9UNP0225SD_Paul_Ehrlich_WordPress

- Good afternoon. I'm Stu Levitan from Madison's progressive talk, "The Mic 92.1." And it is my pleasure and privilege to welcome you to the 2008 Wisconsin Book Festival presented by the Wisconsin Humanities Council. We would not be here without our generous sponsors. Most especially, for this afternoon's event with Dr. Paul Ehrlich, the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Steve Swenson from the Aldo Leopold Foundation will be making some remarks at the close but before we start I do want to recognize and thank the foundation for its support. Also please join me in thanking other sponsors including the Argosy Foundation, the Evjue Foundation, IMS, the Isthmus, the Overture Center for the Arts our host for this event, thedailypage.com, the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation, the American Girl Fund for Children and of course our federal friends at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dozens of other organizations and hundreds of individuals have contributed their time and funds, we thank them all. 

Especially our festival volunteers in the bright green ecologically friendly t-shirts. Our friends from Borders Books West will be selling books and hosting a signing after the event so please do stop out there, buy a book, get it signed by Dr. Ehrlich. The holiday gift-giving season is coming and books make great gifts. They've already chopped down the trees and printed them, so again an ecologically friendly gift for all your gift-giving needs. Dr. Paul A. Ehrlich is without a doubt the most famous, the most controversial, and the most important lepidopterist in the world today. From his study of the structure, dynamics and genetics of natural butterfly populations which, as you know is lepidoptery, he has become a pioneer in understanding and identifying the problems of overpopulation, resource allocation and environmental degradation with a special focus on cultural evolution and environmental ethics. Now a lot of important things happened in 1968 and one of them was the publication of Dr. 

Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb," a synthesis of scientific research and personal observations that offered a very disturbing account of a world with too many people and too little food. Now thankfully we have managed to avoid some of the more dire scenarios and they were scenarios, not predictions. But the book does still stand as an important alarm over a world gone wrong. As have many of his books and articles written in the years since, many of them with his wife Dr. Ann Ehrlich. Dr. Ehrlich is the president of the Center for Conservation Biology and the Bing Professor of Population Studies at the Biology Department of Stanford University. He is a fellow of every significant professional association and recipient of the John Muir Award of the Sierra Club. John Muir, of course a great son of Wisconsin. The Gold Medal Award of the World Wildlife Fund International, and the MacArthur Prize Fellowship, and the Crawford Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy for sciences given in lieu of a Nobel in areas where there is Nobel. 

He received the Volvo Environmental Prize in 1993. The United Nations -- Environmental Prize in 1994. The Heinz Award for the Environment in 1995. The Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize in 1998. The Blue Planet Prize in 1999. And the Distinguished Scientist Award at the American Institute of Biological Sciences in 2001. So the question obviously is, what have you done for us lately? 
[LAUGHTER]

The answer is to write, again with his wife Ann, his new book, "The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment." 

Forty years after the population bomb, some out there still haven't gotten the message of how human dominance over the planet has spawned a series of crises. Soaring energy demand, famine and environmental devastation. These are not independent crises, the Ehrlichs argue and a single response will not serve to cure them. The central theme of "The Dominant Animal" is stark and profound. It is a tale of how one species, homo sapiens, that's us, has become so powerful and so overbearing that it, we, can truly destroy earth's ability to support life as we know it. As the Washington Post recently said in reviewing this book, no one has more authority to write on these matters than Paul and Ann Ehrlich. For decades now they have been documenting and warning of human's effect on the environment. Their new book, "The Dominant Animal" continues the chronicle of the damning we have done to our home. And although they write in prose of a high quality that is rare among academics, let alone scientists, gloomy reading is what they offer. But they want to do more than simply wail Cassandra-like. 

They also want to dig into how and why we got into the predicament in which we find ourselves. This is an important book with much information and some really stimulating ideas. We need to build on these ideas because the world is an environmental mess and things are not getting better. Now if more of us had listened more closely to Dr. Ehrlich in 1968, we would not be in the mess we're in. Now, in 2008, we have another chance. Both in the pages of "The Dominant Animal," and in person for the next hour or so. Please join me, the Wisconsin Book Festival and the Wisconsin Humanities Council and the Aldo Leopold Foundation in welcoming Dr. Paul Ehrlich. 
[APPLAUSE]

- Thank you, very much. Can you all hear all right in the back? Wave your arms if you can hear. Okay. One normally starts a talk like this by saying how glad one is to be back to Madison, Wisconsin, or wherever the hell you happen to be at that moment if you can remember. But actually this time I can say that with considerable pleasure. First of all, I've been here numerous times before because I have very interesting colleagues at the university. Second of all, I just had one of the nicest introductions I've ever had. You'd be amazed at how many people say, "without further ado..." I always try and train my graduate students to skip the ado. 
[LAUGHTER]

But more than that, I was in the motel last night. I got in late yesterday afternoon. Have any of you ever been on any kind of speaking tour you know that you end up in lonely motels and hotels wondering where one can get a decent bite to eat. And I remembered that not only was this town noted for its restaurants but that one of the best was called L'Etoile. And so I went and wandered around the square and found it. I went in and they were mobbed, but they nicely gave me a place at the bar. And I hate to say this, from somebody from the San Francisco Bay area, I had in a superb dinner, the single best dish that I've had that I can remember in the last five years. So Madison has things to be proud of besides of the University of Wisconsin. And those are the last cheery words that I'm going to say for this entire talk. 
[LAUGHTER]

So savor them. I'm going to pour the gin now and get down to real business. I'm not going to try and tell you everything that's in the book. And I particularly know that in places like this you're going to know much of what I have to say so I'd like to really hit some high points and then open it up for as much discussion as you care to have. So I am not going to talk for more than my allotted three hours and then we'll have lots of time for discussion. The idea behind this book actually grew out of several things. I'll try to be honest with this audience. One was that I was very interested in getting a chance to do a fair amount of talking and get on the media at this particular time in the history of the world. Some of you may have heard that we're having an election for the president of the United States. 

Who here hasn't heard that? Okay, we're in good shape then. And I wanted to get a chance to get out and talk, among other things, about the things that aren't being discussed in the presidential debates which are actually critical to our civilization. A second thing is, Stanford, like Wisconsin, great universities, they move-- They're only slightly more conservative than the church. We still, at Stanford, I won't discuss Wisconsin, we have a departmental structure that traces to Aristotle. And it hasn't changed very much since then. Or since it was the solidified by the royal society in Britain about 1680, something like that. And there isn't, just think about it for a minute. Think about the problems of the world. Can you think of a single one that today would fall within the borders of a single university department and the answer is obviously not. 

But you can get all the way through Stanford University, which I think is one of the truly great universities in world, if you plan carefully without learning anything at all about science or the state of the world. We basically have no science requirement at Stanford, to say nothing of an environmental science requirement for instance, and we do have a committee studying it. Now, any of you are medieval historians you might remember the council of --. It was a church council shortly before the Reformation. And it went on, I don't remember exactly, 20 or 25 years. That's all right, keep him here, he's not disturbing me. 
(laughs)

Okay. The council went on for 25 years. People came on from all over Europe, and Bishops and priests, and so on. 

And in those first 25 years, it was just like a university committee, and it accomplished absolutely nothing. Stanford operates on this council time when, in this day and age, we actually need everywhere, Manhattan Project time. Some of you may be old enough to remember the Manhattan Project. That was in three years how we managed to go from scratch and build a nuclear weapon. Right or wrong in whether we should have done it, one can argue about that but the basic point is we did it at an incredible rate. When you think about Al Gore and his plan for getting rid of fossil fuels for generation of electricity in about ten years, most people will tell you, and they're basically right, it will never happen because of the time course of permitting, getting everything out there, doing all the building, so on and so forth. The standard line is that if you have a deployable energy technology and start deploying it, it's going to be 20 or 30 years before you get 10% of your energy from that source. But those few of you here like me, who remember the Second World War, will remember that it doesn't have to be that way. In 1940, I don't know the numbers, but we were producing or '40-'41, we were producing hundreds of thousands of automobiles and in '42-'43 we were producing hundreds of thousands of tanks and airplanes and so on. If you need to do something and you really mobilize the society that 20 to 30 year thing goes right down the drain and it becomes two or three years in which you can actually accomplish stuff. 

