Jamie Lorimer: Rewilding bodies and ecologies for a probiotic planet (ep310)
What does it mean to shift our ways of addressing ecological imbalances and diseases from antibiotic to probiotic? How are large-scale rewilding projects in the west related to biodiversity loss and land conversion in the ‘developing’ countries where food production is increasingly outsourced to?
In this episode, we welcome Jamie Lorimer (Twitter: @jsplorimer), a Professor of Environmental Geography at the University of Oxford. His research explores the cultures and politics of wildlife conservation, and he is the author of two books: Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature and The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Jake Gauntlett
“Rewilding in itself doesn’t challenge the status quo politically; it doesn’t have, at its heart, a kind of redistributive, antiracist, anticolonial politics. But you could imagine a version of rewilding that would do that...”
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Transcript
Note: Green Dreamer is a community-powered multimedia journal exploring our paths to collective healing, ecological regeneration, and true abundance and wellness for all. The values, views, and opinions of our diverse guests do not necessarily reflect those of Green Dreamer. Please do your own additional research on the information, resources, and statistics shared. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamea Chayne: Before we dive into the heart of our discussion today, I'd love for you to give us a little glimpse into your background and what it was that crystallized your interest in environmental geography and wildlife conservation.
Jamie Lorimer: I grew up in the U.K. in between very urban London and very rural Scotland. And I used to spend my holidays in the Hebrides which are the islands off the west coast of Scotland. I used to have a lot of freedom there with my brother to run around on the beaches. And I guess I got interested in wildlife in quite an early way by having access to those spaces.
When I went to university, I wasn't sure what to do. And I ended up studying geography, which at least in the UK is this great degree because you can do lots of different things with it – you can do cultural studies and you can do environmental studies. And I quite quickly realized that I wasn't so much interested in the science of nature, but much more in how people come to understand the world around them, what it is about particular places and particular species that people find exciting and interesting.
And so I finished my first degree and then stayed on and did a Ph.D. at the University of Bristol. And this allowed me to spend a lovely summer traveling around the Scottish Highlands, speaking to different people who were very engaged in conservation, particularly in bird conservation, and trying to understand what it was that drew them into their subject, what it was that gave them such a passion for wildlife.
And I was particularly interested in the idea of a charismatic species. What is it about some species that make them really charismatic?
And so I studied a range of different scientists and their species to try and understand the motivations behind science and what it was that made really passionate people so driven to dedicate their lives to conservation.
And that planted a seed. I carried on in that space, teaching students, trying to get them excited about the environment, but then also studying the different ways in which people think about nature and how they get drawn into a passion for wildlife conservation.
Kamea Chayne: As you mentioned, your earlier work looked at our species and spatial preferences in conservation, and I'd love to start here before we go into The Probiotic Planet. What has it meant for us that we’ve been more keen to protect certain charismatic species and that conservation efforts disproportionately neglect less “aesthetic” and “pristine” spaces like urban and post-industrial areas?
Jamie Lorimer: I think it's really important if we think about what it is that conservation can do, to understand that it's ultimately an expression of human values and human desires to save the world. And our love for different species is very unevenly distributed across different plants and animals and also across different types of places. So if we think about particular places, a lot of conservation emerged out of a romantic attachment to wild landscapes and a sense that the city was an alienating place, a dirty place, a lost place that one should escape from. And you should travel out to the countryside. That's where you would rekindle your love of nature.
And clearly, there are some wonderful wild places outside of cities.
But that also meant that we relegated and really played down all the bits of nature that are actually much closer to urban citizens, the sorts of places where many people have their first encounters with plants or with beetles or with ants or with pigeons or with squirrels. And we tended to dismiss those as unimportant. As a consequence, conservation was quite an elite thing because it became about places that only some people can travel to.
So in terms of thinking about democratizing conservation, we need to think about these urban spaces, these places where many people have their encounters with nature. We're also finding that the countryside has become a very industrial place, at least in North America and certainly in Europe. The intensification of farming has meant that we've lost a lot of wildlife in the countryside, but there are fragments of that wildlife that survive in cities. And so cities have also become these oases, these places in which important habitats, important species survive.
