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Profile of Elisabet Sahtouris
Thank you, Silke in Berlin, for thinking of [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Thank you, Silke in Berlin, for thinking of the other species. I’m an evolution biologist. So I am happy to hear you asking whether we have the right to consider human beings as more valuable than other life forms. Probably every life form has to take itself as valuable in order to get along in the world. But most of them are in a much more cooperative relationship with each other than the humans are with other species. We have been rather arrogant in seeing ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution even though every species on this planet has taken just as long to evolve, to get where it is today as humans have. And, rights are something that humans think up for themselves. Animals, plants, funguses, microbes don’t think in terms of rights. But I believe they are all in communion with each other, rather than in communication the way humans are primarily with each other. We humans too have the capacity for communion with other species and with each other. One of my very favorite books is a book called "Kinship With All Life" by J. Alan Boone, and it's a wonderful, wonderful book I love to give it to kids when they are 10 or 12 years old, because, in it Boone tells of how he learned to commune with other species, with animals. His guru, teacher was a dog, the first famous movie star dog in Hollyhood, named Strongheart, who actually came from Germany, and was retrained to make family movies. And when Boone had to take care of this dog once for six weeks he became the dogs humble pupil, following it all day, eating when the dog ate, sleeping when the dog slept, running, playing, sitting whatever. And eventually, while the dog was [AUDIO ENDS]
A very interesting question Wera about [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: A very interesting question Wera about what’s after capitalism because it recognizes that there can be something after capitalism. And increasingly as we see that capitalism has built us an unsustainable world, we know that our economics do have to shift into something that works better. Capitalism has proven itself to be a system that generates great wealth for some and great poverty for others. And therefore it is not a sustainable living system. I am a biologist, I am an evolution biologist. So I watch species over time and see that in evolution there is a kind of learning curve, a cycle that proceeds from win-lose economics to win-win economics, from hostile competition over resources to the sharing, to cooperative sharing of resources and products. Our own bodies, I think, are the best model for what the economics of a living system look like. Because our bodies are made of up to a 100 trillion cells. And every one of those cells is as complex as the large human cities. Every one of the cells in our bodies has 30,000 recycling centers for example, just to keep its proteins healthy. And that’s only one of the functions of the cell. There are little bodies within a cell called mitochondria that generate the energy for the cell. They are like little banks that issue an energy currency called ATP. And this currency is given out freely to grease the economy. And when that currency doesn’t work anymore because it’s been drained of energy, it goes back to the bank and is revitalized and reissued. So this is a very interesting economic model. Tremendous diversity in the body, no organ running it, the brain is an information gathering organ, and the whole body has a [AUDIO ENDS]
The question of economic globalization [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: The question of economic globalization whether it promotes democracy or consolidates dictatorship is of course a very big one in the world today. I’m an evolution biologist and I look at globalization in a much broader perspective than only in terms of its economics. And in order to talk about the economic globalization, I have to look at that bigger picture. What I believe globalization is really about, is about forming global family, moving out of what I call juvenile species mode of hostile competition and into a more mature mode of cooperation. This has happened to many species all through evolution, and it’s our turn now as humans to do this. And when I look at the broader picture of globalization, I see that cooperation is already happening in many ways. We have money systems that are interchangeable across all languages and cultures. We can use our Visa cards everywhere. We can travel anywhere in the world. Air traffic control is completely cooperative even for countries that are at war with each other. So, we have travel and money exchange and we have communications which went from one-to-one telephones to one-to-many broadcasting to now many-to-many conversations on the Internet, which are the in the direction of democracy or non-adversarial politics preferably. We have interface dialogs, more frequent world parliaments of religions, we have the UN, we have international treaties. So, we see cultural exchanges, international space stations, all of these things are in the direction of human cooperation at a global level. On the other hand, our economics are still way behind in the juvenile mode of hostile competition and that’s what we have to work on now to bring the economics of humanity into line with this process ultimately of forming global family.
It’s a very interesting question you ask, [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: It’s a very interesting question you ask, Jason, because you are asking why do you behave as you do. I think what you really want to know is if black America is being treated as unwanted children why do they volunteer to go and defend their country? Well, among other things, I am one of the 60’s kids who are -- actually I was a grown-up and a mother already in the 60’s, but I was a 60’s activist fighting for civil rights for Black Americans for any discriminated against minority. And, we were so successful in the 60’s that among other things we ended the draft and we thought that young man would no longer go to war. Hurray! Hurray! However, we have an economy in which people who are not treated as equals don’t make as much money and it's harder for a young black man to get a decent job in most cases even than a young white man. And so, many more of them are going to volunteer to go to war for their country for the very simple reason that it's an economically disadvantaged group trying to make a living. And, I think that the mood of the whole world now is that people don’t want war any more. And, I think that armies could not be raised if there weren’t an economic opportunity. So, what we really have to work at is the basic economics of equality. We have to develop an economy in the future that’s a win-win that truly gives people equal opportunity, so that no one will have to go fight wars for higher-ups if they don’t truly believe in the cause. And I hope that there will no longer be causes that anybody kills each other over. I hope that the young generation will make friends around the world through the internet and will make a pact with each other that no differences shall be worth killing each other for, so that there will be no more wars. And if anybody attacks anyone else that there will be international peace keeping forces that will immediately see that as something that has to be stopped.
Interesting question Claire, about what [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Interesting question Claire, about what basic dignities human beings deserve and why we let so many people go without them. I would say that the basic dignities for human beings are that we respect each other, that we help each other to grow, to flourish, to meet our own individual -- to mesh our individual talents with the needs of the world. And, we have a world of great inequities at present. We all know that. And, we are trying hard through the United Nations, through united religion initiatives, through interfaith dialogues, through intercultural exchanges, and so forth to talk more and more about the basic human dignities. The UN has addressed them. It’s difficult to change traditions that don’t work and change traditions that don’t permit the basic dignities to all of their people. And, among those our newer tradition such as capitalism, which makes some people poor, while other people amass great wealth, things that we’ve addressed in other questions today at this round table. And so, we have to keep working toward an equitable society that runs more the way your body does, where the cells are all of equal economic status in your body, they are all nourished and they all contribute to the body’s economy, which is a magnificent example of how an economy can function well until something goes wrong in it, like a cancer where some cells stop caring about the rest of the community. People understand very well that in a family it doesn’t work well if one of the members is neglected or ill or angry or something like that. And, we understand that also in small local communities. We have trouble thinking this in terms of larger communities, nations in the world. We must learn to see all of us as a healthy living system in which every human being is unique, important, deserves, love, respect, and care from others. And, I think our future brighten.
Thank you, Amy from Chicago for your [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Thank you, Amy from Chicago for your question about why we are not feeding everyone if we're producing enough food to do so. It is true that the United Nations periodically tells us that we are growing enough food to feed every man, woman, and child on the planet an adequate diet. The reason that we don’t do so of course, is that land is owned mostly, privately and on that private land corporations can grow food, employ people to grow food and sometimes the very people who grow the food aren’t permitted to eat it. So, it traces to an economic system that doesn’t work to feed everyone. I am an Evolution Biologist and I, in terms of evolving living systems and one of the most highly evolved one on our planet is our own bodies made of a hundred trillion cells in working cooperation. Now, if you try to do global economics in your body, the way we are doing them in the world, it might look something like this. We will call that northern industrial organs those north of the diaphragm, the heart lung system and give them the power of ownership over the rest of the body so that they can exploit the raw material blood cells that are actually formed in bones all over the body and bring those raw materials up to the heart lung system, process the blood, add oxygen, purify it and then the heart distribution center might say, the body price for blood is so much today. Who will buy? And so the heart would ship the blood only to the organs that could afford it. Now, you can see right away that our bodies wouldn’t [clusterate] on into that system and the poor bones who had produced the raw material blood cells that had been mined by the northern industrial organs might not be able to afford the finished blood. So, by looking at highly evolved natural living systems, we can see what’s wrong with our own world economy. And of course, there is a relationship between bodies, individuals, families, communities, nations, and the world every level is a living system and every level must function like a healthy living system if it’s going to be healthy itself. We have a World Trade Organization trying to run the world sometimes at the expense of local economies, that can’t work. It would be like trying to run your body at the expense of its cells. So, if we study living systems, we can see the answer to the problem. We need more equitable economics in our world.
Thank you Glen from Capetown for your [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Thank you Glen from Capetown for your question about whether our current economic system is inherently corrupt and if so, how we should go about dismantling it. Our current economic system in the world is, yes corrupt and certainly highly inequitable. Not all people in the economic system are corrupt, but the system itself is corrupted in the sense that it is an unnatural system for a mature species. I talk like an evolution biologist because I am one. I watch humanity as a species. I watch human economics in relationship to natural economics such as the body economics, your body’s economics or a rain forest economics. And, what I find is that a mature economics system in nature is one that is very equitable and an immature one is one that is greedy for some and very much a win-lose system. Young species tend to go out and grab all the resources and territory they can get in order to multiply as rapidly as possible and takeover. So, they are highly competitive, they try to drive other species out. But, in a mature economic ecology, these species have discovered that cooperating is economically more efficient than competing in hostile ways. And so they set up all kinds of cooperative ways of feeding each other, of making product available to each other more equally. So, the human species right now is behaving like an immature species with an economic system that works for someone at the expense of others. But as we mature, as we grow up into mature economics, we will develop economics that work for everyone trying to run the world the way the World Trade Organization does is often at the expense of local economies. And, what we need is to work more like the body because you couldn’t run your own body at the expense of yourselves, could you? And, our bodies are mature economic systems, while our global economy is not yet a mature economic system.
Thank you, Jens. I like this question of [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Thank you, Jens. I like this question of how an economic system should be devised that isn't in conflict with human, animal or planet rights because I am an evolution biologist. And I study living systems. It’s very easy to see nature as an economy, because in nature the different species take raw materials and they create things from them, they produce products. They consume them of course, they trade them with each other, there’s a lot of cooperation of feeding each other and providing homes for each other in the plant and animal world and the microbial world, and the fungal world. And so, healthy living economies are very cooperative in their economics. But there is a learning curve in nature where young species are actually quite hostile in their competition the way we young humans are at present on the planet. And they take as much territory and resources as they can get, they multiply as fast as possible. That’s the juvenile mode of species behavior in evolution. However, eventually, they meet up with other species and either they have to bump each other off, or they start setting up some cooperative schemes. And then they discover how well those cooperative schemes work. You get more and more cooperation going, so that in a very mature species kind of ecosystems such as the rain forest or a prairie, you have the species feeding each other, taking care of each other, providing for each other, and it’s economically much, much more efficient. And you can see that, if you look for inside the United States Pentagon budget, it's much, much more expensive to destroy countries and then rebuild them than it would be to build them from where they were in the first place. We have to make friends in this world if we are going to stop terrorism, if we are going to stop hostilities. It’s the only way forward for our species, is to get through this evolutionary maturation cycle to take globalization as an opportunity, to build global family, to help each other. And with the coming climate change ahead of us, we are going to really have to cooperate. I hope that it will drive us to do that.
Thank you, Adam in my own state, California, [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Thank you, Adam in my own state, California, for your question on whether corporate social responsibility is possible. I was recently in Brazil where corporations are taking question of social responsibility very very seriously and there are lot of wonderful things happening. I’ve toured a hospital, which is actually a corporation that asks its own community all the time what can we do for you and in which it’s a children’s hospital and some of the leading research in the world goes on there. They are the ones who pioneered liver transplants for instance, from mothers to children. And, I saw there in every room no matter what the child’s illness was, there was a lounge chair that converted into a bed for the mother to be there. They were beautiful murals on the walls. The doctors were running around with clown noses on and entertaining the children. There was a sense of a song and spirit and happiness trying to make the children as happy as possible. That’s one little example of corporate social responsibility in Brazil. Many many companies are doing, so many things in that line. And, it’s also developing in other parts of the world. There is some contradiction in the way corporations are set up now in their -- it’s difficult for them to really take social accountability seriously, because of their pressured 90-day accountability for profits to their shareholders. Now, if we could shift corporate responsibility away from shareholders to stakeholders, which is everyone who has an interest, ultimately everyone in the world, then thing would start to shift or would continue to shift much more rapidly towards social responsibility and also ecological responsibility in corporations. Our whole economic system needs to be shifted from win-lose system to a win-win system. And, as an evolution biologist I have hope that that can happen, because immature species do hostile competitive economics and mature species have learned that cooperation is much more economically efficient than hostile competition. So, my hope are for a transition in this world to a true global family, toward win-win economics in which all businesses will be socially and ecologically accountable as well as making a good living.
Thanks David for the question. And it's a [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Thanks David for the question. And it's a fun one to answer as a woman. In a way you have included the answer in your question by saying that feminine values have been so minimized. I often hear men say: “Oh! You women do the most important work on the planet.” But, if you ask a man whether he would trade places with the women raising children at home, very few will do so. There are some stay-at-home dads now, but they are pretty uncommon. And, what that says to me is that it's a bit empty worded when people say women do the most valuable work, because even if it's true they are not valuing it the way they value men’s work. So, if women are not paid equal wages for raising families with men who do the work in a world of employment, then the society as a whole is not putting equal value on women’s work and never will. Even women in the culture are taught not to value themselves the way men are valued. And so it is more difficult to get women to have equal numbers of decision-making roles even in a democracy where voting happens and women can run for office. So until we see equal numbers of men and women in decision-making roles in the world, we are not going to find out how women really would make those decisions when they don’t feel pressure to behave like men. As long as there is a small minority of women in leadership positions there is a certain pressure on them to talk like men, to behave like men, and so we don’t get the full value of what women have to offer. Men and women were created equal, men and women were created to love each other, to work together, we need each other; we have to refuse the ridiculous separation that has been caused by an economy of private property that devalued women, and get back to where we can function as equal partners. Many indigenous societies did it, there are role models, and we in the developed work can do it too. I hope it will be real soon.
Thank you Kent for asking the question of [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Thank you Kent for asking the question of why it is socially acceptable to hoard wealth while so many people go without even their basic needs. And, I would have to say first of all that it’s only socially acceptable in places where wealthy people live and not even acceptable to all people in those places. I am, for instance, from the United States and everyone in the world saw when Katrina hit, the hurricane, that the United States has abysmal poverty along with great wealth. And among the abysmally poor, I don’t believe it is socially accepted for people to be hoarding wealth while they were going hungry and homeless. It’s not socially acceptable to hoard wealth in many parts of the world. So, it really does depend on whether you have the wealth to hoard or not, whether it’s a socially acceptable thing. Of course it is true that people have been taught that some people being wealthy, while others are poor is natural in the human species. People see the Darwinian Theory as a dog-eat-dog world, a survival of the most powerful and things like that. But actually Darwin only saw the competitive part of evolution, while we really have a tremendous amount of equity and cooperation in nature. Consider for instance your own body, where you have a 100 trillion cells working in complete harmony with each other, where there is no hoarding of wealth or in a rain forest where no species is in charge and many are feeding are each other and there is no hoarding of wealth. So, it isn't natural for it to happen and it shouldn’t be socially acceptable anywhere.
You ask a very interesting question, Matt [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: You ask a very interesting question, Matt from San Francisco. I am a fellow of California. And, back in the 60s, we broke the number of laws I suppose in order to fight for justice and equality. I think that we were so successful that we drove the opposition to creating a whole other world now from which there are even more laws that need some breaking. It’s a tough world that young people are growing up in today, because of the extreme inequalities, because of the hostilities going on in the world. And yet if you look over time, there are fewer hostilities now than there were half a century ago or a century ago. And I think that the whole process of globalization is moving us toward a world of greater equality of global family. Unfortunately, the economics are lagging behind. We still have win-lose economics in the world, while we are learning cooperation in many ways through communications, travel, money exchange, cultural exchange, International Space Stations, World Parliaments of Religions, interface dialogues, all of these things indicate to me as an evolution biologist that our species is growing out of the hostile competitive mode and into the mature collaborative mode. Unfortunately, we don’t yet have a complete body of international law and even those international conventions and treaties that we do have are very difficult to enforce. I believe we need to strengthen something like the United Nations or some other way of building our international laws, so that they are laws we want to keep, so that we no longer have to break laws to get justice and dignity in the world.
