A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

When these beams break this in a bunch of water downstream, they fight out entire communities. We all are interconnected in one way or another.

An award winning author of our changing world and as well as documentarian the end of the roads, we’re essentially committing a form of suicide by destroying the environment.

You’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got a great guest on the program, James Fountain. James has got an amazing background. He’s an expert in ESG compliance and decarbonization. He’s previously held the position of Vice President of sustainability and strategy and ESG integration at BDO, USA.

He’s a leader in renewable energy integration, an award winning author of our changing world, which is a series as well as documentarian, created a documentary called The End of the road. And one of the great facts I like about your resume, James, is that you have a master’s in geography. And our fellow with the Royal Geographical Society and the American Association of Geographers.

You know, I always loved maps as a kid, so yeah, that’s actually how I kicked off my career, actually. And I’m also a fellow at the explorers law, which is a really fun organization, I would recommend anybody checking out, if they’re so inclined. Yeah, I was a cartographer when I started out. My bachelor’s is actually in GIS geographic information systems from The Ohio State University.

And I thought, you know, early in my youth, I came out to the West and just kind of fell in love with the mountains. I grew up in Ohio, I came out to the West and just fell in love with the mountains, and thought that I wanted to spend my time mapping the mountains. And I started doing that for a long time, you know, National Geographic and the EPA and the Forest Service.

And then at some point, I just kind of fell in love with the cultures, the cultural side of geography. And that’s when I said to come back to Montana and leave the cartography behind. Have kind of the cultural side and the environmental and the social nexus of geography in the immune sustainability.

So then, where did that take you on your path? What was the next step?

Yeah, so I was making maps for the Forest Service in California, and I decided to go to grad school the, I mean, the long wish where I saw a foods exhibit at a museum California one time as part of that exhibit, and outlined all of the food costs, and what the average weekly meal looks like for a family of four from different countries around the world.

And of course, it should the United States, with all of our processed food and like, our $5 million budget for per week for food. And then you go to countries like I came around to a country Bhutan, and Bhutan, it was like $7 and it was a super simple but the people look so happy, and it just kind of built this fascination and cultures. For me, that’s where the cultural geography degree comes in. That led me to get my Master’s in cultural geography at the University of Montana, and then worked with the United Nations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for a period of times.

And that experience there, I mean, I went there for doing more GIS work, but that was also doing some humanitarian work there as well. So that experience really kind of opened up my world to what a cultural geographer in the field could be and how important it is that we look at the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss upon indigenous communities and the remote communities around the world, effectively, like a keystone species of our species, if you will.

Because what happens to our climate, the repercussions of what we’re doing to our climate really impacts them first, and that experience in the Congo is what drove that home for me and led me to pursue the rest of my work.

Well, tell us a little bit about cultural geography. It isn’t a term that I hear out in the lexicon too often, so give our listeners and me an overview of what that means, the cultural geography.

It’s similar to anthropology in that it is a study of a people and of a culture. But, you know, cultural geography takes more of a spatial bent to it. So the way I describe it, which is perhaps an oversimplification, we’re going to get a lot of anthropologists. We’re going to get all over, all over me for this, you know, but, but, you know, really, rather than digging deep into the culture itself.

I mean, we do that, but we also look at the surrounding environment as well, the neighboring cultures, the environmental factors, the sociopolitical factors, economic factors, all these things that go into make the culture what it is. And it really kind of looks at the on a broader scale, looks at the why of a culture, instead of the what or the how.

That’s interesting. I did a little bit of Study of Political Economy when I was an undergrad, and always thought that was kind of fascinating. But when you describe cultural geography, it sounds a little bit like political economy, because all those factors are kind of in the mix too, really hard and it really you know, again, as a sustainability professional, people who are listening to your podcast understand sustainability so they they understand systems thinking very well, and that really is very much what a cultural geographer does to their field work.

They apply a systems approach to it and trying to understand how all parts of the system, not just the ecological and geopolitical, but also the business side of things too, because we. Are interconnected in one way or another. So it’s really taking a look at how all factors are impacting a culture.

Well, tell us about your work in the Congo. It seems fascinating. Certainly that was a pretty dangerous area. Civil War has been ravaging that country for decades.

