The Beauty Of Cooperation In Nature With Kristin Ohlson

I’m delighted to welcome Kristin Ohlson to the show. Her work has long inspired me, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to share this conversation with you. Kristin Ohlson is a writer whose work uncovers hidden threats of cooperation, resilience, and generosity in both human and ecological systems. She is the author of This Soil Will Save Us and Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World.

Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian, Discover, and more. In Sweet in Tooth and Claw, Kristin flips the traditional Darwinian narrative of red in tooth and claw to reveal how life thrives, not just through competition, but through interdependence and generosity. This message does stand in stark contrast to two ideas I explored in a conversation with regenerative farmer Mollie Engelhart, who framed Mother Nature as fundamentally conservative.

Kristin’s book suggests something very different. It suggests that nature is, in fact, abundant, creative, and symbiotic. Before we get started, I also want to provide you with an update on our tree planting. As of this recording, our community has planted 26,277 trees through our partnership with ForestPlanet. It is one tree for every new subscriber on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and our newsletter at CareMoreBeBetter.com. Thank you for helping us restore forests and rebuild ecosystems with every read and every share. With that, I hope you’ll join me in welcoming Kristin to the show.

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Welcome, Kristin.

It is great to talk to you. Great news about your tree planning program.

It’s an effort that we started in January 2025. I had a goal of 20,000 by year’s end, and we hit that in June. We’re keeping it going. We’ll see how far we get. We could even cross that 40,000 threshold before the year is through.

It’s super exciting.

Writing ‘Sweet In Tooth & Claw’

I’d love for you to help frame your book. Help us understand what inspired you to write Sweet in Tooth and Claw, and perhaps how it came to fruition.

It’s hard to put a finger exactly on where it started, although certainly, the seeds of this book, Sweet in Tooth and Claw, were in my last book, The Soil Will Save Us. I was so honored and fortunate to be able to talk to all these farmers and scientists who were investigating how humans could grow things and produce food on farms without damaging landscapes.

One of the things that I learned right away is that plants are not just takers. The message that we get from the companies that sell gardening chemicals, agricultural chemicals, and all those chemicals is that plants are takers. They suck all the goodness, all the moisture, and all the nutrients out of the soil, and you have to keep plopping new chemicals in there to replace all the stuff that the plants have taken.

When I was working on that book, I found out that plants are givers and takers. They are in constant dialogue, constant mediation, and constant give and take with the microbes and many organisms that live in the soil. They’re constantly taking from the microbes. They’re taking nutrients that microbes bring them, but they’re also giving microbes. They’re giving microbes moisture. They’re giving microbes carbon fuel, this precious high-energy fuel that plants make from carbon dioxide. The roots of Sweet in Tooth and Claw are in that earlier book. I didn’t know it then, but that helping behavior is called mutualism. It’s mutually helpful behaviors between two or more species. I had written about mutualism in The Soil Will Save Us, but I didn’t know anything more about it other than that one example.

Plants are givers and takers. They are in constant dialogue and meditation with the microbes and organisms in the soil.

When I was at a conference, talking about The Soil Will Save Us and the insights that I got from doing that work, I heard Suzanne Simard, who’s a Canadian forest biologist, talking about the work of her and her students. They were learning to understand how trees cooperate with the fungi in the soil and how different varieties of trees need each other and help each other through the vicissitudes of living in a forest by trading nutrients back and forth through this network of fungi that ties all these trees and plants together in the forest.

There are 300 miles of fungal threads underneath every footprint when we’re walking through the forest. That’s an amazing trading network that’s going on right under our feet. When I heard Suzanne talking about that, I thought, “I’ve got to explore this idea of cooperation in nature. Nobody ever talks about cooperation in nature. Are more people talking about it? How widespread is it?” That was the genesis of this book.

Human intervention and monocropping seem to be the thing that ensures that disease is more likely to take over an entire swath of plants because it’s fertile ground without having any sort of symbiotic relationships between different plant and animal species. More needs to be learned about this. We’re making steps in regenerative agriculture and agroforestry.

Flipping Metaphors About The Environment

The title that you even pose for this book challenges that age-old metaphor of pure competition, which I think of as more of a patriarchal idea, at any rate. We refer to nature as Mother Nature, and yet try to impose these more capitalistic terms on it at the same time. How do you see this work reshaping how we think about nature and even our own relationship with it?