This is a difficult and deep question about [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: This is a difficult and deep question about reconciling respect for universal human rights when they conflict with traditional or religious values. The question before this was about the inequality of men and women and that’s of course one of the issues that comes up when religious beliefs put women in inferior positions, it's very difficult to respect universal human rights in that kind of a situation. And I think what we have to do is recognize that change happens in the world. I am an evolution biologist, I study living systems and change. I am a scientist and science in the sense is expected always to function through change - to change its theories, to changes its hypothesis, to come up with new facts and new ages. Religions where expected not to change overtime because their knowledge was revealed and considered to be eternal permanent law, a permanent way of doing things. However, in this world, religions are changing more in a way than science is, at least so it seems to me. We have -- I have been asked as a scientist by Catholic nuns, by a Episcopalian priests, how do we redefine things in our religion for this changing world. They are ready to shift. The nuns have looked into their rules, their hold bylaws and discovered that they can change their own rules within their convents. They came out of their habits into lay dress in many cases. They liberated themselves and they still are active in full members with the Catholic Church. So, change is possible and it often has to come from -- not from the high priesthoods of religions or traditional values, but from more of the grassroots, from the lay members of a religion or of a society. And we can only hope that the process of change toward equality in the world will continue in more and more ways, in more and more traditions so that the tradition... [audio ends]
The question of whether brands are more [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: The question of whether brands are more powerful than governments reflects the concern obviously with corporations in the world, with companies that brand their products. And the first thing that comes to my mind is that 51 percent of the organizations, most powerful organizations on the earth now are actually corporations rather than governments. So, at face value I would have to say that the corporations have become more powerful than the governments are now. The particular question of branding is interesting, especially when you think of young people, who through MTV and other Internet advertising and all kinds of things like that, probably spent more time and attention on brand names than they do perhaps of the statements made by their own governments. I don’t know whether that’s true around the world. I am an American, and certainly branding is been very important to my own grandchildren, as they go through high school, especially girls care a lot, but probably boys now too the same. In any case, the deeper question is about why so much power is in hands of corporations rather than governments. And, this has to do with the fact that economics has such great power in the world today. And, the kind of economics that we are doing are based on a system in which corporations have to account every 90 days to their shareholders for profits. And this is a situation in which it's very difficult for a CEO to be accountable to the planet and to the people of the planet. We talk about, in business now a days a triple bottom-line, where we are suppose to be accounting for profits planet and people; in other words, social accountability of corporations and also accountability to the ecosystems. My time is up on this question.
This is a very interesting question about [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: This is a very interesting question about how people in industrialized countries can enjoy the cheap products and then criticize China who is producing so many of those cheap products for its rapid industrialization. Personally, I don’t criticize China for going into industrialization. Although, I suppose I think that in part China has thrown some of the baby out with the bathwater. When I visited China in 1974, for example, they had a zero waste policy that was very impressive and obviously the largest one in the world. I very much admired China for having built the strongest economy on earth through basically sweat equity, through the labor of its own people resisting the influx of foreign capital. It developed a far healthier and stronger economy than it would have if it had taken huge loans, the way other developing countries did. So, I applaud China for having built such a strong economy even though it wasn’t some ways a great expense to its people. But, now, I see another problem in China developing too much like the United States, too interested in personal gain and huge profits. So, I hope that the pendulum will swing back somewhat so that China will not get into being a country of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, the way my own country did. I hope I have answered the question appropriately. And, I hope that in the future, we will have a lifestyle of elegant simplicity everywhere, where we will have high quality, lasting products, but not in glut, not in excess, no one needs a 100 pairs of shoes or 10 television sets or no one needs to flaunt wealth. We all want to live well protecting our eco systems, protecting each other. And, I hope that eventually we will have a highly co-operative world in which that’s possible.
I think it’s very interesting that this [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I think it’s very interesting that this question comes from Kerala, India. Because as I understand it, Kerala does have an education system in which children bloom. I understand that children coming through the school system in Kerala know a great deal more about the world and sometimes about my own country, the United States, than children in my country do. The world has very different education systems for different conditions, for different people, under different political systems and so forth. So there is no "our education system" in common to the world. And as I say, I am very impressed that Kerala, which doesn’t have a great deal of material wealth as many people in America have, has a better education system than we do. So, I laud Kerala for doing that, their health system is also better than ours, and I think that’s just amazing and wonderful because it shows that grassroots development can create better education and healthcare system sometimes than highly developed countries can put into place. In other words there is a great deal of inequality in the world then there is a great deal of inequality in our education systems. We have Steiner schools and Montessori schools and some independent educational facilities that have incredibly wonderful education systems in which children truly bloom. On the other hand we have public education system that’s very inequitable. A public high school in a wealthy area is very different from a public high school in a poor area. Bill Gates was recently involved with trying to improve the education system and Oprah in my country has worked hard on that and has shown that even a few blocks from the White House there can be an extremely poor high school for black students largely that have locked bathrooms because they are in such bad condition and no healthy gymnasiums and no computers and just go on some more blocks and you will find high schools that have all of those things, swimming pools, gymnasiums, computers, everything that kids need. And so inequities can be only a few feet apart in this world and I hope that in the future we will be able to offer children an education that will make them truly blossom everywhere in the world when we create true global family on this planet.
The question of whether our wealth depends [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: The question of whether our wealth depends on the third world being poor is a little bit strange at this table, because at this table at least we have representatives from people all over the world, from rich countries and from the poorer countries. It is certainly the case that we have richer countries and poorer countries. And it’s certainly the case that the planet has a long history of globalization through colonialization. And that colonialization has played a big role in making some countries poor while others get rich. It is true in the United States today that much of the world is subsidizing our lifestyle that we do live at the expense of other countries. And I know that my country is very culpable in having underdeveloped systematically other parts of the world. Our country has been very much involved in getting poorer countries to borrow a lot of money to build infrastructures which have not served their development, and that people have been kept poor in order to keep others rich. It’s very true what you are seeing. But I don’t believe that this will be the case in the world forever. I am an evolution biologist who looks at how species mature out of hostile competition and into cooperation. And my hope is that the globalization process is a much broader one than just economics and that people are learning to cooperate in so many ways in the world, and that every new generation, now the millennial generation, the first adults of the new generation, have the opportunity to stop doing the foolish things that my generation has done. I see young people who are not greedy, who are not hostile, who are not racist, who have a real opportunity to create the world the way they wanted to be. And I believe they want it to be in much more equitable world than we have.
Nicola you are asking a big question, why we [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Nicola you are asking a big question, why we consider some lives to be worth more than others. In the answer to the last question I was talking about how every human being deserves human dignity, deserves love, respect and care from others. And I believe that a whole process of globalization is really about building global family in which we all care for each other and which all lives are equally valuable. But it's a process of getting from being in what I as an evolution biologist call a juvenile species mode of win/lose economics to a mature species mode in which we have win-win economics in which we care for everyone. We had a long cold war in which the Soviet Union was in contest with the capitalist west. In the west the sacrificed community to individual interest, in the Soviet Union individual interest was sacrificed to community or to the largest social good, in theory at least, who practice it with quite dictatorial. However, in the west, it’s also getting to be rather dictatorial in my county in my ways. Grassroots people feel that they are losing power, that their representatives are not representing them so well any more in Washington. And so, we have to think seriously about whether the systems we have in place can possibly function to where everyone will be considered of equal value. We see a natural disaster such as Katrina that the US has great poverty and great wealth at the same time. That means our human beings are not being valued equally. Can capitalism be consistent with democratic principles? I think that capitalism is proving to be incompatible with democratic principles. And so, we are going to have to rethink our whole economy.
The question of whether developing countries [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: The question of whether developing countries should go into micro-finance or macro-finance is a very interesting one. Macro-finance is something that has been imposed on developing countries. Developing countries were offered very large loans for development and these were loans that were so large that they couldn’t be repaid. There were also loans that went into building infrastructure that did not necessarily serve the development of all the people of those countries. Sometimes there were highways built that didn’t really go anywhere or more electricity that was more for airports that never got their airplanes or factories that employed local people to make products for export. So, large amounts of money into countries that are developing has proved very disastrous in many cases. And so, micro-finance has been much more effective in grassroots development especially because so many micro-finance programs were developed among women who were extremely accountable economically and with very small amounts of money they were able to develop little local businesses that helped the whole village to improve. And therefore, building the ability of local people to take care of themselves, which is the real strength of any country is when its local systems are functioning democratically and functioning for the benefit of all their people, then the country can become stronger from the bottom up. So, I think micro-finance has proven itself to be much more effective than macro-finance in developing countries.
Thank you Ramazon for your question about [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Thank you Ramazon for your question about why woman are still at a disadvantage. Women were not always at a disadvantage in the world. I work myself often with indigenous peoples, and I was recently with indigenous peoples from the Haudenosaunee or what the white men call the Iroquois Nations of the Northeastern United States and a couple from that culture, Jake and Judy Swamp, who have been long time activists were there and it reminded me of what I know about how the forefathers of America, the European immigrants actually got their constitution from the Haudenosaunee. Unfortunately, there were a number of things they didn’t take from that constitution and one of most important was the equality of women. In the Haudenosaunee culture, the grandmothers chose the Chiefs because they knew all about the men of their culture. They know what they had been like as little boys. They knew which ones would serve their people well. And so, the grandmothers chose the Chiefs and they also had the power to put the Chiefs from their positions. They would give them one warning, if they were not serving the people and then they would take them out. So, that was the culture as many indigenous cultures were in which women were very much respected as equals. There was a division of labor. Men and women didn’t always do the same work. In fact, usually the women were the hearthkeepers and the men the out-rangers who negotiated boundaries, at wars, did the hunting. The women were keeping the family hearth together raising the children. Anyway there was an equality among the genders in those cultures which we have lost in the past few thousand years since women were regarded either as the property of their fathers or whatever and many of us we know these stories, we know this history. And, the whole past 5,000 years or so, if empire building has respected male values over the feminine values of caring and sharing rather we valued the hostilities and the ability to make money and all those things. And, we are now trying to work very hard to get that gender balance back again because we need each other. We were meant to love each other, to work together.
This is a complex question that can be [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: This is a complex question that can be answered on many levels. The issue of drugs in the world is certainly an extremely serious one, it is a huge business, it is technically an illegal business, it is a very shady business in which governments and CIA and all kinds of people have been involved. We have the unfortunate situation today in Afghanistan where presumably we were going to end the growing of poppies and the drug trade that results from it and now there are more than ever there and some people getting wealthy, the Taliban being revived. So, there is an intimate relationship between drugs and human relationships as you ask in your question, is addiction really about human relationships. Drugs are a problem both in terms of illegal money making and in terms of addiction at the other end. It would be very good if that kind of illegal drug were gone from the world by snapping our fingers. Obviously that’s not going to happen. And I guess you really want to know is why do people get addicted, I raised children for a while in New York City and while my son was in grade school, the candy store on the corner was selling drugs to children. So, it's very much about human relationships. There were policemen and the police precinct that some of the mothers could look down into their police yard, seeing the policemen themselves dealing in drugs. So, it's a very complex issue and it's perpetuated at many levels of society. People take drugs to escape lives that aren’t really wonderful. Of course in youth people may start taking drugs just to experiment, just to see if mind alteration is more fun or whatever. So, again, it's very complex, it can be done for recreation, it can be done to get away from problems and of course in the long run it causes more problems, so yes let’s look at the fruits…[audio cut].
And Judith you ask how big is our [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: And Judith you ask how big is our responsibility for AIDS in Africa. In a sense because I'm very concerned with healthy global family, when any part of the world suffers from a major epidemic or poverty or any other problem, we should all be concerned with it. I remember reading around 1991 a very interesting article in the New Yorker magazine in America, in which it referred to AIDS as the revenge of the rain forest. And what it was talking about was that when we go in and disrupt the natural ecosystems, we can create tremendous problems because some of the beings from those ecosystems dislodged from their usual habitats can cause a great deal of trouble in other ecosystems when they are moved around. So, if developers cut down rain forests in Africa for example, where the AIDS virus was in some kind of balance with the rest of the ecosystem and they jump on those people as life boats, the AIDS viruses, and get transferred to other places outside of their natural ecosystem; they can cause what we call virulent problems, the word virulent coming from virus. In Africa, cows have been imported as an alien animal and they are very destructive there. They come from another ecosystem but in Africa they are very destructive. The trample ground, they make pass that rain water runs often, they create desertification. Now the tsetse fly was the last defense of Africa's ecosystems against the invasion of foreign cows because they killed the cows with the illness where as when they bit native hoofed animals such as antelope and wilderbeasts in Africa, they do not get sick from the tsetse fly. So, again it's a case of when you disrupt ecosystems, you cause problems. Of course, the World Bank and developers, other developers, in Africa are now making huge chemical warfare on the tsetse fly and that kills other species. So, we tend to escalate the problems that way. In any case, I think that everyone in the world should be feeling responsible when anyone in the world is suffering and that's my basic answer to your question.
Thanks Elliot for your question. I don’t [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Thanks Elliot for your question. I don’t know this is part of Darwin’s Theory, but of course, the prevailing scientific theory is that human life began in Africa and that people migrated from Africa all over the world. And so, you are asking why if humans originated in Africa, is Africa is less developed than the Western states, and I assume you also know the answer, which has to do with the fact that some of the people who left Africa came back to Africa as colonialists. And, there was tremendous plunder of Africa not only through the slaves that were exported to other lands but also in the settlers taking over much of the land. There was interference between trading tribes, and this has often have been done by conquerors that people who were cooperating were separated, so that friends in some meat hunting tribe and the plant growing tribe who were trading products would no longer have that kind of contact with each other. And then, colonialists came in and developed mines and large plantations and eventually production facilities and urban centers. And taking the men out of their cultures, the men and boys especially, to go to work for foreigners for money, broke up the cultures of Africa, made it much more difficult for the older men and the women and children who were left behind in the villages to continue the culture. It’s the story of colonialization in other parts of the world as well. And, we know now that there are some countries who have become very wealthy at the expense of other countries which have become very poor. The conditions in Africa today I believe will be the conditions of many parts of the world as the coming hot age advances as climate change moves into producing greater deserts in other parts of the world, and disease epidemics, poverty, migrating populations. We will face these problems in many places. And so, Africa perhaps should be the place that the whole world concentrates now on helping rather than hindering in their development, so that we will know how to function in other places in the future. Good luck Africa.
This is a great big philosophical question, [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: This is a great big philosophical question, how do you counteract anger, violence and hatred? I’m reminded of someone who said to me a long time ago, “There are really only two basic emotions or feelings in the universe, love and fear.” If you think about the most hateful, most violent, most angry, nastiest person you know on this planet, if you can imagine that person to be a baby, the first time that baby feels fear, what would you do if you were in its presence? And every one of us instinctively intuitively immediately thinks of holding that baby and comforting it. Now, if we can assume that all violence and anger and hatred comes from the development of unmet needs from babies that are afraid and don’t have anyone to put their arms around them, or from societies that don’t meet people’s needs, then I think you have the clue to most of the deep roots of anger, violence and hatred in our world. Sure, it’s healthy to get angry when there’s injustice in the world and things like that. But if you can learn to separate judgment from discernment. If you can discern the problems of the world without judging them then it’s easier to find solutions to them than if you simply counteract violence with violence, hatred with hatred, which never has worked, and never will work. It doesn’t solve the problem. We have to go much deeper and we have to move toward a human society in which we honestly care for each other and share the resources of the world far more equitably than we do today. I believe we humans are capable of that, that we can really build global family if we all put our minds and hearts into it.
