Episode Transcript
[Intro]: Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.
[00:00:21] Dennis McKenna: Jill Wagner has been a forester in Hawaii for 30 years. She started at the Amy Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden as a horticulturalist for the garden where she grew native Hawaiian species. She received a bachelor's degree from the University of Hawaii at Ethnobotany. She has been conducting forest restoration projects for the State of Hawaii, Department of Hawaiian Homelands, the Nature Conservancy, the National Park Service and Kamehameha Schools and other private landowners. She has trained people in ecosystems restoration and nursery management for decades. She started the Hawaii island seed bank in 2008, which banks seeds for large landowners on Hawaii Island. It also serves as a model for small regional seed bags called Seed Arcs.
She conducts training for people from all over the world so that they can save their native seeds and their food crop seeds. Seed Arcs are off grid, solar powered seed banks that are built to keep seeds in the hands of the people.
And you can learn more about those from the Joseph Rock Arboretum, which we'll be talking about.
Jill, it gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the Brainforest Café.
[00:01:53] Jill Wagner: Hello, Dennis. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:01:57] Dennis McKenna: It's so good to have you. I've looked forward to this for a long time and I've been aware of your work, of course, for decades. We have a long friendship and I've always known of your dedication to ecosystem restoration and particularly with respect to preservation of native Hawaiian species, and just in general, your commitment to saving the world's forests, or as much of them as possible with the focus on Hawaii. So I was surprised somewhat, although not really, because it fits right in with what you've been doing. But I was not surprised. I was actually delighted to learn that you've now gotten into seed banks, which is a whole other area that is very important in conservation, in the fight for conservation. So do you want to tell us a little bit about how you got into this? What are seed banks and why are they important?
[00:03:04] Jill Wagner: Yes, I started the Hawaii island seed bank in 2008 and it was a grant from Hawaii Wildfire Organization and it was basically as a mitigation to have seeds for post wildfire restoration.
And so that was 2008. That was way before this fire thing has really escalated and now it's in the front of everybody's minds. But that enabled me to start collecting a lot of common native seeds. So I've done restoration of Hawaiian ecosystems, but collecting common native seeds and really bulking and amassing seeds has been a really, really good thing for Hawaii island. And now we have millions of seeds and we are, I've been training people for years, a lot of students, and I really want to leave the next generation with a lot of resources so they can have what they need to keep going and to support the land. Because we don't know what's going to happen in the next 20 years. We don't know what's going to happen to plants in the ground.
And we need to have. So when you do restoration in the ground and you do active forestry, that's called In-Situ preservation or conservation. When you take, when you do something that preserves biodiversity out of the field, that's called Ex-Situ conservation. So seed banking is one of the most important Ex-Situ conservation tools that we have because you can store millions of seeds in a very small space, in a refrigerator.
So I was doing that for years and I, I've been really, really, you know, working more and more globally and seeing that this is a model for people globally. So I started, I bought 48 acres here in Kona in 2020 and I started the Joseph Rock Arboretum. And the arboretum houses our Hawaii Island Seed bank. And so the arboretum is a training site for new forest creators. And we work in the nursery, we work in the field and in the seed bank. So it really gives people an understanding of the restoration cycle and we go through the whole cycle. So I do that both in Hawaii and online. I have online courses and I'm more and more working with people in the tropics in Africa and South America and trying to really help people to save their native seeds.
[00:06:01] Dennis McKenna: This is such a multidisciplinary. I mean, the Joseph Rock Arboretum is kind of a Hawaiian institution, but you have kind of revived it, right? And you've been a force in rediscovering it and repurposing it to these conservation efforts. Is that right?