You mentioned the phrase red in tooth and claw. It’s something that everybody knows. Everybody hears that. It’s a line out of a poem by Tennyson from many years ago. It was a poem that he wrote about the death of a friend. He talks about bloody nature taking this friend of his. It’s a metaphor that we apply in so many situations.

When we look out at the bird feeder and see a couple of different birds squabbling over who gets the last seed, we think of nature, red in tooth and claw. A phrase like that that’s so deeply embedded in our consciousness prompts a lot of our behavior. It dictates a lot of our behavior. It gives us a script for how to behave in the world and what we can expect from the world. It’s important that we flip those metaphors.

When I was doing the research for this book, that phrase popped into my head, and I was thinking, “Not red in tooth and claw. Nature is much more sweet in tooth and claw.” That’s not to say that there isn’t some redness. We see that redness. My partner and I very much love to go birding. We go into this wilderness park, where we walk along and look at the birds. It’s always super exciting when one of the bald eagles that’s thriving there zooms down to the pond and snatches up a baby duck. It’s very apparent that that’s a red example.

All those acts of competition and violence grab our attention because we’re hardwired to pay attention to that kind of thing. The reality is that all around us, there are all these living things working together to keep that area healthy, like trees making oxygen, fungi bringing the trees nutrients, and even the birds. There’s that other old odious phrase, birds of a feather flock together. They don’t. The waterfowl are all puddling around together and sleeping on the logs together. There are these clouds of smaller, tiny birds that fly together. There are mixed flocks.

If we examine some of those metaphors and phrases that have guided us and think, “That’s not true. Let’s flip that,” it makes a big difference. When we’re out in nature and we realize that all around us, there are these organisms reaching out to each other and saying, “I’ve got this. Do you have that? I’ll take care of this problem, and we can prosper together,” that’s the truth about what’s going on in nature.

One of my favorite examples in my book is the example of two different species of bacteria that live in the oceans. They make oxygen from sunlight and carbon dioxide. They both do it, but in the process of doing it, they emit a toxic chemical into the water. One of those bacteria has something to counteract. It makes a chemical to counteract the toxic chemical that’s in the water. It does it and takes care of the toxins that both of them create.

One of these forms of bacteria is huge. There are huge amounts of this bacteria, and it produces 5% of the oxygen that’s on earth. That’s because they are cooperating. One is taking on the heavy load of eliminating the problem so that the other can expand and provide all this oxygen. It’s a great example of what’s going on quietly around us all the time.

Why Nature Is Innately Creative

It’s an invisible world. We have to take into account that it’s not just the things we see. When I talk about Mollie Engelhart’s book, she describes Mother Nature as conservative, emphasizing things like limits, restrictions, and discipline. Your book offers more of what I deem the opposite view, that nature flourishes through generosity and through cooperation, like the story you told. How do you respond to that framing, and why do you think it fits better if we are to put a frame around it?

I haven’t read her book, so it’s hard to respond to it. Certainly, nature does have its limits. Nature has its niches. Nature is also massively complex and massively creative and figures out a way to prosper, especially when we humans remove the obstacles that we’ve placed there. Another story that I love in my book is when the people in Western Oregon switched out a culvert that a stream goes through. A culvert was put in there many years ago so that cars could drive over the stream.

Without realizing it, people had damaged the ecosystem there. The culvert was way too high above the stream, so salmon couldn’t leap up into the culvert and migrate upstream. The culvert also blocked the kinds of logs and stones from coming through the culvert, falling into the stream below, and creating habitat for salmon. There were eighteen miles above the stream of this culvert where there were no salmon.

That impoverished the ecology of that area because with salmon, not only do they feed tiny creatures to huge creatures, but when bears, eagles, and animals like that come and grab the salmon, they eat them, and then they drop their carcasses in the forest. Those carcasses themselves, when they start to decompose on the forest floor, give a variety of carbon to the forest that’s valuable and comes from deep in the ocean.

People had destroyed that ecology without even realizing it. Finally, when people did realize it and got together the funding and the resources to switch out that culvert and put one in, then the creek started to change right away. The salmon started to move upstream. The lampreys started to move upstream. All this thriving was able to begin again because humans had removed the obstacles that we had created.

Impact Of Dams And Why They Should Be Removed

You hear statistics about forest growth in those areas where salmon are present and the trees are 50% taller. It’s that simple. You see a direct effect on the ecology, on the speed and the rapidity with which a forest thrives, and how healthy the entire ecology truly is. I’m behind and fully support the removal of dams in Northern California. The Klamath has rebounded incredibly quickly. These are areas that were starting to become more prone to forest fire, too, because they had less moisture coming in.

