EarthX Website: https://earthxmedia.com/
Enjoy this blast from the past from the EarthX Archives. #OvercomingOvershoot was one of the first shows we produced and aired back in 2020. EarthX Media has grown a lot since then, but we still like to look back on these insightful conversations and see how far we've come.
Dr. Christopher Tucker and Professor Phoebe Barnard explore the intersections of the planet's carrying capacity, human dominance, and the climate crisis.
About #OvercomingOvershoot:
#OvercomingOvershoot takes a deep look at the myriad symptoms of ecological overshoot by way of thoughtful conversations with experts and visionaries exploring not only what’s going wrong but also what solution pathways are available to overcome overshoot. Moderated by eco-rockstar, Gary Wockner, this show will serve as an essential hub to connect people from around the world on this most pressing concern.
EarthX
Love Our Planet.
The Official Network of Earth Day.
About Us:
At EarthX, we believe our planet is a pretty special place. The people, landscapes, and critters are likely unique to the entire universe, so we consider ourselves lucky to be here. We are committed to protecting the environment by inspiring conservation and sustainability, and our programming along with our range of expert hosts support this mission. We’re glad you’re with us.
EarthX is a media company dedicated to inspiring people to care about the planet. We take an omni channel approach to reach audiences of every age through its robust 24/7 linear channel distributed across cable and FAST outlets, along with dynamic, solution oriented short form content on social and digital platforms. EarthX is home to original series, documentaries and snackable content that offer sustainable solutions to environmental challenges. EarthX is the only network that delivers entertaining and inspiring topics that impact and inspire our lives on climate and sustainability.
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#EarthDay #Environment #Sustainability #EcoFriendly #Conservation #EarthX
Enjoy this blast from the past from the EarthX Archives. #OvercomingOvershoot was one of the first shows we produced and aired back in 2020. EarthX Media has grown a lot since then, but we still like to look back on these insightful conversations and see how far we've come.
Dr. Christopher Tucker and Professor Phoebe Barnard explore the intersections of the planet's carrying capacity, human dominance, and the climate crisis.
About #OvercomingOvershoot:
#OvercomingOvershoot takes a deep look at the myriad symptoms of ecological overshoot by way of thoughtful conversations with experts and visionaries exploring not only what’s going wrong but also what solution pathways are available to overcome overshoot. Moderated by eco-rockstar, Gary Wockner, this show will serve as an essential hub to connect people from around the world on this most pressing concern.
EarthX
Love Our Planet.
The Official Network of Earth Day.
About Us:
At EarthX, we believe our planet is a pretty special place. The people, landscapes, and critters are likely unique to the entire universe, so we consider ourselves lucky to be here. We are committed to protecting the environment by inspiring conservation and sustainability, and our programming along with our range of expert hosts support this mission. We’re glad you’re with us.
EarthX is a media company dedicated to inspiring people to care about the planet. We take an omni channel approach to reach audiences of every age through its robust 24/7 linear channel distributed across cable and FAST outlets, along with dynamic, solution oriented short form content on social and digital platforms. EarthX is home to original series, documentaries and snackable content that offer sustainable solutions to environmental challenges. EarthX is the only network that delivers entertaining and inspiring topics that impact and inspire our lives on climate and sustainability.
EarthX Website: https://earthxmedia.com/
Follow Us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/earthxmedia/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/earthxmedia
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EarthXMedia/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@earthxmedia
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EarthXMedia
How to watch:
United States:
- Spectrum
- AT&T U-verse (1267)
- DIRECTV (267)
- Philo
- FuboTV
- Plex
- Fire TV
#EarthDay #Environment #Sustainability #EcoFriendly #Conservation #EarthX
Category
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TVTranscript
00:00Hi, my name is Gary Walker. I'm the host of Overcoming Overshoot, and you are watching EarthXTV.
00:07We have an exciting show today, and I'm really excited about getting a conversation with these two great people.
00:14We're going to talk about science, human population, and the global environmental crisis.
00:20Now, that is a mouthful. Hang onto your seats. This is going to move along, and you're going to be holding on tight as we talk about it.
00:29We have two guests today. One is Dr. Phoebe Bernard. She's the Chief Science and Policy Officer of the Conservation Biology Institute.
00:39Phoebe is the co-author of World Scientists' Warning of a Climate Emergency in the journal Bioscience,
00:47warning not just about climate, but also about the loss of nature and biodiversity and human overpopulation, published back in November of 2019.
00:57We also have Dr. Christopher Tucker, who's the Chairman of the American Geographical Society and author of the new book, A Planet of Three Billion,
01:08which estimates that the ecological carrying capacity of the planet should support three billion humans,
01:15which, by the way, is a 60% reduction in the number of people that are on the planet now.
01:21So, trust me, this is going to be a provocative conversation. Thanks for joining us.
01:26So, Phoebe and Chris, thanks for being on the show.
01:29For sure. Thanks for having us. Really appreciate the opportunity.
01:33Yeah, it's a pleasure, Gary. Thanks for hosting it, too. It's nice to meet you guys.
01:38So, I first want to just talk about Phoebe's paper that she co-authored, Scientists' Warning.
01:45Can you give us a little bit of the genesis for this warning and really how it's so unusual in the scientific community for thousands of scientists to take a position,
01:57you know, warning the public about climate change, biodiversity loss and the environmental crisis?
