Back on the Grid: Returning to Information Overload
In July, my six-month long stint in the jungle of Costa Rica came to an end.
Unsurprisingly, the return from a minimalist, low-stimulation environment to the world of constant connectivity has had its challenges. I thought about writing about my experience, but found my thoughts were summed up pretty well in this article, which I found just by Googling, "drowning in a sea of information." I hope you enjoy it.
Tommy's Ark: Exploring Medicinal Plants, GMO's, and the Future of Agriculture
The Ark is a collection of plants that would impress Noah and God..
In 1991, Tommy Thomas bought a piece of land overlooking the central valley of Costa Rica. At first, he was just looking to build a traditional, big house on the 7.5 acre property, but he ran into a guy there that grew herbs for export to the US and learned the tricks of the trade. What started as a hobby exploded into a jaw-dropping collection of thousands of trees, herbs, and plants.
Tommy calls his place the Ark, named after the Biblical allegory. He knew that Noah saved the animals, but wondered who saved all of the plants.
More impressive than Tommy's collection is his knowledge. Tommy has an encyclopedic recollection of all the various uses of each species, and a number of interesting, educational stories to go along with each of them. He also has a lot of experience with importing and exporting these plants, which gives him an interesting perspective on a lot of the issues surrounding agriculture.
Given his knowledge and experience, I thought it would be interesting to sit down with him and talk a little bit about organic farming, industrial agriculture, GMO's, and the like.
You can also take an aerial tour of the farm below.
Show Notes:
Glow-in-the-dark trees
Transcript:
Spenser Gabin: You called it, the Ark. Which is funny, because, we've been talking, you're an atheist, I'm an atheist, but you choose to call it the Ark, so why the Ark, in terms of collecting plants and all of that?
Tommy Thomas: Well it was just--the real issue there was, if there was a Noah and he had an ark of animals, who saved the plants?
[laughs]
Spenser: You need the plants, too, right?
Tommy: Right! You can't have the animals if you don't have any plants.
Spenser: Right.
Tommy: So I said, "somebody had to do an ark of plants, obviously," to do that.
Spenser: Right, and now you have hundreds of plants--
Tommy: Thousands--
Spenser: Thousands. Thousands of plants from all over the world--you have it in this part of Central America. Did you see it as having that scope from the very beginning?
Tommy: No, it just grew. I bought this farm because I was looking maybe for a place to build a house, traditional kind of big house, kind of thing, and I bought it and I didn't have any intention of farming--
Spenser: Yeah.
[laughs]
Tommy: I ran into this guy who did herbs and exported to the United States from here, and he taught me into trying and doing a few of these culinary herbs, and that's how I got into growing basically. Then it just became a hobby that got out of hand.
Spenser: Right--I mean your knowledge on the subject is incredible and there's thousands of plants and you seem to know something about everything--did you have that love of it from the very beginning?
Tommy: No, it just grew. At one point in the late 80's, early 90's, is that I really thought that medicinal plants had a future in commerce--and I was wrong. Yes, they sell medicinal plants, but the grower never makes any of the money. And in the middle 90's, the pharmaceutical companies of the world bought up almost all of the small herb companies. They didn't change them, they didn't put them out of the business, but they wanted to have them, so that they knew what was going on, because again, all the pharmaceutical things come from plant-base--originally. And so, they just wanted to keep their hand in the thing so that they knew what was going on with the plant medicine. So, and that meant that there was no chance of making any money in growing these things anymore.
Spenser: Right.
Tommy: They're looking for the cheapest product and so, I'll give you an example--I did large-scale Echinacea for a lot of times. I had a hundred small farmers here in Costa Rica, growing for me. I exported ten containers of Echinacea leaf and root--it was a couple million dollars worth of stuff--but, I never really made any money from it because I paid my growers good for this, and as soon as the pharmaceutical companies started taking over, they went to what we call standardized extract--where most of the herbalists prefer the entire plant, and used the entire plant. The root has a lot more of the Echinacea signs in it that they're looking for, the leaf has very little. What they found was they could go the farmer in Texas or in Canada and he could plant out hundreds of hectares and use mechanized equipment and harvest the leaf, and that would then--even though it has much less, they could take out all they needed because they were only looking for a 4% standardized extract anyhow, so they were paying a very high price to get root because Western culture couldn't harvest roots because it's too labor intensive. So this was a way of mechanizing their production.
Spenser: So I guess over the years, you've come to more of a conclusion that you want to phase out production a little bit more, and focus more on education.
Tommy: Education, it's all education. That's why I think the botanical garden idea--with educational tours basically.
Spenser: Right, I guess the question is, you of course think there's a need for such education. Why is there that need? I mean I still know so little about it but all of the medicinal properties that plants have, the enormous variety of them, and all of the different uses and everything--I grew up just taking the pills from the pharmacy--you don't care where it comes from you just care that it works, right? But do you see that as kind of your role is to just stimulate that interest--
Tommy: But it's not just medicinals. The plants have so many uses, I mean--all of human's endeavors have come from plants, right? And so I have the artist that does the natural colorants, I have friend who's a woodworker, I have the Canadian guy who did the essential oils, a woman that did the alcohol extracts from things, and the food, the actual food. So again, we do a lot of things with local, rural people, to show them easy, high-protein vegetable sources that they can plant--the katuk, the pigeon pea, the chiscasquil or the chaya. All those things have high-protein value, and all the other things that you need nutritionally--teaching them how to use that because they're easy to grow--you can do it in your backyard if you live out in the countryside, cause you have plenty of food that's nutritional.
Spenser: Right, so it's really kind of that theme of self-reliance.
Tommy: And how to use the plants.
Spenser: Well, we've been talking a lot about technology and it's role in agriculture, and all those things, and of course that leads into the GMO debate, and I definitely come from the scientific, skeptical side of things, generally speaking, but I've also spent a good bit of time with the hippie, permaculture, anti-GMO crowd, and I'm just interested in kind of hearing from somebody that has so much experience with this, to just weigh in on that a little bit, not necessarily say, "I'm pro-this or anti-that," but just talk about the different issues that GMO's bring up. It's not just about--cause the debate in the U.S. to me, is just dominated by labeling--just yell back and forth, "this should be labeled", "this shouldn't be labeled," but there's a much richer, larger conversation there about, "Well, should we be using GMO's? How should we be using them? What are the risks? What are the benefits?"
Tommy: Well I don't know any better than anybody else. Labeling is a no-brainer, they obviously should be labeled. There's no evidence that they're harmful yet. They might be--but we don't know that. So to do all this anti on the basis of no information, because I don't see any scientific studies that would show that this is harmful--I think the real issue is back to the monoculture. And the GMO's obviously help to make monoculture more lucrative, it makes it easier to grow products with less hassle and more production.
Spenser: So the threat, if anything is more just in shifting our stock into monoculture, not so much the worry about, oh well we modified a gene, therefore we might have messed something up--
Tommy: Even though I don't see any real way to avoid monocultures, either. That's a basic problem. That's why I think all the permaculture, hippie movements are advocating growing closer to home, small farms, and that's why they push the organic aspect, because if you're doing it on a small-scale, you probably don't need the chemicals, with the exception of fertilizer, that's where the organic people go wrong, is that they make it too stringent, rather than trying to reduce the reliance on chemicals, they go for absolutely no chemicals.
Spenser: Zero.
Tommy: Zero chemicals. I don't think that's going to work.
Spenser: To scale?
Tommy: Only on a very small scale. Home gardens and stuff, obviously, and hey, I'm sure that'd be better for you, I don't see an argument about that. But on a large-scale, I don't see how that is ever going to work, and I think we have to be more reasonable and say, "ok, let's cut out all these really bad chemicals and go for the ones that have the short half-lives and are basically not harmful to the environment, and use them rationally.
[laughs]
Spenser: Well, one thing I've read is that in some cases, using GMO's in a monoculture would actually allow you to use less pesticides, less chemicals, than if you didn't do that--
Tommy: Some of them. The Roundup Ready, obviously is still going to use Roundup. And Roundup has a fairly short half-life so it's not the bad thing that everybody makes it out to be--but it's not good. We all agree. The BT example is where they don't want any of the BT GMO, but that would reduce spraying and it is considered organic, but they're against it because it's GMO, and that doesn't seem to make much sense to me.
Spenser: And then there's a related issue about Monsanto copyrighting a seed basically--and then the seed gets into their neighbor's farm, and then they say that--
Tommy: I don't think that's really a big deal, I don't think that's really the issue though. That's how it's being played out because of the court battles between Monsanto and some of their neighbors where they grow--I don't think that's a real important issue myself. Yes, localized it might be, but in the world picture, I don't think that's the issue.
Spenser: Right, well I think one concern is that there's a movement to decentralize power a little bit, and allow people to grow more of their own food and take more power back locally, and I think that when you see Monsanto, the big corporation, with their GMO's, probably for some good reasons, there's kind of a sense that they have some underlying scheme where they get to take over and own all of food-production somehow by infesting the world with their own seems and taking over. How much of that do you see as hysteria versus...
Tommy: Well I think that it might happen.
[laughs]
Spenser: It's not hysteria?
Tommy: It's not hysteria, might happen, but it will happen for the reasons that they can produce more food, than the other systems.
[laughs]
Spenser: But the motive is producing more food, but making more money--
Tommy: For them, I understand. We're all against big anything, ok, and big agriculture is one of the worst. But that changes over time. I always loved Archer Daniel Midland's, they were the ones that started out with corn. They made margarine and so they put out of business, a lot of the dairy people, in the north central area of the United States, because everybody bought margarine. Then they started using high fructose sugar from it, so they put US sugar out of business, because they got Pepsi and Coca Cola to buy it instead of sugar. So US sugar, it no longer exists. And then he went, Dwayne Andreas went to China, was advisor to Mao Zedong, he came back from China and he says, "They have 800 million people, they all drink milk, and I didn't see one cow, because they drink soy milk."
Spenser: Right.
Tommy: So he started planting soy in the United States, and everybody thought that was great, we're getting away from corn, we're getting away from wheat, it's great to have soy. Now, everybody hates him because he planted soy, and now soy is hated. It changes over time, and it really depends. How are we going to feed all these people?
Spenser: And golden rice is a hot issue right now, do you think that's the best example of a case where the benefits to using it are so great, that even if there are some potential underlying risks, it's so overwhelming that if we can get golden rice to the most impoverished people that don't have the tools to do agriculture, that would save lives and also it would reduce hunger and do all these things...
Tommy: And increase population.
Spenser: Right, right, so that's a concern.
Tommy: That's a concern also, but it seems to me that the increase in population is really just due to a lack of education, and as soon as we get most of the world educated, the population will level off and not increase anymore, they say about 9 billion, it will stop growing because of education.
Spenser: Let's hope so.
[laughs]
Tommy: And we can probably feed 9 billion. So that's really an issue there. And this has been happening for a long time, it just wasn't GMO, is because Ford and Rockefeller foundations, developed all the hybrid rice and corn and wheat, back in the 60's and the 70's, that kept Asia growing.
[laughs]
Spenser: Right, you need food to grow population.
Tommy: Right, and we definitely were a part of that, and so maybe that wasn't the right decision at the time, but now it's too late to change our minds.
[laughs]
Spenser: Right, is there any way, in your particular plot of land and situation, where a GMO could potentially be useful?
Tommy: No.
Spenser: No.
Tommy: I'm not monoculture, I'm not large scale, there's just no reason for it.
Spenser: Ok. Even those glow in the dark trees?
Tommy: Well, the glow in the dark trees--
Spenser: It sounds so cool.
Tommy: Right, and that can cut our energy needs tremendously. You could plant your highways with these glow-in-the-dark trees, and you wouldn't need a lot of the streetlights, so this could be very, very good for the long-term development of the humans and their energy needs.
Spenser: Yeah, definitely.
Tommy: That's a long way away, still.
Spenser: Yeah, absolutely. Do you have any recommended literature, surrounding issues around GMO's?
Tommy: No, I really don't. The literature, it's almost always site-specific, the location. Because every plant changes in every location, you can bring a plant down from the temperate climates to the tropics and it's going to change, and it's requirements are going to change.
Spenser: Just like when I come down from the temperate to the tropics, things change, you need different stuff.
Tommy: I was doing the Echinacea and I did a lot of testing, both chemical testing and DNA testing, and these plants changed their chemical components, and changed their DNA in a new location.
Spenser: Changed their DNA?
Tommy: Yes.
Spenser: Is that like the epigenetic kind of thing?
Tommy: I don't understand it, but we know in the Echinacea, it was interesting because there were basically three varieties of Echinacea that were the most--and the angustifolia grew in the north or in higher altitudes, and the purpurea grew in the south, or in lower altitudes. And so you try to take one and bring it down to--angustifolia--and bring it down, Europeans liked that one more, so they paid more for it, so I brought that one down, and it did ok, but over time, it started to revert back to the lower altitude and lower latitude--ok. And the DNA actually changed.
Spenser: Wow. I don't think I've ever heard of that.
Tommy: I don't think we know anything about plants, really. The academics, they never participated in farming, really.
[laughs]
They don't go out and grow these things, and so their experiences are limited.
Spenser: Sure. Well, why do you think that things have evolved this way? I mean, food production and farming is so important, it's at the very heart of human existence, is eating and producing food, but it seems to me like it's not given the respect that it deserves, in terms of economics--we don't pay farmers a lot of money, and they end up getting shafted on a lot of these things, even though what they're doing--what could be more important than growing food? Why is it that it's kind of seen as a sort of a working-class kind of endeavor, uneducated people do it--
Tommy: First of all, it's easy to get into. There's no requirements to become a farmer.
Spenser: Right, other than having land.
Tommy: Other than having access to land. In the past, it was always his land, I do the farming, and I share half of it with the owner. And today, what's happened is we want to keep the price low so that everybody can afford it, so the only way to make any money is to increase the amount.
Spenser: The yield.
Tommy: And that's why we go to monoculture and big corporations to manage all of this stuff. Now they can produce a lot, make a small margin, but they're producing so much that it's a lot of money.
[laughs]
Spenser: Right, but it does seem like it's such a rich area for more research and for lots of really intelligent people to dive into, just food science and new techniques for--it just seems like you're saying, we don't know enough about plants.
Tommy: Well, probably, what we have at the same time happening is that we're starting to reduce our reliance on meat, because it's not as efficient as growing and eating the plants themselves.
Spenser: Calorie in, calorie out.
Tommy: Right, so just that alone will probably make us put more attention to getting the protein out of plants. And so we are starting to get more and more of that kind of research and information down. And that's why there are lots of plants that become very popular in the short run, because they're high protein plants. Beans have always been the one that we've relied on, but we're going to have some other ones now, that I think will be a big deal. I mean I think the breadfruit is another good example. In a lot of places in the tropics, it's hard to grow potatoes. Too hot. So they're going to substitute the breadfruit for the potatoes, in those hot climates. Even McDonald's in the pacific islands, uses the breadfruit for their french fries.
Spenser: Really?
Tommy: Yeah.
Spenser: Even they couldn't figure it out.
Tommy: Well, it's just too hard, they don't want to have to import. I mean here, in Costa Rica, they still import Idaho potatoes to do their french fries here.
Spenser: Cause it's cheaper than--
Tommy: No, it's because the potatoes we grow in the tropics aren't very good, for that kind of thing.
[laughs]
Spenser: Nobody would buy them.
Tommy: They become very pasty.
Spenser: Yeah, right. So you've done some conferences and stuff on...Mind States Costa Rica? Can you just talk about your interest in that?
Tommy: Well, I got invited because I have all those plants.
Spenser: Right.
Tommy: The people at that conference are the ones who've been researching it, and they were psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, chemists, and a lot of like, priests, they use them in terms of therapy with different clients of theirs. And so I was invited because I have all the plants and I grow all the plants, and so that was the only reason I got invited to speak, is because nobody there, they only knew about them in a processed form, and not in a plant form.
Spenser: Right, you're growing them so you have some interest in their properties to some extent, right?
Tommy: To some extent, yeah, but that's not my focus on them really. My focus is to see how they grow and I do get people that come through and show me how you use them and how to make the mixtures and that kind of thing.
Spenser: Right, so are you one of the only sources that's growing that actively, in Costa Rica? Are you a predominant source?
Tommy: I definitely was the first one, and now there are a number of these small communities around the country that have gotten plants from me and now grow some of these things, like the ayahuasca, that kind of thing. And yeah, I did it because I'm a collector.
[laughs]
And I have two of everything, it is the Ark. And so, that was my whole intention when I first started, I just wanted to be a collector and have some of these things, that over the years, I've had all these other people come, spend some time here, and teach me what they were doing, how to use the plant for whatever reason, so you see all the different--the chair you're sitting in is water hyacinth. 35 years ago, they said the water hyacinth was going to destroy the world, because it was stopping up all the rivers of the world, because now we believe that it actually helps to purify water, to take the heavy metals out of the water, to clean it up, and so, if you have cheap enough labor, it actually makes a nice chair.
[laughs]
Spenser: Cool. Well, you've certainly been successful, I think God himself--
Tommy: I never made any money on this farm.
Spenser: Not with the money, but certainly with what you created.
Tommy: It's kind of the right location because it's not really good for production for anything. I'm too high for tropical stuff, and I'm basically too low for temperate stuff.
Spenser: You're in the middle.
Tommy. Everything grows, but it's not prolific, it doesn't produce a lot. And so that's why I ended up doing the leafy stuff, because that you can somewhat control.
Spenser: Well, I just mean you'd be a hard collection to top. I think that Noah would be impressed with what you've done. What are your plans moving forward?
Tommy: Just to basically turn the whole farm into a botanical garden. I'm going to concentrate more on usable products like fruits, fruits and nuts I think are the future, and so I'd like to see what does well in this climate, and do those, and offer those into the market. There are so many tropical fruits that the world doesn't really know, and I think that that is kind of going to be the next step. Some of them don't lend themselves to export, to shipping, unless you process them, is one of the main problems with tropical fruits, is that you can't export them fresh, really, you have to process it to export it.
Spenser: Dry them--
Tommy: Or freeze them, is a good solution to that, in a lot of cases.
Spenser: Cool. Well, thanks so much for your time.
Tommy: My pleasure.
Spenser: I've had a great time, I'd recommend the place to everyone if you want to know anything about any plant here, Tommy knows about it.
Tommy: Well, I try, but there are a lot of plants.
[laughs]
Transformational Travel Experiences & Practical Tools for Your Project: Lessons from David Casey
Everyone has a great project idea, but what about the nuts and bolts to actually get it off the ground?
This is a workshop given by David Casey, founder of numundo.org, an organization that aggregates transformational travel experiences into a single website.
David is an expert in crowdfunding and what it takes to get projects off the ground.
In this podcast, he breaks down:
- non-monetary value exchanges
- crowdfunding pitfalls
- the importance of starting small and avoiding grandiose goals
- honing your mission/skill set
- finding similar projects and asking for advice
- the importance of pure intention to attract people to your project
Even though this workshop was at Lucidity Festival 2015, I'm re-sharing it because it changed the course of my life. This workshop lead me to VerdEnergia, which lead to a number of productivity and lifestyle improvements that I doubt I would have experienced otherwise. I hope you enjoy it.
Show Notes:
Creating Continuity with Tim O'Hara of Rancho Mastatal
A conversation with Tim O'Hara of Rancho Mastatal, a sustainability education center in Mastatal, Costa Rica.
Tim O'Hara shares the story of Rancho Mastatal, a sustainability education center in Mastatal, Costa Rica.
With the help of his wife and many others, Tim went from, as he puts it, "shitting in a bucket", to managing one of the most prominent natural building centers in Latin America.
How did he do it? A combination of intelligence, grit, and a "long view" on growing his business and his community.
Show Notes:
RanchoMastatal.com
info@ranchomastatal.com
Books mentioned in this podcast:
Support the podcast by shopping at Amazon through this banner link or by purchasing the books mentioned above. You won't be chargd an extra cent and it allows me to create more content like this. :)
Podcast Transcript
Recorded at Rancho Mastatal on May 8th, 2016
Transcribed by Spenser Gabin on May 14th, 2016
Includes: Tim O’Hara of Rancho Mastatal
Spenser Gabin: Hey guys, today on the podcast, I'm going to do an interview with Tim O’Hara, better known as "Timo", from Rancho Mastatal. Tim is the founder of Rancho Mastatal, a sustainability education center, in Mastatal, which is a rather remote and less known region of Costa Rica. Tim has been there for 15 years and has built a quite remarkable community and education center, he specifically focuses on helping the local economy, which we'll talk a little bit about. It's really just a great example of a successful education center, "permaculture" is thrown around a lot, but I think it's one that's particularly rooted in place.
So Tim, before we get into the nuts and bolts of what Rancho Mastatal is now, I just want to take a step back to 2001, and a little bit before then, to get a sense of what lead you to become interested in starting a place like this, what your background is, just to give us a picture of what things were at the beginning, and then we can get more into how things are now.
Tim O’Hara: I grew up in New York, in a kind of a post-industrial city named Binghamton, grew up in a typical suburban child, lived in a cul-de-sac, had access to the woods, it was a nice upbringing. I am the youngest of five children. After I graduated from high school I went to Cornell University, which is about 50 miles from my hometown, where I studied Agricultural Economics, graduated in 1991 with that degree, and after a little bit of post university traveling, I got my first real job out of school, with Chiquita, which is a large agribusiness.
[laughs]
I worked with them for two years as a marketing analyst, kind of had my first peak into the inside world of agribusiness and how our food systems work. I worked for the branch of Chiquita that imported mainly container loads of fruit from Chile, so that we can now have grapes and plums and peaches in February, in New York State.
Spenser: Who doesn't love that?
[laughs]
Tim: Indeed. After about a year there I started to become quite disheartened with what I was contributing to, I fortunately had a colleague at Chiquita who had recently returned from spending two years in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. She slipped me a book one day at my desk, entitled "Bitter Fruit", which is a story about the overthrow of the democratically elected government, in Guatemala, in the early 1950's and specifically the overthrow of the Jacobo Arbenz Administration. In that book, it talked about the CIA and Chiquita's (the United Fruit Company at the time) role in that overthrow, that violent overthrow.
It really opened my eyes considerably, and really forced me to look inside and forced me to ask questions that were quite uncomfortable at the time, what I was contributing my time and resources and energy to, and the same colleague that slipped me that book, who became a close friend of mine, started to encourage me to look into the Peace Corps as a next step. She thought I would make a good volunteer and that the international experience would be good for me. I had not left the United States up until that point. I was 25 years old and I worked in the Bourse Building in downtown Philadelphia at that time. The regional Peace Corps office happened to be right across the street, not too far from the Liberty Bell, and so, I strolled over there one day at lunch and talked to a representative and was intrigued by what I heard, and a little inspired by what my colleague had told me and picked up an application on my way out, and filled it out over the course of a few days, and made the decision to go ahead and drop it into the mail. I can't remember how long it took, a few months later, in my mailbox was an acceptance packet. I had been accepted to the Peace Corps and targeted to go to South America to the country of Uruguay. That was a big change for me, a big deal, I started to prepare my belongings and uprooted my life in Philadelphia, which was quite a positive life, I had a great community of friends, I really enjoyed Philadelphia a lot more than I ever thought that I would.
[laughs]
But, I decided to up-and-go, and I remember the day from my office at Chiquita, called my father and told him that I had been accepted to the Peace Corps and would be going to South America and he asked me where I was at that moment, and I said, "Well, in my office." And he said, "Ok, I'm coming to get you right now." He was not very supportive. At the very beginning, it took a few weeks to have some open discussions with him so that he became more comfortable with this idea of me departing.
Spenser: What was your role at Chiquita?
Tim: Marketing analyst.
Spenser: So what would that involve?
Tim: I helped out with advertisements, promotional materials, but mainly I studied trends in the market, and produced reports for executives so that they could make decisions on how to move forward with marketing their products and setting prices.
Spenser: Was economics your focus at Cornell?
Tim: Yeah.
Spenser: So what were your father's objections to it? I imagine you're probably doing ok at Chiquita financially?
Tim: Yeah, I was on that path at Cornell that had prepared me. Cornell's agriculture school is quite conventional, probably more so then than now. They do have a sustainable "ag" program now that's quite small, but mainly the agriculture education there that one learns is tied to the current agricultural paradigm that most of us eat from, and it was not very progressive. As I look back, it was quite typical, it was very agribusiness oriented, very globalized, very export/import based, I was essentially trained to fill a position such as [my position at Chiquita] and move my way up the agribusiness.
But fortunately, I had some really good role models. This colleague that I mentioned, Denise, and one of the vice presidents there who had also spent time in Guatemala as a Peace Corps trainer, both of whom recognized that perhaps the corporate world was not a good fit for me, and I was fortunate that I had the wherewithal to share their honest opinions about where I had landed, and recognized that I could probably be doing better work somewhere else. So I went to the Peace Corps, spent three years in South America. In the Peace Corps library, I was introduced to Bill Mollison's “Permaculture Design Manual”.
Spenser: Ah ha!
Tim: It was the first time that I had heard that term before, and opened the book, and like so many people, ended up reading through the entire book fairly quickly, and it made perfect sense to me. I think a lot of people say that when they read Bill Mollison's book, it just makes a lot of sense on so many levels. It really resonated with me on many levels. I had been placed with a group of organic farmers, as my Peace Corps project, so I was fortunate enough to delve into that world, the opposite one that I landed in with Chiquita. I was working with small farmers, trying to help them identify new markets that would market their produce and work with them to incorporate fertility building techniques and strategies.
I took off in that world, I was fully engaged, enamored with that life, just being around people that actually were passionate about putting healthy food on the table. I lived on a farm for a year after completing my training, and fully jumped in and it changed me forever. Peace Corps experiences have a tendency to really impact people. They're not all good experiences for everyone, it's a very mixed bag.
Spenser: You got a good one?
Tim: This happened to be a good one for me. I met my wife in Uruguay as well, who is my partner in crime here, at the ranch, and we developed a strong relationship that continues today. I remember writing a handwritten letter to John Jeavons as a Peace Corps volunteer and reaching out to permaculturalists, in an effort to try and identify what my next step was going to be. I went to Nicaragua after Peace Corps and worked for Jerome Ostentowski's project there in Teotecacinte in Nicaragua for a while.
Prior to doing that, I applied for an ecological agriculture program at UC Santa Cruz. Got accepted, was on my travels working my way back to the states to see you. Started this program when my former boss at Chiquita got a hold of me, this is pre-email, via letter, and told me that she had moved out West to worked for another agribusiness company and that they were looking to open and develop a Latin American program and she strongly encouraged me to think about coming to work with her, she thought I was a good fit, I had become a fluent Spanish speaker since leaving Chiquita, and she wooed me to Vanguard Trading Services, which is a company that I worked at for a few years.
I had to make a very tough decision, I had been accepted into a competitive, ecological agriculture program at UC Santa Cruz, I got a good job offer from a company, I had family and economic pressure. I really, really wanted to do the ecological "ag" program. I remember sitting in my parents living room one night with my head down, asking anybody to give me the right answer to whether to go to Seattle or Santa Cruz and I woke up and decided to take the job. So instead of going to Santa Cruz, I turned down that offer and I moved to Seattle, where I began my new life there, working as a trader of large quantities of fruits and vegetables. All of my clients were based in Latin America, I traveled considerably in this region of the world, but again, quickly realized that that environment was the wrong one for me.
Spenser: And this is [after] having read Mollison's book. So, when you took that job offer, were you a little bit hesitant, I mean it sounds like you had a dilemma of course, but did you have a sense of what you'd be putting your efforts toward at that point?
Tim: I certainly did, I had a better sense than I did when I joined Chiquita right after college, but societal pressures got the best of me. You get a stipend in the Peace Corps, it's enough to allow you to make ends meet. You get some money upon leaving as well, for basically resettling back into life in the U.S., but I was without any income stream at the time. I had traveled after Peace Corps, I didn't have much money, my family expected to use my degree in a certain way that filled my life with a lot of pressure at that point. I had three older brothers and a sister, all professionals, successful, however you want to define that, in their fields of medicine, law, and finance, etc...I had some big shoes to step into and I really felt that pressure as so many people do these days, to take that paved road and to do, what you are "supposed to do".
