the eastern beat

Ania: How did Aurora Klimakert (Aurora Climate Garden) come to life?

Mark: Personally,  the idea came out of my climate anxiety,  or just a general anxiety about the state of the world. The climate is what I'm interested in, but that's blocked by the absolute insanity of politics now and the enormity of the problem - this is a global problem and there is no global government. So now all of these little tiny governments with all their personal problems that they could keep in their countries, they all now have to come out of them and share them with everyone and try to work them all out together. It's a great thing to do, but it's huge. 

I was posting stuff on the net, I was saying, “read this and that, do this, try this, it's gonna work - it was just spitting in the ocean in a way. I was feeling really bad. I thought I had to do something physical, I had to get out from behind the computer at least a couple times a week for a couple hours and get back into nature. I started doing some community gardening and it wasn't working. Everyone was telling me stop that nature stuff, or just keep it away from their plot, nobody wanted to hear about it. I mean they thought it was great but 'I'm not going to do that in my lot.'. 

So when they asked me to compost, I came here to Aurora and we tried the gardening thing without plots. But nobody came. I said: 'look we all realize that if you don't give people that plot of land then those people won't come. They want to grow food and feel a bit connected to Nature, and be able to eat food that they’ve grown, and that's beautiful and a very important thing, but it's a huge luxury in the time of climate crisis. I think that idea would better serve everyone if it was put into every single school. Then all of the real hard stuff could be worked on by the grown-ups. I know some schools that are focusing on that a lot more - I know of a very cool project where the kids have built a permaculture garden with a friend of mine who designed it. He taught the teachers and now the teachers are teaching the kids. The kids have created jams from all the food they are producing, they sell the jams to their parents and then the parents pay for the next generations of kids, so it's a circular economy and the kids love it, it's a really amazing urban project. 

And the urban thing is very important for me, as I found out when I tried to move out to the countryside. I thought about it, looked into it and it was not a prospect that sounded good to me. I mean it would be a great place to visit, but all my friends were here, and I work on a computer - I'm a translator, a teacher, I do film work - you need connections for that, you need to be in the city. So then I took a permaculture design course and almost everyone in the course was saying: 'oh, when I finish this course I'm gonna move out to the countryside' or 'I have this house where me and my wife are gonna go out and have kids and raise them' - everyone is moving away from the city, retiring to the countryside. I want to retire in a city that I can live in, who's gonna help me with this? 

And even the focus of the permaculture course was around a family, primarily about a family home, people who want to raise their own food, at least some of it, create their own environment. I thought 'what if i want to share that, what if I want to make a public space?'. There's this permaculture thing called zone 1, which is the place where you put out all of the stuff that the family needs, usually the herb garden so you can walk out and get herbs right next to the kitchen. In a community garden where cooking isn't important, what's the zone 1 then? In a community garden where there's three different communities using it for three different purposes, what's the zone 1, how does that work into the design? I realised if we figure it out, if we work on it here, this will be a very important part of my permaculture journey. And then I started to become aware of lots of other things, of the importance of the waste cycle, how there are so many materials to use in a city that are usually just shipped out and burnt. The feeling of standing next to such a huge amount of futility - that's the prettiest word I can use - just watching trucks of stuff go off to be burnt, when it could be turned into soil… that really stopped me and I felt I really needed to do something. So I started working on the compost. Our compost is very fast and efficient for a city, uses very little city real estate and produces ten to fifteen cubic meters a year of compost. We have this group here at Aurora, FoodNotBombs, that gives us food waste every week and the local people who bring their own waste to compost here. We mix it with leaves and cardboard we collect. It’s enough to finish almost a cubic meter of compost every 6 weeks.  We also have one person who wanted to do something for the garden but didn't want to garden, so I said ‘well, we need someone to bring us the coffee from this restaurant', so she goes over there and gets their grounds every week and brings them here.

