reproductive rights

Empowering Women: The Climate Solution We Don’t Talk About

Otto Pilot — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 23:50:22 +0000

Empowering Women: The Climate Solution We Don’t Talk AboutOtto Pilot Thu, 06/18/2020 - 4:50 pm

Could empowering women power up the climate movement?

We often talk about climate change and gender equality as separate issues. But the truth is that throughout the world, women’s empowerment is directly linked to the climate fight in many ways, from food security and economic independence to education and reproductive freedom.

By 2050, the world’s population could reach ten billion. That means our planet’s food production will need to increase by fifty percent. And in most countries, women make up more than half of the agricultural workforce. But something doesn’t add up, says Ertharin Cousin of Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment.

“We know that, despite that significant percentage of women in the agriculture system, that they don't have equal access to the tools, the finances, the training that is necessary for them to produce the harvest that are required in a climate affected world,” Cousin says. “What that means then is that we can't solve the growing need for food access unless we equally invest in those women.”

Musimbi Kanyoro, former head of the Global Fund for Women, joins the conversation from Nairobi. Rains and floods fueled by climate change have devastated the country in recent weeks.

“People's houses have been swept away,” Kanyoro reports. “A woman who was on the media yesterday talking about…the fact that she was a farmer woman, and in their farm, they had all the harvest was ready for being harvested…and it was all swept away.

“So she has no house to go back to, she has no food, she has no income.”

As humans continue to test the number of bodies that can fit onto a planet of finite resources, empowering women through access to education and family planning may be at the core of establishing a healthy population balance. But for women to take charge of their own lives, families and futures, they will have to overcome some deeply entrenched power dynamics. Ensuring justice for women globally, Kanyoro says, requires that we address the patriarchal system that holds them back.

“It’s a system that gives privilege to male persons and underprivileges the female persons,” she explains. “We as women and men are all victims of it, and we need to be able to speak out against it, to be angry about it and to find ways in which we can be able to right what is wrong in regards to equality…climate change, as well as in the areas of sexual reproductive health.

Kanyoro believes that investing in education is key to solving many of these problems.

“I'm very inspired by the courage of young people, because young people are able to see quite a lot of how these things are interconnected,” she says. “We should invest in women and the leadership of women…and in the education of young people.

“Many young people are really providing leadership in these areas,” Kanyoro continues. “And because they come to these areas without the stigmatization and patriarchy, without being extremely rooted in patriarchy in the way in which older generations have been rooted in, there really can be a future that opens up someplace that we could go to that is a better place than where we are today.”

Additional speaker:
Evelyne Ajwang, Programme Manager MNCH/FP at Pathfinder International

This program was recorded via video on May 21, 2020.

Guests

Ertharin Cousin

CEO and Managing Director, Food Systems for the Future

Musimbi Kanyoro

Former President & CEO, Global Fund for Women

Corrine Sanchez

Executive Director, Tewa Women United

Empowering Women: The Climate Solution We Don’t Talk About

06/19/2020

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton.

Ertharin Cousin: They don't have equal access to the tools, the finances, the training that is necessary for them to produce the harvest that are required in a climate affected world.

Greg Dalton: For women to take charge of their own lives, families and futures, they will have to overcome some deeply entrenched power dynamics.

Musimbi Kanyoro: Patriarchy is a system...that gives privilege to male persons and underprivileged the female persons. We as women and men are all victims of it. [:14]

Greg Dalton: Empowering women - the climate solution we don’t talk about. Up next on Climate One.

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Greg Dalton: Can empowering women power up the climate movement?

Climate One conversations feature oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats, the exciting and the scary aspects of the climate challenge. I’m Greg Dalton.

Ertharin Cousin: I have never in all of my work met a woman who wanted to stand in a line for food. Everyone wants to feed their own children.

Greg Dalton: ...to education, reproductive freedom and power:

Musimbi Kanyoro: 80% of farmers in Africa are women. How are they going to be able to run their work, if every year, every nine months they have another child. It impacts on their health, their ability to be able to work.

Greg Dalton: On today’s program, we'll talk about some of the ways that empowering women and righting gender inequities can make a difference in the battle against climate change. Joining us from their homes are three guests on the front lines of the social justice struggle.

Ertharin Cousin is former Executive Director of the World Food Programme and currently a visiting scholar at Stanford Center on Food Security and the Environment. Musimbi Kanyoro is former President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, and presently Chair of the Board at the United World Colleges. She’s beaming in from Nairobi. And Corrine Sanchez is Executive Director of Tewa (TAY-wah) Women United, a grassroots organization in New Mexico.

Greg Dalton: Last December, Musimbi Kanyoro and about a hundred other women journeyed to the bottom of the world to learn more about climate change.

PROGRAM PART 1

Musimbi Kanyoro: Indeed, going to Antarctica was quite an experience for me. Traveling with women scientists from many different fields meant that we could learn about the impact of these fields because the objective of the trip was a scientific expedition to specifically understand and speak about climate change while experiencing some part of the world where we can see something that you can hold on and hope for and say, if we keep our world safe and secure and do not disturb it, this is what it would look like. Because part of Antarctica is still quite whole.

So we spent time learning six hours every day about climate change in different ways. How does it impact different people different places and how can each one of us take the leadership that is needed. I have always been in the leadership of women and advocacy work and so was already involved in matters of climate change. But what changed me was the ability to be with these women, many of whom such as water managers, engineers from the Heathrow Airport for example, medical practitioners that treat people not only on their physical health but also mental health etc. And really putting together how all of these things come together and we can speak about climate change from many different possibilities using both data from science as well as the experience of people.

And so that trip changed me. It told me that I can actually change the way of speaking and speak about how climate change has impacted the people in the place where I grew up because I know it really well. I grew up where the rivers were flowing and we could see the water. And it’s a farming area and the farmers knew what season were going on what seeds to plant and not to plant. And today, that is not the case. So I joined many other grassroots women to be able to articulate in a language that people can understand about the impact of climate change and not leave it very far up in such a way that not everybody understands what we are talking about.

Greg Dalton: Corrine Sanchez, your activist half was ignited when you attended the Beijing Women's Conference in 1995. Tell us about that journey and also if you felt like you were privileged to be there.

Corrine Sanchez: So for me going to Beijing was an unplanned kind of event because of Tewa Woman United my mother and other women in our community who have been engaged in this work while I was away at school and college they started Tewa Women United when I was graduating from high school. But to be able to come back during the summers and to see the power of women from my community, which is really has been impacted by colonialism and patriarchy and to travel to Beijing and I say this is where my fire for activism and finding my voice and really stepping into that light came as I witnessed thousands and thousands of women coming from all over the globe to just give voice to the concerns of their community. Stories of women that stayed for years and communities that raised money to send one or two delegates or representatives to that space was empowering. And for me, as a young indigenous woman who heard and understood genocide the colonial history of our communities the understanding of what that meant as far as impacts on economics impacts on our access to health and education but was taken away from our communities, our languages and how that was related to environment.

So coming from my Tewa community, my Tewa-Tewa community it’s about the wholeness it’s about the interconnection it’s about understanding what happens across the globe is a direct result of what we’re doing here. And what happens there is a direct result of what we’re experiencing. And growing up with that knowledge was hearing the stories and hearing the songs, right.

And going to Beijing really was a politicizing moment for me because it expanded my circle like I understood that there was these levels of impact that we had but going and hearing the stories of women that were sharing what was happening the continued genocide that is happening in this world. People talk about it being over and done and part of history. But when we talk about the connections with our communities in South Africa. When we talk about our communities in the Philippines, the taking away of seeds of knowledge of that food sovereignty and seed sovereignty and pushing monocropping and pushing that impact and what we know of how that impacts our climate and where we find ourselves. It was there that I realized that I did have privilege even though I am a woman of color, even though I'm indigenous, even though I was young there was still a lot of privilege that I was gifted with in some ways here in my community. And there is a lot of ways that oppression and racism and classism takes that away and takes our power and our voice. But going there and realizing that though I was a survivor of sexual trauma and violence that there were women that faced immediate death and murder. And then also realizing, you know, it took Beijing but realizing that here now in the United States that there are women and families indigenous women as well as African-American women our immigrant communities that face that eminent death, right, because of these different systems and oppressions that are happening.

But in Beijing, I saw the power of women being able to come together to really give voice on all levels, political, down to the mothers that were just trying to reclaim breast-feeding and reclaim birthing in their communities. And being able to bring that back to our community here and to really commit to that transformation that I witnessed in the stands that I witnessed in the small classrooms of women gathering and knowing that this responsibility lays within on my shoulders and also the generations to come.

And so for me, Beijing just lit that fire and it hasn’t stopped and it continues to be that we find the heart that we find the compassion even in those darkest times to make that transformation and the change that we need to. Thank you.

Greg Dalton: Thank you for sharing that. Ertharin Cousin, you’re a daughter of a community organizer and a social worker. Where does your light and fire come from?

Ertharin Cousin: I was born this way. At an early age it was important to my parents that their daughters understand that though we lived in the inner city of Chicago we grew up in a community called Lawndale which is on the west side of the city of Chicago. Lots of books have been written about the challenges of this community. That we were blessed with two parents who had the ability to educate us and to give us an understanding that we were in the community but not of the challenges of that community. And so they often drove us to communities where people have more and communities where people had a lot less. To help us understand to what disparities meant in real terms to real people. And to give us a sense of responsibility for not just self and family and community but ultimately that grew into responsibility for nation. And as my experiences progressed to global community. And recognizing that we have the both the opportunity to and the kind of the circumstances that demand that we all work together to ensure that we can provide for the sharing of prosperity across racial lines, gender lines and color lines. And that does not come unless each one of us accepts that responsibility.

Greg Dalton: So Musimbi Kanyoro, many people hear climate change, they think of a polar bear, maybe a coal fired power plant, maybe a solar panel. They don't think of a woman carrying water or a woman in general. So help us understand the connection between climate and women's issues, women's education and women’s empowerment?

Musimbi Kanyoro: Those associations, with say polar bears not being able to have a place to be comfortable are relevant and they are important, or us retaining a global warming of 1.5 degrees is a good scientific knowledge. But indeed they are difficult for most shall I say normal people to understand and associate with. They’re not wrong, they’re just difficult. And sometimes they do not tell people to engage. Those of us that are working now in the area of climate change, have begun to use a frame of climate justice. And when we use the word climate justice, the really focus is to try to think of about the people that are impacted by the climate change. So that we can be able to tell the story in such a way that people can actually associate it with something that they can identify with.

So for example, there are rains and floods going on right now, as I speak to you in my own country, people's houses have been swept away. A woman who was on the media yesterday talking about her family, talked about the fact that she was a farmer woman, and in their farm, they had all the harvest was ready for being harvested. And some of it sold, some of it used in the farming and it was all swept away. So she has no house to go back to, she has no food, she has no income. And then she showed her two children, small children, who are likely to be probably affected by pneumonia or bilharzia or any of the other water borne diseases and coal diseases. And then we are at the time of the COVID-19 as well. These people, these communities could not talk anymore about distancing themselves, distancing themselves from each other. They could not talk about wearing masks. They could not talk about anything that we have in place about cleaning their hands, because the water flows that are coming out of the floods, are no longer clean water to clean their hands. All of that was swept away.

Now, if you link that, what has happened in that place too, what has been happening in regards to climate change that these droughts, these floods, their impact on people, and their impact on communities, and the vulnerability of those communities that are poor. And specifically this woman whose name I'll give as Maria, felt and you saw her speak for herself, you really see that there is something completely amiss if we don't think of her as a person. And look for a way, in which justice can be given to her. Attention on health, because when things like climate change happen, the impact on different, there is a difference on how or they impact people differently. Those who are vulnerable already like poor, those who are women. Those who are children those who have disabilities suffer in ways that are different from people who can mitigate these changes by themselves. These inequalities make people experience vulnerabilities in different ways. And until we deal with those inequalities our words will address only those that have possibilities to do something about it. And there are others who cannot do something about it.

And so finally I want to say that there are ways that we can talk about climate change by bringing it closer to the experiences of people. But also we can tell stories in different ways. We can tell stories in films. We can tell stories in podcasts. We can tell stories by bringing actually the actual people that had been impacted to tell their own story and that is the loudest and the best way in talking about climate change. So that the scientists can be able to take this language of people and make it into a language that will engage people's emotions as well as people’s intellectual thinking as well.

Greg Dalton: Ertharin Cousin, you’ve traveled a lot and talked to a lot of women as a former head of the World Food Programme. What are some of the stories that you’ve seen that powerfully connect women's empowerment with climate resilience and climate justice along the lines Musimbi just mentioned?

Ertharin Cousin: I was listening to Musimbi and nodding my head yes, yes, yes, because her articulation of the experiences that my travels have given me just provide more evidence of where the anecdotes that I can bring to you are based upon the experiences not just of the women I saw but women around the world.

For example, when I was in South Sudan after the country became South Sudan. And we were meeting with women in the fields who had migrated back from Sudan after that war, we can talk a great deal about the conflict ongoing in South Sudan. But let’s just talk about that period of time when there was hope and women were given equal access to the seeds to the tools to the financial support as well as to the training that was necessary for them to plant and grow maize. They were so proud to have the ability to grow a crop with other women in their cooperative that for the first time gave them financial resources which gave them voice in their households that they did not previously have because they were able to bring money into the house. And they were able to their collective efforts to support the school fees that were necessary for their children, as well as addressing their own empowerment as we like to say. And the women said to me, this was the first time that they felt listened to.

But what we know is that the effects of climate change are resulted in more erratic rains and that same woman and her cooperative who has the access to finances because she can grow a harvest, we've seen in subsequent periods no longer having the ability to have the resources that they need and being forced to stand in a line.

And what my experiences tell me is that when we give women equal access to the training to the tools to the finances that they will grow the food that is necessary to avoid their need to stand in those lines but that means that we need more climate resistant we need more drought resistant seeds. We need more research into agriculture that is smarter. That continue to ensure the ability of that woman, her community, to have the opportunity to provide for both her food security and the economic security of her family. I have never in all my training all of my work met a woman met a family who wanted to stand in a line for food. Everyone wants to feed their own children. But when the circumstances don't allow them the access to that opportunity it requires that we provide the provision of assistance that is necessary.

And so we know that the projections of population are to 9 1/2 to 10 billion people by 2050. Which means that we need to increase production of food by 50% by 2050. We also know that women produce the agriculture laborers that between 40% and 70% for an average of 43%, 70%, in some other countries. And we know that despite that significant percentage of women in the agriculture system that they don't have equal access to as I said the tools the finances the training that is necessary for them to produce the harvest that are required in a climate affected world. What that means then is that we can't solve the growing need for food access unless we equally invest in those women.

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Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about finding climate solutions through educating and empowering women. Coming up: power, patriarchy and reproductive justice.

Corrine Sanchez: There's also this dark history that we really need to understand when we talk about long term contraceptives and hormones and all of that impact on our reproductive health.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

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Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about climate change and women’s empowerment. My guests are Ertharin Cousin of the Stanford Center on Food Security, Musimbi Kanyoro of United World Colleges, who joins us from Nairobi, and Corrine Sanchez of Tewa Women United in New Mexico.

Greg Dalton: Evelyne Ajwang is a nurse and midwife who also teaches family planning and reproductive health in small towns and villages in Kenya. We asked her about the obstacles faced by the women she works with.

[Start Playback]

Evelyne Ajwang: Women in Kenya normally are not mostly economically empowered. So they depend mostly on men in terms of their livelihoods. They even whatever the woman would want to do she has to get permission from the husband. So this would be a challenge mostly in terms of decisions and matters reproductive birth, the husband has to agree with whatever she wants to do. And in the issues of myths and misconceptions surrounding reproductive health and family planning. For example that we know when results in family planning either this woman will become infertile in the future which is not truth or myth. We realized that men are not well conversed on with issues of contraceptives and also family planning. They are very green and ignorant.

So what we did is we targeted men with the information. Then they are realizing, hey, if we plan our families then the health of this woman will be better. And that’s what you’ll tell him that when you have a larger family, your economics is also not stable. The challenges of population health and environment are integrated. There’s no way one can ever separate the three. Because with a larger population meaning less r esources available to these communities then this people will be using the available natural resources. You know the resources keep on depleting.

When you empower women you empower a whole community. Because when you give knowledge to these women and this is something that is factual was finite, this woman is able to deliver this information to the whole community and this thing will spread.

[End Playback]

Greg Dalton: That was Evelyne Ajwang, She manages a maternal neonatal child health and family planning program for Pathfinder International in Kenya.

Overpopulation has been identified as a key factor in climate change, leading to both increased carbon emissions and worldwide food and water insecurity. Therefore family planning is seen as one way to combat global warming. But as Corrine Sanchez explains, the issue of reproductive justice has a complex and fraught history that goes back for centuries..

PROGRAM PART 2

Corrine Sanchez: There's no way that we as women cannot be involved in reproductive justice issues because it involves our bodies and our choices and the long-term productivity or reproductive ability of our communities. And so I come from, you know, come from this in many different angles of thinking about contraceptives and thinking about reproductive health and thinking about a lot of different challenges that our communities face. And as communities that had a targeted genocidal strategies against our communities, right, when colonialism happened rape and assault and murder of our children and our women were a part of that strategy it still continues to be a part of the military strategies across the world to wipe out communities, to take away their cultural sense of being, their mother tongues.

And so as a community that has seen that impact of reproduction we also had forced sterilization of native women in our communities. We've also had the practice of people bringing in contraceptives and practice and testing those in our communities. So I know that there is this upside and there's also this dark history that we really need to understand when we talk about long term contraceptives and hormones and all of that impact on our reproductive health. And when we talk about the power and voice of women to choose. And I agree that as we become more educated and we have this medically accurate information. This exists in our A’Gin Healthy Sexuality & Body Sovereignty Project that we've been implementing in our communities. As we give people medically accurate information we trust that they’re gonna make the decisions that best support them and their families.

So, I don't want to say lightly that reproductive issues are, you know, just this and this, they are about understanding that complex history and understanding the impositions of other people's religions and beliefs on other peoples. And how do we recognize the humanness and the humanity of all of us. And I want to go back to where we're at in this country of the United States. This colonial space where African-American babies are being murdered not just in the womb, but as individuals throughout their lifetime. That our children, women of color, people of color, children are being murdered because they're being seen as different. And that is a reproductive justice issue, not just the contraceptives, not just the population control. But really understanding that history of how people have used domination over others to implement political policies, and strategies that have erased populations that displaced people.

We really need to understand in our communities the patriarchy and the patriarchal system, the beliefs that come in when people believe that they have dominion over others. And how do we talk about transforming that power dynamic in our individual households, to our systemic societal level. How do we have those deep conversations.

So that we can now have in our organization and in our communities these conversations about engaging men and boys in the violence that's committed against women and girls, because most of that violence is coming from men and boys. And so healthy masculinity and how do we talk about that, how do we talk about toxic masculinity. I think those are all pieces of that reproductive justice that needs to continue.

Greg Dalton: Musimbi, you have a doctorate in feminist theology. A doctrine of feminist theology. Does addressing climate change mean sort of attacking patriarchy, some of the deep-rooted systems, gender power, male power, and dominance that Corrine just talked about. Should that be part of the climate conversation?

Musimbi Kanyoro: Yes, it should be. Talking about any feminist whether they're coming to it from a social perspective from a secular, from a theological perspective, etc., really talks about justice. And one way for us to be able to ensure justice for women, is to be able to address patriarchy, because we are all victims of patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system, and it’s a system that gives privilege to male persons and underprivileged the female persons. We as women and men are all victims of it and we need to be able to speak out against it, to be angry about it and to find ways in which we can be able to right what is wrong in regards to equality. And I think many people are working on this, from many, many aspects of their lives. And in climate change, as well as in the areas of sexual reproductive health. We cannot be able to get to the right answers without also addressing patriarchy.

It's a difficult area, but when we think of sexual reproductive health for women, we think of it in terms of many different directions. I have learned by working for many years with Global Fund for Women, working with them and the organizations that address women, etc. that the health issue for women is important. If we are able to say, for example, in Africa we say that 89% of women in the informal sector, supporting the most important aspect food on the table, kids, etc. And if we are able to say things like 80% of farmers in Africa are women. How are they going to be able to run their work, if every year, every nine months they have another child. It impacts on their health, their ability to be able to work. Women spent on the continent of Africa, for example 40 hours a week, on just fetching water alone, before they even do the other jobs that they have to do. So when we talk about making accessibility, reproductive health for women, we want women to be safe and to be healthy.

And this covers many ways. It may cover family planning, which might be about spacing kids, or deciding when a woman wants to have a child and with whom so that it’s not forced. It might be about pre-ops, postnatal health, it might be about a contraception, it might be about having access to safe abortion. It might be about ability to get the information, age appropriate information at the right time.

Currently, I just want to say I'm very inspired by the courage of young people, because young people are able to see quite a lot of how these things are interconnected. And I think that investing, we should invest in women and the leadership of women to be able to get the differences that my sisters on the panel have talked about. But we should also invest in young people and in the education of young people. And I see through the colleges that really work within the United World Colleges many young people are really providing leadership in these areas. And because they come to these areas without the stigmatization and patriarchy without being extremely rooted in patriarchy in the way in which older generations have been rooted in there really can be a future that opens up someplace that we could go to that is a better place than where we are today.

Greg Dalton: If you’re just joining us we’re talking about women's issues at Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. My guests are Ertharin Cousin, former Executive Director of the World Food Programme. Musimbi Kanyoro, former President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women. And Corrine Sanchez, Executive Director of Tewa Human United. A grassroots civil rights organization in New Mexico.

We’re gonna go to our lightning round. I’ll ask a quick association of our guests. I’ll mention a person, place or thing and ask for their first response from their heart off the top of their mind unfiltered. Corrine Sanchez. What's one phrase or word that comes to mind when I say the new members of Congress elected in 2018?

Corrine Sanchez: AOC. Women power.

Greg Dalton: Musimbi Kanyoro. True or false, inheritance laws discriminate against women in 26 countries?

Musimbi Kanyoro: It’s false because there are more countries than that.

Greg Dalton: True or false. Corrine Sanchez, American capitalism was built on stolen land and stolen labor?

Corrine Sanchez: True, true, true.

Greg Dalton: Ertharin Cousin. True or false, the science is clear that GMO foods are safe for humans to eat?

Ertharin Cousin: I’d say true. The science is clear and we are too often driven by misconceptions.

Greg Dalton: We’ll come back to that. Musimbi Kanyoro. True or false, some women enable patriarchy?

Musimbi Kanyoro: True.

Greg Dalton: Also for Musimbi. I have benefited from white privilege more than I realize?

Musimbi Kanyoro: True.

Greg Dalton: Corrine Sanchez. I've been shaped by patriarchy so much that it's hard for me to see?

Corrine Sanchez: True.

Greg Dalton: Ertharin Cousin. As a talkshow host I should not ask women about gender issues unless I also ask men about gender?

