Okay. Okay. Mhm. Good afternoon. My
name is Bill Hopkins. I am a professor of
wildlife conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment
. And I also serve as the director of Virginia
Tech's Global Change Center. I'd like to welcome everyone
to another installment of our Global Change Center Distinguished Lecture
series. This has been an effort to try to
engage the public on important issues related to conservation and
sustainability. We really appreciate you coming out once again
. It's really encouraging to see such a strong turnout
, not just from the university, but also from
the community. This is a particularly special event for
us today, um, because it's serving multiple purposes
. As we celebrate Earth Day tomorrow. We will
also be holding it all day graduate symposium, where
we're gonna be recognizing our graduate students and some of
their accomplishments. And so Dr Tewksbury is not only
here to give this lecture, but he's also kicking
off that event and spending a lot of quality time
with our graduate students while he's here. Before I
introduce Dr Tewksbury, I want to thank some folks
. First of all, our home. Our academic
home at Virginia Tech is the Frail and Life Science
Institute. So that's where we're funded. And that's
where we actually reside within the university structure. So
we're very fortunate to have them as a sponsor.
The Virginia Tech Graduate School, who funds are graduate
education program and is partially funding today's event, and
I also want to thank a few individuals David Hike
from the department of plant pathology, physiology and weed
science. We would not have gotten Josh here today
. I feel very confident if it wasn't for David's
hard work on this, Uh, I'd like to
thank all the frail in Life Science Institute. Um
, staff are graduate students who were helping get people
in and out today. And, of course,
Gloria Schoenholtz, who is our center coordinator. She
helps us basically do everything that we do. And
last and certainly not least, I want to thank
the Lyric Theatre. We've partnered with the lyric now
several times to hold these events, and we're really
fortunate to have, uh, this sort of a
community theater to engage in these sorts of discussions.
So let's join me in thanking everyone. Mhm.
Okay, So before I introduce our speaker, two
quick housekeeping items Um Uh, first of all,
we will have a brief Q and A at the
end of this, and so we'll have a microphone
down at the base of the stage. Here.
We ask that because the events being taped, we
ask that you come up and use the microphone.
Please be respectful of people's time. We're not going
to have a long time for Q and A because
we actually have to get out of the building by
six o'clock because the lyric has other events going on
. So it is my pleasure today to introduce the
2016 Global Change Center distinguished lecturer Dr Josh Tewksbury,
Dr Tewksbury received his bachelor's and field biology. I
didn't even know schools offer degrees in field biology,
which is awesome from Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona
. He then went on to receive his Ph.
D. In ecology from the University of Montana.
And then he did two postdoctoral fellowships at the University
of Florida. He spent over 10 years on the
faculty at the University of Washington, where he held
the walker and down professorship of natural history. His
research interests have been quite diverse, answering critical questions
and ecology, natural history and conservation. These include
topics such as habitat fragmentation and its effects on biodiversity
. The role of habitat corridors for creating connectivity in
establishing effective movement of seed dispersal pollinators like birds and
butterflies, the chemical ecology of fruit and animal interactions
to include really, really interesting questions related to things
like Why are chili peppers hot? So he's got
a whole research program basically on that subject. He's
also done a lot of work with invasive species and
climate change. He's also written extensively on the importance
of citizen science, new frontiers and ecology based on
big data in today's big data world and the importance
of natural history to both to society and to science
in the future. He's been a prolific publisher not
only just in terms of quantity, but the quality
and impact of his publications is just astounding. He
publishes regularly in Science Nature Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences and Proceedings of the Royal Society, some
of the most high tier journals in the world.
About five years ago, Dr Tewksbury turned his attentions
really change a career path in many ways to start
addressing ways in which science can more effectively serve society
, and he sought to do this. I mean
, that's a hard enough task to do locally.
He sought to do this on a global scale.
To this end, in 2012, he assumed the
position is founding director of the Luc Hoffmann Institute within
WWF International in Switzerland, and he maintained that position
from 2012 to 2015. The institute serves to create
very strong connections between science policy and practice to lead
to effective conservation outcomes. As director, he he
oversaw basically all aspects of the institute, including international
strategic partnerships, creation of international fellowship programs and very
large research agendas. International research agendas, including things
like work on the food, energy, water nexus
in Southeast Asia, global mapping of threats to biodiversity
and the development of low carbon sustainability targets for urban
areas. This year, Dr Tewksbury moved back to
the United States and he was named the U.
S. Global hub director of an organization. And
we'll talk about I think I believe something today Future
Earth, which is an international research platform that's connected
throughout the world, including four other global hubs,
and Sweden, Tokyo, Paris and Montreal. In
his new role he will continue to control, continue
to coordinate research and large partnerships, international partnerships to
generate knowledge and solutions to global sustainable development. A
recent editorial in the journal Science stated that future Earth
is possibly the largest, most ambitious international research program
that's ever been undertaken. After visiting with Josh over
the last day and a half, it is abundantly
clear to me why he was selected for this position
. It takes individuals with Josh's passion, his vision
, his leadership and his enthusiasm, which you're gonna
see a lot of today to lead the charge on
such an ambitious and critical agenda. So it's my
honor today to welcome the 2016 distinguished 2016 distinguished guests
. Dr Josh Tewksbury. All right, Okay,
I think I'm live. So it is an incredible
honor to be here today. I've had an amazing
time at the Latin and over the last day and
a half, working with the staff and the faculty
and the students, um, that are here at
the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech. I want
to thank Bill Hopkins, David Hike and really the
entire group there that's doing it a difficult and incredibly
important task. It is vital for the future of
our societies that are best. Minds in academia have
very low barriers to work together, are incentivized to
actually work on problems that are tightly tied to the
fundamental issues that we're facing a society as possible and
it works within. And that allows that to happen
within within institutions, with the quality that Virginia attack
has as a global land grant institution, as a
leading institution. It's my view that land grants in
this country will be the sort of the nexus point
for sustainability science, because they've been doing interdisciplinary,
sometimes cross disciplinary or trans disciplinary research for a long
time in this country. And that is a skill
set that is more and more vital to the future
relationship between science and the rest of society. So
it's really exciting to be here and to see the
vitality and this crew moving that forward within Virginia Tech
, and I'm super excited to continue working there,
So I want to start by just a little bit
of reflection on where we live. Um, it's
And when I see this planet rising over the moon
, um, I think of the tremendous amount of
life and the tremendous contrast between where we live and
the rest of space. It's a It's a pretty
special place, but what creates those colors and creates
that space are really just a very thin skin on
our planet, of course. So this is that
same planet. But this time the atmosphere which we
depend on is right here. That's all the atmosphere
in relation to the size of the earth. That's
all the water in the size of the earth,
the small dot in the center and fresh water.
