‍[00:02] Jennifer: 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.

The following episode was recorded during the 2024 Villars Summit 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.

“The climate movement has unbelievable momentum, but we have another, and I would say even bigger, threat underlying climate change, and that is the loss of biodiversity.”

“We are biodiversity, we are part of biodiversity, whether you like it or not, we are part of that system, and it can only be revitalized if we recognize that and if we start to value the whole.”

“Essentially, degradation on our planet is driven by the inequitable distribution of wealth. So ultimately, what that means is global restoration isn't just an ecological challenge, it's a humanitarian challenge.” 

“There's a thousand ways you can restore nature. But the single way into achieving that is by distributing wealth towards the local stewards of land, the Indigenous people, the farmers, who are living in direct association with nature.” 

Joining us today is Tom Crowther, professor of ecology at the Swiss Institute of Technology ETH Zurich, where he founded Crowther Lab, an interdisciplinary group of scientists studying global ecosystems and generating knowledge to protect biodiversity and address climate change. 

Tom is also the founder of Restor, a science-based open data platform, and serves as the founding co-chair on the advisory board of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

‍Why is the loss of biodiversity an even bigger threat underlying climate change? Well, let’s talk to him and find out.

Hello Tom, welcome to the Founder Spirit podcast. We're live today from Villars Summit 2024, thank you for taking the time to join us. 

[02:28] Tom Crowther: Hello, thank you so much for having me on. I'm excited to have a chat. 

[02:23] Jennifer Wu: Great, Tom, I thought we'd go back a little bit into your childhood. 

I understand that you grew up as the class clown. Can you tell us a little bit about your formative experience as a child? 

[02:42] Tom: Yeah, I guess before I can think thoughts or feel feelings, I was obsessed with nature. I was always totally obsessed. 

But unfortunately, I really struggled in school. And I was dyslexic, so I didn't enjoy reading, and I also didn't try to get into it, so I just gave up, and I became really lazy. And I liked school for the messing about, but not so much for the learning about the magic of nature. 

And then when I was fortunate enough to get to university, in one of my early classes, I stole a hat from my friend, and I threw it away just to annoy him. And it landed on the projector of this professor's class. And he sent me out of a class of 300 people, and I was devastated. I thought, this is the end, I'm doomed. 

And he met me, and he took me to the pub, and he was like, what's wrong with you? Why are you such an idiot? And essentially, I was just like, look, old man, you don't know me. I'm just living my life. And he was like, well, don't you like ecology? And I was like, yeah, I love it, but I can't, I'm not smart enough to do this. 

And he was like, that is absolute nonsense, no one lacks the intelligence to be interested in something. If you're interested in something, put your mind to it and explore the bits you like. And the more you do that, the more you'll enjoy it. And the more you enjoy it, the better it'll get. 

And I was very skeptical at the time, but turned out he was right. And I really loved my studies, and it all started from there. 

[03:55] Jennifer: So he was the one who really inspired you.

[03:57] Tom: Yeah, Hefin Jones, he's a professor extraordinaire. If every professor was like that, the world would be a different place. 

[04:04] Jennifer: (chuckles) It's interesting. And I also heard that you didn't want to become an ecologist, that you actually wanted to be a construction worker. 

[04:10] Tom: Yeah, a lot of my friends were into construction, and, you know, I'm dyslexic, I wasn't particularly good. I really liked sport, but I didn't think I'd be doing anything with my mind. And so I always thought that would be the direction I'd go until I met Hefin, and then everything changed. 

[04:23] Jennifer: Beautiful story. Biodiversity is defined as the variety and variability of life on Earth. So I want to understand, why is this so important to us as human species? 

[04:36] Tom: It's the most fundamental thing about our planet. Our planet is different from every other known planet in the universe because it has this unbelievable magical system of networks that we call biodiversity. 

So maybe 3.5 billion years ago, there's no way any human could have survived on this planet. But something magical happened and life emerged - we still don't know how, we still don't even know how to define what life really is, bizarrely or not. 

