Darwin and others theorized that evolution was about the survival of the fittest. But when Peter Kropotkin followed up on Darwin’s research, he discovered the competition was only part of the story of evolution in nature.
And Kropotkin argued that cooperation and collaboration among organisms also helps them evolve.
So, why is Darwin’s narrative the dominant one? And how can an understanding of mutualism help us protect the ecosystems we depend on and find solutions to climate change?
Kristin Ohlson is an award-winning freelance journalist and author of The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet. Her new release is called Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Kristin joins Ross to explain why the study of mutualism in the evolution of nature has lagged, and challenge us to recognize and protect the cooperative relationships among organisms in our ecosystems.
Kristin shares some of her favorite stories from the book, describing how ranchers, scientists, and government leaders worked together to heal a degraded landscape in Eastern Nevada.
Listen in for Kristin’s insight on the growth of regenerative agriculture and learn how mutualism gives organisms superpowers as they work together to survive and thrive in extreme environments.
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Resources
Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World by Kristin Ohlson
The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet by Kristin Ohlson
Social Statics: The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed by Herbert Spencer
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Peter Kropotkin
The Biology of Mutualism: Ecology and Evolution by Douglas H. Boucher
Mutualism by Judith L. Bronstein
Gabe Brown on Reversing Climate Change S2EP31
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of Nori and the creative editor there. Today I have with me Kristin Ohlson, author of The Soil Will Save Us and the new Sweet and Tooth and Claw. Welcome to the show, Kristin.
Kristin Ohlson: Nice to be here.
Ross Kenyon: Nice to have you. I’ve been aware of your work for so very long. I’m really happy this book came out. So I’d have a chance to revisit The Soil Will Save Us and Sweet in Tooth and Claw and have you on the show. I think it’s a really interesting book. I imagine someone listening probably has an echo that they’ve heard something in tooth and claw before, but I think maybe if they are somewhat literally inclined, they might know it’s read in tooth and claw. Like, what does that mean? And why did you write this book?
Kristin Ohlson: Well, as to the title, Sweet in Tooth and Claw, so Red in Tooth and Claw comes from a line in a poem by Tennyson. So the poem was written 150 years ago, and it was expressing his grief over the death of a young friend. And, you know, it’s a long poem, lots of lines in it, but red in tooth and claw was in there. Talking about nature, red in tooth and claw. And I found it, you know, I sort of found it significant when I was first starting this book, that metaphor has stuck with us for 150 years.
You know, that we, it’s so easy for us to believe that nature is harsh, nature is unforgiving, nature is all about competition and conflict. And we have all these metaphors to shore up those beliefs. So when I was working on this book, Sweet in Tooth and Claw, which is about cooperation in nature and looking at the relationships, the helping relationships that really hold ecosystems together, including us, we are an ecosystem. I suddenly had this thought, no, it’s not red in tooth and claw, it’s sweet in tooth and claw.
Ross Kenyon: That’s nice. That’s what I did it for you. You had that moment. I will tell you that there are many mystery novels and TV episodes that reference Red and Tooth and Claw. In fact, to look it up, I’m like, yeah, was it Tennyson? Like, who exactly had this? I thought it might have been William Blake. And I looked, I was trying to find it. And all I found were mystery novels, apparently still very popular for that phrasing, for titling something ominous.
Kristin Ohlson: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it, you know, it’s probably if you Could do some very sophisticated search to see how much it crops up in just news articles and interviews. Yeah, it’s still a phrase that we hear a lot.
Ross Kenyon: It’s everywhere. Why don’t we ground this in the common story? So I think people think about survival of the fittest and they think about Darwin. Survival of the fittest does Herbert Spencer, which I’ve only read social statics, but I think people are sometimes are a little unfair to Spencer’s views and he wasn’t quite the social Darwin as he’s accused of being. You can argue with me on that one, though. I might even be wrong. I’m okay with it. But then there’s this other part of the story, too, where you’re contrasting this against mutualism and Peter Kropotkin and this alternate story beyond just survival of the fittest.
If survival of the fittest is the only story we tell about evolution and nature, we’re missing a huge part of the story. And then I’ll just let you take that any way that you want.
Kristin Ohlson: Okay. Well, I was... In my book, The Soil Will Save Us, you know, I was so... Excited to come to the realization, have this understanding about plants that I’d never had before. So, you know, we have this view foisted upon us about plants and it comes from industrial agriculture. And the view is that plants, you know, they’re there in the soil and they just suck everything out. They just take everything good out of the soil and they leave nothing behind. So you farmers, you need to invest in Industrial fertilizers to bring up the fertility of your soil because plants have taken it all.
