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Transcript
Rob Johnson:
Welcome to Economics & Beyond. I’m Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I’m here today with Elizabeth Kolbert who’s a visiting fellow at Williams College. Very well known for writing in the New Yorker, a Pulitzer Prize winner for her book called The Sixth Extinction. And we’re here today to discuss a fascinating and frightening vision in her new book Under a White Sky. Elizabeth, thanks for joining me.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Thanks for having me.
Rob Johnson:
Your book, I just loved the Kafka epigraph and I’ll leave that as a mystery.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Got to read the book.
Rob Johnson:
That’s it. But Kafka tells, how do I say? Gives us a preview of where we’re going, and you tell a story which I think all economists really need to hear. And the way I think it was paraphrased to me was you worry about how to control the system that controls the system that controls the environment. And I found your perspective challenging, daunting and refreshing. How do I say? We’ll get into the yin and yang of optimism, pessimism and hope and despair I’m sure. But let’s start with where you were inspired to write this book? I know you’ve been writing on environmental things for a long time. I read the New Yorker and The Sixth Extinction, but what triggered the inspiration for this particular one?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, after I wrote The Sixth Extinction I sort of felt like I had written myself into a corner a bit because that’s such a big story, the idea or fact depending on that we’re precipitating human activity is causing a sixth mass extinction event. Not since the death of the dinosaurs have we seen such high extinction rates as we have today. That’s a pretty humongous story and I was thinking, well, where do we go from here? And I started to think about, well, how are we going to respond? I mean, we’re losing all these species, we’re losing whole ecosystems. People are very ingenious, they’re very creative. They don’t just sort of sit there usually and watch disaster. They do try to intervene.
I heard about this project, which is at the center of the book, but was really the first thing that I reported. Which was nicknamed the Super Coral Project. And it was scientists in Hawaii and Australia who were led by two women, very dynamic women who had sort of reached the conclusion, well, reefs are doing very badly. They don’t like warm water. We know that oceans are warming. They’re going to continue to warm. There’s really very few tools in our arsenal though we can talk about some of those later to change that trajectory in the short to medium term.
So their thought was, if we want reefs, in the future if we want our grandchildren to have reefs, we want to be able to recede even the reefs of the future. We’re going to need to intervene again. So we’ve intervened climate change. That was an unwitting intervention in the natural world. If we want reefs, we’re going to have to consciously manipulate them. And they were looking at various forms of hybridization. They were looking at all sorts of manipulations of the reef to try to protect at least part of it in Hawaii and on the Great Barrier Reef. And this way of thinking that we’ve changed the world so fundamentally that now we have to go in and manipulate living creatures to enable them to survive our own impacts on the natural world that struck me as well.
I sort of then started to see this pattern everywhere. Yeah, that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to reach for the next intervention. One intervention is going to be laid on top of another because that’s sort of what 21st century humans do and that’s really what inspired the book. So each chapter really looks at a way in which we’ve consciously or unconsciously manipulated the natural world and now don’t like the consequences of that, and so we’re trying to come up with a new form of manipulation.
Rob Johnson:
So manipulation addresses the adverse side effects of the previous manipulation?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Yes. There’s a Rube Goldberg’s quality to it, absolutely. And I hope that comes through in the book, I think it does.
Rob Johnson:
It kind of asks the question, does the fool see how foolish he or she is in this context?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
There’s a lot of human folly in there, yeah.
Rob Johnson:
I remember seeing three sections and reading Down By the River. I was thinking of the old Neil Young song. And you played a little Chicago music and you played a little New Orleans music there. And then the into the wild, which included this Hawaiian study and some thoughts about the Great Barrier Reef and other episodes and then up in the air. And I think the title of your book came from something about up in the air as I recall.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Yeah. So the title is drawn from one of the last chapters where sort of the grandest intervention to solve an intervention which is this notion of solar geoengineering. And what that usually refers to is this idea that we’ve loaded the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. Everyone knows that. We’re warming the planet. One way that has been theorized that you could sort of counteract this, the only way that has been theorized that you could counteract it as opposed to everything else that we’re talking about, reducing emissions, cutting emissions to zero. That stops more warming, but it doesn’t counteract the warming that we’ve already caused.