But after a year at Vanguard, I realized that I was not destined to live [that life], I was miserable essentially. I was beating rush hour in the mornings because I had to be in so early, I was missing rush hour on the backside because I was getting out so late, and my work that I essentially hated--that's a strong word--that I disliked in a very serious way, and so I gutted it out for another year, I was there for a couple of years, gained a lot of good experience. As I look back now, these two corporate experiences that I had, the one at Chiquita and the one at Vanguard, really did help me get to where I am today, even though they are paths that I decided to get off of along the way for a lot of reasons that I am happy for now. I did gain a lot from those experiences.
Spenser: Like what?
Tim: Just understanding for one, how the real agricultural world works. I made a lot of contacts, my network greatly expanded, I had the resources through the companies to travel, I was speaking Spanish all of the time with my job at Vanguard. All of my clients were Spanish speakers, I met some great people, really developed a strong network of friends and a solid community in Seattle, which has served me well up until now, and those experiences, good or bad, like all experiences in life, do inform who you become in the future, and I became uber-sure that that corporate path was one that I would not follow any longer, even if it was a six-figure offer.
And I started to guide, doing outdoor adventure travel trips, and basically set out on an exploration to try and find something meaningful to do with my life. It lead me to guiding, it lead me to manage a canoe and kayak manufacturer, I was an avid whitewater kayaker in Seattle, and lead me on this path of exploration, which lead me to, in part, where I am today, and little by little, from the time I got out of high school until now, I have been exposed to people with more progressive views. Like I said, I grew up in a pretty conservative, post-industrial town, not super progressive. I went to Cornell where I was introduced to kind of a more progressive community of people, and started to hear the words organic farming, and composting, these terms that are now just an expected part of my life. Back then, they were very new and seemed innovative, and incredible and it's been, as I said, Peace Corps, another community with quite progressive thinkers, a different library, the permaculture book I mentioned earlier being there, and that really did open my doors to a whole other world that I hadn't been exposed to prior to my graduation from high school.
Spenser: As you mentioned, working in a corporate environment and choosing to do something else, isn't a totally common experience, but a lot of people are in that place. Was there a last straw? And to follow-up on that, some people might choose to just come to a place like [Rancho Mastatal] that already existed. You, instead, chose to create one. Why did you choose to do that and then also, why, specifically, Costa Rica, and then Mastatal, kind of get into your thought process on why those would be good options?
Tim: Post-Vanguard, my wife and I were starting to look for a different path. My wife was working at a swanky restaurant in Seattle, bringing home the bacon, which was great for us at the time. It allowed me to do some exploring and allowed us to research some different options out there. My wife, who also speaks fluent Spanish, based on her time at the Peace Corps, her and I were really open to returning to Latin America some day, as an option, through our kayaking and adventures, spent a lot of time in the Hood River region of Oregon. We really liked the feel down there. We loved our community of friends in Seattle. We developed a really strong network as I said earlier. But it got to the point where we didn't want to pay rent anymore, we were putting a lot of our money to paying rent, to buying food, and we gardened, we composted, we were doing what we could in that urban environment to be good denizens of our city and of the planet. But it didn't seem like enough to us, we couldn't afford to buy in Seattle. We started to look at what else could be out there.
We essentially had our site set on Oregon, along the Columbia River gorge, a bit more rural. We started to look for work there, when a friend of mine from the Peace Corps, who I had dreamt with back then about starting an organic, ecological farm type project somewhere in South America, called me up and said he had just been to Costa Rica, he had come to a town in Mastatal and he essentially stumbled on an advertisement for a farm that was being sold in the center of town. He told me that it really seemed like the place that he and I had talked about back as Peace Corps friends, that place we had dreamt about back then. He encouraged me and my wife to come down here. It was off the radar of what we were looking at at the time, even though we were interested, and open to returning to Latin America, we weren't thinking that at that time. We were Northwest-based, we saw ourselves being there for the foreseeable future, but he convinced us to jump on a plane, and we came out to the property that [Rancho Mastatal] currently sits on, spent a few days here. We really liked what we saw, it was rural, the property borders a conservation area, and the water resources are abundant and pure. The economy here at that time was very depressed, there wasn't much going on economically, which was intriguing to us, to think about coming and starting the project that could contribute to the revival of a local, rural economy. We walked down to the waterfall nearby here, and I think that was probably the moment that Robin and I looked at each other and were like--
Spenser: Music went on?
Tim: Exactly. We decided at that time to take a closer look at it. You asked about the breaking point before it. I don't quite remember if there was an exact point in my past when I was like, "hands up, this is it". It certainly did come during that time, when I was at Vanguard, and getting up in the morning, feeling miserable every day, [it] was no way to go through life, and [I] wasn't getting enough sleep. My weekends were cut short, but anyway, sorry to backtrack there for a sec. Moving forward, we went back to the States after our trip to Mastatal, we had only looked at this property, we were not actively looking for a property in Latin America, which is unique to this type of story. Sometimes a lot of people are down here looking, and looking for that perfect property. Our story is a little bit unique in that, the property kind of found us, it was the only one we looked at, and we went back and started to brainstorm about how we might be able to put together a business plan that would allow us to meet our financial obligations, while doing meaningful work that contributed in a positive way to an economy. We decided on this idea of a sustainability education center, we started to talk with our network of friends, we had a graphic designer friend who helped us build our website. It was the first website he had ever built, and little by little we started to put the pieces in place. Financially, we had limited resources in our bank account at that time. We were able to talk with the prior owner of this property and asked him if he would hold own half of the value in an owner-held mortgage, which he agreed to. We pooled our money at the time, we went into this project with another couple named Dan and Jen Alcorn. Dan was my friend in the Peace Corps that I had dreamt with back then, so the four of us went in on it together. They got out of the agreement, about a year or a year and a half in. They had a baby girl and it just didn't work out, the timing. Robin and I ended up buying out their shares early on in the deal.
But backtracking a little bit more, we started to put together this idea, the resources. Originally, we bought the property in 2000. We were originally going to come down in late 2000. We had spent all of our money on the down payment for this place, we took out some family and friend loans, and we felt that we really needed to have more of a cushion upon our arrival here, to be able to do something that would make ends meet.
Spenser: Why, both economically and philosophically, the education center, versus, you talked about starting an organic farm, that itself being a profitable endeavor maybe, you instead chose to focus it on education? I mean you grow some of your own organic food, but it's primarily an education center, so why that? Let's start with that, I want to get into those early days of getting it off the ground, but first lets start with why education, versus just trying to sell organic coffee or something.
Tim: Let's see. My wife and I, over the years, while on the Peace Corps and post-Peace Corps started to develop new passions, new ideas, we were exposed to new literature, a new community of friends, and we really started to become very interested in topics such as natural building and agroforestry, wilderness medicine, conservation, education in rural areas, etc...these were all interests of ours, we hadn't fully developed, hadn't fully lived. They were ideas in many cases. It was information that was very interesting to us, but, we didn't really have the background or the experience to say that we knew much about, or, didn't know enough to really apply that information in any real practical way.
Part of the selfish piece of this story is that, we wanted to be a part of developing a place where we could not only teach but also learn and exchange information with other people, experts in these areas, areas we wanted to become experts in, and so part of our decision was influenced by this idea or this dream of creating a space where people from everywhere, with these similar passions and interests and ethics could come together, and basically, be a clearing house for all of this information, which would hopefully lead to some kind of paradigm shift down the road. As far as starting an organic farm, we were interested in growing food at that time, we had no real experience outside of gardening, outside of my work in the Peace Corps, working with farmers to--
Spenser: Make that viable?
Tim: Yeah, think about a scenario that would allow us to make ends meet, financially. Especially in a climate that was new to us, in a rural area. We weren't interested in getting into the exportation of anything, it was something I was turned off to in my corporate days. We were more interested in self-sustenance and thinking about it more on a small-scale, as opposed to a large-scale. My wife has been a teacher in the past, she has an interesting history as well, as we studied the options that we had to make ends meet here, financially. It seemed like taking advantage of Costa Rica's history with eco-tourism, it just seemed like a way that we could develop a viable business that would allow us to connect to the "ag" piece and to these other pieces that I mentioned early, but in a way that would increase the likelihood of success and longevity moving forward.
We did not have our site set on Costa Rica, kind of as I said before, we were looking at Oregon. In fact, we were more, if we were to move to Latin America, attracted to the lower-income areas. It may be influenced by our Peace Corps days. We were a little bit more interested at the time of perhaps moving somewhere poorer, if you will, so that we could have an impact in a place that might, "need it more". But, fate led us here in the end. It was a good geographic location because of our close ties to family and friends in the Northeastern United States, where we were both born and raised, really ended up being a nice geographic location, due to the fact that we can get back to the States, relatively quickly, and relatively inexpensively to stay connected to our world there. Moving from Seattle to Costa Rica actually, distance-wise, got us a little bit closer to our family in the Northeast.
Spenser: What were those early days like? Did you have fears about whether it would work? Whether the local community would buy into it? Would people even want to come? Of course, Rancho Mastatal is successful now, it's working. I just heard you filled a permaculture course with 28 people, things are rolling now. But, going back to 2001, my sense of it is that there was less interest in [permaculture] at that point, the interest has grown over the years, so what were those years like? Was it stressful? Did you have second thoughts?
[laughs]
Maybe it went great, I don't know, I'm just interested in those first couple years.
Tim: Yeah, it was all of the above and more. Very tight times, making payroll at the very end of the week, not being sure if guests were going to show up, we had no phones at the time, there was no internet in town.
Spenser: Cross your fingers, right?
[laughs]
Tim: Yeah, the roads were awful back in those days, I would go to a coastal town, either Quepos or Jaco every three weeks to check my emails. We had no way to stay connected to the people that we were hoping would financially support us. The rainy seasons were terrible, the roads would close down,
[laughs]
the electricity would go out, water would go out frequently, and it really was less developed here. We were the first and only business back in 2001. For those that come here now, they experience what I would consider quite a vibrant, robust, small, rural community, with many both formal and informal businesses, all throughout this community, it really has been a staggering, wonderful story. I don't want to suggest that we're responsible for that in any way, we are one cog in this machine that has allowed this small rural community to elevate itself to the point where young people now, if they so desire, can stay here, if they are innovative enough, and crafty enough and smart enough and work hard enough, they can create a place like the Iguana Chocolate, a neighboring farm here that produces local, organic chocolate, and make a go at it. The fact that those types of opportunities now exist, mean that incredibly intelligent people like Jorge Salazar, who started the farm, one of the most intelligent people I know, it gave him an option to stay home, and to stem that brain drain which was so common in small, rural communities all over the world really, is critical to this success story, and in a way, to the success story of this community, to retain that type of quality individual, that type of intelligence, and with a little bit of luck, training, and exposure, having that person become a real leader that anchors a community like us, and gives it hope moving forward.
Yeah, getting groups, here, getting people here, back in that time we had a volunteer program that's been eliminated since, or I should say replaced by a year-long apprenticeship. Back in those days, I remember when the bus would arrive, a single bus, each day that arrives here, and looking out our front gate, and hoping that it would be somebody on there,
[laughs]
some newer sneakers or boots coming off. Occasionally there would be, more often than not there wouldn't be, and little by little, people trickled in, and we really tried to focus on quality food, a quality experience, quality accommodations, although back in the beginning, we had no real quality accommodations, we were working with what we had.
Spenser: For lack of a better word, how did you sell it at the beginning? I mean, now you have so much great stuff to offer, at the beginning, it's like, "Who are these guys? What do they really have? And the road looks terrible..." How did you get people excited without a lot to offer?
Tim: In part, the same way we do nowadays. That is because a lot of people, increasing numbers, are interested in this type of lifestyle, are interested in disconnecting from the broken systems that I grew up with, and started to recognize [that], and the first two projects that we did here were to build a cob-bread oven. My wife loves to bake bread, we don't bake bread here anymore, for reasons that maybe we'll go into later. She wanted a cob-bread oven, she had experience building with cob, had built two ovens in the States, and then the composting toilet. And so, those two projects alone, kind of gave us something to show people.
Even back at that time, when there was so little here, we did have a lot to offer, not only with those first, miniscule projects, that spoke to this grander idea of sustainability, resilience, regeneration, there's all sorts of terms thrown around these days of course. But, we also had the allure of living rurally, that adventure to get out here was very attractive to a lot of people. The "chicken bus" attractiveness, when traveling through Central America on a bus, and going out on a bumpy bus ride for two hours, and the bus breaking down and helping push it out of the mud, getting here dirty, getting off the bus and seeing the only in tact, primary forest left in Puriscal county, and incredibly friendly people, and bird life galore, mammals and animals and the tropical wildlife and species, flora and fauna, that really attract people to this country, to all over this country. It was enough for us then, to light the fire in certain individuals who then, left our gates at some point and started that very long process of spreading the word. Word-of-mouth, I would daresay, is still our most important form of marketing. Seemed like almost everybody that comes here has heard about us from somebody else that had already been here, and we just tried to, the best we could, provide an authentic, amazing experience, even back when we didn't have very comfortable mattresses, and we were shitting in a bucket
[laughs]
We used Joe Jenkins’s 5-gallon buckets as composting toilets for the first 9 years here at the main house, we now have three beautiful--
Spenser: You won the loo of the year from a permaculture magazine!
Tim: Yeah.
Spenser: It's a fine loo.
Tim: It is indeed. So we moved from that 5-gallon bucket to 8, much larger composting toilets and then, the 3 flush toilets here at the main house that feed a bio-digester that produces methane for cooking in our kitchens. So, we certainly came a long way, back then, we had an abundant amount of energy, we were tireless back then, so even though we were living almost day-to-day, we did have the energy to push through the tough times. Some people say that 90% of these businesses fail, I think we were both lucky and persistent, it seems some days that we shouldn't be here, it seems a miracle that we are here, I should say.
We made a lot of sacrifices, we continue to make a lot of sacrifices, but now, 15 years later, we're in that sweet zone of having our systems start to work for us, a lot more than we're working for them. We're getting into that sweet stage of development in permaculture that you read about, that, really does see the fruit falling off of trees, and the systems really making life for us, less stressful, and more possible to live in a balanced way, I would say.
Spenser: Now, you employ several people in the local community, and I would imagine that you've built up quite a sense of trust and mutual respect and all of that, but was there skepticism from the local community at the beginning? Was there fear? What was it like at first, and then how did that evolve over time?
Tim: In the early days, when we first arrived, I think in general--this would of course be a good question to ask the people that were here when we arrived, this is my perspective of course. But, in general, it seemed like we were welcome by the majority of the community, I think that was because we were seen as a potential source of employment, a potential source of economic injection. To some people, we were probably a little novel.
Spenser: Gringos!
[laughs]
Tim: [We were] the first Americans to come to live here and call Mastatal their home for the first time in a long time. We certainly were not universally accepted, there was a segment of the population that, like in so many rural areas and probably just about anywhere, when they see outsiders come in, there's a certain defensive reaction that's natural in human beings, people asking the questions of why, what did they come here to do, how will they impact the space.
Spenser: Right, so sorry to interrupt you, but one thing that's true of Joshua [Hughes] at [VerdEnergia] is the locals sometime react to somebody that's having success in the U.S. and doing very well, "Why would you come down to Costa Rica and live in a town that doesn't have any businesses and has bad roads?" It's almost like they think you're insane or something. So, was that part of it?
Tim: Yeah, I think those questions were asked, I don't remember that being the overriding feeling, back then. It's hard now, after being here after 15 years to think back and recall certain conversations, but I don't recall having that conversation, too much. Although, certainly we were looking for something here that we didn't get there. That has been a part of the story of course, interacting with people that, in many cases, have dreamt about getting a work visa to the United States, to make money, to then come back and start a business in Mastatal or whatever the case might be.
So that process has continued, some local men have indeed, gone to the United States with work visas, through all of the interactions that locals have had over the last 15 years, relationships that have been forged, have been fortunate enough to be afforded those opportunities. But, I also believe that through our arrival here, at least in part, the local population I think was better able to say this so that I'm not sounding perhaps egotistical, but they, I think, had their eyes opened up to this idea that they lived in "paradise", that they actually lived in a pretty amazing part of the world, wherever you’re born and wherever you're raised, and that's what you know until you leave and get another perspective and then you come back with fresh eyes. I think that process started to happen for some of the people here, they started to see the forest differently as they saw increasing numbers of people coming here, with their draws dropping and their eyes wide opening and their positive comments about the amazingness of the community and the ecosystem, and I think it's been really positive for the self-esteem of this community, it's a very confident community now, I would say. Wasn't when we got here, it was a community that was rife with this brain drain that I was referring to before. You turn 16, you're out of here, you go find a job in the city.
Spenser: Cause that's where the money is.
Tim: That's where the money is. There were no economic opportunities. Farming is in its most late form, it’s dying, and you can't make a living any longer growing corn beans and rice in the same way. There was just nothing for them to do. That has totally turned around, and again, not only because the Ranch exists, we had the mostly fortunate situation of the conservation area that borders our property, getting an elevation in status to National Park in 2002 and the developments that accompany that, I think have been positive in so many ways for this community, that have allowed people to really see a future in what was a dying community when we came here. All of the communities in this kind of tri-town area have been depopulated very fast over the last many decades, and it seems like at least for now that the population has been stemmed, people are coming back, people are starting business, all of the businesses that I alluded to earlier, have been started by local families, it's been a really remarkable development to witness. It's been fascinating to be a part of.
Spenser: You mentioned earlier, you used to have a volunteer program, and now you've switched to apprenticeships. I get the sense that as a center, you're really focused on long-term relationships with people, I mean I have a sense of why that might be, but I think there's a sense in permaculture design courses that people may have the expectation that, "Oh, this is where I learn to become a professional permaculture designer, over the next 3 weeks." Not all of them, but I think there is a bit of a sense of that. Of course, it takes much longer than that to really learn and test things out and implement them.
First, is that part of your philosophy and if so, do you think that's part of why the place has been successful is it has, versus the more short-term thinking, more like adventure tourism sort of, of course that's part of it anyway, but having the focus more on coming here to really learn and invest in the community, rather than, "I'll come and take a 3 week course and party a bunch and then head out and maybe forget I did the whole thing," or just not really feel like you have a long-term investment, whatever it is, agroforestry, any element of it.
Tim: Yeah, we really have invested heavily in this idea of building continuity and stability into our programs, into our business, into the community, and we have found that it's becoming increasingly important for us to go really as deep as we can into these areas that would become, dare I say it, passionate about.
From a personal sustainability standpoint, this idea of having volunteers come in for short periods of time, any day of the week, training them, and having them leave, that was a necessity for us in the beginning because nobody knew who we were, and we had to get people through our doors in the beginning, to generate some type of revenue, to be able to pay the bills. The more well-known that we became, the more picky we were able to become with regards to how we develop programs and a volunteer coming in for a week, taking a lot of our time and energy contributing a lot or a little, depending on the individual, but having them in and out of your community, both the one here at the Ranch and the bigger community of Mastatal, we've found to be somewhat disruptive to our lives, but also to the lives of the people that called this home outside of the ranches gates. To have that kind of “shotgun tourism”, I think it's a part of what tourism is everywhere. You have a people coming into your space and then out quickly and hopefully they leave a little bit of money, and hopefully improve the quality of the economy, but, I think we all also know the potential destructive side of that and how it can impact a community in so many ways, negatively.
Everywhere we looked, it became obvious that the longer we could get people to stay here, the better our lives were going to be, the more they would contribute, the more they would learn, the better their skills would be upon leaving to affect change, wherever they went, the less destructive the community here would feel, the better the friends that our visitors would make with people, the better quality relationships that would be made, it just made sense on every single level, and we've really taken that now, as much as we've been able to, to the next level, not only with our apprenticeship but all of our educational programs, are being looked at in a different light. We're looking at going longer and going deeper whenever we can. We kind of have two types of education that we engage in here. One we would call inspirational education and the other kind of true deep learning education. Both are important, we just had a group of university students that left his morning, they were here for four days.
Spenser: Inspirational.
Tim: They were greatly inspired. They learned a lot, the learning wasn't deep, it was superficial, but they left blown away, they left inspired to come back, they left inspired to change the focus of their studies. They left with these ideas that they may or may not implement, but certainly in some way had an impact and for some of them will have an impact as they make decisions moving forward, but also, we recognize this more and more, this dearth of, going back to your example of the PDC, this dearth of actual practical application, the PDC, like you suggested, some people do feel that they're going to come in with two weeks and leave with the "stamp" and be able to go anywhere and design everything, they would be professional designers, and they would be able to make the money that they needed doing great work. The reality is, permaculture is this enormous world that encompasses everything from natural building, to growing food, to generating [your] own electricity, and so much in between, really it's a lifetime of learning. It's not a two-week experience, it's just a window into what for me has been a lifestyle that has shown that the learning never ends. The older I get, the more I realize how little I know about so much, and in my 30's, I figured I kind of had it worked out in my head, I kind of knew where I wanted to go and how to get there, but as I become totally immersed in this lifestyle the more I realize that there's so much more to learn and so much more to know and the way to that knowing is to practice these skills and to go deep every single day, to build a lot of pieces of furniture, to grow a lot of food and to make a lot of soap and it's a cornerstone of our year-long apprenticeship, this idea of practice and not this idea of ticking off a box, like oh, "Oh, I made kimchi, so now I know I'm going to tick the box off and I'm never going to make kimchi again," and to become great at making kim chi, you need to experiment and practice and make it a part of your life, just like building a table, you'll get better, you'll become one with the tools, you'll just become a better practitioner.
We want to be a place that offers that type of deep experience for people to be able to come and go deep with, and then as I said, take those skills, both the hard skills, like sharpening a chisel, and the soft skills, which don't get talked about enough, such as being able to interact with people in a healthy manner, and go off into the world and engage and do good work, cause I don't think there's any argument that we need a lot of good people doing a lot of good work all over the world, so that we can start figuring out some solutions to some of the bigger issues that affect us as a species.
Spenser: What advice would you give to somebody that's considering starting a similar community or a similar education center? What are those pitfalls that you've managed to either climb out of or avoid entirely, what are one or two things that are the big things to avoid or to focus on?
Tim: We talk more and more about invisible structures here, everyday. The invisible structures, the behind the scenes structures, that none of our guests see but are critical to the long-term success of an organization such as ours. One recommendation that I would have is to get these invisible structures in place as soon as you can. I think we were extremely fortunate, in the early years, survive without having any of those invisible structures in place.
Spenser: What's an invisible structure?
Tim: So an invisible structure might be how you make decisions, so how are we making decisions, are there protocols or policies in place that allow you to make decisions effectively and well? So that would be one example. How you govern yourselves, how you organize yourselves to be able to govern your community. For us, a big piece has been the financial analysis piece. How to figure out, maybe where you're spending too much money, or where you could be saving money. All of these structures, again, that don't make it into the main house anywhere there, perhaps on pieces of cardboard like the one behind me, or in notebooks, in our office.
Thanks to a couple of our core team members in particular, Laura Killingbeck, she has recognized more and more the lack of this structure for us at the ranch, and the importance of really pushing that forward as quickly as we can, as our core team evolves, as our impact evolves, as our reputation grows, having these structures in place, are critical to a sustainable future. Because just like you can get into trouble by not having enough people come through your doors, and it's not enough revenue, I think equally you can get into trouble by not having your ducks in a row when you start growing faster, perhaps, than you're able to handle.
So, being able to make decisions effectively, and have that structure in place, really is incredibly important. How you decide to do that, is up to your core team, it's up to your staff, it's up to the individuals that participate, but having those long, open, hard discussions on how to compensate yourself, how to make decisions, how to govern, whether to allow guests to come with dogs, is just one example of something that seems so simple or perhaps you would never think about until you get this amazing application, from a woman who has all the skills you need as an apprentice, and then the last line says, "oh, and I have a 60-pound labrador, would you mind if I brought it along?" Oh, you know we don't have a policy in place for that. How would that impact this community? I'm not suggesting you have to have a policy for every possible scenario, but to really have an organization or a structure in place to be able to deal with those types of issues, and certainly to deal with any discord that will inevitably come up in a community such as this one. You have to be able to deal with issues, you have to be able to deal with people leaving, you have to be able to deal with people showing up, you have to be able to deal with people separating and coming together and I wish we had done more of that, earlier on.
I had never heard of the term, "invisible structures", prior to coming down here so I didn't know that was as important as I do now, and I think if I were to give someone the best chance of success, they would have some semblance of those structures in place.
Spenser: What advice would you give your 20-year-old self and your 30-year-old self?
Tim: Wow, ok. That's a difficult question. What advice would I give my 20-year-old self, holy cow.
Spenser: One piece of advice, just to simplify it.
Tim: One piece of advice. God, I dare say what I just said, but, get the people part and the organizational part figured out. Spend the necessary time, energy, and money in developing an infrastructure that will work for you over the long-term. I'll say it again, I think we're fortunate in many ways to still be here, based on the fact that we didn't have that well in place. We got by because we worked our asses off and we got lucky here and there and because we live in a beautiful spot, but I can't stress enough how we should've had more of that in place, prior to heading out. To my 30-year-old self, take care of yourself, physically. I think, like so many of these places, burnout is a reality. I toyed with burnout about halfway in with this, I was giving it my all, not compensating myself in any real way, working extremely long hours, playing hard, just really going for it all and I think that really put me at great risk physically, emotionally, psychologically, in my relationships with my friends and family. It's really important self-care, that self-care piece that you can forget about so easily and put last in line, because of everything that's going on in your world, and that need, that perceived need to always be pushing forward, to be able to make it work, but I do now realize that the better rested you are, the more balanced you are, the healthier you are, the better your performance, the more productive you'll be, it's not about going at it at the time, it's about treating yourself well and knowing when to be able to take care of yourself.
Spenser: What do you enjoy most about your job?
Tim: Funny, after 15 years, I am at this really sweet spot in my life where it actually feels like it's getting better, I feel like I'm more at home all the time, which might seem a little bit strange to hear that, perhaps that would be something you would assume, but I really have felt that I've been able to kind of find this balance. I said earlier, we're kind of hitting that sweet spot of our stage of development and I get to spend pretty much everyday with incredible, incredible people. I try not to take that for granted, we have an amazing apprenticeship crew, we have amazing students and teachers coming through here, amazing builders, amazing permaculturalists, and to have that in my life all the time is a real blessing, and to have that be my life, my child's life, my wife's life, really is something that I am ever grateful for, just to be around amazing people all the time is a constant source of inspiration, constant source of education, and fills me up.
Spenser: Cool, thanks so much for doing this, and taking the time to share a little bit with us.
Tim: My pleasure, thanks for allowing us to get our story out a little bit.
Spenser: Sure, there's a little intro to Rancho Mastatal, you can find out a lot more at RanchoMastatal.com, which I'll link out to in the show notes. I really encourage everyone to take a look at it, there's a lot of great information on there, it's a great looking website. If you have any questions or comments on the podcast, we would love to hear from you, you can comment below or email Tim or I. His email is on his website. Alright, thanks guys.
Can Permaculture Make Money?
Nearly everyone thinks permaculture is great for the environment, but can it be used to make money?
Scott mentioned this book in the podcast
Transcript
Recorded at VerdEnergia on May 5th, 2016
Transcribed by Spenser Gabin on May 10th, 2016
Includes:
- Scott Gallant of Rancho Mastatal
- Rachel Jackson of Rancho Mastatal
- Joshua Hughes of VerdEnergia
- Amanda Wilson of VerdEnergia
Spenser Gabin: Hey guys, I'm here with Scott and Rachel from Rancho Mastatal. We wanted to talk a little bit today about the economics of permaculture and agroforestry because one thing we've all been running into a lot is people love permaculture, they love agroforestry, they think it's cool, they like the vibes, but they think at the end of the day, is this really going make any money? Can this really build a business? Can this grow community or is this just something we do to make us feel good and give us good vibes? Scott, can you tell us a little bit about your background with agroforestry, with economics?
