You’re listening to A Climate Change, I’m Mat Matern, your host. I’ve got Isaias Hernandez on the program. Isaias is an environmental educator and activist. He has the queer brown vegan.com. He has over 100,000 followers on social media, went to UC Berkeley and, you know, has been helping out on the front lines environmental movement, I say this, welcome to the program.

Yeah. Thank you so much again, for having me.

Well, tell us a little bit about what inspired you and what’s your pathway to getting here now?

Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up living in poverty in Los Angeles. At a young age, I recognized that my own environment in the San Fernando Valley region had no access to clean air, no clean water, nor soil. And so I think for me, the biggest thing that I started to question is that, why is it that poor people are deprived from resources.

As a teenager, I remember going with my father to garden homes around affluent areas in Los Angeles, like Beverly Hills, Bel Air Calabasas. And I started to recognize that these communities have access to green spaces, they have clean air, clean, water, clean soil, and that start to kind of question about, you know, why is it the fact that poor people don’t have these resources? Is it because they didn’t work hard in life?

And so I think when I heard about the term global warming, when I was in high school, I started to think about, you know, what does that mean to our communities who are poor. And I remember very briefly, as a young child, like hearing a presentation from an environmental organization, at the time and La say that your zip code is the highest indicator of your environmental health status.

And so that kind of started to get me questioning about where does race, class and gender intersect with the environment. And so that kind of led me to pursue environmental science at UC Berkeley, because I truly believe that, in order for me to understand the climate crisis today, I had to put myself in these academic science programs to learn but then I realized that the failure is that it’s not being well communicated to the general public.

And there’s right now a crisis of education that is happening in our public school systems. And in the ways in which social media and dominant culture is responding to these climate disasters that are happening. How would

you say it’s not being communicated effectively? Because just to play the devil’s advocate a little bit, I mean, obviously, you did get communicated to or it was communicated to you that we were having a climate crisis in school. And so you recognize that, obviously, the challenge of and the problem of poor neighborhoods being treated differently, and being kind of literally and figuratively dumped down with pollution? That’s, that’s a major problem. And to me beyond an educational one, it’s it’s a problem that we need to address as a society.

Yeah, well, I think that to kind of be clarifying on that question is that there’s a lack of history that we learned in our public school systems when I was an undergrad. And I learned about the fact that you know, what came first the chicken or the egg, and we reversed it to what came first, the poor community or the toxic facility, you learn that toxic facilities were moving into low income neighborhoods, because affluent areas, were actually complaining that if they were going to be built in their communities that they would legally sue.

And so a lot of these communities ended up you know, being racist in which they discriminated against black indigenous people of color, which is known as redlining, in which they told veterans of color after World War Two. And they worked alongside with the local governments and banks to not give these people loans to live in these safe, healthy environments and said, if you let a black or brown person live in our neighborhood, you are going to steal from what we have in the resources we have. So give them money, unless they’re going to live in a low income area, which has high level rates of environmental contamination.

That’s not taught in history that’s not taught in the ways in which we communicate. What we’re told is that the American dream is that if you work hard in life, you’ll get out of your situation, but we know that does not exist anymore. And there’s huge injustice is that discriminate disproportionately against women, against people of color against queer and trans individuals. And this is something that I think as a young person in this movement, you don’t talk about these things because we’re told that it doesn’t relate to the environment.

But that’s where that adds this disconnection between nature and humans. We’re humans our nature when we were never separated from that. And that’s where a lot of us find ourselves so disconnected from the land from our communities. Because we’re not taught that we are students of the Earth, we’re not taught that we are children of the Earth that we are inhabiting. Well,

I definitely think that we have a lot of firms setting up shop and polluting in poor neighborhoods. And that’s been the history of the country for, you know, over 100 years, you see oil refineries and things of that nature, in places that are poor areas, as you said, Because richer folks are probably going to fight against that occurring anywhere close to them. I guess the question is, how do we dig out of the situation where we’re at? Because it isn’t so easy to just uproot, say, an oil refinery, or a plant that emits toxic chemicals? How do we deal with these situations? What’s your plan?

