Nothing Is Waste: Turning Tension Into Common Ground – DTH Episode 340 with Derek Richard Thomas and Alizabeth Thomas

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Derek Richard Thomas spent ten years touring in a rock band, looking out the van window at farm fields tilled flat and left bare. He had studied horticulture before music, and he knew what that does to soil. For a decade, the same sketch kept showing up in his notebooks: a stoneware pot, half-buried, with holes at the bottom so worms can carry food scraps out into the ground as fertilizer.

Alizabeth Thomas spent about a decade in emotional literacy and well-being work, learning from cultures around the world and coaching leaders to think about the ripple effects of their decisions. They met swimming in the Pacific at dawn. When the Palisades fire broke out in early 2025, they watched it from her window in Santa Monica, and that’s when the two halves came together. As Alizabeth puts it, regenerating the soil and regenerating people are the same thing.

Wilk met Derek and Lizzie at the Braver Angels National Convention in Philadelphia, where they performed and presented the Alchemy Pot Experience. In this conversation, they talk about how the Soil Maker works, the practice they use in their own relationship when things get tense, and why they are bringing both into middle school classrooms.

Key Themes

•         Nothing is waste. Food scraps sent to a landfill become pollution. The same scraps buried in a Soil Maker become fertilizer for the ground around it. Derek compares the bottom of the pot to a sourdough starter, a living culture you feed and then spread through your garden.

•         “Can we pot?” Early in their relationship, Derek and Lizzie started imagining a Soil Maker between them during difficult conversations. The words they didn’t want to say went in like food scraps and became soil for connection. It’s a simple tool anyone can borrow for a hard talk at home or at work.

•         Systems built from fear. Wilk describes driving past Midwest fields that look like a vacuumed black carpet, and how different they look from the fields he grew up around in northwest Iowa. Derek is careful not to blame farmers. His point is about how systems get built: much of modern agriculture came out of a post-war drive for food security, and when systems are built from fear, they tend to take more than they give back.

•         Agency in a small act. Wilk hears it all the time: people want to make a difference and don’t know where to start. Lizzie’s answer is that micro choices shape the macro. Every person eats. What you do with what’s left is a choice about which story you want to be part of.

•         Soil inside and out. The Alchemy Pot Initiative pairs Soil Makers outside the classroom with an emotional literacy curriculum inside it. The focus is middle school, the years when kids feel the most and often have the fewest safe places to work through it.

Takeaways

•         You don’t need a policy fight to start making a difference. Start with what you already have, even if it’s just what’s left on the plate after dinner.

•         Hard conversations go better with a shared container. Agreeing on a ritual like “Can we pot?” gives both people permission to put the difficult stuff on the table.

•         Before blaming the people inside a system, look at what the system was built to do and what it was afraid of.

•         Kids can learn that no matter how dry the ground looks, they have the power to make something grow, in the garden and in themselves.

Get Involved

Soil Makers are available for preorder in small batches at alchemypot.com. The Alchemy Pot Initiative brings the program to schools at no cost to them through tax-deductible donations to the Opus One Foundation, its fiscal sponsor. Schools in Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Chicago are already waiting to receive the program. If you know a school that would benefit, reach out through the website. You can also find Derek’s music, including “Common Ground,” on Spotify under Derek Richard Thomas.

About Derek Richard Thomas & Alizabeth Thomas

Derek Richard Thomas and Alizabeth Thomas are the co-founders of Alchemy Pot, built on the principle that nothing is waste. Their Soil Maker turns food scraps into living soil, and the Alchemy Pot applies the same idea to classrooms and workplaces, giving people practical tools to turn tension into a foundation for working together. Derek studied horticulture, spent a decade as a touring musician, and is the author of How to Make Soil. Alizabeth is a writer and abstract artist who designs educational frameworks that connect emotional literacy with regenerative systems, and she has led meditation at peace conferences and global forums. Through the Alchemy Pot Initiative, they bring both tools into schools.

Learn more about and connect with Derek Richard Thomas & Alizabeth Thomas:

Website: https://www.alchemypot.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thealchemypot

Alchemy Pot Initiative: https://www.opus1foundation.org/alchemy-pot-initiative

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