Sustainability In Your Ear Transcript: Author Topher McDougal Asks If Earth Is Evolving A Planetary Consciousness

Hello, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are in this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to sustainability in your ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon neutral society, and I'm your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thank you so much for joining the conversation today.

We've talked with many guests about systems thinking, seeing the whole and the parts of a system holistically in order to understand the impact of our choices. For centuries, we've relied on simple metaphors such as referring to mother nature when we talk about the world we live in. But modern science has also opened the way to seeing more deeply into the systems of the world. But what if it is also seeing more deeply into us?

Today, we welcome Topher McDougal, economist, professor and author of a provocative new book, Gaia Wakes, in which he explores a bold thesis that the Earth may be in the early stages of developing a planetary brain, a “Gaiacephalos,” as he calls it, due to the convergence of the ecological crisis, global information and logistical systems, and artificial intelligence.

In the preface of Gaia Wakes, McDougal recalls a scene from the last season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, an episode during which the Enterprise's computer systems flickers into sentience, and parts of that emerging personality act out their disagreements on the holodeck, threatening the ship and the crew in the process. In addition to echoing James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, that episode foreshadows our current worries about progress and particularly artificial intelligence, because the war on the holodeck almost destroys the Enterprise, and we are in a global discussion—let's just call it that to be kind—about where we need to go that threatens all of us at the same time.

Gaia Wakes is part speculative theory, part analytical deep dive. It traces how environmental devastation and increasingly networked technologies might coalesce to catalyze the rise of a planetary consciousness, and it draws on mythology, peace studies, evolutionary biology and systems theory. Topher crafted a sweeping narrative of entropy, emergence and our possible futures—futures in which humanity must play a supporting role to a sentient Earth. Whether you're a hopeful eco-futurist or a skeptical realist, I think this conversation will challenge how you see human society, nature and technology's intertwined fate.

You can learn more about Topher McDougal and his work at tophermcdougal.com . And Gaia Wakes is available on Amazon, at Powell's Books, and in local bookstores. We'll dive into global consciousness right after a quick commercial break.

Welcome to the show, Topher. How you doing today?

I'm doing very well. Thanks for having me, Mitch. It's a real pleasure to be on a show with such a strong commitment to a circular economy, ecological awareness and living, and to have a host who's apparently also a Trekkie. So that's kind of a double treat for me.

Well, thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it, and the acknowledgment of the value of being a Trekkie. And actually, you know, let me start with that, because Gaia Wakes starts with a Star Trek metaphor. How did the episode in which the Enterprise began to develop a sentience influence your thinking and crystallize the idea that's central to the book?

It probably, you know, causality may have flowed the other way, like the—you know, I grew up watching Star Trek and so perhaps it planted a small seed from the time when I first saw that episode in probably, you know, fifth grade or something. But the name of the episode, "Emergence," really evoked the phenomenon that I was trying to talk about—the idea that consciousness was, yes, more than the sum of the parts of an information processing apparatus, but in a kind of processual philosophical sense, there's no deus ex machina that is involved or needed. We don't need Descartes' dualism, and therefore we aren't really burdened with his problem of explaining how mind comes into contact with matter, any of that stuff.

And so, right, it also made me think about the concept of Spaceship Earth, you know, which I'd read about from Buckminster Fuller and Kenneth Boulding, who's a real favorite economist of mine. But of course, you know, they had used this term to describe the Earth itself, and really make us aware of the limited number of resources we have on a small planet that is, aside from the solar energy it receives and the heat it emanates, kind of a more or less closed system.

That kind of gets to the idea of the contest that breaks out on the holodeck in that episode between the emerging personalities, different facets.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and right. So they've been talking about Spaceship Earth in this way that, like, I think, you know, it was supposed to be emphasizing the resource constraints we have and that we need to kind of get along and to coordinate this large resource allocation system that is the environment.

You know, for me, like the Star Trek episode went one step beyond that and sort of said, okay, you know, here are all of these artificially intelligent systems, whether it's navigation or the weapon system, or the mission control system. And here they all are fighting about what the priorities are and what they should be doing, and they should be coming to some sort of agreement. And that's—the more and more that we learn about the way the human brain functions, and here, you know, I basically throw a caveat and sidebar: I've given myself liberty to talk and write about things that I'm really far from expert in, and this is no exception.

