Transcription

• Speaker #0

  So I come from this town called Vizag on the east coast of India, on the south. In 2019, 2020, we started implementing our program in India, the Common Land Program. And suddenly we went into this COVID period in the middle of 2020. I got stuck in my hometown. for a month because there was a curfew and nobody was allowed to move out. At that period in time, there was a huge human cry about where is the food coming for the city? Because in the fear that people would contaminate each other and infect each other, all the food coming from the rural sites was stopped. But interestingly, only a few years earlier to this was another disaster because a huge cyclone hit the city and all the vegetation in the city was completely broken down. So they had to replace all the trees and replant them. And they planted these trees with all nuts and fruits and different kinds of edible trees instead of cosmetic and flower trees. So that foresight of whoever the planner was or urban designer was who actually put in all these food plants in the city helped create a food forest. And in the crisis, in the COVID, when the food was not coming into the city from outside, you suddenly started seeing people harvesting jackfruits and mangoes from... They were growing everywhere in the city. So the city was not starved because of this foresight and you had your own food all over the place. And cheap and accessible food was available even though it was not coming from the production places because you were just growing your own food forest. So that gave me a wake up, said whoa, this is definitely how we can actually make our cities more resilient to food rather than just depending on some far off food source. You can actually grow a certain amount of things just around everywhere.

• Speaker #1

  Hi there my friends and welcome back to the deep seed. This week we have a wonderful conversation with Dr. Shekhar Kalipaka. He's a scientist working at the intersection between anthropology and wildlife conservation. The key word today is going to be coexistence. So how do we humans learn to coexist again with the rest of nature? Please don't forget to like this video and subscribe to the deep sea it makes a huge difference for me So thank you so much for that in advance. This episode was made in partnership with Commonland. I am Raphael, your host today, and you're listening to The Deep Seed. Enjoy. Hi, Shikhar. Hi, hi. What are you the most grateful for at the moment?

• Speaker #0

  A lot of things, honestly. I just love life. So I'm just a lover of life. And the fact that I mean, on one side, things can be, they could be looking so gruesome with the war in places and with the El Nino effects that you see on the television and stuff like that. But there are also some small things that make it more interesting. For example, we have this lovely garden in a backyard. We stopped taming it. And then suddenly my daughter and my family, we were just talking yesterday, and then suddenly we realized this year we see more number of... insects in our garden and more butterflies and birds and many which we haven't seen for many years uh it just feels amazing how how how nature can come back given a chance so yeah small things like that uh make

• Speaker #1

  me extremely happy that's great um if there's one important key message that you would you would like to make sure people leave us with today what would it be

• Speaker #0

  How can we... coexist on this planet with other species, for example? How do we master the art of just not dominating this planet, but also to live amiably with others? The concept of coexistence.

• Speaker #1

  Why is it so important that we learn to coexist with... other life forms?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, I mean, one is for the sheer sake of experience and our dependence. We are, as a species on this planet, we're just not on our own. I mean, it may feel I feel very artificial staying in a glass building like this, that you're just alone for yourself here, and everything else is cosmetic. But in the real world, it's not so. I mean, this is a complex web of life, and we are just a little part of that web, and we are so interconnected to that web. But then the minute you put yourself into a glass house and just get disconnected from this. It feels very odd, honestly. It feels we are like isolated from the rest. And just in a generation which I've seen with many of my friends and my own family in India, the minute you put yourself in a glass house, in one lifetime you can just be disconnected from the entire nature to a degree that you're scared of butterflies and dragonflies and small things because you just lost the touch of walking barefoot on the ground. So life becomes very much more controlled.

• Speaker #1

  This is a subject, the subject of coexistence that you've studied quite a lot. Do you have any sort of examples or stories to share with us to illustrate your point on this topic?

• Speaker #0

  I mean, this particular topic fascinated me from the time I went to school. So I studied forestry in India. And later I studied wildlife, and later I went on to do a PhD in anthropology, and also trying to build all these together, mix all these together. So it was a very interdisciplinary subject. And very early on, I got exposed to this concept of something called biophilia. So biophilia is the love for nature. So as a species, I mean, we are hardwired. Because we are nature ourself, we are part of this. There's a lot of love in us for nature. So there's a, for example, you see a sunrise and there's a beautiful emotion there. Or you see waves, or you see trees. I mean, there's a lot of emotion. So this is called a biophilia. The minute nature triggers a certain kind of fulfillment, happiness in you, it unleashes in you these feelings of being happy. You feel very good about it. So that is... already built into us because we are part of nature ourselves. At the same time, there's also a concept called biophobia. It's also a kind of a protection mechanism which gets embedded into you. So you're by default scared of a few things, like for example, a snake. It's also a survival mechanism because as a species, I mean, you need to be careful because this could be a poisonous snake or some colors of frogs, for example, or insects. If it's a very bright beetle, automatically your mind is saying, hey, don't touch it. So there's also an inbuilt mechanism which already, you know, creates a phobia. But then to live with nature, you need to have a good balance of these. If you get disconnected, you get more of the biophobia. And then everything looks scary.

• Speaker #1

  How interesting that the majority of people are quite scared of microbes and bacteria. And we get this praise from the supermarket, 99.9 killed bacteria. We really see it as something scary. While we're actually partially made of microbes, right?

• Speaker #0

  Indeed. Yeah. Yeah, that's what it all gets to.

• Speaker #1

  So I'd love to sort of go back in time and talk about how humans used to live 20,000 years ago and how they used to coexist with nature. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

• Speaker #0

  Well, I can give you a few examples. I mean, in fact, coincidentally, we started interviewing people as part of our studies, as part of my studies earlier. But what you realized is. A lot of the folklore was a word of mouth which gets transferred from a generation to another generation. So for example, the stories around wolves or stories around tigers or stories around bears. And the beliefs about them, whether an owl is an evil bird or a bird of good omen. I mean, these kind of belief systems and everything get passed on from generation to generation. A black cat that you see in the morning, is it a good sign or not? So there's so many beliefs that get passed on from generation to generation. So how long can they go back is something very debatable. Or are these beliefs very recent? We're not sure. But what is definitely for sure is I encountered a lot of rock art. in the areas where I worked. And that fascinated me, because these rock art date back to thousands and thousands of years ago. So, in fact, they open up a window into how people in the same area where you're working used to live thousands of years ago.

