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Transcript
Rob Johnson:
Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I’m Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Rob Johnson:
I’m here today with an old friend, Peter Neill. He’s the founder and director of the World Ocean Observatory. It’s a fantastic resource. People who follow this podcast and know of my nautical background and curiosity. I first met Peter through the South Street Seaport Museum that he directed in New York City. But today’s session is just about work that I think is so important to the future of this planet and to the lives of our children. Peter, thank you for joining me.
Peter Neill:
Oh, it’s my great pleasure, Rob. Good to see you again. Been a while.
Rob Johnson:
Great to see you. I guess where I’d like to start is understanding how this World Ocean Observatory came to be. What did you see, what inspired you, and what have you built?
Peter Neill:
Well, I’ve been in the maritime preservation business for some time. It was sort of a second career. My first career was as a novelist. I published a bunch of novels in the ’70s. But one day I was in Cambridge, it was sleety and rainy, and I ducked into a used bookstore to get out of the weather, went to the dollar bin. And I found a book called The Ocean, Our Future, which was a report by an independent commission on the future of the oceans, the world oceans. It had been gathered together experts from around the world, by Mario Soares, who was the former president of Portugal. And I sat down and read through it. And it was as if my whole life changed, because it’s the most prescient report still. And its final recommendation was that there’d be an online place and exchange for information and educational services about the ocean, key point, defined as an integrated global social system.
So it transcends the conventional focus on species and habitat to connect the ocean to climate, fresh water, food, energy, health, trade, transportation, science, technology, policy, governance, international finance, and cultural traditions, community development. Well, everything in our lives are by the ocean, and it has been exaggerated even still or amplified by globalization. The first person who stepped off a beach onto a small boat and pushed out into the unknown ocean, that was the beginning of globalization through exploration and knowledge and all the rest. So I did some due diligence about this idea. I went to see some people at the UN and asked permission. They said, “Well, we don’t know who’s going to do it. If you’d like to try, why not?” And that was about 16, 17 years ago. And so after I left South Street I took that with me here in Down East Maine, and have built a platform that advocates through communication and connection toward building a community of citizens of the ocean worldwide, which is an informed body sort of created from the bottom up as an exercise in understanding preservation and political will.
One of the great problems we have in all these transformational ideas is political will. And so if we’re expecting that necessarily to come from the top down, we already know that that’s a limited opportunity. The way it does happen though, is from the bottom up. And if that’s going to happen successfully it needs an educated public. So we have these communications platforms. We have audio features, podcasts, aggregated video channel. We have online exhibits, profiles, educational curriculum. We have a digital magazine, we’re developing a virtual aquarium. I’ll talk about that maybe later. And all of these things are vehicles by which we can focus on solutions and responsible science information and solutions, the idea being to become a force in ocean literacy. We are irresponsibly negligent in our understanding of the ocean. And science is hard at work. Data, we are learning enormous amounts every day, more and more and more.
There’s an old adage that we know more about the surface of Mars than we know about the ocean that represents 70% of our planet. Nonetheless, that’s not the entire answer. As in all cases, data is enormously useful. There’s never enough. Scientists always want more. And the idea now though is we need to turn that data into action. And one of the ways we do that is to aggregate the work, the good work of others, celebrate the work of others, bring it all together into one place where people can go and interact. And the website now has almost 3 million people a year. And all of these other things, Facebook following is 950,000, these are all sort of numbers that matter if you’re actually going to try to reach people outside of the conventional circles and silos. As in all cases, we limit ourselves, we talk to ourselves, we have conferences where we all come together and report of the incremental advance that we’ve made since the last conference. These frustrate me terribly.
But so the World Ocean Observatory can now claim, I think responsibly, legitimately, that we’re reaching millions of people worldwide with this message for ocean preservation and sustainability.
Rob Johnson:
I think it’s fascinating just many of the different aspects and dilemmas that you brought up. As you know, in the what you might call, post-Trump era, the notion of expertise hierarchy and representation is in tatters. I don’t mean they are wrong. I mean the confidence in those things has been beaten up. So at some level you have something that is bottom up organic, which you might call for the people on the outside, and I heard you say in that that you weren’t in a place where you felt like you could essentially just go to the insider committee meetings and it will be taken care of. And I guess there are two questions that come to mind. One is sometimes there’s something which economists call the public good. And in a market-based system and whatever, it’s not that we don’t care about it, nobody’s responsible. So it falls between the cracks. The public good is not taken care of.
Other times there’s what you might call vested interests with fierce opposition to the repairs that are necessary for the public good, because it creates private loss. You see a lot of now with fossil fuel companies or nations that have huge endowments on fossil fuels, like Russia seemingly resisting the notion of climate change or the repair of our energy production systems. What do you see when it comes to the sea? Are there organized interests trying to thwart the work that you think needs to be done, number one? Or is it just neglect and falling between the cracks? Or a little of both?