[00:06:24] Jill Wagner: Well, Joseph Rock, of course, is the father of botany in Hawaii. He's in the Linnaean tradition. So he came to Hawaii in 1902 or three from Vienna and he was an autodidact, he was a self taught botanist. And you know, in those times there were no cars. He went like everybody on horseback throughout the Hawaiian Islands and he wrote monographs of individual plant species. So he studied Hawaiian plants and he really increased the knowledge base on these native species. But the other thing, he did a couple of really important things. One of them is in his book “Indigenous Trees of Hawaii”, he described ecosystems. And this is early 1900s, that term ecosystem was coined. I Think it was by Hershberger, like 1885. It's not that old. And he described in his book Ecosystem, so he described the community of species that grew together. And the second thing he did that was really important, I believe, is that he took photographs of the native plants. And again, if you think about photography, that started in the late 1800s, and he took really good photographs. And on this Joseph Rock Arboretum website, you can see some of the photographs, because the book is out of print, and I wanted to share it with people. And for people like me, people doing forestry on the ground that book is in is like the bible of Hawaiian botany. It is the first book that really describes ecosystems of all the Hawaiian Islands. Shows photographs of these plants and their stature in full maturity, which is really amazing today because some of these plants are very, very rare now. And so Rock's favorite place in all of the Hawaiian Islands was Kona, and he loved the dry forest ecosystem. And he went to Puvava, which is a historic ranch here, and he wrote part of his book there. So one of my colleagues, Paul Weissich, he was the director of the Honolulu Botanical Gardens that comprised seven gardens on Oahu. He was the director for 20 years, but he was. He was a good friend of Rock, and he became Rock's executor of his estate when Rock died. Rock was never married. And I asked permission from Mr. Weissich if I could name this arboretum after Rock to honor him. And he said that Rock would. Would love that.
And so this is really honoring the people that have come before and built on the knowledge base that I use today very much and making sure we don't forget about their work. So, you know, this place is a place for teaching and learning, and we have really, really good programs here. But one of them is global.
It's a model for a global way of working with your regional seeds and doing forestry. So for seed banking, those protocols for banking seeds are universal. They're international standards that have been developed, and the seeds are what are regional. So I teach people all over the world about how to take care of their seeds so their seeds can be stored for decades or a hundred years. If you don't do that, we can talk about that more. But if you don't do that, the seeds will degrade. And obviously, seeds are living things, and they age. They have an aging process. Some seeds age faster and some seeds age slower, but you have to properly handle them so they can be stored and that's, that's what I do and teach.
[00:10:36] Dennis McKenna: Teach, as you and I know. It's often that a lot of other people don't know. Tropical seeds are often difficult to preserve their viability. So that's a problem with collecting seeds in the tropics. You know, by the time you get them to a safe place where they can be stored, they're not viable.
Have you had to develop techniques that are specific for these fragilely viable tropical seeds?
[00:11:08] Jill Wagner: Well, there's a few things in regards to that. One thing is that when I started doing forestry in Hawaii, there were no seed banks in Hawaii. So when it started, people thought that most seeds were recalcitrant. Most tropical seeds are recalcitrant. There's basically three different classifications of seeds. One is orthodox. Orthodox means that seeds can be dried, they can be desiccated and stored. They can be put in like hibernation, stored for decades or hundreds of years. Then you have intermediate seeds, seeds that maybe can be stored for a few years, a short period, and then they die. And then you have recalcitrant seeds, seeds that are like a mango seed or an avocado seeds. Those seeds are wet seeds and they can't be banked, they can't be stored. So those plants are more vulnerable because you don't have that Ex-Situ way of conserving them that I explained earlier. So, it's very common for people to think that tropical seeds are not, they're, you know, they're not stored, they can't store well. But the, as research has been done on seed banking, this is very, very new that those, a lot of the seeds that people thought were recalcitrant are actually orthodox. And so the sort of, the knowledge base is shifting and certainly has in Hawaii. And I've talked to people, for example, Australia, who think that most of their seeds are not, you know, they can't store, but it's not that. There was a paper that just came out last year saying that maybe 75% of their flora can be, can be, is orthodox. So, so I think that as we learn, as we do research, and the two largest seed banks in the world are the Millennium Seed bank in England, and they bank native seeds and then there's the food crop seeds in Norway, and that's called the global seed vault. So those institutions also do, especially the Millennium Seed bank, they do research on the seeds and they publish research on, on what the storage capacity is. And for small seed banks like me, I study that. So I can see what I can do with different families or genus. It really helps me to understand how I can take care of the seeds.
[00:13:52] Dennis McKenna: Okay, so this Millennium Seed Project, is that affiliated with the Eden Project or is that part of Kew or what's the institutional affiliation of that?
[00:14:05] Jill Wagner: It's Kew. It's, it's affiliated with Kew.
It's housed at one of the Kew Gardens. And it is a really, I've worked with them and they've done some really great stuff. And the other one that has come out of that is Botanic gardens Conservation International, BGCI. And they put out a paper in 2021 that's called the State of the World's Trees. And that paper, the bottom line of that paper is that one in every three trees today is at risk of extinction. It's really, we're really in a serious place in history and time and we need to collect and save seeds, you know, regionally, all over the world. And so I, I've got a big vision, and my vision, I'm trying to raise $2.5 million dollars now to build 10 seed banks. And I would, I'll tell you how I'm doing it. And, and it's, it's different. It's not the big institution. Those big institutions cost about $20 million to, to set them up and fund them. They were funded and built in 1989. This is very new.
