The Intelligence of Nature for Planetary Healing w/ Dr. Zach Bush

Dr. Zach Bush shares the links with EcoJustice Radio between the health of our planet and of humanity. Learn about the light energy within us that has been dimming since the 1940s and its relation to the rise of chronic diseases.

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Healing Humanity: Dr. Zach Bush on Planetary Health Evolution

In this transformative episode, Dr. Zach Bush [http://zachbushmd.com/] shares his insights on the intricate links between the health of our planet and the health of humanity. Learn about the light energy within us that has been dimming since the 1940s and its relation to the rise of chronic diseases. Delve into the ancient stories of human spirituality and their impact on our modern world with Host Carry Kim. This is a conversation that will change the way you see your place in nature.

Ours is a time that requires fortitude, resiliency, introspection, observation, connection and action. We are aware of the multitude of things afflicting humanity and the world, much of which has been human-induced whether we speak of climate change, conflicts, injustice of all kinds, destruction of the ecosystem and our microbiomes, degradation of soil, loss of biodiversity or personal dis-ease and the deterioration of collective health.

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Dr. Zach Bush has devoted his life and research to the exploration of what harms and what heals ourselves, our food systems, waterways, the soil, and the often unseen world of microbiology. His journey has been a deep and collaborative dive into understanding and revealing root cause. How did we get here and how will we change to chart a better course not just for humanity, but for all inhabitants with whom we share this planet? This conversation is more inquiry than “answers.” It is a pondering of our times and an asking of questions, without the resolution of “answers.” It is an attempt to connect some of the dots between human and planetary health and to awaken our collective memories as intrinsic parts of Nature.

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For an extended interview and other benefits, become an EcoJustice Radio patron at https://www.patreon.com/ecojusticeradio

Interview Excerpts

Carry Kim: Welcome, Zach. We are thrilled to have you on the show today.

Dr. Zach Bush: What an honor to be with this crew. Love you all. Love you all. It’s really a pleasure to be together. It beats la traffic.

Carry Kim: It feels old and new. Part of the ancient future to see you here.

On this continent, we have a chronic degenerative disease epidemic

Speaker B: Well said.

Carry Kim: I feel that, yeah, we have enumerated many of the ills facing society today, but on this continent, we have a chronic degenerative disease epidemic, ranging from obesity to neurological disease, fertility to mental health, or I should say, infertility, diabetes to autoimmune disease, autism to cancer. What do you see as the root cause, physically and spiritually, behind these disease states?

Dr. Zach Bush: Well, I’ll give a really brief answer to both, and then we can expound, because I usually expound for a long time and then forget what the question was. I’m going to try to do the opposite here, which is, biologically, what’s happened is literally the lights within human biology and then ultimately, within the biology of the planet have been dimming, since about the 1940s. And so we’ve had a steady decline in the amount of light energy available to every cell on the planet, whether it be a bacteria in the soil system or a liver cell within a human or a brain cell within an infant, all of these cells are experiencing a decrement in their capacity to produce light energy. And so, as we dim the lights on biology, we see extinction events kind of emerge, and they take on, in our current state of affairs, this phase of chronic disease, as you speak. So, we can look deeper into the last 40 years and exactly how those diseases that you kind of breadcrumbed for us, how those emerged and what the exact pattern of biology is as to at a certain level of light energy decrement, you’ll produce this disease at a lower level, this disease. And so we could go through those if, that’s of interest. But to take it to that endpoint is we have manifest a state of affairs biologically where we no longer can produce the energy necessary to reproduce. And so, yes, chronic disease diminishes lifespan, increases infertility and all this. But ultimately, it’s that infertility piece that leads to the extinction event of any species. And so we’re playing at this edge of our capacity now to persist as any biologic process and something that we would call human DNA.

All of our religious texts and myths point back to an event of separation

On the spiritual side, if we think about what predated those human bodies and what’s going to persist after those human bodies, I, think there’s a wound in our understanding of that spirituality that has led to this same kind of behavior that undermines that biology and its light potential. And that spiritual wound is really this belief of separation that so many are speaking to these days. And all of our religious texts and myths seem to point back to an event of separation where we believed ourselves to be rejected from nature and within that, tying that up with some sort of definition or story around God. And so separation from God and nature occurring at the same time. and these are very ancient, ancient stories.