It was, yeah, yeah. So my work, so I was working, I spent kind of mixed my time between Kinshasa, which is the capital city it’s on the east, and then a village called bumia, which is in the northeast, about 45 kilometers from Lake Albert, and about the same distance south of South Sudan. And it was during the time of Mobutu seseco, when he was just transitioning over.

And I was, yeah, so my work there, the Belgian colonists came in and colonized Congo. They built an infrastructure system, and there were roads and there were bridges, but, yeah, they really went into disrepair because of various reasons for corruption and infighting and all the things that you hear about in the Congo.

So my job was to come in and work with a contingency from Uruguay to determine where the infrastructure needed to be built the most, and then how best to get aid to some of the more remote communities where there’s just simply no infrastructure out there, where the bridges may have been destroyed, for instance, where the roads are just have become impassable to due to disrepair. So my job was to identify those areas to help aid workers come in.

Well, that sounds like very important work. How long were you working in that area?

Working in the Congo for about a year, and then I spent some almost as long in the north, northern part of well, the Himalaya, between Pakistan and Nepal, reserve Abad and Islamabad, that area in Pakistan, working within remote communities and under similar scope, it was less about finding the damaged infrastructure and more about understanding how the communities there are receiving their aid, but also studying a phenomenon called glacial lake outburst flooding, and how policy around glacial lake outburst flooding is impacting these communities.

And in short, Glacier Lake outburst flooding is again due to climate change. The montane glaciers are melting at a faster pace. So due to that, what happens oftentimes is, at the snout of a glacier, large ice dams will build. It’s basically just imagine, like really huge chunks of ice, like the sizes of buildings and whatnot. But eventually some of these blocks break, and they send in behind these walls, if you will, of ice box form interglacial lakes, like large water bodies. And when these beams break, they send a bunch of water downstream.

They fight out entire communities. You know, livestock. There’s some pneumatic it could destroy their migration patterns, their livestock patterns, their fields, sacred sites. So in the Himalaya, there was a lot of policy built around these areas, mostly looking at infrastructure. And I was back there trying to get an understanding of what government policy was putting in place and how well that drives with the needs of the communities who are actually living there.

Did that satisfy their livelihood needs, their spiritual needs and whatnot, as opposed to just the infrastructure?

Well, it’s kind of a fascinating situation, and also potentially incredibly devastating in those glaciers and the Himalayas are feeding or giving water to, I think, around 2 billion people, and so to the extent if these melt, we’re talking about two the source of fresh water for a couple billion people. I mean, a cataclysmic problem that it’s hard to even wrap our heads around what that would look like. It’s so horrible.

So tell us a little bit about the climate change in those areas. And sometimes these areas are experiencing the front end of climate change, maybe much more so than we might be experiencing in some places in the United States.

Well, and that’s a great point, Matt, and this is something that I try to outline in my work. It’s like, what’s happening to these communities. I mean, we spoke earlier about systems and about interconnectedness, and we have to remember that, you know, even though it may be this very remote tribe out in Himalayas that we’ve never heard of before, you know, who farm yak for a living, or maybe they harvest Cordyceps mushrooms for a living. What on earth could that possibly have to do with me and my lifestyle?

Well, I mean, if we see what’s happening to these communities because of where they live, because it is so remote, and because they are exposed to environmental extremes that we may never see because of modern luxuries, or, more likely, what we’ll see later, if we see what’s happening to them, it really is. It really does augur what is coming to larger societies, the drought that they experience when they’ve been relying on the water sources you mentioned previously for eons to water their crops and their animal husbandry practices, when those are drying up and they have to migrate, well, guess what that means, a utilization of resources somewhere else.

That could mean that that could lead to digital political shifts, because, you know, maybe that journey now takes them across a border, and they’re fighting with other tribes now, and there becomes other water issues, trans border or water issues, you know, and that just goes up the scale to international water policy, to international oil policy, to migration, to food supply. So there is a direct impact on it. So it’s really important, I think, to understand and pay attention to how. The lives are being impacted by these communities of climate change.

It’s kind of the canary in the coal mine. These communities are on the front line. Certainly our communities here in the US have been hit hard by hurricanes, and out here in California, wildfires that are unprecedented, and up in Canada, wildfires that are unprecedented. So it’s not like nothing’s happening here, but because of our resources, we’re able to kind of navigate around it and still kind of keep our general lifestyles, whereas countries that don’t have trillions of dollars of resources just can’t possibly do the same things we do.

