Utahs onfor sponsoring this session. Nautical he has won awards for several of his previous books including the World Without us which was named top Nonfiction Book of the year by Entertainment Weekly and time magazine. A lot of you probably know him from that. I have to say your book the World Without us was one of the most inspiring things that i ever read. You had people benign lead disappear and describe how cities and farms and rivers and mountain lions would revert to a more natural state. That book was translated into 34 languagess which means a lot of people found it inspiring. Countdown our last, best hope for a future on earth has already been translated, coming out with 15 foreign editions and more on the way. It is another top seller around the world which is no wonder since youve visited 21 countries to produce it. Basically, given your past success with World Without us and what you learned from that a lot of us are wondering what inspired you to write countdown our last, best hope for a future on earth . Thank you all for coming. Some of you do know the World Without us, i wrote that book because i really want the world with us. The idea of benignly removing the species to which we are all intimately involved was to show how when we relieve it, the daily pressures we keep on the planet, the earth rebounds in the surprisingly swift and wonderful ways, he eventually even refills empty nichees that we have inadvertently extinguished their president s. My hope was that people would see if this restored earth and wonder is there any way we can at ourselves back into this picture, only this time in nice harmony and balance with the rest of nature and not in mortal combat with it. The epilogue to that book was intended to be a discussion about how we might do that. But i ran into a rather disturbing fact and that is that if you see these figures on population, they are so big you cant get your mind around them but thanks to the invention of the calculator i did some Long Division by 365 and found out basically every four days we add a Million People to the planet. And this is not a sustainable number. At the end of that book i did this other little thought experiment which i hadnt even planned out. I asked the Democratic Institute of vienna which is one of the premier such organizations what would happen if setting aside all social concerns everyone participated in the chinese policy from then on and only had one child per family and it turns out suddenly they would go like this and by the end of this century we would be back at 1. 6 billion which was exactly the population of the earth in 1900 before our population suddenly doubled and then doubled again. We quadrupled in one century for reasons we will get into. I left that dangling at the end of the World Without us. The idea of how many of us is a safe population on this planet and is this something we should be talking about when we talk about how we deal with Environmental Concerns . I expected a lot of blow back. In stead what i got was an onrush of interest from a lot of readers. Everyone wanted to talk about this. Was on catholic radio programs, mormon utah. Everybody got the fact that things are more crowded than they were before. All these cities that are endless and all the smog. Finally i decided it is a really important topic but also a really explosive one and people get really passionate about it because religion and economics, growth, that is what makes our economy healthy. Theres a lot of stuff tangled up in there so i decided someone should really explores this product not as pro population control, that itself is a loaded word so we say population management or anti explore it as a journalist. Really research this thing and try to find out can we determine how many people the earth can safely hold without tipping it over . Can we figure out how much nature we need to preserve because we are starting to push other stuff off the planet at an increasing pace and at a certain point we will push something off we wont realize until the is too late we should have kept that one. Given that what comes to everybodys mind is that chinese one child policy and nobody likes including the chinese, are there other approaches . Is there anything in histories, the liturgies war experiences of the worlds vast swath of cultures that might embrace the idea of embracing so much in a time of urgency . And last, the one about economics, shrink to a sustainable size is a way to design an economy that will allow us to prosper . Without constant growth . Particularly that third question, the one about all the cultures etc. That is why i went to 21 countries for this book, starting in israel and palestine and ended in iran. Many of these topics you mentioned, want to come in to. I want to let you know we will leave some time for questions for for the audience at the end so if you have any you can think of but lets start out, not everyone considers population of problem. Given all the other problems applying for attention, why do you consider this a problem and how does it rank among the others . It is a problem that underlies all the problems. We wouldnt have been fine mental problems if one species hadnt grown suddenly so numerous that we are basically in the most abnormal growth spurt of any population in the history of biology and we dont notice it that much because we all were born in the middle of it and it looks kind of normal to us. Let me explain a