Peter Neill:
Well, it’s a little of both. Neglect or indifference. Or just kind of an assumption that it’s out there, you go to the beach, it seems infinite. You don’t really see the tumult, the systems that are inherent in that nature. We take it for granted. You walk down a Walmart corridor and ask somebody where all this stuff come from, they have no idea that it’s come from someplace else across the sea. They don’t understand the interconnection of shipping or, for example, the exchange of data or financial transactions that take place by undersea cables. People just don’t understand that this ocean atmosphere, this ocean environment, is essential to almost everything that happens to our world now. Climate is one part of it. The effect of emissions and CO2 conditions, the acidification of the ocean, all of these things are invisible.
And for the most part, people don’t understand them. A scientist stands up and says, “Well, this and that, and percentages and parts per whatever.” And it’s very hard for people to wrap their minds around it until you can try to make it relevant to their lives specifically.
Now, the vested interest thing, I mean it’s a fact of life. Yes, there’s self-interest. There’s also a kind of underlying psychological fear of change. It’s a natural phenomenon. Nobody really wants to disrupt their lives in some way. Nobody in the end believes that they will give up something essential for someone else. There’s a kind of innate human self-absorption and selfishness. That’s a part of the issue. I don’t think I can ever solve that problem. The problem is how can you make people understand that that fear is groundless, and actually that the thing that they should be afraid of is the status quo? And it’s perfect in fossil fuels. I mean, if the smart money didn’t get out of fossil fuels 10 years ago, it’s not smart money. And they’ve written fossil fuels down in the name of dividend and convention. And that has been further subverted by fracking, which was of course a terrible, destructive extension of trying to get the last drop of oil or gas out of the ground. That had its own social ramifications.
I mean, it disrupted farming, people’s lands were polluted, they had to move away. There’s enormous waste problem from fracking. Fracking waste is being hidden, dumped into waterways, abandoned in places where people don’t think they can see it. I mean, a horrible short term attempt by the industry rather than to go full into alternatives, to include wind and solar, geothermal and all the rest of it. So there’s that part of it.
The other part of it, though, is the idea of understanding the commons. We’ve gone through quite a long period of time where the idea of shared resources has been subverted by individual gain, unlimited growth essentially based on consumption, enabled by fossil fuels. That was the paradigm of the 19th and 20th centuries. I think it’s a dying paradigm. But the fact is it was there, it had formed many, many people’s lives. It’s true that many people’s lives were improved by that, until the point where the positive consequences were overcome by the negative impacts. And so it began then to dilute. And for people to understand that there is this thing called the Nature’s Trust Doctrine, for example, which says that the natural resources of a nation belong to its people, actually. This is in, I think, Roman law, English common law. I think it’s actually mentioned in the constitution that natural resources are an inalienable right of the people who live in the country.
And it is up to government … It can license that, it can develop that, but it can only do it in the context of sustainability so that the supply is never exhausted for the ensuing generations. And of course, we have done exactly the opposite. We have gotten past peak oil to the point where now we’re exhausting it to almost nothing. We’re desperately trying to eke out just a little bit more. And we’re doing the same thing with water, with fresh water. We’re draining the aquifers, we’re polluting the water. We’re doing all this kind of predictable historical behavior using structures that are like dinosaurs. They really are outmoded, outdated, and they’re sinking into the mud. And maybe some future generation will discover them and burn them.
But the fact is it’s a paradigm that that is bankrupt. So there is a kind of returning to the idea of the commons, particularly in terms of shared natural resources. And the biggest single system out there left unpolluted, uncorrupted is the ocean. So I advocate, personally and through one of my books, the Once And Future Ocean, subtitled, Notes Toward a New Hydraulic Society, which is basically an outcome of a new paradigm, which says managed growth, because we’re going to have to grow to meet the needs of a growing population, but based on sustainability and enabled by the freshwater ocean continuum, which is the last place we can go to get the kind of energy, food, fresh water, medicines, and spiritual solace that have been taken away from us by bankrupt activity on land.
So the idea that one would transform or transition into this new paradigm based on this hydraulic concept is imperative. Frankly, I don’t see any alternative. Because if we don’t have water, we can live without chocolate and diamonds and Bitcoin and gold. We can live with without all of that, the caviar. We don’t need any of those things. But the one thing we all need, everyone, everywhere, all the time, is access to water. A couple of days we die as individuals, as families, as communities, as nation states. And we’re seeing it already. We are seeing water wars. We’re seeing major cities that can no longer provide fresh water to the population. And this has all been exacerbated by climate. It’s not going to get any better. And so weather pattern changes, drought, extreme weather, rain, flood, erosion. And then add on top of that a kind of history of corruption and political and financial gain that has been accumulated by a few, and you have essentially a mandatory set of circumstances to which you are going to have to respond and adapt immediately to survive.
There is no time. We have lost the … I’m amazed by the lack of urgency. There is no time in terms of … Even as we set goals for being fossil fuel free by 2050, 2030, that’s not enough, that’s too much time. It’s too much time. It’s a function of reluctant transition. And then what we do is we’re cleaving to short term solutions. For example, the electric car. I despair, and maybe you can help me on this because to me it’s a supply and demand situation. It’s a fundamental economic formula that is not being talked about, which is, which is in order to meet the anticipated demand for electric cars and all the other tools that we propose to run off batteries, we need the rare metals to essentially build the batteries to store the power, to store the energy. And there is nowhere enough of those metals available, now or in the future, on the land, to meet the demand. And no one seems to be talking about this. And the only place that you can go where you can expand the geological opportunity is that is the ocean floor.