Yeah, well, I think that goes back into looking at our existing policies and what’s being passed right. The inflation Reduction Act is a huge act in which they are actually giving alternatives for clean green energy, the Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced that the DOA received a huge amount of funding to actually train people into green jobs.

And I think this is where, you know, for every American, if you tell someone that lives in low income neighborhood that’s employed by the coal industry, the fossil fuel industry, that’s threatening their own livelihood, of course, they’re gonna say no, like, we don’t want a new job, right? Because they’re scared that they’re not going to get the same payment. They’re scared that, you know, there’s no alternative future that has been presented to them.

And so I think that we need to work closely with these institutions that are pushing these policies. And these corporations that have the funding that are trying to train young people that are predominantly in low income communities of color, to get transitioning to the green economy, because this is the only way in which are going to help to be able to divest. I think, when people say, you know, and fossil fuels, I think they get scared because they think, well, they’re trying to end this industry today.

But we’re trying to transition out to a more sustainable future, not just for economic profit loss, we’re thinking about the future of our world, we’re thinking about the future of our children, we’re also thinking about the future of those that we should be giving back to regardless if we have, we have no connection with those people.

And I think, you know, as a climate communicator, in this digital media space, I’ve found that green energy and green conversations around that has often been intimidated by many conservative folks, because they are not understanding what it means to have a green job and what it means to be actually paid equitably. With health benefits and mental health benefits.

You know, certainly a friend of mine described the difference between conservatives and liberals. And one way, which is maybe simplistic, but just general, your average conservative doesn’t want to change anything, they kind of like the status quo. And as you kind of alluded, are afraid of turning things upside down.

Whereas somebody who might be more liberal is kind of opposed to the status quo and willing to turn things upside down a little bit more, you know, somewhere in the middle is is kind of where I land. And one of the things that you brought up was kind of the green tech solutions to some of our problems and the potential of, of those greener jobs as such as like electric cars, but, you know, I’ve just read a couple of articles recently about electric vehicles and, and the challenges of sourcing all the lithium for all these batteries and, and the mining challenges there. Where do you stand on that one?

Yeah, well, I think, you know, with the idea of green cars, it’s, I think what needs to be understood from general public is that it’s not the solution. It’s a part of the solution. And I think as an environmentalist, the extreme human rights that are happening to obtain these minerals from global south countries is inhumane. But I think that a lot of people use that as a very strong argument to further support the production and the extension of fossil fuel industries.

When we know that fossil fuel industries are currently exploding and pipelines, they are poisoning the people. They’re poisoning natural resources. So you have this conversation of this, this thing of which one is the least harmful. But the truth is, they’re all harmful, right? And so I think we need to work together to say, if this green energy has deeply systemic problematic issues to society, then we need to start to reinventing the ways in which we’re repurposing materials and batteries to actually extend the life cycle. Because if we know about the terminology, planned obsolescence.

We know that a lot of times these products that are being designed to us today in our technology sector, they’re designed to break within a few years because we want more customers. And so I think there needs to be collaboration from both groups to push these policies to ensure that and also, from the green tech sector, I think there needs to be this clarification that it’s not all, it’s not all, the end all be all solution and that we need to continue working together to find other existing solutions that are least harmful.

Certainly important for us to be continuing to look for the least harmful situation and, and it is challenging, it seems to kind of measure the externalities, as they say, in economics, which are the the outgrowth of, of using, say, electric cars, you have to do mining, well, how much money do you have to do? Is it worse than the pollution that that comes from extracting fossil fuels and in the form of oil and gas?