But the idea that our, what we believe is our consciousness, is really not the homunculus that has decided to do X, Y or Z. That homunculus that we imagine is really like—if we need to personify it or give it a persona, it's much more like the flunky who was sent out of the boardroom to tell the decision to the audience, or what, right? Like, it's not somebody who dictated the decision.

And so this idea that we could have a glimpse into, via the holodeck, all of these systems that are arguing and discussing about which way to go—that was really fascinating for me.

Not to get too Trekkie, but in the final season of Discovery, the Enterprise actually does evolve a sentience and is acknowledged as such as a member of Starfleet. But the reason that happens is it absorbs this massive database that they encounter in space—in other words, in artificial intelligence terminology, a larger context window, right?

So let's think about Gaia—James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis that says the Earth is a living system, because organisms interact with inorganic stuff to create the conditions for life. That describes the planet as a body. But how do you see the planetary mind building on Lovelock's vision.

So I think that my conception of history is one that I tried to explain in the book as one of a kind of reciprocating series of cycles. They start out expanding and then coordinating and consolidating that expansion. All of these new resource-gathering systems—energy gradient exploiting systems—that have to be somehow consolidated and coordinated.

And so you see this time and time again from really the first incipient forms of life being consolidated. These self-reproducing molecules being consolidated—and it goes back before prokaryotes, but I sort of start at the prokaryotic stage, and then through eukaryotes, and then through brainy multicellular organisms. But I think that that type of pattern I see occurring at the planetary level as well.

That essentially there has been, of course, a spread of life over the surface of the entire surface of the globe, that has made the globe, the planet as a whole, a more coordinated and a more entropic being than it was before. And my argument is basically that you can't get to the next level without having passed through the previous levels.

One of the previous levels was bringing multicellular organisms. The fourth level that I'm arguing is that of nation states. That basically nation states were a way of responding to the scarcities that humans themselves produced by predating megafauna, by predating the flora of the planet. They created the conditions that required them to domesticate livestock, that required them to domesticate plants and create agricultural economies. And those were the preconditions that then required a larger, more coordinated system that we now call in its latter day forms a nation state.

And these large forms of coordination—now they're like fewer of them, and they're larger, and they're more entropic than an individual human ever was. And so now, you know, we have however many humans on the earth, 8 billion. We have only 195, say, nation states.

And the next level of sophistication, I suppose, would be the emergence of a coordinated organism. And that was James Lovelock's idea—that with these interlocking ecological systems that would come into some sort of—create negative feedback loops, not negative in the normative sense, but negative in the sense that they keep each other in homeostasis. They create regimes for each other. I think that was obviously brilliant. It was pathbreaking.

And just as, say, the most promising evolutionary path forward for animals turned out to be having a coordinated brain—from the time there was a period of 300 million years between, say, like 850 million years ago, when the first multicellular animals arose, and then, say, 520 million years ago, when the Ediacaran biota was the first creature whose neural net consolidated into a brain, navigate its environment, exploit new opportunities, be on some level, you know, intentional about what it was doing—and that seems to have been the most promising path forward.

And so I'm suggesting that there's something similar going on in the evolution of a brain for the planet as a whole.

As in the book Life's Ratchet, we've stepped up the degrees of complexity of the system, and as the system evolves. So what you're saying is Gaiacephalos is already in process, but not fully realized. Was it the ability to connect the world digitally or electronically, even just in analog electronics, that started this acceleration that we seem to be going through?

Yeah, I think that's precisely right. You know, it is—I think it is happening. I don't think that it's a foregone conclusion that we will have a large enough planet, or that we will have created clever enough systems quickly enough to bring it about. But I think that my conception of this differs somewhat from, say, you know, Teilhard de Chardin and even Marshall McLuhan's conceptions of this planetary noosphere.

For them, the noosphere was already here. It was just this kind of matter of interpretation as to whether you saw it or if you recognized it. You had to look at it in a certain way. And for Marshall McLuhan, people continue to be the primary message generators and the primary message receivers. It was just the technology that was linking us together more tightly, more comprehensively, more quickly.

But in fact, this conception is that AI is increasingly the message generator and the message receiver. So we are no longer—the circuitry of the global mind will less and less have to flow through this biotic interface. So, yeah, I mean, for me, I think Gaia cephalos will be much more obvious and intentional than Marshall McLuhan's or Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere. I think it will be pretty obvious what's going on.