My vision is to have small seed banks all over the world. Instead of having centralized seed banks, I think that we should have regional seed banks all over the world. So what's happened is that I bought this property in Hawaii to develop the arboretum. And I was living in a 40 foot shipping container. And my carpenter, he built me a little cabin and I was working on my seeds in that cabin and my whole living room was taken up with the seed tables and seeds. And then I thought, I can build a seed bank out of a 40 foot shipping container. So I built a seed bank. And it's solar powered. And that's what the Hawaii Island Seed bank is, is housed in. It's completely off grid. It has a generator for a backup, but it really is fully functional as a solar powered seed bank.
And it's an incredible thing because it's a metal box. And the two main things that you need to do when you bang seeds is you need to control the temperature and the relative humidity. If you get that right, you can store seeds for a long, long time. So because this is a metal box, I realized that I can store, I can start drawing and processing millions of seeds. And we do. And I wish I could show you pictures, but we can't do that, I think with, with this. But I, it's, it's amazing how much seed we can save. So my vision is to build these seed banks and ship them all over the world and help people. I have already, right now I have A list of 10 projects in Africa that are really ready and they want to bank seeds and they want to bank both native seeds and food crop seeds for food security. And it's very, very important. So that's what I'm trying to do.
[00:17:35] Dennis McKenna: Well, that's fantastic. I mean, this idea makes so much more sense than trying to create these centralized seed banks, which are important, but they require enormous infrastructure and millions of dollars. You're trying to find about $2 million to deploy these Seed Arks, I think you call them, in various parts of the world. And that's something that, that each one doesn't have to be that expensive. And it's also something that the local communities can get involved in.
They can find a lot of the resources to do this. This just makes so much sense to take this concept and replicate it throughout the world.
This is really cutting edge stuff, Jill, in my opinion. I mean, I'm not an expert, but I know the importance of biodiversity and I like that your focus here with these seed banks is pretty much, very much emphasizes biodiversity. It's important to preserve food plants and useful plants. But at the end of the day, all plants are useful. Right. And biodiversity is as much a threat to. The loss of biodiversity is as much a threat as the decimation of these different environments due to climate change. So this is a very forward looking, future oriented kind of project that you've got and is the Joseph Rock Arboretum that you founded, essentially you created this organization. So is it a nonprofit?
[00:19:22] Jill Wagner: Yes, yes.
[00:19:23] Dennis McKenna: People can support it and get deductions and all that.
[00:19:28] Jill Wagner: That's right. And that's what I'm trying to do because the people who want these seed banks, I've trained them, I develop long term relationships, I've trained them, I've, I have online courses and I've worked with them for at least a year or two years. And I know they have, you know, nonprofits set up, they've got teams, they've got all of the infrastructure and ready to take. They've got the land, they can show me that they have the land, secure documents to show that they can, they can put a seed bank. So I, what I, what I have found is that they don't have access to the money like we have in the West. It's much easier to raise money in the west than it is in the developing world. And so I'm trying to create a bridge because the native people, indigenous people, this has been written, this is documented, they are really the caretakers of biodiversity on this planet. And we have to leave seed in the hands of the people it can't go to. If we had a catastrophe, would they get the seed? I mean, you've got to have, it's got to stay where it's from.
[00:20:47] Dennis McKenna: It has to be decentralized and it has to be, it has to be the seeds from the environment where these people live. So if there is a catastrophe, God forbid, they'll at least have the genetic resources to try to reconstruct it or preserve. So how much does it cost to build, deploy one of these seed arcs? Have you, I mean, you have one at the arboretum, you have one or two in Hawaii?
[00:21:19] Jill Wagner: Yes, yes, I've built them. And, it costs about 250,000. So as opposed to $20 million with two and a half million, I can make 10 of them and that's including shipping and customs and complete building the solar system. Training. I go in country, I do a two week training program and I teach. So there's institutional knowledge. I teach more than one person, a group of people, and it is really, really valuable. And what happens is these people start scheming about creating micro economies because what happened, I did a training in Tanzania and once they get started massing seeds, then they can start growing plants in their nursery and they can start selling plants and they're like, hey, whoa. Now I can sell native plants for restoration projects. Now I can sell food crop food seeds or food crops and start, you know, medicine, medicinal plants and start creating these little local economies. It's very, very good. I'm so pleased that people are doing that. You know, they're, they're thinking, they're like, we, we want to do this. And it's, it's great.