The only way that you could do that that anyone’s come up with is by pumping a lot of reflective material into the stratosphere, which is what volcanoes do. They pump a lot of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere that sort of sticks together, forms these little droplets, aerosol droplets that reflect a lot of sunlight back to space. You get these beautiful sunsets after a major volcanic eruption, and you get a temporary global cooling about a year let’s say until this reflective material falls out of the stratosphere. So there’s this theory, it’s still a theory, but it’s a pretty robust theory that humans could do that. You could imitate volcanoes. You could spray stuff into the stratosphere, would sort of drift around, create this haze, you’d have to keep replenishing it, but you would be reflecting a lot of sunlight and you could actually have a cooling effect if you pumped enough up there.
And that would have a lot of potential side effects. One of which is that it would change the appearance of the sky. The sky would actually change tint, and it would become whiter. It would probably become completely white. That’s a little bit of poetic license, but it would become whiter, whitish. So that’s how I got the title Under a White Sky.
Rob Johnson:
I guess, because of my own life experience, one of the chapters that really moved me was the one about New Orleans. I used to work in jazz and blues music. I used to do as a guest on a radio show in WWOZ periodically. I was in a team that managed the New Orleans artist Dr. John. When I was down there, I found right after Katrina, a tremendous amount of stress. It’s almost like something that haunts me about the prospects of the future. And I remember one night, I guess I was in Berkeley, California when I listened to Anna Deavere Smith do her solo play about health here called Let Me Down Easy, it’s named after something that James Cone wrote at Union Theological Seminary.
Let Me Down Easy skit was about a woman who was a doctor who went over to the places that were threatened by Katrina. And as a educated upper class person had a complete change of self-confidence about our society, because of the fear of those who were her patients when the flooding started. And it was evidence as we often see that infrastructure and things are, which might call better created, more fortified, more defended in more affluent areas. But it was such an unsettling thing. And then to read your chapter. It’s like all these echoes came back of the dread that I experienced, which was in a distance. I didn’t see an acute flooding or anything, but I talked to a lot of musicians who were moving out of New Orleans out of the fear that they had. But tell us a little bit about your experience in understanding New Orleans and the challenge it faces.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, I also visited New Orleans, not for this book but for a story that is maybe at the root of the chapter in the book right after Katrina. It was certainly extremely sobering. The X’s on the buildings where bodies had been found, the bathtub ring around the entire city, the absolute devastation when that wall of water swept through various neighborhoods. When the flood walls and the levees failed. And I think it brought to top of mind to people in New Orleans what they have always known really, which was that the city is in a very, very difficult geologically. It’s in a geologically tenuous position.
The story of New Orleans, to go way back 300 years now to 1718 when the city was founded. The French came in, they decided to park themselves basically not too far from where the Mississippi hits the Gulf. And it’s a strategically very important spot. Obviously, it’s been called the inevitable city. It’s also been called the accidental city. I mean, that’s where they decided to settle and they very immediately got flooded out. They we’re just in this crazy place with the river, the Mississippi river in those days flooded every year basically and that was crucial.
What the French didn’t understand was that that was crucial. It’s absolutely crucial that the river flooded. That’s what created the delta. And that’s what creates new land and keeps the land that’s above sea level from just sinking into the sea because when the river floods, it deposits silt across the landscape. That is the process of creating a delta. So they settled in the delta, and immediately decided that the river shouldn’t flood anymore. And they set about building this levee system that we now have this just extraordinary hundreds of miles worth of levees and flood walls. We now levee up the Missouri river. So we have really, on some level, very successfully or pretty successfully the Mississippi hasn’t really had a major flood. The Katrina floods were really water coming in from the gulf. We haven’t had a Mississippi flood that really flooded major Mississippi flood since the 1920s, the great flood of 1927.
On some level, we’ve been extremely successful at controlling the Mississippi. The problem is that in controlling the Mississippi, we have sort of faded New Orleans to sink. Just keep sinking. It’s one of the fastest sinking places on earth. It’s below sea level. Much of the city is significantly below sea level. So that’s on some level obviously a very dangerous situation. When you build the levees, the levees are also sinking. So you have a situation where you’ve created a problem that has to keep being solved by building the levees higher and higher, and the risk just keeps growing.
The further you’re living below sea level, the higher those levees are, the greater the risk of catastrophic failure. So now what is being planned is a series of major interventions again in this system of control, where in Southern Louisiana they’re going to basically punch holes in the levees. And when the Mississippi is running high, and there’s a lot of silt in the river, they’re going to let the river out of these gates and into these sort of shallow bays, what are now these shallow bays and create land south of New Orleans.