little bit. First i should mention it seems so obvious when you think about this, most groups dont like to touch this one at all. The reason for that is really understandable because this is a topic that makes us uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable. Like every other organism, we were designed to make copies of ourselves, we were designed to make extra copies of ourselves because sadly enough, most babies didnt make it to their fifth birthday. That happens throughout all natures so the idea was greatgrandmother might have had eight nine kids but maybe two or three survive the. Population grew very slowly, 99 of Human History, the line was like this. Barely more than two babies per woman were surviving. In the beginning of the 1800s just before vaccination for smallpox which would knock us off by the millions, was followed by other vaccines and all these understanding about pasteurization of milk, and we started to rise. We passed 1 billion in 1815 and then we got too little over 1 billion by 1900. And then two things happened in the 20th century that made the chart go like this and this is what it looks like, the classic hockey stick. What happened was right before world war i to two german scientists discovered a way to pull nitrogen out of the air and slather it chemically on the ground. This is the most significant invention in all of Human History because until that happened the amount of plant life on the planet was limited to what relatively few number of plants, nitrogen fixing bacteria in their roots could contribute to this will but now suddenly we could contribute limitless amounts of nitrogen. We started being able to grow much more food. That meant people werent dying and they were having more babies and populations suddenly really started to rise. Then i remember in the 19 late 1960s a book called the population bomb came out, population then was at 3. 5 million, less than half of what it is today. They predicted that the dire philosophy and prediction of Thomas Robert malthus, when the smallpox vaccine was coming out, that population was going to out raise Food Production. It was finally going to come true, we were outstripping what we could do with nitrogen which is so significant by the way. 40 of us would be here would not be here without artificial nitrogen. They predicted that with the population growth spurt, and huge salmons would break out in the 1970s. In asia and africa. Unless an agricultural miracle took place. One did take place, the green revolution. You have all heard of it. The green revolution basically created grains that would prove much more grain than stock, rice and wheat. There was all this extra food, and it was where the fans were supposed to the most dire, pakistan and india and the famine were averted. Everybody who believed this was such a miracle said malthus was wrong. Everybody except the head of the green revolution. He won and Nobel Peace Prize credited for saving more life than any human being on earth and when he accepted that speech instead of gloating on that, we only bought time. He understood the paradox of food. The more food you produce the more people eat it, they dont die of starvation, they live to be get more people. He spent the rest of his life in population groups, he said unless enhance food population and conpopulation control come together we will be in a terrible situation. Would you like me to talk about indiana and pakistan . You call it global water torture going on. Okay. Two of the countrys i went to in india and pakistan, india is as a result of all these people surviving, is about to surpass in this coming decades. We will explain Pakistan First and come back to the indian situation. Pakistani is one of the fastestgrowing countries on the planet and is out of control as a result. It has close to 190 Million People now. It is about the size of texas. Texas has 26 Million People. The climate is around the same. By the million by the middle of this century pakistan will have 400 Million People. That is 85 more than the United States has today and pakistan will still be the size of texas. It cannot possibly employ all these people so you have all these angry frustrated unemployed and underemployed young men and guess what they become . Pakistani and nuclear power. This to me is pretty serious. In 1958 dwight eisenhower, former allied commander who was then president appointed one of the allied generals to look at over population. Over 3 billion people on the planet yet. Eisenhower then stated the single biggest security issue in the postwar era would be over population. The general appointed to that commission spent the rest of his life working on population issues. This is serious business. We all hear Great Stories about in thes economy but i went up to vote place where the green revolution was tried out and it was so miraculous. I met with the head of the green revolution there who explained to me that to grow all these crops relief fast, they did a lot of holes in the ground to get water which they then hit 50, 75 feet and it went down 250 and around 500 feet when it got so expensive to drill at the pump Indian Farmers started committing suicide and i spent a day talking to widows of green revolution farmers who no longer can afford to keep drilling below thousand feet to get to that rapidly depleting water. Since 1995 their farm union told me and i corroborated that, 270,000 green revolution founders have committed