Unlocking Abundance: How Rob Avis and 5th World Are Revolutionizing Site Planning

Rob Avis—designer, educator, and founder of 5th World—is using cutting-edge technology to transform how we design resilient and abundant landscapes. In this episode, Rob shares how his journey from petroleum engineer to permaculture leader inspired the creation of 5th World, a company that merges data intelligence with ecological design.

After working with thousands of students and designing hundreds of properties, Rob saw a major challenge: critical site data—such as climate patterns, property timeline scans, ecosystem services, topography, soils, hydrology, solar exposure, and zoning—was expensive and difficult to access. With 5th World, that information, which once cost tens of thousands of dollars, is now available at a fraction of the price.

This conversation explores:

• Why poor site planning can lead to costly mistakes and long-term problems.
• How data-driven insights can unlock better design decisions and regenerative lifestyles.
• The path to creating landscapes that are resilient, abundant, and regenerative.
• Rob’s vision for bringing ecological design into the mainstream.

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The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast is an independent show exploring the people, projects, and capital reshaping how land gets used and communities get built. Two organizations grew directly out of this work, and they're worth knowing:

Hamlet Capital finances and advises on projects that integrate agriculture and conservation with mixed-use development. If you're building one or looking to invest, let's talk.

Latitude is a real estate brokerage representing sanctuary properties rooted in nature, beauty, and meaningful living.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

I don't think we're sus we're inherently destructive at all. I think we lack the proper feedback. And that when you give people the right information, that they do the right thing, people are generally good. We don't have a world filled of bad people that are out there consciously plotting on how to destroy the earth. We just lack the information. We're ignorant in the most positive sense of the word.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

A show about human environments and how they can be used as a force for good. Conversations that educate and inspire people looking for a different way to do real estate. I'm Neil Collins, and on this episode, I'm joined by Rob Avis, founder of Fifth World, who is using cutting-edge technology to unlock resilient site plans and abundant landscape design. The other day, I got a call from a friend who had just purchased 20 acres of land. He has big dreams of creating a retreat center, building cabins, restoring the forest, and shaping ponds and meadows. But as soon as the ink dried on the closing papers, the excitement turned to overwhelm. And I get it. Working with land isn't simple. It's multidimensional. You know, plants can be moved, but the infrastructure like roads, utilities, fences, and buildings, those come with higher stakes. Poor design decisions can cost tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and ripple into issues like erosion, flooding, and even a reduced quality of life. That's why I'm so excited to bring Rob onto the show. Rob is a well-known Canadian designer and educator with a fascinating journey from petroleum engineer to permaculture leader. After teaching over 5,000 students and designing hundreds of properties, he saw a glaring need for high-quality data to guide better site plans and landscape designs. This led to the creation of Fifth World, a company that merges data intelligence with design expertise. Rob and his team have taken information that once cost $25,000. Things like climate data, topography, soils, hydrology, solar exposure, and zoning, and made it accessible for just a fraction of the price. Maybe it's the engineer and Rob, but his solutions-driven practical approach is exactly what I think is needed to bring ecological design into the mainstream. So without further ado, let's get into it with Rob Avis of Fifth World. I've been looking forward to this. And I'm pretty sure that this is a true statement, but you are the first petroleum engineer by training on this show. So welcome to the Regenerative Real Estate Podcast. It's good to have you on. I want to pick it up there. You know, I love your story. I was listening to a podcast uh with an Irish guy that you did in preparation who was a really funny character. And it's like, that's right. I know Rob's story. How do you introduce yourself to people, Rob, about who you are and what you do?

SPEAKER_01 3:42

I grew up in a cake factory. So I'm actually from industrial food before I was in the petroleum industry. We would produce 100,000 cakes a day. Most of the material that made those cakes traveled through kilometers of pipe. And I didn't really know any different. It was just, in fact, when I was growing up in that context, I thought I was going to become an engineer to design machines to make cakes. Uh, and then I ended up going to university and I studied mechanical engineering and uh ended up following my wife to the oil and gas industry in Calgary, worked as a facilities engineer, and was the guy that was cutting all the forest down uh in order to bring natural gas and oil to refineries. Environmentalist at heart, I remember watching the Amazon Rainforest, a video of the Amazon Rainforest coming down when I was seven years old. And I wrote the prime minister at the time and uh was just crushed by it. And here I was now responsible for the same thing in the boreal forest and had this massive conflict in my head because how can I criticize an industry that I'm supporting as a consumer? You know, I drive to work, I heat my house with natural gas. I can't sit around and criticize an industry that I'm actively supporting by buying those products. And so everybody we talked to in the oil and gas industry, my wife and I basically said, well, we're gonna use oil and gas forever. Like there's no alternative. And um, I ended up getting a YouTube video from Jeff Lawton. He didn't send it to me. A friend of mine sent me his greening the desert video. And then I pulled out a calculator as engineers do, figured out I had 600,000 hours of life on this earth, and I'd burned through about a third of them at the time. And I asked myself, how do you want to spend the next two-thirds of your life? Do you want to continue maintaining status quo, or do you want to do something like this guy is doing? I didn't know who Jeff was at the time. So my wife and I quit our jobs. We traveled to Denmark. We lived in community actually, in a renewable energy institute, which was the birthplace of the Vestis wind turbine company in northern Denmark. We then uh traveled through all of Europe looking for alternatives because apparently in Calgary there weren't any. Well, Europe was actively building them. We were pretending like there weren't uh alternatives. And then permaculture came back up. We converted a Westphalia van to run on vegetable oil, 1983 Westphalia van. We traveled through the US and Mexico working on farms because we figured that Denmark had figured out how to repower the world. We needed to figure out how to refeed the world. And then I ended up on an island not very far from where you are today. Uh, I took my first PDC at Orcas Island with the Bullock brothers. And I uh remember in that course looking at my wife and saying, I'm gonna teach this. And she's like, You're crazy. You're not a biologist. Like, how are you gonna teach permaculture? And so we both quit our jobs and uh started Verge Permaculture almost 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