But once it did, it changed everything. Once one species emerged, it changed the environment, so another species could come. And then they collectively changed the environment, so other species could exist. 

And this is the core principle of ecology, really. Every single species depends on other species to survive. And the more species we have, the more stable the system gets. 

And it's given rise to this magical planet where humans can exist and Toblerones can happen and rocket spaceships and football matches. And all the wonder of our world is based on this complexity of life. 

[05:34] Jennifer: And what fascinates you about the interconnectedness of nature? 

[05:39] Tom: It's this - you can start trying to unravel nature, you take one species and you go, wow, it's fascinating, this is the coolest species. Oh, wait, but it actually depends on that other species. Oh, wow, that one's so cool. Wait, that one also depends on this other species. And you can never unravel the entirety of it because every magical species interacts with and depends on another. 

And the deeper you look, the more you start to realize about your own nature of reality. You are not an independent being. You know, I need my heart to survive, I need my lungs to survive, but I just as much need trees to survive, and I need the oceans to survive. And therefore, where does me separate from the whole? 

And the deeper you look into it, the more lost you get into this wonderful world. 

[06:23] Jennifer: So as a child, were you the person that would pick up a caterpillar or bring bugs into the house? 

[06:29] Tom: I was a nightmare, I was an absolute nightmare. And I was also a weird little kid.

So I had three brothers and sisters, and then we used to go on holiday with another family. And everyday I would just be sitting in one spot staring at this single wall because I knew it had lizards on it. 

And I was just obsessed. And I remember the grandmother of the other family asked my dad. She was like, what's wrong with him? Do you think there's something deeply wrong with him? 

And it was the first time I heard my dad being like, what? What are you talking about? He's obsessed with the magic of nature. What's wrong with us? Why are we running around like idiots? Leave that, that's how to live. 

And I remember, yeah, I got quite emotional at that moment. That was the first time I heard my, like, dad standing up for me. And it really, I guess, deepened my love of nature.

[07:10] Jennifer: And, Tom, what is your favorite species? 

[07:13] Tom: It’s…

[07:14] Jennifer: Don't say it's human, you can say it if you want to… Yeah, far from your favorite. 

[07:19] Tom: Yeah no, my favorite species, it's so hard to say, but I'm obsessed with snakes. And I think my favorite snake is a coral snake. It's either a coral snake or a vine snake, but either way, I'm obsessed. 

And I literally, again, since before I can remember, I used to dream about catching snakes maybe two times out of three. I would wake up every night, was just filled with the process of interacting with and finding snakes. And I lived in Wales, which is not the easiest place to find snakes, so I was like desperate.

And when I found my first snake in Corsica when I was 18, there's a photo of me holding this snake and I'm in ecstasy, pure ecstasy. It was like all my dreams came true that day. 

[07:57] Jennifer: It's your spirit animal then? Probably is, yeah, absolutely, that comes in your dreams. Actually, it's the one animal that I'm really afraid of. 

[08:05] Tom: Really? 

[08:06] Jennifer: Yeah. I guess you're obsessed with reptiles then. 

[08:08] Tom: Yeah. 

[08:09] Jennifer: Starting with the lizards, the snakes. And maybe can you give as an example of your favorite species, snakes, and how they're dependent on other species? 

[08:19] Tom: It's so easy, whenever you start, you can always go on. 

So obviously snakes need food, snakes need to eat lizards, say. And the lizards obviously need to eat flies, and the flies need to eat nutrients that come maybe from shit, and the shit comes from animals that create it. And so there's no way of stopping the endless cycle and that's just the easy stuff. 

So the things that eat other things, that's an easy way of looking at it, but I'll give you another way of looking at it. I study fungi a lot in my lab, that's my main focus of study. 

And if we take two fungi and we put them in a petri dish, one of them almost always kills the other. But if you put a 3rd one in, sometimes the third one fights more strongly against the previous winner. 

Let's call them A, B and C - A beats B, sometimes C beats A, and B beats C, like a rock, paper, scissors. But then when you put a 4th fungus and then a 5th fungus and a 6th fungus, you get more and more likely to find these loops. And we call them intransitive loops, where A beats B, B beats C, C beats A. 