suicide in indiana and they do it symbolically by drinking pesticides. So the numbers have grown, the water is diminishing, the use of chemicals to force feed the land to get more food for us, this was serious stuff which is why i decided i had to write this book. In the midst of it all, i was watching as all of us now watch what is going on with the atmosphere and climate and i realized, you know, i have written a lot a lot about Renewable Energy. It is very encouraging we keep doing it but it is frankly a sin that this university doesnt have solar collectors on every single rooftop. [applause] there is a lot. Any hot water produced at this university that is in from solar energy which is really cheap to heat water, i stand by that comment. Nevertheless the uptake until we know will pull energy is not happening very quickly. 80 of our energy is coming out of fossil fuels and even if tomorrow all we did was build solar plants and wind farms, just the mining of the metals and the construction and all that it would mean several more decades of carbon we have to work off before we have zero emission is energy. I dont know what to do, theres something we can do about limiting the number of the manners of that energy and the matters of carbon dioxide. Right now there is more up the bears and there has been in 3 million years. 3 million years ago the seas were 80 to 100 feet higher. Interesting reconfiguration of our coastline unless we start taking control of it. Thank you. That is really important stuff. We have been hearing a lot about problems and we need to come back to those that cant you give us all little relief from Success Stories you found . Women have been having seven children or more and we are down to replacement rate. I am pleased to say, i went into it and it turns out that unlike Renewable Energy that we still dont know how to create it in massive enough quantities to run our cities and industries and vehicles and indiana and china, contraception is something we dont know how to do. This doesnt require a technological lead. Many places on earth i coming close to or actually below replacement rate. Replacement rate is simply two people with an average of two children and population doesnt grow and if they have fewer than population starts to reduce. There are several examples in countdown our last, best hope for a future on earth of countries that have done this without a coercive policy like chinas. Other than chinas and a brief epic of forced sterilizations in the mid 70s in india that brought down the government, all the ones in the book are non coercive and voluntary and one of my favorites is the one melanie mentions. In 1979, iran had its Islamic Revolution and immediately thereafter they were invaded by Saddam Hussein who wanted to grab this oilrich province on their border. The new government was unorganized, easy pickings. He also had the backing of nato which was not fond of the iranian revolution and he had a lot of sophisticated weaponry and even nerve gas which unfortunately some of our tax dollars provided. Iran just had people. So the Ayatollah Khamenei asked every fertile women to their patriotic duty, get pregnant to help a 20 Million Man Army to fight off the invaders and at one point as they were near the biological limit for females and reproduction as part of the high street production rate in the history of the planet. They held iraq to a stalemate for eight years. An economist and budget director of iran went to the Supreme Leader and said we have a problem. These kids will grow up 10, 15 years. Our economy will not be able to employ them all. Another pakistan. The ayatollah agreed something should be done. The new ayatollah who is currently the ayatollah still immediately issued a fatwa saying theres nothing in the koran that says if as he put it if wisdom dictates you have a number of children you can responsibly care for their is nothing against using any form of Birth Control all the way up to and including operations. Second, they made that stuff available throughout the country. There is of woman on the books, a developed muslim women i talked to in tehran who told me about horseback brigades they would have bringing surgical teams, and later by helicopter to the most remote corners of the country to make sure everybody had access to contraception. It was free. But it was voluntary. They had posters saying choose good. The only thing that was obligatory was premarital for couples which frankly this is not a bad idea. In those sessions which were held either in the moscow for health center, how much it costs to raise, feed, educate, clove children. Women didnt need to be told twice. The fourth and most important part of this, they encourage girls to stay in school because a woman who is studying tends to they fer her childbearing until her studies are done and when she is done she has Something Interesting and useful to do, economically helpful. He wants to be a mother but you cant do all that if you got 7 kids. Overwhelmingly everywhere i went, rich country, a poor country, you get a girl through a secondary school and on the average she will have two children or fewer and if we were doing that from now on, education is the best contraceptive, we would be coming down in the next two or tweak the generations to a sustainable number. You mentioned access to contraceptives and education for women as being key elements. Anything those of us as americans should know about