And mining in the deep sea is already underway. People are trying to do it. People are fighting it. And the reason for it is that these rare metals are all located in the areas of like hydrothermal vents and where intense biodiversity remains, which would be destroyed by this process. So all this is essentially taking a new based on extraction, wrapping it in a new kind of concept, and seeing it as a penultimate solution, which I personally believe it is not.
And so we’re already seeing theft of older devices and catalytic converters in cars so people can get the little bits of lithium and whatever it is that they can need, because there’s a market demand for them. That’s pathetic. And so in order to get these things, we’re going to have to mine. Mining is extraction, extraction is destructive. We’ve been through it all before. So why are we wasting the time on this and not looking and inventing our way out of this? Not just sliding ourselves in using the old tools, wrapping the old behaviors in new clothes, and inventing our way and starting to look at serious alternatives that are out there, that young scientists and others are working on, with some success? And that’s where the investment should be going. Those places are the ones where the smart money ought to be now.
In order to pull this off, right. Let’s just-
Rob Johnson:
You mean in order to sustain life on Earth.
Peter Neill:
[inaudible 00:22:22]. Simple as that.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah.
Peter Neill:
Let’s take a look at the idea, the nature, the definition of capital, because that’s what it all revolves around, it’s capital. And we’ve always separated capital, capitalism, sort of independently of understanding the true value of natural capital. And natural capital, which is the gathering together of all the value of all these resources on Earth, has been utilized. But we haven’t accounted for it correctly. And so I’d like to talk a little bit about that, because I’m not an economist, I just look at this stuff from a kind of logical sort of uninformed point of view. But I do-
Rob Johnson:
You mean you’re not intoxicated by the mythologies of economics? Is that what you’re saying?
Peter Neill:
No, I [crosstalk 00:23:32].
Rob Johnson:
I’m teasing you. Come on.
Peter Neill:
[crosstalk 00:23:33]. That’s your job. That’s your job.
Rob Johnson:
That’s right. That’s right.
Peter Neill:
You drunk the Kool-Aid. [crosstalk 00:23:38].
Rob Johnson:
Detox, detox. That’s right.
Peter Neill:
So if you’re going to pull off this hydraulic society and all the rest of it, that’s fine. But what you really need to understand, and there’s a phrase that describes this, which is ecosystem service analysis, where you actually have to understand the … examine and monetize all aspects of production manufacture, but which includes the costs of water, waste, reparation, health effects. All of those numbers are left out of the evaluation today. We never do that. When you walk down a corridor at a supermarket, you don’t hear the wasting water, you don’t hear the water that was used in the packaging, the harvesting, the delivery, none of that is there. And I’ve advocated for water labeling. Everything on earth is labeled on the package, except the fact that the most important thing that was used in its manufacture is left out. We know about MSG or vitamin C, but we don’t know about water. Everything we produce has a water cost, and it should be labeled. We should know it.
Does it take a million gallons of water to build a Volkswagen? Yes, it does. And much of that water by the way, is not priced and is sometimes free. So the manufacturer has essentially used the primary resource at no cost and added all these other things with all their detrimental impact on top. And we don’t understand the true cost of doing that. So I would advocate… First ecosystem service analysis, you have to understand the problem across the full spectrum of its true cost, and then you have to account for it. And so why isn’t there ecosystem accounting and audits? The fact is that when these companies audit their books or when they calculate their balance sheets, there’s this huge piece of financial information that’s not included. And if it was included at the true value, their profit would be lost.
And that then would say to the investor, this is not a good strategy. We’re investing in the wrong thing by not truthfully accounting for what is the cost of doing business. And we’re going to… Water is now an asset class. You know, there are water funds, there are water companies there, there are hedge funds looking for water. Oh my God. I mean, we just have to not let that happen again. Or that people either misrepresent the true cost of things or they know, and they suck out the value in the short term. And what they don’t understand is that that value is irreplaceable. You may get a fancier car, but you’ll never get the true value of that water loss back again.
Rob Johnson:
I’m kind of grinning, as I think about the history of economic thought here, because there was once a gentleman called the Earl of Lauderdale. And when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, the foundation stone of modern economic thinking, the Earl of Lauderdale said, “You said that value is equal to price? Well, why don’t you turn off the water and the oxygen and see how valuable those things are at a price of zero.” I mean, they were talking about what now accountants call exchange value rather than use value. But at the time, because the scale of population or technological methods that were employed was very small in relation to the atmosphere and the water. It didn’t appear that they were scarce, but that is now changing. And there was a whole lot of fighting on the side of Adam Smith, but the Earl of Lauderdale stands pretty tall and I know John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney, and others have written a number of articles on this, which I’d like to share with your website, because it’s about the wake-up call.
