The Net of Indra,
the metaphor of Indra's jeweled net asks us to envision a vast net
that, at each juncture there lies a jewel,
each jewel reflects all the other jewels in this cosmic matrix.
Every jewel represents an individual life form,
atom, cell, or unit of consciousness.
Each jewel, in turn,
is intrinsically and intimately connected to all the others.
Thus, a change in one gem is reflected in all the others.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died unnecessary deaths.
The question is, why?
Most of what I treat in my office is chronic disease.
We are living in an environment.
Our bodies are ill-prepared for a lot of disease results,
probably about half of disease you see in the hospitals
is due to living in an environment we're not prepared for.
But perhaps the most startling part
is that many of these chronic diseases could have been prevented.
Chronic disease is all the ailments
from heart disease to diabetes, to depression,
that are just chipping away at our quality of life.
Make rounds in a modern hospital
with me in the medical ward sometime,
and just make a note of each patient as you go through.
Which of these patients would actually be there
if they had lived in the natural environment
compared with our modern environment?
These chronic diseases seem to be moving
ever further down in the age bracket
to the point where I am seeing more and more children
with diabetes and heart disease, morbid obesity.
Experts call it "Diabesity."
Over the past decade childhood cases of type 2 diabetes
have increased ten-fold because of rising rates of obesity.
The immune systems in modern people,
specifically in the developed rich countries, are trigger happy.
They are doing crazy things, attacking their own tissues,
like attacking the brain, so then you have multiple sclerosis.
All of these are situations where the immune system
is doing things it should not be doing,
and in developing countries it doesn't do these things.
So something has changed in the rich developed countries
which is causing our immune systems to lose the control mechanisms
that normally stop them from behaving irresponsibly.
The medical profession is now actually the third
leading cause of death in the United States.
People didn't understand why when we get antibiotics
it causes many problems.
Not only that, but each cell in our body has mitochondria
that has been before bacteria.
So bacteria is the fabric of all the living systems.
So we did so many mistakes on our gut bacteria.
As we have less and less infectious disease,
we have more and more chronic disease,
but even conditions like multiple sclerosis and depression,
in our thought, had some microbial involvement.
And so it may be, as we have conquered infectious disease,
some of the strategies like antibiotics
have been either eliminating beneficial microbes
or providing the growth of harmful microbes
that are contributing to these chronic diseases
in ways that we're just beginning to understand.
Most of it relates back to our lifestyle.
So to the foods that we're eating,
the highly processed foods with lots of sugar
and very low nutrient,
to the fact that we experience a huge amount of stress
and that we're disconnected from our communities.
I am starting to discover also to the fact
that we're disconnected from the natural world.
We're gradually killing ourselves off.
People have to start realizing that we're all connected,
I mean, including the creatures of the earth,
including the plants, the land,
at some point it will come back and bite us
if we don't start changing our ways.
Actually it's starting to bite us already.
I love to garden without gloves.
My name is Dr. Daphne Miller
and I am a family doctor and a nutrition explorer.
And I feel like I wear gloves enough in my medical practice,
and why should I have to wear them in my garden
where everything is so wonderful
and where there are the kind of microbes that I want to be connected to, so...
"Agroecology is the science that provides
the basic ecological principles
for how to study, design, and manage agrosystems
that are both productive and natural resource-conservative
and that are culturally-sensitive, socially-just, and economically viable."
We can get behind that, right?
"Agroecology goes beyond a one-dimensional view
of agroecosystems.
At the heart of the agroecology strategy is the idea
that an agroecosystem should mimic the functioning
of local ecosystems."
But the word "health" has not come up once yet.
"The key agroecological strategy
in designing a sustainable agricultural
is to reincorporate diversity
into the agricultural fields and surrounding landscapes."
How about human health?
No health here, okay.
I am pleased to introduce our next speaker,
Miss Daphne Miller.
She will be talking about diverse farming system,
diverse diets.
She is a family physician, a writer,
and associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine
at the University of California, San Francisco.
I wanted also to add this sentence which I like myself,
Miss Miller approaches medicine with idea
that opportunities for health and healing
are found not only in the medical system,
but in such unexpected places such as home kitchens,
school gardens, community organization, spiritual centers,
farmers, and natural trades.
Thank you.
We are hitting a wall,
and we know that pills and surgeries
are not making a dent in the rates of diabetes
and heart disease that we're seeing.
The most important thing to understand is that there is no one answer.
Health is something that needs to be engaged with everyday
throughout the day
in dozens of little choices that we make.
The bad news is that it's complicated.
On my 48th birthday I had a really bad headache.
Ultimately it was determined
that I had a disorder called neurosarcoidosis.
They started treating me with prednisone, with steroids.
I tried to watch TV, TV was too slow,
so I finally had to bring in my laptop
and that was the only thing that was, you know, fast enough that I could feel
because these drugs just had my brain go...
A hundred and six thousand Americans are killed every year
from side effects of prescription drugs.
This is not drug errors, this is not illicit drugs,
and this is actually just compliant to drugs given in hospitals.
And the steroids were great
and that the symptoms that I was having went away,
and within maybe two weeks of going on these massive dosage of steroids,
my appetite was back
and I gained somewhere in the neighborhood 30 or 40 pounds
in two weeks,
because I was eating like a teenage boy.
What I didn't know at that time
was that prednisone can lead to diabetes.
So I began a course of medication for diabetes.
We tend to medicalize health.
We tend to really think of it
within the purview of what we can do
that's either a drug or a surgery
or some kind of chemical intervention
to make us feel better,
and in fact we know
that there is many, many other things out there
that have everything to do with creating this balance.
I mean, I am really thankful that Western medicine saved his life
because, you know, definitely it was going downhill fast.
But at the same time, you know,
prednisone has got such terrible side effects that it's...
it's just one of those things that...
It was like those old '40s and '50s movies
where somebody saves your life and now they own you.
