11 The goose with the golden eggs

Nature is not scarce, but it can be destroyed. Our greatest problem is therefore not scarcity, but our wanton destruction. Ancient wisdom, in the form of the parable of the goose with the golden eggs, illustrates this wonderfully: the abundant growth of the natural world - the golden eggs - and the vulnerability of natural ecosystems (the goose). We unpack the layers and lessons of this teaching tale to inspire our shift to abundance.

Transcript

The Goose with the Golden Eggs

Welcome to cornucopia, the podcast in which we examine the shift to abundance. My name is Karim Benammar, and today I'm just commencing the descent of my favourite mountain in the south of Spain, El Fuerte.

The sun is hanging over the ocean, it's a very clear day, you can see far in the distance. And that, to me, is a great opportunity to talk about a fairy tale. A fairy tale of growth, a fairy tale of abundance, a fairy tale, which can teach us some lessons about the possibility for growth, the possibility for abundance.

The tale is called The Goose with the Golden Eggs. I think you've probably heard of it, because this story, or a story a little bit like it, is prevalent in many different cultures. The idea is that there is an animal, a goose in English, which lays golden eggs. And as long as you keep the goose happy and alive, it will continue laying golden eggs. Now the family who owns the goose, at some point is very happy with the golden eggs, and then become a little bit greedy and think “well, if the goose is laying golden eggs, perhaps the goose itself is made of gold, perhaps the whole interior of the goose is made of gold”. And they decide to slaughter the goose with the golden eggs, and they realise it's not made of gold, the gold of the eggs comes from somewhere else apparently. And then of course, they don't have the gold of the goose and they no longer have eggs produced daily. 

The moral of the story often is: if something is providing you with the fruits of its labour, namely, a goose laying eggs, then you can live off the eggs. But if you kill the animal that lays the eggs, then no more eggs. Now in some countries, in Dutch, for example, it's a chicken, it's not a goose. The story depends a little bit on what language you've heard it in. And it is actually an old story. We find it in French fairy tales, we find the expression in many different languages. There's a version in ancient India, which is pretty much the same idea. It would seem that many different cultures have this wisdom, this folk wisdom, if you will, this kind of general, cultural, archetypical wisdom that is worth translating into a teaching story. 

This story resonates for me because the natural world is full of these growth cycles, is full of these growth systems, is full of goose laying golden eggs. In fact, nature itself is a collection of geese laying golden eggs. There is an abundance in the production, there is a value, the gold in the eggs, there is the output of productive systems in nature, biological systems and other systems which produce this surplus, which produce these golden eggs. When I see the story of the goose with the golden eggs, I see a metaphor for abundance, I see a story which captures the wisdom of our bountiful planet. 

At the same time, of course, it's also a cautionary tale. It's meant to highlight the greed that we may feel, the impatience, the meanness of the owners of the goose that would rather kill the animal in order to get a short term benefit, rather than to live off the eggs and the kind of production. So impatience, greed, short sightedness, short termism: these are all the things that we're being warned against in this tale. To get the fruits of your labour, there is a certain pace, there's a certain natural pace for systems to grow, for a goose to lay golden eggs. And if you disturb that system, then no more eggs. In fact, if you kill the goose, so if you break down the system, if you destroy the natural system that is productive, then you have nothing. 

To me, there lies the crux of a lot of the ecological destruction that we've been doing for the last couple of centuries. There are natural systems, which in themselves are productive, which lay golden eggs, systems of animals, which have offspring and grow, wild animals, or domesticated animals, or forests, or fish in the sea. Every natural system has a tendency to grow. Of course, then there's an ecosystem, and there's predators and these animals eat each other. But in terms of evolution, it becomes ever more varied. There's ever more sub-niches of animals who manage to evade their predators, and then there are smarter predators. There's this kind of competition, if you will, in the food chain, but this leads to this incredibly colourful and varied and chaotic world. 