And when you get those loops, you never lose any of the species from the system. So once we'd added up to about 9 species, we cannot get the system to collapse. It's stable. It's a sustaining system, even in this tiny petri dish, because every species is being fought by one another and being defeated by another, and so the entire system stays together. 

So even in a system without predation and nutrient, even without this top-down process, still diversity begets diversity. The more diversity you have, the more stable the system gets so that everyone can survive. 

[09:54] Jennifer: That's interesting. It's like with the nine species of fungi, they've reached some sort of balance and they've learned to live with each other, basically. 

[10:02] Tom: Exactly, exactly. And what's interesting is then those nine species on average tend to be more productive than the individual species was on its own. And we see that throughout all of ecology is once you've reached enough species that there can be stability, the system functions in the long-term. 

[10:20] Jennifer: So that's also a huge lesson for humanities - how to function together as a collective. 

[10:26] Tom: Right. And there's loads and loads of research showing when you have diverse organizations, the group is not only more sustainable, but it's also more productive. When you bring together different perspectives, you become stronger as a whole. 

[10:39] Jennifer: That's right, it's like one plus one equals three. 

[10:41] Tom: Exactly, yeah. 

[10:42] Jennifer: So climate change seems to be getting a lot of attention these days, but you're one of the leading voices in biodiversity. 

It's a highly complex challenge and at the center of it all, I think, is the human element. What is the role? How can human play into this whole restoration of biodiversity? 

[11:42] Tom: Right so, just touch on this topic of climate and biodiversity before I get into the human, because the climate movement has unbelievable momentum, marches in the streets, billions of dollars being spent. 

And not enough, but still, it's got incredible momentum. We need more and more of that momentum, and climate change is this devastating threat to humanity. 

But we have another, and I would say even bigger, threat underlying climate change, and that is the loss of biodiversity. Every species we lose destabilizes our system more, and so we lose even more species. 

And it's this cascading effect that's undermining not just the climate, but also our food production, our disease control. Our water regulation, our entire economy is dependent on this. And if we have ecological collapse, then there's no chance of fighting climate change or anything else. 

So there has been this separation between biodiversity and climate, which is not the way we need to tackle this. We need biodiversity to achieve about 1/3 of our climate goals. If we can restore healthy nature, we will have achieved ⅓ of our climate change needs. 

But it's not just that we need biodiversity for climate, we also need to fix climate change for biodiversity. There's often been a debate, people saying, we should cut emissions. No, we should conserve nature. No, we should cut emissions. 

There cannot be a debate between emissions cuts and nature, because we categorically need both. We need both of them to survive. So we need to bring biodiversity into this conversation and build huge momentum around this topic. 

Now, the way we do that is by recognizing the humanity in it, as you said. We are biodiversity, we are part of biodiversity, whether you like it or not, we are part of that system, and it can only be revitalized if we recognize that and if we start to value the whole. 

So I personally believe our biggest threat or the worst thing that's happened is that we have a very utilitarian way of seeing nature. So we all depend on nature to survive, but we see the parts that are edible, or we see the parts that give us timber, or that give us medicines or that give us carbon, and we extract those bits and we grow them at scale, at the expense of everything else, whether it's coal mining or banana plantations or anything else. 

We over-simplify, we extract and we propagate. And every time we do that, we lose the complexity of the system that's keeping us alive. And so until we can start to value the whole and the complex, I don't think we're going to be able to… Well, that's what's driving us in the wrong trajectory.

And hopefully there's an awakening of people starting to realize that the true value of our planet is in the complexity of nature. And with more and more scientific tools. I'm a researcher, and we work to generate these tools to measure the complexity of nature. With more and more of those measurements and those tools, we start to better comprehend how those systems work. 

And then hopefully we can start to value them in our cultural systems and our financial systems, in all of our systems that can hopefully start to tip things in the other direction. 

[13:52] Jennifer: So it's interesting because awakening is the word that I pick for myself for 2024, and I've been hearing that a lot. 