Scott Gallant: I've been managing the agroforestry component of Rancho Mastatal's education center for the last 5 years, pretty in depth. Not growing for production, in the sense that we're not trying to sell for market or anything like that, everything that we produce as trees, slowly come on board, just goes right into our kitchen. So, it's a bit of a different model. My academic background is in economics, so I'm not a practicing economist, I never worked in that field, but that's what I studied, and with the focus on the statistical side--econometrics. Spent a lot of time working with Microsoft Excel. Trying to combine those worlds a little bit, working with projects such as the folks here at VerdEnergia and trying to answer some of those questions that you just brought up, like what's the economic viability of a lot of this? And what type of long-term approach do we need to take? And I think they're really good questions, and I think there's some answers that are out there, and there's still a lot to be figured out as well.
Spenser: Ok. And Rachel? Do have any "in" on economics, or?
Amanda Wilson: What do you do at the ranch?
Rachel Jackson: So at the ranch, my focus is a bit more on the design end of it. I have a Masters in Sustainable Landscape Planning and Design. So sort of looking at how those different parts integrate together, I also manage more of our “Zone 1” areas, and then working with the education aspects of it. I think economics is probably less of my focus while there, but I think as a human being living in this world, it's incredibly important to all of us. Something that I think we really spent a lot of time thinking about, in the last 2 or 3 years at the ranch, and how we can create a livelihood that will support all our needs, both economically, socially, and recognizing what we can and can't do with that. What are we good at doing, and what are things that maybe we need to look outside of the ranch, to do for ourselves.
Spenser: Scott, can you just go over a few things that an organic or permaculture based model can do that are efficient, that stack functions, that would, in the language of economics, drive down production costs? Because I think that's something that people think, "Well, we can't use herbicides and pesticides and insecticides, so that means ants are going eat all of our crops and we're going to get no yield and we're never going to make any money." So just talk a little bit about that.
Scott: I immediately go just to the principle of using biological resources, and how we replace industrial processes with metabolic ones. We can look at different plant systems from around the world.
A classic example would be the "Three Sisters” plant guild. A guild coming out of Mesoamerica, Milpas, where you're growing corn, you're growing beans, and you're growing squash together, with other more spontaneous weed species. And each of those grown by themselves is going to obviously produce a yield of some quantity, but if we grow them together, we are able to take advantage of the various functions of each of those plants, functions that we would have to provide otherwise, if we were growing them separately, if that makes sense. As an example, if we're growing corn, we're going to need to do something to keep the weeds down.
In a larger-scale industrial system, you're probably using pre-germination herbicide, if you're doing feed corn then it's probably genetically modified and you're spraying glyphosate, and the corn can resist that. On smaller-scale systems, you're coming in with a machete, or you're hand weeding.
We can replace that cost of labor with a plant like squash. And if we get the timing really right, and the planting, which is a big challenge of these systems, is that they require more knowledge really, you're replacing that labor or that production cost with an increase knowledge of these systems. Squash, as it germinates, has these huge leaves that come out: perfect weed suppressant. So it's really good at keeping things down and keeping things low and letting the corn grow up and high. We work in the beans into that system and suddenly we realize that beans have the ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen, they're in the legume family, they have this wonderful relationship with the rhizobium soil, and depending on how we manage those, how much we're actually harvesting from those, how much we'll be leaving in the ground, the timing of the chopping of them, again, there's some details to this. We can start to replace nitrogen fertilizer that we would otherwise have to purchase off-site and apply to that field.
Then the corn can function as the trellis for the beans, that allows them to climb up, makes them more productive, that if we were just growing beans on their own, we would either have to provide a trellis system for them, or they wouldn't be as productive because they wouldn't be able to get as much sunlight, it wouldn't be able to reach as much. They're photosynthetic potential would be less, and so, with just these little tweaks in this system, we're able to replace, potentially herbicide, potentially fertilizers, and some sort of physical trellising system that if each of those crops is grown on their own, that might be necessary.
Along those same lines, there's this concept of additive yield, or polyculture yield. Each of those crops grown by themselves in the same field, one hectare field of corn, beans, or squash, would inevitably produce more corn than one hectares of this mix system of the "Three Sisters” guild, that has all three of these plants in that same amount of space. You'd get more corn if it was just growing corn, you'd get more beans if it was just growing beans, you'd get more squash if it was just growing squash. But what happens is that as those plants function and support each other, we gain the benefits of that, the additive yield is greater to the total amount of food we get out of that system, which is more than if we just grow one single squash or corn patch.
That's a really simple example of really good design, plant systems, the diversification of our crops, which is something we're generally pretty interested in the world of permaculture and agroforestry. Trying to replace industrial processes, industrial equipment with biological ones can lead to, what a lot of studies have shown, is a really highly productive system that's lasted hundreds of years, has a durability and resilience to it that people still practice this form of agriculture, all throughout Mesoamerica because it makes economic sense in the end.
Spenser: I think that's a question that a lot of people have is, well, the monoculture system that dominates the U.S., why would we be doing that if that weren't the most efficient way of doing things? So why are we doing what we're doing? What do you say from a person that's coming from that paradigm? Or Rachel, what would you say, why are we doing a monoculture of corn a lot of the time, or palm oil, why do we insist on doing it that way?
Rachel: I think economically we're not accounting for other variables: the cheap oil that goes into that, the cheap fertilizers that do make that monoculture of corn when you add in the outside influences, cheaper, because we're not accounting for this larger debt, be that in greenhouse gases that we're putting into the environment, be that the decline fertility of the soil in the end because we're overusing our nitrogen fertilizers. I think you also have touched upon that Scott, that knowledge base, that is necessary when you start working with complex biological systems, that they can be much more productive in the long-term, that they require a level of knowledge and understanding that is a skill that has to be developed, it's a cultural wealth, that is best frequently in systems like with the Milpa and the "Three Sisters", things that have been built up over generations and passed on, and once you have that break in knowledge, and you're trying to develop these systems, particularly for your climate, your environment, your specific locale, that's knowledge that takes a long time to be able to do well.
It's not as simple as, I go out and I plant my corn, on whatever date that is, and I spread my second fertilizer four weeks later, and I go in and I do the herbicide spray at this certain time period: it requires adapting to the land, adapting to the local conditions.
Scott: I think those large-scale systems are easy, it's easy for people to do that, and that makes a lot of sense. Growing food is really hard work. And there's a lot I think we can learn from these systems, they produce a huge amount of calories, which probably shouldn't be our goal, it should probably be more nutrients and making sure that those nutrients and calories go to the right places and not simply just sheer quantity which is what that system is designed for.
But it's easy, we have this concept of food forests in permaculture that we get really excited about, and everybody comes to the courses and comes to our site and they want to know about food forests and it's a system that I've shied away from in a lot of ways because it's asking people to build really complex ecological systems and layer all these different plant species together, understand their functions, match those functions, and most people that are coming into that and are interested in it, that have never worked with plants before, they've never been working with the land before, you're suddenly asking them to manage something that's complex.
And I've seen a lot of those systems not necessarily fail but not thrive in the way they could, or find a lot of people that get burned out from the management of that and the sheer amount of work it is, as they expect this lazy gardening myth of permaculture to come in, which I'm not a huge fan of, and if we can produce food on scale with simpler systems, there's a lot of value to that. I think there's stuff to be pulled from both worlds and I think it's also important that we recognize that there are really good things about large-scale agriculture.
Spenser: Like what?
Scott: It produces a lot of food, with a little amount of labor. And growing food, historically, could be called drudgery, and there are technologies that are probably really appropriate to grow food. So, for example, a couple years ago, my partner and I got a grant to study the history of indigenous agriculture in our region, we went and stayed with all of these folks from the indigenous reserve and various communities around there, and basically, "How did your grandparents grow food? What did the land look like 500 years ago? What are you eating now? We're extracting recipes..." Pretty amazing experience. One of the big goals from that was to understand, how can we support farmers here so that as an organization, Rancho Mastatal, we can be an economic driver. We want to buy all the corn, all their rice, all their beans that they produce, but people had stopped growing most of that, and that was kind of dying out.
Basically, I came to this quick realization that if we were going to encourage people to grow food as they did in the past, the minimal amount of inputs, so it's probably more sustainable than perhaps other larger-scale rice down on the coast, we were basically asking them to live a subsistence lifestyle, and to not step into the modern world and receive some of the benefits of that, and there are great benefits to this world, and the physical work of that is exhausting, it wears your body out. Working a machete, all day, every day, and at a certain point, that work, if you're growing food especially for sale, just beyond your own household needs, the physical amount of work required can turn into this weird word that I use, called drudgery.
None of us are interested in going back to that. Nothing will be good about taking steps back, and so there's reasons we've gone away from that, there's technologies we've adopted as a global society to move us away from that. [We've] probably taken that [to an] extreme now. So where do we pull back a bit? How do we identify the technologies that do make sense? We're finding that appropriate scale. I'm not interested in going back in time. How do we marry this wonderful technology that exists today with the practices that existed in the past, the cultural components of it, that Rachel was talking about, that allow you to manage these complex ecosystems. I think it's either Wendell Berry or Wes Jackson that talks about the eyes to acres ratio. We need to bring that ratio back down a bit; we need more eyes on more acres.
Spenser: I believe I read that 1 U.S. farmer can feed 125 people, and I think with permaculture, I've heard Josh throw around numbers that maybe it's more like 1 can feed 20: which still means 95% of people don't have to farm. But could you talk about some technologies that you either use at Mastatal or might use in the future, that would keep that number from--I think there's an idea out there that permaculture means that everyone's a farmer and everyone needs to farm in order for us to not starve, which is not true. So what are some technologies that you guys use that keep that number from ballooning out of control?
Rachel: Chainsaw. An absolutely great tool that might be running on fossil fuels but if you are working in managing a forest and we don't use a chainsaw very often, but that is something that the time that it saves us is--
Spenser: What would it take with an axe versus a chainsaw?
Scott: It'd suck. It's horrible. Trying to fell a large tropical hard wood tree with an axe.
Spenser: Days?
Rachel: And safety wise.
Scott: An unskilled person, yeah. And then you break your handle and then you have to rehandle, and that's going to take a couple days, if you have the tools and that skill set. A chainsaw you're just done, it happens right away, it's like a two-minute thing.
So along those lines, just recognizing the appropriate use of fossil fuels, I love fossil fuels, they're amazing, I don't want them going away. I fucking want to keep using the chainsaw. My weed trimmer is really helpful, to manage our farm, like I like being able to drive [to VerdEnergia]. From that perspective, recognizing the value of that as a tool, and then of course wanting to conserve it so it's around for a long period of time. I think other tools, which we've been talking a lot about, during the last couple hours here, is community-scale food processing equipment. It's a huge part of this, I can't tell you how many farms I've seen where there's just thousands of pounds of mangos just rotting on the ground, because it's really easy to plant those trees, it doesn't take that much work, it's not that expensive to care for those trees and bring them into production. When you have all of that fruit, and it's all falling within a two-week period, your ability to spread that yield out over time is really what separates, I think, the hippy in the hills, versus a large farmer.
We can plant 100 mango trees, just like a larger-scale mango farmer might be able to do. But they have the connections to sell that right away, to process that right away, and so that's a piece of technology that is often missing. The food processing equipment is either home-scale, like hand-powered stuff or it's big, big industrial-scale. And all the in between, the "shmedium" almost, or community-scale equipment. That's a scale we think we exist at. There's not good examples of that, that equipment, people are having to make it themselves, they're trying bike processing equipment, and the reality is, you can DIY that stuff as much as you want, but unless you have that skill set on site to repair that, it's going to break, you're going to need to fix that, for me, that's a big gap. Is the technology that's really needed to allow smaller-scale farmers, people that are implementing agriculture based on permaculture design, which I think in general means a focus on perennial based crops and tree crops, that's going to allow those producers to be successful to store their food, to get it to market, and be able to feed people, and figure out what that ratio is, of this farm here, how many people can it feed?
Rachel: I think also with that, it's very difficult to make any money whether you're trying to grow ecologically or grow conventionally, selling wholesale products to the large-scale market. I mean you are at the mercy of the middlemen, or the people there when you're trying to get your small product into the market and community-scale technologies that also allow people to take a product that might be your mango. You've got to sell that to somebody or it's going to go bad in the next week. If you have a product like a dryer, or depending on what you're doing, something that can extract or convert that into another product that's going to have a greater storage life, which you can then find a different market for, or allow you to get more money from the work that you're putting into it. It can really help make the economic difference. We have our friends and neighbors who grew wholesale cacao and have now switched into doing the entire process of making that into chocolate, and that is so much better able to support them and support small farmers than when you are trying to sell a wholesale product.
Spenser: We were talking earlier about one common pitfall that you've experienced, is that somebody graduates from a PDC, they kind of think they're ready to take on the world and they go to some plot of land where they think they know what they're talking about and they say, "I can't believe you're growing a monoculture" of whatever, and they don't understand the concept of transitional ethics, which I don't think I fully understand, so could you just talk a little bit about transitional ethics in terms of economy and technology?
Scott: Transition ethic is a fourth ethic that our lineage of teachers that arrive to me through that line, which goes up from Chris Shanks and Dave Boehnlein to the Bullock Brothers, who studied Mollison so I'm not quite sure where that first came in, but it's basically about meeting people where they're at, getting off your soap box, we can operate under the assumption that we're all interested in sustaining this planet for our children, if we're going to have kids, and what that means is that everybody is going to be different but pretty much you can assume most people in this world want the world to be a better place, they want it to be safer and happier and healthier and they want the forest to be there and they want water to be clean. Whether they make choices to do that or not, I think in general, I come from a place of positivity toward that.
If we can make that assumption that we're all on that trajectory somewhere, then it's recognizing that we all enter that trajectory at different points, and who's to say that I'm further along than you, so I can critique you, or tell you what you're doing is bad. I think most farmers; they want to care for their land. They get that how they're treating their land, large-scale farming is more akin to mining than it is to growing soil, which would therefore grow food. I think most people get that.
Spenser: Could you explain that analogy?
Scott: Industrial farming is more of an extractive process. We're mining phosphorous from one part of the globe, we're shipping it to another part, we're applying it, we're mining food, nutrients, from that land and we're shipping it to another part of the globe. We're not growing something there that's going to last for a long period of time, it's just the movement of nutrients and parts around the world.
Spenser: Right, so typical monoculture, industrial farm, how long does that land last?
Scott: It depends.
Spenser: Typical corn monoculture in the U.S.?
Scott: I think it can last a fair amount of time if you're continuing to just pump it full of fertilizers. We're losing a lot of topsoil and that's probably the biggest detriment, the first thing that will go when these systems really start to fail, that loss of topsoil, year after year, millimeter by millimeter as it is, will add up. But you can grow food for a long time by bringing in outside chemicals. The quality, the nutritional compositions of course, then you start getting to that conversation.
Spenser: But you're getting fertilizer from somewhere else, versus getting your own fertilizer from your own compost, where it's an internal system.
Scott: Yeah, you start to get into conversations on peak phosphorous, for example, which is--
Spenser: I never heard of that.
[laughs]
Scott: I honestly don't know that much about it, but a lot of people believe we've hit peak phosphorous and our ability to supply phosphorous for fertilizer, around the globe, is going to be decreasing sharply in the next 20, 30, 40 years, and that will be one of the biggest limiting factors for the continued success of industrial agriculture.
Spenser: Even more than fossil fuel and petroleum, possibly?
Scott: Possibly, I'm not that well versed in the idea but I think there's some merit to it.
Spenser: Going back to your analogy, a farmer that's coming from the framework of it being more like an extractive, mining process, and then transition them to something that's more regenerative, but also profitable, how does that transition happen in your mind? It's complicated.
Scott: Yeah, I think it starts small, I think there's a really great model out there called the Savannah Institute. They're based in the Midwest, I think in Illinois. What they're essentially doing is finding farmers that are interested in being case studies, and converting a small percentage of their acreage, maybe just half an acre or an acre, 5 acres, from whatever they'd been doing from a conventional...whether that's just corn-soy rotation, or something else, and turning it into a perennial polyculture, heavily focused on the chestnut, hazelnut polyculture that's becoming pretty popular in the Midwest, mostly due to Mark Shepard's book, "Restoration Agriculture", and his work, up in Viola, Wisconsin. They are the Savannah Institute, not sure if they're providing funding, but they're providing technical support for farmers, and support in finding plant materials and sourcing for this conversion, and then they're trying to do the ecological monitoring and allow farmers to compare side by side.
And so that transition, in my mind, it's not like, what does one farmer do? It's like, how do we all do it? It's finding early adopters--that's the first step, and empowering those [adopters], because everybody has to see it to believe it. It's the same thing here, any technique that we're applying, no local in the right mind is going to adopt that, unless they see we've been doing it for 5 years and it's really successful. And it's the same thing on these big farms. There's no way you can expect the farmer to shift over to these theories, until they've seen somebody put it into practice successfully, from that environmental, social, and economic side. So I think the Savannah Institute has a really nice model for finding early adopters, and trying to find examples of this that work, that other people can see, and growing it out small like that.
Spenser: [Rancho] Mastatal's been around for 15 years?
Scott: Yeah.
Spenser: So that gives you sometime to prove yourself a little bit, right? Has there been a reaction from locals from seeing any of that? What has that been like?
Rachel: I think on the agricultural end of it, we've only been focusing on agriculture for the last 6 and a half years or so.
Spenser: Ok, so not that much time.
Rachel: Agriculturally, our systems, especially the agroforestry, are really just starting to come into fruition. On that, we have seen, having been there for 15 years, a lot of the early focus was on natural building techniques and education. Our main focus is as an education center, and we've actually seen the locals adopt both of those, very heavily throughout the area. It's been great to watch our neighbors start their own farm-based tourism projects, they each have a different focus. Some are focusing more on the ecology of the rain forest, some are focusing more on giving a Costa Rican farm experience, teaching Spanish, things like that. But they've seen a way that we've been able to do a business model that has been able to give us a good quality of life, and then they've taken that and made that their own and done their own things with it. Then we've also seen the building techniques, not wholesale adoption, but definitely things that are out there as well as technologies like the rocket stoves, wood-fire ovens...
Scott: Composting toilets have been really successful.
Rachel: Composting toilets definitely.
Scott: I think a big part of that is just the interest in conservation in general, which was a big focus early on at the Ranch. A lot of the groups coming through were there to study the national park that borders us, and our wildlife preserve that kind of sits on the edge, and so a lot of young people now, because of those early interactions, care about the environment, they're not poaching anymore, they're studying to be birders, they give tours, and so that has been a really healthy shift in just general awareness, which is where this all has to start. It's that education piece, which is why we're an education center, first and foremost, and it's just like getting the switch to flick for a couple people, and now we have people like Jorge Salazar, La Iguana Chocolate, who basically manages a full-on permaculture design project focused on cacao, and having a lot of success, and able to sell his product to the local region, keep it in the local region and make a livelihood for their family and...
Spenser: He's a local Costa Rican?
Scott: Yeah, born and raised in Mastatal, and he's gone out for education and university, but he's a Mastataleño as they say.
Rachel: All these projects have been started by people in Mastatal, it's been really exciting, we have the Ecoemprendedores group, the ecobusiness association, that are organizing and everything from bringing events and marketing, having a jungle run.
Scott: There's a marathon coming up.
Spenser: I'm a runner.
Scott: May 8th.
Rachel: Watch out for snakes.
[laughs]
Spenser: Wait, really?
Scott: Yes.
Spenser: 4 days from now?
Scott: Yeah, you better start training.
Spenser: I've been running, I can run a half marathon right now.
Scott: Sign up man, it all supports the [La Cangreja] National Park.
Spenser: In Mastatal?
Scott: Yeah.
Spenser: I think I'm there. I don't know why I wouldn't. How many people come out for it?
Scott: I'm not sure, last year it was very successful. We aren't that involved with it, which is awesome. It's all run by the park and the local business association, and think they run on our land a little bit, and we high-five people as they come through.
Spenser: I love a good half marathon. Well ok, getting back to agroforestry and economics...
Scott: That's economics, that's supporting the local economy, through the agro ecosystems of Mastatal.
Spenser: Sure. Yeah. With the exception of being chased by a cow at one point, I do like running here. "Chased", I don't know, I pissed one off a little bit. But anyway, so tourism is part of this, but I think that maybe the idea is that these permaculture communities, seems like on the face of it, like they're producing food profitably, but really it's just tourism and education. But would you say La Iguana Chocolate is an example of a truly, just in terms of the product they produce, the physical product, of a profitable model?
Scott: I can't answer that fully. They also receive groups and do a lot of tours and workshops. So I think like most places they are diversifying, they're interested in that diversification, and yeah, I can't speak to exactly what percentage of their business comes from the chocolate and if that supports itself.
Spenser: Sure.
Scott: My general understanding is that they're happy with the way that it's going financially with the chocolate side of things, it's a good question.
Spenser: So not focusing on them so much, do you think that is a valid concern that people have, as they look at a place like VerdEnergia or Rancho Mastatal and they see it and they say, "oh that's nice, but what's really keeping that place afloat?"
Scott: Yeah, so I think it is a valid concern and it isn't. First of all, it's immensely, frustrating when someone shows up at our place, "Oh, you don't grow all your own food?" And I'm like, "Well, where did we say we grow all of our own food?" That's not our goal. And so, first, well, what is your goal? Just because we use permaculture design and we use the language of permaculture and that word is on our website doesn't mean we're trying to be self-sufficient. We're not interested in self-sufficiency.
Spenser: Fully self-sufficient?
Scott: We have no interest in that. We're interested in region-wide sufficiency.
Amanda: That would be a more permaculture ethic anyway, right?
Scott: I think so.
Amanda: Being a cell in a larger body rather than, "We don't talk to anyone outside our world."
Scott: We're growing all of our own food. That's just one source, that's not a very resilient system, I want to be growing some of our food, but I really want to make sure our neighbors are growing food that I can purchase from them, and further out, and further out. And so, getting over the self-sufficiency fallacy, and then just, permaculture is about context, it's about goals. If your goal is not to be a production farm, then we can still use permaculture, people have to get over that part of it. First, there are those pieces. Stepping aside from that though, yeah, I think there is a problem where you do find places that use language that implies that they're growing maybe a significant amount of their own food and they're not.
Part of that, I think here in Costa Rica, is because the word permaculture has been tagged on to a lot of marketing schemes around different developments and it is, for lack of a better word, a buzz-word, that people use for promotion. That creates a bad part to this. That gives people a bad taste.
Then the other thing is, for example, at [Rancho Mastatal]. As the foreigners in that community, that do not rely on agriculture for generating income, we're not subsistence farmers, we're not interested in being subsistence farmers, that means that as look at our agricultural goals, we recognize that we have the opportunity, the challenge, the responsibility, of being the risk-takers. That's how we approach agriculture. We are the people that are trialing new species, new techniques, and new strategies, many of which will fail. But we should be the ones failing at those, because we can afford to fail. It doesn't make sense for some of our neighbors to go out and trial a new variety of taro or to spend hundreds of dollars on breadfruit trees, when they don't know how they're going to do there.
Spenser: They could get burned.
Scott: Then they're done. We could get burned but if we get burned $1000 on those trees, it's a hiccup. We're going to suffer a bit but we're going to keep going and we're going to be fine. And so that is, in our context, why we're not completely focused on producing huge amounts of food. We're more focused on the fact that we've recognized that agriculture is not working where we live. People have stopped growing food there because they've degraded the soil so badly over the last 70 years that they can't grow food anymore with the same old techniques, the same old crops, so we need something different.
"Ag" is not working, wherever you're at, if it's large-scale agriculture, it's producing calories but it's destroying the environment, it's destroying rural communities, its calories are often empty calories, the movement of those around the globe is really unbalanced with people’s needs. It's recognizing that "ag" is not working, and so we're looking for alternatives, and there's probably really good things in the permaculture world, that are going to provide solutions, and there's probably a lot of really bad ideas, too. And as an education center, we want to be the people filtering those out.
Unfortunately, a lot of the species we're working with, cause we're interested in perennial crops and tree crops and nut oil protein fat species, they're going to take a long time. It's going to take me 20 years before I can really say, “Is Okari nut an appropriate crop for this region? Could that improve food security? Could that be a viable market crop?” Maybe I'll know in 10 years, but probably like 20 years is realistic.
We're not used to operating on that timeframe anymore, no one has the patience for that. That's, again, in our context, in our organization, how we're approaching this. Yeah, we want to get a yield in the mean time, we're trying to grow more food in the mean time. This is a year where we're actually focusing more on that, because we've got most of these trial species in the ground. We've kind of checked off some of those boxes.
But, taking that approach, I like to think of it as, I share this with students a lot, this concept of building a cathedral. Back in the day in Europe, when people would build a cathedral, if you were the mason, you knew that you were going to work on this building your entire life, and it wasn't going to be finished, and your son or daughter might continue that work, and your grandchildren, well after your gone, might continue that work. It's like this multi-generational approach, and as a skilled craftsmen to commit to that, knowing that you're not going to see the end result. And that’s the same approach we need here, it's taken us, basically since the Industrial Revolution, to create all of these problems that have compounded and compounded and compounded, probably going to take that long to unhinge all of this and bring all of this stuff back to where we want to be. It's like this really long view. So if we're not able to have a 30, 40, 60, 100-year timeline on our radar that extends past us, that's super short-sighted, and it's really frustrating to only see people say, "well, you're not growing all of your food right now."
And there should be people doing that, for obvious reasons. We want to eat, we want to enjoy, and that should be part of what we're doing on our site, and it is, but it is to a lesser degree than trialing these long-term crops that are going to answer some of the good questions. That's how I look at it, I love that idea, of building a cathedral, and I think it's really powerful. Mostly because it doesn't exist, we don't build that way anymore, whether it's soil or infrastructure, and that's something that I really hope, people come to our site, people come to [VerdEnergia], these projects that Blacksheep is working on, are taking that long view and it's such a nice way to reframe everything for people, I find it very powerful.
Joshua Hughes: When I was looking at starting Verde, I told everyone in my crew, cause what you're saying really resonates with me about being a laboratory for these things, and being able to take the risks. I knew, for sure, that nothing mattered financially for at least 10 years, when I came to look at the soil. And being able to take that kind of long view, for some people a decade is forever. A decade has gone by now while I'm here, and I'm just now figuring out what you're saying. "Oh, this crop, like turmeric or something, is like a weed and it's amazing and we've taken all these steps to develop it all the way to the consumer markets.”
So we're not just reinventing the way things grow, we have to introduce it to the market and reinvent it as a whole. Cause its confused and lost. It's very interesting to take the long, long view, I love the cathedral analogy, that's great, but even anybody starting these projects, if you're thinking you need to produce in the first 10 years, maybe you've already practiced and know something I don't. The sites we're at here, we chose destroyed areas. You guys chose a destroyed area. That was cause we had the time to experiment and play. I think it's a big part of what you just said, and for me personally, the reason it hasn't stressed me out, day-to-day, was because 10 years was like the first step, and having a couple week course, but I would've been very frustrated if I thought results were going to be any part of this. But now I see it. And the results are there, whether or not I thought they would, seeing the way the soil has already changed is amazing right. Seeing what happens even in a few years in a spot where we leave it alone or something.
Scott: I think that's a huge part of it, most people that are interested in permaculture, that are purchasing land, that are starting sites, probably 9 out of 10 are ending up on the worst land. That's what's affordable, that's what remains to us, and that work of just regeneration--
Spenser: [Rancho] Mastatal was that case? [VerdEnergia] or worse?
Scott: Worse.
Spenser: Worse?
Scott: Way worse. Every farmer says their land is worse.
Spenser: Right, that's part of the pride you take.
Scott: You guys have it easy, man, it's a piece of cake.
Josh: Puriscal was a destroyed area; it was ranked by a few places, like the worst implementation...
Spenser: Right, so that's land that they can get that's affordable.
Scott: Right, if you're talking five years of rehabilitation before you're talking the financial side, "whoa, that's a big sunk cost right there." How do you deal with that?