I’ve always felt comfortable as a bit of an outsider. We moved from Chicago, from the Midwest, from a big city to the countryside at when I was five. So my home life was different than everyone else's in a way. My parents had different views about some things than the people in the countryside, but then I grew up in that, and with all my friends and everything. It just seemed normal. But when I got to the city, I was like, whoa, this is really cool. But I still feel like I'm a country guy, you know? It's all mixed up somehow. I used to think of going home to the States and trying to find work, buying a car, getting an apartment. All of those things, that I would do in English, were more difficult here, but were so much more interesting, all the time. Back home they would be dead boring, because you already know what's gonna happen. Even in the countryside, there are chain stores, and you know what they're gonna say, and they know what you're gonna say. And you don't even feel most of your day. Here, you go to a market and you gotta ask an old lady at a market something in a foreign language -it’s exciting. So sort of every day is a kind of exciting, it’s a bit voyeuristic, you know?

Ania: You're always out of your comfort zone here. Sometimes it can be overwhelming, but it's mostly really exciting. 

Mark: I think so. Always an adventure. I came here because I wanted to extend my vacation, because I had extra money that I didn't spend, US dollars, and the forint was so cheap in 1990. I was like, I can stay extend my vacation for another month or three months! I got a job and I could stay for six months. Then for a year, two years, you know. There was a weird time when I felt like somebody's gonna realize fun’s over, or tell me I have to leave. Somebody's gonna find out and then I'm gonna have to go back, and get a real life like my mom and dad wanted me to, you know? I was searching here for a long time. I got a lot of experience, and did a lot of different things here. I found out that I was a pretty good autodidact. I can start doing something and stick to it till I get it, and that was miraculous - it’s just work! When I wanted to make a film I bought a camera and I was like, let's make a film. Well, I don't know how to make a film. Well, let's just do it and then we'll learn. And we did it. And I made a little film and it was amazing, it was magic. You just do something and then you become that thing. Like you just make a film and then you're a filmmaker. And I did the same thing with Flash programming. I had never thought of computer programming. I didn't consider myself to be a ‘programmer type’, but when a friend showed me what programming was, I was like, oh, I could do that. And I did that for a while, and it was amazing. 

Now I do subtitles for movies, which is wonderful work as well. I also always liked teaching in a way because in tutoring one-on-one you focus on one person, try to figure out who they are, what they like, then if you find something they like, you connect. You connect with them, they connect with the language and they feel great. A lot of my students have learned from books or from school or something. They have a good base, but they don't feel it's active, they don't feel that they can speak. They sit down with me and feel like they’re in a ‘real’ live, english environment.

Ania: How about gardening, did you learn it by yourself?

Mark: Gardening was totally random. I mean, I grew up in the woods. I was a boy scout. I had environmental science merit badge, I knew a little bit about ecosystems, but seaside ecosystems. Corn and soybean farming was all around me, but just not interesting at all to me. I hardly noticed it.

A friend in town called me and he said: you won a garden plot in a community garden. He’d put our names in a raffle. And he thought that if he won, then I'll be his partner. If I win, he'll be my partner. And then we both won. So we started in one of these community gardens 10 years ago now, I guess, or more, right down the street at the Leonardo Kert behind Corvin, but that disappeared. Then I moved to the seventh district to the Kisdiofa garden. And then I ran into that wall that I was telling you about, people not wanting to pursue the climate stuff that I was finding out about and the bugs and the whole natural regenerative agriculture thing, not using chemicals. Very often people said: 'we're not using any chemicals on our food, but we have this Neem oil spray which is totally natural'. And I was like 'well, don't put it on my plot'. 'But it'll get rid of the bugs, you know?' But it'll also get rid of everything, it will totally disturb the whole system. It was a really important point for me when I realized the act of trying to produce food, using nature to make food, is very different, maybe the exact opposite of helping nature and getting food from it. That is, being a custodian of nature, and then nature paying you in food is different than being somebody who says, 'I'm gonna get nature to give me more tomatoes. I'm gonna do this and that. I'm gonna put this on and add all this stuff'. So for me, permaculture was amazing in that there was actually a way to grab on to all the details that I'd been learning and put them into concepts so that I could use them, instead of just randomly knowing a trick and using it, like 'I have tomatoes, so I will plant basil next to the tomatoes. That's good. Why? I don't know, everybody does it. It's proven knowledge, you know?'