02:05Yeah, thank you, Gary. You know, we have all been trained to be dispassionate, neutral scientists.
02:13And particularly those of us like myself who've worked in government much of our careers.
02:20You know, I was running national programs in government in southern Africa for a couple of decades.
02:27And in those situations, we're expected to just be the neutral arbiters of data.
02:34And the data are meant to speak for themselves.
02:36And I think most of us have concluded that that's been a fatally flawed model.
02:42You know, we are also human beings. We are also mothers, fathers, lovers, sisters, faith community leaders, whatever we may be.
02:52And that has in these times really threatened and pressurized that role of us, of ours as neutral arbiters of science.
03:02So I think thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of scientists around the world have been increasingly frustrated that, you know,
03:12for all kinds of evolutionary behavioral reasons, we humans don't necessarily respond well to facts.
03:20And information just laid out is not compelling.
03:24But we have this long, you know, 100,000 year history as primates that enables us to listen to stories and draw morality tales out of human experience.
03:38So I think the scientists' warning came about partly as a result of collective frustration and fear and concern.
03:49And my colleague Bill Ripple at the Oregon State University has had a long history of bringing people together around that issue.
03:58You will know of the previous scientists' warnings.
04:01This specific one about the climate emergency came about over the last year and a half because of that collective wellspring of concern.
04:12And now we've got, I think, around 13,600 scientists co-signing that paper that we published in Bioscience in November.
04:23And it's still open for signature.
04:26Chris, in your line of work, is the frustration level higher than normal in the scientific community?
04:34I mean, how would you define that?
04:37Wow. You know, I think there's a lot of fractured discourse in the scientific community.
04:45And in some ways, there's frustration between the various communities within science.
04:52That's one of the reasons why I think the paper that Phoebe helped author was such a watershed event.
05:01You know, the climate community, the mainstream climate community has been largely silent on issues of population for far too long.
05:10But yet the conservation community has been very interested, very focused on how human habitats are impinging on natural habitats and leading to, you know, undermining various animal populations.
05:26So, you know, I think there's a bunch of different worldviews out there that need to be coalesced, kind of want to be coalesced.
05:34But yet the institutions, whether they're academic disciplines or the international science institutions, aren't necessarily synchronized on some of the big drivers that have given us the situation we have today.
05:49I mean, in a way, right, climate change is a symptom of a lot of human actions.
05:55And they're focused on the symptom without necessarily having an integrated, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary view of how the driving factors come together.
06:06And Phoebe, in the paper, it reminds me a little bit, you remember those books at the Worldwatch Institute you put out every year, they were called the state of the world.
06:17And it was like every year, the graphs mostly got worse, you know, the overfishing got worse, the amount of deforestation got worse, the gross domestic product went higher, population growth got higher, etc.
06:31And so you have a series of graphs in the paper, which are, you know, kind of depict or graphically depict the warning.
06:40And maybe just talk about a few of those as you see fit, in terms of, you know, which graphs are going the worst, and then also if there's a few that are actually turning the right direction.
06:53Sure. Well, you know, it's interesting that we're here talking about population, because it has been, of course, the real elephant in the room that people haven't been willing to discuss.
07:02And of course, not just in the scientific community, but crucially, in society as a whole, in the policy environment, political environment, and in the economy and how population affects our ability to deliver, you know, national and global development goals.
07:18And yet, it's interesting that, in my perspective, our paper spoke mostly about the enormous impacts of consumption.
07:28And I want to really emphasize that these are, you know, two important sides of the same problem.
07:34When you've worked in developing countries, as long as I have, then you understand how increases in consumption can totally undermine a country's national development goals in just the same way that increases in population can.
07:53So, we had, I think, about, I don't know, 17, 16 graphs in our paper, many of which showed enormous increases in consumption, you know, per capita meat consumption, which is a significant thing, of course, for our climate because of methane and other emissions.
08:12The number of ruminants on the world, our human population, the world's GDP just burgeoning, tree cover loss around the planet, and energy consumption, all these kinds of things are just mushrooming.
08:32And part of that is, of course, a function of population, although the bigger thing, I think, has been also the enormous consumption of not only the rich northern world, but increasingly, you know, the countries that finally are able to start delivering better services for their people.
08:56So, how do we deal with these issues? We need to tackle them both, and I'm sure we'll return to that in the conversation. But there have been a couple of real, I think, high points that we can take from these graphs.
09:15One is that the total fertility rate has been declining significantly globally. Another is that we see from several of the graphs relating to carbon pricing and fossil fuel subsidies, and a number of other areas, the importance of good policies.
09:37Where we have policy curveballs coming in, as we have seen in several countries around the world in the last few years, that can blow all of our best intentions out of the water. And so, the policies that we put in place are significant at shifting that curve.
09:57But we are needing to tackle hyper-consumption just as much as we're needing to tackle population, if not more.
10:08In your paper, you guys wrote a few recommendations. Can you go into those just a little more specifically?
10:17Yeah, there were basically six, and it was that we need to focus our attention as a global community. And also, some of these can be handled by people individually in six areas.
10:31One was energy, not only energy conservation, but obviously transitions to clean energy sources. Pollutants, atmospheric pollutants, including methane, carbon, so on. So, we need to do things like manage manure on farms and reduce the amount of it.