And it was so exciting for me after, you know, talking to all these farmers and talking to all these scientists who were working with the farmers to understand that is not true, that plants do take from the soil, but they are also giving to the soil. So plants make this incredible carbon fuel through photosynthesis. They take carbon out of the air and they... Do a little magic and they make this carbon fuel, this liquid fuel that they use to grow. They grow their leaves and their flowers and their stems and all that.
But they also take like 40% and sometimes much more of that carbon fuel and exude it strategically through their roots to this community of soil organism, community of microorganism that lives around the plant. So it was kind of mind-blowing for me to come to that understanding that plants and these soil microorganisms are involved in this constant give and take. They’re a partnership. It’s not a grab. So there was this realization that there was this partnership between plants and soil microorganisms, hugely important partnership, responsible for all the life that is on Earth, basically.
But I didn’t, when I wrote that book, I didn’t understand that the name for that kind of relationship is a mutualism, so that it’s a mutually beneficial relationship between two or more species. So when I started working on this new book that is, you know, looking at cooperation, looking at that kind of cooperation, I thought, well, let me go look and look at the books that have been published on this. So there was one that was published in 1985 by a scientist named Doug Boucher. And he wrote about, and I can’t remember what the title was, but the book was about mutualism.
And he says right away in the beginning, well, mutualism as a As a study by science has been sort of out of favor and has been ignored for decades now. And now it’s starting to come back up again. Now scientists are really starting to apply themselves to the study of mutualism again. Well, good. That was 1985. I thought, well, I never heard of it. And then the other book that I found out there that was about mutualism was Judith Bronstein’s book about mutualism, which came out in 2015, and she was kind of saying the same kind of thing in the beginning of the book.
The study of mutualism has lagged. So I was really interested in why the study of cooperation in nature has lagged and why the study of competition in nature has always been sort of the bread and butter of a lot of biological scientists. And it really, it does go back to Darwin. It does go back to some of the ideas that were in circulation after the Industrial Revolution. So Darwin went out and gathered up all that, all his observations on the Beagle. Collecting samples and looking at species that died out and that they were only existing in the fossil record and also all the diversity of species, how things have diverged from each other.
And he was trying to come up with a theory to tie together all these observations, try to make sense of all these observations. And he read Thomas Malthus, who was a wealthy pastor who was Argued that the growing human population would outstrip the resources of the earth and that there would always be competition and there would always be want and there would always be death. From that discrepancy between our growth and the resources on the earth. And that death and weakening off was kind of a good thing because it would balance society and get rid of the creatures, the beings that weren’t strong enough to keep up.
And Darwin took that idea of competition for resources and used that as his theory to explain how some creatures don’t make it, how some evolve and diverge. And so we’ve had that idea about competition as the brutal architect of nature. But there were other ideas. So one of the scientists that I talk about in the book was Peter Kropotkin. Who was a member of the Russian aristocracy, a little younger than Darwin, who was, you know, sort of was lured away by a life of leisure, leisure and indolence and, you know, trailing around after the czar by, he fell in love with both nature and radical politics.
So he He, instead of going into the czar’s court, he instead got himself a gig where he could travel through Russia for five years. And he wanted to follow up. He was a big fan of Darwin. He wanted to follow up on Darwin’s research. And instead, out there in those five years, instead of seeing fierce competition for resources and bloody combat, what he, I mean, of course, he saw some of that. Companionability and cooperation and collaboration among creatures. And so he was the leading scientist to sort of put forward a different view of how all these living things in nature get along with each other.
And he was emphasizing cooperation. Unfortunately, he did become a leading scientist. Worldwide anarchist. And after the czar was assassinated and some other things that put people off of anarchism, he went from being a scientist who could come to New York and draw 4,000 people to hear one of his lectures to being someone who was no longer welcome in this country. And I think a lot of the scientists now that look at the history of Mutualism, they kind of feel that the anarchism sort of put mainstream science off from Kropotkin’s ideas.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m wondering about the result of how that science became canon and to what degree it was political versus something else. But yeah, it was not a good time for anarchism, obviously radical politics around the turn of the century in the 19th century. Pretty big deal, more radical than I think many people suspect who haven’t studied it. This is also the time of like Emma Goldman in New York too.