These are questions that need to be looked at very carefully. You’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern. And we’ll be right back after this break, talking to Isaias Hernandez, an environmental educator and activist.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern. And I’ve got Isaias Hernandez, the Queer Brown Vegan on the show today, he’s an environmental educator and activist I say is talking a bit before the break about the issues with electric cars.

For the record, I’m a proponent of electric cars over gas cars, though I do think that there is an issue with the potential mining related to electric cars, and I drive a hydrogen powered car, which doesn’t have a battery or a very small battery. So, you know, I’d kind of like to see us move maybe a little bit more in that direction, though. There are challenges with hydrogen and the ability to create enough energy to make the hydrogen a thought as to which way you fall on that question.

Yeah, well, I think, you know, it’s pretty funny myself, when people say, Well, you use a fossil fuel car actually don’t have a license. And I think that a lot of younger people are currently suffering, access to being able to even afford a car. I mean, like, in general, it is expensive to have car, right. You have to pay for insurance, you have to pay for upkeep.

But I think that with electric hydrogen and green hydrogen compensation that are coming out through it, I try to really make it clear with companies is that they avoid greenwashing. Because I think young consumers understand that a lot of car companies that are producing like, if you look at Toyota, Hyundai, Mercedes, Porsche, like all these like famous car brands, they all have environmental violations that they’ve been reported of allegedly, right.

And so I think that was the green high like these hydrogen cars, I don’t want people to think that it’s always the cleanest solution, or it’s always the solution for everyone to do. My theory of chain has always been that you should use whatever you have until it successfully is not able to be used. And I think and I can very consumerist society here in the West, like we are very addicted in consuming excess of items and always wanting the next big thing in our lifestyles right.

And you know, you don’t see that many cars being driven from the 90s. Here in California, you probably see the most latest like Tesla or the Rivian electric truck that’s out there now, like these are all things that are happening at a very fast rate. And I do think that we need to also question these companies of how they’re planning to slow down, while producing and phasing out fossil fuel cars for more electric car engines.

Well, one thing that kind of gets to me is that, say the whole rivian situation, or now Tesla’s talking about building a $3.6 billion plant to have electric trucks and you think that’s kind of a waste of all that lithium to make big batteries for big trucks, it would certainly, if we are really in an environmental crisis, we should not be making bigger and bigger vehicles.

That’s not the solution to the problem. We need to make less vehicles and all of us do with less I mean, in terms of one of the guests recently on the show was talking about how for those of us who live in a urban area, that ride sharing and using Uber and Lyft we could do without having our own personal car and and just use a car when we need it, which would save on a lot of cars. And so that’s a way to limit car production, we can all take the car whenever we need it. But we don’t have to have a car in our own driveway all the time.

Exactly. And I think that there’s really great apps out there that even let you rent cars for a week. And I think there needs to be more models within these companies that are very popular to co share these cars, right? Like one thing that I actually will tell you is that you know, I want I’m getting my license, hopefully this year, and I want to buy an electric car.

And one thing I did is I talked to my sibling, and I asked them like, Would you be willing to split this car with me or even use the car, the days I don’t even use it because I know that I would probably use a card maybe two to three times a week. And I know my sibling would probably use it four or five times. And that’s another thing where we have to kind of invest in this sustainability culture, not from a product end, but more of this mindset, individual lifestyle lens.

And I think that can actually lead to people exploring different options and also provides affordability, right? Because to me, I don’t want to be paying like that much amount. If I if I’m just using the car for one person. I want to be sure if I want to maximize and split the costs that I’m actually sharing it with my own networks.

Yeah, certainly it makes sense to to reduce our outflows on a individual level as well as on a collective level as well. The question is whether or not the mindset is there, and whether or not people will change, I don’t know if it’s been effectively communicated to people, why they should make this change, and why it’s worth doing ride sharing why it’s worth not having your own personal car, if you can deal with that situation, or why you shouldn’t buy an electric truck, and maybe buy a smaller vehicle that has less metal requires less energy, whether it’s an electric vehicle or any type of vehicle.