And I think as human beings, and maybe it's part of the human condition, is that we like to put things in a box because it's easier to understand. It’s very difficult for us to comprehend the complexities, the interdependencies of biodiversity loss and climate change. So, yeah, I think we have to become better communicators. 

Now, in an earlier panel, you talked about the Indigenous communities, so the local stewards of the land, and how can we empower them to lead this movement to restore the planet and restore the biodiversity on our planet? 

[14:37] Tom: So, yeah, there's a stat that's been flying around. I'm not quite sure where it came from, but something like there's about 20% of our planet, where the rights of Indigenous peoples are still recognized to some degree. And across that 20% of our planet, they are protecting about 85% of the biodiversity. 

This tells us so much. Indigenous Peoples across our planet have a deeper connection with nature that many of us have lost. And that gives them the motivation and the power to live with nature and to promote nature and to propagate nature. 

And it's their actions that are saving all of us against these threats like biodiversity loss and climate change. Now, what we desperately need to turn the current trajectory around is to find all of those people and more. 

There's hundreds of millions of farmers, local communities, Indigenous populations, people who live in direct contact with nature. And many, many of them want and need nature to thrive so that their livelihoods can thrive. We desperately need to find these people and build our economic systems to distribute the flow of wealth in their direction. 

When nature can become the economic choice for those people, or even just the preferred choice, when nature is the option that these people choose, that is when they become the stewards of biodiversity, so that we can all survive in our cities and everywhere else. 

A few years ago, we had some research that showed that nature contributes ⅓ of our climate goals. When that happened, the message went viral. And what a lot of governments and companies thought is that means you've got to buy up land and plant loads of trees. And that has nothing to do with it. 

What we need is to find these Indigenous populations and farmers and communities and distribute wealth towards them, the people who are already living with nature, so that they can work with nature so that it thrives. 

[16:19] Jennifer: Very good point. Another thing that I've heard just in the last few days is the word inequity. 

At the end of the day, it comes down to people's livelihood because there are many people on this planet who don't have enough food to eat. And they care less about the planet when they're hungry themselves, so they'll care more when they have more food. So the livelihoods of these people are really at stake here. 

You had mentioned that most of your research is on the fungi networks. So a personal interest of mine is to learn more about mycelium network that's underground. So can you shed some light on that? 

[16:53] Tom: Absolutely. So on this topic of equity, you talk about the equitable distribution of wealth, and that is the crux of the whole thing. Essentially, degradation on our planet is driven by the inequitable distribution of wealth. 

Because if I'm starving, my priorities become, get me food. And particularly if I am living day-to-day and I am forced into short term exploitative cycles, that is what gives rise to degradation that we see at large spatial scales, where all the money is owned by rich people in their cities, and a tiny dregs of that money is distributed to the people who are living in association with nature. 

Now, we've known this for decades that inequity drives degradation. And therefore it's necessary, it’s about time that we tested the alternative hypothesis, that the equitable distribution of wealth, flowing the wealth in the opposite direction, should then lead to ecological recovery. 

Now, it doesn't happen everywhere. In some cases, you give people more money and they buy more tractors and farm more. But in many of the cases that we're seeing across the globe, when people are raised out of poverty, nature does better. 

A thriving landscape is always more valuable to people than a degraded landscape. And so when people have the means and resources to live in a landscape, they tend to promote the health of those ecosystems. 

And so ultimately, what that means is global restoration isn't just an ecological challenge, it's a humanitarian challenge. It’s about distributing wealth where it's needed so that it can thrive. 

But, yes, you are totally right that one of the key factors to that survival is happening below ground in the mycorrhizal systems that essentially structure our ecosystems above ground. In fact, no tree can live in isolation from the microbes that exist below ground. And we do a lot of work studying how interconnected forest systems are. 

Now that doesn't mean there's one big network where every single tree is connected. It's thousands and thousands of fungi growing from the roots of all of these trees, interacting with nematodes and mites and collembola and bacteria and archaea. This is the magic of the below ground world.

And that is the largest component of biodiversity on our planet. It's also the largest storage of carbon on our biosphere. So it's our most valuable resource that we have is our soil. 

