Earth Provides Us with Everything We Need. Robin Greenfield in Takoma Park, Maryland
Earth Provides Us with Everything We Need. Robin Greenfield in Takoma Park, Maryland
For one year, Robin Greenfield is foraging for every bite of his food and medicine. A year without grocery stores, restaurants, pharmacies or even a garden. “Nature” is his garden!
Is it possible to eat in harmony with Earth and live in reciprocity? Robin wholeheartedly believes so and is putting this love and devotion for Earth into bold action as he harvests the food and medicine growing freely and abundantly all around us.
On October 21st, 2025 he spoke in Takoma Park, Maryland at the Takoma Park Community Center to share his awakening to the reality that the “American Dream” is Earth’s nightmare and the journey he has been on to live in harmony with Earth.
While many of us are in great despair over the dire times we live in, this is a call to bold action. Now is the time to embrace community, build local resiliency, grow our relationships and develop our skills. This is a call to healing our relationship with Earth and the land around us through a relationship with the plants.
Transcript: The following is a transcription of Earth Provides Us with Everything We Need. Robin Greenfield in Takoma Park, Maryland, part of Robin’s foraging series during his Foraging 100% of My Food for a Year.
My name is Robin Greenfield and I’m grateful to the city of Takoma Park for bringing me here. I’m on a month-long “Earth Provides Us with Everything We Need” tour as I’m embarked on a year of foraging all of my food and medicine, down to the salt, the oil, the spices. I’m eating only the food that I harvest from the land and the water.
So the timing worked out really wonderfully to be able to come here to the city of Takoma Park. And tonight I’m going to share about my year of foraging, but I’m also going to be sharing a lot about the concept of waste, and how we can live in a way that doesn’t trash the only home that we have, planet Earth, as well as the city of Takoma Park and all the communities that we’re involved with.
And, interestingly enough, a lot of people when they think of foraging, they don’t think of zero waste, but all of this food came from the Earth with no packaging; no fossil fuels were shipped around the world. There was no pesticides or fungicides or any of that sort of thing, so foraging is actually, for me, a deep practice of zero waste that you might not think of.
But I’m going to start off by sharing my journey in general, of my attempt to live in harmony with Earth and the projects, the life that I’ve been living over the last ten years or so, and then bring it back to this current endeavor that I am immersed in right now.
So, in 2011, I was living a fairly typical US American lifestyle. I was very focused on material possessions and financial wealth. At the age of 25, I had the goal of being a millionaire by the time I was 30. And I was on track to do that. I was running a marketing company and we were … we were … we were doing well. I had a lot of friends, I had romance, I was exploring the world. World traveling was a big passion of mine. I was … I was really living my dream. I was happy, I was healthy, and life was good.
And then something happened and I realized that I wanted to totally transform my life. And what that was, is, I started to watch some documentaries, and I started to read some books, and I realized that the way that I was living was causing such incredible destruction to the Earth. And there was …. I was a part of such levels of exploitation and oppression of people, of the plants and animals, and of our Earth as a whole – the ecosystems which we depend upon. And I learned that down to the basics: the food that I was eating, the car that I was driving, the gas I was pumping into the car, the stuff I was buying, the trash I was creating, the money I was spending, the investments that I had. It was all … all tied to systems of destruction.
So at the age of 25, I realized that I was living a great hypocrisy. Because my intention was never to live in a way that was causing harm and destruction. But now I knew. That was the case. At that point, I could have felt really a lot of doom and gloom to realize, “oh well, my life is not what I thought it is. I’m not living the life that I thought. It’s a system of, so much … ultimately, a lot of it was lies that are being sold to us by these corporations. Selling us these things and saying, “Everything is fine. Everything is fine.” When, indeed, it turned out that, well, everything is not so fine after all. So I could have felt a lot of doom and gloom. I could have felt hopeless and helpless, but I actually, when I learned this, felt actually quite empowered. And the reason why is these documentaries and these books that told me the problems, they also shared with me solutions. That another way is possible. That there are ways that we can live that are in harmony with the Earth.
So, I had realized that I was living in this web of consumerism, and with every action that I was taking, I was wrapped up in this web. Literally hundreds of different things I was doing, I was putting together all these pieces and realizing, “Wow, I am so deeply wrapped in this web of consumerism.”
Which, another way of putting that is that I, at the time, would have called that “the American dream.” Now I know that the American dream is the world’s nightmare. What I decided to do was to take my life back. One step at a time, I was going to unravel that web of consumerism and I was going to weave a new web: a web of living in harmony with the Earth. At the time, I would have said the word ‘sustainability.’ That’s still very much a word that I use today, but ‘living in harmony with the Earth.’ You could say ‘equity,’ you could say ‘justice,’ you could say ‘reciprocity,’ you could say ‘regeneration.’ But, you could also just say, ‘not destroying the only home we have.’ That’s what I was very passionate about.
So, one of my early awakenings was actually watching “The Story of Stuff,” by Annie Leonard. How many of you have seen that short video series? Okay. It’s a really … 15-minute video that basically taught me how much waste is created in all of my actions. So, I started to see, “Wow, look at how much trash is filling up in my garbage can.” So, it was like, “What can I do to not create that waste?” That was a big start for me. Because it’s very visual. We can see that. At the beginning of my journey, that was a big part of it.
So that included small actions, like switching to a reusable water bottle rather than disposable plastic bottles, or getting rid of the paper towels and having reusable washcloths. It included composting. That was a big one. I was putting all of my food scraps into the garbage, so instead, starting to compost. I realized most of my food was coming in plastic packaging. So that meant starting to go to a local farmer’s market more, and go to the big box stores less. And then, I was looking at the number of ways that I was wasting water. The average person in the United States uses about 80 – 100 gallons of water per day. I started to harvest rainwater. I started to make a grey water system where my sink would then water food, so I could actually grow food with the waste water rather than sending it to the sewer.
So, many small changes. I started to grow a little of my own food. I started to forage a little bit.
I started to look at all the ways I was spending money. And the companies that I was supporting. So I started to support local businesses rather than shipping my money out to multinational corporations.
I looked at the way that I was using energy. And started to see how I could use the energy of the sun, the energy of the human body. So bicycling was a wonderful thing that I started to do. It was just, “How can I move my body in a way that’s not burning fossil fuels?”