Kristin Ohlson: Right. And I think they were pals. I think she and Kropotkin were pals. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: The Wobblies are running around during this time. You have a lot of like quite radical left-wing politics. Right. Crackdown on left-wing ideas that came about afterwards, too. So, interesting. So, you think then the reason, or one of the reasons why Darwin slash Spencer’s survival the fittest story is more dominant over mutualism is political. Am I reading you right? Do you actually think that?
Kristin Ohlson: Well, I think that’s part of it. I mean, you know, the scientists, again, who study the trends, you know, looking at where science puts its eye and You know, they think that some of the politics had something to do with it. They also think that, in a way, it’s difficult. It’s perhaps less fun to study mutualisms because it’s more fun to watch things chasing each other and eating each other than, you know, things quietly cooperating. I don’t know. I mean, I think there are a lot of reasons.
Ross Kenyon: But I think, you know, Kropotkin did put off a lot of I’m wondering, too, if it’s an issue of scale with microscopes and imaging technology getting better. I think in some of these small microbiome, it’s just easier to see. So things like Lynn Margulis, who I think when she was alive and active, had a reputation as being kind of out there as a scientist. But as time has gone on and imaging has gotten better, I think her reputation has been rehabilitated a fair amount. Oh, yeah.
Kristin Ohlson: Not completely rehabilitated. I think there were some things that she held on to towards the end of her life that have not quite, still don’t go over.
Ross Kenyon: I want to hear about that, too.
Kristin Ohlson: Oh, well, I really would not be the person who could illuminate that. I mean, I think, you know, there was one theory that she had that, again, about the creation of multicellular life. You know, I’m not a... I’m not on top of that enough to explain it. But, you know, she, I think that you’re right that having the modern tools and being able to see the incredible life of the microbial world and how much that life connects us all and makes us all work. And yeah, I think that has completely changed, made head spin in science because it’s so obvious, you know, as one of the scientists, That I quoted in the book said, well, you know, there are just, you know, trillions of microorganisms.
If they really meant us ill, we just wouldn’t be here. We’re completely outnumbered. But Lynn Margulis, yes. I mean, she made some astounding contributions to science. I think she was really the first, at least the first scientist in the modern age that was able to prove that Or able to argue convincingly that cooperation is at the basis of kind of all the life that we know now. So her theory was that there were 3. 8 billion years ago when there were only single-celled organisms, that those were the only living things, that one single-celled organism engulfed another single-celled organism.
And instead of eating it, They continued to share space and the one provided energy for the other and the other provided nutrients and a home for that one. And that was the beginning of what are called eukaryotic cells. And they were more internally complex than previous single-celled organisms and they had the ability to form multicellular life. So Pretty much all of us, every plant, every animal, every fungi, all of those are built from that initial act of cooperation with one cell and another sort of becoming a more complicated single-celled organism.
Ross Kenyon: It’s magical to even consider how that process would have happened the first time. And then seemingly all of life must have been descended from such an event, right? So obviously these things exist on top of each other. There’s competition and cooperation and they’re happening at the same time. Is this an attempt to rebalance that story or is there really just much more cooperation than there is competition and we should actually not balance the scales, but entirely rejigger them to favor cooperation? Yeah.
Kristin Ohlson: I think that we always have to be, I just really think that we need to look at life differently. And I think it makes a very big difference if we look at the world around us and if we look at ourselves, because we are obviously part of nature. We’re not a steel pellet or something. So I think it makes a very big difference if we’re looking at an ecosystem and thinking, Oh, here is this system where there are all these parts working together and we have to be careful not to disrupt those relationships or, you know, some of this is going to start to fall apart.
I think there’s a big difference when we look at an ecosystem that way than here’s a bunch of competing interests and we’re just another competing interest in here.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Kind of think about this and compare it to some down-to-earth example, something like The story that we’ve told ourselves about antibiotics has changed since I was a kid. And now there’s good reasons to not be so willy-nilly about how we distribute antibiotics. And I’m much more likely to think about my internal bodily health as one of balance, where I’m trying to feed it so it takes care of me and not just kill the invader. I’m trying to think of fostering cooperation internally rather than Killing off or outcompeting. Although at the same time, though, isn’t promoting your gut’s microbiome, isn’t that supposed to outcompete bad bacteria?
So it’s like competition simultaneously.
Kristin Ohlson: Well, there are bad guys that get in. And yeah, I mean, we are always trying to feed the ones when we’re eating all those plants and that fermented stuff. We are trying to bolster the good actors, you know, the ones that are helpful for us and leave and do less feeding to the ones that cause us problems.
Ross Kenyon: What were the stories in your book that surprised you the most?