And of course, there’s policy too, right? You know, we both spoke about policy earlier. You know, some of the policy changes that are proposed and are likely to pass, it seems like now. You know, here in the United States can have a devastating impact on some of our rural communities and remote communities, and particularly the indigenous communities who are lying, who are relying on federal grants and subsidies as a viable business means for power and revenue generations.

I mean, back in March, MVP administrator has 31 roll back access in one day. I mean one of them scrapping cumulative impact reviews for new industrial permits. I mean that means a metal smelter proposed next to a tribal school in the four corners now only has a narrow pollutant test, you know, not the broader health lens that communities have survived upon for so long. So again, it’s important to pay attention to policies of other places in the in and how climate is impacting these policies, and what that change is going to be.

Well, maybe walk us back to that particular example you’re talking about in the four corners I’m not familiar with that particular policy. There’s been a flood of disastrous policies in the last six months, so it’s challenging to keep up with them all. And I do know that that area in the four corners was a lot of indigenous communities. The Native Americans have lived in those areas for 10s of 1000s of years, and you can go back and look at their pottery and their writings and things like that that go back a long, long, long time.

Yeah, well, you know, and it’s not just climate change for these peoples, either. Again, for about 20 years, I guess I should back up a little bit. I’ve been riding my motorcycle around the world, working with indigenous communities all over and just learning their creation stories and their histories and whatnot. And one of the things that remains consistent, I think, across indigenous communities, I think that’s kind of immutable, is that there’s not a clear distinction between who they are as a people and the earth and spirituality.

It’s all kind of the same thing. So it’s more than just water rights and loss of water and challenges to livelihood based upon water. It’s cultural integrity and cultural viability as well. So again, just another example, I think, of how climate has not only threatened livelihoods of people, but it’s threatening entire cultures, entire way a group of people are their being, yeah.

And I think that Western thought maybe disassociates ourselves from the land, but the reality is we are associated with the land as well. I mean, we’ve maybe, to the extent we’ve disassociated, shows our sickness as a society, that when you disassociate from the land, when you disassociate from the earth, you’re willing to do very destructive things to the earth because you don’t like have any connection to it. You feel, Oh, well, it doesn’t matter to drill, drill, drill and pollute, pollute, pollute, because what difference does it make?

I think that’s spot on. Yeah, and it’s, I guess, I don’t know if ignorance is the right word, or I think you hit it best, but with, if you’re about with this association, because I don’t know if it’s a matter. I ponder this quite a bit, actually. I mean, I don’t know if it’s because we’ve just simply become too comfortable now, maybe we have too many luxuries, and life is too easy in the West.

I really don’t know. I mean, I’m sure somebody has figured out where the disassociation happened. And if you can probably take it back to Aristotle in the scientific method, where he’s dividing everything up into smaller, smaller pieces, perhaps that’s where it goes to I don’t know, but that is the truth. And I think that is a truism. I think Western culture has put an emphasis on disassociation and maybe Abrahamic concept of land tenure.

I think I don’t know where it is, but the stone where we disassociate ourselves with nature, and I do believe that that is a strong proponent to some of the, I think, in my mind, deleterious environmental policies that are happening not just the United States, but around the world, right?

So tell us a little bit about your series, our changing world, and why you wrote it, and what was the impact of writing it for you and for your audience.

Yeah. Thanks for that. Yeah. So our changing world, it’s a four book series that covers a broad, broad scope of sustainability. I mean, everything from bringing in indigenous voices, you know, and promote people’s voices into policy and decision making for sustainability, to environmental business, to social, environmental rights, and to kind of where and then, I mean, I’m mixing all the books up together here, but, but then also where sustainability kind of started, where it is now and where I think it’s going to go.

Where do you see it going? What’s your view of the future? I don’t know. I mean, where I see it now and where I see it from one. Wrote the book, is changing a little bit again. Policy, current policy shifts are making sustainability really challenging United States, and we have such a huge footprint and a global sustainability footprint, so I don’t know. I mean, we’ll have to see. I mean, I I’m not a fan of a lot of the policy that is being laid out in the big, beautiful bill regarding the environment, at least.