And the idea is hopefully this land will help protect New Orleans from the storms that come in over the gulf. That you need that buffer, that land buffer, which has been sinking away for the last few hundred years. So that’s a form of sort of controlled flooding to counteract the effects of flood control. And those projects are almost certainly going to happen, billions of dollars will be spent. A lot of that money is going to come actually from the settlement with BP, from the BP oil spill. But the long-term fate of New Orleans, where you have a city that’s sinking and sea levels that are rising is very tenuous I think. I don’t know what New Orleans will look like or if it will be there to be perfectly frank in a hundred years
Rob Johnson:
Been reading as the carbon emissions continue and temperatures rise, and the ice shelves in Antarctica and in the Arctic are melting, the pressures will continue to pinch upon that.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Yeah, no, look, there are certain sea level rise scenarios that I think pretty much do New Orleans, or at least consign it to being a city that’s behind such elaborate and expensive defenses that people will eventually decide we just can’t do this anymore. I think that New Orleans is a great is a wonderful city. It’s truly one of the great American cities. And it’s tragic obviously. And there are people I should say also who are thinking about re-imagining the city just really completely trying to re-imagine a city with a much sort of shorter delta. And this gets a little bit technical, but those discussions are really, really, really hard because they do mean abandoning parts of Southern Louisiana, and parts of the city even, and people resist that. So you have these political forces and geological forces that are often at odds.
Rob Johnson:
Taking that notion resistance, I recently made a conversation on this channel with Michael Mann about the forms of which may call information combat or disinformation or legislative obstacles. Whether it’s fundraisers or whether it’s frightening people in West Virginia that when the Detroit auto industry declined, nobody helped them with the transmission. Don’t let them fool you. And all of these different things are used to impede what I call the scale and the velocity of transformation.
Also people like the Hungarian philosopher, Ervin László, talk about habits and behaviors and psychological resistance. The fear of having a house that’s too far out in the suburbs, and you’re commuting an hour a day. If the transportation system is going to change, the value of your house might go down. But all of these, how would I say? Financial resistances do not seem to being reconciled with the tremendous threat that we all face. How can we bring what you might call all those dimensions on the table? Because from reading your book, it’s clear that all this other stuff is small potatoes compared to the scale of the challenge on the horizon.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Yeah. I do think Michael Mann makes really important points and he’s absolutely right that there’s all sorts of organized attempts at disinformation to prevent action. But unfortunately I think it’s a lot of those campaigns work because there’s just sort of status quo bias in our political system that is true really across the board. And you could argue that our whole political system is just incapable. I guess we’re going to find out, stay tuned. Is it capable or not? We so far we have not been capable of overcoming, of dealing with a challenge, an unprecedented challenge.
Really climate change is unprecedented. It’s a global problem, a huge inertia in the system. It’s not your classic pollution problem which can be solved or at least ameliorated relatively quickly if you stop putting certain chemicals into the atmosphere. For example, smog dissipates fairly quickly, let’s say. So we might look at our success in clearing the air of smog and say, well, when we put our minds to it, when we put tile with the converters on, amazing things happens. That it’s not true in the case of climate change. There’s just huge inertia in the system. You start melting the Greenland ice sheet for example. You set in motion feedback loops that you can no longer control. And so the question of whether our political system, which is based on everyone voting their own self-interest let’s say. And this sort of idea that we’ve always had the collective consciousness will get us to the right answer eventually.
That idea, that wonderful Churchill quote, isn’t it Churchill like, “Americans will always do the right thing after they’ve exhausted all of their options.” That’s sort of what we feel that at our political system, we will eventually do the right thing after we’ve exhausted all other options. The problem with climate change or a problem with climate change is at that point it may well be too late. I don’t want to say too late to do anything, but it will be too late to avoid certain … what are called tipping points or just a lot of damages already baked into the system.