10:51Thirdly, nature restoration and conservation. And as a biodiversity specialist, I want to really emphasize this, because every hectare of land, every acre of land that we are losing is one more nail in the coffin of our climate stability and our climate emergency.
11:12So, we are entering the UN decade of ecosystem restoration, and we really need to focus on that. But at the same time, we need to just stop carving up land, stop carving up land, and especially stop carving up new land.
11:27Fourthly, food systems. As I referred to with manure, we need to have regenerative agriculture, an increase in plant-based diet so that we are not consuming enormous numbers of meat. It does have a significant impact on our climate.
11:45Obviously, population, that we need to start talking about it, and that we need to invest in education and family planning support in a way that we have not done at scale enough by a long shot. And we need to depoliticize the issue and be able to talk about it frankly, because it is part of the solution.
12:07And I'm sure we'll return to that. And then finally, economic goals. Instead of having an economy which exalts GDP and profit over almost everything, we need to have an economy where people and the planet actually matter, and we are balancing economic goals for better effect.
12:31It seems to me that the, you know, and I used to work as a scientist, and of course I know a lot of scientists and, you know, scientists aren't activists by training and by sort of, you know, their soul really isn't an activist soul so much either.
12:47And so, you know, to get, you know, thousands and thousands of scientists to agree to sign on to this, I also think it's a watershed movement. But also, the last two points you brought up, like, you know, kind of challenging economic growth, and GDP was your last one, and of course the one right before it, which we're going to talk about a little bit more, especially with Chris, is this concept of population and overpopulation.
13:10Those would seem to me even harder to sort of get scientists to, you know, jump into the ring and put on their gloves and, you know, take a stand on. Do you feel like that was true in your communication and your development of this book, or of the paper? Yeah.
13:26I do and I don't. You know, you're right that many scientists don't have an activist soul, but to be honest, a hell of a lot do. I'm probably one of them, but the scientific community is almost as diverse as everybody else, anybody else.
13:46And we have had to challenge our notions of what it means to be a good citizen, as well as a good scientist. So, you know, James Hansen and all the other people we can think of who have taken brave stands and challenged policy and tried to warn people for decades now.
14:08They are people who have realized that they can't sleep at night if they're not making sure that their results are really changing the world.
14:20You know, many years ago I was at Colorado State University and there was a program. It was called the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program or something like that. It was about training scientists to learn how to talk to real people, to learn how to, you know, communicate in ways that the media and the public can understand, and then giving them opportunities to get out there and speak.
14:40Is there more of that kind of thing going on now? It's been, you know, two decades since I've been really involved.
14:44Tons more. I mean, there's a Facebook group called Science Communication Africa, for example, that has hundreds and hundreds of members, and it's grown exponentially.
14:54There are programs like the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program around the country, which are bringing in a much greater diversity of people into the scientific community around conservation and ecosystems, at least, which encourages and focuses on not only diversified voices, which is an enormously important issue in all of our fields,
15:21but also to help people feel effective at communicating, you know, get them out of their, out from under their mushrooms.
15:34But, you know, we all know scientists who went into science because they maybe felt more comfortable with other animals or with a microscope than with other people, but I honestly don't think they're in the majority.
15:48Well, thanks. So, you know, you have led an effort to issue a warning, and we obviously hope that more and more people in the public are paying attention to it.
16:01So, Chris has issued kind of a different kind of warning. He's the author of this new book, A Planet of Three Billion, and it is arguing that we are way overshot in terms of the number of people on the planet, and the carrying capacity is actually much lower for the human population.
16:21Now, I'm very interested in this topic. I used to work as a carrying capacity modeler for wildlife populations, and, you know, it's always fascinating that we can have the most, and, you know, Phoebe, you'll appreciate this as a conservation biologist,
16:34we can have the most cold-headed, rational conversation about how many elk should be in this geographic area, but you talk about the number of people who are around, and, of course, we just, we lose all sense of rationality in science about the thing.
16:50Chris, tell us a little bit about kind of the genesis of this book, this idea of a carrying capacity of the human population, and, you know, why you wrote it.
17:01Yeah, yeah, sure. And thanks so much for the opportunity to speak and the opportunity to be here side-by-side with Phoebe.
17:09We've had some great conversations since we met after the publishing of her paper, and I'm certainly the better for our conversations.
17:20My book really started 25 years ago. Back in 1995, I worked at Columbia University in the provost's office for the guy that was launching the Earth Institute. Some people have heard about the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
17:36And the inaugural lecture was entitled, How Many People Can the Earth Support? And it was given by Joel Cohen, and that was his brand new book in 1995, and he was one of our professors, and it seemed like the central question that everybody should be asking.
17:53And I talk about it a little bit in my book. And, you know, I was just a dumb kid in a way, listening to these fantastic lectures, trying to assimilate, you know, all this information in my head.
18:03And it probably took me another decade after that to realize that his question, how many people can the Earth support, was perhaps the most profound question we could ask ourselves about the fate of our planet and our species.
18:17But yet, I also realized I didn't like his answer at all. You know, his answer was kind of this factor analysis of, you know, well, if we had this much water and this much protein, we could support this many people.
18:29And if we, you know, had, you know, this much, you know, all these various factors, we can support that many people. And it seemed kind of disembodied and unanchored in a way that I couldn't place. It probably took me into the early 2000s before I realized the ahistorical and a geographical nature of his analysis really left me unsatisfied.