I started to look at where my money was. So every time I swiped my credit card, I was helping these big banks to profit that were invested in huge infrastructure projects that cause an incredible amount of waste and destruction. So taking my money out of the big banks. My investments were in fossil fuels and cigarettes and things like that through my mutual funds. So taking my money out of the mutual funds, my IRAs, and actually going to the step of saying, “Well, I’m not even sure that we have a future. We don’t know what our future is, but I know we have the present moment now. And I know that fresh water and clean air is valuable now and will always be valuable. And we have no future without those things.
So, much more I started just to invest in my … invest in the present moment strategically in a way that’s beneficial to the future as well.
So I was making many of these small changes to live more sustainably, but also a lot of big changes. After about a year-and-a-half, I got rid of my car, which, a lot of what I was working on as well was the societal norms and the societal stigmas around these things. It’s one thing to just not have a car and get around, but, where I grew up in northern Wisconsin, if you were an adult and you were riding a bicycle, and you were wearing plain street clothes, not like you were biking in spandex, most people would assume there’s one reason why you’re riding a bike and it’s because you got a DUI: driving under the influence, and you’re not allowed to drive. So dealing with the social stigmas that I was up against, of just breaking free from these … from these systems of waste.
And, so, step by step. Step by step. I was making these positive changes. And what I had done is, I made a list of the changes that I wanted to make and I hung it up in my kitchen where I could check off one positive change per week, with the idea of making 100 positive changes in two years. So, by doing that, it took me about a year-and-a-half or so, I had made over 100 changes in my life. My objective was to be the change that I wished to see in the world through my daily actions and all the ways that I interact with the world.
After about two years or so, a year-and-a-half, I started to feel like “Yeah, to some degree I am the change that I wish to see.” That hypocrisy that I was talking about, well, I had gone from maybe a level ten hypocrite to down to maybe a level five hypocrite. I still have a lot of hypocrisy. It’s impossible to care about the Earth and care about humanity and not live in some hypocrisy. Except for if you go live alone in the woods all by yourself, but I didn’t have the skills for that, the kind of skills to be able to do that, nor would I then be able to impact society necessarily.
So, in 2013, that’s when I set out on my environmental activism. And the idea from the beginning was I wanted to be the change that I wished to see, but I also wanted to show people that another way was possible. The things I was learning from these documentaries and books I wanted to share with others who didn’t know about the … this other way of being.
So, my first trip was … I set out from California on a bamboo bicycle to bike across the United States to … I ended in Vermont and I came right through here in 2013. So, the idea was to cross the country and try to have no negative environmental impact. The average person creates 4 ½ pounds of trash per day, so I made a rule that I had to carry every piece of trash that I carried with me all the way to the finish line, 4,700 miles. So, if I ate a candy bar in California, that plastic wrapper was coming all the way to … to Vermont with me. I set these really strict rules that forced me to practice sustainability to the deepest level that I could while creating a really immersive project, campaign, show, that would bring people in and get us to think about so many of these things that we never think about.
So, I took it to the extreme level. One other rule was that I could only eat food that was either locally grown, organic and unpackaged, or I could also dumpster dive. Because when we eat food that’s going to waste in the garbage, that’s diverting waste from the landfill. There’s no impact. So it was my ‘no impact’ way of crossing the country. And that summer, about 70 percent of my diet ended up coming from grocery store dumpsters.
For electricity: I couldn’t use any electricity for the whole trip. So even to the level of if I wanted to cross the street, I couldn’t push the button. Someone else would have to push that button and then I would go. Or, if I wanted to walk into a store and it only had electric doors, I would wait there until someone else walked in and then I would hop in behind them. The idea of this was that I was analyzing every single action that I took to learn the truth of my actions and rewire the way that I was being.
So that was my first trip, in 2013. And then in 2014, I cycled across the country again and that’s when I started the campaign, the Food Waste Fiasco, where I would dive into grocery store dumpsters, take out the perfectly good food to create a visual display of just how much of our food is being wasted. So, in the United States, about $165 billion worth of food goes to waste per year while one in seven US Americans is food insecure. That was the idea. It was to create a visual to help people to see that … I was just showing the tip of the iceberg, but in a way that helped people to see the iceberg of food waste that exists behind closed doors: at the dumpsters, at the farms, at facilities, etcetera.
In 2016, I embarked on a project that, instead of being the change that I wish to see, I … instead decided to immerse in that lifestyle that I had left behind five years ago, and for one month I lived like the average person: eating, shopping, consuming, just like the average person does, but with one big exception. And that was that I had to wear every piece of trash that I created. So, if I lived like the average person, I’d be wearing 135 pounds of trash at the end of the month. So, I had a specially designed suit that was made … this was in New York City, in Manhattan. And it had clear pockets so I could distribute the trash all throughout. And by the end of the month, I was wearing 87 pounds of trash. So I was a walking billboard for the truth behind our consumerism. And everywhere I went throughout New York City, people would see me and so often they would say, “What are you doing?” And I would say, “Oh, okay, I’m just living like the average person, but I have to wear all of my garbage.” And they would look at me and they would say, “Oh, that’s me.” My form of activism is not about good or bad, or right or wrong, it’s just about showing something. Showing the reality. Many people think that there’s an ‘away.’ That when we create garbage, we throw it ‘away.’ But so many of us now know there’s no such thing as ‘away.’ It used to be that the world seemed like this … to a lot of people, sort of infinite place. Now, you can swipe a credit card and you can fly around the world in 48 hours. Anybody, without any real skills, can travel around the entire world in 48 hours, while watching TV and gaining weight. That’s how small a world we have.
So, there is no ‘away.’ The more and more we look into this, the more we realize that everything is connected. When we spray pesticides onto our lawn, that goes somewhere. When we throw trash ‘away,’ that goes somewhere.
Another form of waste that I got really passionate about was actually our poop and our pee. Where does that really go? Eight billion human beings pooping and peeing every day. That’s a lot! So, I looked into the flush toilet system and, well, how it basically works is it goes down the toilet, it goes to a treatment facility and then, through a process, they’re able to shrink it down to about ten percent of the volume. Sometimes that’s actually spread into a farmer’s fields. Sometimes it’s incinerated. Sometimes it’s … I think it goes to a landfill. I haven’t refreshed myself on that in a little while. But most of the time it’s a complete waste product. It’s a burden that has to be dealt with that we spend probably billions of dollars annually worldwide to deal with. A big, big problem.