Ertharin Cousin: True.

Greg Dalton: Alright. That ends our lightning round. I made that mistake earlier this week and my female producers scolds me on that. So thanks for that lightning round.

Ertharin Cousin, let’s come to the concentration of power because we’ve heard from Corrine about the importance of seeds and you’ve mentioned how much food production needs to increase to meet the demand of nine or 10 billion people on this planet. And industrial monoculture is one way that some people would say that food demand can be met. And I'm curious to hear whether that industrial monoculture is compatible with empowering women in the way that we’ve been talking about or that concentrates power and corporations in a very more concentrated way.

Ertharin Cousin: Increasing global food production by 50% to feed that 9 ½ to 10 billion people require diversity of solutions. And those solutions must include the 43% to 70% of women who participate in agricultural production. And that will include their participation in the existing systems of today, in organic production, in more biological and technological production that we’ll see in the future. There should not be a solution that is sustainable both from an environmental as well as a social standpoint that we exclude to ensure that we meet the opportunities for empowering all both men and women and feeding all on a regular basis and nutritious food that is necessary to support the adequacy of our lives.

Greg Dalton: I’m interested, Musimbi, how you see GMOs and industrial scale monoculture; are those in conflict at all with empowering women in agriculture?

Musimbi Kanyoro: I have been at two sides of these debate over the years. And I think that, I had the biggest change when there was a large famine in Ethiopia. And I went to Ethiopia for work and the GMOs were other different ways as seeds and so on and quick growing foods were being encouraged too so that people would be able to survive from famine. And I found that all of the words that I used to have to condemn the GMO were done just from a safe place when you are not there in the middle of famine. And I changed my mind. I changed my mind to say, we must do our best to ensure that any traditional farming foods, seeds, etc. are not neglected in favor of only GMOs or other kinds of farming. But we must know that there’s a place sometimes for all of these other possibilities scientifically grown foods. I changed my mind in the middle of a famine because I saw what death looks like.

Greg Dalton: Ertharin, climate disruption is hitting food production in many ways. Droughts and floods are impacting harvest, growing areas are changing and pests are on the move. One particularly dramatic and devastating example is swarms of desert locusts that are ravaging crops in parts of Africa and Asia threatening food supplies for tens of millions of people. Could you say what's happening and what's at stake with these swarms of locusts?

Ertharin Cousin: This is not the first time that locusts have affected agriculture in Eastern Africa, but it is one of the largest swarms that we’ve seen. And we also know that if we had invested last year in the eradication of the locust population we would not be facing the challenges that we see today. Let me just put this into terms, a locust swarm in a field can consume the same amount in one day that 35,000 people would eat. One day. And we know that in June or July the locust swarms in Eastern Africa will begin to hatch and grow and what COVID-19 has done has limited the access to the tools that are necessary to eradicate the locust swarms. But I've been delighted to see over just the last few weeks an increase in access to those tools by the governments of Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia that are now beginning just beginning the work that is necessary directly. But I'd love to hear from Musimbi who is even closer to the actual ongoing activities.

Musimbi Kanyoro: The devastation is terrible in the areas where the locusts have come. And they have been in Eastern Africa all the way from Somali and they arrived in Kenya and we don’t know and in Uganda in some parts of Uganda as well. And they really already define that there will be famine because they eat everything and they have been in places which produce a lot of agricultural products. But they eat anything including grass, anything that grows they eat everything. This is why I think paying attention to science and thinking in advance can be helpful. But I don’t think that I could be able to blame all of these governments that they did not take science into account, etc. There are investments that are required long in advance and also and many of these governments have got so many things that they have to pay attention to. For example, right now, even though the locust are really a big problem. The focus on COVID-19 by these governments is just so urgent and so pressing that you don't even hear much about locusts in the media anymore. We know that something is happening but you don't hear as much as you hear on COVID-19. And so there’s just quite a lot of things that people have to pay attention to.

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Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about women's empowerment and addressing climate change. This is Climate One. Coming up, how food insecurity in other countries affects American national security.

Ertharin Cousin: When agricultural production detrimentally impacts households, and particularly women headed households where sons believe they have responsibility for meeting the needs of the family, they become ripe recruits for Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations like Isis.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

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Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. We’re talking about climate change and women’s empowerment. Joining me today are Corrine Sanchez of Tewa Women United, Musimbi Kanyoro of United World Colleges, and Ertharin Cousin of the Stanford Center on Food Security and the Environment.

Before the break we were discussing the many ways that climate disruption is affecting food production in Africa and Asia - from floods to locust infestations. But we rarely hear about the thread between food insecurity and terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and Isis. Ertharin Cousin connects the dots.

PROGRAM PART 3

Ertharin Cousin: We know that when there is food insecurity when agricultural production detrimentally impacts households and particularly women headed households where sons believe they have responsibility for meeting the needs of the family they become ripe recruits for Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations like Isis. We are seeing this impact now in the Sahel for example, where Isis and Al Qaeda related groups that have now infiltrated into Burkina Faso, and Mali, Niger are now working to recruit the sons in families where they provide food as an incentive for those boys those young men to join their organizations. And that is being exacerbated by COVID-19 now because of the lack of access to food makes these young men even more vulnerable to the attraction of those who would provide the access to the food that the family needs. And so what climate and now COVID-19 are doing is to exacerbate it the challenges of poverty and low human developments in households that are in areas that have been infiltrated by terrorist groups and organizations to making those young men vulnerable to the appeal of these groups. And so we know that the investment in agriculture, the investment in food security, the investments in economic opportunity provide stability in the household and ultimately the stability in the community that limits the attraction of terrorist organizations

Greg Dalton: Thanks. If you’re just joining us we're talking about women's empowerment and climate change at Climate One. I'm Greg Dalton. My guests are Corrine Sanchez, Ertharin Cousin and Musimbi Kanyoro.

Musimbi, the world seems to be turning inward these days with COVID. We’re kind of sheltering thinking about me, here, now. And we hear a lot about community we’re talking about, you know, women's communities around the world. I’d like to hear your thoughts, is community strengthening now?

Musimbi Kanyoro: Yeah, I’m observing and we who don't leave in the USA right now, I’m also quite keen to see what is happening because you're really out in the pedestal. Everybody can see what is happening in the USA. There are three areas that I worry about COVID. One is that we had grown in the world a very strong globalization and sought globalization as something that is good. So for example in United World Colleges the reason that we bring students from every part of the world to study together in a particular college is so that we can be able to overcome the fear of differences and see that we are all human together and we can achieve a lot as human together. COVID has in some ways destabilized some of that because we had to hide quite quickly get into our geographical places and even not just in your geographical place but inside your house and stay locked in and we don't know what that is going to do to us.

But at the same time let me show the other aspects of it. There are a lot of webinars that are going on I’m part of and I have listened to and sat into webinars. And people that used to convene 50 people are now convening 500 people, which means that we are actually hearing each other in larger forums than we did before. And that is really important and we might also learn together that some of the behaviors that we have embraced over time for example, behaviors of destroying the environment were just too much trouble. Putting resources that we have for ourselves, you know, getting on and doing something just a few people we might realize that we could use some of those resources in different ways. Here we are talking and having this conversation while seated in our own houses. We couldn't do that before we would come to a studio where you are so that you could be able to get better quality of voice, etc. at the expense of each one of us getting into a car and driving to you or on a plane sometimes for only 15 or 30 minutes or two hours or two days at most three days meetings. So there are something that we're going to learn about what we could do together.

We have to guard against thinking like in the area of developing vaccines thinking that it matters who does it fast, it matters that we do it. And I think what COVID should be teaching us that the more collaboration that we have and climate work requires collaboration, collaboration and collaboration. Because it does not affect just one place. We are one world. And COVID might show us that indeed we are one world. Because we see what is happening to nature what is happening to fishes in the sea and to animals and to birds. They're having some freedom because we have got this one.

Well, and lastly I want to say that the other aspect of it that is important is for us to realize that when COVID is over and we get -- no, it might not be over, we might learn to live with it or it might be over in different ways. But when we get a vaccine where many people have need to get this vaccine. We have to see that we are it -- COVID has already shown light on the fact that the most disadvantaged ones are even more disadvantaged in the impact of COVID on their lives. We've seen in the USA we hear of the African-American communities or countries that are so-called developing countries you will see that we don't have infrastructure that will be able to help us mitigate as much as some of the other places. So when a vaccine is available, to be human we have to say everybody needs these vaccines. And not privilege those people that have resources for the vaccines. Because that is not a way to go forward into the future if we were have to be one humanity together.

Greg Dalton: A question from Barbara on Facebook. “If governments were to ask their citizens to help by considering having smaller families, would that offer some new perspective to break the historical oppression that some women have experienced?” Corrine.

Corrine Sanchez: Okay. I think it’s much more complex than that. Would the government asking me to do this when the government has implemented a lot of violences against us as indigenous women I find that as a challenge. I think our government should give us all access to universal healthcare access to contraceptives for free. All of these things. And then I think that women will make the decisions that are in support of them which in reality when you look at it when we were well supported we’re making the decisions to not have children. We’re making the decisions to look at our budget and our economies and think about that. So I think when you give women access to all of the information and the tools that they need that you're gonna see that it does impact population in the ways that being forced to or being imposed to may or may not show.

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Greg Dalton: You’ve been listening to Climate One. We’ve been talking about empowering women. My guests were Ertharin Cousin, former director of the World Food Programme and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford Center on Food Security and the Environment;

Musimbi Kanyoro, former President & CEO of the Global Fund for Women, now Chair of the Board of United World Colleges, and Corrine Sanchez, Executive Director of Tewa Women United.

Greg Dalton: To hear more Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your pods. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. It really does help advance the climate conversation.

Greg Dalton: Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Tyler Reed is our producer. Sara-Katherine Coxon is the strategy and content manager. Steve Fox is director of advancement. Anny Celsi edited the program. Our audio team is Mark Kirchner, Arnav Gupta, and Andrew Stelzer. Dr. Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

Indigenous Perspectives

7 Episodes

Play

REWIND: Drawdown / Solving Climate Change

Otto Pilot — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 07:44:00 +0000

REWIND: Drawdown / Solving Climate ChangeOtto Pilot Thu, 01/23/2020 - 11:44 pm

To solve climate change, where is best place to start?

The organization Project Drawdown has published a list of top solutions for climate change – impactful actions already in existence that not only reduce carbon emissions, but also improve lives, create jobs and generate community resilience.

“Electricity is about a quarter of the problem,” says Jonathan Foley, Executive Director of Project Drawdown. “Food, agriculture and forest are also a quarter of the problem… Then you’ve got buildings, industry and transportation. Those are the five things we’ve got to change.”

One item that might surprise many is dealing with global overpopulation. And that starts with improving education and reproductive freedom for the world’s girls and women.

“If women have the opportunity to be able to have a voice and be agents in their community and their country globally, we have the opportunity to have the kind of innovation that we need to be able to combat this,” says Lois Quam of Pathfinder International.

“That human right to decide whether and when and how many and with whom we want to have a child, the ability to exercise that right is… one of the top strategies to combat climate change.”

Of course, the core of the climate challenge involves moving to energy sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide. And when it comes to cutting emissions, some countries are moving more quickly than others.

“We need to decarbonize the world economy really quickly and at massive scale,” says Joshua Goldstein, co-author of A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow.

“The Paris agreement, we all thought it was a step in the right direction,” notes Goldstein. “It’s a step – everything is a step in the right direction the question is are you getting there fast enough to head off this catastrophe.”

Sonia Aggarwal, Vice President at the consulting firm Energy Innovation, is altogether more upbeat about the market-based prospects for decarbonization. “We’re seeing some numbers that I think are kind of nuts honestly,” she says, citing the fact that costs in the last decade have come down 90% for solar, 70% for wind, and batteries 80%.”

“It is absolutely possible to put together a portfolio of zero carbon resources that looks many different ways and delivers electricity reliably,” says Aggarwal.

Part One of this program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on July 11, 2019, and originally aired on August 2, 2019.
Part Two was recorded at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on January 17, 2019, and originally aired on February 3, 2019.

Guests

Kate Brandt

Sustainability Officer, Google

Jonathan Foley

Executive Director, Project Drawdown

Lois Quam

U.S. Chief Executive Officer, Pathfinder International

Sonia Aggarwal

Senior Advisor to the President for Climate Policy and Innovation

Joshua Goldstein

Professor Emeritus of International Relations, American University

Staffan Qvist

Consultant, Qvist Consulting Limited

REWIND: Drawdown / Solving Climate Change

01/24/2020

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, the economy, and the environment.

If you are having trouble sleeping, experiencing changes in appetite, or feeling hopeless, you could be suffering from climate anxiety.

Leslie Davenport: I’m starting to notice in my practice that sometimes people come in with ambient anxiety they’re just more distressed even if they haven't always connected the dots about why. [:13]

Greg Dalton: There are ways to cope with stress and depression brought on by climate change. One very simple form of therapy? Close the laptop, turn off your phone and get into nature.

Nooshin Razani: Within a few minutes you’ll see improvements in heart rate and blood pressure... Around 20 minutes you’ll see improvements in attention span... After an hour you’ll see more physical activity... 90 minutes they've shown that depression goes down. [:15]

Greg Dalton: Exploring Climate Psychology and Getting Outside in the Digital Age. Up next on Climate One.

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Greg Dalton: Is climate change stressing you out?

Climate One conversations feature oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats, the exciting and the scary aspects of the climate challenge. I’m Greg Dalton.

On today’s show, we revisit two discussions from last year about maintaining our well-being in the face of a destabilized climate.

Lise Van Susteren: Whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we accept it or not, everyone is now engaged in some form or has some form of climate anxiety.

Greg Dalton: One way to cope with depression, as many studies show, is to spend time reconnecting with the natural world. Just remember to leave your screens at home.

Phil Ginsburg: The impact to mental health, the impact on creativity, relationship building, all these things happen easier in nature without a phone.[:08]

Greg Dalton: But these days, many people, especially children, are disconnected from nature. Access to the great outdoors - or even a park to run and play in - isn’t always readily available to underserved communities.

Nooshin Razani: If every child is going to have a nature experience then every child needs to have a tree near them. And so we can’t have all the trees and all the green in one part of town and not in another part of town.

Greg Dalton: Later on, we’ll revisit a Climate One discussion about finding ways to bring people to nature, and vice-versa. But first, we talk with three experts on climate psychology. Clinical psychologist Leslie Davenport likens her patients’ feelings about global warming to the five stages of grief.

Leslie Davenport: Denial, anger, sadness, bargaining have its versions of what it might look like in the climate world…really what we're talking about is any kind of loss. Loss of identity, loss of lifestyle, loss of environmental...can trigger a very similar process. [:20]

Greg Dalton: Davenport is the author of Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change: A Clinician’s Guide. She works as a clinical psychotherapist in San Francisco and Tacoma, Washington. Renee Lertzman is a Climate Engagement Strategist and author of the book Environmental Melancholia: Psychoanalytic Dimensions of Engagement. And Bryant Welch is a clinical psychologist and the author of State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind.

Even those of us who care deeply about climate change can find it difficult to bring up the topic in conversation. Renee Lertzman explains why.

PROGRAM PART 1

Renee Lertzman: It's an incredibly challenging topic to talk about because our feelings, our investment in the issue run so high. It’s urgent, it's time sensitivity, has all those attributes that make it incredibly difficult to talk about in a productive way. And so what I've learned over years of studying with all kinds of clinicians and motivational interviewers is that the key I think to talking about climate change is to recognize and tune in to what the others might be feeling and thinking. And so it really is more about the quality of how we show up and how we invite the other to reflect and speak to whatever it is they might be experiencing about the issue. And learn how to hold off on pushing our own anxiety and sense of emergency on to the other which will often be what the person is mainly responding to and then you get into these charged dynamics.

So the first thing I say is, you know, it’s really about listening, but I don't want to minimize what that really means. There’s an internal process so it’s how do we enter into these interactions whether you’re a company or whether you're an individual or organization. How can we have compassionate ways of communicating about climate and I think that being able to tune in and listen and reflect and bringing that quality of again just a sort of an acceptance which paradoxically, I think leads people into entering the topic in a new and different way.

Greg Dalton: Right. And so Leslie Davenport, often there's this impulse to talking about climate to persuade or convince people. To jam a fact or an idea down someone's throat and, you know, I need to convert you right now.

Leslie Davenport: Yes.

Greg Dalton: Has that work?

Leslie Davenport: No, it’s reminding me of that saying that smashing heads won't open minds. It’s about opening to new possibilities new ways of thinking. One thing I wanna add is that, you know, not everyone that we’re gonna engage with is on the same place the same level of receptivity. When I was bringing innovative programs into a medical setting I learned that there was sort of a group of people that no matter what just weren't interested weren’t listening. There was the ones who agreed totally with the new programming and then there was this really fertile middleground; people who didn't quite know about it or maybe a little skeptical, curious, less familiar.

And that just was a really rich area to work with and that's where a lot of the, you know, the success could be felt of people kind of awakening to it rather than kind of necessarily going for those that just had really closed and latched the door to possibilities.

Greg Dalton: Right. And according to the Yale Six Americas studies of American public opinion only 9% to 10% of Americans are just basically never gonna accept it. There's a big persuadable middle that you can connect with it might be through technology, not climate, but there's food, there's ways to connect with people where they are.

Bryant Welch, you talk about disassociation and how things people -- is a defensive mechanism that when there's trauma people disassociate from something that they feel is uncomfortable or painful. How does that apply to climate?

Bryant Welch: Well, I think to support what Renee and Leslie are saying. It really helps if you’re gonna talk to another mind to understand a little bit about the mind. And if you look at the American mind as I have over the last 20 years it’s stunning how much it's deteriorated.

[Laughter]

I can see that my need to persuade this audience is limited. But if you want to do just a quick test. I did write a book 10 years ago when I talked about this and to kind of take a look at it and wrote pretty much the same book only applied to now. If you want to have a quick litmus test of how the American mind has changed and I'm not saying this to be facile. Picture George W. Bush and then picture Donald Trump. Now I was appalled at George Bush and the way in which the American mind was responding at that time. But now we get Donald Trump and so if you look at what's happened to the mind, you know, we all feel that the environment has been neglected. I think that's probably a safe assumption in this group, but let me tell you nothing’s been as neglected as the American mind. The mind is a very limited instrument to begin with. We've done unbelievable things to it just like we've done to the environment. And we now have skilled political manipulators who are experts at making us crazier and crazier.

So in terms of we have got to understand the mind if we’re gonna get a rational decision out of it. So I think when you talk about listening to people and connecting with their mind and I think what you're talking about is making a connection with a person which eases their anxiety unbelievably. If you listen to them you connect with them. Once you connect with them people are in such desperate shape they’ll get dependent on anything. They got dependent on Donald Trump because he was offering them some profound experience. So I totally agree with you but I think there is a bigger issue it’s not just the environment. Our kids are not safe to go to school it’s a very, you know, we had a second amendment and we can't figure out a way to keep guns out of school. So my argument is that we have to all of these issues have to we have to be looking at the American mind itself because it's really been abused over the last 20, 25 years in a number of ways.

Greg Dalton: And we’ll talk later a little bit about how climate is a symptom of some broader things and connected to other things. You mentioned anxiety, Lise Van Susteren is a Washington DC psychologist who specializes on how people feel about the future of climate impacts.

[Start Playback]

Lise Van Susteren: Pre-traumatic stress disorder is a subset of climate anxiety. There is a subset of people who are very focused on future harm and have intrusive thoughts about it and may have had seen their moods and thoughts affected by it. And sometimes they might know they’re anxious but they don't know why. And they will say they can't sleep or they’re sleeping too much. They’ve lost their appetite or they've gained weight. Certainly the angry outbursts the fears the ongoing feeling of dread of hopelessness these are all signs. When we think about future injuries to future generations there's a fear that is generated and this is a profoundly distressing state. I have no doubt now, especially considering recent events, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we accept it or not everyone is now engaged in some form or has some form of climate anxiety.

[End Playback]

Greg Dalton: Lise Van Susteren a Washington DC psychologist. Leslie Davenport, is that true do you agree that everyone has some level of climate anxiety whether they realize it or not?

Leslie Davenport: Yeah exactly that’s the thing whether they realize it or not. I’m starting to notice in my practice that sometimes people come in with ambient anxiety they’re just more distressed even if they haven't always connected the dots about why. And that's what I'm trying to do is also introduce it more into the mental health field to bring those questions in and help people see where that is. You know and related to this, you know, it feels like all of you who are here are here because of your interest in this already. And that as we learn how to talk about it more effectively I just want to introduce the idea that all of us can take a leadership role in whatever sphere of influence your life lives in. We don't all have to write books we don't all have to sit up on a stage but if we’re looking --

Greg Dalton: Or march in a march.

Leslie Davenport: Or march in a march which is wonderful and I do that too. But yeah, to redefine what is leadership and to redefine what is advocacy that if you're responding and looking through the lens of we are interconnected and I stand for a just and sustainable future. How will that influence the words that come out of your mouth and the things that you choose to do and the lifestyle you choose to lead. And that will be a guide that that can very powerfully ripple out in a lot of directions.

Renee Lertzman: I wanna -- can I follow on that?

Greg Dalton: Renee Lertzman.

Renee Lertzman: I think that what you're saying relates to are we all, is everyone experiencing eco-anxiety. What I've noticed is the tendency for those who are very engaged and concerned is to have a perception or an assumption that a lot of people don't care because if they did care more then they would be doing what I'm doing which is coming to events like this and doing the various things we try to do. And I think that’s a very, it’s an inaccurate assumption that for a lot of people this is sort of in that like you said an ambient kind of anxiety.

And I think one of the most powerful ways we can express the leadership that I think you're talking about is by sparking different kinds of interactions and conversations in our lives to create the context where we have permission to go there to name to talk about. I mean evidence-based psychology supports the fact that having conversations and interactions is the driving force for behavior change. And so when people say to me well that all sounds great Renee, we don't have time to have conversations that sounds very kind of not scalable --

Greg Dalton: We don’t need talk. We need action.

Renee Lertzman: Yeah exactly. It makes zero sense to me. For one thing, humans are social beings and we are interacting all the time in our organizations, our schools, our churches our social media whatever, we are interactive social beings. The quality of that interaction makes all the difference. And if more of us were skilled and tuned into how to do that more effectively and again I think it comes back to compassionate communication even if you're running a political campaign. It can be empathetic and it can be compassionate, which I think relates to Bryant’s work, right, which is the lack of that gross kind of generalization not to be too simplistic has led to what we’re seeing which is that there's this fear and anxiety that’s just been simmering under the surface. Well what if we actually start communicating in a more skillful way.

