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Jake Marquez and Maren Morgan are the creators of the forthcoming documentary Death in the Garden, which is their journey to “save the world through embracing the cycles of life and death and changing cultural paradigms.”
These two acknowledge the challenge and complexity of the project they have taken on but have pledged to question everything, remain honest, and uphold the highest levels of integrity.
It’s inspiring to see members of a younger generation not accept black and white thinking or the latest trendy narrative. Jake and Maren challenge the world-saving stories that have been sold as facts like eating a vegan diet, renewable energy, and recycling plastics. Instead, they view the world holistically and refuse to rely on the system that created our problems to solve them.
Jake and Maren have traveled the world interviewing experts in regenerative farming, human nutrition, carbon, soil, human rights, and the list goes on. You may even recognize some of the experts from the Sustainable Dish Podcast, like Lierre Keith and Nina Teicholz.
My co-host, James Connolly, has gotten to know this team as the producer of the Death in the Garden, and now he is interviewing Jake and Maren on what it was like to make the film.
- This in-depth conversation covers:
- How James found Jake and Maren
- Jake’s time as a vegan
- Maren’s involvement with humanitarian projects
- How the film started out about regenerative agriculture and carbon but they realized it needed to be about more
- The problems with renewable energy sources
- Embracing death as part of the story
- How industrial civilization treats life like a commodity
- The next steps for Death in the Garden
Resources:
Silent Spring by Rachel Carlson
Peter Donovan of the Soil Carbon Coalition
Connect with Jake and Maren:
Website: Death in the Garden
Podcast: Death in the Garden
Instagram: @deathinthegarden
Twitter: @death_thegarden
Support their work: substack and Patreon
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Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.
This episode was brought to you by my new Sustainavore Course! Are you confused about which diet is best for your health and the planet? Are you feeling frustrated with quick-fix diets and conflicting nutrition information? Check out Sustainavore. You will learn how to feel confidant that the food you’re buying is the right choice for your health and the environment. The course includes over 7 hours of video instruction from me and 60 daily emails full of tips, tricks, and motivation to keep you going – plus lots of bonus material. For a limited time, I am offering special discount pricing so head over to The Sustainavore Course now!
Quotes:
“I started eating a lot more meat and I felt like my brain finally had the cholesterol that it needed to like, actually function.” – Maren Morgan
“We’re not actually trying to save the planet and the web of life that has emerged from this miraculous planet. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to save civilization. We all want to sit in our homes, get the latest iPhone, order food from Amazon and toilet paper, and pat ourselves on the back.” – Jake Marquez
“What’s actually happening is it’s the same sorts of people as were at the turn of the century, that are getting together and making these terrible decisions that are only going to negatively impact the people who are already the most marginalized. – Maren Morgan
“One of my favorite Malcolm X quotes about the idea of the Civil Rights movement and its progression. It’s like, well, you have a knife in my back, it’s seven inches in and you pull it out three and you call it progress. – James Connolly
Transcript:
(Intro) Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance and initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now onto our show.
(Ad for The Sustainavore Course) Diana Rodgers, RD
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James Connolly
Sustainable Dish podcast, James Connelly here, interviewing Jake and Maren. So this is actually kind of hard for me because it’s harder to interview friends than total strangers. And we’ve gotten to know each other over the past say, what, year, year and a half. And I think I’ve grown to love you guys. So…
Maren Morgan
Well, we love you.
Jake Marquez
We love the hell out of you, man.
James Connolly
We have, we have spent a lot of time together. And I think, you know, after I’d sort of finished up at Sacred Cow, it’s like no more documentaries. There was… I was just absolutely exhausted by them. And I found you guys because you had done an interview with Lierre Keith. And I was like, who are these young upstarts like interviewing these people? And really jumped into it. And I was like, wow, this is actually really good. And you had gotten Lierre Keith into like, a modality I hadn’t seen her in before. You guys are very curious and very open-minded. And I think people really like… they sit down in front of you. You just did a brilliant interview with Nina Teicholz, that goes really deeply into all the aspects of nutrition science, and it’s the most comfortable, I have actually seen her on the interview, it’s the most patient I’ve seen her and just in terms of like, giving out information and her point of view on where we went wrong on these things. So I wanted to welcome you guys on but I wanted to kind of start out with, you know, if you study enough of like neuroscience, you start to realize like, the world that we live in are, our brains aren’t fully formed until we’re sort of like in our mid-20s. And our prefrontal cortex isn’t fully formed, which is the sort of rationalization after the fact the idea and the meaning and all of these different things that are kind of associated, the higher functionings of the brain. And so when I think about my own personal experience of being at and around the age that you are now, the big awakening, for me was at 26 years old. And I realized, like, for me that I hadn’t, I didn’t have a worldview that wasn’t colored by my father. I didn’t think I had an original idea that wasn’t started, or sort of a priori’d like, you know, what would my father think of this idea? And as I dabbled into different things, always had this sort of like, interior monologue with my father, what would he think about that? And at 26, you know, prefrontal cortex is coming together, and I’m like, wait a second, do I have any original ideas at all? And so I had to really start to rethink my ideas of the world. And, you know, I felt like, getting to know you guys, you’re at that cusp now. And I want to kind of talk to you about what that transition feels for you, some of your basic history, how you got to this idea of making this documentary, and all of these different things, and you can kind of start out however you want on that.
