Are We in Trouble - Part 1 | #OvercomingOvershoot S1E1 | EarthX - video Dailymotion

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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.    Host Gary Wockner explores challenges due to overshoot. Tom Butler, VP for Conservation Advocacy, explains how the population is causing environmental & sustainability issues.   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

Transcript

00:00:00Hi, I'm Gary Walkner. You're watching EarthX TV. And this is our first episode of Overcoming

00:00:07Overshoot. And today on the on the show, we are delighted to have the editor of the book that has

00:00:15inspired this show, Tom Butler. This book is massive. It's five times the size of my head.

00:00:23It is a coffee table book of pictures, and they are unsettling pictures titled Overdevelopment,

00:00:30Overpopulation, and Overshoot. Thanks for being on the show, Tom.

00:00:36And it's my pleasure, Gary. Glad to be with you.

00:00:39Tom, this is a kind of just start right out. This is a coffee table book of just amazing

00:00:46pictures. I'm just going to, you know, open one here. And they are, for the most part,

00:00:53see how big it is. It's like huge to fit across your coffee table, just amazing pictures.

00:00:58And they are mostly unsettling pictures. And I just want to do a, you know, a quick check.

00:01:03And when I was younger in college, there was a book by the Worldwatch Institute. It was called

00:01:08The State of the World. Do you remember that book? Sure. It was a series. They put it up

00:01:13every year. Yeah, they put it out every year. And it was full of numbers and statistics and graphs,

00:01:18basically chronicling the demise of the planet more than anything else. But you chose a different

00:01:24path, you know, to use to do this coffee table picture book kind of tells a similar story,

00:01:30but it's all with like images and pictures. So, you know, just tell us a little bit about the

00:01:34genesis of the book and why you decided to go with images and pictures and what you hope to

00:01:38achieve with it. Well, you're absolutely right. We did make a conscious decision to use this format

00:01:46of a large format coffee table book rather than a litany of statistics or trends or charts

00:01:54or policy papers. You know, if you look at the literature in the field of population going

00:02:00back decades, there is no shortage of policy papers or analyses of demographic trends.

00:02:09There's no dearth of technical information, academic primarily and insular really in that field.

00:02:19But does that actually move a popular conversation? Not so much. You know, you just referenced that

00:02:26wonderful series of Worldwatch Institute publications, which were fabulous, and they

00:02:32were highly read. They were well read within the conservation and environmental communities.

00:02:36And I think they percolated some out into the policymaking world in Washington, D.C. during

00:02:41the years that those were published. But they never had a large popular audience. They never

00:02:47drove a national conversation about sustainability. I'm not saying that we necessarily had the

00:02:54aspirations for the book over that we would, but we wanted to at least give ourselves a fighting

00:03:02chance that we could meet regular people, people who had never thought about this issue necessarily,

00:03:09and affect their kind of emotional center of the brain, not the rational center of the brain.

00:03:15That was the rationale behind the photo format. And you're the author, editor, co-editor of more

00:03:22than a dozen books, including Wildlands Philanthropy, Plundering Appalachia, Protecting

00:03:28the Wild and Energy, Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth. You know, this book

00:03:34is a little different format than those. You were also the former editor of Wild Earth Journal.

00:03:39And then you took over at the Tompkins Conservation, which is, of course, down in Patagonia in Chile,

00:03:46and worked with that organization for a long time. Do you feel like this book, how is it

00:03:51different from some of your other efforts? And why do you think it has made a little bit

00:03:56difference in the way that it's reached to the public? It was a natural culmination of the

00:04:01publishing program that the foundation was operating for years and years. I'll sort of

00:04:07digress a little bit with a little bit of history. Yeah, please. Late Douglas Tompkins, my former

00:04:13boss and mentor, was an absolutely brilliant business person and conservationist. People

00:04:19who may not know his name, probably know the companies that he co-founded, the North Face

00:04:25initially. And then he actually became a very wealthy person when he started the fashion

00:04:32company Esprit. Those of us who are old enough to have a little bit of gray in our beards,

00:04:38remember walking around in the 1980s when, you know, every 14-year-old in North America needed

00:04:43to have a t-shirt that said Esprit across the front. And consequently, you know, that was Doug

00:04:51Tompkins and his first wife, Susie Tompkins, creating a fashion brand that became a global

00:04:57powerhouse. But after, Doug Tompkins was also a mountaineer, adventurer, climber, and he was

00:05:05spending several, besides running his company, he was spending several months of the year out

00:05:10on expeditions, kayaking or climbing around the world with his buddies, Yvon Chouinard and Rick

00:05:16Ridgeway and others. And everywhere he went, he saw what? He saw that the wild world was being

00:05:23degraded. It was being eaten slowly, you know, and the wild places that he'd been to before,

00:05:28when he went back, they were not so wild. They were shrinking. And he was also a pilot,

00:05:34so he saw a lot of that degradation of the natural world as wild habitat was lost to the

00:05:40creeping sprawl of industrial humanity. He saw that from the air. And there's no better way to

00:05:47understand how wildness erodes than from above. So all of this is percolating in his mind,

00:05:56and he eventually just got tired of business and said, you know, I'm selling my half of Esprit.