• Speaker #1

  Sorry, what's rock art?

• Speaker #0

  A rock art is paintings on rock made by people who used to live in these areas thousands of years ago. And so you have these caves or rocks or escarpments in natural stone. And then ages ago, people used to just sit under them and just draw. whatever they saw. And then when you, so we started studying rock art in this area. So because that became a huge evidence of the relationships humans had in this area with their nature. And suddenly you realize, you see paintings of, these rock paintings of a tiger chasing monkeys. I mean, this is not a scary picture of a tiger trying to attack a human or something like that. I mean, this is a beautiful illustration of a person sitting and observing a tiger chasing three monkeys. And then he etches this thing on stone. This I see as biophilia. This is not a scared human trying to draw something which made him frightened. But this is something, you know, out of happiness and pure delight of watching what he saw. So you start noticing that, hey, so this idea about this love for nature and observing all these things. I mean, so you can start seeing these in rock art and they've always been with us.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. So interesting.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  Because I suppose humans have existed for, what, 300,000 years, more or less, give or take. And for the vast majority of that, they were living close to nature. They were coexisting with nature as hunter-gatherers, right? The way we live today is very, very recent. So you would imagine that inside of us, we have that still there in us, no?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, I mean, we don't really have to go back so far. to establish our connect with nature. There are people who still live very closely with nature. For example, in the places where we work in India, you have tribes who just live from the forest. They live in the forest. They're very little they want from the outside world. And so most of the, I mean, they just hunt and they gather their honey and grow seasonally whatever crops. They can when the rains come and they worship the forest and the spirits of the forest. So if an animal is killed, they offer the animal spirits, they say thank you to it. And hey, we just take one animal for our own survival. So there's a huge amount of respect to nature. So there are people who live so closely with nature, just where we are working. And 10 kilometers from them are people who have never been in a forest.

• Speaker #1

  And that's a real question I've been asking myself recently. I've always assumed, like the vast majority of people, that my life today is so much better. I have this amazing level of comfort, right? I have a roof over my head, hot water, a fridge to keep my food fresh. You know, we have things that would have been considered miracles by our ancestors. And yet many people are fairly unhappy, disconnected, lost the sense of purpose. We see a lot of people with depression and things like that. And so I wonder sometimes if really we are in a better place, if really we are happier today than our ancestors would have been maybe tens of thousands of years ago.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, I mean, that's kind of a tough question, I would say. Because there are, for example, countries who are putting a lot of weightage for how happy we are as civilizations. For example, Bhutan has a measure for index of happiness. It's one of the measures. And just not the... uh gdp or or or how much do you earn but it's also about how happy a person is so i mean i think these are the kind of things which are extremely important they should also become mainstream for the western countries we also have uh finland or norway or the scandinavian countries they're usually in the top uh you know five list of the happiest countries in the world so there so there There is a... There is a very deep consciousness that we should also use other metrics to see how fulfilling life is. It's just not about the material things. It's also about what's making us really worth living. And is it something more than just material things? And I think, yeah, there is that growing interest.

• Speaker #1

  What I'm interested in trying to understand at this point is like how. Our connection with nature and our ability to coexist with nature has changed over time and how this has led to some issues. We have erosion of biodiversity, you have climate change, you have all of these problems that we're facing right now and I want to try and understand how the

• Speaker #0

  changes in human behavior possibly led to these issues and how we can maybe you know move forward from there i mean looking at i mean coming from a background in anthropology and and how things are panned out for for for the humans i mean one of the one of the clear evidences or or one of the big steps is the the invention of agriculture So when humans are really shifted away from a hunter-gatherer life to settled agriculture, they saw a big jump in human numbers because as a hunter-gatherer, you're constantly looking for food and you're just moving from place to place because seasonally the animals are also moving and then you're just following the animals and then you're moving all across. So you're not really in one place all the time. You're just constantly moving between places. In that case, what happens is You also don't have much time to care for the sick and the old. Sometimes you may just have to leave the younger lot and the older lot who can't move fast enough in some places with some small amount of food, hoping as hell that they will... survive while you are going out hunting and coming back it may just take a few weeks to go around so it is a life where there is a very high human mortality and chances of accidents and things like that but But early on, when agriculture really came in, people started hoarding because you can grow in a small patch more than you can consume at any one point. So that allowed chances for people to have enough supply of food that can actually take you. And that really changed the way in which we started doing business. with ourselves and started treating ourselves. I mean, we had more time for other things. I mean, for example, more socializing, more relaxation, ability to give somebody a loan because you have too much of food. So you can actually give it to somebody who can't give you cash. So the invention of money and currencies came in because you don't have to now trade in big bags, but you can actually trade with coins and notes instead. So a whole leap in how our social organization came in, took place after the invention of agriculture. That was a very special period for us. And this happened around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. And after which, the human population never saw a dip. And on the planet, we were completely growing all the time. And then we could go to the harshest parts of the planet, populate the Russian tundra, start growing things on Mongolian plains and grow in the highest parts of the Himalayas. So that has changed really our fruit production systems and so on and so forth. To a degree that it's also a bit scary because you have a whole population now shifting into the cities. For example, the big cities in India, for example, if you see, they hold 20 million people or more. And nobody grows anything there. You're all dependent on somebody who's growing and you're only consuming it. So which means it makes you pretty vulnerable to constant food supply. And I mean, 20 million is almost the size of the Netherlands. So a whole country is living in a city and they're completely dependent on somebody else to provide them for the food. And in times of... crises like the COVID pandemic, you suddenly start realizing that the food production system is cut and suddenly everybody becomes vulnerable because you don't have people coming in and going out of cities. And yeah, and then you get locked in your cities. So these are big puzzles for our own selves. How do we create resilience in food supply, for example? Are there different ways in which we can ensure we have adequate food. But this is also, for example, in the Indian context, many, many years ago, in the early 70s, there were these great disasters which created a lot of hunger and a lot of death. As a result of that, they started something called the Green Revolution and then started using chemical fertilizers and certain kind of crop varieties and promoting more of rice and wheat as a standard crops rather than others, just to create enough food for. the millions who live there. Now today, it's just not millions, it's billions who live there. It's more than a billion people who live there. And that very green revolution which created a surplus and saved humanity from starving is right now threatening mankind. Because too many people, a very large part of the... Continent is used to grow food and with artificial supplements like chemical fertilizers and so on and so forth. And yeah, it's a disaster for biodiversity, for example, because you're putting in so much of nutrients into the ground and pesticides into the... Nothing else can live there.

