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And that's what I’m wanting us to start talking about is the discovery of the Earth; so far, we've only colonized it. Welcome to FacingFuture! Today's guests are Wes Jackson, the co-founder and President Emeritus of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. His many books include ‘Hogs Are Up:
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Stories Of The Land, With Digressions' and 'New Roots For Agriculture'. Robert Jensen is a Professor Emeritus at the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas in Austin. He's the author of 'The Restless and Relentless mind of Wes Jackson, searching for sustainability', and 'Plain Radical; living, loving, and learning to leave the planet gracefully'.
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Their forthcoming book, ‘An Inconvenient Apocalypse - The Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity', will be published by the University of Notre Dame Press in the fall. The invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago marks the beginning of civilization's degradation of the ecosphere. In the last 100 years, and principally since the 1960s,
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the Green Revolution with its intensive chemical agriculture and industrial animal operations has brought Nature to its knees. Can we… should we try to continue the resource-depleting civilization we have now, or should we accept that its collapse is forthcoming and prepare communities for a transition to minimize human suffering and ecological damage? Where do we go from here?
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>>>Yep, well, where we go from here is by not living with all kinds of illusions that are predicated on a kind of modern religion, which is that technology is going to solve this problem,
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these problems. We have a form of technological fundamentalism that is worse than the whole array of religious fundamentalisms of the usual kind. This, I think, is the most important moment in the history of homo sapiens. If you imagine that over this 200,000 years that we got along
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all right in terms of a livelihood on the planet until we started agriculture, when we made the break and we didn't know - I don't - we didn't know what we were doing, and we've never known what we were undoing as we were at it - I think Wendell Berry put it that
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way - so here we are. We didn't know that when we started agriculture that we were getting what Amri Lovins called 'the young, pulverized coal of the soil', in other words the carbon within the soil was rather readily allocated to seeds and that was the beginning of the extractive economy.
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And so our carbon... our sense to go after energy- rich carbon is in all creatures, but we invented a way to really get after it and once we had metals then we were able to cut down trees and build ships. So carbon one is the carbon of the soil, carbon two of the forests and then
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the third is the coal, the oil, the natural gas, and so going back to the origin of life in that journey from minerals to cells that long, long ago journey carbon has been central. I think it's important for us to know that not only is soil more important than oil,
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but that it's as much of a non-renewable resource. What effectively we did was start a Ponzi scheme. We get the stuff at... the end of the tip; that'll carry us this year and then we do it again next year and then you get the political world doing the same thing and civilizations come,
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all doing the same thing trying to get ahead, and what that means is, almost always, more people, more stuff and here we are and now suddenly we got a down power, because of what's happening in the upper atmosphere which is embracing all of us. So,
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in that down-powering world we don't know how to do this. That's where the challenge comes and so Bob and I are not going around whistling in the dark on this; what we're saying in this book is that we're not going to be solving these problems in the usual sort of
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upward slope. We got to think hard and in the past most of our problems simply developed and then we would find a solution, but those solutions were always of the bailout variety, not a corrective source. So, we got to figure out how to be corrective;
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we got to figure out a different way of being in the world and as a consequence of that, recently, I have become a curator, and that curator is to find some of Nature's charming stuff in the woods, in the soil and so on, and you start looking at all that beauty that's out there in
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Nature, and it is... well - you know - it's a way to help us stay amused while we live till we die, and I think it's a far more joyful way to be in the world which is to be looking at the Nature that is left, and so I call this project 'Art without Ego'.
