NARRATION

Before we dive in, I want to share that this episode is made possible thanks to the support of the Sierra Club Foundation. They’ve been doing powerful work to advance climate solutions and environmental justice. I’m so glad we get to feature one of their board members, Steph Speirs. 

When the idea came up for us to do an episode about wealth, I was conflicted. Talking about money is uncomfortable, and to be honest, I’m just not a finance person. But this week’s guest helped to reframe my perspective on capital, illuminating that there’s all kinds of wealth—including ecological wealth, community wealth, and the wealth of knowledge.

Steph Speirs is an energy entrepreneur and climate solutions teacher. In our conversation, she reminded me that nature itself is a marketplace. Every ecosystem is made up of actors exchanging services: plants offering pollen, bees carrying it to other flowers, and so on. In fact, the root of the word economy is eco, meaning home: our shared planet. 

My name is Willow Defebaugh and this is The Nature Of. Each week, we’ll look to the natural world for insights into how to navigate the experience of being human. This week, we’re exploring the nature of wealth. 

For most people, the economy is a major issue when it comes to not only how they vote, but how they live their daily lives. If we want to make climate progress, we need to get people to understand that a transition to renewable energy will actually be good for the economy. Meanwhile, climate chaos is only going to cost us. Globally, we’re expected to spend $38 trillion on climate change per year by 2050. If that number scares you too, I’d encourage you to stick around and see if Steph changes how you think about wealth and what we place value on. 

Willow Defebaugh

As a starting point for our conversation, I would love for you to share about how you are thinking about the word wealth. It’s a word that carries a lot of weight, and I’m curious: If you could redefine wealth or shift how people think about that word, how would you define it? 

Steph Speirs

You’re right. I think when people hear wealth or capital, they immediately think about the trappings of the financial system that we’re in today. Really, I like to take it back to core values. Wealth should generate this idea of abundance, the same kind of awe-inspiring abundance that nature gives us when we’re in the middle of the forest or the middle of the ocean and we see life all around us. Ultimately, I think wealth means the ability to have time and spaciousness to enjoy abundance. It’s clean air. It’s clean water. It’s well-being, not only defined as self-care, but access to community public goods. That should be things like good health, good education, and a community in which you feel belonging and inclusion.

When I was working in India at a solar company, I once was camping in a really rural area on the banks of the Ganges River. I brushed up against this bush and it immediately gave me this crazy painful rash. It was some kind of poison-ivy-like plant. We were miles away from any hospital, or clinic, or help. The local next to me, he’s like, “Oh, don’t worry, don’t freak out. Here.” He plucks a plant that’s right next to the ivy and he rubbed it on the increasing red, swollenness on my leg, and then it disappeared. He said, “You see? The poison and the healing is planted together. They coexist, they live together. That’s how you know nature gives.” 

Willow

The poison and the healing exist side by side. That is such a beautiful note to start this conversation on. 

Steph

Yeah.

Willow

I really love that you led with the word value also, because I think it has two meanings that are both really apt in this context. I think that what we place value on, what we spend capital on, it reveals so much about what we value as a culture. Especially as it relates to wealth, as we’re talking about redefining it. 

Some of these other essential forms of wealth that you’re talking about—clean air, ecological knowledge, community—they’re often invisible in financial conversations. Or models. How do we build or shift our economic systems so that they recognize that wealth beyond just the financial sense? 

Steph

The financial system we operate in today is really about short-term monetization of natural and human resources. That’s actually come at the expense of grand human and planetary health. Because in the current system, only a few are accumulating more and more wealth, where the vast majority of people are seeing either their lives stagnate or maybe even get worse. 

When we think about reimagining how capital can be deployed—I’m on the board of the Sierra Club Foundation and we have an initiative called Shifting Trillions. We think about shifting trillions as moving trillions of dollars of capital away from extractive economies and toward regenerative ones and restorative ones. It’s basically, how do you move money to create a healthier world for all living beings? 

It is possible to do. It takes a few different measures, though. Right now, we measure our financial health in terms of GDP. GDP is a measurement of production; of goods and services. It’s not a measurement of well-being, it’s not a measurement of if people are healthy. Or if they are feeling like they have their basic needs met of shelter, and food, and nutrition, and education. We have to start by measuring those things more.

