Speaker 1 00:00:08 Good planet. It's a hot final zones and tropic climbs thriving, season blowing, blowing, freezing trees. Strong sunshine. Good planets are hard to find.
Speaker 0 00:00:34 Good planet.
Speaker 2 00:00:35 Hello, case squid listeners. It's every other Sunday again, and you're listening to sustainability now, a biweekly case, good radio show, focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipitz. Today's show is recording of the May 21st deep read conversation between New Yorker, writer Elizabeth Colbert and New York Times and U C S C alum as recline. This recording has been edited to fit the hour time slot, but the full version and video are available online. So without further ado,
Speaker 3 00:01:13 It's an honor for me now to introdu, introduce Elizabeth Colbert and Ezra Klein. Elizabeth Colbert has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1999. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for the Sixth Extinction, an unnatural history, a book about mass extinctions that weaves intellectual and natural history with reporting in the field. The book that is the focus of this year's deep read under a white Sky. The Nature of the Future is a national bestseller and was named one of the best books of the year by multiple publications, including the Washington Post Time, Esquire and the Smithsonian Magazine. As Recline is an opinion columnist and podcast host at the New York Times, his podcast, the Ezra Klein Show receives more than half a million downloads per episode and is routinely in the top 25 on Apples charts. Prior to his work at The Times, Ezra founded Vox and as Vox editor-in-chief, and then its editor at large, he helped create explained on Netflix in 2020.
Speaker 3 00:02:13 He published the book, why We're Polarized, a bestselling examination of the Forces Driving Polarization and Paralyzing Politics in the United States. A few logistics before they come. There will be time after the conversation for audience questions, so please write your questions on the cards you should have been given when you came in. If you would like a card and a pencil, please raise your hand and one of our volunteers will bring one to you. Also, I'd like you to know that this event is being recorded for archival purposes. With that, I invite Elizabeth and Ezra to take it away. Thank you all for coming.
Speaker 5 00:03:04 Oh, it is so nice to be here. Uh, literally here, the nicest place in the world <laugh> that also, unless I missed it, which was missed in my, uh, bio where I went to college. I'm a Stevenson alum, so, and I always feel whenever I'm at the quarry for anything that this is a disappointment and this should really be hosting a Michael Frante concert <laugh>. Anyway, it's a, a thrill to be here. Thank you all for having me. And one of, uh, to have me interview one of my favorite writers, Elizabeth Colbert, and also for it to be this book, because when I was told this is gonna be the book for the deep read, I actually thought that was a fairly courageous choice. You all read the book, right? <laugh>? Yeah.
Speaker 5 00:04:03 So when I was here, which is a minute ago, but I've been in San Francisco for the past couple of years. I associated Santa Cruz environmentalism with, uh, a kind of conservationist strain in the environmental movement. A feeling that maybe there was a way to keep things as they were right. Maybe we can have modernity and the amphitheater, but it can all be never larger than two thirds a size of the nearest redwood tree. And I take Elizabeth, your book as in some ways a challenge, not a happy one, but a realistic one to, to that way of thinking, uh, an admission that if we want something even close to the world we've had, we are gonna need to change the world quite dramatically. I'm curious if you could talk a bit about that tension.
Speaker 6 00:04:54 Um, sure. I'm gonna, I'm gonna start. I know we've heard a lot of thank yous, but I am gonna add a few more. I wanna thank you Ezra, uh, for coming. Um, Ezra has recently Decamped Brooklyn. He didn't tell you that, but it's very kind of him, uh, to be here. I wanna thank the humanities, uh, institute and the, and the university and the, and of course, the Deep Breeds program. Um, it's really, really, oh, and the mayor for calling this Elizabeth Culbert Day. That <laugh> is definitely a first in my career. Um,
Speaker 6 00:05:26 So the, the book, as all of you, uh, know, or many of you know, um, is really, I think, a challenge, um, to, well, I, I guess I would say everything, I mean to two strains of which I think are the dominant narratives in our culture right now, um, as we face really, you know, genuinely, I want to say genuinely unprecedented problems in the history of humanity. And one is, as Ezra said, the idea that we can go back to something. We can, you know, all live, you know, 8 billion of us in a, in a, in, you know, some kind of harmonious relationship with nature. If we only, you know, did X or Y I think that's one narrative. Um, it's one that I am emotionally myself very attached to, but I don't think fits our moment anymore. Um, and the other dominant narrative is technology is going to save us. We're going to have some, you know, dsx machin net, that will be a macina actually. Um, and it will save us. And the book is really, um, an attempt to sort of, uh, come at both of those, critique both of those narratives, really, um, and say, what, what is really going on here?
Speaker 5 00:06:47 I wanna start in the book by having you tell the story of the relationship between Rachel Carson and Silent Spring and the Asian Carp
Speaker 6 00:06:59 <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, so the Asian, Asian carp, you know, once again, as you all know, play a play a pretty starring role in the book. Um, they're big, they're, they, they really, several species are big character in the first chapter, uh, which is about the reversal of the Chicago River and how that's set in the motion, this cascade of environmental consequences that people didn't really understand. And this, one of the major consequences is, you know, opening up this pathway between the Great Lakes Watershed and the Mississippi Watershed. And Rachel Carson comes in, in a very interesting way. Um, if you all have read Silence Spring recently, or maybe even in the distant past, you may remember that the last chapter is called The Road Not Taken. And the Road Not Taken is a hopeful look at what we could do to replace, uh, pesticides, these pesticides that she's very, you know, rightfully condemning.
Speaker 6 00:08:01 Um, and the road Not Taken involves biocontrol, we're gonna use a biological agent to, uh, if we don't like something, you know, we have a pest, we don't like it, uh, we're not gonna, you know, try to kill it off with chemicals. We're gonna try to introduce a natural predator. And it's pretty, it's a pretty interesting, you know, idea. It's very widely used. We use all sorts of biocontrol, but we also have many, many examples, uh, unfortunately of biocontrol having gone awry. And the Asian carp are a very good example of that. They were brought in for various forms of biocontrol to eat invasive weeds, to, um, help with sewage loading, nutrient loading, and they got loose and they've wrecked environmental havoc, havoc, and we have many, many examples of this. And it's, it's actually quite interesting cuz Rachel Carson was quite smart, obviously brilliant, understood what wrote all about the web of nature, but kind of had a weird blind spot about the dangers of moving species around like that.
