Derek Mitchell:
The problem is we can’t conserve our way into a healthy planet anymore. We have to regenerate the natural world.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Derek Mitchell, the CEO of Partners in School Innovation. But it’s not actually a clip from this episode. That clip you just heard comes from Stacey Caillier’s interview with Derek on this podcast in January. That episode is about school improvement and it’s great, you should listen to it. But right at the end, Stacey asked Derek if he has any final thoughts and he takes the conversation in a very different direction. That’s when he says those words you just heard. “The problem is we can’t conserve our way into a healthy planet anymore. We have to regenerate the natural world.” I’m a little bit obsessed with regeneration as a concept. So the moment I heard this, I knew we needed to do an episode about it. So I asked Derek who he’d most want to talk with about taking a regenerative approach to education, and he told me it had to be Scott Sampson who leads the California Academy of Sciences. So what you’re about to hear is my conversation with Derek and Scott about what we must do as educators to help us all survive as a species.
This is a bit of a weird thing to say, but I had so much fun talking with both of them about this and I’m delighted to be able to share a conversation with you. And one last note before we get into it. Late in the interview, I said the words, “I’m a school leader”. I want to be very clear upfront. I said those words in order to offer up a hypothetical in the sense of imagine for a moment that I’m a school leader. I’m definitely not a school leader. Now that’s clear, here’s my conversation with Derek Mitchell and Scott Sampson. It starts with Scott introducing himself.

Scott Sampson:
My name’s Scott Sampson, I serve as Executive Director at the California Academy of Sciences. I married to a wonderful woman named Tony, and I have two kids. I am a dinosaur paleontologist by training and did that for a number of years before leaving academia. And stepping into the world of leadership. And I currently lead the California Academy of Sciences, which is an amazing place with a museum, a planetarium, an aquarium, 46 million objects with a whole bunch of scientists working on them. It’s a unique place in the world, and we are moving that organization towards regenerating the natural world. There’s that word, regeneration. And that’s what I pretty much devote my professional life to.

Alec Patton:
Being a dinosaur paleontologist, does that mean you went on digs?

Scott Sampson:
All over the world. I led digs in places like Madagascar in South Africa and Mexico and Utah, Alberta, various places. I’ve been involved in naming about 16 different dinosaurs. It was the real deal, put it that way. Kind of like Ross from friends, I guess.

Alec Patton:
What was your best dinosaur name?

Scott Sampson:
Masiakasaurus knopfleri. Which translates to the vicious lizard of Knopfler named after Mark Knopfler, the lead singer of Dire Straits whose music we listened to while in the field. When the paper was published in the journal Nature, I was accused of naming it after Knopfler, either because A, he’s a rock dinosaur or B, he is ugly and buck toothed, a little bit like this dinosaur. Fortunately, Knopfler took it in the spirit and intended and was very happy to receive the honor.

Alec Patton:
That’s awesome. What was the most exciting find?

Scott Sampson:
The most exciting discovery I made was a different dinosaur in Madagascar called Majungasaurus, and we’d known that a big predator lived there because we’d found its teeth. Dinosaurs were like sharks, they lost their teeth throughout their lives. So we found plenty of teeth but no bones. And I happened to be fortunate enough to find the skull. It had all fallen apart but fit back together just like a kid’s kit, and it’s one of the most complete and undistorted dinosaur skulls around and it’s on exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Alec Patton:
All right, thank you so much. And Derek.

Derek Mitchell:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
I’m not going to ask you about your dinosaur finds. If you do have any, I’d be curious to know. I’m not going to ask you about torturing cockroaches. Anyone who wants to know about that can listen to another episode. We’ll have the links in the show notes.

Scott Sampson:
I want to hear about torturing cockroaches.

Alec Patton:
Listen to the episode, Scott.

Scott Sampson:
Okay, I’ll check it out.

Alec Patton:
Derek, who are you? What should listeners know about you?

Derek Mitchell:
I’m Dr. Derek Mitchell, the CEO of a nonprofit called Partners in School Innovation, headquartered here in the Bay, but working all over the country. Our work is focused on renewing the promise of public education by building the capacity of teachers and leaders serving the most challenged schools to get brilliant results for kids regardless of background. I guess the thing that’s most relevant for this conversation that readers should know is I have been recently incredibly inspired by the work of Scott, and that incredible facility that the California Academy of Sciences, to start thinking more about the role education needs to play in and essentially jump-starting a movement toward regeneration. And I know we’re going to get into it in more detail today, but the academy is just an extraordinarily powerful place that’s learning some key lessons and shifting its work from being just about a place to being about a mission that I think is really important for the world to hear about and be able to play in and support.