We also have to start, to your point about values, about living up to our values. Quick data point: In 2017, the chief financial institution in Germany noted that the climate crisis and the pollution crisis is going to cost us $550 trillion to fix, which is more than literally all the money in the world.

Willow

Sure.

Steph

Right now, just a couple years ago, we spent $1.3 trillion on the climate crisis. Estimates recently show that we have to be spending $4 to $8 trillion on climate solutions in order to solve this problem. We’re only spending $1.3 trillion, that’s 1% of the global GDP. It’s not reasonable to say that 99% of our financial activity is either not helping our planet and people, or harming it. We just have to shift that ratio to be more in line with what we know we have to do for the future of our planet, and kids, and grandkids. 

Willow

Because ultimately, as you point out, it will only be more costly in the long-term if we don’t. 

Steph

Exactly. That number, $550 trillion, was based on 2017 traction and we’ve already been slower than what we should have done in the last several years.

Willow

We need to get to work.

Steph

We need to get to work, we need to do it urgently.

Willow

Again, coming back to what you were just sharing around values. I’m curious how much of this you feel is possible within capitalism. Which is a contentious word, I think particularly sometimes in this movement. And yet, something you and I have spoken about is that if we say capitalism, if we say the system is the problem for everything, we’re not actually addressing the values underneath that system that have turned that system harmful. Then it becomes easy to just replicate that harm with other systems. 

I’m curious what you think about or how you feel we might be able to shift that conversation so we can move from the place of, just, capitalism is terrible, we can’t do anything until it’s gone?

Steph

Yeah, which is easy to say because the system is broken. It’s leading to accumulation of wealth for very few, and it’s not making people’s lives better. But what we’re experiencing now is unfettered capitalism. I think going to basic principles, like you talked about, basic principles and basic values is correct. 

Aristotle talked about the need for markets in a very logical way that I think most people can get behind. He talked about how the reason why we need markets is because we can’t be self-sufficient. We’re not truly able to provide everything we need in life because we’re interdependent people. We need to be able to buy things or trade things from other people who can produce things that we need that we can’t because we’re not sole survivors. Because of this interdependence, a market is an expression of interdependence in that we are a community and there’s some standardization of value. 

The problem with unfettered capitalism is that the expression of value doesn’t reflect value in the real world sometimes. There’s a misalignment of understanding and measurement of value. When we say things like, capital should include not just financial capital, but it should include human capital, social capital, cultural capital, natural capital, and intellectual capital, we are talking about measuring things that aren’t measured by our financial system. These things are a choice. It’s a choice that our current system prioritizes financial capital over human capital or labor. These are societal choices. We haven’t raised the federal minimum wage since 2009 and it’s been stuck at $7.25 for 16 years. That is a choice. We don’t have to make that choice. 

When we think about how to create a system that goes beyond “capitalism sucks,” we have to talk about, what is the problem that we’re talking about. Because if we want to build a better world, we need to get aligned and we need to get organized around what that better world looks like. I am much less interested in “capitalism is bad” because it doesn’t move us forward together. It gets us stuck, like you said, in the old ways of replicating harm. So much about our climate movement has been revolving around stopping harm for good reason. We had to stop fossil fuel plants from being built, new leases from being extended. Now we have to transition our mindset from stopping harm to building the new world as fast as we can because we are in an urgent crisis. That’s a shift in mindset and it’s a shift in priorities, and a shift toward solutions.

Willow

I wanted to pull at something that you said, which is the idea that a market is an expression of interdependence because I think that’s really important. I think that in our world, or within the world of, as you say, unfettered capitalism, it’s that we’ve lost sight of the values of interdependence. In the natural world, there are certain guardrails. Nature doesn’t hoard. Most species don’t hoard. There’s, you could say, natural checks and balances. That just highlights the need for regulation. It’s the unfettered part that is really the problem here. 

How do we shift the focus toward regulation in some of these conversations? 

Steph

I feel really lucky to have grown up on an island. I was born and raised in Hawai’i. When you live on an island, you know two things. You know natural resources are limited, that you can’t get everything you want unless it comes from the land. You realize that your thriving depends on everyone around you. There are a lot of beautiful places in the world. Hawai’i is one of them, but it’s most special because of the values of Native Hawai’ians that suffuse everything that we do. 

