Today, Amanda sits down with Ross and Christophe to share the vision of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and its namesake’s legacy as an early environmentalist, humanitarian, and techno-optimist with a global vision of the future. They discuss how Nori fits into that vision as part of the ‘design science revolution’ and how the transparency of the blockchain aligns with Fuller’s ideas.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospin.
Ross Kenyon: Hey, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon here with Paul Gamble and Christophe Jaspé. We’re here at the Buckminster Fuller Institute here in San Francisco and I just got handed a sticker and it says, you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. It’s a very Nori attitude. We’re happy to be here. Christophe, why don’t you introduce us from here?
Christophe Jospe: Wow, it’s wonderful to be sitting in this room across from Amanda Ravenhill. We’re seated with a lot of geodesic domes all around us. I guess we’ll figure out why.
Paul Gambill: I guess that has something to do with Buckminster Fuller. I feel like I’m getting my money’s worth because it’s one of the few things I think everyone knows about him. So you just walk in, I’m like, oh, okay, this is the right room.
Christophe Jospe: And I’ve known about Amanda for a while. This is the first time we meet in person, so it’s really cool to be here. Let’s let Amanda introduce herself. What’s your background and what are you doing at the Buckminster Fuller Institute?
Amanda Ravenhill: Well, thank you for having me on the show. My background, I will start, well, at my beginning, not the beginning of everything, because that would take a long time. But my beginning, I was born overseas. I’m a third culture kid. My parents are anthropologists. So I grew up with a very global view. Grew up in Cote d’Ivoire and then in La Paz, Bolivia, and in D. C. in between.
Paul Gambill: Were they USAID?
Amanda Ravenhill: Mm-hmm.
Paul Gambill: Oh, okay.
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah. Yeah. They’re both anthropologists, but applied anthropology. Mm-hmm. You know, fast forward, did my undergrad in International Development and Social Change, NGIS, and then moved back to Bolivia and was more focused on like the poverty alleviation, women’s empowerment side of things. But then these thousand year weather events kept on happening every year. These events that are only supposed to happen every thousand years. And I realized this is going to get a little nerdy for a second, but I realized there’s like this complex equation of like making the world work for 100% of humanity, as Bucky says.
And climate is like a coefficient on that. So I kind of shifted more towards environmental and integrating environmental and social work then. Then came back to the States, did an AmeriCorps fellowship, moved out here to San Francisco for Presidio graduate school. Then worked at 350. org, Carbon War Room. And then in the biochar industry for a while. Tried to start a biochar trade association for the U. S. Didn’t go very far. And then started teaching at Presidio. And Paul Hawken was one of my guest speakers. And we started talking and came up with the idea of Drawdown in 2013.
That’s when we co-founded the project. And then I moved over here to Buckminster Fuller Institute about a year and a half ago.
Paul Gambill: That’s a lot. I don’t even know where to start with all of that. Chris, do you have a good sense? I mean, I think we like to start with why.
Christophe Jospe: And it seems like you lived abroad and something and you clicked. You say, I want to make the world a better place. And I see that it doesn’t work and I want to sort of insert myself. And so there’s something that’s really driving you. So what is your why, Amanda?
Amanda Ravenhill: It’s to ensure that climate change is used as a positive catalyst to transform the world. And to ensure that like this moment, this transition and all of this incredible capital, human capital, intellectual capital, financial capital, political capital that’s being risen right now around climate change is used like thoroughly to like help us. Mm-hmm.
Christophe Jospe: And wow, I clearly didn’t do my homework because the trade association, the biochar network, I mean, that’s so cool and kind of tangentially relevant to what we’re doing here at Nori when we talk about spreading soil amendments over land. And hey, you know, that’s biochar. And it’s this great resource that farmers love. And wouldn’t it be cool if there could be a lot more of that?
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah, I got so excited. I found out about biochar when I was at Presidio Graduate School. And I’d been looking for like a multi-pronged solution through reading Buckminster Fuller and meeting Gunter Paul and reading Wendell Berry. It just seemed like that was a commonality amongst Everything they were saying was like, don’t just solve one problem, try to dissolve. So like try to look at like the pattern and look at how can you address multiple problems with one solution. So when I found out about biochar, I was like, well, waste, energy, climate, food, water, air.
I mean, it just goes on and on what it touches.