18:57And, you know, so I kind of went about on my own, you know, quest to understand the other literatures, the other ways of looking about it, and how to answer that question.
19:08And distinctly, you know, people need to appreciate that the question he asks isn't about Thomas Malthus, right? It isn't how many people can we feed? Is it, you know, is population going to outstrip our ability to feed people or to give them fresh water?
19:23I have no doubt that we can engineer all sorts of additional food and water strategies to feed a continued runaway population.
19:35But you have to look at the other side of the coin, which is to what extent will that undermine our Earth's long term ecological carrying capacity and its ability to support our species over the long term?
19:48And, you know, long term is a term not everybody loves. I think Keynes once said, you know, in the long term, we're all dead. But still, we need to understand that, you know, while we might be able to feed ourselves today, it could actually lead to massive collapse of the ecosystems in which we evolved as a species and which fundamentally support us.
20:11In your book, you talk also about this concept of human wastes, and why the criticisms of Malthus and Ehrlich are wrong and inaccurate. Tell us a little bit about that.
20:24Well, you know, I mean, first of all, what I like to say is, I don't use the term overpopulation, because I feel like it jumps past the essential question. I want somebody to answer for themselves the question, how many people can the Earth support?
20:42And when they come to that answer, in my case, I came to 3 billion. As my optimistic number, I do want to point out, when you look at 3 billion, and you realize we're at 7.7, getting ready to round 7.8 billion, then you can say, ah, we have overshot our Earth, our planet's long term ecological carrying capacity.
21:03And so, you know, then maybe you can use the word overpopulation. But I feel like there's just so many kind of uncomfortable and misplaced overtones to the word overpopulation. And I've had this discussion with friends that, you know, my friends at the Overpopulation Project and people that use it, who I know their hearts in the right place, and I know their analysis is sound.
21:27But so often, we'll get a brochure or a news report that'll say overpopulation, the world's overpopulated, and there'll be a sea of black and brown faces in some faraway land. And they never, like, you know, go to a golf tournament in the United States filled with a bunch of white people and say, oh, my God, overpopulation, right?
21:46So there's some things that make me inherently uncomfortable with that term, and I think the history around that term.
21:52But I think, you know, when you look at Malthus and those guys, they were really focused on more of a, I'd call it an abstract question. They were trapped on a little island called England in the early 1800s, late 1700s, trying to figure out what the impacts of industrialization would be.
22:12And as you have a wealthier and wealthier growing middle class, and you're consuming the resources on this small island, you know, can you support them? And I think, to this day, we have this tension between discussion of carrying capacity in individual nations and the carrying capacity of the planet. I think we'll get to that a little bit later in the conversation.
22:35One thing I want to bring up, and I'm going to set you both up for this question. Back when I worked as an ecological modeler for carrying capacity for big game herds, we would have, like, a boundary like Rocky Mountain National Park. How many elk should be in Rocky Mountain National Park?
22:51And what we did is we measured the forage base, how much forage is out there. The first thing we did, though, was cut that in half. We'd say half of it has to stay on the ground because you need the vegetation to be able to rejuvenate itself every year. And if you eat it down to the roots, of course, you destroy the vegetation's ability to grow and support animals.
23:15And so, you know, Chris, you brought up in your book, and I know Phoebe is a wildlife biologist, especially in Southern Africa, where, you know, big game and the wildlife herds are such a big issue. You brought up the concept of Half Earth and how your book ties into the Half Earth Project, which was created by E.O. Wilson, who we hope to get on the show at some other time. So tell us a little bit about the Half Earth concept and how your book ties into that.
23:40Sure. Yeah. So, you know, E.O. Wilson, he's just, you know, one of those giants that we're lucky to stand on his shoulders. After a really long career writing about biodiversity and a lot of related topics, he wrote a book in 20, I want to say 2016, 17, entitled Half Earth. And now he's a biologist, not a geographer.
24:10Not really telling me which half of the Earth he believed needed to be supported. There's really precious few geographic references at all. But his comment is, if we don't set aside, or his thesis is, if we don't set aside half of the Earth's natural habitats, then it will undermine our planet's ability to support us as a species.
24:34And, you know, you can ask the question, is it half of the terrestrial planet and less of the ocean or more of the ocean and less of the terrestrial planet? And I think there's been a movement called the Half Earth Movement that was spawned by his book that has gotten very geographical. There's a lot of maps on the web where they talk about the eco regions that need to be protected, etc.
25:00And I think that's great. To me, I actually suspect the percentage is much higher than 50% that needs to be protected. And there's all sorts of little questions like if you take an eco region and cut it in half and only support this half perfectly and annihilate this half, is that okay? Or if you take another eco region and you cut it into little checkers and you delete half and leave the other half, is that okay?
25:25So I think there's fundamental questions about the methodology. But as a rhetorical approach to get people to pay attention, I think it was very useful.
25:34And Phoebe, I'd like you to comment a little bit too, because as a conservation biologist, you know, a lot of what Chris has said is about saving, you know, eco regions and half the Earth, so that we can keep the human species to create our ability to survive.
25:56But of course, we share this planet with, you know, a vast number, you know, millions of extraordinary and beautiful and special critters too. And as a conservation biologist, you know, just tell us a little bit about, you know, your concept of like protecting half the Earth for the other critters too.