Bryant Welch: You know I think it is astonishing, I mean it’s startling. I've been doing psychotherapy now for 40 plus years. And I'm always, it's a constantly renewing realization that when people are listened to it is a very unusual experience for them and a very powerful experience for them. And the human connection that comes from that is being torn asunder all across our society. You know, families are broken up, there are now more children who grow up missing one of their biological parents than grow up with both parents. And so the dissociation, disconnection, and ultimately the dehumanization that results from that is astonishing. And it's not just anxiety and trauma a lot of it has happened, you know, I think Renee more than anyone opened my awareness to, you know, to the environmental melancholia with the -- look at what's happened in Green Bay in terms of environmental deterioration it's depression; there is loss. And when you connect with someone in these kinds of conversations that environmentalists are now talking about. I think very, very wisely, it is stunning the impact it has on the person being listened to. And what you all are doing for me right now is wonderful.

Renee Lertzman: Exactly. And I think that we need to learn how to listen; that these are skills we can actually be supporting and cultivating in ourselves. I mean HuffPo did a listening tour around the country last summer I think. I went out and did a training with them. What struck me is very odd because they were journalists and I would’ve thought okay, that’s what they do but they actually we need support to learn how to listen, especially in such charged, you know, environments.

Greg Dalton: But we live in a culture of avoidance, you know, take a pill, distract yourself don't feel that grief or pain. So I want you, Leslie Davenport, to tell us about the climate grief cycle. The five stages of climate grief that you write about.

Leslie Davenport: Well, first I just want to clarify that sometimes when we think about grief because some of the early models like with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, were developed around when someone dies. And that really what we're talking about is any kind of loss. Loss of identity, loss of lifestyle, loss of environmental, you know, the degradation we’re talking about can trigger a very similar process. And so I was overlaying what that looks like when it relates to struggling with the losses that are around climate change. And truthfully it's less important to look at the stages as it is to recognize that there is a purposefulness to the feelings; there's a sanctity to pain. It's kind of like if there's a pain in our body it’s telling us something that we need to attend to. If a signal light comes on in our car it’s saying, hey look something is going on here. And as you were saying, in our culture we tend to shut down and want to erase the pain and not that we want to reside there but we need to recognize what's the message which helps us move through these different ways that it shows that. And so, you know, denial, anger, sadness, bargaining have its versions of what it might look like in the climate world. But the most important part is underneath that making room for the emotional landscape that accompanies this experience so that we can attend to what's happening with more of ourselves instead of investing so much energy at keeping the feelings at bay.

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Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about exploring climate psychology. Coming up, helping children take charge of their feelings.

Renee Lertzman: I think it's vital that we really work on the narrative around look, no matter who you are and where you are, you know, you absolutely have a role to play. [:09]

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

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Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about ways to cope with our anxieties about climate change. My guests are climate engagement strategist Renee Lertzman and clinical psychologists Leslie Davenport and Bryant Welch.

Changes that threaten their world can be especially scary for children. Many of us find it hard to look young people in the eye and tell them everything will be okay, when we’re not so sure ourselves. Lesley Davenport says the best approach is to be direct and authentic.

PROGRAM PART 2

Leslie Davenport: The main thing I would say I don't feel like I have the answers to all of that I think we’re discovering that as we go. But this idea of building resiliency in from early, early on, luckily there are some schools starting to include things like mindfulness programs are becoming much more common. Not necessarily all around the environmental issues but just that capacity to be present with thoughts and feelings as they arise rather than just being sucked into them. The earlier those are learned, the easier it is to build that and rely on that more consistently. So that’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Greg Dalton: Mindfulness and yeah, those going on.

Leslie Davenport: And -- sorry, just one other thing. Just in general in psychotherapy and psychology. Whenever there is helplessness, hopelessness, one of the antidotes is to empower toward being active toward change towards the things you want. So there are child versions of doing that too and I think to infuse that in that it's not just information it’s not just coping but it's how to translate that on a child level.

Renee Lertzman: And I would just add that one way I’ve thought about this is the frame or the narrative that we as humans are figuring out how to be humans and how to live on the planet and we haven't always gotten things right. And here we are and we have, I mean that’s kind of my, that’s basically my interpretation of our ecological climate crisis is we didn't intend for this to happen; that we made a lot of progress there’s been a lot of benefits we've learned a lot. And now we’ve discovered that this isn’t really working too well and now we've got this opportunity to do what humans do so well, which is to grow and create and innovate and have ingenuity and, you know, to really highlight that this is -- and Kim Stanley Robinson, author, I heard him speak about this a few years ago. Where he goes even further and says to especially young people, youth, you know, this is your opportunity to make history and you know, inviting people into a narrative where we’re part of something bigger. But it depends on the developmental stage but I really love the kind of like hey, you know, as humans we’re figuring it out and you’re part of that, right. So again it’s inviting people and all of us into this story because the other danger about, you know, with young people on the kind of projection onto people like Jane Goodall and, you know, they're out there doing that they’re the eco-heroes. Here I am in Minnesota whatever and some small town and what can I possibly do.

I think it's vital that we really work on the narrative around look, no matter who you are and where you are, you know, you absolutely have a role to play and it's up to you, you know, only you really know what that is and to invite that kind of reflection on what we can, but again not being like oh every little thing like we have to, it’s a very fine line between that kind of narrative and, you know, being kind of right and simplistic about it.

Greg Dalton: I bought a Prius, I’m good I’m done. Okay, yeah, I addressed my conscience. Are you sincerely hopeful Leslie that we’ll surmount this challenge?

Leslie Davenport: My hope lies in being more and more aware as I get older of how much I don't know. There have been so many points in my life where I was sure about something that I've been proven wrong that that keeps me very open to possibility. I do find it daunting because I track the science pretty closely. So I am happily with the jury that’s still out and want to be very much part of the story.

One thing I like that Renee said, you know, sometimes in discussions like this there's a certain segment that says oh, you know, the earth will be just fine, we’re just gonna eject all the humans. But I think evolution is more elegant than that. I think humans are part of this and evolutionarily speaking for a kind of purpose and that we are still figuring it out. And with that there’s an investment in the hope of what might be possible.

Renee Lertzman: Can I just add two quick things.

Greg Dalton: Sure. Renee Lertzman.

Renee Lertzman: One is the tendency we have to be very binary or dualistic. We tend to ping pong between the optimism and the hope and the despair. In actuality we I think intuitively we know that that's not real, right that it's much more complicated than that. And I'd love to see us supporting one another and really holding that place that’s sort of in between. The other thing I wanna say based on, you know, following on what you said is I want us to acknowledge that at the same time that we’re learning more about our ecological impacts and climate crisis, we are also experiencing a tremendous revolution of insight into the minds.

I mean it's phenomenal so neuroscience and trauma studies and attachment theory and contemplative practices are exploding motivational interviewing I’ve been doing a training here in the city that's changed my whole outlook. There is no excuse for the climate and environmental community to not be mining and exploiting these resources as actively as we can. I think there's such an opportunity to be partnering between these areas of expertise. Not that we all have to go out and become experts in the psychology, but it's really exciting to me to see how that field is growing and presents this opportunity for new kinds of collaboration and synthesis and creativity.

Bryant Welch: I totally agree. You know the thing we got going for us in this is the very act of awareness is a corrective therapeutic act. And I just think all these things that are encouraging us to be aware and that's a word that we use every day. But when you look at what neuroscientists are doing with the concept of awareness now, you know, there's a saying, if you can name it you can tame it. Now there’s a lot of optimism in that. And it really does produce health, mental health in and of itself. So I really think we've got 50% or 60% of the variance is right there in that discovery. And so I've never been more optimistic. I don't know if we’re gonna survive. But I’ve never been more optimistic.

TRANSITION:

Greg Dalton: We’ve been exploring the psychology of climate volatility on Climate One. My guests for this half of the show were climate engagement strategist Renee Lertzman, and psychotherapists Leslie Davenport and Bryant Welch.

We turn now to the great outdoors, with three experts who joined us on the Climate One stage last year.

Phil Ginsburg is General Manager with the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department, and was recently appointed Commissioner of the California State Park and Recreation Commission. Rebecca Johnson is co-director of citizen science at the California Academy of Sciences. And Nooshin Razani is Director of the Center for Nature and Health at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, California.

All three maintain that reconnecting with nature, one way or another, is essential to both mental and physical health. it’s vital to combating the stress and anxiety that our tech-heavy lives foster - especially in young people. Phil Ginsburg sees how many kids are balancing screens and physical activity in the tech mecca of San Francisco

PROGRAM PART 3

Phil Ginsburg: So let’s start with the, you know, sort of some of the hard reality here, which is the generation of children that are growing up today is the most sedentary generation of kids in our history. It's the first generation that whose life expectancy is probably less than their parents and that stuff about screen time is very true. On average, kids are spending somewhere between five and eight hours a day on their screen and less than an hour a day outside. Not a great recipe. More optimistically, particularly here in the Bay Area we are blessed with incredible open space within city limits of San Francisco, 18% of our city is green space. 18%, that's pretty good and San Francisco is the first city in the United States of America where 100% of us live within a ten-minute walk of a park.

So we have access and I think you know under two or three different mayors who've cared a great deal about this we've invested $500 to $600 million in our park system to try to make it more equitable, more welcoming. And I think we’re doing a pretty good job of that but we have a big culture shift to ensure that every child has the opportunity to enjoy nature every day. And that is what we should all be working on every child should have a nature-based experience every single day.

Greg Dalton: Not just go to a park one week in the summer sort of thing. Nooshin Razani you deal with an underserved population in Oakland that doesn't have the access and has some of the same generational things Phil talked about, sedentary screens, etc. So talk about reaching that underserved population at your work.

Nooshin Razani: I think that it’s important to clarify that while there is absolutely a difference in who has access to nature, and sadly nature is like many other commodities in our society it’s inequitably distributed, that does not reflect whether or not people want to be in nature. And we've spent a lot of time talking to and studying and being with the patient served that Children's Hospital Oakland who happened to the majority are on public insurance such as a marker of being near federal poverty line. And definitely people still want to be in nature and so lack of access is not a marker for whether or not people want nature.

And so I think when you're talking about how to make people have that desire, which I think is what you’re kind of getting to, I usually try to start with folks where their at. And so in a family that has multiple stressors whether if you're living in poverty, you may be working several jobs and this actually applies to all of us. There is so much to do in the modern day that it's really hard to come at a parent and add one more thing on. And so I really don't take that approach that, oh you have to do X, Y and Z in order to maximize your health. I really try to come from a place of you have the right to have this thing in your life that will help you cope with the rest of your life. And you have the right to rest you have the right to spend quality time with each other and let me see if I can help you find that.

And so that’s the approach we take. I think that your point about equity is an important one and so I hope that physicians can join in with people like Phil in parks districts to also advocate for the fact that, you know, if every child is going have a nature experience then every child needs to have a tree near them. And so we can’t have all the trees and all the green in one part of town and not in another part of town but we can all advocate for more equitable distribution of nature.

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Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about combating stress by getting back to nature. Coming up, city kids meet the great outdoors.

Phil Ginsburg: This is a population that probably wouldn't may not flinch at a gunshot, that are used to concrete and asphalt, have seen all kinds of awful stuff that doesn't really scare them very much. And you bring them up to the woods and they just become kids again. [:15]

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

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Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. We’ve been talking about getting outside in the digital age, with Phil Ginsburg of the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department, Dr. Nooshin Razani of UCSF Children’s Hospital, and Rebecca Johnson of the California Academy of Sciences.

We may think that unplugging from technology is the only way to have a nature experience. But Rebecca Johnson believes that our screens can also be used to help us engage with the world around us - and she’s got an app for that.

PROGRAM PART 4

Rebecca Johnson: So through my work at the California Academy of Sciences where I co-direct citizen science, we design programs and try to work with lots of partners all over the city and the state and the world to figure out ways to connect people to nature and at the same time help them by using this platform called iNaturalist, an app and a website, to make biodiversity observations. And so those observations like speaking as a scientist, those observations are really important for understanding and doing really good science and furthering conservation but at the same time, this tool is a way to connect people to the natural world. And sometimes that sounds a little counterintuitive but people are inherently curious. And having this app and tool that encourages them to be curious and take pictures of what they're seeing whether or not they know what it is and knowing that there’s kind of a space where you can take a picture of a plant and you might not know what it is, but if you take a good enough picture the app and then people online, a community of people, will help you learn what it is, is a way to foster curiosity and at the same time use that tool that can sometimes be really isolating but to connect you to a community of people.

And all of our events and the things that run use this app as a tool but it also has a huge in-person community building. There’s a part of it that is in-person community building. So we bring people together in places that matter to them to help discover and document biodiversity together. And so we bring people together that may not have met but share a love of usually of a place and so they can discover and explore together. It might sometimes be through a screen but usually the screen is kind of helping the experience; it's a little different than just being isolated by the phone in between them.

Greg Dalton: Nooshin Razani, there's a professor at the University of Utah named David Strayer, you referred me to his work I watched his TEDx talk. He’s done research about human brains 20 minutes and science. So tell us about his research and what he's found with people in nature with their phone and without their phone.

Nooshin Razani: Sure. Well, I think in general and this is both the work of David Strayer and many others. If you take an urban person and you put them in the forest within a few minutes you’ll see improvement in stress. And so you’ll see improvements in cortisol in heart rate in blood pressure. Once you get to around 20 minutes you’ll see improvements in attention span after an hour you’ll see more physical activity and then 90 minutes they've shown that depression goes down. And then when you spend even longer time in nature and this is one of the studies that Dr. Strayer did where he actually hooked people up to EEG machines while they were backpacking in the wilderness. They had no technology at all.

Greg Dalton: Except the EEG machine.

Nooshin Razani: That’s so true. But what he found is that there seems to around day three there's a little bit of a tipping point where your creativity is really maximized and your cognitive ability goes up. He has also done another study where he looked at the changes in brain waves in nature and then what if you go into nature with your phone. He did show that some of the benefit went away with the phone. And I think as a pediatrician one thing that I'm also and you brought this up, concerned about is parents and parental distraction. And the fact that the emotional attachment that happens between a parent and a child when a parent actually looks a child in the eye and mirrors their facial expression that whole interaction is key to the emotional development of the child. And so when both parties are fixated on a screen instead of each other there is a loss of actually what is not, you know, what is not optional what is actually essential to the development of a human being, which is having your parent mirror your emotions. And so I think except for iNaturalist, we need to be aware of our, you know, of the fact that we might be missing out on really enjoying nature together if we’re doing it through a screen, yeah.

Greg Dalton: Phil Ginsburg, there are juveniles on probation that go to Yosemite. Tell us about that program.

Phil Ginsburg: We run a really, really great program called the Teen Outdoor Experience. It's a multi-agency partnership, but we manage a property near Hetch Hetchy called Camp Mather, maybe some of you have been there. It is a place where there is no cell service and there is no Wi-Fi, think about that for just a second and it is paradise. And you know picking up on Nooshin’s you know, apt remark about the equitable distribution of opportunities like that it is historically not in a place where we have seen that many people of color and that many people from underserved communities. It's beloved among much of San Francisco but we've made a concerted effort to give kids who don't know about it or wouldn't normally have a chance to get up there to get up there. So the program works with kids who touch our juvenile probation system and it involves the Juvenile Probation Department, the Police Department, Department of Children, Youth and Family and my staff and we bring up every year about 70 kids for about five days.

And what's amazing is that this is a population that probably wouldn't may not flinch at a gunshot that they hear in the city, that are used to concrete and asphalt, have seen all kinds of awful stuff that doesn't really scare them very much. And you bring them up to the woods and they just become kids again. They're scared of the dark, they're scared of water, they’re scared of animal sounds. They have trouble understanding why you can't have a bag of Cheetos in your tent in the woods and a couple had to learn the hard way. And to see this group of kids up there you literally watch this population become kids again. And it speaks to everything anecdotally I’m just relaying everything that Nooshin has evidence about the impact to mental health, the impact on creativity, relationship building all these things happen easier in nature without a phone.

Greg Dalton: Nooshin, I wanna ask you, lot of people struggle with how much to tell children. I remember some eighth-graders coming to me and they did a research project and they're very prepared and they looked at me and I looked at them and they look at me as an authority figure. I didn’t know how much to tell them because I think it's kind of dark but so, you know, how do you talk to a 10-year-old versus a 15-year-old versus someone younger? How do you calibrate what you tell them?

Nooshin Razani: I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot and I've actually been drawing from the research that's done on trauma. There's been research done after 9/11 and after really huge events on how to talk to kids about something very traumatic. Because I don't think we should take it lightly that we’re telling children not only that we foresee the entire change of ecosystem but also that we don't really know what to do about it. I think that we have to do that in a developmentally appropriate way.

What that research around trauma shows is that children do best when they think that they’re part of something and when they have social support and when they know their elders are doing what they can and that they have a story to tell themselves about what's happening. So I think for children 0 to 5, you have to recognize that there’s very little separation between the external world and internal world and their relationship to a tree or an animal is one of intimate love. So you really have to talk about the death of that animal in a way that recognizes that you're telling them something they love will be dying.

As kids get older I think you have to progressively give them more leadership in it. But just to wrap it up with drawing from the literature on trauma, I think the really important thing is to not say the world is ending and it’s up to you to change it. I think like because you’re five and you have no power, right. I think the thing to say is, yes, what you've heard is true and what you see is true and my generation is going to do every single thing that we can. But then we actually have to do everything that we can. And what we don’t get to will be up to you and if you have any ideas I’ll try my best to follow you and your lead. But to not like leave it up to them or not say the world is ending so you should recycle. Like I mean it doesn’t make sense.

Greg Dalton: If you’re just joining us we’re talking about connecting to nature at Climate One. Our guests, Phil Ginsburg, General Manager of the Recreation and Parks Department in San Francisco. Nooshin Razani, Director of the Center for Nature and Health at the Children's Hospital in Oakland, California. And Rebecca Johnson, Citizen Science Lead at the California Academy of Sciences. I'm Greg Dalton.

We’re gonna go to audience questions. Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant: Hi. This question is for Mr. Ginsburg. So I found your work with the youth at Camp Mather very interesting. Did you see any long-term benefits after they spent such a long period in nature?

Phil Ginsburg: Well the benefits for us are we were able to engage kids in our system that actually have come back year after year. They come back the second year as a pure leader and several kids that have been in that program now actually work for us. So, you know, we weren’t really collecting data on these kids and maybe at some point we should figure out a way to do that. But just the mere fact that we have kids who are still in our system and are now peer leaders and camp counselors is quite good.

Rebecca and Nooshin talked about how do we get kids to sort of - how do we get us all but how do we get our next generation to kind of sort of care about the earth and really have a vested stake in making sure that we have nature and we have parks. And rather than telling kids what they can't do I think we've done a pretty decent job of giving kids an opportunity to learn and grow and actually work in nature.

Greg Dalton: Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant: Hello. So the earth has always been a changing thing, you know, for centuries it’s always changing. It never stays the same. I think that’s something that's really interesting. But when things like climate come up there is always these issues and I guess this is vague, but this is kind of for all three of you, what would be some things that we’d want to keep the same like as our usage of technology and also balancing it out with like nature what you guys were talking about.

Phil Ginsburg: I could take a stab at a way that technology is actually helping us in water conservation. We now use something called evapo sensors which are, you know, this is basically an Internet 2.0 technology that is actually able to measure the water content in soil so that we can irrigate much more precisely. That's an example of technology being used to help us conserve. And there are probably a few other examples of that but I do think that we have to be open to, you know, building design changes, irrigation techniques change, land management, you know, techniques change with technology. And we have to be open to that as long as we understand what our values are, right. And our values are to try to conserve natural resources to try to respond to some of the impacts of climate change and again in this era of, you know, unfortunately a very sedentary disconnected generation giving the next generation of kids a reason to be outside to form a community.

And I guess kids and parents I mean what Nooshin said about you have to be there to kind of look at your child, I mean that really resonated with me. Because I have a busy job and I spend way too much time on my phone even though I love nature and I’m out in it all the time. I think we have to get back to using our park system to create community. And I do think we should be open to ways that technology invites us to do that.

Rebecca Johnson: I would just add that, you know, even though the work that we do on my team is we use an app and we use technology. I mean it’s all about community. I mean I don’t think I will be in this job or doing this work or care about it nearly as much as if it was just about the technology. I mean it’s really about the people and connecting to people and finding ways to build a community around nature and nature connection for everyone. Everyone who lives in the city, everyone who lives anywhere and helping them use technology to learn more about the nature around them. And to help kind of collectively generate the data that we all need at the scale like global scales to help solve these problems and help understand how biodiversity is changing.

We have global data about climate and a lot of most other variables but biodiversity data is really, really hard to get at that scale. And the only way we can do that is that people everywhere make and share observations. And then the flip like other benefit is that then they’re more connected to nature and hopefully through the work that we do can be more connected to each other wherever they live.

Greg Dalton: Next question, welcome.

Female Participant: So I know that spending a lot of time on screens can be bad for a growing brain which my dad tells me a lot. But can Ms. Razani elaborate on what you said about seeing positive aspects to screen time and how that connects to knowing how much time is spent on screens and how much time to spend outside.

Nooshin Razani: Yeah, so there was a large national study where they looked at screen time in kids and adolescents. And what they found is that there's a huge uptick in number of hours spent on screens at around middle school. And for kids age 14 to 17 sadly, you know, every hour that you’re on a screen does increase your risk of anxiety or depression. And so I think it's real. It does seem that those kids that spend more than seven hours a day, and that's a weekday, on screens tend to have like double the risk of anxiety or depression which may be that kids who are depressed need screens more than other kids.

But I would say that going back in the beginning when I was talking about basically how to live as a human you need 8 to 12 hours of sleep if you’re a teenager it can be up to 12. You need to exercise I mean I can’t even believe that I’m settling for an hour a day but I would settle for an hour a day. And I tell people that you need to be out of doors in the sunshine for an hour a day. And if you think about the human animal, it’s like the only animal that we allow, to only be allowed outside for one hour a day and we find that acceptable. But I think you need to be outside an hour a day, you need to have physical activity and then you should be eating dinner with your family. There should be screen-free zones and screen-free times for families to interact with no screen.

And then, you know, in terms of what to do online, I think there is some data that some of the social networking stuff is more correlated with anxiety and I don't want to speak to that fully. But like instinctively what I think is like when I see my kids creating something or generating content or if they can get good enough to code or actually be in a position of power when they're using the technology as opposed to just a consumer, I feel like that would be better for their mental health.

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Greg Dalton: We’ve been talking about the benefits of reconnecting with nature on Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and my guests were Nooshin Razani, Director of the Center for Nature and Health at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland. Rebecca Johnson, Co-director of Citizen Science at the California Academy of Sciences. And Phil Ginsburg, General Manager with the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department.

Earlier in the show we talked with author Renee Lertzman, clinical psychologists Leslie Davenport and Bryant Welch.

To hear more Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review.

Greg Dalton: Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Tyler Reed is our producer. Sara-Katherine Coxon is the strategy and content manager. The audio engineers are Mark Kirchner, Justin Norton, and Arnav Gupta. Anny Celsi edited the program. Dr. Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, where our program originates. [pause] I’m Greg Dalton.