• Speaker #1

  How are farmers managing at the moment with the... With the energy crisis caused by the recent war in Iran.

• Speaker #0

  The energy crisis is a disaster in the making. Because India is very highly energy dependent, especially for its petroleum products, which come from various sources in the world. A large dependence on the Russians and also from Middle East and America and whoever has the oil and gas. But then the country which also have oil and gas also produce fertilizers. Because potash, for example, or urea or ammonia, all these are derivatives of... petroleum products and then um and and then you you create sulfur out of it and then you make sulfuric acid and from that uh you create something else uh you add this to potash to clean it and uh so and all the fertilizer is made in the middle east for example because they have so much petrol and the derivatives of petrol is fertilizer And for example, in this war, because of the blockade on goods and ships moving out of the Strait of Hormuz, petrol prices went up, which meant production of fertilizer became very expensive. So some production was also stopped, but luckily India has some reserves for a few years. But then that can get threatened if these blockades become longer. But the cost of production goes up. Now, what this means is the food prices will go up because the cost of production of food will also go up because of cost of fertilizer and fuel. So it leads to a whole trigger of chain reactions. And yeah, it makes life very difficult for many people.

• Speaker #1

  This episode is actually part of a mini-series that we created together in partnership with Commonland. So Commonland is a non-profit organization working on large-scale ecosystem restoration projects in over 20 different countries around the world. And they typically do that by bringing people together within a bioregion or a landscape. Farmers, community leaders... scientists, like all kinds of different people who have a stake in the local landscape, and they will just give them the space and the tools and the context in which to build their own projects. I'm a big fan of their approach and their work, and I'm really proud to be partnering with them for this mini-series. I will leave a link in the description of this episode, of course, if you'd like to learn more. But in the meantime, let's get back to our conversation with Dr. Shekhar Kodibagyan. You mentioned that you studied anthropology, so you're very interested in humans and human behavior as well, I'm assuming.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, absolutely.

• Speaker #1

  Humans are complex beings, right? And it seems like we have a lot of knowledge and a lot of science and a lot of data saying, you know, these are problems and this is what we should be doing. But we don't seem to be doing the things that we should be doing. Like, how do we move forward, like, into a future where we can, you know, feed ourselves? thrive while regenerating biodiversity and coexisting with nature? How do we trigger that positive change in human behavior that we're not really seeing at the moment?

• Speaker #0

  The different ways in which you can make sense of these kind of things. For example, if I were to talk to my mother or my aunts, I mean, I don't have my grandparents, but when I spoke to my grandparents, there was always this thing about contentment. How can you be content? It's not like that ever-increasing need for more and But, hey, when you can say, hey, I feel good, I have enough, this is what it is. I just don't need everything. For example, just imagine a country like India. On one side, you have very temperate weather in the Himalayas where you grow apples and grapefruits and all kinds of fancy things that grow in the temperate weather. And then you have the tropical side where you have mangoes and other things that grow in the tropical sides. Till very recently, we never had, we just used to have our own local vegetables or fruits because we didn't have the distribution systems. So, for example, in the south, when we grew up, I mean, we never ate apples because... It was just not there. But when you traveled on holidays to the north of India, you'd get apples there. So now what's happened is the whole of South India, for example, is now dependent on or likes to have a certain kind of a fruit which is grown in North India. So you're just growing for the whole country. So you just increase the scale of even precious things that used to be rare and very geographically located. for the consumer market. So in that way, food has become extremely consumer-driven. Sometimes I wonder if that is really sustainable. If I want to have, sitting in South India, if I want to have apples every day for my breakfast, now that I'm really questioning myself, oh, where is this apple coming from? At what cost is this guy growing? At what is the carbon footprint of being transported from an area far off, 2,000 kilometers from where I am eating, all this food coming here and getting into my, you know, breakfast, mostly. So I'm just wondering, what are the cost of... That kind of a consumerism. Can't I keep it much more local, be happy with what is grown locally? Because as kids, that's how we've been raised, mostly to just eat seasonally what is there, rather than just eating exotic things.

• Speaker #1

  Is it possible that maybe... these crises, like the energy crisis right now, will start making it much more difficult and expensive to actually have these foods available at the wrong place at the wrong time and naturally kind of forces back to working more in harmony with the cycles, with local ecosystems, with things like that?

• Speaker #0

  Well, it has to. Because, for example, in the Netherlands, we are completely re-looking at the way our... energy is distributed. Now, for example, we are looking at how do we tap energy at a Khamente level, at the lowest level of our administration. For example, my village produces a certain kind of thermal energy. So how can that local production, and there are a few factories there which produce hot water. So how can we use our own local water, for example, for our heating systems, and so on, so forth. So they're trying to decentralize energy to that level of Khamente. I think that is smart. I mean, while it may cost, the transition itself will definitely cost a lot of money, but I think it's definitely a very different way of looking at our energy.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. Commend is like municipality, right? Right. It's like, yeah, a small local.