I mean, I think in general, the general American society is that everyone chooses convenience over sustainability, right? We don’t choose what is the most sustainable option for the planet, because that’s not how we were taught. But I think that, you know, in American traditional values, there’s this mindset of working hard for what you want and struggling. But I think that is disconnected once those individuals get to the point where they’re financially stable.

And they’re saying, Well, why would I want to take an hour and a half bus ride to downtown, when I could just take my car, and the history of cars, right? If we know it, the automobile industry was known to say that it destroyed the train and public transit industry because it bought properties essentially, just built freeways on low income communities.

And it designed a system of car culture. And now you see that the symbol of a big huge truck being symbolized to an American man because that presents this idea of masculinity and strength to society. So I think going back to this, of like, how do we instill this culture like are the American people able to do it? I truly believe that it can be done. But that’s only if you work with companies to actually get the messaging, right. What we’re seeing now is that generation Z, and millennials are making up a huge proportions of consumer.

So I’m in my mid 20s, I’m a I’m a consumer, I’m going to be a consumer of these companies. And to me, the way that they’ve been messaging has been always been rooted in these traditional old values that don’t make sense to young people. A lot of us young people can’t afford homes, we can’t afford our energy bills, our food bills, we can’t even afford our rent sometimes.

And so if you’re trying to say, well, what are we going to do to shift this culture, we need companies to actually invest resources in giving us the ideas to create these campaigns and to create these resources and pipelines to these individuals to actually have these conversations because it’s not going to change within a day.

We need to work with the media sector. We need to work with the PR sector, we need to work with the ways in which we consume media, specifically on TV and television because those behavioral mindsets can change us but I think that a lot of us are already so used to seeing a TV show where the person’s going on their car to go downtown to a city. No, you don’t really see like let’s take public transport and take the bus everyone’s always in a car. So that normalizes car culture normalizes idea to consume.

Speaking of consuming, and one of the things that you’re most passionate about as being a vegan, right. So what’s the potential environmental benefit? If we were all vegans, what? What would that be in terms of reduction in carbon emissions for the country and maybe for the planet?

Yeah, so a plant based diet, if you’re a vegan can reduce up to 73 percent of your individual carbon footprint in terms of it, you know, large scale if everyone went vegan, like let’s say in the United States, that can actually lower, at least point five degrees Celsius in which we’re increasing. But, again, the idea of veganism as an individual is saying that, you know, we’re taking a stance against non human animal oppression and the killings of non human animals.

The industry is right, if you look in agriculture, and meat and dairy and fruits and vegetable, the reason why America is still continuing the production of these meats and dairy is because it’s a profitable business, they’re generating almost one to 2 billion or 2 billion plus revenue of annual GDP to the US economy, they’re not going to stop that that’s actually a threat to the global economy.

So what needs to happen is that we need to, again, like we’ve seen in the green car sector in the clean energy sector, is to get these industries to admit to their environmental violent violations. We need to be able to also divest away from these large scale industrialized systems that are, quote unquote, sustainable when we know that when climate disasters strike, there is an increase of produce when we go to the supermarkets. We also need to localize our food systems.

So not many people know how to farm or forage for their own food. And that is being lost because we’ve relied so much on an industrial market, especially in urban areas. I don’t know anyone in LA as much that gardens I know everyone gets their food at an industrial grocery store even myself. So the argument about veganism, I’d say that it’s not about being perfect.

It’s not about being more righteous, but it’s more about being more compassionate and understanding that from a worldview, like in our global food policy, that we cannot continue to produce this amount of, of, you know, animals into this that is wasting our water tables. It’s wasting, you know, air resources that we have, and the amount of natural biodiversity that is being lost at a very high skill rate is actually costing us millions of dollars.

