#246: Dr. Peter Johnston - The Single Biggest Way to Reduce Your Impact on Mother Earth
Learn More About Peter Johnston
Dr. Peter Johnston, a lifestyle medicine practitioner advocating for plant-based diets and environmental activism, shares his journey from his New Zealand roots as a sheep shearer to his personal and professional mission of shedding light on the impact of food systems on climate, health, and animal welfare.
Here’s the sobering truth: We can't feed the whole world today on a Western style diet. There just isn't enough land or resources. It will be even more impossible with the forecast of 10 billion people by mid century.
Dr. Johnston discusses the consequences of biodiversity loss, deforestation, overfishing, loss of insects, and antibiotic resistance, and the urgent need for sustainable practices to combat these issues.
He also proposes simple solutions for each of us to embrace plant-based alternatives and practices for a healthier planet and sustainable future.
Episode Highlights
4:58 Dr. Peter Johnston's Background and Foray into Activism
18:36 Research on Aging and Genetics
22:27 His Transition to Plant-Based Diet
27:57 Health Concerns in Australia and the Rise of Plant-Based Eating
30:48 Biodiversity Loss and Mass Extinction Concerns
35:15 Deforestation Impact: Australia and the Amazon
37:28 Reflecting on Environmental Destruction and Inaction
42:00 Consider Adoption
46:47 The Wild Inefficiency of Animal Agriculture
57:13 Taking Action for a Sustainable Future - Avoid Meat and Dairy
58:08 Grow Your Own Food
1:00:45 Ideas to Reduce Food and Material Waste at Home
1:02:23 Engage in Local Exchange Trading System (LETS)
1:08:17 Hopeful Industry Initiatives and a Sustainable Future
About Dr. Peter Johnston
Dr Peter Johnston is an accredited practising dietitian with a Masters in Nutrition and Dietetics and a PhD in Human Genetics. Peter is also a fellow of the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine, has completed health coaching training with Well Start Health and is a founding Advisory Council member for the charity Doctors For Nutrition. He has been exclusively plant-based since 1991 after learning of the health, environmental and ethical benefits. He has expertise in the prevention, treatment and reversal of chronic diseases through the use of whole food plant based diets and the holistic approach of lifestyle medicine (nutrition as well as exercise, sleep, stress management, addictions and social connections). He enjoys empowering people across all life stages to attain optimal health. Peter has enjoyed attending and speaking at numerous national and international conferences. He has a special interest in the links between food and environment and has also run university lectures in this area.
Episode Resources
Dr. Johnston’s Presentation Slides
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Full Transcript via AI Transcription Service
I'm Rip Esselstyn, and you're listening to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast.
What's the single biggest way that we can reduce our impact on the earth's resources?
We're going to find out today with lifestyle medicine practitioner, registered dietitian, and longtime environmental activist, Dr.
Peter Johnston, right after this message from PLANTSTRONG.
[0:28] I want to tell you something and that is operating a food company has been one of the most challenging endeavors of my life from innovating products that we want to land at the intersection of taste and nutrition to wrestling with supply chain issues and managing inventory I have had had more sleepless nights in the past three years than I have in the last 30, including the 12 when I was a firefighter.
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[2:33] Several months ago, I received an email from my guest today, Dr. Peter Johnston.
Peter's a native New Zealander that's now living and practicing in Australia, and he's a registered dietitian with a master's in nutrition and dietetics and a PhD in human genetics.
He's also a fellow of the Austral Asian Society of Lifestyle Medicine.
[3:00] In his email to me, He shared a very powerful PowerPoint presentation about the impact of food systems and the environment and invited me to use this information from his research any way that I saw fit.
I can't think of a better way to celebrate Earth Day than by having Peter on the podcast guest this week to talk about his work and share solutions for our climate, soil, animals, and the health crisis that is afoot. Here's the thing.
We can't feed the whole world today on a Western-style diet.
We all are aware of this. There just isn't enough land or resources.
And it's going to be even more impossible with the forecast of 10 billion people by mid-century and Dr.
Johnston proposes a solution for each of us and ways that we can cast a vote for the kind of world that we want.
And yes, it can be as simple and powerful as avoiding meat and dairy products and eating more plants.
Please welcome to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast, Dr. Peter Johnston. Dr. Peter Johnston.
[4:22] Alright, Peter Johnson, all the way from Australia. Welcome to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast.
Thank you, Rip. It's a pleasure and honor to meet you. I'm excited to be here.
Yeah. How are you doing, mate?
It's early in the morning, but I'm caffeinated, so I'm happy and well.
It's 6 a.m. here, and still dark.
Midsummer. Well, so what exactly is the time there? Here in Austin, Texas, it's 1.03 in the afternoon.
Yeah, we're about 16 hours ahead of you, so I can tell you what's going to happen in the future.
[4:59] That's pretty trick. It's 6 a.m. Yeah, Wednesday morning.
Well, so Peter, you have a real passion for all things plants and trying to get the world for the most part to eradicate itself from animal agriculture, which you've done a lot of research on and proves to be very, very inefficient and costly to both our human health and to the planetary health.
And I want to dive into that in great detail.
But before we do, I'd love to learn a little bit more about you.
So tell me, you're in Australia. Were you born and raised in Australia?
No, I'm a Kiwi. I'm from New Zealand. Seriously?
Wow. I grew up in beautiful New Zealand, the land of a long white cloud, as it's called by the Maori, the native people there.
Or sometimes they called it the land of the wrong white crowd.
I came to Australia in 87 to do my PhD here in human genetics.
[6:09] Got it in human genetics okay and along that way you uh you you've done a lot of other things i mean so what along your path led you to decide that you wanted to you know do get a phd human genetics and i think before we started rolling here you you mentioned that you also got a phd in aging from somewhere in Montreal, if I'm not mistaken.
No, I did my PhD in Canberra here at the National University in human genetics to study aging, and that took me to Montreal to do a postdoc, but that didn't go very well for multiple reasons, the bully boss, lack of genetic engineering equipment.
So I left academia and left that job and never came back.
I did a range of other things including about a decade as a pretty much full-time political activist fighting for social justice causes in New Zealand, Australia and the US.
[7:17] And then retrained as a dietician so I came back here and did a master's in nutrition and dietetics in the mid-90s What kind of social justice causes were you fighting for?