And if we think about charismatic species, in and of themselves, charismatic species can play a really important role in motivating people to think about the natural world and to give money towards conservation. So if you think about the panda, for example, the panda is this amazing icon for the World Wildlife Fund. People go to zoos and they spend a lot of money on pandas. And through the panda, organizations have raised a lot of money to do work on climate change or to do work on preventing deforestation. So the panda is what's called a flagship species. It's this iconic species that can help save a lot of other organisms. But at the same time, there are a whole load of other species that we just don't know about because no one's ever given the time to go and study them. They're small, they're invisible, they're nocturnal, they live underwater, they live in the soil. And increasingly, the world is going to be a place that's shaped by people and shaped by people's love and affection for different species. Those that we don't know about risk going extinct almost before we even know that they're out there.
And so I try to think about charisma both as a vehicle to get us to really engage with the natural world, but also stay aware that it's very unevenly distributed and there are things that either we are ignorant of or even worse, we're disgusted by, that also fall out of people's concern for the natural world.
Kamea Chayne: A lot of what you focus on really challenges dominant worldviews and perspectives that might be embedded within even the realm of sustainability. And this is especially clear when we start to look at what you explore in your latest book, The Probiotic Planet, which is so pertinent to discuss, especially during this time, during a pandemic. But before we go into the probiotic piece, what do we need to understand in regards to how our dominant responses to various health and planetary ailments have taken on this antibiotic approach at various scales beyond just antibiotic drugs that people might immediately think of?
Jamie Lorimer: The book develops this argument that it's useful to think of the triumphs of modern life, the ways in which we've been able to increase food availability, the way we've been able to control disease and extend life expectancy, as the outcome of a very far-reaching antibiotic way of managing the non-human world. And by “antibiotic”, I mean not just the development of particular drugs that kill particular organisms, but a whole program of activities that really reduce the complexity of the world. They simplify the world and accelerate natural processes, all to optimize the planet for human survival and human civilization. And this has had all sorts of benefits, albeit ones that are very unequally distributed around the world.
But it's also now becoming clear that that antibiotic model can be excessive, that we can go too far. And the over-success of the application of the antibiotic model is now creating situations of what we might describe as blowback – the unintended consequences of our ability to control and rationalize and simplify the non-human world.
And that comes across a range of different scales from concerns about emergent antimicrobial-resistant pathogens, for example, because we've overused antibiotic drugs, to extreme weather events – extreme fires and floods – that have come about because of the way we've really simplified forest management or river systems. And we create the conditions for much more extreme events because of the overuse of this antibiotic way of understanding and managing life.
Kamea Chayne: So I guess the key point to note here is that complexity and diversity lend themselves to resilient ecosystems. And when we take an antibiotic approach, whether it's by using pesticides or herbicides in farming, or at a more micro-scale, by addressing human diseases in certain ways, all of these things are nondiscriminatory in nature in that they might kill the targeted microbes that we're trying to get rid of or control, but then they also might harm the other very diverse species that actually may support the resilience of the system.
Jamie Lorimer: That's true. I couldn't have said it better myself. You've provided a really great summary of what the book is arguing is that we need to depart from – or at least that's the first chapter of the story that sets up the contemporary probiotic turn.
Kamea Chayne: In the book, you give examples of two major types of “rewilding”. The one that I think people are more familiar with is at a macro-scale in landscape ecology and the other is at a more micro-scale in human ecology. I would love for you to share some examples of these probiotic approaches, maybe especially at the microbial level, beyond the commodified supplement of probiotics that people might hear of a lot.
Jamie Lorimer: When we think about rewilding, when we think about ecological restoration, we tend to think of big species in large landscapes. So we think about the wolf, we might think about the beaver – what are called keystone species that have this ability to restore the functions and dynamics of ecology. What we haven't known much about until very recently is the ecology of what's called the microbiome – the bacteria, the fungi, and the other invisible organisms that make up the vast majority of life on Earth, but also come to make up the vast majority of types of organisms that live in, on, and around us in the human body. So with developments in genetic sequencing, it's become much more affordable now to take a sample from the human skin or take a sample from the human gut and to map out the diversity and the ecology of species that live in the human body.
