Season 1, Episode 4: The Laws of the Land

In this episode, you explore the interconnectedness of our planet’s ecological systems and the urgent need for a shift towards an ecological-based economy. Colin Smith, of Land Lovers, highlights the nine planetary boundaries that define the limits within which humanity can safely operate, emphasizing the critical state of our environment due to human activities. Our conversation delves into the concept of bio-regions, advocating for a localized approach to resource management and community resilience. By fostering a shared identity, equitable resource allocation, and inclusive decision-making, you and your community can navigate the poly-crisis. Welcome to The Gravity Well, where you break down complex ideas into manageable insights. Join us as we seek wisdom from diverse perspectives and work towards a sustainable and regenerative future.

Welcome and Recap

Alex:

Welcome to The Gravity Well, where we break down heavy ideas into small buckets anyone can handle. In our work and at play, we seek the wisdom of elders, individuals, and communities that share their knowledge and care for our water, air, land, life and resource needs caring for our homeland will be our guide.

Jenny:

Well, that sounded extra smooth today. Nice work.

Alex:

I just slowed down.

Jenny:

Yeah, thank you for being here, Colin. We’ll get to your introduction. We’re just going to take a few minutes and go through a little bit of what we’ve been working on in the last few weeks. I’ll go first. We started, as I said a few weeks ago, our first discussion, in which there’s a pin in the episode, at the top you can see what I’m referring to. We spoke with our positive intelligence network. Colin, I’ve worked with some coaches every week over the last year or so. We sought their advice in starting that. We set the intention of making sure that we are operating in a space of allows people to bring in different perspectives and be respectful at the same time.

I’m not going to go through the details of our community agreement today, but we’ve got that available on our social media so that people can weigh in. We want to know from people, does this community agreement sit well with you? Then the next week we spoke with a psychologist, his name is Brad Chapin, and the reason why we spoke with him was about overcoming fears. One of our concerns in this discussion is that we have to help people get past certain fears in terms of the overwhelming nature of being in a polycrisis if you will. We’re trying to make sure that people feel, number one, that they understand that we have a regulation system, we have a system in place that helps us stay calm and to tap into that and to also understand when we’re in fight or flight.

That’s a simple way of discussing those fight, flight, freeze or fawn-type places we can go to. And we are faced with fears, with things, say a challenge or something that feels like a threat. Again, just trying to get in this space where we can identify what our triggers are, and Alex and I have been working on that together. When we speak, we try and use a common language now so that we can help understand where each other is coming from. I’ll give an example, I said yesterday to Alex, our PQ coaches would say, or in that framework. We identify our saboteurs in that framework, and my top saboteur is control. Alex and I were having a great conversation yesterday and then I was saying something that was making, I could see he was frustrated with me and I said, I think my controller is coming out here.

I was able to point to something of myself so that we could look at it and go, what am I doing that’s not working right? Anyway, that’s the next week. Then last week I wanted to just touch quickly on our discussion with Regan Boychuk. We met with Regan because we wanted to talk about how we source good news and not good news, let’s say, “How do we source quality news?” We did this great exercise with Regan where we walked through an organization called Media Lens. And their understanding of what they offer is that we have to recognize that media has a centralization process and it means that it works in the best interest of corporations and special interests. It’s not in the best interest of people and the public. We have to look at news and news information objectively.

Jenny:

And the piece that sat with me from Regan is that to me it’s two things, and then I’ll open up to Alex for some of his is number one, we want to see supporting evidence. When I’m looking at this document I shared in the chat and looking at the last line, which is “How do we know how to source news?” To me, it’s two things. It’s looking for that supporting evidence. Science-based information that’s been informed by many, many different experts, not just one, let’s say. And then also that its objectives are for the greater good. Regan described it as operating in good faith. I’m looking for information that it has supporting data and that it’s operating in the best interest of the public. Those are my two takeaways from that conversation. It was just such a great, great discussion. Anyway, I’ll let Alex offer a few thoughts and then we’ll get into our conversation with you, Colin.

Alex:

I think my general takeaway from the first three episodes was there’s an inherent need for conscientiousness, self-regulation and fact-based research. It can be extremely difficult to navigate fact from fiction, fact from opinion, all those types of things. And it was kind of interesting because, in episode three, I mentioned Whitney Webb, who’s quite a famous supposed fact finder, but she never actually provides any of her resources. And upon a deep dive it was like, okay, she has a lot of opinions, she can drop a lot of names, and if you dig deep enough, you can find that she’s not incorrect in dropping those names. It’s just the fact that she’s not providing source links or anything like that makes it extremely difficult because if I wanted to know if she was telling the truth or not, I would have to spend all my days, all my nights, just sourcing everything that she said.