Speaker 5 00:09:01 But I think a lot of us do. One, I, so I just love the, the parable of the Asian carp, and as I will now forever refer to it. And one of the reasons is that it gets something that I think many of us fall prey to pretty easily, which is a conflation of organic and natural, right? That there is a category difference between intervening with something that is artificial. When I was growing up, I could eat like the worst food you could imagine, but it couldn't have artificial colors in it <laugh>, right? Like that was the line. And, and I think that's a, an intuitive thing for, for a lot of people and has been a, a, a, a within the dna, the non-genetically modified DNA n of the environmental movement. So how do you think about that intuition? Where does it make sense? Where does it not, what does it get that's right. And, and what does it get that's wrong?
Speaker 6 00:09:56 Well, that's, that's a, you know, um, sort of a trillion dollar question these days. And I think that, you know, the word natural gets thrown around a lot. Like, we're going to use, you know, nature-based solutions, for example, uh, to climate change. And, and we can certainly talk, talk about that. Um, I think that, you know, one, one of the points of under white skies that we are so implicated in nature these days that it's v very, very, very difficult to draw the line between what is ourselves, whether you wanna call that artificial or human or natural. That's kind of, you know, a semantics, which obviously as a journalist, I'm very interested in semantics, but, um, it becomes almost a semantic question. And the question of, you know, what is a biological agent, right? We are all biological agents, but we would not describe everything that we do as, as natural.
Speaker 6 00:10:57 If we do, the word kind of loses its meaning. I mean, is your iPhone, you know, natural? It's, it's hard to really make that case, I think. Um, but where once again, you know, where we draw that line, we could, for example, you know, in the case of climate change, and you're going to hear a lot of conversation about this, you know, we're, we could, we could grow stuff, stuff, trees, we could, you know, chop them down and sink them to the bottom of the ocean, right? That would take carbon that the trees had sucked up and it would, uh, then, you know, preserve it basically in these logs that are now at the bottom of the ocean. Is is that natural? You know, I, I, I don't think most of us would say that that's natural, um, but it would be kind of labeled a nature-based solution.
Speaker 5 00:11:44 I'd never thought of doing that. <laugh> <laugh>, well, you gonna be sorry, I'm, I'm just, I'm processing that possibility as we speak. <laugh>, being a human being in this age is weird. Uh, one thing that I learned from the book that I think about quite a bit is the insight into human civilization that we get from ice cores. Can you talk through that, that bit of research?
Speaker 6 00:12:12 Sure. So, so ice cores, you know, all an ice core is, is it's a, uh, basically, you know, you set a a tube, you, you stick a tube with pointy teeth, you, you drill, drill with this tube down through the ice core. And we now have really long ice cores from Antarctica, which go back almost a million years now. And we have, um, ice cores from Greenland, which go back about a hundred thousand years. They, all the ice is, all these ice sheets are, are just layers of snow that were laid down year after year and never melted. And they contain a tremendous amount of information. It turns out very smart scientists, some Dallas, uh, here in Santa Cruz figured out how to read these as, as an archive of the climate and of the atmosphere. And what we learn is that the last, uh, ice Age, right?
Speaker 6 00:13:04 So humans, let's say we're around modern humans, anatomically modern humans, around 300,000 years old, let's say. So we've been around for a couple ice ages. Um, but the last ice age we learned from these Greenland cores, which are very, very detailed, uh, was a very climatically unstable time, and people probably couldn't really settle down because the climate changed too often. And then all of what we think of all of the cities that we have, all of what we think of as the great civilizations of history fit into this 10,000 year period since the end of the last Ice age, ice age, which was a very unusually stable climate. And irrigation and farming were invented during that period. And I think there's increasing consensus that that's no coincidence.
Speaker 5 00:13:57 I I wanna read a quote from one of the scientists who you speak to there, who kind of raises a question of, look, we human beings have been around a long time with very similar cognitive hardware to what we have today, to use the, the metaphor of the moment. And he says, you know, they had just as big brains as we have today. Um, well, he's asking the question, why did human beings not make civilization then 50,000 years ago? And he says, quote, you know, that they had just as big brains as we have today. When you put it in a climatic framework, you can say, well, it was the ice age, and this was so climatically unstable that each time you had the beginnings of a culture they had to move. Talking about the human beings then, as you say, comes the, the present 10,000 years. Tell me a bit about, I think that there is a, an ongoing sense that human civilization is built on a, a very stable foundation. And maybe at this point it is, in a way, it wasn't when it was just starting out, right? It could have, could have been a, a more fragile flower, uh, at the beginning and probably was. But what is that relationship when you worry about a climate awry? What do you worry about at the civilizational level?
Speaker 6 00:15:05 Well, I think that, you know, and, and once again, I, I should sort of preface this by saying, as a journalist, you know, I go out and I, as you will be familiar with it, Ezra, you know, you, you go out and you talk to a lot of people. So I, I should say all of these ideas are not, you know, they're not me, um, coming out of this, you know, outta my head. I think, I think that what, what people who really, really know the science, um, would say that they're worried about is, you know, we have this, we have a society now. We have an unprecedented number of people on planet Earth. We recently had 8 billion, a population of 8 billion people. Um, and we are, we are dug in in ways that we, we weren't previously. And the notion that you have, um, a very broad base for civilization is, you know, absolutely true.
Speaker 6 00:16:00 Um, but we also have certain brittleness and certain vulnerabilities that come with these very, very complicated systems that we live off of. And if you think of something as, you know, ordinary, as a, you know, big storm that knocks out the electricity and how we cannot function right now, you know, without electricity, uh, how our societies can't really function. And then you start thinking about the possibilities of cascading, climatic, you know, crises. Um, I think it brings you to worries not about, you know, the end of civilization, but the worries about, um, the vulnerability of these very, very interconnected, uh, societies. And once again, you, you could point to several, I mean, there are people, obviously right now, as you've written about Ezra, you know, people worrying about ai, there, you could worry about many ways in which, uh, a completely globally interconnected society is on one level, very robust and on another level, very vulnerable.
