Today I'm talking with Ben Sargent and Mary Lynn about their book, Mootopia: How to Easily Fix Human Health and Heal the Planet. Let's start with your background and how you came to this project. Excellent.
Well, we started about five years ago with a food co-op in Colorado running food for 30 different farms in the front range of Colorado from Denver to Fort Collins. And during that period, we were handing food to up to 1,000 people a day and 3,000 people a week.
And it got to where I could just read people when they entered the booth and know the kind of food that they ate based on what they would buy. And I noticed that the people who ate a lot of meat and dairy, because we were, especially the grass-fed, grass-finished beef that we were selling and the clean, fresh local dairy, that those people who were eating the most of that were the healthiest, strongest,
clearest-minded people. And I thought, that's really interesting that it's so clear. And we wanted to find out why. And that's really how we launched into the book. So that's kind of my summary. But I grew up on an organic farm, and I've always wanted to get back to it.
And we got back into it, as soon as we retired, we got back into farming, basically. Anything to add, Mary? Yeah, I was trained as a molecular biologist, and I ended up not going into the field because I couldn't get much traction with a sort of like ecosystem as a physiology approach.
You know, I couldn't get much traction with that. And so I ended up doing a lot of things, including being an environmental advocate and a science writer, and have continued to read and study. And everything that I've been learning, and especially the last five to 10 years, has indicated to me that that's absolutely correct.
And that point of view of looking at what's happening in the ecosystem and asking if the ecosystem was one entity, one organism, what could be the relationships here that we're not paying attention to is sort of my approach.
And I studied about Weston Price, gosh, 25 years ago. And I used raw dairy to heal from a very significant illness. And I've tried it multiple times when Ben was still working in his corporate career to get him to drive way out in the boondocks once a week to pick up the raw milk.
But he gets convinced in his own time, in his own way. So it was running the co-op that convinced Ben that there was really something to this. But he's since then really focused and developed some really interesting ideas for how the relationship between cows and other ungulates and humans in the environment as a whole.
So I should probably turn it over to Ben to talk about some of those. Okay. Carolyn, I don't know if that answered your question or not. It did. Well, and that kind of leads into what about the history of the prairies and the bison?
Yeah, well, when we started researching the book, we were looking at nutrition. And we, after learning about nutrition and finding out how, why the grass-fed, grass-finished beef is so much better. And we started looking at the grazing.
We got into grazing theories and learned about regenerative grazing. Then the bison just kind of came with that and how, because we had this romantic notion that before Europeans came to the Great Plains, you know, it was the Garden of Eden, perfect situation, all of this stuff.
But in fact, there's been a long history of droughts going back thousands of years in the Great Plains. And it was really wasn't, the great period of fertility in the Great Plains was really not since the Pleistocene.
And during the research of this book, we kind of found out why, you know, what the case was. Although there were definitely periods of considerable wetness and lushness in the plains that were noted by various naturalists and explorers that kind of went away completely over time when conventional grazing with cows was brought in and the bison were eliminated.
So it is a complicated picture. Okay, Andy. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, so what we found with the bison and with all great herds of animals where you have 300, 600, up to many thousands of animals running together, that the predators would keep those animals moving.
And that's the key thing that we lost as soon as we came in and started putting up fences and trying to corral animals and also shooting wolves. So there was an ecosystemic balance that was maintained that allowed the grasslands to be, the prairies to be healthy.
And what we've seen with the regenerative folks, even in the northern plains that are very, very dry, that you can have up to 200 species per acre in a restored prairie habitat. And that kind of diversity makes a huge difference going all the way back to gut health and human health, because each species of plants comes with its own microbiome, basically, preferred bacteria and fungi that cohabitate with each species.
And that diversity of microbiome comes through with the cows as you're handling the cows and eating. So that diversity, which I guess we can get into in greater detail, but diversity at the microbiome level in the field becomes the, is what's very helpful for the human health ultimately.