I do find that quite interesting because there are people within the public discourse who are quite convincing, but they won’t provide any source material. And I find that’s doing a disservice to everybody. And part of what Jenny and I are trying to do is just exercise our good judgement and take courses where we need to. The course that we took at Delt University out of the Netherlands in complex decision-making and analytics, and it’s served to provide a focus and a means of discerning what may be fact versus what may be opinion. Now, keeping that in mind about the Positive Intelligence group and Brad Chapin, what he was saying is what’s most fundamental is self-regulation, right? And what we need to do is teach that to people, not only the adults, but the children and ourselves so that we can look objectively at things at face value and discern where the commonalities are, where the common agreeable are, even if we politically or ideologically or whatever disagree with each other. There are always common trends. There are always things that we can agree upon, even if we both speak English but in a slightly different language. And to be able to navigate oneself effectively and regulate oneself so that we can get there. I think that’s what we’re setting out to do. I’ll leave it at that. I’ve learned that through the past three interviews, and I’m looking forward to this one.

Introduction to Colin Smith and Land Lovers

Jenny:

Amazing. Yeah. Thank you, Alex. Yeah, I would just, and I’m sure Alex won’t mind me saying we had a great conversation yesterday and it’s not easy to work through these lessons together, but I’m grateful that you’re willing to stretch and do all this stuff. And again, it always just shows with the best intentions. Thank you again. Okay. Colin, first of all, I’m just going to say how I met Colin, and then we’ll get into why we’re having a conversation with Colin. Colin and I were put together by the Calgary Climate Hub. We both put our names forward, and we’re both concerned about clear-cut logging planned in Southern Alberta. We put our names forward as volunteers, and we both got the nudge saying, “Hey, there’s one other person who cares about this issue, talk to them.”

I can’t remember who called who, but spoke to Colin on the phone and right away it was just one of these feelings that this is a person that I am just of the same mind in terms of the urgency of the issues we’re seeing. And also just the understanding of the main opportunity that I see in this transition and that Alex was alluding to before we started this conversation is we have such an opportunity to reconnect with the land and feel good about building community and building community in a way that’s healthy and serves us and serves the land and serves our kids, serves everyone. It’s just there’s such an opportunity here, and I know from meeting you, Colin, that that’s the impression you gave me as well. I’m excited to be working with you on that. And then I’m going to let you introduce the video that we’re using as a basis for this conversation. Colin, I’m sure you could do a better job than me introducing it. Thanks. And sorry, please take a moment to introduce yourself a little bit and tell everyone a little about yourself. Thanks.

Colin:

Yeah, thank you very much for having me. Yeah, it’s been a pleasure working with you on the anti-clear-cut logging advocacy, and I came to that work out of a long-time appreciation of nature on a specific location scale. But over the years, especially over the last four years, it’s grown into a greater understanding of the ecosystem interconnections that we all rely on for our daily water, air, and food. Yeah, the work that I’m seeking to bring to the world is a greater understanding and appreciation of the fundamentals and the magic of nature and all that. It provides essentially the essentials of life and also brings awareness to the fact that our ecological systems on a local and planetary scale are in a dire situation. We’ll talk more about the details of that, I’m sure, but pretty much anywhere.

And there are very few places on earth that humans haven’t touched. We degrade the Earth’s natural systems because we are out of touch with them. One of the things I wanted to start with in this conversation was a bit of a land acknowledgement, just acknowledging, I believe we’re all in Calgary at the moment, but there have been people living in this area, in this landscape since time immemorial. It’s not essentially since European settlers arrived in this area, that the balance of the natural and ecological systems has been growing in the intensity of how dysregulated it is. And it’s time for us to take some responsibility, acknowledge that and realize that our long-term survival depends on changing our relationship with the landscape. I’ve lived in southern Alberta my entire life. I was born just outside of Lethbridge. I feel a deep connection to the lands of Southern Alberta in my previous lifetime or career. I’ve been an electrician by one of my trades, a small business owner and a caregiver, and now I’m looking to extend those caregiving tendencies to the land and the ecosystems that we rely on.

Jenny:

That’s awesome. Colin, can you talk a little bit about your composting work? Go ahead and just explain some of the projects that you’ve taken on a little bit. Go for it.

Colin:

In many ways ties back to… I sold a business that was all about waste reduction and circular economy education and implementation in 2019, essentially 2020, that transition ended right before the pandemic started, and I moved in with my grandmother. She had just had her hip replaced and she needed a bit of care. I was, had some freedom from owning a business for seven years straight. Then the pandemic hit and it led to this unplanned beautiful experience of essentially being my grandmother’s primary caregiver for four years. And that allowed my life to slow down. And I reconnected with her garden. She lives close to Nose Hill, and throughout my childhood, we would walk on Nose Hill, a lot of land-based connections. In doing gardening, I was doing some research about the soil food web and essentially natural not using salt-based synthetic fertilizers to improve soil health.

