I'm here as people probably have guessed by now with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

There's nobody I'd rather talk to, Charles, you have one of the most interesting minds that I've ever encountered.

It's really, really brilliant. I love your books.

And particularly, I think your climate book is probably the best book written on climate and it's so nuanced and unusual and beautiful.

But you and I also, we spoke, I think, about a year ago on my podcast.

Yeah, I remember that podcast. If we really want to change things, we've got to step out of this conflict dynamic because it's just a, it's a law jam, you have to figure out a different way to do it.

And it's not, a lot of this stuff you, you talk about, you know, if you try to summarize it, it sounds almost corny or kind of fluffy, but actually it's quite practical as we're now figuring out.

And it's being effective people on both sides want to hear about solutions rather than just more tribalism.

One of the points I make in the book is into why am I an environmentalist?

It wasn't because I got scared. It wasn't because I calculated that bad things were going to happen to me or to us if we didn't do anything.

What made me into an environmentalist was experiences of beauty, of love, of loss, of the things that I loved, of grief.

When I was a kid, I remember I was standing with my father. We were holding hands even. I was little and we were looking at a flock of birds, a big flock of birds.

And that's when he told me about the passenger pigeons, where, you know, whose flocks would go from horizon to horizon for hours and hours darkening the sun and that they're extinct.

On that, like, really hit home for me. I cried that night in bed.

And I'm wondering if you have any experiences like that because you're known first and foremost, or should be known first and foremost for your lifelong environmental work.

So he's there in a vent like that that made you into an environmentalist.

I mean, I had the same thing that you did where I heard about the passenger pigeons when I was young and the dodo bird and learn the dodo bird.

You know, I knew that dinosaurs were on extinct, but it was so disheartening to me and troubling to me that in our, in the last hundred years that, you know, the dodo bird had gone extinct.

And I was like, you know, how could you let that happen? That's, it was something that I experienced as kind of a theft and assault on, on our rights.

And then I had, there was a stream that I, you know, when I was growing up, I was in McLean Virginia, which at that time was a very rural community.

It was kind of, I was farm and horses and, you know, the shop at downtown was the saddle shop and the feed store and, you know, it was really a rural community, which is hard to imagine today, because now it's just kind of a suburb of Tyson's corners.

You know, pavement stuck between Washington DC and Tyson's corners. I grew up in the fifties and it was Eisenhower's highway program and they built the first these highways.

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