Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Sixth Extinction 20150426

Homocide in america from last weekends Los Angeles Times festival of books. We wrap up at 11 00 with a Panel Discussion on cspans latest book, first ladies. That happens tonight on cspan2s booktv. Pulitzer prizes were awarded this last weekend and other Elizabeth Kolbert won. Her book, the sixth extinction. The and this one will be the most devastating. Sheer he is here she is now on booktv. [applause] thank you very much. I, tomorrow, am very impressed that such a large number of people are here on a friday night, and i really appreciate it. So thanks very much for being here. I want to start by introducing you to this fellow on the screen who is a hawaiian crow, otherwise known as an alala. Know he looks loot like an ordinary crow but there are actually significant differences of his beak is thicker and his legs are thicker and the Hawaiian Islands used to have six species of crows and they probably diverge from the crows that we find on the mainland u. S. At least several hundred thousand years ago. So this is an n a lot of ways a lot like the story of darwins finch. Where an animal arrived on an archipelago. Were not sure how, and then grew and survived in different habitat. The difference in the case of the hawaiian crows most of the species died out after the first humans arrived so whereas the galapagos were not inwanted until europeans around in hawaii, the first settlers, polynesian seafarers and the bright species like rats, the pacific rat that ethe outcome speeded or potentially ate enthe young and eggs of the¢. So most thereof species were already gone by the Team Europeans arrived. This is the last species that survived into modern times. Its native to the big island of hawaii, and it, too has been under terrible pressure, bought from habitat destruction destruction of the hawaiian forest. And with the 1980s the population of alalass was so low the state of hawaii began to take birds into captivity to save the species and this turns tout have been actually quite fortunate because the last wild alal ased were seen in 2002 and the bird is no classified as extinction in the wild. So this particular alala youre looking at is named kano. He was bon on the eland of maui and is quite an odd duck as the sagos. He was raised by people, and he doesnt seem to really selfidentify as a bird. At least as a crow. One of the woman who cares for him told he once fell in love with a spoon bill. So because of his lack of identification with other crews he refused to meat with any of the birds at the breeding facility. So there are now 100alalas maybe a bit more so with roughly 50 females to choose from but he refused to meat. He is now old in this 20s which is old for a bird. And so for that reason his genes are very important. So a couple years ago he was transferred to the veterinary hospital of the San Diego Zoo where he came under the care of a reproductive physiologist named Barbara Durant. And durant is hoping that cae is going to provide some of his dametes so she can run over to maury and artificially inseminate a crow thats there. Eave spring win its mating season durant, a serious scientist, ph. D, takes the birth on her lap yeah, and strokes him in a way that he is supposed to find extremely exciting. [laughter] about a year ago i was out in san diego and ca noh e had not yet delivered on this. And durant offered to introduce know him and he turns out to be a very charismatic if sexually confused bird. So he has this very spectacular cage almost like a suite and we could stand in it. And he hopped over to us and it seemed to me he definitely recognized durant. He seemed to little embarrassed to see her. [laughter] that may be projection, of course but he seems to me to be embarrassed. And durant had brought him some snacks. These little mice, hairless new born mice, known at pink questions. Theyre pink. So he hopped over to peck at them and crows are very smart birds, as im sure you know, and they can imitate human speech. And kano has a line that says, i know. And it sounds demented but that is what he says over and over. He sums up this very strange and sad situation that we find ourselves in. So here we have this crow, one of the very last survivors of his species and people are going to incredible lengths to save this species. This set up this breed facility. Theyre giving what amounts to a hand jobs to crows and people really do care about animals. About what was called the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures. But at the same time, were in a process of causing what has been called the sixth extinction. Were driving more and more species like this you to the brink and more and more spears over the brink. So canoes situation teams to bring together a lot of strands. His knowingness or his pseudo knowingness saying, i know, seemed a reflection almost on his own tragic situation and i ended up ending the book with his story and he sort of is an emblem for what im going to talk to you about tonight. So what is the sixth extinct . The implication obviously is there have been five earlier extinctions and that is exactly the case. So what youre looking at here in this graph is an analysis of the ma mama marine fossil record. What youre saying on the bottom on your left, is time before the present measured in millions of years. So 600 million years up to zero, up to the present. And where you see the big dips, those are opinions when the number of marine families suddenly dropped. And if you remember from introductory bio family is a group that is just before a genus. So goes species genus