So it’s my ambition and my aspiration that a lot of businesses will step up and say, we’re just simply going to do the right thing, not just for our business, because I think an environmental approach to business is viable in a profitable business approach, but also for the earth. So if I can answer that question in six months, I have a better answer for you, but if it goes strictly by policy, I’m a little less optimistic than I was, but still optimistic.

Well, I had another guest on the show recently, and he was saying that some cause for some optimism is how creative the environmental movement has been, and that there are millions of people working on these problems, and we’re creative, and we can move around this.

And I kind of think that maybe the best approach with the current situation is kind of a Tai Chi approach, or Jiu Jitsu, kind of moving this crazy energy in one direction and saying, Okay, well, we’re going to find a way to solve this problem without you. You want to get in the way. We’re just going to throw you to the side and go our own way, because we’re not going to engage with that garbage.

No doubt about it. You know, one of my favorite examples of that, you know, perhaps, comes from the kingdom of Bhutan. I mentioned earlier. You know, the King of Bhutan has implemented the program he’s creating, what’s called the gelafu mindfulness city. And I won’t go into all details of that. I mean, everyone was listening to your show right now. Should Google it.

If you just Google GMC and Bhutan, that’ll pull you up to it the ultimate so essentially, he’s creating an IFC, international financial center around the concept of gross national happiness, which is how the kingdom of Bhutan measures that measures their wealth. And it’s incredible. But I guess, off that tangent, you know, the example that I mentioned for that is hydropower. So we mentioned multi glaciers.

But, you know, Bhutan is a small, landlocked country, again, for viewers who don’t know its geography, it’s a small, landlocked country in the Himalaya, nestled between China to the north and India to the south, two. I mean, literally, a third of our world’s population are on its borders. And it’s a kingdom of 700,000 people. But they’ve nestled to hydropower, you know.

So they’re which is a renewable resource, you know. So they made hydropower and using hydropower to mine Bitcoin as part of their currency, you know. So, so it’s a renewable energy source to mine Bitcoin. So, speaking about one of the innovative ways to use some of the current technologies to have a profitable, not just business in case, but revenue for the country, I think is pretty brilliant.

That is amazing. I was looking at going to Bhutan about a year or two ago, and unfortunately, didn’t, but I would love to make it out there. I love the idea of Gross National Happiness Index. I was an economics major, and I feel like that is probably at root. Cause of the problems that we have here around the world is that we look at gross national product and we look at producing more and more and more as determining whether we’re doing well.

And quite frankly, if we could produce less and be just as happy, we’d be better off if we’re producing less plastics. That is a positive, whereas in our current system, we measure drilling more oil, using more products, polluting more is considered a positive. We’ve got a higher PNP. Well, so what we have more cancer and we have more pollution, like, is that outcome?

Well, yeah, I mean, again, I think it’s probably a relic of Keynesian economics, you know, and the decoupling of $1 from the environment. I mean, if you’re trying to create an unlimited resource with with a limited quantity, you know, the math doesn’t add up. You think about, if you think about the entire supply chain of what we’re trying to build versus the available resources to build it in, it doesn’t add up.

And I think Bhutan has seen that. But even broader than that, I think kind of, and maybe that’s maybe your communism microcosm for this entire conversation so far in that the decoupling of money from the earth is an attempt at decoupling the interconnectedness of money from our live guides. You cannot do it, and probably because Bhutan is a Buddhist kingdom and Buddhist culture, they view things by paradigm of interconnectedness, and they see how things fit together.

But when we decoupled those two with maybe modern capitalism in this sense, I think that decoupling is part of, well, I mean, it has led to a lot of the policy changes. I think that’s put us where we’re at right now.

Well, tell us a little bit about your documentary, the end of the road.

Yeah, thanks for saying that, too. So the end of the road was filmed actually, kind of by accident. You know, I was my first trip to Bhutan a couple years ago. I was there doing field work for our changing world, you know, and for an article I was writing. And while I was there, just, you know, I’m running this motorcycle or homebutton, and I have my GoPro with me and my new iPhone 14.

I’m thinking, Yeah, this would be a way better story by video than it would be on paper. So I just started filming everything, and I. Came back, and I just kind of handed everything to like this producer. It’s like, here’s data. Make something out of this, you know, because it worked back and forth, this in voiceover and put it together, but you went into the road. It’s about the impact of bringing the road to remote communities. I mean, I mean that phenomenon throughout the world.

