Steve Mushin: Rewilding Rooftops with Chickens & Compost Cannons

Can humanity sign a treaty with chickens to transform urban rooftops into thriving multi-story farms? Join me, Yeshe, as I chat with the incredibly inventive Steve Mushin, author and illustrator of Ultrawild: An audacious plan to rewild every city on earth. In this incredible discussion, Steve talks about his crazy ideas to rewild every city on Earth. From zero carbon technologies to crazy but awesome innovations, Steve's journey is packed with unique projects like the composting cannon and the fantastic Chicken Castle project, where chickens rule the rooftops and serve gourmet sky-delivered omelettes!
Prepare for a mix of ingenious ideas and hilarious moments as we tackle the logistics and challenges of these ambitious projects. Steve shares his insights on transforming every toilet into a compost launcher and the entertaining concept of compostapults—giant catapults inspired by Roman technology to deliver compost to skyscraper farms. Tune in for a fascinating and fun-filled episode that blends visionary environmental solutions with a delightful sense of humour.

Also stay tuned for part two when we come back for another (much longer) chat …

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Transcript

Yeshe 0:00

Good day. My name's Yeshe, and you're listening to Yeshe Interviews. Today I'll be interviewing Steve Mushin, author and illustrator of Ultra Wild. It's a book about an audacious plan to rewild every single city on Earth.

Steve 0:18

Hey Yeshe

Yeshe 0:19

Hi Steve.

Steve 0:20

Great to be chatting with you.

Yeshe 0:21

Yeah, you too. So the first question, how did you come up with all these ideas?

Steve 0:29

That's such a great question. I mean, I don't really know myself. Um the the the ultra wild developed over so many years. It it all began. It it it actually, I mean, it be I'm not quite sure when it began, but but it certainly was bubbling away when I was working at Ceres Environment Park in Brunswick, Victoria. And back then I was involved with a bunch of really cool projects looking at how we could develop zero carbon uh technologies to help transform cities really quickly. And it was while working on those projects that I started developing comedic or sort of satirical versions of my technologies. And bit by bit I started doing more of those designs and exhibiting designs, and one thing followed another, and eventually it turned up as a book.

Yeshe 1:25

Also, you know the first idea, the composting cannon idea?

Steve 1:33

The mechanical megafauna project?

Yeshe 1:35

Uh yeah. Like, how's that gonna work? What if something goes wrong and it blows up the toilet?

Steve 1:43

Uh well look, you know, uh with any kind of um rapid technological deployment that there's always gonna be challenges and and the odd problem. But uh but I think you know I'm hoping that the benefits um, you know, outweigh any unfortunate accidents that occur as we transform every toilet in the world into a compost firing cannon.

Yeshe 2:03

Yeah. Like you said, sure, accidents will happen, but if something goes horribly wrong, we can always say we had no idea what would happen.

Steve 2:14

Exactly. That that's my that's one of my important philosophies in life.

Yeshe 2:20

That's funny. And you know, my favorite project in the book is the Chicken Castle project.

Steve 2:27

Yeah, I'm so glad you like that one.

Yeshe 2:29

The gourmet solar cooked sky delivered omelets.

Steve 2:33

Oh, I mean we need them, we need them really badly. Who wouldn't want to live in a city with gourmet sky-delivered omelets raining from the sky?

Yeshe 2:41

I know, right? Like you just shoot, you go go you go to the toilet, shoot your compost at this skyscraper and get an omelet. What could this come?

Steve 2:53

So so tell me what you liked about that project.

Yeshe 2:56

Well, like I like really cool stuff. And that project's like really cool. Like it's got all those chickens on top of uh skyscraper just laying eggs and turning them into omelets.

Steve 3:10

Yeah, living a good life. It's got lasers, got a lot of lasers.

Yeshe 3:14

I know, that's also cool. And like, what makes you think that chickens won't fall off the skyscraper?

Steve 3:21

Well, chickens are pretty smart. They're incredibly smart. And you know, the whole idea of the Chicken Castle project is that we is that we sign a treaty, that humanity signs a treaty with chickens, with the world's 33, roughly 33 billion chickens. And the deal is they get the world's roofs. So every one of the world's roofs, there's roughly two billion buildings in the world, every roof in the world becomes the domain of chickens. And they turn those roofs into their into their kingdoms and queendoms. Uh, and so these are happy places for chickens. These are these are places where chickens are just doing chicken things, and uh and we give them our compost scraps, and in return, they help us transform every building in the world into a multi-story farm, farm producing vegetables, fruit and vegetables, that is.

Yeshe 4:09

Yeah, so like is there something else about that that you want to tell everyone?

Steve 4:16

Ooh, about the chicken castles projects. Well, there is the whole issue of getting compost scraps to the tops of skyscrapers, which is a conundrum that so far no one has been able to solve. And my proposal is compost to polts. So these are um giant Roman-era inspired catapult systems that are public, publicly available, free to use. You just turn up with your you know buckets of compost, you pour the compost scraps into a special kind of compressor, which compresses the compost into a ball, it pours over some kind of toffee to harden a shell around the ball so it's more aerodynamic and so it holds together in the air. And then you use this public facility to launch your compost balls up to the chickens. And if you can land a compost ball on one of the chicken castles where the chickens live, then you score bonus points that you can use to buy solar cooked sky omelets.

Yeshe 5:13

Cool. And like the first idea before that idea was like you just get like boiled eggs.

