9UNP0215SD_David_Orr_Andrew_Revkin_WordPress

- Welcome. I'm the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Humanities Council. And on behalf of the council, I'm really pleased to welcome you to the opening night of the seventh annual Wisconsin Book Festival. Here we are again. 
(applause)
 It's great to have you all here. And we're lucky to have the opportunity for the kick-off of this festival, to have two people here who are going to really be able to speak very eloquently to some of the most important issues encompassed by the theme of this year's book festival, which is changing places. David Orr and Andrew Revkin are here with us, thanks to the Aldo Leopold Foundation. The Leopold Foundation serves all of us by interpreting and caring for the legacy of one of conservation's visionaries, a man who understood that protecting the environment is as much a matter of ethics and culture as it is a science. 

We in the humanities agree with that. And that's why the Humanities Council has launched a new initiative that we're calling "Wisconsin: Making it Home." We have asked the Leopold Foundation to join us in that effort. Making it Home seeks to encourage citizens to explore the state's environmental history and talk with one another about present and future relations between ourselves and the land. At this year's festival, you'll find more than a dozen events on that theme. I hope you'll enjoy them, following today's kick-off event. And as I said, we're here tonight with these two gentlemen thanks to the Leopold Foundation. Of course, there would be no festival without our presenting sponsors, so I want to quickly thank them. They include the Argosy Foundation, the Evjue Foundation, IMS, the Isthmus, the Overture Center, where we are tonight, the Daily Page, the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation, and the American Girl Fund for Children. 

I also want to thank our book sellers you've seen outside. We have Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative here selling books. There will be an opportunity after the event for you to stop in and have our authors sign books. So please, support our book sellers and purchase a book. So with that, special thanks to the Leopold Foundation, and I think Buddy is going to come up here. Buddy Huffaker, the executive director of the Leopold Foundation. 
(applause)
 
- Thanks, Dina. I just wanted to say on behalf of the Aldo Leopold Foundation how pleased and proud we are to be partners with the Wisconsin Humanities Council for this year's book festival, and hopefully many more moving forward. 

I want to quickly echo her thanks for the sponsors that support this event, because these kinds of things don't come together without the generous support of so many. For those of you that are in the audience and are Leopold Foundation members, we want to thank you, because your support also helps make this possible. If you're not, please consider joining us so you can make these kinds of things possible. I also wanted to introduce a few special guests with us this evening. We have a couple of board members. We have our board chair, Susan, an environmental historian at the University of Missouri. And in fact, was introduced to Aldo Leopold here while a student at the University of Wisconsin, as an undergrad. She went on to do her dissertation, and really the first scholarship on Aldo Leopold. So in a way, we're all here because of Susan. So, we have Susan. 

And also with us tonight, Nina Leopold Bradley, and her younger sister, Estella Leopold. Many of you know Nina. She is the eloquent spokesperson in the family's experience along the Wisconsin River. And Estella is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington, and distinguished researcher in paleobotany. So thank you for joining us. We have a great program in the Making it Home and Land and Home series over the next couple of days. We begin tonight and we conclude on Sunday with Paul Ehrlich, who will be back here in this room at 2pm. We hope you'll be able to join us for one or many more of the gatherings. Next year, we're already working on a line-up for next year. We have Wendell Berry committed for next year. 

You can look forward to his participation, and many others, I'm sure. Now I want to turn the podium over to our moderator, Curt Meine. Curt, as many of you know, is a local activist and community organizer. And probably most of you know, he's a distinguished author as well, an environmental historian and conservation biologist. He is the author of the definitive Leopold biography, and most recently, his work, "Correction Land." He'll moderate our discussion tonight. Curt? 
(applause)
 
- Thank you, Buddy. 

Thank you so much. Good evening. My name is Curt Meine. I'd like to welcome you to the last of the three scheduled debates between our two candidates... Oh, wait a minute! 
(laughter)
 Wrong venue, I'm sorry! Thank you all for being the ones who understand what's really important. 
(applause)
 I was giving a talk down at West Jackson, the Land Institute in Kansas, a couple weeks ago. 

And I said, well, there are those who think that the fundamentals of our economy are strong, and some who have problems with that. But then there are those who understand that the fundamentals of our economy are soil, and water, and plants, and animals, and people. And it distinguishes people who are here tonight, I think, from most others. And it has been a rocky ride the last few weeks in so many ways. And we have, as some of us in the conservation arena have taken to saying lately, invoking Winston Churchill, we have entered an age of consequences, whether they're social or economic, political. And they're all interconnected, right, we all know that. So I'm delighted to welcome to Madison and introduce to you, two friends, two gentlemen whom I knew and admired before I met them, and that I can honestly say, I admire them even more after I came to know them. I'm going to keep my introduction short. I'll read a few background biographical paragraphs on each of them, and maybe have an opening question or two prepared. But I encourage you to have your questions ready. 

We'll try to make as much time for that as possible. So we're going to go first with David and then Andy. Let me just read a little bit of the standard, pull it off the Internet ten minutes before you have to give your introduction biography. And I won't hit all of this. You're welcome to Google him at your own will. But David Orr is a Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College; recipient of four honorary degrees and other awards, including the Millennium Leadership Award from Global Green; the Bioneers Award; the National Wildlife Federation Leadership Award. I like this one, a Lyndhurst Prize, acknowledging "persons of exceptional moral character, vision and energy." That's my friend, Dave. Dave, in his career, was a scholar, teacher, writer, speaker, and entrepreneur. He spans fields as diverse as environment and politics, environmental education, campus greening, green building, ecological design. 

His books, for those of you who are in this field of interest, you will know, "Ecological Literacy," in 1992, a real key book in the emergence in new thinking about environmental education. His second book, "Earth and Mind," followed up on that and really, again, drove home the message, as was said by Dina earlier, that our crises we face are not just crises of the world around us, they're also crises of our own internal well-being, of our way of thinking of the world around us. He's articulated that as well as anybody. Other books, especially the last two, "The Nature of Design," and "Design on the Edge," build upon his experience in helping Oberlin College come up with the greenest building that has ever been created onto that point, and maybe still. He can tell us some of that story, I'm sure. And his most recent book, appearing in 2004, "The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics and the Environment in an Age of Terror." But David Orr, I guess my short anecdote on David is I just have an enduring image from the last time we crossed paths, at Colorado State. We were giving back-to-back talks out at Colorado State. He flew in with about 20 minutes, he sat there outside with his laptop computer, downloading all kinds of figures and facts. And he plugged in and immediately presented ten minutes later in front of the lecture hall. 

David Orr is a synthesizer of information. He pulls information in, organizes it in his own head, and communicates it back out in a way that no one else I know does. I'll always remember that image. There are stories associated with that topic that he might get into, especially on the theme of hope versus optimism. We'll just set that as a seed. Now, Andy Revkin, I was long familiar with by reading the New York Times. Andy has been, for a quarter century, covering subject ranging from Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami, to the assault on the Amazon, from the troubled relationship of science and politics to climate change at the North Pole. You will see his byline on a very regular basis in the New York Times. He's been reporting on the environment and environmental science since 1995 there. That job has taken him to the arctic three times in three years. 

And 2003, he became the first Times reporter to file stories and photos from the sea ice around the pole. He's the author of several books himself, of course, including "The Burning Season: The Murder of Chico Mendez and the Fight for the Amazon Rainforest," which was recently re-issued, if I remember correctly. And his latest book, "The North Pole Was Here," describes his travels with climate scientists in the arctic, for readers of all ages. And I know from an earlier conversation that he is keenly interested in writing not only for adult audiences, but for children as well. Since October 2007, Andy has conducted an interactive exploration of trends and ideas through his blog, Dot Earth, which you've already seen behind us, where he examines efforts to balance human affairs with the planet's limits. I hope he will tell us more about that. Now, I first actually met Andy when we were drinking beer and playing music. A couple years back, we were both speaking for a program called the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, where he was one of the presenters. He came in late one night, and was sitting around. He's a wonderful musician and songwriter. 