While we’re doing that, we are … I remember I was in Sebastian, Florida, and I picked up the newspaper and on the front page it said, “Three million gallons of raw sewage spilled into the river.” I don’t remember the name of the river. And I was like, “Wow!” And it said, “Fourth largest spill in a couple of years.” It turns out these systems are nowhere near as effective as we would … we would like to hope.
So I was starting to get really passionate about the concept of ‘humanure,’ which is the words ‘human’ and ‘manure’ combined. So there’s a book called The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins, which teaches all about this. It’s a deep dive on the concept of waste, especially in this realm. But it really is questioning just that whole concept. I started composting my own poop. That was probably … that was five years after my journey began. And that was both a campaign and just a personal living to me. It was very important to me that I wasn’t flushing my problem. Making … flushing my … my … this resource and making it somebody else’s problem.
It turns out that it’s a problem, but at the same time, it’s a solution. We can safely and sustainably compost human poop and pee and turn it into a very rich soil – compost. And actually grow food with it in a … in a safe way. And if we do that, we don’t need to do all the extraction of these … of these fertilizers: nitrogen and potassium that we are literally mining from the Earth.
So, that was another big step forward, and it’s still a little, like, talking about composting my poop up in front of a group of people, there’s still some self-consciousness about this. And that was, I found, the most important step forward to all of this, was …. I started to look at all the actions I was taking, and instead of asking the question of “How will people perceive me?” I started to always ask the question of “Is this beneficial to the Earth, my community and myself?” That was a central question that I started to ask with every action that I was taking.
In 2016, another project that I immersed in was, I landed in Mexico the first time in Baja, and then the second time in Panama, with no money, just the clothes on my back, and had to travel home on the kindness of others. And the reason was, when you turn on the news in a lot of places, they’ll tell you that the … that the world is full of bad people – dangerous people. And my belief is that the reality is that most people care about one another.
So, after the second time, 37 days of traveling through Central America and Mexico, when I got back to my home – which was San Diego at the time – the only words that I could mutter out of my mouth were just “people are good.” That is the only thing that I could feel after 37 days of traveling. And I will, of course, acknowledge my privilege in that regard. For me being a … a white man, but also holding a US passport – very different from someone who is a refugee or somebody who doesn’t have physical abilities, or somebody who is of a demographic where there’s racism toward them. So, so many privileges that I have that are important to acknowledge. But still, that’s what I felt. Just ‘people are good.’
In 2020, my project was, for one year, I grew and foraged all of my food. So the idea was to see, could I step outside of the global industrial food system completely where there’s so much waste and destruction. That was my deep immersion. Do you have a question? Oh, okay. There’ll be questions at the end. [Audience member: unintelligible.] Yes. So, that was a year of growing and foraging every bite of my food and medicine. And that was a deep practice of … of … of … of sustainability and a deep practice of connection with Earth.
And then around that … after that project, I simplified my life down to having just 44 possessions. A deep practice is also, just on a simple living. Mahatma Gandhi has been one of my … he was one of my earliest influencers and inspirations and remains today. And one of the sayings that he has really deeply imparted upon me is “Live simply so others may simply live.” And that is as relevant today as it was then in India. And the basic concept there is that when our lives are a web of consumerism tied to systems of destruction, every action that we’re taking is often taking away life or decreasing quality of life. And when we live simply and we say, “Well, do I really need this? Would this actually enrich my life?” So often the answer is actually, “No.” As we start to live more simply, so many of these things that I thought that I needed, so many of these things that I thought were necessary – they start to just fall away. So simple living is another thing that when people think of ‘zero waste,’ they might not think of simple living first and foremost, but the less we need, the easier it is to meet those needs and then the less waste that there is created in general.
And at this point, I also want to mention this concept of waste. Waste is … well, it’s a new thing. It didn’t exist on Earth for, like, 99.999 percent of the existence of this planet. So waste … in permaculture we say, “Waste is just a resource out of place.” Nature has no such thing as waste. It’s all close-looped cycles that recycle the nutrients and continue producing and continue transforming and manifesting as something else. So, we like to say, “Waste is just a resource out of place.”
So my current endeavor, right now, I started 13 days ago, is right now I am foraging all of my food for a year. So that … in 2020 … 2019 was a year of growing and foraging all my food. So, my gardens and the food that I was harvesting from, you could say ‘the wild’ or ‘nature,’ which again these are just words. But, so this year, I’m doing a year where I’m harvesting all of my food that’s growing freely and abundantly from the land.
So, this is a little display of the foods that I am eating from … well, okay. We talked about societal norms and stigmas a little bit. This is one … this here is venison from a deer that was hit by a car. Some people call that ‘roadkill.’ I call it a deer that was hit by a car. Because it was a deer that was walking before it died, and it’s a deer afterwards. Still first and foremost. If I’m ever hit by a car, please don’t call me ‘roadkill.’ Robin … you could just … a human that was hit by a car. [Audience member: unintelligible] Oh, you can’t see it from over there? Right here. You’ll have a chance to come up here afterward and see everything.
So, there’s … this jar is actually empty because I haven’t caught any fish yet and that represents the fish that I haven’t caught, which … and this is part of my diet. There’s pear sauce and apple sauce. This is the wild rice. Stinging nettle powder. Here’s king bolete and maitake mushrooms, chanterelles. This is a … this is a medicinal mushroom tea with maitake, reishi, turkey tail, chaga and lion’s mane. Apple cider vinegar made from apples from a wild apple tree in my homeland in northern Wisconsin. Wild fermentation is a big part of my life. So, these are … these are lacto-fermented ramp bulbs here in salt water which I’ll get to. Here is hazelnuts, harvested … we have millions of wild hazelnut trees that are out there for us to harvest the abundance.
This is green powder. So I harvest greens, like all the different wild greens; dehydrate them, blend them into a powder and then that’s a super vitamin mix right here, Many of you probably go to the grocery store and buy your green powder. Well, you can make that from the abundance of greens that are growing right in our front yards, back yards, church yards, school yards, medians of our sidewalks, the city hall; all over.
