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Rewilding Earth Podcast
Episode 137: Paul Ehrlich On Saving Nature’s Populations and Ourselves
00:39:16
About Paul Ehrlich Paul Ehrlich is the Bing Professor of Population Studies, Emeritus, and founder of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford. He has carried out field, laboratory, and theoretical research on the dynamics and genetics of insect...
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- [00:06]
A
Extinction allows people to say there's only been three species exterminated in the last year, and it does not bring home the fact that we're wrecking our life support systems at an incredibly rapid rate. We think you should focus on the extermination of populations because that is part of the process of losing species and it's going on at a much higher rate, at a much higher cost to humanity at the moment than the loss of species.
- [00:53]
B
You're listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast. Paul Ehrlich is a renowned American biologist known for his predictions and warnings about the consequences of population growth, including famine and resource depletion. Paul has had a long and successful career as an author, Stanford professor, and strong voice in support of nature. His new book, Before They Saving Nature's Populations and Ourselves, with co authors Gerardo Ceballos and Rodolfo Durzo, urges us to shift our thinking rather than succumb to grief over the losses that humanity faces today. I talked to Paul about this shift in thinking and what it's really going to take for us to turn around the destruction that humans have caused. Spoiler alert. Paul suggests that the hard work ahead could even be fun. Paul, it's a great honor to have you on the Rewilding Earth podcast.
- [01:55]
A
It's my great pleasure because I just, with two colleagues finished a book on rebounding the Earth and I've been a great fan of the efforts of my ex student Michael Soule and a lot of other people on trying to move in the right direction.
- [02:13]
B
In the beginning of the book, you argue that conservationists have placed too much emphasis on the extinctions of entire species and you offered a shift in focus, a way we might look at it, that we communicate the work that we do when it comes to extinction.
- [02:31]
A
It's a problem that I and my colleagues have been concerned about for decades now, but particularly over the when finally biodiversity loss became something that some of the public was aware of, there was a very fine book written about species extinction. There was one that I wrote with my wife on species extinction, which of course was a brilliant book, but it was followed by some others. And of course the extinction of species in the long term is an incredibly important thing for humanity since the other species of our planet are our life support systems. And if we, as I've often said, when you're wiping them out, you're sawing off the limb you're sitting on. But one of the problems that we saw was that of course, by the time a species is ready to go Extinct, its role as part of our life support system is inevitably reduced. There was a time when I had hopes of seeing the ivory billed woodpecker. It was reported to have been seen just about a decade or so ago, and I would have loved to have seen it, but it apparently isn't there. But beyond that, of course, when there's only a very few of an organism left, they're not playing the important role that we once thought they had. There was a time when indigenous Americans lived off of the buffalo basically, and there were millions and millions of buffalo. And the actual US government took up the project of exterminating the buffalo in order to get the Native Americans and suppress them and starve them out. The buffalo still exists. You can still see groups of them or small herds in certain places. But the role they played in the, I guess you would say the economy of North America before the Europeans wrecked it was major and no longer possible after the attempts were made to almost exterminate it. And same thing could be said, for example, if we wipe out the honeybee in North America, there would be billions of dollars of loss in agriculture, but the species would still be around. It evolved in southern Asia and in Africa, and it would still be in southern Asia and Africa as well as Australia and some other places. One of the things that we have been worried about is the emphasis on species extinction allows people to say, there's only been three species exterminated in the last year. That's very small numbers out of the billions of species. And it does not bring home the fact that we're wrecking our life support systems at an incredibly rapid rate. We think you should focus on the extermination of populations because that is part of the process of losing species. And it's going on at a much higher rate, at a much higher cost to humanity at the moment than the loss of species.
- [05:56]
B
So a lot of our listeners are working conservationists, volunteers who are hyper interested in all things rewilding, different conservation topics, they have different specialties, they can tend to get burnt out. It's. You look at the headlines and you read a couple of books and all of a sudden you're like, I'm not sure if I want to do this anymore. What does it look like in your mind when conservationists are using this shift in thinking to replace some of the talk that we spend on, it's okay, we still have bees to, it's not okay, we don't have enough pollinators. The species is okay because technically it's still here. And not extinct. But what's the overall pollinator? Is that how we're talking about it when we're going out and communicating with people?