In fact, you may have heard some of his songs on "Simply Folk." I know I've heard them on Public Radio here in Wisconsin several times. And the last time I communicated with Andy was when he was in a very intense period of reporting. Some of you may remember the phase, I forget, it was about a year and a half ago, I want to say, when James Hanson, Chief Climate Scientist for NASA, was on the hotplate. He was being grilled by the current administration for his own outspoken communications on climate change. Andy was reporting this story on a daily basis in the New York Times. Just having met Andy once, I remember saying, I know he is under pressure, I know he is doing the most courageous reporting of this generation. That's what I thought when I read that. Indeed, I think I wrote him an email saying, you may not remember me, but thank you for what you're doing. He did write back, late, I think it was about 2am in the morning, and said thanks. 

The last word I'll say about Andy is that I had a chance to turn the tables a little bit this afternoon. We're working on a documentary film project with the Leopold Foundation, and I got a chance to do something I'll never again have the chance to do. I got to interview a New York Times reporter. 
(laugher)
 With that, we'll turn it over. 
- You can, too! 
- David first, and then Andy. 
(applause)
 
- Thank you for that. 

It's very nice to be here. Especially, my connection to the University of Wisconsin in Madison does go back to the Leopold family. And through the reading of-- way back when, more years than I think I can recall, the "Sand County Almanac," then reading Susan's wonderful biography, and Curt's biography of Aldo Leopold. So I feel like in many ways, it's coming home, to come back to this part of the world, and being on the board of the Leopold Foundation. Three of my favorite women are sitting right there. Susan and Nina, I want to thank you. And Buddy, for your hospitality and leadership in the Foundation. And Curt, for all your involvement in so many things, and so many events. It's nice to be, having read Andy for years and years, it's nice to finally meet you, Andy, in person. I think I know all about you. 

I read your blog and read your column, and so forth. Curt mentioned the meeting at Colorado State. And before I went up to give a talk there-- Actually, the talk was prepared. I was just fiddling around doing email, or whatever, but you can impress the gullible-- 
(laughter)
 So, anyway. When I got to the meeting, there was some tension at the meeting, and so forth. I was admonished to give a positive talk. And this was primarily a group of ranchers, wonderful people. But it was presumed that they couldn't handle bad news, and further presumed that I was going to deliver bad news. 

And I mulled that over, and I gave the talk I had come to give. There were no suicides and everybody seemed to live through it, for the most part. What came out of that, however, for me, was a long meditation about hope and optimism. And the new book I have coming out in 2009, which I still have not finished the title, but it's tentatively titled "Millennial Hope," and I'll explain that in just a bit. Would it be okay-- Now I can describe this to you, I can talk to you, or I can read from the book. If I can read for ten minutes and give kind of a flavor of it. Is that okay? At a book fest, you can actually read a manuscript. All right, we'll do that. This is the part of the book, and I'll take no more than about ten minutes to read. 

What I'll do is read the conclusion, which I've called, "A Disclosure." And it goes back some years in my life, to the summer of 1980. My brother and I had purchased, in part, because of the influence of Aldo Leopold, 1,500 acres in the Arkansas Ozarks. We had a three-mile-long valley by about a mile wide. We intended to make this an educational enterprise. The rule of thumb was, that if you can draw a line around the whole thing, everything that happened inside the line was curriculum. The way we farmed, the way we did the forest, everything. That was all curriculum. That's not the way we do it at Oberlin, where I teach now. The curriculum comes from Lord knows where, and he or she's not telling. 

We were influenced by the idea, and it's a very John Dewey kind of idea, to make the place where education is supposed to happen part of the curriculum, and one of the drivers of it. So we were out in the Ozarks. It turned out that the summer of 1980 was, and I think it still is, the record summer for heat and drought. And so "Disclosure," the book is about hope and optimism of the millennial sort, in the face of climate change. I'm going to read the postscript here, which is the "Disclosure" part, and then the opening page of the Prologue. Mt. St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980. As a cloud of volcanic debris passed over the Midwest, it triggered thunderstorms and heavy rains. But that was the last measurable rainfall until early November in the Meadowcreek Valley in the Boston Mountains of northern Arkansas. 

The summer of 1980 turned into the hottest and driest summer recorded up to that point in Arkansas history. For the next two months, the high temperatures in the Meadowcreek Valley went over 100 degrees Fahrenheit on 59 days. The highest recording was 111 degrees. As operators of a small farm and a sawmill, among other things, my brother and I worked in the heat every day. The only time in my life I thought for nearly certain that I would die of heat stroke began at 5:30 in the morning... It's about the time that we have to catch a plane in the morning! We're both going to California. ...working a wide and a rough logging road on the west ridge of the valley called Pinnacle Point, and ended early evening after we had harvested and bagged 40 acres of hard wheat. Due to a lack of forethought, we only had 120-pound, not 80-pound burlap bags, which I came to seriously regret in the late afternoon as we loaded them onto the trailer. 

The temperature on that particular day was said to be 102 degrees. And only fools tempt fate in such heat and humidity. And we qualified. Our only salvation was in the cool waters of a deep swimming hole after work. By late July, however, the swimming hole had disappeared, and Meadowcreek was mostly dry. Throughout the Ozarks that summer, springs never known to go dry disappeared. As the summer days ticked by, changes in the land, vegetation, animals and people became daily more evident. Around the limestone bluffs that rimmed the valley, the red oaks turned brown by early August. The smell of smoke from dozens and then hundreds of fires was constantly in the air. One of our cows died, most likely from heat stroke. 

Twice I saw birds fall from the sky, apparently from heat-induced heart failure. Rattlesnakes seeking water migrated from the ridge tops to the valley floor leaving serpentine trails in the thick dust as they crossed dirt roads. People became lethargic. A few became violent. Heat madness was said to be the defense in a shooting nearby. Heat has a particular smell to it, not altogether unpleasant. You can feel heat in your bones. Exposed day after day to high temperatures and humidity with little relief at night, without the luxury of air conditioning, the body's core temperature elevates. Heat can scour your mind, leaving only an obsession with coolness and water. If you work outdoors in extreme heat, you learn to linger in the shade, avoid midday sun when possible, move slowly and drink lots of water. 

But if you work indoors under the anesthesia of air conditioning, it's possible to avoid the experience of heat or drought, or the changes in the land. On a day that summer in which some rain was forecast, I heard a DJ if a Little Rock radio station complain that he might miss his golf game. I laughed, but not entirely in mirth. By late September, temperatures were cooler and the rains held off for another month. The first measurable rainfall we had in the valley came at the end of October and felt like manna from heaven. The smell of rain on parched ground is still about the sweetest smell I know. There were other hot and dry summers in the 1980s, notably that of 1988. On a flight from Memphis to Little Rock, I recall seeing a barge stranded in the Mississippi. The river was so diminished that it looked as if a person could jump from the barge to either Tennessee or Arkansas without getting their feet wet. Water to cool power plants, stressed by high demands for air conditioning, was in short supply. 

Driving across the Midwest in August, I read newspaper stories of shootings over trivial arguments, in which heat was said to be a factor. Scientist James Hansen testified to Congress that summer, saying the nation was seeing the first tangible evidence of climate change. Climate skeptics greeted his testimony with scorn, but fewer do today. No one can say with certainty the summer of 1980 or that of 1988, or the recent droughts in the southeast or southwest, or Katrina, or the floods in Iowa in 2008, or any number of other weather events are the result of anthropogenic climate change. But the odds that they are rise with each increment of temperature increase. And they are certainly consistent with what can be expected in the years to come. After the summer of 1980, climate change was important to me, not because I thought a great deal about it in an air conditioned office, but because I had first felt it viscerally and semantically. My interest did not begin with any abstract intellectual process or deep thinking, but rather with the felt experience of the thing, or what the thing will someday be like. That summer is recorded both mentally and bodily in memories of extreme heat with no respite. And then the book starts with, back to the Colorado State story. 

