(mystical music) (mystical music continues) - [Wes Jackson] Now, here we are.

We find ourselves at a moment.

(gentle music) Well, we've learned a lot of things.

We need to come to terms with who we are.

(gentle music) We've got to understand (crowd murmurs) the split, (gentle music) the first real break with nature.

(inspirational music) Once we started that journey, we're vulnerable.

(suspenseful music) (suspenseful music continues) That's the story of our origins, the story of Eden, the all of everything.

(suspenseful music) (birds chirp) We see forest being cut, soil eroding the very large list, but we're paying more attention to alarms going off on our climate change clocks than we are what's standing behind it all.

(funky tense music) So then we gotta ask, what is it?

What is it that will pull us together?

(tense music) Let's start at the prairie.

(tense music) (tense music continues) (tense music continues) - [Laura] 99.9% of our original prairie's gone.

People can't even imagine it.

They say, "No, you just leave it alone.

It'll come back."

Well, you have not been here.

Sorry.

Animals, insects, plants, gone.

We lose them.

We lose species.

We lose our air, our health.

It's a pretty impossible situation.

- [Bill] How do we grow food?

I mean, we have to think about that.

How do we do it?

How?

If, as some say, the world's soils only have enough nutrients to get us through the next 60 harvests?

It's a paradox.

Homosapiens, the wise one, is demonstrating anything but wisdom.

- [Corie] What we're trying to do is kind of crazy.

We're trying to build and just really transform our farm.

But the farms like us, regenerative farms, there's a lot of forces telling us that's not how you do it.

We gotta deal with that.

Well, guess what?

If we don't change how we've been thinking about it at all, regenerative farms and organic farms just aren't gonna exist because it's just too hard.

- [Robert] I'm the last person you would expect to be tending a garden or pulling potatoes outta the ground.

I was a journalist, and I was a professor.

No experience on the farm or in a garden.

Makes me think of the first time I went to a lecture by this guy named Wes Jackson.

Someone asked him, "What can we do to help solve all these problems you keep talking about?"

And he said, "Take care of a tomato plant."

In other words, yes, there are these big problems to solve, but you also need to understand what we eat, where it comes from.

And at the time, I don't think I realized I was listening to one of the founders of the regenerative agriculture movement.

(upbeat music) - My children would say, "Dad, explain that, but start somewhere this side of the Big Bang."

(laughter) I was told that I was supposed to open up with a joke and get you ready for somethin' that's gonna make you feel worse.

(laughter) How in the hell can public allow chemicals we've had no evolutionary experience with?

When we have an abundance, we regard it as something we can just use up.

We haven't really dealt with who owns the land.

The land owns us.

The wasting of the soil resource, it is insane.

We're billions of times more ignorant than we are knowledgeable.

Industrialization of agriculture is the creation of vulnerability.

The true prophets said, "If you don't shape up and fly right, you're gonna get it."

This is a digression.

I didn't intend to talk about this at all.

(laughter) We're not called to success, but to be obedient to our visions.

By the year 2020, 40 years from now, more centralization, the farmers will be squeezed and more land will be bought up by the corporations.

We've yet to build an agriculture as sustainable as the nature we destroy.

And this Johnny-come-lately thing called an industrial revolution is so passe.

(playful music) - [Robert] Once I understood Wes' way of seeing, this farm boy turned Darwinian evolutionary biologist, this blend of references to science and what we've long believed, ever since then, I've been describing him as the most important environmentalist most people have never heard of.

So working with this guy in Kansas, this guy with all these wild ideas, that was really a dream come true.

To understand what I'm talking about, you just have to meet the guy.

(footsteps shuffle) - Knox College, the University of Kansas.

The Right Livelihood Award.

This is the MacArthur Award.

Well, this is Clarkson University, an honorary doctorate.

Washington College.

Here's Kansas Wesleyan.

This is the Pew.

I was a Pew Fellow.

This is from Sweden.

I've never unwrapped it.

First time.

But I really am proud of this box.

This is Ree's Apple House from near Topeka where I grew up.

This is a good place to put those.

But you know, look at all that right there.

That's what I'm most proud of.

It's one thing to be a dilettante and it's another thing to be a charlatan.

I really don't fit anywhere.