[00:22:44] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, it's a wonderful thing. It's very top, it's very bottom up. I mean, this is the people utilizing their resources. It generates enthusiasm, they understand the value of it. I mean, it's just a fantastic concept and clearly makes much more sense. You still need these centralized seed banks, there's nothing wrong with those, but they don't get the seeds out to the people and under the model you've created. The people have the seeds, they have the environment. They just need the facilities to preserve these things through time and keep the viability.
So have you had success getting funding? How many of these arcs have you deployed around the world?
[00:23:34] Jill Wagner: What happened is I joined with some corporates, I joined with some, you know, corporate.
I got a job working with companies that really understood what I was doing. And I tried it, but the problem is it just doesn't provide enough ROI and I'm not interested as much as on return on investment. I'm trying to help people be secure for the future and I'm very, very concerned.
I just want to give you a couple of statistics. One is, according to the World Wildlife Foundation, 75% of the world's tropical forest that existed 55 years ago have been destroyed or severely degraded. We're losing massively, but people don't realize how massive in our lifetime, the biodiversity that we're losing. Secondly, this is another big one. The United Nations is estimating now extreme fires could rise by 50% by the end of the century. It's where, see the problem with, with all of these climate impacts, we've got flooding, fires, droughts, you know, all of these severe climate events that happen. What people never link is that, that not only you lose biodiversity, you lose the mother trees and those genetics of those standing trees, but also what it really does that's very, very critical, it really hinders pollination.
And when you have pollination disruption, when you have forest health issues, physiological stress on the floral resources, the flowers can't be made, nectar production or pollen is affected. You won't be able to get seeds. So we have to get seeds now. This is something that we really. And I just, I'm so trying to push this forward because I didn't, I wasn't able to do it through the corporate world, but I want to do it. I do think that people will understand and do understand and I made a shift this year and I'm going to try to do it and try to find money and raise money in the philanthropic world, because these seed banks are not, they don't take that much time to build. They take a couple of months and you ship them out and then you start training and you empower people. The other thing that I wanted to say, this is huge, is that the keepers of seeds are traditionally women. And this in the global style, in the developing world is very, very important to empower women. And to set meaningful jobs that they can do that are going to support, support their communities. And this is. I have incredible. I have really cool.
And it's on the website because I've got some recipients who want seed banks. On the Joseph Rock Arboretum I put a seed arc recipients so people can see there's people ready to do this work. They just. What we're doing is they're collecting seeds but seeds age. They need to have this, this. It's not hard science, it's simple.
[00:27:11] Dennis McKenna: It's.
[00:27:11] Jill Wagner: You got to do the protocols, you've got to do it properly and you can suspend that and they won't die.
[00:27:20] Dennis McKenna: Well, that's fantastic. So it seems like as a philanthropic investment, this ticks all the boxes, you know, I mean I would think philanthropists and people with ecosystem awareness and awareness of the challenges that the environment faces on local and global scales would understand because this is simple. There's not a great, there's no new technologies that need to be developed.
It's a people's effort, it's bottom up, powered by women, powered by the local community and it's preserving these local species that are so important to the well being. Not only the food but everything else they get from. I mean the whole non timber forest products range of things as you know very well, better than I do certainly. But there have been various studies done about the, you know, what is the value of a typical 50 hectares of Amazonian rainforest depending on how it's utilized. And if you just cut it down and put in cattle and take the timber out of it, it has a certain value. If you keep it intact, you preserve that complexity and the value is like 10 to 20 times. And you can keep harvesting, you don't deplete it.
[00:28:52] Jill Wagner: That's right.
[00:28:53] Dennis McKenna: The incredible thing, we're so slow to come to these realizations to wake up to this, but this is absolutely fantastic work that you're doing and I hope that you are getting a lot of support and I want to do everything I. Well, I'm hoping this podcast may help so people can contact you through the website, through the Joseph Rock website.
[00:29:20] Jill Wagner: Yes, that's right. And then, you know, there's two ways they can help. One is by providing smaller donations for training because that training helps me to see who you've got to have good people on the ground. So who in the different regions can do the work. I can train them so they get to a professional level and then they can be recipients for these seed arks and people with more, you know, more substantial Donations can help build these seed arks. But I think I want to, you know, I think that the people who will support this will be part of this. Incredible. This is a, this could create a huge sea change in terms of floral biodiversity preservation. And, and I'm really, really excited about it and I wanted to. You made me think of something else I want to talk about and I'm so glad you brought up the Amazon and looking at existing forests because of course we need to save the existing forest more than anything. That's where the real carbon sequestration happens. But um, I have talked to numerous projects, I mean at least over 50 projects in the last few years, maybe a hundred a lot. And what I have found is the largest tree planting organizations in the world are planting one to five species.