And the other thing I would say, there’s a person that the audience of this podcast hears about relatively frequently. It’s one of the philosophers, was a student of Wittgenstein at Cambridge University named Stephen Toulmin, whose daughter Camilla works with INET on projects related to environments in Africa. But Stephen wrote a book called Cosmopolis in the late eighties. And it was a study of the implications going back to the 30 years’ war of the abstract nature of what we will call the Cartesian enlightenment. And it talked about, there were benefits related to astronomy. There were benefits related to so many aspects of natural science, but when it was adapted to social science, where if you will, the subject and object were intertwined, you got to this confusion and it created fault lines.
And he traces this… He wrote this book, I think, during the second term of the Reagan administration, but he essentially said, you could feel at many junctures between the world wars, during the depression, et cetera, during the 1960s, that society could recognize that things were out of balance. And when the turmoil started such as we’ve experienced in the last year, people often become frightened. As you said earlier on in this conversation, and they lurch back to the familiar or the nostalgic, rather than pushing forward with the new design. They have to overcome the psychological resistance that’s implanted in them by fear. And this is when true leadership is called for, and this is when the stakes are high, when society resists its own wellbeing unconsciously.
And I think that’s a large part of where we are right now, where everybody consents that the wheels have come off on social sustainability, environmental sustainability, concentration of wealth, aspects of governance, which look more like they’re bought and sold than representative of people, the representative dollars or the equivalent currency in other countries. So the question is in some way, how do we rise above this? I’m curious, oceanographic institutes. I went to MIT. When I was young I thought about doing graduate work at Woods Hole or Scripps, or any of these places. Are they at the Vanguard along with you of this kind of work or are they somewhat, how would I say caught in the habit structures of previous generations or challenges?
Peter Neill:
Well, I want to give them more credit than that.
Rob Johnson:
Good, that makes me happy.
Peter Neill:
These places are doing the best science. They are out there. Woods Hole is still amazing. Scripps still amazing. One of the problems is that they rely almost entirely on government grants. You also have a different kind of phenomenon where you have something like the Schmidt Ocean Institute, Eric and Wendy Schmidt. And these are very wealthy people. They have essentially constructed a state-of-the-art oceanographic research vessel, and they are subsidizing scholars to go out and do amazing work in the deep sea. And this is essentially a kind of, it’s a not-for-profit, but it’s a private charity in a way with this amazing intent. And so it obviates the structure that, for example, in a government grant, if it goes through a university, anywhere from 20 to 50 or 60% is taken by the university’s overhead.
So there’s this constant. A million dollar grant may only put $400,000 in the water after all the other people have taken their share. So the structures do get in the way. There’s no question about it. Insiders will tell you that they do. In policy, it’s also interesting. We use words like adapt, sea level rise is a good example. Adapt, mitigate. Well, adapt just says, well, it is what it is, we’re going to have to change our ways. That’s one strategy. Mitigate, it basically is a hard response, an engineering response, we’re going to do some kind of a thing like the Thames River barrier or the protecting barriers, artificial dykes. They’re now protecting the coast of the Netherlands. Venice is thinking about the same thing in order to control flooding.
These are engineering solutions. It’s classic. This is how we think. And very smart people are trying to deal with that. You could look at the same thing with the plastic in the ocean, millions of dollars raised to try to go out and engineer a solution to gather it all up in some way, which is really ineffective, hasn’t really worked. And what we don’t do is one of two things. We don’t go, instead of just trying to fix the problem that we try to go back and fix the cause. So the way to fix plastic in the ocean is to fix the plastic problem. Fossil fuel product, let’s remember it’s a fossil fuel product. It can be recycled, but plastic recycling, which had its moment now has eroded. And because it was all based on the old behaviors, you either ship it to China who won’t take it anymore, or you don’t create scale that’s large enough to make it economically viable for industry to recycle that plastic.
But if you recycled every bit of plastic on earth today, you’d never have to make another piece of plastic again. So it’s that kind of behavior that we’re not doing. The other side of that is adapt, mitigate, invent. Invent, that’s what we do best. This is one of the great aspects or great qualities of the human imagination. We know how to invent things. Scientists are brilliant at inventing things, and we ought to be subsidizing them. For example, the way we subsidize fossil fuels. Only within the last 30 days, I believe, has there been an attempt by the U.S. government to stop subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. So we’ve taken our resources that belong to the people, we’ve subsidized them, we’ve given research and develop grants.
We’ve given them tax exemptions. We’ve done all these things to enable the fossil fuel industry, right? We’re exhausting the supply, but what that represents is probably the largest transfer of wealth from the people to the few in human history. Think about it. Coal, oil, gas, all plastic, all of these things are based on a… Have been incentivized up until this very moment. Long after the oil crisis, long after the smart money left only because of these vested interests. And you see these companies today, even still in the name of sustainability and conservation, environmental, and the ESG standards, and all the rest. Look underneath and see what actually is happening. And, there’s a piece that’s-
Rob Johnson:
I did a podcast with a gentleman from Penn State named Michael Mann, whose book, his newest book is called The New Climate War. And it’s about the information. It’s scrambling, what you might call the signal to noise ratio to sow the seeds of doubt that we need to change, or that there is any urgency in that need to change. Naomi Oreskes who I’ve not met, wrote a wonderful book called The Merchants of Doubt, showing the analog between how the tobacco industry deflected attention away from the harm of cigarettes and how that’s been adapted to the fossil fuel industry. Do you yourself experience, what you might call vibrant opposition in the world of ideas from the things that you put out?