I really don't fit in genetics.

Certainly don't fit any university, and I don't think I would fit as a farmer.

(pensive music) If we think about the human journey, we find ourselves on a 10,000 year trajectory.

The big moment, the beginning of agriculture probably started around the campfire.

Let's say that you're a gatherer and hunter.

You see this plant and you think, my golly, you're passing that seed around.

The next thing you know, you're making the habitat.

That was the beginning of being a species outta context.

I don't think we were meant to be farmers.

If we were meant to be farmers, we'd have had longer arms, but we got more food and we got more people.

And now we were on an agricultural treadmill.

But what's really killing us?

Well, life on this planet is the scramble to get energy rich carbon.

And it didn't just stop with the food.

We began extraction.

We began to get at the carbon of the planet, the soil carbon, the forest carbon, the coal carbon, the oil, the natural gas.

Five pools.

We are addicted to highly dense carbon.

We gotta have it.

And you can look at the history of earth abuse through agriculture.

The plowshare destroyed more options for future generations than the sword.

We plowed the prairies and got the yields, but now, not only are they eroding, but chemical contamination of the land and water, and how long can that go?

We're putting chemicals out there our tissues have no evolutionary experience with.

Now, that is one of the dumbest things that comes out of a idea that humans are separate from nature and therefore plow it under.

- [Laura] We'll do kind of a huddle here and talk about... But prairie, it's so much different.

It's so valuable.

It's got all kinds of things going on in it all year round.

You can get something like this, you know, slowly work it loose and like, there's a little thing there.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Wow.

- Yeah, I'm interested in seeing what kind of root system this one- - In the case of a prairie plant root in soil, it looks like to me a lung with this massive surface area.

CO2 coming in, oxygen is going out.

Pockets of air, water, soil particles, clay particles, fungi.

All the cool stuff is really small.

Nematodes, springtails.

- Springtails.

- Yeah.

- Springtails.

- [Colleague] I don't know what those are.

- [Laura] Collembola is the scientific term, Collembola.

We talk in specifics about the ecosystem itself, you know, the roots and awareness of prairie.

So, let's look at Iowa.

Where is the nearest native seed source?

Not that direction.

Not that direction.

Couple hundred miles maybe?

(chuckles) We are looking at a sterilized landscape that can no longer provide that ecosystem service of kind of self-healing.

It's just wall-to-wall corn and soybeans.

Growing up, I saw prairie re seeding itself into the roadsides.

We will never get that back.

The scale of the damage is, you know, an irreversible change.

It's really that stark.

- [Corie] When we got here to this farm, it was a conventional farm, but we did not wanna do that.

We're not just focused on like how many tomatoes can we crank out for these ten years.

(cow moos) - [Laura] We love being outside and we wanna connect people to the land.

- But oh, can we actually make it work?

Can we work with the land organically, regeneratively, and how do you do that?

(birds chirp) - [Corie] We're trying to redefine what a farm means.

We're trying to farm to be as resilient as possible of like, where does their water?

Where is like, what is the soil like?

To have that tangible work to like not do damage, right?

But you know, with modern farms, we've written ourself out of the definition of nature.

We're destructive, right?

- [Wes] And with that, tearing up a big human idea (engine whirs) that nature's to be subdued or ignored.

So now we have this.

There is nature and then there is the human.

To survive, the human has to destroy the original relationship with natural ecosystems.

(engines whir) Now, let's go into the middle west.

That is the richest agricultural land of the world.

Iowa, Illinois, Indiana.

The land, the soils, it's not just dirt.

A healthy soil is a structure.

There are bacteria, there are fungi, there are invertebrates.

That is Eden.

Try to find another place in the world of such an expanse with the ecological capital a benefit of the ice ages, and you're not gonna have it.

You can't lose.

You can't lose.

And yet soil erosion.

We're now losing about 30 million acres a year worldwide due to land degradation.

And it's beyond natural replacement levels.

(water rushes) So we have to respect our creator, Earth.

The soil we are standing in should be our salvation.

But I take it a little farther.

We have to save our soils if we're gonna save our souls.

All right, here we go.

(planer whirs) (planer buzzes) - [Bill] Wes showed me you could be a thinker doing practical things that made a difference.

