Source: HuffPost Live
Date: 21/05/2014
Event: Paul Ehrlich: future people will ask "Is it perfectly okay to eat the bodies of your dead...?"
Credit: The Huffington Post
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Josh Zepps: It's HuffPost Live, I'm Josh Zepps. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb rocked the world with terrifying predictions of impending mass starvation, due to overpopulation. Now the iconic biologist has collaborated with ecologist Michael Tobias on a significantly less depressing book Hope on Earth: A Conversation. They will be with us, shortly - Michael Tobias is here, Paul Ehrlich will be with us in just a moment. Michael, thanks for being with us - this book is a transcript of conversations between the two of you. You both argue that we're essentially on the precipice of an environmental catastrophe. The book's title struck me - Hope on Earth - why, why is it something positive?
Michael Tobias: Well, there are many things to be positive about. We're all so accustomed to doom and gloom, but there are tremendous conservation, scientific, ethical success stories, you know, that continue across the planet to surprise us - even those of us who are most daunted by the challenges, ecologically speaking. So, it's really - it's kind of a question-mark conversation, but there's a tremendous amount of optimism in the book, notwithstanding some pretty hard-hitting data.
Josh Zepps: Yeah, I mean, I'm interested because it's a conversation between the two of you, and you're both brilliant and it's kind of this interplay between your minds. In what areas do you think that you differ the most? Where do you disagree with Paul?
Michael Tobias: Well, I think Paul's focussed for a long time on the extinction, not just of species but of whole populations. In fact, something like 16 million populations per year, 44 thousand populations every day are going extinct. I mean, it's a flock of birds, a pod of whales - I'm
well, deeply concerned about that, and of course the habitats, all the habitats, the ecosystems that are disappearing and the tipping points from the boreal forests of the Arctic to the Western Antarctic glaciers going, dissipating.
I'm also looking at individuals - I really think that we have a capacity in our species to reflect upon and celebrate and really come to the aid of individuals, it's hard-wired into us, genetically. Every child looks up into his or her mother's eyes and we get imprinted on individuals. And I think the story, if you will, about helping individuals in need, is much - has a much greater resonance. It's not so much the cold calculus of big numbers that we're just bombarded with. So that's one of the key distinctions, in the book, that we discussed.
Josh Zepps: Does that feed into your vegetarianism? That's one of the differences that struck me, that you're more focussed on "What good can I actually do to... ?" - you know, in a practical way, and the outcome for an individual living, sentient creature. Whereas Paul's more abstracted vision of how to help species is a kind of a bigger picture thing, but not an individuated concern.
Michael Tobias: Well, I think Paul - well, I don't want to put words in Dr Ehrlich's mouth, of which way, but Paul's obviously concerned with individuals - his own family and his loved ones, his colleagues all around the world, but the question arises inevitably of conservation methodologies and "triage" is a word - well, we don't like to use it, it enters into the conversation. You can't avoid it, you have to prioritise. There are so many wildfires - how do you render imperatives amid a welter of wildfires? And so the traditional issue would be, let's say, you have to choose, you say it's a "Sophie's Choice" kind of thing - do you save one person or do you save ten people? Or if you happen to be related to that one person, it gets very complicated.
Josh Zepps: Right. Paul, good to have you with us. I was just talking with Michael about -
Paul Ehrlich: Yeah, I've just got a sign saying "no internet connection" problem.
Josh Zepps: Well, at least I've got you on the telephone, so if we don't see you, then at least I'll be able to talk to you, audibly. Yeah, I was just talking to Michael about the differences between the two of you. It's a delight reading this book, with a couple of minds like yours where you're going at it and there's a lot that you do agree on, but in what area do you think you disagree the most with Michael?
Paul Ehrlich: Oh, I don't think we have any really strong disagreements - he is I think a little more focussed on animal rights and I'm a little more focussed on preserving populations and ecosystem services, but we both are concerned with animal rights and we both are concerned with preserving our life support systems. And it's a tremendous problem that we both struggle with, and... But we have a little fun more, having dialogues about, you know, how much we ought to value chickens, for example.
Josh Zepps: Yeah, I mean, that is an interesting part of the book, and I wonder what your thoughts are, since, you know, on what grounds are you not a vegetarian? There's so much in your life that feeds into care for other species. I was interested - given what we know about how animals are raised in this country and in industrial farming methods and concentrated animal feeding operations and so on -
Paul Ehrlich: Well, because of that, I have very much reduced my meat-eating. One of the problems is that you acquire your eating habits very, very early in life, and I have not seen enough of a persuasive move towards me to make me want to stop eating meat entirely, because we abuse animals. We abuse - the whole food system - if you want to look at our life support systems, whether you eat vegetables or meat or some mix of them, depending on your nutritional status, and so on, participating and eating in our planet is one of the very things that we all have to do that's very destructive and, er, you know, if people had stopped growth of the human population, back around two or three billion people, we wouldn't have to eat so much meat and we wouldn't have to eat so much, and we wouldn't be wrecking the planet as much.
