. Ik moet zeggen dat ik zelf de podcast met Monion samen wel. Ik vond ik zelf heel heftig, wat hij zei dat windt er geen doekjes om die booschap is niet miselijk. Toen dacht ik wel een beetje van het gaat er langzaam. Dat was wel moment dat ik even wel wat pessimistisch was. Dat ik dacht, ja, we moeten stoppen met praten, we moeten het gewoon gaan doen. Het moet nu anders, weet je wel. Maar er zijn ook weer zoveel gasten van ons bezig met. Hopplossingen dat ik daar ook wel hoopvol van woord. Mensen hebben ideeën om het hele landbouw systeem aan te pakken. En dan ook stukken landbouw grond te verkopen, zodat daar weer woningen ook nog voor een gedeelte en klein gedeelte, maar we worden nodig op te gaan zetten. Maar we hebben ook heel gasten gesproken die zeggen dat wij onze relatie met de natuur moeten gaan hereiken. Daar zitten toch wel heel veel praktische en goede ideeën bij die ook zeker uitvoerbaar zijn. En wat me nog wel ook opviel is dat heel veel mensen die wij hebben gesproken. zijn eigenlijk vind ik bijna te beschrijden om mijn mening te verkonnen. Dus ik hoop wel echt dat wij als Queenpeace goed die oplossingen ook mee kunnen helpen. die over het voetlicht te brengen. Ja. En je gaat ook wel bij Greenpeace. Ja. Hoe kijk je terug op achterkant Greenpeace? Ja, het is gewoon heel erg leuk om met een grote groep mensen. de wereld een stukje mooier te maken. In die 8 jaar ben ik onder andere een periode projectlijner geweest bij de Amazon Reefkampagne. Dat ging allemaal net ontdekt, reef voor de kust van de Amazon Revere in Brasilia. Het is een Reef van 1300 kilometer uit mijn hoofd. En daar wilde BIP-Total en Petrobras gaan boeren naar Oli. En daar hebben we toen in best korte tijd hebben we meer dan een miljoen mensen over de hele wereld. voorzamen die dat ook een slecht idee vonden. En toen uiteindelijk zijn die vergunningen niet gekregen. Dus daar is het niet gebouwd. Ja, dat geeft zoveel voldoening. Dat heb ik nog nooit eerder in mijn leven gehad. Dus dat is waanzinig om dat met elkaar te doen. Ik was toen ik hier begon met werken ook niet echt iemand die dol is op demonstreren. Maar inmiddels vind ik dat eigenlijk heel leuk. En ook heel fijn, het is heel leuk om met gelijkgestemd dat te gaan doen. Dat geeft heel veel voldoening omdat je toch soms die idee hebt dat je me machteloos bent. Als je dat met elkaar gaat doen dan geeft dat echt invulling daar aan. En ik weet ook gewoon niet meer als dat het werkt. Dus het heeft ook zin. Dus dat ben ik ook anders naar geen peken. Dus je bent weg bij Greenpeace, maar je blijft zeker activistisch? Ja, ik ben eigenlijk wel denk ik in 8 jaar wel een activist geworden. En ik blijf ook vrijwillig of voor Greenpeace met de bootjes. Ik ben zeker niet weg bij Greenpeace. Alleen niet meer in een D2D-business. En ik ga dan natuurlijk naar MNST. Die komen op voor de mensenrechten weer op Weiden. Maar ze zetten zich bijvoorbeeld ook in Nederland in op het recht voor demonstratie. Dus ik zal op die manier een paar beeren, maar stenk je bij te dragen. Mooi. En we vragen natuurlijk altijd dat je nog een boter op onze luisteraars. Ik weet niet of dat heel geschikt hiervoor is, maar heb je nog een bootstrap voor je collega's? Voor mijn collega's. Voor mijn collega's heb ik een bootstrap. Ja, laat je gewoon. We zijn echt met iets meer dan honderd activisten. We zijn supereffectief, zijn waahalen. Onszettend veel dingen weten we te bereiken. Geef niet op. Laat je door niemand wat vertellen. Een grader gewoon voor. En je bent nooit te klein om die verandering te maken. Mooi. Ja. Dank je wel. Jij verdankt. Het was een nice ride. Ja, het was een mooie dit. Mooi af te. Thanks. Jij verdankt. K, nou. Het was van dan. Overnauit voor Ilona. En jullie verder knallen me niet, showen.