Alec Patton:
Are there any dinosaur relevant to your life?

Derek Mitchell:
The only dinosaur story I have is actually also at the Field Museum in Chicago. As a middle schooler, I would cut school for weeks at a time and spend time either in the Field museum or the Adler Planetarium, which is two facilities right near each other in Chicago. And I was fascinated by the dinosaur work there, but I loved more the Zeiss projector that was at the Adler Planetarium at the time. I thought I wanted to be an astronaut, and so I would sit for hours and just amazed by the displays that were presented at the planetarium. Until of course the guards found me that I was cutting school and called my mom and all of that adventure stopped.

Alec Patton:
You can tell the really cool kids in any high school are the ones who are cutting school to go to the planetarium.

Derek Mitchell:
Well this was middle school though.

Alec Patton:
Middle school?

Derek Mitchell:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
Wow, that’s really young to be cutting school and going across the city.

Derek Mitchell:
Yeah, well Chicago was really easy to get around. With the L train, you can just hop the L and be pretty much anywhere in the city in 20, 25 minutes. So once I discovered it was there, I couldn’t resist.

Alec Patton:
All right, we are talking because my colleague Stacey Caillier interviewed Derek in January. And Derek, you really threw her a curveball right at the end of the interview. And I want to hear more about it. You said this thing to Stacey, “We can’t conserve our way into a healthy planet anymore.” What did you mean by that?

Derek Mitchell:
I mean that the work we’ve done up till now to convince the world to do a better job of stewarding our resources. As powerful and as effective as it has been in the last 30, 40 years or so, it came way too late. We’re currently experiencing the impacts of climate change. I mean literally paradise is burning one week and flooding the next. I mean it’s absolutely biblical. But I think it’s the world’s way of saying to us we need something more powerful, more dramatic and more effective to happen sooner. And to me, the work of conservation by its nature is really about a holding back. And I think what we want to do is leap forward. And that’s why the work of Scott and the team at the Cal Academy is so exciting to me, because they’re producing science and learnings that are focused on supporting nature in the effort to heal herself. Right?

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Derek Mitchell:
And so that’s really the thing. And for me, being someone steeped in our schools, I feel pretty powerfully that this mission of regenerating a natural world is a responsibility like many others that we’re going to pass to the next generations of young people, because we won’t be able to accomplish it in our time here. And so to do that, we have to get them on board with this idea and inspire them to be more creative, more powerfully thoughtful, and essentially better stewards of human and natural resources in order to accomplish this task. And my sense is we haven’t even begun that yet.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. If your focus is harm reduction, there’s a lot of us, we’re going to keep doing harm. The best that you can hope for with that is that we destroy everything more slowly.

Derek Mitchell:
Pretty much.

Alec Patton:
Which is better, but it’s not a long-term strategy.

Derek Mitchell:
It’s not. If we could blink our eyes today and eliminate all plastics in the world, it would be an incredibly wonderful thing, but that won’t reverse the ravages that we’ve inflicted upon our planet. And so to me, every time I pass a bunch of recycling bins, I think, wow, it’s great that people are being more responsible. But quick on that thought is, we’ve got to do a lot better than just this if we’re talking about a healthy world 50, 60, 70 years from now.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. All right, Scott, I want to bring you in. What brought you to regeneration, what we’re talking about here, as a concept?

Scott Sampson:
Well, the concept that most people are still talking about is sustainability, as it’s been viewed for a while. And sustainability, like the core word within it, sustain, is all about holding on to what’s left. It’s about protection. It’s about separating people from the natural world and saying, Hey, we better sustain this resource out here. And that frame isn’t working for us as Derek said. And just to give a concrete example, there are marine protected areas up and down the west coast of North America, and that didn’t stop the kelp forests from completely collapsing like more than 95% of the kelp forests went away. And those kelp forests are critical for supporting a whole range of ecosystems, including open ocean ecosystems where these young fish eventually grow up and go to. And so, if we’re going to move into a thriving future, we can’t just protect these places, we actually have to give mother nature a helping hand regenerate these places enough that they can become eventually self-regulating and withstand all of the environmental perturbations that we know are coming with climate change and other forces. So for us, regeneration is a way of taking on this whole new frame, that it’s not about doing less bad, it’s about doing more good.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. And I think built into that is a basic idea about what it means to be human, that our relationship to the more than human world is at its core an abusive one.