Oh man. It's amazing to do that with your partner. Uh I love how you said that you followed her into the oil and gas industry. Have you been on similar journeys? Has that always been a working and intimate relationship for you?

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Mostly so. Somewhere in that whole journey, I ended up in an environmental design course at the University of Calgary. I was auditing it, and they played the movie The End of Suburbia, which is all about peak oil and about how poorly our communities are designed, and they're designed basically around a high energy input like fossil fuels. And I remember driving up to her cabin one weekend, and I looked at her and I'm like, you know, one day we might have to be driving horses and buggies. And she just, her mind would just wouldn't accept that reality. And I remember it was like a pretty heated conversation because she had just never contemplated the embodied energy of a fossil fuel and what it actually would mean if we actually physically ran out of, or at least I think running out is the wrong analogy. If if we actually ended up in a situation where we were in a decline, so we were producing less and less every year, uh, what the implications would be for transport, for finance, for for heating. It just was had never come into a reality. And so that was a really hard conversation. But I would say that I am the luckiest man on earth uh to be married to Michelle because she's uh we're very supportive of each other.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

It's incredible. It's funny you you mentioned Jeff Lawton and and really finding the that first intersection with permaculture there. And you can watch his videos, especially the ones in Australia. I know he's done a lot in Jordan. You're seeing him harvest all kind of like plantains and bananas and mangoes and avocados, and it's just like overwhelming tropical abundance. You are you are far from the tropics, my friend. I'm curious how how you really found your way as a Canadian into permaculture. That's that's not something that I hear come up very often, but what what was that learning journey like?

SPEAKER_01 9:00

Well, I I sought out other permaculturists that could uh that I could hire to teach our courses initially. I ended up actually studying with Jeff for six months. I traveled to Australia in that arc as well. And I lived on his farm and I traveled to other permaculture properties in Australia. What's really interesting about permaculture is that while the the plants are different, the climate is different, ecosystems still fundamentally operate under similar principles. The biggest challenge that I would say uh we have in Canada for this concept or this idea, even even I would argue where you live, is that most people don't think that the systems are broken. So you think about Canada, we have an incredible amount of energy, we have mostly intact soils when you compare it to other parts of the world. Uh we have the most forests, we have the most water, we have a really low population density. So to be the guy that's saying, well, you know, we've got all these global issues with nutrient density and eroding soils and deforestation and climate change, most people aren't there. They're they're just they they go to Costco and they see shelves full of products that are shiny and they look really great. And our taste buds at least tell us that they taste good, even though they probably aren't very good. And so there's a lot of cognitive dissonance that you have to overcome. And what was so interesting about teaching permaculture was that the majority of our students were, I call them in-the-closet greenies. And so they were from the oil patch. They would show up kind of with their tail between their legs, not sure if they should be seen taking this uh heretical, you know, thing called permaculture, like what would their colleagues think of them? But but deep down they were worried about what was going on in their job, and they didn't see too many outlets for solutions. It was just like business as usual, keep doing this, we don't have to worry. But like they knew something wasn't right.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

Why did you have the comment to your wife, I'm gonna teach this? What what was it about that entrepreneurial activity that drew you into that?

