Graeme Sait:

It’s a pleasure, Kareem. Thanks for inviting me.

Graeme Sait:

Well, thankfully it’s been—sort of what started off as a trickle of interest in the last two or three years exploded into something of a tidal waves that I’m struggling to keep up. I think I’ve been in 32 countries to date this year. But, just to quickly summarize the scale of the urgency, I think one of the most amazing records has been the academically scientist in history is probably this NASA scientist, James Cameron—James Hansen, sorry. I said James Cameron. I just had a meeting with the film producer while I was in the U.S.—but James Hansen, he’s been a NASA scientist for 50 years. And he just left NASA recently to sort of tour the world and spread the word.

But the interesting thing about this man is that he has made in a 50-year career hundreds if not thousands of predictions and the man has never been wrong. When he told us a year and two months ago that we have 5 years left, I said “I for one set up and took note”. Well, I need to do everything that I can do personally to contribute. I sort of got to the point that I think it’s fair to say that if you’re not an activist at this point of time in the planet’s history, then you’re sort of pretty much dead weight. It’s time for everyone to stand up and be counted. And I’m doing what I can do. James wasn’t saying that we didn’t have a world in five years time or now, in 3 years and 10 months time but it’s irreversible. And that we live in a place that’s a lot more miserable than it otherwise could be.

We are at this sort of fork in the road at this point. And what each and every one of us contributes is going to have a massive impact. And the changes that are coming up are something that our grandchildren are going to see. There is very few people living other than those that are terminally ill that aren’t going to see this thing unfold. And it is unfolding as we speak. I’ve been in 33 countries in the last 12 months and there isn’t a country that isn’t hurting and in some cases hurting quite dramatically from what’s being a 1 degree increase in climate change. And the prediction was business as usual is a 6 degree increase. And the very simple thing that people need to understand is that there is no human life on the planet beyond 5.5 degrees. And many scientists are saying beyond 4.5. And everyone just suggests we’re locked in to that and there’s nothing we can do. And there’s a great deal we can do and that what I’m trying to spread the word about.

Graeme Sait:

The very simple perspective is these three gases that we’ve emitted at a tremendous rate. And the post war party that’s being fuelled by cheap oil since 1950. That’s when the world’s gone crazy where we’ve tripled our population and so forth. And those three greenhouse gases which are actually form a natural blanket that’s necessary to create a liveable climate. That blanket got a bit thicker from those greenhouse gases which trap some of the heat that normally passes through it.

We had just slightly warmer—at this point, the one degree increase. But that one degree increase has already sponsored massive changes. And there’s no country—as I said that’s not feeling that the ocean is warming. The ocean is acidified. And we’ve got all sorts of dramas with massive changes in our climate with just one degree. And we’ve got quite a long way to go, so the experts tell us. It’s time to act. And the simple explanation of where we’re at relative to the soil which is one of the things I focus upon is that, we can’t make more carbon molecules we’ve got what we’ve got since day one—since the earth was formed. And those carbon molecules cycle between three places. They’re either stored in the soil as humus, a chocolate-brown sweet smelling substance that glues the soil particles together that’s made by microorganisms and sort of is their home base. And it’s the main thing that grows healthy vegetables and food for us. And it’s either stored there as carbon or it’s stored on all living things which is all the plants and animals and humans. Or it’s stored in the atmosphere as CO2 and that cycle between those 3 places.

A huge amount of what used to be stored in the soil which has gone from 5% organic matter—which is what humus is—are measured on a soil test. And our soil in the planet used to be 5%. And we’ve dropped down to 1.5%. And that represents actually the vast majority of the problem CO2 in the atmosphere. And the very simple solution is—not simple, but the obvious solution—is to put humus back in our soil because you can make more. If you put humus in the soil, you’ve literally sequestered from what otherwise would have returned as part of the carbon cycle to the atmosphere. Every ounce of humus that we build into the soil would otherwise be CO2 in the atmosphere. The greatest and fastest and most efficient way to sequester the CO2 and save the day basically. And that involves obviously changing some of the things we do in agriculture. And it’s about growing food a lot more sustainably. But the fun part or the exciting part about that initiative is that, it affects everything positively.