In ancient Hawai’ian times, there were tracts of land that were organized called Ahupua’as. An Ahupua’a was a slice of land from mountain to ocean, we call it from mauka to makai. These pizza slices of land from mountain to ocean were a community and they were a self-sufficient community. But not each individual within each Ahupua’a was self-sufficient. The people who lived along the shore and fished, they often needed medicine, or birds, or wood from the forests and the mountains, and they would trade with the folks who lived in the mountaintops. Only together within the Ahupua’a could you be self-sufficient. 

That interdependence was such an ingrained part of growing up on an island. When you think about it, the planet is an island. This is the only planet we have. It’s a really good one. 

Willow

It’s the best island.

Steph

 It’s the best island and we should do more to protect it. Living in Hawai’i, people know that not only is the land just land, the land is your ancestor. It is a family member and you treat it differently when you think of land that way. You also know that, if you take care of the land and people, then it nourishes you in return. That which we nourish nourishes us in return. That interdependence was a crucial part of survival. Everything they made—canoes, houses, food—came from a combination of what everyone was stewarding. 

That’s all to say that in those times, there were also regulations. It wasn’t just individuals were self-moderating. There was a community social contract that you couldn’t take too much fish at the wrong time of the year. I’ve been spending the last five years learning to hunt because, as a meat eater working in climate, I wanted to get more sustainable sources of meat. I’ve learned that Native Hawai’ians, if you hunted the wrong animal at the wrong time of year, you would actually be severely punished by the community. It was a social contract that we were in this together and you shouldn’t break the social contract by upholding your individual values more than the community values. 

That’s centrally what we don’t have right now, is an expression in our markets. When we talk about market failures—of the prices not reflecting the actual costs, or entire customers that are not deemed valuable being excluded from the market—we’re talking about market failures because we’re not valuing the interdependence that we, at our core ancestral roots, know that we rely on. That we can fix, because it’s just incentive systems and structures, and that’s by design. We can redesign a better world. 

Willow

What you’re saying also, I think, comes down to, how do we create our economic regulations in a way that is in alignment or in harmony with ecology? Ahupua’a is an incredible example because it makes you realize how, in somewhere like the continental U.S., we have these arbitrary lines of states that cut through watersheds, and we have rivers that flow through multiple governances in a way that doesn’t really make sense with the ecology of a place. 

It makes me think about that the root of the word economy is eco. It’s something that should be tied to how the natural world wants to grow and thrive. It’s, how can we start to create a harmony between these two things, rather than seeing conversations about capital or the economy as, for some reason, inherently at odds with this movement or environmentalism, I suppose. 

Steph

Yeah, completely. Economy and ecology have the same root, like you said.

Willow

They go hand-in-hand.

Steph

Yeah.

Willow

I am curious to hear a little bit about what you’re learning on this journey you’re on with hunting and that as a way to, I suppose, practice living in harmony with the land in a way that is truly sustainable.

Steph

One of the issues of a globalized industrial system is that we become so separate from nature and from the source of our nourishment and life. And that is very true with the way we get our food. 

We can walk into a grocery store and everything’s packaged very neatly, and we don’t have to ask where it comes from. The fact of the matter is, as an avowed meat eater, I love meat, but working in climate knowing what the industrial meat complex is doing to the planet, I wanted to see: Could I still be a meat eater if I had to gather food at its source, if I had to get my own meat? 

When you’re confronted by the taking of a life for one’s own nourishment, I feel both at once incredibly connected to my ancestry and all of our ancestry as humans, and also so much grief. I do not enjoy the taking of the life. But I realized that that feeling I have, that sickness, that is being outsourced every day, every time I eat meat from the grocery store or in a restaurant. It’s brought me closer to the costs of the life I live. 

Willow

Right.

Steph

And made me more responsible of it. When you take an animal’s life, you have to honor it by eating all parts of it. There is no hoarding. Hunters are great at sharing their food with others. It ties you closer to your community because you can nourish your community, and then there’s beautiful nourishment that comes in return because of that. 

Even though I actually have taken to hunting as my main source of meat right now, I actually eat less meat because I’ve reverted more toward how our ancestors ate meat, which is to eat less of it. To realize that it should be scarce. It is special because there are so many costs associated with it. We can actually be a locus for your community by the provision of nourishment, as opposed to just thinking of it as constant extraction. 