I like the permaculture structure framework and the ethics about it as well. The fact that it starts with the Earth first. That's one of the craziest, most difficult things to believe that we are in this concrete jungle, and this was a forest 200 years ago and it can be a forest again. It's just waiting under the asphalt and concrete, you know, it just needs you to let the rain in and the sun in and it will turn into a forest again. Most people don't believe that, they're like, 'oh, no, no, we killed all that nature stuff here, this is all safe from nature'. Lots of disagreements, conflicts that we have here [in the garden] with neighbors or with people is very much based on the fear that nature is going to destroy us. That the bamboo is going to take over the whole garden. 'That it's an invasive plant, you should kill it, cut it out, you'll never get it out'.  But, Will I never get it out? Or should I kill it? You know, which one is it? It has been fine for the last seven years.

I tend to get deep into details and I don't see the bigger picture and I like that. I also tend to be too cerebral for my own taste. Thinking, thinking, thinking. With this garden thing, I learned a different kind of seeing. You see over time where things go, which you don't get usually when you have a problem in real life which has a linear structure to it. But with this [garden], it's 3D and it's longer. I started doing things naturally thatI didn't know, I didn't hear about, I didn't learn about them. I just accidentally caught myself doing them. I find that with the volunteers here, especially in the beginning when it was young and very sensitive, the volunteers didn't observe enough. So they wanted someone to just tell them what to do and be a part of it. They didn't want to be, they wanted to be a participant, but they didn't want to be a part of the garden in a way that you need to, if you want to work on it with this regenerative method, you have to know everything. You have to just memorize all the types of trees, what they've been doing in the last six months. And you just walk around, you just look and you figure out the names of stuff and look at the soil, and then, once you've got all the points, they all connect somehow after a while. And then you know what you have to do. You know it. But many people come volunteer for a week or two weeks and they feel they are not getting that deep knowledge that they want. They want the secrets and then they are going to be able to use them. Or they feel like they could mess something up, which is kind of funny because nature has fixes for everything, you know?

I've been thinking about one thing recently, my parents were Polish Catholics from the states and we went to church every week and I could not understand why we would go to church to hear the same thing over and over again, I kind of understood it, but I didn't feel the need to do it when I was young. Then my daughter was born and I somehow felt bad that I didn't force her to do that, in a way. Because by going through that you see something, you learn something different. By being somewhere every week and committing yourself every week to something, something builds in you, and you understand the world, and time differently. And I started to think when I dedicated 2 days in a week to the garden that this is a lot like going to church, it's kind of a faith thing in a way for me, because I do believe that this system is the be-all and end-all, it is LIFE and it is really important and I don't know how it's going to end, but I feel like a preacher when I'm talking sometimes. There's something here and I need people to see it, it's just amazing how easy it is to do it, if you just make the first step and say “every Tuesday I'm coming”. I mean I haven't been here every single Tuesday because sometimes I'm out of the country, or I'm on holiday, but I do come on holidays and weird times when nobody else is here.

This is in no way the pristine garden in any kind of sense, this is not nature. I keep telling people that yea, we could close the door and nature would take over, and it would make a really beautiful garden with trees and everything. But it would take fifty years to do what we did in five. Meanwhile, we forced everything. We optimised everything. You can't really maximize nature without breaking something. But we optimise it, and we're using nature to fix a parking lot. So this is a parking lot with trees sticking out. It's not like a nature preserve or anything and we don't pretend that it is, but nature is here. And you can see how nature is reacting to the city, and how quickly in five years it can become a stable forest system. A biodiverse forest, food-bearing forest and biodiversity hub, with many kinds of bugs and bees and birds. There are only a few birds, but many insects and stuff are here, which is just astounding. 

