‍[00:04] Jennifer Wu: Hi everyone, thanks for listening to The Founder Spirit podcast. I'm your host, Jennifer Wu. In this podcast series, I interview exceptional individuals from all over the world with the Founder Spirit, ranging from social entrepreneurs, tech founders, to philanthropists, elite athletes, and more. Together, we'll uncover not only how they manage to succeed in face of multiple challenges, but also who they are as people and their human story.

If this podcast has been beneficial or valuable to you, feel free to become a patron and support us on Patreon.com, that is P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/TheFounderSpirit. As always, you can find us on Apple, Google, Amazon and Spotify, as well as social media and our website at TheFounderSpirit.com.

The following episode was recorded during the 2023 Villars Symposium held by the Villars Institute, where I recorded several short interviews over a period of 3 days. The Founder Spirit Podcast is proud to be a partner of the Villars Institute, a nonprofit foundation focused on accelerating the transition to a net-zero economy and restoring planetary health.

“And I think that respect for the access is something that was ingrained in me being raised off-grid, that you can't just expect to go down to the shopping center and get another ice cream, and you can't expect just to have hot water all the time because the gas has run out and it's going to take two days to get gas in to have hot water. I think that was a good thing and I wasn't really aware of that growing up in that space. But in retrospect, I'm very glad that I had that limitation.”

“I’m very glad that I had that context of understanding that you don't deserve anything, you've got to earn resources, you've got to earn your place. Coming back to being raised not only by a very sensitive and intelligent mother, but also a complete madman of a father, Robert Swan, the first person stupid enough, his words, not mine, to ski to the north and south poles in the 80s, I think that provided a spice of madness for sure, but also an edge of resilience.”

“A really important question of hope is don’t always look outside of yourself, find that space to tap into your breath, to have your feet in the soil, go and do some volunteer work that connects you to real things, real places, real output and it's so satisfying.”

“Just look up and remember the cosmos that we're in and how lucky we are to be having this conversation and to be eating and living on a very diverse and beautiful biodiverse place.”

Joining us today is Barney Swan, Founder of the Australian non-profit ClimateForce, leading off-grid research and development projects around biodiversity, innovations and agriculture solutions. Barney is also an explorer, having managed complex expedition programs in 8 countries, including the Arctic, Tanzania, South Atlantic and Patagonia. 

In 2017, he skied 1,000 kilometers over 65 days to the South Pole, surviving using NASA designed solar ice melters, lithium batteries and biofuel made from waste. The carbon positive journey marked the launch of the ClimateForce challenge, a collaborative mission to clean up 360 million tons of CO2 before the year 2025.  

Currently based in Far North Queensland, Australia, Barney is building a venture to restore over 500 acres of the world’s oldest rainforest, Daintree. A gifted keynote speaker, bridging outdoor stewardship and conscious business practices, he is on a mission to design a more sustainable future.

Hi Barney, welcome to the Founder Spirit Podcast and we're live today from the Villars Symposium 2023. Thank you for taking the time to join us. 

[04:07] Barney: G'day to you, Jennifer. It's great to be sitting here in the beautiful Swiss Alps and what a place to have lots of people from around the world, different industries coming together to talk about not only the problems, but the solutions of what we're up against as a species. 

[04:23] Jennifer: Thank you very much. So I want to explore a little bit about what it was like growing up in Australia as the son of Robert Swan, an explorer and the first person to walk to both poles. 

[04:37] Barney: Well, that's a lot to unpack. So I think we'll start at the beginning with being born in England and born into quite a traditional English family. And my mum, at the age of five, had enough of London and promptly abandoned ship to off-grid Far North Queensland in Australia, which, I think, in her mind, being a horticultural background sounded very romantic - the bold, oldest rainforest, tropical gardens, tropical fruit. 

But little did she know that moving off-grid was a very hard decision in the year 2000, when lithium batteries were definitely not a thing. And if I put my fan on three instead of one, the power would cut out at about 4am in the morning and so you'd be pretty hot come 6 o’clock. 