But the case study for this is a village called Marek in the far east of Bhutan. Traditionally, it’s cinematic community, you know, yacht herders, but they spend their their summers up high in elevations and the winters down low in the lower elevation, selling the wares and what they the money they make in the summertime.

But the road to them has just been a dirt, muddy road forever, up until a couple of years ago, but they were building a road to America now and explores both the positives and the benefits of building roads, because it’s some of the positives, of course, you can bring better access to medicine, and it’s these easier travel to sell their goods, you know, and education and whatnot, but the negatives, it also makes it easier access for other things get there too that might be damaging to the culture. Now, I spoke with their village leader about that, and that was his biggest fear. It’d be, I should go back there and talk to him to see how things have changed.

Yeah, I could see that it would bring in other influences and no longer has kind of the purity that it might have had before, because outside influences affect the culture. During my conversation with him, he mentioned that, you know, even before the road was built, all the way when I was there, the road was there, the road was, they’re literally building the road in front of me and behind me as I was going to this place. You know, there’s like on the part dirt and part pavements.

But he even that time, this is in 2022 he said that their villagers were already starting to use Western and American words for things that had traditionally been used in their language, which is look at more of a Tibetan dialect. Wow, that happens that fast acculturation is living.

Well, one of the things that you’ve worked on a lot is ESG, which has kind of become a dirty word in some circles. More recently, tell us about your work in that area and what has been effective, and maybe one some of the challenges too.

Yeah, I know you might my joke about ESG is, at least here in the United States, ESG has gone from a three letter acronym to a four letter word in a lot of circles. But yeah, ESG, you know, so I think it’s an important thing, right? I mean, the rollout of ESG, I think was challenging at the beginning and maybe not rolled out. Well, we could have been.

But, you know, ESG, really, in its sense, it’s just an accounting mechanism to quantify the whole materiality of a thing. So again, going back to the decoupling of the economy from the environment, ESG, kind of, in my opinion, you may at least from a corporate side, ESG is an attempt to recouple that. It’s taking a total look at the dual materiality of producing an item or of a service. So for instance, the common definition of dual materiality is, what is the impact of a part of the supply chain upon my organization, and what is the impact of product I’m producing on the environment and the cultures and the people around us?

It takes a look at the total cost of building something, and it reports on that, and then there’s regulations around that to ensure that our limited resources don’t go away forever, that they remain renewable, that they remain sustainable. So my work has been at the government level. It has been at the in everything from like a small 10 person business to portion 100 companies in the space.

So yeah, I would imagine this is one of the reasons why polluters want to throw this ESG concept out, because they don’t want an accounting mechanism to show what the cost of pollution is. They don’t want to pay that cost and be held accountable for these bad decisions. So that, again, goes back to pure capitalism.

You know of Adam Smith maybe made sense back in the 1700s because they essentially didn’t have the means to pollute in the way that we can pollute Exactly. And there were essentially like unlimited resources in the 1700s but we’re no longer in the 1700s so that theory just doesn’t work, because we have these externalities called pollution and things that cause cancer and just damage our environment.

Well, we need to account for those things. And tell us what you did in order to bring accounting standards to these companies when you were working with them.

Yeah. I mean, I guess, to elaborate upon your point me and an exponential number more people, too. On top of it all, some more people. And then all of that kind of nails on too. But, you know, with these organizations, you know, so, like, kind of the high level way of implementing an ESG strategy is going to an organization, and you work with them, you identify what they are, what is a product that you make, and what industry you’re in.

And then you follow guidance, and you go through a series of discussions and exploration and analyzes of determining what is dual material for your organization. You know, what are the things that have an impact? Sorry, either a social, an environmental or a corporate governance and. Pact, right? So it also takes a look at, you know, how is your organization governed, you know, is it? I mean, for a number of reasons. But so you go into an organization, you help them identify those items, and then you build strategies on how to improve those upon international standards.

You know, GRI is a big standard people are using. CSRD in Europe is another good one, another big one that Europeans are using. So the idea, again, is just to identify that those things that are having an impact, those strategies on how to reduce them, report on them annually, have them audited by a third party, and then report on your progress publicly on your website or other places as years go on. Again. Another challenge of that, too, again, green finance space we mentioned about funding these areas.