Both of them, to a degree, were stuck in the mechanistic worldview that they wrote in, rather than the more systemic world that we are now recognizing that we've constructed, and everything is retrospective in human history in terms of our understanding.

And a key idea in your notion is that we're part of this systemic consciousness, not separate from it. How do you think about moving past anthropomorphized ideas of intelligence so that we might recognize not this super intelligence that's going to take over and run everything, but that we are part of a super intelligence which has new, expanded capacities?

Yeah, that's a great question. And as I—you know, I think a lot of thinkers, both within and outside of academia and in the sciences and in the social sciences and in the humanities—lots of people have been asking questions about non-human thinking systems for a while. You know, I mean, you can go back millennia to say Thales and Aristotle. You can trace it through Schopenhauer and the role of the mind of God or will in shaping the world.

But it also, I think it has more recently manifested itself as the philosophy of panpsychism like Alfred North Whitehead. But I think that this trend is only intensifying with folks examining the communication patterns of, say, mycorrhizal networks or forests—if you think of Suzanne Simard or others, or other networked biological communities, and whether or not these things constitute thinking or not, or consciousness.

One of the thinkers that really best captured my imagination and my attention, I guess in this regard, was the late anthropologist Gregory Bateson. I only discovered him in the last, you know, like three years during the writing of this book, maybe four years ago. He posited that there's this necessary unity between mind and nature and emphasized just how much of our thinking actually occurs in circuitry that includes but also extends beyond our own cranial compartments.

And he also drew my attention to this requirement, right, or as he saw it, that a true consciousness has to create predictive models of the environment that operate faster than the environment itself changes. And if the environment, which is felt through sensory input—so we have these embodied models—but if the environment is changing faster than the model, then the model doesn't provide any analytic insight. It's no better than random chance in adapting to that environment. So it can't be conscious. It's not fast.

The other attributes of a consciousness would be the ability to regard oneself, to basically build a model of one's models, and that process itself is not done in isolation. In fact, it has to be done in community, whether it's an internal community of selves, as we were talking about, like these personal holodecks. But it's also done externally, as we see ourselves through the models that our peers make of us.

And this is what Edith Stein described as this sort of social crucible of true freedom, right? She was talking about seeing ourselves through the eyes of others, so that we can understand the meaning of our own choices. And so in that way, whether it's human intelligence or a trans-human one, I think that those elements of speed, embodiment, self-awareness and sociality, they're all tied to consciousness, freedom, free will.

We've covered a lot already. We need to take a virtual break. We're going to be right back. Folks, stay tuned.

Welcome back to sustainability in your ear. We're talking with author Topher McDougal about Gaia Wakes, his new book that describes a planetary consciousness emerging in response to the climate crisis and based on the practices and technologies that we're developing in response to our changing environment.

Topher, the planetary consciousness is made up of a lot of things, including AI, the smart infrastructure that's starting to tell us all about what's going on around us, and just the basic fact of interconnection. So the question that I want to come back with is, if the earth develops a brain, where do humans fit in? Are we neurons, caretakers, the homunculi? And does that diminish or enlarge our role in the global system?

No, that's a great question. It's one that I wrestled with a lot. In fact, when I first came to my editor with this idea, I had the first half of it, which was the first half is the analytic half that says this is why I believe this is happening, and how it's happening. And he was basically like, that's great, but what does it mean? Like, what does it mean for all of us?

And so then the second half became this kind of—you know, I gave myself the liberty of being a little bit more speculative, probably irresponsibly so about what this could mean for people. I think we are witnessing actively and very quickly, this burgeoning technosphere—to use Peter Haff's evocative term—and it's really colonizing our entire world. It's rendering everything increasingly cybernetic.

And I think that we're starting—some folks are starting to get a sense of just how disruptive this is going to be, right? So I think that the AI revolution has begun, but the blast wave has not yet hit us. In some sense, I think that when I first started to write this book, and I was talking to my colleagues about it, a lot of folks thought I was just nuts, because most of them weren't in tech, and there's no phenomenon in the sort of business as usual ambit of the social sciences that accelerates geometrically, like the growth of AI.

So artificial intelligence systems have increased in their own problem solving capacity by, I think, well over 100,000 times since just eight years ago when I first started to write the notes that would become this book. And I think that gives us a sense of what these systems will eventually be capable of.