That's the bit we live on. That's the part
that all of our life is dependent on this thin
skin around this around this rock. And, you
know, over the last four billion years of life
on most most organisms, most of us are relatively
inconsequential. We don't actually do much to change the
trajectory of the globe. We're on collectively, over
the deep history and time, there have been events
that that proved that rule with exception. But right
now we're an organism that's sitting on four billion years
of history of life. Approximately 99.9% of the organisms
that arose flourished have gone extinct on this planet,
and we share this planet with 10 to 15 million
other species for most of that history. Oh,
most of us were putting inconsequential. And I guess
the fundamental bit around this lecture is that that's changing
. We're moving into a space in which one species
is having overriding effects on not just the life around
us, but all life on the planet and the
trajectory of the planet itself. The trajectory of that
thin skin that keeps us in a in a bubble
that has really allowed our civilization to flourish. And
I like to sort of walk backwards about 100,000 years
to give a bit of perspective on Why Where will
you live is so important to who we are as
a species as a civilization. This is the last
100,000 years of temperature, and I just want to
point out one pattern. The last 10,000 years are
a period of enormous of that are really different.
There's incredible stability in this 10,000 year period. Well
, you know, so humans have been around for
200,000 years, but just barely. We didn't really
start taking off as a species on this planet until
the past 10,000 years, until all the variables that
make the planet what it is today sort of worked
yourself into an equilibrium that was an incubator for human
civilization. This is when agriculture took off. This
is when everything post agriculture happened. All of our
infrastructure, all of our human systems, are geared
to a time of immense stability in planetary history.
We live and breathe the stability around us, and
what's important about that is I think we're a species
that's now actively, communally pushing ourselves out of that
envelope. We're leaving this garden and even even through
our actions, and these are actions which you know
we collectively have some control over. It's just hard
to exercise that control, and I'm going to show
a few basic statistics that show that our impact on
the planet are is not only just high but increasing
at this. Is this really interesting exponential rate?
A lot of scientists call that the great acceleration,
and it's an acceleration both in human impact and human
trends and in planetary feedbacks, the way in which
the planet is changing. As a result, of
of our changes. So whether we're talking about world
population in developed countries, developing countries or the rest
of the planet, whether we're talking about urban population
explosions, whether we're talking about primary energy use or
water use or fertilizer consumption or transportation, what you
see is around 1950 all of these things start ramping
up its 11 species starts really taking control of this
planet. Um, and if you take these patterns
and then you ask what's happening to the planet and
you look at that same interval Carbon dioxide, nitrous
oxide, ocean acidification, coastal coastal Nitra fication tropical
forest lost all the major trends. They're not just
increasing, but there's these inflection points around this period
. Terrestrial biosphere degradation. These are not inconsequential,
and they're not unlinked. The formless system in which
our impacts on the planet are the ramping up of
human civilization is deeply connected to the feedbacks that the
planet is the feedback, the feedback that are coming
from the planet. So there's there's a paper Just
last year that sort of collected all of these,
um um and it was updated. Last year was
first published a few years before that It just looked
at this large scale acceleration in both human connectivity and
human influence on the planet and the feedbacks that are
starting to happen from planetary variables. And this,
I think, is the story of the Anthropocene.
This is the story of an age that is not
only of men, but potentially under control to some
, some loose degree by man by by by by
one species. And I want to just walk through
the last 250 here, 250 year history of this
with a brief little video. So the Anthropocene,
the last chapter of the Anthropocene is, can start
really 250 years ago. It's a It's a story
that starts about fueled by coal and oil. Several
brilliant innovations appeared, and they ignited the Industrial Revolution
, which started more or less in England and spread
through Europe, spread to the United States, spread
to Japan and elsewhere in the world. And this
is when the great railways and cars and highways connecting
people across the globe. Medical discoveries at this period
saved millions of lives. Now, new artificial fertilizers
that we could feed more people, populations exploded,
but This is really nothing to compare to what happened
. What is to come in this inflection point around
1950. And what we see at that point is
you know, the beginning of what of that great
acceleration right about in here. Globalization, marketing,
tourism. Huge investments helped an enormous growth around the
world. People swarm to cities which became even more
powerful engines of creativity in a single lifetime. The
well being of people around the world dramatically increased massive
reductions in childhood mortality, massive reductions in poverty.
The Anthropocene has primarily been a very positive influence for
most of the people who live on this planet of
wealth, security, longevity. There really isn't a
period in history where so many people have had so
much. But we still have a billion people that
don't have enough to eat. We have 1.3 billion
people without electricity. We have similar number without reliable
access to water. So over the last 70 years
, we have grown into a phenomenal global force on
the planet. We're altering the energy. We're altering
the Earth's natural cycles. We move more sediment than
all natural forces combined. At this point, we
are using a tidy three quarters of the terrestrial land
surface that isn't under ice for our own purposes.
Um, we have greenhouse gases now on this planet
that are higher than has ever been seen in the
last million years. And we're on track for changing
climate at a pace two orders of magnitude faster than
has ever been experienced in in in the made in
recorded history. In the major climate change events 55
million years ago, we see what we saw.
A major spike in temperature. We're gonna do it
twice. Two orders of magnitude faster than that,
really stressing natural systems. So there's a lot of
science of this unprecedented mark and the climate, the
ozone hole, the amount of sinking deltas around the
world Um, the loss of biodiversity, which is
this pernicious variable that we have a hard time communicating
the importance of. And, you know, I
think that this is we have entered the Anthropocene.
This is an age dominated by humanity, and for
most of human history, we have been on we've
been on the couch of this planetary aircraft, and
I think at this point it's very clear that we've
moved up into the pilot seat were up there pushing
buttons, driving the levers. We've just started to
realize that we're flying this plane, but we don't
have a pilot's license, and we and when you're
in this situation, you start to want to learn
to fly really quickly. I think that's where we
are at a place where, as a global society
, we're trying to learn how to fly a plane
, Um, that we just have now realized that
were in charge of more or less sort of like
it or not. So I want to spend the
next 30 40 minutes talking about several bits in which
I think science has a role to play in creating
a narrative that helps us fly that plane because I
don't think it's up to science to fly the plane
. But I do think there is an important value
of evidence and the evidence based that science can bring
to that process. And I think of science.