Now you speak. Okay. So we have a little bit of a lag here, so I apologize for that. So there's a bunch of different bodies of information that have been coming out that are really provocative and they evoke a larger picture.
And we thought we would try to tie them together. One of them was, as Ben has alluded to, the barnyard effect. The idea that there's something about being around a barn and the animals in the barn and the level of germs and dirt and bacteria, which has now been refined to be understood as having to do with humans and cows sharing their microbiome and keeping each other's microbiome robust through the sharing of that.
Then there's the, and Ben can elaborate more on these, then there's the idea of the blue zones where most of the octogenarians to centigenarians in the world live. And we looked at those blue zones and we said, okay, how could these relate to the barnyard effect or to the eating of dairy?
And we found out that in all of them, there's 100 years ago, folks were living around cows and sheep and water buffalo. Even in Okinawa, which where they don't consume very much dairy and they traditionally haven't, except perhaps in times of crisis, they would feed their children, which could have been very important since food insecurity was a common theme in Okinawa.
But everyone was within a couple hundred yards of a water buffalo and the muck of the rice fields all the time. So we said, okay, so here's the barnyard effect. And then we learned out about C15, which is a molecule associated with longevity that is associated with high quality grass fed organic dairy.
And that is actually something that's and not just cow, but sheep and goat and so forth. And that's actually a very significantly high. It's a significant component of the diets of all of the blue zone folks, except for the folks in Okinawa who get C17, which is from seafood.
So we started saying, okay, well, these pieces might fit together for creating this picture of longevity. And then we started saying, so is there something else? So the humans and the cows are keeping each other healthy in these various ways, the humans and the goats, the humans and the sheep.
Is there some way that the sheep and the grass are keeping each other healthy beyond, or the sheep and the, you know, and the grass and the weather and the cows. And that led us to start thinking about one of the things that I do is I think of myself as a science writer.
I think of myself as a sort of a folkloric, scientific investigator. I like to take things that scientists and not scientists, but farmers and local folks, you know, folk wisdom, and see if there's a truth behind it.
So when I was growing up and, you know, working on farms, working on horse farms, the farmers were always moaning and saying things like, if you want it to rain, cut the hay. And so I thought, well, what if there's something to that?
What if grass somehow can signal that it needs rain when it's been traumatized by being cut or chomped by a cow or stomped, you know, in a chomp and stomp regime. So I started going out and looking for evidence and we learned about Pseudomonas syringae, which is a bacteria that has on its shell the most effective ice nucleating protein on the planet.
Some people have essentially said there is no rain without pseudomonas in the atmosphere, and it's everywhere from the highest levels of the atmosphere, the troposphere, all the way down to it's like in the oceans and the waterways and so forth.
So we started looking into that and discovered that the sky microbiome is almost unknown, almost unknown. And then we started saying, okay, well, so if the pseudo, Ben can explain more how that pseudomonas syringate cycle works.
But then the question came up, okay, so if there's all of these microbes in the atmosphere who are changing the weather, are there maybe methanotrophs that eat methane that are floating in the atmosphere or that help to create oxygen?
So we started doing these inquiries and basically writing a kind of somewhat way out there hypothesis, then building literature reviews behind it and writing up the little thesis and just casually sending these to experts in the field.
And what was their reaction? They all loved it. They all loved it. They all wish that there was more creative, integrative thinking in the world of biology and agriculture. And that led me to think, well, we should formalize this function and have folks send us their sort of like folkloric science, their anecdotes, their case studies, their observations.
And we can continue to do this and continue to flesh out this picture of the living, breathing organisms of grassland ecosystems and how life is kind of managing things and keeping it all resilient on the planet as a whole.
Okay, well, I have a question. Does the rain fall down from the sky or does it come up from the earth with the atmosphere being yanked up? So Benjamin, talk about this. Yeah, so there's several different ways that rain is created.
It's not all the same, but in grasslands, the pseudomonas syringae is actually above, in the air above grasslands, the bacteria or the single cell organism that's most prolific, the most commonly found or the most abundantly found microbe in the air of a grassland is Pseudomonas syringae.
