09/14/15 – Joshua Hughes – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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Hey, I'm Scott.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm going to write something down so I remember to say it later on.
Yeah, it's The Scott Horton Show.
I'm here live on the Liberty Radio Network, noon to two, on the weekdays here, libertyradionetwork.com, lrn.fm.
And our first guest on the show today is a good friend, Joshua Hughes, the peace seeker, American expat now living on his sustainable farm down in Costa Rica.
How's it going, Joshua?
Good to talk to you again.
It's going great, Scott.
Good, good.
Hey, man.
So yeah, good to talk to you again.
My first question is, has the raffle winner, because as everybody remembers, right, I should say, we did a raffle.
We raffled off a vacation down to Joshua Hughes' permaculture farm down there in Costa Rica.
And John Cornish won the raffle here live on the show.
And he told me that I should reassure the audience that they should know that, one, he's a hardcore listener of this show, going back for years and years and years, and two, he's really interested in what you're doing down there and wants to learn all about it, not just sit in the hammock by the river and all that.
So that everybody should feel really good about him winning and them not.
But so how's that going?
Have you talked to him?
Has he already gone down there and these kinds of things?
He hasn't come down yet.
I did speak to him, and I'm looking forward to seeing him.
I hope he comes down in the summertime, so there'll be a lot more people here to engage with.
He's really, really busy planting.
There's only a few of us here, but we're planting lots of trees.
So it's not the normal time of the year when people come down in October, because it's really rainy.
But it's a great time for planting.
So I think I'll see him in a few months.
That's cool.
Yeah.
I guess spring comes early down there, right?
Well, we kind of have eternal spring.
It's just we have dry and wet times.
So right now we're coming into our very, very wet time this next month or so.
We'll probably get 20, 15, 20 feet of rain in the next six weeks.
Cool.
All right.
So, you know, yeah, I hope you've got good drainage.
That water, it can pile up pretty quick, man, for a liquid.
You know what I forgot to do?
That's one of the reasons, actually a very important part of what we do here, is we're learning how to keep the rain in the hills, because it's running away too fast right now without all the trees and stuff that used to be here.
So it's a big part of what motivated me to get into what we're going to speak about today.
Okay, cool.
Well, first let me tell them that I'm sorry I didn't say in the first place that the website is verdeenergia.org, only there's just the one E in the middle.
They share the E there, the two words, verdeenergia.org.
And so now tell us, what is all this about?
Why do you want to save all that water in the hills and mountains?
Well, when I got here, I did buy a farm in an area that was very destroyed, very deforested.
I did move down here to just buy an existing forest and call it, you know, like I did something just because I spent some money.
I needed to do something and I really practiced and see what we could pull off.
So we bought an area called the Pudiscal area, it's a little county that we live in, and it's one of the most deforested areas in the country.
And it's actually, maybe 10 years ago, was talked about in National Geographic as one of the worst forestry plans in the world.
50 years ago, we had a, maybe 60 years ago, a primary forest here where I live, and since then it's become pure cattle and tobacco.
And now, tragically, it's all being burnt and cut down for palm oil, which I'm sure a lot of your listeners have heard little bits about palm oil or what's going on around the world, but it's really destructive.
And it's not like it's curing cancer on the other side of things, it's making people sick.
So it's a product here that's making the jungle sick.
It's centralizing wealth into very big corporations' hands that are buying up the property down here, raising the property values so locals can afford to stay on their land, and not really helping with the forestry issues by planting trees, although the government calls it reforestation, even though they're doing it just to exploit it.
So yeah, I've seen that happening, and just in the last week I've been driving around and taking notes of how many farms around me are being, how much jungle is being burnt to the ground right now as we speak, 10 minutes from my house, to put in palm.
So that's become sort of one of my missions over the last years, is to help stop that, to help stop the inflation of the land costs here so locals can afford to be here.
And to make it ...
Well, what we've been doing is we've been putting together collectives and buying chunks of land that are destroyed cattle land.
And we've been doing reforestation projects.
But over the years, I kind of started here.
In other words, you talk too fast.
That's an important thing there.
You're conserving land by just buying it up.
That'll keep it out of their hands.
You're not lobbying the local government to take it over and make it a park or some kind of thing.
You're doing it yourself.
No, and I've just done a lot of research in the last years on what national parks and stuff mean.
And I do support that, because it saves it.
A lot of that was done at the cost of indigenous folks around the world.
And I just read some terrible things about John Muir and eugenics and what these guys did when they started national parks.
So I'm not into that model.
I want a model that comes from the bottom up.
And it's very personal out here, because as they burn or cut, locals lose drinking water.
We lose our roads.
And we lose our local economy.
And now this isn't just you and your gringo friends coming in and doing this to the locals.