And I think that respect for the access is something that was ingrained in me being raised off-grid, that you can't just expect to go down to the shopping center and get another ice cream, and you can't expect just to have hot water all the time because the gas has run out and it's going to take two days to get gas in to have hot water. We didn't have air conditioning being raised in 40 degree celsius heat with 100% humidity, a lot of people would cringe at that. 

And so I think that being very aware of the reality that around the world, a lot of people don't have access, I think that was a good thing and I wasn't really aware of that growing up in that space. But in retrospect, I'm very glad that I had that limitation, because now being in a place like Villars Palace, where literally breakfast was just so much food, so much excess, so much everything. You go to places like Nigeria, you go places like Papua New Guinea, you go to remote islands in Australia, it's very different. And I'm very glad that I had that context of understanding that you don't deserve anything, you've got to earn resources, you've got to earn your place. 

And I think coming back to being raised not only by a very sensitive and intelligent mother, but also a complete madman of a father, Robert Swan, the first person stupid enough, his words, not mine, to ski to the north and south poles in the 80s. (I) think that provided a spice of madness, for sure, but also an edge of resilience. 

And my dad has been quoted as a lot of things, but persistent is the number one thing that seems to come through a lot of people. And we can hear a little bell in the background here - and that bell of passion and ambition is what is needed, and we can hear it tinkling away outside, summoning people to the next part of the conference. 

And that is what persistence is. It is waking up with that bell in your head, it’s going to sleep with that bell in your head, it is engaging in this conversation across the table from you and having that bell in your head of really walking the talk and doing your absolute best to be a person of action and not just words, especially with ChatGPT in everyone's pocket these days. 

We are drowning in words, we are drowning in more commitment. But where is the action? Where is the impact and where is the actual… (knocks on table)? I don't mean to make too much noise into this beautiful microphone, but I just hit the table here and that tangibility is that intersection between being raised from someone who was trained as a horticulturist, my mother, and someone who was stupid enough to ski to the North and South Poles, being the first to do that. That tangible reality of being a human, I think is what binds them both to being remarkable parents and also very firm parents. 

I definitely wasn't raised in Cotton Candy Land. And especially being raised off-grid, if you screw up and die, that's on you. And it’s been very clear running around at age ten, if you get lost, no one's going to come and get you. Fall off a cliff, gravity is going to break your head open - it's a reality. So it was tough, but I think long-term, it's created that bell in my head and that passion. 

[08:24] Jennifer: Excellent. You yourself have done 9 expeditions and the first one you did at the age of 7. 

[08:31] Barney: So I've done 9 expeditions to Antarctica, 3 to the South Pole. 

At the age of 7, I was dispatched with my father on a yacht down there. The southern oceans are some of the most choppy oceans in the world, so I remember promptly vomiting into the bucket that had a smiley face drawn at the bottom of it, and then returned at 18 to help coordinate expeditions. 

Having that access and proximity to Antarctica is a huge privilege, the emissions and the resources that it takes to get down there, I very much acknowledge. And to be honest, I don't think I'm going to be going down there anytime soon because of that reality, unless I'm by sail. And we always have planted trees and made sure that our impact is net positive. But fundamentally, it is a very precious place and it is frustrating for someone who's been down there early on, it’s becoming very en vogue now and obviously I've had my time down there. And if you really want to go, it is a sacred place that really needs to be visited with respect. Just like the Amazon, just like many global commons around the world, we really need to go to these places with the intention to give back to them, not just for a bucket list photo and to have a selfie with penguins. 

We have to go to these magnificent corners of the world, like the Alps, like the Pacific, and like Everest, with the intention to give back more than we take, whether that's culturally, whether that's trash, whether that's emissions, whether that's within ourselves. This trend of traveling for content rather than virtue really needs to shift globally. And we've been a part of hopefully that more virtuous side, but the reality is planes and boats aren't running on rainbow fuel yet, and plastic that we're eating out, our dehydrated food… 

But we did our best in 2017-18 skied to the South Pole, pioneering NASA design solar ice melting systems, biofuels made from waste lithium batteries, powered off solar passive vacuum flasks that melted snow in -45 (degree celsius), so we've done our best to innovate down there. And I'm really proud at the beginning of this year to help support my father finishing off his legacy down there and to quiet his mind a little bit on potentially not going back to Antarctica anytime too soon. And (I’m) really proud of him for finishing off that chapter with grace. 