So anyway I decided not to wait for the next 15 years for the Stanford committee to once again decide there's nothing you can do with the curriculum that would let people at Stanford know something about the world and actually started teaching a course open to all Stanford undergraduates without prerequisites, because you can also open it to all decent junior high school students. I don't think there's anything at all in today's predicament that's not fully understandable to a smart junior high school student. And to start talking about where we came from. That's human evolution. And where we are. We're the dominant animal. And where we're going. And there luckily, probably most of you have a little mechanical model in your house. Go into the room where you always go in private. There'll be a thing sitting on the floor made out of porcelain. 

Lift the lid, look in and then push the switch. And you'll get a little model of where we're going. 
[LAUGHTER]

So anybody can have their own little model demonstration right in their very own home and at no extra cost. Well, first of all, why should we care about where we came from? I think there are a lot of reasons, but let me give you, I think on plain intellectual grounds there are lots of reasons. But let me give you one that has got a certain amount of currency this very day, this very day in fact, if some of you watched the news today. There was a colleague at Stanford, a Nobel laureate about 30 years ago, named William Shockley. Anybody remember William Shockley? Shockley's the man that said people are color-coded for quality. 

That you're skin color tells you what kind of a person you are. And since he had a sort of pasty gray skin, people with pasty gray skins were obviously the smartest, most valuable people on the planet. Now where would an idea like that come from? Well, it comes in part from our evolutionary history. You know, after the KT boundary event in which the dinosaurs went down the drain. If they hadn't there'd probably be a velociraptor here lecturing to you here today. 
[LAUGHTER]

After that, our ancestors stopped feeding on dinosaurs eggs entirely, got up in the bushes and trees and started chasing insects which they caught like this. And it turns out that if you're jumping from branch to branch in a bush or a tree, it's better to see the next branch than to try to smell it. And so we became sight animals. 

Our eyes rotated around to the front of our heads. It's nice for manipulating things. Also, it's nice to have fingers that manipulate things. But being sight animals was very important. If we had been canines we'd be smell animals and our ideas of what made people valuable or not would undoubtedly be how they smelled. But what is obvious to us, of course, is skin color, hair color, one of the most striking things. And it's not surprising, therefore, when a small group animal tries to figure out who friends and foes are that they take visual clues. And this plays over all the way not just into race but also into gender. We use mostly visual cues for gender. And today there are still people who believe that skin color is importantly connected to other features of human behavior. 

When the scientific community, and this is characteristic by the way of almost everything I'm going to say today, the scientific community knows that's total nonsense. We know, for instance, that all of us had dark skins when we came out of Africa 50,000 years ago. And that because of varying selection pressures having to do with the production of vitamin D and the destruction of folate from ultraviolet radiation that our skin color has changed almost continuously as we migrate over the entire planet. Pakistanis who have moved to northern Scotland have troubles with vitamin D deficiency. Very light skinned people who have moved to Australia with high solar radiation, suffer from skin cancers and from disruptions in the folate metabolism. So our skin color has been changing absolutely continuously. Almost nobody has a pure skin color background unless you came over very recently from Africa. And the idea that skin color should have something to do with who gets elected to a position in the United States is scientifically totally nonsensical, but as most of you know it may not be socially totally nonsensical. But that's the kind of thing that if you know something of the background, you can continue to have crazy ideas if you want to, but you certainly at least have been exposed to what the story is. So I think it's important that people understand why we're sight animals. 

How important language with syntax is to us. We don't pay anywhere near enough attention to what's involved to producing languages. The main thing that separates us from all other animals is our language with syntax. Now other animals use tools, and so on and so forth. But no other animal has language with syntax, which means no other animal can have ethics, because ethics are agreed upon standards of behavior. And you have a lot of trouble agreeing upon standards of behavior if you can't talk. So there's a lot to learn coming up on where we came from and not having really silly ideas about it. And those silly ideas permeate lots of parts of our society. It's also important to know where we are. And one of the things that actually came home to me many years ago, when I was a kid working with butterflies, I got offered a job with the Canadian Defense Research Board to work in the Arctic on insect survey problems. 

Because in those days we were going to fight the Russians in the Arctic. If any of you have been the Arctic or the sub-Arctic or even parts of Wisconsin you can't survive the biting flies at certain times of the year. And so the Canadian government was interested in knowing a lot about that. And to make a long story short, I ended up spending a summer with the Inuit in northern Hudson Bay which was maybe the defining summer of my life. But one of the things that came home to me there is what I call the culture gap which I believe we're suffering from now severely. And that is, they were on the other side of it. That is every Inuit certainly a hundred years before I got there but even when I got there, knew every aspect of the Inuit culture. There may have been a few mysteries. A shaman may have known a few words that the others didn't, but the men knew how to use a woman's knife. They just didn't use it. 

The women could crouch over a hole in the sea ice for five hours during the winter and spear a seal if they had to. They knew how it was done, and so on. Now I hate to say this to a university crowd. There probably is someone here who could do it. But if someone presented me with the laptop that I brought with me completely disassembled, and with a soldering iron and say put it back together, I couldn't come close. In other words, the average Inuit adult had maybe 98% of the nongenetic information of his culture available to him or her. And the average person in this audience hasn't got one millionth of the nongenetic information available in that person's culture. Not close to it. There's more cultural information in a 747 by far than there is genetic information in our DNA. We only have 20,000 genes. 

That's nothing, there's a lot more parts in a 747 than 20,000. Anyway, so one of the things we have to remember, is as we try and organize as a small group animal, try and organize a global society, is that we have this terrible problem of cultural differences that we can't even solve within our society let alone when you start looking across cultures and people have to be very aware of that. And one of the things that I would claim, but not claim very hard, is that what's in this book, what we're talking about now, ought to be part of the common culture of all societies because if we're going to discuss how we organize the world, we have to understand some very basic things about how the world works regardless of what our other cultural differences may or may not be. And we have to select very carefully because we have so much nongenetic information out there that we can't possibly absorb all of it. We have to figure out what are the areas we're all going to share so we can decide how to organize the planet. And I'll try and say it again at the end, but I'll say it now just to make at that absolutely clear. I do not believe scientists, even I, should be dictating to the people of the world how they should live. People have to decide that for themselves. What the scientific community can to do though, is if the people of the world get together and say a certain portion of us want to live like this, is give you some estimate of how many people might be able to do it, for how long, under what circumstances. In other words, it isn't the job of science to tell you how to live, it's the job of science however to say, for example, let's take a random example. 

Let's suppose there was a bunch of very rich crooks who got friends into political office, and who destroyed a regulatory system that used to at least partially control how much money could be stolen by people in the financial industry. Let's just make that as an assumption. And then you have a bunch of people say the way we're going to solve this, because we have a system that's called capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich, the way we're going to solve this is to give even more money to the rich people to do what? And that is to get the same old system growing again. So we're going to subsidize the automobile companies because we want to burn at much oil as we can to put as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as possible. We want to keep the growth going in our society which has about four and a half percent of the world's people and already uses roughly a quarter of the resource flows. And surely the right course for humanity is try to increase that to 50%. Well if you are take a random example like that, you might think it would be better for humanity to get together in a time like that and say, yeah, in a time of economic crisis how can we design a world where we can all live decent lives without having some people multi-billionaires and going off to a partridge hunting expedition that AIG did to a England recently. Anyway, so we are the dominant animal on the planet. I could give you statistics on that. 