And this work helped to make sense of a longstanding hypothesis in immunology and in epidemiology that we were missing what are called “old friend microbes” – microbes with which we as a species would have co-evolved over time, but the antibiotic mode of managing microbial life, so the use of antibiotics, changing hygiene practices, living in smaller families cut off from contact with soil and animals has meant that we entered into a condition of what microbiologists describe as “dysbiosis” – a kind of ecological imbalance in the human body.
Ecologists have suggested that one way of restoring functional ecosystems is to restore these keystone species. And so people began to think about whether that theory would work at a microbial scale. So could we think about organisms that have this historical relationship with the human microbiome that could be reintroduced in order to make our immune systems work better, to make our gut ecologies work better?
The organisms that I've been studying are helminths, so parasitic worms with which we evolved over our history, and which most wild mammals and many people living in tropical regions still exist with. And the theory is that the worm is a bit like a keystone species, a bit like a wolf or a beaver, inasmuch as it has a significant effect in configuring the microbiome of the human gut.
And so the idea is that you could restore worms or restore what enthusiasts describe as our “gut bodies”. And the return of the worm would in some ways reset gut ecologies to restore desired functions and services. And so the worm acts much more than a particular strain of bacteria that you might get from a probiotic supplement because it's an active living organism that's working on your gut ecologies. So that's the theory. And there are clinical trials underway to test this. It's fair to say they've been inconclusive in proving the efficacy of the worms. But there is a great network of people, citizen scientists, who have decided that this is what they need to take to tackle particular conditions. They have particular gut conditions, – IBD, Crohn's – and they have gone several stages ahead of the clinical trials and have developed networks for growing their own worms, for exchanging worms, for returning worms online, particularly through Facebook, and speak very compellingly about how their worlds have been transformed by having access to these particular helminths.
So that’s the flagship example of the probiotic turn on a microbial scale that I've looked at. Other examples relate to the rise of what's called a fecal microbiota transplant, which is basically a situation in which people have a very unhealthy ecology in their lower intestine and they receive an enema – a transplant of healthy stool that displaces this disbiotic gut ecology and restores gut function. And that's been proven to be very effective for people with long-term antibiotic-resistant infections in the lower intestine and is now a licensed therapy by the FDA. So there are small examples underway. But it's fair to say that the complex interactions between the host, the microbiome, and possible keystone species are still being worked out through different scientific experiments at the moment.
Kamea Chayne: So maybe the specifics still need more research, but I feel like intuitively it all makes sense how this works. And what I found really fascinating is learning that the diversity of microbes, for example, or the ecology of my elbow is more similar to your elbow than the ecology of maybe my feet is to your feet. So thinking about our bodies as micro-ecosystems, like how a rainforest in Asia might be more similar to a rainforest in Africa than a desert in Asia is to a desert in Africa. Really fascinating stuff to learn about.
And I guess when we talk about microbes and taking this probiotic approach at a micro-level, part of the challenge with that is our obsession with hygiene. The use of sanitizers – even in textile technologies, they're talking about antimicrobial fabrics – so there's all these ideas around antimicrobial everything. And I wonder what misconceptions about the role of microbial life and even viruses you think need to be debunked in order for our culture and society to be more accepting and supportive of this sort of approach.
Jamie Lorimer: Yes, it's difficult. I wrote the book at the end of 2019, so pre-pandemic, and there was, I would say, a broad acceptance that we needed to be a bit more nuanced in our understanding of microbes, that clearly there were a small number of dangerous pathogens, viruses, and bacteria that killed lots of people in many parts of the world – whether that's HIV or cholera. But the vast majority of microbial life that make us up is either harmless or actually performs some useful function in the human body. And stories were emerging every day about the necessity of particular microbes to train the immune system.