When soils thrive, then vegetation thrives, and that means people can thrive. So ultimately, that's the mechanism we need to be moving in the direction if we're going to be restoring our ecosystems. 

[19:13] Jennifer: So how do we support that then? Does that mean we plant more trees or we preserve and we protect trees? 

[19:20] Tom: So that sounds tricky. I'll give you the complicated answer first and then the simpler answer second. 

The complicated one is there's a thousand solutions you need. So in one place, it might be turning your traditional agriculture into agroforestry, having mixed species. Or in another place, it might be rewilding the landscape so that you can have eco-tourism. In another place it might be doing more sustainable timber production. 

All of these cases, you're bringing more income to the community because nature is thriving and this is happening in locations all across the planet. But the answer is different in every place. If you're in a grassland, don't plant trees, you want to revitalize the grassland biodiversity. And if you're in a peatland, protect the peatland. And if you're in a forest, yes, you can either introduce soil microbes so that trees can recover, or you can increase the movement of animals and birds throughout the system so that then they introduce seeds. 

There's a thousand ways you can restore nature. But from my understanding and from everything my research has showed, the single way into achieving that is by distributing wealth towards the local stewards of land, the Indigenous people, the farmers who are living in direct association with nature. 

When they are economically empowered by nature, then they find the solutions to bring back ecological recovery. 

[20:28] Jennifer: Yeah, that's also a message that I've been hearing a lot in the past few days. Just talking to David Obura earlier, preserving coral reefs is really about livelihood of the coastal community. 

[20:40] Tom: Exactly. And it's amazing to see because currently, I think most of us are in a bit of a state of despair. You know, one of the biggest threats we have in our world right now is that everyone's crippled with anxiety about climate change and biodiversity loss. And this anxiety only drives inaction. It doesn't help us feel empowered to act. 

But I'm very fortunate that I, in my job, I interact with thousands of people who have found those solutions. I'll give you an example. There's a farmer called Dester in Ethiopia, who I work with a lot. He lives in an area called the Kaffa region of Ethiopia, which has traditional coffee production. 

And those coffee plantations, usually they remove the forest and they grow coffee plants, but Dester actually plants the trees inside the forest. And because the forest traps water and nutrients, the trees grow well without the need for fertilizers or irrigation. 

And that means for Dester, it makes more money to have the forest standing than he would if it was removed. And when it makes him more money, then he's got more incentives to keep the forest standing. And on top of that, all of his neighbors discovered this, and now they're allowing trees to grow back on their farms so that they can have better coffee production. 

And what you see quite quickly happening is nature recovers across the entire landscape. When nature is the economic choice, then it thrives. I am very lucky that I get to work with thousands of these examples, so I can't help being optimistic about our future. 

[21:57] Jennifer: There you go, that's the advice to the next generation. 

[22:00] Tom: Go check out Dester's farm. 

[22:02] Jennifer: Exactly, how to go from fear to hope. 

I think what also would be interesting for the audience to hear is about Restor. So you're the founder of Restor, it’s an online platform that supports thousands of community-led restoration projects around the world. So I want to know what motivated you to found this platform to begin with. 

[22:21] Tom: So, in 2019, we published a paper that went viral. And it was pretty scary, to be honest. This paper was showing that nature is important for fighting climate change, and again, it can achieve ⅓ of our climate goals. 

And when that happened, the media headlines went crazy, got way out of control. Everyone was talking about mass plantations of trees or buying up land and doing all, and it was crazy. It was not at all what the science was showing, but what was amazing is at that time, we started getting contacted by tens, then hundreds, then thousands of people who are living with nature, farmers and communities, and they were asking us, can you share your biodiversity data with us? 

And obviously, I can't reply to all those hundreds of thousands of emails. So we decided we'll just build this platform so that they can get the data for free. It's like a Google Maps, but instead of seeing coffee shops and hairdressers, you can draw around your garden and it gives you all of our data about the species that grow there, the carbon, the water and everything else. So that's how it began. 