Those rivers returning to their natural state also means more things for the forest as well. I’m encouraged to see that trend continue. Much of that infrastructure has been aging. While you could make an argument for green energy, these dams are crumbling and need to be replaced. We’re talking millions upon millions of dollars to do so. We could also remove them and start to move renewable energy in a way that is less ecologically damning.

One of my other Patagonia authors wrote a book about those dams and how they need to come down.

Cracked by Steve Hawley, right?

Yeah. I went to hear him speak about it. One of the things that nobody quite understands, except for him and some other people, is that the damned water emits a terrible methane source that’s still water. That’s another reason to get rid of them. There are so many reasons to get rid of them, but that’s another one.

At the same time, create an environment where beavers can thrive and create their own natural dam. These two things can go together in a positive way. We’re seeing that. There are more beavers coming further South into California than they’ve been in some time. This is all very encouraging. I did interview Steve Hawley on this show around the release of that book. I do encourage people to go and check that out as well.

It’s a great book.

Examples Of Cooperation And Mutualism In Nature

Great work. I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about cooperation. Could you share another example from your book that illustrates this cooperation, perhaps one that might feel more tangible to people living on the coasts or in the forests?

Certainly, one of the mutualisms that we see all the time is bees and flowers. I like to think of people seeing that every day. Somebody would lead an impoverished life if they didn’t get to see that. It goes on so constantly. The bees are going to the flowers to get nectar and sometimes pollen. Some bees collect pollen. In the process, their bodies are covered with pollen, so they’re going off to other plants. Basically, they’re fertilizing plants. It’s like a third-party mating. That’s something that’s so important.

Maybe a year after I wrote the book, I found out about another relationship mutualism that’s pretty similar to that. Scientists think that it may have preceded bees’ going to flowers. There’s a little crustacean that lives in the ocean, and it climbs up and down seaweed. The seaweed provides some nourishment to the little crustacean. The little crustacean carries around a version of pollen that’s in the water, and it provides the same kind of function. Those mutualisms are all around us, keeping things growing, keeping things healthy, and contributing to a stable oxygen and a stable nitrogen supply in the soil.

Building on your work with The Soil Will Save Us, this early work highlighted the story of soil health and regenerative agriculture. How does this new work expand or shift that conversation? I know you also talked about some of those earlier explorations, as in your conversations with Tom Newmark, who we’ve also interviewed in episode 52. That was published back on November 3rd, 2021, a while back.

He has been instrumental in the creation of Carbon Underground, which is focused on pulling more carbon underground. The not-for-profit name would impose that idea. I know he’s also been working on trials that seek to make the soil in his forest at the Finca Luna Nueva Lodge and Farm to make their farming efforts more like that of the forest to get the levels of carbon into the soil that they were seeing there in Costa Rica. How might we learn more about this story or deepen our understanding of these ecosystems through this work?

In Sweet in Tooth and Claw, I tried to expand the idea of a mutualism that farmers are paying attention to help their crops grow and apply it to every ecosystem. Those mutualisms are going on in every ecosystem. Scientists can’t say every single organism participates in a mutualism because they haven’t tested every single organism, but it is likely that every single organism has some mutualistic relationship with another organism, or probably many.

Care More Be Better | Kristin Ohlson | Cooperation — Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural

One of the things that I looked at in this book was coral reefs and the mutualisms that keep coral reefs thriving. We think of coral as being this crusty piece of composite minerals, but it’s an animal that builds that. That’s its external skeleton. That coral animal has a relationship with an alga or algae that it swallows, and then it lives inside it. The algae provides the coral animal with a carbon nutrient, and the coral animal provides that little algae with nutrients, safety, and all that.

People are very worried about coral bleaching and coral reefs dying. It would be a tragedy if the coral reef died because they are incredible hotspots of biodiversity. They’re like the Amazon all through the ocean. Other fish thrive there. There’s so much biodiversity there. Scientists who are studying mutualisms are trying to figure out what happens when corals bleach. What happens when corals bleach is that they are losing the mutualism that lives inside them. They’re losing that algae. Why does that happen? Heat is one thing, but there are other factors that make that algae break up with its coral host.

