Ethics of sustainability
Science in Focus – Ethical Sustainability
Duration: 55 minutes
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[Music playing]
Speaker: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to UTS and to UTS Science’s special public lecture on the ethics of sustainability. One of the UTS Science’s future plans is in sustainability, and that’s an area that we are highly dedicated to be in. We are, at the moment, establishing a group called Sustainability Central at UTS, to try and action our plans in sustainability, which will include public forums like this, leadership and mentoring programs. So tonight is one of these activities to come, and tonight’s lecture is about the ethics of sustainability. And I’d now like you to welcome onto stage, Professor Paul Ehrlich, award-winning ecologist, evolutionist, educator, author, advocate for sustainability and environmental impacts of humanity. Now I don’t think you advocate for them, do you? You don’t advocate FOR environmental impacts of humanity, but rather against them, I would have thought?
Paul Ehrlich: I’m against many of them, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, right. Good.
[Laughter]
Speaker: His passion, you see, is to investigate the socio-political economic impact on how the living world works, and to develop a globally integrated view of what is required to maintain a suitable environment for future generations. And I’d also like you to welcome Professor Graham Pike …
[Applause]
Speaker: … a highly cited author with many years of experience in environmental science. His most prominent research is involved in understanding why animals forage the way they do, using this information to address other ecological issues. He’s also passionate about generating awareness of important issues like sustainability to a wider audience to enable and motivate those people to work together to make a positive change, especially for the frogs.
Graham Pike: Indeed.
Speaker: So, without more ado, I think you’re going to hear first from Paul and then Graham, or the other way around?
Ehrlich and Pike: Other way around.
Speaker: Graham and then Paul.
Pike: It’s a pleasure to be here with my friends, friendly faces, colleagues, and especially nice to be here with my long-term friend and colleague, Paul, sharing the same stage with him. And it’s doubly nice to be up here talking first, because it means I can steal all his jokes.
[Laughter]
Pike: Now, as Bruce also mentioned, we’re here celebrating UTS’s 25th anniversary as a university, and that’s fantastic. And I am enjoying thoroughly being part of UTS and I look forward to being part of its future. And when I was first asked to participate in this, I was given a brief that said I should address 25 years into the future, and 25 years into the past – the number 25 being chosen for obvious reasons. Well, we can look at 25 years into the future to a degree, but that’s a bit problematic because arguably we have to make decisions rather sooner than that. Looking 25 years in the past is really difficult, because by my arithmetic, neither Paul nor I are old enough to be able to do that.
[Laughter]
Pike: A few chuckles. I thought if I didn’t get any, that probably means I can get away with saying anything. I’d also have to give up my thoughts of becoming a stand-up comedian, but perhaps there’s hope for me yet.
I imagine a lot of you are very familiar with sustainability. Many of you are also pretty keen on the idea – I’m going to talk in a moment about what I think sustainability means. And you might think that after tonight’s event you’ll go home, enthused, to renew your efforts with recycling, drive the car yet, get out your pushbike, walk more. But I want to tell you that we’re expecting you to go home with much, much more than that. But wait and it’ll all be unfolded shortly.
Here’s the plan – the ground I want to cover tonight. The future – why should we care? What do we mean by sustainability? Whose job is it anyway, and what’s been done, or perhaps who’s to blame for the fact that we still don’t achieve it? And I’ll talk about the approach that Paul and I are taking. And then this is the cool bit – I’ll talk about things that you can do, things that we want you to go home and d.
The future. Now, I want to address the future by referring to Groucho Marx. Now, I see plenty of grey hairs in the audience – you’re probably old enough to actually remember the Marx brothers on TV, a group of American comedians. They were great – I grew up watching them on TV. Groucho was perhaps the best known of all of them, and he was famous for all kinds of one-liners, and one of his famous quotes is ‘Why should we care about future generations? What have they ever done for us?’
[Laughter]
Pike: And my point is that this totally misses the point. It misses the point that we care about the future, future generations, because that’s our legacy. Our children, their children, subsequent generations – that’s our legacy, the future. If we don’t care about them, then there really is little point in anything, I think. Now, I want to get you to take home the idea of sustainability by telling you a story. My purpose in telling the story is two-fold; one is to kind of explain how it is that Paul and I come to be here together, and the other I want to impress in a very dramatic way – what sustainability is all about. So bear with me for a bit; I’ll walk through the story.