00:06:03And he took that money and he endowed his initial foundation, a family foundation called the

00:06:10Foundation for Deep Ecology. It's since been subsumed into a larger NGO called Tompkins

00:06:17Conservation, which now works primarily, as you noted, on creating new national parks in

00:06:22South America, Chile, and Argentina. But at the time he first started the foundation, he was a

00:06:28traditional grant maker, supporting groups in the US that were helping to protect public lands,

00:06:34helping to fight off wildlife destroying activities. And he also started a publishing

00:06:40program. He was inspired by the late David Brower. You remember those coffee table books that the

00:06:45Sierra Club put out in the 1970s? Absolutely, yeah. Those exhibit format books that Dave Brower

00:06:51published, that was when Dave, then Doug Tompkins was a young guy, and he found those

00:06:57incredibly compelling. That idea that you create essentially a campaign centerpiece

00:07:03in the format of a coffee table book. So the Foundation for Deep Ecology, since its

00:07:10inception, when Doug first started up, was producing large format coffee books and then doing associated

00:07:18grant making to NGOs, primarily scrappy little wilderness defense groups, on those particular

00:07:25issues. He first published a great book called Clear Cut, the subtitle of which

00:07:30was The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry, about how clear cutting was destroying so much of

00:07:36America's forests, particularly on public lands. And from there, there was this

00:07:42series of large format books, usually kind of focused on a particular issue, industrial

00:07:50forestry, public lands grazing. We published a book on mountaintop removal, coal mining

00:07:57in Appalachia, called Plundering Appalachia. And gradually, as I was running the publishing

00:08:04program for Doug, for the Foundation, we started zooming out. Those first few

00:08:11books were really narrowly looking at a particular issue, industrial logging,

00:08:17industrial recreation, public lands grazing. But we started to zoom out, and then we

00:08:22produced the book that you mentioned about energy and how the entire toxic energy

00:08:29economy is driving both biodiversity loss and this climate crisis that we face. So we were

00:08:35getting a little farther afield. And the commonality with these books was the industrial

00:08:41worldview behind the activity, behind the culture that was participating and driving these

00:08:48activities. And the natural accumulation of zooming out and having your lens broadened

00:08:54was a book like Over, that didn't look at the symptoms, but the root causes, which is exactly

00:09:01what we're talking about with ecological overshoot. How human numbers, that's population, and human

00:09:08behavior, it's the development factor. You add those things together, and what do you get?

00:09:14Overpopulation, overdevelopment, you get equals overshoot.

00:09:19Yeah, and so that, you know, listeners know, one of our goals on the show is to have hard

00:09:24conversations to talk about some hard truths. And so we just edged right into the first

00:09:29one. And I actually, I wasn't completely telling the truth. There is one graph in this book, and only

00:09:34one. And it is the picture, or the graph of human population growth on the planet. And it is a

00:09:42classic hockey stick graph. Yeah. And then I also want to mention, there's a quote right at the

00:09:49beginning of the book, and I'll read it. And it's by one of my heroes, a guy named Al Bartlett,

00:09:56who is a professor, who was a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, which is my

00:09:59alma mater. There's a quote here by Al that says, can you think of any problem in any area of human

00:10:08endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way

00:10:17aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases of population locally, nationally, or globally?

00:10:27Yeah, and I had the, I knew Al just a little bit when I was in grad school at CU Boulder, and I had

00:10:35the pleasure of seeing Al, very near the end of his life, do one of his, one of his classic

00:10:40slideshows. This is like, I think it was in the early 2000s. And, you know, computers were,

00:10:46had been invented by then, and the internet existed. But Al showed up at this event, and it

00:10:51was, and it was a political event. And he showed up, he was the guest speaker, and he showed up with

00:10:56his overhead projector, and his, and his transparencies. And he went right through it, you

00:11:00know, just had, as he had been doing for 50 solid years, you know, telling the story of overpopulation

00:11:07and exponential growth, which, which was, of course, his favorite topic.

00:11:10Oh, he was brilliant at that. I've seen that, that, I never saw it live, but I've seen tapes

00:11:16of him with those overhead transparencies. He was just a peerless educator about exponential growth,

00:11:22you know, just making that real for people. He was, he was a marvelous, marvelous man.

00:11:27And he was a great guy. And of course, so we've edged into the, into the, you know, the first

00:11:32official, extremely controversial topic on the show, overpopulation. And of course, in the book,

00:11:38too, you hit the other controversial word, the G word, growth, over and over and over. So, you know,

00:11:44just talk to us a little bit about, you know, population, overpopulation and growth. And you

00:11:49mentioned that you think it is sort of the root cause, and why you think it's the root cause, and

00:11:55why you think we don't talk about it anymore? Well, you've just, you've gotten, there's three

00:12:01or four questions in a row there. Yeah, yeah. We could talk for days about any one of those. Let's,

00:12:07let's start with the beginning of, of the fact that we, you know, we put one, that one chart,

00:12:12that one hockey stick graph of human population growth into, in the, basically in the front piece

00:12:18of the book. And after that, no charts, we tried to be a statistic-free zone in this book, again,

00:12:24and go right to imagery that was showing how the earth is being transformed by human numbers and

00:12:32behavior. Almost like as if you were seeing a slideshow of just a snapshot of the earth,

00:12:39and the way that industrial humanity, 7.8 billion people on earth, is transforming the biosphere.

00:12:47So very simple, very clean, but we included that, that chart because it's, it is so, when you see

00:12:54that classic hockey stick graph and the, and the exponential growth, you realize that this is an

00:13:00amazingly recent phenomenon. You know, this is all really new. The world, as we look around, you may

00:13:08go through your day and you think, well, this is just how the world is. This is a normal thing.

00:13:12It's not normal in human history. It took all of our history as a species,

00:13:20depending in between one and 200,000 years, and anatomically modern humans, and the several

00:13:27million years before that, one of our closest ancestors, took all that time for the human

00:13:34population on earth to reach a billion people. And that was about the year 1800. And then what

00:13:41happens? So throughout the vast, vast, vast majority of human history, growth was not something that

00:13:49human communities experienced. Human population was incredibly stable. One demographer, a leading

00:13:56demographer who has written about this, you know, calculated that that sort of pre-industrial growth

00:14:01rate was something like one 500th of a percent. So it would have been imperceptible for a person,

00:14:08for a human being, through really pretty much any human times period until very recently,

00:14:14to experience this feeling of rapid expansion of human numbers. So this is all very new. And then

00:14:23something happened around the onset of the industrial revolution. Should we talk about

