Today my guest is Lierre Keith. She is the author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, which has been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.” We’re doing Part 2 of a discussion we began last week on The Vegetarian Myth: Why A Vegetarian Diet Might Not Be Best for Health or the Environment. 
While The Vegetarian Myth does address the vegetarian diet, it does so by comparing the diet to the natural processes of life itself. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today: how life works and how different the natural world is from the industrial world. Lierre and I will each share our experiences of becoming aware of life beyond industrialism, and we’ll discuss some key points that relate to eating. Lierre a writer, small farmer, and radical feminist activist. She is the author of six books and coauthor, with Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay, of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. www.lierrekeith.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Living by Nature’s Way
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Lierre Keith
Date of Broadcast: April 23, 2015
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.
Today’s show is going to be a little different. We’re going to be talking about not so much what we’re doing in our daily lives, although this show with that. But we’re going to be talking about a big shift in the way we think about ourselves as human beings in the larger scheme of life.
Today is Tuesday, September 23, 2014, and it’s the autumn equinox. Now, some of you may have seen in your calendars a few days ago on the 21st, the first day of autumn, well, actually, what the autumn equinox is, is the midpoint between the longest day of the year on summer solstice, and the shortest day of the year, on winter solstice. It happens on a very particular day when the sun is at a particular point in the sky and that is determined by the position of the sun, not by a date on the calendar.
And there’s this whole way that time operates in nature, which is determined by the sun and the moon. And then we have this calendar, which is all about standardizing everything, making what’s called a civil calendar. It has nothing to do with the time that’s going on in the natural world.
I bring this up today because it happens to be, well, I chose to do this show on this day. But it shows the difference between our industrial, civil life and the world of nature. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. We’re going to be talking about that difference and how we can get ourselves re-aligned in why that’s important.
My guest today is Lierre Keith. She was on last Tuesday. She’s the author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability, which has been called the most important ecological book of this generation. And last week, we talked about The Vegetarian Diet. But this week, we’re going to be talking about some of those concepts that made her book the most important ecological book of this generation.
There’s so much to talk about. Hi, Lierre. Let’s say hello.
LIERRE KEITH: Hi, Deb. Thanks for having me back.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So what I want to start with is I know in my life that there was a certain set of things that happened, and I want to tell my story about how I became aware that I was part of the natural world, in addition to being part of the industrial world. I think it’s more basic and fundamental that we are all part of the natural world. I’m imagining from reading your book that you have some kind of similar story. So would you tell us about that moment that this shift occurred for you?
LIERRE KEITH: I think for me it started when I was a really young child. I grew up outside of Philadelphia and we would make journeys north to go see my grandmother in Connecticut and the other place that we went regularly down the shore with the New Jersey coastline. To get to either place, you had to drive along these absolutely horrible highways that are surrounded by these vast, ugly, toxifying machines. It just goes on from miles and miles and miles, this industrial wasteland.
And to my three, four, five-year-old mind, it was just the most horrifying thing. And I learned to just brace myself every time we were going in one of those trips because an hour or two of just driving through – eventually, I read The Lord of the Rings, and it was Mordor. To me, that’s just what it was. I knew that at the end of the journey, we’d be some place really beautiful. So we get to view the ocean or we’d be at my grandmother’s. She lived across the street from this beautiful little river. And we were allowed to just play down the river all day. And to me this was the most magical thing in the world, especially growing up in a more urban environment. They actually have running water and snakes and fish and water fowl and trees. It was just as magical as they could get. But you first had to go through hell to get there.
And I could not understand how it is that human beings had done this to the place that they live. And I think one of the most motivating things in my life was to try to understand that. Why would people do this, to take this place that has obviously been so beautiful once and turn it into this industrial hell?
So that was, I think, just absolutely formative in my early years. I was at this juncture between the beauty of the wild places that was a tiny bit wild that at least I had access to as a young kid and what was being done all around. And that was encroaching, encroaching, encroaching every year.
Now, there were less trees and there are less wilderness. At the beach, there were fewer sand dunes. You can watch the life to just shrink. And I felt the emergency in that.
So I think that was just very formative in my life. And I have now, as an adult, seen other small children have those kinds of reactions as well. So I know it’s not just me. I think there’s something in us as human beings, as actual animals who need a home, who love this place to see the destruction.
Now, of course, we’re really up against the wall in terms of that destruction. But I think we do respond to that. We just learn to shut it off.