family, and if even one species from a family survived, that family counts as a survivor. So, at the species level the losses at this point were much greater than reflected in this graph. So these five major mass extinctions and many minor mass extinctions but this are sometimes referred to as the big five and theyre simply moments when geology include speaking moments, short amounts of time when the diversity of life on the planet for some reason plummeted. To a british paleontologist who have written a lot of this subject, have defined mass extinctions as events that eliminate, quote significant proportion of the worlds bioto in a geology cli significant amount of time. Another british pail pailen tollist has used the metaphor of the tree of life and has written vast swaths of the tree are cut short as if hacked by madmen. The first of these extinctions on the chart took place at the end of what is known as the period 440 million years ago and at that point most of life was still confined to the ocean. There was very little living on land. That was a devastating event for marine life but not for terese central life because there was no at the terese treal life. And the fifth is the most famous thats the event that killed off dinosaurs, most reptiles snakes, mammals and groups like i cant show you a picture of that but die have this wonderful illustration that i like. And theres a pretty broad consensus now this was caused by asteroid impact. Those guys are reacting to the asteroid impact. So to say were in a sixth extinction is obviously pretty serious, and the reason that were in the sixth and some scientists will say were only on the verge of the sixth maybe we can still prevent it, and others would say were pretty deep into it already. Is that were changing the world very very radically and very, very fast, not unlike an asteroid. And in fact you will hear, and i have heard a scientist say this time we human beings are the asteroid. So how are we doing this . How are we changing the world on an asteroidlike scale. Theres a lot of ways. But im going to just focus on the tonight that is how wore changing the atmosphere, how we are changing the oceans, and how were changing what darwin called the principles of geographical distribution. So lets start with with the atmosphere every year humans add on the order of 10 billion met tropic tons of Carbon Dioxide to the atmosphere, coming from burning fossil fuels. You all know this, so im really not going to bee labor it. Its order stuff. We drive our cars, we turn on our lights. There are 7. 2 billion people on the planet right now and it adds up. And what were doing when we burn fossil fuels is that were taking carbon that was buried under the earth over the course of hundreds of millions of years and transferring it back up into the atmosphere. So were basically running geological history backwards at a very high speed and taking a process that took hundreds of millions of years to run from one direction and were rung it in the other direction in a matter of centuries. If you were an alien and came to visit the earth you could conclude what were doing that the fundamental purpose of modern industrialized society is to affect this transfer as quickly as possible. To see how much carbon we can get out of the ground and put into the air and how fast. And if the aliens were measuring this process they would say that we were actually doing quite a good job. We are increasing co2 levels every year. And of course, we human beings are measuring this process. Were doing this once again from hawaii, from a place called the mona loa observatory on this huge mountain. What youre looking at here, im sure most of you have seen this, the curve showing you atmospheric Carbon Dioxide levels and what youre saying on the y axis, is co2 levels in parts per million and there youre just seeing time on the bottom there. And that sawtooth pattern is the seasonal component. So in the winter, when the trees of the Northern Hemisphere drop their leaves, co2 level goes up and when in the summer when they put out their leaves for photosynthesis, theres more land and vegetation in the Northern Hemisphere so whet its Northern Hemisphere summer, we get lower Carbon Dioxide levels. They tack co2 out of the air and global levels fall and you may read recently that cod co2 levels reached but they have dropped over the summer. Therapy now in that rising part of the curve. Thats a recent measurement, 396 parts per million and this sawtooth is going to keep continuing. It is just going to keep rising as long as we continue to put it into the atmosphere. That scientists have figured out how to extract and analyze. And those up and down patterns, youre seeing two levels on the up and down axis there this up and down saw tooth things are ice ages. So when co2 levels are low the ice creeps down all the way, you know down here in places Like Washington state and then creeps back up again. And when people arrive, the arrival of homo sapiens around 200,000 years ago. So this is eight gray shall cycles, and you can see during that whole time, co2 levels were never above 300 parts per million until very recently, and now theyre rising in what amounts to a vertical line straight up. And if you want to go even further back, you know, then the ice runs out. But there are other ways of teasing out ancient atmospheres from the evidence that we have, for example, from the shells of marine creatures that drop to the bottom of the sea and have been preserved for many millions of years. And these methods are not as exact, but they give us a pretty good picture of the past atmosphere. And it turns