So it’s actually more convenient for the US government to save biodiversity than it is for them to continue producing. These, you know, these products that we’re consuming at our grocery stores the…

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got Isaias Hernandez, environmental educator and activist. We’ll be right back in just one minute to talk to Isaias and more about being a vegan and what its effect is on our environment.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. I’ve got Isaias Hernandez, the queer brown vegan on the show. He is an environmental educator and activist. And before the break, I say, as we were talking about the potential reduction in carbon footprint, you had said it was approximately 73%, which is pretty whopping percentage to be reduced if a person became a vegan. That’s a pretty radical change.

Now, the question is whether or not it’s really feasible or with the rate of people becoming vegans in society? And is the change happening fast enough to make a change in our in our carbon footprint so that climate change will be reduced?

Yeah, absolutely. So I like to say that, you know, 6% of American consumers identify having a vegan diet. So some of the key statistics that we need to understand is that it within that demographic, black Americans are the are the highest rates of individuals that are actually adopting a vegan diet or a plant based diet. So in terms of it being sustainable in in the long term is, if everyone can go to it, no, not everyone will go vegan. I have I’ve always understood that.

Not everyone can go vegan because the barriers of veganism is access to food, affordability, you know, safety, right, and a lot of people do not have the resources to be able to adopt a plant based diet. The second thing is, is it sustainable? For vegans to eat more locally? I think it is but I think the biggest challenge here as a vegan myself is that I cannot rely eating from food markets every day and I forage for my own food, sometimes my own food I actually learn how to forage for mushrooms for berries for plants, but is that actually sustainable long term?

No Oh, it’s not sustainable for the whole population. And I’ve rarely relied on industrial grocery markets to provide that. The issue is that within those that who pick our fruits and vegetables, or migrant farmworkers, there are people who look like me people who speak Spanish, and people who are underpaid.

And so right now, like, you know, people are complaining about lettuce being in the increased price produce that’s happening right now. But no one knows that the amount of migrant farmworkers get paid less than around three to $4 a day or an hour to actually harvest that. So there’s already this exploitation that’s happening in the mass limit. And I think when people say veganism is the only solution I do disagree with, I do think that veganism is a part of solution.

Eating more locally is part of that solution, eating eating more sustainably is part of that solution. So I recommend for individuals, instead of going vegan, that is just committed to reducing their intake of me, I know not many people eat meat seven times a day, I think maybe four or five. But I always ask people to at least eat one plant based diet or in plant based meal a day, or out of the week to actually commit and understanding how you can lower your own carbon footprint?

Well, that’s certainly a good first step for everybody. And I think the pandemic kind of helped me in that regard is that I started eating at home a little bit more. And it’s kind of easier to eat a plant based diet at home for me, and I tend to go out, I’ll usually throw in some animal protein into my order, which is kind of almost just a reflexive American type thing to do.

But one of the things that you mentioned, I had to push back on a little bit because I, I’ve had a number of clients who are farmworkers and we’ve represented them in cases they’ve had across the state of California, 1,000s of them. And generally speaking, they are paid the minimum wage. Now, working conditions are very difficult and out 100 degrees Sun many days are, you know, in very difficult circumstances.

So I don’t think that they’re treated as fairly as they should be. And for many years, they were subject to not getting overtime, when they worked over eight hours, they had to work over 10 hours to get overtime, which is crazy that the hardest working folks and the toughest conditions, get overtime later than everybody else. But putting that aside. Moving on to the point of also the farmworkers that we have here, if we don’t have these farm workers, we’re not going to get our fruits and vegetables in witness.

Britain had gotten out of the EU and so lost a lot of Eastern Europeans who used to be picking their, their vegetables and fruits, and now they’re gone. And that fruit is rotting in the field. So that’s something that we need here in California, unfortunately, you know, we have a lot of people who are doing those jobs, but we need to pay them well and treat them well to make their lives sustainable and healthy and reasonable on that front.