This is a very interesting question, how to [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: This is a very interesting question, how to stop gang violence. I remember some years back when I was visiting one of the very affluent California coastal towns and a lady said to me, “I wonder if you can help with a new problem we have in our town.” And she said, “We have suddenly gangs that are violent and that are thieving and we don’t know what to do, we’ve never had this kind of a problem in our town. And we have no idea how to tackle it. Can you give us some advice?” And off the top of my head I said I think that’s a piece of cake, and really easy problem to solve. She said, “Really? How can we do it?” So I said just have one of your wealthy families invite one gang member each, have a group, as many wealthy families as there are gang members since you seem to know who they are, invite one each to dinner once a week and at the table treat them like family. Ask them what their needs are, their unmet needs. Ask them how you can help them fulfill those needs. And really be concerned in that young person’s life and actively support them in doing what they are most talented to do, what they would like to do with their lives. I think you will see the problem evaporate. And I would say basically this is the same thing. If every young person were cared for, nurtured and helped by their society to meet their real needs, I don’t believe we would have gangs, violent gangs, gang warfare, the problems of that kind. I was a criminal justice planner for juveniles in the state of Massachusetts back in the early 70s. And I outfitted Harvard students with tape recorders to go and interview juvenile delinquents on street corners to ask them how their society had failed to meet their needs. It didn’t make my colleagues very happy that I was doing this but I was convinced already at that time that the solutions lie in exactly what I’m talking about. If we meet all young people’s needs they’re not going to be attacking each other or the other parts, the other members of their society.
Oh, what we could do with that big military [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Oh, what we could do with that big military budget around the world! I would of course spend that military budget around the world on helping people to develop their local economies. Many of the people of the world are landless because their lands were taken from them during the colonialist phase. And that phase really isn’t over for us yet. Many people continue to be disenfranchised from land as well as from political voice. And aid doesn’t work. In Africa for instance massive aid has, food aid, has been sent there and every time there’s a massive dose of food aid people grow less food at the same time. So it creates a dependency, it creates a kind of slavery where people are unable to take care of themselves. And that is what has to be changed. We might have to use some of that money to buy land back for people. We need to get rid of the foreign investment schemes that force people to grow meat or wheat or whatever for foreign export rather than for themselves. I consider agribusiness one of the great problems in the world because food production should be as much as possible local, for local consumption, the way it was a few centuries ago. And we can still trade our surpluses, there are some wonderful examples of how to do that. Bainbridge Island in Washington State in the United States for instance has a sister island in central America that grows its organic coffee. And the Bainbridge Island people in the north pay those coffee growers ten times what other growers are paid for the same product. And it’s a wonderful win-win situation for the people in both places. So we could be developing a lot of economic cooperation as well as local self-sufficiency in the world. And I think that’s the first order of business.
The question of why there isn’t peace in the [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: The question of why there isn’t peace in the middle east yet is a complex one. And there are many levels involved here. One of the problems is that the middle east has been a fairly tribal set of cultures that has had artificial boundaries imposed on them by people form other parts of the world, from Europe and America. And this causes conflicts inherently because it has disrupted some peoples from their homelands and put them into other places. So there’s that complexity. And then there’s the complexity of the outside intervention of my country, the United States, and other countries that have played roles in the middle east. There are complex alliances that we don’t hear about in the media. We’ve had some documentaries in recent years showing close alliances between the Saudi oil family and the Bush family in the United States. So there’s a lot of collusion of various kinds going on behind the scenes, some of it out in the open. So it’s an extremely complex situation. I certainly don’t think that the United States has done much to foster peace in the middle east when it comes in and attacks countries like Afghanistan where there have been no solutions due to our intervention. And in Iraq where we are told there is the solution of having removed Saddam Hussein from power. We all agree that he was a brutal dictator, however I believe that the people of Iraq would have overthrown Saddam Hussein himself if my country had not actively been involved in preventing that. I do not believe in foreign intervention on the part of my country. I wish it weren’t happening. I don’t know whether there would be peace in the middle east, probably not, if we had not intervened there. However, supporting dictators and then taking them out of power in the interests of foreign capitol are not the way to go to create peace in the middle east. I would love to see peace in the middle east based on the brotherhood of the sons of Abraham and I have a strong feeling that all the people who go in there to do conflict resolution are successful on the small scales they’re permitted to work on and could be successful on a much larger scale if conflict resolution was seriously supported by the world. I hope for peace in the middle east. I believe that people can get along with each other and that in general we are headed toward the formation of global family in the world. The conflicts worldwide have been reduced in the past century and I hope they will continue to be.
How do we stop our governments from going to [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: How do we stop our governments from going to war? Well, the first thing I think of is I think back to the 1960s when we said make love, not war. When young men burned their draft cards and actually succeeded in ending the draft. There was a big reaction to the successes, the kind of democratic successes of the 60s because it gave rise to the neocons, to very, very heavily funded think tanks for the right wing to regain power in my country. And of course it has a great deal of power in the world as well. Let me see, am I getting away from the question here? So the problem with war is that it offers economic opportunity where it doesn’t otherwise exist for young people, especially for young men, especially for the less enfranchised minorities. I don’t believe that any nation could raise a serious army today if young people had viable alternative economic opportunity to being soldiers going into the military. So the only way I see for getting governments to stop going to war is to work more and more on economic justice for all people, to recognize that no healthy living economy can exist when some people can’t get work and others can hoard immense wealth. No natural biological system that’s well evolved functions that way. Imagine in your own body if there were economic inequity in some cells or some organs could exploit the rest of the body for their own benefit. You wouldn’t last very long and neither will our human economies if we can’t find a way to create more economic equity.
It’s certainly the case that there are now [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: It’s certainly the case that there are now many issues that are global issues and that we have a great need for stronger international law and stronger ways of enforcing international law. And this should be very much on everyone’s mind. How do we do that? I don’t believe that we will ever have a centralized global government. When I was younger that was very much in the air and we tried to figure out how to do it and of course the United Nations was set up as a kind of a rudimentary global governments body that was dedicated to a peaceful world. It hasn’t accomplished that peaceful world. And what I see happening now because we have an internet is that there’s a great deal of peer to peer conversation going on around the world, teachers talking to teachers, judges talking to judges, politicians to politicians in other countries, weaving a kind of network. At the same time national governments are making fewer decision because a lot of decision making takes place in multinational corporations, in NGOs and other international organizations. So what I see as a biologist studying the evolution of living systems is the development of a kind of networked governance of the kind perhaps you see in the human body or in a rainforest. In a rainforest there is no one species in charge, being the government, nor is there in your body. Your nervous system is actually a highly effective information gathering system that works to allocate resources where they are needed. If you cut your toe there’s no complaint on the part of other parts of the body that aid is sent there to get it on it’s feet. Not the kind of aid that makes it dependent, but the kind of aid that makes it healthy. So my question is can we develop a kind of global governance, a way of organizing ourselves for economic equity that is done through a distributed network as in a healthy ecosystem? What it will look like is hard to say but I think the best models we could follow are those of highly evolved biological systems whether they are ecosystems or an individual human body made of 100 trillion cells working in harmony with each other, each one of them as complex as a large human city.
It’s very true that when the powerful use [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: It’s very true that when the powerful use force it’s called self defense and when the weak use it it’s called terrorism. Why is that? Because the powerful have the right to define their violence in any way they want, basically. I don’t agree, obviously, with this distinction. And I see that my own country, I know that my own country has committed terrorist acts in the rest of the world and that the rest of the world knows that better than the people within the United States know it. And I also see that the war on terrorism was in part artificially created and in part I believe it happened in an angry response to imperialism and the later forms of colonialism that are still causing great inequities in the world. The average, if there is such a thing as an average, suicide bomber is someone who doesn’t have a lot of hope for their life, for their continued life. And many young people all over the world are very depressed by the world’s situation. I have a friend who has had personal conversations with suicide bombers and in one case even changed one of them changed his mind just because someone listened to his story, listened to his anguish, listened to the state of his own family which had been destroyed in warfare and so on. It’s a tragic situation that we have violence of any kind on this planet against each other. I’m an evolution biologist. We are a very rare species in the amount of violence we commit on our kind. It is not natural in the biological world. And I also see that there’s a learning curve in evolution where cooperation can come out of prior hostilities. So I keep hoping that we will be able to end war. I believe the only reason you can recruit young men to war is because they don’t have good economic opportunities without going to war. So let’s hope that we can get this world together through new generations that make pacts with each other that no difference is worth killing each other for.
The dramatic increase in civilian death in [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: The dramatic increase in civilian death in war over the past century has obviously been because of the dramatic increase in mass destruction weapons. When combat was hand-to-hand it wasn’t possible to kill as many people as when you can drop a major bomb on them or strike them with a missile. Why is it tolerated? Actually I don’t think the people of the world are tolerating war any more. I think people have become very intolerant of war. Before the American invasion of Iraq we saw people by the millions demonstrating around the world saying no. And to me as a species watcher, an evolution biologist, it was like saying no, let’s stop acting in this juvenile way, let’s grow up and become global family. Why do we teach our children not to hit each other with sticks and stones, not to call each other names, not to fight? Why do we think our children don’t see the hypocrisy of being told not to fight when every time the television is turned on they see grown ups taking things away from each other and fighting? I think the human species is ready to grow up, to solve its conflicts in other ways. And yet it isn’t happening yet. The people of the world are ahead of their governments. I don’t know why so many governments when, as they’re represented in the United Nations, seem to be cowed, seem to be afraid to speak the voice of their own people. But I find it tragic because it’s clear to me that the people don’t want wars when governments are still either tolerating them or actively supporting them. And this has to change because we’ve got to grow up as a species. We’ve got to have generations in which the young people, now that they can communicate with each other all around the world by internet, say to each other, no differences among us are worth killing each other for. Let’s stop this nonsense, let’s not do this violence anymore. In this 60s we said make love, not war. Please, revive that motto. Let’s care and share with each other and stop making war on each other because we should not be tolerating the massive loss of life.
It’s interesting that this question is asked [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: It’s interesting that this question is asked by someone from Germany because in the 1930s as Hitler was coming to power here and we are sitting in the place where he burned books, so it’s a very historic day and a very historic place for us to be in. We are thinking about questions of the past and about how German citizens gave up some of their liberty as Hitler came to power. Because of what happened in consequence to that I believe the German people have learned lessons that have not yet been learned in my own country, in the United States. We’re now going through the same thing. We have a government that has taken away some of the liberties we had. We have now a strong department of homeland security and I know that many Germans see parallels between the rise of Hitler and what has happening in the United States today. I don’t think it is completely inappropriate to point out such parallels. And this is therefore a question that’s very much alive in my country today. Unfortunately the media does more to report what’s going on on the one side in my country than on the other. But there are many of us, I assure you, who are looking deeply into this question, who are deeply concerned, and who are trying to find ways to do non-adversarial politics, to strengthen our communities, to raise the issues of inappropriate aggression against other countries in our own land, who want to stand on our Constitutional liberties and not see them eroded in this way. It’s a tough struggle at present and I hope you wish us luck.
Thanks, Chris, for participating in this [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Thanks, Chris, for participating in this dialogue. My apology for wearing sunglasses. It’s been very gray and cold here all day so far and suddenly we have so much sunshine that it’s hard to see into the camera without sunglasses. I can’t quite tell whether your question is a serious one that you believe that we are trying to spread democracy in the world and that people are acting hostilely when we have good intentions. I’m afraid that I think that our aggression in the middle east is aggression and that we did not have good reasons for attacking either Afghanistan or Iraq. And this is certainly going to be an issue in the elections coming up in the United States today, as I noticed on CNN this morning. I think we have been given a distorted view in the United States and I see that you’re from Vancouver, so that’s why I’m wondering whether your question is serious. I don’t think we have really seriously been spreading freedom and democracy in the middle east. It’s very difficult to find middle easterners who would think that that is what has happened. And having invaded Iraq and Afghanistan I think under false premises and not carrying out the building of democracy very effectively instead Iraq now has a civil war and I think that terrorism is bred by violence whether it’s economic violence, religious violence or any other kind of violence. And I have to take responsibility for my own country as having acted very violently in the war. I know that we were responsible for setting Saddam Hussein up as a dictator. I also know that the Iraqi people were ready to overthrow Saddam Hussein and that we actually intervened so that they couldn’t do that. We have huge oil interests in the middle east and there’s a tremendous amount of anger among middle eastern people against what we are doing in their countries. So while terrorists were relatively few in number before we went into the middle east, I believe there are far more of them now because of our activities there. And so what do we want to do? Stop terrorism? Do we truly want to--
I believe that the decent people of the [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I believe that the decent people of the world are already helping each other a good deal even though their leadership is self-serving and internationally divisive. The rise of NGOs in the world in the past couple of decades has been enormous and there are so many people all over the world, just for example after every great natural disaster such as a hurricane or an earthquake or a tsunami, people’s hearts open up. They give, they go to volunteer, they do so gladly and readily. People naturally are inclined to help each other when each other is in trouble. It’s a very human response and there’s much of it going on on the planet that sometimes it seems that the wave of decency and goodness in the world is very much overshadowed by the problems. But most of those problems are economic. And as people go to do good in other countries they begin to recognize that for instance the violence of modern development in creating deserts out of lands with big agribusiness and things like that aren’t working for local people. So more and more they learn about the problems of people in other parts of the world, they see the things that don’t work. We recognize now that we live in an unsustainable world and we know more and more about why that is. So I think it’s wonderful that people are moving around the world with good intentions and learning so that we can see what is it about our economies that we can keep for the future and what has to be changed. Every new generation inherits the world. And young people today understand so much more about the world than past generations have been able to. And they have the internet. Young people can make friends with each other on the internet. They can go to myspace and make friends and theoretically they could make a pact that no difference among us will ever be worth our killing each other over. We’re not going to do violence to each other. This is a time for our species to grow up, to cooperate, to form global family. So governments are losing power. Don’t worry too much about them. Build the local power wherever you go in the world and in your own communities at home. Try non-adversarial politics. Learn how to reach consensus among the different elements of a community. This is what will work in the world and then human decency can overcome even divisive governments because you won’t divisive governments in the future once you’ve learned how to cooperate with each other. It’s really not about fixing the messes, cleaning up the messes we’ve made. It’s about building the world that you all want.
In principle I think people should have the [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: In principle I think people should have the right to choose where they live. I also think that a lot of the movement around the world of people wanting to move from one place to another has to do with the inequities of our world. The United States, for example, exports a lot of television programs and things that have been rather misleading to the world in many ways, making it seem like the land of milk and honey. I know people were shocked by the pictures of poverty in America after hurricane Katrina and things like that. And many people have come to the United States because they have seen it as the land of opportunity. We also have ever stricter immigration laws in the United States to keep people out. And I think it’s kind of crazy for us to do this false advertising of this as being a desirable place to be in the United States and then keeping people out when they want to come. So it’s a complex issue and it’s a difficult one to solve. We certainly don’t want a world in which people are constantly uprooting themselves and moving around. I think that would be inappropriate. There’s an importance to people being attached to the soil that they live on, to be connected to their ecosystems in intimate ways. I’ve always like the idea of the bioregional movement that rather than drawing arbitrary political boundaries we might divide ourselves according to watershed so that we would care for our water supply and so that we would know our ecosystems and what they can bear in terms of human habitation within them so that we would get along better with the natural world. But again I say in principle I defend the right of people to be able to live everywhere. I wish that we didn’t need passports. I wish that we could all be global citizens. And in a better world I believe most people would want to stay in place much like the cells in our bodies which don’t migrate around. While others such as the blood cells keep moving about. We’ll always have the wanderers. I’m one of them. I’m a world traveler. I love going from country to country and speaking and learning what’s going on in the world and learning from every new culture that I can engage with. But on the other hand I think in a really stable cooperative care and sharing world we wouldn’t need even to do holidays as much because we would have beautiful ecosystems everywhere. We’d be taking care of them. We wouldn’t have that need to get away. So let’s leave the question open, let’s let people decide what they want. And as I say in a better world I think people would decide appropriately.