Jake Marquez
I mean, I can relate to everything you just said on that big time. There’s a line that I think about all the time, that’s, you know, children live their parents unlived lives. And I heard that maybe my early 20s. And it’s something that I’ve always thought about, and it’s done something very similar to me where I’m questioning myself. And it’s not necessarily even just with, say, my mother or my father, but it’s like, what were the things I grasped on to, let’s say, in my early 20s that I really formed my worldview around? And I guess, as of late, it’s me really checking myself on whether I believe those things, whether or not they sounded nice at the time, and to whether I find them true now. And so I guess, like, that’s essentially where my journey starts is that, you know, I was a young, still am 20 something-year-old guy who was very passionate, and was very aware, intuitively and intellectually that there was a lot wrong with the world. You know, that’s an undeniable statement to say that there’s a lot that’s wrong with the world. So like, any young passionate guy, you know, I start reaching out and in trying to figure out what I think are the answers. And it kind of sent me on a long journey of, you know, you take the traditional steps of just kind of being a standard environmentalist, and you’re really excited about solar panels, and you’re angry that we’re not putting solar panels on all the roofs of the world and, and you kind of go for these easy answers. And, you know, for like a lot of people, you kind of come to food as well. So for me, you know, I’d been having a lot of, negative health issues in my early 20s and whatnot. And when you come across veganism, it really sounds like the fix-all for everything it’s gonna be. It’s gonna fix the environment. It’s gonna fix your health. It’s the nicest thing you can do for the planet, for the health and you’re going to have like this heightened sense of spirituality. You’re going to be on a higher plane than the rest of humanity, and I really clung on to that ideology.
James Connolly
How did you… How did you find veganism?
Jake Marquez
That’s a good question. I think it was a, I had a, you know, it’s sort of getting involved in like various spiritual communities, you know. I was on a spiritual quest in my early 20s, to where I was doing a lot of yoga and meditating and a lot of those things were great and very valuable. And I think I just began to be surrounded by people who were involved in the plant-based world. A lot of young, idealistic people were, I was noticing, we’re all vegan, you know, and you’re on social media, and everybody’s vegan and all the beautiful people on social media are vegan. And so I kind of it was actually kind of, like, more economically viable for me at the time to just like, go get really cheap vegetables from Trader Joe’s for five bucks, because I was so broke, you know, so you get a bag of Brussel sprouts for $3 live off that for a few days. So that’s what I was doing. And so it’s kind of convenient, just to be broke plant-based and constipated for about seven years. And it really culminated for me and so and I did have a lot of close friends to me, who I really respected and honored and looked up to who were a few years older than me who were plant-based. Um, and it really ended up for me, I was traveling the world and this big long adventure and ended up that I was I started living in a yoga retreat in Australia, very broke and desperate for a place to pitch up a tent for as long as I could. But it just so happened to be a vegan yoga retreat, where if you worked in the gardens every morning, they’d let you pitch up their tent, and you got three free meals a day, and it was all organic vegan, the most perfect vegan foods you could have. And like I said, before, I really structured how I thought I was going to move forward in the world as a young person who cared, who I felt I was intelligent at the time, who was trying to be thoughtful, I really thought, Wow, I’m living in this vegan community with other like-minded people, and we’re not eating animals, and we’re not participating in death and suffering and all the blah, blah, blah, blah. How cool are we? How beautiful are we? This is so great, we’re the start of the Aquarian Age. It’s nothing but joy from here on, you know. But then, within, you know… so I was largely plant-based for the better part of the decade, but very strict vegan for about a year. And I was like I said, I was doing veganism very… I was doing a perfectly, you know, it’s the best way to do veganism and my health failed, you know, my health really, really failed in an undeniable way. And when I reintroduced animal foods back into my diet, I really, you know, and I feel like this has happened to me a few times in my 20s, where you kind of have these earth-shattering shifts, because 20-year-olds we’re so arrogant, and we keep thinking, we figured ourselves out. And then you if you’re being honest with yourself, you keep having these like, Oh *bleep* that was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong. And when I introduced animal foods back in my diet, and undeniably felt amazing I had to reevaluate everything. Like I had to reevaluate, like, you know, how do I walk on this earth? Who am I? How do I view myself in the web of life? Where do my ethics come from? Where does my spirituality come from? Where does my community and my friendship come from? And so that’s really where Death in the Garden started, for me was this journey of how do I live with myself knowing that I need to kill and consume other life to keep living and for me, that has been the biggest kind of personal journey to be on. And it every day, it kind of drives me closer and closer to like, what’s real. You know, like, how do we live with ourselves? How do we live with the state of the universe? How do we live with these realities that are undeniable and that science and technology are never going to alleviate us from you know, that’s where it started, for me was really digging deep into these big questions of how do I live? How do I live with myself as a human?
James Connolly
And Maren?