This whole idea of the gut-brain axis, that our happy guts make us happy people, that was becoming quite mainstream. And then COVID strikes. And understandably, the big push in public health was around sanitation.
It was about hand washing, it was about masks. It was about preventing any kind of microbial exchange. And this broad-brush pathologization of microbes as being responsible for this terrible, terrible disease that we're still battling does make it feel a bit like we've gone back many, many stages in that much more nuanced understanding of the good guys and the bad guys in the microbiome.
I'm optimistic that as we overcome the pandemic, but also as we start to understand the differential impacts of COVID on individuals, that it will become clear that microbial stewardship – looking after your microbiome – gives you greater resilience, trains your immune system to better set you up in the face of these pathogens. And obviously, we still want to control and keep it at bay. So, the differential life course encounters with microbes seems to be one of the things that helps explain why different people have such different reactions to the virus when when they pick it up, to the extent that some people talk about the potential probiotic benefits of microbial exposure over time to give you a greater resilience in the face of emerging zoonotic pathogens that we might see in the future.
Kamea Chayne: There's been a common saying that, insert whatever you don't want, and then say “this” is a virus. So, for example, “hate” is a virus, or some people will even go as far as to say humans are the virus causing our ecological destruction, which I personally don't agree with. But people basically use the statement to imply that viruses are inherently harmful. And I wonder if you could speak more to perhaps the historic and evolutionary role of viruses that goes beyond them being pathogenic, because from what I understand, I think they actually supported human evolution and adaptation and even at a more short-term timescale, support the development of our immune systems as well. So what are some things we need to know about viruses in general beyond the fact that they can be pathogenic and harmful to humans or any species that they make their host?
Jamie Lorimer: I should start by saying that I'm not a virologist. I'm not an expert on viruses. But from a philosophical perspective, what's interesting about viruses and what's interesting about microbes in general is their ability to exchange genetic material across what we see as distinct species boundaries. So we've tended to think of the human as a separate thing from a monkey and from a mouse or from our cats and dogs. And yet when we look at the exchange of species at a microbial level, those big organisms are fairly meaningless. There's this incredible promiscuity in exchange of materials that goes on all the time around us. And viruses are obviously central to that. Viruses have this amazing ability to spread and replicate. And there's millions and billions of viruses of which we know a tiny number. And histories of evolution of animals suggest this key role of viruses in enabling the exchange of genetic material that ultimately gives rise to much more sophisticated organisms. Your theories of what's called endosymbiosis, this idea that big organisms came about because smaller organisms were combined together, in some ways is a very humbling idea of the human – that we are, if you like, warm, fleshy vehicles for the furtherance of microbial projects rather than thinking of ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution, we are recent Johnny-Come-Lately’s and it's the microbes that have been around for a very long time, configuring how life works, making ecosystems resilient, making ecosystems flourish.
And we may well find as we get better at sequencing viruses that there are all sorts of viruses that perform beneficial roles for us in changing immune systems.
There's lots of interest at the moment, for example, in what are called phages. These are the viruses of bacteria that people suggest could be the new frontier in developing antimicrobial, antibacterial therapeutics. And as antibiotics cease to work, the idea is that we could find the viruses that are the enemy of the pathogenic microbe we don't want and develop that in the way that you might use ladybugs to eat aphids on your crops or you might have nematodes to eat slugs in your garden.
The same sort of theory of probiotic biological control could apply at a human level, and we could harness viruses as allies to help us develop both new vaccines, which we're seeing in COVID at the moment, but also to develop new ways of tackling infectious disease.
Kamea Chayne: So it's taking on this more additive approach as opposed to a more reductive one, really going back to the idea that complexity and diversity overall strengthen our resilience.
And you've spoken about how regenerative agriculture in farming exemplifies this probiotic approach in that it really seeks to rebuild diversity and resilience into the system itself, to essentially make it less reliant on external inputs and the need for control from the outside. But as you also mentioned, this mindset shifts when we're talking about things like pandemics. And I wonder if part of the challenge is that when farmers are transforming their conventionally managed landscapes into regenerative agriculture, the death and transformation of life forms during that process is accepted and seen as inevitable. But with human life, and understandably so, our fear of death drives us to prioritize immediate guarantees of safety or as close to it as possible. And so we want to reduce all risks of coming into contact with any potentially deadly pathogens.