Kristin Ohlson: Just still more on the subject of mutualism. I just think that they’re We are surrounded by these incredible relationships that are going on all the time. So one of the things that was really delightful that one of the scientists told me was that, and she studies viruses. She’s a fan of viruses and will argue that only a few of them do us any harm. But she told me about an example of a three-way mutualism. So these are very difficult things for scientists to study. I mean, it’s hard enough to study two-way mutualisms, and some are less difficult than others.
But this is a three-way mutualism that they discovered in Yellowstone Park. So it was a plant that had been infected by a fungus that had been infected by, and the fungus had been infected by a virus. So they’re all living together. That three-way mutualism, and I’m sure they don’t have it all figured out what’s going on, but that three-way mutualism gives that plant a superpower. It can live by those hot vents and geysers in Yellowstone Park. That’s not really a story, but that’s just a mind-blowing example of probably what is exceptionally common out there in nature.
Microorganisms have been found in Just about every extreme environment where scientists look. And, you know, I think that they probably have incredible powers that they are giving larger, you know, visible creatures all the time. And we just don’t even know it. But, you know, you asked about the most surprising story or some of the stories that surprised me the most. You know, they all just kind of blew me away. I mean, I’m... Really, I always talk, you know, every time I start to talk about this, this book to an audience, and I often talk about, there’s a chapter with, that looks at the story of these ranchers in Eastern Nevada.
And that chapter completely blows me away. But they all do, you know, it’s all pretty, I feel so lucky that I got to write about this work. But okay, I’ll talk about those ranchers. So these ranchers in Eastern Nevada are It’s a very, very arid landscape and it’s a very harsh landscape for humans in many ways. You know, a lot of these, the landscape is, you know, there are these little threads of water that go through there and everybody wants to have part of those little threads of water and... As probably all your listeners have heard from at one time or another, there’s a lot of conflict among humans about that water.
And there is a lot of conflict between humans and between ranchers and environmentalists and ranchers and government agencies and all that. So anyway, in this very harsh landscape in eastern Nevada, some scientists and government people who are working for government agencies approached some of these ranchers and said, The creeks are getting too degraded. They’re too warm. They’re not supporting the local trout. We want to see if you can help make these creeks healthier. So the ranchers were... I’m dismayed to hear this because nobody wants to be told that they need to change.
Nobody wants to have their job made harder. And from their perspective, the only thing this was going to do was make their job harder. And it might make their relationships with some of these agency officials a little easier, but they didn’t really think it was going to do any good. But they said, okay. So they agreed to fence off some of these creeks for part of the year. So the cattle, you know, it’s hot there, it’s dry there. The cattle want to hang out along these creeks. But they agreed to fence these creeks for part of the year so that the action of the hooves along in that mud...
That it wouldn’t do damage there and maybe some plants could grow. So they did that. They fenced it off. It was a big pain in the neck, but they did it. And then, you know, the magic of nature started to happen. You know, we get those seed packets, you know, to plant our gardens and the seed packets on the back say good until May of 2024. And we think that’s how long seeds last. But in reality, seeds can last in the soil for years. Years, decades, sometimes even hundreds of years waiting for the right moment to sprout.
So all these things started to sprout along these creek banks and more riparian vegetation and more riparian vegetation. And everybody was pretty happy with that. And then the beaver showed up. And the ranchers have a very conflicted relationship with beaver because beaver and a lot of people do. I mean, I know a lot of people who think that beaver are just the most annoying rodents that there are. So the beaver would get into the ranchers irrigation systems and screw it up and stuff like that. So they didn’t love beaver. And, you know, when the beavers started to come in there and cut down all the stuff that they had seen grow up alongside the creeks, they thought, well, that’s not what we signed up for.
But the scientists and the agency people said, well, let’s just hold on and let’s see what happened. Well, it was just a miracle that started to happen. You know, the before and after pictures are just amazing. So the beavers, you know, built their dams and built their lodges and ponds started to form and the ponds got bigger and bigger and the water stretches out into the landscape more. The actual water table of the land changed. The shape of the creek started to change. They started to not only have ponds, but have oxbows.
So the Anytime it would rain or when the snow was melting, instead of these creeks, the water just rushing through on these creeks, they were slowed down. And these creeks, which always used to completely dry up in the middle of the summer, they now run water year-round. They stopped drying up in the middle of the summer. These landscapes have changed from really, really dry... Arids, not much growing except for sagebrush and rabbit brush to these large wetlands. And so that’s amazing. And, you know, I think that just has to be mind blowing to anybody who looks at the before and after pictures.