Christophe Jospe: Right. So let’s go into the details. I’m a farmer. I’ve got this residue. I don’t know what to do with it. But if I can collect it and I can starve it of oxygen, I can produce energy there on my property. And then I have this leftover resource that when I spread it over my land, it begins to just like supercharge the entire land with all the nutrients and you have way more water. And by the way, you don’t need to spend any money on fertilizers, which might cause other challenges.
Amanda Ravenhill: Mm hmm.
Christophe Jospe: Awesome. Why isn’t the world doing this?
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Everywhere. Everywhere.
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah, biochar is a tough one because all soil is different and all biochars are different too. Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of potential there. There’s some really great companies that are rising up right now. An important piece to that you didn’t mention is just that biochar can hold a lot of organic fertilizer so you can supercharge it with compost or aged compost preferably and like mycorrhizal, you know, mushroom inoculations and then that goes into the soil and it’s like, it’s incredible. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, and it turns out that we have been doing this for hundreds, if not thousands of years in the Amazon, sort of terra preta. And I think that’s so inspiring when we look at age-old ideas, which can be rejuvenated and actually really work. So our last podcast, and actually today, but for our listeners, it’ll be last week, we brought on Project Drawdown, and they talked a lot about what’s happening in the future. But when you were working with Paul Hawken, you did a lot of the heavy lifting to get it off the ground.
Do you want to tell us about how that worked?
Amanda Ravenhill: Sure, yeah. It was actually born out of our time together at Presidio Graduate School. So he was a guest speaker in the course that I taught and then came in and we taught together for several semesters. And we worked with our students to do some of the initial research for Drawdown. It was really eye-opening to just do kind of the initial back of the napkin math on some of these solutions and realize just that our assumptions around these things, that the top 10 solutions are, you know, hardly anyone could name them.
It’s not just about the top 10. It’s about this diversity and this larger approach. But yeah, that was really fun to kind of birth it out of Presidio and have all the support of all the graduate students there. And then that then fed into the fellowship program that Chad Frischman designed and has been running. And that’s like, you know, all of these incredible people from all over the world, most of which with PhDs, like really knowing a lot of these solutions in depth. It took a village definitely to make this book.
Ross Kenyon: And then what exactly does the Buckminster Fuller Institute do? What are you personally involved in here? Give us the elevator pitch. Yeah, we’ve been making people do that lately.
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah, so we share Buckminster Fuller’s mission, which is to make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or disadvantage to anyone.
Christophe Jospe: Wow, let’s unpack that a little bit. Not everyone knows who Buckminster Fuller is, so maybe we should go in. Maybe we should start there.
Amanda Ravenhill: Mm-hmm, yeah. Buckminster Fuller was a Leonardo da Vinci type last century, and he designed the geodesic dome, which later inspired the soccer ball. He popularized the word synergy. He was one of the early environmentalist, humanitarian techno-optimists. He bridged all of those together and wrote 22 books. He Kind of just saw a different future that was kind of technology enabled and science enabled, but also very grounded in ecology and understanding whole systems. One of his famous quotes is start with the universe. So it’s like, you know, the idea of synergy is behavior of systems unpredicted by just looking at the parts of that system.
So in order to really understand the full whole and any interactions or synergies that will arise, you have to start with the biggest system that you can, which is the universe.
Christophe Jospe: Wow. You threw a word in there, which is one of my favorite words. I don’t think Ross knows this, but spontaneity or spontaneous and creating the space for that spontaneity. What exactly does that mean?
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah. So the piece around spontaneous cooperation is the way I interpret it, at least, is around shared narrative and shared purpose. So once people kind of see that we have the capability of being a beneficial species, I think there’s like a big shift right now in humans going from thinking that we’re this poison towards knowing that we can be beneficial, like Planting the Amazon and doing things like that. So that shared narrative of understanding that we can do this and what needs to be done can result in spontaneous cooperation.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I love that. Whenever I would hear people who are interested in ecology or environmentalism that had the humans as parasite paradigm in, I’m like, where do I fit into this world that you want to build? It doesn’t inspire me. Like the anti-humanism of it, I find very alienating. So it’s nice when you hear people who care about those things, but also are very optimistic about technology, who think that more humans oftentimes means more problem solvers and more people to work together with in solving these things. That gets me excited.
So I’m happy to hear the Institute is very favorable. I should read more. I think I’ve read a couple of his things, but it’s been a long time. Where would one start if they wanted to read some Bucky?