This is where I pay you off.
The hubris of thinking
that we could simplify this complex system,
put it on a pill,
that had the benefits of broccoli,
I mean, they would be making billions of dollars
because it's just so clear-cut.
So our reductionist approach is doing very little
in the face of this epidemic of chronic disease.
Reductionism means taking a system
and reducing it into its component parts
as if the whole was just the sum of its part
so we can take any single part out,
you know, get the same effect as the whole.
Such processes do not really occur in nature.
One of the first ones was Descartes,
which basically said you cannot study nature in its complexity,
you have to study in its parts,
and that's when the transdisciplinary nature of knowledge was divided
into commodities or disciplines.
The second influence was Darwin.
Darwin, although he came up with the Theory of Evolution,
he emphasized the survival of the fittest,
which means competition,
the ones that are successful competitors make it,
when it turns out that in nature
there is much more complementarity
and collaboration and cooperation than competition.
The traditional linear model,
the pharmaceutical company model is,
let's identify one probiotic,
they would be put into this extremely complicated system
which is equally complicated to our brain
and that will cure disease.
In the modern system's view, not the right way of looking at it.
We see now that we don't live in a linear world
that A causes B causes C.
What in fact we live in is a complex network.
It's a complex system where everything is related to everything else.
It's that kind of thinking,
the science of complex systems are adaptive complex systems
that determine our future.
What you need for a complex problem is a complex solution.
One of the things that we have done
is... that was really important to us
was we started a garden.
When we got the house that was one of the first things that we did
and started growing our own food.
It's kind of something that's become more integrated into our lives.
It tends to drive a lot of things,
like we look at some of the food in the grocery store now
and just go, I don't want that.
You know, I want tomatoes from my garden.
I started really thinking about how I eat and what I eat
and started to refine that.
I grew up outside of Buffalo
and a friend of mine who grew up there, she calls it The Land of Meat.
A meal is meat with other things around it.
To have salad as a meal is like having a side dish as a meal.
It was harder to avoid it than it was to just take it in.
You grow up, you don't question it when you get to our age
and meat has some bad effects on your body.
My life then was really very much about my work
and eating as conveniently as possible.
Food is emotional and it's part of, I don't know, who you are.
That was the Ronnie then.
Gotten down to where I am about,
around 210 or so, and that keeps me going.
My blood sugar level has been in the normal range now
for actually probably a couple of years.
Does that mean that you don't have diabetes anymore?
I no longer have diabetes, so...
So you are not taking any medication for your diabetes.
No, and before I was taking daily medication
or twice daily medication for my diabetes.
What we were taught in medical school
is that you can't reverse diabetes,
that was really what we were taught,
that it was kind of like a runaway train,
and once it was, you know, the breaks were off, it just...
it was never coming back to the station,
and you really have disproved that
and I just find it amazing.
And you are not alone
but it's something that's very inspirational
for other people to know that that can happen.
My life, especially in the last ten years or so,
has been about trying to establish routines
where I could be comfortable
and focus on what's really important to me.
If the revolution continues the way it's gone the last five years,
I think we will have to see some dramatic changes
that dietary interventions may have a much bigger influence
I think in medical care,
in both prevention of diseases but also treatment of various disorders.
Yeah, I kind of think of it, too, as that's money I don't have to spend
going to the hospital or something else later.
It's a part of my insurance plan.
Hi. I am Daphne Miller.
- Hi. Nice to meet you. - Nice to meet you.
We had an epidemic of diabetes,
epidemic of nutrition-related problems.
And I show up at Harvard
and there is only one M.D. in my nutrition program, that was me,
and I was absolutely shocked.
I had a couple of people lower their cholesterol
over 50 points in ten days.
If you can lower your cholesterol 50 points in ten days,
why would you want to take a statin drug
that's known to cause liver damage, muscle damage,
memory loss and...
And now there are lawsuits about Lipitor causing diabetes.
Why would you want to take that stuff if you can do it naturally?
And by the way, the side effects of doing it like that
is, well, your blood sugar gets better, your blood pressure gets better
and you might lose weight if you are...
well, you will lose weight if you are overweight.
Here in the United States, the number one killer is diet.
So, what we eat determines our lifespan,
our health span in terms of both disability and mortality.
I went from... close to 300 pounds
with a 42-inch waist
down to about a 190
with a 34-inch waist.
Blood pressure was probably one of the biggest things that changed.
I was diagnosed pre-diabetic
because both my blood pressure numbers were completely off the charts
and that almost changed immediately.
It also changed my palate.
A lot of the food that's actually available right now
in our supermarkets or in our restaurants didn't taste good,
I had to go out and find or grow the type of food
that my body wanted to eat.
In less than, I would even say nine months,
completely changed how I look, how I felt.
Now, people who have seen my whole life didn't recognize me,
and I was often accused of being on drugs
because the amount of weight that I dropped down
and my body just completely changed.
The native people
have just about the worst health in the nation.
If you look at mortality statistics,
we were unfortunately double the rate of heart disease,
double the rate of cancer, double the rate of stroke.
This is in terms of mortality for pure Hawaiians,
five times the rate for diabetes.
So I actually went back to the Bishop Museum
and started collecting photographs of Hawaiians
in the old days,
including drawings from Captain Cook's artists back in 1778,
and you saw slim Hawaiians.
Number one, there was no sugar,
and they didn't have it back in 1778.
I mean, that was a Western invention.
Their main staple was taro and poi, which is made from taro,
sweet potatoes, and yams, and little bit of breadfruit.
The change in the diet, lifestyle, eating processed food,
and so much meat and so much fat
has contributed to the obesity epidemic here,
and of course, all the diseases that come along with it.
I remember when I was a kid,
you could count the number of fast food places on one hand
on the whole island.
Now, there's fast food places on every corner.