But as it evolved, it became so much more valuable than just a data sharing platform, because the more and more projects and communities that came onto Restor and started using it, it became a social media platform. You can now go on there for free, www.restor.eco

And you can, with your own eyes, zoom in, and you can see hundreds of thousands of farmers and Indigenous communities, and you can see every single tree growing on the ground. And that means they have visibility, visibility to us, but also visibility to markets. 

So people started finding Dester's coffee and buying it from him, or donating to projects, or identifying ways in which they could fund these projects and contribute. 

And when people then start enjoying the process of contributing, we then start feeling good and we become a part of the environmental movement with every project we helped, and it just started snowballing into this enormous thing.

Then at that point in time, Google came in and helped us build out this platform, so it was really functional and it was really exciting to just see how it's taken off. 

[24:23] Jennifer: It's great. So I'm just curious, before Google came in, where did the data come from? How did you collect them? 

[24:29] Tom: So the data comes from our research. I'm a professor in a university, and what we do is we collect data from millions of locations around the world where there's experts working on the ground, studying their soils, studying their fungi, studying the above ground plants and animals. 

And when they share their data with us, we can then pull it all together using machine learning to generate a global perspective of biodiversity. So we have all of this data in these global maps and we can show things changing over time. And so we just essentially built Restor on top of those global maps. So now every time you look one of the locations, you see all of that data for free. 

[25:05] Jennifer: So for someone who is based in Switzerland, and I want to learn about the local restoration effort, that's something that I could do as an individual?

[25:13] Tom: Absolutely. You can zoom into your area, and you can see all the restoration projects near you, or you can see the farms near you, or you can see anyone that's working on nature. You can suddenly find them, and you can contact them and see if you want to get involved or support them or buy stuff. 

[25:28] Jennifer: All right, well, that's a great idea. That's how I could contribute as an individual. And in Switzerland, we live so close to the farmland anyway. 

[25:36] Tom: It is. Switzerland's a pretty magical place to live. It's got a uniquely wonderful interaction with nature - you see huge forests. 

I live in Zurich, a big metropolitan city, but I live ten minutes walk away from a massive forest. I go and hang out there in my hammock every single weekend. It's just amazing to see the interaction between healthy people and healthy nature. 

[25:55] Jennifer: Yeah, they also tend to live longer here. 

[25:58] Tom: I don't think it's a coincidence.

[25:59] Jennifer: And the mountain air and the lake water. 

[26:01] Tom: Yeah, exactly. 

[26:02] Jennifer: So, having ignited this global movement of biodiversity, what are some of the key lessons learned from this whole experience? 

[26:12] Tom: So it probably seems a bit cliched because everyone says it, but it is so true that every time you fail, if you don't get stopped by it, it makes your process better. Every single time something goes wrong, the more wrong it goes, the better it makes your process if you don't get killed by it. 

I've just had so many knockbacks, as I said, when I did that study in 2019, and the UN and the World Economic Forum launched the Trillion Trees campaign to restore trees. Many people really attacked me and other people that I love for saying, oh, you're just telling Donald Trump to plant a trillion trees or you're going to kill loads of livelihoods. And the amount of hate, I really wanted to give up. 

But actually, by listening to those critics and speaking to those people over years and years of painful conversations, essentially, we've built a much more resilient network, Because now many of those people who (were) critics are on our side and they're helping to inspire the movement so much more. 

And when you can bring everyone in, it's a lot more impactful, if you can manage to ride those waves. 

[27:17] Jennifer: Well, I'm glad you decided not to give up. I know you have very exciting things ahead. So can you tell us what is next for you? 

[27:24] Tom: So, one of my favorite examples of restoration is the country of Costa Rica. It's very rare. I don't think many people know of examples where restoration happens at scale. You know, we always hear about ecosystems being lost, but to hear about restoration at scale is pretty inspiring. And Costa Rica is the gold shining example.

About 25 or 30 years ago, they started a program called Payment for Ecosystem Services. They abolished the army and used the money, education, and distributed wealth to farmers and landowners across the country to bring back nature. 