Ania: When it comes to maintenance of the garden, you were mentioning that you don't use the city water to water plants and you just depend on rain.

Mark: The rainwater that we collected ran out at the end of June. We got a little rain two weeks ago, enough for a half of a watering on like about 10 of the most sensitive trees. Now last week we tried to collect gray water, we asked  FoodNotBombs to collect their water that doesn't have soap in it, like when they wash the vegetables, just rinse off their hands or drink from the hose, we can use all of that spillage. Now they gave us a half of a trashbin, so half of a watering. And again, we put that on the trees that are suffering the most and we just hope. As you can see, the canopy is looking good. It's not really yellowing or browning. We haven't lost any big trees to the heat and stuff. So that's holding. And we have this microclimate underneath, which is great, but the soil has dried to a depth that has killed most of the shallow-rooted plants… which is no problem for us, because we didn't even plant many of those. Those were the Jerusalem artichokes, they have a rhizome root, so they don't go down like a sunflower. They go sideways and stabilize themselves with these shallow root systems. But it's been bone dry now below where they are, for more than, I don't know how far down there, but it's been really dry down deep, so most of them browned out. We have a few left and we're looking at where they're surviving. 'cause that means the soil is staying good, you know. But there are many places like around the apple tree where they're hardly alive. And that's okay, too, because this has been Hungary's hottest summer ever, and that means after five years, we created a forest area that stays alive without anything but rainwater for the whole year, even through terrible heat waves. 

In springtime, we counted 180 trees, baby trees and tall trees. But now I know of at least five or six trees that are gone, the small ones that are under the canopies. The big ones are fine, but the small ones are suffering really badly. They don't get very much sunlight and their roots weren't deep enough, so they're not gonna make it. That's okay, because 180 trees for a hundred square meters of ground is too many trees, they’re not all going to make it. Obviously, that also is part of the learning process and that's wonderful. When we started this, the thought of cutting a tree scared me to death, why would I wanna cut a tree? It's so beautiful. Let it grow. Everything's gonna be great, just let it grow more and more. And just having to do it a couple of times helped me understand what actually is going on. We had grass growing for a while on that little hill. When we were cutting back grass, and we did it by hand, I used to think 'well, if I was a cow, how would I do this? Probably grab these parts up here, and just cut off the tops that were green'. And then the same thing with the trees. If I was a deer, I would probably eat these branches. They're easy to get to. And I'm sure the trees have enough energy in them to live through a deer browsing or a windstorm or something, you know, there's a level of minimal disturbance, with the soil as well, which is healthy for the system. If the ground gets hard on the top, it's okay to break that surface up a little bit to let the rain get in there, and try to not break up root and soil system.

When you start with gardening you really feel every plant has a personality and you want them to be the best you know, and the biggest and the broadest. And you want them to figure it all out. But in a way, they're more like organs in a body. If we see that some of these trees will die soon, we can cut them back earlier, put them on the ground faster than nature would naturally drop them, to feed the soil. If we have a big tree that dies, we had one maple that died, we can leave it up and it can help support the other trees around it in a windstorm. And also, if any of the bugs or anything need a place to overwinter, that tree helps. And the mushroom population, the fungus can go up it and grow out of it, so we might get different mushrooms that we wouldn't have gotten, if we had cut that all down and threw it away. We want to imitate natural processes, but also give ourselves space here in the garden for people. When the black locust tree throws out a spiny branch into wherever kids are going to walk, we have to cut that back. Or if the rose will fall over into the path, we have to trim it. We know how to do it so that it is better for the plant, better for the soil, better for us. That's what you get to practice, if you come and start doing it.