Maren Morgan
I think that my journey to this point that is less surrounded by food than Jake’s, but I think that it sort of is it runs a bit parallel on what I’ve always been the type of person who’s a bit of an activist. I’ve always been had a lot of opinions, I’ve always wanted to help people. I remember like being 13 in seventh grade, and like, all of the kids making fun of me at school because I was such a gay rights advocate. This was before, you know, gay… like, gay people could get married. And I was just horrified by it. I just couldn’t, I couldn’t believe like, once I had that beam of consciousness that said, like, these people aren’t allowed to, like, love who they want. I was like, that’s insane. That like that. That can’t be… that can’t be true. And this was at a time when you know, I was surrounded by a bunch of 13-year-olds who were like, really homophobic. And but anyway, so I put myself out there. And I remember, I just remember that was sort of the beginning of this sort of activism trend that I had. And when I was 18, I did a humanitarian trip to Cambodia. And when we were there, in Phnom Penh, there’s the killing fields and there’s also this place called Tuol Sleng and when you go to those places, there’s still bones that are just hanging out like human bones from the Khmer Rouge genocide that happened in the 70s. You know, which was caused by America coming in and bombing the *bleep* out of Cambodia to, you know, weed out the Vietcong, and whatever. But anyway, when I was there, we went and visited this place with this big group. And I cried the entire day, I couldn’t stop, I just couldn’t, I could not stop crying, and I was just surrounded by so much death and pain, and you could just feel it in the air. And I remember looking around myself and being like, why am I the only one who’s crying like, this is like, am I being dramatic? What’s my problem? Then flash forward a little bit. I then also did another humanitarian trip the next summer, and I went to Nepal. And it was right after the earthquake that happened in 2015. And I felt so awful when I was there because I didn’t feel like we actually did anything. We didn’t help those people at all their houses had been like, you know, falling down in on themselves. And there were aid groups from all over the world. And we came and we like, painted a school and just like hung out, and I was, I was really angry. I was really pissed. And it was like, I felt like I was continually striving to try to figure out how to make the world a better place in whatever small way I could. Because when I went to Cambodia, I felt so strongly like I have the ability to try to make a difference in the world. And after going to Nepal, I felt so jaded, I felt so *bleep*. And when I got back from Cambodia when I was 18, I had just started college, and I had just broken… gotten out of a relationship. And nobody cared, no one at home seemed to care, I would try to tell them stories about how it felt to be at Tuol Sleng and the killing fields, and no one cared. And then the same thing happened when I came back from Nepal. I couldn’t get people to care about what was happening around the world. And for me, I found myself really, really depressed and unable to kind of cope with the reality that I couldn’t get people to get on the level that I was on with just my passion for making… wanting to make the world a better place. And so I started drinking a lot. And that was the way that I coped with that. I didn’t feel like I had any sort of outlet to really help the way that I was feeling. And for these humanitarian trips, I had to do a ton of volunteer work like 80 hours for each trip. And I remember after I went to… after I came back from Nepal, I volunteered for the Crisis Text Line. And so I was, you know, messaging back and forth with people being a counselor, and I’m trying to help people who are going through crisis. But after a while, I couldn’t take it anymore. And I gotten really, really into drinking and partying, and I was in college, and I really put my head down, because right after that, Donald Trump got elected. And it was just this culmination of, I can’t deal with this. I can’t deal with how wrong everything feels. And so I just avoided it. And I didn’t feel like there was anything productive that I could do. And then after I graduated, I went to Southeast Asia. And this was around the time when it was in the news a lot about the encampments for migrants at the border at the US border. And I remember talking to some people that I was with feeling so bad, just feeling like Oh, my God, I can’t believe my country does this type of thing. And I wanted to do something to help. And I sort of got this feedback of why does it matter? Why do you care so much? And so I went home, and I had originally planned to just go be an English teacher in Vietnam. And I felt like I was running from something. And so I decided I needed to turn around and face it. And so I went back to Utah. I moved back home, and I faced the thing that I was running from and the thing that I was really running from was that I was living in a way that was very, very practical and conventional and pragmatic. And it wasn’t going to lead me toward the result that I wanted, which is having a radically different kind of life and really trying to have these conversations that I was wanting to have with people ever since I went to Cambodia that I was never able to have. And luckily that coincided with my brain forming or I’m 23 years old. And then I was lucky enough to meet Jake around that time too because then it was it we were able to bring something into fruition together and I felt like I was really able to this passion that was in me was seen as not this pathology this thing that because I’ve been pathologizing my sensitivity to the world so much and numbing it with alcohol and trying to escape who I was, but when I met Jake, it was very… he was like No this is a good thing to see if this is a gift. This is actually a way that you can move into the world and be the type of person that you want to be and the other benefit was that when I met Jake, I started eating a lot more meat. And I felt like my brain finally had the cholesterol that it needed to like, actually function.
Jake Marquez
I aided in the fusing of your prefrontal cortex.
Maren Morgan
I felt like my intellect was just it was like, Whoa, I didn’t even know I could think this clearly. I didn’t even know that I could feel this… like read this many books and feel this smart.
James Connolly
There’s a mantra in my head every single time that somebody talks about why you eat meat, and it’s to be strong to be helpful. And so like, I recognize how I felt when I was in art school, and just living off of *bleep* food and doing all of that stuff. And then the paradigm shift that food was able to do and in order to to help my brain develop in a way that I can cope with the world without living through sort of this viscous fog. And, you know, so that, I mean, that kind of leads into the documentary. I mean, you want to create a narrative, you want to create, a story about like… Alright, one of the things that you and I, the three of us always go back and forth is like, is there something fundamentally wrong with humans? Right? Have we fallen from grace? Were we kicked out of the Garden of Eden? Every single major religion on this planet has some sort of narrative that gave us the gift of creation and life and abundance. And we *bleep* it up and so now we live in a diminished state, whether you believe in karma, or whether you believe in every single major religion, it seems to have this overarching idea that humans are the biggest problem. Go into the documentary, the birthplace of the documentary, The stories you want to kind of tell, and maybe we can go into how it’s evolved, as you’ve gone out into the world and started to interview people who are kind of activists and this.
Jake Marquez
Yeah, I mean, it all started about two years ago. Right when COVID happened, you know, those first few weeks of COVID when nobody knew anything, and it was like, holy *bleep*, there’s a pandemic like this could be bad, you know. Thank God, it wasn’t the world-ending pandemic pandemics. But there was the sense of like, God, didn’t we see this coming? Didn’t we? How could we not know that we would cause something like this like are hyper global connected, civilization, of course, would cause like… give rise this crazy pandemic. And we all thought it couldn’t happen. Like we all thought there was this buffer because science and technology has created this fantastic buffer from nature. And we never need to worry about things. Boom, there’s a pandemic. And so I think we had this really strong motivation to do something because like, you know, the narrative was like, stay home, be quiet. Don’t look at anybody. Like, we got to do something. This is freaky as hell, you know. And so, because of my whole vegan journey, I was very fascinated in regenerative agriculture. I just gotten the idea of like, oh, wow, there’s a way I can eat meat and it can regenerate soils, and you know, all the wonderful things that you can say about regenerative agriculture. So we originally thought, and at the time, this is right before all these films about regenerative agriculture came out, and like, we’ll be the ones to make that movie. We’re gonna make…
Maren Morgan
Yeah, like we figured it out.