Amanda Ravenhill: One of two places I usually recommend one is Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, which came out in 1969, almost 50 years ago. It’s 70 pages and it covers a lot of his ideas and it’s just a fun read. There’s some fun stories in there around pirates. And there’s another one called Grunch of Giants, which was the last book that was published while he was alive.
Ross Kenyon: Is it Grunch?
Amanda Ravenhill: Grunch, which stands for the Gross Universe Cash Heist, which is all about mega multinational corporations taking over the world. It’s just about economics.
Christophe Jospe: And that’s kind of happening.
Amanda Ravenhill: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So that’s a good one. And that one’s on audiobooks on Audible.
Ross Kenyon: I’m like the biggest evangelist for Audible. I’ve forced so many people to accept books from friends. I’m like, have you done this before? No? Well, you just got one. Enjoy your 30 hours.
Paul Gambill: I definitely am a recipient of Ross’s prolific audiobook donations, quote unquote.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think Amazon should start giving me like profit sharing just from how many people I’ve gotten to do that.
Amanda Ravenhill: Affiliate marketing.
Paul Gambill: We digress.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, definitely. I want to go back to Buckminster Fuller. So he came up with this word, Dymaxion. Which is a combination of three words, right? So we’ve got dynamic, maximum, and tension. Yeah. Can you link that?
Amanda Ravenhill: It was an advertising guy that he was working with that came up with it, but he liked it. He liked it. Enough to brand everything. It got his seal of approval.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. Okay. What do those three words have to do with each other? And what does that have to do with kind of the ethos of the Buckminster Fuller Institute?
Amanda Ravenhill: So dynamic is, you know, acknowledging that things are in a constant state of evolution, which I think is one of the basis understandings in the regenerative development and design movement. So that’s dynamic. Maximum. It’s kind of like aligned with a doing more with less adage that he used a lot. So like, how can we be more efficient, essentially, with what we have? And then tension is something that you’ll see in a lot of the artifacts and structures that Buckminster Fuller created, preferring tension over compression as a building tool. So geodesic domes are made in what he called tensegrity, which is mostly tension with like these islanded moments of compression.
Where like the struts come together. It wasn’t just about the actual structure of those. Those are all related back to a philosophy. So if you read Synergetics, Synergetics 1 and 2, his books on the geometry of thinking, it’s not just like about the structural form, but how then that relates to how we all relate to one another and organizational design and that sort of thing. There’s a lot to uncover.
Ross Kenyon: Is he just coining neologisms all over the place?
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Making up words all over? Okay. Okay.
Christophe Jospe: One interesting kind of connection that I have in my professional career, maybe a story that some of our listeners might not be aware, but Buckminster Fuller was, the domes, was sort of responsible for the Biosphere 2, which was in Tucson, Arizona. And funny enough, so my old advisor, Klaus Lackner, mentor, was the physicist for the Biosphere.
Ross Kenyon: Under Steve Bannon, by the way.
Christophe Jospe: Which is a very interesting tidbit. Indeed, under Steve Bannon when he was, anyway... So in the biosphere, you had different regions around the world of different sorts of, you know, you have the desert and the rainforest, etc. But it was in that space when Klaus and the manager began to think, okay, how do we actually manage pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, which led to the development of direct air capture technologies and sort of the industrial, let’s extract CO2 out and really think about balancing the atmospheric carbon, which got me on this...
Fascinating learning curve to think about not only the industrial, but spanning all the way to the ecological to look at what are these things that have been happening in the Amazon for thousands of years. And so I feel like Bucky has some sort of small piece in my evolution or learning already. There was no question there. I just wanted to say that.
Unknown speaker: Well, okay. Find a question.
Christophe Jospe: No, no, no. I’m going to get the question. We’re going to keep talking and then it’ll come. But we’re talking about Reversing Climate Change. This is the Reversing Climate Change podcast. And We know we’re not going to do that. And that’s not us alone. We’re simply trying to build a new voluntary market mechanism that can make paying for that as simple as possible and happen out in the open. So on the one side, you’ve got volunteers and there’s pent up demand to say, hey, we want to do something. What we call suppliers and farmers specifically who have been practicing these great ways.
And if you just had one more incentive, then this could really scale and happen quickly. And what Nori is trying to do is to say, okay, we’re building this token, which essentially represents the physical removal of one ton of CO2 from the atmosphere and putting it all out in the open. So I bring this up because how, if at all, do we fit into this kind of grand vision of making the world work for 100% of humanity?