That's what's going on. And I took. Last year, I went online, I researched Verra and gold standard, the carbon sequestration registration bodies and I looked at all the projects that are registered.
Many, many, many of these projects are timber projects. So what they do is they plant a fast growing timber, they register for carbon sequestration. Let's say one of the most popular one in the world is eucalyptus.
They plant eucalyptus, they get the big carbon sequestration in the first 10 years and then they cut the trees down. What does that do for the globe, for habitats, for animals and insects, for biodiversity, for runoff, for soil building?
[00:31:48] Dennis McKenna: It's a very narrow focus on this one thing that grow these fast growing species. They completely seem blind or unaware of the biodiversity issues of the other. Yeah, I mean these are people with good hearts, good intentions, but not much knowledge of how you actually support this, how you actually make it viable not for the next 10 years, but for the next hundred years, hopefully the next thousand years. I don't know if you've read Wade Davis's latest book. It's an amazing book. It's a series of essays, it's called “Beneath the Surface of Things”. He has one of the most interesting essays I've ever read on the current environmental crisis, global crisis. And a point that he makes in that, in that article that he wrote, a series of essays. The point that he makes in that is that there's all this interest, all these people are talking about developing these super high tech technologies for carbon sequestration, for taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and sequestering it into minerals and that sort of thing. And there are like multi billion dollar projects. They're basically usually run by tech people from Silicon Valley. It's basically, it's completely misunderstanding the problem. I mean, and these are people who, you know, their orientation is capitalism. They want to make money and they want to leverage the available funds for this kind of thing toward these ridiculous carbon sequestration technologies. But a tree is the most sophisticated carbon sequestration technology that exists. And it doesn't require any research and development or. No, you know, I mean, it just works.
And the more trees you can plant, the better off you are. And what you need is infrastructure in the sense that you need a place to plant these trees. But an interesting point he made in that article, among many others, was if you could plant a trillion trees, it would reduce carbon emissions. It would sequester 35% of the global carbon emissions.
And what would it cost? It would cost about 30 cents a tree.
So that's less than, so $300 billion. That's peanuts. That's less. That's the typical defense budget of the United States for a single year. But it's not sexy like carbon sequestration technology is. And building these machines and all that, I mean, that's all very sexy. And the tech people are preoccupied with how cool this is, but it won't work.
[00:35:05] Jill Wagner: I mean, I'm so glad this, I'm so glad you brought that up because that is really, really important. And I think, you know, I think that we need to do everything we can.
But I just came back from the oldest forestry conference in the world. It's called IUFRO, and it only happens once every five years. And it is, it, it blew my mind. It was all scientists. And one of the keynote speakers was an atmospheric scientist. And he, this is what he said, Dennis, exactly what you just said. He said, here, let me tell you something. He said, trees have been developing carbon sequestration for 500 million years. Do not think you're going to come up with something better.
[00:36:04] Dennis McKenna: These people. Yeah, so they need to see that lecture or whatever, because they tend to be preoccupied with technology. And it's like, oh, there's a technological solution to mitigate climate change. And that's true. But like you say, the technology has existed for centuries, and it is basically forestry. It's basically creating systems that are integrated, highly biodiverse systems in which trees, because of their ability to, you know, their super carbon accumulators, need to play a big part in these ecosystems, whether they're engineered ecosystems or natural ecosystems that are augmented. I mean, it's so dismaying like in Canada here every summer.
I mean the boreal forests of Canada are hundreds of thousands of acres every summer. A good deal of them and a large amount of them are just on fire because there's no way to prevent it. Well, because everything's heating up and these systems are drying out. But this is the loss, I mean this is this existing pool of captured carbon, sequestered carbon in the form of the trees and we're re releasing it back into the atmosphere. Not on purpose in the case of the boreal forest. Of course in the case of the Amazon, the harvesting of timber and the release of carbon from the existing tinder in the Amazon is very often deliberate because it reflects this completely short sighted understanding about the value of the forest and how you utilize them to maximize the value and maximize their sustainability at the same time.