If anybody doesn't believe it, I'll be happy to in the discussion period. And where is it taking us? Let me go over some of the major features of our dominance. Focusing on something that's very badly, Steve and I were talking about this at lunch, very badly named, ecosystem services. But what I'm talking about basically are the environmental services, the nature services we cannot survive without. When you hear a politician say we've got to focus on the economy not on the ecology right now. And this is a very big thing for current events, obviously. That is telling you the person is an ignoramus, because the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the ecological systems of the planet. If they are not functioning properly, the economy will go down the drain and us along with it, again think of the model in your bathroom. So I'm going to run through some of the things that are serious from the point of view of ecosystem services, or nature services, or whatever you want to call them, and then try and finish up by giving some ideas on what we might do to change the course of this whole mess. 

Now since I got, by the way, when Ann and I wrote-- A confession. Ann and I wrote the "Population Bomb" together, but the publisher insisted on a single author, and insisted on picking the name. Both of those things are pretty much in the publisher's control, and I was very naive. And Ann and I decided to go along with it. Our title of the book when the manuscript was turned in was "Population Resources Environment." By the way, came up through Dave Brauer of the Sierra Club wanting us to put down on paper what I had been saying on radio shows which at that time was the environmental movement had been started by Rachel Carson, and a wonderful lady she was too, and her book by the way I did a retrospective review of it 20 some years ago. She was right on the money. But the population issue was not being raised and they wanted something that would raise the population issue. And that's what we did. It turned out, by the way, and we can talk about this at the end. 

It turned out to be an incredibly optimistic book. And I was thrilled by the introducer who realized that the predictions that are usually quoted in the book that were wrong were in a section of scenarios which led off by saying these aren't actually going to happen, these aren't predictions they're little stories to help you think about the future. And we can go over some of them and you'll see most of the concerns expressed in scenarios are still concerns today. But we can come back to that topic. Anyway, the population side of the situation is one of the places where there is relatively cheery news. As many of you know, birth rates have dropped in many parts of the world. They've dropped in part because social scientists and people have figured out some of the factors that are involved in keeping birth rates high. And it's one of those wonderful win/win situations because the major way in which you bring birth rates down is to educate women and give them job opportunities and give them the opportunity to control their own fertility. And that's been done around much of the world. And that has got dramatic effects and hopefully all of you would agree with me, it's not a scientific conclusion, that that's a much better way of doing it than lots of other ways one can think including having nature kill off the surplus of human beings. 

So we have had a lot of success in reduction of birth rates in most parts of the world. Unfortunately the most politically backward country in the world which also happens to be the most overpopulated hasn't caught up with the news yet. So the United States has no population policy. If you think our government is moronic, you're overestimated it. After all, they will sit around and argue for days about immigration policy without a word about population policy. It's like saying to an airplane designer build me an airplane that will load 100 people a minute. And the designer says, how many do you want it to fly with? Don't worry will that just build me an airplane that will load 100 people a minute. So we are really, really backward. Almost every other country in the world that has a population that's increasing also has a population policy trying to get the rate of growth slowed and to get to the wonderful situation they have in parts of Europe now where population declines are starting. 

And if you look at France, Italy, Spain, Poland, all of them have total fertility rates in the 1.5 to 1.7, 1.8 range. That is somewhat less than two children per completed family. Which is where ours should be but we're still about two, with a high rate of immigration. And by the way, just as an aside, one of the things that isn't mentioned in the immigration debate is a non-trivial issue. And by the way, I think the immigration issue is about as ethically charged as you can get. You can probably see that yourself or we can talk about it. But one of the issues is most of the immigrants that come into the United States in a generation or two do very well. They work hard. They get themselves the American way of life. And what does that mean? 

It means without adding a person to the number of people on the planet, you're increasing the pressure on the life-support systems because the level of consumption is such an important source of pressure, so that if a Bangladeshi comes here and becomes a millionaire, that's the equivalent of having 40 more children in Bangladesh. Again I'm not making any ethical decisions there. I'm just telling you that one of the things you've got to think about when you think about movements of people and so on, is if you have poor people moving into rich countries and becoming rich, that's the same thing as having more people born in a rich country or many more people born in the poor country in terms of the way the planet reacts. Anyway, the population situation is good compared to what it might have been because some of the projections were that we might go to 12 billion people. And now it looks like we're going to go to "only" nine. Going to only nine means me adding more people to the planet than were alive when I was born. That's 2.2 billion more people, it's not a trivial increase. Particularly when you realize that they are going to have a huge, disproportionately huge effect compared to the first 2.2 billion people. Why is that? Well, it's part of our triumph of being the dominant animal. 

Human beings are smarter than hell. They didn't start mining copper ore that was 0.5%, and gradually work up to the pure copper that was lying on the surface. They started with the pure copper. They didn't start farming the most marginal lands and gradually move to the river bottoms to the rich lands. No, they went in the other direction and of course are paving over a lot of the richest agricultural lands. They didn't start by drilling down two miles to get petroleum when you could stick a pointed stick in the ground in Pennsylvania and get a gusher. So each person you add to the planet requires resources that use more energy to get, more energy to transport, and so on, so the disproportionate effect of the next 2.2 billion people is going to be gigantic. And when you're trying, if you look at John Holdren's scenario, for instance, of how we might manage to close the rich/poor gap and survive by the end of the century, the big outlying question is nobody knows whether the inevitable enormous increase in the pressure on the life-support systems of the planet that we have to go to before we can start declining that pressure, nobody knows whether we can do that without a generalized collapse. And as I'll probably say again but it's really important that you pay attention to it, we have a long history of civilizations collapsing on this planet. In part almost every one of them because they didn't pay any attention to their environmental situation. 

Now for the very first time, we have a global civilization that is teetering on the edge of collapse. And that is not a cheery picture. Now, what are some of the aspects of that collapse? They all have to do fundamentally with population and consumption. The old equation, including in consumption what kinds of things we do to service the consumption. That is if we're consuming transport, are we doing it through shoe leather or through SUVs and so on. But basically you can think of it as an issue of population and consumption. And this is causing, as all of you are very much aware, a number of difficulties. The one that is most in the news, the only one really that's in the news significantly, is climate change. And I'm always mixed to know whether I should be cheered by this or not. 

In 2004 there was a press conference arranged at the National Press Club to try and bring environmental issues back into the political discourse, which again, they're not here. Every single question that was asked was asked about climate change. None of the other environmental problems, which I'll come back to, was mentioned at all. It was all climate change. Another thing that worries me greatly about climate change but probably doesn't worry you here is what's the focus on more than anything else? Sea level rise. Now sea level rise is dramatic. We actually have a picture in the book of what Florida would look like after a few meters of rise. And no question if you're in a coastal area, and about half of all humanity is, sea level rise is going to cause all kind of difficulties in the future if you're in Alaska, or on an Island, it's already causing you all kinds of problems. Actually causing problems around the world. 

And there are a lot of problems that people don't think of like even if the water doesn't come up that far, the salinization of sea shore aquifers, and so on, is a really dramatic problem. But in my view, sea level rise is the most inevitable problem if we are warming the planet, which I think all the climate scientists would give you about .95 that we are, it's virtually certain because even if we didn't have ice to melt, of course water expands as it gets hotter. And so sea level is going it rise if you warm it, no matter what else is going on. But I think that's likely to prove to be nowhere near as important as the changes in patterns of precipitation that we've already entrained. Because if again you believe the climate scientists, and I do because I know enough of them and they all tend to agree with each other on the basic facts, if you believe them, we're going to have somewhere between 800 and thousand years of changing climatic patterns and we are already a species which is, in part because of the way we handle it, water short. Particularly for agriculture. And by the way, I hope you all know this, when you hear stories we've got problems with water, the story is normally Ag water. There's almost nowhere in the world, except for extreme desert places, where the problem is having enough to drink in a given day. In California, for instance, we're the biggest agricultural state in the union. We use about 5% of our water for household use, 5% goes to industry and 90% goes to agriculture. 