We would be doing something, because of our, er, style, but I pretty much stay away from red meat and I eat some chicken and I eat some fish. And, among other things, it's easier to stay healthy that way. And I - if we hunt it, then I would say I care even less - in other words, hunting is something that animals do, and we do, and the cruelty of killing an animal is - if it's not you, it's somebody else that kills it or they starve to death, in terms of hunting, so - ah, the having millions of cows standing around in their own faeces is a really bad thing. And we ought to stop that. But what's sadly happening is it's getting worse.
Josh Zepps: Do you suspect, Paul, that in decades or centuries to come, the way that we treat animals and eat, consume them today will be looked back on as a travesty?
Paul Ehrlich: It's hard to say, because I don't think there's going to be the centuries to come, with our kind of civilisation, and with the kind of ethical issues that at least some people in our civilisation are concerned with. I think that the issues are probably more likely to be: "Is it perfectly okay to eat the bodies of your dead, because we're all so hungry?"
Josh Zepps: Really? We'll get that bad?
Paul Ehrlich: Oh, I - it's moving in that direction with a ridiculous speed. In other words, we're going to add, between now and 45 years from now, roughly - if you believe the projections - about two and a half billion people to the planet - that is half a billion more people than were alive when I was born. We already have close to a million - a billion people starving. We have roughly two billion people who are micronutrient-malnourished to a degree that affects their performance. A recent study by Sam Myers and others at Harvard showed that the more CO2 you add to the atmosphere, the lousier food becomes, the more difficult it is to get micronutrients and so on.
So I would fully expect that we're moving towards resource wars in any case, we're having resource wars over oil now - they're going to continue. We've already had one over water, and oil and water are intimately involved in growing our food. Most people don't realise that roughly 30% of the greenhouse gases we're dumping into the atmosphere, producing things like the hideous circumstances of flooding in the Balkans now, that 30% of those greenhouse gases come from our agricultural operations, which are absolutely dependent on the use of fossil fuels, the way we're running the system now.
So the industrial agricultural system is basically over. When it's going to collapse totally, nobody can say for sure. But it's going in the wrong direction, in every dimension. So the issue of - I consider the ethical issues around things like the way we raise cattle, and so on, to be important issues but relatively trivial, in terms of the wrecking of our life support systems. We can keep civilisation going without - er, without, you know, either abusing cattle or not abusing cattle - we can't keep civilisation going if we wreck our life support systems and get rid of the pollinators and the pest control operators and so on - they're absolutely essential to keeping people fed. Which would be my top priority. I care much more about what happens to people, because I'm a person - it's sort of a chauvinism.
Josh Zepps [laughs]: Um -
Paul Ehrlich: But now it's time for Michael to tell me I'm full of it.
Josh Zepps [laughs]: Well, I was just going to invite him to do so. Michael, Paul has copped a lot of flak throughout his career for being alarmist, for making predictions in The Population Bomb in 1968 that there would be outcomes in the 1970s and 1980s, which would involve mass starvation, and so on. Those things didn't eventuate. Are you currently, I suppose, as pessimistic as Paul still continues to be, or do you think there's some way we can right this ship without running it into the iceberg?
Michael Tobias: Well, I think Paul's projections, in fact, were correct. He was criticised in some instances, by some individuals in some very conservative think tanks, for over-stating the projections, but if anything, Paul and his partner and wife Anne Ehrlich not only got it right, they in some ways underestimated how bad it's gotten, in terms of the demographic numbers, in terms of the rapidity with which these tipping points - one after the other - these ecosystems are collapsing around the world, as Jared Diamond also has so brilliantly pointed out. But I think the - and I would also concur 100% with Paul that we're having this conversation because we're the same species. And therefore its very easy for us to blindside one another, and the fact that we're all taking - we're all looking at the world from the same perspective, more or less. Because we're built of the same genomes, essentially.
However, that said, I think that where I differ perhaps a little bit with Paul - not in the underlying ethical point of view, but in the overall, if you will, picture of our future, let's say 50 years hence - I see that this challenge that everyone is confronted with, worldwide, it affects everyone at some level, whether it's climate change, whether it's resource scarcity, whether it's inequality gaps economically, whether it's racism, whether it's cultural biases and the baggage of centuries that have left hundreds and hundreds of millions of people disenfranchised, marginalised at one level or another.
What I do see happening is venture philanthropy amongst the young, is hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars that are being invested by very smart asset allocators into socially conscious related instruments of financial gain. I also see movements like Move to Amend, which are utterly at the cusp of transforming corporate personhood and the reliance on money as a surrogate for free speech. I'm seeing all kinds of non-violent movements, the teaching of empathy, the learning of compassion at younger and younger ages - hopefully it's going to get into the school curricula as will environmental studies, so that the alarming increase in ecological illiteracy begins to slow down and young people can start recognising more species that they can label and names of brands - at the moment it's about 100 to one, most young people have no clue what they're looking at, when they stare at a tree or see a bird fly by.