Speaker 5 00:17:02 Well, one of the reasons I wanted to, to ask that is that com, when I got into journalism in sort of professional in 2005, it felt like the solution space on climate change is fairly unformed. Like, maybe we'd have a, a climate tax, or maybe there'd be a lot of efficiency and everybody would wear sweaters and we wouldn't drive SUVs. And, and now it
Speaker 6 00:17:25 Hasn't worked out,
Speaker 5 00:17:25 Has it? Yeah, it's a lot of SUVs, including in Santa Cruz. I notice, um, uh, try telling people they should eat less meat. They don't like to hear that. So now we've settled, if you look at the Inflation reduction act, if you look at what other countries are doing at, uh, an all out race to now, the term is decarbonize, right? And decarbonization in practice means we are gonna build solar arrays and wind arrays and geothermal at a scale that, until I began looking at this, I did not understand this, but the scale of land use we are talking about here is unbelievable, right? If we really want to live the energy, the level of energy intense lives we do on a decarbonized grid, we are talking about turning over a land mass size of many states in every country, right? Over to, to this kind of energy. How do you think about that? Because that means that far from conservation, decarbonization means probably the single fastest transformation of land in human history.
Speaker 6 00:18:36 Well, I, I think, um, and this once again is not a, a brilliant insight, but I, I think it's huge and it's going to be one of the defining, um, debates, I guess you could call it, or, or, or, or, or developments, you know, of the next several decades. And these decisions are going to be made. They're gonna be made on a case by case basis. Do we take, you know, this desert as it were and, and just turn it into a so array? Do we take that offshore, um, you know, mount and turn it into an offshore, uh, wind, and we're going to ha there are going to be a lot of trade-offs there. Um, I don't think that we can deny that. And I, I guess that that, you know, is another, you know, in a way theme of, you know, under white sky, there are no, you know, there are no easy answers. There are no simple, straightforward, this is what we do, and everything will be fixed answers.
Speaker 5 00:19:31 Well, well, I want to talk about one trade off in particular, because, uh, I read, and we did a show together, and I was very influenced by your book, the Six Extinction, which if you found under the white sky a little too optimistic, sunny didn't leave you feeling sufficiently grim, um, you might enjoy the Six Extinction <laugh> by Elizabeth Colbert <laugh>. Um, and one thing that is already playing out in a lot of efforts to, to, to build these big wind and solar rays is habitat destruction. And you have environmental groups that on the one hand are terrified of climate change, see climate change as a genuinely existential threat to human civilization. And on the other hand, are actually fighting wind farms and solar panels and, and, and for a reason, right? Because you have to turn over a lot of land. You have to like destroy a forest land, you have to like carpet the desert in solar, and then you have to run all that energy through new transmission lines around. And my colleague David Wallace, well, has written about this, but there's increasingly a tension between two parts of the environmental movement that for a long time I think people understood as aligned, which is the part that is working on climate crisis and the part that is increasingly terrified of biodiversity loss. And you've written definitional books on biodiversity loss and in climate crisis, and I'm curious how you have been tracking and understanding that collision of, of, of goals and, and before the collision goals of means.
Speaker 6 00:21:07 Well, I, I, I can, I can e even further talk about, I mean, this gets into some, you know, pretty, um, interesting, we'll call it interesting territory. Um, and it gets back to, uh, so there's, you know, just sheer habitat destruction. There's all of the mining that we're gonna have to do, you know, for electric cars. People talk about mining, mining the bottom of the sea now, um, to get at the kind of elements that we need, rare earth, things like that. Um, and then if you add into that, uh, people talk about, you know, nature-based solutions now, often these nature-based solutions, which involve things like, you know, growing trees to suck up carbon, they also take up a tremendous amount of space, you know, a lot of space that will have to be devoted, for example, to tree plantations, which are not the same as, you know, the forest that was there. So we have a huge array of complexities here, and, you know, are we going to, uh, this, this is really the question of our moment. Are we going to thread our way through all of these in a way that at the end of it, you know, many humans are still here and many other species are still here. That is kind of the question that will be answered in a way, unfortunately, for better or worse, over the next, you know, century.
Speaker 5 00:22:26 One of the notes of the book is towards a deep humility, though, that even if we think we have an answer, we really have it. I mean, I take that as a, a story of the, of the Asian carpet, but all throughout, there's a skepticism that when trying to alter a system as complex as the earth, and in many cases we were trying to alter much simpler systems in, in the stories you tell that human history is an endless procession of both progress and, and profoundly unattended consequences. You talk about the problem of control, but can you talk about the problems of knowledge and prediction?
Speaker 6 00:23:05 Well, I think that, you know, one of the things that we're seeing, um, is that our technological abilities, you know, often outstrip our, our wisdom, to be honest. I guess I'll call it wisdom may, maybe that's an antiquated word. Um, but we need to be, you know, I, I do, I do think if the book is an argument for anything, it is really an argument for a very deep humility, which is, which is tied into a, a very deep, you know, skepticism. If someone, you know, is advertising something as, as a sort of silver bullet, we should be probably pretty skeptical about that. Um, and we should be mindful of intense consequences when we do anything at scale. And that is sort of what we're talking about, right? Scaling up that solar array in your, on your roof, okay? That's one thing. And the solar array that takes up an state is, is sort of, um, doing it at scale. Um, so I think that, you know, what is, what is the, you know, answer here? Um, I don't have, I don't have that answer, I guess is the, is the problem. But, uh, I think that we do need to be a lot more careful, uh, than we have been. We have sort of been conducting this whole earth experiment, uh, the results of which I don't think we're going to care for.
Speaker 5 00:24:30 And this is my, I think my favorite part of the book is a disorientation between these two arguments, because you hear that and some of the stories I've told here so far, and it's a story about the limits of human, of the human capacity to, to reliably affect the world we live in. And I think the natural tendency would be to assume the moralists stop, don't go further. And I also don't take that as the, the moral of the book. Um, I'm trying to say which of these quotes I want to use in many ways, I found the book as sort of leading up to one of the single greatest quotes I've read in any book ever, which is from Andy Parker, the project director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, which is a more boring, uh, title then. And he says to you, we live in a world where deliberately dimming the fucking son might be less risky than not doing it.