So I’m all for more localized agriculture, it is a challenge. And it’s something that’s going to take some time to really build up the infrastructure for Americans to be maybe growing a little better home or community gardens or things of that nature. Don’t you think that’s going to take some time?

Yeah, I mean, I think it is going to be taking time because I think right now regenerative agriculture is being introduced as this very new idea. But we all know that regenerative agriculture comes from indigenous communities to create these sustainable farming systems. I think one of the biggest things is that how do we get people that do not have access to land? This resource is right, because land ownership of the United States is actually very skewed right?

In 1910, Black Farmers owned, I think, around 16 million acres of land. And in 2017, the census was released. The figures now 4.7 million acres are owned by black farmers. And so when you have this lack of diversity of land ownership in the United States, it actually does shape who’s going to get access to food and who would actually be benefiting from those resources. And so I think that with the USDA actually creating these programs to get young farmers into the agricultural systems because they realize that no one wants to be a farmer now because it’s not profitable.

It’s very, like you said, it’s very time labor is how do we get people to get back and I think as individuals the most easiest ways in which I’ve been to Teaching people my communities is like, if you live in an apartment start growing your food. Growing Food is a very radical act because it teaches you the the importance of patience, the importance of paying people for what they’re worth. And it makes you have deeper relationships with individuals when you sell it at the farmers market.

Because I have really great relationships with all the farmers I’ve met at the farmers markets who tell me exactly how long it took, they can tell me what the what resources they use to produce this food. And they can tell me how much they’re making in profit, because that’s what is supposed to be done. I think when you have a lot of these corporations and billionaires owning large amounts of land, which is I think Bill Gates is one of the largest landowners, either in the United States or in the world.

He owns a lot of land in the US, I believe, that is an issue in itself because that land is not being equitably redistributed, nor is it actually being used to produce any types of resources for the general society, right. And that’s where we have this issue of like, who is going to feed the world when the corporations and the governments that have been telling us that they’re going to continue feeding the world, which they have in a certain sense, I’m not saying they have it, I’m saying that, to a certain extent, it hasn’t been affordable, nor accessible for many low income communities, which is why you have the terminologies, food insecurity.

And this is that those big corporate owned farms just tend to have these mono cultures which are not super healthy for our environment, they tend to be producing foods primarily for animal feed, which is not, you know, the best probably way we should be producing food and, and it’s probably not even good for the animals because it’s not the natural way they would eat.

They didn’t naturally eat corn and soybean meal. But it’s what they get fed because it fattens them up faster, to sell them and slaughter them. So I mean, that’s that’s the reality. I wanted to pivot a bit and ask you a little bit about the Eco talk collective, which is you’re the co director of and when did you start it? And what type of work are you doing there?

Yeah, so ECOSOC collective was created back in 2020. And our original founder was Alex, they are a Gen Z climate activists and they wanted to actually use Tik Tok when it was very popular. And it still is very popular app today, which is why a lot of politicians are trying to get it banned for certain reasons. And I think it was used to inspire climate activism and climate education.

And so this collective is composed of different environmentalists that range from the United States that use their platforms and their specific skills and environmentalism, to teach people how to be more sustainable or learn about climate science and to learn about local actions or system at systemic actions. And the point is to actually get young people funded for climate work, because what we’re doing is that we a lot of us have degrees in environmental science, a lot of them actually have their masters or PhDs.

In the specific field, I want to be clear that, you know, we’re not just these eco influencers, trying to get people to buy electric cars, were actually people that are trying to have these discussions in long form to bring environmentalism to the mainstream media content. Because when we think about climate, when we think about the environment, a lot of popular culture and dominant culture isn’t in our generations within Generation Z, and millennials are not really exposed as much to what to do with climate change.

There is an agreement saying yes, I’ve heard the term climate change, or Yeah, I know, a climate change is about it’s about the planet getting hotter. Like, you know, that’s bad for us. But that’s pretty much it. Not a lot of people know, like, well, what are the next steps I should be taking.

