In this episode Desiree Driesenaar and Maanarak explore the concept of abundance and its transformative power in various sectors. Join us as we delve into discussions about blue economy, ecological intensification, harmonious growth, and designing systems that align with nature's principles. Discover how communities and industries can flourish sustainably while promoting self-sufficiency and creating multiple values. Tune in for insights on practical examples, including Bonaire's efforts in tourism, sustainable fishing, mangrove reforestation, and more.
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Maanarak of Grey 00:00:00
We envision a future where individuals are empowered to think critically and creatively, where citizens become agents of change by promoting self-governance, co-creation, and bottom up approaches. Welcome to our podcast.
Maanarak of Grey 00:00:22
Welcome or welcome back to our podcast. Today I am joined by Desiree Driesenaar. Did I say the name correctly?
Desiree Driesenaar 00:01:02
Yes, yes this is how you normally pronounce it, but this is a bit hard for English speaking people. And I'll say Desiree drizzle or so. So that's okay. It doesn't matter.
Maanarak of Grey 00:01:15
But luckily, I do speak Dutch as well as just everything runs in English.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:01:20
So I know, I know I'm I'm bilingual as well. So I lived a lot of a long time in England. So that's yeah, and I do a lot of international work, so I'm used to my name being just de or Diddy or whatever. Okay.
Maanarak of Grey 00:01:40
So I have options
Desiree Driesenaar 00:01:42
Yeah.
Maanarak of Grey 00:01:43
Welcome. And thank you for joining us. I invited you because I, I was so intrigued by the work that you do. In abundance, just the the word abundance. It’s fantastic because what I see worldwide as a culture is a culture of lacking. So I really like this concept of abundance. But please tell us a bit about yourself.
Maanarak of Grey 00:02:12
Who are you and how did you come to this work of abundance?
Desiree Driesenaar 00:02:16
Yes, well, I, I started out with a rather normal career in mobility in even chemistry. And the beginning of my career, I, I did economics and I did languages, cultures because I'm really interested in cultures. And I yeah, I started out with a in a chemical company and then I left because I thought, well, this is just not for me.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:02:50
I didn't like the toxicity of chemistry, of a lot of chemistry. And also the, the way people talk about it as if it's normal. So then I went to smaller companies and I went Amsterdam to be part of a removals company, and that was really great. And then I did more things in the language spheres and I was in an advertising agency and I did a lot of communication work.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:03:24
I became a strategic communication manager, and my last job before I became a freelancer was as a international marketing manager in high tech, which is of course a lot about. It's not about blowing bubbles as marketing, it's really business to business. So it's more about, yeah, getting to depths of friends instance, we were doing technology on vacuums and plasmas.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:03:52
Well then you have to talk to a lot of scientists. And then I packaged it in ways that customers understand it, but also understand differences and what is good or not or why or things like that. So that's what I've been doing most of my life. And then in 2011, I don't know what happened, but one morning I woke up and I thought, I need freedom.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:04:19
I had always been in safe jobs and I thought I need to be a freelancer. Cool. That's exciting, but also scary. So I had a job for four days a week, so I took my extra day to start studying because the other words that came in that morning was sustainability. And I thought, I don't know anything about solar panels.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:04:44
I was not even interested in windmills. So very soon I came across the holistic visions. So that's cradle to cradle, circular economy. The natural step is really big in Sweden and Canada and also Eindhoven, where I'm close and, and well, there is a lot of things happening. And then in 2012 I saw a lecture of Günter Paoli and he has a think tank, zero emissions research initiatives, and it's worldwide.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:05:27
He has been busy with it since the 1970s and it's really built on nature solutions. So how does nature do things and what don't we use yet for good solutions? And I saw this lecture and I thought, Well, this is it, this is it. Touch something. So one year later, I went to the summer school in Hungary, New Economy, Summer School, because this movement is called the economy and it's all about systemic designs.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:06:00
So you look at an environment and you use that environment to design the scope, the economic scope, the society scope and the solutions. Right. And now we do in the world, of course, a lot of economies of scale. So we make huge flows and we have huge problems of these huge flows. And then we try to divide them in small things and it all goes wrong.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:06:31
And economies of scope works from the ground up. So local, it's like island economies call it island economies. It's not only about islands, but you take a scope. It can be an industrial estate, it can be a harbor, it can be whatever. And then you use environment and what is all there you can use. It's a lot of better sciences, but then you use it to create the plus in the system.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:07:07
That's also why I call it we go from the Anthropocene where it's just human thinking to the place of the system. The sin which is in Greek is sin is plus and troubles is the way the men are, how we do it. And then we go for the plus in the system so we can have growing economies. Although nobody believes me at this moment, I think by just going the other way around and these people have been busy with it for since the 1970s, since we went to the moon.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:07:46
I think. I think there was a lot of consciousness coming when the the astronauts came back from the moon and they saw this blue planet and they were touched and our hearts. And I thought, okay, let's do something. A lot of the astronauts became yeah, became environmentalists. And we learned to work with closed systems, which is of course a yeah, a ship, for instance, or a a rocket, a spaceship.