And I had a bit of an aha moment when I was in experiments with that. And I went to transplant some seedlings, and they were the most healthy, incredibly vibrant, and the root system was just mind-blowing. I was like, oh my God, it works. That led me to become a student of the Soil Food Web School, which is an online program all about soil microbiology using a microscope and scientific-based methods to assess and understand soil biodynamics. And essentially the fundamental systems that all life on earth, or at least land-based life on earth is based on, which is relationships between bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and other soil-based organisms. And it is a mind-blowing science. A big part of that learning experience is learning and using how to make compost a high-quality compost that is essentially taking waste materials and turning them into the densest life-based material biomass that can be used to regenerate soil and gardens and well more than just gardens, but essentially land. It’s essentially taking waste materials and Indigenous organisms, soil samples, small amounts of soil from around the landscape, and essentially making it in a specific recipe and essentially mixing it in a way that.

Alex:

Is that preta that you’re speaking of?

Colin:

That I think is what they called the soil of the Amazon rainforest. It was essentially the most black gold. That’s soil in place. Essentially all compost is a human-made thing, but concourses are that the process of recycling earth-based material happens in every ecosystem, whether it’s a grassland or a forest, and relies on the soil food web to do that. And that’s essentially how life on earth works. Organisms break down materials so they can be used by the next, the ongoing seasonal sick cycles that happen in an ecosystem are essentially growth or life growth, death, decay, and it all happens again.

Jenny:

Life cycle.

Colin:

Yeah, exactly. This fall, which is a urban farm community hub in Calgary, and for the last two years in the growing seasons, I and a couple of other compost fanatics and soil food web practitioners have hosted a weekly meetup called Compost Club, and it’s grown into a community of people that care about restoring and learning about soil and compost, and it’s been quite the positive experience.

Jenny:

Amazing. We’ll have to have a whole other conversation around that. But yeah, this is just such a great example of the work you’re doing. Thanks. I’m looking at the video that Joe Brewer did. The presentation that he did about regenerating Cascadia, the reason why, this is one of the things that Colin put forward to me early on in our conversations where I was just like, yep, absolutely. This guy gets it. That we see in terms of the challenges we’re facing right now, to have an ecological based economy. That is where we honour the geographic bounds of where we live. To understand what that means, we have to understand the earth’s system. Today, we really want to talk about, it’s funny, I, tongue in cheek called it “the laws of the land” because I picture us talking about the laws of the land in six different ways throughout the year, but in this case, the laws of the land are literally the laws of the earth.

The Nine Planetary Boundaries of the Earth’s System

Jenny:

That’s really what we want to talk about and why I chose Joe Brewer’s presentation is because he does a good job of explaining the nine planetary boundaries and their interaction with each other and how it helps us understand where we get back to this geographic based economy. Looking at the Earth’s boundaries like the mountains to the west of us and the basin that we sit in. Just understanding the boundaries that are, if we were just honouring the earth, living off the earth, this would be the system that we would be held to. It’s just thinking about the impacts from what we’re, as Colin said, our earth is in disarray, these nine planetary boundaries are a really good way to talk about how we define the problem. Those are these nine problems, let’s call it. That’s what I’d like to start with walking through the nine planetary boundaries themselves, and I’ve got them listed here. Let me know if you want to try and explain them, Colin, or if you’d like me to say to and you offer a comment, whichever you prefer.

Colin:

I can take a stab at it.

Jenny:

Yeah, please do.

Colin:

The background is the Stockholm Resilience Center, I believe. Yeah, Resiliency Centre, yes. In 2009, asking the question of whether there are thresholds on a planetary scale that if we cross, we’ll put essentially human existence on this planet in jeopardy is one way, and I’m paraphrasing, but essentially, “What are the planetary boundaries that keep Earth in a stable habitable zone?” And they came up with nine, I believe they’ve added a couple over the years, but yeah, I’ll quickly,

Jenny:

They had, the ninth was just novel entities, and now they’re defining that better. But yeah, keep going. Sorry.

Colin:

Yeah, I’ll start with climate change, but climate change is just one of nine. I think in a lot of the discourse in today’s world, we focus a lot on CO2 and have essentially tunnel vision of CO2, but it is only one of the more, I think you mentioned in the intro that this is a poly crisis, and these are wicked very complex issues that face that are so entangled, and these nine planetary boundaries kind of get to that. And there’s feedback back loops and all these things, but one of them is climate change and essentially CO2 concentration of the atmosphere. The next is biosphere integrity, which is essentially how ecosystems work and the biological diversity and essentially the pollinators and the plants and the animals and how it all interacts in a very complex system. And due to human impacts, we are essentially degrading those relationships.