Here’s a big question. The first thing [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Here’s a big question. The first thing that comes to my mind, if I’m asked what would the world be like today if the Africans had never been brought as slaves to America, is that well, the Americans would have had to do their own work a lot more than they did. It also implies a very different kind of world, a world in which there is no slavery and a world in which we don’t exploit people in that way. So as I say I would answer the question on the one hand by saying I think more Europeans would have been brought over. Now, whether the people who had already settled in the Americas would have used them as slaves—there was of course indentured servitude, indentured servants, white Europeans were sent to Australia. They had to pay off their passage and often that put them into the equivalent of slavery for their whole lives. So is the question should we have a world without slavery? Of course. And yet, in our world today there’s more slavery going on than there ever was in the world. We have enslaved children, we have sexual slavery, we have work slavery, all these things are as serious as they ever have been in the world except they are less known about. They are not legalized and so it’s all done under cover. And we have to become aware of that and we have to end slavery of all kinds in all places so that we can have the kind of a world that wouldn’t have done what we did with Africans.
Actually, I like very much this question, is [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Actually, I like very much this question, is there something better than democracy, because I’m an evolution biologist studying living systems over time. And I believe that what’s better than democracy is what goes on in my own body. I’ve thought quite a bit about the problems of the system of democracy as practiced in my own country, the United States, lately. Because democracy as we practice it is a two-party system primarily is adversarial politics. Every campaign pits two parties against each other in argument and this is an exploitable thing by the party in power who can determine what the debate is about in each election as we already see in the upcoming one that they’ve defined the debate as do we stay in Iraq and do we stay the course or are we wimps and we’ll pull out. And that is dividing us when we should be talking about healthcare and education and jobs at home and our own economy in the United States which is suffering badly from our military adventures. And so when I look at a living system such as my body I see that every cell is participating, every cell is meeting its interest, every cell is in negotiations between its self-interest and the interests of the community larger than that cell, say the organ that it’s part of. Now the organ also has to meet its self interest and so does the organ system and so does the whole body. What happens when they all negotiate with each other is that these negotiations drive cooperation among all the levels of my body. It’s non-adversarial, it’s the same kind of dialogue that goes on between an individual and their family as a unit, or between a family and a small community as a unit. And these can be non-adversarial goal-oriented dialogues. So what we really need is for every community in our society to practice non-adversarial politics where we bring together all the different interests of the community for town meetings and say, let’s not debate whether we want to do this in the interest of say developers or in the interest of people who need low-income housing, but let’s see that the developers and the poor people are all part of the same community and figure out a way so that everyone can meet their needs, so that the developers can make the appropriate profit and the people can still have the low-income housing. This practice of non-adversarial politics is what we need as a system. And I would call it a living systems politics. In a rainforest every species knows what to do. No species is in charge. How does it all work? We need to study these natural systems such as our bodies and rainforests to find out how living systems function. Economically they function as win-win systems if they’re mature ecosystems. Only in juvenile systems to species try to get everything for themselves. They eventually—whoops. My time is up.
The question about how do we tell the [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: The question about how do we tell the difference between holy war and just war is a bit strange to me because I’m not sure there is anything such as any just war. War implies a conflict between peoples. It implies large numbers of people on one side and large numbers of people on the other side, or at least whole societies at some level of organization. And I don’t think that war can ever be justified. I’m an evolution biologist, I look at other species. There are no other species in which the level of aggression of groups against each other happens that does in our own species. We have heard in recent years about chimpanzee wars and we hear about dolphin pods attacking each other, but they are usually involve far less killing even under the extreme circumstances of other species. When we take the chimp’s territories away, when we force them into smaller places, when we force them into places that aren’t their natural habitats and stuff we increase the level of violence. And perhaps many of the wars among humans have happened because we have relocated people, dislocated people, drawn artificial political boundaries among people that tend to increase hostilities. And there’s also the old divide and conquer methodology comes stemming back to I don’t know how many thousands of years whereby dividing people, by pitting them against each other you can cause conflict. I’m beginning to even question the model of democracy with adversarial politics among two parties. I see in my own country now for instance that the Republicans have defined the issue for our upcoming election this fall as between will we stay the course in Iraq or will we be wimps and come home? And when the party in power can manipulate the electoral debate so that you exclude debates about welfare, healthcare, education, jobs, things that really matter to a society, it’s a kind of way of artificially dividing us rather than letting us focus on the issues that might bring us together. So--
What a deep and powerful question. Can [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: What a deep and powerful question. Can change happen gracefully? I think there must have been changes in the world that did happen gracefully. We gave up smoking gracefully when we realized how harmful it was. It’s rare now in any kind of meeting that I go to in America and in Europe for that matter where people are still smoking, so that’s at least one example of a pretty major change that we made in our culture recently. There should be much better examples and more powerful ones of course. The big question about whether America could lose its standing as the most powerful nation on the planet without disrupting the entire planet, oh, I think easily. If America were willing for instance to disarm and to state to the entire world that it is taking a leadership role in disarming, I think it would extremely graceful. I can’t even imagine anyone attacking America if we ceased to attack anyone else, if we ceased to make weapons. If we put white flags up around our borders and stopped intervening in other peoples’ affairs, which by the way is a rather conservative position, not a radical position. Then I think that we could lose our power very gracefully in that sense, in the sense of military power. I would like us to keep the power to be friendly in the world, to encourage other people, to develop, to use that vast military budget to help people build up their own economies all over the world. We would very quickly be seen as a friend to the whole world. And that’s a kind of power that I would love to claim for my country.
Well, my first answer to who is profiting [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Well, my first answer to who is profiting from terrorism would have to be Halliburton. Halliburton is a big corporation and it’s getting tremendous amount of money for contracts for rebuilding Iraq just for one example. So you would have to say if there had been no terrorism presumably the United States would not have attacked Iraq and that there are economic entities such as corporations that support the military and provide the military supplies themselves who make enormous profits from warfare. This is not new. There have always been economic entities that have profited from war. Many wars have been armed by the same economic entities arming both sides. The five peace keeping nations of the security council I believe have supplied most of the arms in the world among themselves. So what can I say? The more that warfare goes on the more there will be economic entities to profit from them. So the question is how do we end wars? How do we end terrorism? Terrorism is a response to other kinds of violence, whether they’re economic violence or actual warfare. I don’t believe we would have terrorism if we could make friends in the world with each other and if that friendship included equal economic opportunity.
Sarah, from Dublin, Ireland, asks what does [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Sarah, from Dublin, Ireland, asks what does courage mean now. Very interesting question. Courage. I think courage requires a spirit of exploration of wanting to know how things work in your world, wanting to do the right things, wanting to climb the next mountain whatever it is in social terms. Courage requires having a very, very strong inner self, believing in yourself, believing in your own dignity. Because courage sometimes requires you to stand up against laws that aren’t working for people. What’s courage if your country is asking you to do something that’s unjust? What’s courage if your community is being attacked? Is it more courageous to take a gun and point it at an enemy or does it take more courage to sit in front of an oncoming gun or tank? Do we use nonviolent resistance? It’s tremendously demanding to do nonviolent resistance. It takes a huge amount of courage to face up to a strong body of people that are doing the wrong thing in the world. So it requires great integrity, great self-confidence, great belief and I think a deep spirituality. The more you believe that you’re already an eternal spiritual being in this universe the less afraid you are of what can be done to you in this particular body now. So there are many levels on which to address the question of courage. I think we all need it in this world. And I hope that we have the courage to demand caring and sharing in our world rather than violent solutions to our differences. Be courageous, but be lovingly courageous.
I have asked this question myself, why is an [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I have asked this question myself, why is an Iranian nuclear bomb more dangerous than an American, Israeli or French bomb? It’s clear that the U.S. had the bomb first and that it has arrogated to itself the right to say who else should have them or not have them. And that’s one of the big problems that we have in the world today, that we have to end all nuclear violence, all nuclear manufacture of bombs. And I sincerely believe that the only way to disarm this world is for my country to take the lead. I am an American and I hope for a peaceful future for my country. I am unhappy when my country invades other countries. I don’t like the fact that my country stockpiles nuclear weapons. And I hope that one day my country will mature to the point where it will willingly give up its nuclear weapons and state that to the world. And I believe that if my country became the peaceful role model for the world it would not be attacked by others. Most of the conflicts in the world are really due more to economic inequalities, lack of economic opportunity than any other causes. I believe that my country’s behavior has created more terrorism than it has solved and that we simply have to learn to go the way of peace, which is I believe the way that the people of the world really want to go.
Very good question, Maria from Nicosia. How [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Very good question, Maria from Nicosia. How can we have public international law if there are no effective enforcement mechanisms to apply it? You’re absolutely right that it doesn’t help much to have laws that aren’t enforceable. And that’s a big problem in the world today because in the globalizing world there’s no doubt that we need effective international law. We have of course some conventions such as the Geneva Convention and we have international treaties. And we’re trying to figure out how to govern ourselves as a global family. But it’s still very, very difficult because of the lack of ways of enforcing it. I think what has to happen is that first of all we have to get agreements more widely, more globally. My own country, the United States, is a big problem because we don’t support the International Court in the Hague. And of course that’s one effort at enforcing the laws is to have a way of trying people who violate those laws. We need something like that but we need the dominant forces in the world to participate in it. And as long as they refuse it isn’t going to work. So the question is how do we get countries like my own to support an entity like a World Court? Is there a different way of doing it? Do we have other legal systems we can look at? For instance in indigenous cultures. If we look at how did they settle their disputes. Are there alternative kinds of legal systems to the one we have now. This is a wide open question and an extremely important one for young people to think about because you can’t run a healthy family without having some internal family rules that everyone agrees to. Maybe we have to start with common values. If we could just get everybody in the world to agree to the Golden Rule from time immemorial cultures have had some version or other of do unto others as you would have them to unto you. If we could get that kind of value agreed to globally maybe we would have a stronger basis for international law. I don’t know. I hope you and everybody around you are debating these issues. I hope that students are going to research the answers to the questions that we’re trying to give today at this very international little mini U.N.--
Thank you for this question about the [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Thank you for this question about the connection between politics and violence. I think all of us know that there is a connection between politics and violence since many of the conflicts in the world are carried on between political entities such as nation-states. Also, we have wars within nations obviously, but they are often also related to economic and political differences. It’s actually a very strange thing in our human species that we separate categories such as politics and economics and religion. I’ve worked with a lot of indigenous cultures that don’t make these distinctions. They have a way of life and it’s an integrated way of life. And they don’t even recognize sometimes when missionaries come to them that they have religions because they haven’t identified it as such. Rather they hold nature sacred and they hold each other sacred. And so they do ceremonies of gratitude to the Earth, to their ecosystems and therefore their economics are much more equitable. And there’s less conflict within such nations. Of course there have been indigenous cultures that have warred with each other and so there has always been violence of one kind or another in the world. But the more highly organized a political entity, a government of a nation-state becomes and the greater its military and police the more violence it can perpetrate. And well, maybe that contradicts some of the conflicts in Africa where the warfare is not between nation-states as I said before. But the question’s about the connection between politics and violence, and yes, that can obviously be absolutely brutal as people are suppressed in cultures where their needs are not being met. And of course that’s the basic answer to violence is that people’s needs have to be met in a culture. And when you have dictatorial politics, cruel politics, fascist politics--
Oh boy, this is a big question. Is there a [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Oh boy, this is a big question. Is there a modern version of colonialism? Yes, absolutely. And it’s a bigger problem even than colonialism was. The real answer to your question lies between the covers of a book by John Perkins called “Confessions of an Economic Hitman.” If you really want to know what the modern version of colonialism is you can read it from the person who was deeply, deeply involved in it. I’ve met John Perkins. And I believe his story is a sincere one. He was recruited in the 1970s as an economic hitman. His job was to create false economic projections for particular countries where he had to convince the president of a country that their economy could develop from between 19 to 23% per year increase every year, I mean ridiculous from an economist’s perspective, and that they should borrow sufficient money to get this process under way. He was actively instructed to get the president of the country, one of his first big assignments was Indonesia, to borrow more money than he would ever have to pay—that he could ever pay back. Now, this money never went into the hands of the government of Indonesia. It went directly to large firms such as Halliburton and Seimens who went in to build infrastructure, airports that may never have gotten any airplanes, dams, electric supplies that never reached the people because part of his instructions were it must be money given in ways that prevent that country from developing for its own people because we want cheap labor, cannon fodder for wars and votes in the U.N. I don’t like to be sitting here as an American talking about this, but this is the underbelly of the real world that we live in. It’s very real. It has caused enormous misery. And we have to know what’s going on in our world in order to change it. I do not stand in judgment because as a spiritual being I simply want to know what the human drama is about so that I can choose my role in it as a positive role that ends this kind of --
Is freedom relative to where you are in the [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Is freedom relative to where you are in the world? Certainly that’s still the case now, that in some societies people are freer then they are in others. I think particularly of the example now of the king of Bhutan who has asked that his economy be measured in happiness. If a country takes seriously the happiness of every individual then there is necessarily going to be a great deal of freedom for each person to meet their needs. And that’s really what we want. Unfortunately freedom in the west has tended to be seen as freedom from rules, freedom from constraints. In most of the world especially the developing world, freedom is seen as the freedom to achieve things, the freedom to feed your family, the freedom to work, the freedom to have health. It’s a very different concept of freedom whether you’re thinking don’t fence me in or can I get over the fence? Or can I grow my food in the field that I’m in? We need to look at these various definitions of freedom. We need to look at the inequities of the world. And we need to move toward a world in which caring and sharing become the dominant values over private property and how much money can I amass and things of that kind. So there’s of course also incursions on freedom due to religions, due to other kinds of constraints and rules. So it’s a complex issue. I don’t mean to be oversimplifying it. But it is certainly the case that people in some parts of the world are freer than in other parts of the world, and that we need to address that issue as a global family.
In a very interesting issue to talk about [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: In a very interesting issue to talk about personal freedom versus social responsibility. Again, as I’ve said in answer to another question, the capitalist west kind of sacrificed community to self-interest of individuals while the communist east was trying to sacrifice individual interest to the well being of the larger group, at least in principle that was what communism was supposed to be about. In nature this decision doesn’t have to be made. Nature takes care of individual interests and community interest such as in your body where every cell has to meet its self interest to stay healthy but so does every organ. So the cell has to contribute to the communal wellbeing of the whole organ and of the whole organ system and of the whole body. And yet, so it has a great deal of social responsibility but at the same time it has the freedom to meet its individual needs. And it should be the same in human society, that every person should have personal freedoms negotiated with their communities. In a family, for instance, each person has a certain amount of personal freedom and it gets negotiated with the rest of the family. Does one person have the freedom to spend the whole budget of the family? I don’t think so. So it’s about negotiations and it’s about everyone recognizing that their personal freedom depends on the wellbeing of the whole society, of the community, of the ecosystem. What good is it if I have personal freedom if I have destroyed the ecosystem I live in? what good is it if I have personal freedom and my community is dying because of my practice of my personal freedom? If we can have serious and well-meaning negotiations among ourselves we humans can solve this problem so that we can have personal freedom and social responsibility, healthy communities in other words. Because social responsibility is about creating healthy communities. And we certainly want those. So it’s a dynamic negotiation, it’s not something that can be fixed permanently--
Well, first of all it’s an honor to respond [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Well, first of all it’s an honor to respond to a question by Arundhati Roy who is a magnificent writer and who has addressed some of these issues herself. Between non-violent resistance and armed struggle, where do we go? Well, armed struggle I think is obsolete for the human species. It shouldn’t be resorted to at all. I would like to see a world in which we had no weapons, in which we made them illegal to use on each other. I do believe in self-defense in personal situations and self-defense in anything but personal situations is of little use. So on the whole I think non-violent resistance is a better way to go. I believe with Gandhi and King that it’s a better way to go. And I believe that it can be very effective in many situations. But we probably do need a biodiversity of resistance, different ways to do it, and we can be creative about that. So the right thing to do? I don’t think the right thing to do is to use weapons on each other. I believe that as a species we should be able to grow out of our immature hostilities and into a world of cooperation, caring and sharing. Unfortunately those values have been identified as feminine and therefore discredited in the world. Now is the time when women and men have to come together as never before as equal partners because men primarily running the world hasn’t worked very well. It has led us to a world of economic inequities and instabilities when we could have a world in which everybody has enough. But we’ve got to re-enfranchise people whose lands were stolen. We’ve got to re-enfranchise political power in people from whom it has been taken away. And any way that we can do this through mass movements of people beginning in their local communities, revitalizing their local communities, practicing non-adversarial politics I think is the most important thing we can do because if you practice non-adversarial politics then no power can divide and conquer. I have a question about democracy now, whether a two-party system that’s adversarial can ever get us to a peaceful what we call democratic world. So in nature things are done more by consensus. The cells of my body find ways to reach consensus. I believe we humans can do it too especially with powerful communications tools such as the internet. And therefore building our strength as global family from the local family up I think is the most powerful thing we can do in the world now.