And that was what I wanted philosophy to do.

I wanted to be this applied philosopher.

Where it all happens, I guess.

Working with him over the years, I got to feel his energy.

If you need an extension cord, this is the place to come.

The academic world is full of people who are afraid to take risks.

Well, there you are.

Boy, you must have been successful in your career.

You've got some really expensive tools.

- [Wes] Let's see, where's that?

- [Bill] But Wes believes in unbounded enthusiasm.

What are you doing?

- [Wes] Just thinking about if we were to hang it right there.

I mean, that is to me so beautiful.

These creatures were just getting a meal.

How many people would look at that and throw it in the fire?

- [Bill] And I have a wood pile.

There are pieces that I can't put in the fire.

I look at it and I say, "It's too beautiful," and I put it aside.

- [Wes] Really?

See?

- So- - You're on.

- I'm onto it.

Yeah.

- [Wes] You're on.

- [Wes] What helped fuel the great transformation really were two things.

We had the Scientific Revolution and then you get the Industrial Revolution.

So once people get a taste, they gotta get in on it somehow.

Human cleverness has run ahead of nature's wisdom.

And when fossil fuel came on the scene, our topsoil didn't stand a chance.

We couldn't stop ourselves.

(melancholy music) The Dust Bowl is an absolute consequence and the Dust Bowl is not just due to plowing, but the idea that you really had to work the field to get good germination.

The Soil Conservation Service at the time of Roosevelt, there was a tremendous esprit de corps.

All the way from the secretaries to the PhDs in soil science, all dedicated to the common task of saving the soils.

There was a major, major effort.

Some could call it an agricultural revolution.

But then, in '77, I was reading the General Accounting Office study and it looked to me like soil erosion was as bad in the '70s as when the Soil Conservation Service had been formed in the '30s under Roosevelt.

(gentle music) And yet I thought, how can this be?

Well, it was a period of acceleration, the acceleration in the industrialization of agriculture.

You know, my dad, he, too, was a part of the progress myth, the increasing industrialization of agriculture.

He was a part of it.

(exciting music) He got a tractor.

(engine starts up) (exciting music) You can cover more land with that tractor than you can with the draft horses.

And when I was a kid, I remember when the very last mule left, old Bill the mule.

So, once you get in your head progress and no concern about what is gonna be the long term cost of this, you just go.

You just go.

This whole transformation of a cultural mindset happened in such a short period of time.

That's when the horses left the farm.

So I was a part of it back in those days.

I was a part just like everyone else.

- [Laura] When I was really little, Dad would be, "Now, I want you to read this.

And then after that I want you to read this.

And then I wanna tell you what I think about these two books."

(chuckles) I was born with a silver book in my hand, you know, right?

You're surrounded by the love and fascination with the natural world.

Also with evolution, you know, I've won the parent lottery, you know.

Does it kind of look like a dill or a carrot?

You know, kind of like an umbrella?

The way I grew up definitely helped to prepare me to lead the Tallgrass Prairie Center.

We collect seeds from what's left of the original prairie.

We grow that out.

We release it to native seed companies.

As a result, it's planted in the roadside ditches.

And anyone who wants to plant prairie can buy the right kind of seed for their project.

And farmers who wanna plant prairie on their land for conservation, they're using that seed, as well.

We're doing what we can given the huge forces that we're dealing with in this landscape.

It's important for people to realize that we've lost so much.

The test of our understanding of an ecosystem is if we can restore it.

But we know what we need to do, reduce nutrient loss, protect what's left, restore some of that back, no matter how impossible it may seem, you know?

And I've been lucky enough to see that growing up.

(bright music) - [Wes] High school, KU, then Kansas Wesleyan and then teaching at Cal State Sacramento.

But I've always thought California, though, my family doesn't belong there.

Thought I'd be somewhere else.

Now remember this is during the '60s.

There was a war.

There was racism.

There was poverty.

There was a growing gap between the rich and the poor.

- [Robert] And in the middle of all that, here's this even younger generation trying to make sense of things.

Wes asked questions and he was genuinely curious.

- [Wes] And I thought about that a lot and I thought, what's it going to take?

We've gotta feature questions that go beyond the available answers.