Play

Lois Quam

Sara-Katherine Coxon — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 20:03:01 +0000

Lois QuamSara-Katherine Coxon Wed, 06/26/2019 - 1:03 pm

Lois Quam believes deeply in advancing reproductive health and rights worldwide, mobilizing communities in need to break through barriers and forge their own path to a healthier future. As CEO of Pathfinder International, she leads the organization's work in sexual and reproductive health in a rapidly changing world.

Named three times to FORTUNE’s list of the most influential women leaders in business, Quam joined Pathfinder in 2017. She brings a lifelong passion for women’s empowerment and lessons learned as a senior leader in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. Throughout her career, she has applied her strategic and operating experience to drive business revenue and earnings growth and tackle public policy issues.

Before joining Pathfinder, Quam served as chief operating officer of The Nature Conservancy and as a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. She was selected by President Obama to head his signature Global Health Initiative at the Department of State, which provided more than $8 billion dollars annually to help solve major health challenges facing millions of individuals across 80 countries. Reporting directly to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she advanced a comprehensive strategy to increase U.S. global health diplomacy, created a $200 million public private partnership, and introduced integrated systems approaches for global health problems.

Prior to her work in the public sector, Quam was the founding CEO of Ovations, a division of the FORTUNE 50 global corporation UnitedHealth Group.

A Rhodes Scholar, Quam has degrees from Oxford University and Macalester College. She is on the faculty at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management. She speaks English and Norwegian.

Website

Lois Quam

U.S. Chief Executive Officer, Pathfinder International

Are Human Lives Improving?

Otto Pilot — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 11:00:18 +0000

Are Human Lives Improving?Otto Pilot Thu, 11/15/2018 - 3:00 am

In their 1968 book The Population Bomb, Paul and Anne Ehrlich warned of the dangers of overpopulation. These included mass starvation, societal upheaval and environmental ruin. This and other dire predictions about humankind earned Ehrlich a reputation as a prophet of doom, and fifty years later he doesn’t see much in the way of improvement. Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, on the other hand, prefers to look on the bright side: people are living longer, extreme poverty has been decreasing globally, worldwide literacy is on the rise. Is the glass half empty, or half full?

Guests

Paul Ehrlich, Ph.D.

President, Center for Conservation Biology, Stanford University

Steven Pinker

Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University

Are Human Lives Improving?

11/15/2018

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, economy and the environment.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s book “The Population Bomb” warned that the number of people on earth was spiraling out of control.

Paul Ehrlich: We were worried then about the problems of feeding human society when there was three and a half billion people on the planet. Now we've got way over seven billion people.

Announcer: This and other dire predictions about humankind earned Ehrlich a reputation as a prophet of doom. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, on the other hand, prefers to look on the bright side.

Steven Pinker: When you measure dimensions of human well-being you find to the surprise of many newsreaders that they’re all improving.

Announcer: Optimism vs.pessimism – are human lives improving? Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: Is our planet’s glass half empty, or half full?

Climate One conversations – with oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats – are recorded at the Commonwealth Club of California, and hosted by Greg Dalton.

In their 1968 book The Population Bomb, Paul and Anne Ehrlich warned of the dangers of overpopulation. These included mass starvation, societal upheaval and environmental ruin. Not all of their dire predictions have come to pass. But unless we do more to alleviate the world’s problems, Ehrlich still sees little hope on the horizon.

Paul Ehrlich: I'm very pessimistic about the future but very optimistic about what we could do. I have to say that I've become less optimistic about what we could do, for among other things, of course, because we’re not trying any of it.

Announcer: Glass half empty, to be sure. But cognitive scientist Steven Pinker says that, despite dark headlines, in many ways life is getting better for most of the planet.

Steven Pinker: People are living longer. Global extreme poverty has been sinking, probably less than 10% of the world today lives in a state of extreme poverty… And then education, literacy…now 90% of the world population under the age of 25 can read and write.

Announcer: On today’s program, Greg Dalton explores reasons for hope with Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

Later in the program, we’ll hear from Paul Ehrlich, who is now a professor of population studies at Stanford University. Greg talked with Ehrlich earlier this year.

First, here’s Greg’s conversation with Steven Pinker.

Greg Dalton: So tell me how humanity is progressing in terms of poverty, disease, and early death.

Steven Pinker: Well when you measure dimensions of human well-being you find to the surprise of many newsreaders that they’re all improving. People are living longer. The average lifespan across the globe is about 72 years for most of human history it was about 30. Global extreme poverty has been sinking, probably less than 10% of the world today lives in a state of extreme poverty. 200 years ago it’s more like 90% and in fact, it’s fallen just by three quarters just in the last three decades. War is in the classical sense of battles between two armies of nation states is becoming obsolete the last one was the American invasion of Iraq 15 years ago and rates of death and war have been falling. Education.

Greg Dalton: Though people might cite Syria there's still lots of war --

Steven Pinker: There’s still civil wars. Civil wars in general kill fewer people than wars between countries although the Syrian civil war is the worst war in a generation. It has set the curve creeping a little bit back upward, but it is still a fraction of what it was in the 60s, 70s and 80s. And then education, literacy, the natural state of humankind is to be illiterate. Now 90% of the world population under the age of 25 can read and write.

Greg Dalton: You write about the optimism gap or optimism bias; that is that people look at their own lives through rose-colored glasses; when it comes to divorce, illness, crime those things happen to other people. Tell us about that.

Steven Pinker: Yes. We as a species are subject to this strange bias where we often think we’re luckier than average. Now it’s nonsensical, it’s a contradiction in terms. But people think they're less likely than the average person --

Greg Dalton: We live in Lake Wobegon.

Steven Pinker: We live in Lake Wobegon, absolutely. On the other hand when you switch the question from what is your life like to what is the country's life like then people turn from Pollyanna to Eeyore they become pessimistic about the state of the country. They think that the nation schools are failing but their own kid’s school it’s all not bad. They think that streets are, their city are too dangerous to walk on, what about your neighborhood, oh it’s pretty safe. So this is sometimes called the optimism gap, I think one general call is the I’m okay they are not syndrome. And it does distort our view of the state of the nation and the state of the world.

Greg Dalton: So if the statistics say that humanity is progressing and we are wired for optimism then why aren’t we Americans happier? There's the world happiness index put up by the United Nations, the U.S. has never cracked the top 10. In fact it dropped four spots in 2018. So if what you're saying is true, why aren’t we happier?

Steven Pinker: Yeah, it’s something of a mystery why the United States underperforms in happiness. Now the United States is in general a happy country. Most people most Americans say they’re happy and we’re not in the top 10 but we are in the top 15 or top 20. But we punch below our wealth in terms of our prosperity because in general prosperous countries are happier, and indeed, you know, the USA is on the whole a happy country but not as happy as you’d expect considering how rich we are.

And I don’t think anyone really knows the answer; partly it's because maybe because of the large greed, inequality so even though on average we’re richer, there are off a lot of people who aren’t so rich. Maybe because our social safety net is weaker so that people even if they are doing okay they worry that they are one illness away from ruin. It may also be because there's a kind of disillusionment from the American high of the 50s and 60s where everything just seem to be great. America was a beacon of freedom throughout the world, spreading peace and prosperity holding up the international order. Then there was the disillusionment of the 70s which have gotten worse in the last few years. But the honest answer is no one knows for sure.

Greg Dalton: You mentioned inequality and some people said that the way you approach statistics that the macro aggregate sort of doesn't always uncover the concentration of wealth. That a lot of the gains recently the stock market have gone to very few people which is can be distorted depending on the statistics you use.

Steven Pinker: Well that's a good reason why the stock market is not a very good index of human well-being. So I don't concentrate on the stock market.

Greg Dalton: Or the economy.

Steven Pinker: Yeah. Well it depends what the GDP per capita by itself can be misleading because it doesn't take into account the distribution in the range. On the other hand, globally as I mentioned earlier, extreme poverty is sinking, plunging really. And even in the United States although there has been stagnation of wages for the last 30, 35 years. If you take into account the government benefits, the hidden welfare state. We don’t tend to think of the United States as having a robust welfare state. But when you look at things like the earned income credit, the Social Security, food stamps, Medicare, there actually is a pretty a lot of redistribution in the United States. And when you take that into account then the rate of poverty has fallen. And if you take into account what people can afford, that is how much food they can afford, how much clothing, then by that measure too poverty has fallen in the United States.

Greg Dalton: You write about eco-pessimists. What's your take on environmentalism and eco-pessimists?

Steven Pinker: Well I think like most reasonable people I think that preserving the environment is one of our great imperatives one of our highest priorities. But there has grown up around the environmental movement a kind of philosophy that I think has become counterproductive, which is that humans are a kind of a scourge kind of a cancer on the planet that by starting the industrial revolution and seeking economic growth, we are digging our own graves. That the only solution is to reverse economic growth, live a simpler life like our ancestors a couple of hundred years ago and get back to kind of pristine harmony with the land.

There’s an alternative approach to protecting the environment sometimes called eco-pragmatism or eco-modernism associated in part with Stewart Brand here in the Bay Area. The author of the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1970s, which in large part was responsible for kickstarting the environmental movement. But Stewart and others have pointed out that there been many benefits to our capture of energy and deploying it to make our lives longer and safer and richer, to allow us to travel, to heat our homes. But we should see environmental protection as a way of getting the greatest human benefit with the least cost to the environment. That's going to involve a heavy reliance on technology both existing and new to give people what they want and what they are not gonna give up while protecting the environment to the greatest extent possible. It'll never be perfect, as one economist put it. There’s an optimal amount of pollution in the environment just as there's an optimal amount of dirt in your house. Cleaner is better, but not at the expense of everything else in life. We’re not doing all that well, but we are in many regards a number of corners have been turned and the state of the environment has been improving in terms of urban waterways in terms of air quality other than CO2. And most consequentially for human life in terms of indoor air pollution from burning dung and wood in the developing world in terms of consuming water contaminated with human waste. There's been improvement in all of those measures of pollution.

Greg Dalton: And the current administration is trying to rollback a lot of the safeguards and policies that made that possible.

Steven Pinker: Indeed. It’s horrifying. And my own view is that the people who are concerned about the environment in a way almost done themselves a disservice by failing to note the tremendous progress that's been made as a result of the very environmental regulations that the Trump administration is seeking to dismantle. Because if environmentalists say well the environment is getting worse and worse and worse well then the Scott Pruitts of the world will say well, what good are all these regulations, all they’re doing is constraining economic growth and putting businesses into bankruptcy. And we have to make a choice as to whether we want to be prosperous or have or protect the environment it's one or the other.

Now what the environmental movement I think should be emphasizing is that we actually not only can have both but we have enjoyed both thanks to the combination of improvements of technology and improvements in legislation protecting the environment. Since the EPA was formed in 1970 even though there are more Americans we drive more miles our GDP has gone up, but the rate of the emissions of the five major air pollutants have all gone dramatically down by an average of I believe more than more than 50% or 60%. It’s not enough but the last thing we should be doing is undoing the progress that we have been making and I think it's worth emphasizing that we can have economic growth and increase protection of the environment if we are smart about both technology and regulation.

Greg Dalton: One person that you cite in your book, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, Stanford biologist, you've called him a misguided moralist on twitter. I’d like to play a clip of him. I asked him recently in an interview about your book on enlightenment and here's what he had to say.

Paul Ehrlich: There are still 600 million people in India who have to defecate outside because they don't have toilets. And the issue is the violence that we have committed against those people and all future generations by working so hard to destroy our life support systems and to use up the energy slaves often for ridiculous reasons that we took from them and that we inherited. It’s a complex thing but just saying everything is better is fine, if you’re a not-too-bright faculty member at Harvard. But if you're an Indian villager or a member of a Chinese minority or are living up in the mountains and so on, the world doesn't look quite so bright.

Greg Dalton: So that's Paul Ehrlich and echoing the critique, well a review in the New York Times which was humanities say okay but don't ask about individuals.

Steven Pinker: Yeah, first of all Ehrlich is totally wrong. In fact it’s the lives of people in China and India that improved the most dramatically. As we mentioned, extreme poverty these are the people at the bottom end of the scale. The number in extreme poverty has been plummeting it’s actually the people that are complaining are the Americans. The Indians and Chinese actually have a much more optimistic attitude because they see their lives dramatically improve. And the idea that the reason that they don't have toilets is because we've stolen them from them is, historically, it was a little bit inaccurate it’s not like several hundred years ago the world had toilets and American and British invaders came to India and plundered them. The natural state of humankind is not to have improve water, or to have sanitary facilities or to have energy to heat our homes or move us around.

There’s a big difference in what you think of as the state of nature if you have a romantic view that life was ideal in the past, the kind of fall from Eden, the Jean-Jacques Rousseau view, then you might think that modernity has been a terrible mistake we got to reverse it. If you look back to how people actually did live to the high rates of violence to the high rates of child and infant mortality to the life expectancy at birth of about 30, the fact that people were bound to their village, had no awareness of how life was lived elsewhere in the planet. You realize that modernity has brought us many gifts at a cost that we should not be paying indefinitely, namely damage to the environment. But the challenge should be how do we get the benefits of modernity without the cost in environmental degradation.

Announcer: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation with cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. Coming up, how tribal affiliations can get in the way of human progress.

Steven Pinker: We’re Californians, we’re Americans, we’re Giants fans or Celtics fans…But if your tribal affiliation determines your opinion on climate change or taxation or involvement in foreign wars, that is pernicious.

Announcer: And we’ll hear Greg’s interview with the author whose 1968 bestseller earned him the nickname “Doctor Doom.” Coming up, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: We continue now with Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking with Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker about human progress and problem-solving.

Greg Dalton: You write that anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenge scientific hypothesis in history. You also say “Humanity never faced a problem like it.” So talk about climate change.

Steven Pinker: Yeah that's one area in which we by most we have not made progress. I think the threat is severe there’s a good scientific consensus on that. And it's humanity's greatest challenge just because so much of our lives depend on energy, which in turn has meant fossil fuels. Now there is a process that all industrialized countries have undergone that they have relied less on carbon for their energy sources. That is the portion of energy that comes from carbon as supposed to other sources tends to reach a peak when a country industrializes and then falls. And that happened in England first with a switch from wood to coal to oil to other sources to renewables and nuclear. Happened later to the United States and it’s happened to China and India.

Now that by itself can't solve the climate crisis because if we're using more energy altogether even if a smaller fraction of it is from burning carbon it still means that more CO2 is being emitted and other greenhouse gases. But it does show that modernization and industrial economies aren't inherently tied to a flaming carbon; that the natural progression is to move away from it which we have to figure how to accelerate dramatically.

Greg Dalton: And so what does accelerate that is, human ingenuity, is it technology? What are the accelerants because this year we've seen a lot of fires a lot of heat records destabilization and scientists say that this is going to not only continue but accelerate.

Steven Pinker: Well the biggest I mean the improvements that we've enjoyed so far have come from switching from more carbon intensive fuel energy sources to less carbon intensive energy sources. From coal to oil to gas and then to nuclear and renewables. I think that the -- my own view is that the two things that need to be done are carbon pricing so that every economic decision that everyone makes factors in the damage to the environment that comes from burning carbon. And improvements in technology in zero carbon energy sources.

Greg Dalton: And you write that people have difficulty thinking at scale and climate is so big. So I’m interested, you’re wearing your psychologist hat, how people process climate. Because there is a man with a gun with the intent to do harm, you know, cable news channels get all worked up and people respond directly. But with something that's perceived to be abstract and long-term as climate the human brain seems to process that different.

Steven Pinker: Yes. So there are some cognitive limitations that is very hard to think in terms of millions of tons, billions of tons of CO2 or terawatts versus gigawatts. You have to really write down the number of zeros unless there’s that. There is the fact that our fear circuitry is engaged by immediate threats like snakes and spiders and --

Greg Dalton: Tiger in the woods.

Steven Pinker: Tiger and men with daggers and malevolent agents trying to do us in. But I think there are actually two other factors that are far more consequential. And in this regard I kind of diverge from a lot of my fellow cognitive psychologists who point to these cognitive biases. And those cognitive biases are real. People who’ve read Daniel Kahneman's book, “Thinking Fast and Slow” or Michael Lewis’ “The Undoing Project” about the work of Kahneman and Tversky will show how we have these cognitive limitations.

But I think two far bigger factors are first of all, the fact that carbon pollution is a tragedy of the commons, which is to say that everyone benefits from the fossil fuels they burn in heating their homes getting around. Whereas, the costs are diffuse and if I make a personal sacrifice, if I walk to work or if I shiver in the winter or sweat in the summer. It really isn't gonna save the climate. Only if everyone does it, but everyone making the decision by their own lights thinks well why should I be the one to make the sacrifice. If I do, it will bring no benefit to humanity and harm to me.

Greg Dalton: Presuming you don't like that walk to work. Maybe you enjoy that walk to work.

Steven Pinker: Well no, I personally do so, yes. And I wrote by example.

Greg Dalton: Yeah. Some people say there’s a false trade off that the green economy involves price and sacrifice and that's not always the case, sometimes green is better.

Steven Pinker: Indeed. And in fact we should make --

Greg Dalton: My electric car is far better than my gasoline car.

Steven Pinker: Yeah, we should make it as little the case as possible that is with improvements in technology absolutely. But nonetheless, at any level, any benefit to the environment is going to be trifling at the individual level but the cost to the self is going to be huge. So every person rationally thinks well, why should I give up my air conditioning it’s not gonna save the planet, it's going to make life miserable for me. That's why some of the decisions have to be centralized, why you need carbon pricing imposed by government. Voluntary sacrifices, you know, unplugging your chargers and bringing your own coffee cup to work. They’re nice and I do them and I pose for posters saying other people should do them, that’s not gonna solve the problem.

Greg Dalton: In fact you say they are distraction.

Steven Pinker: I think they’re a distraction, yeah, so maybe I should stop volunteering for those posters. The other huge psychological problem this has not been given enough attention is political tribalism. That once climate change got branded a left-wing issue it became a sacred cause for people on the right to deny it, to oppose it. And since humans are ingenious rationalizers if we have a position that we want to defend because it's associated with our team, our tribe, the people that we respect, then we’re pretty good at spin doctoring evidence to be consistent with it and dismissing evidence that's inconsistent with it. And surveys have shown that the main predictor of denial of man-made climate change is not scientific ignorance but political ideology. The farther you are with the right the more you deny human made climate change. And in fact, people who acknowledge climate change actually don't know a whole lot of necessarily know a whole lot about climate, climate science. Often they’re ignoramuses but they just know that they're, you know, they’re to the left of center and that's what you're supposed to believe. Conversely, if you’re right of the center you’re supposed to deny it. So part of the psychological wedge that we have to insert in order to mobilize people around climate change is to depoliticize it as much as possible. I should credit this argument to Daniel Kahan a legal scholar at Yale.

Greg Dalton: Right. There’s some climate deniers are highly intelligent.

Steven Pinker: Yeah, you don't want to get into a debate with them unless you have spent a lot of time boning up because they will be clever litigators. They love every scrap of argument they can muster.

Greg Dalton: One thing that I was really interested to learn in your book was that you write that Pope Francis’ encyclical backfired with conservative Catholics, which was backed up by a study. Why do you think that is the case, why did the laudato si the Pope's encyclical on climate change backfire with the very audience it was targeted at?

Steven Pinker: Because that target which are conservative Catholics belong to a political coalition that is opposed to anything the left supports. And a litmus test if you're being a member of the American right in good standing is to deny the existence of climate change. So partly it’s arbitrary it’s like a tribal creed. But also the fact that Pope Francis framed the environmental issues in terms of human rapacity human evil the problems are economic growth in science and technology. We’ve got to get back to the Bible; we’ve got to get back to Catholic dogma if we want to be good people. There may be some people who are receptive to that but there are others who say, well, thanks but I’d rather be comfortable and have my car. And I think a better way of putting it is let's make the massive changes that we have to make so that people can get around without burning carbon without emitting oxides of nitrogen and sulfur dioxide and particulate matter into the air. Now let’s go back to a simpler and more puritanical lifestyle.

Greg Dalton: Right, voluntary virtue won’t do it. But how do we get beyond the tribalism? If tribalism is the root cause we evolve in small social groups. How do we get beyond that?

Steven Pinker: The general answer is that our cognitive category of tribe is pretty plastic. We all belong to many tribes at once. We’re Californians, we’re Americans, we’re Giants fans or Celtics fans. We’re Cal alumni or Stanford alumni. We have intersecting tribes that we belong to. And one is to try to make the salient tribe we belong to not aligned with policy because policy actually affects, it’s one thing to be loyal to your school or to be a sports fan because that’s just fun, there’s no consequence. But if your tribal affiliation determines your opinion on climate change or taxation or involvement in foreign wars that is pernicious.

So it’s not obvious how to do it in a hurry, but certainly having people who are not branded as champions or mascots for particular causes be affiliated with particular policies is important. In that regard it was unfortunate that one of the champions for combating climate change was Al Gore, the Democratic vice president and candidate for president who put kind of a left-wing stamp on it. So part of it is to try to undo that, find people on the right who acknowledge the reality of climate change. Second is to try to disconnect particular issues that need action such as reducing carbon emissions from philosophies and ideologies like Romanticism, like the growth like anti-capitalism that people may have other reasons not to sign on to. And to dissociate possible remedies from the acknowledgment of the existence of the problem in the first place.

Now I don't think that for example geo-engineering is going to get us out of climate change although it might buy a little bit of time it might be a temporary stopgap to mitigate some of the worst effects. That’s not how we’re gonna -- for many reasons we can’t just turn the ocean into carbonic acid. However, one study showed that if you even mention the possibility of geo-engineering then people are more likely to at least acknowledge that climate change is a problem. Now this of course is illogical; how you solve a problem is independent of whether a problem exists. But if people don't think that acknowledging the problem commits them to some solution that they don't like, such as undoing capitalism or undoing growth, their minds are more open to the existence of the problem in the first place.

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. Steven Pinker is a professor of cognitive science at Harvard and the author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Greg Dalton spoke with him about reasons for optimism in the face of global challenges like war, poverty and climate change.

Earlier this year, Greg sat down with Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich. He and his wife Anne Ehrlich wrote the 1968 best-seller “The Population Bomb.” In it, they warned that the world’s population was spinning out of control, and that the outcome would be widespread famine and chaos.

Here’s Greg’s conversation with Paul Ehrlich.

Greg Dalton: One of the critiques of the book is often that it is overly dark it’s doomsday and what would you say that today?