Environment, feminism, anti-uranium mining, racial justice, free education, anti-capitalist stuff, pretty much the whole kit and caboodle for more social justice.
So that was a tremendous education. I had pretty much seven years doing that full-time, and And we read and studied voraciously the whole time.
So world history, politics, economics, theory, you know, we produced our own newspaper and.
[8:08] Distributed that so that was interesting and it wasn't wasn't the smartest career move but um it was a hell of an education around how the world works and how power works.
[8:20] I i i would imagine so it's probably one of the things that has forged you into who you are today, it has yeah it gave me i developed a really strong sense of social justice and i was already a vegan then um and but the the others in the organizations with me weren't interested in that at all despite me raising it so that was a frustration i didn't see it as important or relevant isn't that isn't that something to me it's kind of bewildering to me that you're we're working with a bunch of people that are really passionate about social justice and yet they can't they can't see something with you and i and i think all of our listeners see is so blatantly obvious is the social injustices around our food system our current food system and what it is doing to humanity the planet all that stuff of course how it's speciesism how how, you know, I think there's a lot of violence involved in the way we produce and exploit animals.
And I think we'd have a much more gentle, peaceable population if we didn't treat animals like that.
We recognised them as fellow sentient beings.
And also they were environmentalists, but they were blind to the environmental destruction of animal agriculture.
[9:47] So very smart, good people, lots of amazing people I met in those years, but just the blinkered cognitive dissonance, maybe they like their meat, their eggs, their dairy, et cetera.
Yeah. No, I think cognitive dissonance is the perfect term for that.
So you mentioned….
[10:07] Before we jumped on here that you did uh for several years you were doing something with sheep what what exactly was it you did you did with with sheep that we should know about you have to be careful how you phrase that in new zealand it used to be i think anywhere not just new zealand right new zealand used to have about three times more sheep than it had people oh they they uh they joked that it was the land where men were men and sheep were nervous.
[10:40] Oh that's awesome peter anyway this is probably a family show so i shouldn't go any further but i worked in shearing gangs as a young man during my summer holidays so a shearing gang what does that mean exactly all right this doesn't translate um, when New Zealand produced a lot of wool and sheep's meat, so the wool was a big valuable product.
So the sheep needed to be shorn once a year, so spring and summer.
And so they had specialised professional shearers with support staff who'd pick up the fleece and get the sheep out of the pens.
And people like me, I did the pressing of the wool bales.
So that was a team of people. We had a team of seven usually with one cook.
And we would travel around from farm to farm, work seven days a week, 5am to 5pm until the flock was shorn.
And so long days, very physical work, very hot and sweaty in these hot sheds with just a tin roof, no insulation.
[11:45] And we would, I did this for three summers, all summer. It was good pay for a young guy.
But seven of us plus the cook would eat a sheep a day, because it was such physical work and so and so and so when you say you'd eat a sheep a day so you'd be give me an example from 5 a.m to 5 p.m how many sheep could you shear are we talking like 250 or are we talking 500 or are we talking 50 lambs are quicker because they're smaller but from memory the top shearers would shear about 400 sheep a day and there'd be usually three Three shearers, three rouser bouts who were the ones who swept away the droppings and picked up the fleece and brought it to the presser, which was me.
[12:35] Okay. Okay. And so –, And then what, at some point in the day, would you guys kill one of the sheep to eat or was there a cook and that was his job? How did that work?
We had a cook and it was always a female, but just sign of the times, I guess.
The farmer would have a sheep or two hanging in the shed for about a week, getting a bit more ripe. So it was tender.
And my job as the presser was to cut off the manky bits where there are flies at it.
And butcher that animal it was already skinned and gutted so i would have to cut it into pieces and bring it up for the cook and then we'd have a cooked we start at five we'd have a cooked full meal 7 a.m midday and after we'd showered at finish of day at five after 5 p.m so that cooked meal would be huge amounts of sheep meat potatoes and vegetables and and is is can you remember in those over the course of those three summers did you get absolutely sick and tired of sheep meat or or not oh no i was it was such physical work and i was you you know that age i was yeah always hungry so the the joke the boss even joked he was going to have to cut my pay because i ate so much and it was really physical work and you were probably what six feet 130 130?
[14:02] No, I've always been skinny, but I was around six foot then.
Okay. So it was really hard work. So you were really hungry when the food came out and we had to cook morning, morning tea and afternoon tea, each, you know, scones, biscuits, cakes.
We had enormous amount of food.
And so did, so did that experience, did that affect your, um, your move to go and become plant-based?
No, not a bit, actually. It wasn't until I met a vegetarian girlfriend at university.
Was that about 1980, 81? And she was the first person I'd ever met who didn't eat meat or fish. And I thought it was pretty weird.
But she was really nice, and we lived together for three years.
[14:53] And pretty quickly I picked up the habit and decided I couldn't eat meat anymore.
I literally gagged on a ham roll at university and said, I'm done.
I'm not eating meat or fish again.
And I knew nothing about the environment, nothing about health, nothing about ethics. I just didn't like it anymore.
And I began to learn after that about the impact.
But we'd arranged to not eat meat at home to make it easier when we were living together and we were living with my sister and her boyfriend.
Four of us, you know, share accommodation. It was cheap for students.
And I was still having meat outside of the house. But once I gagged on this ham roll, that was the end.
That was 81 I became vegetarian.
[15:39] 81 and then you went you went fully plant-based in 91 is that right yeah correct yeah after reading john robbins seminal work diet for new america oh yeah in montreal you good for you for for for being curious and reading john's book um yeah that.
[15:59] That book really swayed a lot of people oh yeah to go to go to go plant-based yeah there's a whole generation of john robbins vegans around the world i've met one of my yoga studio here we're good friends now she became vegan around the same time same same reason wow fantastic uh so i'd love to know a little bit about you've got a whole bunch of degrees will you share with everybody at the degrees that you have before i start peppering you with questions on food and the environment and um and all kinds of good stuff well i don't want to sound like i'm boasting i was just i was more yeah i was trying to avoid getting a real job and in those days you got paid to go to university so it was it was easier to stay on and study but um i started with a bachelor's in psychology because i didn't know what to do i'd um worked a little bit after school and having the failed attempt of being a trainee teacher I didn't like that so I did a psych degree with politics and philosophy but towards the end of it I realized for some reason I got obsessed about not aging and terrified of dying so finished that degree and right off the back of that went straight into a science degree with as much genetics and biochemistry as I could get and.
