Environmentalist author Elizabeth Kolbert joined Professor Lawrence Douglas, law, jurisprudence and social thought, for a discussion on "Progressing Our Way to Mass Extinction?" as part of the Point/Counterpoint series.
- So good afternoon, everyone. My name is Lawrence Douglas and I'm in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought. And welcome to the third of the three-part point/counterpoint events that we've been hosting this semester. This is a conversation that was made possible from a generous gift from the members of the 50th reunion class of 1970. And it supports public conversations in the hope of bridging the growing ideological divide in our nation, and helping us all to think more carefully about the most important issues facing us today. This year's theme is progress or I guess, I didn't pronounce it accurately since there's a question mark at the end. So it's this year's theme is, progress? And the series takes place in conjunction with a course of the same name that's being taught right now. Which about one of every five first-years at Amherst are participating in the seminar. Our first event for those of you who were at the earlier ones, featured a conversation between the Harvard historian Jill Lepore and the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. Our second event featured a conversation between Steven Carter and Nicholas Christakis both from Yale. And this afternoon we're delighted to welcome Elizabeth Kolbert back to Amherst College, because she's been here on a couple of times in the past. And as many of you no doubt know, Kolbert's been a staff writer at The New Yorker for about 20 years now, since 1999. Writing primarily, though not exclusively, on matters of climate change. She's perhaps most famous for two terrific books, "Field Notes From a Catastrophe" and then more recently, "The Sixth Extinction" which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. And I should mention, these books, even though they might sound a little bit like downers, they're actually leavened with a lot of really wonderful humor and they are available for purchase. And think Christmas, Hanukkah season. So, nice gifts with the author who's also willing to sign. Betsy has also received many other awards and distinctions. I won't embarrass her by numerating them all or fuel my envy, but I'll mention that she received this year the Pell Center Prize for Story in the Public Square. And perhaps most notably, Kolbert is the mother of Ned Kleiner, Amherst College, class of 2016. So, please welcome Elizabeth Kolbert back to Amherst College. Betsy, may I call you Betsy?
- You may, Lawrence.
- Okay, thank you, Betsy. So, Betsy, I'm gonna maybe try to defend human beings for a little bit.
- Good luck.
- Just the kind of thing I like to do. And one question I just had is, you describe these mass extinction events, and I just wonder why we should really even care about them. If that's okay to ask, and I'll tell it in the following way.
- Yeah.
- So, we had this friend from New York City who came to visit this past spring, and this is a time where these frogs come out. Some of you might have heard them, these spring peepers. And we get all very excited when the spring peepers come out and we were taking a walk in the evening, and the peepers are all peeping, and we said to this friend from New York like, "Hey, those are the spring peepers." And the friend was like, "Loud." And it shook me that like the spring peepers die off like, we'll be a little sad, but who cares? I mean so what?
- Well, I'm really glad you asked that question. You know, I actually get asked that question quite regularly and I'm going to confess I was a little taken aback, the first time, but I no longer am. And I think there are two ways of answering it, and the first is, it's like, if you don't care about that, if you don't care about the end of all other, or many other life-forms on earth, what do you care about? So, that's one way I would pose it. I mean, you could say. Not really solving the problem, and in some level that's what we're doing right now. You'll always hear, "Well, we're putting up a lot of wind "and we're putting up a lot of solar." And that's true, but we are also burning a lot of gas, increasingly less coal, but a lot of natural gas. And we are driving increasingly actually fatter cars, and using more gasoline. So we need a mechanism to stop. That vis-a-vis everything we would consider that to be ethically insufficient. Do you care about, this is the war in Syria? It's not considered ethically acceptable to say, "I don't really give a shit. "I'm not in Syria." That's just not considered. And I don't think it should be considered ethically and that gets to speciesism. Something we can talk about to say, "I don't really care about anything that isn't human." But if you insist on that, and there doubtless, are people who feel that way, just intuitively and there are probably even people who could construct an argument. I wouldn't probably agree with it, but it could be done. That's all you should care about, king of beasts and all that. It's not a good moment. You wouldn't wanna precipitate a mass extinction. You wouldn't wanna be alive during a mass extinction. One of the questions about a mass extension is how does it even happen. It's not really that easy to eliminate, a large percentage of life on earth. And one of the theories about how it could happen, how things can just start to unravel, is you get these cascading effects, and you pull things out, and you might be able to pull out the spring peepers. There are doubtless many things, and I'm not a biologist. There are probably biologists in this room who could tell us what does depend on the spring peepers, eating their eggs, doubtless, and eating the adults. So you already are seeing many food webs collapse. Probably many people read, there was recently a headline, a big story, about how North America has lost, I think it was, a third of it's birds over the last 50 years. And no one knows exactly why, but it's probably related to the fact that we're losing our insects. So there are these cascades that are probably already beginning. And if you are at the very high on the food chain, as we are, you wouldn't choose that as the time to be alive. You wouldn't think that those were good odds. That it just so happens that humans will survive as everything else collapses. Now, that's a gamble, to be honest, that we seem to be willing to take. And the more we push forward with this project, and I use that term loosely obviously, 'cause it's being done completely unwittingly, and, well, less and less unwittingly, but certainly not purposefully. The more we are playing this roll-the-dice kinda game, and I don't wanna say, we're gonna find out. I don't wanna say even your generation is gonna find out, but the longer this goes on, the worse the odds get, I think.
- Right, yeah. And also just about the ethical dimension of things, like you mentioned the war in Syria. I mean, it's one thing to have, well let me ask the question a little bit differently. You could almost describe Homo Sapiens as almost Homo Extinctor, from the way you describe it in your book. I mean, we seem very good about driving things into extinction. There were all these, you described these like megafauna. Which I guess, if people aren't familiar with the term, megafauna are, what are they? They're like giant sloths or big rats or no--
- Well, they're anything, the term really refers to, and I forget the exact, I think anything over 100 kilos. Any animal over 100 kilos, has that, so.
- Right, and we're very good at, like any time people migrated thousands of years ago and they found these big, slow animals, they died off.