I think of the narrative because that's basically what we
need in order to move forward where social primates we
communicate with narrative science can inform that narrative. Um
, and there are a couple of a couple of
sort of key bits of science, and I think
of an important and friendly, not global narrative once
one is tipping points. Um, the basic understanding
that certain systems look stable for a long period of
time as you put more and more load on them
, and then they suddenly shift. And we're just
starting to get a handle on that at the global
scale. Another planetary boundaries. Um, and then
from that, I'm going to move to several sort
of a bit of an exploration of how you use
those to get to change how, how, as
a society we can start start that movement. And
so there's a lot of ways one could demonstrate tipping
points. I'm just gonna go through one example with
ice sheets. Um, you know, in for
a long time, uh, a number. For
a number of years, scientists have been worried about
critical calculation in which we can see that we're seeing
sea level rise of about three millimeters a year.
But we couldn't quite figure out where all the ice
was coming from to create that rise, and it
was assumed that that was coming mostly from Greenland,
because of some physics that were in place that made
it seem like it would be very improbable for to
be coming from the Southern Hemisphere are from Antarctica.
But in 2014, a couple of papers were published
that showed that not only was many large function section
of the Western Antarctic ice sheet sheet in, uh
in the process of collapse, but actually we're already
past the tipping point in which the amount of water
flow that was there was flowing out from underneath that
ice sheet was creating enough heat and friction to move
that system into a new state where collapses basically inevitable
, that we were moving large sections of that ice
flow into the water, and that was responsible for
some of the sea level rise we're seeing now if
the whole thing collapses, if we lose this whole
space and we kind of think that's gonna happen now
, we just don't know when, um, that's
looking at partial collapse. Maybe 4 ft of sea
level rise, full collapse, maybe 16 ft of
sea level rise. These are a lot larger than
the two or 33 millimeters we're seeing. But again
, long timescales not in my lifetime, Probably not
in yours, but we but we haven't. But
because of the slow nature of the processes, that
tipping point is crossed. And I think when we
take that kind of information home where we live,
we can see that you know, when you have
a place like Virginia, where you know, a
quarter million acres are within 5 ft of the high
tide line where you have$20 billion in housing investments
in that same space, As you start raising that
tide line, you start losing a lot of a
way of life that we're used to. We start
changing the way we're living on the planet, and
it has major impacts on our economies. So I
also think that these tipping points and our ability to
get our heads around them scientifically and then to communicate
them to the public and really into decision makers have
interesting some interesting, um, sort of large scale
implications for the intersection of economic systems and planetary systems
. A recent paper last year showed essentially that we
if we take all the known oil reserves and then
we actually take dig them out of the ground and
burn them were into. We're in for like a
preposterous amount of sea level rise, just preposterous,
like it's not. It's not really feasible. The
interesting thing about that, for me, is that
when we value oil companies, we value them based
on their known oil reserves. And yet we're saying
that fundamentally, for the safety of the planet,
those reserves can't be used. You can't make any
money on those. You can maybe take out 20%
of the of the coal and maybe 40% of the
oil. But beyond that, we'll never get to
a two degree rise. We're going to be a
much higher, much higher temperature rise if we do
that. So this is where these systems sort of
interact, and it's more than just ice. Of
course, we talked a little bit about when we
talk about tipping points. We often use things like
Arctic sea ice or the West Antarctic ice sheet,
which I talked a little bit about, or Greenland
will, how much ice will we lose at what
time period? How do we predict that? But
it's also biotic systems. It systems like as climate
change. We have big you know, we have
uncertainties around the time the the rainfall patterns that will
will emerge in the Amazon basin. Those rainfall patterns
are what keep that Amazon basin as a huge carbon
pump, taking a carbon out of the atmosphere.
If that turns to Savannah or dry forest, its
capacity to do that changes with global ramifications. That's
another tipping point. We don't know exactly at what
temperature point that will happen. We know that it's
out there, and these tipping points, I think
, are cause for, um, for action.
And I want to talk a little bit of how
that sort of leads to planetary hundreds. So once
you know there's a risk, you often time try
and set up. Societally agreed upon actions that mitigate
that risk. And I like the planetary boundaries I
like to use as the analogy of the stops are
a speed limit. We know that there's a sort
of increased risk of driving faster and faster on the
highway, and we also know there's nothing magical about
65 66 a little bit worse, seven little bit
worse than that. 54 a little bit better.
We've decided as a society that 65 some states have
set a little higher. Some states a little lower
is a manageable amount of risk. It still allows
us to get down the road at a reasonable speed
. So we figured that one out and we kind
of agree on that. We don't think too much
about it, but we have a much harder time
doing at a planetary scale. Partially, it's because
we have very weak global governance. But that's also
partially because we have a harder time even understanding where
those speed limits should be set. And so planetary
boundaries is an attempt to put up those speed limit
signs. So the way that this has done is
a whole group of scientists have gotten together to say
We know about climate change. We know that ocean
acidification is a big issue, and as major ramifications
, we know the stratospheric ozone is something is something
we need to worry about. These are what we
often call the Big Three. We also have bio
bio geochemical cycles like nitrogen and phosphorus, which we
we have altered two amazing degrees and we know that
those have impacts on the planet, dead zones and
other other feedbacks. We have global. We have
global freshwater use, which were increasingly use about a
little over 50% of that now global land system change
and biodiversity loss. We often call these the slow
variables because their feedbacks are slower. We know that
biodiversity loss is tremendously important and it will come back
to bite us. But it's much harder to say
exactly when where and which species, so that we
consider these more slow variables. And then we have
these things which are like we don't quite know,
even how to quantify. We're pretty sure that if
you keep putting a lot of novel chemical compounds out
in the environment, that, too has problems but
really hard to come up with. How much is
okay? Because it varies a lot on a chemical
and and atmospheric aerosol loading in the same space.
This is one of those places where scientists are struggling
to amass a lot of different data, to say
something policy relevant for the world. So, um
, if you look at so this is how it's
done, you have a safe space, and this
space is essentially saying, if we do, if
we change at this rate, if you lose biological
integrity at this rate, if we change climate at
this rate, if it's below that area, we're
probably not going to push ourselves out of that sweet
spot. That is the hollow seen that all of
our civilization has grown up in these basic things that
we depend on, um And then beyond that,
we've got a zone of uncertainty where those risks are
pretty highly better start worrying about it and the zone
of really high risks. Um, and in pre
industrial times, of course, we were among all
the other species that had very little impact on the
planet. We're doing much to the planet. Um
, by 1950 we've already seen large scale biodiversity loss
to a stage, which is safe to say that
the rate of change, even in 1950 of biodiversity
loss, was high enough to cause problems when they
come back to bite us in what stays still still
in debate in 1970 we start to see a little
bit more increased both because we start to see the
stratospheric ozone depletion ramping up, and we start to
see climate change ramping up its not until 1990 that
we see we have a huge problem with the ozone
and we better do something about it and we are
doing something about it at that point. But this
is the rate of depletion and in 1990 it was
huge. Um, and we've also now seen with
the massive increase use of fertilizer, loss of increased
lots of an increase in fostering. And then that's
that's the current sort of status of that. Many
of these current systems are intensely the high risk and
a few of them we can't measure now. I
think this is another part of the narrative because it
allows us to start thinking about about speed limits.
