Source: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme
URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9741000/9741475.stm
Date: 31/07/2012
Event: Professor Stephen Emmott talks about "an unprecedented planetary emergency"
People:
Evan Davis: The world population is projected to rise to ten billion by the end of this century. It's difficult to get your head around that number. Hard, too, to imagine what a world of so many people would look like, or how the planet will cope with the demand for food, water and natural resources, or what delivering those will do to the environment. Well, to help us all get a grip on these things, the computational scientist Stephen Emmott has teamed up with the Royal Court Theatre to devise a one-man show that is part interactive performance and part lecture. Our science correspondent Tom Feilden went to see the show and to meet Mr. [sic] Emmott.
Katie Mitchell: Okay, so Tim, can we have a look at the car production animation footage?
Tom Feilden: Director Katie Mitchell irons out a few last-minute glitches with the creative team behind Ten Billion, an exploration of the future of life on Earth at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre.
Katie Mitchell: And... action.
[Mournful music begins.]
Stephen Emmott: Earth is home to millions of species, yet just one dominates it - us.
Tom Feilden: But while Ten Billion is undoubtedly dramatic, this is no conventional drama. It is about the future, but this is science, not science fiction.
Katie Mitchell: I suppose the idea is to find a theatrical form to capture a very complex environmental idea about what our future is going to be like.
Stephen Emmott: Indeed, our cleverness, inventiveness and activities are now the drivers of every global problem we face...
Katie Mitchell: So normally, when we make theatre, we employ actors to impersonate people like scientists. But there's something about the complexity of this subject matter that it seemed better to address it by getting the scientists themselves to actually stand up and talk about it. And then we would support that talk with theatrical means like video animation, lighting and music.
Stephen Emmott: It's basically an exploration of what life on the planet might look like as we grow towards a population of ten billion.
Tom Feilden: The star of the show is Professor Stephen Emmott, the Head of Computational Science at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, and an academic who's become increasingly alarmed at the "eyes wide shut" approach humanity seems to be taking towards its own survival.
Stephen Emmott: We kind of know that there's a carrying capacity to Earth, and the question is: will we have reached it, with a population of ten billion? And the answer to that is: almost certainly, we've already reached it, on our current way of living and rate of consumption. [More mournful music in the background.] So then, the issue then is: if we've already gone past the carrying capacity of Earth, with three billion more on it, what problems does that create? In fact, I believe the situation we're in, right now, could rightly be called an emergency, an unprecedented planetary emergency. That's what I'm here to talk about. Now what those solutions are - I suppose they fall into two categories. One is: we could try and technologise our way out of it. But I think - setting aside, for the moment, we invented our way into these problems - I think it's far from clear that we can rely on this notion that something will come up and we'll be able to invent our way out, and technologise our way out of the problems that we face.
Tom Feilden: We might not be that lucky this time.
Stephen Emmott: We might not - exactly, we might not be. But the other option, other than technologising our way out of it, is radical behaviour change, and again it's not clear to me that we'll go with that option.
Tom Feilden: That was the other thing I was going to ask you about - what is the solution? Is it - well, certainly convincing western societies, the Americans, to don hair shirts and go without isn't a politically easy message to sell, is it.
Stephen Emmott: No, it's not. But I think it's required, because we cannot all consume like a European or an American. Now something's got to give, there. But you make a good point, I think, and it's a point I make in this talk, is that the kind of behaviour change that's necessary is far from clear that we're going to want to make that kind of behaviour change.
Tom Feilden: Unlike a more conventional drama, then, there's no resolution in the final act of Ten Billion, there's all the disparate strands of the narrative are re-woven in a happy ending. How the action really plays out, is of course up to us, over the course of the rest of this century.
Stephen Emmott: You know, one of the aims of this is to at least to try and get, what inevitably in the theatre a smallish number of people but nonetheless non-scientists - and that's important - to think differently about the problems and the scale and the nature of the problems that we face. If Katie and I can achieve that, that would be the success for this project.
[The mournful music reaches a crescendo.]
James Naughtie: Tom Feilden reporting, there, from the Royal Court.