Dr. Thomas Lovejoy: Well, thank you for the
opportunity to be here with you. I've got
too many slides. I'm going to rip through
them. Some pieces of this, I'm sure, will
be familiar, but maybe not the totality or
what the scale of the issues may be that we
need to take on.
In June, when the nations of the world return
to Rio de Janeiro to look at global environmental
issues, in the minds of many was this diagram,
planetary boundaries being exceeded. In my
view the nitrogen cycle is probably pretty
accurate. The climate change one is probably
underestimated because of the impact it has
for the biology of the planet.
And the lower left there, the biodiversity
one, is inevitably greater than all the others
because biological diversity essentially integrates
all environmental problems. There is no problem
that doesn't affect living systems that's
an environmental problem.
In 1896, when Arrhenius wrote his famous greenhouse
gas paper, it was also the same decade that
the New York subways were designed. What he
was really trying to do was answer a question
of why is the earth a habitable temperature
for humans and other forms of life? You can
make the point that the entire human enterprise
is based on the assumption of a stable climate.
But in any case, what he was not aware of
was the actual history of the temperature
of the earth in the previous couple hundred
thousand years. In particular, the last 10,000
years, a period of unusual climatic stability.
Much of the history of civilization is in
that 10,000 year period, and also for the
point of this talk, for that same 10,000 years
all ecosystems were adapting to a stable climate.
That, of course, is now changing. We're seeing
signals in response to the climate change
in the solid and liquid phases of water, particularly
the Arctic Ocean. This is not a new story.
2012 is about the lowest point yet. I'm just
going to go by it.
The timing of ice formation in the fall is
later. The break up is earlier in the spring
on lakes. Glaciers are in retreat in most
parts of the world. I'm sure images of Glacier
National Park are often floated around here
at the Interior Department. In the tropics,
where there are glaciers on top of high mountains,
like Kilimanjaro, all tropical glaciers are
retreating at a rate that they will be gone
within 15 years.
There's rising sea level now, not just because
of the thermal expansion of water but also
because of the addition of melt water of ice
based on land. And on the eastern shore of
Maryland, the Blackwater National Wildlife
Refuge through a combination of natural subsidence
of the land and rising sea level is on its
way to becoming a marine refuge.
We all know about the possibility, increasing
probability I would say of more intense tropical
storms. There's no question about the increased
frequency of wildfire in the American West.
This department has to be preoccupied by it
on a yearly basis.
We're seeing a lot of changes in biology.
Some of the first kinds of changes observed
were earlier flowering times. Here, lilacs
in New England. Not just plants changing their
annual cycles, but animals changing their
annual cycles. Tree swallows migrating earlier,
nesting earlier, laying eggs earlier.
More important, we're seeing species change
where they actually occur. The Edith's Checkerspot
butterfly, one of the best studied species
of butterflies in the world in fact, has clearly
been moving northward and upward in altitude
in response to climate change.
Near Yosemite, snow no longer falls down to
2,200 feet above sea level, only to about
3,500 feet. In that band, the absence of snow
in the winter is actually leading to die back
in the Ponderosa Pine. The Joshua trees are
moving out of Joshua Tree National Park.
We're seeing similar kinds of changes in aquatic
systems. Plankton distribution and fish distributions
are changing in the oceans. In the Chesapeake
Bay, where the eelgrass community is so important
in terms of diversity and productivity and
blue crabs and the like, it turns out that
eelgrass are very sensitive to increases in
temperature. As a consequence, the southern
boundary of eelgrass communities has been
moving northward year after year.
On the north coast of Alaska the Black Guillemot
has its nesting colonies. The adults now have
further and further to fly to get to the edge
of the ice to get the Arctic cod, their main
food supply for themselves and for raising
their young. At least one of these colonies
has failed because the distance has simply
become too great.
This completely incomprehensible slide which
I would actually deduct points if one of my
students did it is actually to make the point
that what I've just been describing to you
is no longer a matter of just individual examples
and anecdotes. It is now statistically robust
that nature is on the move just about anywhere
you look in the world.
The really important is not so much those
observations and what they might mean, but
what does it look like looking ahead?