All of the things which have sort of brought us to a bit of a knife-edge, things like water which is very rapidly becoming the new gold and how we manage water. Well, the greatest management tool for water is humus. Humus holds its own weight and moisture. If you can build 1% organic matter in your soil, you hold 16,500 gallons of water beneath the soil with no evaporation, with no carbon footprint moving it to the site where it’s needed. The plant takes it as it needs it. And it becomes the perfect solution and it goes much more –it gets much more exciting than that when we start talking about the quality of the food we eat. And the fact that humus is hugely linked to the nutrient density and the medicinal qualities and whether or not that foods had chemical intervention. And of course, that chemistry impacts us very seriously.

The whole story is a wonderfully positive story. What’s involved in relation to that answers your first question about, “Has society been accepted and on what scale?” All over the world, in South Africa, the largest supermarket chain, we trained all of their—my Agronomy team and myself—trained all of their growers in South Africa. All of the foods sold now in 540 stores is produced with this nutrition farming. It’s what we call it. This biological approach with this wonderful food, in my opinion, I’ve never seen better food.

There’s no better food on the planet than those in that supermarket chain as a result of those practices. And of course, those farmers are now building humus in their soils, and of course, helping to save the planet. In Vietnam, the largest agriculture company which accounts for 31% of Vietnamese agriculture. They’ve just decided to convert to this approach. In your country, the DOLE Corporation, the world’s largest food producers, has just decided to begin the journey; in fact, they’ve just decided to be our distributors in the U. S. which is something of a surprise but quite wonderful news. And Brazil that converted all my work and I talked to all the agricultural institutes. I had meetings just last night with three key ministers in the Indian government. And they’re talking about converting to this approach and I’m travelling there for two weeks on whistle stop tour to progress that idea and to begin training all of their agronomists and so forth, so that they can understand this whole model because it is a really, really, good news story amongst a lot of grim news.

Graeme Sait:

We are at a point and there are so many tipping points here that we are looking at. Probably, the most dramatic of several, here’s quickly the three things and this is the grim news. We’re going to talk good news in a moment. But the three things basically is that we’ve got an ocean that’s more acidic than it’s been in recorded history. Because the ocean, in part of the earth’s effort to try and balance this out.

We now understand that the planet is like a giant organism. And if you change one thing in one spot, dozens of other things change elsewhere. And as part of that concept that the earth is an organism, the earth has sucked in about half of all the CO2 that we’ve spewed out there as the people over the last 50 years or 60 years. And that’s created carbonic acid in the ocean which has made the ocean more acidic than it’s been in hundreds or millions of years.

And basically, creatures in the ocean that depend upon calcium for building their outer shell wall which is whether they live or die, basically . If you don’t have a shell wall, you’re not much good. This includes coral reefs. That includes algae and krill. And it includes phytoplankton.

Now, just so you understand the significance of that coral reefs, there’s one in fourteen of us, 500 million people who are directly dependent on coral reefs to live or die. They don’t just have the old fish meal. And the coral reef is suffering everywhere. All of the evidence suggests that this is beginning to happen as crumbling or the weakening of the cell wall. Because as the ocean gets more acidic, the whole chemistry says that, “You can’t build that calcium wall.” And then we look at algae and krill, which are the basis of all life in the ocean. We can’t even conceive of an ocean without algae and krill. And there’s Australian research suggesting that they hit the wall in about 20 years which is not someone else’s lifetime. It’s your lifetime. And you can’t really imagine life without them because everything depends on them as a building block. And phytoplankton produces 60% of the oxygen we breathe.

Then we’ve already lost 40% of them because of this problem. That is a huge issue but even more urgent issue, if there is one, is the new research suggesting that in just two years time, there’ll be no arctic ice in summertime. And the problem with this is that beneath these arctic oceans are these massive mountains of what they call methane hydrates.

Methane and carbon slabs that stay stable of 500 meters down in the ocean and their temperatures at that depth. And it’s really important that the ocean doesn’t warm because then they become unstable and start bubbling up into the atmosphere. And this huge amount’s much more than what is currently in the atmosphere of methane.