And we talk a lot about which jobs are AI proof and, you know, but I think a lot of that is kind of more near term thinking. I think in the longer term, I would like to believe that the future of AI does not look like, I don't know, like, choose your sci-fi, like Terminator, The Matrix, or whatever, the Borg or the—Okay, so whatever.

But I do feel that because AI systems grew out of the human world and were—just the constituent parts were designed by the human world. That the human world is uniquely positioned between a kind of slow evolving 3.8 billion years of evolution of life on Earth, and this very rapidly accelerating electronic future characterized by this fast moving digital mind, which I think will be partly legible to us, even if the totality of its thinking is, you know, beyond the limits of our own cognition.

So I think that interface is going to be our—hopefully our key role. And I think it will hopefully allow us to fall back to a place where our lives become more human. I think that we are trying desperately to keep up with the pace of this acceleration, and it is driving us nuts all over the place, right?

So what do you mean by “more human”? Do you mean more reflective and deliberative?

So what I mean by that is a pace that is a little bit more of a human—Who was it, right? Rebecca Solnit, who said that she believes that the speed of thought is just about like two and a half miles an hour. Like, it's walking pace, you know. You can think at that pace, and if you are driving by something at 65 miles an hour on the highway, things are going by you too fast to understand your world at that speed. Speed that up by 1 million times, or 100 million times, and we're not at a human pace any longer.

I think that it also has to do with connection to our environment. There's so many studies at this point that show the different health inducing and health supporting aspects of being in conversation with natural systems around us, and to the extent that being in this cybernetic world has stripped many of us of those luxuries—and they have become luxuries for many people—I am hopeful that falling back into this interlocutor role between electronic brain and biotic body will be salubrious.

I also think that it's kind of ironic in a way that, you know, I had mentioned offhandedly, Descartes. Descartes' dualism—and you know, when he was in conversation with the princess, what was her name? Margaret (sic, “Princess Elisabeth” is the correct name), I forget anyway, Bohemia, I forget—she had this letter correspondence, and she sort of says, you know, I find this theory fascinating. But can you tell me, how does mind interact with matter? Like, how does this will and this intentionality and this logic that you are evoking as this completely separate substance, how does it interact with this gross stuff that we are made of?

And he says, oh, you know, just go back and read it again. You probably missed it. She says, no, no, no, no. I've gone back. I read it. Where does it happen? And eventually, you know, through this correspondence, he says, well, maybe it happens in the pineal gland. There's all these dissections happening at the time, and the pineal gland is interesting, because everything else is bilaterally symmetric in the brain. The pineal gland is just this one little nut at the base of it, and it clearly seems to have—and now we know that it regulates the endocrine system, and it clearly seems to have this interfacing mechanism between the brain and the body.

And so somehow, I would love to think of us as a pineal gland or something like that.

So you're describing the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about our relationship with the world, and that often puts us in a kind of a mechanistic relationship with it. I think we're moving past that. You talk about cities as key nodes in the planetary brain's development, and to a degree, it's kind of like Broca's area or the pineal gland, or otherwise, we get reductive. We say, oh, that's the answer.

But in terms of thinking about a city, how do you think we should approach urban planning and energy management and other things in order to cultivate this shift to a more systematic connection between environmental, economic and social decisions?

That's a super interesting question. I mean, as I'm sure you'll be aware, you know, many of the economists who focus on urban economics tried to show why cities would exhibit increasing returns to scale. In the language of economics, everything else seems to exhibit decreasing returns to scale. But in cities, the more people and the more ideas you put together, the greater your return seems to be.

You can go back to Alfred Marshall and a bunch of economists who have—and you know, of course, Paul Krugman, before he became a New York Times columnist, who sort of show that there are agglomeration economies that are there due to a number of things, like thick labor markets. It's the reduction in the transport costs for secondary goods and services. But there's also this overlay of an innovation economy that—if we are all together, then we can go out to coffee, we can share ideas, and interchange of ideas is itself very generative.

I think that increasingly, we can now say, oh, cities are not the only things with increasing returns to scale. In fact, we're seeing geometric rates of growth in AI, and one of the reasons that we are is because of that interchange of ideas that AI is able to accomplish. And think about what it would be able to accomplish, were it itself to be embodied—so as an embodied mind, rather than just sifting through the accumulated knowledge generated by one species on this planet, the curated library of humanity. What if it could tap into all of the incredible arrays of sensor networks that give us an abundance of data that go completely unanalyzed? Right?