As you saw, the story – oh, I should – the story, like all good stories, starts a long time ago, far, far away. That’s the way all stories start. This story starts in Colorado – that isn’t that far away, and it starts for me in 1972 when I first went to Colorado, and that’s where I met Paul and Anne, at a place called the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, which you can see in the bottom right image there. It’s a field station – you get about 200 biologists hanging out there during the summer. It’s a place with just a summer season, and in the winter it gets a lot of snow. More snow than Australians could ever dream about – about 10 metres of snow every year, so it’s a lot of snow
The Rocky Mountain Lab lies at the bottom of a valley – the East River Valley, which you can see in the top left picture. You can see a valley; you can see a road following down through the valley. At the end of the road, approximately, is where the lab is located, and there’s a mountain just to the right there in the right foreground – it’s Gothic Mountain, the same mountain in the lower right picture, and the lab is at t base of that mountain. So a lot of snow, lot of snow melt, fuels water in the rivers. And there’s a river, you can’t quite make it out in that picture there, but there’s a river going down that valley, and when you get down to about where the lab is, you can see it obviously is a river. It varies from being broad, kind of flat, to being narrow, in between ravines. And early in the summer when the snow is melting, you get a lot of water going down this river, and this water provides what people who like to kayak need – lots of water, fast-flowing water. And people go kayaking, and they launch their kayaks from at about where the lab is, or just a couple of hundred metres downstream from the lab. And the water is much higher here because two rivers have come together. Now, it’s my turn to show a movie – if we can have the movie please.
[Movie plays]
Pike: Downstream, this is what one encounters – significant waterfall.
[Chatter, laughter]
Pike: I think there’s one more
[Laughter, sounds of amazement, more laughter]
Pike: Pretty dramatic stuff. Pretty dramatic stuff. Now, the local kayak magazine has an article about this, and the title of the article is Stupid as Stupid Falls. These falls have been named by the kayaking people as Stupid Falls, the idea being quite obvious – you’ve got to be crazy, stupid, insane to actually go down these falls in kayaks. And it’s about a 30-metre drop there altogether – it’s a long way. And as you can see, it’s a kind of a silly thing to do, really. But maybe there are – you know, people do emerge from this. You saw them getting to the end and doing the high-five. Just to the side of the ravine where the waterfall is, there’s this flat area and a dirt track coming down it. And this is where I was doing, and have continued for many years to do, my research. And I was down there one day walking along this track, and I saw these kayakers coming out, much like the kayakers you see in the picture, and they approached me, I approached them, and said “Hi there – did” – and thinking, I’m about to get the real story – what it’s actually like to go down those enormous waterfalls. So, ‘Hi, did you guys go down the waterfall?’ Expecting to hear a great story. And one of them looked at me and he said ‘No, we believe it sustainable kayaking.’
[Laughter]
Pike: I pondered for a millisecond and looked [inaudible] and said “Please, tell me – what do you mean by sustainable kayaking?” And the same fellow, he said, “It’s very simple. It’s kayaking today so we can still kayak tomorrow, and the next day.”
[Laughter]
Pike: And the penny dropped. I suddenly knew what sustainability really means. It means doing things today so that we can do the same things tomorrow, the next day and so on. In this case, the ‘we’ is kind of a royal we. The ‘we’ is us, our kids, our grandkids, and future generations. So that’s what sustainability is, so hopefully by now you can see that our theme for tonight is achieving this kind of sustainability for future generations – that’s what we’re all about. In summary, sustainability is central. We’ve got to achieve it or it’s all a bit hopeless. And Sustainability Central that Bruce referred to is obtained simply by that, leaving out the middle word. And I’ll explain about Sustainability Central in a few minutes. Now, I don’t want you to think that sustainability is just about the environment – it’s actually got, in our mind, four pillars: environment, economics, health and social. I’m not going to talk at all about these four pillars; I just want you to know that when I talk about sustainability I mean across the board, across those four pillars.
So, whose job is it to carry out sustainability? Or, since we don’t seem to be achieving it, who should we blame? Should we blame the researchers, the academic institutions like the one we’re all in today? Now my favourite one to blame is the media – it just gets me so riled up to listen to some shock jock on radio giving equal time to somebody claiming to be a lord from the old country, spouting forth all kinds of inane things, and it especially bugs me, why do we import crazies? We’ve got enough of our own.