00:14:27what those factors were? Yeah, quickly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, obviously, a few things happened. One, we got

00:14:34much, much better at controlling our death rates through modern science, germ theory,

00:14:42public health measures, kind of understanding of how disease worked. So science, germ theory,

00:14:52modern public health, all of that contributed to lessening death rates and longer lives,

00:14:59which is a good thing. But we didn't necessarily control our fertility at the same rate. And then

00:15:05another sort of magical windfall occurred, which was the exploitation of fossil fuels,

00:15:10which have allowed us to essentially grow vast amounts of food, store it, process it, transport

00:15:17it, and kind of in almost a magical way, because fossil fuels are so energy dense, allowed us to

00:15:25project the kind of power onto the rest of the biosphere and the rest of our relations in the

00:15:31community of life that was unprecedented in human history. And that's where you see the

00:15:36rapid escalation in human population growth, where the curve goes like this. You know, I remember

00:15:44watching Al Gore's The Inconvenient Truth. Do you remember that show? And of course,

00:15:50the book and the show, and he did, of course, an incredible job and an incredible environmental

00:15:55leader trying to bring attention to something that needed attention. And I think he made,

00:16:00you know, in any ways, massive inroads into, you know, the problem of climate change and how to,

00:16:08you know, if there's any way to address it, how to do it. But in the show, he had he had the

00:16:14hockey stick graph of population growth, which, of course, went like that. And then they had the

00:16:21hockey stick graph of climate emissions, which went like that. And then I was I was waiting for

00:16:26him to talk about the link population and climate and climate emissions, but he only talked about

00:16:34climate emissions. And, you know, it kind of leads us into this topic of, you know, the modern

00:16:39environmental movement for the last 20 years. And when I grew up in the I kind of came of age in the

00:16:44environmental movement, late 70s, early 80s to mid 80s. And you couldn't go to any sort of meeting

00:16:50or any kind of event without any everyone was talking about population growth back then. I

00:16:54mean, it was it was like a common issue of topic. You know, if I went to the Sierra Club or I went

00:17:01here, wherever I went, it was always everyone was talking about population growth and overpopulation,

00:17:06of course, and there were almost half as many people, you know, in 1980 as there are now.

00:17:11And now, of course, it's hardly ever talked about anymore. And, you know, one of the things we're

00:17:15going to do on the show is talk about population and population growth. What are your thoughts,

00:17:20you know, on on why we don't talk about that issue anymore? Well, I think I'm first of all,

00:17:25I'm absolutely delighted that you're going to dig into that. And there are some experts there,

00:17:30of course, there are some writers also have written specifically on the mainstream

00:17:35environmental U.S. environmental movement's abandonment of population as a core concern.

00:17:42They published a paper on that several years ago that was I thought was quite brilliant. So I hope

00:17:47you'll be talking to those people in detail, but in a superficial way, you're right. You know,

00:17:52the first Earth Day in 1970, the environmental movement and concerns about population

00:18:00were the same thing. That was one thing. That was one topic of conversation. 50 years later,

00:18:10the population community is totally balkanized. The mainstream environmental community in the U.S.,

00:18:16with with one narrow exception, the big groups do not touch it, do not acknowledge it or only

00:18:23sort of in the most tangential and superficial ways. It's not a core area of their programs.

00:18:29You won't see it in their fundraising appeals. You will, for the most part, it will be studiously

00:18:36avoided. And. The reasons for that are several, but one of them is it became wildly controversial

00:18:49over time when. Discussion of population got mixed up with some really hot button issues,

00:18:57immigration politics, abortion politics. When you're talking about any kind of demographic

00:19:04trends, you're inevitably you're talking about human sexuality. OK, so there's there's a concern.

00:19:12The women's rights movement. I mean, so gender relations, gender equity,

00:19:17then people bring in colonialism, racism. There's there's just a whole bunch of minefields there.

00:19:25And so it became easier, particularly as folks on the far right end of the political spectrum

00:19:33and some people on the far left of the political spectrum got in that mix and started throwing

00:19:40bombs. And it became easier for most conservation and environmental organizations to simply say,

00:19:47we'll avoid that. The people who are working on population, those so-called population groups,

00:19:53they'll deal with that. But we'll keep talking about our issues. And the really interesting

00:20:00thing here and the irony is that what are those groups working on? Oh, let's say it's sprawl,

00:20:06it's loss of wildlife habitat or it's climate issues or energy or it's air pollution or water

00:20:14degradation or damming wild rivers. Whatever issue you're talking about, it does not matter

00:20:22if it's about the health of the biotic community, of the world, of the earth, of this living

00:20:28community in which we belong. It is affected by human numbers and human behavior. And yet

00:20:36we don't name that problem. To me, it's almost laughable. It's kind of funny. If I was sitting

00:20:48here with you, Gary, and I started to feel chest pains and shortness of breath and my energy level

00:20:56went way down and I called the doctor and got an ambulance to go in, I wouldn't want the physician,

00:21:03the ER doctor, I wouldn't want her to say, well, looks like you've got some loss of,

00:21:10you know, some chest pain here and loss of aerobic capacity. I can give you some pills

00:21:16for that and we'll treat those symptoms. I would want her to diagnose the heart attack

00:21:20and say, let's treat the source of the issue and not just try to ameliorate the symptoms.

00:21:28And yet with the population problem, the problem of ecological overshoot, for the most part,

00:21:37we don't name the problem. We just try to treat the symptoms.

00:21:41Yeah. And of course you put the word overpopulation in the title. And so that the viewers know,

00:21:49too, this book was launched with an effort about talking about this issue of overpopulation.

00:21:55And on the webpage, populationspeakout.org, populationspeakout.org, you can actually see

00:22:03the book and go through it page by page and look at the images if you don't want to go by it. And

00:22:08so the public can see it that way, too. You know, I watched a video.