Amanda Ravenhill: How does Nori fit in?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. How do we fit in?
Amanda Ravenhill: Oh, I think it’s integral. Well, so Bucky talked about this design science revolution that was needed.
Christophe Jospe: Aha, you read our bullet points. You knew we were going to ask you that.
Amanda Ravenhill: Yes. So he talked about it as kind of an alternative to politics or alternative to political war revolution that is underway. So he did this amazing research in 1960s called the Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs, where he Kind of tracked everything. This is pre-computers. As an aside, Bucky, when he first started making his geodesic domes, would have to do four days worth of longhand trigonometry to design these things. We’ve moved so quickly and so fast. Imagine. Wow. Anyway, so he did this inventory of world resources, human trends and needs and realized a really important threshold had just been crossed in about 1970 that we have enough to go around.
We have the technological capability of taking care of everyone at a higher standard of living than anyone has ever lived before. And so because of that, war is now obsolete. It’s not that I... We’ve moved from a you or me world to a you and me world. And he said the design science revolution would kind of bring us over into that new paradigm that it would take about 50 years or about 48 years in right now for all of our institutions, you know, our economy, our religion, our government, our education institutions to kind of shift over to this you and me world.
And so... I think the idea of carbon balancing is very much part of the design science revolution that’s underway. And yeah, it’s an integral part, especially the ecological side of it. We have this opportunity to really heal our biosphere and redefine what wealth is the process and increase biodiversity while also balancing the carbon cycle.
Ross Kenyon: Very interesting to me. A lot of the research I’ve read has shown that humans care more about the relative levels of wealth more than the absolute ones. It seems like maybe Fuller was thinking that we would recognize like once you have a certain amount, it’s okay, you don’t need to fight over it. But we’re fighterly people. Is it disappointing sometimes to watch where you’re like, this is probably not worth it, but we get really bored. This is kind of rambly.
Christophe Jospe: No, it’s fine. I think what you’re saying is war is an industry and we believe in world peace. If you’re going to make the world work for 100% of humanity, well, first, okay, we need to stop fighting over resources and make things work more efficiently. I can see Paul just glowing because one of Paul’s big motivations in advancing a sort of goal that’s about Reversing Climate Change is, well, what are the real drivers of a lot of causes of strife and wars around the world? It comes from climate imbalance and if we can fix or try to solve for that, a lot of the rest of the challenges go away.
I think what you’re getting at, Ross, is, okay, we’ve got this war industry, which just wants to keep going.
Ross Kenyon: No, I’m saying individual people want it. People want to fight. If we don’t have public hangings or sports games or something, well, we’ll find some way to get this thing we have to scratch. I wondered to what degree this is a conservative tendency inside of me. We’re like, is this just part of who we are? Maybe VR. Maybe it is just a reflection back of our economic conditions and political conditions. Or maybe there’s just a part of us that’s nasty. I can’t tell. It is a question that I think about a fair amount too.
And if I’m feeling like really good that day, I’ll be like, we don’t need any of this stuff. We’ll get past this. And then I was like, is this just geopolitics that I’m like a tiny little part of forever? And maybe so.
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah. I mean, Bucky talked about moving from weaponry to livingry. So, I mean, you already have it happening in some of our military around the world where they’re not fighting as much. They’re really protecting people a lot more now or doing like disaster relief. So it’s already kind of underway. In terms of like humans needing, you know, aggression in their lives, you know, I think there’s probably a self-expression element to that. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Paul Gambill: I wanted to jump in and ask a question talking about this like future vision of humanity that Bucky had. How do you think that decentralization and blockchains fit into that vision?
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah, I think it’s central to what he was imagining. I mean, if you read Grunge, it’s like all about what will happen if we are too centralized. The Grunge of Giants being that it’s like these mega multinational companies that are becoming the new giant, you know, and keeping people oppressed. Yeah, I think he would be really excited about it.
Christophe Jospe: I’m just getting chills hearing you talk. And when that happens, I know it’s a good sign. Like we’re super resonating with everything you’re saying. And I think part of the opportunity with a decentralized economy allows, okay, well, there are no more middlemen in this system. You’ve got one person on one side, which wants to, in our case, pay for carbon removal. And then you’ve got another person on the other side who wants to get paid. And if you can trust that what you’re paying is actually going to that physical activity...