out if we want to find co2 levels that are significantly higher than todays, weve got to go back quite a long way probably around 20 million years ago to a period called the my seen. And if you keep on pouring co2 into the atmosphere the way we are now, we can reach those levels by around the middle of this century. And if we keep on after that, we could reach levels not seen since around 50 million years ago probably around the end of this century. And whats significant about this, as all of you know, is that co2 has Certain Properties that make it a greenhouse gas. Im not going to, you know give you the Global Warming spiel because you all know it once again, but this is just very, very basic geophysics. This property of Carbon Dioxide that it traps heat near the surface of the earth has been understood since the 1850s. So this wonderful contraption here is called a speck to foe tommer the, and it was constructed back in the 1850s by a britain scientist named john tindall, and he designed this machine because he was interested in looking at the properties of different gases. And when he tested Carbon Dioxide, he realized right away that he had found out something very, very important. Carbon dioxide is transparent in the visible part of the spectrum, so it lets light through, it doesnt block light that comes in, but its partly opaque in the infrared part of the spectrum. So heat that is escaping from the earth and would otherwise just radiate back to space some of that gets blocked. And tindall wednesday again in the 1850s once again in the 1850s, realized that was extremely important that it kept the earth warmer than it would be. So that is called the natural greenhouse effect, and its critical to life as we know it. If we had no Greenhouse Gases in our atmosphere, our planet would be frozen. Wed have an average temperature of about zero degrees. So this has been understood for about a century and a half now theres just no news here. And if you know that co2 is a heattrapping gas and were rapidly raising co2 levels, then all things being equal youd expect average Global Temperatures to be to going up right . And, of course, that is whats happening. So this next slide im going to show you is not a slide, its a video. It was made by nasa and all you need to know to understand it is that as the colors get warmer, more yellowy temperatures are warmer, and when theyre blue, more sort of cold temperatures are colder. So this is a reconstruction of Global Temperatures going back to the 1880s done by nasa. Yeah. Thats pretty dramatic. So what does all that mean for you know, for living things . Well the icon of what it means to be, you know, an animal in a warming world has become the polar bear because polar bears you know, hunt off sea ice which is very rapidly disappearing. But one of the points i make in the book, and its not really my point, i should say, its a point made by the scientists that i went out with is that the effects of Climate Change a are likely to be even more devastating in the tropics. And there are a couple reasons for this one of which is simply that the tropics are where most species live. So if you consider for a moment the example of trees so canadas broil forest is really the largest intact forest left on the planet. It covers almost a billion acres. And in that whole expanse theres only about 20 species of tree that you can find. Now here we are in a cloud forest in the andes in peru. So youre looking down a ridge from the very high andes, from about 12,000 feet. And some scientists here, a scientist named miles sillman who works at wake forest university, has laid out these tree plots along this ridge at different elevations. And each of these properties is about two and a half acres is exactly two and a half acres. And in these plots you can get up to 100 different species of tree in just two and a half acres. So five times as many spee sees as you get species as you get in a billion acres up in the canadian broil forest. So that shows you that there are just a whole lot more species living in the tropics. And what theyve done in these plots is theyve tagged and measured and idd by species every tree with a diameter over four inches. And this sort of leads to another reason why tropical species have a lot more to lose, as it were, or have a lot to lose with Climate Change, certainly as much to close as arctic species, and that is that tropical species tend to inhabit these very narrow range these very very specific climatic conditions. So as we were hiking down that rung that i showed you before rigell that i showed you before miles sillman said to me, you know look find a leaf with an interesting shape as we go down this trail and is watch it as we go down, and you are only going to see this leaf for a couple hundred meters because that is the whole range of this tree. That is the only place youre going to find that treement so they are very well adapted to very very specific conditions. And the whole point of his experiment, the whole point of laying owl these tree plots and measuring all these trees and tagging them is to see what happens to trees as the andes warm, and the andes are warming very, very quickly. So to track the climactic conditions that theyre used to, they would have to be moving up the mountains by several meters per year. Now, obviously trees dont move they just dont get up and move, but they do, you know, put out seeds, and then those seeds can survive at higher and higher elevations. And what they found, this experiments been running for about a decade now and the early results suggest that some species, a few species are moving fast enough to