Episode #191
Marcelo Gleiser: Escaping Extinction – There’s No Place Like Earth

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Our Marcelo Gleiser interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dave Chapman interviews Marcelo Gleiser at Long Wind Farm in East Thetford, Vermont, in July of 2024:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to The Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking with Marcelo Gleiser today. Marcelo is an old friend and he’s a physicist who has spent most of his teaching career at Dartmouth College. He’s written many books. He’s gotten many honors and awards, I went down to New York to see him received the Templeton which was just so much fun, Marcelo.

Marcelo Gleiser 0:26
They had the whole Dartmouth Symphony playing, yeah, that was great.

Dave Chapman 0:30
So we’re here today, I asked Marcelo to wedge me into his busy schedule. And I wanted to talk first about the book, “The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto For Humanity’s Future.” And that’s a big title, “A Manifesto.” So would you just describe the book to me a bit…obviously, in layman’s terms?

Marcelo Gleiser 1:01
Sure. So first of all, thanks for having me. I’m delighted to be part of your conversation. I think it’s wonderful that you can listen to what I have to say, because honestly, I think it’s going to align very well with your whole purpose, you know, of this movement, which I find it profoundly necessary right now. So that’s just an opening statement about how excited I am to be here. So this book is really a departure from my other books that were more, let’s say, always related to science as a narrative that we humans construct, to understand who we are, who we are in terms of members of a cosmic history. Right? And so how do we do this?

Marcelo Gleiser 1:53
So I am a cosmologist, which is a fancy word that basically means a person that spends his or her time trying to figure out the history of the universe from the Big Bang to nowadays. So it’s a big task, right? So how the universe came to be, what it is filled with, galaxies and stars and planets. And in one planet, at least, life, in incredible abundant diversity. This question, of how come this planet of ours, hosts life? And is this planet the rule or the exception? Meaning, are there gazillions of other planets out there that also host life? Or are we really a rare oasis in the universe…is the core of my book.

Marcelo Gleiser 2:48
And essentially, the argument that I construct in the book, and what I do is a mix of, there are two lines of thinking in the book. One is a brief history of civilization as we know it, you know, so starting all the way from the hunter gatherers, pre agrarian civilization, and what kind of organization they had in their lives, right? And there is a huge amount of new anthropological studies that talk about the vision that we had before, the brute caveman, you know, always fighting with one another is incorrect, that there was a lot of interbreeding there was a lot of cooperation between different groups. And in fact, they, they also collaborated, and sometimes merged together, these groups of hunter gatherers.

Marcelo Gleiser 3:40
And so I started the story there, and I can elaborate in a second and move on to the huge transition in worldview that happened between those groups and the beginnings of agrarian civilization, and the shift in religious beliefs that also accompany this transition. You know, from the hunter gatherer societies, a lot of them still very much mirrored in many of the while. A lot of them mirrored in many of the native cultures that we have across the world. The relationship of the world being a sacred relationship, to the transition to agrarian societies where the gods become more abstract, they go to the heavens, they leave the Earth into the hands of people, and there is a sense of ownership that accompanies this transition, that has basically framed our conversation with the natural world for about 10,000 years, you know, meaning we believe that we own pieces of the planet, you know, I always think, who was the first guy right that said, “You know what, folks, this piece of land is mine, this piece of the planet is mine. And because of that I am going to either not allow you to come into my piece of land, my piece of the world. And if you want anything that I produce here, you either have to give me something in return, or I won’t give it back to you. And if you invade, I’m going to fight back.” This kind of like transition from the planet is our sacred mother, there is an animistic relationship, a spiritual relationship with everything that exists in the world. You know, the waters have their spirits, the forest have the spirits, the mountains, the waterfalls, the clouds, the rain, there was no separation between the natural and the supernatural, there was no supernatural, because everything was natural was part of their existence.

Marcelo Gleiser 5:55
And there was a translator to this story, which was the shaman and he still is, who basically could perceive, sense, the wills of the gods, of the spirits, and translate that to the rest of the tribe. In a sense, scientists, philosophers, religious leaders, are doing something very similar. They are trying to sense the mysteries that surround us about the natural world, about the spiritual world and translate that in ways that all of us can understand. So the beginning of the book is really a history of how we got here, because once there was the transition from the Grand society, and people started to produce more food, in smaller amounts of, in smaller regions, and domesticating animals, then you have essentially the sense of control of the natural world, so we become the masters of the land, right. And with that kind of narrative, allied to the development of technologies, this all grew. And then of course, jumping to the 16th 17th centuries, you have the revolution in the sciences, you have huge growth in the understanding of the mechanisms of the natural world. And that initial description, you know, that the planets going orbits that satisfy mathematical laws, that there is a law of nature or laws of nature, so there is order in nature and that we can understand this stuff, then, not just the practicality of controlling the land, but the understanding of the natural world kind of inflated, our perception of being controlling of what’s going on.

Dave Chapman 7:49
So, just to kind of create some context, about how long was the period, we believe, where we were hunters gatherers, until we hit agriculture?

Marcelo Gleiser 8:01
Good. That’s a great question. So so we are thinking that we have, we meaning Homo sapiens, our species has been around for about 300,000 years. And so it’s about 95% of our existence as a species, we’ve been hunter gatherers. So this whole transition into cities, city states and more hierarchical control of power happened only about 10,000 12,000 years ago, you know, the Sumerians, and then the Babylonians, the Egyptians, etc.

Dave Chapman 8:35
These always happened in areas where there was enough natural fertility or annual flooding to bring in to replenish the soil. So those were always the cradles of civilization.

Marcelo Gleiser 8:49
Yeah, the Fertile Crescent, right?

Dave Chapman 8:51
Which we’ve managed to turn into the desert…

Marcelo Gleiser 8:54
The Tigress and the Euphrates, right in nowadays Iraq, and then the Nile in Egypt, I mean…and you see this not just even in the, in the Middle East to see it, every big center, metropolitan center has a river around it, or across it, you know, London, Paris, you know, New York, I mean, and the reason for that is that you need this flow of water, because that’s where the food is coming from essentially not just because you’re planting close to it, but because you can transport. So those rivers serve these dual purpose.