- [06:43]
A
That's how I think we should communicate with people. The, the economists have missed this entirely. The great economist who wrote the wealth of nations, his only talk about natural capital, which was natural. And Adam Smith, of course, was writing at the time of our revolution, and the one thing part of natural capital that he understood and had to understand was coal. But the living parts of natural capital seemed in his generations to be super abundant. And we have continued, the economists, to totally miss the fact that the most important capital, that is the capital assets of humanity, the most important segment of that is the living parts of natural capital. It's the only kind of capital that we cannot survive without. In other words, human capital, which is education. I didn't think we could survive without it, but now that we've seen the MAGA groups, we know that we actually can survive without any education at all. And of course, built capital is something that we really focused on primarily since the agricultural revolution and so on. And we survived for hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans did, before they had a lot of built capital. But you can't survive without natural capital. And that has not been brought home to people in general, to our politicians, or in fact, to the people who run universities. Because, for example, to pick an example at random, Stanford University, which is a small school near San Francisco, does nothing at all about the fact that the world, the civilization is crumbling, that natural capital is disappearing, that the threat of nuclear war is increasing and so on. It just keeps going as if the world was the same old world. And friends at a little university near Boston called Harvard tell me it's exactly the same there. The universities are sucking their thumbs while the world goes down the drain. I don't know how I got on that rant, but you're talking to a ranter.
- [09:03]
B
I love it. And it reminds me of Soule, who always talked to us about the same subject. It's. It is sad when I think back on when he was talking about this and how little has changed since in all of that time. But he was talking about how we need to get out of the labs, we need to get out into the wild. We can't just study everything in a petri dish under a microscope. And then when we have discoveries, we can't just present the data in our heady publications, read only by the elite, untranslated for the masses. We have to be advocates. We have to speak for the wild and for the things that we care about, and thus conservation biology.
- [09:45]
A
I've always been very proud of him. Not only was he one of my two first students, both of whom were brilliant and worked in the right direction, but Michael was just sensational that way. And his own research was very interesting. And some of it, for example, came right home to people living in Southern California and so on, when he talked about the problems of exterminating top predators down there and so on. Obviously, Michael was a close friend and I miss him greatly. And we divided our efforts in two directions. Michael and also my colleague who is a co author in the book, Gerardo Ceballos, concentrated a lot on putting aside land and trying to reduce human impacts on long stretches, which is what rewilding normally is taken to be. But of course, another element where I've worked on very hard is trying to get climate disruption stopped and trying to stop the flow of, of poisons and microplastics into our environment, which not only get us, but of course, get the other organisms who we're dependent upon. So the rewilding really means shifting backwards and reducing the scale of the human enterprise to the point where our life support systems can continue to support us.
- [11:13]
B
Yeah, and the lovely thing is, as hard as it is, as it apparently is, we haven't done it yet. Nature is more than willing to take over if we just get out of the way and leave it alone. I just went to Beavercon and I've never met a group of 500 more passionate people, probably than in that conference. It was really, truly amazing. Singular, focused, just like a beaver, on the things that they love and the work that they do. And, and there were so many slogans to the. Just something about getting out of the way. Beavers can, can take care of this, just get out of the way, stop standing in their way. And nature is like that, isn't it?
- [11:55]
A
No, it, it can take over. How much of it we leave possibly to take over is the big. Is a big issue right now. Because we can. I think if human beings disappeared tomorrow, the restoration of Earth would be very interesting. It would be very dramatically changed. Because our impact is so gigantic, the impact of us and our domestic, that is both plants and animals, is so huge that a takeover by nature would be very interesting. And if there were some survivors among human beings, which I think is possible, that is, even if there's a nuclear war, civilization is toast. But I think it's toast already. The, the whether there would be some human survivors that could go Back to hunting and gathering and to having cooperative small groups where women were given equal opportunities and rights and where there would be no racial prejudice and so on. One could imagine a fairly interesting humanity which would, I suspect, be supported by what would recover, in other words. But if you keep wrecking it, for example, in an undisturbed, relatively undisturbed area of the subalpine in Colorado where I worked for decades, in the last 35 years, basically half of the insects have disappeared. And that's really true over much of the planet. We've probably wiped out something on the order of half of the biodiversity of the planet. Not half the species, but half the number of individuals or colonies of organisms that, that we need one, we need. We're not sure which ones we need, but we know we need a lot of them.