We are faced with a society that's already been brainwashed
to eat meat three times a day,
dairy three times a day,
taught that lean meat and chicken is health food,
which it is not.
We need to educate people,
the healthiest way is nature's way.
After all, for thousands of years,
we have been eating whole grains and vegetables and beans
and animals were not fattened up like they are today,
or chemicalized.
Basically, we're gradually poisoning ourselves.
All you have to do is look at the obesity maps in the U.S.
It's getting worse and worse and worse.
We are just totally been screwed over.
You've got this junk food industry that's spending billions of dollars
to get the young kids to eat their shit.
By the time these poor kids are 13, 14 years old,
they got all kinds of diseases.
They got asthma, they got attention deficit,
they got so much going on that is just out of control,
and it's really sad.
These remarkable studies
in which the progression of cancer
was reversed with the whole food, plant-based diet,
progression of heart disease, hypertension,
type 2 diabetes reversed, and cases, even cured.
It's the complexity in the diet,
how those foods come together,
and how those foods interact with the soil
that really offers us the real medicine.
Is there anybody who is in the health field in this room?
Anybody working in health at all?
Wow. Okay, I really am alone.
How many farmers do we have here today?
A couple of farmers, wonderful.
Well, to the farmers in the room,
I look at you and me as one and the same.
We're doing the exact same work.
We're here to keep people healthy
and heal our communities,
and hopefully by the end of my talk,
you'll all agree with me that that is the case.
I've got the kitchen waste compost in here,
and down inside there we have worms,
so the worms are eating up the kitchen compost,
and we're getting a little bit of rain now,
so it's about time to water it.
And everyday we collect...
We collected this one already
and we get this incredible worm juice.
And we use it for watering our nursery
and other plants that are in need of help.
As far as obtaining anything in the store,
nothing comes close to how wonderful this works
at putting nutrients into your plants.
Look at these coconuts, man, they're only...
They're only four years old and I am eating coconuts off of them.
Yeah, this is quite the site to have a coconut tree
where you got to get down on your knees to harvest.
Right there, there were 16 coconuts.
Nice view. So we get to watch the whales every winter.
The whales park out here, so all winter long,
we get to watch the whales breaching on here.
It's really beautiful.
They call me Ginger John,
that's what everybody knows me by on the island.
Not only are they producing the food that keeps us healthy,
but they are protecting the land and the soil,
which is absolutely critical to our own health.
- Daphne? - Yeah. All right.
Good to meet you too. Aloha.
This is your property?
- It's all of ours. - So it's mine too.
- That's yours too. - Okay.
You're standing here, life brought you here.
Enjoy.
You look fantastic, so obviously it's...
Sixty-eight years old and I work circles around as 20-year-olds.
I was the vanguard of the Hippie Movement
and somehow I got the message to come to Hawaii,
so I got here in 1967, ended up living on this beach,
Makena Beach on Maui,
for two years with no clothes
and no money, no blanket, nothing.
Getting disconnected, so to speak, connected me.
I was laying on the beach and thinking, you're gonna die.
You better go into town so that you can do something about it.
I was sitting and about ready to fall over and this old Hawaiian lady came up to me
and saw that I was really ill and just embraced me.
And asthma was drawing and I told her I was bleeding from my lungs,
I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep.
And she said, "Well, when the Hawaiians had lung diseases, they ate noni."
And she took me to a noni tree
because noni used to grow everywhere,
and I started eating nonis and I haven't stopped.
I have been eating nonis for 50 years now
I am a way into eating noni. I eat it every morning.
That's amazing.
So you were near death, it sounds like.
I have been near death many times.
I have had just about every disease you can think of
and I just lay down on the ground and go through it.
I don't go to doctors.
I am sure John told you all about taro and how beautiful it is.
This is the only hypoallergenic food in the world.
You can give this to a baby, a day old.
If they have a milk allergy to their own mother's milk,
give it to a baby and it will sustain them.
That's the stuff.
My name is Connor Garrett, I am from Naples, Florida.
I am living here on Ginger John's farm.
I initially came here with the intention to do so
and then move on, go back to what I was doing,
but now I've become quite enveloped in this lifestyle
and I don't really plan on going back anytime soon.
John is somebody who will definitely blow your mind
in a lot of ways.
This tool is called the hodad, my favorite tool.
No, he does intensive farming.
It's not like gardening.
It's not anything in a hoop house where you're spraying chemicals,
and you get to prance around in the flowers.
You got to rip things out of the ground,
beat the dirt off of them.
Full bucket.
Good to see you.
I am glad you could make it.
This is all yours, this amazing estate here?
- Sort of. - Sort of.
The bank owns some of it, and my children own some of it,
but this is a family farm.
Can we have a tour first?
Anything you wanna do.
Yeah, let's have a tour and then...
I pity the man that says no to you.
How many acres do you have?
We've got about 100 acres of soybeans.
We just finished this field Monday,
now this is the one we planted after wheat that we dried...
Right.
This was the one we just planted,
and the one that we're just finished working on right now is...
we call early beans that we planted in May.
Do you buy seeds from Monsanto by the way?
Monsanto Technology Card.
My goodness.
So the genetic modification allowed us to use
some simple applications of a herbicide,
Roundup primarily.
It can kill everything but the corn. It can kill everything but the soybeans.
Our cost went down and it was easier to farm,
and it was easier to maintain.
We just have, like, a smorgasbord of chemicals
we were trying to pick out what to use.
So you have to make a cocktail mixture of what to apply
to kill the weeds that were chocking the crop.
Roundup took it all.
You can imagine that anything that is engineered
to kill off bacteria in the soil
is gonna do the same thing in our gut,
and pesticides and herbicides do exactly that.
They work the same way as antibiotics work.
They kill living things.
So we're standing at the side of the Century Experiment,
which is a hundred-year research experiment
looking at the sustainability of different agricultural systems.