that or might contribute . Maybe things we can help with projects . The most important thing. In country after country, i found you dont need to get government involved. This is an individual decision. In iran they told people have as many children as you want the people got the idea. I go to the vatican in this book and we all know the vaticans position on this and the vatican cant change that position because they her painted in a corner called papal infallibility. If there are any catholics in the room amino offense because i had an interesting conversation that you can read about and one of my great mentors in life was a Catholic Priest who is also in the book. The vatican which is this country that is 110 acres, a population of a thousand, nearly all the mail, surrounded by at a very catholic country called italy which has one of the lowest fertility rates, an Italian Women are some of the best educator on the planet. Per capita more graduate degrees among females than anywhere else. They just simply dont Pay Attention to the vaticans position on that more to catholics in the United States, 90 of catholic women in the United States heavy use or are currently using contraception. There is a case of just a country that didnt even have a program, but fertility came weighed down. But it takes getting contraception out there. One of the things that i followed a lot of people in this book in africa, in the philippines, getting contraception out to people and sometimes they have to do real end runs around their government or have to raise money by themselves to do it. In the philippines all these fishing villages where they realized we live on fish, 90 of the protein and a filipinos diet is fish. This is how we make our living but if we become so numerous the fish stocks are all over. Even though the Philippine Government which is one of the few places where the church is bountiful doesnt have a National Policy all the little villages do. Getting the contraception to them, this i was surprised to find out is all financed by a relatively few western governments and by about four major foundations and those are all from the United States, bill and Melinda Gates is number one. I am pleased to say the United States is the biggest contributor to funding by far, more than all the rest put together of contraception out there and it is done very intelligently. When i was in pakistan there were all these usaid promoted familyplanning access to Tools Program and they take off that little phrase, a gift of the american people, because that is not going to fly in some of the really conservative parts of pakistan. Please listen to this because this is the thing that you can do. The funding for this, worldwide, to make contraception available to everybody who wants it and by the way in countdown our last, best hope for a future on earth i talk about the new male contraceptives with an coming online which purport to be very simple and successful, to make contraception available so everyone can choose what to use worldwide would cost 8. 1 billion a year. That is not very much money. That is less than the United States was spending per month in afghanistan and iraq in most of the last decade. This is really affordable. It is also really fragile because the population projections that we have right now which arent pretty, we are at 7. 2 billion right now and we are head to the to 9. 5 billion by the end of the century and just about 11 billion by the end of the century. That means the amount of contraception we currently are making available. I am not a member of a Political Party but if obamas opponent said won a last election, romney and ryan made it clear they would call u. S. Funding for the stuff. Have a child more per woman in the world we would be head to do to 16 million by the end of the century. Have a child fuhrer which would happen if we made contraception universally available we would be headed to 6 billion by the end of the century. That is a huge difference taking us back in the direction of sustainability. The number of abortions would dp to 14 million a year. Thats still a lot of abortions, but thats 36 million fewer. Tsa the best antiabortion program ive ever heard. Well, youve given us a lot of detail as well as science this the book, and i think youre kind of catching that from the discussion, what hes talking about here. But with i wanted to go back, you started off in jerusalem, in the holy land, by three major religions. So, you know, 8 billion a year to stallize global populations stabilize global populations doesnt sound that hard to reach given our global economy, but religion, is that an important element thats getting in the way, or well, you know, some of you might have seen me on Television Last night, i was on the bill maher show, and religion is his big bugaboo, and he thinks its the cause of all the problems. And my response to him is, look, its not really just about religion, its about tribalism. Its, this is the history of, i mean, chimpanzees, primates before us, Everyone Wants to be fruitful and multiply to outthurm your competitors so you outnumber your competitors so, you know, the israelites wanted to be more numerous than the canaanites. Its a strategy, they have a lot of kids, so you are the Biggest Group on the block. But, you know, its the law of diminishing returns. Too much of a good thing suddenly becomes too much, or things change on you. Its very interesting in the bible that