• Speaker #0

  At a village level.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  Or a couple of villages together have a, is a command. But on the other hand, in the Indian context, if you just look at it, There is also a very different kind of awakening where there are different organizations which are trying to come up with prototypes of what should a future city in India look like, where we are not too dependent on, where we're just not making it just concrete. Where people and nature can coexist. Where some of our gardens and everything also can be developed as food forests. So that whenever somebody goes for a walk, you have a berry or a guava or something to eat. And yeah, you don't have to buy everything.

• Speaker #1

  embed that into your into your daily life you can just pluck a fruit off of a tree rather than having to go to the supermarket every time you want to eat a fruit revive a little piece of your hunter-gatherer uh self that's still in there that wants to go out in the forest and i i love it i love going for a walk in the forest and get like finding berries and and edible and wild plants that i know i can take home and make a tea from it's just there's something really nice about it Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  So that's, I also see that kind of, but that's also a knowledge thing. So you need really need to know which mushroom to pick, which berry to eat, which one not to eat. So if people get disconnected and lose that art of picking the right ones, then that's also the human rewilding that's required. It's not about rewilding your cities and rewilding animals, but it's also human rewilding. How do we learn these art? How do we learn these tricks of, you know, picking the right things? I think that is, so we have some work cut out for us, because these things, Once you lose them, it's not easy to revive them back. It takes long years of sustained interaction with nature to really know what to pick up and what is nice and also that curiosity to be knowing all these things. Yeah, so it takes a lot of time. And I hope that some of these landscapes that we're restoring allows these opportunities for people because we're already seeing evidence of that when we, for example, as part of our work, our partners, What they do is they take farmers from one part of the landscape to another part of the landscape they've never been before and vice versa to see how life is in different parts. So there's a lot of cross-pollination of learnings and they are so... many inspiring aha moments there. So that's where the return of inspiration actually becomes a force where you can actually see how do you bring that inspiration back in people to go back into hunter-gatherer mode or rewild yourself or bring a little bit more nature into your very developed manicured setting. Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  I really love that concept, cross-pollination of knowledge. It sounds cool. You mentioned sort of common land projects happening in India. Could you tell us more about that? Like what's common land doing?

• Speaker #0

  Now, common land, with the support of IKEA Foundation, identified India as one of the interesting places to work in because of the sheer complexity of the place and an opportunity to work there. across these diversity of landscapes and diversities of people and all these things that we've been speaking about. And started in 2019 a holistic landscape restoration program. So what this means is it's just not about the physical restoration, which is trying to reassure about trying to reestablish your water systems or put in more trees or work with soil erosion. It's also trying to look at the social capital, the people who can actually do these things. So the difference between a project and a program is the project has a very short time start date and end date. But for a program, it's slightly, it has a longer gestation. So here we are looking, this is a program with a longer gestation for a transition from what is happening right now to a society, to societies which can actually manage things on their own in a more resilient way. So how can we get into this transition? How to make sure that it's just not a few pilots that you actually, you know, establish to prove what's happening. But how can we actually scale these to larger landscapes? So that has been the interest from the start. How can we work at scale? So start with small pilots and see which of these pilots can actually be interesting to be scaled up. So in that, Common Land supports Indian partners who have a realization. that yes, our landscapes need restoring and definitely, and they're trying their best to do it. And we are seeing and trying to see what kind of conditions should we build so that they can effectively do what they're doing. For example, some partners may face at some point some financial difficulties to raise money for the work they're doing. So is there some other innovative way in which we can raise funding? so how can we talk about it? Some of them have maybe some technical complications so how can we create networks so that experiences from different parts of the world can actually flow into the landscape and maybe it'll help them solve their problems. How can we build the capacity within these organizations? So depending on... Each landscape, which has its own unique challenges and a composition of partners who have their own capabilities. So we are trying to create those conditions which will help them address the issues which are most important for them.

• Speaker #1

  Do you have more examples to share with us to sort of illustrate like concrete examples of some of these? programs that you've put in place and the people you're working with and what they're trying to achieve and the results that you've managed to get so far and things like that yeah one of the landscapes that we started working is it's called kabir dam it's a district uh just

• Speaker #0

  like the coming to here it's a it's a district um and um and you have a few hundred villages in this district so vote. This district is located in central India, in the state of Chhattisgarh. And in this district are hills and flat lands below the hills. So you can visualize this whole area as a... has a hilly side on one side, and then it opens into, it meanders into a plains area. So the water is flowing from the hills into the plains. In the hills live the tribes, and in the plains live the farmer communities. And all the farmlands have been converted to grow sugarcane and rice. But there's more to... Life than sugarcane and rice, because you may need other things like, for example, you may need the gooseberries or you may need a lot of forest produced like honey and so on and so forth. So and the hills are the only places where there's forest now. And the tribes are already depending on the forest. now and the plains people also need the honey and all the things that are coming from the forest so look at the pressure on the forest now this this competition has created uh uh an economic disparity and uh so at the end of the day the money wins uh so the plane the people in the plains have won uh because they can buy the produce out so so people have started over harvesting so now the forests have become degraded. So what that means is the tribes can't survive and live from that forest anymore like they used to and now they have to look for other alternative livelihoods or they have to migrate to other places to find work because the forest can't support them anymore. And on the other hand they also depleted a lot of trees because of over harvesting and some species are simply not found. So it's like a catch-22 situation where everybody gets affected in it, either this way or that way. But at the end of the day, the forest is taking a hit, the natural resources are disappearing, and both people suffer. So what we're doing is we're sitting on a branch and we're cutting the same edge of the branch. The whole branch will collapse now. So that's the stupidity in the whole situation, which is very visible. But I really wonder why it's taking so long for people to see the reality of it. Because the very water that we use, we are polluting it. And then we are complaining that, hey, there's more diarrhea and dysentery and people are getting polluted because of the water. But it's us who are actually putting all our garbage into it and putting our processed materials and industrial waste into it and polluting these streams and rivers.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, so this example, how does it...