And if they get to a certain tipping point of certain extinctions happening, certain collapses can take place, essentially like if bees or insects reach a certain critical threshold, there’s not enough of them because we usually have too many pesticides and herbicides on our crops, there won’t be enough insects to pollinate the crops or pollinate the landscape. That’s biosphere integrity, land systems change. It’s very much related to the human impacts. Again, we are encroaching on more and more land across the planet, and there is less and less land for ecological services like water and the insects that I just talked about. We’ve crossed all of these thresholds according to, yeah, there’s only three we haven’t crossed. Next on the list is fresh water change, 1% of the earth’s fresh water. The rest is non-drinkable, non-usable water, and we are impacting that water more and more as the days go on and the years go by.

We’re in extreme drought here in Southern Alberta. The lack of increasing concentrations of pollution in water, and freshwater change is one of the planetary boundaries. The next one is biogeochemical flow. This is related to ionized nitrogen and phosphorus in the planet, and this is a huge cause of this threshold cross is synthetic fertilizers from agricultural use, essentially after World War II and the green agricultural revolution. All of that came from fossil fuel-based or derived fertilizers, which are synthetic and ionized, meaning they dissolve in water, and when they are put on the land and then it rains, very little of it is retained by the plants and the soil. Most of it runs off into the nearby stream or river and concentrates and then enters the ocean and causes algae blooms that essentially use up all the oxygen and cause mass die-offs of fish and aquatic life in estuaries and where rivers enter oceans and just really disrupt the ecological fundamentals of water systems and the land.

Alex:

Yeah, that’s a microcystin toxin problem from blue-green algae formulations due to stagnant water and ate phosphates being put into the water. A good example of that is Lake Winnipeg because they built a hydroelectric dam, which actually stagnated the water, and then all these phosphates were running into the water, and the only solution to that is actually wetlands, but they actually removed all the wetlands to produce farmland and then just started dumping these phosphates into the water and stagnating it, which was really good for fisheries for about 10 years. But then all the fish started to suffocate to death, and now we’re left with these micro cysteines and blue-green alga formations. And the interesting thing, according to the GSC, the geological survey of Canada is these blue-green algae formations as a result of micro cysteines and toxins as a result of phosphates, are responsible for the past most recent five major extinctions.

Colin:

Damn. Yeah, and if you look at the diagram or the chart of the boundaries, the nitrogen phosphorus, and biogeochemical flows are the ones that are the most off the chart. This is an ongoing problem. This is why I’m interested in soil microbiology and soil health. Essentially these chemicals or these, when you put, these are salts that we put on the land, and salts dehydrate the microbiota. It’s like essentially us drinking salt water, we would die. That’s what it does to the microbiology in the soil. That’s killing our soils. We’re in a dust bowl situation here on an even larger scale. There is a way to restore our soils. We stop using synthetic fertilizers. We work to restore the microbiology in the soil and don’t use any more salts on it. Over a short time-period microbiology can come back, and if the right microbiology is there, the fungi and the bacteria can unlock phosphorus and nitrogen through nutrient cycling.

Colin:

Essentially everybody’s eating each other and pooping each other out, and that makes plant-based plants available nutrients. And it does. There are so many benefits to it, but we’ll save that for another episode. But this is a major global problem that, and a lot of people, farmers are very much locked into the mindset of like, oh, well, we’ve done it this way for many generations. All of those planetary boundaries that have been mentioned so far have been crossed. We are outside of the realm of survivability. The next three are still within a threshold. They’re still in the green zone, not the red zone. That’s ocean acidification, and atmospheric aerosol loading, which is just another way of saying air pollution and stratospheric ozone depletion and ozone depletion are the most within the zone. I believe it was 1992, there was a big global agreement to reduce CFCs, and we healed the hole in the ozone. And that was a relatively simple fix to a somewhat complex global problem. But it’s an example of if we want to change, we can. And then the last boundary here is novel entities. This was added, but this is essentially microplastics in the environment. I listened to the Regan episode about checking sources and all this. You can check this out, but novel entities, there are essentially microplastics in every freshwater landscape or system and landscape across the planet. And that’s ours.

Alex:

You see PFAS and PFOS. Those are the forever chemicals that were introduced by 3M in the early 1950s. They’ve been around for a long time. I find it actually kind of interesting that they’ve only been added in 2023 and 2024. These chemicals, the only way that you can actually leach them out of your body is to breastfeed and pass ’em on to your kids.

Colin:

Yeah.

Alex:

It’s messed up.