[17:24] And so I did a BSc honours degree in zoology, which is where all the genetics and physiology and biochem was in those days.
Yeah. And then got a scholarship to Australia, came here in 87 and did my doctorate, a PhD in human genetics.
So we were cloning and sequencing and splicing DNA.
And that was really giving me the tools and the skills to pursue research into causes of aging because I was obsessed with not getting old or not having my parents die on me, and I wanted them to be able to keep living.
So I was in a race against time as I saw it to find out what causes aging.
I was pretty convinced then and now that it's programmed.
So I did that. I finished that degree. Let me interrupt you for a second.
And so you came to the realization that it's programmed, meaning what?
That we can maybe extend our lifespan and our healthspan, but we're all going to die?
[18:37] Yeah, extend the lifespan and healthspan, but whether we died or not, the idea was that it would only be by tragic accident that you could live indefinitely.
But then, you know, I began to realise that this would be a crazy thing.
It wouldn't be very socially sustainable and the rich would probably benefit first.
And I began to be a little bit more socially conscious of what this would mean.
But my postdoc in Montreal didn't go well.
I had a bully boss and they didn't have much recombinant DNA equipment.
And I saw senior academics losing their jobs because their funding didn't go through. And I had mortgages and kids and I got disillusioned with academia.
[19:24] Ski bum for a year in Banff, Canada. Beautiful place.
Oh, heaven. Lake Louise, Banff, Nordic, good places.
Some of the happiest days of memories of my life.
But then I drifted down to San Francisco where I had a cousin and got into, accidentally into political activism.
That really opened my eyes. So after a period there, I came back to Australia and did a master's in nutrition and dietetics.
I decided I needed a new career.
Right. And that's kind of what your career is today, right?
Yeah. I'm a dietitian. I worked in health promotion, community development, and local government for quite a while.
But since COVID began, I've been full-time private practice and running retreats, lifestyle stop medicine retreats with a couple of colleagues, which are amazing fun.
I know you do them. Yeah. And they're intense and a lot of work, but they're really gratifying. So gratifying.
Yeah. And they're so life-changing to see people's changes within seven days.
[20:34] And we've done workplace health programs as well, which is also amazing to do.
And those are a lot less hands-on, but you can get enormous changes as well. Yeah.
It seems to me, I've known several New Zealanders over my life, and it seems that every one of them has this wonderlust to get out of New Zealand and travel the world.
So is that basically what you did with Canada and Banff and San Francisco, or did you do more than just that?
And haven't you noticed they're all good-looking and intelligent? It's crazy.
[21:13] Yeah, it is. I think growing up there, it's paradise and it's stunningly beautiful, but it feels like the end of the earth and like you're missing out on the bigger world because it really is tucked away, sort of out of the way, and it's a long way to anywhere.
I mean, it's a three-hour hop over to Australia, but it's still pretty isolated.
So Kiwis have this really strong compulsion to get out and see the world.
Yeah. And there's a lot of travelers. And there's about a million of them, like me, who didn't come back.
Actually, we're going back to New Zealand tomorrow for a month for a holiday.
So because I haven't been back since COVID. Wow. Are your parents still alive?
My father passed away in 91, sadly, of a brain hemorrhage at 71.
My mother's still alive, but she's in Australia now. She lives nearby, and she's turning 88 this year and is doing great.
Right. Do you have any brothers or sisters?
Yeah, sisters in Melbourne, brothers in London. So all of us have fled New Zealand.
I've got lots of cousins and friends in New Zealand who I'll be checking up on and visiting and hanging out with when we go back. Got it, got it.
[22:28] In reviewing and looking at your bio, uh i love seeing that you're a avid yoga practitioner how often do you practice yoga, three times a week as if i can um and yoga one day gym the next so i pump weights even though it doesn't show but i've i'm i think i'm destined to be tall and weedy but yeah i love yoga i've done yoga for decades i started at uni in christchurch probably in new zealand in the the mid 80s early 80s and i've i've had some gaps but i've done it solidly for 10 years now three days a week at least right and i'm i love that i'm 65 and i can still do handstands wow you're 65, that's incredible and we have like workshops the other weekend we did an hour and a half of handstands and drills and i can i'm the oldest in the class by decades so can you walk on your hands, Not yet. I'm working on it. Okay.
All right. We'll work on that together. I can, but not for more than, you know, eight seconds.
Well, you're a professional athlete.
Well, I mean, but walking on your hands is a completely different animal.
It is. I know. And then you also, are you still competing in speed windsurfing? Yes, I am.
Yeah. Wow. That is intense.
[23:52] It's crazy. Yeah, you're going out in gale force winds in the rare places where you can get flat water and high wind.
So that usually means behind a sandbar or, you know, a freakishly flat lake in South Australia that stays flat even when it's windy. And so we're doing...
[24:12] 80 kilometers an hour, which I think is 50 miles per hour on these tiny little boards like an ironing board and fully powered up.
It's an equal mixture of fear and adrenaline and excitement.
And then you so you're doing a water start. You're getting harnessed in and then you're just taking off. Yeah.
Gosh, incredible. How long you been doing that sport?
Since 79, I bought my first board in New Zealand. I had a long gap when I was traveling and poor and as a student, but I did a lot for six years or so after I started.
Then I've been back into it heavily for 20 years.
[24:52] Well, that's kind of a sport that our family, the Esselstyn family, my brothers and my sister and my parents, we got into for maybe a good three, four years.
And that's what we would do for vacations. we'd go to different places and we'd windsurf.
It's expensive, though, and you've got a lot of gear around and you need different sails and different boards for different winds.
It's not a user-friendly sport. Young people are switching to kite surfing or foiling, wing sailing. Yeah, yeah.
All right, great. So let's get into the weeds here, okay? OK, I want to get I want to get serious with you because, you know, you've got some some pretty big aspirations here for us as a society.
And first, you say that we are in big trouble. We are in big trouble. Yeah.
[25:52] You want to talk about that and what you kind of mean by that?
Yeah, well, we're an ecological overshoot, and I'm very indebted to the work of Professor Bill Rees from Canada who developed the concept of the ecological footprint.
But we're overusing all the key world's resources, and our society is utterly dependent in every aspect on fossil fuels, which are a finite resource.