Dave Chapman 9:30
So, there was several huge shifts in in human understanding on a societal level. One was when we started to grow food and stay in the same area. And another one would be the Renaissance, where we started to have this very different understanding of the world as interpreted by people who are committed to studying that, the scientists.

Marcelo Gleiser 9:56
Right, and what happened there is this mechanistic way of thinking about the world took hold, right? So everything was a mechanism, if you, even if you read the Declaration of Independence of the United States, you read in the text, the laws of man and the laws of nature, you know, you talk about forces that determine things. I mean, this is Newton, this is physics, you know, interfering, or inspiring, perhaps, you know, the way society is organized, not just the natural world.

Marcelo Gleiser 10:28
So this story gave rise to – jumping forward a little bit – you know, the the incredible success of this way of thinking about the world, to the industrial revolution of the 19th century, right, where people really started to use fossil fuels, to end the poor whales, to basically fuel a civilization as we know it, right. And I always say that the world that we have built in the last 150 years was fed from the entrails of our planet, because all of the fuels that we use, right, I mean, the fossil fuels, at least, you know, the the natural gas, the oil, the natural coal, all of this stuff comes from the remain of life that existed here millions and millions of years ago, that was processed into these fuels. And so in a sense, the chemistry of these fuels is the remains of life that existed here a long time ago, and a lot of it is from plants. And so when you pick a piece of natural coal, of mineral coal, right, in that chemistry of that natural coal you have in it, the light of the sun, that made that plant exists through photosynthesis millions of years ago, right. And when you burn the coal, again, it’s sort of like liberating that light. That is an ancient light. But with it, you’re also liberating all the bad stuff. That obviously is polluting the atmosphere. So we are basically feeding our urban industrial growth based on this buried, dead life, right, there has been transformed.

Dave Chapman 12:19
So I’m just, I’m still stunned when you start looking at big time.

Marcelo Gleiser 12:26
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 12:26
And I’ll ask you, rather than tell you, how many years with the dinosaurs on the planet?

Marcelo Gleiser 12:32
Oh, sure. So yeah, I love all these numbers. So the dinosaurs, they were on the planet 450 million years.

Dave Chapman 12:35
Staggering.

Marcelo Gleiser 12:36
And the only reason they disappeared is because 65 million years ago, this big asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. And, and it was like an eight mile wide piece of rock and you say how could an eight mile wide like the size of Manhattan say, How could something that small, completely change the planet? Well, because in physics, there is this thing called kinetic energy, which is the energy of motion, which is mass times velocity squared, okay, and that rock has a lot of mass, but the velocity of that thing was about 20,000 miles an hour. So you think of a rock, which is eight miles wide, traveling at 20,000 miles an hour hitting the land, the amount of energy that the impact deposited is somewhat equivalent to this, just to give you some kind of like, mind blowing number. If you detonated all hydrogen bombs, at the climax of the Cold War, it’s about 5000 of them, not atomic bombs, not the Oppenheimer stuff, the thermonuclear bomb is just 1000 times stronger than that. So you detonate those 5000 bombs at the same time. And you multiply the energy liberated by 100,000 times, that’s roughly the energy this impact caused, and because of that, there was so much stuff that happened to the planet, for example, you know, when you throw a little rock on a pond, and a little water, flood, you know, flood, you have this reflex, right, that goes up? Well, the matter that was that rebounded from this went all the way to, halfway to the moon. Just think about that, and then it came down again. And it covered the whole planet in this dark, thick layer of dust that covered the sun for many, many decades. And the dinosaurs, you know, cold blood, and who survived the little mammals, you know, the rodents that were around, scurrying around. And to me, and this is essential to the narrative of this book and to the fundamental moral principles that I bring at the end of it. Is that, if this impact had not happened, we wouldn’t be here. So the point being that the history of life on the planet is completely contingent on a series of accidents, and you change any one of them, life would have taken a different turn, because you know, life responds to evolution, to environmental pressure, it’s called selective pressure. And this thing changed because it killed the dinosaurs killed about 70% of the life on Earth. And it’s sort of like pushing the reset button on evolution and saying, what kind of life can emerge now. And we’re here because of this, right? So this is, to me, absolutely fantastic, because the plants also survived. And by the way, the plants have been around for 300 million years, way before the dinosaurs. And they are still here, which to me, shows that they have developed survival strategies, which are incredibly smart. And there are lots of very interesting people, very good scientists…and others coming from spiritual dimensions as well. They’re studying the spiritual and intelligence of those plants, you know, the spiritual and natural intelligence of those plants. And this kind of profound relationship between us and the plants, as expressed in all these different native cultures, has been essential for us to create our own narrative of who we are.

Dave Chapman 16:40
Yeah. I remember the ice dialogue that you hosted at Dartmouth with Richard Powers and Monica Gagliano.

Marcelo Gleiser 16:48
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 16:48
It’s fantastic.

Marcelo Gleiser 16:49
Yeah, you know, wonderful people.

Dave Chapman 16:51
Yeah. Wonderful. And just talking about the intelligence of plants.

Marcelo Gleiser 16:54
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 16:56
You know, what this means and the miracle of it, you know, it, it’s, we walk around, so unaware of everything that is living around us, and that supports us without which we don’t live.