• Speaker #0

  like tied to the work of common land yeah now this is how the problems start building yeah these are interconnected problems uh it's just not done by one person because if you have the forest but it's being influenced by people on the on on the uh on the plains but there are also people living in the hills uh who are also dependent on it and now they're also suffering uh so so this is how the nature of the problems look like so interconnected and so huge and having huge impact both for nature and for people living in these landscapes. Now, on one hand, because it's all interconnected, this is also called a system. By fixing one part, the whole thing does not fix because these are all interconnected parts, just like a bicycle. You just have to make sure that the whole bicycle is functioning for it to run efficiently. So this whole system has to be fixed. All these different groups have to be dealt with and all these different areas have to be restored. for this whole place to function again in the way it used to be earlier, so that everybody thrives here. You have to make sure the nature thrives. You also have to see the people thrive and people of different types thrive. Once we understand the complexity and trying to understand who's doing what, now CommonLand as an organization, what we do is we try to be with the groups and try to see, hey, do we really want to solve today's problems or are we trying to create a foundation for a future which works? So suddenly you start seeing groups which resonate with these kind of ideas. Hey, it's not about solving today's problems. It's also trying to see that these problems never occur again. How can we, you know... create landscapes where these problems, the deep roots of these problems are solved. So with these kind of like-minded organizations, you start building coalitions and start seeing how do we actually start working with these coalitions. Because there's so many people influencing the whole thing, you don't start working on everything at the same time. You start small with a few groups and learn the art of working together and see... what is that they require to actually be effectively working. If you really want to address the roots, because you have to be very careful when we talk about these roots of these problems, a lot of them are not visually visible. You can just see that the water is dirty, but what makes the water dirty is not visible. It's just, it could be human practices. It could be subsidized industry, which is actually pumping it into it, or lack of technology, which is actually allowing the industry to pump all the sewage into the water you really there are also a lot of layers which are invisible and different people are responsible for all these different things so you start having dialogues with all these different uh influencers when i say we it is the the local partners who start bringing all these different people and start start creating pilots of seeing hey this is one way we can restore this patch for example if in one area Yeah. We had demonstrations in one agriculture patch where they're using too much of water. One of our partners demonstrated how you can actually grow the same sugar cane and the sugar cane in the same way. same paddy using less water. Now, so that saved about 30% of water less. So in an area which is very, I mean, where there's a shortage of water, 30% less water to grow a very water intensive crop is a lot of water saved. And now this evidence that, hey, we can actually save water by changing the way we are farming. Now, this has to be fed to the government because the government is one of the biggest organs which will scale these practices because you're talking about hundreds of villages. uh so now this impact is now shown to the government and now they will have an they will you know look at the evidence and uh and how you're doing it and then they will adopt it and then scale it um so similarly for for many many things um

• Speaker #1

  can you tell us a little bit more about this these specific uh farming methods you said like they changed the way they were growing that allowed them to save water like do is it possible for you to get into the specifics of of these kind of new farming techniques?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. Here, the question is about water. So we are talking about a landscape. In one part of the landscape is very intensive commercial agriculture. So you're growing sugarcane, and the sugarcane is used in ethanol factories to produce E20. India has a commitment to have 20% of its fuel coming from ethanol so that it can reduce imports from the Middle East and other countries. So it wants to become energy self-sufficient. So they're using precious water because sugarcane is an extremely water-demanding crop. So you're growing an extremely water-demanding crop in an area which is very prone to droughts and has very little water. And growing ethanol. where only 2% of the local population actually have cars or public transport to go in. So you're all growing here for somebody in the cities to consume. With the local water and on local soil, using local nutrients or chemical nutrients and so on and so forth. As a result of this, there's a huge impact on the local population too. For example, sugarcane is not feeding you. Sugarcane is just a commercial crop, but you also have to have an interesting food plate. You should also eat interesting food. Sugarcane is a cash crop. So you sell your crop and you get paid for the sugarcane. And everything else you have to buy from the market. But on the other side, if you go to the tribes, They're also growing a lot of stuff themselves. The forest is providing them a lot for free. So they also have their own, they still have their trees and stuff which give them free mangoes. So you don't have to buy everything. But here you have to buy everything. And unfortunately, here we also have small land holdings. So what this means is the average size of the land a person has is between zero, which is they don't have land, to two hectares. So your entire family's income, everything is dependent on these two hectares that you have. So that is a very limited amount of money and everything you have to buy. So our partner, they thought, okay, what is a good way in which we can actually integrate trees into this landscape and bring slightly more diversity? What is a way in which we can actually bring and increase the quality of the home garden? So you have a small patch of land behind your house where you can actually create a home garden and grow different kinds of local vegetables and stuff in a very healthy way, using local manure without using chemicals. So that while you have cash coming from sugarcane, you also have nutrition. which you don't have to buy all the time. You can also grow it yourself. A few people in the house can actually grow a home garden and maintain it. And then you can measure it. on the variety of things that you're eating every day. So that's called a food plate count. So what is the diversity on your food plate? How interesting is your food? Are you just eating just rice and lentils and a few basic things? Or are you eating two kinds of vegetables and two kinds of chutneys and some fruits with it and some tomatoes with it? How interesting is the food plate? And so that's what they measure to see whether this is having an impact on the quality of the food people are eating. And next they see how these trees are growing on the fields. And because every tree is also bringing more birds into the area, they bring more insects into the area. So it's also contributing to biodiversity. And it's also, so whatever, for example, if they have bamboo there or if they have mangoes there, that's also bringing them extra income. So how can we integrate elements of nature both into the fields, which are so far only sugarcane, and how can we improve the... quality of things that you grow at home so that your food is not compromised and make you a little more resilient and interesting. Yeah, so these are the small kinds of experiments for small farmers that are being done. And now in time... Let's say every farmer has, let's say he's put in two mango trees. And then once you start working with a few thousand farmers, suddenly you'll have a few thousand mango trees. Now that becomes an interesting case for a business. Because then you can start a small industry around mangoes and mango processing. So now which actually stimulates more economy, more jobs into the local area. So how can you also develop business cases around whatever you're growing? So yeah, that's how they're all thinking on generating different kinds of returns. It's just not only financial returns, but also social returns and natural returns. But the biodiversity comes back. There's a social security on food that you eat and control it, just not be dependent on the markets. How can you create business cases in the near future? So that's holistic. Holistic.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. If you'd like to support me and the work I'm doing with the Deep Seed, you can actually do that in just a few seconds by simply clicking on the like button, on the subscribe button. And if you have a bit of time, just leave us a question or a message in the comment section just down here as well. It makes a huge difference for me. So thank you so much in advance. I really appreciate it. So now let's get back to the end of the conversation with Dr. Shekhar Kalibeka. You mentioned earlier the return of inspiration. In a previous episode with Willem, we talked a lot about it as well as being very, very key. This kind of project sounds very exciting, actually very hopeful. So is that something that you've seen or that's been part of your work?