They're a one-off carbon pulse.
Once they're gone, they're gone. And we're not building renewables yet with renewables. We're still using fossil fuel to build solar panels and wind towers and et cetera.
It's estimated that every calorie of food we eat takes 10 to 20 calories of fossil fuel to produce, to get it to you.
So that's the growing, the transporting, the refrigeration, et cetera.
It's wildly unsustainable. All the biodiversity is collapsing through taking their land for, you know, vast agricultural farms.
We're seeing a collapse of insect populations. We're losing topsoil.
We're pumping out groundwater faster than it's replacing.
There's just multiple pressure points on our ecosystems globally.
We're overfishing the oceans.
Climate change is just one aspect of multiple problems.
[27:21] Yeah, yeah. It's a symptom of overshoot.
It's definitely a big problem, but there's a whole host of other problems that are bearing down upon us.
[27:34] Yeah, you actually, you refer to it as a multiple interrelated diabolical crises.
Yes. Kind of, you know, all hitting us at once. Yeah.
Each one of them would be an enormous challenge to address.
[27:51] And yet we might have, there's probably 15 or 16 different of these diabolical crises facing us.
Yeah, at least. feast but let me let me ask you this what is the health of of australia like uh does it closely mimic the health of uh america or i should say not health but the sickness as far as the obesity the diabetes and all that stuff yes we're very close behind we're not quite as bad as the u.s i was traveling to the u.s frequently before covid for conferences etc where i've met your mother and father, by the way, delightful people.
Yeah. And done workshops with them.
[28:33] Australia's not far behind. We've got 70 plus percent are overweight or obese.
Most working age adults have multiple risk factors for chronic disease.
Self-reported in the last census, around half of Australians report having one or more chronic diseases.
[28:49] Many of them will be pre-diabetic and not realise what risk they're in.
Many will have significant vascular damage and be you know ticking time bombs for heart attacks or cancer so we're in an incredibly sick society yeah um is is it my understanding is that australia is becoming pretty um pretty pro vegan plant-based is that your sentiment as well Are you seeing that?
Yeah, it's growing very fast, very fast.
And every time there's a new documentary, we get a wave of more people embracing it, checking it out.
People are much more open to it. Every family has a vegan with one of the kids or grandkids or cousin or brother.
The um like the new series on netflix you are what you eat yeah has led to a wave of people wanting to join our whole food plant-based aussies facebook group oh great so a lot like hundreds yeah i i i saw a graph i think it was on plant-based news instagram channel yesterday and it showed that i think just last year in the uk a million more people now identify as vegan which now is now well over, I think it's 3 million people in the UK.
[30:14] And I don't know what the population is of the UK off the top of my head, but what's Australia? Are you guys at about 25 million?
I think it's 26 now. Okay. Yeah. And it's been growing fast.
Like we've been taking in half a million immigrants a year since COVID. Right.
[30:30] Creating a little bit of infrastructure pressure, housing shortages, so there's some pushback.
But yeah, it's a big country, but unlike the U.S., most of it's not fertile or livable. Right.
Let's get back to talking about some of these diabolical crises that are kind
[30:46] of all going on right here at the same time.
You talk about biodiversity loss. And one of the things that I found interesting in reviewing your presentation on this is that 10,000 years ago, we had basically 99% of wild mammals existed on the planet, and humans accounted for just 1%, right?
And that's flip-flopped, right, since then.
[31:15] And you say that this is basically going to lead us, you know, we are in the sixth mass extinction.
What does that mean exactly? We are in the sixth mass extinction.
Well, there have been previous mass extinctions for different reasons, like dramatic climate change, asteroids, large volcanic explosions, eruptions.
This one is anthropogenic, meaning it's caused by humans.
And we are competitively displacing wild species through taking over the land, through advanced monoculture, through use of pesticides and other poisons and sprays, clear harvesting the oceans with, you know, dragnets, overfishing, clearing all the trees, the forests are being cut back and reduced massively.
So there's just loss of habitat and apex predators are being killed wherever there are farmers who don't want them to take their animals, you know, so that the wolves and the lions, etc. are taken out, they're killed.
[32:23] It's just a collapse of species on multiple levels.
Yeah. And of that, the insects are collapsing about eight times faster than vertebrates.
But the ripple effect of that is the lizards and the birds and the creatures that eat the insects are also facing food shortages.
And they'll face population declines and collapses potentially.
Potentially well you you you mentioned how we could have a a world without insects within a century and explain exactly why that is such a a travesty what does that mean for humanity and and and life on earth well the first thing most people would think of is we need pollinators about 70 percent of our food supply relies on pollinators which are insects bees etc and if If they go, then we will have enormous trouble feeding ourselves.
We will anyway for other reasons we can discuss, but pesticide use is now considered the main cause of insect population decline.
[33:30] We're also eliminating the habitat that they live and breed in, like shrubs and trees that were more prevalent in forests, but also climate change is causing stress and decline in species.
Species um i've seen data in north america about the massive decline in monarch monarch butterflies yeah we have a parallel here with these things called bogong moths now 30 years ago when i was in canberra doing my phd i remember in season you'd see clouds of these moths floating around, Like thousands, millions and millions and millions of them. And if you were driving, your windscreen would be covered in bugs.
Any time of year, there'd be enough bugs that you'd have to stop and clean your screen and your headlights at dusk, you know, at a petrol station every hour or two.
Now that doesn't happen. The bogong moths are massively declined, and there's a lot of species that rely on those creatures for their food.
[34:34] Yeah. Yeah, I just find it to be, it makes my stomach sink, right?
Thinking about that and how the diversity of the, you know, all the insects, all the animals, all living things.
And when you remove, you know, one fell swap, one part of it, you're taking the legs out from, you know, an important part of what makes us tick.
Great. Yeah, yeah.
[35:15] What about deforestation? You know, we know deforestation is absolutely running rampant in the Amazon.
Do you have deforestation in Australia? earlier?
Enormous, sadly, yeah. And it's clearing scrublands with trees for more cattle grazing mainly and.
[35:36] A lot of land clearing is still happening, especially in the north.
The state I live in, they've only just stopped native forest logging.
It's stopping in the next year or two. This is old-growth forests that are, you know, hundreds of years old and complex, amazing ecosystems.
It's unthinkable that they're still considered okay to log that stuff when we have a lot of plantation timber available.