And it's very humbling that he's also helping support our charity team of seven employees. And I have 250 volunteers this last couple of years, fantastic board members, who would not have done anything without them, managing risk, making sure I didn't do anything too silly early on. 

That circle, that team, that charity, Dad is coming in and helping make sure that the land that we're working on is secure and that we have a blueprint to scale to Asia Pacific and many other tropical forests in need of equitable models of land management. Because conservation can't remain in a charity mode, we have to make good business sense out of diversifying land, whether it's agroforestry, food, biodiversity credits, whatever it may be, cattle, monocultures, we really need to diversify. So it's really a beautiful transition that I've supported dad with his Antarctica legacy and now he's coming in this year to support what we're doing in the world's oldest rainforest in Australia. 

And hopefully after that, potentially he can go on a holiday for the first time in several decades, because he has definitely been going hard for a long time. And I think he just needs to cycle around and smell the roses a little bit. 

[12:00] Jennifer: (chuckles) Speaking of ClimateForce, you founded it in July 2017. What inspired you to found the company, basically out of nothing? 

[12:12] Barney: I think working as a consultant, doing a lot of work with expedition facilitation, not just in Antarctica, but Iceland, Kilimanjaro, around the world, I saw a lot of fluff basically when it comes to natural capital. A lot of amazing pioneers, like I planted trees with Jane Goodall, what a legend, a beautiful, amazing soul. But on the other side, they are people who are signaling that they're doing good stuff for the planet and actual fact, just pocketing money, having nice cars and nice houses and actually really not doing as much as they say they're doing. 

So I saw big gaps in the market and really wanted to come in and be a positive force of acknowledging fourth generation farm knowledge, ethnobotanical knowledge in Australia goes back 16,000+ years. But then also marrying really cutting edge technology like drone spatial mapping and virtual reality, augmented reality, blockchain reporting, LiDAR scans, bioacoustics to monitor biodiversity, with both western and ethnobotanical traditional knowledge to create something that really was trustworthy, unique and scalable. 

[13:19] Jennifer: So I understand that you're working on the restoration of Daintree forest. It's the world's oldest rainforest, it's 180 million years old versus Amazonia, which is 55 million. So tell us a little bit about your work there. 

[13:36] Barney: I’m definitely not comparing and contrasting. It's definitely not the size of the Amazon and the Congo as well, amazing rainforest, but that's only 17 million years old. And also in Borneo, Indonesia, Sumatra - again, amazing ancient forests. 

But we do have that claim as being the world's oldest rainforest, 180 to 220 million is the range. And yeah, it's a very hard place to work. It sounds romantic, but it's really not when you've got meters of rain falling in a couple of weeks. I've had fungi infections more than once in my feet and lost my mind from weeks of rain on end. 

But fundamentally, it is a global common and it's the only place in the world (where) two World Heritage zones meet. We've got the world's oldest rainforest, Daintree, which is part of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Management Area. And then to our right we've got the Great Barrier Reef, which hopefully doesn't need too much of an introduction, the world's biggest reef system, over 2000 kilometers of reef. 

So being between two globally significant World Heritage zones and to the southern line of our property, having one of the most diverse mangrove ecosystems in the world from a biodiversity standpoint, we're really in a very unique place to be creating a model that puts biodiversity at the top, and carbon and many of the other co-benefits around education and renewable energy. Biodiversity is that primary objective, all of those other things are co-benefits. And obviously jobs, traditional learning, engagement, education are critical. But because we're in such a globally significant bio-diverse hotspot, biodiversity is that number one major objective. 