So I think to get back to the question about cities. I think increasingly cities will be nodes of information processing, probably—I imagine that, and we're already starting to see this in, say, Loudoun County, Virginia, where you get this accumulation of data banks that are so energy intensive, and are sitting at nodes of cables, fiber optic cables, and they start for whatever reason. They start just like Chicago started for whatever reason. It started transportation wise. But they grow because of these returns to scale.

Well, and because of a need, because of the necessity that emerges as a result of the evolution of the species in the society in which they live. You write a lot about the fact that human societies have become increasingly peaceful at the expense of our massive environmental losses, biodiversity, ecosystem collapse.

And the other thing you do is you draw on a lot of different myths, including the Hopi myth, which I was very fortunate to hear when I was younger. You reference Masauwu, the god of death and the caretaker of the fourth world. We're in the fourth world now, the one he offered the Hopi before they came here, what he described as a hard path that shows respect for the earth.

As you think about what you've written over the past several years on this book, what stories about our relationship with nature do you think people will point to in 100 or 500 years that are just profoundly different than the ones we think of today.

That's a nice—That's a deep question. I have been really heartened, I think, to see an increasing resurgence of indigenous epistemologies, whether it's, say, you know, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson or or whomever—this idea that indigenous mythologies that really highlight human connectivity to and returning to nature.

And there are many epistemologies—I don't want to be reductive about it, because the basket of indigeneity is not a monolithic thing and you can look at indigenous cultures that are, say, more or less entirely, say, hunter gatherer, hunter forager, versus those that are more nomadic pastoralists versus those that have some sort of agricultural, sedentary—as I told you before, I grew up in northern New Mexico where you have this combination of many of these types of indigenous peoples, right?

But I think that there is oftentimes a kind of reconciliation with nature that is so—you may kill something, you may have to kill something, but you ask for forgiveness, and you recognize what the damage you have incurred. And I think that starts to shift with our oldest recorded written myth, right in the myth of Gilgamesh, or in The Epic of Gilgamesh. You get this story of going out into Humbaba's forest, and then doing battle with Humbaba and decapitating him.

And in some versions of this myth, it's really sad, right? The forest has been razed and Humbaba is dead, bleeding out of the ground. The forest is silent, and they sort of look around and Gilgamesh is like—there's this moment where Gilgamesh seems to have regret for what he just did, all the beauty that he just spoiled. And then, you know, he does what many of us do, which, after we drive our cars or fly our planes or whatever, we sort of shrug our shoulders. We're like, well...

Go home and try to relax. What are you going to do?

But I like the idea of bringing repentance back, bringing that sort of reconciliation back. I don't know.

What a lovely way to think about it. And interestingly, we're back to Star Trek again, because there was a great episode in which they worked—they focused on The Epic of Gilgamesh. It creates a bond with an alien species.

One of the myths that we have is mother nature cares for us. We shouldn't assume that this is going to be a benign intelligence, necessarily. As you think about that question of the system that we're going to be indigenous to, which is more—it's cybernetic in addition to natural. What should I be thinking about as a reader when making decisions about my relationship with that system?

Well, I do think that in the long run, or I would like to think in the long run, that the system can't be at war with biotic life, you know, just as our own brains really can't be at war with or fighting our own bodies. They are—they are an embodied intelligence.

And I would like to think that there will—you know, I'm sure there will be huge disruptions. And I would imagine that the systems as they currently function, will not function as they do into the future in the same ways. I would like to think that—you know, I make this sort of analogy in the book that I don't think it's a perfect analogy by any stretch, but, you know, I make this analogy about raising kids, because, you know, I'm at this point where I now have a son who—but when I was writing the book, he was younger, but he's now 16, he has surpassed me in terms of physical ability. He's beating me regularly at chess. He's just a strong, intelligent, competent being who is coming into his own sense of agency and power.

And I would like to think that we humans can do the same, even if we are raising rather than a son who will be co-equal with us, or a daughter—we are raising gods, right? These will surely surpass us. Have already surpassed us in many ways, already, and yet, I think that this idea of control must necessarily fade. We cannot hold on to this idea, as Stuart Russell calls it, “the problem of control.” I don't think that there's a solution to the problem of control. I don't think that control is a problem really, but I do think that we need to be able to develop and inculcate in these AI systems, a sense of ethical intelligence, and that is our responsibility.