And in your case, I don't know anything about this other than what I read, but that's what I understand it to be. I mean if people could look, if they could step back from their fetish about technology and if you're going to put a billion dollars toward carbon sequestration, grow trees, fund these kinds of, exactly the kinds of things that you're trying to do, that you're trying, you are doing. But imagine what you could do with a billion dollars.
[00:38:42] Jill Wagner: A 200 million, I can build a hundred seed banks all over the world and it would change history because it would allow people to secure their own resiliency. And I mean this is very critical. I do want to thank Dr. Joachim Schellnhuber who said that atmospheric scientist because he, he, I think he blew everybody, everybody. It was like a pin drop, could drop when he said that. And everybody knows it in that world because these are all forestry people. But, it really made, it really made the point very succinct. So I was grateful for that because it helps me to convey that to other people. But there's also, you said something else Dennis. You talked about people that are doing either monocultures or really sort of simple projects without using native species and stuff that they're, we're also losing systems. And I thought about it. I'm reading a book called Gaia Psyche and it's Andrew Fellows. Anyway, he's got a there about Dana Meadows who's a systems scientist, who was a system scientist. And I think that what we forget, even people like me, foresters who do ecosystems restoration is that systems are very complex and we can't even, no matter how in depth we go, systems are basically cannot be fully replicated. We lose things when we destroy systems. And there's an intangibility about systems. And also there's exotic behavior of systems.
But the thing about systems is they're self organizing and they build resilience over time. And this is really critical for all life.
And so when we're busting up and killing all these systems and then we say, oh, we're going to plant some tree, it's really misunderstanding a lot of loss, A lot of loss.
[00:41:09] Dennis McKenna: As though, that made up for it, just planting trees. But this is what I mean. They have no sense of the systems dynamics of this whole thing. It's much more than trees. The trees are central to it. But everything that depends on the trees, the animals that live there, the fungi in the ground, the other plants that are associated with them, you know, and I mean, you and I are more accustomed to thinking about in these terms. Certainly you are knowing. We understand that ecosystems are complex and they can't be synthesized. You know, I mean, botanical gardens are a good example. But botanical gardens are wonderful.
I don't want to say anything bad about botanical gardens. They're attempts to bring a lot of species together and cultivate them, but in no way are they an ecosystem as you would find in nature. I mean, they have their virtues.
Botanical gardens and seed banks, it seems to me, go hand in hand and to a certain extent, herbaria.
The McKenna Academy has been working on a project to restore this herbarium in a ketos. And I've spent 50 years working with the curator of that herbarium. But in some ways, this seed project, I mean, I don't want to divert funding away from my herbarium project, but we're not getting much funding for it anyway. So I can say this, I think as an investment for people that want to see, you know, people of a philanthropic bent who want to see their investment really pay off in the future far beyond their lifetimes. The seed is a good bet. It's a good bet. And you know, I mean, there's nothing bad that can be said about it. And everything is good about it, you know, that's right.
[00:43:11] Jill Wagner: And it provides. That's one of the things that I'm trying to develop in my pitch. It provides real metrics. You know, you can, you can, if somebody supports the building of a seed bank, you know, you can provide them with annual numbers of species saved, numbers of food crops saved, numbers of native species. You know, the whole seed bank, how much has it saved, how many jobs has it created, how many women Led.
[00:43:39] Dennis McKenna: It's all quantifiable.
[00:43:41] Jill Wagner: That's right. And that's what I think will be attractive.
[00:43:45] Dennis McKenna: Where is my money going? You can answer those questions in great detail.
I think it's an amazing project.
And the good thing is you're not alone. There is a community of people worldwide that recognize this, but you're a pioneer, and certainly in Hawaii, you're a pioneer of this.
[00:44:08] Jill Wagner: I'm trying to, I'm trying to sort of use the Hawaii model to replicate and, and there are, you know, there's a great book by Martin Prechel called “The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic”.
And what he talks about is being in Central America, being in Guatemala in the 1970s, there was a massive earthquake. And this earthquake flattened this region and it killed a whole bunch of. A lot of people. And then people were trying to rebuild. And he survived. He was not in a building or whatever, and he survived. And what happened was after that, there became all this violence and sort of terror and lack of chaos and lack of leadership.
And the people who survived. The people who survived were the people with seeds.
Because if you have seeds, you have a way, food crop seeds grow quickly. You have a way to grow something and to have food to eat. And this had such an impact on me. I thought, you know, if in the worst case scenario, you, when you have seeds, that's your gold, that is your real security. And a lot of people are thinking about that today. They're growing their own food and all of that. And this just ups the game because you can store millions of seeds, you know, and so I really, really, I really think it's important.