Rachel: This is why it's really important to plan for transition in that. If you are going to be starting in the most degraded soil, you do not want your economic well being to be based on getting production from that soil, in the first 5, 10 years, depending on what your goals. So for us, this is where the education and the hospitality, focusing more in the rain forest in the beginning, and building things like that.
We also didn't start the project and start teaching agriculture, permaculture, either, because we wouldn't have had good, hard experiences to backup anything we were saying. So that shift in education has also happened as we've gained more experience in different areas. But whether that was somewhere where you're starting a farm but keeping a side-job at the same time, it's important to realize that you can't just jump in and live all your dreams and ethics and what you want this land to be, all from the outset. It's a process.
Spenser: Right. [Rancho] Mastatal, in particular, I think, is focused on science, evidence, and education, whereas, I think there is to some degree, a fair stereotype that permaculture sees itself as operating outside of those spheres, and I think maybe in the worst cases, sort of above it, and as somebody that believes in the scientific method, and demands evidence, you were talking earlier about the lack of what we would typically see as the lack of valid, academic, peer-reviewed evidence for permaculture, and the reasons why. I think maybe a first reaction might be, "well, there isn't any, because permaculture doesn't work, it's a bunch of hippies that don't want anything tested because then they'll realize they're not actually doing anything that's effective." But, as I know, that's not the case--
Scott: There's probably some truth in that.
Spenser: Well, ok.
Scott: There are probably a lot of things that don't work.
Spenser: Right, but there's a little bit of a sense of well, "Of course everything works, the magic of the trees will ether out and everything will be ok."
Scott: Mollison said, "Will permaculture work? Well, will plants grow?" I'm not sure if I agree with that statement, but...
Spenser: That's a claim open to investigation. And that's something that Rancho Mastatal supports. Why is it that we don't have peer-reviewed studies on the relationship between cacao and turmeric?
Scott: So there is a lot of information out there and studies out there, it's almost always flown under the banner of agro ecology or agroforestry. So you can always find really good studies on commercial crops. You can find studies on the relationship between overstored legumes and coffee. There are a lot of studies out there on that. In this part of the world, a lot of the studies are buried in obscure academic journals, in Spanish or Portuguese, and so for us, operating in Latin America, there's a language barrier and then the cultural barrier of navigating those bureaucratic university systems to extract that information, which is kind of a different conversation.
I think in general, that information and those studies aren't being done in a hard way, [because] I think it's a financial [issue], I think it's really important to do these type of studies and the ability to get grants to do a really long-term study, is nearly impossible. Most things that are studied are studied for a year, two years, three years, max. It's like holistic management, Allan Savory's work, with grazing animals, gets a lot of critiques, some of which are quite real, but a lot of them are critiques that his system's never been truly measured in a controlled, scientific way, which is kind of true, because his entire system is based on constantly readapting to what you're doing, based on feedback. And so there's nothing you can do to control it, it's about understanding what's happening and changing, all the time. And that's very much the antithesis of controlled science, or economics, or holding variables constant, to be able to look at singular relationships, which don't exist in ecosystems, which is what we're trying to monitor.
So, if we're practicing permaculture and we're using permaculture design, that means we're taking feedback into account and we're constantly re-evaluating and if we're working with long-term species, it's really hard to setup controls for that. There's things you could do, like cacao and turmeric, you could do some really simple things that you could get information on, but would that be enough to say that this works or this doesn't, or are you just better off growing that, managing it, being a good observer, documenting your work, and bringing empirical evidence to it, and bringing that to the world over 20 years.
Spenser: So certainly the randomized controlled trial, used for drug testing, isn't going to make economic sense for agroforestry, at least in the ways that we're doing it. But, can you talk about some other spaces and avenues to present that documented evidence, the way that you would do to an engineering department at a university, to be critiqued, assessed, and reviewed? Just the spirit of observation, analysis, empiricism. Do those avenues exist in the agroforestry world? If so, what are they?
Scott: Yeah, I think they do. I think most people aren't working with them, it's cause it takes time and effort, and if that's not part of your mission, it's a lot of work to document stuff, we're pretty mediocre at it. We have a lot of cultural memory, or institutional memory I would say, on our site. Which is why I can sit here and talk about things that we've done, and then there's organization's that are doing it better.
A really great example is the Analog Forestry Center, down in Londres, Quepos, pretty close to here, they're not particularly flying under the banner of permaculture, but, they are promoting, essentially, concepts of food forests that are mimicking the native forests, and are looking at analog species that would replace native species for yield. And they take a more rigorous, scientific approach and in their documentation, and it's really based in the science of ecology, which is generally considered less of a hard science, more of a science of relationships, which, again, you get outside of those controlled settings and it's more of trying to study the process over time. So I think that's where we should be heading toward, and I think places like analog forestry center are great examples of people doing that really well, and they're also able to do that really well, because they're a nonprofit and are getting a fair amount of government grant money, so they're able to do that and they're able to offer really affordable training, and there's value in that.
For places like ourselves, as just a small business, we get a dozen university students a year who get really excited about monitoring soil moisture levels below and above a swale, and how is that different on different grades, and they bring in some testing equipment, but the complications of doing field testing on a working farm, with a transient population...
Spenser: Over time. Over long-time spans we’re talking about?
Scott: Yeah, for a university student, who needs to do this for--
Spenser: 3 months.
Scott: Yeah, they're excited about it, they really want to know, but then they're moving on.
Spenser: And 3 months is inadequate, really, is it?
Scott: I think so. It depends on what you're looking at. But to draw real information, like that example, how much does a contour swale improve the moisture levels throughout the dry season, on soil horizons below it? That'd be interesting, you could get information, but that's like one dry season, what was the rain like? It's just the complexities of that are so great, you could tell me that, but it would be with a huge grain of salt, if you just did it that one dry season, on three of our slopes, like who can actually use that information to then say, "yes, swale=good." Can you take that around the world and apply it to other contexts? Probably not. That's where you get into trouble.
Josh: Carlos, [a local farmer], finally this year, a couple months ago even, we were out in the field, and he's been hit or miss on a lot of things because he's got to see it, with the swale for years, he'd be like, " heh, heh, whatever", and now he's started saying, "Oh, well I like the way the water is flowing." Just the other day as we were doing soil samples, and someone who's here for two months thinks they're going to finish this process, it's interesting, that's a big part of what we talk about with people, just getting them to think longer, but Carlos grabbed the soil the other day and goes, "Swales work." That's it.
[laughs]
Swales work. It's good. One scientific experiment I've done my whole life is running a small business. You want to do a scientific experiment and see how it's working, is your small business open still? Are you piled in debt? If not, you are going through that trial and error that has to let things go when they don't work, or if you push too hard in a small business, you're done. I think the small business lab of all of this is kind of interesting for me, too.
Scott: That example from Carlos, that strikes at, what, in my opinion, the science should be based on, and it should be a farmer science based on observation, really over time. And it's got to be so place-based, because who's to say that that technique that they're applying here, would work where we are, would work in Ohio, would work in Mongolia. I think that's one of the classic problems with science that permaculture has pushed away from, is that it tends to lead toward cookie-cutter techniques and the homogenization of practices, because we go, "oh, look, this works, in this example, so we're going to apply this over here."
Especially, you can't emphasize enough, the complexity of these systems. There are so many variables, the only way to manage those is time on-site in observation, which is what permaculture is founded in, right? I completely agree with the statement that there needs to be more science done, and there's interesting, exciting organizations that are doing that.
I mentioned earlier the Perennial Polyculture Project, at the University of Illinois-Champaign, doing some great side by side comparisons of polycultures and corn-soy rotation, but for organizations that are operating outside of the nonprofit or the university sphere, it's really going to be challenging for people to do the type of studies that would be useful to a larger percent of the population, in my opinion. And where I think the best energy is put into is into documenting what they do well. And just observing what they do well.
Spenser: And would they publish that on their company or organization's website, is there a forum that they can go to, where do you go to see all of this? So somebody in Mongolia does a study on soil moisture, how do I know that exists if it's not buried in some academic journal or something?
Scott: So, finding the academic stuff, the Permaculture Research Network, from the UK Permaculture Association, probably the best organization I've found of compiling that information, and so they've scoured the obscure academic journals for that study, that we can draw from.
Spenser: If Rancho Mastatal were to do something, or has done something, would you just publish that on your website?
Scott: Yeah, it would probably come out on our blog, it would be documented through that. There are some forms that region-specific, are really successful, permies.com, their forum system. Some of those regions are just jumping with people that have been documenting their project over a decade on their, with photos, this is what we're doing, on some it's super quiet, there's not much going on. And so I think there's a role for that, I think permies is...
Amanda: Informal, and that's the cultural case-by-case, "I tried this in my composting thing and it didn't work," or "I tried this and it worked, what do you guys think?" And so you're able to trade ideas.
Scott: It is very empirical-based. But is also based in people's actual experiences managing these ecosystems, these agro ecosystems, I think there could be something more formal, but I think there are, like the Permaculture Resource Network, that are tackling this question more, that's good to see.
Rachel: I think it's still an area that could use more work, but it's really having local farmers getting together and sharing that information, every piece of land is going to be different, but knowing what people around you, or in similar climates have tried is the starting point that's going to help jump start that process. That then is going to be filled in with the observation and feedback and changing from there.
Spenser: Is that something that Rancho Mastatal uses? Would you go to permies.com to look at the success of such and such project that you guys are thinking about doing? Is that a resource that you guys use, that you see as credible? Because, in a typical academic setting, there's filtration for quality and everything, and verifiability, scrutiny...
Scott: In theory.
Spenser: In theory, right. But at least there's the pretense of that. With an Internet forum, you sign in on an email account, it could be anybody. You don't know what their background is...when you're culling through that stuff, what are you thinking about?
Scott: First we have the issue of shitty Internet. We use books, mostly. Books, actually.
Spenser: I think that's a challenge that will be overcome, given enough time.
Scott: It's kind of gotten worse, actually, in the last couple years.
Spenser: Really?
Scott: Yeah, as more people get on the phones, and bandwidth gets narrowed. But anyway, so we use a lot of different stuff, permies, as a specific example, I don't think is particularly useful to us, because Latin American tropical forums aren't super active.
Amanda: It's really America and Canada centered.
Spenser: And generally speaking, what works in those climates is not that relevant to a tropical setting?
Scott: No, not very relevant, in general.
Josh: You say not very relevant, but I think the practice that we do, translates so easily, if you can just get people to think about nut trees, it doesn't matter if you live here or the Northeast [of the United States], it's just which one.
Amanda: But for things like, “I built a chicken coop.”
Scott: You're talking, big picture, patterns and principles: super relevant. Techniques and strategies: less relevant.
Josh: It's a lot different to deal with winter, and how soil grows in the winter, compared to our eternal spring here.
Rachel: I also want to say how useful things like the Ministry of Agriculture has been to us, here. And that, even if it's not always the exact same goals, as what they were trained to be working with, especially techniques, as a starting point, they've provided us a lot of resources, a lot of help, and especially here in Costa Rica, they really are trying to promote a more ecological approach to agriculture, and really useful for us.
Josh: And they're doing the long study that we can't keep with our students that come and go. "MAG" here, they're coming back, and measuring that tree that they gave me 10 years ago again now, because it is in their scientific mind, because "MAG" people I've worked with, they do come from science, they don't come from permaculture and get involved in the government. So I'm finding them very, very helpful, on that longer study, and they're evolving quickly. An organization, that's in its title, isn't just the Ministry of Agriculture, what's the "G" mean? Cows. So it was the Ministry of Agriculture and Ganadería, but as I'm in a meeting with them, the next meeting they have is to put more cattle in play, maybe in an area, or more palm oil, so they're dealing with whoever is going to show up and do the work here, so we have to be a bigger part in their game and they love it. But, I love how they're here for the long study, they're known, and the studies I've read from the late '70's, were telling the future, and they're scientific approach is going to long-term win out, and that's where some of the money is, going into the science here that I see consistently. You have to empower the governmental organizations to do the long study.
Spenser: You got a blog at Rancho Mastatal that posts every two weeks?
Scott: Yeah, it's super cool. Our apprentices post to that, we all share stuff a couple times a year, it's super varied, it's the last one that came out, was just about nursing in the tropics, from one of our apprentices before then it was on cashew processing, I wrote one on transition ethics, and so really, just kind of a peek into the life at the ranch, it's pretty neat. Our Facebook page is really active for what's going on week by week as well, we try to keep that up, a fairly useful educational tool with good photos and stuff, and documentation of what we're doing, on the day to day grind of what we're doing.
Spenser: Great, I'll link out to all that stuff. It's been a nice calm rainy morning in Puriscal, sun's coming out, we're going to go take a look at a prospective cacao project, and the folks at Mastatal are going to map that out for us at Blacksheep, get us dialed in and squared away for that. So, if you have any feedback or questions for any of us, please feel free to comment on this or shoot me an email. Anything else to add?
Scott: Thanks man, it's good. Let's go walk around.
Rachel: Great conversation.
Delving into Joshua Hughes of VerdEnergia
On this podcast I delve into the story of Joshua Hughes, co-founder of VerdEnergia. Josh has a compelling story that's not quite what you'd expect from the typical tree-hugging founder of an intentional community: he used to play semi-professional football, weighed over 300 pounds (mostly muscle), listened to Rush Limbaugh, and get this: he actually knows how cars work
“I want to have part of my life and my kid’s future to be based on something more solid, scientific...A faith-based approach to capital? That’s not how I approach anything in life, why would I let money be my church? If I want to be faith-based I’ll go join some fun, hippy church, not the dollar church.”
On this podcast I delve into the story of Joshua Hughes, co-founder of VerdEnergia. He has a compelling story that's not quite what you'd expect from the typical tree-hugging founder of an intentional community: he used to play semi-professional football, weighed over 300 pounds (mostly muscle), listened to Rush Limbaugh, and get this: he actually knows how cars work.
Josh uses his extensive sales and business experience to motivate people to do good, without pandering or seeming like one of those obnoxious sales guys that we all love to complain about. His passion for political activism is impressive (even endearing), but never self-aggrandizing.
This is a long podcast but there's a lot of wisdom in here for those of you who want to hear from someone who has run gauntlets in business, community organizing, and environmental activism. I hope you enjoy it.
Show Notes:
www.verdenergia.org
www.weareblacksheep.org
VerdEnergia in 2009. This area is now a lush forest.
This is the movie Josh referenced as a pre-Internet example of a "Kickstarter". It's an absolutely hilarious (and compelling) film, you can rent it for $2.99
Podcast Transcript
Recorded at VerdEnergia on May 1st, 2016
Transcribed by Spenser Gabin on May 14th, 2016
Includes:
Joshua Hughes of VerdEnergia
Spenser Gabin: Hey everybody, this is Notes from the Jungle with Spenser Gabin. I'm here today with Joshua Hughes who is quite a few things, but one of them is the founder of VerdEnergia, which is where I've spent the last several months. It's an intentional community in the jungle of Costa Rica. It is really about an hour drive from even a really small town, and several hours away from any kind of major city, so it's really as "off-the-grid" as you can get these days, or just about, unless you're living maybe in Eastern Siberia or something, but outside of that it's pretty far off-the-grid, and I wanted to take the time to do an interview, something a little bit longer and juicier than like a TV sound bite with Josh, because of what a remarkable person he is.
When I was first looking at these places, I came down to do a video for a permaculture course but I've decided to stay longer and I've gotten involved in some of his other projects largely because of how special a person he is. When I first was looking at these places, I had certain idea of who is involved in these kinds of things, they're hippies, they're New Age, they're woo-woo. They don't understand economics, they don't understand politics, they live with rainbows and sunshine in their head and they don't know a thing about the actual world: all of these stereotypes were dispelled by Josh and I got that when I looked at some of the media they had before I came, but also when I Skyped with him I was pleasantly surprised by how down-to-earth he was, how engaged with the world he was, as opposed to just sort, "Well, I don't want to be part of the man" and all of that.
We're going to kind of go through his history a little bit, because it's not what a lot of people would consider to be the stereotype for an expat hippie living in Costa Rica. Josh, just real quickly, has played semi-professional football, if I'm not mistaken, he used to weigh over 300 pounds and that was mostly muscle. As he put it, he "could get 3 yards." Josh grew up in junk yard with his parents, with his Dad, he [spent time] in Portland [he's from Medford, Oregon], he was into weight-lifting and had a little bit of a run-in with steroids if I'm not mistaken, these weren't things that I typically would have thought a kind of New Age woo-woo hippy would have been into. So, we're going to get into all of that, there's a lot there. This is a question that I hear on a lot of podcasts that I really like: What do you say Josh, when somebody asks what you do?
Joshua Hughes: Well I dedicated my life to changing the world about the time the Iraq War began. I didn't know it was going to be that big but--if I had to say what I do now I'd say I'm a living breathing manifestation of what I think the revolution should be. I'm here to make sure that people are thinking and observing and figuring out what's actually going on in the world, not just kind of what we want to see. My job, these days, as a community organizer, my job these days is [being] a father, someone who's responsible for the future of the planet because my child is growing up on the planet, so my daughter is born in 2003, that coincided with my awakening, coincided with the Iraq War beginning, it's the first time I really felt like I had to pay attention in my life.
So I took all the energies I had spent and all the years I had spent becoming educated in how to do sales or how to be in a business world, for a while, I threw all that away, I thought to just try and live a life of activism and change the world, but I've realized that my activism is going to come out best if I were to take all the tools that I've built up my whole life and use them better, use them all in a way that would be helping the planet instead of just taking for myself, [which is] how I was sort of taught in the business world.
So I would say I'm trying to just be a person that wants to have a legacy, a world worth passing on to my child. These days I find myself organizing my community around the changes that I see best and the leverage points that can change society. Right now, I see that leaning heavily toward food production and organizing capital and the way we save our income, and the way we save our youth, I see this all as very important, that we don't just waste what we've been doing because we don't understand the game. Economics is fun to me, and making it make sense to people on a day-to-day basis, rather than just an abstract thing that is capitalism or communism or whatever, I really am into localism, so I would say I'm a driver of everything local. At the same time, I've been trying to keep a global perspective, so I'm a community organizer that's trying to make sure that what we do adds up and duplicates into some big change. I think Obama was a community organizer right?
Spenser: Yeah, in Chicago. Calling yourself Obama?
Josh: No, I'm saying that it's funny, that I've had a lot of different projects in my life. But nowadays I'm doing so many different things that I would say the most important thing I can do right now is organize my community into action. I rarely have to reach out and even find and try and shift people that don't agree with me anymore, all we have to do is get on the field. I'm finding this a very a effective way to live a life that feels good, my community has fun when we get together and do something, we're going to dance through the revolution, we're not just here to slave away on soil. There's a lot of hidden benefits in coordinating people. Part of my job is going to festivals, that's not so bad. I don't even know how people have, "what they do" jobs anymore; there's so many things to do to have a rewarding life. When I was working a 7-5--
[laughs]
I didn't identify as my job either, I had a lot of things I did. Now I have a lot of things I do, I don't even have time for a job, I don't know how people do that, there's too much work to do.
Spenser: Right, let's go back a little bit then, let's start at the beginning. Where were you born? Where did you grow up? What was it like? What was school like for you?
Josh: I was born in southern Oregon, in Medford, Oregon, a very "red" part of that state. You mentioned I was in Portland, but that was only my last several years in Oregon. So I grew up in a very small town, it was a logging and fishing town and my parents were involved with a family business that was a wrecking yard and auto shop, so we had my uncle's and grandparents and aunt's and everyone in the same spot working every day, which was not always fun--but I learned a lot, everyday. We grew up very poor. I mean, we had a house and making payments in what not, it was the 70's and the 80's, it wasn't quite as hard as it is now, but still we grew up as the lower-middle class working poor, didn't really have access to credit and stuff when I was a small child, so it was fun. I don't remember not enjoying it, I did a lot of camping, we were off-grid a lot in the woods, cause that's what you could do to travel when you don't have money.
Spenser: What did your mom do?
Josh: My mom was a stay-at-home mom until I was about 10 or 11, and then she went to work at a call center--the biggest employer in southern, Oregon. She was working as a customer service person there.
Spenser: Brothers and sisters?
Josh: I have a younger brother, Matthew. He's an amazing musician and creative artist and all around mechanic and businessman. I love Matthew, but he's still in Medford right now, with my parents. Although they're disengaging from there now, they sold their home and they're ready to come be with me more here now. So my father's family was all in southern Oregon, my mother's was in Southern California, so I split my time a bit, spent my holidays and summers in Los Angeles and Palm Springs. so I got a different view, when I'd go spend time with my cousins down there, so I started to reject my small town culture by the time I was 10, 11, 12, and I much more latched onto the hip-hop culture. I was listening to "NWA" when I was like 10 and my mom didn't love that.
[laughs]
Spenser: You weren't much of a student, I understand?
Josh: No, they tried to motivate me a lot with things like sports, because I was becoming a big, strong person pretty young, and I could not sit still in class, it wasn't my thing, I enjoyed learning, but I was learning much more when I would go and build a tree house with my Dad, or go to his shop with him and help even clean an engine. I got more out of that. I could keep my attention on that, organizing big projects. I was actually very politically enagaged, socially engaged, when I was pretty young, 10, 11, 12. but it was weird, I was pulling into a young, right wing businessman, I was 12, trying to guide my parents.
[laughs]
So my parents were really kind of apolitical, my Dad watched a lot of his friends die or get screwed up at Vietnam, being told a lot that we'd be in Canada if there was ever a draft, so I had that in the back of my head, but it was so apolitical that I didn't really get much direction on what I should think politically. So when I was young, I latched onto the idea that we were poor and that was unacceptable, and I started being very business-minded young.
Spenser: How young are we talking?
Josh: Like 10, 11, 12, I was starting my own businesses already.
Spenser: Lemonade stands?
Josh: Yeah, from lawn mowing business to after-market car part sales. By the time I was 13 or 14, I was selling radiators and bumpers and stuff from my Dad's shop.
Spenser: You were an entrepreneur?
Josh: Yeah, I mean my Dad was, too, but he was very much doing it because he didn't have an opportunity to go to college, he didn't have those chances when he was younger. He lived and worked in mines, crushing rock in quarries when he was a kid, so my father had to just make himself, his whole family did. They were all entrepreneurs but it was without a lot of bigger money vision, it was just out of necessity. But again, back in the 70's, the 60's, your house payment was like $40 a month, so you could really be creative back then, not earn a lot of money and get by and be pretty happy. So I recognized that, things changed a lot, through the 80's and the 90's and the 2000's, where those stagnated-type income jobs, being a mechanic, being recycling, being wrecking-yard business, it never got any better. So my families kept going behind, further and further. I recognized that their entire industry was going to disappear soon, because really cheap money and brand new cars from Korea, this really did destroy that, that whole industry.
I see that kind of stuff resurging now, because the economy is changing, but my family was there at the end, the death of that kind of economy. So I watched my father do what he could to keep his family fed and together. My grandmother, he took care of her by staying there. It taught me a lot. It taught met a lot about getting greasy, I didn't want to do that anymore, I did not want to be cold in a wrecking yard anymore, pulling parts off a car when it's freezing cold, and then three months later it's 107 degrees, and inside the car is literally an oven, it's 150 degrees. I remember my last moments of pulling steering wheels off of a car where someone had just died in there a couple hours before, finding cheeseburger with teeth in it or something. These things bothered me, and I really started to kind of not like--I was being repulsed from cars, actually--I was starting to hate cars.
[laughs]
So that actually put me on a different trajectory--deep down, I didn't really understand what was going on, then. I couldn't keep struggling for no money. My dad would bring home a couple hundred dollars a week, when I was a teenager, it was tough. So I wanted to be the mechanism, I wanted to be the thing that could pull my family out of that. By the time I was 16, 17, 18, I'd have a full-time job at a restaurant, a Wendy's or something, and I'd be working 20-30 hours per week, so I didn't have much time for school.
Spenser: So 16, 17, 18, so we're talking 1997?
Josh: I graduated in 1995. '92, '93, '94.
Spenser: So you're just about to graduate high school, college is not on the horizon for you?
Josh: I was wrestling my senior year, and people were trying to motivate me to go to school.
Spenser: For wrestling, you were good enough?
Josh: I was good enough, but more it was the first time I had listened to a coach or a teacher and done something with school, so by being involved in wrestling they thought they could make me get better grades.
Spenser: Right, they said, "Bring it up to a ‘C’ so that we can get you into state school."
Josh: Yes, that kind of thing, or just, “Bring it up to a ‘C’ or you can't wrestle.” Immediately when I did try to participate in school, it was like a carrot and a stick they had, and I didn't like it, so I didn't even finish my senior year of sports, because I was failing classes. I failed economics my senior year, I failed personal finance, I was making $50,000 a year when I was 17, and I failed economics and personal finance.
Spenser: For people that don't know Josh, that's funny because Josh knows more about economics than any five people that I know, or at least the most of any five people that I know. So the fact that Josh was failing economics courses, it's sort of bewildering, but I think Josh is the textbook example of somebody with an intellect that just doesn't gel with the traditional classroom environment. So ok, it's 1994, 95, you're about to graduate, not going to go to college, so what are you thinking you're going to do?
Josh: I had already been working with my father, on and off over the years, in between other jobs, I could see where his shop could be a lot more than it was, so right as I was getting out of high school, I was doing a couple things, I was working in animation, my best friend in high school's dad made cartoons, high-end professional stuff: the "He-Man" and "The Simpsons" and stuff like that. I got to be involved in producing a video game for about a year, as I was transitioning out of that.
Spenser: What was your role in that?
Josh: I was scanning in, composing, painting, and then making sure all of the animation worked, and we didn't have the little color skips, we had to time it all, it was fun. We did an hour-long cartoon for a video game, I did that for about a year.
So I kind of saw myself getting away from any physical labor more and more, I was like, "Ok, I can do things that are a little more 'officey'." I did that for a year or so, and then a friend of our family's was in the oil industry, he was involved in turning oil into gasoline, he was in the refining business in Oklahoma. He had created a little piece that went in cars, in line in the fuel-line, that helped refine fuel a little more along the way, atomize it a little bit. So this product that came into my family's life at our shop that gave people 90% better emissions immediately, and gave people, if they didn't want to drive harder, it gave them more efficiency.
So for a couple years I took this as a mission, and it kind of got me excited about the environment and how business and the environment can work together, cause I'd been in this wrecking yard scene for a while, and while that was recycling things, it was really dirty, and I got sick of being dirty, I got sick of seeing the oil on the ground, and all these things around it, but I didn't really know that yet, I didn't know how deep down that was affecting me, but when we got involved in this for a couple of years out of high school, I was pushing this product through my family business, and to government agencies and to big companies, it really put me on the path of starting companies, getting going, doing roll-outs, I've been doing that a lot more. As I got older, I realized I was finding really niche markets and then pushing hard to get something done. So I did that for a few years until I moved to Portland, Oregon and changed my career path for a while.
Spenser: Portland is when you started the recycling business, when you began working with that?
Josh: Yeah, that was right after I got to Portland, that was in '99. But for those few years between when I graduated and when everybody else I knew was going to college, I was starting companies, working with my own businesses, like the emissions technology I did, with those parts. I also was doing audio installations in cars, I had competition car stereos. So for my last year or two of high school and following out of high school.
Spenser: Still in Medford?
Josh: Still in Medford, still doing those things, still trying to figure out how not just to be like everyone else in my little town, cause everybody else is hunting and driving big trucks. For a while, I didn't know what to do with my free time, I started going to the gym a lot, I took that seriously, cause I really liked athletics, I just didn't like the school, being involved in school, so I was always playing sports but never loving the angle from having my coach be my teacher thing, it didn't work. So I was more like outside of school sports, so when I got done with high school, I was lifting weights, I got up to 330 pounds plus.
[laughs]
Big, big strong, dude.
Spenser: 19, 20, you're 21, you're 330 pounds?
Josh: In 1996, '97, '98, right around then. I was just going to the gym, 3-4 hours a day, enjoying that culture, then doing business in the mornings, and then going and helping my Dad, I had 3 or 4 different projects going after high school that kept me very busy. I was driving all over the country, doing business, selling these auto parts, going to huge--
Spenser: Mostly doing sales?