Colin:

And they’re everywhere. And that’s not even the plastics, those are just specific chemical compounds. But there’s microplastics everywhere. All of our clothes all do you know what the biggest source of microplastics in the world is? Tires. Tires all leach into our waterways, and there’s essentially not a waterway on earth because these microplastics could be transferred by rain. Even a pristine mountain lake in an area that humans don’t even go to has microplastics in it. Thankfully, it’s all about concentration. I am so glad we don’t live in the Mississippi Delta, that’s where so many chemicals and things are accumulating in the water. We can be very grateful that we live near the headwaters of a relatively unaffected watershed, but nobody’s immune to this and everybody drinks downstream. It’s a very complex problem. Yeah, there’s so much to say about those PFSAs, but I don’t want to take up the whole conversation, I’ll leave it there.

Jenny:

You did a great job. The big takeaway I took from our friend who wrote about this, Joe, is that these all interact together. There can be ways where they work against each other and with each other. For example, people have pointed out that in the past there were climate model moments where climate models didn’t mimic the temperature rise that they had anticipated under the aerosols in the air have offered a shield to it. And now recently, actually some Sulphur that was in the fuel used in marine travel was removed because it was harming the, like you said, adding algae plumes and harming the habitat of the oceans. They removed that and now that the removal of that Sulphur has allowed for the atmosphere to warm faster is what they believe. I think there’s a big component of an actual increase in emissions at the same time, which is compounding that. But my point is that these interact together and the opportunity that Joe is talking about is to look at where these interact and make sure that they are in, as you say, in a healthy interactive state. It’s not just about knowing the entities, it’s about knowing how they work together and making sure that we’re honouring the system if you’ll, that’s how I’d describe it. Does anybody want to take another stab at that?

Alex:

Well, I’ve been looking into the geophysical fluid dynamics laboratory (GFDL) and their multi-decade old climate change models, and they’ve noticed a variance over usually typically like four decades in ocean temperature. And it varies, give or take one to 1.2 degrees. GFDL research has pinpointed that there are these fluxes in ocean temperature, but they produce certain types of weather. Different types of science are coming out to contribute to these conversations. And my question would be, given that science is always questioning itself and we never want to limit it, would it not also be prudent to adapt our infrastructure a little bit to be a little bit more resilient to these fluxes within the climate and to maybe find a way to capitalize on providing seeds, encouraging people contributing to the water table by growing Indigenous plants to their regions, and starting to understand that topographically regions are very different, but we can actually educate each other on these different topographies and create some communal comradery in terms of what each topography yields to be able to contribute back to overall atmospheric health and the health of our planet in its entirety.

Colin:

Yeah, I don’t know. Just going back to those planetary thresholds, just, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t want to be too blunt, but to me, it just looks like things are changing so rapidly that I guess this relates to tipping points. I feel like the rate of change recently in the last say two years compared to if you just look at things like wildfires, floods, temperature anomalies, sea ice, the list could go on in the last two years, everything is absolutely off the charts drought in southern Alberta and a lot of mainstream or a lot of different voices like to say, oh, this is cyclical. This has happened before. I truly hope that that is the case. But based on the information and data I’ve come across as well as what I witnessed out my front door, this seems like a very extreme situation.

Jenny:

They know why there are to back that up, right?

Alex:

Yeah. And I don’t know why I’m, I don’t disagree with that at all actually. I was born and raised in Alberta, like 42 years standing, living here, and I don’t disagree with that at all. I would just ask, is mismanagement of our infrastructures and aqueduct and our agriculture and landscape management, does that have anything to do with, does that have anything to do with the disconnect between what’s going on in the ground and our leadership?

Colin:

I think humans are pretty nearsighted. It’s hard for us to think well in advance. Politics is even structured in a way that creates even more short-term thinking. And we should severely really question politicians that say that they have the answers to all of our issues. These are complex issues that nobody knows the answer to. The only way we’re going to figure it out is if we take the blinders off and have hard conversations about how our lifestyles are essentially contributing to the problem as well as contributing to us not being able to address it. We need more than a wartime movement to reframe our societies and our modern lives in a way that prepares for the dire consequences that are essentially knocking at our back door right now. Mother Nature’s ready to come in with a pitchfork and huck us out on the back of the compost pile so she can start over again. And essentially these thresholds equal, we’ve overshot, we’ve jumped the shark.

We are outside of the realm of survivability. There’s no way our way of life can continue and everybody wants it to. And these are, yeah, I don’t know. People who listen to this might see it, and call me alarmist. I think we need more alarms. I want to bring it back to a few things you said in the intro. We need conscientiousness, self-regulation and facts. We need to be aware of what’s happening. We need to be able to hold that grief and that fear and that oh shit together and be like, we got each other’s backs. How are we going to change how this affects our water and our food? And it’s a bit isolating when you know these become attuned to natural systems and the beauty of nature, you have to grow a hard shell or else the world’s just going to make you depressed. And we need more people to acknowledge these, not put their heads in the sand, have eyes wide open and have open honest conversations about what we do to deal with it.