00:08:31:18 - 00:09:00:05
Desiree Driesenaar
And we learn to work with open systems. And since the 1970s, there's also permaculture in the world and it has a lot of design principles. So after Blue Economy, I started studying further. I worked a lot with Gunter on several economies. I didn't do Bonaire, but it was my first example of how it can be done and I was so inspired.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:09:00
And then I went to the Spanish Island to Aledo where they did it, and we did it in Austria and we did it in Rotterdam and we did it in well, I do it myself because I have my my work in Limburg. So that's near the German border. So we do a lot of projects on healthy buildings and on healthy soils and connections with water, things like that.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:09:25
And harbor. We have a river, a river mass. So we do harbor redesigns and then you can see that where the problems are, you can also see where solutions are.
Maanarak of Grey 00:09:42
Yeah.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:09:43
And they're not always easy because people don't think like this. And that's what I try to change. There are a lot of examples, but also people think very superficially about them. So then you can make a nice design, but then you get other problems of course in the design and then you have to solve those also with nature principles apart from your economy.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:10:13
There's another huge movement, which is biomimicry, by Janine Bennis. I must say, all these people from the first times, they know each other. So Gunter, Pauli, Janine Banderas, the natural step is from Karl Henrik Robert in Sweden. They know each other. There was an architect in Sweden, Anders Nyquist. He died in the meantime, but I loved working with him.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:10:41
It is Benali Tarr who's on macro economy. He also died in the meantime. But we tried to make markets together with the new life, because now with digital design you can do so much more. And that is very interesting because you can do 3D design that gives a lot of insights and also like with money, you can have a lot of things like underneath the currencies, you can go with digital currencies and you can go with other ways to design like the flows.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:11:16
And that's what I do now in all kinds of ways because I am still economy. So that's macro and business economy. And also I am this environmental list. But the thing is, an environmentalist is all about health. So for me it's mostly toxicity that I want to get out of the world that I'm not. Of course I do things on CO2 as well, but CO2 and O2 and O2 is also very destructive.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:11:52
So there's lots of things to consider there. So but yes, I do things on seaweeds because they get a lot of CO2 air out of the air more than land for a station. And I studied also permaculture because that's where it starts with the communities. So now I go more to yeah, like at this moment this week I spoke to Africa, to Kenya, and then we are looking for coastal solutions with tourism, with yeah, for the communities with progress but also with health.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:12:34
Yeah.
Maanarak of Grey 00:12:35
So this you said a lot of interesting things. I know, I know.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:12:39
It's so much.
Maanarak of Grey 00:12:41
That I was like, where do I start going in? But there's some go for Bonaire.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:12:47
Why not talk about Bonaire.
Maanarak of Grey 00:12:49
I do a talk whenever before I talk about there is something that you mentioned a couple of minutes ago that stuck with me is that people don't believe you, that this can be done. What are the criticisms that you are seeing in terms of this blue economy and more? I call it harmony is growth with yeah.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:13:12
Harmonious growth is, I think, the good words. You need to have balances and you need to have. Yeah, what we do to grow the economy is we go for ecological intensification and a lot of the environmentalists don't like the word because they think, oh yeah, and then they go intensify again. Right. Well, but we can do it. We can use empty space in systems and then redesign and you can see it's a very easy sum to come to zero, which is, for instance, if a company emits CO2, then you put a closed greenhouse for spirulina growth next to it, and then it uses the CO2.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:14:07
So it is about design of the area. And then you can have economic growth because the company that emits CO2 makes sure that he is self-sufficient for everything. And that's the principle. We always use self-sufficiency. Everybody who's a consumer are use or will always also be a producer. So we can produce much more in all kinds of settings.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:14:39
And then we can also use this to create multiple values, because spirulina is a wonderful food. We need food in the world and it's also a user of CO2. So why not go for closed greenhouses that really grow good food risks? Yeah, so those things can be done in more. The industrial settings, but of course in the rural settings there is a lot of work now done just with soil and water and that is permaculture.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:15:23
And for instance, we have in the Limburg area, we have an environmental and social project for generational buildings, off grid buildings. So they will not use the big system, say they're out of the system for sewage, for water, for yeah, for energy. So and then we combine it with food forestry, right? Because food forestry is really a very good way of, of having an abundance of food because you use seven layers and all of the species work together.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:16:19
So you have herbs there, you have nuts there, you have tree grows, you have bushes, you have and everything is edible. That's why I talk about edible cities. If we have not enough food, why do I go to Athens and see all these orange trees in Athens and citrus trees and nobody harvests? And then I asked the people why don't you harvest?
Desiree Driesenaar 00:16:47
And they say, Well, they're not edible. And I say, Why? They say, Well, they just chose a species that is just for the color. It's because it looks nice. And I think. How Right.
