Unknown: 0:02

The cosmos is within us. We are made of starstuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself. Carl Sagan.

Mark Rubin: 0:13

Welcome to the lessons from nature podcast, modeling the secrets of the bees, hosted by Mark Rubin. If you hear my voice, you're alive. And if you're alive your body survived in the past and is currently in the present. All living things are living in the present. It will be wise to consider that our decisions today impact our future and the future of all living things. As Queen Claudine says, and honey is money. Tomorrow is always coming, and will soon be today, we need to store our sunlight in the most efficient way. Today on the lessons from nature podcast, we'll be discussing secret 21 from honey as money, honey is survival. It's about the idea that we can use some of the money we store to create strategies and tools that improve life on our planet, for ourselves, and for future generations. Environmental futurism is smart. I'd like to introduce my co host, David hula. He's a catalyst for creating a better tomorrow. David is a futurist thinker and keynote speaker. He has keynoted numerous conferences across the country and internationally. In the last 14 years, he delivered 1200, plus presentations and keynotes on six continents and 16 countries. He has written 14 books, and as a co founder of a global nonprofit, to face the climate crisis. It's called this spaceship earth.org. Welcome, David. It's great to have you here.

David Houle: 1:49

It's great to be here, Mark. Thank you for having me.

Mark Rubin: 1:52

It's my pleasure. So David is going to co host four episodes of this podcast with me, where we will be discussing futurology through the lens of the human business of making money and learning skills, curating communities, creating habitat, and creating a better future. So before I begin talking with you about strategies for long term thriving on spaceship Earth, I thought it'd be good to tell the story of how project honey, like got started. Because this is a story that occurred in the past based on long term planning. When I was 15 years old, I decided that I would do something good for nature when I was ready, based on models I have of energy transfer. And I was thinking about how I could be most helpful, and how my models can be used at scale, to create harmony in nature, by rebalancing things in ways that I've thought more matched nature's flow. And what I learned by 15 Is that the human pursuit of money abstracts us from food production, and from cycles of nature around us, because it enables specialization. And with specialization, people do work, but that work is not directly connected to nature, often. And as a result, as you said, we're consuming I think it was 1.7 Earth's worth of resources per year. And that's not sustainable. That's the definition of an event, not sustainable situation, because we're going to catch up to it. And we're catching up now. And I knew this in 1985 Because I was watching a TV show when I was a kid called Cosmos with Carl Sagan about space and time and distances, and also had been exposed to Buckminster Fuller's ideas with operating manual for Spaceship Earth. Basically, the idea that we're on a rock going around a star at 90 miles per second, and the energy from the sun is keeping us alive. And there's a certain amount of resources available for us to utilize and the rate that it comes in and the rate that it goes out has to be managed. And the third influence of project honey lake was someone named Tom Brown Jr. And Tom Brown Jr. Ran a school wilderness school in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. And time back, Tom Brown Jr. was taught by an Apache Scout named stalking Wolf, about ways of living in harmony with nature. But really the thing that struck me the most and it was in line with Buckminster Fuller's ideas, was the idea of planning for multiple generations in the future up to seven generations in the future, intentionally planning for their thriving and longevity. And I looked around in the world that I lived in, and people don't seem to plan for like next weekend. So I was like, How can I combine? You know, the spirit of Carl Sagan and Buckminster Fuller and what I learned through Tom Brown and stalking Well, into an eco project that could share these ideas about models that create harmony in nature. And that was in 1985, and that was 37 years ago. And here we are now. So it's great to be talking to you now even about these ideas.

David Houle: 5:05

Absolutely. Well, you're kind of a futurist at the time.

Mark Rubin: 5:09

I think so is I live my life in reverse. Imagine the end, they go back to the people who

David Houle: 5:15

said to me that I live my life slightly ahead of the curve. And that's kind of the way I think about myself.