- Yeah
- But the climate change business it's not like we're trying to kill off anyone. It's not as if, I mean it's just sort of like, a little bit like bad luck isn't it? I mean, it's not a question of predation right now. I mean we don't want birds to die off, we don't want the little froggies to die. It just happens to be the case that all these good things that we have like central air-conditioning and central heating have these bad consequences. So, I just again, the ethics of the thing I wonder--
- Well, I don't, there's a couple things that I would say. I mean, first of all I don't think that, eating or predating giant sloths, let's just say or whatever Paleolithic people did when they reached this continent. Was that unethical? It's no more unethical than our eating beef. I wouldn't accuse people who even did in the megafauna, I wasn't accusing them of being unethical even, and I don't think that it is, I try very hard in the book, "The Sixth Extinction," not to turn this into an ethical issue. It's not us versus them. It's not good people versus bad people. It's the human project, and at the center of that project, are all the qualities that we value in the human, our inventiveness, our creativity, our ability to do new things. But if you look at this, and it's unfortunately a very simple argument. you could argue it's simple-minded, but I think it's pretty compelling, that if you look at how evolution works it requires a genetic mutation. If you want to change your behavior your way of living in the world, you are reliant on random mutations which don't occur all that often, that are adaptive and very useful, and slowly propagate through a population, and through a species, get fixed into species. Now when we want to change something we go to Amazon and order it, or whatever. And that process has just sped up, and sped up, and sped up. It was true right away, when people arrived in a new place and brought weapons with them. Well animals just don't have weapons. You've got to evolve a new way, form of predation. And that arms race, which is always going on in evolution, is a slow process, and it tends not to lead to extinction, because if you do in your own prey you're in big trouble. We are a species that can do in one species and go on and move on and do in another species, and that makes us extremely dangerous. I mean that's just a fact, to other species, and are we so dangerous to other species that we are a danger to ourselves? I think unfortunately that's true. But that is definitely open to debate.
- Right, but even that, I mean your book also tells us very interesting story about, I mean the image of humans that emerges from the book is, I think, a very interesting one. I mean a lot of the book is TUC talking about species other than humans, but at the same time that you're talking about us as a danger, you also describe. We engage in these extraordinary efforts to propagate endangered species. I mean, a lot of, you described someone, a scientist, who is putting her arm up to her elbow in the rectum of a rhinoceros to try to make it ovulate, or to check if it's ovulating. And not a lot of other species are doing that, I don't think, and I just wondered if you'd comment about that.
- Well I do, I think that that is why the, I definitely would like to trouble our view of ourselves. That definitely was one of my goals, but it's not like I have an answer to this. I think people are complicated that is precisely what makes us so interesting and so destructive. And our empathy, our empathy for each other, or the fact that we think it's, that we declare a humanitarian crisis and go in and provide humanitarian aid for people, so they don't starve to death. I think pretty much everyone in this room would agree that that's a good quality of humanity. Now that is also the reason there are so many of us and we're putting, not the reason but a part of the reason, putting so much pressure on planet Earth. If you just think of how many resources humans arrogate to themselves. This morning, those of you who are there this morning, I gave a figure about just human biomass. And now the figure is that human biomass is greater than all wild mammals put together by a ratio of eight to one. So that's a pretty astonishing figure. And the reason for that is we just use a lot of resources, and you just think about it pretty logically, well there's just that much less left for other species. So is that, where does that fit into ethics? I think it's extremely, I don't think it's clear-cut at all. But these are unfortunate consequences, and so to be constantly patting ourselves on the back and not being cognizant of the collateral damage here, that's really all that I'm trying to bring in to view.
- Right, right. And in fact one of the lines of your book, which I really thought was quite extraordinary, which maybe gets at this whole nature of your understanding of humans, is you write this towards the end of the book and I'm just gonna read this aloud. You write, "If you want to think about why "humans are so dangerous to other species. "You can picture a poacher in Africa carrying AK-47, "or a logger in the Amazon gripping an axe, "or better still, you can picture yourself "holding a book on your lap." Now I thought that was an extraordinary statement because I think a lot of us would be like, "Oh yeah, a poacher with an AK-47, got it, I got that. "A logger in the Amazon, got that. "Picture of yourself holding a book in your, "but I'm holding your book on my lap." And now this is an invitation for me to think I'm a pretty dangerous dude. So I wonder if you could unpack that.
- Well I'm glad you were attracted to that line. What I was what I was trying to get at obviously, yes, obviously that's a dig at my reader. And it is trying to, I mean why are humans, humans transmit knowledge. So if we had to start all over again, what distinguishes the human, one of the distinguishing things, I'm not going to get into the whole thing of what is the characteristic that distinguishes a human, but a culture they can transmit knowledge over generations. That's extremely powerful. And there are animal cultures, absolutely. I think that that's clear in some species, but they have very, very limited amounts of knowledge that they're transmitting, and they're vary, it has to be transmitted directly from one animal to the other. There's no like, go look over there in that book and you can figure it out. And so the idea that we have built up these, this enormous cultural apparatus that can transmit knowledge is unbelievably powerful, that's why we're all here today. That's why Amherst college exists, to continue that project and expand on it, but once again, it just gets to that imbalance between ourselves and every other species. There's simply no other species that can do that. So once again, when you just think about it, it's not rocket science, it's gonna be a problem for a lot of other species that have to deal with the consequences of that.
- And one thing is, I suppose you could say that technology has gotten us into this particular mess. I think one of the things that might have come up in the course of the semester in this course on progress, or progress? Is to point a finger maybe at something like capitalism, like one of the reasons that we're not happier than we are is we have these very productive forces, but they're tethered to a system of inequality. But it doesn't seem like it's really capitalism's fault that has gotten us into this bind, it really does seem like an issue of technology. So do you have a vision of technological determinism? It's hard to play a game of historical counterfactual, but is there any other way to to run this program and not to get where we are now?