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This is taking limbs where insects have made some beautiful artwork, all of it beats the Mona Lisa and the stuff that appears in our various museums and so on. We've got to start getting back into the beauty of the Earth and the glory of the skies and so on,
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and that's just one little suggestion of what's available to us. But we got to rethink where we are. Now, the wonderful thing that's happened during this period, of course, is we now know about our origins in a way; we know about the Big Bang, such as it is, and we know about how the galaxies are formed and how the carbon in our bodies had been cooked in a dying star,
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and from it at lower temperatures came nitrogen and oxygen. We know a whole bunch of things that we didn't know 10,000 years ago that we didn't know 50... 5,000 years ago, that we didn't know 200 years ago and so here we are with all this wonderful knowledge, right at some kind of
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a pivot point where we have all of this available and maybe that's what will help us stay connected to the need to down power and hang on to it rather than to simply run amok, like we're headed. So I think maybe I've talked long enough, now I’m gonna go drink my coffee. >>>Well, thank you, Wes! I read your book and it's full of incredible insights,
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one of which is that - you know - the natural world is... what we want to save; civilization and its industrial processes are another question and I think the environmental movement divides there are people who are trying to save - you know - the industrial complex, the extractive economy and... the economy and such, and there are people who are saying: 'No, the economy is based on growth, and we live on a finite planet; that's insane! We need to save the forests, the land and the oceans, and
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there are people, many people, who are saying that - you know - our abusive animals, particularly our eating of fish and meat, and you know 60 billion animals raised for food have replaced the wildlife on the planet. We've wiped out 70 percent of the wildlife, so we need to - you know - that would be one thing we could start doing right away is to stop eating meat and fish and let the oceans
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recover and the forests recover, and the soil is something that you guys are more expert in in understanding that soil is not infinitely replaceable which people don't really understand. >>>Well, let me first of all point out I am not an expert in soil, that is Wes's domain. In the book ‘An Inconvenient Apocalypse’ we talk about the temptations of dense energy and Wes, I think, one of his most important insights is to start looking at that,
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not just during the Industrial Revolution, not just the fossil fuel era, but back to the origins of agriculture and we have to take seriously the temptations of dense energy which are attractive not only to rich capitalist exploiters, but to all of us, and so in this book what we're trying to do is inject a bit of humility; that we're not just pointing the fingers at the obvious bad guys - you
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know - CEOs of oil companies or something like that. We're talking about human nature, and Wes and I both come from the progressive - you know - left side of the political fence and sometimes folks on that side are uncomfortable talking about human nature, talking about shared responsibility, but if we are going to honestly confront the ecological crises, what we call the multiple cascading ecological crises, it's not just climate change; it's all of these: soil
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erosion, chemical contamination, biodiversity. They interact in ways we cannot predict and if we're going to deal with that I'll go back to Wes’s first point about fewer and less, we are going to have to think about what is a sustainable level of the human population at what level of consumption. That's one of what we call the four hard questions that not only
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the dominant culture ignores, but I think much of the environmental movement ignores as well. >>>I found it interesting the suggestion that we should live in communities of say 150 people that that's the cognitive capability of our minds and our actual being, that we would have much more... a much better life if we weren't living in these enormous cities and so forth; that maybe as we
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transition we should really think about how could we create these kind of communities that would be not based on consumption, because we know that's at the root of the problem, but based on - you know - wow! How beautiful is Nature! How wonderful are our relations, as you suggest in your book, you know? Renewable energy isn't going to step in there and make everything work; it just can't as you've said. >>>That's another one of those hard problems:
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what is the appropriate scale of a human community, and the number 150 comes from research about how many people we can kind of cognitively deal with at one time. Wes and I don't imagine suddenly there's going to be - you know - New York City is going to break into separate communities of 150. But here's where I think Wes’s experience in a rural area is really useful and a lot of those stories are in his previous book: 'Hogs Are Up',
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and I think Wes... one of the things I remember Wes saying many years ago that really had an effect on me, Wes, in a talk you said: this is not mere nostalgia, but a practical necessity, so when you talk about rural communities in the Great Depression, you're not just waxing eloquent about the 'good old days', you're looking for lessons, am I right in that Wes? >>>That's right, that and those are loaded with subtleties that have no standing
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in the conventional culture. It has to do with the nod of one farmer to another when a conversation has been going on that has to do with maybe coming over in the afternoon and helping; none of this stuff computes in the usual kind of economic forum. Well,
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why didn't they just... why did they do it that way? Well, because we're human beings that evolved in the upper Paleolithic and we had to get along with one another when we were out hunting plant material to eat or to sneak up on that deer that was in there, the thicket the other morning. You know, there were ways that we went at things, collectively,
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and we got to remember we didn't have iron and any of the metals. We were armed, so to speak, with... well, that was what's... why it's called a Stone Age. It didn't mean you picked up stones and threw it at the deer. No, it simply meant that you were living in a context and now that's who
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we were and who, I think, to a larger extent than most of us want to believe, are still now. Let's live with that and see where that takes us, rather than this 'g-whiz stuff' that is taking us right down this path of destruction. >>>We are actually a very
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vulnerable animal, we don't like to remember that we are an animal, and we have utilized our environment as if we are the kings of it, which we are not actually; we are part of a system that we don't even recognize. We need to move to an understanding of 'what is Nature', you know - and respect it more highly, of course. We have... I love your phrase 'the failure of success',
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because that's literally what we are. We have succeeded in taming aspects of the environment that now are... you might say fighting back, and meanwhile - you know - I also noticed in your book the idea that people are waiting for God - you know - to help them or technology to solve the problem really takes the responsibility of our own agency away from us. >>>Yeah.