Then all of the potential middlemen, which are kind of standing in the way and a little bit corrupt and all have their special interests, which divert the true incentive to doing the thing it’s set out to do, that becomes less of an issue. And I think that is a very driving piece of what we’re about. I mean, we don’t want to degrade any of the great work happening top down from the UN and the various climate accords, but we think that’s just not enough. And a voluntary movement that is frustrated at the pace of change could actually take hold a lot quicker.
And We’re not trying to keep this to ourselves. If someone else were to come around and say, hey, I think what Nori is doing is really cool. Let me just copy their entire design. We would say, great, more shots on goal. Like we’re trying to just create a new incentive mechanism. And I think one of the pieces that we got out from Drawdown is Chad publicly announced. He said, what Drawdown is putting out is going to be open sourced. And there’s kind of a repository that people can contribute to and all this data can just feed itself.
So I want to go into a little bit about, okay, Everyone’s got their own kind of angle here. We want to also, or we not want to, we already have our code repository just out there on GitHub. And we have this podcast where as things evolve, we want to talk about like, here’s what we’re thinking in a real spirit of openness and sharing. And so how do you see, we’re going to make you queen of the world for a second.
Unknown speaker: This is your new go-to.
Christophe Jospe: No, it’s not my new, we do this sometimes. We do this with the people that we really like and we think they have something interesting to say. But okay, queen of the world, something about open sharing, something about everyone working together for humanity. Everyone has to do what you’re going to say, or at least think in the spirit of Buckminster Fuller Institute. And you have three years to do it. Let’s start in the summer.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, after Burning Man?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, after Burning Man. Three Burning Mans, and each time you report on how you’re achieving your goals to make humanity work for everyone.
Amanda Ravenhill: Hey, you want this answer in a sentence?
Paul Gambill: There’s so much buildup for this question. So many conditions were appended to it.
Amanda Ravenhill: Okay, I’m good now. I’ll take it.
Paul Gambill: A couple sentences is fine.
Amanda Ravenhill: What would I do?
Paul Gambill: Yeah.
Amanda Ravenhill: That’s tough.
Paul Gambill: Get rid of the word grunch. Yeah.
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s about so many different elements to it. I’m stuck.
Paul Gambill: Cool. That’s fine.
Christophe Jospe: We’ll table it and it’ll come out through some of the other questions.
Paul Gambill: That’s like the best response possible.
Ross Kenyon: Whenever someone’s like, I don’t actually know what I would do with all of that power. It’s like good. One, because you probably wouldn’t know all of the things necessary just because that information just isn’t present for any one person to have. And then also, it’s scary to do that. I think it’s actually kind of a good answer. I added way more than she probably intended, but...
Christophe Jospe: I mean, it’s a good answer. Cats out of the bag. We did mention Burning Man. I’ve actually never been. I know that you’re someone who’s been multiple times. I was invited to a camp called Camp ID8, which sounds like super aligned with a sort of similar vision to what we’re talking about here on this podcast. For people who haven’t been to Burning Man or don’t really understand what it is or what it’s about, how does that relate to what we’re talking about here on the podcast or really envisioning a world that might work in a more efficient way?
Amanda Ravenhill: Burning Man is an experiment in community. It’s based on the gifting economy, often misinterpreted as being part of the barter economy where I give you something, you give me something back. But everyone is in this constant state of giving and gifting and generosity. There’s also art everywhere. I think it’s probably the biggest art gallery in terms of participatory art in the world every year. And yeah, I think it’s like one slice of how I see the future. There are definitely elements there. The gifting economy is a really interesting piece. So it fits into what I call the generous economy, which is a different way of seeing the economy going forward.
That includes the sharing economy, the caring economy, which is another word for service economy, the circular economy, and the gifting economy. So all of these trends based on kind of this shift that Bucky talked about from the you or me world to the you and me world, like we’re restructuring the way That we’re relating to one another. And I think Burning Man’s like this great way of like having a felt experience of what that feels like.
Ross Kenyon: It’s also paired with the radical self-reliance, right? So it’s a gift economy, but you also can’t just like mooch off of everyone. You had to like, you’re expected to, no one’s keeping track of it. I think you’d feel pretty bad if you went to Burning Man and just took it from everyone, right? Is it self-enforcing in that kind of way?
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah, yeah. Generally, people have a hard time their first year because they generally don’t bring a lot or haven’t contributed to the city as much. And that’s fine for the first year, but it’s harder on people because they feel like they’re not a part of this ecosystem as much.