And (I’m) really proud to have managed and to have carved out a very unique blueprint that will hopefully, in these coming years, be able to go to scale. And we're currently managing 527 acres, which is a lot, but the reality is we need millions of acres managed better globally. I was chatting with the gentleman in Geneva a few days ago, who has 5.5 million acres under management. By 2030, he wants 13.5 million acres under management in Angola, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Mexico. 

And you've got cultural factors, you've got people living on the country, you've got degraded cattle land, you've got standing forests. We really need technology to help optimize where to be priority restoration spots and where to leave alone and where to optimize livestock and current agricultural practices. 

So it really is a complex thing to manage land. But as we heard at the beginning of today's sessions, which were very humbling and I feel sorry for some of the younger people in the room just getting drilled like Planetary Boundaries, ecological collapse. If you're not familiar with that stuff, I can imagine some kids going to be twitching tonight a little bit with some of the things that were downloaded on this morning's session. 

But fundamentally diversifying land use really is up there. Across the board, one of the major things that we need to do and that trickles on to obviously ocean management as well. And especially the fact that 43% of our planet is international waters. That's a very under-talked-about reality, 43%, which I only found out recently. Around 70% of our planet, depending on what the ice is doing, is ocean. But 43% is no man's land, it's pirate country. 

There's no global momentum that is truly regulating any one of those industries. And the ocean, which regulates ⅔ of our world's carbon, and you've got the IMO, the International Maritime Organization, the United Nations High Sea Commission - you've got a couple of organizations trying. But fundamentally just as AI, just as space, just as gene editing, we really need global governance to come in to support not only international oceans, but those three other sectors mentioned very quickly, or we're going to see some quite hectic stuff going down. 

[17:18] Jennifer: One of the things that we had talked about previously is giving hope to the younger generation because we are in a pretty dire situation right now. To use Greta's words, the house is on fire, but we're sitting around having coffee. 

So what message of hope would you like to offer to the next generation? And maybe you are that generation. 

[17:42] Barney: Well, I'm 29 in ten days and so I think being a millennial, I think we're a bit of a sticky glue between analog and digital. And I really do feel for children who are being raised in the 2000s who were born ten years ago and raised on iPads. And I'm not saying all kids are raised on iPads, but I remember Nokia Snakes - that was like cutting edge technology when I was a kid. 

And I think a message of hope is to really connect with the provisions that bind us, the air that we breathe, the food, the water that doesn't make us sick. And I think connecting to those provisions really is the source of having a healthy planet, and volunteering local organizations, whether that's a wildlife group or an elderly home or helping plant some trees with ClimateForce at the world's oldest rainforest, if you're crazy enough. Or whatever it is, having that tangible connection is such a critical catalyst to creating hope. 

I had a bit of a rough day yesterday, a lot of stuff firing off back in Australia - and big long chats and websites failing, and the usual dramas of managing business. And I found myself on the Doom Scroll in the evening and writing prompts into ChatGPT about how to solve the world's problems. And I just suddenly was like, what am I doing? This is just depressing. And so I went out to the balcony and I just sat there and had some nice breaths and tapped my chest, which is a form of therapy in itself and really went into that holistic breathing of trying to get down to the tummy and looking out in the view and just (breathing out)...

And that simple act of tapping into your breath is such an under-talked about asset. We can do it anytime, any place. And that in itself is a form of currency of hope, is realizing that (breathing out and tapping on the chest) we're here, you're doing your best and stop. 

I remember in Singapore, I've done a lot of work in schools in Singapore. And a kid asked at the end of my presentation, what's the parallel between circular economy and self-realization? 15-year old kid, huge bags under his eyes, clearly under huge pressure to be A++. And I'm like, Dude, that's it. You've just nailed the question of the century. That is it - if you can create circularity in your economy and you can create self-realization within yourself, they're both a form of hope because you're not looking at virgin experience in the pathway of self-realization or you're not looking for virgin resources from an economical standpoint. You're dealing with what you have innately and creating a next generation of either virtue or industry from that. 