Maanarak of Grey 00:17:02
Yes.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:17:03
So that is where the abundance is and also the global goals. So we need food and food. And then maybe we have like if you need evaporation to have a city that cools the planet, it can be done. You can do it with colors. I like black, absorbs light and heat and white reflects light and heat. So with colors you can cool the planet with these kind of mechanisms.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:17:41
Yes, it's interesting. You can also cool with evaporation, which is done by plants. So if you have a lot of the regeneration people, they are now really big and architecture and everything. And then we have plant facades because that's unused space. You have unused roofs, you have unused as facades of buildings. You have unused every space in a system, you know, and you can make all the free goods with them.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:18:23
And I'm a lot about making things free for free. So I always replace something with nothing. That's another thing I want to talk about next may be. Yes. Yeah.
Maanarak of Grey 00:18:39
Just go ahead. So it's something that's Yeah.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:18:45
Yeah. In economies, the entrepreneurs, they create the value in the system, the money in the system, and they create jobs. So I love entrepreneurs, they create jobs, but if you do not create jobs that fit an environment, the island or the that working like in Libre, we have a lot of they call it for doting so a lot for dozing of limber is a real term.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:19:35
And that means that we have a lot of boxes, a lot of distribution centers. They pop up. Yeah, big, big or biggest. Yeah. People hate them.
Maanarak of Grey 00:19:46
I to hate them. Yes.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:19:48
And those are and shipowners and the governments, the local governments sell their land to these and to preneur. So they say yeah because we create jobs. Yeah. And then I say but who has these jobs Because my, my daughter, she works in one of these distribution centers and my son in law does in another one. And they have jobs.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:20:14
Yes. But they are the only limber person and even the only Dutch person in that team. Yes. So they work with Spanish people and Bulgarian people and Polish people.
Maanarak of Grey 00:20:29
Yes, I have this.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:20:30
And that's good. That still creates jobs. But for the area, it creates a lot of pressure on the public systems. Yeah, we have lack of houses in Holland. You know it. I cannot even afford a house in Holland, so I live most of the time in in Greece, where because I work internationally, I can do that. But at this moment I cannot afford a house in Holland because it's too expensive.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:21:07
So accumulation is the biggest problem in the system because the big, big our biggest buildings, they are polluting the few for people. They are polluting tourism because people hate it. They want to have nice mosques and nice nature and nice and then they see this and it's a so it's polluting. It is causing drought in the area because it's concrete and asphalt.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:21:47
Yes. And there's no plants there to evaporate. It's causing energy problems because they do not have the roads, solar panels or their own windmills to create their own energy.
Maanarak of Grey 00:21:59
Which I don't understand. Sorry to interrupt you there. I never understood of having such a big building with most of them, having a flat roofs and not having your own fence like energy for another one.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:22:13
But it has to do with the way that we structure things in a globalized industrialized world. So it is a transition we're in now. It's and now we are trying to find the good scale for everything. I think so. But that also means that in our country, Holland Alley, under the one who does the networks, yes, they have to think different.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:22:42
And then the governments will have to say in the law, okay, what do you use your produce? If you need water, you produce water. If you need energy, you produce energy. If you need while whatever and you produce it. If you need food, well produce your own food. Yes. So and that you can say to an area, but you can also say it to a company and you can also say it to a conglomerate of companies.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:23:18
So and then the scale is important because for a company, sometimes it's not good to go off grid. Yeah, but they can go in an industrial estate, have a local area and now we have technology. So like on little the little island that belongs to Spain, they do a real time monitoring of demand and ahead of supply and demand of energy, they have different sources to do it because that's what nature would do it as well.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:24:03
So I designed for resilience. So because if one falls out, because there's, for instance, no wind, they have windmills and they have two basins with heat and they have microbial installations with biomass. So they have different and they have things like solar roads. So you have different ways to produce energy. And then if one falls out, like if there is a lot of wind and there is excess wind, they pump the water up from the lower base into the higher base and and then when there's no wind, they say, okay, now we go for gravity because we make sure it's a water high hydro technique to have from the higher base into the lower base
Desiree Driesenaar 00:25:16
and have the and then to have energy from that. So you will never have a no energy situation.
Maanarak of Grey 00:25:26
You are like this. Oh yeah, Maybe this is a good moment that we can go over to Bonaire.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:25:34
Oh yes.
Maanarak of Grey 00:25:35
If things working for Bonaire I like, I like the idea that you were saying before about the design. It is I'm going back and I'm going to remodel parts of my childhood home to to make this hub for commercial. And we're going to be doing things like, like rapid prototyping and just testing things out. And this is one of the design ideas I want to work with.
Maanarak of Grey 00:26:00
So I started thinking about, okay, the remodeling itself. I want to already be using these principles. And I looked, for example, for managing heat. I was looking at building maybe a terracotta wall because I saw this helps and I was thinking also about this concept of evaporation. So if I have plants at the bottom and I let water fall down, which helps cool, but also water supplants at the same time.