And where does that water come from? Most of it comes from the snow-pack in the Sierra. Which it you don't have the snow-pack the rain that falls in the winter when you're not farming just flushes out to sea in rivers. You don't have the storage, the storage is in the snow-pack of the Sierras. By the way, this also gives you a clue about how important it is when you have a drought putting a brick in your toilet tank. That is, you can maybe move that 5% that's it used in household use down to 4% if you're really strict with things. But that's about it, it doesn't make any real difference. It's like recycling; it makes people feel good but it doesn't attack the fundamental problem. Anyway, so the water situation is already starting to be serious and it's incredibly serious when you consider California, the biggest agricultural state in the Union. Looking at declining snow-packs. 

Places like Lima, Peru, that again, are dependent on mountain glaciers for their water. Moving in the same direction, perhaps most serious is the so-called Himalayan water towers that is the glaciers and snow of the Himalayan uplands and so on, which supply water to 1.4 billion people who are utterly dependent on it for their agriculture. And worse yet, the crops that they grow are now within about a degree Celsius-- It's wheat and rice-- of the highest temperatures they can still produce grain heads for. Now that might change. If we had a crash program of genetic engineering, which is where our high-yield agricultural basically comes from, it's possible that strains that would still produce at higher temperatures and still produce a lot could be developed. With the funding, the only real source of that, the CDR system, a group of international agricultural research, which needs basically a few million dollars. Say 15 minutes cost of bombing the Iraqis would take care of all of those stations for a full year and help take care of humanities food crisis. But not happening, of course. And the dangers there already we've seen, by the way, a decline in the rise which was fairly continuous of yields, that is how much grain you get per hectare of grains over the last decade or so because of the warming. They've been able to sort that out and so we're already seeing all kinds of problems with agriculture. 

Even if we're to fix them, the costs are going to be gigantic. I'm making up the numbers, I can never remember them exactly, but something like 40% of our food comes from the 17% of land we irrigate. And what this system is telling us is that in all likelihood we're going to have to continually investing in new irrigation systems and moving crops around for almost the next millennium and if we keep on the course we're on now for much more than that, in other words, you got to remember the climate change isn't just a redealing of the cards, some places go bad others go good, it's a continuous change and it's going to require gigantic, it's going to require brains, investment and luck where we are already. Now, I was just in a meeting in Sweden with certainly the best economists in the world and some of the best ecologists including Steve Carpenter from University of Wisconsin who is absolutely world class, world renowned and really knows, he's actually, I think at the moment, or he was the chair of the board of the Bear Institute which runs these meetings and has been running them for about 20 years. The thing that has stunned everybody, economists and ecologists, is that we're facing, this and other problems we're going to describe, nothing, absolutely nothing is being done about them. Nowhere in the world is anybody doing anything significant about the problem of climate change. And more CO2 went into the atmosphere this year than last and all of the scenarios that people paint for what we might do are not enough in the view of people like Jim Hanson. Nowhere near enough. And, of course, we're talking hopefully about our children and grandchildren. Hopefully none of it is going to affect us. 

Because I'm not going to move to Alaska, I've been there. For those of you who are interested, I'll tell you what it means in Swedish after the talk. The people stranded there the first time didn't think it was terrific. It's on the sea coast of Alaska. But they've had to move their town basically because the permafrost melting and the ice diminishing has allowed the wave erosion to just wipe out the little beach ridge in front of the town which I landed a Cessna on in 1953, I think it was. Anyway, so climate change, really serious problem. The most serious part of it in my view probably its impact on agriculture, but lots of others from sea level rise, from changes in the distribution of pathogens, from problems with just overheating in places that are not used to it. But that will be somewhat compensated by fewer problems for instance, of old people freezing to death, which happens even in New England when oil is too expensive and so on. So climate change, gigantic problem, but maybe not the most gigantic problem. What are some of the other contenders? 

Well, many of them are tied in so tightly with climate change you can't sort them out. Loss of biodiversity. That is loss of the working parts of our life-support systems that is certainly exacerbated by climate change. But far from the major cause of the loss of biodiversity. It comes much more from paving over land, from overuse of pesticides, from development in general, and so on. That's a huge problem but it is tied in with climate change because the chances of the -- being able to adjust to it are very much reduced by a combination of the climate change and the fact that we've created barriers over the place so the organisms that normally could move in response to climate change aren't going to be able to. You have yourself your nice national park. It protects the organisms that you like aesthetically and that's one of the services we do get from nature is aesthetic pleasure and then the climate goes away and there's no way for the organisms to follow it. Land use change is just another word for basically the same thing. It's what Aldo Leopold Foundation is very interested in all these things are part and parcel of the same mess. 

What isn't part and parcel are two other things that scare the pants off me and my colleagues. Really three but I'll start with two. One is toxification of the planet. Or as we have released probably more than 100,000 now new organic chemicals which have never been seen in nature before that are now spread from pole to pole. Now there are a number of nasty things about this. One is that a lot of them are hormones mimics and hopefully you all have heard of phenol A. There was a big mistake in 1758. You know what happened? We were named homosapiens. That's the wise, right? 

So the wise man gets some chemical laboratories together and tries to develop synthetic estrogen to put into birth control pills and it turns out, it's called bisphenol A. It turns out, it's not quite powerful enough for birth control pills, so as a change we put it into baby bottles. Now that's what the wise man is doing. It's part of the hard plastics that show up in baby bottles. It leaches out of them. Into sports bottles, and so forth. Well, we've got maybe 100,000 like those. The hormone mimics are particularly worthy of attention because almost all of our legislation trying to control toxics in our environment assume a monotonic dose response curve. The more of the stuff you're exposed to, the worse off you are. Well it turns out many of these hormone mimics have non-linear dose response curves. 

And because of the way receptors on yourself are up-regulated or down-regulated, they may be more dangerous for you in tiny quantities than in big quantities and we don't know. The other thing with these 100,000 chemicals, most of them are untested at all on human beings. Virtually all of them are untested for their ecosystem effects and none of them are tested with their synergistic effects with each other in two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine combinations. Now, maybe this is no worry at all but the kind of things that make biologists nervous are the gonads dropping off the polar bears. The fact that many of the alligators are now inter-sexes. The fact that frogs are showing up with three legs. The fact that in many sub-Arctic towns there are twice as many girl babies being born as boy babies. Those things are kind of nerve-racking when you think about them. There are also arguments about the human sperm count. But there it's hard to sort out the data. 

The data are confusing enough. I wouldn't want to say anything except that it's a matter of concern. But the point is let's suppose that ten years from now we find out that five of those chemicals are synergizing in a way either to give everybody a lethal cancer when their 20, or make them totally infertile. Now with climate change, if we go past the tipping point, there are at least crack pot ideas about what you might do to save the day. You've heard about them. Putting sun shades between the sun and the earth. You can do it. It's technologically feasible. They're going to have the battleship Missouri firing a shell a minute or something into the stratosphere carrying aerosols to block out the sun and we just have to do it for the next 500,000 years. Failsafe. 

You know, that sort of thing. These are truly nutty ideas. Particularly because the CO2 is already acidifying the oceans. But at least we have nutty ideas on what to do with it. What are you going to do about those five chemicals? Get your graduate students out there with forceps pulling them out of the environment. They're spread from pole to pole. There's no way to detect them. There's no way to remove them. In other words, if we make a mistake in that area it would have been as if Sherry Rowland hadn't gotten curious about what the hell the CFCs were doing in the atmosphere. 

Hopefully you all know it was just pure dumb luck a technology we all thought was wonderful, the freons, could have wiped us out totally. There wasn't any life on the land surface of the planet until there were enough microorganisms producing oxygen, photosynthesizing in the ocean, to give us an ozone layer. If we got rid of the ozone layer we would have gone back to the state, I used to describe it-- Most of you are too young. When Ann and I were courting 55 years ago, when we'd go out to a road house in Lawrence, Kansas, in the restrooms there were ultraviolet sterilizers over the seats of the toilets. Anybody here remember those things? That's what we're doing to the planet, we were going to be living under that ultraviolet sterilizer. If Sherry hadn't gotten interested and put his brilliant postdoc on it, and then Susan Solomon hadn't gotten herself down to the Antarctic with some wonderful adventures and shown that it was the ozone layer that was going because of the chlorofluorocarbons, we could have been wiped out. Pure serendipity. Sherry told me that he came home one day from the lab and his wife said, how's the research going? And he said, it's going very well, I think I discovered the end of the world. 