The problem with it, of course, is that
the Globe doesn't have a very good mechanism for acting
on those speed limits. We've been talking about climate
change for a long time. We made some major
progress in Paris last year, but it's still a
long way from getting that under control. So what
I think what I want to do now is talk
a little bit about how you move from these narratives
of mapping the decline, which is a really depressing
job to working towards the solutions and and providing me
the tools to get towards what I would consider a
transformation, the transformation of how we live on this
planet, Um, and and then what? And
then sort of how science plays into that, what
the role that science plays into that. I think
two things that are important here are both getting the
evidence together and presenting it in a way that can
really change people's behavior and lives. And I put
this up here because there's a really key example of
a very simple thing that had a very large impact
for many people around the world. And, you
know, when Bill Gates decided to shift from running
Microsoft to quit early and really devote his efforts to
the foundation. And he attributes that to one graphic
in the newspaper, which showed the seven preventable causes
of childhood mortality clearly and definitively. And he's like
, you know, this is what I need to
do, like I have enough money to help solve
these problems. Let's get on with it. And
his thesis in this is really that If you show
people the problems and you show people the solutions,
they will be moved to act and I would say
, God, I wish it was quite that simple
but or maybe it is. But I don't know
quite how to show people the solutions in a way
they'll act on yet because I think there's some steps
involved in doing that. When I think about those
steps that act, that collective action towards sustainability transition
, I think of a few things that would create
the leverage points for doing and the first. The
first, I think, is what we're going for
long term is this change mindset. How do we
move from a culture that wants to hold on to
its definition of the middle class culture? That recognizes
that if we're going to move 3.5 billion people more
into the middle class in the next 20 years,
which is what we're going to do, we have
to redefine what it means to be successful as a
middle class citizen of the world. There's no other
real choice in that space, and that's not just
for the people entering. That's for the people that
are already here. It's not pulling up the ladder
and saying Look enough already, we're here everyone else
has got to stop. It's not gonna work that
way. And so we haven't developed a change mindset
. But the developer change mindset. I think you
need change mechanisms. You need to know how you're
going to get there because you can't get to change
mindsets. You have some idea that your actions will
actually cause change. And to do that well,
I think you need goals. And for goals you
need information, right? I would argue we actually
have made major progress right here. And here is
where we're having the proper, um, and so
in information, I don't think you can argue that
we're lacking information anymore or connectivity and information. This
is just a global map of the Facebook friends of
the world. With a billion people in that network
. There's a lot of information exchange, but it's
not just Facebook. Of course. We have three
billion Internet users, about 44% of households around the
world, seven billion mobile phone subscribers. Facebook.
We'll have 25 plus billion connected devices by 2020.
It just makes my head split. Um, and
so the connectivity is not the issue anymore. We
don't have. We have certainly work to do to
make better transfer, to create better transparency and better
interoperability of the information. We're walking around the globe
, but those aren't the major obstacles anymore. And
I also think that in 2015 we've made a lot
of major changes and sort of defining those goals.
And of course, the largest one of that was
the major work in sort of defining the global goals
for sustainable development. I mean, the sustainable development
goals are the trillion dollar project that we as a
global and embarked on. And it will dwarf other
goal sets in terms of shaping the trajectory of of
major organizations and major governments focused on development and sustainability
and increasingly, on biodiversity conservation. Those are now
interwoven in these new goals, but it's not just
the global goals. Of course we had the Paris
, the Paris Conference of Parties in which was,
uh, by all accounts, one of the more
one of the most successful events we've seen in milestone
story climate change. We have a ton of work
to do there, but we did bring people together
three times in 2015 around sustainability events. Global leaders
that's unprecedented. And we had global leaders of all
types stepping forward to say It's time for change.
It's time for a new way of thinking, and
I think that's best represented by the pope's encyclical that
came out in 2015. Or, you know,
statements like this in an encyclical from a leader of
one of the major religions of the world. It
changes the narrative around the issue. Human induced climate
change is a scientific reality, and it's effective and
it's effective. Control is a moral imperative for humanity
that brings a whole new group into the into the
conversation, a group that I have no access to
. And that's hugely important when we're starting to try
and create a change mindset. Because what happens in
churches is just as important to what happens in lecture
halls, arguably in many places. More important,
so getting out outside of our own comfort space to
create these kind of opportunities and create partnerships to do
that, I think is critical. But here's what
I think we have a problem, and that's these
change mechanisms. Uh, and for me, I
think part of that is a science problem and part
of It's a translation of science problem how we do
it, how we translated who were involved in the
scientific process, how we know where we're going as
a community and then to me. I think this
is sort of what should science look like to help
us steer this planetary aircraft science and the Anthropocene?
Should we be rethinking how we do our work?
And I think the answer is pretty clearly yes.
Sciences. You know, the scientific institutions of the
world are old institutions. They have venerable traditions.
Many of them are really, really good. You
cannot say that they're the fastest evolving systems in the
world. Um, and and and yet and many
systems are need for information has changed radically in the
past 100 years. So thinking about how science reacts
to those needs, I think is a worthy endeavor
. Um and I think of it as a scientist
, So I like to look at it. So
what does my life look like? This is how
I spent most of my training. And I think
a lot of scientists spend their training. We look
at organisations, we look at systems, we try
to understand how things and I think for a long
time many parts of society were content with, with
a large fraction of science being devoted to that activity
as they saw that fundamental activity critical for the for
the for the sort of increase in the prosperity of
their countries because it builds innovation also critical just for
the more applied branches of science. But more and
more today, scientific communities are being asked to get
out of their own space and create much more integrated
predictions of how systems not only will do work but
will work. Not only might work, but what
will I predict? Predict. So if I study
, excuse me if I studied ticks, I used
to study ticks. I now need to study lives
disease risk. But I am a tick biologist,
so I don't know how to study lines disease risk
. So I'd better learn how to work with others
in my field and in other fields to make predicted
, predict predictions that takes my biology a tremendous amount
of detail of biology and gets that credibly into predictions
that decision makers can use. The same goes If
I study wheat, I'm now studying crop dynamics through
time and understanding how we yields are going to change
. If I'm working, working in droughts or water
, it's understanding how drought will change in the future
. It's building our fundamental information into applied predictions that
have been accessible to decision communities. This is hard
to do individually. As a scientist, a lot
of scientists are already doing it in teams. Um
, and I think, actually asked as much greater
at this point because the urgency for changes greater so
we're not only being asked to scientists to do this
, but it's also you can't really be effective or
your your effectiveness is blunted unless you bring in the
decision communities effectively as well. So if you're working
on technology and then you want to work on Lime's
disease, are you talking to the CDC who actually
has some control and behavior, and how do we
work on Lime's disease? Similarly, if you're working
on, if you're working in a crop dynamics and
you're are you working with death row or other major
agencies that are interested in how yield will change in
the future in southern Europe? In wind, who
are the investors and wind? Berkshire Hathaway, Inter
American Development Bank. What can you tell them that
will change their behavior? How do you fit into
this bigger system? And then major, major sort
of constituencies that are vitally interested in clean water,
like major private sector organizations are looking for answers to
how to be citizens in this space and, of
course, also how to make a profit. So
this is a very difficult space for individual scientists.