In the book, I had to discuss, in this manuscript, the terms of engagement. How do you talk about hope and optimism in a way that is honest and does the truth right. Because, in many ways we're optimistic people. We've seen many movies where the cavalry rides over the hill in the nick of time, or the guy gets the girl, the girl gets the guy, whatever happens, and those kind of movies. We're conditioned, I think, as Americans to be optimistic. And that's very different from being hopeful. So I hate to set the terms of engagement, but here's the start of the book. I write, as an unrepentant and unabashed environmentalist. But tell me who is not. All of us breathe from the same atmosphere, drink from the same waters, fed from the land. 

All of us depend more than we can know on the stability of the same biogeochemical cycles, including the movement of carbon from plants to the atmosphere, oceans, soils, and living creatures. All of us are vulnerable to the remorseless workings of the large numbers that govern earth's systems. All of us are stitched to a common fabric of life, kin to all other life forms. All of us are products of the same evolutionary forces and carry the markings of our long journey in time. Each of us is but one small part of a common story that began three billion years ago. We're all made of stuff that was once part of stars. We'll all someday become dust and remade someday into other life forms. As individuals, we're visitors on the earth for only a brief moment. As a species, however, we're still in our adolescence. But we have in short order created three ways to commit suicide as a species. 

By nuclear annihilation, by ecological degradation, and as computer scientist Bill Joy notes, by the consequences of our own cleverness. Eviction by technology that can self-replicate might one day find homo sapiens useless and inconvenient. We've entered the time that Harvard biologist Edward R. Wilson calls the bottleneck. The book is written in the belief that we will come through that gauntlet chastened, but improved. But it will be trial by fire. Hopefully a tempering process in which we will shed our illusions of being separate from nature and a pretense that we can master nature or each other through violence on the other side of the bottleneck. Maybe we would've gained a truer vision of the majesty of life and a clearer understanding of what it means to be steward and trustees for all life to come. But this is certainly not the only scenario that one can imagine. Perhaps it's not even very likely. 

There are darker possibilities with which we must contend, and for which we must have the foresight to anticipate and the wisdom to avoid. In the fossil fuel age, we live in the unspoken faith that there are no "booby traps" for unwary species, as a biologist once put it. Unwittingly, we set our own, and now the carbon trap is nearly sprung. Even before the coal and oil age, we exploited carbon rich soils and forests. And that is the history of rising and fallen empires, and the uneven march of civilization. The trap is founded on ignorance of our impacts of the biogeochemical cycles of earth, which posed no serious problems when we were fewer, and depended on sunlight and wind for our energy. But now the 6-1/2 billion of us, soon perhaps to be eight or nine billion, are living carbon intensive lives. We've set the trap. It will take now our most creative and sustained efforts to avert catastrophe. And then one more paragraph that kind of frames what the rest of the book deals with. 

It's already too late, however, to avert significant disasters. And that is a difficult message to convey without inducing paralysis of denial, even among those willing to listen. It's a great deal easier for all of us to hit the snooze button on the alarm clock, go back to sleep and hope that it all goes away, or pretend that dire circumstances present only opportunities. Climate change presents opportunities for some, certainly, for a time. But for the islanders who are the victims and droughts, or those of larger hurricanes and typhoons, and those living in low-lying areas like Bangladesh, and 150,000 who die each year, the climate change driven weather events, the word opportunity has a peculiarly hollow ring. It will, as well, for the quarter of a billion or more climate refugees projected by the United Nations by the year 2050. The book goes on to discuss the terms of that, and how we find authentic hope. But the gist of the book, in many ways, is that we've caught ourselves in kind of a Woody Allen sort of problem. We're caught between disaster, which we've bought, and catastrophe, which we hope we can avoid. It's too late to avoid a good many disasters. 

The climate effects that we now see are a result of carbon that came out of our smokestacks and tailpipes 30 years ago. How this ends, no one knows. This is the time for genuine heroism of a deeper sort. But the working title of the book, and may end up being the final title when it comes out in early '09, but working title has been "Millennial Hope," because it's that hope on that far horizon. It's a recalibration of our sense of time. And it changes, it will change how we think about institutions, politics, the rights of future generations, and lots more. But let me close with one grand-dad story, which I think may be appropriate in a political season. I have four grandchildren. And my granddaughter, Molly, is six and has kind of the personality that one could imagine that Queen Elizabeth the first might have had, insouciance personified. My son is an Episcopal priest. 

His wife is trained in also in divinity. Wonderful parents and mild mannered people. But Molly finally went too far and they sent her to time-out. This particular evening, I was in London. The phone rang at about 2:00. My son Danny said, "Dad, sorry to wake you up, I've got to tell you what Molly just did." They started the time-out, and so forth. She stomped out of the kitchen, went to her room for the time-out. They heard her yelling at her 8-year-old brother a few minutes later. "Louis, I'm really worried. 

We've got to do something. The adults are taking over this house." 
(laughter)
 That's the take home message. It's time for adults to take over this house. That may have something to do with tonight's debate. Thank you very much. 
(applause)
 
- Yeah, there's a nice segue in some of this. 

I was lucky enough, when I was in journalism school, graduate school in '81 and '82. I got to interview Rene Dubose just before he died. I hope I didn't kill him! But from his work, which is very different, but there's some relationship to Aldo Leopold's. I've learned-- Rene used to call himself a despairing optimist. He actually wrote a column for the Rockefeller University newsletter called "The Despairing Optimist." That was quite a long time ago. So, almost 25 years later, I keep trying to figure out what I am. And I keep circling back to that thing, because I think innately, humans have the capacity to learn, innovate, react, be resilient when forced. So I have this sense of possibility. 

As a journalist, I wake up every morning trying to be optimistic. I usually go to bed very pessimistic. But I almost always wake up the next morning feeling, okay, what am I going to do today, and try to make the world a better place. So we have this sort of built-in compass, I think, ultimately toward progress and toward healing and toward fixing things. But again, it's on a long time scale. What David just said is very true. It's taking time. All of these processes are taking time. We've just been locked, for 200 years, as I say sometimes, in our teen years as a species, as he said. We've sort of been in our cow tipping phase for 200 years. 

That kind of, whoa, look what I can do mode. Look at all these fuels. Wow, burn them and get rich, and turn on steam engines, and combines, and factories. And the forests, wow, great resource. Look at what's happened to the oceans the last 50 years. We've depleted, diminished, invisibly but profoundly, all the great species, the great predatory fish of the oceans, the tunas the sharks, 80% or 90% reduced from what they were just 50 years ago. But you still go to the market and you get your albacore and have your tuna fish sandwich. It's all kind of invisible. So we've been in this muscle flexing mode. And to me, I've been a science writer for 25 years, and focusing ever more through that period on the environment, and climate particularly. 

When I look at this, and try to sort of synthesize what I'm looking at, the scientists are kind of like the adults in the room. Like the girl saying, you know, "If you don't do 'X', 'Y' will happen." And for 20+ years on climate, actually for 30+ years, they've been saying if you don't do blah-blah, then blah-blah-blah will happen. And we've been running around in our adolescent kind of mode. I wrote this. I'm just going to read to you what one scientist said at a meeting on the changing atmosphere that I got to be at in Toronto. It was Mike McElroy, from Harvard at the time. This is about climate. He said if we choose to take on this challenge, it appears that we can slow the rate of change substantially, giving us time to develop mechanisms so the cost to society and the damage to ecosystems can be minimized. We could alternatively close our eyes, hope for the best and pay the cost when the bill comes due. 