Mark Rubin: 5:21

I, you must be because because of all the accomplishments you've had so far, and all the presentations you've given, it's great to talk about the future now, because we're going to catch up to it. So let's get into it. Lessons from nature. Kania survival. So Honea survival is a way of saying that energy is survival and human energy is money. And we trade that money for other forms of energy, including human work. And what we're going to talk about is the idea that money that we can invest in different areas of society and civilization will have a stabilizing effect on many things, including including the climate, and societies in general. And the idea is to is to deploy this money in a way that creates a harmony across all aspects of what I'm going to call civilization, in this case, and the rest of nature. Okay, so the first, the first topic is environmental conservation, which is investing in environmental protection and renewable energy, sustainable practices that can mitigate the impact of climate change, and reducing the risk of natural disasters that can safeguard human survival in the long term, and also survival of entire ecosystems. And I've, I've listened to some of your work, and I would just like to just freeform, what things do you think, What strategies can we implement now, that would accomplish those outcomes?

David Houle: 6:49

Well, you know, I was at the first Earth Day in 1970, I think the year you were born, I wrote a book called this spaceship Earth, came out in 2015 2016, I co founded nonprofit, the spaceship earth.org. And the tagline there is the Marshall McLuhan from 1970. Around the first Earth Day, he said, there are no passengers on spaceship Earth, we are all crew. So the minute I heard that, it was like, okay, that's the metaphor for the environmental movement. And, you know, that's why I so relate and resonate with this project that you've invited me in on because it's going to take all of us to do it. And everybody has to have an act play an active role. To your question, we've moved from the time of denial, where there were a lot of people funded by fossil fuel that kept saying, Oh, it's not real. This is a hoax. And, you know, the thing to put in perspective, is what is happening right now in the atmosphere in the biosphere, with extinction of species hasn't happened since humans have been on the planet. So we as a species, have no recollection, no history, no reporting of this ever happening before. So it's logical that people would say, oh, hasn't happened is not happening now. Right. And the same thing on the on the other side, the climate scientists have been consistently wrong, because it's never happened before. So what the smart ones that I follow, and the recognized leaders of this call to action are basically said, this is going to happen, say, amount of co2 in the atmosphere by such and such a time, and it's happening faster. And it's happening faster, because scientists thought that things would, would degress or slide down on a linear basis. And then they changed to an arithmetic and now they're geometric and even exponential, the rise in sea level is increasing in rates per year. And the increase in carbon is increasing every year. So we've moved from denial. I mean, all you have to do is watch the network news, right? Or go outside and you see climate change. I mean, I I don't I think you're in Maryland, I don't know if the if the forest fire smokes came down and smoke cans. But all of a sudden, New York City, something that's happening north of our border, make gives them the worst air quality in the world. So the point is, I've been calling it we've been we're in the age of disconnect. Everybody thinks something's being done. Everybody thinks that, well, there's solar panels going up and we got more wind farms and we're going to EVs. But the only thing that matters are the global numbers, right? And every single year with the past, with the single exception of 2020 carbon has increased, right? The amount of carbon we put up every year is increasing and it only decreased in 2020. We think we're further We're long than we are. All the global numbers are disastrous. But we, we we not may not you, but a lot of people think, Oh, well, you know, I'm getting a navy or I'm ready, everything's gonna be fine. It's not, we're just connecting.

Mark Rubin: 10:16

You know that that brings up something interesting you said on one of your videos, which was about a trash collection. And the the idea was that when you put trash in your curb, it disappears. But what you said the way you said it was great, which is it just moves to another part of the spaceship?

David Houle: 10:35

That's why the spaceship, you know, think about if you're a NASA fan, and you've watched spaceships and orbiting and journeys to the moon or your sci fi science fiction fan as I am, if you think about or Star Trek or whatever. What is the spaceship? A spaceship is something that exists in space, where there are crew and their supplies. Yeah, so making this up. If you're on a spaceship, you know, in a sci fi movie, you're going to another galaxy, you've got to make sure that you have enough resources on that ship to get there and to come back. Otherwise, you have to abort the mission? Well, as you referenced, we're at 1.7 Earth's per year of consumption. And obviously, we're consuming more than the spaceship can sustain the true on it. Right. And the problem with that number is that ever since 1970, we've been in deficit. So we have 50 years, where we've been consuming more on the spaceship than will be allowed, right? So it is a flight to disaster.