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You know, I think part of what Wes and I are pointing to is the willingness to stop believing we have solutions. You know, often when you identify a problem people say well we know the problems give us your solutions and part of what Wes and I want to say is simply there are problems without solutions. If by solutions we mean somehow keeping this whole, you know - 8 billion people on the planet afloat indefinitely,
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there really is no solution to that problem. We have to recalibrate our goals. Now, some people would say: well, there have been societies that have lived more sustainably than the contemporary U.S. and that's clearly true, but we go back to this problem of the temptations of dense energy - you know - human beings are like other organisms; we tend to use all the energy available to us and human societies using the technology available to them tend to follow that,
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so - you know - again, this isn't going to be solved by nostalgically looking back to some previous way of living. It's looking back to those ways of living for insight into how to face a future, that is - let's just acknowledge it - is grim right? There aren't - you know - whether it's in my lifetime or my child's lifetime that we see a dramatic reduction in the human population.
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We see a dramatic decrease in the energy per capita that we use. We know that's coming, and unfortunately, even large parts of the environmental movement want to avoid that by, as Wes said, a kind of technological fundamentalism promising - you know - electric vehicles are going to save us. Well, electric vehicles are not going to save us. And that's the kind of reckoning we're trying to do in this book. >>>Yeah,
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there's another thing that I hope is a derivative of all of this. Joan, my wife, yesterday rescued an insect that happened to be a wasp that was on the window of the door. She rescued it and let it outside. Well, I thought, she knows one big thing
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along with the rest. Here is a creature that happens to have the same citric acid cycle as a whale, and a human, and a corn plant, and a silvery bean. Here is the whole creation of life with great commonality that citric acid cycle may be the oldest molecule
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that is in existence. Now, think about that. Here it still is that wasp. It doesn't know it's got the citric acid cycle, neither does the whale, and neither did we until a short time ago. Now, why isn't that being taught in the schools, and I think this is what can bring on the great, this Renaissance in the history of Planet Earth;
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that renaissance that we had back there in Europe, that's a pip squeak thing compared to the renaissance that is now available to us, because of what we now know, and that's the kind of hope that I think is not hard to get onto. I - when students come here - I like to show them a leaf
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and then tell them to look at your watch, because eight and a half minutes from now there is going to arrive from the sun some photons that will land on that leaf and start making sugar. Well, that's wonderful. What can beat that? There's not anything that can beat that, nothing on Wall Street,
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anywhere. It's not there. Now, that's to live for and it ain't hard; it is not hard to get to know those things and that's what I’m wanting us to start talking about is the discovery of the Earth; so far we've only colonized it. >>>Well, we have a killing mentality,
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to get back to your wasp - you know - most people would go slam and kill the wasp, right? We know this. Our chemical agriculture is based on killing all the insects, let's kill off the insects, and - you know - the weeds and stuff like that - you know. We're killing the life of our planet. It's kind of an insanity that somehow we have to... how can we transition away from that agriculture to what you're working on, which is sustainable agriculture which, I think,
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is very exciting the perennial food crops that you've created. I've seen Konza already appearing in the stores which is... I was thrilled to see. Are there other crops and other agricultures that you're working on, that would create a better transition in the future/ >>>Well, yes, we are working on other things. We've got a good group of geneticists and soil people and so on here,
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that are at work. See, here's... here just to put out what our idea is that you don't stop with an organism; you go all the way to the next category called an ecosystem. In other words, this species diversity within an ecosystem along with the non-biota, you know, the soils and the rain
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and the wind and the this and that. Why is it that ecosystems are the only true economies? They are economies. Those are real economies. This other business is not an economy. What it all is is a product of a disruption of the capital that is built within forests and prairies and
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swamps and ...and... and... and... And that is the biggest mistake homo sapiens ever made was to go after all of that, all of those ecosystems, but the larger point is a whole bunch of problems are able to be solved, if we can get in harmony with the ecosystems that gave rise to us in the first place. Yeah, it's yes, that's comical, and it's
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stupid and it's this, that and the other, but we got to begin to imagine a world in which we're in harmony. You know, what happened over there at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean? Once they got those metals? Ah! You could go out and start cutting down forests, and when you started cutting down forests, you can now build ships
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and when you can now build ships, you start going across the Mediterranean and getting involved in other people's business which is none of your business - you know? Why not stay where we were? No, no, no! We got to get over there. Well, of course, if we had not had those trips across that Mediterranean as a result of having the metals to build the ships,
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we wouldn't have ever got to knowing that we're stardust; that we are born of a Universe, and we would not have been able to contemplate our own bodies and think - you know - at one time essentially all of us were within a dying star. You know - that's all wonderful that we can begin