This was published in 1988. This is my cover story in Discover Magazine, my first big piece on global warming. It was 20 years ago. By the way, if you wonder why I've tried kids' books, blogging, documentaries. You know, ever since then, it's the sense of well, is there a way to get this message to work. Is there a way to get people to start to listen to the complexity that comes from scientists. And also to know, that even though there's implicit uncertainty in things like climate projections, you know, we could have a three degree warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We could have an eight degree warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. One of those is probably quasi-manageable. The other one is absolutely unmanageable. 

And there's some magical thinking going on, I think, that society thinks the next intergovernmental panel on climate change, well, you know, five years from now, then they'll have it clear. It will be 2.5 degrees or 4.6 degrees from a certain build-up of CO2. We've got to get over the idea that science is somehow going to be the thing that pushes us in a new direction here. Because there'll be always enough complexity and uncertainty in the science for those who have a tendency to react to that kind of information with inaction to do so. And right now, if you look at the polling, there was just this marketing survey done by an organization called EcoAmerica. It's been on some other blogs. I haven't had time to blog on it. This was a survey done for a bunch of environmental groups and for the state of California. Not a poll, but one of these real marketing surveys, the kind of thing that Coca-Cola does when they want to test drive a new ad campaign. They want to see if it works. 

They want to really understand people. So they did this marketing survey of what people think about global warming. And boy, oh boy. If you think that climatology or the glaciology of climate is scary, you should see the sociology. The soft science is much scarier. And people are still, we are in three big groups, maybe four. Eighteen or so percent of us are completely engaged, are writing letters to Congressmen, turning off the lights when we leave rooms, thinking about our kids maybe getting a job, and Google maybe "energy cheaper than coal," but about the same number are deeply dug in, profoundly not just skeptical, but absolutely reject the idea that humans could possibly be jiggling the thermostat of the planet. They have this very strong polarization at the edges. Almost all the people at that rejection side are republicans. And new information, as I've learned from a lot of sociologists in writing for the blog and a couple of print stories, new information, when someone's embedded like that in a world view, it's not going to change them. 

So it's not like some magical story I'm going to write or some report is suddenly going to get them out of their silo. So that's 18% or so at each end. Then there's the rest of the world and the rest of the country who are disengaged, have no clue what the science is, don't know what a greenhouse gas is. And for them, this is all just a big yelling match. So the louder the yelling gets at the edges, the worse it is for them. They just kind of pull back from the messages, whether it's when Time Magazine, two or three years ago had that cover story, "Be Worried, Be Very Worried." I wrote about it at the time, quoting a bunch of sociologists, saying you can't impose concern on people. Concern rises from within, as people absorb new information. You can't tell someone to be scared. And the harder you try to tell someone to be scared, the more apt they are to recoil, especially if you're the wrong messenger. 

By the way, one of the other details in that EcoAmerica survey was that Al Gore did not do, although he engaged and energized a lot of people, he actually embedded those edge people even deeper in their silos. And so, after the movie, you look at the survey results and you see that a lot of people thought he was the worst possible messenger to be conveying this need to do something. This is the survey. This is not me. I've talked to Al Gore about global warming since 1988. So I know where he's coming from. And I think I know why he's being the way he is. He's also feeling, from his own vantage point, you know, why aren't people getting it. He says that in the film. There's a point where he says he's tried everything and that he'll keep tweaking the PowerPoint presentation until he gets it right. 

So I guess what I'm leading to here is that new information is not necessarily the thing that's going to change things. Some technical quantified deconstruction of things is not going to get us there. I just finished a piece that's running hopefully in the Times this weekend, on the platforms of the climate plans of Obama and McCain. And you know, one of them says, and I can't remember the details right now. Obama, I think says 80% cut in emissions by 2050, and McCain is 60% by some date. That is so silly. Well, his is better because he wants to go to 80%. We don't even know remotely yet how that can happen in a growing economy. The United States is going to have 400 million people in it by very soon. So you grow a country. 

You grow the economy. We're 80% or 85% dependent on fossil fuels, and we're going to go to 80% no fossil fuels in two generations. And you can just sort of write it down on a scrap of paper and say that's my plan. So that's not the thing to look for in the next president. It's not the 80% or the 60% by 2060, it's a shift in somehow or other, a politician, and I haven't yet seen someone do this, has to stand up and say the challenge of our time, of this time, of our generation, and the generation after it, this is not a one generation problem, this gets at the scale issue, is to build a new and sustained and different relationship with energy. We crave it. It empowers everything that makes modern societies run. It got me and David here from wherever David was today. And it allows me to video chat with my kid tonight if I get home to the hotel later. It allows connectedness, mobility, comfort. 

Basically, energy can become drinking water. I did a piece in our climate divide series in the Times in 2007 about the very dry city of Perth, Australia, facing this chronic issue of water shortages in Australia. They built, and they're building another one, doubling the size of it, a desalinization plant in Perth, Australia. It now provides 20% of their drinking water. It's powered by a wind farm. So there's this vision there, right now, it already exists, that you can turn wind into drinking water, which is a remarkable thing. But that's not happening in Namibia, you know, dry parts of Africa. So again, that leads back to the technology can help us through, but willpower has to be there as well. Both to sustain this idea that we don't have all the energy choices we need, that wind, ultimately, couldn't harness enough wind to get us to where we need to be. You can't store the wind and the solar power, you need some pretty big advances, revolutionary advances in energy transmission and storage and also things like harvesting things like solar. 

But even that's not alone, not enough. One of the, the framing question of my blog is, 9 billion people, one planet. It should really be a question mark. 9 billion people, one planet? How does that play out? By 2050, more of less, we'll have 9 billion of us, and even, as far as I know, with all that NASA is trying to do, we're stuck with one for a good long while. Mars is not going to be terraform any time soon. So here's this weird, I had this little mini horrifying epiphany just about a month ago, which is, suppose we get the big breakthrough on energy. That we find a way to make solar panels out of, I don't know, Saran wrap. And it's as cheap as paint. 

So we could just sort of wrap the world, like Crisco, and generate as much power as we want and find the perfect storage mechanism. So now we've got energy up the wazoo. You know what that does? As soon as it happens, it greatly increases the carrying capacity of the planet. So suddenly, we could have 20 billion, why 9 billion? I don't know, I'm curious if anyone has actually played this out, it's largely fossil fuels that got us, along with agriculture, that's also fossil fuel-generated, the huge burst of coming from 1 billion people to 6 billion in the last couple hundred years. So energy technology alone doesn't get you there. So this leads you back to this ethic thing, this thing that Aldo Leopold spent so much time thinking about. And I understand they're trying to think of ways to expand the land ethic to the ocean ethic. But we obviously, and many people have said this for a long time, we need a planet ethic. 

We start to recognize that technology alone doesn't do it. Values in our ethical framework with which we determine our relationship with, not just the non-human world, but other humans on the planet as well. If that doesn't change at the same time as the technology, then you start to wonder about optimism and hope because it leads into all kinds of strange and turbulent places. I'm just going to quickly, maybe I should wait till the question and answer period to go around on the web, but what I try to do on the blog is, tell stories that just-- Whoa, that's weird. Maybe I do need the mouse. Tell stories that simply won't make it into the newspaper. Somehow I've shifted it all. Someone out there must know what I've done. What bar? Slider bar, the blue bar! 

(laughter)
 Ah! Left arrow key. Well, this story over here-- There we go, sorry. You'd think I'd know how to use a computer by now. Although they switched me to a Mac recently so now I see, this is a PC. Here's a story that, I'll just give this one example, it's about hand washing. Today is hand washing day. Did anyone know that? I thought maybe someone read my blog. 