- [Robert] So, you know, it was kind of the ecological awareness of the 1970s.

Things were bad, but we didn't really understand how, and so, that was really the beginning of the very deep ecological worldview, (tense music) a worldview that Wes was just starting to have.

(melancholy music) - [Wes] You are looking at the situation of the world and the deterioration of the environment and you're thinking, these universities are not really doing what needs to be done.

- So, Wes, I wanted to make sure I understood.

You were teaching at Kansas Wesleyan University and you created the survival studies curriculum.

- Yeah.

- And then you got recruited by Sacramento State to head up one of the first environmental studies programs in the country, right?

- [Wes] Well, yeah.

However, I had been stuck with conventional thought 'cause that's what we do.

But the thing is, I was gonna be interested to see how radical we're willing to be.

- So you were successful but you were frustrated with the limits of conventional education.

- Yeah.

- Why?

- [Wes] Yeah, well the question is, what the hell's going on here?

The shallow and conventional.

Why is that being discussed?

(Wes sighs) Can we get above, you know, all of it?

Can we now drive knowledge out of its categories?

- [Bob] So you had a cushy job, but the limits of universities were pushing you to leave and at the same time, you felt a pull to go home, correct?

- [Wes] Well, that's a hard, that's a good question.

I mean, there we were, wife and the kids with me.

Had it not been for my daughter, my daughter, Laura, she broke into tears and said, "I thought you always said we're not called to success, but to obedience to our vision."

Whoo boy.

What have I done to come to this?

(melancholy music) I, I wanted back.

I wanted the prairies.

I just wanted Kansas.

(melancholy music) The Konza Prairie.

This is home.

This is the way.

Look out on this diversity, this geology, geography, precipitation, no fossil fuel dependency, no chemicals being put out there, no soil erosion.

How can this be?

Why is that?

And look at everything out there that is of the biota.

How is it that nature's wisdom is able to continue year after year without any planning on the part of the human?

By looking to the way nature's ecosystems have worked over millions of years, that seems to me a more reliable standard than a standard only 10,000 years.

Now the next question is, what will nature require of us here?

And now the mind is at work.

Mimic the structure in order to be granted the function.

(inspirational music) This great gift of nature, a big idea, the biggest.

And it hit me.

Try to build an agriculture based on the never plowed native prairie.

(inspirational music) That's what we wanna mimic.

(inspirational music) The idea of nature as measure.

Finally, now, we can build something.

(birds chirp) We're gonna spend half our time in reading, thinking, discussing.

The other half time hands on, be able to take something and elaborate on it.

That was the marching order.

So in '76, my first wife and I, Dana, started The Land Institute.

We had a handful of students, but we had a kind of a great spirit, a perception, a different way of engaging the intellectual life and the physical world that should go with it.

- [Robert] Wes takes us way back and Wes' corrective focuses on the problem of agriculture rather than tinkering with specific problems in agriculture.

Farming, that was the break with nature.

We needed to not only see that problem, but to somehow learn to all come together to begin to resolve it.

- [Wes] In our society, we don't exist under a common covenant.

So consequently, a lot of potential profits just aren't paid attention to.

This is mission-oriented work.

We got a mission.

We're not going to throw papers into the winds in order to increase your status.

You're gonna be scientists, but very good scientists that I trust.

Said, "Huh, Wes, you know this is crazy, don't you?"

I thought, I don't know.

But they weren't thinking about it like we do.

We took on the idea that we're gonna try to build an agriculture based on the way natural ecosystems work, but in order to do that, we're gonna have to perennialize the major crops, crossing wild species with domestic perennial grain polyculture.

And that meant breeding.

- [Lee] Well, plant breeding.

It was kind of a crazy decision to come to a place that didn't have any of the resources needed for plant breeding that wanted to do plant breeding.

Like, how's that gonna work?

But to come down here into the hot Kansas prairie, well, what are we gonna do with this?

We hadn't thought quite that far.

(Lee chuckles) But what's amazing is that the promise of plant breeding and genetics, it was a leap of faith.

But how to get people to come along and start to do that work and believe in its possibilities, (birds chirp) sustained breeding, it's still a long ways away.

But if you're calling us to develop perennial grains, there's only one place in the world to do it.

And with the ideas of The Land Institute, this is the place to come.