So there's no easy answer to this and I'm very sensitive to how this question can be misinterpreted as not caring for our most vulnerable. But I guess at what point is our obsession with hygiene for safety at an immediate timescale detrimental to our collective resilience over a larger timescale?
Jamie Lorimer: Yeah, it's a great question. What we're increasingly finding out about the development of human immunity is that a lot of it begins very early on in the life course. So a lot of our immune systems are set up in what they call the first thousand days of a child's life – from conception through birth to the early years, in which children are first colonized by microbes and then have their immune systems challenged by encounters with particular microbes in the soil or amongst other people that they meet. Historically, child mortality was huge and there were very good reasons why we really went after water quality, why we went after sanitation, why we improved diets – to raise life expectancy and do away with child mortality. That's an epic historical project and something that should be really celebrated.
But by and large, that is something that many of us, at least in the urban, affluent Western world, take for granted. And there's a sense now that that success in eradicating or at least domesticating microbes has gone too far, and that children raised in these hyper-sanitized situations can be prone to a whole set of other non-communicative diseases, particularly allergies or asthma or a range of other inflammatory gut diseases. And so there's a definite sense that we need to recalibrate hygiene practices, not reject them. Not a return to the dark ages when we didn't have any of these technologies. But can we arrive at a more nuanced ecological understanding of which are the desirable microbial exposures and which are the ones we still want to keep at bay? How would you plan that over the life course while recognizing that different hosts have different genetic configurations and mediate a really elaborate project – this dream of personalized medicine that you could tailor your microbiome to best fit your immune system so you would arrive at a kind of optimum configuration? And it's still a pipe dream at the moment. But that involves holding on to the success of modern hygiene while recognizing the points at which it can go too far, the points at which it can become pathological in itself.
Kamea Chayne: Clearly our dominant responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have leaned towards being antibiotic responses, but I wonder if you were in charge of our global pandemic response, what might taking on a probiotic approach to containing and addressing a virus like this look like in a way that can actually build our long-term resilience and make us less vulnerable to similar pandemics in the future? Again, maybe also including some of the hygiene practices that have been beneficial to us, but not going overboard. And then taking into account where probiotic approaches can take us.
Jamie Lorimer: Yeah, it's a very hard one to think with, and it's definitely challenged my enthusiasm for all things probiotic thinking about a virus that is it is incredibly able to both spread and mutate. And one that is deeply pathological to many people.
The number one priority should be containing the virus to prevent its spread, to find ways of vaccinating against it, and to neutralize it as a threat. And so, to be honest, the probiotic options to achieve that are much less developed than the antibiotic techniques. I guess if we start to think about vaccines, particularly some of the live strain vaccines which are in some ways not that dissimilar to a probiotic intervention, inasmuch as they're giving the body a controlled exposure to the thing that might kill it and calibrating the body in relation to to the virus it might encounter, you could if you're generous, imagine that kind of vaccine within a probiotic framework of intervention.
I guess if we step back a stage and think about preventing the next COVID, one of the things that's yet to become clear, but if COVID is akin to other zoonotic diseases – viruses that cross over from animals – we need to think seriously about agricultural practices.
We need to think seriously about the hygiene practices of intensively farmed agricultural animals that can often be the hotbeds for viruses to cross over from humans into animals and then to propagate radically through global agricultural supply chains.
So one version of this is to really think about the merits of intensive livestock production, to think about the globalized food system, which clearly has lots of benefits and lots of efficiencies. But how much does that make us particularly exposed to these pandemics that spread fast in global networks with lots of immunocompromised human and animal bodies living in tight proximity, where it can really spread? How might you deintensify urban living, how might you deintensify livestock production to have some firewalls in place to prevent the spread of these viruses until you've got decent vaccine programs in place to control them?