• Speaker #0

  I mean, I think that is the first thing that... It struck me when I learned about Common Land. It was something very new, the return of inspiration. So the first thing, my own academic mind went around trying to understand, whoa, what is this? What is inspiration? Because inspiration is a feeling. It's something that happens to you cognitively in your mind, and that has an emotional and physiological impact. impact. But then a lot of it is happening inside your mind. It's a feeling just like falling in love. It's an emotion. Inspiration is also emotion that just triggers in your mind. And so many things happen as a result of that after. So it did catch my attention immediately. And I tried to understand who studies inspiration, how do they study, what do we know about inspiration. And Um... So my studies led me to an American scientist called Professor Todd Thrash from West Virginia University. And he's been studying inspiration for 20 plus years. So I took about six months, read every publication of his, which was more than 100, to understand what did he find out about inspiration. And that really helped me gather a basis, the scientific basis for understanding inspiration. So inspiration is just not one word. It's called an episode of inspiration. There are three stages in inspiration. The first thing is, inspiration is always coming from... outside of you. You're being, it's coming from the external. So not very, not many people talk about being self-inspired. You talk about being self-motivated, but you don't talk about being self-inspired. So you listen to something, you watch something, you read something, or you hear something, or you experience something, and suddenly inspiration sets in. So it's always coming from the external. So there's a trigger that actually triggers inspiration. And the first thing that happens is a moment, an aha moment happens in your mind cognitively. That's the first step. It's called illumination. And in that phase, you realize a new possibility, a new something you see in what you've just. experienced. So somebody, one farmer goes from one village to another village and he sees something there and suddenly it strikes an idea in his mind and that is the trigger of an illumination, a new possibility. Oh, I've seen sugarcane there. Is sugarcane? I don't know what to do with my field. A moment, an aha, a new possibility, a new awareness kicks in your mind. So that's called illumination. And then from there, it goes to another stage called evocation. So it becomes very vividly clear where did this idea evoke from? Oh, it came from that farm. Oh, it came from that concert I went to. Oh, I went to that museum. That is where I saw and got inspired. So that's a moment of clarity where it becomes very vividly clear in your mind where the source of inspiration is. And suddenly at that stage, a kind of something called as internal motivation kicks in. And then you do something with this motivation. So this idea kicks in, this possibility kicks in, and you know where it's coming from. And suddenly you act on it. So from the idea to action, and once you acted on it, the inspiration cycle is complete. So, it is an amazing human experience, simply because from the time you get an illumination to the time you act, it happens automatically, without your control. You can't stop it. There is no fear of failure, or there's no thinking of wrong or right. You just act and do it. So... So this is how the cognitive psychologists explain the episode of inspiration. And then, to me, working in India, the first question to my mind that came in was, okay, everything about inspiration that I've read so far, heard so far, researched so far, is all about a Western interpretation of... a western mind thinking about inspiration is this also true for somebody who's not having a western mind for example or the western way of sense making so in india we have this opportunity to see for example uh you and i we must have gone to the same western schools where are from from our early learning it's all about logic and reasoning how you solve problems and so there's a certain way in which we are upbringing is how are learning has taken place. But what about those people who have not learned the same way? They've learned in another kind of a traditional way. For example, you've just learned hunting or gazing at stars and telling a good day from a bad day or making sense of things from a very, very different mental lens. So what do they think about inspiration? So because we are working in a non-Western society in India. So it was very important to see how people who are living in non-Western societies, what kind of impression do they have about inspiration? Does it also relate to them? Or is it only to the Western society? And then Common Land was very generous to allow us to do our research in India on inspiration, on the people in the areas where we are working. And that went into two years of research on the topic. And we had a small team and we started working with local communities and trying to understand what inspiration is all about. And at the end of the research, we had so much of understanding about how non-Western society, people from non-Western societies, you know, they thought about inspiration.

• Speaker #1

  And how does it differ?

• Speaker #0

  In many languages, there is no equivalent word for inspiration. So asking somebody to define what is inspiration is a wrong question. You can ask them to explain an experience of inspiration. For people who have no exact word, because I said it's an episode, right? It's three different things happening at the same time. It's called inspiration. All the three.

• Speaker #1

  Illumination, evocation, and what? Realization or?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, or action. Action, yeah. So if you only get an idea, if you only get an illumination and it stops there, if you don't act, it's called inspired by. I was inspired by him. But then you should also. Only the cycle becomes inspiration when it's inspired by and to do. So both of them should finish. Otherwise, it's not inspiration. It only then becomes half of it. It becomes only inspired by. I get an idea, an illumination, and it stops there. I don't act on it.

• Speaker #1

  That's interesting. I've never heard of it that way. You know, people say, oh, I saw this movie. I found it so inspiring. Like, it doesn't always lead to action, but we call it inspiration. But actually, by this, like... definition or explanation, you should actually act on it for it to really be considered inspiration.