- I think that's a really good question. I think that is a question at the heart of, progress? And the question of, a lot of what we think of also as our own achievements, as it were, are the achievements of, especially over the over the last of using energy, what we consider to be the normal course of life. And since the start of the Industrial Revolution, even before that, I mean really we're thinking fire. Fire is using some other organisms as energy, and obviously all organisms are exchanging energy. That's really what ecology is, exchange of energy through these systems. But we figured out ways to get at more and more energy. And when we figured out how to get at fossil fuels, that was absolutely huge. There's just, that's just basically fossilized sunlight. So we're going through hundreds of millions of years of plant matter, that happened to not decompose, turned into fossil fuels, and now we're really rapidly running through that. So we're just running geological history backwards in that sense and releasing all that carbon back into the atmosphere. Now could we have ever reached the state of advanced civilization, that we like to think of ourselves right now in 2019, without using that form of energy? I don't think that, I personally don't think that would be possible though I'd be certainly happy if anyone wanted to argue, if you want to argue, that it seems pretty clear that we are very much a product, of, we all use, if you think of what was possible to do when we were only using the calories that humans or maybe draft animals could consume, we were extremely limited by what we could do. And we did a lot less damage to the to the planet at that point and as soon as we found that we could use these sources of energy, well then we unleashed forces that were many, many times. So even though I would argue there is a continuity of human history, I do think the last 200 years. There's a very good book by a historian called J R McNeill, called "Something New Under the Sun" and it talks about these last, since the Industrial Revolution, something really new has happened to Planet Earth.
- And do you have any kind of, I mean if technology in a way has gotten us into the fix, and we can always talk about the absence of political will, which I'm gonna bracket that as another. But if for example you were made master of the universe or just master of the planet, are there ways right now where we could walk this, but I mean not maybe walk it back because one of the things you talk about is the effects are gonna continue to be like turning an ocean liner around. But is there hope for these people out there? And are there things that you can say to them? Well there's technology that's out there, the question is the political will.
- Well I think that that also is, I do think that that is the, one of the great questions of our time, on the one hand, of the political will, and on the other hand, do we have the technology? Now we do have a lot of amazing technology. A solar panel is an amazing technology, it's a way to take the current output of the Sun and use it to make energy, as opposed to the fossilized output of the Sun. And way more sunlight, I forget what the figure is, but hits the Earth every day then even we can consume. So that's a miraculous technology. We should obviously be making a lot more use out of it. But the question of, as we move forward, and in fact I've been thinking about this a lot recently in the context of a book I'm trying to write, there are a lot of technologies on the horizon. There's genetic engineering. There's species that are potentially at, reached very low numbers. And this is happening even as we speak. You don't have to get to the point, although doubtless, I shouldn't say doubtless, but quite possibly we will, where we will resurrect animals that are extinct. But where you could basically expand the population, the genetics of a population. A lot of animals when they get down to very low numbers, they're, it's called a genetic bottleneck, you have traits that are deleterious, but that's all that's left. So right now, even as we speak, there's an effort for example in the black-footed ferrets. Do people know the story of black footed ferrets? They were really decimated in this country, in the West, they're a Western animal. They were down to like 22 individuals. Many, many millions of dollars have been spent to try to bring them back. But they have, A, they have a disease sylvatic plague that they get, and B, this bottleneck is a real problem. So right now there's a couple of individuals whose tissue is frozen and they're trying, in the very earliest stages of this, to see whether those individuals could be cloned and then impregnate a living ferret eventually and try to bring those genetics back into the population. And that is a brave new world and these technologies, genetic engineering technologies people are talking about. Counteracting climate change with other ways of changing the atmosphere. Geoengineering there's a lot of talk and there's a lot of things on the horizon that I think, in the next generation or two, will become huge battles because they really, really challenge our notion and they will become more and more acceptable. Right now you can't take a genetically modified organism just put it out into the environment. There's huge resistance to that, but I think that's gonna decline as we find that we can muck around with everything and potentially solve some problems, and potentially create a lot of new ones. These are these are really interesting questions.
- What about the mammoth? That's our, the idea of de-extincting the mammoth, Betsy.
- Yeah, well, there's a lot of talk about this. There's a guy named George Church at Harvard, and I do want to emphasize this is a lot of talk. But we could get, one of the problems is when something's been dead for a long time, like the mammoths, you could sequence it's genome, but you'd have a lot of holes in it. You couldn't sequence it the way you could take your DNA and just run it through. So you have to get a sort of jury-rigged version of it. But it could be done. And, to a certain extent, has been done. And then you could try to reverse-engineer a, I think it's an Asian elephant it's closer to a mammoth, than actually an Asian elephant is to an African elephant. And then you could try to get an Asian elephant to carry this embryo. But the changes are our thousands, we're talking about many thousands of genetic changes, and we are not at the point where we can do that yet. But will we ever be there? It's not impossible, and Amherst should be the first place to get them out.
- Yes, yes, totally. And yet I don't know if you have, I don't want to put you in the position of a sage or something. One of the things is, I think we all have to make these decisions about how we live, for example. My wife insists on keeping our house around 62 degrees, as a way of fighting against climate change. So all that means is I'm chronically ill, and I'm not sure if I'm really making a contribution to the environment or not. And then there are questions about-
- I'm not getting between you and you're wife.
- Yes, yes. And then there are questions about do I fly or do I not fly. At some place like Amherst College, think there are interesting issues that always the college declares itself as dedicated to reducing it's carbon footprint but never at the expense of divesting from petroleum firms. Do you have any kind of, any practical advice or how to negotiate those kinds of issues?