Kamea Chayne: Would you say that diversity could act as a firewall?
Jamie Lorimer: I think so. I don't know enough about how these viruses spread and propagate, but it's clear that, certainly in livestock populations, if you've got a very genetically homogenous group of chickens, for example, with a very homogenous microbiome, they're particularly vulnerable to a disease that might sweep through the chicken population and knock them out. So genetic diversity in the human microbiome, genetic diversity in the wider ecology we live in, one would imagine, would provide a buffer against viral emergence. Viruses would have competition, they'd be outcompeted by other viruses.
Certainly on the landscape scale, if we think about other pathogens – so particular plant pathogens or particular insects that cause lots of issues to farmers – having diversity in the ecosystem helps to prevent the spread of bark beetles or locusts or other organisms that are often dependent upon monocultures of particular crops that allow them to build up to these vast concentrations and then spread elsewhere.
Kamea Chayne: To further contextualize the work of probiotic rewilding of landscapes with the globalization of the food system, you've noted that we've been freeing up land in the global north for rewilding projects as food production is outsourced to the global south and other parts of the world. What should we keep in mind when people support rewilding projects, as in, are people in wealthier countries able to enjoy the restoration of the wild at the cost of biodiversity loss in the south? And if so, what are the implications here for perhaps realigning our foodways with our landscapes?
Jamie Lorimer: It's a great question. As a geographer, I'm always interested in how activities in one part of the world connect to activities in other parts of the world. And so what we're seeing with the rewilding movement, particularly in Europe and North America, is the abandonment of land that is fairly marginal for agriculture or for forestry. And wildlife has come back of its own accord or wildlife has been reintroduced through conservation programs. And you have this quite substantial re- and afforestation of Europe and re- and afforestation of North America, the benefits of which largely accrue to people living in Western Europe and North America.
But at the same time, we're not using any less timber, nor are we eating that much less meat that would once have been raised on this land, and instead that has either been concentrated into concentrated animal feeding operations, fed on soy or wheat that's grown in the tropics, or we've outsourced natural production to other parts of the world where there is “dewilding” taking place. So if you imagine in Indonesia, lots of rainforest is getting cut down to produce palm oil. In Brazil, lots of rainforest is getting cut down to produce soy and to raise beef that is no longer grown in the US. It's grown elsewhere.
So we think about the sort of global balance.
Arguably, there's not a net rewilding taking place, it’s just a redistribution of the wild. And the benefits accrue to people living in North America at the expense of people living in the tropics whose land is being destroyed, whose biodiversity is being lost, who are becoming exposed to the issues associated with landscapes that are short on biodiversity: floods, extreme weather events, disease outbreaks, etc.
So if you're a sophisticated enthusiast for rewilding in Europe and North America, you need to think more holistically about reducing your environmental footprint, reducing the amount of land that is required to sustain your diet. And the most straightforward way of doing that is to think hard about the quantity and nature of the meat that you eat, particularly the beef that you eat. And there are arguments that support some forms of beef production, but not at the scale that currently operates globally, which requires huge amounts of land to feed animals through these concentrated feeding operations. And if you couple enthusiasm for taking land out of production with an assertive shift away from beef consumption and other meat consumption towards plant-based eating, it could have a really significant effect on global sustainability or biodiversity, as well as on climate change.
Kamea Chayne: While we're on this topic, we know that billionaires are spending a lot of money right now to buy up large swaths of land, some of which are for rewilding projects. But what are the nuances of this supposedly positive deed? What are some of the potential concerns if this trend continues and critical ecologies increasingly become privatized?
Jamie Lorimer: In many ways, billionaires are piggybacking on an incredibly concentrated model of land ownership that we have in many parts of the world. So it's not necessarily that rewilding is driving this concentration of land ownership, but it's piggybacking off the fact that certainly in the U.K., which is the area I know best, 50, 60, 70 percent of Scotland is owned by a handful of people who buy these large sporting estates, these stalking estates that exist in the Scottish Highlands, which historically have been cleared of people and turned into sheep ranching operations, and then deer stalking operations.