DEBRA: I think so too. I just want to add, coming from California, it’s very different in California. So I think people listening in different places may not have a picture of what you’ve been describing because I know that I was shocked and horrified when I first came to the East Coast, driving along a highway and seeing that industrial, miles and miles and miles of factories and smoke stacks and just really ugly industrialism just right there on the highway. It is all in the northeast very much so.
I didn’t have that in California. That’s not the way the highways look. So I can imagine how you felt as a child.
My story is that I had a different thing that happened to me when I was an adult. And I woke up in the morning. I was living in San Francisco, in the city, in a studio apartment. I woke up one morning and I said, “I need to leave the city.” I just knew inside of myself I needed to leave the city.
And I went and I lived out in a forest about an hour north of San Francisco just on the other side of a hill from the Pacific Ocean. It had huge fir trees. It was a world community. So I lived on a little street. We’re all surrounded by trees but otherwise, there were a few other little cabins like mine and animals. The different wild flowers came out at different times of the year. I could go out my front door in the summertime and pick wild blackberries. It was very real close to nature kind of existence.
And because that was so different from the experience of growing up in suburbia and then living in the city (I lived in San Francisco for quite a while), I lived there for two years and there was just profound shift for me when I started seeing the ecosystem. When we live in a city, when we live in suburbia, there’s no ecosystem anymore. But when you go actually out and live in a forest, you start to understand that there are animals and a change of season. I had a skylight over my bed and so the moonlight would come in.
It was just so, so different that I started experiencing for myself that nature existed because I was living in it. Going camping for a weekend isn’t enough. Going away for two weeks to Girl Scout camp wasn’t enough. When I lived there in the forest for two years, it made a profound difference for me. And at the end of those two years, I looked at this beautiful ecosystem and I looked at suburbia and the city, and I said, “Wait a minute! There’s something very, very wrong here.” We are just living this industrial life of having everything come from a factory or in a store, and yet, if you’re actually in the ecosystem, you see that nature is sustaining life in a way that sustains life. And we humans have forgotten what that is.
And so the first shift, the first thing is just, we’re going to talk about some other things but the first thing is just to understand that you live in an industrial world, but there’s this other world of nature and we live within that too. All the resources for every product we use all come from that. It operates in a different way. And if we want to be sustainable, we need to find out what that is. And you and I have both done a lot in that regard.
And we’re going to talk about that one when we come back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Lierre Keith. We’re talking about nature and how the natural world is different from the industrial world.
One of the things I wanted to say that I forgot to say when telling my story before is that the reason that I went out to live in the forest was because I was trying to escape toxic chemicals. I had been living in suburbia and especially in the city where there were a lot of toxic chemicals not only in my home, but in the environment. And I thought, “Where is the cleanest place I can go?” And I went to live in a forest.
But what I found, even though I was just looking for clean air, what I found was that there was this whole natural world there. It’s just like you stepped out of industrialism into this other world. And that’s what we’re talking about today, this other world of nature. The industrial world is within it, but as we put all our attention on the industrial world, we forget that nature is out there. And it has its own rules. And in order for all of our whole culture and everything to survive, all of life to survive, we as human beings need to start understanding what those are.
So the first thing I want to talk about, we mentioned it a little bit last week in talking with Lierre, is the fact that every lifeform survives by eating other lifeforms.
Lierre, why don’t you tell us something about that?
LIERRE KEITH: I am reminded of a quote by Charlotte Perkin Gilman, who was a feminist in the early 20th century and she had this great quote where she said something like, “The Buddha looked out at the world and he said in horror, ‘My god, they’re all eating each other.'” But I look out the world and I changed one word, and I say, “They’re all feeding each other and it’s good.”
And that to me is the exact problem with things like veganism or the separation that we have right now living in an industrial world. We don’t see those cycles. We don’t understand how life physically works on this planet. And that’s exactly it.
First, there’s growth and then there’s death and degeneration. And then at the end of that, there is regeneration. So everything that we are is recycled back into this process called life. So we are broken down into every last little molecule of carbon, whatever. It’s all going to get recycled, taken out by other lifeforms and life will continue.
That is what life is, it’s that cycle. There’s not really any way out of it unless you want to decide that you don’t want to live anymore. But your body will still be recycled even if you decide to knock it off. There’s no way out. That is just what happens on this planet. And you can decide it’s a terrible thing or you can decide that this is an incredible gift.