- [13:49]
B
Yeah, I think that's one of the things I, I try to, I, I just, the way my mind works, I try to simplify very complex issues as much as possible for my own sanity. And what I really love and why I made that comment about nature taking over is it feels good. It makes my brain feel good when I say those words. And it also feels good with what you just said. It just things being able to stitch themselves back together. It's already a humongous problem trying to get humans to act on their own behalf. It's very difficult to think if we had the same kind of seemingly insurmountable problem of figuring out how nature would put itself back together, but we have to leave enough pieces.
- [14:29]
A
You also, I think for most of us, probably, certainly for you and me, you have to put in the aesthetic issues as well. I had the opportunity, or maybe the penalty of having done a lot of research on land and also on coral reefs and in the oceans. And I've watched reef fishes disappear and I've watched butterflies disappear. And I could start a butterfly collection tomorrow as far as my own desires go. And there still are butterflies in some parts of the world, but they are disappearing. A recent studies show the same thing. As a matter of fact, a very close colleague of mine, who's a little older than I am, is in Georgia, went into the mountains this last spring for a little vacation and he said there were no butterflies. He saw one tiger swallowtail, which when I lived in the east, was one of the super common butterflies. Yeah, they're gone. They're beautiful, they're wonderful. They're going. And reef fishes, same thing. They, when I revisit reefs that I worked on 30 or 40 years ago, they're Desolate now, largely. And the worst thing is that the acceleration is going. In other words, what we lost in the last 30 years is nothing compared to what's programmed for loss in the next 30, unless we take steps that are completely foreign to our politicians and human beings in general today. In other words, the changes that will be necessary if we're going to save ourselves by saving biodiversity. The idea, for instance, that we are going to stop burning fossil fuels, when actually all the efforts we've made so far to substitute non fossil fuel sources of mobilizing energy have not changed the amount of fossil fuels we're burning over the last 20 or 30 years. We're going right down the drain knowing what we're doing. And when I watch commercials on television and I see SUVs rolling off the the production lines, even if they're all electric, somebody has to make the materials to make an all electric vehicle vehicle. And then somebody somewhere has to generate the energy to run the thing. And if you leave it to the engineers or the Chinese, for instance, with their belt and Road initiative, what they basically want to do is pave the entire planet so they can run even more electric vehicles over it. And how they're going to power them, they'll figure that out sometime in the future, probably with fusion power, which will be available in 30 years. I'm very familiar with it because 70 years ago I was told that fusion power would be available in 30 years. And according to my good friend and colleague John Holdren, who's the smartest physicist on the planet and was Obama's science advisor and did his dissertation on fusion power computing, just thinks it's a joke. In other words, these people are eating humanity. A series of cleverly constructed lies in order to improve their profits for the moment. Even though the worst actors are so rich that if 90% of their assets were removed, which I think they should be, they would still be filthy rich.
- [18:07]
B
I remember when I was canvasing for Greenpeace and I'd knock on doors and people would say, you guys just want to go back to the caves. And they paint this stark picture of, of what it would be like without all these modern plastic, gas powered conveniences. And they, you can see it in their eyes, they see, they think it's terrible, they think it's horrible. We fought really hard to get where we are. Why would we go back? Even if what you say is true.