Now, Nature Magazine tells us in their July edition—and that’s a very prestigious scientific journal—that there’s more than a coin toss chance that within three years which fits James Hansen’s story. We might have this birth of methane from that region. And it’s 50 Gigatons. Just so you understand or your listeners understand what that means. All of the carbon we’ve put up into the atmosphere through coal fired power stations and motor vehicles and industries since 1860—the height of industrial illusion—that’s 250 Gigatons.

Now, what we lost from the soil with extractive agriculture is 476 Gigatons. And this big birth of methane that they are predicting may happen if we don’t make some changes. Basically, 50 Gigatons of methane, you multiply it by 23 because it’s 23 times more thickening. We’re talking about quite a lot more than a thousand gigatons in one hit. And at that point, all hell breaks loose because we’ve had about a 3.5 degree increase in temperature. And it’s not really even conceivable. And we’re sitting on that knife-edge as we speak. This issue that just hasn’t been recognized—the issue—even in your country, I couldn’t believe I’ve been in LA, seeing a city with less than two years of water.

There’s no water issue and there’s no even concern. Every other city I’ve ever been when you get down to the last two years. You’re down to showering every second day and you can’t wash your car, you can’t use sprinklers on your lawn and all of those standard kind of things recognizing what happens when you hit the wall and there’s no water for 12 million people. But you guys just seem to be in this incomprehensible state of apathy. And there needs to be some sort of a wake-up call and a recognition of where we’re at—at some point.

Graeme Sait:

Well, the big thing to recognize is that our current practice of producing food which has involved kind of a symptom-treating kind of approach where we see the disease, you bring out chemical and spray it. It’s proving to be something of the bankrupt approach, very similar to the same symptom-treating approach with disease in human beings, where we got to a point where the largest killer in humans is heart disease and just a little breath behind it is cancer. And number three until two weeks ago was stroke. But number three just got overtaken. The new number three is prescription medicines. It’s a ludicrous sign of a bankrupt system that our medicine has now become our third largest killer. And there’s a very similar thing happening in the veterinary industry and a very similar thing happening in agriculture where that approach has proven to be a very destructive approach.

The chemicals that we pour into our food are affecting and have affected very, very seriously the organisms that build humus in the soil. And the organisms that deliver minerals to our food, not only do we get a food that is a fraction or shadow of its former self and that impacts us all. Because we are what we eat and what we eat comes from the soil. And nutritionists will tell us that we are eating food that 20% of the nutrition that was found on the foods that was consumed by our grandparents when they were children.

We’ve got this scenario where every second, every family got someone with cancer and some other form of degenerative disease. Most diseases when you’re actually research them are having nutrition link. The World Health Organization when they studied the death link between nutrition and disease couldn’t find a disease that didn’t have a nutrition link. It all comes back to how we produce our food and not the least of the terrible mistakes and factors and horrific one that I think your listeners need to be aware of and that relates to the food, the major food items which in your case are corn and soybean.

Soy, of course, is in every loaf of bread that you are eating. And the fact that you bought in to this genetically modified concept. Now, the argument here is not about whether the GM proteins which are quite foreign to human bodies and haven’t really been well-researched are an issue because they probably are. We don’t really know for sure because there was no really good research done. But there have been questionable things and studies since. But a much, much, much more serious issue is that you’re spraying Roundup. You’re spraying a herbicide called Glyphosate all over that food. And this is the two biggest food items as in everything that you are eating.

The World Health Organization or I can’t remember which board it was that determined quite some years ago what was considered safe particularly for a little baby in terms of parts per million of Glyphosate in our food. That deal took quite a few years to determine those level was totally overturned with the advent of this new technology, this genetically modified food that could withstand Roundup. Roundup kills everything. And these new plants, corn and soy, don’t die when you spray Roundup on them. But of course, now you’ve got the residues of that Roundup all over the food. So they lobbied the people involved. In Europe, they increased those levels by twentyfold in terms of how much was allowable on our food. And in your country, they lobbied and increased it a hundredfold. It appears to determine a figure a hundred times more is now poured into our food.

Now that didn’t seem so horrible when we thought that Roundup was something quite innocuous. But on the basis of a brilliant scientist called Professor Don Huber, by discovering that it’s an absolute harsh on the soil, but it kills all of these important organisms that build humus and save the day. That led to a bunch of researchers in the last two years looking into, “Well, if that does that to the soil and this is life, what is it doing to human life?” And in the process of researching that, there have been 12 papers in the last 17 months that are showing Glyphosate to be—some scientists are calling it the new DDT.