Maanarak of Grey 00:26:36
So this was one of the ideas I was having for Bonaire. But I also like this idea that you're talking about now, about the electricity, because in recent years we've seen them put windmills and it is my understanding that they are now working on a solar park as well. But I mean, the roads that can get you electricity on an island with so much sun as Bonaire.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:27:08
Yeah, well, that's what we do in biomimicry. And also the blue economy is we replace something with nothing. Like in Holland they say, okay, we want loading poles because some company comes in and says, well, you need electric loading poles. And then I say, The public money is already going to roads. Roads should clean, water should evaporated. How should I?
Desiree Driesenaar 00:27:46
Because it should clean water, infiltrate water because you do not want like in malaria areas, you do not want still water too much in cities because you have mosquitoes then so above water, above ground water should be flowing and below ground it is more still water. So things like that we think about in the designs of where you are and whisper near.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:28:19
The really funny thing is that that's also why I loved having this talk because ten years ago when I started in Hungary, I already had this example of Bonaire because Guenter has been there and Guenter Paoli and the team of Cesari has been on Bonaire and they have had lots of blue tables. It was a project where the people could say, okay, what do we want to be as an island?
Desiree Driesenaar 00:29:00
And that's also how it started in little. And then they said, Well, it's really a touristic island. We want to be beautiful. We want to be have people come because it's beautiful and we want to be natural. We want to let nature do the work. So we want to have a lot of natural growth and we want to be resilient for climate change because that's important in Bonaire.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:29:31
Yes. And then there was a huge there were a lot of ideas there. And they were also calculated through by the by some scientists and everything how to do it. And in the first years where I lectured on blue economy, I used Bonaire as an example all the time. But I know that a lot of things have not been done because I talk to Guenter later.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:30:00
Yeah, I think it was, I don't know, seven years later or something. And I said, Well, how much is done on Bonaire? And he said, Well, there's not really that. They see the whole vision of the whole island. So it's small things that some entrepreneurs have done, and one thing that they have done is apparently run the bulk a restaurant or yeah, hotel has done a lot of work on the replanting of the corals because that's also, of course, in Bonaire, a thing the corals and the diving and everything.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:30:45
So yes, but the other things that came out of the blue tables was, for instance, the mangroves and the mangrove reforestation. And in the meantime, I've seen a lot of this work done in Indonesia, for instance, how you can do it. And there they combine it with ecological fish farming. So the fishermen have jobs as well. But of course after ten years, technology has gone further as well.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:31:18
So Guntur has a big ship now where you can also see how you can fish with a bubble nets like the whales do it and then you don't have any bycatch. So it's very sustainable fishing and like in a little, the cooperatives of fishermen have said, okay, we will only fish with lines, and then we have very sustainable tuna.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:31:48
They also made a very one part of the island is a reserve. No divers can go there, no do not. And they replenish to sea like that. So they have one part of the area is really for fish to become really old. It's because if you now we say, okay, we can fish, but if they're too small, you have to throw them back.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:32:21
But if a fish is big like this, it will make maybe it will lay, I don't know, a thousand eggs. And if a fish can grow this big, it lays a million or a billion eggs. And if you make shelters for that, for the growth of the of the fish, then you replenish to sea. And then, of course, you have to combine it with routes of the ships to just one part of the island to not destruct the rest.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:33:02
So at this moment, yeah, the the mangrove thing was also about creating jobs for people because they came to the conclusion on Bonaire, there's a lot of goats. Yes. And there's wild goats. And they really destroy everything. Donkeys as well.
Maanarak of Grey 00:33:27
And there are donkeys as well roaming.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:33:30
Okay. So they're also. Yeah, yeah. But maybe I'm not sure because there's a lot of knowledge now about holistic grazing. And of course, if you overgrazed and you will destroy everything and you will not have any plants anymore, so you will have to the mass, the size, the animals, at least a little. Yes. So what they said is, okay, goats, let's let abundance do the work.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:34:06
So they said instead of killing the goats, because some scientists came with a plan to say, okay, how much carrying capacity has the island? And then we killed the rest of the goats. Right? Well, that's reductionist and destructive thinking. So what we said, no, not abundance to the work we wanted to domestic size. The goats put fences around them so they don't destruct more than they are.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:34:42
They really can. You can have electronic fences even you can chip them and they will not go over the fence. You do not even have to have physical barriers like a dog in Holland. You have to swallow where you see in the rural areas you can see a walking dog at the and you don't see a fence. But he doesn't go for it because it is this is chips and he is.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:35:11
So that could be done as well. But the goats, the mass the size them and then we wanted to bring I'm not sure I really want to hear from you later when you're there. How much of this has become a reality? Okay.