There was enough water in the landscape now that there’s forage for cattle. Things burn less frequently than they did before. But the other thing about that story is That is also amazing. I mean, it’s amazing how the landscape changed and in terms of what we can do to help climate, what we can do to make Not only climate resilient landscapes, but landscapes that are building carbon in the soil. I mean, that is such an example of a landscape that is now actively building carbon in the soil as all that vegetation is, you know, they’re sharing their carbon sugars with those microorganisms underground and those microorganisms are storing that carbon in the soil.
So all of that is just an amazing story. And habitat, you know, habitat for animals. Birds and insects and frogs and all these other creatures. I mean, it’s an amazing story that way, but it’s also an amazing story in terms of the people themselves. So the ranchers and the scientists and the government agency people realized at the very beginning of this process that it would help If they formed these organizations where they could talk and talk over any problems that happened, talk through any bulkiness or talk through any hurt feelings.
So they formed these organizations where they sit in these big rooms where the tables are in a circle so that nobody is at the head of a table and they They very much tried to learn how to work together and they did learn how to work together and work together on healing this really degraded landscape. So that, you know, I’m not, yeah, I mean, it was surprising and wonderful and it’s something that I just love talking about.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a great story and there’s so many good stories in here. Also beautiful pictures. The book is very well designed. I did want to ask about, before we get too far away from it, we’re going to go to soil next. We’ll come back to this regenerative properties here that are happening. But before we do, I wanted to ask you a bit about this mutualism versus internally evolving to have these capacities. Why wasn’t there an organism with this Yellowstone example that just evolved to internally have these attributes? Why teaming up? Does it just allow for it to happen at a much greater rate?
Or is there any way to even know what the counterfactual is here? I don’t know.
Kristin Ohlson: That is not a question I can answer. There is that example in the book of the two kinds of bacteria that form maps in the ocean. And yeah, so there’s that example. It’s in the part where I was writing about relaxed selection, which is Such a great concept that I learned while I was working on the book. We know about natural selection, but relaxed selection is when something, and often it’s something that’s outside of the organism’s control, relaxes the selection pressure on them, makes it easier for them to thrive, basically.
So one of the examples of that I talk about the book is these two Cyanobacteria, these bacteria living in the ocean. And they form these huge mats in the ocean. They’re a very big presence in the ocean. So both feed themselves by photosynthesis. They photosynthesize and they turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into that carbon fuel that I talked about before. But as they photosynthesize, they create a toxic byproduct of And that goes into the water and they need to protect themselves against that toxic byproduct by making a special enzyme that sort of counteracts it.
And so both of these cyanobacteria, two different cyanobacteria, they both used to have that capacity. They both used to be able to make this anti-venom. Substance that they would squirt into the water to make the water not toxic. But they evolved so that one of them lost that power. One of them lost that power and the other one powered up and makes more of it enough to protect both of them. So it could be something like that is going on inside that plant that has the fungus, that has the virus, you know, that one of them is making something that The others don’t have to make any more to protect them against this hot vent.
I don’t know. That’s speculation on my part.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, something like that really does a number on my brain. I mean, the biggest one is definitely the link from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells. So they just entered the other one and then became one and then conquered the planet over the course of the day.
Kristin Ohlson: Right, and conquered the planet. But it’s the same way with corals. Coral is actually the same kind of relationship there. The little tiny coral animal, when it’s first born and sort of fired into the ocean, it drifts around until it finds an algal partner, and it swallows that alga. But it doesn’t consume it. That alga lives inside the little tiny coral animal and then together they happily float down and anchor themselves to the coral reef and then they start building their shell. But it’s the same kind of thing where the alga is providing...
Food, it’s photosynthesizing. So that’s why coral reefs are in shallow waters because the alga need that sunshine to photosynthesize. So they’re making that sugary carbon fuel for the little coral animal. And the coral animal is protecting the alga and giving it some nutrients. It’s the same kind of relationships.
Ross Kenyon: Is it any kind of surprise to you that people believe in God with these stories?
Kristin Ohlson: I heard somebody say, well, really, you know, God is no stranger than some of what we’ve observed going on in nature.
Ross Kenyon: Let’s talk about the soil will save us. I work in soil carbon, nor is this carbon removal marketplace. We work with farmers. We work in regenerative agriculture. What’s changed since you wrote the book? The book is a classic story. Celebrating what can happen with soil. But it’s been a couple years now. Is there anything that you’d update?