Mark Rubin: 11:43

Speaking of that, in the movie, Apollo 13, I remember there was this scene about the co2 filters, and they they're like the wrong size. And they had to like rig it up now on Apollo 13. Do you think they would burn the internal combustion engine as a generator? Without? Of course? No. I mean, like, were they actually if they had like, sorry, rephrase it? Well, if they had a generator, would they burn fossil fuels on a spaceship?

David Houle: 12:09

The single best scene in that movie? Yeah, was when Mission Control took all the components that were in the spaceship, put it on the table and said, This is what we got saw work the problem work the problem work the problem, right? In other words, we have everything we need on this spaceship Earth, to course correct. We're just not doing it.

Mark Rubin: 12:32

I agree, if we believe that we're in a kid self contained habitat. And we believed it was called a spaceship, we wouldn't be burning fossil fuels in the air because they had environmental scrubbers to scrub out the co2, they were breathing and they had too much saturation and they almost died. The point is, you're I'm agreeing with your point completely is whatever you want to say whatever we put in the air, is we're breathing. So whatever it is, we're changing the atmosphere with whatever we burn,

David Houle: 12:59

we just put up a quarter masters report, the quartermaster, historically is somebody who's on a ship, who gives a report to the status of the inventory on the ship. So in other words, if there's eight ounces of water in a 16 ounce glass, it's not half full, or half empty, it's eight ounces of water, right. So in our most recent quarter masters report we put up in the Spaceship Earth. Here's a statistic that's just astounding, it was estimated that in 2015, one out of every eight human deaths was caused directly or indirectly, by air pollution in 2015. In 2018, it's down to one in five. So 2500 people a day die, because of air pollution. So we're killing ourselves. And the other thing is, we're somewhere around 160 to 170 species becoming extinct every day. Wow, depending on who you what scientists you look at, that's either 1000 times, or 10,000 times accelerated from the last average of the last million years. So we are causing the sixth extinction event, there have been five. And of those five, everywhere from 73 to 97% of the existing species became extinct. This is the first extinction event that's caused by a single species. So the great Pogo, you know, cartoon, we have met the enemy and he is us. So that's why your project, why I've been so positive in response, because it is taking an active part, to course correct. The energy flow on this planet.

Mark Rubin: 14:46

That's right. Thank you for saying that. Recognizing it seems to me teasing this patient metaphor that we're destroying our life support systems. And it also seems to me that based on what you said, all of its going to be left with this trajectory is to humans and the food we eat, which will be like chickens and cows, and some plants, and that's it, and maybe some pets for the lucky few. But basically, if we don't if we don't do something, that's the trajectory and you know, what do you think

David Houle: 15:14

I'll be even more simplified on it. When I make presentations around the world, I basically say, there's two choices and trajectory for humans on this planet. One is 100 to 200 years, which is the path we're on. In other words, it'll be within 100 years, there'd be a collapse of civilization. And with the 200 years, there might be species extinction of humans. Otherwise, the other alternative trajectory is 100,000 to 200,000 years, modern humanity has been on the planet for 150,000 years, say homosapiens, maybe for 300,000, the average mammalian species Mark lives for a million years. So if we're as good as deer field, mice, raccoons, we've got another 700 to 850,000 years left, but we're not doing it, we continue to talk the game, we continue to do things that aren't resulting in success.