Christophe Jospe: So what do you say to the people? Well, no, this is just a bunch of hippies and they’re making a real problem in the desert and it has a horrible environmental impact. And it’s really just a networking event for Silicon Valley and people are flying with their Sherpas who just set up their camp and they show up and they do a bunch of drugs and check out an art experiment.
Amanda Ravenhill: What do you say to them? But there’s also a lot that Burning Man could be doing. My husband and I actually started a change.org petition several years ago to the Burning Man board for them to step up and make some bigger stands really around their environmental impact. So one of the 10 principles is leave no trace. And Burning Man is clearly leaving a trace in the atmosphere and all sorts of other things, especially through the procurement of things that people buy and through the transportation and getting there. And so the Burning Man board said in 2015 that they were going to do something about it.
They made a public declaration and then haven’t said anything publicly since. So we’re kind of waiting on them to see what they’ll do.
Christophe Jospe: I got one for you. So Nori is building a market instrument that can negate carbon footprints. And so if Burning Man as a whole were to say, hey, we actually know our whole carbon footprint. And by the way, we know the carbon footprint of everyone who drove here from San Francisco or Reno or wherever. And all of this excess, let’s pay to negate it. And we could just do that. And we might be more effective than the traditional offset markets, which are just reducing or maybe double counting, or you can’t even trust that what’s happening is actually happening.
Amanda Ravenhill: So just- Yeah, that would be great. We actually ran a carbon offset program the last two years, first with TerraPass and then with Sequest Capital and had voluntary people buy them, but we never really got more than a thousand people, I think. So it would be great if Burning Man did that.
Ross Kenyon: Intent, whoever’s listening- I’ve never bought in the conventional carbon offset markets. I’ve been offered before, I think I’ve told this story on the podcast, being on planes and they would be like, for only this much you can offset. But I was like, how do I know that this works? Like if someone on the street said, hey, do you want to give money to this charity I’m telling you about for the first time right now? I’m like, no, I’d have to like go home and Google this. Is this even a real thing?
Are you just a guy on the street with a clipboard and I’m giving you $20? I’m like, I would want to make sure of it. So I think I would be more likely to buy credits if I knew it was actually working. Do you think that’s part of the psychology of why you only had a thousand people do it perhaps?
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Am I just throwing money away to feel good for 10 minutes?
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah. There’s definitely questions around additionality of like whether it’s actually making an impact or not. Yeah. And we got direct feedback from some people around that.
Ross Kenyon: Really?
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: On that point specifically?
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah. From the Burning Man community.
Ross Kenyon: Whoa. That confirms my intuition then for individual buyers. I’ll have to talk some more about that.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, so I know we’re jumping around a little bit. No, it’s good. It’s fun. It’s vibrant. It’s fun. It’s dynamic, right? We like dynamism. But I want to go back. We have the Drawdown book actually sitting there on the table. What’s so cool about Drawdown is it’s systems thinking. One of their top solutions is educating women and girls. Awesome. So they don’t necessarily frame things in the way that you might conventionally think about it.
Ross Kenyon: That’s one of the more interesting chapters for sure.
Christophe Jospe: And so here you were former executive director kind of steering the ship of thinking about all of these 100 solutions, thinking about metrics that somehow. I’ll add up the cost of these solutions, the carbon impact of these solutions, and then probably a third category that you can’t even compare. We’re not even talking apples to oranges. It’s like fruits to vegetables or something. Co-benefits and all these great impacts where you start just changing the framing ever so slightly, you really see that the world and the solutions start working in parallel and in tandem.
Mm-hmm.
Amanda Ravenhill: As an applied anthropologist with USAID for her whole career. So it’s something I’ve known about for a long time and, you know, have been watching population kind of come in and out of the conversation within environment. And to see those numbers just felt really validating to that idea of like, it’s going to be these surprising numbers. Solutions perhaps that we need to pay attention to and really funnel a lot of resources to that have all of these cascading benefits. You know, it’s not just about population and carbon impact. For every year over primary education that a girl has in the developing economy, then in the like non-industrialized countries, she will have 10 to 20% more wage for the rest of her life for every year past seventh grade.
It makes a huge difference. And then that then feeds into how she’s treating her family and how she’s treating her community and everything. So there’s some really powerful pieces there. That’s one thing that we thought the data would be out there more around the co-benefits. Like when we originally were designing the book, it was like, we’ll have seven different things that we’re tracking for every solution, but the research just wasn’t there yet.