One of the things is fertilizer. All the agriculture on Earth gets overdosed with nitrogen-based fertilizer, which is fertilizer that’s been made in a factory. The Earth didn’t get deluged with that kind of fertilizer before humans figured out how to do that. The Earth got nitrogen from lightning strikes and from microbes, famously. People have not known this for a couple of centuries. Microbes set up shop in the roots of certain plants, draw down nitrogen that’s in the atmosphere, and concentrate it in the soil so that the plant can use it. The plant needs it. Science has shown that some plants in their leaves can concentrate nitrogen for the plant’s use.

We discovered nitrogen fertilizer, which came from our work making weapons. There was all this nitrogen left over from making weapons, and people started to use it in agriculture. That nitrogen that’s in that fertilizer is a very different kind of nitrogen than plants and corals evolved to deal with. That’s a problem. That human-made nitrogen that goes into the ocean from our rivers that drain through agricultural lands disrupts that mutualism. It’s important that scientists are focusing on these mutualisms that shape ecosystems and help them continue to thrive, so that we can see where we are disrupting them and where we are doing things that are making it that much harder for living things to maintain the relationships that they need.

Scientists must focus on mutualisms that shape ecosystems and help them continue to thrive.

When they combine fertilizers, it’s often an NPK solution. That’s Nitrogen, Potassium, and Phosphorus. Phosphorus and potassium are both on the salt side of things. They could get to the state where they’re making their rivers more saltish or brackish than a lot of the fish and other species can manage. It causes them to go from being thriving ecosystems themselves to something else, often looking murky, and then bringing all that junk into the oceans. That results in out-of-control algae blooms that impact the ecosystem negatively. It can starve fish of the oxygen they need, which then results in a bunch of dead fish washing ashore, none of which any of us wants to see.

We can start to work more in symbiosis with nature. Here on the Central Coast of California, one of the things that people see that may help them understand how farmers are using nitrogen-fixing plants is that they’ll take mustard and plant it in a fallow field to fix nitrogen to the soil, to then go through and plant strawberries, brussels sprouts, or whatever else in that next season.

You’ll see these wonderful swaths of land that are in bloom in all this yellow blossom. Bees are hanging around and pollinating. All that nitrogen is then getting fixed in the soil without having to use this top fertilizer approach. The results in the end are often way better. They can simply crimp the mustard through not exactly plowing, but crimping the base of it to then allow the plant to decay on the land and then infuse more nutrients into the soil.

I love stories like that. Often, when you drive along the highway, what you see instead is a completely bare tilled field. You’ll see somebody doing tillage off in the distance and soil flying off through the air. Every time I see that, I’m like, “Ugh.”

They come through with the big sprayers. They spray a bunch of chemicals to kill pests and weeds, douse it with fertilizers, and then do the planting season. It’s like, “What are we doing?” Farmers in those cases are spending millions upon millions of dollars on chemicals. They’re spending on chemical abatement.

They’re spending so much money. I was driving out in the country not too long ago and looking at a big tilled field. People often ask me, “Why don’t farmers change? If they know that all this healthier regenerative stuff works, why don’t they change?” People are barely making a living. Those extractive farming practices that became prevalent in the last half of the 20th century are held in place. The ag colleges still teach to do things that way. The county extension people still teach it that way. The banks expect the farmers to do things that way. It’s so tough for them to make changes.

It does take some time. We’ve seen some incredible stories come out of the regenerative agriculture space. In some cases, they’re able to intersperse crops and have ground cover crops that are in place, even while they’re farming the primary crop. That’s harder in the world of things like grains. It depends on what you’re trying to grow and what tools you can use to best do so. We’re getting better at it all the time. We’re learning from nature, from stories like those told in your book, and from test plots that are being run to see what is achievable through the efforts of people like Tom Newmark at Finca Luna Nueva in Costa Rica, working on this agroforestry perspective.

It’s a beautiful place. I’ve been there.

I have yet to be there. It’s on my bucket list.

I have a friend who’s going to Costa Rica soon. I said, “You have to go to Tom Newmark’s farm.”

Ric Scalzo, who was the Founder of Gaia Herbs and has another brand called Kokora Life, also has a farm down there, so I have reasons to go. I hope to visit at some point in 2026.

How Farmers Changed Grazing Practices In Nevada

One of the things that I love when I hear stories about farmers and ranchers who have been able to make a change and have bolstered their hearts, had some help, and gone ahead and made some changes, is how much people love their work so much more and how much they are thrilled at the nature that is burgeoning around them.