In fact, I think it's kind of even an
unfair space for individual scientists to be it. And
but that's but But I think it doesn't mean it's
less important. And so when we step back and
say, Well, here's the way that we live
in, um, we want to create some change
with what? We're good at that. Maybe some
sustainability science. Um, we're a small group.
This is my tribe, my psychologist tribe. Um
, and, uh, that's academics. I'm probably
0.5% of academics, small tribe within another sector.
Within a larger sector of society, science is largely
academic, but not entirely. There's a whole section
that's not academic, but who are we trying to
influence on this, and how do we scale and
how do we get to the places we want to
go with our information. So I would say that
, you know, were relatively small. And we're
trying to get to these guys, you know?
And even though he's holding a koala there, these
guys aren't scientists, right? They're just not right
. And and actually, if you look at the
politician tribe and you ask, Well, what tribe
do they come from? What kind of monkeys are
these? Um, what you find is that,
you know, in here is this is this is
the tribe of politicians in Brazil, China, Egypt
, India, South Korea and the U. S
. A. This is where the the tribes that
came out so yellow is academia, all of academia
. But I'm not sure you can see that.
So there it is. Oh, wait. You
still can't see that in the US, right?
Because that's because we have a grand total of six
people in Congress, the Senate, and in the
executive branch that are actually in academia. Um,
and that's just all of academia. We don't have
any sustainability scientists who went that route. We have
a few chemists or one chemist, few physicists,
some neuroscience, neurosurgeons, power to them, they
at least understand science, but that you're gonna have
a heck of a time. Moving your agenda is
that is the only place you can go. And
if you can't even talk, you have no one
in your tribe in a position of power. So
I don't think we can solve this on our own
scientists. And I think this is how we try
and do it right now is we get a really
cool result and we lobbied across that someone who is
a decision maker hoping that it will stick a lot
of us are pretty effective at doing that. A
lot of us are less effective. It only works
some of the time, but it's not a fundamentally
good way to do this. Work and other people
have found a lot of literature has suggested that the
economy to work with intermediaries. So the academics are
over here talking to each other more and more.
If they can get to a group that can help
them build a more cohesive understanding of their subject and
then use that evidence to influence decision makers and can
vitally important also get the agendas of these people back
into the science so that scientists are better at working
on the on the agenda items that decision makers want
answers to. One of the things that I think
most scientists myself included, make this mistake every time
they are super excited. To talk to decision makers
is that they think they can. I want to
tell them about a problem. But most decision makers
just want you to solve something they already see is
the problem. But they don't want another problem.
So you're not gonna get very far saying, Wait
, there's a problem you haven't thought of get in
line, right? So So in general, you
need to be a solution agent as a scientist,
not a problem generated. We're really good at showing
the problems right now. We need to get better
at showing solutions. I think that's a different kind
of engagement. So here's the model that a lot
of us work on, dude, which is we
think of a problem because that's a big problem.
I do that as a scientist. I'm trained to
do that, figure out what big problems are.
I do research. I create knowledge around that problem
, and then there's these sort of mystical processes that
happen after I'm done creating my knowledge, which are
transfer, adoption and diffusion, which are handled by
other groups, consultants, policy and business sectors.
Which amounts to a lot of us, like writing
that paper, figuring out a solution, throwing it
over the wall and hoping it hits a passing problem
. Um, it sometimes does, but it needs
to be working a lot more effectively. And I
think the way through that is this thing where we
think about our job is engagement. We think about
our job is service. We're not that different than
other service sectors. We're out here trying to solve
problems for a client. We don't like to think
of it that way all the time. But really
, society is our client. So So if science
and policy and society and stakeholders are together engaging difficult
problems, we have a better chance of finding solutions
that will actually work for those problems. So as
Bill suggested, like I have this new job,
the future earth, and really that I'm gonna tell
you a little about what it is because really,
this is the job of future is to help make
that a little easier for people to do? Um
, so I'll tell you just a little bit about
it. We have. We have about a 35
year history of getting scientists together around the world around
major global change problems, right? Whether that's atmosphere
and atmospheric chemistry and how that's changing because of air
pollution or whether it's measuring risk or thinking about how
governance structures allow people to answer difficult questions or various
different types of questions. It started in 1980 when
we recognize that the planet is a system and we
need to manage it as a system and we need
global teams to do that. And then we gradually
recognize that it's not just physical science that needs to
do this, not just climate, but it also
involves a lot of bio geochemical cycles. And then
we realized that biodiversity itself is also important, and
we need to support global structures to understand what our
priorities need to be in researching biodiversity in exploring what
biodiversity loss means for the world. And finally,
around 1996 we recognize that humans are actually big produce
problem and really the only way we're going to find
a solution. And there's this whole tribe of people
that study humans, and we should support them as
well to help get them into the conversation. That's
the international human dimensions program. What the funders of
this decided and the funders are basically the top 15
or so major National Science Foundation's around the world is
they weren't getting enough societal benefits out of this structure
. A lot of good international communities, not a
lot of connection between communities, not a lot of
reaching out into other aspects of society. So they
scrapped the whole system. It took all the 50,000
or so scientists that were part of this and all
of the groups and said, We're going to form
them into a new group and that's going to be
future Earth And the mandate of future is actually quite
a bit bigger than the mandate of the previous organizations
, and it's sort of seeing here. So we
are. We are there to support high quality global
sustainability science. That's our that's our role. But
but science that is relevant to society's connects with,
and we have to connect research communities across disciplines and
geography, ease and fundamentally figure out how to drive
a step change and how international science engages societal partners
and stakeholders. This is not an easy job because
, um, we are still in a society which
is not has not gone all in on its investment
in solutions yet. And the science required to create
that innovation and a lot of our work, then
, is to sort of build build a movement that
allows that to happen, to take to make it
as easy as possible for voices to come together around
the need to move in this direction. Part of
it is actually redefining scientific communities so that they're focused
on challenges a little bit more than focused on disciplines
. And so we have. We have divided the
world into eight major challenges. You we can argue
at nauseam about whether they're the right eight. It
actually matters. This is the easy part. The
hard part is clearing out structures that actually address challenges
. So the future of cities with 70% of people
living in cities in a very short period of time
is a major concern for sustainability. Health and human
health and ecological health. Um, production and consumption
, how we live lighter on this planet. How
do you actually move that into a reality? How
do you work on supply chain? So that that
happens. Uh, natural capital, Ecosystem Services.