And he could have. So you've got to have a little buffering in the system. So anyway the toxics may prove to be a worse and more difficult to deal with problem than climate change. The other one that's most, if you asked me what are the best chance of something unusual killing you, not this normal course of your life or stepping out on State Street and getting run down by a motorcycle like I almost did today, that sort of thing. But what else? I don't think-- Nobody here is going to drown from sea level rise. You're too far inland and you'll be able to out walk that in any case. And probably we won't be the ones to starve at least not first. But what I think is most likely is getting a really nasty flu. In other words, the issue of the deterioration of the epidemiological environment which goes along essentially linearly with population growth. 

As the population grows the chances of a novel infectious disease moving into the population is higher, the chances of it staying is higher, the faster your rapid transit systems are, the quicker it's going to spread. And guess what? There are no plans in our globalized world. How many of you have heard the word quarantine in the last year, I'm just curious? Well when I was a kid they put a sign that said quarantine on the door of your house when you had scarlet fever or something like that. In other words, the threat from epidemic disease is growing all the time. And yet is not being paid any attention to. Notice none of the things I've been talking about here have been a matter of debate in the presidential elections. No significant debate on any of these issues. And the final one is something that won't surprise you but surprises most American audiences. 

Would somebody like to guess? I won't ask this audience. Most Americans don't know that we have thousands of nuclear tip missiles pointed at Russia and vice versa, and they're on hair trigger alert. I was talking to an official of the Norwegian government a couple of weeks ago and he said, what can a small country like Norway do? And I said well, you know, you almost destroyed the world, isn't that enough. He said what are you talking about? And he didn't know that in 1996 the Norwegians had launched a sounding rocket, an atmospheric research rocket, for doing some scientific work, and they notified the Soviets that they sent it up. But at that time, and it's probably not all that much better today but somewhat, the people in their commanding control system were either out picking potatoes because they didn't have any salaries or lying drunk in their offices and the word never got up the chain, so that when the Russian radars detected the Norwegian rocket, they assumed it was an attack from the United States and they got 8 minutes into their 15 minute countdown to blow up the world. They've got thousands of missiles pointed at us too. If somebody could explain to me why we have thousands of missiles pointed at the Russians and vice versa, I don't know. 

But that's part of the situation but worse yet and if you've seen the recent paper by Tune and his colleagues, unlike what we thought we had discovered when we did the nuclear winter studies in 1983, it now looks like an exchange between Pakistan and India using just a relatively small number of Hiroshima size bombs which are fire crackers about 15 kilotons compared to the mega-tonage that's available now, would basically produce ecological and economic effects that would end the world system as we know it. And that's really scary and is very environmental, of course. So in the hour and a half left, let me run down a few things that we might just do that might change the situation besides voting right. Because that's not going to, you know, one of the things I warn all my audiences is we have had such an incompetent and backward looking government for the most actually from Reagan on. Clinton did better but Al Gore who knows all this stuff couldn't get anything done. So I wouldn't be cheery by just a small shift basically in the way things are going because the bar has been set so low that somebody who is smart and reasonable like Obama looks incredible good. Whether he'll be able to actually get anything done unless people like you are all over him if he gets to be president, I don't know. But the changes that need to be made have to be rather dramatic and you can't get away with just one. There's no, you know, getting a new more efficient hybrid automobile and some of the other solutions that you hear about aren't solutions at all. They're not even beginnings. 

The first thing we have to do is obviously begin to get birth rate attention on a par with death rate attention. Human beings have always been interested in keeping the death rate as low as possible. If you intervene artificially with the death rate, if you're going to be ethical, you have to find ways of intervening with the birth rate. And since around the world, for example, women's level of literacy is still lower than man's level of literacy, in my view, and I think I defend it, the prejudice against women is the greatest single prejudice through all humanity, not skin color. Then we have a lot of room to work on changing birth rates that way without worrying about, you know, force this or force that or whatever. So one thing we've got to do is pay a lot more attention to birth rates because what we want to do is as fast as possible but it's got to be humane and it's got to not totally screw up your society, start getting birth rates down until we begin to get a declining population. What size it should decline to we can talk more about. That's not sure. But the main thing to remember is if it's done right it will take a century. We would have a century to debate what lifestyle and how many people ought to live it when you actually stabilize the world situation at some reasonable sustainable society. 

So we don't have to decide today what the final size of the human population given whatever technological assumptions you make ought to be. You just have to know that you've got to be heading in that direction and then you can have a long and probably continuing debate because it will probably change as technologies change. Second thing is pay a lot more attention to conservation in a broad sense than to consumption. We are beginning, the economists are looking at the issues of consumption. They're much more difficult than the population ones. For a number of reasons, one is political. The average politician thinks the way to solve any economic problem is consume more. You may have seen in the recent thing Bush getting up there and saying we need to buy more SUVs and refrigerators to get the economy going again. Well that's exactly what you'd expect from him. But of course it you had an intelligent person up there you'd get something entirely different. 

So the issue of how to deal with consumption is particularly difficult because of assumptions about consumption but it's also a technically difficult problem. I've been working with Ken Arrow and other economists on this and at the extremes it's easy. First of all, we know there's maybe 3 billion people on the planet that need to consume more. Their situation is already so dire that they're not going to be functioning, helping, help solve the problems human beings unless they get to consume more food, get better housing, better education, so on and so forth. So that's one thing that makes it tough. At the extremes, it's also easy to make your own decision. Anybody here got $50 million in their pocket at the moment? I'm just curious. I know this is Madison. I would assume some of you. 

Nobody's going to admit it. If the choice is to take that $50 million and buy an executive jet or take that $50 million and buy a Van Gough, then the environmental sound decision is clear. But of course as you move towards the middle it gets tougher and tougher. It's like with recycling. When you have something in your hand, is it going to be better for the environment to recycle it or to just dump it somewhere or smash it right where it is. And it turns out that varies all over the place with what it is, where you are, how far away the recycling plant is. Just all kinds of things that are a variable. And the same kinds of issues would come up if you try and figure out what can be done about consumption. At the extremes again it's crystal clear if four and a half percent of the people on the planet are using 25% of the resources, then they're some of the people that are going to have to find ways to cut back on their use of resources, if you assume we ought to have a reasonably equitable planet. Which I do assume. 

It's not a scientific assumption, but a lot of us who are scientists agree that you're not going to solve the problems we're facing without a lot of cooperation and you're not going to be getting a lot of cooperation when many people are say, working as maids in hotels. And others are out shooting partridges in England. In other words, the extremes in wealth have somehow got to be solved or you're not going to get people. How many of you read Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed" book? Fair number of you. You know, I think we all understood sort of intellectually what it was like to be poor. This book will really make you understand emotionally what's it’s like to be poor. But it also made me understand why poor people are in a bad position even to exercise their vote. You know, if you're right on the margin and you have to give up two hours of your pay in order to go vote, that's dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow for you and your kids. It's not trivial. 

So my ethical position, which I got from my mother, is we have to work for equity as well. And that becomes very, very complex in the area of consumption. The only cheery news I have is that a lot of good economists are starting to look at those issues. I wish more social scientists were. The third thing is, of course, to pay more attention to what our technological things do for us or don't do for us. Not just what they might do to us. In other words, I think we're way off the edge on toxics. That is I think, ever compound even though it takes time, and remember what happened with the freons. That was something we all would have agreed was a great safety advance when it was first brought into being. That is, before the freons if your refrigerator sprung a leak, you were dead in the morning. 