Scott Sampson:
Yeah, completely agree.

Alec Patton:
And that going forward, that just doesn’t work. The idea of we are going to do harm will just protect some of these things from us, that doesn’t work.

Scott Sampson:
Well. I would argue that there’s two dominant views that are about the future right now, and they’re both wrong. The first says that we’re already doomed, and that’s the majority of young people in the world already think it’s too late. The other group, sort of the high-tech techno optimist crowd will say, oh no worries. We can just go to another planet or go all over the galaxy. We can spread out. We don’t need to worry about earth. Both are incorrect in that they’re not going to get us to the thriving future we need quickly. And there’s another way of looking at it which says that instead of being outside and above nature, we are deeply and inextricably embedded within it. And the way forward is to align what we do with the way nature works. So communities of people and non-human nature can thrive together

Alec Patton:
And the world is full of examples past and present of groups of humans who have done and continue to do that extremely successfully. They just haven’t really ever made mass conquest of the rest of the planet a goal. And so they’re not the dominant narrative.

Derek Mitchell:
That’s right. And they’re not taught about very often either. I often wonder why we learn so much about the titans of industry who have essentially written the script for environmental degradation and rampant consumerism that has us in the position that we’re in now. We don’t read very much at all about First Nations peoples who live for thousands of years and complete harmony with some of the rivers and streams and mountains and forests that we’re currently concerned about.

Alec Patton:
And didn’t do that by accident either and grew and changed and innovated themselves within their contexts and continue to do so.

Derek Mitchell:
Absolutely. So there are lessons that we can learn from them and that Scott and the team at the academy are already beginning to learn from communities in and around California and in other parts of the world.

Alec Patton:
All right, we are talking on very heady, heavy world level terms, which I could do all day, but we’re here to talk about education. What does regenerative education mean?

Derek Mitchell:
For me, it means stopping and rethinking how we talk about the human relationship with nature. And embedding in a cross-curricular way, a whole nother set of beliefs, norms, systems of thinking that places humans in community with nature, not above it or even below it, but in natural community with it. My sense is if we don’t start thinking about ourselves as being amongst and a part of nature as opposed to mastering it, we’ll never develop the systems that we need, the ways of living and thinking that we want, the values that we would have to have to be able to make some of the trade-offs that are literally on the horizon now. I mean if our planet’s going to breathe, we’re going to have to rewild large swaths of the planet and that means significant trade-offs and to position us as humans to start talking about giving up our creature comforts in the short term for more robust and healthy environment decades from now, that’s an incredibly different moral compass that our current schools and systems simply aren’t anchoring towards.

Alec Patton:
If that’s what regenerative education looks like, how would you characterize what’s happening in schools now?

Scott Sampson:
What I’ll try and do is compare the two of them because they are a study in contrast. So if you think about what’s happening in school now, some people call it industrial education. The goal is to prepare students to participate in the economy, that it’s all teacher driven, everyone sits in little rows and all of that. The geographic focus is either non-existent or global. It takes place in classrooms. The teacher’s role is to convey information. The student’s role is to suck it in and spit it back on exams. The values are very individual focused. And the ultimate worldview that this industrial learning fosters is very much an individualistic human-centered worldview. The regenerative form of learning is almost the opposite. Instead of preparing for the economy to be part of the economy, it’s preparing individuals to achieve their potential, whatever that potential might be. The learning tends to be student driven, the students have agency. The geographic focus is the local place.
And the place where the education happens is not just in the classroom. It too goes beyond the classroom walls to the schoolyard and the local community. The teacher’s role is to create experiences and to guide and the student’s role is to literally blossom. And instead of being focused on the parts, which is sort of the industrial way, the focus is on relationships, on holes, et cetera. And the ultimate worldview that regenerative learning inspires is not human centered but life centered. And that it actually embodies the understanding that we cannot be healthy unless we live in a healthy environment. And that means we have to solve not only for the health of people, but for the health of the more than human world.

Derek Mitchell:
That’s wonderful, Scott. The only thing I’ll add that I think you intended to also add is a regenerative education is much more collectivist collaborative.