Alex:

A hundred per cent. It doesn’t mean that they’re helpless. It’s quite the contrary.

Colin:

And that’s where I hope we can find a shift where I don’t think mainstream media or mainstream politicians are where the solutions lie. I see the solutions being in grassroots community-based organizing, which I still have no idea exactly how to do, but that’s where I want to work, essentially developing underground systems, like the mycelium and mushrooms. How do we decompose the system that is currently operating above? We know it’s modernity.

Alex:

Politics, not, I think systematically. It’s like through education and advocacy, exactly what you’re setting out to do just as you decompose soil. Because every aspect, every cog in those wheels, every single aspect of that system needs that slow decomposition and nurturing and caring so that it can regenerate and grow something else. I think though we want all these changes to happen rapidly. We need to allow people to absorb what’s so important, which is like nurturing the environment, nurturing our communities and planting seeds and allowing that soil to regenerate because politicians will say what they do, but the people on the ground, all of us who are dealing with this and scared of this need to inspire each other to use the tools that we have. And if we don’t have them help to educate each other to facilitate developing those tools.

Colin:

One thing that is helpful for me to think of is Joanna Macy, I don’t know if you guys have heard of Joanna Macy, but she has a framework that she calls the great turning and the three stories of our time, this has also been explained as three horizons by other people. But yeah, there are three essentially simultaneous unfolding stories happening at the same time. One is business as usual, which is essentially, we all know what that means. And then there’s the great unravelling, which could be the collapse and the falling apart of institutions and ecosystems. And then there is the third horizon. This involves business, the great unravelling transitioning business as usual to the compost bin we’ll say. And then, yeah, this is not going to be an overnight process and this is going to be a slow and drawn-out thing. What is the work of certain people to do towards that third horizon? That is what comes after business as usual and the great unravelling.

Jenny:

Okay, awesome. I’m just going to give a little recap of where, I should have let this off, Colin, but I’ll just offer, we always try and work through kind of this where, well starting with why we’re talking, which we did, and then this who, where, how type framework of this conversation. We’ve talked about who, this is everybody. We’re all impacted by this system. It underpins our lives, like you’ve said. We just get to enjoy, and reap the benefits of it. We turn on our taps and there’s water and we go to the store and get food. And let alone, there is a whole system that feeds that, a big complex system that’s worldwide, and that system that we’ve imposed on the earth is too much. We’ve pushed the earth in six boundaries, and now what we’re experiencing is a shift in the system that’s out of balance.

Bioregional Planning and Governance

Jenny:

We’re seeing the ice caps melting, we’re seeing changes concerning the coral reefs, and we’re seeing changes in terms of the weather cycle system because of those major changes. And the thought of a big sea level rise due to that is all part of this imbalance that we are now in and experiencing and trying to make way of. What I liked about Joe’s discussion is that he talks about the concept of bioregions. Can I tip that to you, Colin? Would you mind trying to explain bio regions and what they mean in terms of what I mentioned earlier, this ecological-based economy type thing?

Colin:

Yeah, bioregions. I want to take it back to the land acknowledgement just to start. There’s a website called native-land.ca. I dunno if one of you can put it in the chat or the comment section I guess it’s called. But it is essentially a map of North America, also known as Turtle Island of different languages and territories of First Nations people. In many ways, this is a bio-regional map. First Nations people were very much integrated into their landscapes and weren’t able to travel halfway across the country easily. They were limited to essentially living and thriving within a set geographic area, which likely had similar water flora and fauna and climate and geographical boundaries. That’s one way of looking at bio regions. Another way of looking at bio regions is as watersheds. If you look at an image of the earth from outer space, there are no straight lines. There are no nation-state borders. It’s bounded by eco regions, boreal forests along the northern crown of the northern hemisphere, grasslands, and deserts. Those are big, large bio regions. But how I like to think about it they’re all fractal and fractal, patterns are fundamental patterns of nature. Everything gets smaller but follows a similar pattern if you’re looking at a plant, but also watersheds. Watersheds are a lot more dynamic.

Jenny:

Sorry, just going to say that Fibonacci sequence.

Colin:

Yeah, go ahead.

Jenny:

This Fibonacci sequence, right?

Colin:

Yeah. Fractals are more like just like a nest, if you look at a leaf or maybe even mountains if you look at a mountain, it’s jagged and has a certain pattern to it. You go up closer and you look at a cliff, it follows that same pattern. You go up closer, you look at a rock, and it kind of follows that same pattern. And that is the fractal nature of, yeah. Yeah. And so.