Jake Marquez
I’m gonna have my movie with a quote from Allan Savory, his TED talk, and it’ll be… we’re gonna make a movie about soil, you know. And I still love all those things. I love soil. Soil is amazing. It’s one of the most fascinating topics. But once we started this film, we began to understand that if we were going to be honest with our intentions to and I guess our intentions were what needs to be said to change the world and make it a better place. What conversations need to be had? What information isn’t being shared about the world that is leaving us in such a vulnerable place? And first, we thought it was soil. But then, as we begin talking to thinkers, and writers and activists, environmentalists and scientists, we realized that was a small part of the truth. And I think it was a big moment for me, we were interviewing the environmental writer, Derrick Jensen. And as we’re interviewing him, he looks at us and he says, What do all the so-called solutions to climate change have in common? What they have in common is they take industrial capitalism as a given and the natural world as having to conform to industrial capitalism. I think you might have said industrial civilization, that basic premise of like, oh, it really shattered my brain. And that’s why I always get back to like, what stories are we telling ourselves? Because then we began to think like, wow, like, what we’re trying to do with regenerative agriculture, what we’re trying to do with solar panels, what we’re trying to do with fake meat and death-denying diets, is we’re trying to sustain this version of civilization. We’re not actually trying to save the planet and the web of life that has emerged from this miraculous planet. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to save civilization. We all want to sit in our homes, get the latest iPhone, order food from Amazon and toilet paper, and pat ourselves on the back. We want to have all the cake and eat it at the same time and not actually change anything. And so then we end… it just dawned on us like, wow, like, that got back to my original question like Why has nothing changed since Silent Spring came out? Nothing has changed. I mean, a lot of people have tried really hard, a lot of money has been spent. There’s been a lot of inventions and higher yields and more efficiency that has happened. But ultimately, we’re on a crash course towards climate apocalypse, you know, why is nothing changed? And for me, and this is where the film began to change is that I began to question the premise like, what are the unquestioned premises of our society? And I forget where I read it. But this also changed my perspective, too, is that if we look at humanity as a species, amongst other species, like what are the defining characteristics of our species and the defining characteristics, two prominent ones are that we make culture and we make technology at such a high level and very quickly. And so if you begin to look at humanity that way, well, it’s like, culture is just storytelling. And technology is just reinforcing those stories. So what stories are we telling ourselves? And then once we began to think about our project in this light, well, wow, what narratives is civilization telling itself that is keeping us stuck in the same thinking that won’t let us get out of this problematic situation? We’re inventing solutions and ideas that are essentially telling the same story about who we are, where we are, where we came from, and where we’re going, and our place in the web of life. And we’re repeating the same stories. Elon Musk going to Mars, Bill Gates with his fake meat. It’s the same story. And that’s the end. That’s the thing we’re really trying to allude to in Death in the Garden is until we start questioning Hobbes until we start questioning Pinker, and Rousseau, and all these fundamental thinkers of the Enlightenment in which we are living in their world until we question those fundamental narratives, nothing is going to change.
Maren Morgan
Yeah. Yeah, well, I just think about how we really set the intention at the beginning that we were like, we are going to take this, we’re going to be honest no matter what. We like, refuse to *bleep* ourselves. And we really held firm to that integrity from the very beginning. But at the very beginning, you know, I think we were still following the sort of like carbon fundamentalism because that was all the information we had at the time, you know. It was that like, we need to get the carbon into the soil. Regenerative agriculture. That’s the way to do it. Done and done. We can fix the world. Then, you know, when we started, we were lucky enough to start this film, talking to regenerative farmers who are really, really smart people. And we were always talking about complexity, always talking about whole-ism, constantly talking about how many moving parts are a part of the world. And I started viewing and I think we both did, we started viewing the world as like a farm as like a microcosm of the world. And there was one interview that we did that we actually weren’t able to get on camera. But we were able to talk to this guy. And he sort of like shattered our… my mind a little bit in this moment, when he said… he’s like, actually, his name is Peter Donovan, and he is actually the founder of the Soil Carbon Coalition. And we asked him about carbon because you know, he’s the carbon guy. And he was like, actually, I’ve kind of taken a step back from carbon, because the water cycle, like water vapor, is actually more of a greenhouse gas than carbon. And so I’m more interested in improving water cycles. And that was sort of a big shift for me, because I was like, wait a minute, this is the whole thing. Like the whole point of this is that we’re trying to figure out what to do with carbon. And then, and then from there on, you know, he gave us this presentation of just to show how complex living systems are. And I realized, and I think we both realized in that moment that if we were to take the mechanistic view, of focusing so deeply on this one thing, that carbon can be sequestered in the soil through regenerative agriculture, we were going to be participating in the exact same narrative, that is what, in my view, is destroying the world. It’s the fact that we are unable to view the world as it as a living being as a living complex ecosystem. And that you can’t just take the carbon out of the atmosphere and think that that’s going to do anything, especially if the means through which you’re doing that aren’t actually supporting ecosystem function. And it just really broke open my view of as much as I would like to have this simplistic narrative of that, that this is just all about carbon. If we’re actually following our honesty, and our integrity, we have to figure out how to do it different. And, and I think from there, we were just like, Okay, well *bleep*, I mean, this is gonna be really hard. We’re gonna make this like really insanely complex film and see where it goes. But that’s what then led down the trajectory of us talking about, also the fallacies around renewable energy and conservation and all of the so-called solutions to climate change. That sort of became our tagline of like, what are the so-called solutions to climate change? And are they actually going to change anything and what are… what actually could change things? And what we determined is that we needed to get to the very, very root of everything, and ask ourselves what is our epistemological foundation? And how are we supposed to do anything different as we move through the world if we don’t address that first? And so yeah, so that now, you know, we were also…we always had this intuitive sense that death was really key to this is like the fact that we know we’re going to die. And we don’t know how to deal with it, and we avoid it. And we don’t face death at all in our food system, for the most part, and…