And so there is this contrast between managing soil
sort of like cookbook style, following the menu,
and you put in this and that at this time,
then you spray this.
So it's pretty much a, you know, a codified approach
that you might get from an extension,
as opposed to other farmers who actually talk about farming the soil
and they talk about having a relationship with the soil.
They talk about doing as much for the soil
as they are doing for their crops.
They may even put more emphasis on the soil
because they feel like if they take care of the soil
then the crops are going to do fine.
An organic farmer grows soil,
it's light.
A chemical farmer grows crops.
So how do you put nutrients back in?
So we will buy usually commercial fertilizers.
It's got earthworm in it. Hey, buddy.
You are on camera.
That's good.
So if my crops don't do well,
it's not 'cause of what I'm putting in, it's 'cause of the soil.
So we don't really know where it sourced.
Does that ever worry you
that you're putting all the stuff on your field
from some foreign place?
No, it doesn't.
When you are locked into a system that seems to be working,
it's really hard to make the change.
The whole agribusiness system has separated this whole,
and I think that's part of what the local food movement
a lot of what was going on, how do we make that connectivity to it.
And I don't know how individually to bridge that gap,
I don't know how to do it.
I don't know my consumer.
I have no connection whatsoever.
My farming style is to grow the food crops
that have sustained civilization.
When I sit down and eat,
90 percent of what I eat comes from this farm.
I really feel like I am cheating.
So where do you get your food?
I go to the Kroger Stores.
- Really? - Yeah.
You go and shop in a grocery store for food?
Sure. Every farmer does.
I know very few
who actually consume the food on their own farm.
The average food that we eat travels about 1,500 miles.
And a city like Rome, for example,
has to import 5,000 tons of food per day.
Can you imagine the fragility of a system like that,
the consequences of a system like that
that it has on transportation energy and greenhouse gases.
I mean, things have to change, and that's local agriculture,
and much of our local agriculture is founded in traditional agriculture.
To feed a person in a developed world
with commercial agriculture,
we need about 12 barrels of oil
per year per person.
If we think about the moment
in which the world produced its peak of oil,
that was about five barrels per person, per year.
There is not enough oil in the world to sustain food production
under the conventional model.
It works 'cause it only works in a small part of the world.
Most farmers don't raise food.
We don't know much about food.
We know about product.
I see some sadness in your eyes when I say that,
but I think it's a legitimate statement,
is that we just don't have a way to connect with that aspect.
Organic farming receives, in a country like the Netherlands,
about ten percent of the funding for agricultural research.
Now, the Netherlands invests in organic farming
something like $4 million per year.
A company like Monsanto invests $900 million per year in research,
and most of the governments in the world
invest most of the money in conventional farming.
When I harvest a weed,
I can put it under loan with USDA,
I can at least get three quarters of its market value
the day I harvest it.
So there's lots of incentives for me to stay inside of the safety net.
What you're telling me is that the government
is a lot more reliable customer for you?
On the basic commodities that we raise in this country,
the feed grains, the wheat, the corn,
and the government, through farm bills, has provided a way
to at least protect you and have a marketing system.
Although the gap in yields between organic and conventional
is only 20 percent,
the gap in investments and research is 100 percent,
and yet without research, without funding,
organic farming is pushing and coming closer
to conventional farming.
So the results, the progress made per dollar invested in research is huge.
It's a way of life.
You live like a peasant, you work like a slave,
but you eat better than any king ever ate.
And the important part about that
is that is your health insurance.
I don't have a health insurance, I don't have social security.
I have this.
Another cemetery on the farm over there on the hillside
and there's some Hentons buried over there.
This is one of the...
Well, I figure that's my spot about there at some point.
I am curious to hear what happens with you
in the next couple of years, Hoppy,
because I do believe maybe up...
Hopefully you're gonna talk to my daughter
and she is gonna have a whole new approach on this, okay?
This is the generational shift, this is gonna change.
That statement about not growing food,
that farmers don't grow food...
was unbelievable to me.
That was amazing.
I mean, I just wrote a whole book about farmers being healers
and that they had the health of their community
as their primary concern.
And I think that might be the case for a small subset of farmers,
but from what Hoppy was saying,
that certainly isn't the case for the majority of farmers.
I see this as the single largest health issue
that is facing our country.
Can growing food or growing products
be something that is net positive for us?
Can it be healing?
Last Sunday we told you about a WHO report
that listed several chemicals as potentially cancer-causing,
including glyphosate found in the popular weed-killer Roundup.
Now, in an interview for an upcoming French documentary,
a Canadian scientist has been caught in an Erin Brockovich-like moment
when he's asked to defend that chemical
against links to cancer rates in Argentina.
Take a look.
Do not believe glyphosate, in Argentina,
is causing increases in cancer.
You can drink a whole quart of it and it won't hurt you.
Yes, do you want to drink some? We have some here.
I would be happy to actually, not really, but...
- Not really? - I know it wouldn't hurt me.
If you say so, I have some glyphosate.
No, I'm not stupid.
Okay, so it's dangerous, right?
No, but I know people try to commit suicide with it
and fail fairly regularly.
Tell the truth, it's dangerous.
It's not dangerous to humans. No, it's not.
So are ready to drink one glass of glyphosate?
No, I'm not an idiot.
Even though this may look disgusting to most people
because this is really kind of dirty looking,
I know that the microorganism living in here
is the most beneficial one on earth,
and so...
I'm not afraid to take a big drink of it,
and super-probiotic,
had a little bite to it too.
And this is essentially the food for the microorganisms
when I put them out there.
And this one is much better.
For two years I was trying to grow taro in these fields,
and I have been growing taro for about 40 years
and I never had a problem.
Yet I couldn't get a crop to really grow.
I was getting really discouraged.
And then I heard about Master Cho and Korean Natural Farming.
Nature heals itself.
Natural farming is about using nature's material and processes.
It's not about adding nutrients directly.