I have many heroes. One of my favorite [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I have many heroes. One of my favorite people whom I never got to meet while he was alive is J. Allen Boone who wrote four wonderful books, the one that’s widely available still is called “Kinship with All Life.” And in this book Boone learns from a dog, a movie star dog in Hollywood named Strongheart, came from Germany originally. And learns from this dog the deep communion of nature, the ability for two minds to connect as equals. And Boone talked about once he learned this how he always had to keep the mental bridge between him and the dog absolutely level. If he raised his end with any sense of superiority the flow of information would stop between them. And he said we weren’t in conversation as man and dog, we were in conversation as the universe talking us to each other. The first time I went into the Amazon with a long haired Indian I was naïve enough to say can you teach me to talk to the plants and animals? And he said, “Oh shut up Elizabet, and listen. It’s not yours to initiate a conversation that’s been going on as long as this forest has been here. It’s your job to hear it.” And so he too was saying what many indigenous people have known, that there is a deep conversation throughout nature, that everything is in touch with everything else. That’s why there can be harmony among 100 trillion cells in your body. That’s why there can be harmony in a rainforest, in a prairie, in a coral reef, because things know their part and they can commune with each other. So the last part of Boone’s book is about a wonderful character named Freddie the Fly. And this is really fun for kids because even if you’re not allowed to have another pet, anybody can make friends with a fly and learn how to commune with it, play games with it, have it come when you call it. And so there are all kinds of wonderful possibilities once you really understand the deep kinship of all life on Earth. So my other heroes are often-- whoops, I’m out of time, you’ll have to settle for that one.
Well, I think that’s a good idea for the [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Well, I think that’s a good idea for the future, but certain things would have to be put in place. For example, in the current world which is so based on competition people will steal ideas from each other and there’ll be a race of who can make it better and cheaper and this is unfair to inventors. If we were living in a really cooperative world where everyone was valued and everyone was supported we would welcome new innovations and happily share them. I know quite a few young people who have designed incredibly energy efficient new designs. They’re actually afraid of getting patents because they think those patents will be stolen by the U. S. State Department or whoever thinks they might have a military use. So it’s a bit problematic these days. Here we have a patent system that’s supposed to be protecting inventors and yet we have inventors afraid to even ask for such a patent. These are young people who would like to give their innovations away and yet they need some venture capital to test their designs to help them to manufacture them, to duplicate them, to be able to get them around the world. So it’s a good question to ask, whether there should be intellectual property rights which are equivalent to patents for design. I would like to give my books away freely. I give my writings away freely on my website, sahtouris.com, or another website I have is ratical.org/lifeweb, I have a whole book there, have lots of articles there. I love giving things away and I hope that we will develop a human future in which inventors and writers and teachers and everybody can give their inventions, their ideas, their writings, their plays to the world and yet be supported by their communities for doing the work they do.
I believe it was 1973 when the Club of Rome [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I believe it was 1973 when the Club of Rome first published it’s book, “Limits to Growth,” which clearly stated that there are economic limits, that there are ecological limits to economic growth. That book was published after the first big computer study that could predict where our economy is going if we continue to use resources the way we have been using them. And it was clear then, ’73, now it’s ’83, ’93, 2003, more, more than 30 years since and we haven’t stopped slowing, we haven’t started to really slow our economies down. And we have to do a tremendous amount of work to reduce economic growth and yet make life good for everybody. We all know that if China and India all wanted to live the way the United States does that it would take 5, 7 planets to supply us. So it’s completely impossible for us to do that. But there are many ways for us to grow. We can grow new technologies. We can grow cooperation with each other. We can grow in our inventiveness. We can grow in our caring and our ways of sharing on this planet. We can develop lifestyles of what I call elegant simplicity. Let’s only make things that are lasting and beautiful. We don’t need closets full of junk. And in the highly developed world as we call it there’s a huge amount of waste. Look at our production. We make a lot of things out of hydrocarbons, out of the fossil fuels that were buried in the earth. They were buried for good reason. We’re not supposed to be digging them up and polluting the atmosphere and causing global warming with them. So what do we do? We use heat, beat and treat methods, we actually waste 96% of those hydrocarbons that we dig out of the earth just in the production process. And then--
On the contrary, I think having the internet [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: On the contrary, I think having the internet in every home is making us less controlled and less intimidated. I think young people are learning to be active agents in their own destiny. Computer games have taught them to run agents on screens and now they are the agents because they can blog and post their photos and videos and share ideas and information and I think that that’s a way that this new generation of young adults, the first ones in the new millennium can learn how to do things like non-adversarial politics, can learn how to share information and develop new systems that work for all people. So I think that the internet is a very healthy on the whole it’s a very healthy conversation around the world. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff and nonsense and there’s a lot of marketing going on and things like that, but on the whole I’m very encouraged. I think when I see something like wikipedia where anybody can change anybody’s information and they don’t destroy it—you have to paint a few mustaches on a few Mona Lisas, but when you find out that it’s caught immediately so that it’s the first self-policing system I’ve seen on the internet and that’s something I’ve been looking for, is how can we use the internet even to increase our ethical behavior. So I see even that coming in on the internet now. And therefore I’m encouraged. I think people are much more controlled and manipulated if they sit passively watching television than when they get on the internet and are active agents themselves.
This is a wonderful question. It’s [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: This is a wonderful question. It’s absolutely true that domesticated animals get fat and lazy and not very useful in their original animal sense and it’s also very true that human beings have gotten fatter and lazier because of our convenient technologies in the world. So it’s an appropriate question to ask and I hope it suggests to young people that they go out and get some exercise and hang out in nature and climb some mountains and do some other things to keep themselves healthy. I assure you that if your exercise is all gotten at the mall and if you are eating fast food while reclining on your back in front of a TV set then you too will be like one of those domesticated animals. But I think young people are in fact engaging in sports and doing things other than sitting in front of TV sets. I’d rather have them on the internet talking to each other, but I do hope that you get up and stretch, that you do some exercise, that you run some races, climb some mountains, drink some pure fresh water now and then and eat the healthiest foods possible because you are seriously needed to keep humanity on this planet and to reinvent the world to make it sustainable for the people and the animals. So let’s try to reduce the negative effects of comfortable life. Life is going to get uncomfortable enough because of the hot age coming on so that I think we will be challenged and we need everybody to be as healthy as possible for that.
The question is how we can create [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: The question is how we can create communities, sustainable communities, so that we don’t use up resources faster than they can be replaced. This is what I was just talking about, that we have to find out how to use renewable resources to make things out of rather than non-renewable ones. We’ve been doing a lot of production based on fossil fuels, hydrocarbons. Nature makes the most sophisticated materials on the planet out of carbohydrates. We too can learn how to do that. But we have thought ourselves to be superior to nature. We haven’t looked at her four and a half billion years of experience and incredible technologies. Mother of pearl, spider silk, fantastic materials! Janine Benuse in her book, “Biomimicry,” talks about a lot of this. Take a wasp nest. It’s a building that hangs from a single thread made of material so light that it can hold three hundred times it’s own weight in inhabitants. Can we learn to make buildings like that? Can we grow skyscrapers from the bottom up the way a reed grows by building new cells at the bottom of it and pushing itself upward? We have so much to learn from nature. Spider silk is the most resilient on the planet but it’s made of carbohydrates. It’s an amazing time for young people because the microworld has just opened up. We can now study how bacteria actually grow electric motors out of more than 40 kinds of proteins with rotors, statters, ball bearings, the whole thing of a motor as invented by humans was grown by bacteria billions of years ago. It’s a very exciting time to learn new things about nature and to copy it.
--stop the privatization of water, to [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: --stop the privatization of water, to reclaim water as a right for every human being as a commons. The fresh water of the planet should be a commons. Now, there are many ways to clean dirty water but the most powerful one is with plants. Microbes can also be used but a simple plant such as the cattail, the reed with it’s feet in water is the most powerful water cleaner on the planet. We are also going to have to conserve water, to stop drawing so much on the aquifers which are being depleted at an unbelievable rate and figure out how to save rainwater far more efficiently than we do now. And that’s going to be so important in the future as the planet continues to heat up, the rivers will not be fed by glacial ice and springs will dry up. But there will be storms. And if we don’t want to lose all the water that comes down in the storms we have to get very, very clever at catching it over larger areas and storing it in water tanks. There are very energy efficient devices available now for keeping that water fresh through stirring it, through inducing teroidal flow in those giant tanks. This is going to be more and more important as water gets scarcer. Let’s avoid having water wars on this planet by being sensible as a species, by demanding that we end the privatization of water. Make it a commons. And make it a United Nations priority to figure out how to get fresh water to every person on this planet, to keep these water sources flowing, to reinstate our streams, to green deserts in ways that make them attract water again. These are all possibilities. We know how to do it but we have let water fall into commercial hands where it doesn’t belong.
The long emergency coming up on this planet [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: The long emergency coming up on this planet as we move deeper and deeper into a hot age is a very, very serious matter and the steps that we can take are not only to save energy as Al Gore has recommended in the movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which I recommend that everybody possible should see and it’s no doubt available on the internet if you can’t find it in a theater near you. They’re showing it already on airplanes so it should be getting out and around on the internet. And that tells you a lot of steps at the end that you can take as an individual to save energy. But more important than that what we really have to do is figure out how to get out of our win-lose economy and move into a win-win economy. We shouldn’t be measuring our economies in dollar flow, we should be measuring our economies in the quality of life they produce for their people. This is a demand that citizens can make of their governments, of their economies. We have to study how natural economies work. How the economy of our bodies works or of a rainforest, a highly mature ecosystem where things are shared and traded and recycled. We need to get to 100% recycling or zero waste. Australia and New Zealand already have zero waste projects that are aimed at full real zero waste by 2010 or 2015 or 2020. I was in China in 1974 when that entire country had a zero waste policy. If there was anything that was any material that they didn’t know how to recycle they had national contests so that people would find ways to do so. It was kind of an exciting developmental time when I visited then and I think that they have dropped that policy which is very unfortunate. We have to help each other in big ways around the planet. We have to really become--
Well, I think a lot of television [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Well, I think a lot of television programming is only there to capture eyeballs so that they’ll look at the commercials. Eyeballs and ears obviously with television. And so I don’t think that the people paying for the programs, the manufacturers, the companies producing the products for sale, care about anything other than whether people will watch. So part of this is up to the consumer, to stop watching programs that aren’t giving you any real joy or any real new information and so forth. Public television in the United States is completely listener supported. So there’s very little junk advertising on it. And people are enormously loyal to their public television stations. That’s why they keep giving money to them. And that’s a good use of television. So if more people would watch public television rather than junk shows the junk shows would go out of business. You can certainly boycott the companies advertising on the worst programs. Do some mass protest about it. Demand better programming. That’s the way to go in the future.
The reason we’re taking this risk with [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: The reason we’re taking this risk with genetically engineered food is very simple. It’s a marketing success. Well, maybe not for so long but so far it has been enough of a marketing success to keep it going. The scientific research that’s being done on genetically engineered food is devastating. But it seems that every time a scientist gets a result that shows the negative effects of genetically engineered food he gets fired, usually he’s working in a lab that’s controlled in some way by the companies that are actually creating or planting the genetically engineered food. There was one in Scotland for example who found that feeding rats on genetically engineered potatoes caused their organs to shrink and get leathery, even the brain. And this is what we’re feeding our children. He was fired. You see, if they get rid of this kind of research or don’t do it in the first place then these companies can continue to say there is no research evidence that these things are bad for people. So it’s a trick. It’s a trick for avoiding the responsibility. But we should be after these companies in the same way that we’ve been after cigarette companies because they may be doing very serious damage to the generations that are being raised on these foods. So it should never have been released before much testing was done on humans. But it just wasn’t done. And now all the organic farms are in jeopardy because the pollen of the GM foods blows into their fields and then they get taken to court by companies like Monsanto for growing illegally growing the genetically modified seeds which they never wanted in the first place. So it’s a big mess in the world and I’m very glad that Europe has been so resistant and that some areas of Brazil have outlawed them. Joberto Jicao who is the governor of Parana state in Brazil has outlawed genetically modified soy. And that’s very brave of him and he has been able to stick with that. So maybe Brazil is learning. Most of the soy in Brazil--
I’m a scientist and what we have learned in [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I’m a scientist and what we have learned in the past half century or so about science is that it really can’t be as objective as it had hoped it was, as it believed it was. And the reason for that is that for one thing physics has discovered that when you look deeply down into matter it’s really a dance of energy that we are all connected with and that the observer in a scientific experiment is actually having an effect on the results of the experiment. We call it collapsing the wave function. Through our human consciousness and our human attention we actually affect the physical world. This happens in other ways in science too. For example, the intentions of an experimenter can actually affect the outcome of the experiment. We now know that remote healing works, that when a person has a good intention for another person halfway around the world who is ill there can be a measurable affect from that good intention whether it’s in the form of prayer or any other form. Basically it’s about the good intention, the good wishes for the other person. So the world that we pretended was a physical world apart from humans, independent of them, and therefore could be studied objectively without changing it in any way is gone. It’s just simply doesn’t hold up in science. So we have to look at science a whole new way. The way I look at it all science is done through human consciousness. It’s through our human consciousness that we see the world, that we ask our questions, that we invent our machinery. So if science were honest it would say our models of the universe are models of the universe as perceived through human consciousness. We can’t speak for aliens or for ants about how the universe is, only for ourselves.
Actually, we can’t stop global warming any [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Actually, we can’t stop global warming any more. As an evolution biologist I firmly believe that we cannot stop it any more. However, we can slow it down. And slowing it down is very important because we can buy some time by slowing it down and that will give us more time to prepare for this hot age coming on. Human beings have cut their teeth on ice ages, dozens of them throughout the history of humanity but we’ve never before faced a hot age. The earth however has done hot ages before. It may be that our poles completely melt, and if that happens we have huge sea level rises that are going to completely drown 13 of the largest cities in the world and countless other habitats. There will be too much water in the oceans and too little water on the land. And then we will have to get very creative, very clever about to deal with that problem, how to make fresh water out of salt water, how to deal with dry deserts because when the mountaintop ice melts, the glaciers, they don’t feed the rivers any more. And meanwhile we’re draining our aquifers so freshwater will be harder and harder to come by. Are we going to share what’s left? Are we going to cooperate with each other in developing ways of using catching rainfall and desalinizing water? Right now you can certainly be very conscious of the energy you use. You can use the cleanest energy possible. You can lobby in your local towns that the electricity that your local electric company buys come more and more from sustainable sources, renewable sources. You can investigate the alternatives, some of you will work on creating alternative energies. There’s so much you can do. You can watch how much you drive a car, walk when you can, bike when you can. Buy clothing from companies that are as energy efficient as possible and also eat as much local food as possible. All of these things will help to slow it down. Protest against the continuation of the oil age. Fight for clean energy, local energy, renewable energy. Look into the latest technologies. Get interested. Get interested in inventing new ways of coping with the hot age and surviving by caring and sharing with other humans.