Jake Marquez
And also to add on top of that what death represents to the culture at large because our culture… I really wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a death-denying culture, which I think in many ways it is. But ultimately, it’s a culture that thinks it’s going to evade nature. It’s going to separate itself from nature through science and technology, we are going to transcend all limitations. We will transcend the limitations of the universe, and death represents the ultimate denial of that narrative. And so, but and then, for me, it was also like, because I recognized when I left veganism that things had to die and always had to die for me to live like I never did escape it, that I need you to reconcile that. And I think both of us have been fascinated with this concept of death. Because, as Marian says before, one of the key narratives of the modern world and of modern society, which is getting us into this trouble is that the world is a machine, and you can remove isolated parts and that our control over that machine will be so great that climate change will never happen. We never thought we make a movie about the renewable movement or anything, but to like, have this honest dialogue, it’s like, okay, so we’re gonna remove the carbon out of the atmosphere, how’s that going to be done? And what is going to replace fossil fuels as our major energy production? Well, it’s going to be solar panels and windmills, and the ones we’re going to put in the water. Well, how are those made, how much copper is made, how much silica is needed, how much lithium is needed? Where do they get those things, and then you figure out where all this stuff is gonna come from, you’re like, it’s the same colonial *bleep* that has always happened. We’re gonna go to Bolivia and eradicate indigenous cultures to make sure we can get lithium for Tesla’s or we’re going to make a million new copper mines also on indigenous land to make the windmills that only last 20 years. And maybe you can speak more on this like…
Maren Morgan
Well, yeah. I mean, it’s fundamentally predicated upon the exportation of pollution to the global south, like, none of the 30 by 30, COP 26. That is all entirely fundamentally, it requires colonialism like there’s just no way that it can happen otherwise. And you know, and we also concede in the United States, where, you know, there’s a massacre site that is going to be turned into a lithium mine – Thacker Pass. You know, it’s a massacre site of the Paiute people. And so again, it’s this desacralization of land. All for this like fictitious goal of somehow… that somehow the CO2 that we’re going to pump into the atmosphere to create this process and pollute to, you know, increase, mining, like 900 fold, over the next like 20 years. Somehow, there’s like this accounting that is going to eventually even out and we’re going to, like remove carbon from the atmosphere. And in my mind, I mean, they’re peddling absurdities, like the this is not something that if you actually pay attention to it, and you actually do the accounting for yourself, that you can make any sense of and that’s the bizarre thing is that we’re in the system now, where everyone is unifying around climate change, right? Like the whole world is supposedly unifying around climate change. But what’s actually happening is it’s the same sorts of people as we’re at the turn of the century, that are getting together and making these terrible decisions that are only going to negatively impact the people who are already the most marginalized. And we are expected to just sit here and not talk about it, and not say anything about it. And, and that’s it, that’s the thing that I just am so confused by is like, how it is that there are so few people who are willing to talk about it? And that’s sort of like…
Jake Marquez
In a similar parallel is like the medical industry, right? If the narrative of our culture decides to be the narrative of who we are in the world, which is a mechanistic worldview, well, we never addressed the problem of disease. We address the symptoms and thereby buy ourselves more time that kind of perpetuate the disease. And it’s the same thing, the climate narrative. If our… if the big nexus of evil if the problem is carbon, that we never address the real problem. And yeah, maybe we buy ourselves a decade or two because we’re not choking on carbon in the atmosphere, but then we die from the pollution in the water or this or that, like something’s gonna come to get us because we never addressed the real problem and we never questioned the premise of what the problem was to begin with, you know. And like Maren said, the narratives on how to address climate change are coming from the same colonial institutions. It’s Unilever, it’s these giant corporations, it’s Coca-Cola, it’s the WWF. It’s these giant, Western colonial institutions that are telling us how to think about climate change, what to be afraid of, and how to solve it. And then they paint the picture. They are the biggest marketers of the world. So they’re going to go to the third world and say, they’ve raised traditional communities out of poverty when in reality, they destroyed an entire forest that used to sustain that culture, dig up lithium, and then pay everybody $1 a day to dig up the lithium. And the World Bank is gonna say another half a million people were raised out of poverty. Well no, you destroyed a local ecosystem, in the name of climate change. And they are marketing it back to the rest of the first world as if we’re all gonna pat ourselves on the back. You know, I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s…
James Connolly
No, I think, you know, I mean, I think that’s what we talked about, right? I mean, the thing that I always tried to address it back is to so you have these large form, like really sort of global issues that have historical context. They have a… you know, they are brands that we see every single day, when we walk through the supermarket, or, you know, in our consumer culture, this is, they’re so ubiquitous nowadays, that they essentially there are the envelopes of the shape of the world that we see around us. And the thing that I find is actually kind of genius about it, is the way that we have conformed our language around these ideas, so that when we talk about these things, we actually use their language against us. The first part of it is I find absolutely… like when somebody says my brand, like, What are you talking about your brand, you’re an individual, you’re a person not a brand. Stop it. So when people kind of talk about that stuff, I find it really hard just because the history of advertising is so replete with like, just demons like pure demon. And then the secondary part of it is that at the end result of that, what you do is you say that this is a consumer-driven culture, and that, therefore, it’s the consumers’ fault, that things are the way that they are. And so you see this a lot within social media, especially sort of like vegan communities, and vegan activist communities, where they will go and they will say something like, look at what is happening to cattle production in Brazil, and rainforest, and therefore you shouldn’t eat meat anymore. And you know, it’s a really complex narrative. And I in no way have any understanding of all of it. But it is so complex, we have to embrace the complexity of that. And but the most simplest form of that, is that there’s not a God*bleep* thing you’re going to do that’s going to do anything that’s going to stop that in Brazil. Yeah. Nothing, it is not a consumer-driven culture. It is not it has never been that way. And it’s one of the biggest mythologies that we have to then just kind of work off, right.