So if you go back to the kind of Abrahamic religions, you’ve got everything from the Muslim faith to your christian faith and Judaism and all these things ultimately emerging from this one body of wisdom that was storytold, these profound histories of a garden. And we were kicked out of the garden for having come into some sort of conscious awakening or perhaps a dream that we woke up into that had, us believing that we were separate from nature, rejected by nature. But thousands of years before Abraham comes along, you have those same stories being told in Sumerian texts and before that, Babylonian texts, and Abraham was from a Sumerian family. So you’ve got our modern myths of this separation story really being projected from these much, much more ancient stories and dating back 140 years, with the decoding and kind of understanding of those Sumerian and Babylonian texts, it was clear that before the Abrahamic religions claimed those events to be occurring around a single God, that was a focus of creation and all that, the Babylonian, Syrian, or Sumerian texts were much more pointing to other races that were, in relationship to the planet and then ultimately in relationship to humanity.

And somehow that was the break of relationship with nature, was our new union with this other God force or this other creative force, which was maybe another race. And so whether we think of it as an angel coming in and implanting DNA at the time of an Abrahamic faith, pointing to something more recent or a much more ancient history of maybe what we call angels or other races within the universe that came to this planet and started this change of relationship between a, humanity and our nature, it’s hard to say at this point, other than the fact that, wow, ridiculously similar stories, because it wasn’t just the garden. Sumerian Babylonian texts had the story of the splitting of families and then ultimately the diaspora of humans, and then the Tower of Babel and all that’s thousands of years before Abrahamic storytelling and religious structures.

So something happened along our journey to create this spiritual wound. And I think it’s within the context of our biologic history. And so it’s not something that predates the human that started humanity. I think it happened at some point during human biologic history. And as far as we can tell right now, we always say these numbers as if we know this for fact. And then what just happened in the last years, we were off by 100,000 years. so we’re always wrong, but the current estimates are that human biology have been present on the planet for about 300,000 years, which is a split second, obviously, in the biologic history of the planet. So you got 4 billion, 5 billion year old planet that just a couple hundred thousand years ago, basically a week ago in cosmic time, humans show up. But there’s this interesting thing is that we actually have oral history that dates back through so much of that. And so I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Africa the last couple of years, and the Koisan people have the most ancient oral lineage history of any other peoples on the planet, dates back 100,000 years. If you end up in the Maori culture in New Zealand, or the aboriginal culture of Australia, or your first nations in North America here, they’ve got all about, a 40,000 year oral history.

And there was an general understanding that the birth canal of all of biology, from bacteria, fungi, all the way to humans, seems to be this eastern line through Africa. And so we have some sort of vestigial or truly geologic biologic birth canal of life on the planet. And so as it came through there and humans ultimately become, or that biology of mammals, and then the biology of humans becomes available at some point in that they develop the capacity to move great distances. And so you see that diaspora occur, the migration occur, and that 40,000 year history suggests that somewhere between 100,000 years ago and 40,000 years, we see that capacity for great movement around the planet. And then those oral traditions march on, and they’re doing good. And then suddenly there’s this sudden amnesia event that happens in every single culture about 7000 years ago. And so nobody remembers what happened between 10,000 years ago and 5000 years ago. All of the cultures, Abrahamic religions included, tend to start dating the beginning of everything about 5000 years ago. And yet we have oral histories that go back 100,000 years. So for me, I’ve started to wonder, at this moment of amnesia, is this actually not necessarily the beginning of humans that were somehow in the garden and there was two humans?

Carry Kim: Sure.

