-Sadhguru, welcome to The Daily Show. -Wonderful.
-(chuckles) -You see, now, this is weird for me,
because we tried to start this interview
and then we had a technical issue
and now we're starting the interview again
and now I'm like, "Am I being as authentic as I could be
with you as a guru or is this, in and of itself, inauthentic?"
-To-- You know? -Just be yourself.
There's nothing called authentic.
Nobody knows what's that, authentic.
Because, uh, human beings are a consequence of...
a thousand things they have picked up all over.
Man, that's deep.
Impressions, right?
We're gonna have a good time. I can tell.
-(chuckles) -We're gonna have a really good time.
By the way, I-I woke up today
a lot unhappier than I woke up yesterday,
because I-I had to do all the research
-for our interview. -(laughs)
And I-I knew that there's war in Russia.
I knew that there is, um...
you know, that we-we're facing a climate crisis.
And then now, thanks to you,
I know that we also are facing a soil crisis,
where some people are estimating that,
if we do nothing,
in 50 years' time, we may not be able to grow anything
because we may have run out of soil.
Which, forgive my ignorance,
I did not know that soil is even something
that we could run out of.
Um, the thing is, uh,
this has happened in the last 50 to 100 years
of industrialized farming,
that the organic content in the soil is going away
because there's no replenishment.
To replenish the soil,
we either need, uh, you know,
leaves and vegetative matter or animal waste.
Both of them have disappeared from the farms.
We thought we could do everything with the machines.
-Mm-hmm. -Machines can plow.
Machines can do the work
that animals and human beings were doing.
But organic content cannot come from the machine.
It has to come from vegetative or animal waste,
and that is not there.
Because of that, one must understand,
if you add organic content to sand, it becomes soil.
If you take away organic content from soil, it becomes sand.
So right now, desertification
is one of the most serious problems.
As you said, 50 years or 60 years' time,
after that, there's not enough soil to grow crops.
But the more important thing is,
by 2035 to 2040, they're expecting
that we will grow 40% less food
than what we are growing right now,
and our populations will be over nine billion.
That's not a world you want to live in.
That's not a world where you want to leave your children,
so we need to act now.
Why it's very important to act now
and institute or enshrine this in our policy is,
-on an average, according to U.N.FAO... -Mm-hmm.
On an average, 27,000 species
of microbes are going extinct per year.
And is that because of how we farm,
or is that a natural consequence of existence?
Because there is no organic content for the microbes. See?
-I see. -As you know, today,
that you cannot even digest the food that you eat
-if there are no gut microbion. -Yes.
Similarly in the soil, it's the same reflection
in a much more complex way.
Without the microbial activity in the soil,
the plants are not able
to get the necessary nourishment from the soil.
So we are throwing chemicals and boosting them up,
but without needed nourishment.
On an average, the drop in nourishment
in the United States from the early 20th century
to now is approximately 90%. Only ten percent is left.
If you ate one orange in 1920,
you need to eat eight oranges today to get the same stuff.
So that's simply impractical.
So we're moving to a place where
-food production is sliding down gradually. -Mm-hmm.
So this sliding down will affect...
FAO predicts that by 2035,
there could be dozens of civil wars across the world.
And that is not necessarily in African countries,
or South America. It could be anywhere.
The World Food Program talks about famines
around Chicago, Illinois area by 2035.
This is terrifying.
You know, it's-- (sighs) I was talking to a friend about how,
before the pandemic, I think there was a certain hubris that
humans had about everything. We just believed it would
always go on. You hear these doomsday prophecies,
or you hear these-- even warnings about the world ending
at some point, or humans not being able to inhabit the planet
but until the pandemic, I feel like we didn't have a-- Um...
-A tangible example of the world stopping. -Mm-hmm.
You know, people would even say, "How do you stop the world?"
How could you just stop travel? How could you stop countries?
-How-- And now we've seen it. -Yes.
And now you're telling us...
-No, this is not a doomsday prediction. -Okay.
This is a wakeup call, because we are at a cusp of time that if
we do the right things right now, in another 15 to 20 years,
we can make a significant turnaround.
So what are the right things to do?
We have been pushing this for the last two years.
We have these programs going for over 25 years in southern India
where we have brought in ten percent of the farmers' lands
under, uh, tree cultivation and animals.
Before that, this ten percent produces
-enough organic content for the remaining 90%. -Oh, okay.
So, once the organic content is about three to six percent--
minimum is three to six percent--
if you raise the organic content to eight
to ten percent in the soil, your elevation requirements
will come down to 30% of what it is,
because the water-holding capacity
of organically rich soil is such.
If you raise it to 12 to 15%, your irrigation requirement
would come down to ten to 15%. That is,
in, so, 100 liters of water you'd use 15 liters of water
for the same crop. That's what needs to happen.
And this is the same story everywhere.
When it comes to ecology, when it comes to soil,
-Yeah. -our national barriers--
racial discriminations, our religions, our gods,
our creeds, our gendered stuff,
our, uh, you know, political ideologies--
nothing matters. This is a unifying factor.
If we as a generation of people act now to change
the necessary policy changes, which is not some
rocket science, this is something.
-Always farmers in the past knew. -Yeah.
But we forgot in the last 50 years.
Are you-are you getting any signs that governments
are... are enthusiastic to try and do something about this?
See, in the last two years, I have been talking to various,
uh, country heads, various politicians, political parties,
we have written to 730 political parties on the planet
to make sure that they include soil and ecology
as a part of their election manifestos,
as their political philosophy.
Whatever they believe in-- right, left, center,
whatever they are-- soil is one thing
which is a common factor for all of us.
We're always looking at what divides us. It's time.
If you don't understand the consciousness
of this cosmos and stuff like that,
at least you understand you come from the soil,
you live off the soil,
when you die, you go back to the soil.
That much, you get it.
What I see is in the last two years
that I've been talking to people,
everybody knows there is a serious problem.
-Yeah. -Everybody knows what is the solution, also.
But I think it looks like they were all waiting
-for an idiot to build a cat. So here I am. -(laughing)
I'm 65,
and I'm riding 30,000 kilometers.
Must be an idiot, isn't it? (laughs)
Sadhguru, I could talk to you forever,
and I guess that's why people, you know, come to your events
and your, you know, uh...
It's the gatherings. They read your books.
They-they want to see what you're gonna do.
Um, on a journey of soil,
it-it feels like it is yet another thing
that we add to our list that governments need to do,
that people need to do, that...
You know, if we don't do this, it's over.
-If we don't do that, it's over. -So, this is not
-one more thing, Trevor. -No, no, no.
-I'm-I'm saying it feels like. -I... See, I'm...
I have enough on my hands. I don't have to take this up.
I've taken this up because, as a generation of people,
if we don't do this now, we will regret this, seriously.
If you don't enshrine it in the policy now,
it will get too late if you leave it
for another 20, 30 years' time.
This needs to happen now, so we want everybody
to talk about soil for 100 days in their own terms.
If they don't know anything, we'll provide
-a massive amount of information on our website. -Mm-hmm.
They can pick it up and use it on their own
or they can research themselves. Whichever way they want.
If they don't know anything else to say,
just say, "Save soil." Let's make it happen every day.
(laughs) If you... If you send a message
to somebody, close it with "save soil."
If you call somebody, say "save soil."
Save soil. It was great chatting to you, Sadhguru.
-(laughs) -Save soil, my friend.
-Thank you very much for being here. -Thank you.
-It's really been wonderful having you. -Yeah.
For more information on Sadhguru's Save Soil movement,
all you got to do is visit the website below.