Paul Ehrlich: It’s much darker today. And you can prove it. In other words, there’s no -- after all, we were worried then about the problems of feeding human society when there was 3 1/2 billion people on the planet. Since then, something on the order of 200 to 500 million people have starve to death or died of nutrition related illness. Now we've got way over 7 billion people. We have something on the order of 800 million that's more than double the population of United States, hungry and starving and another billion or two who are micronutrient malnourished. And people will say well, we don't have any food problem. Well, the people saying that, of course, usually don't. I don't have a food problem. I wish I had a little bit more of a food problem. But if you've ever traveled in poor countries, you can't miss the undernourished kids. And the fact that people are micronutrient malnourished means they can't function well in society. So when we try and get society to take action on our existential problems we have trouble doing it.

Greg Dalton: Some organizations, Oxfam included, say that the world produces enough calories. It's a matter of distribution, getting them to the right place. Is that your view?

Paul Ehrlich: At the moment that’s probably true. That is if we did everything right and distributed things fairly, then everybody can have a decent diet. Of course, what do we distribute fairly? In places where there's a lot of hunger the food isn't distributed fairly because the father has to get more than the kids or everybody starves. If you look at the problems of humanity and that's one of the reasons that I and my colleagues have put too much time into it, equity is a huge issue. Money isn't distributed fairly in the United States or anywhere else. Human beings don't distribute stuff fairly. So one of our challenges is to find a government that will arrange things so that even the people who are at the short end of the stick get more than enough to have a decent life. We don't do that, even in the United States.

Greg Dalton: So you’re talking about wealth redistribution?

Paul Ehrlich: Well if you use the term redistribution, of course you get into trouble. I use it all the time to get into trouble because the economists think that growth is the only thing that counts and efficiency is the only thing that counts. Whereas, I know as every scientist knows perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell it can't occur. And that equity is going to require redistribution. You cannot get say 8 billion people, which is where we’re going to be very soon, all living like the Koch brothers. It just can't be done. So we obviously need redistribution –

Greg Dalton: Or 8 billion people even living like you and me. That would be the problem.

Paul Ehrlich: Oh yeah, by the way, when I say rich versus poor, which I may sometime in the program. I'm counting us in the rich. And the problem of overconsumption of course is the other side of the coin. Other words the big problem for our life support systems is the aggregate consumption. The stuff that we extract from nature to use and that's clearly the product of the number of people and the average per capita consumption. Saying it's only consumption is like saying well the area of a rectangle is only the width. It turns out when you multiply two things together they both are equally important. And in this case population and per capita consumption are what really important. And one of the huge things is people, many people like us consume too much and then there is several billion who don't get to consume enough and that's one of the huge problems that’s not normally discussed in those terms.

Greg Dalton: Some people talk about voluntary restraint or virtuous restraint. You know consuming less, not buying things on impulse, driving smaller cars, smaller houses. Do you think that kind of virtuous restraint is going to make a meaningful difference, that humans will really do that?

Paul Ehrlich: It may make a little difference but it's not going to make a lot. We need joint social action. For example, just to give you an idea of the magnitude of things. People, when I was involved in one environmental organization they were crazy about recycling. And recycling can be good. It can be bad also; it depends on where you are and what you're recycling. But the claim would be made if we push recycling then people will get more involved in the environment and I would say true. It’s also true that they could wheel their recycling bins pass the three Humvees in the garage to the curb and feel that they're being very environmentally sound. And the answer is we need huge changes.

To give you an example from the demographic side from population. Having one less child is the equivalent if you have one less child of you giving up driving entirely 20 times. In other words giving up driving only saves the environment and climate area this is in climate at all that if you give up having a child, you save 20 times as much greenhouse gas not going into the atmosphere as you would if you gave up driving entirely.

Greg Dalton: For your whole life?

Paul Ehrlich: For your whole life.

Announcer: You're listening to a conversation about how to cope with the fallout from our exploding population, with Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich. Coming up – things get even more crowded.

Greg Dalton: Are we headed toward what, nine or ten billion people?

Paul Ehrlich: More likely eleven. There's almost no way that you're going to have fewer than 7 billion people on the planet at the turn of the next century unless we have a large-scale nuclear war or absolutely vast plagues or famines.

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking with Paul Ehrlich about his dire predictions for the planet in his 1968 bestseller, “The Population Bomb.”

Let’s continue with their conversation.

Greg Dalton: So let's talk about climate. How has climate affected your projections looking into the future? Because you were pretty dark in 1968 and you say it’s darker now. How has climate figured into that?

Paul Ehrlich: Well in 1968 we did discuss in The Population Bomb the fact is crystal clear to anybody who's thought about it. If you put crap into the atmosphere, you’re gonna change the climate. There was a lot of debate back then about whether it was going to be largely cooling or largely heating which was coming. That's because in 1968 various people hadn't done the research to show that carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, was accompanied by another bunch of gases that almost accounted for another half of the warming and that's what shifted things in the direction of warming.

Sadly, of course, then we thought that climate was going to be a big problem may be around 2100, of course it’s a big problem today and it’s getting worse and worse. And again the morons in Washington are pulling out of the inadequate climate arrangement that went on in Paris. This is the trouble with having people who are totally ignorant and greedy running a country and that's our caucustocracy and other countries are almost as bad, but the U.S. is the most powerful nation in the world and it is winning its war on the environment with the present administration.

Greg Dalton: You say impacts today. How is climate affecting food production, you know, it’s often thought of as a future concern. How is it an immediate concern?

Paul Ehrlich: Well, a lot of the emphasis given in the mass media is on sea level rise, even here at Stanford campus in Palo Alto, California we’ll be able to out walk sea level rise. It’s a relatively gradual process unless we’re extraordinarily unlucky with the dynamics of the glaciers in Antarctica, but my guess is we won't be. What we know for sure is places like Miami are going bye-bye in the relatively near future, going right now. In other words, they can’t keep the water out coming up through the rocks.

Greg Dalton: Sunny day flooding, right?

Paul Ehrlich: Yeah, right. But much more critical is the impact of climate disruption on agricultural systems. We’re already seeing we were doing very well increasing the yields on basic crops. Humanity’s feeding base for non-protein is largely wheat, maize, corn and rice and they are affected by higher temperatures. We’re already seeing reductions in the rate of improvement there. They may even going further; a lot of people at Stanford like David Lobell are working on this huge problem. Agriculture is utterly dependent upon climate. We do irrigate a lot and that's very important, but the water for irrigation has to come somewhere. You may in California for example; the snowpack is getting in more and more trouble in Sierra. That's the water storage for our summer agriculture. If it comes down as rain in the winter, doesn’t do any good for the farmers at all. So we’re seeing impacts around the world on agriculture already from the amount of climate change we've seen from a relatively small influx of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And it’s gonna get worse and worse because we’re not taking the steps to do it. We’re reversing it; we have again a government that’s trying to destroy the environment because it has no clue that the environment is what supports them.

Greg Dalton: But isn’t it possible also that the grain belt, the corn belt could reach up into Canada, that Russia could have arable land; new land comes into agricultural production because of the warming climate.

Paul Ehrlich: In some areas you may get more production because the climate change. If the corn belt moves into Canada, the corn plants are going to have a lot of trouble growing on the Canadian Shield. You got to develop the soil first before a belt of good agricultural land will actually shift. Developing the soils only take 10 or 20,000 years and so after that, maybe we’ll be able to grow a lot of corn in Hudson Bay or on the Canadian Shield, but basically I wouldn't wait around for it.

And of course as it gets warmer in places like the United States we’re moving more and more to tropical agriculture. Tropical agriculture is traditionally less productive than temperate zone agriculture. Among other things, the pests go all year round in the tropics, whereas in the temperate zones we have the benefit of a pest controlled period called the winter which allows us that a lot of stuff grown better than we can in the tropics. The prospects for doing better with food in terms of production are I would say very shaky. And in terms of distribution, I see things going in the wrong direction. We’re caring less and less; we’re putting less into redistribution of food even though we've improved the systems for doing it, but there's less interest particularly in our government in helping other people.

Greg Dalton: Professor Ehrlich, you talked about the capacity to grow more food but that was the main critique of The Population Bomb is you underestimated the productivity gains, the green revolution. Isn’t that fair to say that you underestimated the world's capacity to feed to generate a lot more food with new technology?

Paul Ehrlich: It’s fair and unfair because first of all the estimates we took and cited were from agricultural economists. And I think the general mistake which I certainly shared because I didn't know anything about it. I was talking to people that we cited that knew, I’m no agricultural economist I’m more of one now than I used to be. But the technology was clear what we were worried about more than anything else was how rapidly it could spread and what was underestimated was the brilliance of many subsistence farmers who knew a lot more about what they could do on their land than a lot of the people at industrial agriculture. But it certainly there are a bunch of mistakes in The Population Bomb. Any scientist who is asked about his work 50 years before who still and particularly one it’s a broad thing, who still thinks exactly the same thing he thought 50 years before is a pretty weak scientist.

Greg Dalton: Steven Pinker at Harvard has a new book called Enlightenment Now. And he’s written a previous book saying that life is safer, longer, healthier, more prosperous, people are better educated, societies and cultures are more tolerant, more fulfilling, that there's more progress in humanity than you give it credit for.

Paul Ehrlich: It's true that a relatively small group of people in Western societies with science and certain form of progress, but with science with the idea of democracy which was usually democracy for white men but let's skip that and so on, did make a lot of “progress" in various areas. And what's not usually mentioned by the Pinkers is for instance one of the main things that allowed that was slavery to start out with. If you know your history the role of slavery in the development of the West absolutely gigantic. So slavery is in there.

Then we adopted other people's energy slaves. In other words, it was made possible by using up the sun's energy stored and fossil fuels at a horrendously rapid rate and taking it from other people in the world. You know the old-line about the Middle East. How did our oil get under their sand? And they’re suffering to this day over our wars to get oil, which is the main thing that the West has fought over for many years. That science, it’s still not clear whether it was a smart move. It came from agriculture. We moved into agriculture that allowed specialization, specialization allowed industrialization. Industrialization allowed a moron an absolute moron narcissist to have the power to blow up civilization and destroy humanity and most of the animals on the planet. One single person. Is that advantage? You know, I have my, there are questions. I live a very good life but I spent a lot of time with people who don't have that opportunity.

Greg Dalton: But there are hundreds of millions of people in India and China, who’ve moved out of poverty, into the middle class. Now you could say that China and India are paying a big environmental price for that material wealth. I lived in China in the late 80s. I go back now and the people are better fed, better clothed, better off. So can't you give some recognize that there are have a lot of people, hundreds of millions of people have moved out of poverty better life, better health.

Paul Ehrlich: You can recognize that it's certainly true. There are still 600 million people in India who have to defecate outside because they don't have toilets. And the issue is the violence that we have committed against those people and all future generations by working so hard to destroy our life support systems and to use up the energy slaves often for ridiculous reasons that we took from them and that we inherited. It’s a complex thing but just saying everything is better is fine, if you’re not too bright, a faculty member at Harvard. But if you're an Indian villager or a member of a Chinese minority or are living up in the mountains and so on, the world doesn't look quite so bright.

Greg Dalton: Humans are very adaptive species. That's why we’re here. What are the prospects that we can adapt to a warmer world with more turbulent agriculture? We've adapted to some pretty big challenges in the past. Can we basically ride this out?

Paul Ehrlich: Well, I'd like to hope we’ll be able to. And in fact, our research is aimed primarily now at figuring how to avoid the same mistakes after the collapse. In other words, we’re hoping the collapse won't be caused by a large-scale nuclear war which will basically for instance people say, oh don't worry we won’t need currency, we’ll use bitcoin. Use bitcoin without electricity?

Greg Dalton: Bitcoin uses a lot of energy.

Paul Ehrlich: Yeah. I mean, we’re approaching energy limits which we may get around with quantum computing and so on and so forth. But we’re not gonna get around the basic distribution and political problems. My view has been for a long time that I'm very pessimistic about the future but very optimistic about what we could do. I have to say that over the last decade or so, I've become less optimistic about what we could do for among other things, of course, because we’re not trying any of it. Whereas right now we have deteriorating infrastructure in the United States. Our water handling infrastructure is going downhill fast. Water is absolutely essential. We should be not only rebuilding the infrastructure, but designing it for flexibility because we don't know where the water is going to be needed as the climate change. We’re not doing a thing.

Greg Dalton: Right. The system we built is not adequate for today. But just a few years ago a lot of people were running around, peak oil, peak oil, peak oil, that there would be peak supply. And then fracking comes along, a technological innovation supported in part by the U.S. government and forecast this year 2018 U.S. oil production could surpass Saudi Arabia. That was not foreseen five or 10 years ago. And now the peak oil people are pretty much quiet or they’re talking about, peak demand, but peak supply, this resource we were gonna run out of is suddenly abundant.

Paul Ehrlich: This is absolutely typical thinking, not yours I mean. Sure, what about 10 years from now. In other words, the people look at timescales that evolutionary biologists and ecologists look at very, very differently. And we're also fracking is moving us towards peak environmental destruction. What they're doing in Canada with the oil sands and so on destroying a huge portion of the country for the temporary use of oil. Now if they were moving –

Greg Dalton: For one species and one generation.

Paul Ehrlich: Exactly. And of course I don't even want to get into the rights of the biodiversity that were destroying people. I recently saw an article saying there is no ethical reason not to destroy biodiversity. Well ethics are entirely invented by human beings. And there's a huge portion of our population that thinks it’s unethical. They wipe out the songbirds and so on and so forth. Besides the fact that it’s killing us at the same time. So it’s a complex issue, but they're always going to be people who say oh well we’re going to come up with some magic; we’ll pull the technological rabbit out of the hat to save us. And they forget when you look at the last past technological rabbits. They've often had very nasty droppings.

Greg Dalton: You talk about foregoing population. Are we headed toward what nine or 10 billion people?

Paul Ehrlich: More likely 11.

Greg Dalton: Eleven.

Paul Ehrlich: More likely if we avoid the huge die off. There's almost no way even with billions of people dying prematurely that you're going to have fewer than 7 billion people on the planet at the turn of the next century unless we have a large-scale nuclear war or absolutely vast plagues or famines and I mean losing 15 billion people or something over the period. But not likely to have a very small thing. What we need to do obviously and should've started 40 years ago is give women absolutely equal rights and opportunities. Make sure everybody has access to modern contraception and backup abortion. Teach everybody that you can have lots of fun with sex without having lots of children and change our entire society.

Greg Dalton: If you’re just joining us my guest at Climate One is Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University. I'm Greg Dalton.

Climate is often framed as a moral issue. What did you think of Laudato si’ or “Our Common Home” from Pope Francis?

Paul Ehrlich: I wrote an article with John Hart at Berkeley, whose title was changed by nature, which published it. They change the title to something like the Pope doesn't do enough for women but our title was Two Cheers for Pope Francis. I think he is a more flexible individual than this majority of people who have been in that position. He's well educated. You have to understand that the Roman Catholic Church has a social science and a natural science academy. They're interested in hearing what’s going on in the world. And I think they're changing gradually in the right direction but they have the same problems we have in the United States, politics, stuffy idiots who don't understand the world. I am personally a fan of the Pope and that will get him in trouble.

Greg Dalton: You have this reputation as Doctor, you know, the prophet of doom. Do people kind of avoid you at cocktail parties or picnics? They think oh it’s gonna be that you're a downer?

Paul Ehrlich: I don't talk about these things at cocktail parties. I just drink.

Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking with Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University. Ehrlich wrote the 1968 bestseller “The Population Bomb” with his wife, Anne Ehrlich.

Earlier in the program, Greg talked with Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His latest book is “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.”

To hear all our Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org, where you’ll also find photos, video clips and more.

Greg Dalton: Climate One is a special project of The Commonwealth Club of California.

Kelli Pennington and Sara-Katherine Coxon run our audience engagement.

Tyler Reed is our producer.

The audio engineers are Mark Kirchner and Justin Norton.

Anny Celsi and Devon Strolovitch edit the show.

I’m Greg Dalton the executive producer and host.

The Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy.

Climate One is produced in association with KQED Public Radio.

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The Population Bomb, 50 Years Later: A Conversation with Paul Ehrlich

Otto Pilot — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 09:35:00 +0000

The Population Bomb, 50 Years Later: A Conversation with Paul EhrlichOtto Pilot Fri, 04/27/2018 - 2:35 am

In 1968, the best-seller “The Population Bomb,” written by Paul and Anne Ehrlich (but credited solely to Paul) warned of the perils of overpopulation: mass starvation, societal upheaval, environmental deterioration. The book was criticized at the time for painting an overly dark picture of the future. But while not all of the Ehrlich’s dire predictions have come to pass, the world’s population has doubled since then, to over seven billion, straining the planet’s resources and heating up our climate. Can the earth continue to support an ever-increasing number of humans? On its 50th anniversary, we revisit “The Population Bomb” with Paul Ehrlich.

This program was recorded at Stanford University.

Guests

Paul Ehrlich, Ph.D.

President, Center for Conservation Biology, Stanford University

The Population Bomb, 50 Years Later: A Conversation with Paul Ehrlich

04/27/2018

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, economy and the environment.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s book “The Population Bomb” warned that the number of people on earth was spiraling out of control.

Paul Ehrlich: We were worried then about the problems of feeding human society when there was three and a half billion people on the planet. Now we've got way over seven billion people.

Announcer: The problem isn’t that there’s not enough to go around, says Ehrlich – the problem is that it’s not going around to everyone.

Paul Ehrlich: Many people like us consume too much and then there is several billion who don't get to consume enough and that's one of the huge problems that’s not normally discussed in those terms.

Announcer: The Population Bomb. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: The world’s population is on the rise. How much is too much?

Welcome to Climate One.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s seminal best-seller, The Population Bomb. The book warned of the dangers of overpopulation, including mass starvation, societal upheaval and environmental ruin. While not all of the Ehrlich’s dire predictions have come to pass, the world’s population has more than doubled since then, straining the planet’s resources and heating up our climate.

Paul Ehrlich is now a professor of Population Studies at Stanford University. On today’s program, Greg Dalton talks with Ehrlich about how we’re coping with our ever-more crowded world, and what we could be doing better.

Greg Dalton: You had a impactful, traumatic ride in a taxi in Delhi that was somewhat of the inspiration for the writing The Population Bomb. Tell us about that taxi ride.

Paul Ehrlich: Well we wanted something dramatic to start the book. And Anne and I had, I can't remember where we were going, but was back to the hotel when I was doing fieldwork in India. And we got into a car that had one function, a taxi that had one functioning gear and the seats jumping with lice and went through streets where people were living in the streets as you can still find them in many parts of the world, cooking over little open fires, relieving themselves in the streets and it was a jam. And so we described that. It was probably a mistake because people said, ah you're just racists. Well of course to a biologist who's worked in genetics and evolution the whole idea of racial differences that are important is just nonsense. But even more so, of course the Indians under the classic definitions of race that the ones that are wrong are the same race as we are. So that's quite typical; when you get out in the public, you gotta be ready to have people totally misinterpret what you do. If we wrote the book again, I'd probably describe some real hellhole like Miami for illustrating what's wrong with the world.

Greg Dalton: And you wrote it with your wife Anne, but the publisher insisted on a single author. Tell us why, and do you regret that.

Paul Ehrlich: Well Ian Valentine, who was then the inventor of Pocketbooks, the first person to put out the little mass-market paperbacks and Dave Brower, who everybody in the Bay Area knows is one of the great original environmentalists came to me and said, “Look, if you and Anne can write this down quickly, we’ll publish it.” This was in early, it would have been 68. “We’ll publish it and maybe we can influence the election.” Which shows, of course, how naïve they were just like me. But then when the book was finished. They said, “Look, for publicity purposes for getting it around for getting the word out. It should only have one author.” And I'm ashamed to admit that I folded on it and said “Go ahead. Don't worry about it and I still worry about it because I was a good example of male chauvinism back in those days, which I collaborated with as you may know, my latest book has a senior author who's a woman. And Anne has been had her name on many books that she's written or done all of the brainwork on. So it was a big mistake but I made it.

Greg Dalton: Some people criticized the book for applying an insect model to humans who are conscious beings. Is that fair to think that you –

Paul Ehrlich: It’s not fair at all because of course the mathematics is the same, insects or people basically. Insects are very important to us. They are our major competitors for food. But the basic facts given have not in any way been disputed by the scientific community. In other words, last year a paper was published by a guy named Bill Ripple and over 15,000 co-authors backing exactly what I've been saying for a long time. It's the second notice in 1993, about 1500 scientists signed a thing called the world scientists warning the humanity saying and other things if we don't do something about population growth we’re out of luck. And the same year, all the academies of science in the world basically said the same thing. I've had nothing but support from the scientific community, which has been a real pleasure I must say.

Greg Dalton: And one of the critiques of the book is often that it is overly dark it’s doomsday and what would you say that today?

Paul Ehrlich: It’s much darker today. And you can prove it. In other words, there’s no -- after all, we were worried then about the problems of feeding human society when there was 3 1/2 billion people on the planet. Since then, something on the order of 200 to 500 million people have starve to death or died of nutrition related illness. Now we've got way over 7 billion people. We have something on the order of 800 million that's more than double the population of United States, hungry and starving and another billion or two who are micronutrient malnourished. And people will say well, we don't have any food problem. Well, the people saying that, of course, usually don't. I don't have a food problem. I wish I had a little bit more of a food problem. But if you've ever traveled in poor countries, you can't miss the undernourished kids. And the fact that people are micronutrient malnourished means they can't function well in society. So when we try and get society to take action on our existential problems we have trouble doing it.

Greg Dalton: Some organizations, Oxfam included, say that the world produces enough calories. It's a matter of distribution, getting them to the right place. Is that your view?

Paul Ehrlich: At the moment that’s probably true. That is if we did everything right and distributed things fairly, then everybody can have a decent diet. Of course, what do we distribute fairly? In places where there's a lot of hunger the food isn't distributed fairly because the father has to get more than the kids or everybody starves. If you look at the problems of humanity and that's one of the reasons that I and my colleagues have put too much time into it, equity is a huge issue. Money isn't distributed fairly in the United States or anywhere else. Human beings don't distribute stuff fairly. So one of our challenges is to find a government that will arrange things so that even the people who are at the short end of the stick get more than enough to have a decent life. We don't do that, even in the United States.

Greg Dalton: So you’re talking about wealth redistribution?

Paul Ehrlich: Well if you use the term redistribution, of course you get into trouble. I use it all the time to get into trouble because the economists think that growth is the only thing that counts and efficiency is the only thing that counts. Whereas, I know as every scientist knows perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell it can't occur. And that equity is going to require redistribution. You cannot get say 8 billion people, which is where we’re going to be very soon, all living like the Koch brothers. It just can't be done. So we obviously need redistribution –

Greg Dalton: Or 8 billion people even living like you and me. That would be the problem.

Paul Ehrlich: Oh yeah, by the way, when I say rich versus poor, which I may sometime in the program. I'm counting us in the rich. And the problem of overconsumption of course is the other side of the coin. Other words the big problem for our life support systems is the aggregate consumption. The stuff that we extract from nature to use and that's clearly the product of the number of people and the average per capita consumption. Saying it's only consumption is like saying well the area of a rectangle is only the width. It turns out when you multiply two things together they both are equally important. And in this case population and per capita consumption are what really important. And one of the huge things is people, many people like us consume too much and then there is several billion who don't get to consume enough and that's one of the huge problems that’s not normally discussed in those terms.