I had this theory when, I think it was in college, when I was reading about fractals, chaos theory and all of that. And I was thinking about that idea that, thousands of dots on a page. And when one dot is out of place, you see that one dot right away, you know? And I was thinking, what happens if you can't see anything, if you look at a big mass of green and you can't see it, and you can't look at anything 'cause there's too many details. You just sort of feel the shapes and the system there, but you're not seeing it. I bet that people have evolved to find comfort in that feeling. I bet someday they're gonna figure out that it has a lot to do with why forests can be good for depression. It's just when you have to look at green areas and you just can't see the details cause there's so many, it's like a rhythm.

Ania: I read something recently that in some countries, I don't remember where exactly, it's becoming more and more of a thing that if somebody is suffering from depression or anxiety, they actually get a prescription from the doctor to go to a forest.

Mark: I know that, in Japan, it's amazing. 

Ania: When it comes to the volunteers, who are the people who help in the garden? 

Mark: We call ourselves the ‘Klimamag’, mag means seed or core in Hungarian. My girlfriend Reka is part of that, also Dori who was a volunteer in the Aurora house and came over to the garden. And then Zoli, who heads Aurora, has taken a really strong interest in promoting the garden this year, which is fabulous. And now the garden is a ‘thing’. Because when all the trees were one meter tall, people were weren't so impressed. But it's pretty impressive now, especially in springtime. In springtime, it's shocking. So, we have those people, and then we have regulars who come when they have a free weekend, or come every week for two weeks, and then they disappear, and they come back a month later. We have students, German students for example, who want to do something while they’re studying here. They want to take the stress off from exams and all that stuff. They come here and work all through the spring, then exam season comes and they disappear. Then they come back for a couple of weeks and then festival season comes and they disappear. There are a lot of people like that who come for a while, get something out of it and then they move along. We've had people bring their parents back from Germany, telling us they came back to visit Budapest and had to bring their parents down to see the garden. It's super sweet, and really amazing, how people really feel connected to it. Sometimes people move, sometimes people say 'finally I got a real garden out in the countryside and I'm out of here, out of this city'. That's part of it, that's a wonderful thing too. Also, what's great for me, personally, is that this is a place for me to meet people, new people, interesting people and I don't have to drink a lot to meet them. When I was in my twenties, thirties and forties, it was fine to be drinking all the time and going out all night long and finding that corner with that one person where you get the deep conversation. But I don't do that as much anymore. I really missed that during Covid. This place was amazing for me because I had permission to come, open the gate and people could bring compost even in the lockdown. And even standing far away from them, at least just talking to somebody was really comforting and stabilizing in that weird period. Those are all really great things that I get out of the garden for free. If I just come. Sometimes it's hot and terrible, sometimes it's freezing cold and dark and nobody comes and I'm all by myself, but sometimes there's like 20 people here, families with three kids digging the pond, and other people over at the compost, or shredding cardboard for us and all kinds of other people sifting, compostting and asking questions. And I'm giving tours to six different people at once. It is really mixed and that's that's wonderful, it's meaningful. One of the advantages of our garden volunteer group is there aren't any rules. If you find something you want to do, or you read about something you want to try or you are interested in something, we'll talk about it or we'll help you do it or we'll get everyone together and we'll try it. It's really dependent on people being self-starters.

For example someone might be here for a little while and say 'I really want to figure out how seed collecting works, and then I'm going to organize the seed collecting thing coz this doesn't look right. We can put labels on things and do it the right way’. You know, and they, everyone adds a little bit of something to it. It grows really organically, which is for me is much better than being in a group where you have to be here every Tuesday night and you have to vote on three things. For me it's nicer because I like the flexibility of it. Also, I’m kinda anti-authoritarian, so I don't really take orders very well. I'd rather work on a horizontal level where you get an idea, this is what I think of it. Does that help? This is what they think of it. Does that help? How do we work together and figure out a cool solution that everybody likes? I like that kind of thing. I'm not a group leader guy. Probably why I don't teach in schools. I really like to focus on individuals more than groups. I don't teach in schools anymore. I tried that for a while, but I, I didn't feel like it was my thing. But now I am giving speeches and stuff, which is new. 