How do we value nature in our books at national
and sub national levels? How do we translate that
value into conservation and protection, and then food,
water, energy, providing it, conserving it,
Um, working on the linkages between these issues,
Um, combating, dealing with adapting to mitigating climate
change. What do you do with all the landscapes
people are leaving? How do you How do you
provide? How do you How do you allow those
to be functioning and, uh, and prosperous and
then fundamental at all of this is our the government
systems that would allow you to do this better.
And is the risk management is there a way of
communicating risk that's more effective at moving forward. So
I'm not gonna build without the inside baseball and how
we try and promote these. But I'll just say
that a couple of basic bits on how it's organized
. Um, so we have about we have a
global structure. I got their, uh, secretariat
in five countries. We have national committees in about
20 countries. We're working on starting a national national
network here in the United States. I think that
future Earth needs to have a really strong national network
in this country, fundamentally to push our leaders so
that this country becomes a global leader in the innovation
and science that is needed to support a transition to
sustainability. Because we have the biggest philanthropic market in
the world because we have the greatest concentration of universities
in the world are investment in this future is not
near as great as it needs to be. And
there's lots of grown for us to gather our voices
, act strategically and push our leaders to make a
fundamental move in this direction. Um, we also
basically, we form knowledge action networks to bring scientists
, scientists and stakeholders together around those key challenges.
And we'll be and we're rolling those out in a
very short period of time, and we are establishing
networks that allow people to collaborate not just among academics
, but academics and civil society partners. So these
are this will be a community online to collaborate,
to find partners to generate, to generate funding,
to build to build solutions across borders. It's not
going to solve everything. I don't think, you
know, online solution is all of it. It's
only as good as the people using it. But
we do need ways of connecting communities and letting them
work effectively together. Well, actually, beta testing
is now. So if you go onto a website
, which I'll tell you at the end, if
you're interested in networking and international networks and want to
just tell us what we've missed and how we need
to connect people better, we'd love your input before
we launch it at a global scale. I.
So I'm going to tell you just a little bit
more about the kind of research, the sort of
kind of strategic research that I think is important,
that I hope the future roots can help provide.
And it's already providing, to some extent research,
collaboration, capacity building. So in Cop 21 which
is the Paris climate summit we had, there's the
kind of science the future supports is the somewhat dull
but vitally important job of actually figuring out what our
emissions look like around the world. You can't do
that with one scientist. You can't do that in
one country. It's a distributed problem. And yet
, if you can deliver information on our global emissions
at the right time to the right audience, which
in this case is cop 21 you can have an
impact on the narrative going on right there and change
the course of that negotiation. But if you deliver
it a month later or a month early, it's
going to have much less impact. Academic groups don't
work on that sort of time scale that policy organized
policy groups do. But intermediaries like Feature Earth can
help link the two so that the science comes out
at the right time. And that's what happened at
Cop 21. And we showed for the first time
that we're actually declining emissions around the world. There's
less emissions this year than there were in 2015,
and there were in 2014, primarily because of the
massive shift off of coal that China has used has
done and and some other reasons as well. That
changed the conversation in the room because it was delivered
at the right time and I think there's more strategic
use of science that we have to undertake. If
we want to be major players in decision processes,
I think that's what we need to be there to
do. Um, this is also so This is
also a lot about collaboration. So we work with
major funding organizations to move to synchronize funding so that
if you have a science funding process, you can
also fund the capacity building process and communication process around
that science. So it has a greater impact when
it's done so communities can form. There aren't just
scientists, but there's support for non scientists to be
in the science process. So a lot of our
work is connecting connecting funding pots together and getting them
to work together more effectively and increasing the size of
those pots were doing that on food, water,
energy. And we're doing a big global assessment of
priorities for for solutions in ocean areas right now practice
doing in about six others. But those are the
ones that I'm involved in, and I think the
last bit I feel about this a little bit for
those communications. Like, um, we tend to
undervalue communication in science, and, uh, we
tend to. It's usually an afterthought for most scientists
. There's some scientists are fantastic communicators, Um,
but most institutions don't do near enough support for that
. For the communications to be a strategic and useful
as it needs to be. And I think there
are multiple audiences we need to talk to. So
one of the so we do future with is definitely
doing the kind of standard communications that you would do
with any scientific group, which is when when a
when an important result comes out, we get it
out to broader audiences. We get into papers all
over the world. We bring that we bring those
scientists out on stage to help them tell stories to
more and more audiences. But that's only still one
step. And so the other piece that will that
I'm super excited working on is we're also also launching
a magazine, which is focused on this and a
magazine. This is independent journalism, top level global
focused on sustainability, focused on solutions. And so
the idea is to create a digital printing live magazine
in which the world's top riders, entrepreneurs, scientists
, designers will come together to explore how we can
create a human age and Anthropocene we actually want to
live in. How do we make this a really
the most possible exciting time that we can live in
? I think of this very simply, as once
you realize that you're in that pilot seat. There's
a whole bunch of different conversations you need to have
, and we want to be able to promote and
curate those kind of conversations and instigate dialogue between groups
that aren't talking enough. Currently, that's the goal
of a broader magazine of the broader magazine. So
in in multiple formats and just quickly things like really
high level journalism on finding on food, on on
managing climate risks on the oceans and the future of
oceans, a bunch of others as well. And
it's been this great effort because it involves some phenomenal
collaborators, because there, I mean, I don't
know if you've noticed, but there's a lot of
incredibly good talent in journalism, and a lot of
it is trying to find trying to figure out how
to have a bigger impact because the whole business model
of journalism is still up in the air right now
. There's a lot of incredibly talented people wanted to
have a greater impact with their work and we're and
we've been able to attract people from The Economist in
the New York Times and others to really push push
this forward. So it's been super exciting. I'm
I'm gonna I'm gonna close. I'm gonna close by
just a couple of just a couple of observations.