Paul Ehrlich: It may make a little difference but it's not going to make a lot. We need joint social action. For example, just to give you an idea of the magnitude of things. People, when I was involved in one environmental organization they were crazy about recycling. And recycling can be good. It can be bad also; it depends on where you are and what you're recycling. But the claim would be made if we push recycling then people will get more involved in the environment and I would say true. It’s also true that they could wheel their recycling bins pass the three Humvees in the garage to the curb and feel that they're being very environmentally sound. And the answer is we need huge changes.

at all that if you give up having a child, you save 20 times as much greenhouse gas not going into the atmosphere as you would if you gave up driving entirely.

Greg Dalton: For your whole life?

Paul Ehrlich: For your whole life.

Paul Ehrlich: Well in 1968 we did discuss in The Population Bomb the fact is crystal clear to anybody who's thought about it. If you put crap into the atmosphere, you’re gonna change the climate. There was a lot of debate back then about whether it was going to be largely cooling or largely heating which was coming. That's because in 1968 various people hadn't done the research to show that carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, was accompanied by another bunch of gases that almost accounted for another half of the warming and that's what shifted things in the direction of warming.

Greg Dalton: You say impacts today. How is climate affecting food production, you know, it’s often thought of as a future concern. How is it an immediate concern?

Paul Ehrlich: Well, a lot of the emphasis given in the mass media is on sea level rise, even here at Stanford campus in Palo Alto, California we’ll be able to out walk sea level rise. It’s a relatively gradual process unless we’re extraordinarily unlucky with the dynamics of the glaciers in Antarctica, but my guess is we won't be. What we know for sure is places like Miami are going bye-bye in the relatively near future, going right now. In other words, they can’t keep the water out coming up through the rocks.

Greg Dalton: Sunny day flooding, right?

Paul Ehrlich: Yeah, right. But much more critical is the impact of climate disruption on agricultural systems. We’re already seeing we were doing very well increasing the yields on basic crops. Humanity’s feeding base for non-protein is largely wheat, maize, corn and rice and they are affected by higher temperatures. We’re already seeing reductions in the rate of improvement there. They may even going further, a lot of people at Stanford like David Lobell are working on this huge problem. Agriculture is utterly dependent upon climate. We do irrigate a lot and that's very important, but the water for irrigation has to come somewhere. You may in California for example, the snowpack is getting in more and more trouble in Sierra. That's the water storage for our summer agriculture. If it comes down as rain in the winter, doesn’t do any good for the farmers at all. So we’re seeing impacts around the world on agriculture already from the amount of climate change we've seen from a relatively small influx of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And it’s gonna get worse and worse because we’re not taking the steps to do it. We’re reversing it; we have again a government that’s trying to destroy the environment because it has no clue that the environment is what supports them.

Paul Ehrlich: In some areas you may get more production because the climate change. If the corn belt moves into Canada, the corn plants are going to have a lot of trouble growing on the Canadian Shield. You got to develop the soil first before a belt of good agricultural land will actually shift. Developing the soils only take 10 or 20,000 years and so after that, maybe we’ll be able to grow a lot of corn in Hudson Bay or on the Canadian Shield, but basically I wouldn't wait around for it.

Greg Dalton: And there's estimates of about 50% of food in this country ends up as waste. Both from the farm to the store to the plate.

Paul Ehrlich: Yeah, we get – it’s interesting. People say oh well we can do it. We can distribute food better. We can stop wasting food. Well, I hate to tell you, you're a young man, but in the 1950s and 60s we were saying, you know, we could feed a lot more people if we didn't waste so much food. We’re wasting more now than we did then. In other words, when you look at the trends in how we’re behaving, we’re wrapping more -- after all, in 1960 we didn't have Texas size chunks of plastic debris floating around in the oceans. With now within the next few years we’ll have more plastic in the oceans than we have weight of fish, weight of plastic. The plastic gets ground into tiny little fragments on the surface they’re collected persistent organic pollutants, POPs, and they are now small enough, those fragments, to go through the blood brain barrier. Our seafood is loaded with them. We are one of the things that’s not recognize at all is the toxification of our entire planet.

You know, if you do individual studies, you find if you look at the IQs of kids raised upwind of the lead smelter versus downwind the upwind kids had two or three more IQ points than the downwind kids. If you look at the same the ones raised upwind of the farm fields that are being treated with pesticides versus downwind, the smarter kids are always upwind. So a lot of scientists think we’re actually dumbing down humanity. Now, I didn't think there was any empirical evidence of this until I watch the 2016 Republican debates then you could see we are dumbing down humanity.

Announcer: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation with Paul Ehrlich, professor of population studies at Stanford University. Coming up, did China’s one-child policy go too far?

Paul Ehrlich: The Chinese policy was not as coercive as it was painted over here.

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: We continue now with Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about solutions for an overcrowded planet, with Paul Ehrlich. He co-authored the 1968 best-seller, “The Population Bomb” with his wife, Anne Ehrlich. In the book, the Ehrlichs advocated for a “green revolution” as a way to avoid world-wide famine.

Paul Ehrlich: It’s fair and unfair because first of all the estimates we took and cited were from agricultural economists. And I think the general mistake which I certainly shared because I didn't know anything about it. I was talking to people that we cited that knew, I’m no agricultural economist I’m more of one now than I used to be. But the technology was clear what we were worried about more than anything else was how rapidly it could spread and what was underestimated was the brilliance of many subsistence farmers who knew a lot more about what they could do on their land than a lot of the people at industrial agriculture. But it certainly there are a bunch of mistakes in The Population Bomb. Any scientist who is asked about his work 50 years before who still and particularly one it’s a broad thing, who still thinks exactly the same thing he thought 50 years before is a pretty weak scientist.

Greg Dalton: Lot of people who are critical of the green revolution the industrial scale agriculture cite organics as organic food as a hopeful prospect. Yet, can organic food scale and feed the world? Because there are some concern that it would actually it can't happen with organics.

Paul Ehrlich: It's complicated. There’s some wonderful work by Claire Kremen and others at Berkeley that certainly suggests that you can scale up organic agriculture, but you might not be able to scale up the profits that go with it. Remember for the last couple hundred years we have adopted something brand-new in the society of Homo Sapiens. And I mean all the way back through the hunter gatherers and so on, and that is money has become the standard of everything. And so what we managed to do depends on who's getting rich at it. And that's a, you know, perpetual growth of the GDP is still in the minds of many ignorant politicians and economists a really important thing that's possible and it isn't.

So yes, I think organic farming has huge potential, but there's also huge dangers there are huge dangers in what we’re doing with our soils which where is a resource we’re getting rid of at too rapid a rate. The whole situation leads me and I think all of my close colleagues to believe that we’re headed for some form of a collapse in the next few decades. We can't keep going the direction we’re going and not have shall we say the lifestyles of the people listening to this program dramatically altered in a way they don't want to have them altered.

Paul Ehrlich: It's true that a relatively small group of people in Western societies with science and certain form of progress, but with science with the idea of democracy which was usually democracy for white men but let's skip that and so on, did make a lot of “progress" in various areas. And what's not usually mentioned by the Pinkers is for instance one of the main things that allowed that was slavery to start out with. If you know your history the role of slavery in the development of the West absolutely gigantic. So slavery is in there.

Paul Ehrlich: You can recognize that it's certainly true. There are still 600 million people in India who have to defecate outside because they don't have toilets. And the issue is the violence that we have committed against those people and all future generations by working so hard to destroy our life support systems and to use up the energy slaves often for ridiculous reasons that we took from them and that we inherited. It’s a complex thing but just saying everything is better is fine, if you’re not too bright, a faculty member at Harvard. But if you're an Indian villager or a member of a Chinese minority or are living up in the mountains and so on, the world doesn't look quite so bright.

Paul Ehrlich: Well, I'd like to hope we’ll be able to. And in fact, our research is aimed primarily now at figuring how to avoid the same mistakes after the collapse. In other words, we’re hoping the collapse won't be caused by a large-scale nuclear war which will basically for instance people say, oh don't worry we won’t need currency, we’ll use bitcoin. Use bitcoin without electricity?

Greg Dalton: Bitcoin uses a lot of energy.

Paul Ehrlich: Yeah. I mean, we’re approaching energy limits which we may get around with quantum computing and so on and so forth. But we’re not gonna get around the basic distribution and political problems. My view has been for a long time that I'm very pessimistic about the future but very optimistic about what we could do. I have to say that over the last decade or so, I've become less optimistic about what we could do for among other things, of course, because we’re not trying any of it. Whereas right now we have deteriorating infrastructure in the United States. Our water handling infrastructure is going downhill fast. Water is absolutely essential. We should be not only rebuilding the infrastructure, but designing it for flexibility because we don't know where the water is going to be needed as the climate change. We’re not doing a thing.

Paul Ehrlich: This is absolutely typical thinking, not yours I mean. Sure, what about 10 years from now. In other words, the people look at timescales that evolutionary biologists and ecologists look at very, very differently. And we're also fracking is moving us towards peak environmental destruction. What they're doing in Canada with the oil sands and so on destroying a huge portion of the country for the temporary use of oil. Now if they were moving –

Greg Dalton: For one species and one generation.

Paul Ehrlich: Exactly. And of course I don't even want to get into the rights of the biodiversity that were destroying people. I recently saw an article saying there is no ethical reason not to destroy biodiversity. Well ethics are entirely invented by human beings. And there's a huge portion of our population that thinks it’s unethical. They wipe out the songbirds and so on and so forth. Besides the fact that it’s killing us at the same time. So it’s a complex issue, but they're always going to be people who say oh well we’re going to come up with some magic; we’ll pull the technological rabbit out of the hat to save us. And they forget when you look at the last past technological rabbits. They've often had very nasty droppings.

Greg Dalton: There’s one to talk about human cognition and climate. You’re an evolutionary biologist, you've written about how humans are sight-based animals. Our brains are not wired to recognize and respond to this visible threat of climate change. If there's a man with a gun or a tiger in the woods, we know what to do. But this abstract gas, how are we challenged to respond to climate change?

Paul Ehrlich: We’re challenged because we have to train to do it. You know scientists always find that people can't read graphs that people peering in the microscopes are carefully drawing their own eyes, which are reflected back. People have to be trained to perceive certain things because we evolved as you indicated to dodge the car. That's easy; when the lion jumps at you, you duck. But with climate change, if the climate was changing on Australopithecus, our ancestor, all they could do was mutate or migrate. There was nothing they could really do in response. And they weren't causing it. Now we’re causing it and we can't perceive it.

Greg Dalton: ‘68, was The Population Bomb came out then it's almost around couple years later was Earth Day. We’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Does Earth Day have much of an impact this annual gathering is it kind of a, I think sometimes it's narrowing like every day should be Earth Day, but it still has a lot of resonance.

Paul Ehrlich: It had resonance originally but of course you gotta remember the political situation at the time. We were bogged down in Vietnam and it was a general movement. There was the sexual revolution so it was a revolutionary time. And Earth Day got a lot of people concerned. One of the things that has pleased me though as our government is going down the drain, more and more people are becoming active. And I think if you're counting on the politicians saving you, take a closer look at them. Just watch the evening news. So political activism on the part of people is really necessary. And I think groups at least I see a cheery upsurge in that kind of activity. It may not be enough but as my view, the route we’ve got to take.

Greg Dalton: You talk about foregoing population. Are we headed toward what nine or 10 billion people?

Paul Ehrlich: More likely 11.

Greg Dalton: Eleven.

Paul Ehrlich: More likely if we avoid the huge die off. There's almost no way even with billions of people dying prematurely that you're going to have fewer than 7 billion people on the planet at the turn of the next century unless we have a large-scale nuclear war or absolutely vast plagues or famines and I mean losing 15 billion people or something over the period. But not likely to have a very small thing. What we need to do obviously and should've started 40 years ago is give women absolutely equal rights and opportunities. Make sure everybody has access to modern contraception and backup abortion. Teach everybody that you can have lots of fun with sex without having lots of children and change our entire society.

Greg Dalton: And do you have some regrets for unintended, perhaps, or how the population bomb was used to justify things some oppressive one child policy in China, sterilization.

Paul Ehrlich: Tell me anything social that you try and get done in a country like just the United States that will not be taken over by racists and used or by crazy economically give me more money people for their own purposes. On the other hand, what we did say and I've always said is that the last thing you want to try is coercion and I’ve never supported coercive policies.

The Chinese policy was not as coercive as it was painted over here. There was an incident actually that involve somebody at Stanford saying that the Chinese were abusing the one child family thing and giving stories of forced abortions and things like that. Well it turned out the reason we know about those were the Chinese themselves, labeled them abuses and struggled to correct them. And one of my colleagues at Stanford was very close to the person who invented the one child family thing; perfectly acceptable to most Chinese. Anne and I met with a group of Chinese women to find out about that and secret meeting it was about 20 years ago and there are maybe 35 women. And in the first two minutes they said we had to do that it’s a smart policy they’re doing it right. And then one of the women said but I'm the best neurosurgeon in China and I'll never be head of my service she said because I'm a woman. And the rest of the meeting was discussion of the glass ceiling for Chinese women, which shows you a government can do one thing very intelligently and yet miss another really critical part of the issue.

Greg Dalton: If you’re just joining us my guest at Climate One is Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University. I'm Greg Dalton. Professor Ehrlich, tell us what is the sixth great extinction and why should a person care if some funny looking insect in Costa Rica goes away?

Paul Ehrlich: Well the sixth great extinction, the history of life has not been uniform. There have been five times when over 75% of the kinds of animals and plants the species have disappeared. We know the cause of the last one 66 million years ago was almost certainly a collision with an asteroid on the Yucatán Peninsula, which wiped out the dinosaurs, except for the birds. So why should anybody care? Well, we’re in the middle or at the very start, but maybe almost in the middle of the sixth great extinction episode caused entirely by human activities. Why should you care about the disappearance of little insect? Well, let me give you an example. Most of the focus has been on loss of species which from the point of view of a human lifespan is going on very slowly; we lose a few each year. Let's suppose -- but what we’re losing in huge numbers is the populations of species. Let's suppose that you wiped out a little single bee species in North America called Apis Mellifera which is the honeybee. Now if you wiped them out entirely in North America, there would be no loss of biodiversity by the species count standard, but we lose somewhere between $15 and $20 billion worth of agricultural production and our diet will become much less nutritious. The point is, all those other organisms are working parts of our life support system and when you just have a few of them left that doesn't count in the extinction, the number of species extinction counters, but it counts a great deal in our very lives. And what we’re doing from the sea and from the land is wiping out population after population members of our life support systems. What we’re busily doing is sawing off the limb that we’re sitting on.

Greg Dalton: I once heard it described as rivets in an airplane. You can lose one rivet, two rivets, five rivets, but at some point that rivet in the airplane –

Paul Ehrlich: The wing comes off. Spoil your whole day.

Greg Dalton: Right. E.O. Wilson has this idea of setting aside half of the world's land as nature preserve. Is that realistic and what would that accomplish?

Paul Ehrlich: Well, what Ed is saying is basically correct. Namely if we could set aside half of the world then our life support systems would be secure or at least relatively secure. I don't have to tell you the practical difficulties of doing it; it’s like the practical difficulties of giving women rights, equal rights around the world. There are lots of things we know desperately need to be done. The thing that makes me such a pessimist is I see the politicians going mostly in the opposite direction; doing things to make things worse rather than better.

Announcer: You're listening to a conversation about our exploding population, with Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich. Coming up – can humans overcome their instinct to crowd the planet?

Paul Ehrlich: What do we know is absolutely programmed into us genetically from the theory of evolution? Namely out reproduce your buddies, maximize your reproduction.

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking with Paul Ehrlich about his 1968 book, “The Population Bomb.”

Let’s continue with their conversation.

Greg Dalton: You talked about the problem of inexorable growth. Our retirement plans are tied to mutual funds, the stock market; when the stock market goes down contributions to the Commonwealth Club and KQED and Stanford go down. We’re all locked into the system of growth. But is there really a steady-state economy, something that has less growth or no growth?

Paul Ehrlich: I’ve been working hard with the economist pushing more work on that. It was pioneered by Herman Daly, who basically has written books on a no growth economy. The trouble is, first of all few politicians and many economists can't read and they certainly can't think. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that when you have a finite planet you can’t grow on it forever. You also if you look at the history of economics and the history of humanity. This whole, everything you mentioned is where is the money going. That's the ultimate value. And we’ve got to find a new system and that's what we should be working on. I don't have the answers to these things but every economist should have as their first job seeing to it that people understand you cannot have perpetual growth on a finite planet.

Greg Dalton: For some people they look to what's called biomimicry. They look to nature for solutions and there is no waste in nature. So that waste is always someone else's food or input. So this idea of circular economies where things are consumed and then rebuilt, reused made into something.

Paul Ehrlich: Unfortunately, the second law of thermodynamics tells you there's limits to that. One of the few laws of nature that nobody saying thinks we're going to get rid of. But that is a direction we should be moving. We shouldn't be thinking in terms of perpetual we should be thinking among other things, of not stealing from our children and grandchildren saving as much of the resources that are necessary for human life, including the living resources and hoping that they will be able to find ways to continue. If not for a million years may be for another thousand years. That would be sustainable enough for me and let the Martians take over after that.

Greg Dalton: Climate is often framed as a moral issue. What did you think of Laudato si’ or “Our Common Home” from Pope Francis?

Paul Ehrlich: I wrote an article with John Hart at Berkeley, whose title was changed by nature, which published it. They change the title to something like the Pope doesn't do enough for women but our title was Two Cheers for Pope Francis. I think he is a more flexible individual than this majority of people who have been in that position. He's well educated. You have to understand that the Roman Catholic Church has a social science and a natural science academy. They're interested in hearing what’s going on in the world. And I think they're changing gradually in the right direction but they have the same problems we have in the United States, politics, stuffy idiots who don't understand the world. I am personally a fan of the Pope and that will get him in trouble.

Greg Dalton: One of your former students Stewart Brand, I saw a video of him looking back at your work and saying that there are some countries where there are too few people. There's Canada, wants to import people because the graying of the population. So how about the idea still that Japan, Canada, certain countries their population gets to a certain age, they need younger people to work and support that graying population. So there is such a thing as –

Paul Ehrlich: No they don’t. First of all when you look at the dependency ratio, which is what’s usually considered. They worry about there being too many older people for the society to support. But of course there's fewer, it is easier to make somebody over 70 productive economically than it is to make somebody under seven be productive economically. And the number of people under 15, the proportion shrinks dramatically, as the number of older people over 60, which is what the usual statistic is grows. But of course you gotta stop population growth. You cannot continue to grow, be it by importing people, be it by increasing birth rates. No way, cannot continue. It’s math. No trick around it

Greg Dalton: You know climate is thought of as this collective action problem that no one person, no one country, no one governor can solve it together. It’s the ultimate collective action problem we have to do it together. And yet we seem to be with Brexit and our politics devolving into more of a fractional fragmented tribal. And you said something really interesting, I love watching you on the Johnny Carson show about how we evolved in small groups. You were talking about race. And it seems like we’re going back to that tribal history where at a time when we need to come together to solve this massive climate collective problem.

Paul Ehrlich: If you look at people in our society, giant society and then you look at their Christmas lists or their closest colleagues. The numbers usually are in the vicinity of hundred or 150 people. It's called the Dunbar number. And what the estimate is for the size of our hunter-gatherer groups way back when. Hunter-gatherers had several advantages over us. They were much more equitable. Their leadership was not one leader. There would be a leader for hunting, there would be a leader for medicine. There would be a leader for settling disputes and so on. Since they had to carry everything with them you couldn't have Koch brothers collecting 5 million times as much as somebody as somebody else. They all spoke the same language. They were all genetically related. So if your wife was cheating on you she was probably cheating on you with somebody who had very much your genes so there wasn't the same problem there. So in many ways, hunting gathering was a very good stage of our existence. We didn't have TV and we didn’t have many of the diseases we have today either. But of course we died young. So take your choice.

Greg Dalton: You wrote in The Dominant Animal about cultural evolution as well as genetic evolution. So can we evolve pass these primal tribal instincts?

Paul Ehrlich: Well we have. I mean for instance, what do we know is absolutely programmed into us genetically from the theory of evolution, namely out reproduce your buddies, maximize your reproduction. Now, I've done surveys now on dozens of audiences of thousands of people. I've yet to run into a woman who either has or claims she wants 25 children, which is quite possible biologically. But we've overridden the great genetic code things with contraception and social choice and so on. So there’s no question. We can change. We have the ability to change.

Greg Dalton: You also write about a lot of motivations being driven by hierarchy within social groups. Whether it's money or fertility, or that sort of thing. So how is that really driving our human behavior it's our peer group that’s maybe amplified by social media now?

Paul Ehrlich: Well yeah. There’s no question that our satisfaction if you do surveys and the way our culture has evolved depends on how you do in relation to people you know well. That is if I was living in an obscure Indian village, I'd be an extraordinarily rich person. If I were living in Palo Alto, California, I’m almost poor, can’t hardly afford to live there. So it depends on relative situations and that's among other things, builds hierarchies. All these things are changeable if we get together and try and change them. And there are people moving in that direction. There are degrowth movements in Europe. There are people who are actually working hard to change the economic system. So the potential is there. What we don't have enough of I’m afraid is time.

Greg Dalton: And there’s also the human development index things. These idea to try to come up with alternative measures to GDP or income, gross national happiness that sort of thing. Those things get a lot of attention but do they really get any tracks?

Paul Ehrlich: They’re not taking over.

Greg Dalton: They’re not taking off are they?

Paul Ehrlich: All we can do is keep working.

Greg Dalton: Artificial intelligence, very exciting right now. Silicon Valley's all over this. As an evolutionary biologist, how do you view the creation, the development of artificial intelligence?

Paul Ehrlich: Well, originally it was big at Stanford. And we always said artificial intelligence and natural stupidity, and that really summarizes the situation with artificial intelligence. And that is of course the people who are going to be dealing with it are going to be naturally stupid. And I worry about what they're going to do. But as a general problem –

Greg Dalton: Especially if there are downwind from those coal plants we’re talking about.

Paul Ehrlich: Yeah, well it’s a general problem with technology. Technological change can be excellent or it can be bad and you've got to watch it closely and you've got to be what we call adaptive managers. That is, if it ain't working, you have a way and a backout so you can get rid of it. For example, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had developed a way to simply destroy and remove from Earth all nuclear weapons and fix it so they can’t be rebuilt. Technologies are not all good or they may be temporarily good. There was a time when a car was a wonderful thing. Now if you try and drive in the Bay Area, I don't think the impression you'll get is a car is a wonderful thing.