- Well, I think we keep we keep going around and around on these questions because we are incapable, as a society, as a country, of deciding that we need to reduce emissions. Which we, I really can't exaggerate how drastically and desperately we need to do this. I mean emissions right now, globally, are tracking a scenario the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, I'm not gonna get into a big climate change spiel, but it created these scenarios, they're called representative concentration pathways. And we are now tracking the very highest, which is called RCP 8.5, and it ends up in 2100, when very few of us will be around, but hopefully the children of today's Amherst students will still be around. Ends up with almost a nine degree fahrenheit temperature increase, okay. Now to give you a sense of how dramatic that is, I mean probably temperatures have not been that high on planet Earth for many, many, many millions of years. And that would be completely a ice-free world. It would be a world where we had definitely doomed the Greenland ice sheet, the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Sea levels, Boston, every coastal city in the world, completely inundated. Many parts of the world uninhabitable by humans. So that is a very, very, very dramatic outcome. We are on that. It's 2020, okay. We really, really, really need to get our act together now. Not doing that, we are constantly leaving it to individuals, to make to make choices. And it's very difficult, and I feel this in my own life, so I'm completely empathetic, to say, "Well I should be the one to make these sacrifices." Now I, that being said, I think it's fair, I do think it's very important for institutions like Amherst to lead by example. And whether that is divestment, I'm not gonna get involved in that right now, or whether it's reducing campus emissions and really looking at what travel is necessary, What is necessary? What emissions do we think are serving our mission? And what are not? I think all those conversations should be had in preparation for the day, when I hope and pray, that we will get our act together and decide as a country, and even as a globe, that we're going to do things. And then people will have to, and I don't know how we're going to compel that. If it going to be a price mechanism or what. Make different choices.
- I mean one thing I thought in terms of, I mean now getting to the issue of political will, is you probably saw that I think among Democrats very interestingly the number one concern is climate change. I was actually surprised by that result. It's higher than health care, it's higher than anything.
- Has it persisted there, or that was just that one poll?
- What was it just one poll?
- I don't know, but anyway, it certainly has risen substantially, and I think that that, I can't exactly explain it. I don't know why it hasn't been higher on people's radar before, but I think that the fires in California, all sorts of things have focused the mind a little bit on what's going on. I just was hearing a piece on NPR about real estate values in coastal Miami. All these things are hitting people, impacting people, increasingly impacting people right now.
- This is a question just reflects my own scientific naivety What if things were going the other way? What if we were getting colder? I mean is that, would we be facing the same problem? Is it just bad luck that burning fossil fuels makes everything hotter. That if everything were getting colder, we'd be like, hey, that would be like, huh. Get some more Patagonia, and then...
- Well there's two questions here. One is direction, and one is rate of change. There's a certain amount of question, and you may have heard, and this gets trotted out by the right all the time. Are we looking at another, people in the '70s predicting another another Ice Age, or in the '60s or '50s or whatever. And now you're saying it's gonna be global warming. So there are, there are glacial cycles. Amherst College sits on a piece of ground, if you've been here twelve, or go to the geology Museum and read all about it, if you'd been here 15 thousand years ago, you would have been under under a mile of ice. So obviously the climate changes, duh. And these are orbital cycles, and there's, it's unclear whether and when exactly we would be heading into another glacial cycle had we not decided to intervene very, very dramatically. So the good news is you're not getting another Ice Age. So don't worry about that. But then for quite a long time, and that's another question that I'm sure people are modeling right now. If and when we ever stop emissions, will you ever resume that glacial cycle? But those changes, and if we were heading into another Ice Age, people would be taking that fairly seriously, but it would be a very, a much, much, much more protracted process before Amherst was buried under a mile of ice. We are changing the climate at an extraordinary rate. Once again, it may not feel like it to us, because we weren't around through other things. And to us life is life. But, once again, in a geological sense this is extraordinarily rapid change.
- One of the things also, just in the book, that I found pretty fascinating, is not only you're giving a history of these other extinction events, but you're also giving a history of the knowledge of these extinction events. Like when people first became aware of it. And you link the two in this, early on in the book you say, "In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, "but it's probably no coincidence at all, "the history of these events is recovered "just as people come to realize "that they are causing another one." So that again was a very interesting observation. I wonder if you could maybe talk about that.
- Well the idea there was simply our knowledge of the history of earth and all of the things that come along with being what we think of, and once again, maybe 100 years from now, or 200 years from now, we won't be thought of as an incredibly sophisticated society. But what we think of as an incredibly sophisticated society, and unlocking, I guess you would say, or solving, a lot of these questions that really puzzled people for a long time. For quite a long time they didn't puzzle people because they didn't realize they were puzzles. And then after the beginning of the Scientific Revolution people puzzled over this. How do you get species? Obviously Darwin solving that after more, sort of solving that, after much much cogitation, by many, many very smart people. And extinction was one of those, was a puzzle. What, why would it happen? How would it happen? And extinction actually as a concept, interesting enough, predates evolution by about two generations. So people realized that animals went extinct, In one of the, the new world, this area in New England, upstate New York was key to that. Because people started to unearth, mastodons in particular. Not so much mammoths, whose fossils look a lot like elephants. And Mastodon teeth, once again you can go to the geology museum and see that. Mammoth teeth are every much like elephant. So they were just, there were a lot of mammoths in Siberia, mammoth bones they were just categorized as elephants, that had been washed north in the flood. So that was how that was explained for quite a long time. But then people in in North America start to find mastodons, and mastodon teeth, which are very different from mammoth teeth and elephant teeth, and they were a tremendous mystery. And that actually, it was on the basis of that that people began to sort of realize there were animals out there that no longer existed.
- And again this is another quote. Maybe you've already answered, this but I thought it was interesting. "Extinction finally emerged as a concept. "Again probably not coincidentally in revolutionary France."
- Yeah, so the guy who, quote-unquote, invented extinction, or really solved this growing mystery of what were all these weird bones of things that didn't seem to be around anymore. And once again the megafauna played a very big role in this, because they are big and they're hard to think that there was a mastodon lurking out there. Although Thomas Jefferson famously thought there were mastodons. They thought Lewis and Clark would find them. 'Cause he did not believe in extinction. It was a very active debate at that moment. And this guy George Cuvier, who was the most famous naturalist of his time, and until Darwin, really the most famous naturalist in Europe, but has really been forgotten because some of his ideas were right, and many of them were wrong. And now extinction exists, it happens, and it happens because of these catastrophes. He said he called them revolutions on the surface of the earth, and he was very much a product of the French Revolution. He lived through the revolution, he lived through the terror. And as you all, know a lot of ideas were on the table in the French Revolution and it seems, once again I can't, I certainly can't prove it, but it seems like, that moment of rethinking things was key to his insight.