One way that's done is by looking at climate
envelopes for particular species and projecting
where that climate will be available in the
future. For double pre-industrial CO2 levels,
the Sugar Maple and anything that anybody
cares to enjoy about Sugar Maple will require
essentially no longer being able to see it
in the Northeast, but require you to go to
Canada.
This slide here is to make the point that
we're actually talking about a lot more than
just temperature change. We're also talking
about changes in moisture regimes. If one
thinks simple-mindedly about it, the two most
important physical parameters for any terrestrial
organism is temperature and moisture. For
any aquatic organism, it's temperature and
pH. All of those are changing.
They tend to combine with the other kinds
of stresses that humanity puts on the environment,
so land use problems and population problems
in the Lake Chad region combined with prolonged
drought probably tied to climate change has
actually reduced the size of Lake Chad to
five percent of its original extent.
These are important issues for fresh water
species, particularly cold water species like
trout. And as a class, organisms that live
at high altitudes are particularly in trouble,
because at a certain point as they move upward
trying to track their required climatic conditions,
they will have no further upward to go.
Also as a class, island species are in trouble,
not just low lying islands like the ones in
which the Key deer occur, which essentially
or most immediately threatened by sea level
rise, but even on islands of significant size
and altitude, because the climate change will
be affecting the species, they're unable to
track them and ultimately will be very vulnerable
and many will [inaudible 00:09:56] out. Of
course, as a class, all ice-related species,
like the Polar bear are among the first to
be in trouble.
Going beyond all that, there are serious complications
that begin to take place as one has more and
more climate change. The first of these is
basically the way humanity has fragmented
natural habitat almost anywhere in the world.
And we know, of course, that climate change
is not new in the history of life on earth.
We know glaciers came and went with no apparent
loss of significant biodiversity, but the
major difference is today, when species try
to track their climatic conditions, they'll
be doing it in landscapes that look like this,
which started with continuous woodland in
the upper left in 1831 in this township in
Wisconsin. And end up something like the 1950
collection of fragments in the lower right.
This basically just creates an obstacle course
to species as they're trying to disperse and
track their conditions.
This is the one complication which it is relatively
easy to do something about, at least in principal,
by simply putting natural connections back
into the landscape. Natural connections that
very often are worthwhile to do for other
reasons, like riparian vegetation and what
that does in terms of preventing loss of soil
and maintaining water quality in watercourses.
The other three complications are tougher
to deal with. The second is that we know that
natural communities and ecosystems do not
move as a unit. It's the individual species
that move, each in their own direction and
at their own rate. What we're looking at here
is the movement of three mammal species, two
tree species and one insect species in Europe
after the retreat of the last glacier in Europe.
You can see there's basically no common pattern.
With much more climate change than we're experiencing
right now, but maybe not that much more, the
issue will be that essentially the species
will be responding individually, and the ecosystems
we know will disassemble. The surviving species
will reassemble into some of kind of ecosystem
which is really hard to envision in advance.
Despite the fact that computer models for
climate are all linear and gradual, we know
that the climate system in fact does not behave
that way. We know historically there have
been time when the great global conveyor belt
which is the major way heat energy is transmitted
around the globe has actually shut down.
But the point is not so much the abrupt changes
that might be down the line in the climate
system, although they will be deeply serious
if we get to that point. The issue is we're
already beginning to see abrupt change in
ecosystems.
In North America, none is more obvious to
me than what's happening the coniferous forests
of western North America. You know the story
well. This will just sort of take you through
a time sequence from about 1959 to 2002 in
British Columbia. At the beginning, you can
barely see the little red specks which are
the bark beetle outbreaks.
But as time goes on and the winters are milder
and more beetles survive the winter, and the
summers are longer and make it possible in
some instances to get an additional generation,
it becomes overwhelming and the balance is
tipped in favor of the beetles.
That's the one that we have most obviously
here in North America, but there are other
important ones elsewhere in the world, and
I'll mention a couple. And a lot of these
are just going to be surprises when they happen.