Peter Neill:
Well, it may be that my voice is so tiny, they haven’t heard it yet. They haven’t heard it yet, but-
Rob Johnson:
We’ll work on that together.
Peter Neill:
We’ll work on that. But I think that the other thing to think about is, so if we’re in our inventive mode, and if we do acknowledge that the old way of accounting for things is a way to show on a corporate or an individual investor balance sheet that we’re all engaged in a kind of false economy. And if you then look at this new paradigm, and you say, okay, if you’re going to organize the world around the most valuable resource on earth, which is the ocean freshwater continuum, then you have to start inventing ways to use that appropriately, not to corrupt it, not to pollute it, not to exhaust it.
And if you do that, then other things start to happen that are sort of inevitable. They’re kinds of these additional transformational outcomes. And so if you take that as the premise, then suddenly the policies and the laws and the enforcement of those laws changes because you want to protect this new approach. You start addressing problematic forms of governance, because you start thinking about upstream and downstream effect. We have independent municipalities along a river, somebody up here can put up a chemical plant in and throw their waste in the water. Nobody can stop them. However, it has terrible downstream impact on the community all the way down to the coastal resources, where that river has become polluted. So in order to combat that under this new system, you move away from independent new mentalities to regionalism and regional management, watershed management.
And if you start doing that, you start making changes to the infrastructure based on the commonality of interest and the understanding that these things speak directly to meaningful work and public health and equity and social justice. All of these things that we talk about as problems we need to face in our society today, actually could be addressed in a more creative way. If we were to invent another way of organizing ourselves into new structures, based on new behaviors, that is all essentially gathered together in a strategy, the only strategy for the survival of civilization. So if you want to look at how we’re going to do that, and you look at the ocean, you see that it is a climate regulator, you see that it is a heat pump. It is a massive storage of energy that can be released in many different ways.
It is a huge source of biodiversity and food to feed the world. It is where we will find the cures to cancer and all diseases, even diseases we don’t even know exist. Because in that biodiversity, though we are already essentially building cancer cures on either direct use or synthesis of ocean processes. So if you really want to embrace a solution that could work, that would work, you need to say, and you need to understand it urgently that nothing else matters. And that we should… The United States really doesn’t even have a National Ocean Policy. We say we do. And the Biden administration has put forth some interesting things, and they put some great people into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but ocean policy extends beyond NOAA. It expands to land use, environmental protections, legal protections, health issues, social justice, problems of equity and access. I’ll give you a perfect example of that Flint, Michigan.
Rob Johnson:
Close to my home. I grew up in Detroit.
Peter Neill:
Opportunistic political decision made by some politician basically destroys a community and it is still not recovered. So suddenly the waters, it comes back, it’s sourced to pollution. There’s immediate data that shows that children health is affected, there’s a human cry when they restore it to the pure supply. The only reason they really did it was because there was a GM factory there in Flint that suddenly was complaining about corrosion in the parts, that the water they were using in the manufacture was corroding the parts almost immediately. And so then they had to restore it back to the pure thing, based on basically a political decision in response to a corporate interest, not to the fact that the children of Flint were ill, or that the property values in that city, heavily minority populated were destroyed. And they still haven’t replaced the lead in the pipes. They still haven’t addressed the problem with any degree of compensation or regress, I mean restoration.
Rob Johnson:
You’re winding me up, man. You’re winding me up because I, as you know, I grew up in Detroit and I was there involved in some consultations around the Detroit bankruptcy as the Flint water crisis became known and understood. When I was a kid, I used to sail on Lake Huron all the time. And if you needed some water, you would take a ladle or a bucket, and you’d fill it up over the side and you could cook with it or drink it, or whatever. These people in Flint, what are they, four miles from Saginaw Bay or something? And yet their water was polluted like that. When the bankruptcies happening in Detroit, Detroit water and sewage, I believe was the largest water public utility in the world at that time. It became a source of struggle because they thought they were going to solve the bankruptcy and pay off the creditors by selling that to a French company.
And the French company wanted to do the acquisition. The guy who was the emergency manager worked with Jones Day, which had done a lot of business with that company in France. And yet everybody then realized that the way the money was going to be made was a windfall. When something is a public utility, you have certain laws protecting the workers. When it’s acquired in the private sector, you can lay them off and cancel their pensions. So the windfall would go to the company, not to the city that was in distress, but Detroit water was obviously a very valuable commodity. And it went very deep into the controversy and negotiations there.
And I remember very vividly because I held a conference in 2016. I had a young man who was an activist who had been put on trial because he went to Highland Park, Michigan, there’s this… Right in the intersection between the east west and the north south highways. It was a big water tower. And he got up and he painted graffiti on there. Free the water, it said. And that part, that young man was harassed quite a lot for saying something that, how I say needed to be said. Being around the Great Lakes… I was just going to say, being around the Great Lakes in a water crisis, spun my head in terms of the relation between values and value. Like you can hardly imagine, but you can imagine, I know.