Ross Kenyon: As countries develop, people tend to have less children. I think people in the developing world tend to see children as an insurance policy for themselves, that they’ll have enough people to either work or take care of them when they’re elderly. Once you have a certain amount of money, you can invest more into every person individually, and you would hope that they would be able to serve that same need, but without the need for eight or ten children. Is that pretty much correct? There’s so many assumptions in there.
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: This is the story. I’ve heard this story told like a million times.
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah, I mean, it’s like it depends on the person. Two different sisters could have completely different feelings on that in any one country in the world, even with the same upbringing. So that’s part of it for sure.
Ross Kenyon: At least in aggregate, that is kind of a trend. I’m getting no purchase here.
Amanda Ravenhill: The real thing with family planning is that there’s just an unmet need of people who want to be spacing their children or having less children that just don’t have access to family planning condoms and contraceptives. And so it’s just like it’s a market failure, like bringing these things to market where people have the money and the education where they want them. You know, it’s not necessarily changing the culture or changing how people want to design their family. It’s just giving them access because they already want to do it.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, okay. Yeah, that’s interesting. That almost makes it seem like kind of an easier problem than I might have thought. I was getting a little fancy footwork there. But yeah, very interesting.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to the kind of creating a world by design and thinking about what are those principles that you need to think about. And here we are sort of in an ivory tower. Actually, we’re sort of in the basement. So it’s not But here we are sort of making conjectures about ways to reverse climate change and kind of the ways that can benefit the system. But we may not be right. And we don’t want to impose one way on top of another way. And we don’t want to cause problems that weren’t there before because of the thing that we’re doing.
What advice can you give to us and kind of more broadly, anyone who’s really taking a design thinking approach to solving intractable problems?
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really important that we like think about all four of those. Another way to interpret it is more kind of extractive economy, which is where a lot of our economy is still today. And then less bad, which is where a lot of sustainability has been. And it’s shifting now to more good, but more good kind of like you said, could be like a neocolonialist, like I know what’s right. It’s my good rather than necessarily the good of the whole. Over to Regenerative. So there’s the Regenerative Practitioners course you can take through Regenesis.
Carol Sanford just wrote the book Regenerative Business, which is a really good resource. I would recommend everyone to dive into that work. It’s kind of an evolution of...
Ross Kenyon: It is on Audible. Regenerative Business. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I’m sorry.
Amanda Ravenhill: No, I was just listening to it earlier today.
Christophe Jospe: And I think those principles are something... At the end of the day, right now, what goes into people’s decision making is I have to operate a farm. Let’s stick with the farming. And here’s what it costs me to operate it. And here’s what I think I can sell for my crops. And I’ve been doing it the same way for decades. You’re now asking me to not buy fertilizer and to plant cover crops and to rotate my crops and to completely change what has been passed down over generations. And it’s sometimes it’s our hope, at least, is that this is already happening already.
There’s already a revolution and there’s a movement afoot and we’ve noticed it and we want to be part of it and sort of support it. But be that one kind of straw that breaks the camel’s back to say, by the way, more carbon in soils means healthier soils and a healthier planet. And we’ll pay you and there are volunteers who will pay you to do this. And so that’s at least a leap of faith assumption that now is the right time to jump in to that. Okay. So I want to go into the work about the Buckminster Fuller Institute.
So there are a lot of really cool companies and projects and each year you find one and they apply to a competition. And how do you pick them? I mean, without playing any favorites, I’m sure there are probably, maybe there are people even listening to this podcast who now know about Buckminster Fuller Institute and apply. What’s the thought process that goes into selecting these companies in terms of the potential impact that they’ll have on the world?
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah, so we have seven criteria that we use. You know, it’s really looking at projects that take this comprehensive perspective. So Bucky called it comprehensive anticipatory design science, this way of looking at, you know, comprehensive, starting with the whole and seeing from the systems point of view, anticipatory, looking into the future, making sure you’re doing things resiliently. And then, you know, design science, as we talked about earlier, is like this creative way of designing something that’s based on science that’s really based on nature’s principles. So the seven criteria are comprehensive and anticipatory and then visionary.
So people who are really kind of thinking outside of the box and being bold and then, you know, replicable and scalable and verifiable and, you know, all the good things that we want a business or project to be. People from this podcast might know the Savory Institute. They were a winner in 2009 and Alan Savory has said that winning this prize really helped a lot with giving them some credibility from people who were just questioning, you know, How could you possibly be using animals to help the environment? And helped him get his TED Talk, which has gotten, I don’t know, almost 5 million views now.