It’s certainly true that the United States [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: It’s certainly true that the United States of which I’m a citizen is consuming disproportionate resources and that we’re doing so because the rest of the world is in a sense subsidizing us to do so. It’s also absolutely true that nations like China and India can’t come up to that standard of living. Of course that standard of living that’s so widely known about the United States is also falling in the United States because it’s own economy can’t support it any more. It’s failing in many ways. Now, on the real side I thought as an evolution biologist that with our big brains able to build scenarios to predict the future that we would be more sensible about our use of resources but it hasn’t happened. And as I look back into the evolution of earth I see that other species always had to be pushed by crises to grow up and get more cooperative, to become mature species. So the crisis coming on in the world now, the hot age that we can no longer stop although we can slow it down if we’re sensible about energy use and the kind of energy we use, if we end the oil age we can buy some time to figure out how all of us can live decently on this planet. I said in answer to another question we’ll have to learn to live in elegant simplicity, to have what we need, to live more simply so that other people may simply live as someone very well put it. We can do this, we can share this earth, we can develop the kind of technologies that will help us to conserve water even in a hot age when there’s too much in the oceans and not enough on land. We have the brains, we have everything we need except that we have put, let our economy run wild with corporations that do not have to obey international laws. We badly, badly need international laws that can be enforced. We have to convince each other of the need for that. We have to put pressure on countries like the United States to uphold the World Court. Otherwise we just can’t do it. So a new generation can build a new kind of economy because the young people are interested now in knowing why we’re unsustainable, what doesn’t work, it will be possible for them to build a world that does work. I know that it’s possible to do it. All the other species have figured--
Actually, architecture is a very interesting [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Actually, architecture is a very interesting human endeavor, human production that some architects have shown us such as Christopher Alexander that it’s our connection to the world around us. It shouldn’t, architecture shouldn’t be a barrier between humans and nature. It should be an open boundary, a connector. So as architecture goes in to the future I hope it will be lighter, made of more organic materials. Anyone who’s ever lived in a house built of organic materials knows the different feeling that you have their. I hope we can get rid of all architecture that requires artificial lighting in the daytime. We have so many windowless buildings in this world. They’re often government buildings where we have to have electricity on all day long to heat it, to circulate the air. It’s very unhealthy way to build buildings and a totally energy inefficient way to build buildings. But we now have architects who are designing buildings that actually give back more to the environment than they take from it in energy, that can generate energy, that can use benign materials, that can make life more pleasant inside them, that do not make people sick. Some of our architecture got called “sick buildings” because of the problems it caused. So in the future as the planet gets hotter, as we have to move our cities uphill, let’s really rethink our architecture. Make it from light green materials, make it friendly, give people the connection to nature that we need, make it mobile so that maybe we can fold up our cities and move if we have to because of bizarre weather circumstances or climate change or whatever. In Holland people are learning to--
The future I’d like to see is based on [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: The future I’d like to see is based on living systems. I’m a pastist in order to be a futurist because I’m an evolution biologist and that is a pastist. And the longer I study living systems in evolution the more I see clues in those living systems for a human future that would work better on this planet. So I hope that humans will continue to study nature more closely. Each of us has a body that is a perfect model for a good political and economic system in its own. We’re made of a hundred trillion cells, they’re working in harmony, they’re in constant negotiations with their organs, with the organ systems in the body and when self interest comes from every level of a system like that there are endless negotiations and that drives cooperation. The only time self interest is bad is when it’s not contained by the self interest of a larger living system, of a larger community. So we can learn a lot about politics from our bodies. The brain is not an autocratic government dictating to the body. It receives information from everywhere, it allocates resources very equitably, sends aid to where it’s needed to get that part functioning well, it understands that the whole body has to be healthy. If we could understand that every human being has to be happy and healthy in order to make a healthy world we would have learned a lot just from our own bodies. Our bodies do non-adversarial politics. We don’t pit one way of looking at things against another. We don’t—the body doesn’t have parts that argue with each other but rather it solves problems collectively, all the different parts doing what they have to do to solve any problem that comes along. The economy of the body is an incredibly good model because if we were doing world economics in our body the way we do them in the world then some of the organs would have the power to exploit others and all the cells couldn’t stay healthy. You can’t have a win-lose economy--
Is mass media more opportunity or problem? [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Is mass media more opportunity or problem? It’s a mixed blessing. Mass media on the one hand has given us a kind of monocultured pablum type society because so many of the shows are alike and are used largely as vehicles for advertisers. They’re paid for of course by advertising. And so there are some problems. We’ve created mass culture around the world in the American model among young people. But on the other hand our mass media development has given us an internet. And the internet is the greatest opportunity in the history of humanity for people to talk to each other about their real issues, about look at today, here we are in a square in Berlin, 110 people from all over the world, all answering the questions that are dearest to the hearts and minds of people all over the planet. And those of you who are watching us either now during the event or afterwards I hope that many of the young people who are in college or university or independent study will use the opportunity of what we do today here to do some studies of how we answer these questions, to compare them with the way you would answer the questions, to set up community or class dialogues about these questions, to blog off these broadcasts and to continue this, to expand it, to make it a huge world conversation. Because we are the people and we seem to be on the same wavelength. Judging from the questions that you’ve asked all over the world today I know that you want a better world and that you’re thinking deeply about how to make it. And it’s our joint creativity in this giant global conversation that is changing the world. And we’ve got to get it out into the media. We’ve got to prove to the mass media that the good news of the positive changes happening in the world will sell as well as any kind of news, that we don’t need to know about murder and mayhem, we want to know about the positive things that everybody all over the world is doing now. So I hope that this conversation will spawn a million other conversat--
This is a somewhat complex question because [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: This is a somewhat complex question because there are different levels to this idea. There are some situations in which parts of the brain have been connected to computers and helped people with handicaps such as blindness or deafness, to be able to perceive somewhat better. And I don’t know all the other applications in which there is some connection made technologically between the brain and computers that is actually beneficial. To people who have lost some brain functions, perhaps this can be done. At the other extreme we have [audio goes out] in artificial intelligence work claiming that his mind will be downloadable into a computer within the next decade or two. And I think this is real, real hogwash because first of all the idea is based on the idea that you could duplicate the computer in a three dimensional model, duplicate the brain as a three dimension model in the brain, meaning that every particle and every atom of the brain would be in the same place as it is in the brain and usually they talk about how well to read the brain into a computer you would have to paralyze the person, but that’s ignoring the fact that no living brain can hold still. The blood coursing through it necessarily, the movement of the neurons themselves, of the molecules make it impossible to hold a brain still and download it without killing it. And then when it’s in the computer presumably everything will have to stay in one place and I can’t imagine how it could think under those conditions. The whole thing is very farfetched to me and I personally would rather keep my brain as long as I have my body and then--
In order to give every child on this planet [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: In order to give every child on this planet the opportunity for education and for making contributions to the world obviously we need a world that’s different from the one we have now. So the concrete steps we can take are first of all to ask questions about why we have a win-lose world, why we have a world in which there is poverty and obscene wealth at the same time. I think that capitalism has proved to be entirely incompatible with democracy. There is no equal opportunity for all in a system where you have to have money to invest money to make money. And even though we are starting to show people how to start with microloans it still takes at least a microloan to get something going. And those people who start with microloans while they can build better communities locally are certainly never going to get immensely rich. And why should we have immensely rich people on the planet along with people who are stuck in poverty situations. We have reinvent our economy. We have to ask if capitalism designed to concentrate wealth, then let’s do something else. Let’s have economies that work like nature, that work like your body where every cell is contributing and every cell is benefiting and every organ is benefiting, the individuals, the communities, the ecosystems, the nations, the whole world economy have to be reinvented so that we can all live well. If we stop measuring our economies in money flow and instead measured them in quality of life as the economist Hazel Henderson has suggested for decades--
This question reminds me of a kind of answer [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: This question reminds me of a kind of answer given by an Imara Indian in the Andes named Siri Tupac who said, “The western man has become confused. He has lost community. He has become a disconnected individual.” Much about our lives in urban civilizations disconnects us. Many of the cars driving on the highway are vehicles with a single person in them. Much of our time is spent watching a television set alone not connecting with other people. When we lose the sense of community as Siri Tupac said, our thoughts become like a tangled ball of yarn. We have no connection. We have no rootedness. We have no family. It is a sad thing about the modern world that it’s possible to be lonely. I speak several languages and have Greek citizenship. In the Greek language there is no word for privacy. In the western culture we really prize privacy. But in the Greek culture there isn’t even a word for privacy in the language and when it has to be translated from an American movie on television let’s say, at the time I lived in Greece they always subtitled, they would use the word for loneliness to represent privacy. So this was a very social culture, the Greek one. In fact, I had a hard time being alone as a writer in Greece. I finally discovered that if I said I was a philosopher then people would understand why I needed time alone to think. But otherwise the Greeks are very social beings and so they don’t suffer this loneliness problem. When western architecture came into Greece and changed into small kitchens in apartments and bigger living rooms down the hall Greek housewives were very unhappy because they couldn’t be surrounded by family as they cook--
I think every young person in the world [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I think every young person in the world should have access to the internet. Just because it would equalize the young people of the world. They would all feel and know that they had access to each other, that they can share ideas. There are many things that other young people can learn from people in low income areas of Brazil. I’ve been to the favelas of Brazil. I know how creative and alive and wonderful and bright the young people there are, so they have a lot to teach the rest of the world as well as being able to learn from the rest of the world. And the more that young people around the planet can share ideas with each other the faster they will change the world because they’ll pick up the good ideas and they’ll spread them around and they’ll contribute to each other’s development and education. And I just love watching the way young people on the internet share things with each other. I love going to YouTube and seeing all the videos that they create for each other. I love the way they blog off each other. I love the way wikipedia is the most fantastic encyclopedia on the face of the earth made by people for people. And that’s what we want, we want a world that’s made by people for people. So I think that the internet is a fantastic tool. I love the fact that my grandchildren’s generation has grown up with it. It’s a powerful, powerful research tool. And it is changing the world because the spirit of young people on the internet is about caring and sharing. I don’t see greed there. I don’t see hostilities there. I don’t see warfare there. I wish there weren’t so many older predators on the internet trying to turn Myspace into a marketplace and sexual predators and all that kind of thing. But maybe it’ll make you young people tougher in your ability to resist pure consumer culture and instead in your generation be manufacturing things from organic materials and growing healthy food for each other and building maybe beyond democracies to non-adversarial political systems and win-win economic systems where everything is shared. It’s a wonderful opportunity. It’s going to be a tough planet for a while, maybe for a long time as the hot age advances, but I know that the young people of this world are bright enough and caring enough to be able to work with whatever the conditions are to surf the waves of change and make it work for people.
I think I have two trees. One of my trees [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I think I have two trees. One of my trees is the Cowry tree of New Zealand. They’ve almost all been cut down. They are some of the oldest trees on the planet. And when I visited New Zealand one time I was taken to the last, oldest living Cowry tree, much more than a thousand years old, and then to a museum where the body of a Cowry tree had been dug out of a bog where it had lain since before the last ice age. And they cut a chunk of it, set it upright and cut a spiral staircase within it. And as I, I was very, very tired from two or three weeks of lecturing two or three times a day on television and to live audiences in Australia and New Zealand, and here in New Zealand in that Cowry Museum I was so tired, but as I walked up that spiral staircase inside the trunk of this ancient, ancient dead tree I got such a hit of energy that it just spun all my chakras again. And I was very, very surprised by this amount of energy. And that night which was my last night in New Zealand I was put to bed in a four poster bed made of Cowry wood. And also on my way to that place as we passed the Cowry museum again I got a wish I’d had all day to see a rainbow in New Zealand before I left. And that rainbow came out exactly as we were passing the museum made of Cowry wood. When I got back home after this amazing experience with Cowry trees in New Zealand I found a letter in my mail asking me to help save a tree in my neighborhood that had been condemned to death. And so I went to three meetings in my City Hall to fight for this tree with three different committees--
Well, this question certainly reflects a [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Well, this question certainly reflects a discontent with the consumer culture and I think that discontent is very widespread in the world already. It gets boring. I sense the discontent behind this question. Sure, if kids grow up watching television, seeing those products, they’ll demand those products. I mean the commercial interests spend huge amounts of money researching what will grab kids’ eyes and earballs, so that they’ll demand these products and things like that. But by the time the kids grow up I think they want something better from their world. There’s a lot of wonderful stuff happening with the television industry and what’s becoming of it now too. If you watch what’s happening on the internet with YouTube, with young people making videos for each other they’re not watching the standard shows, they’re busy making shows for each other. They want to give things away to each other. There’s a lot of content in what they’re producing. Look at the way blogging took off. People are spending more time now at their computers than at their television sets. And I think it’s a good sign in the sense that the internet is giving people the opportunity to create for each other, to have a voice, to speak. What we’re doing here today when we’re so many of us are answering the same questions just to start a much bigger conversation around the world, to get other people to blog off what we’re saying here, to study what we’re saying, to see does it reflect the mood of the world? I have such a great sense from the questions which are wonderful deep questions from all over the world that there’s a discontent with consumer culture. We don’t wan to do violence anymore. We want to care and share in this world. All the questions are saying do we really have to keep doing things the way we’re doing them or can we reinvent this world? And yes, it’s there for reinvention. Young people don’t have to clean up our messes, just stop doing things the way we did them. Just start doing things the way you want in a world were there is no greed, where there is no racism, where there is no war, where you make pacts with each other across the internet, agree never to kill each other over your differences. This is the possibility. This is the great new opportunity of the future. Use the media for good purposes rather than for developing a junk culture with junk mentalities.
I certainly hope a person can be perceptive [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I certainly hope a person can be perceptive enough to see themselves as part of nature. I suppose it gets more difficult for young people growing up in urban environments on TV and game screens to see themselves as part of nature, but I certainly hope that every young person can have some time out in nature, some really relaxing time, some time when you just lie on your back and look up at the sky or down into the sky. Try that sometime, go out in a field and lie down at night and look down into the stars, pretend that gravity has you glued to the bottom of the planet because how do you know which way is up? Or the next time you’re somewhere where you can see the sun come up think of yourself as rolling toward the sun on a planet. The sun isn’t coming up, you on the planet are moving toward it. And in the evening you can say goodbye to it as you roll away from it. Start to see yourself as a little being on a planet in a larger cosmos. Go out and sit by a tree and just be quiet and ask yourself some deep personal questions about your own life. And then ask the tree if it can help you with some of the questions you have about life. Some of my best friends have been trees. They’ve gotten me out of trouble by asking them for help. Animals, plants, it doesn’t matter, even if you have some live plants in your house and talk to them because they are intelligent beings. And they know if you are responding to them as an intelligent being and you can practice a deep communion with them. Those are just some little ways that even people in cities might be able to bond better with nature, to recognize yourself as a natural being. I’m an evolution biologist and I know that the human species is a part of nature. We don’t stand apart from it. And if we don’t take care of our planet we’re not ready to go to another one. We don’t have the technology that will hold up. We have trouble keeping even our washing machines working. We’re not ready to live in space. And anyway, if there were other intelligent beings in the universe who were ahead of us technologically I should think that they would stop us from immigrating to another livable planet if we destroyed our own. So--
Again, this question is about doing things [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Again, this question is about doing things for profit. And in India what Coca-Cola and other beverage companies have done to the water supply—Coca-Cola of course is made from water—is an absolute disaster. These companies are mining the fresh water of the upper Ganges River, the sacred river of India, in order to make things like canned Coca-Cola or canned or bottled water. And actually depriving the villagers of their own water supply in order to do it. It is a criminal thing in this world that fresh water should be ownable. This is one of the basic resources of the planet that should be commons. It should be a human right to have fresh water available. No one should be able to own freshwater sources and commercialize them. We have undo some of these things that our economy has done because it has run rampant and it has—patenting life forms, preventing native people from using their native plants for medicines as they have for centuries is a crazy thing. We’ve just, our economy has run amok and we have to reign it in again. We have to figure out ways to feed ourselves in healthy ways and to get our water pure again, to get fresh water supplies. It was a wonderful scientist in Germany, named Kate Zeidel who showed that plants can clean any pollutant out of water that man has thought up to put in it. So there are cheap efficient easy ways to clean water. We can get clean water on the planet again but we have to stop the privatization of water. That’s absolutely essential.