It's about supplying the origin of nutrients
so the crops have everything they need to thrive.
Even those who are new to natural farming can do this
by following simple instructions.
It's kind of designed for peasants like myself.
And all these different things
when combined in the right proportions
make the microorganisms thrive and bring them back to life.
Microorganisms are inside of us.
They are on our skin, they are in our lungs.
They are really what connect us to the world around us.
Nothing was growing, there wasn't an earthworm here,
and he had almost reintroduced that fungal network
into his soil here
and the results have spoken themselves.
Indigenous microorganisms
are basically probiotics for agriculture.
IMOs are made by farmers using the materials from that land
and then fermenting it and putting it back into the land
where it can help the plants and the fungi and all the above,
soil and everything that's there, thrive.
Nice.
If you have totally white mold like this,
it's an excellent IMO-1 that we cultivated.
From this stage you would collect all this into a jar
and add equal amount of sugar to the rice
and so that way we will move it to IMO-2.
Our approach is based on letting natural processes unfold.
It's basically a philosophy of non-interference.
The emphasis is on creating a healthy foundation.
And then just observing as Mother Nature does her work.
We planted the red lettuces.
I was spraying them with the Korean Natural Farming,
and then I guess,
when I wasn't paying attention I forgot the one at the end.
Then I came back and the other red lettuces
are four times the size
of the other red lettuce,
and they were all planted on the same day,
except for the front half of the row
received Korean Natural Farming nutrients.
Four inches deep...
that this tester can get into the ground,
so this is a conventional practice.
So this is six inches.
I have about eight inches deep in an organic plot.
So I have scattered IMO for last season
before we planted tomato in here.
You can see that I get to a deeper level
in this soil compaction.
Now we can see how deep it gets.
So this is 12 inches,
I have it about 14 inches.
So from four inches in the conventional practice,
eight inches in the organic,
now we have 14 inches in Korean Natural Farming.
When you have a commercial plant,
you have a very small root system
because they're drug-dependent,
so the roots don't have to travel.
There is nothing for them to go out there for, it's dead.
It's a dead zone and they're just living on these chemicals
that have been fed them.
If you're farming with microorganisms,
you're doing a biological farming
and you have a good population of microbes in the soil.
The root systems will grow very far out, hundreds of feet.
Korean Natural Farming, what farmers are doing is recognizing
that the microbes that are there
on that farm and in that soil
are really critical to the life cycle of the farm
and to the health of the plants,
and to the health of the people who eat those plants.
I have a degree in Computer Science
and decided to learn how to farm.
With all the techniques you can pick,
Korean Natural Farming is like right on with the kids
because every single thing you use is edible,
and so with the kids I don't have to worry about them
getting poison on them and eating it,
or like getting in dangerous situations.
They just... everything they can eat, if they spill it,
it's not a problem,
it just goes into the ground, makes things better.
Now, right here,
you are probably looking at six billion microorganisms
in this little chunk here.
What Ginger John is practicing
is basically complexity medicine, you know,
or complexity farming.
- Can you see that white on your film? - Yeah.
That's the microorganisms going to work here.
The ones with the microorganisms were flourishing,
They were twice as large, very green,
the cups were full of roots.
So right then we knew, wow, what is this magic?
In here is an IMO pile here.
The first time that I started applying my IMO to the land
and I am dumping it out,
I had this incredible feeling of sovereignty
that I was freeing myself
from the need of spending hard-earned money on anything
that was being shipped over
across the ocean from the mainland.
A plant will put out a stress signal
that it's lacking some kind of nutrient.
It can be like boron or magnesium or calcium.
The fungus that are attached to the roots of the plant
will sense that imbalance,
it can actually send a signal
to an area that's rich
and it will bring that to the plant.
Some of them live in the rhizosphere,
in the root of plants.
Root of plants is extremely complex environment
because there are many, many organisms living there.
Some of them cooperate, some of them compete,
so they have to develop in order to survive
extremely sophisticated social intelligence.
Very much like human in social intelligence,
just more advanced.
So it gave us an idea what are the features
that characterize social intelligence.
Then I found that our own bacteria,
the bacteria that I discovered
fall in the standard deviation above the average.
So they are like Einstein.
They have special circuits to process the information
and even engage in decision making,
looking at the desert,
the social bacteria like enormous soil
on the integrity of Earth,
because all these bushes that you see here
are connected underneath,
so all these things that you see around
has its one big network.
It's super fun, it's almost...
like I am way too scientific.
At first I was like, no, that's some hippy stuff.
No, it's real, it happens,
and it's part of healthy soil.
You'll never see it in conventional agriculture.
One of the things I have been studying is Soil Biology
with a 400 power microscope,
and with that I'm able to see the beneficial fungus and bacteria,
and very quickly quantitatively decide if I'm doing it right or not.
All throughout this sample of the beneficial microorganisms
I am finding nice fungus
and I am finding much more of biodiversity.
They are the ones who are harvesting nutrients from the soil
and passing them on to the roots of the plants,
we're then passing them on to us.
Scientist have now discovered important clues
about the role of so-called good bacteria.
A new study in the journal Nature
finds that people without certain microbes are more likely to be obese
and to have diabetes or other serious health problems.
The fascinating thing about the human microbiome
is that we now realize there is an entire organ inside of us
that until about five or ten years ago nobody even thought about
and all the medical theories about health and disease
have been made without that organ.
Its a mass of cells that weighs about the same as your brain
but it has more genes, more cells,
arguably more connections, and more complexity,
and replacing physiologically well defined roles,
we're just beginning to understand what all those roles are.
It's not an insubstantial organ
because it has composed of 100 trillion cells,
these are ten times more cells
than an entire repertoire of human cells.
There is so much excitement about it
'cause it turns out most of our genes are not human genes but microbial genes.