track the climate, but only a few. Most are not. And a lot are not moving at all. Theyre just sort of sitting there. So these tree communities which have tended to be, you know, very stable over time in the tropics because the climate has tended to be very stable are going to break apart. Were going to have different trees moving at different rates. So whats going to happen to the creatures that are also anticipated to live anything these communities adapted to living in these communities . Thats a difficult question to answer. You know, the insects the birds, the mammals, because its really hard to tag, for example an insect. Trees are easy to study because they stay in one place all the time. But as miles pointed out to me, unfortunately, were going to find the answer. Were going to find out what happens to these species because were running this gigantic experiment. And another question that arises in terms of, you know whats going to happen to the drop you cans when you think about as tropic as all these organisms move up slope or towards the polls is whats going to happen in the tropical lowlands. Those places are already the warmest places on everett. They tend to have a on earth. As everything is on the move, what is going to move into these tropical lowlands . Are they just going to empty out . Once again, we dont have an answer to that at this point but unfortunately, were going to find out. So Global Warming is not the only effect though of pouring a lot of co2 into the air. It has another very very significant effect and perhaps some scientists would argue an even more significant effect. And that is what it does to the oceanings. So here are just oceans. So here are just a couple of key facts about this. The oceans have absorbed about a third of the co2 the weve emitted since the start of the industrial revolution. That amounts to about 150 billion metric tons. Every hour the seas absorb another Million Metric Tons of co2, and the net result is that the acidity of the oceans has already increased around 30 . And the details of this phenomenon which has become known im sure youve all heard this term as Ocean Acidification are a bit complicated, and im not going to go into the nittygritty of chemistry. Basically, all you need to know is that if you dissolve co2 in water, you get an acid. Its a weak acid, carbonic as sit, and if you had a coke this afternoon, you were drinking it. But its an acid. And if you add enough of this to the ocean, youre going to change their chemistry. And this effects a lot of Different Properties of the water potentially but one of the key things it does is that it makes it harder or at least more energetically demanding for organisms that build shells or these external skeletons out of Calcium Carbonate. So Calcium Carbonate doesnt exist in the water as a solid. Organisms have to assemble it the way you would assemble the ingreed credibilities to make a cake. And were making it more and more difficult for them to do that. And lots and lots of different can kind of organisms do this. They calcify. These are these tiny Little Machine organisms you cant see them with the naked eye this is under mag any anyification. And theyre so plentiful at certain times of the year in parts of the ocean that they turn the water this milky white color color. You know, very common shellfish is calcifiers, clams and mussels, starfish are calcifiers. Thats a very beautiful blue starfish that you see on the Great Barrier reef and corals, reefbuilding corals are calcifiers. And what happens when you make life harder for all of these different kinds of organisms . Well, once again theres a lot of work being done to try to answer that question. Its obviously a very important question because some of these organisms are the very bottom of the food chain of the marine food chain. And one of the big concerns is what is going to happen to coral reefs, right . Because coral reefs support these incredibly vibrant and diverse ecosystems as anyone whos ever been, you know, on a thriving reef knows. So this is another place i went in the course of recording the book. We are on the Great Barrier brief, youre looking down at reef, youre looking down at it. The spot that just peeks above the reef that surrounds it. And researchers at heron island were trying to look at what is going to happen to corals as we continue to pour co2 into the water. And corals turn out to be really pretty docile research subjects. You can just basically break off a piece of the reef and glue it to a tile and put it in a tub. And if it has what it needs, it will just sort of sit there quietly going on doing whatever corals do. So in this case, they are bubbling in, there are corals in those tanks, and theyre bubbling in Different Levels of Carbon Dioxide to try to imitate different futures right . And their studies and i should say there are many, many of these studies going on all around the world suggest that if we keep on our current emissions path, then by around the middle of the sent reefbuilding corals are not going to be able to keep up, theyre not going to be able to assemble this Calcium Carbonate at the rate they need to to keep reefs going. They will just sort of effectively stop growing and there are a lot of forces always working to break reefs down. There are a lot of creatures that eat away at the roof, and there are storms, and theres just erosion and wave action. So reefs really need to always be growing in a sense just to be staying even. And this is a quote from some British Marine biologists who wrote a book a whole book, about the future of coral reefs. Its likely that reefs will be the