If you used freons if your refrigerator sprung a leak, your food was spoiled in the morning. That's a big difference. And yet it turned out to be almost total disaster. But we don't do any of the testing of what's it good for. In other words, I think all of us would probably come to fairly easy decisions if a certain chemical turned out was able to magically seal the holes between the sides of a heart in a blue baby we'd all say okay. If there's some chance that will eventual have some bad ecological affect we'll run the chance. We'll keep an eye on it. If it's something that makes eye lash glue a little bit stickier. We might say no, let's not release that all over the place into the environment. We can actually stand women with their own eye lashes or men or whatever. 

I think the point's clear. That we don't pay anywhere near enough attention to trying to figure out what of the things we do technologically are likely to be real benefits. What of the stuff we manufacturer, I could give you my personal example and I'm going to try and end up really fast. I love cold beer. I'm totally in favor of refrigerators because they keep beer cold in the middle of summer. And even in Wisconsin I think that would be an advantage. But I don't need a new designer refrigerator each year. We can build refrigerators that will last for a hundred years or more and very energy efficient. And that's the kind of thing I'd like to be thinking about. What are the things you want to get out of your artifacts and what's the best environmentally way we can get them. 

And I would add in here, by the way, that one of the very few advantages of getting older is that you can look back historically, I remember very clearly what it was like to be alive in the 1950s. I didn't feel that my life was desperate then at all without all the gadgets. I lived in a world once where there was no plastic at all outside of Bakelite. We had very good lives. Not only that, when I went to Stanford, I'm in my 50th year at Stanford now, we were dead broke but my salary was still almost enough to live on without Ann doing any work at all. She stayed home with our daughter until our daughter went off to grammar school. I don't know a single professional couple personally today, young professional couple where both of them don't feel they have to work and have all kinds of problems if they have children with care of the children. Is that an advance? Is the fact that our GDP has five-tupled in that period brought us five times as much happiness? I don't think so. 

I think we ought to be asking these questions. The other things I think we ought to do. One is obviously we've got to educate people. That all ties back into what people ought to be learning. And as Steve and I were talking at lunch, most of this stuff shouldn't be taught in college it needs to start in grade school. It's not see spot run, it's see the plant grow in the sun. Start teaching people about what they depend upon early enough. They'll get it. So that's another thing. We've got to find ways of expanding our empathy, 6.7 billion, going on 6.8 and we're small group animal. 

Even today we tend to have acquaintanceships about the size of 100 gatherer group about 150 people. Unless we learn to expand our empathy as somebody like Peter Singer would drag you further than I could ever go, to caring for people that are distant from us and maybe even more important upon our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, we're not going to have much luck solving this problem. What did posterity ever do for me is a quick and dirty line but I don't think it's one we can afford to live with much longer. And the last things sort of all go together. One is, as I already mentioned, to decide what we want and how we would want to live. And that's a really important thing. The second thing is to try and figure out ways to get there and what can be supported. And the third thing is we are now globalized and that presents all kinds of hideous problems. And I think one of the things that's missed by the politicians, you know, we have a-historic politician that were mostly trained at crooked used car dealers or crooked lawyers or whatever. They don't know anything about history. 

They don't know anything about science. We invaded Iraq run by people who didn't know what Sunni and Shiite meant or what the Kurds were. Didn't know the history of the Middle East. Don't know why Churchill played a key role in starting the Iraq War, and so on. You got to learn more about our history if you're going to make changes and one of the things you ought to learn is that we're a species that's been around for 200,000 years, depending on how you count it. We've only had states of any kind for a few thousand years. We've only had nation states since the Hapsburgs, maybe for 200 years. There's nothing anywhere written that says nation states are the best way to organize a planet. I'm not saying I know how to organize it but we ought to have on the political table, is there some way to go beyond at least in many areas the nation state for organizing what is now a globalized species. Well, that's a small task which I'll leave to the younger of you to take care of. 

Let me just say that I've given you a pretty grim recitation. I always want everybody to remember something that we do know from history and that is human societies can change with incredible speed when the time is ripe and that means we could change the way we treat each other and our environment with incredible speed when the time is ripe. And I think the job for all of us as I probably said in Madison ten years ago, is to find ways to ripen the time. Thank you, very much. 
[APPLAUSE]

Steve, you've got better eyes than I have. Why don't you point to people to answer questions, so that I won't be felt guilty or feel that I am skipping somebody who looks nasty.

- I wanted to ask you, you sort of glossed over this, but what you felt were the absolutely basic things that we have to, every human being needs to know about how to survive on this small planet.

- That's the next hour and a half lecture. Here we go. 

Did everybody get the question? What are the basic things that people need to know? Well, one, of course, is I think where we came from. In other words, you've got to understand our evolutionary history because that tells you a lot about our present behavior and tells you what we might change easily and what might be more difficult to change and so on and where we have to pay attention. So I think that's crucial and again easily taught. It's not all that complicated. The second thing is, of course, what's hidden inside our dominance. What we see are the things that make us feel triumphant. Particularly in our society, in the western society and people who live in cities which is now the vast majority of people in western society. You see skyscrapers, you fly in jet airplanes. 

It gives you this sort of feeling of absolute dominance right there. I mean, who can avoid it? You got a problem you go to the doctor. The doctor gives you some miraculous drug. It may actually have no effect on you at all but if you get better you assume it did have an effect and if you die it doesn't matter, right? So we are, in our society, people always say, well, there have been no food problem, even though you predicted. Well A, I didn't predict it and B, somewhere between 5 and 10 million people have died from hunger and hunger related disease every year since 1968. Many people, something like 600 million people go to bed hungry every night. I don't. I go to L'Etoile. 

It saves me from starvation. So that's another thing that people ought to thoroughly understand. I hate to say it, you can get all the way through Stanford not only without knowing a lot of things, you don't know anything about your agriculture. We had a research associate who thought that milk was manufactured in the computer department. Stop people on the street and ask them, maybe not here in Madison but if you stop somebody on the New York street and ask where their food comes from what are they going to say? The supermarket. And what goes on before that people don't have any idea. For instance, during the nuclear winter studies that we were doing, John Holdren who may be the next science advisor, I think he'd be crazy to do it, but anyway, he and I were doing some back of the envelope calculations. At that time we had tens of thousands of nuclear warheads pointed in both directions. It was a good example of what people don't understand, including our military. 

Who, by the way, we found out in those studies that many people in the military were dead set against nuclear weapons. For reasons I could tell you. But anyway, we figured how many Hiroshima-sized bombs, that's 15 kilotons, very small weapons would be required to end the Soviet Union or the United States as functioning entities. When we had tens of thousands each. The answers were 12 for the United States and ten for the Soviet Union. And the basic reason was all you got to do is disrupt the transport systems and virtually everybody starves. You know, there's only a couple days' food. If the Bay area is cut off or even if Madison's cut off from outside supplies of food you're gone, that's it. And it isn't all that complicated was that there were fewer needed for the Soviet Union was that their web, their supply had fewer nodes in it than the U.S. one. So that's another thing that people don't understand that our single most important activity is agriculture. 

And transport is a huge chunk of agriculture. As is the use of fossil fuels. You talk about going off the fossil fuel standard, which we certainly ought to do, that's going to have a huge impact on agriculture, no matter what way we go. It's not going to be an easy transition. So I would say one thing they ought to understand is how environmental systems support our lives, control the quality of the atmosphere, control the flows, you know, the fresh water flows. Pollinate our crops, that's about 18 billion bucks in the United States right now, control the possible pests in the our crops without which if we didn't have natural controls, we'd all starve. We can't do it with pesticides. And run the agricultural system. All of those things ought to be second nature to people. They ought to be taught those things so early in school that no more wonder about them than they wonder about whether the earth is going around the sun or vice versa. 