This is a spice mix for making my tasty foods. I’ve got my teas. This is my herbal tea mix for the mornings and my herbal tea mix for the evenings. And then, there’s different fruits here like pear sauce … plum … plum sauce, canned blueberries, highbush cranberries. So some … oh, this isn’t highbush cranberry. This is autumnberry, or autumn-olive. Now this is a plant that is called ‘invasive,’ as … well, how many of you have heard that term ‘invasive?’ So, I like to use a little different a term, and that is a plant that has been introduced to an area and it comes from another area, and it’s so prolific and abundant that it is causing ecosystem harm, including displacing the native plants of the area. That’s an accurate description. When we label a plant that’s just ‘invasive,’ we ‘other’ it. We say that it’s inherently bad. And that’s not too much different from calling humans ‘illegal.’ I think most of us here wouldn’t want a human to be considered an ‘other,’ or an ‘outsider.’ And when we use that term ‘invasive,’ we kind of have a tendency to be doing the same thing. So, when it comes to foraging, a lot of people think that … a lot of people will say, “You know, you shouldn’t forage because you’re taking from the animals, the limited resources they have.” But harvesting plants that are considered ‘invasive’ is actually … every single bite is an ecosystem service. So this is a plant that you can harvest to your heart’s content. There’s way, way more than the birds and the squirrels and any other critters would ever eat, and by doing so, with every bite you take, you’re actually doing an ecosystem service.
So, much to a lot of people’s belief, I don’t believe that humans are a cancer upon this Earth. I believe that we can actually exist in a way that is beneficial to the Earth. That’s what people have been doing since time immemorial. Some people think that it can’t be done today, but for me, this is a deep experience, a deep practice, that we can still live in harmony with the Earth. That the Earth can provide us with everything that we need.
So, a few other things that are here. This is a fruit leather made from choke cherries. We have some of my very important medicine is elderberry. So for this entire year, all of my medicine that I’m taking as well is just plants. And some people think, “Well, that certainly can’t work without pharmaceuticals.” But, you have to remember that most pharmaceuticals are actually modeled after something that comes from plants in the first place.
There’s my salt. So I harvested my salt from the ocean. That’s as simple as harvesting salt from the cleanest … salt water from the cleanest body of water … the cleanest area of ocean. And then you can just let that evaporate. [Audience member: unintelligible] Uhh … I don’t exactly know what rock salt is. So, you could call this rock salt. It looks a little rocky. Yeah, you can just let it evaporate in trays in the sun and then you have salt. Or, if you’re in a little bit more of a hurry like I was on this tour, I just boiled it. So. You can do that as well.
And then, there’s seaweed down here. And then there’s some other unique things. This is sweet fern tea. This is fireweed tea. This is mint. A lot of mint. And then an interesting one here. It’s evening primrose seeds. Do any of you know the plant evening primrose? So you can harvest the seeds of that and this is … this is actually one of the highest plants in omegas that there are. So a lot of these plants are highly nutritious. And very delicious.
Over here I have a few of the different mushrooms that I make tea from. Actually, not this one. This is a … this you can actually draw on and I need to write on there “Robin’s Foraging Year.” But life is busy, so I haven’t gotten around to that yet. It’s one of my tasks.
So, yeah. Right now this immersion is a really deep practice. It’s a deep practice in my belief that the Earth can provide us with … with everything that we need and that we can exist in a way on this Earth that actually is … is beneficial.
So, there’s so much that I could say, but I’d really like to be able to … I’d really like to open it up to questions and hear anything … anything that’s alive in you. Anything that you’re curious about. Before I do that though, I’d like to say, some people still … it’s like, you hear all this and it’s like, okay, with the state of the world, why … why even try? Things are … for some people, things are so bad. Like, can we really make a difference that is worth it? And, my answer is, I don’t know what’s going to happen to humanity. I don’t know what the next five years, ten years, 100 years, 1,000 years holds. But, for me, it’s that I really value life. I believe that the life of each of us here matters. I believe the life of all the plants and animals we share this home with matters. If we could exist in a way where, in our actions, we … we … we show that value for all the life that we share this home with, then that’s worth it. No matter what happens. And, we don’t, like, for many of us, it’s so overwhelming to feel this weight of the world on our shoulders.
What I would encourage is, none of us was born with the responsibility of saving the world, but everyone in this room … all of us have a fair bit of privilege and we have the option to take responsibility for our own lives. We have the … we have the option of bringing our actions into alignment with our beliefs. So my encouragement would be, rather than focusing on the overwhelm, is think about what … what are you excited about? What changes are you excited about to make in your life? Are you excited to start looking into your trash can and seeing how you can do things differently to create less waste? Are you excited to start composting? Are you excited to start growing some food? Or foraging? Are you excited to volunteer in your community or at your schools? What is it that you feel really enlivened by? And my encouragement is to start there. Don’t start with the things that are, like, daunting. You don’t know if you can do. One step at a time, transform your life into the life that you really want to be living. Build the foundation of a more sustainable, harmonious life. And step by step, as you build that foundation, the things that you might have thought were never possible, often just start to kind of flow into your being. These little things are all connected. We live in this deep state of interconnection and, as we start to make one change and another change, well, we start to hang out with some new people. We start to look at the world differently. So, my encouragement would be one step at a time. One small change, sometimes big change, continue doing that until you become the change that you wish to see in the world and then keep on going from there.
So, I love you all very much. I’m very grateful to be here with all of you and I’m really interested to hear what questions that you might have, or what comments you might have.
Over here.
[Facilitator:] “If you don’t mind, we’re going to use the microphone to help with the recording.”
[Audience member:] “Interesting talk. In your foraging year, if someone, like, gave you a sandwich or invited you over for dinner, would you eat that?”
So, for this year of foraging all my food, I have to be foraging and actively involved. So, if someone invites me over to dinner, well, they have to invite me over for some foraging first, and then we can make dinner together. Or, I’ll bring all of my foraged food and we’ll have dinner together. So, for this year of foraging, one of my biggest challenges is … for so many people, they like to share, they like to contribute, one of my challenges is the practice of compassionate communication, of making sure that they still are able to feel involved, connected and contribute without being able to actually feed me. And that’s a … that is a challenging aspect of it. So, yes, literally every bite that I take I have to forage or be together and we’re foraging it together. Down to … down to actually even the water. So, this water is spring water, and I fill up my spring water as well. So. Yes, you are welcome to invite me over for dinner, but you’ll be eating something a little different than you’re used to.
[Audience member:] “Thanks so much, —– inspirational. You initially started off your talk saying that you were living in a healthy, happy and average US American life and you went through this transformation. How … that’s healthy and happy … definition of happy and healthy at the time and how it feels right now in terms of both your physical and spiritual health. Like, how would you compare and also the people around you. How did they change or did they stay the same or how’d they adjust to your change?”