- [Wes] And so we had the beginning of the story.

Now, let's go to work.

(exciting music) And this was The Land Institute.

The offices are on the periphery.

The coffee pot's in the middle.

And one of my favorite scenes is seeing my fellow scientists lean against one another's door in conversation.

(bright music) (bright music continues) - [Wes] Are you ready for this, ladies and gentlemen?

So on the left is the plant that started the civilization.

The wheat plant, which is an annual, started civilization.

(bright music) That wheat plant is an annual.

We have to tear up the ground every year in order to be able to plant the seeds because it dies.

The perennial plant on the right, the Kernza plant, sets seed, goes into a dormancy and then is flowering again in the next year.

(bright music) - [Tim] The Land Institute is addressing a shortcoming that has existed in agriculture since it began, that our food production relies on the soil built by the ecosystem that preceded it, a disturbance that loses rather than builds soil, so deeply ingrained in the human psyche that we don't even think of it as an ecological abomination.

(dramatic music) (water rushes) But a perennial agro ecosystem will actually protect and build soil.

- [Stan] Well, the world has never had a perennial grain crop, and our ancestors collected seed and ate it, but they never domesticated perennial plants.

In the far distance there between, you can see between the trees, the light green patch is Kernza, which is a relative of wheat and it is perennial and it's a very strong perennial.

- [David] What I'm mainly doing is domestication with perennial plants.

That's something that not enough people in the world are doing.

We can get beyond the annual habit.

- [Stan] We're trying to combine perenniality from the wild perennial and good grain production from the annual.

- [Tim] Perennial plants like Kernza or a perennial sorghum do have the potential to produce significant yields.

On the flip side, annual crops start from zero and there's no roots in the ground.

You've killed all of the other vegetation and you put your seed in.

Soil can't develop under annual species.

- [Stan] But this soil is perenniality.

The plants live multiple years, produce seed for multiple years, and Kernza has living roots in it, year round roots going down, roots there to perform the functions that make soil soil.

- [David] The soil is getting deeper rather than getting shallower and the landscape is restoring itself.

And so, success looks like the humans are still part of the equation as a kind of mutualism, as a partnership where the plants, they need us and we need them.

These kinds of big problems require efforts that may take decades.

- [Tim] Why wouldn't we invest in what's necessary to undertake a second agricultural revolution?

The fact is we can do it now and why wouldn't we?

We need people to come back down to Earth together.

As Wes wrote decades ago, "Agriculture in the largest sense cannot be repaired independently of culture and society."

- [Wes] And I think we have the moment.

We've only colonized the Earth.

We've not discovered it.

And I think now is the moment of discovery.

(hammer bangs on metal) So that's the biggie.

(hammer bangs on metal) See how that works?

- You gotta do a little more work on it to get a patent.

- Ow.

- So you're like a junkyard here that you use to put stuff to work.

- [Wes] Whaddya mean like a junkyard?

- Well- - Now, you know the story here, Bill.

This is all recycled lumber.

That's Osage orange.

- [Bill] So you like wood?

I think we can conclude that.

(Bill chuckles) - [Bill] So what does nature teach us and how will this inform my thinking and action?

Using nature as our guide, how can we actually effectively build our culture with that perspective, with nature's creativity?

How do we really build a complex society using these ideas?

(grain rustles) - [Lee] And so I think we have a lot of work to do.

It's a much broader issue than just the new grains that we're developing.

- [Don] A new stabilizing effort for food production.

The development of perennial grain has great potential, and here at the University of Minnesota, development of that program really started when we were able to connect with our former graduate student, Lee DeHaan at The Land Institute.

We had a long conversation and figured out how to initiate a co-breeding program.

- [Jake] Now, we're really excited about Kernza because of the perennial agriculture.

(grass rustles) It's really drought tolerant.

Kernza has the deep dense root system that can find water where most annual crops can't.

We have data that shows that there are fewer greenhouse gases emitted.

That carbon that's deep in the roots stays there.

(machine whirs) - [Quintin] We're gonna jump over and do our slate test.

So, same soils, different crop rotations and practices.

I'm gonna drop this sample in, which is the Kernza sample here.

But this sample is taken just across the road.

You can see what happens.