Marcelo Gleiser 17:10
Yeah, it’s sort of like this, the way we have evolved over the last 10,000 years is to think of plants and the natural world as a commodity. And that is true for farmers too. But they are not a commodity, those plants, you know, the natural, their partners, and that calls for a completely different kind of mindset of relationship with because without them, we wouldn’t be here. You know, I always, it’s a very simple equation, right? I mean, if you don’t breathe good air, if you don’t drink good water, if you don’t have protection from the radiation that comes from the sky, you’re done, we’re done. Our project, our civilization is finished. Right? And the reason why I wrote this book is, I felt that we as a species, we reached civilizational bottleneck right now, where this is the time to make a big difference. And if we don’t, then those dystopian scenarios that I profoundly dislike, you know, my book is actually an optimistic approach to the problem that we all face, because it’s very easy to paint a horrible picture of what’s going to happen to the world. That’s what a lot of public intellectuals are doing. Right? So yes, you know, it’s not just, it’s not just pollution and global warming, but it’s also AI and a bunch of other…and thermonuclear war, which is always present. And we are doomed and I’m like, it’s so easy, you know, to sound the alarm, anyone can sound the alarm. But the question is, how do you change this narrative? And that’s what I’m trying in my small way to contribute with this with this book. So the way I construct my narrative and say, This is how we got here, we got here because our development through science and industrialization forced us, unknowingly perhaps, to forget our roots to nature, our roots to the natural world. So we have to retell the story of who we are, reframing our approach, our connection to the natural world. And so what I do is I go through this whole astronomical analysis, right? So that’s where my scientist’s hat is on, where I explain given what we know nowadays, not just our planets in our solar system, but let me just go here for a second. Okay, because it’s good. So let’s talk about our solar system, our little cosmic neighborhood, right because it’s essential. Know thy universe is very, very important for us. So our neighbors, Mars and Venus. Mars is a frozen desert. It’s a horrible place, right? People think that in the first billion years of its existence, so, again, to give context, the solar system, the Sun and the planets, they all emerged together from a condensing cloud of gas. And that happened about four and a half billion years ago. Okay, so that’s how old we are, we’re all together in this Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the sun, we all were born together, about four and a half, let’s make it 5 billion just to talk about round numbers. And the amazing thing about this is that, there are a few amazing things, but one of them is that any one of the worlds here from Mercury to Venus, to Earth, to Mars, to Jupiter, to Saturn, to Uranus, and to Neptune, poor Pluto, who is now demoted, you know, but it’s still around. All of these worlds are completely different from one another. And there is no two worlds even close to being similar. You say oh, you know, Venus and Mars have about similar masses and sizes to Earth. Maybe. But with that they’re still completely different worlds. Venus is total hell, like Venus is so hot that the rocks glow, and it has sulfuric acid in the atmosphere. And it has this other compound, which is the same one that derives from a rotten egg. So it stinks of sulfur. It rains, sulphuric acid, is incredibly hot. So that’s exactly what hell is like. Right? I mean, the media of of it. And so Mercury is a rock that completely dead, that only faces the sun, it doesn’t turn. And then the other planets, you know, Jupiter and company, they’re gas planets, you can’t even stand on their surfaces, because you don’t have a surface, they just have big gas ball, only the very core of them is frozen, and solid because of the pressure. So the point being, that each world, and this is really, really amazing, each world has its own story to tell, right, has a very different evolution. And the fact that Earth is the way it is that it’s at the distance from the Sun, where it’s not too hot, not too cold, in a sense that it can have water at its surface that is liquid, that it has enough mass to hold an atmosphere together is what allows for life to be here in the first place. Right. And so this is our neighborhood. And then I forgot to mention, don’t forget the moons, right? Because we have moons to our moon is a dead rock. But Jupiter and Saturn has, while Jupiter alone has more than 70, seven zero moons, Saturn two, each one of them is different. And they’re all fascinating worlds. I mean, there is a moon of Jupiter called IO that has volcanoes exploding, like The Little Prince, you know, like that kind of stuff. And, subsurface oceans, right. And so it has an incredible diversity of worlds. We actually nowadays instead of talking about comparative literature, in astronomy, people talk about comparative planetology, looking at different worlds studying how they all are. And so what I do in the book is I go through this whole analysis and then I step out of our solar system and go to other planets go around other stars, which are not the sun and just give people a sort of like, an idea here grounding, we are all part of a galaxy, the Milky Way, the Milky Way has about, nobody counted, but that’s an estimate 200 billion stars, right? So that’s a two with 11 zeros after it. That stars, stars, like the Sun. And each one of these stars, or most of them, now we know, we didn’t know this for sure, 30 years ago, but that we do though, each one of them has planets. And those planets, a lot of them will have moons. So you do the math and say Damn, you know, 200 billion stars. An average of five planets per star, you’re talking about 1 trillion worlds. 1 trillion is a world with 12 zeros. And each one of these worlds and this is the point that I really hammer down in the book is different. Because people say even scientists, my book is a criticism to the status quo or to the ways astronomers and astrobiologists who study the life on the planet in the universe. Think about this, they say, Hey, so many worlds, there has to be something similar to our planet out there, meaning the same chemistry going around a similar star as the sun. So of these 200 billion stars, only 7% of them are like ourselves, which, you know, it’s a lot to talk about 35 billion out of, you know, but when you start to say, okay, but if you want a planet that is kind of like the sun, not too close, not too far, so water is liquid. And these other properties that our planet has, like, has a big moon, having one single big moon is what stabilizes the planet, you know, the planet, our planet is tilted by 23 and a half degrees, and it rotates like a spinning top like this that is about to fall, but it’s not falling. That’s called the precession of the equinoxes. And by the way, we’re taping this on summer solstice day, so wonderful, right. And the only reason this happened is because the gravity of the moon stabilizes, this still doesn’t let it randomly fluctuate like this. If this were not true, there’ll be no seasons.