And as Mary said, it has these proteins on the shell of the bacteria that help that fake out water and convince it that it's starting to crystallize. And once it starts to crystallize on the shell of this bacteria, an ice crystal forms around it.
And those are the ice crystals that cause it to rain. However, there's also... This part of the theory of how rain happens, ice is formed in the higher atmosphere, and as it falls down, it warms up and coalesces into water droplets and then becomes heavier and it goes to the earth.
But there's another whole piece to this, which has to do with... The other whole piece of it is that if you just look at gravity, gravity can't explain how fast rain falls. It falls five times faster than can be explained through gravity.
So there's some other effect. And this guy, Gerald Pollack, who's a professor and researcher at, I think, University of Washington, identified that it's really an electrical charge that is, you know, during the day when it's really warm, the heat is rising.
And photosynthesis is creating all these positive ions that are expelled from the plants during photosynthesis. And they rise up on these heat convection currents. And the atmosphere above the grassland becomes highly positively charged.
And the vegetation or the verdure down on the ground gets more and more negatively charged as the photosynthesis peaks in the early afternoon. And so the ground is becoming more negative, the sky is becoming more positive.
And what happens then is that eventually as these Pseudomonas is doing its work with creating ice crystals, there's a tugging. The ground, the green verger on the ground is tugging at the rain, at all of these positive ions in the sky.
And that's actually what happens is that the rain is yanked out of the clouds by the ground, by the plants on the ground. And it's kind of crazy. But this is very recent that Gerald Pollack has demonstrated this just in the last 10 years that he's been working and becoming more compelling in how he is describing this and documenting it scientifically.
And so this goes back to another one of those folkloric things is that, you know, when we were reading this the background here, we got off on this tangent provoked by Charles Darwin in his book. The Voyage of the Beagle.
The Voyage of the Beagle, where he's describing these, you know, when you come in the Pampas in South America, when you come into certain areas where there are cows, it changes from scrubland to this dense verdure, green, rush grass, and it's everywhere that the cows are.
And he didn't know how to explain this. And he mentioned this another writer, Atwater, who had one of the early American starting in Ohio and went all the way out the Arkansas River Valley. And he had described the same effect wherever there's cows in the Great Plains, it went from dry to lush.
And so this is where also mentioned that what was considered folklore that water or storms follow or form over bodies of water. And when I was a kid, when I was 15, I went out and I spent a summer with my uncle at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
And we would go out in his little sailboat every afternoon on Lake Mendota. And we would watch the clouds form right over the lake. And then we would have to race the thunderstorm back to shore, which my aunt didn't know about this excitingness.
I'm sure she wouldn't have been thrilled to know that that was our game. But I saw that firsthand and I thought, well, how many things are there like this that we see, but we don't know the science behind?
So we think it's coincidence and we just discount them. But what happens after the clouds form is that they typically, you know, unless there's a, you know, a whole weather system behind it pushing it in a certain direction, if it's a cloud that's formed over a lake, the natural thing for it to do is to follow the river that comes out of the lake and traverse across the landscape following the river.
And it can be sidetracked onto land if there are appropriate conditions on land in terms of the wetness and the difference in charge or the giving forth of the pseudomonas. I always think about Professor Fred Provenza's teaching on eating medicinally.
And I think the sheep are out there deciding what they're going to eat because there's some unknown cooperation between them that specific plants or specific species or specific plants that are more or less grassed out are going to release more or less pseudomonas.
So the sheep are out there just like deciding what the weather report's going to be that day. And if they're near the river or the lake and there's a storm coming, they can just sort of like help to yank it over to shore.
And all of this sounds, as I said, it sounds folk work, but the more we look, I've discovered that there's biologists are just hungry for folks to actually look at their work and think about it creatively.
And if you know how to ask the questions, you can come up with hypotheses for all kinds of extraordinary sort of, it might be too much to call them communications, but positive and negative feedback loops.
