WEBVTT

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And I want to introduce our next speaker,

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Martin Kirk, program director at Novo
Foundation.

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Established in 2006.

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The Novo Foundation supports initiatives

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that promote a holistic
and healing vision for humanity.

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With a focus on bioregional work

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that supports the reintegration of human
and natural systems.

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Jennifer and Peter Buffett
are the co-presidents of the foundation

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and co-chair of the Board of directors.

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Martin.

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I wanted to start with,

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where we start from,
you know, what our basic worldview is.

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And I will say a lot of it,

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aligns very deeply with what
we've heard today.

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We try to take the very long view,
the civilizational view, if you like.

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One of the ways we describe
this is we believe we're coming to the end

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of a 500 year civilizational arc,
and the next one is just beginning now.

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So our job is to think about,

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what civilization can

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be and start
to plant the seeds of that now.

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It's not going to come into place
in any simple way.

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It's not going to come into place until
the old civilization creates space for it.

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And I don't know
how many people around here

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are very familiar with the concept
of the meta crisis or the poly crisis.

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People talk about collapse
a lot these days.

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I don't like that word collapse.

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I think it presents the wrong mental image
for us.

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I think more in terms of decoherence.

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Things will just slowly start
to stop working.

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But, in the truth

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of systems,
things change slowly, slowly, slowly,

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and then all at once. We're focusing,

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we've only started
this really work in the last year.

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We only started granting in earnest
in January this year.

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And this is a going to be
a global portfolio of ours.

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And it's conceived of as a sister
portfolio

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to our biggest portfolio,
which is supporting indigenous

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communities, largely in North America,
but some in South America.

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A couple in Australia.

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And for all the reasons Dan talked about,

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we are building this
bioregional portfolio,

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which is largely oriented and like
the language itself, is largely oriented

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to fit into Western scientific minds
or scientifically trained minds.

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And bring that together, and rather
to open up the channels of collaboration

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and communication with all the indigenous
work that we do already.