Speaker 5 00:25:33 And when you say, we should be more cautious, we should be alert to the limits of our wisdom. On the other hand, there's this pressure throughout the book, you tell the story of the proliferating cane toad, which is a poisonous toad that everything loves to eat and then they die. But maybe you can use gene splicing or gene editing to edit the poison out of the toad. But if you've just completely changed this entire species of toad or ended malaria mosquitoes, like, how do you know what else you've done to the ecosystem? And you write there too, the strongest argument for gene editing, Cain, the strongest argument for gene editing cane toads, house mice and ship rats is also the simplest. What's the alternative? So there are three pressures here. There's, we don't know what the hell our interventions are actually gonna do. There is, if we don't do them, disaster is going to result. And there's also the question of speed climate, unlike a lot of other things I cover is overwhelmed by the question of speed. You have to do it fast or so much carbon built up in the atmosphere and in greenhouse gases that then your interventions have to be that much more violent because you're digging out of that much bigger of a hole. So I recognize, I just keep sort of posing the same question to you of how do you resolve, but you're the one who wrote this book, I didn't do this to us <laugh>.
Speaker 5 00:26:54 So <laugh>,
Speaker 6 00:26:56 Okay, I plead guilty and I deserve it. Um, you know, I think, uh, the, you know, one, one of the quotes, and I'm, I'm unfortunately gonna mangle it cuz I, I did, I didn't bring it in writing, but one of the quotes that sort of was in the back of my mind as I was writing this book was a, a quote by a guy named Paul Kings North who wrote a book, uh, which I, which I would recommend called, it's called, um, confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. Um, and he says, like, I'm not sure in this time anyone, uh, really has good answers, but I think we can raise some good questions. And I, um, I'm going to, um, you know, plead good questions as opposed to good answers. If I had the answers, Ezra, I, I definitely would've written a different book. Uh, I would've, you know, honestly, probably be a lot more powerful person than I am today. Um, you know, if I had it's
Speaker 5 00:27:51 Elizabeth Colbert Day <laugh> in the city of Santa Cruz, I'll have, you know, good point.
Speaker 6 00:27:55 Good point, good point, good point.
Speaker 5 00:27:57 It's not named after anybody else here.
Speaker 6 00:27:59 Good point. Well, on this one day. Um, uh, so I don't, I, you know, I do realize that that's, um, an unsatisfying answer to the big questions of our time. Um, but it's, it's the only one I I can offer. I don't think there are clear answers. I think there are grades of bad answer. And unfortunately, one of the lessons of the book, as you pointed out, is that we're not even sure necessarily in advance what those are going to be. We can only, um, do the best that we can. And as our tools become more and more powerful, we're seeing this all the time, uh, that our tools outra ourselves. I, you know, keep alluding, I know that this is a, a new, you know, new for all of us, and it's something that you've written about very eloquently. Ezra, you know, AI definitely outstripped our ability to deal with it.
Speaker 6 00:28:57 And now you have a lot of scientists out there saying, you know, we need better governance on this because this is, you know, gonna, gonna outstrip what we have right now. And we see that over and over again. Our tools outstrip our ability, uh, to even think about these technologies. And that obviously raises the stakes. But on the other hand, what we have at the same time, and climate change is just unfortunately one example, but a very good example of how we are already changing the planet without intending to, and we don't have any choice but to react to that at this point. Um, and how are we going to do that? And I was just, you know, walking along, you know, the cliffs in Santa Cruz this morning, and I see, you know, all of these plans to, you know, rebuild up there, you know, does that make sense? These are just decisions that we're going to keep facing over and over again.
Speaker 5 00:29:51 Is that for rebuilding in the cliffs or wondering if it makes sense to rebuild in the Cliffs <laugh>? Um, you wrote something that I hadn't noticed when I read it the first time, but, but I'd wanted to ask you about this time, which is that we've become the prime drivers of extinction. I think people know that, but also potentially of speciation, which I don't think is as commonly said or, or or known. So so tell me about that.
Speaker 6 00:30:17 Well, we, we moved a lot of things around the world. Asian carp, you know, are just one of, um, you know, uh, I guess literally a zillion examples of that. And when you do that, when you move a species, and it's particularly true, the, um, if you move something, you know, to an island, it becomes isolated. It becomes reproductive isolated. So for example, to just just use an example, uh, we've moved rats and mice all around, uh, the world. They're now, you know, rats on uninhabited islands, but that, you know, people landed in ships, um, and left rats behind. And they will, uh, you know, over time become reproductive isolated and quite possibly speciate. And in the six extinction, I do talk about speculation, once again, it's not my speculation, but you know, that we will get new species of giant rats that that will be like our legacy, uh, in evolutionary history, um, because we have left rats really literally everywhere. <laugh>,
Speaker 5 00:31:21 We did it. Everybody <laugh>, um, sorry, I will say that actually threw me for a second. Uh, this is, I guess a big question, but it's something that within this conversation I wonder about a lot, which is we're a pretty unusual species, even in the way we look at ourselves. When we see a beaver build a dam or a bird build a nest, we don't go and say, aha, you've polluted this landscape with your artificial construction. But we have this very interesting, and I think poisonous in kind of both directions, separation of ourself from nature. And I think usually when people say that what they mean is that we don't understand our kinship with everything and our, you know, you know, that we are in intervening with like the sun and the trees and the, and it's true, but we also see everything we do as unnatural.
Speaker 5 00:32:19 Right? When you were saying our legacy will be the rats. Well, no, in a way our legacy will be, I mean, hopefully not just legacy, but the ruins. Like if you were here in a thousand years and we all left, I mean, obviously a lot would grow over the Sanha theater, but if an alien landed, it would be a fascinating, I mean, it would, would become part of the landscape. This is all made with material that at some point originated on planet Earth. And I can't help but think there's something strange in this. And our inability to see our own success is also a kind of success of nature. Life has its desire to reproduce, to grow to, and it has created all these strange wonders. And now, yes, we're in a different world, but it is a world created by the urges and the potency that is in everything else. And there's something in the, um, alienation we feel from that that I wonder if it's also not part of our inability to reckon with it, to try to control it, to try to think wisely about it, that we sort of do it, but also hate it, and so can't actually sit with it.