For example, let’s just take the demise of the Great Barrier Reef, which I think we could all agree would be a sort of tragedy on a planetary level. And that question is, I believe truly an open question right now. Whether our politics, our political system for various reasons, but the baked in status quo bias which biases us towards the fossil fuel industry, which still is much, much, much more powerful and well-financed than any renewable energy industry, and people’s individual loss aversion and resistance to change. Those combined forces are extremely strong. They are why I believe we are where we are today, which is 50 years into the first reports on climate change just sitting here having not just done nothing. Quite the opposite, having built up our fossil fuel infrastructure both in the US and globally at the exact moment when we knew that was exactly the wrong thing to do
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Well, there’s a old critique of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations by a man who was called the Earl of Lauderdale. It’s called the Lauderdale Paradox. And he said in essence to Adam Smith, how is it that you can talk about the value of things as being consistent with the price of things. If I turned off the water or the oxygen you would die. So there are things that have value that aren’t priced, and there was all kinds of fights, [inaudible 00:24:25] law fought, and essentially it is all about exchange value. But I guess if I look back on that in a man named Robert McChesney and John Bellamy Foster wrote a beautiful paper about this years ago.
When you look into that window, you see these folks not recognizing the challenge, because the scale of the population and resource utilization in relation to that planetary environment was not at risk. But as we’ve gone on, industrial development, growth of populations, developing the emerging world. We’re now at that place where those things which have not been priced have very precious value for the future of humankind. And it’s not part of our habit structure of relying on the market to help things evolve or what have you.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Yeah. I really think that if you consider our situation as I say to really be unprecedented. In earth history, an organism that finds itself capable of, obviously, we’ve sort of been aware of this. We invented atom bombs. We’ve realized we are really capable of destroying the planet. And that’s sort of incommensurate with the usual processes of evolution that brought us here after three and a half billion years or so. We are just sailing and very fast. We’re not like putting on the brakes, we’re just like full speed ahead into unchartered territory.
And where that leads us, I can only give you the … And I’m not a climate scientist obviously, but I have read enough now and talked to enough climate scientists, so I can give you a very robust geo-physical prediction about where we’re heading, where the temperature of the earth is heading, and what we can expect the various impacts to be of climate change. But I cannot give you the human dimension is the most unpredictable of it. What do we do? And now is really sort of the motive for Under a White Sky is, “Okay, what do we do? How are we going to react?” And the ways that we are going to react, they’re not necessarily going to be good. But we’ve sort of backed ourselves into a corner, a very, very, very big corner here.
Rob Johnson:
Well, you mentioned earlier the Great Barrier Reef, which is a place I have sailed in earlier in my life and my friend, Naomi Clants took her son there to make sure he would see it. Then she made a special about that. But I remember either reading or listening to you in preparation for this. The Great Barrier Reef is not a little amusement park. It’s something on the scale of the size of Italy. Is that in terms of geographic footprint?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Yeah. The Great Barrier Reef, I mean if you’ve been there you know how huge it is. It’s not one reef. People think Great Barrier Reef is a reef. It’s a system of reefs, thousands of individual reefs. Some of them pretty small, some of them pretty big, that stretches down the entire East coast or most of East coast of Australia. And it’s been many, many, many thousands of years in the making obviously. And it’s an amazing, if you’ve been there and you this. When people ask me, “What’s the most memorable thing you’ve done?” I would say being on the Great Barrier Reef is one of the most memorable experiences of my life.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Most of us live in, well, first of all, we live in temperate zones where biodiversity is limited to begin with. Where I live here in Massachusetts, this land was glaciated until 12,000 years ago or so. So everything that is here is something that’s recolonized this land after 12,000 years. It’s a pretty low level of biodiversity. And then most of us live in cities where obviously, suburbs where we’ve cut down and whatever biodiversity there is. But to get a sense of the richness of planet earth is there’s no better place to go than the Great Barrier Reef. Still today, even as the reef is very, very seriously being damaged. I mean, the reef has lost something like half of its coral cover in the last 30 years, so that’s devastating.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. I was there in about 2001 and it was already underway. I saw both there and around the Philippines and Coast of Indonesia when I was sailing some very market deterioration in the reefs.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Yeah, there was a big global bleaching event I think it’s in 1998, and there’ve been several since then. And these are these times when the water temperatures rise and the corals which depend on this symbiotic relationship with these little plants that they have living inside them who provide a lot of their nutrition. They sort of expelled their symbionts and that’s coral bleaching. They turn white because it’s really these plants that are giving the corals their color and they starve to death and that keeps happening. And that repeated stress is just more than they can take. And that’s why we’re seeing reefs not recovering.
Rob Johnson:
I think the across the spectrum of things that you cover in this book. I remember there was a chapter about Chicago, which is where my father came from and about the water. And one of the most hideous ironies is the Flint water crisis, because Flint, Michigan is what you might call a bicycle ride with a pail down to Lake Huron, where if you went a hundred yards off shore, you could put your pail in the water and get all the fresh water you needed. And yet when it went through these processes and so forth, it was … how would you say? Very detrimental to the health of anybody that drank it through lead poisoning.