- [18:32]
A
Yeah, you're correct. And, and this is where I've got it over you, because I remember those days very well. And we Had a rich, happy life in the United States even during the Second World War. And I. I remember I was just starting to read newspapers at the beginning of the second world. I was born in 32, and of course, the war hit us in late 41. And Ann and I both asked our parents shortly after that, would they still continue to publish newspapers after the war, because everything in the newspapers was war news. And yet, even with rationing and so on, we lived quite happy lives in the United States. Anne in Des Moines, me in North Jersey. And there was no feeling we did. We had almost nothing in place. One plastic, kind of plastic called Bakelite, which we had for a few things. We didn't have cell phones, and boy, could I do without cell phones. I don't even want text messages. I thought when it started coming along that the web might be a really fine thing for education, but now I have serious doubts. We're building a generation of children now who are nearsighted because they spend so little time looking anywhere except at a screen in front of them. So the idea that we have made enormous progress when it comes to human relations and so on, we made progress too rapidly in things like military technology and too slowly in areas like ethics and mental health and so on. And we're suffering more and more from that steadily. When you can have a presidential candidate who's clearly out of his mind, demented, ignorant, and so on, and millions of people will vote for him, we'll see. We're just back like we were in 1933 in Germany. We just imitated one of the biggest mistakes humanity has ever made on a larger scale. The people at risk today are many more people that were at risk when Hitler was taking over Germany.
- [20:55]
B
Yeah, in the last section of the book. So I wanted to characterize for the people who have not yet bought and read the book, which I highly recommend. One of the things I'd like to compliment you and your co authors on is the readability. You really tried to reach out, apparently to everyone. It wasn't a book just for us conservationists, but you really made everything easy to understand. The last section of the book, A Cure, A Bittersweet Pill, I was like, oh, boy, here it comes. How bitter and how sweet is this going to be?
- [21:28]
A
First of all, you're correct at what we aimed for. We also obscurely. But so that people can do it, you can look up what the scientific literature says about virtually any issue we discuss. In other words, the references are all in there, but we tried to make them only for People who care enough to want to really check into what is known about something. But the cure, as far as I'm concerned, is not as hideous as people would think. What the main cure has to be reduction of the scale of the human enterprise. Because first of all, we know as closely as we can that there are too many people on the planet and that they are trying to get more and more from less and less. In other words, they are overstressing their resource base. The most recent thorough study of that was done by the best economist on the planet, Sir Partha Daska Gupta in England, with the full support of the British government and with many people working for him, did a study on the economics of biodiversity. And it's a big thing, it's highly technical and on. But the basic conclusion which most people can take on board is that he and his colleagues calculate, as well as we can calculate today, that humanity's life support systems might support permanently about three and a half billion people if everyone were willing to live at a Mexican standard of living. And since we have more than 8 billion today, with most people struggling to live more at a Hollywood standard of living, it gives you the answer to the problem of what we do almost automatically. Namely, we have to restrict our reproduction to the point where we get a slow decline. And that's a tricky issue right there. Some places we're already in that direction, other places there's no sign of it. But the basic thing is it's got to be timed enough to save enough biodiversity so that we can continue to a stable situation. And figuring out how to do that is very complicated. So huge effort that now goes into nonsense like how you produce a new cell phone for everybody every six months is going to have to go into research in the area that's generally called demography, but it is basically how you arrange society so that humanely, without trying to force people to do things and so on, you can get a gradual decline in the number of people until we get to a number where every child has an opportunity to a decent life, as opposed to today, where every child has the opportunity to die in a nuclear war, or to be destroyed by climate disruption or to be poisoned by the hormone mimicking chemicals. So we have a huge problem demographically and also we need the research to figure out which technologies we can use without killing ourselves and which ones we should ban. I can't resist telling you one of the scariest papers that I've seen since we published the book, and it was a paper by MDS that have been entering the carotid artery to remove plaque. They can now do that and hopefully save you from heart attacks and so on by unplugging your carotid arteries. And for about, I think it was, I can't remember how many patients, but dozens of patients, they took the plaque, what they'd removed from the arteries and examined it for microplastics. And about half the people had an abundance of microplastics, sharp little