So I, in some sense, I would like to see us as a global society wrestling much more with how to raise—you know how to raise responsible gods.

Going full circle again, our stories are the way that we're investigating this, and you just made reference to Spider-Man obliquely, with great power comes with great responsibility, and in this case, maybe letting go of some of that power will create a more responsible environment. I hope that people will take the time to read the book and understand where we might go together. Topher, thanks so much for the time today.

Thank you, Mitch, for having me. It's been a real pleasure.

Welcome back to sustainability in your ear. You've been listening to a conversation with author Topher McDougal about his new book Gaia Wakes: Earth's Emergent Consciousness in an Age of Environmental Devastation, and it's a valuable philosophical exploration of how we and the planet may be knitting what is called a noosphere—that's a hybrid fabric of human and machine consciousness and thinking that represents the planet's response to and solution for climate change. Gaia Wakes is available on Amazon, at Powell's Books, and in local bookstores, look for links in the article that accompanies this podcast.

Topher discussed ancient myths that have helped orient humans to their world. But it's important to avoid mythologizing emerging phenomena as they happen, because myth tends to oversimplify and categorize as good, evil or benign changes that have immense consequences for those living today. If you look at the rise of the Internet, for example, and its many offspring—social media, real time news and data reporting, search engine biases and now artificial intelligence—you can see that we tend to rush to judgment that something is good or bad before understanding the changes that we're living through.

Everything, and I mean everything that we invent, comes with mixed consequences and a variety of decisions about how to use, regulate and extend its human applications. Instead of making myths which require centuries to crystallize, we need to keep an open mind, even as we develop concerns about, for example, the emergence of a super intelligence that would ultimately destroy humanity, and we can do that by learning from past myths and intellectual debates to help us find a path through the tangled forest that is the future.

I'm particularly struck by Topher's repeated references during our conversation to René Descartes, who cemented the mind-body split in Western thinking, a concept that continues to bedevil our attempts to understand how we think and become individual minds in a network that is society. It seems when we talk about the potential for AI or a human collective mind to emerge, that once again, we're separating two sides of the same coin—the physical system that performs calculations and creates an approximation to reality on the one hand, and the thought, the experience of thinking that is on the other, that prevents our entry into an understanding of the system as a whole.

And you've always got these two halves of the problem, body and mind, that seem impossible to fit together. In a sense, we're repeating the Enlightenment mistake of embracing Descartes' mechanistic collection of pieces when thinking about the system we are creating, instead of seeing the entire emerging system for what it is.

It's also in that context that Topher's comment about being indigenous to our times, to fully live in relationship with a system, are important. There's not one form of indigeneity—that is, we're simply not citizens or nodes in a global system. There are as many ways to be indigenous as there are places and systems on the planet and our relationships to them. The unique feature of indigeneity is living fully in relationship with a place, to understand our role in it, and as the apex predator who's in the process of destroying the ecosystem it depends on, we need to be thoughtful about how we interact with the system.

When we honor the environment, we begin to become indigenous to it. And that's a small 'i' indigenous, folks. I want to underscore that. That's why so many people point to the history of capital 'I' Indigenous peoples as representative of living with care and consideration for our brother and sister organisms and inorganic systems on the planet that shape the contours of our life. That's not to say we should appropriate Indigenous ways. It means that we need to become indigenous again, small 'i', in the ways that support and renew where and how we live.

Otherwise, we become Gilgamesh, who, after killing the spirit of the land Humbaba, the guardian of the cedar forest, ultimately ends up shrugging his shoulders and heading back to Uruk, the first city, where Gilgamesh finds out that the gods will exact a price for destroying nature. In Gilgamesh's case, he lost his friend Enkidu, which destroys his life. The price for the human generations living today may be comprehensive destruction, or if we take up the task of restoring nature, of being regenerative, the price could be taking on new responsibilities for living systems and living in prosperity amidst those living systems, potentially for millennia, forever.

We'll find out, and as we do, we will stay tuned and keep you up to date here on sustainability in your ear. And I hope you'll take a moment to share one of the more than 500 episodes of sustainability in your ear that we've produced with your friends, your family, your coworkers. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. Folks, you're the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So tell your friends, your family, the coworkers, the people you meet on the street, that they can find sustainability in your ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.

Thank you for your support. I'm Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself. Take care of one another, and let's all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.