You know, there's a lot of political lobbying that's enabled this to continue, but it's really criminal what they're doing.
You mentioned the Amazon, like the tropical forest tree loss is still enormous.
And I'm so glad there's been a change of government in Brazil, but the Amazon apparently is now a net carbon emitter rather than net carbon sequesterer.
And it's reaching a tipping point where it could burn completely like we had rainforests in Australia burned in the large bushfires of 2019, 2020 over that horrendous summer.
Oh, yeah. And much of Australia was on fire. And those rainforests have never burned in any known history.
You know, they're not supposed to burn. They're rainforests.
They're supposed to be too moist.
So the Amazon is drying out gradually as it's getting the – its margins nibbled at and the planet's heating.
[37:04] The Amazon's so big it has its own weather, but this is going to change.
It will burn and it will turn into a savannah probably unless we do some dramatic changes and start to protect it.
Yeah. And in many ways it's the lungs of the planet.
You know, these forests really are so vital for biodiversity and the ecosystem and the climate.
[37:29] Well, it's like Dr. Seuss's The Lorax. It's like, how can we not see what we're doing to ourselves and to this precious planet that we live on?
And how do we continue to allow this egregious behavior?
It's mind-numbing to me.
[37:56] Yeah. It's like the tragedy of the commons. You know, each individual person or business is pursuing their own interests without looking at the bigger picture.
And I think we have, my partner's a trauma therapist and she deals with sociopaths and psychopaths and narcissists.
And they, from what I know, these people tend to rise to positions of power or end up in prison.
And so, you know, corporate leaders, military leaders often can be sociopathic, which means they have no guilt or shame and they're ruthless.
And I think these people often rise to positions of power where they pursue their own interests and greed without regard for other people or other creatures or the environment.
I think it takes a certain personality to recklessly endanger our home in this way.
I think there's also an ignorance. It's easy to feel like the earth is vast and resilient and it can take whatever we, you know, throw at it with a chainsaw or axe or fire, but there's too many of us.
[39:05] It's just, it's not able to withstand the multiple assaults on its ecosystems globally, and we're seeing the result of that.
We've passed six of the nine planetary boundaries.
You know, we're overtaxing the Earth in almost every aspect globally.
[39:27] So you said something that I don't know if I've ever heard before.
[39:34] We've overpassed six of the nine planetary boundaries. What are those boundaries?
Actually, I can't recite them all, but there's like the amount of –.
[39:47] I don't have this in my slide set because I don't usually refer to that, But it's a concept that there's – it's key.
The scientists worked out there are key areas that we have a finite amount of resources we can use.
And there are nine of those areas.
And we've overreached six of those nine.
Right, right. Right. Well, and in your presentation, in your presentation, you know, you mentioned how, excuse me, you know, we're approaching, we're going to be approaching 10 billion people on the planet here within the next, you know, couple decades.
That in and of itself, I would imagine, is going to be surpassing one of those.
Yes, correct, and many of the experts who look at this closely are the ecological economists.
[40:49] Estimate that perhaps the carrying capacity of us humans is maybe one to two billion for the planet to live harmoniously with the Earth's ecosystems.
[40:59] And we're at eight billion now as of late last year, predicted to go to 10 billion before we plateau.
Now, the footprint of those people, especially as they move towards a high consumption Western lifestyle, is just going to be way more than the planet can sustain.
We're already overreaching the planet's resources every year um so the the footprint on the planet it's already we live like we have 1.7 planets so we're we're digging down into the resources faster than they can renew yeah when you said we're going to you know reach 10 billion and then plateau.
Do you know why is it that we plateau at $10 billion?
Birth rates are declining globally, especially in the more developed, wealthy countries. In fact, they're below replacement rate.
The lowest, I think, is South Korea, which is about 1.1 babies per couple.
All the developed Western countries and China are populating at below the replacement rate.
There's big population growth in the very poor countries, particularly Africa, and that's traditionally been an economic, an education, and a matter of availability of birth control, fertility control, et cetera.
[42:28] But those countries are also predicted to plateau in future as the women get more control over their own fertility.
[42:36] Contraception, et cetera. Well, that all sounds very – as far as –, doing the right thing for Mother Earth because we're so overpopulated, that sounds like a smart solution, right?
Have less children or don't have any children, be child-free and adopt. Absolutely.
I mean, in some ways our own stupidity is helping us because the fertility rate of humans is also dropping steadily at several percent per year.
This is environmental pollutants, poor health. So couples around the world are having more trouble having babies because they're just not healthy and they've got too many environmental contaminants, pollutants.
It's not quite clear what the problem is, but we're not able to produce enough babies in many countries.
So that's actually a good thing in my mind. It's sad for the couples who want a child.
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. What about you? You mentioned in your presentation the collapse of fisheries.
Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Yeah, there are multiple factors happening there. We're essentially overfishing where most of the world's fisheries are in collapse through overfishing. fishing.
[44:02] And experts will argue that where any fishing is overfishing at the moment, the oceans are in such dire state.
And anyone who's seen that amazing documentary, Seaspiracy, will get a deep dive into this. I'd highly recommend that.
[44:18] We waste a lot of fish. Up to a third of fish is wasted before reaching the plate.
A lot of fish are dumped or they're fed to fish farms which is like a food factory in reverse you know so you give 10 kilos of fish meal to get one kilo of of farmed salmon for example but fish growth is being slowed by increasing ocean temperatures and plastic chemical pollution like bpa um yeah we're also decimating populations of seabirds of whales and dolphins of turtles seals we're clear fishing sharks you know so through the whole ocean food chain we're stressing it and overtaxing it um yeah we need to stop fishing, we are successfully doing everything in our power to not live in harmony with the other creatures that we inhabit this planet it's it's sinful it's it's sinful it's despicable and hearing you talk it um.
[45:32] It just makes me disgusted with us as a race. Me too, and it's heartbreaking.
And I don't think they're all bad people involved in these industries.
I just think they don't know what they don't know, and many of them are poor people who need to make a living and feed their children.
It's just that people are not taught about what we're doing and provided with alternatives.
Like, for most people around the world, they still have to do a job they don't really like, get up every morning and bring home money for their mortgage or their rent and their kids.
And many times that will be a job which is environmentally destructive, but if people don't have the education and the opportunity, they don't have a choice.