Marcelo Gleiser 26:19
And if no seasons, the weather, the climate on the planet would be completely random. And life would not be possible, right, because life is sturdy, resilient, but it does exist within certain limits of coordinate and heat, right? I mean, there is a window of possibility for life. So you put that together, you put the fact that we have an atmosphere that is thick enough to protect us from radiation, that we have a magnetic field created by the core of the Earth, which is made of nickel and iron spinning, hot stuff creates a magnetic field that is basically literally a shield against all these very bad stuff that comes from outer space, like protons and other kinds of radiation that comes through. That shields us from those things and protects the surface of the earth. So the problem with Mars for example, is that the atmosphere is so thin, that all this stuff comes through. And life on the surface is essentially impossible. You put all this together, and you start to look at the spectacularly mysterious steps for, first of all, for chemistry, to organize itself into biochemistry, meaning you need, you know, to have a molecule of an amino acid, you know, which is the basic stuff they need to make proteins like the stuff of life you need carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur. Where is all this stuff coming from? All this stuff comes from stars that exploded before the sun was born. Right? So I will say something that I’m sure many of you guys already know. But we are truly made of dead star stuff. So stars explode, they spread out and trails across interstellar space. These gasses are traveling at incredibly fast speeds. They hit a nascent star system, a baby stellar system, sprinkle the gas cloud with carbon, the calcium there is in your bones. The iron is, you know, hemoglobin, you know, blood. And this stuff, organizes itself into a planet eventually. And depending on the chemistry, chemical composition of the planet, life can emerge, emerged here, three and a half billion years ago. So somehow, we are animated. And I love the word animated, right? Because Ernie my Latin is soul. So we are animated star stuff. Right? And and why is that beautiful? That’s beautiful because it’s profoundly mysterious, but also because it connects us to the deep time history of the universe itself. We carry in our bodies, billions and billions of cosmic history in our atoms. So when we go, our atoms will become part of something else. Rocks, other animals, we are part of rocks and animals that existed here before because we are eating this stuff. Our ancestors ate this stuff. So we are recycled stardust.

Dave Chapman 29:41
Right. Can I ask you a question? So there’s a miracle that happened here, which is that this stardust became animate, became alive. Could you I don’t know if this is simple or impossible, but how would you define life?

Marcelo Gleiser 29:58
Yeah, so, in the book, I go into this into tremendous detail, right? Because as part of my argument, what I do is I construct, I make… so I was actually saying this and I diverged. So let me go back to that because you go, good. So the criticism with the astronomical way of thinking about oh, there are so many planets, there’ll be a ton of planets with life. The problem with that is that they’re using what we call inductive thinking. They’re saying, if it happened here, and if we’re not special, why won’t it happen many, many other places? And my argument is that it happened here, because we are special. That is the switch. And why are we special, because of the properties the planet has, and because of I wouldn’t call it a miracle, but I call it the profoundly rare and not understood steps for life to become what it became here. Right? So you say defining life, you can’t, nobody knows how to define life. Okay. There are what we call operational definitions of a life is, they are good to a certain point, but none of them is good enough. So for example, if you’re asking NASA what is life, they’ll say, nine, they will say life is a self-organized network of chemical reactions, chemical reactions, that is capable of metabolizing energy, and reproducing according to Darwinian evolution. So translating, life is chemistry that can get energy from the environment and duplicate itself. And that’s not what life is, that’s what life does. And there is a profound difference between the two things, right? Because if you start to really think about this, right, so, all these steps go from inorganic chemistry, and then you go to organic chemistry, and then you go into biochemistry, which is amino acids, they become proteins. And somehow some of these small networks of chemicals got, you know, absorbed in a little drop of, of fats, of lipid. And that became a proto cell, a baby cell of some kind, and somehow, energy was absorbed by that thing. And it decided any could split into others. And so we have no clue how that happens. And then this is the beautiful part, then life becomes intentional, like, every living creature, from the simplest, simplest amoeba to a whale has intentionality, right? It has a purpose, I want to stay alive, every animal wants to stay alive. And so to the point that you forget a little bunch of bacteria, bacteria in a petri dish, and you put a little bit of sugar, right? The bacteria will sense the presence of nutrients in that in that petri dish. So that means it understands its environment, it can sense it, it will orient itself towards that place. And it will transform intentionality into motion to move there, to eat that stuff. How does chemistry do that? Right, this kind of like, what is going on here? And the answer is, we have no clue. So we are really good, you know, genetics, biochemistry, we’re really good at describing what life does. But how that chemistry became Living Chemistry, with a sense of purpose, of intentionality, of agency of autonomy. It’s, it’s a no. So I go through all this stuff, because then I go back to our planet saying that, and here we are people, this is the place where all of this is happening. And furthermore, not just this is the place where everything is happening. And there are no aliens, folks. Sorry. So I go and explain why there are no aliens, right? And so that means that if life exists elsewhere, it will probably be very rare. There is no reason why it couldn’t, we cannot rule it out. Right? Science is very good about finding things that exist, not ruling out the things that do not exist. So I don’t know if there is aliens out there if there is, you know, extraterrestrial intelligence, but what I do know is that they haven’t gotten here. And we have no evidence of any kind of living things out there. Right. And we’re looking, that’s what I do for my research. I’m looking at the composition of the atmosphere as faraway worlds to see if I find what we call bio signatures.

Dave Chapman 35:01
Yes. David Grinspoon talked about that in another one of your ice gathering so it’s just so interesting and inspiring to me, the thing I remember him saying is that we started out looking for a bio signature of energy use. And now we’ve come to realize that probably an advanced civilization will have a tiny energy footprint, because they either figured out how to go over the hump we’re trying to go over or they went extinct.