There is something going on inside of us that is very exciting, mysterious,
and people are now shifting their attitude
towards understanding this,
implicating the microbiome in virtually every function of the body.
They are doing all kinds of things.
We have no idea what they were involved with
until very recently.
Everything from affecting how we process our diet
to how we respond to different drugs,
even to things like how we resist different kinds of diseases.
One of the more intriguing things about the microbiome
is its possible role in human obesity.
Millions of microbes that live in the guts of slim people
could be turned into potential fat fighters
to help the nation's obesity epidemic,
according to a new study.
They have taken stool material from lean and obese twins
so they are twin humans,
and if you take the stool from the obese twin
and give it to a mouse,
that mouse will become fat,
and if you take the stool from a lean twin
and give it to a different mouse, that mouse stays thin.
What's really important about that
is that the two mice they eat the same, they exercise the same.
So the only factor that was different
was the microbiome that they received.
They are not just sitting there as inactive bystanders.
They produce many chemicals
that are very similar to the neurotransmitters
that our brain uses. They talk to our immune cells,
they talk to various cells within our gut.
The reason that has truly caught the imagination of people
is this idea that we are host to all these creatures,
and those internal bacteria we're discovering
or maybe as important as our own DNA in our own cells
when it comes to determining our mood,
how we process food,
how our immune system works.
When I was a kid I was a huge germophobe.
One of the things that we learned is, you know, they're not...
most of them aren't germs, most of them aren't bad.
So if you eat a little dirt it's not gonna hurt.
We're, you know, introducing diversity to ourselves
and that diversity, especially as children,
is so important
for helping our immune system develop properly.
So now I'm not so worried about touching door handles
or getting my hands dirty,
because I know that I'm just increasing the diversity of my microbes.
That's pretty good for my health.
Having a dog is one of the best evidence-based things that you can do
in terms of reducing the rates of allergies later on.
There is much our inheritance as the genes in our chromosomes are
and yet much of the way we live nowadays,
we seem to be trying to stop transmission
of mother's microbes to the baby.
We need to transmit the microbiota to the baby.
Everyone assumes that breast milk is sterile,
but not only is it not sterile,
there is a biological mechanism to ensure that it is not,
and there are organisms being picked up from the guts,
transported in the blood, and put into breast milk.
One has to guess that those are the organisms
that is quite difficult to get from the maternal gut
into the baby's gut in other ways,
and mother's milk contains a succession
of interesting polysaccharides
produced at different stages during lactation,
which act as a growth factor
for the organisms that need to be developing in the baby's gut
at each stage after birth.
So we do seem to be trying to block this essential transmission
of the microbiota in the next generation.
We come out the regular way.
As you pass through the birth canal
you are coated with a particular set of microbes from your mother,
whereas if you are delivered by C-section instead,
you miss out on that inoculation
and essentially what you pick up is skin microbes from other people
or possibly from dust flushing around in the air.
All of these things are limiting the transmission
of the microbiota,
which is part of the family's heritage,
part of the genetics of the family.
The reason why this is important
is 'cause if you are delivered by C-section,
you have higher rates of a whole lot of diseases
with immune complications
including asthma, allergies, atopic disease, even obesity.
They really determine who we are.
The bushes you see around
is a colony of many microorganisms.
We have also a colony of many microorganisms.
The art was part of the science
and the science is part of the art.
The coloring started not really just to make art,
but for us to capture different features
in different motives in the pattern,
because it seems like many secrets are hidden there.
So each time we do new experiment, we find new patterns
and I keep like a child, wow.
Complexity of the pattern
reflects the fact that you have distribution of task,
you have these dots on the colony that you see.
There are tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands of bacteria that connect together,
they hold hands and they dance together,
they circle around,
and they pave the way to the colony to move on hard surfaces.
When you have a complex pattern, when the environment changes
and in the soil, the environment changes,
they can change the shape, change the mix, make up of the colony,
and adapt to the new conditions.
This is mother nature,
it's the microorganisms in the soil,
and that's what makes all of the globe one big organism.
Restoring this and rejuvenating back
to growing your own beneficial microorganisms
and reinoculating them into the environment
is really the only way to turn the page into heal our forest, to heal our ocean,
and the systems that keep us alive.
On an ordinary day out in a...
out walking in the park or something,
there might be maybe a 100,000 organisms per cubic meter of air.
But if you are out there with your brush-cutter
on a summer's day
or if you're in a cowshed,
you're up to hundreds of millions.
You're taking an enormous number of organisms
from the natural environment.
Our bodies are not islands.
We are very porous creatures
who are constantly exchanging information
and exchanging DNA with the environment around us,
and as we go on this adventure
to discover what makes us healthy and what keeps us in balance
that has to be part of the equation.
It's sort of these microscopic influences
that have a huge amount to do with our well-being.
So there, we're beginning to have real evidence,
real hard evidence,
that exposure to the green environment is doing things to our immune systems
which is relevant to how our immune systems function,
which is therefore relevant to human health.
The problem is we don't live in either a natural
or an urban environment anymore.
We live indoors.
To think that we have evolved
with a contact with nature for tens of millennium,
and to think that moving ourselves to a profoundly artificial environment
have no consequences,
I think it would be willfully naive to believe that.
As of 2008, more people live in cities than in the countryside,
all around the world.
That's the first time in human history.
It raises big questions about the future of our cities.
It raises huge questions about the future of the human race.
That means one or two things.
Either the human species will continue to lose
whatever connection to nature it still has,
or it means beginning of a new kind of city.
If you're interested in trees and how they benefit people,
and ultimately you realize the trees
that give the greatest benefit are in cities,
they are near the people.
The paradox of an urban society,
we get most of our interaction with the natural environment
in an urban environment.
The Atlantic did an interesting piece about this research
and they had a somewhat provocative title,
it's "When Trees Die, People Die."