This is you working with them.
Yes, I've been finding people that want to stay on their land and helping finance or fund changing and evolving their land into something more useful.
Because so far, the locals here have just been taking care of cattle for Burger King or McDonald's.
That's what they do.
Or growing tobacco for Philip Morris.
They haven't done much for themselves with this land at all, mostly due to the free trade deal and the things that come into this country and force the price of food down so drastically that I can't grow tomatoes and compete with Walmart.
It's madness.
I'd just be a slave to my land.
So we had to really figure out how to create some kind of cottage industry that could help regenerate while it was creating wealth for the people in our neighborhoods.
And so most of our projects are about 30%, 40% locals and 60%, 70% people from all over the world.
And what all are you planting instead of palm oil trees?
Is it just palm trees?
Is this what they plant for the oil?
I don't know anything.
Yeah.
They're just doing this African palm, which they turn into hydrogenated oil that fills up pretty much every project on your shelf up there.
Another word for hydrogenated oil in my mind is just cancer.
It's not a good product.
And out here, it's a monoculture that they spray lots of chemicals on.
And worse than that, we're removing massive amounts of forest every few seconds in the world.
I think we remove something like 40 football fields of forest a minute.
So it's not just the products they're making and what they're choosing to make.
It's that they're destroying our air, our water filters here.
Yeah.
I can see how replacing a real rainforest with a bunch of palm trees is not quite the same thing.
No.
All the animals leave.
It becomes an acidic.
The soil becomes acidic, so nothing local will grow ever again.
And they spray a lot of Monsanto products on the forest down here to get rid of it and to replace it with these things.
So they're stealing all our nutrients.
Every acre of those trees creates something like 10,000 gallons of oil a year, which is very attractive to people from outside the country.
So they're taking all of our energy literally from the soil and selling it to people all over the world.
And again, if this was curing cancer, I couldn't complain.
But this is causing cancer, so I'm complaining.
And I've lost three neighbors to cancer in the last year, under 40.
Under 40 years old.
Three young, healthy people from the water being tainted from all these toxins.
And we wouldn't even have these things if we didn't steal them from the UAE and Dubai and Sudan and all these places.
So the way they're even getting these products to grow here is by putting very toxic products all over our land.
And Costa Rica is now the highest use of pesticides and herbicides per acre in the world.
We just passed China and the U.S.
And it's not because we're eating it here.
It's because we're shipping it there.
So every time you eat a palm product, just know that a jungle is disappearing right next to me.
Man, that's amazing to think, comparing just mind's eye, just the land area of Costa Rica is what, like half the size of the Texas Panhandle or something like that?
Yeah, like Connecticut.
Oh yeah, so much smaller than the Texas Panhandle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, hold it right there.
When we get back, we're going to talk more about what's going on down there in Costa Rica and what Joshua Hughes is doing about it and what you can do to take part, too.
Verdeenergia.org.
They share an E in the middle there.
Verdeenergia.org.
We'll be right back in a second.
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Okay, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Joshua Hughes.
He's a refugee from the collapse of the American empire, now living down there in Costa Rica and owns a farm down there.
We're talking about how the big corporations are coming around, buying up all the land, raising cattle and tobacco and driving up all the prices and bankrupting all the locals, forcing them off of their land.
How he bought his own farm, his own property, right in the middle of this devastation, basically, brought by people of very little interest in what kind of disaster they leave behind them when they go.
We were just getting to the part about what in the hell you're really doing about it.
Okay.
Well, I'm glad you put it that way, Scott.
It helps.
I really can't stress enough how those free trade deals do affect people.
While guys like Trump want to call people that come from my part of the world down here rapists and drug dealers, we're actually farmers escaping from his clutches and trying to find a living somewhere in the world.
So anyway, I'll segue into what I want to talk about the positive side.
I've been terrified of how dollars work, and you talk about this a lot, about our lack of sovereignty with our capital in the U.S. and how the Federal Reserve and these banksters control our lives.
People are always talking to me about how they're going to save money or invest here or whatever, but they typically do it still in dollar denominations.
Since the Federal Reserve, I think dollars have lost, what, like 97% of their value?
So we've experienced a complete collapse in the last 100 years, and as we're about to hit the bottom, people are asking me if I think it's going to go down.
I find that amusing.
So it goes down.
It's gone down my entire life.
I can't afford anything that I bought when I was born in 1977.
We're in a different world with the dollar.
So I had to start figuring out a way I could save my energy differently.
I didn't want to work my whole young life, save it in cash, and then in 30 years it's worth three times less or 50% as much.
That's not okay.
And especially while I'm subsidizing my own demise by paying taxes to these corporate � I don't want to use the word.
So what we've done is we've started collectives where we are buying land, like I said, in collaboration with local folks that want to stay on their land.
