Hey everybody Charles Eisenstein is an American public speaker and author his work covers a wide range of topics including the history of human civilization economic spirituality and the

ecology movement he graduated from Yale University with a degree in mathematics and philosophy

and I really wanted to talk to you this earthly Charles because the climate issue has really now be become the dominant and very very polarizing issue in the environmental movement in our country and you have a different take on it and a lot of other environmental

So I just wanted to explore some of your thoughts.

Yeah, I want to say like at the outset that that there is a fundamental truth that is being expressed in the climate change movement and the idea of a climate emergency, which is that what we as human beings do to the planet comes back to affect ourselves.

And that is a, well, it's a very ancient understanding,

but for modern civilization, it's a new understanding

that we can't just do with impunity whatever we want to nature and not have it affect our well being.

That said, we tend to frame the problem in familiar comfortable reductionistic terms.

And this is a much larger pattern in our civilization.

You take you have a problem and you immediately try to find the one cause, the one thing to control or to go to war against.

And that becomes a proxy for a much bigger and more complex problem. So this kind of us versus them reductionistic

thinking can take the form of what I call carbon reductionism that reduces the global ecological crisis to one thing that we can measure and technologically control and as in many other areas of our collective lives, the things that get left out from that singular focus come back to haunt us in the long run.

And this is especially true with the global ecosystem.

So I'd like to try to expand the conversation

to look at, for example, the role of forests and oceans and species and

wetlands and so on and so forth, mangroves, sea grass, meadows, whales, fish,

etc, etc, as organs of a living being.

Because then we realized that when we degrade the organs,

I mean, if we continue to deforest and to put out toxic pollution and to fill the oceans with plastic and to overfish the fish and to drain the wetlands and to dig enormous pit mines all over the place,

then even if we cut carbon to zero,

the planet still dies a death of a million cuts.

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