In other words, it's interesting that when you look at how the media handle questions when it comes to things like whether the earth goes around the sun, or vice versa, they don't even discuss it, they know the answer, right? Well, in creationism and evolution, the difference is exactly the same. We know the answer between those two. If you think back about scientific controversies the truth never lies in the middle. It's always been, there's no ether breeze. There isn't creationism for plants and evolution for animals and on and on. People don't understand that, so your press, which is a segment of your better educated portion of the population, knows so little about evolution and biology that they think that can be controversial. If somebody said we're sending a spaceship to circle Mars, they wouldn't ask somebody from the Flat Earth Society to come in. But when the climate scientists of the world get together and say odds are we're in deep, deep trouble, they find the six paid-for bozos, the same people, by the way, who deliberately-- And you can read the manuals on this, the whole idea has been to pay a lot of money to insert uncertainty about climate change into the discussion. And if you look at the champions of doing that, where were they the time before? 

Not Three-Mile Island, the waste dump in New York.

- Love Canal.

- Yeah, Love Canal. And before that who were they working for? The cigarette companies. They were big players in convincing people that smoking was just fine. Which I find really stunning because I have a heterodox view on that. Smokers who get cancer should not sue cigarette companies. And the reason is when I was about eight I started smoking. I was with my friends picking up butts off the street. 

When my father discovered this he gave me two cigarettes to smoke and when I smoked them without getting sick he said okay, we have cigarettes around the house you're welcome to use ours. Which killed it for me because taking them off the street and saving them behind a loose brick in our wall was really fun. I didn't much like it. But the thing is, you know what we called them in those days? We called them coffin nails. In other words, the idea that somebody naively took up smoking because they thought that it was perfectly safe didn't have the knowledge of an eight year old back then anyway. So anyway the same people were out there pushing that cigarettes are good for you. Yeah?

- It seems like human beings throughout time have always wanted more. It seems like consumption is part of our basic nature. 

We've been in an era of planned obsolescence. Cars were made to fall apart so that they could, so people would buy more. Now what happens if you scale back all that consumption and you build everything to last a hundred times longer and then you have people who don't have any work to do and they're unemployed, it seems like a huge economic problem to try and turn this all around. When we were hunter/gatherers, we didn't have this problem. When we started manufacturing things and selling things, it seems like an insurmountable problem to change this kind of economy around.

- Well, A, you don't have to persuade me it's a big problem. In other words, as I probably said to you earlier but I can't remember, senior moment, the scientific community has known for a long time perfectly well in what direction things are going and the model of the toilet. If you don't believe it go to: www.dominantanimal.org and click on "more information." We've reprinted there the world scientist's warning to humanity from 1993, which was signed by more than 1500 of the leading scientists in the world including more than half the Nobel laureates in science, which basically says we're going down the drain if we don't change our ways. And the same year we reprinted this too, all the academies of science in the world except one or two, 58 of them, got a statement on population of the environment saying exactly the same thing. 

The UCS actually hired a PR firm to push the world scientist warning. They couldn't get it mentioned in the mass media or any of the big newspapers. You can't even find it if you go on Lexus Nexus anymore. Not news. And so the point is, yeah, it's going to be really tough to change but it's nowhere near as tough to change as what's going to happen if we don't change. And one of the things I've done, I've basically, except for fun, I've given up all my other research and moved to cultural evolution. How you change, make dramatic changes, in the way we behave. The fortunate things are, first of all, it's basically all cultural. We haven't changed genetically in the time we became onto the extremely rapid rise on the technological side so we could consume so much more. And for most of our history we didn't behave that way so the change is possible but if you ask me, I used to say, people would say what do you think, are you optimistic or pessimistic? 

I used to say, well, I'm pessimistic about what we will do but I'm very optimistic about what we could do. I've now changed to saying I'm very pessimistic about what we will do but I'm optimistic about what we could do. We can change. And World War II again is an example of it. In other words, we did change. We changed our consumption pattern. What ecologists and environmentalists don't do, and Steve and I were talking about this, is look at what's been done with marketing. What we ought to do is switch and make the idea you can make your life better without commuting in an automobile. Automobiles ought to be saved for what they are really useful for which is sharing one with your neighbors so that each of you get to take a trip in the country for two or three weeks in the summer, that's a wonderful thing to do. Otherwise, they can be used as places for teenagers to mate. 
[LAUGHTER]

There are other valuable things you can do with automobiles without commuting in them. If you're going to change the way people do it, you've got to get the marketers in there that have convinced us that always buying more is making us happier. I'm basically in agreement with you. I'm not a wild optimist on this because the changes will have to be dramatic and that's why they're not being discussed in the election. I mean, you may not believe this but two of our politicians actually said during the election that we ought to take off the gasoline tax so people can burn more oil. Which is already cheaper than bottled water. You know, we are basically invading Iraq to get their oil, get control of their oil. I don't think we can even get control, if you listen to the economists it will never work. The point is that's like having a food problem so you go out and drill for cyanide to eat. 

I mean, it's just nutty. If you even managed to damp down coal, we have already found enough pumpable petroleum to ruin the atmosphere from the point of view of agriculture. So the idea of drilling anywhere is crazy. The idea of drilling on offshore shelves is just a little bit crazier. But it's all nutty. And here we are having these big discussions about drill baby drill, taking off the gasoline tax and on and on. How many of you know about Africom, I'm just curious? You see, here's an educated audience and it's not because of you it's because of the newspapers. We have a thing in the military. It's designed, it's a command that stretches from Egypt to Afghanistan and north through the Stans and through the Caspian Basin. 

It's designed to fight the Chinese over the fossil fuels of Central Asia. The Chinese are under no doubt at all about this they are building, for instance, a blue water Navy to counter our Navy in the Indian Ocean, and so on. If you think we're building fancy fighters and bombers to take care of al Qaeda, have another guess. It's got nothing to do with the war on terror. It's all about fighting the Chinese. That's what our military are thinking really hard about, and that's what the Chinese military are thinking really hard about. Africom just snuck in. That's our new military area covering Africa. That's to fight the Chinese over the oil of Africa in Nigeria and places like that. It was announced a couple of weeks ago but the papers didn't pay any attention. 

I doubt if most reporters understand what the hell is happening. If you took the cost in our military, which I was talking to Michael Clair, some of you may know his resource wars, he's a professor at Hampshire College, but he's the expert on resource wars over water and oil and natural gas and so on, the other day. And I said Ann and I had made a calculation for an earlier book at what the cost of internalizing the externality of having roughly half our military designed to keep resource flows coming towards the United States, if that were added to gasoline what the tax would be. And it's something like 80-cents a gallon right there for that one extra. And Michael said that's right ballpark. May be its closer to a third. We may have overestimated a little bit. It's very hard to judge because when you look at weapon systems and deployments and so on, how do you assign what's on one basis and what's on another. But it's crystal clear to everybody who follows it that much of our military posture is designed to fight the Chinese and the reason to fight the Chinese is primarily over resources. And Michael thinks if we're lucky, we have ten years to turn it around. 

I think he's optimistic but I hope he's right. I probably didn't answer the question but I gave a rant anyway.

- One of the things that really scares me is I have seen a program I think on PBS about the -- due to methane.

- I'm sorry I didn't hear you.

- I said I had seen a program on PBS about the Permian extinction due to methane. And I just read a report that in the Siberian Sea there's some research out there that's found tons of methane chimneys, and I tend to think personally, that there is no way we're going to-- We're past the tipping point.

- The basic question is about methane which is about 20 times as potent per molecule a greenhouse gas as CO2. And she accurately reported that some or one Siberian scientist has been detecting so-called methane chimneys in which a lot, what happens is let me say if I have given this, first of all, I'm not a climate scientist but I'm very close friends with Steven Schneider and John Holdren, we talk about this all the time. So at least you're getting a somewhat bungled version of the truth as they see it. There's been, if I'd been talking to you 10 or 15 years ago, the big issue would have been, what are the feedbacks going to be like? 