Yeah. Well, I think, for me, at the core of health is meaning and purpose. I think if we have no meaning or purpose, it’s very, very challenging to have quality mental health or physical health. So, the source of my health is that I have a deep level of meaning and purpose that keeps me going consistently. Also, living with my actions in alignment with my beliefs. What I’ve found is that, I would say that I end up more in a flow state. So, it was Gandhi who said, “When our actions, our words and our thoughts are all in alignment, that’s harmony.” For me, as I’ve continued down this journey, yes, it’s about the food that I’m putting in my body, and the medicines I’m taking in, and exercise and all of that for health and happiness. But I would say the center of my health and happiness comes around relationships. It’s about my relationships with the Earth, my relationships with the plants and animals, and also my relationship with myself is deeply important. So, I would say that my health … my health is in a similar realm as before, but my happiness is much more consistent. It’s a … my goal is a baseline level of contentedness and joy. And a lot of that comes through … a lot of … some of the people who have been most influential for me are Buddhists, so Thich Nhat Hanh is a big teacher of mine. It’s less the pursuit of ecstasy and bliss and more of a pursuit of a balanced contentedness and joy. And as far as this, experience with the plants, I have found that … well, as I start to now … everywhere I go, I’m surrounded by my friends. The mulberry is a friend. The basswood is a friend. Every onion springing up from the ground is a friend. The mint is a friend. All of these I feel that friendship with. I … on my last adventure, last year, I walked from Canada to L.A., I started to explore … what if the sky was my best friend? And that’s one of the things that I’m working on right now. And it does bring a lot of joy and happiness. So, hopefully that gives some insight into that question.
And the second part was …
[Audience member:] unintelligible
Oh, relationships. Well, relationships, for me, are at the core of everything. So, when we live this consumer driven way that’s based on just buying everything we need, all the products and all the services, we remove … we sever relationships from our life. As I’ve chosen to live simply, as I’ve chosen to live more sustainably, it’s all based on relationships. My entire existence is based on relationships. The challenging part of that is that I am a fairly independent person who likes to do things ‘my way,’ which is a product of … that’s part of… I mean that’s a product of being a part of this country, the United States. That’s what was ingrained into me. So, for me, the true solutions to most of our problems lie in community. So the less stuff that I have, the more I am actually dependent upon others. And that’s my intention. I want to be dependent on you. I want to be dependent on all of you. I want us to actually need one another. Because from what I’ve seen, true community thrives when we actually need each other. That’s a … so, some of my relationships have struggled. Definitely I’ve struggled with my dad, for example. Whereas with my mom, our relationship has improved and we’ve grown much closer. One of my main practices to help with relationships …. Because as an environmental activist, one of the common things to do is to judge people and tell people that they’re bad, that they’re destroying the world, and I may have had some of that for the first handful of years, until I realized that it makes me miserable and everybody else around me miserable. This book, Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg … I got into this practice about three years ago now. And this is a practice of basically listening always for people’s feelings and needs, no matter what anybody ever does, what I do to the best of my ability is I listen: what are they feeling and what are they needing? And when you’re doing that, you’re not judging. You’re just listening for feelings and needs. Or, my own feelings and needs. What am I feeling and needing right now? So, I couldn’t talk about relationships without talking about … about this. This has been a core practice in my life. Yep. I could say another one hour about that. But, summarize that there.
[Audience member:] “Yes, hi, thanks. I’d really love to hear your strategy about foraging and preserving, and I see that you’ve planned some travels to be in areas where there may be food to forage fresh at certain times of year, but I hear you describe preserving and dehydrating and other methods as part of your storehouse?“
Yeah!
[Audience member:] “So I’m curious about all of that and also how much you’re traveling with versus planning, for example, are you collecting persimmons while you’re in the mid-Atlantic and ….”
Robin: [unintelligible] … I will.
[Audience member:] “There are plenty ….”
Robin: Are they out there now?
[Audience member:] “Yep, they are.”
Robin: Oooh, okay, let’s talk afterward.
[unintelligible]
[Audience member laughs:] “For example, yes.”
Robin: Wonderful! So, yes. I am based in northern Wisconsin, my homeland. That’s where I am based out of. I live in a little … shelter of sorts. I don’t know how to describe it exactly. I spent three months preparing, from July 1st until I began on October 9th. I was doing a lot of … a lot of storing. There’s dehydrating, there’s canning, there’s … I have a freezer, so freezing, and then just room temperature storage, or cold storage for things. So, storing foods in many different ways.
And, a lot of people … this is one of the most common misperceptions is they think, “Oh, he’s just harvesting his food every day and eating whatever he finds that day.” And, I take some responsibility for that because in some videos I’ve done different things like eat leaves directly from the ground, just playing around, so people have this idea that that’s what I’m doing … I’m grazing like a giraffe. But the reality is that any forager knows is how this works is you find an abundance and you harvest that abundance and you store it. That’s what you need to do to be effective and efficient. If my entire life was just about harvesting and eating, maybe I could do that. But obviously, here we are. I have other things that I’m doing besides just foraging my food. So I need to be effective and efficient. And that means finding the abundance.
So, to do this tour, I’m on the road for a month. I brought enough food to where I don’t have to harvest while I’m on the road. But, I also left out enough food that would force me to have to harvest in order to really eat thoroughly and enjoy my food. And to get the full and complete diet. I’m foraging a lot on the road and I’m preserving a lot of that. So, I have gotten a year’s supply of seaweed, and a four months’ supply of salt. Today … over the last couple of days I harvested 25 pounds of acorns, of … probably about 50 pounds of hickory nuts, some pecans and bitternut hickory to make my hickory nut oil. Today I harvested probably a couple months’ supply of stinging nettle. So even as I’m on the road doing this, I’m harvesting and processing this food and we have … Glen over here is my teammate and he’s driving and the vehicle is quite filling up, especially over the last few days.
And then lastly I’ll say that I am, after this, I’ll be back in Wisconsin for a couple months. I’m going to do two months in Florida in the winter, teaching and sharing, and I’m actually going to be hosting a weekend-long foraging school there, so if anybody is already going to be getting away to Florida for the winter and wants a deep immersion in foraging, that’s a possibility. And then we’ll also be doing a trip up the coast … the western coast next summer and then I’ll be back here next fall. So I’m probably traveling for six months of the 12 months. So, that is a whole ‘nother realm. That requires a lot of planning and, in some ways, a lot more work. Yeah, that’s a little bit of a summary. I … I … some foods when I harvest them, I try to harvest a years’ supply and others I say, “Okay, I know I’ll be able to harvest this again in this time and that time frame” so it varies, but I have quite a bit of food stored away. I could probably right now just sit on a couch for at least a month without running out of anything at this point.