• Speaker #0

  I'm sure they must have acted in some way. Otherwise, subconsciously, they would not call it inspiration. They should have acted. on it yeah it could be subtle things it need not be uh every time a magic invention or something for example i could just go to a movie i would have been inspired by something from that movie i could have as a inspired action i would immediately recommend it to my uh friend okay so that it could be as simple as that yeah or i heard a beautiful i went to a concert and immediately i came out and then i start singing and making a new tune so it could be as simple as yeah that and It could be as complex as something new. Because there's also a creative facet in that. Because you're doing it, it's coming from so deep and without your control. Sometimes it's artistic. So you end up doing very creative things. So that's another advantage of inspiration. So the output is always something that you like. When you do an inspired action, you will never regret having done it. That doesn't exist.

• Speaker #1

  Absolutely. And so coming back to your example from earlier in India, and now the return of inspiration like that you've explained so well.

• Speaker #0

  But here, what we wanted in India was, one is, when you don't have control on it, how can you operationalize it in your programs? So how can we, you know, create landscapes which can actually inspire people or work that is inspiring others? So how can we operationalize it? And number two is... It's not about individual inspiration. Can we inspire communities, large groups? Because at the end of the day, that scale is also very important. Because if you want the transformative change in these landscapes, one or two people getting inspired and doing will not help. You need a lot of people to get inspired. How do you do that? So we tried working on, so we developed kind of different ways in which to... create conditions for inspiration, just like the three episodes that I told you about, the things you do. So the only thing we can control is the other conditions or the trigger. So we started working on that. And then we started initially with our partners and our teams. By this time, it's already two and a half years since our research. So a lot of our partners got used to stimulating these experiments on the field and trying to measure it and all that. So we became very confident in inspiring individuals or small groups. But it also came to a point where we had to inspire a whole region, a whole landscape. And so we took that as a challenge and created an event called Anjor. So it took about a year and a half of preparation work. Here the idea is, I was just describing to you these different groups which live in a landscape. Now, there are people in the hills and there are people in the plains. So these are two different civilizations living next to each other. Now, the idea was, how can we create one event and try to understand the energy for innovation in that landscape? Earlier, we spoke about all the different problems in that landscape. Water is an issue. Decreasing resources are an issue. The cultures are an issue. So there's so many different things happening there. These are big challenges for anybody to solve. But are there already people who are within the communities who are actually innovating and finding solutions for these? So the first thing is, the hypothesis was, yes, there must be people who are already trying to solve water in their areas. There's somebody who must be growing crops without fertilizer. There must be somebody who's trying to save all these trees in the forest from becoming extinct. I'm sure there must be. How are they doing it? Let's go find these heroes and heroines. So we started looking for... These small changemakers who are making a difference in their lives, who are making a difference in their households, are making a difference in their communities. And we found a thousand changemakers doing small things. And we recorded, of course, Miles and our communication team was very actively involved in the design and how we were working there. And we started documenting these stories of these changemakers. And fascinating things came out. I mean, all kinds of people. For example, one... Coach, he used to play hockey in his school. He decided hockey is a good way to bring energy into the landscape. And he creates a voluntary organization where he starts teaching young girls from the villages playing hockey. And a few of these girls actually go into the Indian team and play in the Olympics. Wow. In a very remote village, somebody is inspired by something and trying to do something inspiring. and then the outcome is... In a village that nobody knows about, there's this champion who's actually was in the Olympics. So they are these kind of, you know, landscape changemakers or or heroes and heroines of the landscape. And we found a thousand stories. That's amazing. Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  That's incredible. I mean, it makes so much sense. You just find all of these inspiring people and stories and positive things and then try and, you know, give them visibility, show them around so people can then get inspired by them and then act and do their own thing. And then maybe they will become inspiration for someone else. Yeah,

• Speaker #0

  that's exactly what we did. So we use them as a trigger to trigger others. so we created this event and from all these different corners of the landscape we invited them to come to a place but then just imagine the most important thing was how do you want to organize the event which will give you that aha feeling because that's the first illumination you have to everybody who comes there should feel illuminated so we designed this entire thing based on a deep understanding of how illumination actually unfolds, how the inspiration actually unfolds. And then we used all these thousand change makers as the triggers. And then in a very choreographed A pre-set way brought in small batches of people in time slots. From 9 to 10, people from these villages would visit. From 10 to 11, people from these villages would visit. So that there's no too much of crowding. Just imagine you want to go to a museum for an inspiration and then suddenly the lighting in the museum is bad or there's too much of noise there or too much of crowd. The whole setting is bad and then it's gone. You won't, it's not an aha moment anymore because you've been distracted. So we just, so you have to be very careful when you're organizing these events. If you want to create inspiration that it creates that you slow people down. Because I mean, I could be coming from a village, but I must have had a bad. night or quarrel with my neighbor or my daughter is sick or I have some other appointment in the evening. I mean, so if you're not open minded and if you're thinking something else in your mind, that may just reduce your chances of being inspired. So how do you actually condition them to be in the moment and see what's happening? So we had to do some things to slow that down. as part of the trick. And then we, and so it was all a very, very well thought out, choreographed and managed show. And then you brought in people.

• Speaker #1

  It's one show? It's like one.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, it's a two day festival.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. In a large five acre area. And we just built a whole set for all this.

• Speaker #1

  So what people walk in, there's a path or how do you?