Speaker 6 00:33:33 Well, I, I mean, I, I think there are a couple ways to get at that question. I mean, the first off is, you know, if, if beavers and beavers are, you know, uh, very, very, I have, we have a beaver dam around the corner from us, and it's an amazingly impressive structure. And if beavers were, you know, suddenly redoing the entire planet, they, they would have a big, they would have a big impact, but they are, you know, restricted as to where they can, um, build their dams. And that I think what, what distinguishes humans is not not just our reach, not just our global reach at this point, but we at some point did take a different turn from, I believe, I think I can say this, without fear of contradiction, uh, every other species by with our technologies. And those started out to as very pretty simple by our own reckoning.
Speaker 6 00:34:37 Um, but they already had very big consequences. I mean, human, human hunting. When we, uh, when humans, you know, started to spread around the world a long, long time ago, many tens of thousands of years ago, we can see these waves of extinction. Because when a species has new technologies that other species are not, uh, equipped to deal with, they have only evolution rate to deal with your new technology. But we can change our technologies very quickly, and that just puts us in a, in a different position vis-a-vis the other species of this planet. And that has consequences. We are finding out,
Speaker 5 00:35:17 But I think I'm asking something slightly different, which is how human beings understand themselves and their technology and its relationship to nature. So something that, that has been obsessing me, because it's part of a book I'm writing and I'm trying to think about, and it's true for as we think about AI and anything else, is there are definitions of human beings. They're the animal that they, they're the technology mediated animal, right there, there are peop, there are people who say, that is what we are. And again, that does not mean we are not natural. Our technology is not natural. It is a alteration of the world, but, and I'm not arguing that it's not of a different type of scaling consequence, but, but it is, we are a natural creature that this is what we do on some level. But what we don't seem to me to have is a thoughtful relationship to that, uh, like almost a religion of our own technology, a way of, um, theorizing what values should inform it, what its relationship with the world around us is.
Speaker 5 00:36:18 And, and to me, this is what this book is a little bit about. You can talk about the problem of control as a problem of wisdom, but it's also a question of values. Uh, I noted this kind of glancingly and, and as a just way of proving that I have lived here before, but the Santa Cruz decision to not have any buildings, at least as I understood it when I was here, higher than two thirds, the size of the nearest redwood is a techno philosophical decision. It's not to not have buildings, but it is to have some kind of relationship between the buildings and the world around them. And, and so I'm curious how you think about that. You, you sort of absolved yourself a responsibility for beyond the questions here. I gu I know we don't have the answers, but, but there is a question here, because we do need to work with our technology to both create the possibilities and to work through the problems that the future brings you. This book is fully used sort of touring around people working through that. What philosophies or relationships to human technology and the way they should think about it in the world appealed to you? Who was eloquent, who was inspiring, who do you wish, who would you say if we were turning to people for answers, they had something in their values that pointed towards an answer?
Speaker 6 00:37:30 Well, that's a, that's a really good question. I mean, I met a lot of people, um, while reporting the book, who I think were really, really sincerely, very sincerely trying to use technology to either minimize or correct for, you know, problems that, that technology was causing. Now a theory of technology that really allowed us to work through our relationship to the natural world, you know, would be devoutly to be wished for at this point. And I think it really gets back in a way, you know, to, to your point that you mentioned earlier about how, you know, now we could try to, you know, we will try to, to decarbonize we will cause other, you know, major, major impacts. And the question of whether there are technologies, you know, there was a lot of talk, uh, in the sixties, you know, Buckminster Fuller, we're going to dematerialize, we're just going to dematerialize the world.
Speaker 6 00:38:35 We're going to, you know, do, um, everything that we do, but our material impact on the world is going to, uh, shrink. And that is, I would say, has not turned out to, to happen. Why not even as we move, you know, onto the web and things are virtual, our material impact on the world continues, uh, to grow. Um, how can we, you know, is there a way, is there a way forward where, where we do have actually where our technologies are there technologies where we actually have less of a material impact on the world? And I am really not, you know, a technologist. Um, but I think that's a huge question. And when we look at things like moving into the next generation of technologies, and we are confronted once again that this thing that arrived, this electric car, let's say, which we hope will be a solution to one set of problems, that it carries this huge trail of other consequences. Um, I don't know if we can get out of that cycle. I think that is once again, a humongous, uh, question
Speaker 5 00:39:52 Who, when you're talking to the book, because it is a book of characters who sticks with you, whose words echo for you as you think about these questions and continue to confront them in your reporting?
Speaker 6 00:40:07 Well, the, the book really began sort of in the, in the middle when I went out to, um, Hawaii and spoke to a, a woman named in, uh, Ruth Gates who had envisioned this project, this super coral project. We were gonna breed up more resilient corals. Um, and Ruth, you know, sadly, very tragically died quite young just a couple years after I met her. Um, but her words, which had really set me on this whole journey, uh, I often think back to that fir, you know, this first conversation that I had with her in a Korean barbecue place in a strip mall in, in, in, in Hawaii, um, about how, you know, going back a lot of people she was fighting against. She, she, you know, this project was very controversial. It was this idea that, well, you know, we've, we've screwed up the oceans, we've screwed them up so much that we're going to have to, you know, intervene in some way if we want reefs.
Speaker 6 00:41:05 That's, that's very controversial. A lot of people don't, uh, don't think it's smart to even be talking that way because you know, you're not getting reefs back if you have to have, if you have to manipulate them. Reefs are just huge. They're, they're their whole ecosystems. And if you think that humans can do that, you know, you're, you're probably wrong and you're maybe deflecting attention from the real point, which is to save the oceans. So it was very controversial. Um, but her point was, uh, we don't have any choice. We're in this too far. Um, and so I often think, think back to Ruth, uh, once again, I don't know that she had an answer, but she was asking some pretty interesting questions
Speaker 5 00:41:44 Speaking. Thank you so much for that ending. Speaking of asking some pretty interesting questions I have here in my hands some pretty interesting questions. And if you thought I was pressing you for solutions, wait till you hear these <laugh>.