00:22:14Say something about that. I mean, because I really want to acknowledge our partners. When

00:22:18the Foundation for Deep Ecology decided to work on this issue, just as we did with other

00:22:23projects, you know, when we did Plundering Appalachia, we went to the dozen or so

00:22:27NGOs that were working on mountaintop coal removal mining. And Appalachia said, educate us,

00:22:33you know, let us help produce a book for you and for you that will advance your campaign work.

00:22:39And the same thing here. We went to the experts and we worked with Population Media Center with

00:22:44Bill Ryerson and with the other key authors in the book were Eileen Crist, a professor at Virginia

00:22:52Tech who's written and produced several books on population. And the forward was contributed

00:22:57by Musimbi Kenyoro, who was the head of the Global Fund for Women, a Kenyan activist for

00:23:03human rights for many decades, brilliant, brilliant activist. And so we wanted to create

00:23:10a little editorial team that would dig into this issue again, visually, you know, not with

00:23:16statistics, not with charts, not with data, but with images that could tell this story of

00:23:23where we are on the planet in this particular moment. So, I mean, our partners at Population

00:23:28Media Center in particular were crucial in that they're doing brilliant work

00:23:34around the world, actually, primarily in the underdeveloped world, the developing world.

00:23:40And shout out to them. And there's a video of Global Population Speak Out

00:23:46and PopulationSpeakOut.org website. There's a video of you online giving a talk where you

00:23:54introduced this book. And instead of a TED Talk, you called it a FRED Talk. So what is F-R-E-D?

00:24:06What does that stand for? Well, it worked in the moment. It may not be here, but I did throw up a

00:24:13kind of a mock TED Talk stylized slide at the beginning of the talk, and talked about Fred,

00:24:19FRED Talk being facing the reality of extinction and doom. And I got a laugh out of it. I was

00:24:25trying to be a little bit light when introducing, you know, a pretty serious and a dark subject,

00:24:32you know. We're in this sixth great extinction crisis in Earth history, collapsing

00:24:40biodiversity around the globe. And it's unlike those previous extinction spasms in the geological

00:24:47record. It wasn't caused by an asteroid strike. It's caused simply by people being

00:24:56people through our prosaic actions. Now, you know, there may be some people out there, you know,

00:25:03when there's 7.8 billion people on the planet, there may be one or two who get up in the morning

00:25:09and they scowl at the world and they say, let me see what, you know, little bunny I can squish and

00:25:16which endangered species I can extinguish today. But I don't think that's the vast majority of

00:25:21people. People aren't trying to be toxic to the rest of life by getting through our day. We're

00:25:27trying to just, you know, support our families and have a decent quality of life. That is what

00:25:32people do. But it is the aggregate of those prosaic actions of eating and storing our waste

00:25:42and making our energy and producing our stuff and getting rid of that stuff and fighting,

00:25:49you know, warring against each other is a huge source of material throughput through the economy

00:25:56and a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions. So it's that war economy is one thing that few

00:26:02people often talk about is those prosaic actions of people that in sort of an aggregate add up to

00:26:09our weight on the biosphere, which is causing that unraveling of life. So that was the beginning of

00:26:18that Fred talk in which I introduced that, that the book's a little parable. One of the unusual

00:26:25things or kind of notable things, and since I wrote it, I'm not a good one to judge whether

00:26:31it works or not. Other readers will have to judge that for themselves, but in bracketing these photo

00:26:39essays and the, you know, the forward and the afterward and the one substantive essay,

00:26:45the lengthy essay by Bill Ryerson in the book, we bracketed with a parable that opens and closes

00:26:52the book, a sequence of images and just short text. And a video version of that is actually

00:26:58on online as well on YouTube. It's called Lord Man, a Parable. Lord Man, a Parable.

00:27:05In the beginning, the world was whole, and beauty prevailed, life begetting life until the waters,

00:27:14then the lands were filled with creatures. Myriad were their languages, from the nearly imperceptible

00:27:21song of moss to the bugling of elk. Whales performed their symphonies in the deep. The

00:27:29sounds of life were everywhere. Life pulsed and contracted and flourished through the ages.

00:27:37Eventually, a being appeared who learned to speak and count. For millennia, he lived well

00:27:44among his wild kin. But as his cleverness grew, so did his ambitions, until the day he declared

00:27:52himself ruler of all. Believing the self-deception that his kind was sovereign over the others,

00:28:00he taught his children that the earth had been made for man's use and profit.

00:28:06He no longer recognized his neighbors in the community of life, instead calling them natural

00:28:12resources. His work he named progress. The old religions, which had long tied the human tribe

00:28:22to the other creatures in a circle of reciprocity, were forgotten. Feigning himself lord man, he grew

00:28:30ever more clever. He learned to gather and burn fossil fuels made by ancient geological forces.

00:28:37Praise was sung incessantly to the new god, growth. His numbers became multitudes.

00:28:46As the multitude spread across the face of the earth, the songs of the other creatures

00:28:51grew fewer and fainter. Many voices went permanently quiet, replaced by the sounds of

00:28:58machines digging, churning, scarring the land, and driving the whales crazy with their noise.

00:29:06Every day, the earth grew poorer, transformed bit by bit by lord man's numbers and actions.

00:29:15The seas were emptied of fish and filled with garbage. The trees were replaced by bleeding

00:29:21stumps. The prairies were transformed into feeding factories for the ever-expanding human masses.

00:29:29Smokestacks darkened the skies. No place was sacred. No landscape safe from the insatiable

00:29:37creature's thirst for more energy to serve his god of growth. Lord man tamed rivers, split atoms,

00:29:46decapitated mountains, and stabbed the earth everywhere he thought a vein of fuel lay hidden.

00:29:54When the feverish earth cried out, sending furies to communicate her distress,

00:29:59lord man ignored the growing sickness until it could no longer be denied.