One of the stories that I wrote about in my book was of these ranchers in Southeast Nevada who changed their grazing practices. As your readers probably know, Southeastern Nevada is an exceptionally dry place. There are these little threads of moisture that go through the land. Everybody wants those little threads of moisture.

All these cattle ranchers typically turn their cattle out for eight months of the year to roam the landscape and graze it. In the process, they were destroying the creeks because they would congregate there. Their hooves would break up all the vegetation nearby. That meant that when the rains would come, there was no vegetation to hold the banks in place. These creeks were becoming deeper, more channelized, and drier. They would dry up in the summer. They were a mess.

Some scientists approached the ranchers about changing their grazing practices because the creeks had become so dry and miserable that the local trout were not thriving in them anymore. They were worried that it was no longer going to provide habitat for them. They talked to some of these ranchers into changing their grazing practices. Instead of letting their animals wander around wherever they wanted to be for eight months of the year, they only let them get near the creeks for a brief period of time, and then they had to graze elsewhere.

The ranchers were pretty excited that vegetation started to spring up right away. In the soil, even though nobody had planted seeds, seeds are always in the soil. Once the cows weren’t there, making it impossible for the plants to grow, all this riparian vegetation started to take place. The ranchers were very excited about that. They thought they had done their job.

All of a sudden, beavers, which had been almost completely eradicated in that area, showed back up again. They started cutting down the willows and some of these other plants alongside the creeks to make ponds. It completely changed the ecology there. Instead of these degraded creeks where the water raced through the landscape, the beavers were damming them. They were creating ponds.

The ponds were spreading out the water table. The surrounding lands started to change. The creeks started to grow in length because when the beavers would dam them, the creeks would start to form kinks and move around. Instead of there being these long, straight creeks, there were these creeks that were like this. Pretty soon, we had wetlands there. It changed the landscape so immensely. Now, they have a ton of wildlife.

I remember this one rancher. It was because of the beavers, the changing water table, and all of that that he had less fire risk, and he had more wildlife. Everything was better for him. I remember him saying that before that had happened, and this ranch had been in his family for generations, he had never gotten flattened out on the earth to look at how the plants were distributed on the ground and look at the soil. It made him so much more aware of this incredible living ecosystem that he was the steward of.

You’re reminding me of Will Harris. Is that who you’re speaking to?

No, I’m not speaking to Will Harris. I’m speaking of Agee Smith.

I want people to know that this story is told by numerous farmers and ranchers. In this case, Will Harris tells a story that’s very similar to one you’re sharing in his book, A Bold Return to Giving a Damn. It is all about his journey and going to regenerative ranching. He talks about the reality of having to move the cows on his land because they will want to rest in the shade and the creek beds.

If you don’t move them off that land or if you don’t make them do what they would’ve done in nature, which is remain a migrating herd, then they will stick where it’s comfy, because they’ve got enough resources around them, and enjoy a bit of shade and mud. It’s not entirely surprising. Will Harris also narrates his own book. I’ve listened to your book and his in sequence on Audible. People can pick it up on Audible and give it a listen, too.

Will Harris is great.

He’s doing some great things.

They are innovators and pioneers, all these farmers and ranchers who have broken with the extractive, damaging way of growing food. They figured out how to do it with nature and figured out how to learn from nature. They not only have thriving businesses and healthier food, but also these thriving, beautiful landscapes.

They’ve been able to do it, even while bucking tradition and going against the grain of what people told them that they should be doing, because they had some conviction that what they were doing was right. That’s what it is going to take, instead of bending to the Cargills and the Monsantos of the world and continuing to use seed stocks that they’ve patented, pesticides, and growing tools that are not natural. Let’s put it that way.

Exploring Indigenous Traditions On Reciprocity

Another thing you speak to in this book is indigenous knowledge and science. You mentioned more than once Robin Wall Kimmerer and some others. I’d love for you to talk a bit about indigenous traditions that emphasize reciprocity and kinship. Did your research specifically highlight these intersections between indigenous knowledge and modern ecological science?

I mentioned it, and I honestly don’t know nearly as much as I should. I know that a lot of the tribes that I hear about and run into at different conferences here in Portland have scientists, and I know that those scientists talk about the importance of bringing those two traditions together. It makes sense. The native people of North America were here for millennia, and they were paying attention. They knew that two things that existed together in nature. They knew when two organisms were helping each other. They knew that when one kind of fish came along, another one would come along soon enough. They knew to take enough, but not too much.