Greg Dalton: Right. And there’s a number of people here at Stanford who spent their careers building up nuclear weapons who then later said we should get rid of all of them, right. The cold warriors who then changed their tune.

Looking back, since the 50 years of The Population Bomb. What positive things have happened that surprised you?

Paul Ehrlich: Well I was very pleasantly surprised by the success of the racial integration movement by the fact that I've now I was trained as a pilot, by a woman pilot. And I've flown in many airliners that are piloted by women. That was an unthinkable thing in the 1930s. My first girlfriend in the late 30s had for opportunity she could be a teacher in a lower grade, she could be a nurse or she could be a secretary that was damn near it. Now we haven't gotten where we need to be in gender equity, but we’ve surely moved or maybe the most surprising thing is the speed with which people understood that it’s nobody else’s damn business how you enjoy sex as long as you're not hurting somebody. And that took place with us almost blinding speed and of course some of the real dopes don't get it yet but they will.

Greg Dalton: You have this reputation as Doctor, you know, the prophet of doom. Do people kind of avoid you at cocktail parties or picnics? They think oh it’s gonna be that you're a downer?

Paul Ehrlich: I don't talk about these things at cocktail parties. I just drink.

Greg Dalton: Fair enough. And looking forward, knowing what you know about population and climate. How do you keep hopeful when it looks the odds are so long, the hour is late, the time is --

Paul Ehrlich: Drink a lot of good wine. You’ll keep your internal environment in good shape while your external goes down the drain. All of us who share the same concerns also share like being in a band of brothers and being social animals. And the most pleasant thing in my life is my social contacts and most of them all of them agree with basically what I've said here today and we don’t talk about it we just drink.

Greg Dalton: I've heard you like wine and chocolate. You spent every summer since the 1959 I think in the Rockies. And I think you may have spent your last one there, perhaps recently.

Paul Ehrlich: Yes.

Greg Dalton: And one of your academic, the person who describes herself as your academic daughter said it might be upsetting to have one's life coming to a close here now in history. You've talked about some of the threats. How do you feel about kind of coming to a close, your career coming to a close in this time?

Paul Ehrlich: Well it’s an interesting philosophical thing put forth by a philosopher named Scheffler who asked the question, if you knew when you died the world would end, that would be the end of the universe. Would that change your behavior? And my view is it would. That you get a certain amount of pleasure while you're alive thinking about what might happen in a good way to people you love, to people, very often you become very loving of the children and grandchildren of your friends. And I think that's enormously important even though I agree completely with Vladimir Nabokov, who said if I recall it correctly, “Life is a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” And so you just keep going.

Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking with Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University, marking the 50th anniversary of the seminal book “The Population Bomb,” which he co-authored with his wife, Anne Ehrlich.

To hear all our Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org, where you’ll also find photos, video clips and more. If you like the program, please let us know by writing a review on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. And join us next time for another conversation about America’s energy, economy, and environment.

Greg Dalton: Climate One is a special project of The Commonwealth Club of California. Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Carlos Manuel and Tyler Reed are the producers. The audio engineer is Mark Kirschner. Anny Celsi and Devon Strolovitch edit the show The Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy.

Climate One is presented in association with KQED Public Radio.

Play

Condoms and Climate

Otto Pilot — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 13:00:48 +0000

Condoms and ClimateOtto Pilot Fri, 02/28/2014 - 5:00 am

Breathing, eating and consuming, an individual human being produces tons of carbon every year – population may be the key to curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Populations are expected to skyrocket in developing areas like sub-saharan Africa, generating even more carbon pollution. Reducing population growth could also help fight climate change, but in the wake of India’s forced sterilizations in the 1970s and China's mandatory one-child policy, nationwide family planning has a stigma.

Malcolm Potts, a professor of family planning at UC Berkeley, believes talking about condoms should be as natural as talking about cabbages. “They're not a medical thing. They are choices, they should be available. Like cabbages, they should be where your vegetables are.” Alan Weisman’s most recent book Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth addresses the question of the world’s teeming masses head on. Weisman and Potts recently sat down at The Commonwealth Club to tackle the sensitive topic of our growing population and its part in straining the earth’s resources.

Both Weisman and Potts emphasized that education is key to reducing growth rates, and in particular, the education of girls. And the reverse is true as well. “People in developing countries want fewer children,” says Potts, “because they all know the power of education and they all know if you have a smaller family, your kids are more likely to get educated. But if we remove the barriers between family planning, the knowledge and means to do it, then even illiterate people will have fewer children.”

Equating the world’s bourgeoning population with climate change, says Weisman, is a no-brainer. “We’ve jet propelled society. We can do all these incredible things. We have electricity but we also have these waste products and they float up into the atmosphere. And the more of us demanding this stuff, the more carbon dioxide is up there. There's more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now than there has been in 3 million years.”

Solving our climate problem could be simpler – and less expensive – than we think. “Carbon-free energy, we don't know how to do that really well yet, but even if we did, it would be really expensive.” Weisman says. But birth control? “This doesn't involve any technological leaps. To make contraception universally available, it's been calculated that it would cost about a little over $8 billion per year.”

“For 200,000 years, there was not a population explosion. We were roughly in balance with our environment” says Potts. “We've done wonderful things to reduce infant mortality. And we're being blind and stupid and curious about not offering people family planning at the same time.”

Alan Weisman, Senior Radio Producer, Homelands Productions; Author, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? (Little, Brown & Company, 2013)
Malcolm Potts, Fred H. Bixby Endowed Chair in Population and Family Planning, School of Public Health, UC Berkeley

Guests

Alan Weisman

Author, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

Malcolm Potts

Professor, Population and Family Planning, School of Public Health, UC Berkeley

Condoms and Climate

02/26/2014

Greg Dalton: I'm Greg Dalton. And today on Climate One we’re talking about condoms and climate.

One of the biggest drivers of carbon pollution is the number of consumers on the planet. And demographers say global population could exceed a whopping 10 billion by the end of the century. Hundreds of millions of those people will climb out of poverty into the middle classes in Brazil, China, India and other countries. That's good news for their quality of life and the economy. But if those people have the same carbon footprint as Americans, the earth’s climate will be thrown into disarray.

Over the next hour, we’ll talk about growing population and efforts to curb it by educating women, by government fiat and other measures. We’ll also talk about food production and the role of innovation and human ingenuity. Joining our live audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco we’re pleased to have with us two guests. Alan Weisman is author of Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth. And Malcolm Potts is professor of population and family planning at the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. Please welcome them to Climate One.

[Applause]

I want to welcome you. And before – I want to mention that we invited and actually had Christine Mugridge, Director of Communications and Outreach from the Archdiocese of San Francisco, accepted our invitation to participate. And unfortunately she wasn’t able to make it on a short notice. So we did have – it wasn’t intended to have three men up here talking about population. And we look forward to having her and others in future population programs.

Alan Weisman, let's start with you and say how you came to write this book about the population story.

Alan Weisman: Well, some people will remember my last book, The World Without Us, got a lot of attention. And for those of you who don’t know, suffice it to say that I wrote it because I would like a world with us. The gist of that book was – it was a thought experiment that theoretically wiped humanity off the planet to show how when we leave the daily pressures that we keep on it, nature could recover in surprisingly beautiful and swift ways. And even eventually refill empty niches.

And what I was hoping leaders would take away from that once they saw this lovely restored world was to think “Isn't there some way that we can add ourselves back into that picture only in harmony and not in constant combat with the rest of nature?” And in the epilogue, I just wanted to talk about how we could do that but I ran into a rather stunning fact, and that is that every four and a half days, we’re adding a million people to the planet, which just did not seem like a sustainable figure to me.

So at the end of the book, I ended up, surprisingly to myself, doing another little thought experiment in the epilogue. Setting aside all social implications, I asked one of the world’s leading demographic institutes, it's in Vienna, to calculate what would happen if we all participated in the Chinese one-child policy? And the surprising answer was that by the end of the century, we would be at 1.6 billion people which was exactly the population of the world in 1900 before our numbers doubled and then doubled again. We quadrupled in a single century.

Now, nobody likes the Chinese one-child policy, not even the Chinese like it very much. But still, I left dangling at the end of that book this question of “What is the safe caring capacity on this planet for one very overgrown species that happens to be our own?” And leaders turned out to be so interested in that. Wherever I went, they wanted to talk about that in a surprising array of venues, including in discussions with Archdiocese and in Mormon Utah to give some classic examples of the extremes.

And yet it's such a loaded topic. It's one that makes us really uncomfortable. We don’t like the idea of somebody telling us how many kids to have. Like any other organism, we’re designed to make copies of ourselves. So there's just something unnatural about the idea of having to limit that. Nevertheless, there's no question that we have become far more numerous than nature ever intended for one species to be in relationship to its environment. And we can talk later about how that came to be.

So finally, I decided I had to look at this as a journalist as dispassionately as possible, not being pro- or anti-population “control,” but just to understand what it's about that’s all ended up writing Countdown.

Greg Dalton: Thank you. Malcolm Potts, tell us how you got into the population. You're an MD. So tell us a little bit about how you came to this.

Malcolm Potts: Yes. I think it comes from being an obstetrician. I'm practicing in England. Before the abortion law was changed and every night I was on duty, I had to get up and treat a woman who’d had an unsafe abortion. And I just thought this was a very curios and bad way to treat women. And I began at the postnatal visits when I delivered a baby to offer women family planning advice. And often they would say – I would say to them “Can I help you? I'm a doctor.” And they would say, “I was just going to ask you that, doctor” which means that it was sort of a code. “I never would have asked you but thank you for bringing it up.” But my consultant, I was responsible she said, “Obstetricians don’t do that.” And I was young and rebellious and I thought obstetricians ought to do that. And I wrote the textbook of contraception and I became very interested. And for the rest of my life has been committed to giving women choices.

And my experience all over the world is when you respect women and give them choices, they will decide just to have relatively few children, and on average, probably about two children or less. And we are species that was evolved to have a very late puberty, probably about 18 or 20 years, to have perhaps four to six children in a lifetime, half of whom could die before they could reproduce. And the one certainty in demography is that for 200,000 years, there was not a population explosion. We were roughly in balance with our environment. We were large animal. We evolved to have a rather slow growth in our numbers. And as Alan said, that's what we've changed. And we've done wonderful things to reduce infant mortality. And we're being blind and stupid and curious about not offering people family planning at the same time.

Greg Dalton: Well, tell us what's on your tie and how that's one of the success stories of addressing family planning. I just can't read it.

Malcolm Potts: To read it, it says Cabbages and Condoms which is – anybody who has been to Cabbages and Condoms? It's a very successful restaurant in Thailand. Okay. A few people.

Greg Dalton: We got one, yes.

Malcolm Potts: And it coincides with an article I wrote in 1970s about a friend, Mechai Viravaidya, who is a pioneer in offering family planning in the villages of Thailand. And I wrote an article called Cabbages and Condoms because it was a metaphor for saying contraceptives. They're not a medical thing. They are choices. They should be available. Like cabbages, they should be where your vegetables are. And we were distributing condoms and packets of pills in the little women, the market women who had little boats in the market. And then when the organization I was involved with got bigger and more successful, they founded a restaurant. And it's now a very successful restaurant in Thailand. It makes a million dollars a year profit which goes into the dry north eastern Thailand which still needs to be developed. And an awful lot of the staff are HIV positive. And it's just a wonderful place and it sells ties.

Greg Dalton: Alan Weisman.

Alan Weisman: I wanted to add something about this program in Thailand that started with Cabbages and Condoms. Often times people say that the idea of bringing the population down to sustainable size is in conflict with the idea of keeping a robust economy because economy’s health are usually defined by whether they grow or not. And so how are we going to continue to grow economically if we’re going to be shrinking our numbers of laborers, our numbers of consumers, et cetera?

Mechai Viravaidya who brought Thailand to below replacement rate – replacement rate is two people having two children. Effectively, that's zero population growth. And anything below is population reduction. Mechai Viravaidya is not a family planning professional. He's an economist. He was working in development for Thailand. He started going all around the country to institute development programs in every village, when he saw them swarming with children, he realized development is never going to happen in this country with so many people. They're just going to overwhelm our best efforts.

And Thailand today not only has low fertility rate but it also has probably the best economy in South Asia. There are several other examples. I talked about them in Countdown; we can talk about them again, where successful family planning programs that were not this coercive Chinese one child policy were instituted. And generally, it was an economist who is the visionary that set the thing in motion.

Greg Dalton: Well, one of the other success stories is Iran. I think that's particularly interesting because you opened your book with a quote from Ayatollah Khamenei about vasectomy. Khamenei - I don’t know if I said that correctly.

So Iran is a very interesting story.

Alan Weisman: Yes. I spent over two weeks in Iran. It was the last country that I went to out of 21 counties. And the reason was that in 1979 when the Islamic Revolution took place, within a few months Iran was attacked by Saddam Hussein. He attacked because there's an oil rich province on their border, and he thought that this new Islamic republic, which was just getting itself organized after centuries of dynastic rule, they would not be able to defend themselves. And of course, 10 years later he invaded Kuwait trying to do the same kind of thing.

Now, back then, Saddam Hussein had the backing of NATO. He had sophisticated weaponry provided by NATO. And he also had, sad to say, the components of nerve gas provided by NATO. And Iran didn’t have that kind of support. They didn’t have much sophisticated weaponry. All they had was people. So first, the Ayatollah actually did the opposite of what we’re going to be talking about. He asked every fertile female in Iran to do her patriotic duty and get pregnant to help build a 20 million man army to fight off the invaders. And for eight years, they held Iraq to a truce. Finally, when that truce was brokered, again, an economist, who was the head of planning and budget for Iran, realized that they were going to have a terrible problem, that within a decade or so, all these kids that were born during that population burst which was so intense that it probably hit the biological limits for fertile females, it was 4.2% annually.

They were going to be needing jobs and the economy wasn’t going to be able to provide them all. And he warned the Ayatollah that we’re going to have a nation full of particularly frustrated, angry, underemployed and unemployed young men which is a very destabilizing thing for a country. And basically it's describing today’s Pakistan which is another country I went to. So they decided to institute a family planning program but they wanted to make it not a coercive one like China’s which it was already 10 years old. They wanted a voluntary program. So they did four things.

First of all, this is the passing from Ayatollah Khamenei to our current Ayatollah Khamenei. He issued a fatwa saying there's nothing in the Koran that says when wisdom dictates you have the number of children that you can responsibly care for, that you can't use any form of birth control from condoms all the way up to an operation for males or females. Second they made all of those birth control methods available throughout the country. There's a devout Muslim OB-GYN in my book, a woman who talks about the horseback brigades that they would go on, bringing surgical teams to the most remote villages and later a four-wheel drive and even helicopters.

The only thing that was obligatory was premarital classes for everybody either in the mosque or in a health center. By the way premarital classes are not a bad idea for anybody. Among other things, they talked about how much does it cost to raise, feed, clothe and educate a child. Well, people had access to contraception and they got that idea fast but the fourth thing that they did may have been just as important as the other three, and that was they encouraged women to stay in school.

At the time, Iran had about 1/3 literacy among females. But they realized if girls stay in school, women tend to postpone their childbearing until their school age is done. So they're going to have a later first birth. And then they've got something interesting and useful to do with their lives. They could possibly be an economic help to raise their family, but you can't do that if you got seven kids hanging on to your apron strings. So they tend to have, as Malcolm said, two or fewer. Today, 60 percent of university students in Iran are female. And Iran brought themselves down to replacement rate, according to some calculations, a year faster than China.

Greg Dalton: Alan Weisman is author of the book Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth. I'm Greg Dalton. This is Climate One. Malcolm Potts, if educating girls is so simple and effective, why isn't it done more consistently around the world?

Malcolm Potts: Well, first of all, we need to understand that it's a two-way process. Women that are educated find it easier to jump over the many unnecessary barriers that we often put between the woman and the information that means she needs to control her fertility. But secondly, when fertility declines rapidly then you're better able to educate your children so that in Thailand they went from six to 1.8 children in 30 years. In the middle of that change, we did a very careful study and we asked families who have had two children or had four or more children how much money they earned, whether they had straw or tiles on the roof, how big their land holding was. And the children from the smaller families were more likely to go to school and stay in school.

And I think this is the primary driver why people in developing countries want fewer children because they all know the power of education and they all know if you have a smaller family, your kids are more likely to get educated. It's not rocket science.

But if we remove the barriers between family planning, the knowledge and means to do it, then even illiterate people will have fewer children as we've shown in Bangladesh as the perfect example of that. And so the fact that what's happened in Iran is that more women are now in university which I think is a great thing. Last time I was in Iran I drove from Mashhad which is a religiously conservative city, into Afghanistan and to Herat.

In the villages in Iran they have two children and they're making progress. You cross this dusty border, which I think my British ancestors drove in the 19^th Century, and you've got the same religion, the same language, the same culture and they’re having seven children and they're so poor that the girls don’t have any shoes in the snow. So we could have done the same in Afghanistan if we've made things available. And that country would have been profoundly different from the mess it’s in the present moment.

Greg Dalton: And what are some countries where there’s troubling population trends? Is it Pakistan? Where are the ones where things are going in a troubling direction?

Malcolm Potts: Pakistan is clearly a disaster. I mean, it's got a very – again, in 1960 Pakistan was east and west. It was the same country, the same religion. And then East Pakistan became Bangladesh. Bangladesh was poor and less urbanized but it now has about 2.3 children which is very near replacement level in a country that still has a high infant mortality. Pakistan just had an incompetent family planning system. It never respected people. It never made things universally available. It was very medically conservative.

It's very difficult to understand how important medical conservatism is in holding back access to family planning. First of all, family planning is a choice. You don’t come to me as a doctor saying, “I've got a disease called too many children.” You make a choice. If anyone tells a story about Mechai Viravaidya, we started –the first day that we started taking family planning into the villages of Thailand. It was about four hours’ drive outside Bangkok. We had about about half as many people as we are in this room. We were going to teach them how to sell pills and condoms to their neighbors in a group of villagers.

And a telegram came from the Ministry of Health in Bangkok to the local doctor saying, “Do not cooperate with Dr. Malcolm Potts and Mr. Mechai Viravaidya because they are breaking the law distributing pills or contraceptives without prescription.” The very nice doctor looked at this telegram and he said, “In this part of Thailand sometimes telegrams take two days to arrive. I think this one will come tomorrow.”

[Laughter]

And within six months, the villages have been so successful that the Ministry of Health changed the rules and they bought in to distributing contraceptives. And you have to sort of push the envelope and listen to people. Family planning is not telling people what to do. It's listening to what they want.

Greg Dalton: And on prescriptions, is there a reason why prescription for birth control pills exists in the United States?

Malcolm Potts: Absolutely not. I mean, we should take and pull of the prescription tomorrow. This is the only drug – how many people in this room, be honest when I ask this question, know that if you take oral contraceptives for a few years, you will halve your rate of a very ovarian and uterine cancer later in life? Yes, just a handful. That is really stunning. And so this is an extraordinarily safe drug. You can't commit suicide with it unlike aspirin. If you take too many, you’ll vomit. If a baby takes all 28 pills, not a good idea, but the baby also vomits.

So it's an extraordinarily miraculous drug. And the only thing that keeps it on prescription is Big Pharma’s greed. I could make pills available in any place for $8 in CVS Pharmacy, and it should be there. That is what they – there was a study in the United Kingdom. I remember it starting on 27,000 women using the pill, 27,000 not using it, followed for 39 years. And the women using the pill actually live longer than the women who didn’t. And there's a lot of biology. There isn’t time to explain. But it's a very good example of how difficult we make it. You’ve got to go in to a doctor and be examined. There’s things that aren't related to the pill.

Greg Dalton: Malcolm Potts is a professor of population and family planning at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. We’re talking about condoms and climate at Climate One. Alan Weisman, let's talk about the climate part of this. With growing population, what is the connection between climate and population? What are we looking at?

Alan Weisman: Well, there are a couple of connections. Number one – I mean, this is pretty elementary. All of our environmental issues are caused because of what we do to the environment. No other species out there is pushing on the environment in a way that is stressing out its habitat. We started doing that because, as Malcolm said, for 200,000 years of the history of Homosapiens, our population stayed pretty much constant because people were dying as fast as they were being born like it happens to any other species. But then we started to repeal some of natural law starting around 1796 when we defeated smallpox.

A vaccine for smallpox was followed by all these other medical advances, other vaccines, pasteurization of milk, and suddenly we had people living longer and many fewer babies dying. And then we got into the 20^th Century and then we did something that far more accelerated it because we hit 1 billion around 1815 and then a little over one and a half year billion in 1900. But then we did something that changed everything enormously by learning how to pull nitrogen out of the air and chemically slide it on the soil and create much more plant life than nature had ever created before. That translated into a whole lot more food, famines didn’t occur, the Green Revolution with improved crops that produce much more food per stalk, added to that, and as famines were avoided, more people survived to beget more people and suddenly we quadrupled.

Now, the two aspects of climate change is, number one, there are many more of us demanding something else that happen right along those same 200 years, and that was our mastery of concentrated energy. Basically we took a lot of energy in the form of carbon that nature didn’t need so it had buried it away. We dug up millions of years’ worth of buried stuff, and we've been burning it for the last 200-250. And we’ve jet propelled society. We can do all these incredible things. We have electricity but we also have these waste products and they float up into the atmosphere. And the more of us demanding this stuff, the more carbon dioxide is up there. There's more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now than there has been in 3 million years.

And the last time there was this much in the atmosphere, the seas were 80 to 100 feet higher than they are today. That also occurred 15 million years ago, same sea levels. This is what we are doing. Second, as those temperatures go up, they are going to affect the amount of food that we can control. Just as our population rose with our food growing capacity, the rising temperature as a result of all that carbon dioxide, this is no secret to anyone in this room, is starting to play havoc with the weather and we all know that we are headed to probably beyond a 2 degree centigrade average temperature by the middle of this century.

Now, agricultural literature is filled with studies and a lot of them are cited in my bibliography inCountdown. It showed that for every one degree centigrade, crops yields are going to go down about 10 percent. And we’re already headed beyond two degrees. And in that same time by the middle of the century we’re scheduled to add about 2.5 billion more people. Folks, this doesn’t compute.

Greg Dalton: There have been previous scares about population starting with Paul Ehrlich in The Population Bomb, concerns about growing population, overshooting the earth’s capacity. Technology came along and solved the day. So what do you say to people who say, “Well, some – whether it's GMO crops or some new technologies or growing corn in Canada, that we will adapt and we will feed the number of people that are coming along.”

Alan Weisman: I was in Iowa last night talking about this. And Iowa claims as a native son Norman Borlaug who was the head of the Green Revolution who is credited with saving more human lives than any single person on earth because he staved off the certain famines that were about to occur in India and Pakistan which is the first place the Green Revolution was tried out.