You know, UNICEF. They found that in school systems in developing countries, where kids wash their hands before lunch, there's like a 50% lower absentee rate, and that's true actually here, too. So hand washing is a life or death issue in many parts of the world. But you see, for my editors, that's a total snooze. We kind of know kids in poor places are having a hard time. We know there's a couple million, well actually, we had a page-one story six months ago when the death rate for kids younger than five went below ten million a year for the first time. So that was great. But the idea that there's a lot of premature mortality is not news. In fact, in journalism school, I had a professor who would approach a story like that with the MEGO factor, that's "My Eyes Glaze Over." Don't you already know that? 

So the blog is a place for me to keep hammering away at issues that you would probably not otherwise see. I had one other blog post recently about the lack of toilets in other parts of the world. Again, you don't see big headlines in the New York Times or elsewhere about the lack of toilets. But it was 2.6 billion people with no place to go. 
(laughter)
 So that's what I'm trying to do on the blog, and I'll get into that more later. So the bottom line, again, as I said, we're in puberty, we're poised to make this transition into adulthood where you start to integrate the information that someone is telling you, you know. We're not there yet, and if you don't have a value set, the technology alone will not be the solution. So I'll stop there, I'm sure they have lots to do over here, and thank you. 
(applause)

 
- Great. Thank you. It's now twenty after, we've got a full forty minutes for questions and answers, so please start thinking of short, pithy questions. I remember I did that last year at this session, so that we can have as many opportunities. I forgot a few remarks in my introduction, you may have noticed, and I would close off with this because it really does convey my sense of our two guests here. But what I appreciate in both of them, as you've been able to see, both of them have a passion for clear thinking, the importance of accurate information. Both appreciate the need to communicate and connect science to other fields. And both have really emerged as essential voices as we navigate our way into the age of consequences. That was going to be my conclusion but it seems like a good halfway mark. 

And I want to actually start off the discussion by alluding to what is going on right now, and you can answer this any way you want. But it is the age of consequences, and that's again, a term from Winston Churchill, looking at the world entering World War II during his era. And both of you have these extraordinary perches from which to hear and see and then turn back to the world, the impressions and the voices you hear. Andy, I can only imagine your index and your email lists and so forth. And David is on the road and communicating as much as anyone I know. And just could you give us just to start off this time of conversation, a sense of sort of the public mind and how that is or isn't being reflected in the presidential campaign? And we'll start with David, this is really a prompt for David, just briefly mention the climate action project that you've been involved in. 
- What am I supposed to do again exactly, the state of the public minds? Is this on? 
- Tell us about the climate action project. 

- All right. Let me say, okay, two and a half years ago, there were a group of us meeting at Wingspread in Wisconsin here. It was the president's council for sustainable development, it flourished under Bill Clinton and had gone somewhat moribund under the current administration. They held a meeting and during the meeting we were kind of floundering around, you know, what do we do? What kinds of things might advance the cause of sustainable development in the country? And had an idea that the next administration starting in 2009, be it Republican or Democrat, would face this issue of climate and would need to deal with it very rapidly. And so we started a list and, long story short, we launched it, it's about a $2 million project, we've now come to the completion of it. You go to the Web site: www.climateactionproject.com Not org, com. The project involved about 200 people from around the country. Climate scientists, policy experts, some politicians, people from business, Ray Anderson, from Interface was one of the co-chairs. 

We met with presidential candidates in the primary season and it the current, we've met with a transition team for both the current candidates, we had the University of Colorado law school do an analysis of presidential power relative to climate change, what can the president do right now without having to get legislation? The final draft of the document we worked on will be probably posted in two or three weeks on that Web site, and our working assumptions are that the president, whichever, has got no time to waste. Time is not their friend on this issue. Secondly, it's not a Republican issue, it's not a Democrat issue, it's not a conservative, it's not liberal, it is a national emergency. Thirdly, if the president comes into office and sees this as simply another item on a long list, a list that gets longer almost daily, it'll fail. It's got to be seen as the lynchpin that connects everything else on that list. So right now we're doing kind of hasty analysis of the ways in which the financial crisis was in fact related and in some ways triggered by energy and a lack of climate policy, the particular energy policy that we now have. One of the best ways to get out of this is to create a really robust energy policy that pushes us hard toward efficiency first and renewable second. Make that a national policy. Fourth assumption is that we would tell the truth. 

Let me end with this. In listening to Andy, who I think, has been a longtime voice of sanity on these issues, there is frustration for a lot of us in this room, about how we thought twenty or thirty years ago this movement, that if we just had data, facts, logic, one more report, one more book on the subject, we would tip public opinion in our direction. And I think, by and large, that hasn't worked. Certainly not relevant to the magnitude and severity of the issues. But we're divided on this, aren't we? Because, in one way, remember that movie "A Few Good Men"? Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise is a young attorney, he's got Nicholson on the stand, there's been a murder on the base the Nicholson was the commandant for. Tom Cruise turns to Nicholson and says, "I just want the truth from you." It's a very tense scene in the movie. 

Remember Nicholson's response? Classic Nicholson. "You can't handle the truth!" Spits the words out. That's the best imitation of Jack Nicholson I can think of. And that is, thank you, that's one side of it. T.S. Eliot, "humankind can't bear much reality." And that is a view. It's like, give people anything but. And after a century of advertising, that's kind of what we've got in this country. 

There's another view, and that's Winston Churchill, when bombs are falling on London in the 1940s, Churchill doesn't go to the British people and say, "Hey, this is a terrific time for urban renewal in London. We can whip the Nazis at a profit." It's just, "Blood, toil, tears, and sweat." Now, I think there are two problems with that. One is, that a war. In the 1940s, you can look at it, you're either going to win it or lose it in a couple years. You had to muster public opinion in a very short period of time and you had a dependably loathsome enemy. Adolf Hitler made the Germans, the Nazi party, into a really loathsome bunch of people. And that's pretty easy for us to get riled up about. But the kind of things that we hear on Andy's blog and the kind of things all of us deal with are parts per million, parts per billion, land ethics, it's abstract, it's difficult, you have to wrestle with the science. 

And are we up to that? And that's the great unknown at this point. But I think that hope really likes in raising the public IQ about these things. And helping people. As a person, as an educator, I think we had two main things to do. One is, to help people connect the dots, help people see the world as systems and patterns. And that has to start early on. So by the time, if a kid can't think of it as a system by sixth grade, you've got a problem. And connecting. And the other is that we need to extend that time because I forgot what Kurt wanted me to answer. 

I'm on a roll and I've got 20 minutes more comments here. 
- You're enjoying what Wes Jackson calls senile rapture. 
(laughter)
 I can say that, he's my friend. Andy, do you have any immediate thoughts on whether you're encouraged or discourage on the presidential campaign? 
- Well, having covered the Bush administration's approach to climate change for eight years and continuing in exposing efforts to downgrade the level of the science and upgrade the level of uncertainty, and looking at their platforms. Actually I got to interview McCain in 2005 for a documentary we did with Discovery Channel on the Arctic, where he had just come back from one of those fact-finding junkets with Hillary Clinton and a couple of other senators. And he was totally, he drank some Kool-Aid, not all of it. I think he understands the basics. He definitely has articulated pretty clearly on the stump, in one or two situations where it mattered, which is not a lot of the situations he's trying to talk to, that it's a passionate issue for him connected to him. 