I decided that I would rather see it as a gift. Maybe that’s a discussion that’s got a more spiritual base to it. But your body is a piece of the universe that you’ve been given. And that’s an amazing thing to have.
DEBRA: It is an amazing thing to have. And also, our bodies – here’s another thing that we don’t see in the industrial world. When our bodies die, then what happens is that they get preserved with formaldehyde and get put in a box and sit in a cemetery. If we were living out in the wild or look at a native culture, it’s not industrial. What happen is that the bodies would get buried or the people would just – I know some Native American cultures or native cultures around the world, when people get to the end of their lives, they just leave their tribe and they go walk out into the woods or wherever, and they lay their bodies down, and their bodies just biodegrade like anything else. And it goes back into the ecosystem. Then the ecosystem feeds us and then our bodies feed the ecosystem.
But there is something else I want to mention about this too. There’s a wonderful little book called Furtive Fauna. And it’s all about our bodies being an ecosystem to other organisms. And when I read this book, there are so many things, little microorganisms that are living with us in our bodies. There is a little microorganism that cleans the little stuff that gets caught in our eyelashes. It actually helps us survive. And the whole microorganism that we talked about, the flora and fauna, in our guts, all those probiotics and everything, that’s a whole culture of being, little cells, that are not our bodies. They’re co-existing with us to help us digest our food.
There are all kinds of creatures in our bodies helping us exist. We’re an ecosystem. Our bodies are an ecosystem to other living things.
And so it’s all about this interconnection.
LIERRE KEITH: About 10 pounds of our body are organisms that are not us. That’s a lot. That’s by weight, but if you do find numbers, there may be as many as nine times more non-human creatures in the human body than there are cells of you. So you can lie there at night going, “Wow, what actually am I?”
And most of them are very friendly. Sometimes the bad ones take over and you end up in a bad way. But most of them are doing things for us and we provide them with a home. Like you said, we’re a habitat essentially. And they do all kinds of fun things for us. They help us digest our food, and they keep us healthy, and they’re part of our immune system, and they keep our skin clean on and on. We can’t see them and we wouldn’t even know they were there. But that is the case. We do provide a home for these other creatures. And now, we have this symbiotic relationship.
DEBRA: And that happens in layer after layer. It’s all kind of nested in nature, these symbiotic relationships as the systems get bigger and bigger and bigger. There’s one other thing I want to mention with regard to this too. And that is, I know that a lot of people don’t want to do harm and that motivates a lot of decisions. For me, the greatest thing if you don’t want to do harm and I don’t want to do harm, but I’m always looking to see what is the thing that can do the greatest good for life.
And that’s why I am so adamant about not using toxic chemicals because to me, the greatest thing that causes the greatest harm in across the greatest amount of life, is to use toxic chemicals. And I think that that’s a much bigger concern when you actually look at the harm being down than to be concerned about that we shouldn’t feed our own lives because we’re taking the life of something else.
Plants have feelings too. Plants know when they’re being eaten. Plants have been hooked up to machines that measure their emotional response.
We’re getting to break. So we’ll be right back and we’ll talk more about this. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’re talking about nature.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Lierre Keith. She’s the author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability, which has a lot about the vegetarian diet but it’s all based on the kinds of things that we’re talking about today. She really has this understanding of how life works and how what we eat from an industrial viewpoint is so out of whack with nature. And she explains all this in the book. It’s very interesting. You can go to Toxic Free Talk Radio and you’ll find her book there. You can click on it and order it. You can also go to her website.
So the next thing I want us to talk about is when I read Lierre’s book when it first came out. I think it was in 2009. And it’s full of scribbles, underlines, post-it notes, and turning down pages, but when I opened it, a couple of weeks ago, when I invited her to be on the show, I had written one thing on the inside of the front cover. And that is life produces food.
And it’s absolutely true. We don’t need supermarkets, we don’t need agriculture, we can just go outside and into the ecosystem and ecosystem will always produce food to support all the living things that are in that ecosystem. It produces food for plants, it produces food for animals, it produces food for humans. That’s what life does.
And here in Florida, I live in an area that has fairly old houses. My house was built in 1940. But every single person has old citrus trees. That’s what people did then. What they did was they planted citrus trees and we all have so much grapefruits, oranges, tangerines and everything, we can’t even eat them. We can’t even give them to each other because we all have trees.