Willow

Speaking of shifting away from extractive systems, you are on the board of the Sierra Club Foundation. What can you tell me about the role of philanthropy, and investment, and subsidies in shifting away from an economy that relies on fossil fuels? 

Steph

Clean energy provides a good example of this. So often, when people critique clean energy, or solar, or any new emerging technology like geothermal, they say, “Well, that’s just too expensive. It’s more expensive than fossil fuels, so that can’t survive in the market. That’s not ready to scale.” That’s not true for two reasons. 

One is that the fossil fuel industry enjoys trillions in subsidies every single year and people forget about that. It’s not a level playing field between new, renewable technologies and old, dirty technologies because they already get subsidies. Already we’re talking about—we’re not putting our money where our values are for the future. 

Secondly, solar is actually way cheaper than fossil fuels now. We just turned the corner on that in the last several years. The reason why solar is exploding across the world is because the cost of it has come down so much through technological innovation. We will see that with every other emerging clean technology because that’s the adoption curve of all technology in the history of human innovation. 

For example, fossil fuels, like coal, oil, natural gas, all of those took about 60 years to reach mainstream adoption. And they took a lot of subsidies to get to that lower cost to reach mainstream adoption. We’re expecting renewable energy to do what these other technologies did in 60 years at a lightning-fast speed and it’s getting there. We sometimes forget our history and where it came from, and expecting things to be mainstream. Now we’re at a place in which clean energy is cheaper than fossil fuels. 

Willow

Yay!

Steph

It doesn’t pollute the Earth, and doesn’t cause air pollution that causes asthma, particularly in disadvantaged communities. We don’t have to use fossil fuels anymore. 

So why isn’t it more prevalent? Well, the old system is really entrenched. All of our infrastructure for over 100 years was geared toward centralized power being pushed out by power plants that were run on fossil fuels. It takes time and it takes a lot of changes on a transformational infrastructure level to get to the new clean energy economy we need. Luckily, that is helping our prosperity as we build the new economy.

For instance, since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed in 2022 in America, there’s been over 320 new manufacturing, or clean energy, or electric vehicle projects that have been built across the country that’s led to $120 billion in investments across the country. If we stop those investments, then we’ll lose good paying jobs that come along with that, and a resurgence of economic activity in a lot of parts of the country that have been more blighted in the past several years. 

An example of some of the initiatives that Sierra Club Foundation is doing, investing money into projects particularly in disadvantaged communities that have been excluded from the clean energy transition. An example is providing credit facility to the first solar developer in West Virginia. 

Willow

Wow.

Steph

They’re training coal miners to be solar installers. They’ve since expanded to other states like Kentucky, and Maryland, and Virginia. This is a company called Solar Holler. 

Another example is investing in Indigenous-led solar projects and wind projects. The Sierra Club Foundation made an investment in the Standing Rock Tribe to build a wind farm and gave them a low-interest loan to do that because they were having trouble getting capital from traditional financiers. Same thing with this group called Navajo Power, that is a tribal-led solar developer building utility-scale solar for a project they were building in Arizona. These are new economic models, new leadership we haven’t seen before in clean energy that is building the future as we speak.

But they’re not getting financing from the traditional markets because they’re either seen as not enough history of financial traction, or too risky. Those definitions of risk are misplaced. We don’t define risk well as a financial system. We can use these capital innovations to really build the new world at a faster pace with new leaders at the forefront, with frontline community-centered, with community ownership of projects. Or at least, community control or community benefits. That’s enlivening, and I think people can get behind that new world, as opposed to being stuck in how the old world operates. 

Willow

I think it speaks to some of these initiatives that you’re describing that the Sierra Club Foundation is shifting resources to speak to a key principle of a just transition, which is not leaving anyone behind. Whether that is placing Indigenous groups at the center, or it’s training people who did work in the old infrastructure, and giving them the tools and the skills to shift toward working in clean energy. To me, it really embodies the spirit of let’s build this new system together. 

It’s so critical right now because we just had an election here in the U.S. where the economy ended up being such a central factor. We need people to understand that a green transition is ultimately good for the economy and that there’s real wins here to see, as well. 

What is the biggest barrier keeping capital locked in the old system? How do we move past it? 

Steph

The Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci talked about how the old way is dying, and the new way has yet to be born. In the interregnum, which means in that intervening time, a variety of morbid symptoms occur. We’re living in this time where the old is dying and the new has not yet been born. 