Two countries, El Salvador and Sri Lanka have actually banned it based on their comprehensive research showing this link to kidney failure and kidney disease. But that’s just the start. I mean it affects enzymes. It affects good organisms. It affects a whole range of things. And it’s one of the biggest things. It goes to say what can an individual do? Well, do something about it. Stand up. Protest. Demand that this technology is removed because it is having, as we now understand it, a horrific impact.

And your president, to my amazement, gives such hopes for them and signed the Monsanto Protection Act. You can only assume in recognition of the findings that there was going to be lawsuits floating like confetti. Now, no one can sue them relative to the problems associated with this technology. It really has got to the point where we have to stand up and say, “We had enough of this.” We need to do something. And we need to stop this contamination of our food chain. Because it’s not just about what we are eating and how sick our family members are as a result but it’s about how sick the planet is, and how soils have been compromised in terms of holding carbon and building carbon and saving the day in terms of pulling that carbon from the atmosphere. That’s one of the biggest story that we need to address.

Graeme Sait:

No, we can’t. There are a few things. Particularly, if you’re growing your own food, I argue so strongly that aside from supporting the people that are doing the right thing or producing the right food which would be regenerative, organic, or biological type of farmers, but also, if you got any opportunity at all, you should have your own vegetable garden.

The vegetable garden is the ultimate wellness tool because you’ve got control of what’s going in there. You can improve the nutrition and put some compost. And put some lime and some good minerals. And eat the food directly as you harvest it which is a huge thing in its own right in terms of maintaining that nutrient density. There’s quite a dramatic loss on snow peas in 24 hours. You lose 50% of their vitamin C for example. I mean you have to pick them and eat them instantly from your garden this champagne of nutrition. And it really changes the equation.

But the other thing that having your own garden allows, is a recognition that there is tremendously enhanced nutrition in heirloom plants. Heirloom is the original—before we started doctoring them and hybridizing them. Because the very simple thing to understand here is that when you’ve only got a certain number of genes in your gene pool and that’s arguably how God intended it. And then we say, “No, we want something different.” Well, you can’t make new genes. You’ve got to pull them from somewhere to create that new response that you want in that plant and something suffers. And the most common thing that suffers is the falloff in nutrition.

Most people aren’t aware that the green revolution where we had these tall plants that were wheat plants that is their primary food in the planet that were falling over too often and they call that lodging. And instead of saying, “Why are they falling over these large tall plants?” which was—it appears to have been a proper efficiency because Copper determines stem strength. Instead of doing that, we said, “No, we’ll just hybridize them.” And the bloke who did it won a Nobel Prize, Norman Borlaug. He actually eradiated a bunch of—and he took out the kind of freak wheat seeds. And our principal food now is a shadow of what it’s used to be. It actually contains 50% less Iron—and iron is the world’s largest deficiency—and 32 % less Calcium, 30% less Magnesium, and one trace mineral Cobalt which is a building block for B12 but can’t even pick up.

There are many, many people who are B12 deficient and lacking in energy, And so forth, as a result that wouldn’t have been otherwise. Everything that you hybridize, we worked for starched strawberry breeders and they say all the plants cannot take manganese anymore. Well, manganese is really important for Alzheimer for making acetyl choline in your body. And we’ve got a plague of Alzheimer where one of four of us over 65 now succumbs to this relatively new disease. It’s so much comes back to nutrition and what you’re eating. And your home garden means you can get the original plants, the nutrient-dense wonderful food. And you save the seeds. You save the best from the best each year. And it adapts to your condition and before you know you’re producing the most wonderful food that anyone ever ate. And you can supply your neighbour and share your seeds. That’s one of the directions that we need to be looking at.

Graeme Sait:

You’ve done really well, Kareem. It’s a great little analysis or summary of the possibility. There are a couple of others. One of them is a recognition that the greenhouse gases. And it’s not the fourth just nitrous oxide, there is methane and it’s not just CO2. It’s nitrous oxide and methane as well. Part of the story about the emphasis on agriculture, as agriculture is the biggest culprit unfortunately or our current form of food production and it’s a lot of its industrial sort of right and plunder agriculture. About 25% of the CO2, 60% of the methane and 80% of the nitrous oxide is coming from that form of agriculture.