So for example, this farm we're doing right now, three out of the nine owners in this family that own this land for the last 80 years want to stay owning it, but the other six can't because they're desperately in need of some funds.
So we found friends and people that want to do this to help invest in the land.
We're replanting it with the plan to take about one out of 10 of the trees eventually to help � eventually we will have lumber from part of the land.
Eventually we will have cacao and production of local species.
That's just what we can do here in Costa Rica.
So we're producing a lot of great high-end medicinals and a lot of trees for our future, like 20, 30 years from now, what we saved in dollars and put into trees now will be worth 30, 40 times as much.
And it will adjust up with inflation.
I actually am not afraid of inflation if I'm in the resource economy.
So I've really been pushing to get out of dollars and into local resource-backed currencies.
And the way we're doing it here and all over the world � I have friends in Texas, California, Washington, Oregon, New York that are all doing this locally too where they live.
There's a bunch of different ways to do it, but forests are kind of the key because there is some support from the governments of the world if you do want to get some subsidy.
But I've been trying to do it from the bottom up again.
I don't really like being beholden to big governments.
So it seems to be working and we've done it on two farms already and succeeded.
So we're going into our third farm.
Now we're actually doing 180 acres.
Now wait a minute.
What's working?
You're saying you're planting the trees, but you also have already created a local currency based on the value of the trees?
Is that it?
Yeah.
Well, based on the value of a lot of the products we create because trees are a little longer term.
But what I've been doing is using something that's a little example.
I grow a pig or I grow yucca, a nice potato like a tuber.
And I grow hectares of this, acres of yucca.
My neighbor has a pig.
We've worked this out over the last 10 years to where we trade, but a little more officially than just a handshake and trade something right then.
That's kind of how currencies were created, right?
You couldn't carry a whole pig around and trade off little pieces.
So we've created a local currency, which we're starting to keep track of.
Hopefully, I've got a friend working on this in the way that Bitcoin does with the blockchain technology.
That's what I really want to work towards as this grows.
But so far, it's been a very local approach.
And we trade out yucca for pig, and I don't have the yucca yet.
I'm going to have it in months.
Well, if my yucca crop fails, I've got trees to back my local trades.
So I can chop a tree down if I have a failure.
And trees are much more resilient to those shifts in climate, which we're experiencing drastically here, by the way.
So trees are a solid way not only to be resilient against the climate change, but to actually help create weather, because trees and mountains that are full of forest make better weather, more consistent.
So I've been doing this, and in the long term, we're talking about millions of dollars worth of wealth to be created off every 50, 60 acre farm.
This isn't just a hippie ideal.
We've been doing this and attracting a lot of people that come from all spectrums of the political, all sides of the political spectrum.
So I'm finding this is a nice way to marry that desire to keep the wild and the nature and everything around us in the forest alive, but also that need to feed our children, to know that 10, 20 years from now, when you maybe can't work as hard as you do now, that you can enjoy life, and that you don't spend the rest of your life toiling in the fields to compete against Walmart.
So it's not only been a great answer for the farmers, it's a great answer for people that want to withdraw legitimacy from Wall Street and put their money into something very real.
So I've been helping my friends do that, and it's been working wonderfully.
We've got two farms that have been functioning for years, and a new one coming online now, and a few more in Oregon that are going to be starting very soon.
So my question is, what all does the term permaculture imply?
Okay, well we've taken what it really means, like a permanent culture shift.
It's not like agriculture.
Agriculture was just kind of a way to suck value out of land.
And I haven't really been impressed with capitalism lately.
So I'm big into taking a local approach at everything, observing what is going on around you, seeing what the needs are, and then addressing them in a way that does no harm to other people.
Try not to steal.
And these are lessons we all probably got taught, but when we get out into the business world, we don't count externalities in.
So permaculture is begging us to count externalities as part of the equation.
And when you do that, you have to start changing a lot of things.
Now I can't just sell tomatoes at the market, because again, I'm competing against Walmart slaves.
Literally, they make $1.50 an hour here to work for Walmart.
So I can't do that.
So I have to reinvent.
Permaculture forces me to reinvent the whole way I think about getting a product to market.
So now I make ketchup instead of sell tomatoes.
And you sell direct through farmer's markets or CSAs, community supported agriculture projects.
But permaculture doesn't stop at the farm.
It goes into your house and how you deal with your garbage, if you even want to make garbage anymore.
I'm actually a believer there is no such thing as garbage, because I've been in the recycling industry my whole life, and it's all valuable.
We just didn't think about it for a long time.
So permaculture is forcing us to address all these issues and kind of mimic nature.
And in mimicking nature, I'm finding it's succeeding with much less resistance.