you get to the fourth generation, and one of jacobs and 13 kids, joseph. He realizes the world is entering a time of scarcity. And he has only one wife and just two children, and he counsels the pharoah of egypt and the israelites, and according to talmudic scholars, the rule was if times of famine, you dont have babies. He basically tells the pharoah, this is not a time to be expanding, this is a time to be conserving. Its a time of urgency. And, frankly, i think were in one of those times of urgency right now. I found in all the religions, you know, no catholicism situation, but on the other hand, catholics are doing what they choose to do when they have the means and the education to know. Buddhists, theres a chapter in thailand, buddhist country where again an economist realized that the country was never going to develop economically because all of the villages were overflowing with kids. So he started passing condoms out in development meetings, and everybody looked at him like hes, like, what are you doing . And it wasnt working. And one day he was talking to a room about this size, and as hes talking about Family Planning and getting all these blank stares, hes unconsciously unwrapping the condom and then suddenly this thing droops, and, you know, just like you, everybody starts to giggle. And then he goes, he realizes hes got their anticipation, so he does what their attention, so he does what every boy has at one point, he blows the things up. [laughter] and then he hands condoms out and has a contest, and he starts doing this all over thailand, and he gets the Buddhist Monks to sprinkle holy water on the condoms [laughter] and this picture gets faxed to all the media. Suddenly thailand, which is a country that has a sex industry as one of its economic pillars, you know, he just went to them and he didnt say you guys are sinners, you have to stop doing that, he says, look, you have a business be, aids is coming up, do you want to be known as the business that makes your clients sick . Heres your answer. So you can use religion as your ally. Every religion has got an opportunity to conserve. In ecclesiastes at times. And i have to say you do cover a lot of religions in here and do show some of us from the catholic background might think of them as loopholes. [laughter] i think theyre ways around what we think theyre saying. You know, religion is just something that we human beings do, you know . Its come up all over the world. And rather than try to tell people, you know, thats fiction, thats poppycock, try to change their beliefs, i just try to find ways to show that its in your belief. Even the mormons actually have a history of this thing, because when polygamy was outlawed in the United States, they were still trying to be fruitful and multiply. And suddenly a lot of mormon women were dying in childbirth because they were getting pregnant too fast. Fortunately, mormons really emphasize education, and this was a new generation of mormon doctors, this was around the turn of the century, and they started advising women that for the sake of our culture and for you and your family, you have to start spacing your births. So when i was in utah talking about this thing, i would say things like, you know, you guys are way ahead of the rest of us who are tied to these thousands of because you have our modern religion with your modern treatise, the book of mormon, and you already did the right thing once to save the mother, and now theres Mother Nature that we might have to save. So i sold a lot of books. [laughter] and speaking of Mother Nature, you provide some really good examples, some juxtapositions of how localgrowing p populations are affecting local species such as mountain gorillas in uganda, the african giraffe in niger, elephants in india. So, and you also point out that its really hard to tell when weve overrun the species and animals are going extint, at what point does it become important. And if you dont mind, id like to read a passage from your book, and i think it shows nice detail that ive been highlighting here. Go ahead. This is in china, in the mao generation. During the great leap forward, chairman mao declared war on chinas tree sparrow because with it ate grain. For four years people tore down their nests and banged pots and pans when they alighted to scare them back into the sky until they finally fell kid from exhaustion. Only after millions were exterminated did anyone connect the swarms of locusts to the missing sparrows. Eurasian sparrows were the locusts principal natural predator. The years in which the sparrows were absent from chinas ecosystem, not surprisingly, were also the years of the great famine that killed 3040 Million People. I wondered if you could speak some more to the role of animals. Well, its really significant to understand that this is the four questions that i mentioned in the beginning that basically this book boiled down to; how many people, how much nature, are there turns that are culturally acceptable and how do we do an economy that can prosper without growth. That question about how much nature, nobody can answer. Thats a scientific experiment. You just start pulling things out of the ecosystem and wait to see when does it crash. And unfortunately, one of the reasons that Environmental Issues get attacked by deniers all the time is that you cant use the scientific experiment on the environment because we all live in the environment, we cant escape