Scott Sampson:
Yeah, absolutely. And the student literally drives it and they often drive it in groups. So Exactly right, Derek, the students come together and they partner on projects that are meaningful to them as opposed to some curriculum the teacher decides on, and the teacher helps that learning along.

Derek Mitchell:
The Roadkill project at Berkeley that one of our board members from the past talked about is a really good example of this, Scott, do you remember?

Scott Sampson:
No, I don’t know that I do remember the details of it. Go for it.

Derek Mitchell:
Well, this is a project being sponsored by a scientist at Berkeley with a group of students in Oakland, Unified and middle school age. And the idea was for this group of young people to think up a project about the health of the environment that would be of interest to them and to learn about it, maybe come up with some policy recommendations for the city in relationship to it. The students had a whole host of really interesting ideas studying potholes and how they form and where they are and how they differ across the city as a real incredible equity challenge was one idea.
But another was this idea around roadkill. That using the actual roadkill, the animals that are hit by cars in our urban centers, as a way of studying A, which animals are still in the ecosystem and what is the nature of the state of their health, as well as what are the processes we have in our cities right now for reclamation and recognition.
And so this professor thought this was really a fascinating idea and it essentially created an amazing project that’s now all across the state of California, which is both powerful for understanding the relationship between humans and nature in urbanity, which I think is a really important question on its own right, but also in lifting up the very questions that young people have about the environment and their world as a way of catalyzing and capturing their curiosity and leveraging that for the betterment of everybody. This was one example, all student-driven, that’s produced a really fascinating set of study.

Scott Sampson:
I’ll throw in a different one that’s new and really exciting and we’re looking at it as a model for what we might do here in San Francisco. This one is based in the UK, it’s called the National Education Nature Park. And it’s a collaboration of multiple organizations including the Natural History Museum in London to think about all the schoolyards in the UK as part of a single nature park. And what the students do is they have agency to think about their schoolyard as an ecosystem and plant native plants, which attract native insects. And the native insects attract native birds and the students monitor this, they do a baseline before the schoolyard is modified, and then they look at it every year to see how their part of the nature park is bringing nature back to the UK. And it’s a really powerful way to link kids not only within a given school, but link kids across schools so they can see how their part of the nature park is influencing other parts.

Derek Mitchell:
That’s another great example and infinitely scalable as well.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. All right, now Scott, I read this line of yours, which I’ll read to you. “We need to reimagine environmental education to embrace regeneration, storytelling and bigger-than-self emotions like awe.” Let’s talk about awe a little bit and its place in education.

Scott Sampson:
That’s a great question. There’s been a whole lot of recent scientific research about the emotion of awe. And what’s come out is that it’s one of the few emotions that takes us outside of our individual self. We experience awe, whether it’s for nature or music or being in a magnificent building, and it takes us outside ourself. It tends to make us feel bigger than our individual self and part of a larger whole, it’s an emotion that makes us feel really positive, it makes us more collaborative. And it’s an emotion that is too rarely experienced these days. If you believe that the outside world is just a bunch of objects that are there as resources for humans to extract, there’s not a lot of awe in that. But if you go outside and you think about that living world as full of your relatives that you co-evolved with over millions of years. And now, you are collaborating with those relatives to create everything from air and food to collaboration across species. Now, that is awe-inspiring. And we need more of this sense of awe, this sense of sacred in the world if we are going to respect it enough to act in ways that allow the natural world to thrive. And I think awe could be a really important part of it.
And I’ll just throw out, we’re partnering with a scientist at Berkeley named Dacher Keltner and he has written a recent book on the topic called Awe, that summarizes the science of awe and the recent work. And he’s been pushing a project that I think we’re going to get involved in here at the academy around creating cities of awe. And that’s really exciting.

Alec Patton:
What’s a city of awe?

Scott Sampson:
Well, we’re still figuring that out, but it’s a city where great effort is put into creating experiences of awe and that we bring people’s attention to places where awe could occur. That you can go on a walk, and he calls them awe walks, where you just put yourself into a frame of mind that you can experience the world around you. It’s a matter of observing the world differently than you normally would. From the very small things that you miss because you walk right by them, to the largest of things, the sky, the universe, the stars at night, whatever it might be. And it’s having regularly seeking out these experiences so that we are all in a city having these ongoing experiences of awe that influence our relationship with that place.