Are we going to find as the climate warms that most of the feedbacks will be negative feedbacks like the thermostat in your home; the hotter it gets, the more the things the heat produces are going to be cooling. Or are they going to be positive feedbacks, that is the hotter they get they'll entrain things that will cause more heat. And a series of the main candidates for positive feedbacks are showing up. One is the warming of the Arctic. The most dramatic and easily seen one is the shrinkage of the sea ice because, of course, sea ice reflects away incoming solar radiation so it tends to cool. But if it gets warm enough to melt the sea ice, then the incoming radiation is absorbed by the water and it tends to warm, and the same thing for land. Also, trees are starting to move north into the tundra and they absorb more of the incoming solar radiation than does tundra. Another positive feedback. And also as the tundra warms, it lets go more, the decomposition is faster, more CO2 comes out of the tundra. The truly frightening thing that the lady is talking about is that there are these weird mixtures, that being no chemist I don't understand, but in various kinds of tundra and under the Arctic seas is methane bound to something they call clathrate which seems to be some kind of a, maybe somebody knows the exact structure of clathrates, but it seems to be some kind of ice methane complex and one of the worries has been that when you warm things up that methane will be released and there are some people who think that sudden climate changes in the past are due to changes in the methane content of the atmosphere. 

I don't know enough about it to tell you. The only thing I can tell you for sure is A, a lot of the climate change in the past was damn fast. The idea that you've 200 hundred years to see the effects, and so on, may be dead wrong. It can be a decade or so. And the methane release is one of the most dangerous things. And so far I haven't seen any really negative, I saw that report and there hasn't been a storm of people saying that's dead wrong. So you got to watch. This is something to watch. And again, you know, if we have to go to things like solar shields and the battleship Missouri firing a round in the atmosphere every minute for the next 500,000 years, I wouldn't count on it. You know, Josh -- who got the Nobel prize for showing sex in the bacteria and the bacteria have been grateful to him ever since. 

He recently died but he was an old friend of mine. Said at one point the survival of humanity isn't preordained, you know, we don't have to make it. Every civilization, and there's a lot of discussion of this now, every civilization so far has had the seeds of its own collapse in it and has collapsed. Now we have a global civilization teetering on the brink of collapse. So my advice to you is drink a lot of wine. Keep your internal environment in good shape and then you won't care so much. 
[LAUGHTER]

I could live with that, if it wasn't for the fact that I have so many friends with young children. You know, the adults, they played a part in this. What gets me is the little kids who had nothing at all to do with this and what we're handing them.

- That's a perfect note. I want to ask you. First of all, sir, you're responsible for the fact that of my four kids, two are adopted. You're almost single handedly responsible. Unfortunately, it didn't work because I have 16 grandchildren. 
(LAUGHTER)

- I think I found the source of the population explosion right here in Madison.

- And it's one of the reasons why I chose ecological ethics as my academic field. And I spent most of my life doing that. But as I've been focusing the last eight years on global warming and activism in that area, and when I go out and speak, about half the time someone lobs your population bomb at me. 

Saying, everything you said is nonsense because the population is going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's all futile. And then they never go on and say what I think is their unspoken conclusion, so let's have a party and go out big. But you said you were studying cultural evolution to try to find other ways to behave and to change human grace response. Do you have anything more to add on how to do that, because I spent most of my life trying to.

- My problem is I can't claim great success in this area as you may have noted, but Ann and I and Don Kennedy and a bunch of people and one of the reasons I was talking to a Norwegian minister is we're trying to get a millennium assessment of human behavior going. We've had the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is extremely conservative but has played the role of at least getting climate change as being the most discussed of this suite of environmental problems that I discussed. Many of you don't know but more than 2,000 ecologists got together and did a millennium assessment, millennium ecosystem assessment which is where the source of the toilet comes from basically. But again it's conservative but covering the whole thing. But what we haven't done is gotten back and started to have an assessment of our behavior and our ethics. 

And ethics, for example, are not broadly discussed in our society. We're getting, you know, we had a little bit of it this morning, I hate to bring up real current events, but when Joe the Plumber was talking to Obama, Obama said something like about we want to spread the wealth around a little bit. And the idiot shows, the Sunday morning idiot shows were just loaded with people like Stephanopoulos, you know the low IQ jerks who try to present themselves as the intellectual body of the United States. And mostly talking utter nonsense and not dealing with any of the real issues. But I got to give it to David Gergen who at one time I didn't think was all that good. Did you see him by any chance? He was great. Because the thing McCain has started, this guy is a socialist who wants to redistribute wealth. And Gergen said, I'm paraphrasing but I'm pretty close, are you out of your mind? We've given $700 billion to the crooks who set this whole thing down who are now hunting the partridges and so on. 

That's redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich once again. And then he gave the statistics for what's happened for the last few decades of how the wealth has been redistributed from the poor to the rich. 
[APPLAUSE]

And there's the basis for having an ethical discussion. But we don't have it as an ethical discussion. The only ethical discussions occur basically in religious bodies and they wouldn't all agree with my ethics and so on, but nonetheless we don't have, as a world society or even as a U.S. society. How many he how many of you had ethics in high school? I sure as hell didn't, but it was a long time ago. How about in college? Are you required to take an ethics course? 

We are required, I hate to say this, the course that I'm not at present at now, but which I organize is the ethics course in our department for the graduate students in ecology and evolution. Why do we have an ethics course? Because the National Institutes of Health says if you're a department that gets funds from the NIH you have got to teach your graduate students a course in ethics. And we had a meeting of our graduate students about six years ago, the ones in the ecology and evolution group, and asked them what they didn't like about their graduate training. And they all liked it just fine except for one thing, they had to take that blankity blank, blank, blank ethics course in the medical school. And I just volunteered to organize an ethics, it's a seminar, an ethics seminar in our department because of course, the medical school what is ethics? How fast you can rotate the rectal thermometer when you're inserting it? Filling out forms of patient permission and so on. Whereas the myriad huge ethical issues of you've got a reserve and the poor people are poor on the outside and the only way they can get food is going in, how do you solve that problem? There's just all the things we've been talking about. 

The immigration situation and so on. Just incredibly charged ethical issues that weren't being discussed, now we do discuss them. But, in general, those questions aren't raised as ethical questions in our great universities and our high schools and so on. So I'm with you, I'm just not saying we're going to solve the problem. You're not the problem. Believe me. 
[LAUGHTER]

- Let's have this be the last question.

- I'm going to sit outside and you can berate me all you want.

- Something along that lines, why is it the middle-class being talked about and not poor people anymore.

- That's easy. The poor don't vote. It's that sad and simple. And you know, Ronald Reagan closed down all the mental health facilities in California and so when I go downtown to meet a colleague for lunch on Saturdays, I always carry bills in my pocket and I always feel bad. We have a lot of people living on the streets, and I think a lot of us would be happy to take the money we're spending bombing Iraq and doing other wonderful things like that and just, you know, people say if you give them five bucks they'll just spend it on booze. And I say if I was living on the streets that's what I'd spend it on. Who am I to dictate what they spend it on? But the point is that's one of the places I think government should be functioning. I got to tell you one more story and then I'll go out and sign books. Or did I tell you already about Ken Arrow and the paper on "Are We Consuming Too Much?" 

The group of us that get together, the ecologists and economists that have been getting together for 20 years in Sweden wrote a paper on over consumption entitled, "Are We Consuming Too Much." And the lead author was Kenneth Arrow who is my friend and colleague from Stanford who I think every economist would say is the smartest economist on the planet, at least there are none smarter. Has a Nobel Prize. And a number of other very distinguished economists and a group of, I think Carpenter was on it also, submitted this paper to the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the top economic journal, by some people's claim, in the United States. They deal with critical problems. When I was looking through them recently, they have a wonderful article on the economics of college football. Something that has us all worried sick, right? They published the paper but the word got back to us that one of the editors said well, we've got to publish this paper by Ken Arrow and his communist friends. 
[LAUGHTER]

So on that note, I'll go out and sign some books. 
[APPLAUSE]