it. There was a noble but feeble attempt up north of here at biosphere ii, and it was quite instructive. So were all part of this experiment. And the only way were going to know whats truly essential to us is when we lose it. Paul and ann ehrlich, one of their later books, have a little story which i replicate in here. And there are several other stories, but theirs is kind of the quick one. Its a story they call the rivet poppers, and its become a classic and e logical understanding from guys getting on a plane, and he notices theres a mechanic sitting up on the wing, can hes popping rivets out of the wing. And he says to him, hey, what are you doing . And he says, removing rivets. What are you doing that for . He says, well, the company saw that they can resell them, and theres so many in there, you know, that, you know [laughter] it doesnt seem to be a problem. The wing hasnt fallen off yet, so [laughter] so here we are, folks. You know, our presence on this planet so huge, you know, this stuff about Food Production. When i went to the vatican, the pope had talked about in cyclical he had said theres enough food on the planet to feed everybody. And i went to ask him, i said, well, what does the pope mean by everybody . Is he just talking about human beings, or is he talking about all those other species . I reminded this cardinal i was kind of jousting with, remember that story about noah when god decides to say, okay, were going to save humanity, but what does he tell noah . We cant have a World Without the animals. And the vatican said, yeah, well, we dont look at biodiversity a lot, but, you know, we could feed a lot of people. I said, come on, were going to have two billion more by the middle of the century. So they sent me to the centers of the green revolution in mexico for corn and wheat and the philippines for rice because they said were coming up with all these transgenic plants that are going to feed us. And theyre trying to hot rod photosynthesis down there, but they all told me its going to take 20 to 30 years if theyre capable of doing it to enhance Food Production even more, in the meantime, two billion more people. So theyre going to lose that race probably. But when you start thinking about what it takes, and this comes back to your animals here, 40 of the the nonfrozen earth is now devoted just to feeding one species. Thats us. And thats whats pushing all these other species off the planet. We are now forcing an extinction of other species that the rate of which and the numbers of which have not been seen since that asteroid crashed into the yucatan 65 million years ago and did away with all those big reptiles. Finish at some point something is going to give. And were already seeing two of the pee cease that most directly species that most directly affect your life and mine, bees and bats, coming down severely right now. Now, they pollinate about onethird of the stuff that you eat, and me too. And, come on, folks, this is logical, you know . Weve got to interrupt this cycle somewhere. Ask like i say, this is the one that doesnt have any technological leaps involved. It also just makes tremendous sense. I go with scientists in costa rica into the coffee fields, and they find out that the coffee plants that are closest to remaining ribbons of rain forest have yields that are up to 60 higher than coffee plants a kilometer away. Why . Because birds, bats and reptiles are either pollinating or they are consuming pests. This is our biggest pest control. You mentioned before about israel and pal tine, ask i start palestine, and i start this book off with a bank. Were all kind of emotional about israel in the western world and religious climate, no one ever thinks of it as anything other than a religious issue or a political struggle. And, you know, why is Israel Holding on to those west bank settlements, you know . Well, theyre on top of wells, folks. Thats where the main aquifer is. The british when they before the state of israel, british ecologists who were in charge calculated that you could hold about two and a half Million People, that was the carrying whats today. David bengurion, the zionist first president , argued, no, jewish ingenuity can make the desert bloom, we can fit six Million People here. Today there are about 12 Million People living between the mediterranean and the jordan, and its going to be 21 million by the middle of this century. And believe me, theyre not making water. Yes, theyre desal nateing, but desal nateing, but that takes a lot of energy to get this corner sea salt. You cant sell it all. [laughter] and you cant dump it back in the ocean because it screws up, you know, marine ecology. The other issue, though, that no one ever realize that i didnt realize until i got over there is the importance of that ecosystem not just to israel, but to the world. It is the major flyway of birds that migrate between europe and africa, both eastern and western europe. They dont usually go over the mediterranean except up by the strait of gibraltars because birds need thermals to carry them on those long trips, and you dont get them over open water. If thats my wife, i am not here. [laughter] so a billion birds go back and forth. And those birds, why do they migrate . Because they go to where the food so they can breed. They eat an enormous amount of mosquitoes and insects in europe every year, and then they go down to africa and do the same thing. We lose the wetlands of israel