I suppose the answer to that question [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I suppose the answer to that question depends on who “we” are. Since I’m a white person from the west I’ll take it to be what can we people in the west learn from Africa. And I think the biggest lesson we have to learn from Africa is how destructive colonialism and its aftermath in modern day imperialism is. And it is the imperialism of destructive investment for profit that I think has created huge problems in Africa. The cows that we have sent into Africa for profit driven reasons have created vast deserts in Africa. The mining has been destructive. The raiding of villages for men and boys to work for money in agribusiness and industry has been destructive to African culture. The condition that Africa is in today with desertification, displaced people, disease epidemics, warfare, is all a set of conditions that many parts of the Earth are going to face as the hot age advances. So if we could learn from Africa what not to do, what is destructive practices, and get together and work with Africans to help redevelop their country as it should be, to get out the foreign businesses that are taking money out of Africa based on African labor, to build African businesses for African people more and more, to give people back land and help them to regreen desert areas so they can feed themselves, it would be the best practice we could do to prepare ourselves for the more difficult climate conditions coming up in other parts of the world. So I hope we can learn our lessons of what not to do and how to do things better in a friendly, more respectful way to offer Africa our help to help it revitalize itself as it should be.
I don’t see any problem with encouraging [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I don’t see any problem with encouraging local cultures and still building global community. I like to talk about not the process of globalization but the process of glocalization which reminds me that the global and the local economies have to be healthy in order for us to have a healthy planet with a healthy humanity behaving respectfully within its ecosystems. So there is no reason for us to have a monoculture on this planet. Monoculture is terribly destructive. We’ve practiced monoculture in agriculture where we plant one crop and kill all the others because we don’t find them useful for that particular area. And it’s been a complete disaster. Monoculture crops the way we’ve been growing them cause disasters, cause deserts—water tables, deplete the soils, it just doesn’t work. If instead we would behave, we would do our food production more the way the old family farms were, where lots of different things were produced on the same land without ever destroying the soils or the water tables, and then apply that to our communities, to have different communities growing their own ways, upholding their own traditions but sharing with others, letting each other see how they live and what they do, comparing notes, learning each other’s languages. We could have a global language and by default it’s becoming English and that’s all traceable to World War II when there were so many Americans stationed around the world and it just happened that way. But that doesn’t mean that local cultures shouldn’t have their own languages and that English speaking peoples should be made to learn at least two or three other languages to get a more better sense of global diversity. So there’s unity in diversity in my body. There’s unity in diversity in every ecosystem. We have everything to learn from nature on this score. There’s no reason why there should be any conflict between local cultures or even different global cultures. Islam is globalized, Christianity is globalized, Judaism is globalized. We can all get along. We just need to make a decision to be a global family.
Well, we’ve all put our two cents in on all [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Well, we’ve all put our two cents in on all these hundred questions. Whether we’ve answered them or not I don’t know because what I really hope is that we have started a conversation. And how do we get the world to listen? By extending this conversation. Each of you watching this can give your own answer to it. You can ask your friends for answers to these questions. You can engage in all the dialogues possible and keep spreading it around, spreading it to other people. Get other people to watch these videos. Get students to do research on our answers. Do some statistics. Find out, how did the women answer, how did the men answer, who did this, who said that, what was the majority opinion in the group of 112 people around this table? We would all love to know that and I hope that anyone who engages in a research project and you can get credit for this, whether you’re in independent studies on in a university or a high school, make it a research project to do something with all these answers we have tried to give today. And therefore your teachers will know about it and maybe some of you are teachers and will encourage your students to work with these questions. I want to see what kind of blogs come off it, what kind of new YouTube videos come off it. Everybody can play. It’s the first time in history that anybody can play at a world level. We can all do it now and everybody’s needed to create--
The most unreported story, the most [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: The most unreported story, the most important unreported story in the world today I think is the tidal wave of change that’s happening at grassroots levels all over the world. There is so much inventiveness and creativity happening as people reorganize their communities, as they find ways to conserve energy and water, as they plant trees—for instance, let me be more specific, in Africa Wangari Matthei who got the peace prize which at least that was reported got it because she initiated the green belt movement among African women to plant millions of trees where the land had been desertified by big agriculture and other destructive practices. In India a village that used to be prosperous that had fallen into total ruin and poverty got together and asked itself why, how did this happen, is there a way for us to recreate the way our life was in the past? And they did it. They listened to the stories of the old people. They figured out how they had been prosperous together. They recreated their economy and they again made a prosperous village. In many places in the United States community currencies have helped to revitalize local communities. In Argentina after two years of disaster the workers went back in and turned the factory machines on again, knowing that they weren’t going to get paid the money they were owned but that those machines could still churn out products that they could then trade for agricultural produce. So they got their economy going again as a people’s democracy. This is happening everywhere in the world. People are inventing the most amazing energy saving devices. One man named John McMillan has proven in many places in Africa and other parts of the world that in three to five years any desert can be greened into a food producing ecosystem that [audio cuts out] protein quality for its local people. He does it with tilapia fish ponds and vegetable gardens around them. The fish water feeds the vegetables, the vegetables, the scraps from the garden feed the fish which are vegetarian. So you have a very tightly coupled ecosystem that has saved countless lives already. And he should be teaching thousands of young people how to do this. There’s a young man in Australia who was a surfer and who studied the way waves and water moves in order to invent new kinds of propellers and fans that are way more energy efficient because they work with the flow.
Well, actually there is a question in which [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Well, actually there is a question in which I have given two opposite answers that I think are both right. And that’s the question of are you an evolutionist or a creationist? And I have decided that I would call myself a creationist evolutionist. The reason I say that is I am definitely an evolution biologist. I believe in evolution. I see evolution as an amazing process, four and a half billion years long on this planet and [audio goes out] years or so in the universe given a linear time perspective. And I also find that the universe is alive and self creative and therefore I have to be a creationist evolution biologist. It doesn’t mean that I believe in an external fatherlike diety who invents nature and stays apart from it, but rather that to me all nature is self creating and alive. I am closer to the eastern religions in this respect, to let’s say the Vedic religion where everything starts with consciousness and consciousness then evolves duality within it so that material worlds can be created out of those dualities, out of those contradictions. So in short, I am both a creationist and an evolutionist when it seems in the rest of the world seems to think that we have to choose between those opposite answers. I don’t see them as incompatible at all. And I am both.
I think the one piece of knowledge I would [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I think the one piece of knowledge I would like to give to my world which believes in the western science creation story is that the universe is not a non-living entity running down by entropy. The universe is alive and well. It is in balance. Entropy is balanced by syntropy which we also know as gravity. When we look through telescopes we see the universe flying apart because we’re looking at radiation, at objects that radiate flying apart, and we don’t see the gravity that’s pulling the universe together at the same time. The rest of the scientific creation story is the evolution story that we are stuck in an endless struggle and scarcity, but I want people to know that we’re not stuck in endless scarcity. Nature for one thing recycles everything. And when you have 100% recycling program you cannot have scarcity. We could be growing healthy food in abundance and letting the people who grow it, eat it. We’re not doing that. So the piece of knowledge I want to give is the universe is alive and well, there is no endless struggle in scarcity, we can create abundance in a living universe. That’s where my hope for the future lies. Many other species have learned that. That piece of information is common knowledge to the species of nature that have matured out of hostile competition into cooperation. And we can do it too.
Well, I have to say that whoever asked the [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Well, I have to say that whoever asked the question is right, that life is getting more stressful when we have to take care of more and more things. I myself don’t drive a car. And I notice that I have saved myself a lot of stress, whether it’s the stress of having it’s check ups and filling it with gas and getting it fixed and things or the stress of driving in traffic and worrying about hitting somebody or not getting somewhere on time. Enormous amounts of stress just around car driving that I’m saving myself. Of course that means I have to choose places to live where I can get around on foot or on a bicycle or on a bus or have enough friends in to get me places that I need to go. It is possible to do life without a car in America. I don’t think there are very many of us practicing it but I at least have proved for the past 15 years since I’ve been back in the United States that it can be done. And I noticed that during the 13 years that I lived on an island in Greece in very, very simple circumstances, had to wash clothes by hand, had to cook from scratch, had to shop from scratch, I had lots more free time than I do in America where I have to worry about all these things and call up all these people and worry about sorting out bills that are incorrect or managing the repairs of things, there’s just all kinds of things that you have to do to maintain a high tech lifestyle that I didn’t have to when I had a very simple lifestyle. So I do understand the differences and I do think it’s true that it can be more inefficient to live a high tech life than a low tech life. However, I hope that we will be living in the future in elegant simplicity with labor saving devices that are easy keep, that don’t break down, hold up longer, made of quality materials, not a throw away culture, not a new thing every year kind of culture. So we should be able to solve some of those problems and make our labor saving devices truly labor saving. I hope that will be the case.
Well, it’s difficult to even imagine the [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Well, it’s difficult to even imagine the technology of the past 50 years without military or market forces just because it has been so driven, so I guess I would like to ask the question of is it possible to have a future in which technology is not driven by market or military forces. I think something has to drive the creativity that develops new technology. And I think that something in the future is going to be the oncoming hot age. The hot age is advancing rapidly. We don’t have any technologies that can refreeze the ice of the arctic or refreeze the tundras that are emitting more greenhouse gases than all the industries on the planet. This is serious, we’ve faced a lot of ice ages as humans. We’ve never faced a hot age. We are now going to face one. I hope that I’ll a book coming out within the coming year called, “Hot. Cool Solutions for a Hot Age,” to talk about these issues. And because we will have to invent new technologies in order to efficiently desalinize water when there’s too much in the oceans and not enough on land. You know, glaciers melting and not feeding rivers any more create more deserts. We’re using up our aquifers. So water’s going to be a big issue. Technologies for collecting water in storms so that it doesn’t run off in flash floods are going to be very important. Very efficient energy devices, there will be countless of those that have to be invented. New architecture, new ways of doing transportation when we’re out of the oil age, new ways of inventing materials based on carbohydrates rather than hydrocarbons, when we’re no longer digging up fossil fuels, and make things more the way nature does. We need to study the natural microworld where it’s so high tech down there. Your hundred trillion cells each have 30,000 recycling centers in them. Think of all the technologies we can invent just around recycling materials and making new things from them. It’s a very exciting time on this planet and there will be tremendous creativity and new technol--
I think it’s the responsibility of all [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I think it’s the responsibility of all humanity to manage the resources of this planet. Of course that’s not the way things work today but we need to have a vision of what things should be like in this future. And I think it’s a shared responsibility for the future. I would hope in the future that we will have pretty sustainable local economies all over the world, that people will have back the use of lands that they once lived on that were taken away from them that are now devoted to big business enterprises, agribusiness or corporate enterprises or mining or whatever, and that if we can get land back so that people can produce their own food as much as possible locally, organically, sustainably then the oceans and the other resources that we hold in common should again become commons. We should have joined voices about their use. If we want to have things made of metals that have to be mined from the earth then let’s talk about that. Are there alternatives? Are there ways of making them from renewable growables? We have to think deeply now about our responsibility on this planet. It’s going to get tougher as we move deeper into the hot age. And we will be forced to live more lightly on the earth. When we have to move everybody uphill from the coastal cities are we going to move them into the same kinds of cities they’ve been living in or are we going to find ways to do lighter infrastructures from more organic materials, more flexible cities that we can move out of if we have to due to huge storms or whatever comes our way? This hot age is going to be of great challenge to humans but we have every bit of knowledge we need already to be able to survive it. But it will take a great deal of creativity and will to share things, to build lighter infrastructures, new kinds of sustainable cities, new ways of--
Whether we can still be indigenous in the [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Whether we can still be indigenous in the 21st century depends of course on our definition of indigenous. If indigenous means rooted in the land on which you live, I think that we may be becoming more and more indigenous in the coming century because there may be less and less mass travel available to us as the hot age proceeds, as either climate events or lack of oil prevent us from having mass transportation this way. Anyway, it’s very important whether the transportation is available or not for us to pay close attention to our own ecosystems because this is where our water is going to come from, this is where our food is probably going to be coming from. So let’s pay real close attention. I think the bioregional movement had a great idea that instead of drawing arbitrary political boundaries we should consider our boundaries to be the watershed areas in which we live, and that way they have to pay close attention to how many people can that watershed area support. Water is going to become critical on this planet and so we’re going to have to pay attention to it, conserve it, recycle it, use it much, much more carefully, learn how to desalinize it. So this will make us indigenous. It will make us pay attention to our own water supplies, to our own soils, to keep our soils healthy so that we can grow food in them. All of this will tie us more closely to the land. So yes, I hope that it will also produce new songs and stories and ways of cooperating within our ecosystems and make us all indigenous again.
I so far I know no success story in genetic [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I so far I know no success story in genetic engineering. They have tried to cure diseases but what seems to happen, for instance with glaucoma, if you implant the gene that seems to be implicated in glaucoma as a disease in seven different patients with glaucoma you get seven different results. One of the big problems with genetic engineering is that the companies doing it understand so very little about how genes work, how the whole genome works. The genome is a living system and it works intelligently. It can recognize when a gene has been damaged. It can repair that gene or put genes out of action that would cause trouble. It can trade genes. It can bring in new genes into the genome. The planet has one genetic system planetwide with genes that are interchangeable among all species from microbes to mammoth sized animals and plants. This is an amazing intelligent information system. Two billion years ago the bacteria, our most ancient ancestors actually developed the first world wide web of information exchange by trading DNA. And this exchange is still going on. Can you imagine that in a few billion years nature has not learned everything possible about genetic engineering on the good side and on the bad side? Yet we don’t study it. We don’t consider it an intelligent system. We map genes as though we’re writing a telephone book of names in a city and then how much do you know about the city when you have that whole map? Very, very little. So we don’t know enough to be doing genetic engineering.
Ah, the question of truth and fact is a big [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Ah, the question of truth and fact is a big one. I personally believe that truth can only be assessed from the inside. Our guts, our hearts can only tell us what is true. What is true is what resonates within us as true. In that sense, truth is relevant. That truth is different for people. But it’s also the case that we can have a whole planet full of people resonate to certain truths such as the Golden Rule as a value, that this would work. We know that it’s true that if everybody in the world acted only in ways that they would like to be acted upon by others, that we would have a better world. So there are deep truths in our religions, in our values. Science cannot give us truth. Philosophers of science have said that for a very long time now — at least half a century, more — that science can only test hypotheses for their usefulness. So does science give us facts? The facts of science can change with time. The facts of science are those things which we believe to be true now in this time in our culture. And so it’s very important for us to think about what’s true for us. Every person has a belief-system. And we should know where our beliefs come from. And we should watch as our beliefs change. We should ask ourselves who are the authorities, who are the people we take as authorities, that could make us change a belief? What life-circumstances make us change our beliefs? What’s true for us now? What was true for you when you were ten years-old? Are the things that were true for you at ten still true for you now? Ask yourself about your garden of beliefs: what you weed out, what you plant, what you create your reality from, because your reality comes from your beliefs. So it’s very important to cultivate a garden of beliefs that will help you to live a good life in integrity, in honesty and in joy and therefore help others create lives of that quality.
I thought a little bit about this question [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I thought a little bit about this question of the three most important values a child should be taught and I would say that one of them is curiosity. Children naturally have curiosity but it’s often kind of drummed out of them by the educational system or by grownups who don’t want to answer a lot of questions. So I would say keep that curiosity motive in children, encourage them to—[audio down] not just to take the facts that are loaded on them in school but to ask questions about them and to develop a child who all their lives will always be asking themselves why do I believe what I believe? Does this belief still serve me? Is there a better belief somewhere that I can find that—what do I have beliefs for? I’m building my life from beliefs, how can I find the best ones? Where? Among whom? Ask questions. Study other cultures. Be curious. Be an explorer all your life. And explore also the deep reaches of your inner mind. Some explorers have said that that’s what takes the most courage to explore the far reaches of your own mind. Where can your imagination take you? Don’t ever let grown ups beat the imagination out of you. Another important value of course is respect for other people. If we all respected each other on this planet we’d be obeying the Golden Rule. We wouldn’t do things to others that we wouldn’t want done to ourselves. So respect is my second important value. And the third one is caring. Let’s care about each other. Let’s care for every child on the planet. Let’s care if people are dying unnecessarily of diseases, of poverty, of whatever it is. We all should adopt the so-called feminine values of caring and sharing.