Mark Rubin: 16:14

Part of the issue, as I see it is lack of long term planning, lack of long term planning. Absolutely. And the idea is that, in my experience, most people don't conceptualize their own eventual death or the death of future generations, and that we're just passing through space and time. And I think that leads to short term thinking, because it's because it's the game is like, an energy grab, how much energy can I get now to, you know, do what I want? And

David Houle: 16:41

the thing that I like so much about your project? Is you related money to energy, you've related to money to honey, right? And he is an example of what people can do with bees. Anybody who reads the News knows that these have been becoming threatened because how human humanity lives on the planet over the last decade. So it's really great because everything is energy. Yes. And very loosely stated, I believe that going forward, the hashtag has to be hashtag humanity first. Right now in the world today is hashtag money. Yeah. First,

Mark Rubin: 17:23

right. And that brings us to the to the chapter of this podcast, which is honey is survival energy is survival. Energy, We've abstracted ourselves from the idea that money is energy.

David Houle: 17:36

I'm sorry. Everything is energy. Yeah, everything is energy. Yeah. Why not harness it from everywhere? Why go into fossil fuels? Which is nothing but ancient sunshine energy in the ground? Why is if everything is energy, there's wind energy, there's solar energy, there's wave energy, right? There's the energy of bees is the energy of animals is the energy of the wind there is I mean, there's energy everywhere. So if you think of it in that big terms, global terms, which is the only way we can think about it, why are we just digging in the ground? For old stuff, it makes no sense.

Mark Rubin: 18:19

Well, the old energy banks at the time when when combustion engines came around, that made sense for a while, and now the cost exceeds the value. So because because the damage done, and also when you left out is a nuclear is old star rocks. So basically, all energy comes from a star, either our sun or an old star. That's it. Those are the choices. Basically, we're moving either sunlight around in different ages. So like wind powers, fresh sunlight, solar powers, fresher sunlight. And then going back to old star rocks is the is the oldest energy source, we use old uranium, and it's from an old star, and everything in between. So basically, you're right is the idea is like, which is the best one? I don't

David Houle: 19:02

think the question should be what's the best one, the problem comes up? I think wind is better than solar, I think solar is better than and it's right now in crisis mode, we need an all of the above energy strategy. Everything Is Everything is fine. As long as it's clean, we have to accept the fact that fossil fuels will be around for a while, we just have to decrease their their usage as much as possible.

Mark Rubin: 19:29

I'm a practical person. So let's start with that. When I said best one I kind of meant philosophically. And having a strategy and a framework for phasing things out that are bad and phasing things in that are good, you know, based on what makes the most sense because we need energy to survive. We need refrigeration, we need lighting, we need transportation, we need these things to survive and thrive.

David Houle: 19:50

And one of the things that I talk about quite often is the concept of legacy thinking. People seem to think because it is this way today, that's what reality is not understanding that it could have been a fluke that made it today, like, for example, you know, you talk about the internal combustion engine and automobiles, Thomas Edison created an electric vehicle, before Henry Ford ever created an internal combustion. But the fundamental difference was that Henry Ford was a greedy, aggressive entrepreneur who scaled his business. And Thomas Edison was an inventor who wanted to keep inventing. So he invented it, he showed it at work. And then he went on to more inventions, where as Henry Ford said, I'm gonna make a lot of money by scaling this up. And right then, was when petroleum was happening as well. So he had a deep pocketed partner to do. So we the extreme example, if for any of our listeners who have ever been to Europe, basically, the roads are narrower than they are in the states. The reason for that, is that back in the Roman Empire, the width of a road had to be two oxen with a wooden yoke, right? And that's the end and, right. That's why I'll say 1500 years ago, they decided that what the width of a road was, so if you lived in Europe, and you come to the United States, oh, the roads are a lot bigger. That's why so accidents, occurrences, things that happen. Political triumphs in the past, temporarily created a reality that we think is the reality, right? I mean, there are people who listen to this podcast, who probably don't realize that you can have a car powered by something other than fossil fuels.

Mark Rubin: 21:46

Let's switch topics a little bit to talk about poverty alleviation. And again, we're talking about strategies, Hania survival. So money is survival energy is survival, which is directing resources towards poverty alleviation programs, such as microfinance initiatives, social safety nets, job creation, and try to address underlying factors that hinder survival and thriving, and improving access to basic necessities and healthcare. And I heard on your YouTube channel, that you talked about poverty and how poverty at one point was like 90% of the world. And now it's like 10% of the world. I think it just could have been from a few years ago. So I'm assuming it's gotten better. What drove that lifting people out of poverty?