It's a legacy issue, I think, for him. So, with McCain. Obama, clearly, you look at his platform and it's a very detailed construction of making a game plan for energy renaissance part of an economic recovery. Between the two of them I'm not going to make judgments, that's not my job. But if you read my story which hopefully will run over the weekend, you'll get a pretty clear breakdown. There's a lot of wiggle room in McCain's cap and trade bill that isn't in Obama's. Frankly, the idea that that legislation is going to move forward anytime soon is a fantasy, especially given what's going on, not just in the national economy, but in the global economy. There are, I've had discussions with people involved, as David has been trying to steer the next president, who say there's a whole suite of things a president can do very quickly. And every energy bill from now on, as a woman at the environmental trust said, should be in part a climate bill. It can work to the detriment or the benefit of this issue. 

And those come up every, there's going to be a new energy bill every year now. So there's an opportunity. Don't wait for the big fight over cap and trade, which, as I've written in the blog and in the paper off and on, you know, especially after what happened with the financial collapse. Cap and trade is rife with possibilities for speculation and all of the things that led to the collapse that we just saw. And measuring a ton of C02 and saying, it's the same as the ton that's coming out of the smokestack. So I don't expect that to be the thing that happens. But there is a long list of things that can be done. 
- All right. Let's start with some questions, and the first one I saw up was there, so let's go there. And could you please speak up. 

(inaudible)
 
- Like a lot of citizens in the past few months, I've been watching the financial meltdown and it's been eating at my guts. And one of the things that strikes me is, even though it's clear a lot of -- has been exposed with the prevailing economic -- the leading political candidates and economic experts are all prescribing the same thing. Which is, we have to -- And they don't mean in the third world. They mean here. And they mean more borrowing, more spending, and more consuming. And I look around, I don't see a country that's out of housing, I don't see us being out of cars or any of the material things. We have a super abundance of them. And, I just, is there any possibility we can-- Can we get someone to say growth is a problem, materials is the problem. 

Why is that, sometimes I feel like I'm living in the Middle Ages, when they were after witchcraft. You couldn't say the world was round then or things like that. And now we can't say growth is a problem. 
- I just put a piece up on my blog a couple of days ago by Herman Daily, that studies economics, and boy, you know, you just start to wonder, when will this shift. I quoted David Leonhart, who writes about economics for us, there was this chilling line he had in the week in review section two weeks ago, it was that, basically it said, the only way out is more debt-fueled spending. I thought, you know, stop the bus. Because we've kind of dug into a hole where maybe to get economic recovery right now, other than to have an utter collapse and to rebuild a more sustainable kind of economy. Politics isn't going to accept the utter collapse so that's where we, the political reality leads us back into this trap of demanding debt-fueled spending to get us out of this problem, which of course, will only get us back into it again. So the politics is really what's driving it. 
- Thanks for your question. 

I think it's right, that it is as heretical a comment as somebody could make at this time. The next president, whoever it is, is going to face something that looks a whole lot like a quadratic equation. It gives the financial meltdown, and if that was a body being brought into the emergency room, you've got to stop the bleeding right away. But then the person had other ailments, anemia or whatever, and that's the longer-term kind of issue. We're at the end of the era of cheap, portable fossil fuels. We've got terrorism, there's a report out, the TEEB report on biodiversity loss and it's being described now as the Stern Review equivalent on biodiversity. So there are a lot of things being converged, and you can make a long, long list. And this is kind of like a quadratic equation. The next administration, what we're trying to say to the candidates, and have been saying to their transition teams and the candidates themselves, when we've been able to meet with them, is you have to find something. And Wendell Barry's great phrase, "solving for pattern." 

You have to find the kind of thing that solves many different issues. And for many, many years-- some of you in the room, have been describing the energy policy as the fastest, quickest way to reduce balance of payments problems, help improve security, create jobs at home, clean up air, help reduce health costs, create new jobs and employment and all that, make that long list of things. So everything that we're putting together with the -- document and presenting it to candidates is, you've got to focus on this. And you could justify it as Jim Woolsey does, on the right, he's kind of a conservative Republican, and you can justify it from the extreme left. I think what it means in Madison or Oberlin or wherever is, you've got to get to work in your own communities reducing energy costs, being able to switch to renewables, are things that we can do to lessen the magnitude of the problem. On growth, boy, I don't see how that works. Herman Daily is a long-time friend and I'm totally persuaded by his argument, I don't see how we grow our way out of the problem. I'd rather see a shift, how we define prosperity. Prosperity becomes, as Daily has argued eloquently for a long time, not quantity but quality. Thanks for that question. 

- Second question is there. Go ahead. 
(inaudible)
 
- We need to hear more about the range of solutions available to the individual right now, going home, the things each of us can do. I'd like to hear as a key part of every communication on global warming and I'd like to hear from both of you about what those of us in Madison can do, individually and collectively. 
- Well, there is definitely kind of a, from the personal to the local to the national to the global, there's a set of things that can be done. And at the personal level, it's pretty limited. You're not going to stop China from building a new power plant in the next three days. But they are going to build one in the next, I mean, it doesn't take three days to build one. 

But they're turning on a power plant every three or four days. But you can focus on energy efficiency in the schools in your community. You can get on a zoning board so that sprawl is not part of the growth plan in the community so that people are driving less. Where I live, Phillipstown, there's a little thing called Phillipstown 20/20. This has been going on for a while now, since the early 2000s, way back. I've been meaning to try and get on the watershed and roads committee, to try to get into the fabric of how communities make decisions. Which implicitly have energy consequences. So that's the local stuff. And as I've been saying, when I travel to schools to speak, high schools and middle schools, as well as colleges. Not so much colleges, it might be a little geeky for college. 

But there's intramural, there's all these sports where they compete. You know, in Texas there's intense rivalry over football. So why not harness the existing networks that pit schools against each other to have them cutting their energy bills? And the network's already there, the rivalry's already there, it just takes someone to get in the door and make this part of what's fun, as opposed to... And then you can infuse that into the curriculum and start to have kids thinking about energy futures, and I don't mean commodities, I mean putting some part of their education around this. And as I said a few minutes ago, the biggest gap in our understanding in climate change is not about sea ice, it's about us. How we react to looming, complicated problems. Look on my Web site, I did this, there's a whole science of risk and how we fail, utterly, often to kind of capture these long-term things. There's no chapter in the IPCC report, like a thousand pages of science, and there's no section devoted to sociology. So that, you don't have to be an engineer to craft your education as a kid around ways they might make a difference, too. 

And then you get into who you vote for, obviously, all that stuff, and that's a whole other realm. 
- All right, I'd just add, to pick up where Andy left, I think it's really important to make this a political issue. Make this an acid test for everybody running for local offices, national offices and everything in between. This movement, the environmental movement, whatever you want to call it, has been pretty much apolitical for way too long. And I think we have to enter the political arena with good ideas and suggestions, and it's an issue of what you can do, what we can do, personally, and what we can do as communities. It is really important to have the right kind of taxes, the right kind of subsidies. The wind tax credit was set to expire at the end of this year, so wind investments were lagging through 2008, as big investors are holding back to see if there's going to be a favorable climate or not. But those are things that really do matter for us. If there's a tax credit or a break or help or whatever, state or federal programs to install energy efficient equipment or solar collectors or buy energy efficient cars really does matter. But that's in the political realm. 

So on top of everything else Andy said, which I agree with, is we have to see this as a matter of politics and hold politician's feet to the fire. 
- I have one quick addendum, I was just reading. Someone sent a long note to me after something on the blog, that Richard Nixon, after the first oil crunch, his State of the Union address, he announced Project Independence was the first time a president swore to get us off of oil in ten years. It didn't work, but apparently it spurred a big burst of patents and everything in energy. This is before the money even started flowing. Within that year there was already a big focus of young, educated people, researchers who were starting to turn their attention to energy like never before. So, leadership, messaging from the top matters, absolutely, too. Not just the bills and stuff, but some president who can get out there and just sustain this as a mantra. 
- I'd like to go back to the part about growth. I think both of you had from your comments suggested that basically what we're trying to do is prop up and maintain a fundamentally un-sustainable economy, un-sustainable way of living. 