This is exploding because it's lacking glomalin, a mycorrhizal fungi produced by a living root system.

So it holds that soil together and actually absorbs much more water.

It's Kernza.

- [Carmen] The benefits of perennializing the landscape.

Water quality, soil health.

Intermixed with all of that is carbon sequestration.

When you don't get the buckwheat out.

- Soil is full of life.

- [Bailey] Soil is an ecosystem.

It's a puzzle.

This is just one piece of the puzzle and it tells me about how this whole landscape formed and what it means for you, me and the farmers that are managing the land.

Yeah, look at that amazing worm burrow.

That is pretty cool.

That's lined with organic matter in the form of worm poop.

Yeah, there it is.

And you can see if you follow this through, it's gonna meet up there.

- [Wes] We can now solve the 10,000-year-old problem of agriculture.

Wheat, rice, corn, oilseed crop, sorghum, grains and legumes, annual monocultures.

But let's say that we're gonna have to perennialize the major crops.

That's different.

That changes everything.

Plus we now have all of that knowledge outta that broad discipline of ecology and evolutionary biology that has been accumulating for 150 years suddenly becomes available to agriculture.

We can now do what our ancestors could not do.

Now, let's find the people to do this.

- [Yvon] You know, we've been pushing organic and regenerative agriculture for years, and right now, we're very interested in grains and, you know, I'm in the clothing business, but people don't eat clothes.

You wanna see some change in how people eat?

Lead by example.

People say, "You are what you eat."

I take it further.

You are what you eat, eats.

Kernza, those roots are 15 feet deep and they pull in nutrients from all over.

It's off the chart.

- [Brandon] Nutrient density, it's a big thing.

Kernza, it sends its roots deeper.

That's important.

Why is that?

Well, to have perenniality in my family farm, because we have that polyculture system that can thrive, we don't need such large acreages to be profitable.

I mean, a semi-load of Kernza is pushing six digits.

I mean, people are making Kernza noodles.

People are making a ale out of it.

Some of it's being puffed.

Some of it's being flaked.

There might be a kinda like oatmeal.

Sky's the limit.

It's a good feeling.

There's a real opportunity out there.

- The heart and the soul of it is certainly perenniality.

Perennial Pantry is a food company and we're bringing Kernza out into the world and into people's pantries.

Build a different world and do it around the dinner table.

- [Sandy] And so, there's something really unique about the perennial grains.

With a small footprint, you can accomplish a lot.

Look at the adjacent lot that is just crushed gravel.

That's how we started.

And now we have a native prairie beer garden, a sweet tiny prairie, yeah.

So, more.

More of this, you know, we can impact change.

We can imagine the future.

- [Beth] The big argument against, you know, growing locally is that we can't grow enough food.

Well, guess what?

We can.

And the benefit of some of these larger crops, Kernza for instance, they're planted in ways that keep continuous living cover on the land.

Food is grown with attention to nature.

And when we do that, we produce really delicious food.

- [Luke] So like, they know it tastes good.

They know it sells.

The market is really looking for regenerative Kernza.

You know, the big chemical seed companies, Monsanto, DEKALB, MicroGen, Syngenta, annual crops, and the synthetic fertilizer, just full steam ahead.

But if you have Kernza, it's completely different.

Perennials, they hang onto the soil so tight, they're gonna enhance the soil that we grow them on.

That's a bigger part.

That's where the story comes in.

The perennial promise, right?

The perennial is that long-term investor.

So we gotta figure out how to produce a lot of this product.

- Lemme take you to where it actually begins in the grain room.

And I'll show you some Kernza.

When those farmers are sweating out there, making all the agricultural magic happen, this is the actual things the brewers and bakers are after.

This is Kernza that's been malted and we're just lucky that it tastes good.

But what I've learned is it's not gonna be beer.

It's not gonna be food.

It's not gonna be the thing down the road that says it is.

It's gonna be us.

The world combined can do this.

People can save the world.

People have to see that the call to action's about them, and that we have to act.

(gentle music) - [Lee] Hearing the perennial story, Wes Jackson's imagination about what could be done along with the ideas of The Land Institute, what plant breeding can do, that it's not such a distant prospect anymore.

Scientists have had successes.