Where there are trees, with the nicest trees in urban areas,
there are also the people who tend to be whiter, wealthier,
they're educated, they're more privileged,
they are going to people who are gonna tend to have health outcomes.
I am trying to disentangle that relationship.
It can be tricky.
The cold weather nothing compared
to what the Emerald Ash Borer can do.
This tiny bug is eating its way through trees
and destroying landscapes all across Western New York.
Let's see what happens
when the Emerald Ash Borer spreads out from Detroit
and see if there are health consequences.
I looked at two causes of death,
cardiovascular disease and then lower, a respiratory disease.
We did see increased levels of these two types of diseases
in counties that were infested with Emerald Ash Borer.
There was a bigger impact in wealthier counties.
If trees are good for you,
and we know that those wealthier counties
are gonna have more of them,
then killing those trees should have a bigger health impact
and that's indeed what we saw.
People who are at the bottom end of the socioeconomic scale
and are not close to green space
are about twice as likely to die in that five-year period
as they with people at the top of the socioeconomic scale,
as they get closer to green space.
So this difference between the top and the bottom
of the socioeconomic scale starts to disappear.
Most people who talk in the environmental movement
talk about, you know, the morality of it.
They are very stern.
We have to protect nature because it's the right thing to do.
Well, I am an economist.
I study selfishness, and what I understand is that, you know,
scolding people do things ain't very effective.
The type of stuff I do in other people
is showing that looking after a natural environment
is profoundly self-interest,
and when you appeal to people's self-interest
then that's a different matter.
You know, if you can show people
this is really in your best interest to do that,
then I think we are gonna see some change.
Nature deficit disorder is not a known medical diagnosis.
Basically what it is, is a metaphor to describe the harm
that comes to the human species
when it doesn't have much connection to the natural world.
And the way to show that is not by saying,
"This kid has nature deficit disorder
and this kid exhibits these symptoms."
You could do that, but what I would rather do
is look at all this positive research that's come out
and then ask, if that's connected to the natural world,
what happens when you take the natural world away?
Shouldn't every kid,
and in fact, I think every adult have a right to the benefits
of being in the natural world.
Really what it gets down to the small choices about, you know,
we plant a tree here, we preserve a part here.
That's what's gonna really make the day-to-day difference
in people's lives, I believe.
I was in a hotel room one day in San Francisco
and I picked up one of those magazines
that you wonder where they come from in the hotel rooms,
and I was flipping through it and I looked at the back page
and there was this black and white photograph
of a little boy on a beach.
He's running along and his eyes are filled with life,
and the story next to this photograph said this little boy had a problem.
He had the wiggles, he couldn't sit still.
He was disruptive in class.
The school finally kicked him out.
The parents were upset, of course.
But they had been very observant.
They noticed how a little bit of time in nature
helped their little boy calm himself and focus.
So for the next ten years they took their little boy
all over the great western wilderness areas.
Now, the kid turned out okay.
The photograph was taken in 1906.
The little boy's name was Ansel Adams.
So here's a question.
What would have happened if they had taken little Ansel
and put him in a chair in front of a desk,
in front of a computer,
telling him to sit there,
take chess all day,
canceled recess, which more and more schools are doing,
cancel field trips,
lengthen the school day, lengthen the school,
and then given him Ritalin?
Would we have the gifts of nature that Ansel gave us?
Would we have the political support
such as it is for the national parks
without his photographs?
How many little Ansels and Anselets are out there right now
who can give us great gifts in the future
if we give them the great gift of nature now?
Kind of been slowly peeling back the story
of what is ailing Hawaiians.
Finally this afternoon,
we started to get at a glimmer of amazing hope
for how to heal by seeing these kids,
by reconnecting to that land
and really understanding how to grow things,
and how to nourish themselves, and how to nourish the soil...
Their soil can make themselves healthy.
Working with the kids has been so powerful
because showing them that the earth is alive at a young age
really will impact how they grow up.
Are they gonna be going and buying Roundup?
Are they gonna be going out to their soil and realizing it's alive
and really feeling that heart space connection to caring for the land?
The kids here, they need economic opportunity
and through this agricultural practices
where it's affordable to do,
where it's environmentally sound,
I believe it will give everyone in this area a great opportunity
to have a great life
and to provide for their family
and to be happy everyday.
Until you started doing this natural farming
and realizing that the earth is alive,
it changes your whole perspective.
It just made me so much more conscientious
in every part of my life,
brought so much more respect to the whole systems
that are naturally there providing such abundance already.
So I went to the Marche region,
it's like a fantasy land for agroecologists.
They have been farming in these little plots
for hundreds of years,
ever since the Benedictines
who were like the original hippies,
who went there and started to create
these little farms with their monasteries,
and the soil there is very healthy and it's very beautiful.
Ninety-two.
Ninety-two?
You're 92 years old.
Bravo!
This is the basic belief of the monastic life.
We pray at dawn when the light is barely coming up.
You feel like you are a part of this breath of the earth.
A rebirth.
This is a vital rhythm for every one of us.
A rhythm that synchronizes you with the earth as it breathes.
Our philosophy, above all, is that we are stewards of creation.
That is to say, the caretakers of the earth, which gives us everything.
When is someone healthy?
When that person acts and lives and forgets about himself or herself.
It's also known for being the place in Europe
that has the most centenarians,
people who are over a hundred years old.
In one year, we celebrated five people turning 100,
which is a very high percentage compared to the 38,000 residents.
I believe this is because our region has always focused on
well-being through food and work.
It's not about preventing sickness...
but promoting health.
The main difference between the two is this:
prevention tries to ward of disease.
While promotion seeks to maintain,
exalt, and increase health.
Most of all, our region has placed
great importance on agriculture.
There's this elder sister who gardens with lots of love
and she talks to the plants.
She talks to the land, with the plants,
with tomatoes, with the flowers.
They're not people, but they might need something, like more water...
or you may need to wait before planting another seed.
They're fragile! Be careful! The beans!