The major one in the oceans involves tropical
coral reefs, which all look like this when
I was in graduate school. A wonderful Technicolor
highly diverse, highly productive, incredibly
important for the 12 percent of humanity whose
well-being depends on tropical coral reefs.
And basically they turn out to be one of the
major ecosystem types most sensitive to elevated
temperature.
What happens in those instances is the basic
partnership between the coral animal and the
algae breaks down, and the animal ejects the
algae, and you get what are called "bleaching
events," which first occurred in 1983, and
now occur with increasing frequency every
year. It becomes hard on the given current
trajectory to have a very sanguine outlook
for the future of tropical coral reefs.
We're also seeing changes at an even greater
scale, which I call "system change." One of
these involves the way moisture circulates
around the world but particularly coming off
the tropical Atlantic and into the Amazon
basin, where the water is basically recycled
because of the immense amounts of moisture
that are transpired by the trees of the forest
and evaporate off the complex surfaces, so
the Amazon literally makes half of its own
rainfall.
Some of the computer models from the Hadley
Centre have actually predicted that will break
down in terms of the feed of moisture into
the Amazon. There have been sort of ominously
two major drought events. One in 2005 and
an even greater one in 2010, perhaps a preview
of what the models have been predicting about
die back in the southern and eastern Amazon.
Just like the Lake Chad situation, there are
other things people are doing to the forests
that have negative synergies, so deforestation
and fire added to climate change suggests,
at least in one preliminary study, that a
20 percent deforestation you would have a
tipping point and get into die back in that
part of the Amazon.
Probably the biggest system change of all,
of course, is ocean acidification, something
pretty much overlooked until 2005. The ocean's
are now a tenth of a pH unit more acid than
in pre-industrial times. It sounds small,
but of course, that is an exponential function,
so they're literally if you look at it in
non-pH units, it's 30 percent more acid than
in pre-industrial times.
That, of course, has enormous implications
for tens of thousands of species which build
shells and skeletons from calcium carbonate.
Basically the colder the water and the more
acid, the harder it is for these organisms
to mobilize calcium carbonate, which means
that the deep water coral reefs, cold water
coral reefs in the fjords, off of Chile or
off of Norway, are particularly vulnerable.
It's also effects species that most people
don't even know exist, like these little sea
butterflies, these tiny little snails. Teeny
little snails with a foot that a snail usually
moves along the ground with, modified in this
case to be two wings to flap and keep it up
in the water column. These are the base of
the food chains in the North Atlantic and
the North Pacific. There are already signs
that these sea butterflies are being affected
by ocean solidification.
Basically, it seems safe to sum this up, that
we're edging towards a lot of critical thresholds
in the global system. Thresholds that we don't
really understand and it would be a sensible
course to try and avoid crossing those thresholds.
Having looked at all of this by now, I've
come to the conclusion that the two degrees
that is being negotiated as the target in
the climate convention, is actually too high.
The 450 parts per million is really bad from
the point of view of what it will do to the
ice systems of the planet and sea level-wise.
It also will have major implications for ecosystems.
Basically, I'm trying to build the case these
days that two degrees is too much. That you
can't just keep thinking about it as some
physical system, that it's a biophysical system.
We do know the last time the planet was two
degrees warmer, that the oceans were maybe
four to six, maybe eight meters higher. In
a sense, what more do you need to know about
that. Nobody knows how fast that will happen,
but the endpoint is pretty clear if you look
back in geological science and geological
time.
This basically makes the point that if you
really want to have tropical coral reefs you
have to be thinking more about one and a half
degrees, or 350 parts per million, which is
what Jim Hanson has been talking about for
some time, but me, through biological glasses
and sea level glasses, I am completely in
agreement with.
The problem of course, is that if we wanted
to stop at two degrees, global emissions have
to peak in 2016. What do you do when you get
to this point? I mean, just adjourn to the
nearest bar permanently? [laughter] What is
there that we might be able to do about this?
This cartoon figure I call Dr. Planet and
he's made the diagnosis, right? Now he's trying
to prescribe for his global patient what needs
to be done. Item number one, which relates
immediately to the mission of this department,
is to revise conservation strategies. It's
putting natural connections back into the
environment, trying to reduce the other synergies
to avoid negative synergies.