Alex:

It’s like the venous system of a tree root and the tree above ground, they’re virtually identical. Or if you look into the iris of a person, it looks exactly like a supernova.

Colin:

Yeah, those are great examples. When it comes to bio regions, I guess that’s just one part of them, but I’ll bring it down to Southern Alberta. Southern Alberta is if I want to define that as a bio region, as maybe a medium-sized bio region, it would be from the continental divide, which is where water flows one way or the other. The water that flows towards the continental divide is our large kind of water catchment and all flows into the Bow River basin. However, within the Bow River basin, there are smaller watersheds. There’s the Ghost River, there’s the jumping pound, River, Elbow, Highwood, Sheep, and Old Man. All of those are their nested bioregions. Organizing my vision, one way is organizing those landscapes. And you can have small councils of people and stakeholders that live, say within the Highwood watershed, and they have their own set of local contexts of that river and that kind of eco region and the land that’s there.

And if you live there, you would want to meet as many of your needs from that direct bio region, but then you would then be part of a larger council. It’s almost like municipalities, provincial, federal in a way, but very much tied to the landscape, not to the fifth meridian and certain degrees of latitude. Each bioregion, has its unique water systems, flora and fauna, native plants and climate and temperature. Some bioregions are more like the Okanagan would be a bio region. It produces a lot of fruit and has year-round water whereas the grasslands of Southern Alberta or the great plains of Southern Alberta rely on its water from the headwaters of the mountain forests, much better for growing crops. And there are different, each bioregion has its own unique set of circumstances in the solution or the economics and the culture, and essentially the people that live there, live different lives or have different means of making a living.

But all this has been thrown out of whack by modernity. The access to cheap oil and gas, essentially the machine of capitalism, draws people to where there are resources that aren’t necessarily part of the living landscape. This is where you get into mining and oil and gas extraction also layered on benefits of the land, access to water, and access to crop land. Right now we’re in a system where there’s probably more people in, people live in Calgary than the landscape can naturally sustain. We have to ship in food from Mexico and California and it makes us fragile.

Alex:

What’s the carbon footprint on that? And let’s look at someplace like Redcliffe Alberta, which is just outside of Madison’s hand. They have one of the largest greenhouse complexes in North America, and they grow vegetables year-round. They don’t just build greenhouses to grow pot. They build greenhouses to grow food, which I think is important. And that’s a crucial piece of low-cost technology that could alleviate some of the carbon footprint on our landscapes. And it shouldn’t be overlooked. That type of success should be spread because we can, by growing locally, reduce a lot of the carbon footprint, not have to ship by truck 25,000 litres of diesel for 25,000 strawberries, seven trucks per day per grocery store when we can just grow it locally. Territorial governance is an amazing thing. If we look into it. It’s like we can save so much money and we can reduce the footprint and we can provide healthy food. I just don’t see the disconnect. And I find it frustrating no matter how hard I try. It just seems like no one’s interested in actually doing something amazing.

Modernity and Unlimited Growth

Colin:

To the story of modernity. And essentially, we all believe in an unlimited growth potential. That’s why we have to sell our oil and gas to China and the states. If we looked at our oil and gas endowment as a legacy to honour and cherish from a territorial perspective, we could be the most utopian place on earth where we don’t have to work. I don’t know. This is getting quite out there, but coming back to the red clip. But yeah, we have amazing resources of all these existing oil and gas wells essentially just sticking out of the ground in Alberta, money of which have abounded but still have. I’ve always thought, why don’t we build greenhouses right next to those and use the natural gas to grow food year-round?

Alex:

A hundred per cent carbon capture, sequestration, pump that carbon into the greenhouses, grow food.

Colin:

Exactly. And back to the story, we all just think that we all need to make more money, have a bigger house and do better and better year after year. Our planet cannot sustain that. And we need to come to grips with a change in the way that we look at wealth and prosperity. I look around these days and my younger generation friends and everybody is just exhausted from working to the bone to make enough money to afford the house that they need. Everybody’s just stretched way too thin. If we took a different approach, we could be much happier, healthier, sustainable. And I don’t like the word sustainable. That just means you are not doing any harm, but you’re not doing any good. And the natural order of life is to regenerate the promise of material wealth and unlimited growth is killing our planet. If we flip that on its head, we would want to restore life and restore the abundance of nature on the planet and sacrifice the monetary and the fancy cars and all the things that increase our GDP but are going to kill us in the end.

Key Takeaways

Jenny:

Thank you. That was amazing. Thank you for explaining bioregions and talking a little bit about what it looks like. And Colin, I’m right with you and I feel your pain in terms of people saying like, whoa, that’s way out there. What you and I have always talked about is we’re not dictating the timeline here. This isn’t what you and I are saying, Hey everybody, give up your staff. We’re experiencing extreme drought in Southern Alberta, and there are likely homes that are not going to have water to them. This is the reality of what we’re facing. Let’s talk about the opportunities which, I’m just going to offer some of my, one of the questions I ask myself in this process is, what do we do when we’re stuck? The key takeaway that I heard from Joe’s discussion is that we want to define a shared identity.