It’s important that somebody like Robin Wall Kimmerer, I remember there was a book years ago called When the Student is Ready, the Teacher will Appear. I feel like that’s who Robin Wall Kimmerer is. We are all ready to bring together those two amazing traditions, to bring together that indigenous knowledge with modern science, which she does in her own person. That’s what she does. That’s the key to our thriving in the future.

I will point people to her work, Braiding Sweetgrass, which is a collection of essays, but it is so story-driven and so profound. There’s an essay in there that I think perfectly illustrates the symbiosis and the mutualism that we see in nature when she talks about the gift of the three sisters, which are the plants of squash, corn, and beans.

The bean helps to fix nitrogen, and it will climb the stalks of the corn. It doesn’t compete necessarily for light with the corn. It’s climbing the stalk. The corn itself produces an abundance of corn, which is used as maize in traditional cultures around the globe. There are so many species of corn in the Americas. Also, at the same time, having the squash growing at its base because it’s a cover crop, and it keeps the soil moist. You have better growth, and at the same time, it produces an abundant crop at the end of the season. You have got food coming throughout the summer and into the fall harvest.

Each of these plants works together. People from tribal lands throughout the Southwest, in particular, would give these three seeds as a gift wrapped in corn husk as a signal to abundance, as a signal to what nature is capable of, and to also give the gift of life to somebody in your circle that could benefit from these things.

Unlocking Culture Change Through Cooperation

I love this concept. I love this idea. More people need to share more stories like this of the symbiosis or of the mutualism that they’re seeing in their environments. I’d love to talk a bit about the human implications of your work. We often glorify individualism and competition, as we’ve talked a bit about. How might our culture change if we elevated cooperation as the primary story of life?

We have to start by acknowledging how much cooperation exists already. We are an incredibly cooperative species. I always laugh. When you start to watch a movie, if it’s a movie that’s set in the city, if you hear a siren, then you’re supposed to know, “It’s dangerous. There are dangerous, bad things happening.” Every time I hear that, I’m like, “No. That means help is on the way. That means we have systems set up to help people when there is a problem.”

We have to readjust and think about how much cooperation is in a hospital, how much cooperation is in city planning, and how much cooperation is in a neighborhood, and acknowledge that that is a much more defining characteristic of human beings than competition. If two of my neighbors are outside sharing tools or exchanging plants, I’m not going to notice that. If they get into an argument and start to yell at each other, I’m going to notice that. We have a tendency to notice when things go wrong and when there is a problem because that’s how we’ve evolved. We needed that sensitivity to danger and dysfunction to thrive.

We need to override that assumption that that’s the thing that’s primary. What is primary is cooperation. We practice it all the time. Our bodies are models of cooperation with all these different cells, organs, bacteria, yeast, fungi, protozoa, and all these things that live in us and on us working together. That being said, in every situation, we need to figure out how to develop cooperative structures to try to move forward.

Back to the ranchers who were trying to change their grazing practices in Nevada and trying to rehabilitate their lands and their creeks, they didn’t set upon that singly. They didn’t each go back to their ranches and say, “We’re going to do it this way. Let’s see what happens.” They formed a big cooperative council. It was the ranchers who were on the council. It was scientists who were on the council. It was people from some of those agencies, like the Bureau of Land Management and other agencies that have something to do with land management in the West. It was all these people. It was a coordinator who works with groups and helps them talk to each other.

They were very intentional about wanting to find a way to work together. These are people who did not always work together. These are people who did not always get along. In fact, usually, those ranchers, when they saw somebody from the Bureau of Land Management arrive on their farm, it was like, “Now what? What are they going to want me to do?” They completely created a new structure and culture of cooperation to get this very difficult, challenging, and exciting work done, and it worked. As much as we can do that everywhere, we should be trying to figure out how to create structures that help us get along and tackle problems.

Blending Nature With Awe And Wonder

One of the things I noticed in reading your book and in reading many of the books that Patagonia Press has released in this space of nature, wellness, and regenerative systems, things like Cracked by Steven Hawley or your work, is this blending of science with awe and wonder, or this blending of nature with awe and wonder. Do you think this is an intentional balance, or is it something that’s part of the undercurrent in the space?