[Laughter]
Pike: Okay, what I want to do is just walk through a couple of these. We’ll start with researchers. Now, researchers have been criticised – some people say – and by researchers I include scientists, but other kinds of academics. Researchers have a moral responsibility to both inform you guys, the rest of the community out there, and possibly even to try to convince, like in the case of climate change, you might say that climate change scientists have a moral responsibility to try and convince us all to actually do something to save the day. Now, the criticism comes in the form of saying well, we – I include myself in this camp – we researchers lack the right stuff. Now, you’ve all seen the movie The Right Stuff? We researchers possibly lack it; we don’t have the inclination to come forward and do what we’re morally responsible for doing, we have other priorities, other things we want to get on with, or we just lack the training, we don’t know how to do it. But this not a fair assessment, I believe, for two reasons. The first reason is that there’s a lot of researchers who really have made a big effort to inform, even convince, people, and I’ve put up one picture here of – I’m sure you’ll recognise – Tim Flannery, a truly fine scientist, a great Australian – in fact, Australian of the Year a few years back. He’s the tip of the iceberg. He has been extremely prominent in terms of portraying the environmental catastrophe that we’re headed towards – what we need to do to save us all. Below him, in terms of the iceberg, there are thousands and thousands of scientists publishing thousands of documents addressing these issues, and many of these documents are informing the general community – informing everybody – about what’s going on. So there really is no lack, in my mind, of effort. The researchers have really been putting in, I think, a huge effort to inform and indeed to convince. But you have to remember that researchers have to be sustainable too. And if you’re a researcher, say at an academic institution like UTS, there’s always been the time honoured criteria – numbers of publications, numbers of grants, numbers of students, and they’re still important. And now we have the additional one that’s just emerged recently …
[Laughter]
Pike: … of citations. It isn’t just enough to publish articles; you have to actually get people to read them. And then they have to cite them because you’ve made some contribution. Now we haven’t got quite to the point where we’ve got vagrant scientists on the pavement like that, but perhaps we’re heading that way.
What about academic institutions? They’ve copped some criticism too, and I’ve put up two images here. One is, top right, Sydney University, which was my alma mater for my undergraduate training, and bottom left there, you’ll see the gothic architecture, is the University of Chicago, where I went and did my PhD. Now, my experience perhaps was typical of the day. I don’t recall having any courses at all that addressed sustainability. I had courses that addressed ecological theory and behavioural stuff, but nothing that addressed the issues of sustainability. And I wasn’t required to give any presentations all through my career until I got to the end of my PhD. And I found myself applying for jobs and went to various universities, and they expected me to stand up and give presentations – that was the first time I had to do that. So I managed to get to that point without giving any presentations. And I’ve never, to this day, had any media training, so whatever abilities I’ve managed to acquire to cope with the media, it’s all been through osmosis and trial and error and so on.
I’ve always had great support from the universities I’ve been involved in, but some people say that they haven’t had much support in terms of being able to get out there and promote sustainability. But I think this view is unfair also. It’s unfair in part because I did my training two or three years ago, and time’s moved on. And so the kinds of things I’m talking about are things of the past, and now, if you take UTS for example, there’s a picture of the UTS present day UTS, you can see the central tower there. Now UTS has been involved a lot in sustainability, especially over the last 10-15 years. We have, for example, programs such as the Institute for Sustainable Futures, and that was begun 15 years ago. We have the Centre for Environmental Sustainability, which is in the School of Environment – that was somewhat more recently begun. There are courses, some of which explicitly identify sustainability as an issue; some deal with it implicitly. And UTS has also embraced sustainability practices. The buildings that Bruce mentioned, they’re going up as green buildings. Attempts may be made to be energy efficient and so on – we have a strong recycling program, programs that attempt to minimise energy use and so on.
The future – well, as you were told, new buildings going up, they’re going to be big, bold, certainly different, some of them. The thing that especially excites me about the future here is a Masters-level program that will get up and running that addresses sustainability leadership, where we try and provide leaders, people who are in positions where they’re having to make decisions that affect sustainability, and we want them to be better equipped to make those decisions. Just like researchers have to be sustainable, UTS and other universities have to be sustainable too. And here’s a graph that shows the position of UTS in the world rankings for universities, and this is important because, for a couple of reasons. One – our projection is great; we’re headed skyward. To get anywhere, you have to be in the top 500, and that’s primarily because many students, particularly overseas students, won’t consider going to a university unless it’s in the top 500. So we’ve been there for a few years; we’re well and truly entrenched in that category now and headed towards bigger and better things. And all this feeds into our reputation, how many students we get, and of course, our finances. We’re achieving that because UTS is embracing, increasingly, a culture of research excellence, and by so doing, we’re rising up the rankings and doing better in all respects.
So coming back to sustainability – whose job is it? I could run through all of those things, present the criticisms and argue that they’re not really justified. The reality is all of these things are issues; they have to all combine together. And there’s one more thing you have to add in, and that’s the general community. That’s me, you everybody here, the whole world out there, and we need to all work together. And you can see how the community is going to be relevant, because the community directly affects a few of these things, and indirectly affects all of them. We choose our government representatives. We vote – as you probably know, there was recently an election. Does anybody think that they managed to vote for sustainability? No one. Well, nobody voted – I tried, but I didn’t succeed. Oh, one – okay, very good. Three. Alright. So if anybody thinks that they tried to vote for sustainability and succeeded, please tell me how you did it.