And it's the most inspiring thing, because over that year, it's gone from, I think, somewhere like 20% tree cover to something like 70% tree cover, incredible recovery of tree cover. 

But we've never known what happened to the biodiversity. And for the last few years, I've had students from my lab and others from across Costa Rica traveling around to all of those sites all across the country and listening to the sounds of nature. We call it bio-acoustics, or eco-acoustics recording. 

And what's incredible is we can hear the sounds of a natural, intact forest, and we can hear the sounds of a degraded pasture the way the country sounded 30 years ago. And we can also then hear the sound of nature, of how these ecosystems are recovering. And they are over 80% of the way back to the full soundscape of the initial forest, which is incredible, national scale. The sound of the country has almost returned. 

And what was even more exciting, I think, is then we correlated those sounds with the sounds of music. So we took the thousand most frequently listened to music in all of human history, and we correlate those soundscapes of the forest. And what's incredible, the forest sounds statistically closer to the sounds of music than the pasture did. 

Because we've all evolved, we evolved for millions of years in complex mixtures of soundscapes where there's high and low pitches of birds and mammals and insects. And that has inherently worked into our physiology. We obviously feel more comfortable, and we enjoy being in landscapes that sound like they have lots of food and resources and medicines and things we need to survive. 

We don't like the sounds of, you know, just like, just cicadas or just the sounds of tractors or. We don't like inherently those sounds. Very few people listen to songs where it's just one note. 

We like complex mixtures of sounds, and that is how nature sounds. And it's amazing to see this sort of evolutionary link to the sounds of nature and to our own preferences about why we enjoy certain music types. 

[39:52] Jennifer: So one of the things that I enjoy most in the springtime in Switzerland is waking up to the birdsong outside my window. So that's when I know the spring is here. And a friend of mine who lives in the city, she plays birdsong in the stereo in her home every morning. It's lovely, it really is lovely. 

[29:52] Tom: I mean, it's absolutely no coincidence that we love that. No one, I don't think there's many people on the planet who hear that sound of birdsong and don't feel better. 

And it's clearly not a coincidence. We need those sounds in order to survive, and we've needed that for millions of years. So of course we like those sounds in our music, too. 

[30:28] Jennifer: Yeah, they're actually very healing to be honest, I only started noticing it just a few years ago. But now when I go to New York City and I hear the sounds of the city, I can't stand being in New York City for more than three days because the sound pollution. 

[30:10] Tom: Well, I'm fully with you about being in New York City for more than three days. I don't know if it's just the sounds or also the smells and the sights and the ink and everything, but it's not natural, is what it is. 

You come back to a forest in Switzerland, you can breathe again. 

[30:54] Jennifer: Exactly. Actually, one of my favorite spots was discovered by my dog, actually. I go into the forest with him, it’s ten minutes away. It's like this energy hole. Every time I insert myself in the middle of that forest, I just feel so much better. It's really incredible. 

So for those people who live, don't live very close to the forest, maybe they should go to the nearest forest.  

[31:14] Tom: Exactly, anyone who questions the value of nature, just go and hang out in a forest a bit more. 

And I should add one thing I forgot to mention with Costa Rica. The other cool thing about it is, yes, the country is getting more beautiful sounding, and that has correlated with increases in economic gains for the country. The country has moved towards economic security because it's brought in more eco-tourism, more people are interested in nature. 

In fact, nature is now a bigger part of their cultural identity. It pervades the entire society and as a result, the economy's doing better. So it makes sense that nature's making them more money. They're going to want more nature. It's a wonderful story.

And Costa Rica are the shining light in the sustainability movement, they're really at the forefront of so many of these amazing developments we see happening around the world. 

[31:55] Jennifer: Tom, that just triggered a thought. Why do you think we lost the connection to nature? Is it industrialization? 

[32:01] Tom: I think well, it's what you said - we box things. 

We go, oh, nature's too complex. I want to take this edible bit, and I'll make only that. And I'll take this flour, and I'll make only flour. You know, we just extract and propagate the individual parts. 