For me, I see replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy if it just allows us to keep on doing what we're doing. We're still mining soil, we're still mining water, we're still polluting the air, all we've done is shifted the deck chairs a little bit. And I see it much more bleakly than you, I don't see, unless we fundamentally change what we're trying to do, that is going to make much of a difference. Even Professor Orr, what you just said about the tax incentives for solar, or wind power. The premise there is that the reason we should do something is because we get a tax credit for it, not because it's the right way to live on the planet if you have a planet ethic. And until we get past that we're still playing the same economic game that led to the financial meltdown. I don't see the solution. 
- Next question. 
(laughter)
 Well, yeah, Aldo Leopold's phrase, and I called Estella once to find out where this was, and Buddy, I probably called all of you. 

Susan actually tracked it down for me, the phrase, "the still unlovely human mind." And that has gotten less lovely maybe over the course of the 20th century in some ways. I mentioned Edward Bernaise, he was Sigmund Freud's nephew and set up the modern advertising firm. And we've got a lot of bad habits to unlearn, and we've been preyed upon. We're now subjects. Bernaise had the idea of appealing only to the Id, to sell things not just to make money, but to keep the public quiescent. He called this the engineering of consent, and we ought to tax advertising in lots of ways. My favorite Bernaisiam out of advertising, you've all seen this, is the rear end of a Hummer, a bright light above it. And in small print, "When the asteroid hits, and civilization crumbles, you'll be ready." And you just have to say, ready for what? 

This thing gets six feet to a gallon, what are you ready to do? You know what the price of a gallon of gasoline is, or what it will be? But I agree with you, and I think that sustainability is a word that we toss out like confetti at a Wall Street parade. And I don't think anybody knows what that means, except Buddy here, and he's not telling. But I think the gist of your question is really good, and it's really a comment more than a question. I think it's very good, I agree. It's going to be a complicated, long-term effort to unlearn lots of things, and what we hope we do, if this is going to be a world of 9 billion people, is that we do it fairly and justly and that gets to the heart of a lot of issues. The growth economy allowed us to make the assumption that rising tides can lift all boats, all these cliches, you've heard them. We wouldn't have to worry about distribution and fairness in the economy, or the quality of the economy. There's a wonderful quote, I can't quote it here, Bobby Kennedy back in the '60s talking about the growth economy and quality and so forth. 

I think we have to confront some deeper issues. And that's why, in the book I've got coming out I tried to wrestle with some of those, drawing from lots of people, many of you in the room, to try to think through some of these larger changes. This is a sea change. It isn't just a shifting of energy sources. That's the tip of the iceberg in a lot of ways. This is going to be a deeper kind of change, profoundly spiritual kind of change. And I've described, I've quoted a passage in the book, Wilson calls this a bottleneck. And when we come through that bottleneck, you know, there's 6.5 billion of us starting into this bottleneck, we'll swell up more. We're losing, according to the TEEB report, a quarter of the species on the planet, it could easily be half. In this century. 

And we find out that these are two highly interactive systems. The social system and the ecosphere, biosphere, and they're together a giant interactive system. Small changes, big effects. And we've got to come through this period I hope justly, fairly, and without jettisoning a whole lot of things that we have struggled hard to get. Fairness and decency and all those kind of things. But I'll tell you this, if we were a sailing ship, and you were a prudent captain of that ship and you saw stormy seas ahead, you would trim sails, you would lighten the load, you'd batten down the hatches. We'd be doing things as passengers on that vessel that we're not doing as a society headed into the biggest storm we have ever faced as a species. Anyways, thanks for that comment, I appreciate that. 
- And it's actually worse than what you laid out. 
- Oh! 

- Which is why I call myself a despairing optimist. Now, just look at carbon very briefly, this is a quick sketch, I did a piece on the blog a few months ago that said, what if the whole world was equal in emissions? And you know, developing countries have been making the argument lately at climate treaty talks that, well, we're very happy to come in at a lower per capita level of emissions than you in the rich countries. But of course, when you run the numbers on that, which I did in the story, suppose we all come in like nice efficient Europeans. The United States is 20 tons per person per year, Europe's about ten, India's about 1.5, China's four or five. So let's all be European as we head toward 9 billion people. So we all are doing ten tons per person per year. 9 billion people, that's 90 billion tons of CO2 per year. We're now at 30 something billion tons, so we're tripling emissions by 2050, even if we have that huge lift, which would be a huge lift, to have all the countries in the world come to this kind of happy medium. So the challenge, the transformation, a world locked into 80% fossil fuels going toward 80% free of fossil fuels, or at least emissions from them, as it grows, and this gets to the population question, that 9 billion up there, is an extraordinary transformation. 

- I'll make one quick book recommendation on this theme. Buddy's going to have to help me. Gus Speth, the soon to retire head of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, has just published in the last six months, a new book called "The Bridge to..." something, and I can't remember. "The Bridge at the End of the World." Which really goes directly at this question of our concept of economic growth and whether that in itself is a sustainable concept. And he's rather direct, I have to say, having just read it. I would just recommend the book. 
- Kurt, on that, I would just say, there's a real issue here it seems to me, that's been swept under the rug. What Gus does in the book in part is to address the economic issues surrounding capitalism. 

And there's one side of the movement, there's a lot of kind of breathless optimism about capitalism and the future corporate world, the greening of Wal-Mart, that populate the front pages of magazines. And then on the other side there's of course people that are skeptical of capitalism, relative to it's ecological performance and prospect. But Gus does a really good job laying that out. I don't know if you want to pick up on that or not, but it is worth reading. 
- Question. 
- I don't want to scare you, but the New York Times today reported on pollutants and toxicities in bottled water, so. 
(laughter)
 
- I didn't see that piece. 
- I'm not feeling very well, is that...? 

(laughter)
 
- My question is actually-- 
- The last two were by the clean coal people. 
- I'm becoming concerned about this melamine issue. In China, of course, it's a huge problem. We've found it here in Wisconsin, in candy, we're approaching Halloween, we really don't know where that processed food is being made, what's being put into it. And I'm wondering why the media doesn't pick up on this. In China, senior executives have been killed for something like this, but in this country, no one seems to-- 
- Well, my guess is, Walt --, who won a Pulitzer Prize with -- for exposing what China was doing with toothpaste and everything last year. 

I'm sure they're on the case, they just haven't put it in the paper yet. On this issue, overall, frankly, I've got too much on my plate to think about melamine. It would be unfortunate if some people accidentally died from it, but I'm dealing with washing hands. One and half million people are dying right now, every year, from diarrheal disease because they don't have a place to go number two. And so, the melamine thing, for me, doesn't rise to that level of priority. 
- All these discussions about per capita, I wonder why there's rarely any discussion about population control. 
- I'm doing a whole series on it starting in January. All year next year. So stay tuned. 
- Paul Ehrlich will be here at the end of the book fair. 

- It's tough! It's a very tough problem and it's hard to modulate. And there are success stories that turned out to be not so successful, and it's clear that women need more opportunity, more education, more access. And when the pope, I blogged recently when the pope gave his speech about consumption, I kind of dug at him. You know, why doesn't the Vatican mention population, there's obviously very good reasons. So it's a tough issue, it's interesting. 
(inaudible)
 
- No. Well, the way you do is, you say, suppose there is 9 billion. 