You know, so I don't – it's the leaders at the top who know this and are not doing anything that I really have anger for.
Anger is not really a healthy emotion, but they're the ones driving this.
It's the captains of industry who are educated enough to have a sense of what we're doing but as i said many of them will be sociopathic you know they'll have children and grandchildren and they won't be even factoring that in.
[46:47] Let could you let the audience know about the inefficiency of animal agriculture um you have some stats in your in your in your deck that i think are pretty darn powerful and i can i can jog your memory if you uh if you sure yeah no no i know this stuff from okay yeah i'm delivering this talk so often um the best the best estimate was from an amazing study from oxford university in england in in um 2018 by academics poor and nemesic and they surveyed over 90 of the world's food production from a bottom-up data collection point where they got food data from almost all of the world.
[47:29] And what they found was that animal agriculture is using 83% of all the world's farmland, but it produces only 18, 1.8% of our calories and about a third of our protein.
That is wildly inefficient, wildly inefficient.
What that means is if we stopped farming animals, and we let animals go wild again and didn't have feral animals.
You know, cows and sheep don't belong in Australia. Chickens are not from Australia.
They shouldn't be here at all. They're terrible for the soil and ecosystems.
So if we stopped animal agriculture, we could put 76% of all the world's farmland back to wilderness.
[48:13] How powerful would that be? That's amazing. We have the solution at our fingertips, which would take our foot off the throat of this precious planet within a year or two.
[48:24] If these animals would die out or we'd feed the remaining livestock to those who wanted their last bit of animal-based meat, and this would be an enormous reprieve for the planet.
[48:37] Enormous. Enormous. And so absolutely necessary.
Yeah. And we won't make one and a half degrees or let alone two unless we change animal egg, unless we get rid of it.
We have to change the way we produce food. because this is it's such a big contributor to global warming amongst other things yeah so can you just very very quickly mention it but i think it probably went over a lot of people's heads you mentioned 1.5 to 2 degrees why can you explain the importance of those numbers.
[49:10] Well they're considered to be points we shouldn't go past it's dangerous to get warmer than one and a half or two degrees.
And most of the scientists I know are listening to and reading are saying it's too late for one and a half degrees.
But we'll race past two degrees Celsius warming if we don't change how we've produced food.
We must change the food system in order to have any hope of not having runaway warming and reaching dangerous tipping points like losing all the world's polar ice and melting the methane permafrost regions which release enormous amounts of methane.
Multiple tipping points. The ocean currents could stop or change direction.
The oceans will get too warm. You know, there's multiple scary potential tipping points that we might pass if we don't keep temperatures which is beneath these agreed limits.
And the scientists say there's no hope of doing that without massively reducing animal egg. Yeah.
[50:23] Talk to me for a sec about antibiotic resistance and why that is.
What exactly that is and why it's important that we get that in check.
Yeah, this one particularly terrifies me. Okay.
We're squandering our precious antibiotics globally by overusing them in animal ag.
So they're administered prophylactically to factory farmed animals in particular.
So it's estimated that about 80% of the world's antibiotic use is for farming, for animals.
[50:59] Now, what this means is that because the concentration of those farmed animals in feedlot farming especially, so this is cattle in the US and more and more around the world.
Pigs and chickens particularly are farmed intensively in these intensive feedlots.
So those are stressed animals, they get more sick, so they give them antibiotics prophylactically to keep them well.
But it also coincidentally makes them grow faster, so it's an economic driver to this.
But what it means is the bacteria are being given more of a chance to develop resistance against those antibiotics.
And so one by one those antibiotics are becoming useless because if they're administered to someone with an infection they don't work anymore we're more and more seeing people get infected with antibiotic resistant bacteria we're approaching a pre-antibiotic era again what that means is if you get a bad infection in your leg amputation is the only option it means that hip replacements are off the table cesarean births are off the table these will be too risky you cannot do these without antibiotics so for most people if they get a bad infection it'll be removal of that area of the body that limb etc or they die yeah so according to the research that you've seen, how long do you think we we potentially are going to be in that era.
[52:28] Um well it depends on how fast we can find new antibiotics and also stop wasting them through overexposing them to bacteria in factory farming so the the bacteria, mutate and adapt very quickly because they have 50 life cycles in a day mostly and so they can change genetically they can learn to live with these antibiotics so So we're in a race against time and it seems like there are not the incentives globally to produce enough new antibiotics and they're very hard to find and develop.
And so if we squander the ones we have, our current arsenal that keep us safe and allow these operations and allow us not to have amputations through infection, then we're in deep trouble.
[53:21] You know so deep trouble um talk to me about food security um and about how you know you talk about how the soil that we have it took 500 years to develop this healthy topsoil um and we're We're effectively, of course, we're blowing that as well.
Yes. Well, industrial farming is leading to a net loss of topsoil every growing season because we're not farming regeneratively. We're not farming organically.
We're clearing vast areas of land and the dust will blow away.
The topsoil will run away in streams and rivers.
And so like many of the world's resources we're depleting the topsoil faster than it can regenerate and it can take 500 years to develop another centimeter of topsoil and the thin layer of soil around the globe is the what keeps us alive otherwise we're living on a rock and we can't grow food.
[54:34] And grass won't grow. It becomes desert and infertile and not viable for producing any food.
So we need to shift how we do agriculture so that we build the soil with every growing season.
This means regenerative organic agriculture where the soil is alive and full of microbiome and the vast populations of microbes that live in the soil and keep us healthy, keep the plants healthy.
Modern industrial agriculture is spraying poisons on the soil continuously.
And it's not really correctly, shouldn't be called soil, it's more just dirt.
And we keep those plants alive with petrochemical fertilizers and sprays.
So we need to rethink the way we do agriculture.
And places like the Rodale Institute in the US are doing amazing work, but permaculture is also incredible. That was developed out of Australia.
We practice permaculture in our section here in Melbourne.
[55:40] My partner is trained in it, did an intensive 12-month course.
So this is the way forward. We need to think about farming sustainably in a way that regenerates the soil.
And the nice bonus is that that will sequester carbon from the atmosphere.
Yeah, yeah. Because you've got a higher level of organic matter in the soil.
What's the actual cost right now for us eating animals?
You say how we pay for cheap animal food three times. What are those three times?
Well, we pay at the cash register when we pick up a slab of dead animal.