Marcelo Gleiser 35:31
Yeah. Right. So this is the so called Fermi paradox, right? The idea that if the universe is filled with life, you know, we’ve been around our galaxy is about 10 billion years old, we are only 5 billion years old, we mean in the solar system, earth, etc. And which means that if another star has life, and it’s appeared a few million years before we did, which is nothing in 5 billion years, a few million is nothing. If they develop technology, like we have looked at us, you know, 500 years ago is Galileo, look where we are now, right? So if they develop technology, they would have had plenty of time to colonize, or at least explored the whole of the galaxy. And so Fermi sketched this calculation that said, the galaxy is this big, if you’re traveling at 1/10 of the speed of light, which is not that impossible, you’d see where, and so he says, Where is everybody? Where are these guys? Right? And so the different explanations are, there are several, there’s actually a really fun book to read, which is called Where is everybody? And there are 50 different answers to that. And one very cold war based is that any civilization that reaches nuclear technology self destructs in a few centuries, and so are we going to do that or not? Others are they just self suffocate themselves through the use, inordinate use, of fuels to promote there, and the other one is that they figure things out, right? They figure things out, meaning they found a way of coexisting with a planet in such a way that their civilization is sustainable, and it promotes biodiversity as opposed to destroying it. And this is the way we need to go. So when Dave and other people are talking about this kind of like future for us. It’s like, what are we going to do guys? How are we going to blow ourselves up? Or choke ourselves down? Or are we going to find a way to actually coexist with the planet that allows life to be possible, right. And all these other dreams, I talked about this to all these other dreams of Oh, but we can go and colonize another planet, right with a pair of for Mars. That’s bullshit. That is total, I mean, not just because technologically is completely. It’s a project of 1000s of years ahead in the future. Right. And, and also, because it’d be a horrible life, we evolved to be in this planet, our body mass, our muscular structure, our bones, our relationship to the environment, we are the planet Earth. We are this, we are here, because we’ve been groomed by evolution to be here. So you go to Mars, the gravity is much lower, there is no atmosphere. It’s horrible, dry, cold. Is that the future? No, the future is here, now. And so I, over the last few years, I developed this almost aversion of thinking about colonizing or moving out into other worlds, because we have so many fundamental problems to deal with here in the next few decades. That is dangerous. And it’s a dangerous use of, misuse of resources to actually not be focusing everything that we’ve got into the next few decades here. Right. So the book tries to build this argument.

Dave Chapman 39:19
Yes. And then you get to the, the tremendous challenge.

Marcelo Gleiser 39:26
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 39:27
Which is how do we change us?

Marcelo Gleiser 39:30
How do we change us, right? Because we’re so self serving, right? So individualistic and our needs and

Dave Chapman 39:37
we aren’t even self serving. If we were, we would change but, but we’re suicidal.

Marcelo Gleiser 39:43
Good. Okay, even better, because we get ignorant of what’s going on. Right. And so what we need to do, and so the end of the book, it’s called a manifesto for humanity’s future, and I had to reread the Communist Manifesto so in order to say, Okay, how, how do you write a manifesto, right? Because it’s not something that you do every day. And a manifesto has essentially two parts. The first part is you build the argument to explain why change is absolutely necessary right now. So you’ve developed the argumentation to show that if things remain the way they are, the system will break down, right? And then you go, Okay, and what do you need to do in order to change the narrative, right? I mean, what are we going to do to…so in the case of Marx and Engels, it was, you know, workers of the world unite, right, because the bourgeoisie is stifling, and destroying you. And we need to change the political system and economical system, etc. So my revolution is much more benign. In fact, it doesn’t call for any bloodshed in principle, in fact, it tries to avoid it. And it makes each one of us imbued with a sense of purpose. So the idea there is that I break it down into small actions that any one of us needs to do. So when we talk about, what can we do, right? I mean, I’ve given enough talks about this and talked to enough people about this, that you have this sense that most people feel powerless, that who am I to do anything, I’m just a person, you know, what I do is irrelevant in the big scheme of things. And it’s really the government and the big corporations that have to do something about this. Well, that is an invitation to disaster and collapse. Because unless we understand that each one of us, we have a role to play in this changing of mindset, then we are never going to succeed. And humanity, if you look at the history of humanity, people tend to unite against a common enemy, right? That’s been the thing and right, the problem with our situation is that the enemy is ourselves as a whole, you know, the global enemy of our survival is the human species, right. And one of the reasons for that is that we have split ourselves into many different tribes. And we forgot that we all belong to the same tribe, which is the human tribe, right? I mean, first and foremost, we are a species of apes in a planet that needs to survive in this planet in order to, to move forward, right? And surviving in the planet does not mean killing the planet for us, like, you know, Easter Island or something like that. But it’s actually developing policies and educational efforts that will reorient the way we actually relate to the world. So what do I propose? And people say, Oh, this proposal is naive, they’re impossible to implement. And my answer to that is, naive is doing nothing, innocent is doing nothing, if you believe that not changing the way you eat, or the way you use energy is not going to change things that this is not your job, then we’re doomed. So that’s what’s innocent, is to actually push the blame and the work to other structures, you know, so my idea, right, is that every citizen should be empowered to start to change. How? So I talked about different principles. Principle number one, is the principle of the less, less what? Less meat, less water, less energy, less garbage. So these four lesses. Right. And I’m not saying that is realistic to think that the whole population of the world is going to become vegan overnight. But I think that if people would cut down their consumption of meat by say, 50%, it would already have an impact, right? Because to me, as an individual, the most important thing you can do, and you guys probably know this better than I do, is to eat less meat. You know, that’s one fundamental thing, for the many reasons that you guys know better than I do. So that’s the less, water consumption, water protection, energy consumption, what kinds of energy and where did where’s your energy coming from? So, so that’s number one. Number two is so that was the last number two is the more the principle of the more. More what? More exposure to the natural world because what has happened and I jumped over this whole thing in our conversation is that with the development of agrarian societies and the development of city states, and bigger and bigger cities, up to now, you know, the modern megalopolis, what we have done in order to grow, is we push nature out. Cities are the anti nature, there are big blocks of concrete and steel and glass and cars and pavement, and you have the little parks there like which are kind of almost like, sad to look at, right. And because they’re nature enslaved to our very, very kind of blind needs. And so people don’t even know nature anymore, you go to big cities, right? I mean, people don’t even know what it means to walk in a forest, to look at green, to look at the sky, they don’t see any of that, or they see maybe a tree here or there a little bird. But that is not nature and exposure to nature is essential in this story, because we need to understand where we came from, where we are, who do we, what do we belong to, right? This, this severance that we have developed over 10,000 years from being completely immersed in nature, to being completely outside of nature is what allowed for us to feel ourselves above nature, and hence, do with it while we want to transform nature into a commodity, and not into an entity that is our partner in our story of survival. Right? And, and so more exposure, and how do you do that? Well, some people you know, is able to just walk out of the house and you have green all over others or not. But there are ways which you can remediate that you could if you’re in a big city, and I talk a lot to educators, I think that schooling and pedagogy is essential here. And I’m going to have a call for farming, as well, as you’ll see in a second, which is every school needs to take the kids out. Even if it’s to a little park, you know, because if you go to a little park that has a little bit of gravel, trees, and sky and sun and clouds and birds and larva and worms that you have geology, you have biology, you have chemistry, you have physics, you have astronomy, it’s all there. So you can actually educate outside the classroom, and use nature as your classroom and create this narrative. To me, I call this biocentrism, which is the essential principle of this book, which is the planet that holds life is a sacred planet. And when I mean sacred, I don’t mean you know, in a Christian, Jewish way, I mean, sacred as a place that we venerate as the only thing that allows us to be here as our mother, as many indigenous cultures have been telling us for 1000s of years. But if we live in a city, and we’ve never seen this, we don’t understand, we don’t hear the story of who we are of the planets of the universe, of the evolution of life. How are we going to do this? So schools need to tell the story at all different levels, elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, college, postgraduate, every level of education needs to make this story of who we are, of how we tell the story of the universe. And our belonging and gratitude for being here. Part of every citizen of the world needs to know this right?