One of the challenges is a lot of investors going on your pollution, example, a lot of investors, you know, they’ll invest in an organization. And this is, I think, why a lot of investors have a horizon with ESG, the kind of usually the investment horizon for an investor is like three to five years, if they want to see an expense return on investment. In that amount of time.

There has been countless studies that have shown how profitable and a sustainable business plan is, but usually you don’t get see a return for, say, five to seven years, which is outside of the investment horizon for a lot of investors. So it’s that’s another one of the challenges is just matching the time horizon with that of which investors are willing to shoulder.

Well, it’s a decoupling of the concept of stewardship, from the economy, from the political economy. And lots of the writers about democracy, like Locke and others, talked about stewardship, and that concept of kind of gotten lost in the conversation of how we’re being good stewards of the environment and pure capitalistic position would pollute unlimited, you know.

To be unlimited pollution because you’re just trying to make as much money as fast as possible, which obviously is completely unsustainable. Tell us a little bit about the CSRD standards. What does that stand for? First off, and how does that differ from the standards we have in the US?

The CSRD is kind of similar to what the SEC guidelines were going to be that were coming out for ESG, but they’re a little bit stricter and the part of the CSRD, and they’re changing actually, and I’m not sure it’s funny, it kind of came out around the same time that some of the current administration us administration’s anti ESG policies are coming out, but they’re softening some of their standards in the CSRD as well.

But the CSRD imposes environmental standards on businesses of a certain size in Europe that require them to report based upon the organization size, both in terms of revenue and employees, and that’s on both ESG standards, but also carbon standards, scopes one and two, particularly so. Scope one emissions are those emissions you’re directly responsible for, and scope two emissions are emissions that you’re indirectly responsible for.

So for instance, like the emissions that are a result of your organization doing business when you turn the lights on if you’re pulling from a coal powered grid, those are your scope two emissions, for instance. So CSRD is basically Europe’s guidelines on how to report for carbon and ESG standards.

I wanted to say I had just recently read an article about the agricultural sector, and they believe that the scope three emissions further downstream are a big driver of emissions, and that, like those businesses, really need to consider the scope three emissions. Is that something that you worked on when you were doing this?

Yeah, scope three really is where it’s at. I mean, scope three. I mean, depending on the industry, sir, so the corporate sustainability reporting directive is the CSRD, but yeah, scope three, I mean, depending on the industry, can be 70% of your organization’s total emissions. But the reason a lot of organizations don’t report on it is because it’s very challenging to report on them. And the reason the CSRD, I think, is not or in another reporting bodies aren’t requiring it yet, is because of the challenge to report on them and the cost reporting on them, because the scope three emissions look, take a look at your supply chain.

So it’s not just what are you in your business working on, but what about your suppliers, upstream and downstream? So the people who you’re assigned to also, and they’re generally way to think about is their scope one emissions can be your scope three emissions. So yeah, scope three emissions is really the organizations who are paying attention to this.

Scope three are really on the leading edge of it right now, because, I mean, it is coming eventually, scope three will be required at some point, once I figured out how to report on it in a easier and cost effective way.

Well, certainly, basically, manufacturers know who is subcontracting for them down in Brazil or Indonesia or places like that, and they can go down to those plants and look at them and do some kind of analysis, fairly easily to know, hey, this organization is either taking care of the environment or they’re not. And I’ve heard a lot of stories about some organizations, some companies really take.

Taking it seriously and cleaning up their scope three emissions, and saying to their suppliers downstream, hey, we can’t do business with you if you’re polluting. And I think that’s where a consumer and also just a citizen, has some power in doing some research into these supply chains and saying, Hey, do you know and reporting to other consumers on social media? Do you know that this company is engaging with suppliers that are, say, destroying the rainforest, for example?

I think that’s spot on. But I think another thing that’s important to consider with that is intent. You know? I mean, because a lot of the suppliers, especially if you go to the base, sometimes it’s just really challenging for them to curb their their scope. Three missions. One of the things that I like to see is, like, some of the leading organizations doing, I mean, Walmart is a good example in this space, Unilever and some of the other ones, they’re, rather than just doing an ethical divestiture.

So they’re like, look, you know, you’re a dirty player. You’re a polluter. I’m not doing business for you, but I’m gonna we say in the United States to cancel culture. You know, we’re not going to cancel you, but what we can do, we’re going to work with you to improve your operations. You know, how can we help you? Let’s just see if we can figure this out together. How we can improve your operations, to improve your scope one, your scope two and our scope threes at the same time.

