The Climate According to Life meets The Wisdom Underground.

A conversation.

I had the great pleasure recently of talking with Didi Pershouse, an early and truly one-of-a-kind voice in the movement to bring living things and their relationships into the climate conversation. It was from Didi that I first heard soil microbes referred to as “essential workers” and photosynthesis described as “the meeting of heaven and earth.” She now has her own Substack page called The Wisdom Underground, the title of which provides yet another indication of Didi’s way with language. Three words, two meanings: that there is wisdom underground, and that there is an underground movement based on that wisdom. Not bad.

I first encountered Didi’s work when attending the Global Earth Repair Conference in 2019 where she was a panelist for a workshop called Ecosystem Restoration for Climate. By the time the 2 hour session was over my understanding of climate, what it is, how it works and what it needs, was completely transformed. Didi’s segment begins at 14:25 and includes her infamous flour and bread demonstration showing just how important biology is to the creation of soil.

We had a delightful and wide-ranging conversation, wandering from the clear-cutting of forests in her home state of Vermont for solar farms to the next steps for this nascent movement that’s trying to bring the living Earth back into the climate debate. There are also a couple points in this video where I say things that could be misunderstood, which I want to clarify here.

At 13:09 minutes, while discussing my frustration with climate journalism, I say “Once you take out land what they say no longer has any validity because it all depends on what you do to the land.” “Validity” was a poor choice of words. What I mean is, once you take land out of the climate picture, the analysis can only be partial for the local, specific regions where we actually live, because at that level the climate is so strongly influenced by what we do to the land.

At 23 minutes, I push back against the tendency of the green energy movement to rely on lots of scary images around climate disasters to promote their perspective. The point I was trying rather unsuccessfully to make is that I think it’s a mistake to portray the climate as something remote and dangerous. Rather, the climate, intimately interwoven with life as it is, should be seen as part of nature, needing defense and healing, not ramped up exploitation. Disasters are all too real, but in almost every instance there is a clear link to land use, which never gets mentioned by in mainstream coverage.

Somewhere in there I refer to Alpha Lo as a “water physicist.” Not sure where I got the water part. He’s a physicist. I also refer to his Substack page as Water Stories, when it’s Climate Water Project.

Various people, organizations and movies are mentioned and links are provided if you want to learn more.

Hope you Enjoy.

Millan Millan

Walter Jehne

Thorsten Arnold

Alpha Lo

Biodiversity for a Livable Climate

Vijay Kumar

Regenerating Life

---

If you enjoy what you find here, please consider a paid subscription. Only by such generosity will I be able to continue doing this work. Many thanks.