Speaker 5 00:42:00 So I mentioned a minute ago my favorite quote, uh, both in the book and in life of what if we now live in a world where it is riskier not to dim the fucking son than to dim it. One thing that can obscure is that it is more and less risky for different people in different places to dim or not dim the sun. And I think this question speaks to that quote, uh, if we have record high temperatures in the next five years, how long do you think it'll be before India or some other nation takes unilateral action like reflective particles in the sky?
Speaker 6 00:42:44 Well, I mean the, you know, that's on one level. You know, a question that I, I can throw back to, to, to, to, to you all, I don't have any particular insight that is actually for those of you who have read, you know, the Ministry for the Future, Ken Stanley Robinson's book, um, that is how it begins that India has a terrible heat wave and they unilaterally decide to do geoengineering. I am less concerned about that because I think that, um, you know, it requires geoengineering, which is this idea, you know, we're gonna spray something, um, reflective in the stratosphere. It does require, it doesn't require buy-in from everybody, but it requires buy-in from everybody who has a very strong air force, right? So I, I don't think that, you know, if the US doesn't want India to do that, I, I don't think that will be, you know, practical how's that?
Speaker 6 00:43:36 Um, but a small group of very powerful nations, you know, could do it. And it raises a lot of questions, obviously, because one of the many fears about geoengineering is that it will change regional weather patterns and that will mess with them monsoons. And these are, you know, very real fears <laugh>. Um, and actually, you know, Andy Parker, who is the guy who, uh, is the originator of that quote, he is actually one of the people working on, you know, ensuring that people, scientists, in this case from all parts of the world, the global North, the global south, do have input into those, um, you know, do, have, are doing research on, on, on the, on precisely these questions because it will affect different or could affect different groups of people very differently.
Speaker 5 00:44:24 This question is from Abby. For Elizabeth, it's very formal <laugh>. There are underlying tones. The capitalism is one of the root causes for the sixth extinction, yet it isn't explicitly stated in that book. What was your intention in this approach, and how was that approach further examined into under a white sky?
Speaker 6 00:44:46 Um, read me the first part of that again.
Speaker 5 00:44:47 There are underlying tones, the capitalism. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> is one of the root causes for the six extinction. So, but it isn't explicitly stated. So I read this question as saying, is it true <laugh>, the capitalism is behind the six extinction, and isn't it true the capitalism is behind a lot of the issues in under a white sky? And if both those things are true, why are we pussy footing around capitalism? <laugh>?
Speaker 6 00:45:17 I think that is a good question, a very good question. Um, I think that, you know, we can go on some level, you know, even, even deeper than capitalism. I suppose we have to, I mean, I think that capitalism which has brought us to the point we're at right now is clearly, you know, unbelievably significant. Now the question is of, you know, would we have arrived at this point of a technologically, you know, very advanced culture with very high consumption habits, you know, without capitalism, would it have taken us longer to get there? Would we never get there? Would we have a totally different set of values? Uh, these are questions that are very, very difficult, uh, to answer. Um, but I certainly think that it is possible. People often ask me, is it possible that we can deal with these problems without dealing, you know, with the underlying economic forces? And the question that I think is really, really urgent is, which is harder to do, you know, change our underlying economic system or change, uh, our, our way of doing things with the economic system that we have. And I don't have the answer to that. And I don't know, uh, whether we can solve these issues, you know, with the current economics system, and I don't know if we can change the current economic system. So these are all, once again, huge questions that everyone will have to decide.
Speaker 5 00:46:55 I'd just like to note that 15 minutes ago I felt pretty negatively about dimming the sun, but now its wisdom is becoming more apparent. <laugh>, how do you see the role of the land back movement in the effort to combat climate change? On top of asking the right questions, are we asking the right people, uh, particularly indigenous communities?
Speaker 6 00:47:21 Well, there was just a really interesting study that came out, that talked about, you know, how land managed by indigenous communities, um, in, in, in all sorts of measurements, including, you know, climate change. Uh, wa we would be much better off, uh, if, if the world, uh, were handed, you know, much of the world were handed over, uh, to indigenous communities. Um, and I think that there's a lot of wisdom to that. Um, but I think we also have to, you know, look, um, look at ourselves, you know, to be honest, we are, we are, um, once again, we are 8 billion people. We have to feed 8 billion people. We have to clothe 8 billion people. Um, and the question of whether we can do both of those things simultaneously, you know, whether we could hand, uh, back a lot of land that has been, you know, stolen from indigenous people, uh, and at the same time, you know, meet the social goals, which I think many people here would also want us to meet for, for everyone else is really, really, really tough question. But I do think that, uh, indigenous communities probably do have a lot to teach us.
Speaker 5 00:48:40 A topic beyond your book is whether there is political capacity to implement the kinds of policies you needed to address the climate crisis. Do you think there is, and if not, <laugh>, then what? <laugh>?
Speaker 6 00:48:56 Well, I think one of the interesting questions of our time, which people, you know, will look back on with either, either knowingly or an astonishment that, you know, and this is also a topic you've written about a lot, Ezra, um, and I commend Ezra's book. I know that many of you have read it, um, about polarization, why we are polarized, um, that
Speaker 5 00:49:18 That's for tomorrow and Ezra Klein day. Yeah,
Speaker 6 00:49:20 Yeah, yeah. Um, you know, that we are facing these incredibly difficult problems, problems that would be incredibly difficult if our politics were functional, that we happen to be facing them at a moment when our politics seem to be heading. You know, we're now deciding whether or not we should even, you know, pay our debts. Okay. Um, you know, where we seem to be at a moment of, of perhaps not maximum political dysfunction, but since the Civil War, perhaps maximum political dysfunction is, you know, is that a, is that a coincidence? Will it look like all of these things were interrelated, they just couldn't cope with, you know, the situation they themselves had devised. Now living through it right now, you know, I don't really think that Donald Trump was elected because of climate change, but when you look back at it a century from now, will it look like, you know, there was just some big unraveling that was going on, and whether our political, uh, institutions are capable. I, you know, I I'll say very simply, I think the answer is no. They are not capable at this moment of dealing with these problems, and the consequences of that will be very severe. I'm willing to answer that <laugh>.