[56:20] We also pay in subsidies to animal agriculture industries.
And thirdly, we pay in the externalities that animal agriculture creates with health and environmental costs and damage.
So, you know, Peter, all this is pretty darn dark.
And frankly, a wee bit, or I should say a huge bit depressing.
So what can I do?
Like what can every one of the listeners to the PLANTSTRONG podcast, what can they do starting tomorrow to help basically mitigate and do each and every one of us do our part to try and turn this thing around?
[57:13] It's a great question, and I agree this is quite depressing.
You can start this before tomorrow. You can start with your next meal, your next snack by not eating animal food.
Pack up the animal food in your house and give it to someone you don't like.
It will harm their health. But don't eat it and don't buy any more.
If you eat plants, that's the single biggest thing most people can do, unless you're a very frequent flyer.
[57:43] It's enormous, the contribution of not eating animal food. It vastly helps the world's environment.
So it's exciting that we have the power in our own hands and our knife and fork, every single one of us, to make an enormous difference to the future of this beautiful planet and the species that we share it with, who are on their last legs, many of them.
[58:08] So that's a really exciting thing. um i would also say learn to grow your own food especially if you live in a city because cities cannot feed themselves they rely on a river of trucks every night and it's said that we're around around nine meals away from anarchy what does that mean exactly what does that mean to you nine meals is three days if we run out of food for three days people get hungry they'll start to riot.
They'll start to knock on their neighbours' doors and ask or steal food.
People don't like to be hungry. If they're hungry too much, they'll move like locusts and look for food.
And many people will do what it takes to get food.
It will lead to conflict and war. So learning to grow food is important.
So join a local gardening group, a permaculture group. group, learn to swap food with your neighbours, make friends with your neighbours.
Your neighbour might have a good crop of potatoes and you might have a good crop of tomatoes and you can swap.
Yeah, yeah. Or you call them tomatoes, but anyway, so there's a lot you can do in that regard.
And knowing your neighbours means you trust each other, so you're more likely to share and collaborate when times are hard rather than be looking to sneak over the fence and steal their food from the gardens.
[59:31] What about, do you have any, you mentioned earlier in our conversation about being supportive of, I think, regenerative, regenerative agriculture.
Absolutely. So you're a fan of organic and regenerative, right? A huge fan.
Organic is probably better for our health from what the science shows.
But the strongest reason I recommend organic is because it's better for the environment.
As I said, the pesticides are killing the soil. They're the leading cause of insect population collapse. We need those insects.
The earth will do fine without humans, but we won't last long without insects. Yeah.
And so organic is a better choice. And if you know the farmer, you're with a local community-supported agriculture, and you're supporting that farmer by providing them with income, and you know that they're farming regeneratively, then you're voting with your dollars.
To support agriculture that's helping the planet rather than harming the planet.
What about reducing food waste? How do you recommend we start that?
Because I know that food waste is out of control.
[1:00:45] It's terrible. We waste over a third of all the food grown, and a lot of it's at the household level.
I was talking to a patient this week saying, oh, I buy lots of fruit, but then I notice it's rotting and I have to throw it out.
And I said, well, you know, we're about to go away tomorrow.
Where we've got about 10 ripe bananas because we have a smoothie every day for dessert. So I will skin and freeze them.
[1:01:05] They'll be good to go when we get home in a month. And so you can cook the fruit up when it's ripe.
You know, you can keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't go off.
You can buy what you need and you can plan times where you cook food before it gets too old.
So there's a whole lot of ways to reduce waste.
And what about the, so what are you going to do with those 10 banana peels that you've turned into, you know, turned into, you know, frozen bananas for your smoothies?
Are those banana peels going to go into an organic compost bin?
Of course. I hope. We have four huge organic compost bins in our garden here.
I don't know if you can see outside. Oh, that's the great.
I love seeing that, Peter. Way to go, Peter.
Walking the walk, my man. I love it. Most people don't realize you can actually eat banana skins if you wash them.
They're quite edible. There are recipes out there for cakes made with the whole banana. You clip the top and tail off and take the little sticker off, blend it up, and you can put that in the cake.
So I think if times get hard, we won't be composting them. We'll be eating them.
[1:02:17] Well, you know, Carleigh Bodrug of Plant U, she actually turns banana peels into banana bacon.
Mistaken yes i've heard that yeah yeah so yeah yeah i was talking to my brother the other day and he was telling me that i can't remember what what war it was in my it might have been the civil war but um these these men in the wintertime got so hungry and they were so low on food they were eating their leather belts yeah i mean imagine that imagine that um what you have an acronym called let's what what exactly does that stand for it's a local exchange trading system so this is like a green dollar local economy so it means that you might have a skill like you can alter clothing, or you can cut hair, or you can mine someone's pet.
And I was in one of these when we lived further north years ago, and they were fabulous.
So what it means is that you trade your skills and no money changes hands, so you get an agreed credit for, say, an hour of trimming.
[1:03:36] Fixing clothing, you know, patching up socks or adjusting trousers.
And in that return for that credit, you can then purchase something like a haircut or someone gives you a lift.
And so it's not taxed and governments don't usually tax this, but it means you've got a local sustaining economy where you're supporting each other with the different skill sets you have.
This is a beautiful way to build community and have a more sustainable and sharing economy where there's less waste.
Yeah. So speaking of less waste, are you a big fan of people downsizing and less is more?
Absolutely. Yeah, we have to live more simply. I'm a huge fan of my guy, Nate Hagans, who's one of your compatriots. He's in Minnesota, I think.
He's got a really good podcast. I love his work, but he says we need to live much more simply because everything in our worlds is dependent on fossil fuel to dig up, to grow, to transport, to manufacture, to deliver.
[1:04:43] We're not going to have that luxury. We're going to have to get used to less energy driving our society, and that means building things to last.
[1:04:52] Fixing them, repairing them, sharing them not consuming as much living to learning to live with less and more simply and using our neighborhood and our community to support each other yeah and in return to me by downsizing by getting rid of all of the trappings uh societal trappings and things that we think we need you actually a light bulb goes on and to me you become happier instead of you know instead of searching for something this elusive thing that you just can't ever catch on to thinking that oh if i could just have this and i could have this and i could have this yeah and the capitalist economy encourages that continuous consumerism because that's what drives the economy yeah and if we're not growing then it's considered a bad thing it's it's said i don't know if you've heard the saying but we we in the modern world we're encouraged to spend money we don't have to buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like oh my goodness great can you say that one more time if you can remember it we're encouraged to spend money we don't have yeah to buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like and that's the state of of the modern world. It's very sad.