[00:45:53] Dennis McKenna: Seeds are better than gold in terms of their actual value. I mean, you can trade gold, but you can't eat gold.
So seeds have a value.
The gentleman that gave the talk that impressed you so much at this conference, can you send us a link to that that we can post? Is it online somewhere?
[00:46:17] Jill Wagner: I´ll try to see if I can find that. He was brilliant. And everything he said was like, I wanted to capture. And absolutely, I'll try to find that because he is, he is. You know what he said? He said, I've been in five countries in five days. I've been talking to, to politicians, to kings, and now I'm here and I'm talking to you. And he, you know, scientists are not. They don't beat around the book. The media is very. Sometimes they're very dramatic, and sometimes they don't say the right thing or they. They water it down. Scientists are like, this is what's happening. Boom. It's very different.
So it's a real call to action. But I. You said one other thing that I wanted to say because I think it's important. You keep triggering thoughts, and me, thank you so much.
You talked about botanical gardens and seed banks, and I wanted to say that now the global strategy for Plant conservation has named To Ex-Situ Sources of biodiversity preservation, and that is botanical gardens and seed banks. So botanical gardens are starting to shift, shift and think about how they can support maybe by planting more natives and not being sort of a museum for any tropical thing. And like, the Joseph Rock Arboretum is really focusing on rare native Hawaiian plants and really working with the state and the Plant Extinction Prevention Program and my good colleagues that are trying to do this and trying to create a safe haven for these plants at this garden. So that's one thing, but seed banks are huge because they can. They can store a massive amount of seeds. So I was glad you said that, because that's actually the global strategy for plant conservation. Now they're listed, those two. So.
[00:48:29] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, I think. I think botanical gardens are there.
Their own understanding of their mission is changing in very good directions because like you say, they used to be museums for plants and people. They would send explorers all over the world and bring all these plants back. This was very much the Victorian model as basically bio piracy. I mean, you're stealing these plants from these environments and you're bringing them back to a place where, yes, they can be preserved and grown, but the focus should be on creating botanical gardens that are rich in local species.
This is happening more and more. I mean, it's interesting what's happening in this whole field of museum science. And I think that botanical gardens are really part of this. It used to be. And the perspective was, we're the top civilization, we're the dominant civilization. These are the treasures that we've plundered from different parts of the world and brought to our museums, our botanical gardens, our institutions. And then aren't we wonderful for doing that? Yes, in some ways it's good that somebody's doing that. But so then what. What do you do with that? It's better to have these institutions, as you say, like, like the institutions give them support these seed banks. If they work with this decentralized small installations like you're talking about, it will be much more effective. And instead of the people having to feel like, well, we have this botanical diversity, this biodiversity in these rich species.
But the biopirates came along and took all that. They never bothered even to say thanks very much.
And that's changing a little bit. And that's a good thing. If you think of, again, if you think of the 5 or 10 major food crops in the world that sustain the world's food supply, these were all indigenous cultivars at some point, right. And then they became global and they became like capitalist plants. But the origins of them was the knowledge of indigenous people. And that persists, you know, I mean when I look ahead at the, you know, the challenges that face our world and you know, we're, it seems hard to see how we're going to avert some very bad things. You know, most of it's going to happen after I'm long gone, probably after you're long gone, although you're much younger. But most of that's going to happen, you know, after. But if these local communities can understand the value of what they have and learn how to share this knowledge and share the seeds and share the resources, they're going to be doing all right. I mean, I think communities at the northern tip of Vancouver island, they won't even notice much when the apocalypse comes because they'll just be in their communities and doing what they can, growing, growing what they can. And you know, they don't depend on the Internet and these kinds of things like the rest of us do. We've become much too addicted to our technology and more estranged from the natural world and it's the natural world that sustains us. And that's what is so beautiful about what the work that you're doing.
[00:52:34] Jill Wagner: Oh, thank you. I totally agree with you. I, we're so in alignment and I really think that we need to build our own self sufficiency and good health for the mother, for the earth and for all the children.
So definitely we have to keep pushing this and see as far as we can go to do something that's life affirming. I want to say yes to the future and I want to do something that's life affirming.
[00:53:13] Dennis McKenna: Well, better than the alternative, you know, but I mean it's possible to. I think there are solutions, but we have to, you know, as I've been saying for a long time, we have to wise up. You know, we have to get wise about the choices that we make and that requires thoughtfulness. We have to wake up and we have to wise up. And if we wise up, then we can begin to make intelligent choices.