26:12I spent a little bit of time in Africa and Zimbabwe and Zambia and Botswana. So I know, you know, some of the issues are down there around game management and the conflicts with people. And tell us a little bit about what you're thinking there.
26:25Well, look, you know, fundamentally, this is an issue that cuts to the core of our sense of identity as a species and our ethics about how we live on this planet.
26:38I am a conservation biologist, but I'm also a national development strategist and a global change ecologist. So I'm thinking all the time, certainly, yes, of humans as just another mammal, but more importantly, how can we use our policy power, our intellectual power to do better than we could?
27:04You know, Southern Africa, like much of the world, has very, very strong competing priorities. You know, there are poverty and literacy and human health imperatives.
27:20And one may say that the issues of planetary health and all those exquisite other species, beautifully evolved other species that we are concerned about, not just large game, but also, you know, plants that are used as firewood and as medicinal herbs and all of these things.
27:41All of them can be equally under threat. Not equally, but all of them can be under threat. And so we need to figure out a way that enables us to balance all of these things better.
27:57Now, systematic conservation planning has been doing this for many, many years. My colleague Carly Vine, who is working on the geography of the half-Earth planning, is one of them.
28:12Andrew Bonfred, a really good friend and professor at Cambridge, and Rhys Green, also at Cambridge, have been working on the principle for some years about whether we spare the land or share the land for agriculture.
28:29And by that, I mean, you know, do we intensify agriculture in a small amount of space to deliver what we need for food security, but maximize the apparent conservation benefits? Or do we enable a situation where people are living more lightly on the land, but further afield, and agriculture is small-scale subsistence, which delivers good food security,
28:56but may expand the pressure on the land. And that is an intense and important debate in this field. You know, I felt that when I started working for governments in Namibia and South Africa, we had to overcome a long and racist legacy of conservation in that part of the world
29:20that hamstrung our ability to make positive change and to integrate conservation with national development. I've written books on that subject in those countries. And it's really, really important to be able to find that right balance.
29:38It's easy to do it once we let go of our sense that there's a conflict between wildlife and people. It is possible to reimagine an economy and a society and constitutional and programmatic priorities that enable that. And I think Namibia and South Africa are two countries that have done that quite well.
30:04Chris, in your book, you have several pages of graphs and really wonderful images. And one of them is about ecoregions on the planet. Kind of just tell us a little bit about what you mean by an ecoregion and why some of them, for example, might be more worth saving or putting in the half we save as opposed to others.
30:27Sure. Yeah. So ecoregions methodology, I found very useful to thinking through the problem of runaway population growth and its human footprint on our planet. So it's a biogeographical methodology, right? So geography as a discipline focuses on the physical geography, the mountains, the oceans, kind of the things that are fairly stable over time.
30:57Our biogeography, which are the flora and the fauna and how they have evolved in these unique geographies. And then our human geography, which is ever changing, right? Humans are continually changing the surface of our planet.
31:12So as a biogeographical method, a community of scientists from the 1960s onwards have iterated on defining a set of ecoregions, geographically bounded regions that have unique flora, fauna, I'd say singular flows of water over particular sets of terrain and climate.
31:35And so they're very unique places. And when you pave them, you know, when you delete those resources, they're gone. You can't say, oh, well, there's another desert over there. So, you know, we didn't need this desert. They're actually not the same. They may be part of the same biome, but they're not, they don't serve the same unique function on our planet.
31:54And, you know, I grew up in Florida. I always like to point out that the Everglades, right, are the Everglades. And there may be other estuarial grassland, you know, ecosystems out there, but not in central Florida. And it plays a fundamental role in that unique place on our planet.
32:12So when you go through the ecoregions dataset, and if you just Google ecoregions 2017, you'll find a great interactive map. And I have some images that you might want to share.
32:24You can tour these unique ecoregions, hundreds of them, that support, provide specific ecosystem goods and services to our planet and, you know, and therefore us as a species. So there's both terrestrial ecoregions and marine ecoregions.
32:47And I thought those were important. So really at the center of my book, literally at the center, if you open up my book to the middle, you know, I try to get people to look at the planet through the lens of those pristine ecoregions that have been stable over many thousands of years, certainly since the end of the last glaciation, let's say 14,000 years ago.
33:08And then the human footprint, just some basic layers like urbanization and population density, right, where humans are, we tend to, you know, mow down the trees and everything so we can put down a house.
33:21The roads, the tens of millions of miles of roads that we have used to not just delete the ecosystem resources in the way, but then to transect, right, literally separate ecoregions so they have difficulty functioning.
33:39Toxic sites, you know, we do all these things with heavy metals and endocrine disruptors. And it's easy to talk about them in the abstract. But, you know, if you look at my maps, it's a global problem. And it's actually much worse than my maps estimate because a lot of this is based on self-reporting and there's not enough funding for it.
33:58And then in the oceans, well, I guess also on land is intensive agriculture. Like you said, you talked about intensive agriculture or, you know, living with the land as let's say Native Americans did before colonizers showed up.
34:13But the intensive agriculture, the amount of it, the volume of it, the continuousness of it is shocking. And what it's done to delete entire ecoregions is pretty amazing.
34:28And then my last two are in the oceans, the dead zones that are based on the flow of agricultural runoff and urban runoff, excess nutrients into the oceans, more than 400 dead zones that just keep getting bigger each year.