I think we can generally agree on the challenges.
You might have a risk. It's a little different
than mine. Your list might match up pretty well
. Um, I don't think that's the hard part
. We can also sort of in general at the
30,000 ft level, agree on the solutions healthy landscapes
, freshwater systems and oceans, clean air, just
equitable societies, livable cities, healthy people. This
part is the easy part. I think the problem
that a lot of scientists have is they want to
put science in the center there. But that's not
Don't think what's in the center services in the sense
like, How do we get there? And service
is science, but it's also collaboration, communication,
innovation, education and engagement. And when I think
of science as a service discipline, I think of
it a little differently. I think of it as
having much more reaching out to other disciplines of having
the much more user focus than some disciplines are.
Currently This idea of co creation reaching out before you
do the science to stakeholder groups, to partners,
to figure out what the needs are to figure out
how you can take that problem off the table,
rather than adding another one to the table on solution
oriented and scalable and transportable. And or I think
I've been now in this sort of new phase where
I'm trying to good science networks, maybe at least
four years or something, and and I had a
conversation with a good friend of mine, Lisa Sheltie
more, who is a fantastic Ecologist working on agricultural
issues in the Midwest, and we're struggling with how
you how you change minds And, you know,
one of the things she said is that you know
we're no longer in a position of finding silver bullets
like our job is to collect and magnify the silver
buckshot like that's what we do. At this point
, there is no single sustainability solution. It's a
lot of little acts. It's a lot of personal
acts with actors at different scales, and there is
no global solution that could be global motivation. Most
of the policy we set in this world is national
or sub national, So we're going to be working
at that level to create change. And a lot
of that, I think, is embracing. That
gives you hope, because you are making small progress
all the time. Um, so you know,
it's Earth Day tomorrow, so I think I just
want to close this. Sort of like if you're
going to get into this work, you have to
have a vision for your future you want and it's
not. It can. It's not a science vision
. It's just where we want to be. So
you know, I think of it this way.
Like imagine if we were to leave our Children nothing
. No poverty, no hunger, no biodiversity loss
, no greenhouse gas emissions. Imagine, like by
2030 that human health and planetary health were the same
thing. That all of us have access to clean
water and sanitation, that energy efficiency was norm.
Forests are protected, coral reefs are recovering. We
connect in new and different ways. We think differently
. We have to think differently and we act differently
and we cooperate more than we're cooperating right now as
societies. Then by that point, you know we're
connected to the Earth's biosphere, and this really means
that we're global citizens on. I think I may
have 20 years of effective worth left in, and
, um and that's if I'm lucky. And I
just think life is just simply too short for me
to do anything for me to do anything other than
to help make this this kind of goal of reality
, like there's just not enough time to be filtering
around on the edges for me, and I just
feel like I don't have that much time to do
it, and it's not like one person is going
to do it and everyone does it in their own
way. But it's been this really personal thing for
me where I'm sort of like getting up going.
It's got it's got to have any impact somehow.
Otherwise, I'm not sure why I'm here on,
and it's it's fantastic to look around the world.
What gives you hope? I think as you look
around and how many people have made that shift,
how many people are saying it's time for change?
it's time for us to sort of not do things
just as normal that I think it gets you up
in the morning every day. Super exciting. So
I want to thank all of you for coming out
today. Tonight. And if you want more information
on what we're doing the future. There's a pamphlet
I believe on outside. We had printed out for
just a bit more information on the internal workings of
future and how you can get engaged and involved.
Um, I would love to see people engaged.
It's not gonna happen without that engagement. So thanks
very much for your time. Yeah, Yeah,
it's not set. Got time for questions. If
we could have people step up to the microphone,
that be great. Mhm. Thanks to the great
talk. Sure. You know, uh, there's
a lot of, you know, you talk about
the tipping points, you talk about all these horrible
things that are having people around the world. Um
, what gives you your sense of optimism in the
face of all this horrible stuff going on and and
a chance that we can actually do something about it
. So I think we are like, so was
it? I mean, I think we are already
seeing phenomenal signs of change and, uh, I
have no doubt that we will change as a society
and there's late change in early change and one of
them just a heck of a lot more painful,
right? And so one of the issues that I
worry about are just changing fast enough to avoid the
really deep losses we're going to see in sort of
human societies. If we're too late around the edges
for some of this stuff, I'm. But I
see I see so many so many signs of this
. I love the work on societal transitions on this
fact that, you know, transitions can happen quite
rapidly and they're quite unpredictable, a little like the
negative tipping points in which, and and so part
of our job is to sort of build these innovations
, support them, keep them moving, so that
when you have a big perturbation to the system,
they can take off and they can really they can
really just change the whole system. And we see
that in technology all the time, and you could
apply that to development and sustainability as well. Sustainability
Science is the fastest growing science in the world right
now. That's kind of awesome, like that's a
whole community deciding to say, You know, I'm
interested in actually doing this solution oriented science. I'm
going to apply my skill set to something that I
think is important. It's also a reflection of funding
agencies saying, If we don't start to direct this
, we won't have the science We need to make
decisions. Um, and I'm confident that, and
we are going to see within the next 10 years
like we will see that step change in investment in
this kind of work. It's already happening in the
private sector. It's starting to happen in some of
the part of the parts of the public sector.
I think in this country is probably not the fastest
one to move that space. Um, but I
I'm hopeful that, you know, we haven't we
have a new cycle of politics coming forward, and
that cycle will be a chance to restart that conversation
. Um, so, uh, I I feel
like there's there's actually if you're if you're like an
Ecologist or a sociologist or like are just a scientist
who's engaged in these relevance problems like there is no
better time to be in that field because there's never
been a time that I've seen, at least in
my career, where people are paying more attention to
feel that predominantly didn't get a lot of attention paid
to them previously. You know, the you have
this commission right now trying to figure out when the
Anthropocene started. These are strategic refers people who study
rocks. They haven't made a political decision since that
field was started. I'm what they decide now is
this huge political decision like there. There have been
, like petitions on like move on dot org about
stopping the Anthropocene as if you could, like,
petition it out of existence. Because if this political
thing it's not about a girl that anthropocene, but
it is suddenly like suddenly you find people who are
used to working in very staid ways being thrust into
the spotlight. But there are also the professionals.
You might have really a lot to providing the information
, so I mean, I think once you get
engaged, it's actually much. It's much more hopeful
than when I was not engaged, like that's I
guess, the key for me. It was actually
just saying I'm just gonna try this stuff, figure
out what I can do, and then you find
a whole community that's doing it. And you're like
, Oh, there's this whole Thank you. I'm
gonna try to challenge your optimism a bit further here
. It seems to be implicit in your presentation.