and pal student, and we lose that bird migration, and theres going to be an ecological catastrophe that we dont want to see happen in this land that we consider holy. Thank you. Weve got a little time for questions if you want. Theres a couple of microphones over here if people want to ask them. And wile were moving while were moving over there, i just want to tell you a result l more about the book with. Its 431 pages. Its pretty, a lot of intense stories but just so beautifully written and quite a variety. Theres a lot of bright spottings. And i just want to interrupt melanie, about the last 80 pages is the bibliography oh, i wasnt counting that. [laughter] in very small type. [laughter] it is well worth it. So please do not be daunted by thickness. But there are just a treasure of international stories. So lets hear from you. Thank you. Within the last year, Stephen Hawking said that we had about a thousand years to get to another planet. Im not sure whether he was thinking that we could then repeat the destructive process on that one or just what he had in mind. Anyway, im interested at just your reaction to that comment. Thank you. Well, its funny, you know, after the World Without us, my agent said, you know, whats your next book going to be. And i was toying with this population idea. He said, oh, god, no, dont write about that. Thats so depressing. How about a book about colonizing other planets. And i said to him, i said, look, i grew up with science fiction, that stuff is fun. But im a journalist. I dont write fiction, and i know that were not going out there to colonize anything. I mean, we couldnt even colonize oracle, you know, under those [laughter] under those bubbles. You know . Its just not going to happen. And even if it were going to happen, though, theres already talks about recent findings. Ive got a journal paper about the amount of radiation between here and getting to mars alone, and mars would have to be teraformed. How are we going to build that stuff out there . Look, its a nice idea, but it i aint gonna happen. And numerically, if it were, were talking about a tiny number of homo sapiens. Im hoping that none of us, first of all, i want everybody alive to have a long life. I just want us to recruit fewer people to take our places in the future so we can continue to have a life on this planet. Because this is the only one that we know how to get to. Sir. Yes. First of all, thank you very much for what you have said. Its very important. And i do agree with you 100 that the population explosion since the Industrial Revolution is an a extremely great concern. But i have to say that that is only one part of the problem, and you have you have not spoke been about the other part. While the population is increasing, consumption per capita in the United States and and around the world is increasing. This drives our economy. So you have an exponential rate of growth in the population, but you also have an exponential growth in consumption. And that means not only consumption in food, but also consumption with all the commodities we have, that commodity must be manufactured by using minerals and all other things. O. K. And then, thirdly, is our, the wealthy part of the world is our habit of eating. If we were Edward Wilson said if we were able to eat like the chinese ate or the other people ate 50 years ago, we could feed three times as many people in the world. But the United States, for example, wastes 40 million in food by just throwing food away and the way we eat. So thats okay. Weve got a few more questions but, no, youve raised some really important points here. And i do address all that stuff at length in the book. But i can address the consumption one pretty quickly right here. Bill maher asked me this question last night, same exact question. I said, look, if i would have known how to solve consumption, i would have written a book about that. Anybody know how to solve consumption . I mean, do you really think that driving a prius or using a compact fluorescent bulb is going to make a dent . Look, we are all born once again, heres the population curve, and we were all born here, and thats why we dont notice the problem. We were also born addicted to energy. And when im talking about energy, its not just the energy to power the lights and my microphone and all of our computers and all the cell phones out there that even the poorest people on earth who dont consume as much as americans, but even in the poor cities they now all have cell phones, and theyre plugging in their chargers every night just like you and me. It might be prior toed electricity pirated electricity, but somethings going up the chimney. All that stuff is going on and the food that we grow, that nitrogen, fertilizer, takes a lot of fossil fuels to make stuff both as feedstock and also as the energy to create it, and when it breaks down, it creates more greenhouse gases. Basically, we eat oil. And were im quoting paul ehrlich here, he says theres no condom for consumption. [laughter] can we do better . Yes. I mean, the europeans consume a lot less than americans, and we have to start emulating them because the european lifestyle is one that we would all accept. And theres a calculation in the book done by some pretty eminent scientists about how many people on earth living, basically, a european lifestyle could the earth hold comfortably, and it comes out to about two billion which is a lot less than we are, but thats