... where people are changing in ways that make you go, "Hello."

Yeah.

Well, you know, I, I think the only way we're going to get through this bottleneck, which is what I think climate change is imposing on our species, is, uh, is through, uh, reconnection with and restoration of natural systems.

So that is certainly true in, with regard to the food system.

There are ways of growing food that restore soils, that, that, uh, store carbon back in topsoil, and that's what we need to be doing.

The, the...

There's really a bifurcation in the response to climate change.

You wrote a book together

But, uh, first I just wanna ask, so for you, what is it that brought collapse awareness into your life? At what point in life did this click for you?

Uh, you know, it's been a long process, and it started when I was, uh, 21 years old, and I read a book called The Limits to Growth.

And, uh, for those who are not familiar with the book, it was written almost exactly 50 years ago, and it was written by a team of scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT.

These were systems scientists, and, uh, they were using this new gizmo called a computer to try to model scenarios of the future, looking at data on things like resources, pollution, population, industrial production, and, and food, and to see how these, these trends in these areas might influence each other over time.

So they didn't do just one scenario.

They did a dozen scenarios, right? You know, jiggling with the data and government policies and all the, all the inputs they could reasonably do, you know, within the boundaries of the experiment.

And their, their standard run, uh, scenario where, you know, it was basically business as usual.

On the overaccumulation side, how, how do you know when you have too much power? What, what does it look like? Or what's the right amount of power to avoid-

So for people who are not familiar with your body of work, um, how would you, if you could, describe it? Uh, how would you summarize it?

Hmm.

Well, um, my perspective, I guess I would say, is that of a, a human ecologist.

Uh, ecology, of course, is the study of the relationships between organisms and their environments, so human ecology is the study of the relationship between humans and our environment, which of course includes lots of other organisms.

So it's, to a large extent, the relationship between human beings and other organisms.

Um, so that, that, that's a huge subject, and the, the, the part of that that's interested me most is, uh, human social evolution and its relationship to energy.

Uh, social evolution because, uh, oth- other organisms, it...

Hmm.