Run the numbers. And if that looks completely unsustainable, then something's going to happen. James Lovelock thinks the world's carrying capacity for humans is 1 billion. So we're in deep doodoo already, let alone where we're heading, by his math. 
- Speaking of James Lovelock, I was in London and he had just put out the book he has regarding Gaia. And he's being interviewed by a BBC TV host, personality. And the interview went something like, "Oh, James, tell us about your new book, and is there any hope?" "No." "What will the state of civilization be like in the year 2100?" "Well, there won't be any." 

"How many people will be on the planet?" "Maybe half a billion," was the number he gave. "James, that is so interesting. 
(laughter)
 It's been wonderful to have you on the show, my guest next week will be..." And you wonder, wait a minute. 
- Is there anyone up there in the back? Yeah, go ahead. 
- I grew up in Missouri, and I love your, David Orr, I loved your reading about 1980. I spent a lot of time in a hay barn in July of 1980 when we had 23 days of about 100 degrees. 

And also spent a lot of time in the Boston mountains hiking around. So I loved that, you brought me back to some of those things with your reading. My question to you is, I've read numerous times now your definition of hope versus optimism and I still, I can't quite get it. I'm wondering if I heard it. Maybe, I'm an auditory learner as opposed to a visual learner. Could you just spend a moment and define the difference as written in your article? 
- Well, in that article, and Buddy reprinted this in the Leopold magazine, but I said, to be optimistic is easy. And the metaphor I used was, if you're a New York Yankees fan and you're ahead by a couple runs in the ninth inning, you've got a couple outs, a 200 hitter on the plate, and you've got Mariano Rivera on his prime on the mound throwing smoke, you're optimistic. And in that case, it's easy. I mean, optimism can wear a confident look and put its feet up on the table, so to speak. 

If you're, say, a Cleveland Indians fan, and you've got two outs, 200 hitter at the plate, you're hopeful that they're going to scratch out a hit on Mariano Rivera, but you're not optimistic. And in that piece I used the phrase, hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. If you take all the things we've talked about in the last forty minutes and you make a list of these, and things we haven't talked about yet, you make a list, is there anyone in the room who has a legitimate reason to be optimistic. That is to say, you're pretty confident that we'll make it through. And the answer is, probably not. Martin-- he's the British astronomer royal, he has a book out that looked at, a book that was well-reviewed in the science press. But all the range of things that could destroy civilization in this century, he concluded that the odds of our making it to the year 2100 were 50/50, or less. And everybody knows the numbers, knows that's probably, I mean, who knows the accuracy of it. Maybe it's one in three, maybe it's one in ten, maybe we don't have a chance at all. But you wouldn't get in a car that had a 50/50 chance of a fatal accident. 

You wouldn't get in a car that had a chance in a one in hundred, or a thousand. But this is the state of the world. Now how do we begin to galvanize the hopefulness to turn this around? So, hope is just a different kind of thing. Hope is knowing what the odds are, but refusing to give in. Hope is, I've got four grandkids, hope is looking at those grandkids, and saying, I'm going to do my dead-level best to make sure this world is one you'll want to live in. And that's the same with all of you. You know what the score is, but no one's going to give up. And I don't worry about the solvability long-term of a lot of issues. I think we're an ingenious species and Andy said this at the beginning, but I worry as much about our losing a sense of hope. 

And one final note on this. When people talk about climate solutions, one of the points I make in the book is, climate isn't something to be solved. Not in any time span that's meaningful to us or our grandchildren or their grandchildren. Climate change is a worsening condition we're going to have to learn to live with. This is Wilson's bottleneck. This is our test as a species. Can we quickly find the leadership at the local level, national level, international, to turn this around. But there is no plan, it's just remorseless working out of large numbers. So I haven't answered the question as well as I could, but hope is something we've got to find in ourselves. It's knowing we're doing the right thing, win, lose, draw, this is what we have to do. 

And hope is, again, a verb with its sleeves rolled up. It is not passive. It is not resigned. It is a fierce determination to turn things around. It is a choice to live for life. Do what we can to help make a planet that can sustain life, a place where life can thrive. It's a celebration of the beauty of the earth, it's a recognition that we're trustees. But it is in a sense that, boy, the odds are long and they're getting longer in lots of ways. Does that mean there's no good news? No, there's lots of good news. 

But it is, it's always relative to the magnitude of the things we face. Maybe we can talk afterwards, but thanks, thanks for the question. 
- I want to add one other thing about hope. I don't know if the sound is on on the computer. I'm going to click it now. So my son and I went rowing in a very suburban, overbuilt part of Florida. And, is this hooked up, guys? I thought it was direct-- Oh, okay. 
(inaudible)
 What's relevant here is Jack. 

He's shooting the video. This was his first documentary. 
- There's a lot of houses along the waterways. 
(inaudible)
 
- Whoa! There it goes! 
- The fun part's coming. 
(inaudible)

- There's babies! They're under there! There! There's one of them. Move over a little bit, I can't see them. 
(audience laughs)
 
(inaudible)
 Come on, little babies. 
(inaudible)

 That's a baby heron. They are cute. 
(audience laughs)
 
- So that's my source of hope. 
(applause)
 Get your kids outside. 
- What a perfect way to work toward to the conclusion here, you can see by the clock on the bottom of your projected laptop screen that we're getting to the end here. But I will offer a couple closing comments relevant here. First of all, I'm a Chicago Cubs fan, David, so my attitude is simply one of total denial. 

And then, this is really, Andy, that's great. What could be a better way to end up a session that is sponsored by the Aldo Leopold Foundation and of course the Humanities Council. We'll give Aldo the last word on the theme of hope. And then a comment on it. It's become a favorite phrase of some of us is in the Leopold scholarship world, which is pretty small, but there is a letter that Aldo Leopold wrote right after World War II. It was a very dark time. Especially for that small handful of people who were thinking globally at the time and understanding that it was a new world. And a new crisis that the human race was entering in the years right after the war. You could almost track it, for about six months after the end of World War II, it was a time of deep despair among global thinkers. And Leopold was fascinating to watch during this period. 

He tended to be a pretty positive and forward-looking person. This was one time in his life when he really felt the weight of the world on him. And he was writing to a colleague, I can't remember the exact context. But Leopold's line to his colleague was, "Although the situation is hopeless, that should not prevent us from doing our best." And yet, what was most interesting about the comment was, that was before he finished "Sand County Almanac." It took another few months before he and his colleagues in this small community of conservation leaders to emerge from that dark period and say, okay, we've been through the bottleneck of their generation, we've worked through that emotional trauma, of one who was of course concerned about the future, and the re-emerged with a more hopeful attitude and putting the pen to paper again. So maybe that's a good way to end this. Putting the pen to paper is what these guys do every day. Please continue to follow Andy's Web site. Please continue to buy David's books and encourage him, because his thinking is certainly one of the sources of hope for me. 

And with that, Buddy has a last momentary thing to do here as we thank the Humanities Council and the Leopold Foundation for sponsoring this. Buddy, you got something there? 
- I had the pleasure to show Andy around the Leopold shack and farm today and indicated that a couple of the critical elements and ingredients that we see that went into Leopold's legacy that has made it so lasting. One was the sense of persistence. The family purchased that property and planted trees for the first four years, only to see them all die, and yet came back out that fifth year to plant 3,000 more trees. The sense of patience, understanding that all of this was going to take some time to come to fruition, and then vision. A vision of a new relationship to the world, to the earth, and to each other, that would yield the ultimate product. healthy land. And so we thought, these two are so instrumental in informing and inspiring us and so many others to those key ingredients of persistence, patience, and vision, we wanted to give to them copies of this special edition of the "Sand County Almanac" made from the waste, the pulp, of the most recent timber harvest of the Leopold pines. It resulted in the Leopold Legacy Center. 

This was kind of the by-product, and we printed Leopold's words on paper made from his very trees kind of as a testament to those three ingredients. So we want to thank you two, and present with you with these special copies. 
(applause)