Dr. Zach Bush: Was this humans in their original relationship to nature? And then suddenly a schism happened in this spiritual wound just a few thousand years ago. 70 00, 10,000, who knows? But there could have been a schism at that time that really broke our sense of self. Our identity was fractured. And it’s possible that that was entirely a spiritual wound. There was some sort of level of consciousness or connection. Or there’s the story of eating a fruit from the tree. And we’re watching this rise of plant medicine in the world right now. And people go and do a plant, and they suddenly feel connected to everything.

Carry Kim: Sure.

Dr. Zach Bush: And I specialized in chemotherapy development as a medical doctor. And I can tell you there’s really nice chemicals for breaking relationship to everything. And so we now grow our food in these chemicals that, break relationships between things. So is it possible that actually our story starts at, a long history of connectedness? And then we ate something, did something shift in our reality that broke our deep relationship to self or nature or our concept of God? And suddenly everything became abstract? Abstract nature, abstract God, abstract self, abstract human ingenuity. And then you see the rise of empire.

Carry Kim: Yeah. And separation. That deep separation that you spoke about.

Dr. Zach Bush: Koisan people, they were lived under a state of natural law. For those 100,000 years predating that wound, your 40,000 year history of first nations in the US and North America, spawned 625 nations or something like that. By the time Europeans arrive, and those 625 nations are living in a state of relative harmony and dynamics. Not super peaceful or romantic, but there’s wars, there’s disputes, but they’d been there for 40,000 years, 600 nations. And you contrast that then to suddenly this wound 5000 years ago, where you have a few, one, two, three dominant empires rise to dominate the entire ecosystem of the human societal expression. So I’m so intrigued now, and I didn’t have any of these questions in my mind a few years back, but in these global travels and sitting a lot around fires and listening to story from our indigenous elders in these communities that still can recall what it feels like to know your story for 100,000 years, right. It started to make a lot of sense for me as a doctor who’s always been staring at this end state of cancer or this end state of ultimate disconnection and loneliness at the cellular level. Is this not just the inevitable expression of a species that 5000, 7000 years ago, went through a root wound in itself, a biologic wound, perhaps leading to a spiritual wound, or a spiritual wound leading to biologic separation? I don’t know which one.

One thing that actually just came to my mind

One thing that actually just came to my mind, which is always dangerous to say something that you’ve never thought before publicly, but something that just came to mind is, in our laboratory, one of the most potent things that break tight junctions and gap junctions, which are basically, the scaffolding that keeps single cells functioning as a larger organism. So you can get billions of cells to make a single gut membrane. Those are tight junctions running deep to the tight junctions of the gap junctions, which are fiber optic cables that move light between the cells. And light, like a fiber optic cable, is information stream and its resources. And so it’s like a mycelial network of the soil manifest in humans. So this is gap junctions. And one of the first toxins that we developed to break those things is alcohol. And so it just dawned on me of, like, maybe that wasn’t a fruit that we ate to break things. Maybe we fermented something for the first time and started to break our, relationship through our food system. Of fermentation to alcohol would be a possibility of an example of a biologic injury that could then give you a root. Spiritual belief or abstract identity. So who knows? I don’t know where those things are. This is a story I’m telling you all. And you should be in a state of great doubt of anything that’s coming out of my head right now. But this is a preponderance of evidence that we had a story of connectivity. It expressed itself in a connected natural law system of societal balance that then was lost and led to the rise of the Babylonian empires, Marian empire, and then ultimately the Greek empire. And at that moment we go from east to west. Right. And so we have eastern empires that then are ultimately defeated by a western culture that starts to change its relationship to technology. Ultimately.

Carry Kim: Did the Koisan have anything to say about this? I mean, did you speak with them?

Dr. Zach Bush: About talked? I’ve asked them what caused the amnesia. Like, why don’t we remember? And the answers tend to be, it’s irrelevant of what happened then and it’s important that we change now. It’s that typical thing that I get trapped in my head game of like.

Carry Kim: Trying to figure it out.

Dr. Zach Bush: And the question are like, that’s stupid. Be present. Breathe.

Carry Kim: Yes.

Dr. Zach Bush: experience the fire. That’s usually the answer. Be present. Look into the fire.

Carry Kim: Stop thinking.