Here.
[Audience member:] “Thank you, by the way. So, I was wondering how were you able to continue your practices during the social distancing of Covid 19? And also, do you make your own clothes? Is that part of your sustainability efforts?”
Yeah. Thanks. Well, I was actually locked down in France during Covid 19. I was on a world speaking tour that I had just started weeks prior. Somebody picked me up at the train station in Toulouse.
[Audience member:] “That’s where I’m from.”
Robin: Oh, okay. He picked me up in the train station. We had never actually met before and we got home and President … er, whatever … Macron came on the TV and said, “Lockdown begins.” So I ended up in their house for six weeks. [Laughter] I basically was a foreign exchange student eating cheese and enjoying the French life for awhile. So, but yeah, I foraged. I deepened my foraging knowledge. And then over time, it’s … it’s a long stretch of a couple years of different phases, but definitely didn’t let up on my living sustainably and I … I personally still managed to have a lot of connections with other people and still … and still … I feel like I managed quite well to hold to what I was accomplishing in my life at that time.
Now, as far as my clothes go, yes. So, last year I got to the point where I got rid of all industrial clothes and now I’m wearing 100 percent homemade natural fiber and naturally dyed clothing.
So, this is all wool all from sheep here in the United States. These pants are dyed with black walnut. So, black walnut is a … is a … you can use the husks of black walnuts and make different colored browns. This is actually glossy buckthorn. So you can make green with buckthorn, which is also considered an invasive species. That’s what this is. And then this is just the natural color of the sheep the wool came from. So … so that’s been …. I mentioned that step by step, and that took ten years. That took over ten years to get to the point of stepping outside of that clothing industry because, of course, I learned about microfibers and realized that when I was wearing these plastic clothes, every step that I was taking, I was literally shedding plastic out into the Earth, which means into my body, and your body and into the body of the plants and animals. Breaking free from that and then also just the natural-dyed clothing, those colors. Or, not naturally-dyed, dyed natural clothing like cotton, those colors – are polluting the waterways in India and Bangladesh. When my clothes are fading, it’s just returning plants, rather than toxic dyes and such. So. So, yeah, I really … I love being in clothes that when … if I, for example, if I lose this shirt in the woods, it just returns to the woods. It’s no different from a bird shedding it’s wing … or it’s feathers, or a deer dying and falling to the woods. The same goes here. As far as one of my ultimate goals in life, it’s just to return to the earth. In these clothes, I’m ready. I will not litter when I die when I’m in these clothes. Whether I fall off a cliff or I go to the woods and I don’t come back, I’ll be able to simply return to the earth. So that’s a … that’s a deep level of that clothes loop that I strive for.
So thanks for asking that.
Here.
[Audience member:] “I have really enjoyed your presentation. I’ve also grappled a lot with how to live in a way that’s aligned with my values. And also as sustainable as possible. And I think it’s challenging given that we’re living in this society that was formed on colonization, colonialism, capitalism and consumerism, and it’s, like, really hard to escape that when you’re living here. I think my ideal life might be, or lifestyle, might be living on a self-sufficient commune and making all my … producing all my own food and clothes and other things … other needs. But then … well, for one thing, I feel like I probably don’t have the physical stamina to … to live on a commune, but also, like I … I also want to try to influence society, so I work in climate policy, so I kind of have to be a part of society. So. So, I’m wondering, in your current life, how much are you, kind of, still kind of, like, tied into the … our economic system here and how much are you kind of independent from it?”
The economic system. Yes. So. Well, one thing that I want to make around that is I know … I always feel a little self-conscious because I’m talking about myself a lot here, because my strategy is my life is my message. I’m embodying another way as possible. But, it’s really about what can each of us do whether it’s in climate policy, maybe you’re a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher or a … or a … a caretaker. Maybe you clean homes. Whatever we do it’s, like, how can we use the … the skills we have? How can we use our lives? That’s what it’s always about coming back to. It’s about asking, “What is it that we can do ourselves?” So, I just … I wanted to acknowledge that. Also, the community aspect is one of the most important things. So, if you are interested in living in community … one thing you can look into is intentional communities. So, there’s a website: IC.org, which stands for intentional communities and then there’s the Global Ecovillage Network. So, if you’re interested in living in community in a more sustainable way, those are wonderful resources. If you go to robingreenfield.org/community, all of that information is there. And then, before I forget, I also want to mention the website is a plethora of resources. So, if you want to reduce your waste, you can go to robingreenfield.org/waste. If you want to forage, go to robingreenfield.org/forage.
If you want to grow food, it’s /food. If you want to learn about the financial system and how to break free from that, it’s /money. So, my website is a deep rabbit hole. So, beware, you might … you might end up there for quite a few hours, but it directs you to all of these other resources.
So, as far as the monetary system, when I first started to change my life in 2011, the learning about the reality of our monetary system was at the core of my desire to change my life. Because I realized that the way our monetary system is set up, it is … with most every dollar I spent, it was intrinsically tied to what I don’t want to be doing with my life. So, in 2015, I made a lifetime vow to earn below the federal poverty threshold, which at the time was about $11,000. So, since 2015, I’ve earned less than $11,000 per year, and I’ll earn less than the federal poverty threshold for as long as I live.
I’ve also made a commitment that 100 percent of my media income is donated directly to non-profits. So, speaking as an example of that: so I use the resources and skills I have to direct those funds …. I’m not against money in and of itself, but what I try to do is I direct funds to the solutions that I want to see in the world.
I’ve also committed to … for life … to not paying federal taxes. Because when we pay federal taxes, we pay for the military/industrial complex, war; we pay for police brutality; we pay for the prison system; we pay for the bailing out of the big banks; we pay for the subsidization of fossil fuels. So, I’ve made a lifetime commitment to not paying for any of that by making my own tax system and that is that I direct the money directly to organizations that are doing the work.