To look at the projections of what will happen
to Glacier National Park, for example, not
just the disappearance of the ice, but the
movement of the vegetation belts so that you're
actually managing something that is no longer
sort of in some kind of dynamic equilibrium.
To use Starker Leopold's phrase, "A vignette
of primitive America, but actually of something
which is on the move."
That was very much behind the thinking that
went into the revisiting of the Leopold report.
I have a certain amount of bias, being part
of that, but I think it's actually a very
realistic report in terms of thinking about
the challenges that global change bring to
natural resource management. There's a huge
energy agenda here, which I'm not an expert
on and I'm not going to go into.
What I want to spend the remaining minutes
here talking about is actually the least known
part of the climate challenge. It's the part
in which the destruction and degradation of
ecosystems over three centuries or more has
contributed a significant amount of the excess
CO2 in the atmosphere. In other words, came
from modern day biological communities as
opposed to ancient ones like the fossil fuels.
Basically every year, this is the way the
climate CO2 cycle works, with huge demand
for fossil fuels, about 20 percent of that
but changing year by year from the destruction
of tropical forests and other ecosystems ending
up in about 50 percent of the atmosphere and
half and half between the oceans and the land.
The question is, is there some way to manage
this basic equation?
One might even actually reverse one of those
arrows. The issue in front of us is that's
how the carbon equation works annually. A
lot of CO2 up in the atmosphere and it stays
there a long time, and it doesn't raise the
temperature instantly. There's a period of
time for the radiant energy to actually accumulate
once you reach a certain level of greenhouse
gases.
The proposal here is to actually think about
lowering atmospheric CO2 through ecosystem
restoration. It's not enough, I don't believe,
given the rate we're burning fossil fuels,
so there needs to be a separate investment
in identifying non-biological ways to pull
CO2 out of the atmosphere. It's certainly
doable, there's nothing in physics that says
you can't do that, it's just really expensive
given what we are capable of today.
I'm going to concentrate on the restoration
of ecosystems and to sort of make the point
of what the biological systems of the planet
can do. Here is what happened in the geological
past. Twice there have been screamingly high
levels of CO2 in the atmosphere brought down
to pre-industrial levels by the biology of
the planet.
That's not just the green plants on land,
which was the first time it happened, or the
modern flowering plants the second time, doing
it more efficiently. It's also the biodiversity
and the action of soil formation. So this
little biodiversity symphony that achieved
those miraculous results, problem was it took
tens of millions of years and we don't have
that to play with.
What I've been looking at, and I actually
have a graduate student I think is going to
at some point produce a 'for instance' map
of what you could do, looking at ways to pull
about 50 parts per million out of the atmosphere
or take a half a degree out of climate change
increase. That will involve sort of looking
at, in a simple minded way, which is the realistic
numbers here are 280, which is the parts per
million, the pre-industrial. The 350, so called
safe, and the 390 one, this one's done we're
now closer to 400.
[inaudible 00:27:43] is the U.N. term for
Reducing emissions from deforestation and
the like. The larger green here, may be overstated,
is the amount of CO2 that could be pulled
out from the atmosphere through ecosystem
restoration on a planetary scale. That involves
reforestation and managing forests with an
eye to their carbon, but not forgetting about
the biodiversity. It's restoring degraded
grasslands and grazing lands, and getting
the ancillary benefit of better grazing.
It's also about modifying agro-ecosystems
so they accumulate carbon instead of leaking
carbon. All together there is a potential
here, I believe, to actually reduce the impact
of climate change by about half a degree.
It has obvious implications for how you manage
all those different kinds of systems, it also
has the potential for citizen participation.
Something a little like Victory Gardens in
the Second World War.
It could be a way, actually, to reawaken in
the larger population, a sense of nature of
which we are a part. I call this my terminal
Quixotic dream, namely to re-green the emerald
planet and make the living planet more habitable
by using the living systems themselves. Thank
you very much.
[applause]
Moderator: Let's start with questions in the
room, I'll come and if you don't mind, raise
your hands. I'll come to you and say your
name and where you're from.