Kristin Ohlson: You know, I think that just so many more people are talking about it. So many more people are doing it. These amazing farmers, you know, I wrote about one of them in The Soil Will Save Us, Gabe Brown.
Ross Kenyon: He’s been on the podcast before.
Kristin Ohlson: Oh, good, good. I mean, he’s just great. He’s so smart. He and some other farmers like him, they are sequestering 10 tonnes per hectare of carbon in their soil annually. I mean, they’re just getting amazing results. And they’re very busy, as you know, they’re very busy online with Podcasts and YouTube videos trying to educate other farmers how to do this too. So I mean, I kind of think that idea of regeneration has just spread in so many ways. I mean, people are talking about regenerating city lots, using a lot of those ideas of getting plants in there.
So I think that There are a lot of people now that are looking at the work of Gabe and some of these other amazing farmers to be able, through the way they manage their land, to sequester 10 tonnes of carbon per hectare and thinking about how to scale that up. Like the scientist Christine Jones has just put it out there that if all the agricultural lands in the planet, so that’s nearly 2 billion hectares. That if they all increase their photosynthesis by 5%, that would offset all emissions from anthropogenic sources.
So it’s pretty amazing. Yeah, I mean, I think more and more people are talking about land when it comes to climate. It’s still not enough. I mean, I think most people don’t realize that to deal with, to really address the problem with climate change, we have to Really protect landscapes that cycle carbon, you know, that where carbon is brought down and out of the atmosphere by plants and then it’s put into the soil by plants and held in the soil by microbes. I mean, that’s what living systems do. And we have to work much harder at protecting the living systems that exist and Coming up with facsimiles of them in our agriculture and in our cities, you know, our cities have to become greener.
We won’t be able to tolerate living in them if we if we don’t do that, you know, they’ll just be too hot.
Ross Kenyon: Is there a place to retain some appreciation of competition, whether in nature, let’s assume that there’s that in nature still, but. How mutualistic should we be considering our social lives between humans?
Kristin Ohlson: Well, I think we should be very mutualistic. I mean, I think there’s always going to be some good competition like in sports. And, you know, there was somebody who Peter Donovan with the soil, I forget what it’s called, the soil carbon project. I don’t know. This guy, Peter, Peter Donovan. Was one of the people that I wrote about in The Soil Will Save Us. And he had this contest going on as to who could increase their soil carbon the most over a period of time. You know, I think that kind of stuff is helpful, fun.
I think that we probably need to... I think we really need to go the other way, though, in terms of where we focus our efforts. I mean, we have to really... Appreciate more how much we already are helping each other. I think we have to appreciate more the work that’s come before us, you know, the people who built the streets, the people who built the houses, appreciate that labor and those resources that are already in place. It’s really one of the biggest vexing problems, I think, that we have. That politics, and I think it all is all about politics, that politics and the money in politics have made ordinary people enemies of each other or think they’re enemies of each other in terms of the ideas that they have.
Ross Kenyon: Just the Kropotkin talking, I think.
Kristin Ohlson: Yeah. More mutualism. More recognition. More recognition that mutualism exists.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think it’s good to be reminded of that. I think people, especially kids, probably just hear the stories these days of, you know, the lion takes down the gazelle and maybe there’s a circle of life kind of teaching in there. But I think thinking of your body as an ecosystem of life Micro biological entities that are mutually supporting is not a model for understanding your own body or self. That is that common still. Or if it’s a story, it’s a story that’s taught pretty far downstream from the sort of like Cartesian individual, I think.
In any case, we can put a pin in it there, Kristin. I think we covered a lot of good rambling philosophical territory. I think if you’re listening and you like the timbre of this conversation, you’ll certainly love Sweet in Tooth and Claw, Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World by Kristin Ohlson. Thanks for being here, Kristin.
Kristin Ohlson: Oh, thanks for inviting me. You know, I really do love talking about this stuff. And I feel so lucky that I got to write those two books. You know, I think Every once in a while, someone said, well, did you write this for a few minutes? And of course, I wrote it for everybody else, but I really had to write it for myself because I wanted to find things that would give me hope and balance in this very challenging world. And so I’m lucky enough to be able to write about those things.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s the cliched book advice, right? Write the book that you would want to read or would need to read. So you did it. Kudos. Came out very nicely.
Kristin Ohlson: Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for listening. Links to all of the things we’ve talked about, or most of them, we covered a lot of ground here, are in the show notes. Send this to a friend who may like this conversation. Give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thanks so much for listening and have a lovely day. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people.
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