SPEAKER_01 11:18

Uh it was less about entrepreneurialism and more about being this part of the solution. I think if it was truly entrepreneurial, I probably wouldn't have gone into teaching permaculture. It's a tough way to make a living. But I mean, I think I didn't have the words for this at that point, but I think everybody could probably understand this now if I if I kind of go through it a little bit. But there's kind of three main paradigms. And they existed back then and they're really apparent now, and they've become more apparent in the last, even in the last six years. The first one I would say is the conventional paradigm. And so this is business as usual. You know, society operates this way, has for a long time. We got to keep it going. It's, you know, raise the GDP uh by 3% every single year, do whatever we need to do in order to do that, even if that means shedding negative externalities onto ecosystems. So essentially everything we do in the conventional system is a form of mining, essentially. And so we just extract, value add, and sell. And uh we create landfills, we use the atmosphere as a landfill with CO2, and uh just kind of assume that everything's gonna somehow work out. The second paradigm is a sustainable paradigm. It's the this idea you and language is really important in understanding the sustainable paradigm. And so um we see things like uh net zero, we see things like zeroscaping. And when we look at what the meaning behind those statements are, those symbols, those words, the idea is that sustainability people know that the conventional system is broken, we need to change away from it. But at best, humans can have a neutral footprint on the earth, even this concept of a footprint. And the concept of a footprint is very very negative. And so we're trying to do the most that we can to reduce the size of that footprint. And then the third paradigm, um, and I'll come back to the sustainable one in a second, is the regenerative paradigm. Uh, if the most negative thing that the human humans have ever done was build a nuclear bomb, let's say, um, the regenerative paradigm asks, what's the most positive? What if we put all that energy that we put into building the nuclear bomb into actually making the world a regenerative space? And that's the regenerative paradigm. Now, if you run the sustainable paradigm out to its logical conclusion with this idea that humans are inherently destructive, that's in all the media that you read every day on the subject. They never say that, they never say those words, but it's implied, then the logical conclusion to the sustainable paradigm is the elimination of humans, because at best, we can just be a little bit less negative. When you think about humans through the lens of an ecologist, you can look at, for example, a bird. A bird is a great example. If I was to take a bird in a cage and put it in the front of a university classroom, and then tell the classroom, okay, I'm going to teach this bird how to fly, and I go through Bernoulli's principle and I go through all the laws of physics that govern flight, and then I open the cage of the bird and the bird flies out, I'll be like, hey, look, look at this. I just taught this bird how to fly. In real reality, the bird already knew how to fly. It was born with the ability to understand flight without me having to teach it the Bernoulli principle. When we look at humans through that same lens, and you've got kids, what's the thing that every child uh that's common amongst every single child in the world? Doesn't matter which country you're from, like when you have a kid, what is the one thing that every kid knows how to do?

SPEAKER_00 15:07

Gosh, they know how to walk. They'll learn how to walk, they'll learn how to talk. Where are you going with this? I'm curious. They create chaos. That was my first impulse. And then I was like, I can't, I can't I say that on on air.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Yeah, they they create chaos so much so like any system oversupplied with energy goes into chaos, and kids are a perfect example of that. And and so, what is like if a bird is meant to fly and humans naturally create chaos, what does that mean? In my my interpretation of it is that we are meant to have a footprint. Like we shouldn't be shy about it. The problem is not the footprint, the problem is how we apply the footprint. And and and the best way to think about this is the beaver, actually. And so a beaver will come into an ecosystem and it will rip all the trees down. It'll dam up a small creek. I have eight families living on my property now. The owner before me was shooting all of them. We've let them live now, and they've we've got millions and millions of gallons of water stored behind these creeks now. And to the untrained eye, they'll come in and say, wow, this is such a mess. Like these beavers have destroyed this ecosystem. They've cut all these beautiful trees down and look at the mess they've made. But what's actually happening is that's the footprint of the beaver. The beaver is creating disturbance. The result of that disturbance is stored water. The result of that stored water is edge. The result of that edge is a 28 times increase in biodiversity. And so the footprint that the beaver creates actually creates the conditions for more life to exist. We have the power of disturbance and we're really, really powerful, a really powerful species. We create a lot of disturbance. But the issue is that we've lacked the information until probably in the last 20 years, actually. We've been creating massive disturbance since the beginning of the industrial revolution to fully comprehend the destruction that we create. And so we can redirect that disturbance pattern that humans do inherently to create exactly what Jeff Lawton describes in Greening the Desert. So Jeff basically took a D6 bulldozer and a bunch of knowledge and he recontoured the land and he transformed how that land interfaced with water. And by doing that, fungi came back. The fungi locked up the salt. The salt made it possible for trees to grow. So the difference between the greening the desert site and the oil sands of northern Alberta, where I live, is scale, time, placement, and form. And so you get the scale right, you get the placement right, uh, you get the timing right, and you get the form right. And all of a sudden, now we're not creating downward spirals, we're creating upward spirals. And this is the power of permaculture. And this is what I learned through studying all of this and why I wanted to teach it, was because I recognized really early on at that Bullock Brother course, uh, and even before that, I just didn't have words for it, that Jeff Lawton was using his life energy and fossil fuels and equipment and machines and technology to actually create more life, not take it away. And I was actively in the oil and gas industry using the same machines, the same technology, and I was taking away the possibility for life. We were both creating disturbance, but we one was doing it in a pro-ecology way, and I was doing it in a way that was just supporting the conventional system.

SPEAKER_00 18:37

That that's incredible. Uh and that really leads me into the wording of regeneration. Do you find that is synonymous with permaculture?