tube like things and so on in the plaque that was blocking their arteries. And worse yet, those were the people in the study that had the heart attacks and died first. And so here we are all producing gigantic amounts of plastic, which I can tell you, having lived without gigantic amounts of plastic, is really possible to do without with some pleasure, actually. Not that plastics can't be useful in some circumstances, we're killing ourselves with it. And anyway, so the first thing you do is reduce the scale of the human enterprise, which will require a lot of attention, research and discussion among people. That is, every university and every high school, for instance, should know the stuff that goes, that comes out from the rewilding Institute. And every university ought to have courses in how you reduce population size humanely and how you treat women properly, and how you get rid of nuclear weapons and so on. So you are studying both the size of the human enterprise and what things it can do safely without sawing off the limb that it's sitting on. And that's a huge task, but it's a fun task. People can get together and socialize over how to do it. Discussion groups can do it. The universities, I would guess that 90% of university faculty and students could not really give you a decent description of ecosystem services, even though they're absolutely essential to all human beings and all human societies. And so it would be really fun to revise, to sit down and say, okay, we're a very social species, we have a lot of fun. We can still drink and have sex. There's just lots we can do. And while we're doing it, we're going to change the whole course of history. We're going to reverse some of the things that we did at the time of the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution and return us to a sustainable, smaller society that will go on essentially forever. Not forever until the earth is crisped by the sun's expansion. But a few billion years will be enough. I think everybody will be tired of it by then. But we can enjoy the planet and smell the flowers instead of trying to look at them by bending over and looking at your cell phone. And I don't see it all as that negative. The idea that progress is more SUVs and more cell phones, as far as I'm concerned, is absolutely nuts.
- [28:35]
B
Yeah. One of the things that keeps sticking out with me in what you're talking about today and other talks I've heard you give is that you come from a world that most people alive today don't understand. And we've moved the goalposts as what our understanding of the past was. And I think that people think that we are here today running from a dark past where we didn't have enough technology, we didn't have enough food, we were dying from all kinds of diseases. And it was worthy of leaving in the past. But you bring up a reminder of it wasn't so bad. In fact, it was great.
- [29:13]
A
And you lived it at that stage in the U.S. but overall, for instance, a lot of the native Americans lived happier lives than the Europeans that invaded the. Some of the native cultures in North America were appalled at a society where there were captains and kings and you had to do what other people said. And there was the idea that first of all, history didn't start with the Romans. We are a species. Modern human beings lasted at least 300,000 years. And the agricultural revolution was 8,000 or 10,000 years ago, depending on where. And that's where the big change came. Because before that, individuals couldn't acquire, couldn't occupy land and acquire more and more goods. And once that people could grow more food than their family needed, you had the opportunity for specialization into priests, soldiers, businessmen, scientists, so on. And that gave you sexual discrimination, racial discrimination, economic poor and the rich. Among hunter gatherers, there generally wasn't the poor and the rich, not in the way we have classes today. And yet in England, one of my colleagues was lucky to transfer out of a job. Climate scientist left England gleefully for France because she couldn't stand a classism in England, the fact that there it's still the upper crust that runs things, and the upper crust, there's those who stole more money than the lower crust.
- [31:01]
B
Yeah. And those crusts are crusting over about every country we have.
- [31:06]
A
Yeah. No, that's the horrible thing. If you really care about today's world, learn the history of the Weimar Republic, Hitler and the takeover. When after Hitler finally occupied got the Hindenburg died and he became both the president and the Chancellor, he fused the two together. It took him only a little more than a year to kill off his main competitors. Literally kill them. Remember, there have been Stupid presidents before there have been venal presidents before there have been crazed Senates before. All of that's true. What isn't true is in those days, none of them could destroy the world with nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons, and so on. The penalties for having a moron as president today are gigantic compared to the penalties of having a moron as a president in the 19th century.
- [32:13]
B
I would also say that you have a functionally illiterate body of people who are in charge. Leaders who can't talk about conservation issues beyond saying climate change and EVs and windmills and solar. They're done. That's it. That's all they can talk about. And what do you.
- [32:32]
A
They don't even know the facts there.
- [32:34]
B
No, you can't question them about it because they've literally given you all they got. What. What do we do about that?