We choose our government. Now, we also in a sense, we choose the media. Shock jocks don’t exist were it not for the fact that there are people out there who actually like listening to them, as crazy as that might seem to an audience like this – there are people who like listening to shock jocks. And we, the digital community, control that. So we need to all work together, and we need to move together, and I call this the sustainability dance. And here is – Paul, you can see, he’s doing the same dance here. This is Paul giving us a demonstration, and perhaps he might be persuaded to give us a live demonstration later. The point is, we have to all work together. We have to do the dance.
Now what Paul and I are doing is a partnership. It’s a partnership that’s going to exist on several levels. On one level it’s a partnership that’s going to exist between UTS and Stanford, so a partnership between Sustainability Central, which I said I’ll explain in a bit more detail in a moment, and Paul’s Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere, that Bruce, I think, mentioned. It’s also a personal partnership – Paul and I, we get along pretty well together and we like doing things together, including drinking red wine. And of course then there’s all our colleagues – we have wonderful colleagues both here at UTS and elsewhere, and they’re part of the partnership as well.
There’s four areas that we’re going to concentrate on, in the beginning. Two here – one is science .Science has been under unprecedented attack of late, and we propose to be advocates and defendants of science. This won’t be a major thing, but it’s one thing. We also mentioned the programs for sustainability leadership – a big area that we want to work on is what I call sustainability champions, and I’m sure obviously you recognise Paul, you should recognise Dick Smith. Now, I’ve put this picture up for two reasons – one, to show that, now obviously both are amazing sustainability champions, they come from different areas. And Paul obviously, environmental science; Dick’s a business person, a successful one. And they’re both working together and working towards sustainability. But also you’ll notice a few grey hairs there, and that’s indicative of the fact that by and large, our sustainability champions are no longer fresh out of nappies. So what I’m trying to say is, we need a new generation of sustainability champions, and we hope to set up a program where we identify people who are potential champions, and give them kind of training experience or help them and encourage them to progress in that direction. We also want to get to what I call the masses, and the main reason for this is shown in this graph here. This is a result of some surveys that the Lowy Institute has done every year for several years, and what they did is they basically put up three propositions and asked people ‘Well, which one you choose?’ And the three propositions – this all relates to climate change .The possibilities are: We need to do something immediate, even if it costs a bit. Other possibility is no, we can take a gradual approach, and hopefully low cost, and the third is, we’ll wait and see – we’ll just wait until the evidence is all sorted out. The evidence arguably isn’t definitive enough yet.
Now I find this quite disturbing, because you’ll see a precipitous drop in how many people actually think we should do something sooner rather than later, but perhaps even more alarming is the increase in the number of people who, despite all the increases in the science, so as science is becoming more definitive, people are saying ‘Well, we’re less certain. We’re waiting increasingly on the good evidence.’ This convinces us that what we need to do is to find new and different ways of getting the message out and those messages will include things like trying to get the message in bite-size bits so it’s simple, clear, logical, and we’ll try to use some of the new means of communication, things like Facebook, Twitter and so on – we’ve got to use those to actually get out to larger numbers of people. Now if you want more info, here it is – you can go to the MAHB website, or the Sustainability Central website, and that second website has gone live this evening, so it’s fresh off the blocks. Now I just want to say quickly, I’ve talked so far about how we’re going to attack things, but there’s one issue that stands out as warranting attention, we believe, and that’s population. Now I’ve got a picture of John Holdren –John is another amazing scientist, trained as a physicist but turned his attention a lot to environmental issues. He’s presently the Chief Scientific Advisor to President Barack Obama; he’s also had the good sense to spend time at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Anyway, John and Paul, back in a science article in 1971, presented this conceptual equation, and it’s very simple. It just says the impact, which is what we want to manage if we’re pursuing sustainability, is the [inaudible] population size times per capita resource consumption, waste production and time as the A there stands for affluence, which is a shorthand way of expressing resources consumption per person, and the T is for technology, which is the impact per unit resource of consumption, because we humans are pretty smart; we tend to pick the low-hanging fruit first, and as time goes on, we get to pursuing things that are harder and harder to ac6cess, so the impact of accessing them actually increases.
Now, really then, impact is like volume of a rectangular object; it’s a product of three things, and you can’t … logically just say ‘Well it’s one and not the other.’ But in this case it turns out that population really is the biggest factor, because of what happens when you have exponential growth. And the thing is that even if we have improvements in the affluence part of this equation or technology, any improvement gets quickly swamped over by increases in population size. You should know, for example, that here in Australia, our present rate of population increase – it sounds small; 1.7% per annum. But that equates to a doubling in 40 years. So in the lives of most of us here in this room, Australia will go from being 23 million to 46 million. Now where do you suppose the extra 23 million are going to go? I certainly don’t know. So it’s a big issue – we have to deal with population.