I think probably the most important subject [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I think probably the most important subject in the arts that I think that should be talked about how more movie stars and television stars could help us to make a better future, both by acting in more stories that have to do with building a better world and by finding ways to weave messages about building a better world into their work, and also by using their time when they’re not acting to talk to the world, to talk to young people, to endorse healthy products, green products, to encourage young people to work on ways of making a better world. Star power is a great power on this earth. Commercial interests know very well how to use star power. When you get Tiger Woods to advertise shoes, a lot more shoes are sold. And in the same way if sports stars and arts stars would do the same thing that would help a lot too. So that’s one of the important things I’d like to see talked about more in the arts, whether the most famous people in the arts would do the most to promote everything about healthy lifestyles, non-adversarial politics, equitable economies, everything we want to take into the future.
What moves me in a very literal sense are my [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: What moves me in a very literal sense are my mitochondria. Those are little organelles within my cells that actually generate energy from the food I eat and the air I breathe. So without them I couldn’t lift a finger and there can be thousands in every single cell that I’m made up of. So I’m very technically on a physical level moved by my mitochondria. I would also say that I’m moved by a great passion for life. I’m a cosmic snoop, I’m curious about everything. I want to know how everything works. And that motivates me. I’m like an explorer of life that keeps looking things from very different angles in the world. I’ve lived in different cultures. I’ve hung out with very different kinds of people. I’ve seen from as many perspectives of religion, of science, of artists, all of those things have given me more information about life. I talk to children, I talk to old people, I just keep learning and I’m so enthusiastic about learning more and more and loving to share the information that I learn by writing and lecturing and making slide shows and things that I’m having a wonderful time. And I will keep doing that. Great to be here with all of you today. And for all the days that you’ll be watching these videos. And I hope you too will be enthused and excited and moved by what we’re all saying and have great conversations yourselves.
There’s no doubt in my mind that we need a [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: There’s no doubt in my mind that we need a good world story and Joseph Campbell the great mythologer called for a myth that serves the whole planet, a myth about the whole planet and its people. I’m a scientist and I was raised on the scientific story of how the world is. Creation stories are part of every culture in human history and they were usually told by some kind of a priesthood. But now science tells the creation story. It’s been elevated to that status of priesthood that gets to tell the big story to the culture. What story is it telling us? That we live in a non-living purposeless universe running down by entropy. Oh, how cheery is that for a creation story? And then we add in that evolution on this planet is about the survival of the fittest, about an endless competition and scarcity and that you have to get what you can while you can and beat the other guy to it. Now, this is a totally depressing creation story. A universe running down meaninglessly, you’re caught in it, you’re stuck in an endless struggle and scarcity. This is a terrible story to be telling people and it does not fit the scientific facts. We know that every force in nature has an opposite. If there’s entropy there has to be syntropy. We know that in evolution there’s a tremendous amount of cooperation. In fact, I’d say there’s a great story in the maturation cycle of evolving species where they first are young and grabby and multiply as fast as they can, take all the territory they can, bump off their competitors, act like capitalists, and then they discover bit by bit the advantages of cooperation. And as they do so they build bigger and bigger cooperative enterprises and find out that their economies are cheaper, more effective, more efficient, work for everybody and you get the evolution of rainforests and human bodies made of a hundred trillion cells working in complete cooperation even though they’re so very diverse. This is the story we need to tell in the world. A great new story of the human species growing up into global family doing win-win economics--
This is really a question for the future. [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: This is really a question for the future. It will be possible to create energy sources that produce more energy than their production consumes. But we’re just in that transition point now where we are moving from burning fossil fuels which is very inefficient way, actually, inefficient way to make energy, to finding more and more ways to use the free energy available on the planet such as wind energy, of course we have to build the windmills and we have to still produce whatever it takes to get the energy from one location to another and so forth, but we are in the process of getting more energy efficient and ultimately we will be able to extract huge amounts of energy from water without putting very much energy into that production. There are already experimental people who have experimented and who proven that this is possible. But there also has to be a way of preventing these things from falling into the kinds of private hands that will keep them away from others or charge exorbitant amounts for them. We have to learn to share this planet and its resources and to use renewable resources or free sources. Actually every point in space in this universe has an infinite amount of energy available in it. And as we get more peaceful and cooperative we will be able to tap that energy better. Even the Bible warned that you had to be pure in heart to be able to touch things that make great energy. It’s a matter of learning to care and share on the planet and then--
I don’t know how many people in the world [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I don’t know how many people in the world believe more in the nationality than humanity but I’m not among them. I believe in humanity way above nationality, I’m a planet person. I was born in an ecosystem, I travel through other ecosystems. I was born in one culture, I travel through other cultures, I’ve lived in other cultures. I live in the United States now. I lived 13 years in Greece. I’ve lived in the Peruvian Andes and in Canada. My loyalties are to this planet, to my species and to all other life. And so for me the question of nationality is long in the past. When it was a child I was taught that I was to be proud of being an American. I have some difficulty now in being proud of being an American. I’m proud of American ingenuity, I’m proud of the many Americans who are questioning what our government is doing, what our economy is doing, whether capitalism can ever be compatible with democracy, whether democracy is the best system for us to govern ourselves by. I would encourage young people to open themselves to questions about everything in your life. Why do we use the money we use now? Is there a different kind of money that would work better for a healthier economy? How do we do things? How do we govern ourselves? Are there alternatives? How can we reinvent the whole world? Because the world is yours to create through your own belief systems, through what’s true for you and what’s fact for you. So be aware, be aware of what you believe, what facts you believe in, what values you believe in. And create your new world consciously, with others, talking about the things we’re talking about today.
The reason the food that we eat is of such [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: The reason the food that we eat is of such bad quality is because our food growing and food processing, food producing enterprises are operating on a profit motive rather than on a feeding people well motive. Personally I think agribusiness, large agribusiness, is one of the worst things we’ve invented on this planet because it’s not producing healthy food and on top of that we put all kinds of chemical additives in it. Our white flour can’t even sustain bugs any more. It’s not nutritive so we have to add some vitamins into it to make bread again. That’s ridiculous when we could be eating very healthy grains made from organically grown wheat or oats or barley, whatever we want to make it out of. So when we highly process foods, when we microwave them, this is all producing a low quality diet compared to what our grandparents were eating. When I was a child I grew up in farm country on completely organic food. Except we didn’t call it that because we didn’t have any other kind of food. There were no farm chemicals until World War II. And the strange thing is that now that we’ve been using those chemicals for over a half a century we find that the crop loss due to insects and diseases and things like that is worse than it was before we started to use the agricultural chemicals. High tech agriculture has to put 14 calories of energy into every one calorie it gets out in food. The old family farm got 10 calories out for every one calorie of energy it put in. So organic farming is far more energy efficient and far more productive than high tech agriculture. So let’s get rid of the high tech agriculture. It’s just causing problems. Makes deserts in the world, pollutes the ground, uses up the water, it’s just a disaster from beginning to end and it doesn’t make any scientific sense.
Technically, God doesn’t have religion. You [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Technically, God doesn’t have religion. You see the word religion comes from the Latin religio, which means tying back to origins, connecting to source. If God is the source, God can’t be the one to connect to source. Religion is something humans do to find God, not something God does. But if you want to know what is the most God-like religion, I would say because every mystic in history has seen God as love and light that the most God-like religion would be a religion of loving each other, of caring for each other. The Dalai Lama has said, “Don’t give up your individual religions. We need a diversity of faiths and religions and religious practices in the world. But everybody in the world can practice the common religion of kindness.” Being kind to each other, if we were all kind to each other we’d all be eating, we wouldn’t be living in fear, we wouldn’t have any terrorism. Kindness is a wonderful religion and very much God-like.
What’s reducing the diversity of cities, [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: What’s reducing the diversity of cities, what’s making them more alike has been global corporations for example building hotel chains that look alike no matter what city they’re in. And I know this from traveling that if you stay in a Hilton in any city in the world it’s going to look kind of alike inside with very minor cultural details possibly. And we spread around food brands and Coca-Cola, so globalized, everybody drinking Coca-Cola, everybody wearing certain kinds of jeans, things like that. These are the things that try to develop monocultures in the world. But I think our cities still have a lot of diversity in them. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s so important to protect local cultures, to value local architecture, to value the individuality of cities. And when we have to rebuild our cities for a sustainable world I certainly hope that we will be building cities that have unique identities all over the world. There’s absolutely no reason to manufacture city infrastructure on a monoculture basis. And as the hot age advances we’re going to have to do more and more local production and there should be more and more local design. And what will be truly wonderful is to see how different cultures in different locations on the planet when they start anew how do they incorporate the best of their traditions with something new? What flavor will each city have? What will each language, each culture do as they build sustainable cities from renewable energy and renewable materials that are light on the earth and flexible and still have unique cultural identities. I look forward to seeing as much as possible of that while I’m still around on the planet. And I encourage you all to get really creative about this. Not to think in terms of doing things the same way everywhere. We may not have big transportation systems available to us to ship materials from one place to ano--
You raise an interesting question and I [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: You raise an interesting question and I think, Thomas, that it’s interesting that you’re a white African because we always talk about black Africans but of course there are white Africans too. And what I see in your generation is a lack of interest in racism. I’ve even heard people in your generation say stop talking about racism because you’re perpetuating the problem. We are all colors. We are not black and white. Some of us are Native American and Irish and Japanese and who knows what else, most of us are mixed ethnic peoples nowadays on the planet. And the main thing is that we’re all people and how wonderful it is that we come in so many colors and sizes and shapes and minds and hearts because diversity is the bottom line in nature. There’s no such thing as an ecosystem on this planet that has less than a thousand species in it. Creativity comes from diversity. I would hope that in all countries and in every meeting of peoples from now on we have a diversity of age and gender and religions and things because what we need most is to talk to each other, to meet each other as personally as we can, to recognize the oneness of the human species, to know that we shouldn’t be destroying each other’s cultures but encouraging them, to know that we can have different cultures and talk to each other. The organs in my body aren’t alike, and the cells that belong to the different organs may or may not be similar. But there’s—my heart doesn’t try to talk my liver into being another heart. It has the good sense to know that a body has to be made up of different kinds of cells and different kinds of organs and organ systems just as any ecosystem. Who’s in charge in a rainforest? None of the species are in charge and yet they all work in harmony. Can we learn from nature? Can we be a global family? Can we love and cherish each other’s differences? I sure hope so.
I think that many young people as soon as [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I think that many young people as soon as they’ve fulfilled their basic requirements for an education should go out into the world, whether it’s into their own communities or traveling around the world, to learn from some experience of their own, to find out what your world is doing, what it’s made of, what your people’s needs are, to work with other young people, to join organizations like Global Youth Action Network or Indigenous and Non-indigenous Youth Alliance, or YES, Youth for Environmental Sanity, or World Spirit Forum Youth. There are so many organizations around the world. There are so many volunteer opportunities. Go travel, find out what your world is all about. Find out what needs to be done. Find out what your passion is. Because if you’re going to become a world changer it’s very important that your way of changing the world, and there are a gazillion ways to do it, is something you love doing. Because if you love what you’re doing you’ll be attractive to other people. They’ll want to do it with you. We can’t bully each other into building a better world. We have to seduce each other into building a better world. We have to be fun. It has to be fun to do what we’re doing. It has to be fun to build a better world or else we’re never going to build a world that’s fun to live in. And why shouldn’t we? I believe we’re a spirit having a human experience and that this human experience is meant to be enjoyed by people. If we care and share for each other all over the planet we will have an enjoyable planet. We don’t have to make wars on each other. We don’t have to exploit each other. We can invent money systems that don’t concentrate wealth but really grease economies so that they work well. So I think get experience of the world, find out who you--
I think the internet can do a lot to enhance [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: I think the internet can do a lot to enhance local communities just through the sharing of information. As communities around the world are learning to reinvent themselves people are developing for example a lot of strategies for non-adversarial politics, for local democracies new kinds of local town meetings and decision making processes, new ways of doing conflict resolution, and as these get passed around on the internet they’re available to more and more people. Go to the co-intelligence institute online. It’s probably cointelligenceinstitute.org or co-intelligence.org. Tom Atlee, you can google his name you’ll come up with it too. There are by now there are thou—[audio goes out] on how people can do peoples communities in non-adversarial ways, to avoid conflicts, to avoid wars in the future, how people can get along with each other. The sharing of stories among people makes friends out of people, and when communities work in a non-adversarial way then there is no way to divide them and to conquer them. I think democracy, being an adversarial system, is a problem that we may not be able to carry into the future. How do we do living economies and living politics, studying nature. How do we pass all this information around? On the internet. So it’s a wonderful opportunity for a global dialogue. It’s a fantastic research tool. You can look anything up there now and you can get brilliant ideas for working in your local community on local issues.
The future of the city is a very interesting [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: The future of the city is a very interesting question because we’re going to have the opportunity to reinvent cities whether we like it or not. Thirteen of the largest 20 cities in the world are at sea level. Global warming is going to force those cities to relocate. Are we going to put them into the same kind of heavy and wasteful infrastructure that they have now? Or are we going to learn to build lean, green, clean cities further uphill? China has a huge project for building a green city for one million people. It’s the largest reinvention of the city on the planet. So it will be an exciting one to follow. I don’t know why China is building this city at sea level off the coast of Shanghai because appropriately it should be further uphill, but I’m sure that China will also build green cities inland and in safer places for, in terms of the coming future. And I hope other countries will follow suit. I know that some of the best talent for building sustainable living infrastructures in the United States is being hired by China and I admire the foresight there even while they’re using up a lot of oil and developing their economy at breakneck pace, they’re also looking into the future and looking into all the energy alternatives and the new ways of building cities and that’s very much to their credit. I would hope that my own country, the United States, would start building green cities very quickly to hold the populations that will have to move from our coastal cities within the next generation or two. And we don’t know how long it will take. The north Atlantic could have a huge tsunami at any time now if the lake the size of Lakes Ontario and Erie together on top of the Greenland ice breaks through floods into the north Atlantic. The climate disasters that are coming up with this oncoming hot age will be huge, will force people out of their homes, will demand that we build new cities. New Orleans is being rebuilt now. Is it being rebuilt as a green, clean city? We have a lot to learn, we have a lot to do and we’re up for the task because we can easily know how to do it and do it. But it’s going to take a great deal of will, a great deal of mass action, a great deal of energy from the young generation to insist that they don’t want to live unsustainably and that they want to build habitats that are sustainable. So the future city can be gorgeous, wonderful, sustainable, fun to live in. Go and design it! And then build it.
Exactly. If all Chinese people want a car [...]
Elisabet Sahtouris: Exactly. If all Chinese people want a car like Americans have then of course the good side is that China already has more stringent pollution requirements for their cars than we do. And actually all the Chinese could have cars if they would make the cars from renewable resources, from plant material which can be done, and make them very lightweight, then you have to use less material to build your roads and there are less dangers in driving them because even a woman could turn her car back up if it were knocked over, if it rolled over into the ditch or something. And then you have to use fuels that are renewable as well. And there are possibilities now for using water as fuel. So I like to say to young people who are technologically minded get really creative, do technology that has no toxics and is 100% recyclable and then there won’t be any limits to what you can create because it won’t drain the earth’s resources and it won’t pollute. So it’s possible to do very benign technologies. Whether we want individual ownership cars or rather share cars or have little bubbles that punch together in chains and go down tracks or whatever. I don’t know what the transportation of the future will be like. It’s up to the people who are young today to invent new ways of doing transportation. If we make a really sustainable world it will also be more fun to stay home so people won’t be so eager to go away all the time. And we can use the internet and teleconferencing so that we don’t have to burn airplane fuel to get around the world as we still do today. So many possibilities for doing things more lightly on the earth.