00:30:05Slowly, the scales began to fall from his eyes when he saw famine ravage the land, when he saw

00:30:12precious sources of fresh water disappear, when the longing that gnawed on his spirit made him

00:30:19recall so many creatures that had passed into oblivion. Seeing the effects of his hubris,

00:30:27he began to wonder if his empire was secure. His delusion weakened just enough to reveal the

00:30:35choice before him. Two paths, one leading to an abundant earth filled with birdsong.

00:30:45The other, the way of growth, offered riches for some, misery for many, and ultimate destruction

00:30:53for all his tribe. Would he restrain his numbers and rejoin the community of life as plain member

00:31:00and citizen, or attempt to engineer all the earth to his will, heeding only the call of more?

00:31:23The lord man being a reference to a John Muir quote when he talked about if there was a war

00:31:39between the wild beasts and lord man, he'd be tempted to side with the bears.

00:31:44In creating a kind of sort of mythic language in a sequence of images, I wanted to try to set up

00:31:54the heart of the book with a story of how we got to be here, and how our worldview changed from

00:32:03the way it, you know, the vast majority of human history, how human cultures have thought

00:32:12about the rest of life. And the way we thought about the rest of life, I mean, again, we're

00:32:20being superficial about this, and there's tremendous nuance and depth when you get into

00:32:26the notion of what it is to be indigenous, and the breadth and diversity of indigenous cultures.

00:32:33So I know I'm a white guy who's not even a trained anthropologist talking about this

00:32:41in a superficial way, but if you do look at across human cultures and human history,

00:32:46what are those things that characterize land-based, place-based indigenous cultures?

00:32:53One is the characteristic that land is sacred, that the community of life is sacred.

00:33:00There aren't ideas of this place is sacred, and this place should be trashed. It's not worthy

00:33:09of concern. And then there's a second idea, which is the even more crucial one, and has

00:33:15been bolstered, really, by the modern field of ecological science. It's a very simple idea,

00:33:23but it runs through essentially every indigenous culture. And what's that idea? It is that

00:33:29everything is connected. Everything is connected. And if you think about those two ideas,

00:33:36everything is connected and everything is sacred, if you treat the world that way,

00:33:42it will not look like the way the world is today. The only way you can have a situation

00:33:50like the way the planet looks today is if cultures have taught themselves or developed

00:33:58to think very, very differently about what the earth is, not a community of life to which we

00:34:03belong, a community of beings to which we are related. No, it is a collection of natural resources,

00:34:12things for humans to develop, exploit, profit from, improve, manage. If the earth is not a community

00:34:23of life that has produced us, nurtured us, and supports us, but rather simply a great factory

00:34:32in the universe that's floating around and it's been here to serve us, to support us,

00:34:38then we treat it as a giant planetary-scale Walmart. Get the stuff. I'm going to get the

00:34:44best deal I can. I'm going to get the most stuff. I don't want that doorbuster special.

00:34:50And you made a nice segue to one of the other topics we want to talk about. And that is

00:34:57sort of, you know, the language that we use and how that's tied to our worldview and how

00:35:05we treat the planet. When people take living beings and living phenomena, living systems,

00:35:14and they commodify them with language, that is what allows us to kill them in good conscience.

00:35:22And it's not unlike, okay, here, you said we could be provocative in this conversation. I'll

00:35:28be provocative. At least I think it's provocative to say, let's equate this to human genocide.

00:35:36If you want to precipitate a genocide of one people against another, how do you accomplish

00:35:42that? Because people don't naturally want to slaughter their fellow beings. You have to

00:35:48dehumanize the other. You have to make them sub-human. You have to make them scary or

00:35:54dangerous or less than human or something that prevents their progress. You have to make them

00:36:04the other and create cognitive systems in a people that will allow them to kill with impunity,

00:36:15you know, with pride, you know, with esprit de corps. We did it. We did what we needed to do.

00:36:23We cleaned out the vermin, whatever, you know, we were told that the other was.

00:36:29Well, that sort of process is the same one that our language allows us to do,

00:36:37sort of to precipitate the genocide against the natural world that supports us, but also is our,

00:36:44you know, our relations in the community of life. And it is language that, for the most part,

00:36:50we don't think about at all. I'm going to throw a quote at you. One of my late boss Doug Tompkins'

00:36:56favorite quotes was from the social critic Neil Everden. This is pretty close to verbatim,

00:37:02I think, if it's not a direct quote, but Neil Everden wrote once that the real authorities

00:37:08in a culture are the unexamined assumptions. And in our case, the unexamined assumptions

00:37:14are encoded in our language. So let me give you a few. If we talk about natural resources,

00:37:22we have commodified something that is alive and that we are related to or supports our life.

00:37:29If we use the very simple little preposition, our, we need to protect our forests.

00:37:37We need to save our oceans. We've included a possessive in there that suggests that those

00:37:43things belong to humanity, that they are ours, that we own them. If we use the phrase from

00:37:52ecological economics, ecosystem services, for example, that's a very common one in our field.

00:38:00Well, that suggests that the ecosystems that are around us, in which we are embedded,

00:38:06are there to serve us. Now it's of course absolutely true that we do live fully and

00:38:15totally and completely at the, due to the grace and the benefits and the mercy of wildness,

00:38:21of wild nature that supports our life. But in framing that sort of undergirding,

00:38:28that nurturing, that motherly relationship as one of ecological services, we again put it into

00:38:34that sort of wonky technical language that inputs it in an anthropocentric or human-centered frame.

00:38:41And every time we do that, we reinforce this notion that this earth is for us. It's just here,

00:38:48is for us. It's again, this planetary scale Walmart, this collection of resources to support

00:38:55us, which keeps us from relearning again, what humans knew for the vast, vast majority of our

00:39:03human history, that we are related to it all. And none of it is outside the bounds of concern.