Dave Chapman 48:42
You know, sort of Marcelo, after I saw David Grinspoon, we had a conversation, and I asked you this, does the faculty at Dartmouth believe David, when he’s saying we’re facing an extinction event. And you said, Yes, overwhelmingly, I said, So why hasn’t the curriculum been transformed if you’re facing extinction, which is a pretty terrifying thing. If we have a war, everybody is transformed, and, you know, they’re going around collecting steel used for weapons? So I’m just curious, this is a development since then, do you, is this forming in your mind about what a curriculum might look like?

Marcelo Gleiser 49:22
Yes,

Dave Chapman 49:22
That would address this need, as part of this manifesto?

Marcelo Gleiser 49:26
Absolutely. So it is actually part of the manifesto. I talk about, you need to implement this in every curricula, right? I mean, it’s just as you know, that two plus two is four. You should know what life is, where it comes from, how are we connected to it? It’s not difficult science. You know, it’s stuff we can say with words. And it’s absolutely essential to develop a sense of responsibility. It’s, to me, it’s more than a curricular emergency. It’s a moral imperative that we have right now and I I have done this, my classes at Dartmouth, I go straight on to this, I may be teaching the history of physics or whatever of quantum physics, they will hear this story that I’m telling you right now. Right? And they are profoundly moved, because I tell them, Look, you guys are the ones that are going to have to deal with this. So this is the story that should be empowering you to be the agents of change, right? I mean, it’s essential. And furthermore, I tell the educators that they are also the agents of change, there is a tremendous amount of responsibility in education, because we need to spread this story, right? Everyone should be telling the story. So the educators have to be inspired by this narrative, so that they tell the story to the kids, you know, and then the kids getting…so you empower the educators. I say, you guys can change the world, because you are talking to the generations that need to hear this story. And then the kids hear this story. And they say, Wow, this is the world I live in, I need to do something about this. And so absolutely that’s…

Dave Chapman 51:15
So this is really redefining citizenship.

Marcelo Gleiser 51:20
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 51:20
In other words, our schools are to create valuable citizens and people who can have fulfilling lives. But this is reimagining that. There’s been a long period, I think where citizenship, in de facto in the country was almost defined as being fit to work in a large industrial enterprise. Right. I mean, school was actually literally consciously how do we train people to work in the factories?

Marcelo Gleiser 51:48
Yeah, and look at the word citizenship, it’s the, it’s the one that belongs to the city, this that is just wrong, you know, it should be natureship, we belong to nature. City is something we just built on top of it, right. And so the whole structure is wrong, right? Even the word religion, right? If you think of the word religion, the way I use it, if you go to the Latin roots, one way of reading it, there are differences, but this one I like, is Ray llegada, which means to reconnect. Ligar is to ligate, to connect, so reconnect with what? With this, you know, with where we came from, this is what so this is my, my cry, so to speak, this is my motion, you know, in terms of what I need, I think needs to be done. There is the last principle, the more principle, and then there is this connection with the history of who we are and how we connect to nature that should be part of a curricular revolution, really, you know, and, you know, I tried to do it as much as I can, as as a voice towards it. And I’m also reaching out now to the corporate world. So I’m also beginning to train or advise, you know, those who control corporations in different places to rethink their role as leaders, because, you know, the idea that, infinite progress and open-ended economic growth is just suicidal. And it’s completely fundamentally wrong. And it’s not going to keep happening. And so the whole mindset of circular economy, systemic thinking. Where is your product coming from? Where’s it going to? How much? What is the energy that you’re using to create what you’re doing coming from? How do you put refuse back? All of these are circles, they’re all together, you know, and they make part of this giant whole, which is really global. nowadays. You can’t break this apart, you know, so this global systemic thinking is really essential for informed leadership. And then finally, I make a call for the farmers as well, because you guys are out in nature doing things. And I think you do too little to invite people to see your work. You could connect to schools, you could help organize groups of kids to come and visit farms, educate them on how it’s going, why organic is different, why it’s fundamental, and why you are deeply connected to the nature cycles as a person as a human a farm is a spectacular laboratory for natureship.

Dave Chapman 54:45
Yeah.

Marcelo Gleiser 54:46
And it could be done much more than it is.

Dave Chapman 54:48
Yeah. You know, in Denmark. An enormous percentage of the citizens visit an organic farm every year. And they do it by they have one day where all the organic dairy farmers have agreed to leave the cows, let the cows out of the barn, and the grass is good enough. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen cows leaving the barn. But after being in all winter, they have such joy. They frolic, they leap, they’re kicking their heels up. And people now it’s a big deal. They take picnic lunches, they take their kids out. And this is the day that all the farms have said, all the organic farms have said, we’re gonna let the cows out of the barn. Of course, the the confinement places never let them out of the barn. They’re always bringing food into the barn.