Steve 5:23

Oh yes, the whole idea of um boiled eggs rolling down pipes and being able to kind of catch some map popping out of things that look like drain pipes. Is that what you mean?

Yeshe 5:31

Yeah, what makes you think that the eggs won't crack?

Steve 5:34

So, yeah, you're right. So in that in that idea, those were fresh eggs rolling out. I I think what we'd have to do is is kind of an elaborate system of little beds of moss within the pipe. So so little natural cushioning systems at each bend to allow the eggs to to you know move down the pipe, roll and slide and drop around without breaking and and land in in the palm of your hand.

Yeshe 6:00

Yeah, that's cool. And like you know the one with all those 3D printed ro 3D printer and printed robot birds?

Steve 6:11

Yeah, yeah, the 3D printer bird project.

Yeshe 6:14

What makes you think that one trillion 3D printer birds will be fine?

Steve 6:18

Will be will be possible, did you say?

Yeshe 6:20

No, it will be fine to have.

Steve 6:22

Oh, we'll be fine, as in what won't block out the sun or won't take over the world, those types of issues?

Yeshe 6:28

Uh, kinda, yeah.

Steve 6:33

Um, look, that's certainly a lot of robot birds. But but based upon the number of birds that we once had in the sky, it's actually quite a small number when distributed around the world. So um, I mean, I'm speaking to you from Altero in New Zealand, and when humans first arrived here around about a thousand years ago, of course, this was uh this was a landmass that had been isolated from the rest of the world for about 65 million years, and it was a it was a it was a world of birds, and apparently the the sky was just filled with birds, and the bird call was so loud that when early human explorers arrived it was deafening to beer monks. So that's the kind of world I'm imagining. I'm in in in i in in every city I'm imagining that we bring back birds like they once ruled the sky, and so uh a a trillion 3D printer birds is is kind of a a drop in the ocean compared to the the number of real birds that would be flying free in our skies.

Yeshe 7:31

Yeah. And like about the ocean, in the book you said that the tricky bit, even if we did manage to quit fossil fuels like right now, then the tricky bit is pulling down all the fossil fuels we'd already created out of the air.

Steve 7:53

Yeah, that's right. So Ultra Wild begins with a discussion about the the need to sequester carbon or or draw down carbon dioxide that we've produced since the Industrial Revolution. So since the Industrial Revolution, um so about 1775, when we started using steam engines and and and from there moved into burning oil and so forth, we've produced roughly 2,500 gigatons of carbon dioxide. And that's really, really hard to imagine. And that's why in the book I talk about a gigaton being roughly a Mount Everest. So a gigaton of carbon dioxide, if it was all in a giant balloon, um, and and if that balloon was cone-shaped, it would be roughly the size of Mount Everest. And so we've produced two and a half thousand of them. Yes, and so the the the book has a couple of different goals. The the first is we talk about the likely need to draw down a hundred gigatons, and that's to that's to reach our climate goals of having climate chlimate change an increase of no more than 1.5 degrees. So but but but ideally to reverse climate change, to change the damage that we've done, we would ideally need to draw down all 2,500 gigatons of carbon that we've released since the Industrial Revolution. And so the goal, and and I mean, virtually no one talks about that being a possibility, but with rewilding, and rewilding being an incredibly powerful way to sequester carbon dioxide, to draw down carbon out of the atmosphere, it does actually look like you could achieve that. And it it's uh it's one of the wild and ambitious parts of the book is that is that I decided to go there and actually explore whether that could be possible to reverse the damage that we've done to the climate.

Yeshe 9:44

Yeah, well, that would be amazing.

Steve 9:46

Like, how much could we lower the planet's uh warmth by if we did manage to re- Well, I mean, that is an excellent question, and you know, planetary systems are incredibly complex, and I'm certainly no climate scientist, but in the in the process of of creating Ultra Wild, I met with numerous climate scientists, and and that that was one of the questions. And thing uh yeah, I I don't think it's something I can answer easily on the spot like this, but certainly if we were to withdraw down, pull that that extra carbon dioxide or that extra carbon out of the atmosphere, we could eventually return to to our pre-industrial temperatures so that the temperature the the atmosphere that the the Earth had before the Industrial Revolution. So currently, um yeah, so it's a really great question. Um basically the the main goal is not is not spiralling temperatures out of control. So we're currently aiming to limit uh warming by 1.5 degrees, and we're getting pretty close to that now, and that's already causing a lot of trouble around the world that we all know about. And so ideally we stop things right here, and even that is an enormous challenge, but it does look like it is possible or it could be possible to to actually reverse the warming that we've that we've experienced, and that is the the much bigger project that that is talked about conceptually in the book.

Yeshe 11:14

Yeah, wow. Well, I think that's all the time we have, but thanks for talking with me. That was amazing.

Steve 11:23

It's an absolute pleasure. Thanks for your fantastic questions.

Yeshe 11:27

Yeah, you're welcome. That was Steve Mushin on his book Ultra Wild. If you haven't seen it, I do recommend giving it a look because it's a very amazing book. There's much more in it than we've been able to talk about today. We could go on for ages, but that's all the time we have. Thanks for listening, and stay tuned.

Steve 11:54

Yeah, cool. Thanks so much, Yushi. Those great questions. Fire out. I thought you were gonna catch me out with a c few curly ones. Like, whoa, okay.

Yeshe 12:04

That was part one of my chat with Steve Mushin on his book Ultra Wild. Stay tuned for part two when I come back for a much longer chat about a lot more of his ideas on how we can rewild the planet. Thanks for listening and stay tuned.