first major ecosystem in the modern era to become ecologically extinct. So another way that we are changing the planet and this is the last one im going to talk to you about tonight is by moving species all the around the world. Youre all familiar with species that have arrived from somewhere else. This one has been making a lot of news lately, this is the asian carp. Asian carp is actually not one species, its actually several species which is as the name suggests, comes from asia. They tend to be extremely voracious filter feeders. They go through, you know, everything in the water column. Its obviously not good for native fish. And theres a lot of fear that these guys are making their way to the great lakes, and, in fact last Month Congress had asked for a study, some of the Congress People from around the great lakes had asked the army corps of engineers to do a study of what it would take to try to keep these carp from getting into the great lakings and the army corps of engineers finally released its plan for how they could maybe keep the carp out of the lake and the price tag that accompanied that plan was 18 billion. So this is another species from asia, this guys the em regard ash borer. He emerald ash borer. He bores into ash trees. Usually the results are fatal for the trees. If you live in the northeast as i do, you see these signs saying please, do not move firewood. That is to try to prevent the spread of this bug. And a lot of the trees in the forest of the northeastern u. S. And midwestern u. S. Are ash trees, so hes also a very worrisome, relatively recent arrival. And not all invaders i just want to say not all Invasive Species are from asia. This guys from eastern europe, hes a zebra mussel. Also a very voracious eater. He has a nasty habit as you can see, of sticking to every available surface and eating virtually everything in the water column. So all of these species were transported by people from somewhere very far away, and when they got to a new place they didnt have any enemies, so they just proliferated. They did really, really well. And moving species around the world is something we do every day. Talk about we do it purposefully often we do it purposefully. Most of us probably have plants in our yards, for example, that are nonnative species and many people that have pents that are nonnative species. But even more often we do it accidentally. So its been estimated that every day in the ballast wart of our supertankers water of our supertankers we are moving around 10,000 species. And this is once again something that strikes us as pretty ordinary. This is just the way things are. But when you think about it, its really something thats very very new and unusual. Without a lot of help a land, a terrestrial species a landbased species cant cross an ocean obviously and a marine species similarly, cant cross a continue knelt. And continent. And this bringing together of species is another way that we are running geological history backwards and at a very high speed. So around 250 million years ago all of the worlds land masses were sort of clumped together in this giant supercontinent thats been called tangia. And then, you know, owing to the effects of plate tectonics they broke up, started to drift apart and formed the world as we know it today. And by bringing together by transporting all these species and bringing out all of these evolutionary lineages that have been living separately for tens of millions of years, we are effectively bringing these continents back together again and biologists have termed in the new pangia, we are creating the new pangia. And not all of the species we bring together have disastrous consequences. The vast majority of them probably dont even survive in a new place and then there are many that survive and coexist peacefully with whats already there. But if youre moving so many species, thousands and thousands around the planet every day, then if even a tiny proportion of them have a disastrous effect, then those disastrous effects are going to, you know start adding up. So this is the panamanian golden frog. It used to be considered a lucky symbol in panama. Its a very beautiful frog, as you can see. Its actually a toad technically its a told but well call it a frog. Its very poisonous thats why it can afford to be so bright and stand out so distinctively from the forest floor. And as i said, it was a lucky symbol. It used to be printed on lottery tickets in panama. [laughter] but then around i guess its around, yeah ten years now maybe more, maybe 15 the frogs in panama just started to disappear. And people eventually figured out that they were disappearing owing to a disease thats known by the shorthand bd. Theres a much longer latin name which is very hard to pronounce. But anyways bd is a fungus. Its caused by a fungus, and it appeared in a lot of disparate parts of the world n Central America, in south america in australia, in europe more or less at the same time. And that is a pretty clear indication that it was moved around by people. No one knows exactly how but one of the theories is it was moved around on a frog called the african clawed frog. And whats interesting about the frog is it was used back in the 50s as a pregnancy test. If you inject an african clawed frog with the your rip of a pregnant urine of a pregnant woman, that frog will lay eggs within hours. Physicians used to keep these frogs in their offices. People got tired of them or whatever, and they let some of them go, and now there are naturalized populations in different parts of the world. And african clawed frogs carry this fungus, this bd fun fun gus fungus