Speaker 5 00:50:41 So that then brings up this question. Uh, and I think you're gonna wanna kind of, I know you well enough to say, I think you're gonna kind of wanna not answer this, but I'm gonna say that for most of my adult life, you've been one of the 4, 3, 2, 1 most important communicators on climate change to the American people. Uh, what is your recommendation for convincing the American people that climate change is real and must be addressed now? And I'm gonna slightly sharpen that by saying or asking on top of it. In your experience, what kinds of arguments work that are not made and what kinds of arguments are made that do not work?
Speaker 6 00:51:22 Well, that's a, that's a, a super good question. And, you know, critically important. And once again, people have devoted their lives, and probably there are also people at Santa Cruz, you know, people doing research on why we can't move this conversation forward in this country. Um, I think one of the things that has changed, you can say, for better or worse, you know, since I started writing about climate change, which is, you know, 20 getting on 20 years now, is people see the consequences. They see it in their own lives. You know, what is happening on the Colorado River, uh, what is happening on, in coastal cities, you can argue about, you know, the underlying causes, which is ridiculous, but we can still argue about it. We manage to still argue about it, but people see in their farms and in their businesses that things are changing and that they have to deal with that. So I think more and more Americans are realizing something's going on. Um, now you still find people ascribing it to different causes, which is, doesn't make it easy to deal with. But I think that unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, you know, nature as it were, is, is doing our work is, is increasingly doing that communication work for us.
Speaker 5 00:52:46 I, I wanna ask the second part of that question, though, again, what kind of arguments do you find that people in politics, people care about this want to make that don't connect? You've written a lot of pieces, you know what? Journalists have a sense, and you're a great storyteller. What kind of stories work and don't? So nature is one of our is is communicating, you know, to some degree, but, but there are a lot of other people communicating. And, and what kind of arguments do you wish you heard fewer of?
Speaker 6 00:53:13 Well, I think one, uh, you know, the, the, the refuge that you have, I mean, that I hear all the time when I, when I go out and, and talk to people, I, I, I went out last year, for example, I just talked to people at Hoover Dam, you know, so you're looking out over Lake Mead, which is only a quarter full, and even after, you know, this year's very heavy snowfall, it's still only a quarter full. Um, you see this huge, you know, bathtub ring around it. Um, and you ask people, what do you see? You know, when you look out at Lake Mead, and half the people that I spoke to, I don't know if I did a random sample or not. Half the people were, I, I see climate change, you know, I see a very scary future. I'm scared for my kids, and half the people are, I see a cyclical thing.
Speaker 6 00:53:56 It's a drought, uh, you know, droughts come, droughts go ice ages come, ice ages go, uh, you know, it'll all turn around. Um, you know, that's, that's, that's just the way the world works. And is that an argument? It's not exactly an argument, but it makes it very difficult, uh, to move forward, uh, when half the people are saying, uh, this is just gonna, you know, magically or naturally, uh, turn around and half the people are saying, we really need to look, you know, very seriously at the trend line here and, and acknowledge that it's not going to turn around. So I don't know how you address that problem.
Speaker 5 00:54:36 Before I ask, before I ask this next one, can I have another tranche of these? If such things exist, um, of questions, not just index cards, which I <laugh> actually don't need on their own. Um, as a uc Santa Cruz student, how can I make a, I actually like this. There's concrete and then concrete is, uh, scratched out, presumably because it's a huge contributor to climate change <laugh>. So if that was intended good on you as a U C C student, how can I make a change?
Speaker 6 00:55:09 Well, this is another really, you know, really good question. And, um, we are in, uh, California, which is, uh, in its own way, you know, really, um, a leader in many ways on trying to deal with climate change. So I think, I think there are obviously two, two dimensions to any one person's, you know, impact. One is, you know, what you do in your own life and the example that you set in your own life. And there are lots of ways that we could all obviously do a lot better, but as many people have pointed out, there's always a limit, you know, to what one individual can do. And so, you know, once again, I'm not saying anything terribly original, but, but political action is crucially needed here. And support for people, politicians who take, you know, what are still, even in California pretty courageous stance, uh, is still probably the single best thing, uh, that you can do.
Speaker 6 00:56:08 And another thing I would also say, I don't know, you know, politics on, you see and you see politics, um, but I think that students have more power than they know, than they realize in terms of, of, of campus life and what is considered to be acceptable and what is not considered to be acceptable. And we need, you know, certain behaviors to be considered unacceptable and certain behaviors to be more and more acceptable, I guess. And, and as a student, I think that influencing, you know, starting with campus politics is probably a, a pretty good place to start.
Speaker 5 00:56:49 Let, let me ask you, while I'm waiting for, uh, the, the index cards, uh, to come about a place like Santa Cruz, this is a really very beautiful place. It's a very special place and it's a place where like in my soul, my desires to build on everything. So there's affordable housing and never build anything ever again, are really put to, to conflict. And this is not also a very sustainable place to be blunt about it. Thank you. Um, there's obviously the kind of building on eroding coastline. There is the way in which not building more dense, affordable housing in a place like this pushes people out into like the urban wild interfaces pushes out sprawl and commuting that people here then get to say, oh, I live this wonderful, you know, localist lifestyle. Um, but it is, uh, pushing others into something very different. You go down to Watsonville, as I was talking to some students here today about, and you have pesticides being sprayed everywhere, not just on food, but on people. What makes a place? Like what are the con, what are the tensions in the responsibility of a place with the ideals of Santa Cruz, but that is very attached to the lovely life it has built for itself?
Speaker 6 00:58:12 Well, these are also, these are really hard question. Um, you know, as someone who is obviously, you know, no, I'm not a Santa Cruz person, but I've only been here a few times in my life. It's a spectacular place. I totally understand why people love living here. Um, I live in a, you know, I wouldn't say the East coast equivalent, there probably is no east coast equivalent, but I live in a conno also rural, you know, place that that prides itself on its own, you know, green aesthetic, but but also is probably exporting a lot of its, um, problems. And I think that, you know, one of the great questions, and this is maybe one of the great questions for capitalism and I, I've been sort of mulling this over lately, is if we internalized the externalities, if we actually in, you know, when people talk about a carbon tax, it's like, should we internalize the external costs of our carbon pollution?