I have worked to demonetize my life substantially. I live with very minimal money and actually don’t have a bank account, credit card, debit card, Venmo, Paypal, any … anything. I just have cash. So, I … I … the key, of course, is relationships and skills. Those are my life savings. Some people would be concerned – I have literally no life savings. And I’ve told numerous people who have me in their Will to remove me from their Will. So, I have no life savings in that regard, but I have a deep level of life savings, and that is relationships. I think that the greatest life insurance we can have is people who care about us. And I think the way that I should do that is by caring myself. So, my simple belief is that as long as I dedicate my entire life to being of service, then I’ll have my basic needs taken care of. If I’m an old man, maybe that’s a … a … guest bedroom in someone’s home who’s happy to have me there. And I’ll still have skills, whether it’s storytelling, or maybe I’ll still be able to garden. I’ll probably be able to do some physical things, but if not, I can watch kids in my older years. So, I have designed my life in a deeply non-monetary way. One of my biggest inspirations there was … is Mark Boyle. He wrote the books The Moneyless Man and The Moneyless Manifesto, and those are [two] of the best resources that I know to learn how to demonetize your life. So, yeah. That’s some … some thoughts on that. Yeah, you’re welcome.
Right here in the front.
[Audience member:] “My question is that here in the U.S., if you break your leg, it will cost you a lot of money. Do you want to rely on other people? Kindness and what other people can do for free, because there are some [unintelligible] not fix your leg for free, but it costs thousands of dollars and it’s not justified. So, let’s say you need an emergency surgery, you have to worry for all that money aspect, because people will maybe give, but is it also fair that people give to sustain that accident of your life, you know? And that’s why we pay taxes. That’s why for me, as a French person, it’s really important to pay my taxes. So.”
Yes. Now, of course, if our tax system was fundamentally functioning, it would be a very different story. But as I shared … so, I look at health a little bit different from my own individual health. So, we have a system where we think of things in a very linear transactional way. And the Earth is much more complex than that. So, well, I do have a 45-minute video on health insurance, age and death where I really dive into all of that, but, first of all, so … we all have different values around our own individual life. But for me, I truly believe … I know … that I am not more important than any of the other eight billion people who exist on this Earth. So, with that being the case … I know I’m young and healthy at the … right now, so some people would say I’m just delusional, but, I have chosen that, under some circumstances, I would not choose to expend vast resources, both monetary and physical resources, to keep myself alive. And, that’s a deep practice of impermanence. I truly … I truly don’t believe so much in my importance as we have been taught to in this society. So … and then there’s other things. For example, it’s important to know … for example, if you’re in the woods and your finger gets chopped off, you cannot bleed out through your finger. It is not a life threatening scenario. Knowing that’s important, knowing that you’re not going to die. And I’ve actually learned how to deal with … if I had that, not necessarily even have to go to the hospital if I did lose a finger. There’s lots of people who function without fingers, for example. So, I have a different relationship around a lot of that, but there’s still some circumstances where I could end up going to the hospital, and then one thing I could easily do is I could get the bill and then I could pay that off. It doesn’t mean that I have to rely on taxpayer dollars. I can get a bill and I can still take responsibility for that, if that were to happen. So, I’ve done research into that and, for example, if I broke my arm, the cost in cash is about $5,000. I could … I could … I could manage that. So, those are a few notes on that. And, but I also want to again say, this is my unique life. This is not me telling anybody else not to have health insurance or … or things like that. And, again, I have a lot of privileges that allow me to live this life. But also, you mentioned the idea of would I want to rely on the help of others. And that goes back to what I said before. And the answer is ‘absolutely.’
So, I have not monetized my life. So, for example, these books that I have here. This book I could easily sell and keep all of that money. That would be something that would be a pretty normal thing to do. But instead, this book is not for sale. It’s an experiment in the gift economy and 100 percent of the money goes to Black and Indigenous-led sovereignty initiatives. So, if there’s a time in my life where I’ve spent decades giving, and then somebody decides they want to help me, I’ll receive their help. And I’ll receive it with gratitude, because there’s plenty of people with abundance who I will … who are happy to share that abundance. So, we’ll see what happens in my lifetime. But it’s also quite possible that never happens. That I never have a major medical accident that I decide to go to the hospital for. So, time will tell with some of those things. Does that give some insight into that question? Thanks.
[Audience member:] “So many questions. But, I guess two at this point. Perhaps there might be time to ask at the end. I don’t want to deprive others. But, one is … not everybody can live your life. You’ve mentioned that a number of times. So, if … if you had to identify your top three things, five things, two things, whatever, in descending order of importance, what could those be for ‘ordinary folks’?”
Yes.
[Audience member:] “Please.”
I’ll answer that first. So, for those of you looking to make changes in your life, if you go to robingreenfield.org/100, that is actually the list of the first 100 changes that I made. And with many of those, you can click on that change and it takes you to resources and knowledge about that change. So, for example, if you want to live low waste, you have all the resources that you want there.
So, some of my top recommendations are:
Compost: So no food … no animal, no plant goes into the garbage. It always goes back to the earth.
To use our bodies to get around when we can. So, walking, biking … minimizing the amount of time we are in these individual giant vehicles. And instead, public transportation versus individual fossil fueled, or electric, vehicle.
Food: Sourcing our food locally as much as possible. So, from local farmers, gardeners, the farmer’s market. That is a really big one. Embracing the local food economy. So, I would say growing a little bit of our own food. Even if it’s just a … some tomatoes on our balcony and some basil. Just being involved in that process is really transformational.
Another one would be to learn just a few of the foods and medicines that are growing freely and abundantly all around us. And I’m actually giving a talk in Bowie? Is that how it’s pronounced? B o w i e? In two nights, in a place called Forested where we’ll be doing a little bit of a plant walk. So, if you’re interested in learning some of those plants …. And also, I’ll be down in Richmond, Virginia, so if you’re looking for something to do this weekend, I’ll be at a food forest there, so you can … you can learn about that.
[Audience member: unintelligible] Yes. robingreenfield.org/foragingyear has my schedule for all of this. So, also I’ll be in …
[Audience member:] “Frederick?”
Frederick, I just came from. But then, besides Richmond, United Plant Savers, Cincinnati, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago, and then back to my homeland. So, if you have friends in any of those places that you want to let know, you can let them know to come out.
So, those would be some of my top changes. And then, a couple of the other ones would be, if you wanted to look at some of the … the really big ones, it would be removing money from the big banks and switching to a local credit union, divesting from any destructive investments and putting that into investments that actually invest in a future that we want on this Earth. Flying: when it comes to flying, that’s the single most impactful action that most of us take as far as the carbon footprint, the destruction. So, really, only flying if it’s really quite meaningful, really need to. Some people go vegan because of the carbon footprint for that, but then they continue flying a lot and it’s, like, one flight across the country is the equivalent of 350 industrial, factory farmed hamburgers. So, a flight is a really big deal. So, looking at our flying habits, that would be some of the … that would be another one of the really big ones. So, those would be some of the … some of the bigger ones, as well.