• Speaker #0

  So people walk in, there's an entry point, there's people walk in. And then the minute they're walking in, you'll have these rows of photos of these change makers and suddenly start noticing people from your villages and from your neighborhoods, people you know. And slowly there's an area where it calms you down. And then wherever you're coming from, there's a registration center. So you register yourself. And from there, you have a small snack and a drink. So that brings you into the movement. You slow them down. And then from there, you slowly are sent in small numbers into tents. which are designed in a way where you had different exposure. For example, in one tent, you had things like scents of your land. So you had different kinds of scents. For example, you had some tobacco in one glass. You had some tea. You had some lemons. You had different kinds of smells, smell of earth, mushrooms, different things that are coming from the landscape, these smells, and you're blindfolded. And then you're asked to smell, just to evoke your connection to the land. So all your senses are awakened in this program. Not only is visual, audio, olfactory, all kinds of senses are evoken to just connect you back with the land. And then suddenly you go into another part of the show. And then you start seeing all these heroes and heroines. posters of them hanging um so this guy's made an electric cycle or this guy's made a machine or this guy's done something with a forest uh produce and then as you go to the end of this corridor suddenly there's a big mirror and then it's reflecting and now you're seeing yourself in that mirror and it's and then on the top is a now so you are a hero what is that you want to innovate it's like a self-provoking yeah that's incredible so how do you evoke these emotions and And then we also had a thing on how to measure this, whether people are being actually inspired by what they're seeing. And so we also had a, so it was also part of a bit of a research going on parallelly to really evoking people. So this whole, and then eventually people would come into another section where Okay, now you got illuminated. There was this aha moment, but you should also get some for that internal motivation to drive you. We also had our partners, they had stalls showing different kinds of possibilities, how to reduce water or how to reduce methane in your, or how to test your soil for its quality or other programs happening there. So there were whole stalls of our partners offering different, different kinds of possibilities. So they would go through that and suddenly, okay, I could use this in my field. Oh, I could use it in my house. Oh, this is a rainwater catchment. I could do something with this. So new possibilities came in. And at that stage, we slowed them down. Then they get a photograph of themselves. And with that photograph, they just go home and be taken back to wherever they came from. And a month later, you go back and see what kind of inspired actions are they doing. Because sometimes some actions are spontaneous. You just do an action. But sometimes there's also a delay. You may just respond after a week or a month. depending on the right conditions and this activated motivation that comes in, the power of it to make you push you to act. And so we have evidence of how they're acting. It's amazing. It's just, yeah. So right now we're making a whole documentary of this evidence and how this event to create mass inspiration actually unfolded.

• Speaker #1

  And are you going to be doing this on a regular basis?

• Speaker #0

  100%.

• Speaker #1

  So you could now include in the next edition some new changemakers who got inspired from the first one.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  To then even show people who come to the next edition, this could be you next year. Yeah,

• Speaker #0

  exactly. I mean, that's quite an interesting thing because once you become inspired, if you or I were to be exposed to that inspiration, we'll become inspired. So inspiration is contagious. So it spreads from, if I see your inspired action, I become inspired. So we need to expose all these people who become inspired to others. So that's the, and then it sets a whole chain reaction. Then more people get inspired like that. So that's the whole idea. And then it's not about one time thing. It's also about the next thing is, how can we build a platform where a lot of these people who are actually doing things for the landscape, also have an opportunity to further improve on what they're doing or do more things. So how can we create a platform for these different changemakers to come together? Yeah. For example, if I want to start a hockey thing in my, in another part of the landscape, how can this changemaker support another changemaker there? Or if somebody wants to, one guy is making an electric cycle and he wants to make a business model out of it, what is the best network he should access too. to make that a reality. So how can they take their dreams to the next steps is what we will definitely support because we need that energy from the landscape. So many changemakers trying to change that landscape in a way in which it supports them in a positive way. So that's the kind of transformation. That's the kind of energy we want to see. It's just not a few people doing things to fix things for our immediate problems, but a whole generation whose energies are tapped. who can transform the landscape into the way in which they like to see the future. Yeah, that's the transformation we would love to see there.

• Speaker #1

  That's inspiring to hear.

• Speaker #0

  Isn't it?

• Speaker #1

  But it will only be inspiring if I do something about it when I go home later tonight, right? So I need to think of even a small action to do to be fully inspired.

• Speaker #0

  If you're inspired, it happens. It's just natural. Yeah,

• Speaker #1

  it happens. True, true. All right. These amazing projects that you described, they were all... in India.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  But you live and work here in the Netherlands. How do you bring back all of that, that experience here?

• Speaker #0

  That's the... That's the whole plan. One is it's just not to bring it to the Netherlands, which is very important because this is our main office. And then we have also other landscapes where we also work in different other parts of the world. How can we create, how can we inspire each other from these kind of learnings? So with that level of, with that kind of consciousness, we are very aware that, yes, there's some very special things happening in different parts of our landscapes. it's just not It's just not only in India. Something very special is happening in the British Isles and something very special is happening in Africa and or in other parts of Australia. But how do you so we, for ourselves, we created a learning platform. And recently, people From working in different landscapes of Europe, they met in Romania to share these different kinds of learnings and inspire each other. And people who are working in, for example, far off places like Australia, India, parts of Africa, we all met in South Africa to spend a few days together to see what we are doing, what is it that we are doing differently, who are the types of people, because the family here. is also grown wide. So the idea is also to know each other a little more than just a face on the Zoom. So I found that very interesting. We had a lot of commonalities and also a lot of differences because every place has a special, has its own uniqueness. So in that way, the stories, the challenges may be the same. For example, you see the same bad soil in Spain and you see the same bad soil in India. In Spain, the expectation from the land is something. In India, the expectation from the same land is something. The people here are educated. There, maybe it's just goat herders. Only time will tell who will succeed faster. But it's the same kind of land. There's no water here. There's no water there. The soil is very bad and eroded here. And it's also the same thing there. So it's the same challenge, but being handled by two different groups of people who have very different interests and worldviews. capacities. So we just need to see. So that's also a very amazing opportunity, you know, to see how different people do it and what works, who's able to crack this puzzle faster. And is there something that we can learn from each other? Does modern science work better to restore a land or traditional wisdom? So these are the kind of things that you can actually, you know, by having operations all over the place, this knowledge has to come back to actually be able to see the What is working better? And see if we can actually learn from each other. So we have this learning team and they coordinate these kind of exchanges and bringing back information from all these landscapes. And yeah, this morning we had a lovely meeting with such a group.

• Speaker #1

  Fantastic. I wish you all the best in those projects. We're going to have to close the conversation here, but thank you so much for your time. It's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you, Shekhar.

• Speaker #0

  It's a great pleasure. Thank you very much.