- And I think you also mentioned that Darwin actually was quite resistant to this idea.
- Well Darwin, and once again there's actually really interesting Amber's connection here with Hitchcock and the dinosaur footprints, and all those people who understood extinction. So that was the moment, the Hitchcockian moment was the moment when people knew that things had gone extinct. We had these wacky footprints, and those animals didn't exist anymore. But what had happened to them. And Cuvier's theory, which dovetailed nicely with the theory of the deluge was a sort of catastrophist theory. And then Lyell, who's the key figure in the history of geology. Those of you who are taking geology will doubtless bump into him. Who argued things only change gradually. And it wasn't like things mostly changed gradually, it's things only change gradually. So that was his answer to this unscientific sort of religiously-based catastrophism. And when Darwin came along, Darwin is really Lyell applied to biology, and he was a big, Lyell was really his mentor. and Darwin adopted the Lyellian view, catastrophes cannot happen. It's not just that most things are explained without catastrophe, it's they simply cannot happen. And that was the gospel. And if you talk to someone who studied geology as recently as the 1970s, they will tell you that. And then along came the impact hypothesis, which you guys are all familiar with, that it was an asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs. And that really shifted that paradigm, that was a real paradigm shift. So while we believe, I think geologists would say, generally in Earth history change is very gradual, but not always. And that's where we are right now and the question of where we fit in that. How do we relate to an asteroid. That's the issue of our time we are changing things about as fast as anything except an asteroid could do.
- It is interesting about the asteroid, because the asteroid theory, that took a while for it to be adopted as well. I mean, there was a lot of pushback against that and it wasn't pushback that was coming from ExxonMobil or something like that. I thought it was interesting the way in which people are so invested in their scientific understandings that they will really, really resist evidence.
- Yeah, I think that is a really interesting case in the history of science, of a theory that was absolutely reviled. It had got a lot of popular press, it was such an amazing idea. But it was in paleontological circles it was considered complete heresy, it was a form of heresy. And that, I think, that gets to this question of how scientific revolutions, I don't want to elevate it to a scientific revolution, but it was a new concept that took a long time for people to buy into.
- Do you know how long it took? I mean was it?
- I want to say it wasn't that long. I mean in the history of, it wasn't like, the Earth and the Sun. The impact hypothesis was first proposed in 1980, and then the impact crater, so the Chicxulub crater, which is under the Yucatan and parts of the Gulf of Mexico, was just discovered in the early '90s. And when that creator was discovered that exactly matched the timing of the end of the cretaceous, a lot of people, a lot of scientists, who were hesitant to embrace the theory. Because there's a saying in science, "Extraordinary theories demand extraordinary evidence." But that was extraordinary evidence.
- I mean it's interesting because that kind of, because on one level, maybe it's hard to tell a good story about the adoption, or the acceptance, of the theory of climate change, or the fact of climate change. But it seems that in the case of the impact, I mean you don't have material forces aligned who are deeply invested in disputing it, and still you had people disputing it. And here with climate change, you can almost tell a good story that, well it's been pretty widely adopted, I mean obviously there's some very serious outliers. And some of the serious outliers are in very powerful positions in our government today. And some other leading governments as well. But at least the theory seems to have been adopted pretty quickly, in the face of a lot of material opposition to it's acceptance, does that make?
- Yeah, but I think climate, there's a couple things I want to say about climate change. And if you go back through the climate change literature, I mean there were reports to Lyndon Johnson about climate change as a problem, okay. So we are now going back over 50 years. So that idea that it was accepted. Climate changes is not a challenge to anything except our economic order as it were. Climate change is very basic geophysics, and I think that any scientist who was, it didn't really challenge any one scientific understanding. It's a variation of blackbody radiation. We have understood that greenhouse gases determine the temperature of the earth since 1850s, okay. So it was very established science that if you add a lot of co2. The insight that brought people to the idea that, "Oh my God, we're changing the climate." Was not the physics of climate change, which were understood and calculated already in the 1890s. It was how fast are the oceans, there was a theory that the oceans were gonna be absorbing most of the co2 that we put up there. And as soon as people started measuring co2, and this was back in, this was in the late 50s, in the atmosphere, they realized, Oops, that's not true. The oceans are not gonna absorb all of our co2 that fast. It's going to, and then as soon as that happened people realized this could have significant consequences. So we haven't exactly jumped on this idea, but it doesn't have the same scientific dynamic. That I think is a much more political dynamic.
- And do you ever, I mean, this is again maybe this is a speculative question. I don't know if you have many opportunities to actually talk to climate deniers, climate change deniers. I, in my own work, I sometimes have contact with Holocaust deniers, and people sometimes ask me, "Do they actually believe what they think?" And my basic answer is, "No, they don't." It's actually bad faith. And I don't know if you have any kind of insight into that.
- I think that's a really interesting comparison. And I think that I don't have a lot to do with climate deniers, which is except to the extent that of a very garden-variety. In some sense we're all climate deniers. We're all living, going on living as if this somehow is gonna get solved. But I don't, I think it's a little bit different in the sense that, even though you could argue it's very basic science, blah, blah, blah. I think that, look there are a lot of people who don't believe in evolution, okay. Now is that, good faith I don't believe it? That's my faith. I don't believe in evolution. So I think it's a lot, I think it's a somewhat different, I think that the professional climate deniers are probably acting in bad faith at this point, yes. But Uncle Joe who thinks we're heading into another Ice Age and he's basically, scientifically, not the most sophisticated person. Is that good faith or bad faith? I don't, I'm not gonna call it bad faith. It's a bit of a fog maybe, but I don't know that it's truly bad faith.
- I'm gonna open it up in a moment to the audience to ask, give all of you an opportunity to ask questions. I'm gonna add one last thing, which is basically for the students in, who have been in the seminar. And I think the point of departure for the seminar was a quotation from Barack Obama. I'm just gonna read you this quotation. And I think this again was shared with the students on the very first meeting of their seminar and Obama had said the following, he said, "If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, "and you did not know ahead of time who you would be. "You didn't know whether you were going to be born "into a wealthy family or poor family. "What country you'd be born in. "Whether you're going to be born a man or a woman. "If you had to choose blindly what moment "you'd want to be born, you'd choose now." And I was just wondering if you had any thoughts about that.