but they dont seem to be affected by it. Its not clear if thats ooh a correct theory, but its one theory. As i was saying, people realized this was what was killing the frogs in Central America or one of the things, certainly, that was killing frogs in Central America. And in this particular case they could literally watch this move. This fun bus was moving east, killing frogs moving in an easterly direction. So some scientists in 2006 american and panamanian scientists decided to try to get out in front of this disease and try to save a population of panamanian golden frogs. So just before it got to this area in central panama that they live in they some biologists scooped some of them out of the rain forest to preserve a remnant population. And at that point they had nowhere to put the frogs. So the frogs quite literally ended up living in a hotel. [laughter] yeah. But then they rushed to build this center this is its an Amphibian Conservation center, and this is now one of the few places that you can still see panamanian golden frogs. They are now classified as extinct in the wild. Ive worked few way from the end of the book to the beginning. I begin with the story of the panamanian golden frog and the wonderful story of whats called the frog hotel. And in some ways you could say this is a heartening story. It shows that people really are concerned about other species. Once again to use Rachel Carsons phrase about the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures. And in the course of reporting this book, i spent a lot of time with people who have really devoted their entire lives to this problem. A lot of them scientists, you know like Barbara Durant whom i mentioned, but a lot of them also ordinary people. For instance, when i went down to the conservation, Amphibian Conservation center, there were a lot of volunteers from the states who were down there to help. And when they took frogs out of the rain forest and put them in the hotel, they needed people to collect food for them, to go out literally into the fields and collect bugs for them. And people from all over the world volunteered. They got themselves over to panama and they volunteered their time and basically their resources. And even people who, you know, are not part directly of efforts like this, you know give lots of money to groups like the World Wildlife Fund Defenders of Wildlife National wildlife federation, groups that do really great work. And i would like to end on that sort of upbeat note and to say whats going to make the difference here, we just need to get even more people involved in efforts like that. But that, unfortunately, wouldnt really be true to the book. So one of the central points of the book and i, and of my talk tonight is that caring is not really the issue. It doesnt really matter, you know, how we feel about this. It doesnt matter how much were concerned about it. What matters is that we are changing the world. Thats what makes us comparable to an asteroid. And unless and until we confront that, that we are this worldchanging force, then im afraid were just not really confronting the problem. Thanks very much. [applause] hi, folks. We have about 15 minutes for questions, so wed like to get through as many people as we can. Once again keep it brief and in the form of a question. If youd like to ask something, come to one of these two microphones on either side of the stage. In your talk of extinction, you left out one species that is sitting here tonight [laughter] and i wonder if you might say anything about that. Well, people do seem to be very concerned about the state of people, and i understand that. As i say in the book, some of my best friends are people. [laughter] and i very, i want to say that i very consciously and pointedly you know if you read the book avoid talking about that. But i guess theres two ways to look at it. The first is if you had to pick, you know, an organism that seems to do really, really well living with people, it would be people, right . We seem to be really quite good at, you know basically taking over the resources the niches, the habitats of other organisms and living there. We live on every continent, we live on virtually every kind of habitat, so we are really very adaptable and clever creatures. If i were betting on a species you know to sort of survive i think i would bet on humans. But the other answer to that is that one of the lessons of the fossil record and its really another, you know, one of the reasons why i do look at, spend a lot of time in the book looking at what can we learn from these past mass extinctions, is that, you know, look, past success is no guarantee of future success. The dinosaurs were an incredibly Successful Group of animals. They dominated the planet for ins of millions for tens of millions of years way way longer than even our most distant relatives have been around. So when the rules change, and we are changing the rules, we are doing that right now you dont know where things are going to end. So those are two somewhat contradictory answers, but thats sort of the best i can do. How serious a problem do you think the spread of foreign genes from the gmo crops to other plants such as the bt genes and round of resistance well, i dont, i dont know, i mean the short answer to that is i dont know. And the longer issue is, you know, there are a couple of different issues sort of involved there. And, you know, one of the big stories thats come out of, come out just in recent weeks, for example, is that a lot of the gmo crops in the midwest that have been modified so that they can withstand very heavy duty herbicides are the