Yeah. So basically a cloud, you know, everything, all other things being equal, a cloud is going to follow that negative charge wherever it goes. And this explains why a farmer in Texas or a rancher in Texas will sometimes observe that it's raining on their neighbor's green fields and it's not raining on their own dry pasture.
And it's like, damn it. Why is that guy getting all the rain? And I'm the one that needs it. Well, it's because it's already green there. There's more pseudomonas and there's more negative charge above that.
So if you want it to rain, you should irrigate your pasture. Yeah, well, it's more complicated than that. But yeah, you've got to get it. You've got to get it going. You've got to get the green going.
Yeah. And that green will help to, you know, with water infiltration, water retention, water retention will create those water vapors that reach up into the sky with the positive ions and make that disbalance between the negative on the ground and the positive above it.
And that's why it's going to rain in one field, but not another. It's basically a weather battery that's created with the movement of the positive ions to the negative. You mentioned the role of predators and stomp and chomp grazing.
You want to talk about that? Chomp and stomp. Yeah, so chomp and stomp really comes out of the regenerative grazing idea that it's not just eating the grasses and the forbs in the pasture. It's also the cloven hoof is smashing stuff into the dirt.
And so it's not just that they're chomping, they're also stomping. And this is why it is more effective to have a dense herd that's moving, that's on the move. And you don't, you know, so obviously this happens naturally with predators in a very peaceful, safe environment.
Bison, for example, will be in very small herds. They typically will be 50, 100 animals together, or even smaller groups. But it's when they're under threat that they come together into larger and larger.
So once one herd, one small group starts moving because it's being harassed, the other small groups around it will see that it's moving, know that it's being harassed, and will tend to join it, and they get these bigger and bigger herds.
You know, the rare cases in the beginning of the European settlement in the Great Plains when there were reports of 10,000 or 30,000 animals together. Those were times when those animals were under a huge amount of stress to get into herds that big.
That's not really their natural size of a bison herd. But then talk about what the mechanism is of chomp and stomp and how that contributes to a healthy grassland. Yeah, so the chomp and chomp and stomp is a dense moving herd creates a swath of manure and it flattens the pasture down into so that the roots of the plants get sun and they all get fertilized and they all burst into action.
And so frequent, you know, the more often you hit it, obviously you need to rest and recover, but you want to hit that as often as the rest and recover cycle for that area allows, because the more often you hit it, the more fertile it will become.
And so the chomp and stomp adds fertility through those mechanisms that I mentioned. But it's really the diverse pasture, getting as many species going as you can. So Ben, can you talk about why we need birds and why we need horses and, you know, what we actually rebuild?
We had a really interesting interaction with Jim Elizondo, who is a master grazer. And he was talking about the grazing guild and how why it's really important or the fact that it is very important to have horses in the mix.
And horses, for most cattlemen, a horse, if you're thinking about stocking density, you put a horse on, you got to take the cow off. So why would you do that? But it turns out that Jim actually wasn't able to carbon-rich soil to have horses on.
And this is where Mary comes in. So Mary actually found out the mechanism by which that, so this is, you know, grazing science that's not well known, but the horse poop has a different mix of actually, Mary, you should explain.
So basically, I've been reading Christine Jones' wonderful work about the carbon storage by fungi. And I started asking myself, is there something different about horse manure that would help to change or balance out in some way or complement what was happening with the cows?
And I discovered that horse manure is very high in fatty acids and an acid, and that's fungi heaven. And when I looked at the composition of cow manure, that's bacteria food. So if you're balancing them, then you're balancing the relationship between the fungi and the bacteria and the soil, and you're able to build the mycorrhizal networks.
We call it the root-wide web, sort of after Suzanne Samard's wood-wide web. That complex network of communication and of storage of carbon and water and nutrients and sharing of nutrients that happen when you feed the fungi.