And it’s just wonderful. And nowadays, people plant ornamental plants instead of planting food. But as recently as 1940, what they were doing was planting foods and fruit tree gardens and all these things.
So Lierre, talk to us about life-producing food.
LIERRE KEITH: So pretty much in nature, every action that every creature takes is going to provide food eventually for somebody else. And that’s why it’s really an interconnected web. It’s not a series of hierarchical relationships where we’re exploiting each other. It’s actually just a system of mutual feeding.
For instance, I live in Northern California now and we still have some salmon run. So the salmons come up the streams to spawn and that’s how they’re continuing their species. But in the meantime, the bears and the eagles and all these, what I call the apex predators, will feed on the fish. And by doing that they actually take the nutrients from deep in the ocean that are in the salmon’s bodies, and they keep themselves alive, they keep their babies alive, but they also distribute an incredible amount of resources, minerals and what-not back into the forest.
This is what this giant pump essentially of nutrients that go from ocean, up the rivers in the fish, and that out into the forest with the bears, and the foxes, and the eagles, and keeps the forest healthy. Without those nutrients, the forest will eventually die. And this is just inevitable because there’s nothing else to feed [inaudible 00:30:06]. They need nutrients from the salmon. And it’s the salmon that do that. But every step along the way, every creature involved is doing what it needs to survive, doing what it needs to feed its babies, and in the act of doing that, it’s feeding the entire community.
And that’s the beauty of this, is that we are all in this interlocking, mutual, symbiotic relationships. If you step outside of it, you don’t understand that. You think, “Oh, those terrible bears! They’re killing fish!” And that’s not what’s really going on. On a small level, yes, but by doing that they’re not just increasing their own species, feeding their babies, but they’re feeding forests.
And because there’s a forest, there are bears. And because there is a forest, there is actually a river that fish can live in, because without those trees, the rivers are dead.
So in fact, by the fish feeding the bears, feeding the forest that feeds the river, which makes the salmon possible. So the salmon are feeding themselves.
And you can look in any biological community and you will see exactly that cycle, that flow of life to life to life to life around back. So it actually helps you to be part of the cycle.
And a lot of us, we don’t see it, we don’t live in it, we don’t understand it. Our culture doesn’t teach us about it. And we’re left on our own as adults to try to figure out where has this all gone so wrong because we lack that basic understanding that life is always feeding life.
DEBRA: I think that’s exactly right. That our culture is not teaching us. I know that for myself. I had to go find this information. It’s out there but nobody told me to go find it. Nobody suggested that it was there. It was just me waking up one day and saying, “I have to get out of the city and go live out in nature.” I didn’t know why I was doing that. I just knew deep inside of me that that’s what I needed to do. And there I just looked around and I said, “Wait a minute. Here’s the model for life. It’s not in the city. This is where we’ve gone wrong, is not understanding the basic fundamentals of life.”
And so what we do is we go and we cut down the trees and we make paper towels. And then the trees aren’t there and there’s not a river and then there’s not a salmon.
I’ve seen the salmon jump. I used to live in Northern California. I could just go. I lived in the San Geronimo Valley and there’s a place there where they come up in January and you can just stand there on this little bridge and watch them jump up over the rocks. It’s a very cool thing to have right there where you live and have your community celebrate that.
And that’s not what I get in the city. That’s not what I get in suburbia. But that’s how we all should be living. That reconnects us as human beings to nature.
LIERRE KEITH: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. The other thing is the more disconnected we are as a culture, the more we lose sight of what’s being lost every day. The descriptions of what the salmon runs were like here, you can hear them coming for 24 hours. It sounded like a thunder rolling. That’s how much noise the fish made. That’s how many fish there were. And I’ve heard this description of rivers, the world over. And once upon a time, the rivers would be black and boiling with fish. It was so dense with fish, you could walk across the river on the back of the fish. There’s a description like that.
So from everywhere, that’s how dense life was. And in a very short period of time, we’re reducing it all to desert. And I don’t know what we think we’re going to eat in 50 years or 100 years. The soil is gone, the trees are gone, the animals are gone.
The planet is skinned alive by agriculture and people need to start feeling the emergency of it while we still have time to turn it around.
DEBRA: I think so too. I totally agree with that. if you read these accounts of what nature was like earlier on, even a hundred years ago, a hundred and fifty years ago, and you think about the immensity of how long this planet is in here, and the difference, how much we’ve lost. And there are so many things that we can do. We just need to decide to do those things.