Ania: Is there an plan to extend the garden's idea in the city or around the country?

Mark: Now we're trying to figure out a way to make this exportable, expandable, scale up or scale down. Lots of people are asking us about it. There's also lots of grants competitions and stuff, and the EU grants and stuff we found out about. We're making a movie about it to figure out if we can do another movie about composting that's different than all the other movies about composting that might help people understand it differently. And then also we're going to do another short film about what the climate garden is. It's getting good. And on top of that, I'm also being asked to do projects, to consult on projects, small little house projects. There are people here from the eighth district who asked me to be their compost master at a public park. So something's moving. There's a big garden project happening in Obuda up at the Kiscelli Museum, which is really wonderful. And these people asked specifically that they don't want to do a community garden with annual plants and plots. They want to do a food forest design. So we're going to spend this winter looking at how they can design something, and I'm going to pitch a bunch of ideas and see how to build it. We're going work up a design and in the springtime start doing it. That's really great, you know, that's that for me. I mean I'm 59 and I would like to be outside working on climate issues in my retirement age here. I mean, I'd like to be able to live from that somehow, make this knowledge not just free here for anybody who comes in, but also go places and help people work out problems. It's starting to happen on a small scale for me, but I'd like to do it regularly and on a bigger scale. 

Ania: Do you think that more people are realizing that, that it's not so great what's happening with the planet?

Mark: Yes, I am sure that more people are realizing it. I think there are less and less skeptics. I think there are less and less cynical people. I know for a fact that there's much more interest in permaculture and that kind of thing from a wide variety of people. Which was surprising to me that they're not all like young urban hippie types, but actually like farmers or older women who are retiring, or professors who want to make food in their garden, people who just want to do stuff. I think that, not only has the interest in permaculture been building, but the interest in doing something for the climate has been building. And I don't think there are a lot of really good answers out there. It's so complex and there's a big learning curve in the beginning for those people with traditional ways of starting things. Lots of people say 'I don't have time to get a degree in this'. But this is sort of something that humans have always done. It's not really about getting a degree. It's about getting into it deep enough that you can start small, and you will learn very quickly because it's so easy if you pay attention. 

Ania: And I guess also people are starting to feel that the anxiety that you were mentioning as well before, that they feel climate change getting really serious and it's progressing really fast. But people are asking 'what can I do'? We have been made to think that if you recycle, you're great.

Mark: Yea, don’t use plastic bags. It'll all be good. 

Ania: Whatever happens to your nicely segregated trash?

Mark: That was a big question here in Hungary this year, because in January we started recycling food waste. Except not all the districts had a program for it, so it never happened. And MOL sat down to try to figure something out. And it looks like they don't have any idea of what they're going to do or what they thought they were gonna do is not working out. I'm not sure what the details are. I know that New York City tried to do something or the state of New York, some, someone in New York tried to do what MOL is doing. They did it for three years and then they had to shut it down pretty much because, well, they didn't want to give it any more money, And the other problem was that what they produced afterwards, they produced a lot of natural gas to be burnt, but the sludge that they produced was poisonous for the soils. So they can't get the poisons out of the compost. 

Compost is full of natural things that are pollution to us. And chemical companies keep creating these things that are less and less compostable. And although our compost [in Aurora] is very, very powerful in breaking a lot of this down, there are specific things that are very bad for our compost, and for nature as well. And you have a city, an urban area, where people put anything in, where you don't really have control of what's going in. Then everything that they use has to be pretty much safe. And that's not the case in this city. That's not the case in Europe even, unfortunately. Although they're much better than the States. There are these PFOAs and every time the government bans one of them because it's so terrible,  the chemical company comes out with a new version that's pretty much exactly the same, but it's not banned.