It’s certainly intentional on Patagonia’s part. That is the heart and soul of embracing nature. I don’t think you can embrace nature without embracing both science and beauty. If you embrace the beauty of nature without understanding the science there, it’s a little impoverished. That’s one of the things that I love about writing a book like Sweet in Tooth and Claw. When I’m out in nature, I have a completely different view about what’s going on. It’s not just the beautiful bird flying by or the beautiful bark of a tree.

When I look at the bark of that tree, I think, “I now know that the bark of that tree is a methane sink. It removes methane from the atmosphere.” That’s because some science was done not too long ago. I knew before that the tree also removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but I didn’t know that. The more science you bring to your appreciation of nature, the more beautiful it is. That’s what Robin Wall Kimmerer is all about. She’s a poet, a scientist, and a lover of nature and of life. The more you know, the more beautiful it is. It’s almost like magic.

The more science you bring to your appreciation of nature, the more beautiful it becomes.

The miles of fungal networks beneath your feet as you’re walking through one of these old-growth forests, and the fact that it has such a different smell and feel. People feel an uplifted sense, spending time in forests. Nature bathing in a forest or by a river and a creek is incredibly rewarding to the senses.

It’s incredibly rewarding. More and more, science is going to show that that’s not just a psychological thing. It’s true. There are some studies that show that even if you look at a picture of a forest, you feel a little better. Science is going to show more and more that the magic of forest bathing or taking a walk anywhere where you’re surrounded by nature is not just that the sight of it makes you feel better, but those trees, those plants, and the soil are emitting chemicals that affect our body.

We evolved out of the lush nature that Earth provides. We evolved in dense, thick forests and grasslands. Plants communicate by chemicals. They don’t communicate by sound. Microbes communicate by chemicals. There are all those chemical signals. When we’re stuck in a house and never get outside, we are cutting ourselves out from those inputs that were integral to our evolution.

I 100% agree with you. On my morning walks, I try to go and touch what I consider the oldest tree in my loop. I visit my old friend Maple, which is this struggling maple tree that someone decided to cable to keep it from falling over, even though it doesn’t seem like it’s on any particular person’s land. She’s covered in moss and growing sideways. It’s also a tree I visit after every storm and go, “She’s still standing.” It gives me a little comfort.

I do the same thing when I’m out walking around. I touch the trees. I put my nose up in the bark and in the moss and take a deep breath. That is medicine there, surrounding us.

How Storytelling Connects Science To The Heart

I see storytelling itself as cooperative. That’s part of this show. I wonder how you see storytelling as a cooperative act. Do you consider it something that connects science to the heart? Am I on a good track here, or is that something that’s a little harder of a leap for you to make?

Ask that again.

Do you see storytelling itself as cooperative, an act that connects science to the heart?

I see storytelling as cooperative in the sense that you are trying to make something matter to somebody else. You are trying to connect with somebody else through words, gestures, and art sometimes. If any of your readers and you have tried to read scientific papers, it’s very hard for those messages to resonate. When you can tell a story and tell it in a way that stirs the emotions of somebody listening, that scientific development or that event takes hold of them in a completely different way.

I can tell you that when I wrote the story of those ranchers in Nevada, how they changed their landscape, how they created wetlands, and how they built these structures to allow them to talk to each other, to the scientists, and to the agency people, especially since these were ranchers who were struggling about how they were going to make a living and also struggling with the idea that so many people have that cattle ranching is a great evil that destroys land.

Methane is causing global warming.

They were feeling like the bad guy. They were feeling like they were at the end of a dwindling tradition. When I was telling that story in the book, I would get emotional and weepy because I was so moved by their story. I was so moved by what they were able to do by paying attention to what the land needed and what the other living things needed, by cooperating with nature, and by how much they got back in return. That is incredibly moving. Telling a story like that when you’re trying to make somebody else feel as strongly about that as you do, that is, in a way, an act of cooperation.

Your emotion comes through as you tell these stories. It helps this book be something that is easily digestible, both the audiobook as well as the physical book. I will proudly keep it on my shelf and share it with friends as well.

It has such pretty pictures.

This is something that is not atypical for Patagonia books, but going to a two-page spread and seeing a beautiful riverbed, there are several of those throughout this book. You can read it in a somewhat chapterized way. You speak of corals, and then you have these pictures showing the ocean, sky, and corals all in one. They’re like National Geographic caliber photographs interspersed amongst the pages of well-told stories. I appreciate that about this work.