Jake Marquez
Yeah. Yeah. And so I love that you brought that up because this is what I always say, because you’ll hear yeah, if you love the because we all love the rainforest like the rainforest is the big kind of like, piece of martyrdom that we all mourn the rainforest, rightly so. But it’s funny, cuz they’ll say, Well, if you eat beef, you’re destroying the rainforest. It’s like, okay, well, let’s add some nuance. Well, maybe if you’re from China, or Russia, because that’s where most of that meat goes to. But it’s not just being cut down for beef, it’s being cut down for gold, for rare minerals, for wood, the fact that it’s just land that somebody wants to buy, for oil, for everything that makes our modern lives possible. That’s why the Amazon has been cut down. And it’s not just the Amazon, it’s the whole God*bleep* planet that is being consumed, you know. And so that’s the part that bugs me as we narrow in like, each group has their nexus of evil, like the climate change has got their carbon, vegans have their cows, and we have this very unnuanced view of what the real problem is.
Maren Morgan
Because it’s we’re trying to find some semblance of certainty and like the most uncertain world we possibly could have. Because, you know, we’re not in these, like small communities, you know, in a relationship with a place that we live in, like, all of these things that would give us some semblance of like, reality. Like everything is so obscured by language, by technology, by all of these things. I mean, a funny example of the same sort of thing is like, where we live in Utah, the Great Salt Lake is like drying up, and you know, and you see online and like, there was like, the Salt Lake Tribune released something on Instagram, like talking about it. And a lot of the water that is from the tributaries gets diverted to these alfalfa fields, but that alfalfa is actually sold to China for cattle in China, not here. But there’s like all of these people in the comments of the section of this thing that are like, well, the only thing that we need to do is we need to all become vegan, and it’s like, you need to become vegan for that like these Chinese cows that are being fed this alfalfa like that is such a non-answer. That’s such an improper solution that that doesn’t actually resolve the problem. There are things that we could actually do in this localized ecosystem to solve this problem. But since everybody thinks on this, like, insanely nebulous, global scale, nothing ever gets done, because people have really latched on to these ideologies. They’re not actually like, predicated in reality. They’re, they’re based in fantasy.
Jake Marquez
It’s the cows are the problem verse our industrial civilization turns the web of life into a commodity, because it’s incentivized to make a profit. You know, the alfalfa and feeding it to cows isn’t like, it’s not that we eat cows. It’s just that we are incentivized to turn everything that is living into profit. Yeah, no, that’s the big incentive.
James Connolly
You know, that’s a really hard thing to kind of, like work through on Instagram. But I was like, I was like, would you use the same methodology when you’re watching James Baldwin, sitting on camera? You know, or Malcolm X, or like, you know, these incredible, like, activists who… one of my favorite Malcolm X quotes about the idea of like, the civil rights of moving and is progressing. It’s like, well, you have a knife in my back, it’s seven inches in and you pull it out three, you call it progress. And so like, would you blame the person for going on TV when that is the medium that gets your message out? I don’t, you know, it’s so hard, you know.
Jake Marquez
You have to play the I mean, this is my really lame, cheesy way of explaining this conversation. It’s like when you watch the matrix, right, like Neo’s got to go into the matrix to defeat the matrix. Not that I like pulling up matrix, stupid analogies, because we go, so lamely kitchy and conspiratorial, a little distasteful. Um, but yeah, man, I think you’re absolutely right. And it’s so incredibly unnuanced. And it’s hard for us to hold all the complexity and nuance as well. And I think any movement, especially social or political movement, that is fueled by guilt, and shame, is the last thing we need on Earth right now. And I think that was one of the most distasteful things while I was in the vegan community is the amount of guilt and shame and vitriol pointed towards people who weren’t vegan. And it was like this is so gross and unproductive. And to think that standard person in suburbia in America is the problem or should feel the guilt and shame is also missing the point as well. Because I think most people in the world, whether you live in suburbia, or whether you, it doesn’t matter where you live, we all want the same things. We all want the love and the community and the compassion and the meaning that life can offer us and that’s what we’re hungry for. And we’re all doing the best with the given circumstances to get those things. And the tricky part is those amazing intentions of humanity are getting co-opted by the climate narrative, by the technology narrative, by the Bill Gates of the world.