Marcelo Gleiser 55:39
And it happens to us, right? Think about us, you know, after a long New England winter, when everything starts to go green, and then there’s an explosion of life and diversity and color. And you’re going like, right, so yeah, because we need this stuff. Right? That’s what we are. I mean, this is our partnership with the world. And so, to me, this connection is not just intellectual, but it’s deeply spiritual, too. Right.

Dave Chapman 56:07
So good. So let me, let me ask a challenging question. Which is, of course, once we say we need to, we need to create a culture that will really encourage natureship, right, that is really going to be different, it’s going to be transformative. And of course, there’s going to be a tremendous amount of power resisting that change. And we see it all the time, everywhere, that there is always a status quo that is designed to resist the change, because the people who are in charge of it are profiting from it. And they that makes them feel good about themselves. So do you have thoughts about how we address that? It’s interesting that you’re, you’re planning to work with some corporate leaders and I myself have asked the question about is that possible? You know, I’ve just my favorite story of that is Emmanuel Faber who’s a Swiss guy who was the head, was made the head of Danone. And my god, he was inspiring. And I think he was for real. I don’t think it was just greenwashed talk, I don’t. I think he was genuinely trying to change the purpose of business, he planned to make a profit doing it. So he didn’t plan to, you know, transform capitalism, he planned to create a more enlightened capitalism through the example at Danone. And of course, they had a down year, and he was gone. And which raised for me the serious question. And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try those things. But I’m just looking at him going well, I’m not sure the system will allow itself to be changed in that way. Do you have any thoughts about that, Marcelo?

Marcelo Gleiser 57:54
Yeah. So people always talk to me about this. But you know, now what? And I think there are two ways to think about this. One is the optimistic way, and one is the pessimistic way. Right. And the pessimist to me, is that guy that goes into the field to play a game, and doesn’t even kick the ball, because he already lost the game. You know? So like, what am I gonna do, right? I mean, it’s these corporations they’re not responding. So I’m not. And the optimist is the guy that says, look, there is work to be done. And there is opening happening. After all, this, this young man, there was leader of Danone and he did something. So 10 years ago, this wouldn’t have happened. So I, and there is the whole B-corporation movement happening, which is huge. And so my sense of this is that the tides are turning. If you look at the Economist, this week, the headline was, Solar Energy Will Change the World. So a lot of people are divesting from fossil fuels. And this is a movement that is beginning to happen. Everybody wants a profit, organic farmers also want a profit. The point is that you can do that and still have a profit. And that’s what we’re going to say in fact, the corporations that adopt a more open social network dynamics, and a more horizontal power structure, have people much happier to work there and produce better. So it helps to open up and to destroy those old structures of power. You know, and I think, I hope I will live to see but it looks, it may not be fast enough. That’s possible. But it’s happening, there’s no question about it, you know, it’s happening and it’s a good feeling to see this, right?

Dave Chapman 57:54
Yeah. I sometimes talk with people about optimism. And I know that you’ve thought about it a lot. And we’ve already talked about a little, but I’m actually not an optimistic person. And, but I insist that I also not be defeated. And that I keep trying. So I’m just curious, because I think that the optimism you’re talking about isn’t just spontaneous, it’s more of a strategic decision. It’s more of something that’s practiced and maybe that can be taught. I’m curious your thoughts about that.

Marcelo Gleiser 1:00:39
Yeah. And that’s, that’s related to this whole biocentric pedagogy, you know that. So it is thought and it could be something that hopefully more and more schools are going to embrace. I just literally last night, I gave a talk to 160 educators, and Secretaries of Education in the whole of Brazil. And my whole talk was very much like this conversation we’re having right now. Like, this is the situation, this is how we got here. This is why we can go on this way. And this is why as educators, as owners of, of, of any kind of business, including the farming business, you can self organize, to be more in contact with schools, and do it on a voluntary basis, you know, meaning, I own a farm, I’m gonna go to my local school, talk to the principal, say, look, I would love to organize some tours with the kids in which we talk about, not just about the farm itself, but why this kind of farming is important for the world, and how everyone can help. And these things, you know, if you hit one in 20, or two in 20, then that one is going to talk to the parents, maybe the parents can come too. And the point is that I believe in the snowball effect of changing mindsets, and I could not wake up every morning if I didn’t believe in what I’m doing. And so it’s a matter of my own mental health and emotional health depends on the drive to kind of try to spread this idea, you know, and yes, it’s it’s difficult, it’s challenging. It needs to be refined in many ways. And but this is exactly what I’m trying to do with the more corporate and other ways in which I am trying to implement this notion. These values.

Dave Chapman 1:02:39
Yes. Yeah. Good. You know, that’s one that I kind of struggle with. So and I’m gonna keep looking at it because I do have a almost a loss of hope around a corporate solution. But, but certainly the people involved in this system are not, nobody is beyond hope. It’s not, it’s not the people. The question is, to the people have the ability to change the system from within. I don’t know that yet.

Marcelo Gleiser 1:03:10
Yeah. And that’s because of, you know, Milton Friedman and stockholding. Right, that’s, it’s not the leadership, it’s not necessarily just the corporate leadership. It is because, as happened to Mr. Faber is that if you do it differently, and it doesn’t, it doesn’t work, you get fired by the Board, which has responded to the interests of the stockholders. But if the stockholders, the people that invest, the people that have money, start to think differently about, What am I doing with my money? Is it worth destroying the world just to get a few more bucks in the bank? Or is there other ways that I can contribute to saving the world and get my bucks in the bank? Then maybe that mentality changes, you know, and so you need to kind of like, inform people, that there are ways of behaving in this planet, which are not just destructive and parasitic, that can actually lead to the global good.