And let’s put a time limit on it. Let’s make sure you’re serious about this, and we’re willing to help you the organizations who are doing that. I mean, again, because when you just do an ethical divestiture, all you’re doing is just kind of passing that down the line, because somebody else will pick that supplier up and they’ll keep on doing the same practices until they change.

So I think you have a far greater impact. Rather than just say, I’m not going to do business with you for you have a far greater impact to help that supplier clean up their operations.

James, that’s a great point, and I will admit that I’m wrong. Thanks for pointing that out. Yeah, it’s far better to clean up the polluter than it is to just do business with somebody else, because that polluted business will find probably some other entity to sell their products to, whereas if you help them clean up, you’ve actually made a bigger difference well and from a strategic perspective also.

I mean, if you’re helping an organization clean up their business, and you’re investing your time and resources into it, you’re strengthening the relationship. I mean, not just by helping them in some way, but you’re probably building in synergies and efficiencies that make the ultimate product, the ultimate cost cheaper too.

So by building in those efficiencies, you’re probably offsetting the cost of helping them green up their operations. So, I mean, it’s really kind of a win, win. So what are you working on now? What’s the new big project? Well, so I mentioned the go through mindfulness study earlier, from the King, you know, and again, I encourage everyone to take a look at it. But I’m working with a team right now to where we’re going to be developing really talks about right now, but I’m hoping to be working with a team right now to be able to build a master plan for their sustainable development program.

They’re situated between two national parks. Is where the city is going to be, and it’s about incorporating national parks into the livelihood of the cities. So working with the king on that, and I’m also writing a large form piece on that that’ll be in a large publication coming soon, and I’ll hopefully what time this is out, I’ll be able to post and say where it’s gonna be.

That’s fantastic. I have been thinking about this a little bit as in terms of that our environmental problems are kind of a spiritual problem. They’re a symptom of a spiritual malady, and that to the extent that our spiritual leaders aren’t leading on this, or not talking about it, or is a failure, and maybe just everyday people of kind of connecting this, that it’s our environmental problems, our health problems.

And they’re also spiritual problems, and maybe they’re even psychological problems, and the disassociation part, like people aren’t as healthy when you’re not going out there and connecting with nature, but that’s another piece. But I think the spiritual part that you’re talking about creating in Bhutan is beautiful. I’d love to hear more about that.

It’s incredible. I mean, again, built into the Constitution for the city, because, again, it’ll be its own administrative region, you know. So the king’s pianist for to veer for 20 years and come back into the greater Bhutan ecosystem for 20 years too. But built into the constitution for this area is mindfulness practices and mindfulness spaces. So the designated amount of land, so Bhutan as a whole is, I think 65% in the Constitution is 65% green space, forever in perpetuity.

I think for the mindfulness it might be 72% I think maybe even up that game. Don’t quote me on those numbers. I have to look those up. But they’re also building in mindfulness corridors as well. So the mindfulness commutes, for instance, are gonna be built into the infrastructure for the city. So again, back to our other conversation.

It’s all interconnected, the spirituality, the health benefits, the economic benefits, it’s all interconnected. And when you try to decouple one part of it, you’re really damaging the whole and again, that’s what I think the sustainability discipline is trying to solve for all of us, right?

And it well, it’s just poor accounting when you don’t account for these other pieces of the puzzle, if you’re just saying money is the only measurement, you’re leaving out. Variables that are important, health and peace of mind and psychology and all this are important pieces. And if you say essentially, they have no value in western accounting systems, well then of course, you’re not going to focus on them. But that is just dumb.

I think that’s exactly right. And money itself. I mean, it’s a construct. I mean, you’re pasting environmental tangibles with a social construct, and you’re putting more weight and more value on the social construct that doesn’t have, I mean, does have a weight. It does have a bear, because we choose to value it. In a sense, we choose to value it more than the other items that you mentioned earlier. And again, you can’t decouple it. It’s not going anywhere. You know, we’re not gonna all sudden, say, okay, money sucks. Screw money. I’m just gonna go to the forest.

Right? We all know that kind of it is part of the system. But we also, at the core, know that money doesn’t equal health, and that somebody who’s a billionaire would trade their billion dollars if they’re sick and gonna die for good health.