Alec Patton:
The thing that immediately made me think of was when my wife and I went to Hong Kong to run a workshop at a conference and looked out of our high rise hotel room and saw hawks flying by. And it turned out that that was just, I think they were hawks, it might have been eagles, but they just turned out that raptors in Downtown Hong Kong was like a thing. And it was just such an incredible moment to go. “Oh, that’s a hawk right there.”

Derek Mitchell:
That sounds like a moment of awe.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. I was curious what moments of awe you’ve both had recently. Personally,

Derek Mitchell:
I had the opportunity to go on a different board retreat in Southern California near LA and Pasadena, I’ve lived down there for a couple of decades through the course of my life, and had no idea of some of the botanical gardens that were available, just right in the middle of all this urbanity. And so I had a chance to experience a couple of the really beautiful nature reserve gardens that are in Pasadena and Glendale, and they were absolutely awe-inspiring.

Alec Patton:
Did you go to the Huntington?

Derek Mitchell:
Yes. That was one of them, yes. And what’s amazing, I didn’t even know it was there. I literally drove past that place on a two-ten freeway daily for seven years and had no idea that was there. And that’s another really important thing to remember that much of what is already available to people to elicit this deep respect for nature and this feeling of awe in terms of our own place within it is there, but not very many people know about it. And so just getting folks educated about the beauty that’s already around them is a key part of what needs to happen as well.

Alec Patton:
Scott, where have you experienced awe?

Scott Sampson:
I recently, just in the past couple of weeks, I experienced two owls right outside the front door of my house that were calling to each other from 10 feet away, great horned owls. And then they actually went and mated. I called my wife out, we were listening to these things and then they made it right in front of us and took off from the branch and flew right past us. And I’ve never had-

Alec Patton:
Scott, this is an all-ages podcast. I just want you to bear that in mind.

Scott Sampson:
Sorry. Well then I won’t go to the next one that I was thinking about, but I will [inaudible 00:27:53].

Alec Patton:
No, please do. Please do.

Scott Sampson:
No, I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. I also happened to have been in the Galapagos in the past couple of weeks and had the chance to travel to an island where Galapagos tortoises have not lived for about well over 100 years. They were exterminated by people who took them mostly for food. And then recently, there’s been rats and mice that have been eating their eggs so they weren’t able to reproduce. Well, there’s been an effort to get rid of some of these invasive species, and we’re right now just in the middle of beginning the reintroduction of about 600 Galapagos tortoises to this particular island where they haven’t been forever. And they are amazing ecosystem engineers and just marvelous animals. And it was awesome to think about the regeneration of this island and to see that regeneration in action, to see that we really can do good. For me, that really did inspire awe.

Alec Patton:
That’s beautiful. Kidding aside, it’s funny how every one of these stories has made me think of something, I think that’s probably something, a characteristic of awe. But I was staying on Palomar Mountain where we were all staying in a yurt. And before dawn we woke up to the sound of a great horned owl and one of my kids just was immediately awake and saying, “I just heard an owl. I just heard owl.” And we went outside and we tried to find it. Of course we didn’t because owls don’t make themselves easy to find. But that experience of hearing that incredible call, it just stays with you in a different way from other stuff.

Scott Sampson:
Yeah. And I’ll just point out is another point of awe that those owls and those hawks and those chickens are all dinosaurs, that dinosaurs are not extinct. There are more kinds of dinosaurs around today than there are mammals. We call them birds. And thinking about the connections between owls and chickens on the one hand and dinosaurs on the other through millions of years of time, an unbroken line of ancestors is another way to inspire awe.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. And then let’s talk a little bit about storytelling. That’s the other word you used that we haven’t talked about.

Scott Sampson:
Derek, would you like to start?

Derek Mitchell:
I can. Storytelling has deep roots in lots of cultures. The griot culture that I come from, storytelling is a core mechanism by which families and generations share values. And as I mentioned earlier on, if we’re going to position ourselves in this world in such a way that we’re in harmony with it, it’s going to require some new narratives. Because as Scott described, our current narrative in this culture is very capitalistic, it’s very much about consumerism and industry and not so much about being steeped and respectful and a part of nature. And so we’re going to need new narratives. And part of the new narratives means better storytelling, new storytelling, bringing stories back of some of the first peoples who were incredible stewards of this land. And who frankly for several generations, have been signaling and warning us about the problems that we were causing, particularly here in California.
And so to start centering some of those stories and then lifting up the lessons from native cultures about environmental stewardship and respect for nature that will inspire our young people to have a different relationship with nature. My guess is, feeling more harmoniously connected to the hooting of an owl or the ebb and flow of the tide is something that’s ingrained in us already, is just our conditioning within our culture that sort of isolates us from it and creates a different distance with it. We have to change parts of our culture that make those harmful distances possible. And storytelling, I think, is a really powerful way to do so.