So, I mean, anyone who's ever had horses, you know that, you know, on a warm day, it doesn't take long for a pile of steaming horsepoo to just be covered with mushrooms. And so I thought, well, that's got to be it.
This has got to be the balance here. But there's other reasons why you need the horses as well. And maybe, I don't know if you're interested at all hearing our fanciful thoughts about the Pleistocene and the ice ages, but the horses actually are used in, they were very important in the Pleistocene, and they are important for maintaining planetary cooling by stomping down and compacting the ice, much as reindeer do,
in the northern regions, so that the permafrost doesn't thaw. And they're, in fact, used for that. Is it the Yalkut ponies? And then they also have them in Iceland, the meat tanks with their broad hooves that just domp the ice down and they just keep it.
Meanwhile, they can eat all of the lifeless cellulose woody stuff that's sticking up through the snow, which is not good food for the cows, but the horses can break it down. Yeah, so it turns out there's multiple reasons.
So yeah, the horses will eat woody more of the cellulosic content from the grasses that otherwise results in thatch. So it's good for the pasture, but it doesn't, you know, going back to the stocking density and, you know, you're going to be, you know, slightly different food that they want and you're going to be depositing more carbon, more carbon-rich soil, more water infiltration, healthier soil.
And it's really this balance between the horses and the cows that is going to give you the best, most rapid deposition of carbon-rich soil. And that's the reason to do it. And it should actually increase the capacity of the land for cows.
So you may, by adding horses, you may actually, within a few years, be able to increase your stocking density. Are there indicators that things are getting better health-wise or ecologically? Well, yes.
The main thing is that all the extra CO2 that's in the air is having an effect on greening. And so there's been worldwide regreening of semi-arid and arid lands. But not just that. We have to give the regenerative grazers, we have to give the Alan Savories and all of the folks in the innovative folks in the generations since he started doing this a lot of credit.
We have hundreds of millions of, or we don't actually know how much. I guess we asked the folks at the Savory Institute and they said they didn't know how many acres were under regenerative restoration right now.
And the fact that we're greening is incredibly important. And the fact that folks are, yes, there is definitely a cultural movement to understanding the value of full-fat, organic raw milk, dairy. Dairy is having a resurgence.
Meat is having a resurgence. I think it's very encouraging that the companies that make the cultured meat products keep faltering and just not being able to give it a toe hold. People feel in our bones, in our milk-fed bones, what healthy food is and what a healthy relationship is.
And I think a lot of people want to go out and get licked by that cow. And the whole last section of her book is talking about how to be your local PR team for this idea by helping your city to bring in goat grazers and to start a little utopia demonstration intensive grazing project.
And we even have folks in Colorado who are working on that. And I have to get back to them. I have to get back to Colorado to help see if we can get our first Utopia City off the ground. I was very impressed with the amount of research that you did.
So much of it's documented. So it's not just your ideas and thoughts, but it's things that go way back. Well, we're just maniacs about that. We love doing the research and we love, you know, articulating it in a way that will stimulate more thought and creative action.
Yeah, the main thing that we learned is just how little we actually know about the land that we live on. There's so much, there's a lot of research out there, but there's also a lot of research that hasn't even been done yet.
And when we were working with in the, you know, the fact checking after writing the book, we spent months doing checking and talking to experts. And one of the guys that really helped us was Pierre Amato, who's an aerobiologist in France.
And he's the guy who's been documenting how much activity is going on in the air. There's so much. And we had wondered about, so one of the things that fundamentally created the climate and the atmosphere that we live in is the blue-green algae and in the oceans.
But that, you know, every time a whale spouts or every time a wave breaks, you know, that cyanobacteria, it's called, it's going into the air and traveling around and it travels from one place to another in the air.
And we were like, you know, why hasn't anybody, we made the comment in the book, why isn't, you know, why aren't we studying this? It could be having a huge effect on, you know, global warming or whatever.
And at the end of our period of review, yeah, Pierre got back to us and said, oh, and by the way, you know, that research about cyanobacteria that you said we needed, well, we just got funded to do that.