Peter Neill:
Well, the people.
Rob Johnson:
… imagine, but you can imagine. I know.
Peter Neill:
Well, the people need to understand that the ocean begins at the mountain top and it descends to the abyssal plain. So, every drop of water that falls, that evaporates from the ocean and goes into the water cycle, the one scientific principle that almost everybody learns in grammar school, it evaporates it up. It goes up into the clouds, into the weather and falls down as rain or snow. And then, it comes right back down through the watersheds, all the way to the ocean and recycles again. It’s an absolutely glorious global system. And for example, you can look at the Himalayas, which is now called the Third Pole, which because of evaporation and snowfall and all the rest of it, that services, what is it? Seven Asian countries, millions and millions of people rely on that water that descends down through all the farmlands and the tea plant and all of that, into the rivers and then out into the sea.
And that refreshment, essentially that descent of water then to be recycled again and again, and again, is the essence of how we survive. We are water. Our bodies are water. And so, if we can’t identify with this, you’re basically denying the fundamental element, physical element in your body, which in fact is that you’re denying yourself, your soul, life, for you and everyone else. And it needs to be urgent enough and understood well enough for people to understand that.
And one of the tools that the World Ocean Observatory is developing with, by the way, the support of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, is a virtual aquarium. Which will allow for anyone, any age, anywhere, at any time, at no cost, to go into a virtual space, that looks just like an aquarium.
And they will be able not only to explore the deep sea, but the coastal zone, but they will also be able to explore the nature of ocean work and also cultural and spiritual resources. So, there will be galleries within this, or modules, or exhibits within this virtual aquarium that demonstrates the hydraulic organization and depth of meaning, and complexity and beauty of this water world. And to me, that’s the most revolutionary thing we can do because there’s no price barrier. I mean, I love aquariums. I love what happens in aquariums in one way, because it inspires in visitors, particularly children, a sense of wonder and reverence, or at least an awe in the face of nature.
But if you follow a family of four after they’ve paid $120 for a two-day ticket and watch them go through, even the placement of the labels and the language in them, is not really conducive because the parent needs to read it to the kid and the parent doesn’t understand it any better than the kid does. And so, that the information is, it’s awkward. There’s an educational program, that’s great. There’s a touch tank, that’s great. It costs 400 million or more to build one. It costs $40 million a year to run one. And all good, I want all of that to do. I want to drive using the virtual aquarium. I want young people and old people alike to essentially then go to those aquariums and learn more, and learn about their region and about their … And that’s true worldwide, there are hundreds of aquariums in China.
Rob Johnson:
My father was an All-American swimmer at University of Michigan. His Zodiac sign is Aquarius. He was a championship racing sailor, and he spent four years in the Navy, in the Pacific. And when my mother passed away, I bought a home overlooking Bolinas Reef, or it’s called Duxbury Reef. A gentleman who you probably know, Charles Reich, who wrote The Greening of America. He wrote a book called the Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef, how he had an epiphany there.
But to sit at that house with my father and watch the weather change. To watch, how would I say? Seals fighting with sharks, to watch breaching whales, all of these things, month after month, after month, is very nourishing and it’s, as you said, with the Native Americans, it’s very nourishing. And I will say for Bolinas, they have marine reserve beaches, Agate Beach, Bolinas Beach, and so forth, that are public access. And people just experience such an uplift.
Peter Neill:
Well, California has made public access a major part of governance. I mean, the Coastal Office regulations and stuff. You drive Highway 1 down the West Coast and the 101, and all you see is thousands of people on the beach enjoying access that is not been taken away from them. Native peoples need access to the water. We’ve taken that away from them too. And that resurgence of Indigenous wisdom is important for us to understand. You can’t just belittle it and take your colonial superiority and deny. If you’ve ever been in the wild … And my epiphany was in Hudson Bay, in an old Zodiac rubber boat with a Native guide who took me out amongst the beluga whales the whales would come up in the wild and just put their heads on the pontoon and swim along with us for a while. Just me and my wife in the boat.
And I would look in the eye of this animal. I suddenly realized, I understand now, this animal has a soul just like I do. He’s looking in my eye. I’m looking in his eye. I am not going to deny his right, her right to life. And so, that’s what’s happening here. This is the fundamental right of life. And that is because we are working to essentially organize ourselves around the most essential natural system. And it’s pervasive from again, from the mountain top to the abyssal plain, across all borders, all cultures, all classes, it affects us all the same way.