Scott Sampson:
Yeah, that’s really great, Derek. I guess I would add to that by saying that as humans, we are attuned to make meaning from life largely through stories. We are inundated with stories, pretty much on a daily basis. Most of us through the media and friends and other sources work, most of those stories that we hear are about the old way of looking at the world. And they tell us about the oncoming disaster. They leave people feeling hopeless much of the time. And so what we’re really in desperate need of now are stories that, on the one hand connect us to the larger living world, and on the other hand are telling stories about the regeneration of that world, that we’re inspiring people with the things that can happen so that more people feel that they too can get engaged in making a positive difference in the world.
And this means lifting up voices that often aren’t heard, including indigenous voices, including people of color whose voices are too often in the background. And if we can lift up those voices, and again, particularly around the positive ways that they are living in the world and making the world healthier, serving the world, I think the better. And here at the California Academy of Sciences, it’s one of the things that we’ve been talking a lot about and that is how can we become a place not only where there’s science and education, but convenings where people can come and hear these diverse stories, where we can have indigenous peoples come and share their stories so people can understand their point of view and how different it is from ours. But more and more I think we just need to find avenues for people to convene and share really positive regenerative stories. There’s a lot out there and a lot of people just aren’t aware of them.

Alec Patton:
Hey, and anybody who can tell those stories, I’ll put them on the podcast.

Derek Mitchell:
Wonderful.

Scott Sampson:
Thank you.

Derek Mitchell:
Two come to mind right away that Scott can queue up for you. The Xerces blue as one opportunity, Scott, will be pretty amazing for folks to hear about. And the work the academy’s doing around regenerating coral.

Scott Sampson:
And I would add a third, and that is we have a very collaborative effort called Reimagining San Francisco. And if there was ever a city that needed to get reimagined, San Francisco probably ranks right up there right now. And we have got this group of 41 organizations, and we are coming together to reimagine what a thriving San Francisco could be and how we could achieve it, lifting up the green spaces that already exist, creating corridors to connect those green spaces, getting more people involved in urban rewilding, and thinking about cities as places not only people but the natural world can thrive. And stories like that are really powerful. And there’s a big consortium of folks now working on that. Trying to reimagine San Francisco so that it can become a global exemplar of rethinking cities for the 21st century.

Derek Mitchell:
Alec, it probably won’t surprise you, but in most of our cities you can use the presence of trees as a mechanism for identifying where there’s poverty. So that’s a live example of how we’ve structured our world in such a way that nature starts to mimic the degradations in particular communities and not the other way around. And so rethinking cities as places where richness and abundance of natural habitat and shade from trees can upend the predictability that’s typically in place right now, would be hugely powerful. And this particular partnership with San Francisco and lots of other nonprofit and other organizations, I think can be a model for the rest of the country.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, that’s awesome. All right, I have a little bit of a thorny question for both of you about stories and ways of living and cultural appropriation and existing power structures.
And just to personalize this, when I read Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass. She’s a botanist and she’s Native American, and she just does a really extraordinary job of educating the reader about, I mean Western, is a weird term to use, but Eurocentric science and indigenous American science. And I finished the book and I was like, well, that’s it. She’s got it right, and I just want to live like that. She’s nailed it and that’s what I want to do. And then I stopped myself and I was like, okay, so a White guy wants to just adopt all the trappings of indigenous American life and join that. That sounds familiar in an uncomfortable way. And so, one of the things I think about a lot is on the one hand, it’s very clear to me that there are existing living traditions and societies today who the rest of us should really be looking to because they have a way of living that will mean that we survive as a species and the more dominant groups don’t. And on the other hand that I’m really conscious that people from more historically supremacist societies saying, “Hey, I’m going to become a part of that,” hasn’t gone so well. So I’m curious about how both of you think about that.