And so he could talk Collective is a nonprofit that actually focuses where we work with organizations, academic institutions, to communicate climate science and to get young people funded for this work, because there really is not many financial opportunities for young people to be displaying their type of work and these high level conferences, or C suite boards. And so we connect them with these large leaders in this mentorship program to create these pipelines of resources.

Well, that’s great. You know, I think that getting the message out there in the format that that younger people are actually going to look at it, see it, read it, and get educated.

You’ve got to give it to them in in many different forms. And certainly tick tock is one of them, though I’m not a huge tick tock fan, given their potential for being infiltrated or their data going uploaded into the Chinese government and then treating American young people differently than the way they treat Chinese young people. gives me reason to pause but You’re listening to A Climate Change this is Matt Matern, your host, we’ll be right back with Isaias Hernandez.

You’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern, your host and I’ve got Isaias Hernandez, environmental educator and activist on the show, I’d say so what is the sustainable climate mean to you? What does that look like?

Yeah, sustainable climate means to me were individuals, regardless of your race, your gender or your class, that we have access to clean air, water, and soil, and food, and that people actually have the wellbeing, lifestyle that is ecologically sound to them, meaning that they have access to public transportation, they have access to health care, they have access to be able to vote and to be able to collaborate with one of each other and to have their own entrepreneurship.

Right. I think the biggest issue about imagining about the future of this world is trying to understand that we have a huge wealth disparity gap, right? We know that there’s a large accumulation of wealth that is being owned by the 1%. And yes, while people can argue saying like, well, they worked hard for that money. No one is saying that they didn’t work hard, but it was built on exploitation of other individuals. And I think that, you know, a sustainable climate isn’t about, you know, going vegan and going full electric going.

All of these like green dominant lifestyles that we talk about, it’s about really asking yourself, like, what are the cultural and traditional values that you’ve grown up with, and what you want to teach for your future, because we talk a lot about financial security, financial security isn’t going to exist in the upcoming decades, if your own children don’t even have access to clean air, and they can’t breathe, and they have to spend their whole life trying to spend their money on medical bills, right?

These are things that we need to start to realistically tell ourselves that this is already happening today in the world, and the United States of America for whatever it was brought upon, or whatever it was political, drawn on this idea of like hard work will mean that you’ll have a good life, we need to say that having a good life should be applied to everyone. Right? This isn’t like we can make this a political as much as we want. But it’s not controversial to say that poor people should have access to clean air, water and food.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, everybody’s got to have access to those things. Or, you know, my air should be as clean as your air, which, you know, generally speaking, we’re all going to suffer if we have bad air. And in the city of Los Angeles, when we have too much smog, everybody gets hurt by that for the most part. You know, some areas may get hurt a bit worse, but we’re all suffering. So we’re all in this together. And if if the world goes down in a bad way, everybody’s going to suffer badly.

So so the question is kind of changing the model of sustainability, to me means that we need to shift the way that we look at what prosperity is for a long period of time, we’ve judged it through the metric of gross national product on a national level, and ever increasing amounts of product being created. Well, to me, that’s gotten us in the mess that we’re in with the climate.

Because we’re not measuring other things which might be even more important, like measuring what’s the quality of our air? What’s the quality of our water? What’s the quality of our food, and our education or health care? And if we’re doing well on all of those fronts, then maybe we don’t need to produce as many goods and being looking at the goods metric is has led us astray. And to me, it we need to change the metrics of what a healthy society looks like.

And that’s a that’s a real fundamental shift, because right now we’re, we’re chasing the wrong metrics. Gross National Product. It’s a wrong metric.

Yeah, I mean, I think, for what for what was lost about the idea of creating products that were good for business owners good for prosperity of life has been exaggerated today, right? And that’s where we talk about overconsumption is unfortunately, right. There’s people who would say, you know, capitalism is good in society if it’s done right.