I don't have to push so hard, because my economy and everyone around me, they all get in line with it, because it's comfortable, and they agree with it, and it fixes things.
It doesn't just take.
And it's a way to protect ourselves from the worldwide economy that is so erratic right now and not going to be doing any better any time soon.
So let me ask you, as a devil's advocate position here, because all this sounds like actually kind of fun, man.
I wouldn't mind living on a farm down in a rainforest and all this kind of stuff.
It sounds really cool.
But on the other hand, I mean, it sounds like maybe some things are being conflated.
I mean, well, not necessarily.
We do live in a society here in the U.S. where we do have a central bank, and we do have the biggest government, the most corrupt government probably in the history of mankind, and this kind of thing going on.
So it is sort of all part and parcel, and I understand why to leave it.
But it also seems like what you're leaving behind is a much finer division of labor and specialization.
And it sounds sort of like really what you're doing is, you know, you're escaping this economy, but you're rewinding a lot of economic progress, too, almost back down to the level of barter.
So doesn't that really harm your standard of living?
And, you know, like you mentioned, somebody gets sick with cancer, well, who's around to treat it?
That kind of thing.
Well, well, in the country I'm in, Costa Rica, we have an amazing medical system, and it's very inexpensive.
We have a functioning insurance system.
We have control over the cost of medical care here, unlike Obamacare, where we turned it all over to Medicare, or all over to Blue Cross Blue Shield.
So we've got a country here that's functioning a little different.
But not everybody has to do the same thing.
It only takes about one farmer out of 20 people to feed people in an organic fashion.
So I have people here that do nothing but work on website development, because that's what they specialize in, and they help us do that.
And so it's not just about all being farmers.
I didn't come here to be a farmer for the rest of my life.
I came here to do the jobs and learn them, so I could have a realistic approach at creating an economy from the bottom up.
So this, for me, has been a very powerful lesson in people getting to learn every part of their corporation, getting to learn every part of their business, getting to learn every part of production.
And I know when I was in the professional world in the U.S., my boss at the top, who was golfing all day, had no idea what was going on in the warehouse, had no idea the struggles.
So really, it's just about me.
For me personally, it's been about getting down and, you say, cutting my lifestyle back.
I eat better organic food every day than I ever have in my life, even when I made $150,000 a year.
I have more leisure time than I ever had then.
And I still get everything I need in the world.
So yeah, it's been a cut in the beginning.
It was definitely a backtrack, because I really didn't know what to do.
I didn't know the word permaculture when I got here.
I just knew I hated war, and I knew I hated slavery, and I knew I would not keep supporting Israel and the U.S. military at all, just because I needed to work.
So by the way, this should be happening everywhere in the U.S.
I don't want everybody to run away.
In fact, I want people to hunker down in their neighborhoods and start building biodigesters right now, turning all of their local poo into gas, so they don't have to buy any gas from Dubai or send pipelines through Syria.
So we can create the local products we need without spending the money, and then we can earn less money if we choose.
So I make my own cooking gas.
I don't spend that much money anymore.
I can make less.
It's been a nice exchange.
But set into an economy like the U.S., if you apply this idea, which is happening all over the place, like I said, CSAs, Community Supported Agriculture, is one of the most exciting things I can see happening in the U.S.
Food production is becoming local.
People are back to talking to their farmers, and we're rebuilding this old economy from the ground up.
Because we talk about this a lot on your show, about how Wall Street is now the economy somehow.
People relate to the Dow as how well things are.
Well, the Dow has skyrocketed over the last 20 years, and most people I know are doing terrible financially.
So I don't know.
It's kind of relative.
And, you know, the TV life in America isn't the real life.
Most of my friends are commuting most of the time or stressing about debt.
So one of the big things that we do here is we really work hard not to get into debt, growing how we can, not just getting ahead of ourselves.
So yeah.
All right.
Well, Joshua, listen, your Internet connection is getting bad on us, and we're quite over time here, too.
So it's time to wrap it up.
But I want to thank you again for coming back on the show.
I'll tell everybody when we get back, the live audience will hear again the name of the website.
But for everybody listening to the recording later, it's VerdeEnergia.org, VerdeEnergia.org.
You'll learn all about what they're doing down there at Verde Energia Pacifica, at the great Joshua Hughes, great permaculture farm down there, and all that they're about.
And there's a lot going on that we were not able to cover even on the show today.
So please go and check that out if you guys have the interest.
VerdeEnergia.org.
And I'll thank you very much, but I'll also give you the last word here, too, if there's anything important you needed to say.
Oh, just thank you again, Scott.
And I'm excited to keep spreading this message and regaining a local sovereignty again.
It's very important to me.
And thank you for spreading the message again on your show.
Right on.
Well, appreciate everything, dude.
Take care.
Ciao.
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