Now, here’s the bit you’ve been waiting for: what do we expect you to do? Well, I think we expect you to first of all become better informed. Now hopefully you won’t rely on getting your science from a shock jock; I have friends who do, but you’ll do better than that. You’ll seek to get high quality information. I also hope that you’ll become messengers – you’ll go and talk with your family, talk with your friends, tell them about sustainability, tell them how important it is. You can al become, in a sense, disciples. And finally, vote. And you can vote in several ways. As I mentioned before, you can vote for your government representatives. You can vote through business – you’re probably all shareholders; by being shareholders you get to vote as shareholders in the context of the business. You might be involved with schools, your P&C association – you can vote there. You can also vote – and this is important – vote with your wallet. You can choose products that promote sustainability as opposed to products that don’t. You can donate as well – you can find your favourite sustainability group and donate to support that. And we’re hoping sometime shortly you’ll be able even to donate to Sustainability Central – we’re going to set up a system with the UTS Foundation that will make that possible.
So in conclusion, I’ve given you an idea of why we’re pursuing sustainability, where it’s going it, how we might do it, how we have to all work together, and we just have to remember that sustainability is central.
Thank you.
[Applause]
Ehrlich: It’s an ideal place to talk about sustainability. Many of you may recognise that the most sustainable population ever that we know of on the entire planet, occupied Australia sometime around 50,000 years ago – there’s a lot of debate about that. And they maintained themselves as a sustainable population until a few hundred years ago, when a group of alien invaders came in, bringing with them a series of extremely thoughtless and damaging technologies with which Australia began to completely destroy its life support system, and it’s been doing a nice job of that. So we actually could learn a great deal from how the Aborigines, who went through, you remember, all kinds of dramatic climate change, all kinds of changes of the flora and fauna on the planet – they developed the first art with [inaudible] pictures of human faces, and their art went through a lot of different stages – in other words, a wonderful, suitable culture which we’ve had a very large role in destroying.
I’m always, I hate to say it, a little bit saddened when I hear the comments about who actually owns the land. That would be really funny if the Aborigines came in and said ‘Okay, all you white folks, get the hell out of here – these buildings are ours, this is our land and you stole it from us,’ and just because you mutter a few things about how we honour you and so on, we’re actually going to continue screwing you over as we did in the past, just like we do in the United States with our Aborigines and so on – you shouldn’t really be too sad about it, because it’s just human behaviour.
[Applause]
Ehrlich: I should say, by the way, though I’m going to talk about some ethical issues, that this picture originally came from an ethical thing that I’m going to be involved in on Friday of this week, and that is World Vasectomy Day in Adelaide.
[Laughter]
Ehrlich: Graham took that picture of me as a PR picture for that show, but since I was naked from the waist down, UTS felt obliged to Photoshop a pair of dungarees on me, which I’ve never worn. But of course, there’s a big ethical issue right there – everybody who doesn’t have to take off their shoes, they count up to 20, knows we have a serious population problem in the world. We are, depending on your actual standard, whether you want to support the kind of population we have today with a couple of billion people under nourished and malnourished and living in misery, or whether you want to have a population that lives like Australians, we’re short somewhere between a half a planet and five or six planets, depending on how you do the numbers. And what are we going to do about that? Well, the usual routine statement – and I believe it – is if you want to solve the population problem, the place to start is by empowering women and giving every sexually active human being access to modern contraception, and if they then need it, backup abortion. And most people, in demography, when they look at it, think that would probably be enough to get us where we need to be. That is, average family size of about 1.7 children so that we will get into the slow decline that will be absolutely necessary if we’re going to avoid a collapse of civilisation.
This isn’t just my view. The scientific community has been saying this repeatedly, over and over and over again. The big statements by all the academies of science in 1993, the world scientists warning the humanity in 1993, this year the consensus statement of the world’s environmental scientists, all say the same thing. Rush Limbaugh doesn’t believe it; Mr Abbot doesn’t believe it – who cares what they believe? They don’t know anything, so who cares what they believe?
[Laughter, applause]
Ehrlich: But basically, why should this be just a problem of giving women the opportunity to have fewer children? It’s high time that the men in the gang started taking an opportunity to have fewer children.
[Applause]
Ehrlich: Remember, thousands of women die from tubal ligations every year. Basically nobody dies from vasectomies. So one of the ethical choices is, if you happen to be a male and if you happen to have a partner, why haven’t you got a vasectomy if you have more than 1.7 children?