David Houle: 22:31

Yeah, basically, around 1800 90% of humans lived in acute poverty. And now 10% Do, theoretically, science, knowledge, sanitation, vaccines. Another key example is the Green Revolution, right of the ad. So Norman Borlaug, great botanist, it was it was projected in the 60s that a couple of billion people would die over the next 20 years due to starvation, because the earth couldn't support that growth of population. And what Norman Borlaug did in greening the Green Revolution, starting the Green Revolution, was he, he quadrupled, the per acre output for wheat, I believe oats and certainly rice. So in other words, the same plot of land could feed four times as many people. So he's, he and the Green Revolution have been attributed receiving several billion lives. So that's why there was no universal education in the western world until the latter part of 1800s. So education, science, better agriculture, and then all the inventions right air conditioning, people didn't die from heat, heat, people didn't die from cold. Right. You know, it's just, it's astounding when you realize how recent it's astounding when you realize that an average American today lives, in certain ways, much better than a king in Europe did 200 years ago. Yeah. You know,

Mark Rubin: 24:05

it's good to have perspective. And I'm glad you talked about nutrition, because that was that was the next one. And, you know, I think it's easy since we're so disconnected from food production, at least where I live at the idea that a plot of land like we're constrained, there's constraints, and variables, and whatever, whatever thing you're growing, whatever energy you're growing, whether you're growing a barrel of oil, or some kilowatt hours of sunlight, or some food calories, there's constraints based on space based on temperature, humidity, water, air pressure, everything. And what a brilliant I never heard that story. But it doesn't surprise me that innovations in food production is probably one of the main reasons why we're able to scale our population.

David Houle: 24:50

When I look into the future. If there's 800 million people every day who go to sleep hungry or malnutrition. Why have Why increase the population decrease the population with that 8 billion people and fertility rates are going down, which is a good thing, because we're stressing the planet. So we should be able to, by the end of the century get down to 4 billion people with nobody having to die. If we keep populating where we are, there's going to be fights over water, land and food.

Mark Rubin: 25:21

That's also in honey is money about the idea that they're cooperating costs less than fighting. And that's a previous a previous

David Houle: 25:30

chapter. And the one thing to say about cooperation, I know this sounds really simplistic, but I challenge anybody to tell me why it's not true. The future of humanity is relative to climate, and everything that this project embraces can only happen if it's a we capital W, capital E, not us and have them. Yeah, all of human history has been us in them. We are now in a global stage of human evolution. We're global citizens, we have to think globally. And if we don't, we'll fail. There's been 2728 is happening this year CLP annual meetings put on by the United Nations to face climate. And they've been 27 failures. Why? Because nation states are sitting down and talking. And well, what about China? What about the United States? It's a global issue there. If you look at the planet from space, there's no boundaries. Right? Right. That's why it's a spaceship. Boundaries. If you're in a spaceship, there's maybe there's there's no place you can't go, right? Because you can go anywhere. But on spaceship Earth? Well, no, you're in Canada, and you're in China. And we're different. So to the degree that we can come together, and that's what's so great about your project, you know, the bees are in cooperation, they can't make honey, singularly only collectively.

Mark Rubin: 26:58

That's right. Next topic, is disaster preparedness. As you know, I live in Florida, and in places that they have hurricanes, for example. And also forest fires up north, wherever there are disasters. Basically, there's two ways to handle disasters, we can pretend that they don't happen. And then, and then we try to react to them, which always costs more, or have funds available for preventative things for all likely things that might happen like early warning systems, evacuation plans, emergency supplies, things that would minimize loss of life and loss of habitat. What have you seen be successful strategies in your life that mitigate loss of life and improve response times?