00:39:11None of it is other, none of it is less than sacred. You know, these ways that language

00:39:21becomes so embedded on our discourse that we don't even think about them to me is really,

00:39:28if not the central, one of the, the crucial problems that really the barriers to us moving

00:39:36forward to a world of beauty, integrity, ecological health, you could call it sustainability if you

00:39:43want. That's kind of a damaged goods type phrase, I think now, but we could just call it one of

00:39:50beauty and abundance. And the path toward that future, toward beauty and abundance,

00:39:57in my mind, very much starts with our language that helps us shift our worldview

00:40:04from human-centered to life-centered, where we see the earth not as a commodity

00:40:10for human use and resources and profit, but the community to which we belong.

00:40:16And, you know, this is one of my favorite topics too, and I'll do another mini lecture on this.

00:40:21Okay, great. Give me your one. You allow me.

00:40:25One of the things that drives me crazy is the continual conversation about how

00:40:32we can only protect the environment if it's good for the economy. And so, this entire language about

00:40:39language, about resources and protecting them and creating these alternative economies,

00:40:44it always has to be about the economy. And one of the actual big concerns I have,

00:40:49and I want to relate it back to something I said a few minutes ago, you know, when I was growing up

00:40:53in the environmental movement, late 70s and the 80s, we hardly ever talked about the economy.

00:40:58I mean, I don't, it was all about the beauty and grandeur and solitude and going outside,

00:41:04and reading Edward Abbey and having these amazing experiences where you felt like you got away and

00:41:09had an authentic, you know, kind of communal relationship with wild nature. But now,

00:41:18increasingly, the environmental movement in America, these sort of large foundations come in

00:41:25and they do all this polling and they test all these messages and the messages that pop

00:41:30are about how it's got to be good for the economy. So, my concern, though, is that

00:41:35increasingly, there's this mass of younger people who are now in their 20s and 30s,

00:41:40and they are the environmental movement in America. And they're being entrained,

00:41:44completely entrained, not just in the language of resourcism and economic, you know, how the

00:41:51economy, how the environment has to save the economy, but it's how they're viewing the world,

00:41:55too. No one, and I'll just, you know, no one ever goes for a hike in the mountains and says,

00:42:01by George, this is going to be good for the economy. You go out there because it's beautiful,

00:42:06and you get away from people and away from development, you have this sense of awe and

00:42:10wonder. Another softball, go ahead and hit it out of the park. No, well, no, I don't think I can hit

00:42:15it out of the park any more than you just did. I think you're absolutely right, that visceral

00:42:19connection with wildness, with wild places and wild creatures, you know, it's crucial, I think,

00:42:26to developing the, both sort of the language and the internal conversation that a person needs to

00:42:33have, because you slowly shift your worldview. It's not like people wake up one day and say,

00:42:39you know, I've seen the light. It's not, you know, Saul on the road to Damascus. For most people,

00:42:46it's an evolution. And for many of us, it begins with time in wild nature. And what does that do?

00:42:53What does time wild in nature do to our psyche? It reminds us of that fundamental truth. Everything

00:42:59is sacred. Everything is connected. It also, there's a third thing that being in a wild place

00:43:06often does, you know, now you're out there in those Colorado mountains, and the scale's big.

00:43:11And if you get above tree line and a storm blows in, you realize, I'm at the mercy of the elements

00:43:18here. There's not, and that's not a new phenomenon in human history. You know, and there was a fella,

00:43:28a cranky sort from Massachusetts named Henry David Thoreau. In 1840s, he happened to be traveling

00:43:36with an Indian guide, the Native American person, went on an expedition to a mountain called

00:43:41Katahdin. I believe it was 1846 when Thoreau tried to get to the summit. He got actually to the

00:43:49summit ridgeline. And what happened to him? He was buffeted by the clouds and the wind and weather.

00:43:54He didn't actually make it to the summit proper, but he was up there. And he called the forces up

00:44:00there titanic. And he wrote so beautifully and eloquently about the sense of proportion and scale

00:44:09that the person, that the individual human psyche feels within this backdrop, this context of wild

00:44:15nature. And when he, you know, in the beautiful passages he wrote about, in about the Maine woods,

00:44:21he wrote about that this was no man's garden. You know, with that wild nature of the Maine

00:44:26woods at the time, he called it mossy and moosey. He said this was no man's garden. And he said the

00:44:32elements up there, you know, on the ridgeline were made out of chaos and old night. I mean,

00:44:38who writes like that? He was just a brilliant, brilliant writer. But let's, let's explore why

00:44:43that might be there, that phenomenon. Let me ask you a question. Now, this is kind of an easy one,

00:44:49because I happen to know that you're a PhD scientist. So I'm going to, I'm going to ask

00:44:54you, Gary, do you believe in sort of the evolutionary, the evolutionary origins for

00:45:02the diversity of life? Do you believe that the diversity of life that we see on earth comes

00:45:08through this process of natural selection and evolutionary adaptation over deep time?

00:45:14Or do you believe that, say, the earth was created in six literal days and is about 6,000 years old?

00:45:23I would definitely lean towards the first, yeah.

00:45:26Okay, if we walk down the street in your town, and we ask 100 people, and we say, to those first

00:45:33100 people, how many of them are going to answer, because they're a sort of a new earth creationist,

00:45:39they believe the earth is 6,000 years old, sort of from a literary or literal explanation in the

00:45:45Bible, or that they see the beauty and the abundance, the diversity of life on earth,

00:45:51and the geological and ecological forces that have been in play over millions, billions of years,

00:45:59that is then the process by which we have seen this flowering in diversity.

00:46:05What's the breakdown in those numbers?

00:46:07You know, I think I've seen polling on this, but I'm not exactly sure, and I think you must know

00:46:12the answer, but I think it's at least a third, if not 40%, you know, don't believe in evolution,

00:46:20but go ahead and give us the answer.

00:46:21Well, I don't know what the actual number is. I've seen those numbers, too, and there's a

00:46:25relatively large percentage that are skeptical of the evolutionary origins of life, but the majority

00:46:31do. I mean, if we go talk to 100 people, well more than half of them say, oh, sure, yeah,

00:46:37absolutely, I believe in evolution.