And if we understand that and can work toward that in our way, using our institutions. It doesn’t mean that we have to become communists, forget all that. We can use our systems and do that. But we just have to understand what the goal should be. And if we understand that the goal now is survival, if people can really understand that … One of the outcomes of the pandemic is, with just about 600,000 people dead, just here. Doesn’t that tell us something? Doesn’t that say to us how vulnerable we are? And how did we solve the problem? Well, we haven’t fully solved it, because one, we have to find the cause, but two, we invented a response. Now, that’s great. That’s what we did. We invented a response and we saved millions of lives by doing that. And why would we doubt science, when science brought us a solution to a problem that was killing our families day after day? Can we come out of that, shouldn’t we come out of that, with a new perspective? And a new perspective that-
Rob Johnson:
Well, I think there’s two things here. I think there’s two dimensions. One is the science itself, which we celebrate together. The other is how it’s refracted by the commodification of intellectual property rights or distribution systems to squeeze the vulnerable. And that obviously is playing out all over the world right now. And it’s unfortunate because it takes away from what you might call that bright light that you identified, of science’s ability to respond to challenge. When people are feeling like the tax payer put up money, government paid for the R&D, and now these guys are out playing as oppressive pirates in the street, in between the R&D, the transformation, the speed at which it came out to save the public are miraculous, but it all gets [inaudible 01:04:31].
By the way, you were talking in this last few minutes about the Native American or the Indigenous people. Going back to whether it’s shamanic rituals or the questions like Black Elk Speaks writing about the environment. I was given a book by my sister who runs a veterinary hospital in Eugene, Oregon. It was called Columbus and Other Cannibals, by a man who had a Western name, Jack Forbes, but he’s Native American. And the book talked about how the Native American people thought that there was this disease called Wetiko, that infected the minds of Western people. I always use the phrase, sometimes abstraction enables cruelty. That because they couldn’t see their organic connection to the environment, they did things that were not only cruel to the animals or to the natural reserve, but to other people, because they didn’t acknowledge being embedded in that system. I thought that book was very, very challenging and very interesting to read.
Peter Neill:
Well, the circle in that is coming round. It’s so interesting to watch the conservation movement, preservation movement in the United States and around the world, basically come back to those Indigenous values. Where meaning and health is embedded in natural systems, and that we have to understand them and preserve them over time in order to retain that wisdom. And that’s coming around and around again, subverting the colonial assertions of dominance over nature, that you spoke of earlier. The fact is that if we haven’t figured out now, how nature can essentially wipe us out in an instant, by virtue of communities washed away by coastal hurricanes. Communities’ extreme weather patterns, essentially threatening nation states.
I mean, Puerto Rico is a perfect example, still completely unrecovered, without help, from hurricane. And the same thing is true in Asia. And slowly, it seems that these values are reasserting themselves, hopefully in time, so that they essentially infect or infuse the populist, who then will vote the villains out, will vote the old way out. Get rid of the old man that’s running our country. Not literally, but essentially there’s an old thinking that’s still-
Rob Johnson:
An old vintage. Yeah.
Peter Neill:
Yeah, old vintage. We have to just turn it over, put it away, put it in the attic, forget about it, and invent our way forward. And my argument is, there’s only one path to follow. I don’t want to be didactic. I just think there’s an impeccable logic that goes with it. That because every place you look for a solution, you find it in this freshwater ocean continuum. You cannot find it on the land anymore because the land has been exhausted. And we’re going to have to live there. I mean, let’s just take it, the most simple thing of all is fresh water. Where is the world going to get adequate fresh water? If you look at the Middle East and you look down at Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan, what are those things? What’s going on? Is it just tribal warfare?
This is the cradle of civilization organized around the flow of water from the mountains in Turkey to the ocean. And if a farmer can’t have access to water because of natural or political, or religious reasons, whatever it is, what do they do? They fight, they give up, or they become refugees. They try to go find a place where there is water. So, refugees crossing the Mediterranean, I think, are basically fleeing the consequences of inadequate water. And you can look at the source of Palestine and Israel, what happened? It’s the diversion of water, at the very offset, the diversion of water from the Jordan River, that essentially was the basis for conflict that still exists in terms of what’s happening in the East Bank and the West Bank and all the rest of it, in terms of control of wells. And actually-
Rob Johnson:
By the way, I listened last night to a wonderful, wonderful lecture by a man who’s a professor at Union Theological Seminary named Onery Hendricks, excuse me, Obery, O-B-E-R-Y Hendricks. And it was called the Kingdom of God and Political Economy. And it was all about Old Testament struggles, over natural resources with God or his messengers continuously reminding us that we were responsible for the common good. And he was contrasting that with the kind of ethic that pervades our, what you might call, economic discourse today.
Peter Neill:
Every religion, Rob, has water as a purification piece. If you’re going to be redeemed, you’re being redeemed by a water accountant. So, my latest book is called Aqua Terra, which says that basically one, the first thing is that, this is Earth from space. It’s not green, it’s blue. It’s the blue planet. It’s the blue marble. People use it all the time. We’re misnamed first. But secondly, again, the one thing that informs all our rituals.
Every organized or disorganized religion has a water element, baptism, go down by the sea, purification. All of these things, which are there to be our functions of redemption and the affirmation of self, are water driven. So, why would we destroy it? And it’s there for us in terms of, let’s just take fresh water desalination. I mean, let’s face it, we are going to have to desalinate water from the ocean in order to provide adequate drinking water for public health. It’s just inevitable.