Josh: Yeah, I was doing sales, and I was learning how to manage big deals once I got them, we were making things happen, from nothing there, and it felt good. I was always kind of starting with nothing and making something out of it--that worked for me.
As I built that up though, I realized the price of fuel was so low back then, $1.10, $1.05, people did not care about fuel-efficiency. To give someone 10% more meant nothing. Then I started working with government agencies and I found out when I could save them money, and I'd go through a year of testing with like a school district, to save their bosses a bunch of fuel, that they wouldn't do it, after it was done, because they didn't want their budget to go down--like being efficient was a bad idea for my local school district, and I did not like that at all--especially after I wasted years working with some of these agencies to make things happen, so I was really getting bitter about that--
Spenser: So just a little background--clearly people recognize that Josh is a politically-motivated person, but, Josh at the current time, is a proponent of Noam Chomsky, and you would say--I don't want to pin him as a leftist but is on that end of the spectrum, he helped promote John Kerry in '04, but my understanding is that things weren't always this way, I mean is this Rush Limbaugh [territory]?
Josh: Yeah, when I was a teenager, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh before I'd go to school--on my own. Like he had a morning show--
Spenser: Not cause your parents told you?
Josh: No, no, my parents and my grandmother on my mom's side, they told me he was a windbag fascist, and I just didn't get that, because what I heard was somebody who was telling me to run with my talents, like, "hey, this world is for you, you do it." And I didn't understand why that wasn't a good idea, I didn't understand the whole perspective of--I was in a small town, and I had traveled in my life, but it was very apolitical, we didn't talk about that stuff so much, so when I was seeing the problem in my family, how poor my family was (cash poor), I listened to people that reinforced that attitude and I was listening to right-wing talk show hosts and I was reading like the first books I ever read were not stuff they told me in school, it was rich dad poor dad, it was these things about economics and things about--
Spenser: Medford is a red area?
Josh: Very. And it was very much then, like if you had long hair in the 70's, you could get chased out of town.
[laughs]
One of my activist friends here Jim, he was literally chased out of a bar with a shotgun, for just having long hair in the 70's, in southern Oregon. So it wasn't really an enlightened place, politically. It was very racist, I heard racist jokes and banter all the time. I saw many race wars going on at my school, I would watch redneck cowboys just pick-on and beat up the Latinos around us, and we had a big migrant population, starting to show up in southern Oregon, because--well now I understand why, because of trade policy and a bunch of big problems. Back then, we didn't know why, we just saw jobs disappearing, those lawn-mowing jobs I had, I couldn't have anymore. So I was listening to the wrong people, telling me the causality of these problems.
Spenser: So you were doing sales in '95, '96, you were still in Medford, you're in Rush Limbaugh headspace?
Josh: Yeah, yeah, not in a social way, I had broken from that, I was not socially conservative, but I didn't understand why anything really mattered socially in the world, like on the big picture, I thought that would all work itself out, and I had a pretty good view on that stuff, probably pretty close to where I'm at now, I wouldn't judge people for being gay, I wasn't that kind of conservative.
Spenser: Economics?
Josh: Economics. I did not want to be paying taxes to corrupt morons that start wars like Vietnam, and I didn't understand at the time that it wasn't just the government, that it was a big, corporate problem, a huge, bigger problem than that, so I had too small a view of the problem, and I think a lot of those folks do. Their knee-jerk reaction is right--don't give money to a war mongering horse, 3,000 miles away, but, they're identifying the wrong person, I was identifying the wrong enemy. I thought my problem was anyone in government. I listened to that rhetoric, and it sinks in well, a 13, 14-year-old white male in southern Oregon, that's who Rush Limbaugh is talking to I think, because once you start to think, I don't know how you keep listening to that kind of stuff.
Spenser: Ok, so what's the kick in the ass to go to Portland?
Josh: I was too ambitious for southern Oregon.
[laughs]
Spenser: You kicked your own ass?
Josh: Yeah, yeah, I didn't fit in, and I was getting into trouble, I couldn't sit still, I ended up playing games that you shouldn't be playing, like going to foreign lands and coming home with pharmaceuticals and things maybe that you shouldn't do. But I was 18, 19.
Spenser: Portland and San Francisco are the two major cities kind of nearby, so why Portland?
Josh: I had never really spent any time in Portland, all of our time traveling had been going south from southern Oregon down to California where our family's were, so Portland was kind of foreign to me, and San Francisco was foreign to me, too. It was more like Sacramento, not nearly as fun, or Los Angeles, or Riverside, California, so my exposure to that fun part, the Portland scene that I'm imagining in my head right now, that was non-existent until I moved there, so I just picked up one day, the girlfriend that I had at the time, she was into it and we moved to Portland with no opportunities, no friends, moved into an apartment, we got a paper by accident the first day, and it had a "fax this" number, a resume, and it got me my job at the recycling place, so that was a total accident that I ended up being at that shredding company, recycling company, AM Document Destruction, a lucky error. I got a newspaper one day before the service canceled.
Spenser: So, you're looking through the paper and you see recycling--to me, a Rush Limbaugh follower is not going to be that jazzed about a recycling job ad, right?
Josh: No, well actually, I grew up in a place where people's garbage was not garbage. I grew up in a wrecking yard when someone would throw away a car cause it stopped running for one reason, they were frustrated with it, I recognized that 95% of that car was still valuable, and it was just going to rust away. I've always identified and been able to find value in what people don't find valuable, and recycling is just that to me, the garbage industry was ripe for renovation, it was ripe for change, and I was also very aware of the environmental problems in the world, I wasn't conservative in that way, either. So when I saw my forests get cut down around me, I was pissed. I didn't fit in in southern Oregon with that, I mean people around me had bumper stickers that said, "Save a job, eat an owl."
[laughs]
I did not agree with that stuff, so I was not in that end of things, when I heard those social conservative talk show hosts or those business people lecture me, I was shutting off like more than half of what they said, I had to really turn it off, like dissing on women for abortion, like I was totally not on board from any of that, so it was really just the business part that I listened to there, the "no tax me" stuff that was really kind of just the greedy, Republican in me--
Spenser: Are you hearing anything from the liberal side of things? We were talking earlier, there's not much of a progressive talk radio, certainly in 1996, there wasn't much of anything? NPR, maybe? I don't know, but you weren't listening to it.
Josh: No, but Bill Clinton was in power and there was such a media push against him, and you know, they pick on him for the wrong things, I think Bill Clinton is horrible, too, but not for the reasons they said in the '90's. I was hearing that, and that stuff works on you, whether or not you think it does. I was hating on the government for the wrong reasons, I never heard the left perspective. I lived near Ashland, Oregon, but where I grew up, 20 minutes form there, [it] just [made] fun of Ashland, for being this pinky, leftist, gay community, that's the nicest way I can say it.
Spenser: That's what it was, so that's what they called it?
Josh: It seemed that way, it had college in it, people were actually reading. Where I grew up, people didn't read anything but trade manuals and magazines.
Spenser: Right, so you weren't--of course you were literate--but you were not a person that read a lot of books at this point?
Josh: No, I hadn't read hardly anything--17, 18, 19, I would chip into these books that were very directly associated with the psychology of sales, that kind of stuff, but it was more like, using--it came from a greedy place, it didn't come from a need to want to learn new things.
Spenser: How to make the sale.
Josh: Yeah. But it didn't seem to me that way, directly, it was working that way. Psychology is much more important than the details of closing a deal, and that's what I realized in hindsight, what I was learning, was that. So I did learn a lot of good things by going to these stupid, hoorah business meetings sometimes. When I had a girlfriend, 16, 17, 18-years-old, her father was big in Amway, that was terrible, but I learned a lot, by going to these meetings, I got to see a lot about how people thought and I also got to kind of identify--I learned how to identify the bullshit of business, I heard a lot of bullshit, and I read a lot of bullshit, and I realized that maybe a lot of that stuff, a lot of the things they were teaching, it requires that, if you're involved in selling products and services that suck, that don't matter, that aren't real or necessary.
As I grew older, I learned that some of those tactics they used, some of the psychological tricks or tips, they were good if it mashes nicely into something if you really do care about it, if it's something that's good. So I've taken some of those tools, and I still use them now, but mostly at that age, I was tending to the greedy side of myself.
Spenser: Sure, the ad was for a job with recycling company but what would you be doing, sales?
Josh: Yeah, I went in and got involved in sales--it actually just said, "Sales Job", in the newspaper, it didn't say recycling, "Sales Job -- Fax this number", I did it, I went and met with them, I saw what they were doing, they were just getting involved in just shredding documents, because in 1999, we started having new laws that made companies protect information, because there was a lot of identity theft going on, so I got involved in the industry of recycling as it was spitting off a new industry of document and product destruction. So, it was a good time to get involved in that business, for someone like me who liked to start new things, I was fearless in going out and getting people to understand what it meant to use our service. We went from like a 10, 15 stops per day company, in about a year and a half, two years, we were up to 200 stops per day, picking up paper and plastics from offices all around Portland, Oregon, southern Washington. So I helped develop this small company into something more focused. Before I got there, my boss was very much just a “golf with friends that had other businesses, and keep these bigger accounts through relationships,” but they hadn't really done a push yet in sales. So, that was my first time in the big city, and it was their first time getting involved in sales. I think we talked about golf more in my first interview than anything else.
Spenser: So you weren't a sales peon, you're the sales manager?
Josh: I had to learn the ropes for a few months, and then there was a guy there who had been doing account management for a while, but not really sales, he was great at what he did, but he had a lot to do already. They brought someone on who could spend their time, spend a year investing and maybe getting no business but getting us out there. So I brought us to the public, we were kind of just a behind-the-scenes, commercial recycler at that point. Yeah, I would walk through the "no soliciting" sign door and knock on it, in a high-rise, until I made our name known.
Spenser: Right, and you're knocking off other shredding companies right?
Josh: Right, as it grew, it grew quickly. There were no shredding companies really then, it was just beginning, so I had a few competitors, but it was no competition, because everyone that was starting to sign up, then there's so much business that it didn't feel like competition at that point yet. By two years later, after 9/11, all of the sudden it was crazy, because security became word of the day.
Spenser: So, a couple years we're doing the shredding in Portland, two years or so, and you're starting to get more politically--
Josh: No, no, I actually started to kind of have my college years then, because I moved to a big city, didn't know anyone.
Spenser: So party [time]?
Josh: And I was making $70,000-$80,000 a year pretty fast.
Spenser: Back then, which was nice, nice money.
Josh: Yeah, I was living in a high-rise, sports car paid for by my company, I golfed three or four days a week, I had to have--I couldn't hear--I still couldn't hear the leftist talk and stuff, or it would've destroyed my job. I spent my time on a golf course, you can't talk about anti-war stuff. Well there was no war yet, we weren't at war.
Spenser: So post-9/11 we're talking?
Josh: Even then, it was like a year before we were engaged in a real way, so like at that moment it was confusing and scary, but I didn't know anymore than most people about why. I started to have friends in Portland, that, as 9/11 unfolded and that culture started to come on, a few a months later people started talking, people that knew there was something wrong and it was bigger than what George Bush was saying, so I started to hear people. 9/11 upset me so deeply, I sat in my high-rise tower watching those towers fall like 1,000 times and I almost joined the Marines.
Spenser: So you are in Portland, which you know, the last time I checked, is leftyville, I don't know if it was in 2001--
Josh: Totally was, but at the time that it had the most bike access of any major city, bicycle-friendly city, it had the most SUV's per capita, too. Portland is Oregon still.
Spenser: It's polarized?
Josh: Very, very much. Now inside the city limits, if you look at the presidential election or something, it may appear very left, but---
Spenser: Kerry won by 20 points?
Josh: More. He got like 75% of the vote or something, like for real. But you go two seconds out of Portland's city limits and you're in a place like Hillsboro, place like Wilsonville, these areas that are very, very Oregon, not Portland. and at least where I lived and what I heard is that they despised Portland and the culture--you can be there and not be exposed to that--I was going out and enjoying it, but at that time, there was really a boom. There was a "Dot com" boom, Hillsboro--
Spenser: Late '90's, early 2000's.
Josh: Yeah, we were in the "Silicon Forest" up there.
Spenser: That's what they called it?
Josh: Intel, and HP, and a lot of huge companies there, a ton of tech around them, support tech kind of people. There was so much money being thrown around at the young, just out of college, "drivers", people that would just do a job without asking why. I don't recall anyone in my circles caring about anything except making money and having a comfortable life. And the housing boom was really beginning then, too. People weren't in pain enough to talk about things yet, I didn't find it. I did have one person in my office, a man named Austin, and he was hearing me talk this stupid shit and he was hearing me say things that I would hear on talk radio or wherever, and he would tell me that I should read a book. And one day, he had enough and I remember him telling me a lot of new things, it was a conversation about climate change, where I'd just been parroting--
Spenser: Limbaugh.
Josh: Limbaugh, a little bit, about climate change not even being real or man-made. I can't believe I say that about myself.
Spenser: So is Austin, is he a big lever?
Josh: Yes.
Spenser: So no Austin, we might have a different Josh?
Josh: Yep, because he was such a well read, intelligent person about this, he wasn't just screaming, "What about the children?", which is what I was hearing from all leftists--what the media lets you see.
Spenser: Of course.
Josh: You don't see Chomsky on the nightly news.
Spenser: Nope, he isn't on there, I checked.
[laughs]
Josh: Even though he's probably the most quoted intellectual in history, he's not on television.
Spenser: America hates intellectuals, we hate them.
Josh: At least the television does.
Spenser: Yeah.
Josh: I was exposed to some books and stuff then, all of the sudden. Austin was trying to make me read, and then I met my ex-wife Emily, her family was a really strong, liberal, leftist union family, and her uncle was a very strong activist from Vietnam on, and he wouldn't back off on me. The second we met, he realized that I either had to change or get the hell out of their family, so to hangout with Emily--
Spenser: So you have Austin, then you have social pressure from your girlfriend. So this is the vortex kind of drawing you...got it.
Josh: And 9/11 was so painful to me, cause I'm a person that defends people. My dad taught me to be an anti-bully, so I spent the last part of my high school years beating up bullies and twisting on people that hurt little kids.
Spenser: I bet all the nerds loved you. That's a good person to have on your side.
Josh: Yeah, I had a younger brother and he had a mouth, a fast-tongue, so I had to keep him--I felt like I had to keep protecting my brother and his friends, who were a lot of my closest friends, cause I was such a kind of a dorky business dude myself, that I didn't hang out with my social--I didn't hang out with people in my class normally.
Spenser: You could've been a jock with all the women though.
Josh: I hated that though.
Spenser: You hated that?
Josh: I hated that. I couldn't see how someone could stand there and let somebody scream in their face, like a coach or something. I could go out on any Saturday or Sunday and play football, pickup games, or basketball with anyone at our school and crush them, but I could not be yelled at, and my friend through high school, my best friend Kai, he was such a strong and physical guy, like he was so good at sports, but he couldn't [deal with that] either. So he brought me into wrestling, which was like a more personalized sport.
Spenser: When was the semi-professional football?
Josh: After high school, when I was really big and working out, everybody around me just said, "You have to do this."
Spenser: In Medford?
Josh: Yeah, and my friend Chad was on a team, and he was playing tight-end or something, he started bringing me to his practices and he made me get involved with his team. So I ended up playing with them, and it wasn't that long, it was just half a season of fun. But I couldn't take that either, I didn't want to travel around and be an athlete that was not my thing.
Spenser: I mean, are we talking, there are guys on this team that have a shot at the pros?
Josh: Eventually, if you wanted to, from those leagues you could go do the Combines or something, and I thought I could, and as I got to Portland I was even getting bigger and strong and I started hanging out with more people that were involved in football, more like ex-college, high-end college athletes. They were trying to pull me into playing again, cause I was only 23, 24, and I was...I was coming into my strength, even still, cause I was working out so hard, just because I was bored.
Spenser: You were the goal-line fullback?
Josh: Yeah. More than games, it was like, I really enjoyed playing and practicing and being fit. I loved playing football, I did not like the idea of being a football player. I love playing basketball, I played basketball four or five nights a week, that was probably my favorite game, but I couldn't imagine being on a team, and going out and being an athlete, that's not me. I never got hurt, that was good. I really did focus more on wrestling, and later on mixed-martial arts, because again, you didn't have to have some coach yelling at you, you could have a support staff. I gravitated more towards that.
Spenser: And what about the social aspect? I played on a high school hockey team, and I didn't fit in perfectly there. I don't know how...generally speaking, I find that those circles aren't that interested in having complex discussions about meaningful stuff, it's mostly babes and booze.
Josh: Yeah, I didn't get along with that at all, and in high school I had one girlfriend for three years, and I proposed to her at prom even.
[laughs]
Spenser: You proposed to your girlfriend at high school prom?
Josh: Yeah.
Spenser: What did she say?
Josh: She said yes, and then luckily, we said no about a year later.
[laughs]
She wanted to join the military. Again, I may look back at myself and talk about myself as kind of right-wingy person, there was no way I was going to go fight in a war for them, or any of that, so I wouldn't follow orders. I was never good at following orders.
Spenser: Got it.
Josh: So yeah, sports were out for me young, it was much more just an individual thing, I had the type of body that could be strong and I was a big guy, so I don't know, I was motivated to go to the gym, and I also--I liked to do whatever I wanted. So if I want to be able to eat cheesecake three times a day, when I was 19, I'd better go to the gym, for three hours of this, so I was--go as far as you want in anything you want to do, that's where I was. I felt like no limits when I was a young white man in southern Oregon and moving to Portland. That's kind of true, actually, if you choose not to care about anything.
[laughs]
Spenser: So going back to Portland, 2003, we're going into Afghanistan, you have a serious girlfriend.
Josh: In 2002 I met Emily, Yemaya, I'll refer to her as Yemaya.
Spenser: She's pulling you into the lefty closet.
Josh: She almost through me out of the car, she pulled over on the freeway to throw me out of the car when I said George Bush wasn't so bad. We had been in love for a few months and not talked about that stuff, and she could see the American flags on my wall and shit, and it was bothering her I'm sure, but we were in love, so it wasn't a big part of the conversation yet. One day, going to visit her family for the first time, George Bush's voice comes on the radio, and she's like reacting as I think most people should, like screaming at the radio, wanting to arrest the man, and I just said something like, "he's not so bad." Her pulling over, her reaction, so visceral, like from love to like hating me in a moment, I could tell.
Spenser: Knowing Josh now, I think you might be the most politically motivated person I've ever met, and the fact that you had a love affair that went a few months without politics coming up--man we're talking about a different person.
Josh: Yeah, I really did think that just the way you lived and what you did with your money could make you a good person, and you could affect the world, and I'm actually back to that a lot, I went through a moment of really macro thinking on this, and I'm coming back to a lot of that.
But with actually understanding and being there is different than not understanding. I didn't understand, and nobody around me talked about it. The only stuff I heard was during the Clinton years was this hardcore pull to the right, I was hanging around militia people. My girlfriend in high school, the one I proposed to, her father was in Amway and he was like a militia guy--well armed, and “Waco”. They talked about Waco all the time. So I thought I was hearing contrary stuff, I thought I was, but I wasn't, I was hearing a story that helped build the culture I don't like now, but I grew up in the right-wing anti-America, so I thought I kind of was dialed. I thought I a had a good enough understanding, and when I turned on Yahoo each day to check my mail, I didn't know, I didn't know that the media was what it was, I didn't know about media being owned by the same people that build bombs, and I didn't understand that stuff, I thought, if it was going wrong that bad, if there was a ton of real corruption, it would on Yahoo front page, it would be on NBC, why would they miss it, so I really just kind of trusted--I had a trust in that--and because they kind of do this anti-government tone, especially during the '90's, it was all about Clinton's blowjobs and "da da da". It sounds like the media is critical, so I thought they doing their job.
Spenser: Faux-critical.
Josh: Yeah, it's faux-critical. So I thought I knew stuff, so when she through me out of the car, it was like, "Wait a minute, I'll do something, let me see why you know so much, why you know different things than me."
Spenser: So she's really the strongest lever that's pulling you this way. Then we have the 2004 Presidential Election.
Josh: Yeah, well it didn't just pull me, I realized how ignorant I was, and I hated that, it didn't take someone like telling me a piece of information that made me care, it took someone saying, just showing me that they knew a whole bunch of stuff that I didn't, and I was frustrated about that, cause I figured--people who are already that way, my family, Yemaya's family, they were angry about the system but they were still working and they were still pushing through life 40 years later after Vietnam, they were still pissed off about it. So when I learned it, I felt so ripped off that I'd been lied to so much, about history, about America's place in history, like a pendulum, I started swinging hard the other way, and I couldn't take a passive resistance, I immediately got hyper-active, I immediately started demanding my friends and family not be ignorant.
Spenser: It's 2003?
Josh: 2002. And as the Iraq War began, well, that's when--well Yemaya was pregnant right then, and my daughter Kaileah was about to be born in June, and the Iraq War started in March of '03? So like right then, it became real that our world is engaging in--now, it's not just politics or debating or arguing, there are people dying, there are massive bombs falling, and my daughter is about to be born into this. At that time, I still could've been convinced that a bus would blow up in Portland at any moment cause some terrorist--I needed to get a grip on what to really react to, what to be afraid of, and what not to be afraid of. I didn't want to bring my kid up in irrational fear, in a world full of irrational fear. It all came at once, it was like a fast head that it came to, and I couldn't imagine telling my daughter, "I saw this stuff happening and I didn't know what to do, so I just did nothing. I had to do something, and my personality--it's my same personality, applied to this.
Spenser: And you're still doing sales at the recycling thing?
Josh: Yeah, and at that point, I mean "recycling" is what's kind of happening in the background, what I was doing then was kind of wildly different from what I'd started when I was just selling service door-to-door to get us some business. I started building a collective around the whole U.S., of small shredding, recycling companies, to compete now against these big behemoths that had come along, big companies that spun-off, to try and do what we were doing. So my job was changing, it was still fun. I was, at that point, able to use my idealism of small business being a part of society, instead of just big companies. So it wasn't going against my grain to do my daily work. I was showing up, helping companies shred information that would be stolen from the garbage can if they didn't do that.
I realized more later, a little bit later, I had another realization with that and I'll get to that in a minute--but I was still doing my thing to help the little guy, in my mind. I was helping a small company, it was fun, fighting big companies and winning. So, we started a collective around the whole U.S. and I got to spend a couple years building that and taking back some of the biggest, funnest businesses in the U.S. from nationwide competitors. So I was still engaged their and having fun, but I was spending a lot of my days researching things now, waiting for phone calls in the sales office, allowed me time. So I was reading a Noam Chomsky book at work, and the more I got into that, the more I started to realize I couldn't do the work I was doing anymore. I was living in the district where all the gay clubs were and it was really progressive.
Spenser: It was really in your face then?
Josh: Really in my face, and I loved it, and my friends at the time, I was making friends with people who were strippers and people who were bartenders, like a scene I'd never seen before, so it instantly started challenging me on that level, and not because I had a problem with any of that, again, I wasn't socially conservative, but I had never really been exposed to it, I had never had a transgender person in my living room before I lived in Portland, I had a lot to learn there, and it wasn't that I was judging, it's that it was so new to me. Portland humanized a lot of things for me. All of the sudden, I spent time with people that were black, people that were gay, people that were liberal, people that had mohawks, and I started to see people instead of characters.
Spenser: The prospect of a second Bush term, is that the fire under your ass to get into politics? It's all these things, but was that a major thing?
Josh: Oregon Country Fair, 2002. I went with Yemaya, we had been talking a lot and it was right before that that I had met her uncle and I'd been reading, but still, I had to kind of be in denial because I was making $100,000 a year at that time, I didn't want to not make money.
[laughs]
A lot of what Chomsky was saying, I had to kind of let it sink in slow, about injustice and stuff. My own facility, I had people that were illegally paper worked, working for nothing. They get injured, they get sent back to El Salvador, instead of fixed. So I was seeing it in front me, but still it was like it was in denial. I went to Oregon Country Fair in 2002, and I think that might have been the first time I experienced psychedelics, in earnest, and I did psychedelics, and I did mushrooms and I played all night with a family from Afghanistan on our belly dancing stage there.
[laughs]
All of the sudden, I had a human, Afghani family in my face, I don't know, that stuff was piling on quick. That switch at Oregon Country Fair, I saw that there was a really active, passionate counter-culture, not just a, "we don't know what to do, floundering, we're angry that children are being hurt." There were people doing things, and I hadn't seen that before. So I didn't expect that, as I got involved in any anti-war actions--like in 2002, after that, I came home and went to a protest in Portland, and I watched a group of grandmothers and high school students get beaten with batons and chemicals and stuff, for nothing, for walking on the street at a farmer's market with a peace sign, and cops deciding that's over. But my perspective before it had been that protesters must be violent and they're causing this stuff, and I had never seen protests other than the television version of a protest. So when I went to that first protest and I saw bullies beating up little kids and old women--that's the first like big switch in me, where I realized that the system is crushing these people for standing here on the street with a sign.
This is about as opposite as it should be. These cops should be protecting these people, not hurting them. My eyes were opening quickly to that corruption, and I'd already seen a little bit of police corruption in my last years of southern Oregon, but I didn't understand the scope of it, I didn't understand what was going on, until I'd gone to a few protests, and this was in Portland that I thought it was a liberal place, the cops lived two minutes outside of Portland and were happy to come in and crush people there. So that was a real switch, when it got physically real for me, when I got pepper sprayed the first time, when I was in a crowd--
Spenser: That was in Portland?
Josh: Yeah, when I got rubber bullets shot at me the first time, for nothing, not for starting a riot, for nothing.
Spenser: Yeah, just being there.
Josh: Nothing, I couldn't believe it, and the "Battle for Seattle" had just happened with the World Trade Organization's protests in '99 I think, right before that, and I had been anti-protesters. I remember even seeing out of my high-rise building and being blocked up for a few minutes by like critical mass bike rides, to bring awareness to that, like naked bike riding people, and I would be all upset about that, so I had a quick shift when I went out and hit the street one time and saw how different it was from what I'd been told. Every time I got more involved in politics what I realized was what I'm being told and what's actually happening are so different, that I had to get grip on it. I can't be ignorant to things that are that important.
Spenser: But you're still doing sales, document shredding, so what finally gets you to say, "This is my last day, I'm going to do x, y, and z."
Josh: Hurricane Katrina.
Spenser: So we're talking after Kerry?
Josh: I was out of it then. Not out of it, I was losing it when John Kerry rolled over and gave that election to George Bush or whatever we want to call this--it wasn't really an election--I started to recognize that there was no hope in top-down approaches, so I really started getting much more involved in the local politics, like harder-core, getting judges installed--
Spenser: City council.
Josh: City council, I was going to every meeting that there were politicians at.
Spenser: Ok, but I thought you were doing door-to-door for Kerry?
Josh: I did that, for like six months, I did that everyday. Everyday for several hours, I pretty much stopped working my normal job and would go do that. It was really an anything but Bush movement on my part, I didn't love John Kerry.
Spenser: Of course, of course.
Josh: But I was going to make sure Bush didn't win and I was getting people registered to vote and I was going to high schools and talking to students about getting out there and getting people registered. I'd talked to dozens and dozens of high school history and political courses, because a bunch of the liberal teachers were allowed to invite me in since the school's inviting military recruiters and inviting Bush supporters in, so I became like the go-to person for the more radical democrats in southern Washington. Vancouver, Washington, Seattle, Olympia, Portland, I was going to anywhere I could to rally the troops, and spending time calling Ohio for a month everyday.
Spenser: Bush winning didn't take the wind out of the sails in terms of your spirit, just; you're not going to do national politics again?