SPEAKER_01 18:49

We all love to use different words to describe things. I am a true believer of like what Bill Mollison laid out in the design manual. I think that um very few people can actually make it through that textbook. It's very dense. But if you go back to the original concepts that he presented, not in a dogmatic way, but just the guy was so far ahead of his time. And I think the way that I see permaculture being executed today, not everywhere, but I I think it's lost the essence that at least some places have lost the essence of what Bill was originally intending for it. And I think the reason it has is not out of any kind of nefarious or kind of ill will. It's just that what what he laid out in that book is very hard because you're you're dealing with hydrogeology, building design, politics, like community design, fauna, flora, earthworks. Like he there's so much in there. It's a huge, huge book. Regeneration, I would say, is is more narrowly focused. And so I think you can use permaculture ideas in how you create regeneration. And I would say that there is regeneration built within the concepts of permaculture, but permaculture realizes that the solution to most of the problems that we face today are societal. The techniques are actually quite easy, and regeneration would focus more on the techniques of regenerating ecosystems. But if you don't change how people relate to that ecosystem, there's nothing saying that all that work that you've done, all that life energy that you put in to regenerate that ecosystem won't get torn down when you die. And so this is why the ethics of permaculture were so crucial, which is care of people, care of earth, and future care. And the future care is that indigenous belief of seven-generation thinking. So that's one of the core pillars of permaculture. The other one is like stop being a victim. Take responsibility for your home and garden and that of your children first. Don't go and blame your problems on other people. Take responsibility for what you have the ability to control before you go out and get mad at other people for destroying the world. You're part of that system. And until you change, you can't ask others to change either. We can go regenerate land, but if we don't change the way people look at land and how they interface with it and understand the importance of that landscape to the health of them and their future generations, we haven't actually succeeded. And the hardest part of all of this is not the swales, it's not the planting of trees, it's cultural shifting, cultural change. And I actually think one of those pillars is actually how do we unlock the finance? Because I think there's enough knowledge now that we could regenerate planet Earth in in 10 years. If we had the resources of the US military, we could do it in 10 years. Like when you look at how much money we spend on trying to destroy each other, it would be a matter of like coordinating and teaching enough people. People want to do this stuff, but there's not enough money for everybody that wants to do it to do it.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Yeah. And and it's interesting because I I from my exposure to permaculture, it's not a a couple people that are trying to do this and and that's where the solution lies. But how do you get that out into millions of people making smaller actions uh and really trying to shift culture, as you say. And I think this is where this intersects with my work is that real estate is the intersection of so many different things between economics, finance, home, livelihood, family. We do not, though, and I'm gonna generalize of we do not see ourselves as living within an ecosystem. And so it's almost like the sentiment is that, yeah, I've got either my postage stamp or my acreage that I'm living on, but what where are we at with this adoption, I guess, of of having that vision of millions of people making small actions? Do you do you put this on that kind of linear graph of you know, there's the early adopters and and that crest into mainstream? Like what how do you think about where we're at in this time with people's ecological literacy in our dominant culture? It's a super hard question.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

Uh I know that like the way permaculture scales is through millions of nodes. And I I I'm currently not teaching right now, and I'm not super connected into many folks that are teaching. And so we saw massive, massive growth during COVID. And I I believe that these movements ironically they benefit from a bit of chaos uh because people realize how fragile the world actually is when we enter into these periods of time. So we taught more students during uh four years of of the pandemic uh than we had taught in the the first 10 years of of teaching. In fact, we taught more students in the first year of that crisis than we did in the first 10. Uh it was like people who were that aware of what was going on in supply chains and being concerned. It was more about self-preservation than it was about ecological preservation. And I think that's the insight that that the PDC or the permaculture design course gives to people is that they may go there initially out of self-preservation, but they leave knowing that the best way to preserve uh myself, my family, future generations is by recognizing that I am completely and utterly dependent upon the health of the ecosystem that I steward. And so we call it enlightened self-interest. So the most self-interested people in the world are actually ecologists that are trying to save ecosystems because they're doing it because they know that we depend upon them. And so a PDC is a really great way to uh help people to have that insight. And I think there's there's we've barely scratched the surface, is my current opinion right now. Life is so easy. And again, like when we when we teach these courses and we say things about the state of the world, there's a lot of cognitive dissidence that happens because it's it's hard, especially in a place like Canada, to see uh the problems that we discuss. Um, you really have to travel the world and and go to other places with the right lenses on, even. I mean, like you can drive through the prairies up here and see a beautiful I use air quotes here, beautiful canola field. And the average person will say, Oh, that's that's absolutely such a stunning landscape. And it's like, no, that's an industrial landscape. That's a landscape void of life, void of insects, void of birds, because we've denuded it, we've removed what was there to basically grow one thing. I think there's a lot of work to be done on eco-literacy and let letting people like giving them the information so that they can look at a landscape through a different set of lenses. I've been on LinkedIn now for a little while and I've met some amazing people. I met this functional medicine doctor, and I asked her, you know, do you see similarities between kind of the permaculture movement, regen movement, and the work that you do with with patients? She's like, oh, so much. And I said, Do you think, like, how quickly do you think we can we can turn the ecology thing around? She's like, well, if if this is dependent upon humans changing behaviors, like the the people that I see on a regular basis typically have to reach rock bottom before they will change their lifestyle, which was a really stark thing for me to hear, a little bit disheartening. And I hope that we don't have to reach rock bottom before we we can make that cultural transition. But my work is definitely growing. We're seeing more interest in what we do. I know that there's there's probably, I read a report from the UK, there's probably over a million and a half people around the world practicing permaculture. So it's a bit of a silent revolution. And uh Mollison's got this wonderful essay in his book, uh his autobiography, about how like the sun never sets on permaculture. There's more people in in the world doing permaculture than there are people actively working in the UN, and none of them are expecting a paycheck. And so it's really hard to know where the movement sits because we're all just silently waking up every morning, building our own properties, demonstrating optimism and positivity, and slowly in a positive way, infecting people with this better way of living. It's not about guilt, it's about moving towards what's better for you and for your family. Um, and so my hope is that we wake up one day and we don't even need the word anymore. It's just, it's just the way that we live. People are moving in that direction. But we need more people teaching, we need more people practicing.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