SOUND FAILURE. 1:0:57 to 1:09:15
[Audience member:] “This is a bit of a [unintelligible] question. Two questions actually. But where do you get your spring water from and what is your favorite meal?”
Umm. Aaah. So where did I get my spring water? So, you can go to the website findaspring.com, and it is a database of all the springs where you can go and harvest your … your spring water freely and abundantly from the Earth. So, findaspring.com. My last spring was up by Frederick, and then before that, it was Connecticut, and then before that, it was my homeland. I actually am from a land that has some of the purest waters on Earth. I’ve been drinking out of an artesian well when I’m back there, for 39 years now. So, that’s where I get my water from. Mostly from wells and springs.
And then my favorite food or my favorite meal? Well, definitely it will often involve a lot of wild rice, or Manoomin. This is definitely one of the plants that has influenced me the most. And I would like to acknowledge the Anishinaabe people. They are the people of the land where I’m from who have had a relationship with this plant for over 700 years. Potentially much longer. And have been stewards of this plant for a very long time. So, when I’m eating this food I am connected to a … a human/plant relationship that has not been severed for over 700 years. And when I eat this food, I feel a connection to that relationship. Which is quite powerful. It’s not just the nutrients that it provides, but it’s that relationship with the Earth. So, right now, my staple meal is venison … or wild rice, venison, sea salt, some different herbs, like monarda and wild onion. I’ll often add in a handful of berries, like aronia or autumn-olive, fresh. Those actually add an interesting flavor dynamic to just add some fresh berries in at the end. And, oh, of course, mushrooms: maitake or chanterelles in that meal. So, I like to make a one pot meal where everything I need is kind of in one pot. So that would be one of my … one of my favorites. Yeah. What time is it now? How long have we been going?
[Facilitator:] ”It is 8:17.”
And oh, this technically ends at 8:30, so let’s just do one more question for now.
Right here?
[Audience member:] “So, my question is, if eventually, enough people stop using car companies, plane companies, do you think the car or plane companies, or meat companies, are going to go bankrupt enough to shut down and then they won’t be polluting anymore?”
Well, okay. There’s two parts to that. So, if … so there’s ‘if.’ I mean, if all of us as human beings decided that we were going to do things in a different way, then you would have new systems. Some people say to me, like, “Well, if everybody wanted to do what you are doing, then who would do this?” And, like, the message isn’t for everybody to do what I’m doing. The message is let’s individually use our lives to the best of our ability as we can to be of service to this Earth. To be of service to the plants and animals.
Then the other part is, okay, if everybody wanted to forage their food, then people would say the Earth would be decimated. Well, but you have to think a little bit bigger. If everybody wanted to do this, it would mean they had all questioned … all the societal structures, we’re all critically thinking. It would mean that we were all developing relationships with everything around us. Everything is interconnected. So, if everybody wanted to live this way, then we would be putting our resources into finding the best possible solutions for living in harmony on this Earth. So, none of this exists in a vacuum. As we start to change our minds, we see what is possible. So, I am really, really grateful for … for tonight, because, like, I was brought here first and foremost to talk about waste. And my strategy though, really, is critical thinking. When we think critically, when we question everything, these systems of destruction of waste, we start to see that another way is possible and we replace them. And that’s really the goal. A note on that. So, yeah, these systems would collapse. And that’s what I want. I want to see these systems crumbling. But while these systems are crumbling, we’re putting newer systems into place that truly serve us, that truly serve the people, that truly serve the plants and animals. I have a desire to say that I don’t think that’s going to happen. I do think that we will destroy ourselves. And some people might hear that and they might feel a little depressed about that. But I don’t. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen. And, I think, most likely, humanity will probably destroy ourselves in the relatively near future. And that … 5,000 years is the relatively near future in the existence of humanity. But, I’m going to do my best to not sink the ship and to keep that ship afloat. There again, that’s meaningful to me no matter what happens. I’m a realist. I’m logical. I’m rational. But I’m still going to strive for the best that we possibly can.
So, I’m really grateful that you’ve had so many questions. Because I can see that there’s a lot of thinking going on, and that’s my real objective. I don’t have to have any answers anymore. In fact, I don’t really want to have answers. I really want to create critical thought. That’s my objective.
So, as far as closing out the evening, I would love to share … actually there’s two things that I want to say. First of all, one of the main purposes of this tour was to talk about community fruit trees. So, over the next decade, we’re going to be planting over one million community fruit and nut trees. If you’re excited about the possibility … or if you’re excited about planting fruit and nut trees in a very grassroots collaborative effort, you can go to robingreenfield.org/communityfruittrees and I am really looking for people who want to get involved. We’re looking for people who want to fund that, to help us to be able to plant all of those trees, people who are willing to grow trees, people who are going to plant trees, people who want to take a prominent role in that initiative. So, I’m excited about that. I really wanted to talk more about that tonight, but … a lot of things to talk about.
And secondly, I would love to share this book with all of you. It’s available on a donation basis. And your donation can be that you learn how to grow kale, and you grow more kale and you give that kale to others. Or you learn how to forage some things and you share that with others. If you have the finances to donate, we lovingly accept those donations. Again, the profits go to Black and Indigenous-led food sovereignty initiatives. And also it allows us to give this book for free to different libraries and organizations and sustainability initiatives. And take these books – put them into local libraries, school libraries, community libraries. Give them as gifts to friends. I don’t own these books. I’m not attached to them. I’d be happy if I didn’t have to carry any back to the car. So distribute them freely among each other, and I’ll be happy to sign them. How many minutes do we have before we, like, have to get out of here, would you say?
[Facilitator: unintelligible]
Okay, I’ll stay for another 20 minutes or so, and I will just sit right here, share hugs and books. You can come up. Oh! One other note. This is actually … these are bookmarks. So everybody can take home a bookmark. This is actually from an owl that was hit by a car. So this is a barn owl feather. These are barn owl feathers. So, if you’d like to put one of those into your book and have a little bookmark, and one day maybe it will just float away and it’ll be fine, because it will just return to the earth.
So, yes, I love you all very much. I’m grateful for our time together and thank you. And thank you to Rick for bringing me to Takoma Park!
[Facilitator:] “Thank you for coming.”
You’re welcome!