It's true that now and then in nature, things disappear. There are geological upheavals when there is a great shift in temperature, or when there is a meteor crash on the planet and the dinosaurs die off. The species themselves are not immune to dying off. But they are not wilfully destroyed the way we have wilfully destroyed certain animals. And apparently, we've been doing this for a long time. Some researchers claim that when we were just hunter-gatherers, and there were megafauna (a lot of the animals on earth were much larger than they are today. There were hamsters, which were enormous, and guinea pigs the size of cows), they all disappeared. One explanation is that they were hunted to extinction by humans, because humans could organise and had spears. Even before the kind of technological murdering machines that we have now and guns, etc., we managed to kill off animals, as long as they were slower, and less smart, and less organised than we were. 

We killed off the dodo. This is a famous example: the person who saw the last dodo apparently in Madagascar thought, “Ah, this is probably the last one, let me shoot it”. And that's why we also say it's not the dodo with the golden eggs, obviously. We almost managed to kill off the whales, because we use them to make soap, and lamp oil, and meat to a certain extent. There is this tendency that human beings have, this tendency that whenever there is a bounty, as it were a natural bounty, whether it's in the form of animals, or in the form of trees, or old-growth forest or something like that, some kind of treasure, something that is perceived as a treasure, then there is this short-termism, impatient, greedy idea: “well, let's grab it all now”. Instead of realising that it's a growing system, that the system itself is abundant and will grow, that it will keep laying golden eggs, that whales reproduce, that other fish reproduce, that dodos reproduce, et cetera.

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The first lesson is, really, that the cautionary tale is there because of some human drive, a human drive for destruction. I've been trying to understand this drive, because in the argument about scarcity and abundance, it's always from the scarcity perspective, “well, there's not enough to go around, there is not enough on Earth. And nature doesn't produce enough, and there's not enough energy”. You've heard this story before. And my argument has always been, “well, the growth system, and the energy systems ,and the natural systems ,and the living systems, and the animal systems on Earth, they're all abundant. But abundance doesn't mean they can't be destroyed. You can hunt something to extinction, even though it is abundant. You could kill the goose with the golden eggs, even though it is laying golden eggs. 

So the fundamental problem to me is not scarcity, because every system if it's managed correctly, if the goose is kept happy, fed and protected, it will produce golden eggs. All natural systems have this tendency to grow. The fundamental problem is not scarcity, but destruction. And we can see this in quite a lot of the stuff that we do today. 

The way we fish, for example. There are fish in the sea, and this is a natural bounty, but we're overfishing the seas. Not only are we overfishing in terms that we're taking more than the sea can actually replace, but we're fishing in a very destructive, very stupid way. We have these long nets, these trawlers with these very long nets that drag on the ocean floor, and that take everything with it. So, all the young animals, all the plankton, all the support systems for the other fish. There is a lot of catch that is just thrown away, that is killed, “bycatch”, and that is not used at all. The way of fishing is so destructive that instead of taking the golden eggs, we're slowly killing off the ocean systems. 

Quite a lot of the time, this is actually illegal, you're not allowed to fish like that. But part of the problem is the oceans are kind of a free-for-all, there is a 200 mile exclusion zone., and then on the high seas, well, it's pretty much every person out for themselves. There are countries, which were shan’t name, but which support large fishing fleets, who don't really fish according to the rules, because it's cheaper and more efficient in the short-term to kill off the ocean like that. Enforcing the rules, in terms of the fishing would already help.  

Actually, a lot of this destructive stuff is illegal. The same is true of clear-cutting old growth forests. There are forests that have taken thousands of years to get to this stage. We don't particularly need to use the space. Yes, we can cut them in the Amazon to grow soy for beef, or we can cut them them in Southeast Asia to grow palm oil trees. You can see from what we're doing with it, that we're taking a very high quality, very beautiful, very mature ecosystem, and replacing it with a boring monoculture which has immediate economic value to a very small group of people, the land owners, and the people who exploit the system, but which is a destruction of this deep nature. Again, we see this killing off the goose with the golden eggs. 

An example that is dear to my heart is sharks. Now sharks are amazing animals, I would probably not want to encounter one in the sea when I'm swimming, I've seen them when I've been diving. Sharks have existed for 400 million years. They are much, much older than human beings. They are apex predators and they reproduce very slowly. We don't really eat sharks for some reason, they're not actually that tasty, probably. But we do fish them, or some countries fish them, for their shark fins.