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SPEAKER_01 29:55

So my dream is to work in places like the Baja or Africa, places that are highly degraded, where uh small actions can make massive differences. I'll get there eventually. Most of my work has been helping individuals because uh it's the aggregate of all of our individual life choices that ultimately will uh direct humanity towards the future. I get a lot of joy. I've I've received a lot of joy. I've received a lot of um, I I've often said for every dollar I have in the bank, I have 10,000 in relationships through all the teaching that I've done, uh working with people. We've built a lot of social capital within the permaculture space up here in Alberta. Fifth world, fifth world's mission is planetary regeneration within a generation. And we want to do that through the acceleration of renewable energy, decentralized food and water. And uh we've just launched a tool that we've been building for the last four years uh that we think has the potential to unlock a lot of these opportunities. It's called Regen Tracker, and we kind of jokingly call it Fitbit for Planet Earth internally. The idea is that if we could, if we can measure the health of an ecosystem quickly with a low marginal cost, we know that when humans get data, whether it's this the weight scale at home or the Hume body pod or the whoop or the Fitbit, that people change their behaviors uh with data. Up until recently, like till to today, actually, like most people doing regen work post before and after photos, which is great. And it's it's stark, it's stunning, it's beautiful, it's like it's very hopeful. We want people to keep doing that, but we want to show that they've improved the health of their ecosystem by X number of percent in these categories. And so we have the ability now to scan a reference site within 20 miles of any property on Earth, and then we can scan the property of interest. We can go back six years in time, and we can measure how that ecosystem has changed as a result of human activity in heterogeneity, uh, vigor. So the amount of photosynthesis, the patch dynamics, the conductivity, and the ecosystem services. And eventually, we would like to find ways to use that data to unlock new financial tools so that we can spawn an entrepreneurial revolution so people can actually get paid to learn and paid to do the work that so many people want to do. And that's the birthplace of that little tool. And so we can scan anywhere on earth. And we're we're actively scanning regen farms right now. Uh, and we do all of this uh scanning before we do any kind of project for folks.

SPEAKER_00 32:52

That's really interesting. I are you tied in towards that ecosystem restoration, like the private markets of that and uh biodiversity credits and carbon credits. Is that the direction that you're talking about?

SPEAKER_01 33:06

It's it's a possible direction. Uh the biodiversity space right now is uh experiencing massive growth, and they're trying to figure out what that uh objective measurement mechanism actually is, and we're having some conversations in that space. Primarily, uh, we're working for individuals. Uh, so when we show up on a property, we'll get a good sense of kind of where the property has come from and where it's potentially going to go to and how we can intervene in strategic places in order to ensure that the health of that ecosystem improves. And yeah, we'll we'll have to continue trying to find other fits for it, but it's primarily like estates, properties, farms, municipalities, and even there's a couple of conversations with corporations right now where they want to look at how their activities are influencing pieces of property that they own.

SPEAKER_00 33:59

Fifth World is really an interesting company for us to interface with at latitude because we have clients that are very interested in that transformation process whenever they're buying property. You know, we we span the world between residential and farm, and and that's urban and rural. And so with region tracker and the tools that you're putting together at Fifth World, is it for a particular size property? Like if you're doing remote sensing, it's really hard to get down to, or I'm not even sure if it's useful to get down to the scale of an urban lot in Vancouver, BC. Where's the sensitivity for that?