Derek Mitchell:
I’ll start. For me, it begins with respect. The respect with which you show the culture that you’re talking about. And the proximity with which you engage in the work of learning about and appreciating what’s there in that culture. Just aping a culture’s look or how they sound and what foods they eat is not the same as demonstrating deep and abiding appreciation for the beauty and richness and the lessons that can be learned within the culture.

Alec Patton:
And also on a pragmatic point, those are sort of the least helpful things to do as far as living more.

Derek Mitchell:
Exactly. I mean, it’s typically performative stuff as opposed to making real sacrifice and showing deep and abiding respect and love for what that difference really is. In addition, we’re talking about societal shifts, culture shifts, not individual shifts necessarily, or not just individual shifts. Scott, you want to add anything?

Scott Sampson:
Yeah, thank you for that. I think first off, I would say Braiding Sweetgrass is without doubt, one of my favorite books and Robin Wall Kimmerer is an amazing human being. And the fact that she has the perspectives of both western science and as it’s being called now, indigenous science is really powerful. And there’s lots of folks who are making the argument that we need to bring these two ways of knowing that are in some sense opposites together to have what is sometimes called two-eyed seeing with both western and indigenous science. And that’s one powerful way that we can learn from indigenous communities. Of course, we have to be sure that we’re partnering with those communities and not appropriating their traditional ecological knowledge. So we ask permissions.
But there’s another element to this, and that is that to my knowledge, there’s no such thing as a big indigenous city, that is a city that is full of mostly indigenous peoples, that indigenous peoples traditionally have lived in much smaller groups. And so what we have to invent for ourselves in the 21st century is a new way of living, a new way of understanding the world and our relationship with it. And we can tap into all of this amazing knowledge and wisdom that’s embodied in indigenous science, and we’re going to have to co-create our own pathways forward because there isn’t a precedent for how to do this kind of living in big cities.

Alec Patton:
I don’t know, man, the Aztec civilization would like a word, Scott.

Scott Sampson:
Well, yeah, and I guess you’d have to make your definition of how big the population size is. And there was some in North America, there’s one in North America that got to be pretty big too as a city, and I think some people have called them cities, but I’m about cities in the ways that we imagine Tokyo or Mexico City or New York City with skyscrapers and very little nature and no agriculture and all of these things. I think we have to reimagine these spaces for the 21st century. And I think that that’s one of the biggest challenges because the majority of us now live in these urban areas. And this is a place where I think these two ways of knowing the world can be deeply complimentary.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. Yeah. I, and there’s a point that by definition, no society that was concerned with the long-term health of the human and more than human world, would have chosen to build a 20th century city. So that’s the challenge, is you got to start from where you are.

Scott Sampson:
Yeah. And then how do we reinvent that? I mean, Singapore is an example I like to use because Singapore decided in the ’60s that they wanted to be the garden city. And then in the ’80s they said, “No, that’s not enough. We want to be a city in a garden. So the garden becomes the context for the city.” And then in the 2000s they said, “No, still not enough. We want to be a city in nature.” And they now have nature reserves that are surrounded by nature parks where lots of people go. Those parks are connected by nature corridors. There are buildings including skyscrapers that are greened all the way up, but on the rooftops and on decks and stuff. And the people of Singapore have embraced this idea of being a city in nature, and now it’s much healthier for people and it attracts tourists as well, which is great for their economy. And so I think there’s lessons out there that we can learn from cities that are rethinking this.

Derek Mitchell:
It is a beautiful place and I highly, highly recommend it. And frankly, in our culture here in the States, there’s some low-hanging fruit. When I think of New York City and Aztecs, I think why can’t New York City reclaim rainwater? Why can every one of those skyscrapers be receptacles? It’s a simple thing, really. And the technology’s already known. It’s just a question of will. Just like the fact that we’re still flushing clean water in our toilets. I mean, it’s just a ridiculous thing when you think about it. But it’s the ideal example of us needing to give away, give up a little bit of a creature comfort to be able to live and exist in a way that’s much more respectful of the richness and beauty and purity of the environment in which we live. It would be a small thing literally to run a pipe along the current set of pipes that are in place that uses recycled water in our toilets, but we’re unwilling to do in this culture.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. We’re often hard on recycling because we say, Hey, this isn’t enough. But when I think that in my lifetime, this thing that nobody gets any personal benefit from, we did as a society, we’re just like, okay, we’re going to do this thing that’s a little more annoying and we’re all going to do it because it’s going to help out. I think that’s actually incredibly inspiring.

