HornedLizard_Chloroplasts_Sherbrooke_Wade_TucsonAZ_6November2023_Reel4179.mp3

Wade Sherbrooke [00:00:00] I like to remind people of this: every living cell on this planet today has a history as deep as any of us...

Wade Sherbrooke [00:00:13] They're all our relatives. Every single plant, animal, fungus and other groups on the planet are our relatives. It's locked into our genes. Geneticists are showing that all the time.

Wade Sherbrooke [00:00:30] Neanderthals, unless you're still in Africa and haven't bred with anybody outside, if you're a white person or a brown person or a yellow person on the planet, you have Neanderthal genes in you. Our ancestors bred with another species.

Wade Sherbrooke [00:00:51] And it would be nice if we could acknowledge that and incorporate that into our social systems and our belief systems. I think that is a major step we need to take.

Wade Sherbrooke [00:01:04] And one of my interests with indigenous peoples is that they live very close to the natural world. And they understood that in their spirit, in who they were, and their belief systems. They knew that they were kept alive by the natural world.

Wade Sherbrooke [00:01:24] And one of the things I chair in discussions sometimes with people, and many times the people don't even know what I'm getting at. I'm sure you know what chloroplasts are, but some people may or may not remember that from some biology class. These are the organisms that somehow got incorporated into plants that made them photosynthetic.

Wade Sherbrooke [00:01:48] And they produce the oxygen we breathe. Every time you take a breath in, it's a plant and a chloroplast that keeps you alive.

Wade Sherbrooke [00:01:59] And they are the ones that capture the energy from the sun. Almost all the energy, minor exceptions to this, but almost all of the energy that humans use, and all animals use, on this planet, comes from plants capturing energy from the sun and building molecules out of it that we can use, taking carbon dioxide out of the air and making carbohydrates out of it.

Wade Sherbrooke [00:02:25] And that's, that's the dependent system.

Wade Sherbrooke [00:02:28] We think we're dependent on the economy. We think we're dependent on the stock prices.

Wade Sherbrooke [00:02:33] That's not what we're dependent on.

Wade Sherbrooke [00:02:35] We are dependent on chloroplasts and plants for keeping us all alive.

Wade Sherbrooke [00:02:41] Horned lizards - where do they fit? They eat the ants that eat the seeds of the plants. Captured carbon is fed to their larvae, and they develop and come out as ants. And then they send searches out to the surface, to harvest more of what the plants are producing. And they're breathing the air just like we are, using the oxygen.