Speaker 6 00:59:14 And if we had an economic system where we actually internalized the externalities of everything we were doing, including the pesticides we were putting, you know, on somewhere else, could that, what, what kind of lives would we lead? And that, that's a very abstract question. I'm sure there are economists in the, uh, audience who would tell me that's either ridiculous or impractical or perhaps brilliant. Um, but what would that be like if we, if we really had to, you know, put our money where our mouths are? And I think it's an, an inter interesting question and potentially an interesting, you know, l experiment
Speaker 5 00:59:51 That's a bridge to this question, which is, wouldn't it be better if when we talk about what we can do to reduce carbon emissions, we stop saying we as in human beings, and we started saying, we as in the US and other high fossil fuel producing and burning human beings.
Speaker 6 01:00:11 Well, I I, I will say that I think when we say we, or when I say we <laugh>, I, I do mean we in the us um, there are many people in the world who are producing, you know, trivial amounts of, of co2, uh, every, every year. And, and we are not among them. No one in this audience today, and certainly I include myself, um, up the way up there are, are, are very high, uh, producers. And so I, I think that in, in sort of climate circles, you know, it's, it's understood that the big emitters, uh, have to have to stop emitting and the small emitters, you know, uh, eventually because they would probably like to, everyone would like to, you'd be using more energy, not emitting more, but using more energy because that has, is very much tied up in modern life with, you know, quality of life or, or standard of living has that, um, that, that also they should take a different path towards energy use. But I think it's, it's, it's clear that it has to be the high emitters who, who go first.
Speaker 5 01:01:21 That could be a question of nations, and it can also be a question of individuals, hence this question, which is how do you think about airplane travel if you have the privilege to be able to afford it? Yes. We're off using it to shrink your carbon footprint. Do you balance it somehow? Uh, it is notable that Santa Cruz is having a deep read about climate and decided to bring in two people who had to fly here to get here. And we both did. What, what about us?
Speaker 6 01:01:48 Oh, I, I, I think that's a very legitimate question. Um, I, uh, struggle with it a lot, um, but I am here, so you could say, you know, you could say I came down on the wrong part of the struggle, um, and that that would be legitimate, um, uh, criticism. So I don't, I don't have a good, um, I don't have a good answer to that. You know, I, I used to say, well, I, you know, if I fly across the country, you know, I, I hope, I hope I will have, um, made it worth those carbon emissions. Um, but, you know, I'm not sure that that's, um, a sufficient justification
Speaker 5 01:02:31 After speaking to so many, confronting these issues, this challenge. What if you, I think it's quite beautiful. What have you learned about the human capacity to both grieve and imagine at the same time? What makes that into a creative relationship?
Speaker 6 01:02:48 Um, wow. That's, that's a really good question. Um, you know, I think one of the great privileges of, of being a journalist and being able to go out there into the world, both into amazing places and with a lot of people, different people, people from, you know, different backgrounds and, and, and all sorts of different, uh, walks of life and philosophies is, is to sort of realize that there, that the human is unbelievably multifaceted. And, and maybe that is, um, the most hopeful thing I can say. You know, we humans are capable of, you know, intense, intense love, intense self-sacrifice, uh, intense greed, intense destruction. All of these are all true simultaneously. Um, and, you know, the choices that we make, which are both individual choices and collective choices as to which of these elements of ourselves will, uh, prevail, um, you know, which we're all making every single day, um, is, you know, what makes what makes the job interesting. And I guess you could say what makes life interesting, um, and also, you know, both, both beautiful and, uh, terrifying.
Speaker 5 01:04:14 This will be the question we end on we here in this event, and also possibly we humanity as a species
Speaker 6 01:04:22 <laugh> right now.
Speaker 5 01:04:23 Well, it's a big question. <laugh>, you mentioned earlier the way in which our technologies outpacing our wisdom. What are practices? What are institutions, what are approaches that you believe could help our wisdom catch up to or once again, outpace our technology?
Speaker 6 01:04:43 Wow, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm probably not the right person to ask this question, um, but I will try to take a stab at it. I mean, I, as they say, I talk, I, I talk to a lot of people. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I, I plead journalism. Um, I don't have, you know, a, a a worldview that I'm, that I can can offer. I think that, you know, the, an organization like the Humanities Institute, an organization like uc, Santa Cruz, which has a lot of very smart people working on a lot of interesting problems from different angles, um, shows the, you know, I guess I do believe, uh, at the end of the day as a humanities major, uh, I do believe that we are capable of, you know, thinking things through in ways that we, uh, don't, don't often do. I still believe that there is an idealized, uh, capacity, uh, for reflection and thought. Um, and, and even wisdom. It's not a, you know, spiritual practice that I can, uh, you know, explain or, or it doesn't have a name. Um, but I do believe, you know, that we are capable, uh, of many different ways of living. And we're the more we can imagine many different ways of living and the more we come in contact with many different ways of living, probably both imaginatively and in practice, uh, the better off we'll be.
Speaker 5 01:06:22 I'll add one thing to that as we end, which is
Speaker 5 01:06:27 Having think spent some years here and always and trying to come back here fairly often since I do think there's something different to being, to the privilege of being inside trees like these, and in a place like this often, I think it changes your thinking. It always changes mine. So to those of you who get to do it all the time, uh, I hope you take that wisdom it gives you and do something with it. This is a, a, a special place that reminds you that special places should be, uh, honored. Thank you to the Humanities Institute, to Elizabeth Colbert, of course, to uc, Santa Cruz, for having us. Um, I think someone is going to come and say what happens next, but very much to all of you for participating in the deep read.
Speaker 6 01:07:08 Thank you.
Speaker 2 01:07:13 You've been listening to a conversation between New Yorker, writer Elizabeth Colbert and New York Times columnist EZ Recline. The complete video is
[email protected] slash 57 C Z N D Z four. If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find them at k squid.org/sustainability now, and Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Pockets among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make Case Goodyear Community Radio Station and keep it going. And so until next, every other Sunday, sustainability now
Speaker 1 01:08:06 Separate zones. Tropic climbs not through current thriving seas. Winds blowing some breathing trees, strong zone, safe sunshine, good planets. Hard to find.