Josh: No, it was a hurricane in my sails, because I saw that these people weren't going to count votes if they didn't want to. Like if it didn't work out the way they wanted to, no Native Americans votes would be counted in Arizona that year. Places in Ohio where we had record, amazing, double, triple numbers for registration and they put one voting machine so black people in inner-city Cleveland couldn't vote--[they'd] wait for 10 hours in the snow. When I saw that happen, I was so disillusioned by top-down approaches that I got fired up about practical, local solutions. So, that election was probably the best thing ever for me, if Kerry would've just been let in, and the same thing unfolded for four more years, as Bush, it probably would've happened. I would've maybe had a weird hope in that. It really crushed that out of me right then, and I realized it was time to do my revolution from the street up, instead of waiting. So, I got involved in biodiesel collective then, I got involved in more direct-action businesses.
Spenser: '05 is Katrina?
Josh: Yep, when Katrina happened I was already transitioning, I was ready to quit my job, I was setting up, I was going to sell the house we had bought a few years before.
Spenser: So you were still doing document shredding when Katrina happened?
Josh: Yeah but I was--and you could ask any of my co-workers or my boss at the time--I was spending 7 hours and 59 minutes a day not working, I was doing activism. I would take my nice sales car instead and go park and get flyers and go door-to-door and talk about anything I could. I would use any organization that would give me lists of peoples names and I would be like, "Yep, I’ll sign up with you because I get to go see people and talk to them.” I did politics face-to-face from that point forward, instead of trying to elect somebody. So that was big for me, and when I came home from weekend retreat at a hot springs, I was recharging my batteries, getting ready to take another step, I come home and people are all drowning in their attics in New Orleans. That's my next step--realizing that we'll sacrifice cities if we want to. That was no accident, that was no just "big storm", it was just utter incompetence mixed with uber corruption, putting people who buy and sell racehorses in control of FEMA--criminal shit. These guys should be imprisoned for that. Hurricane Katrina pushed me over the edge, I started to feel like I was losing my grip on my sanity. That people would let this happen, that my brothers and sisters would let old black women drown in their attic. I don't know how people drown in their attics, it was fucking with my head. And then my friends were coming back from Iraq, and my friends were coming back from New Orleans, having to be there at National Guard cleanup things...my rage became permanent.
[laughs]
And I didn't know what to do, so I started taking a lot more real, direct action, like starting and running protest actions, and living at capital buildings and locking myself to gas stations.
Spenser: Which capital buildings?
Josh: Olympia, or Salem.
Spenser: Not D.C.?
Josh: No, I never cared to go try and confront the president again, I see that as such a--
Spenser: You did that?
Josh: D.C.? No, I never went to D.C., about the time that I would've started that path, I lost complete faith in national politics, I think it all comes down to how you act locally, and that turns into something national. So for a minute, the Kerry moment, I would've kind of kept on that path, when I was working for Kerry, if that would've worked out. But I turned into state houses, and I turned into every--I don't know what you call them anymore, but when a Congressman comes and talks--town hall. I was in every town hall form Canada to Medford, Oregon, and every fair, every place where people would go, I would go and hand things out, hand out buttons. My uncle was making propaganda constantly, so he had this button thing he was into, so I was handing buttons out to everyone all the time, just trying to bring awareness. When I would go through the airport, I would have 15 buttons on just saying, "George Bush is a terrorist", "Dick Cheney did 9/11", I just had whatever I could to annoy people. So I would make everything beep, all the metal things. So I was trying like hell to get people to pay attention. At the same time, I was spending my mornings doing businesses that I thought would change things, so I started a biodiesel collective with my friends, and I disengaged from the shredding company.
Spenser: And this is when the price of oil is starting to climb a little bit.
Josh: Starting, a little bit.
Spenser: Would you say that the biodiesel business worked out? Of course it evolves, but now we're at the point where you've figured out soap is the better way to go.
Josh: I had to figure out how to--at the time, I was really doing anything I could to--I'm a fighter. I like boxing. I like wrestling. And when you see an opening, you punch, and I saw ways to take from the big system and energy is directly causing a lot of these wars, so I saw energy--learning energy, my responsibility of learning how to use properly, how to be efficient, how to find local sources of energy--that came not a survivalist mentality, but like a whole community surviving mentality. How do we actually have something that works? How do I power my car down the road, if I'm going to have a car, without needing war?
So biodiesel came out of a desire for something environmental, it was environmentally dialed. It matched with my skills, I'd come from a mechanic background, so I could actually get people to understand these things. It let me do community-organizing events--I got 15 of my friends together and built a collective with them. I had no naive view that we were going to topple the government with this or we're going to topple Exxon, but I did know that I could feel less like a hypocrite each day, if my little vehicle was driving on French fry oil.
Spenser: Ok, so vegetable oil.
Josh: Yeah, so I was collecting vegetable oil from restaurants, and we had a friend who pretty much started recycling in Portland, in the '70's, he let us use his trash company and recycling company's shop to try and give a shot at making all the fuel for his trucks. So we had a very specific goal--it was to get this company, who's already going to restaurants, and he was already picking up compost, which is unique for a city in those days. He had a compost business, so he was going to all the restaurants, so it worked out great to design another truck, it's the fun stuff that I liked about business, designing and kicking something off. So we got to build systems that collected all this waste oil that was up until that point going in the garbage.
Spenser: And you actually knew mechanics--I think generally with--at least in my mind, the stereotype is the hippie who thinks they can run their car on vegetable oil, they get on the highway where they can only go 35 MPH, the car breaks down--
Josh: It's half full of water.
Spenser: It's full of water. But you know auto mechanics.
Josh: Yeah, and I went to a clinic, and I saw a guy converting cars to vegetable oil, and I read the history of it, and I was like, "Ok, yes, this is how these motors were built actually. Diesel motors are built to run on vegetable oil, not petroleum." So this wasn't a new idea, this was a re-emergence of an old idea, and the reason we use diesel and petroleum in diesel cars--well, the name Diesel--Diesel is the inventor of that motor, it's not the fuel, they named the fuel after the motor. The reason petroleum became the fuel of choice was because it was very inexpensive for a while, and because a few monopolistic companies ran the world and still do. The local answers for fuel was actually why a lot of these motors and how they were built--Henry Ford wanted farmers to make their own fuel, with the alcohol byproduct from their own farms. So, cars were initially invented to run of local fuels, petroleum wasn't even that popular then, it hadn't been discovered all over the world, yet.
Spenser: In the early 20th century?
Josh: Yeah, right when internal combustion was first happening. I like that I was getting in line with an older, local tech, and when I first went to a clinic and converted car, it made complete sense to me, and then I immediately saw where people were screwing up, the hippies, where they wanted it so bad, they're right, they're ahead of the curve, hippies are always ahead of the curve on these things cause they care first, but they don't exactly know the technical solutions, so I was finding people not getting the water out of their system like they should. Vegetable oil is great, but not if it's dirty from a restaurant. So I got with my friends and we created a system that made that an accountable, working system. I didn't want people to put vegetable oil in their car because they heard about it on PBS, and then burn their car up and then it be a very bad thing for the community. So we created a system where we were processing tens of thousands of gallons a month and cleaning it, dewatering it, getting the acidity down, and we designed it in a way that made it make sense to the masses, but we ran into quick problems with feedstock--there's not nearly enough. Our addiction to energy in the U.S. is going to outpace almost any natural or green solution, until it's a comprehensive, community-wide, government plan. So I was trying to take just what's in the garbage and make cars run, which would work for a while, but it wouldn't make a real big impact, so we had to get into farming and creating feed stocks, so that's what lead me into where I'm at now.
Spenser: The biodiesel?
Josh: The biodiesel funneled me into paying attention to the feed stocking, whether it would be energy or fuel.
Spenser: So does that set you on Costa Rica, do you see the jatropha? Or how does that connection get made?
Josh: We were going to do a farm in Oregon, I started meeting with great farmers--
Spenser: 2006?
Josh: 2005, 2006, yep, from Katrina on I was disengaging on.
Spenser: So we're looking at biodiesel farms in Oregon?
Josh: Yep, and they were starting to laws to mandate--the state put a certain percentage of biofuel in each gallon, for the environment. So we were at the right place, it's a good chance to do that. What I learned over time was that the mandates and stuff were just--they make it easy for the biggest companies, not so easy for the small ones, so we were running into problems where it was costing us more to produce than we could sell it for, which is fine for Exxon, because they're getting such subsidy that nothing matters. But for me, it wouldn't work cause it was a small business, and I didn't want it to be some kind of donation-based activism.
Spenser: You wanted it to be a business.
Josh: Yep.
Spenser: A profitable business.
Josh: And it worked from used oil, sort of, the numbers worked, but it wouldn't work buying it from new oil, when that new oil had a market already, so I realized I couldn't be using the grape seed oils, cause that could be inedible, and by doing biofuels, I might end up being counter to my own movement, like raising the price of food somewhere in the third world, because cars need to burn that in the U.S. now, so I didn't want externalities to be bad, I didn't want to find out I was doing bad, so we decided to look outside the country and see what we could experiment with and figure out, and I was so fed up anyway that I had to create some space, I did not need-- I couldn't be close to politicians anymore--
[laughs]
in the U.S., so I was happy to pioneer that and come to Costa Rica and start a farm and start experimenting, and we picked jatropha first, because we knew that would work in this climate. All my friends were recognizing that I wasn't doing well anymore up there. I was getting very angry, so I really needed to find a way to do the next stage of our process or activism, at a distance from the U.S. government. I was so upset about George Bush. I haven't been back to the U.S. since George Bush was president, I've been gone for 10 years now, so. 2006. I couldn't handle that stuff for a long time.
So my friends accepted that and I was moving away and they kept on going with a lot of that and developing the technology there, so that kept going for a couple years, especially as the price of oil went through the roof, it was becoming more interesting.
But we couldn't do what we wanted to do up there. We started to look at farms--there were a lot of restrictions about what you're allowed to do. And I didn't just want to go have a farm, I wanted to try this experiment of...
Spenser: Community.
Josh: Of community, too, because I couldn't answer all of the questions just with "energy's cheaper", or "local", I was also realizing we couldn't have five refrigerators in every person's house, with three SUV's in every driveway. So I was trying to figure out a solution that answered that, so creating intentional communities--not exactly communes, I wasn't thinking that way, still I'm not--but well thought-through community where you were very efficient, sharing things a bit, sharing the big things at least. I couldn't do that though--I tried in Oregon. I couldn't get the permits to put in multi-family housing units with compost toilets.
Spenser: A fortune?
Josh: Couldn't even do it. You need a political movement already in place, just to even start those things a lot. It really did push me into leaving my home--the area that I called home. I probably could've gone to Missouri and done it, but there's a reason a lot of the intentional communities are in Tennessee and Kentucky and Missouri and stuff, their local zoning laws will let you experiment. Costa Rica is very similar, as long as you're not doing harm.
And Costa Rica doesn't have a military; I choose this part of the world for a couple reasons. I wanted to be in the heart of--I believe a lot of the future change and revolution's going to come from the Latin American countries, at least in the U.S., we're going to feel that push soon.
Spenser: Why?
Josh: Cause they've been like the slave culture for our food, and energy needs for a long time, and I really connected deeply with the Latin culture through my education and politics, like learning what we've done to Latin America over the years. Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador--
Spenser: Yeah, you read Chomsky on Nicaragua?
Josh: Yeah, and I started spending time with a lot of activists that were really engaged, and a lot of people that worked for me over the years, I became good friends with, and when I changed, they were ready to talk to me. They'd been ready to talk to me the whole time, but I wasn't ready to hear it. So when I opened up and wanted to learn, it was very quickly apparent that I related with the Latino culture a lot, and half my family is actually from Tijuana. My cousins are half-Mexican, half-American.
Spenser: Dad's side?
Josh: My mom's sister married a Mexican-indigenous man, and he was my favorite uncle.
Spenser: And you and Yemaya are both looking at this or is this more of a Josh idea?
Josh: She's been engaged mentally her whole life in wanting to disconnect from that all, and she's been going to the Oregon Country Fair's and the Burning Man's for her whole life and she was ready to live it, she thought. Her family was always pushing to be off-grid, go learn something new, go build the world you want. She was into it, but she was also happy to be near our family and raise our child near our grandparents and stuff. There were some challenges there in breaking away from the U.S., but I'm the only person in our whole crew that just doesn't go back. Everybody else tends to flow back and forth, so it hasn't been as drastic for everybody, but we did move here for the first five years together, the family, without really going back much at all. And Yemaya was into that, she wanted to experiment and see what we could pull off, too, and a lot of her friends were where this came from in my life.
Spenser: Had you figured out a plot in land or just an area in mind when you were looking at Costa Rica? Where were you at when you first flew to Costa Rica, do you already think, “It's going to be near Puriscal, it's going to be in Lanas, it's going to be on the coast, it's going to be this,” or are you just kind of shooting from the hip?
Josh: I wanted to find the best climate for what we were going to do, so I knew it was going to be in Costa Rica, Costa Rica doesn't have a military, doesn't fund foreign military ventures, so this was the top country on my list. I was thinking about New Zealand at first, but that would've pulled me really far from the U.S. sphere of influence, so Costa Rica was really head and shoulders above everywhere else, because of that. They have a tight social network here, people get health care, people get education, so I started recognizing that my first trip here, that this was different. And I had never met a Costa Rican in Oregon. I had only met the poor Latino classes that had to go north to work for Americans, but that wasn't the case for most Costa Ricans--this is a country where locals--other country's [people] come to work [here].
So it was a great exposure for me to feel the culture here, I love Costa Ricans. And my first experiences were on the east coast, that was too touristy for me--
Spenser: The Carribean?
Josh: Yeah, the Caribbean. Then I came over and spent some time on the west coast, and I didn't want to be near tourism, so I knew I needed to be in a place that needed help. Puriscal identified itself as one of the areas that needed the most help. The land here wasn't speculatively valued, because nobody really moves here for having their beach resort, this is an inland, mountain, off-the-bus, cement--
Spenser: What are we, 70 miles from the beach?
Josh: As the crow flies, no, it's actually way closer than you think. But it's a couple hours of driving and busing to get there. So there's not like that quick tourist flow up here, so we came to a community that was sort of cutoff and it was really for me, personally--I really needed to go somewhere that needed a lot of physical work done, that needed someone to put their nose down and just do it, because I was so macro, so big with my politics at the time, that I was not going to get anywhere, unless I ran for president or something, nothing I was doing would matter. People around me were tired of hearing it without solutions, so I had to come up with at least a couple solid answers. So I came here, got off-grid enough that I could scream at the jungle and not offend everyone in the world.
[laughs]
Really, get it out for a minute, go use my energy to go chop grass, plant trees, I started seeing what happens when you just do stuff, so this place in the beginning was politics manifested for me, the chance to do that, and the chance not to just get arrested every weekend for the rest of my life. I would've ended up with a mile-long arrest record for activism. Instead of just stopping Weyerhaeuser from cutting trees I decided to start planting them. This allowed that, and getting away from people that even spoke English was good for me, cause I had to start knuckling down and start communicating the most basic things again.
Spenser: So how did you, just on a logistical level, you said that Puriscal was one of the areas that needed help, but how do you know something like that?
Josh: Well I had looked in about a dozen different spots, and I had been talking to local brokers, I tried to find people that lived there and get advice from them, and our neighbor Dominique was the guy I first met out here, I found this area on Craigslist and so when we came out here in a car, I met this neighbor Dominique and he is a warrior for the environment, he's been out here for 15, 17 years, alone in the jungle. And he's very passionate about protecting the forests, and he immediately explained to me what was going on around here, and I could tell when I came, the forests were missing. You see it as you drive in, you probably can see it right now if you go to our website, the pictures, the destruction of the mountains here from deforestation, so Dominique was like the guard at the end of this road, and he was helping locals sell their farms to environmentally-dialed people. He wouldn't let this area go to palm and to monoculture anything. So when I came here and met Dominique, it became obvious that I was in a place that needed more support, and there was a couple of warriors like him out here, doing the frontline activism, and kind of going a bit--having a lot of challenges. It's really challenging when you're maybe the only one who cares that there's poison in the water, and when your poor neighbors who need a job will poison themselves for--
Spenser: It's what they need to do.
Josh: Two dollars a day. And Dominique tried really hard for years, but he has a personality that's really strong, and he alienated himself from the neighbors. So I had to kind of help people understand his message, even though he was giving it in a way that wasn't coming across so great. But I had a really good education with him in my first year here, about this area, and its needs, and about what trees mean. I was already on that path, I knew I was going to do reforestation and it was part of my life, bringing forests back, being an environmentalist. It's a big issue, but I didn't really know, I didn't have it in my veins yet, I didn't know everything. He was a big part of me understanding this area, and then I saw Rancho Mastatal was here, and with them close, and with what they were doing, I was excited to sister up with them. They were under way for years and they were worth listening to, I knew it, and Dominique--between the extreme of Dominique fighting, literally, the loggers and the hunters, and then this other school right up the way, doing the future, creating the solutions, I saw nice way to learn all of this. And when I came to this farm and met Carlos the first day, and his wife Lady, my instinct was to go with it, immediately. Within a few seconds of being on this land, I made an offer.
Spenser: You made an offer?
Josh: To buy the land from--
Spenser: From?
Josh: From, well the guy that owned it. I thought Carlos owned it.
[laughs]
Josh: Actually had a long talk with Carlos, translated through Dominique, it was actually pretty funny because I was like crying and stuff and saying, "thank you, I'm going to honor your area, I'm not going to hurt your land,” and after I go through all of this--and if you meet Carlos you'll understand, he's like a stoic, serious man, I love him but--all of the sudden I'm this huge gringo crying to him, I was like 300 pounds at the time.
[laughs]
Josh: And then Dominique looks at me after I say it all and he says, "That's not the owner, dude."
[laughs]
Josh: It's like, "Ok, thanks." And we met the owner on the way out, up the street, he was happy to be coming here that day, and he was building this first space [that we're sitting in].
Spenser: And he had a price or you had an offer?
Josh: I made an offer, he didn't have a price, he wasn't really selling, we made an offer that was in line with local prices, a little more, it's ok, it had power and water already which is a huge thing, and it had road access, sort of.
[laughs]
But the guy may have been building this to sell it one day but he wasn't, I found a farm just down the road on Craigslist with Dominique, but as we drive by this place, it just felt right, my friend Chris told me to stop and he's like, "This is a place we should look at." Spending a day with Carlos, I felt his genuine campesino feel that I was really looking for. By the end of that day, we were at a lawyer making sure everything was good, and then it was just a few days of discussion and we decided this was our place. I brought nine guys down with me that trip, to find the land. We had already decided it was in this area.
Spenser: From Portland?
Josh: Portland, Oregon, Texas, Utah, California. We all met down here.
Spenser: You had a fleet.
Josh: And we'd already targeted this area, that's why I found this area. I had been talking to Dominique on the phone, so I knew it was going to be Puriscal. Plus Puriscal had no big businesses in it, it was like a dream of a farm-town hub.
Spenser: Chris and Dominique, were they just as on board with the whole thing as you or were they like, "Wait a second Josh..." Cause at that point, it was heavily degraded cattle ranch land that looked pretty much like hell.
Josh: Yeah.
Spenser: So were they a little skeptical, giving a little pushback on this or were they like "bombs away, let's do it."?
Josh: A lot of my closest friends in that circle, they had a lot of faith in me, I was doing well in life and I knew how to make things happen, so they knew they weren't going to move here and live here day one. So a lot of them trusted in that. Dominique wanted us here because he knows that more than some rich group of gringos buying some forest that's already there and just calling it "conserved" is not the only answer. You have to regenerate. And so he was very excited to get me out here because he knows that we need this area and these injections of capital, needs energy put into it. Dominique was, although he's always been guarding of this area, so while he would want to help me, at the same time, he would always check me and try and make that I wasn't running away with my--that my "gringo business mind" wasn't just doing all of this, that it was coming from the heart. Most of my friends did not have a problem with it, except maybe it was a little too far off the grid. Some of my buddies really thought that it was too hard to drive here. But they knew that they'd be in place--a lot of my initial investors and friends and this, they were doing this as they had seven and eight year-olds that they knew they needed to stay in Portland or in Utah until they were in college or something, so a lot of those friends are just now getting into position to move here, and now the place is developed comfortably and it's ready for them.
Spenser: There are pictures, but a lot of people don't know, they don't see, but what was here on this land in 2006?
Josh: 2006. This house [that we're in] had a bottom frame, the cement frame was done, and the sticks were up for the room.
Spenser: Just sticks?
Josh: Yeah the sticks were up and the roof was on, but there were no walls up here.
Spenser: And nothing else, this was the only building?
Josh: Well there was a barn where the dorm is, that was a pig barn, it had 40-something pigs in it when I moved here.
Spenser: What did you do with the pigs?
Josh: Well we kept care of them for a few weeks but the ex-owner thought he'd kind of slap me around a little bit by not moving his pigs immediately, like we had agreed to. So one day, me neighbor Dominique came over and decided that this guy was treating me like a foreigner and trying to be a little shady, so we shot two of the pigs and fed them to the neighborhood in a big fiesta.
[laughs]
And when the guy showed up to take his pigs, I was like, "It's taxes man, you made me take care of them for a month." He laughed it off, and we've been friends ever since. But we got rid of the pigs, cleaned that area, started building the dorms, once the dorms were done, took this middle building where the studio is now, took that building down, permitted the studio, built that over a year or two, so by 2008 we had these three buildings and it was enough space for our friends and owners to come be here as we developed the back village area.
Spenser: So you already had somewhat, in your mind, a viable business model in mind from day one when you first bought it? It wasn't like, "Hey, what do we do with this?" You already kind of had it in your head?
Josh: Yes and no. I knew we needed a place. I said to myself, I didn't care about being a profitable business. like I knew we'd be investing for up to 10 years--
Spenser: Before we see a dollar.
Josh: Growing trees, yeah. Growing trees mean you're going to watch trees grow for a living, for a while.
Spenser: Well, what are we talking about in terms of trees in 2006?
Josh: It was empty, there were some big trees in these quebradas and these creeks but mostly it was cattle fields, where we're sitting now, you can see cattle fields rolling all the way to the back.
Spenser: Just so people know, I'll link out to these photos in the show notes, but I don't think they're quite from 2006.
Josh: My mom has them.
Spenser: Ok, well we'll see if we can pull those up for you guys, but anyway, keep going. Right now, I've taken some aerial photos and the place looks gorgeous, I mean, it looks like it couldn't be healthier, to the untrained eye, but 2006, it's looking like--
Josh: It was degraded really bad. The business end of it, I came at it with, "We want to grow trees for these experimental crops, we want to see what's possible with energy, that's why our name is VerdEnergia Pacifica. We're trying to figure out energy, we're not just making green energy, we're observing it and learning it,” so I knew we were going to have some kind of oil production off of this farm, one day. I did not know we were going to evolve into a place that took in volunteers and interns and taught people this stuff. I did not know we'd be a school. I didn't have that many yes's for people at that point, to think I deserved to teach anyone anything. So I was in the school of hard knocks of regeneration for myself, so every bag of poo I carried up a hill here in the beginning was like, I felt like I was getting lighter on the karmic level.
[laughs]
Spenser: So you're thinking jatropha is maybe going to make a business?
Josh: I knew that would, I knew that would happen, and I knew this country would have opportunity for things in that realm. Because price of fuel here is twice as much as the states on any day.
Spenser: Right, but you ended up figuring out soap was a better--
Josh: Years later.
Spenser: So you were thinking biodiesel at the beginning?
Josh: Really, I was more thinking, "Build a place." It was a bunch of levels, it depends on who you ask. There are 20 people that started this together, I was primary investor, and I was here full-time, so my vision--
Spenser: You were the only person who was here full-time? Everybody else had kids and stuff, everybody else had to fly back for stuff?
Josh: My ex-wife and my daughter were here full-time for 5-6 years in the beginning, and my parents would come down for 3-6 months to help build the initial stuff, so really what we thought in the beginning was, we need a place where we can feed ourselves, we can have nice shelter. All the people in my tribe were very, very aware that the current system is a house of cards, and that Wall Street and bailouts and big banks, it's all bullshit. A lot of our friends, without trying to sound like survivalists, we were trying to figure out how we're trying to have our survival ship ready. So building this, and the words I use, "food forest" and stuff, I know those words then, but my friends that were involved in organic farming and CSA's were very confident if we just started, and just got the trees in the ground, that eventually this would happen. So I had listened to people who knew what they were doing, and I decided that I could be the one that could commit a couple years to it without turning back.
So I was ok to be the ambassador of my more dialed and intelligent friends when it came to these things. And when I got here I started leaning hard on what Carlos' knowledge was, and trying to learn that, and Dominique, and foresters and government officials. Since day one, I've been inviting governments here to help us learn, so we've had the ministry of agriculture and the co-op and everyone has been giving us grants, giving us plants, giving us knowledge, and I've just been ready to accept and learn it. It wasn't until about year five that I got in the flow of how we were a business, we were a place that people wanted to come to, to spend three months and learn. We were a place that some people wanted to come to and just read for three months and by the time they leave they're ready to go be a political activist in their town, we were like a retreat. We've been a belly dance retreat, we've been a yoga retreat for our friends, we're kind of just like a canvas for all of our friends to do whatever kind of business thing that could work here, and in line with our kind of "don't do any harm ideals." Those ideals got more and more away from don't do harm into yes's, as I learned permaculture, because I started to see that there were uniform answers, and that people had been working on it for years, I wasn't reinventing this. So I started to be able to say yes to things at about year four or five.
Spenser: So Verde has evolved into quite a few things, so now you have these other businesses where you're looking to expand outside of just this little corner of Costa Rica, so what do you have going on?
Josh: Well, a lot of what we're doing here, if I took in people as investors or partners, I was taking them in as roommates. We were in this social experiment that we're doing to experiment, the social system we'd been building. So, I had to be a little selective over the years, I learned that I couldn't just say, "hey yes and join us" to everyone, cause we'd fill up our little place. I don't want everyone to move to Costa Rica, I don't everyone to be the same, I'm not looking for uniformity, I'm looking for unity. That's a big difference and a lot of communities like this are like little religious, uniform centers. Everybody wears the same shoes and all believes the same religion, and I hate that stuff. That may be a strong word, I really hate that stuff.
[laughs]
In the last few years, I've been figuring out how to make this more accessible to others, so the things that we've experimented with here, I could call Verde more of a laboratory for a lot of the ideas, and now I see the stuff that works here and how it can easily be duplicated and spun off and done in other places. So we've started a regenerative, resource management system with our neighbors that want to do it, where we're using the easiest, totally chemical-free pioneer species, the crops that just grow here like weeds, and those are very valuable here and elsewhere in the world, as medicines or building materials, while holding the torch and passing it forward, of Verde's ideals and permaculture's ideals. So we've learned how to take the best of these tools and then apply them to all sorts of different businesses. It might work great because what we've learned from forestry duplicates to the farm above us, to be a great forest program and that has byproducts from lumber to governments all over the world, just pay us to plant trees.
Where in the States, we're starting companies because there are needs in the festival scene, and what we've learned here about organizing and what we've learned here about permaculture methods for water conservation, or for applying in these other, totally different businesses, that have nothing to do with forestry. We're also starting soap companies and spinning off that with wasted avocados, in southern California, or how we're creating new backing for local capital through forestry management, or through medicinal crops, like creating credit unions with our neighbors in a sense, like new trade networks. All this stuff is spinning out of what we learned at Verde, into a ton of different dynamic businesses, because we've done the important part first, which is organizing people. So we've done the part: we've organized groups of dedicated people that want to change the world, and we've figured out how, and mixed in all of this at Verde, there are both cash crops and cash ideas and people--human capital that can be put to work when it's organized.
Spenser: I think a lot of people don't understand that when they have their wealth stored in a bank account, they kind of think it's sitting in this bronze vault and it just kind of sits there and they can walk to the bank and the money gets taken out and then they can spend their money how they want, but when you actually look at where the money is being loaned out to or [what] you're investing in--we were talking earlier about your Merrill Lynch investment portfolio, you've got your nice big bull on there, it seems really legit, but people don't really kind of dig into what's really in that portfolio. Just talk a little bit about--we don't need to get into the details of each and every business venture here--but the idea of storing wealth in things that people actually believe in, in things that align with their values, and also with real physical things that they can see and exist, it's not a speculation-based model where we're kind of just hoping, crossing our fingers, gambling. With everything that happened with the crisis in '08 and '09...