And as a young person, I say that I disagree with that to a certain extent, because if capitalism was done right, in the early days from what it was conceptually to be talked about, then why have we led it to get to this far extreme, where now we have…

Can I just stop you there for a second, just say, Well, you know, back then 1750, or wherever Adam Smith created the Wealth of Nations, or, you know, the founding documents regarding capitalism, I mean, essentially, resources looked like they were pretty much unlimited, that we couldn’t damage the environment as humans, and that it looked like, hey, we can consume all we want. And there would always be plenty of nature and our natural world would not cave in, because we consume too many strawberries, or made too many boats or whatever built too many houses, that that didn’t look like it was a problem at some point in time.

And it’s only relatively recently that we started to recognize, hey, we have a, we have an impact on our environment. And that’s when capitalist the capitalist model kind of started to not work when we don’t value our resources. We don’t value good health and good water the same way as we’re valuing producing goods. And that’s, like, former President Trump used to say, well, we’ve got all this oil in the in the ground, why don’t we use it? Because it’s money there.

And it comes from this perspective of what we’ve got, you know, we’ve got to make money. That’s just first and foremost versus well, does that make us any healthier? does is, you know, is that a measure of our wealth? Is that a measure of our well being? And, and unfortunately, I think the old school capitalist doesn’t take that into account.

Yeah. And I think this is why, like you were saying to like, in modern society, we got right, well, where we’re at now is that a lot of people will do value, these living natural resources, and will not see them for their true wealth. They see them for their economic outputs that they have, for availability.

And, you know, an environmental economics, we learned that, you know, when I took it years ago, in college, it’s like, we are taught as environmental economics to value the output of ecological values of what they serve to human society, but not what they serve, to the collective well being.

Because in, right, the original ideations in the history of the mythologies of Earth is that this earth was meant for coexistence, not just for, not just for us as humans, but for animals. And for these living systems, like water, to me is a living system. It’s not nonliving.

And that is where we’ve strayed away too far now, and that people are doubt fighting for resources, because the next wars that we are expected to see is the war for minerals, the war for water, the war for, you know, clean air like these are all things that are going to be happening in upcoming decades.

And I think that if we’re not able to come together to this to a more generalized conceptual statement to say, Yes, I don’t think it’s political to say, we deserve prosperity in some way that is ecologically sound, then that may be lost.

And I do say that the political spectrum in which we exist today now with you know, far right extremism, are you quote unquote, far, far left liberals like, it does us no good in some way to destroy ourselves within these movements. When those people from both sides left and right, are the ones making those political decisions about our future.

Well, I, I’d say going back to your environmental economics class, that’s a relatively new thing for for the planet, in terms of I was an economics major back in the 80s. And we had no such study of that. We did not, there was not any discussion of really pricing, you know, empty land, you know, and air and things of that nature. It was, it was not focused on that.

So we’re really having a sea change here. And it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t push hard and push fast to make that sea change, because we have limited time in which to make these changes. But we have to be recognizing when we’re making these arguments, that this sounds scary to somebody who’s conservative with a small “c” who’s maybe older and set in their ways, and we need to communicate it that hey, we’re trying to protect the planet.

We’re trying to protect the air and the water and our way of life. And, you know, hopefully that message gets to Row, how do you plan to frame those messages going forward? I’ll give you 30 seconds before we sign off here.

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s about working with young people, right. And within my own sector, as someone that identifies as more liberal is that I need to meet those that are centrist, out there that are communicating to conservative groups, because I know that I’m communicating to my group, getting them to understand this, but we also need from these other political groups to come together and have a discussion.

But, you know, again, it’s really polarizing to sometimes bring these people into the same room. And that’s where I think as a young person, we need to work together to have those conversations and that’s going to take time.

Well, I appreciate you coming on the show as a as you’ve been listening to A Climate Change this is Matt Matern, your host please, everybody, tune in next week and until then, have a great week everybody.