Because there's a shark fin soup, where the fin of the shark is used as a binder. It doesn't really add anything to the taste, it's just used to bind the soup. It's a luxury thing. It's a status thing to serve shark fin soup, apparently, especially at weddings, and a bowl could cost as much as $200. Iin order to get the shark fins, well, we cut the fin off the shark, throw the shark back into the ocean, the shark will die because it can't swim without fins, it can't navigate, it can't grow them back. And so, you waste most of the shark. You kill off millions of sharks a year. It's very hard to count how many, but sometimes when you catch a boat with shark fins, you realise how many sharks they'd have to kill to get all these shark fins. 

Again, to me, this is an example of utter stupidity. You're taking this beautiful animal, that reproduces slowly, which is part of a varied ecosystem. You're destroying it, basically killing it off, not for its meat, not to survive, but to capture its fin, to turn it into a binding agent for soup, which you probably can't even taste, which you probably can't even blind taste to say does it have actual shark fin, or fake shark fin, or some other kind of binding agent, shark fin taste, if you will, or something or other. 

And you do this out of a sense of culture of exclusivity. In other walks, we've talked about this idea of luxury items, and how they always have to be exclusive, and how value is created by exclusivity. Well, here you have an example of two of these mechanisms coming to meet each other. On the one hand, destructiveness, the killing the goose with the golden eggs, and doing it in order to gain exclusivity. Using rhino horn would be another example. Using ivory from tusks would be an example, etc. 

Now, what is the driver of this destructive behaviour? We could say: stupidity. It seems to me ridiculous to destroy these beautiful systems. The strength of exclusivity, the strength of the status game, the strength of wanting to be more important than somebody else is so strong, is so dominant in our human nature, in our social game, that we're willing to kill the goose with the golden eggs, that we're willing to destroy the natural systems, which support us, that we're willing to destroy some of the most beautiful animals that we have on this planet, just in order to make this kind of social point. And if we want to challenge this, then, part of the answer, I think lies in questioning the social mechanism, the status mechanism. If we would make this status lowering, so that actually having ivory, or rhino horn, or shark fins, or cutting down old-growth forests, would make you lose status, then we might be able to save the goose with the golden eggs.

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I'm coming down the mountain, the sun has now set behind some of the mountains in the distance. There's this golden glow, illuminating the clouds from below. You can see very far: I can see Africa from here, I can see the Atlas mountain range on the other side of the Mediterranean, Morocco, probably, and perhaps, if I look to the left, Algeria. It's peaceful. Sometimes there's a bit of a gust of wind. This is a good opportunity then to talk about the positive side of the story. The negative side is this tendency to destruct, the stupidity, the greed, the short-termism of destroying the goose with the golden eggs. But the opportunity is the golden eggs. 

The first principle is that everything in life wants to grow. Everything has this growth mechanism. That's why the surplus and growth, to me is a positive thing, it's the energy, it's the principle of life itself. And it does so to excess. It tries to produce so much offspring that it grows, so that there will be more of it than there was before. Some fish, of course, will lay thousands of fish eggs. Most of these will get eaten or lost, but some of them will survive. The balance comes from the food chain and the ecosystem of the predators and what eats what. But the system by itself has a tendency to want to grow, as a kind of survival. Part of the way that you survive, not just in your own life, but across the generations, is to make sure that there's more offspring. Humans have this too: if we think that we're going to lose quite a lot of our children to disease, or malnutrition, or war, we will have more than two children, because we need the human race to survive. Once we've managed to ensure the survival of almost all of our children, as we have now, then we can have a replacement system. 

This logic of growth, this logic of spreading, this logic of abundance is evident in every system. Humans have understood this for a long time. When you have animal husbandry, when you have cows, or goats, or sheep, or whatever, you protect them by grazing them in a certain area. You protect them against predators, against wolves or other animals that would eat them in nature. You might shelter them when it gets too cold, you might feed them when there's not enough food. The whole idea of farming is based on boosting this natural growth system. It's a bit like having a whole chicken coop full of chickens or a goose that lays golden eggs. You can organise the coop. You can breed the geese that lay the golden eggs; If two geese that lay golden eggs breed, then you have more geese that lay golden eggs, you keep getting more golden eggs. That you can do. 

