Dear friends and neighbors,
Martin Wainstein, much like Dr. Che Guevara, left Argentina with the goal of making a significant impact on the world. While Che believed in changing the world through revolution, Martin believes in achieving change through evolution. This desire to make a difference has driven Martin to found the nonprofit organization, Open Earth Foundation.
The Open Earth Foundation has quickly become a pivotal player in the fight against climate change. Through various initiatives and programs, the foundation is working tirelessly to raise awareness and promote action towards a more sustainable future.
In a recent interview, Martin discussed the importance of addressing climate change and the role that Open Earth Foundation is playing in this critical issue. The foundation's work is not only making a huge contribution towards climate change, but it is also inspiring others to take action towards a more sustainable future. Martin's passion and dedication to this cause are truly commendable, and his efforts have made a significant impact in the fight against climate change.
You can listen to the audio here, or subscribe to read the transcript below.
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Wishing you Golden Light,
Dr. Richard Louis Miller
Further Reading:
Transcript
*This transcript has been simplified for easier reading without changing the core content of the dialogue. Transcription provided by Vergilius.
What does the Open Earth Foundation Do?
Today on Mind Body Health & Politics, I have the privilege of having as my guest, Martin Wainstein. He is the founder of Open Earth. Welcome to Mind Body Health & Politics, Martin.
Martin Wainstein: Thank you so much, Richard.
Dr. Richard Louis Miller: Start from the beginning. You created Open Earth, tell us about it. What is it exactly?
Martin Wainstein: In essence, the Open Earth Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the research, design, and building of digital public infrastructure and innovations that can help augment humans' capacity to manage the resilience of our planet. And collaboration, as you started mentioning, is at the heart of it. One of the reasons is because individually, we have a big impact in our surroundings, but we've become such a macro civilization that has a massive impact into the entire Earth system that we all share. And in some sense over the next decades, we are really facing an existential crisis. Being able to balance a safe temperature in our planet, addressing climate change, preventing the erosion of biosphere integrity, particularly through the demise of biodiversity and species, and so many other natural resources that we are over exploiting.
I was originally formed or studied astrobiology. I'm originally from Argentina, but I studied in California. Astrobiology, for me, was very powerful, because it illustrated how microorganisms that we can't see affected the whole planet by producing oxygen absorbing CO2. In over billions of years, this planet really created its own living body. What we understand today as Gaia, as a planetary living system, even though it's taken billions of years to form and create stability, over the last 60 years, we've significantly eroded that balance. It is a fascinating time to be alive and to see, to have to go deep internally and collaboratively to review what the position that we want to have in our planet.
Through the process, I've done different work as a serial social entrepreneur and did my PhD on the transformation of the energy system. I understood digital technology, which is something that I wasn't originally part of or followed very closely as something that could be a connective tissue or mesh that can help us look at the same planetary system, deal with having trust on the information about our planet, and bringing a level of coordination in our efforts to really be able to shift the tide in the short time frame. The issue that we find is what we describe as fragmentation, and it's the opposite of collaboration. There's a lot of fragmentation in our efforts to deal with climate change and biodiversity.
One of the most important things that I think you tacitly allude to, Richard, is in this almost battle to turn the tide towards having a sustainable reality in our planet, we are faced to the paradigm of our relationship with our planet and our relationship with nature and we've fallen into the illusion that we're separate from it. So, upon this, what has been interesting in this journey is not only how to create the levels of innovation at the voluntary scale, but also the revisions that it requires us to do as individuals to understand ourselves as an extension of our planet.
So, in Open Earth Foundation, we do a lot of research, and we do a lot of design of systems trying to think as holistically as we can. We also collaborate very closely with government and supra national organizations, the United Nations on climate change, multilateral development banks, and also help them understand the importance of open-source digital technology, and how to empower governments and stakeholders to have better tools to deal with the changing situations around facing a warmed-up planet, but also having to deal with our emissions and our mitigations. Surprisingly, even though we think very holistically, a lot of our work deals with accounting— accounting emissions and mitigations and creating a common trust data layer for our planet. I'll pause there, but I think that summarizes a bit of at a high level what we do or esoterically what we do and how I think it connects to the importance of the mind, body, and spirit equation.
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