34:45And then ocean garbage, right? Five continent sized ocean garbage. And those are our human footprint, right? Those are, they didn't have to be there and they don't have to be as big as they are. And they certainly don't have to be getting bigger every single year.
35:00All right. So we're now thoroughly depressed. Thank you for that. I'm just kidding. But I also want to point out that near the end of your book, you have a call for participation and you have some solutions that you're also promoting to decrease the ecological debt and humanely and over the long term bring down the human population.
35:24Tell us a little bit about that and also make sure you mention your website because you have a lot of stuff written on your website.
35:29Oh, yeah. Great. Thanks. Yeah. www.planet3billion.com. And I have some running commentary also on a blog there. Whenever I see things in the news, I try to put it in a little bit of context.
35:43Like Elon Musk saying, oh, my God, population is collapsing, which it isn't at all because it's growing at 80 million a year. The equivalent of 10 New York City's worth of people are being added to the planet every single year. But yet, Elon Musk can say whatever he wants in the media and they'll cover it as truth.
36:02So, yeah, you know, the first thing we need to do and one of the reasons I reached out to Phoebe after a paper is stabilize the world population and have it decrease in an orderly, humane, ethical manner.
36:20We have certain trends, right, that are driving others. So I always say climate change. It's twice as bad as you think it is, but only one tenth of the problem, first of all, because humans, the human footprint is much bigger than our carbon footprint.
36:38And every time we add a new person, right, we're contributing to all those elements of the footprint. So, you know, the first thing we need to do is bend the global population curve. And to some people, that's a weird taboo.
36:51And it has been for a while, even though I will point out that in Earth Day in 1970, right, it wasn't really a taboo at all. People talked about the doubling of the world population from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 3.7 billion in 1970.
37:09Now, 50 years has gone by, right? This last April was the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. And it was utter silence on the doubling again from 3.7 billion to 7.8 billion, like silence, not a word in the press.
37:25So, you know, clearly we need to do something. And while Phoebe pointed out total fertility rate, you know, we always often say, like, the average American family has 2.2 kids, ha ha ha. But the total fertility rate globally has been declining. But that means the slope of increase has been, you know, less positive.
37:48But that means, you know, even if every year it decreases a little, you could have the total number of people added to the planet stable, like keep doing 85, 80 million a year.
38:00So what we really need to do is bring the total fertility rate from about 2.2, where we are now, to somewhere around 1.5. And the truth is, small changes in big complex systems can lead to profound change.
38:15So we're not telling everybody to not have kids at all. We're saying we need to work globally to try to get to around a 1.5, let's say by 2030. And if we do, we won't even hit 9 billion. And some people say, well, you're going to change things fundamentally.
38:29I always like to point out that that trend, everybody accepts that the global population curve will peak, it will plateau, and then decline, just nobody knows when. So if you leave it to the demographers to predict, they'll say, well, I don't know, it depends on the factors, right? And it's not my job to tell you what the right number is, or how to change the factors.
38:51There was a controversial piece recently put out by the University of Washington that said, hey, based on women's education and women's empowerment, it appears that we're going to top out at 9.7 billion in 2064.
39:09And when I asked them, well, if we empower women more and educate them more and give them integration into the workforce and access to family planning technology more, how much more quickly could we accelerate that trend? And they said, well, that's not our job, right? We don't know. That's not our research question.
39:28So I think the truth is, through women's empowerment, education, integration in the workforce, and access to family planning technologies, tailored in different ways, appropriate ways to different regions, we can accelerate the trend that we know is happening anyways, bend the global population curve before 9 billion, and then have an orderly decrease in that number.
39:52And I think, frankly, that's the second half of my book, right? If we don't crack that nut, there's no hope, really, right? The probability and the scale of catastrophe will simply increase. But if we do, we still have a lot of work to do, rewilding. How do you run an economy where global GDP declines every year? How do you achieve prosperity? So that's really the second half of my book.
40:16In any species, when people have heard about lab rats in a cage, and, you know, with any species, really, the more dense the population becomes, the more ecologically, behaviorally, hormonally, the reproduction rate goes down.
40:37And I think that I'm a little concerned, and I know none of us mean it this way. I don't want anyone to think that there's a whole bunch of people from an authoritarian point of view that are going to control population.
40:51That's right.
40:52And I think we can expect to see more examples of where governments do try and control population, for better or worse. But, you know, we've got some experiments with that in our history, and sometimes they haven't come off so well.
41:10But there are a whole bunch of things that I see already happening with density-dependent effects on humans that I think will continue. One, you know, we've got a global pandemic going on. And even before that, a lot of people, especially in the developed world, were saying, well, you know, or maybe I should say the rich world, because much of the world now is developed.
41:38In the wealthy north, a lot of women, young friends of mine were saying, I don't think it's a good time to have a kid. I'm concerned about the state of the planet. But also, there are a whole bunch of other policy and education effects that we're seeing. People are becoming better educated almost everywhere. And that's having a big effect, as you say.
42:03So, I really want to distance the conversation from any whiff of authoritarian control, because that's not going to be what gets people talking. We all know that the birth striker movement in the UK and elsewhere is a very immediate response to people's sense that the future is less predictable.