Boy and maybe the billionaire, or even you or me. I mean, whoever it might be who are embarking these practices, maybe they have the mindset, you know, what I get it, what I’m doing isn’t great for the earth, but I’ll probably be dead before I really see the impact of it. Maybe, maybe not. I mean, I think climate change is the rate of climate change is increasing.

But also, you know, that’s really kind of a singularly way of looking at things, rather than a special or planetary societal way of looking at things as well. What about your kids, your grandkids? I feel like we should care for more than just what was proximal to our day to day. We have a duty to responsibility to care for all.

Right. I think that some of the current administration is so myopic in terms of just what is going to happen in the immediate next year or next quarter or next week, that they’re willing to trade away our environmental treasures for some immediate profit of drill, drill, drill. And that’s, I like, the indigenous concept, and I think it’s in other cultures too, of just looking at least seven generations out.

And I think that’s kind of a minimal concept, you know, I think we should be looking probably further than seven generations. But let’s just start with seven generations until we can get to more sophisticated level of thought.

Totally and sorry I keep on harping on Bhutan. It’s the front of my mind right now because I’ve been working on so much. But I was speaking with the king, you know, I was working on this project because I was there visiting him a few weeks ago, and he mentioned that every part of the plan he wants to do wants to pan it out for 400 years.

And the reason he did it for 400 years is because the people, the leaders who founded Bhutan, had a 400 year plan. And some of the things that are in place in Bhutan is still working well for the country were about 400 years ago. So he his idea is 400 years from now. I want it still to be a good idea. And I think when you think like that, I mean, everything is good, everything changes, everything is better.

Right? Yeah, when you change the lens of your time horizon, a lot of different decisions look short sighted and not worth it, but when you’re looking out 400 years, you’re thinking in a different scale. And I had a guy on the program who’s at NASA, and he was talking about astrobiology and tracking maybe if aliens ever came here, what would it be like, or and his hypothesis was that if an advanced alien society would leave no trace.

They would recycle everything. They would be completely sustainable. There would be no pollution, because that’s what it would take to travel great distances, and you wouldn’t pollute your planet. Your society would die off. So that’s the problem with our current model, is that we’re essentially committing a form of suicide by destroying the environment 100%.

I mean, because the waste has to go somewhere and I mean, or you repurpose it, or be able to regenerate it into some other fuel. But you know, even the relationships part you’re talking about earlier, you have some isolationist policies we’re adding right now.

We have to think about the reciprocal in the kind of the tangential, I guess you could say detriments to that too. So as we’re isolating ourselves and we’re damaging relationships with other organizations, what policies will they have to put in place to make up for things to where they would rely upon our partnerships for the United States? And will they be environmentally friendly?

Who knows these systems thinking? They are all interconnected. So how we’re treating other human beings and throwing 10 million people who are immigrants out of the country is going to have a cost, and it’ll have an economic cost, it’ll have a societal cost, and that cost is going to be gargantuan. And somehow, I don’t feel like that has been addressed by the people who are carrying out this policy, but James, it’s been great having you on the show, and it’s very thought provoking and great work that you’re doing out there.

Everybody should go check out our changing world, your four volume series, as well as the end of the road, your documentary, and follow you on all your social channels and. Check out what you’re doing. I really like the stuff you’re doing in Bhutan. That sounds amazing. And maybe you could tell the audience where they can find all this stuff.

Yeah. So the books are on Amazon, of course, just check out our changing world, or on my website. The thing is jamesfountain.earth, but definitely on Amazon, you’ll find the books. And the film is also there. The film is on my website.

Okay, great. Definitely, everybody. Check that out, and I appreciate you being on the show, James and sharing with us all the wonderful work that you’re doing around the world and your commitment to this and to the environment and so much else. So we’ll keep in contact with you going forward, and please let us know how it’s going, man.

Thank you for the opportunity doing your show. Thank you for this, and thank you for what you’re doing. By the way, this is an incredible podcast, incredible podcast. I think you bring on really forward thinking people on your show, and it’s doing good and it’s changing things. So thank you and keep doing it, please.

Well, we’ll keep it up. And thank you to learn more about our work at A Climate Change and how you can help us reach our goal planting 30,000 trees in the Amazon this year, visit alimatechange.com don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend. See you next time.