Yeah, so that’s one of the projects that people would probably know about. And then Green Wave, maybe people don’t know as much about, is this ocean farming technology. So they farm shellfish and kelp at the same time, and it cleans the local ecosystem, and kelp has the potential to sequester five times more carbon than land-based plants. And it’s a zero-input fishing, ocean-farming It’s really beautiful. It creates a recreational area when you build it. And yeah, I recommend people looking into that.
Ross Kenyon: We’re very excited about aquaculture. Definitely. I think this century is going to see a lot of that.
Christophe Jospe: I mean, also because our name is Nori, which is seaweed. That’s a form of kelp. So at some point when our suite of carbon removal solutions that might get funded, we absolutely are looking at some of these opportunities.
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah. And I think it’s a really important piece too, as people are questioning soil sequestration, how much surface area is there and how much landmass do we have to shift, you know, between different land uses. If you had the state of Washington, which is no small feat, but if you had the state of Washington size of ocean under ocean farming, you could feed the world. So in terms of just thinking about like land use changes and what we’re using them for, that’s an important piece of the puzzle.
Ross Kenyon: Be pretty sick of kelp at that point.
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah, you can manufacture it into all sorts of different things.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah. I’ve actually seen there’s like a bacon substitute. I haven’t tried it yet. Is it good?
Unknown speaker: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I’ll see if I can get it from the grocery store.
Christophe Jospe: We were emailing and at some point along the way, we must have said, you said something like you’re on team trillion tonnes. I was like, all right, yeah, I’m on team trillion tonnes. So are you. And does that mean that collectively, like us, you, whoever else is really down for large scale carbon removal? Is that our goal? We’re going to try to remove one trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?
Amanda Ravenhill: Yes. So that’s, if you look at, we’re at 410 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere today, getting back down to 280 parts per million and the conversion, which is 7. 8, right? Parts per million to gigaton. 7. 81. Yeah, 7. 81. So if you just do that math, so what’s nice about it is it doesn’t involve any climate model. But if you just do that math, that is just about a trillion tonnes of CO2 that needs to come out of the atmosphere and back into the soil and trees and technosphere.
Christophe Jospe: Yep. And part of that also is that the oceans have acidified because they’ve absorbed a lot of the fossil-based carbon we’ve emitted. And when we pull that CO2 back out of the atmosphere or oceans, the oceans will actually outgas because they’ll equilibrate. So part of that trillion tonnes, I think, is also baked into that number. Okay. Yeah. Let’s do it. Sign us up.
Amanda Ravenhill: And I think it’s important just knowing that number two, just seeing like what the pie chart looks like in terms of where to focus, what needs most attention. So if you look at a trillion tonnes of stuff, like if you’re doing direct air capture and turning it into plastic and carbon fiber and nanotubes and whatever else that’s the sink, that’s like actually stable. A trillion tonnes of stuff is a lot of stuff.
Christophe Jospe: When I think about that stuff, I think it’s cool. It’s very techno fixy, but it is on the millions of tonnes. Yeah. We don’t get to the gigaton scale.
Amanda Ravenhill: Right. Right. But then if you think of like soil and how much surface area there is in the soil, there’s a lot more potential there.
Ross Kenyon: One of the early podcasts I asked why we couldn’t just like send CO2 into outer space via a very long tube. Have you gotten that far?
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve thought about that too.
Ross Kenyon: What do you think?
Amanda Ravenhill: Yeah. Yeah. The fuller is pretty out there. You never know.
Unknown speaker: So this is why I like to stop him a little bit on the earlier side because it devolves.
Christophe Jospe: I thought it evolved very nicely. And I think we’re probably getting about to wrap it up. But Amanda, if you have any last words that you’d like to throw in there, please take us home.
Amanda Ravenhill: We’re in a tricky spot right now, I think, as humanity. And my husband calls me the queen of silver linings. I’m very much always looking at the potential. But I think it’s really important that we also ground in just how perilous this moment is and not bring in the shame and blame and doom and gloom too much, but let people know just how urgent the moment is and that there’s really no time to waste at all. So don’t let up.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. Well, thank you. That was fun. Thanks for being here, Amanda.
Amanda Ravenhill: Thank you.