42:28The future is less prosperous. And we all know that that's likely to be so. And so, there are a bunch of very practical existing responses to that, that I think do fall into the ecological category of density-dependent impacts. And, yeah, I'll leave it at that for a sec.
42:50Well, I'd actually love to underscore what Phoebe's saying there. And it's funny, given your accent, Phoebe, maybe you have some insight on this. But when I'd go and give book talks in the UK, for instance, the words population control would come out of some of the older generation. They'd be like, Dr. Tucker, I love your book. And, you know, what are your opinions on population control?
43:14And I'd always say, you know, the notion of population control and the notion of population policies have a very long history of being, let's just call them racist, eugenicist, xenophobic, paternalistic, and also not terribly effective.
43:32I always like to point out, I mean, it may blunt a curve, but you find these policies undertaking really inhumane, kind of despicable actions that actually don't bend the curve. And that's why I always try to say, you know, I don't want to talk about population policy. I actually want to talk about women's empowerment.
43:57And the tough thing is that women's empowerment is a good in and of itself, right? I mean, it should be done because women are humans too, right? You know, all of us should have equal rights, all of us should be equally empowered, all of us should be equally educated. It just so happens that the side benefit of that is pretty much any place where women are empowered, educated, integrated workforce and have access to family planning technologies, you have below replacement value fertility.
44:23And people don't realize that if that's the problem, the problem has been solved in Japan and Thailand and the United States without immigration and the EU. So it's, this is nothing new. We know how to solve, you know, solve that for that equation. But population policy, whenever I hear those words, my skin crawls and I just know the conversation is going in the wrong direction.
44:46These are the times that really require not only compassion on the part of all of us around the world in navigating this very uncertain and tricky future, but also just incredibly wise, balanced public policy and working in public policy.
45:05I'm living in an area of the world that is very wise and progressive, in my opinion, about some of these things, but needs to still have a bit of a kick up the butt on many issues. And I think that having a compassionate and education and support approach to this issue is the only way forward.
45:32And I want to, just a little bit, you know, I guess my own story. I was a scientist for many years working in a research lab and then I became an activist, environmental activism, mostly around fracking, climate science and river protection.
45:48And I finally got to a point where I just was aggravated because almost as an activist, no matter what I did in the United States, in the state of Colorado, everything is being overwhelmed by population growth. And there was a David Brower used to have this famous quote,
46:03every victory is temporary, every loss is permanent in the world of environmental protection. And so you could save this river, but the growth was coming, it was coming, it's like this big Pac-Man out there, and pretty soon the pressure is going to be so intense that they're going to build a dam and drain the river, that kind of thing.
46:22So I finally started talking about population growth, which I think we need to normalize, somehow normalize the conversation around population growth so that we can start having, again, as Chris noted, in 1970 Gaylord Nelson, who was one of the, if not the founder of Earth Day, did it to talk about population and overpopulation.
46:43And it was sort of the genesis of a lot of the American environmental movement, you know, in the 1980s, when I sort of came of age, any event you went to, you talked about population all the time, the Sierra Club, whoever. And of course, now, no one talks about population.
46:58Phoebe, maybe you can just start us out a little bit, like, how do we kind of renormalize this and allow us to have the conversation again, so we can at least, you know, start making some sort of progress on this particular threat?
47:15Well, first of all, we've got to call it out for what it is. And I love the way that you've introduced that, because we have become tribal. And I mean that in the universal sense, we have become divisive, partisan, tribal. And there's something, you know, rooted deeply in our egos and in our, you know, kind of hominid xenophobia that for many years was an adaptive trait.
47:44But is now threatening to sink us as a species. It really is. And particularly in the US at the moment. We need to recognize that our human tendencies are failing us. People react to conversations. They don't proactively think about things.
48:09So we need to consciously start the conversations, not only about how we deal with population, but how we deal with wicked problems, how we deal with controversial issues, and how we regain our ability to talk in a civil way about stuff. I'll leave it there for the moment, but I've got some other ideas on that too.
48:34And so, you know, Chris, you even have the more sort of profound job because you came out with a book which is calling for decreasing the human population on the planet by 60%. So I'm interested in, you know, some of the reactions you've got to it and just sort of what that relationship with the public and the media has been like.
48:55But also there's plenty of people that I think are very thoughtful, reasonable people that are at like 1.5 to 2 billion. I would like to point out a big chunk of my book is that I'm a technological optimist. And I believe there's a lot of power to capitalism, even though there's a lot of harm that it does to our planet. So my optimistic number is 3 billion. I just want to be clear.
49:17But, you know, the response has been positive because I think, like Phoebe said, you know, the way you have the conversation matters. You need to invite people into the conversation and not just tell everybody that they're wrong. And I think there was, you know, the way the conversation was done in the 70s turned off a lot of people.
49:40You know, it sent a bunch of people packing, just telling them they're all wrong. And I think now what people are trying to do, they're watching the news every day and they see another massive conflagration on the West Coast or they see some more bad news about the ocean or more about, you know, carbon in the atmosphere.
49:56And they're trying to make sense of it. Like, why is there this continuous flow of really bad stuff going on? And once you give them, you know, the concepts of carrying capacity and ecological debt and human footprint, you give them a handful of conceptual tools with which to make sense of what's going on.