So ecological illiteracy is going to diminish, I think we're going to see a lot more interest in high-tech re-engineering of some of our past ills, I think non-violence is going to become increasingly persuasive, as it must, so that it will pervade, not just the sciences, conservation biology but animal rights and ethics and all of our thinking about nature, which I would say ultimately we have this incredible ability to love, revere and celebrate nature - familiarity does not breed discontent [sic] in the natural world, it breeds love and companionship and symbiosis and working together and empathy that has measurable consequences in terms of being pragmatic but also idealistic. So yes, I concur totally that we're on the cusp of probably the worst crisis in 4 billion years of life on Earth. But conversely, more and more people than ever in our history are aware that they've got to take part in conversations like this, and they can make a difference - they can get out and vote, they can spread small gestures of kindness, of tenderness to everyone at every juncture, every opportunity. This is all good news.
Josh Zepps: Paul, on the question of ethics, and how we incorporate ethics into our lives - because that's a theme that goes through the book - Michael says, in the book, quote - he says: "The worry with "ethics" is that it becomes preachy, religious, cultish. If anything, the twenty-first century has real problems that require real solutions. If ethics are to play a significant role in contributing to such solutions, they need an edge, which I take to mean realism. Ethics have to be real." Do you agree with that, Paul, and if so, how do we make ethics real?
Paul Ehrlich: Making ethics real is an educational problem. Ethics is hardly discussed in our media. Ethical issues, for instance, just around climate disruption, which is only one of the many problems that we're facing, is horrendous - how do we care, how much do we care about future generations? You listen to the average denier - and they now, of course, have started to admit they've lost the battle - but listen to the average denier, they've now turned into delayers and saying "Don't worry about it. People in the future will be so rich that no matter how badly we screw up the climate and the planet, they'll be able to fix it."
Ah, and I would be much more cheery and take the same speech that Michael just made, if I felt we had a lot of time. But, for example, we are now losing visitors around the world to natural areas, to people staying at home with their computers. In other words, the trend of getting to know nature is going in the wrong direction. Virtually every single trend is going in the wrong direction. And if you listen to people like Jim Hansen and so on, we maybe have 10 or 20 years to turn those trends around. And you look at the situation in the United States, where we have a mix of a plutocracy and a theocracy, where virtually every state legislator's fighting a war against women, a war against the environment - we have an exception here in California, with Governor Brown but, you know, it's very hard to be hopeful until we get discussion in the mass media in particular, of the ethical issues, of everybody understanding.
When the IPCC middle report came out three months ago, NBC gave more space, more time, on its evening news, to the retirement of a Dodger baseball pitcher than it gave to the IPCC report. And the IPCC report is about all of our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren facing an absolutely horrendous threat, and it didn't get as much coverage as the retirement of a baseball pitcher. As one of my colleagues in Australia said, about their equally broken educational system, any country whose major values are mall crawling and sports will never have a decent education system, and we've proved that in the United States.
Josh Zepps: Michael, if you were Emperor of the World, how would you remedy - how would you remedy this, then? Wave your magic wand... I think we may just have lost - we just lost Michael but Paul, do you want to take that, just rapidly?
Paul Ehrlich: Well, if I'm Emperor of the World, I would do - the first thing I would do is make every possible move to give women full equal rights and opportunities, and give every sexually active person complete access to modern contraception and the necessary backup abortion. Anybody who's fighting the war on women, who's trying to kill women by making abortion illegal, who is trying to deny them access to contraception and so on, is simply condemning our children to a worse and worse world. I say that because we know, from what happened during the Second World War, that we can change our consumption problems, which is the bane of the population problem, we can change them very rapidly, but we cannot change the population size humanely in a quick time, other words it's going to take many decades, we should have started 40 or 50 years ago at least, trying to get our population down to a sustainable size - right now, we are so beyond the carrying capacity, the long-term carrying capacity of the planet, that we're building doom into our business-as-usual sequence.
And again, if I were Emperor of the World, population would be at the top of the list, along with consumption, and the way I'd tackle population is by attacking [?] human rights, which women should have equal access to everything, and of course getting rid of racism, getting rid of the hideous economic inequity that's been created since Ronald Reagan in the United States, with the famous Hood Robin programme of stealing from the poor and giving to the rich, which they've done a beautiful job of. So, being Emperor would be fun [Josh Zepps laughs] and then I might even give up meat, you never can tell.
Josh Zepps [laughs]: Okay. Well, I'll hold you to that. Paul and Michael, thanks so much for being with us. The book is Hope on Earth - I'm not feeing wildly hopeful but it's lovely to hear from you anyway. For more on Hope on Earth, you can check out our resource well below - there are links to it, there. Stay with HuffPost Live - there are plenty more to come, right up.