An obvious one is the perennial rice breeding program, 15 years of hard work in China.

Perennial rice that has lasted for at least eight harvests with the same approximate yield as annual rice.

But it's not just about food.

The benefits to the farmers, like in terms of economics, is overwhelming.

- [Wes] Well, what the current way of doing business lacks is the appreciation of the importance of engaging with the larger world.

If we have those kind of engagements with the world, your creative powers will get enhanced that way.

All right, here we go.

Look, don't we all know once we get outside, we build on those good examples.

I've wondered if this is the origin of the theory of relativity.

(chuckles) But right now, we're not able to see the coherent whole.

- [Laura] And so, I'm not gonna predict what's gonna happen.

But you can see how much of this prairie who's coming back.

It's an almost sacred obligation to take care of them for future generations.

Original prairie remnants are like medieval cathedrals to us.

We'll never duplicate a true prairie remnant, but it's still a way to make a difference.

On average, it takes 20 seeds to get one plant, sometimes a thousand seeds.

And you think of seeds as inert, but you really need to think of 'em more like a goldfish.

Like, it could die, right?

As you can tell, we're really focused on seeds, seeds that are genetically diverse and from original prairie remnants, you know, those medieval cathedrals.

In remnant prairies, we harvest by hand these seeds and then that goes into the cooler in our building.

(refrigeration whirs) Don't worry.

The door locks from the inside, not the outside.

It's not a lot of seed we're left with.

These are the seeds that we've produced over the last 33 years.

They all have information on when they were produced.

This was produced in 2022, represents genetic diversity from several different prairies.

Native seed companies request a few ounces of seed from some of these species, scale up production, sell it, and those prairie species get to have a chance to grow again.

And these seeds, this is not like a corn plant or a wheat plant, right?

There's a lot of stuff here.

And so, you know, this is part of the biological diversity of the prairie.

But we're learning how to launch lifeboats, figuring out how to rescue some of the planet's biodiversity.

Perennial plants can be incredibly tough.

If we can figure out how to get them back out there, they might survive and spread.

You know, once we have learned how to do it better, others will follow.

(door creaks) - [Jacob] Konza.

- [Miranda] Konza, go outside.

- [Speaker] She says, "I didn't used to get treated like this."

- Jacob tried to do that.

He took a bunch of prairie plants from his parents' place and tried to do a transplant, did not take.

- [Wes] All right, so the journey has started for the perennial mixtures.

Boy, he takes that down in a hurry.

- [Miranda] Oh yeah, he does.

- [Wes] Now, we have to change who and what we are on this beautiful Earth.

Well, there's a smile.

- You wanna see Great-Grandpa?

- There's a smile.

We need to increase our imagination about possibilities.

- [Miranda] This is ridiculous.

- [Wes] To be thinking about what are we doing?

- [Miranda] Well, you just look happy and content right there.

- He really does.

- [Wes] This is where the real work is for us.

- [Miranda] Conversation with Great-Grandpa in no time.

- [Wes] We're gonna talk about herbaceous seed producing polycultures and their contribution to the solution of all problems.

- [Miranda] Oh yeah.

Do you wanna come live here in a bunker?

- [Wes] You know, I gave a talk with that title once.

The guy says, "Give me a title."

And I said, "Sure."

Herbaceous perennial seed producing polycultures, their contribution to the solution of all marital problems and the end of the possibility of nuclear holocaust.

And there was a long pause and he said, "Will you need a projector?"

(Miranda laughs) Yeah, that's all right though.

We've already waited too long, but the sooner we act, the more options for future generations we have.

He's watching this.

- [Miranda] I know, I know.

We're so hungry.

- [Wes] And here we go.

Here we go, hot shot.

- Okay, there you go.

- Okay, jump shooter.

See if you can hit from the corner.

- [Miranda] There you go.

The seatbelt is off.

- [Wes] This is who we are.

We are the species that has to do what no species has ever had to do.

That's the way we'll save the beauty of the Earth.

There.

What do you think?

What do you think?

Huh?

(bell rings) (bright music) - [Bill] How do we actually do what no species has ever done?

Can we do it?

I think we can, but it's going to have to rely on us adopting a new perennial imagination.

Like Kernza, we, too, can put down deep roots.