A really important question of hope is don’t always look outside of yourself, find that space to tap into your breath, to have your feet in the soil, go and do some volunteer work that connects you to real things, real places, real output and it's so satisfying. I cleaned about three tons of rubbish off beaches, mangroves and waterways. I cleaned about 75 tons of rubbish from a degraded farm. And it's such a satisfying thing, looking at a beach that's filthy, having 50 people come in and clean up half a ton of rubbish, and you're like, that's a day's worth of impact. And it feels good, it's real. 

And I love academia, but we're surrounded by beautiful books right now. But so many of these things require imagination. And I think just that realness is such an important thing for the next generation to tap into, especially our inner workings and our inner quiet. And just as much as hope and trust can't be bought, you can't buy silence. You have to earn all three of those things. So I really encourage fostering those currencies and bringing it together in a way that invites people along instead of making them feel silly with where they're at. 

I think that's a big thing that I'm seeing across the board with sustainability is that you don't dem(on)ify industry and then hop on a plane to go on a cheap ticket to Bali and drink lots of plastic water bottles, and use your iPhone that has illegal cobalt from Congo and the Amazon in it. You have to work with industry, and we have to hold them accountable for the icky stuff that they're doing. But we also need to acknowledge that we are in a globalized world, and I think, similar to the currency of hope, realizing that we can't blame if you're the one also being a part of that. 

And I think that helps break the cycle of doom and gloom and empowers us to get our act together with how we're eating, how we're consuming on a day-to-day basis, and actually feeling a sense of place in a very, very fast changing world. 

[22:24] Jennifer: That's right, we can't be angry, we have to find solutions out of the system that we created. 

Barney, we're almost coming to the end of this podcast. Can you tell us where people can find you on the Internet and ClimateForce? 

[22:40] Barney: Yes, just TropicalRegen.org or ClimateForce.com, they'll both end up at the same place and all the usual social media bits we've got going on. 

And I really just encourage everyone to tap into their local versions of ClimateForce because there's thousands of them out there. Climate Force is a small drop, hopefully increasingly a little bit of a stream, and maybe one day a river. But just look at your local people, who are doing good stuff and tap into your local elders. Learn who your traditional owners of the land are, and it doesn't matter where you are in the world. They are old cultures, old song lines, old stories - learn about them, be curious about them. Learn about your wildlife. Ideally, shift a little bit more plant-based (diet), I'm not saying go vegan tomorrow. Get more out of this journey of sustainability and doing good for the planet, instead of thinking that it's reductive. 

And if you want to plant a tree with ClimateForce, we got an interactive dashboard, you'll know where your tree is. So that would be awesome if anyone would like to plant a tree and see that grow over time, not only on a 2D dashboard, but we're working towards having that augmented reality, VR-friendly by the end of the year. So any support on that front would be amazing. 

And we're doing extensive research and development with biodiversity tracking and various other modular technologies to create more resilience for rural communities. So any support would be amazing. But again, not about ClimateForce, just look at your local resources, look at your local network. And I really encourage that connection to try and connect a little bit more with local elders - it's really important. Both getting the elderly and the young intertwined is really important. Japan does a great job at that, and I think the rest of the world can really integrate that a little bit more into their culture and their society. 

And, yeah, just tap into that breath. It's a bit cliched and a bit hippy dippy, but we can do that right now at the end of this podcast, go outside, look up. And I think looking up is important, especially with us all looking down on our phones these days. Just look up and remember the cosmos that we're in and how lucky we are to be having this conversation and to be eating and living on a very beautiful biodiverse place. 

[24:46] Jennifer: Thank you very much, Barney, for joining us today. 

If this podcast has been beneficial or valuable to you, feel free to become a patron and support us on Patreon.com, that is P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/TheFounderSpirit. As always, you can find us on Apple, Google, Amazon and Spotify, as well as social media and our website at TheFounderSpirit.com.

The Founder Spirit Podcast is proud to be a partner of the Villars Institute, a nonprofit foundation focused on accelerating the transition to a net zero economy and restoring planetary health.

[25:40] END OF AUDIO