Then they have to go through the whole testing process, five years of testing and, and then the courts, and then, you hear, 10 years later, oh no, this one's banned, too. But to put it out on the market before they test it or, you know, do any real testing - no problem. Yeah. And, that kind of thing ruins little local situations like this, where, you know, people bring us those clear plastic corn syrup, corn sugar, beer cups, and things, and all the Starbucks stuff, you know, it says this is compostable plastic stuff’.  And it IS compostable …in a massive plant in Germany, but they don't have any plants like that in Hungary. But they can sell it here. Why is it in the city if you can't get rid of it? 

You know those simple questions are big, they’re political. But the cool thing is, at least it seems to me like there is a trend where people in cities are now saying, no, we're not allowing any plastic bottles in our city, or any of this kind of thing in our city. And it's pretty much been like this forever - that companies do terrible things until somebody tells them - no, you can't. And then they go, what? Oh, okay. We won't, we'll do it a different way. But if you don't tell them,  if there's no political will to stop them, then they'll just keep doing it. I remember reading about the Cuyahoga River when it started on fire in 1969 just before the Clean Air and Water Act in America. The EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) was invented and created in America. The whole river in Ohio started on fire just from the pollution that the companies had been dumping in. And then the government said: look, this is terrible, you have to stop doing that. And they were like, oh, okay. And that was it, they stopped. The EPA was created. It's just like somebody needs to put it in law.

Now, especially in America with all this money in politics, there's just no way that you can just get stuff passed that makes sense. Without a catastrophe. I think that's my ultimate take on this whole climate thing. I was really scared, really depressed, really angry, I went through all these phases. And I got to the point that I thought this is on a razor's edge. We are very likely now going into the most terrible decade of human history. And there's a chance that people will either get together… or they will become horrible to each other. If we can start doing things, building things like, that give people enough hope that they can trust that something can be done, you know, that actually there are solutions that are just waiting there for somebody to put them into use, then maybe people won't get scared and start buying guns. You know, people coming in to the gardens saying “Give us all your food and give us all your wood.” We can say to them, look, if you want trees, here's all the seeds. We've got baby trees. Take them home, plant them. Then you'll have wood for years. And food and all this other stuff, you know, and maybe that will save us, but otherwise it's just gonna be a nightmare. It's gonna be a real nightmare. And especially with climate migration.

Ania: People don't see the link, right? They tend to see migration as somebody's coming here to take our stuff, but why are they leaving their own space in the first place? 

Mark: Yeah. And they couldn't comprehend it. That's the really big thing. It’s that most people don't have a sort of the global understanding that you need to be able to see through that stuff. They're like, I have a job and this guy's going to take my job. People don't have the time, energy or interest in getting a bigger picture.

And then, very much like in an ecosystem, the thing about the power in this [Climate Garden] idea is that we get the natural system running forward. We're optimising the natural system and pushing it until it gets to a point where there's so much energy in the system that it moves forward, in a stable feedback loop again.

But like all natural systems you can lose that, you could damage it enough. We could take out the wrong trees or something and then everything starts going backwards again. And I think that that's how civilization works as well. There's a point where we can put energy in and get it to move forward and we get all these great rewards. Or, some chaotic thing could happen, wars and stuff like that, and we can lose the energy that we need to keep everything going forward. And then schools are in terrible shape so that people can't understand what to do when they grow up. Then they, and then their governments are corrupted, and then that means that they don't have healthcare. And that means that all of the effects of the climate stuff are all 10 times worse. And it's a snowball effect forward and backwards. 

We basically are lucky here that we're still rolling forward a bit and that gives me personal hope to keep working on it. But I have zero plans for the future. I can't think of what's gonna happen in six months, no idea. And especially until this US election is over. So when that's over, then at least we'll know where we are. I mean, if we're still fighting or if it's going to be really bad and real chaos, or just bad, just normal bad.