Maren Morgan
Yeah, I mean, it’s obviously also confusing. I think when you know, these influencers who are influencing people on how to be more sustainable. They’re, you know, they’re selling their leggings, or they’re selling their, you know, their metal straws. And it’s all *bleep* it is, like, predicated on this consumerism too. Like, I think that it makes sense that people are confused about, like, how to deal with this conundrum, because we’re all looking for the sustainable label now. Rather than, you know, asking us ourselves these deeper questions, and and I’ve always felt that way that it’s like, is the onus of blame really on the person who can’t afford to go to the farmers market? Or like, that doesn’t seem right, that just doesn’t seem true. And yet, at the same time, paradoxically, we are all feeding into the system. And I think that there’s a way that we can have that conversation without being like a shame fest where it’s like I am contributing to this system. But the fundamental question that we all need to ask ourselves is, is it actually working for me? And can I contribute to the system to the degree that eventually I can get myself out of it to the best of my ability? And I think that’s where I would like people to have that conversation with themselves. And to decide, you know, like, because for me, it’s like, this industrial civilization is really, really hard for me, it doesn’t work for me. And yet, I still benefit from it in a profound way. Because obviously, I wouldn’t be able to do this. I won’t be able to make a film and I wouldn’t be able to like travel around the world making this film and I won’t be able to write a book. There’s all these things that I wouldn’t be able to do. But at the same time, I think that we are in such a crisis of meaning that we all need to be willing to look at ourselves and ask ourselves, okay, what do I actually desire? What do I actually value? And turns out like, for me, I value all of the time I’ve spent on farms, and I’ve and that’s something that I want to move toward is like be getting my hands dirty being around life and being around those things, but I also feel very responsible to spreading the message of what I’m learning, because I’m just, I’m just learning this stuff, it’s not that I’m an expert, or, you know, maybe one day I will become some sort of an expert. But for now, I just feel like there is something archetypal about our journey. And the fact that this isn’t this is something that people all over the world go through is this, this crisis of like meaning and of trying to figure out what is my role in the world. And I’m just hoping that if we can share our experience of all of that, then that might be beneficial to some people. And then I’ll feel really comfortable with then being like, moving toward being a farmer of some kind and like, and building the sort of world that I want to live in, that seems more congruent to what I believe homosapiens really wants to be. And so it’s a complicated thing to be trying to, like, explain and express through this film, with the knowledge also that I wouldn’t be able to do any of this if I didn’t have the privilege and the opportunity that I have. And so how then can I also be using my… that privilege to help shape the world in a positive way, and speak up for people who aren’t… who are being ignored and who aren’t being listened to. So it’s really complicated. It’s really complicated to live in modernity right now, I think we’re all entangled with this guilt in this pain and sadness and grief, and also just a really, really strong desire to figure out what we’re doing here.
Jake Marquez
What I think is so hard and confusing right now in the modern world to make any sense of it. Because not only is, if we’re going to call it capital, the natural capital of the world being depleted, but our human capital, our spiritual capital, or communal… community capital, like the machine has turned everything that makes life into capital, you know. We’re marketed to, we’re manipulated. And I think, whether it’s the carbon in the atmosphere, or the fact that we’re all going insane, something’s going to get us, you know, and until we question the premise, I don’t know, you know,
James Connolly
So yeah, so the document… so you guys are… we’re post-production now. I mean, we obviously like may open it up again, you know, we’re following all of these different narratives, building this storyline, you know, the footage you’ve sent me so far is wonderful. It’s like, deeply moving. Maren, your whole experience was I mean, just what you’ve gone through over this past year, sort of culminated in this storyline can draw people in to everything that we’re talking about nowadays. So yeah, I mean, I think it’s really profound. I think, you know, I mean, I’m sure you’re getting questions all the time. Like, when’s it coming out? Like?
Jake Marquez
Well, we are in post-production right now. So we’ve spent the better part of two years really filming non-stop, like we have been to many countries. We’ve done a lot of filming. So we’re chopping through everything. We have to see how close we are to telling what we really want to say. And I think we’re very close. Yeah. So our ultimate goal is to finish post-production as much as we can right now and figure out where the holes are figure out the holes are, but I think there might just be a handful of them. Yeah. And I think we both have come to this place with, you know, nothing is ever finished in your own mind. And the story continues, but there comes a point when you feel like you can start saying something and I think we’re getting there. Yeah. So I think within maybe the next six months to a year. Maren always laughs when I give a day, she’s like, no.
Maren Morgan
I just, I just know that it was a moment we do. It’s like, there’s there’s gonna be something that comes through. But yeah, I am feeling that we’re like zeroing in and that that scene that we sent you, I’m really grateful that you liked it, and that you thought it was impactful. Because I think the… I realized after we went through that shot that scene, I realized that the whole point of this, above all else is to show human beings having human experiences. That whole ordeal that I went through with and I don’t need to like spoil it or anything I don’t know if you want me to but like, you know, that confrontation with death that I had was real. Every aspect of that should have that scene is so real. And I just hope that that comes across. I just want people to watch Death in the Garden and to be like, damn, I don’t need to agree with everything that they think I don’t even agree with everything that they say that these are two people who went on a journey and had a human experience and came out on the other side. More whole for it. Yeah. And I don’t know, I don’t know, maybe that’s enough, you know, in a sense.
Jake Marquez
I think you had asked earlier like, what do you guys feel like so many of these documentaries that have come out lately are missing and I think it’s kind of like, what Maren went through like an honest experience and an honest journey and not an agenda. Like I think I had an agenda when we started this documentary. Like I really wanted to be like ra ra meat, the soil is awesome. Let’s get cow *bleep*. And now I’m just like, I don’t know, I don’t know what to tell people, but I know what it feels like to experience certain things and see certain things and to…. you know, there’s like undeniable lived experiences that are true. And I think that’s far more important than giving a nice hopeful message at the end of a documentary or an easy answer. You know, when you watch a lot of these vegan documentaries, it’s this stupid answer to solve the world’s problems. And that’s not real, that doesn’t exist. And we can’t give that type of answer either. I don’t know. And so I don’t know how you end a movie without giving somebody some piece of advice, but I don’t know if we have it other than, like, let’s feel and think and like, be nuanced. Yeah.