Dr. Zach Bush: Look at the stars. Look into the fire. Look at the stars. Now, what is your answer? And the answer is, it is truly irrelevant what happened 5000 years ago. What is relevant is we are now expressing a wound and we have a choice to either continue to palliate that wound with a bunch of bandaids.

Carry Kim: Uh-huh.

Dr. Zach Bush: Or travel into the wound and find the antidote.

Carry Kim: Right. Or just look at the sky and look at the fire, which is probably.

Dr. Zach Bush: That’s our midwife. Right. So the fire is the midwife. So the stars are the midwife holding space for that pregnancy to occur within you. You are pregnant with a new being within you and you’re being called into an opportunity to birth that new reality through yourself. There’s a lot of psychotherapy philosophies out there that ultimately we’re here to reparent ourselves. And I think there’s a lot of truth and importance to that. I think that came out of my mouth even this morning, talking to a friend. But it dawns on me right now. It’s like it’s a much deeper reality of it’s not just parenting ourselves now, it’s rebirthing ourselves.

Carry Kim: Yeah. And it’s a choice. Not everyone will choose it. The opportunity, but we have to actually choose it.

Dr. Zach Bush: That’s honestly been my toughest journey in some ways is accepting that is that there’s going to be two realities. I think. I don’t know, whatever my character personality is, I have this deep and maybe it’s just my wounded, masculine, running around trying to fix everything. But there’s this deep desire for people to make the leap into this beauty, right? I can feel it, I can taste it, I can see it for myself at moments, and I can’t seem to stay there permanently. But when I’m in it, it’s such an ecstatic state of feeling alive that I don’t want it to end. And I want everybody to feel that.

Carry Kim: Yeah, sure.

Dr. Zach Bush: But then there’s the reality that you just said, which is maybe we get choice. Maybe there’s choice at the human level, maybe there’s not freedom of choice, but there’s different avenues that are walked, different doors that are walked through. And we can’t expect everybody go on the same journey. And we need to completely lose any judgment on the jurging, the idea that one is better than the other or more enlightened than the other, right? That’s all just human narcissism and egoic.

Dr. Zach Bush: Maybe it goes back to the illusion of death. Because even if someone doesn’t choose that, it doesn’t mean that that’s the end, right? Everyone is on their own path of evolution, right?

Carry Kim: It seems kind of funny that we would start to measure the success of an infinite energy field that we might call a soul by how long their finite life is, which by any measurement is a split second in the reality of that being. And so that we would think, oh, that person died at 42. What a failure. This is kind of hilarious. That 85 is super impressive. No, it’s a split second also, right?

Dr. Zach Bush: Or how that’s written on a chart, right? When someone dies, failure to thrive. I’ve always found that very, disturbing that because you died, you failed to thrive. It just points to where we are. Or that kind of amnesia, like you said.

Carry Kim: Or the irony of the fact that so infrequently we write, died of natural causes.

Zach Bush, MD [http://zachbushmd.com/] is a renowned, multi-disciplinary physician and internationally recognized educator on the microbiome as it relates to human health, soil health, food systems, and a regenerative future. He founded *Seraphic Group [http://seraphicgroup.com/] and the non-profit Farmer’s Footprint [http://www.farmersfootprint.us/] to develop root-cause solutions for human and ecological health. His education has highlighted the need for a radical departure from chemical farming and pharmacy, and his ongoing efforts are providing a path for consumers, farmers, and mega-industries to work together for a healthy future for people and the planet.

Carry Kim, Co-Host of EcoJustice Radio. An advocate for ecosystem restoration, Indigenous lifeways, and a new humanity born of connection and compassion, she is a long-time volunteer for SoCal350, member of Ecosystem Restoration Camps, and a co-founder of the Soil Sponge Collective, a grassroots community organization dedicated to big and small scale regeneration of Mother Earth.

Podcast Website: http://ecojusticeradio.org/
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Executive Producer and Intro: Jack Eidt
Hosted by Carry Kim
Engineer and Original Music: Blake Quake Beats

Episode 214

Updated 10 October 2024