Willow

And there are morbid symptoms.

Steph

Morbid symptoms abound. The old industry of fossil fuels is clinging onto power, clenching onto power, and they don’t want to let it go. It’s a lot like, in biology, right before an animal or people sometimes die, they experience something called terminal lucidity. Which is right before they die, they have a surge of energy. It’s a common phenomenon in the natural world. What we’re seeing is that there’s a dying industry and they have a surge of energy to hold onto power. There’s a lot of outspending and out-lobbying that the fossil fuel industry is doing in comparison to the new technologies because they’re smaller organizations, they’re startups. They’re not able to combat with the same amount of resources. 

When you have a lot of money hoarding power, the only answer is community. Community is the salve for moments like this. You can start to build power by building community. 

Willow

I want to stick with this thread of community for a second, because I think that in a time when it feels like federal change can be difficult to achieve, it brings us back to the power of community and local change, local organizing. 

Can you share a little bit about, in this time of growing political pushback against climate policies and equity initiatives, how do we harness the power of community to sustain the momentum of change that we need to see? I think you have a specific example to share about how individual relationships even sometimes can be a big motivator in creating the kind of change that we need to see. 

Steph

I spent the last 10 years running a community solar company that worked to put affordable solar in the hands of everyday Americans. Fifty percent of our customers had a household income of less than $50K a year. We had projects across six different states, over 70 projects that were getting clean energy savings to households that couldn’t put solar on their own rooftop. Community solar is the idea that you enjoy a portion of a shared solar farm instead. Community is embedded in the product and in the way that people enjoy clean-energy savings. 

We found when we were going to people and saying, “Hey, there’s this amazing product, it saves you 10% on your electricity bills. You don’t have to put anything on your home, you don’t change your relationship with the utility company. Do you want to sign up?” A lot of people would be like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That sounds too good to be true. I don’t trust you. No, thank you.” We were like, wow, okay. 

So there’s this amazing product, it just saves people money on their electricity bill, and they’re skeptical. With good reason, because especially low-income communities have been so exploited that there’s a deficit of trust. We found that if we went through community partners—people they trusted like their workplace, or their schools, or their neighbors—and we got them to tell them about the product, that people would sign up in exponentially higher numbers. 

If I came to your door and I said, “Hey, Willow, can you sign up for community solar?” Statistics show that only 1 out of 100 people will sign up that way. But our numbers showed that when a friend went to you and said, “Hey, Willow, sign up for this. I did it, too,” then 30-50% of people signed up for community solar with Solstice that way. 

Willow

Wow!

Steph

All the studies show this too, by the way. There’s a Yale study by Kenneth Gillingham that shows that the reason why people put solar on their rooftop is because they saw their friends and neighbors doing it. There’s a study through RARE, which is a behavioral economics institute in climate, that showed that why do people take climate action? Defined as composting, or buying an EV, or getting a heat pump, or getting solar. They don’t do it based on whether or not they believe in climate change. Unfortunately, a lot of people believe in climate change and don’t take those actions. They found that it didn’t matter whether you were a Democrat or a Republican. That was surprising to some people, but they take climate action kind of equally and in equal measure. 

The only predictive thing that showed whether people take climate action is if they see everyone around them doing it, too. That action is contagious, and invigorating, and inspiring. If people see people they trust do something, they want to do it, too. We often talk about financial capital as the most important currency in the world, money as being the most important currency in the world. Or if you work in clean energy, you often talk about electricity being the most important currency. But in fact, trust is the most important currency, especially in these times. Trust is earned, not entitled. Trust is the currency in which we should build our systems around. 

Willow

Trust is the currency. What I’ve loved about creating this series is how so many of the different episodes have fit together. We had Esther Perel on an earlier episode speaking about the modern loneliness crisis. It shows how all of these problems are really interconnected, but so are the solutions. Fostering trust, creating community, getting to know the people around us actually can help make climate action contagious because you see your neighbor doing something and it inspires you to do something. 

It also, to me, really highlights—there’s often, I think, a conversation around, do we focus on individual action or do we focus on collective action? It’s such a false binary to me because your example is a perfect illustration of the fact that sometimes your individual action can illuminate a path forward for the person next to you. It makes me think of murmurations of starlings when they’re flying through the air and there’s not just one conductor. It’s each starling is looking at the, I think it’s seven birds around them, and they’re all flying in harmony. There is so much that we can do as individual actors within our communities, within our neighborhoods, within the relationships where we can actually build trust as currency, as you were saying. 