Maanarak of Grey 00:35:29
That you know.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:35:30
They wanted to bring new genes so other goats in because on an island you have gene deterioration. That's clear if you have goats and they made with each other for long, then they will not give as much milk as when you bring in new genes in the whole pool. So we brought more goats to the island instead of less.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:36:05
Then you could have a whole flourishing economy. On the combination of mangroves and goats and milk, and you would have a real agricultural economy. But the mangroves, the tops of the mangroves are very edible and very nutritious for the goats. They just have to get used to the taste, apparently because the mangroves are a bit salty right. But like in Indonesia, I saw they made cucumber, which is normally made from shrimps.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:36:49
Yes. They made it out of mangroves. Yeah. Vegan cookbook there. Oh. So those kind of ideas. And then the goats of course, can be done. Well, in Holland you have all ideas about milk, you know it, You can have cheeses, you can have French cheeses, Dutch cheeses or whatever. Goat's cheese is a very, very healthy, more healthy done to done the cow cheese, because the cow has four stomachs.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:37:25
So the milk is less digestible for humans than goat's cheese. So those stories can make the branding for the whole region, for the whole. Everything you do is about health and and then you can have ice cream and you can have this with the with the coral restoration in Limburg, I met a young guy. He was in tactics with me.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:37:57
I was a tactics coach in one point this and he was 13 and he was really so inspired and he went to Bonaire all the time to to plant, to replant the corals. And that's also where Günter said, well, bring Dutch people to maybe Dutch young people to maybe get the diving licenses on Bonaire. Because you are a Dutch municipality.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:38:29
Yes. And I really want us together to make this story about Bonaire being very important in Holland and being an example for Holland to to make this and to not be the poor cousin that needs to be rescued. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You otherwise, once you are the islands economy, that can teach us everything.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:38:58
That's what I want.
Maanarak of Grey 00:39:00
That's beautiful. That's beautiful vision. I wanted to ask about the goats because you mentioned them having to get used to the salt. And then I remember there are some go step like salt.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:39:17
That's that. That's the thinking. You know, the scientists came with another solution. They said, okay, if you do mysticism, then you can bottle feed them at first, make them get used to the taste, and then when they grow up, they like it. Yes. Because what you want to do, the principle behind it is you want to give the goats.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:39:40
If you want to have abundance of goats and abundance of economy of goats on it, then of course you will have farmers making the flavors like cactus flavor and pineapple and every flavor you can think of you make for the ice creams. Ice cream makes the most money that has the biggest margin in it. But of course the yogurts are very healthy as well.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:40:11
The cheeses. But the ice creams can feed into the tourism. Yes. So that's why go into had the idea that when we would have a visit from our king and queen on the island, they would get Bonaire, blue economy, ice cream to taste, to give this promotion and marketing idea and let the principles land. But the principle, of course, is about find a food for the goats that can be abundant on the island naturally, and that is not food for humans, right?
Desiree Driesenaar 00:41:02
So you that's also like in that's maybe a bit of a difference with the circular economy, like in blue City, they do a wonderful blue economy. In Rotterdam they have about 200 and burners who think like this, but some of them make vegan leather, for instance, out of pineapple. And then we think pineapple is too valuable as a product.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:41:33
Yes. Don't go there, but make vegan leather out of mangroves. Why not get the mangrove plant plant Also in blue economy, we are still planting mangroves. What I've seen in Indonesia, that was also a Dutch team, so it's available for you on Bonaire was building with Nature and Wetlands International. Oh yes. And they build bamboo walls in the sea to make new land because the waves bring it over the walls.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:42:11
They the sediments. And then apparently in mangrove areas there are so many dormant seeds in the soil, in the sediments that they grow out magically and they grow as full biodiversity. Well, so then it needs not plant. That's again a replace, not something with nothing in the system, make it cheaper, make it easier for local people, and then also make the mangroves grow again.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:42:45
And of course the mangroves are your now are good defense against the sea level change and also for getting like getting extra land. So that's the abundance of land you get in this whole project are also big companies, so they can also give like technological information. There is are dredgers in there like for George and Boskalis. So they have separate teams for this kind of thinking.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:43:24
So they yeah, you have to find because you cannot go to any company and say they already think like this because they don't. But you can educate people with abundance because it is the abundance of nature that does it. But then you can also you have to be smart to make sure your economy is abundant too. And I want to share one thing about that, about public money and private money, because the private money is mostly investment in health and in roads and everything.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:44:09
And if you do replace something with nothing, then it is less costly. Gucci can imagine that a solar road does two things or a cleaning road that does two things. You do it in one process and you just say as a government, okay, who gives me the cleaning road because the knowledge is done. They have sponge cities in China where they work with all this water balancing stuff and they are fed with technology from Delft, Delft University.
00:44:55:04 - 00:45:15:19
Desiree Driesenaar
So together we can find all these things. If you would want to have projects in Bonaire and yeah, and maybe also get some funding because that's why at this moment I work well, mostly my work is on funding because.
