Gregory Landua wants to save civilization from disintegrating. How? By aligning short-term economic incentives with long-term ecological health.

"It is the moral imperative," Gregory said on the latest episode of the Follow the White Rabbit podcast. "How do we figure out how our presence on Earth makes Earth healthier?"

Gregory is the co-founder and co-Chief Regeneration Officer of Regen network, a blockchain technology designed to track, verify, and reward positive changes to ecological systems. Well-aware of the urgency for Regenerative Agriculture -- a land management practice that seeks to restore soil biodiversity in farming -- Gregory previously founded and managed Terra Genesis International, a regenerative design consultancy, and co-authored the pioneering book, Regenerative Enterprise.

"According to a UN study released five years ago, we had, at that point, 50 harvests left at the current rate of topsoil erosion," Gregory explained. "There is well documented evidence of topsoil loss leading to civilizational collapse a few times over."  

The problem is what Gregory calls the "Tragedy of Market" which looks to maximize the rate of value extraction for short term gain at the expense of long-term ecological health. Gregory believes that, by incentivizing healthy ecology, "the market can be a force of regeneration." Like a sort of NFT (non-fungible token) for healthy ecological practices, Regen Network allows land stewards to sell regenerative practices to parties wishing to offset their negative environmental impact.

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A healthy ecology is not only essential to human survival, but to the maintenance of individual rights and freedom. Everyone needs clean water and healthy food. Ecological degradation precipitates social instability as people struggle over dwindling resources.

"The result of [ecological degradation] is invariably at the nexus of instability ... and fascist and totalitarian takeovers, because those are the conditions where command and control thrive," Gregory argues.

Protecting the ecology is essential to maintaining individual privacy. We often consider issues like data-collection by a few private companies and can lose sight of the larger forces that can enable authoritarian government control.

As Gregory puts it: "There is a strong alignment between how we uplift human agency, human rights, and privacy ... with the responsibility to coordinate on wicked problems like environmental degradation."

To hear more about Gregory's fight to align economic incentives with environmental health, follow us down the Rabbit Hole. Listen to the conversation here or on your favorite streaming platform.