herbicides its not the crops that are doing the damage its the herbicides that are killing off the milkweed in the midwest, and that has led many scientists believe to this really dramatic plunge in the number of monarch butterflies. So, you know, there are all sorts of issues that radiate out that are not necessarily having to do with the exso genetic makeup of the crops but what are we then pouring, you know, what sort of chemicals are we then using that then have effects on different species that actually fend on the plants depend on the plants that we call weeds that they need them to survive. So there are a lot of issues in there, and i dont have im not enough of an expert to unpack all of them. So you brought up this issue of people caring, right and said that wasnt enough which i agree with. But i guess the question im asking is what do you think really is causing this whole situation in Climate Change, the destruction of species etc. Because it seems to me that that whole question of humans caring could be there is tremendous sentiment to stop this destruction, to interact with nature in an entirely different way. But i feel like its really limited and controls and squashed by a system that operates in a totally opposite way, that is just driven by profitability and competitiveness and everything else. And so im wondering what you because i think that theres potential for people to live in an entirely different way in relationship to nature to actually be caretakers of the planet, but its really restrained and controlled. And i wonder what do you think the solution is to this . Well one of the another point, you know which i didnt get into in tonights talk but which i do get into fairly extensively in the book is, you know, the question of when did we begin this project. And we, you know, when people look back at, for example, you know we in north america, you know, we used to have a lot of fantastic creatures that arent here anymore and havent been here for many thousands of years. So its not just a recent phenomenon. I mean, theres a pretty once again, there seems to be a lot of evidence that the very early people to reach north america did in a lot of these fantastic creatures, the mast dons, the mammoths and giant sloths that were here. And if you had a very slow reproductive rate, you sort of didnt survive early contact even with a very small number of people using very, very simple you know what we would consider to be very simple weapons. So people are this unique creature who can innovate in ways that are much, much faster than other creatures can adapt to. And im sorry to say, im sad to say that that seems to be something that weve been doing for a very long time, and it has now ramped up incredibly with our discovery of how to use fossil fuels with the fact that there are seven billion of us on the planet. And i dont want to say that there isnt a way that we could be doing things a lot lot better because there obviously is but the question of whether, you know, with seven billion people on the planet we are using a lot of the resources that other organisms used to use. And the question of whether how we sustain ourselves and also all these other creatures is a question that i want to say i have just yet to see someone provide a good answer for. And im sorry to say that i cant provide a good answer for it tonight. Thanks for a wonderful talk and for your wonderful work. I hope you dont mind a rather personal question. Youve taken a very close look at Climate Change and at biodiversity laws, pretty grim subjects. Youre a parent and like all of us who are parents, you have a deep stake in the future. How do you keep from despair . [laughter] um, well, i dont i mean, i think that once again theres a i could answer that in a lot of different ways. And maybe the most honest way is that we all, you know everyone sort of compartmentalizes right . I mean people do all sorts of, you know people work in emergency rooms, and they work with, you know, people who are dying and suffering in various different ways, and they go home and they play with their kids you know . So we all have the ability to, you know sort of see certain dark truths about life in general and also to put them aside to, you know, lead our daily lives. And you know, maybe thats part of the problem with all of us. But thats certainly true of me too. I think that this material is incredibly sober but its not necessarily any more sobering than what we know, you know about humanity, you know, for a hong, long time. There long long time. There have been many dark episodes in the life of our species, and weve sort of kept going. You know my grandparents were refugees from nazi germany, for example, and they kept going. So, you know, hows that . [laughter] [applause] thank you for a wonderful talk. I heard on, i think you were giving an interview on npr you said at the end of the century a lot of our Large Mammals would have been extinct, which is a scary thought. But i came up here to say that if you look around the room, im pretty sure everyone in here has been to high school, finished high school, been to college maybe, had a good education, and how are we going to fix our planet if we cant fix our own species and we have so many of the worlds poplation sitting in population sitting in poverty and want and need and famine and war . How are we going to help our poor planet if we have little children having to walk miles and miles to get a basin of water or, you know scrape food out of the ground to eat . So what do you think my question would be how are we going to, how are we going to move forward . How are we going to do