So this is really fundamental stuff, you know, but it's. Really fundamental stuff about methane, you know, and methane cycling and, you know, carbon capture through methane cycling. I've been watching the, really it's been a kind of a debacle with Beauvaire in Europe and the countries that rolled it out and had catastrophic effects.
A lot of farmers reported, you know, paralysis and extreme illness and death of their cattle through their Bover. And I looked at it and I did, again, the same thing I like to do. I say, okay, but what is Bover for?
Beauvair is for dealing with cows that have, okay, let's just say that they have, quote, too much methane gas. They've got belching. Well, why do they have that? They would have that because of the bacteria in their, you know, their gut biome.
Well, why, you know, where are the cows that are doing this? Well, if you take a cow and you put him in your grassland and he's eating grass and his gut bacteria is healthy and he has a healthy microbiome or sheath, I don't know why I'm saying he, cow or a, you know, a cow or a steer.
And she's burping into the grass and that has a wet, dry cycle, you know, in part affected by how much or when she eats the pseudomonas syringae. And the methanotrophs and the methanogens, the bacteria that create methane and eat methane in the grass, are in a balance with one another.
And when the methane gets burped onto the methanotrophs, they wake up and they start doing their thing. And they absorb that methane that the cow is burping out. And they metabolize it. And when the water, when it rains and the earth becomes wet, then the methanogens, they start doing their thing and they keep it fed so that there doesn't have to be a cow there all the time in order for the methanotrophs to be there waiting for the cow,
you know, for them to be ready when the cows come by and release more methane. So then we started thinking, well, I wonder if there's methanotropes in the atmosphere. Well, I think Ben has done most of the, we just started looking to this and we were like, oh my gosh, they're everywhere in quantities that people don't even understand.
There's so much resilience in the atmosphere and the relationships that just is not being studied. Yeah, and so sure enough, you know, there's methanotrophs that float around in the air and eat methane.
Yeah. And every time we read one of these papers about, you know, this kind of really interesting feedback loop, the scientists, or not every time, but frequently, we saw this over and over again. They make this comment that's, well, you know, this is a really interesting process and feedback loop, but this is not included in the climate models.
That's right. So I think one of the first or second references we have in the book is about the American Academy of Microbiologists, you know, in their annual report a few years ago, made a very big statement about how if only the climate models would take into account the biological, yeah, the microbiome, they could actually have a better predictive model.
I.e. the current model is not predictive. It leaves out so many of these natural feedback loops that are already built into the system. Well, it's a model of a machine, and ecosystems act like living beings.
We should be treating the ecosystems. I think of it as the difference between, you go to a doctor with a fever and there's the doctor who will say, you have to get that done as much as possible and it'll give you an NSAID, you know, ibuprofen or something.
And then the holistic doctor who will say, oh, well, let's look at all of the different things that are going on in your tissues and what you're eating. And let's just, you know, if we had groups of people working together, scientists and farmers and policymakers, that were acting like a holistic medical team and understanding, you know, with a wellness forward model, we would have a whole different and a much more resilient and much more robust and happier relationship with the agro-ecological world.
And the climate. And the climate. So what is a takeaway that you hope people who read the book would get? Well, I want farmers to have confidence and hope, and I want them to find scientists to talk to, or even folks like us.
I mean, we've started a forum. We want folks to let us know their things like this that they see, their intuitive insights, their outside of science hunches, their observations, the folk tales that they think there might be something to, so that we can help them to sort of articulate it and start really expanding the conversation with scientists and expand the funding sources for really having firmer forward communication and for improving the communication with the public so that they really understand the natural world more fully and where our food comes from.
I find that farmers are just, so many are traumatized by the economic and just political, I don't even know what to call it, juggernaut that controls their lives and can just make or break fortunes in an instant with very little genuine information.
How do people tap into your forum? Yeah, so there's a page on our website which is philosophy.farm. And philosophy.farm slash farmer forum. Okay. And if you go to slash farmer forum on philosophy.farm, there's just a form there where you can ask your question.