SPEAKER_01 34:43

So for the health score, uh, we have access to 10 meter pixels, so 30 foot per pixel. So half an acre to an acre would probably be kind of a minute, like if an acre is 45,000 square feet, you know, you'd have quite a few pixels on that. With regards to an urban property, we'd want to look at a neighborhood to see kind of like the city repair project would be a great, like if there was a neighborhood in Portland where they were actively uh re-vegetating, you know, the boulevards or the the verge or the fringe, we could pick up what was going on on a neighborhood scale quite effectively. An urban lot would be too granular for any kind of major insights. And the human eye would do a much better job of kind of assessing, you know, you you inherently know when you walk up to a permaculture property, there's bees buzzing and there's birds in the trees. And so human would be better for that kind of sensing, if you will.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

It's funny, uh, we we did have Mark Lakeman on, who, for those listeners out there that that don't know the um what you had just mentioned with the city repair project, like Mark even, I don't even know if he mentioned this in the podcast, but I just because I know him personally, they on their city block in Portland, Oregon, they took down all the backyard fences. You know, what is that, 12, at least 12 different homes. I think it might even be 24. It became a big comment. And I just think one, you need to to really enroll a lot of stakeholders to do that. So there's the long work of being place-based, which isn't a a bad thing, especially it's probably one of the needed elements to regenerate real estate. But just the ability to invite people in that conversation, and then you can actually track what those differences can look like to revitalize an area and how that can spill over. So let let me go in into this new direction to continue down the the fifth world theme because I am I'm really intrigued with fifth world. I really am trying to figure out how we can actually work with you guys. I I see tremendous value in linking up these tools of what you're developing, particularly at the point in time where property transitions. It's kind of been our Trojan horse. We we never really were married to the real estate transactional profession, the realtor profession. And in some senses, I've had a bit of an allergic reaction to it. Uh, but it was a really interesting way in which you can create business and livelihood at a point in time that I sense there should be a catalyst or a big lever there for people to get into things. Who are those customers that Fifth World is attracting? And what is the process of engagement? I'm very curious where you find them, who they are, and then what where you take them to and in the journey that they go on?

SPEAKER_01 37:55

So so they usually find us, and it's really difficult to kind of pin down one persona or one type of person that would come to us. What I mean by that is we're not just attracting engineers or we're not just attracting architects or like a specific profession. They are an eclectic group of individuals that are very aware of uh global issues. Some people are motivated by kind of environmental action and wanting to leave a legacy. And so that could be things like rewilding or growing more all of their own food because they recognize that when they buy their apples from New Zealand, there's a consequence to that, whether they feel it or not. That that would be kind of one group of folks. There's other people that are very concerned about financial markets, food security, energy security. They know that by taking responsibility for themselves, they're actually making a societal benefit as well because there's less load on the system. We've seen a couple of fairly substantial crises over the last 20 years. I mean, we had a major flood in Calgary, for example, where a bunch of my clients came to me because they were without power. Uh, the city almost ran out of water because of the flood that occurred. And so they never wanted to be in that situation again. So they just wanted to take a little bit more responsibility for where their water and power came from. There are other folks that are aware of the great nutrient collapse that's occurring right now. And so our food has, in some cases, 100% less nutrient in it than it did 100 years ago. And so, as you see on LinkedIn or other social media platforms, there's there's a lot of functional medicine doctors out there that talk about eating foods without pesticides or eating organic. Very few people are talking about the fact that even the organic food doesn't have a lot of substance in it. And the only real way to get good, nutritious food is either by knowing the farmer and their practices and having a relationship with them, which is a great option, by the way, because we need to support our farmers, or growing it yourself, or at least some of it yourself. And you don't have to do all of it, but growing a little bit makes a huge impact on uh on your health. Um, so that would be kind of a few of the types of folks that we would see. Yeah, just worried about global issues, worried about their own health, wanting to create a legacy.

SPEAKER_00 40:21

You know, I I've spent a so much time thinking around the nutritional aspect of this. I might have told this story for listeners on the podcast before we we went to graduate school in Vermont, and behind the school was a heirloom apple farm. And they grew 119 different types of apples that went back hundreds of years. And they were saying, you know, you would need 99 apples to equate to the same apple 100 years ago in nutritional density. And it just it blew my mind then and it still perpetually blows my mind. And it seems like the luxcon around having local, nutritionally dense, organic, and regeneratively grown food is finally starting to get there. And that's certainly a mouthful, but we've seen it in the United States elections around how people are voting, how people are spending their money, and and it makes total sense. How do we start to optimize our personal environments and our personal ecosystems and our homes to really cater towards nutritionally dense foods and why I love this? It's so generative and and that like how do you educate and attract a lot of people? Like you feed them really quality, delicious food. Like whenever we didn't even know that regeneration as a movement, much less a word, existed, and we're still really wrapping our minds around sustainability, we're hosting dinners and calling them a sustainable future is the flavorful future. And I think that's that is the abundant, beautiful paradigm of how you invite people into a life-giving movement. And hopefully people are conscious enough to recognize the doom and gloom and sinister side of uh motivation towards that. I do find it funny that you're essentially creating technological products for land regeneration. What's your relationship to that? I'm I'm curious what it's been like to build fifth world as an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_01 42:34