00:46:40But if you sort of try to plumb that a little deeper, and by the way, in this conversation,

00:46:46I'm not trying to undermine sort of faith communities in any way, because I come from

00:46:53a traditional faith community as well, and, you know, to say you believe in evolutionary origins

00:46:59of life doesn't sort of discount the idea of a deity that put that process in motion.

00:47:04So, don't want to get, you know, step on anybody's toes there, but if you plumb that idea a little

00:47:14farther, and you say, okay, you tell me you believe in natural selection, evolutionary origins of

00:47:21life. Are you related to me? Are we related? And if, you know, these things spin a little bit,

00:47:32people will say, well, yeah, I guess so, then. We would have to, and, but that's about as far

00:47:39as people usually go with it. If you push them, you might get the idea, the acknowledgement

00:47:45that if we do believe, if we take that idea seriously, of evolution seriously,

00:47:51then I am related to you, Gary. I'm related to the folks who are recording this conversation.

00:47:58I'm related to everybody else who's alive right now, distantly, but I am.

00:48:05But if you go beyond that, if you take that evolutionary origins seriously,

00:48:09I'm related to the maple trees that I see, the fall foliage colors out here,

00:48:16to the black bears that live in the woods here, to the, you know, belted kingfishers that are

00:48:23flying around the pond, and to the moose that live up in the woods, and to the wolves that

00:48:28live in Canada. I'm related to every thing that is alive on earth right now,

00:48:36and everything that has ever been alive on earth, in a sense.

00:48:42If you can take that in and embed that and get comfortable with that idea,

00:48:49then it is very hard to have a resourcist worldview, that the natural world is just the

00:48:56other, and you won't use a term like fisheries that commodifies our cousins, marine wildlife

00:49:06that live in the oceans, our cousins that live in the rivers, our cousins, you know, that live in

00:49:15the woods, our cousins that form the forest. We're related to it all, and that's what helps

00:49:23kind of shift our worldview back to a more Indigenous and life-centered and away from a

00:49:31human and resourcist worldview. I think it starts with language. I want to spend just a few minutes

00:49:38here at the end, you know, talking about your next project. I know you're going to take a job

00:49:46soon with the Northeast Wilderness Trust, and I know you're also involved, and it ties to everything

00:49:52we've said here so far, you're also involved with the Nature Needs Half movement. So tell us a little

00:49:57bit about, you know, where you're going and why you've decided to move in a new direction, or a

00:50:03similar direction, but, you know, with a new organization. Very similar direction. You know,

00:50:08Tompkins Conservation that I've worked with for the last 15 years, while I was sort of on the

00:50:13the publishing program side and not the direct land protecting side, the overall foundation's

00:50:20efforts were targeted at saving wild places in Chile and South America, and Tompkins Conservation

00:50:27has been wildly successful in doing that. Here was a relatively modestly capitalized family

00:50:33foundation, at least by, you know, new money standards, that has been able to protect

00:50:43multiple new national parks and protect over 14 million acres of new public natural areas in

00:50:50Chile and Argentina. That's just on land, and much more with our work to help to create new marine

00:50:55protected areas off the coast of Argentina. So the numbers get much higher, and that the result of

00:51:03that is both great for wildness, for ecological recovery, particularly in those areas that have

00:51:09been previously degraded, but also great for local economic vitality. My colleagues in Argentina,

00:51:16the NGO there that's been sort of the member, the in-country member of this Tompkins Conservation

00:51:22network, is called Rewilding Argentina. They've been doing absolutely brilliant work restoring

00:51:27missing native species into the Ibarra Marshlands region, helping to create full and functional

00:51:35ecosystems again, restore the ecological health of a system that had been degraded since European

00:51:41colonization, while at the same time promoting ecological vitality in the local communities

00:51:49around the Ibarra Marshlands, which is one of the largest wetlands complexes in South America.

00:51:54So here, I mean, we have got a story to tell here that is just absolutely extraordinary,

00:52:00begins benefits for local people, cultural transformation really of an area that was

00:52:07very economically depressed as it becomes an area that supports an extraordinary wildlife watching

00:52:16ecotourism economy, and benefits for ecological recovery. But the root of that, and I give

00:52:24tremendous credit to Christine Tompkins, who runs Tompkins Conservation now, and her late husband,

00:52:29Doug Tompkins, for leading with one idea. Our conservation work is going to start with a

00:52:36very simple idea, the intrinsic value of nature. Not what nature is for us, can do for us. We know

00:52:44it does all these things for us. But we're going to lead with the idea that nature is valuable in

00:52:49and of itself, regardless of whether we value it. And that sort of informed the ethos of the

00:52:56organization. So starting with saving wild habitat first, and helping then create, you know, local

00:53:04economic vitality as a result of that. It's a very, very different scale of NGO, but it's a

00:53:11Northeast Wilderness Trust is also a land conservation organization, works regionally. I was

00:53:16one of the founding board members 20 or so years ago, and now I'm going to be going to work as a

00:53:21senior fellow with that organization, again, talking about the values of wild nature, the values of

00:53:27wilderness, all the roles that all the things, the benefits that wild nature brings to humanity,

00:53:35and its intrinsic value. And if we are going to sort of reach that idea of abundant earth,

00:53:43of beautiful, ecologically robust, diverse, and extraordinarily resilient community of life

00:53:54that Eileen Christ writes about in her book, In Abundant Earth, if we're going to get there,

00:54:00it's going to mean that we allow not only that we reduce human numbers and reduce human consumption,

00:54:09the way we are and how many we are, but also that we accord our relatives in the community of life

00:54:15space enough to flourish. That means protected areas, conservation land, wilderness, self-willed

00:54:23land, wild nature, wild habitat. It means wrapping the earth eventually in at least

00:54:32half of the earth in these big, beautiful ribbons of wildness, of protected areas on land and on sea.