Steph

Yeah. I started out as a kid thinking I was going to change the world, and I’ve gotten much more humble since then. I’ve realized since then, one of my greatest lessons in life is that actually, a voice can change a room. I believe that in the core of my soul, that a voice can change a room and that is the unit of change that matters. What matters is not actually the, “I’m going to change everything,” but, “I can change what I can control.” That creates a ripple that inspires other people to join the movement, too. That is how we actually build the new world we need. 

Willow

I can’t believe that we’re this deep into this season of the podcast and I have not brought up my mother, because she is one of my greatest teachers. Growing up, she was a professor of ethics. I used to watch her give talks and lectures at different universities. Something she would always talk about was that you didn’t need to reach everyone. Sometimes it was just about reaching the five people around you. That’s your sphere of influence, because you don’t know who each of those five people are connected to because they have their own sphere of influence. I think so often, people are afraid to use their voice or they question what they could possibly influence. But it doesn’t matter how big or small that room is; every single person is in a room with other people who need to hear how they can create change in their lives. I love your analogy of it’s not about using your voice to change the world, it’s using your voice to change the room. 

Steph

The unit of change. It makes a lot of sense that your mom was a deep thinker. Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Willow

Mom, I hope you’re listening to this.

Steph

Actually, my mom is the one that taught me about redefining wealth because we didn’t have money. She was a single mom with three kids. We grew up—it was impossible to define success or happiness based on money because we didn’t have it. She said, “Wealth is what people cannot take away from you during hard times,” or during a recession. What does that mean? That means wealth is your time, wealth is your relationships, wealth is the knowledge in your body, and spirit, and mind. No one can take that away from you. Starting from that elemental core belief, and then realizing that actually, yeah, capital is helpful in the world on a practical level because it allows you to change the world, and influence systems, and move incentive structures to be more aligned with our human values. It’s not like we’re saying that wealth on a financial level doesn’t matter. It’s one of many things that matter. How do we align all those things that make us live better lives? 

Willow

It’s beautifully said. Speaking of scale, as a last question, what are a few actions that listeners—no matter their background, no matter their field of work—can take to help shift capital toward this more just and regenerative world that you’re describing?

Steph

Given that we’ve established the dichotomy between individual action and collective action is a false dichotomy, can we take individual action that serves as the light to everyone around us? That’s the way of the future. I want to follow that. Can you consider getting community solar if you don’t own? Can you help community solar get built in your community? Because there’s $7 billion of Solar For All money that is right now flowing into 49 states and six tribes across the country who are building more affordable solar projects. Can you help them? Then can you put it on your own home, if you can afford that or get the financing to do it? Or can you join a local campaign to make sure that the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t get repealed? There are so many ways to make sure that we can do it. 

Lastly, just talking to your friends and neighbors about it. Be the starling that everyone around wants to follow. Be the light that lights up a dark room. Slowly but surely, together—only together—will we get through some dark times. 

Willow

Thank you so much, Steph. This has been such an illuminating conversation. Honored to have you on the podcast and appreciate you using your voice to change the room. 

NARRATION

At the end of each episode, I offer three prompts for guided self-reflection to help internalize and investigate how this week’s themes show up in our daily lives, and how we can apply the principles discussed. For this week, my questions are:

1. What does what I spend my money on reveal about what I value? 

2. What is a form of wealth that I want to invest more in?

3. How can I use the currency of trust that I’ve amassed with people in my life to better impact the planet?

The Nature Of is an Atmos Podcast produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Nuzum of Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Julie Natt, Eleanor Kagan, and Daniel Hartman. Our sound designer is Kristin Mueller. The executive producers of The Nature Of are me—Willow Defebaugh—Theresa Perez, Jake Sargent, and Eric Nuzum. Atmos is a nonprofit media organization focused on the cross-pollination of climate and culture. In addition to our podcast, we deliver award-winning journalism and creative storytelling through our biannual print magazine, daily digital features, original newsletters, and more. To support our work or this podcast, see our show notes or visit atmos.earth/biome. That’s A-T-M-O-S.Earth/B-I-O-M-E. I’m your host Willow Defebaugh and this is The Nature Of.