James Connolly
Yeah. I mean, I don’t necessarily have, you know, you don’t have to make a documentary that’s not like everybody else’s documentary. You know. I mean, I think that’s the joy of working in a genre that I think the, for good or for bad, the internet age is completely like, it’s, you know, it’s changed all of it. I know, you guys are going at it from a very, like honest perspective, because I’m the needle in your side all the time saying well, you have you thought about this. Dammit. I didn’t want to think about.
Jake Marquez
For anybody’s listening, James is the ultimate researcher of researchers and knows a little bit about everything. Yeah. And he knows a certain agree to anything, it’s insane.
James Connolly
Expert in absolutely nothing. But yeah, I mean, I think that is… look, I mean, you know, I’m reading a lot of books on writing now. And I’m not a writer, but I find the way that writers approach the world, the way that they think about how they have to pay attention and live, you know, that their awareness of the world is it’s a methodological function that it brings people into empathy. And I was thinking about that a lot today about the two of you, is that, like, that’s what you’re trying to do. If the reaction to the film is I didn’t want to see that? Why are you making me feel that, then I think you’ve actually done a good deal of service. I mean, I think that there is, there is so much about our world that like you, Maren, you said before, it’s like, I’d ran away from all these things, and I had to turn it face it. You know, there’s so much about our world that doesn’t want us to do that. And mother culture says no sleep. And I think it’s, it’s interesting coming from your perspective, what is generally told about what your generation is, and what you’re doing, and how you’re opting out, and how that is transformed into laziness in all of these other cultures, the way that we talk about in media, I think, pushing back on that you guys are working your asses off in a very different direction. You know, and I think that that’s interesting, because nobody’s gonna ever accuse you guys of lazily going into the future. And, you know, I think that one of the hardest parts of that is like, you know, we had so much trouble, like, Could we get you to Kazakhstan? Could we get you to Turkey? Like, could we get you anywhere in the world, that was going to talk about these things, outside of a perspective, like this, this is a global issue that was then like, I mean, the rails that were put on our boxcar, were so absolute, you know. And I think still, like with everything, all the strings that you pulled, I mean, we barely even talked about Chevron and Steven Donziger, and all of that stuff that’s associated with all of these metaphors for what mother culture is doing, you know, in Canada, with native populations, and Thacker Pass. And all of you guys are gonna have to start to listen to Death in the Garden. Get out there and just go through these interviews. These are interviews in totality, that’ll be part of the film like this is a journey in a narrative that won’t be edited so that it masks the point of view. And that’s what we hope that the film really achieves.
Jake Marquez
Yeah, for anybody listening. All the interviews, we do film are released as full podcasts, you can hear everything like James said, and we’re just yeah, trying to share all the nuances of all these things, whether we agree with them or not.
Maren Morgan
Yeah, and it’s complex. And what we’re trying to convey in a film is something that like, is really a lifelong conversation that we are at the very beginning of, in a lot of ways. And, you know, we try to, like bring that humility into it as much as we can, and we’re not perfect, you know, we’re mid-20s, 20-somethings and so we have that, like, you know, bit of hubris, that excitement and that maybe like potential fundamentalism, but we really try to like, bring it back and like, look at ourselves critically every step of the way. And I hope that that’s it conveyed. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it’s like I’m, I’m also I started writing a book to like, and I because I feel that this story also can be told through narrative in, in for whatever reason I’m just like, this is something that I want to spend some time doing and you know, and we’ll see where that goes. And I mean, ultimately, like these are ideas that are going to be percolating and fermenting forever, as long as humans are alive. And so we’re just grateful to be able to talk about it. And we’re grateful to have you as a producer, James,
Jake Marquez
Greatest producer we could hope to have.
James Connolly
I keep you in steak. That’s what I do. Well, I think we should leave it at that. Yeah. Yeah. So tell everybody, I mean, a lot of this will be in the show notes and all that stuff until because you’re, you’re moving off of social media, and or, you know, keeping it on, but also wanting to have these long-form conversations with people who are listening to you trying to create a movement where we have these conversations. So there’s a Discord now and there’s a Substack. These are all words that I learned through you guys. So know I don’t *bleep* know what they are. Still trying to understand how Discord works. But yeah, so like, name all of that stuff. And…
Jake Marquez
So we are on Instagram and Twitter, if you just search Death in the Garden, you will find us. We are on there we’ve got a lot of really cool content, but because like you said, we just felt like it was so hard to get like nuance on these topics and having to cut things into little soundbites to play the whole social media game, which isn’t social media, but a giant marketing scheme to contort the youth of the world. So we decided to move to a place like Substack, where we can write kind of our own essays and articles and like 10-minute videos from interviews, and then we get to write-up things about it. So if you find us on Instagram, Twitter, and then you search Death in the Garden on Substack. That is a fantastic place to find us.
Maren Morgan
Yeah. Or it’s like death in the garden.substack.com. And then we also have a Patreon community, and it’s patreon.com/death in the garden. And yeah, we’re just…
Jake Marquez
And our podcast, Death in the Garden on any podcast platform.
Maren Morgan
Yeah, we’re just trying to try to spread the word and we just couldn’t, the Instagram was just killing us. And so we decided that it would just be better to, to try to find an alternative. And you know, the truth is that Substack is blowing up and in Substack is fun, because it’s, if you sign up for it, everything that we post will just be emailed to you directly. And which is really nice. If you’re not trying to be scrolling through a social media app. It’s just like comes into your email, and then you can read it or not read it, you can, you know, but anyway, I think it’s cool.
James Connolly
All right. Well, thank you guys.
Jake Marquez
Thanks for doing this. Let’s do it again.
Maren Morgan
Thanks James. Good to talk to you.