pretty much what the population was before we started using nitrogen fertilizer. So if we phase it out gradually because we all know the taj that its doing damage that its doing, besides those greenhouse gases, its leaving dead zones the size of new jersey in the ocean at the mouths of the worlds great rivers, screwing up soil. If we phase that out gradually over two, three generations, well be phasing population down gradually, too, and we can start minimizing the number of consumers even as we try to bring our consumption into a much healthier level. But getting rid of it, i dont know how. Sir . And thisll be the last question. One of the things that blew me away when i was reading about iran is that you have, we have this myth at least about the near east and the middle east society, the authoritarian man and so forth. And so one of the pieces that i wonld orer if you have some observations is, like, obviously the conversation about how many children to have took that into consideration, and it wasnt what we expected. Did you with, did you talk to anybody who told you how the men reacted or how the conversation between the family and the wives . You know, fortunately, men start to get it when they realize theres one muslim man, its in pakistan, where he defies the rest of the village and takes his wife after 11 child, and everybodys upset because he has three wives, hes supposed to have at least 21 children, he takes his wives to get them contraception. And he said, you know, he was ostracized until everybody started to notice that his wives looked so much healthier, and the kids looked so much healthier. And then people start to get it. Buy into it. Yeah. There are two other muslim countries that im aware of that i talk about in the book, bangladesh and due tunisia, tarn below that are down below replacement right right now just like iran. Its Cost Effective for families. Mexico is very close to the rate right now and their cultural approach to this whole thing was soap operas. During the 1970s when mexico was the, mexico city was the biggest city in the world and mexico was growing so fast, we have what we call the immigration problem here . Because they couldnt afford to feed and house everybody. A tv director got together with the government, and they did this series of soap operas that started out very subtly. Just the families with fewer kids seemed to be having a lot fewer problems than the families with a lot of kids. And then it got put into the scripts where some one is really, really tired, she wants to use Family Planning, and her husband who was a macho wanted to have more kids, and for several episodes they fight over this, and he finally sees the light. You can see in the ten years of that series as viewership rose, population dropped, fertility rates dropped 34 in mexico. And there are ways to do this. You reach people at their cultural comfort zone, and just people get it. Men definitely get the idea that money goes a lot farther when you only have a couple of kids to raise. Well, we need to stop there. But just like youve heard today, there are a lot of Inspiring Stories in this, in the text as well in the book. Just so you know, alan is going to be signing books right across the way in the ua bookstore tent, and you can get your book there, and i highly recommend it. I think it is a problem of our awning that were just coming into, so heres your chance to get a signed copy. And also consider becoming a friend of the its value if youre enjoying here. Theres booths on the mall that you can look at. So were going to feed to be clearing out here quickly because theres another event at 10, but i want to thank you all. Thank you so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] next on booktv, a panel on the u. S. mexico border from the 2014 tucson festival of books. This is about an hour. Welcome to the sixth annual tucson festival of books. My name is javier duran, im director of the [inaudible] the moderator of this panel. We would like to thank the city of tucson for sponsoring this venue. We also thank pima county for sponsoring the conversation. The presentationing will last one hour including questions and answers, so please hold your questions to the end. At the conclusion, the authors will go to the signing area to meet you and autograph their book. Out of respect for the authors and your fellow audience members, please turn off your cell phones right now. [laughter] i want to hear a click. Thank you. So i will introduce the three authors immediately, and then we will begin in the order in which im introducing them their presentations, short presentations. And hopefully we have enough time for more commentary towards the end. Professor Anna Ochoa Oleary codirects the National Migration institute here at the university of arizona which carries out collaborative, interdisciplinary and Binational Research into how order enforcement word border enforcement impacts. Scott [inaudible] Research Management in terms of viscosity, and also hes authored a book changing Water Management strategies in mexico. [speaking spanish] and with that wed like to begin with professor ochoa. Thank you very much, everybody, for attending here. One of the things that weve considered in this book is how some of the complexities of living on the border as it relates to immigrant subjects has been considered. So in our particular book, as you might imagine, we address this particular issue by the viewpoin