So I have an interesting relationship with technology. I read a really great book by Kevin Kelly called What Technology Wants. And Kevin Kelly is the uh editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, or at least he was when he wrote the book. I'm not sure if he still is. And uh this is the the guy that originally was the editor of the whole life magazine. The Stuart Brands thing, the whole Earth catalog? Whole Earth Catalog, that's it there. And he says, How did I end up kind of being the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine when I thought for most of my life that I was anti-technology? What he realized was that all the stuff in the whole earth catalog was actually human technology and that humans have been developing technology for tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years. And that there's no difference, this is his words, no difference between a scythe and an iPad. I would argue that there are some differences, but they're still fundamentally technology. That's the common theme between the two. I read this book because I was trying to figure out how to basically engage with technology in my household with my kids. I think the the most important message that that Kevin Kelly gives in that book is that the development of technology is inevitable. The direction that it goes is up to us to be part of. And so Fifth World is an opportunity that was created by some of our co founders with the idea that. Data and technology can help do a couple of things. One, this regen tracker piece, I've only told talked a little bit about some of the stuff it does. It does quite a few other things as well. We've taken $30,000 design projects and shrunk them down to $3,000 as a result of being able to use data. So we've seen a 10x reduction in the initial engagement that we would typically start off with, which makes a really big difference when you're trying to create mass adoption. Maybe not everybody's going to design their own property, but if you can bring the marginal cost down for folks and leverage information that is freely available in unique ways, there's a leverage point there. And not everybody can afford a $30,000 design package. So that's one way that technology helps us. There's been experiments with power bills where power companies have put on individual power bills what their neighbor consumes relative to them. And it sets up a really interesting gamification between the two neighbors that are beside you. And when the neighbor to the left or the right of you is consuming less, you get this competitive nature and you want to start competing and figuring out how to use less. And so without ever having to create any incentives, like physical incentives, just by creating objective data that people could understand, a bar chart bar chart, we don't have to get into kilowatt hours, they created social shifts and social change. And so the other way that technology helps us with this Fitbit for Planet Earth, as an example, is that we know that when people start looking at how their behaviors are impacting their land, they will start to make shifts. And we can make better decisions about how those shifts occur. And so we think of an ecosystem as uh as an atom. And so an atom has neutrons and protons in its nucleus. And if you remember back to high school chemistry, uh it has electron orbits outside of it. And so the number of neutrons and protons in the middle will dictate the element. And then chemistry basically assigns probabilities of certain electrons existing in certain orbits. And so if we think of a property in the same way, we know that when certain elements show up on a property, like a specific type of tree, or uh trees and a certain ratio of trees to shrubs, or trees, shrubs, and grasses, those are like the neutrons and the protons of the atom. We don't can't necessarily see the bee from space, or we can't see the hummingbird from space. But we know that if certain constructs exist on a property, or if we go and place those constructs onto a property, that the probability of that biodiversity returning increases exponentially every single year. This is one of the superpowers of data. Like when we come back to the start of our conversation, with this idea that the sustainability movement kind of subversively says that humans are inherently destructive, if you kind of look at the the messaging there, I don't think we're sus we're inherently destructive at all. I think we lack the proper feedback. And that when you give people the right information, that they do the right thing, people are generally good. We don't have a world filled of bad people that that are out there consciously plotting on how to destroy the earth. We just we just lack the information. We're we're ignorant in the most positive sense of the word. And if we can give people the right tools and data, which technology enables, then we might wake up one day and people are managing their properties differently because they have different information and they can make different decisions.

SPEAKER_00 47:59

If you're giving people this data and this information, where do you want them to go? Like what is that path? Are they then able to create a design from that themselves? Is that something that you're bringing on as a design service? Should they work with somebody local that can go observe the site and work with that data? How, how do you see real as you're you're at a really interesting point in time? I want to paint a clearer picture for the people that are like, you know what, I have a property. This would be really interesting for me to get these kinds of tools. And then what can I do with it to continue down that regenerative journey that I want to go on with it?