Maanarak of Grey 00:45:16
We can have all kinds of ideas.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:45:18
Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah. So we're working now on funding for algae platforms because seaweeds are absorbing 20 times more carbon out of the air than done land for a station. So we're working on. Yeah, autonomous, autonomous floating seaweed platforms, but also on the ships. Ships can clean water. Why not? It's it's the idea, you know, but you have to have the idea first before you start making it happen.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:46:01
And then we have to engineering knowledge by now to do it. Come on. It's not like so that's why it's so good that biomimicry is now really one of the biggest innovation methods worldwide. And we're finding it out all together with technology, with science, with communities. Yeah. And then you have to realize that one thing. Will Yeah. Also it is what you say.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:46:39
It's a balance on Aliados They had to decide. It's it's a story of an island and they started already in the last century. It's, it's an old example and they for instance also wanted only eco tourism. It's because mass tourism wrecks the place. So they want divers and they want 40 people and they want nature people. So they made sure that you can only fly there with an extra stop.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:47:17
And that means the mosque goes to Tenerife or, whatever. And then Alvaro is really the island for. Yeah, specialized people and a lot of the Tenerife people come there for holidays, so other Spanish people come there for holidays.
Maanarak of Grey 00:47:38
We had this before and in my you show us everywhere, Europe still young, but when I was younger, still, and growing up on the island, there was this kind of tourism, predominantly people that would come and stay sometimes for months, and then there would be some people had like part time homes in Bonaire, and then it would go back to I remember this couple from the UK because I was working in a dive shop and they would spend six months in the UK because they had to and came back to Yeah, and but we had a lot more of these kind of tourist before.
Maanarak of Grey 00:48:21
And then at a certain point a lot more cruise ships started coming and with so much frequency that these kind of tourist didn't really like being there anymore because it's got too busy. But a lot of tourists bust and these things. And I thought that is really a shame that yeah, went back. So that is one of the things that I'm curious, can that be retracted?
Maanarak of Grey 00:48:50
Can we no longer be on.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:48:53
Yeah, but one thing is, but then you have to talk to the government and say, well they're wrecking our seas for the divers and divers is what we need. So then you could say make it a bottleneck. Just maybe one or two harbors that can halve the cruise ships and they are timed so then you can. Yeah, you will not have everywhere harbors to have the cruise ships.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:49:22
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We want to have the the corals. We want to be untouched. You make a bottleneck to the island and then you can have only one cruise ship at a time on one part of the island and then the rest of the island. It's like a bit what Ibiza is doing. The southern part is really touristic and whatever.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:49:51
It's what Bali is doing. The southern part is really touristic and whatever, and people who like that and people who want to just party and whatever the rest is really for this kind of things. Like if I go to Bali, there's really just green school Bali there and Darren Woods, which is more in the center and yes, they do these beautiful bamboo buildings and bamboo is an abundantly available material in so much difference and so much that you can have beautiful buildings that are earthquake resistant and that are and you can do so many things with these kind of ways.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:50:44
And then you can also solve the electricity issues very modern because the bamboo people together with SERI have done tests in Italy and I guess because they are in Japan at this moment and doing a lot in China and Japan, they make an earthquake resistant building. And when it has a little little bit of tiny bit of movement like bamboo has done, you can have pizza, electronics, off-grid and you can have the pressure of the roof, which is gravity pressure difference to make for the whole building while things like this are still very unknown.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:51:44
And because the whole grids, the energy grids are always big and then they don't think about of grids. But you can be an island of so much innovation of all these things, because Günter was with you earlier and then with us because he is Belgium is Flemish. Blue economy is Flemish. It is the Azeri organization is in Japan.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:52:20
So it's really European. The Japanese thinking, and it is this. Blue tables have been done in Bonaire much earlier than the 2012 that the book? Yeah, I was at the launch of the book. That's what I first heard about it. And it wasn't is as of 12 because it was translated in Dutch back then. Yes. And I don't know.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:53:00
But in these ten years we seem to just go on as if these things didn't. But we as people like you and me and inspire as many other people in the world with the regenerative movement as well, because regeneration is a very big thing now and biomimicry is a very big thing now. And it is yes, it is a bit of better and it is a bit of science, but you can think about it and it's really inspiring.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:53:40
A lot of technical people as well on your island. And I can.
Maanarak of Grey 00:53:46
I heard I first heard of the blue economy when I was an intern for the Ecuador Buckle. They were interviewed because they they considered their bubble economy and they had have a solid garden as well. It's just yeah, really nice and really nice to see them going further. Also in what they do, they also use the bio mercury for the design.
Maanarak of Grey 00:54:14
So yeah, I was also inspired by them and thus I have where I am now. I had a final question for I maybe we'll talk. Yeah, we could go on forever about this. But my final question is concerning traveling, because that's one of the things like I did a climate coach training in Jeju and that was one of the heavy things like traveling, especially flying.