Josh: Everything's financialized now, instead of backed--
Spenser: Back to wealth really being tied to value, not tied to bullshit.
Josh: Yeah, not fiat. Yeah, well, there's hardly any cash anymore, almost everything's just a digital representation. So there is no vault, anymore, hardly. In fact, if you go try and take out $20,000 from your own bank account, you probably need a few days with your credit union to even find the money.
Spenser: People think that there's this bank with a gigantic room of money, a swimming pool.
Josh: Somewhere, but not your bank.
Spenser: Not your local bank.
Josh: No, that's done, now what there is, the entire world is like one, big, interconnected battery of the wealth moving around immediately. Way faster than immediately, we're talking nanoseconds, is where they trade now. So when you have a bank account and it's make you "x" percent per year, where does that money come from? Maybe on a local level, it does come somewhat from a house being loaned on, and you making a little bit of that percentage in difference, that may be the more pure idea of this, but what's happened now is, your wealth is immediately thrown into some project somewhere, and I would bet, if you looked into your Janus Fund or your Merrill Lynch fund, you'd find that you probably are doing things to make the percentage you request of them, you're probably doing things that wouldn't be in line with you if you had to do them yourself. Every friend that I've ever looked into their retirement accounts with, or any of it, they find it's in deforesting some spot in Africa, or mining or something, because that's where a lot of the real money is, big money.
Spenser: And oil, of course.
Josh: And oil, and stuff like that. Or weapons manufacturing, which is a big part of our economy in the U.S. I think maybe half of our economy is built around that, so most people that I know and love, are passively investing in things that they detest, all the time. And we talk about where we spend our money, and that's a good start. Like a lot of people boycott successfully. Things like a lot of my friends and family don't shop at Walmart because they don't want to support it, but then their savings account where their not shopping at Walmart, is investing in Walmart.
Spenser: Whether they know it or not.
Josh: Whether they know it or not, they literally are investing in one of the companies that's feeding Walmart, or the mines or whatever. I don't know why we wouldn't want to know where our money is sitting, especially since money to me really does represent this moment of yesterday, or my youth, that I spent time trading for it. I spent real time earning that money and now it is going to sit somewhere and do something and hopefully go up in value so I didn't throw away my time.
So I decided years ago, and I've always been a self-employed person, tools are where money is for me. Most of my life, my dad didn't have a lot of cash but he had the proper tool to do the job, to bring in cash. So, I'm much more into managing my big chunk of stored energy and wealth, in things that are very useful, that can create more wealth, and a certain amount of it, liquid and useful in a bank that I can buy and sell what I need to today, that's fine. I'm not opposed to money, I don't hate money, the second we dissolve the current system, we're going to have to build a much smarter money system, so I want to be a part of that, I want to be a part of creating the new, resource-backed economy. Right now, it's all financialized and even some of the biggest producers of real resources, like Saudi Arabia, are changing to financialize everything they do, because they can see the light at the end of this tunnel, or the darkness at the end of this tunnel.
Spenser: Something at the end of the tunnel.
Josh: They know there's an end to that tunnel.
So we don't have to think about it as an end to resources, it's just that resource is being exhausted in its way, like oil is. But with forestry, there's an opportunity to have a bunch more, we can grow that, you can't make more oil really, and a lot of the ways that we think we can are hyper-inefficient. So, we're going to have to replace, eventually, this debt burdened fiat system. We're going to have to start writing off these obnoxious debts that can't ever be repaid. It's going to happen soon enough, which means all of the things attached to that dollar, everything you saved, is going to susceptible to the ups and downs, inflation/deflation.
While I would have some cash, some U.S. dollars and some Euros, and keep them as useful to me, I also have other tools in my box, and some of those are trees, and some of those are water, and some of those are soon enough--air. People are paying for that now. What we're talking about isn't radical even, it's just diversified. The wealthiest people in the world, like the Koch brothers, they own Georgia Pacific. They are in the forest game. We're not really doing something radical, we're just bringing those ideas back to the common person, and by investing in the groups the way we do it, we're investing as small groups of middle class and lower class people that invest their time, their knowledge, or their small amounts of cash. We're able to pull off owning part of the resource commons, this way. If not, we'd have to have a functioning government to do this, and we're not really functioning as governments anymore. We have corporations making decisions and billionaires doing whatever they want, playing with our societies and jerking prices around where they feel necessary. All these things are so based on faith. I want to have part of my life and my kid’s future to be based on something more solid, scientific. So I'm really into a scientific approach to capital and to wealth, instead of a religious approach. A faith-based approach to capital? That's not how I approach anything in life, why would I let money be my church? If I want to be faith-based I'll go join some fun hippy church, not the dollar church.
[laughs]
Really. My Dad's churches were fun as kid. I don't like it, but I'm not going to live in superstition.
Spenser: What's something you would tell your 20-year-old self and your 30-year-old self?
Josh: I was already pretty focused when I was 20. I was probably too focused, already. I would definitely tell myself to start storing away more of what I was earning in those days, in the tools that I would need long-term, cause I know I wasted thousands of hours in my youth, earning money and really blowing it. In hindsight, I would've been more active into the tools I would need in the future, I would've given myself permission to follow my heart more there.
Spenser: What did you spend it on?
Josh: Nice apartments and cars and things that seemed kind of like assets in that old world but were actually just provisional, almost burdens.
Spenser: But you said you liquidated all that stuff in 2005, 2006, right before the crash right?
Josh: Yeah, I was about 25, 26 then. But when I was 20 I was really out of touch.
Spenser: You ended up selling all that stuff, right, or no?
Josh: Yeah, but I only accumulated a lot of the assets that I had in the last three or four years, from like 22 to 26, 27, because all the things I'd been doing, kind of came to a head there, and our business took off. So in my mid-20's is when I built up a lot of the wealth that I carried forward into this. Bought the houses and bought the cars but cars weren't a store of wealth, those end up losing me money every time.
[laughs]
So if I could backup to when I was 30, I would've told myself maybe to think a little more long-term. By the time I was 23 or 24, I was thinking long-term.
If I had to talk to myself at 30, I was already here, a couple of years, I was here a year already, I would've given myself permission to calm down a little bit, and just have faith in what's happening, when you plant trees and when you coordinate people. I would've just told myself to get more and more happy about our solutions, cause for a while, at that age, I was probably just more about the no's.
Spenser: What were you worried about? What was your greatest fear when you started VerdEnergia, in 2006-2007, what woke you up at night, thinking this thing is going to crash, or it's not going to go anywhere? What was your fear?
Josh: Not changing, and letting the world economy crush my family and friends cause I didn't change fast enough, not having an option. I was very urgent to have what we have now, like a fruiting place. I knew that it was going to take time. I would tell myself again, dig your well before you need it. Once you're thirsty, it's hard to dig. And I'm still kind of there, in that same attitude, how stock markets stay operating with all of the criminality and all this crazy shit, I don't know how we allow this. But back then I was really urgent about that, I thought that any moment I would be really needed by my tribe, or that this idea would be very much needed and hopefully in a position to help. So, I was hyper motivated to get that done, and I would tell myself to be more urgent, but maybe have more patience at the same time, internally. Urgently do the work, with an internal patience, because it's going to work, and I didn't know that it would work.
Spenser: I guess maybe you didn't have so much of a specific fear. Was there part of you that thought, at the beginning, like, "oh man, what if I go there and no one wants to cooperate with me, my friends all abandoned me, my neighbor lets their cows run all over my..." You know what I mean? Like specific things about VerdEnergia that you had fears about, that clearly ended up being mostly unfounded. Or maybe you didn't have anything like that.
Josh: No, I sort of burnt the ships when I got here, [of] my own self. I had a lot of those fears in the year leading up to leaving, as I was actually transitioning and selling my old life away and trading it away like it was real at that point. The luxury I was accustomed to, eating what I want when I wanted, restaurant life, having a job like that, that was dissolved a year or two before I came. So, I was already digesting a lot of that, and learning to accept that and actually flow in that.
That was maybe the hardest part in the beginning, knowing that I was going to be knuckling down and not participating for a while in what our culture has kind of provided for us. But I didn't really care because I'm committed to the change, and I really can't handle the way it's going, I have a real difficult, moral challenge with the way the U.S. functions and stuff, so I burnt the ships when I got here, there was no turning back.
Right before I came, a couple months before I came, I was at Burning Man, another turning point in my life was when I did a bunch of LSD at Burning Man, sort of by accident. Fear peeled off when I was there, I just had this moment of seeing how people do cooperate and make crazy things happen. And I'd been in the festival scene for a while and I wasn't in naïveté about it, [as if] it was going to save the world. But I did start to understand that people can get together and do stuff, and economically make it work, and my fear peeled away then, I believed I had a big enough tribe of risk-takers to do it with me.
Spenser: Would you say that's your greatest talent, is just organizing people? You've had success in sales, you've run businesses, but that's the core of what you do is to motivate and persuade people, and organize people?
Josh: I think that's a by-product of me caring about stuff. I tend to care about stuff a lot, when I care about it. And when I care about something a lot, and I recognize its need to grow or expand, I don't understand why others wouldn't. I guess that comes, and I also like to innovate. My dad taught me to be innovative, my dad's an innovator: a poor, mining mechanic who can pretty much build whatever he needs because he has a need and he wants to make it happen. So, I had needs, I had things I always wanted to do in life, whether it was when I was younger and it was just financial, or as I got older, centered around my child or my child's future. I don't know when I had Kaileah, when she same into my life, my daughter, my needs became immediately intertwined with the whole future of this planet, cause she lives on beyond me, so that moment, that moment is my political awakening when there was a child coming into my life that made me live beyond. My genetic code demands me [to] push. I don't know, it's weird. I've always, whenever I've been passionate about something, my friends and family do it with me and it works, or it doesn't, but I try a lot. I like to try.
Spenser: Well, do you think that having spent so many years in activism and trying to do these projects, I find that people, including myself, and I think it's something with youth, is we have way too much short-term thinking and expectations of things happening, way too fast. If something doesn't work after a week, you might as well throw it away.
Josh: Be cynical about it.
Spenser: Be cynical about it. I've gotten a lot more calm having read history and realized that women were trying to get the right to vote way before 1920. It didn't get anywhere--
Josh: It did slowly.
Spenser: It did slowly, it did slowly. The arc of change is slow, and does that give you strength at this point that, VerdEnergia wasn't built overnight and just because not everyone in Lanas is running through the streets screaming "permaculture", you still get up the next morning and keep at it. Because you don't think on--your business plans, they talk about things happening in 15-20 years, short-term stuff, too, but does that give you a little bit more peace than--you were in the business community, they just care about the next three months--that's long-term!
Josh: Yeah, some people.
Spenser: Next week is as far as a lot of people go.
Josh: Every business and every government and every community, I think everybody has different jobs. My job, I tend to want to create the future, instead of just organize the now, so I can see that stuff done a lot in my mind. So permaculture to me is a 50-year process, a 6,000-year process when you talk about forestry. But it's a two-year process when you talk about medicine like turmeric right? Or it's a three second process if you're just talking about feeding your neighbor now, cause you have surplus.
My perspective is all over the place, and I see the short-term important parts--they don't have to run around screaming "permaculture" in Lanas. What they have are consistent jobs now planting trees, instead of cutting them. So whether or not their consciousness is totally coming in line with this one way that I think, the word permaculture sums up a lot of things, but I get a little big about even that. I think we're more evolved than--we're almost trying to rebuild a totally toast system, I feel like we're moving to Mars again, just coming back out here into the campo, permaculture is just one way of explaining it.
So my vision is long-term, that can be hard for some people to understand, but we do it all the time. We save in 401k's in the U.S. when we're 20. We choose to take 10% of our income and shuffle it off to something that we're not going to see until we're 72. We're thinking 52 years ahead sometimes, when we start a job. But it's so natural now, because the way we talk about it, that we just do that, and then we kind of think and talk about it, like we don't think long-term, but we are, with 10% of our time already, and our company matches some, and we do it for tax reasons and it's kind of maybe even greedy in the short-term, could be. But I don't think I'm really all that out of line with it, I'm just talking about something that seems unfamiliar again, I'm talking about investing in nature, or directly into resources--like that just sounds more intense now but 115 years ago, every farmer had his trees that were planted for his son and his grandson and his daughter, so these things are long-term when I see them in nature.
And in politics, I read Eugene Debs, I read things from 100 years ago and these people, I'm standing on their shoulders, I'm standing on the shoulders of the people who stood on the shoulders of the people who stood on the shoulders of these great people, 150 years ago. I got longer-term with this when I got history in perspective, like you said. I think it's really important, history, and they make it boring in school, to discourage this, to discourage us understanding that struggles are different than we think. Yeah, I think way too many of us think we're going to have a revolution tomorrow. Everybody's waiting for some kind of disaster to start.
Spenser: "The Day After Tomorrow"
Josh: That's how we want it. That's how we're conditioning it. Trees grow slow, man.
Spenser: Right, and I think that a lot of people have that idea about their career or their life in general. They get out of college, or maybe even before college. Now the expectation is that you go to college so maybe like 22-year-olds, they kind of think of it as like, "My success is determined in the next...very short-term." They don't think of--how is what I'm doing now going to get me to something in 20 years, that I want to be a part of? I guess in a certain way, we have that luxury, I've had that luxury because I've been really fortunate, but I think even people that have the means to not have to think in terms of tomorrow, they can think longer-term, still find themselves--I mean our culture, it's a consumerist culture is about, "Can you afford the next vacation? The next car? The next whatever." It's not long-term goals, that's not the plane that people operate on.
Josh: Or it's just kind of happening sub-consciously because people are taking care of that. You pay into FICA every week. It's just taken care of. We've had a lot of these talks already as a society, so we thought it was all good, so we've relaxed about it. But when you realize that they've invested it into nothingness and half your money for social security is already gone to some war somewhere that you don't understand. Like, we've just given up the power on this, it's not that we don't participate. You participate with between 7% and 40, 50% of your income, participates in the long-term, you just don't participate in politics, normally. The average American isn't working on it, it's just happening. And literally, you spend, let's say I was, in the States, my last years making good money, six months of every year I was sending money off to somebody else's vision of how to organize the future and pay for the past.
[laughs]
Interest payments for World War I or whatever the hell they're still paying for. I think we are spending our time doing it, we're just not conscious of it anymore. So I'm just asking people to be conscious with some of it, and we may think of somebody from the 1810's as ignorant compared to us now, cause we're all so educated and we've read so much, but they had several generations covered, just in the natural--I think of today and tomorrow, and next month and...we have like an "or" type vocabulary in the U.S. now. I'm an accountant or a mechanic or a doctor. In 1812 you were a mechanic and a doctor and an economist, or you were dead. Your farm was done. Farmers were like innovative, cool, creative humans, for a long time. And we've just recently became so specialized that, I don't know, I don't think we do "and" anymore, we do "or", and I don't like that.
Spenser: It seems like these intentional communities, permaculture-based communities are picking up some steam, what's the most common pitfall in your mind, for somebody that's just starting one out, cause not all of them work, a lot of them collapse right? And we all want to think that they all blossom and everybody grows rich and the local community does great, but that's not what happens for some of them, some of them fall through. So what, in your mind, are some of the greatest pitfalls that you would, maybe you haven't avoided entirely, but the place is still here, it's doing well, for the most part you've managed to make it work--what would you tell somebody?
Josh: For one, you have to not go into debt. You can't be paying interest payments to somebody for property.
Spenser: Or you're done?
Josh: You're done eventually, cause you're going to have to start chasing cash and then stress comes in and then you compromise immediately and then the ideals aren't met that you started with, people quit anyway.
Spenser: So you need capital up front.
Josh: Capital, I mean there's lots of ways to think of capital, we'll talk about that a lot, right. From that old neighbor that wants his land redone to you having cash to buy something, it should be done in a way that doesn't leverage your future in interest-bearing payments. That's number one I think, but quickly another number one which is bigger than that, is not everybody has shared vision. A lot of the time you see couples split up because it's the man or the woman that wanted it, not both, that seems to be a big pitfall.
Spenser: So make sure that if you're with somebody, that you really see the same thing here.
Josh: Or that you maybe diverge and don't add the stress of it, someone who doesn't want what you do want. I mean people should follow their hearts, or you're not going to be happy anywhere. I've heard way too many people think they have to have a perfect plan first. And that probably kills more projects than anything, cause then they never even start. I'd rather have a project start and lose 1 out of 5 members than not start at all.
Spenser: Paralysis by analysis.
Josh: People think this has to be done. Oh, we're going to organize, we're building our constitution, and for 10 years I've had friends still tell me, as my avocado trees now produce, we're eating avocados today from our farm, that are here, not because I knew what I was doing 10 years ago, but because I planted trees.
So there's an amount that has to go into the boldness of stepping forward. There's a genius in boldness. At some point in these things, you have to just push, and do it. Because really, literally, trees and watersheds cannot wait for politics. Politics can help mold and shape things as they grow, but there are real things that have to happen, and expenses are not going down. Each year, inflation affects us. If I waited one year to build that studio to the next, it could've cost between 7% and 14% more in Costa Rica, for cement and nails. So I say, get your action on the ground now.
And another thing is people put way too much stress on the land they want, rather than the practice they need. So I see it as vital, that rather than just getting into debt, or going and living on a bare piece of land that you know nothing about, you don't know how to approach it, you're better off taking the money you were going to spend on that and getting good at something. You should be at a permaculture class or you should be at a carpentry class or you should be at a biofuel seminar so that you're vital to any project anywhere in the world. I think that's more important.
Spenser: Well, I think there's sort of an idea that everybody at these intentional communities or permaculture communities is out in a field with a rake, or they're picking avocados, right? That's what everybody's doing.
Josh: It's nice at times, a "permablitz", you go out and do that, but not all the time.
Spenser: Right, so you're saying that investing in your own--getting good at one domain--
Josh: Or whatever it is you need to be good at for a project. What are your hobbies? Be good at what you do. We say, “Don't just be a specialist”, but in the next breathe I say, "don't go against your nature." If you're good at talking with people, permaculture needs a lot more talking with people right now than it needs green thumbs. Most everybody I've met in permaculture is a green thumb. They want to be in the fields. This whole other level needs to be people that organize economies and treaties with neighbors and marketing the product you grow in your region that nobody else can grow anywhere else, and it's a cancer cure, like those things, if they can't get your product that you planted to some customer or--
Spenser: Market.
Josh: Or patient or whatever it is you're doing, something amazing, whatever, you're not going to work. So we don't all need to be the same again, it's about doing something in unity, I think a lot of people have missed that, they've missed that these movements require a whole governing body of humans making a lot of different things happen. Somebody is good at doing plumbing or no one drinks water. Somebody enjoys working with compost, probably, hopefully. I have people who show up in my life that really love nothing more, and a lot of people, it surprised me, than touching and making human poop into manure for trees. There are people that are obsessed with things that you might never want to do. I have the tolerance to sit down and spend 26 hours on a phone call with someone to get them to understand something.
Spenser: Some people would blow their brains out.
Josh: Or never be able to do it. So they'd never raise money for a project or something, so I'm really learning that way too many people in the beginning think that they need to be a jack of all trades, and what you need is to look at the project and observe what it needs and then make all your shared talents and human capital apply well to bringing that to fruition. That would be something that maybe too many people are like, "Oh, I have to be a gardener? I can't do permaculture." "Whoa, the wrong person has talked to you about this, cause you think you have to be a gardener to be in permaculture?" I need kindergarten teachers to have permaculture ideals somewhere in their heart where they have good care for the land, right livelihood, where their priorities are in line, the constitution that we all live by, not how each of us works, that's going to change. I want librarians and I want Navy SEAL's, we need Navy SEAL's in permaculture. It's not the way that most people talk about this.
Spenser: Just as definitely overanalyzing things and never wanting to take a risk is certainly a problem, I think maybe this culture evolved maybe a little after you left the U.S., now everybody's got a Kickstarter for the idea they thought of last night over a couple beers, right? So what's the other side of that where people don't think things through at all?
Josh: Science, observation, these are the words I would use. Drinking a beer and having an idea is the first part of a scientific equation, not the whole thing. So like, yeah I had a beer or a bong rip at a festival 15 years ago and said, "We're going to have a place someday where we get to eat and walk around in our sarongs all day and da da da..." But then it was $2 million later, research & development, engineers and a ton of work. People all over the world, and some people love to do accounting and some people who love to do law. All sorts of things, that's the beginning and I think people in our culture now are way too immediately gratified all the time, you have a cute idea and there's enough money in our communities that you kind of like tip-out to each other and just keep doing these Kickstarters and funding things and it's fun--it's community-organizing.
And we did it before when we made movies with our community, we watched ["American Movie"] last night, people had been doing that since before the Internet, just kick starting things. It's kind of how capitalism started, you sold shares of your business, that was a Kickstarter. Wall Street is a kick starting organization, so people don't have to go into debt to start businesses, they have owners. So this isn't super new, but I know what you're saying, it's too impulsive now, anybody can play. So I would like people to get on board with the long-term, it's hugely lacking, and that may be the only thing that lacks, the boldness of the youth, is the long-term. That's where permaculture came into my life, at the time when I was settling down and learning that if I can observe, adapt, test, observe, adapt, test, my idea gets forged, over time. Taking an idea from the first day, it's not forged yet, it's not ready. So I think people should get on board with that.
Spenser: There's a lot of apathy in the U.S. regarding politics, on a lot of things. And very few people have your energy for it, or have the belief that they can change things. Is it mostly that their standards for what counts as change are too high? Of course there's some basis for the apathy in that, we have mostly bought elections, we thought Obama was going to be--at least I did, I was 18 when Obama was elected--we all thought he was our savior. Not much really changed.
Josh: Best marketing campaign.
Spenser: Right, he's a great politician. What would you tell someone to give them some energy to feel like there's some hope for things?
Josh: Well first, you do change the world, everyday. Americans have a huge footprint, everyday you wake up, you eat your fucking Wheaties, you get in your car, you just changed the world. Was it good or bad? You can analyze that everyday and get that refined to where...
Spenser: People are thinking too big?
Josh: Too big. Think big, think my foot just landed on an Indian kid’s face.
Spenser: Their expectations for the results are too big.
Josh: At first, you go internal and you start to realize, "Are you even doing the activism? Or is it just a flyer and signature occasionally on MoveOn.org or something?" And that's good, that works, too, it's "and", not "or". But I don't think it's too big, I think it's just--we're making a big impact everyday.
One of the biggest impacts we can do at first is realizing our own pressure, and releasing our own pressure off the third-world, through what we demand, has real ripples through economies and through people's lives. The minute you order a product, something is happening somewhere, for real. Do you matter alone in that? No, but that's a start. Then it goes from there. How's your local water? Is that poisoning you? You should do something about that. In Flint, Michigan, they need people to believe that they can win right now, and fight, and change it, so they don't get poisoned by lead right? So there are global fights and local fights and it's "and, and, and".
Spenser: Think global, act local?
Josh: And act global, and act universal.
Spenser: Right, but don't have the--I just think there's a bit of a--I'm speaking even for myself, I think I had an issue where, "Oh, well the Paris Conference was bullshit, so might as well pack it in and kind of watch Netflix and drink and forget about things." You know what I mean? Cause the expectation is, "Oh, well if we don't reach an agreement that's going to completely overhaul global emissions, then it's a loss and we should kind of fold up the tent and move on to something else."
Josh: No, it definitely feels that way, I go through that myself, all the time. I know that my area right here, has creeks flowing that it didn't before because I planted trees, that instantly makes me go, wait a minute, ok, so I'm an idiot sort of.
I grew up in a wrecking yard, I have some friends, we smoke pot and talk about things at festivals and then we try and do them. But it works. And then all of the sudden I see how that little thing working actually makes sense as a way to support an economy, so like, I can see it being, a not being naive thing, I just think we don't understand history enough and how much we fit into it and we're but drops in an ocean of drops, and I don't do superstition at all, and I don't know that what I do is going to matter all that much in my life except that I know it did matter to the frog right here below us, and the creek we can here running, that is real because some people chose to change ten years ago, so there's only whales right now at all because 75 years ago some people like us chose to take action. There's only not acid rain falling all over LA and in San Francisco and Oregon because somebody did something.
So we are winning, if you're a woman or a black person, it's way better than it was 100 years ago, so I don't discount that, I think it's my weird, white man ego that can let me think, "Nothing ever changes." It changes, everyday, literally, on a global scale. It's going so fast, too, population growth...Capitalism itself, I've heard recently called, "Capitalism is it's own revolution." It wasn't a natural presence in the universe, it's something some people made up and keep making up and setting precedent and moving forward, it keeps working and not working, and they adjust or they don't, and that's a revolution. Our revolution is no different, it's just how we choose to wake up, spend our energy, maybe be naive sometimes, I'm super---Hedges talks about this--
Spenser: Chris Hedges, we're talking about, I'll put a link to some of his books in the show notes. I read a few of them while I've been at Verde and don't agree on everything of course, but he definitely has force and courage and he's an intellect on lots of things, especially history and I've learned a lot from reading his books.
Josh: He says that us that do these things and trying to build this utopian idea of the world, however he says it, we're almost faith-based people. We have to believe this stuff even though it doesn't feel real and in front of us now. And I want my grandchild to literally have a biodiverse set of species on this planet and that's not going to be real if we don't change a lot, and it's probably not going to change, so it's a weird thing for me and my family to resist right now, or to try and push it the other way, cause it can seem futile, but I can't look at my grandchild and say I did not try, and I don't know how anybody who becomes less--when you become awakened to what's going on, I don't know how you can think that through and not say, "I tried," or "I thought I tried, even if I couldn’t win."
We look at all the characters in movies, in history, the underdogs that try and lose: that's what we want to be, that's what we love, that's who we make heroes. So why don't we act like it? All of our Jesus, all of our Buddha, all of our people, that we act like we love, we don't do anything like they do, we don't put ourselves on the line. So I just beg people to actually do what they probably think they should do anyway.
Spenser: One thing that I've found, and I think you think this, too, living that life is more interesting. It's more fun. I think there's a bit of an idea that if you become politically involved or an activist or you take on a different lifestyle, that you're just going to be miserable, because you're going to miss your TV dinner, you're going to miss Netflix, you know what I mean? There's a sense that that's going to be such a sacrifice whereas, just personally, for me, I was living a very comfortable lifestyle in Santa Barbara, I'm not saying I was totally buying into the man or whatever, it takes something to step away from that and things have been more interesting, it's more fun.
Josh: It's more interesting, and I get yesterday's computer out of the garbage for free and then download the movie for free, so I don't have to not have what you have.
Spenser: Right.
Josh: So it's funny, when I step back, I found--
Spenser: You found a way to adapt.
Josh: I found food in the garbage, there's smoked salmon in the package that I couldn't afford yesterday, that I can take now, out of the garbage, so it was really an awakening, more than just a decision to live with less.
My mom told me once years ago, "You can't be poor enough to help the poor." And that sunk in, like ok, that's true, you can't be poor enough to help the poor. But you maybe shouldn't kick people and keep them down to keep yourself fed. But when I jumped out of that stream, the amount of stuff that's in the garbage, and the waste stream of this world allows for a whole new system to be built, parallel to the current system, to then overwhelm it, on its waste, it's like an amazing thing. We have the resources we need without drilling a mine, we're just going to repurpose all the shit the empire poops out, and it's perfectly good. So I'm finding, yes, I did have those moments, but it's way more interesting, because I get to be innovative again. Right now, especially with how it seems insurmountable in ways, it's like running a fun rebel force. We're like a hippie rebel force. We get to come up with better ways to relate to each other, we share a refrigerator, teaches us about ourselves, we get to talk about the way we effect the world, we get to plant trees, we get to learn that those things are actually profitable. All this stuff adds up into fucking interesting, for sure. Way better than my little ticky-tacky box where I was paying my own loan, and everybody else was, and when I even spend a minute watching movies that show me a glimpse of like normal America life, how boring it makes me feel inside. I dread just seeing a normal car pull in the driveway, I'm like, "Ugh, it all feels so unnatural to me now."