- [32:39]
A
What do you do? Actually, you go on a rewilding podcast and rant. You and I are doing what we can. But that's really. I think the first thing every university should do is close its business school. Because as a business school and there's a book on business schools written by a business school professor who said what business schools do is take you, teach you to take money out of other people's pockets and put it in yours. And that's our society is financialized. Wasn't always that way. But people's value is judged by their accumulated so called wealth, although it's not true wealth by the the real standards of economics.
- [33:23]
B
I'm not sure how many times you get asked this or if at all, but I try to come up with questions that you're not frequently asked. And I've noticed that you've been around for a little while. And I wonder about people like you, who I'm sure people wonder about me. And I've been at it for a minute, but you've gone through a lot. Right after you and your wife published the Population Bomb, you immediately were met with just a constant barrage of criticism and pushback this entire time. Anybody could be forgiven for just walking away. I think that a lot of activists, a lot of conservationists, scholars, scientists, wonder how am I going to keep this up? And you are probably one of our greatest examples of keeping it up and keeping going that we have that humanity can produce. I wonder if you could give us a little bit of advice.
- [34:13]
A
First of all, you got to be damn lucky. Among other things, my colleagues have always been super supportive. Even when I was an assistant professor, nobody complained about me. I was Asked to teach a course in evolution when I went to Stanford, my sets my specialty or was my specialty really. And I was a 10 week quarter. And for nine weeks I told what we knew about where human beings had come from. And the last week I talked about where they were going and that attracted attention and that got me invited to the sea, to the Commonwealth Club to talk about that there, which I did. And I didn't realize, but their shows were always broadcast on radio and I started getting requests to talk on radio. And it was. Those were the days when Rachel Carson was becoming famous in the Vietnam War was going on and it was a time that people were thinking about change. And my colleagues, for instance, I had until he died a couple years ago at 102. Ernst Meyer was one of the three top evolutionary biologists, I would say, in the 20th century. And Ernst and I had some differences on technical issues of species definitions which we used to have friendly arguments about. I would bring him to Stanford and have him give a lecture and argue with him. And by fact, one time Ernst had finished one of his lectures by saying, I always tell my graduate students that if they differ with me, please to be frank and just say it, just speak out. And a graduate student of mine named Michael Soule got up and said, does that apply to graduate students from other schools also? And the chair of the department said to me, we've got to get rid of that student. We didn't. And he became famous and Ernst Meyer interacted well with him. But anyway, so I had that kind of support. I'm a natural born loudmouth. I had a discussion once with my major professor, guy named Charles D. Michener. Mitch and I were talking once in the field in Mexico about why we were scientists. And I said, I'm a scientist primarily because I like finding out new, seeing new things. I'm very curious. And I also like telling people what I found. And Mitch said, I'm with you on the first, but I don't think I care much about telling people. And I said, isn't it weird that you've published 250 papers? And he said, you got me. So it's, I've just been able. I've decided when I was a teenager that I could either follow into my father's footsteps into business, he was a shirt salesman, or I could work 50 weeks a year and fool around with butterflies the other two weeks or I could fool around with butterflies all the time and starve. And I chose the latter. And that was the best decision I ever made. I could fool around with butterflies today. I would love to. I wish I could see them better because I'm losing my eyesight, which is something I don't recommend.
- [37:50]
B
Paul, it's been a great pleasure. The book is awesome. Everybody should go grab it. The links will be if you haven't gotten a link yet and you're listening to this on Spotify or somewhere else, you can go to rewilding.org pod and check out this episode. The links to the book and all of Paul's other work is there and all the other and the two other authors of the book as well. I wish they could have been here too. Thank you so much for putting this together. It's really great to hear from you.
- [38:18]
A
It's been a great pleasure for me. I'm sorry Rodolfo and Gerardo can't be here, but along with Sandra Khan. My three closest research colleagues are all Mexican and they're all wonderful and my Spanish remains lousy, but I keep trying. Anyway. Jack, thank you very much. Hope we can rewild the whole damn place.
- [38:43]
B
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