We’re changing the whole equation in that context. But when we look up, beyond that we got to realize those greenhouse gases mainly come from how we produce energy and there’s a thing called the carbon budget. When I travelled around the world and I asked, “Who’s heading the carbon budget?” There’s a terrible lack of publicity about this document that involved a huge number of scientists who have told us and now on certain terms and many people have tried to prove them wrong in the last 8 months since that document was released. It is hard times, it’s an absolute fact. Of all of the coal and oil that remains, that we know of, in the ground between now and 2030 which is 16 years away, we can only take 20% of that. 80% of it must stay on the ground or we live in a very different place and a place where most of us will wish we hadn’t—we’ve made the change when we could. The time as I said action is screaming. In that context, the deal is, the human initiative well funded really knows no boundaries. It’s exciting.

With money behind like sustainable energy for example, we say, “Okay, where’s the biggest source of funding?” Well, it’s in pension plans and what we call an annic of the words superannuation funds. And we’re talking trillions and trillions of dollars of our money and our future are tied up on these funds. One of our ex-politicians, a head of the liberal party, a guy called Dr. John Hewson recently did a global analysis to say, “What are we doing with our money for our future?” Relative to our choices making a difference in this big story that we’re talking about. And he found that 55% of our money has been spent on the Woodside Petroleum and the BHP’s, and all these companies that are actually looking for more oil and coal. And burning what they’ve got as fast as they can possibly shove it into coal-fired power stations. And that’s so ludicrous. “How much has been spent on research and renewable energy?” And 2% of the global funds, our money for our future, and that’s something that we can change.

That’s what I’m talking about. Standing up and being candid. You write. Not email. Because people just delete emails but they don’t delete letters. And you write physically and say, “I don’t want my super funds or my pension funds being spent on more coal and more oil. Oil companies are already doing that.” And you can do the same things with going to websites like Divestment.com and say, “How’s my bank spending its spare cash? Or how’s my university spending? Is it supporting these rogue industries? This is what they are. They’re shortening the life of the planet. We need to be focused.

John Hewson, this man I mentioned, he convinced a local state government in Australia for just their workers which is about 30,000 people to have an opportunity when they got their pension’s fund report. A box-ticking exercise whether I got to say, “Do I want my money spent on renewable energy or non-renewable energy?” my pension funds. And that resulted in 2% becoming 10%. In that tiny little example, and their people weren’t even educated as to why they should change it but that provided $400,000,000. In that tiny example, they could now go to funding human initiatives to make the changes that we need to make. That’s something we can all do. We can say, “I don’t want my money spent on that stuff.”

The founder of Permaculture in Australia, and Permaculture is one of our greatest intellectual exports from this country, Dr. David Holmgren, has recently really, really gone out on a limb. And I’m proud of the man because of his courage. Because As I said, “If you’re not an activist at this point, you’re dead weight.” And David has taken his incredible academic credibility and put it on the line and risked being called an economic terrorist. Because he has spoken to some of the leading economists on the planet, and one of them in my opinion, is a woman called Nicole Foss. You can see her all over YouTube and get some idea.

(Graeme, speaking.)

Graeme Sait:

Nicole Foss is a brilliant Canadian economist and she’s certainly got a finger on the button. She’s one—I hire people with conferences that I put on around the country and I’m very, very discerning in terms of speakers. And she’s absolutely brilliant. She’s a brilliant brain and she has summarized where we’re at currently. And where we’re at currently is that we’re set for a recently long term depression, not recession but a depression and that’s coming very, very soon.