Tom: Well, I always jump in, listen to me.
So Tom, you're President of the United States
in the current political climate. Then you
have all those constraints that go with it,
but there's one thing that you can do, and
you're pretty sure you can do it along the
lines of biodiversity and climate change,
making the big changes that need to happen.
What would that thing be?
Dr. Lovejoy: It would actually be two things
coupled. One is sort of really recognizing
that two degrees is actually too much. The
whole negotiating system is broken because
it keeps talking as though there's no end
to this stuff. That's no use at all unless
you can get at two degrees. One part of doing
that would be to a put up, or set in incentives
for the population at large. That would deal
with re-greening kinds of things in the ecosystem
sense.
Also, I would say instruction to the federal
government to actually use the extraordinary
real estate they have to make a serious contribution.
I know some of this is already going on in
the department, because I took that funny
little graph to the transition team four years
ago, but it's not being publicly stated. Anyway,
the amount of real estate you have is huge,
that includes D.O.D.
Yes?
Audience Member: [inaudible 00:31:36] . Do
you have any idea how much land you're talking
about to actually take the half degree out
of the equation?
Dr. Lovejoy: I did the calculation once because
it had to be a number which was not going
to be threatened by the increased population
and agricultural things that need to be tended
to around the world. I don't have it in my
head but you can do it without having terrible
clashes but those other big priorities.
Audience Member: And then my other question
is if you'd coupled this or spoken to some
of the people that are warning about the huge
impacts on agricultural and food security
because if those duel, that might work very
well together in terms of an overall land
strategy.
Dr. Lovejoy: Yeah, I've had some of those
conversations. I haven't had a lot. The other
thing I should add here is that when I first
started putting this together the idea of
there being an important number in this kind
of calculus in terms of marine coastal systems,
it was really hard to get any number at all.
But increasingly it seems there's an additional
significant amount that can be done in the
way that we manage coastal ecosystems, so-called
blue carbon.
Moderator: We have a question from the Internet.
Audience Member: This is a question about
how you actually put these restored areas
back together. Do you see a strategy where
reforesting ecosystems will require targeting
the new higher temperature tolerant species
for the reforestation efforts?
Dr. Lovejoy: The issue here is that the more
climate change there is, the more the systems
will be operating differently from what we
know. Yes, we have to be realistic about all
of that but I think the most important message
is in fact that if you keep it below a certain
level, it's much easier to manage as opposed
to going out into some unknown frontier.
Gabby: Gabby [inaudible 00:34:17] with the
Fish and Wildlife Service. You're talking
about restoring. As we restore lands, as we
restore ecosystems, we can't protect it all.
We can't save all the species even though
E. O. Wilson continues to talk about we have
to save it all.
In lieu of budgets shrinking, what advice
will you give us in looking into the future
as we restore, how do we look at species?
How do we project and how do we protect in
lieu of climate change?
Dr. Lovejoy: That is such a tough question.
[laughs] I don't have a good answer for you
except you have to be realistic. [coughs]
And I think the real issue is being realistic
but pushing the envelope in the right direction,
as opposed to being realistic and just rolling
over and letting it happen. There's a psychological
gradient there that's really very important.
Gabby: In the surveys, we're growing a process
where we're providing a guidance to our team
in the field to look into surrogate species,
a species where we will peak certain species
that by protecting them, the protection will
cascade into many others.
Dr. Lovejoy: Sure.
Gabby: How do you feel about the term "surrogate
species?" It comes from Tim Carroll. But it's
an approach that we think might help us do
better conservation.
Dr. Lovejoy: I don't know that I'm wild about
the term "surrogate," because it'll mean something
technically, but the public may have difficulty
understanding what that word means. But in
a way that's not a completely new approach.
I mean, that's what umbrella species were
supposed to be. Choose the most appealing
one, right? And let it bring along all the
things that are hard for people to understand.
There's one other thing, since we're on this.
I think that most of us in the game to try
and protect biological diversity actually
miss a strong piece of the argument, which
is basically, the biodiversity of the planet
is an enormous living library for the life
sciences. And on any day, some species which
seems relatively esoteric, like a slime mold
on the bank of the Zambezi River, may turn
out to reveal something that, and this is
a true case, turns out to be important in
cancer treatment.