But I guess, I think you got to look things in the eye. That’s what you’ve done in your writings. But I do remember Michael Mann saying to me, and it was in the conclusion of his book, that you got to find a way to have hope, even if you’re not optimistic, because despair feeds the enemy or what you might call defeats the possibility of the challenge. People become despairing and resigned to the dreadful outcome that’s not immediate, but it’s on the horizon. And I would imagine there’ll be a lot of dreadful outcomes with people displaced and food systems and other things disrupted that will wreak a lot of havoc in between. But so if you were, how would I say, talking to my children, ages nine and 11, what’s the best vision of the … we got to make this, we’re going to make this, and here’s how.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, I just don’t think we have any option, you know what I mean? There’s a lot of talk about in climate circles, this question of hope versus no hope. And I kind of almost think we have to lay that aside and just say, “Look, we don’t have any choice but to act in the with the hope,” I guess I’ll bring hope back in, “With the hope that what we’re doing will make a difference.” And is that hopeful or is that resigned? I don’t really know, but I think we need to put our own.
I don’t think that when people went off to fight World War II to use the military analogy, were they hopeful? I don’t really know. It’s like, well, there’s no choice. This is what you do. It’s the right thing to do. It’s got to be done, let’s just do it. And I think that that’s what we need to do. We don’t need to spend that much time interrogating how we feel about it. We just need to do the work to try to get the best outcome that we can. And the fact as you say, looking reality in the face is important. The fact the best outcome that we can get is not that great, it’s limiting the damage. That’s what we’re talking about.
We’re not talking about a world that is returned to some pre-industrial or pre-lapsarian state. We’re talking about a world where warming is limited to levels that are hopefully, once again, hopefully because there’s a lot of uncertainty in the science here as well, and the dynamics of ice sheets, et cetera. Hopefully that human society can cope with it. That’s really what we’re talking about. We’re talking about whether advanced industrialized societies that are dependent on a lot of stability. Our ancestors spent most of life or most of human history just moving. When things got, the climate changed, it did change. Humans have been around through ice ages and through interglacials and we got up and left. We moved, that’s how we dealt with things.
And that’s how the indigenous peoples of Louisiana dealt with things when the Mississippi flooded, they left and then the French came and they said, “Well, we’re to stay here. This is a new way of doing things.” And that way of doing things is even in human history, relatively young, since we invented agriculture 10,000 years ago or so. And so we are changing the world really, really fast. But we’re not willing to move, we don’t want to move. Are we going to have to change the way we deal with everything. Are we going to have to … This gets back to what we were talking about New Orleans, are we’re going to have to come to grips with the fact that you can’t continue to do things the way we’re doing them and to live in the places that we now live, low lying, coastal cities, those just don’t unfortunately go together. Something’s going to give, I can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to be, but I can tell you that something has to give.
Rob Johnson:
You’ve inspired me, and listening to you right now, to change the way I would approach this. It’s not about hope, it’s about resolve, that you have to have resolve like you alluded to war preparation. One of my board members, Bill Janeway’s father was Eliot Janeway, and he wrote a book called The Struggle for Survival, about FDRs war preparation. The only client older brother Seth recently wrote a book called The Good War, about Canadian preparation. Canada entered the second world war before the United States, and he draws the analogy to the organizing and the resolve that’s necessary to prepare for climate change now, drawing on the lessons of how systems and governments functioned and operated at that time.
And the other thing that came to my mind as I was listening to you, hope can be delusional. It could be an anesthetic that damages resolve. I think you’ve inspired me to change the way I describe things, so that’s good. That’s really good. We have a new administration in the United States this year. There’s much more talk now about addressing climate. I know you’ve been on the radio and things in the last 30, 60 days. But as this unfolds, how are you seeing the new administration’s response?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, I definitely give the new administration a lot of credit for seeing … Biden has put really smart people in place who absolutely see the big picture here, realize that this climate change needs to be confronted across many different sectors. It’s not a silver bullet problem. It’s going to require massive retrenchment across the whole US economy. And that’s going to require all federal agencies to sort of be on the same page and moving in the same direction. And they really get it now.