And when we come back from the break, Lierre and I are both going to talk about some things that we do in our own lives in this direction to consider nature and how to restore it better than damaging it.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Lierre Keith. She’s the author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Lierre Keith. She’s the author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and order her book, and also go to her website, which is there as well.
So Lierre, knowing what you know about nature, what are some of the things that you do in your life to apply that?
LIERRE KEITH: There are two levels. One is that I really encourage people to get politically involved and whatever ways they’re comfortable doing because honestly, we are up against some really vast, global and very brutal systems of power that aren’t going to give up without a fight.
So not everybody has to be a frontline activist. A lot of people don’t have the personality for it or they’ve got too much going on in their own lives. We’ve got children, we’ve got elderly parents. It’s just not going to work. But there are plenty of ways to get involved, to help the people who can be on the frontlines doing those kinds of direct confrontations of powers.
And then behind the scenes, we really need to be creating an entirely new culture. And that’s going to take everybody getting involved. We have to believe that democracy is possible. We have to believe that we can take our place again on this planet as animals who need a home, rather than destroyers of the planet.
So it’s pretty much every institutions from the top one down, we have to redo and we have to redo them, putting the earth first, putting those cycles of life before everything because without them, we’re all dead. And that has to be the center of our spiritual practices, of our interactions with each other, of the way that we make political decisions, all of that has to come first.
We don’t have a world that does that. What we have is a world that puts profit before anything else. And we also have a world that believes in those kinds of social hierarchies that are creating a lot of these problems.
So we need to believe that a better world is possible and then get engaged. And then in a more personal level, there are things that we are all called to do that just express who we are as unique individuals. And for some people that’s teaching children, and for other people, perhaps that means making music or writing books or stories. We’re all going to have the things we do that just make us happy.
So whatever those things are for you, try to center this idea that the earth matters and that we are dependent upon all of those relationships that have a biophilic a world view that loves life and understands that, if the center of whatever it is you’re called to do.
And so one of the things that is really important to me is just food and local food system. And the reason that that’s so important is it addresses so many multipronged problems all at once. So I know that when I’m buying from one of my local farmers who is engaged in what’s called pasture-raised farming, so the cows are out on grass all the time, and the chickens follow the cows, and the ducks follow the cows. All the animals are in rotation and they’re moved very quickly off the grass. This is basically the way that you build topsoil. And by building topsoil, this is important because it’s the number one way to sequester carbon.
We all think of global warming as starting with the beginning of the industrial age, when people started burning fossil fuel. That’s not actually true. Global warming started when people started doing agriculture because all of that carbon was in the ground, and when you do, in the soil, in fact. And so when do you agriculture, in fact, you’re destroying all that soil. And that means it’s coming to pieces and turning back into carbon being released into the air.
And it’s true that industrialization has been an incredible accelerant for this destructive process. But the beginning of it is actually agriculture.
This is a lot of information to pack into two minutes here but to have farming that’s based on actually using grass, using pasture lands, is the reverse of that because you are, in fact, repairing that ecosystem by leaving the perennial cover in place, so the grasses are always in place. And they’re sucking carbon out of the air. That’s what they do when they do photosynthesis. And it’s all getting stored in the ground.
In fact, a lot of the figures show that if we were to do this appropriately around the world, we could actually sequester all the carbon that’s been released since the beginning of the industrial age in about 15 years.
And to me, that’s really the only the help that we’ve got. That’s it. We have to repair those grasslands. And what’s destroyed those grasslands is agriculture.
So that’s the primary wound. That’s where people went off the rails was when they took over entire biotic communities, destroyed the perennial cover, took down the trees, cloud up the prairie and then just used them for human use. So you’re sending all those other species into extinction because they’ve got nowhere to live. You’re destroying all the local waterways because all the soil just runs off into the water. Now, the fish have nowhere to go either. They’re all getting killed. You’re sucking up water from the water table underneath, and ultimately, turning what’s left of the soil into salt. That’s the salinization that you see everywhere around the planet. That’s inevitable with agriculture. And ultimately, all that carbon is being released.
So this is the destructive process from beginning to end. And when I was a vegan, I thought I was eating the right food, but I had no idea that agriculture was, in fact, this inherently destructive process. So by reversing that, by replanting those perennial species and repairing the grasslands and the prairies, and then you can eat food from inside in actual living community.