And it's really hard to sit down with the
current knowledge of the species of the world
and say which are most likely to produce interesting
things for medicine, for example. Whoever
would have thought that a bacterium in a Yellowstone
hot spring would actually be responsible for
generating something on the order of a trillion
dollars of human benefit, which never gets
counted anywhere?
Moderator: Next.
Rita Beer: Rita Beer, with the National Park
Service. What do you think about the role
or impact invasive species are having with
potential recovery and climate change, particularly
in reference to what's happening in western
range lands with the replacement of perennial
with native grasses and the changes in fire
frequencies?
Dr. Lovejoy: So I'm not deeply expert on that.
It just seems to me that with more climate
change it becomes actually...it adds to the
advantage that a lot of these invasive species
has so it becomes yet another reason to try
and keep this all within manageable bounds.
Audience Member: Another question from the
Internet. This one going back to the viability
of the U.N. REDD program. Do you think the
REDD program will be effective despite including
monoculturals and lands of just 15 percent
tree cover in its definition of forest?
Man 1: So my own feeling about REDD is whatever
the details, until something happens to really
bring it to scale, it's not going to make
that big a difference except in certain places.
And really looking at how carbon relates to
the economy and ways in which one could rearrange
tax revenues so that we're taxing carbon would
suddenly change the game for things like REDD.
And, yes, having said all of that, the details
are really important, and to the extent that
which forests are looked at solely from a
carbon perspective, it's really sort of like
looking at a computer chip just as silicon.
So we've got to be really careful in all of
this that we don't set up incentives that
actually have negative effects on biological
diversity just because some particular eucalyptus,
or whatever, grows really fast.
Linus: My names Linus, I am calling from the
[inaudible 00:40:56] office. Could you talk
a bit more about using the sea in either...I
mean we're increasingly looking towards the
sea for additional resources and innovation.
Do you think on net it will be helpful for
doing things on land or will it lead to a
whole new can of worms?
Because a lot of the stuff you talked about
was basically land-based, reforming farming
agriculture on land, reforming trees on land.
Do you think maybe something like kelp growing
or mariculture will help alleviate a lot of
the stress or will it get create a new can
of worms that on net will be worse?
Dr. Lovejoy: Well, on so many of things it's
all in the details, and my sense is that mariculture
has a really importance place, but there is
no sort of silver bullet for any of this.
It's going to have to be a mosaic of different
kinds of things that somewhere somebody is
tracking to know that it adds up to what is
a proper direction.
Audience Member: You have another question
from the Internet. This is a follow-up to
the question about planting higher temperature
tolerant species. If we do target new temperature
tolerant species, we might not see benefits
for decades until they are larger. I assume
grown up. What climate targets should agencies
shoot for, and if we miss, would these efforts
come to naught?
And in other words, if we spend a decade and
plant the wrong species we might lose decades
in which we could have otherwise made progress.
How do we insure our choices maximize the
benefits we're going for?
Dr. Lovejoy: So I can only give a sort of
a general response to that kind of a question.
You really just have to really look at the
details and try and figure out where the unknowns
are and what the risks might be involved in
some of those unknowns. I know that's not
a really great answer, but I don't know enough
about the particular tree options in a particular
place.
But if you have some areas which need to be
actually production forests, and so you get
something that's a little closer to a monoculture,
then I think there's every reason in the world
to be really smart about the temperature sensitivities
of the trees you're trying to grow.
Audience Member: I have a question. Before
you were made president of the United States
and asked how would you do this, I'm going
to hit you as the scientist you are. We've
involved in climate studies from physicists
game to biologists, having demographers, and
economists as we try to maximize return on
investment. How would you orchestrate this
so that we truly get something that is efficient
and not a cacophony of special interest?
Dr. Lovejoy: So I think the challenge you
propose really makes such a huge argument
for interdisciplinary approaches that...you
know, we were talking earlier about an integrated
plan for the Arctic. I mean I look at the
Amazon on a regular and there is no integrated
plan, and until there is an integrated plan
it's going to get closer and closer to that
tipping point. So you have to really have
most of the parties at the table, most of
the expertise at the table.