Jenny:

We need this pro-social context. We’re trying to make sure that we’re setting out to have this shared identity and purpose where we have equitable allocation and contribution. You’ve got equitable allocation on one hand and you’ve got contributions and benefits on the other. You’re making sure that there’s an exchange this of, I think of rather than a sustainable, I think of the infinity loop. You’ve got this cycle happening and we have fair and inclusive decision-making and we have fast and fair conflict resolution. A lot of the problems we have is we don’t have a lot of conflict resolution happening. We have a lot of everybody getting your tribes, and let’s pretend like everything’s cool when we just stay in our tribes. It’s this collective outcomes-based system where we define the rules together, we have the shared identity, we’ve got this understanding that we equally contribute, and there’s an allocation that’s around those contributions and that it’s fair and inclusive and fast with an expectation of overcoming conflict. Those are my key takeaways. I guess since we are close to the hour or we’re at the hour, those are my key things and then I’ll just hand it off to you guys to offer some of yours.

Alex:

I’ll make it quick. First off, I just want to say this was an amazing conversation. I enjoyed it. I know you guys don’t like the word sustainable, but I think a good start, my takeaway was from his talk was he emphasized the necessity for stability projects. If sustainability is just a start, if we can stabilize things, then I think we should focus on that. And then once things are sustained, once things are stabilized, we can start to experiment and share knowledge and share all these other things so that we can look at making the standard of living better for everybody possible. And then also he had another thing that I found quite interesting, and this is about topographical differences, what plants you can grow, where all this type of stuff. He emphasized the requirement for territorial autonomy or territorial self-governance in which each territory or each community or each topographical region within the planet can say what they can do and what they can’t, and then they can share that knowledge. And then other topographical regions can share information and technology and innovation and all those things so that they can build each other up. And I think those were my two main takeaways from what he was trying to say. And I think it’s quite encouraging to know that these conversations are happening. We can figure out a way together to build each other up despite deficiencies, depending on topography, we can contribute to each other. We just need to kind of open those dialogues, open those conversations despite our own biases.

Colin:

Thank you for that. Just you mentioning, despite the individual biases, I think it’s so important that we try very hard, despite how uncomfortable it might be to make unexpected alliances, these are issues that cross all political boundaries and those in power many times try to divide and conquer only to gain more power. But we need to realize that the power lies with the people. And then coming back to Jenny’s question of what do you do when you’re stuck? I like to go into nature. I think nature as such, healing properties for our mind and body and soul. And there’s great benefit in going into nature alone for self-reflection, but there’s also great benefit in going into nature and engaging in natural processes in community. The grassroots organization that I haven’t mentioned yet is called Land Lovers.

It’s all about essentially loving the land together and alone from that, new ideas, and new connections spring from it. And that’s essentially the fundamentals of compost club. I’ve seen firsthand the benefits of people getting their hands dirty, making compost, and working in the soil. It’s good for the individual and good for the community and brings together diverse people. That’s another, you look at a natural ecosystem. It’s not just one kind of thing. It’s many diverse people, and that’s what makes it work. Diversity, nature, and working together, despite our biases, that’s going to get us going in the right direction. Thank you very much for hosting this talk I really appreciate what you guys are doing and I look forward to engaging in more conversations in the future.

Jenny:

Yeah, you bet, Colin. You’re are going to be a callback. Thank you so much for this. We just scratched the surface of what we’re working on and, hoping to potentially work with Joe. He is making his way across North America from what I understand. We’re hoping to, this is a first kickoff conversation of the work he’s doing and what it means and just trying to get people to think about what an ecologically-based economy looks like and get thoughtful in that space and then hopefully actually get some, as Joe said, pull the tapestry together, right? We’ve got many people working, doing great things in this province, but also elsewhere. And that we do have the time right now to learn, as Alex was saying, and then we will be in this place where we at least can put the tapestry together as Joe, well, maybe I’m not saying it as well as he did, but as he alludes to. Thank you so much for getting this conversation going. I think it’s really important for people to understand what this crisis is. As you said, Colin, it is not just a climate change problem. This is a nine-facet problem that is, well, that is the cumulative impacts of our wasteful and ever growth economy. Thanks, we’ve started it off and I’m pleased with how we went here. Thank you so much. You can unmute and say goodnight if you’d like, and then we can sign off. Thank you.

Colin:

Thank you very much. Looking forward to future conversations.

Alex:

Absolutely.