Basically, most of the western countries are technically bankrupt. If you are an American and walked into a bank, there’s not going to be a bank manager in his right mind who would lend you money and the same applies to most countries in Europe, and Australia or New Zealand. It’s inevitable that at some point soon, there’s going to be a crash. And what David Holmgren has recognized is that it’s going to happen anyway. Where in a space where we’ve never been before, we don’t know how long people can just print money and kick the can down the road to prolong the inevitable. But if they do that for more than three or four years, we miss the boat because one the biggest things that can change the day interestingly is for there to be a crash because that stops the production or stops the energy that floods the atmosphere with CO2. I mean the second largest source of CO2 is concrete production. Of course, China and the whole developed world are still using it at a huge amount. You got to take Calcium carbonate and burn it and make it into calcium oxide and the CO2 from that process is the second largest source other than burning coal. And of course, the soil and as well the mismanagement of our soil in terms of CO2 so a crash even though it’s a horrific thought, it does save the day.

David has written an article, a really controversial article called Crash on the Demand. He is saying that if 1% of us removed our money from the banks are, according to the economist he’s been consulting with, that’s sufficient to crash the system. It’s so fragile currently that because the banks borrow ten to one of it.

With every $10 you put on there, they borrow a $100 against it. That 1% is a ten times the figure for them and that’s enough to crash the system. And that speeds up what’s going to happen anyway and saves the planet in the process. As I said, it’s a brave thing. Because obviously, you’re going to be called an economic terrorist and he has been. But I applaud him for recognizing the urgency of the situation. We got to do something and this is something we all can do. It’s an extreme view but an important one. It certainly shows you the scale of the problem at the moment.

Graeme Sait:

You got it exactly right. The banking industry works for every hundred dollars. There’s a thousand dollars borrowed against your $100. The suggestion is that 1%, pull your money. Stop banking with the banks and deal perhaps with yourself at the community level.

The thing is to recognize in the face of what really is inevitable, whatever anyone tells you, that we are going to have this thing happen is to prepare for it.

And Nicole Foss, if you watch her on YouTube and see her wonderful presentations and many others, myself included, and spreading the word that groups like Permaculture groups and transition town movements and this whole move back to the community. I mean I was mentioning this interestingly to a very large crowd of 20 to 30-year old students in Cambria, capital city. And I just branched out on another talk I was giving on human nutrition and mentioned this because I’ve seen the cause speak the night before in one of the other states. And all the audience, these young people threw their arms up in the air in unison.

As if they planned it and cheered and I went down and had a couple of drinks with the mass of students and said, “What was it that drove a response like that? Most people shudder at the thought of moving them to the depression.” And they said, “Well, we’ve watched your generation and it’s something of an indictment of my generation. We’ve watched you buy into this materialist marvel where the meaning of life is to feel peace and happiness. And all of you are stressed to the max. And it’s all those consumerism, consume, consume. Feed from the bones of the darn planet and none of you are happy. What’s the meaning of it all? Let’s say that the impression burn and let’s say that a phoenix arise from the ashes that has a lot more meaningful life for people where we can love each other at community level and have some meaning in their lives.” That’s how they felt. And that’s an indictment of what my generation anyway has contributed and I think we need to recognize that.

Graeme Sait:

If we have to narrow it down to a single strategy, the whole issue and the whole recognition of the importance of food and how it’s produced. And the opportunity at an urban agricultural level. There’s a group that has spawned up and acted on this. There’s some tremendous people including a lot of famous people, singers, actors and so forth. And a lot of talented urban designers and so forth.

They’re looking at urban agriculture in every opportunity that you can grow things everywhere, in good soils and compost and get the composts.

When you build compost, not only did you stabilize carbon in that compost that otherwise would have gone into the atmosphere. But when you put the compost into the soil, it triggers the organisms to build compost, to build much more carbon and hold much more carbon. It’s a tremendous strategy in its own right.

But I think recognizing that we’ve taken the wrong step with our food. And actually, getting out and doing the rallies against the GMO groups. I mean, just yesterday, they’ve actually introduced a new GMO food for major foods in your country. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. But not only is Roundup going to be sprayed, we now know that’s a fairly toxic substance but a much more toxic herbicide called 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T which is Agent Orange and a little bit of Roundup mixed into it has just been okayed by your government to be sprayed all over food crops. It’s not that they’ve gone to be honest and it’s incomprehensible that it’s allowable. But there’s been an apathy where people have just let people do things to them. And they have to stand up and say, “I’ve had enough of this.” And it’s time to do that in your country yesterday.

Graeme Sait:

Lovely talking to you.

Graeme Sait:

Bye.