David Houle: 27:41

If there are disasters, that can be attributable to a cause, you treat the cause you don't treat the symptom. In other words, the reason the sea levels are rising, and accelerating in their increase is because the planet is warming. And the planet is warming, because we've put co2 in the atmosphere for at least two centuries. And it stays up there for decades, if not centuries, right. So it aggregates up there. So if you really want to solve the problem of sea level rise, what you have to do is not put up dikes and barriers, but draw down the co2. Global warming causes climate change, but causes global roaming the greenhouse effect, right. So if you want to stop floods, droughts, Category Five hurricanes, you got to go to what's causing them, which is too much co2 in the atmosphere. So unless you are going back to so the trigger of all the disasters, all you're doing, it's kind of like, you've got some internal disease and you keep getting sores on your skin. I'm making this up. And oh, I'll put a bandaid on it. No, you treat the disease that's causing the sores. Unless we start thinking that way, we're going to go extinct.

Mark Rubin: 29:08

So circle back on something you said. I asked about the poverty in the world improving. And one of the things you talked about was education. And really what I think in listening to your talk, and the message you're spreading with the work that you do, it's about being a catalyst for change by spreading the knowledge through educational programs and your books and you're speaking one way one strategy to deploy money in a way that I think would be advantageous, is allocating funds towards educational initiatives that empower individuals with knowledge and skills for necessary for their survival, and improving their literacy and improving their training and promoting awareness of these topics.

David Houle: 29:51

I think when we first met, I told you what I thought was a key component necessary components that you put your finger on, which was started with a children's book. Yeah, this legacy thinking, if somebody is a 35 year old dad, all they've known are internal combustion engine cars. For example, if you have a five year old, they can't drive for 11 more years, so they don't have any loyalty, other than getting to sit maybe in the front seat, but Dad some time in the car, they don't have any relationship to it. So I think, in the long run, for the long run, getting children, that's what's so great about the way you're setting it up. Children don't know that this isn't the reality. Children don't know that having a beehive in your backyard is something that's odd. They just want to do it because it's the right thing to do. My son, who's now 36, he grew up with an environmentalist. But nevertheless, he would say to me says, What do you do with that newspaper? You can throw it away? Well, let's take it home. And I'll recycle it. Right. So he's grown up with that. So education has to start at the young level for the long haul. For the near term. It's just that that's why we tried to do the Spaceship Earth, you know, there are no passengers in Spaceship Earth, you are all crew, you are a crew member, Mark, I am a crew member. And what you're going to do as a crew member, you're doing a whole lot. That's why you have my support, because it is a systematic way to get young people to understand honey, to understand cooperation, to understand the importance of honey in the environment, and to ultimately be led a little later in terms of age to understanding that all these dynamics of energy relate to money.

Mark Rubin: 31:50

I couldn't just as this being recorded, I'm going to use that. Perfect, perfect. Perfect, Derek, thank you. That was a really, really great summary. I appreciate that. And I agree. So is there anything else you want to say?

David Houle: 32:07

I'll leave it with this because it's a good segue to the next three, I think, yeah, we have to move from the use of the word sustainability. Yeah. The use of the word regenerative. Sustainability has become a meaningless word. The only meaning that it has, is it the global species level is our humans. Is humanity living at a sustainable level on the planet? And the answer is no. So we have to overcompensate for the fact that we haven't that 1.7 Earths to go into regenerative society. So if we're not moving towards regeneration, we're moving towards extinction.

Mark Rubin: 32:48

All living beings are trying to survive over their lifespan. And humans are in the position to create imbalances in our ecosystem. And these imbalances come from short term thinking about resources, about habitat, about biodiversity, about money and about energy. But humans are also in the position of using money to rebalance our ecosystem by investing in strategies that help over long periods of time. If you enjoyed this discussion about strategies for thriving, please subscribe to this podcast the lessons from nature modeling the secrets of the bees. The next episode of the podcast describes the fact that we're all passing through space and time. Visit project tonyalight dot life for more information about living in harmony with the rest of nature.