So rather than imposing ourselves across it and just growing corn or wheat or soy, you’re actually participating in the life on that land. So carbon is being sequestered, topsoil is growing every year instead of being destroyed, all those plants now have a place to live again and in a functioning prairie, one square meter should have about 25 different plants. So all that biodiversity comes back. You will instantly see birds, butterflies, insects, small mammals, amphibians. It creates little, tiny, mini wetlands everywhere if you do this right.
So all this life comes back instantly. I’ve seen places where it’s been a hundred years since they had birds. And all of a sudden, within a few years, there are birds nesting everywhere. Nobody has seen literally over a century because it was destroyed by agriculture. They had nowhere to live. And the moment you give them a place to come back to, they will because they want to live.
And you can be part of that repair by simply supporting the farmers who are doing this as well.
Most of my food comes from those kinds of farms. So I’m helping repair the planet, I’m helping a whole bunch of animals have really great life, the amphibians, all the way up to, if they do it well, they can live with the large predators as well. So everybody gets to come home again. You get to repair the water, you get to restore the water table, you get to sequester the carbon and you’re also helping one of your neighbors be able to earn a living.
This is important. So instead of giving all your money to these corporate robber-barons who are essentially gutting the planet for their profit, you’re actually giving money to a local person who needs to repair the roofs and send kids to college and do all that. Now, you’re circulating your money in a local economy. So you’re helping to rebuild a sort of relationship with humans that are way more based on justice rather than exploitation as well.
You can do all of that by simply buying local food from grass-based farms. And on top of it. It’s good for humans. This meets the amino acid profile that we need, the fatty acid profile that we need. It’s really perfect food. And if you think about it, that makes sense because we evolved from the Savannas from Africa eating exactly that. We’re large, grass-fed herbivores. So this is, in fact, the perfect food for humans as well.
So you can do all of that by something really simple, which is just buying food from local grass-based farmers.
The best website for this is run by Jill Robinson and it’s called EatWild.com.
DEBRA: Wonderful website.
LIERRE KEITH: He has a directory and you can find all the farms in your area that are doing this right. You may have to travel a little bit, but it’s worth it and you get a big freezer or you learn how to smoke and dry it, whatever you’re going to do. But you can find it actually quite pretty easily. Encourage your local co-op, your local food store to carry this stuff. That’s another political step you can take. And they get involved with other people in your area who also believe in this kind of local, sustainable, humane and appropriate human nutrition like the Weston A. Price Foundation. That’s a great group. There are other groups as well. This is just something I really care about because with one seemingly small act, you’re actually affecting all of this stuff.
And honestly, I think the most important thing is like what you’re doing by having a radio show, you’re getting the word out to other people.
DEBRA: Thank you.
LIERRE KEITH: Talking to everyone in your life, teaching your children a better set of values, talking to anybody else on your street, your neighbors, your friends, why this is so important and conveying the emergency of the situation because we don’t actually have a lot of time left before we reach those tipping points on the planet.
And if you love anything, it’s really time to step up to the plate and do what you can to save it.
DEBRA: I completely agree. And one of the things that I think is most fundamental that I like about your approach is that it’s very restorative. Everything you were talking about is not about saying, “I’m not going to do this.” You’re not saying, “I’m going to boycott factory farming so I’m not going to eat meat.” You’re saying, “How can I do the thing that is the best thing to restore life as a whole?”
And when that’s the question that is asked, then you come up with all these kinds of creative restorative things to do. You see what the solution is. And that’s always been at the basis of my work as well. Certainly, I’m telling people, don’t use toxic chemicals but that’s not the end of the story. The other part of it is to instead of using toxic chemicals, that you do the thing that’s restorative. And so always in my work, I have been talking about, here’s a less toxic product that you could use, an industrial product. But I’m certainly reaching out into the realm of artisans making things in their local ecosystems because that’s the sustainable model that is going to save everything.
Lierre is talking about it with food. I’m talking about it with products. Lots of people in the world are understanding this more and more. And that’s really the direction that we need to go.
That’s the end of the show. We’ve only got 15 seconds left. So thank you so much, Lierre.
LIERRE KEITH: Thank you for all your work.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. Thank you for all your work. We’ll just admire each other.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and listen to all the past shows. You can listen to this one again. We’ve got to go. Be well. Bye.