00:54:37And that will only happen incrementally, place by place, as individuals and groups work to save

00:54:43and conserve the places they love. But incrementally, as these knit up into a half

00:54:49earth or nature needs half vision, there should be enough habitat to prevent other species from

00:54:56going extinct because of our behavior and numbers. That's the long-term vision, is space enough for

00:55:03all to flourish, for every species to have the right to life, liberty, and habitat. And wilderness

00:55:12is part of that equation. Yeah, and I would like to note too that while this concept might

00:55:20seem pretty grandiose, there are definitely paths forward to get there, and there are people

00:55:25working on it. In fact, there was a bill, it was actually a resolution bill in the United States

00:55:31Senate just this few months ago, and it was kind of called the 30 by 30 bill. It was like try to

00:55:36preserve 30% of America by 2030. And one of my United States senators here in Colorado, Michael

00:55:42Bennett, was a co-sponsor of that bill. And in the bill, they also mentioned the goal of getting

00:55:48towards 50 by 50, so half of the planet by the year 2050. And so even in the incredible chaotic

00:55:58and dysfunctional political times that we live, there are definitely ideas that are not just

00:56:05grandiose ideas that are being, you know, people like you and me are talking about, but

00:56:10there's bills in the U.S. Senate right now to deal with those. So your book, you know,

00:56:19I want to just talk about this Lord Man concept, and we'll kind of finish up on this. You know,

00:56:24in the beginning of the book, you talk about how this notion of a man being, you know, the lord

00:56:33of all the landscape and how humans are domineering everything and how this language

00:56:40and worldview has led us into this, you know, increasingly apocalyptic treatment of the planet.

00:56:48And then at the end, because our show is called Overcoming Overshoot, we're going to try to end

00:56:54on something positive every time and how we're going to overcome this. At the end, you kind of

00:56:59flip the language and talk about how we can get away from this concept of man as lord and get to

00:57:07one more of a symbiosis and a respect for the beauty and bounty around us. So just tell us a

00:57:13little bit about, you know, the end of the book and your thinking and why you decided to end it

00:57:19that way. Well, we decided to end it that way because I, well, we, the editorial group that

00:57:25worked on the book was because we wanted to present after this very, you know, grim photo

00:57:31treatment of the earth as transformed by human numbers and behavior with a sense that there is

00:57:39possibility. The earth does not have to look this way. Rewilding is possible. We can not only help

00:57:46to restore the beauty and bounty and integrity of life on earth, we can help rewild ourselves.

00:57:54Rewilding the earth begins with rewilding our hearts and minds and helping to sort of

00:57:59undomesticate ourselves as we domesticated ourselves 10 or 12,000 years ago. And that's

00:58:04been part of our problem ever since, but that can be undone. And it's undone every time we

00:58:11consciously help acknowledge that connection. You know, outside here, I'm hearing birdsong

00:58:17through my window. My cousins are out here talking to each other. But every time I walk

00:58:23through my woods and I acknowledge my neighbors, whether it's moss or moose, I'm starting to help

00:58:31recreate in myself the idea of being a person in relationship with all my neighbors in the

00:58:39community of life and not the manager of them, not the Lord of them, not the technocrat that's going

00:58:46to oversee them, but a good member and good neighbor in their community and a good cousin.

00:58:54And that's possible, I think, also on a planetary scale. It doesn't mean it's going to be easy.

00:59:02It doesn't mean it's not going to be difficult. But this human population bottleneck,

00:59:08if we can get through it with some modicum of dignity and humanity and throw a lot more

00:59:15resources at root problems, we can get back to that world of beauty and integrity where

00:59:23a flourishing humanity is embedded in the community of life. There are ways to get there.

00:59:30All of them start with behaving better, with more kindness, with more empathy. And a lot of them

00:59:39also start with, you know, Lord Man is a gendered term, again, coming from the Muir quote,

00:59:47but it was intentional because a lot of these problems also come from a patriarchal world view.

00:59:55You've got to overcome that as well. And if we throw our energies and our capacities at

01:00:03promoting gender equity, at promoting universal human rights framework that allows for reproductive

01:00:10autonomy and makes reproductive family planning skills and methods and technologies and education

01:00:17universally available, that supports people, particularly in the underdeveloped world,

01:00:23who need more resources, and particularly if those of us in the overdeveloped world,

01:00:30in the affluent world, start to rein in our excessive and rapacious consumption,

01:00:37which is a very tough nut, but absolutely fundamental to the issue as well. If we can

01:00:44do that, we can start to change that trajectory of demography, add on sort of replacing the

01:00:55current toxic energy economy, which was one supported by renewables, and add on a wholesale

01:01:00effort in natural climate solutions, including lots more land and marine conservation that helps

01:01:07to naturally sequester carbon and soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide. You save a lot more

01:01:13wild ocean, a lot more wild land, get our human numbers under control, reform the toxic energy

01:01:21economy, and promote gender equity, and we can turn the tide. Wonderful. So, as a reminder,

01:01:31this is the book, Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot. You can buy it online, or you can go

01:01:39to the website populationspeakout.org and look through it there by page by page. Tom, this has

01:01:47been an absolutely delightful conversation, and I really appreciate your time. You know, and like

01:01:53you said, I think we could have picked any one of these topics and gone on for hours and hours on

01:01:57each of them, but it's been just a wonderful, delightful time to visit with you. We wish you

01:02:03great success in your next adventure at the Northeast Wilderness Trust, and

01:02:09you know, hopefully we can have you back on the show sometime. Hey, thank you, Gary, and good luck with

01:02:13your efforts here. It was delightful to chat with you. All right, thanks for being on EarthX TV and

01:02:19watching Overcoming Overshoot.

Are We in Trouble - Part 1 | #OvercomingOvershoot S1E1 | EarthX

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