And Biden’s executive orders and a lot of what’s in the proposed infrastructure plan is really positive. So there’s a lot to praise, and even if you are inclined to that sort of thing, to be hopeful of that. Now, all that being said, I think that there’s a lot of fear and dread that what is actually going to make it through a very, very completely evenly divided senate. There’s a limit to what Biden can do through regulatory through executive action. And there’s also another problem that’s on the horizon, not to completely bring things back to problems, but that’s the supreme court and taking whatever Biden does that has a really significant impact on emissions. Will Dallas be litigated as was Obama’s clean power plan and not to get too much into the nitty gritty here, but you have a supreme court that’s very hostile to a lot of these … looking at the very fundamentals of our sort of modern regulatory system that could unfortunately be challenged. There are two tracks, things are moving on. One is very hopeful and positive in my view. And another is unfortunately very scary.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. I think there’s book that I’ve recommended periodically as I’ve been making this podcast that was written in the 1980s by a famous philosopher, a student of Wittenstein named Stephen Toulmin, the book is called Cosmopolis. In the book, it really has a point and the point is he studies from the 30 years war, the development of the Cartesian enlightenment, the application of it to social science and the fault lines that were created.
But the punchline is when the flaws are identified, it is often very daunting and very frightening. And when people are afraid, they lurch back to the familiar rather than forward evolving in the way they have to. And I think the Toulmin’s insight and his daughter Camilla works with INET on the relationship between Africa and climate change, among other things in Africa, but she’s written books on that. But I do think this resistance, you can have evil vested interests blocking things out, et cetera. But I also think there’s just a fear of change. And the more fearful you are, the more … how would you say, maybe the more daring you should be, but the more resistant you might be.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Yeah. And I think it’s a really important point that you’re making and that sort of gets us back to this idea that, yes, there absolutely are concerted efforts to prey really on people’s fears to preserve very powerful vested interests. But I would argue one of the reasons those have been so successful is because they are very attuned to human psychology or at least American psychology, which is, yeah, I don’t want to change. I don’t want to move. I don’t want my job threatened and we’re all in the same situation. I mean, I’m a journalist, I’ve been a journalist for many years. Journalism is in terrible, terrible trouble right now. Papers are folding.
A lot of my friends are getting laid off. You don’t have to be in the fossil fuel business, a coal miner to be afraid of change. All the American society, the whole way that we work and live is being completely altered out from under our feet. And that’s a very scary time, very scary situation. Even if you left a side climate change, if you just looked at the way the American economy is changing and the way it is creating some winners and a lot, a lot of losers, you would say this is a very unstable time. And when we look at our politics we have to say, I think no matter what your own individual politics are both sides as they were considering the other side to be extremely dangerous.
And that’s a very unstable situation too, a country that keeps lurching from one way of doing things to another and can never put a policy into place. I mean this gets very much back to climate change and action on climate change. At the end of the Obama administration, a series of regulations were put in place that were actually very good regulations and would have made an important difference. And as soon as Trump came in, he literally ripped them all up and started putting in ridiculous regulations. And now Biden has come in and he will have to spend a lot of time unfortunately, just undoing what Trump did, as stupid and waste of time as it was, it has to be legally undone. We just keep lurching around like this and nothing gets done.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Well, let me ask you, what was the … I have a group called The Young Scholars Initiative. It’s about 15,000 young people who are looking to build their career. I guess the question is on behalf of them, what was it that turned you to this purpose? Not of this latest book, but the whole theme and the whole focus and what are you trying to impart with your energy on earth?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, I’m really trying to impress on people at this point how extraordinary the situation that we’re in is, we live in a … not to sound like a broken record, but we really do live in an unprecedented time in earth history. There’s a tremendous responsibility that goes with that. I don’t think we are living up to that responsibility by any stretch of the imagination. But I think I’m trying to do what journalists do except that the stakes are very, very, very high, trying to impart to people, get them to sort of tilt their worldview a little bit or a lot and realize that what we take as extremely ordinary, it’s really ordinary. We live in houses that we heat and cool with fossil fuels. We drive around, we stick ancient plants in our gas tanks and drive around. It seems just really ordinary. It’s actually unprecedented in Earth’s history to do these things. And it’s having consequences that are potentially civilization threatening.