But we can spend another two hours complaining about political systems and governmental systems and you know, basically run by idiots who don't really have any understanding of the, you know, the complexities of what they're trying to deal with. So the answers tend to be very shallow. You know, like this idea about the carbon sequestration technologies. You know, trees have learned how to do this long before we were on this, on this planet. And so we need to listen to the trees, listen to the forest.
[00:54:24] Jill Wagner: Dennis, I wanted to say again, you reminded me of another thing that at that conference that several very high, high level people said and they said that the current political systems are not capable of serving planetary governance.
You cannot have foreign four year cycles and destroy anything that is put in place and have terror of the planet. And, and these, a lot of these scientists have said this from early, you know, when we realized that we were in trouble in the 70s and they threw out ecocide from the Rome Statute, they developed that and all the countries that joined that, you know, that, that international law, crimes against women, crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity. And they threw out ecocide, crimes against nature. And you can be a corporation or an individual and you can harm the planet and know it and do it anyway, that should be absolutely against the law anywhere in the world. And, and that's what these, you know, a lot of people are trying to shift that because we're destroying ourselves. And so thank you for bringing that up too because that's the way we can, that I can sort of relate to the political systems. They're not, they cannot function properly to, to really serve planetary governance and the long term care of all life.
[00:56:13] Dennis McKenna: So now this is one of the big challenges. None of the governmental regulatory approaches really work.
And yeah, we have to have people that are enlightened enough to realize that and change things. And there's a certain, I think, fetishism about technology.
I like technology, we all like technology. But all this idea that, well, it's okay, we can despoil the earth, we can ravage the Earth, we're all going to escape to Mars or something.
Not going to happen, nor should it happen and it won't happen. But so much effort is directed toward this idea. I mean, somebody like Elon Musk I think is so at the end of the day destructive of the world. We can get off on that as well. But he's a visionary, but his vision is wrong, and he completely misunderstands. We need people more like you and people like Tom Lovejoy and this person that addressed the conference. We need people that really have that perspective. So maybe there's hope.
I mean, it's a slow process, but it can make a difference over time. And maybe the shift is happening. Do you get the feeling that it is? I mean, you think 20 years from now, you'll be able to look back and say, yeah, we did a good job.
[00:57:50] Jill Wagner: I don't know about that. I feel like we're on a sort of. We think we're in control, but we're not. So. So that's the problem with the systems, disrupting systems.
But I do think that there are things that we can do that will really help future generations to not suffer as much and to have a livable planet. This is so precious, and it's precious because of all of the biodiversity. And we need to really. That's number one. And so, you know, please, anybody out there, let's help. Let's help everybody and. And try to care for our. For our mother. So we can look back in 20 years and say that we've done. We've done the best we can. We've set something very good up. So let's do that.
[00:58:58] Dennis McKenna: These plants, especially, I think the psychedelic plants, are catalysts for these kinds of realizations. I mean, the central message that I get from Ayahuasca pretty much every time is you monkeys only think you're running the show.
That's the central message. We are monkeys, and we're not running the show. And we have to get humble and we have to work. Learned how to listen to nature and work with nature. And so the people like you that are doing this, I mean, you should just have a little halo over your head, although.
Because I know you're a humble person, and that's part of it, too, is to always remember our limitations in terms of what we think we know. Arrogance has no place in this endeavor. So learning, listening, appreciating other people and other species, that's the way to go. Well, we're just over an hour. Anything we didn't say that we should have.
[01:00:09] Jill Wagner: Well, I'm so grateful, Dennis, for giving me this opportunity and to talk to you. And you and I always have excellent conversations. And so it gave us a chance to do that. And to share it. And I'm so glad. And I think we covered a lot of things. I was worried we wouldn't have enough time, but I think we covered a lot of things.
And hopefully we can talk again at some point.
[01:00:38] Dennis McKenna: Absolutely. You can come back next year or whenever it seems appropriate and tell us about your project and what's happened, because it's a great thing. And I think you're going to have a lot of success. And, you know, to the extent that getting this podcast out there will help, we're going to spread this far and wide.
[01:01:02] Jill Wagner: Thank you for having me.
[Donation] Dennis McKenna: Join our mission to harmonize with the natural world. Support the Makena Academy by donating today.
[Outro] Dennis McKenna: Thank you for listening to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna. Find us online at McKenna Academy.