[1:06:16] And we end up with cluttered houses and when it's hard rubbish day, every year you see households with all this crap on the front lawn for the council to pick up, things that have built-in obsolescence that don't last long, that break after six months, and they end up in the rubbish and go to landfill.
And it's this mindless consumerism.
When I was a kid, we had woolen socks that were handmade and we repaired them when the toe went out.
[1:06:43] We fixed trousers. You know, we repaired clothing because it was expensive then.
It wasn't made with cheap or slave labor in third world countries.
It was made in New Zealand locally, and it cost a fair bit. So we looked after those things, and we repaired them and made them last.
And when you outgrew them, they were handed down to your younger sibling.
[1:07:04] This doesn't happen today. No, not to the extent that it should, not even close.
What's the Darwin app? I think you're a fan of the Darwin app.
Yeah, I heard this guy on a podcast that one of my friends runs, and he's actually the grandson of Charles Darwin, the theory of evolution.
He lives in Australia now, and he's passionate about us eating less animal food and the environment, and he created this app that you can get for free on your phone.
So if you look for Darwin Challenge, and it calculates the environmental impact of every animal food free meal you have in terms of how much longer you'll live how many cars it will take off the road how many fish chickens it'll save how many people it will take out of chronic malnutrition how much water it saves how much land that saves how much forest it saves is brilliant they did a lot of research to make this accurate yeah to make sure that the The calculations are there.
So this can be really motivating for people to look at and see how much change they're leading to with their food choices. Yeah.
[1:08:18] I'd love for you to finish up by talking about some industry initiatives that are going on right now that are hopeful and give you hope.
Yeah, I like this aspect. This is not food that I will be buying because it's replica animal food.
You know, this is happening already with things like Beyond Beef and Impossible Burgers. I've never had them and I don't plan to because I don't like meat.
I don't want a meat replica that looks and tastes like meat.
And these are not really health foods are you are you calling that a replica or replicant, oh it doesn't matter they're fake you know they're meant to they're meant to appeal to meat eaters and they're the key audience i think the the business people who are making these are smart they know vegans are not their key market but if this is this is exciting because.
[1:09:07] Uh organizations like rethink x which is san francisco based think tank for example they're forecasting that the rise of these alternatives that don't require the animal that can be produced in a lab or a factory is so fast and there's so many billions of dollars going into this globally that by the end of this decade it will essentially make animal agriculture obsolete yeah and if not stranded assets these will be cheaper they'll be better they'll be safer you won't get food poisoning from them they won't have salmonella or listeria or or Campylobacter, like so many of the animal products, there won't be people dying from poor quality mincemeat.
So the people who love animal foods can still eat them and they won't know the difference, and it will be better and cheaper and safer.
And so this is going to put the animal egg out of business.
They're not viable. They'll be stranded assets and so bankrupt.
So the farmers will need to be supported. it we need government programs to help those people transition to train them hopefully to rewild that farmland yeah to to help new species come in plants and animals and to help give the earth a massive breather but these things excite me even though i'll never buy them because they're going to put animal ag out of business whether we all turn vegan or not.
[1:10:33] Well and to your point I mean as much as we all want.
[1:10:41] The human race to be healthy i think the most important thing right now is we need mother earth.
[1:10:49] To be healthy so that we can thrive and without mother earth we're all going down we're all going spiraling down the spiraling down the drain correct yeah there's no healthy people on a dead planet yeah no no um you know peter um you've got a really really great a great energy uh i i love your um your mission i love the way you have you know traveled down your path in life and where it's led you and what you're doing now and all the, all the great work and the people that you're helping.
And, um, you know, when you reached out to me not too long ago, uh, I immediately was like, was thinking this was a, this is a guy that I really want to come on the podcast and to share your, your passion for a, a better and a healthier civilization and planet.
And you didn't disappoint you're you're fantastic really appreciate you thank you rip and I do have an enormous passion to help people have their best life so it's a joy to help people get healthy but my main driver now is for the environment yeah that's every person I can get to eat more plant food and less animal food or no animal food is a victory for the planet.
[1:12:17] Well, you are so eloquent, so well-spoken, and love your accent. Love it.
Could listen to it all day long. Really could.
So what do you got planned for the rest of the day since it's now, you know, 7 a.m. Australian time?
In half an hour, I've got a mentee. So I mentor new dietician graduates.
[1:12:43] Yeah, so I'm doing that for an hour. um via zoom yeah he's in queensland then i've got a patient or two um i've got to finish my packing for new zealand and sort out a few things we haven't had a holiday for a while so we're excited to be going back to my home country and yeah touring around catching up with old friends and cousins and having some beach some beach time good you got a place to stay while you're there yeah yeah we're renting a car and we're just cruising around um and i do feel guilty about the fossil fuel and the traveling and but we live we live incredibly lightly during the year we've we've both been plant-based for over 30 years we grow lots of our food we regenerate our soil we don't drive much yeah we've got solar panels on our roof solar hot water solar solar electricity, you know, we do as much as we can.
So good for you. I think that you deserve the trip back to your homeland and a little vacation time. Yeah.
[1:13:50] We'll take in some of the fresh air and the ocean breeze for all of us that can't be there.
Thanks, Rup. And it was a delight to meet with you. Thank you.
I've enjoyed your channel for a long time.
Good. Well, thank you, Peter. And it was great having you on.
Can you can you hit me with a virtual PLANTSTRONG fist bump on the way out? Boom.
[1:14:17] Thank you. All right. Over and out, mate. Take care.
Dr. Johnston has given me permission to share his slide presentation in our show notes with all of you so that you have the facts and the science behind this environmental crisis that we face.
As Maya Angelou has said, when you know better, you do better.
It's my hope that after listening to this podcast, you know a little bit more and are empowered to make changes that have big consequences.
Thanks so much for listening. And as always, let's keep you and Mother Earth PLANTSTRONG. I'll see you next week.
The PLANTSTRONG podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, and Ami Mackey.
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As always, this and every episode is dedicated to my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr.
And Anne Crile Esselstyn. Thanks so much for listening.
