If you’ve followed this project for some time, you’ll know that much of Death in The Garden was initially spurred on by Jake’s experience of reckoning with the limitations of veganism as a solution to climate change. After his health fell apart on a vegan diet, he started to look deeper into the food system and realized that veganism was a false solution to a much deeper problem. This inciting incident sent us on the journey to discover ecologically sound modalities of food procurement, which then led us into a much deeper realization of the inherent unsustainability of modernity, and the reality that our civilization is on an unconscious death march, propelled by bad stories of what humans are and what our role here is on Earth.
This interview is the fifth or sixth interview we ever did, and we were very much in the mode of “Death in The Garden is primarily a film to counter Cowspiracy.” We thought this idea was incredibly revelatory in our energized naiveté, unaware of the production of films like Sacred Cow and many others which would do a much better job explaining the complexity of the vegan vs. non-vegan argument. Listening back on the interview now, with the knowledge gained from past 5 years, I shudder at the shallowness of our questioning given the fascinating threads evoked by Connor that are more relevant to what Death in The Garden has become than what it was at the time. This, like all of our early interviews, is one we’d love to redo with the knowledge we now have. Still, as a basic introduction to some of these ideas, we feel its important to share on YouTube to a new audience.
What permaculturist Connor Jones expresses in this interview is as relevant and important today as it was then: it’s our shallow line of questioning that makes this interview less interesting than it could have been. So if you’re like, “Damn, that’s the question they asked to follow-up what Connor just said?” — just know we had the same feeling.
Anyway, we hope this conversation is valuable in spite of our youth and ignorance, even though the vegan vs. non-vegan debate is pretty much over. This is somewhat liberating, because the Death in The Garden film we aim to make doesn’t need to have so much preamble to express our main conceit — that without engaging with the death required for life, humanity will never be able to truly be part of nature. If we avoid facing this fact, we’ll be doomed forever to inject lifeless death into our landscapes, depleting our ecosystems to a degree that renders the Earth uninhabitable.
Thank you again for your support of Death in The Garden. We plan to continue posting the video versions of our old interviews to YouTube, and we have some wonderful new things in the works that we’re really excited about. Before we head to Ladakh for the Local Futures Planet Local Summit, we’re going to post our first podcast in over a year — a beautifully earnest conversation with Thomas from Heart of Men, alongside his sage wife, Tess. Our podcast for paid subscribers with Alex Leff of Human Nature Odyssey discussing AI will come out after we return, and we also recorded an episode with him about Andor, so we’re so excited to share that with you all. (Attention Andor nerds, check out this video I just found, Andor: The Great Dictator Speech. It’s so good.) Our next video, The World is a Factory Farm, will be out in the coming months, as well. We’re hoping to start pre-production on an AI-Luddite film over the next few months as well, so we’re really looking forward to that.