[Laughter]
Ehrlich: Mrs Abbot had her 0.7 but I think she went on to have even more. But the 0.7s do supply the George W Bushes, the Abbots, the Rupert Murdochs and so on – we need the 0.7s around because it makes the rest of us feel superior. Right? Okay.
[Laughter]
Ehrlich: So, it is a pleasure to be here at UTS, to have an appointment at UTS, because I think it’s one of the few universities in the world that has a chance at becoming a positive force in the world. I come from a university that produces people to fit into the niches in a system that is openly decaying. In other words, the society is running downhill. Anybody who can’t see that, I suggest you turn on the news and watch Mr Boner mumble on television. IN other words, we are in deep trouble, in every country, globally we’re in deep trouble, we’re not facing our problems at all, and it’s high time that some universities started taking a leadership role about this, and they’re not. And the classic great universities like Harvard and Cambridge and Oxford and University of Sydney and Stanford are unable to do anything, because their faculties are all wedded to their disciplines; that’s where the perks come from, that’s where they’ve been trained. If you go to our academic centre at Stanford, you’ll be told that quality lies in the disciplines. It does – lousy quality. I would start firing those people tomorrow if I had the chance. It’s places that are willing to do interdisciplinary things, and interdisciplinary just means not in the same old chunks. Name me a university department at Stanford or Harvard in which an important human problem can be solved. And when you see what the academic community considers to be important problems, I refer you to the Nobel Prize in Economics, given out today to a [inaudible] and a couple of his colleagues. If I said what they had done was trivial, I would be praising it to the skies. You know, these are a couple of people who basically made some rules – actually, they argue about them, about how to gamble on prices of commodities, and that’s asset prices, and who cares – it’s like, if you go to the United States today or turn on CNN, what is the big fuss about? It’s about a debt ceiling. Now, let me tell you, for every nickel of debt in the world and in the United States, somewhere there’s a nickel of credit, guess what. And the whole mess could be easily solved by negotiation. Maybe not so easy, because there would winners and there would be losers, but it’s totally solvable by negotiation.
I absolutely guarantee you, you can’t negotiate with nature. You can’t say, ‘Well, we’ll keep producing all these greenhouse gases, and if we go past two degrees Celsius, you’re going to have to let us grow all our crops at four degrees, or even five degrees or whatever it is – we want to negotiate about it.’ In other words, the stuff that’s covered in our media – graham was much too kind to the media. The stuff that’s covered in our media doesn’t come to the level of crap, and the people in the media clearly are clueless. I mean, you know, they’re the intellectual prostitutes that Rupert Murdoch hires to write in the Wall Street Journal, to publish The Australian, to go on Fox News where they’re forbidden to say anything about climate change, by the way. There’s a whole series of ethical issues there. If you happen to be richer than Cresus and own a newspaper, is that a legal thing to do? Is that really moral? Is it moral for Rupert Murdoch to say ‘Look, I don’t really give a damn what happens to my grandchildren and great grandchildren – the more people we have in Australia, the more copies of The Australian I can sell, and then I’ll have more money and power.’ Is that moral? Is that ethical? Is it ethical in a world where it’s crystal clear that you can’t get by with everybody having children? Some people are going to have to have fewer. Is it ethical to have 20 like the Octomom had, or 20 or God knows how many?
I’m curious. How many women here are planning to have more than 25 children? Have any of you got more than 25 children?
[Laughter]
Ehrlich: That’s the genetic message, you know? Anyway, so there are huge ethical issues tied in with all these things, particularly with climate change. Economists are actually among the – there are some very smart economists that I know personally and work with and there are the smart ones I don’t. The ones that write for the Wall Street Journal or give out Nobel Prizes obviously are idiots, but that’s not the point. There are huge economic problems – how are we going to deal with them? The economics, at least, have looked at the questions of intergenerational equity. That is, how much do we owe – how much do we have to consider – in our actions, the possible situation of people in the future? One of the classic places is the people that think markets can do everything seem to miss the point that guess who isn’t involved in the markets? Those people that Graham was talking about, that – I can’t remember who it was – but Groucho Marx says, ‘What do we owe them?’ An interesting question. Economists have looked at this – when you hear about the discount rate, what is an ethical discount rate? And this involves decisions like, are people in the future always going to be much, much richer than we are? In which case, the argument will be made, why should we make any sacrifice at all to stop, say, stop using fossil fuels, when in the future, the people will be so rich that they’ll be able to solve whatever problems the fossil fuels have caused? And that’s one possible point of view. Of course, most people nowadays, and certainly most analysts, think people in the future are going to be a lot poorer, in which case you’re asking the question, what are we rich people going to do today to try and make the life of these people who are going to be so much poorer in the future, good? And that’s a big ethical issue.