- I mean, I think it's very interesting quote, and I think it shows a certain kind of, a slight America centrism or whatever. I think it shows, many of the things that are attractive about Obama. Optimism, et cetera. But, I mean, would most of the people in this room probably say well I've, it's been pretty good for me so far. Yeah, but if you were picking through, if you were living off. Has anyone seen the movie Anthropocene? Okay, well anyway, I recommend it. It's a really good beautiful photography and there's a scene of many, many people and I forget exactly where this this dump is. I think it's in India, but people living off that. And there are many, many hundreds, thousands, millions of people whose livelihoods. Now, if you compare that as your way of making living, to ten thousand years ago when all of our ancestors were hunting and gathering, and by all accounts, that we can think of, were actually living in pretty egalitarian societies. Because there simply weren't a lot of excess resources in the whole history of civilization. I'm not gonna recount now, I hope you've talked about that in Progress. But I don't know that I would agree with that. I could certainly say your odds of living longer are probably better, but I don't know of your odds of living better. I think that's a very somewhat subjective and somewhat I think that there are many people living in a kind of misery that maybe didn't even, it wasn't even comprehensible ten thousand years ago. I don't know. I wasn't around, and I am not living off of a garbage dump. And maybe there are joys and satisfactions in that. I think that all, I am serious, I think that all of these value judgments, that is exactly what you are at Amherst to examine. So I don't know the answer to that.
- Okay. Questions from you all. Don't be shy. Yes? Do we have a mic to go around, just so, I don't want to scare anyone by forcing them to.
- [Audience Member] Can you explain why climate change has become such a politicized issue in this country, and why, globally, it hasn't been accepted as an issue that we all need to collaboratively address?
- That is a really good question.
- was going to ask it but I decided to.
- I mean, the simple answer, which is as a close an approximation to the truth as I think we need, how's that? Is that it, there are huge vested interests. And by that I want to extend that once again, to a certain extent to all of us, I mean, living the way we all live right now, is completely dependent on fossil fuels. There's just no getting around that. And there are huge industries in this country. And in particular I mean the US is now an oil producer again one of the world's major oil producers. That happened under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, that is completely antithetical to solving or addressing climate change. So it became politicized, I think, very purposefully, by fossil fuel interest. And there's tons written on that, that if you're interested in reading I'm happy to cite you chapter and verse. But it's a very conscious attempt to make it a political issue in this country, okay. And then that was seized on. It has now become a ridiculously polarized, where you have one party that says climate change is a big problem, and another party that says climate change doesn't exist. That really should not be possible, but here we are. And then you have, if you were to take the next step, and we would all acknowledge that climate change is a big problem. We all say we need to address it. You would then face a huge global problem. Acute global equity problem which we never quite get to. Because we never take that first step. But then the question is, well the US has blown through we personally in the, not personally, but in the US, the US is still responsible for more co2 that's up there in the air right now, than any other country. And if I'm a very, the least developed countries as they're officially known, official block of the UN. And say I should cut down on my co2, my fossil fuel consumption, because you guys already screwed up the planet? Screw you. And so that global equity issue, which I think is huge, we never even reached the point of having that conversation. Because we keep getting bolloxed up in whether or not this is a problem or not. So it's a very difficult issue to solve, even if you're well-meaning, and we are not well-meaning at this point.
- [Audience Member] I was wondering how you would respond to claims by governments of some developing countries that say that countries like the US had their economic power and influence in the world largely powered by or influenced by their use of fossil fuels? And that now it's the turn of these governments to use fossil fuels to gain that same sort of economic influence. How would you reply to that?
- Yeah, I mean, I think that's a very difficult argument to counter. I think that it's very hard to say, "Well, don't do what we did, do what we now say." I think our moral standing to say that is approximately zero but that being said, and once again, the only hope here if we must have hope, is that if I'm let's say India, which is soon will be the most populous country in the planet, and has huge coal reserves, and uses huge coal reserves, and is ramping up it's coal consumption. I'm gonna be hammered by climate change. So I do have an interest in addressing this and many, many, many gazillions of man-hours have gone into trying to come up with a way forward, that is both acceptable to developed countries and developing countries. And one of that has always been technology transfer, money transfer, we're not doing this by just telling other countries what to do. Now as I say, we keep taking one teeny step forward and then several steps backwards. And that's what, I'm not gonna go into the whole Paris Accord, but Paris was a teeny step forward and now we're taking a big step backwards.
- [Audience Member] What do you think nuclear energy has, what role do you think it will play in the future of our planet?
- That's another really good question. That is there are some people who might have a lot of, whom I think are very smart, who would say this, There's no way, we're not we're not solving climate change. I have to make that point, because it's already, we've gone down too far down the road, but dealing with it without nuclear, and there's some people who would say, there's no way we're doing it with nuclear. And there is a lot of nuclear going up around the world but not in this country it's, and not generally in the West. Germany is actually closing it's nuclear power plants, as you probably know. So after Fukushima, there's a lot of reluctance to say, let's just go full bore into nuclear. And one thing that really, right now the US is closing, also closing nuclear. A lot of our nuclear plants are very old, and they're actually, so we're actually shutting them down. And we're not building new, because it's extremely expensive. So right now it's just not competitive, but potentially you could get a lot of power out of nuclear power. And you can get a really lot of power out of breeder reactors, where you recycle the fuel. But most countries that even have done it, it's quite dangerous, it produces plutonium, bomb grade plutonium. So it's, these are very, very tough geopolitical and environmental questions to answer. And another point that I would just raise, is that the US has never come up with a place to put nuclear waste. So all of the nuclear waste that has been the radioactive rods, the rods that we pull out of the power plants, that are still extremely radioactive hot, sit at the power plant today. We've never found a repository for them. And the Trump administration was gonna go back to an old plan that had been abandoned. But I don't think they've done anything, because they are incapable of doing pretty much anything. So there we sit, we just sit there, and we don't know what to do.