SPEAKER_01 48:41

So if you're already a regenerative designer or permaculture designer, this is going to supercharge your existing practice because now you can get 75% of your diagnosis work done before you even show up at the property. The map is not the territory, so you still need to go there. But in addition to the health score that we provide, we also do a big data analysis of climate over the last 30 years with an incredible amount of probabilistic analysis. Even though it's it's deduction, we're looking in the past to try and predict the future. We know that there's problems with that, but uh it does give us some ranges that we can start thinking about as a designer. So we do a big data analysis on climate, we do a full topographical assessment and watershed assessment on your property as well as the property around you. And then we do something called a probabilistic design. And so we take all the layers that you learn about in regen design or permaculture and we stack them on top of each other. We put in frost pockets, we put in air drainage, we put in watershed analysis, soil layers, biodiversity layers. If we look at a property, it's overwhelming for most people because they say, well, there's an unlimited number of possibilities for this property. But in fact, if you're trying to do it in a way that is generative, to use your word, it's it's about figuring out what doesn't fit on the property. And so it's a process of elimination. And by kind of figuring out where the best house placement is or where there's water harvesting opportunities, we narrow that down. We're not going to do the work of the designer, but we're going to show where the possible pond locations are, where the best house locations are relative to ecological design principles, passive solar design, renewable energy. We'll help you to figure out kind of what rainwater harvesting systems might work there. We get you 75% of the way there, and then you you take it the last 25%. So as a designer, it supercharges your practice. As an individual, it's the first engagement that you'll have with us if you're wanting somebody to do the design for you. We had a client actually come through the other day and they were looking to place a house on a raw piece of land. They were going to put it into the flood fringe, and our tool picked that up. Even though they're doing the design and build themselves, the tool helped them to find a better location for their house that was not going to be in a risky situation. And then for institutions, think of it as like a really comprehensive due diligence package. Um, so if somebody's trying to buy a piece of property, we can provide due diligence layers that will blow your mind. It may or may not be beneficial to all parties, but uh, but like I had a client wanting to buy a $10 million piece of old growth forest just north of San Francisco. And there was only three building parcels that were allowed on that property. They got zero sun. Our analysis picked that up. She's like, I can't live there. I can't live in a place that's that's got no sun all year round. And the other thing we picked up was that it was, this was before the fires in Los Angeles happened, but it was super fire prone. And the realtor was telling her, you know, don't worry, it's never burned. And we said, like, well, actually, that usually means that it's probably prone to burn. So it can provide layers of data that may not normally be available that can help inform really important decisions, especially if you're motivated by regenerative design or ecology. I would even say, like, if you're worried about climate change, floods, tornadoes, windstorms, like it we all interface with ecology, whether we know it or not. And so this sort of information helps to better position us on the property to manage risk and to take advantage of the bounty that the property can actually provide. Incredible.

SPEAKER_00 52:24

Where can people learn more about uh what you're doing here, Rob? And and what's the what's the interface that they can uh reach out if they have a property or they uh are a developer and landowner, what whatever profession. Uh I think there's there's a lot of different applications, but uh what's the right way to get a hold of Fifth World?

SPEAKER_01 52:47

Just fifthworld.com. Uh I uh publish quite often on LinkedIn. Uh you can check me out over there. And I do have a few uh YouTube videos up on the Fifth World YouTube channel, uh, which shows some of our larger projects that we've done over the years.

SPEAKER_00 53:01

And uh would love to chat with anybody that's interested. Yeah, I will underscore that. I've gone through Rob's presentation of some of the projects that they've worked on with Fifth World. It is really fascinating. It's cool to see how different people, especially the ones that have been in the permaculture movement for a long time, y'all are going in in a lot of really amazing different ways. And so it's so fun to see how you're iterating upon your own experiences and and where you're you're pointing your compass. I think it's gonna be really cool to and and something that we want to start to embed within our processes of of development and working with clients. Rob, with that, I I want to ask you have you done this at at your own property? Like what's your regenerative property look like right now and and how's that going?

SPEAKER_01 53:48

So we have 160 acres. We have 100 acres of forest with 15 kilometers, about 10 miles of trails. And uh we want to keep it that way. So we we love the forest and all of the ecosystem services that it provides. We have a half-acre garden, produce most of our own vegetables. We have a passive solar greenhouse that generates food three seasons out of the year. It gets really cold up here, minus 40. That's when Fahrenheit and Celsius become friends. We just uh completed a deep energy retrofit on our house. We went from uh R22 to R60 in the walls and R30 to R100 in the roof. We use about a sixth of the energy that we did before. Uh went from eight air changes an hour down to one. Really, really high indoor air quality now, which is really important for us. We're just building out our corrals in the next year or two. So we're gonna be producing most of our own proteins. We have a really neat system that we harvest all of the manure off of our corrals. We grow duckweed. Duckweed has got more protein in it than soy. And so one of the things I think we need to start mapping away from is monoculture grain production. And so building farms like ecosystems, as opposed to just building farms and doing the same pattern we've done over the last 10,000 years. So we're gonna demonstrate that. We actively work with the beavers. So they are our best workers, and so they harvest millions and millions and millions of gallons of water for us. We have a solar power pumping system that pumps water to the top of our property into header tanks, and then we have gravity-fed water throughout our property, which we can use for regenerative grazing. Takes a long time to set up all these systems, but all the frameworks are there. Yeah, keep an eye out on our socials. We talk about our designs up uh lots going on up here at the Avis Farm.

SPEAKER_00 55:42

That's the testimonial right there. If you want that, reach out to Rob at Fifth World. You guys are doing really fun stuff. Rob, I appreciate your time and willingness to come on here and really looking forward to working with you guys and more closely with all the fun tools that you've got coming out. So thanks, Steel. Appreciate it. But I don't want this to be a one-way conversation. I'd love to hear about the projects and ideas you're working on. The best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn, just search Neil Collins. And if my team at Hamlet Capital or Latitude Regenerative Real Estate can help bring your vision to life, whether it's buying or selling a home or developing a community integrated within a farm, do not hesitate to reach out. Let's build something meaningful together, but it's a few.