They're fragile! I am so sorry. I don't want to hurt the beans.
I am sorry.
Hello. I am so honored.
This is a doctor who comes from America.
And?
Let's go so they can ask you questions for a little bit.
What questions are they going to ask me?
Don't worry, you'll have a response.
What if I don't?
Then I'll tell it to you.
Come on and she'll give you the answers.
Let's go. Come on. Careful, come on.
She's moving faster than everybody else.
- How old? - Ninety-six now.
This is how you live to be 96.
Right here.
You can see that she works.
Should I help? No?
She climbs that tree.
She climbs those trees?
- Yes. - No.
She climbs that tree to get fruit?
Yes, for taking the fruit.
Yes, you do, to pick the fruit!
No. There's isn't any now.
We know that there's no more.
Now it's finished, the fruit.
They are all down. So she threw...
She threw down.
No more peach.
All that's left are apples.
Okay, we don't have to worry about her.
Where does this go?
You came here when you were a child, right?
Yes, I was five.
This I haven't told you.
She always had a fever and was sick as a child
so they sent her to a hospital, all the way to Rome,
and they couldn't find any medicine to cure her.
The Abbess wanted us to work,
but I thought she meant she wanted us to visit the fields.
She thought she was visiting.
She didn't realize they had sent her to work.
When you came and worked the earth, you felt better, right?
Yes.
Because she's spent her whole life here
at the monastery dedicated to this work,
she knows everything that has been put on this land.
She understands all of it.
What're you doing?
Why don't you get lost?
What I want to talk to you right now is about what we have lost.
When we move away from those little fields
in the Marche region,
what are the health things that we have lost?
Because these are all parts of argoecology, crop diversity,
perennials and native seeds, traditional technologies,
soil vitality, community,
but what they really are is health.
I was operated on because I had pancreatic tumor.
All the doctors asked, "What are you still doing here?
Why aren't you already in heaven?"
- You had a tumor in your pancreas? - Yes.
How long ago was that?
Nine years ago.
You had a pancreatic tumor nine years ago?
Pancreas, stomach, liver, gall bladder, intestines...
all over.
And I am still here to be able to tell this story.
Are they studying you
or are they from the scientific standpoint?
You are a miracle.
I'm here by the grace of God that keeps me here.
But also thanks to my joyfulness and desire to live in nature,
not just food, not just things,
but everything in our lives is connected to nature.
Everything that I feel and experience...
contributes to my physical, spiritual, and moral health.
Can you give us a rundown of this?
- Just give me one second, okay? - Yeah.
Padre Giovanni just shared stuff
that was incredibly personal to him
and that I didn't get the sense that he talks about it all the time,
and it affected me very deeply.
He just got so much of the crux,
what I am trying to understand about those connections
between our bodies and the earth
and he is just living this every day.
For him it's his awareness,
it's his existence,
and that story about him
getting pancreatic cancer nine years ago,
I mean, the life expectancy
from what sounds like he had metastatic pancreatic cancer
he had in his gut,
and everything is three to six months,
and it's really amazing.
He said he did all the medical treatments
but there was this other side of what he did,
which possibly was the reason that he's still with us
nine years later.
People talk about healing the earth, the earth heals us.
Look around us and see the beauty.
I mean, every sunrise and every sunset, every rain shower
and every breeze and every cloud is so magnificent.
I mean, what more beauty could there have been?
Even when we're living in a city
on the 30th floor of a concrete high-rise,
we have to start to think of ourselves
as part of an agroecological cycle.
Only with that mentality are we gonna actually leave something
for our children and our grandchildren.
Thank you.
So increasingly, instead of saying "sustainable,"
I say, "nature rich."
What does a nature rich city look like?
A nature rich future, a nature rich yard,
built with native species
that bring back butterfly migration routes
and bird migration routes.
What does that future look like?
When you begin to use terminology like a "nature rich city,"
people can see that in their minds, and I can tell you,
particularly young people resonate to that.
They want to go there, they want to create that.
We humans are so arrogant
that we think the hypothesis that we come up with
actually have anything to do
with the complexity of the world around us.
So "ai" in Hawaiian means to eat,
means food,
means reproduction,
and then "na" is in reference to the land.
So it's the land that feeds us.
You are the servant to the land.
So that land doesn't only mean land, it also means the ocean.
Right? Everything in nature,
you are the servant to nature in order to live.
There's a movement that is sometimes called the new agrarians.
These are often young people who are dedicated to organic farming
near a city or in a city.
They are changing their neighborhoods.
They are really dedicated
to creating a different kind of food distribution.
The attitude that we're now developing
is a much more humble and modest attitude
where we essentially say, we really don't understand nature,
but we will listen to it in an unbiased way
and will let the wisdom and the intelligence of nature
tell us how it's working and how it's operating.
So we're really starting to think about how all these parts interconnect,
not just to keep the land healthy
and not just to keep the air healthy
but also to keep us healthy.
The big challenge of life in general
is trying to find balance
and once you find it, trying to maintain balance,
it's not a goal that you achieve and then that's it.
The balance is always gonna shift again
and then you'll have to regain the balance.
It's something that's constantly adapting,
constantly moving with thousands of different variables,
and that, in fact, is balance.
Almost everything is organized in interconnected systems,
from the simplest systems to the most complex ones.
There is a natural law that when systems organize,
they will obey one, just like the law of gravity.
You can say there is a higher intelligence
that used to design to create the universe
by very beautiful, simple design that is scalable,
that can be used in tiny little networks of insects,
so ants talking to each other.
There's two ways of explaining it as an engineer
or as a spiritual person,
and I think at the moment, they are both equally valid.
Awareness of interconnectedness
is increasing in leaps and bounds
as the new age of globalization accelerates.
Our civilization has evolved,
emphasizing the separation into parts for too long,
on this realization of unbroken wholeness,
our future may depend.