And again, you can see how stupid it is to kill off the geese with the golden eggs, because you could breed them, and you could increase the production of golden eggs by breeding system rather than by a killing system. There are systems, which we're still discovering, which have enormous growth rates. Basically, the rule is the lower on the food system you go, the higher the growth rate. You see this in the oceans: whales are the largest creatures on the planet. Most whales feed on krill, which are some of the smallest creatures on the planet. Whales spend 23 hours a day feeding themselves, apparently. (I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, we would have to get into a discussion with a whale to find out). You can have this enormous body that is fed, all the energy, all the calories come from these tiny little krill. But you can see how many krill you would need to feed a population of whales. The krill grow very, very quickly. Insects have this massive reproduction rates, and insects are a great source of protein. So, we've been experimenting with protein burgers, insect burgers. Of course, there are some cultures which already eat insects. 

Seaweed grows very quickly, that's a way that you could harvest seaweed, also full of good stuff. You can go even lower on the food chain: microbial things. Yeast grows really quickly. If you have a yeast system that you start, like a kefir plant that you put in yoghurt, it will keep producing kefir. We are experimenting with programmable yeast: we use the growth cycle of the yeast itself, and we can programme it to replicate something else, not kefir, but honey, or other goods. 

And again, we're playing with nature, of course. We are we are programming. I'm using this language, I’m not exactly sure how you programme yeast. The idea is not very different from sheltering animals, and making sure they can reproduce without being eaten by predators. Any system that we protect, basically, we protect its growth, we shelter it from its natural enemies, we take it out of the natural ecosystem, because we starve the predators, we put a fence around it, or we put it in a laboratory, or in a vat, all these processes are processes through which we live off this natural growth. 

All we need for that, really, is energy. And the energy for most living systems comes directly or indirectly from the sun. We're not fundamentally short of energy. The sun is causing all these plant systems, all these yeast systems, all these insect systems, all the different grades of animal systems to grow, is supporting life in the sea through krill and small animals, and all kinds of other systems which we may not fully understand, and is causing this enormous growth. We, as a human population of 8 billion, can easily live off the golden eggs being produced by the system. 

Here we talk in terms of food, but it is true of other living systems. If we would use wood for construction, for example, we can plant trees, we can shelter trees, we can harvest trees. We do this in the ocean, of course with fish farms. And I think it's important to add a quick aside about the cruelty in these husbandry systems. When you have goats or sheep or cows, and you slaughter them eventually, and you do this in a natural farm setting, and these animals have a good life, well, you could have an ethical argument that they've had a good life. You eat them, but they probably wouldn't have had such a life if they hadn't been protected and fed by you, because a predator would have gotten to them in the wild, or they would have starved. 

When we release animals in rewilding projects - there are quite a few of these projects in the Netherlands - they run into problems constantly. Because these animals will grow, the population grows quite dramatically, as long as there is stuff for them to eat, they have lots of offspring. Then if there is a bad winter, there is not enough to eat. So, a third of the population will starve. Thousands of deer, for example. People find that this is cruel, to let the deer starve a starvation death. It is cruel, you see these animals walking around, and they're starving, and they're cold. And so, they give them extra food. But then, of course, then it's not a rewilding system. People say: well, we should introduce some predators, how about some wolves, they will kill off some of these deer. But then of course, other people say, well, that's cruel too. Have you seen a deer being torn apart by wolves, that's not a pretty sight, etc, etc. When we deal with the natural world - and we sometimes have this Bambi attitude to the natural world, it's all very sweet, and natural is good - we sometimes forget how brutal and how tough nature can be, and that nature is really an ecosystem of everything eating everything else. 