Rob Johnson:
I want to emphasize something that is very… What I would say, magnificent about you and your website. You have a series on World Ocean Radio of five to six minute, little snippets each week. Why I think they’re magnificent is they’re so informative in five minutes that people get a huge… What you might call benefit to effort ratio. The most recent one is called Ocean Resilience and the Blue Economy, which I found fantastic too. The way it stirred me, because you talked about… Let me just, you can correct me, but GDP, can be broken down, The Bureau of Economic Analysis apparently does some disaggregation of the sources of GDP.
In the United States, something like 1.9% comes from things that are coastal activities, water related activities. Then you talk about, “Well, okay, maybe today 1.9% of GDP but if we extinct, if we don’t sustain our oceans, our coastlines and so forth, that’ll be gone.” More importantly, other nations talk about a Caribbean island, I think is the reference you use, are 99% dependent on the oceans and we can do things that destroy their ocean, not just our own coastal economy. I thought it was an amazing, amazing offering.
Peter Neill:
Well, thank you. The connections are so viable and so obvious. For example, everyone hears about the Galapagos, this biodiversity Mecca. The reason it’s there is because the ocean currents, essentially distributed nutrients in such a way that they aggregated there. It was an enormous font and safe place for biodiversity development. Well, guess what? The same systems distribute poison, pollution and that is affecting the Galapagos today, discharge from factories, et cetera, or from [inaudible 01:14:24] or whatever it is in places long, far away, but which through ocean circulation essentially comes and affects a place that one think was invulnerable, but it’s not. That’s the thing here. We are all equally vulnerable, whether you’re rich or poor, whether you’ve got a gate in front of your house, or whether you have an abandoned lot next door. We need to understand that that vulnerability has a solution, but it has to be equitable.
It has to essentially apply tools and assert an outcome that is real, that is workable, and that will essentially save us from our own devices. I don’t want to beat it over the head, but there’s only one, there’s only one place to go. I believe that policy governance and all the rest of it should be [inaudible 01:15:28] that there should not be a single act in Congress that isn’t somehow cognizant of its implication on the ocean. I don’t care what it is that, because I guarantee you, I can find a way that it connects, somehow somewhere it connects.
Rob Johnson:
Well, I think some of that relates to what you might call the resistances and what it seems to me that you’re doing is, you’re identifying the challenge. You’re educating a broad range of people. It’s almost like a wake-up call, and then you’re educating them about what to do. Then through the halls of power organization, representative government around the world, we need to… How would I say, inspire change in the face of resistance. At some point, have to point out where that harmful resistance comes from to shame it or to change its direction.
Peter Neill:
I actually think it’s underway. I don’t know if it’s fast enough. I do believe that in Europe and in Asia, we’re beginning to understand it, beginning to see it, beginning to see policies and legislation begin to occur. We’re starting to see certain kinds of regional authorities or regional alliances about things like illegal fishing and coastal protections, Marine protected areas. These are all good encouraging signs, but I will believe that where the action needs now to happen, is at the edge. Where most people live.
Most people who live on earth, live on the coasts or at the confluence of rivers. They are the core of the political will that needs to be put into place. I think they need to understand, or I want to help people have the information available to understand that these things are not in Asia alone. These things pertain directly to the place that I live, whether I live in a Midwestern city or whether I live in an African village, or whether I live in a South American town, all of these things are connected to this one key operating system. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about imagining and building and using a new operating system for earth. That’s what it is. We should be exhilarated by the prospect, because it’s only going to make things better.
Rob Johnson:
Yes. Well, Peter, this is your first time with me on the podcast, but I usually, as I listen, there’s a kind of spirit that crosses through me where I hear music. I hear a song that relates to what you’re saying. There are two today. One of which has been kind of my anthem, but I think it applies to your work by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes . The vocalist was Teddy Pendegrass, it’s called Wake Up Everybody. I’ll just read you the first couple of verses that pertain, “Wake up everybody, no more sleeping in bed. No more backward thinking. Time for thinking ahead. The world has changed so very much from what it used to be. There’s so much hatred, war and poverty. Wake up all the teachers trying to teach a new way. Maybe then they’ll listen to what you have to say cause they are 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 embody that, but the song that kept roaring in my mind, it was an old song that was sung by Dinah Washington, Nina Simone called Trouble in Mind. Given your Blue Economy, I had to bring this lyric to the front. “Trouble in mind, I’m blue, but I won’t be blue always cause the sun’s going to shine in my backdoor someday. Well, maybe it’s not exactly the kind of blue and the kind of sun, but metaphorically, you’re overcoming those troubles in mind.” That song will shine again with respect to the water. I think your work is fantastic. I thank you for being here with me today.
Peter Neill:
It’s been a great pleasure. It’s always fun to talk to you, Rob. Thanks so much for having me.
Rob Johnson:
Thank you.
Peter Neill:
Yep. Be well.
Rob Johnson:
Talk again soon and keep us posted. I’m going to keep pushing things out through our website, social media, whatever, because I think your audience should be 10 times the size that it is because of the quality of work you’re doing. It’s only a matter of finding allies to help for the recognition of the contribution you make.
Peter Neill:
Let’s make it so.
Rob Johnson:
Check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org.