Rob Johnson:
Was there an episode that turned your head and ignited this, did it grow over slowly or was there some acute experience?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Yeah. I mean, I don’t have an epiphany moment where the light bulb went off. I grew up in the suburbs of New York and I grew up, my parents used to take us out West in the summer and I really loved the American west and fell in love with some idea, I realized it was just an idea of wildness. And I guess that has played in the back of my mind always that other creatures besides humans have a right to exist. And I think that that, really that is a pretty fundamental point that gets overlooked again and again and again, with whatever we do, we are always impinging on other species ability to survive at this point.
I can’t stress it enough. It’s becoming catastrophic. I mean, the studies of insect decline, insects are, you would think they’re pretty extinction resistant. They have lot of offspring. They have short generation time, but we’re seeing insect populations crashing. I mean, this is really tampering with the absolute fabric of life on earth. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that at this point.
Rob Johnson:
You mentioned going out West when you were young. I grew up in Michigan and almost all the creeks and islands, and even one of the towns was named after native American Indian chiefs or famous episodes. In talking about climate on this podcast and in organizing, I often hear people talking about native American philosophy as being, which we might call what the doctor ordered for our wake up call. Are there particular works in that realm? I’ve heard people describe about the evil of humans, and then Jack Forbes wrote a book called Columbus and Cannibals, Black Elk Speaks. But are there works in the native American lore that have influenced your way of seeing?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
I’m sure on a profound level that that is true. And I do remember as a kid, I mean, once again, going to visit native American towns out West and seeing some amazing rituals and that I feel very fortunate to have seen at that time. But I do think what we have to be honest about in 2021. And I think native societies, indigenous societies in the US and obviously all around the world live from many, many thousands of years without creating the kind of crises that we are creating. But it’s not possible at this point, it’s simply not possible. And this is another thematic of Under a White Sky. It’s not possible to say on a world with eight billion people, almost eight billion people, well, we’re going to go back to, in living the way that native American tribes did in North America prior to colonial settlement in a way that was pretty stable for many thousands of years.
That’s simply we need to feed eight billion people, that is not happening without synthetic fertilizer, et cetera. We can go on and on without mechanized agriculture, blah, blah, blah. Well, I think that to be honest, I think we need new ways of thinking, we are not solving this. There’s a great deal to be learned from, or to be thought about I think, thinking about how people did live, much simpler, less consumptive lives. But I don’t think that we can look to the past. That is precisely the problem that we have. We have created a situation where the past is not a good guide, is no longer a good guide to us. It can’t get us out of this situation because there are simply, we have too many demands as a human population of eight billion people. If we were willing to return to the global population of a billion or 500 million we could talk, but I don’t think anyone really wants that to happen.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Well, I’m a, how do I say it? Was very inspired by reading your work. It reminded me of an experience in my own life when 9/11 happened. My older children who are now in their thirties had many parents of their classmates were killed. And I was coming down the West side highway when I saw the planes hit the building. And within a week, someone gave me a novel that they said they thought would help. And it was by a man named Rohinton Mistry from India. And the name of the novel was A Fine Balance. And I read this and it was very, very powerful, and I won’t say soothing, but helping redirect forward.
And I learned later that the title came from a notion, which I experienced in listening to you. A fine balance is taken from the phrase. Life is a fine balance between hope and despair. And I see you on the hopeful side. And I often celebrate, music always invades my spirit, so there’s a lyric I want to share with you. Teddy Pendergrass singing with Harold Melvin and Blue Notes has a song called Wake Up Everybody. And the first two verses go, “Wake up everybody, no more sleeping in bed. No more backward thinking, time for thinking ahead. The world has changed so very much for what it used to be, so there is so much hatred, war and poverty. Wake up all the teachers, time to teach a new way. Maybe then they’ll listen to what you have to say because they’re the ones who are coming up and the world is in their hands. When you teach the children, teach them the very best you can.” I think you’re one of the best teachers that I’ve come across.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
That’s very kind of You.
Rob Johnson:
And that’s why I recite that song in your honor, because we can all use the wake up call and we can all use the illumination.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
That’s really what I should’ve said. When you said, “What are you trying to do?” I should have said, “I’m trying to get people to wake up.” Because we are really sleepwalking into disaster here.
Rob Johnson:
Well, I guess on the wake up mission, I’m your deputy amplifier-
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Thank you.
Rob Johnson:
… and try to reach more and more people with the awareness that you impart. Thanks for being with me today. Maybe we’ll watch a little bit in a handful of weeks or months, come back and do another episode. But I’m very grateful that you joined me in this episode.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Oh, well, thank you. Thanks for having me.
Rob Johnson:
My pleasure. And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org.