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to think about our journey, you see, but we... until we start thinking about our journey we're going to keep going around trying to set traps for this problem of climate change. You know - we set a trap here and we set a trap there, and we have legislation here and legislation there, and then think that's enough. I think we ought to be asking ourselves: why has the environmental movement
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failed to make the necessary transformation? Let's just start talking to our buddies, all in these non-profits, and for that matter government: Why is it that it doesn't work? Well, we got a big consciousness; we hear one more report about what we must do, you see, and I think we need to move over into the realm of the possible. Now what this book of
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Bob's and mine is about is to say: Look! Better get used to a different life, something different we didn't set out to solve a problem; we set out to get used to a down powering, maybe not 2 billion down to where we were when my brother was born in 1928, no, it may be a… it'll be a bigger number, probably, but
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it's got to be a kind of a goal and how do we get there? Well, anyway, >>>Well, it's our… it's us and it's our stuff and it's our animals. All of that. It's not just human beings; it's all of the accumulation that we have in our first world. We're all at an unsustainable level. In the rest of the world people are in some way better adapted for the transition,
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although climate change is going to hit people in the Global South first and very hard, which is extremely sad and unfair, unless we, in this first world, stop consuming our brains off to all these unnecessary things we're creating in our present time. >>>You know, I’d like to go back to something Wes said - you know - traditional and indigenous cultures are often presented in
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opposition to modern culture and the scientific revolution, and I think Wes made a point that's quite important: the reverence for the Earth that one sees in indigenous and traditional cultures is not in opposition to modern science. Wes was saying that modern science should deepen our capacity for that reverence, because as we learn more about the biophysical realities of the planet
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the wonder of it should expand. Sometimes people say that - you know - science desacralized, took the sort of magic and wonder out of the world, but I think Wes is right, it's just the opposite. So we're not talking about going back and we're not talking about just a g-whiz future. We're talking about the merging of those two; that's where we live. How will we solve the ecological crises? Well, it won't just be by trying to magically transport
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ourselves back a few hundred years and it won't be by trying to invent our way out of it. It will be by utilizing science in this broader goal and I think, at the Land Institute, that's what Wes has established using modern science, genetics, plant breeding, to try to create a world that can, as Wes used the phrase earlier, down power, because Wes is exactly right, I think ,
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whether we want to or not, we are going to move into a down powering. There is really no other option. It's what Wes has long called a 'sunshine future'… the sunshine future is inevitable whether we get there reluctantly, fighting it, or whether we embrace it, I think, is the real question. >>>>Yeah, I have one other thing to say to be sure that we're clear: you mentioned animals
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and we think about animals as what we call I think it's dumb to say that, but ‘sentient beings’. I don't know if this is correct, but I hope it is, that it wasn't the killing of the animals at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean that contributed to this problem. It was the killing of plants,
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the getting rid of natural ecosystems that feature the plants, and it was the iron or the ore that allowed us to cut trees to build the ships. We may not have lost a single species of animal, but we've got to be thinking about the creature laid-ness of all of this that includes both the plants and the animals. There tends to be - I think - too
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much of an ignorant… ignoring of what we are doing, say, with the loss of rain forest - you know – we… I have grandchildren that won't eat animals and I don't either much anymore, but the… it's the creaturely world and it's not creatures only. It is that non-living world
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that was brought into existence because of the creatures that were at work. So, how did the oceans get salty? They got salty because it rained and came down upon the land and then that washed into the ocean and now we have more salt in the ocean than when the planet was first formed. And if it hadn't been for that - you know - those ancient seas
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taking that salt set the pattern of ions in our blood - you know - we are the product of rainfall on land that took salt to the sea and now here we are. Now, that's wonderfully interesting to know and if that isn't enough, think about the geese that fly over the Himalayas. Why are they able to fly over the homeland Himalayas? Well, because they're descendants of
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dinosaurs. Back at a time in which there is less oxygen in the air and the less oxygen in the air sets it so their bones were more hollow and therefore could hold more oxygen and therefore they hang on to that for goose hood to go over the Himalayas. Now, look at what a world we got and that's knowable; that was not knowable ten thousand years ago.
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It wasn't knowable five thousand years ago; it was not knowable at the time of Darwin. >>>So we are wiser, we know more, perhaps we're wiser from it, but so far we haven't used that wisdom to save ourselves, but you know, all of these things - as you say - are treasures of humanity and we should have - you know - hopeful attitude, I love that,
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toward our future because we do still live on this incredible planet with this incredible system of Nature of which we are a part. Well, thank you both very much for this conversation! It's been really enjoyable to talk to you and to gain some of the wisdom that you have accrued over the years. Thank you! Good to talk to you, too.
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you
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