- Questions? You're not going anywhere, so. Yes.
- [Audience Member] So in our class we are currently reading about Vaber, and he said all the leaders and scientists and our teachers have completely different roles in society, because those who are engaged in teaching or academics are expected to provide a true story. If you want to do this thing, then does this thing's like that. But those leaders are having arguments or some ideals, however teachers are not allowed to provide ideals or personal opinions in the classroom. So what do you expect yourself to do, as we write as a person who writes books for us how gives influence to other people.
- Oh, that's a good question. I set the bar pretty low, and what I'm trying to do in general is progress, is raise questions. Is get people to look at things that they might think they understood or have settled ideas about, and trouble that in a way. So I am a troublemaker. That's sort of how I see myself. But I don't see myself as, and this you could argue is a cop-out, and I accept that, I don't see myself as providing grand theory, or a grand argument, or a grand answer. I just would like to get under people's skin a little bit.
- Next question
- [Audience Member] I think one way, it's sort of tempting to think about issues, about our role in climate change, and extinctions, I think we all sort of slip into this, is to think that what's really wrong here is that we're messing with nature. Or that we're intervening in nature, but I worry that there's not a notion of nature there that can really sustain that thought. Because, well, I guess to put it bluntly, either we're part of nature or we're not. And if we are then everything we do is also part of nature. So we're not intervening or messing with nature. On the other hand, if we're not part of nature, then even the benign things we do are things that are intervening in nature. That we're messing with nature even with the benign things we do. so I wonder whether you think there's a notion of nature that will sustain these thoughts, or whether you think there's another way we should be thinking about the bad things we're doing here.
- Well I think that's a really, really good question.
- Not so sure that's good, okay.
- And I mean, to a certain extent what I, one answer I could give and it might sound flip, but I think it's important, is to a certain extent that's a semantic thing. That's once again, something that is in our own heads. What we define as nature, what we don't define as nature. Nature doesn't give a shit. So do we imagine the nonhuman world, let's say we just take the nonhuman world, which in the presence of humans has a certain trajectory, and in the absence of humans has a different trajectory. Can we can we agree on that? And then the question becomes, so there was a pre human world and there will be a post human world and the post human world will look radically different for our having been here. And once again I don't necessarily think that it, I think bringing human ethics to bear on this is not necessarily even productive, though on some level we can't help it. But I don't think it's, I guess I somewhat take issue with the idea that we can't at least imagine, in a theoretical sense, a nonhuman world, a world that humans haven't intervened in. Now as a practical matter there is no such world anymore. And that's what we're dealing with right now. And it's still the case that we can't make nature do what we want. It's still the case that we are changing the climate and we're not doing what we want. we're not making it do what we want, when that hurricane comes on, we're not making it, it's not our product. So there's a lot of things that we're doing and this is where things get super, super messy. We're having an influence, but we're not determining it. And there's a lot of cases where we are determining it. When we mow down the rain forest and plant a soybean plantation and feed it fertilizer and pesticides and all the things. That's, I would argue, a very human created landscape. But there's all sorts of intermediates, and that's increasingly the nature that we're dealing with. Is that which can survive alongside us. And what you call it or don't call it, does that matter as much as what's happening? And I think one of the, also other things I would say is, is that we're realizing that even as we have a tremendous impact on everything, we don't understand a lot of things. I mean that non-human world, we only have access to what we look at and what we can imagine, try to imagine is going on. But most of it is going on imperceptibly to us. It's just happening. And it's still carrying on in this degraded or whatever word you want to use. Once you guess it's a word that humans are applying, but it's still carrying on in some fashion. I don't know if that answers your question, but I think it is a very profound question.
- Lee?
- [Audience Member] So I'm wondering if you have any ideas for technological interventions that might not be that commonly discussed ones? If anything in your writing and talking to people gives you ideas about unexpected areas where a technological advance could make a big difference? If somebody wants to take a long-shot bid at working on some kind of technology that will have a large impact?
- Wow, that's a good question. I would say I'm not a technologically particularly talented or savvy person, and I would say anything that I could think of someone is working on. People are tinkering with everything right now. The most amazing things are going on, I mean, people are trying to, for example, rejig photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is an extremely inefficient process, developed over several billion years of evolution, but it doesn't work, it was just chance, and we got the best we could, jury-rigged. Let's try to work that one out. So anything you can think of, anything I could think of, I shouldn't say, you could think of, I only get my ideas from people who are out there working on them, and I'm, all the time, just amazed. I just read a story yesterday that people had, scientists had broadcast sounds of fish on a reef to try to attract fish back to a degraded reef because they thought that the noise might help, and they claimed that it did. So anything I could come up with, someone has come up with.
- Should we just follow up Lee's question, because maybe the question is less about what you yourself would come up with, and just more that, because I think maybe there's a fear that we almost get paralyzed, that I can keep my thermostat at 62 degrees, I'm not sure if that's really gonna have an effect on anything. I know it's gonna make me have a head cold for most of the winter months.
- You and your head-colds.
- But there's also this fear that if we can't change anything, then we might as well go ahead and just live our lives the way. So I just wonder, is there technologies out there that look really really promising, that we just haven't heard a lot about, that you might have read about, that, "Ooh, that sounds like that could really "be very, very promising."
- Well I think that the lesson is it depends what you're talking about. So one point, if we came up with a source of energy, so the holy grail of energy right now in the energy world is fusion, so we would imitate the Sun. Now fusion has always been just above, over the horizon. There are many people who have concluded it will always be just over the horizon, but there are some people who feel it will one day be harnessed, and that would provide, basically limitless energy for potentially very low cost. It would also, as people point out, would provide the means technology for making a thermonuclear bombs to a lot of countries. But there are trade-offs. So let's just imagine, for the sake of imagining, and there's a big project under underway in France. It's hideously troubled and blah, blah, blah, but it is under way. We get fusion, we have limitless energy. Non-carbon sorts of energy, so we sort of arrest climate change at a certain point and it slowly, as the oceans take up co2, the climate eventually reverts. The question then arises in my mind, vis-a-viz the other occupants of planet Earth, what do we do with that energy? And it seems to me that if we continue to mow down the rainforests, and all the other things, a lot of the things that we currently are doing with our energy, we might well be better off, but the other species with whom we share planet Earth will not necessarily be better off. So I don't think that there's a simple straight line here, but humans and from a human perspective, and from a short to medium term perspective, obviously the big question is, can we come up with non-carbon sources of energy? And that gets back to nuclear and so nuclear is fission. Next generation nuclear people talk about, and then the absolutely gold standard would be fusion energy.