Some assumption of goal alignment. You did note,
for example, the value of the oil companies.
There's a heck, a lot of interest there.
That's behind those valuations. How do you see?
And you mentioned the importance of engaging stakeholders. How
do you see the new degree of that working when
it comes to Hey, different interests, different priorities
. And they don't always fit with these visions of
sustainability. Yeah, so, um so I I
mean, I you're going to need different tools for
different stakeholders. And so you brought up Big Oil
is one example of a stakeholder that has a high
investment in A In a current system, social systems
have all these sort of lock ins in which you
know that investment makes it very difficult to create change
because you pull on one thing and it just pops
in back in when you let go of it.
Another part puts it together. So it's very hard
to keep take that big change and move it along
. Um, at the same time, Um,
I think there are so many kids in that in
that particular industry, I think you have to.
I think the issue is figuring out where the leverage
exists. And actually, you know, in I
think a lot of companies are starting to worry about
legislation that would prevent them from removing fossil fuels from
the ground. I think that's right now it seems
hard I'll bet within 10 years it's done in many
places. I mean, you've got India saying they're
going to have no gas powered cars by 2030 being
sold all electric by 2030. You've got countries in
Europe that are saying their entire economy will be carbon
neutral by that period of time, right? These
are that's unthinkable five years ago. But these are
politicians saying we're just going to we're going to put
it on paper and we're going to go after it
. No, it hasn't happened in this country yet
. Um, but you know, we'll get to
do We'll get there because, you know, it's
like what Churchill said, right? You know,
America does the right thing after its tried a bunch
of other stuff first, and, um uh,
well, we get there and the current political state
makes that hard, right? So I don't think
right now we can see ourselves as the first in
the line to make those changes. But as other
countries move, we will be forced to move and
I think are sort of internal communities like academic communities
and civil society communities. And the really strong connection
we have, the strong civil linkages we have between
some of those can be put to better use to
create more, more, more push. That way
, I I get what you're saying. I'm but
I don't I don't feel that like I mean,
like, what is the oxygen in this space?
In other words, you have like there's so many
people searching for change. There's so many disruptive communities
starting. It's a tremendously exciting time to kind of
create that change, like right when it gets darkest
is when the innovation is most excited in some ways
, because that's the one that boom takes off.
We're getting close to that space where there's not a
lot of time where we will come through this and
someone is going to figure out some fantastic ways through
. I want to just be a part of that
. So I guess that was Yeah, mhm.
Okay, It seems like none of these solutions what
can be realized if you don't have a solution to
population growth. And I'm sorry to see you didn't
mention it in your talking. So population growth is
an interesting one because we've already hit Peak Child.
It's a huge problem, but it's a problem that
has actually turned the corner. And it's a problem
, that is, that is what I would call
it, one of the slow ones. In other
words, you can't fix it overnight. There are
no policy solutions that are ethical that would allow you
to turn the clock on or even feasible that that
would, uh, that would change the trajectory of
population growth measurably in the places where it needs to
change fastest. So the biggest, the most effective
, a way of of changing population growth is through
development. It always has been. We've seen that
in every country we've worked in China's policy of one
child had no impact on population growth there, Um
, and neighboring countries that didn't have it through,
you know, grew at slower rates like it's not
about it's top down control. It's about empowering women
particularly, and to create, to have other options
and pushing the building that empowerment in societies around the
world. That said, You've got negative population grew
up in much of Europe. You've got you've got
population growth. It's declining throughout many areas of the
world, and you have Africa. It's locked in
. It's locked in because of the demography. Right
now, where you have this massive population under 17
. In many countries throughout Africa, you know,
upwards of half the population in many countries that will
continue like that is going to double the population of
that continent. It will be the most populous continent
by the 20 by 2021. Um, probably sooner
. And the challenge for there is, I think
, more than population growth. It's what do you
do with that eventuality, right? Because the impact
of a person on the planet is the product of
the is a product function of the number of people
and their individual impact you can have, and our
individual impact is many, many, many times larger
than an individual impact. The current current sort of
consumption issue concerned consumption levels in much of Africa.
So I agree with you. It has been a
huge problem, and it is a root cause of
part of of the many large scale impacts. I
am much more worried about how we deal with moving
3.5 billion people into the middle class and how we
deal with a growing population in Africa, primarily because
I think we have choices in the first and we
don't have a choice about the trajectory of millions and
millions of 17 year olds getting older. That's going
to happen. We have to build. And we
know the tools that are implicit in reducing fertility and
reducing the rates at which Children are born and that
those tools are relatively well established. The political will
to put them in place is tough because its development
it's fundamental development work. That's a great question.
Uh, yeah, yeah, we'll take one more
, and then I got to cut it off.
Sorry. Yeah, this question is from my friend
Alan Moss and myself. How will a massive loss
of species throughout the world affect humans? Um,
well, it already is. Um, it's doing
it. And I think it's, you know,
you can but just turn myself up, right?
Here we go. I'll just hold it up.
There are there are That's a prediction that I'd love
to be all with a nail. Um um but
, uh, but I think I think your question
is I mean, I could throw out statistics of
individual impacts that species loss is having on economies.
I'm not sure that you're trying to get a laundry
list. I think one of the things about ecological
systems that we are starting to understand is the degree
to which some parts fill in for others. And
the timing, the points at which those systems collapse
. So ecological or ecosystems also have these sort of
tipping points where they move into other states, and
those other states can be more or less desirable for
humans. Um, I work a lot on an
island of an island in the South Pacific or North
Pacific called Guam. And Guam is the only island
on the Earth Sizable Island has no birds. All
the birds have been wiped out by a snake and
it's the highest density of snakes in the world.
And it's also the highest density of spiders because there
are no birds eating the spiders. And we've been
working there eight or 10 years to try and figure
out how that's going to affect a forest that had
all of its seeds. About 80% of the trees
dispersed by birds. There are no birds anymore.
There haven't been for 25 years. We can't bring
them back. I'm untangling. The effects of that
has proved much more challenging than I think any of
us anticipated at the beginning on. But it is
now pretty clear that that will cause large scale forest
changes on that island. I think there are other
. I know there are other Ecologists working within similar
systems, making similar conclusions, adding them all up
super tricky, right? Super tricky because we've been
at this for a while, knocking out species one
after another, and we've seen the effects. We've
seen very large effects in some cases and then very
small effects in others, so I don't have a
really good answer for you, I think. Sorry
about this, but yeah, we promised the lyric
that we would not overstay our welcome. So thank
all of you for coming out today. This is
great. And thanks to Josh for taking his time
. Yeah, Mhm.