Maanarak of Grey 00:54:48
And I like traveling, but of course I don't want to be causing this this damage to the environment. Is there a way that we can do this? IS yes.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:54:59
But I still think freedom is my big word. So I don't want to tell people what to do or what not to do. I just want to enlighten them on all the possibilities. The Earth. It is a science now in Gaia theory that the Earth is self-regulating an organism, so we are nature, and that means that we emit CO2.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:55:39
You can say, well, kill the people because then we don't have CO2 anymore. But we also breathed a lot of O2 and O2 is very good for us, which is an oxygen, but it's also a very destructive material because you can see it for fire. For instance, you need if you have oxygen, you have bigger fire. And if you have no oxygen, then the fire extinguishes it.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:56:12
But everything has two sides. And that's what I learned in the past ten years after I started studying. Everything has more sides and the plans will really balance everything. That doesn't mean that we should not. For instance, that's why I work on toxicity, because our chemistry is way too toxic and it should be green chemistry from the planes, I must say.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:56:50
First of all, it gives a lot of peace in the world when we see how other people live. So that is really it gives us a lot of ideas for our own environment. When we come back. That's why I want places to be very diverse and inspiring environments for others. If you travel, it's how I do it personally, because I, of course, travel as well.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:57:20
As you heard from my stories, if I can go overland, I go overland. So I use boats or I use, yeah, a train or a car. But a boat is very polluting as Yes, because we have horrible energy sources. The moment I can work on a shipyards and tell them to use water and make hydrogen out of it on the boat, so that is also what dangerous doing.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:58:03
He made now a prototype boat with all kinds of ways like you can have hydrogen without a lot of without electrolyzers, without compressors, because hydrogen is the biggest problem that it uses a lot of energy because it's just storage of energy. It's not a production of energy. Well, that's the of technologies we need then on a boat to get the whole voting industry excited.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:58:43
So I do a lot of my work online and then you can say, well, even online uses a lot of energy. And it's true at this moment we're still in deep transition. But I work again with the biomimicry professor of math who has the super formula and a super formula is a new kind of dynamic math that is the unifying form related.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:59:16
Also, engineering has been waiting for all this time that that's that the physicists have been dreaming about it. And astrophysicists. Well, this is made by an astrophysicist and a mathematician and a botanist. They understand ecology and how it works on the planet. So it is one formula, but with that one formula, you can even even make the are very realistically was just k bs instead of g bs.
Desiree Driesenaar 00:59:59
That means less transfer over systems. That means a data center of this size instead of this size. C So we're in transition. I'm just trying to get this message across that abundance is not just a nice word for everybody because I say abundance for all. That means I want all these islands economies and all the global South to understand what is happening, because you still have to also do space and the need.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:00:42
What I've been I've been I've been struggling with the past ten years is I've been in environments where we don't need to do any less, we don't need to do anything. There's just no urgency. Apart from some governments saying we should and nobody wants it. But if you have space, it's like in a war. The Second World War is for me, still very realistic.
01:01:19:05 - 01:01:50:14
Desiree Driesenaar
I'm older than you, and my parents were really in this war, so it is close to me. My father had big war traumas and my mother really lived through the war. She was ten when it ended and he was 17, so they were not really young anymore, understood what was happening after the war. Germany was really bombarded a lot.
Desiree Driesenaar
Holland was bombarded a lot We got space, we got a lot of problems, we got a lot of destruction. England was one of the rescuers did not get a lot of destruction. Where did the really big growth and really because the money goes to where the destruction is done you can make big leaps in like technology, but and I think that's all the climate money that is coming to climate prone areas like Ireland and everything else we have in Amsterdam.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:02:37
We have this. He was the minister of Rishard Visser. He was the minister of human health of health care in Aruba. And he then now is one of the leading forces behind Ireland's tropical island health care. And he has it's called Earth's nurse and Earth medics because we have to use everything on these islands. You have often less access to health care.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:03:28
So we need aid to really do things like easy and faster, really recognition what it is. But then we also have to include like India principles, which is I are Veda, India has a minister via video. I was born. Yes. And that is cold in Holland. I had cancer last year and I talked a lot to my oncologist and I know all this nature stuff.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:04:07
And I said to him, Well, how do I make sure that my chemo is not wrecking the people because I pick it out? He says, I don't know. I said, Well, you should. You were the seller of this chemo. You're the seller of antibiotics, you're the seller of hormone pills for women, anti conception. And all this hormones come into the into the environment through the rivers.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:04:39
It's as you should have either had to fight filters or you should have like dry, dry toilets to not have this and do it with microbes, because microbes can do so much. So those are the things I kind of work on. And I must say my projects mostly find me. So you found me. If you need me, just call me if you get funding or if we can do funding together from maybe the Dutch government, Why not?
Desiree Driesenaar
I will write a one pager and you go for the funding for Bonaire with a team on Bonaire and then. Yeah, if you need me to be part of the team, go into Doesn't have the time, but I. I can be part of teams. But of course I funded teams then we can do great things together. Really talk to governments.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:05:42
I love working with the young people. You have to find it out in the new areas. That will be a time when when all this work otherwise stays hidden.