50:17And they start saying, maybe we haven't, you know, maybe the human population has exceeded our carrying capacity of our planet. What is my number? Every once in a while, you'll get some troll on Twitter who says, I had one the other day, says, we can handle 26 billion. You don't know what you're talking about. And I say, great, just show me your data and show me your math. Love to have the conversation.
50:42And of course, you get no response because they suddenly realize they're fundamentally unhinged from reality.
50:49But have any of those people convinced you, Chris, that their numbers have merit?
50:54Yeah, you know, I've had definitely some people that have forced me to think a little bit lower. And we get into real details about energy production, energy consumption, about the actual technologies that we would need to use in the future, right, to get there. Same thing with water, same thing with food. And they'll say, like, there's only so much solar you can do. And there's only so much transmission. They get into real details.
51:20And I love having those conversations. I've had some that their optimism gets them to four and a half to five. And my only response is, God, I hope you're right. That would make solving this so much easier. You know what I mean? I'm not there yet. But God, I hope you're right.
51:37God, I hope you're right. Anyone who sits there and says 7.7 billion and above. Nobody's even tried. Honestly, they're like, I think we're fine and good. Great. Show me your data. Show me your math. Show me how we're not incurring long term ecological debt every time we add another human. Just show me that.
51:55And it's silent because I think they they take, you know, continued growth, kind of this growth ideology as an article of faith, you know, so they have to say it on Twitter loudly with bravado. But the moment you ask them a reasonable question, they just kind of fall apart. So no, no, nobody has even tried to argue that our current numbers and the rate of 80 million a year added 10 New York City's added.
52:25To the planet every year is remotely sustainable. Nobody's even tried.
52:30Gary, can I continue that just for a second?
52:32Yeah, please.
52:34Not long. And I, ironically, as an ecologist, I haven't been too concerned about a number. I'm more concerned about the process that gets people changing behavior or thinking about things differently.
52:50And in a way, as a policy person, I'm thinking that that number is of use to public policy wonks and a few others like us. But, you know, for most people, it's an irrelevant number. There are a couple of things that I think motivate people and information and fear and doom are not among them.
53:14So I think looking at positive solutions or alternative models of how we could live our society, how we think about common problems is really, really important.
53:25And, you know, like many people, I'm involved after hours in in organizations like the Transition Network that help put forward really effective local models of how people can live more lightly on the planet, more collaboratively on the planet and that kind of thing.
53:45And so I think looking and putting forward those alternative models is really powerful at helping people know that there's an alternative to this broken system that we are living in, particularly in the West, and that things don't have to be this way. We can, in fact, change them.
54:02I have a wonderful friend called Harry Balasubramanian and Harry used to work for a large wealthy conservation organization and as a senior policy and monitoring person, but he did a back of the envelope calculation one day and realized that the global corporate world was spending about 54 times, I can't remember the exact figure, but it was about 54 times
54:31in trashing the planet, for lack of a more nuanced term, than the conservation organizations of the planet were having as a global budget to stop them and that therefore we needed to think about how we do things differently and not keep tilting at windmills or shouting into the wind, if I can put it delicately.
54:56But, you know, I think numbers do have value and your idea of focusing on numbers for reproduction is important. Look at what Bill McKibben has done in the 350.org global movement in getting people to focus on a number, a goal for bringing down emissions. It's very, very similar to what we need to do with population.
55:21And I mean, I'd love to just add to that. There's numbers, there's numbers and there's numbers, right? So I answered the question, how many people can the earth support? But when people start talking about overpopulation, which is a natural, you know, conclusion of my title even, I always say, you know, I'm less concerned about overpopulation. I'm more concerned about runaway population growth, right?
55:48And it's, it's a process that we have no handle on. And it's almost like asymmetric, you know, you'd love to cross that barrier and go negative, but you just keep, we just keep adding more and more and more and never going negative, even though we could get fertility within point one of, you know, replacement value, below replacement value, and still just climb forever.
56:09Well, luckily, in a way, it's not up to us to give the world anything, you know, the world is developing in a messy, needs based way.
56:24But I think that the, the dialogue that's happening in many countries, and the incredible energy and dynamic involvement of young people around the world is changing the old thinking that people over 40 have been having people especially over 60. And I'm 59.
56:50And, and I take great hope from that, because I see the shift happening very erratically, very imperfectly, not nearly fast enough. But elections are happening and changing the debate in so many countries, and people are looking forward to positive alternatives for society.
57:15And, you know, just to wrap up, I kind of agree with Chris, and both of you, I think, in the last 12 months, I've seen more conversation around this issue. And that's, that's got to be a positive thing, too. This has been a great conversation. You know, again, we talked earlier, I think part of our goal is to try to normalize the conversation around population growth, and we've taken a big step towards that.
57:36When this show is posted on EarthXTV, we'll be able to share it widely. And I hope that you too can share it with your networks, which are very, very large, you know, in all the places and the people you work with. And I, you know, I just want to especially acknowledge that one of the problems we have in this conversation is trying to find a platform that will even allow us to have it. And so I want to, you know, a nod here to EarthX and EarthXTV for allowing, yeah, allowing us to have this conversation.
58:06You couldn't, you couldn't be more right on that. So kudos to EarthX, and thanks for having us on.
58:13All right. Thank you, Phoebe. Thank you, Chris. Again, I'm Gary Wachner, the host of Overcoming Overshoot, and you are watching EarthXTV.