Get In Touch With Kristin And Join Corinna’s Reforestation Efforts

I highly encourage my audience to pick it up. You can do so with the audiobook version and also pick up this book on Patagonia. You can pick it up for Kindle or pick up the physical copy. I frankly recommend the physical copy. I have to do audiobooks to get through the number of books I’m reading while also pursuing my PhD in sustainability. It’s one foot in front of the other. How else can readers find you and engage with your work to stay connected?

I have a website, www.KristinOhlson.com. There are different podcast interviews there. New things that I write are posted there. That’s pretty much it.

Here on the show, we are planting a tree for every new subscriber, so if you like this episode and you want us to plant more trees, please join this effort. In the spirit of your book, why do reforestation efforts like the one we’re undertaking matter?

Reforestation is so important. Forests are such a wonderful, rich environment for so many different creatures. We’ve lost so many forests on Earth. We need to build up that stock again. Anybody who’s doing reforestation thoughtfully and regeneratively is making such a good effort.

Forests are such a wonderful and rich environment for many different creatures. We have lost so many forests on Earth, and we need to rebuild them.

We’re focused on a mangrove reforestation project in Africa, which also ends up being an estuary for all sorts of species of fish that are connected to the coasts. That’s helpful in a number of ways as well because many of our fish species are declining with their shrinking habitats. When you have mangroves cut down for any number of reasons, then you lose that space for their young stage of fish to survive and thrive.

Another thing that I wrote about in this book was about people planting trees along waterways to shade the water so that the salmon and other fish aren’t overheated. It is super important.

Seeing Life As One Huge Cooperative Act

Especially as you have increasing storms coming through and ripping out some of that forested land, you need to constantly replenish. If there is one hope that you have for this book or one idea that you hope that people will bring from it to change their perspective, what might it be?

It’s super important to realize that life is largely a cooperative act. When we walk through the world, we’re witnessing but probably not seeing multiple, probably thousands, of acts of cooperation among living things that are keeping our planet healthy and shaping it. We are part of nature. We are just like that. The old metaphors, like the survival of the fittest and red in tooth and claw, were metaphors that made us think that life is a zero-sum game. For us to thrive, that means that everything else has to suffer. That is not true. We can figure out how to live in this world and help it thrive at the same time.

Move out of scarcity into ideas of abundance. That’s something that’s hard to contend with when you may have grown up in a city and seen nothing but limits for much of your life. Get out there in nature and enjoy it. See a space. Visit a farm. See how these things happen in real life. I will always encourage people to try and shop and buy their food from local sources. In many cases, it’s not possible, so you have to go elsewhere, but you can seek out regenerative farms and different products that help you live more sustainably.

I, frankly, buy our meat from a regenerative rancher in the Midwest. We have shipments come a couple of times a year and put them in our chest freezer. I know I’m getting healthfully raised animals as opposed to something that lived a more stressful and awful last hour. I try to keep that as nice a life as possible for something that’s giving life to end up on your plate. When we do things more responsibly like this, then we are automatically living in a more collaborative fashion. Thank you so much for your time. I thoroughly enjoyed this interview.

It was great to talk. Thank you.

Thank you.

—

Episode Wrap-Up And Closing Words

What an insightful interview. I hope that you take the opportunity to pick up a copy of Kristin Ohlson’s book, Sweet in Tooth and Claw. You’ll find the stories in here both compelling, nourishing, and informational. You’ll learn a lot. It will truly help you engage with nature and with life in a different way. As a reminder for all of our followers, whether it be on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or even in our newsletter, we are planting a tree. We crossed 26,266 trees that were planted. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do and help us build that greener future. Together, we’re helping life flourish, not just for ourselves, but for generations to come. Thank you.

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Author

Corinna Bellizzi

Corinna is a natural products industry executive who has earned a reputation for leading the development and growth of responsible brands (e.g. Nordic Naturals, iwi, NutriGold). In her professional life, she champions social benefit programs to enhance company impact while preserving and protecting our home planet. She’s presently working tirelessly on the development of a new pre-market that seeks to achieve a carbon-negative impact. In January 2021 she launched her show, Care More, Be Better: A Social Impact + Sustainability Podcast to amplify the efforts of inspired individuals and conscious companies. Through Care More Be Better, she shares their stories in an effort to show us all that one person with one idea can have a big impact. As part of her lifelong education journey, she earned her MBA from Santa Clara University, graduating at the top of her class with a triple focus in Entrepreneurship, Leadership and Marketing in June 2021.

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