- [Assistant] Sorry I went the wrong way.
- [Audience Member] - It seems like a lot of us know things about climate change, find it devastating. I just wonder as someone who spends so much of your time and effort learning about this. How do you deal with the just unbelievably devastating reality, like on an emotional level? How do you deal?
- I don't think, I don't have a good answer for that. I think that it's really hard, especially now, I've been writing about this for almost 20 years, and the world has gone, it's not just that the world hasn't made progress. The world was gone very dramatically backward. I mean emissions are way, way up over that period, and the politics really in this country, haven't, I would guess on some level you'd say we've gotten better, and on some level they've gotten worse. So it's very, unhappiness inducing situation. But I don't have, the routine I do in the morning, I psych myself up, to get through another day. As Lawrence would tell you, I'm a pretty gloomy person. So maybe I just started with a baseline of gloom, and this is just sort of, but it's very, and it doesn't reflect well on humanity, and this gets back to, we were talking this morning about reason and all that, it doesn't make people seem very rational. People do not, at this moment, strike me as behaving the way a enlightened rational society would when you've been told four hundred gazillion times that where your doing is not safe, and you can see it, you can see the sea level rise and you can see the temperature rise. And you're just twiddling your thumbs.
- [Audience Member] Thank you. I have an additional response to the last two questions, which I was in despair about climate change and environmental destruction throughout my whole 20s. And couldn't get out of bed some days. And I just find that being in action about it really, really makes a huge difference. And we don't have one solution, there's never going to be one solution to climate change. But there are already dozens upon dozens of solutions to climate change. And we have to do all of them to make a difference. And some of them are very simple, you've mentioned so many of them, and some of them are very simple, like planting trees is one of the biggest things we can do. Switching to sustainable agriculture, because we can sequester carbon in the soil. There are so many things, and we just need to start doing them. And as you mentioned, what really is in the way is the fossil fuel industry who's buying our government. So one of the biggest things we can do is pressure our local officials and our federal government to make change. Thank you.
- [Audience Member] This question kind of piggybacks on that in terms of personal action. We often read, or I've read that some of the biggest things you can do, I already have had my kid, but just have one child, or not to have children, or to eat a plant-based diet. To make a choice like that. And then my son gobbled up the turkey that his father cooked with great glee, and he would say, "It makes no difference what you're doing mum, "and you're just making yourself feel good "because I made these choices years ago "and it feels right to me." Am I just, do you feel, do you tell young people. Do you tell your child that it makes a difference? And if millions of people made these choices, it does make a difference, even if the government is slow to make change.
- Yeah, I think once again, it's not like, it's not a separate category of ethical action. Does it make a difference if you don't cheat on your tax returns? Let's say, leaving aside the question of getting audited, which is very, very unlikely these days in the Trump administration. There are certain things that you don't do because you consider them unethical. And you don't say to yourself, well is this really changing the course of history? And I think that, why do we always ask that about climate change? Of course it's true, that if your choices were, if you're making a choice that if universally, the continuum imperative, if you're really interested, if universalized was make a difference that seems to me to be an ethical choice, and what you should do, regardless of whether it does become universalized. You can't control that, so I don't. I think that's an non unique problem to climate change, but I certainly do urge people, to behave ethically with regard to climate change. Now that being said I am in a tremendous bind. I travel a lot for work, and do I justify that by saying, Well, this is going to do so much good for the world that it's worth the carbon I'm spewing into the air? I find that harder and harder to do, to be honest. So I don't, I try not to preach to be honest, because my carbon footprint is as bad as, the point, of whatever percent on this planet. So I am in no position to do that. But that being said, I don't think that you should let your son brow be you.
- We have time for one more question, if there, yeah?
- [audience Member] It might be a little bit, maybe bringing a couple of things together as far as what should we do? And who gets to do it? Who gets to decide? But I guess I wonder, maybe not on a, can it happen level, but more on a policy level. Like, what's your view of the Green New Deal or the Green Industrial Revolution, which is the platform for Labor in the UK, or even in China, the goals that it's set out, in a completely different non democratic way. But these large policy advancements, I guess, are being put forth before voters, or not being put forth before voters, in this case of China. What's your take on those, policy wise?
- Well that's a very complicated question. So I'll try to address it pretty simply
- [Audience Member] Sorry.
- The Green New Deal is unfortunately, fortunately or unfortunately, it's a political document. It has no policies attached to it, no legislation, and I'd sort of defy someone to write the legislation that would result in the Green New Deal. So it was very consciously a set of principles that we should aspire to. I am on some level heartened by that, and a lot of people getting behind it. And I say, if it feels good, do it. No, I mean, if it unites people, if it unites Labor and the environmental movement, great. And people fighting for social justice. All of those forces, it was very consciously designed to bring people together, so great. What really worries me is it has rejected the last generation of thinking, which is we need a price on carbon and we need it now. And no one has come up, if you do all these great things, store a lot of energy, solar power, et cetera, and you don't back out the fossil fuels that you're using. You are just, Up what's bad and encourage what's good. And economists, whom I don't place all my faith in by any stretch of the imagination, would say the only way to do that, only way to influence behavior on a mass scale, in a capitalist country, is with a price. So I worry that having turned against a carbon tax, we're just now gonna fight about that. So that's my worry about the Green New Deal.
- And maybe just the very final question is would you be prepared to sign copies of your beautifully written and priced to move books?
- Yes, makes an ideal stocking stuffer. Absolutely yes.
- Well again, thanks so much for this conversation.