Derek Mitchell:
It’s a huge success without a doubt. It’s an incredible success. And in the doing of that, we’ve let our foot off the pedal, we could have kept going and ended with a world that’s not warming at such an alarming rate, and us not being so wasteful of the very things that will help us survive.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. All right. I’m going to take us to a very concrete question, and I’m going to focus on school leaders here. So if a school leader is listening to this, what is a first step they can take to put their school on a path to becoming a regenerative space for students and staff?

Scott Sampson:
Derek, you start and I’ll jump in.

Derek Mitchell:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think probably the first thing they can do is listen to their families, to their students, to their teachers. And start the work of seeding power by doing robust and thoughtful listening, right? Ask folks the question of how can our school be more healthy, more respectful of nature, more thoughtful about resource, and what role do you all want to play in helping us do that? And then listen, just listen. Because it’s tremendous what young people can contribute when we’re willing to listen to what they have to say.

Alec Patton:
Okay, Derek, I want to push you slightly. So I’m a school leader, I’m working with partners in School innovation. And I say, okay, great, great, great, great. What does that actually look like? When should I do it? Who should I talk to? Who do I listen to? Can you give me a sense of a structure that you would recommend?

Derek Mitchell:
Okay. There are tons already in place. You have local school councils in just about every school. You have leadership teams in just about every school. You have either student government or student groups related to literacy or mathematics, or you can leverage the classroom in this way too by having a key question that every classroom reflects on, and have the teachers route the intel back their way.
Principals have a lot of ways of listening if they’re just willing to do it. And using existing structures rather than starting new ones is probably a good idea too, because starting something new, you have the challenge associated with all of the trust issues with something new. But leveraging your local school council and asking them that question, having them tap the parents and their PTAs and PLCs for other intel and impact conversations and having students talk with one another and bring back some recommendations, those are all live and viable and really useful structures that principals can leverage. It’s just really a question of will, and then the expectation that they’re going to do something with that intelligence, right? With that data. Typically. That expectation tends to be the thing that keeps folks from doing it. Because if you ask me how we’re going to make the school more holistic and more respectful in nature, and I give you a bunch of ideas and nothing happens, that basically tells the community that you really weren’t interested in what they had to say.

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Scott Sampson:
It’s a really good question, Alec, and it’s not a simple one because the current system is pretty deeply ingrained where there’s a curriculum with a whole ton of material, a bunch of which isn’t relevant to the students’ lives. There’s testing and report cards, all of this stuff, which with regenerative education really changes. So how does one even start? I think part of it is giving teachers the opportunity, the professional development opportunity to think about learning in a different way, to think about being the guide on the side instead of the sage on the stage, as they say. To think about using the community rather than the textbook as the context of learning.
So how could that start? It can start right in the schoolyard, doing something as simple as getting the kids to plant native plants in the schoolyard and watch what happens to them, or school gardens where kids can grow food and get a sense of how nature provides for food. And then expanding beyond that, getting the students out in the community to understand where the bulk of their food comes, where their water comes from, what are the problems in the community. And then even beyond that is listening to in the community and figuring out places where they could make a meaningful difference. So going out and listening to folks, bringing in community members to the school so they can hear about challenges in the school, and thinking about places where students can actually, of their own volition, go make a real difference in that community. Because only in doing that will students get to the point where they’re saying, “Wow, I can actually make a difference in the world.” And if they get that experience when they’re young, then they are empowered when they get to be teens and get to college age. But the way education is now, students mostly interact with it passively. So the goal here really is to make students active agents, and I think there’s lots of ways to get that going, but it’s going to start with the teachers shifting their frames.

Alec Patton:
That’s awesome. That is a perfect note to end on. Thank you both so much for taking the time to talk about this. I enjoyed this more than I can say.

Derek Mitchell:
I know Alec, this has been a hobby-ish for you for quite some time, so I’m glad you find the conversation useful and helpful.

Scott Sampson:
And Alec, thank you for bringing us together and Derek, it is always good to hear your thinking because it always stretches mine, and I appreciate you, brother. So thank you both very, very much.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Derek Mitchell and Scott Sampson for taking the time to talk about this. Definitely check the show notes for this one. We’ve got links where you can find more information about a bunch of the things we talked about. Thanks for listening.