that . What do you think . Well, you know i think that these are the questions of our century and, you know beyond because there are tremendous issues obviously, of global equity. You know, this is one of the real, one of the issues at the heart of trying to mitigate Climate Change is, you know, those of us in this country and in the developed world who really created the problem to a large extent, its going to be borne by a lot of people who did pretty little to contribute to it, and whats the fair way and equitable way to deal with that. I, believe me, do not claim to deal with it fairly or equitably. But the question of how we can improve, you know, the lives of people who are now living in poverty and at the same time try to preserve those many other species that depend on our not using all of their resources right . Lifting people out of poverty tends to take resources. Its in question. As i say im sorry to keep saying i cant answer it, but i cant answer it. But i do think it is question that will, you know, occupy us or should occupy us for the rest of this century, and it will impinge on us more and more, i think. Both the inequity of our global system and, you know what were doing to other species, i dont think that the situation is just going to, you know continue on as it is right now. Okay. Two more questions. Sure. Thank you for your no impact man article a couple of years ago. Can we anticipate this is not the right word sudden extinction events that may help to tell the climate story in the way that weather events have begun to help . Thats a really interesting question and i dont know the answer to that. Its sort of like, you know, be careful what you wish for thats for sure. But i dont know the answer. Its a good question, and i just dont know the answer. Thank you for your presentation. So i had a couple questions. One of them during the presentation you were saying that science different scientists thought differently about how deep we were in this situation. What do you think about that . Do you think weve taken a step too far and that it is irreversible . Well, you know, if you just, if you simply look at, okay, well, how many species, you know, have we already driven extinct and how many are on the verge of extinction right now, youd say well, this is, you know, this is a pretty serious situation, but its not, you know the end cretaceous, its not the death of the dinosaur, its not the death of 75 of all species on the planet. But when you look at, you know sort of realistic scenarios for lets just say the rest of in this century and you know how much co2 were going to pour into the water and things like that and how much global population is going to increase and how many resources people are going to use now we dont know whether those scenarios are going to come to pass, then you say, well that is taking us into some pretty dangerous territory. And then if you, you know, project out and out and out and once again as longer out we go, you know the more and more uncertain our projections become right . But people who have, you know looked at, for example things like measuring the rate at which creatures are going from these categories of vulnerable and threatened to near extinct extinct in the wild and then ebbs at this point would say that this rate the rate at which these things are happening, you know, suggests that we are in a very major extinction event. People have tried to look at different ways for calculating that. And as i said at top, ive come up with different answers. I honestly cant tell you where we are in that process. Its one of these things where you know, many millions of years whatever is looking at the positive sill record will know, but fossil record will know, but itll be very difficult for us to know while were doing it. I also have a second question. So at the end you said caring isnt enough, we actually have to manually, like, make a change. But earlier on you said that some leading factors toward the sixth extinct were how seven billion people on the planet were using lights and driving and such. Do you think its, do you think that us manually making a change would make a big enough change so as not to be impacted by all the lights and cars and such . Well, what i was trying to say by that is just our good intentions are not enough. We really need to confront, you know not it doesnt really even at the point where, you know, somethings on the verge of extinction and we preserve a remnant population, thats a very, very noble thing to do, and i really admire people spending their lives doing that but we really need to confront, you know the root causes, as it were, of whats going on. And those are, as i hope i indicated, theyre really big and theyre many. Theyre not just one. Its not even just Climate Change unfortunately. Theres a host of ways in which we are changing the planet on a geological scale, so much so that youve probably heard discussions of e geologists thinking that we should rename the time we live in. We officially live in the holocene which is the time since the last ice age, that we should rename this after people because people have replaced the great forces of geology of the past. So these are really, really big things and theyre not its not a matter of, you know spending more time helping animals or even donating more money, though those are all good things too old, and i really do recommend them. But its a matter of sort of trying to get our minds around, you know, all of these really really big ways in which what were doing seems really ordinary. Its really just changing the planet on a permanent basis. Thank you. Thanks a lot