Graham and I and Anne were at an interesting conference, a Fenner conference in Canberra last week, and there was an excellent talk, I think not the best talk necessarily, but the most interesting to us, because we didn’t know the numbers, as an excellent guy Mike [inaudible], who’s a mining engineer and simply pointed out that mining is unsustainable. There’s no way we’re going to be able to continue to get the minerals in the soil that we need to run our kind of civilisation, even for the 7.1 billion people we have today, let alone for the 9.5 billion that are programmed for 2050, or the 11 or 12 or however many more billion around the end of the century. It was a program that Mr Abbot should have sat in on, and had somebody try to explain it to him. And yet, even though some of the best scientists in Australia were there – people like Hugh Possingham and David Lindenmayer, and Ian Lowe and so on and so forth, the press didn’t show up. There was no coverage at all – nothing in any of the newspapers. So again, is that ethical? Is it ethical for rich people to own the media, and hire idiots to say whatever they tell them to say? Is that ethical? I don’t think so.
And if you go down the line, you run into ethical problems in this mess, at every level. For example, climate change is not our only environmental problem. It may not even be the worst. What are some of the other contenders? Loss of biodiversity, upon which agriculture is utterly dependent, we’re utterly dependent on agriculture. It is of course, and this is not a list of problems; they’re all interacting. Climate change and biodiversity interact a great deal, and to the negative effect on biodiversity we have to have, not just pollinators – we talk about feeding people, people often say ‘Well, the big problem is pollinators.’ Actually, probably a bigger problem is the natural predators that hold pests in control, because as we, particularly as we warm the planet, they’re going to get worse and worse, and there is no way we can control pests with artificial pesticides all the time. It just doesn’t work. we have a huge problem of loss of biodiversity, we have a huge problem of increasing chances of epidemics, because there’s a huge mathematical literature showing that the more people you have, the more likely it is for new diseases to transfer into the human population, to become permanent and to wipe them out, basically. We have a gigantic problem with toxic chemicals that now spread from pole to pole, and which may turn out to be more serious than climate change, because although we have some nutcase solutions for climate change if it gets away from us, dangerous stupid things like geo-engineering, we don’t have any equivalent. For example, the signs we’re beginning to see of toxicity in human beings and in animals just take off – if everybody starts getting cancer of the pancreas by the time they’re eight, form the hundreds of thousands of interactive toxic chemicals we’re exposed to, nobody knows what to do about it. You have crazy schemes for geo-engineering, there’s no bio-engineering that’s going to save us if the toxins get hold of us.
All these things are interacting, but we’re not even discussing the ethics of it. Is it ethical to let a compound that’s biologically active, particularly a hormone-mimicking compound which may be more dangerous in tiny quantities than in big quantities, to manufacture it? An interesting question – I would say well, if it’s a compound that looks like it has a high possibility of curing breast cancer, let’s take a chance. If it’s a compound that has a high probability of eyelash glue stronger, let’s not. But this is never viewed as an ethical issue. In fact, it’s considered absolutely ethical for companies to try and maximise their profits without any regard for whatever happens to people that are on the side – the externalities. The whole idea is to shove those costs off onto society as a whole, and increase your profits for yourself and your rich friends. Is it ethical, as in the United States, to have a gigantic program of redistribution of wealth? We have what’s known in the United States as the Hood Robin system, in which you steal from the poor and give it to the right. Now, is that an ethical system? Should we not be discussing that all the time? We’re having this – if you look at the news, it’s never even mentioned that we have a system that does that and we’re pushing it really hard.
I’ll give you an example of how bad it is on the climate front, because there, there are lots of examples coming up all the time. The United States, for example, has fought a series of wars to make sure the flow of oil to us and our friends continue. The government admitted, for example, the Iraq war was just over oil, about nothing else – there was a lot of bullshit, but it was just over oil. The head of the fed even said that in the United States. Well, of course, fighting a war over oil is like if we were starving to death, fighting a war to get more cyanide. Burning the fossil fuels is going to end society as we know it, and yet we are still fighting over it.
Now, to go back a little bit to biodiversity and give you an example, there’s a huge area of essentially pristine forest in Ecuador that has two native groups in it, and one of the greatest reservoirs of biodiversity on the planet. The president of Ecuador was told that there was a gigantic amount of oil under it – actually, not so gigantic. But the oil was worth about $7 billion, and he said to the world community – the president of Ecuador said – ‘Give us $3.5 billion dollars. We’re a poor country, but if the rich countries give us $3.5 billion, we’ll leave the oil in the ground. We’ll preserve the Yasuni Forest. We’ll preserve the two groups of people that are utterly dependent on it. We will save a huge amount of carbon dioxide for the rich countries, which have of course been the major ones putting CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – a perfect win/win situation. The UN set up a fund for the rich countries to get the $3.5 billion to give to Ecuador. After four or so years, $19 million had been given and about $100 million pledged, and the president of Ecuador said ‘Screw you – we’re going to go for the oil.’ Again, $3.5 dollars, probably the US spends that every year blowing up wedding parties in Pakistan to protect our oil interests there. But I mean, how ethical is that, when you can’t even go to the aid of a poor country to do something that would be enormously beneficial for the rich countries, and well as enormously beneficial for the poor country?