But we are not just natural, we have a system of culture. At the moment, our system of culture may be that we have large pig farms, or large chicken coops, and that these animals suffer greatly in order to be as productive as possible. And there might be ways in the future to do a lot less of that. There are meat substitutes, of course, if you can use different things which are not meat, and you flavour it the same way as you would meat, and people think it's meat, then it has the same value, as we've had with all these fake burgers and fake meats, then that would be a way to go. You can do it with fish, smoked fish, for example, sometimes you can't tell there's no fish in it. The other way, of course, is to grow meats or fish in a petri dish, to take the cells of the fish and add nutrients and to programme the cells to replicate. So you can have - tuna apparently is a is a reasonably easy thing to replicate - you could have batches of tuna, which look like tuna, which taste like tuna, which are in fact tuna, but which have never been part of a living fish. 

Again, this creativity, this experimentation, it all has to do with these growth cycles. These are all ways to take advantage of different geese laying golden eggs, the golden egg-laying system of nature, the abundance system of nature. These are all experiments at the moment. Some of them might be more successful than others, some of them might have unintended consequences, as with fish farms, for example, which we're discovering. We might have to change course, some solution may be so productive that it supersedes all kinds of other systems. What's the point of doing it this way if this is so much more effective, and so much cheaper, and so much less cruel? So, there's a lot of ways to go.

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As we're coming to the end of the walk, let's summarise the two main messages that we get from this archetypal tale of our culture, of our human nature. The first is the warning, the warning against our greed, our stupidity, our short-termism, our capacity to destroy wilfully, our impatience to take a growth system and to think, “ah, let me wring its neck”. To somehow withstand that impulse, to be aware of that impulse, to question that impulse. That's the cautionary aspect of the tale. But there's also the other aspect, the aspect of opportunity. The aspect that this goose that lays the golden eggs is the principle of nature, of the bounty of nature at work. It's the reproductive system of all living systems. It's a system that allows you to breed geese that lay golden eggs, to perhaps come up with new forms of geese that lay golden eggs, to discover other golden egg-laying systems because nature is full of them, like we're discovering them with yeasts, for example, or insects, and to start using those,  to start looking for the geese that lay the most golden eggs, as we do in the case of yeasts. 

From an emotional perspective, the message, or the story, or the very existence of this mythical animal, this very existence of golden eggs, which, of course, is a metaphor, the very gold in the story, the very treasure in the story, is to realise how incredibly blessed we are with this enormous abundance, with this abundance of energy. This is all really solar energy. These are all photons, this is all energy. But this energy is being transformed. It's being transformed into forests, it's been transformed into plants, it's been transformed into wheat. It's being manipulated by us into stronger wheat that can withstand drought, into rice that can withstand pests. Those grains and those grasses are eaten by animals that we kill, if we are carnivores, for food. 

This has led to a whole system, in the oceans, and on the planet, of an incredible variety of animals, a whole ecosystem, a whole food chain of animals, of which we are part - but we end up at the top usually, because we are the smart monkey in this case. If we see this line coming from solar energy, and it's not just solar energy, because you can have solar energy, you can have a sun shining in the desert where pretty much nothing grows. It's not just energy, you need earth. You need worms, you need the minerals, you need the atmosphere, you need the temperature, you need the rains, you need the seasons, you need all these elements in order to make life possible in this small band of atmosphere, which covers this planet, the circumstances which give rise to life. You need all of that. And at the same time, there's this solar energy flowing through all of it. 

When you're drinking a glass of wine, then you are drinking the fermentation, you are drinking the grapes that have hung on the vines, the sun that was beating down on those grapes, the wind, and the rain, and the nutrients in the soil, and the minerals in the soil that give it that specific kind of grape. There's the labour of those who have picked the grapes and who have put the wine in vats, and have nurtured it, and have checked it, and have made the wine, and then treasured it, and bottled it. You are tasting all these different elements of the richness of this planet, the richness of living things. 

And you're also tasting the sun. We are, at the end of the day, as it is the end of the day, now, here, we are solar beings, we are transmutations of solar energies. And some of that transmutation happens through geese, or all kinds of other living processes that lay golden eggs. Thank you for listening. I hope this story and fairy tale has been instructive, that you start seeing golden eggs here and there in the world, when you look around you, and I look forward to going on the next walk with you in the next episode of Cornucopia.