We just want to have it based on observation and intuition that you think surely there must be an explanation for this if it's true. And that's the kind of thing that we want, you know, we can't answer questions about what kind of dewormer to use.
But if it's a philosophical question or spiritual question. There are larger eco-questions that we could do some research and help the farmer to formulate or articulate a question, or maybe it will be something that we can put in the next book.
We feel like this is a conversation that we've just started and we need to keep it going. And as I said, I've had some background in activism. I worked in sustainability for a long time. And Ben was a, in his former career, was international.
He was a talking head. He was an industry expert. And he worked a lot with statistics and he wrote the big reports about that field. And we want to be the folks who can kind of help to advocate for this level of the conversation in many different ways.
Yeah, integrated or large synthesis of information. That's sort of beyond what scientists typically say really focused on one narrow field. And we seem to be able to do this bridging of many, many different fields.
Can't you come up with a name that'd help you? I don't know. It was, well, because basically when you realize how incredible cows are and ruminants in general, and, you know, it's, you know, it was this thing of it's incredibly good for your health to be around cows.
Best thing that can happen for you is like, you know, like we got from Meg Cattell, who's, you know, a rancher veterinarian, cheesemaker person. Professor, I think she's retired now, but yeah. She said, go get licked by a cow.
You know, there's the shared microbiome is not only good for health, but also mental health. And then when you realized, okay, well, and regenerative grazing restores native habitats for wildlife and it has an incredible effect on the biome and the soil, the insects, the birds, the fish, the reptiles, the mammals, you know, like everything, the whole trophic cascade can be triggered by properly managed cows.
Right. And then when we saw this whole effect on the climate, it's like it brought up, you know, pictures of the, you know, the Garden of Eden and how it's already being done. It's not like we could do this.
We're already doing this. There's, you know, as Mary said, there's tens of millions of acres now under regenerative management. It's already happening. And so what we're doing is we're restoring the Garden of Eden.
It's already, you know, we're already doing it. So that's where Mutopia, we want to reintegrate cows with societies. And it's not just cows, but the caribou, the water buffalo. Sheep, the goats. Yeah, all of these different ruminants that are all over the world.
And the people of Russia who herd reindeer, who, you know, who ironically are experiencing enormous pressure because of mining, looking for rare earth minerals, you know, for the sake of the climate.
And what if the terrible tragedy and irony is that what we need more than anything is for them to keep their herds and to expand their herds for the sake of the climate? So Ben and I are both from the Boston area, and Boston is famous for its common.
Massachusetts was a commonwealth, and the Boston Common was the place where city folks, out in the little spit of land that is Boston, where there was not much land, you know, and they were there for, you know, for the reasons of being part of the trade and so forth, you know, oceanic trade.
The common was, Boston Common was a place where you could take your cow out of the backshed and you could take it down and you could graze it on the common. And so we believe that the microbiome that we share that keeps all of us healthy is a commons that we, that it is high time that we recognized and cultivated.
And heck, we want people to be able to bring their cows down on Boston Commons again. It's not just for, you know, it's not just for makeway for ducklings. It's slumboats. Cows need to be reintegrated.
Cows and other ruminants reintegrated with human communities, urban, suburban, rural, and wilderness areas. Everywhere. Everywhere there's people, there should be ruminants. And how do people get your book?
Where can they find it? Right now, it's on Amazon. It's the easiest way to find it. If you go to Amazon, search for Mootopia. There's an e-book and there's a hardcover. So if you look for Mootopia, How to Easily Fix, it comes up right away because the subtitle is How to Easily Fix Human Health and Heal the Planet.
Okay. Well, thank you so much. And we look forward to Carolyn. This was great fun. Hearing more about your book, too, whenever that is down the road. And look for more podcasts from the Stockman Grass Farmer.
And the magazine itself is digital or in print. So thank you both for being with me and talking with this. Okay. Thank you, Carolyn.