And so the individuals buying this land want to rewild it. They don't necessarily want to change the historical status quo through which land was taken from people and concentrated into the hands of a few people.
And likewise, in North America, the history of the creation of national parks is often about the loss of indigenous people who lived on the land and the killing of indigenous people in colonial ventures so that these could be seen as wilderness places without people that could now be repurposed as sites for conservation, or have now become large private ranches that people want to turn over to regenerative agriculture.
Rewilding in itself doesn't challenge the status quo politically; it doesn't have, at its heart, a kind of redistributive, antiracist, anticolonial politics. But you could imagine a version of rewilding that would do that, that would think about the historical injustices associated with the loss of biodiversity, the loss of indigenous land ownership, the loss of indigenous knowledge about the land.
And you could in some ways through that model, which is a much more politically radical model, think about there being a place for people in those landscapes, in which they’d have an ecological role to play so that they're not completely unproductive landscapes. It's just that the nature of agriculture is fundamentally different from the type of agriculture that's largely practiced in these huge enclosed ranches or on some of the big farms that we associate with Europe and North America.
Kamea Chayne: Right. And the one statistic that I love to share on this topic has to do with biocultural diversity: we know that indigenous peoples make up 6.2% of our global population right now, but steward 80 to 85% of our global biodiversity. So that to me really speaks volumes and emphasizes the importance of not excluding people who have native knowledge of native ecologies from these landscapes.
Thank you so much.
We are wrapping up our primary discussion, but I'd love for you to share anything else on your mind that I didn't get to ask you about, as well as your final calls to action for our listeners.
Jamie Lorimer: I guess where we left off just then was about how to combine a kind of progressive political agenda with a progressive ecological vision and not to see our environmental crisis as something that will be solved through technological solutions. We need to embed all of this knowledge within the historical, political, and cultural contexts that it works in. And certainly thinking about regenerative agriculture, which is this really exciting buzzword at the moment, but has a danger of losing a sense of its history in agroecological thought and in the ways in which some versions of what has been described as regenerative agriculture have deep roots in indigenous understandings and land-use practices.
And so I guess for all of us who are looking for solutions, I want to emphasize not to take the solutions in isolation, but to think about the solutions as part of these complex political histories that continue to haunt the present and that we have to live with and work with and try and overcome.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much.
What is an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Jamie Lorimer: The book that I recommend is a book called Wilding by Isabella Tree, which is this fantastic autobiographical account written by a woman who takes her farm out of failed dairy production and transforms it into this incredible example of rewilding in the UK.
Kamea Chayne: What do you tell yourself to stay motivated and inspired?
Jamie Lorimer: I guess for me, the key currency is curiosity. I'm a teacher. I love inspiring my students and it's always trying to find a new angle on something, always trying to look at something from a different direction, always trying to get out of bed and think about things afresh without getting stuck in a groove, without accepting defeat and a kind of pessimistic worldview as the default.
Kamea Chayne: And what makes you most hopeful for our planet and world at the moment?
Jamie Lorimer: I’m about 40, and so I'm starting to feel old. I look at my kids, I look at the students that I teach and there is this incredible ecological motivation that I see among them, a generation that is much more aware and much more driven to face up to the challenges that we see in the present. And so I'm hopeful that the students that I teach and the people that I spend time around have the kind of passion and energy and the commitment to bring this long-standing environmental movement to fruition, to really bring about a better future.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much. Green Dreamer, we're coming to a close, but to learn more and stay updated on Jamie's work, you can follow him on Twitter @JSPLorimer. And we'll also have links to his books and his work in our show notes as well at GreenDreamer.com. Jamie, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciated your time and this conversation. Thank you so much. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Jamie Lorimer: That's a tricky one. I think for me, it’s about this question of curiosity and an appetite for encountering the world anew. We are surrounded by fantastic podcasts. We're surrounded by fantastic social media. We're surrounded by fantastic film. The goal is to keep challenging yourself to address the new and to take on the new in a way that would enhance your world.