Audience Member: Another question from the
Internet. This one's a follow-up to your slide
with the emerald planet and the awakening
that you'd mentioned. Going back to your statement
about victory gardens and engaging people
to act with the common sense of purpose and
duty, is there some key overarching message
that we're missing that would rally a common
consciousness around the urgency of this situation
and the need for immediate action at global
and local scales?
Dr. Lovejoy: So I don't know that I would
actually wordsmith the rallying cry word by
word, but I think at the heart of all of this
has got to be the recognition this planet
does not work just as a physical system. It
works as a linked biological and physical
situation, and it's pretty complex in the
way that it does that. And to ignore that
is basically, to our own peril.
So let's get people back into contact with
the natural world, understanding that it's
not just something nice in the neighborhood
park or the nearby national park, but it's
also actually making the planet function.
So I had really interesting experience briefing
the executive vice president of the Inter-American
Development Bank, Julie Katzman, who's just...I
mean she's amazing. But she said to me, "I
don't know anything about biodiversity. What
should I read about it?" And for somebody
who has that many things to pay attention
to, I couldn't think of anything.
So I said, "Well, I do have a sort of a Biodiversity
101 PowerPoint. You can come over sometime,
and I'll walk you through it." And when she
saw the graph of increasing CO2 measured on
top of Mauna Loa, and it goes up like that,
and she realized that when it goes down, which
is about six billion tons of carbon in the
atmosphere, that's springtime in the northern
hemisphere, I mean her eyes just got wide,
right?
I mean that's the kind of thing that most
people should actually know, and then they
would feel very differently about what's going
on with the living planet.
Audience Member: Another question from the
Internet. This one's a bit of a definitional
question. What do you think about the view
of biodiversity as a result of a global economic
system that is unsustainable?
Dr. Lovejoy: Could you ask that again so I
really understand it?
Audience Member: Sure. I can read it word
for word. What do you think about the larger
view of biodiversity loss that posits that
is a systematic result of a global economic
system that is unsustainable?
Dr. Lovejoy: OK, so, I mean there are lots
of flaws in our economic systems, and we call
that "externalities," right? But we happen
to live in the middle of externalities and
depend on them. And so I don't think you'll
ever have an economic system, which is inclusive
enough to take care of everything perfectly,
but it certainly can be a lot better. So I
think some of the efforts that have been made
like the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity,
the TEEB, is very useful.
Some of the national accounting exercises
that are going on at the moment, some of the
attention being paid by major corporations
to environmental profit and loss could be
quite revolutionary in how they change the
way the economic system works with less downside
for the environment. Yes.
Audience Member: Hi. Most of the world is
very poor. What do we offer them besides fossil
fuels to get them out of that?
Dr. Lovejoy: So most of the world is very
poor, and the rest of the world lives extremely
well, and perhaps better than we actually
need to. So I think one of the things that
has to go on is a redefinition of the quality
of life. And I'm old enough to remember parents
whose lives were marked by the Depression
and by rationing in the second world war.
There was a fundamental frugality in which
they approached life which is lost in our
throw-away society.
So having said that, I also believe there's
no solution to a lot of these environmental
problems until there is a reasonable quality
of life for people in Amazon cities, for example,
or the poor. The question was asked in terms
of fossil fuel. I think the real answer to
that is energy. It doesn't have to come from
fossil fuel but energy clearly is part of
advancing the lot of the billions of poor
people today.
Audience Member: In what form? You're suggesting
nuclear power?
Dr. Lovejoy: There is actually a lot of stuff
going in distributed solar and others kinds
of systems out there. It's not at scale yet
but it's happening in a lot of places.
Let me also go on to say I'm perfectly happy
with the future from the perspective I've
been talking about if fossil fuels are being
burned but the CO2 doesn't go into the atmosphere.
That's the issue. It's not fossil fuels per
se, it's the gas waste product.
Moderator: Thank you very much and thank you
all for coming. See you next year.
[applause]