And it makes some sense evolutionarily, we need more food, so we propagate some food. But unfortunately, it was like we were on crack, we just went wild.

And the more we grew, the more we propagated, the more we grew, the more we extracted, the more we grew. And it just led to this feedback loop that the bigger the human population got, the more resources we extracted, which led to a growing human population. 

But I do believe we're at a point now, we're the first civilization in history that knows the scale of the challenge ahead of us. And therefore, we definitely know that we can turn it in the other direction and we can start to value the whole rather than valuing the individuals. 

[32:51] Jennifer: Right. And then I'm told to ask you about bushcraft. (chuckles) Why are you so obsessed about bushcraft? 

[33:01] Tom: I think if I was a troublemaker in my student years, I am definitely not anymore, I'm now a boring old man. 

Every weekend, everyday I get free, I just walk into the forest. And I take a saw and a knife and an ax, and I find all the dead trees, and I build little buildings and I make my food, and I try to forage mushrooms and things like that. And I make a fire without using matches. 

And this is what I call bush crafting. I'm just talking about sort of living very minimalistic, but it's unbelievable how fulfilling it is. I've done so many hobbies in my life. I've been obsessed with tennis and football and kitesurfing. But this hobby has taken over forever. 

I can sit for 42 hours straight in a forest, just whittling away at a bit of wood. And it's the most satisfying thing in the world. I can't explain why. You just have to try it - sit in a hammock for 12 hours. 

You know, people always say time moves too fast. Anyone who has ever said that has not sat for 12 hours in a forest and not spoken to anyone. Time moves so slowly, you’ve got lifetimes of experience just in that day. It's another world. 

[34:04] Jennifer: So I heard that you're going to Finland on your next trip. And you also mentioned Costa Rica. Besides those two locations, what are your favorite travel destination that you've been to that you would recommend people to visit? 

[34:17] Tom: So I haven't actually been to Finland yet, I should say. I'm going on holiday there, but my holiday plans are drive 8 hours into the wilderness with no tent and no food, and we're just going to try and survive. And it's going to be the most challenging holiday of my life. 

[34:31] Jennifer: Bear Grylls, I think. 

[34:32] Tom: Exactly. But I want it to be a bit nicer than that. I'm going to try and build a little hut and have comfort, rather than fighting snakes. 

[34:38] Jennifer: So you don't have to drink water extracted from the elephant dung. 

[34:41] Tom: Exactly. I'm planning for it to be quite a nice experience, not a brutal one, more like Ray Mears (a British woodsman) if you know him. So, yeah, can't wait for that - we'll see if I survive on the way back. 

But, no, a place I really want to go and spend time is actually where I was born. It's Namibia. Everyone I've ever spoken to tells me that it's the most spectacular country to visit. And it is. It's got one of the lowest human densities in the entire world. It's got spectacular landscapes and sand dunes, and it's got the skeleton coast, which just looks like the wildest place on the planet. And apparently, the people are just wonderful. 

And I can't wait to go back there. I really want to go and spend some real time. 

[35:17] Jennifer: That's actually on my bucket list. That and Costa Rica, as well. 

[35:20] Tom: Costa Rica - we've got a research field station in Costa Rica, in the Osa Peninsula, which is. National Geographic described it as the most biologically diverse part of one of the most biologically diverse countries. And it's so true. 

You fly in and you feel like you get out of the plane or the bus, and it feels like you're in Jurassic park. The sounds of birds and animals are wild. You get emotional because you're like, this is how our planet is supposed to sound. Oh, my God. This is how big trees are supposed to be. 

[35:46] Jennifer: Yeah

[35:47] Tom: Oh, my goodness. It's magic. 

[35:48] Jennifer: I love to visit. 

Well, thank you for this lovely time. I learned a lot, and thank you for bringing your energy, your optimism, and your humor to everything that you do, that you love. Thank you!

[36:00] Tom: Thank you so much, it was such a lovely conversation. 

[36:04] Jennifer: 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 a partner of the Villars Institute, a nonprofit foundation focused on accelerating the transition to a net-zero economy and restoring planetary health. 

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