Spenser: Yeah, it's grotesquely boring.
Josh: It is.
Spenser: It really is.
Josh: We think that's the way things are, but that's the way somebody thought it through, and that somebody was like literally, Goodyear, and GM, and weird people and ideas that I don't like, so we can rethink that. And when I walk to me neighbors house, here we get to go through a little creek and I might get bit by a snake or something, but I had to pay attention, and along the way, I get to see a bird that I get to see on Discovery Channel, that's valuable. And instead, someone has Netflix to get a disc that has a bird that they'll never see.
So I don't know, I think the sacrifices as being outweighed, the pros and cons, I was getting a short picture, I had a smaller perception before, of the pros and cons, now I'm seeing it bigger. And some of the cons are very hardcore, very hardcore. Lost a young woman, 13-year-old girl died, nearly in my arms, a few years ago, because we're not in a space where it's completely sanitized. But then in the north, she may have been hit by a car. You don't have a rescue crew here, maybe you don't have a cop when you need him, but then maybe you don't have a cop when you don't need him. You know what I'm saying.
Spenser: There's trade-offs. There's trade-offs.
Josh: I don't want a cop to bug me when I cross the street, but I do want a cop here when there's a robber, so the trade-offs are now--I am taking more responsibility for everything, not just the fun parts. That's interesting, that's been a pro and con thing I had to learn, but it's more rewarding, honestly, and it's more interesting, I demand people be more responsible for themselves and that's a big learning curve for people in the beginning.
Spenser: For somebody that hasn't read, "Capital in the 21st Century", by Thomas Piketty, which I did a little review of, hasn't read a lot of Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges, what's a way in that you would recommend that you see work for people because, it's a lot to swallow, right away, for people that are just looking to kind of [get involved]?
Josh: I'd join a CSA, join a community supported agriculture project. You don't need to know everything right now, there's plenty of places doing it, that are growing food locally and collectively sharing it and making sure there's no waste. You don't have to reinvent that wheel.
Spenser: I guess I mean, like a media outlet, if people want to get...
Josh: Man people really don't like to read anymore, so a lot of things I recommend come later.
Spenser: But you listen to "Democracy Now!"...
Josh: Yeah, shows like "Democracy Now!"...there are really brilliant people in the world, and they're showing up in a few spots. There's some great journalism that's showing up in a few spots, there's "Democracy Now!", there's people like Glenn Greenwald, very specific people I love. John Perkins changed my life, he wrote a book called "Confessions of an Economic Hitman", and his solutions that he's done, reaching back out to the third world. There's a lot to learn. I suggest everybody go somewhere poor.
Spenser: Travel.
Josh: I think travel is probably the best answer for Americans that have a little bit of resource. Go to like Nicaragua.
Spenser: You realize how much wealth that you have. I think that's one thing that's lost on people, if you are middle-income in the U.S., you have a shit-ton of money.
Josh: Whether you know it or not, your little lifestyle changes can make a big difference somewhere else, once people come and see what we're doing here and then go and see what's happening 10 minutes away with a Nicaraguan working for a dollar a day, feeling that for real, then when I go and want to give $1,000 in a year to a project to help, I actually know that it's quantifiably helping people for real. Maybe in the States you go, "Oh what, if I gave $5, $10, or $100/month, like would it buy a couple Starbucks?” Yeah, for you, but somebody who needs a mosquito net--
Spenser: It's serious money. $2.50 for a mosquito net that could save somebody's life, or not even just their life. I'm going to use this to plug the Against Malaria Foundation. I mean, living with Malaria, the economic problems alone, you can't work, you can't do anything, you can't do shit.
Josh: So these solutions are very real when you hit a, I don't want to say "Third World country", the other side of the coin, when you see what's happening there, it can really pull your heart into the game. Once an American's heart is in the game, there's no stopping us. We have confidence, we know we can get things done, that's one of the few things we kind of get in education, I think we're the most confident people when we come out of high school.
[laughs]
So let's use that, when I learned to care. I mean I kind of came from redneck America where there was a little bit of money, it came from a time before credit was, so I had a little different appreciation for that, but I see it really matter to people when they spend even a month or two with a family like Carlos', what it means to live simply, how it doesn't mean you have to be unhappy.
Spenser: It's not asceticism. I think that's confused, that simplicity means that you don't have fun toys, like I have a drone now, that is super fun to play with, but I haven't bought clothing in six months and I haven't gone to a super nice restaurant, and it's been totally fine.
Josh: And you invested in a tool, not just a toy.
Spenser: Right, right, it's not a toy. I'm just saying there's a little bit of a sense, "Well, to be a good permaculture person means I never buy anything again, from anyone."
Josh: No. I talked about this with a friend on the permaculture podcast recently, [there’s] a moment when we're first coming into awareness on this, that we're going to maybe be super angry about the way this computer is made or something. But we're going to have to use that tool in this world to change things, so we have to have a transitional ethic.
Spenser: The tools are already here.
Josh: I like that idea, because it means I'm not beholden to it in my future world, I'm going to use an X-wing with a laser canon to shoot a Death Star. Ok but we don't have but then we don't have X-wing factories maybe in the future, so we have to measure our things and use the best levers and there's these pressure points and things that matter right now.
And you think you can go around and you're going to go to the third-world and you're going to feel super connected to it and going and living there and being poor with them, might not help one person, but if you go home and change the way your university invests money, if you go back and change the way your alumni supports your university, where they put their money: these things are big. We have trillions in trusts and investments done through our work, through our universities, through our states, through our credit unions, that stuff's activism is pretty easy, it's not too big either. If you want to go be a part of your credit union and where they invest their money, you can be. If you're part of a bank, you should go have a credit union, too, right now. And then be a part of it, and it's fun. I learned so much going to my credit union board meetings and stuff, that was one of the places my activism, [where the] rubber met the road. Then I helped control [it], we gave loans more to local housing--
Spenser: Then you can actually see it.
Josh: Yeah.
Spenser: I think that's a problem that a lot of people have with investing, is that it's such an abstraction the way that we do it. I'm investing in this portfolio. What's a portfolio? Well it's stocks and bonds and what are those? Well those are little pieces of a company that does these things that aren't really specific and where's the money really going? At the end of the day, it's just, "Well, if I got my 7-10% return: life's good. Kinda who cares." But a credit union acts locally, so you get to see, "Oh, well Bob's Pizza shop, organic pizza that supports local farmers, that's going to be built now, because--"
Josh: Money will start circling in your economy.
Spenser: Right. I didn't even know until two years ago that doing banking locally is a real difference.
Josh: It's a real difference.
Spenser: People need credit.
Josh: Yeah, local businesses want to expand and that big bank doesn't care, and won't give them the loan.
Spenser: Won't give them the loan, they're too small.
Josh: And the big bank only wants to give loans they can package off and sell, so some second mortgage on your loan with your credit union doesn't do them any good. A local credit union is investing in you, and we talked a lot recently about interest rates and stuff, and could you do a world without interest? Well credit unions are building that. They are using interest rates as a mechanism, but they're investing in their society, they are. Their money is not just racing off to a hedge fund.
So that really does matter, and the credit union movement has been growing, the amount of money is transferring every month, every day, to credit unions is phenomenal. The next step with that, what I would be doing up there, I would be engaging those credit unions and that capital model with the farming. Let's reintegrate that stuff, that's where I see my next big goal is integrating long term capital with really smart local business, and credit unions are that mechanism and CSA's, that's how I would say, I felt good every day that I participated in that, even though I was within this big system and by getting crushed by George Bush's police and pepper sprayed in the afternoon. In the morning, I was a part of this gathering together farm and I was very, very happy I got to touch or be a part of that process. Going to the farmer's market even, I had 30 minutes of conversations with neighbors, instead of going through the self-checkout isle at Kroger's.
Spenser: Well, it's a really alienating process. I think that from people that have never gone to a farmer's market, actually looking the person in the eye that produced your food is a so much more rich experience than--you know, buying pre-packaged stuff that's been shipped halfway around the world and gone through 20 different companies that are all owned by the same mega-company...
Josh: In my CSA, I didn't only see it in their eyes, I signed a contract with them in April and they knew I was coming every week so they counted on me, and they could go get the short-term help they needed to buy the tractor cause they had me as a contract, so my demand, my future demand, was a way for them to stay out of an interest-bearing loan, so I was most directly--my promise. It's like a fiat-human capital currency thing.
We can play that game, too. We don't just have to let it be through centralized banks, so I see that as my next step in all of this, my energy a lot lately has gone into helping people not just see why it's a good idea to use one refrigerator for a few homes, or one pickup truck for a neighborhood, why that neighborhood should also be investing in itself, in a lot of ways. So the money we save on those extra goodies can actually go into long-term tools and localized--we can take risk together, so we can actually do things that maybe you couldn't do as a person. You can go and do that solar array that you couldn't risk as one house, or you can go do the micro-hydro electrics, that you couldn't do, so you can start living--actually start governing your own communities, and governance is more important to me than politics. Arguing politics is one thing, governing a community is fun.
Spenser: Yeah, yeah. Well there's clearly a lot to talk about here, I'll be talking more with Josh about other things, but I think it's a pretty good place to kind of wrap things up. It's raining pretty hard, we're starting the rainy season here. VerdEnergia.org is a place where you can read more about Verde, weareblacksheep.org is the new resource management venture that I'm a shareholder of and Josh is of course a part of--that website is in development but by the time your listening to this, hopefully it's in a place that--we have drone footage of places with my new Inspire One.
Josh: That's fun, that's fun stuff. We've been getting the perspective from the air that is hard to grasp from down below. When you're in a forest sometimes, you can't really get the perspective so--seeing our place in the development here, what happens, it's been really fun. And even me, I've had my nose to the grindstone too long. Backing up, flying up 1000 feet in the air and seeing what a forest can look like--almost like an oasis in the middle of this other opportunity around it, to do it. It's really great.
I'm looking forward to following up on a lot of these things. Joshua@weareblacksheep.org is where I'm available a lot these days, and VerdEnergia.org, we do a pretty long-running blog there over the years, everything from our favorite local answers to global activism and calls to action, so a lot of good media to share on their, too. Enjoy VerdEnergia.org.
Spenser: I'll be at Verde for at least the next two and a half months or so, so if people have questions, comments, stuff for Josh or for me, we want your feedback, we want your interaction, so don't hesitate to contact Josh or I. Is that all we got Josh?
Josh: Yeah, I think so, this is fun. I've been very motivated myself by these kinds of programs, so I like that we can sit down and hammer through some of the stuff that I've found useful to lots of people over the years, I've had about 5,000 people pass through the farm, and a lot of what we talked about today is what I go through pretty much with every person as they come here and have these kinds of questions.
Spenser: And now you don't have to come all the way to the jungle of Costa Rica to meet Josh a little bit.
Josh: Yeah, so I thank Spenser for that, I think this medium is fun and I love podcasts myself and I'm going to be on a few more programs soon, talking more about regenerative economics.
Spenser: Which programs?
Josh: The Permaculture Podcast and the Scott Horton Radio show, scotthorton.org, soon, and a few other places, probably KBOO in Portland, we're going to be doing a few permaculture courses this next year and we're doing some raffles and some things to help out our favorite programs out there. You'll here a lot more very specific stuff over the next few months on different podcasts and here, too.
Spenser: Alright guys, that's it for this Notes from the Jungle, hope to hear from you soon, thanks.
Sam Harris vs. Dan Carlin on Extremist Islam
A short segment from Sam Harris' "Waking Up" podcast, discussing extremist Islam.
Listen to the whole podcast here.
Transcript:
Hey guys this is Spenser Gabin with "Notes from the Jungle". I'm going to call it that for now, I might change my mind, when and if I decide to leave the Costa Rican jungle, but for now, it will be, "Notes from the Jungle". Today I just wanted to pop in a little segment from, "Waking Up" with Sam Harris, which is a podcast that I just kind of found out about and I really really like.
For those of you who don't know Sam Harris, he is one of the "New Atheists", who aren't really so new anymore, their books started coming out around 9-10 years ago when I was going through high school, and getting into atheism and secularism and rationality and all that fun stuff. Harris, recently, has been renown for speaking out against extremist Islam, and calling out liberals for being afraid to call out extreme Islam and Islamists who want to impose their beliefs on all of civilization.
He's been criticized along the left for being Islamophobic, which is total bullshit, he is just calling something for what it is. He calls this new Left, which is extremely concerned with political correctness, the "Regressive Left", which I think is an appropriate name, but anyway, in this segment, Harris is having a conversation with Dan Carlin, who is a history buff and has his own podcast called, "Hardcore History", which I have not listened to that much, but so far sounds really good, and really in depth, and he sounds like an interesting guy.
The reason I wanted to share this segment in particular, the entire podcast is about 2 hours, and I recommend listening to the whole thing, but I just thought it was representative of a sophisticated conversation between two intelligent people, who just happen to come at things from different points of view and disagree.
But, instead of how you typically see on TV and other podcasts, people talking past each other, or, people just kind of kissing each other's ass and not really saying anything, you have an interesting debate, with of course, some overlapping agreement and then some areas of disagreement or at least different areas of emphasis. Specifically here, they're talking about relative frequency of extremist Islam within Muslim communities.
I happen to side a little bit more with Harris on this one, in terms of underestimating the degree to which conservative Islamist beliefs influence people and their relative frequency overall. However, I thought Carlin was really smart and incisive throughout the podcast. They do agree that the War on Terror, really ought to be a war for hearts and minds rather than a war where we just drop bombs on people and hope that we kill them off, which I of course agree with.
Anyway, without further adieu, this is Sam Harris and Dan Carlin talking about these issues, I hope you enjoy it. As always, I welcome your comments and feedback.
[Podcast]
So there you have it guys, I really encourage you to listen to the whole podcast to get the context and everything of course, that was taken out of context. For that reason, I recommend you listen to the whole thing. It is a bit long but if you put it on in a long car ride, or something like that, I think you'll find it really, really enjoyable, I definitely did.
Getting Aerial at VerdEnergia with the DJI Inspire One: Feedback/Review
Shots like these were only previously available to those with large budgets...
Several months ago I began living in an intentional community in the jungle of Costa Rica called VerdEnergia. I brought my 5D Mark III with me and got some great shots of the area, but because of the mountainous terrain and heavy tree cover, it was really difficult to get shots that gave you an overview of the environment.
I had used drones for real estate and other industries in my previous video marketing job and was generally skeptical about whether they were little more than a gimmick for most projects. I had found a lot of sensationalism and overhype surrounding them: a lot of people thought that just having drone shots in your video made it a good video, or that you should use drone shots just because you have a drone, not because it actually makes sense.
That being said, this landscape screamed to be filmed with a drone. The shots I’ve been able to get are utterly unachievable without a helicopter, and some would probably be nearly unachievable even with one. The work of getting this puppy down here was well worth it—despite nearly having a conniption trying to get the firmware to update before my return flight back to Costa Rica.
My advice—call a local repair shop for help with updating the firmware out of the box. DJI’s instructions are confusing and in some cases just plain wrong.
Most of all--take your time and remember that this is a long-term investment, not a toy. Don’t take stupid risks and fly in crappy weather or other stupid shit. I was testing out the drone’s top speed (allegedly 50 MPH although I’ve only been able to get around 40 MPH) and nearly flew the thing into a tree.
Pros:
- Outstanding image quality (both photo and video)
- Ability to operate aircraft and camera separately
- Excellent operation capabilities—smooth, fully customizable controls
- Kickass build
- Excellent stabilization
Cons:
- Firmware updating is extremely finicky and tedious
- Relatively expensive ($2500, supported device not included) compared with the Phantom 3 Professional & Phantom 4
- A steep learning curve for those who haven’t flown before
Takeaway Tips:
- Make sure you buy a supported device: I tried to use my new Galaxy S7 Edge and it did not work. DJI may update their App to support it in the future but in the meantime I’ll have to use my iPad mini 2—which has worked very well.
- If you run into trouble, contact local drone repair shops instead of DJI Support, who may take the cake as having the most laughably horrendous support offering ever. I had people give me conflicting advice, hang up on me, say things that ending up seeming patently false. And don’t even get me started on their chat support, their responses don’t even past the Turing Test, and it probably is an actual human being on the other end.
- Don’t panic if the gimbal doesn’t work properly after flying through clouds or moist areas (i.e. all day everyday in Costa Rica)
- Read the manual—actually do it, it’s worth it.
If you do end up buying the Inspire One and you’d like to support more posts and reviews like this one, please purchase it through this Amazon link; you won’t be charged an extra cent and it will make more content like this possible.
Cell Phones, Distractions, and the Illusion of the Future
Cell phones help us stay connected, but what do they distract us from?
A great talk, related to this podcast, by Sherry Turkle on her fantastic book, "Alone Together"
Transcript of podcast:
So a few months ago I decided to quit my job and volunteer at VerdEnergia, which is an intentional community, focused on the proliferation of permaculture. It's really in the middle of nowhere in Costa Rica. We are miles and miles and miles even from a small town, let alone a major city. There's electricity, but there's virtually no cell phone service, and you can only get some very slow, pretty much dial-up level Internet from about 11 at night to 6 in the morning. So it's really pretty far off the grid, by most standards. So, I knew this when I came here, and I was really looking forward to living that kind of lifestyle for a while, and I anticipated the internal relaxation that comes from that kind of disconnection.
But one aspect I didn't really think about was how there'd be more social intimacy amongst the people here, because of that. So I'm all for technological improvements, I'm not a Luddite, but it's been so awesome when we eat together, we eat in community and there aren't any cell phones at the table, or almost never. Whereas back in the first world, on the grid, myself included, everyone has to check their goddamn cell phone every five minutes when we're at the restaurant, when we're at the dinner table, to make sure that our friend didn't text us and we missed it, or somebody sent us a Facebook message, or we're just looking at bullshit. I was looking at my Facebook feed, my Twitter, my email about this sale coming up. Mostly bullshit.
You really don't have that here because there's nothing to check. You get to give your undivided attention to people, and they get to give their undivided attention to you, and the level of connection that you experience and the depth, and the focus that you can have with that is awesome. I really think that it's a huge selling point for coming to a place like this that people like myself don't often consider. Being away from this has made me reflect a little bit more about, why is it that we check our cell phones so often? Of course we have the dopamine boost when we look at our e-mail and we get a nice email from our boss saying we did a good job or whatever it is. But the incessancy of it, the fact that it's so ubiquitous, what's really going on there?
I have some thoughts on what's happening there, I just think stepping away from it has given me a little bit of perspective on it. We like to tell ourselves, "We need our cell phones because what if people need to get in touch with us?" I don't think that's what most of the phone checking is about. If somebody really needs something, they'll call and you'll know that they need something and you'll do something about it. It's checking of this other kind of stuff.
One thing that I've realized is that the phone checking--it's almost like a baseline social marker for people, in that they need to do it to show that they have something they need to check--they have a friend who might be texting them, a boyfriend or a girlfriend, a "this", a Tinder conversation, something going on in their lives worth checking. And of course, we often feign this to seem like we have a lot going on, when we don't really have anything that important to check. And because of that, here people are a lot more vulnerable. If people are feeling like shit, or have something they want to share, they're more open to it, versus I think what we often do back on the grid is we retreat, to our cell phones, to kind of box ourselves in, to shelter ourselves from the world.
And I'm totally guilty of this, I don't want this to sound like I'm on my high-horse and saying how wrong everyone else is. I definitely think that I've been guilty of this, and I really hope when I go back on the grid; I don't kind of retreat back into this stuff. So there's none of this at VerdEnergia and it's really interesting and really awesome for people that have grown up in the cell phone checking-era. It's not even the cell phone era--cause it used to be cell phones were just--you could call and play "Snake" maybe, but it was pretty much just that--now, the entire world is available on our phones, so we have endless numbers of distractions that we have in our pocket, at any moment. Or it's out on the table, a lot of the time.
Another thought that I had was that cell phones offer this kind of distraction from uncomfortable thoughts, things being brought up in ourselves that are disquieting, much the way that I think noise is often used to hide any kind of uncomfortable silence that we have. So it's used as kind of a social-filler when there's some kind of awkward tension within ourselves or with another person. We had this defense of the phone, "ok I'll look at the phone and pretend to do something so I don't have to deal with reality." Again, I've totally been guilty of this.
But it made me think of a passage by Carl Jung, the psychologist and thinker, from, "The Earth Has a Soul". He's talking about noise and I think his thoughts on noise as this kind of distraction, can be applied to cell phones because they're sort of a visual noise, where we can just distract ourselves and stimulate ourselves to avoid whatever is coming up. He says,
“Noise is welcome because it drowns the inner instinctive warning. Fear seeks noisy company and pandemonium to scare away the demons. (The primitive equivalents are yells, bull-roars, drums, fire-crackers, bells, etc.) Noise, like crowds, gives a feeling of security; therefore people love it and avoid doing anything about it as they instinctively feel the apotropaic magic it sends out. Noise protects us from painful reflection, it scatters our anxious dreams, it assures us that we are all in the same boat and creating such a racket that nobody will dare to attack us. Noise is so insistent, so overwhelmingly real, that everything else becomes a pale phantom. It relieves us of the effort to say or do anything, for the very air reverberates with the invincible power of our modernity. ”
So I think a useful, modern comparison to what Jung's talking about is the Facebook news feed. Because think of what the Facebook news feeds is--it's really just an algorithmic conglomeration of shit--people that you've friended on Facebook. And it's presented in this stream, news feed fashion, to give it this kind of sense of, "ok, what's going on? What’s happening in the world?" And it gives it this sense of importance. Because we're all friends with so many people and everything, it's endless. It's a 24-hour news feed of stuff we can distract and stimulate ourselves with.
And I think there's a safety to the Facebook news feed because you can experience things through the computer screen, through the cell phone screen, rather than actually having to, face-to-face feel something, to be vulnerable, and I've experienced a lot of vulnerability and a lot of the relationships here feel so much more solid and sincere because people make eye-contact, and they're not half-present, with half their presence being on their cell phone.
The other day a friend came up to me and looked me in the eye and told me she wished we would talk more--and I just thought it was so nice that somebody came up to me and looked at me and said that, versus it being a Facebook message, versus the person not being willing or thinking to say that because they're sort of distracted with what they're doing on their cell phone or on the internet or anything like that.
Another girl told me straight away that she thought I was attractive, she thought that I was a physically attractive person, but she personally wasn't attracted to me. Of course, I didn't love to hear that--but it was so nice to have somebody look me in the eye and tell me that, versus, back on the grid, that would probably be maybe a Tinder conversation, or Facebook message, or text message. It would've been robbed of the emotional richness in the situation. But it made me feel so real, even though it was unpleasant. These are things that I think we're robbing ourselves by filtering all of this stuff through a screen.
I had an ex-girlfriend who didn't want to have--we were having a fight about--I don't even remember what it was, but she refused to have the conversation in-person, she wanted to have the fight over GChat--because it would have been all too painful and real to have a conversation in-person, like a human being, where you see and feel emotional cues, when you hear the inflection in a person's voice. These are all things we are robbing ourselves of when we resort to these forms of communication. And I wonder, what would've happened if we had had the fight in the jungle? Maybe we would've reached some better, more emotionally honest place.
The last one that I'll talk about that I've definitely experienced that is really common nowadays when we have unlimited information, is FOMO, we call it, fear of missing out. And we respond to it by--we're always checking our phones to make sure nothing else bette is going on. On New Year's Eve, everyone needs to have five different plans of what they're going to do, in case they arrive at a plan and go, "Oh! What if this other plan is better?". The irony of this is that it guarantees that you'll enjoy nothing, and you'll always be in some other abstracted reality, instead of the one that you're really living.
And what's great about living at Verde, is you don't really have a choice but to accept what is present. You know, I'm sitting here by this river and I don't have an option to figure out if there's something better going on somewhere. Yes, I can go and walk somewhere and figure it out but I don't have a phone that tells me what every other person on the planet is doing with themselves currently, and think about whether I need to be doing that or not, I can just do this, be fully present with it, and fully engage with it, fully experience it.
It's awesome that I can get fully into spreading chicken fertilizer. I don't have to check my cell phone to see if it's time to do something else or not, I can just do it. When we gather these devices, we say it's to stay connected, we say we want to stay in contact with whoever we want, but what it ends up really doing is it makes real connection less likely because we're so bewildered by the options available to us, the amount that's going in and what everyone else is doing. I think we're having trouble connecting with anything that we're doing.
And this is what I was doing back on the grid, it's like paying whack-a-mole, things pop-up, you have to go and hit it, and you're never actually enjoying hitting the mole, you're always worried about the next one that's going to pop-up. And I think that also these tools, things like Facebook news food stuff, are used because we don't like ourselves--we don't like our reality, we don't like what we're doing, we don't like our job, we don't like who we are, we don't like our girlfriend, our boyfriend, our this, our that, so if we just kind of keep the input of distractions flowing, we'll basically forget, much the same way that people that drink themselves silly or get addicted to drugs to forget about how they don't like their reality.
But this was really unconscious for me-the fact that this was going on--that instead of facing something in our lives that we don't like and trying to do something about it, or just experiencing it, just experiencing your own sadness about loss, whatever it is, it's ok to just feel that and not bombard yourself with distractions to escape.
Even though we're talking about modern technology, these are of course thoughts that have been thought for thousands of years, but I think they're often lost on us and lost on myself. Blaise Pascal said 400 years ago,
“We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight. So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us. We conceal it from our sight, because it troubles us; and if it be delightful to us, we regret to see it pass away. We try to sustain it by the future, and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching.”
And it's in this sense that a lot of our pleasure comes more from anticipation of experience, than experience itself, and I think Pascal would think of it as cell phones as this kind of demon of present detachment.
The cell phone allows us to conjure up these illusory futures and plans for ourselves and other possibilities and they truly are illusory because it's our own projection of what we think that other people are doing and experiencing, not the experience itself.
And I've been a worrier my whole life, I come from a family of worriers, and I know what it's like to think that you're missing out, and you haven't made the right choice, and that you're in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. The people that say, " be present", and wave it around, it's insufferably trite. But there's of course truth there.
We should consider turning off our cell phones for dinner, for talking with your friend. Don't trust yourself to not look at it, because these things are designed for us to constantly be looking at them, they beep, they blink, they do this, they buzz. Just turn it off, put it in another room, and just totally be present to what you're doing. The things that make us most human, vulnerability, intimacy, love, they require us to do away with these distractions and surrender to our present.
And I really believe that what would make my life tragic is to never feel like my experience was worth engaging with, for me to always be considering some other alternative to what I'm doing. That's the tragedy, not oh, thinking about, well, "Did I do the right thing? Did I not do the right thing? Do I go left, do I go right? Up, down?" That's just life is that you have to decide these things, the only choice is to whether you're going to engage with it or not.
Alan Watts, a more modern thinker, wrote a lot about this sort of thing, and a lot about the present and the future as an abstraction. He said,
“…the future is still not here, and cannot become a part of experienced reality until it is present. Since what we know of the future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements-inferences, guesses, deductions—it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead, this is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.”
It's interesting to think of constraints, the constraint of living in the jungle, as something that actually opens up possibilities instead of narrowing them. But this is what I've often found is the case, I can read better and in more depth here, than I ever could on the grid. I can write in more depth, I can do things like this post with total focus because there's literally nothing else going on.
And I don't have t worry about whether I'm missing out on something else that's happening in the world because I just don't even know about it. And I don't need to know about it, I can just do this.
So when I go back to the grid, I hope I'm not worried so much about deliberating about every decision, over and over and over again, but just going with something, with just doing it. We're up against an unprecedented array of distractions and possibilities for things that we can disguise our own reality with.
And it's going to take a lot of effort to do these kinds of things. I'm trying to give myself a little prep talk here, because these are things that we have to bring to our consciousness to move forward, these are not things that are not just going to happen unconsciously. What's going to happen unconsciously for me is I'm going to check the Facebook news feed and check the email constantly and constantly, these are things that we have to fight and we have to create rules for ourselves and boundaries so we can fully experience being human.