Dave Chapman 1:04:13
Yeah. Right.

Marcelo Gleiser 1:04:14
And honestly, the Global South, in many ways is ahead of us, you know, in thinking that way.

Dave Chapman 1:04:21
Yeah, I know, I love that, that, of course, you’re from Brazil, and you have a huge audience there that you’re talking to and are part of that community and that dialog. And it’s pretty refreshing. Before we go, I just, I did want to touch on reductionism, and just to help, because we talk about it a lot, but the model of reductionist science and then as an alternative, looking at other kinds of science or ways of knowing and I’ve heard you talk about Asian and traditional, like early Chinese, and heard you talk about indigenous as different ways of approaching knowledge and a different understanding? Could you…could you touch on those things?

Marcelo Gleiser 1:05:11
So, so there are two ways to talk about this. One is just within science itself, science meaning Western science. Alright, so let’s go there first. So Western science, a lot of it has been based on what you said reductionism, which is, essentially, you know, nature is very complicated. So if you can break a system into little bits and study the behavior of those little bits, and then put them together to understand the bigger system, awesome. And it works in many, many ways, beautifully. I mean, it has fueled the whole technological progress that we have, you know, the only reason why we have a computer, right? That is, it’s a combination of classical mechanics, electromagnetism, quantum physics it’s all in there. It’s because of this reductionistic approach. So that’s just great, right. But for certain kinds of systems, this way of thinking just does not work, right. And there is this other way, which is complexity science…

Dave Chapman 1:06:14
Called what?

Marcelo Gleiser 1:06:14
Complexity science. Yeah. And it’s about emergence, the concept of emergence, which is really beautiful, which is the notion that when you have many, a system that has many parts, they interact with one another, depending on how they do that, they may create behaviors, which cannot be reduced to the single parts. I’ll give you an example. You can go look, I’ll stop.

Unknown Speaker 1:06:42
It’s called an emergent property. It’s like a car, you if you have all, all parts of a car just kind of on the floor around each other. It’s not going to do much like that, when you put it together, it’s able to actually,

Marcelo Gleiser 1:06:52
Exactly there you go, yeah. It is. Absolutely and so. So one, one very simple example of that is temperature, you know, when the concept of temperature is everywhere, right, and, and but temperature really is the product of the behavior of many different molecules of gas, they’re kind of colliding with one another. So if you have just two or three of those molecules, there is no, you cannot talk about them being cold or hot. But when you have a bunch of them, the collective behavior, allows us to describe that qualitatively through the measure of temperature, which really encompasses all of these things happening together. And there are many, many, many more instantly, like hurricanes and all sorts of other ones. But, that’s within science, emergent science, is really the science of the future, actually the present, because when you talk about the climate, for example, you can talk about the climate through reductionistic physics, it just does not work. Because it’s so highly nonlinear. And there are so many parts that interact with one another, that you have to use different techniques to describe it. And the narrative of the way you predict things is different as well. Right? So that’s within science. So emergent science, systemic thinking, that works out science, these are all new things that we’re doing now to try to describe more complicated systems like the brain, or nature, or the interactions between the brain and nature, etc. But then the other part of your question, which is more of a general cultural question, which is that many, so many of the topics that we are debating today, right, or the questions that we, existential questions that we have, are not new, they’re very old, they’re much older than science. And people have been dealing with those things for a long, long time. And so the relationship between forest and people, and how you live in those places, and how you can use the plants to kind of, as medicine, you know, to kind of treat all sorts of ailments, and to open your gateway to the spirit world, is something that has been around for 1000s and 1000s of years. And there is beautiful, profound knowledge there that we’re only beginning to kind of like pay the due respect, you know. And so I think that one of the movements that I really embrace right now is not to dethrone Western science, but is to create a convergence of ways of thinking, addressing the same question, you know. So for example, if you’re talking about the nature of intelligence, right, what is intelligence about, what kind of intelligence because you have all these different kinds of intelligences. Plant intelligence. And plants have developed strategies for survival for millions and millions of years, they have a lot to teach us because they work together. Right? And collective intelligence of insects. Bees are spectacular, right? They have, the idea of the beehive, right? I mean, this kind of like, is we work together for the good of the whole hive. And there is this thing called collective intelligence. And so let’s think of the human hive a little bit, and how we are all working together or could work together to create the common good at a global scale, right. And so, bringing those spiritual ways of connecting to the natural world as an inspiration to promote change of mindset, like I mean, you look, people that don’t get out of a city, you take them out of the city, let’s go for a walk in a forest and let’s watch a sunset from the top of a mountain. And let’s rethink a little bit about who you are in the world. And what is it that you’re doing with your life? Those things, they do change people, you know, I know, because I’ve seen it, and, and we need to do more of that. So I think that’s why I think this confluence of different ways of knowing is so important, you know, we need to kind of open our old mindset of reductionism, mechanistic way of thinking, and less growth. I mean, the flag of Brazil has in the middle of the flag has a little saying it says, order and progress that is precisely positivistic mechanistic way that was dominant late 19th century. And order from what? The laws of nature? The laws of man? Progress of what? By exploiting natural resources without thinking about the impact of all of that. So this mindset has to change. The Brazilian flag needs to change its saying, you know, and it’s, it should be belonging and gratitude, instead of order and progress.

Dave Chapman 1:12:07
Beautiful. All right. We should probably wrap up. We could, we could talk for a couple of days. And, but let’s finish. Is there any last thing you’d like to say, Marcelo?

Marcelo Gleiser 1:12:21
I just, you know, of all the things that I’ve said, I think I’ve said enough. I really do hope that everyone, farmers included, will become more proactive about attracting people to their worlds, you know, so that they can share the importance of what they’re doing. You know, so go out, reach out to the schools, the communities you know, so that more people can see your work so that we can together construct this new pedagogy of natureship.

Dave Chapman 1:12:51
Marcelo Gleiser, thank you very much.

Marcelo Gleiser 1:12:53
My pleasure.