We can apply the philosophies and knowledge Wes talks about and build around efforts like our New Perennials Project in Vermont.

- We can turn this into a big garden.

- [Bill] These are practical ways to make ready for a world that's already here and daunting as heck.

(gentle music) - [Corie] What does it mean to be human?

And what are all the things we need to thrive and live happily?

That, to me, is like the definition of a functional community.

And you can trace all of those right back to the land and each other.

(gentle music) - [Wes] We're gonna have, I think, a lot of need to learn community life that involves cooperation.

People that know how to be neighborly, that know how to hold civilization or a society together.

(gentle music) - [David] Something people forget is that we're really, really good at working with other species.

It's something that comes to us very easily.

And the species that are gonna survive and thrive are gonna be the ones that can work together and work with us.

We have this opportunity to bring a lot of other species into the team.

Another golden era of co-evolution between humans and all these other species.

- [Lee] It still gives me shivers down my spine just to feel that you're one piece of that process.

To see things coming to fruition is really, really amazing.

We're interested in this vision for the world, and we want to facilitate the work.

And I'm predicting about in 15 or 20 years, we're gonna get these plants to the point of having yields similar to wheat.

(machine whirs) - [Laura] And so, right now, it has been really wonderful to see much broader acceptance and awareness of prairie.

You know, and gradually, we are challenging the prejudices against this tall, weedy, shaggy stuff.

You can, you know, sense a deeper beauty as you learn more.

- [Cathy] I called up and talked to Dr.

Jackson and she said, "Well, you can come up here and talk about it if you'd like to."

- [Laura] This is an astonishing gift.

This is Cathy's gift to her community and to future generations, Irvine Prairie.

Her vision is a place where people can come and see what Iowa used to look like.

And that's a pretty big vision.

The seeds we planted have turned into grass, a deep curtain of prairie roots exploring into the soil.

- [Cathy] It's important to maintain this as it is, to demonstrate what could be done, and the expertise that I found at the Tallgrass Prairie Center put it into effect.

It's so beautiful and it's what was meant to be here.

Therefore, it feels very satisfying.

- [Laura] And Cathy is inspiring others to restore prairie on their property.

When I think of the connection to nature being deeply rooted, that's what I mean.

And that's perennial.

(contemplative music) - [Robert] Still, as our options have narrowed, Wes wants us to face up to the nature of the human predicament, finding solutions to the problem of agriculture, knowing there's no guarantees that we could solve problems that have been, after all, millennia in the making.

(gentle music) - [Wes] We start out being driven from the garden, the angel denying access to the Tree of Life.

But we say we've gone too far.

We simply cannot give up on the Tree of Knowledge.

But can we also have access to and always nurture the tree, the Tree of Life?

Now we have got a conversation going on.

It's all tied in.

We make this promise.

We will no longer have priority on the Tree of Knowledge over the Tree of Life.

The appreciation of the creation.

We may love this Earth, but wonder, does this Earth appreciate us?

Well, hold it a moment.

We connect to create our own purpose.

The universe gives us the opportunity to create purpose.

And now, through creativity, perception has changed.

What?

You can't ask for more.

(inspirational music) We end on what we believe is the most upbeat, most positive endorsement of love and action.

At our moment in history, that love is bound to be harsh, (inspirational music) but it's still love.

That's all we got.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) ♪ We came with vision, but not with sight ♪ ♪ We came with hooks and gears in the night ♪ ♪ We came with power, we came with plague ♪ ♪ We came with an eraser and not with a page ♪ ♪ Oh, ooh ♪ We came with marrow, we came with sand ♪ ♪ We came with a singular insular plan ♪ ♪ We came with hope and we came with grit ♪ ♪ And we didn't know what we would do with it ♪ ♪ Oh, ooh ♪ Uh-huh ♪ I will show you fear in a handful of dust ♪ ♪ All that you have conquered covered in rust ♪ ♪ I will show you pain in the palm of your hand ♪ ♪ The tidal wave crashed in the form of man ♪ ♪ I'll show you surrender right down on your knees ♪ ♪ See the fruit that is fallen down by your feet ♪ ♪ I will show you maps, I will show you a plan ♪ ♪ It all starts and ends with the land... ♪