Anne and I were just in Africa – and I’ll make this short – where a similar situation has developed in Uganda, where oil has been discovered under Murchison National Park, which is one of the places that Idi Amin basically got destroyed, and it’s just coming back, but they are beginning oil exploration there – they’re going to kill off the hippos that have come back with seismic searching, and the really weird thing is the oil’s lousy. They know it’s lousy – it’s only good – it’s like the Canadian tar, only worse. It’s only good for [inaudible] roads and that sort of thing. But why do they want to be there? Because the oil companies want to be on the edge, able to jump in the Congo, as so as the Congolese stop killing each other. It’s not clear when that’s going to happen, you probably don’t know because newspapers don’t carry it, but over 2 million people have been killed in wars in the Congo in the last decade or so, and they’re all, same thing, they’re about to try and destroy the wildebeest migration in the Serengeti to build roads in towards the Congo and western Tanzania, where coltan, among other things, is available – a mineral that’s critical to making cell phones, which you’ve all hopefully turned off, and computers. In other words, we’re in a race after what’s left of the minerals on the planet, and it’s now been rumoured that the Ugandan Government is going to be bought out by the oil companies to close the park for 20 years so they can destroy it totally for oil exploration.
Okay – lots and lots and lots of ethical issues. I barely scratched the surface. Let me finish by going to another ethical issue. Is it ethical for me to harangue you about this stuff and tell you not to have so many children, tell you not to consume so much, tell you to get active on this – is this really an ethical thing to do? John Holdren and I, and Steve Schneider and Anne, have talked about this a lot. What are your ethical obligations if you’re a scientist in a world that you see going down the drain. What are your obligations to say, or not to say? And what we came up with is a) First thing you do is tell people what the scientific consensus is. Science is never sure, the answer is never absolutely in, and so on, so the first think you do is give the scientific consensus. Second, if you differ with the consensus, you say so, but you point out why you differ with the scientific consensus. And third, you give your own opinion as a scientist, but make it clear that you’re giving the scientific consensus. Now, for instance, in this talk tonight, first of all, all the scientists I know who are any good always have their stuff highly reviewed. What I’ve said tonight is all published in the scientific literature. This year, a paper Anne and I wrote in The Proceedings of the Royal Society was refereed by the scientists picked by the Royal Society, [inaudible] anonymous referees. The paper was refereed by us, by about 40 colleagues, including a Nobel Laureate in Economics, and so on, so scientists have to work within what is basically an ethical system. If I did what Julian Simon does or what Rupert Murdoch’s jerks do, I’d be out of the game immediately. You can’t lie, you can’t cheat, you can’t steal. Scientists live by the opinions of their scientific colleagues. What Tony Abbot or Rush Limbaugh thinks of me, I couldn’t care less. If y major professor, who is still working at the age of 95, wrote me a letter and said ‘Paul, I think you’re on the wrong track’, I’d think really hard about it.
So one of the things that we hope to do through the mob, and through Sustainability Central, is start getting all the NGOs, civil society together to deal with these problems and do it under a set of ethics that’s similar to the one I just described. That is, basically a community ethics. Ethics, after all, have only one origin, and that is discussion among human beings. Chimpanzees don’t have ethics because they don’t have language with syntax. So the source of ethics is, what do you think is right? So we need much more discussion of ethics, and I’m hoping that UTS is going to become the first 21st century university on the planet, having sustainability and the ethics of sustainability at the very centre of its programs. It’s a great pleasure for me to be here, and you’ve been a very patient audience. Thank you.
[Applause]
15 October 2013 54:59
Tags: environmental science, ethics, sustainability
Professor Paul Ehrlich and Professor Graham Pyke tackle the urgent imperative to pursue sustainability and how we might do this. This lecture compares the past, our current approaches and what we should be doing to ensure the environmental security of future generations.
Explore how socio, political and economic impacts have shaped our attitudes and thoughts on how humanity might achieve sustainability through more ethical conduct. Discover the importance of educating, motivating and creating an open dialogue about sustainability issues to help direct humanity toward a sustainable society before it’s too late.
We owe it to ourselves, our children, grandchildren, and subsequent generations, to pursue sustainability for humanity.
UTS Science in Focus is a free public lecture series showcasing the latest research from prominent UTS scientists and researchers.
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