But as a result, India is about to surpass China during the coming decade as the most populous nation on earth. And Pakistan, you heard a little bit about it before, here are the numbers. Close to 200 million Pakistanis right now in a country the size of Texas which has 26 million. And by the middle of the century, it will have nearly 400 million. That's way more than the population of the United States right now. And it will still be the size of Texas. And they can't employ these young men that they have. And it's a breeding ground for terrorism and it happens to be a nuclear power. I mean, the place is out of control.

Now, in both of those countries, I met people who implemented the Green Revolution and they repeated – and I also went to the Green Revolution Centers where they design this technology, and they all pointed out that Norman Borlaug himself when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize didn’t gloat about solving hunger in the world. He said that we have postponed a problem that we can only solve if we couple it with population control. And he spent the rest of his life on the board of population groups because he knew that the more food we produced, that would drive population upward. And so now we've got a chaotic situation in Pakistan and in India, the wells for the Green Revolution which are originally were about 50 feet deep to grow all these new jet propelled crops, then dropped 100 feet. And then by the time they hit 250 and 500, a lot of Green Revolution farmers there could not afford to keep drilling deeper and deeper and deeper.

I spent a day while I was researching this book just interviewing widows of farmers who have committed suicide. Since 1995, 270,000 Green Revolution farmers in India have committed suicide, and they do it symbolically by drinking pesticide. This is not saving the world at this point. It's too much of a good thing.

Greg Dalton: Alan Weisman is author of the book Countdown. We’re talking about carbon and climate at Climate One. Malcolm Potts, is technology going to save us?

Malcolm Potts: I'll tell you of a place where it's not going to save us. We’re very focused on the Sahel at the present moment. Sahel is the Arabic word for shore. And that's an area below the Sahara Desert that is dry and dusty and goes to the Atlantic to the Red Sea. In 1950, there were 30 million people. Today, there are 125 million people. And in 2050 which isn't all that far away, there'll be 325 million people. And at that time when we've had some studies done by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab at the hill above our campus, the temperature won't rise by two degrees. It will probably be by four or six degrees because this is already a very hot place. The rainfall may go up a little bit but it will be so hot, the water will evaporate before it can go to the roots of the plants.

And so you'll have more people than live in the United States of America watching their crops wither and their cattle die. And those people will either die or migrate or they’ll be involved in conflict and literally kill one another. And I think all three things will happen. I think the infant mortality will go up again. And we will see many of the triumphs of the past 50 years in International Health rolled back by these catastrophic situations. I think there'll be huge migration.

The third largest town in Kenya after Nairobi and Mombasa is a refugee camp, and those are refugees from Somalia and Ethiopia. And that's going to be multiplied many, many times. And so I was looking at a report yesterday by the UN that says by 2050 there'll be 300 million ecological refugees in this world. Now, many countries can take and welcome a small number of migrants. But if you suddenly double the population, different people with different religion or different language, that's just not going to work. This is a recipe for disaster.

Now, again, there are solutions which begin with offering family planning. There are things you can do to adapt agriculture at least to mitigate some of the harm. And we’re looking in the Sahel, then girls’ education becomes critically important because many of these areas are polygamous and there's a lot of girl marriage. And unless you can raise the age of marriage of those girls – if you can put up the age of marriage by five years, you cut the birth rate by 25 percent without even the contraceptive. And we are having a fantastic success with Nigerian colleagues. One of them was with us yesterday. Keeping girls in a series of very conservative religions where only four percent of girls ever went to secondary school and not one of them completed that education, now 70 or 80 percent are staying there in secondary school. It's costing about $100 a year per girl.

Now, it costs billions of dollars to bring all the girls in that area to give them some opportunities and raise the age of marriage, and get rid of this human rights abuse of child marriage. But we have to make that investment because if we don’t, the cost of inaction will be very, very much greater.

Greg Dalton: Some people say that it's foregone conclusion that world population will get to 9 or 10 billion. There's actually a range from 6 to 16 billion. So let's talk about how high it's going to go and whether that's inevitable or those curbs can be bent. Malcolm Potts.

Malcolm Potts: Well, some additional population growth is inevitable because take China. China now has fewer than two children on average but the population of China still goes up by about 7 million more births than deaths each year because of what we call demographic momentum. The women that were born a generation ago are now having children. So in parts of Africa in the unlikely event that everybody had two children, the population will still go on growing. On the other hand, the UN population division projects population to the end of this century. And the projection for 2100, I hope my grandchildren would still be alive and your grandchildren, is about 9 or 10 billion people.

But if, on average, you have half a child more, there'll be 15.8 billion people, which would be totally unsustainable. If you want an average of half a child or less, there’ll be 6.2 billion, which might be a tolerable world that you could sustain. But those decisions are not made after 2050. Those are decision we have to make now. We have to make family planning universally available and we have to make the investment that's needed in these countries that have child marriage and where there are really no educational opportunities for girls. And those are things that we must do. And doing that will be a very, very tiny fraction of the cost of not doing it.

Greg Dalton: But this is not a conversation a lot of people like to have, a little bit embarrassed to say I've been doing Climate One for six, seven years now this is the first program focused directly totally on population. I've asked many environmentalists and energy people, “What about population?” They say “That's not our issue. We don’t like to talk about it. It's a nasty political/social issue.” So why don’t we like to talk about population, Alan Weisman, when it's such a lever for solving a problem?

Alan Weisman: Well, as I mentioned earlier, it's doing what comes naturally, and it just seems unnatural to do something else. And also, of course, there are religious pressures.

Every nation, tribe, et cetera, starts out with a mandate to be fruitful and multiply. And the reason for that, of course, is that you want to be bigger and stronger than the competitive nation or competitive tribe next door. The Israelites in the bible were polygamous for the same reason that the Mormons were later on - to fill up that land and to out-compete the Canaanites. Though it was very interesting when I was in Israel researching Countdown, a Talmudic scholar pointed out to me that after Abraham, Isaac and Jacob with their multiple wives and offspring and all begets. Then you get to Joseph. He's one of Jacob’s 13 children who might be the first ecologist in recorded history that we have because he was very observant and he realized that we are going to be entering a time of scarcity.

Well, at first he has just one wife and only two children. And he counsels the pharaoh of Egypt and the Israelites that in order to save themselves, this is not a time to expand. This is a time, so to speak, to refrain from embracing so much. It's a time to conserve because it's a time of scarcity and urgency. And frankly, we’re in a situation like that again. And one of the most interesting parts of getting to research a topic that frankly I knew nothing about and there’s people like Malcolm who helped educate me – it was a talk to so many of the world’s religions and to realize that there are things in their liturgies, in their histories that would accommodate that sort of behavior if necessary. You don’t have to change people’s minds and say, “You're wrong.” Show them that there are examples in their history where they have done exactly the right thing.

Greg Dalton: Malcolm Potts, why is there a sort of awkward reluctance to talk about population?

Malcolm Potts: The beginning point for me is that we are very unusual animal. If we were cats and rabbits, it would be easy to solve this problem because they only have sex when the females are ovulating. We have an enormous number of sexual intercourses over our lifetime. And most people in this room could have conceived 10 or 12 children just because that's something that human beings do because we use sex both to express love and we use sex to conceive children.

And the curious thing about it which separates us from, some may say, chimpanzees is that we’re very shy about it. We do it in private. We do it in the dark. We don’t have sex in the middle of this room. If we were a group of chimpanzees, there'd be probably somebody having sex out there and there'd be absolutely shocked by the fact that we were sharing food. So animals do differ. But the good news about family planning is it's something that's wanted. It is the most cost effective way of reducing our carbon footprint. It's more cost effective than making solar panels or windmills.

There's a wonderful program in California called Family PACT. [Family Planning, Access, Care, and Treatment] And it provides subsidized, basically family planning, reproductive healthcare for people at 200 percent in the poverty level. And those people don’t want to have a lot of children. And a very good analysis of that program is showing it diverts about 100,000 unintended pregnancies every year. Now, those 100 – it's difficult to get your mind around an unintended pregnancy or half a child, if it’s sort of like Monty Python. But if those babies had been born and they lived to be 80 years, their carbon footprint would have been enormous even if they're relatively poor.

Mechai used to blow out condoms in front of a big crowd of people, and then everybody laughs and the important thing is the person next to you is laughing. The National Condom Week always has a competition for what is the best condom couplet, and the one I remember is this.

"Use a condom and you will learn no deposit, no return."

Now, the important thing is that the person next to you laughed, not that you laughed, but the person next to you is the same. The person next to you has exactly the same opinions about sex being a wonderful, beautiful and loving thing, and not to be shy and stupid about it. So if we bring a bit of humor into this, I think will help everybody make comfortable.

Greg Dalton: Alan Weisman?

Alan Weisman: Can I respond? As I mentioned before, for 200,000 years, our population growth rate was like this, and then it went like this and it's really that hockey stick.

And everybody here in this room, we were born here and it looks normal to us, because this is what we know - crowds. But we are part of the most abnormal population explosion in the history of biology, and there's never been anything like it like that. But because we think it's normal, that's one of the reasons why it's so hard for people to grasp if there's something wrong, because it just looks like what we're used to.

I also wanted to put a different figure on what Malcolm just said when he said that this is affordable. Carbon-free energy, we don't know how to do that really well yet, but even if we did, it would be really expensive. This is not expensive tech. This doesn't involve any technological leaps. To make contraception universally available, it's been calculated that it would cost about a little over $8 billion per year.

Malcolm Potts: And going back to subsidized family planning here in California, probably a lot of you are taxpayers and some of your taxpayers' money is going into this FamilyPACT program. For every dollar spent within about five years, there's $3 saved because, again, unintended pregnancies, premature babies only cost to that. I mean family planning is not a cost, it's an investment. It's an investment in every country in this planet. So we're not asking people now to put up their budgets.

Greg Dalton: We're talking about condoms and climate at Climate One. Our guests are Alan Weisman, the author of Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth; and Malcolm Potts, a professor of Population and Family Planning at UC Berkeley. I'm Greg Dalton.

Let's go to our audience questions. Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant: Okay. You talked about educating women, young girls as being a solution to the problem. However, say you get very successful along that lines of educating women, won't that make for more educated populations in different countries, wouldn't they want to then have more of an American lifestyle, hence a larger carbon footprint, what are the tradeoffs on that?

Greg Dalton: Alan Weisman, if we – educated girls want iPads.

Alan Weisman: Well, it's definitely a problem that we are going to have to contend with. A lot of people ask me, "Well, isn't the problem really consumption? It's not population." And it's obviously both. Its consumption and it's the number of people who are doing the consuming. But to quote Paul Ehrlich, there just isn’t a condom for consumption yet.

Malcolm Potts: Yes.

Alan Weisman: Believe me, if I knew how to solve consumption, I would have written a book about that, but we are all addicted to that concentrated energy that I mentioned before. Imagine living your life without electricity and we don't even have to wait for those girls to get educated to start being demanders of electricity. More and more people are moving to cities now and that's actually helping bring fertility rates down, because kids are an economic asset out in the farm. They do all sorts of farm chores. In the city, kids cost money and they're not providers so much.

But even the poorest cities that I went to, wherever I went, poor people are finding a way to get cell phones, even kids. The electricity maybe pirated, but they're plugging in those chargers every night just like you and me, and that's sending more carbon dioxide up the chimney.

Greg Dalton: There's even a quote in the book about, I think, it's a person in Uganda saying, "I wish we could market condoms the way we market cell phones, they’d be as popular." Let's have our next question at Climate One.

Male Participant: I'm curious about how many people the earth can continue to support and let those people live in a comfortable fashion, given the fluctuations of food production from El Niño and La Niña and so forth north and south of the equator. What's the sustainable population that's comfortable for the earth?

Greg Dalton: Alan Weisman?

Alan Weisman: Yes. I attacked that in a couple of different ways or I get a few different scientists who have looked at it from different ways to respond to that and one of them in terms of food production. I mentioned artificial nitrogen before. Our food supply is now chemically force fed and it is having severe negative repercussions. Besides the incredible amount of greenhouse gases that are involved in nitrogen fertilizer and the fact that – just the meat industry, and the repercussions of eating meat and animal flatulence. And you add all of that up together, it turns out that just meat production is probably responsible for 51% of our greenhouse gases. I mean it's extraordinary, but this comes from the World Bank. It doesn't come from some wildlife vegan I assure you.

We're looking at a situation where this chemistry is starting to backfire on us. You know a lot about it here in California, because rising rates of breast cancer, autism, all of this stuff is starting to be tied to some of the protectors of this laboratory who bred plants that are the basis of our food supply now, and all the antibiotics that are being fed to animals and I could go on here. Before we had commercial levels of artificial nitrogen, there were over two billion people on this planet. 40% of us would not be here without artificial nitrogen.

So if we do a healthy thing for our planet, but gradually phase it out over the next couple of generations as we gradually are bringing our population down so people don't start starving, we're going to have fewer dead zones the size of New Jersey at mouths of the world's great rivers. We're going to have soils that are starting to recover. So many soils have been sterilized by this stuff, and we're going to come back to a sustainable level.

Another calculation for the number of people that the earth could safely sustain has to do with how much carbon per year could be ejected into the atmosphere without really destabilizing both the climate and the chemistry of the seas. And that number which was calculated here at UC Berkeley by a team of physicists led by John Holdren, who's now President Obama's science and technology adviser. And in keeping with your question, figuring out what would give pretty much an average amount of energy to everybody on the planet so they could have a chance at a lifestyle that most people would feel acceptable, say a European lifestyle, less consumptive than us but certainly higher than in Africans or South Asians. And again, it came down to about one and a half billion to two billion.

Now, that was again the population of the world in 1900, and we had a pretty robust world back then. We had great inventions coming up. The Wright brothers came up with airplanes. Somebody in a debate said to me, "Yes, but if we control population, that next kid, that could be the next Mozart." And I said, “Well you know, when the last Mozart was born there were less than half a billion people on the planet, and somehow we had a critical mass of intellectual activity.

Greg Dalton: We're talking about population and climate at Climate One. Let's have our next audience question. Welcome.

Marian Swain: Great discussion. Thank you. My name is Marian Swain. I work at The Breakthrough Institute over in Oakland. So you're talking about empowering girls and educating girls and women, which is great but then your rhetoric just kind of shifts. And when you talk about booming populations in Pakistan or India, you start to talk about people as if they're like a scourge or a pest, which I find somewhat troubling as a type of rhetoric.

So I think what we're actually seeing in the developing world is countries with rising populations, but also that are developing and getting wealthier. And as they get wealthier, then the population growth does start to slow and we do see birth rates start to converge towards replacement rates. And I think most of the mainstream projections are seeing population stabilization by the end of the century. So I was hoping you could react to that.

Greg Dalton: So Malcolm Potts.

Malcolm Potts: I mean there is a very widespread idea that we don't have to do anything and the population will stabilize. What I think Alan and I are saying is that we have a huge opportunity to accelerate the slowing of human population by making choices available to women.

Now, the first question was a very good one. I think there are levels of human poverty that I've seen that I wouldn't wish any other human being to be in. If we look at measures of GDP, people want to get richer and richer. If you look at measures of happiness, poor people are not happy. They get to a certain level and then their happiness is pretty much horizontal. I think we got to get away from all these silly GDP measures. We cannot bring the whole world to America's standard of living, whatever that is. That is just physically impossible. There aren't the resources. We run out of copper and things like that. And there are realities that we have to live with, but we have an opportunity to slow rapid population growth in the human rights framework, and that's one we should welcome.

Greg Dalton: Let's have our next audience question at Climate One. Welcome.

Female Participant: Thank you for this interesting conversation. As a youth, I would hope to see this population growth change, and I hope to be alive to see it. In your ideal, like reasoning, what sort of time frame do you see for this and what sort of consequences do you see if there aren't enough younger people to support older people who maybe more in need of support?

Malcolm Potts: Okay. Well, first of all, there are a lot of people that are worried about declining populations in Europe and Russia. Every year the science-based industry makes more stuff with fewer people. They make more large SUVs with robots than they used to make with more people, so there's unemployment in Europe. There's unemployment in America. I think it's crazy to be worried about a slowly falling population. I think it's something that we should welcome.

Greg Dalton: Let's have our next question for Alan Weisman and Malcolm Potts at Climate One.

Male Participant: My thought is, I'm from the generation where progress is our most important product. And I remember in your book that you said that in order to get our economies leveled up, we need to have a stable state economy and I was wondering if you could comment on exactly what a stable state economy? Because, obviously, I grew up where the free enterprise, but it seems like if we're controlling people in a stable state economy that I'm going to have to give up some of my freedom, so I was wondering if you could comment on that.

Alan Weisman: Yes. I mean your freedom doesn't have to go anywhere. I tackled the economic question like on Japan, which is one of the first countries on earth that is really dealing with a shrinking population. For the reason being that in 1949, Japan had to cut off its baby boom, because it lost World War II.

Now, some of you may recall that it entered World War II or it started World War II because it had a population problem, and it wanted to expand in the Manchuria to bleed off surplus numbers. But then, of course, things got out of hand. They kept going and then they lost. When their soldiers came back, they started to rejoin their wives just like our soldiers did, and their population rose by 10 million, and suddenly everybody was starving to death because their economy was wrecked.

So in 1949, as an emergency measure, they legalized abortion. Remember, this is before birth control pills because Japanese women who are pregnant were literally throwing themselves in front of trains, because they didn't want to watch another baby die of hunger. So today, there is a much smaller generation that's about to take the place of that last large generation that was born before World War II, and their population is already dropping. By the middle of the century, it's going to be approaching its 1950 population again, and many Japanese economists are terrified by that because they say they're not going to be able to keep growing economically.

But I met an economist named Akihiko Matsutani, who is part of a major policy think-tank in Japan, who sees this as an opportunity. He sees what's going to happen and it's already starting to happen that instead of everybody living in this crowded court cities where they can import raw materials and create through their heavy industries stuff for exportation, younger people are already starting to move into the hinterlands, away from the cities, because as there are fewer people living there land is cheaper, housing is cheaper and he says that light industries are going to follow them, because there's going to be fewer so they're going to be more valuable. Wages are not going to drop.

In fact, he said per capita GDP - if that's not a paradox - is not going to drop. The country's GDP may because its economy is going to be shrinking, but people are going to earn pretty much the same. Only as demand drops, when there are fewer people demanding and fewer people putting carbon dioxide up into the atmosphere I would add, they're going to simply cut working hours so people are going to have more leisure time, and the definition of prosperity is going to be more about quality of life than quantity of stuff.

Now, this is not a bad vision of the future. And, of course, it's going to take some tweaking but he says the way it's going to happen, as population drops gradually as it does, we're going to have a generation or two, a few decades to make this transition towards steady state being that we're not trying to grow and always demand more resources on a planet that does not grow and does not have an unlimited number of them.

Greg Dalton: Let's go to our next question. Welcome to Climate One.

Male Participant: Thank you. Quick question, Dr. Potts, let us suppose that we do get all of these things that are on both of your wish lists, that we have ample education for women everywhere, and that we have ample access to contraceptives. What then would you estimate would be in the aggregate globally the rate of reproduction for everyone? And if that is more than what would be needed to get down to the 1.5 billion or so that you, Mr. Weisman, see as being sustainable in number, what solution would you then propose and is that consistent with the principles?

Malcolm Potts: I think it's a good question, I think, with fairly good answers. So I think by the end of this century, if we invest in family planning now, we could probably have six billion people with the population continuing to decline. So sometime in the 22^nd century we'll probably get to the one or two billion, which I think would be biologically sustainable and I think would be a wonderful and beautiful world. The really dangerous time is between 2015 and 2100, and what we do now will determine what that population looks like.

Greg Dalton: We're going to take two more questions from these young questioners. Yes, welcome to Climate One.

Nina Harpell: Hi. My name is Nina Harpell. I'm a student at Foothill. I just have like a really quick question about if this affects population growth at all. So if healthcare is like decreasing the mortality rate, how do we deal with our current population control if lives are being prolonged?

Greg Dalton: Alan Weisman?

Alan Weisman: Well, just one example, Bill and Melinda Gates have been very concerned about malaria and HIV, and they have devoted a lot of funding to try to eradicate them in the world. And, of course, we all want that to happen. If you've ever seen the ravages of either, you pray that they will succeed. But in recent years, the Gates’ have come to understand that solving one problem is going to exacerbate another on a stressed and stretched the planet. So they have now become some of – I mean their foundation, among private foundations, is number one in trying to fund family planning, because just as Norman Borlaug realized with food production, if we solve one problem that's going to increase the number of surviving human beings, we're going to have to couple that with family planning in order to keep a steady balance.

Look, imagine a national park. Every one of us knows it just makes total logical sense that you have to keep the number of predators and prey in some kind of balance. Otherwise, the ecosystem can just get completely out of whack and even collapse. But when the species ourselves, it's a little harder to imagine and yet this is exactly what we have to do.

Greg Dalton: Let's have our last question. Welcome to Climate One.

Rebecca Thompson: I'm Rebecca Thompson. I'm from the San Francisco Waldorf High School. And the question I have for you is with the growing population obviously affecting the climate. We're having some really weird weather, so what kind of physical effects and changes to the U.S. climate can we see after this current polar vortex?

Greg Dalton: Alan Weisman, you've traveled a lot and seen a lot of climate impacts.

Alan Weisman: Boy, I said that I went to 21 countries and then 21 of them, people told me that the weather had changed. And while Malcolm was talking a couple of minutes ago about poor people and how they are impacted by climate change, I was thinking about a country that both of us spent time in Niger - a Sahel nation. And when I went there, every village after village, people would say to me the same thing. They say, "If you have been here 25 years ago, you couldn't have seen that house over there. It's about 100 meters off because a lot of the trees we used to have."

And I said, "What happened to the trees?" "Well, we cut them because more of us need them for firewood and now trees aren't growing back because we used to have this 10-year drought cycle, and then it became a five-year drought cycle, and then it became a three-year drought cycle, and now we're in the fourth year of the three-year drought cycle." And it's just impacting everybody right now wherever we are. And here in the United States, what we're probably looking at, the models are racing to catch up, but it looks like the ice pack in the Arctic was kind of the anchor for the jet streams.

And now, as that ice pack is diminishing, the jet stream has kind of started to wander and drop down into the mid latitudes, and hence we are having – I live in New England, and I was just in Iowa, and I mean we're having subzero weather much longer than we used to have in the winter time. And meanwhile, we're sucking the moisture out of the west, as you well know here in California. And up there in the pole, ask anybody in Alaska, they're having an unusually warm winter up there, and they're having avalanches that are burying highways. We're in uncharted territory now and I think that we can ride this thing up, but not if we keep putting carbon dioxide up there. And this is one of the best ways that I know to start diminishing our use of fossil fuels is by diminishing the number of users.

Greg Dalton: We have to end it there. Our thanks to Alan Weisman, the author of Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth; and Malcolm Potts, professor of Population and Family Planning at the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. I'm Greg Dalton. Thank you for listening to Climate One today.

[Applause]

Malcolm Potts: Thank you.

Alan Weisman: Thank you.

[Applause]

[END]

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