Maanarak of Grey 01:05:53
Yeah, and I am fighting against that. AS So that was the point also for starting this podcast. I looked around my network and I said, I have such a fantastic network. People are doing things with regeneration or with abundances and like you are doing and no one knows that this is going on and that's panic around the climate and that people are indeed talking as if you just wipe up, why wipe us off the planet and just have the planet be itself as it.
Maanarak of Grey 01:06:27
But that's that's very destructive thinking and that gives you a kind of easy copout. Well, I'm just not going to change and I'm going to keep living the way I am now and then die. And then since I die, then the planet will. It's not my issue. Yeah, Yeah, I don't I don't want to be a part of this type of thinking.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:06:47
No, the thing is that the travel thing, I want to say a few more words about it because you mentioned the English people having at this moment we do a project in Greece to get tourists to the area, nice tourists and not too big. Well, if you do things like that, I now just made a very simple Facebook page for it.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:07:13
I make target groups and because I want Greeks to have jobs and not tourists take over or no other people take over, I will not allow people to post a lot of things about buying houses and then leaving them empty. Half of the year. That's only driving up prices I'm not talking about because the Greeks want to sell it to us.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:07:43
That's the thing. The problem is with the Greeks and the the the Dutch in this case, or they do northern European ones in this case, because we want to sell it right. Nice and cheap, and we want to buy it there and be there. And the Greeks want to sell it for the best price, which is to outsiders.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:08:03
But then the outsiders leave it empty. So what we need to be doing is fill up a already existing houses and then mainly off season. Yep. So if you go for touristic, things like that, go for instance, for digital nomads, there are a lot of people in these climate worlds like where I live, I work and they love things like this and be on nice places and do the digital work like this.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:08:43
You can also have people like in the Greek part, we found out sometimes you find out things when you just start. So we found out that a lot of people are interested to come there for a few months to find their ancestors, their Greek ancestor. So that is very nice target group, because then we can fill it up with people from abroad who are interested in Greek culture, in Greek, because I do the leadership by always saying, listen to the Greeks.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:09:20
They are the ones charge, not me, not other, you know, Europeans. We can think we can have ideas, but they it's their land, it's their village. And then the Greeks, because I explain things as well, I will now go there again from October to February, long time. I will travel overland. And yes, there are people like older people, like pensioners, they would like to over well make Bonaire a nice over winter place and make sure that the Bonaire people own the buildings that they rent out to the pensioners from Holland.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:10:15
So that is an economic system make work in Indonesia. They have done it from the government out because they say as a foreigner you can never own anything in our country. So if for instance, we want to have a house there to stay, we have a kind of a bonus daughter there that we really would love to have like a life and, things like that.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:10:48
We would buy it if we would have the money, we would buy it together with her in her name. She will be in our testaments, the one to really get it to really us. She's much younger. She's so. And then we will also, if we are not there, it is an income source for her and her family, her community, her whatever she wants to spend it on.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:11:20
Yes. So or she can go live there. It can be both sides. So those are the kind of the in-between solutions that Mike and I, my husband and I found thinking about all these things. But we understand that everything has a downside. But we are cold to these places. We cannot not be there. So also, if you ever want to some Bonaire, we would to stay longer, be your guest with your community and then bring stuff to the island and really do some in-depth thinking about things and helping you design things so that you are there then empowered to give it speech with a bigger community on the island.
Maanarak of Grey 01:12:23
I would love that actually.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:12:24
Yeah. So that how we do it and yes, that is how you can do it as well. We can all book this car and on holidays and go one week to whatever. But that's not what that's why regenerative travel is a good term. Yes, we travel, but it is regenerative travel because without these ideas you would not get the speed on the islands to get it going.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:12:56
You can also use us then to talk to governments, to talk to companies, to talk to whoever you want us to talk to.
Maanarak of Grey 01:13:04
And that is great. I will definitely stay in contact with you about this. Yeah. And now I'm just going to for this period of about three months, I'm working on the crowdfunding campaign and then I'll move. And once there and a bit settled, definitely contact you about that.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:13:24
Yeah. Wonderful.
Maanarak of Grey 01:13:26
Thank you very much for joining me. It was a pleasure listening to you talk of inspired. I have taken a lot of notes.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:13:35
I know always too much when I talk because I tried to put ten years of study into one hour and people get overwhelmed. People get confused sometimes. Yeah, but I try to give it words what is possible so that they are inspired to ask questions of all these movement that are already there. And they will grow. They really they grow in the world.
Maanarak of Grey 01:14:08
And I'm yeah, I'm excited to continue. We going to have another episode too, where we continue going deeper in these topics. Again, thank you for joining and.
Desiree Driesenaar 01:14:21
Thank you for asking me.
Maanarak of Grey 01:14:23
It's my pleasure. Thank you for listening. Till next time on the Kreashon Podcast
Desiree Driesenaar 01:14:29
Okay, Bye bye bye.
Abundance for all